● 12.15.15

● Links 15/12/2015: CentOS Linux 7 1511, Enlightenment DR 0.20.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Before making any contributions to Bitcoin, Bloq Co-Founder and Bitcoin Core Developer Jeff Garzik was a longtime Linux developer who started working on the operating system in the early nineties — before the creation of Red Hat. As someone who was involved in the early development of both Linux and Bitcoin, Garzik has a unique perspective on the common themes found in the two respective development communities.

• Today in Linux news, several reviews lead the pack today. Jesse Smith and Das U-Blogger Prashanth reviewed Chakra 2015.11, Swapnil Bhartiya tested newly released Mint 17.3, and a couple of quick openSUSE reports were posted. Elsewhere, Donald Stewart posted an update on Mageia Cauldron and Antonio Rojas said Arch is dropping KDE 4. A couple of interesting polls warrant a mention as well and more in tonight’s Linux news recap.

• No matter what people say, efficiently utilising the resources of your computer is very important. Sure disk space is cheap they say, but one thing they never tell you is that no matter how big your hard disk is, a way will be found to fill it up. Especially for older machines, as operating systems are getting bigger and bigger, requiring more memory and disk space than ever before.

Desktop

• Qubes OS, the security-focused operating system that Edward Snowden said in November he was “really excited” about, announced this week that laptop maker Purism will ship their privacy-focused Librem 13 notebook with Qubes pre-installed.

• I used to carry ThinkPads, starting with the IBM models and then Lenovo’s versions, with me everywhere. They were, and still are, great laptops. Then I started using Chromebooks. I still have a couple of ThinkPads, but they never leave my office. Why? Because a Chromebook can do anything I want, typically deliver battery life that can see me through a whole day of work at a coffee shop, and are immune to almost all of Windows’ security woes. I’m not the only one who loves them.

• A few years ago there was a project designed to boot generic laptops so they functioned as Chromebooks. It was a cool project, but unfortunately, the compatibility wasn’t great, and it wasn’t reliable to use on a daily basis. Although Chromebooks are old news these days, it still would be quite useful to transform aging laptop computers into Chromebooks. Because they have such low system requirements, older laptops running the ChromeOS can become quite useful again.

Audiocasts/Shows

• If you’re a die-hard Linux user, or a command-line newbie, you’re going to find something worth listening to in this list of seven download-worthy Linux podcasts.

Kernel Space

• Eduardo Mayorga Téllez, a Teens in Training scholarship recipient, is 17 and lives in Nicaragua. He plans to become a Linux kernel developer and use his knowledge of device drivers to help Linux support the most hardware possible. He says he often hears classmates and colleagues argue that Linux is not suitable for them because they cannot make the most of their hardware. Eduardo says he will change that.

• Linux in space is the subject of the Linux Foundation’s latest “World without Linux” video, which highlights how open source software helps power the world we live in — or, in this case, the things orbiting around it.

• Dell — the first big company to sell Linux computers — is catering to open source fans again by announcing plans to make user-friendly firmware upgrades possible on Linux.

• In a blog post, Richard Hughes, who works for Red Hat (RHT) and contributes to the GNOME project, writes that Red Hat and Dell have been collaborating on a system that will allow users of Dell hardware to update firmware from Linux. If that doesn’t seem significant to you, it’s probably because you either do not use Linux or have not spent enough of your life geeking out to know what firmware is.

• The latest iteration of the stable Linux kernel, 4.3.3, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, making this the latest and best version available right now.

• The 4.3 branch of the Linux kernel is a really popular one and it’s been adopted by many distros. From the looks of it, the maintainers will continue to provide support for it, but it’s not clear for how long. There is already a 4.1.15 version that has been declared long-term, so it’s difficult to say if another branch will be tagged LTS as well, after such a short time.

• Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) on December 9, 2015 announced the creation of a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) Linux on Azure certification. Created in conjunction with the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, this certification represents one more important step in broadening the technology integration between Microsoft and the open source community.

• I haven’t used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even though my gmail account not only handles more email than I ever had on desktop clients, but also allows simultaneous access from multiple locations across the globe? Distributed systems have an unfair advantage, in that they can be robust against total disk failure in a way that desktop clients can’t, but none of the file corruption issues I’ve had have been from total disk failure. Why has my experience with desktop applications been so bad?

• The reality is much simpler: the kernel is a software project. There is nothing particularly special about being a kernel developer. Jumping into any code base is going to involve a learning curve. You don’t need to be the best programmer ever to make modifications. The core kernel is completely self-contained in one project which means fewer dependencies than a lot of userspace projects. (yes, there are modules out of tree but the most important parts are in a single project). The self-contained nature means that it’s easy to switch back to a stable kernel from an unstable one which makes testing easier.

• Rob Clark submitted his MSM-Next DRM driver changes today in preparation for the Linux 4.5 kernel cycle.

