● 09.17.16

● Links 17/9/2016: Debian 8.6 Released, More Microsoft Layoffs and Dead Products

Posted in News Roundup at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Carla Schroder sometimes describes herself as an “Ace Linux guru,” which is as good a way to tell you who she is as any — at least in the Linux context. She’s written so much, in so many places, that it’s easier to give you a single Google link to her work than to list a whole stack of articles, plus three O’Reilly books. The single article I’ll point you to on its own is one Schroder wrote for Opensource.com in July, 2016, titled I’ve Been Linuxing Since Before You Were Born.

• But the main thing (the “takeaway,” marketing people would say) about this interview is that it shows you how a persistent person can teach herself Linux and build a pretty good career working with it and writing about it — and still have time to do a little farming on the side.

Desktop

• If you need to use those productivity programs that Chrome OS just doesn’t offer, or you just want to try something new, Linux on your Chromebook has you covered.

• You’ve may have seen chatter on the internet about installing Linux on your Chromebook. Plenty of longtime Chrome OS users are doing it, and it allows the use of programs like GIMP (a Photoshop replacement), or Darktable, (a Lightroom alternative) as well as plenty of programs for video and audio editing. It’s a way to use your Chromebook for the few power-user features you might need. It’s also completely free and easier than you think.

Server

• OpenStack’s adoption by business users has created an opportunity for devs, architects, sysadmins and engineers to pay the rent by working on free software–and there’s plenty of open seats at the table.

• OpenStack has seen rapid growth since its beginnings in 2010, when 75 developers gathered to contribute to the project, to 2016, where more than 59,110 community members and 20 million lines of code. OpenStack’s maturity has been praised by analysts like Forrester, who say that, “OpenStack meets the needs of production workloads and is ready to enable CIOs in tackling the strategic requirements of their business.”

• Five Questions for Katherine Daniels: Thoughts on adopting DevOps effectively, the importance of empathy, and new essential skills for today’s ops professionals.

• The success of DevOps—development and operations—is its automation and continuous integration of DevOps lifecycle—from planning, coding to testing, release and monitoring. To overcome any testing error and give 100 percent positive outcomes, organizations prefer automation in testing their product; and adopt DevOps. Recently, RightScale survey revealed that around 54 percent of the companies have adopted DevOps and the interest around DevOps is increasing rapidly. There are lots of DevOps tools available in the market, both paid and open source. However, there is a category of tools widely used across automation testing community because of its flexible software-defined platform. But the trickiest part could be in selecting the right DevOps testing tool.

Kernel Space

• Besides the Greybus subsystem being right around the corner for the mainline Linux kernel, it might not be too much longer before the TEE subsystem is ready. TEE is now up to its 12th patch revision and is about trusted computing.

• Linaro developers and other stakeholders continue working on TEE, the Trusted Execution Environment. The Trusted Execution Environment is for securely interfacing with a “trusted” OS running in a secure environment or on a separate co-processor. The TEE driver of this new Linux subsystem handles the communication between the host Linux OS and whatever is the trusted TEE implementation. Of course, given Linaro’s involvement, the primary focus of TEE is on better supporting ARM TrustZone.

• I just discovered: I was not alone.

• Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has also chosen the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition as his next laptop. A few weeks ago, Torvalds wrote on his Google+ page that he was looking at the replacement for his old laptop. When I met Torvalds during LinuxCon North America (for a long exclusive interview) I asked if he had selected a worthy one.

• The discussion about blockchain’s adoption is gaining momentum, but where are we now? How far are we from seeing blockchain in all industries and how can we help speed up the process? We talked to Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project about all this and more.

• “Blockchain”—the technology underlying the virtual currency Bitcoin—has become a hot topic in the business world. Proponents claim that Blockchain has the potential to be as disruptive to business as the internet, and businesses in many industries are investing significant resources into exploring and developing applications for it.

• In Part 1 of our two-part post on this subject, we’ll provide an introduction to the technology, its potential applications, and organizations that have been formed to foster it (similar to organizations formed during the development of the internet).

Graphics Stack

• The Intel Mesa OpenGL driver now exposes the ARB_ES3_2_compatibility extension.

• The Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver has already supported the necessary extensions for OpenGL ES 3.2 support while this ARB_ES3_2_compatibility extension signifies that features found in GLES 3.2 but missing from OpenGL 4.5 are present in the desktop GL driver. This extension makes it easier for bringing mobile OpenGL ES programs to the desktop.

• One month after the first AMDGPU feature pull of new functionality for DRM-Next to in turn land in Linux 4.9, the second feature pull request has now been sent out and it presents experimental Southern Islands (GCN 1.0) support for AMDGPU.

• In continuation of yesterday’s article about Mesa Gets Improved For Running On Windows With Cygwin, the Windows-DRI extension has landed in the X.Org Server code-base.

• This is about improving the OpenGL/GLX support on Windows in a similar manner to the X.Org Server on Mac OS X, with the primary benefactor to this being applications running under Cygwin. See yesterday’s article for some more details.

• libinput’s touchpad acceleration is the cause for a few bugs and outcry from a quite vocal (maj|in)ority. A common suggestion is “make it like the synaptics driver”. So I spent a few hours going through the pointer acceleration code to figure out what xf86-input-synaptics actually does (I don’t think anyone knows at this point) [1].

• If you just want the TLDR: synaptics doesn’t use physical distances but works in device units coupled with a few magic factors, also based on device units. That pretty much tells you all that’s needed.

Applications

• The Tor Project has released Tor Browser 6.0.5 for all major platforms. This update of the popular anonymity software comes with an important bug fix in Mozilla Firefox that allowed an attacker to exploit an add-on vulnerability and inject malicious code. Other changes come in the form of updated HTTPS-Everywhere and a new Tor stable version 0.2.8.7.

• A new version of the Sayonara music player is out, and it adds cover art support, new icons, and a new crossfader. We show you how to install it on Ubuntu.

• One of the most important uses of a network is for file sharing purposes. There are multiple ways Linux and Windows, Mac OS X users on a network can now share files with each other and in this post, we shall cover Nitroshare, a cross-platform, open-source and easy-to-use application for sharing files across a local network.

• Nitroshare tremendously simplifies file sharing on a local network, once installed, it integrates with the operating system seamlessly. On Ubuntu, simply open it from the applications indicator, and on Windows, check it in the system tray.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine software has been updated today, September 16, 2016, to version 1.9.19, a development milestone towards Wine 2.0, bringing various bug fixes and improvements.

Games

• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will be available on Mac and Linux later this year, it has been announced. While the console and PC versions were published by Square Enix, these versions are being handled by Feral Interactive.

• Feral previously worked with Square Enix to publish Tomb Raider, Life is Strange, and Sleeping Dogs on Mac and Linux. A more specific release date has not been announced. System requirements for both Mac and Linux versions will be detailed “closer to launch.”

• Aspire Media are celebrating their 20th birthday with a sale — which is my kind of celebration!

• Along with RIVE, now we have another game coming from the Netherlands: Marooners is a casual title developed by M2H studios (Verdun), aimed to be played at parties with your friends. It consists in a group of minigames where you have to collect treasures while trying to survive your friends’ attacks and diverse environmental threats. Also, there is an original mechanic that suddenly switches the game modes, forcing you to quickly adapt to the consequent chaos.

• Thanks to the great TheLinuxGamer for the poke on Twitter about it, it seems that ‘Owlboy’ [Official Site] will come to Linux using FNA.

• Project Highrise [Official Website] a cool looking skyscraper construction and management sim is now available on Linux, but it’s a very experimental form.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• When GNOME Shell (aka GNOME 3) dropped into the world of Linux, many criticized it for not being flexible enough. The new-look GNOME was seen as a step backward in productivity and efficiency. GNOME however had a few tricks up its sleeve to silence such naysayers. One such trick is GNOME Shell Extensions, which bring some much-needed configuration options to the GNOME 3 desktop environment. Offering everything from aesthetics to actual productivity, there’s a GNOME Shell Extension to fill whatever void you see in the latest version of GNOME.

• For a while now, you’ve been able to get Builder from the gnome-apps-nightly Flatpak repository. Until now, it had a few things that made it difficult to use. We care a whole lot about making our tooling available via Flatpak because it is going to allow us to get new code into users hands quicker, safer, and more stable.

• So over the last couple of weeks I’ve dug in and really started polishing things up. A few patches in Flatpak, a few patches in Builder, and a few patches in Sysprof start getting us towards something refreshing.

• Next Monday I am speaking at the Libre Application Summit GNOME in Portland about how we’re managing and delivering the applications to our Endless OS’s users. I am also very curious to check out the city of Portland as everybody tells me good things about it.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

Red Hat Family

• When the banner displaying a crimson fedora briefly appeared outside 300 A St. in April, the rumors spread faster than free software: Red Hat was coming to Fort Point.

• The flag, it turns out, was an effort to recruit the company, not necessarily a sign of anything definitive. But the recruitment effort paid off. North Carolina-based Red Hat has just signed a lease that will bring 100 to 150 workers to the South Boston building.

• Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies, said the business software company will occupy 40,000 square feet, with an opening planned in mid-spring 2017.

• The Red Hat-Citrix-HQ Raleigh backed Innovators Program picked 10 early-stage startups with a heavy Triangle presence despite international interest.

• The lineup includes Raleigh startup Malartu Funds, which focuses on crowdfunding, plus two Red Hat teams, three from Citrix, and four other firms.

• Three are Triangle-based: Nebula, Glance and ShineBig.

• Each of the 10 receives a $10,000 grant, mentorship, and possible future investment.

• The new solution is powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which provides backend services to the complex IoT system. In addition, Herzog has used Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite to help manage systems and meet compliance of the solution.

• Red Hat debuts a new tool for simplifying cloud installation as well as a new cloud platform, RHOSP 9.

• In a bid to help make it faster and easier for organizations to deploy their own private cloud, Red Hat announced the QuickStart Cloud Installer on Sept. 14. The new installer follows Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform 9 release, which became generally available on Aug. 31.

• Red Hat has released various installation tools and methods available for its cloud technologies in recent years. But the QuickStart Cloud Installer (QCI) is somewhat different in that it can help an organization install multiple technologies from the Red Hat Cloud Suite, including OpenStack, CloudForms, OpenShift and Red Hat Virtualization.

• The OpenShift Commons Gathering will bring together the brightest technical minds to discuss the future of OpenShift and it’s related upstream open source projects. With OpenShift Container Platform quickly gaining adoption around the world, the OpenShift Commons Gathering will feature talks from upstream project leads and case studies from users like Red Hat, Google, Microsoft Azure, Amadeus, GetUp Cloud, Dell Technologies, Apache Spark, Click2Cloud, UNC Chapel Hill and more. This event will also include face-to-face meetings for all the OpenShift Commons Special Interest Groups and allow ample time for peer-to-peer networking.

