● 10.30.16

● Links 30/10/2016: Lenovo Surrenders to Linux, Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:00 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Sure, Linux and open source has always been more about substance over style. Raw machine power and reliability are what we want, not necessarily chic design and gorgeousness. I said “necessarily”. But we live in a world where hit records assures rock star status. Likewise, Linux needs a machine that rocks like Sabbath, but looks like Taylor Swift.

• Unlicensed games and applications can run on PlayStation 4 now that firmware version 4.01 was reported hacked. This situation could lead to potential security failure and possible rooting of even the upcoming PlayStation 4 Pro.

• To make the problem worse for Sony’s console is the report that PlayStation 4 hack was done using web browser, an exploit that can easily replicate. This info first surfaced during a geek’s event in China where PlayStation 4 was shown running an unauthorized Linux system. Digital Trends reported that this Linux can be installed using PS4′s built-in web browser.

Desktop

• Following last month’s criticisms, Lenovo has released a BIOS update for its Yoga 900 range of laptops, finally allowing them to support GNU/Linux installations.

• Lenovo directly denied the sensational allegation that it had conspired with Microsoft to lock its laptops to Windows 10 with a BIOS setting locking the SSD to RAID mode.

• Despite stating that “Linux operating system vendors [would be responsible for] releasing new kernel and drivers to support features such as RAID on SSD”, Lenovo has now accepted that other methods of connecting to storage on its machines would be acceptable, if sub-optimal, and has issued a BIOS update for its Yoga 900-13ISK2 models, which will allow GNU/Linux installs.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Now, on with the show.

• Welcome to “Cooking With Linux”, episode 6, the show that combines wine, food, and free software. It’s all desktops all the time on this episode of “Cooking With Linux”. One question that I get asked regularly is why we have all these distributions. One explanation I give is that it provides a way for people to work they way they want to with an environment that works well for them. But what are these desktop environments? On today’s episode, I’ll take you through a number of different desktop environments and window managers, from slick and modern to just plain strange. Pull up a chair, enjoy a glass of wine, order some food, and enjoy.

Kernel Space

• Today, October 28, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the immediate availability for download of the Linux 4.8.5 kernel maintenance release.

• Linux kernel 4.8.5 is here less than a week after the announcement of the fourth maintenance update to the Linux 4.8 kernel series, which is currently the most stable and advanced you can get for a GNU/Linux distribution, and, according to the appended shortlog and the diff from the previous release, it’s a pretty big one, changing a total of 152 files, with 1416 insertions and 612 deletions.

• Immediately after informing us about the availability of Linux kernel 4.8.5, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the release of the twenty-eighth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.

• Releasing rc3 on a Saturday, not to catch any people trying to game the rc release timing, but simply because I’ll be traveling for the kernel summit tomorrow.

• It turns out that the bug that we thought was due to the new virtually mapped stacks during the rc2 release wasn’t due to that at all, but a block request queuing race condition. So people who turned off the new feature weren’t actually avoiding it at all, but probably the only people who hit it were people like DaveJ who are doing stress-testing. But it’s all fixed now, and we should be all set.

• As mentioned in my previous post, I recently upgraded interbench which is a benchmark application I invented/wrote to assess perceptible latency in the setting of various loads. The updates were to make the results meaningful on today’s larger ram/multicore machines where the load scales accordingly.

• This is to announce the first major ~stable public release of MuQSS (pronounced mux), the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler.

• At the beginning of the month well-known independent kernel contributor Con Kolivas confirmed he was working on a new project called MuQSS as an evolutionary successor to his Brain F*** Scheduler. This Saturday morning he’s now announced the first stable major release of MuQSS.

• MuQSS is short for the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler. MuQSS is a drop-in replacement to the BFS scheduler and continues to cater towards responsiveness and interactivity as primary goals for the scheduler.

• I first came up with the idea around 2001, and I was in part inspired to do so by previous careers where I’d taught UNIX system programming courses and developed course materials for those courses.

• Back in 2001, there were only two real choices for books related to Linux system programming. The first was Richard Steven’s 1992 book, Advanced Programming in The UNIX Environment, which was (and is) a great book, but back then was a UNIX-generic book with no details about Linux. By quite some margin, the best of the then available Linux-specific books was the first (1998) edition of Eric Troan and Michael K. Johnson’s Linux Application Development. That book had a lot of good Linux-specific detail, but there were also many Linux-specific areas as well as some UNIX-generic areas that it did not cover. So there was obviously a gap in the market.

• The mainline kernel has support for a wide range of hardware. One place where support has traditionally been lacking, though, is graphics adapters. As a result, a great many people are still using proprietary, out-of-tree GPU drivers. Daniel Vetter went before the crowd at Kernel Recipes 2016 to say that the situation is not as bad as some think; indeed, he said, in this area as well as others, world domination is proceeding according to plan.

• ABI changes can be painful for anybody charged with the development and maintenance of software; that can be doubly so when the changes happen inadvertently and take people by surprise. There is tooling out there that can search for and report ABI changes. At Kernel Recipes 2016, Dodji Seketeli presented some early work he has done on a tool that would find unexpected kernel ABI changes and asked what might seem like an obvious question: would this functionality be useful to the development community?

• It is worth noting that he was not talking about the sort of ABI change that kernel developers worry about the most: changes to the user-space ABI. Instead, he is focusing on changes to the loadable-module ABI. At first blush, that might seem like it could reduce the level of interest in his work. As was pointed out in the talk, kernel developers are generally unwilling to talk about the module interface as an ABI at all; at best, it’s a fluid API with no stability guarantees. This interface is explicitly allowed to change, so the number of developers wanting a tool to flag those changes might be thought to be small.

• For the last couple of release cycles, the kernel’s ongoing transition to the Sphinx documentation system has left kernel.org behind.

Graphics Stack

• With Linux 4.9 there is unfortunately no new feature code for Nouveau due to being late to merge the new functionality, but that work that missed 4.9 is now staged in DRM-Next for merging to mainline when the Linux 4.10 merge window rolls along.

• With this pull over night the code we originally hoped to see in Linux 4.9 for Nouveau. This new material for Linux 4.10 includes the initial boost support for greater performance but disabled by default as some more great work done by Karol Herbst. There are also related volt/clock changes done by Karol while all the re-clocking and boosting must still be done manually. The boost support also isn’t yet optimal but at least will help raise the frame-rates for open-source NVIDIA Linux gamers.

• Collabora went public today with their new spin-off project from Wayland: meet Waltham.

• Waltham is developed by Collabora at the request of some of their clients. Waltham is a generic Wayland-style IPC over network and can allow for more Wayland network-friendly applications.

• X.Org Server 1.19 was supposed to be released last week but that didn’t happen while now available today is the second release candidate.

• If you are looking for some Linux gaming this weekend, Black Mesa was recently released in early form for Linux / SteamOS.

• Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has setup a tracker bug to indicate all of the bugs that are blockers for the upcoming Mesa 13.0 release.

Benchmarks

• Earlier this week NVIDIA began shipping the GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards and our first review is of a Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Mini. A GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Linux review is still coming up plus some other articles looking at performance-per-Watt and other interesting areas for these low-cost Pascal-based GPUs. Here are results of the latest NVIDIA Linux performance compared to the latest open-source AMD Linux driver with various Radeon GPUs.

• Yesterday I published the first GeForce GTX 1050 Linux benchmarks with OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan coverage. With now having my hands on the EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti SC GAMING graphics card, here are the first Linux benchmarks of the GTX 1050 Ti graphics card that can be fetched for less than $150 USD.

Applications

• This site seems to have a thing for disk space menu bar apps of late. Joe even misquoted a well-known saying in a recent post, noting that “you wait ages for one disk usage indicator to arrive, and then two come along at once.” Well, you better make that 3, buddy!

• A new major version of the powerful, free, cross-platform and open source FFmpeg multimedia framework has been released on October 27, 2016, for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• Dubbed “Hypatia” and cut from Git master on the 26th of October, 2016, the new FFmpeg 3.2 branch is now considered stable, well-tested, and ready for production. It includes up-to-date library versions like libavutil 55.34.100, libavcodec 57.64.100, libavformat 57.56.100, libavdevice 57.1.100, libavfilter 6.65.100, libavresample 3.1.0, libswscale 4.2.100, libswresample 2.3.100, and libpostproc 54.1.100.

• On October 28, 2016, the team behind the HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging & Printing) project, an HP-developed solution for providing up-to-date drivers for HP Inkjet and Laser-based printers to GNU/Linux distributions was updated to version 3.16.10.

• HP Linux Imaging & Printing (HPLIP) 3.16.10 comes a little over a month after the release of the previous version, 3.16.9, to introduce support for Canonical’s recently released Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system, as well as for the sixth update to the stable Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series.

• Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is not known as the go-to platform for multimedia production. Instead, Apple Mac systems are probably the most popular system for graphic designers, video editors, and music production specialists, with Windows PC’s coming a close second. But here are a few Linux video editing software review.

• CRAN requested a release updating any URLs for Omegahat to the (actually working) omegahat.net URL. The RProtoBuf package had this in one code comment (errr…) and on bibfile entry. Oh well — so that caused this 0.4.7 release which arrived on CRAN today. It contains the requested change, and pretty much nothing else.

• I have just released version 1.20 of Obnam, my backup program. It’s been nine months since the previous release, and that’s a long time: I’ve had an exciting year, and not entirely in a good way. Unfortuntely that’s eaten up a lot of my free time and enthusiasm for my hobby projects.

• live-wrapper is a wrapper around vmdebootstrap for producing bootable live images using Debian GNU/Linux. Accompanied by the live-tasks package in Debian, this provides the toolchain and configuration necessary for building live images using Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, MATE and XFCE. There is also work ongoing to add a GNUstep image to this.

• Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

• The Linux notes from DarkDuck blog has recently published a How-to guide for using cloud storage from the Russian company Yandex with native Linux support: Yandex.Disk.

• Of course, Yandex is not the only company that offers free and subscription-based cloud storage services. There was even a discussion about one of the alternatives in the comments for that article.

• My take on that discussion is that I would not trust my files to a company that only receives revenues from the cloud storage. It is like putting all your eggs in the same basket. That’s why I would recommend you use a company with a diverse set of cash cows. How many of them are there? Not that many, I am afraid.

• NoNotifications is an Ubuntu indicator for temporarily suppressing NotifyOSD (which is used by Unity) notifications. This can be useful for presentations, when working, and so on, to prevent unwanted notifications.

• SafeEyes is an application that tries to protect your eyes from eye strain (asthenopia) by reminding you to take breaks while you’re working long hours at the computer. It was created as a free and open source Linux alternative for EyeLeo, a Windows-only app.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine team released yesterday another development release of their software. Version 1.9.22 has many small changes including 25 bugfixes.

• A new development release of the popular, open-source and cross-platform Wine free implementation of Windows on Unix solution has been announced on October 28, 2016, versioned 1.9.22.

• Coming two weeks after the release of the previous version, namely Wine 1.9.21, the Wine 1.9.22 update is here to add even more improvements to the upcoming HID support, improve the WebServices implementation, adds experimental bitmap rendering in Direct2D, and adapts the macOS clipboard support to the new design.

Games

• A little reason for the delay on this particular episode: I had planned a trip to my home state back at the beginning of this month, when an opportunity came up. I found out that none other than The Linux Gamer from YouTube lived in the area.

• So we arranged for the recording of this podcast to happen face to face, something of a rarity in our very digital age. So the topic we came to discuss was about Steam Machines and we ask the question: how should they be viewed, as a console or PC? So sit back and enjoy, while we talk about gaming on Linux.

• The game store itch.io can be a bit of a goldmine when it comes to smaller titles, and it’s time to give them a shout out.

• The problem with itch, is that the barrier for entry is really low, so a lot of pure crap ends up on the store. Finding games worth your time and/or money can be problematic.

• Some are free, some are not. Some are also in development, but I found them interesting. I tested them all to make sure they run smoothly on Linux. This is not meant as an in-depth review of each game, but a shout-out to games that work that you may have never heard of. Essentially, it’s games to keep an eye on.

