● 12.27.15

● Links 27/12/2015: Perl 6, Solus 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:06 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Most Linux distributions are fairly similar these days, but Qubes OS is different. Qubes OS is based on Linux, but it runs applications in lightweight virtual machines. Applications can be completely isolated from each other, limiting the damage a security vulnerability can cause and aiding in privacy. It’s no surprise Edward Snowden said he was excited by Qubes OS.

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation, the technology non-profit organization responsible for one of the largest open source projects in the tech sphere till date is now going to collaborate with technology and banking giants to work on yet another open source technology. The new technology in question is Blockchain technology, the technology powering bitcoin and a lot of other cryptocurrencies enabling transactions across the network.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand has published a patch set today for providing real function support inside NIR, the new Mesa intermediate representation.

• Up to now they haven’t had suitable support for functions sans the single-function main(). However, these 12 patches wire everything up for functions.

• Yesterday I published our usual end-of-year results showing how AMD’s open-source driver evolved in 2015 with regard to its OpenGL performance. For your viewing pleasure today are similar results but on the Intel Haswell side looking at how the open-source Intel Linux driver performance changed since the end of 2014.

Applications

• As you may know, Entangle is an open-source software that allows the user to take photos with digital cameras, controlled from the computer.

• kstart is a collection of two utilities for managing Kerberos tickets, particularly focused on the needs of long-running commands or daemons.

Proprietary

• When it comes to video editing, Windows and Mac rule the screen. Professional apps by the likes of Adobe, Avid and Apple only run in the Win/Mac world and Apple even throws in a pretty sophisticated video editor (iMovie) for free.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine (Wine Is Not An Emulator) is an open-source compatibility layer software app that enables the Linux and Unix users to run Windows software on their systems, via the Winelib software library.

Games

• Been wanting to play Larian Studios’ Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition on Mac, Linux or SteamOS since it launched in October for PC, PS4 and Xbox One? Well there’s good news – the Enhanced Edition of the award-winning RPG is now finally available for these platforms. The SteamOS support means you can play it on your Steam Box in the living without any issues as well.

• To mark the occasion, Larian remarked that the PC version of the game has been updated too so it’s now “in synch with the Mac & Linux version” and that they’ve “fixed a number of stability issues reported by players.”

• This year was a stellar year for Linux gaming with seeing hundreds of new native game releases and more.

• Over the course of the past 12 months there were more than 700 Steam Linux games released: I haven’t been able to find an exact count, but simply put it was just this past March that there were 1,000 Steam Linux games while as of writing this article today there are more than 1,750 titles.

• The developers behind OpenRA, the open-source re-implementation of the original Command and Conquer games with a focus on cross-platform support, issued a new version of their engine for Christmas.

Distributions

New Releases

• Solus 1.0, a Linux distribution built from scratch that’s using its own desktop environment named Budgie, has been released and it now ready for download.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• Manjaro 15.12 “Capella” KDE Edition is the latest version of Manjaro Linux built in with KDE Plasma 5.5 as default desktop, has been released by Manjaro Development Team and it now available for download and install on your computer.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has been issued a 1.5 rating by the sell-side brokerage firms covering the stock. Basing the rating on a simplified scale where 1 represents a Buy and 5 represents a Sell, this is the average rating based on the 17 firms polled by Zacks Research. To determine the direction the stock sentiment is headed, it’s noted that the stock had a rating of 1.5 three months ago.

Debian Family

• Here is an update to the usual graphs generated from snapshot.d.o. See my previous blog post for the background info.

• In all graphs, it’s easy to see the effect of the Jessie freeze (and the previous freezes since 2005, too).

• Following my blog post yesterday with graphs about Debian packaging evolution, I prepared lists of packages for each kind of outdatedness. Of course not all practices highlighted below are deprecated, and there are good reasons to continue to do some of them. But still, given that they all represent a clear minority of packages, I thought that it would be useful to list the related packages. (I honestly didn’t know if some of my packages would show up in the lists!)

• Like the years before, the Debian Med team performed a bug squashing event from December 1st to 24th. All bugs that have been closed during that period got an entry in the calendar. This year I am really impressed with the achievement of all participants. After the rather small quantity last year, the incredible number of 150 bugs have been closed this year! Thanks alot!

• Before I disappear into the Japanese winter holidays, here the Christmas update of all TeX Live packages. Nothing spectacular here, just the usual bunch of updates of loads of packages. There is a bug with respect to a file move from one package to another, will be fixed in an upload soon.

• Various developers and engineers have been thinking along the same lines, and ROKOS v4 is an interesting candidate. The operating system itself is based on Raspbian – a popular Linux version for Raspberry Pi users – and comes pre-packaged with integrated Bitcoin OK clients and Node software ready to be used.

• If using APT with PDiff enabled for package diffs to do incremental updates, the latest code should now be much faster.

• APT’s performance in applying the Pdiffs files, which are the diff format used for Packages, Sources, and other files in the archive has been slow.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As you may know, Ubuntu Touch is the mobile version of the Ubuntu desktop system, currently pre-installed on Bq Aquaris E5, Bq Aquaris E4.5 and Meizu MX4, but also officially supported on the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 devices.

• Recently, the Ubuntu developers have announced the immediate availability of Aethercast, a feature for connecting the Ubuntu phones to the Miracast protocol, a Wi-Fi Display feature that permits a device to connect to a monitor via wireless.

• Ubuntu counts a billion: There was more creative counting from Ubuntu this week, which all started over an item on Phoronix. On Sunday, Michael Larabel pointed out that Ubuntu doesn’t seem to be anywhere near reaching a goal to have 200 million users by 2015 set by space cowboy Mark Shuttleworth back in 2011. With little data available from Canonical, Larabel did some figuring on his own and concluded that the total number of users of both server and desktop Ubuntu is in the tens of millions.

Flavours and Variants

• The beta releases are out today for Linux Mint 17.3 in the Xfce and KDE desktop forms. Linux Mint 17.3 will be an Ubuntu-based LTS release supported until 2019.

• As you may know, the Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa images have been released in the Cinnamon and MATE flavors at the beginning of December, followed by the OEM images, for the same flavors.

• Today, the beta images of the XFCE and KDE flavors for Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa have been released, the final versions being scheduled for January 2016 and will be supported until 2019.

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi was created as an educational platform but has become one of the most popular embedded systems platforms on earth with a full copy of Linux and a rabid community of DIY-minded developers. That combination alone makes the Raspberry Pi a natural fit for hacking together enterprise IT applications and devices. Add in its low cost and the ready availability of open source solutions, and you can quickly see how previously expensive systems and devices are suddenly within reach of IT departments willing to experiment with Raspberry Pi, as my first foray into DIY IT Raspberry Pi projects showed.

