● 10.24.16

● Links 24/10/2016: Linux 4.9 RC2

Posted in News Roundup at 8:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop/Microsoft

• This scandal covers buying Microsoft licensees for Romanian administration from 2004 to 2012 for total 228 millions USD.

• During the investigation was found that more than 100 people, former ministers, mayor of Bucuresti and businessman are involved in this corruption scandal and more than 20 millions euro are paid as bribes.

• Ranting about Microsoft’s unreliable, sideline tablets is not a top priority for 49ers coach Chip Kelly and quarterback Colin Kaepernick, not with a five-game losing streak in tow for Sunday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

• But both Kelly and Kaepernick confirmed this week that they’ve experienced problems with the Microsoft Surface tablets. They’re just not as fed up with them as New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who’s lambasted the imperfect technology for years and finally declared this week: “I’m done with the tablets.”

• Research firms like IDC and Gartner have continued to forecast contraction, not expansion, in the PC business. Only when enterprise migrations to Windows 10 kick into gear do analysts see a reversal of the industry’s historic slump. That isn’t expected to happen until next year.

Server

• In the supercomputers of yore, “people wanted the operating system to just get out of the way,” says Pete Beckman, a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and co-director of the Northwestern Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering.

• Beckman recalls complaints about slowdowns in application runtime while the OS handled mundane but necessary behind-the-scenes tasks. Frustrated with this OS noise, users called for a “thin, lightweight operating system,” he says.

Kernel Space

• I’m back on my usual Sunday afternoon release schedule, and 4.9-rc2 is out.

• My favorite new feature that I called out in the rc1 announcement (the virtually mapped stacks) is possibly implicated in some crashes that Dave Jones has been trying to figure out, so if you want to be helpful and try to see if you can give more data, please make sure to enable CONFIG_VMAP_STACK.

• .. and on the other hand, if you want to just not have to worry about _that_ particular issue, disable the virtually mapped stacks it for now, but please do help test.

• Because 4.9 is obviously shaping up to be a big release (I haven’t done the actual stats yet, but I think it’s the biggest in number of commits we’ve ever had), and I think Greg is also planning on making it an LTS release. The two may be related, with people pushing to get their stuff ready. Regardless, the more people who help test, and the earlier in the rc series those people start testing, the better off we’ll be. Hint hint.

• Ok, enough about that. rc2 itself isn’t huge, but that’s a fairly common pattern: either people just take a breather after the merge window, or it simply takes a while for the fallout of new code to be found, so rc2 is usually a fairly small rc.

• But we have stuff pretty much all over the map: drivers dominate (gpu drivers stand out, but there’s ipmi, clocksource, mmc, pinctrl, HID, scsi, nvme .. you name it). Add some architecture updates (x86 and arm64) and a few filesystems (ext4, nfs, ceph, f2fs), and some VM cleanups and one big fix, and you’ve covered most of it.

• The appended shortlog gives the details, and for even more detail you can always go to the git tree itself.

• Linus

• It’s still Sunday in the US, which means that it’s time for you to take yet another RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel release for a test drive.

• That’s right, Linus Torvalds just announced the second Release Candidate for Linux kernel 4.9, which lands eight days after the first one and appears to be fairly normal development snapshot that includes lots of updated drivers, mostly for GPU, but also HID, SCSI, MMC, PINCTRL, IMPI, and clocksource, various x86 and ARM64 architecture updates, improvemnts to the EXT4, F2FS, Ceph, and NFS filesystems, and some VM cleanups.

• Linux 4.9-rc2 is now available as the latest test release of this forthcoming kernel update.

• Over the past week there’s been a fair number of merges of bug/regression fixes for this stage of Linux 4.9 development, one week since the closure of the merge window.

• We’ve already written a lot about Linux 4.9, including our detailed Linux 4.9 feature overview for those interested in the fun changes of this next kernel release.

• Not mentioned in my earlier features you won’t find in the Linux 4.9 mainline kernel is support for Intel’s Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) but at least it was revised this weekend in still working towards mainline integration.

• The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board provides the development community (primarily the kernel development community) with a voice in the Foundation’s decision-making process. Among other things, the TAB chair holds a seat on the Foundation’s board of directors. The next TAB election will be held on November 2 at the Kernel Summit in Santa Fe, NM; five TAB members (½ of the total) will be selected there. The nomination process is open until voting begins; anybody interested in serving on the TAB is encouraged to throw their hat into the ring.

• Last week the Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 patches were updated for the Linux 4.9-rc1 kernel. While it won’t be mainlined until Linux 4.10 at least, I decided to try out these TBM 3.0 / ITMT patches with a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E CPU.

• Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Technology is designed to boost single-threaded application performance by moving the most critical workloads to the fastest core. TBM 3.0 is complementary to TBM 2.0. Those unfamiliar with it can find details at Intel.com.

Graphics Stack

• Ever hear of the Intrinsic game engine? Neither have we, until The Khronos Group mentioned it this morning as a new game engine focused on Vulkan support that was open-sourced last week.

• Intrinsic is an open-source cross-platform graphics and game engine that’s designed around Vulkan. Intrinsic is still in the early stages of development but the visuals from it so far appear quite good. The game engine is actually GPLv3 licensed but the developer is also making it available for proprietary purposes through private means.

• The latest Mesa 13.0 weekly release candidate is now available for testing.

• Today, October 24, 2016, Emil Velikov, a software release engineer working for Collabora, announced the availability of the second Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming Mesa 3D 13.0.0 Graphics Library.

• The development cycle of the major Mesa 3D Graphics Library 13.0.0 branch, due for release later this month, on the 28th of October, started last week, on October 19, with the Release Candidate 1 milestone. And today, we’re able to test drive the second RC build, which introduces even more bug fixes and improvements.

• One of my “hobbies” when news is light and there isn’t any fun/new/exciting hardware keeping me busy on a given weekend is checking out the various Vulkan projects on GitHub. It’s been great seeing all of the independent graphics renderers/engines being tried by different individuals, tons of different Vulkan samples, and a lot of other innovative projects around Vulkan, many of which I’ve written about in the past few months on Phoronix. One of the projects I see being regularly updated when checking on weekends and haven’t written about yet is LLGL, the Low-Level Graphics Library.

Applications

• Having remote support for Linux work with one release, then completely stopping Linux support with the next application release is a frustrating experience. Sometime ago, we watched this happen with Splashtop. What’s even lazier on their part, is that they can’t be bothered to remove the obsolete Linux packages.

• Then you had options like Mikogo. They went from supporting remote support for Linux users to acknowledging in a blog post that this is no longer the case. To be fair, the software is still available if you know where to look for it. However it’s not a good idea to rely on unsupported software.

• Coreboot 4.5 is now available as the latest version of this open-source BIOS/firmware implementation project for those looking toward the bi-annual releases rather than Git.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Back in September Feral Interactive announced Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for Linux and macOS. This game under Windows is one of the few titles using Direct3D 12 and Feral announced their macOS port would be making use of Apple’s low-level Metal graphics API. Unfortunately, it’s still not clear yet whether the Linux port will feature Vulkan support — the open, cross-platform equivalent to Metal and D3D12 — or just have an OpenGL renderer.

• Aspyr Media sent out a tweet today for Linux gamers stating that Civilization VI [Steam] for Linux is still possible.

• I’ve followed ‘A Quiver of Crows’ [Steam, Official Site] for a while waiting for the release of this grim looking twin-stick shooter, and it finally released with day-1 Linux support.

• Pharaonic [GOG, Official Site] the stylish and difficult side-scrolling RPG/Action title is now available DRM free on GOG, it has a Linux build of course.

• SIEGE [Steam], a strategic single-player card game recently released for Linux. I love card-based combat games and it looks quite cool.

• ‘Sky Break’ [Steam, Official Site] recently released and it’s also available for Linux, it looks like a fantastic single-player open-world action & adventure game.

• To me, it almost looks like a mix of No Mans Sky in visual style, with Horizon Zero Dawn styled robotic enemies. I think it looks extremely cool and i really want to give it go!