• Dear Linux gamers, a new game bundle from Humble Bundle is up for grabs today, and it looks like it includes five cool, DRM-free games that you’ll be able to play on your Linux-powered computers.

• Dubbed Humble “Day of the Devs 2016″ Bundle, the new game bundle came online just a couple of hours ago, and brings you $129 worth of awesome stuff, but you’ll pay what you want for Broken Age, Lumino City, and Titan Souls. Unfortunately, only Broken Age is supported on Linux, as the latter two are for Windows and Mac.

• Natural Selection 2 [Steam] is the RTS/FPS hybrid that’s pretty damn fun and it has just been updated. You can now get a new game-mode from the Steam Workshop and the entire game is free to try all weekend. Not only is it free all weekend, it’s also on sale at 50% off.

• Thanks to this, the player-count online has spiked quite nicely!

• Slayaway Camp is an isometric and sadistic puzzler where you play as a deranged psychopath who goes on a rampage at an isolated camp in the woods. It features one of the best trailers I’ve seen recently. I couldn’t stop laughing at the 0:44 part, honestly:

• Although there isn’t an official demo available, you can find the free version of the game on Kongregate. I would’ve liked to write some first impressions of this free version, but unfortunately it requires Flash Player to run. I will try to contact the developers to see if they can upload a HTML5 version.

• Humble Day of the Devs Bundle 2016 is the latest pay what you want bundle, and it actually has some pretty nice Linux games on offer.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Budgie is a new desktop environment created for Solus Operating System, emphasized to be user-friendly. Budgie is not a descendant from any previous desktop environment, so it’s not a fork of GNOME nor KDE. This review covers some aspects of Budgie at its latest version today (10.2.8). It is my first time to review Budgie Desktop Environment. For Mr. Ikey Doherty, thank you!

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Mageia KDE Team just finished to push in Mageia cauldron : – Plasma 5.8.2 ( the Plasma LTS version ) – KDE Applications 16.08.2 – KDE Frameworks 5.27.0

• In the initial release announcement I have promised to focus on calendar support. Unfortunately I haven’t had that much time for development as I initially anticipated. In the meantime some early adopters have uncovered a number of issues that have since been fixed. In order to deliver those fixes I have decided to issue a bugfix release (0.8.1).

• Getting the correct dependencies and up to date version of required libraries has always been a challenge for Kdenlive users. So we are pleased to announce that we now provide binary packages for download. These packages contain the latest Kdenlive development version (git master), as well as current development versions of MLT, Frei0r, OpenCV. The GPU movit library is not included at this stage. There might be some performance hit due to the nature of the formats, but these packages will be most helpful to debug and test the alpha/beta versions so that we can provide better releases. It will also help to identify issues linked to missing dependencies or outdated libraries on your system.

• With Plasma 5.8 LTS out the door it’s time to look ahead at future Plasma releases. In our first long term support release we introduced “modifier only shortcuts” that allow you to open the application launcher with just the Meta key. Judging from feedback on the Internet this is one of the best features introduced in all of KDE’s history I was quite surprised to find that the global menu is a close second.

• I’m very glad to announce the release of KStars v2.7.0 (Menkab)! This new version brings improvements all over the board, from speed improvements, better cross-platform support, and Android mobile/tablet support is now finally merged into mainline KStars!

• From August 31th to September 10th I was em Berlin attending two amazing conferences: QtCon and Akademy.

• QtCon brought together five communities to host their respective conferences at a same time and place, creating one big and diverse conference. Those communities were Qt, KDAB, KDE (celebrating 20th birthday), VLC and FSFE (both celebrating 15th birthday).

• Dependency freeze is in 2.5 weeks and Feature Freeze in 3.5 weeks, so hurry up!

• Putting the effort on having KDE well supported in Yocto would provide the project a third life, landing on an industry that is heavily investing in Open Source with a key piece of software, with no clear competitor today in the open.

• It would revamp the interest of many KDE developers in porting their apps to embedded/mobile environments and would bring attention to the project from Qt professionals all over the world. Currently KDE is significantly better than anything else that is open in automotive. It would just require the effort to include it and maintain it in Yocto, which is not small, and adapting Plasma a little initially, not much.

• GENIVI launched a Challenge Grant Program that might help to put some funding in the equation

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Just a few minutes ago, GNOME developer Javier Jardón informed us about the availability of the GNOME 3.23.1 desktop environment, which is the first development snapshot towards GNOME 3.24, due for release on March 22, 2017.

• As I mentioned in my previous blog post we organized a hackfest to discuss all about the core GNOME experience, with emphasis on core apps and taking into account its impact in 3rd party developers too.

• But you can imagine, bringing together a not small amount of developer, designers and community in a single place involves travel costs, accommodation, an appropiate place where we can gather and discuss with internet and tables… and apart of that, small details that improves the overall experience like snacks and something to distract ourselves after a long journey, like a simple dinner all of us together.

Distributions

Reviews

• Damn. I’m so miffed. I was really hoping to test Solus some more and exploring its capabilities. I wanted to see how well it would handle my smartphones, its performance, I was having high hopes around battery life, and the application stack looks interesting. This was also a first chance for me to check how well Budgie handles real hardware. All that was taken away from me by a silly bootloader error. Yes, the forum mentions it, but why.

• Such a missed opportunity. Solus 1.2.0.5 had a fresh air of originality about it, it had the right dose of good looks, and it seemed to handle the functionality side, too. My final evaluation will have to wait for a future version, as this one is a no-go. I would also have to advise you to be careful with your own testing, as you may not be savvy enough in how to recover from failed boots. Be warned. The live session was top notch, but no grade here, as we didn’t really get to experience Solus. Sigh, Maybe another time.

New Releases

• Do you remember Maui? It’s the new name gave by the Netrunner team to their Netrunner Desktop flavor earlier this summer, rebased on KDE Neon and shipping with the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) goodies.

• The first Maui release, versioned 1, landed in mid-August, and we’ve just been informed about the general availability of Maui 2, dubbed “Blue Tang,” featuring the recently released KDE Plasma 5.8.2 LTS desktop environment on top of an updated Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base, and, of course, running the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel.

Gentoo Family

• The Sabayon project has always brought us a modern, rolling, reliable and easy to use GNU/Linux distribution based on the Gentoo operating system, which is known for being notoriously difficult to install.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• You may be aware that openSUSE Leap 42.2 is now in the release candidate stage, and there’s a lot of activity aimed at squashing those pesky bugs before they hit the final release. One particular bug proved to be quite tough to fix, and it was only solved thanks to the “heroes” mentioned in the title. This is the history of the bug.

• [...]

• What could I say: upstream-downstream collaboration is truly awesome, and even more so when such a difficult bug is tackled and fixed. The way my fellow KDE team members acted is truly commendable, and so the behavior of upstream KDE (despite the false “they don’t listen” mantra) that helped and offered assistance in getting a proper solution out.

• So if you ever meet Antonio, David, Fabian, and Martin, please offer them a beverage of their choice. They’re the heroes Free Software deserves.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• It is well-known for some people that my heart, head and soul belong to both, the GNOME and FEDORA project, and anytime I have the opportunity to talk about Linux, I bring these ones to the table. So, thanks to the organizers of the event SEISCO 2016 for letting me share more about them!

• Fedora 25 will be coming soon! So I decided to try F25 beta to see if I can hunt some bugs; and even if I can start using it as my primary OS. Specially since it is going to use Wayland by default rather than Xorg for its graphical subsystem, more testing is needed to make sure that final release will have less surprising bugs! I’ve tried Wayland in Fedora 24 and some applications (notably Eclipse) work terrible under Wayland; and I’m installed F25 mainly to see how Eclipse works under Wayland there.

• Fortunately, Eclipse works fine under Wayland in Fedora 25. Even better, Wayland experience under Fedora 25 seems more smooth than that of Fedora 24 using nouveau driver.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• There’s plenty in Ubuntu 16.10 that makes it worth the upgrade, though nothing about Canonical’s latest release is groundbreaking. This less experimental but worthwhile update continues to refine and bug-fix what at this point has become the fastest, stablest, least-likely-to-completely-change-between-point releases of the three major “modern” Linux desktops.

• Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offers stability and speed today, it’s not long for this world. Ubuntu 16.10 is the seventh release since the fabled Unity 8 and its accompanying Mir display server were announced. Yet in Ubuntu 16.10, there’s still no Unity 8 nor Mir.

• This time we couldn’t cover new Ubuntu release, few days back Canonical announced the latest version of Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak. It features Linux kernel 4.8, a preview session of Unity 8 desktop environment but Unity 7 is default desktop, Libreoffice 5.2, Gnome 3.20, update manager now shows changelog from PPAs: “Ubuntu 16.10 released with Hybrid Cloud Operations and Unity 8 developer preview, from Canonical, Developer preview of Unity 8 includes desktop, tablet and phone UX convergence. Apps provided by GNOME have been updated to at least 3.20. Many apps have been updated to 3.22 also. Network performance is a primary focus of this release, with updated versions of Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), OpenVSwitch (OVS) and virtualization technologies, all able to handle critical application traffic for lower latency and greater throughput. Ubuntu 16.10 and the corresponding updates to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS further enhance Ubuntu’s position as the leading private cloud infrastructure operating system, with OpenStack Newton, DPDK, enhanced OpenVSwitch and LXD machine containers alongside regular KVM based VM guests. Ubuntu 16.10 previews Canonical’s device convergence vision.” Yakkety Yak final version includes most recent versions of core set of packages, notable changes: Linux kernel 4.8 version, Gnome Software Center 3.20.1, Firefox 49, LibreOffice 5.2.2, Gnome platform 3.20, GNOME Calendar 3.20.x, Thunderbird 45.3, Rhythmbox 3.4.1, Shotwell 0.22.x, Nautilus 3.20.3, GTK+ 3.20, Gnome System Monitor 3.20.x, Gnome Terminal 3.20.2, Gnome Disks 3.22, Totem 3.22, Gedit 3.22, Mesa 12.0.3, Xorg Server 1.18.4, Pulseaudio is updated to 9.0, systemd 231 and latest versions for other applications.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint is making it lock-screen a little more useful, adding music and volume controls and MPRIS track data.

• Clement Lefebvre today blogged of upcoming Mint 18 update, Serena, saying 18.1 should be released in November or December. He also teased users a bit with a few details of coming attractions. Elsewhere, Maui 2 was announced and Fedora-derivative Chapeau was reviewed. Mohd Sohail compared Mint to Ubuntu and delivered his shocking findings and The Document Foundation put out the call for designers. Micheal Larabel checked in on Fedora 25 progress and Dominique Leuenberger posted his weekly review of Tumbleweed changes.

• Many new features and improvements were developed since the last release. We’re now just days away from feature-freeze, trying to squeeze one last thing here and there, before wrapping things up and focusing on the new release.

• Linux Mint is a brilliant operating system. Based on Ubuntu, it aims to make Linux accessible to everyone. You know what? It succeeds.

• Just a few moments ago, Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland proudly announced the release and general availability of his beautifully crafted, Ubuntu-based Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 distribution.

• Hot on the heels of the Moksha 0.2.1 desktop release I am happy to announce the stable release of Bodhi 4.0.0. I would like to start by extending a giant thank you to all of the Bodhi Team Members who made the release possible. Stefan, Sef, Charles, Ylee, Okra, Tristram, and all our users taking the time to report issues on the forums – this release would not have happened without all of your help. For those who are more interested in download links than the details here you go:

Devices/Embedded

• Samsung extended its Artik line with a Linux-driven Artik 7 COM and dev kit for gateways with 8x Cortex-A53 cores, plus two Cortex-M4 based Artik 0 modules.

• To implement the terminal you could fix a Raspberry Pi or similar to the back of the screen. Could it be powered by the same PSU as the screen? Perhaps if the screen had a USB port.

Phones

Tizen

• Great news this morning as Samsung UK have made the Gear S3 available to pre-order with a shipping date of November 11, 2016 and priced at £349 with FREE postage for both the Frontier and Classic versions. The frontier is seen more for the adventure type of person and the classic for the more refined business people.

