● 01.01.16

● Links 1/1/2016: WebGL2 in Firefox Nightly, Gentoo on PS4

Posted in News Roundup at 7:10 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Console-hacking group Fail0verflow has cracked the PlayStation 4 and loaded it up with a version of Linux. This is a big step in the process to get homebrew software running on Sony’s popular console. This also turns the PS4 into a real PC. Sony embraced PC-style architecture for the PS4 after experimenting with exotic chips for its last system. And now that has come full circle to the point where the console is running a desktop computer’s operating system.

• But it doesn’t stop with Linux. Fail0verflow also booted up a Game Boy Advance emulator and a modded copy of Pokémon that the group calls the “PlayStation Version.”

• The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One systems are just PCs, and now hardware hackers have started doing some very cool things with at least one of these systems. Console-hacking group Fail0verflow has cracked the PlayStation 4 and loaded it up with a version of Linux.

• It’s been some since we’ve heard about impressive mods to get game consoles running software and games they’re not meant to, but thanks to Failoverflow, a collective of console hackers, there’s something new to closeout 2015 with. The group has managed to hack Sony’s PlayStation 4 to install the Linux operating system on it, taking advantage of the console’s fairly standard PC architecture.

• Believe it or not, it would appear that a hacking group that goes by the name of Fail0verflow managed to hack Sony’s PlayStation 4 (PS4) gaming console to run a Linux kernel-based operating system.

• 2015 was another banner year for the Linux kernel, with a robust slate of mainline kernel developments and new ‘big’ number release.

• On the Linux kernel front, there were five big mainline releases, including a move to new ‘big’ number. The first Linux kernel release of 2015 was also the last of the Linux 3.x series. Linux 3.19 was released on February 9, and includes a news lockless page counter for improving memory handling.

• Can it run Linux? Yes, we’re just as tired of the Web joke as anyone else, but it is a fair question for some devices—especially gaming consoles, which are basically just computers in a different form factor than what you’re used to seeing under (or on top of) your office desk.

• The PlayStation 4 has been fairly resilient to various forms of modding, as it was only really “jailbroken” earlier this month. This process allows those with modified consoles to run, well, just about whatever they want on them, from pirated games to custom software.

Desktop

Kernel Space

• The mainline Linux kernel is up to 20.86 million lines spread across more than 52 thousand files, as the latest statistics for the kernel as we end out 2015.

• Thomas Schoebel-Theuer on behalf of Germany’s 1+1 Internet continues working on bringing MARS to the upstream Linux kernel.

• Thomas describes MARS as, “an asynchronous replication system for block storage over long distances. It is the base for HA over long distances (more than 50km) and over network bottlenecks, e.g. high / varying packet loss rates.” MARS is short for Multiversion Asynchronous Replicated Storage. The project is described in much more detail via its PDF manual.

Graphics Stack

• Similar to the recent open-source year end driver recaps (Nouveau, Radeon, and Intel), here’s a recap of NVIDIA’s binary driver activities for 2015 along with some benchmarks comparing the performance of the proprietary driver over the past year.

Applications

• Although coala’s primary purpose is to make the creation of analysis routines easy, we have taken an effort to include functionality of other open source linters into it. coala can automatically fix the indentation of your Octave files, sort and correct Python imports or add the missing dereferenciation operator to your C++ code (greetings from Clang!) – the list is growing every week. Try running coala with the -A argument to see what we’ve got!

• As you may know, Frogr is an open source program that enables the users to easily upgrade photos on Flickr. Among others, it has a simple and clear interface, allows the uploaders to edit the visibility, content type, tags, description and enable/disable global search results in Flickr.

• As you may know, Variety is an app indicator that changes the desktop wallpaper, using automatically downloaded images from: Wallhaven.cc, Flickr, Wallpapers.net, Desktoppr, NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.

• Audacious is an open-source music player, having the features of a modern music player, including support for audio effects, equalizer, lyrics and plugins, visualization, support for Winamp skins and support for playlists organized in tabs.

• Do you miss Notepadd++ which is only available for Microsoft Windows? Here is an alternative for you called “Notepadqq” released under GPL (GNU General Public License) Version 3. Notepadqq is a Notepad++-like editor for the Linux desktop. It helps developers by providing all you can expect from a general purpose text editor, such as syntax highlighting for more than 100 different languages, code folding, color schemes, file monitoring, multiple selection and much more. You can search text using the power of regular expressions. You can organize documents side by side. You can use real-time highlighting to find near identifiers in no time. It has support for multiple programming languages, multiple encodings and plugin support.

Instructionals/Technical

• This series started off as being about customizing some common Linux desktops (Xfce, KDE, Gnome 3, Cinnamon, MATE, and LXDE). Then the previous post looked one layer lower, at the Openbox window manager. Now I am going even further off the beaten path, to look at Enlightenment.

Games

• It seems like it could be quite an interesting game when it’s a bit further along in development. I enjoyed my little go in it, and I think the environment graphics and lighting are really quite good, but I would love to be able to zoom a little bit, and rotate the camera. I feel like that’s a must in this type of game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• On the Manjaro mail forum, a thread is rating KDE applications into three categories: second to none, decent, and better uninstalled and replaced.

• Despite the modern proliferation of desktop environments, such a rating could only be done with GNOME or KDE. No other desktops have encouraged as extensive ecosystems of applications, and, in fact, most modern desktops borrow from GNOME.

• When I first started with Google Code In, I thought that it would be about work that is done fast and easy. With that attitude I had to abandon my first task at a random company (I don’t remember). Seeing that this contest is pretty advanced, I looked for a task that fit to my programming skills which brought me to WikiToLearn: My first task was to run W2L locally so I can edit a part of the website.

• Spectacle is out as part of the Applications suite as of KDE Applications 15.12, and not only do the users like it, other devs love it too. Maintaining Spectacle isn’t as hectic as it used to be in the early days. I get a steady stream of mostly benign bug reports, which is nothing I can’t handle in a few hours over the weekend. Wayland support still hasn’t materialised though, and it looks like it’ll be a while. Proper High-DPI (retina displays) support did materialise though, courtesy of Kai Uwe Broulik, and will land in 15.12.1.

Distributions

• Year 2015 was one of the most turbulent, troubling periods for Linux. It started with so much hope, so much goodness, and then it all crashes come the autumn season, with distros failing one after another, almost like trees succumbing to a flood. Whatever emotional metaphor works for you.

• Now, though, we must put the pain and elation aside, and focus on voting the best distributions of 2015. There have been many, and while we did not have any great revolutions like the last time, it was an interesting year overall. So let’s separate the wheat from the chaff, and the wit from the chav. Shall we?

