● 11.30.15

● Links 30/11/2015: Linux 4.4 RC3, Zaragoza Moving to FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Phoenix based Symple PC, which offered refurbished “web workstations” running Ubuntu for $89, has evidently ridden off into the night of no return. Since at least August 24, the company’s website has said the product is “No Longer Availabe,” although the website remains operational. Numerous attempts to contact the company for clarification have gone unanswered.

• Today it is no longer sufficient to cover Microsoft and Cisco certifications only. A well-prepared IT professional needs to know about Linux too. Linux is the power behind the cloud, open source and the Internet of things.

Desktop

• It took the Linux community a while, but they finally managed to put together a very good Windows 10 theme that works on most of the famous desktop environment.

Server

• So how is it possible that Linux has grabbed such an extraordinary share of cloud servers for the enterprise market? In 2014, Linux was used for 79 percent of enterprise cloud deployments, while Windows OS comprised just 36 percent. And 87 percent of enterprises planned to add more Linux servers in 2014, while 82 percent plan to add more Linux servers in 2015.

Kernel Space

• We reported earlier today, November 28, 2015, that kernel developer Ben Hutchings had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Linux kernel 3.2.74 LTS. Immediately after his announcement, kernel developer Jiri Slaby informs users about the general availability of Linux kernel 3.12.51 LTS.

• I was out most of today, so this is a few hours later than usual, but there it is, the normal weekly rc. “Steady progress towards 4.4″.

• The changes look fairly normal: just under 60% driver updates (of which almost half is GPU updates, this time mainly skewed due to some nouveau firmware update patches), about 25% arch updates (mostly arm[64], but some changes in x86, s390, powerpc, nios, mips, m68k, arc..), and about 10% filesystem updates (mostly btrfs and nfs). With the rest being “misc” (mainly header files).

• The first of two laptops ordered so far is the Toshiba Satellite L55D-C5269. For $449 USD, this laptop provides a 15.6-inch display, AMD A10-8700P APU, 8GB of DDR3L memory, and 1TB SATA HDD. The most interesting part of that for the forthcoming tests is the A10-8700P — a Carrizo APU. The A10-8700P is a Carrizo APU with two Excavator CPU modules and Radeon R7 graphics with six compute cores.

Graphics Stack

• Following the recent Mesa 11.2-devel Git tests on Skylake I also ran a comparison to see if the OpenGL performance differed at all when comparing Linux 4.3.0 to Linux 4.4 in its second release candidate form.

• From the Core i5 6600K “Skylake” system I ran some tests of the HD Graphics 530 to see if the performance was impacted at all by switching to the latest Linux kernel development code as of this week.

• Mesa 11.1 is set to be released next month and while it won’t advance the OpenGL 4 state for the Intel/Radeon/Nouveau drivers, there is a lot of other changes that have built up over the past quarter to get excited about for users of this open-source Linux graphics driver stack.

• With earlier today showing new OpenGL performance numbers for how the Nouveau driver with working re-clocking compared to NVIDIA’s proprietary driver, here are some benchmarks to show how the AMDGPU kernel DRM driver with PowerPlay patches compare to AMD’s Catalyst driver for the R9 285 (Tonga) and R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics cards.

• NVIDIA continues to be working on PRIME synchronization support to fix tearing when using this multi-GPU method. There will be support for this functionality within the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver.

• As it’s been a while since last playing with Intel’s Beignet project, the open-source effort to allow OpenCL compute capabilities on HD/Iris Graphics under Linux, I decided to try it out on an Ubuntu 15.10 system this weekend with a Skylake processor.

Benchmarks

• With the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel, the Kepler re-clocking is in much better shape and for select GeForce GTX 600/700 series cards now allows the open-source driver to run them at their fully-rated clock frequencies. Here’s some tests showing how Nouveau now compares to NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux driver in such a comparison.

• This CPU certainly isn’t meant for any really demanding workloads, but could serve as a potential Linux desktop with basic accelerated graphics via the HD Graphics 510. The Pentium G4400 is still rated to drive up to three displays and can handle 4K via HDMI/DP. Like the other Skylake processors with HD Graphics 530, the hardware can support up to OpenGL 4.4 / DirectX 12 but under Linux the current Mesa driver still only has full OpenGL 3.3 support with the GL 4.x support being a work-in-progress.

• On Friday I posted benchmarks showing Nouveau’s re-clocked performance relative to NVIDIA’s proprietary driver for showing the performance potential of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 600/700 series with the performance state code there beginning to work. That article was followed by AMDGPU driver tests on Linux 4.4 against Catalyst for the newest AMD GPU tech that uses this newer Direct Rendering Manager driver. The third test now is comparing the Radeon DRM performance on Linux 4.4 against AMD’s binary blob when using older AMD GCN GPUs as well as a Northern Islands GPU for reference.

Applications

• Earlier today, November 27, FFmpeg, the leading multimedia framework for Linux kernel-based operating systems has received a new maintenance release, version 2.8.3, which updates many of the project’s core components.

• A few weeks ago we started working again on Yokadi, our command-line oriented, todo list. We are now finally ready to release version 1.0. This new version fixes a few bugs but does not bring new features. This lack of new features is actually a conscious decision: we wanted to make changes under the hood, and doing changes under the hood at the same time as adding new features is often a recipe for disaster.

• remctl is a simple and secure remote command execution protocol using GSS-API. Essentially, it’s the thinnest and simplest possible way to deploy remote network APIs for commands using Kerberos authentication and encryption.

• A minor release of my C utility library, including some changes required for the previous release of pam-afs-session and the upcoming release of remctl.

• For the past fifteen years, I have been tweaking my ~/.emacs continously, most recently by switching to Spacemacs. With that switch done, I started to migrate a few more things to Emacs, an Atom/RSS reader being one that’s been in the queue for years – ever since Google Reader shut down. Since March 2013, I have been a Feedly user, but I wanted to migrate to something better for a long time. I wanted to use Free Software, for one.

• Version 0.7.0 of our data mining toolkit ELKI is now available on the project homepage, GitHub and Maven.

• It’s been nearly one year since last talking about LZHAM, the lossless data compression codec designed by a former Valve developer and has been showing great potential — particularly by game developers for compressing assets. While LZHAM news has been quiet, Rich Geldreich has still been hard at work on advancing open-source lossless compression.

• Cloud computing is not simply a popular phrase; it is a very important part of how we use technology. Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

• The cloud eliminates maintenance and management issues, and eliminates the risk of running out of capacity. Cloud-based applications also have the virtue of being accessible from any location with an internet connection. And Linux continues to demonstrate that it is the go-to cloud platform.

• Developers need a broad set of powerful tools to use the cloud. There are far too many excellent cloud development tools, and this is not an exhaustive survey. But here are four excellent tools that caught our eye. The first is Dirigible; don’t be put off by its name.

• podlators is the distribution that includes the Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules for Perl, plus the pod2man and pod2text driver scripts (among a few other, more minor things).

• The developers of the PeaZip software, a cross-platform and open-source graphical application designed as a front-end for some popular archive managers, such as 7z, p7zip, RAR, ZIP, etc., announced the release and immediate availability of PeaZip 5.9.0.

• The developers of the open-source and cross-platform qBittorrent torrent downloader software were extremely happy to announce the release of qBittorrent 3.3, the next major version of the project.

• Moritz Bunkus informs us about the immediate availability for download of MKVToolNix 8.6, another maintenance release of the acclaimed cross-platform and open-source MKV (Matroska) manipulation software.

• Yesterday, Gammu 1.36.7 has been released.

• Sometime earlier last year, I started to help Philippe Massicotte with his gtrendsR package—which was then still “hiding” in relatively obscurity on BitBucket. I was able to assist with a few things related to internal data handling as well as package setup and package builds–but the package is really largely Philippe’s. But then we both got busy, and it wasn’t until this summer at the excellent useR! 2015 conference that we met and concluded that we really should finish the package. And we both remained busy…

Instructionals/Technical

• Be at the Cavendish Campus, University of Westminster

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.8-rc2 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): - Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

• The source is available from the following locations:

• http://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/1.8/wine-1.8-rc2.tar.bz2

• http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/1.8/wine-1.8-rc2.tar.bz2

• Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

• http://www.winehq.org/download

• The Wine developers have just released a new Release Candidate for their application, bringing the version number up to 1.8 RC2.

Games

• Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 19 Syllepsis”, the nineteenth alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This alpha features building and siege engine capture, a new pathfinder, visual replay and more!

