● 12.02.15

● Links 2/12/2015: Microsoft and Debian, Thunderbird’s Fate

Posted in News Roundup at 8:56 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Rocks and a stick? That’s a curious way to express Linux, the kernel that is the center of the majority of supercomputers around the world. I’ve heard it expressed or compared a lot of ways, but I don’t think “rocks and a stick” was one of them — up until then at least. But he’s not alone in his way of thinking. I remember a conversation I had with a colleague in 2005 who held the same view and went so far as to stop working with our newly-formed organization. He stated that he would not put his efforts into a losing cause. I vaguely remember that my response made mention of asses, doors and all of that.

• I love the idea behind Chromebooks, but because of the privacy implications of using them, I just admire them from a distance.

• However, because of their cheap price and lower cost of maintenance, they’ve been very popular with educational institutions. The problem, is most people are either not aware or don’t care about the privacy implications of using those light and cheap notebooks or other devices running Chrome OS.

• Are you a Linux fan? Or maybe you have some friends who prefer Linux to any other operating systems? Or maybe both?

Server

• It only takes a minute to notice a performance issue. In 60,000 milliseconds, you can get a Linux performance, and the Netflix Performance Engineering team can show you how.

Kernel Space

• The IO Visor project is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project chartered to create an open source, technical community where industry participants easily contribute to and adopt the IO Visor project’s technology for an open programmable data plane for modern IO and networking applications.

• The Linux Foundation is adding the Open Networking Summit to its event portfolio beginning with the next show scheduled for March 14 in Santa Clara, California.

• The ONS was initially started by companies focused on software-defined networking technologies to enable collaboration efforts centered on SDN, OpenFlow and network functions virtualization. Those events have seen collaborative efforts announced from the likes of AT&T, Google and the Linux Foundation.

Benchmarks

• At Netflix we have a massive EC2 Linux cloud, and numerous performance analysis tools to monitor and investigate its performance. These include Atlas for cloud-wide monitoring, and Vector for on-demand instance analysis. While those tools help us solve most issues, we sometimes need to login to an instance and run some standard Linux performance tools.

• In this post, the Netflix Performance Engineering team will show you the first 60 seconds of an optimized performance investigation at the command line, using standard Linux tools you should have available.

• Netflix has a very big EC2 Linux cloud and makes good use of performance tools to keep track of how well it is working for the company. In a recent blog post Netflix shares how it investigates performance of its Linux cloud at the command line.

Applications

• The developers of the popular Samba software have announced the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release of Samba 4.3.

• A new package! A couple of weeks ago folks at Google released CCTZ: a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. It requires only a proper C++11 compiler and the standard IANA time zone data base which standard Unix, Linux, OS X, … computers tend to have in /usr/share/zoneinfo.

• The previous release, switching to Module::Build, created a circular dependency with Module::Build itself with older versions of Perl. I pondered various ways to get around this, since I’m no longer a fan of ExtUtils::MakeMaker, but I finally decided that I was being silly. So podlators now just uses ExtUtils::MakeMaker — it does support the new metadata keys these days — rather than trying to support two separate build systems. (ExtUtils::MakeMaker is required for Perl core integration.)

• FreeType 2.6.2 was released this weekend as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source library for text/font rendering.

• FreeType 2.6.2 changes to the LCD filter for improving the appearance of fonts on LCD panels, better handling of malformed fonts, stem darkening support for the auto-hinter, and more.

• As you may know, Scribus is a free, open-source page layout program used for designing brochures, magazines, newsletters and posters. It uses XML-based files, which is not proprietary, unlike other pieces of software.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I’ve been keeping an eye on Parkitect for quite some time, reading up on the development now and then as it looked promising. They have just release their Linux version, and it’s already bringing back glorious memories of binge playing Theme Park.

• I do wonder what’s holding it up, as they stated at the start of November that it was almost ready, but what that means to a developer is probably quite different to our expectations.

• We’ve been informed that the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for November 2015 has been published by Valve, which shows us that the Linux platform continues to grow at a slow pace.

