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● 10.11.15

● Links 11/10/2015: Kate/KDevelop Sprint, Blender 2.76

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds Makes Bold Claim That 2016 ‘Will Be The Year Of The ARM Laptop’

• Where Linux is concerned, no one’s opinions are weighed quite as heavily as Linus Torvald’s, so when he makes a bold claim, it’s worth paying attention. At LinuxCon Europe this week, the Linux creator partook in a fireside chat with Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist Dirk Hohndel, and from the conversation, a few interesting things were revealed.

=> ↺ Linux’s Torvalds: ARM-Based Laptops Will Be Big in 2016

• The mythical Year of the Linux Desktop never arrived. But 2016 could be the year of the ARM-based laptop. That’s according to Linus Torvalds, who spoke at the Linux Foundation’s recent LinuxCon Europe 2015 event in Dublin.

• “I’m happy to see that ARM is making progress,” Torvalds said in a discussion at the conference. “One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year, but maybe it’ll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop.”

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds Wants to See a Real ARM Computer That You Can Develop On One Day

• Freshly returned from the LinuxCon Europe Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel project, has just published a short continuation of the interview with Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel.

Server

=> ↺ IBM POWERS up new Linux servers for Big Data workloads

=> ↺ New IBM Linux Servers Tap OpenPower Technology

=> ↺ Should Intel Worry About IBM’s Launch Of Linux Servers?

• Clearly, IBM is aiming at taking the server chip business away from Intel. Should Intel really worry?

Kernel Space

=> ↺ The Linux Foundation: How to fix the internet

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds Still Not Afraid of Being Hit by a Bus

=> ↺ Why unikernels might kill containers in five years

• Container technologies have received explosive attention in the past year – and rightfully so. Projects like Docker and CoreOS have done a fantastic job at popularizing operating system features that have existed for years by making those features more accessible.ACLU: Orwellian Citizen Score, China’s credit score system, is a warning for Americans

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Better LLVM IR Generation Coming For RadeonSI

• Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has published a new patch series that yields better LLVM IR generation with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

=> ↺ Intel Skylake Tests On Linux 4.3 Bring A Few Changes

• With development activity on the Linux 4.3 kernel settling down, here are some fresh benchmarks comparing the Linux 4.2 and Linux 4.3 Git kernels atop Ubuntu when using an Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake system.

Applications

=> ↺ qBittorrent 3.2.4 BitTorrent Client Out Now with Fixes for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows

• The developers of the free, open-source and cross-platform qBittorrent P2P BitTorrent client announced on October 10 the immediate availability for download of what appears to be the last maintenance release in the qBittorrent 3.2 series.

=> ↺ Blender 2.76 Brings OpenSubdiv, Better AMD GPU Support

=> ↺ Blender 2.76 Free 3D Modelling App Is Out with New Features, Hundreds of Bugfixes

• On October 10, the Blender Foundation pushed a new major version of its amazing open-source, cross-platform, and free 3D modelling software used by numerous animation studios across the globe, Blender 2.76.

• Prominent features of Blender 2.76 include initial support for Pixar’s OpenSubdiv geometry subdivision technology, support for tiled strokes in Sculpting, support for text effect strips and subtitle export in the sequencer, and a major performance boost to the view-port functionality.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Changing quickly between a final and derivable GObject class

=> ↺ Install Quokka on a Centos VPS

=> ↺ Get started with Sweet Home 3D on Linux

=> ↺ How to split large audio files on Linux

=> ↺ string interfaces

=> ↺ Blocking Facebook Web Trackers At The Firewall For Extra Privacy

=> ↺ whose xterm is it anyway?

=> ↺ How to Install Subrion CMS on a Debian 8 VPS

=> ↺ Remember sed and awk? All Linux admins should

• I happened across a post on Reddit by chance, asking about textfile manipulation. It was a fairly simple request, similar to those that folks in Unix see nearly every day. In this case, it was how to remove all duplicate lines in a file, keeping one instance of each. This sounds relatively easy, but can get a bit complicated if the source file is sufficiently large and random.

=> ↺ Fixing Gnash setting system volume to 100%

• The first thing I noticed was that it actually worked out of the box, and after installing gstreamer-ffmpeg all of the codecs I needed were working!

Games

=> ↺ Have You Tried Tanks Of Freedom? An Open Source Strategy Game

• We have covered Tanks of Freedom before, but this open source strategy game has changed quite a bit since the initial article. I am pleased to see that they have been doing regular releases, and since our initial article they have added new unit movement, new maps, added a new soundtrack, upped the colour palette from 16bit to 32bit and much more.

=> ↺ InfiniTrap, A Hardcore 2D Maze Game Made On Linux, We Have Keys For You

• The developer of InfiniTrap has sent in a few keys for us to giveaway, it’s interesting because it’s made on Linux, and it’s pretty hard. It’s from the mind of Yanick Bourbeau who recently wrote a Linux game development editorial on gamasutra, so it’s nice to see the developer still working away at it.

=> ↺ Open-Source Doom 3 Spin Updated With Many New Features

• While many initially looked at ioDoom3 as the exciting fork of id Software’s id Tech 4 / Doom 3 source-code as it was done by some of the same folks as ioquake3, there sadly hasn’t been much to report on in recent times for the project. Fortunately, the independent “dhewm3″ is making strides as an open-source Doom 3 project.

=> ↺ Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide Expansion Released & Thoughts From A Civ Addict

=> ↺ Unity To Abandon Their Web Player In Favor Of WebGL

• For games developed in Unity and designed to be run from the web-browser, Unity has offered a Web Player plug-in for browsers. However, with Chrome dropping NPAPI support and other browsers changing their plug-in handling, Unity is dropping that plug-in to instead just use open web APIs and using WebGL for graphics. Unity has already supported WebGL but now it’s about the death of their Web Player.

=> ↺ Divinity: Original Sin 2 Linux or Mac Ports Uncertain

• While Divinity: Original Sin 2 is pretty much confirmed for Microsoft Windows following its successful Kickstarter campaign, the same cannot be said for the Linux or Mac version of the game.

• The independent Larian Studios wants to remain publisher-free, and collected little over $2 million with its Kickstarter fund campaign. However, despite expectations of a Linux/Mac port for the game, the developers have pretty clearly stated that they cannot afford to port the game on other platforms at the time of release.

=> ↺ Virtual Programming Is Porting Four More Titles To Linux

• Virtual Programming has published their latest in-development titles for Mac and Linux, which includes the Overlord and Saints Row games making it over from Windows.

• While many Linux gamers particularly don’t like Virtual Programming Linux game ports due to their use of the eON wrapper layer, which started out as a train wreck but has improved for recent games like DiRT Showdown, they’re bringing more games over to Linux.

=> ↺ SteamOS 2.0, emulators on Raspberry Pi, and more open gaming news

=> ↺ Unigine 2.0 Officially Released With Big Improvements For This Linux-Friendly Engine

• While the Unigine engine isn’t used by too many games compared to its presence in simulation and other industries, it remains one of my favorite engines for its top-notch Linux support over the years, beautiful OpenGL capabilities, and powering the most demanding Linux graphics tech demos. Today Unigine Corp is excited to announce the release of Unigine 2.0.

=> ↺ Valve Is Trolling Us With A New Half-Life 3 Leak

=> ↺ HL3 References In Dota 2 Are Raising Eyebrows

• SteamDB has revealed some new references to Half-Life 3 content within today’s Dota 2 game update.

• Most evident is “hl3.txt”, which is a file defining some game assets while there are also some other new game definition files. Some of the definitions do differ with Source 2 and there’s also some VR-related definitions.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Baloo 5.15

• We have a new release of Baloo. For those of you who don’t know about it – It’s a file indexing and searching solution for Linux. It’s quite fast, and shipped by default in KDE Plasma.

=> ↺ The Kubuntu Podcast Team Debunks some Myths

• Aaron Honeycutt, Ovidiu-Florin BOGDAN, and Rick Timmis debunk the myths surrounding the future of Kubuntu and interview Eike Hein (KDE Developer).

=> ↺ KDE Frameworks 5.15 have landed in Kubuntu Wily

• KDE Frameworks 5.15 have landed in Kubuntu Wily (to become 15.10).

=> ↺ October Development News: krita moves to a new repository

• Lots of things are happening! Let’s start with the most important part: Krita is no longer part of the Calligra source code. Krita 2.9 will still be developed inside Calligra, and we expect to do several more releases of Krita 2.9 with bug fixes and performance improvements. In fact, we expect to be releasing Krita 2.9 regularly until Krita 3.0 is done.

=> ↺ Krita Is No Longer Part of the Calligra Source Code, Krita 3.0 Coming Along Nicely

• While waiting for the release notes of the Krita 2.9.8 to be published, so we can tell you what new features it brings, the developers of the best free, cross-platform and open-source digital painting software published news about the future of the project.

=> ↺ Calligra Stage 3 Alpha: next pure Qt5/KF5 one

• As with Words and the other Calligra apps, Stage of course has seen a few regressions due to the porting, which will be need to be ironed out in the next phase, together with the existing old bugs. Where you are invited to join our efforts!

=> ↺ Polish, Polish, Polish, 5.5 Edition

• With Plasma 5.4.2 out the door, it’s time to look ahead at what Plasma 5.5 will bring to a Desktop near you. Even though we’ve gone mobile, we won’t neglect traditional Desktops. In the upcoming release, I took care of the little things, as well as bringing back specialized tools that haven’t been a priority for the initial releases.

=> ↺ Cool features in Kexi 2.9.8

• This week database apps builder Kexi that competes with MS Access and Filemaker has been released with cool new features.

=> ↺ Mesa 11.0.3 Fixes the KDE/Weston Regression, Includes a Healthy Amount of Bugfixes

• A few minutes ago, Emil Velikov had the great pleasure of informing us of the release and immediate availability for download of the third maintenance version of the open-source Mesa 11.0 3D Graphics Library.

=> ↺ Kate/KDevelop 2015

• From the 7th to the 11th of October Kate and KDevelop contricutors once again met to work on both Kate and KDevelop.

