● 12.21.16

● Links 21/12/2016: Red Hat’s Results Not Positive, Raspberry Pi Goes for Debian

Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Every upcoming new year has been predicted, or wished rather, to be the year when the Linux operating system in its desktop form would finally explode into the mainstream. That has actually become a thorny subject among Linux advocates and sometimes even a running joke among both believers and skeptics alike. After so many tries, dating back to even before the popular Ubuntu was released, is there still hope for the Linux desktop? Or perhaps the question is whether it still matters at all.

Desktop

• Even though more and more people are choosing laptops and tablets for their computing needs nowadays, there is still a place for desktops. All-in-one machines in particular can be a cost-effective way to get both a PC and monitor. This design will also save space on a desk or table — a good thing for those without a lot of space.

• Today, Acer announces its Aspire C Series all-in-one desktops. The machines come in two screen sizes, both with 1080p resolution — 21.5-inch (22) and 23.8-inch (24). What is particularly cool, however, is the operating system that they run. Of course, Windows 10 Home is available as default, but if a consumer prefers, they can opt to have a Linux-based OS instead (Linpus Linux). How cool is that?

• Acer’s new all-in-one desktop PCs look more like displays than fully functional computers. The Acer Aspire C desktops come with a choice of 21.5 inch or 23.8 inch displays, and both models have bezels that are just under a third of an inch thick.

• Acer has announced the launch of its new Aspire C Series, a family of all-in-one desktop PCs, offering sleek design and a choice of three operating systems.

• Along with Windows 10 Home, buyers are also offered the option of having FreeDOS or Linpus Simple Linux pre-installed on their machine.

Server

• Is virtualization still as strategically important as it was now that we are in the age of containers? According to a Red Hat survey of 900 enterprise IT administrators, systems architects, and IT managers across geographic regions and industries, the answer is a resounding yes. Virtualization adoption remains on the rise, and is integrated with many cloud deployments and platforms.

Kernel Space

• While the DRM feature updates for Linux 4.10 were already sent in and integrate the AMDGPU improvements for the next kernel release, a fixes pull request sent in now gives more hope for GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” users wanting to run AMDGPU.

• For users of the Network File System, there are more NFS client updates coming in the Linux 4.10 kernel.

• Sent in last week was the first pull request of NFS client updates for the Linux 4.10 merge window. There is client support for the NFSv4 unmask attribute, NFSv4 having correct support for flock() state ids, eliminating redundant GETATTR calls, attribute cache improvements, and various bug fixes.

• Most people don’t care about the kernel until it breaks or they think it is broken. When this happens, usually the first place people look is the kernel logs by using dmesg or journalctl -k. This dumps the output of the in- kernel ringbuffer. The messages from the kernel ring buffer mostly come from the kernel itself calling printk. The ring buffer can’t hold an infinite amount of data, and even if it could more information isn’t necessarily better. In general, the kernel community tries to limit kernel prints to error messages or limited probe information. Under normal operation the kernel should be neither seen nor heard. The kernel doesn’t always match those guidelines though and not every kernel message is an urgent problem to be fixed.

• The kernel starts dumping information almost immediately after the bootloader passes it control. Very early information is designed to give an idea what kind of kernel is running and what kind of system it is running on. This may include dumping out CPU features and what areas of RAM were found by the kernel. As the kernel continues booting and initializing, the printed messages get more selective. Drivers may print out only hardware information or nothing at all. The latter is preferred in most cases.

• Bisecting is extremely useful to fix a regression in big projects like upstream kernel. The goal here is to get the regression fixed instead of just reporting it and forget about it. Usually upstream regression reports have easily been ignored due to the bandwidth of the kernel developers, complex of the code analysis involved to find out the root cause, developers limited access to the hardware etc. However, since it is a regression, it is usually possible to track down which exact commit introduced it. Hence, make it is way easier for developers to figure out the root cause and come up with a fix. Also, the original authors who introduced the regression usually response quickly (within one working day) because they want to maintain good reputations within the community. By introducing regression with their patches without fixing them quickly makes lives harder for them to get their future patches accepted by Linus and sub-system maintainers. Linus and friends are usually not afraid of and good at making them feel public peer pressure once happened. In the worst case, the solution is to send a revert patch to fix the regression. Usually, it will be accepted as Linus and friends because they absolutely hate regressions even the trivial ones.

Applications

• The GNU Compiler Collection version 6.3 has been released.

• Version 6.3 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been released as scheduled.

• QEMU 2.8 is now available as a significant update to this important piece of the Linux virtualization stack.

• Happy Holidays to all the OpenShot supporters around the world! I am very proud to announce the latest and greatest release of OpenShot (version 2.2) has just arrived, and is ready to edit all your holiday videos! It’s faster, more stable, and better than ever!

• In case you plan to do any video editing for your 2016 holiday videos and are deciding between the different open-source non-linear video editors, OpenShot 2.2 was released this morning as a sizable feature update.

