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● 01.17.16

● Links 17/1/2016: 4MLinux 16.0 Beta, Black Lab Linux 8 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 5:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ We Support Linux! (Maybe)

• To my surprise, I got a reply from a representative assuring me that they were different and that they preloaded nothing unless I told them to do so and that they fully supported Linux. This person even said that the warranty was not affected.

• I inquired more only to find out that what the company actually does is to sell you a no-OS tablet and Linux can run on their hardware. They do not preload Linux (although they do preload several versions of windows) and they have drivers available. Oh, they can also save your “image” once you have succeeded installing and configuring Linux.

Desktop

=> ↺ Finding the Perfect Linux Laptop

• It looks like a fairly capable device – but, as with lots of products from Shenzen, it’s hard to get a direct price quote for the exact Ubuntu model. It appears to be reasonably compatible with the latest version of Ubuntu – but there are a few tales of woe spread around the web.

Server

=> ↺ Ocean is a Smartphone-Sized Powerful Linux Server thats Runs on Battery

• Usually servers are large machines that take up huge amounts of space on the floor or lots of space in a rack. But no more, a new Node.js Linux server has launched by iCracked for developers who want to be able to write software for Internet of Things applications and other tasks that is very small. The server is called Ocean and it is about the size of a smartphone. The small size means that you can slip the server in your pocket and carry your work with you wherever you go.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ [GIT PULL] f2fs updates for v4.5

=> ↺ Linux For Everyone! Goodwill Partnership Yields Exciting Scholarship To Teach You New Skills

• Adult students from underserved communities now have the unique opportunity to enroll in a new program launched by The Linux Foundation in partnership with Goodwill.

=> ↺ It’s Elementary My Dear, Watson!

• Linux has been around as an open-source, free operating system for quite some time. But, in 2012, auto companies started to look to standardize it for their use. More companies announced support this week, including Ford. 7 car companies are now involved, with some notable exceptions, such as the European carmakers and GM. When will automotive grade Linux come to trucks? Will it make life for a service technician any easier if all the computers have the same operating system? What will a future tech need to be? A software guy or a hardware guy? I say a systems engineer. He won’t be just fixing leaks in radiators from rocks.

=> ↺ Kabylake HDMI/DP Codec Support Comes With Sound Pull For Linux 4.5

• The sound changes are plentiful for Linux 4.5 and includes significant ALSA core improvements, ongoing Intel Skylake support work, HDMI/DP hotplug notifications for the HD-audio code, new Renesas driver features, new ASoC drivers, i915 DRM driver integration improvements for HDMI/DP audio, Kabylake HDMI/DP codec support, Firewire clean-ups and more, and a variety of other changes.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ AMD Is Planning To Support GLVND For Easier Linux Driver Setup & Maintenance

• The other follow-up question I received an answer to on Friday from AMD’s media liaison was whether the company is looking at supporting the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) to make it easier to install and maintain their user-space GL driver on Linux systems.

=> ↺ Drag-n-Drop Gets Improved Within Wayland

• Support for Drag-n-Drop (DnD) actions have been added to the Wayland protocol.

• Carlos Garnacho of GNOME developed the protocol support for adding Drag and Drop actions to Wayland. This protocol addition is meant to make Wayland DnD support closer to what’s offered in the X.Org world with the XDND protocol.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Brainstorming Further Cooling Improvements To The Linux Benchmarking Room

Applications

=> ↺ ‘TimeKpr’ A Parental Control Application for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

• Parental Control application for Linux is bit hard to find, if you encounter any then it may be outdated or just don’t work as per your wish, they just restrict internet access or sort of stuff. If someone uses your computer or you let your kids use your computer. You can restrict access for them as you want, from now you don’t have to say your kids to leave computer, Timekpr will do it better. You can call Timekpr restriction application or parental control application, whatever you like to call it.

=> ↺ Why WondershareElement Stand Out from Many PDF Editors?

• PDF file is essential document by academic research and office environment used. To convert these documents into different files, PDF editor software should be the most practical tool. Wondershare PDFelement, that willbe a superb cost effective tool that has all it takes to solve all issues that has to do with PDF files .The Wondershare PDFelement is one of the few genuine “all in one” PDF editors that supports both Mac and Windows platforms. It allows you to create, convert and edit PDF easily. It also features an OCR plug-in which is useful for editing scanned images and PDF’s. With Wondershare PDFelement, you can digitally sign, verify, stamp, watermark and password protect your PDF files.There are a whole lot of reasons that makes PDFelement one of the best PDF editors available today.

=> ↺ SMPlayer 16.1.0 Has Been Released, Bringing Fixes

=> ↺ SMPlayer 16.1 Released, Adds Video Bookmarking

• SMPlayer, the awesome MPLayer (cli) based GUI capable of playing pretty much any multimedia file, has been updated to the version 16.1 which includes a couple of minor bug fixes and a new video bookmarking feature.

=> ↺ GhostWriter 1.2.5 Is A Distraction Free Markdown Editor For Ubuntu

=> ↺ Install Cutegram 2.7.1 On The Most Popular Linux Systems

• Cutegram is an open-source Telegram application, similar to Sigram. It is developed in Qt5 and QML and uses the libqtelegram and the libappindicator libraries.

• Like other Telegram clients for Linux, it has support for Emoji, allows the users to send data by dragging it in the message window and gets integrated with the system notifications.

=> ↺ Quod Libet GTK Based Audio Player and Tag Editor for Linux

• Quod Libet is a GTK based audio player written in Python programming language, using Mutagen tagging library, it is cross-platform and available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Basically it is an audio management program, which offers several ways to manage and view your audio library and also support audio feeds. It can support libraries with tens of thousands of audio files. It also carries some additional features which should be in modern audio player: Unicode support, advanced tag editing, Replay Gain, podcasts & Internet radio, album art support and all major audio formats.

=> ↺ Are you Struggling With Finding Text In Files Or Locating Files? Try ‘Recoll’ Program In Linux

=> ↺ FFmpeg 2.8.5 Has Been Released

=> ↺ GScan2PDF 1.3.7 Has Been Released, Bringing Changes

• As you know, GScan2PDF is an app for scanning pages and exporting them to PDFs. The user can export scans one by one, in separate PDF files, or export scans all together, in one PDF.

=> ↺ MyPaint 1.2.0 Has Been Released

=> ↺ Curlew Multi-Converter Returns Back To Support Latest Ubuntu Versions

• Curlew is a multi-converter program that depends on ffmpeg/avconv/mencoder to perform its functionality. It is free, open source and easy to use rich format multimedia converter written in GTK3 and Python programming language.

=> ↺ Open Source Wealth Management

• This is a brief look at an Open Source wealth management platform. It is not an in depth review, merely a brief description of what I understand the scope of the project to be and pointers to more information.

=> ↺ Steel, Password Managing the CLI Way

• One thing that’s probably obvious to anyone who’s read more than a few Linux Rain articles is that we appreciate the CLI (command-line interface). Graphical programs and utilities are great and there are some fantastic examples of those out there, not to mention new ones being created all the time. But the CLI will always have a place for those who feel comfortable using it and appreciate the power and lightweight nature of the interface. So if you’re looking for a password manager for the command-line, Steel is one such example we’re taking a look at today.

=> ↺ MyPaint 1.2.0 Open Source Digital Painting Tool Is Out After Three Years of Development

• MyPaint developer Andrew Chadwick reports on January 15, 2016, that his MyPaint free, open-source and cross-platform digital painting software reached version 1.2.0 for all supported operating systems, including Linux, Mac and Windows.

Proprietary

=> ↺ FlexiHub – Access and manage remote USB and Serial port devices from anywhere

• For our lab remote applications always were/are/will handy to manage our connection, I know there are many ways to manage your remote devices but some of them are complex and rest do not work well with all operating systems, once my professor said “Don’t reinvent the wheel if it is already invented, just use what is available that fits your requirements and save time”, well this debate could go long and I don’t want to go into this discussion.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Disassembling NWScript bytecode with the open source project ‘xoreos’

=> ↺ Installing sbopkg with Slackware 14.1

• One of the more frequently voiced complaints you will hear about Slackware is that it has a limited number of software packages available. There is a fair amount of truth in this claim, as my full install of Slackware 14.1 has just over 1200 packages installed.

