● 11.19.16

● Links 19/11/2016: KDE Applications 16.12 Beta, Zorin OS 12

Posted in News Roundup at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I gave myself a little gift recently and revisited Ubuntu Mate by virtue of a transplanted hard disk.

• In my case, Mate was a gift that was giving and giving until it wasn’t.

• When the eMachines T6528 went belly up due to leaky logic board capacitors, I parted this tank of a tower out, half-heartedly vowing to get back to this low-footprint Linux distribution as soon as I could.

• Fast forward several months and with some precious free time on my hands, I was finally able to make good on the promise.

Server

• I obsess about operations. I think it started when I was a department IT manager at a financial services institute. It was appallingly difficult to get changes deployed into production and the cost of change was spectacularly high. It felt like there had to be a better way, and most every decision I have made professionally since 2008 has led me to work on technology that makes that guy or gal’s life easier.

• By now, you no doubt understand the advantages of using a microservices architecture, especially in greenfield applications and in new organizations that need to achieve efficiencies wherever they can. But what about your legacy code and applications? Do you totally rewrite the monolith or do you chip away at it with new functionalities, added as microservices, over time?

• In a quiet corner at the Synnex Varnex conference, Rob Moyer is pulling back the curtain — just a bit — on the Synnex CloudSolv strategy for channel partners. The conversation with ChannelE2E includes some familiar themes. But there are also some surprises — including a serious bet on container technology and Docker.

• Synnex CloudSolv is a management and deployment platform that helps channel partners to activate cloud solutions for their end-customers. Moyer, VP of software and cloud services at Synnex, isn’t pursuing a toe-to-toe cloud marketplace battle against Ingram Micro, Tech Data and other distributors. Instead of vetting hundreds of software and SaaS solutions for online distribution, Moyer discreetly but purposely made a few strategic bets — including Docker, Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite (particularly for education) and Red Hats.

• Containers are faster. Containers work only on Linux. Containers are insecure. These are all examples of myths about Docker and other container platforms that continue to persist.

• Some of these misconceptions reflect popular misunderstandings of containers. Others are based on information that was once accurate, but is no longer true. Either way, these myths are important to clear up if you want to deploy containers effectively.

Kernel Space

• This year at LinuxCon North America in Toronto, The Linux Foundation partnered with MakerKids and Kids on Computers to organize a day-long event focused on getting school-aged children interested in learning more about computer programming. The Kids Day workshops included projects around Linux, Arduino, robots, and more.

• “Kids on Computers has participated at SCALE and OSCON in years past, but this was our first time at LinuxCon. We do lot of hands-on training with students, teachers, and communities where we install computer labs (we have 12 in Mexico!), but this was our very first conference-based workshop. We are excited to see our Linux Foundation partnership grow and very much appreciated the opportunity to be at LinuxCon and conduct this workshop,” said Avni Khatri, President of Kids on Computers.

• As several media outlets are now reporting, open source veteran Sam Ramji, who has been the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, is joining Google in an executive position that is not fully announced yet. Cloud Foundry is managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and Abby Kearns will take over as Executive Director while Chip Childers will function as the organization’s CTO.

• Earlier this week we reported on the Btrfs RAID5/RAID6 code being fixed, well, it appeared to. However, now the Btrfs developers have clarified that the situation isn’t entirely resolved.

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.9 kernel.

• All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA today issued the 375.20 Linux driver release as their first in the stable 375 driver series for Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD.

• In addition to the Radeon and AMDGPU DDX updates yesterday, other X.Org drivers are seeing releases this week in order to support the brand new X.Org Server 1.19.

• Nvidia announced a new stable, long-lived version of its proprietary graphics driver for GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris platforms, versioned 375.20, which appears to be a major update that introduces numerous improvements and some new features.

• As expected, the biggest change in the Nvidia 375.20 proprietary video driver is the addition of support for the recently released X.Org Server 1.19.0 (ABI 23) display server for all supported operating systems, which means that most of the modern distributions will soon push an updated graphics stack to their users for better gaming and overall desktop graphics performance.

• Earlier this week was the X.Org Server 1.19 release as a major update with development going on for one year. Now, X.Org Server 1.20 development is open.

• Jerome Glisse has sent out the latest version of his patches now for Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM), which he’s been working on the Linux kernel since 2014.

• It’s been a while since hearing anything about Heterogeneous Memory Management and frankly I even forgot about these pending HMM patches or for seeing any new work from Jerome Glisse at Red Hat. For those that forgot, Jerome was one of the early contributors to the open-souce AMD driver work going back to the xf86-video-avivo (pre-RadeonHD) days when wanting to make an open-source R500 graphics driver.

• A developer’s effort to implement Direct3D 9 (D3D9) over the Vulkan API has now reached its “fourth milestone” but a lot of work remains.

• Rob Clark on Friday sent out the patches for implementing the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync extension within Mesa’s EGL and Gallium3D code.

Benchmarks

• Last month when Ubuntu 16.10 was released I ran some desktop gaming benchmarks with Intel Skylake graphics under Unity, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE, Openbox, and MATE. Following that article a few Phoronix Premium readers requested similar tests be done under the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack, so here are those numbers.

Applications

• The BH package on CRAN was updated to version 1.62.0. BH provides a large part of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R, possibly with Rcpp as well as other packages.

• This release upgrades the version of Boost to the upstream version Boost 1.62.0, and adds three new libraries as shown in the brief summary of changes from the NEWS file which follows below.

• Yesterday the eighth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp made it to the CRAN network for GNU R where the Windows binary has by now been generated too; the Debian package is on its way as well. This 0.12.8 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, and the 0.12.7 release in September — making it the twelveth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. While we are keeping with the pattern, we have managed to include quite a lot of nice stuff in this release. None of it is a major feauture, though, and so we have not increased the middle number.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a great way to monitor SNMP traffic on your network. It’s a free tool, and it’s fairly simple to install. By monitoring daily/weekly/monthly/yearly traffic going in and out of your network, you can get a very good snapshot of how much traffic your network sees and what times of the day/week/month/year it spikes.

Games

• In this bi-weekly open gaming roundup, we take a look at Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition running Linux, SDL support for Unity 5.6, 0 A.D. Ulysses, and more gaming news.

• Syndrome [Steam], a good-looking sci-fi survival horror was supposed to come to Linux at release, but it seems Unity is holding it back with bugs.

• If you still haven’t picked up Alien: Isolation, now is a good time. Feral Interactive have the game on sale on their official store.

• Without a doubt, the Radeon RX 480 is a great ~$200 USD graphics card for someone caring a lot about open-source driver support. But with the Pascal-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 also costing about the same, what’s the better decision for a Linux gamer who may not be religious about his driver choices? Here is some food for thought.