• OpenShot 2.2 delivers on performance improvements (for some operations, more than 10x faster than the previous release), editing HD videos (1080p / 4K / 5K) is vastly improved, there is a new caching engine, stability improvements, keyframe enhancements, better error handling, new title templates, and various bug fixes.

IRC

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• So what is Lara Croft Go? It’s a puzzle game wherein you play as Lara Croft as she traverses a multitude of caves, jungle temples, mountain tops across 40-or-so levels. The game is based around the Unity engine and handles quite nicely on both Linux and Windows using the Nvidia and Intel drivers. The only complaint I have about the Linux version is that, even with V-Sync enabled, the game still occasionally had tearing.

• Impossiball [Steam, Official Site], an interesting take on a Pong-like game has plans to bring out a Linux version. It looks somewhat amusing.

• Wild Terra Online [Steam, Official Site] is a player-driven MMO with hunting, crafting, building creation and tons more and it’s now available on Steam in Early Access.

• Master of Orion [Steam], the revamp, not the original, has been updated again and it finally includes fixes for troubles a bunch of Linux players had been having.

• XCOM 2 [Steam] for Linux has been patched and it adds official support for Mesa 13.0.1 along with other changes.

• Building off last week’s Wine 2.0-RC2 milestone is now an updated Wine-Staging with various experimental/testing patches.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE contributor Bhushan Shah recently showcased a modified version of the Plasma Mobile operating system, based on Google’s Android 6.0 OS, on the LG Nexus 5X smartphone.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• So we’re approaching the end of 2016, and I thought I should probably give a little update as it was a while since last time now…

• As can be seen in the screenshot below, the route labels will be expanded a to fill out the available space instead of getting ellipsized when there is no headsign label, as is the case for the Staten Island Ferry in the example

Distributions

• Developers love things their way and no other way. To that end, Linux stands to be the ultimate developer’s desktop environment. Linux is endlessly customizable, and it provides easy access to nearly all the software a developer might need. But a good Linux for developers must have other key attributes—like a comfortable work environment, good documentation, and useful features that a developer can benefit from generally.

Reviews

New Releases

• I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 17.0 KDE Live DVD. (The previous version was 16.4 from 160731). The best thing with ExTiX 17.0 is that while running the system live (from DVD/USB) or from hard drive you can use Refracta Tools (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu system.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• Put simply, it’s the GNU/Linux we would want to use.

• A few months back the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the PIXEL desktop environment that is used in future versions of the Raspbian Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi ARM SBCs. Now though they’ve decided to spin Debian and PIXEL for x86 systems.

• [...]

• So, after three months of hard work from Simon and Serge, we have a Christmas treat for you: an experimental version of Debian+PIXEL for x86 platforms. Simply download the image, burn it onto a DVD or flash it onto a USB stick, and boot straight into the familiar PIXEL desktop environment on your PC or Mac. Or go out and buy this month’s issue of The MagPi magazine, in stores tomorrow, which has this rather stylish bootable DVD on the cover.

• The 2nd Reproducible Builds World Summit was held in Berlin, Germany on December 13th-15th. The event was a great success with enthusiastic participation from an extremely diverse number of projects. Many thanks to our sponsors for making this event possible!

• FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) are increasingly popular for data acquisition, device control and application acceleration. Debian now features a completely Free set of tools to program FPGA in Verilog, prepare the binary and have it executed on an affordable device.

• From November 25 to 27 some people met in the hackerspace bitraf in downtown Oslo. On Saturday and Sunday we met in the morning and hacked and translated all day until we went for dinners in the evening. Despite the short time I think we managed to get a lot done and had good fun, so I’m hoping we’ll have another gathering in 2017!

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In perfect alignment with its self-described identity as “the data reduction expert”, Permabit Technology Corporation recently announced availability of its Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) 6 for Canonical’s Ubuntu Server. VDO data reduction enables enterprise hybrid cloud data centers and cloud service providers to reduce their storage footprint, increase data density and avoid costly data-center expansions, resulting in “massive savings on data-center investment”.

Devices/Embedded

• The tiny, open-spec, Kodi-oriented “Khadas Vim” SBC has a quad-core, -A53 Amlogic S905X, plus WiFi, BT, 2GB RAM, and 8GB ($50) or 16GB ($65) eMMC.

• A Chinese startup called Khadas has launched an open source Khadas Vim single board computer that runs on the Amlogic S905X, a lower-cost upgrade to the quad-core, Cortex-A53 Amlogic S905 found on Hardkernel’s Odroid-C2 hacker SBC. Primarily aimed at media player applications, the Khadas VIM supports Android 6.0 Marshmallow with built-in Kodi-17 media software, as well as Ubuntu 16.04, Buildroot, and 7.0 versions of the Kodi-supporting OpenELEC and forked LibreELEC.

