● 12.24.15

● Links 24/12/2015: Manjaro Linux 15.12, Black Lab 7.0.2

Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• In the past, we had a server running GNOME and when a user clicked on Firefox, it handed that process off to another server and Firefox then remote displayed back to the workstation. This met our needs for many years. When using NX as the transport however, having Firefox running on its own server meant that there was an Xwindow hop in the middle. Because of the network hungry nature of Firefox, this application was moved and now runs directly on the same server as GNOME/NX. This gives Firefox direct access to the NX/Xserver with no hop in the middle. Firefox therefore is very much faster, scrolling and typing is far superior. This also meant that our scaling and loads have changed and required tuning and in the coming weeks some load balancing. The server version of Firefox is used for all aspects of user requirements, except for video playback which is now handled by launching the Firefox version found on the local workstation.

Server

• It seems that everyone has a metaphor to explain what containers “are”. If you want to emphasize the self-contained nature of containers and the way in which they can package a whole operating system’s worth of dependencies, you might say that they are like virtual machines. If you want to emphasize the portability of containers and their role as a distribution mechanism, you might say that they are like a platform. If you want to emphasize the dangerous state of container security nowadays, you might say that they are equivalent to root access. Each of these metaphors emphasizes one aspect of what containers “are”, and each of these metaphors is correct.

Kernel Space

• The planning committee for the 2016 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference is happy to announce that planning for the conference has begun. LPC will be held November 2-4 in Santa Fe, New Mexico in conjunction with the Kernel Summit at the Santa Fe Convention Center in the historic downtown area. More information about LPC can be found at the web site and we will be posting additional bits and pieces here as they become available. We look forward to seeing you there!

• At the beginning of October I spent a week in Dublin sharing a room at a tiny bed and breakfast with two English students, each with really interesting stories to tell. Why was I there? I received diversity scholarship to attend LinuxCon 2015. I was so excited I didn’t even mind the rain on the first day.

• Andre Przywara of ARM Holdings published basic Allwinner (A64) support under a “request for comments” flag on the kernel mailing list.

• Recently, I covered the news that a group of top technology and finance companies including IBM, Wells Fargo and the London Stock Exchange Group, are partnering and working with The Linux Foundation to advance blockchain technology, which is central to how many businesses process transactions. The Linux Foundation announced that the project will develop an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and developers wil be invited to focus on building industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support business transactions.

Graphics Stack

• Following the latest Mesa and libdrm patches last week for allowing the Nouveau Gallium3D code to take advantage of the Nouveau DRM kernel driver’s new interfaces, that work has now landed.

• With Linux 4.3 was the big restructuring to the Nouveau DRM driver. The massive changes were to improve the driver’s design, reduce memory usage, provide for faster GPU VM, and allow for future improvements.

• Mir 0.18 brings prep work for Vulkan, latency improvements for nested servers, hardware-accelerated multimedia decode optimizations, the start of plugin renderer support, Xmir graphics corruption fixes, using libinput by default for input handling, and many bug fixes.

• The final feature pull request has been sent in of the Intel DRM graphics driver for targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel.

• Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center team has already sent in multiple i915 DRM updates for Linux 4.5 while Daniel Vetter, Intel’s DRM maintainer, sent in the final pull request this morning for getting the code aligned into DRM-Next.

• It seems a few days ago NVIDIA quietly released some documentation to help open-source driver developers working on Nouveau.

• Last week was this GitHub pull request from a NVIDIA developer for providing documentation on Maxwell’s texture header format and additions to the existing Fermi/Kepler/older documentation.

• If you are anxious to help test out the new changes of the Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers that will be added to Linux 4.5, I’ve spun up a kernel for Ubuntu x86_64 systems to try out this experimental code.

• Last night I spun an Ubuntu x86_64 kernel build against Alex Deucher’s drm-next-4.5 branch, which includes the Radeon and AMDGPU driver changes for DRM-Next to then go mainline during the Linux 4.5 merge window.

