● 11.13.15

● Links 13/11/2015: GNOME 3.18.2, New Kubuntu Release Managers

Posted in News Roundup at 8:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• With the meteoric rise in cloud computing, overwhelmingly dominated by Linux, the demand for Linux IT professionals, along with their salaries, has risen to all time highs, and the trend looks set to continue.

• Cloud computing has changed the IT landscape forever and with it the skills that employers demand of IT professionals. No longer is it sufficient to know Windows or Cisco only. Whether you are just entering the labour market or a long-time Windows system administrator, you will need to master Linux if you wish to remain relevant.

Desktop

• Purism began shipping the Librem 13 laptop last month. The Librem 15 started shipping this month November. Both laptops run a specially developed Linux OS with a kernel free of non-free software components.

• That homegrown refined Linux OS, dubbed PureOS, is designed to address user concerns about identity theft, Internet privacy, security and digital rights. It is the first high-end Linux laptop built on tailor-made hardware to ensure privacy and compliance with the Free Software Foundation’s endorsement, according to Todd Weaver, CEO of Purism Computer.

• On 30th September 2015, Kampala was host to two international ICT conferences. The International ICT BPO Conference took place at the Kampala Serena Hotel and attracted a wide variety of participants, ranging from students studying IT at the various Ugandan universities to visitors from faraway lands. Several delegates flew in that morning from Nairobi after the close of the Indo-Africa Expo the previous day. I was on the team of 15 Ugandans who attended the conference and exhibited at the expo, with support from the ITC NTF III project, and we flew back Tuesday night so that we could attend the conferences.

• Chromebooks have long been big sellers on Amazon, and so have their desktop counterparts Chromeboxes. But now there’s a new Linux distribution called GalliumOS that promises to provide high performance and compatibility with these Chrome OS devices.

• Beta 1 of GalliumOS is now available to download. The GalliumOS wiki has install instructions and a hardware compatibility list.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Dave Chinner has now sent in the XFS file-system updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel.

• The XFS file-system updates aren’t too exciting this round with only one major feature being the per-mount operation statistics that are exposed via sysfs. Other XFS changes for Linux 4.4 are various fixes, memory allocation failure message improvements, an fdsatasync optimization, and other random clean-ups.

• Collabora developers contributed 48 patches to kernel 4.3 as part of our current projects.

• Danilo worked on the kernel doc scripts to add cross-reference links to html documentation and arguments documentation in struct body. While Sjoerd Simons fixed a clock definition in rockchip and a incorrect udelay usage for the stmmac phy reset delay.

• Linus Torvalds always had strong opinions about hardening the Linux kernel from a security point of view and opposed some of the drastic changes proposed. In a recent interview, he explained why, in the end, kernel vulnerabilities are not all that bad as people make them be.

• The difference between the leaders at big proprietary software companies and Torvalds is that he says everything in the open for the whole world to see. The others do it in private conference rooms. I’ve heard people claim that Torvalds would be fired in their company. Nope. He’d be right where he is now: on top of his programming world.

• Oh, and there’s another difference. If you get, say, Larry Ellison mad at you, you can kiss your job goodbye. When you get Torvalds angry at your work, you’ll get yelled at in an email. That’s it.

• As I said, I don’t take this rumor seriously. But unconfirmed rumors don’t go viral without deep reasons. In this case, the reason is that Raymond’s post touched an open nerve. Unfortunately, there are more and more disturbing cases of political correctness run dangerously amok in the tech world. Last year, there was the ridiculous “bullshirtstorm.” A few months ago GitHub, the repository hosting service used by many open source software projects, proposed to adopt a code of conduct that explicitly endorsed “reverse” racism and sexism. The project was paused after a wave of outraged reactions, but interestingly Github never clearly admitted that the project is on hold.

• The Solus operating system is moving along, and lots of upgrades are still being made every week. One of these upgrades involves pushing the latest version of the Linux kernel into the repositories so that users can test it properly.

• The Linux Foundation, along with industry and academic partners, plans to drive innovation in open source high-performance computing (HPC) through a new collaborative project, OpenHPC.

• On November 12, the non-profit organization The Linux Foundation was proud to announce that they will attempt to create a new open source framework, called the OpenHPC Collaborative Project.

Graphics Stack

• On November 11, Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release of the open-source Mesa 11.0 3D graphics library software for GNU/Linux operating systems.

• AMD has finally published patches for providing preliminary PowerPlay support for the AMDGPU DRM driver, which will eventually replace the current DPM (Dynamic Power Management) support for Volcanic Islands hardware. This PowerPlay support comes with compatibility for Tonga, Fiji, and the rest of the VI line-up!

• The X.Org Foundation Board of Directors decided at yesterday’s bi-weekly board meeting to go ahead with a plan to host XDC2016 in Helsinki, Finland.

Benchmarks

• Here’s the third installment of our Windows vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarking this week… This is a look at how the AMD Catalyst closed-source driver on Windows compares to AMD’s latest open-source driver code on Linux.

• Following the Intel Skylake Graphics: Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance and NVIDIA OpenGL: Windows 10 Pro vs. Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks is now a fresh look at the cross-platform performance for AMD Radeon graphics cards. This testing today is with the closed-source driver on Windows 10 Pro x64 and the open-source driver on Ubuntu 15.10 Linux.

• While the level of performance out of the Raspberry Pi devices have had me less than interested, I decided to finally pick up a Raspberry Pi 2 anyways for some benchmarking and testing of the VC4 DRM+Gallium3D driver stack.

Applications

• Are you a system administrator, Linux power user, or just spend a lot of time at the command line? Then chances are, your choice of terminal emulator says something about you. Do you prefer something lightweight? Full of features and customizable options? Or do you just use the default which ships with your distribution?

• IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an online chat protocol that has existed since 1988. IRC is a network of large chat rooms. Each room lets members of a community talk with each other from all corners of the world. Those new to IRC may have used a web chat interface. Many users have an IRC client to connect to their favorite IRC networks and channels. After a while, you may notice some groups of users seem to always be in the channel, each time you connect. Are they really sitting in front of their computers with their IRC clients all day?

• Earlier today, November 10, Oracle has announced the release of a new maintenance version for its powerful, cross-platform, and open-source VirtualBox 5 virtualization software for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

• The awesome folks behind the open-source and cross-platform MPV video player software have announced the release of MPV 0.13.0 for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• The Calibre eBook reader, editor, and converter has been upgraded to version 2.44. It’s not a major upgrade, but there are some interesting fixes, and one of them is quite important for Linux users.

• As you may know, Kid3 is a free, open-source, cross-platform application for tagging the following music file formats (similar to EasyTag): MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack, WMA, WAV and AIFF.

• The latest Screenkey 0.8 also comes with various advanced features, such as placing the Screenkey window on top of an application (first screenshot below), command-line placement (these features require “slop”, which is not available in the official Ubuntu repositories but is available in the main WebUpd8 PPA and is installed automatically when you install Screenkey from our PPA) and more.

Proprietary

• We’ve been informed by the folks from Vivaldi, the proprietary web browser based on the open-source Chromium project on which Google Chrome and Opera web browsers are also based, about the availability of the first Snapshot post-Beta.

• Opera, through Aneta Reluga, has had the pleasure of announcing the promotion of the Opera 34 web browser to the Beta channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• Opera Software, through Błażej Kaźmierczak, announced earlier today, November 12, that they’ve promoted the upcoming Opera 35 web browser to the Developer channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Instructionals/Technical

• Recently LinuxAndUbuntu reader raised an issue that he was having with his dual boot. When he restarts from Ubuntu to Windows, the time in Windows changes. Here is why it happens and how you can fix it easily from Ubuntu.

• In Ubuntu 15.10 (which uses GTK 3.16), there’s a bug which causes some themes, like Numix, to have large black borders.

• This bug only occurs for applications that use header bars (client-side decorations) and it affects Ubuntu (with Unity), while Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu GNOME don’t seem to be affected (at least in my quick test). Update: MATE with Compiz enabled is also affected so I guess any desktop environment under which you use Compiz is affected (thanks to pawelp!).

Games

• Fooball Manager 2016 was released today by SEGA. Compared to the past where the Linux port came after the fact, Football Manager 2016 has seen a same-day release for Windows, OS X, and SteamOS/Linux.

• Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 4.10 today, which includes 53 improvements done by the community on GitHub along with a lot of other exciting in-house improvements.

• Klei Entertainment is a studio that remarked itself with some pretty amazing games, and now they are celebrating their tenth anniversary with a massive sale on Steam.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Kubuntu project now has a couple of new release managers, and this was necessary after Jonathan Riddell left the project a few weeks ago.

• Kubuntu is moving on in the absence of Jonathan Riddell who left the project and his longtime role as the release manager.

• Replacing Jonathan Riddell will now be two release managers for Kubuntu: Philip Muskovac and Scarlett Clark.

• Jonathan Riddell’s departure left Kubuntu without a release manager, until yesterday when Philip Muskovac posted of the replacements, plural. Allan Day today posted about GNOME’s “next big thing” and Graham Morrison shared his look “inside the GNOME Foundation.” On the KDE side of town, Sebastian Kügler posted some “wayland and libkscreen benchmarks” and Neil Rickert wrote a Plasma 5 review.