• Not only is that an awesome piece of gaming history to have accessible to the world, but it also builds for Linux! Woah!

• So Halloween is fast approaching, and you want to play something scary, here’s some good ones to try out.

• It’s tough choosing which games, as honestly, we don’t really have all that many good quality horror games. There’s a lot of junk out there!

• Discovering Colors – Animals [Steam, Official Site] is a cheap kids game about colouring and it recently gained a Linux version.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• With great pleasure, Chakra GNU/Linux developers Neofytos Kolokotronis informed the community about the latest open source software projects and technologies that landed in the stable repositories of the distribution originally based on Arch Linux.

• Just like Arch Linux, Chakra GNU/Linux is a rolling operating system, which means that users always receive the latest updates without having to download a new ISO image and reinstall. And today, we’re happy to inform our Chakra GNU/Linux users that they’ve received the newest KDE Plasma 5.8.2 LTS desktop environment.

• KDE Plasma’s KDE Applications 16.08 software suite series will receive just one more point release, namely KDE Applications 16.08.3, which lands November 10, so it’s time for the next major branch.

• The KDE developer community has firmed up the schedule for the KDE Applications 16.12 release.

• The Qt Company has made available new snapshots for testing of upcoming releases for the Qt tool-kit.

• For those sticking to the Qt 5.7 series currently, a new pre-release snapshot is available of the upcoming Qt 5.7.1 release as the first big collection of bug-fixes for this point release. Today’s Qt 5.7.1 snapshot packages can be found here.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Cinnamon desktop environment is incredibly popular, and for good reason. Out of the box it offers a clean, fast and well configured desktop experience.

• But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make it a little better with a few nifty extras.

• And that’s where Cinnamon Applets come in. Like Unity’s Indicator Applets and GNOME Extensions, Cinnamon Applets let you add additional functionality to your desktop quickly and easily.

• The hackfest is aimed to raise the standard of the overall core experience in GNOME, this includes the core apps like Documents, Files, Music, Photos and Videos, etc. In particular, we want to identify missing features and sore points that needs to be addressed and the interaction between apps and the desktop.

• Making the core apps push beyond the limits of the framework and making them excellent will not only be helpful for the GNOME desktop experience, but also for 3rd party apps, where we will implement what they are missing and also serve as an example of what an app could be.

• In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 335 commits, with 13631 lines added and 37699 lines removed.

Distributions

• Qubes is a Fedora Based Linux Operating System to provide better security by using virtualization. Qubes is developed by Poland developers that includes Joanna Rutkowska, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki and many others. The first Qubes version was released on 3 Sep, 2012. Currently, Qubes is on version 3.2. It is developed under GPL v2 license its default user interface is KDE and Xfce.

• You know those times when things go wrong on your computer, and it won’t boot, or you can’t’ login into your system, or there’s a rootkit messing up your booting or you just want to recover files from a drive. Those are the times having a rescue disc will do you a great deal of good in helping you out. So let’s take a look at 5 very useful Linux based Rescue CDs you can check out.

New Releases

• Just one day after announcing the release of the GParted 0.27.0 open-source partition editor software, Curtis Gedak is informing us about the availability of the GParted Live 0.27.0-1 stable release.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE developer Dominique Leuenberger informs the openSUSE Tumbleweed community about the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software projects that landed in the stable repositories.

• We have now released the long-awaited version 1.22 for SUSE Linux Enterprise, but of course it is available for openSUSE and other distributions as well. Since our previous Machinery for SUSE Linux Enterprise release (1.18) there are quite some changes and new features introduced.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that UKCloud, the foremost public cloud provider for UK government, has standardized on Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat Ceph Storage to lead its public sector customers through their digital transformation journey. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud platform is designed to enable UKCloud’s customers to deliver digital services directly to citizens by providing the required levels of scalability, performance and assurance.

• Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) today announced support for Red Hat CloudForms, an enterprise management platform. With this new capability, enterprise customers can now use the power of Red Hat CloudForms in conjunction with Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat, which is managed and supported by two leading OpenStack vendors in the industry.

• This is an important milestone for Rackspace customers who want to deliver a complete private cloud solution to their users across multiple cloud platforms. For Rackspace and Red Hat, it is a continuation of the companies’ commitment to empowering customers by enhancing capabilities in the core OpenStack project, while also integrating value-added software when appropriate.

• Red Hat Product Security recently celebrated our 15th anniversary this summer and while I cannot claim to have been with Red Hat for that long (although I’m coming up on 8 years myself), I’ve watched the changes from the “0day” of the Red Hat Security Response Team to today. In fact, our SRT was the basis for the security team that Mandrakesoft started back in the day.

• In 1999, I started working for Mandrakesoft, primarily as a packager/maintainer. The offer came, I suspect, because of the amount of time I spent volunteering to maintain packages in the distribution. I also was writing articles for TechRepublic at the time, so I also ended up being responsible for some areas of documentation, contributing to the manual we shipped with every boxed set we sold (remember when you bought these things off the shelf?).

Finance

Fedora

• As for today, latest version of systemd is v231, released in July 2016. This is the version that will be in Fedora 25 (to be GA in three weeks). That’s quite a long time between releases for systemd – we used to have a new version every two weeks.

• During the hackfest at systemd.conf 2016, I’ve tried to tackle three issues biting me with Fedora 24 (v229, released in February this year) and F25. The outcome was… unexpected.

• Recently I’ve been working on improving hybrid graphics support for the upcoming Fedora 25 release. Although Fedora 25 Workstation will use Wayland by default for its GNOME 3 desktop, my work has been on hybrid gfx support under X11 (Xorg) as GNOME 3 on Wayland does not yet support hybrid gfx,

Debian Family

Derivatives

• After releasing the first Test build of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” operating system a couple of days ago, today, October 23, 2016, the Parsix GNU/Linux development team announced the availability of new security updates for all supported Parsix GNU/Linux releases.

• Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” is the current stable release of the Debian-based operating system, and it relies on the Debian Stable (Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie”) software repositories. On the other hand Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” is the next major version, which right now is in development, but receives the same updates as the former.

• Today, October 23, 2016, the development team behind the Debian-based Netrunner GNU/Linux distribution proudly announced the release of Netrunner Core 16.09 “Avalon.”

• The gift and curse of desktop Linux-based operating systems is the ability to change the desktop environment. On one hand, having the choice to pick your favorite user interface, such as Unity, GNOME, or KDE Plasma, can be a huge positive. On the other, this also creates fragmented experiences between Linux users.

• If you are a fan of KDE Plasma, there are plenty of quality distributions available. The overall best for home users, however, is the wonderful Netrunner. You’d be hard-pressed to find another KDE-focused distro with such care and focus on the user experience. Today, a specialized version of the Debian-based operating system, called Netrunner Core, becomes available for download. This pared-down OS is designed for lower-end systems, and there are images for both x86 and ARM.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• It is evident that Samsung has been having a hard time to gain back customers’ trust after the Note 7 disaster. However, not everything’s going wrong for the South Korean Electronics giant. The company’s Tizen Based Quantum DOT SUHD (2016) TV was named as the “2016 TV of the year” by some of the top IT magazines in the UK. Samsung’s Quantum DOT SUHD TVs bagged 5 out 5 points from “WHAT HI-FI” internet tech magazine which also obviously had to be the top score.

• Last week lots of games were added to the Tizen store. Zombie Derby 2 is one of them by Herocraft Ltd. Today they added another game in the Tizen Store named FootLOL – Crazy Football.

• As the Internet of Things gets more popular new questions arise: which protocol will become the open standard for supporting IoT networks across a huge array of devices around the world? Today we start hearing some answers from Russia.

• Igor Shchyogolev, former Minister of Telecommunications between 2008 and 2012, is thinking about a service that involves both an Internet card and a City card for citizen to use the Internet, hence named “Internet + City card” or just “Internet + City”. Long story short, Russia is contemplating the hypothesis of domestic regulation, rather than an intergovernmental agreement between major countries involved. Testament to this intent are Russian focus towards cryptographic protection and the plan of the country to substain such autarchics drives with national production of chips and direct control of both analog and digital TV frequencies.