• Hatred is one of the most controversial games that has been published on Steam, is also coming to the Linux platforms sometime in the near future as developers have managed to run it on Ubuntu successfully.

• The Steam Exploration Sale is underway, and more than 1,600 games are now discounted for this platform, from a total of over 2,800. A lot of them are really good, but they might now be present on the first page. Here are some of the must-buy titles.

• Guild Software has announced that a new maintenance version of the Vendetta Online 1.8 cross-platform 3D space combat massively multiplayer online role-playing game is now available for download.

• Wildfire Games has released 0 A.D. alpha 19 “Syllepsis” yesterday. This alpha release includes new gameplay features, graphics and user interface changes as well as various under the hood improvements.

• 12 is Better Than 6 was funded on Kickstarter last month and is already available as a full release on Steam. The game is similar to Hotline Miami, though set in a sketch book style 19th century Wild West.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Sebastian Kügler’s latest KDE Wayland work has led him to discover that KScreen is now working on Wayland.

• Using KScreen for screen/monitor configuration with KDE Plasma on Wayland-based environments should now “just work” and is a step towards having suitable KDE Wayland multi-screen support.

• Well, after a few issues, i finally push the Br-Print3D code to the git on KDE Playground.

• We knew the animation plugin was something artists all over the world were really waiting for… What we hadn’t expected was the flood of cool little animations that suddenly appeared everywhere! Let’s take a look at a selection of them! And in another way, the release also helped find some issues. First: if onion skinning doesn’t work for you, check that you’re not trying to onion skin a completely opaque layer. Yes — white is also opaque! The best setup: create a white background layer, but paint on a transparent layer above that. That’s Krita’s default setup in any case. For some people with some combinations of graphics cards and drivers, the Instant Preview doesn’t work. There’s not much we can do about that, but we do need your reports! And finally, a couple of real bugs surfaced, and we’ll look at that next.

• It’s been a year and a half since the original KDE Frameworks 5 release and more KDE applications continue to be ported over to this modern framework alongside Qt5. The latest to be ported over is KTorrent.

• On Thanksgiving Day, Eike Ziller of Qt writes about the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Qt Creator open-source and cross-platform IDE (Integrated Development Environment) designed for the needs of Qt developers.

• We’re ( kde-sig ) trying slowly improve the quality of Fedora KDE and Qt, and is a lot of work. Some of the members even got to new jobs reducing the time to deal as “life” happens, which makes the work harder. Rex Dieter, our fearless ( and reasonable ) leader do a fantastic 100 people work, but still, we have enough to 100+n persons. So anything that can reduce the test time and the burden on the process are a necessary solution.

• Some can arg that rawhide is a test place, and they are right, but is for a devel future, not for a soon to be stable set of packages. And we’re hardly see people using rawhide on production aside us in some very very very restricted cases and most of all, in virtual machines, not bare metal.

• Then we can go to the -testing repo, which leads to Fedora buildsystem, that not helps much as every new package submitted need rely of someone say’s ok to testing stage or worst, wait minimum 7 days until reach the servers.

• And is not testing per se, as if we wait for 7 days without anyone really tested the package and reach the stable with a bad version, so we’re be double screwed.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Hi!

• The second snapshot of GNOME 3.19 is now available, it incorporates updates from 3.18.2 as well as quite a serie of edgier modules.

• To compile GNOME 3.19.2, you can use the jhbuild [1] modulesets [2] (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release).

• [1] https://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/ [2] https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.19.2/

• After a couple of weeks of hard work, and with a two-day delay, the second development milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment is finally here, available for testing on various GNU/Linux operating systems.

• Frederic Peters announced the release a few minutes ago of GNOME 3.19.2, the latest development release leading up to GNOME 3.20.

Distributions

• The Solus developers have been working to fix a problem with their system on the famous Acer C720 laptop. It might not seem like a big deal, but that’s only for people who don’t have an Acer C720.

• Solus’ Josh Strobl has published the twelfth installment of the well-known “This Week in Solus” weekly newsletter to inform users about the work done on the GNU/Linux operating system during the week that has just passed.

Reviews

• Chakra probably also isn’t for you if you are a casual computer user who has chosen Linux because you prefer it to Windows but you still like it to be straight forward with perhaps menus, point and click installers and straight forward connections to your hardware.

• Chakra might be for you however if you have been using Linux for quite some time and you are looking to have more control, use the command line a little more and have a closer affinity with how things really work.

New Releases

• David Cortarello of the Kwort project has announced today, November 27, the release and immediate availability for download of the Kwort Linux 4.3 computer operating system.

• Today, November 29, Jacque Montague Raymer of MakuluLinux had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the final version of the MakuluLinux Aero Edition computer operating system.

• The MakuluLinux Aero Edition is now Live and available for download. It has been a long wait and an even longer journey to make the impossible, possible, I fought many battles, obtained many scars, suffered many injuries and doctored many wounds along the way. But Victory was always a MUST and not optional, the words “You only fail when you stop trying” kept me going. One Developer against all odds, many sleepless nights, many headaches, and many frustrated days, working on a masterpiece which I am proud to show off to the world today. I hope this lives up to all your expectations, I hope it brightens your day just a little more… It was a pleasure to make, and I hope you enjoy using it.

• New version of Kwort available, this one is 4.3. Get it while it’s hot!

Gentoo Family

• Sabayon Linux continues to be one of the easiest ways to setup a Gentoo-based environment. With Sabayon 15.12, GNOME 3.18 packages were added to their testing repositories, KDE Plasma 5 was updated against KDE Frameworks 5.16 and KDE Plasma 5.4.3, and there is support inbound for ARM. The Sabayon project intends to release Raspberry Pi 2 images in the near future.

Ballnux/SUSE

• It had been years since I installed Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for development and testing purposes. I want to say that the last time I dabbled with SLES was when version 9.3 was released in 2005. This was shortly after Novell had acquired the distribution and it would seem, that it was shortly before Novell ruined the distribution. In 2011, the Attachmate Group acquired Suse from Novell. Anyway, I recently loaded SLES 12 to port RapidDisk as a precompiled RPM for the distribution and what a disaster that was.

• Tumbleweed had one snapshot so far this week that brought more appeal to users of openSUSE.

• Snapshot 20151123 changed fonts for openSUSE. The terminal font changed to Adobe Code Pro and Roboto was also added as the default font.

• Just a few moments ago, November 27, the openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, announced the latest updates to the openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE Leap 42.1 GNU/Linux operating systems.

Slackware Family

• There was still some work to do about my Plasma 5 package repository. The recent updates in slackware-current broke several packages that were still linking to older (and no longer present) libraries which were part of the icu4c and udev packages.

• Thanks for all the valuable feedback on the first public beta of my Slackware Live Edition. It allowed me to fix quite a few bugs in the Live scripts (thanks again!), add new functionality (requested by you or from my own TODO) and I took the opportunity to fix the packages in my Plasma 5 repository so that its Live Edition should actually work now.

Red Hat Family

• According to Zacks, “Red Hat Inc. is a leading developer and provider of open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system. Unlike proprietary software, open source software has publicly available source code and can be copied, modified and distributed with minimal restrictions. The web site, REDHAT.COM, is a leading online source of information and news about open source software and one of the largest online communities of open source software users and developers. “

• Satellite 6.1 supposedly supports bonded network interfaces. If it does, we’ve yet to get it working.

• To be fair, this is a slightly more complex setup with two interfaces on separate cards heading to separate switches using LACP for resilience which is more complex than balancing. There are then a number of virtual interfaces hanging off this on separate vlans.

Fedora

• From Sunday, November 1st to Tuesday, November 3rd, the Globalization Fedora Activity Day event took place in Tokyo, Japan.

• Hi folks! I haven’t blogged for a while, so I thought I’d write up a few notes on what’s going on in QA now Fedora 23 has been released.

• The latest Linux benchmarks I ran this weekend in welcoming the new Phoronix Premium subscribers participating in our Black Friday deal are some MacBook Air benchmarks on Fedora 21, Fedora 22, and Fedora 23.

• Every day, people are making all kinds of incredible software powered by Fedora. The Fedora user community is broad and diverse, and sometimes, we hear about things that we never imagined possible. Rochester Institute of Technology student and Fedora user Brendan Whitfield developed an open-source library for interfacing with laser projectors to create all kinds of awesome images and animations using lasers (including the Fedora logo)! We wanted to know more about the work Brendan was doing and interviewed him about his project, LZR.

