● 12.23.15

● Links 23/12/2015: Plasma 5.5.2, Wine-Staging 1.8

Posted in News Roundup at 8:31 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If you haven’t looked into Chromebooks, or if you previously wrote them off due to the immaturity of Chrome OS, look again. Many holiday gift receivers would be happy to get a Chromebook, and they are much more flexible now than before. And, Google is even offering incentives with Chromebooks, including, in many cases, free storage in the cloud and other perks.

Server

• Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) has launched a simpler way for developers to manage Docker containers on its cloud platform.

• The EC2 Container Registry (ECR) gives developers an AWS-hosted registry to manage, store and deploy Docker images.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation hosts numerous Collaborative Projects — independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development in an effort to drive innovation. For these projects, the Linux Foundation provides the essential collaborative and organizational framework so that participants can focus on innovation and results.

• To provide greater insight into these projects, we are talking with key contributors about what they do, what motivates them, and how they got involved. In this feature, we talk with Noah Harlan, co-founder of Two Bulls and board member of AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry consortium that is dedicated to enabling the interoperability of devices, services, and apps that make up the Internet of Things (IoT).

• The “World without Linux” video series from the Linux Foundation has wrapped up with a final episode featuring copious amounts of geeky puns, as well as a cartoon version of Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds. Here’s what it’s all about.

• The Linux Foundation has partnered with twenty companies on a major collaborative project called Blockchain, which aims to build an open source distributed ledger system and enable Bitcoin-like transactions for the business world at large.

• Since the beginning of 2015, an increasing number of central banks and government agencies have begun to show interest in bitcoin and digital currencies. Investment Strategist Philipp Vordran believes that countries are considering turning their currencies into crypto-currencies.

Graphics Stack

• Last week I posted benchmarks of the AMD proprietary vs. open-source Radeon R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers of various graphics cards on the newest open-source code. Today I’m doing a similar treatment on the NVIDIA GeForce side with seeing how their proprietary driver compares to the latest open-source Nouveau code.

Applications

• The ownCloud community has had the great pleasure of sending users an early Christmas gift – the availability of new maintenance releases for almost all of the supported ownCloud Server branches.

• Innotop is a tool that allows you to control the status of a MySQL/MariaDB database. It is widely used since it shows the data with an interface very similiar to the top one.

• On Sunday I have released ReText 5.3, and here finally comes the official announcement.

Instructionals/Technical

• I recently installed the Fedora Cinnamon Spin after using Manjaro for some months. I have used Fedora for many years, and Cinnamon is one of my favorite desktop environments. However, until Fedora 23, if I wanted to use Cinnamon in Fedora, I would have to install it after I installed another desktop. Now, I can install Cinnamon directly from an ISO file. In this article, I will share my experiences installing and using the Cinnamon Spin for Fedora.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine-Staging continues to be an experimental proving grounds for Wine patches not yet ready to be accepted mainline. Wine-Staging didn’t follow Wine 1.8 stable’s feature freeze process for the past few weeks, so there still are a few new features to find, but they did go lighter on what was merged.

• On December 22, the Wine Staging development team was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Wine Staging 1.8 software, based on the recently released Wine 1.8 stable branch.

Games

• I actually recognise the game, so it’s possible I played it many years ago on another platform. I really do love GOG bringing us classic games back. This title uses DOSBox as it’s an oldie.

• The last GOL Survey results of our Linux & SteamOS user survey for 2015, wow what a year! The next survey will be available on January 1st and run for two weeks as usual.

• I don’t really have many comments to make on it right now, as there’s not really any shocks.

• Never Alone has been developed in collaboration with Alaska Native people the Iñupiat, and the game is based on their stories, which they have shared and kept alive across generations. You also unlock video clips as you play, where members of their community share stories which represents their culture.

• I have yet to try the game myself, but it has received positive reviews from press and users on Steam, and seems worth a look. According to Destructoid, who criticized the game for its poor pacing, the game has some interesting elements, like third-person shooting from behind cover. The trailer also seems to suggest elements of crime scene investigations, but none of the reviews I’ve seen seem to be clear about how these tie into the game.

• The two latest Saints Row games were released for Linux yesterday.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Tuesday, 22 December 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.5.2. Plasma 5.5 was released a couple of weeks ago with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience. We are experimenting with a new release schedule with bugfix releases started out frequent and becoming less frequent. The first two bugfix releases come out in the weeks following the initial release and future ones at larger increments.

• The KDE Community has revealed that the KDE Plasma desktop has been upgraded to version 5.5.2 , marking the release of another maintenance update.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Today, I’ll focus on CSS boxes in GTK+. This is where we take size information from the theme, such as margins, padding, and minimum sizes, and apply them to the widget layout. The internal name we’ve chosen for the objects that encapsulate this information is gadgets . I’m well aware that we’re not exactly breaking new ground with this name, but the name isn’t really important (as none of this is currently exposed as public API). For the purpose of this post, you can think of gadgets simply as CSS boxes that make up widgets.

• Here’s a little Christmas present. This is GNOME Software working with xdg-app to allow live updates of apps and runtimes.

Distributions

New Releases

• Hamara Linux is a distribution based on Trisquel, hence descending from Debian via Ubuntu.

• Next release will be a direct derivative of Debian.

• We recommended to package missing parts for Debian itself, even if Hamara needs them faster than deemed “stable” in Debian. ITP bugreports is since filed for theme and install routine.

