● 11.03.15

● Links 3/11/2015: Tails 1.7, Fedora 23

Posted in News Roundup at 6:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Linux Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.3 yesterday with some new and improved features. Eclipsing the new kernel release was another salty post by the famous Linux founder beginning, “Christ people. This is just s**t.” In other news, a couple more Ubuntu reviews were posted and Adam Williamson has an important Fedora 23 public service announcement.

• Enrique Sevillano (age 42) is a recipient in the Sys Admin Superstar category and works as an IT manager at an energy utility company in the United States. He recently decided to move the company’s architecture to Linux. By doing so, he says, they have optimized services on old servers that otherwise would have been cost prohibitive. Enrique says Linux and open source have allowed him to deploy a high-availability virtualization infrastructure as well as affordable storage and cloud solutions.

• The new stable Linux kernel is out there supporting Intel’s Skylake and a reworked open source support platform for Nvidia graphics cards.

Applications

• Fotoxx is an open source photo editing program, working on Linux. It has support for the most important image formats, including JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and RAW. Fotoxx is mostly used for cropping, resizing or retouching photos, without using layers, like Photoshop.

• As part of my job at the Université Catholique de Louvain, one of my projects is to develop gCSVedit, a small and simple text editor to edit CSV files.

• gCSVedit is now a free/libre software (GPLv3+ license) and is currently hosted on GitHub.

• As you may know, PhotoFlow is an open-source, non-destructive photo editing software for adjusting photos from RAW images to high-quality printing.

• As you may know, Simple Screen Recorder is a screen recorder application, with support for X11 and OpenGL. Having a simple and intuitive GUI built by using the Qt libraries, it enables the users to easily record both the entire screen (having multi-monitor support also) or parts of it only, or OpenGL applications.

• Containerbuddy is a shim written in Go to help make it easier to containerize existing applications. It can act as PID1 in the container and fork/exec the application. If the application exits then so does Containerbuddy.

• This release of Mejiro is all about fixing minor problems and annoyances. As you may know, in order to display photos, Mejiro must generate thumbnails for all uploaded photos. Depending on the number of photos and hardware, this task can take considerable time during which the entire app “stalls.” This may give the impression that the app is either unreachable or non-functional. To avoid this, the new version of the app displays notifications when it is generating thumbnails.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software available for Linux, I feature below 5 excellent open source web proxy tools. Some of the them are full-featured; a couple of them have very modest resource needs.

Proprietary

• Bomgar, a leader in secure remote support and access management solutions, today released Bomgar Remote Support 15.2, the latest version of its enterprise-leading remote support software.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I know it’s an advert, but sometimes adverts really are quite nice. ZOTAC now seems to be stepping up their SteamOS Steam Machine hype with a trailer for their NEN unit.

• I have to hand it to Alienware as they really are trying to do a push for their Steam Machine units, we have another video to show off, this time from Trisha Hershberger.

• Euro Fishing immerses you deep into the adrenaline-packed action, fun and beauty of Europe’s most famous lakes. Sounds okay, and the graphics look quite nice too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Cinnamon is a relatively new desktop environment from the same developers responsible for Linux Mint, a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, and Linux Mint Debian Edition, also a desktop distribution based on Debian.

• Cinnamon 2.8 is the latest edition, just released yesterday November 2 2015.

• The Linux Mint developers have finally released the stable version of the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment. It’s a huge release, and all users of this desktop environment are in for a treat.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Back in 4.x we provided two binaries for KWin: one compiled against OpenGL (kwin) and one compiled against OpenGL ES (kwin_gles). The reason for that is that one can only reasonably link either OpenGL or OpenGL ES and OpenGL ES is only a subset of OpenGL, so one needs to hide the OpenGL calls (especially the OpenGL 1 calls).

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I can’t say that she was a close friend, but we knew each other since way back in time. She was a constant companion in search of good food and during several free software conferences, she and I took the lead of a group of hackers, finding them nourishment for the night and day ahead. So I was saddened today to learn that Telsa Gwynne has passed away.

