● 12.22.15

● Links 22/12/2015: Linux 4.4 RC6, Solus 1.0 Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linux world changed a lot in 2015. Perhaps the biggest change was at Microsoft, which turned from a foe into a lover of Linux. We saw the first Ubuntu Linux powered smartphone. Samsung launched a smartwatch running on Tizen Linux. In the enterprise, Linux and open source continued to become stronger with technologies like OpenStack, Docker, and Cloud Foundry. It has been an exciting year.

Kernel Space

• Things remain fairly normal. Last week rc5 was very small indeed, this week we have a slightly bigger rc6. The main difference is that rc6 had a network pull in it.

• But rc6 is still pretty small, and the patch looks pretty normal: just over 60% drivers, 16% core networking, 13% architecture updates, and 10% “misc” (documentation, header files, some small filesystem updates etc). Small stuff all around – you can see the appended shortlog for a flavor of what is going on.

• I’d expect (and hope) that with the holidays next week should continue being quiet.

• And maybe I can hope that people take the downtime to play with their hardware and test out the most recent kernel version?

• Linus

• This sixth weekly release candidate for Linux 4.4 “remains fairly normal” according to Linus even though it’s slightly larger than -rc5 due to network updates.

• Just a few minutes ago, December 21, 2015, Linus Torvalds had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the sixth RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 LTS kernel.

• The Linux Foundation last week announced it was teaming up with a group of high-tech and financial giants on a project to advance the blockchain technology made famous by bitcoin virtual currency.

Graphics Stack

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov has announced earlier today, December 21, the immediate availability for download of the eighth maintenance release in the Mesa 11.0 3D Graphics Library series.

• For those that haven’t moved onto the Mesa 11.1 series yet, Emil Velikov has announced the release of Mesa 11.0.8 that backports many fixes to this previous stable series.

Benchmarks

• A few days ago on the new Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5 “Skylake” system I ran a variety of GCC and LLVM Clang compiler benchmarks to show how the performance of the resulting binaries differ between these competing open-source compilers.

• While Intel NUCs powered by Skylake have been announced for some time, it’s still next to impossible to find these “NUC6″ models at major Internet retailers. I’m told the situation should improve in early 2016, but fortunately there is some early Linux performance result data from two of these Skylake NUCs.

Applications

• The Calibre eBook reader and editor has been upgraded today and it looks like this is the last release for this year. It’s not a major update, but it does come with a very important feature.

• This past weekend, the development team behind the open source and cross-platform Claws Mail email client and news reader application based on the GTK+ toolkit had the pleasure of announcing the first point release in the Claws Mail 3.13 series.

• Vagrant 1.8 has been released. Comes with support for linked clones and snapshots.

• Vagrant is a very popular open source application for building and managing development environments. It is developed by HashiCorp, the same company behind several other applications, like Otto, Atlas, Consul, Nomad, Terraform and Packer.

• Due to previous efforts we have a pretty good appdata coverage of apps themselves, but apps are not the only entities that can be exposed to users in GNOME Software and other app catalogs that use the AppData format. Add-ons are another one. If an add-on has a metadata file it appears in the profile of the app it extends. This makes them much more discoverable for users.

• On December 20, 2015, the development team behind the leading multimedia framework for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems announced the availability of the fourth maintenance release for FFmpeg 2.8.

Proprietary

• It looks like the development team behind the Vivaldi web browser hasn’t stopped working on improving the cross-platform software after they released the second Beta build earlier this week.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Twelve years ago developer Bill Kendrick created an open source, cross-platform video game called SuperTux. It’s been under development ever since, but the last time the a build was marked as “stable” was in 2005.

• This one is quite vague, but a new job posting may suggest that a Linux port of Elite: Dangerous isn’t out of the question.

• Elite Dangerous is currently available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Xbox One, but there are a lot of users out there that would want to see the game on Linux as well. It turns out that the developers might be working on something.

• Valve is on fire and has released a new update for the Steam Beta client, continuing to fix some issues with the Steam controller and with the In-Home Streaming function.

• Saints Row IV and Saints Row: Gat out of Hell have been released today for SteamOS/Linux.

• Saints Row IV is an open-world action-adventure game released for Windows in 2013 while Saints Row: Gat out of Hell was released for Windows just this past January. Gat out of Hell is a standalone expansion to Saints Row IV.

• Insurgency was very exciting to have on Linux, as it’s the most tactical FPS game we have available. The new updates have made it much more fun too, with gamepad support and decent Steam Controller support added in.