• While Linux 4.5 brings support for PowerPlay in the AMDGPU DRM driver to allow the modern discrete Radeon graphics cards to run much faster thanks to re-clocking, this major feature isn’t being enabled by default for Linux 4.5.

• Just minutes after writing about how AMDGPU PowerPlay support made it into AMD’s drm-next-4.5 branch, that Git branch is now called for pulling into DRM-Next. Besides the PowerPlay support for the latest Radeon GPUs, there are also a number of other changes.

• Prominent to PowerVR Graphics SDK 4.0 is a new framework for helping developers move from OpenGL ES to Vulkan. Vulkan isn’t being released until sometime in 2016 but with being a Khronos member, Imagination has been heavily involved and investing in Khronos with their SDK along with their various seminars about Vulkan.

Benchmarks

• If you missed my overview from a few days back, see Getting Started With Intel’s Clear Linux High-Performance Distribution. Clear Linux is a distribution primarily intended for servers with running container-ized applications and other cloud applications. You can learn more at ClearLinux.org.

Applications

• The developers behind the NetworkManager open-source network connection manager used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, were proud to announce today, December 23, the availability of NetworkManager 1.0.10.

• Various months ago I had hardware problems. To debug this and because I wanted a small server I bought an Intel NUC5PPYH. It’s a really small low power PC. Using this I discovered that my hardware troubles weren’t related to my SSD. Since that time I’ve been using the NUC as my main machine. My previous machine had upgraded parts, but GPU/motherboard and memory all were from around 2007. A slow low power 2015 NUC is somewhat in the same performance range as that 2007 machine (50% slower in some things, faster in others) while using way less power. My previous machine had 2 cores, the new one has 4.

• Are you a Gnu/Linux user who develope web ? Are you looking for a application to edit HTML/JS/PHP/CSS files easily ? if yes, Bluefish is amazing lightweight open source and fast web editor that you can have it on your Gnu/Linux and it has lot of good features.

• Nmap was not the only popular open source network security tool to receive a recent upgrade. Wireshark 2.0.0 , an open source tool used for network sniffing and packet analysis, also got a major update in November.

• The new release of Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) is important because if you want to keep your network secure you need a way to see and analyze the traffic that passes through it at the individual packet level.

Proprietary

• Today, December 22, the development team behind the Vivaldi cross-platform web browser has been happy to announce the immediate availability for download and testing of the last snapshot build for 2015.

Instructionals/Technical

• Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming, is one of the biggest names in computer science. When he received proofs of the second edition of this book in early 1977, he found them awful – so awful he decided to write his own typesetting system. So Tex was born. By 1984, Leslie Lamport extended Tex with a set of macros known today as Latex. Tex provides layout features; Latex, (which translates to Tex) operates on higher-level objects.

Games

• Today, December 23, Larian Studios had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition game for the SteamOS, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.

• Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition has finally released for SteamOS/Linux. I have picked up a copy, and I am downloading right now to give you some thoughts.

• On a more positive note, an open-source Age of Empires II engine is in the making. Openage will be native to Linux and run using AoE’s assets. The engine is being rewritten from scratch to be an exact source port with less bugs and more features. Unfortunately, according to the project’s gitHub page, this version will not be network compatible with the original version. Build and install instructions, current features , and a link to the code can be found on the project’s website.

• The Steam Winter Sale is now in effect, and as usually, there are thousands of discounted games available for sale. It’s getting more difficult to find the really good ones, so here are five titles that are really cheap and which should keep players busy and entertained for hours.

• Epic Games is preparing to release a major update for the Unreal Engine, and the developers have shared the first 4.11 Preview version so that anyone can give it a go and offer some feedback on what’s happening.

• This highly-acclaimed game, Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition, is now available for Linux gamers — just in time for those fortunate enough to have extra gaming time around Christmas. The enhanced edition of this game features, “With hours of new content, new game modes, full voiceovers, split-screen multiplayer, and thousands of improvements, there’s never been a better time to explore the epic world of Rivellon!”