• The first day of December was a generous one for Linux software releases, and thus we’re glad to inform our readers that the Warsow 2.0 first-person shooter (FPS) was officially released, and it is now available for download.

• It seems to be the season for new versions of excellent open source gaming projects. OpenMW, the open source recreation of the Morrowind engine, has a new version which brings important rendering updates.

• The latest expansion for the popular grand strategy game, Europa Universalis IV, is now available. Hordes get a lot of shiny new features but there’s a lot of new internal and diplomatic options introduced as well. It’s been released alongside a massive patch that improves things for all players.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Over many years, many people spent a long time with Linux desktop using either KDE or GNOME. These two environments have grown through the previous years and each of these desktops continued to expand their current user-base. For example, sleeper desktop environment has been XFCE as XFCE offers more robustness than LXDE that lacks much of XFCE’s polish in the default configuration. The XFCE provides all benefits which users enjoyed in the GNOME 2, but with some lightweight experiences which made it a hit on the older computers.

• I have been a Plasma user since 2011, when Ubuntu switched away from Gnome to Unity. Prior to that, since 2005, I had been a Gnome user. The transition from Gnome to Plasma was interesting because Gnome didn’t offer much customization and Plasma (it was called KDE back then) was all about customization.

• Back in those days both Gnome and Unity were kind of half baked and KDE 4.x was fully mature. I loved it. I kept dipping my toes in the waters of Gnome and Unity while KDE moved from 4.x series to Plasma. Then with the recent openSUSE Tumbleweed, I decided to give Gnome 3.18 a try, and I was pleasantly surprised.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Try to use korganizer to create a calendar entry when the server is not reachable (say, you are offline, or you typed the wrong password), and you may find that you end up with no error messages, an entry that shows up perfectly fine, but that will never be synced to the server, ever again.

• I use korganizer, radicale and caldav for important things. The practical ramifications of me inserting entries in korganizer, seeing that everything looks ok, and then not finding them on my phone while on the go, are scary.

Distributions

Reviews

• I am sorry to say I have tried each major release of Qubes OS released to date and, so far, none has installed successfully for me. I admire the goal of the Qubes project, making it easy for users to isolate separate tasks in order to improve security. I am of the opinion the concept of a user (and a user’s processes) having full access to everything in a user’s account raises security concerns. I would like to see more effort put into projects like Qubes and AppArmor in order to make it easier for a user to compartmentalize their digital life.

Arch Family

• On the first day of December, the Manjaro project leader, Mr. Philip Müller, revealed the codename of the next stable version of the Arch Linux-based computer operating system, as well as some other juicy details about its development cycle.

• Another month begins, and a new ISO image is released for the acclaimed, lightweight and powerful Arch Linux operating system, incorporating all the updates released during the month that has just passed.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fedora 23 is such a strong release that it highlights what feels like Fedora’s Achilles heel—there’s no Long Term Support release.

• If you want an LTS release in the Red Hat world, it’s RHEL you’re after (or CentOS and other derivatives). Fedora is a bleeding edge, and as such Fedora 23 will, as always, be supported for 12 months. After that time, you’ll need to upgrade.

• As of the 1st of December 2015, Fedora 21 has reached its end of life for updates and support. No further updates, including security updates, will be available for Fedora 21. A previous reminder was sent on 27th of May [0].

• The popular Voice Over IP (VoIP) program, Mumble, is being repackaged again for Fedora 22 and 23. Fedora contributor fedpop unretired the package from the Fedora Package Database and is working on getting it added to the stable repositories.

• I was involved in Fedora at the very beginning, and worked to get the port of Fedora Core 1 to x86_64 done. Shortly before the Fedora Core 2 release, I took a break to go work for rPath for a few years. I returned in the Fedora 11 development era and have been active ever since. Previously, I was the Red Hat point person for Fedora virtualization efforts, helped to get the Cloud SIG up an running, and have been a Fedora kernel maintainer for a few years now. I am both a contributor and a user of Fedora, and while I am happy to put effort into the pieces where I contribute, I also want Fedora to “just work” without a lot of effort as a user.

