● 12.12.15

● Links 12/12/2015: Mozilla Funds for FOSS, Rust 1.5

Posted in News Roundup at 10:59 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Aside from the novelty of the touchscreen, convertible design, and Rockchip RK3288C CPU, Asus’ 10-inch Chromebook Flip tempts with a $249 price, superior keyboard and IPS display, and 11+ hour battery life.

• For years, cloud services have been spreading like an out-of-control bushfire. From mega-corporations to the individual owners of a Chromebook, users are outsourcing their infrastructures, passing their administration and their data to third party applications on the Internet. Software companies are investing heavily in cloud services, and every indication is that they will continue to do so — at least, until the next development fad comes along.

• Dell is one of the first big companies out there that are finally taking into consideration allowing Linux users to upgrade the UEFI firmware on their devices.

• Dell Fixing UEFI for Linux? Linux users may be able to update their UEFI firmware on devices, if Dell has their way. The computer manufacturing giant is looking at making things easier for Linux users, and Richard Hughes writes on his GNOME blog that this capability might be available as early as Fedora 24. “With Dell on board, I’m hoping it will give some of the other vendors enough confidence in the LVFS to talk about distributing their own firmware in public,” Hughes writes, and we have our fingers crossed here.

Desktop

• Chromebooks have been for quite some time now, and that success has also happened in the classroom. Many schools have opted for Chromebooks over more expensive laptops or iPads from Apple, and that doesn’t sit well with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

• [...]

• While I can understand why the success of Chromebooks has irritated Apple’s CEO, I’m glad that they are available for the students and schools that want to use them. Chromebooks aren’t perfect but they definitely offer a low-cost and very viable alternative to more expensive devices, and they work amazingly well for the folks that use them.

• And what is wrong with that? It’s good that schools and students have options these days. I remember the dark days when everything was Microsoft-oriented, and I’m very happy that those days are well and truly behind us. Those were the dark ages of computing, and I never liked the idea of one company owning a particular market. Competition breeds innovation, and it offers real choices for consumers.

• TIM COOK has been labelled “out of touch with reality” after his comments that Google Chromebooks are merely “test machines” and are only successful because they are cheap.

• Cook made the remarks during an interview with Buzzfeed during a surprise visit to Apple’s new Upper East Side retail store in New York ahead of its Hour of Code program, which kicked off in all of its retail stores on Thursday.

• A small education technology firm called Neverware has since been so outraged by his remarks that it has decided to write to the Apple CEO and give him a good telling off.

Server

• The developers of the CoreOS Linux operating system, which can be used to create and maintain open-source projects for Linux Containers, have announced the release and immediate availability for download of CoreOS 835.9.0.

• Many HPC systems use standard operating systems, most notably Linux, which increases the familiarity for most network administrators. HPC manufacturers have also taken steps in recent years to improve the usability of their systems. In fact, more business users now directly access HPC servers and clusters to run high-end data analysis applications.

• In the last several years, the hype surrounding containers has grown, but so has their usage. At the Tectonic Summit earlier this month, the focus wasn’t on hype, but rather on real-world use-cases, as container technology enters mainstream IT. Tectonic is a commercial product built by CoreOS, and includes CoreOS Linux as the operating system, the rocket (Rkt) container platform and the Kubernetes container management system. CoreOS competes and collaborates with Docker Inc., the lead commercial sponsor of Docker containers. Users and real-world deployment stories dominated the event. Financial services firms were well-represented among the users. Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch discussed how and why they are using containers. The International Securities Exchange (ISE) explained how it is using a CoreOS container-based infrastructure to enable its trading platform and 150 million messages a minute. Also at the summit, entertainment giant Viacom detailed how it’s using containers and why it’s moving the popular MTV.com Website to a container infrastructure. We look at some of the highlights of the Tectonic Summit as well as the use cases presented.

Kernel Space

• Linux capabilities are one of the more fluid and less defined regions of kernel development. Linus Torvalds typically has no trouble violating POSIX standards if he sees a better way of doing something. In the case of filesystem capabilities, however, there’s no standard to violate. The best we’ve got is a POSIX draft document that was discarded before becoming official. So really, anyone with a good idea can come along and make big changes in that part of the kernel.

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.3.2 kernel.

• This release fixes a bug with regards to X.509 certificates, more details can be found in the commit log. If you don’t use these certificates, no need to upgrade from 4.3.1. Note, the bug is also in 4.3.0, it is not new in 4.3.1.

• The updated 4.3.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.3.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

• thanks,

• greg k-h

• While the Raspberry Pi DRM driver landed for Linux 4.4, with this forthcoming kernel release it doesn’t expose any 3D hardware acceleration. However, it looks like that’s coming for Linux 4.5

• Intel has already queued up a lot of DRM graphics driver changes for Linux 4.5 and now they’ve sent out a DRM-Next pull request for another serving of updates for this next kernel cycle.

• Arguably, however, the kernel is the most important part of your Fedora (or any Linux) system. It mainly handles two things: hardware, and time on your CPU. It is made up of millions of lines of code, contributed by hundreds of regular developers and countless others. The kernel used in Fedora comes courtesy of this upstream community, where releases happen regularly.

• The Open Container Initiative, which, as we reported, was formed last June to build the future direction of container technology, has embarked on its self-governance and new status as a collaborative project of the Linux Foundation.

• After informing us of the release of Linux kernel 4.3.2, Linux kernel 4.2.7, Linux kernel 4.1.14 LTS, and Linux kernel 3.14.58 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman has also announced the release of the ninety-fourth maintenance release of Linux 3.10 LTS kernel.

• Just one day after the announcement of the first maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.3, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has published details about the availability for download of Linux kernel 4.3.2.

• Immediately after informing GNU/Linux users about the release of Linux kernel 4.3.1, Linux kernel 4.2.7, and Linux kernel 4.1.14 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the fifty-eighth maintenance version of the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel.

Graphics Stack

• HyperZ support in the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers has been a bumpy road to say the least but it looks like some more improvements are imminent.

• Since the start of HyperZ support in the open-source Radeon drivers in 2012 there have been many issues/workarounds to overcome, even going back to the ancient R300 Gallium3D driver, and issues have persisted through the R600g and RadeonSI drivers. Fortunately, there are a new round of improvements courtesy of Marek Olšák.

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov has been glad to announce the release of the seventh maintenance version of the stable Mesa 11.0 3D Graphics Library software for all GNU/Linux operating systems.

• According to the internal changelog, attached at the end of the article for reference, Mesa 11.0.7 comes with a great number of fixes for meta, which apparently affected the Intel i965 driver, as well as various improvements to the Intel i965, Nouveau, Radeon r600 and LLVM (formerly Low Level Virtual Machine) video drivers.

Benchmarks

• With having a new Intel Broadwell laptop for testing that came pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows 10 x64, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to run some comparison benchmarks against Ubuntu Linux. The Intel HD Graphics 5500 were tested under Windows 10 and then under Ubuntu 15.10 — both in a stock configuration and then switching over to the Linux 4.4 kernel with Mesa 11.2 Git.

• While I ended up returning my AMD A10-8700P “Carrizo” laptop due to its faulty fan, I did run a few benchmarks of it prior to sending it back. Here’s roughly what you can expect in terms of its performance against Intel Core i3 and i5 laptops.

Applications

• Below is the list of some quality open source video players which are available on Linux. Usually you can find that most video players differ only in User interface, there backend which is made of shared libraries remains same for many if not all the players.

• Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment), is an open-source virtualization platform used running Virtual Appliances and Virtual Machines, has been upgraded to version 4.1, and it is now ready for download.

• Since last month Krita 2.9 Animation Edition has been in beta as the version of this KDE drawing program that supports animations and uses OpenGL 3 on the GPU for rendering. The second beta of it is now available.

• On December 11, ownCloud was proud to announce that they would start a collaboration with the tech giant Western Digital to bring self-hosted cloud storage solutions powered by ownCloud for home users.

