● 12.01.15

● Links 1/12/2015: Porteus Kiosk 3.6.0, Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa”

Posted in News Roundup at 9:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• IBM wants software developers to make applications more accessible to speakers of different languages by using a new cloud platform, IBM Globalization Pipeline, that provides automatic translations.

Kernel Space

• This season’s spirit of giving fits right in with the Linux and open source philosophy. Whether you’re paying it forward in line for coffee, volunteering at a local food bank, or contributing to an open source project in your spare time, giving back to the community is what it’s all about.

• In keeping with that tradition, the Linux Foundation is offering a special Cyber Monday deal on training and certification to help you build your job skills or transition to a new career.

• This week only, you can sign up for training and certification as a Linux system administrator for a special rate of $179 (regularly $499)! This special deal includes.

• Just a few moments ago, Linus Torvalds announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the third RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel.

• I’ve been hacking on the bisection scripts for quite some time now. Things got stalled for a bit in October/November. I introduced several bugs which caused me to lose multiple days of testing verification so I took a break and worked on other things to relieve my frustrations. They are now at the point where they could use some testing besides my own. Here’s a walk through of what I have

• Matthew Garrett’s recent very good response to Eric Raymond’s recent post opposing inclusiveness efforts in free software reminded me of something I’ve been noticing more and more often: a very substantial proportion of the female developers I encounter working on the kernel are from non-European cultures where I (and I expect most people from western cultures) lack familiarity with the gender associations of all but the most common and familiar names.

Graphics Stack

• It’s coming a few days late, but Mesa 11.1 Release Candidate 2 was officially released today.

• Mesa 11.1 when released later in December will have many new features but doesn’t bump the overall OpenGL version support. Now being past the Mesa Git branching, Mesa 11.1-RC2 is just about bug/regression fixing.

• Today, November 30, 2015, Collabora’s Emil Velikov has announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Mesa 11.1.0 open source 3D graphics library software.

Benchmarks

Applications

• Images are everywhere, from a small blog post to social media. One of the best ways to attract customers to your content is through a unique and attractive graphic that describes what the whole content is all about. There are numerous software that let you design images for blogs and social media, but that needs to start from scratch. What if we have tools that get us going right from we open the tools for the first time. That’s what we are going to talk about. We’re going to mention 5 best online image editor free & premium tools to create illustrative images for your websites, blogs and social media etc. without any hard work. So let’s do it.

• The famous Popcorn Time app that allows people to stream movies and TV shows directly from torrents is back after the development was suspended for a few weeks.

• After 1.5 years of work we released APT 1.1 this week! I’m very excited about this milestone.

• Lately it seems like cloud computing is all the rage. Unfortunately, the cloud computing bandwagon has completely forgotten about users with limited connectivity.

• This article will dive head first into solutions that allow folks to enjoy the advantages of running their own personal cloud without relying on off-site servers.

Proprietary

• I tested Laptop Mode Tools in Ubuntu 15.10, and it’s available in the official repos. You can use the Ubuntu Software Center to install it, and in this case, it’s quite useful because it also provides the option to install a couple more packages, one for Ethernet devices settings and the other one for Advanced Power Management (APD).

Instructionals/Technical

• We’ve created the following tutorial at the request of our readers who asked us to post some easy-to-follow instructions on how to install the next-generation Unity 8 user interface on the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Games

• So I clicked through to Amazon and then noticed that the full price is more than actually $10,000. So apparently it’s on sale and you can save $2900 or 27% if you buy it for $7939. What a deal! Talk about saving some big bucks! Well not really but if you’re seriously considering paying $8,000 for a gaming rig, then what’s another $2900, right?

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Today marks the surprise release of Enlightenment 0.20! The E20 development cycle has taken more than a year and saw more than 1,890 patches merged.

• The prominent features of Enlightenment 0.20 include full Wayland support, new screen management infrastructure and dialogs, new audio mixer infrastructure, internal widgets being replaced with Elementary, improved FreeBSD support, and a new Geolocation module.

