● 11.04.15

● Links 4/11/2015: Linux-Based Parcel Delivery, OpenSUSE Leap 42.1

Posted in News Roundup at 2:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “Twitch Installs Arch Linux”—billed as a “cooperative text-based horror game”—began on Halloween. After beating both Pokemon and Dark Souls earlier this year, thousands of people are now trying to do something even geekier: collectively install Arch Linux. The stream is now back up after a botnet took over and partially installed Gentoo, another Linux distribution.

• You can tune into the stream at Twitch Installs Arch Linux. It works just like Twitch Plays Pokemon and Twitch Plays Dark Souls. Viewers vote on which key press to send to the terminal. Every ten seconds, the most popular key press is sent to the terminal. Arch Linux is a particularly good candidate for this, as it’s not the kind of Linux distribution you can install with a few clicks—it requires some terminal commands. You have to know what you’re doing, or at least be able to follow an installation guide.

Kernel Space

• In looking for any EXT4/Btrfs/XFS/F2FS file-system performance changes, I tested the three latest kernel series atop a PNY 120GB SSD. Ubuntu 15.10 64-bit was running on the system.

• The GNU Linux-libre maintainers also cautioned against Intel and Qualcomm/Atheros Bluetooth hardware and now Intel Skylake sound support too. Skylake sound support was added to Linux 4.3 but apparently there too the code isn’t “free” enough for GNU Linux-libre.

• Herbert Xu mailed in the crypto subsystem updates this morning for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

• The Linux 4.4 Crypto update brings a new wrap algorithm, a few API changes, alterations to the akcipher interfacem Intel SHA Extension SHA1 and SHA256 optimized functions, support for the ST and STM32 RNGs, support for the mxs-dcp crypto device, and other crypto driver improvements.

• Trusted Platform Module 2.0 support has been around for a few kernel cycles now and with the forthcoming Linux 4.4 kernel it will be in much better shape.

• Last month I wrote about how with the code lined up the developer was saying TPM 2.0 is ready for distributions and that code is now set to land as part of the sent out security subsystem pull request.

• LWN’s 2015 Kernel Summit page now has coverage from the open day of the event, which focused primarily on technical topics. Subscribers are invited to have a look. Coverage from the final day is in the works and will be posted within the next day or so.

• Linus Torvalds’s latest rant underscores the high expectations the Linux developer places on open source programmers—as well the importance of security for Linux kernel code.

• Torvalds is the unofficial “benevolent dictator” of the Linux kernel project. That means he gets to decide which code contributions go into the kernel, and which ones land in the reject pile.

• Octavian Purdila of Intel has announced today the Linux Kernel Library, a.k.a. LKL, for re-using kernel code more easily in user-space.

• Jens Axboe sent in the patches today for landing support for LightNVM and Open-Channel SSDs within the mainline Linux kernel!

• The developer at Facebook wrote, “This first one adds support for lightnvm, and adds support to NVMe as well. This is pretty exciting, in that it enables new and interesting use cases for compatible flash devices.”

Applications

• There is no single technology hotter today than Docker containers. Today the open-source Docker project released version 1.9.0 of Docker engine, providing an important milestone update.

• Kakoune is a command-line code editor that’s inspired by Vim and its advertised features are support for multiple selections, many customization possibilities, a client/server architecture so many clients can collaboratively edit the contents of a file, and advanced text manipulation primitives.

• Hello all! I’m excited to announce v0.1 of Activipy. This is a new library targeting ActivityStreams 2.0.

• If you’re interested in building and expressing the information of a web application which contains social networking features, Activipy may be a great place to start.

Proprietary

• The new browser by Opera founder and ex-CEO Jon von Tetzchner is available as a beta today, after ten months in preview. You can grab it for Windows, Mac and Linux – and he’s promised that a mobile version will follow.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Coming in just a few days after the Wine 1.7.54 release is the experimental Wine-Staging 1.7.54 release with a few extra features.

• New to the Wine-Staging patch-set are multiple improvements and fixes to the Wine IDL (WIDL) compiler that reads data from Microsoft’s Interface Definition Language and converts them into alternate formats, which in turn are used by scripting languages wanting to communicate with COM objects.

