● 12.08.16

● Links 8/12/2016: Korora GNU/Linux 25, SparkyLinux 4.5.1

Posted in News Roundup at 7:20 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Ah, yes. I remember the good old days when you had to be a real man or woman to install Linux, and the first time you tried you ended up saying something like “Help!” or maybe “Mommmmyyyyy!” Really, kids, that’s how it was. Stacks of floppies that took about 7,000 hours to download over your 16 baud connection. Times sure have changed, haven’t they?

• I remember Caldera advertising that their distribution autodetected 1,500 different monitors. I wrote an article titled “Monitor Number 1501,” because it didn’t detect my monitor. And sound. Getting sound going in Linux took mighty feats of systemic administsationish strength. Mere mortals could not do it. And that’s why we had installfests: so mighty Linux he-men and she-women could come down from the top of Slackware Mountain or the Red Hat Volcano and share their godlike wisdom with us. We gladly packed up our computers and took them to the installfest location (often at a college, since many Linux-skilled people were collegians) and walked away with Linuxized computers. Praise be!

Server

• The IBM i operating system is proprietary; its Licensed Internal Code (LIC) is private, and good luck getting into the innards of DB2 for i. But for all the top-secret code running in an IBM i server, there’s a surprising amount of open source technology available for the platform, too. Here are the top seven open source products every IBM i shop should have, or at least be aware of.

• These products are in no particular order. But we would be remiss if we didn’t start with the big one from IBM itself.

• Docker aims to directly integrate storage capabilities into its container engine, while still leaving room for organizations to choose other storage technologies.

• Docker Inc. announced on December 6 that it is acquiring privately-held distributed storage vendor Infinit. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.

• I’m pleased to announce the release of the Xen Project Hypervisor 4.8. As always, we focused on improving code quality, security hardening as well as enabling new features. One area of interest and particular focus is new feature support for ARM servers. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a surge of patches from various ARM vendors that have collaborated on a wide range of updates from new drivers to architecture to security.

• On December 7, 2016, the Linux Foundation-hosted Xen Project proudly announced the release of Xen 4.8 hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization.

• It’s been a little over five months since the release of the Xen 4.7 series, and it looks like the development team behind this highly customizable, extensible and flexible type-1 or baremetal hypervisor did not stop improving the software and adding new features to it. Xen 4.8 is the latest stable and most advanced version, which focuses on advanced embedded use cases and enhances support of ARMv8-A based servers.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation released its 2017 schedule, including an Embedded Linux Conference in Portland on Feb. 21-23 that needs proposal ideas by Dec. 10.

• This year, Linux Foundation events attracted over 20,000 “developers, maintainers, sysadmins, thought leaders, business executives and other industry professionals from more than 4,000 organizations across 85 countries,” and 25,000 are expected in 2017, says the not-for-profit Linux advocacy organization. In truth, the LF is now more of an open source advocacy organization as it spreads into non-Linux projects like Zephyr. Fittingly, the co-located LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen events in Japan, North America and Europe have this year combined into new umbrella events called Open Source Summits.

• The MacBook Pro introduction in October caused unusually negative reactions among professional users due to the realization that Apple no longer caters equally to casual and professional customers as it had in the past [YouTube video]. Instead, the company appears to be following an iOS-focused, margin-driven strategy that essentially relegates professionals to a fringe group. This has well-known developers such as Salvatore Sanfilippo (of the Redis project) consider a move back to Linux. Perhaps that’s a good moment to look at the current state of Mac hardware support in the kernel. While Macs are x86 systems, they possess various custom chips and undocumented quirks that the community needs to painstakingly reverse-engineer.

• There is an interesting subset of Linux users that prefer to run it on a Mac. Yes, a Mac. That might seem odd given how Apple is known for its closed ecosystems and high cost hardware, but the Linux on Mac folks really do exist out there.

• But how well does the Linux kernel support Mac hardware? LWN.net has a “state of the union” article for Linux on the Mac that could be quite helpful if you are thinking about installing Linux on your Mac.

• There is yet another new Linux kernel vulnerability being disclosed today that allows for unprivileged processes to gain kernel code execution abilities.

• This new vulnerability is CVE-2016-8655 but it doesn’t seem to be getting too much attention yet. CVE-2016-8655 comes down to a race condition within the af_packet.c code for gaining local root access. The researcher that found it was able to write an exploit to gain root shell on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system and defeats SMEP/SMAP protection too.

• Just a quick note: on recent versions of systemd it is relatively easy to block the vulnerability described in CVE-2016-8655 for individual services.

• Since systemd release v211 there’s an option RestrictAddressFamilies= for service unit files which takes away the right to create sockets of specific address families for processes of the service. In your unit file, add RestrictAddressFamilies=~AF_PACKET to the [Service] section to make AF_PACKET unavailable to it (i.e. a blacklist), which is sufficient to close the attack path. Safer of course is a whitelist of address families whch you can define by dropping the ~ character from the assignment. Here’s a trivial example:

Graphics Stack

• The latest patches for the AMDGPU DRM driver’s DC code — what was previously known as DAL — have been published and they reduce the size of the code-base some more.

• NVIDIA has released a major new version of their Linux Graphics Debugger for helping game developers and others wishing to optimize OpenGL 4.x workloads on a variety of Linux distributions.

• It’s been a while since publishing any fresh Intel Core i7 5775C benchmarks, the socketed Broadwell CPU with Iris Pro 6200 graphics, since normally it’s busy in the daily benchmarking churn of the server room for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org / LinuxBenchmarking.com efforts. But with having been doing some maintenance on that system this week and loading a clean install of Ubuntu 16.10, I did some fresh benchmarks of the Iris Pro 6200 graphics using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9, including a look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for the Iris Pro graphics.

• Intel’s Mesa driver has wired in support for two more OpenGL extensions not part of an official OpenGL specification release. These two new extensions are supported for Skylake and newer.

• Mesa developers are discussing the idea of removing the Intel “ILO” Gallium3D driver from Mesa since it hasn’t been maintained in a while and provides only limited functionality.

• ILO is the Intel Gallium3D driver that was developed at LunarG Inc and was promising a few years ago with Ivy Bridge and Haswell era hardware. LunarG was using ILO for experimenting with Gallium3D and different driver approaches. But ILO hasn’t been maintained in quite a while now while LunarG has since changed too.

• AMD have announced that they are working on a big driver update. The Linux driver will support FreeSync and have wider support for their different GPUs.

• The rumor is back that Intel and AMD have reached a deal for future Intel CPUs to be paired with integrated AMD Radeon graphics.

• It’s been two months since the release of Intel GPU Tools (intel-gpu-tools) 1.16, the open-source collection of tools for development and testing of the Intel DRM driver for Linux-based operating systems, and Petri Latvala announced the release of version 1.17.

• We had the hope of getting it working for Leap 42.2 in October, but except freezing kernel and xorg, you will not get what you would expect: a stable xorg session

Benchmarks

• With now having netperf in the Phoronix Test Suite as well as iperf3 for the latest open-source benchmarks in our automated cross-platform benchmarking framework, I couldn’t help but to run some networking benchmarks on a system when trying out a few different Linux distributions and BSDs to see how the performance compares. The operating systems ran with these networking benchmarks included Debian 8.6, Ubuntu 16.10, Clear Linux 12020, CentOS 7, and Fedora 25. The BSDs tested for this comparison were FreeBSD 11.0 and DragonFlyBSD 4.6.1.

Applications

• There have been 40 commits by 4 people in the 9 weeks since 2.26. Note that there were many additional important changes via gnulib.

• Do you like to cook? No, me neither. And that’s largely because I don’t know how to cook.

