● 01.31.16

● Links 31/1/2016: OpenELEC 6.0.1, Linux Lite 2.8

Posted in News Roundup at 1:13 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• The oldest long-term supported Linux kernel branch finally reaches end of life next month, but before going into the deepest darkest corners of the Internet it just dropped one more maintenance release, Linux kernel 2.6.32.70 LTS.

• Libreboot, the version of Coreboot that is 100% free software without relying upon any proprietary blobs, has added support for another AMD motherboard.

• Libreboot now supports the ASUS KCMA-D8. This isn’t some new and exciting motherboard, but rather a motherboard for Opteron processors with the SR5670 + SP5100 chipset. On the bright side, at least this motherboard is still being sold as new from various Internet retailers.

Graphics Stack

• When it comes to OpenGL 4 support on the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver for pre-GCN graphics cards, currently the only R600g-supported cards advertising OpenGL 4.1 right now are the Radeon HD 5800 “Cypress” and Radeon HD 6900 “Cayman” series. Here are some tests done with OpenGL 4.1 on a Radeon HD 5830 compared to Cayman and various GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

• The latest batch of open-source Linux benchmarks to share this weekend are doing some P-State and CPUFreq scaling driver benchmarks and also trying each driver’s different CPU scaling governor options when using the AMD Radeon R9 285 graphics card on the AMDGPU kernel driver of Linux 4.5.

• A few days back I showed the Radeon vs. AMDGPU vs. Catalyst kernel driver potential when testing on the R9 290 “Hawaii” graphics card that has experimental and disabled-by-default support for the new AMDGPU kernel driver primarily designed for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer. Those results were interesting and showed some areas where AMDGPU came out faster than Radeon, so I decided to run experimental tests on another GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPU that can be made to work with this kernel driver.

• Jason Ekstrand of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center had a main track presentation on Saturday at FOSDEM about Vulkan.

Benchmarks

• This week I’ve already delivered a number of AMDGPU/Radeon benchmarks from the in-development Linux 4.5 kernel now that there’s AMDGPU PowerPlay and other improvements. With the week not being over, here are some more AMD Radeon graphics card benchmarks from Linux 4.5 while also using Mesa 11.2-devel Git with LLVM SVN.

Applications

• There are a plethora of different image viewers for the Linux operating system that come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Today I would like to highlight the default image viewer that Bodhi Linux utilizes – Ephoto.

• I have just released version 1.19.1 of Obnam, the backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.

• Gis Weather is a customizable weather widget available for numerous Linux distros. It’s not all that well known, but it’s a great tool nonetheless.

• If you’re looking for a EPUB viewer (reader) to use in your GNU/Linux operating system, FBReader is a great free application that you should try. It’s free and comes with a user interface that is easy to use.

• FBReader however does not support the PDF format, except under the Android platform. I primarily use it to read the epub format, and officially it supports the epub, non-encrypted Mobi format (Amazon Kindle format), RTF & DOC (Microsoft Word Document format), while epub version 3 is partially supported.

• Once I had NetworkManager installed, I decided it was easier to find, connect to and manage passwords of wireless networks using a graphical tool rather than digging through the copious output of commands run from my terminal and trying to keep track of the passwords. So long wireless.

Proprietary

• Opera might work well, but it just isn’t natural enough, not friendly enough. It also exists to monetize first, show web pages second, and somehow it shows through the pages. Sure, it’s my personal impression, but if you were hoping for a white knight to champion your cause, Firefox is still the lesser of evils. It is also more customizable, and you still get a feeling it’s not all about the dosh. At the end of the day, the wicked combination of somewhat weird, non-intuitive features, inability to tweak as you please, and the Linux software offering lagging a good few years behind Windows makes Opera a very hard sell. Not meant to be. It just does not feel right. That’s all.

• Skype for Linux is a video chat and voice call application made by Microsoft that happens to have a Linux build as well. Let’s take a closer look at what Microsoft is doing for Linux users.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I’m actually a big fan of the game, as I played it when it came out on PS3, but sadly I never got to finish it for various reasons. Being able to do so on my favourite system, that’s bloody brilliant.