• He was quick to note that with this MSM DRM driver update from the Freedreno project there is now DSI support for Qualcomm’s MSM8960 and APQ8064 hardware. He explains the impact as, “should be helpful for getting an upstream kernel working on nexus7/nexus4/etc.” DSI is short for the Display Serial Interface and is a MIPI specification for communicating between the host and display device.

• Version 0.9 of AppStream is now available. As a refresher, AppStream is a FreeDesktop.org specification backed by multiple major Linux distributions as a cross-distribution effort of standardizing Linux component metadata.

Graphics Stack

• In Linux 4.4 there wasn’t 3D support, but that’s changing with Linux 4.5. However, besides needing the Linux 4.5+ kernel, you also need a supported VC4 Gallium3D driver. While there’s been the VC4 Gallium3D driver developed in mainline Mesa over the past many months, the branched code currently present for the imminent Mesa 11.1 release doesn’t support the DRM driver as set to be shipped in Linux 4.5.

Benchmarks

• For those curious about how Intel’s laptop/ultrabook CPUs have evolved over the past few generations and whether it’s worthwhile upgrading from one generation to the next, here’s a fresh Linux laptop comparison with seven different laptops being tested on Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 and comparing these laptops from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell on a variety of workloads while also doing some performance-per-Watt measurements.

Applications

Proprietary

• Earlier today, December 14, 2015, the developers behind the cross-platform and free Vivaldi web browser announced the release of a new snapshot build towards the second Beta version of the software.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Read the latest in crowdfunding news for Linux in the last issue of The Funding Crowd this year. We have an even mix of hidden gems and biggies this time, as well as a few bonus picks that might be worth checking out.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• This bugfix release improves on the 0.20.0 release and resolves a number of issues.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Keyboard shortcuts can be a powerful feature, particularly for actions that are repeated often and are consistently available. In GNOME 2, shortcuts could be learned through menu bars, but we moved away from these with GNOME 3. There were a number of reasons why we did this, and it was a good thing, but it did leave users without an easy way to learn keyboard shortcuts. This is something that we’ve wanted to address for some time, and are now finally resolving.

• The GNOME 3.19.3 desktop environment is under heavy development these days, and many of its core components and applications are being updated by the hour.

• GNOME Maps is one of the many components of the GNOME stack, and it looks like the upcoming 3.20 version will get some pretty cool features.

• Not all the packages get big improvements when they move from one version to another. In fact, for many packages in the GNOME stack, not a lot happens. GNOME Maps is not one of those apps, and it’s becoming more useful with each new release.

• I’m nearly a month down on a branch for Builder 3.20. It’s goal is to radically simplify the process of creating plugins, and prepare for external plugins. We really wanted to create a solid plugin story before doing that and things are progressing nicely.

Distributions

• Let’s do it again. Last year, in a first-of-its-kind Dedoimedo best distro vote poll, I asked you about your favorite operating system, and you responded in kind. With exactly 1,900 votes, you opined on the state of the Linux. It’s that time of the year once more.

• I am going to post an article reflecting my own view on how this year of distro testing went, but I would also very much like to hear from you. Like in 2014, I used the THP on Distrowatch and selected the top ten entries for the poll. But there’s also a free field for you to add any other distro you like, as well as comments. It ought to be interesting, and hopefully not too quiet. After me.

Reviews

• Not only has it been a while since I’ve done a Linux distribution review on this blog, but it has been an especially long time (over 2.5 years, in fact) since I’ve looked at Chakra. I figured that now that KDE 5 (technically incorrect terminology, I know, but please bear with me, as I’m using this for the sake of brevity) is being used in Chakra, it may be time to see how a distribution I’ve rather liked in the past has evolved. In case you don’t remember, Chakra was originally based on Arch Linux, but a few years ago, it branched off into its own independent distribution with its own repositories, though certain tools (like the package manager Pacman) are based on things found in Arch Linux. It focuses exclusively on KDE, and it uses a semi-rolling release model in which core system packages are updated less frequently in order to maintain stability, while front-end applications seen by users most often are updated more frequently to provide a competitive desktop experience.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• For those of you who are most familiar with Mageia and its development, you are starting to know the drill: Cauldron is the place where we break stuff by upgrading everything that we tried to keep stable during the previous release cycle, and then we work on making it stable again. We are now in this stabilization phase and we were aiming internally for a first development snapshot of Mageia 6 as a set of ISO images, but there are still a number of factors that make it difficult right now.

Arch Family

• Since the KDE 4 desktop has been unmaintained for several months and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to support two versions of Plasma, we are removing it from our repositories. Plasma 5.5 has just been released and should be stable enough to replace it.

Ballnux/SUSE

• So what exactly is LEAP? What’s it for? The easiest way to approach something like OpenSUSE LEAP is to think of it like a beefed-up, more stable Fedora-type thing. The main goal of this Linux distribution is to create an enterprise grade distribution designed for workstations and servers free of charge.