• Could a desktop cooking app help? GNOME’s Matthias Clasen is hoping so, and has started work on a brand-new desktop recipe app that you — and anyone you know — can help contribute to.

• Looking for free stop motion animation software? If so, you’ll definitely want to check out Heron Animation.

• A free program, Heron Animation lets you take a series of pictures from a connected webcam and assemble each shot into a real moving animation.

• The tool, which is written in web technologies, pitches itself as ‘perfect for beginners and more experienced animators alike’. That sort of balance is notoriously hard to achieve.

• EasyTAG, an open-source, simple, free, and cross-platform application for viewing and editing tags in audio files, supporting MP3, MP4, FLAC, Ogg, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio, and WavPack files, was updated to version 2.4.3.

• It’s been more than nine months since EasyTAG 2.4.2 was released, and we’re now finally able to update the software on our GNU/Linux or Windows operating systems. Version 2.4.3 is out as of December 5, 2016, bringing support for MP4 files that use the .aac file extension, as well as Adwaita-style artist and album icons.

• GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

• More than two months after the release of the major Audacious 3.8 open-source and cross-platform music player software for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating system, the first maintenance update arrives on December 6, 2016.

• A new version of RcppAPT — our interface from R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, … commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like — is now on CRAN.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard today informs Softpedia about the availability of a new development snapshot towards the Vivaldi 1.6 web browser, versioned 1.6.687.3.

• Rebased on the open-source Chromium 55.0.2883.76 web browser, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.687.3 is here a week after the first development release, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.682.3, to introduce two exciting new features, but also to fix many of the issues and annoyances reported by users since the previous snapshot.

• A new version of Lightworks, the professional-grade video editing software, has entered into public beta.

• It debuts a brand new look, brand new features, and some brand new workflows.

• The new interface is called “Fixed” and it’s designed to offer a “more organised” workspace, helping users discover, use and learn more about the editor’s various features.

Instructionals/Technical

• Many people learn Linux for different reasons ranging from work to personal interest, and for all those people, I have selected the best courses/ways to learn Linux.

Games

• The MAME open-source emulator program that makes it possible to play a lot of classic arcade games and emulates a large number of old computers, such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, GameBoy, and Atari 2600, received a major update.

• A new Linux-powered retro games console wants to do for the Gameboy, SNES and Genesis, what the NES Classic has done for the NES. As a retro gamer I (quite naturally) was stoked to see the popularity that greeted the $60 Nintendo NES Classic (which, it turns out, runs Linux) last month.

• More and more AAA games are coming to our beloved Linux platform, and nothing makes us happier than to see Daedalic Entertainment’s Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun title launching today on Steam for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

• If you’re not familiar with Daedalic Entertainment’s work, they are the creators of the superb and fun Deponia series, but Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is something different, a tactical stealth-strategy game in the style of the Commandos stealth-oriented real-time tactics video game series.

• Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun [GOG, Steam, Official Site] is the rather good top-down stealth game from Mimimi Productions. It’s now out way a day-1 Linux release and it has a demo.

• I played the demo and I was massively impressed, so impressed that I would very much like to cover the game properly. So I will be reaching out to the developer for a key.

• The Keeper side-scrolling survival action game full of boss battles, a combo system for combat and a day and night cycle will come to Linux.

• It has come to my attention recently that some people have been taking a really hard stance against developers who want to gauge interest for a Linux port. I want to talk about it for a bit.

• [...]

• Be the Linux community I know and love, be helpful to developers, get in on beta testing when you can (I’ve seen plenty of developers give out free keys for this too!) and appreciate the good games we get. We are a smaller market in most people’s eyes, so let’s not turn away anything that could help us grow even a little.

• The fact is, I’ve seen multiple games only come to Linux because Linux fans showed actual interest in it. One such example is Nightside, which I discovered on Steam. After a quick chat with the developer, I was able to convince them to do a Linux build and after a short test they then decided to do support a Linux build. There’s many such examples like this, but due to the amount of games I cover that’s one I could quickly pull up (without having to sift through hundreds of articles).

• BOOR [Official Site] is a new puzzle platformer from developer Dazlog Studio and publisher BadLand Games that will have Linux support.

• We have many puzzle platformers now, so I do hope BOOR has something to set itself apart from the rest of them. I haven’t seen anything in the trailer or the feature list that really jumps out at me. I am hoping when they reveal more gameplay it will look more enticing.

• EVERSPACE [Steam, Official Site] is the fantastic looking UE4 space shooter that’s being ported to Linux, but the developers have encountered a problem with lighting bugs.

• I follow the topic on Steam, but a user also emailed this in to ask me to highlight it. I would have anyway since I’m interested in it.

• Total War: WARHAMMER – Realm of The Wood Elves [Steam] is the next DLC that introduces an exciting race into this strategy game.

• Feral have confirmed it will be on Linux soon with the quick tweet they sent out.

• After ZeniMax sent the lawyers knocking, the developer of what was called DoomRL (Doom Roguelike) has changed it’s name to ‘DRL’ [Github, Official Site] and it’s now open source.

• ZeniMax are well within their rights to “protect” the Doom brand, but I still think their lawyers are idiotic for doing this. It’s not like small-time roguelike was actually competing with the real Doom.

Distributions

• BackBox Linux is an Ubuntu-based operating system that’s developed with a focus on penetration testing and security assessment. If you take a look at our list of top 10 ethical hacking distros, BackBox ranks in top 3.

• This alternative of Kali Linux operating system comes with a variety of ethical hacking tools and a complete desktop environment. The software repositories of the hacking tools included in BackBox Linux too are frequently updated. Earlier this year in May, we witnessed the release of BackBox Linux 4.6 that was based on kernel 4.2 and Ubuntu 15.10.

New Releases

• There is an update of Sparky 4.5.1 MinimalGUI available to download.

• The Sparky Advanced Installer doesn’t work as it should in the MinimaGUI edition, if you are trying to install an additional desktop. The installer calls a ‘desktop-installer’, but it does not coming back to the main installer with right privileges after. It used to do before, but not any more.

• Only four days after the official release of the Debian-based SparkyLinux 4.5 operating system, the development team published an update MinimalGUI ISO image dubbed SparkyLinux 4.5.1.

• The development of the open-source and platform-independent LibreELEC (Libre Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) operating system based on the latest Kodi media center software received a new Alpha milestone on December 6, 2016.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Does it happen to you, too, that there are moments where you ask yourself why others want something from you that is there already since a while? Exactly this happened with https://keyserver.opensuse.org/: the original machine was set up a long time ago to make it easier for people attending the openSUSE GPG key-signing parties, but it looks like nobody officially announced this “new service” for our users…

• …and so here we are: the openSUSE Heroes team is pleased to announce that keyserver.opensuse.org is up and running as public GPG keyserver. We are of course also part of the official keyserver pool, which means that some people might already noticed us, as they got redirected to our server with their requests. (And for those who are interested to setup their own SKS keyserver: we have also written a nice monitoring plugin that helps you keeping an eye on the pool status of your machine and the ones of your peers.)

• Bruno Friedmann has announced the end to AMD proprietary driver fglrx support in openSUSE while also announcing they don’t plan to support the hybrid proprietary AMDGPU-PRO stack either.

• Friedmann wrote, “Say goodbye fglrx!, repeat after me, goodbye fglrx… [In regards to the newer AMDGPU-PRO stack] I will certainly not help proprietary crap, if I don’t have a solid base to work with, and a bit of help from their side. I wish good luck to those who want to try those drivers, I’ve got a look inside, and got a blame face.”

Slackware Family

• The update is for the 64-bit version. Updated kernel and Xorg, as well as taking care of security and functional fixes (such as tweaks to pulse audio, network manager, battery management.) Installer also updated to correct error of sometimes not finding drives for autoinstall. All Slackware updates in current included and several programs recompiled to keep up with dependency changes.

