● 01.30.16

● Links 30/1/2016: Neptune 4.5, *buntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus Alpha 2

Posted in News Roundup at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• One year ago, I switched to Linux operating system from windows and I realized how much I’ve been missing so much of the customization that is offered by Linux. So Why you should move to Linux? There are a number of advantages and there are some downsides too.

• In all, 449 of you voted, and a whopping 48.8 percent of you, that would be 219 votes, said that when it comes to considering what to run on your desktop Linux box, the choice of distro and desktop get equal weight, or thereabouts.

Server

• The answer to this question depends on what you need. Zentyal is an amazing server that does a great job running your SMB network. If you need a bit more, such as groupware, your best bet is to go with ClearOS. If you don’t need groupware, either server will do an outstanding job.

• I highly recommend installing both of these all-in-one servers to see which will best serve your small company needs.

• The group hopes its reference software platform will help accelerate the adoption of ARM-based systems in the data center to challenge Intel. When talking about ARM-based processors running in servers and other data center systems, the challenge has been as much getting the necessary software and ecosystem support together as it has ensuring the chips can handle the workloads.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation recently announced a new partnership with Linux Academy on discounted Linux training for SysAdmins.

Graphics Stack

• Dutch software firm StreamComputing has launched an educational project aiming to get more developers using OpenCL and as part of this initiative they will try to port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible.

• While the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver right now exposes support for AMD GCN 1.2 GPUs and newer, like Carrizo, Fiji, and Tonga, it is possible to get GCN 1.1 Sea Islands hardware working with this driver if jumping through a few hoops. In this article are some tests of a Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” when using the proprietary Catalyst driver, Radeon DRM driver as is the default for this card on open-source, and then using the experimental AMDGPU DRM open-source support.

Applications

• gThumb is not a popular app, and that’s a real shame. Even if it has been around for almost 15 years, people don’t know about it. With the GNOME stack integrating so many apps, who’s going to notice one more? Yet, users should give it a try, regardless of their running Ubuntu with its old repos or something more up to date.

• Varnish is distributed as both source and binary packages. Please choose the appropriate version for your platform.

• HDR images are intended to capture more than this number of stops. (Depending on your patience, significantly more in some cases).

• Kovid Goyal has proudly announced today, January 29, the release of an important milestone in the development of the world’s most popular free ebook library management tool, Calibre 2.50.

• Kodi 16 “Jarvis” has received a second RC, and the developers have managed to close a few problems that have been reported since the first RC.

• Kodi 16.0 “Jarvis” is quite close to being released with today marking the availability of their second release candidate.

• Kodi 16.0 RC2 fixes some crashes, increases time-outs when searching for audio devices on Windows, and fixes on saving settings when switching between different profiles.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The creator of Gary’s Mod and Rust, one of the most successful titles on Steam, has said that if he could do it all again, he wouldn’t have supported the Linux platform

• SNOW is incredibly interesting, mainly as it’s our first proper winter sports type game to have on Linux & SteamOS, it’s a bit buggy though. It’s free, so no big loss right now if it’s a bit iffy.

• The reason we talk about Croteam in the Linux section is because they were also among the first major studios to port one of their games to Linux when Steam for Linux was still in diapers. Serious Sam 3 was the only triple A game on Steam for Linux for a long time, and they continued to update it and to improve the user experience.

• A few websites are reporting that Steam for Linux has hit 1900 games after only hitting 1800 around nine days ago, this is false. We are currently on 1820.

• Right now 1,913 Linux games are being listed on Steam while there are 2,913 listed Mac OS X games on Steam and 7,587 listed Windows titles available on this digital distribution service. It will certainly be interesting to see what the rest of the year looks like for Linux gaming with how quickly Vulkan-powered games are released, what happens to SteamOS and Steam Machines throughout the year, what unexpected AAA Linux games get released, and if the Linux desktop manages to become more widely adopted by Steam gamers while right now the listed Steam Linux market-share is about 1%.

• Bundle Stars has released an awesome bundle, featuring 8 excellent games with Linux support. Time to grab some cheap games.

• I’ve been waiting for this for many months, and Valve has finally fixed their Steam store filters to allow you to view only Upcoming games on SteamOS & Linux.

• It’s insane how long it actually took them to fix this. It was reported to them in March of last year on github, and it wasn’t working for quite a while before then from what I remember.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I answered that KMail and KDEPIM are still alive and they still continue to be maintain[ed].

• Today I made my first talk in a big event, I talked about Qt and C++, and on this talk a 100 people show up, but only 6 people on that group knew about Qt. I remembered when I started to study Qt, and it’s really hard to find Qt programmers on Brazil, until I met the people from KDE Brazil. So my talk was about how to create user interfaces with Qt. What modules we should use to make an app. If is better use QtWidgets or QtQuick. And I think that I made a impression. =D

• Qt 5.6 brings improved high-DPI support, in the form of better support for the devicePixelRatio scaling mode. In this blog we’ll look at how to configure and enable it, from the perspective of a Qt application user and a Qt application developer.

• There are still some things that needs fixing. The current installer is built from git master and not from released packages so the translation stuff hat you usually get with the release packages are missing. So only partially translated. Another feature that I’m still missing is the spell-check. I need to still add a/hspell and language dictionaries to get that to work.

• A few month ago I reported that Snorenotify is becoming a KDE project.

• The Qt 5.7 release is running slightly behind schedule due to the recent licensing changes with open-sourcing some new components and other reasons, but upstream Qt developers are now planning for the feature freeze to happen next week.

• Jonathan Riddell, the former Kubuntu release manager that was ousted from the project, will be announcing a “KDE Neon” incubator project this weekend at FOSDEM.

• Riddell posted a quick blog post on his personal site about there being a KDE Neon launch party on Saturday night in Brussels followed by a talk on Sunday about the new project.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It looks like the GTK+ developers are working hard not only on the upcoming GTK+ 3.20 release but also on the stable branch, the one used for the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.

• The developers of the GNOME Builder application, an open-source piece of software that lets skilled developers build the most awesome GNOME software, have announced their participation in the development cycle for GNOME 3.20.

• I was really pleased to see Endless, the little company with big plans, initiate a GNOME Design hackfest in Rio.

• The ground team in Rio arranged a visit to two locations where we met with the users that Endless is targeting. While not strictly a user testing session, it helped to better understand the context of their product and get a glimpse of the lives in Rocinha, one of the Rio famous favelas or a more remote rural Magé. Probably wouldn’t have a chance to visit Brazil that way.

Distributions

• Wondering which is the best operating system for ethical hacking and pen testing purposes? Trying to solve this problem, fossBytes has prepared a list of the most efficient Linux distros for hacking purposes that you need to check out in 2016.