=> ↺ How To Install Curlew 2.0 Beta On Ubuntu Systems

=> ↺ How to Find Out Top Directories and Files (Disk Space) in Linux

=> ↺ In full tinfoil hat mode: Using GPG with smartcards

=> ↺ Shadow Icons Looks Great With All Themes, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

=> ↺ How to install and configure vsftpd with TLS on Debian 8 (Jessie)

=> ↺ How to paste password easily when pasting into password input fields disabled on Google Chrome

=> ↺ Install Snapcraft 1.0 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint And Elementary OS Systems

=> ↺ How To Install Calibre 2.49 on Ubuntu 15.10 via PPA

=> ↺ Sending & Receiving SMS on Linux

=> ↺ How to Start/Stop and Enable/Disable FirewallD and Iptables Firewall in Linux

=> ↺ How to Encrypt your Data with EncFS on Debian 8 (Jessie)

=> ↺ How to Track Business or Personal Expenses Using GnuCash (Accounting Software) in Linux

=> ↺ [Last month] 10 Free Online Resources for Learning Linux

=> ↺ How to search multiple pdf documents for words on Linux

=> ↺ Managing my books

=> ↺ SSH tunnelling for fun and profit: Tunnel options

=> ↺ How to Disable/Lock or Blacklist Package Updates using Apt Tool

=> ↺ ngrep Cheat Sheet with examples

=> ↺ Install and Configure Caching-Only DNS Server in RHEL/CentOS 7

=> ↺ Updating your server BIOS using FreeDOS and GRUB

=> ↺ Create & Restore VM Snapshot in VirtualBox on Ubuntu Linux

=> ↺ 4 Ways to Disable/Lock Certain Package Updates Using Yum Command

=> ↺ How To Install OpenLP 2.2.1 On Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ ReactOS 0.4 RC2 Released For The Latest Windows-Compatible OS Experience

• One month after releasing ReactOS 0.4.0 RC1, the second release candidate is now available of this next ReactOS update that continues marching towards a Windows ABI compatible operating system for applications and drivers.

=> ↺ PlayStation 2 Emulator ‘PCSX2′ New Version Released, Install In Ubuntu/Linux Mint Via PPA

• PCSX2 is a PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows and Linux. It was started by the team behind PCSX (an emulator for the original PlayStation) back in 2002, and as of early 2012 development is still active. The emulator achieved playable speeds only by mid-2007 and subsequent versions have improved speed and compatibility making it both the ultimate solution for PS2 emulation and the instrument to keep and preserve the PS2 legacy in the modern world. Though not yet perfect the program can successfully emulate most commercial PS2 games at playable speeds and good visuals (often better than the original PS2). The project is open source, and it is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3. Currently up to 3 cores are supported (2 cores and an additional one if the new MTVU speed hack is used). To make PCSX2 efficiently use 4 or more cores will require major code changes. PCSX2 only uses 2 cores,so if you have more the CPU usage will be way less 100%. Even if you have exactly 2 cores, the emulator will not cause 100% CPU usage because of the way threading works. This does NOT mean PCSX2 isn’t using the full power of your CPU, it is normal.

Games

=> ↺ My Experiences with Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut On Linux

• Wasteland 2: DC is not a “new game”, its been available on Linux since October. But I wanted to call attention to it, partially due to problems I had running it, and partially due to my rather lackluster impression from Fallout 4.

• Testing was done on Fedora 23 with Linux kernel 4.2.8, Mesa 11.1, with both the Intel and RadeonSI Drivers, using the latest GOG version of the game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Guest Blog: Dolphin Survey

=> ↺ Call for Testers for Plasma 5.5.3 on Kubuntu Wily (15.10)

=> ↺ OpenShot 2.0 Beta Released!

=> ↺ OpenShot 2.0 – Beta Released!

=> ↺ digiKam Recipes 4.9.9 Released

• A new release of digiKam Recipes is ready for your reading pleasure. This version adds two new recipes: Chroma Subsampling Explained (tucked under Configure digiKam) and Create Embeddable Maps with digiKam and uMap. That’s all there is to it this time around.

=> ↺ KDE Partition Manager 2.0.0

=> ↺ Plasma 5.5.3, Applications 15.12.1 and Frameworks 5.18.0 by KDE now available

• The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users.

• Plasma releases now follow a new schedule, with fast early bugfix releases that gradually become less frequent. Plasma 5.5.3 includes bugfixes and new translations with the changes being ‘typically small but important’.

=> ↺ Akregator

• Long time ago I worked on akregator2 (a akregator based on akonadi) but it was never released and there is no future for it.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Cruising Altitudes…

• Breaking up in pieces, First I divided the data into parts. Each part is associated with corresponding page which is to be printed. From that I get number of pages which will be required and then actual printing took place in draw-page call. The understanding of GTK Print API helped me. Begin-print signal is the one which is emitted when user is done with page setup ,but before rendering starts. All the calculations done to divide the data and get a count of pages are ensured in this one. In draw-page, actual rendering takes place using Cairo.

=> ↺ EggSlider

• Today we’ll cover a playful widget. You probably won’t find many great uses for this widget, but then again, maybe you will.

=> ↺ EggScrolledWindow

• A common pattern you see across software targeting a recent Gtk+ stack requires the use of GtkPopover. Choosing the right default-size for that popover is an exercise in futility.

Distributions

=> ↺ This Week in Solus – Install #17

New Releases

=> ↺ 4MLinux 16.0 BETA released.

• 4MLinux 16.0 is ready for testing. Create your documents with LibreOffice 5.0.4.2 and share them using DropBox 3.12.6, surf the Internet with Firefox 43.0.4 and Chrome 47.0.2526.106, stay in touch with your friends via Skype 4.3.0.37 and Thunderbird 38.5.1, enjoy your music collection with Audacious 3.7 and aTunes 3.1.2, watch your favorite videos with MPlayer SVN-r37557 and VLC 2.2.1, play games with Xorg 1.18.0/Mesa 11.1.0 support enabled. You can also setup the 4MLinux LAMP Server (Linux 4.1.13, Apache 2.4.18, MariaDB 10.1.9, and PHP 5.6.16). Perl 5.22.0 and Python 2.7.11 are also available.

=> ↺ 4MLinux 16.0 Beta Has LibreOffice 5, Audacious 3.7, Skype 4.3 and Linux Kernel 4.1.13 LTS

• GNU/Linux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta build of the upcoming 4MLinux 16.0 computer operating system.

=> ↺ Ubuntu-Based Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx” Enters Alpha, to Feature Linux Kernel 4.3

• Today, January 16, Black Lab Software was proud to inform Softpedia about the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha build of the upcoming Black Lab Linux 8 computer operating system.

• Dubbed Onyx, Black Lab Linux 8 distribution is now in development, based on the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system and powered by Linux kernel 3.19.43, which will be upgraded to the Linux 4.3 kernel branch used in Wily later in the development cycle, for the Release Candidate and final builds.

=> ↺ Black Lab 8 “Onyx” is released!

• Today PC / Opensystem LLC is pleased to announce its latest release : Black Lab Linux 8 Alpha 1 “Onyx” – our latest FOSS offering. Since this is a consumer-focused release we focused on issues that end-users bring to our attention.

=> ↺ Bedrock Linux 1.0beta2 Nyla Major Features

• Bedrock Linux can utilize any of a large number of init systems as provided by other distributions: if there is a distro out there that provides an init system you like, you’re probably able to use it with Bedrock Linux. Openrc from Alpine or Gentoo, systemd from Centos or Debian or Arch, upstart from Ubuntu LTS (for now), runit from Void Linux, BSD-style from Slackware or Crux, etc.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ KaOS 2016.01 Screencast and Screenshots

=> ↺ Solus 1.0 Budgie Desktop

=> ↺ SolydXK 2015.12

Arch Family

=> ↺ Arch Linux Gets Reader’s Choice ‘Best Distro’ Award

• The voting is all done for the second round of our poll to decide which GNU/Linux distro our readers would choose to receive our “Reader’s Choice Best Linux Distro” award for 2015. As in round one, Arch Linux won the day. The poll results are considered to be more a measure of a distro’s community support than any indication of a distro’s technical merits.

• The first round of our poll was a qualifying round, which Arch won as well, racking up 1,376 votes. The second round of voting was “winner take all,” and with the voting lighter than in the first round, Arch still managed to put together 592 votes. In all, 2,625 votes were cast in round two, which was active for seven days.