• I am sorry for this silly article. But it is important. Just as important as my other failures over the years. They teach as much as image-rich guides and prosaic, finely worded reviews, albeit with much less beauty and style. The moral of the story is, as you may have guessed already, DON’T DO IT. Wait for openSUSE to gets its due major and minor version increment and come around with Plasma 5 natively and a suave, integrated Gecko or Chameleon theme, as it just recently did.

• At this point, thinking in retrospect, I probably should have used BTRFS, and this might have given me the necessary snapshot to go back in time and undo the damage. Maybe. Furthermore, I am disappointed with the SUSE team. They should protect their system a little more robustly from aesthetic escapades. All I did was install a bunch of packages and let the system remove some of the conflicting dependencies with the previously installed desktop environment. Not something we should let happen in 2015. Food for thought. As for Plasma on openSUSE, I owe you that one. Leap 42.1. Very soon. Take care.

Red Hat Family

• The ClearFoundation has just revealed that the ClearOS Community and Professional editions of this Linux distribution have been upgraded to version 6.7.0, and they are now ready for download and upgrade.

• For large businesses looking to embrace Linux and open source solutions, one of the best — if not the best — enterprise-grade operating systems is RHEL. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is rock solid and offers legendary support.

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) had its price objective boosted by RBC Capital from $85.00 to $90.00 in a research note published on Tuesday morning, MarketBeat reports. They currently have an outperform rating on the open-source software company’s stock.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has dropped 4.04% during the past week, however, the bigger picture is still very bullish; the shares have posted positive gains of 0.96% in the last 4 weeks. The shares has underperformed the S&P 500 by 0.26% during the past week but Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has outperformed the index in 4 weeks by 1.5%.

Fedora

• Last weekend I participated in the FAD Singapore 2015. Apart from the annual review of the last year’s expenses and budget planning for the coming year, the most important agenda for this meeting was – To develop a strategy for the Fedora community growth across APAC region. Fedora Ambassadors came from various countries(Singapore, India, Sri Lanka, China, Malaysia, Philippines, Cambodia) across the Asia pacific.

• LetsEncrypt recently entered into a public beta. Thanks to the work of the LetsEncrypt team and Fedora packagers, the official LetsEncrypt client is now available in both Fedora 23 and Rawhide. To learn how LetsEncrypt works or what it is, you can read more in the Fedora Magazine article announcing the public beta launch. In this article, we provide a basic configuration to secure an Apache HTTPD-based site with a LetsEncrypt certificate.

• Voting is open to all Fedora contributors, regardless of the area you work on — not just packagers or ambassadors, but designers, writers, marketers, testers, translators, and everything else.

• In the world of Linux distributions, there are many that are based on Debian and Ubuntu, but those are the only two distro that have fueled a following of derivative distros, Fedora and CentOS have too.

Debian Family

• In the previous post I had mentioned that I didn’t figure out how to add dependency on mount points so as to achieve correct ordering of mount points. After a lot of search today I finally figured it out thanks to the bug report and the patch which adds x-systemd.requires and other option to systemd.

• Exchanges have started with F-Droid developers to better understand what would be required to test F-Droid applications. (h01ger)

Derivatives

• Today, December 14, the Parsix GNU/Linux developers announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second TEST build of their upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” computer operating system.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A couple of developers have started to work on bringing FM support to the Ubuntu phones, and they already made some progress, but it’s more complicated than it sounds.

• The community is working on a OnePlus One Ubuntu Touch port, and the developer who’s doing the heavy lifting is also trying to help other people port the OS to their devices.

• The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition is the elephant in the room, and it looks like people don’t want to talk about it. It’s been pulled from sales, and it’s virtually invisible on social media, but all hope is not yet lost.

• Mycroft is a home automation Linux-based device that promises to change the way we interact with our homes. The guys who are making this hardware decided to show us how it’s made.

• I grew up on a farm and ranch up until I was fourteen. It’s a tough life, best suited for tough people who can beat their environment into submission and produce the results needed to thrive. Should I ever have displayed the poor judgement to complain about something within earshot of my dad, I would get the same advice every time.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint is among the most popular GNU/Linux-based operating systems. Although DistroWatch is not a metric of popularity, Linux Mint has claimed the #1 ranking on the website, which means it’s the most sought after distro on the site.

• Our apologies for posting these news so late. Since the website and forums went down, we’ve been hit by two new server issues. Two of our repository servers lost their hard drives. That’s a total of 3 servers going down in just a few weeks. This time around we had full backups though and we were able to minimize downtime (no downtime at all on the Mint and LMDE2 repositories, a few hours yesterday on the LMDE 1 repositories). We’re eager to resume work on Linux Mint but at the moment most of our focus is still on server administration, on recovery, on configuration but also on making sure we’re stronger and issues like these have less of an impact on us going forward.

• Reminder: OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. After an OEM installation, the computer is set in such a way that the next reboot features a small setup screen where the new user/customer has the ability to choose his/her username, password, keyboard layout and locale.