• Glen McArthur has just posted a preview video of what will become the next release of AV Linux. The upcoming release will be based on a carefully put together version of Debian testing, optimised for use with audio production.

Reviews

• And so, up to the final bit, Manjaro 15.12 Xfce gets a very nice 8.5/10. It’s improved a lot, and it’s become an interesting choice for home use. However, with the Windows problem and kernel crash taken into account, the grade goes down to zero, because we have a system that simply cannot be used. Food for thought and debug. Maybe the next version.

New Releases

• We are proud to announce Neptune 4.5 the 5th service release to the Neptune 4.x series. This version comes with some core updates to the system including LTS Kernel 3.18.25, Systemd 227, libc6 2.19, Mesa 10.5.9, Alsa 1.0.27 and more. For the first time we also offer a testing version of our Plasma 5 version based on Plasma 5.5.3 as seperate ISO download. The usual software Updates like Chromium updated to version 46 and Icedove to 38.5 are also included. We replaced TrueCrypt with VeraCrypt which is compatible with TrueCrypt Containers.

• Neptune is a Linux operating system fully based upon Debian 7.0 (‘Wheezy’), has been updated once more by its developers.

• The IPFire development team announced last evening the immediate availability for download or update of the IPFire 2.17 Core Update 97 Linux kernel-based firewall distribution.

• As you probably understood URIX OS is a general purpose OS. URIX is a live OS runnable from USB and ISO.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

Red Hat Family

• BofA/Merrill has issued rating on RED HAT INC COM in the latest move. Company shares are now Downgraded by BofA/Merrill to ” Neutral”. The firm had an earlier rating of “Buy ” on RED HAT INC COM. The rating information was released on Jan 26, 2016 by BofA/Merrill.

• Bank of America lowered shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) from a buy rating to a neutral rating in a research report report published on Tuesday, The Fly reports. Bank of America currently has $80.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock, down from their prior price target of $90.00.

• As it reflects the theoretical cost of buying the company’s shares, the market cap of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is currently rolling at 12306.76, making it one of the key stocks in today’s market. Hence, the existing market cap indicates a preferable measure in comprehending the size of the company rather than its worth.

• Red Hat Inc is a provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to develop and offer reliable and high-performing operating system, middleware, virtualization, storage and cloud technologies.

• The origin-artwork that inspired Overpass (Highway Gothic) is public domain.

Fedora

• The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the 2016 Flock conference, coming August 2-5, 2016 in Krakow, Poland. At Flock, Fedora contributors gather to promote and discuss ideas to improve our distro, community, and userbase, and promote our core values: Freedom, Friends, Features, First.

Debian Family

• We reported a couple of days ago that the Tor Project announced the release of the Firefox-based Tor Browser 5.5 anonymous web browser for all supported platforms, but they’ve also published details about the first Alpha build of the next major release.

Derivatives

• Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) version 2.0 has been released. It is a Debian-based security-focused Linux distribution, and it is designed to increase privacy and anonymity online. This release fixes many security issues, and users should upgrade as soon as possible.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It seems like a whole lot of Mark Shuttleworth interviews are starting to pile up these days, and today we would like to inform our readers about a recent one, where the Ubuntu founder talks about the latest cloud technologies coming from Canonical.

• Like most mobile carriers across the globe, AT&T has embraced Linux — in fact, the Linux kernel powers the Android platform. But AT&T recently surprised a lot of people by turning its back on Microsoft and adopting Ubuntu as its cloud, enterprise, and application solution provider. In addition, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) will provide support for these platforms/solutions.

• Canonical, through Łukasz Zemczak, informs us today about the latest work done by the developers of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system in preparation for the upcoming OTA-9.5 hotfix update.

Flavours and Variants

• The Chinese developers behind the deepin Linux kernel-based operating system have announced the immediate availability for download of the first point release of deepin 15.

• The Ubuntu Kylin developers have just released today, January 28, 2016, the second Alpha build of the upcoming Ubuntu Kylin 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) computer operating system.

• Ubuntu MATE 16.04 Alpha 2 has finally landed, and its developers are saying that it’s the biggest update so far.

• The Ubuntu MATE developers are spoiling its users with bigger and bigger changelog with each new edition. From the looks of it, the upcoming Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS is going to be a really big upgrade, and that’s easy to notice form the changelog that’s been posted. Besides the large number of fixes and other improvements, there are quite a few package upgrades.

• We’re preparing Lubuntu 16.04, Xenial Xerus, for distribution in April 2016. 16.04 will be an LTS. As 16.04 is an LTS, the focus is on looking out for and fixing bugs.

• As expected, Lubuntu is one of the opt-in flavors for the two Alpha and one Beta build of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system from Canonical, and Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Alpha 2 just arrived earlier for testing.

Devices/Embedded

• Shenzhen Xunlong launched a $10, Linux- and Android-friendly “Orange Pi One” hacker board with a quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC and a Pi-compatible expansion port.

• Even with competition from the $9 Chip and $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, 2015’s biggest price/performance breakthrough among open-spec SBCs was arguably the $15 Orange Pi PC. Unlike the single-core Chip and Zero, the Orange Pi PC delivered the performance goods with a quad-core Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3 SoC, while offering more ports, including HDMI, Ethernet, quad USB, and Pi-compatible expansion. Now Shenzhen Xunlong has spun a similar, stripped down Orange Pi One variant for only $10 — or $13.77 if you want it shipped to the U.S.

• Element14 has spun an industrial version of the BeagleBone Black with -20 to 85°C support, while BeagleBoard.org is prepping a “BeagleBone Blue” for robots.

• The Raspberry Pi single board computer has seen numerous spin-offs in recent years, from official Raspberry Pi Foundation models like the Zero to competitive, third-party lookalikes like the Banana Pi and new, $10 Orange Pi One. Yet, the BeagleBone Black, which is widely considered to be the second most popular Linux hacker board, has remained stubbornly set its ways. In recent months, however, there’s been a flurry of spinoffs, including the BeagleBone Green, BeagleBone Enhanced, and a COM version called the BeagleCore BCM1 (see farther below).

• The new platform, called Cayenne, provides a user-friendly toolset for connecting Raspberry Pi hardware to the Internet and configuring it to communicate with other devices and sensors. myDevices is pitching Cayenne as a solution for businesses to build IoT devices based on Raspberry Pi hardware quickly without investing in Pi-specific programming expertise.

• IoT devices for the smart home appeal strongly to consumers, but the software that drives them has a long way to go to please users. That’s according to a new report from Argus Insights, which studied IoT products from ADT, Comcast, Vivint, Honeywell and other vendors.

