Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

How fat prawns can save lives

New research provides a roadmap for how entrepreneurs can harness freshwater prawns' voracious appetite for snails to reduce the transmission of schistosomiasis-causing parasites while still making a profit selling the tasty animals as food. The study shows how small-scale farming of freshwater prawns could be a win-win for communities in emerging and developing economies where schistosomiasis is common.

He Was Told to Go Back to Africa. Instead, He May Go to the U.S. Senate.

Helena, Montana, mayor Wilmot Collins was reminded by Donald Trump’s recent comments of the racism he faced when he first came to the U.S. from Liberia.

The post He Was Told to Go Back to Africa. Instead, He May Go to the U.S. Senate. appeared first on The Intercept.

As a psychiatrist, if I had severe depression I’d choose ECT | Mariam Alexander | Opinion | The Guardian https://prismo.xyz/posts/3490ef9c-918d-4deb-a553-c0573511c926

https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-development-fund/

Pretty neat! If they keep this up Blender might start displacing Autodesk (apparently people aren't happy with that anymore)

Amazon customer service representatives report 24 hour shifts - Vox https://prismo.xyz/posts/fc43509d-d33d-4493-b5ba-d7fbdfe11ccc

Heart disease biomarker linked to paleo diet

People who follow the paleo diet have twice the amount of a key blood biomarker linked closely to heart disease, the world's first major study examining the impact of the diet on gut bacteria has found.

San Juan Takes to the Streets

Puerto Rico changed after Maria – and protestors aren’t backing down.

Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

What does the future hold? Ask our seer, Ben Passmore.

Why Am I Scared to Ride a Bike?

To save lives, cities need to design roads for people—not cars.

10 Years of Working In These Times: The 25 Best Stories

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Working In These Times. When I became its editor, in 2012, the site had just turned three.

Founded in July 2009 as a daily labor “blog,” WITT had already become much more, providing full-length, original reporting on each and every major labor story of the day.

We had a void to fill. With the exception of Steven Greenhouse at the New York Times, major newspapers lacked a single reporter dedicated to labor (and most still do). When they deigned to cover labor at all, mainstream outlets published management-slanted pieces in their business sections.

Working In These Times boasted a fleet of top-notch reporters: some casualties of downsized U.S. newsrooms whom we’d lucked out to inherit, some young journalists just cutting their teeth, and David Moberg, a veteran In These Times reporter who had been pounding the picket lines since the magazine’s founding in 1976.

Those reporters—David, Stephen Franklin, Kari Lydersen, Michelle Chen, Sarah Jaffe, Josh Eidelson and many more—taught me the principles of labor reporting: Cheerlead the labor movement and the power of unions, while keeping a critical distance so as to inform labor strategy. Talk to the rank and file. Make sure workers understand the risks they’re taking when speaking out about workplace conditions. Don’t twist their arms to “get the story.”

And the golden rule: Report from the workers’ perspective, not the bosses’.

Reading through the more than 4,500 articles we’ve posted in 10 years of Working In These Times, what I noticed most is the variety of workers you meet. Coal miners, transit workers, teachers and domestic workers: the working people who rarely get a forum to tell their stories.

What struck me, too, was how dogged labor’s fights are—and how long they’ve lasted. Hotel workers spoke out about sexual harassment years before the #MeToo movement erupted. The Chicago teachers walkout in 2012 helped lay the groundwork for the teachers strike wave that took the country by storm in 2018. Fight for $15 protesters demonstrated for years before $15 minimum wage ordinances were won in cities across the country (and the position became de rigueur for Democrats seeking office). Domestic workers came together in New York nine years before the first national Domestic Workers Bill of Rights was introduced, just last week.

In the stories below, which chronicle the iconic labor battles of the last 10 years, you’ll meet the workers who formed the backbone of those fights and many more.