• Eric Griffith, our 2015 summer intern, brought up he was deciding between a GTX 1060 and RX 480 for his Linux gaming box. He hadn’t bought a NVIDIA card in the past ten years and is currently using the venerable Radeon R9 290, but it’s certainly time for an upgrade to play the demanding Linux games of today.

• With Mesa coming along rather nicely in the latest releases, Feral Interactive are requesting that Canonical push out Mesa updates to their official graphics driver PPA to help Feral officially support Mesa in their Linux ports.

• With Mesa drivers this year really improving a lot and reaching OpenGL ~4.5 compatibility for most drivers as well as the Intel and RADV Vulkan drivers getting into shape, they are becoming usable for day-to-day Linux gamers. While not all new Feral Linux game releases work with the Mesa drivers, a growing number of their games work well on Mesa 13.0+, and as such they are hoping Ubuntu will adopt a policy of making it easier to switch to newer Mesa releases.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of KDE Applications. With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

• Check the community release notes for information on new tarballs, tarballs that are now KF5 based and known issues. A more complete announcement will be available for the final release

• The KDE Applications 16.12 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We’re counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the team by installing the beta and reporting any bugs.

• Today, November 18, 2016, KDE announced the availability for public testing of the Beta build of the upcoming KDE Applications 16.12 software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.

• As reported last week, the KDE Applications 16.08 series reached end of life with the third and last maintenance update, versioned 16.08.3, which means that work begun on the next major branch, KDE Applications 16.12, which you can now take for a test drive using today’s Beta release.

• KDE Applications 16.12 is now in beta while this collection of KDE software is under a dependency and feature freeze ahead of next month’s official release.

Distributions

New Releases

• We’re proud to announce the availability of the Zorin OS 12 Core and Ultimate–the biggest release in the history of Zorin OS. With this new version, we’ve introduced an entirely new desktop experience that will make your computer more useful, more powerful and more enjoyable to use.

• The guys behind the Ubuntu-based Zorin OS Linux operating system were proud to announce the general availability of the final release of Zorin OS 12, which comes in both Core and Ultimate flavors.

• Zorin OS 12 is the result of many months of hard work, and it looks like it’s the project’s biggest release ever. The GNU/Linux distribution is now based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, and ships with the Zorin Desktop 2.0 desktop environment.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Now this is a week I call fully rolling. There was a full 7 snapshots since the last review – which is about the maximum we can do in a week with one snapshot per day (or we have to change the versioning to not be only ‘date’ based). So, this review is about the snapshots {20161110..20161116}.

• I’ve been running some fresh benchmarks of the recently released openSUSE Leap 42.2 compared to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed and friends. Those benchmarks will be posted shortly, but after using the Nouveau experience on Tumbleweed I found the need to comment.

• In the world of Linux distributions, users are often faced with the option of choosing an enterprise-grade distribution or a community distribution. With the openSUSE Leap approach, SUSE is attempting to merge the best of both the enterprise and community models into a new type of Linux distribution. In the pure community-first model the upstream open-source code is packaged in a distribution, which can then be further hardened to eventually produce an enterprise-grade Linux product. The open-source openSUSE Leap 42.2 Linux distribution became generally available on Nov. 16 and takes a different approach. Code from the SUSE Linux Enterprise Service Pack 2 release, which debuted on Nov. 8, is now in the freely available openSUSE Leap 42.2 update. As part of its enterprise community stability focus, openSUSE Leap benefits from the Linux 4.4 Long Term Support Kernel (LTS). SUSE expects to support openSUSE Leap releases for 36 months. The new release also includes the latest in open-source application packages with LibreOffice and Firefox as well as developer and graphics tools. This slide show eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the new openSUSE 42.2 Linux operating system release.

Red Hat Family

• The Mad Hatter of Linux is getting Alice in Wonderland style physical space virtualisation with thin provisioning, compression and deduplication courtesy of Permabit.

• Building on its June 2016 Linux availability announcement, Permabit and Red Hat have a go-to-market partnership based on the former’s Albireo deduplication and HIOPS compression technology being added as a kernel module to Red Hat Linux. Up until now dedupe and compression have largely been storage array features, and then appearing in software-only storage running on servers and direct-attached disks, SSDs or JBODs.

• Even among technology companies, Red Hat has to stand out as one of the geekiest firms in the business.

• The enterprise company offers services and support around the Linux open-source operating system, which non-techies can think of as a free equivalent of Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s MacOS. Developers and IT operators, however, regard Linux as more than just a free service: It’s the underpinning of some of the most popular apps and software used today.

• For instance, if you’ve ordered a car ride from Uber or bought digital storage from Amazon, it’s likely Linux OS was in a corporate data center somewhere along the line, making sure the appropriate software was chugging along.

Finance

Fedora

• The goal of the Fedora Hubs project is to provide a consistent contributor experience across all Fedora teams. Hubs serve as an “intranet” for the Fedora Project. The many different projects in Fedora each have different processes and workflows. Hubs will be a single place where contributors can learn about and contribute to these projects in a consistent way.

• Hubs is also a social tool for Fedora contributors. It’s designed to help you keep up with everything and everybody across a big open source project in ways that aren’t currently possible. Hubs solves obstacles so new contributors can get in touch with experienced ones.

• Do you want to learn more about the history behind Hubs? Fedora Design team lead Máirín Duffy wrote a few blog posts on the progress of Hubs.

• The Seattle GNU/Linux conference, SeaGL, intentionally attracts a variety of attendees, students from Seattle Central College, local Linux enthusiasts, curious neighbors, and programmers from big software companies, indies and start-ups. About 500 people attended the exhibits and talks on the two days. The exhibit area was closed for the keynotes so I saw Corey Quinn tell us the Art of Personal Failure and Allison Randal presented Free as in Freedom. Bill Wright received the Cascadia Community Builder Award for his efforts building LinuxFest NorthWest.

• Today’s guest is Matthew Miller (mattdm)! He’s a long-time Fedora user and contributor, as well as the founder of Boston University Linux. However, perhaps most important of all, he is the current Fedora Project Leader! In this interview, we ask Matthew questions like…

Debian Family

Derivatives

• A few days after the announcement of Tails 2.7, the development team behind the popular amnesic incognito live system based on Debian GNU/Linux unveiled a few technical details about the next major release.

• Yes, we’re talking about Tails 3.0, which is now in development and appears to be the next major update of the anonymous live OS that ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden used to protect his identity online. Tails is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution built around the popular Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser anonymous browser.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• System76’s Ubuntu-based Oryx Pro is a Linux laptop loaded with features also found in some of the fastest Windows laptops.

• The Oryx Pro can be the ultimate Linux gaming laptop. It can be configured with a 15.6-inch 4K screen and Nvidia’s latest Pascal GeForce GTX 1070 GPU.

• The laptop with those features starts at $1,987, and goes higher as more storage and memory are added. The ultimate 4K Oryx Pro configuration with 9TB of SSD storage prices out at $7,012. It comes preloaded with Ubuntu 16.04 or 16.10.