• It’s been several months since talking about blivet-gui as a Fedora-focused UI for Linux storage management while with Fedora 23 is now blivet-gui v1.0 and other post-1.0 progress is also being made.

• Today we’re informing our readers that the Fedora 21 Linux operating system officially reached end of life, as the Fedora Project developers announced on the project’s mailing list.

Debian Family

• The developers of the Q4OS Linux distribution have sent an email to Softpedia, informing us about the release and immediate availability for download of Q4OS 1.4.4.

• While many Linux users are vocal Microsoft detractors, the truth is, the company is a proponent of the kernel. Yes, in years past, the Windows-maker seemingly looked at Linux with disdain, but times are changing, folks. The company is hiring open source professionals, and even developing apps for the world’s most popular Linux distro, Android. Not to mention, Azure has long supported a handful of Linux distributions.

• This month I marked 352 packages for accept and rejected 61 of them. I had to send only 15 emails to maintainers.

• This was my seventh month as a Freexian sponsored LTS contributor. I was assigned 8 hours for the month of November.

• As I did last month, I worked on review and testing of the proposed MySQL 5.5 packages for squeeze-lts and did a bit more work on Quassel. It has been suggested that maybe we ought to just EOL Quassel since backporting the necessary fixes is so complicated. I think they may be right, but I haven’t quite given up yet.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Don’t get me wrong, I still like and greatly appreciate Ubuntu and Ubuntu Unity. But when you get a taste of GNOME (as it runs on top of Ubuntu 15.10), you quickly realize you are working with something special…something beyond anything the Linux desktop has ever had.

• Am I going over the top? The only way you will know is if you install Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 and give it a try for yourself.

• Canonical has announced that a new kernel update is now live in the default software repositories of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, urging users to update as soon as possible.

• On the first day of December, the Ubuntu developers published a new iteration of the Ubuntu Kernel Team Weekly Newsletter, informing us all about the latest work done on the Linux kernel packages of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

Flavours and Variants

• Deepin 15 Alpha 2 (or is it Deepin 2015 Alpha 2?) is the latest pre-stable release of what will become Deepin 15 (or Deepin 2015). It was made available for download and testing yesterday.

• Deepin is based on Ubuntu Desktop and developed by some fine folks in China.

• If you’ve installed the latest pre-stable edition of Deepin 15 (Deepin 2015), which I just wrote about earlier today (see Deepin 15. This could be the best Linux desktop distribution of the year), a module you’ll find in the Control Center, is Remote Assistance.

• Linuxbsdos.com today wrote that Linux Deepin could be the best distribution of the year. The Ubuntu-based distro features its own in-house desktop that’s “a whole lot better” than Cinnamon. To Jack Wallen, Ubuntu GNOME is the “perfect” distribution though. Elsewhere, Fedora 21 reach its end-of-life and Slackware Live hit Beta 2. In software news, KDE user Swapnil Bhartiya said today that GNOME 3.18 is “simple and easy” and GIMP 2.9.2 was released.

Devices/Embedded

• Now that there are two capable, sub-$10 computers for Makers — the $5 Pi Zero and the $9 C.H.I.P. — the debate will rage online over which board is faster, cheaper, and the right one to use in a project. These debates are often unproductive, but they don’t have to be. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of each board.

• Every month it seems like the Raspberry Pi Foundation keeps wowing us, and this November was no exception. As a matter-of-fact, this past month was jam packed with headlines, so much so that I’m eagerly waiting to see what the month of December will offer. Since there was so much that happened, here is a recap of the biggest stories that headlined the Raspberry Pi for the month of November.

• Variscite’s rugged, 50 x 25mm “DART-6UL” COM runs Linux on an i.MX6 UltraLite SoC, offers NAND, eMMC, and wireless, and starts at $27 in volume.

• In April, Variscite announced the world’s smallest i.MX6 computer-on-module with its 50 x 20mm, Freescale i.MX6-based DART-MX6. At 50 x 25mm, the DART-6UL doesn’t quite match those dimensions, but it offers greater power efficiency, making it well suited for IoT applications and battery-powered devices. Variscite claims it consumes only 5mA in suspend mode.