Bad Religion expand fall tour

While the band is already touring in support of their new album, Age of Unreason, Bad Religion have added some additional tour dates to the US leg of the tour. The newly added dates will begin September 17 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL and wrap October 6 in San Diego, CA. Tickets are on sale as […]

The post Bad Religion expand fall tour appeared first on Dying Scene.

Librem 5 Devkit on a train, it just works.

Border Patrol’s Toxic Culture Goes Way Beyond Facebook Groups. It’s Actually for Sale on a T-Shirt.

A Border Patrol agent who allegedly hit a migrant with his agency truck is going on trial next month, and a federal judge ruled Thursday that some of the racist text messages he sent before and after hitting the man can be used in court. On December 3, 2017, Matthew Bowen, an agent patrolling in […]

Kazakhstan government is now intercepting all HTTPS traffic - which is why a trusted root certificate is important https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-intercepting-all-https-traffic/

Don’t Let Encrypted Messaging Become a Hollow Promise

Why do we care about encryption? Why was it a big deal, at least in theory, when Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook would move to end-to-end encryption on all three of its messaging platforms? We don’t just support encryption for its own sake. We fight for it because encryption is one of the most powerful tools individuals have for maintaining their digital privacy and security in an increasingly insecure world.

And although encryption may be the backbone, it’s important to recognize that protecting digital security and privacy encompasses much more; it’s also about additional technicalfeatures and policy choices that support the privacy and security goals that encryption enables.

But as we careen from one attack on encryption after another by governments from Australia to India to Singapore to Kazakhstan, we risk losing sight of this bigger picture. Even if encryption advocates could “win” this seemingly forever crypto war, it would be a hollow victory if it came at the expense of broader security. Some efforts—a recent proposal from Germany comes to mind—are as hamfisted as ever, attempting to give government the power to demand the plaintext of any encrypted message. But others, like the GCHQ’s “Ghost” proposal, purport to give governments the ability to listen in on end-to-end encrypted communications without “weakening encryption or defeating the end-to-end nature of the service.” And, relevant to Facebook’s announcement, we’ve seen suggestions that providers could still find ways of filtering or blocking certain content, even when it is encrypted with a key the provider doesn’t hold.

So, as governments and others try to find ways to surveil and moderate private messages, it leads us to ask: What policy choices are incompatible with secure messaging? We know that the answer has to be more than “don’t break encryption,” because, well, GCHQ already has a comeback to that one. Even when a policy choice technically maintains the mathematical components of end-to-end encryption, it can still violate the expectations users associate with secure communication.

So our answer, in short, is: a secure messenger should guarantee that no one but you and your intended recipients can read your messages or otherwise analyze their contents to infer what you are talking about. Any time a messaging app has to add “unless...” to that guarantee, whether in response to legislation or internal policy decisions, it’s a sign that messenger is delivering compromised security to its users.

EFF considers the following signs that a messenger is not delivering end-to-end encryption: client-side scanning, law enforcement “ghosts,” and unencrypted backups. In each of these cases, your messages remain between you and your intended recipient, unless...

Client-side scanning

Your messages stay between you and your recipient....unless you send something that matches up to a database of problematic content.

End-to-end encryption is meant to protect your messages from any outside party, including network eavesdroppers, law enforcement, and the messaging company itself. But the company could determine the contents of certain end-to-end encrypted messages if it implemented a technique called client-side scanning.

Sometimes called “endpoint filtering” or “local processing,” this privacy-invasive proposal works like this: every time you send a message, software that comes with your messaging app first checks it against a database of “hashes,” or unique digital fingerprints, usually of images or videos. If it finds a match, it may refuse to send your message, notify the recipient, or even forward it to a third party, possibly without your knowledge.

Hash-matching is already a common practice among email services, hosting providers, social networks, and other large services that allow users to upload and share their own content. One widely used tool is PhotoDNA, created by Microsoft to detect child exploitation images. It allows providers to automatically detect and prevent this content from being uploaded to their networks and to report it to law enforcement. But because services like PhotoDNA run on company servers, they cannot be used with an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, leading to the proposal that providers of these services should do this scanning “client-side,” on the device itself.