• I have been using opensuse Leap 42.1 on my main desktop for a little over a week. So I now have a better feel for Plasma 5, than I had from periodic testing. So it’s time for me to give my opinion on Plasma 5.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In 2014, alot changed for both the Gnome desktop and the Foundation that supports it. There were reports of financial difficulty, and the continuing struggle to bring the new desktop up to functional parity with the previous desktop. But the Gnome team is winning the war. The latest releases have been well received and Gnome has just become the default desktop for Debian, a sure sign that its usability and functionality problems are in the past. The Foundation itself has been able to improve its financial situation, while at the same time helping lots of other projects beside the Gnome desktop we all love. We caught up with Karen Sandler, a member of Gnome’s board of directors, to find out where it all went right.

• This time last year, Karen was at the helm as Executive Director of the Gnome Foundation, having taken up the role in 2011. After she stepped down as Executive Director she put herself forward in the elections to the board of directors, and was elected to the board of seven with the most votes in the contest – a real affirmation of her leadership during what must have been some of the most challenging years at Gnome.

• The GNOME developers are working around the clock these days to release the second and last maintenance build for the stable GNOME 3.18 desktop environment. Therefore, there were many updates to GNOME’s core components and apps in the last few days.

• Matthias Clasen announced the release today of GNOME 3.18.2 while all feature development continues to be around the GNOME 3.19 series culminating with GNOME 3.20.

• The Cinnamon 2.8.3 and 2.8.4 maintenance releases have been published this week on the official GitHub page of the acclaimed open-source desktop environment used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems.

• Just a few moments ago, the GNOME Project, through Matthias Clasen, proudly announced the release of the second and last maintenance release for the stable GNOME 3.18 open-source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

Distributions

New Releases

• VeltOS is a new operating system that’s been in the works for a while now, and it has been announced as using a Budgie-based desktop. It seems that the developer didn’t like what Budgie was offering them and decided to fork it.

• We are proud to announce a new release of Calculate Linux Scratch 15 featuring KDE 5, alias CLSK.

• Alexander Tratsevskiy, the lead developer and creator of the Russian Calculate Linux operating system has announced earlier today, November 12, that the his Calculate Linux Scratch 15 KDE distribution has been released, and it’s available for download.

• ClearFoundation, through Peter Baldwin, has announced today, November 11, the release and immediate availability for download of the final build of the highly anticipated ClearOS 7.1.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• We’ve been informed earlier by Arne Exton, the creator of numerous GNU/Linux distribution and Android-x86 operating systems, about the immediate availability of EXTON OpSuS Build 151112.

• Douglas DeMaio of openSUSE announces today, November 12, that there’s a new snapshot available for users of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed GNU/Linux operating system.

• Marcus Meissner of openSUSE informs users that the openSUSE 13.1 GNU/Linux operating system will reach the end of its life in approximately two months from the moment of writing this article, on January 5, 2016.

Red Hat Family

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

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced results from a recent mobile maturity survey, which revealed that 90 percent of respondents anticipate increasing investment in mobile application development within the next 12 months. The 2015 Red Hat mobile maturity survey also finds that these same respondents predict their organization’s investment for mobile application development increasing at an average growth rate of 24 percent during the same period.

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) EVP Michael Cunningham sold 5,000 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, November 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $80.78, for a total value of $403,900.00. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 46,500 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $3,756,270. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website.

• Perhaps the best moment was in Tokyo, during the OpenStack Summit. My team presented a brand new, and accurate, total cost of ownership (TCO) model for OpenStack. We developed and used it internally to understand how to lower the cost of an OpenStack private cloud, and we discovered that implementing IT automation can save millions of dollars at a certain scale. When the team connected the discovery with the acquisition of Ansible, we got a great reaction around the room.

• Is the enterprise market saturated with mobile technology and app development? Not yet, according to results from a new mobile maturity survey done by Red Hat, which revealed that 90 percent of respondents anticipate increasing investment in mobile application development within the next 12 months.

• Working the open source way always involves standing on the shoulders of giants. And in a recent interview with Business Insider, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst acknowledges the literary shoulders supporting The Open Organization, his own contribution to the growing field of books exploring open management and leadership principles.

• Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today unveiled key enhancements to its comprehensive portfolio for developing and deploying enterprise-ready applications using Linux containers, OpenShift and Atomic. As more enterprises look to adopt container-based architectures for application workloads, Red Hat’s enhanced offerings enable the use of Docker-formatted Linux containers to create microservices-based applications and modernize traditional workloads – all benefiting from security features of a consistent foundation based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Not only did Duke University build a fast software delivery pipeline with RHEL and AWS, they also used technologies from those two sources to combat a DoS attack. Here’s their re:Invent 2015 presentation.

• Open source projects can attract toxic personality types — and well-meaning bad influences — along with other problems that can send them off in the wrong directions. Red Hat’s Dave Neary laid out some of the problems, and how to fix them, in a breezy talk here at the OPNFV Summit.

• “Some people with the best of intentions engage in behaviors that harm the community,” said Neary, a member of the open source and standards team at Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) He added that he’s engaged in some of this non-productive behavior himself at times.

• Comms companies are increasingly participating in open source projects as they seek the agility and innovation required in the New IP economy. But they can encounter pitfalls along the way.

Fedora

• It is a very good question. Ultimately, Linux is Linux. The only difference is the time you spend on the setup and adjustment of the necessary components. And what you get as the result. Whether it’s clean system without a graphical environment, or a distribution with thousands of unnecessary packets. It is worth noting that the most of this article is built on the idea that I do not want to have arch + i3wm right now. Maybe later.

Debian Family

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

• Larry’s away today, hiding beneath his tinfoil hat and hoping to escape the ravishes of Friday the thirteenth, so I was volunteered to write this week’s review. Sorry. Larry will return next week — as long as his astrologer says it’s safe.

• G’bye Debian Live: By now you’ve probably heard the news that evidently the Debian Live project is no more. This according to the project’s leader, Daniel Baumann, who posted An Abrupt End to Debian Live on the Debian website on Monday. According to him, the project was “hijacked by the Debian-cd and the Debian-installer teams.”

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Here’s new features and changes in Ubuntu GNOME 15.10,Ubuntu MATE 15.10, Ubuntu Kylin 15.10, Kubuntu 15.10, Lubuntu 15.10 and Xubuntu 15.10.

• We’re back with details about the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 software update, as well as some initial information about the next update, the OTA-9, as Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report a few minutes ago.

• The border between the mobile and the desktop Ubuntu platforms is getting blurry, and distinguishing which is which is now difficult, judging by a simple image. Convergence is happening, and it will be here much faster than people imagine.

Devices/Embedded

• Adlink’s Mini-ITX-BST-I SBC runs Linux on Intel Bay Trail SoCs, and offers 8GB RAM, dual GbE, and rich multimedia, plus MIL spec shake-and-bake ruggedness.

• Adlink says its “AmITX-BT-I” single board computer targets applications that demand high-level processing and graphics performance, along with low power consumption. The “Extreme Rugged” board joins an assortment of competing Bay Trail-based Mini-ITX SBCs including Habey’s MITX-6771 and MITX-6770, Aaeon’s EMB-BTx series, Axiomtek’s MANO842, DFI’s BT160, and Portwell’s WADE-8078. Adlink’s board appears to be unique among the pack in its MIL spec-level shock and vibration resistance (see table farther below), and support for -40 to 85°C operating environments. Presumably, meeting these specs requires the use of carefully designed thermal management solutions.

Phones

Android

• Google has announced that Android Wear now supports cellular access. OEMs will now be able to pack cellular modems and SIM cards into a smartwatch, allowing them to access the Internet and make calls without the phone being nearby or needing a Wi-Fi connection. The first device with baked-in cellular access will be the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE.

• Every year, Google announces a slightly revised version of its mobile OS, but Android Marshmallow offers the biggest improvement in ages. Alongside bigger features such as Doze and Now on Tap, Android M – or Marshmallow – also introduces a range of less glamorous but important tweaks that add to the user experience.

• Razer’s Android TV-powered Forge TV is no longer on sale through Google, but tonight the company tells Engadget it’s not giving up. According to a Razer representative, it’s “doubling-down on Android gaming in the living room and looking forward to producing the world’s largest library of Android TV games.” The company thinks Forge TV can be a “spiritual successor” to the Ouya platform it purchased earlier this year, and is ramping up production to address current demand. The note (included in full after the break) promises more information soon, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see the gaming hardware maker bring something fresh to CES in January.

• Those looking for a new Android smartphone have a lot of really good options as 2015 comes to a close. What makes a phone the best, or great, or even really good is all subjective and ultimately comes down to what users need the most. With that in mind, here we want to share our thoughts on the best Android phones of 2015, chosen by the staff at Gotta Be Mobile to help buyers choose the right phone.

• Many were hoping that Android Wear would signal the true start of the smartwatch revolution, and while Google’s effort is easily the best we’ve seen so far in this particular field, there are issues that could prevent it from catching on in the way some have predicted.