• Game: Sputnik Eyes now available on Tizen Store

Android

• The massive Oracle v. Google litigation has entered a new phase, as Oracle filed papers (PDF) yesterday saying it will appeal its loss on “fair use” grounds to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

• For a brief recap of the case: after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems and acquired the rights to Java, it sued Google in 2010, saying that Google infringed copyrights and patents related to Java. The case went to trial in 2012. Oracle initially lost but had part of its case revived on appeal. The sole issue in the second trial was whether Google infringed the APIs in Java, which the appeals court held are copyrighted. In May, a jury found in Google’s favor after a second trial, stating that Google’s use of the APIs was protected by “fair use.”

• Though it is manufactured under contract by China’s TCL, the DTEK60 is designed, distributed and marketed by BlackBerry. This is a typical arrangement in the consumer electronics world, where brand-name companies will typically outsource much of the manufacturing and assembly to dedicated OEMs and other contractors.

• The CPI (Maoist) leaders and cadres have adopted the available technology, from making rocket launchers to using laptops for their strategy planning, and the mobile phones with android system are no exception. There are also reports of the underground cadre enjoying the entertainment available on their mobiles and taking selfies.

• [...]

• Their fancy for a selfie resulted in the police getting their latest photos.

• Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge

• Cnet rating: 5 stars out of 5

• The good: The Edge has a gorgeous larger curved screen and larger battery than the otherwise identical standard S7. It really is something special. The extra navigation tools can be useful when used judiciously.

• The bad: When you pile on these extra tools, they slow you down rather than speed you up. It’s pricier than other good phones.

• The cost: $600 (refurbished) to $780

• The bottom line: The gorgeous Galaxy S7 Edge makes the best Android phone that much better.

• There’s no shortage of Android Wear watches to choose from. Companies including Huawei, LG, Casio, and Fossil all have smartwatches that run on Google’s wearable operating system, and all of them can use Google Fit’s activity tracking. Now, the fitness company Polar is getting into the mix with the M600 Android Wear-based fitness watch, which is the first device that integrates Polar’s existing exercise software with Android Wear.

• The M600 wants to appeal to a specific kind of user: one who is into fitness and wants a heart rate monitor and onboard GPS in their tracker, but who also cares about getting wrist notifications and using wearable apps. But at $329, Polar’s device is right up there with the Apple Watch in price, and that might be too steep for some consumers, considering the experience it offers is much different.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source dominates big data. So much so, in fact, that Cloudera co-founder Mike Olson has declared, “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years in closed-source, proprietary form.” He’s right, as the vast majority of our best big data infrastructure (Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, MongoDB, etc.) is open source.

• It’s not surprising that businesses are feeling jittery about cybersecurity, especially after last week’s news that a botnet had used Internet of Things devices to hack into platforms like Reddit, Twitter and Spotify. And this week, a new report from Rackspace, the managed cloud company, has revealed that while many companies are now using open source – a type of software that makes the original source code freely available – they still harbour security concerns.

• The report, which surveyed 300 large organisations in the UK, found that 90% of companies are using open source coding, despite 54% associating it with security threats. And while 25% of companies are fully using open source, of the companies that aren’t fully using it, 49% saw closed source technologies as more secure.

• In his Open Source Landscape keynote at LinuxCon Japan earlier this year, Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation said that the trend toward corporate-sponsored open source projects is one of the most important developments in the open source ecosystem. The jobs report released by the Linux Foundation earlier this year found that open source professionals are in high demand. The report was followed by the announcement that TODOGroup, a collaboration project for open source professionals who run corporate open source program offices, was joining the Linux Foundation. Open source is no longer exclusively a pursuit of the weekend hobbyist. Professional open source management is a growing field, and it’s critical to the success of your technology strategy.

• For a while now, Ignite UI has been the choice for large enterprises to create beautiful and powerful modern web UIs on top of their enterprise data. We (Infragistics) are now making this product available to everyone. We want to open up the most powerful and easy-to-use UI framework for Modern Web Applications to everyone. In order to do this, we’ve made the majority of the line of business Ignite UI controls and components open source, and available on GitHub to everyone to grab! The open source part of Ignite UI is licensed under Apache 2.0.

• Often women are presented with a “Prove it again” bias in the workplace, in which they must repeatedly demonstrate their competence just to be taken seriously. As a member of the OpenStack Technical Committee for the past four years, Anne Gentle has encountered her fair share of these biases. Gentle shared her experience on today’s episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona this week.

• Microservices architecture has reached a tipping point where its broad adoption is now pretty much guaranteed. According to a survey by NGINX, nearly a third of companies have deployed microservices in production, and another third are either using microservices in development or considering them. Furthermore, there is fairly even distribution of microservices adoption across small (36%), medium (50%), and large companies (44%), indicating that the approach has merit regardless of how many developers you have in your organization.

• Are you involved in DevOps and web development, or are you aiming to be? If so, you’re probably very aware of many of the tools from the open standards and open source arenas that can make your work easier. Still, these are always spreading out at a fast clip and there are some applications and tools that are rarely discussed. Here at OStatic, we try to regularly update our collections focused on them. In this post, you’ll find numerous free resources for web development that range from complete online courses available for free to unsung applications.

• The gap between the computational science and open source software communities just got smaller – thanks to an international collaboration among national laboratories, universities and industry.

• The Eclipse Science Working Group (SWG), a global community for individuals and organizations who collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software, recently released five projects aimed at expediting scientific breakthroughs by simplifying and streamlining computational science workflows.

• TCGA Expedition, a new new tool developed by the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, can help cancer investigators wade through huge amounts of genomic data.

• The open-source technology, which manages data from The Cancer Genome Atlas project, continuously downloads, processes and manages TCGA data, allowing researchers to choose specific tools as they work toward better treatments.

• “Starting with TCGA, our goal is to make large data sets available to the average researcher who would not otherwise be able to access this information,” said Rebecca Jacobson, MD, professor of biomedical informatics and chief information officer at Pitt’s School of Medicine, in a statement.

• Several Pittsburgh-based genetic research organizations have released to the public an open-source software tool that aims to make researchers’ work easier while handing massive amounts of genomic data across disparate data sources.

• The three participants in the software development project, called TCGA Expedition, are the University of Pittsburgh, the UPMC health system and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The 30-year-old center is a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

• The genetic database known as the Cancer Genome Atlas is, for now, the focus of the Pittsburgh developers’ attention. It is a joint project of the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

• When a bunch of open source devotees get together, the results can be quite astounding. In eight short years, Cloudera has become number five on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. As for the “pay it forward” reference – see the comments at the end.

• As the co-founder of HashiCorp, Mitchell Hashimoto is credited with being the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Consul, Vault and other DevOps tools. In addition, he’s an O’Reilly author and a top GitHub user, whether guaged by followers, activity or contributions. That’s quite a set of accomplishments for a young man who’s still on the younger side of 30.

Events

• The winners of the 2016 New Zealand Open Source Awards have been announced.

• Jason Ryan, chair of the judging panel said the winners constituted an impressive list of New Zealand’s Open Source community, and represented a cross-section of a thriving technical, social and creative sector.

• “The calibre of the nominations meant that there were strong contenders in every category. And while all of the finalists were worthy of recognition, the judges unanimously agreed that the winners in each category were those most deserving of recognition for their contributions”, Ryan said.

• The Awards aim to raise awareness of the free and open source advantage for New Zealand by “telling powerful success stories based on real achievements that are already making a difference for our country,” according to the award web site.

• Yesterday I conducted my talk at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. You can find the presentation here: “Vanilla or Distributions: How Do They Differentiate?” and the video from the session on the OpenStack Foundation youtube channel.

• KDAB has long supported the C++ community, as C++ is the backbone of Qt and up-to-date knowledge of its changes keeps us on the leading edge in the Qt world.

• Later this year we shall be supporting Europe’s Meeting C++ in Berlin, but now that this year’s talks have been released we felt it was time for a Special Report on CppCon which ran from September 17th-23rd this autumn in Bellevue, WA.

• KDAB’s Kévin Ottens was on the program committee and reviewed the talks at this year’s show, while Giuseppe D’Angelo (Peppe) contributed a day’s training on Programming with Qt Widgets, and two Lightning Talks on Qt (see them here and here), as well as attending the rest of the event.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Over the past year, our top priority for Firefox was the Electrolysis project to deliver a multi-process browsing experience to users. Running Firefox in multiple processes greatly improves security and performance. This is the largest change we’ve ever made to Firefox, and we’ll be rolling out the first stage of Electrolysis to 100% of Firefox desktop users over the next few months.

• But, that doesn’t mean we’re all out of ideas in terms of how to improve performance and security. In fact, Electrolysis has just set us up to do something we think will be really big.

• Mozilla’s latest secret project to go public is Quantum, a new browser engine for Firefox. But before wondering what happened to Servo, don’t worry, Quantum makes use of Servo and Rust.

• Last time I showed you my beginnings of porting parts of Librsvg to Rust. In this post I’ll do an annotated porting of a few functions.

• Disclaimers: I’m learning Rust as I go. I don’t know all the borrowing/lending rules; “Rust means never having to close a socket” is a very enlightening article, although it doesn’t tell the whole story. I don’t know Rust idioms that would make my code prettier. I am trying to refactor things to be prettier after a the initial pass of C-to-Rust. If you know an idiom that would be useful, please mail me!

SaaS/Back End

• Don’t expect future implementations of OpenStack without vendors first having cleared a new battery of emerging conformity tests.

• That’s the word from OpenStack Foundation chief operating officer Mark Collier, who reckons the appetite to prove interoperability is too strong for tech providers to resist.

• 451 Research doubles its previous estimate of the value of the OpenStack marketplace and predicts the majority of OpenStack revenue will come from private cloud deployments.

• The OpenStack Foundation revealed an updated version of the logo for the open source cloud platform at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona.

• The new logo ditches the outdated 3D effect and shadow in favor of a simplified, flat design and a different shade of red. There’s also a new typeface, and consistent branding guidelines to go with it.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Earlier this week we talked to Heiko Tietze, LibreOffice’s user experience (UX) mentor, and then looked at some of the changes that the Design team has made in recent releases of the suite. You’ve seen that even the smallest updates to the interface can have a significant effect, and the Design team is always looking for new ideas and contributions. So read on to learn how you can get involved and make LibreOffice better for everyone.

CMS

• A day after being on the receiving end of allegations that it not only stole code from WordPress, it also failed to contribute back to the open-source community, Wix has responded, saying that the claims against it are baseless and that its do-it-yourself website building platform has been operating in good faith.

• In an open letter to WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, Wix chief executive and cofounder Avishai Abrahami answered every criticism leveled at his company. He admitted that Wix did use WordPress’ open source library for “a minor part of the application,” but claimed that every modification or improvement the team made was submitted back as open source. Mullenweg had said previously that Wix’s mobile app editor, which was released this month, was built using “stolen code.”

• Recently, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s accused Wix of stealing source code from WordPress and using it in the company’s mobile app “without attribution, credit, or following the license”. Wix, deciding it was best not to let Mullenweg’s stipulations go unchallenged, has fired back with a double-barrelled, if wishy-washy, reply.

• Matt Mullenweg’s letter garnered not one, but two responses from Wix: the first from CEO Avishai Abrahami and the second via the company’s lead engineer Tal Kol.

• Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, is not happy with the editor used in the Wix mobile app, saying the web building service copied his platform. Wix.com’s CEO Avishai Abrahami responds to Mullenweg’s accusations.

• Mullenweg said in his blog that Wix’s mobile app seems familiar to him, it’s like he had used it before. He said he has because it’s WordPress.

• “If I were being honest, I’d say that Wix copied WordPress without attribution, credit, or following the license,” he said. “Wix has always borrowed liberally from WordPress – including their company name, which used to be Wixpress Ltd. – but this blatant rip-off and code theft is beyond anything I’ve seen before from a competitor.”

• Nasdaq Corporate Solutions, a business line of Nasdaq, Inc., is banking on the collective input from users of Drupal open-source web content management technology to empower its platform for IR websites.