Ballnux/SUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Leap: LibVirt And NetworkManager

• I recently switched to Leap from 13.2. First time i have seen the next generation of kde and plasma. So far i like the experience. But i miss some stuff :(. If some dev out there needs an idea for his next little plasma widget project please consider porting service monitor. That widget alone could bring me back to kde4 :).

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Most enterprises plan to increase mobile app development this year, Red Hat finds

• A full 90 percent of enterprises plan to increase mobile app development this year, according to a survey of 200 IT decision makers from 200 enterprises in the United States and Europe conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Red Hat.

=> ↺ Behind-the-scenes: How the FCC migrated to the cloud (Part 2)

• All organizations are familiar with Murphy’s Law – the idea that if something can go wrong, it inevitably will. It’s a mantra in IT circles and all the motivation needed to ensure IT organizations are prepared for all possible scenarios. It’s likely this very idea was going through the mind of Dr. David Bray, CIO of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, in the early hours of the morning on September 4, 2015, as he watched a truck with 200 servers and 400 terabytes of data driving away from the FCC – and nearly getting stuck in the driveway.

=> ↺ Montrusco Bolton Investments Has $8,180,000 Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

=> ↺ On Analysts Radar: Red Hat, Inc.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has received a consensus one-year price recommendation of $90.50 by sell-side analysts. The price estimate shows the mean recommendations provided by the firms surveyed by Thomson Reuters’ First Call. The same set of brokerage firms have projected an earnings per share of $0.50 for the company during the upcoming quarter and an EPS of $1.86 for the current year.

Fedora

=> ↺ Fedora 24 Linux Delayed, the Distribution Will Be Released on May 31, 2016

• Well, it didn’t take long for the Fedora developers to change the official release schedule for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system and delay it for two weeks.

• The initial release schedule of Fedora 24 suggested that the upcoming OS would see the light of day on May 17, 2016, but now it has been postponed for the last day of May, most probably due to some issues that will take a little bit longer to be resolved.

=> ↺ First January Fedora meetup in Pune

• Last Friday we had the first Fedora meetup in January here in Pune. This was the first of the many upcoming meetups/workshops. The venue for this meetup was moved to Sayan’s apartment as we never found a free meeting room in the local Red Hat office, and as it seems that we will continue to use the same venue for the future meetups.

=> ↺ Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades, Let Users Skip a Release

• Fedora developers are currently discussing the possibility of a new upgrade method for future versions of the operating system that might allow users to skip a certain Fedora release and upgrade to the most recent version available.

=> ↺ Fedora 24 Dropping i686 Server Support! | Release Schedule

=> ↺ The AWS tools are approaching Fedora

• In the last few weeks I’ve worked toward bringing the Amazon Web Services tools in Fedora. The three AWS tools that are coming in the next few days in Fedora are: botocore: a low level Python library to interact with Amazon Web Services APIs boto3: a high level Python library to interact with Amazon Web Services APIs awscli: a Command Line Interface to interact with Amazon Web Services APIs Botocore just landed in Fedora updates repositories while boto3 and awscli will be pushed to the updates repository tomorrow or Monday morning.

Debian Family

=> ↺ The Fifth Alpha Version Of The Debian 9.0 Stretch Installer Has Been Released

• Cyril Brulebois, one of the Debian Installer developers has announced yesterday that Debian 9.0 Stretch Alpha 5 installer has been released, permitting the users to test Debian’s Testing system easily.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Canonical’s Ubuntu Day Event Brings Ubuntu Linux to a City Near You

• Marcin Kierdelewicz of Canonical writes on January 15 about an upcoming event that promises to bring the Ubuntu Linux operating system in a city near you during the entire year of 2016.

=> ↺ Canonical Plans To Add Encryption To Ubuntu Touch

=> ↺ New Ubuntu Convergence Device To Be Announced Next Month?

• Canonical will demo at least one new Ubuntu convergence device at next month’s Mobile World Congress next month, we’ve learned.

=> ↺ AT&T selects Ubuntu for cloud and enterprise applications

=> ↺ How You Can Help Test the New Ubuntu Software Center

• Testing of the app store set to replace the Ubuntu Software Center in 16.04 LTS is getting underway.

• Last November we shared the news that developers plan to drop the current Ubuntu Software Center from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and replace it with GNOME Software, an upstream alternative.

=> ↺ New Dekko Email Client for Ubuntu Phones Looks Awesome, Here’s a Convergence Demo

• On the day of January 15, 2016, Ubuntu app developer Daniel Wood teases Ubuntu Phone users on his Google+ page with the latest development of the next major release of the Dekko email client.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Lubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) Has Been Ported to Raspberry Pi 2, with LXQt

=> ↺ Lubuntu 16.04 LTS will use kernel 4.4 LTS

• The Ubuntu Linux kernel team has announced that the Linux kernel in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has been upgraded to version 4.4, the latest stable release made available.

=> ↺ Linux Mint: from Rafaela to Rosa

• You know I love Linux Mint. It is one of my favorite distros. Which made the Rosa disappointment all the more shocking. It was so bad it was almost a Rosawell Accident. See what I did there? Never mind, I have calmed down since, and now we’re trying Mint 17.3 once again. Only this time, in a slightly different fashion.

• Rather than booting from a live USB or whatnot, I am going to attempt an in-vivo upgrade, which is something that usually didn’t work quite that well in the past. Linux Mint abstained from this thorny path for many years. Its parent Ubuntu sucked for a while, with dodgy upgrades, and then eventually Ubuntu worked just fine. So this is going to be a rather interesting exercise. Shall we?

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

=> ↺ Samsung Z1 to get Tizen 2.4 FINAL as Soon as 22 January, according to Samsung MD

=> ↺ Apache Spark cluster on Tizen

Android

=> ↺ Now the Official Xiaomi Number (‘over 70M’) and apparently only 1M Windows 10 Lumia devices for Xmas

• First off, that Xiaomi number. So this is now the official number (I mistakenly reported on an old news story last time). Xiaomi said their full year 2015 sales were ‘more than 70 million’. Not more precise than that. Lets say its about 71 million. Their last official number was ‘slightly below 35 million’ for first half of 2015, so if we say thats 34 million, then their ‘year-halfs’ grew from 34 million to 37 million. I would hope the Chinese started to report actual unit sales to one decimal point of millions, in accuracy and every quarter. But still, this is better than nothing. 71 million would be 16% growth vs 2014 and give Xiaomi a rough market share of about 4.7%. For the Christmas quarter, Xiaomi’s sales would be roughly flat 18.5 million vs the estimated Q3 (and consistent with Chinese regulator data on new smartphone sales in China being flat QoQ) and the quarterly market share be about 4%. So Xiaomi is there in that crowded mid-field in the race for final rank of 2015 unit sales and market share.

=> ↺ My Time at Tox

• Then it came time to set up an F-Droid server to distribute Antox to those users without Google Play. I was first told that the project could set up an F-Droid server, but after a month of asking zero-one about it, it was clear that it was never going to happen. Various excuses were used to justify why it could not be done, something about how there would be no package server until there were other packages to host. This did not sound like a reasonable explanation to me, so I spent the six or so hours required to get F-Droid working that the project could not spare, paying for my own VPS, domain name, and HTTPS certificate. I was not okay with this situation, but if I wanted to continue working on Antox I saw no alternative. This situation worsened as time went on. zero-one flat-out refused to set up a ToxMe instance to replace toxme.se, asserting that a name resolution service was unnecessary for the project to succeed. I strongly disagreed with this, arguing that convenience and user-friendliness were Tox’s primary goals. I went so far as to go on strike in the process (see this commit), which lasted for two days before I, with great disappointment, realised that the leadership would rather see me leave than set up this service for Antox. I didn’t want to leave, I just wanted to work on Antox, so I caved in. I went off strike, bought another domain, HTTPS certificate and set up a ToxMe instance on my F-Droid VPS. Nobody had any great issue with promoting this service, in spite of the fact that it was run by someone clearly not capable with managing sensitive user data or competent with security.

=> ↺ Hyundai’s 2017 Elantra to start at $17,150, offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto

=> ↺ Casio Unveils First Android Smartwatch At CES 2016

• While one segment of the smartwatch market prefers the luxurious and the fashion-conscious kinds of wearable technology available, there is another segment that prefers a more rugged and sporty treatment of wearable technology. Casio, the Japanese watchmaker, unveiled the company’s first smartwatch called the WSD-F10 Smart Outdoor Watch during CES 2016, which brings to the market another smartwatch for the consumer who likes the outdoors but will not sacrifice functionality.