Games

• Although Windows is still the most-used operating system for PC gaming, Linux has seen an impressive rise in the gaming scene. A few years ago, Linux had virtually no games available for it, aside from some oft-mentioned open source ones. Fast forward to today, and Linux now has more than 1,500 games available on Steam alone, with a few AAA titles littered among those 1,500.

• If you’ve become interested in gaming on Linux, using SteamOS as your Linux distribution of choice is a good idea. But how do you get SteamOS on your computer so you can start playing on it? Here’s a detailed guide that will cover every step and possible question you may have along the way.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Me, Carlos and others has been working on improving the newcomer experience. GNOME is a 15 years old project. Our community conventions and infrastructure which newcomers have to learn all bear signs of this. Over time such project in the size of GNOME build up vast amount of information, historial baggage and complex navigation structure. To me this is all a natural healthy sign of a large project swiftly advancing the Linux desktop.

Distributions

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSECon 2015 kicked off today in Amsterdam. One of the biggest highlights of the keynote was SUSE’s entry into the platform as a service (PaaS) landscape: the company is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

• The wait is over and a new era begins for openSUSE releases. Contributors, friends and fans can now download the first Linux hybrid distro openSUSE Leap 42.1. Since the last release, exactly one year ago, openSUSE transformed its development process to create an entirely new type of hybrid Linux distribution called openSUSE Leap.

• SUSE has announced its Enterprise Storage 2 product.

• This is the latest version of its self-managing, self-healing, distributed software-based storage solution for enterprise.

• We reviewed OpenSUSE 13.2 and we still believe it is an excellent release. It will be supported for a long time still. According to our OpenSUSE source, probably until the first quarter of 2017.

• So how does the new release OpenSUSE 42.1 Leap rate? Let’s take a look.

• Red Hat has CentOS. Canonical has Ubuntu. Both these operating systems can be installed at no cost, and they are enterprise grade operating systems running on servers and cloud. However, SUSE doesn’t have any such distro; The openSUSE codebase is way too diverged from the SUSE codebase.

• But that’s changing. The openSUSE community is taking a big leap, dropping the old regular release cycles of openSUSE and moving to openSUSE Leap. The community has released the first version of openSUSE Leap today at SUSECon 2015.

Red Hat Family

• Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from Hold to Buy with a price target of $90.00 (from $75.00). Analyst Karl Keirstead noted the company’s cloud opportunity.

• Following the recent BusyBox 1.24 release, the developers behind this “Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux” have decided to drop systemd support.

• BusyBox developer Denys Vlasenko pushed this commit where he explained, “systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. Therefore there is no reason for the rest of the world to cooperate with them.”

• The first task any accomplished technical writer has to do is write for the audience. This task may sound simple, but when I thought about people living all over the world, I wondered: Can they read our documentation? Readability is something that has been studied for years, and what follows is a brief summary of what research shows.

• Red Hat, Inc. provides open source software solutions to enterprise customers worldwide. It develops and offers operating system, virtualization, middleware, storage, and cloud technologies. RHT has a PE ratio of 76. Currently there are 14 analysts that rate Red Hat a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 4 rate it a hold.

Fedora

• Fedora 23, the latest edition of the Fedora Linux distribution, was released earlier today.

• It is the first edition of Fedora that features a Cinnamon Spin. That means it comes with its own Live installation image, making it easier to install a Fedora Cinnamon desktop without having to use a netinstall image or the Everything image.

• Fedora 23 has rolled out this week after six months (give or take) of hard work by the Fedora Project. Job done, right? Not exactly–we still need to tell the world that Fedora 23 exists, and why they should be giving it a try.

• Welcome back for another installment of the systemd series. Throughout this series, we discuss ways to use systemd to understand and manage your system. This article focuses on how to convert legacy scripts you may have customized on your system.

Debian Family

• My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

• Distributions have been working on it for years to let the X.Org Server run without root privileges. This feat has now been accomplished for Debian testing users where if using systemd and a DRM/KMS graphics driver, you can run the xorg-server as a user.

Derivatives

• Tails, a Live operating system that is built with the declared purpose of keeping users safe and anonymous while going online, has been updated to version 1.7. This is a major upgrade and users have been advised to make the switch as soon as possible.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The next Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update is scheduled to arrive in about two weeks and the developers are now putting the final touches. There is a certain number of bug-fixes still left to be added, but they are slowly getting implemented.