• Blivet-gui, a graphical tool for storage management, reached an important milestone — version 1.0 (blivet-gui 1.0 was actually already released in September and it took me more than two months to write this blog post, the latest version available in rawhide is 1.2).

• RPM of QElectroTech version 0.5, an application to design electric diagrams, are available in remi for Fedora and Enterprise Linux 7.

• For the past many years the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA has generally been a reliable, quick, and easy manner of getting new mainline Linux kernel builds and to have the latest Git kernel fresh every morning. However, as of late, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA has been letting me down and I’m looking at setting up my own kernel build system for the community and also extend that to include some extra graphics patches, etc.

Debian Family

• APT (Advanced Package Tool) is a famous set of core tools inside Debian that make it possible to install, remove, and keep applications up to date. The stable branch of APT has been finally upgraded with the version 1.3.

• Julian Andres Klode from the development team of the well-known and acclaimed APT open-source package manager for Debian GNU/Linux operating system and its derivatives, such as Ubuntu Linux, has announced two new maintenance releases of APT 1.1.

• The following is a short summary of my open source work in November. My hope is that keeping better track of what I’m doing will help me reflect on how I spend my time, and help me to focus my efforts better.

• This was updated to use recaptcha on the sign-up page, which is my attempt to cut down on the 400+ spam-registrations it receives every day.

Derivatives

• This version includes bugfixes in the installer handling special cases and some improvements in the overall speed process. The desktop has now the clock by default included and there’s some improved configurations by default too. We still working on the packaging for the other architectures like 64bit and different distros to keep the updates and fixes more reliable in the future.

• The developers behind the Debian- and Enlightenment-based Elive Linux distribution have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta release.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Just a few moments ago, we were notified by Łukasz Zemczak from Canonical about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers for the upcoming OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phones.

• Ubuntu users are really curious to find out what the new Unity 8 will look like as opposed to the current Unity 7 version, and how the design will be implemented. Well, they now have a glimpse of how things are changing.

• The Ubuntu developers announced a few minutes ago, on November 30, that the Ubuntu Font Family package was updated to version 0.84 in the daily build ISO images of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

Devices/Embedded

• Turris Omnia is a new open source router that comes with powerful hardware and a Linux distro based on OpenWRT. It’s a smashing hit on Indiegogo, and there is still time to get one.

• Security should be a top priority for all internet users, as well as companies relying on deployed hardware to ensure their intranet connections are as secure as they can be. While a mesh network may be a preferable choice for Internet connectivity, such a solution is still a few years away. Until that time, a router updating its own security is definitely something to keep in the back of one’s mind.

• Turris, a hardware manufacturer from the Czech Republic, has launched a crowd-funding campaign to help it build a new router concept, one that focuses, above all, on the user’s security.

• Your wireless router is one of the most energy-hungry gadgets in your home and who knows how vulnerable it is to data leaks.

• As I write this post it’s November 28, and the Kindle Voyage 2 is nowhere to be seen. As someone who buys a lot of Kindle and Audible books, I find it more than a little irritating that I can’t buy an updated version of the Kindle Voyage. I love the current Kindle Voyage, which has and more than 7600 customer reviews, but I’d like a new version with better hardware and more features.

• Raspberry Pi has raised the bar on low-cost computing again.

• The UK-based educational nonprofit released a new, tiny computer on Thursday for $5, the Raspberry Pi Zero, and sold out of it online within a day.

• The Thecus N4310 is a small business oriented Linux NAS (Network Attached Storage) device that makes it easy to setup an EXT4-based RAID storage environment with encryption support. The Thecus web-based software makes it easy to take full advantage of the NAS with features such as BitTorrent support, media streaming for iOS/Android, and more.

• Competition is really hotting up in the cheap single-board computer market. CHIP, “the world’s first nine dollar computer” was successfully crowdfunded earlier this year, and now we have a $5 competitor in the form of the Raspberry Pi Zero.

Phones

• Oh, yes, of the “1.52 billion visits over the past 90 days”, 33.5% were not from the desktop… Android/Linux had 15% share. Oh yes, this is a victory for all things open and Free. Monopoly desktop OSs are like the zombies on “The Walking Dead” TV-series. They try to keep going missing lots of important parts but they don’t do very well despite the numbers… GNU/Linux seems to do best on weekends when folks are home during office hours.

• Last week I presented a keynote in Skopje Macedonia where I did an update to my projections related to ‘Grand Convergence’. Some of our readers will probably want to see what the latest numbers look like. So this is an update to the ‘biggest race in human history’ or the 7 Trillion dollar collision of 17 separate giant global industries.

Android

• When news of a Pepsi smartphone launching leaked, it seemed a bit of a left-field move that made little sense.

• Once announced, however, it made more sense. It’s aimed at the Chinese market, which is far more welcoming of branded limited edition devices. I said it made more sense, not a lot of sense.

• A BlackBerry running on Android was an eventuality. BlackBerry 10, the company’s home baked operating system, is comprehensive, but a lack of application support meant BlackBerry’s smartphones could be used for a lot less. When BlackBerry announced Android applications would run on its phones, it was akin to raising a white flag.

• LG G4 users in Europe can check for Google’s latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS as some users in Germany and other parts of EU have claimed to have received the update. The OS is seemingly seeding as a 1.5GB file.

• Recently we heard the story of a programmer who wrote scripts to secretly automate almost everything he did at work. Most of us may not have the coding skills to pull this off but there are tools you can use on your smartphone to automate various tasks in your life. Here’s how to take advantage of those tools.

• Android has always been associated with the best known handsets, the best specs and for always being the platform with the most advanced features, whether imaging, processors or display technology. And 2015 was no exception. Apple’s iPhones have always been plenty powerful, but handsets from Samsung, LG and HTC have always strived to take things further, introducing never-before-seen-technology, features and USPs like water-and-dust-proofing, QHD screens and the first implementation of optical stabilised cameras (OIS) on mobile.

• Yes, that’s perfect. One of the things I’ve been so thankful for is that, unlike the competition (wink wink, nudge nudge) each iteration of Android offers up a bevy of improvements. There has yet to be an Android release that failed to please. Lollipop was better than KitKat, which was better than Jellybean, which was better than Ice Cream Sammich — you get the idea. This is one of the very reasons I’ve been so excited about getting Marshmallow, as well as why I’ve been so frustrated about not getting it.

• For those with some spare x86 tablet/mobile hardware around, a new test build of Android-x86 is out in the wild.

• Since October there’s been the Android-x86 5.1-RC1 build of Lollipop and since then is also a x86 branch based on Android 6.0-Marshmallow. A Phoronix reader pointed out that uploaded today to the project’s SourceForge page is an Android-x86 20151128 release.

• Android 4.1+: Doze is one of the best new features in Android Marshmallow, which stops apps from using the network when your phone is idle. But if your phone still doesn’t have Marhsmallow, this app will bring the feature to older phones.

• Tracking and managing stock is one of the most important tasks of any business dealing with physical goods. Thankfully, today’s apps and mobile technology are making it much easier for small businesses to take control of their inventory. Plenty of inventory management software for Android is now available on the Google Play store, and the power of these apps is improving all the time.

• It’s Black Friday, the time of the year for the biggest deals in the US. We’ve found great deals for electronics you can get shipped, and some Indian e-commerce sites are also offering Thanksgiving deals, but you can get great deals on digital goods as well. If you’re an Android user, then check out Google’s Cyber Weekend deals, and you’ll find great discounts on both apps and games.

• Thanks to Huawei and Google, I have become a true fan of stock Android and simply do not desire to change to another smartphone which is a first for me. The Nexus 6P truly is premium and is a product that both should be tremendously proud of. Both companies should take a bow and we all should stand and applaud this device. With superior software, gorgeous and durable build, a super high resolution display, fantastic camera, a new fingerprint reader, dual-front facing speakers and incredible battery life, the Nexus 6P leaves no detail behind.

• Huawei, like any manufacturer that puts time and effort into a software layer of unique features and enhancements, believes wholeheartedly in the value its interface adds to the core Android experience. As Android nerds, we naturally tend to gravitate toward a stock experience that we can customize ourselves, but we are also aware that we are hardly representative of ‘average’ smartphone consumers.