• The developers behind the Enlightenment open-source desktop environment have had the great pleasure of announcing today, November 30, 2015, the immediate availability for download of the final release of Enlightenment 0.20.0.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• So, what to take a away from this? In a reduced form, Plasma can be a huge help to create also Android applications. The mobile components which we’re developing with Plasma Mobile as target in mind have had their first real world exposure and a lot of fixes, we got very useful feedback from the Subsurface community which we’re directly feeding back into our components.

• MKV Extractor Qt is yet another tool that helps users manage MKV video files, and it has this function and this function only.

• The MKV container is becoming a lot more prominent in the industry, which is causing some problems to the community. This is only a container, and in theory, it should work on any systems and in any conditions, but that’s not happening. Sometimes users need to unpack the MKV file for various purposes.

• KShutdown is an application that allows users to customize the shutdown procedure for Linux and Windows OS, with features like time delay or proper notifications.

Distributions

New Releases

• I’m pleased to announce that Porteus Kiosk 3.6.0 is now available for download.

• New version sums all the development which happened in the last 3 months and which can be tracked with details in the changelog to the Porteus Kiosk ‘automatic updates’ service.

• After three months of hard work, Tomasz Jokiel has announced the release and immediate availability for download of the Gentoo-based Porteus Kiosk 3.6.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• We are happy to announce our eight update for Manjaro 15.09 (Bellatrix)!

• Archlinux decided to go with Xorg-Server 1.18.0 even with the fact that Catalyst doesn’t support that server yet. Therefor we used once more our overlay feature which blocks that series from updating. However I already updated some drivers against the 1.17 series of the Xorg-Server, including the latest Nvidia drivers.

• On the last day of November, the developers of the Manjaro Linux operating system have announced the release of a new stable update for the Manjaro Linux 15.09 (Bellatrix) operating system.

Ballnux/SUSE

• It has been seven years since I’ve joined SUSE (for second time, but that’s different story). As everything has to come to the end, I’ve decided to make a change in my life and leave safety net of being employed and go for new experience with freelancer life.

• [...]

• PS: It’s not that SUSE would be bad place to work. It’s actually pretty great if you’re looking for work with free software. You work there on free software, with great people and you get quite some freedom. As bonus once or twice in a year, there is Hackweek which you can spend on anything. And of course they have lot of open positions :-).

Red Hat Family

• Baird maintained its 85 price target and outperform rating, but Red Hat fell 1.3% in the stock market today, to 81.41. Red Hat stock hit an all-time high of 83 on Nov. 5 and is up 18% this year.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), of the Technology sector was at a price of 82.5 today, marking a change of -0.02%. Red Hat, Inc. forecasts a earnings per share growth of 2.20% over the next year. Its return on investment is currently 8.70% and its debt to equity is currently 0.53. Red Hat, Inc. has a market cap of 15081 and its gross margin is 84.80%.

• Analysts on the street covering shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), are projecting a one year target price of $85.058, according to Zacks Research. Research brokerage firms make stock recommendations, predict future earnings as well as the future stock price (price target) of the equity. The lowest estimate sees the stock going to $72 while the most bullish has a lofty target of $92.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2 was officially released on November 19 and barely a week later, Oracle Linux 7.2 is now available too. Oracle Linux is based on RHEL and tends to track releases more closely than other RHEL clones. Officially Oracle calls its release Oracle Linux 7 Update 2 and makes it available with the upstream RHEL kernel as well as the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) release 3.

Fedora

• Well for one we all need to advertise Linux to the general public, it has been about 5 years since there was a push to advertise Linux to the general public. (example: The Kid Commerical by IBM in 2005)

• Our displays at events need to show the public what Linux can do for them for their daily computer tasks. (examples be it from email, web browsing to using Linux for Amateur Radio Emergency Communications).

• Follow-up tests on this MacBook Air are likely to happen with Ubuntu and potentially other Linux distributions too. There will also be more tests to come; with OS X El Capitan, some of the PTS test profiles that formerly worked on OS X weren’t working on this new release and so those additional benchmarks will come later on.