• When the Raspberry Pi was first launched things were relatively straightforward – there was just one model to choose from. Fast forward to today, however, and you have no less than four major models to choose from. So, which one is best for your needs?

Phones

Android

• People upgrade their smartphone on average once every two years. And every time, you’re faced with the same question: What to do with the old device? As it happens, there are a number of creative uses for an old Android smartphone, that can make your life and the lives of others far easier. And these require little to no investment on your part.

• From Periscope, Google Photos and Dubsmash to Apple Music, YouTube Gaming and Ninja Jamm, the 25 best new Android apps of the year

• Asus and Eyeo GMBH have teamed up to ensure that Android tablets and smartphones remain ad-free. Asus’s mobile line of products will ship out in early 2016 with Adblock Plus pre-installed and already switched on in the Asus browser. Asus smartphones are pre-loaded with the company’s proprietary browser, complete with its ad-blocking powers. Legitimate advertisements can be allowed to slip the ad-blocker’s clutches, ensuring that revenue streams of proper websites are not significantly affected by the move.

• Android app developers were busy in 2015, delivering a cavalcade of clever phone and tablet apps to help boost productivity, launch a startup, stay safe and keep you from getting bored while you’re waiting to board your plane.

• In line with the previous report about Android Marshmallow being rolled out for select Xiaomi devices, a new GizmoChina report states that the update is in its final testing stages and will roll out soon.

• If the measure of Android’s gaming credentials is the number of great games it shares with iOS, then Google’s smartphone empire had a pretty good year indeed.

• Many of this year’s top App Store titles are also playable on Google Play, rubbishing the claim that mobile gamers need something with a piece of fruit on the back to stay up to date.

• If you’ve been a very good boy or girl this year, you might have got yourself a fancy new Android device for Christmas.

• To help you get started, we’re putting together quickfire lists of the best games on the App Store.

• In this entry, we’re bopping enemies on the head with the best platformers.

• The collaboration between Google and LG dates from a few years ago when the Nexus 4 made it to market. Fast forward three years and the South Korean company launched the third Nexus smartphone in partnership with Google.

Free Software/Open Source

• In my How Much Do You Cost? post last year, I said open-source contribution is a very important factor in defining who is good and who isn’t, as far as programmers go. I was saying that if you’re not contributing to open source, and if your GitHub profile is not full of projects and commits, your “value” as a software developer is low, simply because this lack of open-source activity tells everybody that you’re not passionate about software development and are simply working for money. I keep getting angry comments about that every week. Let me answer them all here.

• Open source software—software freely shared with the world at large—is an old idea. A guy named Richard Stallman started preaching the gospel in the early ’80s, though he called it free software. Linus Torvalds started work on Linux, the enormously successful open source operating system, in 1991, and today, it drives our daily lives—literally. The Android operating system that runs Google phones and the iOS operating system that runs the Apple iPhone are based on Linux. When you open a phone app like Twitter or Facebook and pull down all those tweets and status updates, you’re tapping into massive computer data centers filled with hundreds of Linux machines. Linux is the foundation of the Internet.

• The latest ownCloud stability and security updates are available, bringing improvements to sharing capabilities and performance enhancements to the ownCloud 8.2 series and LDAP, sharing and many minor fixes to the earlier releases. We recommend to upgrade as soon as possible! Please note the change in upgrade behavior for the Linux packages which require system administrators to manually run the occ upgrade command. Read on for more details about this end-of-year gift from your friends at ownCloud.

• The Trolley Problem is an ethical brainteaser that’s been entertaining philosophers since it was posed by Philippa Foot in 1967:

• A runaway train will slaughter five innocents tied to its track unless you pull a lever to switch it to a siding on which one man, also innocent and unawares, is standing. Pull the lever, you save the five, but kill the one: what is the ethical course of action?

• The problem has run many variants over time, including ones in which you have to choose between a trolley killing five innocents or personally shoving a man who is fat enough to stop the train (but not to survive the impact) into its path; a variant in which the fat man is the villain who tied the innocents to the track in the first place, and so on.

Events

• I came to Nha Trang this year to bring Fedora back there after the successful event last year. This year, the event was held in another university in Nha Trang, TCU with more participants from other universities in Nha Trang and nearby cities.

• There was a academy/science conference in the morning with some talks from open source enterprises who sponsor the whole event. The afternoon was reserved for FOSS communities and I had a session to introduce about the Fedora project to all students and lectures. There were about 200 attendees join into a big classroom.

• During the session, I talked to them about the benefit of contributing to FOSS and Fedora. I told participants what the employers need in general when they recruit new employees, especially young students. Basically, they need candidates to have critical thinking, group working, English speaking and technical skills. Students can study those skills during participating in a FOSS project like Fedora.

BSD

• pfSense® software version 2.2.6 is now available. This release includes a few bug fixes and security updates.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• The open source gadget looks like an iPod (if an iPod had header pins sticking out of it). It has basic analog I/O capability, can generate PWM pulses, sniff I2C traffic, and do lots of other features. It is open source, so you can always add more capabilities if you need them.

Programming

• Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests. For x86_64 only.

• The December 25 entry follows with the Rakudo Perl 6 release. “This version of the compiler targets the v6.c ‘Christmas’ specification of the Perl 6 language. The Perl 6 community has been working toward this release over the last 15 years.”

• The most frequently viewed page on this site is Signs you’re a bad programmer, which has also now been published on dead trees by Hacker Monthly, and I think that behoves me to write its antithesis. “Bad programmer” is also considered inflammatory by some who think I’m speaking down to them. Not so; it was personal catharsis from an author who exhibited many of those problems himself. And what I think made the article popular was the “remedies”–I didn’t want someone to get depressed when they recognized themselves, I wanted to be constructive.

• Therefore if you think you’re missing any of the qualities below, don’t be offended. I didn’t pick these up for a while, either, and many of them came from watching other programmers or reading their code.

Leftovers

• RESCUERS scrabbling through the aftermath of a huge three-day-old landslide discovered two people alive in the mud, as China’s cabinet announced a probe into the country’s latest industrial accident.

• Almost 72 hours after being buried alive by a tide of earth and rubble, 19-year-old Tian Zeming was pulled from the soil by emergency workers who have been battling around the clock in the search for survivors.

• Images from the scene showed dozens of firefighters and police thronging around a stretcher, apparently bearing the teenager to a waiting ambulance.

• [...]

• “The lack of safety supervision and passive attitude in taking precautions has caused the whole nation to shake with anger and shocked the world!” user Xizidan wrote in a post that was taken down by authorities, but found on the censorship tracking website Weiboscope.