• My first exchange with Telsa was around Christmas of 1998. We were talking about Christmas gifts, and whether Alan Cox, her husband, wouldn’t like to get a nice printout of RFC-1149, the “Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers”. Little did we know at the time that Alan would later support a group of Norwegian hackers in actually implementing that very specification!

• Telsa never had an easy time in the free software community. From the very early days when we started talking, she was frequently and repeatedly abused by people trying to use her to get to her husband. Over the years, she withstood harassment and abuse of almost any sort from people in the free software community. She got to witness first hand the darkest corners of our community and the worst kind of people anyone can ever imagine.

• Some of Telsa’s contribution to the free software community before that included a lot of work on explaining GNOME to people. She served on the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, contributed translations and wrote comprehensive FAQs about both GNOME and the GNOME Foundation.

• On 2015-10-04 it was announced that the governing body of the GNOME Foundation, the Board, has a vacant seat. That body was elected about 15 weeks earlier. The elections are very democratic, they use an STV system to make as many votes as possible count. So far, no replacement has been officially announced. The question of what strategy to use in order to find the replacement has been left unanswered. Let me summarise the facts and comment on the strategy I wish the GNOME project to follow.

Distributions

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• The Manjaro Community announced, through the voice of Stefano Capitani, the maintainer of Manjaro-Budgie, that a new version of the Budgie flavor has been released and is now ready for download.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Opensuse Leap 42.1 should be available on Wednesday Nov. 4th. So here are a few notes that some readers might find useful.

Red Hat Family

• Deutsche Bank’s Karl Keirstead upgraded the rating on the company from Hold to Buy, while raising the price target from $75 to $90.

• Deutsche Bank upgraded Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) from Hold to Buy. Red Hat shares closed at $80.14 on Monday.

Fedora

• As of today, the Fedora Project is proud to announce the new Fedora Developer Portal. The Developer Portal supports developers working on software projects with Fedora as their primary operating system or inside a virtual machine. It helps them install essential development tools, language runtimes, and databases. It also introduces distribution and deployment options using COPR and OpenShift.

• It’s (approximately) Halloween, so you know what that means — new Fedora! The Fedora 23 release is here, and it’s better than ever before. We’re pleased to bring you the latest incarnations of the three main Fedora editions — Fedora Workstation, Fedora Cloud, and Fedora Server, each built with love by the Fedora community to custom-fit your needs in different areas. Fedora 23 is also available in alternate desktop Spins, curated software Labs, and special images for the ARM processor architecture.

• If that’s all you need to hear, download from https://getfedora.org/, or if you already use Fedora, follow the simple upgrade steps. Otherwise, read on for details.

• Fedora 23 Workstation is now released. It’s a reliable, user-friendly, and powerful operating system aimed at home users, hobbyists, students, and software developers. Fedora 23 Workstation features the latest GNOME 3.18 release courtesy of the GNOME community. This release of GNOME includes updates to the Files browser, and the new Calendar and Todo applications. Fedora 23 Workstation is the first release of Fedora to include LibreOffice 5.

• Not all Linux distributions are created equal. The focus of its maintainers can vary wildly, leading to very different experiences. I still insist that there are too many distros, leading to confusion and resources being spread too thin, but c’est la vie.

• Today, my favorite Linux distro, Fedora — which is also the operating system of choice for Linus Torvalds — reaches a new milestone. Yes, Fedora 23 is finally here and it comes with Linux kernel 4.2. If you are a fan of open source, security, frequently updated packages and free-software ideology, this is the Linux-based operating system for you.

• Fedora 23 is now hitting the streets and has been officially released. You’ll likely want to upgrade your system. If you’ve upgraded from past Fedora releases, you’re likely familiar with the fedup tool. However, Fedora 23 features a new release method using some of the perks provided by the dnf package manager introduced in Fedora 21. To upgrade to Fedora 23, you will use the DNF system upgrade plugin. Using this plugin will make your upgrade to Fedora 23 simple and easy.

• Dunno how many of you know but Just in time was invented in Japan. Same way FAD day 1 started just in time as planned Everyone was at meeting points at the time. Information about G11N FAD available at Wiki.