• 1-Net today announced that its public cloud service, Alchemy, has officially joined Canonical to be the Southeast Asia’s first Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud Service Provider. Alchemy is a high performance and secure IaaS platform, which enables users to build and manage scalable infrastructures on demand.

Flavours and Variants

• While Jonathan Riddell stepped down as the Kubuntu release manager immediately following the Kubuntu 15.10 release and Kubuntu’s post-15.10 future was portrayed as uncertain, the developers still with the project are focusing on making a great 16.04 “Xenial Xerus” release.

Devices/Embedded

• Gumstix has opened up its quick-turn expansion board design service to third-party COMs and SBCs like the BeagleBone Black, with Raspberry Pi coming soon.

• Gumstix launched its web-based Geppetto custom design-to-order (D2O) platform for embedded boards back in 2013. Later that year, the company added new crowd-funding features to the drag-and-drop embedded board design service, and released version 2.0 last December. Previously, the service has been limited to a few Gumstix computer-on-modules such as the company’s TI Sitara AM3354-based Overo modules, as well as its dual-core, Cortex-A9 OMAP4430-based DuoVero modules. Today, however, Gumstix is extending Geppetto’s support to expansion board designs for use with other companies’ TI Sitara AM335x-based COMs and single-board computers (SBCs). The company also plans to soon add support for COMs and SBCs that use SoCs beyond TI’s, notably including the Broadcom BCM2835-based Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Compute Module.

• A London-based startup called “Starship,” launched by Skype co-founders, is developing a wheeled, Linux-based robot and service for package delivery.

• Former Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis announced the formation of a London-based robotics services company called Starship Technologies, “which aims to fundamentally improve local delivery of goods and groceries, making it almost free.” The 30-employee company, which also has offices in Estonia, showed off some images and a few specs for a prototype delivery robot that will enter trials in 2016. The robot runs on a Linux operating system, according to a Starship rep.

Phones

Tizen

• October has come to an end and it’s time to have a look at last month’s Top 20 Best Tizen Apps. WhatsApp still remains as the number one downloaded app for the Tizen Store and it just shows you how many people actually use this application. At number two we have the new comer Truedialer phone & contacts app.

Android

• Of course, not every young person grows up with an Apple device in hand. As a group, Android-powered devices far outsell iPhones. That’s in part because they’re often cheaper than Apple’s premium handsets. So it’s safe to assume lots of young Americans grew up not with an iPhone, but with an Android device. Would they prefer a more powerful Android device to take with them into the business world?

• These rival platforms are updated every year, when their creators are bringing new devices running on them. The latest Android version is 6.0 Marshmallow, while Apple launched iOS 9 and a few updates in the meantime. In order to get to know these platforms better and to find out what new features they brought, check out this article.

• The Android 6.0 Marshmallow update is yet to be available for non-Nexus devices. Various smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, Sony and Motorola have announced the list of smartphones from the respective companies that will receive the Android 6.0 upgrade. Motorola is likely to make the upgrade available first to its 2015 devices such as Moto X Pure Edition (Moto X Style), Moto X Play, Moto G (Gen 3) and Moto E.

• Google today announced that over 19,000 organizations are now either testing, deploying or using its Android for Work service.

• Android for Work makes it easier and safer for businesses to allow their employees to bring their own Android devices to work. It separates business apps from personal apps. Thanks to this, the IT department still retains control of its data and apps, while the employee can still play Angry Birds on the device, too. This program, which Google first previewed at its I/O developer conference in 2014, officially launched in February of this year.

Free Software/Open Source

• “With the Libyan High National Elections Commission (HNEC) and consultative support from the United Nations Support Mission to Libya, we have open sourced their elections management platform today under a permissive Apache 2.0 license,” read a blog post published by Caktus Group. “Open sourcing means other governments and organizations can freely adopt and adapt the elections tools which cover nine functional areas. The tools range from SMS voter registration, the first of its kind, to bulk alerts to voters and call center support software,” read the statement.