• Max Teufel had the great pleasure of announcing this past weekend the immediate availability for download of a new major update for his awesome SuperTux arcade/adventure game, a clone of Super Mario Bros. featuring Tux the penguin, for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

• Oh baby! Saints Row IV is now available on SteamOS and Linux, and I can’t wait to give this insane game a go. It’s part of a very small selection of open world games available on Linux, so I hope it does well.

• We will have thoughts up on it later, as we had no advanced warning or access.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Qt 5.6 remains about two months behind schedule, but the beta release of this tool-kit update with long-term support has been finally realized.

• The Qt 5.6 toolkit went into beta on Friday and will be supported for three years with being an LTS release. Qt 5.6 features fully rewritten HiDPI support, full Windows 10 support, the removal of WebKit and Qt Quick 1 support, and many other changes. More information on Qt 5.6 can be found via our past articles.

• Recently releases of KDE and GNOME Desktop Environment have a serious progress to Wayland porting – the first Plasma Wayland live image is available for download. Last versions of GNOME work more or less stable and how about KDE? Time to explore it.

• With the relatively new Plasma 5, there are some oddities with “kwallet” (also called “kdewallet”). I’ll be discussing those in this post.

• Since Martin posted his Wayland progress I’ve noticed an uptick in questions about CSD, so I figure now is a good time to upload this post I’ve had sitting around, as for the past month I’ve been closely examining the concept of “Dynamic Window Decorations”, or “DWDs” and how to better implement them.

Distributions

Reviews

• I have a lot of thoughts on Arch Linux, partially because the project is so unusual in the Linux ecosystem. One point that stands out is Arch has some of the best documentation in the Linux community. The wiki is a very valuable resource, not just for people who run Arch Linux, but for the community as a whole and the wiki is an essential read for people who wish to try Arch.

• Another point is that getting up and running with Arch Linux is a bigger investment in time and effort than most other Linux distributions. With most mainstream distributions we can put in the installation media, click “Next” through some installation screens, set up a user account and we will soon have a feature-rich operating system. Arch feels less like a finished product, like openSUSE or Linux Mint, and more like a collection of components we can put together however we like. I would compare it to the difference between buying a toy car and buying a model kit where we paint the individual pieces and glue them together. Putting together the model takes a lot longer and requires some skill, but what we end up with includes just the pieces we used and in the colour we wanted.

• The flip side to Arch taking a long time to set up is that, in theory, it will be possible to constantly update the distribution without re-installing. This may be of benefit to some people, especially those who like to stay on the bleeding-edge of software development. Rolling Arch forward gradually may be less work (over time) than updating to a new release of Fedora or Ubuntu every six months. However, Arch is not likely to remain as stable as Debian or CentOS over five years as some packages will almost certainly break during that time period. People looking to install-and-forget a distribution will probably be better off with a long-term-support release that will remain stable for years while people who want to keep up with the latest software changes may find Arch less work in the long run.

• Fedora 23 Workstation with the Gnome desktop is a very reasonable release. I am surprised first and foremost by the advancement in the Gnome framework. It’s usable, and there’s no reason to hate it anymore. This shows how objective and cool I am, and that my past resistance was all legit techno babble. When credits are due, I’m a bloody bank.

• Indeed, self praise aside, Gnome has reached a point where it can be used. ‘Tis a paradox, because it was perfect before being ruined, and now it’s approaching the same level of usability it had years ago. But if we put the background story aside, yes, it’s okay, and it makes sense on top of Fedora. The distro itself also works well. It’s stable, robust, the hardware support is really good, all my peripherals were properly initialized, all the network protocols ate their bits and bytes without hiccups, and with some extra pimpage, you have a pleasant, friendly system that can serve entertainment as well as state-of-the-art functionality.

• There’s a lot more to be done. Easier access to codecs, extra software, better Nautilus support, better desktop usability without hacks, tweaks and special utilities. And yes, make the distro run on my Lenovo laptop. What’s up with that. But given my experience this autumn, given my expectations, all considered, Fedora 23 is good. I am cautiously optimistic around Gnome 3, and maybe, just maybe, it could come back to the family and be nice and dandy once again. If you’re looking for a refreshing change from the ordeal of pain we have been inflicted so far, you might want to give Fedora a spin. Grade: 8/10. Something like that.

New Releases

• Josh Strobl from the Solus Project had the enormous pleasure of informing the world about the official release date for the Solus 1.0 Linux kernel-based computer operating system on December 25, 2015.

• The Solus Operating System is planning to announce its version 1.0 release on Christmas.

• Solus is a newer but promising desktop Linux distribution built off of Intel’s Clear Linux project, features the Budgie Desktop, and more.

• Solus is launching in just a few days, and everyone is looking forward to playing with a new operating system. The more interesting perspective is the fact that it’s going to be powered by the new Budgie desktop, and that’s just as cool.