• Kdenlive is a multi-track video editor for Linux that supports DV, AVCHD and HDV editing, among many other features. The developers are preparing the launch of a new major update, and they have informed us of some of the features that are going to land.

• Noteworthy changes:

• Fix compile error when IPv6 is disabled or SSL is not present. Fix HSTS memory leak. Fix progress output in non-C locales. Fix SIGSEGV when -N and –content-disposition are used together. Add –check-certificate=quiet to tell wget to not print any warning about invalid certificates.

• Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH today released version 4.1 of its open-source server virtualization solution Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE). The virtualization platform enables users to create and manage containers and KVM virtual machines on the same host as well as to set up highly available clusters via an integrated web-based interface.

• These days, the bulk of my work at Kolab Systems does not involve writing code. I have been spending quite a bit of time on the business side of things (and we have some genuinely exciting things coming in 2016), customer and partner interactions, as well as on higher-level technical design and consideration. So I get to roll around Roundcube Next, Kube (an Akonadi2-based client for desktop and mobile … but more on that another time), Kolab server hardware pre-installs .. and that’s all good and fun. Still, I do manage to write a bit of code most weeks, and one of the projects I’ve been working on lately is an IMAP filter/proxy called Guam.

• Erlang is a very nice fit for many of the requirements various components in Kolab have … perhaps one of these days I’ll write something more in detail about why that is. For now, suffice it to say that we’ve started using Erlang for some of the new server-side components in Kolab.

• Just a few moments ago, Kovid Goyal announced the release and immediate availability for download of the Calibre 2.46.0 open-source ebook library management software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Proprietary

• The developers behind the cross-platform, Chromium-based Vivaldi web browser have announced earlier today, December 11, the immediate availability for download of a new snapshot for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• Opera Software, through Błażej Kaźmierczak, has had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of the first development milestone of the Opera 36 web browser for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Instructionals/Technical

• Regardless of your operating system, wireless can sometimes be a headache. Either you drop a signal, your wireless connections flakes out, your connection is slow, or your wireless device winds up MIA. Either way, there are times you’ll wind up having to troubleshoot or tinker to get the most out of that connection.

• So far in this series I have looked at customizing Xfce, KDE, Gnome 3, Cinnamon and MATE. That covers a lot of territory, and there has been some significant overlap in focus, features and capabilities between those desktops.

• This time I’m going to look at LXDE, and I think the difference will be clear – LXDE is focused on being lightweight and low overhead but still easy to use and config

Wine or Emulation

• In the past the bi-weekly release cycle of Wine causes a lot of work for developers and packagers. Not all distros can afford to update a single package every two weeks. As a result, they often only provide packages for the stable branch or ship an outdated version of the development branch. To solve this problem, there was the decision at WineConf 2015 that WineHQ should provide packages for popular distributions. Since we already build packages for Wine Staging, we offered to extend our current system to include the development branch. As part of this process we decided to drop our dependency on external build services (except Launchpad) and instead build everything in our own VMs. We also extended our build scripts to provide a more general way of building packages which is less tied to Wine Staging or Wine in general. These changes do not only affect the newly built Wine development packages but also our existing Wine Staging packages. The changes differ between distros and are described below.

• With the Wine crew shipping new unstable releases every two weeks, the Wine packages that end up in Linux distributions tend to be out of date for fetching the bleeding edge support for running Windows programs on Linux. As a result, Wine developers are stepping up their game in providing packages for popular Linux distributions.

• The Wine developers are now working to provide more up-to-date packages specific to some of the major distributions out there, which should make it easier for users to get their hands on bleeding-edge stuff.

Games

• Idol Hands is a strategy game where you gradually take over the world by guiding your people and defeating other gods. It doesn’t have the best reviews, but the patch that came with the Linux version may sway a few to change their reviews I think.

• I’m not a big survival fan, but even I think Hurtworld looks pretty damned good. Hurtworld is a hardcore multiplayer survival FPS with a focus on deep survival progression that doesn’t become trivial once you establish some basic needs.

• Stardust Galaxy Warriors looks like another good one for the Steam Machine race, as it combines good looking visuals with fun looking gameplay.

• Well this one caught me by surprise, F1 2015 looks like it may actually come to Linux & SteamOS which will give us another more realistic racing game.

• Unvanquished Alpha 46 was released this past weekend as the open-source game project’s 2015 holiday release.

• This monthly alpha release to the Unvanquished game powered by the Daemon engine, which is now a distant relative of the id Tech 3 engine, comes with a fair amount of changes.

• Unvanquished is one of the few free, open-source first-person shooters that are still available for Linux users. A new Alpha release was made by developers, and it looks like the game is finally coming together.

• For my quick tests, I was using an ASUS ultrabook with Intel Core i7 4558U “Haswell” processor. The Intel Core i7 4558U has Iris Graphics 5100. This laptop was running Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 with the Linux 4.4 Git kernel and Mesa 11.2-devel. Once downloaded via Steam, the game sure enough fired up!

• Feral Interactive today announced the release of GRID Autosport for OS X and Linux.

• GRID Autosport was developed by Codemasters and released for Windows last year. GRID Autosport is powered by the EGO 3.0 engine. Overall, GRID Autosport looks like an excellent racing game.

• Total War: Attila, a strategy game released for Windows back in February, is now available for Linux.

• If strategy games are more your thing rather than racing games like the just-released GRID Autosport, fire up Steam as Total War: Attila was released for Linux today.

• The performance of Total War: Attila is a big let down on Linux, but it looks like under Windows this game isn’t known for great performance. The Linux experience on both AMD and NVIDIA was bad, but particularly bad on the red side. Beyond that, this is sadly another game that has a built-in benchmark mode but appears inaccessible via command line switches. Thus, this article is the first and last time that Total War: Attila will be tested at Phoronix without being able to properly automate it for accuracy and reproducibility.

• In the hours since Feral Interactive released the Linux version of GRID Autosport today, I’ve been trying out this racing game on a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards atop Ubuntu Linux. Here are my initial results for GRID Autosport under Linux with seven different graphics cards.

• The Smach Z is powered by Linux and designed to run the compatible Steam Linux games. This handheld has a 5-inch 1080p touch-screen, 64GB of internal memory, haptic controls, 4GB of RAM, and is powered by a new AMD G-Series embedded APU. The AMD SoC provides Jaguar CPU cores and Radeon GCN graphics with 2GB of video memory. The reported battery life of the device is five hours.

• Cyber-crooks are taking advantage of the new Steam trade escrow system introduced yesterday and are spreading malware using websites that promote a workaround for the trading limitation.

• Total War: ATTILA is the latest title in the Total War series and the game is now available on Steam for Linux as well.

• The game was launched for Windows players all the way back in February 2015, and it looks like it took The Creative Assembly almost a year to release the game for Linux users as well. It seems like this is becoming a habit for the studio and quite a few Total War titles have made their way onto Steam for Linux.

• The latest of the popular Total War series makes its appearance on Linux today along with its newest expansion. Total War: Attila will let strategy-minded penguins enjoy the mix of turn-based and real-time strategy that the series is known for against the backdrop of the barbarian invasions of Roman Europe.

• Developer Matthew Brown’s new game is similar in style to his popular Hexcells trilogy, seems like another great buy for fans of Japanese style logic puzzles, and is available now on Steam.

• Just a few moments ago, December 10, 2015, Feral Interactive dropped the news every Linux and Mac gamers wanted to hear, the awesome GRID Autosport racing game is now available on Steam for Linux, SteamOS and Steam for Mac.

• GRID Autosport is now available natively on SteamOS and Linux. We finally have a more realistic racing game thanks to Feral Interactive.

• Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.

• XCOM is not only one of my favourite Feral ports on Linux, but it’s also one of my most played and favourite games ever. XCOM 2 now has a brand new trailer, and wow, I’m excited.

