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Links 6/7/2015: Linux 4.2-rc1, YotaPhone Picks Sailfish OS





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Facebook ‘Likes’ Open Source And It’s Not Afraid To Show It
    Most recently, Facebook released the source code for its new static analyzer dubbed “Facebook Infer.”


  • Teaching open source communities about conflict resolution
    At OSCON in Portland this year, Donna Benjamin and Gina Likins are combining forces to talk about a topic that is sometimes easily dismissed: conflict resolution. Given the growing need to address conflict in technology, and that even popular projects like the Linux Kernel adopting codes of conduct, it’s no surprise that conferences feature talks on human interaction.


  • Web Browsers



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



  • CMS



    • Open edX: The open source learning management system for corporations and non-profits
      This month marks the third birthday of edX, the online learning platform developed jointly by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In that short time, usage of the edx.org site has exploded. Over 4 million students have taken one of the hundreds of free online courses provided by dozens of prominent universities. Individual courses have had tens of thousands of enrollees in a session.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Data



      • Austrian GIP information available as open government data
        The Austrian Graph Integration Platform (GIP) has made its national transport graph available to the public for re-use. Although some of this information was already exported for specific applications, the data will now be published in full under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, allowing for any re-use — even commmercial — as long as the source of the information is specified.


      • Open Data and eParticipation - 2 priorities in the next EU eGovernment Action Plan
        Open Data and citizen participation, two core principles of Open Government, will be priorities in the eGovernment Action Plan 2016 - 2020 of the European Commission.




    • Open Hardware



      • An amazing open source 5-axis 3D printer built By University of Oslo Master's student
        As he explains to 3ders.org, this unusual idea actually grew out of the ambitions of one of his professors. 'The idea behind creating the printer was mainly my supervisor's (Mats Høvin). He wanted a student to build a 5-axis machine with some sort of tool. Together we decided it would be interesting to try creating a 5-axis 3D printer since that had not been done at that time, with the exception of DMG Mori's Lasertec 65 3D and others 5-axis metal printers,’ Grutle explains.






  • Programming



  • Standards/Consortia



    • France updates its web accessibility guidelines
      France has updated its guidelines on the accessibility of public administration’ websites. The rules now include recommendations on the use of modern web technologies (HTML5) and come with improved tools for testing website accessibility. The website for the guidelines itself has also been revamped, providing easier access to the documentation.


    • The Unicode 8.0: A Song of Praise for Unsung Heroes
      Two weeks ago, I got a call from a reporter who had stumbled on two pieces I wrote in praise of new releases of the Unicode, the first in 2003 (on the occasion of the release of Unicode 4.0, referred to above), and the second in 2006, two releases later. The reason for the call was the release of Unicode version 8.0 by its stewards, the Unicode Consortium.






Leftovers



  • What happens to my late husband’s digital life now he’s gone?
    Since her husband, Iain, died seven months ago, Caroline Twigg has had to face an unexpected problem – what to do with his online legacy


  • Robbert Barons



    • Settlement approved on Bill Gates’ horse poop code case
      Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates has 30 days to pay $30,600 in Wellington to clear up code violations involving a misplaced manure bin.


    • Bill Gates' trust just got hit with a $30,000 fine over horse manure
      A trust affiliated with billionaire Bill Gates will pay a $30,000 fine over horse manure in a settlement expected to be approved on Thursday by a special magistrate in the affluent south Florida village of Wellington.


    • Bill Gates Foundation working on “Birth Control Chip”
      Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation is working on a birth control chip that can be remote controlled. The birth control chip can be implanted into people’s body – in hip, inside arms or even beneath the back – and can be used for 16 years. The research on birth control chip was kept a secret until now, before the spokesperson for Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation confirmed that the beta testing for the birth control chip would be starting towards the end of this year and that they need volunteers to assist in real life testing of the chip.




  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



    • Are we the fascists now?
      The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones”, “body counts” and “collateral damage”. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.


    • The Government doesn't understand terrorism — and it's making things worse


      It has been scarcely five months since the Government last passed legislation designed to combat the terrorist threat – in February’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Yet already, following Seifeddine Rezgui’s bloodletting in Tunisia, David Cameron, Theresa May, and other senior ministers have offered fresh promises to ratchet up measures in the fight against extremism and in preventing ideological radicalisation.