Free Software/Open Source

• Segrada is a piece of open source software that allows historians (and detectives) to keep track of their data. Unlike wikis or archival databases, its focus lies on information and interrelations within it. Pieces of information might represent persons, places, things, or concepts. These “nodes” can be bidirectionally connected with each other to semantically represent friendship, blood relation, whereabouts, authorship, and so on. Hence the term “semantic graph database,” since information can be displayed as a graph of semantically connected nodes.

• Here are five full-featured Slack alternatives — tools that go beyond IRC, in other words — that are open-source software, which means you can download it and run it on whatever server you want. That implies that you’re in charge of security, for better or worse, instead of, say, Slack.

• All examinations of the A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technological University (KTU) — which run on an online platform — would switch to open source software from the second semester onwards. For the first semester examinations, the KTU would use a proprietary, Microsoft, software.

• In response to demands from student organisations, the KTU has pushed back its first semester examinations by two days. The first of the examinations would now begin on December 4 instead of December 2. The first of the results would be published on December 19.

• Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (an important work describing the effectiveness of open collaboration and development), recently wrote a piece calling for “Social Justice Warriors” to be ejected from the hacker community. The primary thrust of his argument is that by calling for a removal of the “cult of meritocracy”, these SJWs are attacking the central aspect of hacker culture – that the quality of code is all that matters.

• The #HROS project was launched in back in May of 2015 to bring the worlds of human resources (HR) and open source (OS) together, hence the name: HROS.

• The Fedora Badges system, which is interoperable with Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI), lists more than 17,000 contributors who have been issued digital badges. And, at the top of the leaderboard is Kevin, who has been issued 142 badges—less than half of the overall number of badges available! Those badges Kevin has achieved are a mix of Content, Development, Community, Quality, and Event badges, with some easier, and some harder, to obtain.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

SaaS/Big Data

• Huawei has a new deal with giant Spanish telecom company Telefonica through which the two firms will work on helping enterprises move infrastructure onto Telefonica’s OpenStack-based cloud. It’s yet another indicaton of the global phenomenon that OpenStack has become.

CMS

• People often misinterpret WordPress.com as the self-installed version that isn’t fully hosted but a mere subsidiary. For starters, we are talking about the fully dedicated version that engulfs the myriad aspects of the ‘Content Management System’.

• After years of development and competition, open source content management systems (CMS) have become very powerful tools for building, deploying and managing web sites, blogs and more. You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.

• I just have pushed a new version of the Slick Google Map plugin for WordPress to the servers. There are not many changes, but a crucial fix for parsing coordinates in DMS (degree-minute-second) format.

Healthcare

• I am prepared and excited to take on that challenge, and to make sure my chosen FOSS project, with the wind of open source as a dominate model in the world to drive us, tries to change the world of healthcare IT for the better.

• Viva la FOSS!

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• At DockerCon EU 2015, VMware made available their Photon Controller as an open source product via the organisation’s GitHub account. Photon Controller is a component within VMware’s Photon platform, which is designed as an infrastructure stack optimised for ‘container and cloud’ workloads. The virtualisation platform offers an ‘API-first’ user experience, a scalable control plane, and native container support via frameworks such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Mesos.

• Releasing internal products to the open-source community is the hip new thing for technology giants to do

BSD

• I’ve been using OpenBSD since way back at release 2.3 in 1998, so I’ve gone through upgrades that took a fair amount of work due to incompatible changes, like the switch from ipf to pf for host firewalling or the change to ELF binaries. The upgrade from 5.7 to 5.8 was a pretty smooth and easy one, for the most part. The two most painful changes for me were the replacement of sudo with doas and the dropping of support in the rc.conf for the pf_rules variable. While sudo is still available as a package, I like the idea of reducing attack surface with a simpler program, so I made the switch. The two things I miss most about sudo are the ability to authenticate for a period of time and the ability to have a single config file across a whole set of servers. The former I’m just living with, the latter I’ve adjusted to by having a single config file that has lines commented out depending on which server it’s on. I did have one moment of concern about the quality of doas when it incorrectly reported the line number on which I had a syntax error in the config file–fortunately, this was just a failure to increment the line count on continuation lines (ending with a “\”) which is fixed in the -current release.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• After turning 20 years of activity, the GIMP developers have been happy to announce that the development cycle of the upcoming GIMP 2.10 open-source and cross-platform image editor software has started with the immediate availability of GIMP 2.9.2.

• With GCC 6 feature development now over I decided to run some benchmarks comparing GCC 5.2.0 against GCC 6.0.0 (the 20151124 snapshot) on an Intel Haswell-E Xeon system running Ubuntu.

• Days after celebrating the project’s 20th birthday, GIMP 2.9.2 has been released as the latest development snapshot towards the GIMP 2.10 image editor.

• But software freedom is not merely an ideology for me. I believe the ideology matters because I see the lives of developers and users are better when they have software freedom. I first got a taste of this IRL when I attended the earliest Perl conferences in the late 1990s. My friend James and I stayed in dive motels and even slept in a rental car one night to be able to attend. There was excitement in the Perl community (my first Free Software community). I was exhilarated to meet in person the people I’d seen only as god-like hackers posting on perl5-porters. James was so excited he asked me to take a picture of him jumping as high as he could with his fist in the air in front of the main conference banner. At the time, I complained; I was mortified and felt like a tourist taking that picture. But looking back, I remember that James and I felt that same excitement and just were expressing it differently.

• Some projects receive support from or are managed by companies or trade associations that benefit from the software the community produces. That is great as long as the community objectives and the company profit motives are aligned. Free Software is a great way for companies to work together. The services that the Conservancy provides allows projects to define their own terms and conditions for the community to work together. And companies can then join on equal terms. Making sure the project and community will work together for the public benefit.

Public Services/Government

• The Spanish city of Zaragoza continues to expand its use of free and open source software. The city administration now has 1200 of its 3000 PCs running the AZLinux desktop, which is based on Ubuntu Linux. On all workstations, LibreOffice is the default office suite, and the city by default uses the Open Document Format ODF.

• Government IT departments in Europe, over the past several years, have been eager to trumpet their interest in open-source software – and have been backing their interest up with action. Open-source has become a matter of national policy in the U.K., a critical part of the infrastructure at the European Commission, and the standard for the city of Munich.

• Portugal’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA) is offering IT training that is open to all public administration staff members. The courses are intended to help modernise public administrations and to speed up the introduction of eGovernment services.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The rise of data mining, mobile applications and social media, among many others, has dramatically changed the face of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and what they can accomplish. This has led to the creation of tools suited to various use cases. The most obvious place to begin when thinking about GIS is the web maps available through the Google Maps API.

Programming

• ARM’s Matthew Wahab posted the new patch series yesterday, “ARMv8.1 includes an extension to ARM which adds two Adv.SIMD instructions, vqrdmlah and vqrdmlsh. This patch set adds support for ARMv8.1 and for the new instructions, enabling the architecture with –march=armv8.1-a. The new instructions are enabled when both ARMv8.1 and a suitable fpu options are set, for instance with -march=armv8.1-a -mfpu=neon-fp-armv8 -mfloat-abi=hard.”

• First, a huge thanks to AFUP for the organization of this great event, as always, reception was beyond reproach.

• RPM of PHP version 5.6.16 are available in remi repository for Fedora ≥ 21 and remi-php56 repository for Fedora ≤ 20 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).

Leftovers

Hardware

• Chip geeks have produced an interactive blueprint of the ARM1 – the granddaddy of the processor cores powering billions of gadgets today, from Apple iPhones to Raspberry Pis, cameras, routers and Android tablets.

Security

• Underscoring just how hard it is to design secure cryptographic software, academic researchers recently uncovered a potentially serious weakness in an early version of the code library protecting Amazon Web Services.

• Ironically, s2n, as Amazon’s transport layer security implementation is called, was intended to be a simpler, more secure way to encrypt and authenticate Web sessions. Where the OpenSSL library requires more than 70,000 lines of code to execute the highly complex TLS standard, s2n—short for signal to noise—has just 6,000 lines. Amazon hailed the brevity as a key security feature when unveiling s2n in June. What’s more, Amazon said the new code had already passed three external security evaluations and penetration tests.

• Social engineering is one of the most powerful tools in the hacker’s arsenal and it generally plays a part in most of the major security breaches we hear about today. However, there is a common misconception around the role social engineering plays in attacks.

• Sony agreed to reimburse employees up to $10,000 apiece for identity-theft losses

• Malicious attacks on shoppers increased 40% on Cyber Monday in 2013 and 2014, according to EnigmaSoftware.com, an anti-malware and spyware company, compared to the average number of attacks on days during the month prior. Other cybersecurity software providers have identified the December holiday shopping season as the most dangerous time of year to make online purchases.