• The XCOM 2 Digital Deluxe Edition is now available for pre-order on Steam, 2K and Firaxis Games have revealed today.

• Immediately after announcing the latest Steam Controller improvements for December 2015, Valve updated its stable Steam Client for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

• Out now, The Age of Charlemagne Campaign Pack is an epic expansion for Total War: ATTILA; set in the Middle Ages, long after Attila’s vicious reign has ended.

• Today, December 10, Valve has announced a new update for its Steam Controller gamepad device, transforming some of the greatest user-requested features from dreams into reality.

• SMACH Z is a portable Steam Machine, powered by SteamOS and capable of running most of the games in the Steam library. The new device is not yet available, but it’s trying to raise enough money on Kickstarter to become a reality.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We have been working hard over the past months to improve stability, polish the interface and continue our big code cleanup. Kdenlive 15.12.0 will be released next week, and here are some of the changes you will get with this new version.

• I’m happy to announce our Plasma 5.5 development build of Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!

• The KDE development team has been working hard over the last four months to smooth off the rough edges, add useful new workflows, make Plasma even more beautiful and build the foundations for the future.

• On X11 the big problem for gaming is the Compositor. Games need access to the GPU and need to pretty much exclusively use the GPU. Compare to a true console like a PlayStation: while the game is running you can be sure it’s the exclusive user of the GPU. The way how compositing works on X11 this cannot be provided. There is the compositor which needs to render the scene. The setup looks simplified like:

• I am all for increasing performance on Linux games, and KDE developer Martin Gräßlin does have some interesting thoughts, but I disagree with a lot of it.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Hello all,

• Tarballs are due on 2015-12-14 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.19.3 unstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.19.3. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

• One of the greatest things in contributing to GNOME is the ability to have a really close contact with highly skilled designers. We, mere programmers, learn a freakin’ lot by talking to them and trying to understand their points of view.

• Last week it’s the 7th birthday of BJGUG, we made some gifts which included mouse pad and stickers.

• This also comes at an interesting time. I have been planning a blog post to discuss the GNOME user interface in terms of branding and wayfinding. In preparing the post, I have been breaking down what I perceive to be the essential branding elements, what are the minimal visual elements that define “GNOME” as a desktop interface. And in doing that exercise, I discovered that it’s not really today’s “GNOME” without the Cantarell font. Cantarell is part of of the visual branding for GNOME.

• GNOME’s default UI typeface Cantarell gained a new maintainer, Nikolaus Waxweiler. Nikolaus was on a holy crusade to improve the state of text rendering on Linux by improving FreeType and lobbying for changes in different projects. While he continues on those efforts, bug reports hinted (pun intended) that GNOME’s font rendered worse as FreeType improved so he went on to investigate why. It turns out that Cantarell had many metric related issues and its development was quite stagnant.

Distributions

New Releases

• The developers behind the IPFire project have announced earlier today, December 11, that a new update is available for download for the IPFire 2.17 series of firewall operating systems based on the Linux kernel.

• Windows users don’t have to concern themselves with what libraries they need to have installed when they just want to play something, but the Linux platform is still struggling with this problem. The Solus developers have solved the issue for their OS, by integrating the much-needed 32-bit glibc and its dependencies.

• Koozali, through Terry Fage, was pleased to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the final release of SME Server 9.1 server-oriented Linux operating system.

• Black Lab Software, through Roberto J. Dohnert, was more than happy to inform Softpedia a few minutes ago, December 11, 2015, about the immediate availability for download of the Black Lab Linux 7.0.1 computer operating system.

• s you might have noticed, usually a new Tanglu release (Tanglu 4 “Dasyatis”) should be released this month. We decided a while ago, however, to defer the release and are now aiming for an release in February / March 2016.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• After several months of ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 KDE release, we are happy to announce a lightweight edition of Desktop Fresh R6 which uses LXQt desktop environment.

• The developers behind the ROSA GNU/Linux operating system have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 LXQt edition of the project.

Arch Family

• Arch Linux developers have begun phasing out the KDE 4 desktop and automatically upgrading users to KDE Plasma 5.

• With the KDE 4 stack effectively being unmaintained now and the newly-released Plasma 5.5 being in good shape stability wise, Arch packagers are dropping Plasma 4 and related KDE 4 code. They recommend any remaining KDE 4 users to upgrade as soon as possible or switch to a maintained desktop.

• The noted posted this morning to ArchLinux.org confirms the switch to the new ABI. Arch Linux developers recommend rebuilding all non-repo packages against the new application binary interface.

• The Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, has had the pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the first development release of Manjaro Linux 15.12 “Capella” KDE Plasma 5.5 Live OS.

Ballnux/SUSE

• GeckoLinux is a custom spin of the openSuse project. It offers an impressive variety of options and easier operation than typical Suse-based Linux distros provide.

• GeckoLinux is a newcomer. I mean very new. Its first release was last week. You shouldn’t view this distro as a wailing infant, however. It’s based on openSuse Leap 42.1 and was leapfrogged into near-instant maturity from Suse Studio, a Web application for building and testing software applications in a Web browser.

• Jack Germain test drove new openSUSE-based GeckoLinux that “provides advantages over openSUSE.” Speaking of openSUSE, Dominique Leuenberger posted his weekly Tumbleweed update today. The first development snapshot for Mageia 6 has been delayed until after Christmas due to “large influx of new software.” Matthias Klumpp said the next Tanglu is delay as well due mainly to GCC 5 and the Free Software Foundation is ready to recommend another laptop.

• The last week was no perfect one for openSUSE Tumbleweed: not a single snapshot could be published. Sadly, there were some issues with OBS ‘refusing to build’ new medias, which means snapshots could not be passed on to openQA or even be considered for release.

Slackware Family

• We’ve been informed today, December 12, by Arne Exton, a GNU/Linux developer known for several Linux kernel-based and Android-x86-based operating systems, about the availability of a custom kernel for Slackware 14.1 series of distributions.

• We’ve reported earlier today, December 12, that an unofficial Linux 4.3.1 kernel package was made available by GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton for the Slackware 14.1 operating system and its derivatives.

Red Hat Family

• Alex Pinchev, a former marketing executive at open source software company Red Hat who also has led firms specializing in cybersecurity and assistance for technology startups, has been named Rackspace executive vice president and president of global sales and marketing.

• A spokesperson for Citrix confirms that the software and services firm is moving ahead with plans to shut down a global Startup Accelerator program as part of financial cutbacks. But that decision doesn’t mean it is ending participation in the Raleigh Innovators initiative, and a top Red Hat executive told WRAL TechWire that the Hatters remain interested.

• This workshop is about JBoss Fuse application deployment on JBoss EAP, the JavaEE container. How does that work? In order to save you from building a large “fat WAR” that includes all the libraries you need, and to help you avoid the chaos of including the correct and supported version of Apache Camel, JBoss Fuse allows you to patch your JBoss EAP to make it “Fuse Ready.”

Fedora

• Fedora 23 was released recently, and as is now traditional, it’s time we celebrate all the fine folks who contributed to testing with Heroes of Fedora! Heroes of Fedora (HoF) features some exciting statistics analyzing major areas of contributions. Your regular host Roshi is busy at the moment, so I’m standing in.

• I have been a Fedora Ambassador for six (6) years so far. I joined in December 2009, when I was fourteen (14) years old at that time. This probably makes me one of the youngest people to ever join the Project, and especially the Fedora Ambassadors. Over these years I have been part of numerous activities, from representing Fedora at conferences to supporting regional communities.

• Every Fedora contributor has a right to cast his vote in Council, FESCo, and FAmSCo elections. Please use this right and elect the best of us to those important bodies.

• The 2015 November / December cycle of Elections is in full swing. Voting officially began on Monday, December 7th, and ends Monday, December 14th at 11:59 UTC. Voting takes place on the Voting application website. As part of the Elections coverage on the Community Blog, most of the candidates running for seats published their interviews and established their platforms here. Are you getting ready to vote and looking for this information? You can find the full list of candidates and links to their interviews below.