• Linux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the first Beta release of the upcoming 4MRescueKit 15.0 system rescue Live CD.

Ballnux/SUSE

• I run a local file and media server, which is a very important part of my digital life — it hosts all of my files. Everything. I have been using an Ubuntu 14.04 server running on a self-assembled PC. But, it’s a big, noisy system and generates too much heat. So, I planned to move to smaller form factor, such as System76′s Meerkat.

• Because I was moving to a new hardware, I decided to give openSUSE Leap a shot at running my servers. I have nothing against Ubuntu: I love Ubuntu on servers. But, I wanted to try Leap because this is the distro that runs on my main system.

Red Hat Family

• Karanbir Singh from the CentOS team has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the CentOS 7 Linux operating system for the ARM hardware architecture.

• In a research report released on today, Needham reaffirmed their Buy rating on Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)’s stock. The target gives a potential upside of 21.23 % from firm’s current stock price.

• After briefly announcing the other day that the CentOS 7 Linux operating system was available for select ARMv7-based single-board computers, such as Raspberry Pi 2, Banana Pi and CubieTruck, Karanbir Singh is proud to present the release of CentOS AltArch 7.

• Carolyn recently resigned her teaching position to accept another offer, and she now works with software. She’s also a server sysadmin, but that position didn’t come with the original job offer. The previous admin decided he didn’t want to work there any longer and walked away. Carolyn was the only choice they had, in house that is. Because she was a Red Hat user at home, it was decided she could be the new server system administrator.

• Red Hat gapped open sharply higher Friday, but gave back some ground during the first hour of trade. The stock was range-bound for the remainder of the session and closed up by 2.54 at $81.40 on the highest volume in 8 1/2 months. Red Hat jumped to a 2-week high.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) reported Revenues increased 15% year over year to $524 million and beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $521 million.

Fedora

• Christmas is coming, so we cut a new release of the Fedora Developer Portal for you. We have a few new tools, a new member to our development team, and a new staging instance to test future updates of the Developer Portal before deploying them.

• Today in Linux news Dedoimedo found a distribution he described as “decent.” Elsewhere, Pavlo Rudyi tested Plasma on Wayland and Neil Rickert discussed Kwallet. PCWorld’s Jared Newman said Monday, “Ubuntu appears to have fallen far short of the 200 million user goal it set back in 2011″ and Jesse Smith reviewed Arch Linux in today’s Distrowatch Weekly noting a “fondness growing for Arch.”

• The results are in! The Fedora Elections for the F23 release cycle of FESCo, FAmSCo, and the Council concluded on Tuesday, December 15th. The results are posted on the Fedora Voting Application and announced on the mailing lists. You can also find the full list of winning candidates below. Now that the recent Elections cycle is finished, the Fedora Community Operations team compiled an Elections Retrospective report of how the Elections went.

Debian Family

• Theme of our trip is Debian Pure Blends. More specifically, we will meet with distribution developers and designers to try understand why they fork from (other forks of) Debian, and how Debian might improve to better serve them – ideally be able to fully contain such projects within Debian itself.

Derivatives

• New iso images of SparkyLinux 4.2 “Tyche” are ready to go. Sparky 4 is based on and fully compatible with Debian testing “Stretch”.

• Earlier today, December 21, the developers of the Debian-based SparkyLinux computer operating system had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of SparkyLinux 4.2.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After releasing a major kernel update for all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems a couple of days ago, Canonical announced today, December 20, the availability of new kernel versions for Ubuntu 15.10, 15.04, 14.04 LTS and 12.04 LTS.

• Immediately after announcing the availability of new kernel updates for all supported Ubuntu OSes, Canonical published another Ubuntu security notice to inform users about the release of another patch for the Linux kernel packages of Ubuntu 15.10 for Raspberry Pi 2.

• After a few of the most seemingly uneventful Ubuntu releases in its history, Canonical is making a few major changes to patch up Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for the long haul. Aside from disabling those reviled online search results, the next version of Ubuntu will also dump the Ubuntu Software Center and replace it with GNOME’s Software application.

• We’ve just been informed by Martin Wimpress, the main developer and leader of Ubuntu MATE, about the general availability of a spin-off project from Ubuntu MATE, called Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker.

• With the end of 2015 imminent, Ubuntu appears to have fallen far short of the 200 million user goal it set back in 2011.

• Today, December 22, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has sent his last daily report for 2015, informing us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers on the mobile operating system that powers the Ubuntu Phone devices.

Flavours and Variants

• TheeMahn, the developer behind the Ubuntu-based Ultimate Edition Linux operating system had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability for download of Ultimate Edition 4.2.3 LTS.