• “The attackers know that there are more people online, so there will be more attacks,” said Christopher Budd, Trend Micro’s global threat communications manager. “Cyber Monday is not a one-day thing, it’s the beginning of a sustained focus on attacks that go after people in the holiday shopping season.”

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Britain is at risk of being prosecuted for war crimes because of growing evidence that missiles sold to Saudi Arabia have been used against civilian targets in Yemen’s brutal civil war, Foreign Office lawyers and diplomats have warned.

• Advisers to Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, have stepped up legal warnings that the sale of specialist missiles to the Saudis, deployed throughout nine months of almost daily bombing raids in west Yemen against Houthi rebels, may breach international humanitarian law.

• Supporting neo-con military attacks in the Middle East is one of two prime articles of faith of a Blairite.

• Despite all the grandstanding and rhetoric from the French President and Western leaders, a critical point that needs to be emphasised is that Western governments are complicit in the Paris attacks and any future terror attacks (there will be more). If we put aside for a second the thesis that the Paris attack was a false flag operation or that French intelligence simply allowed it to happen, what can’t be disputed is that Western foreign policy has directly resulted in the rise of terrorism globally, most notably the rise of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.

• One manifestation of the shift is a turn toward large-scale terrorist attacks against distant targets, including the massacre in Paris and the bombing of a Russian charter jet over Egypt, Western intelligence officials say. But the group’s leaders are also devoting new resources and attention to far-flung affiliate groups that pledged their loyalty from places like Egypt, Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere. There are at least eight in all, according to Western officials.

• Not since Hitler ordered General Walther Wenck to send his non-existent 12th Army to rescue him from the Red Army in Berlin has a European leader believed in military fantasies as PR Dave Cameron did last week. Telling the House of Commons about the 70,000 “moderate” fighters deployed in Syria was not just lying in the sense that Tony Blair lied – because Blair persuaded himself to believe in his own dishonesty – but something approaching burlesque. It was whimsy – ridiculous, comic, grotesque, ludicrous. It came close to a unique form of tragic pantomime.

Transparency Reporting

• The four USAF military drone operators who recently blew the whistle and exposed the callousness and complete lack of concern for civilian casualties of the US drone assassination programme, (and received very little mainstream media exposure), yesterday found their bank accounts and credit cards all blocked by the US government. The effects of that on daily life are devastating. My source is their lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, through the Sam Adams Associates (of which we are both members).

• No criminal charges have been brought against any of the men, despite numerous written threats of prosecution. Their finances appear to have been frozen by executive action under anti-terrorist legislation. This is yet a further glaring example of the use of “anti-terror” powers against people who are not remotely terrorist.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Beijing’s residents have been advised to stay indoors after air pollution in the Chinese capital reached hazardous levels.

• The warning comes as the governments of more than 190 nations gather in Paris to discuss a possible new global agreement on climate change.

• The prospects for a meaningful agreement at the UN climate change talks beginning on Monday are bleak. As a result, so too are the prospects for the 100 million more people predicted to be living in poverty by 2030 as a result of global warming.

• Though framed by record high temperatures and an increasing number of extreme weather events, the Paris talks are already beset by the same problems that repeatedly dog climate change negotiations: the richest countries steadfastly refuse to meet legal commitments and shoulder their share of responsibility, preferring to uphold the desires of all-powerful corporate lobbies. Meanwhile, the poorest countries meet or exceed their responsibilities.

• In the last 25 years, dolphin-safe labeling of tuna managed to reduce unnecessary annual deaths of the mammals from over 100,000 to only 3,000—an astounding 97% reduction—but the World Trade Organization just effectively nullified this critical program.

• In order to placate Mexico as a member nation of the upcoming (and seemingly inevitable) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the WTO deemed dolphin-safe labeling a “technical barrier to trade”—even though that environmentally-conscious label is voluntary and applies equally to domestic and foreign companies. At issue are fishing methods that exploit the as-yet-unexplained symbiotic relationship between tunas and dolphins.

• At least 24 climate activists have been put under house arrest by French police, accused of flouting a ban on organising protests during next week’s Paris climate summit, the Guardian has learned.

• One legal adviser to the activists said many officers raided his Paris apartment and occupied three floors and a staircase in his block.

• French authorities did not respond to requests for comment but lawyers said that the warrants were issued under state of emergency laws, imposed after the terror attacks that killed 130 people earlier this month.

• Three days before the beginning of a critical international climate conference in Paris, one of the world’s most famous climate scientists, James Hansen, has written a withering criticism of President Obama’s approach.

• The Paris meeting will be attended by the heads of state of more than 130 countries, including Obama. Heading in, the United States has adopted a policy of calling for each country to set limits on carbon dioxide emissions, and will push for the adoption of technology to capture and store carbon dioxide. That approach, Hansen wrote in a new letter posted on his web site, “is so gross, it is best described as unadulterated 100 percent pure bullshit.”

• In his “communication” published on Friday, Hansen argued that world leaders are eager to avoid the embarrassment of the last major climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, which was largely ineffectual. This time, world leaders will reach a deal, Hansen says, and pat themselves on the back. This deal will likely include pledges to cut emissions by 2025. For example, the United States is expected to aim for cuts of 25 percent based on 2005 carbon levels.

• During the 1990s, the scale of the burning grew each year as the forestland converted into tree plantations in Sumatra and Kalimantan expanded. Plantation firms and the land-clearance contractors they hired almost exclusively use fire to clear land. Scientists assessing the forest fire damage say that approximately five million hectares of land were burned in 1997. Of this, 20 per cent was estimated to be forest, 50 per cent agricultural land, and 30 per cent non-forest vegetation and grasslands. Putting this in financial terms, scientists working for Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia have calculated that the direct and indirect short-term impacts of 1997/1998 have exceeded US$ 4 billion, equivalent to total annual health spending by both the public and private sectors.

• Indonesia’s forests are being ravaged by forest and peatland fires that are sparking a public health and environmental crisis – but how responsible is the palm oil industry?

• Volkswagen’s (VOWG_p.DE) top executives knew a year ago that some of the company’s cars were markedly less fuel efficient than had been officially stated, Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag reported, without specifying its sources.

• VW in early November revealed that it had understated the level of carbon dioxide emissions and fuel usage in around 800,000 cars sold mainly in Europe.

• The scandal, which will likely cost VW billions, initially centered on software on up to 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide that VW admitted was designed to artificially suppress nitrogen oxide emissions in a test setting.

• The Bild am Sonntag report contradicts VW’s assertion, however, that it only uncovered the false CO2 emissions labeling as part of efforts to clear up the diesel emissions scandal, which became public in September.

Finance

• This week on CounterSpin: While many folks go to family or friends for Thanksgiving dinner, somewhere around 15 million Americans have that holiday meal at a restaurant, with more millions ordering food to eat at home. What that means is that millions of restaurant workers don’t have a choice about where to have their Thanksgiving. And of course that’s only a small part of the things that make work in that industry difficult and, for many, precarious.

• Hervé Falciani sentenced in his absence for financial espionage by federal court for exposing wrongdoing at HSBC’s private Swiss bank

• The EU appears to have given the US oil company ExxonMobil access to confidential negotiating strategies considered too sensitive to be released to the European public during its negotiations with the US on the trade agreement TTIP, documents reveal.

• Officials also asked one oil refinery association for “concrete input” on the text of an energy chapter for the negotiations, as part of the EU’s bid to write unfettered imports of US crude oil and gas into the trade deal.

• The employers’ confederation BusinessEurope was even offered “contact points” with US negotiators in the State Department and Department of Energy, according to the cache of material which was released under access to documents laws.

• What would drive the boss of a Bavarian mechanical engineering company to launch a business initiative against TTIP? Martina Römmelt-Fella detailed her concerns about it to EurActiv Germany.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• So here we have US claims that Russian airstrikes are killing civilians backed up by statistics from a presumably independent human rights group. Meanwhile, when the US government claims to killed almost no civilians in its air attacks, the Post just takes the Pentagon’s word for it.

• Having been sat the last three hours in a lounge at Stansted, with a Sky News screen in front of me, it has been fascinating to watch them six times cover the Grant Shapps resignation and never mention the word sex. It was all apparently just about “office bullying.” There has also been some pontification about why, over Shapps and Coulson, Cameron is such a bad judge of people.

