● 10.27.16

● Links 27/10/2016: Major Changes in Unity 8, Nextcloud Targets Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 1:06 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Linux has always had a reputation for being difficult to use. Consequently, when developers began improving users interfaces, they concentrated on what they imagined that new users needed. They rarely had the actual opportunity to observe new users, but the new user they imagined became a standard figure among developers, often surviving to this day.

• Yet after observing this habit for over a decade, I wonder more than ever if the imaginary new user still exists, or ever existed at all. I suspect, too, that the emphasis on this figure has been a detriment to other types of users.

• I pimped some Fedora community wallpapers yesterday, there was that (rather gorgeous) Ubuntu Timeline wallpaper a few weeks back, and the steam from hype-train that brought the “new” Ubuntu default wallpaper still lingers in the air a bit.

• So — honestly — I wanted so bad not to write about yet another wallpaper.

Server

• Spending time with Docker during Cloud Field Day about a month ago opened my eyes to the larger ecosystem that Docker is building, and that others are building around it. There is so much more to Docker than just the idea of immutable containers.

• For a start, Docker made using containers easy. That’s no small feat for a tricky piece of technical infrastructure. Making it easy, and specifically easy for developers, to use removed a lot of friction that was no small contributor to the pain of other, earlier methods. It gave developers are really simple way to create a fully functional development environment, isolated from all other dependencies, with which to work.

• What are the risks of network functions virtualization (NFV)? As with any emerging technology, moving fast or picking the wrong components can do more harm than good. Let’s spend some time breaking down the NFV risks in building a virtual network.

• I have spent the few months gathering feedback from various service providers to get their view on whether NFV and its cousin software-defined networking (SDN) are ready for prime time. Even though many service providers expressed optimism that NFV technology is moving toward maturity, there are definitely cautionary tales on what to look out for.

• This article serves as an introduction to the challenges of NFV component selection – later articles will refer in more detail to the challenges in selecting NFV hardware and software components such as OpenStack and Open vSwitch.

• Improving your own organization’s performance – from where they are now to performance levels equal to the industry leaders – seems like a very long and difficult road. What is missing in most organizations? We talked to Damon Edwards, co-founder and managing partner of DTO Solutions and DevOpsCon speaker, about the challenges that accompany DevOps and how a repeatable system that empowers teams to find and fix their own problems looks like.

• A disk image is simply a file, but that seemingly innocuous file contains a complete structure that represents applications, storage volumes and even entire disk drives.

• Even if you don’t need the servers themselves, serverless technologies could still require plenty of supporting software. Frameworks are needed to codify best practices, so that everyone is not out to reinvent the wheel, especially when it comes to interfacing with various languages such as Go, JavaScript and Python. And platforms are needed to help people avoid spending too much time on configuring the underlying infrastructure, perhaps by handing the work off to a service provider.

• Just in time for the Serverless conference in London, this post highlights some of the most widely used frameworks and platforms, as well as other supporting tools, that make successful serverless-based workloads happen.

Kernel Space

• David Herrmann has posted the initial patches for review of the BUS1 kernel message bus, the successor to KDBUS as an in-kernel IPC mechanism.

• Herrmann announced, “This proposal introduces bus1.ko, a kernel messaging bus. This is not a request for inclusion, yet. It is rather an initial draft and a Request For Comments. While bus1 emerged out of the kdbus project, bus1 was started from scratch and the concepts have little in common. In a nutshell, bus1 provides a capability-based IPC system, similar in nature to Android Binder, Cap’n Proto, and seL4. The module is completely generic and does neither require nor mandate a user-space counter-part.”

• The next Linux kernel release, i.e., Linux 4.9, could be the biggest ever Linux release in terms of the commits. Linus Torvalds shared this news in the release announcement of Linux 4.9-rc2. He also hinted at the possibility of turning 4.9 into an LTS release. The final build of the kernel is expected to arrive in December.

• The official mascot of the Linux kernel developed by Linus Torvalds is a penguin named Tux. You might have thought about the probable reasons why a penguin has been used as the face of the Linux kernel. Some people believe that Torvalds was bitten by a penguin that’s why he chose one to represent his kernel.

Graphics Stack

• The latest Mesa Git code has re-enabled SDMA support in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Sea Islands and Carrizo hardware.

• Well known Intel open-source developer Ian Romanick has published a massive set of 59 patches for enabling GL_ARB_gpu_shader_int64 within core Mesa and their i965 DRI driver.

Applications

• There’s a new stable release of WMail, the app that describes itself as “the missing desktop client for Gmail”.

• A picture might be worth a thousand words, but a video demonstration can save a lot of talking. I’m a visual learner, so seeing how to do something has been very helpful in my education. I’ve found that students benefit from seeing exactly how an application is configured or how a code snippet is written. Desktop screen recorders are great tools for creating instructional videos. In this article, I’ll look at two free, open source desktop screen recorders: SimpleScreenRecorder and Kazam.

• I’ve looked at general astronomy programs in the past that are helpful for many tasks you might need to do in your stargazing career. But, several specific jobs are more complicated and require specialized software to make relevant calculations, so here, let’s take a look at Nightfall.

• Nightfall is a program that can handle calculations involving binary star systems. It can animate binary star systems, taking into account not only orbital speeds but also rotational motion and the changing shape of stars due to their close positions. You can model what it would look like and what kind of light curves you would register when observing a binary system. You even can take a set of actual observational data and find a best-fit model for the system you are studying.

• The first point release of the popular, open-source, and cross-platform Nmap 7.30 free security scanner and network mapper arrived, versioned 7.31, adding several important stability improvements, and bug fixes.

• New features in Nmap 7.31 include Npcap 0.10r9, which has been upgraded from version 0.10r2 bundled in Nmap 7.30 to add raw 802.11 Wi-Fi capture support, updated Zenmap graphical interface to indicate that better display of hostname is attached to Topology page’s address, and IPv6 fingerprint submission improvements.

• “To increase the number of IPv6 fingerprint submissions, a prompt for submission will be shown with some random chance for successful matches of OS classes that are based on only a few submissions. Previously, only unsuccessful matches produced such a prompt,” read the release notes for Nmap 7.31.

• A new stable release of the popular Shotwell open-source image viewer and organizer arrived for users of Linux-based operating systems, version 0.25.0, bringing lots of important changes.

• As usual, we’ve managed to get our hands on the internal changelog, which we’ve also attached at the end of the story for your reading pleasure, and we’d like to tell you that Shotwell 0.25.0 now supports the tags written by the commercial ACDSee photo manipulation software.

• The application now makes use of Unicode characters, supports recent Vala compiler releases, improves the Piwigo upload support by implementing an option to override the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate handling, and another one to display the SSL certificate, along with better creation of new albums.

• Xfce4-panel 4.12.1 has been released as a “long overdue maintenance release” while Xfce 4.14 is still in its infancy.

• Xfce4-panel 4.12.1 has translation updates, support for xfpanel-switch in the preferences, and just some basic fixes. This comes a few weeks after the quiet bug-fix releases of xfce4-settings 4.12.1 and also joined by the xfconf 4.12.1 release this week.

• Working in Computer for long hours is pain, and it will definitely affect your eyes. You must take some breaks for your eyes at regular intervals. There are numerous utilities available out there to remind you to take breaks. The one we are going to discuss now is SafeEyes. It is a free and open Source Linux alternative for EyeLeo, a MS Windows-only app. As the name suggests, SafeEyes will protect you from Eye Strain by reminding or forcing you to take breaks after a particular period of time. During the break, it will suggest you some simple exercises like walking for a while, rolling your eyes etc., to relax yourself. If you are a hardcore user who work on computers for long hours, I recommended you to use SafeEyes in your system.

Proprietary

• IBM put ‘significant advances’ into its database software DB2, helping companies lower their operating costs while bringing together transactions and analytics in the same database to increase the speed of real-time data analysis.

• The new DB2 will incorporate hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP) available for Linux, Unix, Windows, and z/OS in December

• Spotify is arguably the most popular music streaming service out there. Apologies to any diehard fanboys who may have been offended by this statement. With 100 million users and tight social media integration, it sure plays in the big league. You can also go premium and this will render your interface ad-free and fidelity-high.

• But what about Linux? As it turns out, Linux has never been high on the list of priorities for the Spotify team, and at some point, the support was discontinued, then it was revived recently, which prompted me to give it a try. Seeking originality and uniqueness in my work, I opted for Fedora, only to learn that only builds for Debian-based distributions are available. In other words, Ubuntu and friends. Very similar to my experience with Sayonara. Anyhow, let’s see what gives.

Instructionals/Technical

DevOps Handbook and Course

Games

• …for Linux, with both Steam Machines going with plenty of games and the Vive being shown off working on Linux.

• You don’t get to chat, you communicate through emotes, symbols and sounds.

• It sounds like it’s some sort of experimental social playground, which is where the developers description ‘forum in games clothing’ comes from.

• Has anyone picked it up and played it? Tell us what you thought in the comments, I’m keen to know the point of it.

• Wallets at the ready as Humble Gems Bundle is now live, a pay-what-you-can-be-bothered-to-palooza offering a selection of hitherto undiscovered indie gaming marvels. Alright, they’re all games that you’ve probably heard of before, certainly if you’re an active fan of the indie gaming scene.