• The Steam Controller was launched a while back, and the world didn’t stop spinning. The problem is that it should have. If players give it enough time, they will be impressed and soon realize that Microsoft, Sony, and all the others have been lying to them for a long time.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The word ‘Open Source‘ can be attributed to Linux community which brought it into existence along with introduction of Linux (successor of then existing Unix Operating System). Although ‘Linux‘ in itself came into existence only a base Kernel, but its open source nature attracted huge society of developers worldwide to contribute to its development.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, had the great pleasure of announcing this past weekend the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming Qt 5.6.

Distributions

New Releases

• After almost three months of development we can present to you now Capella, our latest instance of Manjaro Linux. This release comes with XFCE 4.12, KDE Plasma 5.5, 4.1.0 LTS kernel and all the usual Manjaro and upstream updates. We worked mostly on our tools and the graphical installers.

• Manjaro 15.12 was released today under the Capella codename for this Arch Linux derived operating system.

• Santa Claus is a cool dude. Not only does he live at the North Pole with a bunch of elves, but he has a magically massive sack too. Santa’s sack can hold an infinite number of toys and presents. It’s kind of like Dr. Who’s Tardis — it looks like a normal sack, but the inside is much bigger than the outside.

• Today, Santa is emptying his sack all over the Linux community, by delivering Manjaro Linux 15.12. Sure, Christmas is not for a couple of more days, but if you are a fan of the Arch-based operating system, you can begin celebrating early.

• The Arch Linux-based Manjaro operating system 15.12 (Capella) has been released and is now available for download.

• Manjaro is no longer a new operating system, and its developers have gathered a lot of experience in the past couple of years. This is one of the few Arch Linux-based operating systems that aim to be as users-friendly as possible and to give them a chance to use something unique.

• Black Lab 7.0.2 has been released for the holidays!

• Today we are releasing the Kernel 4.3.3 Kernel Enablement Kit for Black Lab Linux. This pack brings the latest stable kernel to Black Lab Linux and other Ubuntu derivatives. Kernel 4.3.3 can be installed on the following systems:

Ballnux/SUSE

• SUSE announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 1, giving customers new capabilities for maintaining application uptime, improving the efficiency of data center development and operations, and bringing solutions to market faster.

Red Hat Family

• In this article, we’ll focus on the implementation of Red Hat’s (RHT) operations. Despite a negligible rise of 17 basis points in its gross margin, Red Hat remained slightly inefficient while implementing its operations in 3Q15. The majority of its expenses arose from its general and administrative activities, which totaled $53.0 million in 3Q15 compared to $39.5 million in 3Q14.

• Red Hat recently announced a partnership with Microsoft where Microsoft is now offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an option on Azure. Although Microsoft has been offering Linux based IaaS offerings on Azure for a few years already, adding RHEL to the mix introduces an option with the backing of Red Hat enterprise support.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), from the Technology sector had a price of $ 80.89 today, indicating a change of 0.56%.

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) had its target price boosted by analysts at Stifel Nicolaus from $85.00 to $97.00 in a note issued to investors on Friday,

• Red Hat Inc logoRed Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) had its target price upped by Piper Jaffray from $89.00 to $95.00 in a research note issued to investors on Friday morning, AnalystRatingsNetwork.com reports. The brokerage currently has an overweight rating on the open-source software company’s stock.

Fedora

• The multimedia and Skype repositories now contain all components and libraries to have the same “experience” as in Fedora 23. This includes HandBrake, MakeMKV, Skype and the same FFMPeg build with the same options that are enabled in the Fedora 23 build; including Intel Quick Sync Video and the Nvidia Encoder.

• There is currently an issue with gtk3 and gtkmm30 using applications crashing on start. The gtk3 folks are working on a fix. If you need something that uses gtk3/gtkmm30 right now, downgrade to gtk3-3.19.4-1.fc24.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• With clueless politicians, the media, and scared citizens calling for a ban on encryption, it can feel like the Internet is under attack. Such basic rights to privacy are the foundation of the net — once we lose them, it can be impossible to get back.