Finance

Fedora

• Today in Linux news, Red Hat formally announced their 2017 expansion plans into Boston. Elsewhere, Dedoimedo posted another guide, this time how to make Fedora 24 useful and fun. After a rough start, Michael Huff found Mageia 5 to be “smart, eager and full of potential” and Dimstar has this week’s Tumbleweed update.

• the current stage of the Fedora 25 Supplemental Wallpaper.. Start of this month I openend the submission phase for the Fedora Supplemental Wallpaper. So far we have received 91 submissions and currently 72 of them are approved. So far 49 contributors earned a badge for their submission. But there is still time until 11. October left to contribute a wallpaper.

• A two-day workshop on women in free software and Fedora Women Day were held on the 15th and 16th of July 2016 at the Netaji Subhash Engineering College in Kolkata, India. This event was jointly organized by Ubuntu Women Project, Fedora Project, and the university. It was substantially sponsored by Ubuntu Women Project. The goal of the workshop was also to get new participants interested, improve the level of participation by women, and explore new avenues of free software community development. Given the factors involved, the Workshop on Women in Free Software / Fedora Women Day 2016 (shortened to WWFS-FWD’2016) was a successful one.

• Ladies and gentlemen, it’s pimping time. We shall now transform a tame Fedora installation that is not designed for mass consumption into a beautiful and majestic fun box. This means adding codecs and pretty stuff and extra software that people crave. We shall do this quickly and easily, and I will be your shepherd.

• Recently, I’ve discovered or rather rekindled my passion for all things Red Hat and Gnome, and Fedora has joined the list, after a long season of dreadful releases. It works well, it’s fun and stable and fast, and all it’s missing is some flavor and spice.

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 8 (codename “jessie”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 8 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old “jessie” CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Derivatives

• Q4OS is a Debian-based open source Linux distribution that comes with Trinity desktop environment, which is forked from KDE. The latest release, Q4OS 1.6.2 ‘Orion’, improves the previous version and fixes the bugs reported by users. The existing Q4OS 1.6 or 1.6.1 OS users are advised to update their systems to the latest version.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today, September 16 2016, Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov was proud to announce the release of yet another maintenance update to the Snapcraft tool that helps application developers package their apps as Snaps for Ubuntu and other Linux OSes.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• In this brief hands-on review, Ben Martin takes the low cost, quad-core Orange Pi One hacker SBC for a spin, and benchmarks the board’s performance.

• The Orange Pi single board computer series lets you run a small Linux machine dedicated to a specific task for a very attractive price — less than $20 for a complete setup. Some ideas for using an Orange Pi include adding network connectivity to an older printer, transcoding a USB webcam and sending it over the network, or just connecting some hardware to the 40 pins and being able to interface to chips faster than a microcontroller could.

• The Orange Pi One is a credit card sized quad-core ARM machine that sells for about $13, including shipping. You will have to buy a 5-volt wall plug and bring your own micro SD card, but the total cost should still be under $20. Many people are familiar with the popular Raspberry Pi offerings that have brought the cost of ARM machines to below $50. Now, the entry price for a Linux machine with Ethernet and HDMI has dropped to under $20.

• Since the original Homebrew router is in service for my office now, I built a new one. (Actually, I’ve built quite a few new ones since then—they’ve proven pretty popular.) The Homebrew 2.0 looks a lot more serious than its spunky little disco-colored predecessor; it’s got a smaller form factor, rugged heavy heat dissipation fins along the top, and four Intel gigabit LAN interfaces across the front. It also has a newer processor: a J1900 Bay Trail Celeron, as opposed to the original Homebrew’s 1037u Ivy Bridge Celeron. The new CPU is a mixed bag. It’s got twice the cores, but it’s a bit slower per thread. For most routing jobs, this gives the older Ivy Bridge CPU a slight advantage, but overall it’s a wash. Either version has proven to be more than enough muscle to do the job.

Phones

Tizen

• We have another Tizen story coming from Russia, where the platform has been doing very well. Tizen based smartphones like the Samsung Z3 are being actively used by Russia’s business and corporate sector as well as Government officials. Gazprom, which is Russia’s as well as the world’s largest Natural Gas company have now come up with a pact with Samsung to use Tizen based smartphones. To understand the kind of scale of this agreement is, it would be helpful to know that Gazprom has a global gas reserve share of 17 percent and 72 percent in Russia. Gazprom is also involved in the Russian Government’s diplomatic efforts; distortions of gas prices, and access to pipelines.

• Samsung Electronics has now announced that it is providing a lifetime guarantee against screen burn-in, covering all of its 2016 Tizen-powered SUHD Quantum Dot TVs. Though with the high level of technology the Koren giant infused on the 2016 models it is very unlikely for Burn-in to occur on the smart TVs. But if peradventure it does occur, Samsung has said it will replace the smart TV for free.

• Cublast was initially avaialble for the Android and Windows platforms and has now made its way to the Tizen Platform. This is an arcade style game that promises a lot of fun, which is called a “all new agility game” for your smartphone! We have Touch and tilt controls, multiple challenging stages, mind blowing puzzles, and the ability publish your high score online whilst battling against the clock !

Android

• It’s possible to get a decent Android experience, even on a shoestring — and unsurprisingly Motorola dominates this field.

• The launch of the HTC G1 was significant for two reasons. First and foremost, this phone was weird because it was Google’s effort “against” Apple and their iPhone and somehow it might actually compete well. Second, and in my mind the most important, Android was positioned from day one as a platform where third-party apps could be submitted and people could choose whatever apps they wanted. It took Apple a little while to catch on, but in the next revision of iOS they did.

• Remix OS Player is based on the virtual machine in Android Studio and runs inside a dedicated window. It’s based on Android Marshmallow (6.0) and comes with access to the Google Play Store. Jide recommends using it primarily as a gaming emulator, letting you play Android titles like Clash of Clans straight from your Windows desktop. There are some very accessible spec requirements (Windows 7, Core i3 processor, 8GB of storage, etc), but Remix OS Player is basically a very simple package to use.

• Android is known for easy to customize and personalize. The best part is, if you’re prepared to dig deeper, you’ll find a goldmine of hidden features and settings that can improve your mobile experience. Here are four of our favorites you can uncover in the most recent versions of the OS.

Free Software/Open Source

• Without realizing it, I joined the open source movement in 1999 during the midst of the Kosovo refugee crisis. I was part of a team helping route aid supplies to local humanitarian organizations running transit camps across Albania. These are the camps that refugees often arrived at first before being moved to larger, more formal camps.

• Open source software is all the rage, as the DevOps movement advances, but it’s important to keep track of it carefully for licensing and security purposes.

• Sometimes we wonder how Ms. Joseph finds the time to balance her career at HP with writing, evangelizing Ubuntu and public speaking, along with an active life in the city by the bay. That she is an inspiration to open sourcers everywhere can be seen in this video.

• HPE is paring down its software holdings, including analytical software in the Vertica line. A sale to Micro Focus is due to close next year.

• Today, September 16, 2016, Nextcloud informs Softpedia about the launch of a new hardware product, the first in the company’s history, in collaboration with Canonical and WDLabs.

• The embargo expired this morning on the Nextcloud Box, a device from the cooperation of Canonical, Nextcloud, and WDLabs for making it easy to deploy your own Ubuntu-powered personal cloud.

• Cloud storage is amazingly convenient. Unfortunately, the best part of the cloud can also be the worst. You see, having your files stored on someone else’s severs and accessing them over the internet opens you to focused hacking, and potentially, incompetence by the cloud storage company too. As a way to have the best of both worlds, some folks will set up net-connected local storage so they can manage their own ‘cloud’.

• Most of us love using the cloud. It gives us on-the-go-access to our personal files, photos and documents, and helps keep our busy lives in sync.

• But loving the cloud doesn’t mean you have to love using a proprietary closed-off services like Dropbox, Google Drive or One Drive.

• Content delivery firm Varnish Software has announced its Varnish Plus Cloud product — essentially, a full version of the Varnish Plus software suite that can be accessed via the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Marketplace.

• NetNordic said it has recently chosen Nexenta to create a centralised storage repository for its customer base as well as for the company, as the operator and its customer base continue to grow. Nexenta provides open source-driven, software-defined storage, which offers extra data with compression turned on, a significant factor for NetNordic, said its operations engineer Sander Petersson.

• Open Source to the Rescue

• One solution to LED overload is going with open source technology.

• One Slashdot commenter going by the handle of guruevi uses OpenWrt: “You can reprogram any LED on your router for whatever purpose. Want them all on or off at the certain time of day or blink if it detected anomalous traffic.”

• I also got email from Dave Taht, who happened to recently write a blog post titled “Blinkenlights: A debugging aid AND a curse” (with the subhed of “Too many LEDs! Give me back the stars!”). Taht is a busy guy as director of the Make Wi-Fi Fast project and co-founder of the Bufferbloat and CeroWrt projects, though took time out to share some LED disabling tips in his blog post.

• Taht, like many of those cited above, has made his share of manual fixes over the years, using electrical tape and just plan moving devices behind things. Only recently did he start monkeying with software to solve his problem.

SaaS/Back End

• Cloud computing has vastly changed the $3 trillion enterprise computer industry and one of the most interesting technologies at the center of this trend is called OpenStack.

• And one of the critical (and oddest) companies at the center of OpenStack is Mirantis.

• On Thursday, Mirantis announced that it bought a startup in Prague called TCP Cloud.

• Mirantis, focused on OpenStack, announced an initiative in February of last year that would integrate Kubernetes with OpenStack, letting developers deploy containers on OpenStack in what the company claimed took only minutes. Since then, Kubernetes’ star has risen and containers are all the rage.

• Against that backdrop, Mirantis has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire TCP Cloud. Headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, TCP Cloud employs 30 people and specializes in managed services for OpenStack, OpenContrail and Kubernetes. The acquisition will support Mirantis’ initiative with Google and Intel to enable OpenStack on Kubernetes by equipping Mirantis to continuously deliver OpenStack to customer datacenters. According to Mirantis, the combined entity will solve the problem of upgrades, which is one of the primary burdens of on-premises infrastructure.

• “The model for delivering infrastructure employed by traditional vendors is fundamentally misaligned with modern software development patterns. Disruptors of the digital era push new code to production multiple times a day, while traditional enterprise vendors ship infrastructure as packaged software once every few years and require forklift upgrades,” said Alex Freedland, Mirantis CEO. “Mirantis empowers enterprises to embrace the new, continuously delivered infrastructure model on their terms. TCP Cloud’s technology and expertise helps us accelerate that vision.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Healthcare

• Speaker Karen Sadler, JD, heartedly agreed that developing open-source software for medical devices is critical. She is the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that develops, promotes and defends open-source software. Her life was changed when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart problem and implanted with a defibrillator. “I went from someone who thought open source was cool and useful to someone who thought great open-source software is essential for our society,” Sadler said.