• I wonder who’s doing the port? Any guesses folks?

• Bit Blaster XL is a mobile port of an arcade shoot em up now released on SteamOS and Linux. It’s origins are very obvious from the get-go. Your space ship moves and shoots all by itself without the need of pressing any buttons. The only thing you can do is turn it left or right and give it a little boost.

• I have been hoping to see something like this. Open Game Benchmarks is a brand new website dedicated to showing off benchmarks from Linux games.

• Previously we’ve only really had Phoronix (and people know how I feel about the quality on Phoronix in recent times), so it’s good to see some healthy competition in the Linux benchmarking area. While we do benchmarks, it’s generally only on big new titles as we focus more on the Sales Page, the Calendar and general day to day Linux gaming news.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today in Linux news, KDE contributor and former Kubuntu release manager Jonathan Riddel teased a new KDE subproject will be introduced this weekend at FOSDEM. In related news, Laurent Montel said, “KDEPIM/Kmail is NOT dead” despite it being “the year of Kube.” ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek today told developers to kill off screensavers once and for all.

• At FOSDEM this weekend KDE is announcing our newest project, KDE neon. Neon will provide a way to get the latest KDE software on the day its released.

• More than ever people expect a stable desktop with cutting-edge features, all in a package which is easy to use and ready to make their own.

• The latest and greatest of KDE community software packaged on a rock-solid base.

• Following the news yesterday that KDE is incubating a new “KDE Neon” project, it’s now been launched from FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, Belgium.

• Sadly, it’s no extraordinary breakthrough nor at this point does it seem to be fundamentally different from the former Project Neon. KDE Neon is about providing daily KDE packages to Ubuntu users.

• More FOSDEM news: Kolab Systems’s CEO, Georg Greve and Collabora’s General Manage, Michael Meeks, will be signing an agreement during the event to integrate CloudSuite into Kolab.

• But what is chroma subsampling and what does it do? As you may know, JPEG is a lossy format, which means that it trades quality for a smaller size. One of the methods for achieving a smaller size is to store color information (chroma) at a lower resolution than brightness (a.k.a intensity or luma) data. This is possible due to the fact that the human eye is less sensitive to color than brightness, so discarding color information doesn’t produce a perceptible loss of quality.

• digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 5.0.0 beta3. This version is new stage to the long way to stabilize code of Qt5 port of next main digiKam release. See previous announcement about 5.0.0-beta2 release to know all details about code re-writing under progress.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Over the last few days I’ve been at the GNOME Developer Experience hackfest in Brussels, looking into xdg-app and how best to use it in Debian and Debian derivatives.

• In the last two weeks, I worked on adding minimaps, enabling the different layouts for long routes and shorter routes and the refactoring of code. After discussion with design team, it was confirmed that minimaps were to be added for starting and finishing points only.

Distributions

• CoreOS is an important part of many container stacks. In this series of posts, we’re going to take a look at CoreOS, why it’s important, and how it works. If you don’t know anything about CoreOS already, don’t worry. We start at the beginning.

Reviews

• Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in Finland. It was inspired by Minix, a small Unix System and was introduced in October 1991.

• The first official version was Linux 0.02. In 2001, 2.4 version was released. It is developed under GNU license, which allows the source code of Linux to be distributed freely. Linux is used for networking, software development and web hosting.

New Releases

• The OpenELEC 6.0.1 release has been published. Users running OpenELEC 5.95.1 thru 6.0.0 with auto-update enabled will be prompted on-screen to reboot and apply the update once it has been downloaded. Users running older OpenELEC releases or with auto-update disabled will need to manually update. If you would like to update from an older OpenELEC release please read update instructions/advice on the wiki before updating. Manual update files can be obtained from the downloads page.