• Ubuntu Core 16 is now available. It is a tiny, transactional implementation of Ubuntu Linux that targets embedded applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). It uses a new packaging system with modules called snaps that include metadata about their connectivity and interface requirements (Fig. 1).

• A snap can have one or more interfaces that are either a plug or a slot providing connections between snaps. A snap exists as a read-only, immutable, compressed squashFS blob, while an instance also includes a private, writeable directory. Communication with the operating system services uses the interface mechanism. Snaps can be given access to other directories.

• Nowadays, Linux processes are forever in conflict. Is there somewhere out there for them to live together in harmony… perhaps by separating them via full resource isolation?

Devices/Embedded

• Powered by Ubuntu and Robot Operating System (ROS), the Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk open development hardware and software kit enables drones to transform into smart robots. Parrot’s S.L.A.M.dunk (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) technology enables the design of advanced applications that enable the drone to understand and map its surroundings in 3D and self-navigate in environments with multiple barriers or lack of a GPS signal.

• Because Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk exploits ROS, the leading Linux-based versatile robotic development environment, it can be used not only for standard drone applications but also for a much wider set of “robots”—that is, flying wings, articulated arms and roving robots.

• The Next Thing’s “Dashbot” is an automotive gizmo that offers voice control of a phone’s music, nav, and texts. Inside is a CHIP Pro COM running Linux.

• A little over a month after announcing a computer-on-module version of the CHIP (Computer Hardware in Products) SBC called the CHIP Pro, The Next Thing went to Kickstarter to launch a hands-free automotive/mobile interface called the Dashbot, based on the COM. At publication time, the open source device was more than halfway to its $100K goal, with the funding round open until Dec. 17. Don’t expect to see your Dashbot under the Christmas tree, however. The $49 device won’t ship until July 2017.

Phones

• A few quick notes from a few less-familiar players in smartphone wars. So yes, I’ll do the math shortly on Q3 smartphone market (nothing exciting there, we know Samsung, Apple, Huawei are the top 3, the excitement is long gone from that ‘race’).

• But first off, as I was doing some back-log Tweets of old tech news items to cover, on Twitter, today, I noticed a few interesting tidbits of smartphone-related news. These are all October-timeframe news items (so they’re old but went to cover them anyway).

Tizen

• Samsung Open Source Conference (SOSCON) 2016 as been in full flow at the Samsung Seoul R & D Campus in Umyeon-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul, for the last two days. The conference saw over 2,000 open source developers discussing the Internet of Things (IoT), Tizen platform, web, big data, cloud, and also machine learning.

• One of the mostly requested apps by Tizen smartphone users is a Video Audion convertor. Now, Videoaudio converter is now available in the Tizen Store by Om Prakash. It’s a very easy app to use for end users, just tap on the video file and convert it to audio. You can convert MP4, MKV, 3GP & AVI files to M4A, AMR, OGG & AAC formats. The files will save in your music folder in your device storage.

• Its time for the Tizen Community to meet once again and discuss what is important to us all. This time the subject is going to be IoT on Tizen Wearables. As ever there is no special format for the discussion but it is hoped that we cover everything in the allocated 1 hour time slot.

• The meeting is scheduled for 28 November 2016 at 09:00 UTC. You can find your local time by following this link. Some discussion points will be “How to deploy to a commercial device”, think Gear S2, and there will also be hints about other Tizen wearables that we can also discuss.

Android

• Nokia fans around the world have been expecting the company’s return to smartphones. Rumours and leaks in the past had all suggested that the company will come out with Nokia-branded mobiles this year, but with the year all-but-over, everyone’s eyes are already on next year.

• A new study suggests that 70 percent of European Android users want pre-installed apps.

• No, it is not opposite day.

• The Application Developers Alliance asked 4,000 Android users in France, Germany, Spain and Italy about their app install preferences. It’s worth noting that Google helped develop the study, and the company is currently locked in battle with the EU over whether its default Android apps are anti-competitive.

• The results seem to lie in Google’s favor. The vast majority of Android users change their home screen setup (90 percent), and that while Google apps were generally within the top few apps used, they were rarely #1.

• $250 gift cards being bundled with Android smartphones, up to $100 being knocked off Android tablets by big retailers for Black Friday 2016

• The DTEK60 is the latest BlackBerry-branded smartphone manufactured by partner TCL, the Chinese company behind the Alcatel handsets. The difference in hardware design is immediately obvious. Spotting a gorgeous glass back and a smooth, curvy body just 6.99mm thick, the phone (HK$4,488) is by far the most beautiful BlackBerry phone that runs on the Android system.

• Like its predecessor, the DTEK50, the overall design remains minimalist, but the new release comes with a fingerprint sensor that is conveniently located at the back of the phone right below the camera lens.

• Samsung announced the beta release of Android 7.0 Nougat for its 2016 Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge devices a week ago in three important smartphone markets: the United Kingdom, United States of America and South Korea. Beta programs are designed to allow customers or users to experience an unfinished product so as to provide feedback to the company. For a major software version such as Android Nougat, a developer – or in this case the smartphone manufacturer – will conduct a large number of internal tests, but because smartphones are both extremely complicated and customers can download and install large numbers of third party applications, it is useful to allow the pre-release version of the operating system to be tested “in the wild.” This way, Samsung can hope to capture many different device configurations and uncover bugs and glitches that might otherwise not be found until the software is officially released.

• As many of you know by now, Samsung had launched the Galaxy Beta Program last week, and the company is essentially allowing Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge consumers in specific markets to try out Android 7.0 Nougat beta firmware. Needless to say, Android 7.0 Nougat is the last big iteration of Android, even though the company had released Android 7.1 Nougat as well. In any case, Samsung has just started rolling out the Galaxy Beta Program in yet another region, read on.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source is free software that developers make available to benefit the community. The original developer of the software benefits from making their code freely available because doing so increases the number of end users with the ability to enhance the software. These enhancements can make the software more valuable for all. Some examples of open source software include Android, Wikipedia, Mozilla Firefox, WordPress and Drupal.

• But the point is this one: It is 2016 and shared calendars that should be simple and straightforward are both complex and obscure. People should not think twice about what to use: they should be able to share their calendars seamlessly, post it online, move from one provider to another with very little hassle. Instead of this most are locked in and when they want to move to another provider the notion that they should learn about the various calendar sharing protocols is simply outlandish.

• Alibaba is arguably the world’s biggest online commerce company. It serves millions of users and hosts millions of merchants and businesses. As of August 2016, Alibaba had 434 million users with 427 million active mobile monthly users. During this year’s Singles Day, which happened on November 11 and is one of the (if not the) biggest online sales events, Alibaba registered $1 billion in sales in its first five minutes.