      Moral panic, rather than sober politics, is at work here. Rezgui was not radicalised in Britain, and his attack tells us precisely nothing about whether UK domestic counter-terrorism policies are currently adequate or inadequate. The concrete implications of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act are not even clear yet – universities, for example, are still awaiting guidance on what it requires of them. But elements of the Government’s Prevent strategy, combined with the post-Tunisia rhetoric, hint at a misguided ambition to make universities and schools part of a state-directed ideological campaign against the amorphous spectre of “violent or non-violent extremism”. One Prevent consultation, for example, implied that universities may soon be obliged to censor the activities of university societies, monitor students for any “opposition to fundamental British values”, maintain records of those students who do so, and unequivocally denounce or exclude such views wherever they are expressed.


    • American Exceptionalism
      Medea Benjamin discusses issues from drone warfare to the recent fast track trade vote.




  • Transparency Reporting





  • Finance



    • Greece Needs Our Solidarity in Its Struggle Against Austerity
      Not for many years has the issue been posed as clearly as it will be on July 5 in Greece's referendum: European capitalists, the political leaders whom the capitalists' money controls, and the austerity they together impose will be judged by the people most savaged by that austerity.

      The Greek people were informed that the financial maneuvers made by Europe's biggest banks, biggest industrial capitalists, and the usual political elites (shamefully including Greeks and "socialists") in 2008-2009 would absolutely require massive losses of Greek jobs, incomes, property, and financial security for many years to come. Recycling Margaret Thatcher's words, they were told "there is no alternative." Other Europeans (and Americans, etc. too) were told the same although their austerities were less bleak (so far).


    • Greek finance minister accuses creditors of 'terrorism'
      Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis accused Athens' creditors of "terrorism" in an interview, a day before Greeks vote in a high-stakes referendum on the conditions of the country's bailout.

      "What they're doing with Greece has a name - terrorism," Varoufakis told the Spanish El Mundo daily on Saturday.

      "What Brussels and the troika want today is for the "Yes" (vote) to win so they could humiliate the Greeks."

      "Why did they force us to close the banks? To instill fear in people. And spreading fear is called terrorism," he said, referring to the IMF, European Central Bank and the EU.

      After failing to reach a deal with its creditors last weekend on an extension of its bailout programme Greece's radical leftist government closed the country's banks and imposed capital controls until July 6.


    • IMF's Christine Lagarde: 'I Don't Pay Taxes, But You Should'
      Politics can be merciless, and the IMF is political even if it’s not a country. IMF chief Christine Lagarde suggested in an interview with UK’s Guardian that the Greeks should pay their taxes. It turns out Ms. Lagarde—legitimately—doesn’t pay them herself.

      In fact, her IMF salary of $467,940 plus an $83,760 additional allowance is not subject to any taxes. See Christine Lagarde, Scourge of Tax Evaders, Pays No Tax. No taxes is the norm for most United Nations employees covered by a convention on diplomatic relations signed by most nations. If you look at salaries, those working for the IMF, World Bank, and UN can stretch their dollars.


    • Greece's mass psychology of revolt will survive the financial carpet-bombing
      When Times correspondent George Steer entered the city of Guernica in April 1937, what struck him were the incongruities. He noted precisely the bombing tactics “which may be of interest to students of the new military science”. But his report begins with a long paragraph describing the city’s ceremonial oak tree and its role in the Spanish feudal system.

      Sitting in Athens this week, I began to understand how Steer felt. Sunday’s referendum will take place under a kind of financial warfare not seen in the history of modern states. The Greek government was forced to close its banks after the European Central Bank, whose job is technically to keep them open, refused to do so. The never-taxed and never-registered broadcasters of Greece did the rest, spreading panic, and intensifying it where it had already taken hold.


    • Greece and Global Class War
      Lest this seem too diabolical to be plausible, this is the basic lending model that has been used by Western banks and backed by Western governments and the ‘independent’ institutions they control for some six decades now. The U.S., Germany or France have long lent money for infrastructure projects, agricultural ‘upgrades’ like the Green Revolution and direct purchases of technology and / or munitions. This indebted the citizens-by-degree of both internally and externally organized nation-states while making large profits for the corporations who could sell their wares thanks to the ‘largesse’ of Western states and banks. This practice in some measure explains how corrupt and / or incompetent government officials and plutocrats in Greece managed to line their own pockets while permanently indebting the good citizens of that storied nation.