Phones

• With Lumia sales on the decline and Microsoft’s plan to not produce a large amount of handsets, it’s clear we’re witnessing the end of Windows Phone. Rumors suggest Microsoft is developing a Surface Phone, but it has to make it to the market first. Windows Phone has long been in decline and its app situation is only getting worse. With a lack of hardware, lack of sales, and less than 2 percent market share, it’s time to call it: Windows Phone is dead. Real Windows on phones might become a thing with Continuum eventually, but Windows Phone as we know it is done. It won’t stop Microsoft producing a few handsets every year as a vanity project, but for everyone else it’s the end of the line. Farewell, Windows Phone.

Android

• For those familiar with AirConsole, it looks like they have now released a dedicated app for Android TV. For Those unfamiliar with AirConsole, in short, it allows you to use your smartphone as a controller to play a bunch of games on your desktop. Back in December, they also partnered with OnePlus to release a small selection of exclusive games for the OnePlus 2, OnePlus One and OnePlus X. With the release of the Android TV dedicated app this week, this is now essentially what you can do with your home TV.

• Consider this article a list of ways that Android outshines the iPhone 6s. But also consider this to be a wish list for the iPhone 7. As I’ve made clear, I have no intention of switching to Android anytime soon and these are all compromises that I’m willing to make. Why? Because the positive tradeoffs far outweigh the negatives.

• I wish Apple would address all of my wants in its next-generation smartphone, though I’m certain that won’t be the case. But hey, there’s always the iPhone 8…

• BlackBerry might soon give up making devices running on its BB10 OS and switch to Google’s Android OS fully. The Canadian firm’s hardware business is going pathetically, and such a move could help revive it, which generates the majority of its global revenue.

• If you’re developing Android-based games or complex apps with extensive cloud integration, you’ll probably want to seek out native application development tools. These range from the Java-oriented Android SDK and Android Development Tools (ADT) Eclipse plugin to game-oriented engines like Corona to commercial enterprise platforms like the cloud-oriented Monaca toolsuite.

• Most mobile apps, however, are simpler affairs with tight deadlines and budgets and the need to support both Android and iOS. For most app developers, especially those converting web apps to mobile, cross-platform mobile app frameworks are a better choice. And the latest mobile frameworks promise some native-like performance and functionality while still hewing to a basic “write once, run anywhere” development approach.

• Now consider that Alphabet’s share of the global smartphone OS market is five times that of iOS, and it’s easy to see why Oracle’s Android revenue numbers aren’t shocking. Now if only someone would shed some light on the impact YouTube has on revenue and profit growth — that would really be intriguing.

Free Software/Open Source

• If you’ve spent any time shopping for digital signs for your small business, you might be a tad discouraged at the cost and complexity. But thanks to Linux and Android, you can enjoy a whole new generation of software, services, and devices that range from free to inexpensive, and that offer all kinds of great features.

• Amazingly flexible, digital signs can display simple images, slideshows, movies, Web pages, and dynamic content pulled in from the Internet, or whatever sources you want to use. Anything you can do on a computer you can put into digital signage.

• Companies are building new applications everyday – whether it is to meet their own requirements or to serve their customers. Open source platforms are increasingly being used to support these applications, moving from initial development and experimentation into production.

• For example, Apache Hadoop provides support for storage of huge volumes of data and companies are now looking at how to get more from their ‘data lakes.’ Meanwhile, new stacks of tools are being developed to help developers build their applications faster.

• There was no supercomputing magic involved in at least most of the video interceptions. As part of an operation codenamed “Anarchist,” NSA and GCHQ analysts used Image Magick (an open source image manipulation tool) and other open source software developed to defeat commercial satellite signal encryption. One of the tools, called antisky, was developed by Dr. Markus Kuhn of the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. The tools could be used by anyone able to intercept satellite signal feeds then exhibit the patience and skill to sort through the pixels. However, the conversion to digital video feeds on some drones has apparently made video interception more difficult.

• A new open source plugin designed to prevent the creation of dead content links online – so called “link rot” – has launched.

• Amber has been designed by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and it provides what it calls a “persistent route” to information on the internet by automatically taking and retaining a snapshot of every page on a website and storing it on the same website’s server.

• Will Gorman, VP of Pentaho Labs, explains how the new Python integration will benefit data scientists and what’s coming next.

• In this video, Jono Bacon describes a singular passion that motivates his career in open source: “Figuring out how we can build strong, inclusive, effective communities that build really cool things.”

• If you’re a network or systems administrator, you’re likely familiar with the concept of a load balancer. It’s a hardware device or software stack that distributes network application load across all the machines and servers connected to it in order to help mitigate network congestion. Google’s software solution, called Seesaw, was created in 2012 in response to a lack of adequate load balancing software for Google’s own use. Coded in Google’s own Go language, the software boasted a flexible Linux backbone and was used to manage Google’s own network needs, which entailed things like automated deployment and ease of use and maintenance.

• Google announced today that it is open-sourcing Seesaw — a Linux-based load balancing system. The code for the project, which is written in Google’s Go language, is now available on GitHub under the Apache license.

• As Google Site Reliability Engineer Joel Sing, who works on the company’s corporate infrastructure, writes in today’s announcement, Google used to use two different load balancing systems back in 2012. Both, however, “presented different sets of management and stability challenges.” So to fix this, he and his team set out to find a new solution and because the ones available at the time didn’t meet Google’s needs, they started writing their own.

• Thank goodness this week is over. After our Larry Cafiero spent last week “putting out fires,” as he puts it, at SCALE 14x, I’ve spent the last couple of days doing the same here at FOSS Force. It seems our article on Slashdot’s sale attracted some unruly types to the comments, forcing us to put the shields up on our comments site-wide for the first time in our nearly six year history. You can still comment, but you might have to wait a while for us to notice it and approve it for publication. We’ll take the shields down as soon as we determine it’s safe to do so.

Events

• The Southern California Linux Expo 14x (SCaLE 14x) concluded on January 24 with a keynote from open source developer Sarah Sharp, who made waves in October, 2015 with a blog post explaining why she stepped down as a Linux kernel developer. Here are some highlights from her presentation.

• I am excited to be joining the conference. The last time I made the trip was sadly way back in 2007 and I had an absolutely tremendous time. Wonderful people, great topics, and well worth the trip. Typically I have struggled to get out with my schedule, but I am delighted to be joining this year.

• Is a unikernel an impenetrable black box, resistant to profilers, tracers, fire, and poison? At SCaLE14x this weekend there was a full day track on unikernels, after which I was asked about unikernel profiling and tracing. I’m not an expert on the topic, and wasn’t able to answer these questions at the time, however, I’ve since taken a quick look using MirageOS and Xen.