• It is an operating system based on open source software. The underlying source code can be used, distributed or modified (commercially or non-commercially) by anyone under terms of respective licenses. Linux runs on mobile phones, tablets, network routers, TiVo, smartwatches, video game consoles and television sets.

• Android is a derivative of the GNU/Linux operating system, which is an open source, unix-like operating system. Other popular open source products developed over the years and are still extensively used are Chromium, Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice, Apache HTTP Server, etc.

Phones

Tizen

• There is lots happening in the world of Tizen and here is some news that relates to Samsung’s Smart TVs. We have a leaked video that allegedly shows a new user interface that will be Introduced in Samsung’s 2017 range of Tizen-based Smart TVs. We should see the official unveiling next month at the Consumer Electronics Show CES 2017, held in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Android

• Android apps have gotten more powerful and faster over the years, but there are still times when a desktop program is necessary. Usually that means you need to hop over to your (for example) Windows computer, but the ExaGear Windows Emulator can run those programs on Android. So, Android devices and select Chromebooks have access to a ton of desktop applications in theory. ExaGear is not perfect, and it’ll cost you $30 to test yourself.

• Have you ever downloaded an Android app only to find that it wants access to all your phone’s features and all of your data? This experience, while not ubiquitous, is frustratingly common. Even applications in the F-Droid repository are not immune to requesting permission to access things they should not even need to access. For example, there is a Minesweeper application in F-Droid that wants to be able to record audio and video.

• Lets write a letter to Santa. Santa Claus lives in Finland (not on the North Pole but that is a common misconception, Finland is, after all, the Northernmost country in the world when countries are compared by the centers of their geography). Santa lives in a mountain called Korvatunturi (The Ear Mountain) which is in Lapland. Finnair is the official airline of Santa and Rovaniemi is the official airport for Santa. As Nokia is a Finnish company (from far far South, born in the town of Nokia from which the company took its name. Nokia the town is located outside of Tampere, inland in SouthWestern Finland; originally Nokia was a paper mill company and also a rubber goods manufacturer before it made telecoms equipment like mobile phones. Thats how I knew Nokia as a kid in Helsinki my rubber boots were Nokia brand and in our Saab car, we had Nokia brand tyres). I know there are always skeptics around this time of year, who make silly claims that Santa is not real, here is the proof. Rovaniemi is the official airport of Santa Claus! What more could you ask for?

• All of Sony’s speakers that have Chromecast built in will get the Google Home support by virtue of a firmware update, as is the case with Android TVs poised to take advantage of the expanded ecosystem. This means that barking orders to Google Home, such as playing music from Spotify, can now be routed directly to supported Sony speakers.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source development practices will create further communities of developers, not only in software but also in hardware (Open Source Hardware, OSH) and “wetware”, for example in do-it-yourself synthetic biology. Together with the continued fall in the costs of equipment and computing, this creates greater opportunities for new entrants — including individuals, outsider firms and entrepreneurs — to succeed in new markets.

• 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, steady progress has been made in security software as well, and now Google has released Project Wycheproof, a collection of security tests that check cryptographic software libraries for known weaknesses that are used in attacks.

• This newly open sourced project, named for Mount Wycheproof, apparently the smallest mountain in the world, features a code repository on GitHub.

• If you’re familiar with Kickstarter, you know that it and other crowdsourced funding sites have helped fund numerous open source applications. Kickstarter actually has its own engineering team, though, and now that team has made the announcement that it is open sourcing its own Android and iOS creations.

• You can go to the team’s Android or iOS Github pages and find repositories. “The native team at Kickstarter is responsible for building and maintaining features for Android and iOS,” the team reports. The open source toolsets may be especially useful for startups to leverage.

Events

• DigitalOcean launched Hacktoberfest in 2014 to encourage contribution to open source projects. The event was a clear success, and in terms of attendance and participation goals reached, it’s also clear that Hacktoberfest has become a powerful force in driving contributions to open source. The lure of a t-shirt and specific, time-limited goals help new contributors get started and encourage existing contributors to rededicate themselves and their efforts.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation today announced MUFFIN, a new user-interface concept for LibreOffice.

• MUFFIN is short for “My User Friendly & Flexible INterface.” MUFFIN focuses on a “personal UI” depending upon a user’s habits, is deemed user-friendly, and is flexible. These different UI elements will be available with the upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 and offer options for the default UI, a single toolbar UI, a sidebar with a single toolbar, and a new experimental “notebook bar” interface.

• Immediately after informing Softpedia today, December 21, 2016, about the launch of a new LibreOffice Extension & Templates website, The Document Foundation company announced MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice 5.3 onwards.

• The Document Foundation announces the MUFFIN, a new tasty user interface concept for LibreOffice, based on the joint efforts of the development and the design teams, supported by the marketing team.