Health/Nutrition

• The startup has been capturing that air in “massive cans” through a clean compression process, which according to Vitality Air, “lock[s] in the pure air without any contamination.” The siphoned air is taken back to the company’s bottling facility, where “we begin filling our convenient delivery cans to the brim with excellent air.”

• Vitality Air’s pitch might read like a throwaway joke on Silicon Valley, but the company has found a market for their version of Canada Dry. People in smog-filled Chinese cities have been buying up the cans in bulk.

Security

• In this tutorial, I will show you how to embed an executable into a corporate network via email, behind the firewall(s), disguised as a Word document. There is no patch for this issue.

• Liz Upton, the Director of Communications for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has tweeted out a screenshot of an email where an unknown person has proposed that the Foundation install malware on all of its devices.

• In the email, a person named Linda, is proposing Mrs. Upton an agreement where their company would provide an EXE file that installs a desktop shortcut, that when clicked redirects users to a specific website. (Raspberry Pi devices can run Windows as well, not just Linux variants.)

• Italian security researchers from VoidSec have come across a botnet structure that was using vulnerable Aethra Internet routers and modems to launch brute-force attacks on WordPress websites.

• The security issue looks like it might be resolved now, but resulted in gamers being able to see other account holder’s information. Seeing other accounts included partial credit card information, addresses, and other personal information. For a while, the Steam store was completely shut down. The issue seems to stem from some caching issues due to account holders being presented with the wrong information.

• The Xen Project has reported a new bug, XSA-169, that means “A malicious guest could cause repeated logging to the hypervisor console, leading to a Denial of Service attack.”

• The fix is simple – running only paravirtualised guests – but the bug is a big blunder for another reason.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The United States armed forces now have more than 200,000 soldiers deployed in one hundred countries of all continents, according to Defense Department reports. About 9,800 remain in Afghanistan, while about 3,500 in Iraq and Syria under the pretext of fighting Islamic State (IS), most of the latest from the 82nd Airborne Division.

• The Navy maintains about 40 ships deployed, the largest of which is the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, with about 5,000 sailors and officers on board-.

• In recent days, this naval unit crossed the Suez Canal with its escorts ships to station in the Persian Gulf Gulf and from there to take part in the bombing against the IS targets in the region.

• Ostensibly, the Arab Middle East is controlled and managed by the US intelligence network; otherwise, Arab leaders would have hard time to stay afloat. The authoritarian Arab leaders live in palaces, not with people to understand the outcomes of their political folly and ignorance. Ironically, the US-Russian air strikes and killings of the civilians in Syria and Iraq will instigate reactionary opposition and increased insurgency to topple the puppet regimes. Daveed Gartenstein-Rosss writing in Foreign Policy (“Thank you for Bombing-Obama- Why al Qaeda might be the biggest winner of America’s airstrikes on the Islamic State.”), argues that President Obama is using wrong strategy to attack ISIL: ‘But an emphasis on degrading and destroying IS while giving a pass to other jihadist groups in Syria could have serious consequences that could leave al Qaeda in the catbird seat.’ America enjoys a record of failure in strategic thinking and practices if you view the war theater in Afghanistan and Iraq and now the forged battleground is Syria.

• UK Prime Minister David Cameron and the chiefs of Britain’s three intelligence services have briefed German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the latest terror threats, including Daesh, also known as ISIL, in what analysts say is a rare move.

• The current crises with the ISIS/terrorist threat has political and media fear mongers salivating over the potential of going into another prolonged military conflict. Money would once again flow freely into corporations (mostly Cheney’s Halliburton) involved in supporting combat operations in addition to the weapons of war manufacturers and technology industries developing and maintaining hundreds of technology based combat support systems, most of which are not needed nor completed. In this greedy quest, there appears to be little, if any, concern for thousands of military and civilian deaths and the destruction of in-country vital infra-structure essential for post operation stabilization and reconstruction.

• France once led the world in lambasting George W. Bush’s “war on terror”. But as François Hollande looks to enshrine emergency powers in the constitution, the country’s leaders are suddenly sounding like the US president they once held in contempt.

• Malacañang on Tuesday denied reports that there is now an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) training camp in the country.

• Presidential Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma, Jr. said National Security Adviser (NSA) Cesar Garcia has denied the report.

• In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. president George H. W. Bush through his secretary of state James Baker promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for Soviet cooperation on German reunification, the Cold War era NATO alliance would not expand “one inch” eastwards towards Russia. Baker told Gorbachev: “Look, if you remove your [300,000] troops [from east Germany] and allow unification of Germany in NATO, NATO will not expand one inch to the east.”

• Islamic State has sanctioned the harvesting of human organs in a previously undisclosed ruling by the group’s Islamic scholars, raising concerns that the violent extremist group may be trafficking in body parts.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• More than 100,000 people evacuated their homes in the bordering areas of Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina due to severe flooding in the wake of heavy summer rains brought on by El Niño, authorities said.

• The Paraguayan government declared a state of emergency in Asunción and seven regions of the country. Several people were killed by falling trees, local media reported.

• But the modest, grey pony-tailed founder and president of the Orangutan Project has made world-first discoveries about the orangutan, which literally translates as a “person of the forest” in Indonesian.

• That brief conversation in Miami would result in Florida becoming, however briefly, a pioneer in grappling with the effects of climate change — such as flooding and freshwater drinking supplies contaminated with saltwater. After Crist was elected governor, he convened a summit, appointed a task force and helped usher in new laws intended to address a future of climate change and rising sea levels. Crist and the Florida Legislature set goals to reduce emissions back to 1990 levels.

• British Armed Forces personnel have been deployed to the English county of Cumbria to rescue people whose homes have been flooded, UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Friday.

• Earlier this month, Storm Desmond brought record amounts of rain to Cumbria, resulting in several bouts of flooding in the region.

• The M62 has been closed around a 20ft sinkhole which opened up in the road as the north of England was battered by a month’s rain in a few hours.

• The massive hole opened up between junctions 20 and 19 near Rochdale, Greater Manchester shortly after midday, bringing traffic grinding to a halt.

• The westbound carriageway has been closed as engineers examine the scene.

• Meanwhile, the Met Office has issued ‘danger to life’ flood warnings and the army has been called in to evacuate residents in flood-hit parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

• Greater Manchester is on flood alert after torrential rain throughout the night.

• Rivers across the region have burst their banks with many roads closed.

• Part of the Waterside pub in Summerseat in Bury has collapsed

• We will bring you all the latest updates here.

• Severe flooding has caused widespread disruption throughout the morning causing loss of power to customers in Rochdale and Lancashire with 10,000 properties currently off supply.

• 30,000 properties are usually supplied with electricity from the main substation in Rochdale. Engineers from Electricity North West shifted 10,000 properties from the substation an hour before the flooding hit to secure supplies.