SaaS/Big Data

• Today, however, MySQL in particular has evolved into a serious contender as an enterprise-capable database engine, powering many websites and commercial applications. Aided in large part by Oracle’s acquisition of the company behind MySQL, we have seen over the past several years the growth of a number of very interesting and viable MySQL derivatives.

• Many third parties create rich applications to facilitate database management, database development and database administration. Here are ten outstanding graphical interfaces for MySQL.

• CenturyLink’s new MySQL-compatible DBaaS platform, Relational DB Service, highlights the company’s growing investment in managed cloud solutions.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Walmart on Tuesday announced that it has posted the code for its OneOps cloud application life cycle management platform on GitHub. The company developed the OneOps platform for building and launching cloud-based applications across varied storage environments that change frequently. It lets e-commerce vendors deploy apps on platforms from Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and CenturyLink public clouds to private or hybrid environments built with OpenStack.

Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is huge: the opening keynote for LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System is a conversation with National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor.

Licensing

• The introduction of the new 451 HTTP Error Status Code for blocked websites is a big step forward in cataloguing online censorship, especially in a country like India where access to information is routinely restricted.

• It seems the definition of censorship becomes more fluid and convenient with each new use. If free speech groups feel the need to cry censorship about editorial decisions, there are many, many stories of slavery that don’t feature smiling enslaved people or white saviours in the rejected folders of the 79% white publishing industry that they could start with. They could look into the even wider array of stories about our anger, our resistance, our power, that have never made it out of the slush pile, let alone to the shelves of major bookstores.

• But the free speech advocates haven’t devoted much energy to the alarmingly un-diverse publishing industry and its very real effect on literature. (Pen American, of which I’m a relatively new and usually proud member, has been doing more recently and hosted an excellent series of panels on the subject last year.)

• What we’re left with is a palpable sense of selective outrage. Pulling a book because it’s historically inaccurate and carries on the very American tradition of whitewashing slavery is classified as “censorship”, while maintaining an ongoing majority white industry that systematically excludes narratives of color is just business as usual.

• The automotive industry is moving toward the use of Free and Open Source software (FOSS) in vehicles. GPLv3 is currently presenting a roadblock to greater adoption. Specifically the Installation Information requirement in GPLv3 Section 6 (sometimes called the “Anti-Tivoization” clause) is causing some car makers to fear GPLv3. These car-makers want to lock down all software installed on their cars against user modifications, but fear that using GPLv3 software will prevent them from doing so. Although there may be good reasons to lock down some software on cars, car-makers should not fear GPLv3. One solution the industry may wish to consider to allay concerns about the Installation Information requirement in GPLv3 is to adopt and advocate for use of an “Additional Permission” that excepts users from having to comply with that requirement.

Openness/Sharing

Programming

Leftovers

• It now can be revealed that “Just Solutions International” – the Ministry of Justice commercial venture promoted by former Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Chris Grayling – caused an overall £1.1 million LOSS to the MoJ.

• JSI was closed by Grayling’s successor Michael Gove last October.

• It’s an outrage — I think it would outrage anyone. You go out in the street you don’t expect people to look under your clothes. It’s such a basic expectation that any court in the country would find that this violates that right.

• In the 70s and 80s people used text command line interfaces at the computers and mainly black and white or green CRT monitors. This CRT monitors had a problem. If they show the same interface for a long time like for example Wordstar or Visicalc then the interface is burned into the screen and the screen is basically damaged. This was not good.

• Last week the UK government ripped up a public consultation into the future of the BBC because almost all the responses came from one source, the pressure group 38 Degrees.

• If you used Windows Media Center only for playing DVD movies and music, you can find alternatives if you upgrade to Windows 10 and do not have a serious loyalty to the old software. For example, VideoLAN’s VLC media player can play many types of video and audio files. If you want more of a “media center” experience, programs like Kodi, MediaPortal or Plex may offer a range of functions similar to the old, discontinued Microsoft software.

Science

• Thirty years ago I was at mission control at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for the launch of the Challenger. I was working data communications. My job was making sure all the telemetry links between the space shuttle and NASA’s ground communications system (NASCOM) were working. Everything was green on my board, the shuttle launched, and a few seconds later everything went to hell. I stared at my controls, tried to get things to reconnect, and then I finallly looked up at the TV display.

Health/Nutrition

• It is possible to trace every drop of toxic water spewed from Flint, Michigan back to two terrible decisions. The second was switching the city’s supply from treated Lake Huron water to the corrosive broth in the Flint River. Left untreated, that water unleashed the disaster stored in the walls of the city’s first bad decision: its lead pipes.

• In the past few weeks, the nation’s attention has increasingly focused on Flint’s public health disaster. At least 15 percent of the city’s homes have water with lead levels exceeding the safe limit established by the federal government. Several of those homes had water with lead levels 900 times above the safe limit. Poor political decisions caused the crisis, but it wouldn’t have happened at all if the lead pipes weren’t there to begin with. The current solution is a stopgap—spiking the water supply with an anticorrosive chemical. But if the powers that be want to eliminate the risk completely, they will ultimately have to replace all the lead plumbing. A September estimate, only recently released by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, puts the cost of replacing all the lead pipes in Flint at $60 million. And the project will take 15 years.

• Quayana Towns’s 2-month-old daughter wriggled on an exam table last week as her pediatrician ticked off questions that have become essential for every parent of young children here.

• “So what are you guys doing for water — what are you drinking?” asked the doctor, Mona Hanna-Attisha.

• “I have a whole bunch of bottled water that I picked up,” said Ms. Towns, 26, assuring the doctor that the family had been drinking it for a few months, since the gravity of Flint’s water crisis came to light.

• “And before that you were using tap water?”

• News of the poisoned water crisis in Flint has reached a wide audience around the world. The basics are now known: the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the free elections in Flint, deposed the mayor and city council, then appointed his own man to run the city. To save money, they decided to unhook the people of Flint from their fresh water drinking source, Lake Huron, and instead, make the public drink from the toxic Flint River. When the governor’s office discovered just how toxic the water was, they decided to keep quiet about it and covered up the extent of the damage being done to Flint’s residents, most notably the lead affecting the children, causing irreversible and permanent brain damage. Citizen activists uncovered these actions, and the governor now faces growing cries to resign or be arrested.

• James Warren, chief media writer for Poynter, wrote a column Friday that suggests news media bears a share of the responsibility for the lead poisoning scandal that has afflicted the city of Flint and engulfed the state government that caused it to happen.