=> ↺ Google Play Store Finally Allows Android App Promo Codes

=> ↺ Introducing Phoenix OS, an Alternative to Remix OS and Android-x86 Made in China

• Today we have the pleasure of introducing you guys to an alternative computer operating system to the already popular Remix OS that everybody is talking about these days.

=> ↺ Mobile investments paying off

• The survey revealed that 74 per cent of respondents whose organisations use key performance indicators, or KPIs, to some extent to measure mobile application success are achieving positive return on investment. The survey also revealed that 85 per cent of organisations are using KPIs to measure mobile app success, while nine per cent use other means and the remainder are not measuring mobile success at all.

=> ↺ Good Deal: Get a free Chromecast for using Android Pay

• Google’s Chromecast media streaming dongle has always been cheap, but if $35 is too rich for your blood, you’ll want to pay attention to a new Android Pay promotion in the US. If you make ten purchases with Google’s contactless-payment app before the end of February, you’ll get a free Chromecast.

=> ↺ Android Pay rewards program ‘Tap 10′ allegedly spotted

=> ↺ Tap 10 offer gets you rewards for simply using Android Pay

=> ↺ Sony’s Xperia C4 And Xperia C5 Ultra Receive Their Android 5.1 Over-The-Air Updates

=> ↺ This is the hardest Android quiz you’ll ever take

=> ↺ Sprint HTC One M9 to receive Android Marshmallow update in the middle of next week

=> ↺ Android malware can hack your bank account through a phone call

=> ↺ U.S. bound honor 5X to receive Android 6.0

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ git outta here, GitHub

• What a relief! I just deleted my GitHub account. Life is already looking brighter. ’cause you know, GitHub is Facebook. And you don’t want a Facebook account.

=> ↺ Nobody is using your software project. Now what?

• Working with open source software is an amazing experience. The collaborative process around creation, refinement, and even maintenance, drives more developers to work on open source software more often. However, every developer finds themselves writing code that very few people actually use.

=> ↺ How I Stumbled Upon The Internet’s Biggest Blind Spot

• Open source infrastructure refers to all the tools that help developers build software. On a deep level, it includes physical things like servers, but closer to the surface, it also includes things like programming languages, frameworks, and libraries.

• If you’ve ever built an app before, maybe you used Rails, Django or Node.js. Maybe your app was written in Ruby or Python. Maybe it made use of something like jQuery or React. All of these projects are open source.

• There is no question that these developer tools are vital to startups and technology: we couldn’t build anything without them. There is also no business model in many cases. You couldn’t charge people to use Python, for example, any more than you could charge someone to speak English.

=> ↺ AI research lab releases code to help with speech recognition

• Yesterday, Baidu Research’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) released open-source code called Warp-CTC to GitHub. The goal is for this code to be used in the machine learning community.

• Warp-CTC is a tool that can plug into existing machine learning frameworks to speed up the development of artificial intelligence, and according to SVAIL, it will speed up development by 400x compared to previous versions.

Events

=> ↺ First Meetup at University of Bamberg summons local Docker community

• This is the summary of the first Docker meetup that we organized in cooperation with University of Bamberg. As a supplement to this event yesterday, we share the pictures and the slides of the presentation.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Thunderbird 38.5.1 Brings Fixes Only

• As you may know, Thunderbird is an open-source e-mail client and chat client developed by Mozilla. Among others, it has support for email addresses, newsgroup, news feed and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) Client, managing multiple accounts. Also, it has support for different themes and its power can be extended by plugins.

=> ↺ Firefox to convert old YouTube Flash code to HTML5 Video

• Mozilla has added a feature to Firefox 46 that will convert old YouTube Flash code to HTML5 Video automatically under certain circumstances.

• When YouTube started out, Flash was the dominating technology used to stream video on the Internet, and the first player that YouTube made available to webmasters to embed videos on third-party sites used Flash exclusively.

• YouTube changed the code later on to reflect changes in streaming technologies. From a technical perspective, YouTube started to offer embed codes as iframes instead of objects.

SaaS/Big Data

=> ↺ Startup takes on Dropbox, Box, using cloud and local storage

• Right now, access to Infinit Drive and Infinit Cloud, the small-business and enterprise versions of the product, are restricted to invitations only, but it’s possible to sign up for early access. The open source pieces haven’t all been released yet, but the first of them have started to show up on Infinit’s GitHub site.

=> ↺ An introduction to OpenStack clouds for beginners

• This year, SCaLE 14x attendees will have the opportunity to hear Anthony Chow speak on how to get started contributing to OpenStack.

• Anthony is network engineer with a passion for sharing and promoting technologies that enable community growth. He’s currently working on Docker and OpenStack Magnum.

• In this interview, Anthony explains what OpenStack is, how it works with containers, and how an enterprise might want to use it.

=> ↺ OpenStack Foundation 2016 Directors Announced

• The OpenStack Foundation election of Individual Directors to the Board of Directors has now completed and the winning candidates have been announced.

=> ↺ Lessons learned (the hard way) doing DevOps at scale

• I had the chance to talk to Ticketmaster’s Victor Gajendran who will be attending (and speaking) for the first time at SCaLE 14x this year, which is taking place on January 21 and 22 in Pasadena, California. He’ll speak to attendees about how his company uses open source and how to empower your small teams to be part of a large, effective whole.

BSD

=> ↺ group test: BSD Distros

• On Test

• FreeBSD OpenBSD NetBSD DragonFly BSD GhostBSD PC-BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ Free/Libre/Vrije Software: The Goal and the Path

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Kiev tests open budget process

• Through this new initiative SocialBoost partnered with Open North, a Canadian company, which has developed a ready-to-use portal called Citizen Budget. This portal was adapted for the Kiev project.

=> ↺ Civil society plays a key role in policy shaping in Europe

• The main theme of this debate, organised by the NGO Support Centre, under the European U-Impact project (From Citizen Involvement to Policy Impact) was “Civil Society and the EU”. The U-Impact project basically gathers citizens’ views on EU policies and explores the relationship and engagement between civil society and EU.

Open Hardware

=> ↺ A20-OLinuXino OSHW Linux computer is doing hard 24/7 work at Mining industry

=> ↺ Open Source Hardware (OSHW), why it matters and what is pseudo OSHW

• Why all people love so much OSHW? Because every one love to learn something new for free and to see how other people did this or that and improve his own skills, this is why OSHW has many fans even among people who never released something as OSHW. This is how many people got infected with the Open Source virus, they watch, learn and at one point decide to give something back to the community.

=> ↺ Br-Print3D on Google Summer of Code

• After a few conversations with Guilherme Razgriz, the designer of Br-Print3D, we realize that the actual Ux is not good enough. Why? You may ask. Weel, the idea behind Br-Print3D, was to make things diferent, and, until now, the Ux is ordinary, looking like the others printers hosts on the market.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Mr Cameron, the renegotiation and evidence-based policy making

• The outcome of the British government’s attempt to renegotiate the UK’s terms of membership of the European Union and the referendum that will follow are highly uncertain but the renegotiation reveals quite a lot about David Cameron.

=> ↺ Celine Dion’s brother Daniel dies two days after her husband

• The older brother of Canadian singer Celine Dion has died of cancer, two days after her husband also died.

• Daniel Dion, 59, died on Saturday near Montreal, a statement by the singer’s spokeswoman said.

• Ms Dion’s family paid tribute to the father-of-two, calling him “a gentle and reserved man of many talents”.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ In 1993 Meeting, Hillary Clinton Acknowledged “Convincing Case” for Single-Payer

• Two doctors who met privately with Hillary Clinton during the 1993 health reform debate say she agreed that single-payer healthcare would be good for Americans. Their recollections raise questions about both the motive and the sincerity of Clinton’s recent assault on Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders for supporting such a system.

• Until Clinton’s pivot, the accepted Democratic view was that single-payer was the best solution in theory, but that it was politically unrealistic. Clinton’s new critiques, by contrast, are an attempt to make Sanders’s single-payer proposals sound costly and destructive.

=> ↺ Sanders’ Courageous Stand for Universal Coverage

• The Clinton campaign just made a serious mistake.

• They sent Hillary and Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea out on behalf of her mother to bash Senator Bernie Sanders on the issue of health care.

• What’s so wrong with that? Don’t all candidates use family surrogates when and where they can? The Kennedys, for example, deployed a horde of kinfolk for Jack’s campaign for president, then Bobby’s, then Teddy’s.