• Recently, Aspyr Media confirmed that they’ll be doing a Civilization 6 Linux release soon. Currently, Civilization 6 is live on both PC and Mac. Will Aspyr Media release concrete details about the Civilization 6 Linux release in the next few days?

• A new video about a Playstation 4 Linux hack may have shown a vulnerability in the 4.01 firmware update that came out for the Playstation 4 a few weeks ago. The hacking news came from a video at the GeekPwn 2016 convention in Shanghai, China, where the hacking was shown via a live demo.

• In this demo, a pair of Chinese computer users use a Linux computer and the Webkit browser, which is used to inject a certain exploit into the Playstation 4. One cut later, and a command line prompt appears that is then used to play Super Mario Bros. While the first use for it in the live demo is innocuous, the fact that this is even possible points once again to possible holes in the Playstation’s security.

• A showcase event at this week’s GeekPwn conference in Shanghai suggests that Sony’s PlayStation 4 has been hacked, as a recently released video shows the console running an unsanctioned Linux build courtesy of a web browser exploit.

• While details regarding the hack are not yet known, a browser-based security issue in PS4 firmware version 4.01 could potentially allow users to root the upcoming PlayStation 4 Pro console in order to run unlicensed applications and games.

• ‘Titus the Fox: To Marrakech and Back’ [GOG], a platformer from 1992 that was originally released for the Amiga, but now it has a Linux version on GOG.

• Yet another classic game revived for Linux thanks to GOG. The Linux version uses DOSBox.

• Point & Click adventure game ‘The Wardrobe’ [Official Site] to release with day-1 Linux support on January 26th 2017.

• The GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards are beginning to ship today. As mentioned in yesterday’s NVIDIA 375.10 vs. Linux 4.8 + Mesa 13.1-dev AMD GPU Benchmarks, I unfortunately don’t have any Linux reviews to publish today due to waiting on the hardware but will have GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti reviews in the days ahead. The first GTX 1050 card to be tested is a Zotac GTX 1050 Mini, which might be great for a living room HTPC or 1080p “Steam Machine” on a budget.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Thanks to the work of Hans de Goede and many others, dual-GPU (aka NVidia Optimus or AMD Hybrid Graphics) support works better than ever in Fedora 25.

• On my side, I picked up some work I originally did for Fedora 24, but ended up being blocked by hardware support. This brings better integration into GNOME.

• GNOME To Do is one of those apps you’ve probably heard of, but do not use. And with a bunch of rivals task managers and to-do list apps available on Linux — from Simplenote to Remember the Milk — and online, the little app that might has its work cutout.

Distributions

• There are quite a few lightweight linux distributions around but why should you care especially when most of our PCs that are on the market boast some very fast multi-core processors, large volumes of RAM and very fast Solid State Drives. Sure they can bring new life to old machines but there are many other reasons why they could be awesome for you.Let me give you a few reasons you would so much benefit from going with a Lightweight Linux distribution.

New Releases

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today, October 26, 2016, about the release and immediate availability of version 20.0 of his server-oriented TheSSS (The Smallest Server Suite) GNU/Linux distribution.

• Puppy Linux developer Barry Kauler was happy to announce the general availability of his Quirky 8.1 “Xerus” GNU/Linux distribution built with binary DEB packages from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

• Quirky 8.1 “Xerus” is here to replace the old “April” series, and while it is indeed built using the binary DEBs of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, it stays true to being a distro from the Puppy Linux family and not an Ubuntu clone. However, it lets users install packages from the official Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) software repositories, a feature that was not available in the Quirky “April” releases.

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.4.5 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This is a bugfix release of the v3.4 musl based branch, based on linux-4.4.27 kernels and it contains important security fixes for the kernel and for musl libc.

• A new maintenance update of the server-oriented Alpine Linux 3.4 operating system has been released, bringing a new Linux kernel version from the long-term supported 4.4 series and the latest security patches.

• According to the release notes, Alpine Linux 3.4.5 is now available as the most up-to-date version of the GNU/Linux distribution based on musl libc and BusyBox, it’s powered by the Linux 4.4.27 LTS kernel, which was fully patched against the “Dirty COW” vulnerability, and includes numerous updated components and applications.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Gentoo Family

• As I noted when I resurrected the blog, part of the reason why I managed to come back to “active duty” within Gentoo Linux is because Robin and Amy helped me set up my laptop and my staging servers for singing commits with GnuPG remotely.

• And that happened because this year I finally managed to go to the Gentoo MiniConf hosted as part of LinuxDays in Prague, Czech Republic.

Arch Family

• Arch Linux is very unique, compare with other Linux distributions because it doesn’t comes with live ISO & Desktop Environment. Arch gives you the full freedom to customize the installation as you wish, When you boot up, you’ll be end up with a terminal and most of the people panic here because they don’t want to build from scratch.

• There are many, Actively developed Arch derived Linux distributions are available with pre-installed Desktop environment. I would advise you to go with any one distribution as you wish.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Bruce Byfield may have hit upon something in his latest rumination on the “imaginary new user.” This “new user” has been used as an excuse to over-simplify Linux to the “detriment to other type of users.” In Linux news, Bodhi chieftain Jeff Hoogland posted Moksha themes for last minute testing hinting that 4.0 must be very close. Douglas DeMaio posted a brief on the latest Tumbleweed snapshots and night falls on Linux.

• In less than a week, openSUSE Tumbleweed had two snapshots that included new Linux Kernels.

• Snapshot 20160120 brought users Linux Kernel 4.8.3 and and four days later snapshot 20160124 brought the 4.8.4 Linux Kernel. A kernel patch for the Dirty Cow security vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195) came quickly to the rolling release and was available by Saturday.

Red Hat Family

• Today we announced that Gartner has named Red Hat Storage as a Visionary in its first ever Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. This is a great honor and solid recognition by a leading IT analyst of Red Hat’s vision and prominence in the market with Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage.

• Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Raleigh-based open-source technology firm Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), says the world – not just technology companies – are shifting toward “open.”

• About 25 years ago, open-source operating platform Linux was born, Whitehurst tells the crowd at the All Things Open Conference early Wednesday. It was just a “bunch of geeks” getting together figuring it all out on an 8286 chip, he says.

Finance

Fedora

• It is with great pleasure to announce that the Community run respin team has yet another Updated ISO round. This round carries the 4.7.9-200 kernel along with over 800 MB of updates (avg, some Desktop Environments more, some less) since the Gold release back in June.

• LinuxCon EU 2016 took place from Oct 4-6 in Berlin, Germany. LinuxCon is one of the biggest FOSS conference where developers, sys admins, architects and all levels of technical talent gather together under one roof for three days. Since I am currently living in Berlin, there was no way I could miss this conference – even though the tickets for attending the full conference were around 1000 euros and way out of my league as a student researcher. Thankfully, I was awarded the Minority scholarship by Linux Foundation to attend the conference (including the talks and workshops) – and also the Women in Open Source Lunch and some other evening events ! I was also a part of the Fedora ‘crew’ at LinuxCon and helping out with Fedora Booth !

• The Fedora community has been at all European editions since 2011 and this is a report from the last one, which took place on Oct 4-6.

• Today, October 25, 2016, Alex Larsson had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Flatpak 0.6.13, a new major update for the universal binary package format for GNU/Linux distributions.

• For those not in the know, Flatpak is an application container that lets you package your open source project as a standalone binary that can be easily distributed across multiple Linux-based operating systems, independent of the package manager of that particular OS. Flatpak 0.6.13 is now the latest version, coming three weeks after Flatpak 0.6.12, and it looks like it’s the biggest so far, bringing app layering support to flatpak-builder, as well as support for extension directories.

• GNOME developer Bastien Nocera talks today, October 26, 2016, in a blog post, about the recent dual-GPU improvements brought by the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment release, and coming soon to Fedora 25 Linux.

Debian Family

• The newest eye candy to grace the default desktops of Debian 9 users is very tasteful and beautiful. The color palate is easy on the eyes while providing warmth and a professional aura. This year’s winner is a remarkably wonderful job by returning designer Juliette Belin, who just happened to have designed last version’s theme. 3,479 folks voted and Laura Arjona explained the vote gathering and counting methodology. I started getting a headache trying to understand that, so suffice to say the prettiest won. The other submissions are being combined into one package for easy installation.

Derivatives

• After informing us of the release of Exton|OS Light Build 161021, today, October 26, 2016, GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton sent an email to announce the availability of DebEX Barebone Build 161025.

• The latest version of the DebEX Barebone GNU/Linux distribution, build 161025, is here, based on the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” (Debian Testing) operating system and kernel 4.8.0-21-exton, a specially crafted Linux kernel package based on the latest stable Linux 4.8 kernel.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 17.04 Daily Builds Are Now Available to Download http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/10/ubuntu-17-04-daily-iso

• Now that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system is officially open for development, the first daily build ISO images have published in the usual places for early adopters and public testers.

• Ubuntu Advantage is the commercial support package from Canonical. It includes Landscape, the Ubuntu systems management tool, and the Canonical Livepatch Service, which enables you to apply kernel fixes without restarting your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems.

• Ubuntu Advantage gives the world’s largest enterprises the assurance they need to run mission-critical workloads such as enterprise databases, virtual/cloud hosts or infrastructural services on Ubuntu.