• To win new users and later on new contributors, you have to go locally and that means also to translate Fedora to the local language. For Cambodia and his language khmer we had no translation since Fedora Core 6. We planned since last year to re-initiate the translation for this language, it took as some time to arrange everything, getting the mailing list setup, making the wiki pages and so on.

Debian Family

• The work is not yet entirely over us for Roland and I, since we’re now busy updating the French translation of the book. It should be available in the upcoming weeks. Keep posted!

Derivatives

• This release fixes numerous security issues. All users must upgrade as soon as possible.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Distro time! After a quiet distro slayin’ period here in Dedowood, we embark on the great hunt once more, and we pay an excessive amount of time to Ubuntu and its derivatives, starting with the original beast. If you’ve followed my reviews lately, you know that I found Trusty to be excellent, and Vivid was also rather cool.

• Let’s see what the latest in the series can do. Our test machine will be Lenovo G50, which comes with the modern obstacles of multi-boot, Windows 10, UEFI, Secure Boot, and other things that make Linux folks raise a skeptical brow. Let us.

Flavours and Variants

• Ubuntu comes with a couple of different flavors which are largely defined by the desktop environment that’s included in the each flavor, and by the default set of software applications included, to some extent.

• While there are about nine flavors (official), targeting various kinds of end-users, I thought making a comparison of the three major flavors, specifically concerning their performance (since I’m more of a technically oriented individual, plus you can easily find their various new features on most other websites anyway), namely Ubuntu 15.10 (Unity desktop 7.3.2), Kubuntu 15.10 (KDE Plasma 5.4.0) and Ubuntu Gnome 15.10 (GNOME Shell 3.16) would come in handy for someone who’s trying to decide which to use.

Devices/Embedded

• Aaeon’s rugged, Linux-ready “Boxer-6404” industrial controller offers quad- or dual-core Bay Trail SoCs, plus four GbE ports and -20 to 60°C operation.

Phones

Tizen

• The IoTivity project has recently reached an important milestone – its 1.0.0 release, which includes Getting Started instructions for Tizen.

• IoTivity is the reference implementation for the work of the Open Interconnect Consortium, who are defining a standard and a certification program for the device-to-device connectivity needs of the Internet of Things (IOT).

Android

• Sundar Pichai, the new CEO of Google under Larry Page’s Alphabet, even dropped a hint about Chrome OS and Android’s future during Google’s last earnings call. Pichai said that “mobile as a computing paradigm is eventually going to blend with what we think of as desktop today.”

• Since it first appeared in Apple’s App Store last year, the free encrypted calling and texting app Signal has become the darling of the privacy community, recommended—and apparently used daily—by no less than Edward Snowden himself. Now its creator is bringing that same form of ultra-simple smartphone encryption to Android.

• These days we’re spending more time than ever on our smartphones. Despite this trend, there is still a lot of work that gets done on our desktop PCs. In this article, I’ll share some Android applications that you can use to remotely access your desktop computer.

• Following Android Alpha and Android Beta, Google has always named its Android OS updates after sweet treats, and in alphabetical order. So far we’ve had Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop and Marshmallow.

• Next in line is Android ‘N’, sure to be a sweet treat, but Google won’t reveal the operating system’s full name until the second half of 2016.

• The Huawei Watch is the best Android Wear smartwatch yet and one of the best cross-platform smartwatches. It easily passes as a traditional watch while providing access to information and notifications on your wrist.

• It isn’t a standout “look at me” piece of technology, which is good if you’re more interested in function and classic design than showing off, and is comfortable to wear. The higher resolution sapphire screen is the best available at the moment and the battery lasted two days in my testing with the screen on all the time.

Free Software/Open Source

• Slack is a popular team communications application for organizations that offers group chat and direct messaging for mobile, web, and desktop platforms. While Slack offers many benefits to customers, there are also downsides to using the platform, including high subscription fees and the risk of a massive leak of private data if Slack’s servers are ever breached (again).

• I’ve noticed that more and more projects are using things like Slack as the chat medium for their open source projects. In the past couple of days alone, I’ve been directed to Slack for Babel and Bootstrap. I’d like to try and curb this phenomenon before it takes off any more.

