● 12.03.16

● Links 3/12/2016: Mageia 5.1 Released, Mozilla Revenue at $421.3M

Posted in News Roundup at 11:14 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• In these hard-economic times, cutting expense is among the keys to the success of a business. Licensing costs can be a huge drain on the wallet of any service. Of course, Microsoft Windows servers are still the standard in a lot of offices, however, there is an unsung hero out there simply waiting to be discovered by more business-owners. This article is obviously describing Linux. While it does have some appeal in both the general public and economic sectors, it is widely used for servers and still not a really popular operating system for workstations but among geeks. Why? You might ask. Microsoft has the marketplace cornered and remains the norm simply by being the standard. This is not to state that Microsoft does not produce quality software application; this post indicates absolutely nothing of the sort. Microsoft got where they are today by their sweat and devoted developers, in no way is this article lessening the quality of Microsoft or their line of products.

• Over the recent years, there has been a large number of individuals as well as organizations who are ditching the Windows platform for Linux platform, and this number will continue to grow as more developments in Linux are experienced. Linux has for long been the leader in Web servers as most of the web servers run on Linux, and this could be one of the reasons why the high migration is being experienced.

• Does actually Linux community like Microsoft? Does actually Linux community trust Microsoft? I cannot answer the first question for sure, but I have a sure answer for the second question.

Desktop

• PINE, the rival company of Raspberry Pi and maker of the $20 Pine A64, has just announced its two below $100-priced Linux laptops, known as PINEBOOK. The affordable Linux laptop is powered by Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-bit processor and comes with an 11.6″ or 14″ monitor.

• I have an odd confession: sometimes I feel (irrationally) embarrassed that despite being a computer person, I don’t have a laptop. Everyone else seems to have one, yet here I am, clearly behind the times, clinging to a desktop-only setup. At times like this I naturally wind up considering the issue of what laptop I might get if I was going to get one, and after my recent exposure to a Chromebook I’ve been thinking about this once again.

• I’ll never be someone who uses a laptop by itself as my only computer, so I’m not interested in a giant laptop with a giant display; giant displays are one of the things that the desktop is for. Based on my experiences so far I think that a roughly 13″ laptop is at the sweet spot of a display that’s big enough without things being too big, and I would like something that’s nicely portable.

Server

• In my last infrastructure update, I documented our challenges with storage as GitLab scales. We built a CephFS cluster to tackle both the capacity and performance issues of NFS and decided to replace PostgreSQL standard Vacuum with the pg_repack extension. Now, we’re feeling the pain of running a high performance distributed filesystem on the cloud.

• Sysadmins can use the product to improve their skills or prepare for an interview by practicing some day to day job scenarios. There is an invitation list opened for the first testers of the product.

Kernel Space

• Brillo, he said, is a software stack for the Internet of things based on the Android system. These deployments bring a number of challenges, starting with the need to support a different sort of hardware than Android normally runs on; target devices may have no display or input devices, but might well have “fun buses” to drive interesting peripherals. The mix of vendors interested in this area is different; handset vendors are present, but many more traditional embedded vendors can also be found there. Brillo is still in an early state of development.

Applications

• For years, one of the overlooked areas for the Linux desktop was access to “effective” parental controls. Back in 2003, I remember the now defunct Linspire (then known as Lindows) offered a proprietary option called SurfSafe. Surprisingly, at least back then, the product worked very well in providing accurate content filtering capabilities; something that was not,in fact, available and easy-to-use at that time.

• Years later, an open-source alternative was released to the greater Linux community known as GNOME Nanny. Fantastic in terms of usage control, its web content web filter was laughably terrible. As expected, crowd-sourcing a filtering list isn’t a great solution. And like SurfSafe, the project is now defunct.

Proprietary

• I have been testing some services for our project and found this amazing service, thought why not share it with you guys, it might be useful for you. Project management is a term that in some respects appears common, yet in practice still seems to be limited to large companies. While this may be true, the foundations of project management are actually rather simple and can be adopted by anyone, in any industry. One of the major requirements you need to consider when selecting a good project management software is the ability to run and operate it on the go via your mobile devices. Other factors include the ability to access the software from any platform whether it be Linux, Mac, or Windows. This can be achieved when the project management software is web-based. Wrike is a software that does of all this.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• For 20 years KDE has been building free software for the world. As part of this endeavor, we created a collection of libraries to assist in high-quality C++ software development as well as building highly integrated graphic applications on any operating system. We call them the KDE Frameworks.