• Unfortunately, even mundane aspects of computing, like operating systems — which should fade into the background — are threatening our privacy. Windows 10, for instance, sends much data to Microsoft, while Android is partly a means for Google to collect data. Traditional Linux distributions are not inherently privacy-focused, but generally speaking, many are. For the gold standard in privacy and security, Tails — a distro recommended by Edward Snowden — can be used. Today, the first beta of the 2.0 version operating system becomes available.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A Git vulnerability has been identified and repaired in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• Dustin Kirkland, one of the top leaders of the Ubuntu project, explained in a rather lengthy and comprehensive open letter to the community that Ubuntu is probably used by more than a billion people.

• In response to my article this past weekend about It Doesn’t Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year, Dustin Kirkland of Canonical’s Ubuntu Product and Strategy team has come out to say that number should be over one billion.

• But in reality, hundreds of millions of PCs, servers, devices, virtual machines, and containers have booted Ubuntu to date!

• It seems Canonical – Ubuntu’s parent company – may achieve it its convergence goal in the new year. The move will allow you to get the same experience of Ubuntu whether on PC, tablet or phone. This will likely mean apps, too, will become cross-platform.

Flavours and Variants

• Last week Michael Larabel reminded the community that Mark Shuttleworth had predicted 200 million users by this year and then estimated the number to be “tens of millions.” Today Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland fired backed. In other news, Scott Gilbertson has again declared a version of Linux Mint “the best Linux distro” and Tecmint.com looked at the desktops of 2015.

Devices/Embedded

• 2015 started with an impressive showing of Linux at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). And now the year is closing, having delivered some great Linux-powered devices. Here are the 9 that I found most exciting.

• Running Ubuntu Linux on Raspberry Pi hardware — and, maybe, ARM-based devices in general — has become easier thanks to a new tool called Ubuntu Pi Flavour, which is developed by the team behind Ubuntu MATE.

• Congatec announced a “Conga-TS170” COM Express Basic module series based on Intel’s 6th Gen (“Skylake”) Core and Xeon processors, and aimed at high performance “server class” apps.

Phones

Tizen

• The Tizen Developer Conference 2015 took place in Shenzhen, China earlier this year. This was the first time that the main developer conference was uprooted from its usual location in San Francisco and relocated to the far east.

• A couple weeks ago we saw VLC released on the Tizen Store for the Samsung Z3. VLC is a media player application that is portable, free, open-source, cross-platform, media player and streaming media server. Initially we thought this app was available for both the Samsung Z1 and the Z3 Smartphones, but that was not the case. It turns out that it needs Tizen 2.4, but the initial Tizen 2.4 beta release was also not compatible.

Android

• Developer Drippler has turned its Step Counting live wallpaper into an open source Android Experiment. The wallpaper uses your Google Fit data to visualize the steps you’ve taken, filling up a water drop as you take more. Now, other developers can take a look at Drippler’s code to help them build similar projects.

• Kore is a dedicated Android app that can be used to control the Kodi media hub. A new major and stable version has been released for it.

• Google has always had a strange relationship with its hardware and software partners. Where Apple is seen as something of a bully, forcing software partners to fall in line or face punishment, Google has always tried to steer Android with a lighter hand. That hand is getting heavier in some respects, but Google seems to be putting pressure in strange places and not taking control where it should be.

• Samsung Electronics, the South Korean consumer electronics giant, has reportedly been looking for volunteers and Android enthusiasts to beta test its Marshmallow ROM designated to hit two of its 2015 flagships – the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge. While the company is reportedly looking for beta-testers for both the aforementioned devices in South Korea, the UK unit of the company was originally said to have been looking for volunteers to beta test the Marshmallow ROM for the regular Galaxy S6 and not the curved-edged S6 Edge. However, latest reports now indicate otherwise, but more on that later. Either way, now that willing volunteers are presumably signing-up to the program in droves, the company has reportedly started to roll out the Marshmallow ROM to the chosen users, according to a post on XDA. SamMobile actually has also posted some screenshots, thanks to someone called Jack, who’s apparently one of the beta-testers to have received the update on his phone.

