● 12.20.15

● Links 20/12/2015: OpenMandriva Server Version, Alpine 3.3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Back in 2006 I switched from Linux and Windows to Mac as my primary operating system. I paid for my white macbook with my first real paycheck. This was right after they switched to the Intel platform and it really was an amazing time to step in. At the time it was the perfect combination of a great UX, combined with the power a unix-ish system.

Desktop

• As I’ve pointed out repeatedly thin clients work for almost anyone not generating huge quantities of multi-media stuff locally. Schools, banks, clerks, medical staff… They all have one thing in common. Most of their data is best kept on a server somewhere so why not their applications as well? Whether the applications are web applications or something GUI that could be provided by a desktop, it can also be provided by a rather thin client device, even a Raspberry Pi, it turns out.

• Health workers now need ubiquitous access to medical records that are increasingly kept electronically. Moreover, medical staffers are increasingly taking their work to patients in the field, a paradigm of care that requires constant access to files stored in the cloud and centralized administrative systems accessed via the Internet. That has put special emphasis on refreshing client devices to meet the demands of modern medicine and made Chromebooks a superior alternative to desktop PCs and traditional laptops for delivering secure, lightweight, cost-effective access to medical systems, records, and services.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Bryan Cantrill is the CTO at Joyent, where he oversees worldwide development of the SmartOS and SmartDataCenter platforms. Prior to joining Joyent, Bryan served as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he spent over a decade working on system software, from the guts of the kernel to client-code on the browser. In particular, he co-designed and implemented DTrace.

Kernel Space

• Who is Invovled?: Early commitments to this work come from Accenture, ANZ Bank, Cisco, CLS, Credits, Deutsche Börse, Digital Asset Holdings, DTCC, Fujitsu Limited, IC3, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, London Stock Exchange Group, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), R3, State Street, SWIFT, VMware and Wells Fargo.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• Following this week’s OpenGL 4.1 R600g benchmarking with that newly-enabled OpenGL 4 support, I set out to run a larger hardware comparison on both the R600g and RadeonSI drivers as part of our year-end 2015 Linux benchmarking. In this article are tests of seven AMD Radeon graphics cards tested on the proprietary driver compared to the latest open-source driver stack — with extra steps of enabling DRI3 rendering and also using the latest AMDGPU PowerPlay code.

Applications

• Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a raster graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. This means all image information is restored when the file is decompressed during viewing. The compression engine is based on the Deflate method designed by PKWare and originally used in PKZIP, a file archiving computer program.

• Please feel free to give ircb a run and share your feedback here. Your suggestions and feedback are extremely valuable to us and will help us in developing this product accordingly.

• After a short hiatus, a new version of the (wonderfully useful, if I dare say so RcppTOML package is now on CRAN. RcppTOML lets R read the (absolutely awesome) TOML configuration file format–which is simply fabulous as it emphasizes strong readability for humans while at the same time supporting strong typing as well as immediate and clear error reports. At work, we’re all fans now.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Bombernauts is pretty much bomberman on a year long diet of steroids, as it’s insane. We should get a game of this going sometime. This is definitely a contender for the next multiplayer GOL livestream that’s for sure. It’s in Early Access, so we might leave it to bake in the oven a bit longer, it seems to run quite well though, with no obvious bugs I could find.

• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is an RPG from 2002. You are released from prison and sent to the province of Morrowind by the emperor of Tamriel to complete a task that will take you on a great journey throughout Morrowind.

Distributions

• The Budgie operating system has some pretty awesome theming features that are not usually found in other distros, as shown in a recent video posted by the developers.

New Releases

• We are pleased to announce Alpine Linux 3.3.0, the first release in v3.3 stable series.

• Alpine Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and Busybox that’s oriented towards security and less on the overall user experience. A new version has been released and is now ready for download.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• OpenMandriva has largely been a desktop-focused Linux distribution but now apparently they have set their sights on assembling a server offering.

• OpenMandriva’s Kate Lebedeff has shared with us that the project is assembling a server distribution. OpenMandriva OMLxs Server is intended to be a stable environment for Docker, includes AuFS kernel support, and includes Nginx, Docker, Fail2ban, and other server-related packages.

Arch Family

• The second release candidate of what will become Manjaro Linux 15.12 was released yesterday. This article offers a preview of the KDE edition with screenshots taken from a test installation.

• If you’re new to Manjaro Linux, it is a desktop distribution, and one of the very few desktop distributions based on Arch Linux. Antergos is another one of those.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat reported its financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2016 year, once again showing continued revenue growth.

• For the quarter, revenue was reported at $524 million, a 15 percent year-over-year gain. Net income was reported at $47 million, a marginal decline from the $48 million reported in the third quarter of fiscal 2015.

• In an analyst report sent to investors and clients on Friday morning, Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) stock had its “Buy” Rating kept by stock analysts at Stifel Nicolaus. They currently have a $97.00 target price on firm. Stifel Nicolaus’s target would suggest a potential upside of 19.75 % from the company’s last price.

• Did you miss last night’s “Mad Money” on CNBC? If so, here are Jim Cramer’s top takeaways for Monday’s trading.

• In an analyst report published by Piperjaffray on 18 December, Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) had its target price boosted to $95.00. The firm right now has “Overweight” rating on the stock.

Debian Family

• Arch Linux packages in the multilib and community repositories (4,000 more source packages) are also being tested. All of these test results are better analyzed and nicely displayed together with each package. (h01ger)

• travis.debian.net is my new hosted utility to make it easier and cleaner to test your Debian packages on the Travis CI continuous integration platform, without duplicating configuration or scripts across mulitiple repositories.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Four years ago at UDS Budapest was a lofty goal laid out by Mark Shuttleworth: 200 million users in four years.

• We’re just days away from closing out 2015 and it doesn’t look like Ubuntu has come close to reaching that goal. Canonical isn’t too forward about accurate Ubuntu user counts, but most indications these days are that Ubuntu installations — both desktops and servers — are in the tens of millions. I haven’t seen any reports of Ubuntu server/desktop installations being north of 100 million let alone 200 million.

• Canonical is going to host its first live convention, UbuCon, in just a month. We’re saying first because it’s been a really long time since the previous one.

• Canonical figured out a while back that the Ubuntu conferences were not really reaching all the people they wanted. Not everyone could attend, and the cost of organizing such a big event for the most used Linux operating system in the world could not be justified.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Jolla management really seems to not understand a first thing about how to deal with consumers. They “sailed” on wings people believing it will be open source product. They got litterally hunderds of request and question for why it isn’t? Answers, I found once something along in these lines “we plan in future”.

Android

• Android is many things. A mobile operating system, a tool for smart watches and set-top boxes, any much more. But one of the things it most certainly is not is a desktop OS… at least in its current form. That said, it’s also the world’s biggest piece of open-source software, so when Jide decided to make what it calls “the world’s first true Android PC,” they were more than free to do so. Whether or not it’s a good idea is a subject for discussion… and this review.

• The popular BlackBerry Priv Android phone is helping BlackBerry boost its earnings. According to BBC News , BlackBerry Reported that it had revenue of $548 million during the third quarter of 2015 including September, October, November. The revenue reported is 12 percent higher than the same period in 2014. The new BlackBerry Priv phone was released before the end of the third quarter. The high sales from the Priv could have helped boost earnings for BlackBerry.

• BlackBerry is to launch its first Android-powered smartphone, the PRIV, in the Middle East in January, the Canadian telco giant announced

• The device will be launched in the UAE at the start of 2016 and in Saudi Arabia soon after.

• The smartphone brand’s latest model will include a dual-curved screen, touch and physical keyboards, state-of-the-art 18MP camera, and a long-lasting battery.

• “PRIV is the first BlackBerry smartphone running Android and it creates a new market opportunity for us in the Middle East with users who are entrenched in the Android ecosystem and who are seeking greater productivity and more powerful privacy features,” said Mike Al Mefleh, product management director Middle East, BlackBerry.

• For BlackBerry, making an Android phone was never so much about having a great option as much as it was about having a least bad one.

• There are a lot of Android launchers available at the Google Play store and all of these come with refreshingly new themes. Here are the top five Android launchers for you.

• Android is the most popular mobile OS on the planet, and Google has brought the OS to cars, watches, and televisions. And, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google will soon be bringing Android to yet another form factor: desktop and laptop computers. Re-architecting Android for a mouse and keyboard is going to require major changes to the smartphone operating system, but Android is actually much farther along that path today than most people realize.

• Earlier this year BlackBerry released its first ever Android-powered smartphone, making the inevitable shift over to Google’s mobile platform in a last ditch effort to plug the losses of its hardware business. The BlackBerry Priv appears to be performing better than its BlackBerry 10 OS powered counterparts did last year and the company makes it clear that it’s not done yet. Not only will it release another Android-powered handset, but the upcoming device will be cheaper than the Priv.

Free Software/Open Source

• Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of these open sourced projects involve LEGOs. When perusing through Github, developers will find a variety of projects based around LEGOs—for example, a project that allows you to create custom decals (or clothes) for LEGO minifigs (LEGO people). Or, a developer may stumble upon a project that enables him or her to create music, electronically, with a 32×32 inch LEGO plate and 2×2 inch LEGO bricks. The latter of the two involves a little more technology—a webcam, basic coding knowledge, and music software—but nonetheless, it is possible to achieve.

• Computer vision-assisted license plate reading seems to be a favorite spectre of a certain sort of privacy worrier, at least anecdotally speaking. Something to do with its potential for tracking and profiling an activity that seems to make Americans in particular feel their most, uh, liberated (driving cars).

