● 12.07.16

● Links 7/12/2016: ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5, Ubuntu Touch OTA-14

Posted in News Roundup at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Operating systems don’t quite date back to the beginning of computing, but they go back far enough. Mainframe customers wrote the first ones in the late 1950s, with operating systems that we’d more clearly recognize as such today—including OS/360 from IBM and Unix from Bell Labs—following over the next couple of decades.

Server

• Docker, the startup that pushes open source software for packaging up code into containers that can be deployed on many machines, today announced its latest acquisition: file transfer app Infinit.

• Yes, that’s right, Docker bought a company with a consumer-friendly app. It lets you sync files to your other devices or send them to others.

• We’ve all been the victim of a dropped mobile phone call and know how frustrating it can be. However, virtualized networks provide network operators with powerful tools to detect and recover from network disruptions, or “faults,” that can drop calls for thousands of subscribers simultaneously. The Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) project together with OpenStack have developed features in software that add resiliency to mobile networks and enable them to recover from network and other outages.

• “My own story would not have been possible but for the democratizing force of Microsoft technology reaching me where I was growing up,” CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders this week.

• But the price of that “democratizing force” is about to go up, with Britons uniquely singled out. Microsoft has reiterated to Azure customers that prices will go up by 22 per cent from January 1st.

• The problem? The price rise is far greater than any exchange rate post-Brexit fluctuations might justify. Microsoft’s biggest European data centre is in Dublin, a member of the Euro currency. The Euro hovered around €1.28 to one pound for the first six months of the year, before crashing after Brexit. It’s now €1.19, a depreciation of just 9 cents, or 7 per cent.

• The value of the British pound has weakened more dramatically against the US dollar, dropping by 18.9 per cent since 24 June – the day after Brits voted to leave the EU.

• For new Office or Azure cloud customers in the UK, no exchange rate can justify any price rise at all. In September, Microsoft made Azure available in UK data centres.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Today on the podcast we’re looking at the copyright reform that is being proposed by the EU commission. Of course even as I say those words, I can hear some of you clicking off, or saving this for later even if later will never come. Copyright is one of those things – it hits us in so many ways, everyday, yet often the discussions and specifics cause us to get bored or lost… amazingly something that matters so much is really hard to get excited about. But we’re daring to tackle the important on this program, with help from three voices – Polina Malaja of the Free Software Foundation Europe, Dimitar Dimitrov of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU, and Julia Reda, German Member of the European Parliament.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Overall the Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.10 are significant after they missed out on any feature changes for Linux 4.9. Given all the churn, there’s been a last minute pull into DRM-Next of some more fixes and other minor activity.

• NVIDIA has confirmed that their next proprietary driver update for Linux will introduce support for Vulkan rendering outside of the X.Org Server.

• With NVIDIA’s current Vulkan Linux driver it’s not possible to achieve headless Vulkan rendering if the X.Org Server isn’t running, but that limitation is said to be addressed by their next (post-375) driver release.

• Today, December 5, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the fifth and last scheduled maintenance update of the Mesa 12.0 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux distributions.

• It seems NVIDIA are preparing a new driver update that will enable the use of Vulkan without needing X11.

Applications

• Whether you plan to work on a book, a screenplay, or better structure your dissertation, you’ll probably see apps like Scrivener recommended. If you’re running Windows, macOS or even Android then you’re spoilt for choice, with various competing proprietary apps at varying price points readily available. On Linux the choices are somewhat limited.

• The past weekend brought us new stable and development builds of the Tor anonymity network project, versioned 0.2.8.10, as the most advanced version out there, and 0.2.9.6 RC (Release Candidate).

• Version 0.98 of the GNOME-aligned GStreamer-powered Pitivi non-linear video editor was tagged today as the newest development milestone.

• The main feature addition of Pitivi 0.98 is now supporting customizable keyboard supports! Aside from finally supporting customizable keyboard shortcuts for this open-source video editor, a lot of warnings were fixed from GTK 3.22, and there has been a lot of other bug fixing. Bugs around Pitivi’s timeline were primarily targeted by this release.

• Phoronix Test Suite 6.8.0 is now available as the latest version of our open-source, fully-automated, reproducible benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, macOS, Windows, and other operating systems.

• Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 is the latest stable release now of our GPL-licensed benchmarking software updated on its regular quarterly release cadence. Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 development focused on a number of low-level improvements to particularly benefit Phoromatic and the Phodevi (Phoronix Device Interface) software/hardware library abstraction layer.

• Today, December 6, 2016, the development team behind the powerful, open-source, free, and cross-platform FFmpeg multimedia framework released a new maintenance update in the FFmpeg 3.2 “Hypatia” series.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard informs us about the availability of a new snapshot for the cross-platform, Chromium-based Vivaldi web browser, which promises to let users name tab stacks.

• Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.682.3 marks the beginning of the development of Vivaldi 1.6, the next major version of the popular web browser, and it looks like it has been rebased on Chromium 55.0.2883.64. Besides fixing a bunch of regressions, the new development release implements an option under Settings -> Tabs -> Tab Features -> Tab stacking -> Allow Tab Stack Renaming, which lets you rename or name tab stacks.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Nintendo NES Classic is quite an amazing console. True, it is not as powerful as modern game systems like Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but it comes pre-loaded with many classic NES titles. Unfortunately, its strength is also its weakness — those pre-loaded titles are the only games you can play. You cannot load other games, so you are stuck with what you got.

• The developers of Alwa’s Awakening [Official Site, Steam] contacted me to let you all know that they are going to need help testing the Linux version of their game.

• For those that remember the classic game Myst, Quern – Undying Thoughts [Steam, Official Site] a game clearly inspired by it launched with day-1 Linux support.

• SHENZHEN I/O is the new simulator/puzzle game by Zachtronics, the creators of other excellent games like Spacechem, Infinifactory and TIS-100. After being on Early Access for some time, it’s now available on Steam since November, 17th. But most importantly, even when only two weeks have passed since the official release, the game already has ‘overwhelmingly positive’ reviews by Steam users, just like its predecessors; out of a total 785 reviews so far, only 14 are negative against 771 positives, something truly remarkable.

• The Living Dungeon [Steam, Official Site] is a board game come to life in video game form and it’s now available on Linux. Up to 9 players can take part in a battle of wits, luck and skullduggery. It also features a 30 hour story campaign.

• Stellaris [Steam, Official Site] has received a major patch today to address a bunch of bugs, do some optimizations, adds a ton of achievements and more.

• We always love to see AAA titles released with day-one support for Linux, and Square Enix has just launched the Lara Croft GO turn-based puzzle video game on Steam, the next episode in the Tomb Raider series.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The end is near. I mean, 2016 has less than a month left on its credit. We should now step back and contemplate. Which distribution merits our highest regard, most excitement, best praise, prolonged use? However, before we can declare the final result, we need to do it step by step. First, Plasma.

• Overall, Year 2016 was a fairly tough one for us Linux users. Whether you like it or not, Ubuntu plays a very big part in how the world of distros turns. The pendulum of fortune sways heavily toward the gravitational pull of what Canonical does, and when Ubuntu mis-delivers, a large number of other distributions suffers for it, both directly as they be based on Ubuntu, and also indirectly, through the erosion of hope and good karma. Still, despite these challenges, we can sift through all the trouble and search for the nuggets of happiness. The desktop environment candidate for this article is Plasma, and to some extent, KDE.

• Long-time KDE Community developer Harald Sitter has been working lately on creating a sharable KDE Frameworks Snap that would make snapping of KDE applications for Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distros a lot easier and fun.

• In a recent blog post, the developer explains how he managed to bundle KDE apps as Snaps while trying to make them as smaller as possible. The size of the downloadable binary Snap and Flatpak packages, as well as AppImage or other similar technology, always appeared to have been an issue for most users.

• In order for Snaps and Flatpaks to be adopted by the mass, they need to be smaller, and thanks to the hard work of Harald Sitter, there’s now a Snap version of the KDE Frameworks 5 collection of add-on libraries for Qt 5, which KDE developers are using to develop KDE applications for the Plasma 5 desktop environment.

