● 12.19.15

● Links 19/12/2015: Manjaro Linux 15.12 RC 2, Jolla is Back

Posted in News Roundup at 1:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I didn’t have to look too far because I quickly came across The Linux Foundation’s “Introduction To Linux” course available through edX. I’m not bragging, but I found the edX class to be somewhat like the book in that I found I knew a lot more than I thought I did. It seems that the previous ten years worth of reading about Linux, watching YouTube videos about Linux and fooling around with Linux myself had taught me a great deal. I felt my confidence rising more and more the further along I got in the course. And when it was done I knew for sure that I was ready to deal with just about any problem a Linux box might throw at me. The course is designed to be the first step toward becoming a certified Linux SysAdmin and there’s much in it that the average home user wouldn’t need on a daily basis but knowing a bit about networking, scripting and the command line certainly helps when you’re trying to figure out how to do something with your computer that goes beyond point and click. The main thing I took from the experience was the feeling that I had the knowledge required to make the system do my bidding and meet my computing needs. Microsoft’s days were numbered on my computer and I wouldn’t have to wait long before I had no choice but to take the leap.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• On December 18, The Linux Foundation announced the availability of the final episode in the World Without Linux animated series with which the non-profit organization attempted to promote Linux around the globe.

• Each episode illustrates a fictitious world in which Linux doesn’t exist to make a bold and fun statement about Linux’s role in our everyday lives. While technology innovations like the Internet, Twitter or space exploration may exist without LInux, this video series underscores how the operating system has accelerated modern day technologies. Through this storytelling technique, the story of Linux can reach more people around the world and bring attention to the developers and companies who support it.

Graphics Stack

• On December 18, 2015, AMD released for download the AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 proprietary graphics driver for Linux kernel-based operating systems.

• Long-time open-source graphics driver contributor and one of the newer members of AMD’s open-source driver team, Nicolai Hähnle, has written an insightful article about debugging GPU VM faults.

Benchmarks

• In continuation of last week’s article about building an Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake Linux system, here are my complete performance figures on the Xeon E3-1245 v5 as a $300 Skylake processor featuring HD Graphics P530.

Applications

• The biggest change this time is finally switching to cairo for rendering, instead of cobbling together hideous Xlib based methods. This opens up a variety of rendering finesse, such as the ability for transparent paths, and perhaps more interestingly, a text tool. I’m sure there are many cairo rendering related bugs hiding out around the edges of Laidout, so please let me know if and when you find them!

• Today, Internet users are threatened with mass surveillance and invasive packet tampering which undermines our privacy and destroys the integrity of what we read. Encryption can keep the Web safe and reliable if it’s used everywhere, but this will never happen while site owners need extra financial and technical means to employ encryption if they can run their site more easily without it.

• … Because the latest version 1.6.8 « XMas 2015 Edition » of G’MIC has been released last week ! G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing) is an open-source framework for image processing that I’ve started to develop in August 2008. This new release is a good occasion for me to discuss some of the advances and new features added to the project since my last digest, published here 8 months ago. Seven versions have been published since then.

• ChromeOS is one of the last Operating Systems where you could not run VLC and play all your media as you wished.

• On December 18, 2015, Oracle announced the release of a new stable update for its powerful, cross-platform and open-source virtualization software, VirtualBox 5.0.12, for all supported operating systems.

• …open-source application for creating timelapse videos. It is easy to use, has an intuitive interface and uses gPhoto2 and wxWidgets to do its job.

• As you may know, PyCharm is a Python IDE, having some interesting functions like: code completion, error highlighting, customizable UI and key-bindings for VIM, VCS integrations or automated code refactorings and good navigation capabilities.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• Security is at a prime and that’s not going to change in the unforeseeable future. With more and more people taking advantage of technology in nearly every aspect of their lives, it’s now time for people to get serious about security.

• That includes your home network.

• But, outside of simply using Linux to increase the security of your data (which helps a great deal), what can you do? Can you just demand that everyone in the house switch to Linux? In a perfect world, that would be ideal—however, we do not live in a perfect world and some users won’t want to leave behind their platform of choice.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.8 is now available.

• This release represents 17 months of development effort and around 13,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the implementation of DirectWrite and Direct2D, and the new Pulse Audio driver.

• It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as support for many new applications and games. See the release notes below for a summary of the major changes.