• Vendors, university researchers, students, and developers find that open source is a very effective tool for validating a solution to a particular problem. However, these solutions are often born within the context of a specific company’s use case or a specific research problem. Therefore, these projects are similar to code built in the context of a professional services engagement and often don’t have the polish and finish of an enterprise product. Some may not even have solved basic enterprise requirements like availability, resilience, security, and so on.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Three days after we reported on the official availability of the Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, it looks like users of the Ubuntu Linux OS can now install the application.

SaaS/Back End

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Tony Get, my colleague, showed me an interesting tool available in Android: it’s an app to turn your Android device into a remote control to work with your LibreOffice Impress presentations. It is called Impress Remote and it is very easy to use.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• We all know how popular and helpful Linux and open source products are. But since most of them are available for free, how do the companies that produce them make any money to pay their bills? As it turns out, lots of ways.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Support for Intel’s low-power Quark SE micro-controller has been added to the GNU Compiler Collection.

Public Services/Government

• The Government Digital Service (GDS) has appointed its first open source lead, with the goal of driving the use of open source platforms and frameworks throughout Whitehall and beyond.

• Anna Shipman, who has been at GDS for several years will step into the role, having worked extensively with open source as the development lead for GDS’s open source infrastructure provisioning project vCloud Tools.

• Shipman also has experience working with open source projects outside of GDS with her work on government-as-a-platform, the GDS objective to create a range of open and reusable digital components that can be used to create digital services without the need for costly, bespoke systems.

• Improving the way the government delivers information technology (IT) solutions to its customers isn’t just a goal, it’s our mission. We at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office know that by publishing our open source code, the public can help us come up with new and better IT solutions. In advance of the new Federal Source Code Policy and in support of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative, we have been publishing content on Github for over a year, and it now includes source code for a mobile application for trademarks.

Licensing/Legal

• Open-source development covers a lot of bases. There’s everything from documentation to development that is freely available on the web. It’s rather magical to know that you’ve got access to the code that drives some of the industry’s most widely used platforms like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, and much more.

• As a purveyor of some open-source goodness myself, I’ve started to become more aware of the nuances of each of the various open-source licenses. There is much more to these licenses than many of us may realize. It is a legal contract, so it is important to be aware of the differences in each license.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The world of open source software is a busy place. Sometimes keeping up with all of the news, announcements, and cool things to be discovered can be difficult. Here’s a look at some of what we’re reading today.

Open Hardware/Modding

• AMD announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) featuring software support of new Radeon GPU hardware, new math libraries, and a rich foundation of modern programming languages, designed to speed development of high-performance, energy-efficient heterogeneous computing systems. AMD also announced planned support of OpenCL™ and for a wide range of CPUs in upcoming releases of ROCm, including support for AMD’s upcoming “Zen”-based CPUs, Cavium ThunderX CPUs, and IBM Power 8 CPUs. The advances further cement ROCm’s position as the most versatile open source platform for GPU computing.

• Processor maker is going all in for developing and sharing GPU-related hardware and software for high-end computing use cases. In days gone by, one rarely heard of IT companies getting involved in the open sourcing of hardware blueprints. It was always about software. This is happening more frequently all the time and making a significant impact in many enterprises. It’s yet another seismic change that has hit the larger-picture IT world.

• This is relevant now because companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Brocade, Cisco Systems and a number of others through the Open Compute Project are now dedicated to designing and open sourcing items such as new-gen servers, racks, routers, switches, specialized teleco equipment and storage appliances, in addition to offering previously proprietary expertise to others in how to build new-gen IT hardware.

• RusEFI isn’t anywhere near a works-right-out-of-the-box system, even now. It’s hardware for the expert user who is comfortable doing everything from soldering to writing code, and it’s all absolutely open-source, on both the hardware and software sides. The advantage of this? According to RusEFI developer Andrey Belomutskiy, “You are free to criticize/change software and hardware without being yelled/threatened/banned, in the spirit of open source.”

Leftovers

Science

• Have you ever watched a baby stare at a TV? The TV is huge, flashing and mesmerizing, and you’ll notice that while watching, infants do not turn their heads – they just sit and stare straight ahead. Because infants become so transfixed on the screen, they stop doing anything and everything else and ultimately, they miss out on human interaction and the opportunity to explore their new and exciting world.

• The same is true of certain electronic toys. The graphics and sounds are mesmerizing and hold a child’s attention for longer than a traditional toy. Studies have shown that during the time kids are watching a screen or playing on an electronic toy, they are not interacting and learning as much as they could with other types of toys. Electronics also change how we interact with our children – sometimes the toy becomes the babysitter, and parents do not have to interact.

• The election of Donald Trump to the White House left great segments of the US population elated, and others feeling deflated and terrified. It still isn’t clear what he will do after he’s inaugurated, although certain policies and approaches are beginning to take shape. But as observers take stock of how a novice politician who’s never held elected office snagged the highest one in the land, something has become abundantly clear—America is divided, and one of the starkest divisions is around education.

• People voted along lines that reflect levels of education. While Hillary Clinton led college graduates by nine points (52/43 percent), Trump led non-college graduates by eight (52/44 percent). According to Pew Research, this is the widest gap in support between college-educated and non-college educated voters recorded in exit polls since 1980.

• To hold Trump, or any president, accountable to the people they represent, the US needs an informed electorate. According to some experts, this is literally an issue of national security. More uniformly educated populations are better equipped to resolve chronic policy problems, bolster economic growth, and keep pace with rapidly shifting geopolitical dynamics, which contributes to stability at home.

Health/Nutrition

• State officials in Michigan asked a federal court in Detroit on Thursday to block a court order requiring bottled water deliveries to homes in Flint, Michigan, where residents are still waiting for clean tap water two years after municipal water supplies were contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

• The state’s motion requests the court to temporarily block the water delivery order while officials appeal the requirement. The order was issued by a federal judge last week and requires city and state officials to deliver bottled water to Flint residents unless they have a functioning faucet filter or refuse the delivery service.

Security

• Security researchers have found a rather frightening vulnerability in Linux that could ultimately allow an attacker to copy, modify, or destroy the contents of a hard drive, along with with configure the network to exfiltrate data. That in and of itself is cause for concern, but the real harrowing part about this is how easy it is to activate—an attacker need only boot up the system and hold down the enter key for 70 seconds.

• There is still a flaw in the open source security model which the Core Infrastructure Initiative only partly addressed. Remember the thousands and thousands of eyes looking for vulnerabilities in the code? While that may be true in a generalized sense, there are some small but important projects that are flying under the radar and don’t seem to be getting the necessary attention.

• Adobe will pay just $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by 15 state attorneys general over its huge 2013 data breach that exposed payment records on approximately 38 million people. In other news, the 39-year-old Dutchman responsible for coordinating an epic, weeks-long distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam provider Spamhaus in 2013 will avoid any jail time for his crimes thanks to a court ruling in Amsterdam this week.