Devices/Embedded

• The faster and more powerful Raspberry Pi 2 makes it possible to run more and different operating systems than with earlier versions. Here is my first-hand experience loading and running Ubuntu MATE on the Pi.

• The Raspberry Pi is now a threat to thin clients.

• Citrix has been fooling around with the Pi as a desktop virtualisation (VDI) target for a while, even releasing a prototype Citrix Receiver for the little computers. That effort was in early 2014.

• Everything you need to know about the tiny $5 computer that is the newest member of the Raspberry Pi family.

• Work to turn the $35 Raspberry Pi board into a thin client for Windows and Linux virtual desktops appears to be paying off.

Phones

Tizen

• Have you been anticipating a Gear Live 2 from Samsung running Android Wear? Well, we’re way past Google’s 2015 I/O Conference, so I think it’s safe to say that the Android Wear-powered Gear Live 2 is a no-show. With that said, however, I don’t think the Gear Live 2 was ever meant to be. I don’t think the Gear Live 2 was ever in the cards for Samsung, ever on the Korean giant’s “to make” list. To find out why, though, the key lies in Samsung’s latest smartwatch, the Tizen-powered Gear S2.

Android

• Last month, the company acquired wearable and fitness tracker specialist Misfit for $260 million. Fossil intends to integrate Misfit’s technology into many of its products over time, which could make them stronger alternatives to the growing number of smartwatches.

• This blog is normally in danish, but since there are very few actual reviews of the Blackphone2 to be found, I decided to write this review in english.

• The Blackphone2 is a product from the swiss company “Silent Circle”.

• Silent Circle makes a lot of hoopla about security but all the reviews and tests I could find were just treating this as another phone with a cloud-security-thingie.

• My goal is to have a computer in my pocket I can actually trust, at least to some degree, so in the end I shelled out £500 from the point of view that it is probably not any less secure than other phones in the market.

• The security wizards at the AV-Test Institute have been sharing a lot of good news over the past few months. Microsoft’s infamous antivirus has seen a meteoric rise in quality, and the last round of Android antivirus testing yielded 17 perfect scores out of 25 candidates. After impressive achievements like those, we’re sad to report that the final Android antivirus app test results for the year from AV-Test show a downward trend. But it’s far from a total disaster.

• Google has announced that Android Marshmallow’s Now on Tap feature now supports six new languages and surfaces additional contextual information, including flight status and package tracking updates.

• Samsung’s Galaxy S7 is coming in March and will feature a pressure-sensitive screen similar to the 3D Touch display Apple introduced with the iPhone 6S, The Wall Street Journal reports. Like Samsung’s current flagship, the Galaxy S6, the S7 will also reportedly have an “Edge” variant with a curved screen; one source says the regular, non-Edge version is likely to have expandable storage, unlike both S6 models.

• Put some holiday cheer on your wrist with this collection of Santas, elves, snowmen, and other wintry wonders.

• Smartphone battery life. It is truly the bane of modern life. While most of us are overjoyed when our phones make it over a day, what if you could get over a week of use without charging? This is the promise one company is making for its upcoming Android phone release. Meet Oukitel’s K10000 smartphone.

• In the coming weeks Chrome and Android will no longer trust one of Symantec’s root certificates with an RSA key size of 1,024 bits.

• Huawei has launched a new variant of the Honor 7 smartphone in China. Dubbed Honor 7 Enhanced Edition, the device differs from the standard model in two aspects: it has 32GB internal memory and runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, compared to Honor 7′s 16/64GB storage options and Android 5.0 Lollipop.

• Mohu, makers of some of our favorite over-the-air TV antennae, recently unveiled the Mohu BeBox, a wireless audio system that’s small enough to go with you, loud enough to sound out a party, flexible enough to be a streaming stereo or a Bluetooth-controlled boombox, and more—all powered by a built-in Android tablet.

• The GStream development team released today, December 14, 2015, the second maintenance release in the GStreamer 1.6 series of the open-source, free and cross-platform multimedia framework.

Free Software/Open Source

• In a string of announcements, Huawei has unveiled plans to launch an open source OS and the HiLink SDK protocol aimed at the smart IoT home market.

• The OS, dubbed Huawei Lite OS, has been designed with the purpose of standardising IoT technologies. The HiLink will be able to understand all programming languages.

• With the release of Docker 1.9, Docker has eliminated many of the challenges of container networking. But, Project Calico is another unique option.

• There are four major reasons why open-source technology is fundamentally changing the way operators build and run their networks, including the development and deployment of network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN).

• Open source networking projects are growing in interest and in the number of contributors adding code, technologies or ideas to them, but commercial versions of the various projects out there are still few and far between. If Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation, is correct, then 2016 will be the year that changes.

• Almost everyday, someone within the open source community is talking about how folks should be using open source software. I completely agree with this point of view. To further dive into the issue, I’ll share my opinion as to why using open source software offers significant advantages over proprietary alternatives.