Android

• Google has taken itself down a very promising road with its new Pixel phone line, offering a level of polish and power that makes it very competitive with the market’s top phones.

• I admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by the Pixel’s first appearance, which came at a Google launch event earlier this month. Google’s Nexus line of phones had always appealed well to the niche Android superfan audience, and on paper it did not seem that the $750 Pixel would really offer that much more.

• Yet my mind changed after the company sent me a Pixel XL to review. Both this 5.5-inch phone and its smaller sibling run pure Android and feature Google’s voice-controlled Assistant. The Pixel XL proved to be an elegant, capable and — best of all — useful phone.

• Researchers have devised an attack that gains unfettered “root” access to a large number of Android phones, exploiting a relatively new type of bug that allows adversaries to manipulate data stored in memory chips.

• The breakthrough has the potential to make millions of Android phones vulnerable, at least until a security fix is available, to a new form of attack that seizes control of core parts of the operating system and neuters key security defenses. Equally important, it demonstrates that the new class of exploit, dubbed Rowhammer, can have malicious and far-reaching effects on a much wider number of devices than was previously known, including those running ARM chips.

• Previously, some experts believed Rowhammer attacks that altered specific pieces of security-sensitive data weren’t reliable enough to pose a viable threat because exploits depended on chance hardware faults or advanced memory-management features that could be easily adapted to repel the attacks. But the new proof-of-concept attack developed by an international team of academic researchers is challenging those assumptions.

• It was earlier this month when a report suggested that OnePlus is working on a new variant of its flagship device – the OnePlus 3. Even while earlier reports suggested that the phone might be called the OnePlus 3 Plus or the OnePlus 3s, but a recent post made by a OnePlus designer on Weibo suggests that the phone might be called the OnePlus 3T.

• There has been no official information that OnePlus is even working on a new variant of the phone. OnePlus has said in the past that they will be launching just one flagship device in a year, but according to a GizmoChina report, the company is facing a huge backlog of OnePlus 3 orders that they have been unable to fulfill because of a shortage in supply of AMOLED displays. The report had added that the new version of the phone might feature an LCD panel display instead.

Free Software/Open Source

• Developers, distributors, and users of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) often face a host of legal issues which they need to keep in mind. Although areas of law such as copyright, trademark, and patents are frequently discussed, these are not the only legal concerns for FOSS. One area that often escapes notice is export controls. It may come as a surprise that sharing software that performs or uses cryptographic functions on a public website could be a violation of U.S. export control law.

• Export controls is a term for the various legal rules which together have the effect of placing restrictions, conditions, or even wholesale prohibitions on certain types of export as a means to promote national security interests and foreign policy objectives. Export control has a long history in the United States that goes back to the Revolutionary War with an embargo of trade with Great Britain by the First Continental Congress. The modern United States export control regime includes the Department of State’s regulations covering export of munitions, the Treasury Department’s enforcement of United States’ foreign embargoes and sanctions regimes, and the Department of Commerce’s regulations applying to exports of “dual-use” items, i.e. items which have civil applications as well as terrorism, military, or weapons of mass destruction-related applications.

• If tweaks to your Puppet setups are causing breakage across your deployments, GitHub’s Octocatalog-diff ensures that new Puppet settings don’t wreck old ones

• Puppet released a number of announcements today including the availability of Puppet Docker Image Build and a new version of Puppet Enterprise, which features phased deployments and situational awareness.

• In April, Puppet began helping people deploy and manage things like Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere, and CoreOS. Now the shift is helping people manage the services that are running on top of those environments.

• At LinuxCon Europe in Berlin I gave a talk about Kubernetes titled “Why I love Kubernetes? Top 10 reasons.” The response was great, and several folks asked me to write a blog about it. So here it is, with the first five reasons in this article and the others to follow. As a quick introduction, Kubernetes is “an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications” often referred to as a container orchestrator.

• Mirai gained notoriety after the Krebs attack because of the bandwidth it was able to generate — a record at well over 600 gigabits a second, enough to send the English text of Wikipedia three times in two seconds. Two weeks later, the source code for Mirai was posted online for free.

• Onchain, an open-source blockchain based in Shanghai, will provide technology for Alibaba’s first blockchain supported email evidence repository.

• Onchain allows fast re-constructions for public, permissioned (consortium) or private blockchains and will eventually enable interoperability among these modes. Its consortium chain product, the Law Chain, will provide technology for Ali Cloud, Alibaba’s computing branch.

• Ali Cloud has integrated Onchain’s Antshares blockchain technology to provide an enterprise-grade email repository. Onchain provides the bottom-layer framework for Ali Cloud, including its open-source blockchain capabilities, to enable any company to customize its own enterprise-level blockchain.

Events

• Today’s cloud native ecosystem is growing at an incredibly rapid pace – as new technologies are continuously introduced and current applications are ever-evolving.

• Taking the lead in bringing together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the cloud native software stacks including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and OpenTracing and serves as a neutral home for collaboration.

• To help spread cloud native practices and technology across the world, CNCF is hosting CloudNativeCon to bring together leading contributors in cloud native applications and computing, containers, microservices, central orchestration processing, and more November 8-9 in Seattle.

• I’ll be speaking about Spark on Kubernetes at Spark Summit EU this week. The main thesis of my talk is that the old way of running Spark in a dedicated cluster that is shared between applications makes sense when analytics is a separate workload. However, analytics is no longer a separate workload — instead, analytics is now an essential part of long-running data-driven applications. This realization motivated my team to switch from a shared Spark cluster to multiple logical clusters that are co-scheduled with the applications that depend on them.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• If you’re a Firefox user and you’re a little fed up with going to Google Chrome every time in order to watch Netflix on your Linux machine, the good news is since Firefox 49 landed, HTML5 DRM (through the Google Widevine CDM (Content Decryption Manager) plugin) is now supported. Services that use DRM for HTML5 media should now just work, such as Amazon Prime Video. Unfortunately, the Netflix crew haven’t ‘flicked a switch’ yet behind the scenes for Firefox on Linux, meaning if you run Netflix in the Mozilla browser at the moment, you’ll likely just come across the old Silverlight error page. But there is a workaround.

• For some reason, Netflix still expects Silverlight when it detects the user is running Firefox, despite the fact that the latest Firefox builds for Linux now support the HTML5 DRM plugin.

SaaS/Back End

• Business intelligence is the dominant use-case for IT organizations implementing Hadoop, according to a report from the folks at AtScale. The benchmark study also shows which tools in the Haddop ecosystem are best for particular types of BI queries.

• As we’ve reported before, tools that demystify and function as useful front-ends and connectors for the open source Hadoop project are much in demand. AtScale, billed as “the first company to allow business users to do business intelligence on Hadoop,” focused its study on the strengths and weaknesses of the industry’s most popular analytical engines for Hadoop – Impala, SparkSQL, Hive and Presto.

• Revenues from OpenStack-based businesses are poised to grow by 35 percent a year to more than $5 billion by 2020, according to analysts at 451 Research. In its latest Cloud Price Index, 451 Research analyzes the costs associated with using various cloud options to determine when it becomes better value to use a self-managed private cloud instead of public or managed cloud services.

• The idea is to createa complex pricing model that takes into consideration the major factors impacting total cost of ownership (TCO), including salaries and workload requirements.The 451 study found that because of the prevalence of suitably qualified administrators, commercial private cloud offerings such as VMware and Microsoft currently offer a lower TCO when labor efficiency is below 400 virtual machines managed per engineer. But where labor efficiency is greater than this, OpenStack becomes more financially attractive. In fact, past this tipping point, all private cloud options are cheaper than both public cloud and managed private cloud options.