• The infographic below gives an overview of Ubuntu Advantage, it explains the business benefits, why Ubuntu is #1 in the cloud for many organisations and includes a selection of Ubuntu Advantage customers.

• A new YouTube video claims to show an ‘quick overview of what’s to come to Unity 8’ in a future update.

• Uploaded by Kugi Javacookies (not sure if that’s his real name), the clip is described as offering a “quick overview of what’s to come soon to Unity 8. Since the silo has now been signed-off by QA, so it will probably land really soon.”

• Kugi adds that he finds it “awesome to actually follow projects even up to the small details. Codes in launchpad, actual projects in bileto and queued silos for QA testing in Trello. Really cool! :D”.

Flavours and Variants

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs us about the availability of a new build of his Exton|OS Light distribution, now based on the latest Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.

• We will be stamping the 4.0.0 release as stable fairly soon and one the last pieces of that puzzle is getting all the “extras” for moksha into the repos. Users can now find the following modules and themes in the Bodhi 4.0.0 main repository for usage / testing:

Devices/Embedded

• ARM launched its first Cortex-M MCUs with ARMv8-M and TrustZone security: the tiny, low-power Cortex-M23 and faster Cortex-M33.

• At the ARM TechCon show in Santa Clara, ARM unveiled two new Cortex-M microprocessors that will likely emerge as major Internet of Things workhorses over the coming decade, supplanting most existing Cortex-M designs. The Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 are also the first Cortex-M processors with ARMv8-M technology, enabling ARM TrustZone security, among other benefits. The TrustZone support is enabled via a new IoT-oriented CoreLink SIE-200 network-on-chip, which adds IP blocks on top of the AMBA 5 AHB5 interface. ARM also announced a TrustZone CryptoCell-312 technology for creating secure SoCs based on ARMv8-M.

• Over the past decade, the majority of new open source OS projects have shifted from the mobile market to the Internet of Things. In this fifth article in our IoT series, we look at the many new open source operating systems that target IoT. Our previous posts have examined open source IoT frameworks, as well as Linux- and open source development hardware for IoT and consumer smart home devices. But it all starts with the OS.

• In addition to exploring new IoT-focused embedded Linux-based distributions, I’ve included a few older lightweight distributions like OpenWrt that have seen renewed uptake in the segment. While the Linux distros are aimed primarily at gateways and hubs, there has been equivalent growth in non-Linux, open source OSes for IoT that can run on microcontroller units (MCUs), and are typically aimed at IoT edge devices.

• Congatec announced three Linux-friendly COMs based on Intel’s new Atom E3900 SoC: a Qseven, a COM Express Compact, and one of the first SMARC 2.0 modules.

• Congatec is one of the first vendors to announce a major product lineup based on Intel’s newly announced, 14nm-fabricated Atom E3900 “Apollo Lake” SoCs. In addition to the Qseven form-factor Conga-QA5 and the COM Express Compact Type 6 CongaTCA5 modules, the company unveiled the Conga-SA5, which is billed as Congatec’s first SMARC 2.0 module. In fact, the Conga-SA5 appears to be the company’s first SMARC COM ever, and one of the first SMARC 2.0 models to be fully announced. (See more on SMARC 2.0 below.)

• The Linux-ready Atom E3900 series, which was formally announced at the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona on the same day as the start of ARM TechCon in Silicon Valley, has already started rolling out to some 30 OEM customers, some of which have already announced products (see below). The first Apollo Lake based products will ship 2Q 2017, says Intel.

Phones

Tizen

• With the intention to make Samsung’s latest Tizen based smartphone- the Samsung Z2 reach out to possible customers all across India, the company has now partnered with two more e-commerce giants Flipkart and Snapdeal. This partnership comes just a month after the company started distributing the Z2 via Amazon India prior to which Paytm was the only exclusive online store to get hold of the Smartphone.

• Here is something for our developer community out there who are Interested in the Knox Tizen Wearable SDK. Tomorrow, there is a special Webinar taking place online entitled Build powerful and secure apps on the Samsung Gear S3.

• Wearables are growing in popularity in the enterprise space and many businesses are seeing the benefit of Integrating a wearable device into their business processes. In the consumer market they are doing well, as only yesterday we reported that Samsung had a Year over Year growth of 9% to currently have 15% of the smartwatch market, whilst the majority of other vendors saw their market share decline. Apple has been severely hit with almost a 72% decline.

• According to a korean report, Samsung are said to be slowing down some of their future projects due to the battery issues encountered by the Note 7. This knock on effect was due to the fact that some of these projects would potentially make use of Cloud and iris recognition technologies that the Note 7 was to come Integrated with. Also Billions of lost dollars in revenue has made the tech giant rethink its approach to future tech.

Android

• It was only a matter of time until this happened, but Oracle has officially appealed its fair use Java API loss to the Federal Circuit (CAFC). As you recall, after a years-long process, including the (correct) ruling that APIs are not covered by copyright being ridiculously overturned by CAFC, a new trial found that even if APIs are copyright-eligible, Google’s use was covered by fair use. Oracle then tried multiple times to get Judge William Alsup to throw out the jury’s ruling, but failed. In fact, on Oracle’s second attempt to get Alsup to throw out the jury’s ruling, citing “game changing” evidence that Google failed to hand over important information on discovery, it actually turned out that Oracle’s lawyers had simply failed to read what Google had, in fact, handed over.

• Smartphones put a wealth of games at users’ fingertips, but many of the proprietary games are loaded with advertisements, in-app purchases, and other features that create less-than-stellar play experiences. While the open source world is not exactly known for the quality of its games, there are a wide variety of open source games available in the F-Droid repository that are polished and very playable.

• There’s no denying that our smartphones have made our lives so much easier, putting our contacts and schedules, our driving directions, the whole internet, right at our fingertips. But if you’re using an Android phone you might be leaving even more convenience on the table.

• There are a bunch of super-smart settings in Nougat and Google Now that’ll make your Android device feel like it’s 10 steps ahead of you. Your Android phone can be proactively telling you how long it’ll take to get to work in the morning, and nudging you when your favorite team is about to take the field. Your device can keep itself unlocked whenever it’s on you, and those snapshots you just took can automatically be arranged into beautiful collages. Battery running low? Android can know to dial down background activity to keep your phone alive. And if you love the idea of asking Google questions without ever touching your phone, you can train your phone to do that, too.

Free Software/Open Source

• Chain, a San Francisco-based Blockchain startup, launched the Chain Core Developer Edition, which is a distributed ledger infrastructure built for banks and financial institutions to utilize the Blockchain technology in mainstream finance.

• Similar to most cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin, developers and users are allowed to run their applications and platforms on the Chain Core testnet, a test network sustained and supported by leading institutions including Microsoft and the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts (IC3), which is operated by Cornell University, UC Berkeley and University of Illinois.

• Few organizations have the cloud expertise that Netflix has, and it may come as a surprise to some people to learn that Netflix regularly open sources key, tested and hardened cloud tools that it has used for years. We’ve reported on Netflix open sourcing a series of interesting “Monkey” cloud tools as part of its “simian army,” which it has deployed as a series satellite utilities orbiting its central cloud platform.

• Netflix previously released Chaos Monkey, a utility that improves the resiliency of Software as a Service by randomly choosing to turn off servers and containers at optimized tims. Now, Netflix has announced the upgrade of Chaos Monkey, and it’s worth checking in on this tool.

• As some early post-Coreboot 4.5 changes are some work to benefit fans of the RISC-V ISA.

• The extremely popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds has been much in the news lately. CTO and founder of ownCloud Frank Karlitschek resigned from the company a few months ago. His open letter announcing the move pointed to possible friction created as ownCloud moved forward as a commercial entity as opposed to a solely community focused, open source project.

• Karlitschek had a plan, though. He is now out with a fork of ownCloud called Nextcloud, and we’ve reported on strong signs that this cloud platform has a bright future. In recent months, the company has continued to advance Nextcloud. Along with Canonical and Western Digital, the partners have launched an Ubuntu Core Linux-based cloud storage and Internet of Things device called Nextcloud Box, which we covered here. Now, Nextcloud has moved forward with some updates to its mobile strategy. Here are details.

• If you cycled the clock back about 15 years and surveyed the prevailing beliefs about open source technology at the time, you would find nowhere near the volume of welcome for it that we see today. As a classic example, The Register reported all the way back in 2001 that former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer made the following famous statement in a Chicago Sun-Times interview: “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

• In part one of this series, I covered my top five reasons to love Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration platform created by Google. Kubernetes was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in July of 2015, where it is now under development by dozens of companies including Canonical, CoreOS, Red Hat, and more.

• My first five reasons were primarily about the project’s heritage, ease of use, and ramp-up. The next five get more technical. As I mentioned in part one, choosing a distributed system to perform tasks in a datacenter is much more complex than looking at a spreadsheet of features or performance. And, you should make your decision based on your own needs and team dynamics. However, this top 10 list will give you my perspective, as someone who has been using, testing, and developing systems for a while now.

• The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project has announced that 10 new members have joined the project in order to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications.

• A blockchain that was born out of the rejection of a contentious technical change is on the cusp of making a decision some argue contradicts its core values.