=> ↺ kate / KDevelop sprint in Berlin

=> ↺ Kate/KDevelop Sprint 2015 – Summary for Kate

=> ↺ KDE on Android: Cross-Compiling Docker Image

• For people never worked with Docker, I probably have to add slightly more information: Frankly, the Dockerfile is a recipe how Docker generates a system image that can be run as a virtual machine (for details, please use your favorite search machine). The virtual machine built by our Docker script provides a pre-configured cross-building environment for Qt applications on Android. Especially, our setup is very well suited to compile CMake-based Android projects, which use the cross-building toolchain from Extra-CMake-Modules. Using only 3 commands (see documentation at community.kde.org/Android), the virtual machine gets set up and one can directly start working.

=> ↺ Mesa 11.0.3 Fixes A KDE/Weston Regression, Many RadeonSI Fixes

• While all of the major feature work is building up in Mesa Git for the next release, Mesa 11.0.3 still has a healthy smothering of fixes and improvements across the board. First up, Mesa 11.0.3 fixes a KDE/Weston regression that was introduced in the previous point release.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Epiphany Web-Apps: Integrate the Web with Your Desktop

• Are you a frequent user of web apps? Would you prefer them to be more integrated into your desktop? The Epiphany browser can do just that and this article will show you how.

• For me, web apps feel a bit removed from the computing experience. I’d like them to integrate with my desktop more to make it easier and faster to launch them. Most browsers don’t offer this type of integration, so you have to load the browser, navigate to the web app and then login to the web app. Epiphany browser provides tools to seamlessly integrate web apps into the desktop as well as make the web app experience more enjoyable.

Distributions

=> ↺ Reasons Why you Might Not Like Lightweight Linux Distributions As A Newbie

• There are hundreds of Linux distributions and users choose the one based on their day-to-day tasks. Some of the popular Linux distros are Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora etc. Other than this I also suggest users to choose a lightweight distro when they’re starting to use Linux. But, In this post I’ll talk about the Lightweight Linux distributions and why Lightweight Linux distributions may be bothersome. Although there are benefits of using Light Linux distributions but there is also a fact that I experienced through my blog readers.

=> ↺ The 8 Best Windows Linux And Other Operating System Clones

• There are many Linux distributions out there which are designed to look like Windows and this guide lists the best ones. Why stop there though? Why not list Linux distributions that look like OSX, ChromeOS and Android as well.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ Quirky 7.2 Screenshot Tour

=> ↺ Manjaro 15.09-1 Cinnamon Screenshot Tour

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Drexel Hamilton Begins Coverage on Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) with Buy Rating

• Analysts at Drexel Hamilton initiated coverage on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in an analyst report revealed to clients and investors on Friday morning. The financial company set an Buy rating on the $13.74 billion market cap company.

=> ↺ Mizuho Reiterates Buy Rating for Red Hat (RHT)

Debian Family

=> ↺ Perl6 is now up to date on Debian sid

• Thanks to the help of Daniel Dehennin and Paul Cochrane, The rakudo implementation of Perl 6 is now up to date on Debian/sid.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ A Few Worrisome Regressions Appear In Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 Performance

• With Ubuntu 15.10 set to be released later this month, I’ve started preparing for a variety of Linux performance comparisons involving the Wily Werewolf. This morning I ran some Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 benchmarks on one of my frequent test beds and it’s revealed a few significant changes in some of the benchmarks.

=> ↺ Watch: Convergent Ubuntu Phone Music App Running on the Ubuntu Linux Desktop

• Earlier today, October 9, Canonical’s Alan Pope posted a very nice video on his YouTube channel to show us the latest convergence features of the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Preparations Begin, OTA-7 on Its Way with Unity 8 Notifications Fix

• Just a few moments ago, we were informed by Mr. Łukasz Zemczak about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-7 software update.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch Almost Ready For OnePlus One, Heading Soon To OnePlus 2

• Recently it was reported that the next iteration of the highly famous OnePlus One will be getting a port of Ubuntu Touch. Well it seems that the developers have now delivered (well partially) and OnePlus One now has Ubuntu Touch support. Not long before it makes its way over to OnePlus 2.

=> ↺ Ending my 6 year tenure on the Ubuntu Community Council

• On September 16th, Michael Hall sent out a call for nominations for the Ubuntu Community Council. I will not be seeking re-election this time around.

• My journey with Ubuntu has been a long one. I can actually pinpoint the day it began, because it was also the day I created my ubuntuforums.org account: March 12th, 2005. That day I installed Ubuntu on one of my old laptops to play with this crazy new Debian derivative and was delighted to learn that the PCMCIA card I had for WiFi actually worked out of the box. No kidding. In 2006 I submitted my first package to Debian and following earlier involvement with Debian Women, I sent my first message to the Ubuntu-Women mailing list offering to help with consolidating team resources. In 2007 a LoCo in my area (Pennsylvania) started up, and my message was the third one in the archives!

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Linksys WRT1900ACS review: The best router for most router enthusiasts

=> ↺ Linksys Announces New WRT1900ACS Wi-Fi Router

=> ↺ Mediatek Start Kit With Amazon Web Services Integration

=> ↺ MediaTek Labs Announces IoT Starter Kit

=> ↺ MediaTek Labs Announces IoT Starter Kit Powered by Amazon Web Services

=> ↺ Mini PC invasion: 13 radically tiny computers that fit in the palm of your hand

• Computers have been shrinking for years, and the revolution has only accelerated in recent times. As chipmakers focus on creating processors that sip power without sacrificing performance, thermal concerns have largely been alleviated in modern CPUs. Because of that, today’s pint-sized PCs offer enough performance to play HD video and satisfy Office jockeys, the opposite of the janky, compromised experience of yesteryear’s microcomputers.

Phones

=> ↺ Tidbits and Noise from Smartphone Wars

• Blackberry hasn’t quite yet died. And now they have officially shown the world the new physical QWERTY-slider (narrow format keyboard like Blackberries had always, not wide like Nokia Communicators for example) and its called the Priv. Best of all, it also runs Android! Wanna see the pictures? Slash Gear has the Blackberry pictures. For the record, I think this is a brilliant move and will see Blackberry smartphone unit sales jump once those Priv units are offered widely – and I personally will buy one. How big will the boost be, is anybody’s guess because its been so long since we’ve last seen a proper slider solution to a large touch screen and a physical QWERTY but yeah, I bet it will sell well. Lets see if this can save the company.

=> ↺ Projecting From Kantar Statistics for August Quarter, to Global Smartphone Market Q3

• We all know by now how to read the Kantar numbers. Its useless to compare Kantar this quarter to the same quarter last year, as Kantar doesn’t measure the whole world, too many variables change the issue, such as did Apple launch the iPhone in China at the same time as the other big markets, or not, etc. But what we CAN do, is use Kantar latest quarter data, to compare to the immediate previous quarter. That is usually a good indicator of what the current just-ended Quarter is likely to show. We know well what Kantar measured for the last quarter (ended June 2015) and if we assign smartphone penetration-corrected indexes to all the reported region from Kantar, we get a pretty reliable indicator of what the direction and to some degree even scale of the change is, this quarter vs previous quarter. Note, this methodology is not infallible, it once led us on this blog to vastly mistake the Nokia/Lumia Windows Phone share. But in general, its worked quite accurately for about 15 of the past 16 quarters. I think we can use this as a good but not infallible predictive tool to see what the market share situation is like for the just-ended quarter.

• [...]

• Android 84% (82%) iOS 12% (14%) Windows Phone 3% (3%) Others combined 1% (1%)

Tizen

=> ↺ Samsung Glass to have Augumented Reality Features Far Beyond the Capabilities of Google Glass

• Samsung has applied to patent a 3D image technology that is years ahead of the capabilities Google Glass, it’s main competitor, as users will be able to Interact with 3D images shown on the glasses mid-air and be able to do such things as dial phone numbers, send SMS text messages and even play a virtual piano keyboard.

Android

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note Edge and LG G3 Received Android 5.1.1 Lollipop Update

=> ↺ WhatsApp offers Android users back-up in Google Drive

=> ↺ Sony Bravia 50W950C Android TV review

• Sony’s new Bravia Smart TVs are the first ones to come preloaded with Android TV software offering a rich app experience and enhancing the smart TV experience. While some local players offer Android-powered TVs, what you actually get is a customised version of the mobile/tablet Android interface and apps that are scaled to fit the big screen. We’ve used the 50-inch Android smart TV for more than a month to help you make a buying decision.

=> ↺ Keeping your Android, and your data, safe and secure

=> ↺ Google Android 6.0 Marshmallow: 5 of the BEST new features

• Google has started to roll out Android 6.0 Marshmallow – but there is a catch.

• Unfortunately the latest version of the hugely popular Android operating system is currently only available to those running Nexus devices.

• Express.co.uk has provided a quick guide on how to upgrade your handset, here.

• If you are lucky enough to be running Marshmallow – here are FIVE new features and tweaks you should know about.

=> ↺ Andy Rubin, ‘Father’ of Android, on China, AI and the Next Wave of Computing (Full Video)

• Onstage at the Code/Mobile conference at The Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, Calif., he shared some of the ideas he thinks could spark “10 more Androids.”

=> ↺ Paranoid Android is pretty much over

• Paranoid Android has long been considered one of the most popular custom ROMs available on Android. Unfortunately, it looks like the development team might be throwing in the towel sometime soon.

• It’s no secret that the team has been slowing down as of late. After OnePlus hired a handful of key members from the Paranoid Android team to work on its new OxygenOS ROM back in February 2015, users running Paranoid on their devices quickly found out that future updates would be few and far between. The dev team did manage to push out Android 5.1 Lollipop to Nexus devices in July, though the team said the delay was largely due to the fact that they were missing the manpower they once had on their core team.

=> ↺ Europe could lead the way on Android’s great unbundling

=> ↺ Android-x86 Team Unveils First Android 5.1 Lollipop Release Candidate For Your PC

=> ↺ A bunch of top Android games are 10 cents right now on Google Play

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ FinTP the first open source application for processing financial transactions expands its footprint

• FinTP is an application distributed under GPL v3 open source software licensing frame that processes transactions, automates flows and offers compliance to regulatory and industry standards. FinTP is directly aimed to grow competitiveness, making financial processing systems affordable to both financial institutions and SMEs.

=> ↺ Open Source FPGA Pi Hat

• It is great to have an open source board and tool chain for FPGA development. We’ve talked about the open source Icestorm toolchain before and MyHDL, too. If you prefer, most of the vendor FPGA tools are free to use for many common devices and uses. The Lattice tools should work just as well with this board, even if it does offend your open source sensibilities.