• Victoria Martinez de la Cruz is no stranger to OpenStack’s mentorship opportunities. It’s how she got her own start in OpenStack, and now a few years later is helping to coordinate many of these opportunities herself. She is speaking on a panel on mentoring and internships later this week at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Spain. In this interview, we catch up with Victoria to learn more about the details of what it’s like to be a part of an open source internship, as well as some helpful advice for people on both sides of the mentoring process.

Databases

• The primary focus of this article is on the use, configuration, and optimization of PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB Postgres Advanced Server running on the IBM® Power Systems™ servers featuring the new IBM POWER8® processor technology.

• Note: The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2 operating system was used. The scope of this article is to provide information on how to build and set up of PostgreSQL database from open source and also install and configure EnterpriseDB Postgres Advanced Server on an IBM Power® server for better use. EnterpriseDB Postgres Advanced Server on IBM Power Systems running Linux® is based on the open source database, PostgreSQL, and is capable of handling a wide variety of high-transaction and heavy-reporting workloads.

Valgrind

• Valgrind 3.12.0 was just released with lots of exciting improvements. See the release notes for all the details. It is already packaged for Fedora 25.

• 3.12.0 is a feature release with many improvements and the usual collection of bug fixes. This release adds support for POWER ISA 3.0, improves instruction set support on ARM32, ARM64 and MIPS, and provides support for the latest common components (kernel, gcc, glibc). There are many smaller refinements and new features. The release notes below give more details.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• For the past number of months the LLVM project has been considering a move from their SVN-based development process to Git with a focus on GitHub. That effort continues moving forward.

• Lumina is a lightweight Qt-based desktop environment for BSD and Linux. We show you what’s new in its latest release, and how you can install it on Ubuntu.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• There are various things that make up an operating system. In any operating system, one of the most critical parts is powering on the machine. During this process, the computer will execute a small program in read-only memory (ROM) to begin initiating the startup process. This small program is known by many names, but most often called a boot loader. In almost every Linux distribution, including Fedora, GRUB2 (or GRand Unified Bootloader 2) is the default boot loader. Even though it is a critical piece of the operating system, many people aren’t aware of the boot loader, all that goes into it, or how it can be customized.

Public Services/Government

• Public policy makers in Sweden have limited insight on how IT project can lead to IT vendor lock-in, a study conducted for the Swedish Competition Authority shows. “An overwhelming majority of the IT projects conducted by schools and public sector organisations refer to specific software without considering lock-in and different possible negative consequences”, the authors conclude.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Mobile Internet connectivity is growing rapidly in rural India, and because most Internet users are more comfortable in their native languages, websites producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this growth. In a country like India in which only a handful of journals are available in Indian languages, open access to research and educational resources is hugely important for populating content for the various Indian language Wikipedias.

Programming/Development

• One source of data about programmers’ skills is HackerRank, a company that poses programming challenges to a community of more than a million coders and also offers recruitment services to businesses. Using information about how successful coders from different countries are at solving problems across a wide range of domains (such as “algorithms” or “data structures” or specific languages such as C++ or Java), HackerRank’s data suggests that, overall, the best developers come from China, followed closely by Russia. Alarmingly, and perhaps unexpectedly, the United States comes in at 28th place.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Iraq’s parliament has voted to ban the sale, import and production of alcohol in a surprise move. Proponents of the ban argue the ban is justified by the constitution, which prohibits any law contradicting Islam.

• Opponents say it violates the same constitution which guarantees the traditions of religious minorities such as Christians and have vowed to appeal against the decision.

• Those violating the law will be fined between 10 million and 25 million dinars (roughly £7,000 to £17,500).

• While this moggy was struggling to get back from Indonesia, the Court of Appeal handed down its decision in the pregabalin appeal Warner-Lambert Company LLC v Generics (UK) Ltd (t/a Mylan) & Ors [2016] EWCA Civ 1006 (13 October 2016), and finally the IPKat has managed to blog about it (the lateness by no means reflecting on the importance of the judgment).

• It is very much a judgment of three halves.

• In the first part of the judgment (up to [135]), which substantively disposes of the case, Lord Justice Floyd (with whom Lord Justic Kitchin and Lord Justice Patten agreed) upheld the decision of Mr Justice Arnold on the validity of the patent. Arnold J had considered that the claims of the patent that were alleged to be infringed were insufficient, and in particular claim 3 directed towards use of pregabalin for neuropathic pain, because the patent did not render it plausible that pregabalin would be effective at treating central neuropathic pain, only peripheral neuropathic pain. Floyd LJ agreed with Arnold J’s construction of the claims, and rejected the challenge to the finding that claim 3 was not plausible across its breadth.

Security

• Technology experts warned for years that the millions of Internet-connected “smart” devices we use every day are weak, easily hijacked and could be turned against us.

• The massive siege on Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, shows those ominous predictions are now a reality.

• An unknown attacker intermittently knocked many popular websites offline for hours Friday, from Amazon to Twitter and Netflix to Etsy. How the breach occurred is a cautionary tale of the how the rush to make humdrum devices “smart” while sometimes leaving out crucial security can have major consequences.

• Security experts have been warning for years that the growing number of unsecured Internet of Things devices would bring a wave of unprecedented and catastrophic cyber attacks. Just last month, a hacker publicly released malware code used in a record-breaking attack that hijacked 1.5 million internet-connected security cameras, refrigerators, and other so-called “smart” devices that were using default usernames and passwords.

• On Friday, the shit finally hit the fan.

• Fingerprints aren’t authentication.

• Fingerprints are identity. They are usernames.

• Fingerprints are something public, which is why it should really bother nobody with a sense of security that the FBI used them to unlock seized phones. You’re literally leaving your fingerprints on every object you touch. That makes for an abysmally awful authentication token.

• Using open source software is a viable and proven method of combatting cyber-crime

• It’s encouraging to read that the government understands the seriousness of the loss of $81 million dollars via the hacking of Bangladesh Bank, and that a cyber-security agency is going to be formed to prevent further disasters. Currently, information security in each government department is up to the internal IT staff of that department.

• Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has announced that it will provide a live kernel patching services for version 16.04 which was released in April.

• If I asked everyone to tell me what security is, what do you do about it, and why you do it. I wouldn’t get two answers that were the same. I probably wouldn’t even get two that are similar. Why is this? After recording Episode 9 of the Open Source Security Podcast I co-host, I started thinking about measuring a lot. It came up in the podcast in the context of bug bounties, which get exactly what they measure. But do they measure the right things? I don’t know the answer, nor does it really matter. It’s just important to keep this in mind as in any system, you will get exactly what you measure.

• [...]

• If you have 2000 employees, 200 systems, 4 million lines of code, and 2 security people, that’s clearly a disaster waiting to happen. If you have 20, there may be hope. I have no idea what the proper ratios should be, if you’re willing to share ratios with me I’d love to start collecting data. As I said, I don’t have scientific proof behind this, it’s just something I suspect is true.

• Reading Matthew Garret’s exposés of home automation IoT devices makes most engineers think “hell no!” or “over my dead body!”. However, there’s also the siren lure that the ability to program your home, or update its settings from anywhere in the world is phenomenally useful: for instance, the outside lights in my house used to depend on two timers (located about 50m from each other). They were old, loud (to the point the neighbours used to wonder what the buzzing was when they visited) and almost always wrongly set for turning the lights on at sunset. The final precipitating factor for me was the need to replace our thermostat, whose thermistor got so eccentric it started cooling in winter; so away went all the timers and their loud noises and in came a z-wave based home automation system, and the guilty pleasure of having an IoT based home automation system. Now the lights precisely and quietly turn on at sunset and off at 23:00 (adjusting themselves for daylight savings); the thermostat is accessible from my phone, meaning I can adjust it from wherever I happen to be (including Hong Kong airport when I realised I’d forgotten to set it to energy saving mode before we went on holiday). Finally, there’s waking up at 3am to realise your wife has fallen asleep over her book again and being able to turn off her reading light from your alarm clock without having to get out of bed … Automation bliss!

• Since the first of the month, I’ve heard colleagues and others report each of the 10 security variants to Murphy’s Law listed below. Murphy is not only alive but has been reincarnated.