=> ↺ This is how toxic Flint’s water really is

• The city of Flint, Mich., is in the midst of a water crisis several years in the making. The city opted out of Detroit’s water supply and began drawing water from the Flint River in April 2014, part of a cost-saving move. Eighteen months later, in the fall of 2015, researchers discovered that the proportion of children with above-average lead levels in their blood had doubled.

=> ↺ This Bee-Killing Pesticide Is Terrible at Protecting Crops

• In 2011, agrichemical giants Monsanto and Bayer CropScience joined forces to sell soybean seeds coated with (among other things) an insecticide of the neonicotinoid family. Neonics are so-called systematic pesticides—when the coated seeds sprout and grow, the resulting plants take up the bug-killing chemical, making them poisonous to crop-chomping pests like aphids. Monsanto rivals Syngenta and DuPont also market neonic-treated soybean seeds.

• These products—buoyed by claims that the chemical protects soybean crops from early-season insect pests—have enjoyed great success in the marketplace. Soybeans are the second-most-planted US crop, covering about a quarter of US farmland—and at least a third of US soybean acres are grown with neonic-treated seeds. But two problems haunt this highly lucrative market: 1) The neonic soybean seeds might not do much at all to fight off pests, and 2) they appear to be harming bees and may also hurt other pollinators, birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates.

• Doubts about neonic-treated soybean seeds’ effectiveness aren’t new. In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency released a blunt preliminary report finding that “neonicotinoid seed treatments likely provide $0 in benefits” to soybean growers. But the agrichemical industry likes to portray the EPA as an overzealous regulator that relies on questionable data, and it quickly issued a report vigorously disagreeing with the EPA’s assessment.

=> ↺ All Flint’s children must be treated as exposed to lead

• In order to address the public health crisis in Flint, every Flint child under 6 years of age — 8,657 children, based on an analysis of Census data — should be considered exposed to lead.

• The direction came earlier this week from the doctor who forced the state to acknowledge Flint’s lead problem and the state itself.

• The exposure began in April 2014 after the city switched from using Detroit’s water system, which pumps water out of Lake Huron, to its own treatment plant, which drew water from the Flint River.

=> ↺ ‘Ludicrous’ as Flint Tells Residents: Pay for Poisoned Water or We’ll Cut You Off

• Amid a crisis that has poisoned the water supply of an entire city, authorities in Flint, Michigan are under renewed fire on Friday for sending out shut-off notices to residents who are behind on paying their water bills.

• Slammed as “ludicrous, the move comes as Republican Governor Rick Snyder finally asked President Obama to step in and declare a federal state of emergency.

• Following a short holiday reprieve, Finance Director Jody Lundquist announced Wednesday that officials will resume sending an unspecified amount of shut-off notices to past-due accounts. According to Lundquist, the city already sent out 1,800 notices in November.

=> ↺ Bernie Sanders Calls For Michigan Governor To Resign Over Poisoned Water Scandal

• Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders urged Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to step down in light of his state’s ongoing and fatal water crisis that has sickened thousands of residents and left more than 30,000 Flint, Michigan households with undrinkable tap water.

• “There are no excuses. The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign,” Sanders said in a statement Saturday.

=> ↺ Russia’s ‘state sponsored doping’ endangered athletes lives

• Sessions also focused on organizational issues that are necessary to quickly consider doping cases, investigating problems mentioned in the report by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Independent Commission, collecting information about the location of athletes and comprehensive testing of Russian athletes before WADA restores the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), as well as educational and other measures necessary for introducing zero tolerance policy for doping in Russian athletics.

• Part one revealed state-sponsored doping in the country which resulted in them being suspended by the IAAF.

• Being generous, it seems officials weren’t ignoring Russian doping but rather were seeking expedient ways of dealing with the large number of cases thrown up by the IAAF’s “blood passport” anti-doping program before the 2012 London Games.

Security

=> ↺ Hacking Team’s Leak Helped Researchers Hunt Down a Zero-Day

• The vulnerability, which Microsoft called “critical” in a patch released to customers on Tuesday, would allow an attacker to infect your system after getting you to visit a malicious website where the exploit resides—usually through a phishing email that tricks you into clicking on a malicious link. The attack works with all of the top browsers except Chrome—but only because Google removed support for the Silverlight plug-in in its Chrome browser in 2014.

• [...]

• In July 2015, a hacker known only as “Phineas Fisher” targeted the Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team and stole some 400 GB of the company’s data, including internal emails, which he dumped online. The hack exposed the company’s business practices, but it also revealed the business of zero-day sellers who were trying to market their exploits to Hacking Team. The controversial surveillance firm, which sells its software to law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world—including to oppressive regimes like Sudan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia—uses zero-day exploits to help sneak its surveillance tools onto targeted systems.

=> ↺ Flexible, secure SSH with DNSSEC

• With version 6.2 of OpenSSH came a feature that allows the remote host to retrieve a public key in a customised way, instead of the typical authorized_keys file in the ~/.ssh/ directory. For example, you can gather the keys of a group of users that require access to a number of machines on a single server (for example, an LDAP server), and have all the hosts query that server when they need the public key of the user attempting to log in. This saves a lot of editing of authorized_keys files on each and every host. The downside is that it’s necessary to trust the source these hosts retrieve public keys from. An LDAP server on a private network is probably trustworthy (when looked after properly) but for hosts running in the cloud, that’s not really practical.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ They Make Cheney Look Like Chomsky: Cruz, Trump, Rubio and the Frightening Bellicosity of Today’s GOP

• They want to “carpet bomb,” “bomb the shit” out of them and make “sand glow.” The GOP field somehow makes Cheney seem moderate.

=> ↺ U.S. Radically Changes Its Story of the Boats in Iranian Waters: to an Even More Suspicious Version

• When news first broke of the detention of two U.S. ships in Iranian territorial waters, the U.S. media — aside from depicting it as an act of Iranian aggression — uncritically cited the U.S. government’s explanation for what happened. One of the boats, we were told, experienced “mechanical failure” and thus “inadvertently drifted” into Iranian waters. On CBS News, Joe Biden told Charlie Rose, “One of the boats had engine failure, drifted into Iranian waters.”

=> ↺ After Me, the Jihad

• The West was then gearing up to use unrest in Libya as a pretext for military intervention and regime change. Gaddafi desperately tried to convey through Blair the folly of such a war, pleading that he was trying to defend Libya from Al Qaeda, which had set up base in the country.

=> ↺ US Foreign Policy Discussions Need a Colossal Dose of Humility

• According to an apocryphal Russian proverb, it’s easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but much harder to turn fish soup into an aquarium. The US political class has served up plenty of fish soup over the past decade, and much of it was created in the belief that each aquarium just wasn’t good enough without our help.

• A prime example of US-created fish soup would be Iraq. It’s a steaming bowl of it, and no amount of firepower is going to change that. Societal cohesion was destroyed, it’s not something that can be put back together through force of arms.

=> ↺ Thanks to Donald Trump, Police Brutality and Guns, the United States’ Reputation Is Plummeting

• Donald Trump’s bewildering popularity in the presidential race has been exceedingly hard to bear for many Americans, particularly those who belong to one or more of the communities that he openly disparages, like African-Americans and Muslim Americans.

• Yet if even some citizens wrestle to make sense of Trump’s rise to power, how do non-Americans view the strange state of politics in the world’s most powerful nation?

• While on a recent visit to Dubai, United Arab Emirates—where I was born and raised and where my parents still live—Trump’s name cropped up as a topic of conversation within the first few minutes of nearly every interaction I had, so I decided to gather a group of my friends together to answer that question.

• Dubai is home to myriad immigrant communities, and while the city of more than 2.4 million struggles with its own unique social problems, the United States remains hugely influential there when it comes to both pop culture and politics.

=> ↺ Implementation Day: Full Description From JCPOA Text

• As can be seen from the incredibly long and detailed list of actions Iran has taken to dismantle much of its nuclear technology, Implementation Day represents a remarkable movement away from any capability to produce a nuclear weapon. A devastating array of economic sanctions has been put into place by the West, and many of these are dropped on this historic occasion.

• Diplomacy has won.

=> ↺ GOP Debates Are Pure Hawk Without a Paul

• Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul was not the perfect antiwar candidate sent down from above, but you would be forgiven for thinking so if you compare the 2008 and 2012 presidential races to the 2016 one.