• Plop Linux, a small distribution built from scratch and that can boot from CD, DVD, USB flash drive (UFD), USB hard disk or from network with PXE has advanced to version 4.3.1 and is now ready for download.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Linux vendor SUSE is out today with the first service pack update for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. The big new addition is full support for Docker container though a number of different technologies.

• Jigish Gohil has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 42.1 operating system targeted at schools and educational institutions.

• A second problem showed up as bug 954126. This bug seems to have only affected Leap, and did not cause a problem with Tumbleweed. This was a bug in the file “grub.efi”, which is part of grub2-efi but installed along with shim. With this bug, attempting to boot Windows with secure-boot enabled gives a message about invalid image. It does not affect booting opensuse.

• Just in time for Christmas, SUSE today announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 1. Part of the goodies awaiting customers includes High Availability Extension, full Docker support, and security updates without full recertification. In related news, Neal Rickert today described a UEFI bug in Leap and Tumbleweed that bit him.

• SUSE is the parent company or sponsor of sorts of the openSUSE/Tumbleweed distributions. The latest openSUSE release, 42.1 Leap, is based on SUSE Enterprise Linux. Today SUSE announced the immediate availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SPI update. This release brings a new extension that promotes increased uptime. The SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension provides network redundancy and “increased throughput,” and more powerful system backup and rollback features.

Red Hat Family

• As of December 18, 2015, Red Hat (RHT) has generated returns of 19.6% in the trailing-12-month period and -1.0% in the trailing-one-month period. The share price of the company has risen by 3.4% in the trailing-five-day period.

• In this article, we’ll focus on the implementation of Red Hat’s (RHT) operations. Despite a negligible rise of 17 basis points in its gross margin, Red Hat remained slightly inefficient while implementing its operations in 3Q15. The majority of its expenses arose from its general and administrative activities, which totaled $53.0 million in 3Q15 compared to $39.5 million in 3Q14.

• Business enterprises are continuously shifting from traditional IT (information technology) infrastructure to emerging open source technologies and cloud computing. Red Hat (RHT) strengthened its position in hybrid cloud computing by introducing new technologies and forming a strategic partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), which will allow it to leverage the Azure cloud with the Linux platform.

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) had its price target increased by Stifel Nicolaus from $85.00 to $97.00 in a report released on Friday, Marketbeat reports. They currently have a buy rating on the open-source software company’s stock.

• What a year 2015 has been. And, as we begin to turn the page to 2016, I’m excited and energized by the opportunities that our Red Hat community has ahead of us.

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) had its price target increased by Cowen and Company from $82.00 to $86.00 in a research note released on Friday, AnalystRatings.NET reports. The brokerage currently has a market perform rating on the open-source software company’s stock.

Fedora

• It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since Fedora tends to always ship the latest version of the GNU Compiler Collection at release time, but planning is now underway for landing GCC 6 into Fedora 24.

• It has been a while since we saw any interesting system-wide changes proposed for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system, but today we can report that the OS will switch to GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6 by default.

• Every release the Fedora Design team collaborates with the Fedora community to release a set of 16 additional backgrounds to install and use on Fedora. The Fedora Design team takes submissions from the wider Fedora Community, then votes on the top 16 for inclusion in the next release. You can check out the backgrounds chosen for Fedora 23 lower down in this post.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Just a few moments ago, December 23, the development team behind the Tails amnesic incognito live system had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first Beta build of the upcoming Tails 2.0 Live CD.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is getting closer to its convergence goal, and it looks like it started to tease the users about some upcoming big news.

• Today, December 22, Canonical’s Kevin DuBois had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the Mir 0.18 display server for the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

• According to a recent submission published by Marco Trevisan a few minutes ago on the Launchpad repository of the Unity 7 project, it would appear that we might be able to rotate the Unity interface and place it at the bottom of the screen.

• I liked the early Ubuntus, and then became disillusioned when later releases became fat and slow. That was mostly the fault of the desktop environments that were included with each version. Lubuntu, which used the LXDE desktop, was a tremendous improvement, but I found the shortcomings of LXDE too much to bear. When I discovered the MATE desktop, I was happy again. (I currently use Debian with MATE; my wife uses Linux Mint with MATE.)

• Ubuntu Touch is still considered a young platform, so there aren’t many native applications available for it. The guys from the unofficial app store for Ubuntu, the uApp Explorer, have put together a list of desired applications for this mobile operating system, and there are at least a few surprises among them.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 17.3 is the final Mint 17 release and should put to rest any worries about Mint’s plan to stick with Ubuntu LTS releases for its base. Mint has done what it set up to do, namely improve the Cinnamon desktop to the point that it not only matches, but in many places far exceeds the user experience found in other options like GNOME, and especially, Unity.

Devices/Embedded

• Compulab launched its fastest Fitlet mini-PC yet with a quad-core, 2.4GHz AMD G-Series “Fitlet-T,” plus two Intense PC mini-PCs using Intel’s 5th Gen Cores.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung Z1 powers users have some great news today, as Tizen 2.4.0.2 Beta version Z130HDDU0COL5 becomes available. This is the second Beta release and is available as an Over the Air (OTA) update, measuring in at 258.2 MB. You need to be on Indian firmware Z130HDDU0BOK2 or later (Tizen 2.3.1) and submit your phones IMEI’s at the Samsung Tizen community forum (link at the bottom).