Distributions

• We knew it was destined to happen sooner or later, the evobuild package build system used in the Solus Linux-based operating system for building packages in the .eopkg format is now officially deprecated.

• North Korea built its own Linux distro which was dubbed as the worst Linux distro ever. A security firm known as Hacker House has found a vulnerability that can compromise the Red Star OS 3 using a malicious link.

New Releases

• Jerry Bezencon, the creator of the Ubuntu-based Linux Lite operating system for personal computers, kindly informs Softpedia today about an updated version of the in-house built Lite Software app.

• The NuTyX team is please to annonce the development release 8.2.91 of NuTyX.

• About 1000 commits since version 8.2

• A new ISO is available in 64 bits. The size is 217M.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5 64-bit Live (WOW! That’s a long name!) left a decent impression on me. It was quick. I noticed no issues in regards to speed and performance.

• There were no bugs or crushes during the run.

• Both issues I had during the Live session run were linked to the notification area: the icons that should be placed there don’t appear.

• The default menu in ROSA R8 Plasma 5 is not to my taste, but that is easy to change.

• On the positive note, there were no obvious traces of the operating system “nationality”. Unlike full-of-French Emmabuntus, you won’t find anything Russian in ROSA R8.

Gentoo Family

• Porteus Solutions, through Tomasz Jokiel, announced today the release and immediate availability of Porteus Kiosk 4.2.0, the latest stable version of the free and open source Gentoo-based kiosk operating system for web terminals.

• Powered by the latest long-term supported Linux 4.4.36 kernel, Porteus Kiosk 4.2.0 ships with some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software projects, including the recently released X.Org Server 1.18.4 display server, as well as the Mozilla Firefox 45.5.1 ESR and Google Chrome 54.0.2840.100 web browsers.

Arch Family

• After announcing the release of a new version of his Ubuntu-based ExTiX Linux operating system for Intel Compute Stick devices, Arne Exton has announced today the availability of RaspArch Build 161205.

• RaspArch is a remix of Arch Linux ARM for Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers, and the latest release is shipping with the long-term supported Linux 4.4.35 kernel and the latest package versions released upstream as of December 5, 2016.

• “When you have installed RaspArch to your Micro SD Card you can use the system like any other Arch Linux system, i.e. install new programs, etc,” said Arne Exton in the release announcement. “Arch motto is KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). RaspArch uses kernel 4.4.35-1-ARCH and the LXDE Desktop environment.”

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE Project, through Douglas DeMaio, proudly informs Softpedia via an email announcement about the general availability of a 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 image of the openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system.

Red Hat Family

• Three years ago I wrote about how Red Hat was bringing its JBoss Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) middleware to the PaaS cloud. It took longer than I expected. But, the full Red Hat JBoss Middleware stack is now containerized and available on Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud.

• With a properly configured OpenStack deployment and Red Hat Ceph storage backend, DBaaS clients merely go to a self-service interface and request the number and configuration of databases they require. OpenStack dynamically provisions the required storage capacity from the appropriate Ceph storage pool. No more manual placement of these database instances on MySQL clusters of various shapes and sizes. This manual exercise was a bit like playing the old Tetris game, trying to fit new database instances into fixed-sized clusters, followed by moving or rearranging them to new clusters when they outgrew available capacity.

• Available now, The Open Organization Leaders Manual is a community-produced companion to Jim Whitehurst’s The Open Organization. With contributions from more than 15 authors, it explores new attitudes and practices leaders should adopt when leveraging the power of transparecy, meritocracy, inclusivity, sharing, and collaboration to build the workplaces of the future.

• Step back and think about it, and It’s hard to believe that the OpenStack cloud computing story isn’t even five years old yet. Back in 2010, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create a sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Since then, OpenStack has won over countless tech titans that are backing it, and has its own foundation.

• Now, Red Hat is out with results from a survey that show that OpenStack production deployments more than doubled in 2016. Clearly, organizations have moved beyond the evaluation stage and are trusting this open cloud platform.

• Last year, many companies were still learning about OpenStack clouds or developing proof-of-concepts. Now they are deploying OpenStack.

Finance

Fedora

• The top story today was Fedora developers’ considering lengthening their developmental cycles and releasing only once a year. Matthew Miller said “PR is a legitimate input into planning.” Bryan Lunduke is back with his prognostications for 2017 and Bruce Byfield has seven tips for using Plasma. DistroWatch Weekly reviewed Fedora 25 and Roger Carter penned an extensive user guide for Bodhi Linux 4.0.

• The latest change request coming in for Fedora 26 is to update the default C/C++ compiler flags.

• The proposed changes are to add -Werror=implicit-function-declaration and -Werror=implicit-int for helping better prepare C code for future revisions to C and making the code more friendly with C++ programs. Additionally, for Fedora 26 on i686, the plan is to drop -mtune=atom. The tuning for Atom was done previously back when 32-bit Intel Atom CPUs were very common, but now less so, and many i686 Fedora packages are being installed on x86_64 and thus might run a bit faster on current hardware.

• This blog should now be showing up on various planets (Fedora, Outreachy, Fedora Design), which means I need to do an introduction.

• Hi, I’m Suzanne. I’ve been working on getting myself into User Experience (UX) for about a year now, although I’ve been interested in smoothing the interface between people and technology for longer than that. Most recently, I spent a few years in a PhD program working with robots and investigating the kind of gestures that robots will most need to understand when conversing with people. When that turned out to not be a good program for me, I figured out that UX was the most interesting and relevant path forward.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• There are numerous Linux distributions designed to serve different needs. Being an open source software, Linux allows the developers to pick its code and create something new and exciting.

• Out of these numerous Linux distributions, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, and Debian are some of the most popular operating systems. If you’re facing trouble with Windows 10’s privacy nuisance, you can surely try out a fresh Linux experience.

• Canonical’s Michael Hall announced on December 5, 2016, that Ryan Sipes, Community Manager at System76, reports on the fact that both companies are currently working together to improve HiDPI support in the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

• On December 5, 2016, Canonical published several security advisories to inform users of the Ubuntu Linux operating system about the availability of new kernel builds for their OSes, patched against a critical security vulnerability.

• Right on the heels of Ubuntu 16.10 ‘Yakkety Yak’ is Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus. Ubuntu 17.04 is currently scheduled for release on April 13, 2017 but know that this is only an estimate. One thing to know is that all things being equal, it is going to be released in April 2017. Ubuntu Zesty Zapus will be supported for only 9 months until January 2018 as it is not a LTS (long term support) release.

• A few moments ago, we’ve been informed by Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak about the general availability of the long-anticipated Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 software update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices.

• Ubuntu Linux producer Canonical plans to sue a European cloud provider for “publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu despite many months of coaxing to do it properly.”

• The company says that its cloud OS relies on trust and that such actions undermine the sucess of the certified Ubuntu images that are guaranteed to run on specific cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google.

Flavours and Variants

• On December 6, 2016, the developers behind the Ubuntu-based, hacking-oriented BlackBox Linux operating system proudly announced the release of BackBox Linux 4.7.

Devices/Embedded

• T-Firefly is Kickstartering the first hacker SBC with Rockchip’s Cortex-A72/-A53 RK3399. The Firefly-RK3399 has up to 4GB DDR3, M.2, and USB 3.0 Type-C.

• T-Firefly, which offers Linux- and Android-ready open source boards like the Firefly-RK3288 and sandwich-style Firefly-RK3288 Reload, both of which are based on the quad-core, Cortex-A17 Rockchip RK3288, has advanced to a more powerful Rockchip SoC for its new open spec Firefly-RK3399. The hexa-core Rockchip RK3399 features two server-class Cortex-A72 cores clocked to up to 2.0GHz, as well as four Cortex-A53 at up to 1.42GHz. This appears to be the first RK3399 SBC and the first SBC to include Cortex-A72 cores.