• Moodle is a very popular course-management system, equivalent to Blackboard, but entirely free and open source. This short YouTube video by Moodle expert Nellie Deutsch explains how you can install Moodle in your cPanel with Softaculous in under 2 minutes.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Public Services/Government

• Poland is to create a central source code repository, aiming to facilitate sharing and reuse of ICT solutions. The repository is part of an overhaul of the country’s eGovernment strategy, which was adopted last month.

• Boston has loaded the source code for boston.gov on github, which means code writers can now rummage around and submit improvements to make the site work better.

• City Hall says this makes Boston the first “major” US city to turn its Web site into an open-source project. Officials emphasize the code – based on open-source Drupal software – contains no sensitive data.

• Senior ICT executives from Malaysian government agencies got together at an OpenGov Breakfast Dialogue to discuss the process of transforming government with flexibility and transparency, how to do more with less in an era of increasing budgetary constraints and the key role that could be played by Open Source.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Conventional ‘top down’ health care is characterised by the system not really catering for the patient’s needs and often restricting the way patient data – especially for chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease – can be shared and utilised, says patient advocate, Tim Omer. But there is an alternative, bottom up, approach he tells Ian Scales. A range of “community projects are very interesting because we’re freeing the (patient) data. We’re not necessarily saying we know how to use it, [but] we make it available and other community projects take that data and then do interesting things with it,” he says.

Open Hardware/Modding

• If you are in the market for an inexpensive USB logic analyser you have a several choices, but few of them deliver much in the way of performance. There are kits from China for a few dollars using microcontrollers at their heart, but they fail to deliver significant sample rates. If you require more, you will have to pay for it.

• [...]

• This project has the promise to add a very useful piece of test equipment to the armoury of the engineer on a budget, and to aid the cost-conscious reader he’s provided extensive documentation and installation instructions, as well as the code for the FPGA. Thanks to one of the more awesome hacks of 2015, there is an entirely open toolchain for this Lattice part, and our own [Al Williams] has written up a multi-part getting-started guide if you want to get your feet wet. You probably want one of these anyway, and now it’s a logic analyzer to boot.

• If you are looking for a large format CNC machine you might be interested in a new open source system which has been created by Bar Smith in the form of the Maslow CNC which provides a cutting surface 8 x 4ft in size.

Leftovers

Hardware

• The MacBook introduced in early 2015 already set the stage for this, but the MBP no longer has the USB ports you’re used to. Nope, the now has four Thunderbolt ports, Intel’s proprietary port that also supports the new, smaller, and reversible USB-C standard. What does that mean for you? Basically, if you want to continue to use your current USB devices, like mice, you’ll need an adapter.

Health/Nutrition

• It is critical, if we are to solve the ongoing healthcare crisis in the US, that we are not fooled by what is actually the Profiteer’s Option that will be another gift to the insurance industry. We must unite instead and fight, just as we fight to stop pipelines and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for the solution, national improved Medicare for All, a single payer system that nearly two-thirds of people in the US support.

• In May 2016, the World Health Assembly adopted a viral hepatitis strategy with the goal of eliminating hepatitis B and C as public health threats by 2030.

• The report found that increasing generic competition is beginning to have an impact on the prices of hepatitis medicines, which are becoming more affordable in low- and most lower-middle-income countries. High prices in high income and middle-income countries have led to rationing of treatment, including in the European Union and Switzerland.

• Measures that have been used to increase affordability and improve access to hepatitis medicines include optimised procurement, voluntary licenses, local production, and patent oppositions, said the report.

• Countries that are not able to procure from generic sources have to engage in price negotiations unless they use flexibilities contained in the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the report said. The report provides pricing information to help buyer countries to better assess the market prices and fix goals in price negotiations.

• High drug prices are a global public health crisis. This is mostly the case among lower income countries but also for citizens and residents in the US, where tens of millions are not filling prescriptions due to cost. The international online marketplace is a much-needed lifeline for consumers who cannot afford prescription medication where they live. People deserve the widest possible access to safe and affordable medication, including online access, and the Internet community can help.

• The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called “Obamacare,” may be the biggest insurance scam in history. The industries that profit from our current health care system wrote the legislation, heavily influenced the regulations and have received waivers exempting them from provisions in the law. This has all been done to protect and enhance their profits.

• In the meantime, the health care crisis continues. Fewer people, even those with health insurance, can afford the health care they need because of out-of-pocket costs. The ACA continues that trend by pushing skimpy health plans with low coverage and restricted networks.

Security

• The last attempted hack came 5 minutes ago, using the username root and the password root.

• Security researchers have discovered a new way that allows malware to inject malicious code into other processes without being detected by antivirus programs and other endpoint security systems.

• The new method was devised by researchers from security firm Ensilo who dubbed it AtomBombing because it relies on the Windows atom tables mechanism. These special tables are provided by the operating system and can be used to share data between applications.

• “What we found is that a threat actor can write malicious code into an atom table and force a legitimate program to retrieve the malicious code from the table,” Ensilo researcher Tal Liberman said in a blog post. “We also found that the legitimate program, now containing the malicious code, can be manipulated to execute that code.”

• This new code-injection technique is not currently detected by antivirus and endpoint security programs because it is based on legitimate functionality, according to Liberman. Also, the atom tables mechanism is present in all Windows versions and it’s not something that can be patched because it’s not a vulnerability.

• The Wirecutter, an in-depth comparative review site for various electrical and electronic devices, just published an opinion piece on whether users should be worried about security issues in IoT devices. The summary: avoid devices that don’t require passwords (or don’t force you to change a default and devices that want you to disable security, follow general network security best practices but otherwise don’t worry – criminals aren’t likely to target you.

• The OpenStack Security project adds new tools and processes to help secure OpenStack technologies. The project technical leader offers insight on the program. Security is such a critical element of the open-source OpenStack cloud platform that there is an entire project—the OpenStack Security project—dedicated to the task of helping protect OpenStack technologies.

• In a well-attended session at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 27, Rob Clark, the project technical leader of the OpenStack Security project, detailed the group’s most recent efforts.

• The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Cyber Crimes Unit arrested Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai, an 18-year-old teenager from the Phoenix area, for flooding the 911 emergency system with hang-up calls.

• According to a press release from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Desai created a JavaScript exploit, which he shared on Twitter and other websites with his friends.

• People accessing Desai’s link from their iPhones saw their phone automatically dial and redial 911.

• It’s apparently possible that a DDoS attack can be big enough to break the internet — or, as shown in the attack against ISP Dyn, at least break large parts of it.

• The DDoS attack against Dyn that began Friday went far past taking down Dyn’s servers. Beyond the big-name outages, organizations could not access important corporate applications or perform critical business operations.

• First, there was nothing — nothing — surprising about this attack. As Paul Mockapetris, creator of the Domain Name System (DNS), said, “The successful DDoS attack on DYN is merely a new twist on age-old warfare. … Classic warfare can be anticipated and defended against. But warfare on the internet, just like in history, has changed. So let’s take a look at the asymmetrical battle in terms of the good guys (DYN) and the bad guys (Mirai botnets), and realize and plan for more of these sorts of attacks.”

• On Thursday, October 20th, a bug in GitHub’s system exposed a small amount of user data via Git pulls and clones. In total, 156 private repositories of GitHub.com users were affected (including one of GitHub’s). We have notified everyone affected by this private repository disclosure, so if you have not heard from us, your repositories were not impacted and there is no ongoing risk to your information.

• This was not an attack, and no one was able to retrieve vulnerable data intentionally. There was no outsider involved in exposing this data; this was a programming error that resulted in a small number of Git requests retrieving data from the wrong repositories.

• Regardless of whether or not this incident impacted you specifically, we want to sincerely apologize. It’s our responsibility not only to keep your information safe but also to protect the trust you have placed in us. GitHub would not exist without your trust, and we are deeply sorry that this incident occurred.

• If you haven’t heard about last week’s Dirty COW vulnerability, I hope all of your Linux systems are automatically patching themselves…

• Why? Because every single Linux-based phone, router, modem, tablet, desktop, PC, server, virtual machine, and absolutely everything in between — including all versions of Ubuntu since 2007 — was vulnerable to this face-palming critical security vulnerability.

• Any non-root local user of a vulnerable system can easily exploit the vulnerability and become the root user in a matter of a few seconds. Watch…

• Flexera Software, the leading provider of next-generation software licensing, compliance, security and installation solutions for application producers and enterprises, today announced that it has acquired Palamida, provider of Software Composition Analysis solutions. The financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

Defence/Aggression

• Wikileaks’ Podesta Files shed light on US billionaire George Soros’ deep concerns about the lack of “freedom” and “constitutional democracy” in Malaysia under Najib Razak. Soros’ concerns may serve as a prelude for a series of “color revolutions” in Southeast Asia, Mathew Maavak of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia assumed in an interview with Sputnik.

• The latest set of documents released by Wikileaks indicates that George Soros and his Open Society Foundation are very concerned about the situation in Malaysia, one of the US’ longstanding allies in Southeast Asia.

• A memo, sent by Michael Vachon, US billionaire George Soros’ “right hand,” on March 6, 2016, to Chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign John Podesta shed light on the Malaysian “corruption crisis” and blamed the country’s Prime Minister Najib Razak for “damaging the US’ credibility in the region.”

• The Army acknowledged Friday that Maj. Gen. John Rossi committed suicide on July 31, making him the highest-ranking soldier ever to have taken his own life.

• Rossi, who was 55, was just two days from pinning on his third star and taking command of Army Space and Missile Command when he killed himself at his home at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. ‘

• Investigators could find no event, infidelity, misconduct or drug or alcohol abuse, that triggered Rossi’s suicide, said a U.S. government official with direct knowledge of the investigation. It appears that Rossi was overwhelmed by his responsibilities, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.

• Rossi himself talked in March about suicide at a conference on preventing troops from killing themselves.

• One in ten school students in Gothenburg’s north-eastern suburbs sympathize with religious extremist organizations, according to a survey carried out by Swedish non-profit organization Varken Hora eller Kuvad.

• “I was completely shocked when I saw the result. I perhaps would have guessed one percent. I’m speechless,” Guluzar Tarhan Selvi, acting project manager at Varken Hora eller Kuvad told Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten (GP).

• The Swedish government’s national coordinator against violent extremism said she was not hugely surprised by the number however.

• “The study was carried out in some of the areas where we know there are people who have travelled to join Isis in Syria,” Hillevi Engström said.

• And the MP insisted it is good that more facts about support for extremist organizations are coming to light.

• “You have to put forward all the facts and after that start prevention work early, and speak about everyone’s equal value and human rights in school. It’s also to do with alienation. Many people have a feeling that they don’t belong to society,” she added.

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday said his government would ask parliament to consider reintroducing the death penalty as a punishment for the plotters behind the July coup bid.

• “Our government will take this (proposal on capital punishment) to parliament. I am convinced that parliament will approve it, and when it comes back to me, I will ratify it,” Erdogan said at an inauguration ceremony in Ankara.

• “Soon, soon, don’t worry. It’s happening soon, God willing,” he said, as crowds chanted: “We want the death penalty!”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WikiLeaks has dumped another batch of emails from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. This is the 21st batch of communications to be released by the whistleblowing site.

• Following the latest release, the total number of leaked emails reached over 35,600.

• WikiLeaks published the first batch of emails on October 8.

• The self-proclaimed “most transparent administration” isn’t even more transparent than the last administration — one run by a hawkish member of a politically-powerful family and given a blank check to increase government power by a terrorist attack on American soil.

• Less transparent, perhaps, than any other previous administration, including those run by the truly corrupt (Nixon) or those engaged in actual wars against actual entities (rather than against loosely-defined concepts like “drugs” or “terrorism”).

• These previous administrations managed to be at least as transparent as the current one, even without the “disadvantages” of being presided over by a lawyer specializing in the Constitution and pushed towards openness by multiple leakers exposing multiple secret surveillance programs.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Southern Spain will be reduced to desert by the end of the century if the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, researchers have warned.