• From BlackBerry’s perspective, the company is in way better shape with the Priv than it was with any of its BB10 devices. It can’t stand up to the competitive Android smartphone market, but it is at least a livable smartphone that you could make do with. Maybe BlackBerry will convince some enterprise customers to buy a few Privs for their business, but for normal consumers, there is nothing compelling here. The Nexus 6P has better specs, a better camera, an aluminum body, and stock Android with updates direct from Google. It’s also $200 less than the Priv. There is still no reason to buy a BlackBerry.

• It’s cheap, it works well, and it looks fantastic. The OnePlus X costs $249 and goes on sale Nov. 19. If you’re in the market for an Android phone that looks like it costs a lot more than it does, and can figure out how to get your hands on one, the OnePlus X is definitely worth considering.

• The rumor mill on Samsung’s next clamshell with Android, the Galaxy Golden 3, is in overdrive, as the flip leaked today from the Chinese certification agency TENAA, flaunting pretty great specs for what has been a nearly forgotten form factor.

Free Software/Open Source

• Marten Mickos is a well-known technology executive in the open-source and cloud realms, but he’s less known—if known at all—in the security industry. That’s about to change, as bug bounty vendor HackerOne named Mickos its CEO today.

• Mickos’ background includes stints as CEO of open-source database vendor MySQL, which Sun Microsystems acquired for $1 billion in 2008, and CEO of open-source cloud vendor Eucalyptus, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2014.

• By building Arctic on MongoDB, Man AHL realised a 40x cost saving when compared to the legacy time series data store. Processing performance improved by 25x. Man AHL is based in London, Hong Kong, Oxford and Pfäffikon, and has USD17.9 billion in assets under management as of September 2015.

• Over time, I became much more sympathetic to the philosophical reasons for adopting FOSS. I was never hostile to it, I just hadn’t given it much thought. But looking back, it became clear that a large part of my success and enjoyment of my career was due to the opportunity to learn independently, taking things apart and putting them together.

• An interesting post caught my eye this week entitled “Corporations and OSS Do Not Mix” by Ian Cordasco. It was kind of depressing – here was a person who had spent a lot of free time contributing to open source code, but the actions of some users of that code had taken the fun out of it.

• My only issue with it was the targeting of “corporations” in the title. At OpenNMS we have a large number of corporate customers and we get along with them just fine. I want to talk about that in a bit, but first I want to address some of the other experiences Ian had that were similar to mine.

• Business listings and review site Yelp has made a surprise contribution to the open-source software world by releasing an internal Docker and Apache Mesos-based platform-as-a-service to the Apache Software Foundation.

• Yelp engineer Kyle Anderson provides a detailed look at the machinations of its custom-made PaaS, which it calls PaaSTA, in this blog post, describing in-depth how the different parts of the stack fit together.

• Added to Coreboot this week was CC6 support to provide greater power-savings for current-generation AMD processors.

• Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering took on the challenge to implement CC6 support for Coreboot so there’s more competitive power-savings when using this free BIOS/UEFI implementation. He explained of the patch, “This patch adds CC6 power save support to the AMD Family 15h support code. As CC6 is a complex power saving state that relies heavily on CPU, northbridge, and southbridge cooperation, this patch alters significant amounts of code throughout the tree simultaneously. Allowing the CPU to enter CC6 allows the second level of turbo boost to be reached, and also provides significant power savings when the system is idle due to the complete core shutdown.”

• In recent years, we’ve seen a boost in popularity of community-driven projects. Software and hardware development, social activities, crowdsourcing, manufacture, education—thousands of communities are growing and striving to achieve their goals. Creating a new community can be a difficult task, so the tools used in the process are very important.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has given Windows XP and old versions of Apple OS X their marching orders.

• Support for the ancient (in the case of XP) / no-longer-supported (OS X Mountain Lion and older) operating systems will end in April 2016.

Mozilla

• Today’s release of Firefox for iOS is not the first time the Firefox name has been in Apple’s App Store. In July 2010, Mozilla’s first attempt, called Firefox Home, debuted in the App Store. Firefox Home was never a full browser, but rather a mechanism to enable users to synchronize browsing across devices. In 2012, Mozilla pulled the plug on Firefox Home and ceased development.

• Mozilla this week released Firefox OS 2.5 as well as a Firefox OS 2.5 Developer Preview that can be downloaded to Android devices.

• Today we have made Firefox OS 2.5 available worldwide. We are also making an early, experimental build of the OS — Firefox OS 2.5 Developer Preview — available for developers to download on Android devices.

SaaS/Big Data

• Software Defined Networking (SDN) vendor Akanda got its start in 2014 as a spin off from hosting vendor DreamHost. Now, in 2015, the company is powering forward as the lead sponsor of Project Astara, a new networking effort in the OpenStack cloud ecosystem.

• It is true, Hadoop is a key focal point for many of us when we talk about big data — and indeed, open source big data projects.

• As the OpenStack cloud computing scene evolves, a whole ecosystem of tools is growing along with it. Tesora, the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, came recently came out with an update of its OpenStack Trove database as a service (DBaaS) platform that simplifies management of 11 different database technologies. The Tesora DBaaS Platform Enterprise Edition when it was at version 1.5 built on the list of supported databases, adding CouchDB 1.6 and DB2 Express 10.5 databases, as well as an updated database version of Redis 3.0.

• The success of closed-source companies (like Microsoft in the early days of the digital revolution) made it easy to write off open source as a niche movement with little real-world relevance. But the concept of open source is almost as old as software itself — it has been, and continues to be, a viable option.

Databases

• We are becoming more and more accustomed to reading about losses of online data through malicious hack attacks, accidents, and downright carelessness – it’s almost as if we don’t know how to secure data against the most common form of attack.

• Of course, that isn’t really true as best practice, legislation, and education on the matter are easy to come by, from a variety of sources.

• MongoDB grabbed headlines last week with the release of version 3.2 of its popular NoSQL database. Consistent with the company’s prescribed messaging, the tech media dutifully inserted “enterprise” into every headline, touting MongoDB’s new storage engines for better data security, among other things.

• For PostgreSQL users, the next 9.6 release should be particularly exciting as the parallel sequential scan / parallel query support has been committed.

• This parallel sequential scan support has the ability to significantly improve the performance of selects on PostgreSQL databases. In one of the examples, a database select query dropped from taking 743 ms to now taking just 213 ms.

• The open source PostgreSQL database is about to get query parallelisation, starting with just a few processes, and is looking for crash-test dummies to give it a whirl.

• Developer Robert Haas blogs that he worked with Amit Kapila over “several years” to get the feature working, and if things go well, he hopes to see the feature included in production code in PostgreSQL 9.6.

Business

Semi-Open Source/Openwashing

• The director of the Open Agriculture Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caleb Harper is currently working on creating sustainable food systems. This means the involvement of boxes where people can grow their crops and take control of the production of their food. It is quite impressive and revolutionary if you come to think of it, not to mention fairly easy and simple to do.

BSD

• Despite being open source software, the most-popular NAS solution, FreeNAS, is at best only a cousin of the Linux operating system. It’s based on FreeBSD, uses the ZFS filesystem, and is more suitable for large-scale enterprise-wide deployments than the sort of home projects beloved of Linux users. If you’re a Linux user looking for a simple but effective tool for housing and managing data, the Debian-based OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a better bet.

• Stefan Sperling (stsp@) writes in to the tech@ list with a great announcement for WiFi users..

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Although GRC (the GNU Radio Companion) uses the word radio, it is really a graphical tool for building DSP applications. In the last post, I showed you how you could experiment with it just by using a sound card (or even less). However, who can resist the lure of building an actual radio by dragging blocks around on a computer screen?

Project Releases

• db2twitter 0.2 was just released! If you missed my last post about it, db2twitter automatically extracts fields from your database, use them to feed a template of tweet and send the tweet.

• I am proud to announce that CMake 3.4.0 is now available for download at: https://cmake.org/download/

Public Services/Government

• With open source comes open standards and application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable the extensibility, interoperability and portability needed for federal agencies to meet higher expectations in launching new services quickly, adding infrastructure when needed and identifying new opportunities to engage citizens .The GSA and DOI examples represent a dramatic shift for the federal government as many agency innovators seek to employ agile methods and drive faster cloud adoption.

• Years after Linux and open source first emerged in the market, organisations in Asia remain unsure about the platform’s ability to support enterprise applications and are cautious about moving out of their proprietary software environment.

• “There’s a lot of misconception and also some inertia,” Damien Wong, Red Hat’s Asean senior director and general manager, said in an interview. “There are unfounded concerns about whether open source is enterprise-ready and mission-critical. These companies also see little reason to change and move to open source when their existing systems haven’t failed in the last five or 15 years.”

Licensing

• Back in March, the FCC issued a Software Security Requirements document that said manufacturers applying for equipment authorizations should “Describe in detail how the device is protected from ‘flashing’ and the installation of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT.” Applicants also had to answer the question, “What prevents third parties from loading non-US versions of the software/firmware on the device?”

• Upon receiving criticism, the FCC insisted that there was no ban on software like DD-WRT and OpenWRT, saying instead manufacturers must prevent devices from working outside their allowed frequencies, types of modulation, and power levels so as not to interfere with other systems.