• The technology has had a steady uptake among law enforcement agencies, who of course think it’s wondertool for busting crimes, but now an open-source implementation is starting to make some waves in the developer world and beyond. This is OpenALPR, and, as Mike James notes at I-Programmer, it’s not a new thing but is getting some new attention in the wake of a recent code release. LPR is here for the masses and it’s incredibly easy to use.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Immediately after LibreOffice 5.0.4 was released, the developers have already posted information about the first RC for LibreOffice 5.1.0, which is now also available for download and testing.

Funding

• In September, The FUUG Foundation gave me a grant to buy some hardware for Obnam development. I used this money to buy a new desktop-ish machine, see below for details. It’s sat in a corner, and I use it as a server: it’s not normally connected to a monitor or keyboard. It runs Obnam benchmarks. Before this, I ran Obnam benchmarks and experiments on my laptop, or on BigV virtual servers donated by Bytemark.s

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Programming

• With the evolution of the cloud, it may come as a surprise to some that there are so many businesses still using dedicated servers. In fact, according to Zephyr’s annual How The World Tests Report, nearly half of respondents host their test environments in their private servers, while 36 percent chose a mix of cloud and hardware solutions. The question, then, is what conditions do these organizations have and why are private servers so essential to their workflows?

Leftovers

• This is on the BBC so must be true: New Zealand has given approval to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to carry out marriage ceremonies in the country. Members of the church call themselves Pastafarians and believe that the world was created by an airborne spaghetti and meatballs-based being, although its own website notes that some followers consider it to be a satirical organization. The N.Z. registrar-general said his decision was based solely on whether the organization upholds or promotes religious beliefs, or philosophical or solely convictions, not whether the beliefs are all a big joke or not.

Security

• Just by looking at an email message in Outlook, attackers can now take control over your PC. The good news is that Microsoft has patched the issue, but unless you updated Outlook after December 8, you’re still vulnerable to this issue.

• Security researcher Haifei Li discovered this peculiar Outlook bug, which he named BadWinmail. According to a technical report he put together after the vulnerability’s discovery, the attack is extremely easy to carry out and does not require any complex interaction from the end user.

• Researcher Chris Vickery said he uncovered four IP addresses that took him straight to a MongoDB database, containing a range of personal information, including names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, phone numbers, IP addresses, system information, as well as software licenses and activation codes. All Vickery had to do was look for openly accessible MongoDB databases on the Shodan search tool.

• Penetration testing, also called pentesting, is an attack method which scans for broad vulnerabilities in networked computers. It is primarily used in professional settings in order to ascertain the status of security in a machine.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• There are a few ways to judge The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs, a new documentary which interviews all 12 living former heads of the CIA (and several other key personnel) and premieres on Showtime at 9pm on Saturday. You can view it as a piece of filmmaking, as an apologia for the tactics the agency has to employ to get its very difficult job done, or as a rewriting of history from the CIA’s point of view. On two out of three of these criteria, it sadly comes up short.

• As a film, The Spymasters is a bit of a failure. In aesthetic, tone and pacing it seems directly based on The Gatekeepers, a 2012 film that interviewed all the former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police. However, the former spooks in Spymasters aren’t nearly as candid as the Israelis. This new film is slow-moving and, at a solid two hours, long-winded. The first 15 minutes consist of throat-clearing platitudes, it is often hard to tell who is speaking, and interruptions from directors Gedeon and Jules Naudet frequently take the viewer out of the experience entirely.

• Whom to waterboard? Which village to drone? A bizarre documentary explores the spy elite’s secret suffering

• At least one of the guns used in the November 13 terror attacks in Paris was purchased by Century International Arms and then re-exported to Europe. One of the largest arms dealers in the United States, Century Arms has close ties to the CIA and has faced charges in America and Europe of involvement in illegal arms deals.

• The weapon, an M92 semiautomatic pistol, was produced at the Zastava arms factory in Kragujevac, Serbia. Last week, factory manager Milojko Brzakovic told AP he had checked its records on seven weapons that it manufactured that were used in the Paris attacks. It delivered several of the weapons inside Yugoslavia before that country dissolved amid capitalist restoration and civil war in the 1990s, but it delivered the pistol in May 2013 to Century Arms, based in Delray Beach, Florida.

• Social media campaigns will “legitimize the spread of internet censorship and will lead to the increased censorship for everyone, including Anonymous,” the message reads. “Dealing with government agents et al will not only result in many more informers in Anonymous but will also damage its reputation as it will lead to a view that Anonymous is too close to US intelligence interests.”

• The term “radicalized” is a problematic one, namely because virtually no one who carries out sub-state political violence (which we’ll broadly refer to as terrorism) follows the same pattern. Some are hyper-religious while others have but a passing knowledge of the Bible or Quran. Some are battle-hardened fighters, while others carry out their “jihad” in a typical workplace violence mode. But in the wake of a terrorist attack, authorities and the press alike scramble to ask the question: When exactly did the attacker begin to show signs of violent ideology? In the case of Islamic-tinted violence, the question more specifically is: When did they first show support for either al Qaeda or ISIS ideology?

• Americans want to treat San Bernardino and the risk of future such attacks — and that risk is real — as purely a terrorism problem, because that feels like a problem with difficult but achievable and politically palatable solutions. We want to ignore the ways in which this is also a mass shooting problem, because American political and social factors have made addressing the broader mass shooting problem seem just about impossible.

• Juan González: GOP to Puerto Rico–”Drop Dead”; GOP Debate: Trump Defends Muslim Ban, Other Candidates Debate How to Restrict Rights & Go to Wa; Democracy Is Being Dismantled Before Our Eyes: Bob Herbert on Sheldon Adelson-Backed GOP Debate; Ben Carson: I am OK with Killing “Thousands of Innocent Children and Civilians”; Trump Calls for Closing Parts of Internet as Cruz & Rubio Debate NSA Powers; Stephen Zunes: No Candidates Are Looking at Root Cause of ISIL, “This Monster We Created.”

• How could a man barred from possessing guns because of a 2009 conviction for illegal possession of a firearm have a 30-30 lever-action rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun in the trunk of his car?

Transparency Reporting

• In a victory for millions of people in the U.S. who have placed telephone calls to locations overseas, EFF and Human Rights Watch have confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of collecting those records in bulk has stopped and that the only bulk database of those records has been destroyed.

• From the 1990s to 2013, the DEA secretly and illegally collected billions of records of Americans’ international calls to hundreds of countries around the world. In April 2015, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of our client, Human Rights Watch, challenging the constitutionality of the program and seeking to have the records purged from the government’s possession.

• Today, HRW has agreed to voluntarily dismiss that suit after receiving assurances from the government, provided under penalty of perjury, that the bulk collection has ceased and that the only database containing the billions of Americans’ call records collected by the DEA has been purged from the government’s possession.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Revised carbon loss estimates for recurrent fires on tropical peatlands have been revised by a research team. The study also found that peatlands closer to canals have a higher probability of high frequency fires, which release harmful carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

• Those fires have contributed to the smoke crisis choking Southeast Asia almost annually.

• But many experts believe fires in Indonesia are likely to start up again when the rainy season ends in March. They say not enough has been done yet to head off the risks.

• Slash-and-burn clearance of land – much of it to plant oil palm, and trees to make pulp and paper – is the main culprit fuelling the fires that smoulder deep underground in peat. They have pushed up pollution levels, disrupting daily life from Indonesia to Singapore and Malaysia.

• Who is responsible for starting the fires is unclear, although the finger is often pointed at small-scale growers of the palm which produces cheap, edible oil.

• Mansuetus Alsy Hanu, national coordinator for Indonesia’s Palm Oil Smallholder Union, said his members are often unfairly blamed, and better mapping of the land would show some fires break out on larger holdings.

• Still he admitted that financial pressure on small growers pushes them towards slash-and-burn clearance.

• South Sumatra’s governor, Alex Noerdin, is adamant there will be a “significant reduction” next year in fires on deforested and peat land in his province.

• Those fires have contributed to the haze crisis choking South East Asia almost annually.

• But many experts believe fires in Indonesia are likely to start up again when the rainy season ends in March. They say not enough has been done yet to head off the risks.

• Often at this season, I visit Elvin Elfenhausen, my inside guy at the North Pole. “How’s the Jolly Old Man?” I ask.

• “Not very jolly,” he sighs. “Nor would you be jolly if everything around you was turning from reliable snow and ice to slush and water.”

• “I forgot,” I say. “Global Warming?

• “Yes, but not just Global Warming,” Elvin says. “That supposedly slow disaster is happening with disturbing quickness. And it seems everything else is going to pot. Santa’s thinking of moving.

• “Santa moving his workshop from the North Pole?” I exclaim. Immediately, I wonder which of my friends in the economic development business I should call with this startling opportunity.”

• “Where’s he thinking of going?” I prod. “How many jobs? What incentives? Cash? Tax abatement? A frozen TIF district? Labor training support? Does he want a new building or would an existing structure, zoned manufacturing, suffice? Does he demand a sleigh launching and landing site?”

Finance

• Cook’s remarks, made on CBS’ 60 Minutes show, come amid a debate in the United States over corporations avoiding taxes through techniques such as so-called inversion deals, where a company re-domiciles its tax base to another country.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Republican Party’s top presidential candidates proved that they know nothing about foreign policy.

• Sometimes what matters most takes up every inch of space in the room and somehow we still don’t see it. That’s how I feel about our present media moment.