• The FBI on Friday announced the arrests in Oakland of two animal rights activists, Joseph Buddenberg and Nicole Kissane, and accused the pair of engaging in “domestic terrorism.” This comes less than a month after the FBI director said he does not consider Charleston Church murderer Dylann Roof a “terrorist.” The activists’ alleged crimes: “They released thousands of minks from farms around the country and vandalized various properties.” That’s it. Now they’re being prosecuted and explicitly vilified as “terrorists,” facing 10-year prison terms.

Censorship

• After considering the case for almost a month, the District Court of Stockholm ruled that copyright holders could not make Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget block Pirate Bay.

• The court found that Bredbandsbolaget’s operations do not amount to participation in the copyright infringement offences carried out by some of its ‘pirate’ subscribers.

• Pirate Bay is blocked by many European ISPs but anti-piracy outfits have always hoped that one day the notorious site would be restricted in Sweden.

• Recent events in Punjab are consistent with the Indian government’s strategy of public silence and local repression.

• Actress Divya Dutta feels at a time when everything is easily available online, the relevance of censorship on films in the country is questionable.

• The 38-year-old “Bhaag Milkh Bhaag” actress says she agrees with filmmaker Shyam Benegal, who recently said that censorship should be abolished.

• Divya says the audience today is quite sorted and should have the right to choose what they want to watch.

• Bollywood actor Emraan Hashmi has termed the censor board’s move to trim the length of kissing scene in the new James Bond film “Spectre” illogical and “going back to dark ages”.

• Censor board chief Pahlaj Nihalani has been criticised on social media as well as by his colleagues and Bollywood actors after it was revealed that board had shortened the length of kissing scenes in James Bond movie “Spectre”.

• Following the landslide election result for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) earlier this month, Myanmar appears to be transforming from one of the world’s most repressive regimes to a relatively free country.

• But signs of regression towards old habits by the military over the past year, and their continued presence and power of veto in parliament even after the election result, the future for democratic freedoms – including freedom of expression – is far from guaranteed.

• Kissing is also expunged, presumably on the assumption that lip-to-lip congress is a gateway behaviour that, if glimpsed even briefly, will inspire the innocent to fornicate in the streets like frenzied simians. Unobstructed cleavage is likewise a harbinger of civilisation’s demise.

• Speaking of which, we are living in one of the most censored countries. Have you personally, or the club you are part of, ever run into any censorship issues?

• Oh yes, of course. There was a whole series of shows that was banned because one joke was heard by, I don’t know, some censor from the government. But the joke was totally harmless. The thing is they never have a standard, like which line you can not cross. If they think you are not right, and then they can just ban you. Another time we were supposed to have an open mic and a couple of officials from the Cultural Bureau [Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture] said “OK you can have shows here, but we are going to censor you for the whole thing. If you guys are OK, then that will be OK. But if something happens we have to report it.” So we decided not to do the show.

• The organizers of a Miss Earth beauty pageant have refused to allow its Taiwanese contestant on stage or to be photographed by the press, after she refused to wear a sash bearing “Chinese Taipei,” according to an online post written by the contestant.

• At China File, Professor Hu Yong from Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication looks at China’s censorship of personal media, emphasizing the rise of pre-publication censorship by new media platforms, which in turn encourages self-censorship by users.

• China has sentenced three human rights activists to harsh prison terms for participating in an anti-censorship protest in 2013.

• The attorney for the three, Zhang Lei, told VOA that he is “shocked and angered” by the verdict, which gave a sentence of six years to activist Guo Feixiong.

• Zhang said the court added an extra criminal charge to his client’s case just moments before Friday’s trial started.

• China has jailed a leading civil rights activist for six years on charges of disturbing public order — in part for his role in protests against censorship at a popular liberal newspaper in Guangzhou. A court in southern Guangdong province on Friday passed the sentence on 48-year-old Guo Feixiong in a hearing off-limits to foreign media, his lawyer said. Two other activists were also jailed, in what human rights groups said was a sign of a deepening crackdown on civil liberties in China.

• Guo, a former university lecturer who has campaigned for greater freedoms in China for the past two decades, was detained after taking part in protests in January 2013 outside the offices of the Southern Weekly newspaper in Guangzhou. The protests were a response to the spiking of the paper’s New Year’s editorial, which had called for more thorough implementation of China’s constitution, including its promise of freedom of speech for all.

• A prominent Chinese rights activist, Guo Feixiong, was sentenced to six years imprisonment on Friday by a court in southern China, amid a continuing crackdown on human rights advocates across the country, his lawyer said on Friday.

• Two other activists, Liu Yuandong and Sun Desheng, were sentenced to three years and two-and-a-half years respectively, according to Guo’s lawyer, Zhang Lei.

• Hundreds of people demonstrated in Turkey Friday in support of two journalists from a leading newspaper being held on spying charges over a report suggesting Ankara shipped arms to rebels in Syria.

• Over 1,000 demonstrators, including a number of journalists and opposition MPs, gathered outside the Istanbul offices of Cumhuriyet daily shouting slogans such as “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism,” and “Tayyip thief, Tayyip liar, Tayyip killer”, referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

• Local media has reported that a third Turkish reporter has been arrested, amid concern Ankara is cracking down on free speech. Yesterday, protesters took to the streets following the arrest of two other journalists.

• The District of North Vancouver is looking to rein in “inappropriate, offensive, misleading, harassing or threatening” letters and emails sent to district staff and council members.

• The move however has some council watchers crying censorship.

• Ten news items the media ignored

• As long as credit cards are the dominant way to purchase items online, Visa and MasterCard will still hold this power over the smut peddlers of the world. So unless Bitcoin, or another relatively unregulated digital currency, happens to take off, banks will continue to have the power to silently shape the landscape of porn, enforcing their view of acceptable sex on the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

• The advertisements for the show wrap seats on New York subways. They feature an American flag with a German eagle and iron cross in place of the stars. There is also a flag with imperial Japanese imagery. The crimes against humanity by the Nazis during World War II were so gruesome that it’s a pretty shocking thing to see upon entering a subway car and Democratic mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio fielded complaints. He called the advertising campaign “irresponsible” and “offensive” and called for their removal.

• Last week, I wrote about a new Pew poll that showed that 40 percent of millennials would be in favor of government bans on speech offensive to minority groups. Many people took this as a dire sign that kids these days are Nae Nae–ing themselves straight into an authoritarian future, especially given all the recent talk about young people’s coddling and fragility.

• Forty percent of millennials believe the U.S. government should be able to censor speech that is considered offensive to minority groups, a new poll from Pew Research Center finds.

• The Pew poll identified a notable disparity in opinion between millennials—those ages 18 to 34—and those surveyed from three other age groups.

• The poll found that 27 percent of Generation X, those ages 35 to 50, favor such government censorship, as did 24 percent of baby boomers, ages 51 to 69.

• By comparison, only 12 percent of the so-called Silent Generation, ages 70 to 87, agreed.

• Exhibition highlights celebrated Iranian director’s approach to living and working under censorship.

• The move has been roundly criticized by the country’s academic community and opposition politicians who say it amounts to censorship.

• A New Zealand police spokesman says that the contract was designed to protect the police and the data from misrepresentation by researchers who could potentially “misunderstand” the data they were analyzing.

• Police also justify the agreement by pointing out that requests often involve access to confidential information and personal identifiers.

• “The research agreement which academics are expected to sign with police sets out our expectations, including that research is accurate, balanced and constructive,” said Mark Evans, the police force’s Deputy Chief Executive of Strategy, in a statement.

• The Green Party is calling on Police Minister Michael Woodhouse to ensure Police scrap controversial contracts that place onerous restrictions on academic researchers’ access to Police data, the Green Party says.

• Award-winning photographer Sayed Ahmed al-Mousawi was sentenced on Monday, 23 November 2015, to 10 years in prison and had his nationality revoked, along with 12 others, after covering a series of demonstrations in early 2014. Security forces detained Al-Mousawi for over a year without trial or official charges, accused him of being a part of a terrorist cell and subjected him to torture. The undersigned NGOs condemn the government’s continued attacks on independent journalism, policy of media censorship and severe restrictions on freedom of expression in Bahrain.

• PKR’s Kelana Jaya MP Wong Chen and Parti Amanah Negara’s (Amanah) Kuala Krai MP Dr Hatta Ramli said that Internet service providers (ISP) would be given the role of “internet police” in the new trade pact when it comes to copyrighted content.