• As Chair of the Architecture Group of The Linux Foundation’s CE Working Group, Tim Bird has long been the amiable public face of the Embedded Linux Conferences, which he has run for over a decade. At the recent ELC Europe event in Berlin, Bird gave a “Status of Embedded Linux” keynote in which he discussed the good news in areas like GPU support and virtually mapped kernel stacks, as well as the slow progress in boot time, system size, and other areas that might help Linux compete with RTOSes in IoT leaf nodes.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently started contracting with Free Electrons to give me some support on the display side of the stack. Last week I got to review and release their first big piece of work: Boris Brezillon’s code for SDTV support. I had suggested that we use this as the first project because it should have been small and self contained. It ended up that we had some clock bugs Boris had to fix, and a bug in my core VC4 CRTC code, but he got a working patch series together shockingly quickly. He did one respin for a couple more fixes once I had tested it, and it’s now out on the list waiting for devicetree maintainer review. If nothing goes wrong, we should have composite out support in 4.11 (we’re probably a week late for 4.10).

• Eric Anholt’s latest weekly blog post on the VC4 development highlights SDTV support coming together, the Raspberry Pi Foundation contracting Free Electrons to provide more development help on the display stack, HDMI audio support for VC4 DRM driver continuing to inch along, DSI fixes, some code generation improvements for VC4 Gallium3D, and other work.

• Axiomtek’s “eBOX565-500-FL” computer runs Linux or Windows on dual-core Intel 6th Gen CPUs, and offers four USB 3.0 ports and wide-range power.

• The eBOX565-500-FL updates the two-year-old eBOX560-880-FL embedded PC, which provides dual-core Intel 4th Gen “Haswell” Core and Celeron CPUs. The very similar eBOX565-500-FL instead taps the 14nm Intel 6th Gen “Skylake” ULT processors, once again offering two dual-core options: the 2.4GHz Core i5-6300U and the 2.0GHz Celeron 3955U.

• Igel has launched a “UD Pocket” USB stick that boots up a VDI environment on any 64-bit x86 PC, laptop, or other device without overwriting its local OS.

• Since the early days of Linux, IT administrators and demo presenters have been using USB stick and Live CD-based devices to boot up Linux distributions like Knoppix on desktop computers. Now Igel Technology has taken the bootable USB stick to the thin client world with the Igel UD Pocket. The 22 x 12 x 6mm, 3.3gm device plugs into any 64-bit x86 PC, laptop, or tablet with at least 2GB of RAM and a bootable USB port, to turn it into a thin client running a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) user interface.

Phones

Tizen

• Hey guys, do you like to play with Auto Rickshaws ? This is a racing game named “Crazy Auto Traffic Racer”, added by Games2Win Pvt. Ltd.

Android

• Your phone probably contains banking, payment and personal information that can be remotely stolen via numerous known and unknown bugs in the Android software. This is attractive to criminals.

• Vendors (LG, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc.), after selling you their phone, have no incentive to keep your phone’s software up to date with Google’s fixes. Your Android phone is probably out of date and therefore a gaping security hole through which attackers can steal your stuff from the safety of their own laptops.

• The history of Android on tablets is complicated. Just as Apple had done in 2007 with the first iPhone, the iPad’s release in 2010 set a very high standard for the rest of the market. The next year, Google released Android 3.0 Honeycomb on the Motorola Xoom, designed specifically with tablets in mind. The Xoom wasn’t the iPad killer that Motorola had hoped for, and there have been very few Android tablets that could stack up to Apple’s iPad line.

Free Software/Open Source

• Today, on the opening day of the marquee AI conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona, Google announced in a blog post the release of its DeepMind Lab project available to the AI community under open source licensing terms.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are the next two computing platforms. DeepMind Lab is a 3D AI platform for building virtual games that bring these two platforms together in multiple dimensions. DeepMind Lab uses a special kind of AI, called machine learning (ML). And within the field of ML, it uses an advanced form of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL).

• In the early days of the open source movement, a lot of the attention was on operating systems, and later on large content management systems. These days, containers are mentioned regularly even in mainstream news outlets. The big tech stories are great, but they miss the other great activity in the niches of the open source space. I’ve rounded up seven interesting lesser-known projects from the past year. You can see more articles about projects like this in my Nooks and Crannies column.

• With coding and software development in serious need of talent, it’s essentially a graduate’s market, but you still need the right combination of skills and attributes to beat the competition. When it comes to open source and DevOps, a deeper understanding is essential.

• To this end, foundations such as the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Open Container Initiative (OCI) at The Linux Foundation are actively bringing in new open source projects and engaging member companies to create industry standards for new cloud-native technologies. The goal is to help improve interoperability and create a stable base for container operations on which companies can safely build commercial dependencies.

• Two leaders in the field of artificial intelligence have announced that they’re open-sourcing their AI platforms.

• After investing in building rich simulated environments to serve as laboratories for AI research, Google’s DeepMind Lab on Saturday said it would open the platform for the broader research community’s use.

• DeepMind has been using its AI lab for some time, and it has “only barely scratched the surface of what is possible” in it, noted team members Charlie Beattie, Joel Leibo, Stig Petersen and Shane Legg in an online post.

• In 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs officially moved its most critical software, the VistA electronic health record system, into open source by establishing the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA). Along the way, VA officials solicited and followed advice from numerous open source experts, including Red Hat, Carnegie Mellon University and the Industry Advisory Council.

Events

Databases

• The popularity of open source DBMSs, as measured by the DB-Engines Ranking, has reached a new record. So, we’re going to analyze the underlying details.

• We have 154 open source systems in our ranking, slightly less than the 156 commercial systems. If we add up the popularity scores of all the open source systems, we get 46% of the overall scores, whereas 54% goes to commercial systems.

• Open source has never been more important or, ironically, irrelevant. As developers increasingly embrace the cloud to shorten time to market, they’re speeding past open source, making it even harder to build an open source business.

• After all, if open source were largely a way for developers to skirt legal and purchasing departments to get the software they needed when they needed it, the cloud ups that convenience to the nth degree. In Accel’s annual business review, the vaunted venture capital firm writes: “‘Product’ is no longer just the bits of software, it’s also how the software is sold, supported, and made successful.” The cloud is changing the way all software is consumed, including open source.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Today, December 6, 2016, The Document Foundation, through Italo Vignoli, was proud to announce the upcoming third bug hunting session for the LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite.

CMS

• Due to its organic nature, the world of open source software is in constant flux, which makes it difficult to keep tabs on.

• To keep you in the loop, I’m kicking off a monthly roundup of open source CMS news, starting today.

• Here are your latest open source CMS highlights.

• What happens if your startup can’t afford one of these proprietary solutions or you need customized features? You go look for an open source alternative that could open the space for new solutions and modules. Here are four peer-to-peer marketplaces that are working to become the WordPress or Prestashop of their kind.

• Version 4.7 of WordPress, named “Vaughan” in honor of legendary jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.7 help you get your site set up the way you want it.

Education

• Administering standardized tests online is trickier than it sounds. Underneath the facade of simple multiple choice forms, any workable platform needs a complex web of features to ensure that databases don’t buckle under the pressure of tens of thousands of test takers at once. On top of that, it also needs to ensure that responses are scored correctly and that it’s impossible for students to cheat.

BSD

• Hans Wennborg has laid out plans to release the LLVM 4.0 (and Clang 4.0, along with other LLVM sub-projects) toward the end of February.

• The proposal by continuing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg puts the 4.0 branching followed by RC1 at 12 January, RC2 at 1 February, and the official release around 21 February.

Public Services/Government

• The Open Government Partnership (OGP) will suggest to its member governments to create a policy on open source. This week, a draft proposal is to be finalised at the OGP Global Summit in Paris.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• When we think about skills needed to build open structures and establish open mindsets, collaboration jumps to mind immediately. In order to collaborate effectively, communication—or rather, clear communication—is imperative to making it all work.

• Communication can be defined as a transfer of information from one space or person to another—but it can look like dialogue, conflict resolution, listening skills, or even a knowledge commons. In open organizations, we look for timely transfers of information to all members so that they may do their jobs effectively and efficiently.

Open Data

• The Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernisation (Agência para a Modernização Administrativa, AMA) has published two national open data guides.