• Penetration testing tools, which check for malicious codes and security loopholes in applications, databases or systems, are some of the most important tools in the security professional’s arsenal. These free or inexpensive pentest tools use open source technology, which offers security pros far more flexibility than they will find in most proprietary tools.

• One of these systems is IBM LinuxONETM, which can scale to handle tens of billions of interactions daily with sub-second response times. This system can process 54 per cent more data than distributed systems for model building, according to tests using Spark-Perf benchmark suite.

• It can also help simplify the creation of innovative intelligent apps when using the Apache Spark big data processing engine; and lets companies tap into Node.js to develop high performance web and mobile apps without purchasing additional hardware.

• Every year we look back at 10 of the hot open source projects from the past 12 months. (Last year’s list made a splash!) And, we expect more great things from these projects in 2016.

GCHQ

Web Browsers

• The web browser market is dominated by a few mature heavyweights: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. But they are not for everyone. And there are a myriad of other web browsers that are worth investigating. With a smorgasbord of web browsers out there, there should be one to cater for your own specific requirements. If you want to experiment with some fresh and innovative web browsers, this article should be helpful.

Mozilla

• The Mozilla Firefox 43.0 web browser is scheduled for an official release on December 15, 2015, but Mozilla has just started seeding the binaries for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• While Firefox 43.0 won’t be officially released until tomorrow, you can already find this exciting open-source web browser update available via their mirrors.

SaaS/Big Data

• We have some new performance data on Big Data. And we return to the best case study there exists on Big Data as the only major case that offers some details of its performance. Yes, its time to revisit Orca vs Narwhal, the battle of election-specialist database systems of the 2012 Presidential election. I promised you that some more details will eventually come out and we’ll revisit that topic when it does Today we find new data courtesy of Jim Messina.

• The Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has graduated several important projects to top-level status over the past few days. The foundation announced that Apache Brooklyn is now a Top-Level Project (TLP), “signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.” Brooklyn is an application blueprint and management platform used for integrating services across multiple data centers as well as and a wide range of software in the cloud.

• The Big Data phenomenon has reached a reality that is often baffling to the amount of information to be managed, and what for us today is called “Big” it will not be anymore in 5 years, from where it will be necessary to coin other terminologies and corresponding analysis technologies .

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• A new Release Candidate for the LibreOffice 5.0.4 branch has been revealed by The Document Foundation, and it looks like the final version is just around the corner.

CMS

• The open-source project behind the widely used Joomla content management system has issued a patch for a vulnerability that is now being widely used by hackers.

• The open-source project behind the widely used Joomla content management system has issued a patch for a vulnerability that is now being widely used by hackers.

• Sucuri, a company that specializes in securing websites, wrote on Monday that attackers have been trying exploit the flaw for the last two days.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• In business, investment expects a return. So, what’s the return on funding open source software?

• It’s not always clear to people why companies like Divio—businesses that need to make a profit—would want to donate to open source communities and projects. Giving money away isn’t exactly the first thing one would put on a business plan.

• In our case, we sponsor numerous projects with ongoing regular contributions, including the Django Fellowship programme, Read the Docs, and Django Girls. We also sponsor well over a dozen open source conferences each year, from large, established events such as PyCon U.S. and DjangoCon (Europe and U.S.) to small, nascent ones such as Django Weekend and Python Namibia.

BSD

• Under the plans laid out on the mailing list, LLVM 3.8 would be branched on 13 January followed by the first release candidate, the critical bug fixing period and RC2 would begin on 27 January, and the final release would ship around 18 February.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• It’s been a while since last having anything to report on with Haiku OS, the BeOS inspired open-source operating system. One minor advancement to mention today is they have just landed optional GCC5 compiler support packages.

• Help the Free Software Foundation by doing your holiday shopping at GNU Press. If you are not a member, join today! Any purchase made during this time will count toward our fundraising goal of $450,000.

Public Services/Government

• The European Commission is about to start security audits of open source software it is using. Actual review is planned for next summer. The coming months teams will work on an inventory of projects at the European Parliament and Commission, and compare the security practices with those in the open source communities.

Openness/Sharing

• Last week, the Ministry for Public Consultation and Civic Dialogue (MCPDC) organised a public debate to discuss the budget draft law for 2016, as the nineoclock.ro website said. This represents a first step towards an Open Budget approach.

• AI is a hot topic and it is clear that it could be an engine for great good or great evil depending on who or what controls it. OpenAI is a new non-profit that aims to put the control back in the people’s hands.

• Research in the artificial intelligence field has come a long way in recent years. We’ve progressed beyond predictive analytics towards deep learning, such as those used in IBM’s Watson supercomputer, which promotes the use architectures which allow a machine to generate its own algorithms based on data — rather than developers inputting single algorithms and instructions for certain problems.

Programming

• The development team behind the popular Meld open-source and free diff and merge software have released earlier today, December 14, 2015, the first development milestone towards the next major release of the project, Meld 3.16.