Gentoo Family

• Calculate Linux Desktop, featuring either the KDE SC 4 (CLD), the MATE (CLDM) or the Xfce (CLDX) environment, Calculate Directory Server (CDS), Calculate Media Center (CMC), Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) and CLSK with KDE SC 5, Calculate Scratch Server (CSS) are all available for download.

• The developers working on Calculate Linux decided to release a new version of their Gentoo-based Linux operating system before heading to New Year parties.

Arch Family

• The first Manjaro 15.12 Capella update has been released by the developers, bringing interesting changes, including updated Plasma5 to version 5.5.2, dbus 1.10.6, thunderbird 38.5, Kernel 4.4 RC7, Mesa 11.1.0, fixes for the Maia GTK theme, updated python and haskell packages, an updated version of wine, new deepin settings and the brand new Budgie 10.1 desktop environment.

Ballnux/SUSE

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc. enjoyed a solid 3Q15, reporting $523.6 million in revenue and $0.48 in EPS, versus the expected $521.5 million and $0.47 respectively.

Debian Family

• I never met him but I’ve used Debian GNU/Linux for many years and appreciate that he made the world a better place one package at a time.

• Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols had the best report today quoting sources “close to the police department.” Apparently, Murdock had still been celebrating the Christmas season when he resisted arrest for trying to break into a house. He makes $1.4 million a year, but he still needs to break into someone’s home? He claimed on twitter he was knocking. A scuffle ensued at the scene and Murdock was treated for abrasions and taken to a nearby hospital. Apparently, accordingly to police sources, he was arrested again the following evening for knocking on a neighbor’s door but it wasn’t clear if it was the same door. Again, Murdock had to be treated for injuries following that police encounter. He made bail at some point and returned home.

• I first met Ian Murdock gathered around a table at some bar, somewhere, after some conference in the late 1990s. Progeny Linux Systems’ founding was soon to be announced, and Ian had invited a group from the Debian BoF along to hear about “something interesting”; the post-BoF meetup was actually a briefing on his plans for Progeny.

• Many of the details (such as which conference and where on the planet it was), I’ve forgotten, but I’ve never forgotten Ian gathering us around, bending my ear to hear in the loud bar, and getting one of my first insider scoops on something big that was about to happen in Free Software. Ian was truly famous in my world; I felt like I’d won the jackpot of meeting a rock star.

• Considering himself as a law abiding citizen, Murdock stated that a female police officer had ripped his underwear, which is equivalent to rape. It is possible that the emotional trauma suffered by Murdock due to these incidents might have caused him to take his life, but the individual has no history of physical or emotional abuse, which once again brings us back to the subject that the cause of death is still unknown.

• It is possible that his decision to commit suicide came after he was emotionally traumatized. Some of his latest tweets suggested that he was abused by the police. He said that a female officer had torn apart his underwear, which corresponds to rape. The emotional consequences of this incident might have pushed him to do something reckless but this remains a speculation.

• Public concern about Murdock’s well being grew on Sunday when, in a series of posts on Twitter, he vaguely described a violent encounter with San Francisco police, accusing the department of beating him up and sexually assaulting him during an arrest.

• “The police are uneducated, evil, and sadistic. Do not trust them,” Murdock wrote. “The rest of my life is to fight against the police.. they are NOT friends, so don’t ever ever believe otherwise.”

• Murdock’s final tweets described an uncomfortable encounter with law enforcement in Northern California. He railed against police brutality and mentioned his intention of committing suicide.

• Murdock also left a cryptic hashtag that some social media sleuths believe may be a password to an application or document where his writings about the incident could be found, but it may actually be a Twitter account of someone close to him.

Derivatives

• Deepin 15 adds new system sound effects, Qt is powering the desktop to replace their previous HTML5+WebKit implementation, Mutter is now used as the window manager, the Linux 4.2 kernel is used, systemd has replaced Upstart, Bash is now the default shell rather than Zsh, GCC 5.3.1 is the base compiler, and many other changes. Fundamentally different is switching from an Ubuntu based to now using Debian Sid. The rewrite of the desktop in Qt is also a big deal.

• Today, December 31, 2015, the development team behind the gorgeous deepin Linux operating system had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the deepin 15 OS.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu developers are currently working at a download manager to add by default on Ubuntu Touch, starting with the OTA-9 Update. The software would permit the users to download files directly from the browser, without having to send them to other apps, or download a file once and send it to multiple apps without needing to redownload each time.

Devices/Embedded

• In 2015, the number of open-spec, hacker friendly single board computers running Linux or Android has continued to grow while prices have dropped to unprecedented levels. Low-cost boards such as the Chip, Raspberry Pi Zero, and Orange Pi PC have set a higher bar for price/performance ratio, while on the high end, we saw the first 64-bit, ARMv8 hacker SBCs arrive at surprisingly low prices. Meanwhile, the board that matters most to makers around the world — the Raspberry Pi — was updated to a Pi 2 model with a modern quad-core, ARMv7 processor that opens up new applications and a wider range of Linux distributions.

Phones

Android

• Last week Motorola released the code necessary for developers to dive into the underpinnings of the Android 6.0 update for the Moto X Pure Edition. Now the company is pushing out those files for last year’s flagship, the 2014 Moto X. These follow the Android 5.1 code that hit GitHub in July.

• With these kernel source files, tinkerers can see the Marshmallow-related changes for the 2nd generation Moto X. Regular users won’t get much use out of downloading any of this directly, but they may get the benefits if their custom ROM of choice eventually gets an Android 6.0 release that supports the Moto X.

• Google is lining up OpenJDK – an open-source implementation of the Java platform – for future Android builds.

• Up until now, the mobile operating system has used a Java class library derived from the Apache Harmony project. Harmony was developed from 2005 by the Apache Software Foundation as a free implementation of Java, with the blessing of then-Java supremos Sun Microsystems. Work on Harmony ended in 2011 after Oracle bought Sun.

• Like years before it, 2015 saw the release plenty of big-name Android smartphones. Flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S6, LG G4, Motorola Moto X Pure Edition, Sony Xperia Z4/Z5, and the Nexus 6P were all just a few of the great options available to Android fans. While each device brought something new to the table, there was (and always will be) some glaring features missing in every single one.

• Fair play to Huawei for including a speaker on its self-titled Android Wear watch long before the software actually supported it. That being said, I’m sure Huawei Watch owners are wondering when their expensive gadget will have all of its parts activated so they can stop carrying around an extra quarter-ounce of extraneous electronics. According to multiple sources, that speaker will be activated soon, specifically whenever Google gets around to issuing the next version of Android Wear’s firmware.

Free Software/Open Source

• As you may know, MuseScore is an open-source music composition and notation software, allowing the users tp create, edit and print music in an WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment.