• On Oct. 3, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story that Adobe had just suffered a breach in which hackers siphoned usernames, passwords and payment card data on 38 million customers. The intruders also made off with digital truckloads of source code for some of Adobe’s most valuable software properties — including Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop and ColdFusion.

• MORE TERRIFYING SECURITY RESEARCH has discovered that almost half of a collection of firms surveyed admitted that they have been the victim of a ransomware attack.

• Endpoint security outfit SentinelOne said that the ransomware attacks do not just go after monies these days, but have darker aims and can be used to threaten and terrorise people.

• “[Our] results point to a significant shift for ransomware. It’s no longer just a tool for cyber crime, but a tool for cyber terrorism and espionage,” said Tony Rowan, chief security consultant at SentinelOne, in the firm’s Ransomware Research Data Summary (PDF).

• I’ve worked with IT since the 1960s. I’ve seen systems that fell down just idling. I’ve seen systems that were insecure by design. Their creators just didn’t seem to care. I’ve seen systems that were made to get you. Their creators wanted to own your soul. I’ve also used FLOSS.

Defence/Aggression

• Flynn has called for Washington to work more closely with Moscow, echoing similar statements from Trump. But his warmth toward Russia has worried some national security experts.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• In what might be viewed as a slight disagreement in assessment, or at the very least, semantics, Clapper told the committee Thursday that there was not strong evidence of a connection between WikiLeaks, which provided a frequent drip of leaked emails from top Democratic officials aimed at damaging the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and the Russian hacking campaign against Democratic party entities and individuals, for which many believe provided WikiLeaks the stolen contents for their leaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• A new global initiative, launched today at the climate meeting in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of lives by protecting peatlands – the world’s largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

• The Global Peatlands Initiative will mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in a targeted effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

• Greenhouse gas emissions from drained and burning peatlands account for up to 5 per cent of anthropogenic carbon emissions. These emissions are rising due to increasing peat degradation and loss from agriculture and fires, and driving the world closer to a dangerous tipping point.

• Rising temperatures can cause a chain reaction in which thawing permafrost switches boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gas. Peat carbon stocks are equivalent to at least 60 per cent of all atmospheric carbon, meaning they hold the potential to send climate change spiraling out of control.

• A new global initiative was launched today at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 22) under way in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of live by protecting peatlands – the largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

• According to the UN environment Programme (UNEP), the Global Peatlands Initiative seeks mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in an effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

• If global temperatures continue to rise, this could lead to thawing permafrost, switching boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, resulting in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and potentially causing climate change to spiral out of control.

• Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment stressed that despite the Paris Agreement, global temperatures will rise over 3 degrees Celsius this century. “This will cause misery and chaos for millions of vulnerable people, so we cannot afford to let any opportunity to reduce emissions slip by,” he added.

• Latest study from Scientific Reports reveals that massive wildfires in Indonesia and Borneo had produced unhealthy air pollution, exposing 69 million people and causing thousands of cases of premature deaths.

• The wildfire greatly affected the forests and peatland of Equatorial Asia during the autumn of 2015. Experts have found that a quarter of people living in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia were severely exposed to the killer haze between September and October 2015.

• In an article by Eureka Alert, the lead author of the study, Dr. Paola Crippa, from Newcastle University, UK, said: “Our study estimated that between 6,150 and 17,270 premature deaths occurred due to breathing in the polluted air over that short two month period. To put this into perspective, we estimate that around 1 in 6,000 people exposed to the polluted haze from these fires died as a result. The uncertainty in these estimates is mostly due to the lack of medical studies on exposure from extreme air pollution in the area.”

• Jeff Sessions, the ultra-conservative Republican senator from Alabama, has been a controversial political figure for decades. His early career as a US attorney was threatened by allegations of racist remarks in the 1980s, but he remained popular in his home state and managed to carve out a congressional career for himself as a staunch opponent of, among many other things, consensus climate science.

• But Sessions is about to get a whole lot more influential to the lives of all Americans: President-elect Donald Trump has picked him to be the next attorney general of the United States.

• In what’s become a daily routine during the Trump transitionary period, the president-elect’s pick of Sessions has been met with exasperated outcries. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are preparing for a long period of conflict under the Trump Administration, and Sessions is sure to be a part of it.

Finance

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Since election night, U.S. cities and towns have rung with protest. Hundreds of thousands of people, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Columbia, South Carolina to Salt Lake City, Utah took to the streets en masse to protest the election of a man who promised, among other things, to force Muslims to register and to repeal a health care bill that helps some 20 million people get health insurance, and who has been accused of sexual assault by at least 13 women. Hand-scrawled signs declared “Not My President,” “No To Bigotry,” “Trump Puts My Life In Danger,” and “Protests Are Patriotic.”

• The Tory MP was one of David Cameron’s modernisers, and campaigned to remain in the EU. Now she is angry at everyone – at Labour, her own party, the Daily Mail, even herself – but feels she must vote for article 50 regardless

• Donald J. Trump has reversed course and agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign.

• The settlement was announced by the New York attorney general on Friday, just 10 days before one of the cases, a federal class-action lawsuit in San Diego, was set to be heard by a jury. The deal, if approved, averts a potentially embarrassing and highly unusual predicament: a president-elect on trial, and possibly even taking the stand in his own defense, while scrambling to build his incoming administration.

• It was a remarkable concession from a real estate mogul who derides legal settlements and has mocked fellow businessmen who agree to them.

• But the allegations in the case were highly unpleasant for Mr. Trump: Students paid up to $35,000 in tuition for programs that, according to the testimony of former Trump University employees, used high-pressure sales tactics and employed unqualified instructors.

• The agreement wraps together the outstanding Trump University litigation, including two federal class-action cases in San Diego, and a separate lawsuit by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. The complaints alleged that students were cheated out of thousands of dollars in tuition through deceptive claims about what they would learn and high-pressure sales tactics.

• In 1976, President Gerald Ford appointed physicist H. Guyford Stever as the first Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Having previously advised the military during World War II, and directed the National Science Foundation for four years, Stever became the first of a long line of advisors who counseled the White House on matters of science and technology—everything from disease outbreaks to climate change to nanotechnology.

• [...]

• But amid that certainty, there is also lots of room for variability. (Buckle up; here be acronyms.) Holdren currently wears many different hats. He’s also the president’s Science Advisor or, to quote the formal title, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. He co-chairs (with Obama) the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—a group of leading scientists and engineers who offer policy recommendations on everything from the reliability of forensic science to preparing for a biological weapons attack. And he sits on the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a group that coordinates research and development efforts across all federal agencies; it is chaired by the president and includes the vice-president and several cabinet secretaries.