Microsoft Openwashing and EEE

• “Experimental” is a great adjective for Microsoft’s WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). Not only is it Microsoft’s attempt to lure Linux devs into making themselves comfortable in Windows, it also provides a lab for the hacking whizzes who want to see how far they can push the WSL.

• Reported closure of the tech firm’s London base is likely to lead to the loss of 400 jobs

• This year, a handful of Microsoft veteran employees are retiring and/or moving on. Over the past couple of weeks, here’s who has left or is in the midst of leaving the company:

• THE DANCE-OFF over which browser has the best battery life goes on in a war that has turned some parts of the internet into an uninhabitable zone in the hours of darkness.

• Opera pwned everyone in its own tests, taking particular beef with Microsoft’s Edge half-browser, but Google then came forward to show that version 53 of its Chrome browser pwned all the things.

• Microsoft has now re-run the tests and, not entirely surprisingly, claimed that Edge beats everything else.

• Microsoft conducted tests against its three biggest rivals, and said that Edge, when used with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, uses 24 per cent less power than Chrome, 32 per cent less than Opera and 43 per cent less than Firefox.

• Edge managed 527 minutes of video playback against 429 for Opera, 365 for Chrome and 312 for Firefox, according to Microsoft.

• However, closer inspection reveals that Microsoft used Chrome 51 (not 53), Opera 38 (not 39) and Firefox 36 (not 38).

• In other words, Microsoft’s methodology has been tainted by pitting the latest version of Edge against earlier versions of other browsers.

• According to ZDNet, all signs indicate that the Microsoft Band 2 will be the final product of the software giant’s foray into smart fitness trackers. The original Microsoft Band from 2014 was poorly received by the market, as was the follow-up successor, even though it was redesigned and improved in many ways. Band 2 even got a price bump and launched at $250, which didn’t help its chances. The company has since reduced the price to $175, presumably in an effort to clear out inventory.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A disturbing story broke this morning concerning the sudden action by the Libreboot project to leave the GNU project. I started to write “potentially disturbing,” until it occurred to me that no matter how this plays out, the news is disturbing.

• Friday afternoon after we published our report, Richard Stallman, founder and president of FSF, posted a brief, unofficial statement in an email to the thread around Rowe’s email. “The dismissal of the staff person was not because of her gender,” he said. “Her gender now is the same as it was when we hired her. It was not an issue then, and it is not an issue now.”

• Danielle* didn’t expect her workday to begin with her male coworkers publicly joking about rape.

• Danielle is an engineer at Apple — and like many of the women in the company, she works on a male-dominated team. On a Tuesday morning in July, when men on her team began to joke that an office intruder was coming to rape everybody, Danielle decided to speak out about what she described as the “very toxic atmosphere” created by jokes about violent sexual assault.

• The coworker who first made the joke apologized, repeatedly assuring her that something like this wouldn’t happen again. But his assurances did little to instill confidence. This wasn’t the first time Danielle had allegedly seen something like this happen on her team, nor was it the first time she complained that the office culture at Apple was, in her words, toxic. Despite repeated formal complaints to her manager, Danielle said, nothing ever changed.

• But this rape joke was the final straw. The next day, Danielle escalated her complaint about the offense to the very top: Apple CEO Tim Cook.

• And today is the 13th edition of Software Freedom Day! We wish you all a great day talking to people and discovering (or making them discovery) the benefits and joys of running Free Software. As usual we have a map where you can find all the events in your area. Should you just discover about SFD today and want to organize an event it is never too late. While the date is global, each team has the freedom to run the event at a date that is convenient in their area. We (in Cambodia) are running our event on November 26 due to university schedule, other conferences and religious holidays conflicting.

Public Services/Government

• To promote the exchange of comments made by the Free and Open Source Software communities, the EU FOSSA project points out some specific sections of the deliverables he produced so far. By consulting these chapters, you have a more direct insight to what the project team consider as the most relevant information.

• Read more

• While LEOS has been developed to support the drafting of legislation by the European Commission services (i.e. proposals for directives, regulations and autonomous acts), public administrations can download and adapt the code to meet their own specific requirements. The code is available under the free European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Malaria is one of the leading causes of mortality in developing countries – last year killing more than 400,000 people. Researchers worldwide have found the solution for drug discovery could lie in open, “crowd-sourced” science.

• Open-source code is no longer just for computers – it’s increasingly the code for how business gets done in a globally connected, always-on marketplace.

• Today’s marketing executive needs a skillset that is freely used, freely changed and freely shared by anyone. The modern marketer must understand return on investment like a chief financial officer, technology like a chief technology officer, product integration like a chief product officer, PR like a chief commercial officer, and bring it all together like a chief executive – all the while delivering compelling, seamless and delightful consumer experiences.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Now that the dust from the desktop 3D printing explosion has settled, one thing has become clear: desktop 3D printing is fantastic, but DIY part design comes with a huge learning curve. Even experienced users regularly run into design challenges and issues surrounding materials and costs. But there is a solution. British researchers from Newcastle University have just shared their own open source RMADS code for Matlab, which consists of a detailed 3D printing advice system that helps users find the best and most cost-effective 3D printing solution.

Programming/Development

• anytime arrived on CRAN via release 0.0.1 a good two days ago. anytime aims to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to POSIXct (or Date) objects.

• GitHub, the popular code repository service, has to serve two masters. It’s well-known for hosting popular open-source projects, but it’s also working to acquire more large and small business users to privately store and manage their proprietary code.

• Those different constituencies sometimes need different things. But Chris Wansrath, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told the company’s annual user conference this week that building new features into GitHub isn’t a matter of helping only one or the other.

• The GitHub Universe event has kicked off in San Francisco, with a number of new GitHub features announced by CEO Chris Wanstrath.

• GitHub’s main product is a collaborative source code repository, which you can use on the public cloud or in your own private deployment. There are now over 19 million open source projects hosted on GitHub, with 5.8 million active users.

• The focus of today’s announcements is on project management and workflow. A new Project dashboard lets you create cards from pull requests, issues or notes, and organize them into groups such as Backlog, In Progress, and Ready.

• Oracle’s asking for more time to complete JDK 9.

• The chief architect of Oracle’s Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold, took to the Java developer’s mailing list to say that while work on JDK 9 is coming along nicely “We are not, unfortunately, where we need to be relative to the current schedule.”

• The hard part of JDK 9 is “Project Jigsaw”, an effort to “design and implement a standard module system for the Java SE Platform, and to apply that system to the Platform itself and to the JDK.” Reinhold says “it’s clear that Jigsaw needs more time.”

• MIT boffins have created a new programming language called “Milk” that they say runs code four times faster than rivals.

• Professor Saman Amarasinghe says the language’s secret is that changes the way cores collect and cache data.

• Today, he says, cores will fetch whole blocks of data from memory. That’s not efficient when working on tasks like big data, when only some of a block’s content is needed by an application that may want to work on only a few items across very large data set.

• Monaca today announced Onsen UI 2.0, a UI framework and tools for building HTML5-based native mobile apps, is now JavaScript framework-agnostic, having broken from its AngularJS dependency roots.

• The open source Onsen UI is itself based on the popular open source Apache Cordova/PhoneGap projects, which facilitate creating native iOS and Android apps with one codebase based on technologies usually used for Web development: HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

• There have been a few recent articles reflecting on the current status of the Python packaging ecosystem from an end user perspective, so it seems worthwhile for me to write-up my perspective as one of the lead architects for that ecosystem on how I characterise the overall problem space of software publication and distribution, where I think we are at the moment, and where I’d like to see us go in the future.

Leftovers

• You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There’s also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk.

• At its height, the fault affected API management, web apps, Service Bus and SQL database services in the central US region, and Azure DNS globally.

• Microsoft’s Azure status page has just now reported that SQL database is still affected in the central US region.

• As is often the case, however, customers noticed confusion with Microsoft’s messages, as Azure Twitter feeds and status pages seemed to disagree on the speed of recovery.

• Finland is sixth in an OECD ranking of countries by the number of young men who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). Some 21.1 percent of Finnish men aged 20-24 fall into that category. The number has leapt up in recent years, from just 12.2 percent in 2005.

• The figures are not replicated among young women. In 2005 13.9 percent of young women fell into the NEET category, and ten years later that stood at 15.4 percent.

Science

• Nearly two years ago, Kat Neil wrote about declining public trust in innovation. It is becoming increasingly apparent that economic growth and innovation is not benefitting everyone, and that it needs to be addressed by policy and society. At the SPRU conference, a session on IP looked at clashes between intellectual property rights and human rights’ protection.

• An ongoing concern is the potential that the participation of low-skilled workers in production will be rendered obsolete. A dystopian take on this suggests that innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will give rise to the Useless Class, a disenfranchised section of society with skills for which there is no demand. The potential social fall-out from this disenfranchisement is extremely unpleasant with a large portion of society no longer having a “reason to get up in the morning.”

• German carmaker Audi has signed agreements with Chinese technology companies Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent to work on data analysis, internet connected vehicles and intelligent public transport.

• Audi China and FAW-Volkswagen – a joint venture between state-owned car manufacturer FAW Group and Volkswagen that makes Audi and Volkswagen cars in China – will work with the three technology companies on features for “the connected car of the future”, Audi said.

Hardware

• The smartphone years have not been kind to Intel. The company ignored the transition to mobile early on, allowing ARM-based processors to take an early, decisive lead. Intel’s presence in pocket computers hasn’t just been minimal, it’s been practically nonexistent. That is, until the iPhone 7.

• Bloomberg first reported that Intel had worked out a deal with Apple in June, but now that the iPhone 7 has shipped, we have actual confirmation, thanks to a teardown from Chipworks. Apple may make its own processors now, but Intel’s providing an entire mobile cellular platform to the Cupertino company, the transceivers and modem that help put the “phone” in smartphone. For the first time, a flagship mobile device has Intel inside. Better late than never.

Health/Nutrition

• South Sudan’s leaders stand accused of industrial-scale embezzlement, ripping off public money to fund property and business investments across the region. That opulence is in sharp contrast to what the vast majority of their fellow citizens are enduring, as they wrestle with chronic shortages and hyperinflation.

• Nationwide, food inflation hit a record 850 percent in August, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Some food price rises are 1,000 percent above the five-year average in Northern and Western Bahr el Ghazal, the World Food Programme has warned.

• Renewed fighting in July in the capital, Juba, between the forces of President Salva Kiir and those of his rival-turned vice president Riek Machar contributed to the latest jump in the inflation rate.

• The fear the country would return to civil war sent the South Sudanese pound tumbling to the current rate of 80 to the dollar, compared to 15 to one a year ago. That is driving up prices in a country dependent on imports from its neighbours, including much of its food and all of its fuel.