=> ↺ SD Times GitHub Project of the Week: Open Source Society University

• Want to expand or refresh your computer science knowledge, but don’t want to pay or go back to school for it? Become a self-taught computer scientist with the Open Source Society (OSS) University’s “path to free self-taught education.”

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ NEWS: Google unveils open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages to speed up article loading times

• Google has unveiled a way to make web pages load much faster on mobile web browsers using their open-source project Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

• For internet users, the faster load times will be welcome, but the move raises issues for ad-supported sites and services, who are unsure at this stage how they’ll be able to have ads on AMP pages.

• Indeed, the company admits it is not yet sure precisely how advertising will work within AMP. It has stated that pages will load content before advertising but other details around ad targeting and tracking capabilities are yet to be addressed. Gingras said: “There are a lot of details to work out here in terms of some of those capabilities. We want to support existing business models, but it’s a work in progress. Today wasn’t the finish line; today was the starting line.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ What LibreOffice Impress Needs To Rock

• Across the course of my career I have given, and continue to give, a lot of presentations at conferences all over the world. In the vast majority of them I have used LibreOffice because I like and support the project and I like my presentations being in an open format that can be used across different Operating Systems.

=> ↺ What’s the best free alternative to Microsoft Office?

• One of my longtime favorites, WPS Office (formerly Kingsoft Office), has become something of a mess. If you head to WPS.com, you find only Android, iOS and Linux versions of the suite. Huh? A little Googling reveals that Kingsoft proper still offers the Windows version, but good luck figuring out the different names and options. (My advice: click the Download button next to Office Suite Free 2013. That’s the version I used for a long while and really liked.) Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders can’t save America

=> ↺ Insider: Oracle has lost interest in Java

• There has been a lot of scuttlebutt lately about Oracle and a supposed de-emphasis on Java within the company. The rumblings are getting louder.

• From the apparent dismissal of Java evangelists to an email alleging a shrugged-shoulders attitude about Java, Oracle’s commitment to the platform has come into question. This is happening despite a road map that commits to a modular Java 9 release in a year and a planned emphasis on enterprise Java at next month’s JavaOne conference.

Business

Semi-Open Source//Openwashing

=> ↺ Government’s First Open Source PaaS Service Comes to Market

• ARCWRX is built on Red Hat’s OpenShift and already has significant interest from several federal agencies, according to John Keese, director of government cloud solutions for CSC.

• [...]

• The National Institute of Standards and Technology definition for PaaS is: “The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.”

BSD

=> ↺ l2k15 Hackathon Report: dlg@ on SMP networking

=> ↺ bsdtalk257 – NetBSD Developer Christos Zoulas

=> ↺ Radeon KMS On PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.2 Surprisingly Worked On A FirePro+DP System

• While open-source AMD Linux users have largely been able to take it for granted for years that the Radeon DRM/KMS driver will at least light up their display when using an older GPU, after the Radeon KMS problems I ran into on DragonFlyBSD, I didn’t expect this hardware to play nicely on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.2. Fortunately, I was proven wrong and this AMD FirePro graphics card driving a DisplayPort monitor managed to run nicely out-of-the-box.

=> ↺ Announcing NetBSD 7.0

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ CC-BY-SA 4.0 Is Now One-Way Compatible With GPLv3

• The Creative Commons has announced that their BY-SA 4.0 license has been found to be one-way compatible with the GPLv3 license.

• With CC-BY-SA 4.0 material being compatible with the GPLv3, this should increase interoperability for games and other projects.

Licensing

=> ↺ Startups, Know This About Open Source Before Incorporating It into Your Products

• The use of open source to develop new software products is widespread among technology startups, to the point that there are over 25 million repositories on GitHub, over 430,000 projects on SourceForge and over 21 billion lines of indexed and searchable open source code on the Black Duck Open Hub. Technology startups use open source in three main ways:

=> ↺ Open source software: What you don’t know could hurt you

• The most significant aspect of the GPL is that it requires users of open source code who incorporate that code into their own programs and then distribute those programs, to make both the pre-existing source code and the source code for the new work available to recipients of the new software. This requirement arises when the new work is derived from or based upon the pre-existing code.

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ All Things Open 2015 Twitter contest winners announced

=> ↺ Real-Time Linux, 3D printed bicycle, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, and more

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ Professor: Open-source textbooks will save students money

• Students spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks every semester, but a push toward open-source has offered universities free electronic alternatives to make higher education more affordable.

• With over $21,000 in funding from the Undergraduate Student Government, UConn professor Edward Neth will adapt a free open-source chemistry textbook for introductory chemistry courses in Fall 2016, Neth said.

• Last fall USG passed legislation calling for the university to set-up an open-source textbook committee chaired by Vice Provost for Libraries Martha Bedard. This semester, the faculty-run UConn Senate passed a resolution in support of the open-source textbook initiative.

=> ↺ Senators bring bill to lower textbook prices

=> ↺ Dems push bill to lower cost of college textbooks

=> ↺ Al Franken wants to make college textbooks free

=> ↺ U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin introduces bill to make most common college textbooks free

=> ↺ Durbin Proposes Legislation To Lower Textbook Costs

=> ↺ Digital textbook advancements may save students money

=> ↺ Senators Durbin, Franken, King Introduce Legislation to Help Make College Textbooks More Affordable

=> ↺ Sens. Franken and Durbin propose free textbooks for college

=> ↺ Durbin, Franken propose open source textbooks act

=> ↺ Durbin Co-Introduces Bill To Reduce College Textbook Costs

=> ↺ These lawmakers want to make textbooks cheaper

=> ↺ Durbin pushes bill to lower college textbook costs

Programming

=> ↺ Julia 0.4 Release Announcement

• We are pleased to announce the release of Julia 0.4.0. This release contains major language refinements and numerous standard library improvements. A summary of changes is available in the NEWS log found in our main repository. We will be making regular 0.4.x bugfix releases from the release-0.4 branch of the codebase, and we recommend the 0.4.x line for users requiring a more stable Julia environment.

=> ↺ Julia Language 0.4 Released

• Julia, the high-performance, high-level technical computing programming language written against LLVM, has made it to version 0.4.

• Julia 0.4 features generational garbage collection support, incremental code caching for packages, inter-task channels, tuple-type improvements, and a variety of other compiler and language additions.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Report: Twitter prepping for “company-wide layoffs” next week

• Following the news that Twitter interim CEO Jack Dorsey was fully hired to the post on Monday, the company has been linked to a series of what Re/code has described as “company-wide layoffs” next week.

• A Friday report from Re/code cited “multiple sources” in saying that most of Twitter’s departments will be hit with layoffs starting next week. Those sources did not specify numbers or percentages of staff, but they did point to Twitter’s plans to “restructure” its engineering staff, which may affect how the alleged firings play out in all. When asked to comment on the report, a Twitter representative told Ars that “we’re not commenting on rumor and speculation.”

Hardware

=> ↺ Smartmobe brain maker Qualcomm teases 64-bit ARM server chip secrets

• Qualcomm, the maker of processors for Nexus smartphones and other mobes and tablets, has revealed early specifications for its upcoming server chips.

• The California company is best known for designing the brains in handheld devices, networking kit, and other embedded gear.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Monsanto’s Stock Is Tanking. Is the Company’s Own Excitement About GMOs Backfiring?

• Pity Monsanto, the genetically modified seed and agrichemical giant. Its share price has plunged 25 percent since the spring. Market prices for corn and soybeans are in the dumps, meaning Monsanto’s main customers—farmers who specialize in those crops—have less money to spend on its pricey seeds and flagship herbicide (which recently got named a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health organization, spurring lawsuits).

=> ↺ Study: Fracking Industry Wells Associated With Premature Birth

• Expectant mothers who live near active natural gas wells operated by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania are at an increased risk of giving birth prematurely and for having high-risk pregnancies, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.

• The findings, published online last week in the journal Epidemiology, shed light on some of the possible adverse health outcomes associated with the fracking industry, which has been booming in the decade since the first wells were drilled. Health officials have been concerned about the effect of this type of drilling on air and water quality, as well as the stress of living near a well where just developing the site of the well can require 1,000 truck trips on once-quiet roads.

Security

=> ↺ Amazon, Google Boost Cloud Security Efforts

• Not to be outdone, Google introduced its Google Cloud Security Scanner the same day of the Amazon Inspector announcement. Unlike Inspector, Google’s product is already generally available.

=> ↺ CryptoLocker Ransomware Springs on Scandinavians

• The screenshot, as gained by Heimdal Security, shows the link within the email that, when clicked, will redirect unsuspecting users to a website that will download the file ‘forsendelse.zip’, containing the executable file, forsendelse.exe.

=> ↺ iOS 9 Lock-Screen Bug Grants Access to Contacts, Photos

• A clever iPhone user uncovered a new exploit in iOS 9 (and 9.0.1) that allows a person—presumably with a list of handwritten steps—to bypass the device’s passcode and get into the Contacts and Photos apps.

• So unless you have a bunch of selfies you don’t want anyone to see, or you use an alphanumeric instead of a four-digit passcode, you probably don’t have much to worry about. You can also cripple the exploit by disabling Siri on your lock screen, though you’ll lose convenience in the process.

=> ↺ Malware that hit Apple similar to that developed by CIA: report

• The techniques used by XcodeGhost, the infected version of Apple’s Xcode compiler that has caused an eruption of malware on the Apple China app store, are similar to those developed and demonstrated by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

• A report in The Intercept, a website run by Glenn Greenwald who is well-known for having been the first to report on the NSA spying disclosures made by the former US defence contractor Edward Snowden, claims the CIA detailed the techniques at its annual top-secret Jamboree conference in 2012.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ Media Reports ISIS Nuclear Plot That Never Actually Involved ISIS

• There was only one problem: At no point do the multiple iterations of the AP‘s reporting show that anyone involved in the FBI sting were members of or have any connection to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (aka ISIL or Daesh). While one of several smuggling attempts discussed in AP‘s reporting involved an actual potential buyer–an otherwise unknown Sudanese doctor who four years ago “suggested that he was interested” in obtaining uranium–the “terrorists” otherwise involved in the cases were FBI and other law enforcement agents posing as such.