Red Hat Family

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced the general availability of an updated kernel package for the enterprise-ready CloudLinux 7 operating system based on the freely distributed sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• CloudLinux is the operating system of choice for hosting providers and data centers, powering over 20 million websites. It’s a super-platform designed for stability, security, and efficiency in shared hosting by isolating each occupant and giving them allocated server resources.

• A new kernel version, tagged as build 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.26, has been announced earlier for those who are using the CloudLinux 7 release on their server infrastructures, and it’s now available for installation from the updates-testing repository. It’s been rebased on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7′s OpenVZ rh7-3.10.0-327.36.1.vz7.18.7 kernel.

Finance

Fedora

• I honestly never thought I’d consider Fedora a rock solid enough distribution to serve as a daily driver for anything but developing and testing. This came with good reason: Fedora was always released as a bleeding edge platform, a playground for testers and developers.

• That was the Fedora of old. What they have created with their 25th iteration is some sort of magical confluence of bleeding edge and bloody brilliant.

• With more laptops abandoning DVD drives, USB-based flash drive installers being well supported and widely-used, and CD/DVDs just being far less popular these days, Fedora developers are discussing the future of the official status for optical images in future Fedora releases.

• While Fedora developers continue discussing the possibility of making their release cycles longer, the latest post-F25 topic is the official state for the optical Fedora images. In particular, Fedora QA wondering about future requirements given the significant time requirements spent on testing Fedora CD/DVD images.

• I regularly try many Linux-based desktop operating systems on my computers, just so I can be familiar with them. Ultimately, I always return to my favorite — Fedora. While that distribution is very good, it can also be a bit difficult to use — for some. Don’t get me wrong, it functions well ‘out of the box’, but once a user begins needing some non-free packages, it can be tough going. In other words, setting it up can sometimes be a chore.

• With Fedora 25 out the door a couple of weeks ago, Fedora is once again moving ahead towards Fedora 26. As usual after a new release, the Fedora Elections are getting into gear. There are a fair number of seats up for election this release, across both the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora Council. The elections are one of the ways you can have an impact on the future of Fedora by nominating and voting. Nominate other community members (or self-nominate) to run for a seat in either of these leadership bodies to help lead Fedora. For this election cycle, nominations are due on December 12th, 2016, at 23:59:59 UTC. It is important to get nominations in quickly before the window closes. This article helps explain both leadership bodies and how to cast a nomination.

• Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to Escape Velocity. The game sets you as a beginning pilot, just having made a down payment on your very first starship. You’re given a choice between a shuttle, a freighter or a fighter. Depending on what ship you choose, you will need to figure out how to earn money to outfit and eventually upgrade your ship. You can transport passengers, run cargo, mine asteroids or even hunt pirates. It’s an open-ended game that blends the top-down action of a 2D space shooter with the depth and replayability of a 4X.

• I’ve known of affinity mapping, and even tried to use sticky notes to figure out some of my data in the first UX project I did. Unfortunately, as I found out at the time, analysis of the data I get in UX research doesn’t really lend itself to being done alone. Much like statistics, I suspect. I’m not at all sure how UX consultants do their analyses, given this!

• On December 7, 2016, the development team behind the Fedora-based Korora Linux operating system proudly announced the release and general availability of Korora 25.

• One of the things about working in open source software communities is that you are always moving forward. It’s hard not to get a sense of momentum and progress when it seems you are constantly striving to improve and build on the work you and others have done before.

• But sometimes you have to pause to reflect, because sometimes there is loss.

Debian Family

• Let me get some interesting tit-bits not related to the day-trip out-of-the-way first –

• I don’t know whether we had full access to see all parts of fuller hall or not. Couple of days I was wondering around Fuller Hall, specifically next to where clothes were pressed. Came to know of the laundry service pretty late but still was useful. Umm… next to where the ladies/gentleman pressed our clothes, there is a stairway which goes down. In fact even on the opposite side there is a stairway which goes down. I dunno if other people explored them or not.

Derivatives

• Today, December 7, 2016, the development team behind the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system have announced the release of the second preview version of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” distribution.

• Still based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” repositories, Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” Test2 is here one and a half months after the previous development release, and ships with more recent technologies and Open Source software projects, including the latest GNOME 3.22.2 desktop environment and Linux 4.4.35 LTS kernel.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We’ve seen what the Raspberry Pi can do when you throw in some extra hardware, and we recently heard about what the Pine64 is going to do once it’s inside a laptop casing.

• Ubuntu OTA-14, the latest over the air update to Ubuntu phone and tablet, has begun to roll out to supported devices. “This time not so many changes released in overall but with the goal of introducing less regressions,” says Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak in the release announcement mailing list post.

• 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.

• In October, a DDoS attack on Dyn’s infrastructure took down a big chunk of the internet, making sites like Amazon and Twitter inaccessible. It was the first major attack involving IoT (internet of things) devices. Fortunately, it was also a benign attack: no one got hurt, no one died.

• However, the next attack could be catastrophic. No one knows when it will happen. No one knows the magnitude.

• There are billions of IoT devices out there: web cameras, thermostats, doorbells, smart bulbs, refrigerators, heaters, ovens, and much more. IoT devices are low hanging fruits for cybercriminals because for all theoretical and practical purposes a majority of these IoT devices are insecure by design, they are insecure by default. It should be called IIoT: insecure internet of things.

Flavours and Variants

• Windows 10 is a really great desktop operating system, but it is not for everyone. For those that care deeply about security and privacy, an open source Linux-based operating system is a wise alternative. The problem? Learning a new user interface can be hard for some. If you have always used a Windows OS in the past, moving to a desktop environment like GNOME or Unity can be confusing and scary.

• Luckily, for those that have difficulty with change, there are some Linux-based operating systems that are designed for Windows-switchers. One fairly popular such offering, Zorin OS, has now reached version 12. It is designed to be familiar to former users of Microsoft’s OS. While the company does charge for an “Ultimate” version, the “Core” edition of Zorin OS 12 is entirely free.

Devices/Embedded

• So you have a Raspberry Pi, or you’re thinking of getting one, and you want to know how to get started and how to become a master user of one.

• The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer, meaning that in many ways it’s a regular PC, except that everything that makes up the computer is on a single board rather than a traditional PC, which has a motherboard and requires a number of additional daughterboards to make a whole unit.

• Android was once the darling of the open source community, though you’d be forgiven for forgetting that – these days its commercial elements seem to be all that make the news. One developer is hoping that community can save the smartwatch, or at the very least, breathe a little new life into existing designs. Florent Revest, a French computer science student, released the 1.0 alpha version of AsteroidOS today. It’s ready to run on multiple Android Wear devices: the original LG G Watch, the Watch Urbane, the Asus ZenWatch 2, and the Sony Smartwatch 3.

Phones

Tizen

• Whilst BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) might not be seen as an attractive messaging application as it once was, due to the decline in popularity of the BlackBerry Operating System (OS), in some countries it is still continuing to thrive. Worldwide we are possibly looking at over 190 million users, with about 60 million located in Indonesia, a country that has recently had the Samsung Z2 released there.

• The Tizen Devlabs series of events are currently being held in India. We have already seen them taking place in Pune, Bangalore, and Delhi. If you missed out on those locations then we also a couple more being held in India this month. Mark your calendars for the following dates:

• The Samsung Gear S3 has made its way to many markets including the US, Europe, and the far east. If you have a Samsung Galaxy Device then you can download the Gear Manager App, that is used to connect to the smartwatch with the phone, from Galaxy Apps Store. If you are using a non-Samsung device you have to do things a little differently.

• [...]

• Whilst we wait for the iOS Gear Manager app to become available users are using the Leaked version that became available. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long now for the official version.

