● 12.10.16

● Links 10/12/2016: KDE neon User LTS Edition, AsteroidOS in Headlines Again

Posted in News Roundup at 6:15 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux has come out of oblivion to become a mainstream technology today – making its presence felt in the world of marketing, finance, operations and in every other domain. The New Year 2017, should hold promise for Linux, as Bryan Lunduke said recently. There will be some crucial outcomes of the Linux Foundation-Microsoft partnership as well, which made waves in the tech circles the world over. From the predictions available, there will be increased focus on some areas, while the others will witness a lot of trial and error, and even predictive failure, for that matter.

Desktop

• Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.

• The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Server

• Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.

• The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it’s tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

• The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

• Most website owners use web hosting control panels to manage their hosting environment. The fact is, the control panel facilitates the server administration and allows users to manage multiple websites without hiring an expert. Today, with so many options available, you don’t have to be a command line guru in order to host a simple website. All you need is a server and a web hosting control panel. There are paid control panels like WHM/cPanel or DirectAdmin which are very powerful, but if you don’t like to pay for a control panel you can simply choose one of the open source alternatives. In this guide, we will present to you some of the most popular open source hosting control panels.

• NFlabs rebrands as ZEPL and announces $4.1M in funding in support of open-source Apache Zeppelin data analytics project.

• The open-source Apache Zeppelin project is an increasingly popular, web-based notebook for interactive data analytics that directly integrates with the Apache Spark project for Big Data analytics. Among the commercial backers of Zeppelin is ZEPL, formerly known as NFLabs. On December 8, the newly branded ZEPL announced that it has raised $4.1 million in an initial funding round.

• The funding round was led by Vertex Ventures and it included the participation of Translink Capital, Specialized Types and Big Basin Capital. The funding is set to be used to help ZEPL build a successful business model. Sejun Ra, co-founder and CEO at ZEPL said that the plan for the new money to help his company build and develop a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow.

• Amazon launches AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal, extending Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to 15 regions and 40 availability zones around the world.

• At long last, the cloud is coming to Canada. Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on December 8, the official launch of the new AWS Canada (Central) Region, providing cloud infrastructure from data centers in Montreal, Quebec. The new AWS region is set to help serve customers in Canada with Amazon already highlighting a number of well-known organizations including National Bank of Canada, Porter Airlines and clothing retailer Lululemon.

• MEF Thursday announced the release of a new white paper – “An Industry Initiative For Third Generation Network and Services“ – spearheaded by MEF and co-authored by ON.Lab, ONOS, OPEN-O, OpenDaylight (ODL), the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), and TM Forum. The white paper describes an industry vision for the evolution and transformation of network connectivity services and the networks used to deliver them. MEF refers to this vision as the “Third Network,” which combines the agility and ubiquity of the Internet with the performance and security of CE 2.0 (Carrier Ethernet 2.0) networks.

• For as long as any of us can remember, fulfillment and assurance were two independent processes, mostly because they were conceived, operated and purchased by separate departments. As Alfred D. Chandler demonstrated in his classic book “Strategy and Structure,” operations and even business structure follow organizational charts and vice-versa. Fulfillment and assurance are no exceptions, with those organizations driving processes and supporting software purchases. While many know that its not ideal, the situation has mostly worked.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.13 kernel.

• All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

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

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

• A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.

• While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it’s not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week’s Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

• In recognition of the increasingly central role open source technology has played for the networking sector, the Linux Foundation today named Arpit Joshipura as its general manager for networking and orchestration.

• Joshipura, a veteran tech executive who has worked at Dell, Ericsson, and Nortel, among others, is considered by the organization to be a foundational contributor to open source software in general and networking in particular. Currently, he’s the chief marketing officer for Prevoty, an application security startup in Los Angeles.

• The good news is developers are looking very closely at Linux’s core code for possible security holes. The bad news is they’re finding them.

• At least the best news is that they’re fixing them as soon as they’re uncovered.

• The latest three kernel vulnerabilities are designated CVE-2016-8655, CVE-2016-6480, and CVE-2016-6828. Of these, CVE-2016-8655 is the worst of the bunch. It enables local users, which can include remote users with virtual and cloud-based Linux instances, to crash the system or run arbitrary code as root.

• When the Linux kernel version 4.9 will be released next week, it will come with the last pieces needed to offer to some long-awaited dynamic thread-tracing capabilities.

• As the keepers of monitoring and debugging software start using these new kernel calls, some of which have been added to the Linux kernel over the last two years, they will be able to offer much more nuanced, and easier to deploy, system performance tools, noted Brendan Gregg, a Netflix performance systems engineer and author of DTrace Tools, in a presentation at the USENIX LISA 2016 conference, taking place this week in Boston.

• With the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window expected to open this weekend, I was digging around to see whether there was anything new on the BUS1 front and whether we might see it for the next kernel cycle.

• While I have yet to see any official communication from the BUS1 developers, it doesn’t look like it’s happening for BUS1. In fact, it’s been a rather quiet past few weeks for these developers working on this in-kernel IPC mechanism to succeed the never-merged KDBUS.

• IBM believes blockchain technology, with its capability to create an essentially immutable ledger of digital events, will alter the way whole industries conduct transactions. To make that happen, Big Blue asserts, requires a complete ecosystem of industry players working together.

• To that end, IBM today said it is building a blockchain ecosystem, complete with a revenue sharing program, to accelerate the growth of networks on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. IBM envisions the ecosystem as an open environment that allows organizations to collaborate using the Hyperledger Fabric.

Graphics Stack

• While it was disappointing that Fedora 25 shipped with Mesa 12.0, the Mesa 13.0 version has now been sent down as a stable release update.

• Games company Feral Interactive’s call for a PPA be set up to offer the latest Stable Mesa drivers on Ubuntu has been semi-answered. Emphasis on semi, there. As noted by Gaming on Linux, a new stable Mesa PPA is now available — hurrah — but it is not “official” in the way that the stress-tested Nvidia drivers PPA is — boo.

• Feral Interactive’s call for a stable Mesa PPA has already made progress, as there’s now a stable PPA available for Mesa.

• Paulo Dias “Padoka” has setup another PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/pkppa

• Note: This is a community-run PPA, so it’s possible it may someday go out of date and/or have issues at times.

• This is likely a stop-gap measure until something more official is done.

• It currently hosts Mesa 13.0.2 and LLVM 3.9 along with RADV and ANV the AMD and Intel open source Vulkan drivers.

• Toward the end of November was a discussion that started about potentially dropping all of the FBDEV Linux kernel drivers that are currently in the staging area, but it doesn’t look like that will go through, at least until the relevant hardware has seen basic DRM driver ports.

• Today, December 8, 2016, AMD announced the general availability for download of the latest AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 proprietary graphics driver for Linux-based operating systems.

• Shipping with FreeSync support and DirectGMA for OpenGL, the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 graphics driver provides support for some GNC 1.0 GPUs from the Southern Islands series, namely AMD Radeon R7 M465X, AMD Radeon R7 M370, and AMD Radeon R7 M350.

• Additionally, the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 graphics driver includes install scripts for the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, CentOS 7.3, CentOS 6.8, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 Service Pack 2, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 2 operating systems.

• Windows is the indisputable platform of choice for gaming and VR, but Linux is catching up fast as graphics companies ramp up driver and hardware support for the OS.

• AMD is showing more love for Linux than ever before. The company on Thursday announced some hardware and driver updates that will strengthen gaming and VR on the OS.

• The biggest news is AMD’s support for FreeSync on Linux PCs. FreeSync can improve the rendition of games and high-definition video by allowing GPUs to communicate directly with displays, reducing image stutter and lag time. Images are drawn up on the screen while they are being rendered in GPUs.

• This morning’s AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

• AMD ran into a snag getting out the updated proprietary hybrid Linux driver stack this morning, but it’s now available for download from AMD.

• This page has the 16.50 Linux x86/x86_64 driver available for download.

• While AMD developers have been working to improve their “DAL” (now known as “DC”) display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it’s still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.

• For those curious how the latest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver code is comparing to yesterday’s AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release, here are some fresh OpenGL Linux driver benchmarks from a few AMD graphics cards.

• Announced alongside the AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition driver debut on Thursday (and the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 Linux driver) was their GPUOpen initiative introducing OCAT, the Open Capture and Analytics Tool.

• With Linux 4.9 expected for release this weekend and the 4.10 merge window to then immediately open, Alex Deucher of AMD sent in an early batch of fixes atop the earlier feature material of AMDGPU/Radeon DRM changes for Linux 4.10.

• Daniel Stone of Collabora has sent out his latest patches for wiring up atomic mode-setting support in Wayland’s Weston.

• These “v2″ patches provide many clean-ups to the original code, various feature improvements, and some plane work too.

• While Intel’s at OpenGL 4.5 compliance in Mesa with their open-source graphics driver, there remain a number of modern extensions that aren’t currently mandated by an OpenGL version number, among them is ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• At some point in your career as a Linux administrator, you are going to have to view log files. After all, they are there for one very important reason…to help you troubleshoot an issue. In fact, every seasoned administrator will immediately tell you that the first thing to be done, when a problem arises, is to view the logs.

• And there are plenty of logs to be found: logs for the system, logs for the kernel, for package managers, for Xorg, for the boot process, for Apache, for MySQL… For nearly anything you can think of, there is a log file.