Debian Family

• It’s been almost 2 years since the Debian Continuous Integration project has been launched, and it has proven to be a useful resource for the development of Debian.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical announces that it’s finally retiring a feature that wasn’t all that popular to begin with, the default online search in Unity 7′s dash.

• Just a few minutes ago, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report for the day of December 11, 2015, to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch devs in preparation for the upcoming OTA software updates.

• Just a few minutes ago, December 11, 2015, Ubuntu app developer Marcos Costales had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of a new update for his awesome uNav GPS navigation app for Ubuntu Phone devices.

• Ubuntu Community Manager David Planella has just sent his bi-monthly report to inform us all about the latest work done by members of the Ubuntu community in the last few weeks.

• The 21st – 22nd January 2016 are some important dates you need to pencil into your calendar. The reason? That is when the UbuCon Summit is happening in Pasadena, California, USA.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon has been released and announced by Linux Mint Team, this release featuring the latest version cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment, based-on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, linux kernel 3.19, Xorg 1.17, Mesa 10.5.9 and will get updates and security patch until 2019.

• I’m a big fan of the Dell XPS 13. It is the first laptop I’ve felt an emotional attachment to since my first Powerbook. The only issue is that I have not been able to run my distro of choice, Linux Mint, due to severe issues with the trackpad.

Devices/Embedded

• The $15 “Pine A64” SBC runs Linux or Android on a quad-core 64-bit Allwinner A4 SoC, and features dual expansion buses, one of which is Pi 2 compatible.

• Roll over Raspberry Pi — there’s a new price/performance leader among hacker SBCs, and its name is Pine A64. Fremont, Calif. based startup Pine64 quickly blew past its Kickstarter funding this week, and is rising fast. Yet, there’s plenty of time to get the $15 early bird special for the base-level Pine A64 board, or $19 for the Pine A64+, which doubles the RAM and adds a few more interfaces. The prices stay the same throughout the campaign’s Jan. 23 wrap-up. Early birders benefit only by getting the board earlier, with shipments due from February to April.

• Earlier this year, I wrote an article about how to use the Raspberry Pi to create a music light show using an open source project called LightShowPi. My little Christmas tree light show was popular enough that I was invited to demo it for a group of middle school kids in North Carolina.

• “Over two years of R&D and testing went into the creation of our Linux OS i80 platform,” said George Zhao, CEO of CHC.

• Rikomagic’s latest mini-desktop computer features an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Cherry Trail quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and 802.11ac WiFi.

• I’m part of the Lunchbox Electronics team where we create innovative, new products with great imagination and passion for open source hardware. Our goal is to combine the art and engineering of an R&D Lab with playful products and projects. We believe that learning should be intuitive and fun.

Phones

Android

• Let me just say something right off the bat: I really hate mobile device rankings.

• You know the drill: “It’s the end of the year, so we’re going to create a list that orders the current Android phones in terms of” — hell, I don’t even know what. And I think that’s the problem: Trying to make an ordered list of the “best” this-or-that usually feels like an arbitrary and forced effort. At the end of the day, what it’s like to use a particular smartphone just isn’t something you can quantify and represent with a number.

• The Pixel C finally went on sale this week—but our full review notes that the convertible tablet feels like hardware in search of the software to make it a compelling product. Perhaps that’s because, internally, Google engineers seem to have been searching for a compelling Pixel C software package for the last year and a half.

• Google is succeeding in keeping Apple at bay in Europe. The latest figures from Kantar show that Android is growing in popularity in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain (known collectively as EU5), while iOS growth is slowing.

• Google clearly wants its users to be able to get work done on Android tablets, even designing a keyboard specifically for the Pixel C, the first tablet manufactured by Google itself. There’s just one problem: The Pixel C’s Android software leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to productivity.

• Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC is gearing up for next year as the end of 2015 is nearing. In fact, several rumors about the company’s 2016 flagship device have been surfacing online.

• According to Digital Trends, there has already been quite a collection of names for HTC’s next big thing. Some of the rumored devices are the O2, M10 and X9. But recent reports say that none of those mentioned are going to be the 2016 flagship. Instead, a device named the HTC Perfume will be taking the spot.

• Janam’s Android-based “XM70” rugged mobile handheld has a 3.5-inch screen, 1GHz Cortex-A8 SoC, WiFi, BT, and a Zebra SE4500 1D and 2D barcode scanner.

• Last year, Woodbury, NY based Janam Technologies LLC added Yocto Project-based Linux support to its Windows Mobile-ready XG Series barcode scanners. Now, it’s expanding beyond Windows Mobile to Android with its XM70 rugged handheld computer.

• Echobox has launched a high-end, portable “Explorer X1” Android music player, with a 3.5-inch screen, quad-core RK3188, TI DAC and amp, and earphones.

• There are five days left to pick up Echobox’s high-fidelity “Explorer X1” portable music streamer on Indiegogo for $299, including three free months of the Tidal music service (the $249 early bird version is sold out). You can also pay $329 for the same deal with the addition of Echobox’s similarly high-fidelity Finder X1 Titanium Earphones topped off with three pairs of Comply T-400 Isolation Tips. The Finder X1 and Comply on their own go for $99. Shipments are due in April for the Explorer X1, and January for the earphones, but you can pay $40 extra for a $329 combo package delivered by Dec. 21.

• With the Pixel C, Google imagines a tablet as more than just a portable window into the internet. These things have to be good for more than endless Candy Crush and Netflix, right?

• The current thinking is tablets needs to evolve, and so Google, like its rivals, has created its own, kinda-sorta work tablet, complete with keyboard accessory. Although I did manage to get work done on this thing, the hefty price didn’t justify the minimal convenience.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new security initiative aimed at identifying vulnerabilities in open source code. The move is another sign of the open source world’s increasing interest in leveraging the the community to shore up software security in the wake of embarrassments like Heartbleed, the bug found in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library that led to so much trouble last year.

• An open-source project for vendor-neutral containers has come to life.

• The Open Container Initiative (OCI) has been ushered into existence with the creation of a technical governance structure.

• Surely by now we know that every company is a software company, and as more companies focus on software development, it is increasingly difficult for them to manage the complexity around coordinating builds and creating executables. That’s where the open source Gradle tool comes in — and it got $4.2 million today to continue to expand the commercial company behind the open source project.

• TED speakers explore how open-source is changing how we build, collaborate and govern.

• In September Bitcoin Magazine reported that nine global banks were pooling resources to fund R3, a next-generation global financial services company focused on applications of cryptographic technology and distributed ledger-based protocols within global financial markets. Several other top banks joined R3 soon thereafter, and five more banks – ING, BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, MacQuarie and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce – joined in November.

• Anyway, we’ve decided to get to the bottom of this. We want to know how people actually use their email. Not just any people, mind you, as we already know that most people, not being overly interested in privacy, security or free tech, use email any way that suits their fancy. We want to know how FOSSers, folks who read FOSS Force and who are presumably informed and knowledgeable about these issues, use email.

• Password recovery and cracking tool Hashcat has made the jump to open source, according to SC Magazine. Creator Jens “Atom” Steube said the move will help penetration testers and other security pros who like how the software works but can’t reveal the changes they need to make because of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Here’s a look at Hashcat’s new prowling grounds, and what the transition means for both IT pros and password security.

• A new project initiated by IBM to create a toolkit for language runtimes is about to go open source, and it could be used to speed up the performance of existing runtimes for many languages.

• The OMR project takes pieces of IBM’s J9 Java virtual machine, decouples them from Java, and turns them into components that can be added to any other language runtime. What’s more, proof-of-concept implementations for Ruby and Python are already in the works, with the Ruby variant set to be open-sourced shortly.

• Established back in 1934, when gambling was still illegal here in Great Britain, William Hill is one of the oldest bookmakers in the country. And like most other industries out there, it is facing a significant amount of disruption from new digital challengers and it is having to adapt.