• A timetable for those negotiations has not been set. But election officials are starting to prepare. Libyans can now register to vote and receive election updates from their homes thanks to a new text messaging system created by a digital consultancy group in the United States. Smart Elect, designed by Caktus Group, a technology firm based in Durham, North Carolina, is a free open source platform that can be used by anyone to build an SMS [short message service] voter registration system as well as the tools needed before, during and after an election to support it.

• Then, five years later, at 24, I founded TuxWeb with a mission to solve clients’ problems using open source technology. Creating a startup has been fun (even here in Italy where funding does not come so easily), and in 2011 I cofounded a second startup with Luca Garulli, the creator of OrientDB, called NuvolaBase.

• Blockchain consortium The Distributed Ledger Group (DLG), which is managed by R3CEV expects to license its technology as open sourced by early next year, according to R3CEV officials.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Check out “What’s New” and “Known Issues” for this version of Firefox below. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think, or file a bug in Bugzilla. If interested, please see the complete list of changes in this release.

• We’d also like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!

• As we wrote previously, we think it’s important for users to be able to protect themselves from non-consensual online tracking. That’s why we created Privacy Badger, which enforces Do Not Track around the Web. But it’s also important for browser vendors to join in the fight to protect user privacy. Mozilla has done just that with today’s announcement.

• We’re releasing a powerful new feature in Firefox Private Browsing called Tracking Protection. We created this feature because we believe in giving you more choice and control over your Web experience. With the release of Tracking Protection in Firefox Private Browsing we are leading the industry by giving you control over the data that third parties receive from you online. No other browser’s Private Browsing mode protects you the way Firefox does—not Chrome, not Safari, not Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer.

SaaS/Big Data

• Finally, Gnocchi 1.3.0 is out. This is our final release, more or less matching the OpenStack 6 months schedule, that concludes the Liberty development cycle.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli today announced two LibreOffice updates. These two minor number bug fix updates cover the Fresh and Still branches of LibreOffice and user are advised to upgrade. Fedora 23 was officially released to the general public today and folks have been talking about that. Phoronix reported today that Debian had moved to rootless X server instances and Mozilla announced a new privacy feature for Firefox.

Business

Semi-Open Source/Openwashing

BSD

• Want to run something other than Linux on a ARM 64-bit server? Soon you can: a small software company has shown FreeBSD running on a 96-core server.

• Semihalf, which is based in Poland, demonstrated a beta version of FreeBSD running on a server board built with Cavium’s ThunderX processors. That’s the first hardware based on ARM’s 64-bit processors to run FreeBSD.

• Or everything I didn’t know about unix. The OpenBSD source tree has lots of example code for solving any number of problems, but I like to do things my own way. Occasionally this means something gets overlooked. A few examples. Previous thoughts on rewrites and reuse: out with the old, in with the less and hoarding and reuse.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Public Services/Government

• A group of 15 schools in rural areas in Denmark, Italy, Greece, Macedonia (FYROM), Spain, and the United Kingdom are using open source software solutions for learning, teaching and working together. An EU-funded consortium of research institutes and public administrations has developed and trialled software specifically for rural schools.

• The management tools for Andalucia’s standard corporate desktop, GECOS – Guadalinex Escritorio COrporativo eStandar, is ready for reuse by others, companies and public administrations alike, says Juan Conde, head of the free software promotion project of the Andalusian Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. “The potential user base outside of the Junta de Andalucía is huge.”

• [...]

• The software was designed to run on the Debian and Ubuntu free software distribution, but can be adapted to other distro’s such as Redhat and CentOS with little effort, he says. At the moment, GECOS is of limited use for managing proprietary desktops, says Conde, “until someone adds the equivalent management policies.”

• An agreement has been reached between the Cabinet Office and software firm Collabora Productivity, for the provision of a new range of open source applications for desktop, mobile and cloud.

Leftovers

• Pessimistic economists have predicted overpopulation problems based on exponential growth trends, but statistics point to lower birth rates as countries become more industrialized. So now, there’s a different kind of problem — aging populations and minimal population growth in certain countries. How will we deal with people living longer and having fewer and fewer kids?

Security

• FreeIPA’s X.509 PKI features (based on Dogtag Certificate System) continue to be an area of interest for users and customers. In this post I summarise recently-added PKI features in FreeIPA, work in progress, and what we plan to do in future releases. Then I will outline my personal vision for what the future of PKI in FreeIPA should look like, noting how it will address pain points and limitations of the existing architecture.