• Ron Paul was not without fault (early immigration fearmongering, the vote for the Afghanistan Authorization for Use of Military Force) but he was the rare politician who got better and more interested in peace and freedom the longer he stayed in office. The 2012 election was basically a victory lap for him, but one that involved the vital message of peace and nonintervention. There’s a reason that he’s so beloved, and that YouTube videos with titles that call Paul a seer for predicting more terrorist attacks on the US back in 1998 are amusingly common.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

=> ↺ Why is the Guardian letting Shell fill its pages with dubious spin?

• Oil sponsorship is pretty controversial. Where companies like BP and Shell have paid to have their logos displayed in museums, art galleries and theatres, they have been met with a torrent of protest performances and artistic antipathy.

• Groups like BP or not BP, Liberate Tate, BP out of Opera and Art Not Oil have found numerous high profile and creative ways to challenge oil company sponsorship of institutions including the Royal Shakespeare Company, The British Museum, the Tate and Tate Modern, the Science Museum, the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the Edinburgh Festival and the Louvre.

=> ↺ Things Just Got Even Worse For Coal

• About 40 percent of all US coal extraction takes place on federal land, much of that in Wyoming, the nation’s top coal producer. For years, environmentalists have complained that the coal industry enjoys royalty rates much lower than offshore oil or other publicly owned fossil fuels. Those low rates make it cheaper for coal companies to operate and may also be a raw deal for the public that has to deal with the impacts, from local environmental degradation to global climate change. While offshore oil companies typically pay a royalty rate of about 18 percent, Jewell said, the rate for coal is only 8-10 percent. A Government Accountability Office report in 2014 found that undervalued coal leases cost the US Treasury nearly $1 billion per year in lost revenue.

=> ↺ Coal Ash Wastewater Will Be Dumped Into Virginia Rivers

• Millions of gallons of treated wastewater from coal ash ponds can be disposed in two major Virginia rivers — one a tributary of the Potomac River — the Virginia Water Control Board ruled Thursday.

• The decision comes as some residents and environmentalists questioned the stringency of permits that allow Dominion Virginia Power to release wastewater with some levels of arsenic, lead, copper, and other substances into nearby waterways rich in wildlife. Wastewater will come from the Possum Point Power Plant located by Quantico Creek, and the Bremo Power Plant located by the James River.

=> ↺ 22 Mind-Blowing Catastrophes That Are Just A Matter Of Time

=> ↺ Asia is imperiled by COP21’s climate cop-out

• The nations of the world gathered at the Paris Climate Conference (COP21) last month to come to an agreement on the urgent mission of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, all they produced was an attractive vision statement that is more sham than solution.

• It is imperative that the world invests significantly and quickly in climate mitigation strategies to reduce the human and economic cost of climate change, which is where COP21 fell short. The vague wording of the final declaration gives too much wiggle room for nations to avoid painful choices.

• “This agreement is a great escape for the big polluters, and a poisoned chalice for the poor,” concludes Asad Rehman from the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. “We’ve got some warm words about temperature levels, but no concrete action.”

• [...]

• Indonesia is also in the process of increasing harmful emissions and pollutants as it develops. Anyone visiting the main cities on the island of Java will come away convinced that Indonesia is zooming toward environmental disaster, while its destruction of rainforest through the deliberate setting of fires to clear land in Sumatra and Kalimantan for palm oil plantations is devastating the environment and subjecting citizens of Singapore and Malaysia to high levels of unhealthy smoke. Indonesia already emits more carbon dioxide per capita than India.

Finance

=> ↺ Whiny Ragequitting

• I characterized Mike Hearn’s farewell essay as a ‘whiny ragequit’. I did this because it is, well, a whiny ragequit. He attempted a hostile takeover of Bitcoin with Bitcoin-XT, and now that he’s predictably been made to feel like persona non grata in Bitcoin development he’s throwing a tantrum on his way out.

• There are of course real howlers in Hearn’s essay which I can explain, although truth be known I shouldn’t have to. There is overwhelming alignment among people doing Bitcoin development on the path forward. The popular perception of internal division is caused by having a camp consisting of Mike Hearn, Jeff Garzik, and Gavin Andresen who are doing a good job of whipping up popular support and talking to the press. They have a simplistic plan which appeals to people who don’t know any better or want to be told that technical problems can be made to magically go away with a simple fix. On the other side are the people doing actual development, who aren’t particularly good at talking to the press or whipping up support on reddit and have a plan which requires real engineering work moving forwards.

=> ↺ ‘Bitcoin Has Failed’, Says Lead Developer Who Just Quit

• Once again Bitcoin has been declared dead. This time, the announcement has come from a prominent developer Mike Hearn who just quit the project. In a long blog post on Medium, he called Bitcoin an ‘experiment’ that has now failed.

=> ↺ BTC dev: ‘Strangling’ the blockchain will kill Bitcoin

• The destiny of Bitcoin, like that of Apollo 13, shall never be realised, at least according to one of the cryptocurrency’s most well-known developers, who has announced that “the experiment has failed”.

• Mike Hearn was a senior software engineer at Google up until 2014, when he left to focus his full-time attention on Bitcoin development. In a blog post on Thursday, Hearn announced he would longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and had sold all of his coins.

=> ↺ Walmart to Close 269 Stores, Most of Them in the United States

=> ↺ Walmart to shutter 269 stores, with most located in the US

• The retail giant announced it is working to transfer 10,000 US employees to nearby stores, as CEO said closings are ‘necessary to keep the company strong’

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ Hillary Clinton: Israel First

• Although the United States is still ten months from its next exercise in electoral futility, most polls do not indicate what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is most anxious to see: a runaway victory for her candidacy. It is a good sign that, despite the fact that she has no real contrasting opponent on the Democratic side, the coronation she expected isn’t going to happen.

=> ↺ The Good, Bad and Ugly in Oregon Standoff Coverage

• Unraveling the Gordian knot of media issues in the Oregon standoff between federal authorities and a Patriot/Militia alliance of building occupiers is a daunting task. Some journalists have written excellent, thoughtful articles, and some have wasted wood pulp and bandwidth. Most early reporting sat between those extremes.

=> ↺ Trump’s Muslim Ban is a Vile Joke That GOP Condenders Don’t Have the Guts to Take On

• You obviously can’t try and explain such intricacies to a nasty hare-brain who trucks in inflammatory bromides. So what do you do? Condemn him? Ignore him? The first would be the most honorable course and the second understandable. But what the GOP luminaries actually did – i.e. sing and dance to Trump’s tune – was neither. The only exception was Jeb Bush.

=> ↺ Review: Michael Bay’s 13 Hours Is A Coded Message To Benghazi Conspiracy Theorists

• Shortly before Michael Bay’s latest movie, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, hit theaters, The Hollywood Reporter published a long report on how the film had been carefully marketed to conservative pundits. In return, the film was praised as “riveting” and “extraordinary” by people the studio could use to validate the movie to their hoped-for audience.

=> ↺ How Corporations and Politicians Use Numbers to Lie — and How Not to Be Fooled

• Americans, as P.T. Barnum once noted, are not all that difficult to fool, and our nation’s somewhat weak math skills don’t help. A Pew Research Center report issued last year, which studied test results of 15-year-olds, ranked the United States 35th in the world in math. Not only has this weakness in understanding numbers created opportunities for mass exploitation by Big Pharma and other industries, it has led to needless and mostly unwarranted fear. While Americans don’t understand math, be assured that corporations do, and they happily use it to mislead and obfuscate in the name of selling their products.

Censorship

=> ↺ Letter: Censorship can deny all opinion

• Tears flow down my cheeks as I read of the torture some readers go through when they read Thomas Sowell’s weekly column. Their pleading for The Columbian to stop carrying his column tears at my heart. The anguish the writers go through detailing point by point of where they disagree with him is almost too much to bear.

=> ↺ Is The Internet Evolving Away From Freedom of Speech?

• Yesterday Motherboard published a fascinating look back at how Twitter’s rules have evolved over the past decade and how its own experiences as flag bearer of the social media revolution have influenced and changed the accepted wisdom of the juxtaposition of freedom of speech and commercial reality. From its founding principles that guided the site through the end of last year that enshrined “because of these principles, we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content except in limited circumstances” to its new rules, published last month that clarify “there are some limitations on the type of content and behavior that we allow,” Twitter has evolved along with the web itself.