Android

• For instance what about RIM; there was a time when no self-respecting businessman would be seen without at least one Blackberry handset on them. Now with falling profits and struggling sales, the company seems close to collapse. So what happened there? Well I would argue that RIM fell behind, with the introduction of the iPhone and Android handsets, RIM left their Blackberry line swimming in the dark. The devices stuck to the same form factor, hardly improved from a hardware perspective and just completely ignored the shift in the industry. Now I’m not sure why this happened but it seemed like the company lacked the drive it once had.

• In an interview with Bloomberg earlier today, BlackBerry CEO John Chen revealed that his company might launch an upper mid-range smartphone based on Android at some point next year.

• It’s been a long time, but there’s finally an Android smartphone on the market that offers a sliding keyboard.

• Some will react in mock shock about this, then giggle, making some comment about how the early 2000s called and wants its phone back. But others will be thrilled because a physical keyboard — whether thorugh function or nostalgia — remains attractive, intriguing and even valuable to users. It will remind them fondly of days when they used their BlackBerry to pound out emails and texts en masse.

• Today, a startling discovery was made in the Google Play Store for Android. You see, a malicious app masquerading as a game made it past Google’s security screeners, putting millions of users at risk. Had anti-malware company Lookout not discovered it, there is no telling how many Android users could have installed it.

• It’s that time of year, ladies and gents, when the pundits and predictors cast their d20 to chance a guess at what’s in store for various and sundry sectors of nearly every market on the planet. That’s right… it’s a chance to take a stab at guessing what the future holds.

• In being true to that tradition, these are my predictions for what’s in store for Android in 2016. Find out why I think 2016 might be one of the biggest years yet for the platform.

Free Software/Open Source

• This year marked a real sea change for open source in the enterprise. With the advent of the cloud and Linux, many are looking to the open source community to further build out their businesses.

• On the vendor side, traditionally proprietary software companies from IBM to Microsoft popped the hood on some code to share with enterprises and developers.

• 2015 was an extremely good year for open source, in general. Enterprise customers embraced open source at an unprecedented rate. Not only that, arch rivals came together to work on shared technologies like Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. And we saw traditional proprietary companies like Microsoft and Apple release their software as open source. It was an exciting year.

• Here are my picks for the top 9 open source stories of the year.

• For a major OEM to get behind GNU/Linux and push it as its operating system of choice: Like that’s ever going to happen.

• Back in my radio days, I worked with a salesman who was legendary in our local market, and he would tell hard-to-get prospective clients to “not buy just enough time to prove radio advertising doesn’t work” — which is exactly what the major OEMs have done with Linux. Several OEMs — Dell and HP come immediately to mind — have made feeble attempts to offer machines with Linux preinstalled, but if they haven’t buried the Linux offerings on a back page, they haven’t given customers a good reason to buy the penguin either.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Last September, Google announced plans to slowly sunset support for the SHA-1 algorithm used within online certificates, used to validate websites.

Mozilla

• WebExtensions is currently in an alpha state, so while this is a great time to get involved, please keep in mind that things might change if you decide to use it in its current state. Since August, we’ve closed 77 bugs and ramped up the WebExtensions team at Mozilla. With the release of Firefox 45 in March 2016, we’ll have full support for the following APIs: alarms, contextMenus, pageAction and browserAction. Plus a bunch of partially supported APIs: bookmarks, cookies, extension, i18n, notifications, runtime, storage, tabs, webNavigation, webRequest, windows.

SaaS/Big Data

Databases

• Again one week has passed and there has been some progress on phpMyAdmin.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Public administrations that value openness and accountability of their cloud-based document data, should try out Collabora Cloudsuite, a combination of LibreOffice and OwnCloud, recommends Michael Meeks, General Manager Collabora Productivity. “This cloudsuite will enable complete transparency and control of cloud-based document data.”

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The great PR machine in the sky promised us an enterprise-centric, open source developer news nugget before the Christmas break — could this be it?

• DreamFactory is an open source firm dedicated to helping programmers manage REST APIs for mobile, cloud and IoT applications.

• DreamFactory Software, the creators of the fast-growing open source DreamFactory REST API backend, announced the release of DreamFactory Enterprise. A new commercial software package, DreamFactory Enterprise gives users the ability to easily deploy, manage and transport multiple instances of DreamFactory across the entire application development lifecycle. Designed for enterprise development and IT teams, software development agencies, systems integrators, independent software vendors, managed service providers, and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service companies, DreamFactory Enterprise empowers development teams to provision, govern and report on DreamFactory instances so they can accelerate modern application development and deployment on a well-governed infrastructure.

Funding

BSD

• Electric Sheep Fencing LLC., through Chris Buechler, has been glad to announce the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release of the stable pfSense 2.2 FreeBSD-based firewall distribution.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Parallel 20151222 (‘ParisAgreement’) has been released.

• The Free Software Foundation submitted comments from free software activists in response to the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed new regulations on the licensing of grant-funded works.

• If you’ve noticed my blog a little silent the past few weeks, I’ve been spending my blogging time in December writing blogs on Conservancy’s site for Conservancy’s 2015: Year in Review series.

Public Services/Government

• The 2016 edition of SILL (Socle Interministériel de logiciel libre – a reference list of free and open source software applications) has been published by France’s inter-ministerial working group on free software. The update to the list was approved at a meeting on 11 December of the government’s IT department (Dinsic) and ministries’ CIOs.

