● 10.18.15

● Links 18/10/2015: OpenBSD 5.8 Released, OpenBSD 20th Birthday

Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• You’re probably familiar with Windows and/or Mac OS. But they aren’t the only operating systems available. A popular alternative is Linux. In this article, Lesley Lutomski introduces Linux and what you need to know to give it a try.

• Looking deeper, Linux’s importance to the Web is even more extreme. By W3Cook’s analysis of Alexa’s data, 96.3 percent of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux. The remainder is split between Windows, 1.9 percent, and FreeBSD, 1.8 percent.

• While a great deal of the Internet networking infrastruture runs on Cisco iOS, much of it also runs on Linux-based switch operating systems, such as Cumulus Linux, Big Switch’s Switch Light, and VyOS, the open-source fork of Vyatta.

• It’s true that Linux is not the easiest platform to operate, but once you get the hang of it a whole world of opportunities opens up right in front of your techie eyes! We know it can be a bit intimidating to get started in the complex and fascinating world of Linux, so we have a couple awesome deals to get you into this adventure without spending significant amounts of cash.

• The second episode of the World Without Linux animated series created by the gorgeous Amelia Lorenz and distributed by The Linux Foundation non-profit organization is now available.

• Once you start digging into what this open-source, versatile, wifi-enabled component can do, it’s sure to put a smile on your face. The price – just US$39 in the AndroidPIT Deals Store – should make that smile even wider.

• And if you don’t want to be flying blind as you fiddle with VoCore programming, you can also pick up the Linux Learner Bundle, which comprises five courses to boost your Linux coding skills and is also on sale, for 97 percent off its regular price.

Desktop

• Chromebooks have come a long way in five years. Andy Wolber looks at the features that distinguish the Dell Chromebook 13 from other devices.

• So, is it worth ditching Linux for Windows 10? While it is a great update to Windows 8, the one that fixes it all, upgrade problems and privacy issues are main reasons Linux users should be wary of the upgrade. However, if you want the latest and greatest, it should be a no-brainer. Our advice is to wait till Microsoft settles the issues plaguing the OS and then give it a shot. Till then, penguins are always your friends.

• Both are loaded with my usual variety of Linux distributions, and while the E11 also has Windows 10, the V3 still doesn’t even have Windows installed on it.

• The first issue I want to discuss is wi-fi connectivity. It seems that wi-fi coverage is becoming so common as to be practically taken for granted these days. Hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, and even campgrounds now offer free or low-cost access: but offering coverage and actually being able to connect can be two different things. At the beginning of the trip there were several times when my traveling companion was able to connect and use her smartphone, but I couldn’t get a stable connection on the Aspire E11.

• */Linux has ~5% share.

Server

• Still a heavy-hitter in the world of big enterprise workloads, AIX is part of that declining population of Unix-based rather than Linux-based operating systems.

• Microsoft has always been prepared to use open source software when it could do so for reasons of profit. When it bought Hotmail, Microsoft continued to run the service on FreeBSD for a long time before it switched to Windows.

• “We’ve seen basic researchers learning Linux and cloud computing to keep up with it all,” said Aaron Chang, director of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at UC San Diego. “I’ve had people show up at my door with USB drives filled with data. It has to be pushed on to the cloud so that it is accessible anytime, anywhere.”

Audiocasts/Shows

• After last week’s look at how there’d be no internet without Linux, this latest episode posits a related tack: “a world without Linux would mean a world without direction”.

• No Linux means no GPS navigation device and no mobile mapping apps. The protagonists of the six-part series end up lost …and headed in to the Bermuda triangle — eek!

Kernel Space

• Mark Brown is the Kernel Working Group technical lead at Linaro. He is responsible for looking at anything that isn’t explicitly covered by some other part of Linaro. Upstream, he maintains a few subsystems related to embedded systems — ASoC (audio for embedded systems), regmap, regulator, and SPI — as well as other things when he has time.

• We reported at the beginning of September 2015 that The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization whose ultimate goal is to accelerate the growth of Linux among hardware companies, announced the expansion of their “Get a Free Chromebook” educational program until the end of the year.

• I have often written about how the world runs on Linux, and how most users are none the wiser.

• To spread awareness about Linux, the Linux Foundation has created a series of videos called ‘World Without Linux’ that features two characters trying to navigate through life without Linux.

• With Skylake’s retail availability improving, we’re starting to see more of the Skylake processors in stock besides just the i5-6600K and i7-6700K. One of the other processors now widely available is the Core i5 6500, which is a step down from the Core i5 6600K, but retails at just $199 USD — making it an attractive offer for many building new PCs and trying to stick to a decent budget. I’ve been testing out an i5-6500 under Ubuntu Linux and so far this processor with HD Graphics 530 is running well and offers compelling CPU performance relative to older Intel hardware as well as AMD’s APU/CPU competition.

• Just in time for the 24th Birthday of the Linux Kernel, the Linux Foundation has released the first episode in a new web video animation series that shows us what a world without Linux might be like.

Benchmarks

• The overall system-level processor utilization between AIX and Linux on Power for identical workload and Power hardware configurations in multicore SMT systems can’t be compared because the calculations are completely different. The overall system-level processor utilization reported in Linux on Power is derived from /proc/stat, which is purely time based. Whereas, AIX is based on PURR and SPURR, which is more towards CAPEX planning and also projects more realistic and accurate processor utilization for the latest evolution of processors which has SMP and SMT environment. Actual performance difference between single threaded and SMT8 on POWER8 is 2.2 times. In time-based calculations, processor utilization report for a single thread projects as if each SMT thread and execution unit is independent of the other. This gives a notion that users can achieve eight times better performance in the SMT8 mode, which is not true in real world. The realistic 2.2 times processor utilization factor that is not accounted in the calculation is one of the reasons for the low processor utilization reported in Linux on Power system for certain workloads that do not utilize 100% core, when compared to the AIX on Power platform.

• In this article are benchmarks comparing the performance of DragonFlyBSD 4.2 to that of Ubuntu 15.10. With these CPU-focused benchmarks, the core scaling performance was also looked at in going from two cores through four cores plus Hyper Threading.

Applications

Proprietary

• As you may know, Vivaldi is a Chromium-based open-source internet browser, built by the Opera founder. It did not reach a stable version yet, but it is already usable.

• The first Vivaldi version was very fast, but it lacked a lot of features, while the second version brought many new features and kept the speed.

• BeeBEEP is a simple, secure, and fast peer-to-peer messenger that can be used to send/receive messages and files over local network. You can use it anywhere, including your office, home or internet cafe to effectively chat and share files with others. It’s a serverless apllication, so you don’t need any central server to send and receive messages or files. Just download it, extract it, and run it. It’s one of the simplest messenger ever I have used. Moreover, BeeBEEP is completely free, open source, and it supports all modern operating systems, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, OS/2 and eComStation.

Instructionals/Technical

• Yesterday, 13th of October, Willy has announced the release of HAProxy 1.6.0, after 16 months of development! First good news is that release cycle goes a bit faster and we aim to carry on making it as fast. A total of 1156 commits from 59 people were committed since the release of 1.5.0, 16 months ago.

• Please find here the official announce: [ANNOUNCE] haproxy-1.6.0 now released!.

• NGINX, an open source, high-performance HTTP server, reverse proxy, and IMAP/POP3 proxy server, has gained popularity as a load balancer. I caught up with Sarah Novotny, head of Developer Relations at NGINX, ahead of her All Things Open session later this month, and asked her to explain NGINX’s growing popularity.

• Since early 2015 I’ve been working on testing installation related components in Rawhide. I’m interested in the code produced by the Red Hat Installer Engineering Team and in particular in anaconda, blivet, pyparted and pykickstart. The goal of this effort is to improve the overall testing of these components and also have Red Hat QE contribute some of our knowledge back to the community. The benefit of course will be better software for everyone. In the next several posts I’ll summarize what has been done so far and what’s to be expected in the future.

• As the screenshot above illustrates, there are approximately 39,000 packages in the Universe repository, and around 8,500 packages in the main repository. These numbers sound a lot. But there is a smorgasbord of open source applications, utilities, and libraries that don’t have an Ubuntu team generating a package. And more importantly, there are some real treasures missing from the repositories which can only be discovered by compiling source code. DFileManager is one such utility. It is a Qt based cross-platform file manager which is in an early stage of development. Qt provides single-source portability across all major desktop operating systems.

• The good news for Linux users is that there are plenty of outstanding apps to make reading e-books quite easy. And, because these tools happen to be offered on the Linux platform, they offer some really cool features to make your e-book life even better.

• Let’s take a look at two of the best e-book readers available for Linux, as well as a trick or two for each.

• After taking a two-week break, Kovid Goyal comes today, October 16, with hot news from the Calibre world, as he has just published details about the 2.41 version of the open-source, free and cross-platform ebook library management software.

• Fresh Memory Lite is an educational application for studying foreign languages using flashcards and the Spaced Repetition method, built for KDE and having a simple to use interface.

• Parole is a media player for Xfce that uses GStreamer and comes with a simple, compact interface, plays pretty much anything supported by GStreamer, and has basic features such as desktop notifications, system tray integration, support for playlists and subtitles. Parole 0.8.1 was released two days ago, and the good news is that it’s going to be included in the Wily Werewolf repositories.

• The GNOME developers are still working hard to release the first maintenance version of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that many of the project’s core components and applications receive updates these days.

• For a while I’ve been wanting to tidy up some of my existing ikiwiki hacks, as well as test some changes I’d like to make to this site, but I hadn’t had much success with setting up environments to play with it. That was until earlier in the year, when as a bit of an experiment I tried to put ikiwiki in docker.

• As you know, GScan2PDF is an app for scanning pages and exporting them to PDFs. The user can export scans one by one, in separate PDF files, or export scans all together, in one PDF.

• As you may know, RedNotebook is a journal app, with calendar support. Among others, it allows the users to add tags, use bold and italic characters, has support for images, spell check features, automatic saving and backup functions, and many others.

• GLnemo2 is a 3D particle visualization program with various capabilities and support for OpenGL rendered objects.

• Growing up in a time of vinyl records and 8-track cassettes, it’s safe to say that I have an appreciation for music. Flash forward to today and we’re now able to enjoy any song we want, on demand! With music services provided by Amazon and independent sources, legally downloading music has never been so easy.

• We’ll assume you’re familiar with Apache rewrite rules and with how NGINX Plus processes URLs. For a review of the return, rewrite, and try_files directives in NGINX Plus and NGINX, see Creating NGINX Rewrite Rules.

• I’ve spent the last week setting up Rapicorn and Beast with travis-ci.org, a free continuous integration service for Github. Since travis is only available for Github, this means the Beast Git repository (hosted on git.gnome.org) had to be moved (cloned) to Github.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.53 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): - Support for the various versions of XAudio. - More implementation of the Web Services DLL. - Improved OLE object embedding. - Various code cleanups in Direct3D. - New MAINTAINERS file and Signed-off-by requirement to improve the patch review process. - Various bug fixes.

Games

• Wilderness adventure video game “Firewatch” finally gets a release date. It is arriving for Windows, Mac, Linux and the PlayStation 4 on February 9, 2016, according to a report in Wired. The first-person adventure game features the Wyoming wilderness and is being developed by independent game developer Campo Santo. As the name suggests, players take on the role of a fire lookout that is stationed in the middle of the wilderness and reports to a supervisor reachable only through a handheld radio.

• Head over to their Mac & Linux events page for the full details. Also, be sure to join the group if you haven’t already to get notified about the events in your Steam client.

• After the recent SteamDB info for Minecraft: Story Mode, we have some more interesting info to share. It seems one of the developers at Telltale is a Linux user, and wants to see the new Minecraft: Story Mode on Linux.

• In a recent blog post the developer for Defender’s Quest has stated that they’ve redone their engine in C++ instead of dealing with Adobe products. Linux is specifically mentioned as a beneficiary of this move. Not only that, since the upcoming sequel will be using the same engine, it seems possible that we’ll get a native port upon release.

• This is quite interesting, it seems Valve are actually doing some more curating on their store now ahead of the SteamOS launch.

• Valve Corporation has been shuffling around a number of things in their gigantic distribution service Steam ahead of the Steam Machines launch.

• One thing that a number of people noticed was how they were treated Linux games that are supposed to be playable on the new platforms. In a recent series of changes to the website, it appears that Valve has removed the SteamOS icons for a number of Linux games.

• Valve has started removing SteamOS icons from Linux titles on Steam, reportedly due to required standards not being met or incompatibly issues.

• Just a few moments ago, Valve announced the release of a new stable update for its awesome Steam Client for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.

• Valve has removed its SteamOS icon from a batch of Linux-compatible games on Steam, which has reportedly resulted in Linux players no longer having the option to download said titles.

• Valve didn’t give itself an easy job when it publicly announced its decision, over two years ago now, to bring the PC gaming experience to the living room TV. Plenty of companies have tried, and most never even got off the ground (see the Infinium Phantom for just one high-profile failure). But Valve is perhaps better positioned for success than any past effort, with a deep understanding of the PC gaming market and a deeply entrenched, market-leading distribution platform in Steam.

• I still haven’t properly tried out Don’t Be Patchman, but it looks cool. The funny bit of Wednesday news for you is that it’s still the only game on Steam to only support Linux, and the Windows release is now delayed.

• Valve’s Steam Machines will launch on November 10, and it looks like they’ll ship with the newly stable SteamOS 2.0. Those Steam mini-stores in GameStop will probably offer Steam Machines running software based on Debian 8 “Jessie.”

• SteamOS 1.0—codename “Alchemist”—was originally released at the end of 2013. It was based on Debian 7.0 “Wheezy” and included a newer Linux kernel, proprietary Nvidia and AMD graphics drivers, and Valve’s Steam Big Picture mode provided as the default interface.

• Iridium Studios, developer of the critically acclaimed Before the Echo and There Came an Echo, is proud to announce its first title, Before the Echo (formerly “Sequence”) is now available for the Mac and Linux platforms. It’s possible that they were recently inspired by that new Steve Jobs movie, or just happened to recently find a programmer who was good at this stuff. It’s a mystery, really.

• If something was missing from the Linux world that was an expansion pack for Cards Against Humanity, that’s entirely about Linux. Well, it won’t be missing for much longer, and one such expansion is on its way.

• The most in-depth ones I have found yet is engadget and ars technica who deserve some applause here, as they went into quite a bit of detail, and more so than any other website.

• They seem reasonably positive about the whole thing. They do note the interface does still have its issues, like accidentally introducing a bug that shows Windows games which will get ironed out properly (one would hope anyway!).

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I am happy to share six new additions to the themes section of our AppCenter…

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Believe it or not, the KDE desktop environment turned 19 years old on October 14, 2015. Yes, it has been 19 long years since Matthias Ettrich announced his new project, the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE).

• This not a rant! I just want to share some concerns about the quality of the current KDE desktop and its deployment to normal users.

• I upraded to KDE 5 by upgrading from Fedora 21 to Fedora 22. I did this rapidly on four laptops because I liked the new fresh look. Two of them I use heavily for personal work. The plasma version in use was 5.3. But after some weeks of work I collected a long list of heavy issues with that desktop. They all showed up doing very general things. Especially problematic are multi screen configurations. Things you usually do when you plug in and plug off your laptop from the display at your working place.

• Today we have released Qt 5.5.1, the first update to Qt 5.5. In addition to improvements and fixes to Qt functionality, it also packs in new Qt Creator 3.5.1.

• Right after Plasma Mobile was first announced at Akademy 2015, the team put me in charge of the creation of a crucial pillar of the ecosystem: The Human Interface Guidelines for KDE phone applications. This means guidelines for “applications made by KDE for phones”, not “applications made for KDE Phone”, because

• There is no “KDE Phone”, just the phone UI of Plasma Mobile KDE applications for phones do not only run on Plasma Mobile, but may also run on e.g. Android or Ubuntu Touch

• I know it sounds harsh, and I should reiterate that the work the KDE team has done on the design is quite elegant. But the lack of stability (even if only a perceived stability) undercuts the design of the desktop. I want to use it, but placing KDE in a production environment, to me, seems like a risk.

• Believe me, I want KDE to succeed. I’ve always loved that Linux had such a vast array of choices… something for everyone. And KDE fills a very important niche for the Linux desktop—but at a 5.4 release, the environment should feel a lot more solid than it does.

• The digiKam Team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.14.0. This version is the result of another bugs triage on KDE bugzilla where more than 20 files have been closed. Thanks to Maik Qualmann who maintain KDE4 version.

• One of the problems we’ve historically had in the GNU/Linux world (and especially in KDE, since we’re cross-distribution) is that we’ve always had a hard time at explaining how to install our applications. Basically because it’s different on each distribution.

• Even those which are so clear to see that you ask yourself what the KDE devs have done to release software in that quality. Report your bugs, all of them. They are not obvious.

• All the old hardware I kept from my KO GmbH days is, well, old, and dying. The Thinkpad’s hinges are breaking, the Dell XPS 12′s has a really small screen and is too slow for development work, the Thinkstation desktop machine has been throwing compiler segfaults for a year now. I’ve got a bunch of Intel Software Development Platforms, which are interesting laptops, but without battery life. And the Surface Pro 3 is a test device, not suited to develop on either. Even the Dell monitor is slowly losing what little contrast it had.

• Still a long way to go, ATM the application bundle contains just the application binary + plist + icons. The libraries are still found only because of they are were they were compiled & installed. Plugins are not found either, need to take a look if that is just missing env vars or more.