• Fedora Project’s Platform and Program Manager, Mr. Jan Kurik, published another feature proposal for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system, the implementation of a default local DNS resolver.

• I built perl-podlators-4.00 in Rawhide (only).

• My history in Fedora technically pre-dates the Fedora Project itself, I’ve been a member of the user community since Red Hat Linux 7 and I still have my boxed set of “Deluxe Workstation” sitting on my book shelf. However, my time as an active contributor to the Fedora Project is far more recent having started during the Fedora 8 cycle when I both became a Fedora Packager and a member of the Fedora QA community.

Debian Family

• The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: fontforge, golang-github-tinylib-msgp, libpango-perl, libparanamer-java, libxaw, sqljet, stringtemplate4, uzbl, zope-mysqlda.

• Presented at MiniDebConf Cambridge 2015 on the current status of Debian’s Reproducible Builds effort.

• I recently presented a talk at the Debian miniconf in Cambridge. This was a new talk explaining what goes on in a web browser to get a web page on screen.

• The presentation was filmed and my slides are also available. I think it went over pretty well despite the venues lighting adding a strobe ambiance to part of proceedings.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After failing to build working kernels for the past few weeks, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA is finally offering working daily Linux kernel builds.

• Today’s kernel build following Linux 4.4-rc3 is the first since the release candidates began to have a successful build of Linux 4.4. All the builds up to now were borked due to a Lustre/LNET dependency issue.

• The next Ubuntu desktop with Unity 8 cannot launch with the same theme as the old Unity 7, although that seemed like the case, until now at least. The team has finally changed the theme for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Unity 8, and it looks really, really good.

• Today, November 30, Marcos Costales has just announced a new update for its awesome uNav GPS navigation app for Ubuntu Phone devices, a release that introduces some interesting new features.

• On the last day of November, which also happened to be the first day of the 49th week of 2015, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers on the upcoming OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phones.

Flavours and Variants

• After a couple of months of hard work, the crew behind the Linux Mint project has pushed today, November 30, 2015, the final builds of the Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa) computer operating system.

• The developers of the Deepin Linux distribution designed from the ground-up to provide users with a beautiful, secure, stable, user-friendly, safe and reliable computer operating system have announced the release of Deepin 15 Alpha 2.

Devices/Embedded

• When the Raspberry Pi Zero was announced last week, I thought that I had very little chance of getting one anytime soon. It was obvious to me that this wonderful little computer would sell like the proverbial hotcakes, plus the fact that they were being given away with The MagPi magazine on UK newsstands meant that whatever initial production run there had been was going to be gone very, very quickly.

• Today I share more information and first-hand experiences with the Raspberry Pi Zero, including loading, booting, configuring and using the PiHub for both USB expansion and power.

• The Raspberry Pi Zero, a small ARM-based, Linux-friendly computing device that costs a mere $5, may be an obvious stocking stuffer this Christmas. But obtaining one will be tough, as all the devices sold out within a day of launch on Nov. 26.

• 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.

• That’s $30 cheaper than its original Raspberry Pi model, which went on sale in 2012. And $4 less than the CHIP, which raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter earlier this year.

• “Matrix” is a sensor-studded Ubuntu Snappy based home automation and surveillance hub that supports voice automation and gesture and face recognition.

• In 2014, AdMobilize applied its computer vision (CV) expertise to the AdBeacon, a recently upgraded Linux-based device that sits next to display advertising and watches, and analyzes public response (see farther below). Now, the Miami Beach-based firm has gone to Kickstarter to sell a Linux-based home automation hub called the Matrix, which uses similar computer vision technology, including gesture and face recognition.

• The Turris Omnia is different from most other routers in a number of ways. The biggest — and coolest — is that it ships with an OpenWrt-based OS that lets you hack it to do just about anything you could do with a desktop Linux system. Use the integrated virtual server for anything you want, like an OwnCloud or Tonido instance or an encrypted chat host.