• The usage of open source technologies has grown significantly in the public sector. In fact, according to a published memo, open source technologies allow the Department of Defense to “develop and update its software-based capabilities faster than ever, to anticipate new threats and respond to continuously changing requirements”. Cybersecurity threats are on the rise and organizations need to ensure that the software they use in their environments is safe. IT teams need the ability to quickly identify and mitigate breaches. They also need to deploy preventative measures and ensure that all stakeholders are protected.

Defence/Aggression

• The Middle East has become Finland’s most important market for arms exports. According to a new report by the think tank SaferGlobe Finland, local arms manufacturers sold some 99 million euros of mainly armoured vehicles and mortars in 2015, the bulk of it to countries outside the European Union.

• My glorious Roman Empire ignored religion for too long and it almost destroyed me. While I built roads, raised armies and sought trade deals with nearby city-states and rivals, my neighbor Spain kept to itself, built churches and spread the good word of Protestantism. Which was fine. As the Roman Emperor Trajan, I’d established a religion based on the worship of the mighty turtle and then forgotten about my people’s spiritual needs as I concentrated on getting tanks before my rivals.

• “Foolish Spain,” I thought. “This is a Civilization game. Glory and riches goes to the ruler who builds a spaceport or conquers their rivals. There’s no easy path to victory through the gods.” Then, almost too late, I checked the scorecard and realized Spain was about to declare victory … a religious victory.

• Civilization 6 is very different and much better than its predecessors.

• Some 34 years ago, almost by accident, Britain’s ministry of defence solved the pesky problem that had laid the Pentagon low in Vietnam. What do you do about journalists running wild in your warzone? You put them on a long, slow boat to the other side of the world. You – ahem! – take control.

• And so, from Grenada to Panama to Iraq War One, journalists were locked in little boxes as far from the action as possible before (Iraq Two) being cautiously “embedded” with units they depended on to keep them safe. No freelance trips here. No unwanted questions asked. Control was still the theme of each and every fighting day.

• So what are we to make of Mosul, as Kurds and Iraqis advance on the city via 24/7 streaming on Facebook Live from Al-Jazeera, Channel 4 News and a Kurdish agency? Do we want an emoji on every blast of destruction? “Like”, “like”, “like” the carnage … Is this some sort of macabre computer game?

• You’d expect tabloid foes of Channel 4 News to have a predictable view on that – and they do. The Sun is apocalyptic as usual. But there’s a deeper, continuing theme here. As David Patrikarakos, a specialist on the use of social media in war, blogs for CNN, this battle is about more than just a military defeat of Isis: it’s also about “winning the hearts and minds of the local population” – “it becomes not just a military war, but also a narrative war, in which the latter is arguably more important”.

• A plane has crashed in Malta, killing all five people on board in the country’s worst peacetime air disaster.

• The light aircraft went down during take-off from Malta International Airport at around 7.20am local time (6.20am BST) on Monday morning.

• A witness told the Times of Malta newspaper the propeller plane suddenly tipped to its right side and “went straight down to the ground”.

• An attempt to force the government to reveal its secret list of terrorist groups has been shot down by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals [PDF]. The Heartland Alliance Immigrant Justice Center’s FOIA request for “Tier III” terrorist groups can remain unfulfilled. [h/t Brad Heath]

• Without giving too much away (and neither the court nor the government does), “Tier III” is apparently more nebulous and fluid than tiers I and II.

• During his recent visit to China, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte declared “it’s time to say goodbye” to the United States. The Philippine leader and Chinese President Xi Jinping are getting closer, while Washington now is ignored.

• Duterte spoke to the press in Beijing on Wednesday and his conference coincided with talks of unprecedented agreements, mainly granting the Philippines the use of Scarborough Shoal territories.

• Duterte declared in allusion to Washington, “Your stay in my country was for your own benefit. So time to say goodbye, my friend.”

• “No more American interference. No more American exercises. What for,” Duterte told the Filipino expat community in Beijing.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Is Julian Assange playing a political role, meddling with US electoral affairs, or is WikiLeaks a neutral mouthpiece?

• [...]

• Some say the revelations are valuable information for voters. Others have accused Russia of being behind the hack and argue WikiLeaks is aiding foreign interference in the elections. Julian Assange’s haven, Ecuador, has recently pulled the plug on his internet usage, claiming that interference with other countries’ electoral processes is against their policies.

• Putting aside the agendas of all the players involved, one institution comes out undeniably sullied by the publication of the emails: the US news media. While some of the emails released presented typical behaviours, with the Clinton campaign reaching out to particular publications with stories, others are more problematic.

• Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and other international NGOs working in India had sought US government intervention after their funding came under increased scrutiny of the Modi government, according to emails released by the Wikileaks.

• The emails, hacked from the email account of John Podesta, who is the chairman of the Clinton Campaign, also indicates the global funding links of these NGOs, including those environmental groups opposing a massive mining project in Australia being undertaken by the Adani Group.

• As I said at the start, this is just one example of media spreading lies about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. It happens every day, all round the world. WikiLeaks represents a serious threat to the status quo, exposing the corruption of politicians and corporations. They are constantly targeted by journalists who choose to act as stenographers and gate-keepers of power. While these so-called journalists survive in their jobs at the mercy of the boardroom, WikiLeaks is 100% funded by people like you and me. Please help keep them strong.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• What will a planet plagued by escalating climate change look like? No one really knows. But speaking at EmTech MIT 2016, Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, presented results based on his recent analysis of economic and climate data that begin to more clearly define what the world might look like as it gets hotter.

• Further south, about 40% of USAians apparently support Trump and his denial of global warming so I expect it will take another generation suffering even larger effects before real action is taken.

Finance

• An estimated 8,000 people hit the streets in Paris, chanting against police brutality, labor reform, deportations and airport construction in Nantes that will displace dozens of farmers. The converged on the site of Nuit Debout protests, an occupation that lasted months against pro-business labor reforms and drew direct parallels with Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados.

• Tens of thousands also rallied across Spain, Belgium, Germany and other countries that will be affected by the deals.

• In Vancouver, the developer of a new Trump Tower has been under pressure for months to drop the Republican presidential candidate’s name from the project. Meanwhile, the Trump Tower in Toronto is the subject of a lawsuit after facing years of controversy.

• Donald Trump’s controversial run for US president is having an impact on his businesses in Canada and knock-on effects for those who have partnered with his brand.

• The opening date for the Vancouver hotel has been delayed until 2017, well after November’s US election. A contest offering a chance to meet with the Trump family for the grand opening caused a stir.

• Across the country, the Toronto building, which opened in 2012, has been the target of a lawsuit by small investors who claim they were misled into buying into the project. Its developer, Talon Development Inc, has tried to remove the Trump name from the troubled hotel and condominium complex.

• The story is similar in other countries.

• “The EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is in fact a political agreement that will decrease the value of European democracy.”

• This is what economist Professor Boyan Durankev said speaking for Radio FOCUS.

• In his words, there are too serious concerns that the agreement will lead to loss of jobs, lower standards in the ecology, domination of the big business, while the countries like Bulgaria will be most affected.

• We are at a crossroads for international trade policy. The failure of TTIP and CETA would pave the way for a fairer and more democratic world, argues Paul de Clerck.

• Paul de Clerck is the economic justice programme coordinator for Friends of the Earth Europe.

• The European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc, is, for the second time in a matter of months, on the verge of seeing one of its mega trade deals fall into disarray.

• If the objections of several regions in Belgium are upheld, the signing of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada planned for next week will most likely be cancelled. This follows the near collapse of TTIP, the EU’s proposed agreement with the US. Rather than despairing at the state of the EU, we should see how these developments provide a unique opportunity for the EU to take the lead in shaping new trade regimes for the future that are beneficial for people and the environment.