• This Graperain 6818 motherboard is very close to what I want for new computers in my home. It has sufficient computing power, good connectivity, low price and low power-consumption.

Phones

Android

• 2015 has been an epic year for Android smartphones, and we’re closing off the year with nine awesome devices from a range of manufacturers.

• Learning to code is difficult enough on its own but with Android development it can be more complicated. Not only do you need to understand Java, you also need to install all the Android-specific software and learn all of the unique quirks of Android app development.

• Big discounts on newly released Android phones sound like great news, but it’s a worrying sign for manufacturers. A free Samsung Galaxy S6 with the purchase of a 4K TV soon after launch could mean that the company was struggling to sell devices at their original price. With poor software differentiation, comparison shopping and the desire to bring new customers into their ecosystems, Android makers are finding it hard to charge iPhone-level prices for their high-end offerings.

• The photo narrative app, which was founded as an iPad-only experience in 2013, began shifting to develop an even more mobile platform when it added support for the iPhone early last year. Still, Android users have been waiting to try out the app which was the winner of an Apple Design Award and the 2014 Crunchie for Best Mobile App.

• In Indonesia, for example, 95% of male smartphone users and 93% of female smartphone users have Android phones. In India, those figures are 95% and 94%, respectively. The Android-oriented skew is slightly less extreme in Malaysia, where 91% of men and 86% of women have a smartphone with Google’s OS. Similarly, in the Philippines, 91% of men and 85% of women had Android phones.

Free Software/Open Source

• Wikimedia is an organization which has both volunteers and paid folks working together in software development, with many software projects and different stakeholders involved.

• Twitter developed the open source software Zipkin in 2012 to address this issue, however it only supports Java architectures.

• So then, Varnish now launches Zipnish in response to demand for an architecture-agnostic open source tool.

• The creator or micropayments startup dogetipbot has announced he will open-source the payments tool, just over one year after raising $445,000 from investors including Blackbird Ventures.

• IBM’s machine learning technology has been accepted as an open source project, adding momentum to the steady enterprise shift to open-source development. The development effort also extends IBM’s reach into the Apache Spark ecosystem.

• IBM (NYSE: IBM) said last week its SystemML originally developed for its BigInsights data analytics platform has been accepted as an Apache Incubator open source project. SystemML is a machine learning algorithm translator designed to help developers building machine-learning models used for predictive analytics across a range of industries.

• “Altair’s open source contribution is valuable and will help advance the work of the OpenHPC Collaborative Project,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “By working together to build and extend new technologies for the world’s most complex computing systems, Altair and other members of OpenHPC can accelerate exascale computing.” The open licensing system is scheduled to be released to the open source community in mid-2016.

• GitHub’s Phil Haack hosted a panel on Channel 9 that focused on best practices for open source projects.

• The panel saw the participation of four maintainers of open source projects: Carlos Rojas, audience evangelism manager at Microsoft for Latin America; Brian Lagunas, maintainer of the PRISM framework, used to build loosely coupled, maintainable, and testable XAML applications; David Paquette, contributor to several open source projects; and Carlos dos Santos, maintainer of CodeCracker, an analyzer library for C# and VB.

• It’s funny how Hadoop continues to crop up as the prime example of an open source platform that finds an early niche as an experiment in enterprise IT shops then suddenly explodes into its own vibrant ecosystem. In fact, the same thing might be happening with Spark, at least as an engine for the types of workloads that Hadoop was not so skilled at tackling.

• IBM followed Google’s lead in donating machine learning technology to the open source community, providing developers with more resources for their Big Data predictive analytics projects.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• For some time, Google has been developing technology to reduce data consumption on mobile devices. Last January, the company officially introduced an optional data compression feature into its Chrome mobile browser, allowing users to reduce their data usage by up to 50%. Now Google has improved upon this earlier release with an update to the Data Saver feature in the Chrome Android browser which can now save users up to 70% of their data usage.