    • Greek Media Really, Really Wants Yes Vote On Euro-Bailout
      I suppose it's no surprise that Greece's corporate class is deeply unthrilled by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's leftist government, and would be happy to see him humiliated and tossed out of office. I assume that they also prefer the devil they know—grinding European-imposed austerity for years—to the devil they don't—exiting the euro amid chaos and eventually rebuilding their economy with a devalued drachma. After all, they'll stay rich either way, and sticking with their fellow European moguls probably seems the better bet by far.


    • Greece news media taking sides in coverage of upcoming vote
      The bias toward the "yes" side reflects the fact that many of Greece's biggest news outlets are owned by corporate titans and other "oligarchs" whose business interests would be directly threatened by a "no" victory and the potential abandonment of the euro in favor of the drachma, Leontopoulos said.


    • Greece is being deliberately humiliated for daring to question austerity, Caroline Lucas says


      European authorities have set out to deliberately humiliate Greece for electing a left-wing anti-austerity Government, the Green Party’s MP has said.

      Speaking at a Greece solidarity rally in London Caroline Lucas argued that the “deluded” policy coming out of the eurogroup was designed to punish the Syriza-led government.


    • Greek conservative opposition chief Samaras resigns
      Greece's conservative opposition chief Antonis Samaras on Sunday announced his resignation after the country appeared set to reject further austerity cuts in a referendum.


    • Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”
      In a forceful interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, the star economist Thomas Piketty calls for a major conference on debt. Germany, in particular, should not withhold help from Greece.


    • Canada Without Poverty charity challenges Harper govt. audits at UN in Geneva
      The head of a small Ottawa-based charity is in Geneva this week to complain to a United Nations committee about the Canada Revenue Agency's program of political-activity audits.

      Harriett McLachlan, president of Canada Without Poverty, is pleading her case before the UN Human Rights Committee, arguing that a special audit program launched by the tax agency in 2012 violates Canada's international commitments on human rights.


    • Urgent TTIP Vote: Please Write (Again) to Your MEPs before Wednesday
      There is (another) very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday, when the European Parliament will vote on a resolution concerning TTIP. The first time around, the vote was pulled for tactical reasons by the pro-ISDS camp, rightly afraid that the European Parliament would reject the inclusion of this anti-democratic idea in TTIP. Now they have cobbled together a "compromise" on ISDS which simply calls it something else, without solving the fundamental problem, which is that it gives corporations unique rights to sue entire nations, with us, the public, footing the bill.


    • Don Quijones: Wikileaks Exposes How TISA Will Gut Financial Regulations All Over the World
      TiSA is arguably the most important – yet least well-known – of the new generation of global trade agreements. According to WikiLeaks, it “is the largest component of the United States’ strategic ‘trade’ treaty triumvirate,” which also includes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP).

      “Together, the three treaties form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic ‘grand enclosure,’ which excludes China and all other BRICS countries” declared WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in a press statement. If allowed to take universal effect, this new enclosure system will impose on all our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of financial risk, and social and environmental responsibility.

      [...]

      But that is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the treaty’s Annex on Financial Services, we now know that TiSA would effectively strip signatory governments of all remaining ability to regulate the financial industry in the interest of depositors, small-time investors, or the public at large.
    • Canadian Neocolonialism in Colombia: Oil, Mining and the Military




  • Censorship



  • Privacy



    • Wikileaks Reveals New Details of 'Intensive' NSA Brazil Spying
      Wikileaks published more damning details of U.S. spying on Brazil's government Saturday, just days after President Dilma Rousseff said she had faith Washington has rolled back snooping.

      The latest release includes a list of the NSA's top targets in Brazil, with the agency taking a particular interest in key financial and economic figures in what Wikileaks described as “intensive interception.”

      [...]

      The list itself includes 29 phone numbers – all linked to high level Brazilian officials. Many of the numbers are identified as being associated with senior figures in Brazil's finance ministry, along with the head of the country's central bank.

      [...]

      Brazilian ambassadors in France, Geneva, Germany and the United States also make the list, indicating their private communications have been monitored by the NSA. The publication comes less than a week after Rousseff said during a visit to the White House that “things had changed” between the United States and Brazil.


    • US spy agency targeted top Brazilian officials: WikiLeaks
      Aside from listening in on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's phone calls, US spies also targeted top political and financial officials, according to new information released by WikiLeaks on Saturday.

      The whistle-blowing website published a National Security Agency list of 29 Brazilian government phone numbers that the American spy group monitored.