• The Government is considering whether a new insurance levy should be introduced to fund flood cover for homeowners who cannot buy policies.

• Insurance companies do not offer cover to homes and businesses in areas at risk of flooding.

• The Department of Environment, the Department of Finance and the Office of Public works are working on possible solutions.

• Listen to this account from an eyewitness who says that flooding has caused a gas explosion in Bury, Greater Manchester.

Finance

• Capitalism, like a speeding train, barreled into a stone wall in 2008. Shocked and dazed, its leaders have been trying to “recover.” By that, they mean to fix the mangled tracks, reposition the locomotive and cars on those tracks and resume forward motion. No basic economic change, in their view, is needed or even considered. They see no absurdity in such a “recovery plan” – just as they saw no approaching catastrophe in the years leading up to 2008.

• In 2008, a programmer issued a white paper in which he argued that we need an Internet currency not subject to the fees and permissions of third-party intermediaries. So he came up with the digital equivalent of cash online, a system that lets participants send value to anyone else with a Bitcoin address the same way they might send an email. “Like the Internet flattened global speech, Bitcoin can flatten global money,” says computer scientist Nick Szabo, who is suspected as Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• This week on CounterSpin: From community rallies around the country to the presidential election, the Black Lives Matter movement has changed the conversation. Keeping a spotlight on state-sanctioned violence against black people, activists have opened up a debate, including in corporate media, that addresses racism and white supremacy in ways more searching and less euphemistic than we’re used to. At least, fewer pundits tell us we’re living in a “post-racial” society—that’s a start.

• And helping taxpayers understand how these vital public goods are going to be delivered or paid for is important too. Which is why many people across Michigan are baffled by the Michigan Legislature’s desire to prevent school districts and other public bodies from distributing factual and unbiased information about ballot proposals within 60 days of the election.

• Gov. Rick Snyder should stand for more information and transparency, not less, and veto Senate Bill 571, now before him.

• Senate Bill 571 would prohibit a public body, or person acting for a public body from using public resources for factual communications referencing local ballot questions by radio, television, mass mailing, or prerecorded telephone message for 60 days prior to an election.

• “What most concerns the [New York] Times is that the crude politics of Trump shatters the lying rhetoric used by Democrats and Republicans alike to justify the policies of the ruling class, at home and abroad. Thus, it worries that Trump is doing “serious damage” to the country’s “reputation overseas” by “twisting its message of tolerance and welcome.” What is the “tolerance and welcome” of which the Times speaks? Is it perhaps the Obama administration’s deportation of more immigrants to Mexico and Central America than any other president? Or the construction of brutal detention facilities in the southern US to hold men, women and children seeking refuge in the US. The Times writes that Trump “has not [yet] deported anyone, nor locked up or otherwise brutalized any Muslims, immigrants or others.” The newspaper fails to add, “Obama, however, has.”

• As you probably already know, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign was involved in some recent hijinks involving improper access to campaign data from the Hillary Clinton campaign, after a buggy software patch applied by the contractor maintaining the Democratic Party’s voter database, NGPVAN, inadvertently opened a data firewall. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) suspended the Sanders’ campaign access to Democratic voter lists (a subscription that the campaign had paid for); Sanders responded by suing the DNC; after a brief negotiation, the DNC restored the Sanders campaign access; and Sanders apologized to Clinton for the hack in Saturday night’s debate. Clinton accepted the apology, and noted that most Americans don’t care anyway.

Censorship

• AMOS Yee’s most recent blog post has got him into trouble with the authorities again and has led to vehement responses online. However one response, by the President of the Humanist Society, has chosen not to focus on the 17-year-old himself, but on the perceived vitriol against the youth, in turn sparking two camps of responses both online and offline.

• Even though the letter Humanist Society president Paul Tobin wrote was in response to Amos Yee, his letter about the vitriolic responses towards Yee’s blog post has engaged citizens on a general discussion of intolerance towards offensive remarks online.

• It seems like Singaporeans have found themselves a new pastime – filing police reports. The past week alone saw two police reports filed against former Nominated MP Calvin Cheng, for incitement to violence. Add to that police reports filed against Amos Yee earlier this year, filed by National Solidarity Party, and another by Workers Party candidate Daniel Goh during GE2015 and so on, and it seems like our boys in blue have no time to nab criminals but spend their days attending to people with grievances to air.

• Outspoken blogger Amos Yee, who sparked an uproar for his criticisms of Lee Kuan Yew, was high on the search list of Singaporeans who followed the controversy online.

• Members of the Anonymous hacker collective have defaced the Asia Pacific Telecommunity website (apt.int), gained access to the site’s admin panel (running Drupal), and also managed to get their hands on a database dump.

• Needless to say competing voices and groups oppose this kind of censorship. Officially I think of censorship as acts of governments to limit or punish ideas that threaten them. On a less legalistic basis, I think we tend to use the term to refer to efforts to shut up any views by anybody that the other person or party or organization objects to. You could say, for example, that when our fellow citizens called us peace activists opposed to the Iraq War “unpatriotic” that were attempting to censor our speech. Bullying, peer pressure, threatened loss of livelihood…all are techniques for suppressing unpopular or unwanted ideas separate from any specific government action.

• Now they want the statue of the man the campaigners call “the Hitler of South Africa” removed. One can see why. Rhodes began enforced racial segregation in South Africa and was – avowedly – a racist, proclaiming the superiority of Anglo-Saxons. Looking back at him today, it is difficult not to regard him and much of his legacy as toxic.

• The International Publishers Association on Dec. 22 condemned what it called “blatant political censorship” in Turkey, saying three journalists’ books had been pulled from shelves on court orders.

• “Books by Hasan Cemal, Tuğçe Tatari and Müslüm Yücel will be removed from sale merely because they were found in the possession of people arrested on suspicion of being members of various outlawed political parties,” the Geneva-based IPA said in a statement.

• The Third Criminal Court of Peace in southeastern Gaziantep province decided to remove a total of three books focusing on the Kurdish problem by journalists Hasan Cemal and Tuğçe Tatari from bookstores after being seized during an operation into a cell where suspected militants of the outlawed Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), youth-wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), were detained. The court ruled for the confiscation of the books on Dec. 4, arguing they spread terrorist propaganda and praised criminal activity.

• The International Publishers Association on Tuesday condemned what it called “blatant political censorship” in Turkey, saying three journalists’ books had been pulled from shelves on court orders.

• “Books by Hasan Cemal, Tugce Tatari and Muslum Yucel will be removed from sale merely because they were found in the possession of people arrested on suspicion of being members of various outlawed political parties,” the Geneva-based IPA said in a statement.