• Linux Lite 2.8 Final is now available for download. The star of this release is the inclusion of the Hardware Enablement Stack 3.19 based Kernel offering greater hardware support. We’ve also included a host of new features including, BTRFS support during install, the Help Manual is now accessible from the Desktop, Hulu now works out of the box, and the usual compliment of community suggestions and bug fixes.

• The developers of the OpenELEC (Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) open-source and cross-platform media center operating system announced today, January 30, the release of OpenELEC 6.0.1.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• Arch Linux users received today one of the biggest updates in the history of the Linux kernel-based operating system for the built-in pacman package manager utility, which is used for installing, updating and removing packages from the distro.

• The Arch Linux crew has announced the release of their Pacman 5.0 package manager.

Red Hat Family

• Building off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 that was released back in November, coming next week will finally be the Scientific Linux 7.2 release.

• Mackay Shields bought a new stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm bought 18,481,000 shares of the open-source software company’s stock, valued at approximately $24,132,000.

• While company fundamentals are a crucial element in determining where a stock might be headed, potential investors might also be interested in crowd opinion as well as Wall Street sentiment on a stock. Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) company shares have been the recent focus of individuals providing personal stock ratings (crowd) as well as professional Wall Street Analysts.

Debian Family

• Neil McGovern has written a blog post today explaining that work is still ongoing for landing ZFS support in Debian. This ZFS file-system support will be added to Debian’s contrib repository and will be a source-only, DKMS module. In other words, due to licensing issues, they will not be patching their default kernel package or the like, but rather will distribute it as a source package that will then build locally on the user’s system against their installed kernel version.

• I’m currently over at FOSDEM, and have been asked by a couple of people about the state of ZFS and Debian. So, I thought I’d give a quick post to explain what Debian’s current plan is (which has come together with a lot of discussion with the FTP Masters and others around what we should do).

• Last year I started the bootstrapping during the holidays and I now have the prototype in the form of cross built packages which can be installed next to amd64 packages using multiarch.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today sees the second alpha release of the Ubuntu 16.04 development cycle made available to download.

• Alpha 2 arrives a day later than originally planned, and sees just three flavors release builds as part of the milestone.

• Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME and Kubuntu sit this alpha out. Why? To paraphrase a recent comment from a Kubuntu dev: “There’s simply nothing to test yet.”

Flavours and Variants

• In the first days of 2016, we reported the fact that this year will be an exciting one for Linux Mint users, as project leader Clement Lefebvre revealed the fact that there might be a new look and feel for the upcoming distribution.

• Thursday, Linux Mint project lead Clement Lefebvre announced the creation of the X-Apps. The X-Apps are designed to be desktop-agnostic so that developers can update them without having to tweak them for each desktop environment. Lefebvre stated that these X-Apps would be used as default applications for Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.

• After the Ubuntu 15.10, all the Ubuntu members are preparing the for the next big release i.e. Ubuntu 16.04 ‘Xenial Xerus’. All Linux users especially Ubuntu users are curious to experience the 16.04. But it’s taking shape and Ubuntu members including Ubuntu MATE have released Alpha 2 of Ubuntu MATE 16.04. You can test it out and send feedback to developers to help them shape it better for you.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge

• Cnet rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

• The good: The Edge’s wraparound screen transforms an already great phone into Samsung’s best-looking handset. Ever.

• The bad: That supercool design comes with a big price, and the screen doesn’t deliver any real killer apps. Like the regular S6, the Edge doesn’t support swappable batteries or expandable storage.

• Android tips are a little trickier to offer than iPhone tips, for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s often up to carriers or manufacturers – rather than consumers – who have control over which version of Android your phone is running. Furthermore, there are so many more kinds of Android phones, which have their own neat little features.

Free Software/Open Source

• Now everyone can have their own torrent search engine as Strike torrent search goes open source

• Somebody’s loss is always somebody’s gain. The same happened in the case of the popular torrent search engine Strike which has just gone open source. Now, torrent lovers and film fans can build their own custom torrent search engine based on Strike code.

• The popular torrent search engine Strike has shut down permanently. Following a lawsuit from the RIAA, developer Andrew Sampson decided to stay away from torrent released projects. To mark the end of a turbulent period, he has now released the search engine’s source code to the public.