• I borrowed the above title from a video on Youtube because it is instantly intriguing. If you are anything like me then you just need to find out how you go about crashing Linux Mint.

• The key part missing from the title is the number of times you have to click your mouse in order to bring Linux Mint to its knees.

Devices/Embedded

• Commell’s Linux friendly “QE-E71” COM appears to be the first Intel Core based Qseven module. It supports both 4th Gen Haswell and 5th Gen Broadwell CPUs.

• The QE-E71 appears to be the first Qseven COM packing an Intel Core processor. We have seen a number of Intel Atom, Intel Braswell, and AMD G-Series based Qseven modules, not to mention numerous ARM-based Qsevens, but Intel Core chips are more often found in COM Express form factors. The QE-E71 updates an earlier QE-E70 Qseven module with Atom E3845 and Celeron J1900/N2930 support.

Phones

• The Finish company Jolla has managed to remain in business after a successful financing round, giving hopes to the users that we might yet see new Jolla products in the future.

Android

• Most people don’t realize that they’re not limited to the Android apps found in the Google Play store. There are also great open source apps available from F-Droid. The apps found in F-Droid are both open source and specifically designed for your Android device. In this article, I’ll share some of my favorite open source Android apps and share my experiences with each application.

• Chinese smartphone market is the largest one in the world, it has been rising for years now, and 2015 has been quite successful for a number of China-based companies. China is actually home to many, many smartphone manufacturing companies, some of which have been striving in 2015. These smartphone manufacturers have released a number of really compelling smartphones this year, and picking our top three definitely wasn’t an easy task. There are many aspects you need to consider when choosing the best of the best, and after careful consideration, we managed to pick three devices made by Chinese companies which have risen above the competition. That being said, these are our top three picks!

• Canadian company BlackBerry may launch a second high-end Android smartphone in 2016, its CEO John Chen has hinted.

• According to a report in softpedia.com, Chen said if BlackBerry PRIV – the first BlackBerry smartphone powered by Android — does better, “we will focus on the high-end, probably closer to mid-range, coming out in 2016.”

• My wife hates her Samsung Galaxy S 5, an oldie-but-goodie Android smartphone that still scores near the top of our Ratings. Oh, she’s grateful that her Galaxy’s battery, unlike the iPhone 5′s can last a day on a single charge. And she appreciates that the relatively big display on the Samsung helps her squint less. But she’s still not an Android person. The gesture controls and widgets and other customizing options that define Android smartphones are lost on her.

• While those ideas still seem far-fetched for the football team and the disgraced comedian, the one-time immensely popular smartphone with its signature keyboard looks to have at least taken a step toward relevance. BlackBerry still lost money in its most recent quarter — about $89 million or $0.17 a share — but there are some positive signs.

• Google understands this to some extent, but I see it at a crossroads. Chrome OS is interesting, but Android dominates the mobile market, and it should be the principal OS that Google pushes to a younger generation.

• Oh, finally we can write this post. Video editors have sucked on Android for a long time. Too long. But now, Adobe Premiere Clip brings basic, easy-to-use video editing to Android. You can trim clips, mix multiple clips together, and add your own soundtrack. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start.

• Boomboxes were everywhere in the 1980s. Throw in eight D-cells and you had a portable, all-in-one stereo system with a single—or even a double—cassette deck and an AM/FM radio that could go anywhere around the house, in your back yard, or to the beach.

• It is still early days in my Android experience but I am enjoying this courtship. Not sure if it stays this way or if the bond would grow stronger, but the early signs are positive.

Free Software/Open Source

• The pool of people participating in open source communities still lacks diversity, but the good news is that many people, projects, and organizations are working to improve it. I’ve collected a few highlights from 2015 efforts to increase diversity in open source communities. Which 2015 diversity in open source stories would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

• Eight years ago, the Robot Operating System (ROS) project began, and since then there have been huge advancements made to the robotics industry. Robots are teaching kids to code, becoming companions, have been given X-ray vision, and even started to fly.

• But adding these features aren’t easy, and that is where the Robot Operating System comes in, according to Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

• 2015 was crowded with events for Linux and open source. It was a year in which the runaway success of OpenStack continued, fuelling — among other things, rumors of a Canonical Software public offering. It was also the year of unsuccessful ventures into smartphones by Mozilla, Sailfish, and Ubuntu, and the first appearance of a Steam Machine for gamers.

• Wearable electronics have exploded in the past year. Countless small devices are now on the market for not only fitness tracking, but posture improvement, sunscreen reminders, muscle-sensing gesture control, and much more. As technology on the body becomes more pervasive than ever, having open source tools for developing wearable technology is more important than ever, so that we can create the future of fashion tech while maintaining data privacy of biometric sensor data.