• ORACLE HAS begun an aggressive campaign of chasing licence fees for use of payable elements of its Java software.

• The company, which acquired Java owner Sun Microsystems in 2010, has already lost a case over the fair use of Java APIs in Google’s Android operating system, but as it awaits another appeal hearing, it’s going after a myriad of other companies that are using elements of the open source software that aren’t actually free.

• Oracle has been hiring a legal team this year to bolster its License Management Services, which in turn has forced companies to hire compliance specialists, as it looks like Oracle has made 2017 the year of kicking ass.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Leftovers

• The Velvet Underground, Sly Stone and Nina Simone are among the artists who will be awarded the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2017, the organization behind the Grammys announced Monday.

• To die-hard fans, Apple Inc.’s Macintosh sometimes seems like an afterthought these days.

• Mac upgrades, once a frequent ritual, are few and far between. The Mac Pro, Apple’s marquee computer, hasn’t been refreshed since 2013. The affordable and flexible Mac mini was last upgraded in 2014. And when a new machine does roll out, the results are sometimes underwhelming, if not infuriating, to devotees.

Health/Nutrition

• A Reuters examination of lead testing results across the country found almost 3,000 areas with poisoning rates far higher than in the tainted Michigan city. Yet many of these lead hotspots are receiving little attention or funding.

• ST. JOSEPH, Missouri – On a sunny November afternoon in this historic city, birthplace of the Pony Express and death spot of Jesse James, Lauranda Mignery watched her son Kadin, 2, dig in their front yard. As he played, she scolded him for putting his fingers in his mouth.

• OTTAWA – Old Dutch Foods Ltd is recalling one of its potato chip brands because of possible salmonella contamination.

• The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says Old Dutch brand Cheddar and Sour Cream Potato Chips are sold in 66 gram and 255 gram bags.

• One of the greatest fears of Chinese parents is coming true: China’s young people are turning away from marriage. The trend is also worrying the government.

• After a whole decade of increases in the national marriage rate, China witnessed its second year of decline in the number of newly registered unions in 2015, with a 6.3% drop from 2014 and 9.1% from 2013. This was accompanied by a rise in the age of marriage, which increased by about a year and a half in the first 10 years of this century.

Security

• You might think that because your business is small you aren’t an attractive target for hackers.

• But you would be wrong.

• According to the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), 82 percent of small business owners believe that they are not a target for cyberattacks, but 43 percent of last year’s cyberattacks targeted SMBs. And a single attack can cost SMBs up to $99,000.

• Cyberattacks of all kinds are on the rise with data breaches increasing 15 percent over the past year, NCSA says. And ransomware, attacks that freeze up organizations’ systems until they pay a ransom, has become particularly prevalent; in just the first three months of 2016, U.S. ransomware victims paid out $209 million to attackers, compared to $25 million for all of 2015.

• In case you’re facing a problem of your embedded devices going overloaded with networking and computing tasks, there are chances that it might be due to some foreign elements trying to lure your ‘smart’ device into joining a botnet cult.

Defence/Aggression

• A refugee who says he lives below the home where two Derby men were arrested for alleged terror offences said they were strict Muslims who fell-out with him for wearing shorts.

• Haji Ahmadi said he “had the shock of his life” when he discovered his neighbours in Leopold Street had been held in a major anti-terror probe in which six people were arrested – four were from Derby.

• Mr Ahmadi has lived on the ground floor of the home for five months and the former Afghan soldier said two of the four city men who have been arrested lived there when he arrived.

• Three weeks ago, on a bus ride to Takae, a small district two hours north of Okinawa’s capital of Naha, a copy of a local newspaper article was passed around. “Another Takae in America,” the headline read, over a photograph of the Standing Rock Sioux marching against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. At the top of the page, someone had scribbled “water is life” in red ink. As we drove through the foothills along the coast, the article made its way around the bus—behind me, a woman said to another, “It’s the same struggle everywhere.”

• We were headed to the US military’s Northern Training Area, also known as Camp Gonsalves, which stretches over 30 square miles of Okinawa’s subtropical forest. Founded in 1958 and used for “terrain and climate-specific training,” the US military likes to call the training area a “largely undeveloped jungle land.” What they don’t like to acknowledge is that the forest is home to some 140 villagers, thousands of native species and dams that provide much of the island’s drinking water. Though Okinawans have long opposed US presence on the group of islands, their purpose on this day was to protest the construction of a new set of US military helipads in the forest of the Northern Training Area, which they consider to be sacred.

• Since 2007, Okinawans have been gathering in Takae to disrupt the construction of six helipads for the US Marine Corps, which come as part of a 1996 bilateral deal between Japan and the United States. Under the agreement, the US military would “return” 15 square miles of its training ground in exchange for the new helipads—a plan Okinawans say will only bolster the US military presence on the islands and lead to further environmental destruction.