• TiddlyWiki has become a very polished piece of free, open source software engineering and I was delighted to find that the latest version could even import my ancient version’s content. My old TiddlyWiki was a fairly large collection of recipes and other than some minor formatting issues (the latest version supports a type of markdown called WikiText so my old version’s content wasn’t correctly formatted) everything was easily imported and upgraded.

• GCHQ used open source software like AntiSky to break down commercial satellite encryption. AntiSky was developed by Dr. Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. The software allows anyone to peep through the satellite signals and then use his expertise to come up with some meaningful outcome. However, digital video signals used by some drones might pose difficulty for the analysts appointed by the security agencies.

Events

• The next OpenStack Summit will take place in Austin, TX, US from April 25-29, 2016. The Call for Speaker period is still open and will close on February 1st , 2016, 11:59 PM PDT (February 2nd, 08:59 CEST). You can submit your presentations here.

BSD

• With ZFS file-system support continuing to spread via OpenZFS, you may be one of the many out there still wondering about the benefits of ZFS.

• Allan Jude, a FreeBSD server administrator, is presenting at FOSDEM this weekend about “interesting things you can do with ZFS.” His presentation covers ZFS features like data integrity checking, multi-level cache, copy-on-write behavior, snapshots, quotas, transparent compression, incremental replication, and more.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• One year ago was a status update on GNU Hurd where it was mentioned that GNU Hurd lacks 64-bit, audio, and USB support among other features for this micro-kernel free software project alternative to the Linux kernel. Sound support for Hurd is now in the works, but other features remain missing.

• Publicly declaring a goal for a free operating system was visionary in 1984. We have quite a bit to celebrate – this vision has manifested. We could retire fulfilled.

Leftovers

• It wasn’t that long ago that I—and many other people I know—would have argued that Twitter was more than just another social network. I would have told you that Twitter was more like a utility, a service so fundamental that I could imagine a scenario in which it was literally underwritten. Twitter needed to exist. A stream of those hundred-and-forty-character tweets was how you found the most crucial, critical, and thought-provoking stories of the moment.

Health/Nutrition

• Janine Jackson interviewed Chris Savage about the Flint, Michigan, water-poisoning for the January 22, 2016, CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Officials admitted late Friday the filters they’ve been handing out to residents may not be effective enough in removing lead from their faucets.

• Water samples collected from 26 random taps since the last week of December have shown lead levels higher than what filters are rated to handle — above 150 parts per billion. That is more than 10 times the level deemed safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More than 3,900 homes were tested. The highest reading out of the 26 residences “was at least 4,000” parts per billion.

• Scientific research into the safety of genetically modified food is often funded by agribusiness giants like Monsanto, but the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged as one of the biggest backers of so-called “frankenfood”, as part of its efforts to promote cheap fodder for the masses in Africa.

• Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged to donate their Facebook stock to a corporation which would invest in socially-oriented development and political initiatives.

Security

• The OpenSSL project has patched a problem in the cryptographic library but one that likely does not affect many popular applications.

• OpenSSL enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption. Most websites use it, which is indicated in Web browsers with a padlock symbol.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Fear of those Shiite Muslim militias is driving many locals in Diyala Province, where the population is mixed, to change their names to more neutral formulations.

• The reason is simple survival. “Just over the past two months our department has received between 150 and 200 applications for a name change,” said an official working for Diyala’s Directorate of Nationality. “Most of the applications are being submitted by people whose names reveal their sect or the areas from where their family or tribe comes.”

• A pair of bombs near Kirkuk damaged a pipeline that delivers gas used for electricity production in Kurdistan and caused power outages.

• Every candidate running for president accepts war as a necessity.

• About 24,000 madrassas in Pakistan are funded by Saudi Arabia which has unleashed a “tsunami of money” to “export intolerance”, a top American senator has said, adding that the US needs to end its effective acquiescence to the Saudi sponsorship of radical Islamism.