Android

• We’ve rounded up the best upcoming android smartphones for 2017. Those we consider to be the best beyond all platforms, and we’ve regularly updated that list as the smartphone world has evolved. Check out the most anticipated android phones next year.

• December’s Android platform distribution numbers are up and… not much exciting has changed in the last month, to be honest. The only real milestone we’re seeing is that Android 4.4 KitKat is finally no longer the most common API level of the platform, having been usurped by Android 6.0 Marshmallow. KitKat’s dominant streak was around two years – let’s hope Marshmallow doesn’t sit on the throne that long.

• So what exactly is going on with Nvidia’s Shield family of products? We may get that answer at the beginning of CES 2017 in early January. Typically, the company uses this time to reveal its automotive-related news, but there is a rumor that Nvidia plans to showcase a new Shield device during the event as well. The rumor indicates that the company may have originally planned to reveal the device during 2016, but pushed the date back for unknown reasons.

• You will hear many things about today’s Pebble acquisition by Fitbit – that it was about software, firmware, engineers, intellectual property, or simply that Pebble was unable to continue on as it existed. The one examination you should take to heart, though, is that Fitbit just straight up wrote a check to kill a competitor. There’s really not any other way to slice this deal from Fitbit’s end: Pebble was competition, even if not necessarily in a big commercial sense these days, and this was an easy way to smother a company that had hogged much of the wearable limelight.

• Android Nougat 7.0 is the latest official Android Operating System update and is currently available only on 0.3% of Android devices, including the Nexus 5X and 6P, and the Android One devices like General Mobile 4G. As with every update, Nougat brings many new features make users’ experience better, easier and more customizable.

• Nvidia’s Shield Android TV box has been around for more than a year but is still the flagbearer for Android set-top-boxes. It was the first media streamer to offer Netflix in 4K and with HDR, and its Tegra X1 processor and 3GB of RAM ensured that it zipped through Android apps and games like a Ryu fireball through a butter wall.

• Are you an AIB or KBC customer, with an Android phone? If so, there’s some good news for you today. You can now use Android Pay to purchase items.

• The Android-x86 Project eventually may become a viable operating system alternative for your desktop and laptops computers, but it’s not there yet. You will have to wait a while for the developers to fix a number of failures with the latest release upgrading Android-x86 to Marshmallow 6.0.1.

• The developers late this summer released the first stable version of Android-x86 6.0, codenamed “Marshmallow.” Android-x86 lets you run the Android OS with the Google Chrome browser on your desktop and laptop computers, rather than buying one of the qualified Chromebooks with the Google Play Store features bolted on.

Free Software/Open Source

• Just as groundbreaking advancements in technology in the ‘90s and 2000s have fundamentally changed the way film, music and television are produced and distributed today, more recent tech innovations have also provided entrepreneurs with the tools they need to compete in the global marketplace. Here is a look at some of the open-source solutions that you can use in order to realize your entrepreneurial ambitions.

• [...]

• The rise of high quality open-source web utilities has made it possible for anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of web design to make a quality site. In fact, open-source content management systems like WordPress are so easy to use and comprehensive, companies like Best Buy and Xerox use them to maintain their web presences. Additionally, open-source business management and accounting program Solegis, customer relationship management app ConcourseSuite and e-commerce solution Zen Cart all exist to empower entrepreneurs with limited resources.

• 2016 has been a polarising year. A year when the unexpected and largely unpredicted has occurred, shocking people worldwide. We have lurched into a post-truth era, where emotion transcends logic, and maintaining the status quo is no longer a given.

• Change is inevitable and there are vast swathes of global society who are disappointed and apprehensive about what lies ahead. In times of uncertainty, an increased focus on collaboration and community is appealing and desirable.

• The internet has long been a polarising force, a connecting platform that allows individuals to find kindred spirits they might not have been able to find before, regardless of their allegiances and views.

• Developers don’t want to take what companies tell them at face value: they want to look under the bonnet, and assess the quality and design of the code for themselves. If you want to win credibility among the developer community and encourage the right people to your brand, you need to share your work and demonstrate best practice, not just talk about it.

• The benefits to an open source approach don’t end with the positive impression it can help foster among developers.

• The founder and coordinator of the FreeDOS Project writes about FreeDOS 1.2, which is scheduled for a Christmas Day release. There is good news for classic gamers and nostalgia buffs: this one’s got games.

• Over the past few years, interest in both civilian and commercial use of drones has continued to grow rapidly, and drone hardware sits at the top of many people’s holiday wish lists. Even just within the civilian side of things, the list of unmanned aerial devices which fit the moniker of drone seems to be constantly expanding. These days, the term seems to encompass everything from what is essentially a cheap, multi-bladed toy helicopter, all the way up to custom-built soaring machines with incredibly adept artificial intelligence capabilities.

• Hardware giant Lenovo is banking on a future where both public and private clouds are critical in driving IT innovation, and the glue binding those hybrid environments is mostly open source technologies.

• Dan Harmon, Lenovo’s group director of cloud and software-defined infrastructure, encouraged solution providers attending the NexGen Cloud Conference & Expo on Wednesday to explore opportunities to engage Lenovo as its products stock the next generation of cloud data centers.

• Both public and private clouds are growing rapidly and will dominate the market by 2020, Harmon told attendees of the conference produced by CRN parent The Channel Company.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• While Chrome 55 has JavaScript async/await support, the Firefox support isn’t coming until the Firefox 52.0 stable release in March while currently it’s available in the latest Firefox Developer Edition and early alpha builds.

• Mozilla developer Dan Callahan wrote a post today on hacks.mozilla.org for the async/await support in Firefox and can be used if you are running the latest Firefox Developer Edition. Check it out if you’re interested in JavaScript async await support for more asynchronous programming for the web.

SaaS/Back End

• Recently, we’ve taken note of the many organizations offering free or low cost Hadoop and Big Data training. MIT and MapR are just a couple of the players making waves in this space. Recently, Cloudera announced a catalog of online, self-paced training classes covering the company’s entire portfolio of industry-standard Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark training courses. The courses, according to Cloudera, allow you to learn about the latest big data technologies “in a searchable environment anytime, anywhere.”

• Now, Cloudera has announced an updated lineup of training courses and performance-based certification exams for data analysts, database administrators, and developers. The expanded training offerings address the skills gap around many top open source technologies, such as Apache Impala (incubating), Apache Spark, Apache Kudu, Apache Kafka and Apache Hive.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• “That was one of the reasons why we chose an open-source model. We want be open, want people to trust us, want to overcome that barrier they have in mind, those strong beliefs that there’s nothing but Microsoft Office, that nothing better could be created. We won’t change our mind about open source.”

• Bannov says he ultimately sees OnlyOffice becoming a firm that provides consulting, technical support and remote managed services to companies using its open-source products.

• Today, December 7, 2016, Collabora Productivity, through Michael Meeks, is proud to inform Softpedia about the general availability of the long anticipated Collabora Online 2.0 office suite based on the LibreOffice, Nextcloud, and ownCloud technologies.

• After being in development for the past six months, Collabora Online 2.0 is finally here as the powerful cloud-based office suite that promises to protect users’ privacy and freedom of expression while editing various documents formats online. Collabora Online is mainly targeted at the enterprise world, hosting and cloud businesses.

CMS

• Open source methods are being covered more often on television and radio these days, as witnessed by this recent story posted Monday on YouTube by CNBC that mentions Drupal-based Farm OS and covers the story of Dorn Cox, an organic grain grower at Tuckaway Farm in Lee NH; the Director of Green Start, an organization working towards food and fuel security; and co-founder of Farm Hack, an open source community for resilient agriculture.