Wine or Emulation

• A few moments ago, the Wine development team was proud to announce the general availability of the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Wine 2.0 open-source software for running Windows apps on Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.

Games

• Don’t adjust your screens, as you did read that correctly. Over 1,000 games have released on Steam this year alone with Linux support.

• I’ve been slowly writing up an end of year roundup and something I wanted to know was how well we have done this year in terms of actual releases.

• It took a while to add it all up, as some games show up in the list with a date that’s passed and they aren’t actually released. I had to be pretty careful and do it slowly to make sure it’s right.

• A few moments ago, Valve’s engineers pushed a new Steam Client Beta, the fourth one for the week of December 5, and while it’s not a major milestone, it brings an exciting feature for Steam Controller users on Linux platforms.

• The fact of the matter is that there’s only once change in today’s Steam Client Beta release for the day of December 9, 2016, and it makes the Steam Controller device work again with the older udev rules.

• To support future functionalities of the Steam Controller, which Valve is known to implement all the time to make it the best gaming controller for Steam users, the company recommends upgrading the rules to allow Steam to access /dev/hidraw*.

• This is quite an amazing little fix. Marek sent in a patch for Mesa that fixes a bug that has apparently been an issue for around 9 years.

• A nine-year-old Mesa bug has now been squashed by Marek Olšák. This Mesa bug ended up affecting the RadeonSI driver and causing stability issues, which has now been addressed and should help open-source AMD Linux gamers run titles like Team Fortress 2 and Batman Arkham: Origins (Wine).

• Released yesterday was the newest build of vkQuake, the open-source game project developing a Vulkan renderer for the original Quake game based upon the QuakeSpasm code-base.

• OneShot [Official Site, Steam], a pretty promising looking puzzle & adventure game was planned as a day-1 Linux release, but it’s seen a delay.

• Feral Interactive was proud to inform the media about the upcoming Christmas release of the immense DLC pack for the Total War: WARHAMMER turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game to SteamOS and Linux.

• Last month, on November 22, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive brought us the Linux/SteamOS port of the astonishing and addictive Total War: WARHAMMER game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. And now, they promise to port the Total War: WARHAMMER Realm of The Wood Elves DLC too.

• Ethan Lee sent out a teaser tweet earlier about Owlboy [Official Site, Steam, GOG], as it seems he is porting it and wanted to get in first before it ends up popping up on SteamDB.

• The developers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance [Official Site, Kickstarter] have put out a Kickstarter update. The bad news is that the Linux version of Kingdom Come: Deliverance will not be a day-1 release.

• This was quite obvious from their lack of communication about the Linux version, but it’s still sad to see it written up now.

• I have to hand it to the guys working on Albion Online, they certainly are putting the effort in to polish the game up for a big release. The big ‘Faye’ update has landed and it’s huge.

• Note: I still suggest waiting until the beta ends, since players will be wiped.

• One Eyed Kutkh [Official Site] is one of the weirdest looking games I’ve seen recently! It’s a point & click adventure game about an alien trying to get home.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma 5.8 is designated an LTS edition with bugfixes and new releases being made for 18 months (rather than the normal four months). This will please a category of user who don’t want new features on their desktop but do want it to keep working and bugs to be removed. Because Neon aims to service Plasma and its users in every way we have now created the KDE neon User LTS Edition.

• Jonathon Riddell today announced a new release of KDE Plasma flagship neon, KDE neon Long Term Supported. neon LTS features Plasma 5.8 and will not change to 5.9. Elsewhere, two users shared their methods for upgrading from openSUSE Leap 42.1 to 42.2 and Tumbleweed received several interesting updates this week. Dedoimedo posted a best distro poll and Sourceforge said watch out for your project founder’s “mentality.”

• Jonathan Riddell has announced the KDE Neon User LTS Edition availability. Rather than tracking the bleeding-edge KDE developments as KDE Neon traditionally does, the User LTS Edition tracks Plasma 5.8 LTS.

• The KDE e.V. community report for the second half of 2015 is now available. It presents a survey of all the activities and events carried out, supported, and funded by KDE e.V. in that period, as well as the reporting of major conferences that KDE has been involved in.

Distributions

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki proudly informs Softpedia today about the general availability of the Antivirus Live CD 21.0-0.99.2 bootable ISO image for scanning computers for viruses and other malware.

• Time for you to express yourselves. It’s been another year full of ups and downs, good distros and bad distros. Or if I may borrow a quote from a movie, Aladeen distros and Aladeen distros. Indeed.

• The rules are very similar to what we did in years gone past. I will conduct my own annual contest best thingie wossname, with a sprinkling of KDE, Xfce and other desktops, having their separate forays. But then, I will incorporate your ideas and thoughts into the final verdict, much like the 2015 best distro nomination. Let us.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• ROSA is a Linux distribution forked some time ago from Mandriva Linux by a team of Russian developers, Rosa Lab, or officially LLC NTC-IT ROSA.

• I reviewed their distributions several times: ROSA KDE R7, ROSA Desktop 2012 and even interviewed the ROSA team.

• The most recent release of ROSA is now ROSA Desktop Fresh R8, which is available in several flavours: MATE, GNOME 3, KDE 4 and Plasma 5. I decided to try the Plasma 5 edition of this distribution, especially as my interest to Plasma increased after the good impression Kubuntu 16.10 left on me.

• There are links to the ISO images available on the ROSA download page, and I used it to get my own version of this Linux distribution. The size of ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5 64-bit image is 1.9 Gb. The dd command helped me to “burn” the image to the USB stick.

• So, the USB drive is attached to my Toshiba Satellite L500-19X laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let’s go!

Arch Family

• Manjaro Deepin is an edition of Manjaro Linux that uses the Deepin Desktop Environment, which is a desktop environment that originated from the Deepin Linux, a desktop distribution that’s based on Ubuntu.

• The main edition of Manjaro uses the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Manjaro Deepin is just one of many community-supported desktop environments available to users of the Arch Linux-based desktop distribution. The others are: Budgie, Cinnamon, GNOME 3, i3, LXQt and MATE.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE developer Bruno Friedmann, informed the community of the openSUSE Linux operating system about the fact that he’s planning to remove the old ATI/AMD Catalyst (also known as fglrx) proprietary graphics drivers.

• openSUSE’s Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

• Topping the list of updates for snapshot 20161129 was the update to Light Display Manager 1.21.1, which added an Application Programming Interface (API) version to the greeter-daemon protocol for future enhancements. Other updates in the snapshot include openVPN, which added a recommended utility for network and traffic protocols, and subpackages for systemd relevant for 32-bit users. Desktop manager xfdesktop updated to version 4.12.3 and introduced rotating wallpaper images if the images contain rotation information.

• The programming language vala, which aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements, updated in the 20161129 and 20161201 snapshots.

• I’m sure nobody doubted it, but Tumbleweed is back on the roll! And in fact, we did the impossible and released 8 snapshots in a week. This review will cover {1201..1208}.

Slackware Family

• Paul Sherman, the developer of the Absolute Linux distribution based on Slackware, has announced the availability of the second point release to the stable Absolute 14.2 series.

• Absolute 14.2 launched in mid-September 2016, and it’s based on the latest and most advanced Slackware 14.2 operating system, but from time to time there’s need for updated installation medium in case you want to deploy the OS on new computers without the need to download any updates. That’s why Absolute 14.2.2 is here, bundled with all the latest kernel and graphics stack updates released for Slackware 14.2 since its July launch.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has steadily taken significant steps in the cloud computing arena, expanding the focus of its OpenShift open source Platform-as-a-Service hybrid cloud computing offering, including launching a cloud-hosted commercial edition called OpenShift Online. Now, the company has announced the availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform.

• The new offering brings Red Hat’s container platform as a managed service offering to enterprise customers who want to build, launch, and manage applications on OpenShift Dedicated with Google Cloud Platform as their underlying cloud infrastructure. With the availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform, users can speed adoption of containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native application patterns, according to Red Hat. Users also get access to Google’s global, container-optimized infrastructure and can more easily augment their applications with Google’s ecosystem of data analytics, machine learning, compute, network, and storage services.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform. The new offering brings Red Hat’s award-winning container platform as a managed service offering to enterprise customers who want to build, launch, and manage applications on OpenShift Dedicated with Google Cloud Platform as their underlying cloud infrastructure. With the availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform, users can speed adoption of containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native application patterns, benefiting from Red Hat’s deep enterprise experience. Users also benefit from Google’s global, container-optimized infrastructure and can more easily augment their applications with Google’s ecosystem of data analytics, machine learning, compute, network, and storage services.

• Ceph is a storage system designed to be used at scale, with clusters of Ceph in deployment in excess of 40 petabytes today. At LinuxCon Europe, Allen Samuels, Engineering Fellow at Western Digital, says that Ceph has been proven to scale out reasonably well. Samuels says, “the most important thing that a storage management system does in the clustered world is to give you availability and durability,” and much of the technology in Ceph focuses on controlling the availability and the durability of your data. In his presentation, Samuels talks not just about some of the performance advantages to deploying Ceph on Flash, but he also goes into detail about what they are doing to optimize Ceph in future releases.

• When businesses and enterprises begin adopting data center platforms that utilize containerization, then and only then can we finally say that the container trend is sweeping the planet. Red Hat’s starter option for containerization platforms is OpenShift Dedicated — a public cloud-based, mostly preconfigured solution, which launched at this time last year on Amazon AWS.