Openness/Sharing

• Two homebrewers are taking their passion for unique craft beers public to open Halo Brewery in the Junction Triangle this spring. The new space, located at 247 Wallace Avenue, will also function as a bottle shop and taproom – it’ll also be one of Canada’s first open-source breweries.

• “We’re going to provide full details of all our recipes including ingredients, quantities and process, along with any changes we make to them batch-to-batch,” says co-founder Eric Portelance via email.

Transparency

• The European Commission has opened an online consultation aimed at collecting information and points of views on the next 2016 – 2020 eGovernment Action Plan.

Open Hardware

• Anyone looking to keep their data safe from prying eyes might be interested in a new open source computer named the ORWL which will automatically delete your data if the case is tampered with in any way.

• Making art more accessible to blind and visually impaired people is founder Marc Dillon’s new mission. After almost a quarter century working in the mobile industry — latterly at alternative mobile OS maker, Jolla, from where he finally departed this fall — he says it’s time to give back.

Programming

• A “snake oil salesmen” is a phrase that conjures up images of stuffy old men with bowler hats, bushy mustaches, and tailored pinstripe suits peddling bottles filled with “cure-all” liquids. Although prevalent a few centuries ago, the snake oil profession is now lost to the annals of history. These days the snake oil description has expanded beyond human health care. In the tech world, for example, a snake oil solution can be used to describe anti-virus software or a favorite software development process.

• Among the most “oversold as a cure” methodologies introduced to business development teams today is Scrum, which is one of several agile approaches to software development and introduced as a way to streamline the process. Scrum has become something of an intractable method, complete with its own holy text, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and daily devotions (a.k.a., Scrum meetings).

• While the highly anticipated PHP 7 release was supposed to happen today, it hasn’t as instead it’s been replaced by another release candidate.

• PHP 7.0 RC7 was released today rather than the official release. PHP 7.0 RC7 is the 12th pre-release of PHP7 and this newest version comes with seventeen bug fixes. Due to needing this unscheduled release candidate, PHP 7.0 final isn’t expected to come until 26 November. So for PHP developers in America, this could be a nice Thanksgiving release.

• Intel MPX support landed in time for GCC 5.0 but with it having landed close to release time, it was disabled by default. Now for the GCC 6 release in 2016, libmpx support will be enabled by default for all supported targets. This change was approved for landing this week ahead of the planned move of GCC’s code-base to stage three this weekend, which will mark the end of feature development.

• Six years ago the Go language was released as an open source project. Since then, more than 780 contributors have made over 30,000 commits to the project’s 22 repositories. The ecosystem continues to grow, with GitHub reporting more than 90,000 Go repositories. And, offline, we see new Go events and user groups pop up around the world with regularity.

Leftovers

Science

• Computer pioneer and entrepreneur Gene Amdahl has died, aged 92. Amdahl joined IBM in 1952 after graduating with a clutch of degrees from South Dakota State University and the University of Wisconsin.

• As chief architect of the IBM 704 scientific mainframe computer, his engineering decisions helped IBM to sell many more of the machines than IBM had expected.

Health/Nutrition

• A report released today by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) could pave the way for EU re-approval of the world’s most used weedkiller – glyphosate – which has been linked to cancer by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The report heavily relies on unpublished studies commissioned by glyphosate producers and dismisses published peer-reviewed evidence that glyphosate causes cancer, said Greenpeace.

Security

• These vulnerable devices tend to coalesce in distinct geographical pools with deeper pools in countries with more ISPs that shipped them direct to customers without modification. SEC Consult said it found heavy concentrations of the exposed Ubiquiti devices in Brazil (480,000), Thailand (170,000) and the United States (77,000).

• SEC Consult cautions that the actual number of vulnerable Ubiquiti systems may be closer to 1.1 million. Turns out, the devices ship with a cryptographic certificate embedded in the router’s built-in software (or “firmware”) that further weakens security on the devices and makes them trivial to discover on the open Internet. Indeed, the Censys Project, a scan-driven Internet search engine that allows anyone to quickly find hosts that use that certificate, shows exactly where each exposed router resides online.

• Let’s Encrypt will enter Public Beta on December 3, 2015. Once we’ve entered Public Beta our systems will be open to anyone who would like to request a certificate. There will no longer be a requirement to sign up and wait for an invitation.

• Our Limited Beta started on September 12, 2015. We’ve issued over 11,000 certificates since then, and this operational experience has given us confidence that our systems are ready for an open Public Beta.

• The security firm said the ransomware was infecting Linux web servers by exploiting unpatched instances of the widely-used Magento CMS.

• Linux is very secure in its architecture that you even won’t need to go behind any kind of firewalls until you’re on a Network. The access control Security Policy in Linux which is called SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is a set of user-space tools and Kernel modification that implement the security policies in Linux operating system. Even this Security-Enhanced Linux isn’t must for normal users, however, it’s very important for users who are on Network and/or Administrators.

• Infrequent web server administrators may find requesting and installing security certificates cumbersome and expensive. Open Source project Let’s Encrypt claims to simplify the process.

• Today the SSL certificate costs ~$50-100 – big money for non-commercial websites and bloggers. But some peoples can change it just now. In this article I try to describe a practical guide for getting a free as a beer certificate for your blog, website or e-mail. There are two ways:

• Out of all the DDoS attacks, 45.6% of attacks are from Linux-based botnets, as per the Intelligence Report of Kaspersky for the period Q3 2015. Security researchers of Akamai Technologies discovered that XOR DDoS botnet is the prominent most group, which was used to launch 150+ gigabit-per-second (Gbps) DDoS attacks.

• There are multiple security controls and best practices for Docker container security, many of which are inherited from the Linux operating system on which Docker is deployed, including cgroups and namespaces, which provide isolation and control.

• ProtonMail, the encrypted e-mail provider that buckled under crippling denial-of-service attacks even after it paid a $6,000 ransom, said it has finally recovered from the massive assaults seven days after they began.

• The BBC reveals that the attack appears to have been carried out by Armada Collective, a Swiss group responsible for numerous other online attacks. It seems that ProtonMail now regrets its decisions to pay the ransom. The company says it would advise anyone else against doing so. It is now trying to raise money to pay more than $100,000 for DDoS protection from a commercial security firm.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It’s believed that West Papuans are now a minority in their homeland, and many feel shut out of the economic expansion and democratic reforms Indonesia has experienced in the past decade.

• They see Jakarta’s rule as a threat to the survival of their people and culture.

• A separatist conflict has been simmering for decades, and the death toll is put in the hundreds of thousands by some estimates. Speaking out remains a dangerous activity in a place tightly-guarded by Indonesian military and police.

• But the new Indonesian government says it’s making real efforts to help Papuans improve their lives, and has begun allowing foreign journalists to visit and see for themselves.

• A former Moscow policeman was convicted of spying for the CIA and of passing state secrets to a foreign intelligence agency on Thursday and sentenced to 13 years in prison, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement.

• Russia has convicted a former policeman on high treason charges, accusing him of spying for the CIA, according to security services.

• Russia has sentenced a former policeman to 13 years in prison on high treason charges, accusing him of spying for the CIA, the security service said today.

• The Moscow District Court today convicted a former employee of the interior ministry’s Moscow region branch, Yevgeny Chistov, of high treason and sentenced him to 13 years in a high-security prison, the FSB security service said in a statement.

• A Moscow region court has sentenced former police officer Yevgeny Chistov to 13 years in prison for passing classified information to the CIA, the public relations center of the Federal Security Service (FSB, former KGB) told TASS.

• Between January 2013 and May 2014, the OIG completed 111 investigations of alleged crimes, such as the killing of an animal on federal property, possession of child pornography, fraud, embezzlement, and domestic violence. The CIA is still processing VICE News’s FOIA request for a list of investigations the OIG completed between May 2014 and the present.

• Reacting to Monday’s comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the White House ruled out calls to formally recognize the Israeli occupation and subsequent annexation of the Golan Heights away from Syria, saying they weren’t sure if Netanyahu was even serious but that the US had no intention of changing its position on the occupation.

• American taxpayers doled out $5.9 billion in foreign military financing in 2014, according to the government’s Foreign Assistance report — that’s roughly the GDP of Somalia. But where did the money go?

• To the usual suspects, mostly — Israel ($3.1B) and Egypt ($1.3B) received roughly 75% of all foreign military aid money handed out by the U.S. last year.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Climate change denier Marc Morano of the fossil-fuel funded Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) will feature a new “documentary film” called “Climate Hustle” in his latest attempt to promote his destructive climate change denial agenda. The film is due to be shown to a public audience for the first time on December 7 at the Cinéma du Panthéon in Paris at the same time as the upcoming United Nations climate talks.

• Ria Heilena Pratiwi has had enough of the toxic smoke that plagues her hometown of Pekanbaru.

• The thick haze is caused by fires set to clear land for palm oil plantations and other uses. The city of around 900,000 is the capital of Riau province, on Sumatra island in Indonesia. A single mother between jobs, Pratiwi lives in Jakarta but had until recently been contemplating a move back home, so that her mother could help out with the childrearing. But now she’s decided to stay in Jakarta, and bring her mother there, away from the smoke.

• “From a long time ago, every year the haze comes again,” she tells Quartz. “So we decided to not live there anymore.”