• A task force in March found that emergency managers appointed in Flint, along with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, were the primary culprits for Flint’s water crisis. The task force found the state’s actions “inappropriate and unacceptable.”

• German drug and crop chemical maker Bayer clinched a $66 billion takeover of U.S. seeds company Monsanto on Wednesday, ending months of wrangling with a third sweetened offer that marks the largest all-cash deal on record.

• The $128-a-share deal, up from Bayer’s previous offer of $127.50 a share, has emerged as the signature deal in a consolidation race that has roiled the agribusiness sector in recent years, due to shifting weather patterns, intense competition in grain exports and a souring global farm economy.

• “Bayer’s competitors are merging, so not doing this deal would mean having a competitive disadvantage,” said fund manager Markus Manns of Union Investment, one of Bayer’s top 12 investors.

• A giant company just bought another giant company, but if you’re not an investor or a farmer, you may not have noticed. Bayer—the aspirin company that also makes farm products like pesticides—announced on Wednesday it was merging with Monsanto, the massive genetically-modified seed producer that owns about a third of the seed market in the US.

• The $66 billion merger is the largest this year, and means Bayer now controls more than a quarter of all seeds and pesticides on the planet, according to the BBC. But what’s even crazier is that this is just the latest in a long list of big mergers of agricultural companies this year, meaning the options for where farmers buy their seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers are shrinking at lightning speed.

• A girl raped by her own father will have no choice but to give birth. A woman at high risk of dying in childbirth or of carrying a dead baby will not be able to seek a termination. This will be the impact of new legislation to be debated in the Polish Parliament later this week which, if passed, would usher in an almost complete ban on abortion.

• On Sunday in Warsaw, London and other cities, protesters will gather opposing the amendment to Poland’s existing abortion legislation. The amendment aims to criminalize women and girls who have sought or had an abortion, making them liable to a prison term of between three months and five years. It also will increase the maximum jail term for anyone who assists or encourages women have an abortion.

• “The Census Bureau’s official estimate that 29 million Americans, including 3.7 million children, still lacked health insurance in 2015, five years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, starkly illustrates how our inefficient, private-insurance-based system of financing care is fundamentally incapable of providing universal coverage,” said Dr. Robert Zarr, a Washington-based pediatrician who is president of Physicians for a National Health Program.

• There are a lot of different reasons why some people choose not to consume any animal products. The fact that we regularly pump our livestock full of antibiotics, significantly contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance, is one of them.

• But what some vegans may not realize is that just eschewing animal products doesn’t absolve them of any responsibility for the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, at least as it relates to the food supply. We douse our fruits and vegetables in antibiotics, too (though at a much, much lower rate than meat). Unless you strictly eat organic, your food is contributing to a problem that threatens to send us back to the dark ages of medicine, where every cut or scrape could be life-threatening.

• I point this out not to shame vegans, but to serve as a reminder. We are all contributing to the problem, and we’re all at risk because of it. Even if you keep a strict, organic, vegan diet, and never take antibiotics unless you absolutely need them, you’re not granted a magic halo of protection against superbug infection. You can do everything ostensibly right, and it still won’t stop antibiotic resistance. Paying attention to what we eat is part of the solution, but there’s more work to be done.

• Antimicrobial resistance had in the last decades emerged as a health issue, but only in the last couple of years has there been an understanding that we are facing a “global societal challenge and threat.” On a day-to-day basis, people worldwide are said to be driving resistance across human health and agriculture.

Security

• The report shows that well-organised criminals focus on the use of ransomware. “Professional criminals have evolved into advanced actors and implement long-term and high-quality operations.” The larger the hacked organisation, the bigger the ransom demands, the cybersecurity experts conclude. Regular backups and computer network segmentation help to reduce the impact of such attacks.

• It would be an understatement to say that the security world tends to be full of hype and noise. At times, it seems like vendors virtually xerox each other’s marketing materials. Everyone uses the same words, phrases, jargon, and buzzwords. This is a complicated phenomenon and there are many reasons why this is the case.

• The more important issue is why security leaders find ourselves in this state. How can we make sense of all the noise, cut through all the hype, and make the informed decisions that will improve the security of our respective organizations? One answer is by making precise, targeted, and incisive inquiries at the outset. Let’s start with a game of 20 questions. Our first technology focus: analytics.

• Linux users have yet another trojan to worry about, and as always, crooks are deploying it mostly to hijack devices running Linux-based operating systems and use them to launch DDoS attacks at their behest.

• With Docker appearing in businesses of all shapes and sizes, security is a concern for many IT admins. Here’s how to secure Docker on the container or the host machine.

• I shared a meal not long ago with a source who works at a financial services company. The subject of ransomware came up and he told me that a server in his company had recently been infected with a particularly nasty strain that spread to several systems before the outbreak was quarantined. He said the folks in finance didn’t bat an eyelash when asked to authorize several payments of $600 to satisfy the Bitcoin ransom demanded by the intruders: After all, my source confessed, the data on one of the infected systems was worth millions — possibly tens of millions — of dollars, but for whatever reason the company didn’t have backups of it.

• The internet was designed to be a massive, decentralized system that nobody controlled, but it is increasingly controlled by a select few tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, and they are continuing to consolidate power, said the CEO of a cybersecurity company.

• “More and more of the internet is sitting behind fewer and fewer players, and there are benefits of that, but there are also real risks,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of web security company CloudFlare, in an interview with CNBC. His comments came at CloudFlare’s Internet Summit — a conference featuring tech executives and government security experts — on Tuesday in San Francisco.

• Facebook has faced a lot of criticism for perceived abuse of its editorial sway among the 1.7 billion monthly active users who visit the site to consume news alongside family photos and ads. For example, a Norwegian newspaper editor recently slammed Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s removal of a post featuring an iconic image known as the Napalm Girl that included a naked girl running from napalm bombs.

Defence/Aggression

• President Obama is delaying a planned veto of a bill that would allow the families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the plot, hoping to tap into an unusual well of buyer’s remorse among senators who passed the measure unanimously in the spring.

• The measure sailed through the House last week after a surprise last-minute vote, raising the prospect of the first veto showdown between Mr. Obama and a bipartisan coalition in Congress. But an intense lobbying campaign by the White House and Saudi Arabia, among others, has cast doubt on what had appeared to be an inevitable override of the president’s long-expected veto.

• Officials have refused to say when Mr. Obama would veto the bill, and he has until next Friday to do so. His advisers are considering whether he should wait until then, after Congress is expected to recess on Thursday for the November elections, which could give him weeks to persuade lawmakers to drop their support for the measure before they return and consider the veto override.

• Already, cracks are showing, even among Republicans who generally would love to exercise the first veto override against Mr. Obama.

• Many Americans have heard by now that 20 veterans commit suicide each day. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump cited the figure at last week’s Commander-in-Chief Forum viewed by 14.7 million people, further raising the issue’s visibility.

• But a 46-page suicide analysis released by the Department of Veterans Affairs last month reveals just how swift this current of self-destruction is flowing, particularly for young veterans fresh from war. It’s a pace of killing unknown to most Americans and a source of national shame.

• A veteran is choosing death every 72 minutes, and the VA could be doing more to keep that person alive. When veterans manage to ask for help, too many of their calls are not getting through to VA’s suicide hotline (800-273-8255). The agency isn’t offering enough veterans the kind of cutting-edge treatment therapies that researchers are finally uncovering.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Mishandling classified material can result in a variety of punishments, depending on who you are. If you’re a presidential candidate, the routing of hundreds of sensitive documents through an unsecured, private email server might result in a few conversations with the FBI, but not in any criminal charges. If you’re a retired general, routing classified material to your biographer/mistress might result in criminal charges, but not any time served. If you’re a whistleblower taking your complaints to the press, you’ll likely see some jail time to go along with your destroyed career.

• And if you’re a Marine Corps officer trying to warn others of trouble headed their way, you’re more likely to be treated like Jason Brezler than Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, or even former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

• Brezler is facing dismissal from the Marine Corps for mishandling a classified document — one containing information about an allegedly corrupt Afghan police chief who had already been kicked off a US base by Brezler himself.

• [...]

• At this point, the Marine Corps is offering him an honorable discharge — a “thanks, but no thanks” for his attempt to warn his fellow soldiers about the long list of allegations against police chief Sarwar Jan. Brezler sued for full reinstatement as a Marine and the discharge has been put on hold pending a possible jury trial later this year.

• There are a handful of disturbing aspects of the Marine Corps’ dismissal of Brezler, not the least of which is its decision to ramp up its efforts to rid itself of him after it had been publicly embarrassed by a US congress member. It also highlights the absurdity — and danger — inherent to the military’s weirdly-selective non-interventionist policy: one deployed by an outside force playing World Police within its borders (decidedly interventionist) that draws the line at preventing the sexual abuse of minors on its bases by local officials.

• The decision to go after the messenger — one that self-reported his mishandling of sensitive information — shows the government, by and large, cares more about protecting itself from embarrassment than solving its problems.

• In a major victory for journalists and privacy and transparency advocates, a federal court has started the process of unsealing secret records related to the government’s use of electronic surveillance.

• US District Court Judge Beryl Howell said at a hearing Friday morning that absent an objection by government attorneys, the court would post to its website next week a list of all case numbers from 2012 in which federal prosecutors in Washington, DC applied for an order to install a pen register or a trap and trace device.

• A pen register is an electronic apparatus that tracks phone numbers called from a specific telephone line (though the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the definition of pen register to allow for collection of email headers as well). A trap and trace device is similar, but tracks the phone numbers of incoming calls.

• For decades, court records relating to these documents have typically been sealed in their entirety, including even the docket numbers. Next week’s release, which is in response to a three-year-old petition filed by VICE News, will be a crucial first step in learning details about the electronic surveillance orders, and the beginning of a multilayered process that will ultimately lead to the disclosure of thousands of pen register applications dating back at least five years.

• Pen registers and other similar devices do not intercept the content of communications, and the government is not required to obtain a warrant or to have probable cause that the target committed a crime. Instead, a government attorney can simply obtain authorization by filing an application with a federal court stating that the information that would be obtained is “relevant” to a criminal investigation. The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal law enforcement agencies have used pen registers.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Mark it down, Arctic sea ice watchers: the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has (preliminarily) called the annual minimum ice extent. On September 10, Arctic sea ice coverage dipped to 4.14 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles) before ticking back upward for a few days. While it’s possible that a couple more days of shrinkage could come along, that was probably the low point for the year.

• That puts 2016 in second place for the lowest minimum on record—statistically tied with 2007, which was within the error bars of this year’s data. The record low is retained by 2012, which fell to an incredible 3.39 million square kilometers. This continues the trend of marked decline observed by satellites since 1979.