• It’s finally done! I’m happy to tell you that Marble Maps version 1.0 has just landed in the Google Play Store (update: direct APK here if you are not using Google Play). We hope you like it as much as we do

• Many thanks to all contributors who made this possible. Thanks to a multitude of performance improvements all over the place, vector rendering has become very fast. And thanks to the ever-improving vector tile creation toolchain we are able to provide a lot more data than I anticipated some weeks ago. For the first version there are Germany and 200 cities world-wide in full detail, as well as most European countries and the USA in high detail (up to tile level 13 or 15). For the rest of the world we provide medium detail at least (up to tile level 9). The plan, of course, is to provide full vector data for the whole world in the near future.

• In KDE-land I’ve mostly been helping out porting and finishing up porting stuff to KDE frameworks. A lot of smaller stuff like krename and kregexpeditor, but also helping out finishing up the porting of e. g. okular, ktorrent and konsole. And of course also Filelight.

• As you have probably noticed, this move took a while to reach stable due to the issues with our main server, which resulted in a downtime of 2 days for our website and all the related services. There was nothing we could do, since our hosting provider experienced a major subsystem malfunction. The website might be a bit unstable or slow in the following days until the issue is properly fixed. We can only apologize for any inconvenience.

• KDE has been lately been growing quite a bit in repositories, and it’s not always easy to tell what needs to be build before, do i build first kdepim-apps-libs or pimcommon?

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This November from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 was held in Berlin the GNOME Core Apps Hackfest.

• My focus during this hackfest was to start implementing a widget for the series view of the Videos application, following a mockup by Allan Day.

Distributions

Reviews

• Fedora plus Moka icons plus some extra software, mainly coming from proprietary sources. I guess that’s the best way to describe Chapeau. But then, what separates one distro from another if not a collection of decorations, as software is essentially the same, apart from a very small number of standalone distributions trying to develop their own identity with their own desktop environments and app stack, re: elementary or Solus + Budgie? Except they struggle, too.

• Chapeau 24 is a nice effort to make Fedora friendlier, but then it does not achieve the needed result without pain. The biggest issues included a botched smartphone support. Samba woes and the horrible bootloader bug. Other than that, it behaved more or less the same way as the parent distro. Then again, why bother if you can pimp up Fedora without any loss of functionality?

• I do like Chapeau Cancellara, but I cannot ignore the fact Fedora does the same with fewer problems. All in all, it’s a welcome effort, but it needs more polish. It does not quite capture the heart the way Fuduntu did. And with some issues looming high above the distro, the grade can only be about 6/10. Most importantly, the bootloader setup must be flawless, and there’s not excuse for small app errors that we’ve seen. We know it can do more. Anyhow, if you’re not keen on any self-service round Fedora, this could be a good test bed for your games. A moderately worthy if somewhat risky and flawed experience.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• As we’re getting closer to the end of the year, Mageia has a present for you! We are very pleased to announce the release of Mageia 5.1!

• This release – like Mageia 4.1 was in its time – is a respin of the Mageia 5 installation and Live ISO images, based on the Mageia 5 repository and incorporating all updates to allow for an up to date installation without the need to install almost a year and a half worth of updates. It is therefore recommended for new installations and upgrades from Mageia 4.

• The new images are available from the downloads page, both directly and through torrents.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• If you have a rotational disk, then Fedora 25 will be a little slow to boot and there is nothing you or I can do to fix it. But if you have an SSD, then you shall have no issues here. Other than that, I’m quite pleased with this release actually. Sure the responsiveness sucked the first time on, but as mentioned, it can be fixed, permanently. And the stability is also excellent. While I’m not a huge fan of the GNOMEShell (I think it’s stupid!), the ‘Classic’ session is also available, nonetheless. If you fancy giving it a go, then get it from here, but first make sure to read the release notes.

• For those who can’t live without screen colour shifting technology such as Redshift or f.lux, myself being one of them, using Wayland did pose the challenge of having these existing tools not working with the Xorg replacement. Thankfully, all is not lost and it is possible even right now. Thanks to a copr repo, it’s particularly easy on Fedora 25.

• One of the changes that comes with Wayland is there is currently no way for third-party apps to modify screen gamma curves. Therefore, no redshift apps, such as Redshift itself (which I recently covered here) will work while running under Wayland.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• There’s a new MirAL release (0.5.0) available in ‘Zesty Zapus’ (Ubuntu 17.04) and the so-called “stable phone overlay” ppa for ‘Xenial Xerus’. MirAL is a project aimed at simplifying the development of Mir servers and particularly providing a stable ABI and sensible default behaviors.

• Nemo 3.2.0 with Unity patches and without Cinnamon dependencies is available for Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10. To make it easy to go back to Nemo 2.8.0 for Ubuntu 16.04 users in case something doesn’t work properly (because there were quite a few under the hood changes in Nemo), I decided to upload the latest Nemo 3.2.0 to a new PPA.