• WordPress 4.7 was released on December 6, providing the tens of millions of internet users that rely on it, with a long list of new features.

• As always with every new major WordPress milestone, there is a new theme. For WordPress 4.7 the new theme is Twenty Seventeen, which provides users with video headers and features images.

Education

• The following is an adapted excerpt from chapter six of The Open Schoolhouse: Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students, a new book written by Charlie Reisinger, Technology Director for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In the book, Reisinger recounts more than 16 years of Linux and open source education success stories.

• Penn Manor schools saved over a million dollars by trading proprietary software for open source counterparts with its student laptop program. The budget is only part of the story. As Linux moved out of the server room and onto thousands of student laptops, a new learning community emerged.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• For those looking toward the next maintenance release of GCC 6, the GNU Compiler Collection 6.3 is aiming to be out by Christmas.

Public Services/Government

• The city of Rome, the fourth-largest city in the European Union, will increase its use of free and open source software, it decided in October. All new software solutions should be based on open source, and the city is to consider replacing existing proprietary solutions by open source alternatives.

• The Dutch government is to create a vision document on how all software developed for and by public administrations can be made available as open source. On Tuesday, the Lower House of the Dutch Parliament agreed that sharing software developed for or by the government has significant benefits, including information security, efficiency and openness.

Licensing/Legal

• Traditionally, platforms and software stacks were implemented using proprietary software, and consisted of various software building blocks that originated as a result of internal development or via third-party software providers with negotiated licensing terms.

• The business environment was predictable and companies mitigated potential risks through license and contract negotiations with the software vendors. It was very easy to know who was the provider for every software component.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• In December 2015, the COP21 Paris Agreement saw many countries commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through initiatives in the land sector. In this context, emissions estimation systems will be key in ensuring these targets are met. Such solutions would not only be capable of assessing past trends but also of supporting target setting, tracking progress and helping to develop scenarios to inform policy decisions.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Blender Institute, a platform for 3D design and animation, are collaborating with Lulzbot 3D printers. This project a continuation of Lulzbot and Blender Institute’s approach to open source and aimed at enhancing collaboration. The Blender Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is an important figure in the Free and Open Source Software community (FOSS). Providing open source design tool software for 3D movies, games, and visual effects. While Lulzbot, a product line of Aleph Objects take an open source approach to hardware through their 3D printers.

Programming/Development

• As a developer, I rely on a CI server to take care of the day-to-day routine of building, testing and deploying software…so much so that I often find myself committing code after every new class or group of methods as a “fire and forget” signal to the CI server to go ahead and run my tests, check my code for style violations, and push a new version to the dev server. When I have finished my train of thought, I can jump into the CI server and either be greeted with a green tick or have a handy (and more importantly authoritative) list of issues to be addressed.

• However, for all the convenience that a central CI server brings, there are times when this environment lets me down. Maybe my jobs are at the end of the queue, I can’t deploy to the dev servers during a certain time frame, or the configuration of the build just doesn’t quite do what I want it to do but I don’t have the authority to change it.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• Time to publish another first, as the first ever source for a statistic related to tech, mobile, media and advertising. As I do my various workshops and seminars, my clients invariably love my numbers and the one they have most asked for, was a comparison of the different media and communication platforms. Because there wasn’t one. And it was a difficult task to try to do. Now I have done it. We have the 12 tech and media with largest reach.

Hardware

• With the SoC out now for sampling with partners and potential customers, they have demonstrated this SoC so far with Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux. Qualcomm anticipates the Centriq 2400 series SoCs being commercially available in H2’2017.

Health/Nutrition

• The much-awaited decision of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body on Australia’s law requiring that tobacco products be sold in plain packages, challenged by four countries, has been postponed and is now expected “not before May 2017.”

• The Board of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) this week is considering a report calling for the 11 cosponsor agencies of the programme to follow the recommendations of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines to improve policy coherence, and to produce reports on the use of intellectual property at country and regional levels, including the use of flexibilities.

Security

• For almost three months, Internet-of-things botnets built by software called Mirai have been a driving force behind a new breed of attacks so powerful they threaten the Internet as we know it. Now, a new botnet is emerging that could soon magnify or even rival that threat.

• The as-yet unnamed botnet was first detected on November 23, the day before the US Thanksgiving holiday. For exactly 8.5 hours, it delivered a non-stop stream of junk traffic to undisclosed targets, according to this post published Friday by content delivery network CloudFlare. Every day for the next six days at roughly the same time, the same network pumped out an almost identical barrage, which is aimed at a small number of targets mostly on the US West Coast. More recently, the attacks have run for 24 hours at a time.

• The developers of open source webmail package Roundcube want sysadmins to push in a patch, because a bug in versions prior to 1.2.3 let an attacker crash it remotely – by sending what looks like valid e-mail data.

• The authors overlooked sanitising the fifth argument (the _from parameter) in mail() – and that meant someone only needed to compose an e-mail with malicious info in that argument to attack Roundcube.

• [...]

• Roundcube posted a patch to GitHub at the end of November, and issued a version 1.2.3 here.

• Yet another industry survey has flagged open source software that according to one estimate accounts for half of the global code base as a growing security threat. Moreover, a review released by Flexera Software also found that the very security products designed to protect IT infrastructure are themselves riddled with vulnerabilities embedded in open source software.

• Researchers from antivirus provider Eset said “Stegano,” as they’ve dubbed the campaign, dates back to 2014. Beginning in early October, its unusually stealthy operators scored a major coup by getting the ads displayed on a variety of unnamed reputable news sites, each with millions of daily visitors. Borrowing from the word steganography—the practice of concealing secret messages inside a larger document that dates back to at least 440 BC—Stegano hides parts of its malicious code in parameters controlling the transparency of pixels used to display banner ads. While the attack code alters the tone or color of the images, the changes are almost invisible to the untrained eye.

• Many network security cameras made by Sony could be taken over by hackers and infected with botnet malware if their firmware is not updated to the latest version.

• Researchers from SEC Consult have found two backdoor accounts that exist in 80 models of professional Sony security cameras, mainly used by companies and government agencies given their high price.

• One set of hard-coded credentials is in the Web interface and allows a remote attacker to send requests that would enable the Telnet service on the camera, the SEC Consult researchers said in an advisory Tuesday.

• After years of wrestling GnuPG with varying levels of enthusiasm, I came to the conclusion that it’s just not worth it, and I’m giving up. At least on the concept of long term PGP keys.

• This is not about the gpg tool itself, or about tools at all. Many already wrote about that. It’s about the long term PGP key model—be it secured by Web of Trust, fingerprints or Trust on First Use—and how it failed me.

Defence/Aggression

• WikiLeaks has released a cache of thousands of personal emails allegedly from the account of senior Turkish government minister Berat Albayrak, son-in-law of the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which it says shows the extent of links between Mr Albayrak and a company implicated in deals with Isis-controlled oil fields.

• The 60,000 strong searchable cache, released on Monday, spans the time period between April 2000 – September 23 2016, and shows Mr Albayrak had intimate knowledge of staffing and salary issues at Powertrans, a company which was controversially given a monopoly on the road and rail transportation of oil into the country from Iraqi Kurdistan.

• Turkish media reported in 2014 and 2015 that Powertrans has been accused of mixing in oil produced by Isis in neighbouring Syria and adding it to local shipments which eventually reached Turkey, although the charges have not been substantiated by any solid evidence.

• WikiLeaks published on Monday a searchable archive of nearly 58,000 emails from the private email account of Berat Albayrak – Turkey’s incumbent energy minister and son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – revealing the influence Albayrak has in Turkey and his correspondence regarding Powertrans, a company implicated in oil imports from ISIS-controlled oil fields.