=> ↺ How Twitter quietly banned hate speech last year

• But that wasn’t all. More links to outside documents appeared in the company rules. In August, Twitter clarified that it would include “indirect threats” under its definition of “hateful conduct.” It would also censor people who “incited” harassment, for example by urging their followers to send harassing messages to another user.

=> ↺ My Experience With the Great Firewall of China

• When I recently visited China for the first time, as an InfoSec professional I was very curious to finally be able to poke at the Great Firewall of China with my own hands to see how it works and how easy it is evade. In short I was surprised by:

• Its high level of sophistication such as its ability to exploit side-channel leaks in TLS (I have evidence it can detect the “TLS within TLS” characteristic of secure web proxies)

• How poorly simple Unix computer security tools fared to evade it

• 1 of the top 3 commercial VPN providers uses RSA keys so short (1024 bits!) that the Chinese government could factor them

=> ↺ Censorship still works — just not the way you think

• But top-down approaches don’t work so well when anyone can get online and fight back. Then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was widely ridiculed for the heavy-handed YouTube ban. Similar backfires occurred in 2010 when WordPress was blocked in Venezuela, and in China the same year when a man with political connections tried to censor news of his hit-and-run killing of a college student. Egyptian authorities turned off the whole country’s internet during 2011 protests there, but it didn’t save President Mubarak. The old ways do not work as well anymore. Effective censorship is done not by deletion, but by confusion.

Privacy

=> ↺ Apple has patented a way to track your digital ‘skeleton’ using a camera

• Apple has been granted a patent for software that can work out information about a person’s “skeleton” by looking at it through Microsoft Kinect-style hardware.

• Microsoft Kinect is a hardware accessory for the Xbox that uses cameras to the track movements of people in the room, helping control a video game.

=> ↺ Why is Apple starting to patent light fittings?

• Apple has been granted a patent for the ceiling lighting system it has developed for its new-look stores in a move that has again raised the issue of the company’s intentions in the lighting market.

=> ↺ Theresa May’s snooping defence remains inherently contradictory

• The UK government doesn’t want backdoors to encrypted messages. But it wants companies to decrypt messages on demand anyway.

• That apparently contradictory policy remains at the heart of the Investigatory Powers Bill, Home Secretary Theresa May has told MPs.

• May, who is overseeing the creation of the IP Bill and saw similar plans blocked in 2012, told a group of MPs and Lords that companies will be required to remove electronic protection on messages and information when a warrant is issued.

=> ↺ No, the European Court of Human Rights did NOT just greenlight spying on employees

• Reports that say the European Court of Human Rights ruled bosses can peek into their employees’ personal communications are hogwash.

=> ↺ German data surveillance includes Finland

• According to leaked German intelligence documents, German intelligence agency BND monitored phone calls and possibly Internet traffic to and from Finland in the 2000s — possibly at the behest of the American security agency, the NSA.

=> ↺ FISC Still Sitting on Government Proposal for EFF Data

• When last we checked in with the new-and-improved post USA Freedom Act FISA Court, amicus Preston Burton had helped the Court finish off the Section 215 dragnet with a strong hand, in part by asking a bunch of questions that should have been asked 9 years earlier. And in a reply to the government (the reply was released belatedly), Burton made an argument that led first to a hearing on the issue and then a briefing order for ways the government might stipulate to something in the EFF lawsuits so as to permit the FISC to lift the protection order requiring all Americans’ phone records to be kept indefinitely.

Civil Rights

=> ↺ Laura Carlsen on the Arrest of ‘El Chapo,’ Omar Shakir on Closing Guantanamo

=> ↺ What’s Your Threat Score?

• Police have found a new way to legally incorporate surveillance and profiling into everyday life. Just when you thought we were making progress raising awareness surrounding police brutality, we have something new to contend with. The Police Threat Score isn’t calculated by a racist police officer or a barrel-rolling cop who thinks he’s on a TV drama; it’s a computer algorithm that steals your data and calculates your likelihood of risk and threat for the fuzz.

=> ↺ First Member Of Bundy Militia Arrested

• The first members of the militia illegally occupying a federal building in Oregon have been arrested. The occupation has gone on for nearly two weeks, costing the state more than $133,000 per day.

• Two members of the militia were finally arrested when they took federal vehicles stolen from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and drove them to a local Safeway.

=> ↺ America Is a Dystopian Hellhole and Don’t You Forget It

• And the surprise? There’s nothing on this list from Ted Cruz. He had plenty of criticisms of Obama, but I looked at everything he said last night and there was really no hint of America going to hell in a handbasket. I didn’t expect that, but I’ll bet it’s deliberate. Maybe he knows something the rest of field doesn’t?

=> ↺ Poor and Seeking Justice in Louisiana? Get in Line.

• Taking aim at Louisiana’s “chronic underfunding” of its public defender system—which has forced at least four parishes in the state to create “waiting lists” for appointed counsel—the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Louisiana filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday evening on behalf of criminal defendants in Orleans Parish who are unable to afford an attorney.

• “So long as you’re on the public defender waiting list in New Orleans, you’re helpless,” said Brandon Buskey, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. “Your legal defense erodes along with your constitutional rights.”

• What’s more, he added in an op-ed published Friday, “The people the public defender is making wait in line are most at risk in our justice system: usually poor, often a person of color, and facing severe sentences. [T]hese are the people who most need the public defender’s help investigating the state’s case against them and quickly uncovering favorable evidence before it is lost.”

=> ↺ Justice Has a Waiting List in New Orleans

=> ↺ Terrorism In Europe is Less Common and Less Deadly Than in the Recent Past — And Doesn’t Justify Expanded Repressive Surveillance

• International security researcher: “Western Europe is safer now than it has been for decades and is far safer than most other parts of the world.”

=> ↺ Dr. King’s legacy still relevant

=> ↺ Cock.li server seized again by German prosecutor, service moves to Romania

• cock.li’s Vincent Canfield said that he had initially chosen a German data host because the country has a reputation for “good data privacy laws.”

• “Of course, though the facts of the case are yet to be seen since no one in Germany is talking to us, I will definitely never host anything in Germany ever again,” he told Ars in an encrypted chat.

• The same Zwickau authorities previously seized one of cock.li’s hard drives in late December 2015. That first seizure came shortly after cock.li was reportedly used to send a bogus bomb threat e-mail from “madbomber@cock.li” to several school districts in the United States, which led to the closure of all schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The New York City Department of Education, however, dismissed the e-mail as an obvious hoax. (The LAUSD has refused to provide Ars a copy of this original message under the California Public Records Act, a decision that we have appealed.)

• “We live in an age where anonymous messages can be sent with extreme ease.” Because the novelty e-mail host was configured as a RAID1 (mirrored) setup, the e-mail service continued operating until Friday. It is unclear why there was a weeks-long delay between the first and second seizure.

=> ↺ The report which could destroy Britain’s immigration prisons

• Entrance to healthcare, The Verne Immigration Removal Centre (HMIP)

• The Home Office never wanted this report. It was only after a string of stories about abusive guards and sexual attacks that Stephen Shaw’s inquiry into Britain’s immigration detention centres was even commissioned.

• Even then, they tried to narrow its remit. It was limited to assessing detainees’ welfare and there was to be no discussion about the principle of detention itself.

• As if that weren’t restrictive enough, officials also didn’t want Shaw, a former prisons ombudsman, addressing the issue of how long detainees are held. Under the current system, they never know how long they’ll be imprisoned. It could be hours or it could be years. That uncertainty can sometimes drive them mad. It is a uniquely bureaucratic form of mental torture.

=> ↺ What Accounts for the Saudi Regime’s Hysterical Belligerence? The Agony of Death

• The Saudi rulers find themselves in a losing race against time, or history. Although in denial, they cannot but realize the historical reality that the days of ruling by birthright are long past, and that the House of Saud as the ruler of the kingdom by inheritance is obsolete.

• This is the main reason for the Saudi’s frantically belligerent behavior. The hysteria is tantamount to the frenzy of the proverbial agony of a prolonged death. It explains why they react so harshly to any social or geopolitical development at home or in the region that they perceive as a threat to their rule.

• It explains why, for example, they have been so intensely hostile to the Iranian revolution that terminated the rule of their dictatorial counterpart, the Shah of Iran, in that country. In the demise of the Shah they saw their own downfall.