• The giant firm has revealed it’s working on OMR, to develop reusable and “easily consumable” components for building “all kinds” of language runtimes.

• A year after Microsoft Corp. released its popular .NET application framework under a free license to enable vendor-agnostic use cases, IBM Corp. is preparing to open-source a homegrown development technology of own that holds the potential to make an even bigger impact on the software world. OMR is a toolkit that implements the lessons the company’s engineers learned from creating its runtime system for Java to speed up code execution across potentially the entire gamut of programming languages used in the enterprise.

Leftovers

• For the three English clubs left in the Champions League there must be a sense of deja vu about the draw for the last 16 but not a great deal of satisfaction. Arsenal’s supporters could be forgiven for thinking the worst after drawing Barcelona, with the prospect of going out at this stage for the sixth year in a row. Manchester City, for the second season in succession, will not be allowed to take fans to a Champions League tie because of the racism of others and the bad news for travellers on the Paris Métro is that Chelsea are on their way back to the French capital.

• Yahoo is facing shareholder pressure to pursue other alternatives besides a complex spin-off of its internet operations while chief executive Marissa Mayer struggles to revive the company’s revenue growth.

• The last time we wrote about the Las Vegas Review-Journal — the largest newspaper in Nevada — it was owned by Stephens Media and was making headlines for using the LVRJ as a copyright troll, pretending to sell its copyrights to a company called Righthaven. That scam fell apart when it was discovered that Righthaven didn’t really own the copyrights it was suing over. Since then, the LVRJ has changed hands a couple times. Stephens Media sold the paper to New Media Investment Group earlier this year. And then, last week, it was announced that “New Media Investment Group” had sold the newspaper to News + Media Capital Group LLC, for $140 million. News + Media Capital Group LLC is a brand new Delaware-based company, and no one has the slightest clue who they are, including all the folks working for the LVRJ.

• As open source fans, we tend to spend a lot of time curled up in front of our computers. Many of us we work in front of computers during the day, and some of us even work on or with open source projects, too. If you are anything like me, spending an entire day in front of a screen and then spending most of the evening there, too, is not uncommon. Today is a good example: I started work at 8:00AM, and at 8:21PM I am starting to write this article…

• Microsoft on Friday apologized for how it conveyed last month’s decision to slash OneDrive storage allotments, and restored the 15GB of free cloud storage space to current users who asked for it. But it did not back down from its determination to eliminate the unlimited allowance.

• “We are all genuinely sorry for the frustration this decision has caused and for the way it was communicated,” wrote Douglas Pearce, a group program manager for OneDrive, in a message that shut down a massive plea on Microsoft’s own website for the restoration of the allotments.

Health/Nutrition

• The United Nations public health agency in charge of tobacco control has warned EU policymakers to keep their distance from industry as they consider reforms to fight cigarette smuggling.

• The head of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control secretariat, Vera Da Costa e Silva, wrote senior European Commission officials earlier this month, saying the EU’s close working relationship with tobacco companies to fight cigarette smuggling may violate Europe’s international commitments.

• Standardised packaging (also known as plain packaging) legislation has recently been adopted in some states as a tobacco control measure. Under such laws, tobacco products must be sold in drab coloured packaging without branding other than a written indication of the name under which the product is sold. Its aim is to reduce the attraction of tobacco products, particularly to young smokers, and to prevent advertising imagery from interfering with prominent mandatory textual and visual health warnings. In March 2015, the Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015 received Parliamentary approval in the United Kingdom. The tobacco industry vigorously opposed their introduction. Amongst other objections, it claimed that the restrictions on branding introduced under the Regulations violate its fundamental right of property under Art 1 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights and Art. 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union because they deprive it of its ability to use marks, designs and inventions protected by intellectual property law. In this article, this argument is tested by reference to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU. It is demonstrated that the absolutist view of property rights promoted by the Industry is very different from that prevailing in European fundamental rights law and that, as a result, the Industry’s suggestion that the Regulations violate A1P1 and Art. 17 is seriously misleading.

Security

• ybersecurity researcher Peter Kruse, founder of CSIS Security Group in Denmark, thought his mother was calling. Her number appeared on his phone, but when he answered, it wasn’t her. Instead, a male voice told him to stop what he was doing as a computer expert.

• “They checked my family members,” he said, referring to his anonymous tormenters. “They did their homework.”

• Security researcher Costin Raiu at Kaspersky Lab in Romania has a similar story. While he was analyzing Stuxnet, a worm written by the US and Israel and considered to be the first cyber weapon, someone broke into his house.

• Institutions such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are fighting a losing battle in relation to preventing this type of piracy, simply because of the sheer number of people across the world tapping into the technology to download their favourite television show or album.

• If you’re old enough, you remember reading a lot about the coming “paperless office”. It never came, but I realized there are parallels we can draw in the context of our current security problems.

• Back in the 90′s, everyone wanted a paperless office. It sounded neat and with the future coming, who would need paper with all the flying cars and hoverboards! It turns out paper didn’t go away. Everyone keeps talking about how security is the most important thing ever, investing in the paperless office was once the most important thing ever.