• Business problems today are too big for any one person to solve. Agile teams are much more effective at solving problems than are lone geniuses. So why do we still reward the smartest people in the room more so than those who excel at working with others? You know who I’m talking about: the people who brazenly take over meetings by showing off how much they know or how witty they can be at the expense of any other voice in the room—and who often end up getting all of the boss’s attention.

• This article provides an overview of free and open source software (FOSS) that may be of use to students and researchers in academia, based on my own experience in psychology studies.

• Open source software is being seen increasingly as a viable option for CIOs seeking to drive innovation, build platforms, increase agility and cut costs in the enterprise, but barriers to adopting open source remain to IT executives seeking to put together a business case to using open source applications.

• Will your car be controlled by open source software one day? Ericsson Research is taking this question seriously, with the help of the open source Restlet Framework project, where a simple text message can turn on the air conditioning before you walk back to your car.

• Are you a mentor? Or, maybe you’re someone who identifies as a bridge builder, just looking for the right opportunity to help someone out—because working in tech can, well, be hard sometimes.

• Chef, the workflow automation tool company, has announced the general availability of its DevOps tool Chef Delivery. The product was initially launched in April.

• Over on PaulGraham News, there’s an ongoing discussion about using Slack for FOSS projects. It’s interesting but almost entirely focuses on the technical and UX aspects of why IRC has failed, while ignoring what is in my opinion the most important aspects of a chat platform: The social aspects.

Events

• Back from OpenStack Summit in Tokyo. It was really a interesting conference with many interesting meetings, a lot interesting talks and also events.

• The Creative Commons Summit, a bi-annual meeting of members of the CC network and friends of the Commons, took place in mid-October in Seoul, South Korea. One of the event’s tracks was devoted to copyright reform advocacy. The track was organised by member organisations of Communia, including Creative Commons.

• MINIX has been around now for about 30 years so it is (finally) time for the MINIXers to have a conference to get together, just as Linuxers and BSDers have been doing for a long time. The idea is to exchange ideas and experiences among MINIX 3 developers and users as well as discussing possible paths forward now that the ERC funding is over. Future developments will now be done like in any other volunteer-based open-source project. Increasing community involvement is a key issue here. Attend or give a presentation.

• I’m quite excited by this event as it is the first time two succesful and longstanding events in Paris have merged: Linux Solutions on the one hand and the well known Open World Forum. The venue is worth a look as well: the Docks are the rehabilitated industrial area just north of Paris and close to the Stade de France.

• OpenStack summit Tokyo anyone? I’ve been there and thought it was a very well organized event, in a nice location. Every minute together with peers seemed worth it to me. This said, let’s talk about the actual sessions. I spent most of my time at the TripleO and Heat sessions, with a little detour on Magnum. Plus some booth crawling.

SaaS/Big Data

• The OpenStack community gathered in Tokyo to learn about the latest developments in the open-source cloud world, including the upcoming Mitaka release.

• Software Defined Networking (SDN) vendor Midokura first open-sourced its MidoNet technology in 2014 and hasn’t looked back since. At the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo last week, the company announced an update to its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) platform and participated actively in Summit sessions.

• IBM acquired privately-held managed OpenStack vendor Blue Box in June of this year. Now barely six months later, Blue Box is out with a new solution and the company’s founder is aggressively hiring major talent in the OpenStack developer space. Proudman has managed to attract 55 people to help IBM build out its OpenStack cloud efforts.

• I’ve attended the summit mainly to discuss and follow-up new developments on Ceilometer, Gnocchi, Aodh and Oslo. It has been a pretty good week and we were able to discuss and plan a few interesting things. Below are what I found remarkable during this summit concerning those projects.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• 28 October 2015 – The Apache OpenOffice project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of OpenOffice 4.1.2. You can download it from the official website http://www.openoffice.org/download

• Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 brings stability fixes, bug fixes and enhancements. All users of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 or earlier are advised to upgrade.

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0.3 “fresh”, the 4th release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, and LibreOffice 4.4.6, the 7th release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family. So far, the LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular LibreOffice ever, based on feedback from journalists and end users.

Business

• For any business or enterprise, objective is to improve revenue, cost efficiency, business processes, and create more agile organizations. Gartner predicts that by 2016, 99% of Global 2000 Enterprises will have incorporated Open Source Software (OSS) into their technology portfolios and half of the leading non-IT organizations would have embraced OSS.