• The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body responsible for overseeing the internet’s technical standards, has approved HTTP 451, “an HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. The new status code will show viewers when a web page is being blocked for legal reasons.

• HTTP status codes are not normally a thing that aids political dissidents, or really anything to get excited about. But the newly-made code 451, to be used when something is taken down for legal reasons, is a timely exception.

• Status codes are used when requesting and transmitting data over the internet, for example, pulling up this page. There are five classes, 100s-500s, and tens or hundreds of specific codes within those classes. You normally don’t encounter the codes unless something goes wrong—the infamous 404 error for a page not found, for example.

• With those words, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced new HTTP status code 451, to be used when access to a website is denied due to legal demands.

• Most users pay little attention to status codes, which are numerical indicators of how a website is responding to a browser request. If they are familiar with status codes at all, they have most likely encountered a “404 – File Not Found” or possibly an occasional “403—Forbidden.”

• Burmese artists lived under strict laws of censorship since 1964. Through their artworks they battled for freedom and it’s only since 2012 that censorship was abolished. Since then there was an explosion of political art but artists stayed very careful in their choice of subject.

• Walking through the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, you could feel an air of silenced excitement. The first free elections in 25 years were only a month away and artist Khin Maung Zaw took me to his home and gallery. The idyllic paintings of Buddhist monks and Burmese landscapes on the wall express the love he feels for his country but “Myanmar is a shattered country. We need to choose democracy. It’s the only way we can talk about our needs.”, says a soft-spoken Zaw. Still, he doesn’t call his work revolutionary: “my works are snapshots of the daily lives of Burmese people.”

• If you were planning to hold an Internet conference for the world, where would you choose to hold it?

• “Anyplace but China” would be a reasonable response. Yet last week, no less a luminary that Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed more than 2,000 guests to the coastal city of Wuzhen, as they opened the World Internet Conference.

• That’s right. China hosted an Internet conference. Has one of world’s heaviest-handed cyber censors decided to join the digital marketplace of ideas? Hardly. Check out the guest list, including delegates from such freedom-loving places as Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

• The purpose of this conference was not to be to open the Internet, but how better to close it. China is promoting the idea of “Internet sovereignty,” which is basically a web of fiefdoms gagged by official censors.

• 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.

• The director of China’s state-controlled film bureau, Zhang Hongshen, has said that China is at war with Hollywood. China’s propaganda chief, Liu Qibao, believes that Chinese movies should reflect the Chinese Dream. President Xi Jinping declared that art should be patriotic and that foreign films should be sanitized.

• Every hotel I stayed at in China offered free WiFi, but it was a meaningless gesture. While some of my email got through, I was not able to reply to any of it until I returned to Thailand. Likewise Facebook was blocked, though many might see that as a blessing in disguise.

• China jails more journalists than any other country, but media students say the landscape is changing.

• A video shows filmmaker and satirist Ami Horowitz on the campus of Yale University asking students to sign a petition calling for a repeal of the First Amendment.

• Horowitz said he was able to quickly gather more than 50 signatures in less than an hour and believes most who signed were students.

• Two Yale University professors recently said they would no longer be teaching classes after students expressed outrage that the instructors called for open debate and dialogue in an email. Increasingly, students are making demands of university faculty to limit exposure to material that the students deem to be discomforting. One way this is being expressed is in the call for trigger warnings in course syllabi. The student government at the University of California–Santa Barbara, for example, passed a resolution requiring trigger warnings on every syllabus with no penalties for students who skip a trigger class or assignment.

• Well-respected ASIO chief Duncan Lewis has advised MPs to use soothing language when publicly discussing Islam, apparently to prevent a backlash. Malcolm Turnbull’s tacit support for the advice is not merely an error of judgment, it is profoundly misconceived.

• During the past week, the government has changed the parameters of the public debate on Islamism in Australia. Along with ASIO, it has reframed the debate to propose the cause of militant Islam is, in part, our response to it.

• Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, who had returned to the House by this time, protested against Naidu making comments against the opposition in his absence.

• The Middle East is notorious for banning books due to moral, political, religious, or commercial reasons. Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Syria are often heralded as the countries that tend to ban the most books.

• There is, it turns out, a bright side to this otherwise depressing affair. A small group of brave and principled students, who identified themselves as ‘representatives of the Harvard undergraduate council’, made themselves heard and announced their outraged opposition to the administration’s latest experiment in thought control. A truly diverse array (just judging by last names such as Biebelberg, Ely, Gupta, Kelley, Khansarinia, Kim, Popovski and so forth) wrote ‘to express concern regarding’ the placemat dissemination. ‘Reject[ing] the premise that there is a “right” way to answer the questions posed’, the protesting students affirmed that ‘we should work to foster a climate that is conducive to frank, open discussion – especially among students who disagree’. The placemat, they complained, ‘gives the impression that the points it articulates are positions endorsed by the college and, more disturbingly, positions that the college thinks students should hold’. College, concluded the students, ‘should engage in the task of helping students to think and speak for themselves, not telling them what to think and what to say’.

• “The problem in Hong Kong is not censorship,” said Pi Li, the Sigg senior curator at M+. “The problem in Hong Kong is self-censorship. It’s self-censorship hidden in the procedures, so it’s difficult to distinguish.”

• Public schools should not have the power to punish off-campus speech.

• Call her a traitor, call her a normalizer — Palestinian-Israeli singer Amal Murkus has heard it all. Now as she gets ready to release her brilliant new album, the avowed Marxist and feminist is speaking out against the racism of the Israeli mainstream as well as Palestinian attempts to silence her.

• The U.S. Supreme Court has a long string of decisions defending speech and speakers that many Americans would like to shut off or shut down. But within a just a few days of each other:

• • Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said in an Op-ed piece for The New York Times that his company and others should create algorithmic “tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media – sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.”

• • Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton called on Web companies to “disrupt” terror groups’ ability to use social media for recruitment and communication, to “deprive jihadists of virtual territory.”

• • GOP poll leader Donald Trump said at a South Carolina rally that “in certain areas” we should just shut down the Internet.

• After a highly promoted holiday interview with Iran’s popular Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was canceled at the last minute, Iranians cried foul, accusing state television of taking sides in a partisan quarrel ahead of the elections.

• We recently warned about how the new Data Protection Directive in the EU, while written with good intentions, unfortunately appears to both lock-in and expand the whole right to be forgotten idea in potentially dangerous ways. A big part of it is that the directive is just too vague, meaning that the RTBF may apply to all kinds of internet services, but we won’t know for certain until the lawsuits are all finally decided many years in the future. Also unclear are what sorts of safe harbors there may be and how the directive protects against abusing the right to be forgotten for out and out censorship. Unfortunately, many are simply celebrating these new rules for the fact that they do give end users some more power over their data and how it’s used.