The prevention of child exploitation imagery might seem to be a uniquely strong case for client-side scanning on end-to-end encrypted services. But it’s safe to predict that once messaging platforms introduce this capability, it will likely be used to filter a wide range of other content. Indeed, we’ve already seen a proposal that Whatsapp create “an updatable list of rumors and fact-checks” that would be downloaded to each phone and compared to messages to “warn users before they share known misinformation.” We can expect to see similar attempts to screen end-to-end messaging for “extremist” content and copyright infringement. There are good reasons to be wary of this sort of filtering of speech when it is done on public social media sites, but using it in the context of encrypted messaging is a much more extreme step, fully undermining users’ ability to carry out a private conversation.

Because all of the scanning and comparison takes place on your device, rather than in the cloud, advocates of this technique argue that it does not break end-to-end encryption: your message still travels between its two “ends”—you and your recipient—fully encrypted. But it’s simply not end-to-end encryption if a company’s software is sitting on one of the “ends” silently looking over your shoulder and pre-filtering all the messages you send.

Messengers can make the choice to implement client-side scanning. However, if they do, they violate the user expectations associated with end-to-end encryption, and cannot claim to be offering it.

Law enforcement “ghosts”

Your messages stay between you and your recipient...unless law enforcement compels a company to add a silent onlooker to your conversation.

Another proposed tweak to encrypted messaging is the GCHQ’s “Ghost” proposal, which its authors describe like this:

It’s relatively easy for a service provider to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call. The service provider usually controls the identity system and so really decides who’s who and which devices are involved—they’re usually involved in introducing the parties to a chat or call. You end up with everything still being end-to-end encrypted, but there’s an extra ‘end’ on this particular communication. This sort of solution seems to be no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips that our democratically elected representatives and judiciary authorize today in traditional voice intercept solutions and certainly doesn’t give any government power they shouldn’t have.

But as EFF has writtenbefore, this requires the provider to lie to its customers, actively suppressing any notification or UX feature that allow users to verify who is participating in a conversation. Encryption without this kind of notification simply does not meet the bar for security.

Unencrypted backups by default

Your messages stay between you and your recipient......unless you back up your messages.

Messaging apps will often give users the option to back up their messages, so that conversations can be recovered if a phone is lost or destroyed. Mobile operating systems iOS and Android offer similar options to back up one’s entire phone. If conversation history from a “secure” messenger is backed up to the cloud unencrypted (or encrypted in a way that allows the company running the backup to access message contents), then the messenger might as well not have been end-to-end encrypted to begin with.

Instead, a messenger can choose to encrypt the backups under a key kept on the user’s device or a password that only the users know, or it can choose to not encrypt the backups. If a messenger chooses not to encrypt backups, then they should be off by default and users should have an opportunity to understand the implications of turning them on.

For example, WhatsApp provides a mechanism to back messages up to the cloud. In order to back messages up in a way that makes them restorable without a passphrase in the future, these backups need to be stored unencrypted at rest. Upon first install, WhatsApp prompts you to choose how often you wish to backup your messages: daily, weekly, monthly, or never.  In EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense, we adviseusers to never back up their WhatsApp messages to the cloud, since that would deliver unencrypted copies of your message log to the cloud provider. In order for your communications to be truly secure, any contact you chat with must do the same.

Continuing the fight

In the 1990s, we had to fight hard in the courts, and in software, to defend the right to use encryption strong enough to protect online communications; in the 2000s, we watched mass government and corporate surveillance undermine everything online that was not defended by that encryption, deployed end-to-end. But there will always be attempts to find a weakness in those protections. And right now, that weakness lies in our acceptance of surveillance in our devices. We see that in attempts to implement client-side scanning, mandate deceptive user interfaces, or leak plaintext from our devices and apps. Keeping everyone’s communications safe means making sure we don’t hand over control of our devices to companies, governments, or other third parties.