• The website listing Austria’s historical commemorations and anniversaries is built on open source components, including the Linux operating system, web server Apache, search engine Apache Solr and content management system Typo3. The site, managed by Austria’s Federal Chancellery, list events, projects and publications that deal with historical events in the country. The site was launched in February.

• The Danish municipality of Roskilde is looking for service specialists to help support and extend Kitos, an open source IT project management system tailored to Denmark’s municipalities. Any improvements to Kitos will be made available as open source.

• France’s platform for civil servants working on free software, Adullact, is to revitalise its repository of ICT solutions. On 11 December, the Montpellier-based NGO announced a ‘massive investment’ in its tool platform. The group plans to use the ADMS – a method to describe interoperability solutions – to make solutions on the repository easier to find.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• The Missing Maps project, which launched in 2014, aims to literally and figuratively put more than 20-million at-risk people on the map using OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a platform. We need to fill in “missing maps” before the next disaster strikes, ensuring the maps have detail sufficient for emergency responders to hit the ground running.

• OpenStreetMap is an open and free source of geographic data. Anyone with a username can add, edit, or update data, so the Missing Maps project is community driven and focuses on local knowledge. Remote volunteers around the world use satellite imagery to trace features, such as roads and buildings. Community members and volunteers in the area then use the base map to add local data to these shapes, including street names, addresses, building types, and points of interest.

Leftovers

• If it were the Miss Universe beauty pageant, the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, would have taken a much shorter time to strip Ben Johnson of Canada the gold medal he supposedly won for ruling the 100-meter dash for men.

• But there was an official process for taking back the first-place mint from Johnson.

• After three days, it was established by a board of inquiry that the sprinter was indeed a fraud, with the dark episode for sports in general eventually becoming just a footnote to notoriety.

• The Canadian had been found to be relying on stanozolol, a banned anabolic steroid.

• No wonder the unbelievable time (9.79 seconds) he posted in track and field’s centerpiece event against a formidable field that included Carl Lewis, winner of three gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympiad.

• [...]

• Maybe, it’s time for the International Olympic Committee to be harsher with cheats by stripping them of any medal of any color right then and there (if technology would make it possible for fraudsters to be ruled instantly as having doped their way to the podium).

• At least that would be a consolation for Miss Gutierrez and Miss Wurtzbach.

• Congratulations to the two unflappable ladies but shame on Johnson, Jones and Armstrong and their ilk!

• Clearly, some speculating journalist had mistaken my willingness to work with the EU’s institutions while I was Foreign Secretary for actually liking them enough to join them. And I am often asked whether the years I spent in EU meetings and negotiations made me less Eurosceptic than when I toured the country 15 years ago with my “Save the Pound” campaign.

Science

• As a child develops, a tug of war between genes and environment settles the issue of the child’s intelligence. One theory on how that struggle plays out proposes that among advantaged kids—with the pull of educational resources—DNA largely wins, allowing genetic variation to settle smarts. At the other end of the economic spectrum, the strong arm of poverty drags down genetic potential in the disadvantaged.

• But over the years, researchers have gone back and forth on this theory, called the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis. It has held up in some studies, but inexplicably slipped away in others, leaving researchers puzzled over the deciding factors in the nature-vs-nurture battle. Now, researchers think they know why.

Health/Nutrition

• The director at Antibiotic Research UK, whose discoveries helped make more than £20bn ($30bn) in pharmaceutical sales, said efforts to find new antibiotics are “totally failing” despite significant investment and research.

• It comes after a gene was discovered which makes infectious bacteria resistant to the last line of antibiotic defence, colistin (polymyxins).

Security

• Yeah, sure. Anything’s possible, but the NSA still has to be the leading suspect here, and the insistence that it’s the Chinese or the Russians without more proof seems like a pretty clear attempt at keeping attention off the NSA.

• And, of course, all of this is happening at the very same time that the very same US government that is now freaking out about this is trying to force every tech company to install just this kind of backdoor. Because, as always, these technically illiterate bureaucrats still seem to think that you can create backdoors that only “good” people can use.

• The first of these CVEs (#7755) was an authentication vulnerability, caused by a malicious hardcoded password in SSH and Telnet. Rapid7 has an excellent writeup of the issue. This is a pretty fantastic vulnerability, if you measure by the impact on security of NetScreen users. But on the technological awesomeness scale it only rates only about a two out of ten, maybe a step above ‘hit the guy with a wrench’.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.

• The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Transparency Reporting

• The International Studies Association (ISA) and its associated journal, the International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), have not always prevented the publication of academic analysis that relies on classified and leaked data. The ISQ published classified data from the Pentagon Papers

• The United Nations International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights says that the arresting of Mr Julian Assange can & should be put to an end. The extreme intervals and deferrals in the Swedish managing of the case has resulted in protracted period of five years, and in which Sweden has incurred in ostensible infringement of Article 9, paragraph 3, of the said International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This international-law pledge, of which Sweden is a signatory, stipulates that all individuals under prosecution investigation – even if they are only “detained” and thus, even if they are not being charged with any crime – as it is the case of Mr Assange – “shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release”.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Environment Ministers Meeting in October, the 10 member nations agreed to develop a roadmap towards a haze-free ASEAN by 2020. Each country is supposed to come up with its National Plan of Action.