• From posting a message on Facebook to watching the cursor blink on a screen, many of us take online communication for granted. For most, the idea that such activities might lead to severe punishment is absurd. But, in Saudi Arabia, the West’s treasured Middle East ally, keystrokes can result in public stoning, flogging, life imprisonment, crucifixion, or beheading. Saudi Arabia appears to be existentially threatened by freedom of expression.

• On 16 December Ensaf Haida, the wife of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi accepted, on his behalf, the 2015 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Saudi authorities had sentenced the blogger to 10 years in prison with 1,000 lashes for posting comments that criticized the kingdom’s extremist Wahhabi ideology. They consider his views blasphemous.

• In January 2015, the Saudi authorities publicly gave Badawi 50 lashes. This first round of flogging resulted in such a serious deterioration in his physical health that doctors were able to halt the flogging for a while. But, a remaining 950 lashes still await Badawi.

• United Nations human rights expert David Kaye has expressed alarm at growing repression in Saudi Arabia: ‘Such attacks on freedom of expression deter critical thinking, public participation, and civic engagement, the very things that are crucial to human development and democratic culture,’ he said.

• MPAA ratings are more political than ever, so parents should do their own research

• When atomic weapons historian Stephen Schwartz tried to post information about 1950s U.S. nuclear targets to Facebook Wednesday, the site stopped him. “The content you’re trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe,” an automated error message announced. Here’s the strange thing: Schwartz—who pointed out the oddity on Twitter (where Washington Post journalist Dan Zak noticed it)—wasn’t sharing state secrets. He was posting a New York Times article.

• It’s not immediately clear why Facebook blocked the story—a fascinating and chilling historical narrative woven from publicly available information—or even whether the block was algorithmic or manual. At first, Slate colleagues told me they were able to link to it through the Facebook widget on the New York Times’ page, but attempting that method now generates a message that reads, “The server found your request confusing and isn’t sure how to proceed.” As some have noted, posting the mobile version of the article appears to work, and other articles about nuclear targets failed to generate the same issues. All this suggests that Facebook isn’t really taking issue with the article itself, so what exactly is going on here?

• [...]

• Again, whatever’s going on here clearly isn’t willful censorship. What’s troubling is the lack of transparency. The more powerful Facebook gets, the more such erratic quirks threaten to shape our everyday experience. At the very least, the company would do well to elaborate on what they mean by “unsafe.” Without providing further details, the site is effectively infantilizing its user base. Even if Facebook eventually explains what happened with the New York Times article, the initial mystery is a potent reminder of who really controls our ability to share information.

• Thailand’s Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the 2012 conviction of a webmaster for not acting quickly enough to delete online comments deemed insulting to the country’s monarchy, a decision decried by rights advocates as another blow to freedom of expression.

• Facebook has suspended a 175-year-old British pub’s social media account over its “offensive” name, saying it was derived from a black cockerel — a male chicken, the media reported.

• The manager of the Blackcock Inn in Llanfihangel Talyllyn, a small village in Wales, in November this year received a message from Facebook saying the pub’s account he created had been suspended for “racist or offensive language”, he told the Independent in an interview.

• After making it easier to report abusive tweets and increasing the size of its anti-troll team, Twitter believes it is getting ‘bad behavior’ under control. As well as bullying of acquaintances and work colleagues, Twitter has also been used to attack celebrities, the gay community, religious groups, and more, with many people feeling driven from the site. It seems that the decision to take a very hands-on approach to troll tackling is starting to pay off.

• In the past several years, Turkey has been facing increasing unlawful government oppression on civil society and aggressive assaults against the media.

• After consolidating his power, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government did not hesitate to arrest critical voices and media professionals, and has even seized private property and companies. While known as a democracy — even if not a liberal one — Turkey, embracing these tyrannical tendencies of President Erdoğan, has brought the entire nation to very unsteady ground.

• Patrick Butler, vice president for programs at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), a Washington-based non-profit organization that works to improve the skills and standards of journalists and media around the world, says he is deeply saddened to see assaults on journalists in Turkey.

Privacy

• Our credit score is one of the more controlling elements of American life. It disproportionately affects people of color and serves as a means of social control, sometimes benign, sometimes not. But what if the logic of the credit score—an opaque algorithm designed to promote “good” behavior in an effort to encourage easier lending—was combined with social media and social circles? What if our credit score was used to punish us for our political views?

• But for 21 days, Cox’s order required the Post to remove from its website what confessed murderer Frederick Cobia had said about helping prosecutors secure inmate confessions, again and again.

• For reasons that remain unclear, the judge believed the snitch had a right to privacy in phone conversations at the jail, which participants are told are recorded. The calls were not only between Cobia and his lawyer, which you might understand, but also with family and friends. In them, he talks about meeting with a now-retired judge and a state prosecutor to discuss being rewarded for his unusual work, the Post reported.

• Cox’s chilling order applied not only to the news outlet, but to everyone, including defense attorneys who might want to suggest to juries why the state’s star witness might be saying what he’s saying about their clients.… For if someone can get a reduced sentence by saying his cellmate confessed, or by sneaking peeks at confidential files when his cellmate is sleeping or in court, why wouldn’t he?

• Secret mass surveillance continued to spark global controversy this year, yet the National Security Agency’s dragnet programs unconstitutionally monitoring Americans are stretching into their second decade. Ignited by news reports in 2005, eight years before Edward Snowden’s revelations blew the lid off illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying in 2013, mounting concerns around the world about the threat to free expression made 2015 a watershed year in the battle to restore privacy.

• The National Security Agency wants a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the man who was mayor of Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

• The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation want a Salt Lake City federal judge to throw out a lawsuit that claims widespread government surveillance of phone and email communications during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

• In court documents filed last week, the NSA and FBI asked U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming it offers no proof the spying occurred or that it affected the specific plaintiffs in the case.

• In addition, the motion from Department of Justice attorneys says the government is immune from prosecution unless it commits “willful and intentional” privacy violations — a high standard.

• The National Security Agency is asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges it spied on every person in the Salt Lake City area during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

• The class action lawsuit, filed by former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, alleges the NSA eavesdropped on everyone in and around Olympic venues throughout the entire two weeks of the games, including phone call metadata, text messages and emails.

• Clinton and Trump want Silicon Valley to make it easier for the government to eavesdrop. An NSA gaffe that harmed a leading networking company shows how dangerous that could be.

• It appears that the NSA (“or someone”) hacked into the code of a popular firewall and planted a password in there that would allow them access as needed.

• That means the NSA (“or someone”) would be able to bypass the security features of a network and do what they wanted inside. This is basically an act of sabotage. Given that American organizations as well as foreign ones use these same firewalls, and that the planted password could be discovered by others outside the NSA, the act made vulnerable a multitude of innocent, untargeted systems.