• The US “got it wrong” about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the CIA analyst who interrogated the former dictator has said.

• John Nixon had numerous conversations with the deposed leader and now says that America was critically mistaken about their intervention Iraq in a number of ways.

• In particular, he claims, the CIA’s view of Hussein’s attitude to using chemical weapons was wrong.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• President-elect Donald Trump may be staffing his administration with anti-environmentalists, but that isn’t stopping President Barack Obama from using his final weeks in office to protect the planet.

• The president is invoking a provision in a 1953 law known as the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act in order to indefinitely block drilling in large sections of the Arctic and Atlantic, according to CNBC on Tuesday. This will include most of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic and 31 underwater canyons in the Atlantic.

• Trump is likely to roll back several of the current administration’s clean energy policies, such as the 30% Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar power deployments, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) and U.S. support for the 195-nation Paris Agreement.

• In mid-November, while Americans were preoccupied with election returns, China sent some of its clearest signals yet that it will continue to pursue an international leadership role on issues including climate. At an international climate change summit in Marrakech, the Chinese government reasserted its commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The government announced that its aggregate emissions will peak by 2030 or earlier, and that its emissions per dollar of economic output will decline sharply.

Finance

• Even as Uber Technologies Inc. exited China, the company’s financial loss has remained eye-popping. In the first nine months of this year, the ride-hailing company lost significantly more than $2.2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. In the third quarter, Uber lost more than $800 million, not including its Chinese operation.

• At the same time, the company’s revenue has continued to grow even after leaving the world’s most populous country. Uber generated about $3.76 billion in net revenue in the first nine months of 2016 and is on track to exceed $5.5 billion this year, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

• A multilateral investment court would lock in greater exposure, larger scope and the “highest possible level of legal protection and certainty”. Furthermore, due to inherent systemic issues with specialised and supranational courts a multilateral investment court would create a high risk on expansive interpretations of investors’ rights.

• A multilateral investment court would strengthen investments vis-à-vis democracy and fundamental rights. This undermines our values and ability to respond to crises.

• A Spanish tax break that was only available to Spanish companies acquiring foreign companies constituted a ‘selective’ tax advantage in breach of EU state aid rules, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said in two cases, overturning previous decisions of the EU General Court.

• As Britain grapples with a depreciating pound sterling in a post-Brexit era and India continues to grow rapidly since its economic liberalization in 1991, the two have swapped spots in the rankings of world economies.

• For the first time in 150 years, India has surpassed its erstwhile colonial master in terms of GDP, which is now the fifth largest in the world after the U.S., China, Japan and Germany.

• Not all parts of the European Union-Singapore trade agreement “fall within the EU’s exclusive competence and therefore the agreement cannot be concluded without the participation of all of the Member States.” This is the result of an opinion of the European Court of Justice Advocate General Eleanor Sharpston published today.

• The Singapore Free Trade Agreement can only be concluded by the European Union and the member states acting jointly, according to the decision which clearly divides issues that fall under EU competency compared to such that need member states acting as well.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Electoral College was created 229 years ago as a check and balance against popular sovereignty. And, with its formal endorsement of Donald Trump for the presidency, this absurd anachronism has once again completed its mission of desecrating democracy.

• As of Monday afternoon, the actual vote count in the race for the presidency was: Democrat Hillary Clinton 65,844,594, Republican Donald Trump 62,979,616. That’s a 2,864,978 popular-vote victory. Yet, when the last of the electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia had completed their quadrennial mission early Monday evening, the Electoral College vote was: Trump 304, Clinton 227.

• So-called “faithless” electors split from Trump and Clinton, casting votes for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, former secretary of state Colin Powell, Ohio Governor John Kasich, former congressman Ron Paul, and Native American elder (and Dakota Access Pipeline critic) Faith Spotted Eagle.

• When the President-elect speaks, people listen — and governments, businesses and ordinary citizens scramble to parse, interpret and, given his power, make snap decisions about how to respond. The post-election, pre-presidential Donald Trump has used social media with the same abandon as his campaign self — yes, to get his message out, unfiltered by the media he loathes, but also as a bludgeon against critics, a tool for disseminating misinformation and, as he nears the inaugural, an outlet for breeding confusion in business and international relations, purposefully or not.

• During the election campaign, Trump used Twitter as a means to sidestep legitimate news media which tended to criticize or add commentary. He wanted to control everything in his stream of propaganda.

• However, while skilled at producing his content in volume, he had a very high error rate and/or showed himself to be a compulsive liar. He’s still doing that. He must know that one can fool some of the people all of the time but not all the people. Mustn’t he?

Censorship/Free Speech

• Abbey Dental of Las Vegas doesn’t like the number of negative reviews that are piling up at Pissed Consumer. But that’s about all it (and its lawyers) know. It seems to understand that taking on Pissed Consumer with a defamation lawsuit would be a complete failure, as would be any effort it made to sue individual reviewers. Nevada has an anti-SLAPP law in place, which would fit Abbey Dental’s attempt to artificially resuscitate its reputation to a tee.