• That is one of the most common questions that we get when a new CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) appears. We explain SELinux as a technology for process isolation to mitigate attacks via privilege escalation.

• In April 2015 we took a look at a years worth of branded vulnerabilities, separating out those that mattered from those that didn’t. Six months have passed so let’s take this opportunity to update the report with the new vulnerabilities that mattered across all Red Hat products.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The onset of the rainy season in Indonesia brings hope of extinguishing forest fires that have raged for weeks, spawning both an environmental and political crisis in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

• Conservative media outlets are wrongly claiming that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is hiding data related to a recent study that challenged the so-called “pause” in global warming, and echoing Republican House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith’s baseless accusation that NOAA manipulated temperature records to show a warming trend. In reality, the NOAA study’s data is publicly available online, and NOAA routinely makes adjustments to historical temperature records that are peer-reviewed and necessary to account for changes to measuring instruments and other factors.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Filkins apparently intended to write a journalistic portrait of Nisman and the disputed circumstances in which he died of a gunshot wound last January, rather than to explore the case itself. But in order to write such a portrait, Filkins had to deal with the evidence Nisman used in his AMIA indictment, and Filkins stumbled badly in writing about those issues.

• Filkins’ failure goes to the root of a systemic problem of news media coverage of Iran and many other issues. Certain narratives about episodes and issues in recent history have become so unanimously accepted among political and media elites as to be virtually unchallengeable in media reporting. Such narratives have been repeated in one form or another for so many years that reporters simply would not think to question them for a moment, much less actually investigate their truth.

Privacy

• If it was good enough for them… it’s pretty ridiculous that we’re still having this debate now. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve heard from a few different folks who have insisted that there are bills sitting in drawers ready to go to “ban encryption” (not just backdoor it), and that’s so ridiculous in a world where encryption is used all the time and is a key driver of how we all live. But it’s even more ridiculous when you understand how often it’s been used throughout history.

• It’s been a rough few weeks for legal challenges to NSA surveillance. First, a federal district court in Maryland dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the NSA’s Upstream surveillance of the Internet backbone. Then, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the ACLU a preliminary injunction against the NSA’s bulk telephone records program, despite having previously found that the program was illegal. Essentially washing its hands of the case, the court refused to even consider the ACLU’s arguments that the phone records program is unconstitutional because the program will stop in its current form at the end of November.

• Communications companies will be required to store records of customers’ phone and internet use for 12 months in long-awaited measures overhauling the laws on surveillance by the state being published today.

• Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has dropped several measures from legislation – dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter” – which was blocked by the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition government.

• Protecting members of Parliament from mass surveillance by bulk collection is “exceedingly simple”, according to the US co-inventor of the high technology devices and programs now used by GCHQ to intercept optical fibre cables carrying Internet data in and out of Britain.

• Bill Binney, formerly Technical Director of the NSA’s Operations Directorate, dismissed as “absolute horseshit” claims by government lawyers to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), reported in an adjudication last month, that “there is so much data flowing along the pipe” that “it isn’t intelligible at the point of interception”.

• Theresa May is to propose a major extension of the surveillance state when she publishes legislation requiring internet companies to store details of every website visited by customers over the previous year.

• The home secretary will try to sweeten the pill of her revived snooper’s charter on Wednesday by announcing that the police will need to get judicial authorisation before they can access the internet connection records of an individual – something that is currently banned in the US and every European country, including Britain.

• She will also try to strengthen the oversight of Britain’s surveillance by replacing the current fragmented system of three separate commissioners with an investigatory powers commissioner who will be a senior judge appointed by the prime minister on the recommendation of the lord chief justice.

• The smallest member of the Five Eyes spying alliance is rolling out a “protected disclosures” policy to enable would-be Edward Snowdens to safely blow the whistle on suspected wrongdoing by security agencies.

• New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Cheryl Gwyn, said a formal internal policy for handling protected disclosures, or “whistleblowing”, has been developed by her office in liaison with security agencies.

• The UK home secretary, Theresa May, confirmed today that the UK government will seek to force all ISPs to retain a record of your Web browsing history for the previous year, even though the existence of tools like Tor and VPNs can make such data useless. This “Internet Connection Record” will be “a record of the internet services a specific device has connected to, such as a website or instant messaging application,” and does not include details of individual Web pages visited.