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora-based Korora 25 was released Wednesday in 64-bit versions. Users are urged to upgrade. Elsewhere, Jack Wallen was seriously impressed by Fedora 25 and blogger DarkDuck said ROSA R8 is “near-perfect.” Bruce Byfield discussed obstacles to Linux security just as a new kernel vulnerability comes to light. Dedoimedo declared the best KDE distro of 2016 and FOSSBYTES has 10 reasons to use Ubuntu.

• With the recent release of Fedora 25, Fedora 23 will officially enter End Of Life (EOL) status on December 20th, 2016. After December 20th, all packages in the Fedora 23 repositories will no longer receive security, bugfix, or enhancement updates, and no new packages will be added to the Fedora 23 collection.

• Upgrading to Fedora 24 or Fedora 25 before December 20th 2016 is highly recommended for all users still running Fedora 23.

• Fedora 25 is now out. People are buzzing, as the team have decided to make Wayland the default graphical session going forward. For many Linux users Wayland is a new term that has popped up, but one that they do not understand.

• In this article we’ll briefly go over what Wayland is, what it does, and why developers are flocking to it in droves! What exactly is Wayland? Let’s find out!

• The Korora Project has released version 25 (codename “Gurgle”) which is now available for download.

• As usual, you can find a list of already known problems at the common F25 bugs page.

• It’s sad I don’t get more time to post here these days. Being a manager is a pretty busy job, although I have no complaints! It’s enjoyable, and fortunately I have one of the best teams imaginable to work with, the Fedora Engineering team.

• In 2017 dgplug summer training will be happening for the 10th time. Let me tell you honestly, I had no clue that we will reach here when I started this back in 2008. The community gathered together, and we somehow managed to continue. In case, you do not know about this training, dgplug summer training is a 3 months long online IRC based course where we help people to become contributors to upstream projects. The sessions start around 6:30PM IST, and continues till 9PM (or sometimes till very late at night) for 3 months. You can read the logs of the sessions here.

• Do you have an interest in the 3D printing space but don’t know which 3D printing application will work on your favorite Linux distribution? You’re in luck, because in this article, you learn about 6 of such applications that you can install on Fedora 25 and other Linux distributions, like Ubuntu 16.10 and debian 8.

• Most of these you can install by selecting the 3D printing package when using the DVD or netinstall ISO image to install Fedora 25, but the rest you have to install individually.

• FUDCon 2016, that was for me first of all a lot of work especially after the change of the venue in nearly last minute. Instead of ITC BarCamp happened this year at Norton University, what turned out not to be a good choice. A new hotel had to be found, not an easy task as on this side of the river are not many yet.

• With Fedora 25 safely out of the door, time has come to bid adieu to version 23. Users are urged to upgrade. Elsewhere, Robin Miller looked back at an activity that older Linux users may remember, the Linux installfest. Michael Larabel reported today that the kernel may drop framebuffer device drivers and Dustin Kirkland shared Ubuntu’s security overview.

• With the recent release of Fedora 25, the Fedora 26 release schedule is falling into place. The current Fedora 26 schedule projects a release date of June 6th, 2017. Fedora 26 Alpha is slated for release on March 14th, 2017 and Beta is aiming for May 9th, 2017.

Debian Family

• It’s nice to see Debian on the home-stretch building the next release of GNU/Linux.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Just one day after announcing the availability of new kernel versions for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, Canonical published a new kernel live patch security notice for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

• We remind you that Canonical offers a Livepatch Service for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users, designed to reduce planned or unplanned reboots when updating the kernel packages. Canonical Livepatch Service is available for everyone for up to three computers, but you can also purchase a monthly subscription if you need to install it on more PCs.

Devices/Embedded

• ST unveiled a Cortex-M4F based “SensorTile” sensor and BLE module plus an open source dev kit that adds audio, micro-USB, and an Arduino-like interface.

• STMicroelectronics (ST) announced its SensorTile sensor module at its developer conference in October where it was one of the highlights of the show. Now the company has officially launched the 14 x 14mm SensorTile module along with an open source “STEVAL-STLKT01V1” development kit. The kit can be used for developing wearables, gaming accessories, smart-home, and other Internet of Things devices.

• Florent Revest is a French computer science student who has been working on an open source operating system for smartwatches for the last two years. Yesterday, he officially launched version 1 of the alpha for AsteroidOS.

• The goal for the platform was to create something that gave smartwatch owners more control over their privacy, as well as the hardware they purchased.

• Florent feels that the current proprietary platforms do not guarantee this, and this was the basis for AsteroidOS. He wanted his open source smartwatch operating system to provide freedom with free software, more privacy than other wearable platforms offer, interoperability so it could communicate with other devices, modularity that enabled the user to tweak and change the OS as they see fit, the ability to port the software to as many devices as possible, and gathering a community who is passionate about the platform.

• Smartwatches may not have taken off like companies were hoping, but they have come quite far in terms of what they can offer and what sorts of features are available for the many different models of smartwatches that are out there. Even with the updated functionality of options like Samsung’s Gear S lineup and Android Wear platforms, though, smartwatches can still feel a little bit limiting, and part of this undoubtedly includes the reason that the operating systems aren’t as open as platforms like Android. That is now changing thanks to a platform called AsteroidOS which is an open source operating system for smartwatches.

• Congatec’s “Conga-MA5” is a Linux-ready COM Express Compact Type 10 Mini module with Apollo Lake SoCs, up to 128GB eMMC 5.1, and -40 to 85°C support.

• Congatec was one of the first embedded vendors to announce computer-on-modules based on Intel’s Atom E3900 and other Apollo Lake Pentium and Celeron SoCs. The offerings included a Qseven module, a SMARC 2.0 module, and a COM Express Compact Type 6 Conga-TCA5. The company has now followed up with a COM Express Compact Type 10 Mini Conga-MA5 module.

• Conexant and Amazon have launched an Alexa Voice Service development kit for the Raspberry Pi 3. The kit includes a Conexant AudioSmart CX20921 voice board.

• Since Amazon opened up access to its Alexa Voice Service (AVS) agent inside the Amazon Echo smart speaker/IoT hub, including an open source port to the Raspberry Pi, several projects have emerged for creating Echo-like devices built around the RPi. For example, earlier this year, a Novaspirit Tech hack along these lines was promoted by the Raspberry Pi blog. Now Conexant Systems and Amazon have teamed up on a higher end “AudioSmart 2-mic Development Kit” for the RPi that’s designed specifically for voice-controlled smart home IoT functionality.

• Can a new smartwatch operating system based on Linux breathe some new life into the smart wearables market? Florent Revest hopes so.

• Revest, a French computer science student, on Wednesday announced the alpha release of AsteroidOS, an open source operating system that will run on several Android smartwatch models.

• “Many users believe that the current proprietary platforms can not guarantee a satisfactory level of control over their privacy and hardware,” noted Revest, who has been working on his OS for two years. “Hence, I noticed a need for an open wearable platform and AsteroidOS is my attempt to address this issue.”

• VersaLogic’s Linux-friendly, EBX style “Viper” SBC offers a Bay Trail Atom E3800, up to 16GB DDR3L, -40 to 85°C support, and MIL-STD-202G ruggedization.

• Doyodo has launched a mini-console RetroEngine Sigma that can run classic video games and soon to release in the market. The mini-console is said to directly compete with Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition console.

• Doyodo, a design company has introduced its crowd funding campaign console called RetroEngine Sigma. The mini-console is also a plug-and-play media player that is capable of running thousands of classic video games using an emulator.

• You can be your own Geordi La Forge and build yourself a fully capable GNU/Linux pocket computer with this uber inexpensive five-inch touch screen and a Raspberry Pi.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• 2016 was supposed to be the year that smartwatches well and truly took off, but it turns out that smartwatches are still about as unpopular as they were at the start of the year. Android Wear, for example, was first launched way back in 2014 as a platform for all wearables; however, to date it’s really only available on smartwatches that haven’t sold anywhere near as well as the Apple Watch has.

• Google today announced that it’s changing the names of its services for pushing Android apps in enterprises. Google Play for Work, a tool that organizations can use to distribute public and private Android apps to employees’ devices, will now be called just Google Play. Android for Work, which keeps business and personal apps and content separate, from here on out will be just Android.

• “With platform-level support shipping with every GMS [Google Mobile Services] compatible device, Android for Work and Play for Work have become a core part of Android and Google Play,” as Google software engineer Adam Connors and product manager Travis McCoy put it in a blog post. “We think this change better reflects the built-in nature of enterprise features of Android and our commitment to enterprise mobility.”

• Really, Michael Kors? You’re calling your new Android Wear-powered smartwatch the “Access Bradshaw?” That sounds like the worst new podcast on the Fox Sports website. Oh well, if you really must – at least it’s somewhat consistent with the equally awful name of the Access Dylan. The former is up on the Google Store for the same $350 price as the latter. It’s shipping right now, if you’re desperate to get into the depressingly shrunken wearables market before the end of the year.

• With all the uncertainty, I don’t imagine Android Wear smartwatches will be a hot item this holiday season. Some people are probably still willing to take a risk, but pickings are getting slim either way. Even though it launched more than a year ago, the Huawei Watch is still considered by many to be the best Android Wear device. It’s no longer on sale in the Google Store, though.