• So Holdren’s a busy guy. But of these jobs, only the OSTP directorship is a non-negotiable Senate-confirmed post. The rest are essentially optional, and depend on the president’s attitudes to science and willingness to continue the legacy of past offices. Trump might not convene the PCAST or the NSTC; both are established by Executive Order. He could appoint an OSTP Director and never seek advice from them.

• So that election sure was pretty crazy, huh? There are lots and lots and lots of really pissed-off people right now, and since we’ve said quite a bit on the subject, I won’t add more to that here. What I will tell you is that you absolutely have a real-world, tangible way to fight. And I’m not talking about having to wait four years for the next presidential election.

• We have a new leader in America. Known for his distinct regional accent and often seen wearing a baseball cap at rallies, he starred in a show on NBC, and holds strong opinions about guns and the NRA. He may not be the leader you saw coming, but you’re going to see a lot more of him: Michael Moore. The documentary filmmaker shuns the activist label he is often given. In a recent LA Times interview Moore asserted, “I’m not an activist, I’m a citizen. It’s redundant to say I’m an activist. We all should be active.” Moore has been very active, and has made films that take on some of America’s most complex and controversial topics — globalization, gun violence, 9/11, our healthcare system, the economy, war, and most recently, Donald Trump, someone he did see coming. Unlike the Democrats.

• Moore tried to warn the left in July, when he wrote a piece titled simply “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win. In it, he did not mince words: “Go ahead and say the words, ’cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: ‘PRESIDENT TRUMP.’ Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.” With his midwestern directness and efficiency, Moore then proceeded to list how and why Donald Trump was going to win.

• A week after Trump’s election, Democrats and progressives are still raw with shock and grief. The agony is acute. The mood of over half the country? Political satirist Barry Crimmins nailed it in a tweet, saying “We’re now kids trapped in the back of our blowhard, road-raging, shitty-driver, dad’s car for a 4-yr trip and he’s issued a “No Talking” edict.”

• Donald Trump’s daughter has been pictured attending a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, heightening concerns the President-elect’s family will wield unprecedented influence over his political duties.

• Ivanka Trump, who features in handout photos of the impromptu gathering, plays a significant role in managing Mr Trump’s businesses, along with his other adult children.

• Unlike other presidents, Mr Trump’s children are part of his transition team, which has been beset by problems since its inception.

• Republican America is now so vast that a traveler could drive 3,600 miles across the continent, from Key West, Fla., to the Canadian border crossing at Porthill, Idaho, without ever leaving a state under total GOP control.

Censorship/Free Speech

• No job comes without sacrifices, but how many downgrading comments, criticism or even threats can one person take before it becomes too much?

• Just consider the experiences of a female journalist that I know:

• She had her phone number shared on dating websites, her email and other accounts were hacked, she received death threats on Skype, the website publishing her articles was hacked and a sex video was posted with the implication that she had participated in an orgy. Anonymous articles with lies about her and her family were also posted online.

• Imagine being forced to shut down your accounts on social media platforms because of such massive attacks with detailed images of rape and other forms of sexual violence.

• At one point, you would probably be inclined to ask yourself if it is really worth it. Is this a career I want to continue to pursue?

• In the past few years, more and more female journalists and bloggers have been forced to question their profession. Male journalists are also subject to hate speech and online abuse, but research findings suggest that female journalists face a disproportionate amount of gender-based threats and harassment on the internet. They are experiencing what Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, has described as a “double attack”: they are being targeted for being both a journalist and a woman.

• How do these attacks affect female journalists’ lives, their work and society in general? Journalists are used to being in the frontline of conflict and they often deal with difficult and even dangerous situations. But what if you cannot shield yourself from these threats? What if the frontline became your own doorstep, your office or your computer screen?

• So, according to the ECRI and scholars of Teesside University, when Muslim jihadists murder people and the press reports that killers are Muslims, the press, and not Islamists, is encouraging “Islamophobic incidents” in Britain. According to ECRI Chair Christian Ahlund, “It is no coincidence that racist violence is on the rise in the UK at the same time as we see worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech in the newspapers, online and even among politicians.”

• Yuni Hadi has been promoting independent Singapore films for many years. She has helmed the film programme at The Substation Centre for the Arts, creating milestone projects such as the annual Fly-by-Night Video Challenge and the Singapore Short Film Festival. She also helms Objectifs Films, a Singapore-based international film distributor. She is also the co-producer of award-winning Singapore film Ilo Ilo which saw its box-office takings in Singapore surge, after it attained international accolades.

• Today, she is executive director of the Singapore International Film Festival which takes place from No 23 to Dec 4.

• She went “On the Record” with 938LIVE’s Bharati Jagdish about censorship and growing the local film industry. They started by talking about the perceived bias against local content.

• There’s nothing those operating on the fringes of science hate more than people questioning their means, methods, and conclusions. To question is to be sued, unfortunately. Ken White has again fired up the Popehat signal in hopes of securing a skeptical blogger some legal assistance in fighting off a clearly bogus defamation suit by a junk scientist offended by the blogger’s dismantling of his junk science.

• It is known as the land of gross national happiness, a country that puts contentment before the trappings of wealth and power. But discontent is growing in Bhutan after one of the country’s best-known journalists was hit with a defamation suit for sharing a story on Facebook.

• In a case that will test the boundaries of freedom of speech in the tiny Himalayan kingdom, independent journalist Namgay Zam, a former presenter on the state-run broadcaster Bhutan Broadcasting Service, faces imprisonment or a fine equivalent to 10 years’ salary if she is found guilty of defaming a prominent businessman.

• A Sharia court convicted the 29-year-old singer after he was banned from performing due to the nature of his music.

• Amir Tataloo’s fans reacted furiously to the news that he had been apprehended while walking down a street in the capital Tehran in August.

• He has been held in custody until his trial this week and will now be forced to endure physical punishment after defying the Ministry of Culture.

• According to reports Mr Tatoloo refused to leave the country he was born in and defied orders to stop performing.

• In December of 2007, the legal theorist Cass R. Sunstein wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the filtering effects that frequently attend the spread of information on the Web. “As a result of the Internet, we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches—much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we’re likely to like,” Sunstein noted. In the piece, “The Polarization of Extremes,” Sunstein argued that the trend promised ill effects for the direction—or, more precisely, the misdirection—of public opinion. “If people are sorted into enclaves and niches, what will happen to their views?” he wondered. “What are the eventual effects on democracy?”

• In the wake of the US election, critics have blamed Facebook for bringing about—at least in part—Trump’s surprise win. A BuzzFeed report showed that Facebook users interacted far more with “fake news” stories about both candidates than they did with mainstream news outlets before the election. This wouldn’t seem like such a big deal if it weren’t for a Pew Research Center survey showing that 44% of Americans rely on Facebook to get all their news.

• But proving whether fake news influenced the election more than the usual political propaganda is impossible. What’s certain is that fake news on Facebook is a symptom of a larger problem: the company is trying to play contradictory roles as both trustworthy news publisher and fun social media platform for personal sharing. The problem is that it cannot be both—at least not without making some changes.