• The opposition to CETA and TTIP has been unprecedented in the history of the EU. Concerns have been expressed by millions of people across the continent, including lawyers, academics, political parties, local authorities and virtually all sectors of civil society. Many governments have also expressed reservations on CETA. Only the Walloons, however, had the guts to show it the red card.

• The Paris Climate Agreement is now a reality. More than 55 countries representing over 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions have ratified the pact, which means the historic agreement is set to enter into force faster than was ever anticipated. As we celebrate this landmark and get ready to grapple with the next steps of how to implement it—a key topic of discussion at COP 22, the upcoming international climate conference in Marrakesh, Morocco—the U.S. Congress may soon vote on the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with 11 other countries, and the administration continues to negotiate the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the European Union.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The emails are full of potential damage for Hillary Clinton. She weighed the political implications of policies. She is close to Wall Street. Her aides gathered information to discredit a woman who’d accused her husband of rape.

• So how has she so far remained largely unscathed by the unprecedented release of hacked emails? It’s one part a deliberate strategy of casting doubt on the authenticity and distracting from the content of the emails, one part fatigue by Americans who already have seen tens of thousands of Clinton’s emails and one part a whole lot of luck.

• With Clinton leading in both national polls and battleground-state surveys, the Democrat is in some ways trying to run out the clock on the election.

• The WikiLeaks emails do threaten to reinforce voter doubts about Clinton’s honesty. But her strategy – refuse to confirm the authenticity of the emails, blame Russia for the hack and say little else – has so far successfully defused the impact by avoiding any talk that would keep voters looking at the content of the messages. Her undisciplined opponent has taken care of the rest.

• “When you start explaining, you’re in trouble,” said G. Terry Madonna, the director of the Franklin & Marshall College poll in Pennsylvania. “They are handling it the best way they can. It’s about as an effective argument you can make.”

• Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile complained during an interview on Wednesday that she is being “persecuted” by being asked questions about leaking a town hall question to the Clinton campaign.

• And during the interview, conducted on Fox News after the presidential debate, Brazile said that her interviewer, Megyn Kelly, was “like a thief” because her questions cited emails that were stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and released by Wikileaks.

• Kelly grilled Brazile, who was a CNN and ABC News contributor prior to taking over the DNC in July, about an email revealed by Wikileaks showing her providing a tip about a March 13 town hall question to the Clinton campaign.

• Voters who want to fight against racial profiling, human rights violations, war and the two-party system should cast their ballots for the Green Party, vice presidential nominee Ajamu Baraka said Tuesday.

• Baraka, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s running mate and a self-described socialist from Atlanta, spoke to about 55 people at Wayne State University in a campaign stop. A Glengariff Group poll released last week to The Detroit News and WDIV showed the Green Party ticket receiving 4.6 percent of support from 600 likely Michigan voters, trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump and Libertarian Gary Johnson.

• A Stein-Baraka presidency, he said, would be focused on using executive powers to create an “emergency jobs bill” to address inner cities and rural areas, notify the “right-wing” government in Israel “that we’re no longer going to allow for them to have unfettered freedom to expand settlements and undermine the rights to Palestinians” and reverse the attempt at regime change in Syria.

• When Jill Stein ran as the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, media attention to her candidacy was rare. Now, with two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in history, she has received widespread attention. There seems to be record interest in third party campaigns, including Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.

• The Nation published a debate between Socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant and Nation contributor Joshua Holland.

• The editors gave Sawant’s column the negative headline—”Don’t Waste Your Vote On the Corporate Agenda—Vote for Jill Stein and the Greens”—but column does not hinge on loathing Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Rather, it makes a positive case for supporting Stein by primarily arguing the need for progressives to build an alternative to the two pro-capitalist political parties in America. It has a long-term focus on bringing about radical change.

• The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.

• It is as Bernie Sanders has foreseen it, you might say.

• With its publication of thousands of less-than-flattering emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta over the past two weeks, Wikileaks has done much to undermine Hillary Clinton in her ongoing effort to appeal to millennials who see Washington as a corrupt town where big business and big government are deeply intertwined.

• Excerpts from various six-figure speeches that Clinton made in 2013 and 2014 reveal a politician who is not only quite friendly with Wall Street in private, but somewhat resentful of the American public for constantly attacking and scapegoating big banks for the financial crisis.

• “The people who know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” said Clinton in one speech. Reform, she continued, “really has to come from the industry itself.” In another speech, Clinton stated that you have to have “both a public and a private position,” which has cast further doubt on her trustworthiness among young voters.

• Hours after conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia passed away, the Clinton campaign floated a Texan as a possible replacement.

• Wallace Jefferson, a former chief justice on the Texas Supreme Court, was the subject of an email titled “Scalia replacement” written by the president of a George Soros-backed grant-making organization.

• “Remember our discussion of Wallace Jefferson, Chief Justice in Texas?” said Open Society Foundations president Chris Stone in the email.

• “Yup,” replied Clinton campaign chief John Podesta.

• The hacked email was one of thousands released by WikiLeaks in recent weeks and the authenticity of the email could not be independently confirmed. The Clinton campaign declined to confirm the authenticity of the email mentioning Jefferson.

• Jimmy Dore, host of ‘Aggressive Progressives’ on ‘The Young Turks’ network, says he is disappointed to see the Democratic Party using Russia as a scapegoat for the information revealed by WikiLeaks.

• “This is a complete distraction,” he said about the DNC’s pivot to blaming Russia for WikiLeaks. “I hate that it is the Democrats now. We now have two parties of war. And now the Democrats are saber-rattling and building up a boogie-man in Putin, instead of what they should be doing, saying we both have a common enemy: ISIS. Let’s join hands and work to defeat them. That’s not what they’re doing because it makes more political sense for the Democrats to ratchet it up, to ratchet up the Cold War, which is what they’re doing now.”

• “By the way, when the [Berlin] Wall went down, Reagan assured them that we would not expand NATO, and we’re expanding NATO,” he said. “So we are the ones right now, we are the expanders… This McCarthyism that they’re trying to smear Trump with. There’s so much, you don’t have to smear that guy. But Trump has said he wanted to work with Putin to fight ISIS, while Hillary Clinton has called for a no-fly zone in Syria, which means dead people on the ground, and boots on the ground. And who are we going to shoot down? ISIS doesn’t have any planes. That means a war with Russia. This is beating the drums for war, in fact.”

• “I’m bothered by this more than anything: A lot of people are saying that we’re closer to nuclear war now than we ever were during the Cold War,” Dore said.

• There is both a principled and strategic component to voting choices in presidential elections. In principle, citizens should cast their votes for whichever candidate’s views align most with their own. Strategic voting, on the other hand, includes a voter’s assessment of the probability that various voting choices will lead to desired outcomes.

• These components are related to some degree; voters are more likely to agree about which candidate to vote for if they agree in principle on which candidate is best. Yet principled and strategic voting are not the same. One might believe a third-party candidate to be optimal, for example, but still vote for a major party candidate because of the higher probability that the major party candidate will win the election.

• This decision can be a self-fulfilling prophecy —third-party candidates would be more electable if their supporters decided to vote for them — but it can also be rational, depending on how one evaluates the differences between major party candidates and the downside risk to voting for a bad nominee.

• Disgraced former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has mostly attempted to avoid the spotlight after her resignation in the wake of emails released by WikiLeaks.

• Throughout the primaries, Wasserman Schultz was viewed unfavorably by Bernie Sanders supporters for overtly favoring Hillary Clinton, despite the DNC charter stipulating her and fellow DNC staff remain neutral to ensure a fair and balanced primary election. When indefensible evidence exposed the pro-Clinton environment at the DNC that Wasserman Schultz created, she and several other top DNC leaders were forced to resign—but there were almost no repercussions or changes made as a result of these resignations.

• Instead, Clinton immediately hired Wasserman Schultz as honorary chair of the Clinton campaign’s 50-state program, while President Obama, VP Joe Biden, and other establishment Democrats made unprecedented appearances to help Wasserman Schultz survive her re-election bid to Congress. Another Clinton surrogate, Donna Brazile, was appointed interim DNC chair to take Wasserman Schultz’s place.