• As KDE turns 19, two reports today said that KDE isn’t stable enough, one is a fairly comprehensive analysis. Elsewhere, openSUSE Leap 42.1 RC1 was released today and SUSE announced their SUSECon 2015 keynotes. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols discussed whether there’d actually be an Internet “Without Linux” and OMG!Ubuntu! got a look at Episode 2 before it was mysteriously pulled. Finally, Jack M. Germain said Robolinux 8.1 has the best MATE ever.

• The big news today was Red Hat’s acquisition of cloud automation specialist Ansible. Ansible is located just up the road from Red Hat and was started by former Red Hat employees. In other news, Jamie Watson reported on openSUSE Leap 42.1 progress.

• In a blog post published earlier today, October 15, KDE contributor and developer Björn Ruberg talks about the stability, usability, and reliability of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment for end users.

• The developers of the powerful, free, open-source, and cross-platform Krita digital painting software have announced the release of the eighth maintenance version for the Krita 2.9 series.

• Pentobi is a board game in which players have to place pieces that are similar in shape with tetrominos on a square grid board, while trying to block the opponent from doing the same. The winner is the player who places the most number of pieces on the board when no more pieces can be placed.

• One applet I missed the most from KDE4 Plasma times was Quicklaunch applet. I use vertical panel and adding multiple launchers to vertical panel is not really convenient because they are placed bellow each other, and in result occupy a lot of vertical space. That’s why I was using Quicklaunch that let’s you have (in my case) 4 applets that occupy the same space as one big launcher.

• Now let’s talk about the other Simon – the open source speech recognition program. As you might have read Peter Grasch, the former maintainer of Simon, needed to leave the project and was searching for someone that takes it over. And as I was at this point in time the only person interested in this great tool and framework… So I’m the new maintainer of Simon and would like to thank Peter a lot for his trust and for the great work he did in and with Simon over several years!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The developers behind the open-source GNOME desktop environment are working hard these days to put all the bits of the first point release of GNOME 3.18.1 together and publish the update on the project’s official channels.

• Version 3.18.1 of GNOME’s Mutter window and compositing manager was released today for the GNOME 3.18.1 point release.

• Notable to GNOME Mutter 3.18.1 are fixes to improve the state of HiDPI on Wayland. There’s also been a number of crash fixes plus the addition of fullscreen/unfullscreen animations.

• Polari 3.18.1 also commonly known as “It’s Yoghurt. It’s French” was released recently and I wanted in that relation to cover the latest whereabouts in Polari.

• The GNOME developers are still working hard these days to release the first maintenance version of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that many core components and apps have been updated lately.

• On October 15, Christian Hergert, the lead developer and creator of the open-source GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) software, announced the release and immediate availability for download of GNOME Builder 3.18.1.

• On October 15, GNOME developer Florian Müllner has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the GNOME Shell 3.18.1 and GNOME Shell 3.16.4 maintenance releases.

• The GNOME developers are still working hard these days to prepare the first point release of the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, so many package maintainers are releasing updates as we speak.

• Hi all!

• Here comes our first update to GNOME 3.18, it has many fixes (several wayland related), various improvements, documentation and translation updates, we hope you’ll enjoy it.

• We will soon publish the schedule for our next release, and a first development release, 3.19.1, should soon hit the streets.

• For more information about the major changes in GNOME 3.18, please visit our release notes:

• https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.18/

• GNOME’s Florian Müllner announced the release of two maintenance versions for GNOME’s window manager and compositor, Mutter 3.18.1 for GNOME 3.18.1 and Mutter 3.16.4 for GNOME 3.16.

• I am really feeling happy about sharing the great news that GNOME.Asia 2016 is going to held in New Delhi NCR, India

Distributions

Reviews

• Robolinux will impress both newcomers and seasoned Linux users. The Mate desktop version is an excellent starting point. Its user interface is easy and familiar.

• Robolinux is an impressive traditional Linux desktop distro. It could be an ideal vehicle for both enterprises and small and home offices to make the migration to Linux.

• BackBox Linux is a distribution that provides the best penetration testing, incident response, computer forensics, and intelligence gathering applications in a user-friendly desktop distribution.

• It’s based on Ubuntu, but uses a resource-friendly desktop environment called Xfce.

• BackBox Linux 4.4 was released a few days ago, barely three months after the release of BackBox 4.3.

• This article presents a summary review of the latest edition – BackBox Linux 4.4, which is based on Ubuntu 14.04.3.

New Releases

• We have just received an email from Animesoft International informing us about the availability for the final release of their Ubuntu-based Linux Mangaka Chu distribution.

• We reported last week the release and immediate availability for download of the Manjaro Linux Fluxbox 15.10 Community Edition computer operating system based on the Manjaro Linux 15.09 and Arch Linux OSes.

• Unlike the normal Bodhi Linux releases which come with a minimal amount of software pre-installed, AppPack releases will include a variety of software pre-installed for folks who want minimal setup work after installing their operating system. The software included by default in the 3.1.0 AppPack ISO images includes.

• Wireshark, the world’s most popular, open-source, free, and cross-platform network protocol analyzer that is being used for analysis, development, education, and troubleshooting purposes, has been updated to version 1.12.8.

• The team recently announced the new BackBox version 4.4 with all the packages updated to their latest versions & some new packages have also been added.

• Q4OS, a Linux distribution based on Debian that aims to provide users with a desktop experience that is similar to the one found on older Windows systems, has been upgraded by its developers to version 1.4.3.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• Leap is less about the newest updates, which is the purpose of Tumbleweed and its frequent snapshots; Leap is more about relevance and purposeful updates and packages that provide users prolonged, stable and enterprise-level functionality. Leap has newer, community packages built on core SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) source code for a more stable base. Of the 7,000-plus packages in Leap, 1,500 are from SLE.

• The openSuSE Linux 42.1 Leap Release Candidate 1 (whew, that was a mouthful) was made available on their download page yesterday (click on ‘switch to Development Version’ at the top of the page to get it). Although I will be running their Tumbleweed advanced development version on most of my computers, I am planning on keeping Leap on one or two of them, so I have been downloading and trying the pre-releases as Leap development has progressed.

• The openSUSE community, through Douglas DeMaio, has announced earlier today, October 15, 2015, the immediate availability for download and testing of the RC (Release Candidate) build of the forthcoming openSUSE Leap 42.1 operating system.

Red Hat Family

• After being in development for quite a few months now, the port of the CentOS 7 Linux operating system to 32-bit (i686/x86) hardware architectures has been finalized earlier this week.

• Red Hat, Inc. will host the 2015 Government Symposium on Tuesday, November 10th from 7:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City in Arlington, VA. This event will focus on DevOps, mobility, cloud, containers, and more. It will feature breakout sessions and technical labs with specialized tracks for architects, developers, operations and management.

• Whitehurst, too, left a “cushy job” for something completely different – in his case, it was Delta for Red Hat.

• Many investors like to look for momentum in stocks, but this can be very tough to define. There is great debate regarding which metrics are the best to focus on in this regard, and which are not really quality indicators of future performance. Fortunately, with our new style score system we have identified the key statistics to pay close attention to and thus which stocks might be the best for momentum investors in the near term.

• Today, we are pleased to announce the beta availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.1, Red Hat’s newest installment of open source web development tools, dynamic languages, and databases. Delivered on a separate lifecycle from Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a more frequent release cadence, Red Hat Software Collections bridges developer agility and production stability by helping to accelerate the creation of modern applications that can then be more confidently deployed into production.

• The basic working premise remains the same—serving our customers, working with our partners, and creating a friendly environment that is enriching and nourishing for our employees.

• We, at Red Hat, work very closely with our customers, partners, and open source community for growing our business. India has a large developers’ base with a strong open source community, which we strive to be engaged with.

• Open source giant Red Hat is making another acquisition to build out its enterprise IT portfolio: today the company announced that it would buy Ansible, an IT automation solutions specialist that helps companies build and manage hybrid IT deployments across the cloud and on-premise solutions.

• The acquisition had been rumored to be in the works for a price of over $100 million. Officially, however, Red Hat tells TechCrunch that it is declining to disclose the price of the deal, which should close this month.

• Although Red Hat is picking up Ansible to complement its existing IT management tools, it isn’t dropping its use of Puppet.

• Red Hat today announced that it is acquiring privately held IT automation vendor Ansible, whose open-source platform is well-known and deployed in the DevOps community and is competitive with both Chef and Puppet. Ansible’s primary product is its Ansible Tower platform, an enterprise-grade IT orchestration and automation system.

• Publicly traded enterprise software company Red Hat has acquired devops software startup Ansible for more than $100 million, VentureBeat has learned.

• Red Hat will announce the news as soon as tomorrow, a source familiar with the matter told VentureBeat.

• Mizuho reaffirmed their buy rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research report released on Friday morning, MarketBeat Ratings reports. They currently have a $88.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock.

• Wall Street Analysts have given a mean estimate of $ 0.38 earnings per share to Red Hat Incorporated.

• Our partners can also scale their businesses and grow profits with us by leveraging the power of the open source community and our unique annuity model, says Rajesh Rege, managing director, Red Hat India.

• The use of open source solutions in Brazil is expected to double by 2017 in terms of revenues, according to US open source firm Red Hat.

• The forecast was made by Gilson Magalhães, Red Hat Brasil country manager, who was speaking at the Red Hat Forum held in São Paulo.

• On October 15, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team was proud to announce the release of the Beta builds for their open source Red Hat Software Collections 2.1 project, a collection of web development tools, databases, and dynamic languages, and Red Hat Developer Toolset 4, which helps developers to streamline app development on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Although Red Hat is picking up Ansible to complement its existing IT management tools, it isn’t dropping its use of Puppet.

• Red Hat today announced that it is acquiring privately held IT automation vendor Ansible, whose open-source platform is well-known and deployed in the DevOps community and is competitive with both Chef and Puppet. Ansible’s primary product is its Ansible Tower platform, an enterprise-grade IT orchestration and automation system.

Fedora

• Fedora developers have been discussing whether the Wine-powered PlayOnLinux open-source software can be packaged for the distribution.

• While Fedora has official Wine packages in their repository, there isn’t any PlayOnLinux package at present. PlayOnLinux is powered by Wine and is effectively just a wrapper for making it easy to run Windows games and other applications with Wine while the POL code itself is open-source under the GPL. PlayOnLinux is a great free alternative to CodeWeavers’ CrossOver for making an easier-to-use Wine experience.

• Here’s a fantastic opportunity in open source for folks from underrepresented backgrounds. The Fedora Engineering team has an Outreachy internship available December 2015 to March 2016. Applications are being accepted at the Outreachy site. The deadline is 1900 UTC Monday, November 2, 2015.

• Flock is the annual contributor’s conference for Fedora team members. It’s where contributors come together, discuss new ideas, work towards making them a reality, and promote the values of sharing free software. Every year, Flock alternates between a North America and Europe location. This year, Flock 2015 was held in Rochester, New York from August 12th to August 15th. Despite some delayed flights and early morning arrivals, Flock 2015 began on a high note, with Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller leading a State of Fedora talk as contributors from across the world assembled throughout the day.

Debian Family

• The Debian developers have announced that new kernel updates are now available for their Debian GNU/Linux 7.9 (Wheezy), Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 (Jessie), and Debian GNU/Linux Unstable (Sid) operating systems.

• All this dispute centers around people not being capable to distinguish two things: One, being against the Code of Conduct due to the inclusion of administrative actions without clear definitions, and Two, being pro offensive behavior and and insults. Now, dear Lars^WWirzenius, please listen: I never advocated abusive behavior or insults, nor do I defend it. (Did you hear that!) I simply opposed the Code of Conduct as ruling instrument. And what kind of emails I got due to my opposition was far outside the Code of Conduct you are so strongly defending.

• I am not going to talk about Norbert Preining’s continuous ranting against Debian’s Code of Conduct. Suffice to say that it annoys me, and that I think he is wrong.

• A big update of all related packages (tex-common 6.04, texlive-bin 2015.20150524.37493-7, texlive-base/lang/extra package 2015.20151016-1) due to the move to support multi-arch. Of course, the regular updates of the TeX Live are included, too. With this change it should be possible to run a multi-arch system with only one TeX Live installed.

• Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Derivatives

• The Robolinux developers were proud to announce today, October 16, the immediate availability for download of the Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions of the Robolinux 8.2 distribution.

• Valve is getting really close to the November 10 launch of the Steam Machines, and it’s polishing the SteamOS distro. Only small fixes are landing, but they are important ones.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canoical’s Łukasz Zemczak has sent in his report on the work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the seventh OTA (Over-the-Air) software update for the mobile operating system.

• The Ubuntu Touch platform is still very young, and it doesn’t have millions of apps in the store, but someone has just uploaded a malicious one that managed to get past the automated testing.

• Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux open source mobile OS for smartphones and tablets will be able to run programs designed for any version of Linux.

• Ubuntu and other Linux-based operating systems are extremely secure, but nothing is infallible. While you are arguably safer than on Windows or OS X, the argument can also be made that a little common sense goes a long way. In other words, all modern operating systems can be rather secure, as long as the user is not lackadaisical in their behavior.

• You may be surprised to hear that Ubuntu Phone has a rather nasty security vulnerability. Don’t worry, the desktop operating system is not impacted; it is a phone-only affair. Still, it is scary to see something like this fall through the cracks.

• An important security issue on Ubuntu phone that has been revealed this morning has been fixed by the Canonical team. This is the first major issue revealed on Ubuntu Touch, and the developers have been quick to repair it.

• I have plenty of experience with securing Red Hat-based systems like Red Hat Enteprise Linux, CentOS and Fedora; but Ubuntu is new territory entirely. The rest of this post is full of lessons learned along the way.

• We’re reported earlier today, October 15, that a member of the Ubuntu App Developer Google+ community has discovered a malicious app on the Ubuntu Touch Store that could give root access to an intruder.

• A month ago, someone asked Snappy Ubuntu developers if it is possible to host private snaps (snappy apps), the packages used in the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system for IoT devices and embedded hardware, and system updates in a software repository that can be controlled and reviewed before those packages arrive to customers.

• As of nowish, wily has entered the Final Freeze period in preparation for the final release of Ubuntu 15.10 next week.

• The current uploads in the queue will be reviewed and either accepted or rejected as appropriate by pre-freeze standards, but anything from here on should fit two broad categories:

• 1) Release critical bugs that affect ISOs, installers, or otherwise can’t be fixed easily post-release.

• 2) Bug fixes that would be suitable for post-release SRUs, which we may choose to accept, reject, or shunt to -updates for 0-day SRUs on a case-by-base basis.

• The Ubuntu developers are working on fixing a problem with authentication failure notifications for online accounts that’s been affecting the mobile platform.

• The Steam Controllers have started to ship to gamers across the world, and some people are already using them to play games. Unfortunately, the Steam Controllers don’t work by default with Ubuntu, but there is a workaround in place.

• Canonical developers released Mir 0.17.0 yesterday in time for the final freeze of Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.

• First up for Mir 0.17.0 is the introduction of libmircookie. Mir’s cookie library is explained as, “a simple mechanism for a group of cooperating processes to hand out and verify difficult-to-forge timestamps to untrusted 3rd parties.”

• Smartphones running Ubuntu Linux from Canonical may soon support not just mobile apps, but all programs for open source, Linux-based platforms. That’s according to developers working on bleeding-edge versions of Ubuntu for phones.

• A new OTA update for Ubuntu Touch is set to release in just a couple of days, but developers have unveiled it by mistake only for a short while. A few users got the notification and even managed to install it before it was pulled, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

• Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has just informed us about the new features and bugfixes implemented in the forthcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 software update, due for release on October 19, 2015.

• Those of you who are looking for an in-depth tutorial on how to design their own icons, following the Suru icon theme, for applications submitted in Ubuntu Linux are in luck, as Sam Hewitt shared with the world his knowledge on the matter.

• Sam Hewitt is a professional designer known for his contributions to numerous popular projects, including the Ubuntu Suru icon theme, the elementary UX (User Experience), as well as the Moka icon theme.

• On October 16, Canonical’s David Planella sent in his report on the work done by developers and members of the Ubuntu Linux community in the last two weeks of October 2015.

• Ubuntu Touch has featured an online account option that integrates the OS with your Google account. However, many people seem to be having plenty of problems with this useful online integration, as reports have been flying around about constant authentication failures/

• Ubuntu Touch developers are aware of the issue, and have been talking about how to fix the problem. For this very reason, they’re requesting feedback from the community and other devs.

• While everyone is focused on the launch of the official Ubuntu 15.10 flavors, the Ubuntu MATE team has been working on the Raspberry Pi 2 version, and it looks like it’s going to be a glorious one.

• Ubuntu Phone Music App is the perfect example of platform convergence. It’s pretty much the same code running on the phones and on the desktop, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved, tremendously.

• The Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) development cycle is coming to an end, and the project has finally entered Final Freeze. This means that only a small number of particular fixes are allowed now, and the launch of the OS is only one week away.

• My employer, Igalia, recently purchased a Gazelle Pro from System76 for me to use. So far, it seems like a great laptop, but time will tell. It came with Ubuntu 15.04 preinstalled, so before replacing that with Fedora Workstation, I decided to check out how some of our applications look under Ambiance, the GTK+ theme that Ubuntu uses instead of Adwaita.

• Making the switch to Ubuntu – or any popular Linux distribution – is more than the mere act of changing operating systems. You must also have apps that allow you to get work done. In this slideshow, I’ll be sharing critical applications that I rely on, and I’ll talk about how I use them in my daily activities.