Games

• Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (Steam, GOG) takes the best from the N64 and PC versions, puts them into a new engine and then released into the wild. It looks like the developers are planning a Linux release too.

• As you may know, Valve has decided to conquer your living room with their Steam Machines, which are Linux-based gaming consoles that run SteamOS and the Steam Controller, which is the first remote control that can be used to play shooters like Counter Strike.

• Not quite as bad news as the Rocket League delay, but Divinity: Original Sin – Enhanced Edition for Linux & SteamOS is being held up by some memory corruption issues.

• Hacknet is a terminal-based hacking game using real UNIX commands and abstractions of real hacking processes. The game tells the tale of Bit, a hacker responsible for creating the most invasive security system on the planet. When he is murdered, his failsafe kicks in, sending instructions to a lone user who can help unravel the mystery and ensure that Hacknet-OS doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

• It was a little weird that a terminal based hacking game wasn’t on Linux to begin with, but now it is! Hacknet joins our growing list of interesting titles.

• Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at the latest Steam controller update, a Company of Heroes Linux update, and more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We made some improvements to QDockWidget for Qt 5.6. You can now re-order your QDockWidget’s tabs with the mouse. There is also a new mode you can set on your QMainWindow so that you can drag and drop full groups of tabbed QDockWidgets. Furthermore there is a new API which allows you to programatically resize the QDockWidgets.

• The Plasma team has been working on an early Christmas present: a live image running Plasma on Wayland.

• Being able to run a full session of Plasma with applications is a major milestone in our aim of moving from the 30 year old X Window System to its replacement.

• KDE’s Martin Gräßlin has announced a Christmas present to everyone looking forward to KDE on Wayland: support for server-side decorations.

• KDE on Wayland has long been planning to use server-side decorations rather than the client-side decorations done by others on Wayland. Martin has now implemented the KWin/Wayland server-side decorations support to replace the “ugly” and feature-lacking Qt client-side decorations used by default.

• A few moments ago, December 18, KDE developer and ex-Kubuntu maintainer Jonathan Riddell had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first ever Live ISO image with the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment running on top of the next-generation Wayland display server.

• Jonathan Riddell today announced the first Plasma Wayland Live Image so everyone can test drive the new graphics server. Riddell added this is a milestone release because Wayland is able to run a full session including applications. Martin Graesslin joined the conversation by saying server-side window decorations are coming to Wayland early next year.

• Riddell wrote that users of the live DVD will “notice some obvious glitches” but all the goodies should be “appreciated by everybody.” I didn’t have too much luck myself. I did get to the desktop I think, but nothing else materialized. I did see the wallpaper and a pointer. It may be been my dual monitors that threw it off. One screen had the full screen background, but the other monitor had a small section of background and a lot of black. It looked like it was trying to do a clone, but perhaps Wayland is cardist against NVIDIAs or something.

• All the concept art, painting, coloring and 2D animation on this film is done with Krita, supplemented with Blender for compositing and video editing. Hizkia says: “Krita is the best software for me, I like the very smooth brush engine. This is useful, and a lot of people share their brushes. My concept styles are: tropical, dirty, imperfect, colorful.”

• During the Randa Meetings in Switzerland this year, the KDE PIM team decided to do an experiment. We wanted to see how modern QtQuick based PIM applications could look like. So we started to develop Kube Mail, an email client build with QtQuickControls on top of Akonadi-Next.

• I just published a live Plasma image with Wayland. A great milestone in a multi-year project of the Plasma team lead by the awesome Martin G. Nowhere near end-user ready yet but the road forward is now visible to humble mortals who don’t know how to write their own Wayland protocol. It’ll give a smoother and more secure graphics system when it’s done and ensures KDE’s software and Linux on the desktop stays relevant for another 30 years.

• The main reason is that I wanted to make life easy for new developers.

• Until now when we wanted to develop an extension for kmail/kaddressbook or other kdepim application it was necessary to build all kdepim.

• End users like using Type Managers, they make their life easier through many different means that compliment each other. If KDE [type manager] applications integrate more Type Manager features I do believe that they will get more users.

• It is time for a refresh of my ‘ktown’ package set. KDE 5_15.12 has been uploaded, containing the latest and greatest: Frameworks 5.17.0, Plasma 5.5.1 and Applications 15.12.0.

Distributions

• Diversity is critical to success, but so are standards. The Linux kernel got so popular because it offered stability alongside flexibility. And if you follow the right channels, you will see when bad ideas get rejected, because they aren’t stable or safe or mature enough.