• So, instead of handling this in the normal way (which would also be the route least likely to succeed), the company has decided to take a more oblique approach: a lawsuit filed in federal court (to better dodge the state’s anti-SLAPP law) centered on a variety of tremendously stupid trademark infringement claims.

• A state senator from South Carolina thinks he can save his constituents from a mostly-imaginary parade of horribles by erecting a porn paywall. Only none of this paywall money will go to porn producers or actors. Instead, it will all go to the fine state of South Carolina… you know, theoretically… if there were actually any way to effectively enforce this.

• Any subversive software developer knows its app has truly caught on when repressive regimes around the world start to block it. Earlier this week the encryption app Signal, already a favorite within the security and cryptography community, unlocked that achievement. Now, it’s making its countermove in the cat-and-mouse game of online censorship.

• On Wednesday, Open Whisper Systems, which created and maintains Signal, announced that it’s added a feature to its Android app that will allow it to sidestep censorship in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, where it was blocked just days ago. Android users can simply update the app to gain unfettered access to the encryption tool, according to Open Whisper Systems founder Moxie Marlinspike, and an iOS version of the update is coming soon.

• On Dec 15, an amendment to Thailand’s 2007 Computer Crime Act passed its National Legislative Assembly — a body appointed by the country’s military after the 2014 coup — unanimously, and in 180 days, the country will have a new internet law that represents a grab bag of the worst provisions of the worst internet laws in the world, bits of the UK’s Snooper’s Charter, America’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the dregs of many other failed laws.

• Under the new law, sending “false computer data” is a criminal offense, as is transmitting material affecting “the maintenance of national security, public security, national economic security or public infrastructure serving public interest or cause panic in the public” — and ISPs are co-liable with their users if they fail to pre-emptively censor this broadly defined material.

• The statue mandates vaguely defined cryptographic back doors, and bans possession of “information that the court has ordered to be destroyed” — while also appointing a committee to order the removal of “dangerous content.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Combining a case brought by a group of UK politicians and organisations (698/15 Watson) and a Swedish case started by telecom operator Tele Sverige (C-203/15 Tele2 Sverige), the court declared both the British and Swedish data retention provisions illegal under EU law.

• Only targeted retention fighting serious crime is possible, with tight limitations applying, also with regard to access, according to the judges. Exfiltrated data for these cases must be stored inside the EU, too, the decision notes. Once more the court with this ruling reminded EU legislators about the severity of indiscriminate data collections.

• When cops have a phone to break into, they just might pull a small, laptop-sized device out of a rugged briefcase. After plugging the phone in with a cable, and a few taps of a touch-screen, the cops have now bypassed the phone’s passcode. Almost like magic, they now have access to call logs, text messages, and in some cases even deleted data.

• The Court of Justice of the European Union today published the final judgment in relation to the Tom Watson MP (and formerly David Davis MP) case regarding the lawfulness of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA).

• Tor has become such a popular application in online anonymity circles that people have been using its name mistakenly to refer to the concept it operates under (onion routing). What it is, how it works, and what it can do is still mostly unclear to most people who use it on a daily basis which often leads to complacency based on certain slight misconceptions about its mechanism. Although using onion routing offers several advantages, it’s important to note what its limitations are. Understanding the risks associated with Tor can help you better protect yourself from measures that would compromise your privacy.

• The UK’s recently passed Investigatory Powers Act hit a major snag on Wednesday morning, when Europe’s highest court ruled that the “general and indiscriminate” retention of citizens’ data communications is unlawful where it is not being slurped for serious crime cases.

• More and more entities involved in government work are coming out in support of encryption. (Unfortunately, many governments are still periodically entertaining backdoor legislation…) While recognizing the limits it places on law enforcement and surveillance agencies, they’re not quite willing to sacrifice the security of everyone to make work easier for certain areas of the government.

• [...]

• One agent’s facially-invalid search warrant is the same agent’s legally-unassailable judicial order. This is enough of a problem in the US, where multiple federal districts have resulted in contradictory opinions on identical legal arguments. In the European Union, the problem is only exacerbated. Not only are there multiple courts, but also multiple nations, all with their own laws. Sure, there’s an attempt to unify guidance on technical/legal issues under the EU, but only so much can be done. Deciding what is or isn’t abusive use of government-mandated backdoors is going to be far from consistent. And that, of course, requires a unified European stance on encryption backdoors, which isn’t likely to happen either.

• Ultimately, ENISA concludes that tech advancements do pose legitimate challenges to law enforcement/national security efforts, but backdoors are no way to solve the problem. But the solution it does suggest isn’t much better. Here in the US, courts routinely defer to Congress when the remedy sought isn’t within their power. Over in the EU, ENISA suggests legislative measures are the wrong approach.