• Canonical had been pursuing the dream of “convergence”— a phone that can power a PC desktop—for years. This year, Microsoft declared plans to bring a similar feature to Windows 10 as “ Continuum,” making it a central part of Windows Phone’s identity. This lit a fire under Ubuntu, and Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth announced hardware would ship before the end of 2015 and beat Windows 10 to market.

Devices/Embedded

• Although the BeagleBoard.org announcement and product page make no mention of price, the eLinux.org site, where all design materials for this open spec board have now been released, mentions a $239 MSRP. That’s pretty steep when you can pay only $75 for a Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c SBC featuring a Snapdragon 410 SoC with four 64-bit Cortex-A53 cores, as well as 8GB eMMC, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

• The delays appear to stem not from BeagleBoard.org or its unnamed manufacturing partner. Rather, the announcement was made in conjunction with TI’s formal release of the previously tipped, and equally delayed dual-core, 1.5GHz Cortex-A15 Sitara AM57x SoC. The BeagleBoard-x15 runs Linux or Android on the AM5728 model.

• Syncloud is open source software which allows users without any technical knowledge to have popular services running at home on cheap hardware like raspberry pi with UI similar to modern mobile app store solutions. With almost one click install within seconds user can have complex services like ownCloud ready for use otherwise impossible to install without an admin friend with experience.

• Drones are fun gadgets that work on the same principles as helicopters. As their technology progressed so did their capabilities. Modern drones are equipped with powerful electric motors that can lift other various things besides the drone itsself. The flight time of such a gadget varies from 5 to 20 minutes depending on the battery size and the efficiency of the motors. Most drones are used for taking photographs and filming, some come equipped with a video recorder while others offer the possibility to attach a digital camera like a GoPro.

• Aaeon’s “AQ7-BT” COM runs Linux on dual- or quad-core Bay Trail SoCs, and offers onboard RAM and SSD, rich I/O, PCIe expansion, and -40 to 85°C operation.

• TI has released its Sitara AM57x SoCs, with one or two 1.5GHz Cortex-A15 cores and C66x DSPs, plus two Cortex-M4 MCUs, a PowerVR GPU, and a quad-core PRU.

• The Ubuntu MATE project posts the details about the donations they’ve received each month, detailing who gave money and where they are going. They’ve been doing this for quite some time, and many times they used those funds for donations to other projects. Now they are saving the money because Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for Raspberry Pi is coming out, and they think it’s going to be a hit.

• Ka-Ro’s “TX6UL” is an SODIMM-style COM that runs Linux on an i.MX6 UltraLite, supports industrial temperatures, and offers 4GB eMMC and secure boot options.

• Considering all the announcements of i.MX6 UltraLite based computer-on-modules over the summer, one might think that Ka-Ro’s TX6UL is behind the times. Not at all. Freescale’s IoT-oriented Cortex-A7 UltraLite SoC won’t ship in volume until 4Q 2015, at which point the TX6UL will be ready to roll, complete with Yocto Linux and dual development kit options, says Ka-Ro.

• The DragonBox Pyra is a handheld gaming device aimed at a very specific niche: folks looking for a versatile, open source machine that can run desktop Linux apps and emulate game consoles including the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo 64 and Gameboy DS.

• It’s been in development for a few years, but now you can finally pre-order a DragonBox Pyra… kind of.

• Forrester technology analyst J P Gownder poured a little rain on the parade, pointing out that smartphones are becoming ever more sophisticated, and dominant operating systems such as Windows are evolving across devices.

• I have worked with ARM based systems for longer than I care to admit to myself. From the Acorn Archimedes 305 in 1987 through to modern 64bit systems I have seen many many changes in the ARM community. One big change has been the rise of the inexpensive single board computer (SBC).

Phones

• Unique mobile subscriber count has been updated by the World Bank for 2015. This is the elusive number, we find easily the total subscriber count for the planet (now more mobile subscriptions in use than humans alive) but many of us have two or more accounts, so what is the actual unique user count. The World Bank now says 5.2 Billion human beings. That number is 72% of all humans alive, of any age including babies. It is utterly unprecedented for any technology including the internet, PC, TV, radio, even the wristwatch. Mobile is the most widely spread technology humans have ever experienced, used in places that have no electrical grid, no running water. It even extends beyond literacy as even an illiterate person can talk on a mobile phone.

Tizen

• A few tidbits from the smartphone wars. Samsung finally got its Tizen based Z3 out to the market, releasing it in India. About US $130 will get you a 5 inch smartphone with 8mp camera, so superficially its similar to last year’s iPhone 6 (but without the apps). Lets see where else it is released and if more models are coming.

• And if you thought 1,000 phone manufacturer brands selling 2,500 models of phones was not enough, we have yet another new entrant to the smartphone wars: Pepsi. Not for most of us, but they will launch phones and accessories in China next year, on Android of course.

• Samsung won’t give up on its Tizen operating system for smartphones: it’s launched a new handset running the OS, aimed at price-sensitive users in India.

• The South Korean company uses Google’s Android operating system for most of its smartphones, but sees a potential for Tizen in low-end smartphones, wearables, TVs and the “Internet of Things,” consisting of sensor-connected devices.

• Wow, Samsung Z3 was launched in India yesterday and now, as expected, it has launched at the Samsung Electronics Enterprise Mobility Forum in Moscow, Russia. This is the 4G version of the Samsung Z3 (SM-Z300F) and represents a great opportunity for Tizen and also russian app developers.

• Samsung India have Launched the Samsung Z3 Smartphone today at a special event in Gurgaon, India. The Z3 is the second Tizen based smartphone to be released by the Korean company. We exclusively had the news of the Z3 coming months ago and finally the day is here!

• Security is a key selling feature for Tizen, and the platform is now certified for usage in the Russian Government and also corporate sectors, according to people close to the matter. We have previously reported on the certification process which was hoping to yeild some results by the end of this year. This is the first example of such certification in Russia (for mobile devices), and the solution will be pushed out to corporate clients near the end of this year. The Samsung Z3 Smartphone will be the target hardware with the Tizen platform and relevant certified apps installed, with the exception of the Tizen Store.

Android

• Google engineer Kirill Grouchnikov has spilled the beans on a major new visual overhaul coming to Google’s Play Store on mobile – and reports suggest the refreshed look is now rolling out to users across the world.

• Test Automation nowadays plays a very important role in product testing. There are multiple positives to go implement test automation. This includes minimizing test execution time, ensuring larger coverage in less time in critical release phases, and reliable and repetitive runs during product development phase to ensure no regression issues are introduced. And it minimizes the risk of human error or negligence while doing repetitive regression testing cycles.

• The Android-running BlackBerry Priv finally has a price tag courtesy UK-based retailer Carphone Warehouse. Additionally, BlackBerry has released an official promo video of the smartphone after setting up a pre-registration page earlier this week.

• It’s been seven months since ResearchKit first launched and researchers from a number of research institutions have launched new studies on the platform — at least 9 news apps have launched since the first five apps were announced. While Apple and its initial collaborators made the right move and made the framework open source, none of the studies so far have been made accessible to Android users.

• Phone manufacturers are already gearing up to update their devices to the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS, as we detailed earlier, but it seems like LG G4 might be the first outside the Nexus lineup to actually receive Google’s latest. LG announced that it will start rolling out the update beginning next week, and that Poland would be the first stop on the list, with other regions such as the US, Asia, and Europe to follow, though LG has not revealed any schedule for it yet. It is a common practice among manufacturers to roll out the update to a limited-size region first, to check for any issues before a worldwide release.

• 1.4 billion people: That’s the latest number of Android users across the globe. Nearly 20 percent of the Earth’s population is utilizing Google’s Android mobile operating system (OS) on a day-to-day basis. Let that sink in for a moment.

• Sony has updated its support pages to indicate the fact that at least six of its devices will not be receiving updates to Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. Instead, these will jump from 5.0 straight to Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

• Each version of Android since Gingerbread has had an easter egg associated with its version number. Here’s a video that looks at this tradition and gets the inside story from its most recent implementer who most recently has put a multiplayer game into Marshmallow.

• People upgrade their smartphone — on average — once every two years. And every time, you’re faced with the same question: What to do with the old device?

• Bin it? Sell it? Give it to a friend?

• As it happens, there’s a litany of creative uses for an old Android smartphone, that can make your life — and the lives of others — far easier.

• Build an alarm clock. Or a robot. Help cure cancer. Secure your home. Save the rainforest. And much, much more.

• Two new Android devices from Miami-based phone-maker Blu Products offer something that you don’t find in other models: batteries that last up to three days on a single charge. Announced Thursday and available immediately through Blu’s website, the Studio Energy 2 and Energy X pack in 5,000mAh and 4,000mAh batteries, respectively.

• The BlackBerry Priv, the Canadian smartphone maker’s first Android-based smartphone, can now be pre-registered via a new dedicated website. The page also confirms some of the smartphone’s specifications. The release date however, is still a secret for now. Interested users can sign-up on the page to get updates as to when the device would be reaching the shelves.

• NPR One for Android has gained MirrorLink compatibility, offering users yet another way to listen while on the go. Through the use of a free app from MirrorLink, RockScout, you can now control how you listen to NPR One right from your dashboard. For those not familiar, MirrorLink offers a way to bring your smartphone content to your dashboard, and is not OS specific like Android Auto and CarPlay.

• 6.0 Marshmallow, the latest version of Android, hit Google’s own Nexus devices last week, and LG is planning to get the update out to its own phones as soon as possible. The company just announced that G4 owners — in Poland, at least — will get the OS upgrade from next week, with the Americas, Asia, and Europe to follow. LG says its Polish G4 customers will be the first in the world to get Marshmallow, as was the case with last year’s G3.

• All modern phones have multi-tasking capabilities, yet some are clearly better than others. Not only can hardware make a difference, but also software — an incredibly notorious mistake on Samsung’s part for its biggest releases of the year.

• But despite the memory management fiasco, Samsung has had the upper hand in Android multitasking due to its excellent multi-window solution. And Note users that know how to exploit it get an extremely useful and unique Android experience.

• When ship modifications have to be designed we first spend time crawling around the ship measuring, scanning, and documenting the condition of the ship and machinery. I always wrap my phone in some kind of rugged case because it’s likely my phone will be slipping out of a pocket as I twist and turn to fit into all the spaces.

• Some people spend a lot of their time outside working and playing. Using an Otterbox or other rugged case helps protect phones, but sometimes people need something more than a durable case. Cat Phones has a line of rugged smartphones and I’ve been testing the latest one, the Cat S40, for the past ten days.

• Modular Android smartwatches and smartphones are around the corner, as evidenced by new devices coming soon from Blocks and Fairphone.

• Blocks, which has been developing a modular, open source smartwatch for several years, has re-emerged with a resoundingly successful Kickstarter campaign, and a new Android Lollipop based operating system. UK-based Blocks has already hauled in more than $700,000 for its Blocks smartwatch, and packages starting at $195 are still available through Nov. 19, with shipments due in May 2016.

• Google doesn’t always promote or include all of its Android apps in Android phones.

• Things weren’t helped when it transpired the rumoured BlackBerry Venice phone would actually launch as the BlackBerry Priv – a slang term for a toilet in the UK (privy, to be exact). The headlines were writing themselves.

• Android has always been a powerful operating system. But with the release of Android 6.0 Marshmallow — the best Android operating system to date — and the latest hardware from Google, Samsung, Sony, and others, now might just be the perfect time for even settled iPhone users to give Android a very serious look.

• Blocks, which has been developing a modular, open source smartwatch for several years, has re-emerged with a resoundingly successful Kickstarter campaign, and a new Android Lollipop based operating system. UK-based Blocks has already hauled in more than $700,000 for its Blocks smartwatch, and packages starting at $195 are still available through Nov. 19, with shipments due in May 2016.

• It’s muddier than ever with Android 6.0. Now on Tap has the potential to give Google insight into apps, just like it knows everything about the web — as long as Google can keep it useful enough to entice users to long-press that home button. There might be privacy implications to worry about, though Google has insisted that it doesn’t store that search data.

• Assuming Google can improve Now on Tap (and quell privacy concerns), it might need to think about another rebranding. Google itself got a new logo, maybe Android is going to need a new name soon. The best candidate is obvious: Google OS.

• If you’ve been looking forward to finally getting your hands on BlackBerry’s first Android-based handset and you’re based in the UK, you can now pre-order the device and it will arrive at your door next month.

• UK retailer Carphone Warehouse is offering the slider device on tariffs of £31.99 or more across a range of different networks. At that cost, you’ll need to still put in money up-front though; if you want a ‘free’ handset, you’ll need to commit to at least £49 per month or more, and again, deals vary by network.

• On October 5th, Google started rolling out the Android 6.0 Marshmallow update to new Nexus smartphones and tablets. This brand new software delivers tons of new features, security enhancements, better battery life, and more. Now that Marshmallow is here, and will be coming to most recent phones from Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Huawei, and most other Android phones in the near future, below are 10 things to know about Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

• The Android 6.0 Marshmallow is the most recent Android build that will soon roll out to smartphones and tablets across the globe. Sony has confirmed the list of the Xperia smartphones that will receive the Android M update.

Free Software/Open Source

• Now that LastPass has been acquired by LogMeIn, you might be interested in a free open-source alternative

• Already prevalent in big data applications and many other software solutions regularly employed by agencies, open-source technologies are a natural fit for the public sector. Their ability to combine distributed peer review and transparency drives software innovation at an accelerated pace and at a significantly lower cost.

• Vendor lock-in has plagued the corporate world since well before the arrival of the cloud, but now — with ever more of today’s technology operating in an online environment dominated by providers such as Amazon Web Services — it’s taken on new urgency.

• Aiming to strike a blow at the problem, Walmart on Wednesday announced that it will open-source the cloud technology it has built up following its acquisition of startup OneOps roughly two years ago.

• Sussman seemed to disagree with that view of things. “Software freedom is a requirement for the system I’m talking about!” I liked hearing this, but didn’t understand fully what he meant… was he talking about the foundations on top of which the AI software ran?

• Robots in Depth is a new video series featuring interviews with researchers, entrepreneurs, VC investors, and policy makers in robotics, hosted by Per Sjöborg. In this interview, Tully Foote — ROS Platform Manager at the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) — explains the benefits of open source in robotics and how ROS came to be an open standar

• In today’s open source world, there are a number of very large communities that have tangible incentives for contributing to projects. Commits that make it into the master branch of Docker can attract tips, and once you become an Active Technical Contributor for OpenStack you get a number of perks, including free entry to the next OpenStack Summit.

• For smaller projects based on GitHub, it’s relatively easy to find contributions for a user, or contributors for a project. There are some limitations to this, but the mechanism is there.

• Inventory management is the process of specifying and quantifying the shape and percentage of goods you hold in stock. By knowing what you have, and where, you can save money and improve your service to customers. There are myriad free inventory management software systems to choose from, so here are the 8 best free and open source inventory management systems, listed in alphabetical order. For more free software, see our free software downloads. See all of our IT Business tutorials.

• NASA has released its VICAR Core set of applications as open source and it looks like the agency is opening its tools toward the international community.

• End-to-end products look to be dead in a growing world of open source. But, there’s still a niche to be had for those who provide a comprehensive platform, especially to medium- and small-sized firms.

• Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down with Donna Prlich, VP of product marketing at Pentaho Corp., to get her perspective on the industry and to explain what, exactly, Pentaho is.

• We’ve often heard that the demand for programmers is leading to a skills shortage in the coding sector. Linux already pumps a lot of money into education. Is it time we saw coding as a curriculum staple in schools? Zemlin reminded us that, while its an emphatic ‘yes’, there’s more to it than just lines of code.

• “In the US you are starting to see schools putting programming and coding into the curriculum. But coding can sometimes get in the way of actually understanding how a computer works, and that’s where you get something like the Raspberry Pi which was designed to allow Cambridge students to actually understand how a computer works,” he explained.

• Many, if not most, people, myself included, run a heterogeneous environment, picking the appropriate operating system or platform for the job. To have some level of consistency in my cross-platform workflow I choose applications that I can run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. And it’s icing on the cake if these applications are open source.

• Here, then, are some of the best open source and free apps I’ve found for my heterogeneous environment.

• Open source software (OSS) are accessible under a software authorization that enables individuals to access the source code and customize it according to their needs so providing the capability to tailor the software for different jobs. The program license keeps the right of the individual to modify and customize it in any way they desire. This feature is the major difference among open source software and blocked source software model. The blocked source model enables only the developer of the application to access and customize the program according to their requirements.

• Open source is already playing a very critical role. If you monitor Kickstarter for just a month, you will see numerous “startups” offering new IoT-focused hardware based on open source software and (in some cases) open source firmware.

• Personally, I am happy to give a lot of the credit to the Arduino team—open source hardware and software—allowing anybody to build their first intelligent and connected sensor or actuator.

• I’ll be blunt: Learn to embrace open source, or get buried. It’s that simple.

• Personally, I love open source. I love the ideology, I love the code, and I love the way it makes me feel to know that when I learn an open source app or operating system I can take that knowledge with me and use it anywhere for anything. That’s some serious power, right there! You learn to use Photoshop, and now you’re tied to $1,000 or more of software license—you might or might not be able to get an organization to buy that for you, or you might or might not have one of your own that you might or might not be able to use at any given organization. That just sucks, and I got bitten by licensing more times than I can remember in the bad old days. Now, though? Learn to use Krita or GIMP and you can take that anywhere. It’s yours. Those capabilities you gained when you learned how to use it are yours. You can use them—legally—however and wherever you want to. I wish more people understood what that really represents.