• That’s the situation the developers behind ethereum classic face ahead of a hard fork expected to be enacted on its blockchain on 25th October (should network participants approve the upgrade). Originally formed in reaction to a decision by the ethereum community to edit its “immutable” ledger, the fork caused an ideological schism among its enthusiasts.

• Alarmed by the action (or seeing a chance to profit by continuing the original network), miners and speculators began running its blockchain, which developers named “ethereum classic”. Other investors then bought into the vision, and today, there are currently 85m classic ethers (ETC) worth $87m.

Events

• Few months back Praveen called to tell me about the new event he is organizing along with FOSSASIA, Science Hack Day, India. I never even registered for the event as Praveen told me that he just added mine + Anwesha’s name there. Sadly as Py was sick for the last few weeks, Anwesha could not join us in the event. On 20th Hong Phuc came down to Pune, in the evening we had the PyLadies meetup in the Red Hat office.

• It started quite early with Kushal telling me that Praveen Patil was organizing a Science Hack Day with Hong Phuc’s help and that it might be an interesting place to come to. He mentioned that there were many interesting people coming in and that Nisha and I would have a good time. I wasn’t very keen though because of my usual reluctance to get out and meet people. This was especially an issue for me with Cauldron and Connect happening back to back in September, draining most of my ‘extrovert energy’. So we were definitely not going.

• FOSDEM is one of the world’s premier meetings of free software developers, with over five thousand people attending each year. FOSDEM 2017 takes place 4-5 February 2017 in Brussels, Belgium.

SaaS/Back End

• As noted here yesterday, OpenStack is here to stay in enterprises. A new study by 451 Research analysts shows that about 72 percent of OpenStack-based clouds are between 1,000 and 10,000 cores and three fourths choose OpenStack to increase operational efficiency and app deployment speed.

• Meanwhile, in conjunction with OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Red Hat is out with very notable results from its polling of its OpenStack user base. Its study found that production deployments increased hugely in the last year, according to a survey of 150 information technology decision makers and professionals carried out by Red Hat.

• Cloud companies like to talk about about how you can avoid vendor lock-in. And OpenStack just showed how to make it happen.

• Sixteen different vendors did a live demo at OpenStack Summit showing that you could run the same software stack on 16 separate OpenStack platforms.

• The future looks bright for OpenStack — according to 451 Research, OpenStack is growing rapidly to become a $5-billion-a-year cloud business. But obstacles still remain.

• Mirantis recently signed a major deal with NTT, but the company is also laying off some of its employees.

• The OpenStack Summit keynotes got underway the morning of October 25, with Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation, declaring that the world runs on OpenStack.

• How fast is the OpenStack global cloud services market growing? Research and Markets analysts came out with a new report recently that forecasts the global OpenStack cloud market to grow at a CAGR of 30.49% during the period 2016-2020. Many enterprises now have large scale OpenStack deployments, and in conjunction with this week’s OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, new study results are shedding light on exactly how entrenched this open cloud platform is in enteprises.

• The bottom line is: OpenStack is here to stay in enterprises.

• OpenStack deployments are getting bigger. Users are diversifying across industries. Enterprises report using the open source cloud software to support workloads that are critical to their businesses. These are among the findings in a recent study by 451 Research regarding OpenStack adoption among enterprise private cloud users. About 72 percent of OpenStack-based clouds are between 1,000 and 10,000 cores and three fourths choose OpenStack to increase operational efficiency and app deployment speed. The study was commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation.

• Here are some of the companies discussing their OpenStack deployments in Barcelona: Banco Santander, BBVA, CERN, China Mobile, Comcast, Constant Contact, Crowdstar, Deutsche Telekom, Folksam, Sky UK, Snapdeal, Swisscom, Telefonica, Verizon, Volkswagen, and Walmart. You can find some of the specific deployment stories from the companies at the OpenStack User Stories page.

• One thing you can count on at the semiannual OpenStack Summits are new studies and reports about OpenStack. And that’s the case at the OpenStack Summit going on in Barcelona, Spain, now through Oct. 28. A number of studies are being discussed at the event, including the October 2016 OpenStack User Survey and new analysis on the state of OpenStack from analyst firm 451 Group. According to the 451 Group, the OpenStack software market will generate $1.8 billion in revenue in 2016 and grow to $5.7 billion by 2020. The firm is forecasting that the five-year compound annual growth rate for OpenStack from 2015 through 2020 will be 35 percent. The semiannual OpenStack User Survey is also a topic of discussion at the OpenStack Summit, providing insight into the state of OpenStack deployment. Among the high-level findings is that 71 percent of OpenStack clouds are now in production and fully operational, up from 59 percent in 2015. Also of note is how well-regarded the Kubernetes orchestration system has become, outpacing CloudFoundry in terms of user interest. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the latest OpenStack research studies.

• HPE still supports OpenStack in its Helion cloud program, but it’s cutting way back on how much it’s spending on helping create OpenStack.

• Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, argues that interoperability doesn’t start at the infrastructure layer. It starts with applications, he said. BARCELONA—A keynote highlight on Oct. 26 at the OpenStack Summit here was a live, onstage demonstration with 16 OpenStack vendors, all showing a degree of interoperability. The demonstration was part of an interoperability challenge, though, according to Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis and member of the OpenStack board of directors, the infrastructure layer is not necessarily the right place to emphasize interoperability.

• Red Hat’s annual poll found that 43 percent of respondents have deployed the cloud platform in production, compared to just 16 percent one year ago. The company reckons the increase reflects efforts by the community to address complexity and deployment issues that were previously known to have been a major roadblock to adoption.

• The study also noted that the steep learning curve for deploying OpenStack is being addressed as a growing number of engineers become certified to operate the platform. In addition, Red Hat cited cloud native application development as another driving force in enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

• From security to interoperabilty to use cases and everything in-between, this week’s OpenStack Summit from Oct. 25 to 28 in Barcelona, is set to illuminate the cloud. This year’s event, which brings together vendors, operators and developers of the open-source cloud platform, will offer more sessions than ever before on securing OpenStack clouds.

• The Barcelona Summit follows the release of the OpenStack Newton milestone, which debuted on Oct. 6. While discussions about the most recent release are always part of every OpenStack Summit, so too are case-studies from operators of OpenStack clouds.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Nominations for the 19th annual Free Software Awards opened at LibrePlanet 2016, right after the most recent Free Software Awards were presented — and we need you to nominate more projects by November 6th, 2016 at 23:59 UTC. For details see instructions below.

• If you know a free software contributor or project that deserves celebration, don’t hesitate to nominate them! This is your opportunity to publicly recognize people and projects that have inspired you. Your nominations will be reviewed by our awards committee and the winners will be announced at LibrePlanet 2017.

• MetaHTML is being ported to modern GNU/Linux systems by a small team of eager contributors. We are happy to announce the new developments in the world of GNU MetaHTML.

• I am pleased to announce an small update of guile-curl, which is a library for fetching files by URL from the internet in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language. It supports many protocols, such as https, ftp, tftp, and, most importantly, gopher.

Public Services/Government

• The partnership between Microsoft and the city of Toronto certainly comes at the right time, as other authorities across the world already announced decisions to give up on Windows and Office and replace them with open-source alternatives.

• Munich is the city that started the entire trend, but it wasn’t at all a smooth transition. Some of the local officials proposed a return to Microsoft software, claiming that training and assistance actually impacted productivity and explaining that in the end it all pays off to use Microsoft software because of the familiarity that users experience, which translates to a substantial productivity boost.

• And yet, the transition off Microsoft products is happening and more authorities are willing to do it, not necessarily because of the costs, but also due to security concerns, as is the case of Russia.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Bryan Liles, from DigitalOcean, explains about many useful open source big data tools in this eight minute video. I learned about Apache Mesos, Apache Presto, Google Kubernetes and more.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Despite the vast amount of customization options technology has allotted us, it can still be difficult to create projects that are community-centric. For example, though 3D printing can help us personalize our own jewelry, it has limited use for outfitting parks with trash cans or equipping bus stops with comfortable seating. Still, hyper-customizable tech has taught us the convenience of managing our own products, eliminating the bureaucratic complications of mass produced, production-line assembly.

• Leveraging this ideology to better the community, the Better Block Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to building local communities, has developed an open-source toolkit for creating a variety of fixtures for communities. The platform, called Wikiblock, allows designs ranging from benches to beer garden fences to be downloaded and taken to a maker space where a computer-aided machine can print the design from plywood. Similar to Ikea’s simplistic, DIY approach, the printed wood can be assembled by hand, without glue or nails.

• While I typically go all out for Halloween decorations every year, I’ll admit I’m feeling tired this year. I still wanted to delight the neighborhood kids with simple details, so I decided to make lighted bags for my front porch railing this year.

• If you are someone who has a paper cutting machine like the Silhouette, this project will likely be a lot easier. Simply import the SVG file, resize for whatever size box you want, cut out, and assemble. However, for those of you who don’t have one, I’ve included instructions on how to make this project without any machine at all.

• The box was created with the help of artists who share their art at OpenClipArt. I also used Inkscape to create the SVG file. If you don’t like bats, you could modify the SVG file to include other types of clipart in the center of the bag.

Leftovers

Science

• A team from MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital believe that machine learning can play a part in better understanding speech disorders.

Hardware

• The new standard provides for improved energy efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas emissions and is expected to lead to significant reductions in e-waste.