• Have you been thinking of launching an open source project or are you in the process of doing so? Doing it successfully and rallying community support can be more complicated than you think, but a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly. Beyond that, some planning can also keep you out of legal trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish. In this post, you’ll find our newly updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you’re doing an open source project.

• At Pinterest, that company with a popular app for pinning images and other content to boards, much of the source code is written in the longstanding Python programming language. But in the past year, a few of the company’s software engineers have called on a young language called Elixir.

• Pinterest’s notification system now uses Elixir to deliver 14,000 notifications per second. The notification system runs across 15 servers, whereas the old system, written in Java, ran on 30. The new code is about one-tenth of the size of the old code.

• Rather than continuing to use low-level tools such as YAML, says Carl Caum, technical marketing manager for Puppet Labs, IT organizations can now make use of the declarative programming environment that Puppet Labs created to configure containers alongside the operating system and virtual machines that many of them already rely on Puppet to configure.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• This month marks a milestone for me. It’s been five years since I started working in—and learning from—an open organization.

• But it also marks another important milestone. My organization, the Mozilla Foundation, just finished drafting a strategic plan for what the next five years may hold.

• And we created that plan through open collaboration between our staff and community.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• A little more than two years ago, the open source consulting company Collabora took over the job of commercialising LibreOffice, the free office suite that is produced by an army of developers.

• At that time, a number of LibreOffice developers moved from the Germany-based Linux company SUSE and became staff of Collabora.

• There are however a few comments I would like to make about this testing release. First, I’m very happy to see LibreOffice Online become a reality. By reality, I mean more than an announcement and more than a demo with chunks of code and configuration notes. Today, LibreOffice runs in the cloud. Which leads me to my second comment: the relevance of LibreOffice in the future is now pretty secure. Running LibreOffice in the browser needs you can access it without having to download the code and just by using the access gateway to everything these days: the browser.

Funding

• They could also make an Interactive Tutorial Application for Android and then maybe charge a little money for that. I’m pretty sure this is an easier way to get funding rather then by donations only.

BSD

• Can you believe that it has been a decade of BSDTalk? The first episode aired on Dec 20, 2005.

• An interview with Robert N. M. Watson and George V. Neville-Neil about teaching operating systems with tracing and teachbsd.org.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.6.10, the tenth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

• There’s a problem with the word ‘free’. Specifically, it can refer to something that costs no money, or something that isn’t held down by restrictions – in other words, something that has liberty. This difference is crucial when we talk about software, because free (as in cost) software doesn’t necessarily give you freedom. There are plenty of no-cost applications out there that spy on you, steal your data, and try to lock you in to specific file formats. And you certainly can’t get the source code to them.

• Jessica Tallon from the MediaGoblin project, open-source media server software designed for GNU/Linux operating systems, announced this past weekend the immediate availability of a patch for GNU MediaGoblin 0.8.

• The developers behind the GnuCash Project were happy to announce this past weekend the immediate availability for download of the tenth maintenance release in the GnuCash 2.6 series, bringing all sorts of improvements, updated translations, and numerous bugfixes.

• It’s amazing to think that a broken printer lead to the creation of the Free Software movement which, many years later, would give me a professional career, an education, and incredible friends around the world.

• Vendors who don’t release their code remove that freedom from their users, and the weapons users have to fight against that are limited. Most users hold no copyright over the software in the device and are unable to take direct action themselves. A vendor’s failure to comply dooms them to having to choose between buying a new device in 12 months or no longer receiving security updates. When yet more examples of vendor-supplied malware are discovered, it’s more difficult to produce new builds without them. The utility of the devices that the user purchased is curtailed significantly.

• Conservancy needs 750 Supporters to continue its basic community services & 2,500 to avoid hibernating its enforcement efforts! The next 38 supporters who sign up by December 24th will count twice thanks to an anonymous match donor! 552 have joined so far and match pledges reduced our 2,500 maximum need by 178 !

• We have had a security problem in our OAuth implementation reported to us privately and have taken steps to address it. The security problem affects all versions of GNU MediaGoblin since 0.5.0. I have created a patch for this and released a minor version 0.8.1 (see the release notes page). It’s strongly advised that everyone upgrade as soon as they can.

Public Services/Government

• The European Commission has started working on the next version of Joinup, the collaboration platform for eGovernment professionals. Users are the main focus of the upgrade, which will make the platform easier to use. Access to and sharing of interoperability solutions will be streamlined, and the developers are making it more straightforward to contribute to the platform’s projects and communities. If all goes well, the new version could go live in June.