• The slimmer, completely air-cooled Black Lab Briq Gen 5 mini-PC has Mac Mini-like specs and runs Black Lab Linux on a Core i3 or i5 CPU.

• PC/OpenSystems has offered a commercial version of the Black Lab Linux distribution since 2007, and sponsors Black Lab Software, which sells the community version. The company has now released its fifth generation of the Black Lab BriQ mini-PC. The system is pre-installed with the commercial version of the Ubuntu-based Black Lab Linux, with prices starting at $450, including a three-year warranty.

• iWave has announced an industrial temperature Qseven form-factor module that runs Linux on the new, dual-core, Cortex-A15 Renesas RZ/G1-M SoC.

• Bangalore, India based iWave Systems is typically associated here with SODIMM-style computer-on-modules based on Freescale SoCs, such as the iW-RainboW-G18M-SODIMM i.MX6UL. For its new iW-RainboW-G20M-Q7 module, iWave is branching out with a Qseven form factor COM built around the recently announced Renesas RZ/G series of ARM SoCs. Specifically, the iW-RainboW-G20M-Q7 module runs Linux on the dual-core, 1.5GHz RZ/G1M, which uses Cortex-A15 architecture, as opposed to the dual-core Cortex-A7 based RZ/G1-E.

Phones

Android

• Omate probably isn’t the first brand that comes to mind when you think of smartwatches, but the truth is it was one of the first to launch a 3G-enabled smartwatch. It’s been over two years since then but such devices have yet to fully take off, not to mention that LG has recently canned its latest LTE watch. But that’s good news for Omate who is launching the Rise, a $200 fully circular smartwatch, via Indiegogo on December 7th. Much like its predecessor, the Rise runs on full Android 5.1 (customized with Omate’s new OUI 4.0) instead of Android Wear, meaning you can side load any regular Android app — including all the missing Google Play services — onto it. But of course, you’ll have to get used to poking around on that 1.3-inch, 360 x 360 round LCD. Additionally, the Rise also works as a notification watch with phones running on either iOS 9 or Android 4.4 and above.

• Motorola or LG? It’s not an easy question to answer this year, at least when you’re comparing the Moto X Pure Edition (also known as the Moto X Style) against the LG G4. At first glance, they’re actually more similar than you might expect (same CPU, GPU, memory, etc.), though there are some important differences worth underlining.

• Hello there, mobile photographer! Fancy trying out a new camera app? We found one that may be to your liking — it’s free and also open-source. Open Camera might not look like much, given its bare-bones interface, but as we all know, looks tend to deceive! So, yeah, check this out — Open Cam gives you several interesting photography-related functions. There’s the option to auto-stabilize shots so your scenes are near-perfect level, no matter what’s going on. In terms of camera modes and settings, the application offers flash, torch, focus, scene, color effects, white balance, ISO, exposure compensation, exposure lock, and face detection.

Free Software/Open Source

• LEGO bricks: To a parent, they’re a virtual minefield, hidden away in the carpet to inflict unimaginable pain from a seemly innocent barefoot step. But to a child, they are a tool for creatively engineering anything the mind can imagine. And for many, they are our first foray into open source. The instructions with a LEGO set start out as rigid rules, and become merely guidelines as children learn to remix, adapt, and extend the “code” which defines the object being built, and then be shared with anyone nearby.

• Thomas said IBM has another reason to open-source its machine learning code – it helps the company recruit new AI experts, which are currently in great demand.

• I’ve worked on many projects in my life so far, and almost all of them involve open source somewhere along the line. Below is a brief summary of some of the projects I worked on and the tools I used to work on projects in my own time, outside of work.

• At the end of every year I always like to donate some small amount of money to the open source projects I spend the most time using. If everyone donated even 1/10th of the money free software saved them each year to the projects that they use, I have no doubt that a lot more open source software would exist today.