Flavours and Variants

• The developers of Mofo Linux talk a good game. From the name’s origin in abusive street slang to its self-description on the home page as “Linux designed to defeat state censorship and surveillance,” Mofo presents itself as a champion of security and privacy. Nor is the claim unjustified. However, rather than putting security and privacy into the hands of ordinary users, Mofo simply presents the tools and leaves users to figure them out with a minimum of help. The result is a promising distribution that with only slightly more work, could be a leading one.

• Just possibly, though, this approach is a deliberate tactic, and not the carelessness it appears. Based on Ubuntu, the current release of Mofo offers nothing different in the way of productivity tools. It uses Unity for a desktop, and its applications are the standard GNOME ones. In fact, Mofo shows such little interest in such matters that it does not bother to change the title bar in the installer from Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• In February this year, Google’s smartwatch boss painted me a rosy picture of the future of wearable technology.

• The wrist is, David Singleton said, “the ideal place for the power of Google to help people with their lives.”

• Mycroft will soon be available as a pre-built Raspberry Pi 3 image for any hobbyist to use. The new backend we have been quietly building is emerging from beta, making the configuration and management of you devices simple. We are forming partnerships to get Mycroft onto laptops, desktops and other devices in the world. Mycroft will soon be speaking to you throughout your day.

Phones

Tizen

• Going on a train journey in India? Ixigo will check the PNR status, the train arrival and departure & how many of the particular tickets are left that you can purchase. You can also do a PNR status check to make sure that your seat is booked and confirmed.

Android

• Sprint, the fourth-largest U.S. wireless carrier, stopped leasing certain Android phones to customers after finding that the devices weren’t holding their value on the used market.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google has launched a new project for continuously testing open source software for security vulnerabilities.

• The company’s new OSS-Fuzz service is available in beta starting this week, but at least initially it will only be available for open source projects that have a very large user base or are critical to global IT infrastructure.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• For its fiscal 2015 year, Mozilla reported revenue of $421.3 million, up from $329.6 million that it reported Mozilla’s revenue’s have grown significantly over the last decade. The first year that Mozilla ever publicly disclosed its financial status was for its 2005 fiscal year, when the open-source organization generated $52.9 million in revenue.

• Mozilla announced a major change in November 2014 in regards to the company’s main revenue stream.

• The organization had a contract with Google in 2014 and before that had Google pay Mozilla money for being the default search engine in the Firefox web browser.

• This deal was Mozilla’s main source of revenue, about 329 million US Dollars in 2014. The change saw Mozilla broker deals with search providers instead for certain regions of the world.

Healthcare

• “Well, looks like the Angel Sensor folks have (finally) officially thrown in the towel,” he wrote. “Not really a surprise, as they had gone silent for nearly a year after delivering their crowdfunded product over two years late. They did release code for their open-source SDK, and there is a community of developers who have forked it on GitHub3 to continue development. Too bad they gave up, as the promise of a truly open source wearable with an array of useful sensors is lacking in the QS space.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The government can help us by making software companies distribute the source code. They can say it’s “in the interest of national security”. And they can sort out the patent system (there are various problems with how the patent system handles software which are out of the scope of this article). So when you chat to your MP please mention this.

• Among its many activities, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is one of the few organizations that does any work on enforcing the GPL when other compliance efforts have failed. A suggestion by SFC executive director Karen Sandler to have a Q&A session about compliance and enforcement at this year’s Kernel Summit led to a prolonged discussion, but not to such a session being added to the agenda. However, the co-located Linux Plumbers Conference set up a “birds of a feather” (BoF) session so that interested developers could hear more about the SFC’s efforts, get their questions answered, and provide feedback. Sandler and SFC director of strategic initiatives Brett Smith hosted the discussion, which was quite well-attended—roughly 70 people were there at a 6pm BoF on November 3.

• At the FSF, we run our own infrastructure using only free software, which makes us stand out from nearly every other nonprofit organization. Virtually all others rely on outside providers and use a significant amount of nonfree software. With your support, we set an example proving that a nonprofit can follow best practices while running only free software.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Bay Area startup SiFive has announced the Freedom Everywhere 310 (FE310) system-on-chip — the industry’s first commercially-available SoC based on the free, open-source RISC-V architecture, along with the corresponding low-cost, Arduino-compatible HiFive1 development kit.

• It was always thought that, when ARM relinquished its independence, its customers would look around for other alternatives.

• The nice thing about RISC-V is that it’s independent, open source and royalty-free.

• And RISC-V is what Samsung is reported to be using for an IoT CPU in preference to ARM.

• First introduced in Intel’s 965 Express Chipset Family, the Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically located in the (G)MCH chip (for Core 2 family CPUs which is separate from the northbridge), or PCH chip replacing ICH(for Core i3/i5/i7 which is integrated with northbridge).