Semi-Open Source//Openwashing

BSD

• Oct 2015 is the 20th anniversary of the OpenBSD source tree!

• This episode is brought to you by the id utility, which returns the user identity. id appeared in 4.4 BSD.

Public Services/Government

• The application will be published using the European Union’s public software licence, EUPL.

Licensing

• The signers respectfully request that the commission carefully balance the important work of protecting the radio spectrum with the immeasurable value in experimentation, innovation, and freedom for law-abiding users. Additionally, the signers invite the commission and other regulatory agencies to collaborate with industry; free, open source, and proprietary software developers; and device users on developing wireless device policies and recommendations that meet the needs of regulatory agencies and protect the ability of users to inspect, modify and improve their devices.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• The entire editorial staff of the prestigious academic title Lingua have resigned in protest over the high cost of subscribing to the journal, and the refusal of the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, to convert the title completely to open access. The open access model allows anyone, whether an academic or not, to read a journal online for free. Currently, most academic journals are funded by subscriber payments; with open access journals, the model is flipped around, with institutions paying to publish their papers.

• As Inside Higher Ed reports, the academics who have made Lingua into one of the top journals in its field through their editorial work all gave up their roles after telling Elsevier of the “frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn’t even figure out what it would cost to subscribe.”

Open Hardware

• Once again Aleph Objects finds themselves being honored by Make: by taking home the “Best Overall” award for the LulzBot TAZ 5, as well as the “Outstanding Open Source” award. According to Make: editors, the TAZ 5 was selected Best Overall because the latest iteration of the TAZ is an example of LulzBot’s ongoing “commitment to excellent engineering.” TAZ 5 was selected as Outstanding Open Source because LulzBot continues “holding true to its open source roots.”

Programming

• If you thought Fortran and Cold War-era assembly language programming is pointless and purely for old-timers, guess again. NASA has found an engineer comfortable with the software to keep its old space-race-age systems ticking over.

• In an interview with Popular Mechanics this month, the manager of NASA’s Voyager program Suzanne Dodd said the retirement of the project’s last original engineer left the space agency with a shortage of people capable of communicating with the 40-year-old craft.

• Launched in 1977, the two Voyager crafts rely on mid-1970s hardware controlled by purpose-built General Electric interrupt-driven processors. After 38 years in space, the two probes are on the outer fringes of the Sun’s influence, heading into interstellar space.

Standards/Consortia

• The German Federal Office for Information Security (‘Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik’, BSI) has joined the FIDO Alliance, an industry consortium working on open standards for easier and secure online authentication technologies, the two organisations announced in early October.

Leftovers

• The Harvard Law professor and internet pioneer launched his campaign just after Labor Day, and from the start, it was clear that to call his bid quixotic was to sell Cervantes’ protagonist short. Lessig said he was running to win the Democratic nomination, but of course it was clear that his candidacy was more of a classic protest run. Having focused strongly on campaign-finance reform in recent years—including in a string of Atlantic articles—he made passing the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, which would enact universal voting registration, campaign-finance limits, and anti-gerrymandering provisions, the single issue of his candidacy.

• Ever since Larry Lessig announced his campaign for the Presidency a few months ago, we noted that it wasn’t just a long shot, but seemed more like a gimmick to get the (very real) issue of political corruption into the debates. I like Larry quite a bit and support many of his efforts, but this one did seem kind of crazy. I’m glad that he’s willing to take on crazy ideas to see if they’ll work, because that’s how real change eventually comes about, but the whole thing did seem a bit quixotic. That said, the last thing I expected was that the Democratic Party would be so scared of him as to flat out lie and change the rules to keep his ideas from reaching the public. Yet, that’s what it did, and because of that, Lessig has dropped his campaign for the Presidency.

• How the Supreme Court built a monster out of America’s campaign finance law.

• At the time social media offered a way for new political voices to be heard, and BorisWatch was one of those new voices: informed, focused, critical, often witty, and always happy to engage.