• What blissful days these must be for the alt-right.

• Their preferred candidate for president is transitioning into the White House.

• Their champion, Steve Bannon, formerly CEO of the most mainstream media platform for alt-right voices on the internet, Breitbart.com, has secured a place in the West Wing at elbow’s length from the new president.

• And the conventional media seem to be stumbling around trying to decide whether to explain the alt-right, ignore it, censor it or refuse to even speak its name.

• Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, fears the very term “alt-right” is a sinister “branding move” to give cover to racists. Instead, he suggests journalists should use phrases such as “the alt-right, a white nationalist, anti-Semitic movement.”

• Sixty percent of Russians believe that Internet censorship — in particular, the banning of certain websites and material — is necessary, according to a new poll.

• Just 25 percent opposed the idea; the rest of the respondents didn’t know or declined to answer.

• The poll was conducted by the Levada Center, an independent polling firm, which asked Russians questions about trust in media and censorship between Oct. 21 to 24. On the subject of political censorship, 32 percent of Russians said that denying access to certain websites would infringe upon the rights and freedoms of activists, while 44 percent said it did not and 24 percent could not answer.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Even one is a problem, for reasons that Edward Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang pointed out earlier this year: a mobile phone is “the perfect tracking device.” The new register may indeed help tackle the theft of mobile phones in Argentina. But it will also create a powerful and dangerous new resource that the authorities will surely be unable to resist dipping into for other purposes.

• Since publishing a story about an apparent National Security Agency surveillance site in New York, The Intercept has obtained several previously unseen photographs from within the building, offering a rare glimpse behind its thick concrete and granite walls.

• On Wednesday, we reported that top-secret documents indicate there is an NSA spy hub inside the massive, windowless skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, used by AT&T to route communications across the world. The 550-foot tower contains equipment that covertly monitors phone calls, faxes, and internet data, according to the documents. But with the exception of employees who have worked at the building, few people have ever been allowed inside the iconic brutalist structure, which was built to withstand a nuclear attack amid the Cold War.

• Stanley Greenberg, a 60-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, shared a series of photographs he took in September 1992 while visiting 33 Thomas Street. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks, security was not as tight. At the time, Greenberg was carrying out research for a book, Invisible New York, and AT&T granted him access. The photographs never made it into the book, but Greenberg revisited his photo archive this week and sent the pictures to The Intercept after reading the revelations about the building’s apparent role as an NSA site, code-named TITANPOINTE.

• [...]

• One of Greenberg’s photos (featured at the top of this article) clearly shows some of AT&T’s “4ESS switch” equipment that is used to send phone calls across networks. The NSA’s documents describe the TITANPOINTE facility as containing a “RIMROCK access,” which is what the agency calls the 4ESS switches that it taps into. By 2004, at least one of these was an “international gateway” used to route foreign calls to and from the U.S., a former AT&T engineer has said.

• Another photograph taken by Greenberg (below) shows a room full of large batteries, which were likely used as a back-up energy source for the building in the event of a power failure. Original planning documents for 33 Thomas Street state that it would have enough emergency power to last two weeks, enabling it to become a “self-contained city” in the event of a catastrophe.

• [...]

• Klein later moved to California, where he continued his work for AT&T. In 2006, he alleged in a sworn court declaration that the company had maintained a secure room in one of its San Francisco offices, which he stated had been equipped with NSA technology to spy on phone and internet traffic. Klein told The Intercept that he didn’t know of any NSA presence at 33 Thomas Street, but it did not surprise him to discover its apparent role as the TITANPOINTE surveillance site.

• “I always assumed and gathered information back then that there were numerous other offices like the one in San Francisco,” he said. “I was only aware of the ones on the West Coast, from talking to people. But logically I assumed there had to be some in places like New York or Chicago, the major telecom centers.”

• President Barack Obama’s administration institutionalized a drone program that involves a targeted assassination policy for individuals put on kill lists. It not only devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in countries, like Afghanistan, but it traumatizes the military officers, who are part of the system which makes strikes possible. But for them, there is little to no support for the depression, suicidal ideations, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) they develop as a result of the horrible things they are asked to do.

• As the documentary, “National Bird,” shows, the officers struggle with the morality of their actions, but they face a presidential administration, which has criminalized more whistleblowers than all other previous presidential administrations combined. Officers who speak out about the drone program face the prospect of harsh prosecution under the Espionage Act, as if talking about what they saw as officers is treasonous. That weighs heavy on veterans of the drone program and makes them terrified to be labeled whistleblowers because they know how the government could destroy their lives if they become known to the public as whistleblowers.

• A new law giving GCHQ increased powers is set to become law.

• The Investigatory Powers Bill has been passed by peers in the House of Lords and there only remains some discussion of possible amendments in both houses of Parliament before Royal Assent by the Queen makes it law.

• Privacy campaigners have criticised the bill as ‘Snooper’s Charter II’ after the 2012 Draft Communications Bill which was blocked by Liberal Democrats in the coalition government.

• Donald Trump announced on Friday that he’s chosen Congressman Mike Pompeo to run the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the premiere spy agency of the United States.

• Pompeo, a Republican lawmaker from Kansas and a former Army officer, has little-to-no experience in the world of intelligence (other than being part of the House Intelligence Committee), but he’s distinguished himself for being a strong supporter of mass surveillance and for thinking that using encryption, by itself, might be a sign that you’re a terrorist.

• “Forcing terrorists into encrypted channels, however, impedes their operational effectiveness by constraining the amount of data they can send and complicating transmission protocols, a phenomenon known in military parlance as virtual attrition,” Pompeo wrote in an op-ed published in January by The Wall Street Journal. “Moreover, the use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag.”

• Transport for London is to start a four week trial of reading Wi-Fi connection request data from London Underground passengers’ mobile phones.

• The trial, which will last four weeks from 21 November, “will help give TfL a more accurate understanding of how people move through stations, interchange between services and how crowding develops,” according to the transport authority.

• The idea is to develop a more accurate picture of how passengers make interchanges on the Tube network.

• Data available to TfL at present only records where people enter the London Underground and where they leave it, meaning figuring out their movements in between those points is a matter of educated guesswork.

• The selection of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for National Security Adviser has local Muslim leaders concerned about what it could mean for their community members.

• There’s already been some talk of a Muslim registry under a Trump administration, but the appointment of Flynn is adding to the concerns of Muslims in south-central Wisconsin.

• Flynn has been outspoken in his opposition to radical Islam, but that is not the part that bothers local Muslim leaders.

• He’s also taken aim at the religion as a whole, tweeting in February – “Fear of Islam is RATIONAL.”

• Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence officer who is Donald Trump’s pick to serve as his national security adviser, is a harsh critic of Muslim extremism and the religion itself, calling “radical Islam” an existential threat to the United States.