Finance

• Major outsourcers, largely based in India, are obtaining the lion’s share of the 85,000 H-1B visas issued each year and are paying salaries far below the prevailing wages for American IT workers — a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the H-1B rules. New information from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that oversees the H-1B program, finally proves what critics have long suspected: H-1B abuse is real and rampant.

• The H-1B program is designed to let U.S. companies hire foreigners at prevailing wages when they can’t find qualified Americans. And U.S. companies, especially those in Silicon Valley, have been clamoring for years to raise the cap of 85,000 so that they can hire more foreign workers. They’ve long denied the charges that they’ve exaggerated the employee shortage, so they can instead reduce wages by importing workers.

• The irony of Friedman’s comment is that Trump’s claim is not far from being true, if the United States were to adopt a more efficient healthcare system. The United States pays more than twice as much per person for its healthcare as other wealthy countries, with little obvious benefit in terms of outcomes.

• The World Bank put US annual per person spending at $9,150 in the years 2006-10. By comparison, Canada spends $5,700, Germany spends $5,000 and the United Kingdom spends $3,600. This enormous gap suggests that the United States could cover the uninsured and pay for it by eliminating the waste in its system.

• Donald Trump lambasted the Trans-Pacific Partnership at Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, contending that China would use it to “take advantage of everyone” — generating snickers from journalists and a withering refutation from Rand Paul, who said “we might want to point out that China is not part of this deal.”

• But Trump never suggested that China was part of the TPP, only that the country would “come in, as they always do, through the back door” of the agreement. And he was right.

• In August, New York-based Amalgamated Bank announced it would immediately raise its minimum pay to at least $15 an hour.

• At the time, the bank noted that it was the first to make such an announcement. But it’s also committed to making sure more follow its lead.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Fox host Bill O’Reilly and GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump repeatedly used the pejorative “anchor baby” when discussing the children of immigrants in the U.S. This term has been described as “racist” and false because parents of children born in U.S. aren’t allowed to apply for citizenship until the child is 21.

• But here’s the thing: conservative commentators, and especially conservative bloggers, are ignoring the fact that Obama was vetted — by them. For more than two presidential election cycles.

• And it was priceless.

• Obama’s a Muslim. Obama was born in Kenya. Obama forged his birth certificate. Obama is the son of Malcolm X. Obama’s hiding his gay past.

• All of those claims, and much more, were forwarded by right-wing media outlets (including Fox News) that have been thrashing around in cesspools over the years, all in the name of vetting the elusive Obama. (The late blogger and satirist Al Weisel, known as Jon Swift, masterfully detailed the attempted vetting.)

• The television program, “60 Minutes,” aired a segment on Sunday in which it assassinated the character of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and even went so far as to question their loyalty to America. The two whistleblowers were compared to the Washington Navy Yard shooter, who killed twelve people.

• It was part of an examination of what U.S. government officials perceive to be serious flaws in the process by which the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) reviews security clearances granted to government employees, but the framing made it seem like architects of “insider threat” programs from U.S. security agencies and politicians, who support total surveillance of government employees in the workplace and while they’re at home, had produced the segment.

• Using language that would scare everyone’s grandparents, the CBS show used “fugitive” to describe Snowden, “convicted spy” to describe Manning (even though she is not), and “mass murderer” to describe the Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis. Anchor Scott Pelley amplified the terror by adding they all had “one thing in common: U.S. government security clearances which they turned into weapons.”

• But according to recent poling data, 54 percent of all Christians now say that “homosexuality should be accepted by society.” The data come from Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study, which surveyed more than 35,000 U.S. adults as a follow up to Pew’s 2007 study. Now, the majority of major Christian groups, including Catholics, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and historically black Protestants, believe homosexuality should be accepted by society…

• Fox News supports the right to protest, unless, it seems, the protesters are students of color shining a spotlight on incidents of racial injustice.

• Protests against racial discrimination on college campuses across the country are garnering national media attention with students criticizing administration responses to incidents at University of Missouri, Yale, U.C.L.A, University of Oklahoma and other institutions.

Censorship

• Anyone who can write a sentence like this simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Which is fine, but not fine when the person is the head of an organization dedicated to freedom of expression.

• By “our citizenry,” Nossel is referring to the recent round of free speech wars on college campuses. Now, when these issues of free speech arise on campus, you usually see an explosion of conversation about it: on the campus itself, and in the media. Far from dampening down discussion, the controversy over free speech on campus actually ignites discussion. Everyone has an opinion, everyone voices it.

• Mr Assange began his talk by making clear that he is “not on a TV” and that he was actively present, stating that engagement in debate and questions would make his presence more immediate. Hence, Assange opted to talk for twenty minutes and take questions from the floor. Assange discussed the fact that he had been present at the Union in 2011, and skirted around the topic of the referendum that the Union held on his address to begin with, stating “There is also an interesting contextual situation surrounding this talk itself” .

• In a move that isn’t particularly surprising given their lack of support for intellectual diversity to date, Reddit has introduced outright bans to replace its shadow banning policy.

• The Center for American Progress, a leading progressive group with close ties to both President Obama and Hillary Clinton, held an event this week hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington. That decision reportedly prompted a revolt from some staffers angered that a liberal group would give Netanyahu a platform. In his opening remarks at the event, Netanyahu told attendees he wanted to speak to “a progressive audience.” Netanyahu’s appearance came just days after a new controversy over the group’s alleged censoring of writers critical of Israel. Newly leaked emails from 2011 and 2012 published by The Intercept show CAP made key editorial decisions—including editing articles, silencing writers and backing off criticism—at the behest of influential groups who backed Israeli government policies. We speak to Ali Gharib, a contributor to The Nation magazine and a former staffer at the Center for American Progress. Gharib says one of his articles for the Center was censored.

• Google terminated most of its operations in mainland China in 2010 after controversy over the country’s online controls and an attack on users of its Gmail service.

• But Eric Schmidt, its former CEO and now president of its new parent company Alphabet, was in Beijing last week declaring: “We never left China.”

• Facebook said on Wednesday that requests for user data from government agencies and law enforcement groups surged in the first half of 2015, with the social network site reporting an increase in demands by 18 percent worldwide.

• Facebook has experienced a significant increase of information-seeking and censorship requests from national governments around the world, according to a new self-published report, with India ranking high on the list of nations making the most inquiries.

• Per the social media giant’s Government Requests Report, international queries for account data has ramped up in the first half of 2015 compared to the same period last year, from 34,946 requests to 41,214.

• Members of the PHS Thespian Club told the Portage Township School Board that high school administrators ordered the Broadway play rewritten to remove references to drugs, cigarettes and sexual innuendo.

• I spent a semester studying abroad in Beijing, China, where censorship by the government is rampant and dominates all form of media. There, armed with my Western ideas of how media should be, it was easy for me to criticize the government and its apparent inability to provide accurate news and information to its people. I thought I understood the premise behind the Chinese government’s heavy hand on free speech: obviously, the people in higher positions of authority were afraid of the instability that freedom of speech and press could create. For the semester I was there, I developed a skeptical and an almost comical point of view of the Chinese national media: how could I take a news source that so heavily distorts reality seriously?

• For three decades, Cui Yongyuan has been one of China’s national treasures. As a veteran television presenter for CCTV (China’s BBC), Cui’s career was made by this state-controlled broadcaster. So his recent talk in London – entitled ‘An Idealist’s commitment and compromise’ – caught my attention for its political undertone. Could he have been talking about the compromises he had to make as a Chinese journalist? To my delight, Cui spoke about this – and more.

• On Monday, the ministry issued a “notification on strengthening and improving the management of online music” policy, demanding that music services set up self-censorship departments to check their catalogs for deviant messages. State-owned news agency Xinhua, announced this, saying: “Online music should go through a strict reviewing process according to the requirement of the ministry before being made available online. The reviewing information should be filed in the provincial relevant departments or above.”

• Of Tunisia’s entire artistic community, the musicians – and in particular urban rappers – have borne the brunt of the state’s censorship and repression. A wide legal arsenal has been used to drag musicians into court and throw them unceremoniously into gaol.

• Two journalism lecturers who have embarked on a four-year First World War research project which shows how local newspapers manoeuvred round Lord Kitchener’s draconian press censorship laws and produced articles that rivaled the war poets for powerful imagery.

• Warming to his theme, Rushdie said universities should be refuges for the unfettered exchange of ideas. “The university is the place where young people should be challenged every day, where everything they know should be put into question, so that they can think and learn and grow up,” he said. “And the idea that they should be protected from ideas that they might not like is the opposite of what a university should be. It’s ideas that should be protected, the discussion of ideas that should be given a safe place. The university should be a safe space for the life of the mind. That’s what it’s for.”

• Here are excerpts from Rushdie’s comments:

• “If you are not a good writer, that’s not your fault — that’s just your problem. But if you are a self-censoring writer, that is your fault because then you are choosing to be a bad writer, and that’s to my mind not forgiven.”

• A national newspaper for and about prison inmates is accusing the state Department of Corrections of censorship.

• The lawsuit filed in federal court contends top agency officials purposely and illegally withheld copies of Prison Legal News from inmates who subscribe. And even in situations where the newspaper eventually was delivered, portions had been redacted.