• A team of open source software developers solved the problem that most urgently needed solving: distributing wages to healthcare workers

• For our first Open Source Yearbook, we reached out to dozens of open source organizations and community members and asked them to contribute articles that help provide a feel for 2015. What were a few of the LibreOffice extensions that stood out in 2015? Which Drupal modules were notable? Which books would publishers highlight if they could only pick a handful from the past year? What did open source wearables and 3D printing look like in 2015? And how in the world could we pick one best couple for our yearbook without offending all the other fabulous open source couples in the world? The 2015 Open Source Yearbook answers all these questions, and many more.

• In the late 90s I was ensconced in the Microsoft ecosystem. With the introduction of Windows, personal computer users were being pushed away from the command line. But I stubbornly kept an MS-DOS terminal close by. For reasons now lost to the receding tide of memory, one day I found myself installing Cygwin, a suite of commonly used software and command-line tools that ran within a terminal or X-Window. My introduction to a unix-like environment impressed me. The day I typed “startx” and my screen exploded with tiny x’s sealed the deal. At that time (around 1998), anyone familiar with unix had become aware of the upstart unix-like operating system, Linux, developed around Linus Torvalds’ college software project. When Red Hat Linux 5.2 became available I rushed to my local computer store, intrigued by the new operating system that cost half the price of Windows.

Events

• Sarah Sharp Joins SCALE Keynote Roster: While the SCALE Team is still busy with preparations for SCALE 14X, the first-of-the-year FOSS event worldwide in Pasadena in three weeks, one specific development is that Sarah Sharp joins the list of keynoters. Sharp will speak on “Improving Diversity with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” on Sunday morning, Feb. 24. She joins Cory Doctorow, who is the Friday keynoter at SCALE 14X, with the Saturday keynote yet to be determined. Watch this space.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• For users of Firefox Nightly builds, WebGL 2 support is now enabled.

• Jeff Muizelaar mentioned that WebGL 2 is now enabled within Firefox nightly builds. The WebGL 2 implementation isn’t yet fully complete, but is at least to a point that it’s working well enough for most modern content written against the provisional specification. Jeff mentioned it in this blog post.

Education

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• With 2015 coming to an end, LinkedIn Corp. has taken a look back at its year of using, developing and contributing to open-source software.

BSD

• This is the time of year when we look back and go, “Wow. How did this all ever happen?” Or something to that effect. And after about a month of PC-BSD daily use, the verdict so far (subject to appeal) is overwhelmingly positive with a couple of bumps (e.g., someday I will turn off tap-to-click on my touchpad).

• Of course when I look back on the year, I can only look back as far as the time I have been using BSD. It wouldn’t be fair to go all the way back — one time back in the aughts, by some miracle, I got NetBSD to run on a PowerBook G3 until I updated the system and then poof — so this retrospective goes as far back as the month I’ve been using PC-BSD.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• RMS gave his speech “Copyright vs Community” at the Quetelet auditorium, Sint Pietersplein, in Gent, Belgium, on November 17th, to a diverse student audience.

• Thanks to the free software community’s giving, we have already raised more than $250,000 toward our goal of $450,000 by January 31st, 2016. As we look to the new year, we at the Free Software Foundation are feeling optimistic about our plans for 2016.d

Openness/Sharing

• Directed by Beorn Leonard and produced by Ton Roosendaal, Blender’s original founder and chairman of the Blender Foundation, the film is reminiscent in tone of Pixar’s shorts, with the key difference that all assets, including tutorials for some of the techniques used in the film, are free and can be downloaded from Blender’s Cloud storage service.

• The French draft law Loi Numérique will be presented to the French Parliament on 19 January, after being co-created with citizens through an online public consultation. This is the first law in France resulting from a co-design process.

Open Data

• Northern Ireland has officially launched its open data portal, OpenDataNI, the goal of which is to provide a global platform where public services and all governmental agencies can publish data.

• This CKan-based portal is now accessible through NIDirect, the official governmental portal for Northern Ireland citizens, which states that it provides ‘a single point of access to public sector information and services’.

Open Hardware

• Chances are that you are not going to find this on display next week at the 2016 International CES (the big tech trade show in Las Vegas). The creators of the $5,000 Novena Heirloom, a laptop built with a completely open and modifiable design, shipped the last premium models to backers last week.

Programming

Leftovers

• Software as a service to many people is the way to convert what used to be licensed software into a repeat revenue stream and in principle there is nothing wrong with that if done properly (Adobe almost gets it right). But if the internet connection is down and your software no longer works, if the data you painstakingly built up over years goes missing because a service dies or because your account gets terminated for no apparent reason and without any recourse you might come to the same conclusion that I came to: if it requires an online service and is not actually an online product I can do just fine without it.

• The BBC experienced a major technical issue on Thursday morning, with all of its websites and several of its digital services offline.

• “We’re aware of a technical issue affecting the BBC website and are working to fix this now. We’ll update you as soon as we can,” the BBC press office said on Twitter.

• The internet did not cope well with this news.

• The government has been accused of turning the honours system into an “old boy’s club” after Lynton Crosby, the political strategist who ran the Conservatives’ 2015 election campaign, was awarded a knighthood.

• Young Earth creationism evangelist Kent Hovind asserted this week that God had purposefully put contradictions in the Bible to “weed out” non-believers.

Science

• The various branches of the alternative industry make a lot of claims, and a lot of money off these claims. We looked into homeopathy, healing, detox, acupuncture and strange panacea machines supposedly utilizing bio-resonance or quantum mechanics. (Astrologists, psychics and mediums got a showing too, but let’s leave them alone to lick their wounds for now.)

Health/Nutrition

• As cannabis is taken more seriously as a medicine and a treatment, more people are taking a chance and using it as a treatment for terminal illnesses. This treatment has had overwhelmingly positive results for countless people who had no other hope of recovery. Every day more stories and scientific studies are appearing from all over the world where people of all ages, even young children, are cured of life-threatening illnesses with cannabis oil.

• Plain packaging has been a hot topic on the Kat this year, most recently with Guest Kat Niko’s post on the topic here. But if you thought that would be the last on the matter in 2015, think again. From the AmeriKat’s colleague, Jin Ooi (Allen & Overy), comes news of the latest development concerning Australia’s tobacco plain packaging legislation. The latest news saw a “win” for the Australian government against Philip Morris Asia Limited (“PM Asia”) in which the arbitral tribunal seated in Singapore issued a unanimous decision that it has no jurisdiction to hear Philip Morris’ claim.

Security

• You can hack any Linux system just by pressing the backspace key 28 times! That’s what some sites would have you believe after an unfortunate GRUB bug was recently made public. But this won’t actually allow you to easily own any Linux system.