Leftovers

Science

• This fundamental form of scientific communication is threatened by modern recording technology and researchers who refuse to adhere to an age-old ethical code.

Health/Nutrition

• The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, civil society, and farmers’ representatives have raised serious concerns on the upcoming adoption of draft regulations of a protocol protecting breeders’ rights in Africa. Civil society groups and farmers’ representatives have been blocked from participating in the meeting expected to adopt the regulations, according to them. The Special Rapporteur is calling for a halt to the process, and for starting again with a more transparent, inclusive, and evidence-based process.

Security

• I received a container bugzilla today for someone who was attempting to assign a container process to the object_r role. Hopefully this blog will help explain how roles work with SELinux.

• When we describe SELinux we often concentrate on Type Enforcement, which is the most important and most used feature of SELinux. This is what describe in the SELinux Coloring book as Dogs and Cats. We also describe MLS/MCS Separation in the coloring book.

• The Internet Society (ISOC) is the latest organisation saying, in essence, “security is rubbish – fix it”.

• Years of big data breaches are having their impact, it seems: in its report released last week, it quotes a 54-country, 24,000-respondent survey reporting a long-term end user trend to become more fearful in using the Internet (by Ipsos on behalf of the Centre for International Governance Innovation).

• Report author, economist and ISOC fellow Michael Kende, reckons companies aren’t doing enough to control breaches.

• “According to the Online Trust Alliance, 93 per cent of breaches are preventable” he said, but “steps to mitigate the cost of breaches that do occur are not taken – attackers cannot steal data that is not stored, and cannot use data that is encrypted.”

• Among the many unpleasant things in the Investigatory Powers Act that was officially signed into law this week, one that has not gained as much attention is the apparent ability for the UK government to undermine encryption and demand surveillance backdoors.

• As the bill was passing through Parliament, several organizations noted their alarm at section 217 which obliged ISPs, telcos and other communications providers to let the government know in advance of any new products and services being deployed and allow the government to demand “technical” changes to software and systems.

• Today the European Parliament approved the EU Budget for 2017. The budget sets aside 1.9 million euros in order to improve the EU’s IT infrastructure by extending the free software audit programme (FOSSA) that MEPs Max Anderson and Julia Reda initiated two years ago, and by including a bug bounty approach in the programme that was proposed by MEP Marietje Schaake.

• Since the initial launch of Qubes OS back in April 2010, work on Qubes has been funded in several different ways. Originally a pet project, it was first supported by Invisible Things Lab (ITL) out of the money we earned on various R&D and consulting contracts. Later, we decided that we should try to commercialize it. Our idea, back then, was to commercialize Windows AppVM support. Unlike the rest of Qubes OS, which is licensed under GPLv2, we thought we would offer Windows AppVM support under a proprietary license. Even though we made a lot of progress on both the business and technical sides of this endeavor, it ultimately failed.

• Luckily, we got a helping hand from the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which has supported the project for the past two years. While not a large sum of money in itself, it did help us a lot, especially with all the work necessary to improve Qubes’ user interface, documentation, and outreach to new communities. Indeed, the (estimated) Qubes user base has grown significantly over that period. Thank you, OTF!

• Every new Linux system administrator needs to learn a few core concepts before delving into the operating system and its applications. This short guide gives a summary of some of the essential security measures that every root user must know. All advice given follows the best security practices that are mandated by the community and the industry.

• The law of leaky abstractions states that “all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky”. In this blog post we’ll explore the ashmem shared memory interface provided by Android and see how false assumptions about its internal operation can result in security vulnerabilities affecting core system code.

Defence/Aggression

• Hackers destroyed computers at six important Saudi organizations two weeks ago, marking a reappearance of the most damaging cyberweapon the world has ever seen.

• Last time, it was used to destroy 35,000 computers at the oil company Saudi Aramco. U.S. intelligence quietly blamed Iran for that attack.

• This time around, the cyberweapon has attacked at least one Saudi government agency, as well as organizations in the energy, manufacturing and transportation sectors, according to two researchers with direct knowledge of the investigations into the attack.

• A teacher faces a classroom ban after he allegedly “condoned” the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in front of pupils at a Tower Hamlets school.

• Hamza Jalal Tariq, 28, effectively said during a lesson that the victims murdered by Islamist gunmen “should be killed for insulting the prophet”, a professional conduct panel ruled.

• The panel heard Tariq made the comment in response to a student just days after 12 people were murdered in the French satirical newspaper’s Paris office in January last year.

• Tariq was a teacher at Tower Hamlets PRU, which has four sites across the east London borough, since 2013, but resigned after the accusations surfaced.