• In strident speeches and public comments, including a fiery address at the Republican National Convention, Flynn has aggressively argued that Islamic State militants pose a threat on a global scale and demanded a far more aggressive U.S. military campaign against the group.

• Donald Trump’s national security team is discussing plans to dismantle the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the organization that was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, according to an adviser to the president-elect and a former senior intelligence official. The news comes as the current director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced his resignation Thursday.

• The Trump national security team has been meeting in recent days, planning the removal of the cabinet-level position and assessing how to fold parts of the organization into the 16 federal intelligence agencies it oversees, according to both people with knowledge of the plans. If the restructuring is accomplished, it would undo legislation passed by Congress in 2004, dismantle the biggest American intelligence bureaucracy created since the end of World War II, and roll back a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

• Remember how, right after the Paris bombings, people started blaming encryption for the attacks, despite the fact it was later revealed that most of the planning was done in the open and communication occurred via unencrypted SMS messages? As we noted, it seemed pretty clear that the bombings were an intelligence and law enforcement failure rather than an encryption problem.

• Now, just to add more evidence to that conclusion in the most ridiculous way possible, apparently Brussels police just found a mobile phone and USB stick that had belonged to one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks, Brahim Abdeslam. The police had seized the phone and USB stick during a drug raid back in February of 2015… and promptly misplaced them entirely. They were found under a stack of papers. Really.

• A former GCHQ employee once suspended from work because of an “incident” was found drowned in his bath with his flat’s front door unlocked, an inquest heard.

• Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed any suicidal thoughts to those closest to him and was actively seeking a new job at the time of his death.

• A former GCHQ worker who was looking for a new job was found drowned in his bath with the front door of his flat unlocked by his parents.

• Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed suicidal ideas and seemed ‘completely normal’ when he last saw his parents a couple of months ago, an inquest heard.

• They found him laying face-down in his bath when they went to his Cheltenham flat – near the spy base – on April 17 because they had been unable to contact him.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A former CIA officer has broken the U.S. silence around the 2003 abduction of a radical Islamist cleric in Italy, charging that the agency inflated the threat the preacher posed and that the United States then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from responsibility for approving the operation.

• Pompeo on Guantanamo Bay:

• “GTMO has been a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism. I have traveled to GTMO and have seen the honorable and professional behavior of the American men and women in uniform, who serve at the detention facility,” Pompeo said in a statement on Nov. 18. “The detainees at GTMO are treated exceptionally well – so well that some have even declined to be resettled, instead choosing to stay at GTMO. It is delusional to think that any plan the president puts before Congress to relocate radical Islamic terrorists to the U.S, and potentially Fort Leavenworth Kansas, will make our country safer. The reality is that this proposal will ultimately put Kansans and Americans in danger.”

• Last week, I was a little unfair to our friends over at Fight for the Future in noting that it was too late for President Obama to “dismantle the NSA” as was suggested in a Time article written by FftF’s awesome campaign director Evan Greer. I was focusing on why the President should have limited the NSA much more seriously earlier on (like way earlier…), but some interpreted it to mean that I was suggesting that FftF had only just jumped on the bandwagon to stop mass surveillance. That’s clearly not true — as it’s been one of the leading voices in the fight to get the President to scale back mass surveillance since the group took on that issue many years ago.

• There is very little chance President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden before his final term is up – leaving his fate to an unforgiving Trump administration and an incoming CIA director who had called for his execution.

• Mr Snowden has lived in Russia since he leaked documents revealing a secret surveillance programme helmed by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies. The Department of Justice charged Mr Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

• After appearing before the United Nations for the first time and telling delegates she was “ashamed” to stand before them while they did nothing to prevent the rape and abuse of Yazidi women, Amal Clooney stood before a conference of women and urged them to join the fight for women’s rights in countries where they are most under threat.

• The renowned human rights lawyer gave the keynote speech at the Texas Conference for Women on Tuesday, where more than 100 leading women from different sectors also delivered talks.

• In September, Clooney condemned world leaders for their inaction over the persecution of the Yazidi community, a religious minority in northern Iraq who have been targeted by Isis. In her speech on Tuesday, Clooney spoke more about the plight of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was trafficked by Isis as a sex slave and now advocates on behalf of Yazidi women.

• Civil asset forfeiture is victimization by government — removing any possibility of a defense. It’s taking without any sort of proof of wrongdoing by the person whose money has been hoovered up by the government; it’s the antithesis of our legal standard, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

• It turns citizens who have been convicted of nothing into victims of greedy law enforcement workers and officials, who typically get to keep the proceeds or part of the proceeds from stopping somebody on the road who’s carrying some cash and declaring it the result of ill-gotten gains…sometimes simply because people who are in the drug trade use a road and sometimes without as much as a bullshit excuse like that.

• President-elect Donald Trump has nominated US Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to be his administration’s attorney general, a move that civil liberties advocates are decrying as a likely catastrophe for privacy and immigration.

• While many of Trump’s forthcoming nominations will amount to little more than inside-the-Beltway gossip, Sessions stands out. He’s an advocate for surveillance and an enemy of encryption; an opponent of criminal justice reform; and a hardliner on immigration. First elected to the US Senate in 1996, he has long stood to the right even among his conservative Republican colleagues as a champion of security above all. As Attorney General, Sessions would have the power to radically recast the Obama administration’s definition of civil liberties online and off.

• The Senate Judiciary Committee must still approve Sessions’ nomination. But civil rights groups are already sounding the alarm over the possibility that he could become the most powerful law enforcement officer in the land. Sessions’ track record also suggest he’s also going to find himself at sharp odds with the tech industry’s liberal and libertarian-leaning leadership.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The open-source maps were created in collaboration with the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network and World Bank statistics to create datasets that incorporate population demographics, infrastructure development and existing internet penetration to identify the connectivity gaps and how to fix them. Making them open source means NGOs, innovators or companies can access them. They plan to release more maps over the coming months.

• In the wake of a Donald Trump’s upset victory, telecom industry players are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of eviscerating Barack Obama’s fledgling net neutrality rules.

• It was one of the crowning achievements of Obama’s administration when the FCC passed rules that barred broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic, or providing paid “fast lanes” for select content. The rules enshrined the principal that all data traveling through ISPs’ pipes had to be treated equally.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Donald Trump isn’t in the White House yet is but already under pressure from people hoping to benefit from his influence. Among them Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which have written to the president-elect hoping that he’ll uphold the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA to prevent service providers from being held liable for user-uploaded content.

• The age of digitisation has opened new doors to distribution of information including for libraries and archives. However, librarians and archivists are often confronted with risk of liability for copyright infringement, nationally and in cross-border activities. This week, they asked the World Intellectual Property Organization copyright committee to provide them not only with some exceptions to copyright, but with protection against liability.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.