• We need the same thing in the distro space. There must be a higher cause, a higher framework to connect all the pieces, a mechanism that will define how things should be done, across distributions, across desktop environments. Calming the pace in between releases and clearly labeling broken things BETA should also help. Ultimately, it comes down to making sure there aren’t a hundred implementations of the same thing, all changing arbitrary, all breaking randomly. Across all distros. No such body exists today. The users deserve better. Linux itself deserves better.

• Maybe someone should create a project for it.

New Releases

Arch Family

• I’m happy to announce the second release candidate of Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!

• This is one of the biggest updates we did so far. Mostly due the C++ 11 ABI change within gcc. It is recommended to rebuild your AUR packages for this ABI. With this we finally dropping Plasma 4 for good. All users of this desktop should either switch over to Plasma 5 or any other maintained desktop, like LXQt.

• Earlier today, December 18, the Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, was happy to announce the general availability of the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) computer operating system.

Ballnux/SUSE

Slackware Family

• There was yet another update of slackware-current today. The 150+ lines of ChangeLog.txt are not as massive as previous updates but still, lots of polishing and under-the-hood improvements, a couple of security updates (bind, cups-filters, libpng, mozilla-firefox and openssl), two new packages (libtirpc and rpcbind) to replace the removed portmap package; a fresh version of the GCC compiler suite (5.3.0) and a new Linux kernel (4.1.15).

Red Hat Family

• Containers are where all the cool-kid DevOps kids want to put their applications. While there’s a lot of edge servers available in containers, such as web and e-mail servers, there are far fewer middleware programs. Red Hat wants to change that.

• Red Hat has been a “dramatic gainer” largely because it is a cloud-based subscription company similar to Adobe (ADBE), TheStreet’s Jim Cramer said on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street this morning.

• Earnings improved 3.3% on a year-over-year basis.

• Currently the return on equity is 14.90% and its debt to equity is 0.53. Red Hat, Inc. has a total market cap of $ 14415.61, a gross margin of 84.80% while the profit margin is 10.20% and the ROI is 8.70%

• Red Hat Inc. (RHT) reported third quarter EPS of $0.48 after the bell Thursday, up from $0.42 in the prior year. The consensus estimate was for EPS of $0.47. The company expects to report fourth quarter EPS of $0.47 and full year EPS of $1.86. Analysts are expecting EPS of $0.48 and $1.85.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Details about a couple of SoS vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have been detailed in a regular security notice.

• On December 18, Mr. Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform all Ubuntu Phone users and Ubuntu Touch developers about the latest updates pushed to the stable branch of Canonical’s mobile operating system.

• Ubuntu has been around for just over a decade. That’s a long time for a project built around a field that evolves at such a rapid pace as computing. And not just any computing –software made for (and by) human beings, who have also inevitably grown and evolved with Ubuntu.

• [...]

• At some point, UDS morphed into UOS, an online-only event, which despite its own merits and success, it does admittedly lack the more personal component. This is where we are now, and this is not a write-up to hark back to the good old days, or to claim that all decisions we’ve made were optimal –acknowledging those lead by Canonical.

• As you may know, Canonical has added an online search functionality to the Unity 7 Dash starting with Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. The community was not pleased with the fact that Dash searches triggered online results and many of them disabled the feature, but Canonical has disabled it by default, on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

• As you may know, Canonical has been working hard at Ubuntu Touch lately, with OTA-8 already released and OTA-9 update scheduled for January 2016, Canonical has focused a lot on the OTA-8.5 hotfix, which should squash all the remaining bugs from OTA-8.

Devices/Embedded

• Spanish company Erle produces a full family of DIY drones and devices, like the most interesting controller board, Erle Brains 2.

• Erle-Brain 2 is the second generation of Linux-based artificial robotic brain for making robots and drones with official support for the Robot Operating System (ROS) and access to the app store.

• Adlink unveiled COM Express Type 6 Compact and Basic modules based on Intel’s 6th Gen Core “Skylake” CPUs, with up to 32GB DDR4 RAM and -40 to 85°C support.

• This year, we’ve seen some incredible price/performance breakthroughs in sub-$100 single board computers that can run Linux or Android and do cool stuff.