Licensing

• While everyone knows of the need to comply with contractual terms in software licenses (and elsewhere), the salient point in this context, is that under several recent cases, failure to do so with respect to a license for copyrighted material (which is usually applicable to software), allows the pursuit in United States District Court of claims for infringement damages under the Copyright Act and related items, such as attorney fees. This is in addition to traditional contract damages, which may be non-existent or difficult to prove. For example, if the evidence establishes (among other things) that the work infringed was a registered work in the U.S. Copyright Office and the infringement was willful, then the court may, in its discretion, award statutory damages of up to $150,000 (regardless of the retail cost of the underlying work).

Programming

• Presumably there are people that think the PHP language is awesome. An afternoon spent writing PHP code is like a fine meal and a backrub in one transcendent coding experience while JavaScript and client-side scripting can just go to hell.

Standards/Consortia

• Baroness Neville-Rolfe said that the planned new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is likely to give consumers “more control over how their data is to be used” but she raised concern about the impact data portability rules could have on “new ideas, innovation and competition”.

• Various drafts of the GDPR have contained proposed new rules which would, if finalised, require businesses to ensure that they can hand over the personal data they possess on a consumer in a usable transferable format.

Leftovers

• More than a million people have read Woody Leonhard’s “10 reasons you shouldn’t upgrade to Windows 10” since we posted it on Aug. 20, 2015. Its companion piece, “10 reasons you should upgrade to Windows 10,” has been read by fewer than 70,000 people.

• That tells you something about the way people make decisions: Always look for the showstopper first. But it’s also symbolic of Windows 10’s ongoing drawbacks, despite the fact that many millions of people have already downloaded and installed the free Windows 10 upgrade or have bought a new Windows 10 system.

• West Australian businesses have topped settlements for unlicensed software use in Australia, with WA manufacturing businesses Gastech and Offsite held accountable by ex-employees for unlicensed software use.

• According to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), West Australian (WA) businesses are leading unlicensed software settlements in 2015 with over one third of settlements related to WA businesses with penalties tallying up to $100,000 for using unlicensed software.

Health/Nutrition

• Australia has prevailed in an international legal dispute brought by tobacco giant Philip Morris. This is good news for the government and for taxpayers, who now won’t have to pay a penny to the company in compensation. The government and its legal team should be congratulated for their success and for standing up for health policy in the face of multiple legal challenges.

• However, ultimately the decision is more a victory for common sense than a vindication of the government’s plain packaging policy. And for several reasons, it provides cold comfort to anyone concerned about investor-state dispute settlement.

Security

• In terms of the alleged legal threat, Stamos admitted that he contacted Jay Kaplan, CEO of Synack, and told him that legitimate bug research does not include exfiltrating unnecessary data.

• GNU/Linux has a massive flaw in Grub, its ubiquitous bootloader. Just by hitting a few keys, you can completely pwn a Linux box—including many embedded devices.

• The “Grand Unified Bootloader” had a weird vulnerability added in 2009. Was CVE-2015-8370 introduced into GRUB2 by a government agency, such as the NSA?

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In an editorial about Iran testing a ballistic missile, the Washington Post (12/20/15) warns that there are “clear connections between the missile launches and Tehran’s ambitions to become a nuclear power.” According to the paper’s editorial board, “The only practical military purpose of the missiles the regime is testing is to carry atomic warheads.”

• [...]

• Israel, the only Mideast country that does have nuclear weapons, has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran. Given that Israel has already bombed Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia, there’s no need for the Post to attribute “nuclear ambitions” to Iran to explain why it would be interested in developing a credible deterrent to the prospect of an Israeli attack.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Indonesia continues to experience dangerous forest fires across the country, with over 100,000 active fires detected in 2015. The fires have been raging since September and are now releasing more emissions daily than the entire U.S. economy. In the past three weeks alone, Indonesia has produced more carbon dioxide than Germany does in an entire year. People and animals are at risk, with one-third of the world’s remaining orangutan population in peril.

• It was the office Christmas party, and for a few brief minutes we broke off from our labours for the annual ping-pong challenge. We took the chairs out from around the big table in my office, and put some books down the middle – and soon we were whacking the ball to and fro with metronomic rhythm and serpentine guile.

• In his latest column repeating his clients’ attacks on climate change policies, lobbyist and Washington Post writer Ed Rogers finally disclosed to readers that his lobbying firm “represents interests in the fossil fuel [industry].” Rogers is the chairman of BGR Group, a top lobbying firm that has received more than $700,000 from the energy industry in 2015. Rogers has personally lobbied this year for Southern Company, one of the largest electric utility companies in the U.S. — and one of the biggest opponents of the most significant U.S. policy to combat climate change.