• The emails encompass 16 years between April 2000 and September 23, 2016. A search by the ‘Powertrans’ keyword in the published WikiLeaks emails returns 32 results, including emails sent to Albayrak regarding personnel and salary issues at Powertrans.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s mother Christine has told SBS News she feels “angry” but she’s still fighting six years after her son was arrested in relation to sexual assault allegations.

• Assange handed himself in to police in London on December 2010 and was released on bail.

• However, in June 2012 he broke his bail and sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London over fears he would be extradited to the US to face possible espionage charges.

• Since then police have kept the embassy surrounded, preventing him from leaving to Ecuador.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been in confinement for over 2,100 days without being charged with a crime. Since 2012, Assange has been under asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after he faced extradition to Sweden for questioning related to sexual offenses against two women, which Assange has consistently denied. Assange feared that if extradited to Sweden, he would subsequently be extradited to the United States, where he would likely face criminal charges for his work at WikiLeaks.

• Since its founding in 2006, WikiLeaks has published millions of documents exposing corruption in governments around the world, most notably the United States. WikiLeaks has shown light on the mass surveillance conducted by the NSA, torture in Guantanamo Bay, civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. military, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rigging the primaries for Hillary Clinton, and many other revelations. This has, in turn, provided WikiLeaks and Assange a despised reputation among the United States government officials implicated in their releases.

• The New York Times and Washington Post, who previously coordinated with WikiLeaks to publish documents, assisted in propagating a narrative that Assange was a Russian ally due to the damage resulting from the leaks of DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails. Assange and his allies affirm that the abrasive attitude toward WikiLeaks from U.S. officials have been a primary cause of Assange’s prolonged detention by the U.K. and Sweden.

• It should not have been terribly surprising to Sweden or the United Kingdom that the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that the various forms of confinement suffered by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violate his human rights. The Working Group has many times warned that it is unlawful to force someone to choose between liberty and a fundamental right, such as asylum, which Assange now enjoys only so long as he stays inside the walls of the Ecuadorean embassy.

• What is news are the deplorable rhetorical parries from the UK and Swedish governments, who both stated not just disagreement, but that the Working Group opinion would have absolutely no effect on their actions. This is not what one expects from democratic governments who usually support the UN mechanisms and international law.

• The mother of Julian Assange has pleaded with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to secure her son’s release, six years to the day after he was arrested.

• Christine Assange made phone calls to the PM’s and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s offices on Wednesday to ask for their help in releasing the WikiLeaks founder from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, six years after he was arrested in the UK on December 7, 2010.

• ‘Today he has been detained six years without charge,’ Ms Assange told AAP on Wednesday. ‘It’s time for the Australian government to stand up for my son’s human and legal rights.’

• 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.

• Julian Assange has published his statement given to the Swedish prosecutor. I give it in full below. I do implore you to read it. This is the first time his defence has been made public, although the media have been delighted to report the leaked allegations against him in detail. His defence will not be given in the same detail in the media.

• It is worth noting that under Swedish law the identity of both the accuser and the accused ought to be protected, but that did not prevent Swedish police and prosecutors leaking details to a complicit media, or the women concerned selling their story to the tabloids.

• You really do owe it to yourself, to justice and to personal honesty to read Julian’s side of the story.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Sometimes we say that so and so is a “mouthpiece” of some special interest, meaning that they’re in cahoots, that they express their views. Or maybe we say someone’s a “puppet” of industry. Most of the time these are metaphors.

• But sometimes they’re literal. Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s pick to head the EPA, is a mouthpiece and a puppet of the fossil-fuel industry. He’s a stenographer.

• How do we know this? We know this because in 2014 Pruitt sent a letter to that same EPA in his capacity as attorney general of Oklahoma. The letter argued that the agency was dramatically overstating how much pollution new gas wells in his state were causing.

• Climate deniers don’t just want to deny global warming and its danger. They want you to deny it too.

• But man-made climate change is real, the danger is extreme, so they have to use guile to persuade you otherwise. There are three tried-and-false tactics they use often, and to great effect. Let’s take a close look at these misdirection methods, so you can arm yourself for defense against the dark arts.

• THE METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE (MPS) is still running Microsoft’s now-defunct Windows XP operating system on 19,000 PCs.

• This figure, confirmed to the INQUIRER’s sister site V3, marks a decrease of 7,500 from the 27,000 MPS PCs that were running Windows XP in August.

• This means a total of 15,500 machines have been upgraded from XP, although only to Windows 8.1, rather than Microsoft’s newer Windows 10 platform.

• President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Scott Pruitt, the Republican attorney general of Oklahoma and a frequent legal adversary to President Obama, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a transition official told The Hill.

• If confirmed by the Senate to oversee the 15,000-employee agency, Pruitt would take the lead on dismantling the EPA regulations that Trump targeted throughout his campaign as job killers that restrict economic growth.

• Reuters first reported the news Tuesday.

Finance

• First came Ford and Carrier. Now Boeing and SoftBank are experiencing the power of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.

• The president-elect jumped into corporate affairs again Tuesday, tweeting first to criticize one company and then to hail another. He began at 8:52 a.m. New York time by calling out Boeing Co. over costs to develop new Air Force One jets. Just over five hours later he celebrated a $50 billion investment in the U.S. by Japanese telecommunications firm SoftBank Group Corp.

• The tweets, coming after Trump last week announced a deal with United Technologies Corp. to cancel plans to close a U.S. factory, dominated news and moved markets even as details in both cases remained sketchy and the impacts unclear. Trump again showed a willingness to use his bully pulpit to criticize or congratulate companies over actions affecting American workers and government spending.

• The number of workers living in poverty has reached a record high as the UK’s housing crisis fuels growing insecurity, a think tank has warned.

• Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) showed that 3.8 million workers, or one in eight, live in poverty.

• Low wages are regularly cited as the cause of in-work poverty, but the rising cost of rented housing is also pushing working people into extreme financial difficulty. A total of 7.4 million people, including 2.6 million children, are living in poverty despite being in working households, the report claims.

• Sports Direct’s chairman has accused the media, unions and politicians of a damaging “campaign” against the company amid its working practices and governance crisis.

• Donald Trump has taken credit for a Japanese tech conglomerate’s plan to invest $50 billion in America.

• True, Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and CEO of SoftBank (SFTBF), pledged Tuesday to invest the huge sum in U.S. startups. But that’s only part of the story.

• In reality, a big chunk of the cash is likely to come from the Saudi government.

• In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Son said the source of the investment would be a $100 billion fund SoftBank launched in October with Saudi Arabia.

• You have until December 21st. That’s it. But you can opt out.

• Here’s the deal: Uber changed its terms of service to force people into arbitrations, taking away consumers’ rights to sue the ride sharing company if something goes wrong. Like plow into another car because the driver was looking at his phone to see where his next right might come from.

• That kind of thing.

• For the past week, Naked Capitalism has run a series of articles by transportation industry expert Hubert Horan on the economic shenanigans of Uber, which cooks the numbers it shows investors, drivers and the press to make it seem like something other than a black box that uses arrogance and lawlessness to make a bet on establishing a monopoly on transport in the world’s major cities.

• Horan started with four articles on Uber’s economics: Understanding Uber’s Bleak Operating Economics; Understanding Uber’s Uncompetitive Costs; Understanding False Claims About Uber’s Innovation and Competitive Advantages and Understanding That Unregulated Monopoly Was Always Uber’s Central Objective — today, he finishes (?) up with a fascinating Q&A with the commentators who’ve followed the series.

• Trump is not an economic populist, he’s just playing one on TV.

• [...]

• Trump’s opening speech of his “thank you tour” in Ohio laid out the bait. While putting forth his “action plan to make America great,” Trump dished out nationalist and populist themes with a characteristic mix of racist signaling. Trump promised to put America first: “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag. From now on it is going to be: America First,” Trump said. “Never anyone again will any other interests come before the interest of the American people. It is not going to happen again.”