• Anything less than extremely ambitious and politically unlikely carbon emissions cuts will see ecosystems in the Mediterranean change to a state unprecedented in the past 10 millennia, they said.

• The study, published in the journal Science, modelled what would happen to vegetation in the Mediterranean basin under four different paths of future carbon emissions, from a business-as-usual scenario at the worst end to keeping temperature rises below the Paris climate deal target of 1.5C at the other.

• Over time, a funny thing happened to the perception of climate science in some countries: it became just another badge in the culture wars. Public opinion on what this field of science says is now primarily a reflection of which team you’re on politically. While anyone trying to reach across teams to communicate about climate change is likely to be discounted as a result, voices from within a group can get a fairer hearing.

• We now know one of the three tribunalists who will decide TransCanada’s $15 billion claim against the U.S. for rejecting the dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline that would carry oil from Alberta to Texas: David R. Haigh, Q.C.,a lawyer with a long history of representing the oil and gas industry whose previous clients include Alberta-based oil and gas producers, an Alberta-based oilfield materials supplier, and an Alberta-based oil and gas pipeline company. Mr Haigh works as a senior partner in a law firm working on Canadian tar sands.

• The case, which TransCanada is bringing under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is just one of a growing number of suits in which multinational corporations and other investors use sweeping rights in trade deals to challenge environmental protections in private tribunals.

• This raises a critical question about such tribunals, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals: are they biased in favor of corporations and other investors?

• The answer is yes, according to a growing body of independent empirical research.

• So why does bias plague ISDS tribunals? How does this affect environmental protection, and where does this leave deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with ISDS at their heart?

• If it’s possible in this oversaturated age for a mass-protest movement to fly under the radar, the battle over the building of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline certainly qualifies. Just this past weekend in Morton County, North Dakota, 127 people were arrested during protests over renewed construction, which follows what protesters believed was relief from the federal government, in the form of a multi-agency letter to the pipeline builders, Energy Transfer Partners, asking them to halt building for tribal consultation and the preparation of environmental-impact statements. The construction has continued apace.

• And yet the clash hasn’t quite risen to the level of front-page news. That’s despite the efforts of investigative journalist Amy Goodman, the host of the Democracy Now! independent news broadcast, who had an arrest warrant issued for her in September after her coverage of the situation. (A judge dismissed the charges.) “Not enough people realize what’s going on out there,” says Goodman. “It’s a bigger story than the amount of attention its received.”

• “I knew North Dakota state was planning something,” says Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chair Dave Archambault II of the raid on a resistance camp Thursday by militarized police. “They set up a pre-hospital tent near the camp. … That was sending me signals this was going to get out of hand.” Archambault says he asked the Department of Justice to step in and ask the state not to proceed with the raid, and now calls on the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the use of force against those resisting the Dakota Access pipeline.

Finance

• This morning in London, protesters dressed as zombies posed outside the European Commission office in London with a banner saying “Stop CETA rising from the dead – Toxic trade deals belong in the grave.”

• The controversial trade deal between Canada and the EU was due to be signed on Thursday, but was postponed following opposition from one of the regional Belgian parliaments. An agreement was later reached to appease the Wallonian parliament, but the deal has still yet to be signed.

• Investment protection and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are perhaps the most contentious aspects of TTIP and CETA. These mechanisms provide foreign investors with the right to sue the EU or its Member States in private tribunals over potential losses in profit due to current or new public welfare regulations.

• To address this, we, the Stop TTIP European Initiative, are presenting this legal statement signed by 101 professors of law from 24 European countries.

• The goal of this statement is to convey to European decision-makers that a significant part of the legal community finds the investor protection mechanisms within the free trade deals TTIP and CETA to be highly problematic and not compatible with the rule of law. The statement outlines the fundamental legal issues within these mechanisms and explains how they pose grave threats to public interest, democratic principles and state budgets.

• Vietnam’s decision to hold off ratifying the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a further blow to the beleaguered trade pact and a setback for American economic ambitions in Asia.

• The 12-nation TPP is aimed at liberalizing trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region, and Vietnam has been hoping that its participation in the deal will lead to an increase in exports. But even in the U.S., which led negotiations for the pact, approval of the TPP is nowhere in sight. This apparently convinced Vietnam to proceed slowly as well.

• An official in the secretariat of the Vietnamese parliament told reporters on Oct. 18 that approval of the TPP is not on the agenda for the current legislative session, which runs through late November, making it certain that the country will not ratify the pact this year.

• Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, chairwoman of the parliament, said in September that Vietnam’s ratification would depend on factors such as moves by other negotiating members of the TPP and the outcome of the Nov. 8 presidential election in the U.S.

• At the same time, the Philippines, which was considering joining the TPP after Vietnam, has apparently changed its stance in recent weeks, moving away from Washington and closer to Beijing.

• This article will focus on the power of the EU Commission by looking at how its members are appointed, their security of employment and how they are motivated during and after their employment. The second part will focus on Commission powers including its absolute right to veto all ‘legislative initiatives’ from whatever source, including the Council of Ministers and the EU Parliament. The power is, in effect, a veto on all EU Law, amendments and repeals, without exception.

• Edit. 27 Oct 2016. Some quite strong objections on Twitter have been made by pro EU people about the suggestion that the EU Parliament cannot amend proposed EU legislation.

• Wallonia is not alone. Not only has the region been joined by several other Belgian regional parliaments in opposition to CETA (the Canada-EU Comprehensive and Economic Trade Agreement), but now a Canadian constitutional challenge against CETA has been launched in the Federal Court of Canada.

• On Oct. 21, renowned constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati filed the statement of claim against CETA on behalf of the Hon. Paul Hellyer (former Minister of National Defence) and two co-plaintiffs, Ann Emmett and George Cromwell (members of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform). At the Oct. 25 press conference, Galati referred to the corporate sector as “the new royalty,” and he stated, “What this treaty does is literally revert us back to the divine right of kings, but they are multinational corporations now.”

• The European Union and Canada will sign the CETA trade agreement Sunday, after a weeks-long deadlock.

• European Council President Donald Tusk announced in a tweet Friday evening that a summit has been scheduled for noon on Sunday.

• Canada and the European Union will sign a landmark free trade deal on Sunday after a series of key votes in Belgian regional assemblies on Friday ended opposition that had threatened to destroy the entire agreement.

• Soon after the final Belgian vote, European Council president Donald Tusk called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and invited him to Brussels for the signing ceremony, which is scheduled for noon local time (1000 GMT).

• First, Germany’s constitutional court imposed some quite stringent constraints on the German government. The most important of these is that the official signing of CETA will not cause the entire text to be applied provisionally, as the European Commission had originally hoped. Instead, some parts must wait until all 28 member states ratify the deal through votes in their national parliaments. That’s going to take quite a while — perhaps years — and there’s no guarantee that every country will ultimately ratify CETA. The corporate sovereignty provisions are one of the elements that will not come into force until after full ratification, something also agreed with Magnette. This means it’s quite likely that the CJEU will hand down its verdict on the legality or otherwise of ICS before that, possibly killing it forever.

• The other important point about the German constitutional court’s decision is that it only rejected a request for a preliminary injunction, which it deemed unnecessary. The German court’s full consideration of whether CETA is constitutional or not continues. The European Commission may have postponed the Wallonian problem but there are plenty of others on both sides of the Atlantic that could still stop CETA, and definitively.

• “We’re going to kill cash,” he said. “Nobody likes to carry around cash.”

• A U.S. banking regulator says an employee downloaded a large amount of data from its computer system a week before he retired and is now unable to locate the thumb drives he stored it on.

• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is a part of the Department of the Treasury, said the loss represented “a major information security incident” as it reported the case to Congress on Friday.

• The data was taken in November 2015, but its loss was only discovered in September this year as the agency reviewed downloads to removable media devices in the last two years.

• The employee in question used two thumb drives to store the information, both of which he is unable to locate, the agency said.

• It didn’t say what information was downloaded but said it involved “controlled unclassified information, including privacy information” and numbered at least 10,000 records.

• GIG ECONOMY SUPERSTAR Uber has been dealt a blow by a London employment tribunal which has ruled that its drivers be paid the national living wage.

• In July, two drivers took the cab firm to court arguing that their terms of employment meant that they were effectively full-time employees rather than self-employed. This would make them entitled to the national minimum wage of £7.20 per hour, rather than the £5.00 they typically earned.

• Uber argued that its drivers are self-employed and were ineligible for this level of pay, as well as from other benefits such as holiday pay.

• In the back room of a pub in Kentish Town, a group of middle-class Londoners are perched on velvet-covered stools, eating hummus and talking about property. On the wall, above a pile of empty beer kegs, a slide presentation is in progress. A video of Airbnb’s recent advert shows smiling hosts opening their front doors and declaring their support for Sadiq Khan’s post-Brexit “London is open” campaign.

• The audience of Airbnb hosts are there after receiving individual invitations from the company to a “home sharers” meet-up – a concept largely unfamiliar to the slightly bemused crowd. Jonathan, an enthusiastic Californian Airbnb employee, who was recently seconded to London to set up the clubs, is happy to explain: “Homesharing clubs are simply a way of organising this into something … that has a unified voice … then actually takes actions as a collective,” he says, in a less than clear answer.

• With a delay of mere days, CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between the European Union and Canada, will be signed Sunday in Brussels by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker. This follows two weeks of uncertainty over the deal that includes not only tariff reduction, but also an attempt to harmonise regulation and set up a reformed investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

• In truth, Tanden’s leaked email conversations read almost like discarded lines from a sitcom screenplay, and her candid criticisms of Clinton and colleagues — not to mention her predilection for foul language — have become something of an internet sensation among those keeping close tabs on WikiLeaks releases.

• So, to save our readers from the effort and tedium of spending hours sifting through John Podesta’s leaked emails, here are some of Tanden’s most spectacular statements.

• Tanden on “The Letter” (presumably the letter from Clinton’s doctor touting her health): “Is great. F*** these a**holes.”

• Tanden on Clinton’s use of a private email server: “Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered? Like whole thing is f***ing insane.”

• The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions. In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them]according to our will without their knowing about it”. He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”. Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives as it does now, and to go unchallenged.

• And there are more choices. In Connecticut there are at least 20 or so other presidential candidates you can vote for. Secretary of the State Denise Merrill will explain.

• Germany and other European countries have a thriving multiparty political culture. The U.S. used to have one too. In 1916, five parties were seated in Congress.

• In his Washington Post article “In Europe, the Green Party is a force. In the U.S., it’s irrelevant. Here’s why,” Per Urlaub, associate professor of German studies at the University of Texas, contends that “the American electoral system is heavily weighted against small political parties.”

• He’s right. Alternative parties must wrestle with ballot-access laws, enacted since 1916 by Democratic and Republican legislators in many states, that privilege major-party candidates and hinder others. In some states, alternative parties are effectively banned from participation.

• When alternative parties do get on the ballot, their candidates often face the “spoiler” accusation. The supposed spoiler effect can be eliminated by replacing the prevailing “first past the post” system with “ranked choice,” which allows people to rank their preferences.

• Reforms like ranked choice voting (RCV) and proportional representation—which gave Germany and other European countries their multiparty legislatures—are considered radical here, even though they grant voters greater power and more options.

• During a TRNN Facebook live event, Green Party Candidate Margaret Flowers – who was not invited to the Maryland Senate debate despite being on the ballot – responds to questions posed to Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen and Republican State Delegate Kathy Szeliga, as well as questions from viewers.

• Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s email controversy may be far from over, if internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is to be believed. The man wanted by the U.S. on copyright infringement and money laundering charges said on Twitter Thursday that all of Clinton’s “permanently deleted” emails can, in fact, be accessed. Legally.

• An internet entrepreneur notorious for his illegal file-sharing website Megaupload says Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails could be recovered by the US National Security Agency.

• “I know where Hillary Clintons [sic] deleted emails are and how to get them legally,” wrote Kim Dotcom on Twitter Wednesday (27 October).

• Dotcom is fighting extradition to the United States on copyright infringement charges, among others, for hosting unlicensed content like films, music, and software on his defunct file-sharing site.