• The world of community-backed SBCs continued to expand in 2015, marked by lower prices and more modular, kit-like Internet of Things boards. Here we take a look at the top 10 most important — and probably the best — under $100 Linux- or Android-based, open-spec hacker SBCs that began shipping in 2015.

• When I read for the first time about Raspberry Pi Zero, I think at a new frontier in the DIY area. But I was only half right. This new frontier was announced first by the South Korean company called Hardkernel that prepares in their labs a new cheap single board computer a week before Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s about ODROID-C0.

Phones

• Finnish mobile OS maker Jolla, whose Sailfish platform is one of the few remaining alternatives trying to fight the Android-iOS duopoly, has pulled out of its latest financing death valley by closing a delayed Series C financing round.

• Dear Jolla fans, community, customers and Jolla Tablet backers,

• Last time when I wrote here, we had just heard that our financing round had not succeeded as expected and realized that we were in a full on financial crisis situation. In other words, the whole continuation of the Jolla story was in a real jeopardy and unfortunately we had to make some drastic moves to handle the situation.

• As you may know, Jolla has been founded by a group of ex-Nokia employees that decided to continue developing Linux-based mobile operating systems when Nokia accepted to release only Windows phones. Sailfish OS, Jolla’s Linux mobile system is based on the good old MeeGo, but has ditched the deb packages for rpms, has Android compatibility and an unique user interface.

• Antti Saarnio has shared that “Jolla is back in business!” with their latest financing round. With this money, they will specifically be focusing upon Sailfish OS 2.0 development, strongly focusing on India and Russian markets, and they hope to get the Jolla Tablet back on track.

• The top-15 vendors together took up 81.4% of shipments and nine were based in China, two in the US and South Korea, and one in Japan and Taiwan.

Android

• Deciding on which Android phone to buy can be difficult. On top of a record 1.1 billion Android phones shipped in 2015, there were 24,000 unique Android devices in the wild this year, according to Open Signal. Android smartphones vary widely, and range in price from less than $100 to over $700.

• A lot hinges upon the success of BlackBerry’s newest smartphone, the awkwardly named Priv.

• The company’s first phone to run Google’s Android mobile software, and not its own BlackBerry 10 operating system, represents a make-or-break moment. If the Priv fails to turn enough heads, that could spell the end of BlackBerry as a smartphone maker. It’s a grim thought for the few of you who are still into BlackBerrys.

• I don’t know where the time goes, but I do know this: 2015 has been an absolute blur here in the land of Googley goodness. From the arrival of Marshmallow to the expansion of Photos and the launch of Google’s finest flagship lineup to date (Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, and Pixel C — c’mon!), we’ve had more than enough to keep our brains a-spinnin’.

• With the holiday break ahead of us, now’s the perfect time to catch up on everything related to your favorite gadgets. Maybe you need to find the perfect new device for yourself or a loved one. Maybe you already have the right device and want to spend your days off teaching it new tricks. Whatever your situation, this guide’s got you covered.

• Just like Windows, Android has a special Safe Mode you can use if your device isn’t behaving as it should—all third-party apps are disabled, enabling you to see if your woes are being caused by one of those apps or something more fundamental that’s going on with your system. Here’s how to find it.

Free Software/Open Source

• There is also an OpenALPR agent tat can run as a Linux daemon. In this mode it can monitor one or more MJPEG video streams and return JSON packaged data containing the licence number it found.

• In mid-August, the first commercially available ZFS cloud replication target became available at rsync.net. Who cares, right? As the service itself states, “If you’re not sure what this means, our product is Not For You.”

• Of course, this product is for someone—and to those would-be users, this really will matter. Fully appreciating the new rsync.net (spoiler alert: it’s pretty impressive!) means first having a grasp on basic data transfer technologies. And while ZFS replication techniques are burgeoning today, you must actually begin by examining the technology that ZFS is slowly supplanting.

• The annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place on October 19-20 in San Francisco. Used in a relatively discrete manner by IT professionals until now, OpenZFS celebrates its 10 year anniversary as its adoption continues to grow. Witness how this open source technology has been used to store the twelve petabytes of dailies for the movie Gravity (1), or its integration into the latest release of Ubuntu as a native file system. This year, two representatives from the OVH storage team were sent to the Developer Summit to learn about new developments and to propose their contribution to the community, “Live migration with Zmotion”. Explanations and an overview are provided by François Lesage and Alexandre Lecuyer, OVH storage engineers.