• Stark white against the glowering blue skyline, a bolt of lightning flashes over Newcastle , narrowly missing the spire of a 19th century church.

• Thursday night’s thunderstorm had photographers throughout the city taking some impressive shots, and this dramatic view over the west end is one of our favourites.

• The church in the picture is St Stephen’s, in Low Elswick, a Grade II-listed Anglican church built in 1868.

• At least 250,000 gallons of gasoline have spilled following a pipeline rupture in central Alabama. Emergency responders are working to repair the spill, while Alabama and Georgia have declared a state of emergency due to possible fuel shortages.

• The spill, equivalent to 6,000 barrels, took place in a rural area southwest of Helena, Alabama, and was first noticed Friday. A spokesman for Colonial Pipeline said the spill has affected an area about two acres in size, Birmingham’s WBRC-TV reported.

• According to local media, the spill is located near Lindsey’s Crossing in Shelby County, about 28 miles southwest of Birmingham.

• Indonesia has dispatched almost 5,000 fire-fighters to Kalimantan as the dry spell continues across the western and central parts of the island, where hundreds of hot-spots have been detected in recent days.

• The National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) said on Wednesday (Sept 14) that it has deployed 2,492 and 2,363 personnel in west and central Kalimantan respectively.

• The group includes soldiers, policemen as well as officers from the BNPB, the Environment and Forestry Ministry, as well as local volunteers, said agency spokesman Dr Sutopo Purwo Nugroho.

• The reinforcements were sent in after satellite data from Indonesia’s meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency (BMKG) showed 536 total hot-spots across Kalimantan as of Wednesday.

• A Spanish wetland home to 2,000 species of wildlife – including around 6 million migratory birds – is on track to join a Unesco world heritage danger list, according to a new report.

• Doñana is an Andalusian reserve of sand dunes, shallow streams and lagoons, stretching for 540 square kilometres (209 square miles) where flamingoes feed and wild horses and Iberian lynx still roam.

• But the Doñana region is said to have lost 80% of its natural water supplies due to marsh drainage, intensive agriculture, and water pollution from the mining industry.

• Spain now has until 1 December to declare Doñana permanently off limits for dredging and industrial activity in a report to Unesco, or face becoming the first EU country to have a national park classified as being “in danger”.

• We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

• In this case, the perturbation is us — rather than, say, an asteroid. As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published Wednesday in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species — rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.

Finance

• So, uh, that sounds good. Why do we need the rest of the crap that they’re debating, around corporate sovereignty ISDS provisions — especially since the entire basis for those kinds of agreements was supposed to be to encourage investment in developing countries. The EU and the US have perfectly decent court systems, so any dispute shouldn’t need a special tribunal.

• But, of course, those who have relied on shoving all sorts of pork and special interest protectionism through trade deals do not like the idea of a “lite” agreement that covers the officially discussed reasons for a trade deal. Why, that would be horrible! How could they continue to hide all the sneaky stuff they want to get in?

• The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is now in the process of being ratified by Canada and the European Union (EU). Like other ‘new generation’ trade agreements, CETA aims at further liberalizing trade, investment and other sectors of society so far protected from market competition. CETA is thus more than just a ‘trade deal’ and needs to be approached in its complexity, without blinders.

• CETA’s proponents emphasize the prospect of higher GDP growth due to rising trade volumes and investment. However, official projections suggest GDP gains of up to 0.08% for the European Union 0.76% for Canada. More importantly, all these projections stem from a single trade model, which assumes full employment and no negative impact on income distribution in all countries excluding the major risks of deeper liberalization. This lack of intellectual diversity and of realism shrouding the debate around CETA’s alleged economic benefits calls for an alternative assessment grounded in sounder modeling premises.

• In speech after speech, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has decried companies sending jobs abroad to low-wage countries, calling it a profound betrayal of the American worker. And despite having profited from his Trump branded Chinese-made cufflinks and dress shirts woven in Bangladesh, the real estate mogul has pledged to crack down on labor outsourcing if elected.

• But Trump’s threats have not discouraged American auto companies from setting up factories south of the U.S. and then sending finished vehicles north.

• On Wednesday, Ford Motor Co. CEO Mark Fields announced further efforts to take advantage of Mexico’s low-cost labor force, telling investors at an event near Detroit that Ford would soon shift all the company’s U.S. small-car production to Mexico by 2018.

=>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/nyregion/100-million-awarded-in-contest-to-rethink-us-high-schools.html?_r=3 ↺ $100 Million Awarded in Contest to Rethink U.S. High Schools

• An organization announced on Wednesday that it had chosen the winners of $10 million grants in a competition to rethink the American high school.

• The organization — the XQ Institute, which is backed by Laurene Powell Jobs — is funding 10 schools, for a total of $100 million.

• One of the winners, the Somerville Steam Academy in Somerville, Mass., will operate without standard class periods and without separating students by age.

• Rise High in Los Angeles will be designed for students who are homeless or in foster care. It will share locations around the city with service providers, like medical or mental health centers, and will have a mobile classroom to teach or tutor students wherever they are.

• And in New York City, at the Brooklyn Laboratory Charter High School, the school day will last from 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.

• “Each of these represent schools that don’t exist today,” said Russlynn H. Ali, chief executive of the XQ Institute and a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the federal Education Department.

• Ms. Powell Jobs, chairwoman of the XQ Institute’s board of directors, was the wife of Steven P. Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died five years ago next month.

• The Super School Project was announced a year ago by the Emerson Collective, the organization Ms. Powell Jobs uses to make philanthropic investments. The goal was to offer $50 million to schools that offered new approaches to education. Ms. Ali said American high schools had “stayed the same for 100 years” and were badly in need of new ideas and paradigms.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies, unnerved by the tightening presidential race, are making a major push to dissuade disaffected voters from backing third-party candidates, and pouring more energy into Rust Belt states, where Donald J. Trump is gaining ground.

• With Mrs. Clinton enduring one of the rockiest stretches of her second bid for the presidency, her campaign and affiliated Democratic groups are shifting their focus to those voters, many of them millennials, who recoil at Mr. Trump, her Republican opponent, but now favor the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

• While still optimistic that the race will turn decisively back in Mrs. Clinton’s favor after the debates, leading Democrats have been alarmed by the drift of young voters toward the third-party candidates.

• In a largely negative presidential campaign, where most Americans are voting against, rather than for, a candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump 48 – 43 percent among likely voters nationwide, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

• This compares to a 51 – 41 percent Clinton lead in an August 25 survey of likely voters nationwide, by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.

• The GOP nominee prefers his KFC by the bucket, devours the fries before the Big Mac, and only eats greens out of taco bowls perched atop white linen napkins — but make no mistake, these are Donald Trump’s salad days.

• Counted down in the dark days after his gloomy Cleveland convention, with polls showing him behind by double digits, Trump has mounted what, to the unschooled political observer, appears to be a remarkable comeback. He’s pulled even with Clinton among likely voters in the latest New York Times/CBS national poll — a 42 to 42 percent deadlock that has been reflected in a raft of tightening battleground state polls. And he’s surged to an 8-point lead in Iowa, reflecting his improvement in critical battleground states.

• The big story of this year’s House and Senate elections is how the presence of Donald J. Trump at the top of the GOP ticket affects Republicans running for Congress.

• What’s getting less ink this cycle, however, is how Democrats are reckoning with the down-ballot effect of their nominee, Hillary Clinton — but that doesn’t mean some Democratic candidates aren’t having problems.

• There’s good reason for that: broadly, Trump polls worse than Clinton, nationally and in the North Star State. And there are few elected Democrats out there who, like Rep. Erik Paulsen did with Trump, say that Clinton hasn’t earned their support.

• Nigel Farage celebrated his last night as Ukip leader with a late night skinny dipping session off Bournemouth pier, it has been revealed.

• Key financial backer Arron Banks told BBC Radio 4′s Any Questions? show on Friday night that he and Mr Farage had stripped off their clothes and jumped in the sea after a late night drinking session on Thursday.

• Multi-millionaire businessman Mr Banks had been challenging claims during the political talk show that Mr Farage might stage another comeback as leader.

• It’s a rare thing to see honesty emerge from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but we were all treated to a bracing dose of forthrightness this week by the Republican candidate’s son, Donald Trump Jr., on the subject of his father’s tax returns. Speaking with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Trump Jr. explained that his dad’s tax information would remain hidden because if people saw it, then they’d talk about something other than what the campaign wants them to talk about.

• “He’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create . . . financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from (his father’s) main message,” the paper reported Trump Jr. as saying. That’s about as clear-cut an explanation as you could hope for: The campaign will keep on stonewalling because it doesn’t want people scrutinizing and talking about Donald Trump’s tax history and financial arrangements.

• US Green Party nominee Jill Stein says she is planning to appear at the first presidential debate despite being ignored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

• The commission announced on Friday that Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson and Stein will not participate in the September 26 debate because they failed to garner the 15 percent support in five polls required to qualify for the debate.

• But the Green Party presidential nominee rejected the standards set by the commission and told CNN she plans to show up at the event with her supporters.

• “We will be at the debate to insist that Americans not only have a right to vote, but we have a right to know who we can vote for,” she said.

• Meanwhile, Johnson said in a statement he wasn’t surprised by the decision to “exclude” him from the first debate.

• He said he plans to have the 15 percent polling threshold to make it to the second debate in early October.

• “There are more polls and more debates, and we plan to be on the debate stage in October,” he stated.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Singaporean blogger activist Amos Yee has pleaded guilty to more charges, according to his personal Facebook page. In a short update on on Wednesday, he wrote: “Came back from court, pleaded guilty to all charges for ‘intending to wound religious feelings,’ going to jail in a few weeks.”

• [...]

• The controversial blogger frequently posts videos critical of the government and the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP.) He was convicted in May 2015 of offending the sentiments of Christians in a video comparing Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan-yew with Jesus Christ. He was also convicted for posting an obscene doctored image of Lee and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in a sexual position.

• Piracy, long the bane of copyright agencies and content distributors – it may be soon that search engines, browsers, and DNS providers simply will not be able to find and access known pirate sites.

• Early reports from Torrent Freak state that, at least in the U.K. Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, and Comodo Secure DNS are actively blocking torrent sites like Pirate Bay instead bringing up stern warnings about the site containing harmful programs.

• Google and Mozilla claim that such sites may contain malicious programs that can lead to a virus, malware, adware, ransomware or worse. Despite the warnings users can apparently still access the site by clicking on “details” but most users will press the boxed highlighted default – Back to safety. (See graphic at the end of the article)

• Despite the FUD (fear, uncertainty and deception) they are wrong about these sites! They generally contain nothing but a searchable torrent index and do not store material on them. However, many are advertising supported. Some advertisers have dubious pedigrees (porn, gambling, etc.) and clicking on those links can result in malicious program download.