• Speaking at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Digital Innovation Summit, Navin Vembar, director of IT for GSA’s Integrated Award Environment, detailed the open-sourcing of the IAE and why it should provide more value to federal agencies and taxpayers. The Wednesday event was hosted by FedScoop.

• The plan is to make it “open source from the ground up,” Vembar said, who was joined on stage by Munjeet Singh, a vice president of the Strategic Innovation Group at Booz Allen Hamilton, the contractor awarded modernization work on the IAE project late last year. “The platform will be open source, the code that we’re producing that lies on that platform will be open source.”

• Digital transformation. Collaboration. Sharing economy. These and other expressions are part of the vocabulary of those who live and breathe information technology. However, it is a mistake to think that these expressions are limited to the IT world. As with all the changes and transformations happening in society, they are quite common outside of tech.

• According to the president of Red Hat in Brazil, Gilson Magalhães, open source plays an important role here. He thinks that, even though many people do not yet understand that transformation, sooner or later a strategy (followed by proper implementation) will be needed to adapt to the new times.

• International Business Machines (IBM) has given in to the pressure from the Chinese government to provide Beijing access to its source code as proof there are no security risks. Like Us on Facebook

• However, IBM said to Forbes that it is not the first American firm to open its source code to Beijing. IBM said that Microsoft and Apple had also allowed Chinese officials to look into their software, reports Engadget.

• Open source software is arguably one of the foundation stones of the collaborative economy and, as many trailblazers are, is a controversial topic.

• Even its name has been subject to heated discussions. Whether a program is called “Free Software”, “Free and open source software (FOSS)” or “open source software (OSS)” has always been (and to a certain extent still is) an indication of the personal view of the motivations, ideologies, philosophical views etc. behind the specific development and distribution model.

• This week researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have Release the demonstration video of a new open source facial recognition program based on Google’s FaceNet research, which has been named OpenFace.

• The results from a Pennsylvania company’s TrueAllele DNA testing software have been used in roughly 200 criminal cases, from California to Florida, helping put murderers and rapists in prison.

• Criminal defense lawyers, however, want to know whether it’s junk science.

• Defense attorneys have routinely asked, and have been denied, access to examine the software’s 170,000 lines of source code in a bid to challenge the authenticity of its conclusions. The courts generally have agreed with Cybergenetics, the company behind TrueAllele, that an independent examination of the code is unwarranted, that the code is a proprietary trade secret, and disclosing it could destroy the company financially.

• The era of HTTP/2 is now here, with both browsers and web servers supporting the next generation of the HTTP protocol that powers the modern web.

• The new Apache HTTP 2.4.17 release this week now includes the mod_http2 module providing HTTP/2 support. The basic syntax to enable HTTP/2, is about as easy at it gets – H2Direct on|off

• SDN AND OPENFLOW WORLD CONGRESS– The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today unveiled its annual set of networking industry predictions for 2016, predicting that 2016 will be the year of the Northbound Interface (NBI). The predictions were delivered by ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt during his keynote remarks at the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress in Düsseldorf, Germany.

• Despite the widespread open source, we’re entering a world of closed platforms:

• Today’s iOS9 launch shows what incredible power a single company has over so many independent publishers. Apple would love to push us into reading via the News App (built on open source!) using Webkit (built on open source!). Facebook is trying to get publishers to write directly for their Pages platform (built on open source!), rather than on the independent web. Android is the world’s largest mobile platform (built on open source!), but have you seen what happens to phone manufacturers who don’t play by Google’s rules?

• Something Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat said to me a while back was that coming from Delta to Red Hat, and thus outside of Open Source into Open Source, helped him to realize how special the Open Source culture and mindset is.

• Likewise, while I never left Open Source, moving to XPRIZE was stepping back from the flame somewhat, and it helped me to see the kindness, creativity, agility, and energy that so many of us in the Open Source world take for granted.

• As such, despite the rewarding nature of my work at XPRIZE, I decided that I wanted to get back closer to technology. There was a caveat though: I still wanted to be able to play a role in furthering the efficacy and impact of how we as human beings collaborate and build communities to do incredible things.

• The General Service Administration’s innovation team 18F will soon use its “micro-purchase” authority to buy open source code for applications being developed by the group.

• Open source application development has been a core offering of the organization, which believes collaborative, community development results in a better overall product.

Events

• For the past five GHC conferences, Open Source Day has been held to bring together programmers, writers, and organizations, such as Mozilla and Cloudera, to work through some of the problems facing open source projects. The main goal of the 5-6 hours they have together is to get a solid chunk of work done and, for cool—yet scrappy—projects such as Women’s P2P Network, that’s what’s needed to take progress to the next level.

• FUEL GILT Conference is one of the largest events of FOSS language technology – Its challenges, solutions, best practices and its conventions. Due to some unavoidable reasons, we are a bit late in announcing CFP. We apologize for the same. We are late, but this time we have grand plan to celebrate the presence of our languages on new technology platform.

• Cory Doctorow at SCALE 14X: While the Call for Presentations for SCALE 14X is ongoing and closes in two weeks — on Friday, Oct. 30, at midnight Pacific, so at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday morning the 31st, your unsubmitted proposal turns into a pumpkin — the SCALE team has announced it has chosen one of the keynoters for the four-day, first-of-the-year Linux/FOSS event.

• Midokura, the global innovator in software network virtualization, today announced that Susan Wu, director of technical marketing, will present at the All Things Open 2015 conference, taking place October 19-20, 2015, in Raleigh, NC. Her session will cover the use of open source networking and load balancing as a service (LBaaS) to support open cloud platforms, such as OpenStack.

• Ten years ago when Pentaho Corp. was founded, Big Data was barely a gleam in the tech world’s eye. Chuck Yarbrough, director of Big Data, product marketing of Pentaho, joined Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts from theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about those early days.

• Embedded analytics has become Pentaho Corp.’s cornerstone offering at all levels of the market. Gretchen Moran, director of engineering services at Pentaho, a Hitachi Data Systems company, joined Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during PentahoWorld 2015 to talk about how open source enabled the company’s success.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google will soon make a significant change to Chrome—one that you probably won’t notice. On Wednesday, Google announced that an upcoming Chrome release will remove the notification center in Windows, Mac, and Linux. The notification center will remain in Chrome OS, however.

• If you don’t know what Chrome’s notification center is, open Chrome on Windows and then click the upward facing arrow on the far right of the taskbar. See that little bell icon? That’s notification center.

Mozilla

• Just a few moments ago, Mozilla published a second hotfix release for its latest stable Mozilla Firefox 41.0 web browser patching a single vulnerability that could allow a malicious web page to access private data from other origins.

• At Mozilla, community participation creates a dynamic that values transparency, drives the relationship with users, and produces a clear sense of mission.

• To learn more, I invited Mozilla’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, to appear as a guest on CXOTalk. The conversation is important to anyone interested in open source, principled marketing, and the power of community participation in product development.

• Mozilla, which has steadily been expanding its focus out from the Firefox browser to mobile phone and device usage, has released the results of a very far reaching study on mobile device usage in the developing world. Among other findings, it concretely establishes that education and learning resources are needed in places where mobile devices and the Internet are just taking root.

• As you may know, Mozilla Firefox is among the most popular internet browsers available, being very appreciated by FOSS users.

• The latest version available is Firefox 41.0.2, bringing regression fixes and security updates only.

• In August, Mozilla was notified by security researcher Cody Crews that a malicious advertisement on a Russian news site was exploiting a vulnerability in Firefox’s PDF Viewer. The exploit payload searched for sensitive files on users’ local filesystem, and reportedly uploaded them to a server in Ukraine.

• I am proud to say Firejail users were protected! The default Firejail configuration blocked access to .ssh, .gnupg and .filezilla in all directories present under /home, while more advanced configurations blocked everything else.

SaaS/Big Data

• The OpenStack Liberty release, set to become generally available on Oct. 15, will provide users of the open-source cloud platform with new projects and features. The second major OpenStack update in 2015, the Liberty release follows Kilo, which debuted on April 30.

• Bank of America Corp.’s massive shift to a software-defined data center (SDDC) encompasses two architectures: one built by a vendor and the other by an open source community. So far, the vendor is winning.

• During a Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)-sponsored webcast this week, Ben Swartzlander, a NetApp architect who is the project team lead for Manila, outlined the new features in the OpenStack Liberty release that is due for general availability next week. He also gave a preview of the upcoming Mitaka release, which he estimated would be ready in late April 2016.

• Out today, OpenStack’s latest release, Liberty, takes up where predecessor Kilo left off, with improved management features. But it also adds an important advance in the Nova compute project, with the second iteration of Cells tailored for scaling deployments.

• According to OpenStack, Cells functionality enables clouds to be scaled in a more distributed fashion without having to use approaches such as database and message-queue clustering.

• The OpenStack Murano app catalog project is continuing to grow and evolve, led by the continued effort and support of Mirantis.

• It was all the way back in 2010, when we at OStatic first did a short post on an emerging open source cloud computing platform called OpenStack. “The open platform will go head-to-head with cloud platforms from VMware and Microsoft, and will likely compete with other open source cloud platfroms such as Eucalyptus Systems’,” we noted at the time.

• Liberty, the newest release of the OpenStack open source cloud operating system, is out this week. It brings a host of new features, as well as a revamp of OpenStack’s governance model.

• The full list of new features in OpenStack Liberty is so extensive that it comprises a long list with 17 individual sections, each filled with specific information about driver updates, API changes and so on.

• As analytics accelerate closer to real-time, historical analytics are not being displaced. The benefits of a comprehensive and historic view of data is becoming more than just a daydream. Imagine a problem with a fleet of vehicles. Would current information and stats be the only aspect an analyst might look at? Wouldn’t the history of the whole fleet factor in? Only when viewed together can we see the entire context.

• Integrations in this fashion are the focus of the innovation arm of Pentaho Corp., according to Will Gorman, VP of Pentaho Labs at Pentaho Corp.

Databases

• With declining market share in the database business, Oracle lacks a real flagship product.

• Incumbents IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP have ruled the Gartner Magic Quadrant for operational database management systems for years. But with the rise of open source and cloud, new competition has gained ground. Here’s what you need to know.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice developers have begun working on a new toolbar layout that at least for now is optional and should provide a better user experience with some desktops.

Education

• Take, for example, the question ‘How does Google work?’. In CS, or foundations, terms, this is about big data, the Page Rank algorithm, caching and indexing. In IT (applications) terms, there’s typing your query and clicking the button, but also using advanced queries, filtering results, checking sources and dates and so on. In terms of digital literacy (implications) we’d want to talk about the data built up about each user, filter bubbles, targeted pay per click advertising, possible over-reliance on one source for information and about employing smart, creative people.

Business

• Pentaho has had a busy week — the firm has had its first week out in full public scrutiny as the new Pentaho, a Hitachi Data Systems company and staged its second annual PentahoWorld customer, partner, user & developer event.

Semi-Open Source//Openwashing

• One of the more interesting parts of last week’s IBM i announcements (if easily overlooked) was the introduction of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to the platform. As IBM’s product manager for the IBM i explained last week, the addition of GCC essentially opens the door to bringing a wide range of open source packaged applications to the IBM i environment, and provides a key building block for IBM moving forward.

• During his October 5 webcast on the COMMON Europe website (which you can view below), IBM i product manager Tim Rowe discussed the importance of open source software to IBM i, and what it means for the platform’s future.

• This release, like all X2CRM versions, is available as an open-source CRM application as well as in two commercial versions available in both cloud and download editions.

• X2CRM is fully internationalized and has been installed on over 24,000 public and private cloud servers across 160+ countries.

BSD

• OpenBSD’s source tree just turned 20 years old.

• On October 18th 20 years ago the first commits to the OpenBSD project landed in the CVS repository.

• In the march towards greater security there is a downside that affects older computers and older software. Using older web browsers that only support older versions of SSL are often locked out of certain web sites. Naturally web browsers that don’t support SSL at all won’t work either.

• Recently I tried to access forums.freebsd.org and osdisc.com and always got the message “The connection was interrupted” in firefox 16.0.2, the newest version which would run on an older version of Vector Linux. At first I tried to disable IPV6 within firefox but that made no difference. Then I wondered ‘could the version of SSL supported in firefox be too old?’ so I tried again using Q4OS with iceweasel 38.2.0 and it worked.

• The current release is OpenBSD 5.8, released Oct 18, 2015 which is the 20th anniversary of the OpenBSD source tree.

• Last weekend, the 2nd vBSDCon was hosted in Reston, Virginia by Verisign and several iX employees were in attendance. A big thanks to Dru Lavigne, Kris Moore, and Michael Dexter for sharing their experiences at the show with us.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• You have to be really enthusiastic person to dedicate your whole life to spread the idea of human rights and freedom. Richard Stallman proves with his life that you don’t have to be a politician to change the world. Talented programmer with a strong life position, is a good sample for those who are fighting for freedom.

• If you will get deep into the free software idea, you could understand it clearly by promoting, using and developing free software. Free software is not about technics, it is about your and population’s rights and freedom.

• I could not leave this article without saying thanks to Richard Stallman for his huge role in making the world better.

• Today the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project announced the first version of criteria for evaluating services that host free software source code repositories for distribution and collaborative development. Developed with the leadership of Richard Stallman and GNU volunteers, the criteria provide a framework for code repositories to ensure that they respect their users in a manner consonant with the values of the free software movement, and for users to hold these crucial institutions accountable.

• At the CiviCRM User Summit on the weekend of September 24th, I got to meet the faces behind the software that powers the Free Software Foundation’s communication. CiviCRM is the leading free software CRM (constituent relationship management) software, and it’s central to our work at the FSF: it sends every email we write and receives every petition signature and every donation you send us.

Public Services/Government

• France’s policies on open source and open data are helping to create a market for French ICT service providers, says Didier Tranchier, Professor of Innovation Management at Institut Mines-Telecom, a research institute.

Openness/Sharing

• Workforce diversity has become a huge point of discussion in the tech world, with the benefits of diversity being demonstrated every day. Still, tech companies have found it difficult to reach their targets for diversity because there are few role models to show how it’s done. One of those model companies is GoDaddy, who have shown a strong commitment to diversity and women in the tech workforce.

• Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation — which is responsible for the Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikimedia and other Wiki* projects — launched its renewed Public Policy website. On the site, the foundation presents five policy areas that it says are most important for its mission and projects: access, censorship, copyright, intermediary protection, and privacy. These enable the Wikimedia community to push for “policies to allow people around the world to access, create, share, and remix free knowledge.”

• The Lithuanian government should improve the debate and dialogue with both governmental and non-governmental actors. It should increase citizen engagement in law making, policy making and service delivery. And it should improve its eGovernment strategies and implementations. These are the recommendations from the recently published OECD report ‘Lithuania: Fostering Open and Inclusive Policy Making’.

• Alberto Albella, president of the OKFN (Open Knowledge Foundation) Spanish Chapter, has outlined some best practices to understand what an active Open Government is about.

Open Data

• This is especially true for those in governments around the world tasked with promoting open data, data that anyone can access, use and share. “Open data leaders often need to address very real fears from their colleagues and bosses,” said Emma Truswell, services business manager at the Open Data Institute. “These include national security, privacy concerns, the risk of embarrassment to the administration, and concerns about the quality of data.”

Open Hardware

• Affordable 3D printing enables open-source hardware because it allows anyone to print any design they can find, but Geenan notes that open source designs helped bring down prices of 3D printers in the first place. The RepRap was one of the first affordable 3D printers, and that was because the design was open source and could itself be 3D printed, he notes. “Because of those open source printers, MakerBot and others could make super cheap printers and get them into the hands of people,” said Geenan. “And now they’re being used to make open source products. It’s this loop.”

• Despite all the making freedom it gives us, we in the 3D printing community are still slaves of the filament manufacturers. And as everyone knows, those rolls can get expensive. This is exactly why more and more people are turning to desktop filament extruders, that turn very cheap pellets (usually a sixth of the price of filament) into perfectly 3D printable filament. In essence, creating your own 3D printer filaments not only helps save users money, but it also brings them closer to the 3D printing experience as a whole. Earlier this year, Italian startup Collettivo Cocomeri had already released the very interesting and open source Fefil extruder, but have now appeared on Kickstarter with an improved (and much better looking) version: the Felfil Evo, a cheap and excellent option for those thinking about cutting out the filament middle man.

• We’ve already seen plenty of fantastic examples of what 3D printing can do when put in the hands of musicians over the last year or so, from this playful 3D printed beer bottle instrument to this seriously cool 3D printed guitar. Unfortunately, few of the high quality creations are capable of matching a store-bought instrument while also being available to a wider audience. Fortunately, the Hova couple have decided to do something about that. Husband and wife Kaitlyn and Matt Hova have recently shared their open source, 3D printable and very high quality Hovalin acoustic violin, and encourage everyone to recreate it themselves.

Programming

• PHP developers have today released PHP 7.0 RC5 as the second to the last release candidate for the major PHP 7.0 release due out next month.

• If you are not already familiar with this next release, see our PHP 7.0 articles already on the matter. There’s some new language features and consistent 64-bit support, but most notable about PHP7 is the greatly enhanced performance. PHP 7.0 is crazy fast compared to PHP 5.

• There have been dozens of articles written comparing Python and R from a subjective standpoint. We’ll add our own views at some point, but this article aims to look at the languages more objectively. We’ll analyze a dataset side by side in Python and R, and show what code is needed in both languages to achieve the same result. This will let us understand the strengths and weaknesses of each language without the conjecture. At Dataquest, we teach both languages, and think both have a place in a data science toolkit.

• Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are only available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests.

Standards/Consortia

• …stressed the importance of saving government documents using open formats.

• I mean, this young woman showed evident command of her data and was, in no way, an incompetent speaker. The sad reality was that, however persuasive her words were, they contrasted sharply with the way in which her speech started. How can you advocate open formats and, at the same time, ignore how to use LibreOffice?

• The vast majority of EU officials who publish documents online are oblivious to the EU’s open document formats policy. One year after the launch of the ‘FixMyDocuments’ campaign, advocates of open document formats conclude the policy is perceived as unimportant. “There is a huge lack of awareness”, says campaign organiser Maël Brunet. “Maintainers show little interest to fix documents.”

• “EU institutions are not living up to their 2010 commitment to support open document formats”, says Brunet, director of European Policy at OpenForum Europe.

• Lack of awareness, lack of time and the perceived unimportance are the main reasons that EU officials do not fix documents after being contacted by the FixMyDocuments campaign, Brunet says.

Leftovers

• On Tuesday, Twitter’s recently returned CEO Jack Dorsey sent a letter to all employees, notifying them that 336 jobs would be cut—around eight percent of the company’s workforce.

• [...]

• In a follow-up tweet, Teeuwisse clarified that he worked from home and HR called him, but the call went to voicemail. Apparently, HR decided to remove him from the corporate network despite the lack of person-to-person contact.

• It is a pleasure to report that Kevin Kiernan, one of the world’s foremost Beowulf scholars and editor of Electronic Beowulf, was inducted into the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame on 9 October 2015. To coincide with this event, we have made Electronic Beowulf 4.0, available as a free online digital academic resource, which will be of interest not only to scholars of Anglo-Saxon England but to all interested in the history of the text of this celebrated poem.

• [...]

• In addition to providing standard digitised images of the Beowulf manuscript (Cotton Vitellius A. xv); it includes over 130 ultraviolet images, and over 750 backlit images that reveal hundreds of letters, which are covered by the nineteenth-century restoration frames. These were installed to protect the manuscript after fire damage in 1731, for more information on the fire damaged items in the Cotton Collection check out this blog post by my colleagues in Collection Care.

• The Guardian is preparing for steep editorial cuts after a slowdown in advertising sales. Job losses are highly likely, insiders at the media company said.

• “This is shaping up to be one of the most difficult … periods we’ve faced in many years,” David Pemsel, Guardian Media Group’s chief executive, said in an internal memo obtained by POLITICO.

• Spending on new hires, salaries, travel and other expenses will be reined in as the company tries to reduce its losses, Pemsel added. He did not mention job cuts in the e-mail but several people at the company said there will need to be a reduction in the workforce to stem the red ink.

• The Huffington Post has seen a major decline in its monthly traffic coming from within the U.S. over the past year, while competitors such as BuzzFeed and Vice Media continue to grow, according to data provided by comScore to International Business Times. In September of last year, HuffPost pulled in around 113 million unique visitors and hit 126 million last November, but then steadily bled visitors into 2015 and throughout the year. Last month, it was down to 86 million.

• Culling engineering jobs is a bizarre act in a field where, such is the intense competition for staff, poaching is commonplace

Hardware

• The strained relationship between Microsoft and PC makers is getting harder to hide.

Health/Nutrition

• Undercover footage has revealed how doctors are carrying out ‘virginity tests’ on Swedish girls against their will – because their religious families want to prove they haven’t had sex.

• Reporters wearing hidden cameras approached doctors in cities across Sweden and asked them whether they would be willing to carry out the examinations.

• Human rights experts have called the revelation ‘shocking’ while one young victim likened her ordeal to ‘torture’.

• Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Care will not run children’s services in Bristol.

• The Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has named its preferred bidder to run its children’s services next year as a partnership involving Sirona care and health Community Interest Company (CIC), Bristol Community Health CIC and Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust.

• A large majority of NFL players may suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a rare brain disease believed to be caused by repeated head trauma.

• Researchers from the Department of Veteran Affairs and Boston University tested 91 dead former NFL players, and found it in 87 of them — that’s 95 per cent.

• Dr Ann McKee, chief of neurophysiology at the VA Boston Healthcare System and director of the lab where the tests were done, told PBS: “People think that we’re blowing this out of proportion, that this is a very rare disease and that we’re sensationalizing it.

Security

• After a pair of very public disclosures in the last two weeks, Netgear published new firmware for vulnerabilities in its routers that have been publicly exploited.

• Microsoft has issued a cumulative patch for a set of critical flaws affecting all supported versions of its Windows operating system, to protect against remote code execution flaw in its Internet Explorer web browser.

• A Ukrainian hacker who once hatched a plot to have heroin sent to my Virginia home and then alert police when the drugs arrived had his first appearance in a U.S. court today, after being extradited to the United States to face multiple cybercrime charges.

• Instances of Apple OS X malware are soaring this year, already totaling more than five times the number tallied over the previous five years combined, according to an in-house Bit9 + Carbon Black report.

• Instances totaled 180 from 2010 through 2014, but have already reached 948, according to “2015: The most Prolific Year in History for OS X Malware”, the results of a 10-week study of malware crafted for the operating system.

• A majority of organizations polled in a data center and cloud security survey are dissatisfied with their malware containment and recovery times.

• More than half (55 per cent) of survey respondents were dissatisfied with the length of time it takes them to contain and recover from hacker infiltrations and malware infections, with more than 17 per cent of respondents needing more than a week to contain an contagion. About 37 per cent reported containment times of up to eight hours.

• In the previous two stories, I documented the damage wrought by an organized crime gang in Mexico that has been systematically bribing ATM technicians to install Bluetooth skimming components that allow thieves to steal card and PIN data wirelessly. What follows is a look at a mysterious new ATM company in Mexico that sources say may be tied to the skimming activity.

• I spent four days last week in Mexico, tracking the damage wrought by an organized crime ring that is bribing ATM technicians to place Bluetooth skimmers inside of cash machines in and around the tourist areas of Cancun. Today’s piece chronicles the work of this gang in coastal regions farther south, following a trail of hacked ATMs from Playa Del Camen down to the ancient Mayan ruins in Tulum.

• For years, privacy advocates have pushed developers of websites, virtual private network apps, and other cryptographic software to adopt the Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key exchange as a defense against surveillance from the US National Security Agency and other state-sponsored spies. Now, researchers are renewing their warning that a serious flaw in the way the key exchange is implemented is allowing the NSA to break and eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

• There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public encryption.” The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand.

• “In our letter [PDF], the scientists and engineers most deeply concerned with the internet have finally spoken with one voice, loud enough, maybe, to make a difference,” Dave Taht, co-founder of Bufferbloat, an initiative to improve router performance, told Motherboard. Taht, who lead author of letter to the FCC, said that manufacturers often ship routers that are vulnerable to known exploits, putting consumers and the wider internet at risk as soon as the routers are turned on. Making the matter worse is how few consumers bother to upgrade their firmware if patches are released.

• Crimp nasty privilege escalation bug by running it in Linux instead says Rapid7

• A coalition of 260 cybersecurity experts is taking advantage of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) public comment period to push for open source Wi-Fi router firmware.

• Vinton Cerf has added his name to a campaign begging the FCC to scrap plans to ban custom firmware on Wi-Fi routers and other wireless devices.

• You may know that you can replace your WiFi router’s software with an open source version like DD-WRT or Tomato to make it more secure or powerful. However, the US wireless regulator (FCC) only seems to have figured that out recently, and is not happy with your ability to boost the signal power excessively on such devices. As such, it proposed changes to regulations, with one document suggesting it may ban or restrict third-party software altogether. That caught the eye of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which created an online petition asking the FCC to make changes.

• The EFF petition says that “router manufacturers are notoriously slow about updating their software — even with critical security fixes on the way. Under the FCC’s proposal, you could have no alternative to running out-of-date and vulnerable firmware.” It’s referring, in part, to an FCC demand that manufacturer’s “describe in detail how the device is protected from ‘flashing’ and the installation of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT.”

• A coalition of 260 leading Internet technology experts are warning the FCC to tread carefully when it comes to updated FCC rules governing RF devices. In a filing (pdf) with the FCC, experts like Vint Cerf (co-creator of the TCP-IP protocol) and Dave Farber (former Chief Technologist of the FCC) warn the agency that the FCC’s latest proposal for updated RF device guidance, as currently written, could potentially make the Internet slower, less secure and prevent users from maintaining and modifying devices they own.

• The FCC is currently inviting open comments on its plan to require router manufacturers to lock down device firmware as a means of ensuring that consumer devices can’t operate in certain frequency bands or at power levels that violate FCC guidelines. While these requirements are made to guarantee that limited spectrum is allocated fairly and in a manner that minimizes interference, many have raised concerns that locking down devices in this way will prevent open source firmware projects from continuing as well as hampering critical security research.

• Now, a group of more than 250 researchers and developers, including the Internet’s grandpa, Vint Cerf, have sent the FCC a letter proposing an altogether different set of rules that would actually mandate open-source firmware while simultaneously protecting the FCCs original goals. There are multiple reasons, the letter argues, why open-source firmware updates are a necessary part of securing the Internet against attack.

• Siri may be your personal assistant. But your voice is not the only one she listens to. As a group of French researchers have discovered, Siri also helpfully obeys the orders of any hacker who talks to her—even, in some cases, one who’s silently transmitting those commands via radio from as far as 16 feet away.

• Apple scored unforgettable hits against Microsoft with its Mac vs. PC ads, which anthropomorphized Windows as a sneezing, miserable office worker.

• Security experts always knew that the campaign was a clever bit of marketing fluff, one that allowed Apple to capitalize on Microsoft’s painful, years-long security revamp.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• There’s a lot going on in this paragraph. The heretofore unmentioned Palestinian dead come in at the back end of a sentence about Israeli fatalities, to whose numbers are added dozens of wounded so it is not immediately obvious that there are three-and-a-half times as many dead on one side as the other.

• Classified documents, leaked to investigative news website The Intercept, have revealed the inner workings of the secret US drone program in Yemen and Somalia.

• A source from within the US intelligence community leaked the documents which appear to undermine American claims that drone strikes have been precise.

• The whistleblower, who has already been labelled as the new ‘Edward Snowden’ on social media, said the public has the right to know about the process by which people are placed on ‘kill lists’ and “ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the US government.”

• The source told The Intercept: “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong.”

• The leaked papers appear to show that drone strikes were often carried out based on insufficient and unreliable intelligence and when executed, often compromise further gathering of intelligence.

• The documents reveal that in Afghanistan, drone strikes on 35 targets killed at least 219 other people.

• From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.

• The Saudi-led coalition is guilty of systematic war crimes in Yemen, and the US bears legal responsibility because of the use of arms purchased from the United States, an Amnesty International report charged in early October.

• But although the Obama administration is not happy with the Saudi war and has tremendous leverage over the Saudis, it has demonstrated over the past several weeks that it is unwilling to use its leverage to force an end to the war. And it now appears that the administration is poised to resupply the munitions used by the Saudis in committing war crimes in Yemen.

• The Taliban occupation of Kunduz may have been temporary, but what they did to Afghan women’s rights could prove to be lasting.

• In a methodical campaign, the Taliban relentlessly hounded women with any sort of public profile, looted a high school, and destroyed the offices of many of the organizations that protected and supported women in Kunduz.

• Among those who have fled are the women who ran a shelter for female victims of violence, who Taliban commanders say are “immoral.”

• The US military maintains that its drone program delivers deadly “targeted strikes” against its enemies overseas, and yet, reports of civilians being killed by drones keep pouring in.

• Secret documents prepared as part of a Pentagon report on the US drone program in Yemen and Somalia, obtained by The Intercept, reveal the reason for this apparent contradiction: The US military is over-reliant on signals intelligence, or SIGINT—such as cell phone records, or metadata, of who is called and when, as well as the content of phone and online communications—when selecting targets for drone strikes.

• This kind of intelligence is often supplied by foreign governments, is difficult to confirm on the ground in Yemen and Somalia, and is easily gamed by adversaries, the Intercept report on the documents alleges. Basically, it’s unreliable until a human confirms it. But in Yemen and Somalia, signals intelligence makes up more than half of the intel that goes into marking someone for death, the documents state.

• In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

Transparency Reporting

• The UK government on Wednesday denied WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange safe passage from Ecuador’s embassy in London to a nearby hospital to diagnose shoulder pain. The 44-year-old Assange has been granted asylum from Ecuador, and he has been holed up at the embassy there since 2012 as Swedish authorities wish to question him about an alleged sexual-assault.

• The British decision, announced by the Public News Agency of Ecuador and South America, came as Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño told state TV that the UK should honor the request to enable Assange to “benefit from the right of asylum that we have granted him, as should be done in a respectful international relationship.” Assange has been at the embassy for three

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• German carmaker Volkswagen has been ordered by US regulators to recall half a million cars because of a device that disguises pollution levels.

• As wildfires rage, crops are abandoned, wells run dry and cities work to meet mandatory water cuts, drought-weary Californians are counting on a savior in the tropical ocean: El Niño.

• This warming of the tropical Pacific occurs about every five years, affecting climate around the globe and bringing heavy winter precipitation to parts of California. The state experienced two of its wettest years during two of the strongest El Niños, in 1982-83 and 1997-98.

• Environmentalists slam appointment of ex-Schlumberger consultant as energy and environment adviser just months before global climate summit in Paris

• This spring, as California withered in its fourth year of drought and mandatory water restrictions were enacted for the first time in the state’s history, a news story broke revealing that Nestlé Waters North America was tapping springs in the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California using a permit that expired 27 years ago.

• If you’re searching for advice on using the Internet without losing your mind, the classic xkcd web comic “Duty Calls” remains the gold standard. After all, no matter how much technology changes, as long as there are humans using it, the Internet will be full of people; and many of them will be wrong. So unless you figure out a way to log-off — and, more important, stay logged off — you’re just going to have to find a way to deal.

• Rangers in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park have discovered the carcasses of 26 elephants at two locations, dead of cyanide poisoning along with 14 other elephants who were found last week, officials said Wednesday.

• Patrolling rangers discovered the carcasses Tuesday, according to Bhejani Trust and the National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority. Bhejani Trust undertakes joint animal monitoring and welfare work with the parks agency

• Erna Solberg, the Norwegian Prime Minister, has called on the world to immediately set a global carbon price and phase out fossil fuel subsidies in order to better drive investment in low carbon technologies.

• Speaking at a conference hosted by the Norwegian British Chamber of Commerce in London today, Solberg argued Norway’s 26 year old carbon tax had been crucial in helping to drive development of “climate friendly” technologies.

• A sharp earthquake in central Oklahoma last weekend has raised fresh concern about the security of a vast crude oil storage complex, close to the quake’s center, that sits at the crossroads of the nation’s oil pipeline network.

• The magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of Cushing, roughly midway between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The town of about 8,000 people is home to the so-called Cushing Hub, a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world.

• Scientists reported in a paper published online last month that a large earthquake near the storage hub “could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines.” Saturday’s quake continues a worrisome pattern of moderate quakes, suggesting that a large earthquake is more than a passing concern, the lead author of that study, Daniel McNamara, said in an interview.

• Do you know the name Michael Horn? He’s the CEO of Volkswagen of America. You know what’s going on with Volkswagen, right? Dieselgate? The fact that the software that controls the Diesel engine in some of their cars was specifically written to defeat emissions tests? Yeah, apparently that software could detect when an emission test was being run, and could put the engine into a mode where it emitted one fortieth of the noxious nitrogen oxides of it’s normal operation.

• [...]

• I think that argument is even more asinine than Michael Horn’s. They knew. And if they didn’t know, they should have known. They had a responsibility to know.

• If we had a real profession, those programmers would be brought before that profession, investigated, and if found guilty, drummed out of the profession in disgrace.

Finance

• Thom talks income inequality and Reaganomics with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s Sarah Badawi and radio host and author Ari Rabin-Havt. In tonight’s Conversations with Great Minds, Thom discusses capitalism and the climate with award-winning journalist Naomi Klein, author of the new book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.”

• “It takes brains to make millions,” according to the slogan of Donald Trump’s board game. “It takes Trump to make billions.” It appears that’s truer than Trump himself might like to admit. A new analysis suggests that Trump would’ve been a billionaire even if he’d never had a career in real estate, and had instead thrown his father’s inheritance into a index fund that tracked the market. His wealth, in other words, isn’t because of his brains. It’s because he’s a Trump.

• Volkswagen (VW), we now know, systematically evaded pollution control regulations. Over the last decade it defrauded 11 million buyers of its diesel-engine vehicles, fouled the planet’s environment and thereby damaged the health and lives of countless living organisms. Regulation-defeating deception gave VW diesel autos competitive advantages over other companies’ diesel products and thereby enhanced its profits, the driving purpose of capitalist corporations.

• I hardly know where to start to deconstruct his speech, but one fact stands out. Osborne purported to give an overview of Britain’s economic crash and “recovery”, without making a single mention of the banking crisis or bankers’ corrupt and greedy practices as the cause of the crash, of vast banking bailouts by the taxpayer and the rapid contraction of the economy. That banker behaviour was of course accelerated by Gordon Brown’s extreme banking deregulation, but that was Brown’s great blunder, not the levels of public spending.

• Last Monday, as the prime minister rehearsed his Manchester conference speech, a story appeared in this newspaper that showed you who really runs this country – and how. It revealed that one of Britain’s largest companies, AstraZeneca, paid absolutely no corporation tax here in both 2013 and 2014, despite racking up global profits in those years of £2.9bn.