• As its title implies, the ‘Open Data Introduction Guide’ is aimed at the general public or those interested in learning about the subject.

• The ‘Open Data Guide’ is the official government publication on the subject of public sector data openness. It addresses theoretical issues and practices relevant to the development of open data in Portugal. The topics include open movements, the potential of data openness, processes of opening information, ways of reuse, and an introduction to technical issues. This document is aimed at the various stakeholders in the Portuguese open data ecosystem, such as public agencies, researchers, journalists, citizens and companies interested in reusing or analysing public sector information.

• The Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs is looking for a new director for its Department of Development of Digital Services and Open Data. The director is expected to be a “creative and proactive person who will set out the directions and lead the way for the most important and boldest changes in the state administration”.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Open-source innovation is making the traditional patent system obsolete. Michigan Technological University associate professor Joshua Pearce and his team work with what is called open-source hardware development.

• “What that means is sort of developing technologies that don’t rely on patents,” Pearce said. “We work collaboratively with engineers and scientists all over the world, and (it’s) fairly successful. And the reason it’s successful is because if you have thousands of people working on something, it tends to get pretty good pretty fast.”

• Pearce said the concept began some time ago with open-source software.

• The high-tech vision of open-source software meets low-tech design at non-profit organization OHorizons, an international coalition of innovators working to solve persistent global challenges. The team’s most recent invention is the open-source Wood Mold, designed to allow even the least experienced person to create a BioSand Filter that can deliver clean water at 1/10th of the cost of the traditional method. The Wood Mold is designed to be accessible by anyone who has the DIY, open-source construction manual that OHorizons offers for free online.

Programming/Development

• C has ruled the programming world for a long period, becoming the base of many operating systems and programs. However, over the course of past one year, its popularity has fallen, probably, due to lack of any corporate sponsor and increase in the usage of newer languages.

• HDD happens when a development team picks the “newest, hottest technology” to use on a project, based on how the technology is trending on Twitter, or on a number of enthusiastic blog posts or conference talks. A key symptom of HDD is that contrary to the hype, progress doesn’t speed up when the new tech is developed but just the opposite: work slows to a crawl.

Leftovers

• When I returned to the store this week, the display was gone. Still, the idea is in the air, the two individuals mentioned didn’t know about the Microsoft product.

• The Microsoft implementation might be too kludgy, or immature, or the concept itself could just be a doomed Rube Goldberg fantasy. Back to reality, we’re likely to pick up fresher clues on iOS direction when new iPads show up, probably next quarter.

• Every single day, Grant shares one satellite photo from Digital Globes to change the way we see our planet. “With a focal length 16 times longer than a standard DSLR camera, the cameras are so powerful that you can take a picture of a beach ball on the Golden Gate Bridge in full resolution…from Los Angeles,” Grant told Bored Panda. “I try to present the images with no bias and let people decide what these altered landscapes mean, based on the facts and the visual evidence in the frame. I believe that this perspective is a means to start a conversation about the condition of our planet and how we can better protect it.”

Science

• Finland has slipped down the Pisa rankings in recent years, and that trend continued in the latest set of the OECD educational charts released on Tuesday. Although Finland was the only country where girls outperformed boys in science, the number of poor performing students was up and there were fewer high-achievers.

• Finland’s teaching union, the OAJ, says it is concerned about the development in Finnish Pisa results.

• “Finnish results have declined clearly when compared to previous years,” said OAJ expert Jaakko Salo. “The biggest concern in this is that our cornerstone—equality in education—looks to be crumbling.”

Health/Nutrition

• Goulson called it “sinister” last week when made aware of the silence, but now concludes it was probably an innocent error. Bob Maurer, chairman of the show, told me the event has never received any sponsorship from the big chemical companies that manufacture neonicotinoids. He believes an accidental “technical hitch” by the video producer was responsible.

• Concern over this coincidence can be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but what cannot be dismissed is the solid scientific evidence that Goulson is helping to produce, showing how neonicotinoids harm bees and other insects.

• The Michigan Civil Rights Commission will discuss an early version of its report about the lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint at its next meeting.

• The commission, which meets Monday morning at the University of Michigan Detroit center, is expected to check on progress and provide feedback. The report is scheduled to be released next month.

• A California state senator introduced a bill on Monday that would mandate reporting of antibiotic-resistant infections and deaths and require doctors to record the infections on death certificates when they are a cause of death.

• The legislation also aims to establish the nation’s most comprehensive statewide surveillance system to track infections and deaths from drug-resistant pathogens. Data from death certificates would be used to help compile an annual state report on superbug infections and related deaths.

• In September, a Reuters investigation revealed that tens of thousands of superbug deaths nationwide go uncounted every year. The infections are often omitted from death certificates, and even when they are recorded, they aren’t counted because of the lack of a unified national surveillance system.

• “The (Reuters) story highlighted some of the problems that have come from the lack of information, the lack of reporting, especially deaths,” said state Senator Jerry Hill, who introduced the bill. “I wasn’t aware that on death certificates, antibiotic-resistant infections have never been called out.”

• Because there is no federal surveillance system, monitoring of superbug infections and deaths falls to the states. A Reuters survey of all 50 state health departments and the District of Columbia found that reporting requirements vary widely.

Security

• Security experts consider the aging FTP and Telnet protocols unsafe, and HP has decided to clamp down on access to networked printers through the remote-access tools.

• Some of HP’s new business printers will, by default, be closed to remote access via protocols like FTP and Telnet. However, customers can activate remote printing access through those protocols if needed.

• The face of cybercrime is changing. Healthcare has gone from a declared mission of stealing personal data to much more disruptive issues. In fact, healthcare has seen the largest jump in ransomware attacks than in any other industry.

• When Joel Brenner opened the HIMSS Privacy & Security Forum in Boston Monday morning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology research fellow – who focuses on cybersecurity, privacy and intelligence policy – and former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, didn’t sugarcoat the state of healthcare security.

• The government isn’t going to sort out that problem until we suffer some great losses, Brenner said.

• Chrome 55, released earlier this week, now blocks all Adobe Flash content by default, according to a plan set in motion by Google engineers earlier this year.

• Back in May, Google’s staff announced that starting with Q4 2016, Chrome would use HTML5 by default, while Flash would be turned off.

• While some of the initial implementation details of the “HTML5 By Default” plan changed since May, Flash has been phased out in favor of HTML5 as the primary technology for playing multimedia content in Chrome.

• A new Google program aimed at continuously fuzzing open source software has already detected over 150 bugs.

• The program, OSS-Fuzz, currently in beta mode, is designed to help unearth programming errors in open source software via fuzz testing. Fuzz testing, or fuzzing is when bits of randomly generated code is inputted into programs as a means to discover code and security flaws.

• Back in 2014, public exposure of the OpenSSL Heartbleed security bug created a stage for security experts and commentators to field opinions on the open source error that left an estimated two thirds of the internet unsecured. We followed up back then with a guest post for OStatic from Eren Niazi, founder of Open Source Storage, where he discussed the security implications for the open source community.

• In a reinforcement of his company’s marketing message that containerization as an architecture is more secure by design, Docker Inc. CEO Ben Golub [pictured right above, with HPE Executive VP Antonio Neri] told attendees at HPE’s Discover London 2016 event last Tuesday morning that the Docker platform addresses and ameliorates its users’ security concerns just by its very architecture.

Defence/Aggression

• The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

• Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

• The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Julian Assange has thumbed his nose at Swedish investigators, who he says have robbed him of his freedom for six years, by releasing the answers he gave to them under questioning in Ecuador’s London embassy last month.

• The decision to issue the statement, which contains for the first time a detailed account by the WikiLeaks founder of his encounter with a woman in August 2010 who made rape allegations against him, marks a fresh twist in a case in which Assange claims an early leak of information from the Swedish police has shaped opinion.

• The transcript of a police interview with the woman was leaked to media in December 2010, which the Australian, who has not been charged with any crime, says helped to establish an aura of guilt around him.