• Let me put it this way: I’m a creature of habit, and one of those habits has long been watching NBC Nightly News, previously with anchor Brian Williams and now with Lester Holt. It’s my way of getting some sense of what an aging cohort of American news viewers (like me) learns daily about the world — what stories are considered important and not, and in what order, and how presented.

• Bernie Sanders called Donald Trump a “pathological liar,” Sunday in the Vermont senator’s sharpest jab so far at Trump.

• “It really is rather extraordinary,” Sanders told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I’ll say this straight-forwardly: I think you have a pathological liar there.”

• “Much of what he says are lies, or gross distortions of reality,” Sanders continued.

• Progressive Honor Roll 2015FAIR is on The Nation‘s “Progressive Honor Roll 2015” (12/17/15), a list “celebrating progressivism that mattered in 2015 and that—if past is prologue—will matter even more in 2016 and beyond.”

Censorship

• Geo-blocking and other geographically-based restrictions undermine online shopping and cross-border sales. The Digital Single Market strategy includes a commitment for an initiative to end unjustified geo-blocking by way of legislative proposals to change the e-Commerce framework or the Services Directive framework

• GERMANY HAS managed to get the large internet companies to come together and agree to smash hate speech off the internet.

• People say that the internet is mostly pornography, but actually a huge chunk of it is hate speech and nasty talk of some kind. Taking it offline would be a challenge, but it is a challenge that companies like Google are ready to accept, according to Germany’s justice ministry and a number of reports.

• Following Congress passing the Omnibus spending bill, it of course did not take long for President Obama to sign the bill, meaning that the fake cybersecurity bill/actual surveillance bill, is now law. Particularly ridiculous is that in his little speech about it, Obama talked about how he “wasn’t wild about everything in it” but that he was happy that it was a bill “without ideological provisions.” Except, you know, for the many ones that did get in there.

• But, what do you expect with a 2000+ page bill that Congress was only given a couple of days to look at before voting on. Zach Carter, over at Huffington Post has examples of a couple of ridiculous provisions in the omnibus, starting with a ban on giving any funding to ACORN, the organization that was the target of scorn from Republicans a few years back. So what’s so ridiculous about that? Following the pile on against ACORN years ago the organization shut down. It hasn’t existed in years. Preventing funding for it seems, you know, kinda pointless, as it doesn’t exist.

• [...]

• So Congress can’t seem to get much of anything done, but it does pass an omnibus bill that includes a weird meaningless porn filter requirement four times… and a damaging surveillance bill. And you wonder why people dislike and distrust Congress.

• October marked 50 years since the Indonesian military launched one of the twentieth century’s worst mass murders. Yet the anniversary passed almost unnoticed. The massacre of some 500,000 members or sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) during 1965-1966 is the least talked-about genocide of the last century.

• As 250 million Indonesians face up to the 50th anniversary of one of the most crushing episodes of our nation’s history – the massacre of up to 500,000 or more alleged Communists between 1965 and 1968 by the Suharto regime – the business of confronting the past has reached a new urgency. And it is an urgency that has only a week ago was sharpened by new disappointments.

• That new disappointment is our president Joko Widodo’s stance on “1965” – as the tragedy is commonly referred to. In a statement in front of the leaders of the Muhammadiyah, the country’s second largest Muslim organisation, he has refused to apologise to the victims of 1965. And so ended the campaign promises he made –hollow ones to start with, of giving priority to the country’s unresolved cases of human rights violations, including 1965 – that earned him the people’s votes.

• Our biggest concern is not Amos’ posts, which the authorities are already addressing, but the vitriol coming from “offended” individuals.

• Such vitriol has seemingly got a free pass in spite of its obscene, threatening, abusive or insulting nature – the very offences that Amos was previously convicted for.

• According to a statement released by the Singapore Police Force, 17-year-old blogger Amos Yee is again under police investigation, after he allegedly made offensive anti-Islamic comments on his personal blog.

• In a November 27 blog post, Yee wrote about former Singapore Nominated Member of Parliament Calvin Cheng and allegedly made anti-Islamic comments. He expressed similar sentiments in a Facebook post the next day.

• The police have said officers will interview teenage blogger Amos Yee “upon his return to Singapore”, in connection with investigations into offensive remarks made online about religion.

• Yee, 17, was to have shown up at Jurong Police Division on Monday (Dec 14) to assist with investigations, but he failed to do so.

• In a blog post last month, Yee had responded to remarks supposedly made by former Nominated Member of Parliament Calvin Cheng and made references to Islam.

• The police said in response to media queries that Yee is not prohibited from travelling overseas.

• Amos Yee, a teenaged blogger detained for a video he posted about Lee Kuan Yew in March, was the second highest-trending person on Google in Singapore this year – after the late former prime minister.

• The haze was the top trending news story of 2015, with ‘PSI Singapore’ the top news search of the year, followed by the Southeast Asia Games. MERS was the most popular international news search.

• Reality TV show Bigg Boss was the top trending TV show in a list featuring four Korean dramas. The iPhone 6s was the most searched for gadget.

• Other top searches included “SEA Games”, which were held in Singapore in June; “WhatsApp Web”, the web version of the chat app released this year; “iPhone 6s”; “QZ8501″, the AirAsia flight which crashed on route from Surabaya to Singapore; and “Amos Yee”, the controversial teenage blogger.

• Blogger Amos Yee, who drew consideration for his criticisms of the previous prime minister, was looked for as individuals stored tabs on the controversy on-line.

• Rounding up the rest of the list is teenage blogger Amos Yee, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) virus and the Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501, which crashed in December 2014, killing 162.

• Blogger Amos Yee, who drew attention for his criticisms of the former Prime Minister, was looked up as people kept tabs on the controversy.

• While Mr Lee did not take top spot overall, he was the most trending person followed by controversial YouTuber and blogger Amos Yee and Mr Lee’s daughter, Dr Lee Wei Ling.

• Somewhat different from this pair is the painting titled Wheelbarrow, which is oddly dated to “1990-2015”. It’s an incongruity that is revealed to be part of a tranche of old paintings of Leow’s, most of which lie rolled up in a custom-made coffin next to Wheelbarrow. The damage wrought by time seems to mirror the relentless march of the news cycle, which Leow tops off by painting an overlay of a quote from the nation’s current potty-mouth of the year, Amos Yee.

• Otherwise, we might have to call out – as surely as Amos Yee can’t stop himself trolling for attention – “Humbug!”

• In January 2016, Singapore’s human rights record will face international scrutiny at the United Nations (UN) for the second time.

• Universities are “killing free speech” by banning anything that causes offence, a group of leading academics have warned.

• Students are being denied the opportunity to debate opposing views due to political correctness and censorship, the group argued in a letter published in The Telegraph.

• Because universities increasingly see fee-paying students as customers, they do not dare to stand up to the “small but vocal minority” of student activists who want to ban everything from the Sun newspaper to the historian David Starkey.

• The letter says: “Few academics challenge censorship that emerges from students. It is important that more do, because a culture that restricts the free exchange of ideas encourages self-censorship and leaves people afraid to express their views in case they may be misinterpreted. This risks destroying the very fabric of democracy.

• “An open and democratic society requires people to have the courage to argue against ideas they disagree with or even find offensive. At the moment there is a real risk that students are not given opportunities to engage in such debate.

• On Monday, prominent human-rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang went on trial for writing seven social-media posts criticizing Chinese policies and government officials. Supportive online messages posted during the trial were swiftly taken down.

• At the same time, China’s Internet began to fill with images of Wuzhen, a scenic southern river town that is playing host to China’s biggest annual Internet conference this week. And on Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping, in the presence of leaders of several Central Asian countries and a who’s who list from China’s biggest and richest online companies, laid out his vision for an Internet where governments like Beijing’s could regulate the Web how they see fit.

• Chinese president Xi Jinping opened the World Internet Conference by telling world leaders to respect other nation’s cyber sovereignty. The leader went on to say that every country has the right to govern the web in accordance with local laws, and that China stands against “internet hegemony.” The move reinforces China’s right to suppress information on a whim, like when it shuttered Instagram during the Hong Kong democracy protests. By making it an issue of sovereignty, the country is effectively shouting “back off” to rivals who would dare criticize its heavy-handed attitude toward censorship.

• China on Wednesday will kick off its World Internet Conference, a three-day gathering in the eastern city of Wuzhen. With Chinese leaders stressing all things Internet as a major economic development strategy, and with foreign tech firms salivating over the massive but tightly managed market, many are looking to the conference for signposts to the future.

• Wuzhen, I can only imagine, has been chosen as the venue for China’s World Internet Conference because it is beautiful.

• That is one of the recurring themes of the event: that the internet is a thing of beauty which should be shared and cherished by all mankind.

• And Wuzhen is a water town, a village held together by interconnecting canals, criss-crossed by elegant stone bridges.

• So that kind of works for the internet metaphor too. But the town, as it happens, is also unbearably cold at this time of year.

• President Xi Jinping has defended his government’s broad censorship of the internet, in a high-profile speech underscoring China’s increasingly emphatic attempts to justify its strict online control.

• Mr Xi said cyberspace was not a “place beyond the rule of law” and that countries must not interfere in the internal affairs of others, in remarks made to an international audience of world and business leaders at a technology conference in Wuzhen on Wednesday.

• Chinese Internet giant Alibaba’s announcement this week that it’s buying Hong Kong’s premier English-language newspaper has set off concerns that the move will stifle the city-state’s free press.