• [...]

• Joy goes as far as to say that “procurement guys are not even in the conversation now” and that William Hill is looking at wholesale changes across IT. Instead Joy looks to the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter, the consumer web companies, for insights into how to run and build a digital business. A lot of this focuses on, according to Joy, on the “bottom-up element from the open source community”.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Firefox phone’s main strength might well have been its Achilles’ heel. That could revisit any new uses for the Firefox OS.

• Yesterday news came with a blow: Mozilla announced that, despite development of Firefox OS will continue, they decided to stop their three year experiment with the OS on phones.

• For many, this was equal to saying that Firefox OS is dead.

• Some people were surprised because this decision came when Firefox OS phones were starting to get some traction in developing markets.

• Mozilla has ceased development and sales of its open source, Linux-based Firefox OS mobile distribution, although the code may infuse future IoT projects.

• At Mozilla’s “Mozlando” developer conference yesterday, the company announced the end of its ambitious Firefox OS project for low-cost, web-oriented phones. TechCrunch ran a quote from Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices, saying in part: “We weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels.” Jaaksi also said Mozilla “will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices,” and that “we’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon.”

• A month ago, Mozilla announced MOSS, the Mozilla Open Source Support project, during which it planned to give away $1 million / €0.91 million to open source projects it relied on.

• In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, Mozilla announces new content blocker and ends Firefox OS, the Edge browser’s JavaScript engine source released, and more.

• Mozilla’s experimental Servo engine has been ported to run on Wayland’s Weston.

• The biggest news with Rust 1.5 is the introduction of cargo install, a new subcommand that installs Cargo application packages on the local system. This tool offers a painless way to distribute Rust applications.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Berlin, December 10, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.4.7, the seventh and final minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family, with a few key fixes over the previous version. LibreOffice 4.4.7 is the “still” version targeted to more conservative users and enterprise deployments.

• Today in Linux news, Martin Gräßlin examined the next step in Linux gaming. Italo Vignoli today announced The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice 4.4.7 and tech blogger Locutus said it might be time to discuss “code bloat” again. Bruce Byfield took another stab at outlining the choices one really makes when choosing cloud services and the Electron Frontier Foundation launched a new cell phone privacy information site.

• The Document Foundation announces that LibreOffice 4.4.7, the final point release for the 4.4 branch of the official suite, has arrived and is now ready for download.

• There is a great deal of affection within the enterprise Java community for the open source, Java EE-compliant application server GlassFish, which is why so many were confused when Oracle recently terminated its support for production GlassFish Open Source.

• Of course, there are plenty of people who are using, and want to continue to use, the reference implementation of the Java EE runtime, which is where Payara comes in. Payara provides 24/7 support for the GlassFish Open Source edition, and at JavaOne 2015, TheServerSide got a chance to chat with Steve Millidge, founder and technical director at U.K.-based C2B2 Consulting, the firm behind the Payara project.

• The interview quickly delved into the Java EE Server wars, posing to Millidge this question: With so many different offerings on the market, why would an organization choose GlassFish over WebLogic, WebSphere or even Tomcat?

CMS

• A consortium of open source CMS vendors are making progress in their efforts to create more ethical web experience management.

• Earlier this year, Jahia, together with other vendors, launched initiatives to address the rapid growth of digital experience and the data it generates.

• The WordPress 4.4 release includes a number of features that provide improved extensibility for content. Images are also getting more responsive.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• BSDCan is an enormously successful grass-roots style conference. It brings together a great mix of *BSD developers and users for a nice blend of both developer-centric and user-centric presentations, food, and activities.

• In 2002 I asked a number of developers/Unix people for screenshots of their desktops. I recently republished them, and, seeing the interest this generated, I thought it’d be fun to ask the same people* again 13 years later. To my delight I managed to reach many of them.

• Parsing the developments from the BSD side of things this week for consumption by the general public is a little trickier than it is across the street on the Linux side, however with a little juggling (and an important note from iXsystems to come tomorrow in the weekly FOSS roundup), we’ll take a look at the new images ready for your testing and feedback. Also, I’ll answer some questions which arose in last week’s comments.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Libreboot T400 laptop as sold by Minifree. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy.

• The FSF’s Giving Guide is designed to make it easy for you to choose tech gifts that respect recipients’ rights and avoid those that don’t. But to have the greatest possible impact, we also need you to spread the word about ethical tech this season.

Public Services/Government

• The Dutch Parliament on Tuesday approved a EUR 0.5 million budget to develop and improve existing open source encryption solutions that are a crucial part of the Internet. The plan is to enhance projects such as OpenSSL, LibreSSL or PolarSSL (mbed TLS).

Openness/Sharing

• Vanedge led a $3 million Series A round for the company in 2013, and Boundless simultaneously changed its name from OpenGeo. With that round of funding, the company spun out of OpenPlans, a nonprofit and incubator focused on urban planning that had housed the open source software since 2002.

• One use for the Boundless tool might be to help government users plan who might need to be evacuated in the case of a hurricane, Brady says. As information about the hurricane’s route comes in, the government agency could use that to map out who the storm might impact and where evacuations are necessary, he says.

Open Data

• During the launch of the new plan in July, which brought together representatives from central and local government and the civil society, Rachel Davies from Transparency International UK hosted a session called “Anti-corruption: how can collective governance be used to prevent corruption?”.

• “Open government data initiatives vary in nature, and the implemented approaches reflect this heterogeneity. However, the most common approaches include data portals, data catalogues and services”, according to a paper published by Judie Attard, Fabrizio Orlandi, Simon Scerri, and Sören Auer from the University of Bonn.

Open Access/Content

• Benjamin Mis, an assistant psychology professor at Irvine Valley College, is ditching a $100 textbook and will instead assign his Introduction to Psychology students in the spring semester an open-source book that will cost as low as … free.

Open Hardware

• Anyone interested in building robots may be interested in a new open source modular robotics platform called BoxBotix which has been designed by Rocketship Systems and takes the form of a 3D printed robotics platform that is easy to hack, make and sustain.

Programming

• Back in September LLVM Clang 3.7 brought OpenMP 3.1 support but it wasn’t configured on by default. With this latest change to LLVM, OpenMP support will now be enabled by default.

• Junio Hamano announced the release this afternoon of Git 2.7.0-rc0 with 463 commits since Git 2.6.

• Git 2.7 is bringing improvements to a number of sub-commands, the Git bisecting mode now supports old/new terms in conjunction wuith term-old/term-new if you find good/bad confusing, prep work for a on-disk repository change that is backward incompatible, various performance improvements, and a number of bug fixes.

• There is a real shift in perception which really struck me the other day. I went to download the Qt framework for use on a virtual machine and when I chose their online installer these words they used struck me.

• They stated that the online installer is just a small executable. This intrigued me so I looked at the size of the downloaded small executable and found it was a whopping sixteen megabytes. Just for an executable to list, download and install a programming framework. There wasn’t much in the way of graphics either as generally graphics is the biggest contributor to code size.

• The holiday break and start of the new year are just around the corner, and this week’s “Hour of Code” can be a great time to get your kids involved in a creative new world of problem-solving. I’m talking about coding—computer programming—and, your kids are probably not too young to start learning. I began coding with my sons when they were ages 2 and 4 (they’re now 5 and 7, and I collected the apps we built into a fun book, Teach Your Kids to Code, 2015, from No Starch Press).

• For seven years straight, PHP has been the fourth most popular programming language in the world, powering more than 200 million Websites, with more than 81.7 percent of public websites leveraging PHP on the server side.

• PHP took a huge leap into the future this week with the first major update to the language since 2004, when version 5.0 was released.

• Poland’s new government is encouraging the country’s schools to teach programming skills to their students. Minister for Digital Affairs Anna Streżyńska is asking the Coalition for Digital Literacy, a stakeholder group, for recommendations on how to best fund schools’ programming activities.