• Yesterday, I wrote about the thwarted mass murder at Ohio State University. To the Best Vice-President We Never Had, Tim Kaine, it was “a senseless act of gun violence”. To those under attack, it was in fact an act of automobile violence and machete violence. And to the perpetrator, it was not “senseless” but made perfect sense.

• Donald Trump has spoken with the president of Taiwan, a self-governing island the U.S. broke diplomatic ties with in 1979.

• It is highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for a U.S. president or president-elect to speak directly with a Taiwanese leader. The U.S. cut formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan when it shifted diplomatic recognition of China to the communist government on the mainland, although Washington still has close unofficial ties with Taipei.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The term “snowball effect” is an unfortunate way to describe climate change, but a new study is predicting just that.

• Climate scientists warn that by 2050, an astonishing 55 trillion kilograms of carbon could be released into the atmosphere from the soil. To put things in perspective, that’s the emissions equivalent of adding another United States to the planet. And, like a rapidly tumbling snowball, more emissions mean more warming, and more warming means… well, you get it.

• Of course, this nightmare scenario hinges on our inability to curb carbon emissions—a fate that’s become significantly more realistic with Donald Trump, a vocal climate change denier and coal aficionado, about to enter the White House. Our failure to meet the goals mandated by the Paris Agreement would result in “about 17 percent more than the projected emissions due to human-related activities during that period,” Tom Crowther, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, said in a statement.

• Climate change is set to cause a refugee crisis of “unimaginable scale”, according to senior military figures, who warn that global warming is the greatest security threat of the 21st century and that mass migration will become the “new normal”.

• The generals said the impacts of climate change were already factors in the conflicts driving a current crisis of migration into Europe, having been linked to the Arab Spring, the war in Syria and the Boko Haram terrorist insurgency.

Finance

• The story went on to say that Trump and Vice President–elect Mike Pence had promised Carrier they would be “friendlier to businesses by easing regulations and overhauling the corporate tax code.” Probably more to the point from Carrier’s point of view, Schwartz noted that the state of Indiana, where Pence is still governor, “also plans to give economic incentives to Carrier as part of the deal to stay.”

• So Trump’s job program involves cutting business taxes and regulations, plus a corporate-welfare package whose cost will presumably be declared after media attention wanders. This makes Trump “a different kind of Republican” how, exactly?

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• About 1:30 into the video above, Daily Show host Trevor Noah, as echoed by the Huffington Post, committed fake news.

• Well, to be fair, it was more like ignorance than fake, because Noah’s shock and accusations that Trump is going to charge the Secret Service $1.5 million in rent to help protect him at Trump Tower was only a couple of Googles away from being shown to be wrong.

• To begin, Noah appears somewhat surprised that a president-elect is protected, and that protection costs a lot of money. Noah seems somewhat offended that that protection will take place at Trump Tower.

• Surprise! Any president-elect has to live somewhere. It makes sense he’d stay living where he always does. There is no junior White House. Also, presidents do not give up their homes when they move into the White House. All have kept their own homes and the Secret Service has always protected them there. Reagan and Bush had their ranches, remember. Nothing new here.

• The Washington Post (11/24/16) last week published a front-page blockbuster that quickly went viral: Russia-promoted “fake news” had infiltrated the newsfeeds of 213 million Americans during the election, muddying the waters in a disinformation scheme to benefit Donald Trump. Craig Timberg’s story was based on a “report” from an anonymous group (or simply a person, it’s unclear) calling itself PropOrNot that blacklisted over 200 websites as agents or assets of the Russian state.

• The obvious implication was that an elaborate Russian psyop had fooled the public into voting for Trump based on a torrent of misleading and false information posing as news. Everyone from Bloomberg’s Sahil Kupar to CNN’s to Robert Reich to Anne Navarro to MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid tweeted out the story in breathless tones. Center for American Progress and Clinton advocate Neera Tanden even did her best Ron Paul YouTube commenter impression, exclaiming, “Wake up people.”

• But the story didn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Follow-up reporting cast major doubt on the Washington Post’s core claims and underlying logic, the two primary complaints being 1) the “research group” responsible for the meat of the story, PropOrNot, is an anonymous group of partisans (if more than one person is involved) who tweet like high schoolers, and 2) the list of supposed Russian media assets, because its criteria for Russian “fake news” encompasses “useful idiots,” includes entirely well-within-the-mainstream progressive and libertarian websites such as Truth-Out, Consortium News, TruthDig and Antiwar.com (several of whom are now considering lawsuits against PropOrNot for libel).

• Donald Trump is about to become president and immediately begin violating the Constitution. The Constitution explicitly prohibits the president from taking payments and gifts from foreign governments. (Can we stop using the term “emolument“? No one has used it for a hundred years. We want to be clear on what the Constitution means.)