• Prison Legal News, a 25-year-old magazine produced by the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center, has sued the Arizona Department of Corrections over censorship.

• We should remember, however, that offence can be taken even when it has not been given. There are radical feminists who search every innocent remark about women for the hidden sexist agenda. Even using the masculine pronoun in the grammatically sanctioned way, so as to refer indifferently to men and women, can cause offence and is now being banned on campuses all across America. It is not that you wish to give offence. But you are up against people who are expert in taking it, who have cultivated the art of taking offence over many years, and who are never more delighted than when some innocent man falls into the trap of speaking incorrectly.

• Widespread media censorship is rendered impossible by modern technology, Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency Director General Dmitry Kiselev said Tuesday.

• When students at one of the United States’ most prestigious universities throw tantrums in reaction to a call for debate, free-speech advocates who have long warned of the dangers posed by campus civility codes may be tempted simply to respond, ‘We rest our case’.

• The events at Yale over the past weeks have provoked a great deal of conversation, but little effort to understand or acknowledge the cultural and institutional biases at play. In their responses, many have made the same mistake that my friend did, assuming that individual actions can be divorced from their broader context, or from the larger and more troubling legacy of racial discrimination in America. But they can’t.

• [...]

• Like many elite schools, Yale has a tense racial past and present, one that ensures that admission isn’t necessarily synonymous with full social acceptance. The reports of recent incidents, like swastikas painted on campus, or a frat turning black girls away from a party, are surely only a few examples where some students are implicitly told that they are less welcome than their classmates.

• On 8 November Andrija Rodić, the owner of the Adria Media Group – which publishes 18 magazines including the daily tabloid Kurir – came out with a public apology to Serbian citizens for his role in producing overly favourable coverage of the situation in the country, alongside 80 per cent of Serbia’s other local media owners.

• Until that point he and his associated media outlets had been faithful supporters of Serbia’s Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vučić, and his policies. In a blunt admission of the extent of political censorship in the Serbian media, Rodić described how threats to weaken his company financially or create fabricated legal cases led to the development of self-censorship among journalists.

• Journalists are the “watchdogs” of democracy, according to the European Court of Human Rights. Anyone who wants to control a country without being troubled by criticism tries to muzzle reporters, and unfortunately, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a past master at stifling the cries of freedom. As journalists from around the world converge on Antalya to cover this weekend’s Group of 20 summit, many of their Turkish colleagues are being denied accreditation.

• Sidelining opposition media has become a bad habit in Turkey, which is ranked 149th out of 180 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. Four days before the Nov. 1 parliamentary elections, the police stormed Ipek Media Group headquarters and shut down its two opposition dailies and two opposition TV stations. After control of management had been secured and 71 journalists fired, these outlets resumed operations with a new editorial line verging on caricature. The dailies, Bugun and Millet, ran Erdogan’s photo on the front page along with the headlines “The president among the people” and “Turkey united.”

• It’s been three weeks since a series of public debates dedicated to reconciliation and remembrance of the 1965 Communist repression in Indonesia were cancelled at the Ubud writers and readers festival in Bali, following police pressure and increased scrutiny from the Indonesian authorities.

Privacy

• The UK government is making a dramatic expansion of its internet surveillance efforts, in the space of less than 18 months trying to bring international tech companies firmly under the remit of its spy legislation.

• But the attempt is unlikely to succeed, like its other attempts to make overseas companies hand over their customers’ data and communications.

• Because millions in the UK now use services like Apple’s iMessage and Whatsapp — which are based outside of the UK and use strong encryption — the UK government says there is a large, and growing gap, in the ability of law enforcement to intercept and read communications.

• Earlier today, Motherboard posted a court document filed in a prosecution against a Silk Road 2.0 user, indicating that the user had been de-anonymized on the Tor network thanks to research conducted by a “university-based research institute”.

• Google is attempting to combat the issue of inbox clutter and unanswered messages with its new smart reply feature released this week to its new email app, Inbox.

• The FCC has refused to order websites to protect users’ privacy in response to “do not track” requests — and that’s actually a good thing for people who want to stay anonymous online. Here’s why.

• When choosing a smart television, buyers are often presented with a variety of features. One they may not be aware of: that TV could be watching you.

• Vizio Smart TVs, one of the most popular manufacturers, can track your viewing tendencies and report them to advertisers, as reported by ProPublica.

• LAST MONTH, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square. It was the first time we’d met in person; he first emailed me nearly two years earlier, and we eventually created an encrypted channel to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, to whom Snowden would disclose overreaching mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ.

• This time around, Snowden’s anonymity was gone; the world knew who he was, much of what he’d leaked, and that he’d been living in exile in Moscow, where he’s been stranded ever since the State Department canceled his passport while he was en route to Latin America. His situation was more stable, the threats against him a bit easier to predict. So I approached my 2015 Snowden meeting with less paranoia than was warranted in 2013, and with a little more attention to physical security, since this time our communications would not be confined to the internet.

• “I never thought that I would be Big Brother,” jokes Snowden as he is lowered down from the cloud and on to a projector screen. The crowd greets him like a rock star. He looks sheepish, perhaps overcome by the fervor of an audience in a country that he has no possibility of returning to under the present circumstances. On the stage to greet him is poet Ann Lauterbach and the Intercept’s Peter Maass. The dissident, the poet, and the journalist engaged in discussion at the penultimate talk of Bard College’s “Why Privacy Matters” conference held in October in the spirit of the college’s matron philosopher Hannah Arendt.

• Whether it is state-sponsored or corporate surveillance, or increasingly sousveillance, it seems privacy has become a relic of bygone days. In some sense, we have become unquestioning of this new reality of zero privacy put forth by government and corporate interests alike. But then I look up and see Snowden.

• On Wednesday, Motherboard reported that a “university-based academic research institute” had been providing information to the FBI, leading to the identification of criminal suspects on the dark web.

• Circumstantial evidence pointed to Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Software Engineering Institute and an attack carried out against Tor last year. After the publication of Motherboard’s report, the Tor Project said it had learned that CMU was paid at least $1 million for the project.

• On Thursday, other academics who focus on the dark web and criminal marketplaces expressed anger and concern at CMU’s alleged behavior, feeling that the research broke ethical guidelines, and may have a knock-on effect on other research looking into this space.

• The head of the Tor Project has accused the FBI of paying Carnegie Mellon computer security researchers at least $1 million to de-anonymize Tor users and reveal their IP addresses as part of a large criminal investigation.

• Neither Carnegie Mellon officials nor the FBI immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment. If true, it would represent a highly unusual collaboration between computer security researchers and federal authorities.

• Ed Desautels, a spokesman for Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, did not deny the accusations directly but told Wired: “I’d like to see the substantiation for their claim,” adding, “I’m not aware of any payment.”

• “I was really worried … that this would be a two day story, then everybody would forget about it and we’d move on.” he said during a video question and answer session hosted by the PEN American Center on Tuesday.

• Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg met in Moscow recently to exchange views on freedom of information and Snowden’s fate.

• Ellsberg is a welcome guest on any campus these days. In 1971, while a military analyst at the Rand Corporation, he leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.

• The two met last winter, ac

• The former secretary of state attacked the NSA whistleblower without bothering to get her facts straight.

• Hillary Clinton is wrong about Edward Snowden. Again.

• The presidential candidate and former secretary of state insisted during the recent Democratic debate that Snowden should have remained in the United States to voice his concerns about government spying on U.S. citizens. Instead, she claimed, he “endangered U.S. secrets by fleeing to Russia.”

• People concerned about how much information is out there about them on Google have a new way to control what everyone can see.

• Without any fanfare, Google has begun rolling out an About Me page to make it easier for people to control what others can see about them across Google services.

• The page should be welcome news to people concerned about their privacy, according to Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research.

• “With this feature, there are no changes to what information people can see, but a way for people to better control what people can see about them across Google services in one place,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email to Computerworld.

• Comcast will reset the passwords of roughly 200,000 customers after their account information wound up for sale on a shadowy Web site, the company said Monday.

• Why did a liberal professor embrace the Bush surveillance state? Look to the law.

• Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade said: “The Gulf states have appalling human rights records, particularly Saudi Arabia, yet they are always the key focus for UK arms sales. Despite the cancellation of the Saudi prison contract, and despite the horrors being unleashed on the people of Yemen by UK arms, there is growing talk of David Cameron visiting the regime to apologise and make up.”

• MPs have launched an inquiry into the cost and feasibility of the government’s Investigatory Powers Bill.

• The pair, who both left public office late last year, will address a “top-tier” audience of fund managers on the first evening of a high-profile conference sponsored by hedge funds and investment banks. Sawers is familiar with an audience of this kind, having delivered a keynote speech at a prestigious hedge fund summit in Paris in April.

• We’re probably gonna need some bigger laws

• Hannigan warned that the UK is under constant threat of cyber attack and that the authorities are in an arms race against the bad guys.

• Speaking this morning to CESG’s Information Assurance conference, Robert Hannigan, director of GCHQ, declared that Britain was a “sovereign cryptographic nation” and reproached the free market’s ability to provide adequate cybersecurity.