=> ↺ Phyllis Bennis on US Bombing of Afghan Hospital

• This week on CounterSpin: The Pentagon has declared the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, a “mistake.” But it will investigate itself to determine how US bombs came to destroy the Doctors Without Borders facility, killing at least 22 people. Doctors Without Borders is calling for an independent investigation—and you would think journalists would, too, since who knows better than they the administration’s history of changing its story?

=> ↺ Self-censorship

• It is well enough to condemn the US for bombing a hospital and killing Muslims in Kunduz but what about the Muslim members of a wedding party who were bombed into extinction in a formerly friendly country by the air force of an extremely friendly country?

=> ↺ Turkish police use tear gas to stop mourners laying carnations at the site of bombings in Ankara that killed 97 people as officials say ‘initial signs point to ISIS responsibility’

• Turkish police fired tear gas to disperse mourners who were laying flowers at the site of Turkey’s deadliest ever terror attack this morning.

• Two Turkish security sources said ‘initial signs’ suggest ISIS were behind the two explosions which killed at least 97 and wounded 247 more at a peace rally in Ankara yesterday.

• Protesters clashed with riot police in Istanbul last night as they took to the streets to denounce the attacks. And today, police clashed with demonstrators and pro-Kurdish officials at the scene of the disaster near Ankara’s main train station.

• They held back the mourners, including the pro-Kurdish party’s leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, insisting that investigators were still working at the site.

=> ↺ The day I met the other victims of extremism: boys brainwashed to kill

• In the mountains of Pakistan I met young men who would have killed me. They would have slit my throat, put a bullet in my brain, caved in my skull with a rock. After I was dead they would have severed my head from my body and displayed it as a warning to all.

Transparency Reporting

=> ↺ Wikileaks Releases Final Intellectual Property Chapter Of TPP Before Official Release

• Last weekend, negotiators finally completed negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. However, as we noted, there was no timetable for the release of the text (though some are now saying it may come out next week). Once again, it was ridiculous that the negotiating positions of the various countries was secret all along, and that the whole thing had been done behind closed doors. And to have them not be ready to release the text after completion of the negotiations was even more of a travesty. Wikileaks, however, got hold of the Intellectual Property Chapter and has released it online.

=> ↺ The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared

• Today’s release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn’t survive to the end of the negotiations.

• Since we now have the agreed text, we’ll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself—but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like “x” that may change in the cleaned-up text. Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks and others.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ Elon Musk Says Climate Change Will Bring Even Worse Refugee Crisis

• Tech visionary warns that countries must do more to combat climate change

• Climate change could create a refugee crisis far worse than the one currently unfolding in Europe, Elon Musk warned Thursday.

• The Tesla CEO gave a speech in Berlin in which he said changes in Earth’s temperature could lead to depleted water and food supplies, thus forcing millions of people to leave their homes in search of resources, the Huffington Post reports.

=> ↺ ‘Polluter Interests Have Been Spending Millions on Disinformation Campaigns’

• Janine Jackson: “New Regulations on Smog Remain as Divisive as Ever.” That was the headline on a September 30 New York Times story which balanced what it called “concerns of lung doctors” that smog, or ozone, is a public health threat with industry claims that installing new equipment, in the reporter’s words, “could kneecap American manufacturing and threaten jobs across the country.” Three different industry sources were counterposed with a single representative of the American Lung Association.

• But if the topic is harmful pollution, is the public really served by coverage that centers the views of the polluters? What’s a different way to talk about it? David Baron is managing attorney in the DC office of the group Earthjustice. His article “Smog Kills” appeared recently in Politico. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC; welcome to CounterSpin, David Baron.

=> ↺ On Climate Change, Listen to Pope Francis, Not Jeb Bush

• The politician says we should disregard the pope because “he’s not a scientist.” But the pope’s background is in chemistry and his counselors are top scientists.

=> ↺ The collapse of Saudi Arabia is inevitable

• On Tuesday 22 September, Middle East Eye broke the story of a senior member of the Saudi royal family calling for a “change” in leadership to fend off the kingdom’s collapse.

• In a letter circulated among Saudi princes, its author, a grandson of the late King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, blamed incumbent King Salman for creating unprecedented problems that endangered the monarchy’s continued survival.

• “We will not be able to stop the draining of money, the political adolescence, and the military risks unless we change the methods of decision making, even if that implied changing the king himself,” warned the letter.

• Whether or not an internal royal coup is round the corner – and informed observers think such a prospect “fanciful” – the letter’s analysis of Saudi Arabia’s dire predicament is startlingly accurate.

• Like many countries in the region before it, Saudi Arabia is on the brink of a perfect storm of interconnected challenges that, if history is anything to judge by, will be the monarchy’s undoing well within the next decade.

=> ↺ Report: VW was warned about cheating emissions in 2007

• The Volkswagen scandal—selling 11 million diesel-engined cars designed to fool US emissions regulations—is moving into the “who knew what, and when” phase. Newspapers in Germany are reporting that Bosch (the company that supplies electronics to the auto industry) warned VW only to use the cheat mode internally back in 2007, and that a These findings both emerged from an internal audit at VW in response to the scandal.

Finance

=> ↺ Working Moms Respond To Bill O’Reilly’s Latest Poor-Shaming Tirade

• On the October 6 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly falsely claimed that childhood hunger in the United States is “a total lie” and blamed purportedly “derelict” parents for allowing their families to live in poverty, which he implied was a form of child abuse.

=> ↺ New Leak Of Final TPP Text Confirms Attack On Freedom Of Expression, Public Health

• “The monopolist pharmaceutical industry has won a lot with the TPP, at the expense of people’s health,” says Public Citizen.

=> ↺ NYT on TPP: Too Secret for Critics to Have a Right to Complain About

• Critics, meanwhile, are characterized as having parochial interests: On the right, there are “congressional Republicans who fear for local interests like sugar and rice, and many conservatives who oppose Mr. Obama at every turn,” while Hillary Clinton is backing away from the deal “as she has campaigned among unions and other audiences on the left.”

• You might hope reporters would see the secrecy around such an important deal as a problem in itself, rather than an opportunity to scold critics for jumping the gun.

=> ↺ ‘Poverty Is Not a Lifelong Identity’ – CounterSpin interview with Rebecca Vallas about shaming the poor

=> ↺ If Apple didn’t hold $181B overseas, it would owe $59B in US taxes

• More than any other American company, Apple holds $181.1 billion in offshore accounts, according to a Tuesday report released by Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group.

• Other major American tech firms—including Cisco, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle—are among the largest companies that are using legal but questionable tax tricks to keep money overseas and effectively pay little to no American federal corporate taxes.

• Citizens for Tax Justice concluded: “Multinational corporations’ use of tax havens allows them to avoid an estimated $90 billion in federal income taxes each year.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ Major Papers Reject the Opt-Out Option

• All three papers offered arguments that closely align with the rhetoric of corporate education reform, focusing on the plight of low-income students of color while ignoring the realities of how testing affects such populations.

=> ↺ New Yorker Calls Corbyn ‘Childlike’–but Who Are They Kidding?

• The landslide victory of left-wing candidate Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom has many establishment types bent out of shape. The Blair wing of the party was literally obliterated, with Corbyn drawing more than four times the votes of his nearest competitor. After giving the country the war in Iraq, and the housing bubble whose collapse led to the 2008-2009 recession and financial crisis, the discontent of the Labour Party’s rank and file is understandable.

=> ↺ CBS Analyst Pushes Paul Ryan For Speaker Without Disclosing Ryan Paid Him Over $100K

• CBS News analyst Frank Luntz pushed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for House Speaker, claiming “he’s got a brain for policy, which is what we need in Washington right now,” adding, “if Paul Ryan says no, God help us.” CBS News and Luntz did not disclose that Ryan has paid Luntz’s company over $100,000 in consulting fees in recent years.

=> ↺ CNN is basically begging Joe Biden to join its Democratic debate

• This is quite unlike the rules CNN set for its Republican presidential debate earlier this month. In addition to reaching a poll threshold, candidates had to officially file with the FEC and say they were running three weeks before the debate. They also had to have a paid campaign aide working in at least two of the four early voting states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada). And they had to have visited two of those states at least once.

• Those Republican rules were designed to keep many candidates in the large field offstage. But CNN’s starkly different Democratic rules have seemingly been deliberately designed in hopes of coaxing one potential candidate in particular — Biden — onstage.

=> ↺ Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders can’t save America

• Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky’s chief preoccupations has been questioning — and urging us to question — the assumptions and norms that govern our society.

• Following a talk on power, ideology, and US foreign policy last weekend at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change.

• For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, “is a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.” It is not implemented, Chomsky says, “because of any economic laws.” American capitalism also benefits from ideological obfuscation: despite its association with free markets, capitalism is shot through with subsidies for some of the most powerful private actors. This bubble needs popping too.

=> ↺ Fox News Doc Defends Ben Carson By Criticizing German Jews For Failing To Resist The Nazis

• Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow is defending Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s controversial remarks that fewer people would have been killed in the Holocaust had they been armed by criticizing German Jews for not having “more actively resisted” the Nazis.

• Carson sparked an outcry after he claimed the outcome of the Holocaust “would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.” Carson has stood by his comments. The Anti-Defamation League called Carson’s remarks “historically inaccurate.”

• In an October 9 FoxNews.com piece, Ablow defended Carson’s comments by asserting, “If Jews in Germany had more actively resisted the Nazi party or the Nazi regime and had diagnosed it as a malignant and deadly cancer from the start, there would, indeed, have been a chance for the people of that country and the world to be moved to action by their bold refusal to be enslaved.”

Censorship

=> ↺ Reporters in Latin America face worse censorship, violence: IAPA

• Conditions for reporters are more challenging than ever in Latin America, where they face increasing government repression and spiraling violence, the region’s leading journalism advocacy group said Tuesday.

• The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) issued its grim assessment about the state of the profession in the region, as it wrapped up a five-day general assembly meeting in Charleston, South Carolina.

=> ↺ Venezuela’s Censorship Goes from Bad to Worse

• The state of free speech in Venezuela has worsened over the last year, and the few remaining independent media outlets are under attack by the government. This according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which convened its 71st General Assembly of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) in South Carolina on Friday, October 2.