Health/Nutrition

• While the issue of antimicrobial resistance has arrived in high-level discussions, and there is a consensus that the problem must be tackled one way or another to avoid slipping back into a pre-antibiotic era, some voices are highlighting the need to remember that other health issues remain unmet, and access to medicines is still an acute problem.

• On 25 October, the World Health Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization organised a joint technical symposium on antimicrobial resistance. The symposium sought to achieve a better understanding of the global challenge of antibiotic resistance and examine possible ways forward.

• Most speakers invited to the event presented possible solutions to boost research and development for new antibiotics and the need to restrict the use of existing antibiotics to prevent the building up of microbe resistance. However, some speakers insisted on the fact that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is only a part of the issue of access to medicines.

• Raising awareness, creating effective stewardship, national action plans on antimicrobial resistance, building trust and getting onto the agenda of the G20 are critical to fostering access and appropriate use of antibiotics, according to speakers at yesterday’s joint technical symposium on antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

• The annual trilateral cooperation event between the World Health Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization and World Trade Organization was held on 25 October. The first panel of the symposium discussed the balance between fostering access to antibiotics whilst ensuring their appropriate use.

Security

• However, the county also said server logs show that no one outside of emergency services had accessed the server. Yet, at the very least, the logs should show Vickery accessing the server and downloading files. It isn’t clear why the county missed that, or why the server didn’t log Vickery’s actions.

• Everyone has been sweating the DirtyCOW bug that has been in the Linux kernel for over 9 years. I recently discovered the Open Source Security Podcast and their most recent episode covers DirtyCOW some in a way I found interesting so I thought I’d share. Enjoy!

• Today, October 25, 2016, CentOS maintainer and lead developer Johnny Hughes informed the community of the server-oriented Linux-based operating system about the availability of an important kernel update for CentOS 7.

• Today’s CentOS Errata and Security Advisory 2016:2098 is marked as important, and users of the CentOS 7 Linux distributions are urged to update the kernel packages to version kernel-3.10.0-327.36.3.el7.x86_64 as soon as possible. As expected, the new version addresses the infamous “Dirty COW” vulnerability patched upstream in the Linux kernel 3.10.104 LTS maintenance release.

• Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a few minutes ago, October 26, 2016, that a patched kernel is now available for the Debian-based Raspbian GNU/Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi devices to address the “Dirty COW” bug.

• We believe that by now every single one of you is aware of the fact that there was nasty security flaw in the Linux kernel that could have allowed a local attacker to gain administrative priveledges (root access) on a vulnerable system, and was patched recently by Linus Torvalds himself and pushed to almost all supported kernel branches, including Linux 4.8, 4.4, 4.1, 3.18, 3.16, 3.12, 3.10, and 3.2.

Defence/Aggression

• The former strategists spoke to the Guardian as Clinton’s Republican rival Donald Trump warned that Clinton’s proposal to establish “safe zones” to protect beleaguered Syrian civilians would “lead to world war three”.

• The proposal of no-fly zones has been fiercely debated in Washington for the past five years, but has never attracted significant enthusiasm from the military because of the risk to pilots from Syrian air defenses and the presence of Russian warplanes.

• Many in US national security circles consider the risk of an aerial confrontation with the Russians to be severe.

• “I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft,” said James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, on Tuesday in response to a question from the Guardian at the Council on Foreign Relations.

• The UK is deploying hundreds of troops, as well as aircraft and armour to eastern Europe as part of the biggest build-up of Nato forces in the region since the cold war. The deployment is taking place during growing tensions over a series of high-profile Russian military manoeuvres.

• RAF Typhoon aircraft from RAF Coningsby will be sent to Romania for up to four months, while 800 personnel will be sent with armoured support to Estonia, 150 more than previously planned, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said. France and Denmark will also commit more troops, the British government said.

• Hillary Clinton has a plan for defeating Islamic State in Syria. Donald Trump has one, too. With the conflict in Syria spreading beyond its borders, it’s essential to understand the new president’s strategies – and how they may need to be adjusted over the next four years.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A former deputy director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), John C Inglis, believes that WikiLeaks – the whistleblowing platform led by Julian Assange – has become “internally confused” in recent years and that “natural forces” may soon wipe it out.

• “WikiLeaks might be in fact be sowing the seeds of its own destruction,” Inglis told IBTimes UK in an exclusive interview on 25 October, indicating the organisation has overstepped a boundary by leaking material which has the potential to influence the upcoming US presidential election.

• To the former deputy head, Snowden is not a whistleblower and may indeed be an unwitting pawn of the Kremlin. Sitting calmly in the British Museum, London, Inglis exclusively told IBTimes UK how the agency was “stunned” by the leak now commonly known as the ‘NSA files’.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• A reference to the Keystone XL pipeline was chopped from Hillary Clinton’s memoir due to political considerations, according to the latest batch of stolen emails posted Thursday on Wikileaks.

• While writing the book Hard Choices, Clinton initially included a reference to the pipeline at the urging of her daughter, Chelsea, according to a 2014 email purportedly sent to her current campaign chair John Podesta.

• “She decided to write about Keystone because her daughter suggested that it would be a glaring omission and look like an even worse dodge if she left it out,” said the note from Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin.

• The note said the passage was crafted with some help from Podesta, then edited by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The ill-fated phrases referred to Keystone XL as a tough choice amid the transition to a clean-energy economy. They concluded with Clinton refraining to take sides, out of respect for her successor John Kerry, who led the project review as Secretary of State.

• Her book editor apparently wanted the section dropped — because it read like a political dodge.

Finance

• Prime Minister Theresa May is pushing Britain into a “hard Brexit,” which will see the UK leaves the European Union without a trade deal.

• May has justified this by saying that “Brexit means Brexit” and stressing that the will of the people is to reclaim control of Britain’s borders even if it means giving up access to the EU’s single market.

• There may be some truth in that. But an audio recording leaked to The Guardian shows that May knows that this plan is doomed to fail economically.

• Belgian politicians failed to break their deadlock over a planned EU-Canada free trade agreement on Wednesday, but agreed to resume talks on Thursday in a sign they may be nearing a consensus that would keep the deal alive.

• The news prompted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call off plans to fly to Brussels on Wednesday night. He had been due to sign the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) at a summit on Thursday.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• ES, “that Sea Shepard Captain, Paul Watson.” YES, “that Woodstock.” Sea Shepard Captain Paul Watson cast his vote the other day, and shared his experience about his experience as an early voter.

• Though she’s grown out the blue-dyed coiffure, Birgitta Jónsdóttir still brightens up the anodyne halls of the Althing, Iceland’s parliament in Reykjavík, the country’s capital. In stockinged feet, a white-cotton hippie skirt, and a dark-blue embroidered waistcoat, the 49-year-old Jónsdóttir refuses to fit the classic mold of politician, even though she’s occupied a parliamentary seat for seven years, since 2012 as the front person of the Pirate Party. Jónsdóttir, the former WikiLeaks spokesperson and a published lyricist, calls herself a “poetician,” since verse is her true calling, she says, not the daily grind of politics. Yet if Iceland’s national elections were held today and not on October 29, the Pirates could head up a new government on this rugged island of 330,000 souls—possibly with Jónsdóttir as prime minister.

• Iceland’s political status quo—a Nordic-style parliamentary democracy, dominated for decades by pro-NATO conservatives—was shattered when the country went bust in the 2008 financial crisis, pitching Iceland into its deepest crisis since full independence and the republic were declared in 1944. This year, Iceland was rocked again when the Panama Papers leak exposed corruption among top politicos, including the prime minister, who resigned under fire. “People here are angry and frustrated,” says Karl Blöndal, deputy editor of the center-right Morgunbladid. “In the minds of many voters, the Pirates are the only untainted party, and with them Birgitta carries authority. She’s been the face of the opposition since the crash.”

• Although the Pirates began surging in polls more than a year ago, peaking at 43 percent in April, Jónsdóttir has been coy about whether she’d take the country’s highest post if elections go in the party’s favor and supporters insist on her as prime minister. (Iceland’s Pirates have slipped considerably in surveys since early this year; currently, they’re neck and neck with the ruling Independence Party.) The object of her desire, she says, is the Althing’s presidency, an office from which she could reinvest power in the legislature—one means of bringing politics nearer to the people, a cause close to Pirate hearts.

• No humans were remotely piloting the drone, which was nothing more than a machine that could be bought on Amazon. But armed with advanced artificial intelligence software, it had been transformed into a robot that could find and identify the half-dozen men carrying replicas of AK-47s around the village and pretending to be insurgents.

• As the drone descended slightly, a purple rectangle flickered on a video feed that was being relayed to engineers monitoring the test. The drone had locked onto a man obscured in the shadows, a display of hunting prowess that offered an eerie preview of how the Pentagon plans to transform warfare.

• Almost unnoticed outside defense circles, the Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power. It is spending billions of dollars to develop what it calls autonomous and semiautonomous weapons and to build an arsenal stocked with the kind of weaponry that until now has existed only in Hollywood movies and science fiction, raising alarm among scientists and activists concerned by the implications of a robot arms race.

• Being interviewed by Megyn Kelly, here’s how Brazile tries to claim that the emails are not real, but basically comes out with a word salad of nothing, rather than simply admitting that the email is legit.