• The Huawei Watch was the first Wear device that didn’t have any obvious compromises. The display was completely round, it was compact, and it had a good selection of bands. Google’s affection for the watch is evidenced by its use as a developer device in the Wear 2.0 beta. However, that didn’t save it from the chopping block.

• Asus has already released a few devices under the Zenfone 3 name. These include, among others, the Zenfone 3 Deluxe, Zenfone 3 Ultra, and Zenfone 3 Max. But apparently, the company is not done yet, as a new device under the name of Zenfone 3 Zoom has recently been certified by TENAA – the Chinese equivalent of the FCC.

• We often, and quite rightly, complain about the way device makers customize the “stock” build of Android to suit their own needs. Customizing software is not inherently bad, but Samsung, LG, and others are usually doing it to push their apps and services. These companies frequently make unnecessary aesthetic changes for the sake of being different.

• You don’t have to put up with the look and feel of Android on your phone, though. You can customize things to better suit your own style and usage patterns—all it takes is a little legwork. The more time you want to spend on it, the more extensive the customization can be. It all starts with the right tools.

• For phone lovers, the Android space is the place to be. Inside the Android Kingdom things move fast and, for the most part, set the goalposts for the rest of the market. Often, what you find in contemporary Android phones eventually makes its way down to iPhones and what few other rivals remain!

• QHD panels is one example of this; dual-lens cameras and curved OLED displays are others. 2016 was a decent year for Android releases, with strong handsets from all major players. Sales were, once again, dominated by Samsung in the Android sphere (and Apple elsewhere).

• There were some pretty big developments, however, such as the Galaxy Note 7 disaster and Google entering the fray with its Pixel phones. The latter point is a huge deal for hardcore Android fans, as this is the first time Google has actually taken the bull by the horns and released its own, bespoke smartphone.

• OnePlus has never been one to play by the rules. Back when it made its entrance into the crowded smartphone market with the One, it set itself apart by selling a premium handset at a mid-tier price and offering invitation-only purchases instead of the standard preorders. The 3T very much fits with this rebellious nature. Essentially a refreshed version of the 6-month-old OnePlus 3, the new phone undermines another smartphone constant: the yearly update.

• iPhone users are familiar with the concept of the mid-cycle model—a handset that keeps the same enclosure but beefs up features and internal components. But there’s always been a special hook with Apple’s S phones, a reason for current owners to rush out and buy the new model. The 3T could be seen as OnePlus’ attempt to mimic the success Apple has had with the formula (and in fact, the company says it picked T for the new phone’s surname simply because it’s a letter higher than S).

Free Software/Open Source

• The team behind the Apache Zeppelin open-source notebook for big data analytics visualization has renamed itself ZEPL and announced $4.1M in Series A funding.

• ZEPL, which swears a certain professional football organization had nothing to do with it ditching its former name (NFLabs), is one of numerous companies smelling blood in the water around Tableau, the $3.5 billion business intelligence and analytics software vendor that has stumbled financially in recent quarters and seen its stock price plummet accordingly. The pitch from ZEPL entering my email inbox read: “Is Open Source project eating Tableau’s lunch?”

• OpenMake Software wants to improve how developers use the Continuous Delivery pipeline with its recently open-sourced Application Release Automation (ARA) solution, Release Engineer, which is based on version 7.7 of the ARA solution and offered under the FreeBSD license.

• When open source was first introduced in 1991 with Linux, it was considered a novelty in the industry, a new toy for developers to play with. Today, it’s a fundamental driver of technology innovation across all software companies, according to Dirk Hohndel, VP and chief open source officer at VMware Inc.

• “Open source is more than software development methodology; open source is how a group of people interact and how you create fantastic technology,” said Hohndel.

• Everything has a season, and as organizations age—communities, charities, companies, churches and more—they face similar diseases of time. These are emergent patterns of failure that arise not from mistakes but from the consequences of earlier success. In open source, we are seeing the same patterns emerge; this should not be a surprise.

• Some of them are unavoidable. Understanding them helps leaders reduce the risk that will arise and helps identify them when they do. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but we have encountered all of these modes of systemic failure, some of them often.

• With the dawn of the Internet of Things, software is making its way into every product, into every industry. And along with software come developers, who bring their beliefs, attitudes, expertise, and habits along with them. One of those is open source technology — a staple in the software industry since the 1980s, but a new and often scary concept for many traditional industries, whose businesses are built on protecting their assets and intellectual property.

• In this article, we will illustrate how open source technologies permeate every part of the IoT development stack, and outline how open source can be used as a means of market control as well as a booster of innovation and a way to tap into the IoT developer talent pool. The data have been collected from 3,700 IoT developers in 150 countries across the globe, surveyed in Q4 2015 and shines a light on how big a deal open source really is in IoT, why developers love it, and how companies can create a successful commercial strategy around the use of open source by aligning themselves with the values of that core stakeholder group that are developers.

• Open source software enables Google to build things quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, allowing us to focus on solving new problems. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we know it. This is why we support open source and make it easy for Googlers to release the projects they’re working on internally as open source.

• We’ve released more than 20-million lines of open source code to date, including projects such as Android, Angular, Chromium, Kubernetes, and TensorFlow. Our releases also include many projects you may not be familiar with, such as Cartographer, Omnitone, and Yeoman.

• Open source is personally very important to me, and my team has a long track record of contributing to open source projects, so it was a simple decision to open source our platform. Doing that encourages transparency and community engagement, which is key for any product that has security at its core. We had a vision to be a secure and completely transparent messaging app and we stuck to it.

• With 2016 closing out, there is no doubt that cloud computing and Big Data analytics would probably come to mind if you had to consider the hot technology categories of the year. However, there is an absolute renaissance going on right now in the field of artifical intelligence and the closely related field of machine learning. In fact, in its top 10 strategic technology trends for the year 2017, Gartner put AI and machine learning at the top of the list.

• Google is among several companies making big contributions in this space. It recently gathered some compelling AI and machine learning demonstrations and placed them in its Google AI Experiments showcase. Now, Google has announced that it is open sourcing its data visualization tool, Embedding Projector. The tool will aid machine learning practioners as they visualize data without having to install and run Google’s TensorFlow tool (also open source, which we covered here).

• The extremely popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds has been much in the news lately. CTO and founder of ownCloud Frank Karlitschek resigned from the company a few months ago. His open letter announcing the move pointed to possible friction created as ownCloud moved forward as a commercial entity as opposed to a solely community focused, open source project. Karlitschek had a plan, though. He came out with a fork of ownCloud called Nextcloud, and we’ve reported on strong signs that this cloud platform has a bright future. In recent months, the company has continued to advance Nextcloud.

• Now, if you’re running the Nextcloud platform, a convenient new addition is coming your way. The Nextcloud 9.0.54 and 10.0.1 releases come with a new updater. This new updater allows reliable upgrading to new Nextcloud versions via the web and in the upcoming 11 release even via the command line interface.

• There’s a certain mentality that can creep up and slowly destroy open source project development. It’s dangerous in a way that nobody really notices it’s there or that it is destructive, except at the very last moments. It’s the founder’s mentality.

• “The stability of this kind of easy archiving for document storage, review and revision is a great possibility, but the workflow for journalists is very specific, so the grant will allow us to figure out how it could function.”

• Another feature of Webrecorder that journalists might find appealing, and one of the software’s core purposes, is to preserve material that might be deleted or become unavailable in time.

• However, the tool is currently operated under a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Takedown policy. This means any individual can ask for a record of their web presence or materials to be removed, so Rhizome will be working to “answer the more complicated questions and figure out policies” around privacy and copyright with the latest round of funding.

• There is one particular moment in every Free and Open Source Software project: it’s the time when the software is about to get released. The software has been totally frozen of course, QA tests have been made, all the lights are green; the website still needs to be updated with the release notes, perhaps some new content and of course the stable builds have to be uploaded. The release time is always a special one.

• The very day of the release, there is some excitement and often a bit of stress. The release manager(s), as well as everyone working on the project’s infrastructure are busy making sure everything is ready when the upload of the stable version of the software, binaries and source, has been completed. In many cases, some attention is paid to the main project’s mirror servers so that the downloads are fluid and work (mostly) flawlessly as soon as the release has been pushed and published.

Events

• CloudNativeCon 2016 was a wonderful first conference for me and although the whirlwind of a conference is tiring, I left feeling motivated and inspired. The conference made me feel like I was a part of the community and technology I have been working with daily.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• There have been some new commits to Google’s Chromium code-base this week worth pointing out.

• Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

• Google has announced the release of the Chrome 56 beta and it comes with a good amount of changes.

SaaS/Back End

• In the tech job market race these days, hardly any trend is drawing more attention than Big Data. And, when talking Big Data, the subject of Hadoop inevitably comes up, but Spark is becoming an increasingly popular topic. IBM and other companies have made huge commitments to Spark, and workers who have both Hadoop and Spark skills are much in demand.With all this in mind, several providers are offering free Hadoop and Spark training.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Mail chew; really encouraged to see Kolab’s lovely integration with Collabora Online announced and available for purchase. Wonderful to have them getting involved with LibreOffice, doing testing, filing and triaging bugs up-stream and so on, not to mention the polished marketing.

• Well, Meeks and company have done it. What was at first a rather limited demonstration of LibreOffice running in a browser window is now available as a Docker image for everyone to try out. I haven’t yet, because I’m under the weather with yet another winter cold, but that shouldn’t delay you.