Leftovers

• Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

• Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

• Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

• Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

• Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?

• Google has admitted that incorrectly typing the name of a case-sensitive variable cooked its cloud.

• Users of the Alphabet subsidiary’s Google Container Engine customers “could not create external load balancers for their services for a duration of 21 hours and 38 min” on December 8th and 9th.

• Let’s not torture our junior developers by forcing them to do the programming equivalent of making high school students studying the Catcher in the Rye and the Scarlet Letter. Let’s talk to them like humans who are writing software. Let’s find out whether or not they’re open to learning, good at communicating, and people we’d like to work with every day.

• Cyberbullying has been a long-standing problem in the online community. Wrapped under the guise of anonymity, some individuals will launch hate campaigns against others rather than confront them in the physical realm, whether it be Facebook messaging and posts, tweets or campaigns designed to smear their reputation.

Hardware

• But when the holidays are over, what will happen to the Gear VR? Is the headset a novelty or, as many of its developers and fans suggest, the start of a new medium? Once you’ve given everyone you know five minutes of virtual reality, is there much left to do? I’m not sure there is yet — and I’m not sure when that will change.

Health/Nutrition

• GMOs’ toxins put your health at risk, according to plant biologist Jonathan Latham. As Latham reports, many genetically modified plants are engineered to contain their own insecticides. These GMOs, which include maize, cotton and soybeans, are called Bt plants. Bt plants get their name because they incorporate a transgene that makes a protein-based toxin (usually called the Cry toxin) from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. (The term “cry toxin” comes from the crystal proteins that form the toxin.) Many Bt crops are “stacked,” meaning they contain a multiplicity of these Cry toxins. Bacillus thuringiensis is all but indistinguishable from the well known anthrax bacterium

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The United States’ relationship with Al Qaeda could be closer than corporate media might lead you to believe. In August 2015 retired CIA chief David Petraeus openly called for recruiting so-called moderate members of Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra to fight ISIS in Syria. Despite corporate media reiterating the message that Al Qaeda is an enemy terrorist group, the CIA and US military leadership continue to discuss using Al Qaeda as a tool for their own military objectives. As Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef report, Petraeus called for recruiting members of the Nusra Front, which opposes the Syrian government, to help the US combat ISIS.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• As satellite data of the fire hotspots shows, forest fires have affected the length and breadth of Indonesia. Among the worst hit areas are southern Kalimantan (Borneo) and western Sumatra. The fires have been raging since July, with efforts to extinguish them hampered by seasonal dry conditions exacerbated by the El Nino effect. As well as Indonesia, the acrid haze from the fires is engulfing neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore and has reached as far as southern Thailand.

• Fox News pundits have spent much of the past year mocking and dismissing comments by President Obama, Democratic presidential candidates and others who have described the connection that climate change has to terrorism and the rise of the jihadist group ISIS. But as world leaders strive for an ambitious agreement at the conclusion of the United Nations climate change conference in Paris — the site of horrific terrorist attacks by ISIS in November — it’s more important than ever that Americans and people around the world recognize the relationship between global warming and global security.

• I live in the Ketapang district of West Kalimantan. We had some serious fires here, but it wasn’t as bad as in Central Kalimantan, which was basically the epicenter of the disaster. Breathing the smoke wasn’t pleasant, and I didn’t dare open a window or a door in my house because it would just permeate everything.

• The smoke also seriously disrupted some of my travel plans. There were no flights into or out of my town for at least a month, so we had to rely on boats or long-distance travel by car.

• The smoke also disrupted my work. I do lot in the community and in schools, but September and October were quiet months for us because the schools were not in session. It was too dangerous for students. Adults were not available to participate in our conservation activities and meetings because they either had to stay in the field and guard their crops from fire, or didn’t want to be outside more then necessary.

• Groundwater is disappearing beneath cornfields in Kansas, rice paddies in India, asparagus farms in Peru and orange groves in Morocco. These are stories about people on four continents confronting questions of how to safeguard their aquifers for the future – and in some cases, how to cope as the water runs out.

Finance

• New Networks Institute just released two reports in a new series, “Fixing Telecommunications”. It is based on mostly public, but unexamined information that exposes one of the largest financial accounting scandals in American history. It impacts all wireline and wireless phone, broadband, Internet and even cable TV/video services, and it continues today with impunity.

• Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, and other large telephone companies have been able to manipulate their financial accounting to make the local phone networks and services look unprofitable and have used this ‘fact’ in many public policy and regulatory decisions that benefited the incumbent telecommunications utilities.

• But the core of this scandal, which we dubbed the “FCC’s Big Freeze”, is so bizarre that no one would believe it if it was detailed in some thriller about financial chicanery. I’ll get to this in a moment.

• On Tuesday, both Wired and Gizmodo dropped a big bombshell: According to “leaked” (Wired) or “hacked” (Gizmodo) documents, the real Satoshi Nakamoto is…. Craig Steven Wright.

• Uh, who? one might ask. It’s a good question. Until now, Wright hasn’t pinged very many people’s radars as a potential Satoshi Nakamoto. On the other hand, Wright is indeed considered an expert on Bitcoin—in fact, he appeared on a panel with other possible-Satoshi Nick Szabo this year at the Bitcoin Investor Conference.

• Both Wired and Gizmodo outline Wright’s qualifications and accomplishments in detail, aside from pointing to emails and other documents that seem to nail Wright as once-and-future Bitcoin king Satoshi Nakamoto.

• Remember CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU? Even though the text was “celebrated” back in October 2014, it is still not ready to be presented for possible ratification. As Techdirt has been covering, it’s pretty clear that the problem area is the corporate sovereignty chapter, because of concerns about the huge power it grants to Canadian (and US) corporations. First there were hints that Angela Merkel wanted the so-called “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) mechanism changed. Then France said the same — twice. Most recently, the EU commissioner responsible for trade and trade agreements, Cecilia Malmström, indicated that it wouldn’t be possible re-open the corporate sovereignty chapter, or to move away from “classic” ISDS to the re-branded version known as the Investment Court System (ICS), which the European Commission is pushing in an attempt to head off growing opposition to the whole idea.

• Janine Jackson: “The truth of the matter is this is a big deal,” says Simon King, the general manager of The Modern, a high-end restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. He is referring to the decision by Danny Meyer, owner of The Modern and many other restaurants, to phase out what the New York Times called “the time-honored American practice” of tipping.

• IT WAS a strike, but not as we know it. At midnight on 1 December, about 100 workers in New York City logged out of the Uber app on their phones in protest over a pay cut at UberRUSH, a delivery service run by the ride-sharing giant. One post on the Facebook page they created to rally the strike and list their demands read: “All we are asking is that Uber treats us fairly.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• I am involved quite extensively in the making of what I believe to be a valuable independent documentary. It is based on George Ponsonby’s excellent book London Calling, and has the working title How the BBC Stole the Referendum. We have already done a few hours filming of my contribution.

• On the December 10 edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert reunited to lament the media’s extensive coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Colbert told Stewart that “the media won’t pay attention to anything … unless you are Donald Trump” and that if he wanted the media to pay attention to serious issues, he would have to “Trump it up.” Stewart appeared on the show to urge Congress to pass the Zadroga Act, which provides health care funding and compensation for the first responders to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Recently the media has been called out for its “wall-to-wall” Trump coverage, especially of his unconstitutional plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

• Some would say Columbia Journalism Review put it mildly, referring to the events of December 4 as an “unbecoming media frenzy in San Bernardino.” That was the sight of dozens of TV crew members from MSNBC and CNN trampling through the home of alleged killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, rifling through whatever they came across, holding it up for the camera and guessing about its meaning.

• Sample commentary from MSNBC‘s Kerry Sanders: “Come over here, you can see the baby’s toys. We have really quite a number of toys.” Sanders proceeded to show millions of viewers various photographs, we don’t know of whom, and for good measure, the driver’s license of Farook’s mother, including identifying information like her address.