• Since then, Indonesia, where forest fires caused parts of the region to be shrouded in toxic haze this year, has made some important commitments. These include the review of a much-criticised law that still allows farmers to burn up to 2ha of land and the banning of all development on peatland, which is wetland made up of decayed vegetation and organic matter.

• Peatlands are vital carbon sinks, and it is also heartening that Jakarta has pledged to start a new peatland restoration agency as well as to mandate green financing by banks by 2018.

• Nevertheless, some questions remain. First, who will foot the bill? Around S$5.1 billion will be needed for the restoration of 2 million ha of peatlands. Indonesia has said that it would seek international funding, including at the recent Paris climate change summit. But it is unclear how much support Indonesia can garner from international partners.

• Second, will companies causing the peatland degradation take responsibility for restoration projects?

• Third, how will Indonesia ensure the enforcement of its laws?

• Indonesia does not have a good track record of keeping its conservation areas free from fire. In fact, 30 per cent of fire hotspots detected this year occurred in conservation areas.

• Indonesia, or the Republic of Indonesia, is the largest island country in the world with more than 10 thousand islands and a population of more than a quarter billion people. The company also has the 16th largest nominal GDP in the world with a GDP per capita of more than $3500.

Finance

• Six months ago in a previous post I showed that 45% of transactions have an output of less that $1, and estimated that they would get squeezed out first as blocks filled.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Radio host Mark Levin responded to an editorial from The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens that criticized right-wing media for their obsession with electing an ideologically pure conservative candidate at the expense of electability. Levin attacked Stephens as a “mouthpiece for amnesty” and “a jester for big government Republicans.”

• In a December 21 editorial, Stephens claimed conservatives are building a wall around the Republican Party by supporting a frontrunner who insults “Mexicans, Muslims … and others.” Stephens highlighted conservative desire to elect a candidate that “has passed all the Conservative Purity Tests (CPTs), meaning we’ve upheld the honor of our politically hopeless cause.” Stephens concluded that this nonsensical ideology would alienate “not just Hispanics, or Asian-Americans or gays and lesbians, but also moderates turned off by loudmouth vulgarians” and lose elections.

• Jonathan Karl: “Is There Any Doubt That ISIS Would Use What You’re Saying About Muslims?”

• Is there any merit to such criticisms? Do media and racial polarization reinforce each other? Is there a connection between news media viewing habits and attitudes about racial equality? Based on an analysis of the American National Election Studies 2012 dataset, we find that white respondents who regularly watch Fox News are more likely to express attitudes of symbolic racism and racial resentment. This is especially true of those Fox News viewers who live in the South.

• Fox News has a long history of promoting sexism on-air, and 2015 was no different. Media Matters rounded up the 10 most cringe-worthy instances of sexism that happened on Fox this year — as well as a bonus cringe-inducing moment from CNN.

• On the December 22 edition of his show, Charles Payne discussed increasing gun sales in the holiday season due to fears of terrorism and of Obama taking action to limit gun access. Payne invited Erick Erickson, a Fox contributor who claimed Obama will take executive action to limit access to guns.

• The Democratic and Republican debates have this asymmetry: Republican candidates are presumed to need ideological sympathizers among their questioners—Fox News, for example, or Salem Media, which teams up with CNN for GOP debates—while Democrats are thought content to be quizzed by representatives of mainstream corporate media outlets like CNN, CBS and ABC (FAIR Action Alert, 10/9/15).

• This set up resulted, on the Republican side, in the spectacle of Salem Media‘s Hugh Hewitt pressing GOP contender Ben Carson to declare his willingness to “kill innocent children by not the scores, but the hundreds and the thousands.” (Carson’s response: “You got it. You got it.”)

• And on the Democratic side, the result is debates like the one we got on December 19.

• Although primary debates are ostensibly intended to help members of each major party select their nominee, the questions asked by the debate moderators from ABC—World News Tonight anchor John Muir and national security correspondent Martha Raddatz—consistently posed questions from the right.

• In an interview with NPR this week, President Obama complained that the media is oversaturated with coverage of terrorism. “If you’ve been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you,” Obama said.

• Of course, during Lack’s lifetime, the world was a more dangerous place when Soviet and American attack submarines were playing chicken with each other every day in the north Atlantic, to say nothing of a certain 13- day stretch in October of 1962. (Also, too, Berlin.) But let’s take his opinion at face value and stipulate the world is in such unprecedented peril that a pivot to “hard news” was called for. What has Lack’s response been to the most dangerous situation in his lifetime so far?

• Corporate media outlets often pretend to be “objective” and “neutral.” People who work in the media nevertheless understand that this is an impossible task — and that publications that present themselves as such do so only as a cynical marketing tactic to attract larger audiences (after all, Fox News’ slogan is “Fair and Balanced”).

• Sometimes, however, media outlets throw the charade out the window altogether and expose whose side they are really on.

• The New York Times did just this today, in its coverage of the third Democratic presidential debate, which was held last night in New Hampshire.

• The first article on the front page of the Times this morning reads “Clinton’s Focus In 3rd Debate Is G.O.P. Field.” This is the headline for the newspaper’s coverage of the debate. It does not have a separate article about Bernie Sanders’ role in the debate, yet alone about fellow candidate Martin O’Malley.

• Holy cow! He must be advocating for some crazy stuff that will bankrupt America! But is that really an accurate picture of what Sanders is proposing? And is this the kind of number we should be frightened of?