• Senator Chris Murphy said Pakistan is the best example of where money coming from Saudi Arabia is funnelled to religious schools that nurture hatred and terrorism.

• Air Force Space Command has declared its first cyber “weapons system” operational as a conference of computer warfare experts gets ready to kick off in Colorado Springs.

• The weapon, deemed fully operational this month, is basically a big firewall designed to protect the Air Force’s internal 1 million-user network from hackers. It will be a hot topic at the Rocky Mountain Cyber Symposium, which is expected to draw hundreds of computer experts to The Broadmoor for a four-day confab starting Monday.

Transparency Reporting

• Now, as I have said before, one thing that is going on here is that CIA is acting just like CIA always does when it declares publicly known things, including torture and drones, to be highly secret. It appears likely that these Top Secret emails are yet another set of emails about the worst kept secret in the history of covert programs, CIA’s drone killing in Pakistan. And so I am sympathetic, in principle, to Hillary’s campaign claims that this is much ado about nothing.

• Confirming that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private computer server held highly classified material, the U.S. government Friday censored 22 emails.

• The seven email chains from the Democratic presidential front-runner will be withheld from the public because information in them has been deemed “top secret,” announced John Kirby, State Department spokesman. However, “These documents were not marked classified at the time that they were sent,” he said, having been upgraded at the request of intelligence agencies.

• Hmmm. A news article? Here’s a Politico piece from a couple of weeks ago, when we heard that the inspector general’s office was concerned about some of Clinton’s emails.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Researchers have identified another piece in the climate machinery that is accelerating the melting of the Greenland ice cap. The icy hills are responding to the influence of a higher command system: the clouds.

• An international research team led by scientists from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium report in Nature Communications journal that cloud cover above the northern hemisphere’s largest single volume of permanent ice is raising temperatures by between 2° and 3°C and accounting for 20-30% of the melting.

• Global temperatures will continue to soar over the next 12 months as rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions and El Niño combine to bring more record-breaking warmth to the planet.

• According to the Met Office’s forecast for the next five years, 2016 is likely to be the warmest since records began. Then in 2017 there will be a dip as the effects of El Niño dissipate and there is some planet-wide cooling.

• But after that, and for the remaining three years of the decade, the world will continue to experience even more warming. The forecast, which will be released this week, is the first such report that the Met Office has issued since it overhauled its near-term climate prediction system last year.

Finance

• CETA is a Canada/EU “free trade agreement,” negotiated in secret and containing the notorious “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) clause, which lets corporations sue governments in confidential tribunals in order to force them to repeal their environmental, safety and labour laws.

• If that sounds familiar, it should: CETA was negotiated in the same corrupt, secretive process that the old Harper government deployed for the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Canada/China deal.

• Make no mistake: The purpose of privatization is to make a profit. The promise of privatization is efficiency. But in its pursuit of both profits and efficiency, privatization creates perverse incentives. It encourages privately managed charter schools to avoid or get rid of “expensive” students” (unless the reimbursement formula makes them profitable to keep); it encourages for-profit hospitals to over diagnose patients and perform unnecessary surgeries; it encourages private preschool providers of special education to misdiagnose children as in need of services to produce profits.

• Before announcing for President in the Democratic Primaries, Bernie Sanders told the people he would not run as an Independent and be like Nader—invoking the politically-bigoted words “being a spoiler.” Well, the spoiled corporate Democrats in Congress and their consultants are mounting a “stop Bernie campaign.” They believe he’ll “spoil” their election prospects.

• Despite the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, the equal pay needle hasn’t moved much at all.

• It’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first piece of legislation to become law during his presidency. Back in 2009, we celebrated the law’s potential for turning the rallying cry of “equal pay for equal work” into a reality.

• But sadly – as President Obama’s announcement today to hold companies accountable for paying women and people of color less makes evident – the momentum created by Ledbetter’s namesake legislation hasn’t moved the equal pay needle all that much.