• ownCloud is a self-hosted open source file sync and share server. Like “big boys” Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and others, ownCloud lets you access your files, calendar, contacts, and other data. You can synchronize everything (or part of it) between your devices and share files with others. But ownCloud can do much more than its proprietary, hosted-on-somebody-else’s-computer competitors.

• We’ve been experimenting with VOIP in our school, primarily for internal communication. I’ve set up both asterisk and freeswitch servers, and have been quite frustrated with the limitations of both.

• Asterisk only allows one registration to be connected to each extension. Yes, there are ways to work around this restriction (for extension 101, set up multiple extensions – 980101, 981101, 982101, and then set up a ring group 101 that rings those extensions simultaneously), but it’s an incredibly irritating workaround.

Events

• Since I moved into the island, one of the first things I did was to find out if there were any people around interested in free & open source technologies. Luckily, there was this community called fossaegean, which pretty much stands for Free & Open Source Software Community of the University of the Aegean. However, it was not that active back then.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• If you live in the web browser, using a Linux-based operating system makes a lot of sense. By combining say, Ubuntu and Google Chrome, you can have a very secure and easy-to-use platform running the world’s best web browser. A bloated and heavy Windows 10, for instance, could be unnecessary.

• The first signs of the end of 32bit are on the wall – starting with Linux. I wonder how long Google will continue to support 32bit Chrome on Windows. For some strange reason, Microsoft is still selling 32bit Windows 10.

• The brief announcement was made an hour ago by Dirk Pranke on the Chromium-dev group, and it informs users of Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux distributions that starting with March 2016, the Google Chrome web browser will no longer be available for 32-bit hardware platforms.

Mozilla

• While Mozilla continues to give away its open source products for free, including the Firefox web browser, it is still generating growing revenues. Mozilla’s newly published 2014 financial statements show that the open source software group made more money than ever before in 2014, though 2015 will be a year of challenges.

• How important is Google to open source? Not quite as important as it was up until a year ago, when Mozilla announced that it was no longer receiving large sums of cash from the search giant. Yet it turns out Firefox and other Mozilla products are still thriving without as much Google support.

• When Mozilla released the first Firefox Developer Edition there wasn’t much difference from the regular Firefox release, but all that changed recently.

• Firefox DE 44, delivered in early November, packs in a wealth of new features and improvements, particularly for anyone working with HTML5 and CSS3 animation.

• The Developer Edition’s Page Inspector tool adds an animation panel that allows developers to step through animations node by node and easily scrub, pause, and inspect each animation on the webpage.

SaaS/Big Data

• According to a new best practices survey from TDWI there is a big increase in how many enterprises plan to have Hadoop clusters in production. By Q1 of next year, 60% of survey respondents said they will be in production, up from 16% when the report was published earlier in 2015.

• In addition, only 6% of organizations have ruled out Hadoop, down from 27% in 2012, which points to a future for Hadoop as a common enterprise tool.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice is hailed as the best open source office suite available right now, and we keep hearing about the amazing adoption rate, but we hardly get any real numbers. That changed today after Collabora released some statistics about LibreOffice usage and it’s more than impressive.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Besides this, the new Camunda Modeler is an open source tool for creating BPMN diagrams. It is based on the well-known project bpmn.io and targets business users as well as software developers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Conservancy provides a lot of services to member projects, including financial and administrivia. Conservancy also provides license enforcement services, including support of a high-profile suit against VMWare. Although Conservancy uses litigation as a last resort, it’s sometimes necessary. However, this has lead to some corporate sponsors pulling their funding.

• The Free Software Foundation is striving to provide more and simpler ways for hackers to contribute to the GNU Project. For projects that are assigned to the FSF (such as GNU Emacs or GCC), dealing with the paperwork for assigning contributions can sometimes be a bottleneck in the process. We are always working on ways to make assignment itself simpler. We have accepted GPG-signed documents from U.S. contributors for some time now. Our legal counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center recently gave us the all clear to begin accepting GPG and electronic signatures from contributors in Italy. We would also like to thank Carlo Piana for providing local counsel on this issue as well.