• The e-commerce site on Monday said it had agreed to buy media assets of the SCMP Group Ltd., whose holdings include the South China Morning Post. Alibaba executives said the purchase was aimed at improving China’s image and countering what it calls the bias of Western news outlets.

• “Tiatrists are not mere artists but defenders of society and have a right as well as do enjoy the freedom of expression to speak out and criticise the government and other personalities,” remarked Kala Academy chairman Vishnu Surya Wagh on Monday.

• The c-word is just another one of India’s tales of paradoxes, the way William Ma-zzarella, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago known for authoring Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity sees it as he revisits the way the censorship story has been unfolding in the country the recent times.

• William Mazzarella, a professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, has authored Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (2013) and co-edited Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (2009). Currently in Mumbai to talk about film censorship in India, Mazzarella on how censorship is used as a tool for publicity. Excerpts from an interview:

• This past year, censorship has made big and recurring news in India. The Censor Board for Film Certification (CBFC) under Pahlaj Nihalani’s chairmanship has proved to be simultaneously a bane for filmmakers and a god-given-muse for Twitter humorists. The CBFC has gone where few previous iterations of the board have gone before. Whether it’s a list of banned words —including ‘Bombay’ and ‘masturbation’ — or cutting short James Bond’s kisses on screen. There has been a heightening of the old desi variety of crowd-sourced censorship.

• Our society seems to take offense easier and insist more volubly on our right to silence each other. And yet, while traditional channels of censorship have increased their scope and heightened their intensity, India is seeing a wide open space of cultural production online, which is somewhat free of the claustrophobic pressures of moral policing.

• The Godrej Cultural Lab this Friday is hosting a talk titled ‘Censoring India’ by William Mazzarella from the University of Chicago.

• Of course the government has and continues to try to regulate access to various internet sites, not least pornographic ones. At the same time, we all know that people find ways to access what they want to see. I think the interesting question is why and how censorship persists despite the fact that it obviously is unable to exert tight control — even the authorities themselves admit that. So the only answer has to be that censorship is in fact not only, or not even mainly, about control. Instead, as I was saying earlier, it’s about what can be gained from harnessing the controversy around a particular set of words or images and using that controversy to bolster authority. Of course that’s always a delicate and volatile game.

• For example, an Iranian man was recently jailed when images were shared online of him posing with several women dressed in miniskirts and crop tops. Photographs of women in provocative Western attire are deemed immoral and illegal in the nation, even while such images are relatively commonplace on Western social media accounts. In fact, in just the last eight months more than 700 people have been arrested in the country for “economic, moral and social” crimes.

• Given the swathes of corruption and human rights abuses in Angola, the rapper’s performance should not lend credibility to the dos Santos regime

• In Monday’s Guardian, in reporting on the number of journalists around the world who have been killed so far this year, I noted that only four of the 55 victims came from Mexico.

• But that relatively low figure, plucked from the death toll compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, conceals a terrible truth because it follows years of murders of media workers in that country.

• To put the situation in context, I turned to a special report published on Friday by the Washington Post, Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels.

• Balancing journalism’s twin goals of telling the public what it wants to know and what it needs to know is not only an ethical matter for journalists but a very real concern for the media consumers.

• [...]

• It is fair to ask whether two major newspapers, Yediot Aharonot and Israel Hayom, are suffering from problems that may lead to self-censorship.

• Our well-researched assumption from years of review is that the former is very anti-Likud and almost pathologically anti- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while the latter is at the other end of the spectrum, being consistently sympathetic to Netanyahu and his policies.

• The mainstream media has been lax, both the pro- and the anti-Netanyahu press, claims Yoav Yitzhak in a November 29 report at his News1 web site on whether Sara Netanyahu had “hidden away” gifts she and her husband received, as he has published, when visiting abroad rather than handing them over to the proper government clerks responsible for their storage.

• In the 1980s, the main form of home entertainment in Iran consisted of two TV channels and two radio stations. For those who were tired of watching or hearing news about the ongoing war with Iraq and sanctions, there was only one source of entertainment: old movies from the time of former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Despite the danger of being arrested and having to pay a fine or go to jail, people continued to watch videos by renting smuggled and banned VCRs. Media expert Dr. Fereydoun Ahmadvand told Al-Monitor, “One of the reasons videos became so popular among people and ultimately forced a retreat in the state’s position was the need for diversity and the desire to hear several voices and have cultural pluralism, which did not at all exist in Iran during the years of war.”

• To remix an old saw for the Internet age: Familiarity breeds a particularly nasty, exhausted sort of apathy—the burnout of overexposure to a brand, whether it be Hulu’s fusillade of unchanging ads, Upworthy’s smug click bait, or an artist’s monomaniacal shtick. For a longtime devotee, the first few pages of Ian F. Svenonius’ “Censorship Now!!” carry plenty of that checked out disappointment. A longtime D.C. indie-punk fixture, Svenonius has spent two books (2006′s “The Psychic Soviet” and 2012′s “Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group”)—and 20 years as frontman for The Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, Weird War, and Chain and the Gang—mining a narrow melange of socio-musicological history, academic inquiry, and Marxist camp.

• Svenonius posits some rather radical steps concerning a remedy for censorship, takes a deep dive into the often unacknowledged cultural ramifications seeded during the earlier (and even earliest) days of the Internet and the corporate cooption of college rock that robbed it of its teeth, its vitality, its integrity. He also discusses the historical role of sugar in empire building, the potential corruptive powers (or misinterpretations) of backward-messages on vinyl records and, as we said, the 1988 film Heathers (concerning copycat crime sprees and the culpability of pop culture icons.) But there isn’t a shred of facetious snark or anecdotal wiseass-ery going on here. Each subject is thoroughly investigated and ruminated upon, scrutinizing some of the historical gunk that may have been disregarded from our more popular discourses and shrewdly polishing some ponderous interpretations to provide insight to the curious reader.

• The Lebanese nonprofit cartoon collective Samandal is in dire financial straits after the central government cracked down on them with censorship charges and fines.

• Supporters of Argentina’s former president protest fearing new conservative leader Mauricio Macri will change media ownership laws. Natasha Howitt reports.

• Hundreds of people have protested outside Argentinas congress amid fears of censorship and media monopoly. Protesters gathered in Buenos Aires on 17 December to demand the new president, Mauricio Macri, and his government reconsider proposed reforms that could lead to private organisations taking control of the countrys mass media.

• They say they are worried about censorship in Argentina if the anti-monopoly laws are loosened or repealed, and demanded that the president keeps the rules against market concentration.

• Martin Sabetella, director of the Federal Authority of Audiovisual Communication Services (AFSCA) watchdog – which is in charge of enforcing the legislation – said: We have come here to defend the audiovisual communications law, which is a tool to ensure freedom of expression, a plurality of voices, to guarantee a deep democracy that is enriched by all voices.

• The internet is a powerful tool for good as well as evil. So like almost every organization, ISIS has used it to organize and to spread its message. And Donald Trump wants to put a stop to that.

• “We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet, and we have to do something,” Trump said at a rally earlier this month. “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them maybe in certain areas closing that internet up in some way.”

• When it comes to political theater these days, there’s no lack of boneheaded ideas backed by deliberately misleading statements (aka lying) and topped with a heaping helping of fearmongering. two hands pointing at each other creating an electrical charge against blue background The power of PowerShell: An intro for Windows Server admins

• In this increasingly devops-minded world, automation is king. Here’s how to get started with PowerShell Read Now

• Presidential candidates at this week’s debate were falling over each other in their rush to embrace bad policies, from dismantling the Internet to banning encryption and restarting NSA phone surveillance (not that it’s needed).

• A graffiti artist who paints murals in war-torn Yemen, a jailed Bahraini academic and the Ethiopia’s Zone 9 bloggers are among those honoured in this year’s #Index100 list of global free expression heroes.

• The NSS has defended cinema chains’ freedom to refuse religious or political advertising after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) accused them of “failing to uphold Britain’s long tradition of freedom of expression.”

• The EHRC has offered its legal expertise to the Church of England, should the Church seek to use the law to force cinemas to screen its advert featuring the Lord’s Prayer. The EHRC also said it would examine issues raised by Digital Cinema Media’s (DCM) decision not to screen the advert as part of its ongoing examination of the laws protecting freedom of religion and belief.

• The ban on an advert featuring the Lord’s Prayer from being shown in cinemas could be part of a “slippery slope towards increasing censorship”, and will be investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, it was announced on Friday.

• Music has long been used as a form of resistance, from civil rights movements to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, focusing on taboos and the breaking down of social barriers, features an exclusive new short story by Ariel Dorfman about a military trumpeter who plays a defiant, rebellious song on his instrument.

• The prosecution and imprisonment of journalists by the Egyptian government has garnered widespread criticism from governments and rights groups worldwide. In August Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi [BBC profile] approved [JURIST report] a 54-article counter-terrorism law that has been met with significant controversy, as many believe it infringes on the freedom of the press. Many have said that the law defines terrorism too broadly and imposes harsh sentences and fines on violators. Human Rights Watch [advocacy website] (HRW) criticized [JURIST report] Egypt’s new counterterrorism law saying it infringes on freedom of the press. HRW opposes the fact that the new law gives prosecutors the power to detain suspects without a court order. Also in August Egyptian police arrested [JURIST report] three people under the law for their role in spreading propaganda related to the Islamic State on Facebook.

• [...]