• Chrome and Firefox are actively blocking direct access to the The Pirate Bay’s download pages. According to Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostics service TPB contains “harmful programs,” most likely triggered by malicious advertisements running on the site. Comodo DNS also showed a “hacking” warning but this disappeared after a few hours.

• Two of the biggest porn sites in the world have been blocked by Russia’s media regulator, a decision which has apparently prompted uproar on the country’s social media.

• Weirder yet, Roskomnadzor, the body that enacted the bans (whose name translated into English is the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media), has been actively engaged in sassing members of the Russian public who complain.

• The regulator dropped the banhammer on Tuesday, applying rules which had previously been imposed by two separate regional courts. Any Russian citizen visiting PornHub or YouPorn is now redirected to a simple message telling them that the sites have been blocked “by decision of public authorities.”

• Sexually explicit material isn’t illegal in the country, but according to the BBC’s Vitaliy Shevchenko, the law confusingly appears to ban “the illegal production, dissemination, and advertisement of pornographic materials and objects.”

• An eye-opening film examining how governments, society and tyrannies have suppressed women’s voices through the ages is being screened at Enfield’s Dugdale Centre.

• Blue Pen,looks at censorship of women, with particular focus on female journalists.

• It centres on the account of a female British war corespondent who was locked up in a lunatic asylum for over 39 years after she disguised herself as a male solider during World War 1 so she could report from the front line.

• Dorothy Lawrence had been refused the role because of her gender, so she concealed her appearance and posed as a uniformed soldier.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Thijs Broenink audited the AnalyticsCore.apk app that ships pre-installed on all Xiaomi phones (Xiaomi has their own Android fork with a different set of preinstalled apps) and discovered that the app, which seemingly serves no useful purpose, allows the manufacturer to silently install other code on your phone, with unlimited privileges and access.

• The app phones home to Xiaomi once a day and transmits the user’s “IMEI, MAC address, Model, Nonce, Package name and signature,” all in the clear, then gets instructions back about which apps to install — it can seemingly overwrite your signed, pre-installed apps with modified versions.

• In December 2014, the FBI received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency that a Tor Hidden Service site called “Playpen” was hosting child pornography. That tip would ultimately lead to the largest known hacking operation in U.S. law enforcement history.

• The Playpen investigation—driven by the FBI’s hacking campaign—resulted in hundreds of criminal prosecutions that are currently working their way through the federal courts. The issues in these cases are technical and the alleged crimes are distasteful. As a result, relatively little attention has been paid to the significant legal questions these cases raise.

• But make no mistake: these cases are laying the foundation for the future expansion of law enforcement hacking in domestic criminal investigations, and the precedent these cases create is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of Internet users for years to come. In a series of blog posts in the coming days and weeks, we’ll explain what the legal issues are and why these cases matter to Internet users the world over.

• Bill Binney is not mincing his words. In a rallying battle cry against mass surveillance, the former NSA analyst tells an audience at the UK premiere of A Good American that we are basically at war. In every democracy across the world; in our very “hearts and minds”, a war “against the totalitarian temptation” is being waged.

• Perhaps because Binney is such a quiet, considered man, his words seem to carry extra weight. But it’s not just his solemnity that captures attention. Binney is not just a campaigner for civil liberties, speaking of principles and rights. He was on the inside – one of them. A high-level NSA analyst, technical director, and one of the best mathematicians the agency ever had, Bill Binney was their man for 32 years. And then, suddenly, he was their enemy.

• Director Friedrich Moser draws some conclusions on mass surveillance from his groundbreaking documentary on the work of NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney

• Three news organizations, including USA TODAY’s parent company, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking information about how the FBI was able to break into the locked iPhone of one of the gunmen in the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

• The Justice Department spent more than a month this year in a legal battle with Apple over it could force the tech giant to help agents bypass a security feature on Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. The dispute roiled the tech industry and prompted a fierce debate about the extent of the government’s power to pry into digital communications. It ended when the FBI said an “outside party” had cracked the phone without Apple’s help.

• The news organizations’ lawsuit seeks information about the source of the security exploit agents used to unlock the phone, and how much the government paid for it. It was filed in federal court in Washington by USA TODAY’s parent company, Gannett, the Associated Press and Vice Media. The FBI refused to provide that information to the organizations under the Freedom of Information Act.

• John McCain — fighting for the government’s right to get all up in your everything — has decided to embrace the “grumpy” part of his “grumpy old legislator” personality.

• Back in July, McCain expressed his displeasure with Apple declining his invitation to show up and get yelled at/field false accusations at his hearing on encryption. He dourly noted that he was “seeking the widest variety of input,” but his invited guests included Manhattan DA Cy Vance, a former Bush-era Homeland Security advisor and former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis. Not having Apple to kick around peeved McCain, who finished off the “discussion” with subpoena threats.

• Another encryption hearing hosted by McCain devolved into the senator ranting about something no one cares about but him: a tech company not immediately prostrating itself in front of an intelligence agency. Here’s Marcy Wheeler’s summation of McCain’s “contribution” to the discussion.

• USA Today, the Associated Press, and Vice News have joined forces to sue the FBI over its refusal to release even the most minimal amount of information on the hack it purchased to crack open the iPhone seized during its San Bernardino shooting investigation.

• The DOJ certainly seemed adamant that Apple disclose all sorts of inside info to the government during the heated litigation. It turned down offers of assistance from hackers and security researchers before finally shelling out an unknown amount of money to an Israeli firm to gain access to the phone’s contents. It also ensured it would never have to discuss the technical details of the hacking by not demanding this information be included in the purchase price.

• Now, it refuses to even discuss the purchase price. Educated guesses that put it north of $1 million are based on a James Comey comment in which he said it was several times his annual salary. Somehow, the actual amount paid — if revealed — would somehow prevent the FBI’s investigation from reaching its conclusion.

• This FOIA lawsuit [PDF] targets other innocuous information the FBI refuses to release: contractor info on the party used to open up the seized iPhone (and discover nothing of investigative use on it).

• The report ended by saying that the NSA needs to improve its work on creating an environment in which another Snowden-style leak cannot take place, claiming that not enough has been done to reduce the risk.

• As you probably heard, the ACLU and other have launched a massive campaign asking President Obama to pardon Ed Snowden. You can check it out here and sign the petition. There have also been a bunch of high profile op-eds and endorsements from a wide variety of people — from former intelligence officials to human rights groups and more. The campaign was obviously timed to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone’s new movie, Snowden.

• Apparently also timed with the release of the movie, the House Intelligence Committee has released a “report” that they claim they spent two years writing, detailing why they believe Snowden is no whistleblower. They’ve released an unclassified three page “executive summary” that is, at best, laughable. Honestly, if this is the best that the House Intel Committee can put together to smear Snowden, they must have found nothing bad. I mean, it’s the stupidest stuff: like that he once got into a dispute with his boss over some software updates at work and (*gasp*) emailed someone higher up the chain, for which he got reprimanded…

• A couple years ago, Robert Delaware requested from the NSA any entries from its Intellipedia – the agency’s internal answer to Wikipedia – regarding the micronation “The Conch Republic.” The agency later released four pages, which is a fairly impressive feat considering that, strictly speaking, the Conch Republic doesn’t exist.

• Edward Snowden, in exile in Moscow after leaking U.S. National Security Agency documents, said Friday he intends to vote in the U.S. presidential election, but did not say which candidate he favors.

• “I will be voting,” Snowden said, speaking at a conference in Athens by video link from Moscow.

• “But as a privacy advocate I think it’s important for me … that there should never be an obligation for an individual to discuss their vote. And I won’t be doing so with mine.”

• Edward Snowden, in exile in Moscow after leaking documents of clandestine spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on everyday Americans, said Friday he intends to vote in the U.S. presidential election, but did not say which candidate he favours.

• Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency and intelligence whistleblower, has delivered a scathing indictment of US mass surveillance techniques. Binney told Sputnik that the current strategy of collecting bulk data is doomed to result in “people ending up getting killed.”

• When you think of intelligence whistleblowers, Edward Snowden may be the first name that springs to mind. But before Snowden, another NSA operative, Bill Binney, felt compelled to lift the lid on the secretive surveillance actions of his government.

• Mr Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution and now wants a presidential pardon as a whistleblower.

• Intelligence agencies are in the business of deception and misinformation. Truth has little objective meaning or value, but rather exists as it is necessary or useful. How else to make sense of the announcement earlier this week that agencies who just a few years ago railed against strong encryption and were exposed as trying to undermine it, and thus the security of the internet as a whole, are now claiming to be the internet’s protector?

• On Tuesday the director of the UK’s new National Cyber Security Centre laid out vague plans to build a Great British Firewall to protect us from the dangers of cyberattacks in the digital age: “We’re exploring a flagship project on scaling up DNS filtering,” said Ciaran Martin.

• Filtering, or domain name system (DNS) blocking, is controversial – especially when done by a government, as it can interfere with the essential architecture and security of the internet. In the US, bills to mandate DNS blocking such as the Stop Online Piracy Act failed after vigorous debate. Many spam and phishing attacks spoof legitimate sites or email servers, so blocking them has huge collateral damage.

• Digital devices and software programs are complicated. Behind the pointing and clicking on screen are thousands of processes and routines that make everything work. So when malicious software—malware—invades a system, even seemingly small changes to the system can have unpredictable impacts.

• That’s why it’s so concerning that the Justice Department is planning a vast expansion of government hacking. Under a new set of rules, the FBI would have the authority to secretly use malware to hack into thousands or hundreds of thousands of computers that belong to innocent third parties and even crime victims. The unintended consequences could be staggering.

• Critics are giving mixed reviews to Snowden, the Oliver Stone film that opens in theaters on Friday. But as I wrote this week, the movie is essential viewing for anyone who cares about the national security debate and NSA’s co-opting of familiar technology like Google and Facebook to spy on us.

• One reason the movie is worth watching is the realistic depiction of technology and hacker culture. Even as Snowden engages in Stone-style propaganda to support its hero, it avoids the stupid clichés that often appear when Hollywood takes on tech topics. I spoke with screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald and technical supervisor Ralph Echemendia, who explained that Edward Snowden himself read drafts of the film and corrected details he felt were inaccurate.

• Here are five aspects of the film that make Snowden a convincing tale about tech.

• The recent integration of two military contractors into a $10 billion behemoth is the latest in a wave of mergers and acquisitions that have transformed America’s privatized, high-tech intelligence system into what looks like an old-fashioned monopoly.

• In August, Leidos Holdings, a major contractor for the Pentagon and the National Security Agency, completed a long-planned merger with the Information Systems & Global Solutions division of Lockheed Martin, the global military giant. The 8,000 operatives employed by the new company do everything from analyzing signals for the NSA to tracking down suspected enemy fighters for US Special Forces in the Middle East and Africa.