• Car makers have been competing with Google and Apple (more so Google) for the past few years. And now, they are joining the two tech giants. Google and Apple both launched their car versions of their mobile OS back in 2014, but in 2015 it really began to take the industry by storm. We saw countless car makers jumping on the bandwagon to include either Android Auto or Apple Carplay, and more times than not it was both. Now the car makers have been competing with Google for quite some time, mostly for their self-driving car (which Ford is supposedly working with Google on), and also with maps. See, each car maker has their own maps service, and having Google Maps means that Google is competing with them. And with Android Auto, you’re using Google Maps over the car makers mapping solution.

• You certainly have reason to be upset at how Apple handled iMessages for users switching away from iOS, but it’s clear that not everyone has raised those gripes the right way. Judge Lucy Koh (from the Apple-versus-Samsung case) has dismissed a lawsuit arguing that Apple effectively wiretapped iMessage chats to prevent them from reaching Android users. There’s no mention of the reasons for dismissal in the court order. However, Apple had asked the judge to toss the case when it learned that two of the plaintiffs dumped their iPhones after the case began — they’d eliminated important evidence.

• Like we said in the beginning, choosing between these two tablets is essentially choosing what you want to sacrifice. The Pixel C is easily the better tablet of the two, with its longer battery life and smaller form factor that plays nice in every situation. But if you’re really buying one of these to attach a keyboard to it most of the time Dell has built a much more capable machine at a slightly more reasonable price. For $579 you get a 32GB Venue 10 7000 with its superior keyboard, where the same Pixel C configuration will run you $648. All you’re really doing at this point is deciding which features you value, because unfortunately there is no machine that offers the best of both worlds right now.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source software is nothing new. The roots go back to the 1980s from a global community of programmers who created free software. But the movement got a huge boost in the 1990s because of the Internet. If anything, this rapidly growing open-source community essentially became one of the first social networks.

• But there was always skepticism. After all, how can you really trust open source software? Was it really good for enterprise-level applications?

• Well, it seems that such arguments are quickly fading away, especially as seen with the success of standout companies like RedHat. But even the mega Internet operators like Facebook and Google have been major players.

• A few days I came across the OpenALPR project, a free software project to automatically discover and report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the “car numbers” in a machine readable format. I’ve been looking for such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the automatic number plate recognition tool only is available in the hands of the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance. I discovered the developer wanted to get the tool into Debian, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian archive.

• There has been lots of discussion around mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) and the merits of open source vs. proprietary options in this space. Arguments on either side of the fence are largely unchanged from when the same debate raged over a decade ago, across anything from operating systems – Linux vs. Windows vs. (Open) Solaris – to productivity software – Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice. Take the debate to the cloud, give it a mobile spin, update your FUD and you’re all caught up to what’s happening in the world of MBaaS.

• One of the things that has interested me most as I’ve followed the 3D printing industry is just how similar it is to the story of Linux distributions. In my articles from three years ago, I discussed all of the open-source underpinnings that have built the hobbyist 3D printing movement, starting with the RepRap 3D printer—an open-source 3D printer designed to be able to build as many of its parts as possible. Basically every other 3D printer you see today can trace its roots back to the RepRap line. Now that commercial interests have taken the lead in the hobby though, it is no longer a given that you will be able to download the hardware plans for your 3D printer to make improvements, even though most of those printers got their initial designs from RepRaps. That said, you still can find popular 3D printers that value their open-source roots, and in my follow-up article on hardware, I will highlight popular 3D printers and point out which ones still rely on open hardware and open-source software.