• The prosecution and imprisonment of journalists by the Egyptian government has garnered widespread criticism from governments and rights groups worldwide. In August Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi [BBC profile] approved [JURIST report] a 54-article counter-terrorism law that has been met with significant controversy, as many believe it infringes on the freedom of the press. Many have said that the law defines terrorism too broadly and imposes harsh sentences and fines on violators.

• Quintessential racist and British supremacist though he was, Cecil Rhodes cannot simply be written out of Oxford’s history

• Dell says it is not censoring IdeaStorm, merely responding to IdeaStorm community requests to “merge” ideas.

• Commenting in response to our post Dell censors IdeaStorm Linux dissent, Dell spokesperson John Pope said that the company isn’t censoring dissent on IdeaStorm.

• “If ideas are submitted and they turn out to be the same, we have been asked by the IdeaStorm community to merge them — as well as any votes cast and comments logged — for simplicity,” said Dell spokesperson John Pope.

• Mark Zuckerberg is an extremely competent CEO when it comes to building an enduring internet company. But he’s less skilled when it comes to navigating the politics of the internet, as evidenced by his statement during Brazil’s unexpected crackdown on WhatsApp.

• It wasn’t long ago that Brazil was trumpeting its bona fides on electronic surveillance, slamming the National Security Agency’s spying programs as a “grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties” in a 2013 speech to the United Nations.

• Now, though, Brazil is finding itself in an awkward position as it moved to block an immensely popular messaging app within its own borders for 48 hours. Prosecutors demanded that the service, WhatsApp, be shut off for its 100 million Brazilian customers after the company did not comply with a secret order for user data. (That ban was soon reversed by a higher court, but the damage was done.)

• AN art gallery has been criticised after removing words such as ‘negro’ and ‘Mohammedan’ from the descriptions of its artworks in case they cause offence.

• ‘Indian’ and ‘dwarf are two other words that have been altered at the the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – leading to accusations that it is pandering to political correctness.

• It has removed ‘offensive’ words from around 200 titles and descriptions of it works of art, replacing them with less racially charged terminology.

• Martine Gosselink, head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum and initiated the project, said: ‘The point is not to use names given by whites to others.

• Facebook has had a super-clear policy on hate speech spelled out on the service since March 2015. What’s off limits? “Content that directly attacks people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, serious disabilities, or diseases.”

• Fast Company posted, simply, “I’m with Trump, it’s time for a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’” The comment was flagged and removed for violating community guidelines.

• During a recent United Nations summit in New York, Mark Zuckerburg was put in the hot seat when German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, directly called him out about Facebook’s inaction over anti-immigration comments.

• Zuckerburg responded that his team “needed to do some work on the issue.”

• Censorship on Facebook is nothing new, but the social media site’s stance on global issues has been unpredictable and at times confusing. In this article we will take a more in depth look into Facebook’s reaction about censorship of anti-immigration content, and then investigate FB’s stance on a number of controversial topical issues in the past.

• Way back in March, I wrote about a freshly passed Wyoming law that criminalized “collecting resource data.” The law appeared designed to stop pesky journalists and activists from documenting abuses on ranches and poultry and dairy farms — a so-called ag-gag law. But the actual language of the law was exceptionally broad. In my earlier post, I wrote that “by my reading, you’ve technically violated this law and could be subject to a year’s imprisonment if you idly counted the dandelions in a Wyoming farmer’s front yard without asking the farmer first.” (I see now that your dandelion count would have to be reported to the government, or you’d have to intend to report it, to violate the law — but still.)

• And so I concluded my post with these (abridged) words: “Bad laws like this do accomplish one good thing: they keep public interest lawyers employed. Lawyers like those at the Center for Food Safety should be lining up already to see Wyoming’s law struck down.”

• North Korea’s Moranbong Band abruptly cancelled its scheduled performances in Beijing in protest of China’s request not to sing propaganda songs praising its young leader, a lawmaker claimed Tuesday.

• Article 298 of the Constitution, which stipulates heavy fines and bans on TV stations during every election period in a blatant display of censorship, may be amended, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered changes to the article used to justify bans by the Supreme Election Board (YSK) that oversees elections.

• The possible amendment was reported after the president met İlhan Yerlikaya, head of Turkey’s television and radio watchdog, the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), earlier this week. Yerlikaya and Erdoğan discussed bans on private-run TV channels during the meeting.

• If you were planning to hold a Internet conference for the world, where would you choose to hold it? Silicon Valley? Boston? London? Germany? Tokyo?

• Whatever locale you guessed, it is a pretty safe wager that China was not among the top 10 options.

• Yet, on Wednesday, no less a luminary that Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed more than 2,000 guests to the coastal city of Wuzhen, China as they began participation in the something called the World Internet Conference.

• That’s right. China is hosting an Internet conference. Has the nation noted as one of world’s heaviest-handed cyber censors suddenly gone soft and decided to join the digital marketplace of ideas?

• The clash of cultures is inevitable once you move beyond your own borders. A lot of American companies had issues being present in China, for example – and that lead to bans of particular companies. Watching YouTube or being on Facebook (NYSE:FB) in China is impossible without a friendly VPN/Proxy server, because those companies refused to ‘play ball’ with the Chinese authorities. And yes, all the companies which were targeted would often criticize their policy and refused to abide to censorship. Yet, every once a while, a slight ‘what the he…’ happens when the censorship scissors of Facebook’s Political Correctness Police appears. This time, a victim was none other than Bundeskunsthalle – National Museum of Art in Germany.

• The Qatar-based news network, Al-Jazeera, has prevented an article slamming human rights in Saudi Arabia from being viewed outside the US.

• The article, titled “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse for Human Rights Abuses” and published on Al-Jazeera America’s website on 3 December, cites reports 50 people are intended to be executed for alleged terrorist crimes, injustices in the treatment of Saudi’s minority Shia population and criticises the country’s relationship with the US.

• The article is understood to still be available in the US, but when viewed in other countries is replaced with an error page.

• A tweet from Al-Jazeera America’s account with the article’s headline, pictured on a Bahraini website, appears to have been deleted, while the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz quotes Al-Jazeera’s director apologising for the article, The Intercept reports.

• THE CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS of Al Jazeera appears to have blocked an article critical of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record from viewers outside the United States. The news network, which is funded by the government of Qatar, told local press that it did not intend to offend Saudi Arabia or any other state ally, and would remove the piece.

• The op-ed, written by Georgetown University professor and lawyer Arjun Sethi and titled, “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse for Human Rights Abuses,” ran on the website of Al Jazeera America, the network’s U.S. outlet. It comments on reports of 50 people recently sentenced to death for alleged terrorist activity and criticizes the U.S. government’s silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

• We are condoning our forefathers’ bigotry if we fail to modify or rename portraits with offensive titles

• Bartomeu Marí, the new director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, attempted to ban a satirical sculpture from an exhibition during his previous role in Barcelona

• The Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, says he would never remove offensive words from the title of an artwork on display in his gallery. His views contrast with those of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has changed the titles of several of its paintings to take account of modern sensibilities. For example, Young Negro Girl, painted around 1900 by the Dutch artist Simon Maris, has been retitled Young Girl Holding a Fan. Serota says he would only do this if the artist gave permisison to do so – which means that for historic art he’d do nothing.

• We should tread with extreme caution before taking such a drastic step as renaming art, and there’s a clear danger of oversensitivity in making any decision. But for Serota to say “never” is wrong. There are many words and phrases which, while accepted in their day, are clearly insulting and derogatory in the modern context and distort or confuse our understanding of the art itself.

• Malaysian authorities should immediately drop charges under the Film Censorship Act against rights activist Lena Hendry, Human Rights Watch and 11 Malaysian and international human rights organisations said on 11 December 2015 in letters to Malaysia’s prime minister and attorney general.

Privacy

• Despite big promises, these tech giants probably won’t champion end-to-end encryption

• From Web browsing, to email addresses and access to your social media accounts, be careful what privacy you relinquish and what you are gaining in return.

• A security researcher is in a bit of a scrum with Facebook over vulnerability disclosures that not only tested the boundaries of the social network’s bug bounty program, but he said, also prompted hints of legal and criminal action.

• The Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill invites any “interested individuals and organisations” to submit evidence to this inquiry. Written evidence should arrive no later than 21 December 2015.

• Congress on Friday adopted a $1.15 trillion spending package that included a controversial cybersecurity measure that only passed because it was slipped into the US government’s budget legislation.

• House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin, inserted the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) into the Omnibus Appropriations Bill—which includes some $620 billion in tax breaks for business and low-income wage earners. Ryan’s move was a bid to prevent lawmakers from putting a procedural hold on the CISA bill and block it from a vote. Because CISA was tucked into the government’s overall spending package on Wednesday, it had to pass or the government likely would have had to cease operating next week.

• On Friday, Congress will vote on a mutated version of security threat sharing legislation that had previously passed through the House and Senate. These earlier versions would have permitted private companies to share with the federal government categories of data related to computer security threat signatures. Companies that did so would also receive legal immunity from liability under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and other privacy laws. Today’s language, renamed the Cybersecurity Act of 2015 (Division N of the omnibus budget bill) mostly assembles the worst parts of the earlier bills to threaten privacy even further.

• A critical patch has been released for an issue that has existed since 2012.

• Devices running Juniper’s ScreenOS – the operating System used on the company’s VPN-enabling firewalls are vulnerable. Specifically versions 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20 are affected and subject to the patch.