• Who was Lilly Ledbetter? In 2007, the Supreme Court threw out a jury’s verdict that she suffered pay discrimination during her nearly 20 years as one of the only female managers at an Alabama Goodyear Tire plant. In a 5-4 opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court found that Ledbetter waited too long to sue, even though she didn’t know about the disparity between her pay and that of her male peers until she was close to retirement.

• Accountable government in the West is history. Nothing but failure and collapse awaits Western civilization.

• The New York Times caused a stir by publishing a classic man-bites-dog style campaign finance story in its Friday editions titled “Bernie Sanders Is Top Beneficiary of Outside Money.” The article charges that despite his fiery campaign rhetoric against Super PACs and big money in politics, Sanders has gained much more from Super PAC spending than his Democratic opponents.

• “In fact,” the Times reports, “more super PAC money has been spent so far in express support of Mr. Sanders than for either of his Democratic rivals, including Hillary Clinton, according to Federal Election Commission records.”

• On any given night in the United States, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, over half a million people are without a home. That number may have decreased nationwide in the past few years, but California remains on the forefront of the problem, accounting for 20 percent of the country’s homeless in 2014.

• [...]

• The common perception of homelessness is that it is a problem that afflicts only those with mental health and substance use problems. But this description doesn’t describe the experience of older adults, particularly those who first experienced homelessness late in life.

• The Washington Post has been on something of an anti-Sanders kick lately. Its latest editorial, Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign, is somehow worse than its last one, which derided his single-payer plan in tabloid-like terms. It’s entirely predictable that an establishment gatekeeper publication like The Post would not approve of Sanders’ relatively radical policy proposals, but the degree to which it keeps offering up hysterical, and often times totally disingenuous critiques, is surprising even by its standards.

• To understand why we see so few genuine alternatives to US technology giants, it’s instructive to compare the fate of a company like Uber – valued at more than $62.5bn (£44bn) – and that of Kutsuplus, an innovative Finnish startup forced to shut down late last year.

• Kutsuplus’s aspiration was to be the Uber of public transport: it operated a network of minibuses that would pick up and drop passengers anywhere in Helsinki, with smartphones, algorithms and the cloud deployed to maximise efficiency, cut costs and provide a slick public service. Being a spinoff of a local university that operated on a shoestring budget, Kutsuplus did not have rich venture capitalists behind it. This, perhaps, is what contributed to its demise: the local transport authority found it too expensive, despite impressive year-on-year growth of 60%.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• He is the veteran socialist that no one gave a prayer to – but now Bernie Sanders is starting to be seen as a serious contender to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate. Does that remind you of anyone?

• Lest anyone begin to believe that this writer is indicating support for Mr. Sanders, please disabuse yourself of any such notion. The fact that Mrs. Clinton is an unabashed corporate shill, and Mr. Sanders, perhaps, isn’t, or is less so, doesn’t cause this writer to reject the one and embrace the other. He agrees that Mr. Sanders is probably the lesser of the two Democratic evils, but there are alternatives.

• The bankrupt political establishment has given us Trump as surely as Victor Frankenstein gave his community the monster. I’m all for revolting against the establishment, but we will regret making the authoritarian and boorish Trump the standard bearer of that revolt.

• Conservative pundits are bickering over Donald Trump’s campaign, especially after National Review’s “Against Trump” issue and the backlash it engendered. On one side are pundits who want to stop Trump’s candidacy in its tracks.

• Let’s be frank: the status quo does not offer sufficient safeguards for BBC independence.

Censorship

• A terminally ill woman has hit out at Facebook after a “potentially life-saving” photograph showing one of her nipples was removed from her page.

• Rowena Kincaid, who has secondary stage-four breast cancer, said the decision to remove the image could prevent thousands people from learning about the symptoms of the disease.

• Still, this marks another step by the company to limit the sale of firearms on its service. As the Verge reported in 2014, Facebook previously limited posts about gun sales to people over the age of 18.

• Teeraporn Suwanvidhu had a tough decision to make five years ago as president of the Thai Student Association in the UK: remove an article, or lose all support from the Thai Embassy next year.