• With the conclusion of the negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement now in place, there has been some ridiculous whining from the pharmaceutical industry which got almost everything it wanted in the agreement, but wasn’t quite able to get a few things, including a 12 year patent-like exclusivity on biologics. And, because of that hissy fit, apparently, the USTR and its counterparts in Australia and Canada have agreed to help out Big Pharma in another arena. Jamie Love is reporting that this week there’s a meeting at the WTO this week to explore granting a special exemption on patent rules for developing nations (i.e., those who often need drugs the most, while also being the least likely to be able to afford them). It’s silly to enforce patents in these countries, because doing so would not only lead to almost no business at all, but (more importantly) because lots of people will die or, at the very least, suffer needlessly.

• TTP is causing a lot of consternation. Critics say the agreement benefits developed countries at the cost of developing countries. They also argue that negotiations have been suspiciously secret. Proponents argue that TPP will reduces barriers to trade, support economic and job growth, improve IP protection and, ‘create new 21st century trade rules.’

• [...]

• While the economic arguments are against term extension, there is evidence that public domain content spurs innovation and new content. Under the agreement, “The Parties recognise the importance of a rich and accessible public” and recognise the importance of good registers. Despite this, the agreement’s copyright terms will reduce the public domain.

• There are also provisions for making the circumvention of DRM illegal (and everyone knows how much consumers looooove DRM) and vague liability for ISPs. Not in the leaked draft are the different copyright terms for corporations, which were discussed earlier, presumably as life-support for Mickey Mouse.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• One of the biggest audience responses during the October 12 Democratic presidential debate came when Bernie Sanders agreed with Hillary Clinton that focus on her email server was a distraction. But as Lee Fang at the Intercept (10/14/15) pointed out, TV coverage only stressed part of that story, the part about the political impact of Sanders expressing solidarity with Clinton.

• What the Times and these pundits failed to mention is the fact that every online poll we could find asking web visitors who won the debate cast Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the winner—and not just by a small margins, but by rather enormous ones.

• Now that the TPP deal is done, it appears that the USTR has decided to focus on pushing propaganda, rather than legitimately discussing the details with the American public.

• CNN’s decision to exclude Democratic presidential candidate and tech policy icon Lawrence Lessig from tonight’s debate in Las Vegas is drawing strong criticism from his supporters and other prominent voices from across the political spectrum.

• The Harvard law professor and campaign finance reform crusader, who is best known in tech circles as one of the nation’s top authorities on internet policy and digital copyright law, is running a highly unusual single-issue campaign aimed at rooting out what he calls the corrupting influence of money in politics.

• Lawrence Lessig sounded irritated as he spoke by phone while on a train Saturday morning. The Harvard professor turned political rabble-rouser, who launched his presidential campaign a month ago, has already raised more than a million dollars and started hiring political operatives. But CNN has not invited him to participate in the Democratic debate on Tuesday night.

• For all of the attention paid to the Republican primary — thanks in large part to the classy marquee name of Donald Trump — it’s worth pointing something out: More Americans currently support Hillary Clinton than Trump, which you probably already knew. But it’s safe to assume that more Americans also support Bernie Sanders.

• We looked at this a bit back in May, when the Sanders phenomenon was first emerging. But it’s worth revisiting now that he has surged.

• Last month Techdirt wrote about the attempt by the European Commission to deflect the growing EU resistance to the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter in TAFTA/TTIP by turning it into a more formal Investment Court System (ICS). We pointed out some major problems with the proposal, and noted that the US Chamber of Commerce had already rejected the idea out of hand. We now have a response from BusinessEurope, one of the main lobbying organizations in the EU with 40 members in 34 countries.

Censorship

• It’s not enough. It’s dangerous out there for cops these days.* So, in the interest of making things even safer for our underprotected boys/girls in blue, a New Jersey politician is introducing legislation that would fold cops in to the state’s “hate speech/bias” laws.

• Twitter has been coming down hard on accounts that share GIFs or video footage of sports highlights without permission. It temporarily suspended the @Deadspin account on Monday, and the @SBNationGIF account is still suspended at the time of writing.

• Playboy’s recent decision to stop publishing nude photos marks a watershed moment in media, as the porn pioneer buttons up and turns its back on what made it famous. But the company’s core has had little to do with pornography for a long time.

• Over the course of a decade, Playboy has steadily transformed itself from a publishing company to a company that sells bunny drawings to T-shirt manufacturers. Revenues from licensing Playboy merchandise went from $37 million in 2009 to $65 million in 2013‚ marking about half the company’s revenues at the time (paywall).

• When SOPA was imminent, Internet users expressed concerns that web blocking might “break the Internet”. The legislation didn’t pass, but according to data just published by a web-blocking watchdog in Russia, a similar law means that 2,800 of Cloudflare’s IP addresses are now on the country’s blocklist.

• In their submissions yesterday, Yee’s lawyers said that it was not their client’s “dominant intention” to wound the religious feelings of Christians. Instead, his dominant intention was to critique Mr Lee.

• Thailand has experienced a dozen military coups since it became a constitutional monarchy in 1932. While the country has one of the more prosperous economies in Southeast Asia and remains a hotspot for international tourists, many Thais feel that political violence is a persistent, latent threat to civic order.

• The Palme D’Or-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has said he does not want his new film to be screened in in his home country, for fear of the reaction of the ruling military junta.

• Speaking at the London film festival, which screened Cemetery of Splendour earlier this week, Weerasethakul told the BBC he would be forced to self-censor the film if he wanted to show it in Thailand. The drama centres on a group of soldiers who fall ill with a mysterious sleeping sickness, and it has been viewed by critics as a metaphor for the country’s societal travails.

• An award-winning Thai film director has told the BBC he does not want his latest film shown in Thailand as he would be required to self-censor.

• Apichatpong Weerasethakul, winner of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or prize in 2010, said Thais did not have “genuine freedom”.

• The film, Cemetery of Splendour, evokes political uncertainty in Thailand.

• Thailand’s army seized power in a coup last year and has since increased censorship in the country.

• The organization lobbies the Federal Communication Commission and various broadcasting networks regarding the content of television programming, and encouraged advertisers to withdraw their support of programs they deem offensive or contain overly violent, sexual or suggestive content.

• Conservatives once wanted to ban Playboy magazine, violent rap lyrics and offensive depictions of Jesus. Leftists then were right to fight such bans, but today leftists encourage censorship in the name of “tolerance.”

• This may be remembered as the year China’s publishing industry truly went global. In May, a large delegation of Chinese publishers attended BookExpo America, a major publishing trade event, as international guests of honor. And on Thursday, the Publishers Association of China, a government-backed industry group, was admitted to the International Publishers Association, a Geneva-based federation of more than 60 organizations whose mission includes promoting the freedom to publish.

• The PEN American Center has recruited 12 American publishing houses to a pledge. According to the press release, these companies have sworn to “monitor and address incidents of censorship in Chinese translations of books by foreign authors.”

• Earlier this year, PEN released a report on the censorship of foreign authors works when translated for the Chinese market, which included recommendations for those looking to publish there. That report came ahead of the 2015 BookExpo America, where China was honored as the guest of honor. PEN’s report did much to stoke conversation about weighing the appeal of China’s enormous book market with the government censorship required for entry.

• The vision and directives of Dr Shaikh Sultan have contributed towards promoting the culture, knowledge and love of the written word, not only in the UAE but also in the Arab region and the world. The Sharjah book fair has now risen to be amongst the top fairs in the world, said Ahmed bin Rakkad Al Ameri, Chairman of the Sharjah Book Authority, on the sidelines of the Frankfurt Book Fair

• China’s state media regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), is tightening up censorship of TV soaps and dramas to ensure that costumes remains decidedly demure and storylines hew towards “socialist core values” rather than courtly innuendo.

• Allowing ill-defined “extremist” content to be removed without judicial oversight or due process can too easily be used by states interested in limiting independent reporting and staving off public policy debates.

• Siaosi Sovaleni plans to bring this flawed technology and introduce “Internet Censorship” to Tonga.

• There is no disputing the excellent efforts by the Hon. Minister to ensure Children’s Cyber-Safety (Parliament passes Bills to control internet access) is the centrepiece of this bill amongst others. There is never a place for online child-abuse material in any society, Tonga included.

• Congratulations to the students, parents, and teachers in Lumberton, New Jersey, who have proven that grassroots action makes a difference.

• After Irish Independence, a state body with the unimprovable title of The Commission on Evil Literature was set up, followed shortly after by the Censorship of Publications Act.

• On October 13, the Out of Joint co-production of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern, based on the story of one of the last women to be put on trial for witchcraft in England, was due to be staged at Ipswich High School for Girls. Instead, the performance was cancelled relatively late in the day, as reported in The Stage, due to “grave reservations” over its portrayal of child sex abuse, a decision Out of Joint’s artistic director Max Stafford-Clark branded “spectacularly perverse.”

• Co-produced with Watford Palace Theatre and the Arcola Theatre, the play’s tour includes 10 performances overseen by Eastern Angles, a regional touring theatre company based in the east of England, of which the Ipswich High School date was part. This collaboration was something of a new venture for both Eastern Angles and Out of Joint. It was important to Stafford-Clark that the play should tour this part of the country because the story it tells is so tied up in East Anglian history. In the 17th century, Suffolk was the stomping ground of the notorious Matthew Hopkins, self-styled ‘Witchfinder General,’ and while the Pendle Witch Trials are perhaps lodged more firmly in the collective imagination, the largest single witch trial in England actually took place in Bury St Edmunds in 1645. Walkern itself is in East Hertfordshire, but Wenham’s story, which takes place in 1712, in the time of Queen Anne, when the witch craze though fading was still alive in people’s memories, is part of the landscape of this part of England.

• The world-famous novelist has called freedom of speech a fundamental right in his keynote address at the annual literary festival. His words come after Iran boycotted the event because of his presence.

• “Limiting freedom of expression is not just censorship, it is also an assault on human nature,” Mr. Rushdie said in his speech, according to Agence France-Presse. “Expression of speech is fundamental to all human beings. We are language animals, we are story-telling animals.” He added, “Without that freedom of expression, all other freedoms fail.”

• It is without doubt, as we are constantly told, that we now live in the ‘information age’. With a click of a button, or the swipe of a finger, we can now access, share and follow more stories, content and information from across the world than previous generations could have ever imagined.

• However, as the age-old maxim goes, with great power comes great responsibility. And as we continue in our race to becoming an all-knowing, all-seeing population, we have also become a part of an extremely divisive and important debate: Should the information and media we consume so readily be censored and vetted when it comes to violent and graphic content?

• As is often the case, this debate is rarely black and white. Of course, certain forms of censorship are ostensibly necessary. For example, the use of a television watershed and various forms of film classification boards are in place to avoid unsuitable content being easily accessed by children. However, when it comes to the news outlets and mass media targeted at mature audiences, is such policy really suitable?

• From Jan. 1 to June 30, the Chinese government asked Microsoft to remove 165 items from the web, according to the company’s annual transparency report released on Wednesday. That compared to 21 requests from other countries, which included 11 from the United States, five from Germany, two each from the United Kingdom and Russia, and one from Austria.

• Pro-Israel organizations have championed a number of progressive causes as a form of hasbara, or propaganda, seeking to immunize the Israeli occupation from criticism. These include environmentalism– greenwashing– and LGBTQ rights — pinkwashing. The latest effort is a case of veg-washing.

• Last week, the Shawnee Mission School District told the Kansas Supreme Court that the state’s cap on local spending for education should be lifted. The cap, it said, “has led to a crippling loss of teachers, loss of foreign language programs, larger class sizes, closure of neighborhood schools and loss of property values.”

• The spending cap was put in place to make Kansas’ school funding system more fair for every student. The court is trying to figure out if the scheme has accomplished that goal.

• [...]

• “Ceilings on education are but censorship by another name,” the brief says.

• It’s fun and important to mock the jumped-up Joe Stalins who have seized power in student associations across the West and who are banning songs, hats, newspapers, and people that piss them off. But it isn’t enough. Too often we treat this scourge of student censorship as a sudden, almost malarial hysteria infecting campuses—the fault of a uniquely intolerant generation corrupting a hitherto healthy academy with their demands to be Safe-Spaced from hairy ideas. But this is wrong. These ban-happy brats are actually the bastard offspring of… well, of some of the people now criticizing them. They are Complacency’s Children, the angry logical conclusion to liberals’ failure over the past 30 years to kick back against a creeping culture of intolerance.

• On the eve of separate visits by EU commissioners and the German chancellor to Ankara this week, officials from the European Commission and the European Parliament have expressed their concerns about the arrest of Today’s Zaman Editor-in-Chief Bülent Keneş, with the German Bundestag also joining in the growing chorus of those condemning the political pressure on the media and media professionals.

• Purdue University erased a video of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman’s campus address on Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency because his presentation included classified government documents, Gellman said.

• Gellman, a former Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Edward Snowden and the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, gave a keynote speech Sept. 24 at Purdue’s technology conference, “Dawn or Doom.” His talk was live-streamed and organizers promised to provide a permanent link to the video on the school website after the talk, Gellman said. But the school, located in Lafayette, Indiana, never provided the link, Gellman wrote in a piece posted on the website of the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

• “It turns out that Purdue has wiped all copies of my video and slides from university servers, on grounds that I displayed classified documents briefly on screen,” Gellman wrote. He said he was told that the university at one point pondered destroying the projector he borrowed as well.

• In my research for my forthcoming book, War on Wheels, on the story of the mechanisation of the army in the Second World War, I read many accounts of captivity written by those who had spent years as prisoners of war.

• They were allowed to write home, but in the knowledge that everything they wrote would be seen by their captors. The result was letters that revealed nothing of the dreadful conditions under which they were forced to live.

• Playboy is to abolish the nude. Many people will celebrate this, even if the magazine once seen as the bible of sexual liberation is getting out of the business of soft porn because it has been outdone by the internet, and not for any idealistic feminist reason.

• In the 2013 school year, 666 of 1241 schools in Texas protested or challenged books according to the Robert R. Muntz Library staff. Two commonly known books that have been banned or challenged are World War Z and A Christmas Carol. To bring attention to the issue of banned books, a public debate focusing on “Censorship of Offensive Material in an Academic Environment Does More Harm than Good” was organized and held at the Cowan Center on September 29th.

• Recently a letter writer demanded that The Morning Call engage in the irrational and immoral practice of censorship — specifically censorship of scientific measurements and observations (i.e., scientific facts) which refuted the global warming crisis theory and the predictions of its flawed computer climate models.

• As the great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, pointed out, valid scientific theories must be built upon measurements/observations. NASA satellites during the past 18 years have measured no significant global warming, despite an 11 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Neither the theory nor its computer models predicted this huge pause in global warming, proving that both are grossly flawed.

• Today, they are regarded as classics, but “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Fahrenheit 451” were once banned for being too controversial. More recently, “Friday Night Lights” was rejected for its depiction of profanity and racism, and the Harry Potter series is banned in several countries for allegedly promoting witchcraft.

• Reaction continues to grow after Digital satellite platform Teledünya, cable provider Digiturk, online TV streamer Turkcell TV+ and Treasury backed Tivibu have all joined the political bandwagon and censored the networks, citing an audacious terror investigation launched by a public prosecutor. The platforms’ actions have violated contractual agreements both with viewers and with the channels, and have drawn condemnation from rights groups, opposition politicians, and scores of citizens who have cancelled their subscriptions.

• This most fundamental of principles is under attack – from over-zealous law making, online witch hunts, and a profit-driven media offensive on the BBC

• Around a quarter of UK broadband subscribers (24 percent) have opted to allow their ISPs to block pornographic content, according to an online survey by the broadband comparison site Broadband Genie. Just over half (54 percent) said that they did not use the porn filters, while another 22 percent said they didn’t know. Although there was no attempt to conduct the survey rigorously, and it was relatively small—2,491 respondents took part—it offers useful indications about the public’s uptake of filters not available elsewhere.

• According to the Broadband Genie numbers, the main reason people chose to opt out of the filtering system was that they did not want their access “hindered in any way” (40 percent), while 15 percent of those who rejected the blocks were worried about censorship. Another 11 percent said they did not need the filtering, because they had their own software to do the job.

• Documentary attempts to put the attacks and French society in context

• How committed is Apple (APPL) to user privacy and freedom? Not very, it seems—at least for users in China, where the company has blocked access to its News app for iOS mobile devices.

• As its name implies, News is an app for aggregating and reading news on iPads and iPhones (presumably for people who haven’t yet discovered Google News or other free, web-based news aggregators). The app is only available to install for Apple users in the United States. (Apple is currently testing the product in the United Kingdom and Australian markets.) Once it’s installed, however, it can be used from any location.

• MPA Deputy General Counsel Okke Visser has revealed that European instances of site blocking on copyright grounds now exceed 500. During a presentation in the UK yesterday, Visser highlighted 13 countries that are implementing web blockades, including latest addition Iceland, which blocked The Pirate Bay this week.

Privacy

• The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has ruled that the Wilson Doctrine does not protect MPs and peers’ communications from surveillance by the intelligence agencies.

• The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the UK body that hears complaints about intelligence agencies, has ruled that the communications of MPs and peers are not protected by the Wilson Doctrine, which was thought to exempt them from surveillance by GCHQ and other intelligence agencies. Back in July, the UK government had already admitted that the Wilson Doctrine “cannot work sensibly” when mass surveillance is taking place, but today’s decision goes further by explicitly rejecting the idea of any formal immunity from spying.