• Security shortcomings in an internet-connected burglar alarm system from UK firm Texecom leave it open to hack attacks, an engineer turned security researcher warns.

• Luca Lo Castro said he had come across shortcomings in the encryption of communication after buying Texecom’s Premier Elite Control Panel and ComIP module and assembling it.

• To be able to remote control the alarm system remotely, you open a firewall port in the router and do a port forwarding to the internet. But this allows the mobile app to directly connect to the ComIP module over an unencrypted connection, Lo Castro discovered.

• Using WireShark, he said he had discovered that data traffic between the mobile app and the control panel is done in clear text or encoded to BASE64. That means potentially confidential information like the alarm control panel (UDL) password, device name and location are exposed, as a blog post by Lo Castro explains.

• I gave a presentation at 32C3 this week. One of the things I said was “If any of you are doing seriously confidential work on Apple laptops, stop. For the love of god, please stop.” I didn’t really have time to go into the details of that at the time, but right now I’m sitting on a plane with a ridiculous sinus headache and the pseudoephedrine hasn’t kicked in yet so here we go.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Reminding us the Revolution may well be tweeted if not televised, ISIS again used its much-vaunted social media savvy this weekend to broadcast the first new online rallying cry since May. In the 24-minute address delivered through ISIS-aligned media accounts, leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi told his audience, “Be confident that God will grant victory to those who worship him, and hear the good news that our state is doing well. We urgently call upon every Muslim to join the fight, especially those in the land of the two shrines (Saudi Arabia).” The message was re-tweeted in English by Iyad El-Baghdadi, a prominent human rights activist and ISIS foe initially confused by many online with al-Baghdadi himself. Soon after posting the ISIS message, he started getting mock replies from folks who preferred to join a growing, deft flurry of online anti-ISIS activity aimed at proving that “making fun of the enemy is the best way of defeating them.”

• The clan relations principle has been a prime factor in business affairs for centuries in numerous Islamic and Middle Eastern countries. Unfortunately, in recent months we’ve often witnessed evidence that in Turkey the family of Tayyip Erdogan has been transformed in some sort of carnivorous octopus that has not simply entangled the Turkish economy and politics, but has also extended its tentacles far beyond the state.

• It is hardly necessary to remind anyone of all the scandals in which the members of this family have been engaged. Here are just some examples of its connections with the Islamic State (ISIL) and other terrorist groups:

• Erdogan’s daughter – Sümeyye Erdogan – has been running a covert military hospital, which is treating Islamic State militants.

• News of the death of prominent anti-Assad commander (or ‘terrorist,’ ‘rebel,’ ‘opposition commander,’ etc.) Zahran Alloush has the potential to radically alter the nature of the war in Syria.

• These behavioral indicators have become central to the U.S. counterterrorism prevention strategy, yet critics say they don’t work. “Quite simply, they rely on generalized correlations found in selectively chosen terrorists without using control groups to see how often the correlated behaviors identified occur in the non-terrorist population,” Michael German, a former FBI agent who is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, told The Intercept.

• The trainings are based on flawed theories that just don’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, according to German. “The FBI, [National Counter-Terrorism Center], and [Department of Homeland Security] promote these theories despite the fact they have been refuted in numerous academic studies over the past 20 years,” he said.

• A huge fire has engulfed a 63-storey hotel in central Dubai ahead of a New Year’s Eve firework display.

• Despite the blaze at the Address hotel, the display at the nearby Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, started as planned at midnight.

• A massive fire was blazing at a 63-story hotel in downtown Dubai on Thursday night, near where tens of thousands of people had gathered for the world’s largest New Year’s Eve fireworks display.

• According to the Associated Press, “It was not immediately clear what caused the fire, which ran up at least 20 stories of the building, which would likely have been packed with people because of its clear view of the 828-meter (905-yard) tall Burj Khalifa.”

• The vital capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, once a city of half a million people, Ramadi has in the past seven months fell to ISIS, was surrounded and bombarded, and now (mostly) recovered by Iraq. As Iraqi officials tout their victory, however, it seems what they really won is a big repair bill.

• Antiwar.com has found that at least 51,738 people were killed across Iraq during 2015, while at least 19,651 were wounded. The number of fatalities reported was slightly higher than in 2014, but the number of wounded was substantially lower. These figures should be taken as very rough estimates and probably low estimates at that.

Transparency Reporting

• It’s the last day of the month, and that’s when the State Department releases additional tranches of Hillary Clinton’s email from her stint as Secretary of State. Here’s one from State’s chief of protocol keeping Hillary apprised of a joke Obama told about her at the White House Correspondent’s dinner.

• Well, of course New Year’s Eve would be the day the State Department releases thousands more privately stored e-mails from former Secretary of State (and presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton. Expect more next week.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• From droughts to floods to mega-storms, extreme weather over the past 365 days raises disturbing questions about future of climate chaos

• Runaway natural gas leak above Los Angeles has emitted more than 150 million pounds of methane since late October.

• The El Niño currently wreaking havoc around the world is forecast to only worsen in 2016 — and NASA experts fear it could get as bad as the most destructive El Niño ever.

• A new satellite image of the weather system “bears a striking resemblance to one from December 1997″ — the worst El Niño on record — which was blamed for extreme weather, including record rainfall in California and Peru, heat waves across Australia, and fires in Indonesia. The severe conditions resulted in an estimated 23,000 deaths in 1997 and 1998.

• BP is partially evacuating an oilfield in the North Sea because a barge has broken loose and is drifting out of control in rough weather.

• BP says it employs 235 people in the Valhall oilfield but it cannot confirm the number of people who were being evacuated Thursday.

• One worker has died and two others have been injured after huge waves hit a North sea platform. Statoil today confirmed the news after initially reporting three workers had been injured.

• The barge was 110m in length and 30m wide and there were fears that it could ram one of the rigs.

• Oil and gas giant British Petroleum (BP) is partially evacuating its Valhall oilfield in the North Sea as one of its barges is drifting in the sea uncontrolled, local media reported Thursday.

• California’s drought has already imperilled many of its trees, and within 80 years climate change could destroy the evergreen forests of the entire US southwest.

• This story has been updated to include buoy measurements that confirm the North Pole temperature climbed above 32 degrees on Wednesday.

• Once again, in 2015 the oil and gas industry showed us the ludicrous lengths they will go to in order to frack more communities. In the process, they created ample fodder for Comedy Central, and the likes of John Oliver, John Stewart, Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore. Here are a few of the worst head-shaking stunts that made the news in 2015:

• Governments must act immediately to end conflicts and counter the impact of climate disruption so as to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe affecting millions.