• Executives of the giant social media outlets Facebook and Line have been called to a meeting by the national reform assembly over monitoring and removing content considered a security threat to Thailand.

• The meeting called by the assembly’s media reform committee follows a similar one with Google executives on Jan 22 in which they were asked to remove content without a court order.

• A report claims that a Thai junta-appointed committee is to ask Facebook and online communication device Line to immediately remove content deemed threatening to national security or the monarchy, if it wants to continue operating in the Kingdom.

• The removal would be carried out without the need for a Computer Crime Act court order — previously needed before any action is taken against anyone posting “threatening” content online.

• The Bangkok Post reported Sunday that a document claimed to have been leaked and obtained by Thai cyber activists reveals details of the February plans.

• Here is a screenshot of a story in the Daily Mail, titled EXCLUSIVE – Swedish social worker was stabbed in the back and thigh as she tried to break up a fight between two teenage migrants: Police officer reveals shocking new details of the killing. Note how it appears just fine through my regular Internet service:

• The photos went as part of the deal that sold Corbis Entertainment’s licensing arm to Visual China Group.

• Few subjects are more heavily censored in China than mention the 1989 Tiananmen uprising and massacre.

• The sale of politically sensitive pictures to a Chinese company raises the question of whether they will become harder to access. The answer depends partly on your location. Within mainland China the issue of who owns sensitive images is a somewhat academic matter. Censorship—both government-led and self-imposed—means that images such as “Tank Man” rarely see the light of day anyway.

Privacy

• The more I thought about it, the more I realized how upsetting this is. This is not just about me. So, allow me to present my point in two lights: one, a user (even a non-power user) should have choice over what is uploaded from their phone; and two, people who have no business relationship with Facebook should not have their information uploaded without their consent, and there are people for whom it is very dangerous for their personal information to be uploaded to Facebook. I’ll address these individually.

• The first is straightforward, but painful. I consider myself to be an experienced user, and I hold the expectation for myself that I know enough about my computer to be in control of what it’s doing, and what data it’s sending where. But let’s say that the bug that caused this to happen somehow was fixed, or that if it wasn’t a bug, I managed to look more carefully and avoid doing whatever it is that I did that uploaded everyone else’s data to Facebook. Let’s say that Facebook fixed it just to that point, and not beyond. That’s not good enough. Our responsibility, as engineers, does not end with protecting the powerful. It is not sufficient to say “we gave them the option, and it’s not their fault if they didn’t click the little tiny box opting out”. As computer designers, it is unethical misconduct if we don’t aim to protect the most vulnerable users of our systems as well as we protect the well-off. There is an excellent essay addressing this subject by @SwiftOnSecurity; if you haven’t read it, you would do well to carve out the five minutes that it takes to read it. We would not tolerate this in any other professional engineering discipline; “growth hacking” is not an excuse in ours, either.

• Exactly how the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) cell works is a closely-held secret — despite some recent leaks — but in a rare public appearance, TAO’s chief shed some light on how America’s top cyber spies do their thing.

• During the course of an address at the recently-held USENIX Enigma security conference, Rob Joyce – the chief of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit – said that hackers require focus and persistence to wage cyberattacks, rather than just zero-day exploits.

• I’m interested in this because the full list — including whatever other items were included in item 4 and whatever was originally numbered 5 — probably resembles what the government would get from Yahoo under PRISM, and therefore answers questions I raised in this post about how the government requests under PRISM to Yahoo expanded between August 2007 and January 2008. The calendar and buddy lists are unsurprising (indeed, we know NSA used to steal that stuff in the clear). But I’m also interested in how many of the initial list address hardware, which suggests one thing they’re likely getting under PRISM is mapping of such hardware. Also note the location-data of both the person using the account and the hardware associated with its use.

• Google’s push for all websites to be HTTPS has so far been all carrot. But the company is now using its big stick: a large red cross through every website that doesn’t offer an encrypted connection.