• The sheer size of the new entity makes Leidos one of the most powerful companies in the intelligence-contracting industry, which is worth about $50 billion today. According to a comprehensive study I’ve just completed on public and private employment in intelligence, Leidos is now the largest of five corporations that together employ nearly 80 percent of the private-sector employees contracted to work for US spy and surveillance agencies.

• Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union launched a joint campaign and public petition to urge President Obama to pardon Snowden and allow him to return to the United States without the fear of persecution.

• The campaign is being supported by a number of politicians and celebrities, including Senator Bernie Sanders, Susan Sarandon, Daniel Radcliffe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Terry Gilliam, Noam Chomsky, Senator Ron Wyden as well as former NSA director Michael Hayden.

• It coincides with the release of Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” movie. The movie is largely based on Snowden’s own story, who worked as a NSA contractor until defecting in 2013. Snowden initially took refuge in Hong Kong, then fled to Russia, and worked with journalists at newspapers like Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian to reveal details about the NSA’s surveillance programs against U.S. citizens.

• Late yesterday afternoon the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a three-page executive summary (four, if we count the splendid cover photo) of its two-year inquiry into Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures. On first reading, I described it as an “aggressively dishonest” piece of work.

• Every whistleblower undergoes some kind of transformation that pushes them to the point where they make the pivotal decision to challenge power. Oliver Stone’s film about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden portrays how he went from a person reluctant to question the government to a person who believed it was virtuous to challenge abuses of government power.

• “Snowden” unfolds in the Mira Hong Kong Hotel, where Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) met with journalists Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto). The script intermittently flashes back to periods of Snowden’s life, from his time in a military boot camp to his time working for the CIA in Geneva to when he worked at an NSA facility in Oahu, Hawaii.

• Gordon-Levitt nails the intonation of Snowden’s voice. Shailene Woodley is fabulous as his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and the choice to make much of the film revolve around Snowden’s relationship with Mills positively elevates the film to a fairly compelling love story. In fact, the way the story is told suggests Snowden’s views on questioning the government changed from post-9/11 flag-waving nationalism the more his romance with Mills blossomed, especially since she was against the Iraq War and other acts of President George W. Bush’s administration.

• Like me, Goldsmith believes there’s no chance Snowden will get a pardon, even while admitting that Snowden’s disclosures brought worthwhile transparency to the Intelligence Community. Unlike me, he opposes a pardon, in part, because of the damage Snowden did, a point I’ll bracket for the moment.

• I was going to write about this funny part of the HPSCI report anyway, but it makes a nice follow-up to my post on Snowden and cosmopolitanism, on the importance of upholding American values to keeping the servants of hegemon working to serve it.

• As part of its attack on Edward Snowden released yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee accused Snowden of attacking his colleagues’ privacy.

• To get to the offices of the congressional intelligence committees, you must follow a shaft of sunlight down a circular staircase, into the bowels of the Capitol, and down a corridor until you reach heavy wooden doors guarded by an armed sentry. Behind those doors, there are no windows, there is no sunlight. Behind those doors, members of Congress and their staff review our nation’s most secret espionage programs. And on occasion, whistleblowers have helped shine a light into this dark and secret world.

• But high-profile leakers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning indicated that they thought approaching Congress would be futile, even dangerous. That is because there is a history of prosecution of whistleblowers and myriad internal hurdles to clear before anyone can report possible classified wrongdoing to Congress—hurdles that are greater in the intelligence arena than any other. So instead they went to the media.

• This must change. Congress must encourage whistleblowers concerned about sensitive intelligence programs to approach the committees first, not to go straight to the media. If the committees made a few changes to welcome whistleblowers, they might avoid having sensitive intelligence programs revealed, while strengthening our national security.

• If you’re a current or former member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) or a current or former staff member of the same and you’ve decided to read this, I commend you. It will be the first step in a multi-step program you’ll need to undergo in order to come to terms with how the nearly 40 year-old institution that you are or were a part of, an instiution that was originally designed to police the Intelligence Community, has instead become’s its chief guardian — and in so doing, enabled that same Intelligence Community to become the single biggest threat to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that we’ve faced in the history of the Republic.

• Oliver Stone’s “Snowden,” a quiet, crisply drawn portrait of the world’s most celebrated whistle-blower, belongs to a curious subgenre of movies about very recent historical events. Reversing the usual pattern, it could be described as a fictional “making of” feature about “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary on the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. That film seems to me more likely to last — it is deeper journalism and more haunting cinema — but Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.

• In the context of this director’s career, “Snowden” is both a return to form and something of a departure. Mr. Stone circles back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy that have propelled his most ambitious work, and finds a hero who fits a familiar Oliver Stone mold. Edward (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, leaning hard on a vocal imitation) is presented as a disillusioned idealist, a serious young man whose experiences lead him to doubt accepted truths and question the wisdom of authority. He has something in common with Jim Garrison in “J.F.K.” and Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July,” and also with Chris Taylor and Bud Fox, the characters played by Charlie Sheen in “Platoon” and “Wall Street.”

• Typically, cops don’t like talking about IMSI catchers, the powerful surveillance technology used to monitor mobile phones en masse. In a recent case, the New York Police Department (NYPD) introduced a novel argument for keeping mum on the subject: Asked about the tools it uses, it argued that revealing the different models of IMSI catchers the force owned would make the devices more vulnerable to hacking.

• Civil liberties activists are not convinced. Christopher Soghoian from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in an affidavit as part of a petition against the NYPD’s decision not to share this information, “It would be a serious problem if the costly surveillance devices purchased by the NYPD without public competitive bidding are so woefully insecure that the only thing protecting them from hackers is the secrecy surrounding their model names.”

• The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), an affiliate of the ACLU, has been trying to get access to information about the NYPD’s IMSI catchers under the Freedom of Information Law. These devices are also commonly referred to as “stingrays”, after a particularly popular model from Harris Corporation. Indeed, the NYCLU wants to know which models of IMSI catchers made by Harris the police department has.

• “Public disclosure of this information, and the amount of taxpayer funds spent to buy the devices, directly advances the Freedom of Information Law’s purpose of informing a robust public debate about government actions,” the NYCLU writes in a court filing. The group has requested documents that show how much money has been spent on the technology.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Two such advocates reached out to EFF: Esther Große and Carrie Christensen. These women work with a high-profile inmate, Kenneth Foster, to try to secure his release and reform Texas’ so-called “Law of Parties,” which allows the state to assign capital punishment to accessories to a murder, even if they didn’t actually commit the act. Foster was facing the death penalty under this rule, but hours before his scheduled execution in 2007, Gov. Rick Perry commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Ever since, Foster has engaged in political activism from behind bars through his writing and poetry.

• Esther and Carrie had been running various social media accounts to support Foster. They maintained editorial control of these accounts and posted his writing. But they voluntariliy suspended these accounts after the new TDCJ rule was announced for fear of the impact on Foster. EFF communicated (.pdf) with TDCJ on their behalves to establish better clarity on what will and will not be permitted under the policy. Based on the information we and others (.pdf) received from TDCJ, we can now share lessons we’ve gleaned for operating a social media campaign regarding an inmate.

• In 2007, an FBI agent impersonated an Associated Press journalist in order to deliver malware to a criminal suspect and find out his location. According to a newly published report from the Department of Justice, the operation was in line with the FBI’s undercover policies at the time.

• Journalistic organisations had expressed concern that the tactic could undermine reporters’ and media institutions’ credibility.

• “We concluded that FBI policies in 2007 did not expressly address the tactic of agents impersonating journalists,” the report from the Office of the Inspector General reads.

• The case concerned a Seattle teenager suspected of sending bomb threats against a local school. FBI Special Agent Mason Grant got in touch with the teen over email, pretending to be an AP journalist. After some back and forth, Grant sent the suspect a fake article which, when clicked, grabbed his real IP address. Armed with this information, the FBI identified and arrested the suspect.

• Tesla is suing an oil executive under suspicion of impersonating Elon Musk to dig up confidential financial information from the company, Forbes reported on Wednesday.

• The lawsuit, reportedly filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, claimed that Todd Katz, the chief financial officer for Quest Integrity Group, emailed Tesla’s chief financial officer using a similar email address as Musk’s looking to gain information that wasn’t disclosed in an earnings call with investors.

• Tesla Motors is suing an oil pipeline service executive in a California court, claiming the man impersonated Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an attempt to gain undisclosed financial information.

• The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, says Quest Integrity Group CFO Todd Katz sent an email to Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler from a Yahoo email address similar to one Musk has used in the past.

• A spokesman for the Quest’s parent company called the allegations involving company officials “unsubstantiated” and “absurd.”

• ALLEGED HACKER Lauri Love, the 31-year-old British citizen accused of breaking into the systems of the FBI, the US Missile Defence Agency and the Federal Reserve Bank in 2013, has lost his appeal over extradition to the US.

• The judgement was delivered within minutes of the commencement of this afternoon’s session at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

• Love’s lawyer, Tor Ekeland, said that Love had “embarrassed” the US authorities and that they had “very bad security and these hacks used exploits that were publicly known for months”.

• Former hacker and ex-Anonymous and LulzSec mouthpiece Jake ‘Topiary’ Davis attended the hearing and live tweeted the verdict, calling it “a horrible decision” and “a mess from the start”.

• According to Davis, Love was immediately advised by the judge that he could appeal against the decision and that the case would be sent on to the Secretary of State while he remains, for the time being, on bail.

• Love, referring to his appeal, told press and supporters outside the court: “This means we’ve been given a higher platform. There will be justice. Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

• Briton Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges of hacking, Westminster Magistrates’ Court ruled on Friday.

• Love faces up to 99 years in prison in the US on charges of hacking as part of the Anonymous collective, according to his legal team.

• Handing down her ruling at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, district judge Nina Tempia told Love that he can appeal against the decision. The case will now be referred to the home secretary Amber Rudd while Love remains on bail.

• Copy This URL

• Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges related to his alleged involvement in #OpLastResult, a UK judge has ruled today.

• Speaking at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this afternoon, Judge Nina Tempia said: “I will be extraditing Mr Love, by which I mean I will be passing the case to the Secretary of State.”

• The ruling, which lasted under five minutes, was attended by Love, his parents, and around 40 supporters. Leaving court, some of his supporters derided the decision, shouting: “Bullshit, kangaroo court!”

• Lauri Love has lost his court case against extradition to the US to face hacking charges.

• Love was indicted in US courts in 2013 after it emerged that he had hacked into servers at the Federal Reserve, NASA, Missile Defence Agency and the US Army as part of hacker group known as Anonymous.

• He and his doctors have consistently argued in extradition hearings that he should not be extradited to the US from his home in south-eastern England because he suffers from Asperger syndrome and depression. Love has repeatedly told the media that he would rather commit suicide than face trial in America.