• [...]

• However, Sanders supporters refuse to forget Wasserman Schultz’s role in rigging the primaries, and made sure to demonstrate that they wouldn’t let her off the hook as easily as the Democratic Party had.

• Around 20 Sanders protesters showed up with signs outside the event in contrast to the 50 or 60 Clinton supporters attending the inside. A few minutes into Wasserman Schultz’s speech, the protesters interrupted her, at which point the regional organizing director for the Florida Democratic Party and former field organizer for Clinton campaign, Omar Rashid, ran up to one of the two protesters and began yelling “Hillary” while fist pumping in their face face. Other Clinton supporters joined in the “Hillary” chant. While there are several constructive ways to de-escalate an interruption by protesters, this certainly wasn’t one of them.

Censorship/Free Speech

• David Simon was in trouble. Just weeks before he was supposed to begin filming the second season of “The Wire,” Simon still couldn’t get the permits he needed to shoot on the streets of the very city that was his setting.

• It was time to call Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley.

• The showrunner and the politician had a complicated history. When O’Malley ran for mayor in 1999, he targeted drug dealing at the intersection of West Fayette and Monroe streets, the neighborhood that was the subject of “The Corner,” Simon’s 1997 book about the city’s drug trade. But in Simon’s telling, once O’Malley was in office and fighting the drug war, Simon’s bleak critique of that effort made for an awkward political prop. When HBO held the premiere for the adaptation of “The Corner” at Baltimore’s Senator Theatre, O’Malley skipped the event. He said he already knew the story.

• Is Facebook, Inc. (FB) censoring politically conservative news and topics? According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook employees have been urging senior management to remove some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s Facebook posts, which have been deemed as insensitive hate speech.

• Trumps posts, including his position on banning Muslims from entering the U.S., is considered by some to be in violation of Facebook’s policies. However, despite numerous complaints by employees claiming that Facebook was bending the rules for Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg overruled the decision, as he did last December when he said it would be inappropriate to censor the candidate.

• Another “free speech” controversy has blown up at Facebook. “Free speech” in quotes because Facebook is a private company that can make it own rules about speech it’s willing to tolerate, much less protect. It’s also one that can make up the rules as it goes along and apply them inconsistently. Welcome to the Internet. That’s just how things are done.

• Why the sensitivity?

• To what group might the reference be to “women who live in secular countries and conform to religious dress codes make the lives of all women less free and less safe.”

• Ah, now we understand.

• There was a time when the media was, or we believed it to be, independent and unbiased, but the full on, no holds barred, political battle that has now engulfed United States has revealed our mass media is fully controlled and no different than USSR’s Pravada, Qatar’s Al Jazeera or China’s Xinhua.

• Anyone who posts videos on YouTube mocking Thailand’s dead king will have their after Google bowed to demands to censor offensive material.

• Thailand’s government met with representatives from Internet giant Google, amid growing calls from Thai hardline royalists to bring those who insult the monarchy to justice, as many Thais look with uncertainty to a future without their revered king.

• King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s death earlier this month has thrown the country’s 67 million people into mourning. It has also led to the rise of ultra-royalist vigilante groups who say they will punish anyone perceived to have insulted the monarchy during a highly sensitive time for Thailand.

• Deputy Prime Minister Prajin Juntong said he met with Google representatives in Bangkok on Friday.

• Mark Zuckerberg is a hands-on guy: the Facebook CEO stepped in himself to put a halt to calls by some of his employees to censor remarks by Donald Trump that they considered hate speech.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The NSA doesn’t like the fact that it didn’t get a big enough slice of the tax-dollar-grabbing cyber pie. After much discussion about which agencies would oversee what aspects of the US government’s cyberwar defense systems, the NSA — despite all of its computing power and hoarded exploits — ended up with the unenviable task of protecting the home turf rather than engaging in more offensive maneuvers.

• Taxpayer-funded grants to a private New Zealand tech firm were used to build mass surveillance equipment for Britain’s largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

• Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes with her ex-partner, David Shayler.

• The German parliament has approved a controversial legislation to tighten the oversight of the BND spy agency amid criticism that the law violates the privacy rights of people.

• The 2013 Snowden documents revealed UK intelligence agency GCHQ to be tapping into the undersea cables that carry Internet traffic, covertly gathering vast amounts of digital comms data under a surveillance program code-named Tempora — apparently with the help of commercial partners.

• Now leaked documents obtained by The Intercept confirm GCHQ paid New Zealand-based Endace to create data capture systems to enable it to tap high speed Internet traffic.

• It was a powerful piece of technology created for an important customer. The Medusa system, named after the mythical Greek monster with snakes instead of hair, had one main purpose: to vacuum up vast quantities of internet data at an astonishing speed.

• The technology was designed by Endace, a little-known New Zealand company. And the important customer was the British electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

• Dozens of internal documents and emails from Endace, obtained by The Intercept and reported in cooperation with Television New Zealand, reveal the firm’s key role helping governments across the world harvest vast amounts of information on people’s private emails, online chats, social media conversations, and internet browsing histories.

• The leaked files, which were provided by a source through SecureDrop, show that Endace listed a Moroccan security agency implicated in torture as one of its customers. They also indicate that the company sold its surveillance gear to more than half a dozen other government agencies, including in the United States, Israel, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Spain, and India.

• How China tamed the Internet |This is part of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the mid-1960s a young American teacher in a small central African country became involved with a group of political rebels — former government ministers mostly — who had been active in the struggle for independence. They had fallen out with the authoritarian prime minister, objecting to his dictatorial style. The country was newly independent, hardly a year old. The men advocated democratic elections and feared that the prime minister would declare himself leader for life in a one-party state.

• Fluent in the local language, obscure because he was a teacher in a bush school, and easily able to travel in and out of the country on his United States passport, the American performed various favors for the rebels, small rescues for their families, money transfers, and in one effort drove a car over 2,000 miles on back roads to Uganda to deliver the vehicle to one of the dissidents in exile. On that visit he was asked to bring a message back to the country. He did so, without understanding its implications. It was a cryptic order to activate a plot to assassinate the intransigent prime minister.

• I was arrested on Oct. 10, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a holiday where America is meant to celebrate the indigenous people of North America.

• I was in North Dakota, standing in solidarity, side-by-side with a group of over 200 water protectors, people who are fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

• People who carry a rainbow of colors on their skin. People who gathered together because they realize that if we don’t begin taking genuine steps to protect our precious resources—our soil, our water, our essential elements—we will not have a healthy or thriving planet to pass on to future generations.

• At least 27 people, including Hollywood actress Shailene Woodley, were arrested during the Standoff at Standing Rock on October 10, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, while attempting to blockade the Dakota Access pipeline construction at two separate worksites. Footage of Woodley’s arrest was streamed live to roughly 40,000 viewers on her Facebook page. She was later strip-searched in jail. She says her dedication to protest with indigenous people who are at the forefront of the fight remains strong: “Every time we allow another pipeline … we are endorsing the fossil fuel industry and only prolonging the time it is going to take to switch to renewable energy.” Woodley recently starred in the new Edward Snowden film, “Snowden.” She has appeared in the TV series “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” and has also starred in films including “The Divergent Series” and “The Fault in Our Stars.” She received a Golden Globe nomination for her role as Alex King in “The Descendants.”

• Courage founding Trustee and Centre for Investigative Journalism founder and director Gavin MacFadyen has passed away at the age of 76, after a few months of illness.

• Gavin devoted his life to independent, investigative journalism, exposing truths, challenging power and championing truthtellers at every turn. Gavin championed the rights and principles of the persecuted, even when it was controversial to do so. He supported WikiLeaks when it was targeted by US prosecutors and he cofounded Courage, to assist those most in danger for shining a light on the powerful.

• A cross-party coalition of 105 backbench Members of Parliament have signed a letter asking US President Barack Obama to withdraw the extradition requests for British activist Lauri Love before he leaves office.