The Northernmost Settlement on Earth Cracked 70 Degrees For the First Time This Week #climatechange #climatecrisis
https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-northernmost-settlement-on-earth-cracked-70-degrees-1836527516

Germany has banned its #schools from using cloud-based productivity suites from Microsoft, Google, and Apple, because the companies weren't meeting the country's #privacy requirements. 
https://t.co/smlJIQ0sNA

Victory! Oakland City Council Votes to Ban Government Use of Face Surveillance

Earlier this week, Oakland’s City Council voted unanimously to ban local government use of face surveillance. The amendment to Oakland’s Community Surveillance and Community Safety Ordinance will make Oakland the third U.S. city to take this critical step toward protecting the safety, privacy, and civil liberties of its residents. 

Local governments like those in San Francisco, CA; Somerville, MA; and now Oakland, CA are leading the way in proactively heading off the threat of this particularly pernicious form of surveillance. However, after a series of hearings by the House Oversight Committee, national and international policymakers have also begun to look closely at the technology’s threat to human rights and civil liberties. 

On the same day that Oakland’s City Council voted to ban government use of the technology, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act (H.R. 3494) that would require the Director of National Intelligence to report on the use of face surveillance by intelligence agencies. David Kaye, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, has also called for a moratorium on face surveillance saying, "Surveillance tools can interfere with human rights, from the right to privacy and freedom of expression to rights of association and assembly."

Over the last several years, EFF has continuously voiced concerns over the First and Fourth Amendment implications of government use of face surveillance. These concerns are exacerbated by research conducted by MIT’s Media Lab regarding the technology’s high error rates for women and people of color. However, even if manufacturers are successful in addressing the technology’s substantially higher error rates for already marginalized communities, government use of face recognition technology will still threaten safety and privacy, chill free speech, and amplify historical and ongoing discrimination in our criminal system.

Even as Oakland’s face surveillance ban awaits a procedural second reading, lawmakers and community members across the country are considering their own prohibitions and moratoriums on their local government’s use. This week, the Public Safety Committee in the neighboring city of Berkeley, CA held a hearing on their own proposed ban, and lawmakers across the country took to Twitter to share news of their like intentions.

Massachusetts residents, beyond Somerville, hoping to protect their communities from face surveillance should contact their state lawmakers in support of S.1385 and H.1538, the proposed bills calling for a moratorium throughout the Commonwealth. Outside of Massachusetts, as governing bodies across the country adjourn for their summer recess, now is an opportune time to call on your own representatives to take a stand for the rights of their constituents, by banning government use of face surveillance in your community. 

SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects

Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.

In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.

Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.

The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine; the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.

But as office networking spread, the battle moved to a new front: networking compatibility. AppleTalk, Apple's proprietary protocol for connecting up Macs and networked devices like printers, pretty much Just Worked, providing you were using a Mac. If you were using a Windows PC, you had to install special, buggy, unreliable software.

And for Apple users hoping to fit in at Windows shops, the problems were even worse: Windows machines used the SMB protocol for file-sharing and printers, and Microsoft's support for MacOS was patchy at best, nonexistent at worst, and costly besides. Businesses sorted themselves into Mac-only and PC-only silos, and if a Mac shop needed a PC (for the accounting software, say), it was often cheaper and easier just to get the accountant their own printer and backup tape-drive, rather than try to get that PC to talk to the network. Likewise, all PC-shops with a single graphic designer on a Mac—that person would often live offline, disconnected from the office network, tethered to their own printer, with their own stack of Mac-formatted ZIP cartridges or CD-ROMs.

All that started to change in 1993: that was the year that an Australian PhD candidate named Andrew Tridgell licensed his SAMBA package as free/open source software and exposed it to the wide community of developers looking to connect their non-Microsoft computers—Unix and GNU/Linux servers, MacOS workstations—to the dominant Microsoft LANs.