Events

• It has become almost tradition for me, so yes, I’m attending FOSDEM 2016. It’s probably the best conference in Europe to meet other free software guys and that was always motivation for me to come – to see people I meet on mailing lists for rest of the year.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Thin Film Electronics has been been awarded a grant from the European Commission as part of its Horizon 2020 research and innovation initiative.

• Thin Film Electronics ASA (“Thinfilm”), a global leader in printed electronics and smart systems, today announced a commercial partnership with Jones Packaging Inc. (“Jones”), a world-class provider of premier packaging solutions for healthcare and consumer brands. The two companies are collaborating to integrate Thinfilm’s NFC OpenSenseT technology into paperboard pharma packaging and establish key manufacturing processes for production on Jones’ high speed lines. Jones and Thinfilm are engaging leading global pharmaceutical companies to integrate the smart technology into product packaging and deliver the solution to market.

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning are going through a mini-renaissance right now, and some of the biggest tech companies are helping to drive the trend.

• Thanks to Apple open sourcing Swift compiler and libraries earlier this month, JetBrains added support for Swift to its cross-platform IDE, CLion, running both on Linux and OS X.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This release fixes documentation bugs (thanks to Joshua Davies) and adds support for the MIX instructions SLB,SRB,JAE,JAO,JXE,JXO (implemented by Sergey Litvin).

• The p≡p foundation would like us to enter into an agreement. Their initial draft proposal (nothing final) is below (in DE and EN). Matthias and Christian can give some background on their motivations at the meeting. The goal of the discussion will be to get some feedback from the members and a mandate for the Vorstand in terms of the direction for how to proceed.

Public Services/Government

• According to a spokesperson, the procurement system is currently being used by more than 2,000 government officials and state companies from across Ukraine. During 2015, ProZorro has run over 30,000 tenders worth a total of UAH 6 billion (236 million euro). This resulted in savings ranging from 12 to 18 percent, worth UAH 500 million (20 million euro) in total.

Programming

• Django is built around the concept of reusable apps: self-contained packages that provide re-usable features. You can build your site by composing these reusable apps, together with your own site-specific code. There’s a rich and varied ecosystem of reusable apps available for your use—PyPI lists more than 8,000 Django apps—but how do you know which ones are best?

Leftovers

Science

• Britain would face an exodus of the best international scientific talent and lose millions of pounds in research funding if voters decided to pull out of the European Union, some of the country’s most eminent scientists have warned. Leaders from across scientific disciplines have told MPs that leaving the EU would relegate the UK to a bit player in worldwide research.

• When Norway announced plans to expand its Ørland Airport this year, archaeologists got excited. They knew that pre-construction excavation was likely to reveal ancient Viking artifacts. But they got far more than they had hoped.

• Ørland Airport is located in a region of Norway that changed dramatically after the last ice age ended. The area was once completely covered by a thick, heavy layer of ice whose weight caused the Earth’s crust to sink below sea level. When the glaciers melted, much of this region remained underwater, creating a secluded bay where today there is nothing but dry land. At the fringes of this vanished bay, archaeologists with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology Museum found the remains of what appears to have been a large, wealthy farming community.

Security

• The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council pushes back the date for organizations to migrate away from the vulnerable encryption technology standard.

• Oracle has reached a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over charges related to Java Software updates and security. The problem that the FTC had with Oracle’s Java updates is that the update mechanism wasn’t actually keeping users secure as it left older versions of Java on the user’s system.

• Security researchers believe they have finally solved the mystery around how a sophisticated backdoor embedded in Juniper firewalls works. Juniper Networks, a tech giant that produces networking equipment used by an array of corporate and government systems, announced on Thursday that it had discovered two unauthorized backdoors in its firewalls, including one that allows the attackers to decrypt protected traffic passing through Juniper’s devices.