• “General and indiscriminate retention” of emails and electronic communications by governments is illegal, the EU’s highest court has ruled, in a judgment that could trigger challenges against the UK’s new Investigatory Powers Act – the so-called snooper’s charter.

• Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime is justified, according to a long-awaited decision by the European court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg.

• The finding came in response to a legal challenge initially brought by the Brexit secretary, David Davis, when he was a backbench MP, and Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, over the legality of GCHQ’s bulk interception of call records and online messages.

• The European Commission has charged Facebook Inc (FB.O) with providing misleading information during its takeover of the online messaging service WhatsApp, opening the company to a possible fine of 1 percent of its turnover.

• However, the statement of objections sent to Facebook will not affect the EC’s approval of the $22 billion merger in 2014, the Commission said in a statement on Tuesday.

• Facebook becomes the latest Silicon Valley target of EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has demanded Apple (AAPL.O) pay back $14 billion in taxes to Ireland and hit Google (GOOGL.O) with two market abuse investigations.

• The European commission (EC) has filed charges against Facebook for providing “misleading” information in the run-up to the social network’s acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp after its data-sharing change in August.

• The charges will not have an affect on the approval of the $22bn merger and is being treated completely separately to other European cases against Facebook, but could lead to Facebook being fined up to 1% of its global turnover in 2014 when the merger was approved, which was greater than $10bn for the first time.

• FACEBOOK HAS been accused of misleading regulators over its $19bn (later upped to $22bn) takeover of mobile chat platform WhatsApp.

• The European Commission is investigating the possibility that Facebook either out-and-out lied or negligently withheld data that was relevant to the takeover, specifically regarding the company’s ability to swipe data from the app to power its “personalisation”.

• Facebook will have until the end of January next year to respond to a “Statement of Objections” which will then potentially lead to a full investigation.

• If it turns out that Facebook really did lead the commission a merry dance, it could impose a fine equivalent to 1 percent of turnover, or $180m based on 2015 revenue.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “Don’t tell them you took me to Church yesterday and for God’s sake, don’t bring up Christianity.”

• These were the words hissed at me a few years ago by my mother, as we prepared for the onslaught of relatives coming over for dinner. If I am spending it with my mother’s side of the family, then this is how the standard Christmas Day begins — and this conversation sets the scene for the rest of the day.

• For those of you that are wondering, I left the religion that was assigned to me by my family at birth — Islam — when I was 19, and I was halfway through my first year of university. I found several different flaws with its teachings and had several objections to various parts of the Qur’an. I discovered Christianity a year later when a friend casually asked if I fancied going to a church service. I went on to explore it until, finally, I was baptised in December, 2014.

• That led to a 21-month prison sentence, though Bowser was released after 11. Prison cost him more than time; Bowser also lost several teeth.

• As we drove the few miles to the scene of his crime, Bowser told me that he had just come from a denture-fitting appointment at an orthodontist’s office, needed after a race riot at the county jail where he had been held at the request of federal authorities.

• “I got busted in the mouth with a lock in a sock, knocked my teeth out,” he said. “That was my first day in Fresno County jail.”

• And all for making a poor decision with a laser pointer.

• As President Obama’s term nears to a close, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition urging Obama to commute the sentence of Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking more than 700,000 classified files and videos to WikiLeaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. Manning has been held since 2010 and been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and denied medical treatment related to her gender identity. In a letter to President Obama, Chelsea Manning wrote, “The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests of the United States or harm any service members. I am merely asking for a first chance to live my life outside the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks as the person I was born to be.” For more, we speak with Chase Strangio, staff attorney at the ACLU, who is representing Manning in a lawsuit against the Pentagon.

• Google is being sued over its internal confidentiality policies which bar employees from putting in writing concerns over “illegal” activity, posting opinions about the company, and even writing novels “about someone working at a tech company in Silicon Valley” without first giving their employer sign-off on the final draft.

• The lawsuit, revealed by industry news site The Information, accuses Google of breaching California labour laws through its confidentiality provisions, by preventing employees from exercising their legal rights to discuss workplace conditions, wages, and potential violations inside the company.

• It has been brought by an individual employee under a Californian act that allows employees to sue on behalf of co-workers; if the employee wins, the state gets 75% of the penalty, while the remaining payout would be split among Google’s employees. The maximum fine in Google’s case is almost $4bn.

• Hope Not Hate says it has been overwhelmed by the response to an appeal to crowdfund possible legal action against Nigel Farage after he said the organisation, which combats political militancy, was itself extremist.

• Farage attracted significant criticism after saying the widower of the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox was tainted by extremism for supporting Hope Not Hate, which Farage called “violent and undemocratic”.

• Hope Not Hate, which campaigns mainly against rightwing extremism but also on areas such as militant Islamism, wrote to Farage warning him to withdraw the comments and apologise or face legal action.

• Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, through his spokesperson, told Buzzfeed they plan to reintroduce an embattled bill that barely gained a House hearing in 2015. But this time around, they said, the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) was likely to succeed due to a Republican-controlled House and the backing of President-elect Donald Trump.

• Over the past week, the Polish parliament controlled by the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party passed legislations dismantling the current primary education system, finalizing its overhaul of the country’s constitutional court, and de facto limiting the freedom of assembly. A chaotic night on Friday has both sides of the political conflict accusing each other of a coup d’etat. Since then, opposition lawmakers have been occupying the parliament’s main hall. Meanwhile, on the streets of the country’s cities, people have been protesting tirelessly nearly every day. The desperation is palpable: some protesters have been blocking politicians’ cars with their own bodies, while others are camping out in front of the parliament in the middle of Poland’s frigid December. We’re only days away from Christmas, when Poles usually turn to the hearth. This year, for many of them, far more stressful than last-minute gift-shopping and making heaps of holiday pierogi is a political crisis for the history books. What is going on in Poland, which was supposed to be the former Soviet bloc’s beacon of democracy and a poster child of European Union integration?

• Birgitta Jónsdóttir has been back on Icelandic soil for less than twelve hours when we meet. During the previous three days, the Pirate Party MP, privacy activist and former Wikileaks volunteer quietly travelled to Moscow, where she took part in a documentary with Dr. Lawrence Lessig, and the world’s most famous whistleblower: Edward Snowden. The three were brought together by French journalist and documentarian Flore Vasseur, who has previously interviewed Birgitta and Lessig for the French media in her ongoing coverage of the current troubled state of democracy.

• The UK National Crime Agency (NCA) and secret intelligence service GCHQ are facing an embarrassing failure as it appears that the Eritrean man they accused as being one of the world’s “most wanted people smugglers” may actually be a victim of mistaken identity, according to Italian prosecutors.

• The high profile investigation has taken an embarrassing turn for the worst as the NCA and GCHQ appear to have seized the wrong man and the real criminal, a man named Medhanie Yehdego Mered, remains at large.

• In June 2016, British authorities claimed they had captured a human trafficking kingpin, nicknamed ‘The General.’ Mered was arrested and extradited to Italy on suspected charges of running a trafficking network, where he sent thousands of migrants to Europe, with many of them perishing at sea.

DRM

• If you’re one of the 60% of Pebble employees who didn’t get a job offer from Fitbit, the company’s new owner, you’re probably not having a great Christmas season — but that trepedation is shared by 100% of Pebble customers, who’ve just learned (via the fine print on an update on the Pebble Kickstarter page) that the company may soon “reduce functionality” on their watches.

• The watches are among the many cloud-based Internet-of-Things products that are reliant on the ongoing maintenance of server infrastructure for normal functionality. This problem is exacerbated by the widespread IoT deployment of DRM to lock devices into manufacturer-controlled infrastructure — thanks to laws like section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, developers who create software to replace cloud functions with alternative/self-hosted servers, or with local computing, face potential jail sentences and millions in fines. Add to that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which has been used to threaten and even jail researchers who improved services but violated their terms of service to do so, and the IoT space is the land of the contingent, soon-to-be-bricked devices: memory cards, cars, car batteries, phones, and home automation systems — not to mention printers.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Australian Government has just released the Productivity Commission’s report into Australia’s Intellectual Property Arrangements.

• It’s a move that appears to have been designed to avoid some of the controversy of the copyright wars by releasing the report just before most Australians settle into their summer break.

• The report does something that is very difficult in copyright debates: it sets out a rigorous, evidence-based case for reform. Academics have praised the “independent and systematic study that has assessed the effectiveness, efficiency, adaptability and accountability of Australia’s IP [intellectual property] laws”.

• When one thinks about censorship, he or she usually has in mind restrictions imposed on the contents, reproduction and distribution of printed works. Indeed, for over a century before the first enactment of a copyright law, the Statute of Anne in 1709, there was institutionalized censorship of printed works by both the Crown and the Church. But censorship during that time was not limited to books; works of art also were subject to attempts at censorship. Perhaps the most noteworthy case was the interrogation carried out in Venice on July 18, 1573, by the holy court of the Inquisition with respect to the large-format painting created by the Renaissance master, Paolo Veronese, also known as Paolo Caliari. Despite the temporal distance between those 16th century events and our modern world, the circumstances surrounding that attempt at censorship has a remarkably contemporary feel.

• Veronese, best-known for his use of colors, was among the most distinguished of the Venetian Renaissance painters, mentioned in the same breath with Titian and Tintoretto. He was renowned for his paintings of feasts and pageants and he was the leading painter of ceilings of his time. The painting in question was first known as “The Last Supper”, and it was commissioned for the rear-wall of the refectory of the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Castello, Venice.

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