• The Internet could face widespread censorship under the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) as Internet service providers (ISPs) would be free to remove copyrighted online content without having to face the music, warned Amanah lawmaker Mohd Hatta Ramli.

Privacy

• A newly discovered vulnerability can expose the real IP-addresses of VPN users with relative ease. The issue, which affects all VPN protocols and operating systems, was uncovered by Perfect Privacy who alerted several affected competitors to the threat before making it public.

• For future people, here’s how you can recover your PGP key if stored in your GNOME session.

• In-brief: Alphabet’s Nest Cam continues to run even after users have turned it “off,” the company acknowledged on Tuesday, raising questions about transparency and the potential for privacy abuses using the popular home surveillance device.

• The head of the UK ISP Andrews & Arnold, Adrian Kennard, has pointed out a number of major technical issues with the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill (aka the Snooper’s Charter). Kennard and other representatives of the UK Internet Service Provider’s Association (ISPA) met with the Home Office on Tuesday, where they presented a number of ethical, technical, and privacy related issues with the incoming new law. These issues, plus some of the Home Office’s responses, can be found in written evidence (PDF) penned by Kennard.

• The U.S. National Security Agency will end its daily vacuuming of millions of Americans’ phone records by Sunday and replace the practice with more tightly targeted surveillance methods, the Obama administration said on Friday.

• As required by law, the NSA will end its wide-ranging surveillance program by 11:59 p.m. EST Saturday (4:59 a.m. GMT Sunday) and expects to have the new, scaled-back system in place by then, the White House said.

• None of that is to say that the privacy and security concerns aren’t very real, of course, and ZDNet does a nice job of discussing those concerns. But it’s not new. Perhaps the better conversation to be had is why anyone in their right minds would think that Comcast deserves anyone’s trust to the level where users’ browsers should be injected with copyright violation notices in a system rife with abuse from pretty much every player involved.

• I paused a TV show last week as one of those lower-third ads promoting the local newscast was displayed. It screamed, “Encryption preventing police from catching criminals, more at 11.” There’s nothing subtle about that, I pointed out to my wife, nothing at all. Clearly, this “encryption” stuff is very dangerous and should be made illegal, right?

• Then the world was scarred by the attacks in Paris a few days later. Before any real news about the attacks made it to the mainstream media, we were already hearing how encryption was the reason these attacks succeeded. The New York Times posted a story to that effect, then pulled it and redirected the link to a completely different article about France’s retaliation. The Wayback Machine still has the original, which states, “The attackers are believed to have communicated using encryption technology.” This is the functional equivalent of stating, “The attackers are believed to have communicated using words or sounds.”

• It was always a good bet that the draft Investigatory Powers Bill would broaden data retention obligations to cover more categories of communications data. That was at the core of the Communications Data Bill, blocked in 2012 during the Coalition government and vowed after the May 2015 election to be resurrected.

• The draft Bill has duly delivered, accompanied by a blizzard of commentary about the propriety of forcing communications service providers to retain users’ browsing histories.

• [...]

• Internet connection records and the proposed restrictions on accessing them (clause 47 of the draft Bill) have become a lightning rod for the ensuing discussion: not just the rights and wrongs of requiring browsing data to be retained, but whether internet connection records as defined in the draft Bill can be matched to real categories of data processed by service providers.

• The focus on internet connection records is understandable. The Home Office’s Guide to the powers in the draft Bill focuses on internet connection records. The estimated cost increase in the Data Retention Impact Assessment mentions only internet connection records as a new category of retained data.

• The language in the US Justice Department statement is far from inspiring, written in bland legalese, but it still represents an important victory for the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• The Obama administration said on Friday that it would go ahead with the scheduled closure of the National Security Agency’s bulk phone records collection program. The USA Freedom Act, which passed in early June, outlined this weekend’s deadline.

• At 11:59PM ET tonight, the NSA will shut down its systems that collect bulk phone call data from Americans across the US. The move comes as planned, precisely six months after the USA Freedom Act was signed into law.

• But instead of being rewarded for developing a cutting-edge electronic spy system on the cheap, Binney and his crew were bureaucratically sandbagged by then-NSA Director Michael Hayden and his signals intelligence director, Maureen Baginsky.

• THINTHREAD’S deployment was officially canceled by Baginsky three weeks before the 9/11 attacks. Baginsky instead put American taxpayer money into a far more expensive, and ultimately failed, program named TRAILBLAZER.

• The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution is just 32 words: “No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

• Amongst very nerdy constitutional law circles, the Third Amendment is practically a joke. It’s never been the primary basis of a Supreme Court decision, and it only turns up rarely in legal cases. The reality is that the federal government isn’t going to be sending American soldiers to individual homes anytime soon. Even The Onion tackled the issue in 2007: “Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year.”

• This past week, a report came out that suggests “sheer luck” was one of the elements an NSA program needed to find useful info in the sea of surveillance data. The info came from an NSA in-house newsletter leaked by Edward Snowden, called SIDtoday. Dated March 23, 2011, it was written by a signals development analyst within the operation. In it, the author says that “by sheer luck, (and a ton of hard work) I discovered an important new access to an existing target and am working with TAO to leverage a new mission capability.” TAO stands for Tailored Access Operations, through which the NSA hacking team had collected 900 usernames and passcodes. The target in question was reportedly PDVSA, a Venezuelan state oil company also known as Petróleos de Venezuela.

• The U.S. National Security Agency accessed the internal communications of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela and acquired sensitive data it planned to exploit in order to spy on the company’s top officials, according to a highly classified NSA document that reveals the operation was carried out in concert with the U.S. embassy in Caracas.

• The March 2011 document, labeled, “top secret,” and provided by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, is being reported on in an exclusive partnership between teleSUR and The Intercept.

• By the time the National Security Agency (NSA) nixed its email surveillance program in December 2011, other surveillance initiatives that could “satisfy certain foreign intelligence requirements” had taken its place, according to a report in The New York Times.

• The Times caught wind of the alternative programs after obtaining documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. Included in the documents are inspector general reports that say the NSA ended the email program because it could meet requirements through other efforts—three other reasons for the program’s demise were redacted. The Times report said while the agency no longer conducts the bulk collection data from telecom companies, under the replacement initiatives the NSA still analyzes the social links found in email patterns.

• It is difficult to believe that Chancellor Angela Merkel believes her own words because sprouting the international terrorist card and national security, in relation to spying on France, EU targets, and German companies, appears absurd. Indeed, her comments about the role of German intelligence (BND) assisting a non-European Union entity, is truly untrustworthy and irresponsible. After all, why was the BND assisting the US National Security Agency (NSA) in spying on German companies and nations like France?

• Whistleblower Thomas Drake, who in 2010 became the first American charged with espionage in almost 40 years and who was a predecessor of Edward Snowden, applauds a new report by the PEN American Center accusing the government of failing to protect whistleblowers.

• The report comes after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said at last month’s Democratic debate that NSA whistleblower Snowden “could have gotten all the protections of being a whistleblower” instead of leaking materials to the press. PEN’s report shows that Clinton is wrong and that the U.S. government gives employees and contractors little assurance that they won’t be prosecuted, even if they go through sanctioned channels.

• It’s increasingly clear since the Paris terrorist attacks that the future of Americans’ privacy is largely in Silicon Valley’s hands.

• Valley leaders such as Apple’s Tim Cook, and Alphabet/Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai are going to need the technology community’s full support to ward off political pressure from the FBI and NSA, who want government access to encrypted data on mobile devices.

• The United States needs to aggressively pursue terrorists. But it must not allow emotions of the moment to result in an ill-conceived security policy undermining not only Americans’ privacy but also the success of the nation’s driving industry.

• And never mind that the Paris terrorists don’t appear to have relied upon encrypted messages, despite some misleading early reports.

• As our opinion leaders, lawmakers and intelligence community officials reflect on the events leading up to these terrible attacks, and what the appropriate response should be to better detect and thwart terrorist plots in the United States and throughout the world, it is critical that we first step back and take a deep breath.

• Under Schneier’s proposed policy, companies could not take away your rights to your data without your explicit permission…

• Earlier this month Microsoft announced the building and expansion of data storage facilities in Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom after an EU court invalidated a key U.S.-EU data transfer agreement in October — a response to mass National Security Agency surveillance programs revealed in the last two years.