• Perhaps the most realistic assessment was posted by Guardian columnist George Monbiot on the day of the final deal. “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle,” he wrote. “By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” It is clear that those who are praising the agreement and those who emphasize its shortcomings live in almost entirely different worlds.

• [...]

• Still, the means for limiting average warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees are largely aspirational, and this is reflected in the agreement’s language throughout. Words like “clarity,” “transparency,” “integrity,” “consistency,” and “ambition” appear throughout the text, but there’s very little to assure that these aspirations can be realized. UN staff are to create all manner of global forums, working groups and expert panels to move the discussions forward but, as was clear prior to Paris, the main focus is to instill a kind of moral obligation to drive diplomats and their governments to take further steps. Article 15 of the agreement proposes a “mechanism to facilitate implementation and promote compliance,” but this takes the form of an internationally representative “expert-based” committee that is to be “transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive.” This compliance “mechanism” is described in three short sentences in the main Agreement and another couple of paragraphs in the Adoption document; as predicted, there’s nothing to legally pressure intransigent countries or corporations to do much of anything.

• Whether they were covering extreme weather events or presidential campaign events, media outlets often came up short in their reporting on climate change this year. But 2016 will be a fresh opportunity for improved climate coverage. With that in mind, here are five resolutions for reporters looking to provide better coverage of climate change in the new year.

Finance

• This corrupt higher education “industry” ought to be put out of business.

• Donald Trump, billionaire Republican presidential frontrunner, has changed his mind about wages: Americans aren’t earning enough. He’s also not keen on Wall Street. The shift has Trump on a collision course with Democrat Bernie Sanders – while oddly agreeing with many of his points.

• “Wages in are [sic] country are too low, good jobs are too few, and people have lost faith in our leaders. We need smart and strong leadership now!” Trump tweeted on Monday.

• City regulators haven’t enforced a 2007 law that requires doormen, janitors and other service workers at taxpayer-subsidized apartment buildings to be paid wages comparable to union rates.

• Island commonwealth faces close to $1bn in interest payments in 2016 but governor says it will do ‘all it can’ to avoid shutting down government services

• Blowing the budget left and right

• 2016 is the year to put ‘the interests of communities and the environment before the interests of multinational corporations’

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• WorldNetDaily’s founder and editor Joseph Farah is one of the nation’s leading purveyors of “birther” conspiracy theories — the repeatedly debunked notion that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya — publishing more than 600 posts on the topic. Even after Obama released his long-form birth certificate indicating his birth in Hawaii, Farah claimed that this proved nothing. Trump has frequently repeated these claims and Politico reported in 2011 that Farah frequently advised the billionaire investor and former reality show host.

• This is the new reality that I helped research while working with Columbia Journalism School’s “ RT Watch” project. For the better part of 2015, the project compiled RT’s output, attempting to examine how, or whether, RT deserves its reputation as a bulwark for Kremlin-friendly programming. Alongside a group of other Columbia graduate students, we watched, read, and consumed RT for hours a day, months on end. We piled our findings—the deceits, the distractions, the direction RT takes—over at the RT Watch blog, along with assorted social media accounts. As one observer said, we watched RT so you didn’t have to. After subsuming ourselves in the entire RT gestalt, I’d like to share some of the things I found.

Censorship

• But America’s principles should be why we hold the nation to such a high standard, not give it a pass for good intentions and high-minded ideals. We say we’re for free speech, so we should mean it. Unfortunately, as we bomb and invade, so we sometimes violate free speech. For most of our history, we’ve managed to at least be better than the rest of the world when it comes to allowing free expression.

• TWITTER IS CLOSING OFF 2015 with updated guidance on what it will and will not stand for on its microchatting pages.

• The Twitter rules have been updated and blogged about. The message is that change is necessary if the firm is to manage free speech and keep people happy.

• “We believe that protection from abuse and harassment is a vital part of empowering people to freely express themselves on Twitter,” said Megan Cristina, who is dubbed a Twitter director for Trust + Safety.

• Twitter Inc has clarified its definition of abusive behavior that will prompt it to delete accounts, banning “hateful conduct” that promotes violence against specific groups.

• Copyright holders asked Google to remove more than 560,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine in 2015. The staggering number is an increase of 60% compared to the year before. According to Google the continued surge is a testament that the DMCA takedown process is working, but some copyright holders disagree.

• French magazine journalist – ousted by Beijing after writing about repression of the Uighur minority – says reporters must find a way around barriers

• A French reporter forced to leave China by authorities after she criticised government policy in violence-wracked, mainly Muslim Xinjiang, said she had been left with a feeling of “surreality” Thursday ahead of her departure.

• A French reporter forced to leave China after she was accused of supporting terrorism for criticising government policy in violence-wracked, mainly Muslim Xinjiang, was preparing to leave on Thursday.

• A French reporter forced to leave China after she was accused of supporting terrorism for criticising government policy in violence-wracked Xinjiang was preparing to leave on Thursday.

• Ursula Gauthier wrote an article in the magazine L’Obs questioning official comparisons between global terrorism and the unrest in Xinjiang.

• China’s parliament passed a controversial new anti-terrorism law on Sunday that requires technology firms to hand over sensitive information such as encryption keys to the government and allows the military to venture overseas on counter-terror operations.

• Chinese officials say their country faces a growing threat from militants and separatists, especially in its unruly Western region of Xinjiang, where hundreds have died in violence in the past few years.

Privacy

• So that’s that. The NSA spied on Netanyahu. That’s a nothingburger. Of course they spied on Netanyahu. And the NSA says that they properly minimized the congressional end of any conversations between Netanyahu and a member of Congress. Since conservatives insist that we should take their word for this in general, why shouldn’t we take their word for it now? Wake me up if it turns out there’s anything more to this story.

• Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) privately defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even as he publicly condemned the practice.

• The latest chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s career ended in November, when the Harvard Law School professor concluded his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. That effort centered on his campaign to reform Congressional politics. Prior to that, Prof. Lessig’s scholarship, teaching and activism focused on technology policy and the Internet. He has argued for greater sharing of creative content, the easing of restrictions in areas such as copyright, and the concept of Net Neutrality. Prof. Lessig, who founded the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, is the author of numerous books on technology, including “Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” and “The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.”

• DARK WEB GATEKEEPER AND PRIVACY ENABLER the Tor Project is taking a leaf out of the rest of the industry and is offering security researchers prizes for bringing its weaknesses to its attention.

• All eyes are on Tor already. The privacy-aware browser is already a hot topic at the National Security Agency (NSA), and has a price on its head in Russia. With such attention, it makes sense that the outfit behind it would seek to get ahead of the game.

• But encryption is now in the spotlight. Should the maths that underpins it be banned in the name of foiling terrorist plans, or should we accept that there is some information our governments will never know?