• As many of you are aware, twice a year we mail a new edition of the FSF Bulletin to our members and supporters via the good old United States Postal Service. The Bulletin comes together in just a few weeks, and this time we had to make an extra quick turnaround after celebrating FSF30.

Public Services/Government

• Germany’s Aerospace Centre DLR is steadily increasing its use of free and open source software. The DLR is already using open source tools for many of its software development projects, and also makes several of its solutions available as open source. In addition, the research institute plans in the long-term to use open source for it PC operating systems, office productivity and collaboration tools.

Standards/Consortia

• One of the core topics of this blog -at least one of the main reasons it came to existence- was open standards: their benefits, their advantages, and their value as a fundamental component for digital innovation and ultimately software freedom. This is still the case of course, but today I will try to show how one open standard in particular, ODF, has failed in its approach until now and could very well make a remarkable comeback.

• This is not to say that ODF is a bad idea or that it is not a good standard; it is all this and much more. However I have realized with the hindsight of several years since it became an official ISO standard that the expectations about its adoption and its development have been defined the wrong way. Hence the title of this post.

• Electronic books, or eBooks, have been around for a long time, but convenient devices upon which to read them are a relatively recent development. Between mobile phones, tablets, and dedicated eBook readers, chances are you have some device in your life that you can use to read an electronic book upon. That’s great for leveling up on how much you read, but it begs the question of what open file formats are out there for eBooks, and which ones are best.

• Open standards should be a priority in public administration’s IT projects, says Noel Cuschieri, enterprise architect at Malta’s Information Technology Agency (MITA). Open standards are a strategic part of Malta’s IT policy, Cuschieri says.

Leftovers

• Back in the day, way back in the day perhaps, there were interesting places to hang out online. FidoNet provided some discussion groups — some local, some more national or international. Then there was Usenet, with the same but on a more grand scale.

• There were things I liked about both of them.

• They fostered long-form, and long-term, discussion. Replies could be thoughtful, and a person could think about it for a day before replying.

• Socially, you would actually get to know the people in the communities you participated in. There would be regulars, and on FidoNet at least, you might bump into them in different groups or even in real life. There was a sense of community. Moreover, there was a slight barrier to entry and that was, perhaps, a good thing; there were quite a lot of really interesting people and not so many people that just wanted answers to homework questions.

Science

• The computational requirements for weather forecasting are driven by the need for higher resolution models for more accurate and extended forecasts. In addition, more physics and chemistry processes are included in the models so we can observe the very fine features of weather behavior. These models operate on 3D grids that encompass the globe. The closer the points on the grid are to each other, the more accurate the results. Today most global grid models use a range of 10 to 25 kilometer separation between points; the Holy Grail of weather forecasting is to reduce that separation to one kilometer or less.

Health/Nutrition

• There are 222 days left until an unprecedented treaty between tobacco company Philip Morris International (PMI) and the European Union expires. The 2004 deal saw Europe halt all its legal claims against PMI in exchange for the multinational’s cooperation in the fight against cigarette smuggling. The EU had previously sued PMI and other tobacco companies in the US over suspected involvement in smuggling operations.

Security

• A little more than a year ago, I urged manufacturing companies testing the IoT waters to leave the work of bringing Internet connectivity to their traditionally unconnected products to those who understand what’s at stake. I’m not alone in my concerns that the IoT brigade will bring with it an avalanche of staggeringly insecure products that will find their way into our daily lives.

• What we’re seeing right now is a hopefully imperfect storm of security challenges that, with any luck, will not result in global security and privacy breaches. In one corner, we have companies like Dell and Lenovo distributing computers with wide-open root CAs, allowing anyone with a small amount of skill to crib a certificate and spoof SSL websites, run man-in-the-middle attacks, and install malicious software on those Windows systems with nary a whimper from the “protections” in place to prevent such issues.

• Huawei isn’t planning on patching several flaws in seven models of WiMax routers that are not being supported anymore by the company, according to a security researcher.