• Trump echoed Bernie Sanders with his focus on the “forgotten” American worker. Trump felt their pain, and indicted trade deficits and flight of manufacturing jobs. He promised good jobs. He will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and take on China. He bragged about the Carrier deal, and pledged a 35 percent tariff on companies that offshore jobs and try to ship products back into the United States.

• Like Sanders, Trump proposed a major plan to rebuild America, including “our inner cities.” His plan will have “two simple rules”: “Buy America” and “Hire America,” phrases that too many Democrats would choke on.

• The conservative core of his program—corporate tax cuts, deregulation, reviving coal and oil, repealing Obamacare—is wrapped in this populist gauze.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.

• “My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, ‘Well, I might not sleep much tonight.’ ”

• Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.

• Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.

• In Michigan, where Donald Trump won by just 10,704 votes, election officials are refusing to recount ballots in counties Hillary Clinton won handily.

• A federal judge in Michigan on Wednesday revoked his order requiring a recount of the state’s presidential vote sought by Jill Stein, siding with a state appeals court that found the Green Party candidate had no grounds to mount the challenge.

• U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith’s ruling has the effect of halting the recount in Michigan, at least for now, following conflicting rulings a day earlier by federal and state appeals courts.

• The Michigan Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the recount stopped, while the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Goldsmith’s earlier decision and said the process should proceed. The dueling rulings had both sides claiming victory but left the future of Stein’s bid unclear.

• Goldsmith, in deferring to the Michigan appeals court, said Stein had not presented valid reasons for him to override that court’s decision, which found that she was not an “aggrieved” candidate with standing to demand a recount.

• The Stein campaign said in a statement following Goldsmith’s ruling that it had appealed again, to the Michigan Supreme Court, and sought to disqualify two justices there because they had been mentioned by Republican President-elect Donald Trump as potential nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.

• A federal judge in Michigan on Wednesday revoked his order requiring a recount of the state’s presidential vote sought by Jill Stein, siding with a state appeals court that found the Green Party candidate had no grounds to mount the challenge.

• US District Judge Mark Goldsmith’s ruling has the effect of halting the recount in Michigan, at least for now, following conflicting rulings a day earlier by federal and state appeals courts.

• The Michigan Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the recount stopped, while the US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Goldsmith’s earlier decision and said the process should proceed. The dueling rulings had both sides claiming victory but left the future of Stein’s bid unclear.

• This past Sunday, a man fired a rifle into Comet Ping Pong, the Washington, DC pizza place at the center of an internet conspiracy theory dubbed Pizzagate that claims, in part, that the restaurant is a haven for a child abuse ring. The gunman surrendered to police after he realized there were no children being illegally harbored in the restaurant. What should have been an end to one of the internet’s strangest conspiracy theories appears to be just another moment in its convoluted timeline.

• This week, conspiracy theorists have named other pizza parlors as willing participants in the cover-up. DNA Info reports that New York pizzeria Roberta’s in Brooklyn received a threatening phone call last week after the restaurant was linked to Pizzagate.

• Two Democratic electors from Colorado filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday, challenging a state law that requires they vote for the winner of the state’s popular vote, the Denver Post reports.

• Polly Baca and Robert Nemanich had pledged to support Democrat Hillary Clinton, the winner of Colorado’s nine electoral votes.

• But now they are joining so-called “Moral Electors” in other states and say they’ll shift their Democratic votes to a consensus Republican pick — if one emerges.

• The “Moral Electors” want to persuade Republican electors in other states to vote for a third-party candidate, the Post reports, in an attempt to keep Donald Trump from receiving 270 electoral votes.

Censorship/Free Speech

• At present, LinkedIn is blocked in Russia. One of the world’s largest social networking sites with over 400 million users in 200 countries, LinkedIn has not been accessible in Russia since November 22 2016. On November 10 2016 the Moscow City Court upheld a lower court’s decision ordering that the website be blocked for all users in Russia.

• Islamic leaders in Australia have backed a campaign to produce an alternative to Peppa Pig set in a “predominantly Muslim town”.

• The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) has encouraged parents to raise funds for TV shows that support Islamic values.

• Barakah Hills, a “halal cartoon series”, has been pitched as a Muslim alternative to the UK pre-school show.

• Peppa Pig is a popular children’s animation shown in 180 countries.

• Production company One4Kids, which makes children’s shows with Islamic themes, wants to raise A$20,000 (£12,000; $15,000) to begin production on Barakah Hills.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Norwegian Consumer Council has looked at the terms and the technical features of selected connected toys. The findings show a serious lack of understanding of children’s rights to privacy and security.

• Based on what was discovered, consumer organizations in Europe and the United States in cooperation file formal complaints to relevant authorities on what seems to be obvious breaches of several consumer laws.

• – Children are especially vulnerable, and are entitled to products and services that safeguard their rights to security and privacy. As long as the manufacturers are not willing to take these issues seriously, Internet of things-technologies are not suited for toys, says Finn Myrstad, Head of section, digital services in the Norwegian Consumer Council.

• The makers of the i-Que and Cayla smart toys have been accused of subjecting children to “ongoing surveillance” and posing an “imminent and immediate threat” to their safety and security.

• The accusations come via a formal complaint in the US by consumer groups.

• They, along with several EU bodies, are calling for investigations into the manufacturers.

• On Sunday, November 17, 1985, a short article appeared on page A12 of the Washington Post under the headline “Managua Said to Get Military Copters.”

• The article stated that “Recently stepped-up shipments from Warsaw Pact countries to Nicaragua include at least two Polish Mi2 helicopters that can be used as gunships,” attributing this to “government officials with access to the latest intelligence reports.”

• The last of the story’s seven paragraphs clarified that just one of the Polish helicopters actually was “equipped with launchers for air-to-ground rockets.”

• By the first half of 2004, the National Security Agency was drowning in information. It had amassed 85 billion phone and online records and cut the ribbon on a new hacking center in Hawaii — but it was woefully short on linguists who could make sense of captured communications and lacked enough network analysts to effectively monitor all the systems it had hacked.

• The signals intelligence collected by the agency was being used for critically important decisions even as NSA struggled to understand it. Some bombs in Iraq were being targeted based entirely on signals intelligence, a senior NSA official told staff at the time — with decisions being made in a matter of “minutes” with “less and less review.”

• On issues of national security and intelligence, no one is likely to have more influence in Donald Trump’s White House than retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn.

• Yet Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has gained prominence in Republican politics by fueling conspiracy theories and Islamophobic rhetoric that critics warn could create serious distractions—or alienate allies and embolden enemies—if it continues.

• In its first month of operation, computer experts at the UK’s new GCHQ-led National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) responded to nearly 70 reported hacking incidents including seven cases of ransomware attacks, it has been revealed.

• Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked tens of thousands of documents revealing that the American government has spied on its own citizens, told Katie Couric on Yahoo News on Monday that retired Gen. David Petraeus, Donald Trump’s potential pick for secretary of state, disclosed far more classified information despite receiving a much lighter punishment.

• “We have a two-tiered system of justice in the United States,” Snowden said to Couric, “where people who are either well-connected to government or they have access to an incredible amount of resources get very light punishments.”

• Snowden went on to juxtapose how he was treated by the federal government with the punishments received by Petraeus, who shared classified information with his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell.

• “Perhaps the best-known case in recent history here is Gen. Petraeus — who shared information that was far more highly classified than I ever did with journalists,” Snowden said. “And he shared this information not with the public for their benefit, but with his biographer and lover for personal benefit — conversations that had information, detailed information, about military special-access programs, that’s classified above top secret, conversations with the president and so on.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Women in Lebanon are protesting for the removal of a law that allows rapists to escape punishment for their crimes as long as they marry the survivor.