• And he quotes two sources — one of them is a former, longtime environmental writer for our company — who suggest local journalists were lax in following the story, or too inexperienced to know how to handle it, due in part to cuts in staffing in newsrooms.

• Following release of new document and emails, Gov. Snyder told he must ‘explain to the people of Flint why his administration trucked water into a state building while allowing residents to drink unsafe water’

• The same four mistakes that led to tragedy in Flint are repeated in other cities and, dangerously, in the realm of global climate policy. To create a just and sustainable world we must learn to recognize and rectify each of them.

• The World Health Organization Executive Board this week noted a number of reports on communicable diseases, such as poliomyelitis, and vaccines. Developing countries underlined the affordability and accessibility of treatments. The board also agreed on the setting up of an open-ended intergovernmental meeting to come to agreement on the organisation’s governance reform.

• “Things seem very abstract,” the representative said, citing the high prices of drugs, such as cancer drugs. It is important, he said, that local generic manufacture of drug be supported.

• This week, a Houston grand jury returned a surprise indictment. It was tasked with investigating videos that purported to expose Planned Parenthood for selling the body parts of aborted fetuses. The grand jury found no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, but instead charged the video producers David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt from the anti-abortion group The Center for Medical Progress, with tampering with a government record, a felony.

• This week on CounterSpin: The consensus of Beltway media seems to be that a single-payer healthcare system, similar to those in other industrialized countries is “excellent in theory,” but “dead on arrival” in Washington, making its proponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, naive at best. Americans make life-altering healthcare choices, in which worry over cost plays a big part, every day, but serious public discussion about how to address that crisis is a sometimes thing. So we should care what media are saying about single payer—as a lesson in policing possibilities, even apart from what it means for the presidential race.

Security

• While organization like the Linux Foundation, through its Automotive Grade Linux platform and GENIVI, have pushed for an open-source approach to in-car infotainment, the same principles could be applied to vehicle code at large to help prevent hacking. And given the rapid pace of self-driving technology and the lines of code that will be required—100 million or more for a modern vehicle, compared to 60 million in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider—perhaps it’s time for automotive software to become more transparent and therefore more tamper-proof.

• All versions of OpenSSL are vulnerable to CVE-2014-0195, but this vulnerability only affects DTLS clients or servers (look for SSL VPNs… not so much HTTPS).

• The Linux trojan that spied on users by taking screenshots of their desktop has now a Windows variant, as Kaspersky’s security team has found out.

• The trojan, first discovered by Dr.Web and named Linux.Ekocms, and later also identified by Sophos as Linux/Mokes-A, and then by Kaspersky as Backdoor.Linux.Mokes.a, has caused some stir in the Linux community because it was one of the first spyware threats detected in the wild on the platform.

• I’ve also tried to make stress-ng portable, so it can build fine on GNU/Hurd and Debian kFreeBSD (with Linux specific tests not built-in of course). It also contains some architecture specific features, such as handling the data and instruction cache as well as the x86 rdrand instruction and cache line locking. If there are any ARM specific features than can be stressed I’d like to know and perhaps implement stressors for them.

• Unused code is untested code, which probably means that it harbors bugs—sometimes significant security bugs. That lesson has been reinforced by the recent OpenSSH “roaming” vulnerability. Leaving a half-finished feature only in the client side of the equation might seem harmless on a cursory glance but, of course, is not. Those who mean harm can run servers that “implement” the feature to tickle the unused code. Given that the OpenSSH project has a strong security focus (and track record), it is truly surprising that a blunder like this could slip through—and keep slipping through for roughly six years.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A leaked report by a UN panel of experts is calling for a formal inquiry into Saudi human rights abuses, saying the nation is “deliberately starving” Yemeni civilians in its war, and targeting civilians in airstrikes in a “widespread and systematic manner.”

• Qarwash Mohsn Awad was already aboard his flight to Jordan at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in May 2015 when he was pulled off and escorted to a small room by two individuals – a man and a woman.

• The agents questioned him – asking him for his documents, how much money he had, how many bags he had. Every time Awad answered, they responded, “You are lying, you are lying.” Agitated, Awad had no idea what was going on, he says. He was accused of having fake paperwork and told he would be locked up.

• Sopko’s office has unleashed critical reports about Pentagon spending in Afghanistan — especially TFBSO, which was finally disbanded in a mercy killing last year. Financial records show that the task force spent $43 million on a compressed natural gas filling station that has been widely mocked as the world’s most expensive. It also spent upwards of $150 million on private villas and associated security, bankrolled a multi-million dollar Afghan start-up incubator that is now defunct, and even paid to import Italian goats in order to jumpstart the country’s cashmere industry.

• In Baghdadi, five suicide bombers attacked a guesthouse belonging to a town councilman; they killed a tribal fighter acting as a guard and wounded 10 other people. Two more suicide bombers attacked first responders, killing the police chief and two policemen. In a second attack on the outskirts of twon, a dozen suicide bombers attacked a barracks and killed 25 security personnel.

• To any informed observer, the motivation for the increased frequency of these attacks, and their growth into new countries, is abundantly clear. Western imperial ambitions, especially those in Islamic-majority countries, lead to a perceived lack of self determination on the part of the body politic of those people living under dictators friendly to Western governments. When attempts to resist authoritarian leaders beholden first to foreign interests fail, frustration within the social order builds among members of that nation’s populace. This, in turn, validates the narratives of the most violent groups opposing Western rule, and attracts the young, the restless, and often the jobless elements of society most hungry for change and willing to take the most dramatic steps to initiate it. This is a phenomenon that Chalmers Johnson labeled”blowback” in a now-famous article published in The Nation in late September of 2001. Its existence has become an accepted fact in the realm of military planning, and Hillary Clinton herself warned of its possibility in March of 2011. More important to her, however, were her political ambitions, a chance to grease the palms of friendly arms dealers, and a good deed done for the domestic politics of the Clinton Foundation’s gulf supporters. If there is any action an American Secretary of State ought to take in attempting to quell violence aimed at Western targets, it is to facilitate peace talks rather than engage in fruitless military escapades overseas to intervene in conflicts about which American bureaucrats understand nothing. And, even then, such enterprises carry with them the threat of backfire. In tracing the footsteps of unrest across the whole of North and West Africa, one finds that all roads lead to Hillary Clinton and her Libyan regime-change operation. The best of all solutions is the complete withdrawal of Western military forces from the foreign lands they occupy. Only under these conditions will peace in the Sahel become an achievable outcome; and until then, the peaceful citizens of the tiny nation of Burkina Faso will be asked to foot her bill.