• While it says it has no reason to think there are backdoors in any of its products, Cisco has started an additional code review looking for “malicious modifications” after Juniper’s announcement that its ScreenOS operating system has been vulnerable for years.

• FBI director James Comey should be taking notes: The Juniper debacle shows why security experts are up in arms over government-ordered backdoors

• As the US and UK governments seek to get backdoor access to encrypted phones, computers and other devices pushes forward, we just got the best example of why to avoid them altogether.

• Research shows 20 to 25 per cent of Canadian Internet traffic gets routed through the U.S., exposing browsing habits to organizations like the NSA.

• A bill introduced in the New Hampshire House for the 2016 session would prohibit a federal-local surveillance collaboration that the NSA’s former chief technical director called the “biggest threat since the civil war.”

• Rep. Neal Kurk prefiled House Bill 1494 (HB1494). The legislation would prohibit government agencies from acquiring, collecting, retaining or using personal information and social media data without a warrant in most cases.

• The bill does allow a few exceptions to the warrant requirement. Governments can collect personal information with the express written permission of the owner, pursuant to a judicially recognized exception to the warrant requirement or in some emergency situations.

• HB1494 broadly defines “personal information.”

• The hacktivist collective know as Anonymous has published a Christmas video message, in which it issues a national surveillance warning to the tune of the well-known carol Santa Clause is Coming to Town .

• The video shows people dressed as Santa with wires and clipboards, representing members of the US National Security Agency (NSA), spying on people in Guy Fawkes masks – the recognised symbol of the Anonymous collective.

• In a brief video statement posted late in the day on Monday, Cock.li owner Vincent Canfield confirmed that the site’s SSL keys (for encrypted site access), Secure Shell host keys, and full mail content of the site’s 64,500 users, as well as hashed passwords, registration time, and the last week’s worth of logs were all confiscated by the police from its Bavarian datacenter.

• By throwing bricks over China’s draft anti-terrorism law, Uncle Sam has once again defended its championship of “Master of Double Standards,” reminding the planet that only the United States can steal a horse while others cannot even look over the hedge.

• The draft, the latest attempt of China to address terrorism at home and help maintain world security, is by no means a “wicked legislation,” as framed by Washington, to limit freedom of speech and invade privacy.

• One year after apologizing for its controversial “real name” policy, Facebook maintains that it will not change the rule – but will begin to offer more loopholes for people who want to use an alternative name on the social media site.

• Edward Snowden will appear via video link as a featured speaker at a New Hampshire convention of libertarian activists.

• The Valley News reports (http://bit.ly/1RUCFLK) that the former National Security Agency contractor will participate in a 30-minute discussion and Q&A at the New Hampshire Free State Project’s convention in Manchester in February.

• The Free State Project describes itself as an effort to recruit “liberty-loving people” to move to New Hampshire. The group says it is trying to recruit 20,000 people who agree that a government should act to protect people’s rights.

• Switzerland has long prospered from its unique geo-political situation. Touting its neutrality, stability, and fundamental respect for privacy, Switzerland has become a leading banking nation. Yet as Bern signs banking deals with the U.S and other nations, Switzerland’s famous banking secrecy is slowing being eroded.

• Seeking to capitalize on its existing reputation and expertise, Switzerland is establishing itself as a global leader in data processing and storage. To this end, the Swiss are employing a uniquely Alpine outlook: literally. Switzerland is turning its underground mountain fortresses into data centers.

• Weeks after the Paris and San Bernadino attacks, authorities have yet to disclose evidence that the terrorists used encryption.

• National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden is a patriotic hero in Ted Rall’s new nonfiction comic book Snowden (Seven Stories Press). The back cover tagline: “To save your country, betray your government.”

• LEAVE IT TO THE COUNTRY that brought us the Gestapo and STASI to teach the Land of the Free about the perils of surveillance. Unlike the British, who have inexplicably embraced CCTV and other snooping technologies despite having produced Huxley and Orwell, Germans well remember the total paranoia and rigid control engendered by authoritarian systems overly concerned with “your papers.” Hence it was unsurprising but slightly ironic that one of the more substantial and wide-ranging symposia about surveillance on these shores to date was held at the Goethe-Institut New York over the first weekend of December. Entitled “Images of Surveillance: The Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics of Surveillance Societies,” the two-and-a-half-day conference gathered artists, scholars, theorists, and activists from Europe and North America to discuss the increasingly inescapable digital fishbowl in which we all live and work.

• This latest round of funding is part of an earlier $679.8 million raised so far, according to an updated version of the SEC filing. Palantir began raising the round in July, according to the filing. The startup has now raised $2.32 billion in total.

• With the Holiday Season here, we are in the midst of the real or imagined “War on Christmas.” Where overly sensitive Conservatives get angry when someone says Happy Holidays and overly sensitive liberals get upset when someone says Merry Christmas, and everyone involved forgets about that whole “peace on earth” thing.

• This year, a more sinister war is brewing. It is one that was fought before, and back then the good guys won. But like an uninspired Michael Bay sequel, the bad guys are back with the same tricks and increased hyperbole. I am talking about the war on encryption. The first encryption war was fought in the early 90s. Then, the NSA, FBI and various other fear mongers from our government attempted to put hardware back doors into our cell phones and potentially more, until public outrage and the insecurity of their “clipper chip” killed the plans.

• But Schrems’ biggest achievement was convincing a European court that the U.S. “Safe Harbor” data-sharing pact is invalid. This was a monumental, far-reaching verdict, one that is fundamentally changing the way U.S. tech companies manage its users’ data around the world.

• According to article 25§1 of Directive 95/46 the transfer from a Member State of the EU to a third party of personal data, which are undergoing processing or are intended for processing after transfer, may take place provided that the third country in question ensures an adequate level of protection. On the basis of article 25§6 of the said Directive 95/46, according to which the Commission may find that a third country ensures an adequate level of protection by reason of its domestic law or of the international commitments it has entered into for the protection of the private lives and basic freedoms and rights of individuals, the Commission adopted Decision 2000/520. By virtue of the aforementioned Decision 2000/520 it was concluded that the “Safe Harbour Principles” issued by the US Department of Commerce on 21 July 2000 are considered to ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU to organisations established in the United States.

• Two days after the horrendous shootings in San Bernardino, White House press secretary Josh Earnest was asked by a reporter during his daily briefing, “Are we at the point where the administration is ready to, if not concede, become concerned about the possibility of a major intelligence failure on these individuals on the West Coast?”

• How quickly people forget. It was little more than two years ago that reporters were questioning whether intelligence collection to discover terrorists had gone too far.