Events

• The new year is looming, so this seems like a good time to share some of what we are thinking about at Kolab Systems when it comes to the Kolab ecosystem. As a result of careful examination of the Kolab ecosystem, we put together some priority adjustments to make.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Now that the Mozilla Firefox 43.0 has safely landed on our computers, the time has come to take a look at some of the upcoming features of the next major release of the popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox 44.0.

• On December 8, TechCrunch reported from Mozilla’s annual developer meeting that Mozilla had announced it was putting an end to its Firefox OS smartphone program. The announcement spread quickly—but with quite a bit of variation as to exactly what aspects of Firefox OS were being shut down. A number of tech-industry bloggers, for example, characterized the move as Mozilla “ditching” or even “killing” Firefox OS itself. But the actual statement published at TechCrunch was more limited in scope—although it still leaves many unanswered questions about where Firefox OS is heading next.

• Firefox 43′s official release data is December 15, 2015. This overview provides you with information about new features, updates, and changes in the new version of the web browser for the desktop and Android.

• As you may know, Mozilla Firefox is among the most popular internet browsers available, being very appreciated by FOSS users.

SaaS/Big Data

• Many organizations are also wrestling with how to quantify the performance they are actually getting from big data tools like Hadoop and Spark. On that front, there is good news. The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has announced two new additions to its growing arsenal of industry-standard benchmarks: TPC-DS 2.0 and TPCx-V. TPC-DS 2.0 is billed as “the first industry-standard benchmark for SQL-based Big Data systems, including Hadoop and Apache Spark-based systems, as well as relational database management systems (RDBMSs).” It could provide a standard for quantifying big data performance.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• My christmas break has started! So there is finally time to finish some of the stuff that had been piling up. First thing to release is the new version of LibreOffice 5, because it is so fresh. Release 5.0.4 was announced yesterday on the Document Foundation blog. My virtual server I rent from HostUS gives me so much better speeds than my build server at home for RAM-hungry compilations like LibreOffice… I built my new packages in a third of the time it usually takes me. Plus, the server at home was free to work on Slackware Live Edition… more about that soon, in another post.

• Perugia, 17 December 2015 – the Defence Association and LibreItalia announce the conclusion of the first course for referees LibreOffice computer, run independently from the group of trainers within the organization of the defense (formed last November) and under the supervision of mentor volunteers Association LibreItalia.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• BetConstruct has announced that the core of its new ‘Spring’ gaming platform is to be launched as open source next year.

• The new platform provides a single gaming management environment and can support a number of different products.

• The Facebook-owned cloud application platform heard you loud and clear…

BSD

• RetroBSD is a port of 2.11BSD Unix intended for embedded systems with fixed memory mapping. The current target is Microchip PIC32 microcontroller with 128 kbytes of RAM and 512 kbytes of Flash. PIC32 processor has MIPS M4K architecture, executable data memory and flexible RAM partitioning between user and kernel modes. The project is open source and hosted at RetroBSD.org

• FreeNAS Logo Contest: Okay, artists, get those colored pencils sharpened, those brushes cleaned and ready, because you have an assignment — that logo isn’t going to design itself. FreeNAS — “founded in 2005 on the guiding principle that network storage software should be available to the public at no cost and free of license restrictions” according to its site — has initiated a logo contest, urging the community to contribute artwork to become a part of FreeNAS history.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Department was seeking comments on proposed rules that would ensure that works created with competitive grant funds from the Department would be licensed to give the public and educational institutions the right to freely modify and distribute the works. The FSF’s comment lauded this goal, but suggested an important wording change in the regulation to ensure that “the license must grant public permission to ‘distribute modifications’ or equivalently ‘distribute adaptations.’” Earlier this month, the FSF also called on free software supporters to submit comments of their own, or add their signature to the FSF’s filing.

• “What the Department of Education is proposing is a great step for education and for computer user freedom. We submitted our comment, along with comments from our community, to ensure that the updated regulations create the greatest benefit: that all public grant-funded educational works carry the essential four freedoms,” said FSF’s executive director, John Sullivan.

• It’s been a few months since my last major update so I wanted to fill in what’s going on. As usual, a lot has been happening, and it’s been hard to cover it all as we go. There’s some particularly huge news in this update, including something about funding something oh hey this should help us get MediaGoblin 1.0 out the door, plus something about the standards work we’re doing, something something. So let’s dive in and resolve all those somethings, right?