Censorship

• This week the will of Nigerian citizens triumphed over a threat to the free and open Web. The recently proposed “Bill for an Act to Prohibit Frivolous Petitions and Other Matters Connected there-with”, popularly known as the “Social Media Bill”, sought to restrict free expression by making it illegal to start any type of petition without swearing an affidavit that the content is true in a court of law.

• Not everyone was sold. ESPN has pulled all of its content from YouTube due to what a YouTube spokesperson called “rights and legal issues.” At least EPSN got to choose. YouTube has said that companies that do not sign off on YouTube RED will find their videos unavailable to viewers. And it’s keeping that promise, blocking a huge swath of Japanese artists from U.S. fans.

• Star Wars: The Force Awakens has gone into an early and bizarre anti-piracy overdrive. Earlier this week a fansite posted an image of a ‘Rey’ action figure legally bought in Walmart but it was taken down by Facebook and Twitter following a DMCA notice. Meanwhile, webhosts are facing threats of legal action.

• or the last decade, Marjorie Carvalho and her husband have produced Star Wars Action News, a podcast dedicated to Star Wars collectibles of all sorts. Predictably, they’ve had a lot to talk about, as waves of action figures and other collectibles have been launched in the run-up to the much-anticipated release of Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens next week.

• On Tuesday, a Star Wars Action News staffer saw something he shouldn’t have—and bought it. A 3 3/4″ action figure of “Rey,” a female character from The Force Awakens, was on display in a Walmart in Iowa, apparently earlier than it should have been. The staff member bought it for $6.94 plus tax, no questions asked. The following day, he posted pictures of the Rey figure on Star Wars Action News’ Facebook page.

• A Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent by the Walt Disney Company earlier this week seems to have truly awakened The Force, and now the company can’t seem to decide if it wants to be on the light side or the dark side.

• Marjorie and Arnie Carvalho run Star Wars Action News, a podcast about Star Wars collectibles. Earlier this week, SW Action News staffer Justin Kozisek purchased an action figure of “Rey” in an Iowa Walmart. The figure, which hasn’t been seen elsewhere, was presumably put on the shelves by accident ahead of its official release date. An image of the figure was posted on the SW Action News Facebook page—and promptly subjected to a wave of DMCA takedown demands by Lucasfilm. Many of those who had spread the image on social media were also subject to copyright claims.

• Russian telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor says it will create a working group to look into the regulation of search engine results. The move is part of a package of initiatives designed to make pirated content harder to find. Also on the table are discussions on how to make anti-piracy techniques less prone to circumvention.

• In March 2015, Wyoming legislators passed a law that makes it illegal to report environmental hazards to the general public or to state officials. Senate Bill 12, “Trespassing to Collect Data,” makes it illegal to “collect resource data” from any “open land,” meaning any land outside of a city or town, whether the land is federal, state, or privately owned. As Justin Pidot and Deirdre Fulton reported, the controversial law protects the interests of private land owners by making it illegal for people to take photographs, sample soils, test water, or to take any kind of environmental data from any private, public or federal land outside of city limits.

Privacy

• In the weeks since the Investigatory Powers Bill was officially released, we’ve seen a lot of Government PR. They are trying their best to assure us that we have nothing to be worried about, but we’re not convinced.

• Washington Post reporter Andrea Peterson has put together a really excellent explainer piece on what you should know about encryption. Considering the source, it’s a good “general knowledge” explainer piece for people who really aren’t that aware of encryption or technically savvy. That’s important and useful, given how important this debate is and how many participants in it don’t seem to understand the first thing about encryption.

• It’s no secret today’s vehicles collect tons of data. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be a secret. It certainly isn’t well-known, despite even some of the latest comers to the tech scene — legislators — having questioned automakers about their handling of driver data.

• More than one insurance company will offer you a discount if you allow them to track your driving habits. Employers have been known to utilize “black boxes” in company vehicles. These days, the tech is rarely even optional, although these “event data recorders” generally only report back to the manufacturers themselves. Consumer-oriented products like OnStar combine vehicle data with GPS location to contact law enforcement/medical personnel if something unexpected happens. Drivers can trigger this voluntarily to seek assistance when stranded on the road because of engine trouble, flat tires, etc.

• The FBI’s secrecy surrounding stingrays has been well documented. And the controversy over the use of zero-days by governments has also generated its share of headlines. Both issues are controversial, in part because they have the potential to harm vast numbers of people who aren’t suspected of committing any crime. That’s because stingrays generally intercept all cell phone communications in a given area, not just those of a drug or kidnapping suspect. Paying large sums of money to buy zero-days, meanwhile, creates powerful incentives for governments to keep the underlying vulnerabilities secret. FBI officials have long attempted to distance themselves from such topics. Today, they inched slightly closer.

• Telegram is a popular messaging app which supports end-to-end encrypted communication. In Spring 2015 we performed an audit of Telegram’s source code. This short paper summarizes our findings.

• Our main discovery is that the symmetric encryption scheme used in Telegram — known as MTProto — is not IND-CCA secure, since it is possible to turn any ciphertext into a different ciphertext that decrypts to the same message.

• We stress that this is a theoretical attack on the definition of security and we do not see any way of turning the attack into a full plaintext-recovery attack. At the same time, we see no reason why one should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist.

• The take-home message (once again) is that well-studied, provably secure encryption schemes that achieve strong definitions of security (e.g., authenticated-encryption) are to be preferred to home-brewed encryption schemes.

• It’s been widely suspected for ages that both the NSA and the FBI made use of so-called “zero-day” exploits to hack into computers. Leaks from a few years ago (which may or may not have come from Snowden) exposed just how massive the NSA’s exploit operation was, and there have been plenty of stories of security companies selling exploits to the NSA, who would use them, rather than reveal them and get them patched — thereby putting the public at risk. Last year, the President told the NSA to get better at revealing these zero day exploits to companies to patch, rather than hoarding them for their own use. Just about a month ago, the NSA proudly announced that it now discloses vulnerabilities 90% of the time — but conveniently left out how long it uses them before disclosing them.

• Today, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) released a letter expressing her concern with news reports indicating an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent enlisted local law enforcement to pressure a New Hampshire public library into disabling its Tor relay.

• The letter, addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, notes that the Tor network is used by journalists, activists, dissidents, intelligence sources, and other privacy concerned individuals to keep their web browsing private, and the network receives significant funding through government grants.

• FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday called for tech companies currently offering end-to-end encryption to reconsider their business model, and instead adopt encryption techniques that allow them to intercept and turn over communications to law enforcement when necessary.

• End-to-end encryption, which is the state of the art in providing secure communications on the internet, has become increasingly common and desirable in the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance by the government.

• The Obama administration plans to clarify its stance on strong encryption before Washington shuts down for the holidays.

• Administration officials met Thursday with the civil-society groups behind a petition urging the White House to back strong, end-to-end encryption over the objections of some law-enforcement and intelligence professionals.

• Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters

• Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal.

• A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.

• HUNGRY DATA HIPPO Facebook has promised to launch the work version of its time-wasting solution very soon.

• The firm reckons that the time blight will hit worker desktops in the next few months and will not be used for things like crushing candy or, presumably, assessing the global cat situation.

• Reuters is first with the news, hot from Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships at Facebook, who explained that the system is very much like the consumer version, except it is designed to make users more productive. This means no crap apps or gimmicky gewgaws but a lot of the other crap that you might have come to expect.

• The Tor Project is entering a crucial phase in its nearly 10-year existence. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, it has assumed a higher profile in the world of privacy and security than ever before. But it’s also come under increased attack by governments out to demonize it, and by law enforcement and intelligence agencies out to crack it and unmask its anonymous users.

• Now that encryption has been elevated to a default technology on mobile devices, the government has heightened its “Going Dark” rhetoric, again on Wednesday insisting during a Senate Judicial Committee hearing that Silicon Valley figure out how to deliver plain-text communication between criminal and terror suspects to law enforcement.