• National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had distributed highly classified documents related to the National Security Agency’s collection of information related to terrorism at home and abroad, and White House press secretary Jay Carney had to deal with reporters asking such things as, “Is the government striking the right balance between privacy and security.”

Civil Rights

• From John Oliver quizzing Edward Snowden on whether the NSA is collecting our “dick pics” to EFF’s legal team obliterating the patent that was used to go after podcaster Adam Carolla, digital rights issues have been in the public spotlight this year. For the most part, 2015 found us winning hard-fought battles to advance our freedoms online.

• It has been a fascinating year in which to edit this Blog. Political and social challenges – from continued government cuts to the alarming rise of Islamic State – have presented new human rights conundrums that have, as ever, slowly percolated to the doors of the country’s highest courts. And all this during the year of an astonishing General Election result and amid continually shifting sands around the future of the Human Rights Act.

• [...]

• This was a historic decision if only for the fact that it was the first time the Investigatory Powers Tribunal had ever found against the Government. It all began with the Edward Snowden leaks and revelations surrounding the US National Security Agency’s communications interception programme. Liberty and other NGOs cited breaches of Articles 8 and 10 ECHR as a result of the UK authorities’ reception, storage, use and transmission of material intercepted and shared with them by their US counterparts.

• The imam, Ajmal Masroor has accused the United States of enacting the anti-Muslim policies propagated by Republican presidential hopeful, Donald Trump, who prompted global condemnation this month when he pledged to ban Muslims from entering the US.

• We reaffirm our commitment to the principled American ideals of equal opportunity, due process, and the transparent application of the rule of law and justice afforded to all citizens irrespective of one’s national origin, presumed religion, creed, ethnicity, or gender. I submit this note specifically to YOU to take appropriate action to ameliorate the adverse ramifications of certain aspects of HR158:

• As a powerful Iranian-American community, we are politically passive. Many of our parents came to the US to avoid politics and politicians. But it seems our passive disposition relative to politics and lack of unity regarding politicians has hurt us and the passing of this legislation is a representative example. The legislation that passed last week by both democrats and republicans is un-American. This legislation is legally, socially, and morally wrong.

• Bob Lord, the company’s newly appointed chief information security officer, said in a blog post that it will notify users if it suspects suspect that their account may have been targeted by a state-sponsored actor.

• “We’ll provide these specific notifications so that our users can take appropriate measures to protect their accounts and devices in light of these sophisticated attacks,” said Lord.

• China’s controversial anti-terrorism law could be passed as soon as the end of this month, state news agency Xinhua said on Monday, legislation that has drawn concern in Western capitals for its cyber provisions.

• The draft law, which could require technology firms to install “backdoors” in products or to hand over sensitive information such as encryption keys to the government, has also been criticised by some Western business groups.

• Matthew Harwood’s definitive article shows that America’s police have gone out of control.

• Children have been returning to schools in eastern Ukraine after the Red Cross provided materials to repair the damage and allow them to restart their studies this winter.

• Although the guns have been mostly silent since the early September in Ukraine, government troops and Russian-backed militant forces continue to report casualties in the region. Among the most vulnerable populations are children attending schools near the frontline.

• Genuinely appalled members of the public and press, as well as elements of the Republican establishment, desperate to stop Trump as a loose cannon not beholden either to the party or its decisive megadonors, labored mightily to make Trump’s Muslim ban blather a huge issue, the killer gaffe that would disqualify him as presidential material.

• However, efforts to neutralize Trump through public censure–“bigot” “fascist” etc.—do not appear to be getting much traction.

• I believe there’s a good reason for that.

• When confronted by discriminatory speech and actions, some make the high-minded appeal to Americans’ better nature: “this isn’t us.”

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

• China’s World Internet Conference is last week’s news, but the event will likely reverberate for years to come, as China seeks international support for its notion of a “multilateral” approach to the governance of global cyberspace.

• The piece that follows is one of the most informative I have read so far on the so-called “Wuzhen Summit,” attended this year by President Xi Jinping. Published in The Initium, a Hong Kong start-up that has done some very good reporting on China over the past six months, the piece is written by Fang Kecheng (方可成), a former journalist at Guangzhou’s Southern Weekly newspaper.

• The Bay Area is home to several legal nonprofits focused on issue advocacy. We asked state and federal judges to identify the staff litigators they see as particularly effective advocates.

• The final element in this perfect storm is differing cultural expectations about the role of digital laws. The United States, says the stereotype, sees Europe’s digital laws as anti-business, anti-free speech, and pro-regulation. The EU, in turn, sees the United States’ digital laws as anti-privacy, reckless, and dictated by corporate interests.

• Police responding to a call about a domestic disturbance shot and killed a 19-year-old engineering student and a 55-year-old mother of five, and authorities acknowledged late Saturday that the woman had been shot by accident.

• The families of both victims demanded answers after the deaths, which were the first fatal shootings by Chicago police officers since last month’s release of a 2014 video of Laquan McDonald’s death put a national spotlight on the city.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• At the beginning of this year, the Washingtonian ran an incredible piece about “electrosensitives” who had moved to “the town without wi-fi.” These people believe all the signals crowding the air to power our telecommunications-dependent society are making them sick, so they fled to Green Bank, West Virginia, which exists in the US’s only federally-mandated “radio quiet zone.”

• Facebook is back with its game of trying to pretend that its platform is a substitute for the Internet, particularly for the poor. The originally controversial Internet.org is now back, re-branded as Free Basics, with full page ads in major papers, hoardings and a completely misleading on-line campaign using Facebook itself.

• The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has issued a notice for public consultation on the issue. While TRAI has put on hold Facebook’s agreement with Reliance offering Free Basics for now, it has not stopped Facebook’s campaign.

• Free Basics violates a fundamental principle of the Internet.

DRM

• Historians and archivists call our times the “digital dark ages.” The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years. But don’t blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen big 8-inch floppies replaced by 5.25-inch medium replaced by little 3.5-inch floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud — and let’s not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Showing users how to send large video files is a task undertaken by dozens of software and hardware manufacturers but for the folks at Netgear the issue is now a controversial one. Want to send a pirate movie to a friend after downloading it from a torrent site? Netgear apparently has an app for that.

• Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand-based German entrepreneur behind the Mega Upload file-sharing website, can be extradited to the US along with three associates, an Auckland court has ruled.

• Dotcom and his three associates are accused by the US authorities of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering. However, Dotcom claims that his file-sharing website was little different from many other file-sharing websites.

• The past several years have been a roller-coaster ride for Internet mogul Kim Dotcom. As he continues to fight an aggressive government determined to extradite him to the United States to face serious criminal charges, this Christmas Day the Megaupload founder recaps his case here on TorrentFreak.

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