• The letter, whose initial signatories were David Burrowes MP, Barry Sheerman MP and Alistair Carmichael MP, has been signed by more than a fifth of the Parliamentarians able to do so. By convention, government ministers and their opposition shadows do not sign letters of this type, although Culture Minister Matt Hancock MP – the Love family’s local constituency MP – has also added his name to the appeal.

• The 105 signatories demonstrate strong opposition to Lauri Love’s extradition across the political spectrum. The letter has been signed by 39 Conservative MPs, 39 MPs from Labour, 22 MPs from the Scottish National Party, three Liberal Democrat MPs, Mark Durkin MP from the SDLP and Green MP Caroline Lucas.

• A gathering at the United Nations in Geneva this week is hearing a litany of views on a prospective legally binding international instrument to regulate within human rights law the activities of transnational corporations and other businesses. The meeting is being webcast live.

• This might be big, depending on how much of this information is passed on to the general public, rather than delivered ex parte or under seal. Joseph Cox of Vice/Motherboard was the first to snag this ruling [PDF] by a Washington district court judge ordering the FBI to turn over tons of info about the NIT it deployed in the Playpen child porn investigation.

• As we’re already aware, the NIT was deployed by the FBI in Virginia but obtained identifying information about Tor-cloaked site visitors not just all over this country, but all over the world. The motion to compel discovery asked for several details about the NIT and its deployment and most of them have been granted.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• But even beyond this ad campaign, AT&T is talking up the value of getting this and that, and on the consumer side this has its most concrete instantiation in what AT&T has done with DirecTV since the merger. This isn’t just about traditional bundling and the discounts that come with it, but about additional benefits you get when you bundle. The two main examples are the availability of unlimited data to those who bundle AT&T and DirecTV, and the zero-rating of data for DirecTV content on AT&T wireless networks. Yes, AT&T argues, you can watch DirecTV content on any device on any network, but when you watch it on the AT&T network it’s free. The specific slogan here was “All your channels on all your devices, data free when you have AT&T”.

• As fixed and wireless broadband growth crawls to a halt and cord cutting begins to hammer TV numbers, incumbent telecom giants have been trying to pivot into the media and advertising game with mixed results. Verizon so far has shelled out billions to acquire aging 90s internet brands Yahoo and AOL, believing this can somehow transform the stodgy duopolist into a sexy, sleeker Facebook and Google competitor. So far these efforts to woo Millennials have been arguably underwhelming and occassionally comical, highlighting how innovation and disruption is somewhat foreign to these companies’ DNA.

• AT&T has decided to follow a similar tack, over the weekend announcing a mammoth $85 billion deal to acquire Time Warner (not to be confused with Time Warner Cable) and its media properties (CNN, HBO). AT&T was quick to proclaim that the deal would be a “perfect match of two companies with complementary strengths,” who can bring a “fresh approach to how the media and communications industry works for customers, content creators, distributors and advertisers.” The deal comes not too long after AT&T decided to spend $79 billion to acquire DirecTV, adding notable debt for the already giant company.

• Remember when AT&T was broken up in the US? Whether you do, or don’t, AT&T is on the verge of becoming the most powerful telco and media organisation in the world.

• It’s the stuff of Telstra’s dreams: a telco servicing a population of more than 300 million, with enough clout and earnings to support a US$85 billion buyout of Time Warner – and that’s after spending US$49 billion to buy DirecTV.

• Talk about relegating dumb pipes to the dustbin of history, AT&T wants to own the content, create it, serve it, charge for it and everything in between and beyond.

• Telstra’s half share of Foxtel looks like a tiny molehill against AT&T’s Everest-size mountain in comparison.

• As you know, last week, large chunks of the internet spent hours writhing on the ground and totally inaccessible thanks to a giant DDoS attack that appears to have been launched via a botnet involving insecure DVR hardware (which can’t be patched — but that’s another post for later). Of course, whenever this kind of thing happens, you know that some people on the politics side of things are going to come up with dumb responses, but there were some real whoppers on Friday. I’m going to focus on just two, because I honestly can’t decide which one of these is dumber. I’ll discuss each of them, and then you guys can vote and let us know: which of these is dumber.

• First up, we’ve got Marsha Blackburn, who is not just a member of Congress, but (incredibly) on the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, which is often considered to the subcommittee that handles internet related issues. We’ve written about her quite a few times before, highlighting her efforts to block broadband competition and gut net neutrality. She’s also argued that fair use is just a buzzword and we need stronger copyright laws. Not surprisingly, she was one of the most vocal supporters of SOPA who only finally agreed to dump the bill days after the giant online protest.

• And apparently she’s still upset about all that.

• On Friday she went on CNN to discuss a variety of things, and the first question from Wolf Blitzer was about the DDoS attacks, and her answer is the sort of nonsense word salad that is becoming all too common in politics these days, but where she appears to suggest that if we’d passed SOPA this kind of attack wouldn’t have happened. She’s not just wrong, she’s incredibly clueless.

• For some time now, security researchers have been warning that our lackadaisical approach to Internet of Things security would soon be coming home to roost. Initially it was kind of funny to read how “smart” fridges, tea kettles and Barbie dolls did an arguably worse job than their dumb counterparts with a greater risk to privacy and security. But as we collectively realized that these devices not only created millions of new home and business attack vectors, but could also be used to wage historically-unprecedented DDoS attacks, things quickly became less amusing.

• Last week, the theoretical became very real with the massive attack on DNS provider DYN, which knocked a swath of companies and services off the internet for a large portion of Friday. In a piece discussing the attack over at Flashpoint, the security firm (which worked with Akamai to help DYN) notes that the DDoS was indeed thanks to compromised IoT devices, and the Mirai botnet malware recently released to make compromising and harnessing such devices easier than ever. But the group also notes that targeted devices included everything from cameras to…

Intellectual Monopolies

• A new report by civil society groups defending the right to food and nutrition lays bare threats to seeds and biodiversity created by intellectual property rights, and calls for states to respect their human right obligations to protect small farmers’ right to seeds and food security.

• Two years ago this month, the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity (“Protocol”) entered into international force. To date, 87 countries have ratified or acceded to the agreement, and that number is expected to reach 100 by the end of this year. With its entry into force, the Protocol is ushering in a new international system to govern research, development and intellectual property rights surrounding a potentially vast array of products derived from non-human genetic resources. Those products include, among others, pharmaceuticals, products of synthetic biology and biotechnology, seeds, biocides, horticultural and microbiome products, nutritionals, supplements, cosmetics, perfumes, fragrances and industrial enzymes.

Copyrights

• The United States Copyright Office Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante has changed roles to become senior advisor for digital strategy. In her place, Karyn Temple Claggett will move up to serve as acting register of copyrights while a search is conducted for the next permanent register.

• The announcement, available here, was made on 21 October by the US Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

• A news report suggested Pallante was asked to step down and was locked out of the Library of Congress computer system on 21 October. At press time, details on that assertion were unconfirmed, but the official press release gives little indication of a problem.

• In partnership with pro-copyright group Creative Future, iKeepSafe has launched a competition asking students to submit projects that promote the creation and ethical sharing of content. Whether kids will take the time to read the small print is debatable, but doing so will provide a valuable lesson in getting a fair price for creative works.

• Children and students of all kinds are some of the most valuable assets to society. After all, they’re literally the future of the planet. As a result, hundreds of groups around the world dedicate themselves to protecting their interests, from general welfare and healthcare to Internet safety.

• Maria Pallante has been appointed senior adviser for digital strategy by the Librarian of Congress after serving as register of copyright since 2011, with Karyn Temple Claggett appointed acting register of copyrights

• As explained by Brad Spitz in a post published on the Kluwer Copyright Blog, “the new provisions will apply to ‘automated image search services’, which Article L.136-1 IPC defines as any online public communication service that reproduces and makes available to the public for purposes of indexing and SEO, plastic, graphic or photographic works, collected in an automated way from online public communication services (i.e. internet websites). In other words, these provisions target search engine services like Google Images.”

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