SAMBA was created by using a "packet sniffer" to ingest raw SMB packets as they traversed a local network; these intercepted packets gave Tridgell the insight he needed to reverse-engineer Microsoft's proprietary networking protocol. Tridgell prioritized compatibility with LAN Manager, a proprietary Network Operating System that enterprise networks made heavy use of. If SAMBA could be made to work in LAN Manager networks, then you could connect a Mac to a PC network—or vice-versa—and add some Unix servers and use a mix of SAMBA and SMB to get them all to play nice with one another.

The timing of Tridgell's invention was crucial: in 1993, Microsoft had just weathered the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of its monopoly tactics, squeaking through thanks to a 2-2 deadlock among the commissioners, and was facing down a monopoly investigation by the Department of Justice.

The growth of local-area networks greatly accelerated Microsoft's dominance. It's one thing to dominate the desktop, another entirely to leverage that dominance so that no one else can make an operating system that connects to networks that include computers running that dominant system. Network administrators of the day were ready to throw in the towel and go all-Microsoft for everything from design workstations to servers.

SAMBA changed all that. What's more, as Microsoft updated SMB, SAMBA matched them, relying on a growing cadre of software authors who relied on SAMBA to keep their own networks running.

The emergence of SAMBA in the period when Microsoft's dominance was at its peak, the same year that the US government tried and failed to address that dominance, was one of the most salutary bits of timing in computing history, carving out a new niche for Microsoft's operating system rivals that gave them space to breathe and grow. It's certainly possible that without SAMBA, Microsoft could have leveraged its operating system, LAN and application dominance to crush all rivals.

So What Happened?

We don't see a lot of SAMBA-style stories anymore, despite increased concentration of various sectors of the tech market and a world crying out for adversarial interoperability judo throws.

Indeed, investors seem to have lost their appetite for funding companies that might disrupt the spectacularly profitable Internet monopolists of 2019, ceding them those margins and deeming their territory to be a "kill zone."

VCs have not lost their appetite for making money, and toolsmiths have not lost the urge to puncture the supposedly airtight bubbles around the Big Tech incumbents, so why is it so hard to find a modern David with the stomach to face off against 2019's Goliaths?

To find the answer, look to the law. As monopolists have conquered more and more of the digital realm, they have invested some of those supernormal profits in law and policy that lets them fend off adversarial interoperators.

One legal weapon is "Terms of Service": both Facebook and Blizzard have secured judgments giving their fine print the force of law, and now tech giants use clickthrough agreements that amount to, "By clicking here, you promise that you won't try to adversarially interoperate with us."

A modern SAMBA project would have to contend with this liability, and Microsoft would argue that anyone who took the step of installing SMB had already agreed that they wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it to make a compatible product.

Then there's "anti-circumvention," a feature of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, bypassing a "copyright access control" can put you in both criminal and civil jeopardy, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 was originally used to stop companies from making region-free DVD players or modding game consoles to play unofficial games (neither of which is a copyright violation!).

But today, DMCA 1201 is used to control competitors, critics, and customers. Any device with software in it contains a "copyrighted work," so manufacturers need only set up an "access control" and they can exert legal control over all kinds of uses of the product.

Their customers can only use the product in ways that don't involve bypassing the "access control," and that can be used to force you to buy only one brand of ink or use apps from only one app store.

Their critics—security researchers auditing their cybersecurity—can't publish proof-of-concept to back up their claims about vulnerabilities in the systems.

And competitors can't bypass access controls to make compatible products: third party app stores, compatible inks, or a feature-for-feature duplicate of a dominant company's networking protocol.

Someone attempting to replicate the SAMBA creation feat in 2019 would likely come up against an access control that needed to be bypassed in order to peer inside the protocol's encrypted outer layer in order to create a feature-compatible tool to use in competing products.

Another thing that's changed (for the worse) since 1993 is the proliferation of software patents. Software patenting went into high gear around 1994 and consistently gained speed until 2014, when Alice v. CLS Bank put the brakes on (today, Alice is under threat). After decades of low-quality patents issuing from the US Patent and Trademark Office, there are so many trivial, obvious and overlapping software patents in play that anyone trying to make a SAMBA-like product would run a real risk of being threatened with expensive litigation for patent infringement.