• Top Democrats in Congress are brushing off a report that U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between Israeli government officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

• Rep. Eliot Engel (N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said it is no secret that the U.S. and Israel spy on each other, even though they are allies.

• “I’m not surprised,” he told The Hill. “I kind of think the report is much to do about nothing.”

• Engel, a staunch supporter of Israel, said he met twice behind closed doors with Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer during the heated debate over the nuclear agreement with Iran. He said Dermer presented the Israeli government’s case against the deal.

• A U.S. House of Representatives committee asked the National Security Agency on Wednesday for information about a media report that the agency, while spying on Israeli officials, also intercepted communications between the Israelis and members of Congress.

• In a letter to NSA Director Michael Rogers, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz and subcommittee Chairman Ron DeSantis said the story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal raised “questions concerning the processes NSA employees follow in determining whether intercepted communications involved Members of Congress.”

• This news sparked a denunciation by Florida Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio. “Obviously people read this report, they have a right to be concerned this morning about it,” said Rubio on Fox News Wednesday morning. “They have a right to be concerned about the fact that while some leaders around the world are no longer being targeted, one of our strongest allies in the Middle East – Israel – is. I actually think it might be worse than what some people might think, but this is an issue that we’ll keep a close eye on, and the role that I have in the intelligence committee.”

• If you’ve spent any time reading about encryption this year, you know we’re in the midst of a “debate.” You may have also noted that it’s a strange debate, one that largely replays the same arguments made nearly 20 years ago, when the government abandoned its attempts to mandate weakened encryption and backdoors. Now some parts of the government have been trying to revisit that decision in the name of achieving “balance” between user security and public safety. The FBI, for example, acknowledges that widespread adoption of encryption has benefits for users, but it also claims its investigations of terrorists, criminals, and other wrongdoers will “go dark” unless it has a legal authority and the technical capability to read encrypted data. But because the principles of what makes encryption secure haven’t changed, the only “balance” that can satisfy the government’s goals is no balance at all—it would require dramatically rolling back the spread of strong encryption.

• In the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, 54 percent of Americans say it can be necessary for the government to sacrifice freedoms to fight terrorism; 45 percent disagree. About half of Americans think it is acceptable to allow warrantless government analysis of internet activities and communications—even of American citizens—in order to keep an eye out for suspicious activity. About 3 in 10 are against this type of government investigation.

• Privacy advocates are accusing politicians generally deferential to the government’s mass surveillance programs of hypocrisy after leading hawks expressed concern about the possible collection of their own communications.

• Collection on members of Congress, revealed this week by The Wall Street Journal, was performed by the National Security Agency with a wink-and-nod from the White House, which was intent on countering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bid to derail the Iran nuclear deal.

• Congress took action in 2015 to address privacy and transparency, but state legislatures emerged as the nation’s leaders for policy innovation. From Virginia to California, states adopted new policies to reclaim digital privacy, advance government transparency, and protect free expression. These new laws both protect residents of these states, and also provide models for other jurisdictions to emulate.

• A recent report has revealed that the National Security Agency intercepted communications involving Israeli officials and members of Congress. Republicans are now requesting that the NSA provide them with the details.

• The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has opened an investigation into U.S. surveillance practices following a report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that the National Security Agency (NSA), an intelligence agency in the executive branch, may have intentionally swept up communications between U.S. lawmakers and Israeli officials.

• U.S. Rep. Peter King said reports that the National Security Agency dropped in on private conversations of congressmen while spying on Israel raise questions about whether the lawmakers were the real target — and the legality of the whole operation.

• After two years of doing little about the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden, the US Congress has sprung into action in less than two days – with investigations into the NSA spying on some the legislature’s members.

Civil Rights

• The politics of guns in 2015 was largely shaped by a series of newsmaking horrible multiple-casualty murders in public places. Each one inspired Democratic Party politicians, including President Obama and frontrunning 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to call for a similar set of what they now call “common sense gun safety” laws (“gun control” has lost its luster since Al Gore’s 2000 presidential loss).

• A new study clears up any lingering doubt that the Republican Party engaged in the tactic of dogwhistle politics in the 2008 presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. The study, which was published online this month in Public Opinion Quarterly, shows that the McCain campaign’s negative ads about Obama overwhelmingly featured him with a darker skin tone in a subtle attempt to appeal to voters’ racial prejudices.

• But the cover actually understates the weight of the evidence against Cosby. It’s not just the detailed allegations of more than 50 women that implicates Cosby. He is also implicated by his own description of his conduct.

• Kevin Steele, the Pennsylvania prosecutor who charged Cosby today, relied on Cosby’s own statements to support a charge of Aggravated Indecent Assault. The criminal complain filed by Steele revealed that Cosby told police investigators that he gave Amanda Comstand “one whole pill and one half pill” of “over-the-counter Benadryl” even though he knew the pills would “make him go to sleep right away.” He then acknowledged having sexual contact with her when he knew she would not be fully conscious.

• In the first season of Veep, the brilliant political comedy from HBO, Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) gets, um, wind that in the coming year, a hurricane will share her name. “Shit!” she says. “What if it hits and we get headlines saying, ‘Selina causing large-scale devastation?’” Needless to say, her staff eventually gets the name of the storm changed.

• It’s hilarious, and it’s consistent with the show’s portrayal of much of Washington as an endless cycle of image control and crisis management. How much should we trust it?

• On December 28th, 2015, the foreign ministers of Japan and Korea, suddenly and hastily announced a “resolution” to the “comfort women” issue, women trafficked and exploited as sexual slaves by the Japanese Army during WWII. This involved an apology by the Japanese prime minister, and the creation of fund for reparations.

• “The issue of ‘comfort women’ was a matter which, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, severely injured the honor and dignity of many women,” said the Japanese Foreign Minister. 1 billion yen ($8.3M) was also promised to the fund to assist the 46 surviving comfort women.

• It’s always amusing, if only bitterly, when government shows its true colors of obdurate opposition to human safety and happiness in the name of its bogus authority.

• The history of the US is soaked in blood.

• [...]

• As Ned and Constance Sublette make clear in their comprehensive and exhaustive history, The American Slave Coast, that profit was not only determined by the labor of the enslaved but also in the slaves’ bodies themselves, including the potential production of more slaves. The authors call this latter status the “capitalized womb.” In a manner similar to the projection of an animal’s potential reproduction capabilities through several generations, the potential offspring of enslaved girls and women was considered when they were sold and when their owners applied for credit. As an example, supposedly when one kills a hen with their vehicle in some countries, the driver of the vehicle pays the farmer who owned the hen for the hen, but also for all the chickens the hen might have produced and another generation that those chickens would have produced. There is a certain formula used by the legal system in these situations to determine the sum total owed by the offending driver. Slaveowners and traders also agreed upon such a formula in the antebellum United States.

