● 12.24.16

● Links 24/12/2016: Christmas Tux 2016, LLVM 3.9.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Merry Christmas, everyone! I’m excited to share the 14th Christmas Tux with everyone. This year I unfortunately didn’t make any cool timelapse recordings of the process. I’ve been working on this piece in little bits over the past couple weeks. I have no actual idea how long it took me to finish, but I had fun making this one. I decided to really amp up the color this year with a bright and colorful winter sunset.

• In the last 10 years, GNU/Linux achieved something some foreseen as almost impossible: powering both the smallest and biggest devices in the world, and everything in between. Only the desktop is not a conquered terrain yet.

• The year 2016 had an impact on the world. Both from a real life perspective, as digitally. Some people found their personal details leaked on the internet, others found their software being backdoored. Let’s have a look back on what happened this year regarding Linux security.

• Whether you’re using Windows as your main OS or you’ve seen the light and switched to Linux, there’s a good chance that you may need a virtual machine at some point in the future. This might be to get the sort of Linux evaluation experience a live disc cannot deliver or it might simply be because you need to use a different distro for a short time.

• Either way, the best results will be gained from having the most efficient Linux distro available. This will reduce system overhead on the host PC, and make for a generally more satisfying experience. Five Linux operating system distributions are particularly suitable for this, so let’s take a look at them.

• Australian Rusty Russell gives an amusing TEDx talk in Adelaide, South Australia, explaining his voyage from being a Linux kernel developer to being a bitcoin developer.

Desktop

• Microsoft does not always do things the right way, few people would argue otherwise. However, Microsoft has traditionally been good at admitting when it drops the ball or otherwise could have done a better job. Such is the case with Windows 10 and the super aggressive approach Microsoft took to getting users to upgrade. It was annoying and at times even obnoxious, and while Microsoft can’t go back in time and change that, it can at least give users the satisfaction of recognizing it. That’s what Microsoft’s chief marketing officer Chris Capossela did during a recent video podcast.

Server

• Linux administrators will have to change their holiday plans, because Exim is still releasing a security update on Christmas Day, and not earlier as had been hoped.

• An information leakage vulnerability was fixed last week in Exim, a widely used email agent for Unix and Linux systems, and major distributions are currently updating their packages to incorporate the fix. Exim maintainer Heiko Schlittermann originally announced on Dec. 18 that details of the vulnerability and the updated software will be available Dec. 25. There was a possibility the release date could be moved to Dec. 23 if the partner distributions could complete their preparations in a shorter timeframe, but that’s no longer the case.

• ClusterHQ which had been an early pioneer in the container storage market with its open-source Flocker project, ceases operations.

• Container storage vendor ClusterHQ announced on December 22 that it is shutting down the company’s operations, effective immediately. ClusterHQ raised $18 million in venture capital funding to help fuel its efforts to build a commercially supported stateful container storage technology.

• In a 2014 interview with eWEEK, ClusterHQ co-founder Luke Marsden explained the core premise of his business and its primary open-source project called Flocker. Simply put, Flocker was built to help solve the challenge stateful storage for containers.

Kernel Space

• For those that haven’t yet switched to Btrfs, ZFS On Linux, or running EXT4/XFS but holding out hope for Reiser4, this out-of-tree file-system code has been updated for Linux 4.9.

• Reiser4 was released for Linux 4.9.0 last weekend but then a revised patch series came out three days ago to fix some problems with this port to 4.9. With the new Reiser4 patches built against Linux 4.9.1, all should be well if you want to use this experimental file-system on the newest Linux kernel.

• Linus Torvalds is expected to release the Linux 4.10-rc1 kernel this weekend ahead of Christmas and thereby marking the formal end of the 4.10 merge window, but with all of the major pull requests already submitted and Linus tending not to honor last-minute pull requests of big changes, here is our usual look at the exciting changes and new features you will be able to find with the Linux 4.10 kernel.

• My 15 (18) minute demo stepped through the evolution of recent built in Linux tracers: ftrace (2008+) and its many capabilities, perf (2009+), and bcc/BPF (2015+) which provides the final programmatic abilities for advanced tracing. I suspect I might change people’s view of Linux tracing, as these tracers – despite being built in to the Linux kernel – are still not widely known.