• Each year, free software fans from across the world gather for the LibrePlanet conference. At this year’s LibrePlanet, our theme, “Fork the System”, will explore how free software creates the opportunity of a new path for its users, allows developers to fight the restrictions of a system dominated by proprietary software by creating free software replacements, and is the foundation of freedom, sharing, and change.

• I received a very generous offer to create a new logo and donate it for the project’s use. The benefactor is Justin Dorfman, and he has been very patient to wait for me to select from among a number of good alternatives (part of what made it so tough).

• Yesterday I had the pleasure of engaging in a conversation hosted by Bryan Lunduke on the topic of compromise in Free software. He has uploaded the audio and video recording of Richard Stallman, Stuart Langridge, Swapnil Bhartiya and myself tackling this topic.

Openness/Sharing

• Wednesday evenings the hackers and biologists of Counter Culture Labs, a North Oakland “anarchist collective,” meet to work on a project aiming to create an open-source protocol for manufacturing a more accessible and affordable version of insulin, made by recombinant DNA, also known as genetic engineering.

• From day jobs at such powerhouse facilities as UC San Francisco, Amgen Inc., and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, they come to work on the project called Open Insulin. The project aims to accelerate development of a generic version of the lifesaving medicine while showing that citizen scientists and biohackers can contribute an alternative to methods now used by the for-profit pharmaceutical business model, says the group’s 35-year-old co-founder Anthony Di Franco of Berkeley.

Leftovers

• Google enlisted members of the US congress, whose election campaigns it had funded, to pressure the European Union to drop a €6bn antitrust case which threatens to decimate the US tech firm’s business in Europe.

Security

• “The MoD can confirm that Windows XP will not be used by any onboard system when the ship becomes operational,” the spokesman added. “This also applies to HMS Prince of Wales.”

• Prince of Wales is the second of the UK’s two new carriers. It’s notable that the MoD doesn’t state that either ship won’t use XP at all – only when they become operational, which doesn’t rule it out altogether. El Reg has asked the MoD about this but they refused to comment on this point.

• Software based on XP is used to run the command suites of most of Blighty’s major warships, including the Type 23 frigate fleet and the newer Type 45 destroyers, the last of which entered service in 2013.

• HMS Queen Elizabeth will begin her sea trials in August 2016 that the MoD said will last until mid-2017, after which she will be officially handed over to the Royal Navy.

• Besides posting “an open source PlayStation 4 SDK” on GitHub, CTurt analyzed PS4’s security twice and explained PS4 hacking. CTurt updated the open source PS4 SDK yesterday; he previously explained that Sony’s proprietary Orbis OS is based on FREEBSD. In the past he released the PS4-playground, which included PS4 tools and experiments using the Webkit exploit for PS4 firmware version 1.76. To put that in context, Sony released version 3.0 in September. However, CTurt claimed the hack could be made to work on newer firmware versions.

Transparency Reporting

• Prince Charles has been receiving confidential cabinet papers for decades, giving him access to the inner workings of British government, according to a Whitehall manual released after a three-year freedom of information battle.

• The heir to the throne, who has previously been criticised for “meddling” in politics, is sent all cabinet memoranda, alongside the Queen and ministers in charge of departments, including secret proposals for new legislation and other discussion documents that have only been released to the public after 30 years.

Finance

• As we noted recently, the arrival of a new government in Canada has meant that the corporate sovereignty provisions in CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU, might be re-examined, even if they are unlikely to be dropped completely. The other major trade deal involving Canada, TPP, is much more complex, since there are 11 other nations to consider. Although that limits the Candian government’s scope for changing course, it appears that it is nonetheless taking a radically different approach compared to its predecessor.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• This week on CounterSpin: Alleged San Bernardino killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik did not pledge allegiance to ISIS on social media, the FBI now says, but no matter: The California killings have already added fuel to an upsurge of Islamophobia in US media and politics that in some ways is worse than that seen in the wake of September 11, 2001. One new element is the murky idea of “radicalization.” We’ll talk about that with Arun Kundnani, adjunct professor at NYU and author of, most recently, The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror.

• According to The New York Times’ public editor, the paper’s repeated publication of front-page, anonymously sourced stories that required major editor’s notes damages the paper’s credibility and should be a “red alert” for its editors.