• According to Bob Worrall, SVP & CIO, “During a recent internal code review, Juniper discovered unauthorized code in ScreenOS that could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen® devices and to decrypt VPN connections. Once we identified these vulnerabilities, we launched an investigation into the matter, and worked to develop and issue patched releases for the latest versions of ScreenOS.”

• Democrats have strange ideas about the internet, too. At tonight’s ABC News presidential debate, candidates offered a number of vague, borderline-illiterate thoughts about technology, especially Hillary Clinton. It all started when ABC gave her an inane prompt, characterizing encryption as a “terrorist tool used in the Paris attacks.” In response, Clinton suggested that, instead of breaking encryption, the US should launch a “Manhattan-like project” to “bring the government and tech communities together” so that law enforcement can “prevent attacks.”

• “Maybe the back door isn’t the right door, and I understand what Apple and others are saying about that,” Clinton said. “I just think there’s got to be a way, and I would hope that our tech companies would work with government to figure that out.” None of that makes any sense, of course. Figure out a way to do what? Breach fully encrypted communications? (That’s called a backdoor.) Improve information sharing between industry and government? (We already have PRISM and CISA.) Clinton’s non-answer here is essentially Trumpian: don’t worry about the details, the experts will figure it out.

• A gang of hooded protesters have attacked the Facebook offices in Germany, smashing glass and spraypainting the word “dislike” on walls.

• Between 15 and 20 black-clad yobs stormed the social network’s Hamburg outpost.

• Facebook, Twitter, and Google have committed to removing hate speech from German websites within 24 hours, according to an announcement from German government officials. The news comes after Germany launched an investigation into a top official at Facebook to determine whether the company had broken the law by neglecting to remove slurs and threats posted on its platform. Within Germany, the context for that inquiry and the new restrictions consists of both stringent German anti-hate speech laws and concern over anti-foreigner sentiment and incitements to violence online during a refugee crisis.

• Moviescope spoke with Jeremy Geltzer, author of Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment (The University of Texas Press) about the filmmakers who pushed the boundaries of the status quo.

• Canadians’ data requests overwhelming flow through US cables, even when the communications are within Canada. Since the NSA takes the view that it is legally entitled to collect, inspect and retain foreign communications, this means that almost all Canadian communications are being spied on by a foreign power.

• Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a mapping tool that shows how internet data moves around and how the NSA can use just a few surveillance sites to scoop up online traffic.

• IXmaps is a visual, interactive database of traffic routes, and uses real data to help Canadians get a sense of what happens when they are sending and receiving information. In some cases, even when the servers you are accessing are next door, the data packets will move around the United States before heading back into Canada.

• Cyberhawk, Yellowstone, Blackfin, Maximus, Cyclone, and Spartacus – these are not the names of characters from a children’s action movie. These are the names of surveillance devices that the Obama administration uses to spy on American citizens through their cellphones.

• A secret catalog of surveillance gear has been leaked by a concerned US intelligence official. The document reveals details about devices that can intercept, collect and read civilian communications, such as the ‘dirtboxes’ or the notorious ‘Stingray.’

• The catalog was obtained by The Intercept through a source from within the US intelligence community, who was reportedly concerned about the increased militarization of law enforcement. About a third of over 50 devices described in the document are so secret, they had not been described in public before.

• Yesterday, The Intercept published an extensive catalog detailing the innumerable gadgets and technologies used by the military, law enforcement authorities, and U.S. governmental agencies like the NSA to track down and spy on targeted users via their cellphones.

• The entire product listing is eye-opening, but given how extensive it is (53 items in total), we’ve compiled a list of some of the scariest and more worrisome devices on the list. Note: when compiling this list, we didn’t include tracking devices and technologies typically affixed to UAVs. Instead, we opted to focus on devices that enable local law enforcement authorities to conduct surveillance, listen in on phone calls, track user location, jam cellphones, obtain deleted text messages, and even zap up data from seized laptops or smartphones.

• We were disappointed today to learn that a federal appeals court in Pasadena declined to consider EFF’s appeal of a ruling in Jewel v. NSA, our long-running lawsuit battling unconstitutional mass surveillance of Internet and phone communications. While we are disappointed that government’s stall tactics prevailed here, the case still lives on. We look forward to litigating back in the lower court, making it clear that Internet backbone spying is unconstitutional.

• Banning encryption is not the solution to defeating the Islamic State group or preventing so-called lone wolf attacks inside the United States, Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the U.S. National Security Agency and the CIA, said Friday at a conference. The kind of legislation advocated by top U.S. law enforcement officials and various lawmakers would only make Americans’ data less secure, while doing little to stop terrorist communications.

• Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz clashed over their opposing votes on a key surveillance bill during Tuesday night’s GOP debate, with each senator trying to establish himself as the strongest on national security.

• Rubio accused Cruz of hampering intelligence agencies by supporting the USA Freedom Act, which ended the National Security Agency’s vast collection of millions of U.S. phone records. That information could have been critical in investigating the shooting in San Bernardino, California, Rubio argued. “We are now at a time where we need more tools, not less tools,” the Florida Republican said. “And that tool we lost, the metadata program, was a valuable tool that we no longer have at our disposal.”

• Although Tuesday night’s Republican debate had a heavy focus on national security, candidates devolved frequently into posturing and bravado. But when, finally, a real debate over national-security policy began to peek through the fog, it was quickly shut down.

• It began with a question about government surveillance directed at two of the three senators on the stage, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. This summer, Cruz voted for the USA Freedom Act, which reigned in some of the National Security Agency’s spying powers, ending a program that allowed the agency to scoop up massive amounts of information about Americans’ phone calls. Rubio, for his part, opposed it.

• Cruz argued that the bill increased privacy protections, while expanding the government’s tools for targeting terrorists. Rubio shot back that the bill shut down a valuable tool for law enforcement without offering the NSA a viable alternative.

• Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, initially told reporters that his staff would review comments by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, at the Republican presidential debate to see if he ‘drevealed sensitive information. Burr later said there would be no inquiry.

• A South Dakota-based political action committee that’s endorsing Donald Trump for president is threatening to file an ethics complaint against a communications staff member in North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s office over a tweet she sent Tuesday night during the Republican presidential debate.

• A Republican senator is investigating whether Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz released classified information while discussing the National Security Agency during Tuesday night’s debate.

• “I’m having my staff look at the transcripts of the debate right now,” Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, told reporters, according to The Hill, a political website. “Any time you deal with numbers … the question is, ‘Is that classified or not?’ or is there an open source reference to it?”

• The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee is looking into whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) referenced classified information during Tuesday night’s Republican debate on CNN.

• Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the chairman, has asked his staff to explore whether Cruz’s comments about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program constitute disclosing classified data, The Hill reported.

• Juniper Networks Thursday said it had discovered a major vulnerability in its firewall operating system that could allow hackers to decrypt VPN connections, news that solution providers and security experts said raises broader concerns around VPN security.

• The vulnerability affects devices running ScreenOS, which is the operating system for its NetScreen firewall devices. Juniper said in the security announcement that a “knowledgeable” hacker could use the vulnerability to decrypt NetScreen VPN connections, although it said it has “not received any reports of these vulnerabilities being exploited.”

• Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of America’s surveillance network began in mid-2013, just months after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) took his seat in Congress. Some Republicans immediately demonized the former Booz Allen consultant-turned-leaker.

• Are you looking for ways to protect your privacy while browsing the web? Are you trying to learn how to use Tor, the browser that anonymizes your Internet traffic? Are you interested in ditching Windows for something that’s more privacy-friendly? The good news is that there are ways to do that. The bad news is that this sort of online behavior apparently triggers NSA spying, especially if you’re a foreigner.

• On the second-highest hill in Berlin sits the carved-out remnants of Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg, a former NSA spy station used to collect signals intelligence on Soviet-aligned East Germany during the Cold War. Before the aging structure decays beyond repair, a newly appointed manager hopes to give a second life to this architectural relic from a very different, yet not-too-distant, time. Can it be saved? We went inside the graffitied and hollowed out building to get a sense of its future.

• In a video posted on YouTube, “Americans from all walks of life” speak out against the U.S. spying on Venezuela revealed by teleSUR.

• “Anyway they can go and steal and spy and cheat and rob people out their natural resources, that’s what they do,” says a man featured in a new video commissioned by the Foreign Ministry of Venezuela. “That’s the nature of America.”

• The video comes after teleSUR, in an exclusive partnership with The Intercept, revealed that intelligence agents—working for the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, but posing as diplomats—used powerful surveillance equipment stationed in the U.S. Embassy in Caracas to infiltrate the computer network of Venezuela’s most important company, the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela.

• Last month, the National Security Agency was finally forced to end its bulk collection of data on Americans, a direct result of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations.

• However, Americans continue to be under unprecedented levels of surveillance both online and in their daily lives. Many of these everyday invasions of privacy are driven not by the government, but instead by some of the largest corporations.

• This is all backwards. The terror watch list is a massive violation of due process, and civil liberties advocates ought to team up with the NRA to abolish or reform it.

• The once-secret “metadata” program, which a federal appeals court found amounted to “sweeping surveillance” of Americans’ data in “staggering” volumes, ended in November, four days before the San Bernardino massacre. Now, some of the program’s supporters are playing on the fears created by the California attack to try to bring the intrusive program back to life.

• In fact, the program had been operating for nine years before Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, murdered 14 people at a holiday party. It was operating when they were married, when she came to the U.S. and when, according to news reports, Farook had contacts with six people whom federal authorities had scrutinized for possible terrorism ties.