=> ↺ Leaked TPP Intellectual Property Chapter Spells Doom for Free Speech Online

=> ↺ Amos Yee’s appeal to overturn conviction and jail term dismissed

• Teen blogger Amos Yee had an appeal against his prior conviction and jail sentence dismissed by the High Court on Thursday (Oct 8).

• Yee was expected to attend the hearing for his appeal to be heard, but did not show up. His lawyer, Mr Alfred Dodwell, who filed the notice of appeal on Jul 9, was present.

• Justice Tay Yong Kwang decided to conduct the hearing without the 16-year-old, who has already finished serving his 4-week prison sentence. Following a hearing that lasted about two hours, the appeal was dismissed.

=> ↺ High Court dismisses teen blogger Amos Yee’s appeal against conviction and sentence

=> ↺ Singapore court dismisses Amos Yee’s appeal against conviction and sentence

• Blogger Amos Yee’s appeal against his conviction and jail sentence was dismissed by the High Court on Thursday.

• Yee, who had filed a notice of appeal through his lawyer Alfred Dodwell on July 9, was not present during the hearing.

• The 16-year-old was found guilty on May 12 – after a two-day trial – of intending to wound the religious feelings of Christians in a video, as well as of uploading an obscene image onto his blog.

=> ↺ Singapore’s court dismisses blogger’s appeal vs conviction, sentence

• The 16-year-old was found guilty on May 12—after a two-day trial—of intending to wound the religious feelings of Christians in a video, as well as of uploading an obscene image onto his blog.

=> ↺ High Court dismisses Amos Yee’s appeal

• Blogger Amos Yee was admonished by a High Court judge yesterday for having no regard for anyone else and using crude language to seek attention.

=> ↺ Amos Yee’s appeal dismissed

• On May 12, Yee was found guilty of electronically transmitting an obscene image of former Prime Minister (PM) Lee Kuan Yew and former British PM Margaret Thatcher, and also for uploading content online that contained remarks against Christianity.

=> ↺ Amos Yee’s ‘complete disregard for others makes sentence appropriate’

• Throwing out blogger Amos Yee’s appeal against his conviction and sentence today (Oct 8), a High Court judge said four weeks’ jail was a justified sentence for the teenager, in light of his “attitude of complete disregard for others that is hardly ever seen, whether among adults or among younger persons like him”.

=> ↺ Time to review arts regulation

• In a case which attracted much attention in Singapore, Yee, 16, was found guilty earlier this year,of making remarks intending to hurt the feelings of Christians in a video, and uploading an obscene image.

• The only reason given by MDA for the cut was that the show’s producer Artsolute had submitted the script late, and hence it “was not able to process a problematic segment and work with Artsolute to address specific content concerns”.

=> ↺ YOUR SAY: Amos Yee’s ex-bailor calls for more protection for youths

• Article 16 of the United Nations Child Rights Convention (UNCRC) states, “No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.”

=> ↺ Yee ‘openly defied directions of the court’

• They were for electronically transmitting an obscene image of late former prime minister (PM) Lee Kuan Yew and late former British PM Margaret Thatcher, and for uploading content online that contained remarks against Christianity.

=> ↺ How Amazon’s monster erotica book ban helped shape CloudFlare stance on censorship

• “I worry about Jeff Bezos’ bizarre obsession with dinosaur sex,” said Prince, towards the end of a long conversation in our New York newsroom.

• “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a chief executive — hell, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say anything like that before,” I said.

• Prince was referring to how the bookseller and online retail giant banned so-called “monster erotica,” a genre of fan-fiction revolving around fantasy-based fictional encounters with mythical or extinct creatures (including dinosaurs), which was for a time sold on its online bookstore. Amazon, according to reports, pulled hundreds of the self-published books it sold — as well as some content that fetishized incest and rape — despite “vague” guidelines by the retailer.

=> ↺ The NUS is not your mate

• The NUS has a strict No Platform policy, banning a growing list of people and organisations it deems too offensive or controversial for students to hear. The NUS does not want students to be faced with controversial opinions, and it will not allow students to form their own defence against opposing views. No Platform also forbids people with the views it deems unacceptable to run for NUS office. Apparently, the NUS doesn’t even trust its students to vote against a racist in an election campaign.

=> ↺ A student union banning an offensive ‘free speech’ magazine is not censorship

• Recently, the Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) has banned a magazine called No Offence from their Freshers’ Fair, on the grounds of it being offensive. The apparent irony of this was quickly snapped up by various national news outlets. Having spoken to some of the editors and contributors of the magazine, and having had the dubious pleasure of reading certain excerpts of it, I cannot help but be exasperated by the way in which this has played out. The OUSU statement on the issue noted “The magazine included a graphic description of an abortion, the use of an ableist slur, a celebration of colonialism, and a transphobic article. In an attempt at satire, another article suggested organising a ‘rape swagger’ – in the style of a ‘slut walk’ – in order to make rape ‘socially acceptable.’”

=> ↺ Why we must fight for free speech for people we loathe

• Indeed, many of those fighting for friends’ speech actively support restrictions on non-friends’ speech. The defenders of Bindel include people who campaigned to end Page 3. In a letter to the Observer denouncing the No Platforming of feminists, various activists and academics called for a return to that time when No Platform was ‘a tactic used against self-proclaimed fascists and Holocaust deniers’. That so many can use the language of freedom of speech to defend people they like while simultaneously giving the nod, or turning a blind eye, to the censorship of people they don’t like – fascists, sexists, Islamists, pornographers – should leave no doubt that we are not witnessing a new fight for freedom of speech. If anything, the ideal of freedom of speech is being damaged, badly, by those who use the language of freedom in the pursuit of the very narrow, self-serving aim of preserving their own political influence.

=> ↺ Julie Bindel banned from appearing at censorship debate over ‘dangerous’ trans views

• Two speakers at a debate on feminism and censorship have been banned from appearing at the University of Manchester.

=> ↺ Radical feminist and gay conservative banned from speaking at Manchester SU debate on free speech

• Radical feminist Julie Bindel and rightwing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos have been banned from speaking at a Manchester Students’ Union debate on free speech.

=> ↺ Radical feminist and gay conservative banned from speaking at Manchester SU debate on free speech

• They were due to debate at an event being held by the Free Speech and Secular Society – titled ‘From liberation to censorship: does modern feminism have a problem with free speech?’ – the irony of which has not gone unnoticed by critics.

• However, the president of the society, Leonardo Carella does not believe the reaction of the union answers the question posed by the debate.

=> ↺ Feminist barred from university debate on free speech because of her ‘abhorrent’ views about transsexuals

=> ↺ Student union bans speakers from free speech event

=> ↺ Journalists banned from U.K. university’s debate on censorship

=> ↺ How a Gay Conservative and Radical Feminist Were Banned From a College’s Feminism Debate

=> ↺ University Bars Two Reporters — One a Gay Conservative, the Other a Lesbian Feminist Activist — From a Debate on Feminism and Censorship

=> ↺ Conservative Journalist Banned From Participating in University Debate on Censorship

=> ↺ Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos Banned from University Debate About… Censorship

=> ↺ Petition launched to allow secular activist Maryam Namazie’s speech at Warwick University, following ‘ban’

=> ↺ Student union blocks speech by ‘inflammatory’ anti-sharia activist

=> ↺ Lenkiewicz play cancellation sparks censorship row

• An independent girls’ school in Ipswich has ignited a censorship row after it pulled a Rebecca Lenkiewicz play due to “grave reservations” over its portrayal of child sex abuse.

• Censorship campaigners claim the move is part of worrying trend among schools and other education bodies to cancel productions that deal with controversial subjects. The news marks the second time a school has pulled out of a theatre production this year, after Raines Foundation Upper School in Bethnal Green withdrew from National Youth Theatre production Homegrown – which was later cancelled altogether.

=> ↺ Report: Apple Blocking Apple News in China

• You can only officially download the Apple News app if you’re in the United States right now. Though the app is also being tested elsewhere—Britain and Australia—it’s predominantly U.S.-only at the moment.

• That’s not to say that you can’t access Apple News if you’re from the United States and you’re traveling abroad. Well. Sort-of. According to a report from The New York Times, Apple has allegedly turned off Apple News for anyone in China. You can open up the app without any issue if you happen to have it, but Apple News will time out before a single headline arrives on your iOS device: “Can’t refresh right now. News isn’t supported in your current region,” reads the resulting error message.

=> ↺ Music in Exile Fund launched by Index on Censorship and UK film producers

• Freedom of expression campaigners Index on Censorship and the producers of award-winning documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First are delighted to announce the launch of a new fund to support musicians facing censorship globally.

• [...]

• Songhoy Blues, who feature in They Will Have To Kill Us First, were nominated for the arts category of the Index Freedom of Expression Awards in 2015. Index’s current arts award fellow is Mouad Belghouat, a Moroccan rapper who releases music as El Haqed. His music publicises widespread poverty and rails against endemic government corruption in Morocco, where he is banned from performing publicly.

=> ↺ Censorship Statistics: INFOGRAPHIC

• Banned Books Week 2015 may have come to an end, but censorship is still alive and well. The team at the Simply Novel Teachers Blog has created an infographic on “Banned and Challenged Books by the Numbers.”

=> ↺ Challenged and Banned Books – By the Numbers – Infographic

=> ↺ Self-censorship exists in HK news media, poll finds

• Hong Kong’s news media has had its general credibility rating improve slightly to 5.86 out of a maximum of 10, according to a survey by the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

=> ↺ Academics and students march in Hong Kong against ‘Beijing crackdown’

• More than 1,000 students and faculty members have marched through one of Hong Kong’s leading universities in silence to protest against what they describe as an intensifying Beijing-backed assault on academic freedoms.

=> ↺ 55% believe local news media have practiced self-censorship, according to HKU survey

=> ↺ Post-handover high on self-censor fears

=> ↺ MEGADETH’s Beijing Concert Ends Abruptly, Allegedly Due To Censorship (CONFIRMED!)

=> ↺ Megadeth Cut Concert Short Due To Government Censorship?: Megadeth News

=> ↺ Megadeth’s Beijing Show Canceled By Censorship Officials

• During their show in Beijing on October 6th, Megadeth was abruptly canceled only an hour into their performance allegedly because of Chinese Censorship Officials.