• While the move represents the first time a major U.S tech company has admitted it can’t protect user data inside U.S. borders, the question of whether it will allow Microsoft to skirt the U.S. government’s ability to obtain user data is still very much in the air.

• “In terms of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), whether giving the data over to another company would avoid whatever legal obligations they’re under here is a very fact-specific question,” American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Alex Abdo told InsideSources. “I’m sure that the federal government would argue that so long as Microsoft has effective control over the data, they could still be subpoenaed for it or they could still be ordered or compelled to turn it over.”

• Microsoft has been fighting such a battle with the Justice Department since last year, when the government ordered the Silicon Valley giant to turn over user emails stored in a Microsoft data center in Dublin, Ireland as part of an FBI drug trafficking investigation.

• On June 5, 2013, the Guardian published a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order from the National Security Agency directing Verizon Business Network Services to provide daily records for a three month period of the “telephony metadata” for all telephone calls on its network. The order was part of thousands of documents stolen by Snowden while employed by a NSA contractor. In the months that followed, the government acknowledged it had been receiving this kind of data since at least 2006.

• Washington is awash in intelligence agencies, some of civilians and others of the military services, 17 by one count, and a lot of what they produce is gobbledygook. Like all bureaucracies, the intelligence agencies want to protect their turf first, and writing in words (many coined on the spot) that only a small audience can understand is a way of protecting the turf.

• The next big thing in computing could be a glass-encased chip embedded under the skin of your left hand.

• Think of it as an extension of the wearables that can track your movement, your sleep, your heart and pulse rate now. Chip implants can do so much more.

• In its early stages today, it can store data that can be read by Near Field Communication (NFC) readers. Technically speaking you can open your door, your car just by scanning your hand in the NFC reader. It can serve as your key or access pass to the gym, the library, the office, or wherever is it that requires identification.

• For example, the Islamic State was using encrypted apps and websites before the NSA’s surveillance operations were uncovered, John Chase, a cybersecurity specialist who has worked with the hacking group Anonymous, told The Washington Times Friday.

• He is said to have transmitted to the Mossad an impressive quantity of US documents, sometimes concerning the Near East, but particularly concerning the surveillance methods used by the US to spy on the Soviet Union. Tel-Aviv later sold some of these documents to Moscow, particularly NSA codes, in exchange for the immigration of a million Soviet citizens who claimed to be Jewish.

• Alexander’s IronNet has stirred allegations that he is profiting from the privileges of his former government post. Fueling the controversy was IronNet’s prospective collaboration with NSA’s Chief Technology Officer, a deal IronNet ultimately scuttled after it came to light last fall. While eyes are on the top brass, little attention has been paid to IronNet’s recruitment of young engineers, an issue that acutely plagued the NSA during Alexander’s tenure.

• Current and former government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of “hand-wringing” that has made “our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.” Former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, “In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn’t seem to be the scariest thing in the room.”

• Ultimately, it’s impossible to know just how successful sweeping surveillance has been, since much of the work is secret. But what has been disclosed so far suggests the programs have been of limited value. Here’s a round-up of what we know.

Civil Rights

• At least 24 climate activists have been put under house arrest by French police, accused of flouting a ban on organising protests during next week’s Paris climate summit, the Guardian has learned.

• One legal adviser to the activists said many officers raided his Paris apartment and occupied three floors and a staircase in his block.

• Saudi Arabia plans to execute 55 people convicted of terrorism in what appears to be a warning to would-be jihadists at a time of militant attacks on the kingdom.

• The prisoners were found guilty of involvement in al-Qaeda linked terror attacks which killed more than 100 civilians and 71 security personnel, the Saudi newspaper Okaz reported.

• The forthcoming executions come as human rights groups expressed growing fears that 21-year-old Ali Mohammed al-Nimr and his uncle could also be executed in the coming days.

• The Post article went on to note that the Bush administration “took the same approach,” and that while “many U.S. diplomats and human-rights groups had hoped Obama would shift his emphasis in Africa from security to democracy … that has not happened.” In fact, “‘There’s pretty much been no change at all,’ the official said. ‘In the end, it was an almost seamless transition from Bush to Obama.’”

• The italicized portion of the quote explains the crux of feigned U.S. concerns for human rights abuses: It’s never genuine, never anything more than a weapon cynically exploited to advance U.S. interests. The U.S. loves human-rights-abusing regimes and always has, provided they “cooperate”: meaning, honor U.S. dictates. On human rights abuses, such compliant regimes “get at least a free pass”: at least, meaning either passive acquiescence or active support. The only time the U.S. government pretends to care in the slightest about human rights abuses is when they’re carried out by “countries that don’t cooperate,” in which case those flamboyant objections to abuses are used by U.S. officials as punishment for disobedience: to “ream them as best we can.”

• As a film, The Spymasters is a bit of a failure. In aesthetic, tone and pacing it seems directly based on The Gatekeepers, a 2012 film that interviewed all the former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police. However, the former spooks in Spymasters aren’t nearly as candid as the Israelis. This new film is slow-moving and, at a solid two hours, long-winded. The first 15 minutes consist of throat-clearing platitudes, it is often hard to tell who is speaking, and interruptions from directors Gedeon and Jules Naudet frequently take the viewer out of the experience entirely.

• Whom to waterboard? Which village to drone? A bizarre documentary explores the spy elite’s secret suffering

• Calvin Cheng, a former Nominated Member of Parliament and current member of the Media Literacy Council recently shared his ideas of how to tackle ISIS, which involved killing not just the extremists, but also children.

• Some members of the public were troubled by how a sitting member of the Media Literacy Council – which was set up to encourage Singaporeans to “use, create and share content safely and responsibly” – appeared to be advocating the pre-emptive killing of children, and wrote to Professor Tan Cheng Han, chairman of the Media Literacy Council.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• It is very annoying when our fast Internet connection goes down. Sometimes it is due to some technical error or sometime in case of wired Internet the wires damage causes the Internet completely shutdown. But, it’s all unexpected. We can’t go and fix it. Our ISP (Internet Service Provider) fixes it as soon as possible. But what if your ISP is limit bandwidth and block you to access some sites or the whole Internet world upto a limited speed.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• A Russian court has ordered a Church of Scientology branch in Moscow to close after a dispute over its registered US trademarks.

• The Moscow City Court backed calls from Russia’s Ministry of Justice to close the church after accepting the department’s argument that the church cannot call itself a religious organisation if it owns a registered trademark.

• The Church of Scientology has said it will appeal against a decision by a Russian court to close its Moscow branch, describing the ruling as a “disease of the justice system”.

• In a statement sent to WIPR, the church said it will appeal against the decision to the country’s Supreme Court.

Copyrights

• With a lot of people streaming music and video from services such as Spotify, Pandora and Netflix, torrenting is less of a visible conflict than ten years ago. But similar fights continue in the shape of net neutrality and privacy, with the same values: it was never about the money.

• Internet provider Cox Communications is not allowed to use derogatory terms to describe Rightscorp during their upcoming trial. Terms such as “copyright troll,” “blackmailer,” and “extortionist” are off-limits and the same is true for Rightscorp’s dire financial position.

• If you get a letter through the post accusing you of Internet piracy, you must be guilty. That’s the message from most copyright trolls and infuriatingly, even some ‘neutral’ lawyers commenting on these cases. But while it might seem daunting, putting up a fight is not only the right thing to do, but can also cause claimants to back off.

• A 30-YEAR-OLD MAN accused of piracy has had to make a solemn confession mini-movie to avoid being sued.

• The video is bleak at the start, reminiscent of a hostage video or one of those confessions you might have read about in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is earnest, and perhaps a bit scary, but a storyline soon develops.

• It is not in the English language, which makes the message slightly hard to understand, but ultimately it warns that you do not want to be caught pirating anything. It appears to be a short rags-to-riches story of a man who enjoyed piracy, then met the police, and was sad. Tom Hanks might try for a US remake.

• The UK’s 2014 private copying exception, which allowed you to make personal copies of your own music, including format-shifted versions, has now been definitively withdrawn, according to The 1709 Blog. As a result, it is once more illegal to make personal backups of your own music, videos or e-books, rip CDs and DVDs to standalone digital files, or upload your music to the cloud.

• The chief judge of an IP court in Finland has expressed concern that ‘copyright-troll’ piracy lawsuits will cause chaos if a law firm follows through with threats to sue hundreds of Internet users. Using the courts is the ultimate weapon to make alleged pirates settle but experts believe that copyright owners could have an uphill battle.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.