• Does Google’s browsing and Internet strategy take Linux into account? Absolutely, in fact, Chrome OS is built on Linux. Now, though, Google has announced it is ending Chrome support for 32-bit Linux, Ubuntu Precise (12.04), and Debian 7 (wheezy) in March of next year.

• Google is going to provide Chrome updates and security patches for users on the above mentioned operating systems for less han four months now. After that, included browsers will still work, but will be stalled on the last version released in March.

• If you purchased your computer in the last decade, it probably has a 64-bit-capable processor. The transition to 64-bit operating systems has been a long one, but Google is about to give Linux users another push. In March 2016, Google will stop releasing Chrome for 32-bit Linux distributions.

Mozilla

• How do you know whether a Firefox add-on is signed or not? And what does it mean if it is signed?

• One could say that you find out as soon as you try to install the add-on in a recent version of Firefox and that is certainly true, but it may sometimes be useful to know in advance.

• The Mozilla web browser is indeed a great product and just recently, the same finally made it to Apple’s iOS App Store after being available on Android for long. And with all of that app development effort Mozilla needs to focus on just its browser for now, says Mozilla Chairperson, Mitchell Baker.

• This is a long-ish message. It covers general topics about Thunderbird and the future, and also the topics of the Foundation involvement (point 9) and the question of merging repositories (point 11). Naturally, I believe it’s worth the time to read through the end.

SaaS/Big Data

• As the year draws to a close, several research reports and surveys are quantifying just how big an open source success story Hadoop has become. According to a new best practices survey from TDWI there is a big increase in how many enterprises plan to have Hadoop clusters in production. By Q1 of next year, 60% of survey respondents said they will be in production, up from 16% when the report was published earlier in 2015. We covered the complete results of the survey here.

CMS

BSD

• We have been working hard for a few months now to rewrite the ELF support in lld, the LLVM linker. We are happy to announce that it has reached a significant milestone: it is now able to bootstrap LLVM, Clang, and itself and pass all tests on x86-64 Linux and FreeBSD with the speed expected of an LLVM project.

• They wrote today, “We are happy to announce that it has reached a significant milestone: it is now able to bootstrap LLVM, Clang, and itself and pass all tests on x86-64 Linux and FreeBSD with the speed expected of an LLVM project.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Richard Stallman wants to make one thing completely clear: He is not the father. “I’m not the father of open source. If I’m the father of open source, it was conceived by artificial insemination without my knowledge or consent,” he proclaimed from the keynote stage last month at Fossetcon 2015. It wasn’t close to the strongest statement he made from that stage.

• Developers on GUPC, the GNU UPC project for extending GCC to support the Unified Parallel C language dialect, are hoping they can get their code merged for GCC 6.

• It’s been a while since last talking about Unified Parallel C as the C programming language extension designed for HPC on parallel machines, but the developers have been hard at work on improving the code and keeping it in sync with GCC.

• In a surge of long overdue updates the GIMP team made the first public release in the 2.9.x series. It’s completely GEGL-based, has 16/32-bit per channel editing and new tools. It’s also surprisingly stable enough even for the faint of heart.

• They provide a non-profit home, infrastructure, and advice for FLOSS projects. They take care that the will of the project members, choosing free software licenses, is respected by third parties. They care about “all the rest” so free software contributors can focus in improving the software itself. They have an agreement with the Debian community to protect the freedoms that Debian Developers provide to the Debian end users (and derivative distributions).

Public Services/Government

• In introducing Manzoni, Nefkens described the UK as a world leader in the “digital transformation of government”, a model even for similar schemes in the USA and Australia. Furthermore, New Zealand has used Gov.uk source code – it’s based on open standards and is open source – to help build out own digital services.

Openness/Sharing

• Modularity is what makes sciNote flexible and useful for every laboratory. Modules are either developed by the sciNote team or by the community. There is a number of open source scientific platforms out there which can be connected to sciNote so there will be an ever-growing selection of modules to choose from. Modules can be simple, such as reagent calculator or complex, such as bioinformatics modules. They can be connected with your existing, databases, laboratory instruments and software.