• The FBI says Finicum appeared to be reaching for a gun in his jacket when he was killed. The video is aerial footage, and the distance and high angle of the shot make it hard to speak conclusively about what it shows. But at the very least, Finicum did raise and lower his hands repeatedly, and had his hands lowered and near his torso when he was killed.

• The agency has released both the full 26-minute aerial video of the stops, and a briefer clip showing Finicum’s attempt to run a barricade and subsequent death. Greg Bretzing, the top FBI official in Oregon, told reporters that they’re limited in discussing the encounter because of an ongoing outside review of the shooting by the Deschutes County Sheriff’s office.

• The majority state-owned company has been granted an export license despite the UAE’s involvement in the Yemeni conflict, and its own series of corruption scandals.

Transparency Reporting

• Documents related to a US police association have been dumped online, as well as a database of personal information and member-only forum backup.

• The affected organisation is the “Fraternal Order of Police” (FOP), which describes itself as “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers, with more than 325,000 members in more than 2,100 lodges.”

• “We have learned today that our data system has been hacked by the Group known as Anonymous,” said a statement posted on Facebook by the FOP national president Chuck Canterbury on Thursday. The attack “appears to have originated outside of the United States,” the statement continued.

• Two days after this announcement, EPIC filed expedited FOIA requests on both sides of the pond for the text of this agreement, arguing (logically) that the people this would affect had a right to know what their governments were agreeing to. EPIC specifically had concerns that the US would offer less protection to foreign citizens’ data than to its own citizens, given that it has historically refused to extend these niceties to those residing elsewhere on the planet.

• Ashkan Soltani is a well known privacy expert who (among other things) worked with Barton Gellman at the Washington Post to analyze the Snowden documents for story worthy information — an effort that won that series a Pulitzer Prize. Soltani has been hugely instrumental in reporting on other privacy-related issues as well, including being a part of the team that also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the Wall Street Journal’s excellent What They Know series on digital privacy issues. Basically he has a long history of doing great journalism around privacy. For most of the last year, he was also the Chief Technology Officer at the FTC. Back in December, it was announced that he had moved over to work for the federal government CTO, Megan Smith, in the White House as a senior advisor. The CTO’s office has been collecting some fairly amazing tech talent recently.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Senate rejected the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change, days after NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2014 the hottest year ever recorded on Earth.

• The Republican-controlled Senate defeated a measure Wednesday stating that climate change is real and that human activity significantly contributes to it. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, offered the measure as the Senate debated the Keystone XL pipeline, which would tap the carbon-intensive oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Finance

• Over in Japan, there’s been a big political scandal brewing over the last few days, leading the country’s economy minister Akira Amari to resign amid charges that he received significant bribes from a construction company. What makes that relevant to us here is that Amari was also Japan’s leading negotiator on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, and his resignation and the bribery charges are raising additional (and fairly serious) questions about whether or not Japan really should support the TPP. So far, the bribery that’s been discussed does not appear to directly impact that TPP, but it at least raises other questions about whether or not the TPP itself was compromised by similar corruption (of course, some may argue that the entire process, in which big companies basically helped write the thing, is itself corrupt). Amari had been expected to travel to New Zealand in the next few days for the TPP signing ceremony, but obviously someone else will now have to go.

• Japan’s Economy Minister Akira Amari has said he is resigning amid corruption allegations.

• Mr Amari unexpectedly made the announcement at a press conference in Tokyo on Thursday.

• But he again denied personally receiving bribes from a construction company, as had been alleged by a Japanese magazine.

• Krugman’s latest column suggests that such establishment media figures are leveraging this climate to launch spurious attacks against the left and progressive movements.

• It’s not surprising that the Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos) would be unhappy with a presidential candidate running on a platform of taking back the country from the millionaires and billionaires. Therefore the trashing of Sen. Bernie Sanders in an editorial, “Bernie Sanders’ Fiction-Filled Campaign” (1/27/16), was about as predictable as the sun rising.

• Last year, Ars provided an extensive introduction to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement currently being negotiated between the EU and the US. This massive deal—it involves half the world’s GDP and a third of its trade—was launched back in 2013, largely on the basis that it would provide a significant fillip to both economies. The previous EU commissioner responsible for trade, Karel de Gucht, claimed it would be “the cheapest stimulus package you can imagine.” A study published in 2013 by the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) on behalf of the European Commission predicted that the EU’s economy would be boosted by €119 billion, and the US’s by €95 billion.

• Three days before the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released what might have been her closing argument had she been a candidate in the presidential race.

• It’s a thorough indictment of a rigged system in Washington that allows corporate criminals to go free while those without the same power and influence get severely punished.

• The report — a 12-page booklet titled “Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy” — cites 20 well-documented civil and criminal cases from 2015 “in which the federal government failed to require meaningful accountability.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• There’s a telling paragraph in this post from Ezra Klein, one of a series of posts written lately by self-described “wonks” defending the electoral and political approach Hillary Clinton embraces.

• With just a few days to go until the Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders spoke to an evening rally in Burlington, Iowa on Thursday and made some of his boldest statements yet criticizing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s political track record and Wall Street ties.

• Sanders, who has faced an escalation of establishment ire in recent weeks, made a sharp contrast between his principles and his rival’s—such as his early and consistent opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Keystone XL pipeline, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton.

• “Check the record, find out where my opponent was on all of these issues,” Sanders said. “It is great to be against the war after you vote for the war. It is great to be for gay rights after you insult the entire gay community by supporting DOMA.”

• A year and a half ago, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo barbarically choked my father, Eric Garner, on a Staten Island sidewalk in broad daylight. My father died that day. His death was ruled a homicide. Despite viral video footage of the incident, international media attention and widespread protests, our justice system failed to find Officer Pantaleo guilty of any crime. In fact, until a few weeks ago, the only person indicted in relation to the case was Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed it all.

• As a daughter, I was devastated. As a citizen, I remain outraged — my father’s death was an absolute injustice, but not an uncommon one. By now, we know many of the other names all too well: Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Rekia Boyd. But it’s only thanks to the tireless work of organizers and protesters, who take to the streets and disrupt business as usual, that we know their names at all.

• [...]

• I trusted establishment Democrats who claimed to represent me, only to later watch them ignore and explain away the injustice of my father’s death. I trusted the system; then I watched as politicians on both sides of the aisle — from Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel to Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder — disregard the will of the people they were elected to represent and abdicate their responsibility to protect them. I’ve watched as our system criminalizes blackness while allowing Wall Street to bilk the American people with impunity.