    • US spied in Brazil government officials: WikiLeaks
      Whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks has published the names of more than 29 members of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's administration who were spied on by the US National Security Agency at the start of her first term in office, which began in January 2011.

      The release of the list of phone numbers on Saturday linked to high-level Brazilian officials comes just days after Rousseff, who was reelected to a second term late last year, and US counterpart Barack Obama met in Washington to end bilateral tensions stemming from previous revelations about NSA eavesdropping on Brasilia.


    • WikiLeaks: NSA spied on Brazil's president
      WikiLeaks disclosed documents Saturday detailing the National Security Agency’s wiretapping of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

      They said the NSA also spied on Rousseff’s secretary, her chief of staff and other top Brazilian government officials, according to USA Today.
    • NSA’s Top Brazilian Political and Financial Targets Revealed by New WikiLeaks Disclosure
      Top secret data from the National Security Agency, shared with The Intercept by WikiLeaks, reveals that the U.S. spy agency targeted the cellphones and other communications devices of more than a dozen top Brazilian political and financial officials, including the country’s president Dilma Rousseff, whose presidential plane’s telephone was on the list. President Rousseff just yesterday returned to Brazil after a trip to the U.S. that included a meeting with President Obama, a visit she had delayed for almost two years in anger over prior revelations of NSA spying on Brazil.


    • Brazil brushes aside latest WikiLeaks release on U.S. spying
      But there was no indication in the list that the spying took place more recently than 2013, and Brazilian officials brushed it aside as old news.


    • Popular VPNs leak data, don't offer promised privacy and anonymity
      Virtual Private Network (VPN) services can be used for circumventing Internet censorship and accessing blocked content, but researchers warn that you shouldn't believe the companies' claims that they offer privacy and anonymity.


    • Cameron calls on web firms to drop encryption for spies' sake
      Cameron wants security services to read your private chats on social media by getting tech firms to drop encryption. The former leader of the Pirate Party, Loz Kaye, thinks Cameron’s anti-encryption moves are ill-thought out, and could spell disaster.




  • Civil Rights



    • Shakira, Ricky Martin, America Ferrera Blast Donald Trump
      If Donald Trump’s anti-Latino rhetoric was an attempt at gaining electoral ground among U.S. conservatives in recent weeks, the backlash appears to have united the country’s large and diverse Latino population.

      Weeks after Donald Trump labeled U.S.-Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and criminals, Latino leaders and artists in U.S. are standing up to the billionaire showing who, in fact, is boss.



    • EFF Is Turning 25 and We Want to Celebrate With You
      We're kicking off this milestone in two ways: a membership drive and a party and minicon in San Francisco on July 16. We're asking people to donate and become members because we fight passionately for the rights of individuals—and in turn, rely deeply on individuals to strengthen our work as we confront threats from powerful institutions and as technology transforms our lives. We're throwing the party to celebrate 25 years of work in the digital world and imagine what the next 25 years ought to look like. More information on our anniversary activities is below.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • ​The last seconds are ticking off the U.S. IPv4 network clock
      The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit group that manages Internet addresses for Canada, most Caribbean countries, and the United States, announced that it has activated its Unmet Request Policy. What that means is that there are no longer enough IPv4 address blocks available for the demand.




  • DRM



    • Apple Music Could Wreck Your iTunes Library
      Because Apple Music is a cloud based service, adding favourite tracks and playlists in Apple Music will add them to your collection in the cloud. If you don’t turn on Apple Music, you don’t have access to your musical cloud record, and the only way to listen to the music is to stream tracks while online. No offline copies, no playlists, and no bookmarks (just the struggle to remember your favourite albums you’ve recently been listening to).


    • Apple locking down users’ music by adding DRM to it
      Apple’s iCLoud Music Library is apparently causing anger in the Apple community. The iCloud Music Library feature was released just a few days ago with the 12.2 release of iTunes. The paid service which comes part of an Apple Music subscription syncs all of you music to iCloud so you can listen to it on any device, sounds good right? Wrong, it adds DRM to all your music.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Major Streaming Sites Must Be Blocked, Court Rules


        After a prolonged legal battle, last year several leading Austrian ISPs were ordered to block major streaming sites Movie4K.to and Kinox.to. All but one of the ISPs appealed but now the Supreme Court has not only ruled against them, but ordered them to pick up the cost of blocking sites in the future.








Comments

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