Open Data

• One of the first tasks for Flanders’ newly created Agency for Information (Agentschap Informatie Vlaanderen) will be to promote the use of open data standards by public administrations in the Belgian region. The agency is to align existing and future business processes involving open data and will advance the use of European linked open data standards. The agency’s long-term vision is to support the European Commission’s actions on spatial data infrastructure standards (INSPIRE) and on semantic interoperability for eGovernment systems – one of the actions of the EC’s ISA programme. (ISA is also responsible for the Joinup platform.)

Open Hardware

• Olimex Ltd is hoping to make it possible to sell a Do-It-Yourself laptop powered by a 64-bit ARM SoC.

• Olimex has been working on the OLinuXino OSHW Linux laptop that’s an open-source ARM hardware design and would be powered by an Allwinner A64 64-bit SoC.

• They just received samples of their plastic body design for the laptop itself. While a pure plastic laptop is worrisome, they claim that “the plastic parts [are] very good!” They have also sourced the battery, LCD display, keyboard, and other components.

Leftovers

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The United States is deploying a specialized expeditionary targeting force to help Iraq put additional pressure on Islamic State and be positioned to conduct unilateral operations into Syria, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Tuesday.

• MPs have instead been summoned to meetings to talk to “experts” – David Cameron’s reference to intelligence agencies that he is reluctant to identify after the disaster in Iraq. We are having to wait until next summer, more than 13 years after the invasion, to hear what Chilcot says about “lessons learned”, the main purpose of his inquiry.

• Labour is in a mad panic over Ken Livingstone’s fundamental departure from the neo-con narrative.

• So, in just the last three months we’ve seen a car set on fire, Molotov cocktails allegedly thrown at a house of worship, terroristic threats leveled against a family, liberal protesters gunned down by radicals, and a medical facility stormed by an anti-abortion/anti-government gunman who killed civilians and a policeman.

• What portrait do those events paint in your mind? And is that portrait of radical homegrown violence and terrorism the one you’ve seen conveyed in the press following the Colorado Springs terror attack?

• It’s not the one I’ve been seeing.

• Media Matters for years has documented how Fox News in particular has used a blinding double standard in terms of casting wide, cultural and religious aspersions when covering terror attacks involving Muslim attackers, versus how it deals with homegrown political violence from the right. (It was Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade who once confidently declared, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”)

• Hundreds of BBC journalists were left bemused after a rival news outlets reported they were being evacuated from Broadcasting House.

• Staff at the broadcaster were less than impressed at claims – later debunked – that they had been escorted from the building over a suspicious vehicle parked nearby posing a possible bomb threat.

• ITV, the Independent, the Daily Express, City AM and others fell foul of the false claims, sparked by a tweet from one BBC journalist who claimed Broadcasting House had been evacuated.

• On the front lines of the battle against Isis, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.

• Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting Isis for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.

• Precisely as I reported two days ago, Cameron really is in trouble over the Syria vote due to his patently ludicrous claim of the existence of 70,000 “moderate rebels”. Most MPs are pretty unpleasant people, but they do have a high opinion of their own importance. They will vote for anything they see as in their own self-interest, but not if it means kneeling and licking the floor when they are being treated with very obvious contempt, in public. Well, a great many of them will even do that if it advances their career, and the George Osborne tendency do it in private and pay for it. But not even pretending to take MPs seriously is a risky tactic, and that is what Cameron has done with his foolish ruse of just inventing 70,000 moderate fighters.

• Today the government rubbed MPs faces further in the dirt by saying they could not give a breakdown of who the 70,000 are, because it is a secret.

• Yes, honestly. The identity of our allies – even just in terms of what groups they belong to – is a secret.

• Lyall Grant is now National Security Adviser and made responsible by Cameron for persuading Labour MPs to bomb Syria. A disagreement has arisen tonight over whether he admitted or not that a great many of the “70,000” are “extreme Islamists”.