• Attached to the tweet — which was copied to Donald Trump’s Twitter account — is a screenshot with a five-step plan on how to get the emails. Step two suggests contacting Michael Rogers, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). The third step is to have Rogers use the XKeyscore surveillance program, revealed by Edward Snowden, to recover the emails.

• Earlier this week, Bloomberg had a fairly revealing article about the internal digital efforts of the Donald Trump campaign, in which Bloomberg reporters embedded for a few days. The whole article is quite interesting, but one of the most stunning parts, frankly, was the Trump campaign staffers directly admitting how they are actively trying to suppress voting by African Americans. It’s no secret that a variety of new voter ID laws are designed to suppress voting — especially among minorities. When North Carolina’s voter ID law was struck down by the court, the judge pointed out how the legislators that had backed it had explicitly targeted rules that would suppress votes among African Americans. They had requested “racial data” concerning voter ID and then specifically targeted the types of ID more commonly used by African Americans.

• Iceland Pirate Party Candidate Smari McCarthy discusses how the party would govern should it win the country’s upcoming election. He speaks on “Bloomberg Markets.”

• Snowdens of the world rejoice, the Pirate Party is coming.

• This Saturday Iceland holds its parliamentary elections and is likely to become the first nation to vote Pirates into government.

• The New York businessman with a penchant for celebrity television may suddenly find himself in love with artificial intelligence developed in India.

• The polls and simulations that involve the skills and insight of human beings suggest Donald Trump could be heading for something of a pasting. But an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed in Mumbai, and which correctly predicted the last three US presidential elections, puts the Republican nominee ahead of his rival Hillary Clinton in the battle to secure the keys to the White House.

• MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, the founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It has taken 20 million data points from public platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter and analysed the information to create predictions, CNBC reported.

• Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up a problem related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. These problems, puzzles and riddles come from many top-notch puzzle folks around the world — including you!

• Recently, we started something new: Riddler Express problems. These are bite-size puzzles that don’t take as much fancy math or computational power to solve. For those of you in the slow-puzzle movement, worry not — we still feature our classic, more challenging Riddler.

• Douglas Band, one of former President Bill Clinton’s closest advisors, boasted to outside auditors that his for-profit corporation had a “historical role in carrying the majority of the fundraising burden” for the nonprofit Clinton Foundation.

• A Nov. 16, 2011 memo Band authored, which WikiLeaks made public Wednesday, raises disturbing questions about charitable law violations due to mixing for-profit activities with the nonprofit foundation.

• WikiLeaks has released the 22nd batch of emails from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta.

• To date, the whistleblowing site has released 36,190 emails, with around another 14,000 expected before Americans go to the polls on the November 8.

• It was revealed in mails released on Friday that Podesta had been warned in March 2016 to change his email password “immediately” as someone had illegitimately attempted to gain access to his account.

• Donna Brazile, interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, faces new scrutiny as evidence points to abuses of power.

• Brazile’s alliance with the Hillary Clinton team looks to have started in 2008. In February of that year, while Clinton was running for president against Barack Obama, CNN political commentator and consultant Paul Begala wrote an email to the Clinton team saying that it should “court” Brazile. At that time, during the primaries, Brazile refused to publicly endorse a candidate but worked closely with the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Until recently, she also worked for CNN and ABC News. Her close relationship with the Clinton camp has deepened over the years.

• This phrase has become very useful in our current political environment. It’s a line from one of those Shakespeare plays where everyone dies in the end, and its use has become a way of pointing out when someone’s frantic resistance to something reveals a lot more about their true agendas than they intended to let on. When you know that your government is lying to you and the media is helping them, such things can often be a useful way of figuring out exactly what’s going on.

• Take for example the way corporate media, proven by WikiLeaks to be pervasively controlled by the Clintons and their allies far more than we ever knew, has continued to run smear pieces on Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, even while they assure everyone that Hillary has an insurmountable lead over Donald Trump.

• Doug Band, a longtime aide to former President Bill Clinton, said in a 2011 document released by WikiLeaks that the high-powered consulting firm he co-founded helped raise money for the Clinton Foundation when its own efforts were flagging.

• The memo was written around the time Chelsea Clinton was questioning whether Band’s role as an adviser to her father and the family foundation presented conflicts of interest as he courted clients for Teneo Holdings LLC. In the memo, Band argued just the opposite: that he was a volunteer who sought to “leverage my activities, including my partner role at Teneo, to support and raise funds for the Foundation.”

• The “Podesta emails” being released daily by Wikileaks have produced their first bona fide “smoking gun” — a long email by Clinton Foundation associate Doug Band detailing the manner in which Bill Clinton was using the foundation’s connections as a way to build up personal clients for speech giving and consultancy.

• The Middle East Forum’s “Islamist Money in Politics” (IMIP) project has revealed the top ten recipients of 2015-16 campaign contributions from individuals who subscribe to the same Islamic supremacism as Khomeini, Bin Laden, and ISIS.

• Hillary Clinton tops the list, raking in $41,165 from prominent Islamists. This includes $19,249 from senior officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates on November 15, 2014.

• For example, Mrs. Clinton has accepted $3,900 from former CAIR vice-chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras, who has defended numerous Islamists in Ohio indicted – and later convicted – on terrorism charges.

• Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server (at times kept in her own basement…) has obviously been a big story during this campaign — and for a variety of obvious, yet stupid, reasons, the discussion has become ridiculously partisan. What people should be able to admit on all sides of the debate is that Clinton’s use of a private email server was incredibly stupid and, at the very least, calls into serious question the judgment of whoever told her this was okay. It also, almost certainly, put serious information at risk of being exposed through hacks. But, earlier this year, the FBI came out and said that it didn’t actually break the law. There was a bit of the old “high court, low court” to this whole setup, because you could see how someone with much less fame or status would be nailed to the wall by the DOJ if they wanted to put that person away.

• Either way, the surprise of today is the new announcement by James Comey that the FBI is investigating some new emails that were apparently discovered in an “unrelated case” on “a device.” There were a couple of hours of speculation on this, with gradual denials — not the Wikileaks investigation, not the Clinton Foundation investigation — until it was revealed that it was from the investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting. Law enforcement seized devices belonging to both Weiner and his then wife (they’ve since filed for divorce), Huma Abedin, who is a close Clinton aide (and who also had an email account on the private Clinton server). Other reports have noted that the emails aren’t ones that were withheld from the original investigation, so it’s not an issue of withholding info, but could potentially reveal issues about the motivations and setup of the private server.

• In political circles this is raising eyebrows, coming just 11 days before the election, in a campaign where Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump, has repeatedly pointed to her use of an email server as a reason that she should be in jail, and even promising to appoint a special prosecutor to go after her for this (which, uh, actually isn’t how the President is supposed to use that power, but…). Comey’s letter doesn’t go into much detail, though reporters have been getting more and more details. The letter was sent to a variety of people in Congress, on key committees, including the heads of the Intelligence, Judiciary, Oversight and Homeland Security committees.

• Her first role was as “woman,” hoping to sweep up roughly 50% of the electorate in a single empowering noun. As with Obama, she hoped to mobilize a huge swath of voters who wanted to participate in electing the first Black female president. Didn’t go mainstream. Grandmother, same. Competent life-long government person, hmmm, cut both ways, many people wanted a change. Third Obama Term, meh, took some steam out of Bernie’s campaign but not much more. Killer of bin Laden, sorta worked in one debate, dragged on into an SNL skit cliche through the others.

• When the first news of the emails came out in March 2015. Hillary didn’t really have a persona for that, mumbling about no classified, then about not wanting multiple devices, prevaricating here, avoiding there. She tried blaming Colin Powell, then the State Department’s creaky IT infrastructure.

• Until she nailed it: She was the victim of a conspiracy.

• Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are separated by only two percentage points in a new Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll, ending a week in which the race has tightened as core Republican groups have returned to Trump’s fold.

• Likely voters split 47 percent for Clinton and 45 percent for Trump, according to the survey conducted Monday through Thursday. That’s little changed from a 48-44 split in the previous day’s tracking results, which covered Sunday through Wednesday, but it is a substantial tightening since last weekend when Clinton led by a wide margin.

• More than 36,000 emails from Podesta’s account have been released by the whistleblowing site, which has vowed to publish a total of 50,000 emails before the US presidential election on November 8.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Twitter took on the narrative of “listen and believe”. They appointed people like Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency to their Trust and Safety Council and had people like Randi Lee Harper and the Crash Override Network crew in their ear. They censored people like Milo Yiannopoulos, a Conservative provocateur at the behest of comedian Leslie Jones, and have amply ignored a lot of other cases of sexual and aggressive harassment that didn’t fit in line with their Social Justice “progressivism”.

• As Techdirt reported last year, the problematic “right to be forgotten” — strictly speaking, a right to be delisted from search results — took a really dangerous turn when the French data protection regulator told Google that its orders to delist results should apply globally, not just in France, a view it confirmed twice. The latest development in this saga is the submission of a petition to the French Supreme Court against the global reach of delisting, made by the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia

• Although the [French data protection authority] CNIL’s case is directed towards Google, the gradual disappearance of Wikimedia pages from Google search results around the world ultimately impacts the public’s ability to find the invaluable knowledge contained within the Wikimedia projects. Search engines have played an important role in the quest for knowledge — roughly half of Wikipedia visits originate from search engines.

• The CNIL’s most recent order, if upheld, threatens the capacity to write and share important information about history, public figures, and more. It undermines the public’s ability to find relevant and neutral information on the internet, and would make it exceedingly difficult for projects like Wikimedia’s to provide information that is important for society.

• The Danish ex-editor who commissioned the Mohammed cartoons that triggered deadly protests a decade ago on Friday accused the Jyllands-Posten newspaper of trying to silence him, saying it had let “the jihadists” win.

• Angela Merkel has called on major internet platforms to divulge the secrets of their algorithms, arguing that their lack of transparency endangers debating culture.

• The German chancellor said internet users had a right to know how and on what basis the information they received via search engines was channelled to them.

• Speaking to a media conference in Munich, Merkel said: “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’.

• Erika Christakis set off a furor a year ago by publicly questioning whether Yale students should try to stop their peers from wearing allegedly offensive Halloween costumes.

• Student activists tried to get her and her husband Nicholas, both professors, removed as the masters of the Silliman residential college, and Erika canceled her spring classes because the campus climate was not “conducive to civil dialogue.” She never came back.

• The right to speak freely may be enshrined in some of our nation’s great universities, but the culture of listening needs repair. That is the lesson I learned a year ago, when I sent an email urging Yale University students to think critically about an official set of guidelines on costumes to avoid at Halloween.

• I had hoped to generate a reflective conversation among students: What happens when one person’s offense is another person’s pride? Should a costume-wearer’s intent or context matter? Can we always tell the difference between a mocking costume and one that satirizes ignorance? In what circumstances should we allow — or punish — youthful transgression?

• “It’s a sickening feeling to know you’re being censored not for any horrible thing you’ve done, but for trying to tell the truth to millions of people. Are we living in America? Seriously, our First Amendment rights have been slowly eroding away bit by bit.”

• Leisa Audette and Patty McMurray started the Facebook page when they became “frustrated by so-called journalists” and were inspired by Andrew Breitbart. The citizen journalists say they were both stay-at-home moms with three girls. They met at a fundraiser at Patty’s house.

• Leisa said, “We were blessed to meet and hear Andrew Breitbart speak at a small, private event in Michigan just one week before he died. Inspired by his work and his passion to save America, we started a Facebook page to honor his legacy.”

• A culture war between Russia’s artistic community, the Kremlin and a patriotic biker gang has broken out, after the leading star and director of a Moscow theatre accused the state of heading towards Stalin-era censorship.

• “I see how people are itching to change things and send us back to the past. And not just to the time of stagnation, but further back – to Stalin’s times,” said Konstantin Raikin, during an emotional speech to a gathering of theatrical professionals earlier this week.

• “Stop pretending that the authorities are the only bearers of morality. That’s not true,” he said.