• The claim was delivered to a cybersecurity shindig attended by government employees and private professionals, arranged by GCHQ’s infosec arm CESG, as GCHQ’s head honcho pontificated upon the relationship between the market, regulation, and threats affecting the cyber domain.

• The U.S. National Security Agency is ready to end later this month collecting Americans’ domestic call records in bulk and move to a more targeted system, meeting a legislative deadline imposed earlier this year, according to a government memo seen by Reuters.

• As we have previously written the new CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) allows this information to be passed along voluntarily with little to no recourse be the average citizen. All the NSA or other government agency has to do is quietly ask a company can hand the data over all in the name of National Security on the “Cyber” front (ASL?). This is not the first time that the US Government has tried to pass a bill like this one, but they finally managed to get one through. The claim is that this will help companies share threat information with each other, but the reality is that the law goes much deeper than that and is not really needed. Companies are already sharing threat data and indications of compromise without any fear of consumer backlash, so this bill really only serves the purpose to protect other data sharing. Russ Spitler, Vice President of Product Strategy at Alien Vault had this to say about CISA.

• Little by little, the US government is opening up about its use of computer security vulnerabilities. Last month, the NSA disclosed that it has historically “released more than 91% of vulnerabilities discovered in products that have gone through our internal review process and that are made and used in the United States.” There should probably be an asterisk or four accompanying that statement. But more on that in a minute. First, it’s worth examining why the government is being even the slightest bit forthcoming about this issue.

• Until recently, the NSA has been able to do what it wants without having to explain anything to us, the little people. At the end of October, the agency published an infographic to tell us all exactly what they do (most of the time.)

• The NSA likes its software vulnerabilities. There are those it discovers on its own and others it purchases from “weaponized software” dealers. There are also certain tech companies that hand over exploits to the NSA first before working on a patch for the rest of us.

• Up until now, the NSA really hasn’t discussed its policies regarding software vulnerabilities and exploits. A few months after the Snowden leaks began, the White House told the NSA to start informing software companies of any exploits/vulnerabilities it had discovered. The quasi-directive set no time limit for doing so and allowed the agency to withhold discovered exploits if there was a “clear national security or law enforcement” reason to do so.

• While other parties have discussed the NSA’s hoarding of software exploits, the agency itself hasn’t. All information gathered to date has come from outside sources. Snowden provided some of the documents. The EFF knocked a couple more loose with an FOIA lawsuit against James Clapper’s office.

• Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior official of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, computer software expert, linguist, management and leadership specialist, and whistleblower. In 2010 the government alleged that he ‘mishandled’ documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. His defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project.

• Five years after becoming the first American to be charged for espionage in nearly four decades, Thomas Drake is still trying to rebuild his life.

• In 2010, Drake, a senior executive with the National Security Agency from 2001 to 2008, was indicted by the Obama administration for leaking classified information under the Espionage Act after speaking out on secret mass surveillance programs, multibillion-dollar fraud and intelligence failures from 9/11. He was the first U.S. whistleblower to be charged under the Espionage Act since Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, and faced 35 years in prison before the government’s charges against him were ultimately dropped in 2011.

• Can whistleblowers safely express concerns about their agency within internal channels? Do a whistleblower’s motives matter? Should the press focus on the leaker when reporting stories about the information they revealed?

• Edward Snowden — famous for his NSA data leaks — New York Times reporter James Risen and whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack tried to answer these questions using their own experiences at a Newseum forum Tuesday.

• “For all the whistleblowers I’ve worked with, for them, the press is the last resort,” Risen said. “They’ve tried and almost never found any real result from that internal system.”

• PEN America, a human-rights organization advocating for free speech, sponsored the event and released a report examining the channels whistleblowers have available, which showed why many concerned officials turn to the media to get their information out safely.

• Drake and Radack said they tried to work within the system to bring up their concerns with agency activities, but they suffered retaliation or superiors destroyed or redacted evidence they raised.

• Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the NSA, revealed multi-billion dollar fraud, failures with 9/11 intelligence and mass surveillance violations. The Obama Administration indicted Drake in 2010 and charged him with espionage. He went free in a plea deal in 2011.

• Bill Binney, a former high-level intelligence officer in the NSA and later prominent whistleblower, has explained the inner workings of the security agency and its surveillance in a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session.

• NSA surveillance has been a hot topic ever since Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency’s activities. But government employees were concerned about surveillance for a decade before Mr. Snowden came along.

• Not many know William Binney. He is a ex-NSA official and a whistleblower who helped another serial whistleblower, Edward Snowden leak thousands of classified NSA documents two years ago. He has not suffered like Edward Snowden who has suffered the ignominy of being fugitive and a wanted man in United States. Binney left US relatively unscathed after the NSA leaks.

• William Binney doesn’t have a membership card to the small group of which he’s a part — people who have spoken out against the National Security Agency, and been left relatively unscathed — but at least he has the next best thing, a valid passport.

• The National Security Agency will phase out its bulk surveillance program sweeping up Americans’ phone data to a more targeted system, marking a continued win for privacy activists.

• Despite the controversy over Edward Snowden’s revelations of US surveillance of its citizens, it’s easy to imagine the country’s security services privately not being that embarrassed: there might be professional pride in overzealous snooping.

• But such bodies’ role in 9/11 is another matter entirely. What if it could be shown that the NSA could have – should have – prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center; that its failure to do so wasn’t due to bad luck, but a lethal cocktail of incompetence, arrogance and greed; and that they then sought to cover up their mistakes?

• This possibility is the driver of a fascinating, conspiracy theorising documentary: Friedrich Moser’s A Good American, which premieres on Tuesday at the CPH:DOX film festival in Copenhagen. It may not have the contemporaneous frisson of Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning Citizenfour, but it certainly packs a punch.

• The American of the title is William Binney, Bill to his friends, a crypto-mathematician and former NSA analyst, who devised a surveillance and analysis system that was cut-price, had built-in privacy protections, was up-and-running in 2000, and so dazzlingly effective that he claims it “absolutely would have prevented 9/11”, if only the agency hadn’t wilfully ignored it. The documentary doesn’t categorically prove the case – ironically for a film about data, we need to see some, or have more collaborations than are offered. Yet it does make us believe.

• The nation’s only successful challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata surveillance program lasted just one day, as a federal appeals court is allowing the constitutionally suspect program to continue unabated.

• This is hardly a surprise, but the DC Appeals Court has issued a stay on Judge Richard Leon’s ruling from earlier this week that the NSA’s bulk phone record collection program was unconstitutional. This is the same appeals court that overturned Leon’s earlier ruling finding the program unconstitutional. This time, as we noted, Judge Leon refused to grant the government a stay, noting that the DC Circuit had taken its sweet time in actually issuing a ruling on the appeal — and the program is set to end in a couple weeks anyway. Also, Leon didn’t order the entire program shut down, but just that the NSA stop keeping the records of the plaintiffs who were customers of Verizon Business Network Services (J.J. Little and J.J. Little & Associates).

• A federal judge on Monday ruled [opinion, PDF] against part of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) [official website] surveillance program that collects domestic phone records in bulk. Judge Richard Leon of the US District Court for the District of Columbia [official website] said that the program was most likely unconstitutional and shut down the program just weeks before the NSA was scheduled to scrap it and replace it.

• Only weeks before the US Patriot Act will be replaced with the USA Freedom Act a federal judge ruled that National Security Agency (NSA) Bulk Telephone Metadata Program which was revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 that systematically collects Americans’ domestic phone records in bulk “likely violates the Constitution.”

• A replacement program, adopted by Congress and scheduled to begin at the end of November, essentially has the telephone companies keep the records and give them to the government according to a protocol. This does not mean the agency will stop collecting phone data, however it will be a more target specific program.

• According to research by MapLight, the 217 congressmen that voted against the amendment received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 people that voted for the amendment.

• Now joining us to unpack all this is Jay Costa. Jay is the program director of MapLight’s web and data projects. He previously served on San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, chairing the group’s Education, Outreach and Training Committee, and on Berkeley’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission and Open Government Commission.

Civil Rights

• On Tuesday night, lines like this one appeared on the University of Missouri’s feed on Yik Yak, the location-based, hyperlocal social media app.

• “I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see,” wrote an anonymous user.

• The anonymous post led to beefed up campus security on a campus embroiled in protest and turmoil. But that user didn’t remain anonymous for long. It’s hard stay anonymous when the company knows all of its users’ locations, and will ship that information to law enforcement, no questions asked. Messages like the one sent by Hunter M. Park, a 19-year-old from Missouri, who was arrested on Wednesday just hours after he allegedly posted these threats on Yik Yak.

• Senior executives within the Veterans Benefits Administration misused incentive programs to benefit themselves, an Inspector General report shows. Two officials went so far as to pressure subordinates into accepting unfavorable transfers to create vacancies for themselves.

• An anonymous source alerted authorities to one senior VBA executive’s $274,019 expenses for moving from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia, a distance of 140 miles, in October 2014. A subsequent Inspector General investigation has uncovered abuse of incentive systems within the Veterans Benefits Administration available to senior-level executives and has resulted in two requests for criminal prosecution to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia.