• Security tools are confusing to use but they are even worse to install. You often get stuck installing development packages and loads of dependencies just to get one working. Most of the tools are written by a single person trying to get something out the door fast. And most security tools want advanced privileges so they can craft packets with ease or install `-dev` packages themselves.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• David Talbot’s latest book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, examines the post-WWII U.S. intelligence sector and the power it wields, by following the career of Wall Street lawyer, diplomat and spymaster Allen Dulles. Talbot discussed his new book with fellow author Peter Dale Scott, in a public event at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco on December 2, 2015. Talbot says he believes CIA assassins were responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy.

• Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.

Transparency Reporting

• The problem for governments that hate the scrutiny that FOI laws bring is that it looks a bit suspicious to kill off the right where it already exists — cynics might think they have something to hide. So the question politicians obviously ask themselves is: how can we throttle FOI laws without making it too obvious?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Just before 3 a.m., Jay Garetson’s phone buzzed on the bedside table. He picked it up and read the text: “Low Pressure Alert.”

• He felt a jolt of stress and his chest tightened. He dreaded what that automated message probably meant: With the water table dropping, another well on his family’s farm was starting to suck air.

• The Garetson family has been farming in the plains of southwestern Kansas for four generations, since 1902. Now they face a hard reality. The groundwater they depend on is disappearing. Their fields could wither. Their farm might not survive for the next generation.

• Greenpeace says the impact of rampant forest and peatland fires in Indonesia’s Papua region is having a devastating effect on West Papuan society.

• Fires from land clearance on drained peatland have caused rampant fires across the republic including in Papua, catapulting Indonesia to being one of the world’s largest emitter’s of greenhouse gasses.

• Greenpeace’s Indonesia forest campaigner Yuyun Indradi says the fires have belched carbon haze across the region which is a health hazard for many communities.

• Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels, experts told IndiaSpend.

• Acrid smoke and haze have enveloped Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and have reached Thailand, choking people, reducing visibility and spiking respiratory illnesses, according to Susan Minnemeyer, Mapping and Data Manager for Washington-based World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch Fires initiative.

• The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don’t want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off the kids. “All the young people are going to move out,” warned Bobby Mann, a local resident concerned about the future of his burg. Worse, Mann said, the solar panels would suck up all the energy from the Sun.

• Another resident—a retired science teacher, no less—expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would block photosynthesis, and prevent nearby plants from growing. Jane Mann then went on to add that there seemed to have been a lot of cancer deaths in the area, and that no one could tell her solar panels didn’t cause cancer. “I want information,” Mann said. “Enough is enough.”

• These comments were reported not in The Onion, but rather by the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald. They came during a Woodland Town Council meeting in which Strata Solar Company sought to rezone an area northeast of the town, off of US Highway 258, to build a solar farm. The council not only rejected the proposal, it went a step further, voting for a complete moratorium on solar farms.

• Chuckling and shaking their heads as they described their annual family gift exchange to reporters, Koch Industries executives Charles and David Koch confirmed Wednesday they had unwittingly gotten each other the same election for Christmas this year.

• The two brothers and energy industry magnates, who for decades have gathered to share a holiday meal and open presents next to the Christmas tree in Charles’ Wichita home, admitted they were a bit embarrassed to learn they had each given the other U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin’s congressional seat, but said they ultimately shrugged off the coincidence.

Finance

• The study comes as student loan debt continues to grow nationwide. Outstanding student loan balances increased by $13 billion to $1.2 trillion as of Sept. 30. That’s more overall debt than consumers owe on credit cards or auto loans. Nearly 12% of the money owed on student loans is 90 days or more delinquent in the third quarter of 2015.

• In the federal loan portfolio, which makes up $896 billion of the $1.2-trillion overall student loan debt, 20% of all borrowers, owing 13% of the debt, are in default, or more than 90 days late on a payment.

• Professor Wolff joins David Pakman to discuss the the future of employment in the context of automation and technological unemployment.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A commentary video from the National Rifle Association labeled those who called for more than thoughts and prayers following the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California the “Godless Left” and claimed that they “march hand-in-hand” with terrorists “toward the possible, purposeful destruction of us all.”

Censorship

• Internet service providers in the UK have begun blocking around 85 new ‘pirate’ domains following demands from rightsholders. All six major ISPs will implement the ban which targets, among other things, various clones, proxies and mirrors associated with The Pirate Bay plus major torrent and MP3 download sites.

Privacy

• There is no indication what “government” Twitter suspects is connected with the hack, but online news sources are speculating the usual suspects, China and North Korea. PCWorld reports that many of the account holders receiving the Twitter notices are “privacy advocates and security researchers, some of whom tweet under pseudonyms.” Reuters is also reporting that Google and Facebook have also started warning users of possible state-sponsored attacks, but offers no details.