• …a new intervention will play directly into the narrative used by ISIS to lure the Western recruits most likely to carry out attacks in Britain.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• President Obama is in Paris at a United Nations summit, where nations hope to reach an international agreement on climate change. In response, conservative media figures have resorted to denial, dismissal, and mockery, while criticizing Obama as “simply stupid” and NASA scientists as “talentless low-lives.”

• As world leaders gather in Paris to discuss the global response to climate change, we assess the impact of the widespread forest fires in Indonesia. Set to clear land for paper and palm oil production, the fires have not only destroyed forest and peatland, but also severely affected public health and released massive amounts of carbon

Finance

• The most controversial aspect of the the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement, which is currently being negotiated behind closed doors between the US and EU, is the plan to allow foreign companies to sue entire nations in special tribunals for the alleged expropriation of future profits through changes in laws or regulations. This is not an entirely new approach—these secret tribunals have been included in hundreds of other smaller-scale trade agreements over the years—but its inclusion here would have profound impacts on both the EU and US.

• Opponents of the idea see these secret tribunals as undermining a government’s sovereign ability to implement democratic decisions through new legislation. Those in favour of this investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism insist that it’s just a normal part of trade agreements, and nothing to worry about.

• The UK government’s public stance on ISDS is typical: “Since 1975 the UK has negotiated 94 Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) almost all of which include ISDS provisions,” one of its information leaflets says. And yet the government also claims: “No ISDS challenge has ever succeeded against the UK. Despite the large number of treaties in force with ISDS clauses, there have been only two ISDS challenges brought against us.”

Censorship

• As we’ve noted, we regularly get legal threats, some of which are more serious than others. Sometimes we ignore them entirely, and sometimes we feel the need to respond. Depending on the situation, sometimes we respond privately. Sometimes we respond publicly. The more ridiculous the threat, the more likely we are to respond publicly — and I think the latest holds up as one of the most ridiculous legal threats we’ve seen. It comes from Milorad Trkulja, who is also known as Michael Trkulja, and who lives in Australia. Trkulja made some news a few years back when he (somewhat surprisingly) successfully sued both Yahoo and Google for hundreds of thousands of dollars, because when people did image searches on a variety of phrases related to things like “Australian criminal underworld mafia” sometimes a picture of Trkulja would show up. Apparently, Trkulja was actually shot in the back a decade ago by an unknown gunman. And somehow, for whatever reasons, certain websites included pictures of him along with enough keywords that the search algorithms at both Google and Yahoo would return his photo in such searches. We wrote about his victory over Google back in November of 2012, pointing out how ridiculous it was that an Australian court said you could sue search engines because image search happens to pop up your image along with actual gangsters.

• [...]

• That’s enough of a response. There are tons of other possible responses, but in short: we’re not doing a damn thing in response to this ridiculous threat. You have no case whatsoever and complaining about this is ridiculous. It may be time to find a hobby or something, Mr. Trkulja, because poorly written and ridiculous legal threats to foreign entities aren’t doing you any good.

• Prince Charles is demanding “North Korean-style” pre-conditions in television interviews, including advance knowledge of precise questions, the right to oversee editing and even to block a broadcast if he does not approve of the final product.

Privacy

• GCHQ carries out “persistent” illegal hacking of phones, computers and networks worldwide under broad “thematic” warrants that ignore privacy safeguards, a security tribunal has heard.

• Microphones and cameras on electronic devices can be remotely activated without owners’ knowledge, photographs and personal documents copied and locations discovered, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has been told.

• GCHQ, the government monitoring station in Cheltenham, has for the first time in a court case admitted that it carries out computer network exploitation (CNE) – commonly known as hacking – both in the UK and overseas.

• Law enforcement has been complaining for years about the Web “going dark,” saying that encryption and privacy tools are frustrating their ability to track criminals online. But massive FBI operations over the last year that have busted ‘hidden sites’ used for the sale of drugs, hacking tools, and child pornography suggest the digital criminal world has gotten lighter, with law enforcement bragging that criminals can’t “hide in the shadows of the Dark Web anymore.” While mysterious about its tactics, law enforcement indicated that it had found a way to circumvent the tool on which these sites relied, a software called Tor. But criminals are not the only ones who rely on it.