• Hyatt said it had taken measures to “strengthen” the security of its systems and customers could feel safe to use payment cards in Hyatt hotels worldwide. The hotel chain had 627 properties in 52 countries at the end of September.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• But there are killings of journalists by the US that aren’t counted in these tallies. In 2006, CPJ put out a list of 15 media workers killed by US forces in Iraq. The Pentagon dismissed these deaths as regrettable accidents, but there’s suspicion in at least some of these cases that reporters were targeted by the US military for doing their jobs. Regarding lethal airstrikes against Al Jazeera‘s Baghdad offices and a deadly military assault on journalists in the city’s Palestine Hotel, for example, Reporters Without Borders declared (4/8/03), “We can only conclude that the US Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists.” (See “Is Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?” FAIR Press Release, 4/10/03.)

• Sometimes attacks on journalists by US forces are openly acknowledged. During the Kosovo War, the US military targeted and destroyed the offices of Radio/Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers. CPJ refused to include these casualties in its annual list of attacks on the press, saying that RTS fell “outside our extremely broad definition of journalism.”

• [...]

• Page rightly scorns “Putin’s casually dismissive attitude toward murdered journalists.” But how much has Page–as he discloses, a board member of CPJ–spoken out about CPJ’s dismissal of media workers deliberately killed by his own government? It’s easy to get outraged by the crimes of official enemies, and to forget or to justify the crimes of the state you identify with. What really sets Trump apart is that he seems lackadaisical about both types of crimes.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels, said experts.

• Acrid smoke and haze have enveloped Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and have reached Thailand, choking people, reducing visibility and spiking respiratory illnesses, according to Susan Minnemeyer, Mapping and Data Manager for Washington-based World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch Fires initiative.

• The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) will publish maps of all its members’ palm oil plantations – with the exception of Malaysia – in the hope closer monitoring will prevent forest fires and peat land destruction. But is this enough?

• The announcement comes as forest fires continue to burn across large swathes of Indonesia’s forests and peat lands, although the arrival of monsoon rains which have dampened fires in some hot spots.

• Except under exceptional circumstances, the RSPO operates a no-fire policy on its members’ plantations, and monitors compliance with this policy by studying data provided by the Global Forest Watch (GFW). But because there is no single up-to-date database of palm oil plantations, the data is not 100% accurate.

Finance

• Mark Thompson said it is wrong to force corporation to shoulder cost of ‘social transfer’ to over-75s and that charter renewal talks have been acrimonious

• Recent reports have documented the growing rates of impoverishment in the U.S., and new information surfacing in the past 12 months shows that the trend is continuing, and probably worsening.

• Congress should be filled with guilt — and shame — for failing to deal with the enormous wealth disparities that are turning our country into the equivalent of a 3rd-world nation.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Almost six months have passed since Donald Trump overtook Jeb Bush in polls of Republican voters. At the time, most pundits dismissed the Trump phenomenon as a blip, predicting that voters would soon return to more conventional candidates. Instead, however, his lead just kept widening. Even more striking, the triumvirate of trash-talk — Mr. Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz — now commands the support of roughly 60 percent of the primary electorate.

Censorship

• After a three-year campaign, the IETF has cleared the way for a new HTTP status code to reflect online censorship.

• The new code – 451 – is in honor of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451 in which books are banned and any found are burned.

• The topic of Internet censoring … excuse me … filtering is certainly a controversial one. Some countries are taking a very active role in forcing ISPs to filter the Internet. But does this help or hurt their customers? A writer at Ghacks recently took a look at this divisive and very important issue.

• I’m following the UK’s fight against porn on the Internet with fascination as it highlights how ideologists use something that everyone can agree on (protect children) to censor the Internet.

Privacy

• As we remind you all the time, the future ain’t what it used to be. We have no jetpacks or robot butlers, and we’ve still not upgraded from Land Wars to Star Wars. The dreamers fell short … but it turns out that some of the pessimists came pretty close to the mark. In the same way that no one in the ’50s thought “millions of strangers across the world accidentally saw your dick” could ever become a realistic problem, our near-future will be filled with annoyances that sound completely ridiculous to us now.

• [...]