• Our nation—and our world—face a perfect storm of economic and environmental crises that threaten not only the global economy, but life on Earth as we know it. The dire, existential threats of climate change, wars for oil, and a stagnating, crisis-ridden economic system require bold and visionary solutions. In this election, we are deciding not just what kind of a world we want, but whether we will have a world at all.

• There is a growing concern in advanced economies that governments are running out of options to stabilize a precarious and volatile global economic system. Since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, the Fed’s large-scale bond purchases, called quantitative easing, have helped push interest rates close to 0% and have done more to serve Wall Streets’ interests by way of propping up the stock market than by boosting the overall economy for average Americans.

• These have proven to be temporary fixes, providing a semblance of “recovery” without addressing the underlying problems in the real economy: stagnating demand, lack of productive investment, staggering inequality and concentration of wealth—not to mention the climbing cost of climate-related disasters, like floods and wildfires, which have cost $26.9 billion dollars in 2016 alone. As recent warning signs in the U.S. market have shown, we are hardly out of the woods when it comes to preventing another big crash. Keeping interest rates super low has only produced the illusion of a healthy economy. Without sound fiscal policies targeted to help ordinary Americans, economic growth will stagnate.

• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and Eddie Glaude, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, debate the issue of strategic voting and the role of third-party candidates.

• He dubbed those for-profit pursuits “Bill Clinton, Inc.” The resulting deals often involved a mix of foundation donations, paid speeches and consulting contracts for Bill Clinton, lumping charitable and personal financial work together in ways that may have crossed ethical boundaries.

• Bill and Hillary Clinton have both defended the work of the Clinton Foundation as completely independent of their family’s finances or political ambitions. Critics have frequently accused the Clintons of using their foundation to enrich themselves and grow their political clout in anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

• However, the Band memo makes clear the inextricable ties between Bill Clinton’s personal profits and his eponymous charity. What’s more, it reveals the fact that Teneo’s operation, at least in the early months of its existence, was heavily dependent on the Clinton name and foundation to build relationships with its clients.

• One example found in the memo involves GEMS Education, a for-profit education corporation that has been linked to the teaching of Sharia Law. The group paid Bill Clinton nearly $6.2 million between 2011-15, when the former president ended his contract with the firm ahead of Hillary Clinton’s campaign launch.

• The Clinton campaign buzzed over a picture of Bernie Sanders in his swimming suit, at the same time they were pushing stories about the Vermont Senator attending a fundraiser for Democrats with wealthy supporters.

• Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, emailed the attached photo of Sanders relaxing by the pool at the DSCC retreat to Brian Fallon, Clinton’s national press secretary.

• An internal memo released Wednesday by WikiLeaks reveals new details about the interplay between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton family’s personal business interests.

• The 12-page document is penned by Doug Band, a longtime Clinton confidant who had been the Clinton Foundation’s primary fundraiser for a decade.

• Band wrote the memo as a principal for Teneo, a private consulting firm that raised tens of millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation while also acting as a personal in-house agency for Bill Clinton.

• In the memo, Band describes his “unorthodox” role in raising money for the nonprofit foundation while simultaneously securing for-profit opportunities for the former president.

• The document argues that Band’s dual lines of work were “independent” of one another. The memo came after criticism from Chelsea Clinton — revealed in a separate email published by WikiLeaks — over Band’s role within the family’s network of interests.

• The memo states that as of November 2011, Teneo had raised tens of millions for the foundation and produced between $30 million and $66 million in revenue for Bill Clinton through various “business arrangements,” including paid speeches.

• A close aide to Bill Clinton said he arranged for $50 million in payments for the former president, part of a complicated mingling of lucrative business deals and charity work of the Clinton Foundation mapped out in a memo released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday.

• The report was written by Doug Band, who has transitioned from his job as a Clinton aide to a partner in Teneo Consulting, a company whose client roster now includes some of the biggest companies in the world. Along the way, Band wrote, he also pushed his clients and contacts to donate millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and to help win business deals for Bill Clinton.

• What, the world’s most ardent defenders of freedom want to know, has happened to Julian Assange? Just a few years ago, he was such an earnest fellow, who spoke all truth to power. Well-known liberals gave him airtime, centrist trade organisations gave him membership and middle-brow humourists gave him plaudits and harbour. Now, all that the honourable can offer him is their disgust. He’s a Russian collaborator, a spiteful traitor, a pussy-grabbing narcissist whose leaks on Clinton place him in precisely the same deplorable basket that emits the stink of Trump.

• As a longtime Bill Clinton adviser came under fire several years ago for alleged conflicts of interest involving a private consulting firm and the Clinton Foundation, he mounted an audacious defense: Bill Clinton’s doing it, too.

• The unusual and brash rejoinder from veteran Clinton aide and Teneo Consulting co-founder Doug Band is scattered across the thousands of hacked emails published by WikiLeaks, but a memo released Wednesday provides the most detailed look to date at the intertwined worlds of nonprofit, for-profit, official and political activities involving Clinton and many of his top aides.

• With the whistleblowing site promising the release of around 50,000 emails from Podesta, Wednesday’s dump brings to 33,042, the number of messages published by WikiLeaks so far.

• Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign pitched a small group of wealthy liberals worried about global warming to become “climate policy donors,” according to a leaked email chain.

• One of those donors, however, has taken money from a Bermuda-based law firm with extensive ties to Russia. The email chain was one of thousands published online by WikiLeaks from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s hacked Gmail account.

• How did alleged hackers get access to the email account of John Podesta, the chair of the Hillary Clinton campaign? Apparently he just gave them his password.

• This is according to a leading cybersecurity firm, which says Podesta fell for a simple phishing scam frequently used in spam mail.

• A researcher at the company SecureWorks told Motherboard that Podesta was sent an email on March 19 that appeared to have come from Google. In the email was a link using Bitly, a URL shortening service. Podesta clicked on this link, which took him to a fake Google page, where he then typed in his login information.

• According to the cybersecurity firm, this is how the email account of former secretary of state Colin Powell was also hacked.

• The alleged hackers appear to later have sent Podesta’s emails to the whistleblowing journalism organization WikiLeaks, which has published them this month in installments. WikiLeaks says it has 50,000 messages to and from Podesta, and has published roughly 2,000 per day.

• John Podesta lost his cell phone getting out of a cab, the latest dump of WikiLeaks‘ “The Podesta Emails” indicates. Podesta, the chairman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, appears to have sent an email to Eryn Sepp on July 19, 2015, in which he asks for help finding his lost phone.

• “[I] lost my phone this am. It must have fallen off my belt getting in or out of the cab. I used Diamond and had a 4:45 pick up at Brandywine. Can you call Diamond Cab and see if the cab driver found it. They should be able to figure it out given the pickup. The receipt says #Diamond 444 C502,” Podesta appears to have written, according to the allegedly leaked email in WikiLeaks’ Podesta files.

• Readers have speculated that this incident might have been the way whoever delivered the Podesta files to WikiLeaks was able to access Podesta’s emails.

• Throughout the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton’s campaign presented her as a crusading reformer who would take on powerful corporate interests and curb the role of big money in American politics.

• But the recent WikiLeaks dump of campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails offers revealing snapshots that tell a somewhat different story. Top aides plot to “scare our people into giving bigger sums.” They debate whether to take cash from registered foreign agents: “Take the money!!” one senior campaign official advises. A top corporate lobbyist, pressed to “hit up” his clients for Clinton campaign coffers, asks for high-level help to advance one of those client’s interests. And there are new details about the overseas cash that rolled into the Clinton Foundation — including a $12 million commitment from the king of Morocco that Hillary Clinton personally helped facilitate.

• The emails also disclose just how nervous top Clinton advisers were that Vice President Joe Biden might get into the race (Podesta himself was convinced he was getting in.) And they fretted about their own candidate’s limitations. “Almost no one knows better [than] me that her instincts can be terrible,” wrote one longtime Clinton aide.

• Wikileaks’ latest document dump vindicates Bernie Sanders’ critique of Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment.

• Hillary Clinton may win the election in two weeks, but the manner of her victory will bedevil her in the White House. Specifically, evidence keeps turning up suggesting that the FBI probe into her emails was influenced by political favoritism and double standards.

• The Pirate Party promises to clean up corruption, grant asylum to Edward Snowden and accept the bitcoin virtual currency.

• Riding a wave of anger over perceived corruption among Iceland’s political elite, the Pirate Party is doing well in the polls ahead of Saturday’s general election.

• Hillary Clinton’s closest aides hid the private email scandal from her campaign team in the months before the official launch of her presidential campaign, emails made public by WikiLeaks show.

• Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, and Neera Tanden, co-chair of Clinton’s transition team, each expressed shock at the revelations about her private server as they emerged in early March 2015.

• Although Clinton’s team had performed research on her in 2014 as staff prepared for her campaign, Clinton’s inner circle apparently steered Mook and others away from the issue until it was too late.

• When Podesta asked Mook if he had “any idea of the depth of this story,” Mook answered simply, “Nope.”

• On Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016, Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric speaks with Washington Post political investigations reporter Rosalind Helderman about her article detailing a hacked memo released by WikiLeaks that appears to implicate former President Bill Clinton in a pay to play scenario.