• Raikin is the director of Moscow’s Satirikon theatre as well as its star actor, featuring in a number of leading roles including King Lear. He said the state was using informal influence to block stagings or plays it thought were inappropriate, or went against loosely defined traditional values.

• Andrey Zvyagintsev, the Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated Russian director of Leviathan, has written an op-ed in Russian daily Kommersant, in which he expressed concerns about state censorship in the world of arts and culture.

• Oscar-nominated director Andrei Zvyagintsev on Thursday launched a furious attack on the Kremlin over government censorship that he said is strangling the arts.

• “It’s completely obvious that censorship has fully entered into the cultural life of the country,” Zyagintsev wrote on the website of the Kommersant daily.

• Zvyagintsev, whose biting social drama “Leviathan” was nominated for an Oscar last year, argued that the state effectively censors the arts by limiting funding for only projects it approves.

• The director said he was responding to comments by President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov that while censorship is unacceptable, the commissioning of arts projects made with state funds does not fall under this category.

• “We say it’s censorship, they say it’s a state commission,” he wrote, saying that cinema and other arts are dependent on state funding to survive.

• Zvyagintsev has become one of Russia’s best known directors abroad since he won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival with his debut film “The Return” in 2003.

• Some Twitter users suggested the permission slip may have indeed been a part of the lesson, but Radosh expressed doubt.

• Ars first raised the prospect of the UK government bringing in age verification for porn sites a year ago and confirmed that it would be happening in February.

• In its written evidence to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee on the Digital Economy Bill, the Open Rights Group put together a good summary of the problems with the approach. These include the privacy risks of creating insecure databases of the UK’s porn habits, and the fact that age verification will be easy to circumvent.

• As a more recent blog post by the Open Rights Group notes, MPs have finally woken up to the fact that age verification won’t in fact stop children from accessing pornographic sites, and have come up with Plan B, which is even worse than Plan A: “in order to make age verification technologies ‘work,’ some MPs want to block completely legal content from access by every UK citizen. It would have a massive impact on the free expression of adults across the UK. The impact for sexual minorities would be particularly severe.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Google made a significant change to the company’s privacy policy recently which changes in a significant way how the company is tracking users on the Internet.

• Previously, the company kept its DoubleClick advertising engine apart from its core user services such as Gmail, Search or YouTube. While users could give Google consent to use the information for advertising, it required users to become active and opt-in for that.

• Those who did give Google consent, did not have their “personal” information and activity used for advertising purposes and tracking.

• The Communication Data Bill was draft legislation introduced first in May 2012. It sought to compel ISPs to store details of communications usage so that it can later be used for law enforcement purposes. In 2013 the passage of this bill into law had been blocked and the bill was dead.

• In 2014 we saw the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 appear. This seemed to be in response to the Data Retention Directive being successfully challenged at the European Court of Justice by Digital Rights Ireland on human rights grounds, with a judgment given in 2014. It essentially reimplemented the Data Retention Directive along with a whole load of other nasty things.

• The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act contained a sunset clause with a date set for 2016. This brings us to the Investigatory Powers Bill which it looks will be passing into law shortly.

• Among a range of nasty powers, this legislation will be able to force ISPs to record metadata about every website you visit, every connection you make to a server on the Internet. This is sub-optimal for the privacy minded, with my primary concern being that this is a treasure trove of data and it’s going to be abused by someone. It’s going to be too much for someone to resist.

• Year after year, both in his messy personal life and his brazen theft of classified documents from the National Security Agency, Harold T. Martin III put to the test the government’s costly system for protecting secrets.

• And year after year, the system failed.

• Mr. Martin got and kept a top-secret security clearance despite a record that included drinking problems, a drunken-driving arrest, two divorces, unpaid tax bills, a charge of computer harassment and a bizarre episode in which he posed as a police officer in a traffic dispute. Under clearance rules, such events should have triggered closer scrutiny by the security agencies where he worked as a contractor.

• Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers.

• That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.

• The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment.

• Google Brain has created two artificial intelligences that evolved their own cryptographic algorithm to protect their messages from a third AI, which was trying to evolve its own method to crack the AI-generated crypto. The study was a success: the first two AIs learnt how to communicate securely from scratch.

• A seismic shift in privacy policy by messaging app WhatsApp this summer, when it said it would begin sharing user data with parent company Facebook including for ad targeting, has now attracted the attention of European’s data protection watchdog group, the Article 29 Working Party.

• The WP29 group wrote to WhatsApp founder Jan Koum yesterday, setting out its concerns about the privacy policy U-turn — including how the shift was communicated to users.

• “The Article 29 Working Party (WP29) has serious concerns regarding the manner in which the information relating to the updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy was provided to users and consequently about the validity of the users’ consent,” it writes.

• “WP29 also questions the effectiveness of control mechanisms offered to users to exercise their rights and the effects that the data sharing will have on people that are not a user of any other service within the Facebook family of companies.”

• It adds that its various members, so basically all the national DPAs of EU Member States, will “act in a coordinated way” to target any problems they identify, with a dedicated working group for enforcement actions set to address the WhatsApp issue specifically.

• President Barack Obama has disclosed that his younger daughter recently mocked him on Snapchat.

• The US leader said Sasha had recorded him discussing the social network at a family dinner and then quietly posted a reaction to her friends.

• It is not the first time the president has discussed his 15-year-old’s online activities.

• In July, he said she also tweets, leading several media outlets to try to identify her account.

• It remains secret.

• Likewise a copy of the described Snapchat post has not been made public. Messages posted to the app are designed to disappear after being viewed or within a short period of time, but there are ways to circumvent the restrictions.

• Ontario police have used the mass-messaging technique, known as a tower dump, before now, but its use was challenged in Canadian courts after one local force applied to use it to contact more than 100,000 people.

• Besides privacy-enhancing technologies, privacy by design and the “leveraging of international frameworks that contain basic principles of security, privacy and trust,” the conclusions also “stressed” security goals, including “sharing of information between public and private sectors on threats to the ICT infrastructure,” and a joint effort “to develop national capabilities to protect from cyber-attacks.” ITU experiences 1 million attacks every day, according to Reinhard Scholl, deputy director of ITU-T, of which he called 10,000 serious.

• Digital privacy and the control of personal data have emerged as two of the main online battlegrounds in recent years, as the flood of Techdirt posts on the subject attests. One of the central questions is how we can use global online services like Facebook and Google without surrendering control of the information we provide them. The US and the EU take contrasting approaches here, both of which have attracted plenty of supporters and detractors.

• But what about alternatives: might there be another way to tackle this crucial subject that is effective and reasonably fair to all? Jack M. Balkin and Jonathan Zittrain, respectively professors at the law schools of Yale and Harvard, believe there is. Together, they’ve written an article that appears in The Atlantic, entitled “A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy,”

• Booz Allen Hamilton said on Thursday it had hired a former FBI chief to conduct an external review of its security practices, after the consulting firm learned for the second time in three years that an employee working under contract with the National Security Agency had been charged with stealing classified information.

• Booz Allen, which earns billions of dollars a year contracting with U.S. intelligence agencies, has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after authorities took Harold Thomas Martin into custody.

Civil Rights/Policing

• If police culture is truly going to change, it needs to start at the bottom. Years of DOJ investigations and consent agreements have done almost nothing to root out the deep-seated problems found in many law enforcement agencies. The change has to come from within each department — a much longer, slower process that requires those leading the reforms to put their careers on the line. They will be opposed by many of their fellow officers and villainized by police unions for any attempts to bring more accountability to policework.

• There are probably more law enforcement officials out there with the same mindset as Austin (TX) police chief Art Acevedo. Unfortunately, very little of what they’ve done or said makes its way into the public eye without being strained through several filters. Acevedo’s private comments to Austin PD commanders, however, arrive in the form of a leaked recording.

• Acevedo was addressing the criticism he took for firing Geoffrey Freeman after the officer shot and killed a naked, unarmed, mentally-ill 19-year-old as he ran down a residential street. Acevedo addressed many issues during this talk and made it clear the APD isn’t going to keep heading down the same limited-accountability road and end up just another law enforcement agency more known for its misdeeds than its law enforcement efforts.

• Students at the University of California, Berkeley held a day of protest on Friday to demand the creation of additional “safe spaces” for transgender and nonwhite students, during which a human chain was formed on a main campus artery to prevent white students from getting to class.

• The demonstrators were caught on video blocking Berkeley’s Sather Gate, holding large banners advocating the creation of physical spaces segregated by race and gender identity, including one that read “Fight 4 Spaces of Color.”

• Protesters can be heard shouting “Go around!” to white students who attempt to go through the blockade, while students of color are greeted with calls of “Let him through!”

• In a new 90-second video ad, a Muslim-focused political action committee rightly slams Donald Trump for his sinister proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

• While Trump is wrong-minded as he pounds the drumbeat of “us vs. them” with the Islamic world, I also hope liberals can move beyond blind defense of the Muslim religion and assess it with greater nuance. I say this as someone who has endured considerable alienation by challenging the premises of Mormonism, my childhood faith (even after facing discrimination growing up because of my religion). While initially painful, thinking about Mormonism objectively has broadened my worldview and allowed me greater ability to analyze any institution, religious or otherwise.

• I wish many Muslims and liberals would be so objective when looking at the brutally misogynistic behavior associated with some Muslims’ interpretations of sharia and reject the knee-jerk reaction that paints anyone who questions the modern Muslim world as Islamophobic. The refusal to do so is chilling those of us who unequivocally believe in women’s rights, who believe in freedom of expression, who believe in rationality and critical thinking. Last week in a #SalonTalks interview, author Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, who is otherwise incredibly talented and articulate, essentially said that the horrible French move to ban the “burkini” is essentially on par with an anti-woman acid attack; this is as false equivalency.

• Saudi Arabia is an incredibly private, patriarchal society. While I was making the film, many women were afraid to share their stories for fear of backlash from the male relatives who oversee all aspects of their lives as so-called guardians. We wanted to hear more about their fears, their frustrations, their ambitions.

• Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s highest rates of Twitter use, and our posts rocketed around. We were overwhelmed by the outpouring.

• Most of the responses focused on frustration over guardianship rules that force women to get permission from a male relative — a husband, father, brother or even son — to do things like attend college, travel abroad, marry the partner of their choice or seek medical attention. Some women talked about the pride they had in their culture and expressed great distrust of outsiders. But many of them shared a deep desire for change and echoed Juju19’s hopelessness.

• Do the committees that oversee the vast U.S. spying apparatus take intelligence community whistleblowers seriously? Do they earnestly investigate reports of waste, fraud, abuse, professional negligence, or crimes against the Constitution reported by employees or contractors working for agencies like the CIA or NSA? For the last 20 years, the answer has been a resounding “no.”

• My own experience in 1995-96 is illustrative. Over a two-year period working with my wife, Robin (who was a CIA detailee to a Senate committee at the time), we discovered that, contrary to the public statements by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell and other senior George H. W. Bush administration officials (including CIA Director John Deutch), American troops had in fact been exposed to chemical agents during and after the 1991 war with Saddam Hussein. While the Senate Banking Committee under then-Chairman Don Riegle, D-Mich., was trying to uncover the truth of this, officials at the Pentagon and CIA were working to bury it.

• On any given day, more than 50,000 young offenders are locked away from their families in juvenile detention facilities.

• We expect these kids, most of whom have few positive relationships with adults or meaningful connections to education or jobs, to emerge equipped for success.

• Instead, recidivism rates (which vary from state to state) range from nearly 50% to 75% within three years of release for juvenile offenders in many areas of the country. Across America, we need a watershed shift in youth justice that protects public safety and is more informed by what works.

• According to Esther Schor, in her new book, “Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language” (Metropolitan), this famous story, of the Tower of Babel, represents a sort of second original sin. “If mortality is what it is like to live after Eden, misunderstanding,” she writes, “is what it is like to live after Babel.” This is not just a psychological misfortune but, more pressingly, a political one. Because we don’t speak the same language as our neighbors, we can’t see their point of view, and therefore we are more likely to rob them and kill them.