CMS

• WordPress is among the most widely used open-source technologies in the world, powering more than 70 million websites. WordPress 4.7 was released Dec. 6, providing a new milestone update including new features for both users and developers. As is typically the case with new WordPress releases, there is also a new default theme in the 4.7 update. The 2017 theme provides users with a number of interesting attributes including the large feature image as well as the ability to have a video as part of the header image. The Theme Customizer feature enables users to more intuitively adjust various elements of a theme, to fit the needs of websites that use will upgrade to WordPress 4.7. In addition, the new custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) feature within a theme preview lets users quickly see how style changes will change the look of a site. As an open-source project, WordPress benefits from participation of independent contributors and for the 4.7 release there were 482 contributors. In this slideshow eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the WordPress 4.7 release.

Education

• The Center for Open Science, directed by University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek, has launched three new services to more quickly share research data as the center continues its mission to press for openness, integrity and reproducibility of scientific research.

• Typically, researchers send preprint manuscripts detailing their research findings to peer-reviewed academic journals, such as Nature and Science. The review process can take months or even years before publication – if the research is published at all.

• By contrast, “preprinting,” or sharing non-peer-reviewed research results online, enables crucial data to get out to the community the moment it is completed. That, said Nosek, is critical.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• IAS worked on the SDK with support from Ansible, Google, InMobi, Lenovo, the Media Rating Council (MRC), and other firms. The goal is to bring more transparency and interoperability for mobile viewability measurement to publishers, marketers, and agencies.

• Frank Desmond, CEO at TPI, says: “Quaternion’s open source risk framework is of huge value to the academic community, facilitating research into the fundamental drivers of financial markets. Our data, Quaternion’s innovative approach and Columbia University’s research will provide the financial markets with more clarity on risk.”

BSD

• Earlier this week I published some GCC 5.4 vs. GCC 6.2 vs. GCC 7.0 SVN development benchmarks with a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system. For those curious how the LLVM Clang compiler stack is comparing, here are some tests on the same system when running fresh benchmarks of LLVM Clang 3.9 as well as LLVM Clang 4.0 SVN.

• These tests were done with LLVM Clang 3.9 and 4.0 SVN added in to the GCC results from this Core i7 6800K system running Ubuntu 16.10 with the Linux 4.8 kernel. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were maintained the same throughout all testing with the “-O3 -march=native” flags.

• While LLVM 4.0 isn’t coming until its planned release in Feburary, the LLVM 3.9.1 point release is expected this coming week.

• Tom Stellard of AMD released LLVM 3.9.1-rc3 on Friday and anticipates this being the last release candidate. This 3.9.1-rc3 build just has some ARM/AArch64 fixes compared to his earlier RC2 milestone.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• It’s been a while since last hearing anything of Google’s experimental Fuchsia OS but it looks like things are moving along as they are now looking to merge support for it into the GCC compiler.

Public Services/Government

• The President of the Parliament of Slovenia, Milan Brglez, last Monday unveiled Parlameter, a web-based software solution that displays in the National Assembly voting results and helps analyse them. The software, made available as open source, is developed by ‘Danes je nov dan’ (Today is a new day) an NGO focusing on eParticipation, openness and government oversight.

• Next week, the government of Bulgaria will make the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) the preferred licence to be used for governmental software development projects. An ordinance, to be adopted on Wednesday, will allow projects to use around ten popular free and open source software licence approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) – an open source advocacy organisation.

• The United States of America and three EU Member states – Bulgaria, France and the United Kingdom – have pledged support for the open source policy, making it an official part of the ‘Paris Declaration’, the outcome of the 4th Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), taking place in Paris this week. The open source policy is also supported by the city of Austin (USA).

Licensing/Legal

• Imagine your company just acquired its competitor for $100 million. Now imagine the company’s most important asset – its proprietary software – is subject to third-party license conditions that require the proprietary software to be distributed free of charge or in source code form. Or, imagine these license conditions are discovered late in the diligence process, and the cost to replace the offending third-party software will costs tens of thousands of dollars and take months to remediate. Both scenarios exemplify the acute, distinct and often overlooked risks inherent to the commercial use of open source software. An effective tech M&A attorney must appreciate these risks and be prepared to take the steps necessary to mitigate or eliminate them.

• Over the past decade, open source software has become a mainstay in the technology community. Since its beginnings, open source software has always been viewed as a way to save money and jumpstart development projects, but it is increasingly being looked to for its quality solutions and operational advantages. Today, only a fraction of technology companies do not use open source software in any way. For most of the rest, it is mission critical.

• Last week news broke that Zenimax is threatening legal action against the developer of DoomRL, a free Doom-inspired roguelike. Now, DoomRL’s creator is open-sourcing it in an attempt to put it beyond the reach of Zenimax’s legal team.

• Many devs will probably appreciate the symbolic resonance of this move, given that id Software open-sourced the original Doom code almost twenty years ago.

• Earlier this week, ZeniMax Medi hit DoomRL, a popular roguelike version of the original first-person shooter, with a cease-and-desist order. This order instructed producer ChaosForge to remove the free downloadable game to prevent further legal action. Instead of taking it down, co-creator Kornel Kisielewicz turned the game open-source.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Kate McKinnon’s got the right idea. In the spirit of “open source” sharing and collaboration, Slate’s holiday coverage this month will be an enthusiastic invitation to good-willed appropriation. In the weeks remaining until the new year, we’ll present a series of recommendations for the best traditions we know of, with an eye toward the specific, the peculiar, and the surprising—at least to non-adepts. We hope you’ll take one (or all!) of them, and incorporate it into your own celebrations. Consider it our gift to you. Happy holidays!

Open Access/Content

Open Hardware/Modding

• The RISC-V footprint is expanding with the commercial availability of open-source chips and related development boards from silicon startups like SiFive and OnChip.

• Open source continues to drive rapid innovation in the 3D printing industry. This makes sense if you stop and think about it—a 3D printer exists to make other things. Combining that philosophy with free software and open source hardware helps other people participate in improving the objects that it makes, and in making the printers faster, smarter, and cleaner.

Programming/Development

• In what can be called a major motivation for Indian tech firms, Amrut Software, an end-to-end Software, BPO services and solutions provider has become a GitHub distributor for India region.

• GitHub hosts world’s biggest open source community along with the most popular version control systems, configuration management and collaboration tools for software developers. It has some of the largest installations of repositories in the world.

• Python,the high-level interpreted programming language is now one of the most preferred programming language by beginners and professional-level developers.So,here Python 3.6 is now available with many changes,improvements and of course the ease of Python was not left in the work list.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Veteran public health advocate Els Torreele of Belgium has been named the new executive director of the high-profile Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) Access Campaign, based in Geneva.

• Britain will have to reach a deal to pay for the healthcare of its citizens in Spain once the country leaves the EU, Spain’s foreign minister has said. Speaking at a conference in Alicante, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said Spain would try to reach a deal for the UK to pay for the healthcare of the estimated 800,000 Brits living in the country.

• “We must reach an agreement for residents to access health services in Spain, but covered by the United Kingdom” he told the conference held by accountancy firm PWC, according to Spanish news site Estrella Digital.

Security

• These ideas have yet to reach major distributions. So far as they are modernizing security and privacy at all, they seem to be placing their faith in containers, isolating applications to minimize the damage that an intrusion can do.

• This is an important new security feature, and in fact, containers feature in security distros like Subgraph. However, containers are a new technology, which means that they should be relied on cautiously. If nothing else, as Subgraph recognizes, defense in depth is a basic principle of security, and there is no need to depend on a single feature when so many others are readily available.

• The main challenge now is not to add security and privacy features — although new ones like containers are always welcome. Instead, the challenge is to make the existing features accessible. If they add inconvenience in the form of changed work flow and extra precautions, they need to minimize inconvenience in other ways, so that users will accept them.

• A critical, local code-execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel was patched more than a week ago, continuing a run of serious security issues in the operating system, most of which have been hiding in the code for years.

• OpenVPN, an open source VPN client on which a majority of VPN services rely, will be audited by cryptography and network security professor Matthew Green. The audit will be funded by Private Internet Access (PIA), one of the major VPN service providers in the United States.

• This security concern has only raised because of using 3rd party parsers (well, in the case of the GStreamer vulnerability in question, decoders, why a parsing facility like GstDiscoverer triggers decoding is another question worth asking), and this parsing of content happens in exactly one place in your common setup: tracker-extract.

• Just the other day we reported on the general availability of a kernel update for the shared hosting-oriented CloudLinux OS 7 operating system, and today a new patch is available for those running KernelCare.

• If you’re not familiar with KernelCare, it’s a commercial kernel live patching technology developed and provided by CloudLinux of its CloudLinux OS users. We’ve discussed CloudLinux’s KernelCare in a previous report if you’re curious to test drive it.

• From Linux kernel livepatches to encryption to ASLR to compiler optimizations and configuration hardening, we strive to ensure that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is the most secure Linux distribution out of the box.

• Google researchers publish a study based on two-years of Security Keys usage and determine that improved security, reliability and lower costs are the result.

• In a new two-year research study, Google researchers have concluded that the use of the FIDO Alliances’ Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, as part of the Google Security Keys initiative, has had positive security results. The new study comes as FIDO is preparing to update its standards for 2017.