• Digital analyzer. IMSI catcher. Stingray. Triggerfish. Dirt box. Cell-site simulator. The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But no matter what name cell-site simulators go by, whether they are in the hands of the government or malicious thieves, there’s no question that they’re a serious threat to privacy.

Civil Rights

• This is not a person talking about a subset of blacks with a particular kind of educational background; taking his words at face value, this is a person asserting that African-Americans as a whole belong in “lesser schools” that are not “too fast for them.” (Or that “there are those who contend” that that is the case, if you want to give Scalia credit for that circumlocution.)

• The fact that a Supreme Court justice justifies eliminating affirmative action on the basis of openly racist views ought to be big news. By sugarcoating what Scalia actually said, the New York Times disguises that news–making the ethnic cleansing of America’s top schools a more palatable possibility. Perhaps that shouldn’t make me gasp.

• According to the United Nations’ High Commission on Refugees Global Trends Report: World at War, published in June 2015, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. One in every 122 people is considered a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker. Those individuals come from almost every continent. Parts of Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa all have massive numbers of people who are trying to flee. Millions of people are on the move or hiding in the fringes of society to keep from being persecuted and harmed.

• The Republican presidential hopeful’s views are getting more and more extreme. Perhaps, as Salman Rushdie suggested, there’s more going on than meets the eye

• As long as the stop isn’t extended for too long (a wholly arbitrary length decided on a case-by-case basis during suppression hearings/civil rights lawsuits), cops are pretty much free to stop and search any driver for any reason. And even if they’re completely wrong every step of the way, there’s a good chance the “good faith exception” will excuse their misdeeds. (For everything else, there’s qualified immunity.)

• Syria never had a hackerspace until Bassel Khartabil – known online as Bassel Safadi – started Aiki Lab in Damascus in 2010. The Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer used it as a base from which to advance the free software and free culture movements in his country. Because of Khartabil’s work, people gained new tools to express themselves and communicate.

• Writing to the vice president of the European commission in 2013, MEPs Charles Tannock and Ana Gomes summed up Khartabil’s contributions as “opening up the internet in Syria – a country with a notorious record of online censorship” and “vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people”. Among his awards included the 2013 Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award for using technology to promote an open and free internet.

• Given what we’ve seen in other (and much smaller) sexting cases — where sex offender laws have been twisted to cover consensual interactions between adolescents — the district attorney’s decision to put control of the situation back in parents’ hands is a surprise. It will no doubt be the exception that proves the rule.

• The instinctual reaction to bring law enforcement into the equation is understandable and, admittedly, there are aspects of sexting that may require this sort of scrutiny. The problem is that prosecutors often feel compelled to find something to charge sexting participants with, if only to justify the expenditure of law enforcement resources. This leads to preposterous (and potentially life-damaging) outcomes like teens being charged with exploiting themselves by taking photos of their own bodies and sharing them with others.

• The attack is currently being investigated by Twitter. In their notice to users, Twitter said that the attack only impacted usernames, IP address, email addresses, and phone numbers if a phone number was associated with the account. Twitter did not say which state was implicated—it could have been China, Russia, or even the US.

• I spoke to a number of Twitter users who received the notice. A couple are engaged in activism and are connected to the Tor Project in some capacity. A few are located in Canada, and vaguely associated with the security community at large. However, I could not determine any common factors between all recipients. They all received the notice around the same time, between 5:15 and 5:16 PM EST.

• This week on CounterSpin: There are calls for the resignation of Chicago Mayor (and former Obama chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel—stemming from the city’s 13-month cover-up of video that belied the official story of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. That video, along with an autopsy that also showed police’s initial story to be false, eventually came to light through the work of journalists—but not mainstream journalists; it was independent reporters, including our guest, who stepped in to force the police department and the city to acknowledge not only what happened on the night of October 20, 2014—when officer Jason Van Dyke put 16 bullets into the body of a boy who posed him no harm—but what happened after, as institutional forces came together to keep the truth from the public.

• In El Salvador an unexpected pregnancy loss has been declared unconstitutional and criminal. The law that has been in place since 1998 prohibits abortions in the country regardless of the situation. The penal code does no take into account if the mother’s life or the baby’s life is in danger; it is all abortion. The purpose of this law is to give the embryonic human a right to life. If any expectant mother happens to break this law regardless of the situation, she can be sentenced to 2-8 years in prison, and the medical professionals assisting the women can serve 6-12 years in prison. In some more severe cases, a woman can be charged with aggravated homicide if it is believed that the fetus could have been able to reach life successfully.

• New York and North Carolina are the only two states in the US that prosecute sixteen and seventeen year old teenagers in the justice system as adults. This is a crucial issue because in other states these teens are sent to juvenile facilities where they are held in more appropriate environments, given their ages. Young teens in adult prisons are often forced into solitary confinement, which can be severely, psychologically and physically damaging.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• While Comcast doesn’t actually cut people off the Internet when they hit their 300GB-per-month data limits, customers do get charged an additional $10 for each 50GB used. Customers can also pay an extra $30 or $35 per month for unlimited data, depending on where they live. Comcast, the nation’s largest home Internet provider, has implemented the data caps in many cities but hasn’t rolled them out to its entire territory yet. “We’re just trialling ways to have a balanced relationship,” Roberts said. “You can watch hundreds of shows and movies and other things before you hit these levels, many devices, but I don’t think it’s illogical or something people should be paranoid about… it’s not that different than other industries.”

• Comcast CEO Brian Roberts was forced to defend the company’s expansion of usage caps this week at an industry conference. As most of you know, Comcast has been imposing usage caps of 300 GB on the company’s customers. Users then have the option of either paying $10 per every 50 GB consumed, or paying $30 to $35 to enjoy the same unlimited service many of these users literally enjoyed only just yesterday.

DRM

• Eighteen months ago, Mike wrote about the DMCA being abused to censor stories in an Ecuadorian newspaper that someone in the government there apparently didn’t want out in the open. But Boing Boing points us to a post by Andrés Delgado from a few weeks back which offers hope that some good things could be happening in Ecuador in the field of copyright.

• Last.fm is a web service for users to track and share their music tastes with friends in an easy, simple way. A single play of a song is known as a “Scrobble”. Listening to music and recording the listen with Last.fm is known as “Scrobbling”. This is a service that has existed since 2002, originally under the name of Audioscrobbler. In 2015, Last.fm rolled out their new website beta, originally optional, but later forced upon all users.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a German museum suing Wikimedia over photos of public domain objects that were in its collection. We mentioned there was a related situation in the UK, where the National Portrait Gallery in London had threatened a Wikimedia developer for using photos of objects that were clearly in the public domain. Mike pointed out that in the US, the Bridgeman v. Corel case established that photographs of public domain images do not carry any copyright, since they do not add any new expression. In a rare bit of good news, noted by Communia, the UK Intelllectual Property Office has just announced officially that it takes the same view…

• New Government documents have shed some light on the future agenda points for online copyright enforcement. In a briefing for minister Mélanie Joly, officials from the Department of Canadian Heritage mention VPN pirates and website blocking as emerging issues and pressures.

• Pirate Party UK is our first brave volunteer as we explore the fringe movements campaigning against the dominance of the Westminster parties in British politics.

• Speaking to the deputy leader David Elston, newly elected as part of a leadership change following the general election, we delve into what the Pirates stand for, why authenticity is a new force in campaigning, and what effect Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is having on smaller parties.

• After more than two years of litigation, “Happy Birthday to You” — often called the most popular song in the world, but one that has long been under copyright — is one step closer to joining the public domain.

• A copyright lawsuit centring on the song “Happy Birthday to You” has been settled out of court.

• Music publisher Warner/Chappell and a group of documentary makers, who had been disputing ownership of the song for more than two years, settled the dispute yesterday, December 9.

• Details of the settlement have not been disclosed.

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.