• Since then, Assange has repeatedly asked to be allowed to tell his side of the story to prosecutors, but until recently they insisted he come to Sweden for questioning. Assange has been confined to Ecuador’s cramped London embassy since June 2012, after claiming asylum to avoid extradition over the allegations.

• The ABC has obtained a copy of the statement the WikiLeaks founder gave prosecutors from his refuge inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on November 14.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• In early 2015, scientists monitoring satellite images at Global Forest Watch raised the alarm about the destruction of rain forests in Indonesia.

• Environmental groups raced to the scene in West Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, to find a charred wasteland: Smouldering fires, orangutans driven from their nests, and signs of an extensive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

• “There was pretty much no forest left,” said Dr Karmele Llano Sanchez, director of the non-profit International Animal Rescue’s orangutan rescue group, which set out to save the endangered primates. “All the forest had burned.”

• This weekend the Army Corps of Engineers said Dakota Access Pipeline won’t go through as planned since it could have destructive environmental consequences. But, as activists know, that doesn’t mean Republicans are done fighting for the oil pipeline.

• President-Elect Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan were among pipeline supporters who emphasized their commitment to the project, and promised to approve the project in the next term. Trump has suggested in prior speech he would push an oil pipeline through during his first 100 days in office, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• The Obama administration halted construction on the Dakota Access oil pipeline Sunday, saying it would hold off on granting the final easement for the project while it conducts a thorough environmental review.

• Both the developer and President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have vowed to finish construction, while protesters say they could bring the conflict to court.

• Here are five things to watch in the unfolding fight.

• Trump’s strategy

• When Trump and his administration take office, approving Dakota Access probably won’t be as simple as signing a piece of paper.

• The Army Corps of Engineers ordered an environmental impact statement for the project Sunday. Experts say that because of that, Trump’s administration will have to either complete the yearslong process or find a way to remove the requirement for testing the environmental impact. Doing the latter, however, would be a rare move that could subject the pipeline to a lawsuit.

• Melting permafrost is causing significant changes to the freshwater chemistry and hydrology of Alaska’s Yukon River and could be triggering global climate impacts, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report released yesterday.

• Researchers say the study, which analyzed more than 30 years of data, sheds light on how climate change is already affecting the Arctic.

• According to the report, the Yukon River and one of its major tributaries have accumulated increasing levels of calcium, magnesium and sulfates over the last three decades due to thawing permafrost.

• The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has asked the thousands of “water protectors” gathered in encampments along the Missouri river to “go home” after the US Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the river.

• In a video statement Dave Archambault thanked the thousands of Native American and environmental activists who travelled to North Dakota to help the tribe fight back against the pipeline, which they feared would contaminate their water source and destroy sacred sites.

• But after the “huge victory” of the Army Corps decision, Archambault said: “There’s no need for the water protectors or for anyone to be putting ourselves in unsafe environments.

• Indonesia has strengthened its moratorium on converting peat swamps to plantations in a move a conservation research group says will help prevent annual fires and substantially cut the country’s carbon emissions if properly implemented.

• President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s amendment to the moratorium regulation, which was issued on Monday, expands it to cover peatlands of any depth and orders companies to restore areas they’ve degraded.

• Indonesia’s move was welcomed by Norway, which in 2010 pledged $1 billion to help the country stop cutting down its prized tropical forests but has released little of it. As a result of the expanded regulation, Norway said it would give $25 million to Indonesia to fund restoration of drained peatlands and another $25 million once an enforcement and monitoring plan is ready.

• Draining of peat swamps by palm oil and pulp wood companies is a big contributor to destruction of tropical forests in Indonesia and the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The land conversion worsens annual dry season fires that release huge amounts of carbon stored in the peat. Many of the fires are deliberately set to clear land of its natural vegetation.

• Britain could slash environmental and safety regulations on imported products after it leaves the EU, a Tory MP has suggested.

• Jacob Rees-Mogg said regulations that were “good enough for India” could be good enough for the UK – arguing that the UK could go “a very long way” to rolling back high EU standards.

• The idea, floated at a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee, was immediately rejected by an economist, who said such a move would likely cause “quite considerable” difficulties.

Finance

• Below the medieval citadel in Kazan, two vast frozen rivers turn the landscape white. On a Saturday afternoon there are a few hardy locals shuffling through the icy sludge to take selfies against the mosque, the Christmas lights and the Soviet-era statues.

• It’s 25 years since I was last in Russia, trying and failing to revive the left during the chaotic first days of Boris Yeltsin’s economic reforms. Half a lifetime later I am here to address a room full of people who want to talk about replacing capitalism with something better – and suddenly we have something in common: now we both know what it’s like to see a system that once looked permanent collapsing.

• Since I’ve been here, almost everyone who has chosen to come and hear me is involved in either contemporary arts or philosophy. The journalists who want to interview me – a public critic of Putin’s policy in Syria and Ukraine – mainly write for cultural magazines. These, if not exactly the new rock’n’roll, are the safest intellectual spaces in which critical thought can take place.

• If the American Dream is still alive – the one that includes a good job and a house with a yard, kids, and a two-car garage – you can see it taking shape in Wake County in the heart of the state of North Carolina. Signs of surging prosperity are everywhere this morning as I make my way to West Lake Middle School in Apex, NC, on the outskirts of Raleigh.

• What were once sleepy two-lane country roads are now teaming with impatient commuters, school busses, and mini-vans. New housing developments, shopping centers, and office buildings are transforming the rolling Piedmont landscape.

• Despite the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being – to all-intents-and-purposes – dead in the water, pursuit of some of the most egregious objectives of the corporate interests driving the TPP agenda rolls on. Pharma is persisting in its push for countries to adopt not just TRIPS-Plus, but in some cases even TPP-Plus intellectual property rules – presumably groundwork for the later emergence of a ‘son-of-TPP’ agreement.

• Government is committed to an early and balanced outcome of India-EU Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) negotiations and is willing to resume talks without any preconditions, Parliament was informed today.

• “The European Union (EU) has expressed willingness to re-engage with India in India-EU Broad based Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) negotiations subject to certain conditions.

• The list of financial titans, including Trump, who have profited from a rigged financial system and fraud is endless. Many in the 1 percent make money by using lobbyists and bought politicians to write self-serving laws and rules and by forming unassailable monopolies. They push up prices on products or services these monopolies provide. Or they lend money to the 99 percent and charge exorbitant interest. Or they use their control of government and the courts to ship jobs to Mexico or China, where wages can be as low as 22 cents an hour, and leave American workers destitute. Neoliberalism is state-sponsored extortion. It is a vast, nationally orchestrated Ponzi scheme.

• This fevered speculation and mounting inequality, made possible by the two ruling political parties, corroded and destroyed the mechanisms and institutions that permitted democratic participation and provided some protection for workers. Politicians, from Reagan on, were handsomely rewarded by their funders for delivering their credulous supporters to the corporate guillotine. The corporate coup created a mafia capitalism. This mafia capitalism, as economists such as Karl Polanyi and Joseph Stiglitz warned, gave birth to a mafia political system. Financial and political power in the hands of institutions such as Goldman Sachs and the Clinton Foundation becomes solely about personal gain. The Obamas in a few weeks will begin to give us a transparent lesson into how service to the corporate state translates into personal enrichment.

• In Detroit, parents of school-age children have plenty of choices, thanks to the nation’s largest urban network of charter schools.

• What remains in short supply is quality.

• In Brightmoor, the only high school left is Detroit Community Schools, a charter boasting more than a decade of abysmal test scores and, until recently, a superintendent who earned $130,000 a year despite a dearth of educational experience or credentials.

• On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance.

• Jill Stein went to Trump Tower on Monday to press her case for long-shot recounts in three closely contested states in last month’s presidential election.

• Ms. Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee and now the leader of the recount campaign, appeared emboldened by an early morning federal court ruling that ordered Michigan elections officials — over the protests of President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies — to begin a recount by noon Monday.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A REPUBLICAN presidential elector has issued the shock claim that he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump in an attempt to block his path to the White House.

• Christopher Suprun said in an article for the New York Times that he could not approve Mr Trump in good conscience as he felt the president-elect was unfit for public office.