• Over the next several years, blockchain could soon turn into big bucks for software vendors that can capitalize on the technology, according to a forecast from Tractica.

• The market research firm expects the worldwide market for enterprise blockchain applications to reach $19.9 billion by 2015 from $2.5 billion this year. North America will primarily drive demand during the forecast period, followed by Europe.

• Best known for its Bitcoin implementation, the distributed ledger technology is highly resistant to tampering and can potentially streamline many of today’s complex financial, trading and recordkeeping platforms by eliminating intermediaries.

Graphics Stack

• We have known of Valve wanting to improve AMDGPU DRM for VR Linux gaming and Valve wanting to contract Mesa developers to improve the open-source AMD driver. Now we know at least one of the faces who is hired by Valve to improve the open-source AMD driver.

• There is some very exciting Nouveau news just ahead of Christmas if you are interested in this open-source NVIDIA driver on Maxwell graphics cards.

• First up, Maxwell and Pascal graphics processors now have OpenGL 4.3 patches! Presently these newer NVIDIA GPUs on Nouveau are at OpenGL 4.1, but with three new patches from Samuel Pitoiset, he’s enabling OpenGL 4.3. He explained in the series, “arb_shader_image_load_store-atomicity will most likely hang your box, I think it’s now quite reasonable to enable GL 4.3 on Maxwell/Pascal GPUs. I suspect that test to be wrong because it doesn’t even work on the NVIDIA blob. I have tested a bunch of benchmarks (UE4 demos) and real games like Shadow of Mordor and they all work fine.”

• NVIDIA Linux developer Thierry Reding has posted some Mesa patches this Christmas weekend.

• Reding started with a Mesa loader change to add support for USB devices. He explained with the patch, “Allow USB devices to be used as output slaves for PRIME. Note that this currently doesn’t work on the X.Org server’s built-in modesetting driver because it requires glamor in order to expose the necessary capabilities through RandR. It should be possible to use this in order to accelerate Wayland clients on the GPU, though it’s questionable how useful that is without having a compositor that gets accelerated.”

• Back in 2007, the announcement that AMD intended to reverse its longstanding position and create an upstream driver for its graphics processors was joyfully received by Linux users worldwide. As 2017 approaches, an attempt by AMD to merge a driver for an upcoming graphics chip has been rejected by the kernel’s graphics subsystem maintainer — a decision that engendered rather less joy. A look at this discussion reveals a pattern seen many times before; the positions and decisions taken can seem arbitrary to the wider world but they are not without their reasons and will, hopefully, lead to a better kernel in the long run.

• Therefore, I came to the conclusion that I needed (for the time being) another model and feature-set for compatibility with X, than what is currently offered by XWayland.

Applications

• MPV video player is forked from mplayer2 and MPlayer, MPV supports wide variety of audio and video file formats. It offers some of the features with the former project while introducing many more. It is an command-line video player as well as offers GUI, it is lightweight and cross-platform available for Linux, Mac and Windows. From command line MPlayer’s options parser was improved to behave more like other CLI programs, and many option names and semantics were reworked to make them more intuitive and memorable.

• I would like to introduce my new application SystemdGenie. Some of you may be familiar with systemd-kcm, a KCM module I wrote for managing systemd. SystemdGenie is basically systemd-kcm transformed into a proper application. The KCM module format wasn’t really suitable anymore since systemd-kcm had evolved into more than just a simple “settings” utility. Moving to a proper application enabled e.g. having menus and toolbars, but also necessitated a new name.

• The Domain Name System (DNS) is an amazing technological achievement, but it suffers from a historical excess of trust, which makes it possible for people who rely on it to be lied to. The DNS Security Extensions (formally DNSSEC-bis, more usually just DNSSEC) are a mechanism for including robust trust information within the DNS. Here we discuss briefly what DNSSEC does, how it does it, and how (and whether) you can use it to secure your domains.

• There mainly two reasons for scanning a computer hard disk: one is to examine it for filesystem inconsistencies or errors that can result from persistent system crashes, improper closure of critical system software and more significantly by destructive programs (such as malware, viruses etc).