Science

• George Boole was a British mathematician whose work on logic laid many of the foundations for the digital revolution. The Lincolnshire-born academic is widely heralded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th century, devising a system of logic that aimed to condense complex thoughts into simple equations. His development of ‘Boolean logic’ paved the way for the computer age.

Security

• Last week, CIA director John O. Brennan became the latest victim of what’s become a popular way to embarrass and harass people on the Internet. A hacker allegedly broke into his AOL account and published e-mails and documents found inside, many of them personal and sensitive.

• It’s called doxing­ — sometimes doxxing­ — from the word “documents.” It emerged in the 1990s as a hacker revenge tactic, and has since been as a tool to harass and intimidate people on the Internet. Someone would threaten a woman with physical harm, or try to incite others to harm her, and publish her personal information as a way of saying “I know a lot about you­ — like where you live and work.” Victims of doxing talk about the fear that this tactic instills. It’s very effective, by which I mean that it’s horrible.

• A THIRD SUSPECT in the TalkTalk hack has been released on police bail, as the telco provides more information about the scale of the attack, claiming that it was smaller than first thought.

• A 27-year-old man was arrested and released in Staffordshire under the Computer Misuse Act, as officers from several forces continue to close the net on the cyber criminals responsible.

• And yeah, Heartbleed and Shellshock turned out to be much less of a threat than the tech world predicted. However, in various forums and other places where tech folks choose to hang out, Windows folks had a field day with all variants of “told-ya-so.” I pictured server admins running in circles with their hands flailing in the air, shouting that Armageddon was indeed here.

• [...]

• Fortunately, that rootkit was discovered fairly soon by Mark Russinovich, co-founder of Winternals. After the disclosure, Microsoft didn’t waste any time moving toward the acquisition of Russinovich’s company, although for complete disclosure, Russinovich had been offered a job by Microsoft years before. It is suggested in some circles that Microsoft purchased the company so quickly in order to quell the entire Microsoft/Sony duplicity rumors, as some believe that Microsoft would have to know about the rootkit, given how deeply it burrowed into Redmond’s proprietary code.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• One after another, our citizens are being killed, but we are yet to see a proactive approach from the government. Maybe they don’t realise that the blogger killings are damaging the country’s stability. What the government must understand is that by killing the bloggers and publishers, the extremists are actually killing freedom of speech and freedom of expression. The question is: why is the government unable to look at this in a broader perspective? They should be looking at it in a much more strategic way.

• Terming these as“isolated incidents” is one way of depoliticising them. Such statements will only embolden the terrorists to carry out more attacks. This government was involved in the Liberation War, so they must know how guerrilla tactics work. Terrorist attacks are always isolated incidents. The main point is whether or not the government is willing to take anti-terrorist strategies.

• The horrific cycle of killing of secular bloggers in Bangladesh, which has already claimed at least four lives this year, and the fresh murder of publisher Faisal Arefin Dipon, in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, on October 31, is deeply disconcerting. The Ansar al-Islam, an Islamic extremist group, which identifies as the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for the attack.

• Two businessmen who had published the works of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism, were stabbed on Saturday by groups of men in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, the police said. The attack came eight months after Mr. Roy was himself stabbed to death with machetes.

• One of the publishers, Faisal Arefin Dipan, died of his wounds immediately, the police said. The other, Ahmed Rahim Tutul, was in critical condition late Saturday.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• THE annual haze that blankets swathes of South-East Asia usually begins to recede in October. This year however the smoggy conditions—caused by fires set to clear farmland in rural Indonesia—only got worse. On October 26th Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, cut short a state visit to America to handle the crisis, which has become one of the worst in memory. With the onset of this year’s rainy season delayed by the “El Niño” weather cycle, it could be a month or more before all flames are doused.

• NPR executive editor Edith Chapin and ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen agree it is “unfortunate” that NPR has thus far failed to cover groundbreaking reports documenting that ExxonMobil funded efforts to sow doubt about climate science for decades after confirming that burning fossil fuels causes climate change.

• Morning Joe’s interview “exclusive, first-ever joint interview” with industrialists Charles and David Koch was full of softball questions and worshipful praise. They also gave the Koch brothers a pass for claiming they oversee one of “the safest and environmentally protective” companies. The fawning interview follows months of pro-Koch coverage by the MSNBC hosts.