• A former college math professor at James Madison University has been charged with the brutal murder of his wife in their Maryland home.

• Jason Martin, 41, bludgeoned his wife, 42-year-old Carla Dee Martin, with a dumbbell while their three children slept upstairs, according to Howard County Police.

• Martin was a mathematician with the National Security Agency, PEOPLE reports.

• A Maryland man has been charged with murdering his wife by allegedly bludgeoning her with a dumbbell, police say.

• A onetime division chief for the National Security Agency is expected to plead guilty this month to child abuse resulting in death, according to records filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.

• Brian Patrick O’Callaghan had been charged in February of 2014 with first-degree murder of little Hyunsu. The boy died just several months after he was adopted by O’Callaghan and his wife, who lived in Damascus, Md.

• A former division chief within the National Security Agency is slated to plead guilty beating his three-year-old son to death, according to records filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court.

• Bad news for Apple users. A firm which describes itself as “a premium exploit acquisition platform” has just paid $1 million to undisclosed hackers to remotely jailbreaking the latest iPhone operating system – which potentially opens way for spy agencies abusing it too.

• The French cybersecurity company Zerodium’s modus operandi is largely the collection of so-called zero-day vulnerabilities – holes in software unknown to the vendor which can be exploited by hackers without fear that they would be patched up.

• Hacking Apple’s iOS isn’t easy. But in the world of cybersecurity, even the hardest target isn’t impossible—only expensive. And the price of a working attack that can compromise the latest iPhone is apparently somewhere around $1 million.

• On Monday, the security startup Zerodium announced that it’s agreed to pay out that seven-figure sum to a team of hackers who have successfully developed a technique that can hack any iPhone or iPad that can be tricked into visiting a carefully crafted web site. Zerodium describes that technique as a “jailbreak”—a term used by iPhone owners to hack their own phones to install unauthorized apps. But make no mistake: Zerodium and its founder Chaouki Bekrar have made clear that its customers include governments who no doubt use such “zero-day” hacking techniques on unwitting surveillance targets.

• Bamford then suggests the super-fast computers are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program located in Oakridge, Tenn. (of Manhattan Project fame), specifically in Building 5300 according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the project interviewed by Bamford.

• The official mentions that security intensified in a big way when the Building 5300 team made a huge breakthrough, adding, “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”

• A federal appeals court has denied a request to immediately halt the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans’ phone calls, ruling that Congress intended it to be allowed through November.

• Unsurprisingly, the Pennsylvania lawyer who tried to single-handedly challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance infrastructure has had his case dismissed. Like similar cases, it was tossed for lack of standing.

• While Elliott Schuchardt talked tough, US District Judge Cathy Bissoon found that he could not prove that he himself had been surveilled by the federal government, according to her 11-page opinion handed down in late September 2015.

• Just a few weeks ago, the divorce lawyer appealed the decision to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

• In 2013, the world learned that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government. Amid the outrage, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter thought: Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them. With antennas mounted on the roof of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin’s government district, they set up an open network that let the world send messages to US and UK spies listening nearby. It’s one of three bold, often funny, and frankly subversive works detailed in this talk, which highlights the world’s growing discontent with surveillance and closed networks.

• New legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aims to prohibit federal, state and local government agencies from using without a warrant so-called stingrays or cell-site simulators often used to intercept mobile communications.

• New legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives aims to prohibit federal, state and local government agencies from using without a warrant so-called stingrays or cell-site simulators often used to intercept mobile communications.

• Stingrays or “IMSI catchers” track the location of mobile phones by mimicking cellphone towers

• Many people are guilty of over-sharing on Facebook — whether they realize it or not — and the potential consequences of what people post on social media are getting even worse.

• There once was a time when the only thing at stake was your reputation, but those days are long gone. Most people are well aware of the potential risks of social media these days, and it’s no secret that a Facebook post can get you fired from a job or prevent you from getting a job in the future.