• Social media apps which track cyclists’ routes are believed to be behind a sharp rise in high-value bike thefts.

• The mobile phone apps, which allow cyclists to post details of their routes on the internet, are giving thieves the chance to track down top-of-the-range bikes to their owners’ sheds and garages.

• The apps, such as Strava, Endomondo and MapMyRide, record what make and model bike the cyclist is using, so thieves know the value of the bikes.

• A year ago, shortly after breaking up with her boyfriend of three years, Emma Lauren decided to jump back into the dating scene, starting with an OkCupid account. Her first date went disastrously: the dude showed up late, looked nothing like his profile picture, spent the entire time talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories, and berated her for smoking a cigarette before he tried to kiss her at the end of the night. She didn’t speak to him again, and later blocked his phone number after he became belligerent because she didn’t reply to his texts.

• So this week the usual folks have been all over China’s proposal to use big data techniques to assign every citizen a Citizen Score. And while a tiny ethics-free part of my soul weeps for joy (hey, I never expected parts of Glasshouse to come true!) the rest of me shudders and can’t help thinking how much worse it could get.

• So, let’s start by synopsizing the Privacy Online News report. It’s basically a state-run universal credit score, where you’re measured on a scale from 350 to 950. But it’s not just about your financial planning ability; it also reflects your political opinions. On the financial side, if you buy products the government approves of your credit score increases: wastes of time (such as video games) cost you points. China’s main social networks feed data into it and you can lose points big-time by expressing political opinions without prior permission, talking about history (where it diverges from the official version—e.g. the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square—hey, I just earned myself a negative credit score there!), or saying anything that’s politically embarrassing.

• The special social network magic comes into play when you learn that if your friends do this, your score also suffers. You can see what they just did to you: are you angry yet? Social pressure is a pervasive force and it’s going to be exerted on participants whether they like it or not, by friends looking for the goodies that come from having a high citizen score: goodies like instant loans for online shopping, car rentals without needing a deposit, or fast-track access to foreign travel visas. Also, everyone’s credit score is visible online, making it easy to ditch those embarrassingly ranty cocktail-party friends who insist on harshing your government credit karma by not conforming.

• [...]

• First a micro-example: The Chinese government could conceivably to abolish it’s Great Firewall once the citizen score is enacted. Instead, it could require ISPs to log all outgoing internet connections; the UK’s GCHQ already does this via the KARMA POLICE program (and that name could be a big hint about where this is going). By monitoring what people are looking at, you can then reward or punish their habits. The 50 Cent Party demonstrates that they’ve got the human resources to actively track internet activities; members could be rewarded for identifying hostile foreign web sites, and non-members could then earn penalty points on their citizen scores for looking at those sites. By rendering the firewall transparent they could paradoxically improve enforcement: looking at dodgy sites on the internet would get you shunned by family, friends, and workmates out of self-interest.

• I spoke with a well-established camgirl, NataliaGrey, of the popular website MyFreeCams, about how she keeps herself safe online. The first step is protecting your location.

• Then there was this peculiar psychic incursion. One night, about a year before my phone suggested I eat more walnuts, I was researching modern spycraft for a book I was thinking about writing when I happened across a creepy YouTube video. It consisted of surveillance footage from a Middle Eastern hotel where agents thought to be acting on behalf of Israel had allegedly assassinated a senior Hamas official. I watched as the agents stalked their target, whom they apparently murdered in his room, offscreen, before reappearing in a hallway and nonchalantly summoning an elevator. Because one of the agents was a woman, I typed these words into my browser’s search bar: Mossad seduction techniques. Minutes later, a banner ad appeared for Ashley Madison, the dating site for adulterous married people that would eventually be hacked, exposing tens of millions of trusting cheaters who’d emptied their ids onto the Web. When I tried to watch the surveillance footage again, a video ad appeared. It promoted a slick divorce attorney based in Santa Monica, just a few miles from the Malibu apartment where I escaped my cold Montana home during the winter months.

• Things on the Crypto War 2.0 battlefront just got a little more interesting. The administration won’t seek backdoors and neither will Congress. The intelligence community has largely backed away from pressing for compliance from tech companies. This basically leaves FBI director James Comey (along with various law enforcement officials) twisting in his own “but people will die” wind.

• Comey continues to insist encryption can be safely backdoored. He claims the real issue is companies like Apple and Google, who hire tons of “smart people” but won’t put them to work solving his “going dark” problem for him. As pretty much the entirety of the tech community has pointed out, holes in encryption are holes in encryption and cannot ever be law enforcement-only.

• The vast majority of Australian internet service providers (ISPs) are not ready to start collecting and storing metadata as required under the country’s data retention laws which come into effect today.

• ISPs have had the past six months to plan how they will comply with the law, but 84 per cent say they are not ready and will not be collecting metadata on time.

• The Attorney-General’s department says ISPs have until April 2017 to become fully compliant with the law.

• Australian intelligence authorities accessed private internet data gathered by the US National Security Agency even more than their British counterparts over a 12-month period, according to a previously unreported document released by Edward Snowden.

• The document relates to the NSA’s PRISM program, which takes chunks of users’ online activity directly from companies like Google.

• In the 12 months to May 2012, Australia’s electronic spy agency, the ASD, then known as DSD, produced 310 reports based on PRISM. The UK produced 197.

• Eric King from British activist group Privacy International found the document and told Lateline he was astonished.

• “What we’ve now found out is that DSD, the Australian intelligence services, were using PRISM, they were having access directly to Google, Apple, Facebook and other big US companies which are right into heart of their customer’s data and pulling that out,” he said.

• “The fact that [Australia] had a third more than even Britain used is astonishing to my mind.”

• There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public encryption.” The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand.

• Germany’s justice minister has called for tighter control of the national foreign intelligence agency, after media reported its spies had targeted the embassies of allied countries without the government’s express permission.

• Heiko Maas told the Rheinische Post newspaper in an interview to be published on Friday that a fundamental reform of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) was needed.

• “Parliament must get all the necessary means for an effective control of the intelligence services,” he added.

• Two years ago Edward Snowden let citizens know that their privacy wasn’t all it seemed. Records were routinely being kept on the websites they visited, the texts they sent and the numbers they called. Even search terms and passwords could sometimes be harvested as “bulk data”, making it possible in principle to weave an intimate portrait from disparate electronic traces.

• There were shockwaves around the world, from Washington to Berlin. Westminster, however, shrugged off the news, with many MPs more interested in taking pot-shots at Mr Snowden, and sometimes the Guardian, than in engaging with the substance of what he had to say. If parliamentarians were less than excited about snooping, then – on the-personal-is-the-political principle – it could be because they didn’t imagine that it affected them. The Wilson doctrine – the 50-year-old prime ministerial promises that MPs’ communications wouldn’t be tapped – gave that hunch some basis. Today, however, the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) told them bluntly that the doctrine had no force in law. Now it is the politicians’ turn to discover that their privacy isn’t all that it had seemed.

• Facebook has hired Microsoft’s UK chief marketing officer Philippa Snare as its marketing director for business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

• In the summer of 2014, an anti-surveillance “digilante” only known as PhineasFisher hacked into the servers of the controversial company Gamma International, makers of the FinFisher government spyware, and exposed some of its secrets to the world.

• The breach revealed the company’s customer list as well as details of its products. For some, this was going to seriously damage the company. But a year later, FinFisher is alive and well as a now-separate company. In fact, it has more customers than previously reported, according to a new investigation by Citizen Lab, a digital watchdog at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

• The NSA hasn’t said much (well… compared to the FBI) over the past several months about the default phone encryption offered by Google and Apple. This lack of public outcry has to do with the NSA’s capabilities, rather than a sudden interest in ensuring people around the world have access to secure communications. If it truly felt the world would be a better place with safer computing, it wouldn’t have invested so much in hardware implants, software exploits and — its biggest black budget line — defeating encryption.

• Where there’s no smoke, there’s a great deal of fire which can neither be confirmed nor denied. The NSA has very likely punched holes in encryption in existing encryption. But how does it do it? A brute force attack on encryption would be largely futile, even with the computing power the agency possesses. Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger at Freedom to Tinker have a theory, and it involves a “flaw” in a highly-recommended encryption algorithm.

• The NSA could have gained a significant amount of its access to the world’s encrypted communications thanks to the high-tech version of reusing passwords, according to a report from two US academics.

• Most encryption software does the high-tech equivalent of reusing passwords, and that could be how the US national security agency decrypted communications

• WHERE you go, what you buy, who you know, how many points are on your driving licence: these are just a few of the details that the Chinese government will track – to give scores to all its citizens.

• China’s Social Credit System (SCS) will come up with these ratings by linking up personal data held by banks, e-commerce sites and social networks. The scores will serve not just to indicate an individual’s credit risk, for example, but could be used by potential landlords, employers and even romantic partners to gauge an individual’s character.

• “It isn’t just about financial creditworthiness,” says Rogier Creemers at the University of Oxford, who studies Chinese media policy and politics. “All that behaviour will be integrated into one comprehensive assessment of you as a person, which will then be used to make you eligible or ineligible for certain jobs, or social services.”

• In a post on Wednesday, researchers Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger presented compelling research suggesting that the NSA has developed the capability to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections using an attack on common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm with 1024-bit primes. Earlier in the year, they were part of a research group that published a study of the Logjam attack, which leveraged overlooked and outdated code to enforce “export-grade” (downgraded, 512-bit) parameters for Diffie-Hellman. By performing a cost analysis of the algorithm with stronger 1024-bit parameters and comparing that with what we know of the NSA “black budget” (and reading between the lines of several leaked documents about NSA interception capabilities) they concluded that it’s likely NSA has been breaking 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman for some time now.

• Facebook, Google, Yahoo and a number of open source advocates are joining the rally cry against a controversial new bill proposed in the U.S. called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015. Some experts are saying that, if passed, the bill could have a seismic impact on individual privacy and privacy at businesses.

• Ben Wizner got a call in January 2013 that would revolutionize his professional career.

• The call was from a journalist and filmmaker, Laura Poitras, whom he had known for years. She had received an email from someone who claimed to be a senior intelligence official.

• “She came to me in order to seek advice,” Wizner says via phone from New York. “She wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure, whether the writer was a real person, a crank, or even something more sinister.”

• The writer turned out to be a former CIA employee and government contractor named Edward Snowden. The rest turned out to be history.

• Snowden, with help of journalists around the world, released information about the National Security Agency that had not previously been discussed in public — most notably, that the NSA was collecting telephone data in bulk, including the numbers dialed by Americans and how long the calls lasted. Snowden now lives in Russia, but he has said he would one day like to return home.

• Europe’s outspoken digi Commissioner, Günther H-dot Oettinger has admitted that the European Commission did too little, too late in reaction to Edward Snowden’s NSA spying revelations.

• Following a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) striking down the EU-US data sharing Safe Harbor agreement on Tuesday, Oetti told German daily Der Spiegel that “a mandatory government agreement would be the best solution” but that he didn’t believe it was likely to happen.

• The second-best option is a re-negotiated arrangement, said Oettinger, for once sticking to the Commission official line. He said clarity was urgently needed for “the many medium-sized companies that are now feeling insecure”.

• As well as smearing Snowden, the aim of the documentary was to head off opposition to upcoming UK government legislation, in which even more spying powers are being handed over to an already vast and all-embracing intelligence apparatus.

• The National Security Agency’s massive data center in Utah isn’t being used to store Americans’ personal phone calls or social media activity, but plays a key role in protecting the country from cyber-attacks by hostile foreign governments, U.S. Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah said Tuesday.

• Stewart’s comments came during a national security conference he hosted on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City. NSA Utah director Dave Winberg was among the speakers, but didn’t talk specifically what happens at a $1.7 billion data center south of Salt Lake City. He instead focused his remarks on the NSA’s global purpose.

• According to leaked internal memos given to The Guardian, the U.S. government’s National Security Agency (NSA) worked with Microsoft in order to enable them to read personal messages sent over Skype as well as Outlook email, and its predecessor Hotmail

• According to an award-winning paper presented at a security conference earlier this week by a group of prominent cryptographers, the NSA has likely used its access to vast computing power as well as weaknesses in the commonly used TLS security protocol in order to spy on encrypted communications, including VPNs, HTTPS and SSH. As two of the researchers, Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger explained, it was previously known that the NSA had reached a “breakthrough” allowing these capabilities. The paper represents a major contribution to public understanding by drawing a link between the NSA’s computing resources and previously known cryptographic weaknesses.

• This really wasn’t in the script. All conquering, “disruptive” Silicon Valley companies were more powerful than any nation state, we were told, and governments and nations would submit to their norms. But now the dam that Max Schrems cracked last week has burst open as European companies seek to nail down local alternatives to Google, Dropbox and other Californian over-the-top players.

• They don’t have much choice, says Rafael Laguna, the open source veteran at Open Xchange.

• Adam Fuchs and his small team labored for years inside the National Security Agency on a system that would enable analysts to access vast troves of intelligence data and spot hidden patterns.

• “We very much had a startup feel,” Fuchs said. The team worked in an office at Fort Meade with ideas scrawled across whiteboards and old furniture scattered around.

• Their work helped analysts identify terrorist groups. But the ordinarily secretive NSA did something else with the technology: Figuring that others could make use of it, too, the agency released it to the world for free.

• And that was when those who had built the tool saw an opportunity. Half eventually left the agency to develop it on the outside. Fuchs and others founded a company.

• In a post on Wednesday, researchers Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger presented compelling research suggesting that the NSA has developed the capability to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections using an attack on common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm with 1024-bit primes. Earlier in the year, they were part of a research group that published a study of the Logjam attack, which leveraged overlooked and outdated code to enforce “export-grade” (downgraded, 512-bit) parameters for Diffie-Hellman. By performing a cost analysis of the algorithm with stronger 1024-bit parameters and comparing that with what we know of the NSA “black budget” (and reading between the lines of several leaked documents about NSA interception capabilities) they concluded that it’s likely NSA has been breaking 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman for some time now.

• You are a tool of the state, according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• The NSA in the U.S., and its equivalent in the UK, GCHQ, are taking control of your phone not just to spy on you as needed, but also to use your device as a way to spy on others around you. You are a walking microphone, camera and GPS for spies.

• The paper describes how in Diffie-Hellman key exchange — a common means of exchanging cryptographic keys over untrusted channels — it’s possible to save a lot of computation and programmer time by using one of a few, widely agreed-upon large prime numbers. The theoreticians who first proposed this described it as secure against anyone who didn’t want to spend a nearly unimaginable amount of money attacking it.

• Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders sparred over Edward Snowden during Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate with both calling for him to face trial, but with the Vermont senator saying he thought the NSA whistleblower had “played a very important role in educating the American people”.

• That’s not accurate, we found. While American law does shield government whistleblowers, it wouldn’t necessarily apply in Snowden’s case.

• Last week, Edward Snowden made several statements about the NSA, as he usually does, and the U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ claiming that these agencies wish to control the phones of the public. Lost in much of the typical nonsense one expects to hear from Mr. Snowden, there was the claim that these two signals intelligence agencies were actively engaged in spying on Pakistan. More specifically, Snowden claimed that the eavesdropping was conducted through an exploit in the Cisco routers employed by the Pakistanis.

• In the wake of last week’s dramatic judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which means that transatlantic data transfers made under the Safe Harbour agreement are likely to be ruled illegal across the EU, there has been no shortage of apocalyptic visions claiming that e-commerce—and even the Internet itself—was doomed. Companies are already finding alternative, if imperfect, ways to transfer personal data from the EU to the US, although a very recent data protection ruling in Germany suggests that one approach—using contracts—is unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny. But what’s being overlooked are the much wider implications of the court’s ruling, which reach far beyond e-commerce.

• The careful legal reasoning used by the CJEU to reach its decisions will make its rulings extremely hard, if not impossible, to circumvent, since they are based on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. As the European Commission’s page on the Charter explains: “The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU brings together in a single document the fundamental rights protected in the EU.” Once merely aspirational, the Charter attained a new importance in December 2009: “with the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the Charter became legally binding on the EU institutions and on national governments, just like the EU Treaties themselves.”

• Facebook’s ad targeting algorithms are about to get a new firehose of valuable and controversial personal data.

• Being a job seeker isn’t a crime. But the FBI has made a big change in how it deals with fingerprints that might make it seem that way. For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.

• As Privacy SOS reported earlier this month, the FBI is looking for new ways to collect biometrics out in the field—and not just fingerprints, but face recognition-ready photographs as well.

• The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department (SCSD) announced a new cell-site-simulator policy earlier this week, saying that it would seek “judicial authorization” when deploying the devices, which are also known as stingrays.

• In a press release, the largest law enforcement agency in California’s state capital region touted that it was the “first law enforcement agency in the country” to release such a policy.

• AVG, the Czech antivirus company, has announced a new privacy policy in which it boldly and openly admits it will collect user details and sell them to online advertisers for the purpose of continuing to fund its freemium-based products.

• This new privacy policy is slated to come into effect starting October 15, and the company has published a blog post explaining the decision to go this route, along with the full privacy policy’s content, so users can read it in advance and decide on their own if they want to use its services or not.

• Security researchers say they found critical weaknesses in a South Korean government-mandated child surveillance app — vulnerabilities that left the private lives of the country’s youngest citizens open to hackers.