• A bill filed in Michigan yesterday would not only support efforts to turn off water and electricity to NSA facilities in Utah, Texas and other states, but also would have immediate practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.

• Rep. Martin Howrylak, along with 21 cosponsors from both sides of the political aisle, introduced House Bill 5162 (HB5162) on Dec. 15. The Fourth Amendment Protection Act would ban the state from providing material support or resources to any federal agency to enable it to collect, or to facilitate in the collection or use of a person’s electronic data or metadata, without a warrant, the person’s informed consent, or in accordance with legally recognized exceptions to warrant requirements.

• U.S. intelligence agencies can now reach almost all domestic phone records, far more than they collected under a now-scrapped program by the National Security Agency, according to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

• Despite evidence that shows that mass surveillance has done little to thwart terrorist attacks, Senate Republicans are pushing to reopen discussions on the Patriot Act in the wake of the deadly incidents in Paris and San Bernardino.

• Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told the AP on Wednesday that the Senate may revive the National Security Agency’s wire-tapping authority after voting to end it earlier this year. The issue, which previously divided the Senate and has split the GOP candidates running for the presidency, has been launched back into the national conversation as the candidates focus on national security following the recent terrorist attacks.

• The Senate may re-open debate on National Security Agency wire-tapping authority following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told The Associated Press on Wednesday, broaching a divisive issue already roiling the GOP presidential field.

• The Kentucky Republican said in an interview in his Capitol office that the terror attacks abroad and on U.S. soil have raised questions about Congress’ wisdom in limiting the authority earlier this year, something he personally opposed. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida sided with McConnell at the time, but Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was on the other side, and the two GOP presidential candidates have clashed heatedly on the issue, including in Tuesday night’s debate.

• A funding deal approved by the House today and set to clear Congress within days positions the Department of Homeland Security as the front door for hack surveillance intelligence arriving from private industry. The back door, to the chagrin of some privacy activists, is the intelligence community.

• The 2,000-page $1.1 trillion spending bill rife with unconnected policy measures creates an instant information-sharing regime housed at DHS.

• On Friday, Congress approved what was considered a “must-pass” end-of-the-year, $1.15 trillion omnibus spending bill. But such a last-minute bill includes a piece of legislation too controversial to have passed on its own.

• If you thought the US government’s ability to spy on its citizens had languished of late, think again.

• Yesterday, Congress and President Obama approved the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a measure that lets private companies turn over consumers’ personal data to Homeland Security, as long as that data meets some broad and vague criteria of relevance to cybersecurity investigations. Homeland Security can then pass said data directly the NSA, the Department of Defense, and the FBI.

• On Friday, Congress is poised to respond to Americans’ growing concerns about cybersecurity by passing legislation that trades our privacy rights for the temporary illusion of improved security.

• It’s discouraging, because Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, revealed that the organization, ostensibly in an effort to combat terrorism, had exceeded all reasonable and legal bounds and was collecting data on nearly all Americans. The documents revealed an agency that was out of control, was violating Americans’ civil rights and badly needed to be reined in.

• Because the bill is critical to keep the government running, there’s no way the White House would ever veto it, and there would be no chance to re-amend the cybersecurity provisions – even though they threatened to veto a cybersecurity bill two years ago that was just as bad on the privacy front than this one.

• While the final version of the legislation, dubbed the Cybersecurity Act of 2015 on page 1,728 of the omnibus, goes beyond stopping hackers with more surveillance authorities since the Senate and two companion House bills went to conference, lawmakers managed to keep some privacy language in the bill, however vague.

• Europe’s highest court, the European Union Court of Justice (CJEU), released a decision on October 6, 2015, declaring invalid the EU Commission’s Safe Harbor program, which allowed for legal data transfers between the EU and the United States. With this decision, the CJEU takes a restrictive stance towards privacy rights, emphasizing that the EU regime requires compliance with a high standard of privacy protection. The declaration of invalidity significantly impacts companies that transfer EU citizens’ data to the United States. Although Canada was not a party to the Safe Harbor program and data transfers from the EU to Canada are generally permissible, the CJEU decision may have a ripple effect in Canada.

• The Republican presidential hopefuls debate in Las Vegas Tuesday night will be the first since the terrorist attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, Calif. In recent weeks, ISIS and how to keep Americans safe have dominated the campaign and shot to the top of Americans’ concerns.

• Tuesday’s GOP debate circled primarily around terrorism and the growing threat our nation faces from ISIS and jihadists in the wake of the San Bernardino attacks. America is already afraid, but the candidates were working to fuel that fear into rage, rage against the Obama administration and current leadership for supposed inaction.

• From Rick Santorum’s unfounded “We’ve entered World War III” and Ben Carson’s repeated avocation that Congress officially declare war on ISIS, to Ted Cruz’s incessant mantra of “radical Islamic terrorism,” a sense of fear infused the dialogue—fear that Obama isn’t doing enough, fear that our intelligence officials are incapable of gathering crucial information, fear that the terrorists are always one step ahead in terms of technology and encryption .

• The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) designates .onion as a Special-use Domain Name. Calling the formal recognition of the .onion by the IETF “a small and important landmark in the movement to build privacy into the structure of the Internet,” Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher and developer, privacy expert and a core member of the Tor Project, said in an October blog post that the draft to register the domain name included security and privacy considerations that likely “will help to protect end-users from targeted and mass-surveillance.”

• Evidence given in a hearing brought against the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), by Privacy International and seven international internet service providers has shed further light on its mass surveillance operations.

• Privacy International is an international campaign group for private and unmonitored use of the Internet. The case is being heard at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which deals with complaints about the intelligence services and surveillance by government organisations. The four-day hearing in Central London is the result of American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s exposure of illegal and widespread abuse of power by both the US-based National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ.

• Snowden revealed GCHQ’s use of computer network exploitation (CNE), also known as hacking, against whole sections of the population inside the UK and internationally. The programmes included ones with the following codenames: “Nosey Smurf, which involved implanting malware to activate the microphone on smartphones; Dreamy Smurf, which had the capability to switch on smartphones; Tracker Smurf, which had the capability to provide the location of a target’s smartphone with high precision; and Paranoid Smurf, which ensured all malware remained hidden.”

• After a many-months-long search for a new executive director, the Tor Project announced last week that it has hired Shari Steele, former head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), to lead the organization.

• Steele spent 15 years at EFF, including the last eight as its executive director, helping to grow the organization into one of the world’s foremost privacy advocates.

• In her new role, Steele will be the main voice and face of the Tor Project, tasked with raising its profile, securing new sources of funding, and expanding the use of its anonymity software and tools to the broader public.

• Q: I heard that there is a “golden key” that unlocks all encryption. Is there such a thing?

• A: Not yet and it’s not clear it will ever exist. The U.S. government has been trying to figure out how to access encrypted data for decades. However, wiretapping a phone call is far easier than creating a backdoor into encryption technology.

• Last year, the Washington Post editorial board called for Apple and Google “with all their wizardry,” to “invent a kind of secure golden key” that would allow law enforcement officials to read any encrypted message sent by a suspect.

• It would be a tremendous challenge to convince the world’s encryption makers, many of whom live outside the United States, to give American authorities access to such a tool. And it would be an even bigger challenge to keep the master key secret — given that it would immediately become the No. 1 target of every hacker and nation in the world.

• To address that issue, a White House working group proposed a split key — where one half of the master key would be kept by the government and the other would be held by the encryption company. But the report noted that this approach would be “complex to implement and maintain.”

• In the public battle for strong encryption, EFF has championed the voice of everyday Internet users. After all, if we can’t rely on the security of our digital communications, how can the Web continue to grow and thrive?

• Now the fight has moved to the Oval Office. EFF, Access Now, over a dozen nonprofits and tech companies, and over 100,0000 concerned Internet users joined forces to ask President Obama to stand up for uncompromised encryption.

• Two years ago, during a month-long trip to California, Edith Schumacher stayed in a house in Irvine, California that her partner Kevin Stockton had booked via Airbnb. While staying in the house, they did what people do when they think they are alone. They walked around naked. They talked about their relationship. They talked about “highly personal matters,” including their finances. But on the third day of their stay at the Airbnb, they suddenly felt very self-conscious, because, according to a lawsuit filed this week, they found a camera hidden between candles on a shelf that had, presumably, been recording everything they had done.

• In the face of a Federal Bureau of Investigation proposal requesting backdoors into encrypted communications, a noted encryption expert urged Congress not to adopt the requirements due to technical faults in the plan. The shortcomings in question would allow anyone to easily defeat the measure with little technical effort.

• Please note, the testimony referenced above was delivered on May 11, 1993. However, that doesn’t change its applicability today. In fact, current pressure being applied by law enforcement and intelligence officials over end-to-end encrypted communications appears eerily reminiscent of a similar battle nearly 25 years ago.

• There is a massive, Empire-sized army of people dedicated to making us trackable online and very tiny rebel ships trying to prevent it.

• Last year, a couple of security researchers attacked one of the rebel ships. Michael McCord and Alexander Volynkin of Carnegie Mellon University broke the Dark Web by launching an attack on Tor, software that makes it possible to browse the Web anonymously and host sites “hidden” from the public Web. Their attack unmasked many Tor users and may have led to some of their arrests. After I wrote an in-depth account of the attack that explained what Tor is doing to make sure it never happens again, a security researcher contacted me, alarmed. Tor had said it shut down the malicious nodes controlled by the attackers, yet he saw that Tor users’ activity was still being routed through nodes hosted by Carnegie Mellon, home of the attack.