• Donald Trump is right now and will continue to be taking payments and gifts from foreign governments in the form of benefits to his properties, unless he dumps the stuff. This is about as clear a violation of the constitutional provision imaginable, so why on Earth do we have Andrew Ross Sorkin (New York Times, 11/28/16) approvingly accepting Donald Trump’s nonsense claim in his letter to Mr. Trump?

• “The establishment,” Donald Trump famously said during his closing argument for the presidency, “has trillions of dollars at stake in this election.”

• He described “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

• He asked the country to be “brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment.”

• Now, less than four weeks after riding that line to victory, he formally invited the establishment into his administration.

• On Friday, Trump announced the creation of a “Strategic and Policy Forum” that will serve to advise him on domestic economic matters. The list of advisers is a who’s-who of corporate elites.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In April 2016, the European Ombudsman launched an investigation into the European Commission’s failure to disclose information of the “EU Internet Forum”. The EU Internet Forum brings together US internet companies (Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google), government officials, and law enforcement agencies to discuss how to reduce the accessibility of undefined “terrorist material” (as defined by 28 different national laws that are not even properly implemented in some countries) and badly defined “hate speech” online.

• The ripple effects of the Donald Trump election victory in America continue to wash over many different shorelines of public opinion, like so many mini-tsunamis hitting the Pacific rim over the last few last weeks. The seismic changes have indeed been global, and not least in Europe.

• First up, the Eurocrats have been getting in a bit of a flap about the future of NATO, as I recently wrote. In the past I have also written about the perceived “insider threat” – in other words, whistleblowers – that has been worrying governments and intelligence agencies across the Western world.

• Currently the Twittersphere is lighting up around the issue of “fake news“, with Western mainstream media (news purveyors of the utmost unsullied probity, naturally) blaming Trump’s unexpected victory variously on the US alt-media shock jocks, fake news trolls and bots, and sovereign-state media outlets such as the Russian RT and Sputnik.

• In the wake of US Democrat claims that Russia was interfering in the election process (not a practice that the USA has ever engaged in in any other country around the world whatsoever), we now have the US Green Party presidential candidate apparently spontaneously calling for recounts in three key swing-states in the USA.

• In the summer of 2005, the Danish artist Kåre Bluitgen, when he met a journalist from the Ritzaus Bureau news agency, said he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his book on Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Three illustrators he contacted, Bluitgen said, were too scared. A few months later, Bluitgen reported that he had found someone willing to illustrate his book, but only on the condition of anonymity.

• Like most Danish newspapers, Jyllands-Posten decided to publish an article about Bluitgen’s case. To test the state of freedom of expression, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor at the time, called twelve cartoonists, and offered them $160 each to draw a caricature of Mohammed. What then happened is a well-known, chilling story.

• The public gets a lot of its news and information from Facebook. Some of it is fake. That presents a problem for the site’s users, and for the company itself.

• Facebook cofounder and chairman Mark Zuckerberg said the company will find ways to address the problem, though he didn’t acknowledge its severity. And without apparent irony, he made this announcement in a Facebook post surrounded – at least for some viewers – by fake news items.

• But it didn’t stop there. As the Global Voices post notes, when government officials finally admitted that there had been an accident, social media continued to challenge the government version, which tried to play down the number of dead, and to lay the blame on allegedly-defective Chinese-made carriages.

• China’s WeChat originated as a WhatsApp clone, but later evolved into the single-most important tool for connecting people in China. Yet it’s never been clear exactly how China’s internet censors have attempted to control information that spreads in the app. That’s partly because you likely wouldn’t know if you got censored in the first place.

• When 20-year-old Lan Cai was in a car crash this summer, it was a bad situation. Driving home at 1:30am from a waitressing shift, Cai was plowed into by a drunk driver and broke two bones in her lower back. Unsure about how to navigate her car insurance and prove damages, she reached out for legal help.

• The help she got, Cai said, was less than satisfactory. Lawyers from the Tuan A. Khuu law firm ignored her contacts, and at one point they came into her bedroom while Cai was sleeping in her underwear. “Seriously, it’s super unprofessional!” she wrote on Facebook. (The firm maintains it was invited in by Cai’s mother.) She also took to Yelp to warn others about her bad experience.

• The posts led to a threatening e-mail from Tuan Khuu attorney Keith Nguyen. “If you do not remove the post from Facebook and any other social media sites, my office will have no choice but to file suit,” he told her, according to a report in the Houston Press on the saga.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Most Interesting Man in the World is said to have invented skinny-dipping and parallel-parked a train, but he’s had trouble holding people’s attention on Facebook. A decade ago, TV commercials listing the Connery-esque mondain’s fictional achievements, backed by a jingle heavy on Spanish guitar, helped turn Dos Equis from a fringe beer into a best-seller.