• Police in South Boston repeatedly fired their stun guns on a Richmond man before he died in 2013, a network news program revealed Wednesday.

• Accompanied by graphic videos of Linwood R. Lambert Jr. being taken into custody, repeatedly shocked at the doors of a hospital, and then slumping nearly unconscious in the back of a police vehicle, the MSNBC investigation apparently buttresses allegations raised in a $25 million suit filed this year by Lambert’s family.

• When three Virginia police officers put Linwood Lambert in a squad car around 5 a.m. on May 4, 2013, they said they were taking him to the ER for medical attention because he was speaking delusionally. Just over an hour later, Lambert died in police custody.

• Matt DeHart’s long saga of government persecution, including FBI torture, refused asylum, and seized property, continues today as Matt has been cornered into taking a plea agreement to avoid a decades-long prison sentence. The deal, in which the government would recommend Matt be sentenced to a total of seven and a half years — minus his three and a half years of time served — was Matt’s only hope to prevent something even worse: the government’s initial recommendation of forty years in jail or the charges’ maximum, of seventy years and a half-million-dollar fine.

• Under the deal, Matt would have to plead guilty to receiving teen “pornography,” consisting of messages dated from 2008 that the US government decided to charge years later after they became aware that Matt discovered sensitive military files had been uploaded to a server he ran and that he was a WikiLeaks and Anonymous supporter.

• [...]

• Matt’s father, Paul DeHart, has cited Aaron Swartz’s case as a turning point in the family’s fear of egregious prosecution. Swartz committed suicide after facing more than 50 years in jail for rapidly downloading publicly available JSTOR documents. Similarly, in Matt’s case, the government threatened an extremely long prison sentence of several decades — a highly disproportionate sentence for the allegations against him.

• [...]

• Further, we have to prevent future retaliation, like the solitary confinement suffered by Barrett Brown, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond. Matt has already been tortured during interrogation and imprisoned for years before trial. We must keep Matt’s sentencing in the public eye as only significant scrutiny will prevent further abuse and ensure as fair a trial as possible.

• The former foreign secretary Jack Straw and Sir Mark Allen, a former senior MI6 officer, could avoid prosecution over complicity in the rendition and torture of two Libyan dissidents by claiming immunity, the supreme court has been told.

• The extraordinary prospect of senior figures dodging their alleged liability for abductions and torture by deploying the “foreign act of state doctrine” in criminal proceedings emerged during a civil claim brought by Libyan and Pakistani former detainees.

• Cameron’s EU renegotiation may be too little too late for the Eurosceptics. The rise of their “Out” campaign threatens the livelihoods and social protection of thousands of UK citizens, writes Jude Kirton-Darling.

• As things stand, the referendum is on a knife edge, with our poll showing a three-point margin for remain. The vote is heavily conditioned by class and age: middle class people under 55 want to stay by 26 points while working class people over 55 want to leave by 34 points. It is a statistical tie among the older middle class and the younger working class. Among the general population, 13% are on one side or the other but open to changing their mind, and a further 12% don’t know either way.

• Brazil’s Vale corporation masks brutal exploitation with the language of South-South solidarity.

• Another Cold War has started, strongly resembling the old one; but the old arsenal of ideology, like old weapons that were not maintained during a decade, have all oxidized and fallen out of use from indifference.

• [...]

• Viktor Orban in Hungary wins by promising to murder more gypsies and eventually the remaining Jews. Marine Lepen, new front-woman of the party for the ovens, openly anti-semitic and anti-Arab, grows more roots in France. Her solution to the refugee crisis is bacteriological and more eloquent than Trump’s: “let them have their ebola” she says, as her popularity sky-rockets.

• The White House indicated Tuesday that President Barack Obama will sign into law a Pentagon spending bill that significantly raises the base budget of the US war machine while prohibiting the shutdown of the prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba or the transfer of its detainees to US facilities.

• The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides for a base Pentagon budget (excluding expenditures on active military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria) of $548 billion, larger than any year since the end of the Cold War.

• On top of the base budget, the funding bill includes $50.9 billion for “overseas contingency operations,” that will pay for ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, down from $64.2 billion in the last fiscal year. Together with a few smaller increments, this brings the total in military spending to $607 billion for the fiscal year that began October 1.

• These personal accounts come to light at a crucial time: Next week, China will answer questions from a United Nations anti-torture committee at a conference in Geneva—the UN’s fifth probe into the country’s torture practices.

• For a decade, the FBI flagrantly abused its counter-terrorism authority to conduct a widespread surveillance and monitoring operation of School of Americas Watch (SOAW), a nonviolent activist organization founded by pacifists with the aim of closing the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (now renamed) and ending the U.S. role in the militarization of Latin America.

• By 2009 someone had uploaded a file to the shell, which is a server that I had operated the front-end of. Can’t really tell you the size of it. It had a text intro from an individual claiming to be a special agent for the FBI, he was explaining how the included documents pointed to CIA involvement in the Amerithrax case. It had an index, a file index which i skimmed through, it had PDFs, powerpoint files. The PDFs included scanned hand-written notes. Specifics which stood out to me, i mean I jotted some notes down before were technical nature of stuff like degraded Anthrax VS Brucellosis, degraded Anthrax VS Tularemia. There was nuclear regulatory commission paperwork tracking a radioactive cobalt source. From the handwritten notes, they thought that source was used to degrade or render inert weaponized anthrax. What else stood out to me.. it was the Ames strain of anthrax, and they said it was weaponized ‘electro-statically charged silicon nano particles’. That’s been burned into my memory

• Love expects that if he is forced into the American judicial system, things will go no differently for him. “It’s clearly problematic that as a direct consequence of there being insufficient evidence even to bring a charge in the UK, I am facing a fate that I consider worse than any possible sentence given in the UK. If I were ever taken to the USA and refused to plead guilty, that number would go up significantly, until it were many times larger than the number of years I have left to live.”

• He thinks the extradition case against him is being used by British law enforcement officials to pressure him into giving up evidence against himself and others. Love presents his case to a British court on 10 and 11 December.

• When I ask him how many years of jail he thinks he’d face, he replies: “It’s all academic. I will never go to America except in a bodybag.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• So how does Method stack up against its competitors? According to the article, major detergent challengers such as Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson and Clorox have so cleaned up their own products that they are apparently, in the main, eligible for the United States EPA (Environmental Protective Agency) seal of approval as well as for eco-labels from several well-regarded certifiers. However, companies of this type tend not to apply for such eco-labels. Not only that, but many do not provide information about how and why their products and the process of their manufacturer are now greener. The suggested upshot is that, while there may not be a significant environmental difference between the products of Method and those of its competitors, consumers may not have any clue that this is the case.

Trademarks

• We were just discussing the University of Kentucky’s asshat-ish bullying attempts concerning Kentucky Mist Moonshine’s gall in selling hats and t-shirts featuring the distillery’s name and logo. The whole episode has been entirely silly from the outset, with the school essentially declaring itself the sole owner of the name of its home state for the purposes of its use on apparel. This attempt to throw aside even the question of actual customer confusion made the whole thing a strange power-play against a distillery, with some questioning how a trademark over a state’s name could be granted in the first place. Kentucky Mist itself filed a lawsuit against the school, requesting that the trademark it has chosen to flaunt so brazenly be either declared invalid entirely or reformed to protect the school only against any attempts to actually be associated with the school as opposed to the state of Kentucky.

• Again: none of this should be happening. If the University of Kentucky had simply kept its nose out of an unrelated business’ business, no suit would have been filed. But now, as the silliness continues, we get news that the judge originally assigned to preside over the case has recused himself. Why? Because he’s a graduate of UK.

Copyrights

• TorrentFreak turned ten years old today, but even after 8,477 articles and nearly a million comments we’re really just getting started. A special thanks goes out to everyone who’s helped to make this such an enjoyable ride so far.

• As the entertainment industries catch up, fewer and fewer Swedish citizens are using unauthorized file-sharing networks. That’s according to a new study which has found that just 18% of the population now engages in the hobby. Nevertheless, those that do pirate are dramatically more likely to buy legal content than those who don’t.

• A coalition of Dutch film producers and distributors has today announced a lawsuit against the local Government. The filmmakers argue that the authorities are not doing enough to combat piracy and want pirate website operators and their users to face serious legal consequences.

• In September, a judge ruled that music licensor Warner-Chappell doesn’t own the copyright to “Happy Birthday.” The question now seems to have become who does?

• A charity called the Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) has now stepped forward to say that if Warner loses the copyright, it should become the rightful owner. Earlier this week, ACEI filed court papers (PDF) asking to intervene in the copyright dispute.

• It ain’t over yet, folks. While many in the press went on and on back in September that the song “Happy Birthday” had been declared in the “public domain,” as we pointed out, that’s not what the judge said. He only said that the Summy Co. did not hold the copyright, because it seemed clear from a lawsuit back in the 1940s that the Hill Sisters (who sorta wrote the song — long story) only assigned the rights to the music and not the lyrics — and everyone agrees the music is now in the public domain. As we pointed out, this actually made the song an “orphan work”, which created a new kind of mess, and as we noted, it was entirely possible that a third party could now make a claim to holding the copyright — though we thought it was unlikely.

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