• Six months ago, I was a Bernie Sanders skeptic. In July, I wrote about how Sanders had bungled his outreach to the black base. Though he spent a lot of time talking about economic inequality, his message seemed aimed at the thousands of white liberals who attended his rallies. A month later, I accused his white online supporters of condescending to black people who weren’t sold on his civil rights record.

• [...]

• But now, I’m beginning to rethink my position. That’s thanks, largely, to Sanders’s black women supporters. Over the last week, I’ve spoken with people like Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, Trayvon Martin family lawyer Natalie Jackson and several black female Sanders staffers, like Tezlyn Figaro. No one shaped my thinking more than Erica Garner. She’s the daughter of Eric Garner, an unarmed African American who died after being put in a choke hold by an NYPD officer in 2014.

• I’ve been a critic of Sanders. I think his main problem is a lack of radicalness, especially on foreign policy.

• New FEC filings show that all of the $417,250 in monetary donations to a Super PAC called “Black Americans for a Better Future” comes from conservative white businessmen — including $400,000, or 96 percent of the total, from white billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.

Censorship

• His latest movie, Long Long Time Ago, to be released on Feb 4, follows the struggles of a Chinese family living in a kampung in post-independence Singapore. It may sound heavy, but Neo assures audiences that it’s a comedy with a message.

Privacy

• Denmark scrapped the practice in 2014 and the European Court of Justice has previously ruled that the blanket retention of internet usage is illegal, but the ministry not only plans to bring back session logging, it will go even further than before.

• Jakob Willer, the director of the Telecom Industry Association, told news agency Ritzau that the government plans to carry out total surveillance on all online activities by every single internet user.

• “We are actually a bit shocked that such a massive expansion has been suggested,” he said.

• I come from a meeting in the Danish ministry of Justice this afternoon,

• They plan to reintroduce the data retention of Internet sessions.

• It was scrapped in 2014 after the European Data Retention Directive was declared invalid by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

• But now Denmark plans to require data retention much more invasive than both the old directive and the pre 2014 danish implementation of.

• One revelation was that TAO is very patient: they will monitor adversaries’ systems as a matter of course, waiting for an opportunity — such as when a system malfunctions and the vendor asks the administrators to temporarily turn off password protection for a few moments.

• Dear Microsoft, it’s never about technology. It’s about basic human respect and choice. Just let the user feel like they count. And then, you will have willing participants in your cloud experiments and online and social integration and all that. The alternative is, you are slowly but surely alienating yourself. I was the first to defend you when the keylogger nonsense cropped up, and I still think you have better privacy than your rivals. But you are testing my limits, and even though I don’t care what you think you want to achieve with all that pointless user data, forcing my hand only makes me write articles like this. Out of pure spite. It’s my basic human need to resist attempts to curtail my freedom of choice. Repeat after me. Freedom, of, choice. That’s all. Nothing more.

• Of the countries represented, the US led the encryption adoption with 54%, while Australia, Canada, and India all followed close behind with almost 50%.

• In terms of what the respondents were encrypting, general customer data and customer payment data led the responses with more than three-fourths of respondents saying they always encrypt that data. Company financial information and employee bank details were also highly encrypted with roughly 70% of respondents saying that they always encrypt those types of data.

• Google is in the process of adding a new anti-malware detection program in its online malware detection tool VirusTotal. It will be used for scanning BIOS for the legitimate programs installed on it. VirusTotal will also use machine learning to learn from the program behavior and hence finding out the malware.

• CyberGhost has released its transparency report that tells us a wide range of facts regarding the usage of its VPN service all around the world. Due to the increased surveillance measures used by government, a hike in the VPN usage has been observed. The report mentions that a large number of requests to disclose the identity of VPN users are made different entities like law enforcement agencies, website owners, law firms, and police offices.

• The new Data Protection Regulation has taken four years to go through Brussels, in a convoluted process that has seen the original proposal from the European Commission utterly transformed through unprecedented levels of lobbying by companies and governments. The US was particularly aggressive, but in the end EU member states such as Germany managed to do a lot of damage with their demands for carve outs and exceptions.

• The UK government is signing off on the sales of advanced surveillance technologies to repressive regimes that it has admonished for human rights abuses, the Independent exclusively reported Wednesday.

• So we recently reported on a claim that ISIS had been spotted making use of their very own encrypted messaging app, and highlighting how totally useless US laws requiring tech companies to backdoor encryption would be in that situation. However, it turns out that we should have been a lot more skeptical of the original report, coming from a single sourced security company. Over the years, we’ve learned that single-sourced security company claims are often highly suspect, and designed much more to get attention or increase FUD, than based on any real issue. The good folks over at Daily Dot are now reporting that this encrypted messaging app doesn’t really appear to exist, and their investigation is pretty thorough and fairly convincing. Just like the claims that ISIS had a “training manual for encryption,” this claim appears to be false.

• Harrison Ford and Anthony Hopkins have joined the cast of Official Secrets, the long-mooted film about the Observer’s reporting of the GCHQ bugging scandal in 2003, it has been announced.

• In the latest film to cover the activities of whistleblowers and the journalists who report their revelations, Official Secrets will tell the story of Katharine Gun, an officer at the Cheltenham-based government eavesdropping agency. She leaked an email that contained a request by America’s NSA to illegally bug the United Nations offices of six key countries in the run-up to the UN’s vote on whether to authorise the Iraq war.

Civil Rights

• Parents have every right to send their children to a religious school, but not on the public dime.

• Opportunity in education. Effective education options for every child. Stimulating educational environments. Every year at the end of January, the proponents of National School Choice Week emphasize these ideals as reasons that parents, educators, and policymakers should support school voucher and tax credit programs.

• By appealing to the core aspirations for reform desired among the education community, the school choice movement masks the fact that these programs do not actually offer the benefits their supporters tout. Instead, voucher and tax credit programs typically funnel taxpayer funds into private and often religious schools that are free to discriminate against students on a variety of grounds and are exempt from meeting the same educational requirements as public schools.

• In a display of cooperation across ethnic lines, Tibetan and Muslim students and their parents came together this week in a public protest to demand better funding for the education of minority groups in northwestern China’s Qinghai province, Tibetan sources said.

• Gathering on Jan. 24 outside government offices in the provincial capital Xining, protesters called especially for an investigation into the activities of the education department head of the Bayan Khar (in Chinese, Hualong) Hui Autonomous County in Qinghai’s Tsoshar (Haidong) prefecture, a local source told RFA’s Tibetan Service.

• “The protesters were parents and students of Tibetan and Muslim origin belonging to a local school called the Gangjong School,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

• A Georgia state representative has triggered anger on social media after he made several statements that appear to defend the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, a group he insists “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order.”