• Google first embraced the FIDO Alliances’ Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) technology in an initiative to help improve user security back in 2014. The Fast IDentity Online Alliance (FIDO) Alliance first got started in 2013 as a group dedicated to the advancement and development of standards for strong authentication mechanisms.

Defence/Aggression

• Like 9/11 for New Yorkers, the Paris attacks of November 2015 have become that rare thing for city slickers — a topic of conversation in which everyone can participate. There are two million Parisians, each of whom has a story about the night suicide bombers and gunmen killed 130 people at cafés, restaurants, the Stade de France and the Bataclan music hall.

• Some offer a poignant mix of tumult and tragedy, like the one my high school friend tells of diving under a table at a café when a terrorist opened fire on drinkers with an assault rifle. (She performed CPR on a shooting victim who ended up dying from loss of blood). Others, like mine, are less riveting. After making sure my friends and family were safe, I got to work covering the story. The tales all have one thing in common: a moment in which the person recounting it is struck by the enormity of what occurred.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• In the statement Assange also complains at considerable length about what he says is the oppressive behaviour of the Swedish authorities towards him: reviving a rape investigation after it was closed down, issuing an arrest warrant against him without proper cause and in breach of due process, and insisting on his extradition from Britain to Sweden instead of questioning him in Britain, as he had repeatedly offered.

• In this part of the statement Assange says that the Swedish prosecutor’s decision to interview him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London – something which the Swedish prosecutor had previously consistently refused to do – was the result of a decision in March 2015 of the Swedish Supreme Court that she was in potential breach of her duties, and of the February 2016 decision of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the UN Human Rights Council that he has been illegally denied his freedom as a result of her actions and of the actions of the British authorities.

• Assange’s statement is obviously partly intended to give his side of the story after years of legally enforced silence.

• As Assange rightly complains, numerous stories about him and about his case have appeared in the Western media, some undoubtedly leaked to the media by the Swedish authorities. These leaks and stories were clearly designed to ruin his reputation, and have in fact been very effective in doing so.

• The Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: the key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.

• These unnamed sources told the Post that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” The anonymous officials also claim that “intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails” from both the DNC and John Podesta’s email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA’s “secret assessment” itself remains concealed.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• SolarCity, the largest installer of residential solar systems in the U.S., nearly doubled its workforce last year, hiring 4,000 people to do everything from system design and site surveys to installation and engineering.

• The hiring spree at SolarCity isn’t slowing; it’s picking up speed as the company attempts to install twice as many rooftop solar systems than last year and readies its 1.2 million-square foot factory in New York, which is scheduled to reach full production in 2017.

• Donald Trump’s transition team wants the Energy Department to provide the names of any employees who have worked on President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives — a request that has current and former staffers fearing an oncoming “witch hunt.”

• The president-elect’s team sought the information as part of a 74-point questionnaire that also asked for details about how DOE’s statistical arm, the Energy Information Administration, does the math on issues such as the cost-effectiveness of wind and solar power versus fossil fuels. POLITICO obtained the document Friday, after Trump’s advisers sent it to the department earlier in the week.

Finance

• As well as calling for truly independent and impartial judges, the Declaration also wants any dispute resolution mechanism to be available to small companies and even members of the public.

• The Namur Declaration is mostly of interest because it grew out of Magnette’s personal experience with CETA (article in French). The fact that a few dozen leading academics have lent their names to it adds weight, but is unlikely to bring about major changes to the way that trade negotiations are conducted. However, seismic political developments on both sides of the Atlantic are already doing that; let’s hope these provide an opportunity to debate and maybe even adopt some of the Declaration’s bold ideas.

• President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday chose Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that franchises the fast-food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor.

• “Andy Puzder has created and boosted the careers of thousands of Americans, and his extensive record fighting for workers makes him the ideal candidate to lead the Department of Labor,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.

• Mr. Puzder, 66, fits the profile of some of Mr. Trump’s other domestic cabinet appointments. He is a wealthy businessman and political donor and has a long record of promoting a conservative agenda that takes aim at President Obama’s legacy. And more than the other appointments, he resembles Mr. Trump in style.

• The road back to health for Italian banks just became rockier. A lot rockier.

• Last month, we pointed out that that pretty much everyone agrees that TPP is dead… except that some still cling to the hope that Trump might be persuaded to carry out another swift U-turn and revivify the zombie deal. As Mike noted, Trump doesn’t seem to be against these kinds of mega-trade deals in principle, it’s just that he says the US generally concedes too much in them. That means he’d need some kind of high-profile win to make TPP 2.0 compatible with his earlier condemnation of TPP 1.0′s terms.

• The hope amongst true TPP believers seems to be that Trump could reopen the negotiations, talk tough, and strike a deal that is far more favorable to the US, which he could then ratify, holding it up as another Trump triumph. But in an article on the Cobram Courier site, the Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, says it would be “fanciful” to think the other TPP nations would happily reopen negotiations so that Trump could rewrite it in his favor.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The recount of the presidential election ended on Wednesday night as abruptly as it had begun. By Thursday, workers were packing away canvas bags of ballots, board records and tables and chairs. A legal battle halted proceedings before all of Michigan’s votes were counted again, but not before a flood of perplexing peculiarities emerged.

• An effort to recount the votes here and in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin led by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, was never viewed as very likely to change Donald J. Trump’s election to the presidency, but it revealed something else in stark terms: 16 years after a different presidential recount in Florida dragged on for five agonizing weeks, bringing the nation close to a constitutional crisis, recounts remain a tangle of dueling lawyers, hyperpartisanship and claims of flawed technology.

• States still have vastly different systems for calling recounts and for carrying them out. Counting standards are inconsistent from state to state, and obscure provisions, like one in Michigan that deems some precincts not “recountable,” threaten to raise more public doubt about elections than confidence. Some of the most basic questions — is it better to count by hand, or with a machine? — have not been settled.

• A Wisconsin judge is set to decide if a recount of the state’s presidential vote can proceed. We speak with Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein, who has requested recounts in three states where Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Stein has faced obstacles in all three states. Today’s hearing in Wisconsin comes after two pro-Trump groups, the Great America PAC and the Stop Hillary PAC, filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop the recount process. Meanwhile, in Michigan, a judge has already halted the recount. Another hearing will be held in Pennsylvania today to decide if a recount there can begin.

• The election didn’t end on 8 November, it just morphed into a crisis whose resolution is not in sight. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was impacted by an October surprise delivered by a partisan FBI, but November was not short on surprises, and there may yet be one in December. A little more than a week ago, while people were wondering what it would take to get the Clinton campaign to pursue a recount, Jill Stein’s campaign amazed everyone by taking on the job. Exuberance for the idea immediately inspired small donors to contribute $6.5m in about 48 hours.

• A Michigan judge ordered that the state start its vote recount on Dec. 5, but by Dec. 7, he had changed his tune and halted that very same recount. You might think this effectively knocks out Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount effort, but according to her team, the Michigan vote recount isn’t stopping Stein.

• U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith had originally ordered the ballot recount to start at noon on Dec. 5 so as to complete the recount by the Dec. 13 soft deadline before the Dec. 19 Electoral College vote. But the case came back to him when a Michigan Court of Appeals panel rejected the recount after determining that Stein was not considered an “aggrieved party” in the election. (Due to her fourth place finish in the state with around 1.1 percent of the votes, it wasn’t considered realistic that Stein could have actually won the election.) Goldsmith upheld this decision and lifted his previous order, citing the lack of evidence of “significant fraud or mistake” in his decision.

• Interestingly enough, Stein chose to spearhead vote recounts in battleground states rather than her opponent Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote over President-elect Donald Trump. And for Clinton, whose campaign agreed to cooperate with Stein’s effort, not winning Michigan’s electoral votes in the recount effectively puts her out of the running to overturn Trump’s Electoral College victory. (She needed to win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to put her vote count ahead of Trump’s.)

• On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith said he would abide by a court ruling that found that former Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein could not seek a recount. Goldsmith concluded, “A recount as an audit of the election has never been endorsed by any court.” Stein has pledged to continue to push for a recount. Michigan is one of three battleground states where Stein had demanded a recount. The other two states are Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump narrowly defeated Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton in all three states. For more, we’re joined by John Bonifaz, attorney and political activist specializing in constitutional law and voting rights. He was one of a group of leading election lawyers and computer scientists calling for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

• Donald Trump’s campaign spent about $94m in its final push for the White House, according to new fundraising reports.

• The Republican continued his campaign-long trend of spending far less than Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Her campaign spent almost $132m in its closing weeks, according to reports filed on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission. The latest reports cover 20 October to 28 November.

• Over the course of the primary and general elections the Trump campaign raised about $340m including $66m out of his own pocket. The Clinton campaign, which maintained a longer and more concerted fundraising focus, brought in about $581m.

• President Obama has ordered a full review of foreign-based digital attacks that U.S. intelligence agencies say were aimed at influencing this year’s presidential election, a top White House official said Friday.

• The disclosure came after President-elect Donald Trump again dismissed a blunt U.S. intelligence assessment that concluded senior Russian authorities had authorized the digital theft of emails from Democratic Party officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager during the campaign.

• President Barack Obama has ordered a full review into hacking aimed at influencing US elections going back to 2008, the White House said Friday. “The President has directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders,” White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters Friday. “This is consistent with the work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were seeing.”

• White House spokesman Eric Schultz added later that the review would encompass malicious cyber activity related to US elections going back to 2008.