Finance

• Sweden is shaping up to be the first country to plunge its citizens into a fascinating — and terrifying — economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society.

• The Swedish central bank held its benchmark interest rate at -0.35% today, the level it has been at since July.

• Although retail banks have yet to pass on that negative to rate to Swedish consumers, the longer it’s held there the more financial pressure there is for banks to pass the costs onto their customers. That’s a problem because Sweden is the closest country on the planet to becoming an all-electronic cashless society.

Privacy

• It seems Google does record audio from microphones all the time, despite attempts to play down the situation. The “hotword” searching – when you initiate a search by saying “Ok Google” – has been criticized before, when it was downloaded to open-source browsers running Chromium. However, major privacy concerns remain as Google doesn’t start recording when you say “Ok Google”; it was recording before you said the hotword.

• We require people to use the name on Facebook that their friends and family know them by, and we’ll continue to do so.

• Proposals in the UK’s imminent Snooper’s Charter, which would allow police and security forces access to everyone’s Web browsing history, have been dropped, according to The Guardian. In a statement, “senior sources” in the UK government apparently said that “rather than increasing intrusive surveillance, the [Investigatory Powers] bill would bar police and security services from accessing people’s browsing histories,” and that “any access to internet connection records will be strictly limited and targeted.” The Guardian also claims that other controversial options for the Investigatory Powers Bill, due to be published on Wednesday, have been shelved.

• These include the suggestion that companies would be restricted or perhaps banned from using encryption, and the requirement that UK telecoms would have to capture and store Internet traffic originating from US companies in order to allow UK intelligence agencies to access them even if the companies refused to hand over the data.

• However, as many experts have pointed out, neither idea was feasible: online business would become impossible without encryption, and end-to-end encryption means that storing traffic from US-based companies would be largely useless anyway.

• These facts raise the possibility that the UK government’s latest “climbdown” is actually nothing of the sort; rather, it would appear that the UK government has been feeding journalists exaggerated stories of what might be the Snooper’s Charter, so that it could then appear to back down graciously in the face of the inevitable outrage those ideas generated.

• Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to under the Investigatory Powers Bill

• The bulk collection of communications data without targeted suspicion is mass surveillance. The bulk collection of global communications data should end. Surveillance should be targeted, necessary and proportionate.

Civil Rights

• It was a huge victory. We were up against a powerful billionaire and we won. But it came at a great cost: at least $2.5 million for us and our insurer, and $650,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for Mother Jones, to be precise. Everyone’s been asking whether we can recoup our attorney’s fees from VanderSloot, but unfortunately the answer is no.

• The win means a lot to me, personally, too. As someone who writes about rich and powerful people, it’s good to know that the First Amendment is alive and well. And it makes me beyond proud to write for Mother Jones: Not too many other shops would have had the guts to fight back, but we knew you’d expect us to, and that you’d have our back if we took a stand.

• A US paramedic has reportedly been suspended without pay for making an “unauthorised” stop to try to save the life of a choking little girl.

• Qwasie Reid, an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in New York City, was transporting a nursing home patient to a doctor’s appointment in an ambulance last week when he was flagged down by a “frantic man” near a Brooklyn school who said a student was choking.

• Back in 2011, we wrote about a troubling ruling in the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the case which basically said that it’s perfectly fine for businesses to put in place “binding arbitration” clauses, that take away people’s rights to take a company to court over some sort of wrongdoing. As I noted at the time, ever since taking a series of classes on arbitration in college, I’ve been fascinated with the process, which sounds like a good idea. But it’s yet another case where theory and reality don’t necessarily match up.

• Quick–who’s missing from this New York Times chart (11/2/15)?

• The point of the chart, based on one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that US non-Hispanic whites aged 45-54 have a rising mortality rate, unlike the similarly aged groups included for comparison purposes: Hispanics in the US, and people in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and Sweden.

• The most obvious omission is African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the US population. They are left out of the chart not because they don’t support the point—they, too, have a falling death rate in the 45-54 demographic, unlike US whites—but presumably because they would require a larger graph, since the black mortality rate is still well above whites in this age group: 582 vs. 415 per 100,000.