• “It made a lot of people straighten up,” Republican State Rep. Tommy Benton said, according to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. “I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”

• In Aladdin, female characters speak only 10 per cent. While in Mulan, despite the eponymous character saving China, female characters utter 23 per cent of the dialogue.

• The Obama administration will entirely withhold 22 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server because they have been classified as “top secret,” the State Department said on Friday.

• The existence of multiple top secret emails in the Democratic presidential front-runner’s inbox will only increase public scrutiny on the former secretary of State’s unusual email arrangement, mere days before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest on Monday.

• The 37 pages of emails are the first time the Obama administration has confirmed that messages within Clinton’s server while she was at State merit one of the highest levels of classification. Although the State Department has previously classified more than 1,300 of Clinton’s emails upon release, the vast majority of those were at lower classification levels.

• The State Department on Friday will release roughly 2,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails but will delay the final batch of messages until after voters go to the polls in the first several primary states.

• In a court filing late on Thursday evening, the department insisted that it “regrets” its inability to publish the final 7,000 pages on Friday, as a federal court ordered it to do last year.

• Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is not the sudden resurgence of Bernie Sanders. It is the fidelity to the rule of law of the FBI.

• The recent revelations of the receipt by Clinton of a Special Access Program email, as well as cut and pasted summaries of state secrets on her server and on her BlackBerry nearly guarantee that the FBI will recommend that the Department of Justice convene a grand jury and seek her indictment for espionage. Here is the backstory.

• The Obama administration confirmed for the first time Friday that Hillary Clinton’s home server contained closely guarded government secrets, censoring 22 emails that contained material requiring one of the highest levels of classification. The revelation comes three days before Clinton competes in the Iowa presidential caucuses.

• Social networking giant Facebook announced Friday that it would ban the private sale of guns on its site, and on its photo-sharing platform Instagram.

• Although the site itself does not act as a retailer of firearms, it has allowed users to sell guns on Facebook pages or in Instagram posts. The new prohibitions will affect only private and person-to-person sales, and not licensed gun sellers.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick, one of the leading scholars on net neutrality, has filed a report with the FCC detailing how T-Mobile’s Binge On clearly violates net neutrality. As we’ve been highlighting, Binge On has numerous problems when it comes to net neutrality, and appears to clearly violate some of the FCC’s rules. There’s also the fact that T-Mobile flat out lied about it and claimed that it was “optimization” when it’s really throttling.

• One of President Barack Obama’s selling points for the TPP has been claims that it helps preserve “an open and free Internet.” The references to an open and free Internet, which is closely linked to net neutrality, may strike a chord with those concerned with digital issues. However, the Trouble with the TPP is that a close examination of the text and a comparison with existing net neutrality rules in many TPP countries reveals that it doesn’t advance the issue. In fact, the standards are so weak and unenforceable that at least half of the TPP countries already far exceed them.

• Back in October 2015, an admin error caused the ownership of its main domain “google.com” to lapse and a lucky fellow managed to snap it up.

• Sanmay Ved, a researcher managed to buy google.com through Google domains for a brief moment, which led to Google having to buy it back for around $12,000 USD.

• Although this was seemingly done as a moment of opportunity rather than a means to get quick rich. Google paid the sum for the domain which Sanmay went onto donate to charity.

• The debate over whether or not Binge On violates Net Neutrality has been raging ever since the service was announced in November. The latest party to weigh in is Barbara van Schewick, law professor at Stanford University.

• In a new report published today — and filed to the FCC, as well — van Schewick says that Binge on “violates key net neutrality principles” and “is likely to violate the FCC’s general conduct rule.” She goes on to make several arguments against Binge On, saying that services in Binge On distorts competition because they’re zero-rated and because video creators are more likely to use those providers for their content, as the zero-rated content is more attractive to consumers.

• Key elements for their Internet are optical white boxes and bare metal optical switches. Bare metal switches use merchant chips rather than custom silicon, and can be cheaper and easier to use. Open source software can be used.

• Data Centers are embracing these cheaper open switches that can be programmed like Linux computers, explains Computerworld in a 2015 article.

• I wrote about merchant chips in April 2015 in ‘Open source a driver for merchant chips.’

• [...]

• Add to this the idea of a special network virtualization mechanism that lets multiple networks use the same infrastructure, plus the aforementioned open source elements and high-speed light-based networks, and the Internet will be able to move forward with exciting new applications a la Google and iOS, they reckon.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Not too surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has been a big booster of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement over the past year, repeatedly praising the deal and claiming it will save the world in all sorts of ways. Most of that is based on the faulty belief that the TPP is actually a “free trade” deal (it’s actually the opposite), with some of it just being the standard WSJ faith-based belief that “if big businesses like it, it must be good.”

Copyrights

• However, as we’ve explained time and time again (much to the chagrin of David Slater, the photographer whose camera was used to take the photo), the photo is clearly in the public domain, as it’s long been held that the Copyright Act only applies to human authors. In court a few weeks ago, the judge made it clear he didn’t believe PETA had any case at all, but Judge William Orrick has now come out with his written opinion in the case explaining his reasoning why. Not surprisingly, it more or less tracks with what he said in court: there is no evidence that the Copyright Act applies to monkeys, and thus, case dismissed — with leave to amend.

• The US Copyright Act should be amended to become more favourable towards fair use and change the way that damages are awarded in cases, a report from the US Department of Commerce has argued.

• In a white paper released yesterday, January 28, the Internet Policy Task Force (IPTF) at the department outlined ways judges and juries could be given more guidance when assessing damages.

• The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force has released a set of copyright reform proposals. The Government recommends Congress to implement various changes to avoid excessive damages awards and stresses that copyright trolling should not be tolerated.

• Yeah, it was taken down by EMI. But why, you ask? While many of us would thank anyone or anything that could tear the existence of this horror show away from wherever unsuspecting innocents might happen across it, what stake does EMI Music have in this song sung by The USA Freedom Kids?

• A couple of years ago, the Commerce Department put out a somewhat problematic “Green Paper” on copyright, that at times seemed to have been pretty heavily influenced by the maximalist view of the world, without recognition of how widely copyright is abused. Lots of people responded to it with their concerns — including an excellent response from (believe it or not) Hollywood screenwriters who actually pointed out the problems of copyright maximalism, statutory damages, abusive takedowns and attacks on fair use. I don’t know if it was that letter that really influenced things, but the Commerce Department has now come out with its follow up “White Paper” and it’s really quite good. It basically says that copyright’s statutory damages are a huge mess and need to be fixed.

• In a real-world fairytale story this week, the discovery was announced of a previously unpublished work by beloved mycologist (also children’s author) Beatrix Potter, 150 years after her birth.

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