Civil Rights

• Each week, Ridgeway leaves his home in Washington, D.C., walks to his local post office, and returns with about fifty letters from men and women locked in solitary-confinement units in prisons around the country. The letters began arriving in 2010, soon after Ridgeway launched a Web site, called Solitary Watch, with an editor named Jean Casella. “When we started, there was nobody writing about this,” she said. Ridgeway was then seventy-three years old. He dug into his retirement fund to help cover startup costs, and now, when he goes to the post office each week, he pushes a walker.

• Asked by an atheist voter about how his Christian faith would play a role in his presidency, Republican candidate Ben Carson said he believes there is inherently “no conflict” between God’s law and the laws of America.

• “Fortunately, our Constitution, the supreme law of the land, was designed by men of faith, and it has a Judeo-Christian foundation,” the retired neurosurgeon told a packed room of potential caucusgoers in Iowa City on Friday afternoon. “Therefore, there is no conflict there. So it is not a problem.”

• ON JANUARY 29, Dr. Amin Shokrollahi was planning to do something he had done many times before: take a flight from his home in Switzerland to the United States. Shokrollahi, a dual German-Iranian citizen, is a renowned mathematician, computer scientist, and a professor at the prestigious École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne. Once in the U.S., he was to deliver an address at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSC) in San Francisco.

• The Ku Klux Klan has gotten a bad rap, according to one Georgia lawmaker. He says the terror group “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order” that “made a lot of people straighten up.”

• That leader is now hellbent on stopping the “cultural cleansing” of the South’s heritage. So far this year, State Rep. Tommy Benton (R) has co-sponsored two bills to preserve the Confederate’s legacy.

• In August of 2014, multiple deputies with the Marion County Sheriff’s office conducted a drug bust. During the bust, Derrick Price ran from deputies Jesse Terrell, Trevor Fitzgerald, James Amideo, Cody Hoppel and Adam Crawford. However, once he realized he could not outrun the pickup truck, he quickly stopped, put his hands up, and laid face down on the ground — completely surrendering.

• Upon reaching the unarmed, nonviolent, completely compliant, and prostrate man, the deputies proceeded to unleash a furious beating composed of kicks to the head, knees to the body, and countless blows from fists.

• Arrested on a theft charge for disciplining his daughter by taking her cell phone away, a North Texas father said “justice” was finally served.

• Ronald Jackson was arrested by Grand Prairie police after investigators attempted to retrieve the phone, but were never successful in their efforts.

• A judge at the Dallas County Courthouse found Jackson not guilty on Tuesday, citing a lack of evidence to move forward with the case.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Earlier this week it was revealed that the Czech Pirate Party is being prosecuted for running a pirate TV show site. The party faces 200,000 euros in damages and could even be dissolved as a legal entity, but according to the chief of the party’s International Department, defending Internet hyperlinking is worth the risk.

• And it is a huge trend — vinyl sales are at a 26-year high in the US, and they represent more revenue to the music industry than streaming right now.

• This paper grew out of a series of hearings in 2013 and 2014 in which EFF and other public interest organizations and academics gave evidence, along with people from the media and publishing industries. The Commerce Department panel deserves praise for inviting many different viewpoint. It covers three issues: remixes, the ability to re-sell and lend digital goods (called “first sale” rights), and copyright’s civil penalties (called “statutory damages”). The paper makes some recommendations to Congress that will help promote innovation and free speech, and will hopefully help begin a conversation about other needed fixes. And the Commerce Department panel did a good job of inviting and hearing many different viewpoints. Still, their recommendations in these three areas don’t go far enough to fix the problems they identify.

• In 2014 we stood in the North-West Region for the European Elections. At last year’s General Election we had candidates in Manchester, Sheffield, South Wales and London. This year we want to consolidate in those areas, and branch out to new ones as well. This means that even if you are the only Pirate in your area it’s still worth standing as a candidate as a way of putting the Pirate name and brand out there – hopefully it will lead to kick-starting a branch in your area if people come forward and are interested.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.