• The answer isn’t quite so dramatic: while Sanders does want to spend significant amounts of money, almost all of it is on things we’re already paying for; he just wants to change how we pay for them. In some ways it’s by spreading out a cost currently borne by a limited number of people to all taxpayers. His plan for free public college would do this: right now, it’s paid for by students and their families, while under Sanders’ plan we’d all pay for it in the same way we all pay for parks or the military or food safety.

• My last article, in which I take the position of “Bernie or bust,” seemed to set off a fierce debate, and drew heavy criticism from Hillary supporters. I would like to address some of those concerns, and elaborate points that I made.

• I’ll start with a briefly recap of my main point: If Hillary gets the nomination, and is elected, she will inadequately address the problems this country faces, that are angering people, by negotiating from the center/right and then moving right as a compromise, to give us mere half measures or quarter measures. I fear, given her New Democrat background, that she will likely use social programs and financial reform as bargaining chips.

• Stop the presses! According to a new poll by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) destroys Republican candidate Donald Trump in a general election by 13 percentage points. In this new poll, Sanders has 51 percent to Trump’s 38 percent. If this margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives.

Censorship

• Sky Broadband is to switch on its porn filters by default for all new customers from 2016.

• The company announced the decision would lead to “much greater use of home filters”, but said customers could opt-out if they wanted to.

• Two years ago, David Cameron announced plans for every home in the UK to have pornography blocked by their internet providers unless the homeowner specifically opted-in to be able to view adult content.

• [...]

• However, a year later only 3 per cent of its existing customers had opted to switch it on, the BBC reports.

Privacy

• A press conference was organised this morning on behalf of Mr Santa Claus. At the conference, a spokes–elf confirmed that there had been repeated attempts to hack the “naughty or nice (NON)” database. The NON-database was thought to be used by Mr Claus to keep records of young inhabitants of planet earth, in order to set gift-giving priorities on 6, 24 and 25 December each year.

• Mr Claus’ spokes-elf stressed that the security of the database was not compromised in any way. He also confirmed that the IP addresses associated with the attack were traced to the US National Security Agency (NSA). In response, a spokesperson for the NSA said that he could neither confirm nor deny that the attack took place. He also refused to confirm the rumour that the attack took place in order to check whether or not the boys and girls working at the NSA were on the naughty list.

• The draft Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB) has serious implications for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who could be both obliged to assist the state in surveillance and also adversely affected by other provisions in the Bill, such as new hacking powers.

• Sasinan also pointed a finger of blame squarely at Microsoft Thailand for divulging users’ private or identifying information in many of her cases. “The prosecutors love Microsoft as they give them all the information they ask for,” she said.

• [...]

• Arnon Chalawan from iLaw said that since the coup 17 people had been prosecuted for article 112 of the criminal code for their Facebook activity. He said that in many cases it was the defendant pressing like rather than re-sharing the offending post that got them arrested.

• I did a working thread of the surveillance portion of the version of CISA in the omnibus funding bill here. The short version: it is worse even than CISA was on most counts, although there are a few changes — such as swapping “person” in all the privacy guidelines to “individual” that will have interesting repercussions for non-biological persons.

• As I said in that post, I’m going to do a closer look at the privacy provisions that didn’t get stripped from the bill; the biggest change, though, is to eliminate a broad biennial review by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board entirely, replacing it with a very narrow assessment, by the Comptroller (?!) of whether the privacy scrub is working. Along with the prohibition on PCLOB accessing information from covert ops that got pulled in as part of the Intelligence Authorization incorporated into the bill, it’s clear the Omnibus as a whole aims to undercut PCLOB.

• President Barack Obama signed into law a $1.1 trillion spending bill last Friday, staving off a potential government shutdown — and in the process, quietly inaugurated what some have called a second Patriot Act.

• As part of the more-than-2,000-page document, the 14th rider to be exact, the appropriations omnibus includes the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. Buried within that section is the text of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill that seeks to permit private companies to handover information to federal agencies.

• A VPN is generally touted as an ideal tool to remain anonymous online, but this is more easily said than done. This week ProstoVPN revealed a widespread issue that can in many cases expose the true IP-addresses of users, unless proper action is taken.

• Juniper was using a known flawed random number generator as the foundation for cryptographic operations in NetScreen’s ScreenOS and the safeguards it put in place were ineffective.

• Security researchers and crypto experts have spent the last few days trying to figure out the details of a recently announced backdoor in Juniper NetScreen firewalls that could allow attackers to decrypt VPN (Virtual Private Network) traffic. They believe that they found the answer: a combination of likely malicious third-party modifications and Juniper’s own crypto failures.

• Today we’re launching version 2.0 of our tracking and fingerprinting detection tool, Panopticlick. This version brings new tests to our existing tool, such as canvas and touch-capability fingerprinting, updating its ability to uniquely identify browsers with current techniques. In addition, we’re adding a brand new suite of tests that detect how well your browser and extensions are protecting you from (1) tracking by ads; (2) from tracking by invisible beacons; and also (3) whether they encourage compliance with the Do Not Track policy, which EFF and a coalition of allies launched earlier this year. We’ve also redesigned the site look and feel, including friendlier layout on mobile devices. If your browser lacks protections, Panopticlick 2.0 will recommend installing tools that are available on your platform, such as Privacy Badger, Disconnect or AdBlock, in order to get better protections as you navigate the Web.