=> ↺ MEGADETH’s Concert In Beijing Ends Abruptly After One Hour

• According to The Beijinger, MEGADETH’s October 6 concert at the MasterCard Center in Beijing, China ended abruptly after only an hour, possibly due to the band being censored by officials.

=> ↺ Censoring Islam in Georgia?

• Some disturbing news out of Georgia this week after parents in bucolic Walton County got fired up about their children learning about Islam in public schools. In response to the controversy, the Georgia Department of Education removed a program guide called “Respecting Beliefs” that was part of its statewide middle school requirements.

=> ↺ Members of targeted media assemble in face of censorship

• Journalists from various points on the political spectrum who have been targeted by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) convened with press unions at the Press Museum in İstanbul on Tuesday to discuss ways to fight censorship.

=> ↺ Criticism hails at Digiturk over censorship from across the political divide

=> ↺ Turkey’s CHP cancelling all Digiturk subscriptions over pro-gov’t censorship

=> ↺ Boycott of Digiturk for dropping 7 stations prompts widespread cancelation of subscriptions

=> ↺ Macedonia ‘Censorship Bill’ Shelved Amid Protests

• The Macedonian Parliament has confirmed a controversial government-backed bill that would have criminalised the publication of material related to allegations of mass unlawful wiretapping has been withdrawn.

• Parliament announced the bill had been withdrawn in a written statement issued late Wednesday evening, as hundreds of demonstrators rallied outside the parliament building in the capital city Skopje.

• Breaches of the proposed law would have been punishable by up to four years in jail.

• Claims of mass unlawful surveillance emerged after opposition leaders began publishing recordings in February that they say reveal the government’s direct involvement in election fraud, the justice system and the media.

=> ↺ Hopkins Feminists advocates censorship

• Hopkins Feminists attempts character assassination of Alan Dershowitz prior to his planned speech

=> ↺ Thailand must stop online royal slurs says PM amid censorship outcry

• Friday said the kingdom must counter online dissent and royal defamation as public outcry mounts over junta plans to launch a single Internet gateway that critics say will muzzle the web.

=> ↺ To be or not to be: The great firewall of Thailand

• Tucked away in a coffee shop near Central Bangkok, Phannee Naksuk rushed behind her counter, sprinkling cinnamon on the foam of an iced latte that was beginning to wilt. All around, her dozen customers were stuck on smartphones or laptops, their faces illuminated in faint blue light inside the shady shop.

=> ↺ Thailand’s gamers fight to save the open internet

• Thailand’s military junta has already banned Facebook (a few times), Bitcoin and the game Tropico, but that’s not enough for the censor-happy dictatorship. The nation is now kicking around the idea of a single gateway — effectively one internet connection between Thailand and the rest of the world. With that in place, the government would have complete control over the country’s internet traffic, making censorship and surveillance a breeze. Naturally, this so-called Great Firewall of Thailand isn’t something that its citizens are taking lying down, which is why several government websites were taken down in a co-ordinated DDoS attack last week.

=> ↺ Instagram CEO Says Apple Guidelines Don’t Allow App to #FreetheNipple

• Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom has responded to the #FreetheNipple movement – he says it’s Apple that requires women’s nipples to be censored on the photo app.

=> ↺ Instagram Blames Apple For Nipple Ban And Censorship

• According to Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s CEO, Apple’s App store has stringent policies when it comes to inappropriate content. Speaking at a Dazed Media event last week, he explained that if Instagram breaks these rules in any way, such as allowing the posting of nipples, the app runs the risk of being banned by the store.

=> ↺ Leos Carax calls nudity censorship ‘childish’

• French director Leos Carax of “Boy Meets Girl” on Wednesday denounced the blurring of genitalia in Korean and Japanese cinema as “childish,” illustrating the wide gap that persists among censorship practices around the world.

=> ↺ Government censorship of the media in Hungary: The case of HírTV

• Péter Tarr is the deputy director of the right-leaning HírTV cable television news network, which was established in 2003 as Hungary’s first 24/7 news channel. Back in February, the station’s owner, Lajos Simicska, had a very public and profanity-laced falling out with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and after that happened, HírTV journalists and staff, once the media darlings of the Orbán government, collectively became persona non grata in Fidesz circles. They were seen as traitors and enemies, nearly as bad as those independent journalists who the government labels with career-ending markers, such as “liberal” or “left-liberal.” This week, Mr. Tarr shared some insight into how HírTV was forced to make the transition from a station where government officials would intervene on a regular basis in programming decisions and would lecture journalists on how to do their job, to a news network that today is seen by the regime as being a tool of the opposition.

=> ↺ Jail accused of censorship, lawsuit filed

• A Winchester jail is being sued over alleged censorship of inmates’ magazines

=> ↺ Syria: Disclose whereabouts of detained freedom of expression advocate

• Syria’s authorities should immediately reveal the whereabouts of Bassel Khartabil, a software developer and defender of freedom of expression, 31 organizations said today. Syrian authorities transferred Khartabil, who has been detained since 2012, from Adra central prison to an undisclosed location on October 3, 2015.

• Khartabil managed to inform his family on October 3 that security officers had ordered him to pack but did not reveal his destination. His family has not received any official information but believe based on unconfirmed information they received that he may have been transferred to the military-run field court inside the Military Police base in Qaboun.

=> ↺ Column: Trigger warnings are about common decency, not censorship

• A TV show advising its viewers to use discretion when viewing shows that have potentially disturbing material is not censorship. Letter ratings on films are not censorship.

• A two-sentence warning at the beginning of an opinion article, warning readers about potentially traumatic material contained within is not censorship.

=> ↺ Russia’s targeting of NGOs ensnares journalist associations

• Most of the Russian NGOs defending freedom of the press are blacklisted as “foreign agents”, while facing excessive pressure for non-compliance, writes Mapping Media Freedom correspondent Andrey Kalikh

=> ↺ Freelance journalists in Belarus face fines for working with foreign media

=> ↺ Censorship a form of abuse of power

=> ↺ Chrome and Firefox Block KickassTorrents Over “Harmful Programs”

• Chrome and Firefox are actively blocking direct access to the popular torrent site KickassTorrents. According to Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostics service the site contains “harmful programs,” most likely triggered by malicious advertisements running on Kat.cr.

=> ↺ Toronto Sun: We Value Criticism And The Voice Of The Reader So Much, We’re Killing Both

• The Toronto Sun is the latest to join what’s now a massive trend, a note to readers proclaiming that the paper is regretfully killing its news comment section because the paper just can’t figure out how to interact with human beings in the digital age, and would like to roll the clock back to an era where only editor-approved thinking reaches the readers’ eye.

Privacy

=> ↺ Snooper Charter Strikes Back event success

• Earlier in the week we had the pleasure of entraining Jim Killock, ORG’s executive director, ahead of a workshop on talking you MP about intrusive surveillance.

• Jim bought us entertainingly up to date with the current thinking around the still-under-wraps government plans for wide-ranging updates to their subservience powers. Happy to take questions, Jim elaborated a number of points with us, including explaining a bit about what ORG’s plans are, which led neatly into the other half of the evening, but not before everyone had a well deserved tea break.

=> ↺ Everything You Need to Know About AOL’s Zombie Apocalypse

• America Online (AOL) will be resurrecting Verizon’s zombie cookies because they are fabulous data-trackers that cannot be “killed”.

=> ↺ Obama administration opts not to force firms to decrypt data — for now

• After months of deliberation, the Obama administration has made a long-awaited decision on the thorny issue of how to deal with encrypted communications: It will not — for now — call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement.

=> ↺ Turnbull: Don’t assume government email is more secure than private email

• Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull responded to concerns over the use of his own private email server by saying politicians use insecure communication all the time.

=> ↺ Chinese Credit Scoring System Smacks Of Censorship

• Rogier Creemers, a China-specialist with Oxford University, told ComputerWorld, “With the help of the latest internet technologies the government wants to exercise individual surveillance. Government and big internet companies in China can exploit ‘Big Data’ together in a way that is unimaginable in the West.”

=> ↺ China’s new credit reports are the government’s latest censorship tool

• Chinese Internet users now have one more reason to look over their digital shoulders at the government’s nearly inescapable surveillance and censorship regime.

=> ↺ ACLU: Orwellian Citizen Score, China’s credit score system, is a warning for Americans

• Gamer? Strike. Bad-mouthed the government in comments on social media? Strike. Even if you don’t buy video games and you don’t post political comments online “without prior permission,” but any of your online friends do….strike. The strikes are actually more like dings, dings to your falling credit score that is.

• Thanks to a new terrifying use of big data, a credit score can be adversely affected by your hobbies, shopping habits, lifestyles, what you read online, what you post online, your political opinions as well as what your social connections do, say, read, buy or post. While you might never imagine such a credit-rating system in America, it is happening in China and the ACLU said it serves as a warning for Americans.

=> ↺ White House Takes The Cowardly Option: Refuses To Say No To Encryption Backdoors, Will Quietly Ask Companies

• Last month, we wrote about a document leaked to the Washington Post that showed the three “options” that the White House was considering for responding to the debate about backdooring encryption. The document made it clear that the White House knew that there was zero chance that any legislation mandating encryption backdoors would pass. But the question then was what to do about it: take a strong stand on the importance of freedom and privacy, and make it clear that the US would not mandate backdoors… or take the sleazy way out and say “no new legislation for now.” As we said at the time, option 1 was the only real option. You take a stand. You talk about the importance of encryption in protecting the public.

=> ↺ European Supreme Court: Because of NSA, U.S. Corporations Have No Self-Agency To Agree To Privacy Obligations

• This week, the European Court of Justice – the highest court in the European Union – declared that US companies may not transmit private sensitive personal data out of Europe to the United States for processing as they have up until now. It was a cancellation of the so-called Safe Harbor agreement, where U.S. companies self-declare that they meet certain European privacy standards. But the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) reason for declaring Safe Harbor null and void goes far beyond the cancellation as such – it says that U.S. companies don’t have agency to make any such promises of any kind in the first place, contractual or unilateral, not now, not ever, as long as the NSA operates.

=> ↺ Tech companies like Facebook not above the law, says Max Schrems

• The EU’s safe harbour ruling is a “puzzle piece in the fight against mass surveillance, and a huge blow to tech companies who think they can act in total ignorance of the law,” says Max Schrems, the man who brought the case.