• For thousands of years, people have taken this matter quite seriously. Ambitious organizations such as the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church made sure that their members, whatever their mother tongue, learned a second, common language. More recently, various thinkers have considered constructing universal languages from scratch. Schor gives a colorful summary. In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon proposed that our written language switch to something like Chinese ideograms, bypassing words altogether, and John Wilkins, the first secretary of the Royal Society, proposed a new language with two thousand and thirty characters. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said that we should use a pictographic system, a little like Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came the rise of nationalism and, with it, linguistic nationalism, which held that the particularity of language was in fact an advantage, not a problem. Johann Gottfried Herder claimed that a people’s language contained its spiritual essence. Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that language, mediating between the mind and the world, actually created a people’s identity.

• The city legislature of Seoul, South Korea, is considering implementing a law that would ban after work messaging to employees, in an effort to reduce work-related stress among employees.

• Members of the Seoul Metropolitan Council proposed a revision to a public ordinance that would ban after-work messaging to employees of the city’s government. The new rule is an attempt to guarantee employees the right to rest and states that employee privacy must not be subject to employer contact outside of work hours. If passed, it would ban managers from contacting public sector employees after work hours through phone calls, text messaging, or social networking.

• A top heart doctor who worked at the UN gave his teenage daughter a beating and labelled her a “prostitute” after she disobeyed his orders and went to a Halloween party, a medical tribunal heard on Thursday.

• Dr Gohar Rahman, 57, grabbed the youngster by the hair, caned her on the bottom with his walking stick and then rained down punches on her head after he accused her of “bringing shame” on his family.

• Police were called in after the daughter sent out a SOS message on social media using a Nintendo DS.

• The daughter, then 17, had earlier gone to the party after falsely telling her father she would be home from a friend’s house by 9.30pm.

• The anticipation of meeting a U.S. Supreme Court justice for the first time turned to shock and distress for a young Truman Foundation scholar in 1999 when, she says, Justice Clarence Thomas grabbed and squeezed her on the buttocks several times at a dinner party.

• On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve been noting for the last year how the latest front in the quest to bring competition to the broadband market is the boring old utility pole. Under the current model, a company like Google Fiber needs to request an ISP move its own gear before Google Fiber can attach its fiber lines. Given that ISPs often own the poles, and have little incentive to speed a competitor to market, this can often take six months or longer — worse if gear from multiple incumbent ISPs needs moving. Google Fiber notes this has quite intentionally slowed its arrival in cities like Nashville.

• As such, Google Fiber has been pushing cities to pass new “one touch make ready” utility pole attachment reform rules, which let a single licensed and insured technician move any ISP’s gear (often a matter of inches), reducing pole attachment from a 9 month process, to one that takes as little as a month. Needless to say, ISPs like AT&T feel threatened by anything that could speed up competition in these stagnant markets, so it has been suing cities like Louisville and Nashville for trying to do so.

• After all the shouting this election season, perhaps it’s no wonder AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is proposing a tone-deaf $85.4 billion megamerger with Time Warner. On paper, the deal may have seemed like a shoo-in — after all, the Department of Justice approved a similar merger between Comcast and NBC Universal in 2011. But a lot has changed in the meantime.

• Riding the current wave of populism, politicians from both sides of the aisle have expressed skepticism — even outright hostility — to the proposed merger. Hillary Clinton last year vowed to prevent further market concentration by beefing up the antitrust enforcement arms of the DOJ and FTC. And in a fact sheet on competition policy put out earlier this month, she promised a return to stricter antitrust enforcement, “in contrast to the highly permissive approach of the Reagan era.”

• The big news earlier this week, of course, was AT&T’s announced plans to purchase Time Warner. As we, and plenty of others, were careful to point out, Time Warner is a different and totally separate company from Time Warner Cable (which Comcast famously tried to takeover not that long ago). Yes, at one time they were the same company, but that was a long, long time ago. They’ve been separate since 2009. And yet, lots of people still get them confused. In fact, soon after the announcement of the deal, AT&T had to do a special filing with the SEC to clarify which Time Warner it was buying. Really.

Intellectual Monopolies

• There is no need for IP owners and advisers to panic following the UK vote to leave the EU. But now is a good time to consider how rights could be affected in the medium term

Trademarks

• The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has seen a slew of unusual cases this year, according to John Welch, an attorney with Wolf Greenfield

• Exactly how far can overly protective trademark owners go before the wider public wakes up to what a shitstorm trademark has become? It’s a question I find myself asking often, given the type of stories we cover around here. It seems any progress made on that front is slow, however, and the ridiculous stories keep on rolling in. You may recall that the Premier League, the UK’s famous soccer/football/whatever league, has already proven itself incapable of making any kind of sense while enforcing its intellectual property rights. Well, perhaps taking its cue from its parent league, the also-famous Arsenal soccer club is reaching across the pond to try to block a trademark application for a small bar in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.

• When I drop dead of a massive heart attack, it will be because some huge company has bullied some small company over a ridiculous trademark that never should have been granted in the first place. The examples for this sort of thing are legion around Techdirt, but it still gets me every single time. The Trademark Office has done such a poor job of turning even the barest of critical eyes towards trademark applications that all sorts of short and common words have been granted trademarks all over the place, including in industries where it was plainly insane to grant them at all.

• The latest of these concerns a small family-owned supper club in Maryland and the threat letter it received from an enormous casino company over the trademark it had somehow received on the word “live.”

Copyrights

• Nearly a decade ago, just as YouTube was really getting popular, we questioned whether or not it would be considered infringement to merely embed a YouTube video if the content in that video were unauthorized. As we noted at the time, it seemed like a crazy idea that this should be considered infringing, given that embedding is just sticking a simple line of code on a website. No content ever actually is hosted or lives on that website. You’re just telling a browser to go find content from the original YouTube source. For the most part, US courts have agreed that embedding is not infringing. And we’d thought that the EU had come to the same conclusion — however that ruling was a bit vague, in that it focused on the embedding of authorized content, not unauthorized content.

• Last month, however, there was the troubling EU Court of Justice ruling that found that mere links could be deemed direct infringement, especially if they were posted on a for-profit site. The ruling, somewhat dangerously, argued that any for-profit site that posted links should have the burden of checking to make sure the content they link to is not infringing, and it’s fine to assume that they had the requisite knowledge when they link (this is, of course, crazy). And now we’re seeing the reverberations of such a silly ruling.

• Time Warner Cable has added an interesting clarification to its copyright infringement notifications. In addition to warning pirates of the standard “mitigation measures” that are part of the Copyright Alert System, the ISP now adds that persistent pirates also risk losing their Internet connection, and more.

• The Icelandic Pirate Party has made a record election. Early vote counts place Pirates at 14 percent, for nine seats of the 63-seat world’s oldest Parliament. As the victory party draws to a close and the results slowly finalize, it’s worth looking a little at what comes next.

• Pirate Parties keep succeeding, although on a political timescale. It started out a little carefully with getting elected to the European Parliament from Sweden, then to multiple state parliaments in Germany, city councils all over Europe, the Czech Senate, and the Icelandic Parliament, all in a decade’s insanely hard volunteer work.

• Today, as the victory party draws long into the night and as the Election Saturday becomes Celebration Sunday (and quite probably Interview-and-Media Sunday for a lot of people), it’s clear that the Pirate Party of Iceland has broken all previous election records, clocking in at 14% with about one-third of the votes counted at 01:00 on election night.

• Birgitta Jónsdóttir likes to describe herself as a “poetician”—part poet, part politician. But that moniker doesn’t touch on what she’s best known for: founding Iceland’s radical Pirate Party, the collection of anarchists, libertarians, and techies that could gain control of the Nordic island’s parliament in an election Saturday.

• The Pirates are expected to gain as many as 20 seats in the weekend vote, which would give them a leading position to form a government. If that happens, the group’s extraordinary rise to power will have taken just a heartbeat in politics—less than four years.

• On Saturday, in the shade of the American presidential elections that dominates the daily global news, some more important elections are going to be held. They will take place in the land of ice and snow, the most northern country of Europe, Iceland.

• This election is important because in Iceland we don’t have the usual “pretenders” to the power, but a pair that symbolizes the fight between the old world that is dying and the new one that is rising. The old is a traditional right-wing, conservative party which gives all power to the politicians. They stand against the radical, which believes in power of the base of the society, the grass root movements, the collective intelligence.

• This weekend, the political landscape in Iceland could be transformed. Polls show a real possibility that the Pirate Party – best known for its anti-establishment views and activism over copyright law and transparency – could come into power.

• In opinion polls conducted in October, the Pirate Party is tied for first place with the Independence Party (currently in government) and the Left-Green Movement. The pirates and the greens have agreed to form a coalition, and if after Saturday’s election they have a majority – perhaps with the help of some other parties – they will become the government of Iceland.

• “We don’t know what will happen on election night,” says Björn Leví, a Pirate Party candidate hoping to be elected on Saturday. “It will be very exciting, and it looks like it will be amazing for the Pirate Party.”

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• Iceland’s Pirate Party is led by Birgitta Jónsdóttir. The first Pirate Party was established in Sweden in 2006 with the main intention of reforming copyright law. Political parties acting under the Pirate Party banner now have a presence in many countries.

• “In Iceland we’ve expanded the Pirate Platform,” says Leví. “We’re not just about copyright and privacy, we’re about transparency and direct democracy as well.”

• Earlier this week we wrote about the revelation, via a FOIA request by the EFF, that the Copyright Office consulted heavily with Hollywood (the MPAA directly, and a variety of movie studios) before weighing in on the FCC’s set top box competition proposal. As we noted, the Copyright Office’s discussion on the issue involved completely misrepresenting copyright law to pretend that an agreement between to industries (content studios & TV companies) could contractually wipe out fair use for end users. That’s… just wrong. The FCC’s proposal had absolutely nothing to do with copyright. It was just about letting authorized (paying) customers access content that was already authorized through other devices. What the FOIA request revealed was that the Copyright Office not only had many, many, many meetings with Hollywood, but that it actually prioritized those meetings over ones with the FCC — and lied to the FCC to say that key Copyright Office personnel were not available the very same week they were meeting with the MPAA, in order to push back the meeting with the FCC.

• It was a pretty big deal, given the Copyright Office’s reputation for acting as a taxpayer-funded lobbying arm for Hollywood. Of course, the MPAA is now mocking the EFF over this story, with a blog post by Neil Fried, one of the top lobbyist’s for the MPAA, and someone who features prominently in the conversations with the Copyright Office revealed by the FOIA request. The crux of Fried’s post is that there’s no news in the revelations, and that the Copyright Office met with the MPAA because the MPAA asked to meet with it.

• We’ve discussed the amazing bullshit known as Hollywood Accounting many times here on Techdirt. This is the trick whereby big Hollywood studios basically get out of paying anyone royalties by claiming movies (including big, mega-famous ones) are not profitable. The most simple version of this trick is that the big studio sets up an independent corporation to represent “the film.” It then “sells” services to that corporation, which it owns, at exorbitant prices. So, for example, it will charge a “marketing and distribution fee,” which may actually be many multiples of the film’s actual budget. No cash changes hands here. It’s just a paper transaction, but because of those “fees” any money made from the film remains with the big Hollywood studio, and is not passed on to anyone who has “participation” in the net profits from the film.

• Things can get more complex than that, but that’s a basic version of the scam. This has come out a lot in the past few years, thanks to a series of lawsuits. It’s how we know that a Harry Potter film that brought in basically a billion dollars in revenue still declared a $167 million “loss”. It’s why one of the highest grossing films ever, Return of the Jedi, still claims to be in the red, when it comes to paying out residuals. That’s a film that’s made $33 billion (with a b). Not profitable, under Hollywood accounting. Another film whose books were opened up in a lawsuit was Goodfellas, where Warner Bros. was not only accused of charging $40 million in interest on the $30 million cost of production, but also of hiding over $100 million in revenue.

• In another bizarre case from a few years ago, two subsidiaries of Vivendi went after each other over Hollywood accounting — with StudioCanal suing Universal for pulling such an accounting trick on a bunch of famous movies. Universal hit back by claiming it actually overpaid StudioCanal.

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