• Any denizen of the digital generation knows that anything you say on the Internet can and will be used against you, especially if it’s embarrassing fan fiction. However, that’s a logical extension of using written material as evidence, as we’ve done for centuries. The newest way to incriminate yourself online has far less precedent: the data collected from wearable technology, such as the Fitbit.

• The survey commissioned by state broadcaster DR found that 20 percent of respondents said that they use social media once or less per month.

• Of these, 70 per cent said that they had made a conscious choice to avoid logging on to Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and other such sites and apps.

• People polled said a major reason for staying away from social media was a belief that spending too much time online led to missing out on ‘real life’.

• The Copenhagen-based Happiness Research Institute has a simple formula for increasing your happiness, social activity and concentration, but it might not be something you’re willing to do.

• The internet was once described by International Telecommunications Union secretary general Dr. Pekka Tarjanne as “a haven for pornographers, terrorists and hackers.”

• That was in 1995. Some things, it seems, never change.

• In fact, a scan of tech headlines today is like a time-warp into yesteryear. Encryption? Debates on limiting such protections were rife in the 1990s, and we’re still fighting about it today. Censorship? Foreign governments were trying to stifle the internet’s rising tide, even in its earliest days, and such attempts haven’t gone away. AOL may not be much of an ISP these days, but we’re still trying to get America online.

Civil Rights

• It’s the end of 2015, and one fact about the internet is quickly becoming clear this year: Americans’ freedom to access the open internet is rapidly dissolving.

• Broadband access is declining, data caps are becoming commonplace, surveillance is increasing, and encryption is under attack.

• This is not merely my opinion. The evidence is everywhere; the walls are closing in from all sides. The net neutrality victory of early this year has rapidly been tempered by the fact that net neutrality doesn’t matter if you don’t have solid access to said ‘net.

• A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this week showed that at-home broadband adoption has actually decreased over the last two years, from 70 percent of people to 67 percent of people. Among black Americans, that number has dropped from 62 percent to 54 percent; among rural residents, the number has dropped from 60 percent to 55 percent.

• Google’s lawyers fought strenuously against the DoJ’s demands for access to the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum, a journalist, activist and volunteer with the Wikileaks project; they fought even harder against the accompanying gag order, arguing that Appelbaum had the right to know what was going on and have a lawyer argue his case.

• In both cases, a Federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled against the company, allowing the government to read Appelbaum’s email in secret.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The controversial program allows mobile customers free access to a limited set of Internet services, including certain online shopping, employment and health sites, Wikipedia and, naturally, Facebook itself. While Facebook has said the program offers limited Internet access to more than 1 billion people, those who might otherwise have none, it’s come under fire from net neutrality activists and others in the industry who say it limits users to a walled garden populated solely by Facebook’s partners.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Last night, we posted the news that a judge in New Zealand had ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues were extraditable. Dotcom is appealing the decision, so it’s not over yet. Soon after the decision was announced, the full ruling by Judge Nevin Dawson was released. It’s a staggering 271 pages, and I’ve spent a good chunk of today reading it over. Some parts of it are more compelling than others, and there may even be enough to support the ruling. However, what troubles me is how frequently Judge Dawson appears to totally, without question, accept the US government’s arguments (as relayed by New Zealand prosecutors), despite the fact that many of them are clearly misleading at best, or downright incorrect.

• You might expect champagne corks to be popping within major music labels at the news that a New Zealand court has ruled Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the US to face charges of copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering.

• In his heyday at cloud storage service Megaupload, Dotcom became a cartoon villain for music rightsholders – and their compatriots in the film, games and software industries – as they saw the company as a haven for illegal filesharing. Yet that heyday is ancient history for a music industry that has been going through an intense period of digital disruption in recent years. Dotcom was arrested and his site shut down nearly four years ago, in January 2012.

• Finally, a decision, but don’t expect Kim Dotcom to be going anywhere fast.

• In an interview just before the extradition decision, Dotcom says no matter the outcome he is determined to live in New Zealand.

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