• “US companies are realising that European laws are getting more and more enforced. But still, people don’t believe that a court would order Google or Facebook to do something – they wouldn’t dare. Well, yes, they fucking would,” he said, speaking in Vienna.

=> ↺ How much money do you make for Facebook?

• How much do you estimate you’re worth to Facebook? If you live in America, it’s a lot more than if you’re a resident of the UK or other countries.

• US Facebook users generate the site on average four times more advertising revenue than users outside of the country, making around $48.76 per year per user as opposed to $7.71, according to market research firm eMarketer.

• The firm predicts revenue is set to rise to $61.06 in 2016 before reaching $73.29 the following year. Non-US users meanwhile, are expected to rise to $9.26 and $10.79 respectively.

=> ↺ The node pole: inside Facebook’s Swedish hub near the Arctic Circle

• From the outside, it looks like an enormous grey warehouse. Inside, there is a hint of the movie Bladerunner: long cavernous corridors, spinning computer servers with flashing blue lights and the hum of giant fans. There is also a long perimeter fence. Is its job to thwart corporate spies? No – it keeps out the moose.

=> ↺ EU-US Safe Harbour For Personal Data Eliminated

• The European Court of Justice (CJEU) handed down a decision declaring EU-US safe harbour for personal data invalid this morning. It has far-reaching implications for cloud services in particular and may presage increased opportunity for open source solutions from non-US suppliers. Looks like a real gift to companies like Kolab.

=> ↺ Facebook: I want out

• Two weeks ago, on my birthday, I decided to check Facebook for birthday wishes because I was having a crappy birthday. It became much worse when Facebook did two things. First, it informed me it had removed an image posted to my timeline based on violating its nudity/obscenity policy — though I had not posted an image, only a link to a post in which I wrote about a new documentary on identity and the gender binary (my link was posted with an NSFW warning). No image. I’ve been around the internet a long time, and I’ve been censored — mostly under inaccurate circumstances — by everyone from the government of Libya to Flickr, feminists and Christian conservatives alike, and Facebook too, when a religious organization campaigned to (successfully) get one of my pages removed on false pretenses.

=> ↺ Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads. Hasn’t worked out that way.

• Fake traffic has become a commodity. There’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it. Some companies pay for it intentionally, some accidentally, and some prefer not to ask where their traffic comes from. It’s given rise to an industry of countermeasures, which inspire counter-countermeasures. “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole,” says Fernando Arriola, vice president for media and integration at ConAgra Foods. Consumers, meanwhile, to the extent they pay attention to targeted ads at all, hate them: The top paid iPhone app on Apple’s App Store is an ad blocker.

=> ↺ Stealing fingerprints

• The news from the Office of Personnel Management hack keeps getting worse. In addition to the personal records of over 20 million US government employees, we’ve now learned that the hackers stole fingerprint files for 5.6 million of them.

=> ↺ GCHQ tried to track Web visits of “every visible user on Internet”

=> ↺ GCHQ’s Karma Police: Tracking And Profiling Every Web User, Every Website

• As of 2012, GCHQ was storing about 50 billion metadata records about online communications and Web browsing activity every day, with plans in place to boost capacity to 100 billion daily by the end of that year. The agency, under cover of secrecy, was working to create what it said would soon be the biggest government surveillance system anywhere in the world.

• That’s around 36 trillion metadata records gathered in 2012 alone — and it’s probably even higher now. As Techdirt has covered previously, intelligence agencies like to say this is “just” metadata — skating over the fact that metadata is actually much more revealing than traditional content because it is much easier to combine and analyze. An important document released by The Intercept with this story tells us exactly what GCHQ considers to be metadata, and what it says is content. It’s called the “Content-Metadata Matrix,” and reveals that as far as GCHQ is concerned, “authentication data to a communcations service: login ID, userid, password” are all considered to be metadata, which means GCHQ believes it can legally swipe and store them. Of course, intercepting your login credentials is a good example of why GCHQ’s line that it’s “only metadata” is ridiculous: doing so gives them access to everything you have and do on that service.

=> ↺ Facebook Ads Are All-Knowing, Unblockable, and in Everyone’s Phone

• Sheryl Sandberg’s top concern as she prepares for New York’s largest annual gathering of advertising and media executives this week has nothing to do with ad-blocking software or click fraud. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, can brag to Advertising Week attendees about how the world’s largest social network is largely immune to forces that have sent Internet and publishing companies into a panic. But Sandberg is losing her voice, so her pitch will need to be succinct.

• Between sips of strawberry water at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, Sandberg explains how Facebook has avoided controversies around online advertising with its emphasis on a single account tied to a user’s real-world identity and subtle ads that can be easily scrolled past if the user isn’t interested. What advertisers want, according to a raspy-voiced Sandberg, is “to reach people in a way that feels good, that’s not intrusive.” The argument ignores that Facebook trackers are just about everywhere on the Internet. But because most of Facebook’s 1.49 billion users routinely access the service through an app, the ads cannot be hidden using one of the many blocker tools now topping the download charts on Apple’s App Store.

=> ↺ CityNews investigation: Prison cellphone surveillance may have hit nearby homes

• A CityNews investigation reveals Correctional Services Canada (CSC) introduced super surveillance technology in at least one federal institution this winter; capturing calls and texts made from inside the jail, the visitor parking lot and, potentially, passing drivers and residents who live in close proximity to the institution.

• “We understand and believe there’s really been a breach of privacy. These were personal cell phones and personal calls. We’re looking at it from a legal aspect,” the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers’ Jason Godin told CityNews.

• A confidential Sept. 17, 2015 email sent by Warkworth Institution’s warden Scott Thompson to staff at the Campbellford-area prison, and obtained by CityNews, details how the technology captures these conversations.

=> ↺ How I hacked my IP camera, and found this backdoor account

• The time has come. I bought my second IoT device – in the form of a cheap IP camera. As it was the cheapest among all others, my expectations regarding security was low. But this camera was still able to surprise me.

• Maybe I will disclose the camera model used in my hack in this blog later, but first I will try to contact someone regarding these issues. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of different cameras have this problem, because they share being developed on the same SDK. Again, my expectations are low on this.

=> ↺ “Snowden Treaty” proposed to curtail mass surveillance and protect whistleblowers

• A “Snowden Treaty” designed to counter mass surveillance and protect whistleblowers around the world has been proposed by Edward Snowden, and three of the people most closely associated with his leaks: the documentary film-maker Laura Poitras; David Miranda, who was detained at Heathrow airport, and is the Brazilian coordinator of the campaign to give asylum to Snowden in Brazil; and his partner, the journalist Glenn Greenwald. The “International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers,” to give it its full title, was launched yesterday in New York by Miranda, with Snowden and Greenwald speaking via video.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ NRA’s Ted Nugent Calls Unarmed Victims Of Gun Violence “Losers”

• National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent said “losers” who don’t carry a gun “get cut down by murderous maniacs like blind sheep to slaughter” in a column for WND, becoming the latest public conservative figure to blame victims of gun violence who are unarmed.

=> ↺ Locked Out Of The Sixth Amendment By Proprietary Forensic Software

• Everything tied to securing convictions seems to suffer from pervasive flaws compounded by confirmation bias. For four decades, the DOJ presented hair analysis as an unique identifier on par with fingerprints or DNA when it wasn’t. A 2014 Inspector General’s report found the FBI still hadn’t gotten around to correcting forensic lab issues it had pointed out nearly 20 years earlier. This contributed to two decades of “experts” providing testimony that greatly overstated the results of hair analysis. All of this happened in the FBI’s closed system, a place outsiders aren’t allowed to examine firsthand.

• That’s the IRL version. The software version is just as suspect. Computers aren’t infallible and the people running them definitely aren’t. If the software cannot be inspected, the statements of expert witnesses should be considered highly dubious. After all, most expert witnesses representing the government have a vested interest in portraying forensic evidence as bulletproof. Without access to forensic software code, no one will ever be able to prove them wrong.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia’s troubling death sentence

• On September 14, local media reported that an appeals court and Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence of Ali al-Nimr for participating in protests four years ago. He was 16 at the time. Today, he awaits the execution of his sentence, which stipulates that al-Nimr should be beheaded and that his headless body should be strung up for public display.

=> ↺ Saudi employer chops off Indian woman’s hand, Delhi seeks action

• Kasturi, 50, is currently undergoing treatment at a hospital in Riyadh, her sister Vijayakumari told The Indian Express from their home in Vellore district.

=> ↺ India woman’s arm ‘cut off by employer’ in Saudi Arabia

• India’s foreign ministry has complained to the Saudi Arabian authorities following an alleged “brutal” attack on a 58-year-old Indian woman in Riyadh.

• Kasturi Munirathinam’s right arm was chopped off, allegedly by her employer, when she tried to escape from their house last week, reports say.

=> ↺ UK and Saudi Arabia ‘in secret deal’ over human rights council place

• Leaked documents suggest vote-trading deal was conducted to enable nations to secure a seat at UN’s influential body

=> ↺ ‘UK did secret Saudi deal on human rights’: Cables allege Britain approached Gulf State about vote trade to support each other’s election to UN council

• Britain has been accused of backing Saudi Arabia’s election to the United Nations top human right’s body as part of a vote trading deal – despite the Gulf State’s appalling abuse record.

• Secret cables reportedly show that Britain approached Saudi Arabia about the trade ahead of the 2013 election for membership of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

• The Saudi regime has shameful record on human rights and has executed 135 people since January on charges ranging from murder to witchcraft.

=> ↺ Matthew Keys’ Hacking Conviction May Not Survive an Appeal

• The conviction of former Reuters employee Matthew Keys on hacking charges this week has renewed focus on a controversial federal law that many say prosecutors are using incorrectly and too broadly to inflate cases and trump up charges.

• The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, is a federal law that was designed to target malicious hackers who obtain unauthorized access to protected computers. But judges have used it in a number of controversial cases to, for example, prosecute and convict a woman for violating MySpace’s user agreement, and to convict a former Korn/Ferry International employee for violating his employer’s computer use policy. It was also used to indict internet activist Aaron Swartz for downloading scholarly articles that he was authorized to access.