• The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR) took a significant step forward ​on 17 December when the European Union’s trilogue (Parliament, Council and Commission) reached agreement on the proposed EU GPDR. All that is needed now is for the full parliament and member state governments to approve it in January next year. Once that has happened, a date will be set for the two-year run in period before the new Regulation comes into being and organisations processing personal data about European citizens will be required to be compliant. The big but in this though is that some data protection regulators may decide to implement some of the coming changes earlier.

Civil Rights

• General John F. Kelly, the commander of United States Southern Command who is in charge of Guantanamo military prison, has restricted media access because he is increasingly frustrated with reporters, who “question officials” about President Barack Obama’s failure to close the facility.

• The Associated Press reported on Dec. 17 that journalists will now be allowed four trips to Guantanamo per year. The trips will last no more than one day. Reporters will be prohibited from accessing either of the two prison camps, “where a majority of the 107 current prisoners are held.”

• The New York Times additionally reported, “The general said he no longer wanted reporters to talk to lower-level guards because it was not their role to opine about detention operations, or to go inside the prison because that could cause disruptions. However, he said, depending on what else is going on, exceptions might be made to let first-time visitors inside.”

• SPY Historian Vince Houghton sat down with Thomas Drake, former senior executive of the NSA – and whistleblower – who in 2010 was indicted on 10 felony counts; charges that would have carried decades of prison time had Drake been convicted. Instead, in early June 2011, the government dropped all of the charges and agreed not to seek any jail time in return for Drake’s guilty plea to a misdemeanor of misusing the NSA’s computer system. Although the legal case was settled, the controversy would continue, as a new wave of whistleblowers (or leakers – depending on your perspective) burst on to the public scene, and dramatically changed the way many Americans viewed the power of their government.

• You likely have not heard of Corey Williams but the story of his dubious murder conviction is another story that lays bare the scope of injustice that pervades Louisiana’s criminal justice system — and Caddo Parish in particular. It is a story that merits national attention not just for the shoddy work of police and prosecutors in the case but for the way state judges so far have refused to use their authority to unwind what surely is an inaccurate and unreliable result.

• The Los Angeles Police Department has announced that of 1,356 allegations of biased policing against them by civilians, zero of those allegations were valid. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

• The claims of biased policing—a euphemism for racial profiling—were submitted to the LAPD from 2012 to 2014, according to the LA Times, and not even the president of the Police Commission can support the idea that an investigation would turn up no instances of wrongdoing whatsoever.

• A Saudi millionaire has been cleared of raping a teenager after claiming he might have accidentally penetrated the 18-year-old when he tripped and fell on her.

• Property developer Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was accused of forcing himself on the girl as she slept off a night of drinking on the sofa of his Maida Vale flat.

• He had already had sex with her 24-year-old friend and said his penis might have been poking out of his underwear after that sexual encounter when he tripped on the 18-year-old

• The 18-year-old met Abdulaziz in the exclusive Cirque le Soir nightclub in the West End on 7 August last year where she had been spending the evening with her friend, who was known to the businessman.

• He invited them to join him at his £1,000-per-night table and then offered them a ride home in his Aston Martin.

• The British Government signed a secret security pact with Saudi Arabia and is now attempting to prevent details of the deal from being made public.

• The Home Secretary Theresa May agreed to the so-called ‘memorandum of understanding’ with her Saudi counter-part Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef during a visit to the Kingdom last year.

• The Home Office released no details of her trip at the time or announced that the deal had been signed. The only public acknowledgement was a year later in a Foreign Office report which obliquely referenced an agreement to “modernise the Ministry of the Interior”.

• UN human rights experts have criticsed Zambia after it pardoned a singer who was convicted of the rape of a 14-year-old girl – then appointed him as an ambassador in the fight against gender violence.

• Clifford Dimba, known as General Kanene, was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to 18 years in prison, but was pardoned by President Edgar Lungu after serving one year.

• Anyone found illegally celebrating Christmas in Brunei could face up to five years in prison, according to a reported declaration by the Sultan of the tiny oil-rich state.

• Brunei introduced its ban on Christmas last year over fears that celebrating it “excessively and openly” could lead its Muslim population astray.

• Tiny conservative nation on Borneo warns citizens that putting up festive decorations or singing carols could threaten the country’s Muslim faith

• Why are the Metropolitan Police not feeling Tory Lord Sebastian Coe’s collar and trawling his hard drives? I blogged recently about his involvement in awarding the World Athletics Championships without a vote to the hometown of his long term paymasters and sponsors, Nike. Plus the £12 million his promotions company made from VIP hospitality packages for the Olympics, the VIP tickets for which were allocated by the Organising Committee of which he was the £600,000 pa chairman.

• The prime minister is facing calls to challenge the US over its refusal to allow a British Muslim family to board a flight from Gatwick to Los Angeles, to visit Disneyland.

• Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, has written to the prime minister after a family party of 11, about to embark on a dream holiday for which they had saved for months, were approached by officials from US homeland security as they queued in the departure lounge and told their authorisation to travel had been cancelled, without further explanation.

• At times when media or politicians talk about video, like that of a Chicago police officer killing a 17-year-old, as inciting public unrest, you’d think they believe it is not the horrific action shown, its context and implication, that inflamed—but simply the video itself. It’s as if when it comes to police violence against mostly poor, mostly people of color, some believe things would go easier if we just didn’t know.