• On Facebook, though, you’d have to click for the sound, so many people would scroll past the ad and didn’t catch any of the Most Interesting Man’s feats, or hear the Spanish guitar, or even see a bottle of beer. “The ad may work better than most, but the consumer still has the right to swipe past it,” says Ron Amram, manager of global media for Dos Equis owner Heineken.

• On Thursday, changes to the rules around US search warrants came into effect, meaning that magistrate judges can now authorize the hacking of computers outside of their own district.

• Legal experts have described the move as the broadest expansion of extraterritorial surveillance power since the FBI’s inception, an agency that has already embarked on international hacking operations. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, has defended the changes, arguing they are crucial for policing crime in an age of anonymization technology such as Tor.

• We decided to do a deeper analysis of this law, since it potentially impacts a large number of ProtonMail users. According to our 2016 Encrypted Email User Survey, the UK accounts for the third largest group of ProtonMail users after the US and Russia. It came as a surprise to us that the law passed with such little fanfare, so we feel it is necessary to draw attention to what is quite possibly the worst surveillance law to have been passed so far in a Western democracy.

• A last-ditch effort in the Senate to prevent changes to a rule that will ease the process for law enforcement to use hacking in investigations failed Wednesday morning, allowing the controversial updates to Rule 41 to take effect at midnight.

• Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Chris Coons (D-Del) took to the floor and unsuccessfully asked for unanimous consent to either pass or formally vote on three bills to delay or prevent updates to the process used by law enforcement to get a warrant to hack suspects’ computers.

• “We simply can’t give unlimited power for unlimited hacking,” Daines argued.

• The updates to Rule 41 address two issues raised by modern cyber investigations. Currently, when suspects use technical means to disguise their location of their computers, it is impossible for law enforcement to determine in which jurisdiction officers must apply for a warrant. The updates would allow any judge to issue a warrant to hack a computer of a suspect hiding its location.

• What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)?

• Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this.

Civil Rights/Policing

• KT McFarland, Donald Trump’s pick to be his deputy national security adviser, once wrote that former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning should be tried for treason and executed if found guilty.

• Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison for handing over a trove of classified documents to Wikileaks. McFarland, a national security analyst and host of an online Fox News show for years, made the comments in a weekly column on the Fox News’ website.

• If Boylan didn’t catch the name of the commentator she saw, it was not hard to find; if I put “boutique issues November 9 MSNBC” into Google, the first thing that comes up is a piece on Breitbart (11/9/16) approvingly recounting the conversation.

• It seems more likely that the omission of Bruni’s name—a familiar one, of course, to regular readers of the Times op-ed page—was a deliberate choice. Note that Maher got different treatment—which seems to suggest a different standard for commentators who work for HBO vs. those who write for the New York Times.

• Out of nine technology companies, from Facebook to Booz Allen Hamilton, only Twitter confirmed it would refuse to help the Trump administration build a “Muslim registry,” The Intercept reported on Friday.

• The outlet contacted—or attempted to contact—the companies over the course of two weeks, asking if they would contract out their services to help create the hypothetical database, which President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser Kris Kobach has said would track immigrants entering the U.S from Muslim nations.

• We’ve written plenty of posts about police body cameras — how useful they can be and how useless they often are. What should result in additional law enforcement accountability has been turned into a mostly-optional documentation system. The new tech and its accompanying guidelines have done very little to increase accountability.

• Body cameras are pretty much mainstream at this point, but when excessive force and/or misconduct are alleged, footage captured by police is often nonexistent. Officers disable recording equipment, delete footage, or simply claim the camera “malfunctioned.” Some repeatedly “forget” to activate their cameras ahead of controversial arrests and interactions.

• But what can be done about it? So far, law enforcement agencies have done little but promise to create more policies and guidelines — ones that can continue to be ignored by officers who’d rather not create a permanent record of their actions. There’s been some discipline, but what little of it there is hasn’t been very severe. And stories of repeated tampering with recording devices in some agencies suggests what is in place isn’t much of a deterrent.

• The FBI is now allowed to hack into computers anywhere in the world using only a single warrant, according to a new rule that was quietly implemented on Thursday.

• Prior to the new policy taking effect, federal computer investigators could only hack into a computer within the same district where they obtained a warrant from a judge. “Rule 41,” as it is known, changes those procedures, allowing feds to search potentially any computer, regardless of where the warrant was issued.

• Devices that investigators believe are part of a botnet or that are masking their location would be vulnerable to the new single-warrant intrusions.

• Authorities say the change is necessary for them to effectively investigate cyber-crimes, particularly ones involving botnets–devices that leverage multiple computers to carry out an attack. A side-effect of the rule, however, could lead to the hacking of innocent individuals whose computers were infected by malware making them unknowingly a part the attack.