• Wikipedia is to put artificial intelligence to the enormous task of keeping the free, editable online encyclopaedia up-to-date, spam-free and legal.

• The Objective Revision Evaluation Service uses text-processing AI algorithms to scan recent edits for signs that they may be spam, an effort at trolling, part of a revert war (where edits are made and reversed endlessly), or otherwise dubious. But humans are excellent at making sense of the nuance of the written word – can a computer do the same?

• Natural language processing is a branch of AI, focusing not on creating smart computers but on intelligent comprehension of text. Its aim is to help computers understand human language, and communicate as humans do.

• Despite the best efforts of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his allies on the state Supreme Court, the John Doe is not dead.

• On Friday, three county prosecutors filed a motion to intervene in the case, the first step towards appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

• In July, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a decision rewriting the state’s limits on money in politics and ending the “John Doe” investigation into Walker’s campaign coordinating with dark money groups. Yet some justices faced serious conflicts-of-interest in the case, since the same groups that coordinated with Walker’s campaign were among the majority’s biggest financial supporters, spending $10 million to elect the court’s majority.

• Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, the justices likely should not have heard the case at all. The Special Prosecutor leading the probe, Francis Schmitz, asked two justices to recuse but they refused to do so.

Privacy

• The European Parliament has made headway into the development of cybersecurity rules its member states should follow. Under the first set of regulations it has laid down, critical service companies in all 28 member states will have to make sure they’re using a system robust enough to fend off cyberattacks. By “critical service companies,” we mean those that fall under any of these six categories: energy, transport, banking, financial market, health and water supply. Each member state will have to list businesses that can be identified as critical service companies under a category. Any company that makes the cut will have to be able to quickly report security breaches to authorities.

• There continue to be many people around the globe who want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. Typically, the anonymous crowd turns to common tools that can keep their tracks private, and one of the most common tools of all is Tor, an open source tool used all around the world.

• Juniper, a major manufacturer of networking equipment, said on Thursday it found spying code planted in certain models of its firewalls, an alarming discovery that echoes of state-sponsored tampering.

• The affected products are those running ScreenOS, one of Juniper’s operating systems that runs on a range of appliances that act as firewalls and enable VPNs. ScreenOS versions 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20 are vulnerable, according to an advisory.

• Encryption backdoors have been a hot topic in the last few years—and the controversial issue got even hotter after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, when it dominated media headlines. It even came up during this week’s Republican presidential candidate debate. But despite all the attention focused on backdoors lately, no one noticed that someone had quietly installed backdoors three years ago in a core piece of networking equipment used to protect corporate and government systems around the world.

• On Thursday, tech giant Juniper Networks revealed in a startling announcement that it had found “unauthorized” code embedded in an operating system running on some of its firewalls.

• The code, which appears to have been in multiple versions of the company’s ScreenOS software going back to at least August 2012, would have allowed attackers to take complete control of Juniper NetScreen firewalls running the affected software. It also would allow attackers, if they had ample resources and skills, to separately decrypt encrypted traffic running through the Virtual Private Network, or VPN, on the firewalls.

• With recent revelations about browser fingerprinting, the race is on to find ways and means that will help reduce your browser’s fingerprint, and with it, make it difficult for it (and you) to be tracked.

• After trying Panopticlick yesterday, a tool released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help users determine if their browser is safe against tracking and fingerprinting, I set out to find out how to make my browsers less unique to trackers.

• For the very paranoid, the results are not good.

• After more than a year of stalemate, Congress has used an unconventional procedural measure to bring a controversial cybersurveillance bill to the floor. Late last night, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) announced a 2,000-page omnibus budget bill, a last-minute compromise necessary to prevent a government shutdown. But while the bulk of the bill concerns taxes and spending, it contains a surprise 1,729 pages in: the full text of the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which passed the Senate in October.

• WhatsApp has been blocked for 48 hours in Brazil following a court order by a judge in the country. It has been alleged that the messaging service has been providing “pirate” services, undermining the role of the country’s telecommunications companies, and should be regulated. The so-called blockade goes into effect at midnight tonight.

Civil Rights

• We saw off a sneaky attempt to introduce Snoopers’ Charter into law. Four members of the House of Lords tried to insert the text of the Snoopers’ Charter into the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill, just when that Bill was at its final stages. With only a few days notice, ORG responded, galvanising supporters to call Lords and explain why this was unacceptable. The Lords saw sense and the amendments were dropped.

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