• Although extreme, Danczuk, unfortunately, is far from anomalous within the Labour Party at present, both in parliament and in local councils. Following the expulsion of socialists in the 1980s and 1990s and, later, the creation of Tony Blair’s nefarious “New Labour”, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) has been dominated by neoliberal apologists and class collaborationists. What differentiates Danczuk from this clique, however, is his constant and calculated appeals to a speciously defined working class culture in order to justify his divisive views.

• Reuters reporters Charles Levinson and David Rohde (the former New York Times reporter who was held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan for seven months, until he escaped) cite Ba Odah’s case in their latest article, writing, “Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president’s plan to close Guantanamo.”

• Before Arenas-Alvarez could communicate to the officers that his infant daughter was in the car, the “two minutes” had passed and Sgt. Mitchell arrived with his Belgian Malinois. Almost as soon as he exited the vehicle, Mithcell released the K-9 into the SUV of an entirely innocent man and his daughter. Photo Credit: c/o The Free Thought Project

• Henderson, NV — On January 30, 2015, a health food store in Henderson called the police after a disgruntled customer, attempting to return some protein powder, allegedly threatened to rob them. The store described the suspect to police as a black male wearing a black and tan t-shirt who left in an SUV. Shop ▾

• As police responded to the call, they quickly stopped the first person they saw, who happened to be Arturo Arenas-Alvarez. Arenas-Alvarez had just pulled up in the shopping center to do some shopping when police drew their weapons and demanded he put his hands in the air and step toward them.

• Arenas-Alvarez did not appear to understand why multiple armed men were pointing their guns at him, so one officer asked him in Spanish to approach the vehicle.

• Before Arenas-Alvarez makes it all the way to the vehicle, officers realized they had the wrong guy.

• [...]

• Below is the horrifying video of the incident which illustrates the sheer violent and unaccountable nature of police in the US.

• Criminals, terrorists, and madmen with guns—how fears of violence reshaped American politics

• When an entire field of candidates tend to thrive on bullshit (especially the current front-runners), it is not at all surprising that they have certain reliable terms that vilify critics of their bullshit and shut down debate. The truth is, Republicans have long utilized a manipulative phraseology, full of euphemisms and doublespeak, used either to shut down criticism and debate, as shown above, or to acerbate the listener’s emotional state — think “baby parts” and “death panels” — or provide a positive light on something that is generally frowned upon. (Ergo: Tax-avoiding billionaires become “job-creators.”) The GOP has become truly masterful at distorting political discussion through language, and at each Republican debate, just about every candidate showcases this manipulation. In George Orwell’s classic essay on this subject, “Politics and the English Language,” he seems to describe modern Republicans to a tee, repeating the same tired, yet convenient phrases (the phrases have changed, of course).

• Texas State Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R) apologized Wednesday after the Texas Observer published a 2008 quote from an online post in which the lawmaker joked that nothing a husband does to his wife could possibly be rape.

• The rape “joke,” accompanied by a yellow smiley emoticon giving a thumbs-up sign, was : “Rape is non existent in marriage, take what you want my friend!”

• Stickland told the publication that he ““severely regrets” the comments now. “I do not feel that way today. I can only repent and ask for forgiveness from the people it offended and hurt. Rape is serious and should never be joked about the way that I did regardless of my age,” he explained. Stickland’s official biography indicates that he is now 32 years old.

• The debate may prove to be academic—a new opinion poll shows 86 percent of French people saying oui to the idea. If approved, the amendment might still be challenged at the European Court of Human Rights, but don’t hold your breath: Citizenship-stripping in the name of fighting terrorism is on the rise worldwide, including in Europe.

• The failure to indict a police officer for yet another killing of a young, Black person – this time a child, 12-year-old Tamir Rice – should outrage us and cause us to look more deeply at the structures that make both Rice’s shooting and the non-indictment mutually reinforcing acts. Similarly, the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the brilliant organizing within it compels us to look at the relationship between crime and policing in a new way: it forces our society to confront how it allows the police to get away with committing crimes against Black and brown communities.

• When it comes to policing, civil and human rights lawyers are myth busters. We work with organizers, activists and journalists, to bust storied myths, passed down through generations, that attempt to normalize unaccountable police power and the abuses that inevitably flow from it. We also bust the myths about Black and brown criminality that many people believe are true, but simply aren’t.

• Want a ringside seat for the war on crime? Go to killedbypolice.net. A few hours ago (as I write this), the site had listed 1,191 police killings in the U.S. this year. I just looked again.

• The total is up one.

• Every December, I make a list of what I think are the best movies released that year. It has never seemed so beside the point as it does this time, looking back at 12 months in which the moving images that actually mattered — the ones that needed to change the national conversation and maybe even started to — weren’t on multiplex screens or dialed up through our cable guide but came crashing through our browsers, our cellphones, and on the nightly news.

• To me, the most important movie of 2015 was the police car dash-cam video of the July arrest of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, in Prairie View, Texas. Not just the three minutes or so of the altercation with a white police officer that resulted in Bland’s being taken to the local jail, where she allegedly hung herself three days later, but the entire 52-minute expanse of the tape, for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment.

• Confined in Ecuador’s embassy in London, Assange shows a patent physical and psychological deterioration. But with his intellectual voracity and capacity of attention intact, he seeks international and Argentinean support.

• Former Florida governor and current Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush told reporters that a grand jury’s decision not to indict police officers in the shooting of 12-year old Tamir Rice shows that “the process worked.”

• “If there is a grand jury that looks at all the facts and doesn’t indict maybe there’s reasons for that,” Bush said Wednesday night in Lexington, South Carolina. “I don’t believe that every grand jury is racist.”

• It’s also sort of stunning that apparently violent crime was basically flat in the second half of the year. That means violent crime was up about 40 percent from January-June, and then dropped to 0 percent in July-December. This is…a little hard to believe. And no, the deployment of 200 more Metro cops can’t even remotely account for that.

• Anyway, I’ll be curious to see what happens next year. Maybe this whole thing is just an artifact of better crime statistics. Hard to say. In any case, the mayor says LA is safer than at any time since the 1950s. I’m not sure how he figures that, but apparently that means there’s nothing to worry about. Go about your business, citizens.

• Most Americans believe Muslims deserve religious freedom, according to a poll by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. 61 percent said religious liberty was important for people of Muslim faith, though the number is dwarfed by the 82 percent who believe Christians’ religious liberty is important.

• The figure wasn’t drastically different along political lines either, as 60 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats supported religious protections for Muslims. Those numbers for Christians were 88 and 83 percent, respectively.