• That’s a luxury, of course, and affected community members don’t actually need more proof of their experience. But for journalists, we would hope that “it’s better to know” would be a core principle.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Today the world’s first website turns 25 years old. Created by 60-year-old British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, while he was a researcher at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the website still exists today.

• The site’s address is info.cern.ch, and provides information about the world wide web – the platform that sits on top of the Internet, where documents and pages on the Internet can be accessed by URLs, and connected to each other via hyperlinks, like this.

• Berners-Lee, by his own admission, “just” had to take the concept of hypertext linking – as developed in the 1960s – and convince CERN that widespread use of this idea between organisations and institutions could result in a globe-spanning network of information.

• If the web were a person, it wouldn’t have trouble renting a car from now on: the world’s first website, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, went online 25 years ago today. The inaugural page wasn’t truly public when it went live at CERN on December 20th, 1990 (that wouldn’t happen until August 1991), and it wasn’t much more than an explanation of how the hypertext-based project worked. However, it’s safe to say that this plain page laid the groundwork for much of the internet as you know it — even now, you probably know one or two people who still think the web is the internet.

• For much of the year Facebook has been under fire for trying to dress up its attempt to corner developing nation ad markets under the banner of selfless altruism. Facebook’s plan is relatively simple: through a program dubbed Free Basics, Facebook plans to offer developing markets a Zuckerburg-curated, walled garden version of the Internet, for free. Under Facebook’s vision of this program, Facebook becomes the axle around which online access (and therefore online advertising) spins for generations to come, with the tangential bonus of helping low-income communities get a taste of what online connectivity can offer.

DRM

• FACEBOOK HAS MADE the switch from Flash to HTML5 for playing video content on the social media website.

• Facebook said in a blog post that it has changed to HTML5 for all video content in News Feed, Pages and the Facebook embedded video player.

• “From development velocity to accessibility features, HTML5 offers a lot of benefits. Moving to HTML5 best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs,” said the firm’s front-end engineer Daniel Baulig.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Sportswear designer Adidas has slammed the design of a line of shoes which it has described as a “confusingly similar imitation” of its own three-stripe trademark.

• In a lawsuit filed on December 17 at the US District Court for the District of Oregon, Adidas has claimed a line of shoes manufactured by Delaware-based Tweak Footwear infringes its three-stripe trademark and is “irreparably harming Adidas’s brand”.

• ThinkGeek, a Delaware-based e-commerce company, has also been named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Copyrights

• Following an extradition hearing lasting 10 weeks, today New Zealand District Court Judge Nevin Dawson ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues can indeed be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dotcom confirmed that an appeal to the High Court would go ahead.

• The case raises questions about how far U.S. jurisdiction extends in an age when the Internet has erased many traditional borders

• On Tuesday afternoon (Wednesday, Auckland time) a New Zealand judge ordered that founder Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants are eligible to be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges over alleged massive copyright infringement on his now-shuttered site, Megaupload.

• The judgement, which almost certainly will be appealed, sets the stage for the winding down of Dotcom’s tenacious years-long legal fight against the American judicial system.

• This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but minutes ago in New Zealand Judge Nevin Dawson gave the US Justice Department a bit of an early Christmas present in declaring that Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants in the Megaupload case are eligible for extradition, following the long extradition trial earlier this year. The judge apparently said that the evidence was “overwhelming” against the defendants. This does not mean that Dotcom and crew are boarding a plane across the Pacific just yet. They have 15 days to file an appeal and Dotcom’s lawyers have already indicated that such an appeal is on the way (what did you expect?). Dotcom’s lawyer Ira Rothken points out that under New Zealand’s extradition agreement with the US, there is no extradition over copyright issues — and argues this ruling renders such a safe harbor “illusory.” Of course, even if that fails, there’s still a separate process for approving the actual extradition, which would take place with New Zealand’s Justice Minister, but that part of the process is more of a formality than anything else. It’s not over yet, but at this point things are leaning strongly towards Dotcom and his colleagues being shipped to Virginia to face a US criminal trial.

• Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is set to be extradited to the United States to face charges including copyright infringement, money laundering, and racketeering, a court in New Zealand has decided. District court judge Nevin Dawson gave the verdict today at 2PM local time (8PM ET), decreeing that the US had fulfilled requirements to get Dotcom, plus associates Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato, and Bram van der Kolk extradited to face further time in court, fines, and possible jail time.

• Dotcom was originally indicted in the United States back in 2012, with the Department of Justice claiming that Megaupload — the web storage service he created and operated — cost music and film studios in excess of $500 million dollars as people used it to download pirated songs and movies. He was arrested in a high-profile armed raid on his Auckland home soon after the charges were leveled against him, but it’s taken almost four years for the New Zealand courts to reach a decision on whether to send Dotcom to America.

• German tech entrepreneur Kim Dotcom hs lost a bid to block his extradition from New Zealand to the United States to face charges including copyright infringement and money laundering, a major victory for the U.S. Department of Justice in the long-running case.

• The decision by a New Zealand court comes almost four years after police raided Dotcom’s mansion west of Auckland at the behest of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and shut down his popular filesharing website, Megaupload.

• A judge has ruled internet mogul Kim Dotcom is eligible for extradition to face charges in the United States.

• However, Dotcom immediately said he would file an appeal, ensuring the long-running courtroom drama will continue for some time yet.

• Following lengthy arguments in the North Shore District Court Judge Nevin Dawson called a last minute hearing on Wednesday to give his ruling.

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