• A new report reveals that the UK’s current mass surveillance program was initiated under former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

• The report released by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden also said that the program has a specialist internet and phone tapping center at MI5’s London HQ under the code-name PRESTON.

• The National Technical Assistance Centre, a shadowy intelligence cell, was set up by Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1999 to counter encryption and act as the UK’s code-breaking specialist, the report said.

• So, there is a functional limit to the size of the numbers we can factor into primes, and this fact is absolutely essential to modern computer security. Pretty much anything that computers can easily do without being able to easily undo will be of interest to computer security. Modern encryption algorithms exploit the fact that we can easily take two large primes and multiply them together to get a new, super-large number, but that no computer yet created can take that super-large number and quickly figure out which two primes went into making it.

• The NSA’s Section 702 surveillance program is massive. It provides the NSA (and the FBI) with access to the email content and internet activity of millions of people, some of them US citizens. Quite obviously, the intelligence gathered with it has led to prosecutions. But the government is still seemingly uninterested in informing defendants about the origin of evidence being used against them.

• Cryptography is the science of keeping secrets, with encryption algorithms and methods such as public key encryption the gold standard. Despite widespread usage and heavy scrutiny, these ciphers remain unbroken. But while encryption can keep messages secret, it cannot protect the identities of the sender and receiver.

• Details such as the IP addresses of computers communicating on the internet and other metadata can reveal more than just the identities of those communicating. Companies use metadata to infer sexual orientation, approximate age, gender and interests for targeted advertising, while intelligence and law enforcement ag

• Edward Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower who fled overseas in 2013, said the NSA was intercepting far more data than it could possibly analyze. It did so as part of General Keith Alexander’s “collect it all” campaign.

• The result was an intelligence agency drowning in so much intercepted data that it missed what Comey’s agents found in a matter of days – once they knew where to look. By then, 14 people were dead and 22 injured.

• Encryption and the openness of the internet took center stage at Tuesday’s Republican debate, with presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina calling for Silicon Valley to help government solve its “tech problem” and circumvent encryption.

• The Omnibus Budget bill that Paul Ryan crammed through Congress last week didn’t just harbor a domestic mass surveillance law and a bunch of nonsensical dog-whistles about ACORN and pornography, it was also full of grotesque pork for rich people and pointless government boondoggles.

• We ought to be scared, appalled, and angry about the loss of privacy and anonymity.

• Malicious actors target “endpoints”—any device or sensor connected to a network—to break into that network. Network security seeks to protect those endpoints with firewalls, certificates, passwords, and the like, creating a secure perimeter to keep the whole system safe.

• This wasn’t difficult in the early days of the Internet and online threats. But today, most private networks have far too many endpoints to properly secure. In an age of “Bring Your Own Device,” the cloud, remote access, and the Internet of Things, there are too many vulnerabilities hackers can exploit. As Ajay Arora, CEO of file security company Vera, notes, there is no perimeter anymore. It’s a dream of the past.

• But the security paradigm remains focused on perimeter defense because, frankly, no one knows what else to do. To address threats, security experts should assume compromise – that hackers and malware already have breached their defenses, or soon will – and instead classify and mitigate threats.

• Despite saying that he “respects” Telegram’s founder, Russian Pavel Durov, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said the messenger lacks security at its default settings.

• It’s the ultimate machine of what’s become our Paranoid State. Clive Irving on the Orwellian mass-surveillance data center rising in the Utah desert.

• Remember the Stasi, the secret police who operated in East Germany when it was a communist state? When the Berlin Wall came down, East Germans discovered they had been living in a society so rotted by paranoia that at least one in three of its adult citizens were spying on the other two.

• From this springs what I call the Stasi Principle: a state’s appetite for collecting intelligence expands in direct relationship to its technical ability to do so.

• Cryptography, when used properly, is a critically important tool for securing data on the notoriously vulnerable networks that we rely on for almost every aspect of daily life. But law enforcement agents have expressed concern that cryptography might sometimes work too well, thwarting investigators from extracting useful evidence from wiretaps, smartphones and computers. They call for encryption systems to be designed with special backdoor access features that would allow the government to decrypt data when it is needed for an investigation.

• The cryptography debate is often portrayed as a zero-sum game pitting law enforcement against privacy — our individual right to be free from unwarranted intrusion by the government. Put this way, reasonable people might disagree on where balances should be struck and lines should be drawn, and we rely on the political process to find compromises, however imperfect, that we can all live with. But lost in this framing is the reality that cryptography and security are not just political issues, but also deeply difficult technical ones.

• The National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance capabilities would have been “a dream come true” for East Germany, a ex- lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police told Matthew Schofield of McClatchy.

• The Stasi was one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world.

• Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal called them “worse than the Gestapo,” referring to the secret police of Nazi Germany.

• RSA has hit back at allegations stemming from Edward Snowden’s latest whistleblowing – specifically, the claim that it secretly took US$10m from the NSA in exchange for using the deliberately knackered Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) in its encryption products.

• The EMC-owned security outfit said it started using Dual EC DRBG by default in 2004, sometime before the generator was standardised. By 2007 the algorithm was found to effectively have a backdoor in it that weakened the strength of any encryption that relied on it, making life easier for snoops. In September 2013, RSA told its customers to stop using the algorithm.

• The NSA, which championed Dual EC DRBG, is separately accused of weakening the random number generator during its development.

• Europe Fights Back Against the NSA

Civil Rights

• The Islamist war on secular bloggers in Bangladesh.

• Attendees at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas January 5-9 will be subject to metal detector screening, pat downs and bag checks. Even laptop bags are being discouraged.

• Police and military forces have fired on demonstrations, killing at least 75 protesters and wounding many others, according to activists. Government officials have acknowledged only five deaths and said that an undisclosed number of security force members have also been killed. On December 15, the government announced that protesters had a “direct connection with forces that have taken missions from foreign terrorist groups” and that Ethiopia’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force will lead the response.

• Those responsible for the torture of suspected terrorists in the wake of the 11 September attacks cannot dodge justice forever, a top UN human rights official, Juan Mendez, told Middle East Eye.

• Mendez criticised US officials for not prosecuting intelligence agents for the widespread use of torture that was detailed in the US government’s own report – a damning probe that was released a year ago this week.

• “I’m certainly disappointed that the official policy of the US is to consider that bygones be bygones and to let torturers off the hook, but I wouldn’t say that this will never happen,” Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, told MEE on Sunday.

• She should be in China competing to wear the Miss World crown on Dec. 19. But the Chinese regime denied Anastasia Lin, Miss World Canada, entry into the country and declared her “persona non grata” because she speaks out about human rights in China.

• September 21, 2014, was a day of global climate action. To testify to the scale of the protest in cities around the world, people at the Sydney rally were asked to smile for the drones flying above us.

• It was the first time I had been asked to smile at a drone. I felt uncomfortable. I was being watched, becoming an object of my own protest – a pixel, not an agent.

• What kind of society do our so-called “Western and networked democracies” count as normal if humans are constantly objectified, monitored and profiled?

• The Saudi property developer said he had already had sex with the young woman’s 24-year-old friend and it was possible his penis may have been poking out of his underwear when he tripped.

• Republican front-runner Donald Trump has stood firm over his provocative call for banning Muslims from the United States as his party’s presidential candidates pushed their own plans for fighting Islamic State (IS) militants.

• As part of EFF’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, we are releasing “Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier,” an anthology of speculative fiction from more than 20 authors, including Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Charlie Jane Anders. To get the ebook, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We’re releasing the ebook under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license, which permits sharing among users.

• For the last four years, EFF has greeted the holiday season by publishing a list of things we’d like to see happen in the coming year. Sometimes these are actions we’d like to see taken by companies, and sometimes our wishes are aimed at governments, but we also include actions everyday people can take to advance our digital civil liberties. This year has seen a few wishes come true. For example, our FOIA lawsuit against the NSA led them to disclose the (redacted) details of their Vulnerabilities Equities Process. We’ve also been pleased to see more journalists and news organizations using SecureDrop to securely accept documents from anonymous sources and the House Judiciary Committee is finally considering reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The presidential debate did not score highly on accuracy or sense.

• What, exactly, did Trump mean? If you look at his different statements on the subject, it seems that he wants to knock out the infrastructure that provides Internet access in areas of Syria and Iraq that are controlled by ISIS. That’s one way to disrupt their recruitment, and the plan is technically feasible, at least in part. In theory, the United States could sever fibre-optic cables, destroy satellite dishes, and knock out cellular towers. It could also put pressure on telecommunications companies in the region. The headquarters of ISIS’s media operations, according to a defector who was quoted in the Washington Post, uses a Turkish wireless provider. Turkey is a NATO ally, and its government hasn’t recently shown any particular affection for free speech online. President Trump could call up its leaders and make a deal.

• The Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday it was exploring whether new services from Comcast, T-Mobile USA and and AT&T violate net neutrality rules.

Intellectual Monopolies

• We recall that the basic framework for 3D printing consists of a person who downloads a CAD file or the like, which digital file then instructs the 3D printing device to produce the desired product, using the proper materials. If there is a brand that is identified with the product, then the brand will appear on the product. The consumer may carry out the production process either within the confines of his home or business (think of a dental implant or airplane wing) or at a fulfillment center. In either situation, the ultimate manufacturer is the consumer (or the fulfillment center acting on the consumer’s instructions). The result is that 3D printing largely renders redundant the traditional product distribution function-—from manufacturer to distributor/importer to retailer to customer.

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