• Huawei isn’t planning on patching several flaws in seven models of WiMax routers that are not being supported anymore by the company, according to a security researcher.

• Pierre Kimpublished a list of the affected models, which are still used in countries including Ivory Coast, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Philippines, Bahrain and Ukraine.

• WordPress and Magento sites are the main targets. The software had infected 2000 sites by 12 November and surpassed 3000 two weeks later.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Often in the past few days, BBC listeners and viewers, and readers of the unpopular newspapers, might have had the impression that Britain is discussing the pros and cons of an intervention in the Labour Party, rather than of an intervention in Syria.

• As I read the papers and listened to BBC Radio 4 on Friday morning last week, I was baffled to find that the main item was not the plan for war, but the divisions on this subject within the Labour Party.

• I think you can measure the death of democracy by the sheer audacity of the propaganda that government can get away with. Michael Fallon today on the Marr programme churned out the “70,000 moderate rebels” lie with a smooth bland face, and mentioned only the Free Syrian Army when pressed on who they were exactly. This is dishonesty on an epic scale.

• [...]

• As does the fact that a substantial number of MPs of the official “opposition” have spent the weekend actively colluding with government ministers to forward the government’s militarist agenda.

• When US special forces raided the compound of an Islamic State leader in eastern Syria in May, they made sure not to tell the neighbours.

• The target of that raid, the first of its kind since US jets returned to the skies over Iraq last August, was an Isis official responsible for oil smuggling, named Abu Sayyaf. He was almost unheard of outside the upper echelons of the terror group, but he was well known to Turkey. From mid-2013, the Tunisian fighter had been responsible for smuggling oil from Syria’s eastern fields, which the group had by then commandeered. Black market oil quickly became the main driver of Isis revenues – and Turkish buyers were its main clients.

• As a result, the oil trade between the jihadis and the Turks was held up as evidence of an alliance between the two. It led to protests from Washington and Europe – both already wary of Turkey’s 900-mile border with Syria being used as a gateway by would-be jihadis from around the world. [...] direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking Isis members was now “undeniable”.

• There is a right way to approach a question as serious as whether the UK should extend airstrikes against Islamic State to Syria – and a wrong way. The wrong way is to view it through the lens of the bitter debate about the future of the Labour party and in particular its leader. For all the drama of Monday’s decision to allow a free vote, the threat of Isis is too grave to be used merely to undermine or shore up the position of Jeremy Corbyn.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Indonesia surprised the environmental community earlier this year when its climate action plan shifted away from saving forests and towards ramping up clean energy. But then its forests started burning, and now in Paris there are signs that forests and ecosystem restoration will play a larger role in the country’s climate strategy.

• In the last few months, a team International Animal Rescue (IAR) has been working round the clock to save orang-utans from burning forests in Ketapang, West Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo.) “Thus far our Rescue Team has rescued more than 20 orang-utans from burnt forest and we are still rescuing more. What is worse is that we don’t know how many orang-utans have perished before we were able to rescue them. This is by far the largest number of rescues IAR has had to conduct in the area since we opened our orang-utan centre in 2009 and it is a deeply worrying indication of the plight of orang-utans in Indonesia,” says Tantyo Bangun, Chairman of IAR Indonesia.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• It’s hard to say what was more incongruous: the description of someone who had reportedly admitted carrying out a deadly act of terror as a “gentle loner” or the presumption that phrase could be attached to someone who “occasionally unleashed violent acts” toward women and others.

• Faced with a barrage of criticism on Twitter and elsewhere, the Times rewrote the lead of that story to make Dear less “gentle.” Now the same reporters reported that “neighbors said they barely knew him”—the same neighbors, presumably, to whom the earlier description was attributed.

Censorship

• A few days earlier, an FBI agent had come by Calyx’s offices and handed Nick a “national security letter” demanding that Calyx turn over sensitive information about one of its subscribers. The letter included a gag order prohibiting Calyx from disclosing to anyone that it had received the demand. It also included an attachment listing the kinds of information that the FBI wanted Calyx to turn over.