• A crowd of at least 200,000 Muslim protesters has descended on Jakarta to demand the Christian governor of the Indonesian capital be arrested for insulting Islam.

• There was heavy security at the rally on Friday with authorities wary of the kind of violence that marred a similar demonstration in November.

• People headed towards a huge park in downtown Jakarta to protest against Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known by his nickname Ahok, who has become the target of widespread anger in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

• A number of Saudi social media users reacted with anger when a woman posted Monday a picture showing her in Riyadh without the traditional body covering known as the abaya and headscarf known as the hijab.

• A 21-year-old student from the city of Dammam who called herself Sara Ahmed for fear that her real name could put her in danger shared the tweet of a woman named Malak Al Shehri photographed wearing a dark blue coat, bright multicolored skirt and boots. Next to the picture, she included screenshots of three tweets by accounts calling for justice and even violence against Shehri. All three tweets included an Arabic hashtag that translates to “We demand the imprisonment of the rebel Angel Al Shehri.” The name Malak translates to “Angel” in Arabic.

• “Kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs,” @ab_alshdadi wrote, while @ilQil tweeted “we want blood.” Many others insulted Shehri’s morals.

• Today it was reported that a Saudi women who posted a picture of herself on social media in public without wearing a hijab faced outrage on social media, including calls for her execution. One man memorably declared: “Kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs.”

• To the surprise of the some, Saudi Arabia – which has been bombing Yemen for 18 months, including one incident where the country’s fighters bombed a funeral, and which has arguably the worst record on women’s rights in the world – was recently re-elected to the Human Rights Council, the United Nations’ premier human rights body. There was, predictably, an outcry.

• Governing women’s clothing, whether on the beaches of Cannes or the streets of Riyadh, is a violation we should all stand against. And clearly people in the Islamic world believe this as ardently as atheists in the West. This year, men in Iran wore headscarves in solidarity with their wives who are forced cover their hair in public places. The campaign against the enforced hijab in Iran has seen women defying morality police in public and even shaving their hair. If men in Saudi Arabia campaigned in similar numbers and joined the fight, perhaps we’d see a change in the Middle East’s political landscape.

• Defense attorneys for Michael Slager, a 35-year-old North Charleston officer, called for a mistrial in the murder case, while the judge has ordered the 12-member panel to continue deliberating. All the while, a single juror wrote a note to the presiding judge that he or she could not, “in good conscience, approve a guilty verdict.”

• “You have a duty to make every reasonable effort to reach a unanimous verdict,” Judge Clifton Newman told panelists, who began hearing the case a month ago. The jury began deliberating Wednesday.

• North Charleston police had officially defended Officer Slager until the footage surfaced. At the moment, the video doesn’t appear to be swaying all 12 jurors that the officer is guilty of murder or voluntary manslaughter.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Specifically, the regulators said “zero rating” can hurt competition and consumers. In the letter obtained by the Associated Press, regulators make the case that other services could pay Verizon and AT&T to not eat into customers’ cell data. This could be bad for competing video services who aren’t in favor with the carriers, the FCC argues.

• AT&T launched DirecTV Now earlier this week. AT&T Mobility customers can stream video data over LTE without impacting their data allowance. Verizon offers something similar with its go90 service.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• When you cover enough trademark disputes, you come to expect a fairly typical pattern to them. Entity X bullies entity Y over a vaguely similar use of a mark that often times is overly broad or generic, and then there is either a capitulation to the bullying, a settlement, or the rare instance of a trial that results in an actual ruling. The outcomes aren’t typically favorable for those of us that think trademark law has been pushed beyond its original intent, but the pattern persists.

• But every once in a while, you find a zebra amidst the thundering hooves of horses. Such is the case with a very strange dispute currently going on between Iceland Foods, a foodstuffs retailer, and Iceland, the island nation between Greenland and the rest of Europe. Due to the retailer’s aggressive protection of its trademark, which consists of a generic term preceeded by the name of a country, Iceland has petitioned to revoke the trademark Iceland Foods has on its name for all of Europe.

Copyrights

• A site that was outlawed following mass court action against more than 150 domains has been cleared on appeal. Kisstube embeds movies, some of them infringing, hosted on other platforms such as YouTube. However, the Rome Court of Appeal found that according to an EU ruling, merely embedding pirated content is not illegal.

• Early November, police in Italy targeted more than 150 sites involved in the unauthorized streaming of movies and sports.

• The Special Units of the Guardia di Finanza obtained a mass injunction from a judge in Rome, heralding the largest ever blocking operation in the country.

• Yesterday – as part of its Digital Single Market Strategy – the EU Commission unveiled proposals for new tax rules with the objective of supporting e-commerce and online businesses in the EU.

• Among the measures proposed, there is one that may be of interest also from a copyright perspective.

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