• Yahoo News Now Special Edition: “2016 The Choice” — Every weekday until the election, we’ll be coming to you live from the Yahoo Studios in New York City, bringing the latest information and analysis of the day’s most compelling storylines in the race for the White House.

• Erica Garner, the daughter of police chokehold victim Eric Garner, ripped the Hillary Clinton campaign in a series of tweets Thursday after new campaign emails released by WikiLeaks showed how the Democratic nominee’s staffers discussed the death of her father.

• “I’m troubled by the revelation that you and this campaign actually discussed ‘using’ Eric Garner … Why would you want to ‘use my dad?” Garner tweeted along with a link to emails released by WikiLeaks. “These people will co opt anything to push their agenda. Police violence is not the same as gun violence.

• Political operative Ron Klain in January sent an “urgent” email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff warning of possible questions she might face, including how her husband’s sexual indiscretions might compare to disgraced comedian Bill Cosby.

• Klain’s insights became public Thursday thanks to the latest dump by WikiLeaks of campaign Chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails.

• Klain, who served as chief of staff to Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden, wrote that the campaign needed to set aside time to discuss the political questions, which now seem to be really owning the coverage.”

• Klain had several under the heading “WJC Issues.”

• One was particularly harsh: “How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?”

• A new cache of hacked e-mails, released Wednesday by WikiLeaks, is shedding new light on how Bill Clinton made millions of dollars while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, and raising questions about whether there may have been conflicts of interest between foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and the former president’s personal business.

• In one 2011 memo written by Doug Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton, Band explains how he worked for years to raise $46 million for the Foundation through the Clinton Global Initiative, while also leveraging his relationships with corporate sponsors to secure lucrative speaking arrangements and consulting gigs for the former president. Band, who wrote the 12-page memo in response to an internal audit being conducted by lawyers for the Clinton Foundation, described the money-making endeavor as “Bill Clinton, Inc.”

• Those for-profit activities largely involved “speeches, books, and advisory service engagements” in which Band and his private consulting firm, Teneo, acted as “agents, lawyers, managers, and implementers.” Teneo also negotiated “in-kind services for the President and his family—for personal travel, hospitality, vacation, and the like.” By 2011, Bill Clinton had secured over $50 million in compensation and received an additional $66 million in future contracts, according to the memo. Among the deals were a number of paid speeches to corporations including banks like UBS and Barclays, and an $18 million arrangement to serve as “honorary chancellor” for Laureate International Universities, a for-profit college. Some foundation donors were also clients of Teneo, although there is no evidence of any quid pro quo.

• In the memo, Band details how he set up for-profit deals for the former president, both involving money and “as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like.”

• Band’s memo covers 2001 to 2011, during which time “President Clinton’s business arrangements have yielded more than $30 million for him personally with $66 million to be paid out over the next nine years, should he choose to continue with the current engagements.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• As you can imagine, the Nazis and the Soviet Union clamped down hard on music. Not only were many pieces permanently taken from society, but their composers as well. Modern Russia has also done its share; witness the imprisonment of the feminist Russian protest-punk band Pussy Riot in 2012.

• Censorship isn’t fun. Sure, some things need to be censored, but the politically correct world that we live in now has caused many people to fear expressing their opinions, even if it’s something harmless or backed by facts. You have a political view? Well, maybe you should hold it back because others may disagree. You don’t like a certain athlete’s protest of the national anthem? Delete that Instagram post because you’re going to get death threats. Fear has consumed us like a fire in a time of needing to please everyone, and it’s causing both panic and frustration among social media users.

• Earlier this year, we were among the first to write about the highly questionable practice of “reputation management” companies filing clearly bogus lawsuits against unknown defendants, only to magically have those “defendants” show up a day or two later with an agreement that they had posted defamatory content. The goal of these lawsuits was obvious: get a court order. That’s because many platform websites, including Google, won’t take down or delink content based on a claim of defamation, but will do so if there’s a court order. Of course, filing a real lawsuit has all sorts of problems, including money and actually needing to have a real case. These reputation management lawsuits got around all of that by basically faking defendants, having them “agree” to a settlement admitting to defamation, and getting a court order saying that the content is defamatory. Neat and clean. And total abuse of legal process.

• Last month, Public Citizen’s Paul Levy (who has helped defend Techdirt against some legal bullies) picked up on this thread and found evidence of more bogus lawsuits. A few weeks ago, he and famed law professor Eugene Volokh teamed up to reveal more details on a series of such lawsuits, which all seemed to be connected back to a guy named Richart Ruddie and an operation that goes by a bunch of names, but mainly Profile Defenders. It appears that Ruddie/Profile Defenders is not the only one filing these kinds of lawsuits, but he’s been prolific. So far, Ruddie’s only response is a bizarre press release touting his “anti-cyberbullying skills.”

• In the last few weeks, we’ve written a few posts about Richart Ruddie’s company, Profile Defenders, which appears to be “improving reputations” online by filing bogus defamation lawsuits, finding a bogus made-up “defendant” to “admit” to posting defamatory information, reaching a “settlement” and getting a court order. The whole scheme is about getting that court order, which is then sent on to Google and others (mainly Google). The whole point: if Google sees a court order saying that some content is defamatory, it will de-index that page. That the whole process to get that court order is a total sham is basically ignored. That may be changing. We were just noting that some of Profile Defenders’ cases are in trouble, and at least one has had the court order vacated.

• Stories of Facebook’s attempt at puritanical patrols of its site are legion at this point. The site has demonstrated it cannot filter out parody, artwork, simple speech in the form of outrage, iconic historical photos, or sculpture from its prude-patrol censorship. As a private company, Facebook is of course allowed to follow its own whim when it comes to what is allowed on its site, but as an important tool in this era for communication and speech, the company is also a legitimate target for derision when it FUBARs this as badly as it does so often.

• So queue up the face-palming once more, as Facebook has decided to remove a video posted by a Swedish cancer charity informing women how to check for breast cancer, because the video included animated breasts, and breasts are icky icky.

• THERE’S a new book out by 20th century erotica pioneer Anais Nin — but you won’t find it if you search on Amazon.

• The world’s largest bookseller has black-listed erotica collection Auletris, the latest posthumous Nin work, after its publisher refused to edit the text to remove its more salacious details.

• But Nin’s literary cult following has slammed the retailer for “hypocrisy”, arguing that its censorship policy is haphazard and nonsensical.

• Long before the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon brought erotic fiction to the mainstream, French bohemian Anais Nin penned the writings that would see her hailed by critics as among the best authors of female erotica.

• Delta of Venus and Little Birds, erotica collections published in the late 1970s after Nin’s death,can both be searched and bought on Amazon.

Privacy/Surveillance

• He gave a concrete example of how big data techniques could be used in this context (original in Chinese). He said that there was nothing suspicious about somebody buying a pressure cooker or a clock, nor anything suspicious about someone buying ball bearings. But if somebody buys all of them together, you have a suspicious pattern. His suggestion that data mining techniques applied to everyday purchases might help the authorities to spot these patterns and to stop criminals before they act — a familiar enough idea — indicates that he is thinking of China’s plans to track every transaction from every shop as part of its “citizen scores” project.

• Once that data is gathered, it would indeed be possible to start applying big data techniques as a matter of course in order to spot correlations — something already being used on Internet data by the NSA and GCHQ. But Ma’s suggestion is to go even further, and to analyze every digital breadcrumb people drop for possible significance when combined with more data points, whether their own or of others.

• Last week, I wrote about how privacy is about tradeoffs, and despite what some people claim, there’s no such thing as “absolute privacy,” nor would you actually want something approximating what people think they mean by it. The real issue is the tradeoff. People are quite willing to trade certain information in exchange for value. But, the trade has to be clear and worth it. That’s where the real problems come in. When we don’t know what’s happening with our data, or it’s used in a sneaky way, that’s when people feel abused. Give people a clear understanding of what they’re giving and what they’re getting and you eliminate most of the problem. Then give end users greater control over all of this and you eliminate even more of the problem.

• This was our thinking in designing a Privacy Bill of Rights for companies to abide by in designing their services (along with EFF and Namecheap).

• It appears that Google would fail to meet the standards of that bill of rights. Last week, ProPublica wrote about how Google quietly changed the privacy policy related to how it connects DoubleClick advertising to other data that it has about you, allowing the company to actually link your name and other identifying information to you as you surf around the web. And, on top of that, it apparently includes tying what you type in Gmail to the ads you might see.

• New attention is being paid to American exile Edward Snowden these days with the release of a movie by filmmaker and screenwriter Oliver Stone. Titled “Snowden,” it looks into what drove the National Security Agency (NSA) contract worker to take top secret documents from his workplace.

• More attention to Snowden is also being generated with the calls by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union for President Barack Obama to pardon him.

• A former National Security Agency contractor charged with stealing government property and taking classified information appealed to be released from prison in a motion Tuesday as he awaits trial.

• Harold T. Martin III, 51, of Glen Burnie, was charged in August with stealing 50 terabytes of information over two decades. Martin’s lawyers have not denied the theft but have characterized him as a hoarder who started taking documents home to help him get better at his job.

• On Friday, Martin’s lawyers tried to convince a judge to release him, but Magistrate Judge A. David Copperthite ruled he was a flight risk and had to remain in jail.

• Defense attorneys representing Harold Martin, the former National Security Agency contractor accused of stealing a vast quantity of classified materials, have asked a more senior judge to review the decision that kept their client in federal custody.