• The outdated statute from the 1940s currently says that rape is punishable by up to seven years in prison. The penalty for raping a minor or someone with mental or physical disabilities is higher – but Article 522 of the law creates a loophole which says that criminal prosecution is suspended if the two people involved get married.

• The law is up for debate on Wednesday after it was raised by a member of parliament. Lebanon’s diverse Christian and Muslim political representatives are currently energised by the election of a president after a more than two-year-long paralysis which meant legislation could not be passed – and activists are optimistic something can be done.

• Five Afghan teenagers have been arrested after a boy was gang-raped at knifepoint in a forest in Sweden, it has emerged.

• The victim, who is under 15, was filmed during the attack, which happened in woodland in Uppsala, south east Sweden.

• He was beaten and dragged out to the forest at knifepoint before being subjected to an ordeal lasting more than an hour, prosecutors say.

• Back in 2008, Senator Barack Obama promised that, if elected, he would run the most transparent Administration in history and would champion the cause of whistle-blowers. “Such acts of courage and patriotism . . . should be encouraged rather than stifled,” Obama said of whistle-blowers during his campaign.

• Eight years later, these words ring hollow to admirers of dissenters such as Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake, two of eight national-security “leakers” who have been charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act during Obama’s Presidency. His Justice Department has prosecuted more such cases against whistle-blowers than all previous Administrations combined, setting a precedent that some fear Donald Trump will invoke—and drastically build upon—to further muzzle dissent.

• A breast-cancer patient said she felt violated and humiliated in a public TSA search at Los Angeles International Airport Sunday after two security agents put her through what she called an aggressive pat down.

• Denise Albert, a frequent guest on the PIX11 Morning News and co-host of “The Moms,” was traveling through LAX security when two TSA agents pulled her aside for a manual search because she was trying to bring a necessary medical cream with her on her flight, Albert said.

• “I always let them know I have a medical port and that I am wearing a wig,” says Albert.

• Stuart Allen died on November 22, 2016. I learned of his death by way of an email from Laurel Krause, whose sister Allison was gunned down by the National Guard on May 4, 1970, just after the noon hour during a demonstration against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

• Stuart Allen would not like to be called a hero, although he certainly was one. Stuart was both an audio and video expert, with degrees in both fields and worked out of his lab and business in New Jersey that offers expert analyses of that kind of data. Stuart often worked for law enforcement, including the Justice Department and the FBI.

• In 2010, both Stuart and another forensic audio expert, Tom Owen, provided information at the request of the Cleveland Plain Dealer (“New analysis of 40-year old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire,” May 9, 2010) about a new analysis of the famous Strubbe tape, a recording of the events that led up to the death of four students and the wounding of nine others during a demonstration against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia.

• The tape that Stuart analyzed, and the results with which Tom Owen concurred, yielded dramatic new information. Using state-of-the-art forensic audio tools, one of which was developed by the Soviet KGB prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Stuart found that a sequence of orders was given to the National Guardsmen as they reached the top of Blanket Hill on the campus of Kent State University, turned in unison, and fired 67 times at unarmed student demonstrators below the hill.

• A Christmas celebration led by preacher Stephen Tong at Sabuga Building in Bandung, West Java, on Tuesday (06/12) was forced to end after a Muslim hardliner group disrupted services.

• The group, identifying as Defenders of Ahlus Sunnah (PAS), forced organizers to end the event and claiming the religious service should be held in a church, not a public building.

• Human rights activists in Egypt have reacted angrily to the arrest of prominent women’s rights advocate Azza Soliman, saying it marked a “chilling escalation” of pressure on civil society organisations.

• Soliman, the founder of the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA), is one of a number of activists, lawyers and journalists to have been prevented from leaving Egypt in the past month.

• The rights lawyer and leading feminist said last week that she had been turned back on 19 November at Cairo airport. Soon after, Soliman discovered that her personal assets and those of her group had been frozen. On Wednesday, her foundation and a security source said she had been detained by police.

• Tensions between the industrial-age establishment and the networked people-at-large have been rising for years, if not for two decades. Politicians and elites striving to paint themselves on moral high horses are seen as increasingly isolated from the real world, enriching themselves at the expense of everybody else – not just expense in a monetary sense, but even more so in a liberty sense. With a perceived establishment increasingly insisting on their worldview, using an increasing amount of political violence and in contrast with people at large, major changes are inevitably in the cards.

• There are many signs that the political establishment is losing touch with reality – basically, losing touch with everything that happened since the Internet. The political structures they’re a part of were built to solve the problems of a different era, and those organizations are institutionally incapable of realizing that today’s conflicts are completely different from those that defined the industrial age. Therefore, politicians do two things – they keep hammering home messages that come across as increasingly irrelevant, while at the same time strengthening their own reality bubble where they are denying that the world is changing, has already changed, around them.

• [...]

• The UK is preparing for ten years in prison for teenagers who share music and movies directly, as people have always done but in violation of the copyright distribution monopoly, on the basis that they theoretically may have caused somebody to not earn as much money as they feel they should have. This is a prime example of a “let them eat cake” moment: in a referendum, would such a draconian measure even get a single percentage point of support?

• [...]

• When I can’t walk home safely, I just get angry when the taxation money I’ve worked hard for is being spent on things like gender pronoun awareness campaigns and parental leave bonuses within the administration instead of on fixing basic security and foundational liberty in the streets. The elites are now so far isolated from the common people, they’re not even aware that they’re working at the utterly wrong level of the Maslow Pyramid of Human Needs: politicians and establishment are operating at level five (self-emancipation) with society at large at level two (basic safety concerns).

• A federal judge has stopped the hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots in Michigan, a decision that seems to secure Donald Trump’s narrow victory in the traditionally blue state.

• U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith, who effectively ordered the recount to begin Monday, sided with a state appeals court Wednesday in halting the effort, ABC News reported.

• On Tuesday, a Michigan appeals court ruled 3-0 that Green Party candidate Jill Stein should not have been allowed to demand a recount because she is not an “aggrieved candidate.” Goldsmith, after hearing arguments from the state Republican Party and GOP attorney general, agreed.

• “Because there is no basis for this court to ignore the Michigan court’s ruling and make an independent judgment regarding what the Michigan Legislature intended by the term ‘aggrieved,’ plaintiffs have not shown an entitlement to a recount,” Goldsmith said.

• The Stein campaign’s lead lawyers in Michigan said they were “deeply disappointed” with the ruling.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• After several years, the appeals court has reached a final decision in the case between anti-piracy group BREIN and Usenet provider NSE. The court ruled that the Usenet provider is not liable for the copyright infringements of its users. However, it also requires the service in question to offer a fast and “effective” takedown procedure.

• YouTube has said it has paid the music industry $1bn (£794m) in royalties this year – but record companies have responded by claiming it is not enough.

• The spat began on Tuesday, when YouTube’s chief business officer Robert Kyncl posted a blog highlighting the site’s contribution to the industry.

• He said YouTube had distributed $1bn in advertising royalties alone, arguing that “free” streaming was as important as subscription sites like Spotify.

• But record labels were not impressed.

• Google has just announced that during the past 12 months, YouTube paid out $1 billion to the music industry from advertising alone. However, the IFPI remains unimpressed, accusing the platform of taking advantage of artists and producers. YouTube exploits loopholes in the DMCA, the industry group argues, while calling for legislative change to address the “value gap.”

• The opinion explains that recent empirical evidence from national implementation of publishers’ neighbouring rights confirmed a negative impact on small publishers. However, news aggregators might have a positive effect on online news sites, they said.

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

----------

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