Finance

• Much like the popular “homeless guy does the right thing” viral “prank” videos, these PR stunts are fundamentally based on two flawed, rather vulgar premises: 1) that the poor are somehow expected to not be altruistic (otherwise, why not run this experiment at a private boarding school?) and 2) the cheap emotional pornography and shallow moralism these videos offer the average social media consumer outweighs the inherently cruel act of making poor children “choose” between obtaining material possessions they can’t normally have or stripping their parents of the same. The fact that the marketing firm behind the experiment ends up giving the child both gifts is supposed to make it OK, but it doesn’t. This last-minute paternalistic gesture doesn’t justify the voyeuristic act of watching a poor child suffer through such a task for no objectively worthwhile reason.

• But what is even more striking is the Post‘s ability to treat the Fed as a neutral party when the evidence is so overwhelming in the opposite direction. The majority of the Fed’s 12 district bank presidents have long been pushing for a rate hike. While there are some doves among this group—most notably Charles Evans, the Chicago bank president, and Narayana Kocherlakota, the departing president of the Minneapolis bank—most of this group have been publicly pushing for higher rate hikes for some time. By contrast, the governors who are appointed through the democratic process have been far more cautious about raising rates.

• It should raise serious concerns that the bank presidents, who are appointed through a process dominated by the banking industry, have such a different perspective on the best path forward for monetary policy. With only five of the seven governor slots currently filled, there are as many bank presidents with voting seats on the Fed’s Open Market Committee as governors. In total, the governors are outnumbered at meetings by a ratio of twelve to five.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) late Saturday broke the record for the most individual contributions to a presidential campaign in an off year, his campaign said in a statement released on Sunday.

• “His campaign has now received more contributions than any other candidate at this point in any White House bid – more than 2.3 million contributions,” the statement read.

• The previous record was held by then-Sen. Barack Obama, who in 2011 amassed 2,209,636 individual donations.

• The campaign said Sanders passed that mark with a spree of donations during Saturday night’s Democratic primary debate.

• “The Sanders campaign crossed that mark during the debate as grassroots supporters flooded the BernieSanders.com website,” the campaign said. “The average contribution for the night to the Sanders campaign was below $25.”

• Clinton Noted Trump’s Islamophobic Rhetoric Helps ISIS Recruitment

• As groups such as Media Matters and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting have made clear, the Democratic race is getting less media attention than the Republican race. The attention paid Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley, in combination, has been dramatically less than the attention paid one Republican—billionaire Donald Trump. Even also-ran Republicans like former Florida governor Jeb Bush have enjoyed far more television time than Sanders and O’Malley and, of late, second- and third-tier Republicans have grabbed more of the spotlight than Clinton.

• Brock: “We’re Playing Donald Trump’s Game Here By Focusing On A Video When In Fact It’s His Statements That Are Endangering Our Lives”

Censorship

• Governments will not always be able to disguise which content they restrict across the Web thanks to a new error code which will warn users of content restricted through censorship.

• On Friday, the group responsible for Internet standards, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), approved a new HTTP code to differentiate between Web pages which cannot be shown for technical reasons and others which are unavailable for non-technical reasons, such as governmental censorship.

Privacy

• On Thursday, United States ISP Cox Communications was found liable after it failed to disconnect subscribers it knew had committed several copyright infringements. Although an appeal could be on the way, who will benefit from the ruling and how is it likely to affect the piracy landscape?

• Hopefully details are forthcoming, but the folks at Hacker News have pointed to this page about Juniper’s use of the DUAL_EC_DBRG random number generator. For those who don’t immediately recognize that name, it’s the pseudo-random-number generator that was back-doored by the NSA. Basically, the PRNG uses two secret parameters to create a public parameter, and anyone who knows those secret parameters can predict the output.

• The discovery of spying code nestled deeply in Juniper’s networking equipment, the latest example of a major IT vendor caught up in an damaging cyberattack, raises many questions.

• Rapid7′s Chief Research Officer, HD Moore, has posted some notes on the Juniper ScreenOS incident. After analyzing the patches released by Juniper, Moore’s team discovered the backdoor password that enables the Telnet and SSH bypass.

• In a blog post on Rapid7′s community portal, Moore said that a quick Shodan search identified 26,000 public-facing Netscreen devices with SSH open. Considering the severity of the issues disclosed by Juniper on December 18, his team started digging.

• Last week, Juniper said that an internal audit uncovered unauthorized code that was added to ScreenOS. The added code created two security issues. The first is an authentication bypass, and the second issue would allow an attacker to monitor and decrypt VPN traffic.