• Britain First, a far-right group that opposes immigration and brands itself a “patriotic resistance and ‘frontline’ for our long suffering people”, accused Facebook of fascism after its page on the social network was briefly taken down.

• The group saw its page briefly taken down for violating rules on Monday, with a message saying its page had been “unpublished” and that Facebook does not tolerate hate speech.

• However, the page was subsequently re-published. “The page was removed in error but has now been restored,” a Facebook spokesman said.

• The Facebook page is known for publishing anti-immigrant, and pro-army and Christian messages on Facebook, with its fan page receiving more than 1.1 million “likes”. However, it has also generated a backlash, with an opposition page, “Exposing Britain First”, becoming popular.

• Sweden’s internet service providers cannot be forced to block file sharing site the Pirate Bay nor be held responsible for copyright infringements by users, a court has ruled.

• Stockholm District Court rejected a lawsuit filed by the Swedish Film Industry, Nordisk Film, Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music last year which argued that Sweden’s second-largest internet service provider (ISP) Bredbandsbolaget should be held liable for the copyright infringements of its users should it refuse to block access to the Pirate Bay.

• The court said in a statement: “The District Court considers that Bredbandsbolaget’s operation and conduct in the present case does not constitute participation under Swedish law.”

Privacy

• Here’s a recent interview I did on RT’s Going Underground about the aftermath of the Paris attacks…

Civil Rights

• The Paris attacks have fueled a debate over surveillance on both sides of the Atlantic that, while not new, has reached a level of hysteria that I have not witnessed since the weeks and months following 9/11. There is great cause for grief and great cause for concern over whether those horrific events could have been prevented. But in our desire to prevent such a tragedy at home, it is vital for Americans to remember the values that drove the birth of our nation, and to guard them jealously. It is not “handwringing” to fret over the future of privacy rights, religious freedom, and free speech. At a time when the British government has spent months discussing its desire to implement a “Snooper’s Charter” and ban strong encryption, we would do well to remember that the Brits are the reason we have the Fourth Amendment (and the First), rather than echoing their arguments for broader surveillance powers.

Copyrights

• The MPAA has issued an updated version of its best practices for the prevention of movie piracy in theaters. While much remains the same, theater managers are no longer required to call the police for every incident. In addition, the long-standing pirate hunting bounty program has disappeared.

• The history of anti-piracy activities by the legacy entertainment and software industries always seems to focus on the mistaken idea that if only the public were “more educated” piracy would magically go away. That’s never been true. In fact, nearly every attempt at an education campaign hasn’t just failed to work, it’s often actively backfired and been mocked and parodied. And yet, if you talk to politicians and industry folks, they still seem to think that “more education” will magically work next time. One can only wonder what the hell the geniuses at the Software Alliance (the BSA — which used to be the “Business Software Alliance” but has dropped the “Business” part, but not the “B” in its name) were thinking when they decided to “settle” with a guy who apparently uploaded some Microsoft software in the Czech Republic. The terms of the settlement required him to take part in a “professionally produced” anti-piracy video and that the video needed to get 200,000 views on YouTube or he might face having to pay damages in court.

• The BSA is a well-known front for Microsoft, and has a long history of rather ridiculous claims about “piracy,” so I guess it’s little surprise that it’s now engaged in out and out propaganda, but done so badly that it’s turned the whole thing into a laughingstock. The whole “compelled speech” aspect of the settlement, including the requirement to get so many views, strikes basically everyone as ridiculous and stupid.

• The mission of museums and art galleries is generally to spread knowledge and appreciation of beautiful and interesting objects. So it’s rather sad when they start taking legal action against others that want to help them by disseminating images of public domain works of art to a wider audience. This obsession with claiming “ownership” of something as immaterial as the copyright in a photograph of a work of art made centuries ago led the UK National Portrait Gallery (NPG) to threaten Derrick Coetzee, a software developer, when he downloaded images from the NPG and added them to Wikimedia Commons, the media repository for Wikipedia, of which he was an administrator.

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