• On Tuesday, Martin’s federal public defenders filed a “motion to review detention order,” asking US District Judge Richard D. Bennett to overrule his more junior colleague’s decision last Friday to keep Martin behind bars.

• In August, when Martin was arrested, investigators seized 50 terabytes’ worth of data and many other printed and classified documents from Martin’s home in suburban Maryland. If all of this data was indeed classified, it would be the largest such heist from the NSA, far larger than what former contractor Edward Snowden took.

• During last week’s hearing, James Wyda, one of Martin’s lawyers, told US Magistrate Judge A. David Copperthite that his client “is not Edward Snowden. He’s not someone who, due to political ideas or philosophical ideas or moral principles, thinks he knows better than everybody else.”

• “Does not exist” is not nearly the same thing as “did not exist.” This means Yahoo is no longer scanning emails in this fashion, not that it never performed this scanning.

• The letter does make a good point about transparency. Currently, Yahoo is unable to defend itself against any allegations because it is likely under a gag order. Yahoo would like Clapper’s office to share in the public pain, especially since it had a problem sharing in the communications gathered on its behalf by the email provider.

• Public embarrassment or not, Clapper’s office is probably not rushing through a declassification review of this Section 702 FISA order. It could still be months or years before the government produces this document and/or allows Yahoo to speak openly about its email scanning program.

• Perhaps recognizing that a displeased letter to the ODNI doesn’t create much leverage, the company appears to be making this a global issue, rather than simply a domestic one. Marcy Wheeler points out that the letter mentions Yahoo’s global reach and users several times and namechecks the EU’s Privacy Shield agreement. This may be the key that loosens the Intelligence Community’s Glomarred lips.

• The US government is still holding onto its opacity ideals while publicly touting transparency directives. The FISA court — which presides over the NSA’s surveillance programs — has normally been completely shrouded in darkness. Things changed in 2013 after Ed Snowden began leaking documents.

• Forced into a conversation about domestic surveillance, the administration responded with more transparency promises and the signing of the USA Freedom Act into law. The new law curtailed the collection of domestic business records (phone metadata and other third-party records) and required the court to make its opinions public following declassification reviews.

• All well and good, but the government has apparently decided the new law only requires transparency going forward. FISA opinions dating back to 2001 still remain locked up, despite transparency promises and reform efforts.

• A few weeks ago, we reported on a move by some public-spirited lawyers in Kuwait to challenge an extraordinary new law that would require everyone in the country — citizens and visitors like — to provide their DNA for a huge new database. It seemed like a quixotic move, since the Kuwaiti authorities were unlikely to be intimidated by a bunch of lawyers.

• The damage, scar tissue, and cleanup process in a post-Snowden world

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Streaming video competitors are justifiably nervous about AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. Consumer advocates have been raising alarm bells since the deal was announced, warning that AT&T could make it more difficult than ever for streaming providers to gain access to the content they’ll need to compete with AT&T’s upcoming DirecTV Now streaming service. They’re also concerned that AT&T will continue to use zero rating to give its own content a distinct advantage, while penalizing streaming competitors like Netflix and Amazon.

• Back in August a report emerged claiming that Google Fiber executives were having some second thoughts about this whole “building a nationwide fiber network from the ground up” thing. More specifically, the report suggested that some executives were disappointed with the slow pace of digging fiber trenches, and were becoming bullish on the idea of using next-gen wireless to supplement fiber after acquiring fixed wireless provider Webpass. As such, the report said the company was pondering some staff reductions, some executive changes, and a bit of a pivot.

• Fast forward to this week when Access CEO Craig Barrett posted a cheery but ambiguous blog post not only formally announcing most of these changes, but his own resignation as CEO. According to Barrett, Google will continue to serve and expand Google Fiber’s existing markets (Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Kansas City, Nashville, Provo, Salt Lake City, and The Triangle in North Carolina), and will also build out previously-announced but not yet started efforts in Huntsville, Alabama; San Antonio, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; and Irvine, California.

• Google in the past two years put in place plans to expand its Fiber fast internet service to more than 20 cities. Inside the company, executives harbored bigger ambitions: to deliver service nationwide and upend the traditional broadband industry.

• Google parent Alphabet Inc. reset the project on a more humble footing on Tuesday. Craig Barratt, head of the Access unit that includes Google Fiber, is leaving, and about 9 percent of staff is being let go, according to a person familiar with the situation. The business has about 1,500 employees, meaning there will be more than 130 job losses.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• On the bright side, I suppose, if the plan by the Cubs was to undertake an overly aggressive stance on trademark protection every round of the playoffs, there’s only one round left, so this should be it. We had just been discussing that as the team entered the League Series to attempt to make the World Series, it had filed a lawsuit against the many street vendors that line the path to Wrigley Field for selling counterfeit merchandise. This suit, while perfectly within the rights of the team, bucked a decades-long trend of allowing those sales. It was part of the tradition of going to a game, walking by these vendors and seeing their kooky designs. Another tradition for the team is raising a blue “W” flag whenever they win. That “W” was part of trademark opposition by the Cubs and MLB when a business unrelated to the professional sports market dared to use the single letter in a logo for its financial services product.

• And now it seems that, on the eve of the World Series, the Cubs are going after more than one kind of W still, as well as the letter C.

• Back in August, Mike wrote about a trademark case between Car-Freshner Corp., the company that makes those ubiquitous tree-shaped air-fresheners, and Sun Cedar, a tiny non-profit that made real-wood fresheners while employing at-risk folk in the form of the homeless, ex-cons and recovering addicts. It was a strange case for any number of reasons, including the dissimilar appearance between the product of the two companies, the wide delta of size of the two companies, and the very nature of the work Sun Cedar was attempting to do as a social good. Sadly but unsurprisingly, Car-Freshner trotted out the excuse that it had to sue this small non-profit or risk losing its trademarks.

• And now it seems like, rather than working out some other kind of arrangement that would have allowed Sun Cedar’s good work to continue, the trademark dispute has resulted in the end of the non-profit entirely, at least in its current iteration. Even with an attorney agreeing to represent the non-profit for free, the costs of taking on the suit in far-off NYC simply killed the whole operation.

• The company that filed the suit, Car-Freshner Corp. of Watertown, New York, is known for its aggressive defense of its trademark. It once sued a greeting card company for using a scratch-and-sniff air freshener shaped like a tree.

• Mediation efforts between Sun Cedar and Car-Freshner were unsuccessful and last month Sun Cedar filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Its shop, a converted garage, now sits idle. The equipment Adams purchased will be sold to pay off Sun Cedar’s debts.

Copyrights

• There was some oddity over the summer, when the Copyright Office flat out misrepresented copyright law to Congress and the FCC with regard to the impact on copyright of the FCC’s (now dead) proposal to create competition among set top box providers. As we’ve explained over and over again, there were no copyright implications with the FCC’s proposal. All it said was that if an authorized user wanted to access authorized content via a third party device, that authorized user should be able to do so. And yet, the Copyright Office, incorrectly, seemed to make up an entirely new exclusivity in copyright law (one that would outlaw DVRs) that basically said not only could a content provider license content to a cable TV provider, but it could also limit the devices on which end users could view that content.

• Simply put: that’s wrong. That’s not how copyright law works, and we’ve known that since the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Betamax case decades ago.

• But why would the Copyright Office so misrepresent copyright law? That was the perplexing part. Even with a bunch of copyright professors explaining how wrong the Copyright Office was, the Office still went ahead with its letter. Of course, as with so many policy issues, it really seemed like the Copyright Office was just acting like a lobbying arm of Hollywood.

• In 2012 the claimant (Rebecka Jonsson) filmed a bungee jumping session gone wrong in Africa.

• Someone (not Ms Jonsson) uploaded the video on YouTube. On 9 January 2012 the YouTube video was embedded on the L’Avenir website run by the defendant, in the context of an article describing the incident.

• The claimant had neither authorised the publication of the video on YouTube, nor its embedding in the L’Avenir article.

• In her action before the Attunda District Court, Ms Jonsson claimed that L’Avenir had infringed copyright in her video by both embedding it on its website and publishing a frozen still of the video. She sought damages for EUR 1931 against the defendant, as well as award of litigation costs.

• The Swedish court stated at the outset that the video is protected by Swedish copyright law, and noted how the circumstance for which the claimant’s video was (and still is) available on YouTube does not mean that no copyright infringement has occurred. This is because the claimant had not authorised the publication of the video on YouTube, nor – apparently – anywhere else on the internet.

• Remember when a copyright maximalist think tank guy insisted that copyright would never, ever be used for censorship? Well, about that…

• Earlier this year, we wrote about a crazy lawsuit filed by Gene Kelly’s widow, after finding out that a college professor named Kelli Marshall was working on a book collecting interviews with Gene Kelly. Marshall and her publisher reached out to a number of people associated with those interviews to clear any legitimate copyright claims (interview collection books are pretty common, and the copyright issue rarely gets in the way). Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, claimed that she held the copyright on all of Gene Kelly’s interviews, and sued Marshall for infringement. This was crazy for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that the person being interviewed very rarely holds a copyright in the words they said (and Kelly’s widow made a mad dash to the copyright office to try to register these interviews right before suing). There’s also the whole fair use thing.

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