• American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

• They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

• In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

• Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.

• The phrase “Fake News” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

• One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).

• Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald.

• As the Hillary Clinton campaign slogged toward victory in the long primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders, word came from WikiLeaks that it had scored a trove of hacked emails to and from the Democratic National Committee. Among other things, they proved that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, along with their organizations, had been working hand-in-glove to skew the primaries in Clinton’s favor.

• The day before the party’s convention opened in Philadelphia on July 24, Wasserman-Schultz had to resign her post or face a floor revolt. Sanders delegates were so angry at what they were learning from WikiLeaks about the sabotage of their candidate that hundreds walked out on the second day of the convention, tossing away their delegate credentials over the security fence and vowing never to support Clinton.

• The Washington Post has been under fire for its publication of an article entitling “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” The article by Craig Timberg relied on a controversial website called PropOrNot, which published what is little more than a black list of website that the authors deemed purveyors of fake news including some of the largest sites on the Internet like Drudge Report. However, the previously unknown group was itself criticized for listing “allies” that proved false. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton ramped up the call for action against “fake news” which she described as an epidemic. Now the Washington Post has published a rather cryptic correction to the fake news story. The controversy is the subject of my latest column in USA Today.

• The organization listed a variety of news sites as illegitimate. It included some of the most popular political sites from the left and right Truthout, Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and the Ron Paul Institute. It even includes one of the most read sites on the Internet, the Drudge Report. Notably, it also included WikiLeaks, which has been credited with exposing political corruption and unlawful surveillance programs.

• President-elect Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States needed to improve its relationship with China, which he criticized for its economic policies and failure to rein in North Korea.

• “One of the most important relationships we must improve, and we have to improve, is our relationship with China,” Trump told a rally in Iowa. The United States and China are the world’s two biggest economies.

• “China is not a market economy,” he said. “They haven’t played by the rules, and I know it’s time that they’re going to start.”

• Intelligence community officials have confirmed that president-elect Donald Trump has declined many of the daily intelligence briefings that have been offered to him, a Senate aide confirmed to CBS News’ Margaret Brennan. The Washington Post first reported that Mr. Trump was turning away intelligence briefings in the weeks after the election.

• Two key Senate Democrats — Ben Cardin of Maryland and Dianne Feinstein of California — expressed dismay about this in an op-ed published Thursday by USA TODAY.

• American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

• They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

• In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

• Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.

• On December 11th, 2016, voters around the state will demand that their votes be counted and will respectfully request that the courts approve a full hand count of the paper ballots of the 2016 Florida Presidential Election.

• Green Party candidate Jill Stein is in line for a big check from the state of Michigan after the recount she requested was stopped by a federal judge and the state Board of Canvassers after only three days of counting ballots.

• Under state law, Stein had to pay $125 per precinct — or $973,250 — to count Michigan’s 7,786 in-person and absentee voting precincts. That check was delivered to state officials when she requested the recount last week.

• Now, with only a fraction of the recount completed, Michigan’s Secretary of State is prepared to refund a portion of that amount, said Fred Woodhams, spokesman for Secretary of State Ruth Johnson. Stein will have to pay for the precincts in Michigan that were counted, but she will not be charged for the precincts that couldn’t be counted because of problems with the ballot containers.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A NOTABLE American commentator, Charles Krauthammer, once explained Rupert Murdoch’s success in founding Fox News, a cable channel, by pointing out that he had found a niche market—half the country. The same may be true of Breitbart News, a conservative website whose fortunes have risen with those of Donald Trump, and whose chairman, Stephen Bannon (pictured), is Mr Trump’s chief strategist.

• Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at Breitbart, explained after Mr Trump’s victory that half of voters are “repulsed by the Lena Dunham, Black Lives Matter, third-wave feminist, communist, ‘kill-all-white-men’ politics of the progressive left.” Breitbart saw it coming a while ago, he added. The company’s expansion plans suggest it sees something coming in Europe, too. It already has a website in Britain and in January it will launch French and German sites.

• So, it seems like “fake news” is all the rage these days. As we’ve discussed, the sudden focus on fake news is a silly distraction. It’s not likely to be changing many minds — and the talk about fake news seems mostly to be leading to calls for censorship. And a big part of the problem is that “fake news” is such a broad and vague label. It’s been applied to outright propaganda, to satire, to serious reporting, to serious reporting people don’t like… and to serious, but mistaken, reporting. The problem is that when you lump all those things together, things get pretty damn messy.

• Take, for example, this “fake news” story that got a lot of attention when it came out right around Thanksgiving: the Washington Post claimed that some “experts” had shown that Russian propagandists were behind the fake news explosion during the election. Which experts? The story doesn’t say. What evidence? The story doesn’t say. The article is focused on a brand new organization called “PropOrNot” that claimed to be run by experts, but won’t identify who’s involved, and the Washington Post didn’t seem to care. But still it made incredibly broad claims about “fake news” and Russian propaganda.

• The Iranian government is reportedly taking steps to expand regulations on large public news channels on the instant messenger Telegram. The move would apparently affect groups with more than 5,000 subscribers.

• It remains unclear, however, if state officials seek dramatic changes to controls on these online communities (ostensibly in the battle against “fake news”), or if the government merely plans to extend and continue existing Internet controls.

• As reported by Tasnim News, a hardline news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, Iranian ICT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi made the announcement at a press conference during the National Conference on Public Service. Vaezi cited the dangers “unofficial news channels” pose in Iran’s rural and less developed regions, where fake news and misinformation have gained sizeable audiences.

• In February 2011, Arab Spring protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Zitounia, a fictional island-nation in the Mediterranean. At least that’s the plot line for “Good Morning, Zitounia!” a new off-Broadway play from comic and activist Leila Ben-Abdallah.

• Ben-Abdallah takes the audience back to a time when protests raged and reporters maintained their propaganda directed by the corrupt government. Despite extreme restrictions, state-owned media did their best to cover the news; a phenomenon some American journalists seem to be emulating in an all-Trump era.

• “This show is for anyone who doesn’t want to read the news because it is too sad, or wants to learn more about the Middle East and North Africa, but is afraid it is too dense or boring,” Ben-Abdallah explained.

• The buzzword “fake news” has popped into the popular lexicon in recent weeks.

• We’ve been using that term for years, though, when referring to the mainstream media.

• While poll numbers show that about 9 out of 10 people don’t trust the information they get from the mainstream media, they likely still have no idea just how fake it all is.

• As someone who travels the world, I often walk by a television program and it’s called program for a reason, with the local media and can’t even believe what I am seeing or hearing.

• That’s just unbelievable. I have read this sentence over and over again, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that in a U.S. ruling, let alone by higher courts. It happens in all jurisdictions that concepts get conflated or confused, but the words “conflation” and “confusion” are by far not strong enough to describe this.

• It’s highly illogical that unrelated factors such as a profit motive and knowledge of an infringement cold have any bearing on the term “communication to the public.” You either communicate (including that you make available) something to the public or you don’t, but that is unrelated to whether you do it for profit, for fun, or pro bono, just like it has nothing to do with whether you do it on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Also, a “communication to the public” (including a “making available”) is a communication to the public regardless of whether it’s legal or illegal. That is a subsequent question then.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Congress on Thursday passed the National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal year 2017, which includes a provision to separate U.S. Cyber Command from the National Security Agency.

• Cyber Command would focus on developing cyber weapons and use them against adversaries online, whereas the NSA would focus on gathering intelligence in the digital sphere.

• Cyber Command and the NSA operate as a “dual hat” agency since Cyber Command began in 2010. If President Obama signs this bill into law, U.S. Cyber Command would become equal with other combat units of the U.S. military such as the Central and Pacific Commands, and would be able to tackle cyber challenges around the globe.

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday ruled against a constitutional plea made by Mohamed Osman Mohamud — a Somali-American who attempted as a teenager to detonate a fake car bomb supplied by undercover FBI agents during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, in 2010.

• Since his conviction in January 2013, Mohamud has been fighting in court to challenge the government’s warrantless collection of his emails sent overseas. With support from the American Civil Liberties Union as an amicus, he contended that the Fourth Amendment should have protected his emails.

• Britain’s electronic spy agency listened in on businessmen, government departments and politicians, including heads of state closely allied to the UK, according to the latest Snowden leaks.

• The documents, first seen by French Newspaper Le Monde, are likely to cause severe diplomatic issues between the UK and, for example, Kenya, whose President Mwai Kibaki was named in the leaks alongside his senior advisers.

• Newly released Snowden documents reportedly reveal that Britain’s intelligence agencies spied on Octave Klaba, the CEO of one of Europe’s largest internet hosting firms OVH. “Oles” as Klaba is fondly nicknamed in France, appeared in a list of GCHQ targets, according to reports.

• Klaba’s email address was listed among others considered as targets by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies. According to a report by Le Monde, in 2009, the GCHQ in a test aimed at uncovering whether it was possible to intercept a satellite liaison between Sierra Leone and Belgium, British intelligence agencies intercepted a list of email addresses, which were obtained as part of the intercepted data. The list contained email addresses belonging to politicians and ambassadors as well as Klaba.

• In late October, a group of Maryland legislators met with police officials, attorneys, privacy advocates, and policy analysts to discuss creating a legal framework to govern aerial surveillance programs such as the one the Baltimore Police Department had been using to track vehicles and individuals through the city since January.