Civil Rights

• The FBI wants to deputize the nation’s schools into its anti-terrorism posse. At this point, it’s unclear whether the program will escalate to the elaborate Rube Goldberg machinations the FBI currently employs to generate terrorism suspects (putting the “rube” back in “Rube Goldberg machinations”), but for now, it appears to be “edutainment” that applies a ridiculous metaphor with blunt force precision.

• Are there limits to what a company can put in a standard form contract, like a click-through agreement? Can a company take away its customers’ freedom of speech?

• The Consumer Review Freedom Act, now pending in Congress (S.2044, H.R.2110), would limit several ways that companies attempt to keep their customers from criticizing them on the Internet.

• In August 1951, inhabitants of the picturesque French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly tormented by terrifying hallucinations. People imagined lions and tigers were coming to eat them. A man jumped out of a window, thinking he was a dragonfly. At least seven people died, dozens were taken to the local asylum in straitjackets and hundreds were affected.

• Channel 2 reported Sunday that the information security department, part of the IDF’s intelligence force, issued a call to its officers and soldiers to beware of recruitment attempts by the CIA.

• The militarily intelligence services of Israel have reportedly warned members of the country’s defense forces about being recruited by CIA officials. Soldiers and officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) were warned last week not to divulge important security information about plans for possible military action in the Middle East region.

• The details of the inquiry are outlined in the 2015 annual report of the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.

• The United States Senate Committee Report documented instances of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the period between 2001 and 2009.

• In her annual report, Ms Gwyn said there were a number of other countries involved with the programme – but the names were redacted.

• “My decision… does not suggest or presuppose that New Zealand agencies or personnel were in any way connected with those activities.

• Voters in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday approved a first-in-the-nation “democracy voucher” ballot initiative that could serve as a national model on campaign finance reform.

• Initiative 122 (I-122), which was endorsed by nearly every Seattle City Council candidate and enjoyed the support of dozens of local and national progressive groups, passed 60-40, according to the King County Elections Office.

• Supporters say the innovative public campaign financing program could give everyday voters more control over the city’s elections while limiting the power of corporate and special interests.

• The initiative states that for each city election cycle, or every two years, the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC) will mail four $25 vouchers to each voter. They can only be used in Seattle campaigns for mayor, city council and city attorney. The SEEC will release money to the candidates that agree to follow I-122′s rules, which include participating in three debates and accepting lower contribution and spending limits.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is building his own internet alternative called Meganet. With Meganet, he promises to offer you a way to communicate with the world without any fear of censorship and away from the continuous surveillance.

• Kim Dotcom aims to do this by making a P2P-based internet service that won’t need an IP address and all the communications will be encrypted. On Thursday, in New Zealand, the Hollywood foe Kim Dotcom revealed this vision of a more secure Meganet. It should be noted that Kim is wanted in the U.S. under criminal copyright violation charges.

• For the last few years, we’ve noted a worrying trend of a few law professors, who have decided that the best way to make people nice on the internet is to do away with Section 230 of the CDA. As we’ve noted repeatedly, Section 230 of the CDA is without a doubt the most important law on the internet. The internet would be a massively different (and worse) place without it. Almost every site or service you use would be very different, and the internet would be a much more bland and sterile place. Section 230 is fairly simple. There are two key elements to it:

• People cannot blame service providers for content posted by users.

• Service providers who decide to moderate/delete content cannot be held liable for the content they choose not to moderate (or the content they choose to moderate).

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Jay Radcliffe is a security researcher with diabetes. In 2011, he gave a talk at Black Hat, showing how his personal insulin pump could be hacked—with potentially deadly consequences.

• As a result of his 2011 presentation, he worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Food and Drug Administration to address security vulnerabilities in insulin pumps.

• “The specific technical details of that research have never been published in order to protect patients using those devices,” he wrote in his testimony to the Librarian of Congress and the US Copyright Office.

• The major movie studios of the MPAA are behind the recent shutdown of the torrent site YTS, the associated release group YIFY, and the main Popcorn Time fork, PopcornTime.io. In an international effort spanning Canada and New Zealand, visits were carried out at the premises of at least two key suspects

• As Kim Dotcom’s extradition defense enters its second day, the court has heard that none of the 13 charges against the Megaupload founder are enough to extradite him to the United States. The U.S. is characterizing the alleged offenses as extraditable fraud but Dotcom’s team believes that copyright violations can not be prosecuted as such.

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