• “Mr Trump urged violence against protesters at his rallies during the campaign,” he wrote. “He speaks of retribution against his critics.”

• “I owe no debt to a party. I owe a debt to my children to leave them a nation they can trust.”

• As you’ve probably heard, there are progressive efforts underway to force recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – three traditionally “blue” states where Donald Trump narrowly prevailed. Had these three states, where literally every independent poll showed Hillary Clinton ahead in the months leading up to Election Day, voted Democratic, Trump would’ve lost.

• Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is vowing to move ahead with recount efforts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, despite legal setbacks and growing opposition from Republicans and other Donald Trump allies in each state.

• “We will not give in to intimidation, to legal maneuvering and to bureaucratic obstruction,” Stein said at a news conference outside of Trump Tower on Monday.

• Her vow came as Stein’s campaign on Monday morning filed a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania — an attempt to revive the push there after Stein and other Pennsylvania voters dropped a state-based lawsuit to try to force a recount. They gave up on the state-based lawsuit when a judge raised the bond to $1 million, a price Stein panned as exorbitant .

• But even as she railed against the roadblocks in Pennsylvania, Stein lauded developments in Michigan, which was to begin its recount by noon Monday.

• On July 7, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, met privately with House Republicans near the Capitol. I was present as chief policy director of the House Republican Conference. Mr. Trump’s purpose was to persuade the representatives to unite around him, a pitch he delivered in a subdued version of his stream-of-consciousness style. A congresswoman asked him about his plans to protect Article I of the Constitution, which assigns all federal lawmaking power to Congress.

• Mr. Trump interrupted her to declare his commitment to the Constitution — even to parts of it that do not exist, such as “Article XII.” Shock swept through the room as Mr. Trump confirmed one of our chief concerns about him: He lacked a basic knowledge of the Constitution.

• Presidential candidate Jill Stein’s fight to force presidential recounts in three states focuses Monday on Pennsylvania, where her Green Party is seeking an emergency federal court order for a statewide recount, and Michigan, where a federal judge has ordered a hand recount to begin by noon.

• The recount is underway in Wisconsin.

• President-elect Donald Trump narrowly defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in all three states. The recounts were not expected to change enough votes to overturn the result of the election.

• Stein says her intent is to verify the accuracy of the vote. She has suggested, with no evidence, that votes cast were susceptible to computer hacking.

• Shortly after the Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over the wire: the Thomas Mann villa in Los Angeles has been saved. The house, which was built to Mann’s specifications in the nineteen-forties, went on the market earlier this year, and it seemed likely to be demolished, because the structure was deemed less valuable than the land beneath it. After prolonged negotiations, the German government bought the property, with the idea of establishing it as a cultural center.

• The house deserves to stand not only because a great writer lived there but because it brings to mind a tragic moment in American cultural history. The author of “Death in Venice” and “The Magic Mountain” settled in this country in 1938, a grateful refugee from Nazism. He became a citizen and extolled American ideals. By 1952, though, he had become convinced that McCarthyism was a prelude to fascism, and felt compelled to emigrate again. At the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communism in Hollywood, Mann said, “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in Germany.” The tearing down of Mann’s “magic villa” would have been a cold epilogue to a melancholy tale.

• In less than seven weeks, President Barack Obama will hand over the government to Donald Trump, including access to the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David. Trump will also, of course, inherit the infamous nuclear codes, as well as the latest in warfare technology, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s fleet of killer drones, the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance and data-collection apparatus, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s enormous system of undercover informants.

• On the other hand, what he DOES is important. When he settled the Trump University for 25 Million, despite prolonging it for multiple years and putting all of the plaintiffs through years of frustration and debt, the news stories lasted less than 12 hours before being drowned by the Hamilton Tweets. My own reaction to the tweet was reflexively the same as others: Our President-elect is so sensitive that anything even slightly negative is considered an insult. But, you have to work HARD to find a story today talking about the settlement (or the fact that some are contesting it), but the fallout from the tweets lasted days. Looking back, more than once a fundamental issue concerning Trump was obscured by Tweet reactions. Nude underage beauty contestants, Manafort Russian connections, a debate that clearly showed Trump unprepared, unpresidential, and unhinged turned immaterial as the world reacted to his tweets about Alicia Machado.

• Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has initiated recount efforts in three states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a combined margin of 103,519 votes. (A fourth, partial recount is underway in Nevada, by independent presidential candidate Roque De La Fuente).

• Though considered an “extreme long shot” by the New York Times, Stein’s campaign raised her initial goal of $7 million — twice as much as she raised in her failed campaign bid — in just a matter of days. Clinton’s campaign has cooperated with the effort.

• The Taiwanese representative office in Washington paid the law firm of former Sen. Bob Dole $20,000 a month to advance its interests in Washington, public filings show. Dole said on Monday his firm helped broker a controversial phone call between President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

• Dole told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that his law firm “may have had some influence” on the phone call, which broke decades of diplomatic precedent, but has been widely praised by China hawks for the tough signal it sends to Beijing. An unnamed Trump transition team official told the paper that Dole had arranged the call.

• Johan Galtung, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated sociologist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, warned that US global power will collapse under the Donald Trump administration.

• The Norwegian professor at the University of Hawaii and Transcend Peace University is recognized as the ‘founding father’ of peace and conflict studies as a scientific discipline. He has made numerous accurate predictions of major world events, most notably the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

• One-third of precincts in Wayne County could be disqualified from an unprecedented statewide recount of presidential election results because of problems with ballots.

• Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month.

• Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662.

• A single missing ballot was enough to scuttle the recount of a Michigan precinct Monday.

• The computerized poll book in Rochester Hills precinct 11 listed the names of 848 voters who cast ballots there, but the ballot box contained just 847 ballots. So where is the other ballot? The poll workers’ notes offered no explanation.

• “It didn’t match on the canvass and it doesn’t match now,” said Joe Rozell, Oakland County’s director of elections. “This precinct is not recountable.”

• Two Michigan counties began the recount process Monday, hours after a federal judge ordered the immediate start of the presidential recount. Six counties are expected to start the recount process Tuesday, with the last batch of counties to start Dec. 12.

• Three central Florida voters are mounting an unlikely bid to overturn the presidential election result in the Sunshine State.

• In a lawsuit filed Monday in Leon Circuit Court, they assert that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, actually won Florida. The plaintiffs, who live in Osceola and Volusia counties, say the state’s official election results were off because of hacking, malfunctioning voting machines and other problems.

• They’re asking for a hand recount of every paper ballot in Florida, at the expense of defendants including Trump, Gov. Rick Scott and the 29 Republican presidential electors from Florida.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The rise in websites dispensing false information has become a problem for Facebook. But for one high school teacher, having students take misinformation at face value is nothing new – though it’s gotten worse.

• “I’m constantly got kids coming to me, ‘Did you know?’ insert whatever conspiracy theory,” says Dave Stuart Jr., who teaches world history at Cedar Springs High School in Michigan. “Ranging from the Apollo missions to the moon never happened, to current events-related stuff.”

• The Common Core standards focus strongly on skills that should prepare students to detect fake news – the standards emphasize the need for students to write and read arguments using and looking for strong reasoning and evidence, says Dana Maloney, an English teacher at Tenafly High School in New Jersey.

• Four of the largest tech companies—Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and YouTube—are coming together to stop the spread of terroristic content on social media.

• The plan is to create a shared database and track the digital fingerprints of accounts who share propaganda for terror networks helping them identify the content and easily remove photo or videos from their sites.

• “Our companies will begin sharing hashes of the most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos we have removed from our services — content most likely to violate all of our respective companies’ content policies,” the companies announced in a joint statement Monday night.

• Actor Hameed Sheikh, known for his phenomenol performance in Jami’s Moor, spoke about the difficulty he faced while trying to release the movie

• Can social media even exist without political debate? What about trolls? Hacker News, the social news site run by Y Combinator, is trying to find out.

• The head of the Hacker News community since 2014, Daniel Gackle (whose HN handle is “dang”) on Monday initiated a site-wide “Political Detox Week.”