• Most of the time, though, my slips were accidental. I discovered (again this year) that social software is embedded everywhere. My Facebook log-in doubled as my log-in for my ride-sharing app (Uber), my jogging music app (RockMyRun), my house-sharing app (Airbnb), and my bike-riding app (MapMyRide). And then there was Rise, the social app I use to send photos of my meals to a professional dietician, who advises me to leave off the chocolate and add a bit of spinach. Wasn’t that basically a social app?

• UL, formerly called Underwriters Labs, soon expects to certify wearables for safety and security, including user privacy.

• Founded in 1894 and more commonly known for certifying appliances for electrical safety, UL is developing draft requirements for security and privacy for data associated with Internet of Things devices, including wearables. A pilot program is underway, and UL plans to launch the program early in 2016, UL told Computerworld.

• Germany once again requires telcos and ISPs to make user data available to law enforcement, after a previous law and the EU directive on which it was based were declared unconstitutional.

• Even as the European Union attempts to tighten privacy laws, law-enforcement interests have won a battle in Germany: a new law forces communications service providers there to once again make data about their customers’ communications available to police.

• The online advertising business, which has for years struggled against a rising tide of ad blockers by deploying ever-heavier and more-invasive ads, this week publicly acknowledged the error of its ways.

• “We messed up,” begins the post by Scott Cunningham of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which represents 650 advertising and tech companies that produce 86 percent of all Internet ads in the US.

• If you unpack a shiny new drone on Christmas morning, it’s possible you’ll have to get Uncle Sam’s permission before you can fly it.

• NBC News is reporting that the federal government will soon announce new requirements for drones, the most severe of which is that consumer drones will need to be registered with the Department of Transportation.

• Now we can see what moves legislators to take swift action against domestic surveillance. It all depends on who’s being targeted.

• The Wilson Doctrine is named after former Prime Minister Harold Wilson who in 1966, following a spate of scandals involving the alleged telephone-bugging of MPs, told the House of Commons that MPs’ phones would not be tapped. In 2002, Tony Blair said that the policy also applied to the “use of electronic surveillance by any of the three security and intelligence agencies”. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, Parliamentarians have asked repeatedly for the Government to clarify whether the Wilson Doctrine still applies. In addition, Caroline Lucas MP and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb asked the IPT whether the Wilson Doctrine prohibited the interception of their communications – including their confidential correspondence with constituents.

Civil Rights

• Municipalities across the United States are evicting domestic abuse victims from their homes. Officials term these evictions as “nuisance evictions,” which occur when too many police calls are made to a specific residence.

• That doesn’t take into account cases such as Thomas Drake’s, a former senior NSA executive who obeyed the law while trying to report problems within the NSA and found himself on the wrong side of a major investigation. He now works at an Apple store outside of Washington, DC. Admittedly, the law is fairly complicated, but as Politifact pointed out in January 2014, when the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald said Snowden did not have any whistleblower protections under the Espionage Act, his claim was “mostly true.” Greenwald received the classified information from Snowden.

• In response to the many people who have asked me whether I am leaving Berkeley, it is true that the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department has fired me. More precisely, the then Chair of the Mathematics Department, Arthur Ogus, emailed me on October 31st 2014 saying that my employment would be terminated in June 2016. I have asked the campus authorities to review the circumstances leading up to that decision and overrule it. I have filed a formal grievance, viewable here, with the aid of my union representative, and a meeting is scheduled for October 20th, 2015 with representatives from the UC Berkeley campus administration. My contract entitles me to a written response within 15 days of that meeting, by November 4th, 2015. I will be communicating the response I receive at this URL when I receive it.

• For 15 minutes, a man shot by an off-duty officer here lay bleeding from two gunshots in his abdomen as the responding officers stood by without providing first aid. At one point, as the victim, a 53-year-old black man, raised his head, an officer used his foot to keep the man’s face on the pavement, according to a dashboard camera video supplied to The New York Times recently by the man’s relatives.

• From the time the episode was first reported, at 2:17 a.m. on July 9, 2014, and including the time the man, Charles K. Goodridge, lay unaided on the ground, it took more than an hour for him to arrive at an emergency room. An hour after his arrival at the hospital in an ambulance, he was dead.

• Last week we wrote about Matthew Keys being found guilty of three CFAA charges which will likely lead to some amount of jailtime for him (the prosecution has suggested it will ask for less than 5 years). While Keys still denies he did anything he’s accused of, the prosecution argues that he took a login to the Tribune Company’s content management system, handed it off to some hackers in an internet forum and told them to mess stuff up. And… so they made some minor vandalism changes to an LA Times article. It took the LA Times all of 40 minutes to fix it. Even if we assume that Keys did do this, we still have trouble seeing how it was any more than a bit of vandalism that deserves, at best, a slap on the wrist. Its ridiculous to say that it’s a form of felony hacking that requires a prison sentence. As we noted in our original article, the Tribune Company and the feds argued that the damage cost the company $929,977 in damage, well above the $5,000 threshold for the CFAA to apply. We still have trouble seeing how the $5,000 could make sense, let alone nearly a million dollars. And it’s important to note that the sentencing guidelines match up with the dollar amount of the “damages” so this actually matters quite a bit for Keys.

• Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian, imprisoned in Tehran for more than 14 months, has been convicted following an espionage trial that ended in August, Iranian media reported Monday. The verdict — belated and opaque — was strongly condemned by the journalist’s family and colleagues, as well as the U.S. government.

• The Fourth Amendment somehow still survives, despite the government’s best efforts to dismantle it… or at the very least, ignore it.

• Law enforcement agencies seemingly have never met a warrant they didn’t like. They’ll do everything they can to avoid getting one, even though the process appears to be little more than [INSERT PROBABLE CAUSE] [OBTAIN WARRANT].

• New Jersey was one of the last states to pay lip service to the warrant requirement for vehicle searches, but recently overturned that because it seemed to be too much of an inconvenience for officers (and drivers [but really just officers]). The court noted that the telephonic warrant system no one had bothered using didn’t seem to be working very well, and so the warrant requirement had to go.

• Everywhere else, there’s any number of ways law enforcement officers can avoid seeking warrants. Exigent circumstances, bumbling ineptitude/warrant-dodging d/b/a “good faith,” the Third Party Doctrine, coming anywhere near a national border, dogs that always smell drugs, the superhuman crime-sensing skills of patrolmen, etc.

• The family’s decision comes four months after Eaton County Prosecutor Doug Lloyd determined that Sgt. Jonathan Frost’s actions were lawful when he shot and killed Deven Guilford during a traffic stop.

• If you’ve been on an airplane in the last few decades, you’ve had a close encounter of the TSA kind. We’re all annoyed about taking our shoes off, throwing out our sweet pocket machetes, and emptying all of our delicious exotic liquids just to please The Man. We sat down with someone who spent most of the last decade working for the TSA, and he explained to us just what it was like being inside that most hated of organizations …

• A trade group representing Facebook, Google, Yahoo and other tech and communications companies has come down heavily against the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, a controversial bill in the U.S. that is intended to encourage businesses to share information about cyberthreats with the government.

• The Computer & Communications Industry Association claims that the mechanism CISA prescribes for the sharing of cyberthreat information does not adequately protect users’ privacy or put an appropriate limit on the permissible uses of information shared with the government.

• The bill, in addition, “authorizes entities to employ network defense measures that might cause collateral harm to the systems of innocent third parties,” the CCIA said in a blog post Thursday.

• A political activist arrested but not charged during peaceful protests is facing illegal deportation from the UK, his lawyer has claimed.

• It is thought to be the first case of its kind and has raised serious concerns that the right to peaceful protest, which is enshrined in English law, is being eroded.

• Daniel Gardonyi, 34, is Hungarian but has lived in the UK for several years. He is self-employed and has been involved in several high-profile protests, including the occupation of Friern Barnet library in north London and the Sweets Way housing occupation in the borough of Barnet.

• A professor of history and Holocaust studies debunked Ben Carson’s suggestion that fewer people would have been killed in the Holocaust had there been greater access to guns in an op-ed for The New York Times, explaining that such assertions “are difficult to fathom” for anyone “who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust for a living.”

• Ben Carson has come under fire after an October 8 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer where he claimed that the number of people killed in the Holocaust “would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.” Carson’s comments were immediately called out as “historically inaccurate” by the Anti-Defamation League, but Fox News figures continuously stood by the controversial comments, which parroted an old right-wing media talking point.

• North Carolina high schooler and his girlfriend face legal proceedings over selfies as both the adult perpetrators and minor victims

• Wife of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi says move amounts to “a green light to flog him”

• A police pursuit led to a wrong-way crash and fatal gunshots fired from a Sheriff’s Department helicopter Friday afternoon, leaving three people hospitalized and prompting the closure of all lanes of the northbound 215 Freeway just south of the Cajon Pass.

• China is a big — and quite appealing — market. I think just about everyone recognizes that. But it’s also a troubling market for a variety of reasons, and American tech companies have struggled with how to handle China. Beyond the fact that China often requires American firms to “partner” with a local Chinese firm, China often helps local firms get a leg up on American firms. And, then, of course, there’s the whole “Great Firewall” censorship issue, and concerns about the Chinese government’s desire for greater surveillance powers. Google famously left China about five years ago after it got tired of pressure to change its search results. However, just recently it was reported that Google has (at least somewhat) caved to China with a plan to bring a censored version of the Android Play store to China.

• The TSA, it appears, is just simply bad at everything. The nation’s most useless government agency has already made it clear that it is bad at knowing if it groped you, bad at even have a modicum of sense when it comes to keeping the traveling luggage of citizens private, and the TSA is especially super-mega-bad at TSA-ing, failing to catch more than a fraction of illicit material as it passes by agents upturned noses. And now, it appears, the TSA has demonstrated that it is also bad at pretending to give a shit.

• The revelation will prove embarrassing for the SNP, which last year called for a full judicial inquiry into Britain’s role in the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists.

• Police Scotland are also pursuing a lengthy investigation into claims that rendition flights made refuelling stops in Scotland during the early years of the war on terror.

• Glasgow Prestwick was bought by the Scottish Government for £1 in November 2013, in a move that safeguarded hundreds of jobs in and around the struggling airport.

• A Fox News guest terrorism analyst was arrested on Thursday after a grand jury indicted him on charges of falsely claiming to have been a CIA agent for decades, US prosecutors said.

• A Fox News guest terrorism analyst was arrested on Thursday after a grand jury indicted him on charges of falsely claiming to have been a CIA agent for decades, US prosecutors said.

• Wayne Simmons, 62, of Annapolis, Maryland, bogusly portrayed himself as an “Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Officer” for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1973 to 2000, the US Attorney’s Office for Virginia’s Eastern District said in a statement.

• [...]

• He has appeared on Fox News, a unit of 21st Century Fox Inc , as a guest analyst on terrorism since 2002 and has a wide presence among conservative groups, a profile on Amazon.com said.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Here’s a riddle: the Internet Movie Database, the now-ubiquitous website that tracks pretty much every speck of info about movies and TV, will celebrate its 25th birthday on Saturday. But the 25th anniversary of the proposal that gave birth to the World Wide Web won’t come around till November. That means that the website is older than the web.

• Australian telco Telstra has partnered with HP, F5, and Nuage to announce a proof of concept for a multi-vendor, open NFV solution.

• The concept of network neutrality was unplanned, an accident even, but a lucky one that did more to encourage internet innovation than any purposeful master plan ever could have done.

• The first architects of the internet, primarily researchers in the US, wanted to build a network that would scale, and they decided the best design for such a network would have smart end points (computers) and a ‘dumb’ network that did one thing only, but did it really well, and that was to forward packets as fast as possible. In contrast, the telephone network had dumb end devices (think rotary handsets) but a smart network that handled end-to-end reservations, accounting, billing and other processing.

• You might think the conversation about ad blocking is about the user experience of news, but what we’re really talking about is money and power in Silicon Valley. And titanic battles between large companies with lots of money and power tend to have a lot of collateral damage.

DRM

• Law enforcement have asked a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York to compel Apple, Inc. to unlock (and possibly decrypt) an iPhone. In response, Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has asked Apple to brief the court on “whether the assistance the government seeks is technically feasible and if, so, whether compliance with the proposed order would be unduly burdensome.”

• If you have ever tried scanning or photocopying a banknote, you may have found that your software—such as Adobe Photoshop, or the embedded software in the photocopier—refused to let you do so. That’s because your software is secretly looking for security features such as EURion dots in the documents that you scan, and is hard-coded to refuse to let you make a copy if it finds them, even if your copy would have been for a lawful purpose.

• Earlier this year, we wrote about a plan to add DRM to the JPEG standard, meaning that all sorts of images might start to get locked down. For an internet where a large percentage of images are JPEGs, that presents a potentially serious problem. We did note that the JPEG Committee at least seemed somewhat aware of how this could be problematic — and actually tried to position the addition of DRM as a way to protect against government surveillance. However, there are much better approaches if that’s the real purpose.

• Researchers want to find out, but the subject (and related science) is complicated.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Although it was due to end today there’s no end in sight for the extradition hearing of Kim Dotcom and his co-accused. After a series of delays and adjournments the case continued this week, but on occasion without the Megaupload founder present due to a reported bad back.

• For years, Google has been cooperating with libraries to digitize books and create a massive, publicly available and searchable books database. Users can search the database, which includes millions of works for keywords. Results include titles, page numbers, and small snippets of text. It has become an extraordinarily valuable tool for librarians, scholars, and amateur researchers of all kinds. It also generates revenue for authors by helping them reach new audiences. For example, many librarians reported that they have purchased new books for their collections after discovering them through Google Books. Nonetheless, for almost a decade the Authors Guild has argued that its members are owed compensation in exchange for their books being digitized and included in the database.

• A U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday that Google’s massive effort to scan millions of books for an online library does not violate copyright law, rejecting claims from a group of authors that the project illegally deprives them of revenue.

• The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York rejected infringement claims from the Authors Guild and several individual writers, and found that the project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law.

• The authors sued Google, whose parent company is now named Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), in 2005, a year after the project was launched.

• Some libraries agreed to allow Google to scan only public domain works, but others also permitted the scanning of in-copyright content. Overall, libraries agreed to abide by the copyright laws with respect to the copies they make.

• Litigation ensued between the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Authors’ Guild on the one hand, and Google on the other hand.

• For quite some time we’ve pointed out how problematic Section 1201 of the DMCA is. That’s the part of the law that says it’s copyright infringement to simply circumvent any kind of “technological protection measure” even if the reasons for doing so are perfectly legal and have nothing to do with infringement at all. And, of course, we now have the big “1201 Triennial Review” results that are about to come out. That’s the system that was put in place because even Congress realized just how stupid Section 1201 was and how much innovation and research it would limit — so it created a weird sort of safety valve. Every three years, the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress would work together to come up with classes of technology that are magically “exempted” from the law. Now, normally, you’d think that if you have to come up with exemptions, there’s probably something wrong with the law that needs to be fixed, but that’s not the way this worked.

• The copyright infringement notices rightsholders send to Internet providers should not lead to account terminations, the EFF and Public Knowledge have told a federal court in Virginia. Both groups submitted their opinion in the case between Cox and two music groups, stating that the interests of millions of subscribers are at risk.

• Following pressure from Hollywood studios including Viacom, Paramount, and MGM, an Italian ISP is now warning its customers of severe consequences if they persistently share copyright infringing content. In emails to subscribers the ISP warns that accounts will be permanently closed in order to protect the company.

• For the first time in years, online piracy rates have dropped significantly in Australia. The downswing coincides with the launch of Netflix, which played a key role as most consumers who say they are pirating less cite legal alternatives as the main reason.

• Imagine you are a researcher in 2050, researching the history of the Black Lives Matter movement. But you’ve stumbled across a problem: almost every Tweet, post, video or photograph with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter that you want to use in your work is an orphan work (i.e., works whose owners are impossible to track down, but are still covered by copyright). You’d like to ask permission but all you’ve got to go on are usernames from defunct accounts. Where do you go from here?

• [...]

• Instead, the Copyright Office proposes to “solve” the orphan works problem with legislation that would impose substantial burdens on users that would only work for one or two works at any given time. And because that system is so onerous, the Report also proposes a separate licensing regime to support so-called “mass digitization,” while simultaneously admitting that this regime would not really be appropriate for orphans (because there’s no one left to claim the licensing fees). These proposals have been resoundingly criticized for many valid reasons.

• Who is to blame when torrent and streaming site operators end up in jail?

• For most researchers the main goal is to publish their research in credible academic journals. Getting published is a victory for them, but one that comes with a downside that’s seldom discussed. In order to get their work accepted they have to sign away their copyrights, which means that they can’t freely share the fruits of their labor.

• Crown lawyers have spent nearly 30,000 hours and counting on the Dotcom extradition case.

• Google is facing a never-ending flood of takedown requests from copyright holders but there’s also another problem cropping up. Spammers are now submitting takedown notices as well, in the hopes it will indirectly drive traffic to stores selling dubious and counterfeit products.

• The Pirate Bay and several other locally significant ‘pirate’ sites have been placed on an advertising blacklist. The initiative is the fruit of a collaboration between anti-piracy group Rights Alliance and Swedish Advertisers, an association of advertisers with more than 600 member companies.

• It’s not necessarily a new idea. Nearly four years ago, we asked a similar question right here at Techdirt. And even after centuries of having public libraries, we sometimes still see authors lash out at them. And, indeed, you see some weird situations like when people put up little personal libraries in their front yards, people have tried to shut them down, but for being “illegal structures” rather than over the horror of the free lending of books. And you could argue that various attacks on parts of copyright law on the internet really are attacks on the modern form of a library.

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