• The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is drafting a policy to restrict the use without a warrant of cell-site simulator technology to snoop on the location and other information from mobile phones.

• The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is drafting a policy to restrict the use without a warrant of cell-site simulator technology to snoop on the location and other information from mobile phones.

• The head of the IRS, John Koskinen, wrote in a letter that the agency was drafting a policy that would mirror an earlier Department of Justice rule, which requires a search warrant supported by probable cause before using the technology, except in exigent or exceptional circumstances.

• Google has been collecting information about schoolchildren’s browsing habits despite signing a pledge saying it was committed to their privacy, the EFF said Tuesday.

• Google has been collecting information about schoolchildren’s browsing habits despite signing a pledge saying it was committed to their privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a complaint filed Tuesday.

• The Boston Police Department has been fighting two FOIA requests — one from Mike Katz-Lacabe and one from Shawn Musgrave — for months. We covered Katz-Lacabe’s battle back in June. In that one, the BPD denied the release of documents related to Stingray devices on the questionable grounds that they were covered under the “investigative materials” exemption.

• But the facts that have emerged thus far tell a different story. It appears that much of the planning took place IRL (that’s “in real life” for those of you who don’t have teenagers). The attackers, several of whom were on law enforcement’s radar, communicated openly over the Internet. If France ever has a 9/11 Commission-type inquiry, it could well conclude that the Paris attacks were a failure of the intelligence agencies rather than a failure of intelligence authorities.

Civil Rights

• While Rosa Parks became a symbol of the U.S. civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated Alabama bus, the 60th anniversary of her arrest is also highlighting lesser-known pioneers of the bus boycott she sparked.

• Parks made history by taking a stand alongside other desegregation pioneers like Claudette Colvin, a black teenager arrested nine months earlier in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger, said Fred Gray, a lawyer who represented both women.

• “If there had not been a Claudette Colvin, who did what she did, a lot of other events would not have occurred,” Gray said. “It was a matter of each one building upon each other, and the rest is history.”

• The Montgomery bus boycott, launched in protest of Parks’ arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, modelled the nonviolent protests that defined the era and brought to prominence a lead organizer, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

• Chicago’s police chief was ousted on Tuesday following days of unrest over video footage showing the shooting of a black teenager and the filing of murder charges against a white police officer in the young man’s death.

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced during a news conference he had asked Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to resign. The mayor also said he was creating a new police accountability task force.

• The white officer, Jason Van Dyke, was charged a week ago with first-degree murder in the killing of Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times. The video of the killing was released on the same day.

• Human Rights Watch called on the Obama administration on Tuesday to investigate 21 former U.S. officials, including former President George W. Bush, for potential criminal misconduct for their roles in the CIA’s torture of terrorism suspects in detention.

• Human Rights Watch concluded in a report that foreign governments must prosecute senior US officials involved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program.

• The UAE, we now know, was busy planning its own operation against Muslim Brotherhood affiliates at home while urging David Cameron to do the same in Britain.

DRM

• Score one for the late Steve Jobs. Adobe is changing the name of Flash Professional CC, its web animation tool, to Animate CC. The goal is to accurately reflect the reality that web developers are using the tool to also create HTML5 content—“over a third of all the content” created with the app—according to Adobe.

• In a blog post announcing the change, Adobe credited Flash with “[pushing] the web forward.” But the company also conceded that HTML5, which is friendlier to laptop batteries and not the security nightmare Flash has become, has matured enough to “be the web platform of the future across all devices.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• After a long wait the UK’s broad anti-piracy effort operated by ISPs and copyright holders has finally launched. The UK Government-funded program aims to warn and educate illegal file-sharers in the hope of decreasing piracy rates over time, but thus far the response has been rather underwhelming.

• Lawyers for Kim Dotcom have asked a Hong Kong court for the release of millions in previously seized funds claiming that their client is broke once again. However, the prosecution claim that after opening new businesses, Dotcom banked “hundreds of millions” of dollars through Hong Kong.

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