• Star Trek is not a franchise you’d normally associate with controversy. Nevertheless, between 1969 and 1994, four episodes of the original series – Empath, Whom Gods Destroy, Plato’s Stepchildren and Miri – were not aired on the BBC, and other episodes were heavily redacted.

• Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube have announced that they will be working together to curb the dissemination of terrorist material online. The Web giants will create a shared industry database of hashes—digital fingerprints that can identify a specific file—for violent terrorist imagery and terrorist recruitment materials that have previously been removed from their platforms.

• According to a statement the four companies have jointly released, the hope is that “this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online.”

• It was an assignment that I barely prepared for. I didn’t think I had to.

• For most reporting trips I have made in the last decade, I would think long and hard about where I was going and what the variables were. If I was heading to a conflict zone, I would need body armor and a trauma kit. If it was a natural disaster, I would bring a satellite phone and spare food. If I was heading to an authoritarian country where journalism was not allowed, I would need a mix of burner phones, encrypted hard drives and a disposable laptop. I felt I was prepared for every eventuality. But I never thought that I would have to think about these things so close to home.

• For my recent assignment heading from Canada to the U.S. to cover the anti-oil pipeline protests in Standing Rock for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I didn’t prepare for anything extraordinary. But at the border, after handing over my Canadian passport I was taken aside. I wasn’t worried. Why should I be? I had nothing to hide, and I felt like it was the one border in my travels where I could proudly proclaim that I was a journalist to safe ears.

• Last week, an independent news website in Qatar, Doha News, discovered that they had been blocked in Qatar. While there has been no official news on why this block has happened, Doha News stated that they suspect that the block happened at the behest of the government. The news site has a reputation for toeing the line in Qatar, and had previously done such “unprecedented” things in the emirates such as publishing an anonymous article by a homosexual Qatari man. Ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it is more than possible that this is just the first of many censorship actions by Qatar. Another famous international media site that is based in Qatar is none other than Al Jazeera.

• Doha News confirmed that Qatar’s two ISPs, Ooredo and Vodaphone, have blocked Doha News. The independent news source tried to create a new domain name to get past the block but that new website was quickly blocked as well. Doha News’s editor, Shabina Khatri was forced to use a different Medium to communicate after the block.

• Facebook appears to be testing a tool designed to help it identify and hide so called “fake news” on the social network, in an attempt to quell increasingly vocal criticism of its role in spreading untruths and propaganda.

• The tool, reported by at least three separate Facebook users on Twitter, asks readers to rank on a scale of one to five the extent to which they think a link’s title “uses misleading language”. The articles in question were from reliable sources: Rolling Stone magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chortle, a news site which reports on comedy.

• If you asked Google who won the popular vote just after the election, there’s a chance you would have been sent to a conspiracy blog with bogus results. And the site is likely to have looked as legitimate as any other.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Low morale at the National Security Agency is causing some of the agency’s most talented people to leave in favor of private sector jobs, former NSA Director Keith Alexander told a room full of journalism students, professors and cybersecurity…

• Last week, a mysterious group calling itself The Shadow Brokers dumped online a series of hacking tools associated with the NSA. The leak provided an unprecedented look into the actual tools that the NSA uses to hack its targets, and in the process, put the spotlight on a little-known team that works inside the spy agency—its elite-hacking unit.

• Known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, its existence was barely—if at all—discussed in public until 2009, when intelligence historian and author Matthew Aid described it in his book about the history of the NSA as a “super-secret” unit that taps into “thousands of foreign computer systems” and accesses “password-protected hard drives and email accounts of targets around the world.”

• A federal appeals court will hear oral argument Friday in Richmond, Virginia, in the case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a broad group of organizations challenging the National Security Agency’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international internet communications.

• WikiLeaks published 2,400 documents on the NSA spying affair, according to which Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was involved in the creation of the spy software that was later used by the NSA to tap top-ranking officials. It was also said that BND used the software in its work.

• The U.S. federal appeals court has ruled in United States v. Mohamud, a case that began with a 2010 holiday bomb plot and will end with unique implications for the private digital communications of American citizens.

• Digital privacy advocates had hoped that the appeals case might prompt reform for a contentious portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as Section 702. The provision accommodates U.S. surveillance of foreign targets located abroad, although its many detractors argue that Section 702 allows the U.S. government to collect the bulk communications of Americans in the process.

• A U.S. man convicted after his emails were revealed by the NSA’s PRISM program, the first public case of its kind, will not have his case overturned, an appeals court has found.

• My recent interview about the German domestic spy agency, the BfV – the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, ironically – being allegedly infiltrated by ISIS.

• The new Canadian government is looking to further expand its surveillance powers by requiring decryption capabilities for all services, mandatory storage of both internet and phone records for service providers, backdoors that allow interception, and warrantless access to basic subscriber information.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Saudi authorities banned journalist Jamal Khashoggi from writing in newspapers, appearing on TV and attending conferences, the Alkhalij Aljadid reported in Arabic.

• This came after Khashoggi’s remarks during a presentation he made at a Washington think-tank on 10 November in which he was critical of Donald Trump’s ascension to the US presidency.

• Two weeks ago, an official Saudi source was cited by the Saudi News Agency as saying that Khashoggi did not represent the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in his interviews or statements.

• An associate of hate preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed for 28 months for knocking a schoolboy unconscious because he cuddled his girlfriend in the street.

• Michael Coe, a Muslim convert, has a long record of violent offences starting when he was 16, including assaults, burglary, robbery and violent disorder.

• The married father of two was convicted in August of attacking the boy after he took exception to the 16-year-old cuddling his teenage girlfriend in Newham, east London, in April.

• A group of German activists have carried out a study which found that rates of sexual offenses increase significantly in the vicinity of asylum reception centers, Germany’s Journalistenwatch news portal reported.

• Forced into marrying a man 25 years her senior after he had allegedly raped her, this 23-year-old Tajik woman from Kabul is now in a Greek camp for migrants.

• But Lina told the BBC that the abusive husband she ran away from is now following her, threatening to kill her for disobeying him.

• Her story was corroborated by volunteers for a Spanish refugee charity.

• Lina’s husband is one step behind her and her two small children, having reached the Greek island of Lesbos shortly after she was transported to mainland Greece.

• Muslim communities remain isolated even after decades in the UK because men keep marrying foreign wives, a Government adviser has warned.

• Dame Louise Casey said that there is a “first generation in every generation” phenomenon in Muslim communities which is acting as a “bar” to integration.

• The review also accuses Labour and local authorities of having “ignored or even condoned” harmful cultural traditions for fear of being branded “racist or Islamaphobic”.

• It reports concerns that Sharia Courts in the UK have been “supporting the values of extremists, condoning wife-beating [and] ignoring marital rape”.

• Today, the British law of the land applies to all citizens, be they Catholics, Protestants, atheists, etc. Not one single citizen is beyond the law. Except for the former ‘natives’, be they actually British citizens or migrants: those – and those only – are, once more, entitled to laws of their own, because, beyond their official citizenship, they are still seen as ‘different’ from – and inferior to – the (former?) colonial master. ‘Let them have their own customs, it is their way’.

• ‘Proper’ British citizens are ruled by laws they have voted on, that they can change if they come together and press their MPs. How can ‘Sharia laws’ be changed by the will and vote of citizens? A significant proportion of British citizens are now under supposedly religious laws that they have neither voted for, nor can change through a democratic process. Democracy for ‘proper’ British citizens but unchangeable ‘tribal native customs’ for others?

• European Union Member States must ensure that a new effort to standardise counterterrorism laws does not undermine fundamental freedoms and the rule of law, a group of international human rights organisations said today.

• Amnesty International, the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Fundamental Rights European Experts (FREE) Group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) are warning that the overly broad language of the new EU Directive on Combating Terrorism could lead to criminalising public protests and other peaceful acts, to the suppression of the exercise of freedom of expression protected under international law, including expression of dissenting political views and to other unjustified limitations on human rights. The Directive’s punitive measures also pose the risk of being disproportionately applied and implemented in a manner that discriminates against specific ethnic and religious communities.