=> ↺ In The Post-Ferguson World, Cops Are Now Victims And It’s The Public That’s Going To Pay The Price

• There’s a new narrative out there — one that’s being repeated by campaigning politicians and buttressed by fearful news reports. Apparently, the public has declared war on law enforcement. Each shooting of a police officer is presented as evidence that it’s open season on cops. Officers aren’t simply killed. They’re “targeted.” The problem is, the stats don’t back this up.

=> ↺ 71% Of Americans Oppose Civil Asset Forfeiture. Too Bad Their Representatives Don’t Care.

• Most Americans haven’t even heard of civil asset forfeiture. This is why the programs have run unchallenged for so many years. An uninformed electorate isn’t a vehicle for change. This issue is still a long way away from critical mass.

• Without critical mass, there’s little chance those who profit from it will lose their power over state and federal legislatures. Forfeiture programs are under more scrutiny these days, but attempts to roll back these powers, or introduce conviction requirements, have been met with resistance from law enforcement agencies and police unions — entities whose opinions are generally respected far more than the public’s.

• California’s attempt to institute a conviction requirement met with pushback from a unified front of law enforcement groups. Despite nearly unanimous support by legislators, the bill didn’t survive the law enforcement lobby’s last-minute blitz. They also had assistance from the Department of Justice, which pointed out how much money agencies would be giving up by effectively cutting off their connection with federal agencies if the bill was passed.

=> ↺ H&M features its first Muslim model in a hijab

• Twenty-three year old Mariah Idrissi is the first Muslim woman in a hijab to be featured by world’s second largest fashion store

=> ↺ America’s most secretive court invites its first outsider

• A well-known Washington, DC lawyer has been appointed to be the first of a total of five amici curae—friends of the court—who will act as a sort of ombudsman or public advocate at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

• The move was one of the provisions in the USA Freedom Act, which passed in June 2015 as a package of modest reforms to the national security system.

• The attorney, Preston Burton, was named to the post by the FISC earlier this month, which was not widely reported until The Intercept noticed it on Friday.

• Burton was likely selected because he has dealt with many security-related cases in the past, including former CIA intelligence agent Aldrich H. Ames, and former FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen. In addition, according to his own biography, he “has held a Top Secret/SCI level security clearance at numerous points in his career,” which he will likely need again.

=> ↺ Facebook ‘unfriending’ can constitute workplace bullying, Australian tribunal finds

• Australia’s workplace tribunal ruled that a woman was bullied after she was unfriended on Facebook following work dispute

=> ↺ Absolutely Egregious: Man Jailed For Unpaid Traffic Ticket Gets Ignored Until He Dies In Custody

• This is so terrible. The guy — from a Detroit area suburb — is off his addiction-treatment meds and in withdrawal, and, at one point, lies under his bed, clawing up at it. What kind of person looks at a human being in this condition and just leaves them in their cage?

• During his 17 days in jail, in the final days the horror of his withdrawal, he laid there on the floor for 48 hours, waiting to die — in a cell that was supposed to be specially monitored.

• This guy was not a violent criminal. He lost 50 pounds in 17 days while jailed for an unpaid ticket.

=> ↺ Selling Out and the Death of Hacker Culture

• We’ve sold each other for profit and lost what makes us happy.

=> ↺ The Jocks of Computer Code Do It for the Job Offers

Internet/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Tennessee Voraciously Defends Its Right To Let AT&T Write Awful State Broadband Laws

• After fifteen years in an apparent coma, earlier this year the FCC woke up to the fact that ISPs were effectively paying states to pass laws focused entirely on protecting uncompetitive, regional broadband duopolies. More specifically, they’ve been pushing legislation that prohibits towns and cities from improving their own broadband infrastructure — or in some cases partnering with utilities or private companies — even in areas local incumbents refused to upgrade. It’s pure protectionism, and roughly twenty states have passed such ISP-written laws nationwide.

=> ↺ Facebook Hopes Renaming Internet.org App Will Shut Net Neutrality Critics Up

• Facebook is trying its best to defuse worries that the company is trying to impose a bizarre, walled-garden vision of the Internet upon the developing world. As we’ve been discussing, Facebook’s Internet.org initiative has been under fire of late in India, where the government has been trying to not only define net neutrality, but craft useful rules. Early policy guidelines have declared Internet.org to be little more than glorified collusion, since while it does offer limited access to some free services, it involves Facebook determining which services users will be able to access (and encrypted content wasn’t on the Facebook approval list).

=> ↺ Mark Zuckerberg tells the UN: ‘the internet belongs to everyone’

• Zuck was presenting a document signed by himself as well as Bill and Melinda Gates, stating: “The internet belongs to everyone. It should be accessible by everyone.”

• [...]

• Google too has been involved in looking for ways to improve coverage in remote areas. The firm’s Project Loon works to provide internet access using weather balloons. Bill Gates slammed this project stating that it won’t uplift the poor. Something has clearly changed his mind.

=> ↺ Facebook founder calls for universal Internet to help cure global ills

• Signing on to the connectivity campaign were U2 star Bono, co-founder of One, a group that fights extreme poverty; actress Charlize Theron, founder of Africa Outreach Project; philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates; British entrepreneur Richard Branson; Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington; Colombian singer Shakira, actor and activist George Takei and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

=> ↺ Where the candidates stand on Net neutrality

• What is it about Net neutrality that invites such political posturing over a principal that enjoys huge bipartisan support among voters? While 85 percent of Republican voters oppose the creation of Internet fast lanes, presidential candidate Jeb Bush made headlines this week saying that if elected he would roll back Net neutrality rules passed under the Obama administration.

• The Open Internet regulations still face legal challenges, but the biggest threat could come in 2016. President Obama has been a firm supporter of Net neutrality rules enacted by the FCC and a sure vetoer of any attempts by Congress to undo them. But what happens with the next president — and the next FCC? The agency is directed by five commissioners appointed to five-year terms by the president, but only three commissioners may be from the same political party. The FCC approved the current rules along party lines, with a 3-2 vote, but in 2017 the next president will be in a position to appoint a new commissioner who could reverse that vote.

DRM

=> ↺ Librarian of Congress who made phone unlocking illegal retires today

• The Librarian of Congress wields a surprising amount of power over the mobile devices we use every day. Once every three years, the head of the US Library of Congress is responsible for handing out exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

=> ↺ How the DMCA may have let carmakers cheat clean air standards

• It was by sheer chance that the software “defeat device” that allowed Volkswagen to thwart emission tests on its diesel vehicles was discovered last year. The discovery came after a few university researchers tested a group of European cars made for the U.S. market.

• The West Virginia University researchers drove the vehicles for thousands of miles, testing the emissions as they went along. They weren’t expecting to discover what they did: Nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions rates 20 times the baseline set by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA).

• The university researchers reported their findings to the California Air Resources Board, which then further investigated. That ultimately led to the charges by the EPA.

=> ↺ RIAA chief says DMCA is “largely useless” to combat music piracy

• Cary Sherman, the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, has some choice words about the current state of US copyright law. He says that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, rightsholders must play a game of whack-a-mole with Internet companies to get them to remove infringing content.

• But that “never-ending game” has allowed piracy to run amok and has cheapened the legal demand for music. Sure, many Internet companies remove links under the DMCA’s “notice-and-takedown” regime. But the DMCA grants these companies, such as Google, a so-called “safe harbor”—meaning companies only have to remove infringing content upon notice from rightsholders.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Do you need permission to link? Here’s my table attempting a summary of recent CJEU case law

• Earlier this week this blog reported on the latest reference for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on hyperlinking and copyright.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Norway’s Pirate Bay Block Rendered Useless by ‘Mistake’

• Copyright holders celebrated a landmark victory early September when a Norwegian court ordered local ISPs to block the Pirate Bay. A breakthrough verdict perhaps, but one with a major flaw as the rightsholder forgot to list one of the site’s main domain names.

=> ↺ Pirate Party Runs Privacy Campaign Ads on YouPorn

• The Austrian Pirate Party is running a rather unusual advertising campaign on one of the largest Internet porn sites. Using an image of the Minister of the Interior the Pirates warn unsuspecting visitors that they might soon be being watched, a reference to a new mass surveillance proposal in Austria.

=> ↺ Piracy Isn’t Worth The Risk of Prison, Freed Cammer Says

• That urge to be first was what put Danks on the radars of FACT and then the police. After his arrest and subsequent conviction Danks was initially sent to HMP Hewell, a Category B prison in Worcestershire, later being transferred to the low-to-medium risk HMP Oakwood. But despite committing only white-collar crime, Danks was placed alongside those with a thirst for violence.

• “I was locked up with all sorts of people, including murderers, bank robbers etc. I remember one guy who I worked with in the kitchens who had been sentenced to 18 years for killing someone. He got out and within six hours was arrested again for killing his victim’s friend,” Danks explains.

=> ↺ Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg—aka Anakata—exits prison

• Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was released from a Swedish prison Saturday, three years after he began serving time for a Danish hacking conspiracy and for Swedish copyright offenses connected to the file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay.

• Warg hasn’t made any public comments following his release from Skanninge Prison in Sweden.

• But his mother chimed in on Twitter. “Yes, #anakata is free now. No more need to call for #freeanakata. Thank you everyone for your important support during these three years!”

=> ↺ Aurous Dev Fires Back at “Fearmongering, Babbling” Rightscorp

• Aurous, the music equivalent of Popcorn Time, is just two weeks away from alpha release but anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is already touting a ‘solution’ to deal with the software. Biting back, Aurous’ developer Andrew Sampson says that Rightscorp has no idea how his technology works and accuses the company of fear mongering in an attempt to get more clients.

=> ↺ Rightscorp Retains Dallas Buyers Club Copyright Troll Lawyer

• Anti-piracy monetization firm Rightscorp says it has retained a lawyer known for his work with infamous copyright troll Dallas Buyers Club. Carl Crowell, who recently claimed that it’s impossible to be anonymous using BitTorrent, will help “educate” people about the effects of piracy while suing “persistent and egregious infringers.”

=> ↺ MPAA and RIAA’s Megaupload Lawsuits Delayed Until 2016

• Megaupload has asked a federal court in Virginia to postpone its legal battles with the MPAA and RIAA while the criminal proceedings remain pending. The movie studios and recording labels haven’t objected to the request which means that it will take at least six more months before the civil cases begin.

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