• AT exactly 5 p.m. on March 13, 2007, just as I was preparing to leave my cubicle in Washington for the day, I got a phone call from the journalist Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers. To this day, I remember his exact words.

• “One of your congressman’s constituents is being held in an Ethiopian intelligence service prison, and I think your former employer is neck-deep in this.”

• The congressman was Rush Holt, then a Democratic representative from New Jersey, for whom I worked for 10 years starting in 2004. The constituent was Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., who alleges that he was illegally taken to Ethiopia, where he was threatened with torture by American officials. My “former employer” was the Central Intelligence Agency, but it soon became apparent that the agency “neck-deep in this” was the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Facebook has been trying to get India to fall in love with its Free Basics service for several months since it launched in February. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even visited the capital of New Delhi last week and attempted to address concerns about it during a Townhall Q&A session.

• But he still doesn’t get why Indians are opposed to the social network’s zero-rating service.

• More than 330,000 people signed a petition to oppose zero-rating and uphold net neutrality principles in the country and numerous Web and media companies dropped off Facebook’s offering in support of the initiative.

• Zuckerberg still thinks that Free Basics will serve India well, and believes that campaigns against it don’t factor in the benefits it brings to those who are still offline.

• In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices. Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail journal – “postjournal” in Norwegian) is public information and thanks to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal – OEP) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting journal entries .

Intellectual Monopolies

• The World Trade Organization is poised to announce this Friday its approval of a limited 17-year extension of a 2001 waiver of obligations in the TRIPS Agreement, set to expire at the end of this year, the terms of which exempt Least Developed Countries (LDCs) from requirements to grant patents or related intellectual property rights on pharmaceutical products.

• The decision to grant the 17-year waiver represents a compromise between the United States, which had asked for a ten-year waiver, and Least Developed Countries, which wanted an indefinite extension of the waiver that would have lasted for as long as a country remained least developed per UN classification. An indefinite waiver would have been a clear victory for LDCs, as it would have recognized their needs above the United States’ continuing promotion of more restrictive intellectual property rules.

Copyrights

• Lawyers for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom accused the United States of misrepresenting evidence and of trying to “contort the law” in a bid to persecute their client.

• This is do-or-die time for Dotcom and three other former Megaupload execs at the now defunct Megaupload. On Monday, their attorneys began arguments at an extradition hearing in Auckland on why the New Zealand government should not hand them over to the United States on criminal copyright violations.

• The US Department of Justice claimed in a 2012 indictment that Megaupload’s leadership generated $175 million by helping users pirate movies, and wants them brought to the US to stand trial.

• The hearing began with at least one serious allegation made by Dotcom’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield. The way Mansfield tells it, either DOJ attorneys speak very poor German or they intentionally misrepresented the meaning of Dotcom’s internal communications to blacken his image before the public and the court.

• Throughout the six-week hearing, New Zealand prosecutors, arguing on behalf of the United States, have told presiding Judge Nevin Dawson that Dotcom referred to himself and several other former Megaupload managers as “evil.”

• After proceedings began in September, Kim Dotcom began his extradition hearing defense in New Zealand today. His legal team argued that U.S. prosecutors cherry-picked evidence, intentionally mis-translated discussions to make the entrepreneur look bad, and created criminal liability for service providers where none exists.

• The RIAA is asking a New York federal court to issue a default judgment against the ‘reincarnation’ of the defunct Grooveshark music service. The record labels are demanding more than $13 million in piracy damages plus another $4 million for willful counterfeiting.

• After nearly a year of debate and deliberation, the Library of Congress (LoC) has granted gamers and preservationists a limited legal method to restore access to games that are rendered unplayable thanks to defunct, abandoned authentication servers.

• In new guidelines published today, the Librarian of Congress said that gamers deserve the right to continued access to “local play” on games that they paid for, even if the centralized authentication servers required for that play have been taken down. So if Blizzard, for instance, decides to take down the authentication servers required to verify a new copy of StarCraft II online, players will now be legally allowed to craft a workaround that allows the game to work on their PCs.

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