• “These numbers seem to be part of a growing climate of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States,” Madihha Ahussain, an attorney for Muslim Advocates, a California-based civil rights group, told AP. “This climate of hatred has contributed to dozens of incidents of anti-Muslim violence in recent weeks.”

• Eyewitness accounts from neighbors appear to confirm a Chicago police officer began shooting into the home of Quintonio Legrier and Bettie Jones from several feet away while standing on the sidewalk. That contradicts the police department’s early account, which suggests one of the officers opened fire in the entryway after Legrier confronted him.

• Legrier, a 19-year-old engineering student, and Jones, a 55-year-old mother of five and workers’ rights activist, were shot on Saturday when officers responded to a domestic disturbance call at their home around 4:30 a.m. Jones opened the door when police responded to a call from Legrier’s father.

• Members of New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled state legislature are pushing for a bill that would make it illegal for a woman to show her nipples in public. And while the bill contains an exemption for breast-feeding, that didn’t stop representatives from sharing their opinions on the matter of public breast-feeding on social media Tuesday night.

• The Orlando Sentinel reports Sherry Campbell, who works as a 911 dispatcher, told investigators she was awakened by what she thought was a stranger breaking into her home. That noise was actually the sound of her daughter, Ashley Doby, moving about the house. Campbell fired a single shot that fatally struck Doby in the chest.

• In 2015, 457 people died from 353 mass shootings (as of December 17). After Congress blocked legislative efforts, the president will now take executive action to attempt to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals.

• His comment calls to mind those made by current and former heads of the Cleveland union, which represents the officers responsible for Rice’s death. Former boss Jeffrey Follmer previously said on MSNBC that Rice was an imminent lethal threat who might have survived had he listened to police commands—even though the 12-year-old boy was given less than one second to react to purely hypothetical orders before he was fired upon. Current boss Steve Loomis had even worse things to say: he called Rice “menacing.”

• This year saw a flood of passionate, creative, often furious protests, with many in this country focused on racist police and economic inequality. Revisit some of those most powerfully suggesting that, with concerted collective action, change is possible. Take heart. And a peaceful new year.

• Grand Rapids, MI — Suffering permanent physical and mental damage after a Michigan police officer savagely beat his head bloody with a flashlight, an unarmed teen recently filed a federal lawsuit against the cops for violating his Fourth Amendment rights. Although the teen was cleared of the charges against him, none of the officers involved in the beating received any disciplinary action.

• Among the progressive issues that won on local ballots this fall, November 4th, voters approved every initiative to raise the minimum wage in the five states where they appeared.

• The year also saw decisions to have phased-in minimum wage hikes in Los Angeles, Seattle, Oakland, and San Francisco.

• And the Huffington Post points to a recent analysis showing that workers in 14 states will see the minimum wage go up.

• Contributor Erik Sherman wrote previously at Forbes: “With 28 states now supporting minimum wages higher than the federal level, pressure on Congress will increase, while states with lower figures could find themselves economically uncompetitive for workers and, therefore, businesses.”

• In the summer of 2014, a series of incidents of police brutality brought the issue of excessive force into the mainstream national debate. Since then, progress on the reform front has been slow, but still moving. Police shootings in 2015, from that of Walter Scott in South Carolina to Jamar Clark in Minneapolis, have received more attention, from the media, the public, and authorities, than similar cases in previous years. That’s led to a tripling in prosecutions of police officers on murder and manslaughter charges in 2015—there were a total of 18 cops charged this year. This year also saw the White House launch a panel on police reform, which called for more guidelines, training, and spending, but offered little in the way of introspection on how our culture of more laws contributes to endemic police violence.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• So, you must’ve heard about Facebook’s plan to “bring the Internet to the poor in India” that they’ve named Internet.org/Free Basics. If you’ve read the plan in detail, you’ll see that it isn’t really bringing the Internet to anyone for free. Well, technically it is, but let’s look at the complete picture before we begin celebrating, shall we?

• Fact: “Free basics” is not providing free access to the whole of the Internet.

• For a few weeks now, we’ve been telling you about a worrisome EU consultation on regulating the internet. That consultation was supposed to end today — but it’s been extended a week. As we noted recently, the survey technology built by the EU Commission had a major bug in it, meaning that many people had their submissions rejected. Based on this, we requested that they extend the survey. We got back two separate responses, the first telling us that they were very sorry, but it would be “impossible” to extend the survey. The second response was that they had agreed to extend the survey one week… but only for people who had run into problems. Given the two conflicting responses, I asked for more information on this (including how they would keep it open only for those people). I also asked if they were planning to announce this anywhere. I was told that it would likely be impossible to make an announcement, and I never heard anything else, as I believe many left for the holidays.

Intellectual Monopolies

• It is so easy to get wrapped up in one’s own orbit. What impacts you right here and right now, be it your local weather, your commuter train delays or the decision of your local patents judge, is often as far as your daily horizon ventures. However, it is becoming increasingly important that IP practitioners look further afield as to what is happening in IP law and practice in other jurisdictions. Much like a lion, the IPKat prides itself in bringing news of important decisions from other jurisdictions.

• The lack of action in Congress was 2015’s biggest disappointment. House and Senate committees both managed to pass reasonable bills aimed at reducing litigation abuse by patent trolls. Meanwhile, opponents of reform tried to muddy the waters by introducing a terrible bill that would make it even harder to challenge bad patents at the Patent Office. In the end, legislative reform efforts stalled over the summer and Congress did nothing. Lawmakers might return to the issue before the next election. With trolls running rampant, we need legislative reform now more than ever.

• While we did not see blockbuster Supreme Court patent decisions like last year, there was some progress in the courts. Most importantly, the lower courts have applied the 2014 ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank (which held that abstract ideas do not become patentable simply because they are implemented on generic computers) to invalidate a significant number of abstract software patents. The outlier, of course, is the Eastern District of Texas which is granting motions based on Alice at much lower rates than other courts. This has created an even greater incentive for trolls to flock to that district.

• Last session, legislators introduced AB 463, which would have required drug companies to detail the profits and expenses on the development of all treatments that cost more than $10,000. It failed, but it was part of this same anti-gouging approach epitomized in the drug-price ballot initiative.

• I loved the idea of Wikipedia in the early years. I used to read encyclopaediae, the dead-tree-kind, as a boy. My father bought them from door-to-door salesmen. I kept them with me for years. With the Internet and search engines the dead-tree-kinds are pretty well obsolete. When Wikipedia came along, I made a local copy for use in the North. The Internet connection could drop and we were still on the air thanks to a LAMP stack. Kids loved it. I worked at it. It took weeks of sifting through articles and hundreds of thousands of images to remove age-inappropriate content. I did that.

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