=> ↺ 12-year-old girl suspended because she lent her inhaler to a gasping classmate

• A 12-year-old honor student from Texas got suspended from school for giving her asthama inhaler to another girl who was wheezing and gasping in gym class. She could also be tranferred to an “alternative school” for up to 30 days. The girl told Fox 4 News she feels the punishment is not fair. “I was just trying to save her life. I didn’t think I was trying to do anything bad,” she said.

=> ↺ Garland girl suspended, potential alternative school time for sharing inhaler

=> ↺ Apple Shrugs Off Diversity Push, Calling It ‘Unduly Burdensome’

• Apple’s board and senior management teams are dominated by white men. But its leadership still feels that speeding up efforts to change that makeup are “unduly burdensome and not necessary.”

• Antonio Avian Maldonado, II, one of the company’s shareholders, has put forward a proposal that would force the company’s board to adopt an “accelerated recruitment policy” for diverse senior management and board seat positions, “bodies that presently fails [sic] to adequately represent diversity (particularly Hispanic, African-American, Native-American and other people of colour).” By Apple’s own count, the company’s leadership team is 72 percent male and 63 percent white, while it’s just 6 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black. Of the eight people on its board, just two are women and only two are people of color.

=> ↺ The FBI’s Two-Pronged Investigation of Hillary Clinton

• Later, as a member of a secret Presidential committee to investigate the CIA’s view of the Soviet Union’s ability to withstand an arms race, I had very high clearances as the committee had subpoena power over the CIA. If the Kremlin had had access to the top secret documents, all the Kremlin would have learned is that the CIA had a much higher opinion of the capability of the Soviet economy than did the Kremlin.

• Distinguished law professors have concluded that the US government classifies documents primarily in order to hide its own mistakes and crimes. We see this over and over. The US government can escape accountability for the most incredible mistakes and the worse crimes against the US Constitution and humanity simply by saying “national security.”

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia’s foreign affairs minister Adel al-Jubeir urges Britain to ‘respect’ the kingdom’s use of the death penalty

• Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has urged Britain to “respect” his country’s use of the death penalty, two weeks after the oil-rich kingdom executed 47 people in one day.

• Adel al-Jubeir, responding to a question over the kingdom’s “terrible image problem”, put to him by Channel 4 News’ Jonathan Rugman, said: “Well on this issue we have a fundamental difference. In your country, you do no execute people, we respect it. In our country the death penalty is part of our laws and you have to respect this as it is the law, part of the law, in the United States and other countries.”

=> ↺ A Few Keystrokes Could Solve the Crime. Would You Press Enter?

• The discovery would surely help in the prosecution of the laptop’s owner, tying him to the crime. But a junior prosecutor has a further idea. The private document was likely shared among other conspirators, some of whom are still on the run or unknown entirely. Surely Google has the ability to run a search of all Gmail inboxes, outboxes, and message drafts folders, plus Google Drive cloud storage, to see if any of its 900 million users are currently in possession of that exact document. If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized “touches” on their accounts to see if the file reposed there.

Internet/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Why Americans Should Pay Attention to What Facebook Is Doing in India

• If you live in India, or happen to have visited in the past month, you probably noticed the seemingly-ubiquitous advertising for something called Free Basics. It’s what you might call a full-court press: full-page ads in newspapers, billboards, and movie theater trailers. Also, if you were to log into Facebook, you’d be presented with an ad (and possibly if you were in the US, too).

• The first thing to understand is that Free Basics is Facebook, and Facebook is Free Basics, and they’re both basically Internet.org. Perhaps more accurately, if expressed in matryoshka dolls, Free Basics is inside Internet.org which is inside Facebook. First, Facebook launched the Internet.org initiative, which covers various projects aimed at spreading internet access to developing countries. One of the first projects was a free service that offers limited access to the internet, including ad-free Facebook and other sites. Then, in September, Facebook rebranded that service from Internet.org to Free Basics.

=> ↺ outrageous roaming fees

• Unexpected roaming fees are the worst. You’re just cruising along, having a jolly old time, and then boom. $20 per megabyte??? Should have read the fine print. Of course, if you had known to read the fine print, you probably would have already known about the roaming fees, and therefore not needed to read the fine print. And so it goes, in life and in ssh.

• What, ssh has roaming??? Should have read the fine print. The Qualys Security Advisory is more than thorough. Now that we’ve read the fine print, what can we do differently?

=> ↺ ‘Poor internet for poor people’: India’s activists fight Facebook connection plan

• India is having its internet uprising, and many western activists can’t figure out what to do about it.

• Since the spring of 2015, Indian activists have built ferocious momentum against Facebook’s bid to take charge of the nation’s internet through a program called Free Basics.

• Formerly called “Internet Zero,” Free Basics’s pitch has been: we’ll get “the next billion internet users” (that is, poor people in developing nations) connected by cutting deals with local phone companies. Under these deals, there will be no charge for accessing the services we hand-pick. We will define the internet experience for these technologically unsophisticated people, with our products at the centre and no competition. It’s philanthropy!

DRM

=> ↺ Netflix’s VPN Ban Isn’t Good for Anyone—Especially Netflix

• After expanding to nearly ever country in the world, Netflix is already in danger of alienating its international audience.

=> ↺ Why Netflix VPN ‘Pirates’ (Shouldn’t) Terrify Hollywood

• This week Netflix announced that it would ramp up its crackdown on VPN and proxy pirates. The decision is a response to increased demands from major Hollywood players, but is this fear of VPN pirates justified?

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

=> ↺ Yosemite to Rename Several Iconic Places

• Can a private company trademark public property? That’s the question the feds are scrambling to answer after a longtime concessionaire in Yosemite claimed rights to the names of some of the park’s most iconic locations.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Summary of ‘Cinematic Bricoleurs’ Remix Conference, King’s College, London (Jan.2016)

• After tea, a panel was assembled for a Q&A session, featuring Prof. Charlotte Wealde, Julia Reda (Pirate Party MEP), Elizabeth Gibson (BBC), Richard Misek, Dan Herbert and myself, chaired by Helen Kennedy. The focus of the panel was ‘the currently shifting sands of territory specific intellectual property legislation, set against the wider backdrop of the global digital economy.’ Each panelist discussed their own position in relation to this issue, as well as suggesting where the leading edge is in terms of influencing changes to current IP legislation and what needs to happen to make those changes. From the floor, questions were fielded in relation to the identity and personality of the author with regard to moral rights and individual self-expression, as well as the challenge of identifying the most important issues and problems in this debate. Some of the answers yielded genuine insights, such as when Julia Reda described how recent attempts to change the EUCD to allow greater freedoms for transformative works were met with great resistance, on the grounds that such exemptions would only serve to benefit large US tech companies. It was suggested that the gathering of evidence and lots of different examples of remix should be prioritized to assist with the changing of copyright legislation and to support the case for such changes. A number of times during the discussion, reference was made to Christian Marclay and especially his found footage work ‘The Clock’ (2010), which was hailed as a superb example of the form.

=> ↺ Croatian cake pirates threatened with lawsuits

• As Harlan Ellison once said about Disney, “Nobody fucks with The Mouse.” Even if you live in Zagreb, Croatia, the long hand of The Mouse can reach in and change your birthday party plans. That’s what several bakers in Zagreb discovered when they received cease-and-desist letters warning them to stop making cakes featuring popular Disney characters from Star Wars, Frozen, and more.

• According to Croatian paper Jutarnji, the letters came from a law firm representing the Zagreb chain Fun Cake Factory, which has an exclusive license to make Disney-themed cakes via its partnership with British confectioner Finsbury Food Group. Ana Marcelić, a local Zagreb confectioner who received one of the cease-and-desist letters, told the paper it would be a “huge loss” for her financially and difficult to explain to customers requesting Disney-themed cakes.

=> ↺ Pastry Shops Targeted Over Copyright Infringing “Star Wars” and “Minion” Cakes

• Pastry shops in Croatia are receiving legal threats over their use of popular cartoon and movie characters on children’s birthday cakes. Baking cakes with a Star Wars or Minions theme is off-limits, as a local pastry chain has secured the rights from copyright owners.

=> ↺ Don’t Terrorize The Public Over Piracy, Putin’s Adviser Says

• The man just appointed as Vladimir Putin’s key adviser on Internet related affairs has suggested that copyright holders should consider the state of the economy before being aggressive with the public. Speaking on local TV, Herman Klimenko says the time is not right for “terrorizing” citizens over piracy.

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