• An autistic man suspected of hacking into US government computer systems is to be extradited from Britain to face trial, a court has ruled.

• Lauri Love, 31, who has Asperger’s syndrome, is accused of hacking into the FBI, the US central bank and the country’s missile defence agency.

• Mr Love, from Stradishall, Suffolk, has previously said he feared he would die in a US prison if he was extradited.

• Lauri Love, the student accused of hacking into the computer systems of the US missile defence agency, Nasa and the Federal Reserve, has lost his appeal against extradition to America.

• Judge Nina Tempia said the 31-year-old, who has Asperger syndrome, could be cared for by “medical facilities in the United States prison estate” and implied that he should answer the “extremely serious charges” in the country where the damage was inflicted.

• Love, who lives with his parents in Newmarket, Suffolk, was granted permission to appeal against Friday’s ruling and given bail pending further legal action. The battle over his fate could eventually reach the European court of human rights in Strasbourg and last several years.

• There were gasps in the courtroom as Tempia read out her ruling, which followed a full case hearing in June. Love’s supporters, who stormed out of Westminster magistrates court in London shouting “kangaroo court”, fear he could face up to 99 years in a US jail if convicted on all counts.

• There’s little to be gained by adding up the maximum possible jail sentence facing Love. Rest assured, if convicted, it will likely be over a decade. Consolidation of the cases and charges is likely, but more than one of the charges carry possible 10-year sentences.

• Meanwhile, back in the UK, Love has managed to escape being jailed for refusing to turn over passwords and encryption keys to law enforcement. UK investigators fought hard to force Love — who they’ve never formally charged — to crack open multiple seized devices for them. This attempt was shot down in May by a judge who viewed this as an end run around protections built into RIPA, the laws governing law enforcement’s investigatory powers.

• The final decision on Love’s extradition is in the hands of Elizabeth Truss, the recently-appointed Secretary of State for Justice. Truss’ previous government work doesn’t really provide much guidance on which side she’ll come down on this, but her voting record tends to indicate she’s more sympathetic to national security/law enforcement interests than those of her constituents. Considering the UK and US have a very cozy surveillance relationship, it stands to reason Truss will likely decide to appease the DOJ, rather than overturn the court’s decision.

• A Swedish appeals court on Friday upheld a detention order for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, dismissing the latest attempt by the 45-year-old Australian to make prosecutors drop a rape investigation from 2010.

• The decision by the Svea Court of Appeal means that the arrest warrant stands for the 45-year-old computer hacker, who has avoided extradition to Sweden by seeking shelter at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012.

• Assange, who denies the rape allegation, has challenged the detention order several times. He says he fears he will be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges if he leaves the embassy.

• Muslims are the most disapproved group in America, according to a new study, amid increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric from conservative politicians.

• A new study from sociologists at the University of Minnesota, which analysed Americans’ perceptions of minority faith and racial groups, found that their disapproval of Muslims has almost doubled from about 26 per cent 10 years ago to 45.5 per cent in 2016.

• Amid increasing focus on immigration, refugees and national security and in the wake of multiple terrorist attacks around the world, the study found that almost half of those surveyed would not want their child to marry a Muslim, compared to just 33.5 per cent of people a decade earlier.

• A Southern California police officer gave a man less than a second to raise his hands before opening fire and killing him, a federal appeals court noted Friday in rejecting the officer’s request to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against him.

• The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Tustin Police Officer Osvaldo Villarreal couldn’t reasonably have feared for his safety when he shot 31-year-old Benny Herrera after responding to a domestic dispute call in December 2011.

• That determination ran counter to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, which said in 2013 that the shooting was reasonable and justified because Villarreal fired after Herrera ignored orders to show his hands.

• A video captured by a police dashboard camera shows otherwise, according to the 9th Circuit judges who cited the footage.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Earlier this year, New York City undertook one of the biggest free city WiFi efforts ever conceived. Under the plan, an outfit by the name of LinkNYC is slated to install some 7,500 WiFi kiosks scattered around the five boroughs that will provide free gigabit WiFi (well, closer to 300 Mbps or so), free phone calls to anywhere in the country (via Vonage), as well as access to a device recharging station, 311, 911, 411 and city services (via an integrated Android tablet). The connectivity and services are supported by a rotating crop of ads displayed on the kiosks themselves.

• Two young men sit on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 54th Street, huddled against a tall silver obelisk on a hot summer day. One man is sprawled on the ground in dirty sweatpants, and the other is 20-something, shirtless and examining an iPhone plugged into the kiosk’s USB port. Around them on the ground is a backpack, a duffel, loose cigarettes, and a roughed-up phone.

• LinkNYC, New York City’s newest communications network, includes more than 350 kiosks installed on sidewalks throughout the city and was created to repurpose payphone infrastructure through public kiosks offering free internet, phone calls, and USB charging ports. The project is a collaboration between the city and a consortium of private technology and media companies including Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet (read: Google) company, and represents an important innovation in the “smart city” movement integrating information and communication technologies into all aspects of urban life.

• Let’s say somebody has a blog that I’d like to read. Subscribe to even. Let’s say they have an RSS link on their page. This should be easy.

• Now let’s say the blog in question is hosted/proxied/whatever by Cloudflare. Uh oh.

• Just reading the blog in my browser is now somewhat hampered because Cloduflare thinks I’m some sort of cyberterrorist and requires my browser run a javascript anti-turing test. But eventually the blog loads, I read it, click the RSS link to subscribe, see that it is in fact XML rendered in my browser, and copy the link.

• The age old cry is that “The internet too slow.” In part that has been exposed by the raft of new AC routers that may be able to connect at up to a gigabit in your network but grind to a halt when it hits the internet.

• The internet speeds offered by Telcos, ISPs and RSPs are a theoretical maximum speed – more guidelines really and they are under no real obligation to provide even a fraction of the advertised speed. The vast majority of ADSL connections are heavily contended (bandwidth is shared by other users on the same DSLAM), so when the kids get home, internet speeds slow even more.

• Like any advertised goods or services, you should get what you pay for – a kilo of fruit must weight a kilo, or there are huge fines for “short weight.” But it seems ISPs are dead against that principle telling the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to butt out.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Cuba and the US held their first talk on the issue of intellectual property, the island’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday.

• A statement revealed that Daniel Marti, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at the White House visited Havana on September 8-9 and met with representatives of the Cuban Office of Industrial Property, the National Centre of Copyright, the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment.

• Marti was accompanied by officials from the State Department, the Copyright Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Xinhua news agency reported.

• “In this first official meeting between Cuba and the US on intellectual property, the parties exchanged views on current regulations in the respective countries … and the legal framework of the two states for the protection of trademarks, patents and legal copyright,” read the statement.

Copyrights

• This week the U.S. sent notice to Polish authorities indicating it wants to extradite Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents. Vaulin’s defense team is reviewing the request but warns that the case is turning into an international due process problem, as he is still unable to meet his U.S. counsel.

• The European Commission’s “copyright modernisation” plan is an unmitigated disaster, but there’s one particularly insane section of it that I want to call your attention to: the “link tax,” which entitles publishers to payment when people link to them on the internet.

• Fundamentally, this is the insane idea that companies own the information about where they and their assets are located, a shitty idea that we’ve been making fun of since 2001, which the elected European Parliament has repeatedly rejected, which experiments in Germany and Spain have shown to be a disaster.

• But the unelected, thoroughly captured bureaucrats of the European Commission refuse to let go of this ridiculous plan.

• Remember Kim Dotcom? He’s the convicted fraudster-turned rich dude who ran MegaUpload, that file storage website that hosted a ton of pirated content. In January 2012, Dotcom was raided by New Zealand authorities and he’s been in legal purgatory ever since. Right now, Dotcom is fighting extradition by the United States for charges of online piracy.

• The European Union’s online reforms help the old more than the new

• Businesses such as coffee shops that offer a wireless network free of charge to their customers aren’t liable for copyright infringements committed by users of that network, the ruling states—which, in part, chimes with an earlier advocate general’s opinion. But hotspot operators may be required, following a court injunction, to password-protect their Wi-Fi networks to stop or prevent such violations.

• In 2010, Sony sued Tobias McFadden, who provides free Wi-Fi access at his lighting and sound system shop in Munich, Germany. The company claimed a copyrighted song had been offered for download from his wireless network. Although he wasn’t the individual responsible for the infringement, the local court mulled a ruling of indirect liability because the network hadn’t been secured.

• In all of our coverage of copyright trolls, those rent-seeking underdwellers that fire off threat letters to those they suspect of copyright infringement with demands designed to extract cash without having to actually take anyone to court, it’s quite easy to become somewhat numb to the underhanded tactics they employ. Between specifically targeting folks over pornography in order to minimize the chance that anyone might want to actually go to trial, to the privacy invading tactics occasionally used when a court case actually commences, it becomes easy to simply shrug at the depravity of it all.

• But there is a special place in hell for copyright trolls who falsely inform students that failure to pay on receipt of threat letters, or who falsely inform foreign students that deportation could result from a failure to pay. According to at least one university in Canada, this is apparently a new favored tactic among some copyright trolls.

• For quite some time now, we’ve been following an odd case through the German and then EU court system, concerning whether or not the operator of an open WiFi system should be liable for copyright infringement that occurs over that access point. Back in 2010, a German court first said that if you don’t secure your WiFi, you can get fined. This was very problematic — especially for those of us who believe in open WiFi. The EU Court of Justice agreed to hear the case and the Advocate General recommended a good ruling: that WiFi operators are not liable and also that they shouldn’t be forced to password protect their access points.

• The ruling, unfortunately, says that WiFi operators can be compelled to password protect their networks. It’s not all bad, in that the headline story is that WiFi operators, on their own, are not liable for actions done on the network, but that’s completely undermined by the requirement to password protect it if a copyright holder asks them to.

• Who owns a meme—those pictures, videos and ideas that go viral on the internet?

• In the case of the Socially Awkward Penguin, the answer might be National Geographic, since a staff photographer took the original penguin picture. Around 2009, internet users got hold of that photo, changed the background, added text and made it an internet phenomenon.

• But stock photo company Getty Images says it controls the penguin—and its meme progeny. Last year, Getty Images, which licenses National Geographic’s pictures, told the German company Get Digital that it owed license fees for using the penguin meme on one of its blogs. And Getty’s bill was twice the normal licensing fee, according to Get Digital.

• For some unknown reason, Paramount Pictures has decided that the freely distributed Ubuntu OS torrents are “infringing” their copyrights on Transformers movie! Paramount Pictures recently sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google, accusing Ubuntu OS of infringing their copyrights.

• The 28-year-old former operator of a French-based torrent site has been ordered to serve a year in jail and pay a five million euro fine. A moderator received a four-month suspended sentence. Somewhat unusually, four regular users of the site were tracked down by their IP addresses. They too received custodial sentences.

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