• Apple told NBC News they use the information to provide personalized services and that “it’s kept solely on your device and won’t be sent to apple without your consent.” Google, the maker of Android, told NBC News that users have the ability to “enable or disable location capabilities both on their Android device and Google Account.”

Civil Rights

• A 22-year-old Egyptian has been jailed for three years after posting a photo-shopped image of the country’s president wearing Mickey Mouse ears on Facebook.

• Amr Nohan, a law graduate, was just five days away from finishing his compulsory military service when he was tried by a military court for sharing satirical posts on social media sites.

• A military prosecutor issued an indictment against Nohan on August 22 for sharing the image, which showed President Abdel Fattah El Sisi with a photo-shopped pair of Mickey Mouse ears.

• Dim lighting and candles softly illuminate decorative tapestries as the smell of incense fills the air and the harmonic sound of hundreds singing in unison drifts onto a busy street next to an overflowing church on a wet and windy Sunday morning.

• Despite the packed pews at Gaza’s Church of St. Porphyrius just weeks before Christmas, Christianity is not booming here. Rather, the worshipers at the 1,600-year-old shrine believe they may be the last group of Christians in Gaza, where they have lived and prayed since the birth of Jesus.

• I have been in Cruden Bay the last few days, where Nadira had been for some time shooting a film she has both written and produced. It is a short drama, a harrowing tale of torture victims who have applied for political asylum in the UK and are now in immigration detention on the “fast track”. The script is based on numerous interviews with genuine torture victims, refugees, lawyers, NGOs and policemen. One of the things the film does is highlight the work of Medical Justice, who do quite amazing work.

• The super-rich ruler of Brunei has told residents of his country that if they plan on celebrating Christmas, they could face up to five years in jail.

• In fear the the religious holiday will affect the faith of its country, the tiny oil-rich nation’s Sultan, Hassanal Bolkiah, has banned the public celebration of Christmas.

• Any Muslims caught celebrating Christmas, and non-Muslims who are discovered organising celebrations, could face the lengthy prison sentence.

• While non-Muslims are allowed to celebrate the holiday within their own communities, they must not disclose their plans to the nation’s Muslims – which make up 65 per cent of the 420,000-strong population.

• Most people dream of a white Christmas, with a thick, shimmering layer of fresh snow blanketing the world, wrapping everything you know in a cozy embrace. It’s a beautiful, quiet scene — a scene that’s best enjoyed from indoors, with a warm cup of coffee (Irish or otherwise), and a warm fire roaring in the fireplace. If you’re homeless, however, a white Christmas can fucking murder you.

• Finland’s food safety authority Evira recently loosened its criteria for charitable organisations distributing food aid, generating a needed spike in the availability of such services throughout the country. In the western coastal city of Vaasa, for example, four separate distribution points give out a total of 6,000 kilos of surplus food donated by shops each month.

• Guests at several amusement parks in the United States will now be checked for weapons such as guns or bombs as they arrive, with several theme parks beginning the inspections on Thursday, December 17. Some operators cited holidays as the reason for the new procedures.

• Universal Studios Hollywood, which has used metal detectors at its entrances during special events, has begun a “test” during which it is using them every day. Universal Orlando is using metal-detecting wands.

• In a new video statement posted on Monday, the administrator of novelty e-mail provider cock.li announced that one of the hard drives used to host the service in a Bavarian data center had been seized.

• “That means that SSL keys and private keys and full mail content of all 64,500 of my users, as well as hashed passwords, registration time, and the last seven days of logs were all confiscated and now are in the hands of German authorities,” Vincent Canfield said.

• Cock.li was reportedly used last week to send a bogus bomb threat e-mail from “madbomber@cock.li” to several school districts nationwide, which led to the closure of all schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The New York City Department of Education however, dismissed the e-mail as an obvious hoax.

Intellectual Monopolies

• On November 6 2015, the Mexican Ministry of Economy made public the Spanish version of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), allowing a wider view about the effects that the chapter regarding intellectual property will have on Mexican legislation and how human rights on the digital environment will be affected. One thing is sure: Mexico has a lot more to lose that it has to win with the made agreements.

• TPP’s final draft has confirmed what was previewed on the leaks made by WikiLeaks: the agreement will promote negative changes on copyrights, access to culture or intermediary liability. This implies that local legislation must align to TPP’s dispositions, which in turn will bring significant impact on rights. In Mexico’s case, the consequences on the matter of intellectual property will be devastating, promoting a scheme based on restrictions and sanctions out of proportion.

Copyrights

• Disney is making a fortune and safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece

• Yes, really. There’s a whole lot of confusion in the dangerous and wrong cliché that “authors must be paid” for every copy that’s made. We live in a market economy for good reasons.

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