• “What, if anything, are other states doing to address this issue?” Joseph Vallerio, the committee’s chairman, asked the panel.

• “Nothing,” replied David Rocah, an attorney with the ACLU. “Because no one has ever done this before.”

• The Baltimore surveillance program broke new ground by bringing wide-area persistent surveillance—a technology that the military has been developing for a decade—to municipal law enforcement. The police department kept the program secret from the public, as well as from the city’s mayor and other local officials, until it was detailed in August by Bloomberg Businessweek. Privacy advocates, defense attorneys, and some local legislators called for the program to be suspended immediately, until the technology could be evaluated in public hearings.

• But in the three months since the public discussion began, the police have continued to use the surveillance plane to monitor large events, such as the Baltimore Marathon, and essential questions remain unanswered. The police continue to classify the program as an ongoing trial, but the private company that operates it for the police—Persistent Surveillance Systems—doesn’t have a permanent contract and no specific regulations govern its operations.

• The former head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, is reported to have said that the agency is facing a “brain drain” of its best staff, predominantly the younger ones.

• Employees working for the National Security Agency are leaving their posts in “increasingly large numbers” following the scandal caused by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA’s former director has revealed.

• Keith Alexander, who ran the NSA from 2005 to 2014, said during a talk hosted by the University of Maryland’s journalism school on Tuesday that the mass exodus is partly the result of “how the American people see them.” He said much of that is due to Snowden’s leaks, and how they were reported.

• Georgia’s Secretary of State is accusing someone at the Department of Homeland Security of illegally trying to hack its computer network, including the voter registration database.

• In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, copied to the full Georgia congressional delegation, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp alleges that a computer with a DHS internet address attempted to breach its systems.

• Kemp writes: “On November 15, 2016, an IP address associated with the Department of Homeland Security made an unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Georgia Secretary of State’s firewall. I am writing you to ask whether DHS was aware of this attempt and, if so, why DHS was attempting to breach our firewall.”

• November 15 was a full week after the election.

• The letter goes on say that the systems under attack contained the personal information of over 6.5 million Georgians, 800,000 corporate entities and over 500,000 licensed or registered professionals.

• A group of investors in AT&T have had it with the phone company’s collaboration with law enforcement through the Hemisphere program, in which the company facilitates police access to trillions of phone records. At the spring shareholder conference, Zevin Asset Management plans to force discussion of contradictions between AT&T’s stated commitment to privacy and civil liberties and the Hemisphere program. One of the chief goals is to demand greater transparency over the highly secretive program.

• The internet didn’t come with privacy, any more than the planet did. But at least the planet had nature, which provided raw materials for the privacy technologies we call clothing and shelter. On the net, we use human nature to make our own raw materials. Those include code, protocols, standards, frameworks and best practices, such as those behind free and open-source software.

• So far, our best privacy tech is encryption. But I won’t dwell on that one, because I assume all Linux Journal readers are experts at that. Instead, I want to visit three others, all of which are new.

• Next month, President-elect Donald Trump will be handed the keys to the NSA’s vast spying apparatus. As a candidate, he supported mass surveillance of Americans’ phone calls, called for expanded spying on American Muslims, and even invited Russia to hack the emails of his political opponent. With these threats to privacy and liberty on the horizon, our courts will likely be more important than ever as a bulwark against unlawful spying.

• One of the courtroom battles that will shape Trump’s spying powers is already under way.

• On Thursday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Wikimedia v. NSA, our case challenging “Upstream” surveillance. First revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in June 2013, Upstream surveillance involves the NSA’s bulk searching of Americans’ international internet communications with the assistance of companies like AT&T and Verizon. If you email friends abroad, chat with family members overseas, or browse websites hosted outside the United States, the NSA almost certainly has searched through the contents of your communications—and it has done so without a warrant.

• A leaked NSA newsletter published Wednesday highlights the collection of phone metadata as one of the agency’s “most useful tools.”

• The document — which was leaked by Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept — says that the NSA has used metadata such as numbers called, IP addresses, and call duration to yield “concrete results,” such as the capture of terror suspects Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaida.

• It’s worth noting that while the collection of specific metadata may have helped catch terror suspects, the agency’s bulk collection has a far worse record.

• Cornwall has always played a notable role in the UK’s telecoms history, from Marconi’s transatlantic radio broadcasts to the Goonhilly satellite site receiving broadcasts from Telstar.

• But ever since the leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013 another, darker side of Cornwall’s role in the UK’s communications landscape has come to light – the interception of internet traffic on the cables that come ashore in the county by GCHQ as part of its Tempora programme.

• The documents leaked by Snowden said GCHQ had set up intercepts that allowed it to syphon data off before storing and analysing it at its Bude station, and even sharing it with the US’s National Security Agency (NSA).

• Blighty’s freshly passed Investigatory Powers Act, better known as the Snoopers’ Charter, is a dog’s dinner of a law. It gives virtually unrestricted powers not only to State spy organisations but also to the police and a host of other government agencies.

• The operation of the oversight and accountability mechanisms in the IPA are all kept firmly out of sight – and, so its authors hope, out of mind – of the public. It is up to the State to volunteer the truth to its victims if the State thinks it has abused its secret powers. “Marking your own homework” is a phrase which does not fully capture this.

• However, despite the establishment of a parallel system of secret justice, the IPA’s tentacles also enshrine parallel construction into law. That is, the practice where prosecutors lie about the origins of evidence to judges and juries – thereby depriving the defendant of a fair trial because he cannot review or question the truth of the evidence against him.

• Next month, President-elect Trump will be handed the keys to the NSA’s vast spying apparatus. As a candidate, he supported mass surveillance of Americans’ phone calls, called for expanded spying on American Muslims, and even invited Russia to hack the emails of his political opponent. With these threats to privacy and liberty on the horizon, our courts will likely be more important than ever as a bulwark against unlawful spying.

• The publishers of Wikipedia and several civil rights groups will head to a federal appeals court Thursday to challenge a National Security Agency surveillance program that mines Americans’ internet communications.

• A key hurdle for the groups will be to provide convincing evidence that their emails and other communications are among those collected in bulk by the NSA.

• A lower court previously dismissed the lawsuit, which challenges the NSA surveillance program Upstream, on grounds that the groups were unable to prove their communications were among those intercepted and instead were relying on speculation about how the spying system is used.

• The Wikimedia Foundation, parent of Wikipedia, wants a judge to determine whether a government surveillance program is constitutional. Photo by Screenshot courtesy of Laura Hautala.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders was on Friday found guilty of incitement and encouraging discrimination, but was not given a penalty.

• A judge said that freedom of expression is fundamental to a democracy, but said there were limits to how far people could go.

• The case against Wilders dates back to 2014 when, during a rally of his Freedom Party (PVV), he asked supporters if they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. The crowd responded by chanting “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”

• Wilders answered them by saying, “We’ll take care of that.”

• Prosecutors asked for a €5,000 fine to be the penalty for Wilders and argued that he deliberately tried to distinguish Dutch citizens of Moroccan origin from others, calling his comments “unnecessarily offensive.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• The already existing problem of cross-licensing agreements and also the problem of “cluttering” of patent or trade mark registers, particularly in the information technology and life sciences industries.

Trademarks

• As the Northern European weather turns to a cold chill, a trade mark dispute is just starting to heat up…

• Iceland is known for its chilly temperatures and occasional financial difficulties. It is also the name of a Nordic country.

• You might think that a supermarket which primarily sells frozen foods would not be readily confused with a country which is known (in no particular order) for Bjork, hot springs, Northern Lights* and the pirate party. But a recent war of words (the main word being “Iceland”) has erupted like a geyser and once again brought trade mark law to the mainstream media’s attention.

• The role of recordation of well-known marks varies across jurisdictions. Against that backdrop, the step about to be taken by the Trade Marks Registry in India in connection with recording well-known marks is especially noteworthy. Kat friend Ranjan Narula, of RNA Intellectual Property Attorneys, describes what can be expected to shortly take place.

Copyrights

• The House Judiciary Committee has been “exploring” various copyright reform proposals for a few years now, asking for feedback, holding a “listening tour” and more. Through it all, it seemed pretty clear that the Judiciary Committee is (reasonably) fearful of getting SOPA’d again, and thus was trying to figure out some less controversial proposals it could push forward first to see how they worked. Two, in particular, have been brought up multiple times: moving the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress… and creating a “small claims court” for copyright infringement. And it appears that’s what the Judiciary Committee is now moving forward on, even though both are pretty bad ideas.

• This is of course not the first time we’ve seen such an attempt to nibble (or chomp) away at the edges of the public domain. Other examples include the high-profile fight over Sherlock Holmes, and the recent loss over Wizard Of Oz promotional materials. But each is subtly different, and together they form a trifecta that snuffs out giant swathes of the public domain.

• In the case of Sherlock Holmes, we’ve got the rule that early works falling into the public domain can be freely used, but if you’re building on them or adapting them, you can’t incorporate character traits or story points from later works that are still under copyright. While this still raises a huge host of “perpetual copyright” concerns, at its core it seems… somewhat reasonable. The Wizard Of Oz situation is similar, stemming from the idea that just because some materials from the film have fallen into the public domain doesn’t mean everything else is fair game. But, it pushed the borders: the court didn’t simply say that building on the public domain material with other still-copyrighted material from the film becomes infringing, but that building on it with anything or changing it in any way makes it infringing.

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