• More than 3 million European Union citizens living in Britain after Brexit will have to be issued with “some form of documentation”, the home secretary has said.

• Amber Rudd told MPs she would not yet set out the details for any new EU ID card, but said: “There will be a need to have some sort of documentation. We are not going to set it out yet. We are going to do it in a phased approach to ensure that we use all the technology advantages that we are increasingly able to harness to ensure that all immigration is carefully handled.”

• The home secretary’s statement came in response to Labour’s Hilary Benn, who told MPs that EU citizens already in the UK would need to be documented so that employers and landlords could distinguish them from EU citizens arriving after Brexit.

• During Home Office questions in the Commons, Rudd also said she was aware of the need to continue the seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme after Brexit, but again ruled out demands to remove international students from the annual net migration target.

• The UK is becoming more divided as it becomes more diverse, a Government-commissioned review has claimed.

• In the report by Dame Louise Casey, it is revealed that the ‘pace of immigration in some areas has been too much’.

• Campaigners have condemned a review of integration for “adding to the politics of racism and scapegoating” after it called for immigrants to swear an oath to the UK and children to be taught “British values” in schools.

• Dame Louise Casey’s review, which was commissioned by the Government, found the country is becoming more divided amid growing “ethnic segregation” and that Muslim women in particular were being marginalised by limited English language skills.

• Despite the fact that more British Muslim women than men are getting degrees, we are the most disenfranchised group in the country. Not only are we subject to high levels of unemployment and poverty, but discrimination on the basis of our faith, gender and ethnic background hinders our entry into the labour market.

• Last month, Pennsylvania legislators wrapped up a little gift for the state’s law enforcement agencies: a bill that would have allowed agencies to withhold the names of officers involved in deployments of deadly force for at least 30 days. This was just the mandatory withholding window. The bill never stipulated a release date past that point, meaning “never” was also an acceptable time frame.

• The normal concerns for “officer safety” were given as the reason for the new opacity. Rather than see disclosure as an essential part of maintaining healthy relationships with the communities they served, law enforcement agencies saw disclosure as just another way to hurt already very well-protected officers.

• The DOJ itself — often a defender of entrenched police culture — recommended a 72-hour window for release of this information. State legislators, pushed by local police unions, felt constituents would be better served by being kept in the dark. Given the back-and-forth nature of public sentiment, it was unclear how Governor Tom Wolf would react to the passed proposal.

• Theresa May has been urged to confirm she will put human rights reform on her agenda when she meets Saudi and Bahraini leaders on Tuesday, after announcements on her two-day trip to the Gulf were squarely focused on trade and security.

• Rights campaigners in Bahrain argue that although the UK has been assisting Bahrain with judicial and police reform since 2012, current levels ofengagement on rights issues have not prevented crackdowns on journalists and pro-democracy activists in the country.

• May said: “I think the UK has always had the position, and we continue to have the position, that where there are issues raised about human rights, where there are concerns, we will rightly raise those.

• Theresa May is visiting Bahrain to meet with leaders of Gulf states, who are in the country for a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

• She will attend a dinner with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman on Tuesday, before addressing the plenary session of the summit on Wednesday.

• The Prime Minister will use the visit to announce a new working group with regional nations to combat the financing of terrorists. The UK will provide three specialist cyber experts to the Gulf states to help deal with extremism.

• In 2014 Mohammed was arrested at Bahrain’s airport where he worked as a police officer. My husband believes in human rights, democracy and transparency. He attended peaceful marches in Bahrain calling for our government to respect these values. As a state employee, he knew that it was risky for him to go to these protests. But he believes in reform and so he went anyway.

• After Mohammed was taken into custody, our family heard nothing for four days – we had no idea where he was, or even if he was alive. Eventually, two weeks later, we were allowed to see him, but only with three guards watching us on a surveillance camera. As soon as we saw him, it was clear that Mohammed had been tortured by the security services.

• Mohammed seemed weak and exhausted, and his body was trembling; this suggested to us that he had been subjected to extreme torture. But no one would tell us the reasons for his arrest or the charges against him.

• To loud applause, Chancellor Angela Merkel told her party members on Tuesday that Germany should ban full-face veils “wherever legally possible” and that it would not tolerate any application of Shariah law over German justice.

• Accepting her party’s nomination as its candidate for another four-year term, the chancellor used the moment to broaden her stance on banning the veil, trying to deflect challenges from far-right forces that have made some of their deepest gains since World War II.

• In welcoming nearly one million asylum seekers to Germany a year ago, Ms. Merkel emerged as a powerful voice for tolerance across a Europe gripped by anxiety over waves of arriving migrants and fears of terrorism.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Talking about net neutrality is so boring, the comedian John Oliver once quipped, that he would “rather listen to a pair of Dockers tell me about the weird dream it had” than delve into the topic.

• So it’s unsurprising that Donald Trump—an entertainer with a flair for the dramatic and little interest in wonky details—has stayed away from the issue almost entirely.

• If you want to captivate a nation, discussing thorny telecommunications policy is generally a terrible way to do it. (For those who have managed to avoid reading up on net neutrality thus far, the term refers to open-web principles aimed at curbing practices that give certain companies competitive advantages in how people access the internet. The FCC formally established rules last year that allow the agency to regulate broadband the way it oversees other public utilities. Those rules ban internet service providers from throttling—or slowing—connections to certain content online, and prohibit providers from offering faster connections to corporations that can afford to pay for premium web services. The rules also discourage zero-rating—in which an internet service provider subsidizes a consumer’s cost of going online but often does so in exchange for a competitive advantage.)

• Millions of Americans still have extremely slow Internet speeds, a new Federal Communications Commission report shows. While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds of 25Mbps, about 47.5 million home or business Internet connections provided speeds below that threshold.

• Dealing with speeds a bit lower than the broadband standard isn’t too horrible, but there are still millions with speeds that just aren’t anywhere close to modern. Out of 102.2 million residential and business Internet connections, 22.4 million offered download speeds less than 10Mbps, with 5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps. About 25.1 million connections offered at least 10Mbps but less than 25Mbps.

• 54.7 million households had speeds of at least 25Mbps, with 15.4 million of those at 100Mbps or higher. These are the advertised speeds, not the actual speeds consumers receive. Some customers will end up with slower speeds than what they pay for.

DRM

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an amazing, long-running open standards body that has been largely responsible for the web’s growth and vibrancy, creating open standards that lets anyone make web technology and become part of the internet ecosystem.

• Since 2013, the W3C has been working on a very different kind of standard: Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), designed to enable DRM for streaming video, is more than a technology standard. Thanks to US-propagated laws that give DRM makers the right to sue people who break DRM, even for legal purposes, EME will — for the first time in W3C history — give its members the power to sue security researchers, accessibility toolmakers, and competitors who improve EME implementations, regardless of whether these improvements enable copyright infringement or other illegal outcomes.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In 2015, a coalition of copyright holders lost a court case which demanded an ISP blockade of The Pirate Bay in Sweden. A year later and Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music and Nordisk Film are back, hoping for a victory in a brand new court that could open the floodgates for widespread website blocking.

• An Oregon District Court has sided with a wrongfully accused man, who was sued for allegedly downloading a pirated copy of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler. According to the court’s recommendations, the man is entitled to more than $17,000 in compensation as the result of the filmmakers “overaggressive” and “unreasonable” tactics.

• A few weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Duran Duran co-founder Nick Rhodes signed a music publishing agreement assigning his existing and future copyrights to a publisher, as did the other band members. None of them was aged more than 21 at the time.

• A campaign has been launched in Australia to prevent proposed changes to copyright law and the introduction of a “fair use” doctrine. Australia currently has a “fair dealing” provision but the royalties and anti-piracy group APRA AMCOS and its celebrity supporters are opposing rules that would provide more freedom.

• The Digital Economy Bill is currently at the report stage. It hasn’t yet become law and could still be amended. However, as things stand those who upload any amount of infringing content to the Internet could face up to 10 years in jail. With the latest bill now published, we take a look at how file-sharers could be affected.

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