• Last week, Let’s Encrypt came out of beta. Let’s Encrypt is a collaborative effort that provides free SSL/TLS certificates for use by anyone with a valid Internet domain. It’s also a trusted certificate authority, and it’s currently issuing 90-day certificates free of charge. The upside is free SSL/TLS certificates. The downside is that 90-day expiration, though there are methods to renew the certificates automatically as the expiration approaches.

• Further, the tools provided by Let’s Encrypt make it pretty much effortless to implement. The Let’s Encrypt Python tool available at GitHub runs on a Web server, requests a valid certificate, and even does the Apache configuration for you, all with a pretty ncurses UI. Basically, you run this on a host with a bunch of non-SSL domains, and when it’s done, they’re all secured with free valid certificates.

• In a victory for millions of people in the U.S. who have placed telephone calls to locations overseas, EFF and Human Rights Watch have confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of collecting those records in bulk has stopped and that the only bulk database of those records has been destroyed.

Civil Rights

• In his first interview since returning home to London in October after being detained without charge for 14 years in the US military facility in Cuba, British resident Aamer suggested the former prime minister and the former foreign secretary were aware that he was being tortured.

• “The not unreasonable allegation that Shaker Aamer makes is that both the [then] prime minister Tony Blair and … Jack Straw must have known not just about his illegal abduction, but also about his torture at the hands of the US authorities,” Salmond told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show.

• The SNP foreign affairs spokesman and former Scottish first minister said that “as with so many other things”, Blair and Straw had a great deal to answer for. “They have to be asked the straight question of how could they possibly not have known about the fate that had befallen a British citizen,” he said.

• “Governments have many responsibilities, but the primary responsibility of all governments is to keep their own citizens safe from harm, and governments aren’t meant to collaborate on the illegal abduction and the torture of one of their own citizens. So both the then prime minister and home secretary have to face up and tell us exactly what they knew and when they knew it.”

• Teenagers under the age of 16 could be banned from Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and email if they don’t have parental permission, under last-minute changes to EU laws.

• The European Union is on the verge of pushing through new regulations that would raise the age of consent for websites to use personal data from 13 to 16.

• Officials quitely amended proposed data protection laws last week to increase the age and put the EU out of step with rules in other parts of the world.

• The most powerful gun in the damage-control arsenal isn’t truth. It is demonization—a vicious assault on the character of the whistleblower in order to destroy credibility and distract from the message. The damage controller’s bag of tricks is as old as Machiavelli.

• Find anything that borders on illegal behavior in the whistleblower’s past, such as court convictions, messy divorces, arrest reports, domestic violence complaints, a history of alcohol, child support issues, or drug abuse. Attack the whistleblower’s motive by alleging that he or she was driven by malice, revenge, deceit, greed, or hunger for publicity. Dig up colleagues, neighbors, and fellow workers who are willing to say, true or untrue, that the whistleblower is vindictive, sneaky, dishonest, prone to exaggerate, not a team player, disruptive in the workplace. Allege that the whistleblower is incompetent at his or her job, cannot be trusted with responsibility, or lacks leadership skills. Accuse the whistleblower of being a thief who stole proprietary documents, illegally revealed company secrets, broke a confidentiality agreement. Label the whistleblower mentally unstable.

• Edward Snowden—“the world’s most wanted man by the world’s most powerful government”—wasn’t surprised that his enemies tried to assassinate his character. He expected as much. As he told Greenwald and the Guardian, “I know the government will demonize me. They’ll say I violated the Espionage Act. That I committed grave crimes. That I aided America’s enemies. That I endangered national security. I’m sure they’ll grab every incident they can find from my past and probably will exaggerate or even fabricate some to demonize me as much as possible. . . . What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions. . . . I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can’t live with is knowing that I did nothing.”

• The only thing as trustworthy as a cop’s testimony are statements made by confidential informants. These are used to secure warrants and, occasionally, as supporting evidence in prosecutions. Never mind the fact that confidential informants are often career criminals who carry with them the innate desire to stay out of jail.

• For years, AT&T worked tirelessly to erode its customers’ legal rights, using mouse print in its terms of service preventing consumers from participating in lawsuits against the company. Instead, customers were forced into binding arbitration, where arbitrators employed by the company unsurprisingly rule in their employer’s favor a huge percentage of the time. Initially, the lower courts derided this greasy behavior for what it was: an attempt by AT&T to eliminate customer legal rights and save a buck. And with AT&T’s massive history of fraud, you can imagine AT&T was looking to save quite a bit.

• The Federal Aviation Administration, responding to heightened concerns about rogue drone flights near airports, unveiled a pre-Christmas rule on Monday requiring drone hobbyists as young as 13 years old to register their unmanned aircraft.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Grumpy Cat is not happy. Her owners have filed a lawsuit at a California federal court, accusing a coffee maker of exploiting the cat’s copyrights and trademarks without permission. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, Grumpy Cat’s owners also want control of the coffee maker’s grumpycat.com domain name.

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