This thicket of legal anti-adversarial-interoperability dangers has been a driver of market concentration, and the beneficiaries of market concentration have also spent lavishly to expand and strengthen the thicket. It's gotten so bad that even some "open standards organizations" have standardized easy-to-use ways of legally prohibiting adversarial interoperability, locking in the dominance of the largest browser vendors.

The idea that wildly profitable businesses would be viewed as unassailable threats by investors and entrepreneurs (rather than as irresistible targets) tells you everything you need to know about the state of competition today. As we look to cut the Big Tech giants down to size, let's not forget that tech once thronged with Davids eager to do battle with Goliaths, and that this throng would be ours to command again, if only we would re-arm it.

A Bad Copyright Bill Moves Forward With No Serious Understanding of Its Dangers

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted on the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act, aka the CASE Act. This was without any hearings for experts to explain the huge flaws in the bill as it’s currently written. And flaws there are.

We’ve seen some version of the CASE Act pop up foryearsnow, and the problems with the bill have never been addressed satisfactorily. This is still a bill that puts people in danger of huge, unappealable money judgments from a quasi-judicial system—not an actual court—for the kind of Internet behavior that most people engage in without thinking.

During the vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was once again stressed that the CASE Act—which would turn the Copyright Office into a copyright traffic court—created a “voluntary” system.

“Voluntary” does not accurately describe the regime of the CASE Act. The CASE Act does allow people who receive notices from the Copyright Office to “opt-out” of the system. The average person is not really going to understand what is going on, other than that they’ve received what looks like a legal summons.

Take Action

Tell the Senate Not to Enable Copyright Trolls

Furthermore, the CASE Act gives people just 60 days from receiving the notice to opt-out, so long as they do so in writing “in accordance with regulations established by the Register of Copyrights,” which in no way promises that opting out will be a simple process, understandable to everyone. But because the system is opt-out, and the goal of the system Is presumably to move as many cases through it as possible, the Copyright Office has little incentive to make opting out fair to respondents and easy to do.

That leaves opting out as something most easily taken advantage of by companies and people who have lawyers who can advise them of the law and leaves the average Internet user at risk of having a huge judgment handed down by the Copyright Office. At first, those judgments can be up to $30,000, enough to bankrupt many people in the U.S., and that cap can grow even higher without any more action by Congress. And the “Copyright Claims Board” created by the CASE Act can issue those judgments to those who don’t show up. A system that can award default judgments like this is not “voluntary.”

We know how this will go because we’ve seen this kind of confusion and fear with the DMCA. People receive DMCA notices and, unaware of their rights or intimidated by the requirements of a counter-notice, let their content disappear even if it’s fair use. The CASE Act makes it extremely easy to collect against people using the Internet the way everyone does: sharing memes, photos, and video.

If the CASE Act was not opt-out, but instead required respondents to give affirmative consent, or “opt-in,” at least the Copyright Office would have greater incentive to design proceedings that safeguard the respondents’ interests and have clear standards that everyone can understand. With both sides choosing to litigate in the Copyright Office, it’s that much harder for copyright trolls to use the system to get huge awards in a place that is friendly to copyright holders.

We said this the last time the CASE Act was proposed and we’ll say it again: Creating a quasi-court focused exclusively on copyright with the power to pass judgment on parties in private disputes invites abuse. It encourages copyright trolling by inviting filing as many copyright claims as one can against whoever is least likely to opt-out—ordinary Internet users who can be coerced into paying thousands of dollars to escape the process, whether they infringed copyright or not.

Copyright law fundamentally impacts freedom of expression. People shouldn’t be funneled to a system that hands out huge damage awards with less care than a traffic ticket gets.

Take Action

Tell the Senate Not to Enable Copyright Trolls