• If you are a student who uses Linux or who is thinking of switching to Linux, you may not be aware of the educational tools at your disposal. In this article I will introduce you to a few programs available for Linux that will improve your studying and learning experience.

• We all very often uses download manager to download files from internet for different requirements, it’s one of the major contributor for me as well as others too. We all want a super fast download manager to complete the download as much possible, so that we can save our time and move forward for further work. There are a lot of download managers and accelerators available (GUI & CLI) which speeds up your download.

• My Linux experience can be summarized literally on a postage stamp. I’ve tinkered with Ubuntu using VirtualBox, a virtualization software package, and experimented with an Android application called AndroLinux. But I’ve never installed a Linux distribution from scratch. From what I’ve seen, Ubuntu and the volume of high quality open source software has piqued my interest in Linux. I have been seeking a utility that lets me easily test out as many distributions as possible (without using desktop virtualization software). A colleague suggested I try out a little utility called Etcher, to start on my Linux adventures. This walkthrough summarizes my first steps with this utility. It is currently in a beta of its software release life cycle, which suggests the utility is feature complete but prone to known or unknown bugs.

• Other players on my list to review were APlayer, MOC (music on console), XMMS2, SMPlayer, UMPlayer, Lollypop, Aqualung, Goggles Music Manager, and LXMusic.+

Instructionals/Technical

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

• If you are a bit into computers you must be knowing that java is must for several or I would say many important applications. By default jdk is not installed in your Linux distro (Ubuntu), so to utilize the functionality of your system to its full extent we have to install it separately.

Wine or Emulation

• Just a few minutes ago, an unexpected third RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Wine 2.0 implementation of Windows on Unix software arrived for public testing.

• The Wine development release 2.0-rc3 is now available.

Games

• Crypt of the NecroDancer: AMPLIFIED [Official Site] is the first gameplay DLC for the roguelike rhythm game and it sounds great.

• Back when I started using Linux full time around 2007, there were two game genres that were well represented: fast action multiplayer oriented first-person shooters in the Quake mould and Risk derivatives. Mostly made in Java, games like Lux Delux and Aevum Obscurum were notable for their presence on a platform that had yet to be embraced by major game distributors. After Desura launched for Linux in 2011, I finally gave one of these games a try in the form of Age of Conquest III.

• Online gaming is becoming something of a standard and there quite a few options available for those in the Linux universe. Some are more popular than others but there is nothing wrong in knowing the alternatives as you can check availability from amongst them or compare pricing. So let’s look at some of the popular gaming platforms on Linux.

• My Mom is a Witch [Steam, Official Site], an Early Access mix of beat’em up and roguelike mechanics is now available on Linux. The developer explained that this was thanks to the Linux community being so helpful.

• I’ve asked you what number one game you want to have on Linux, but what about games we already have? What is the number one game that you are truly thankful to have on Linux right now?

• You have a few days to grab a total of 5 Linux-supported games from GOG’s ’10 good buys of 2016′ sale. Yes, another sale. This is a crazy cheap time of year to be a Linux gamer, or expensive, depends how you look at it and how much you buy!

• Team17 decided to postpone the cross-platform online play update for Worms W.M.D [Steam, Official Site] to ensure it all goes smoothly. They also have more planned!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Currently Plasma Mobile is supported by very small number of devices, for example Nexus 5, and One plus one. These devices uses Android 5.0 or CM12 as their base. Current libhybris upstream doesn’t have support for the devices running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), however there are two different forks of libhybris which are proposed to be merged into upstream libhybris and supports the Android 6.0,

• Smaragd is a port of the Emerald window decoration engine to Plasma‘s window manager KWin. In other words, if you install Smaragd, you will be able to use Emerald themes for Compiz/Beryl in your Plasma desktop.

• Smaragd was already released 6 years ago for KWin 4. Today, I have ported most of it to the new KDecoration2 API that KWin 5 uses. What is still missing is the configuration dialog, but you should be able to move the old kwinsmaragdrc file to ~/.config/ to keep your old settings.

• just in time for Christmas, we are pleased to announce the new GCompris version 0.70.

• It is an important release because we officially drop the Gtk+ version for Windows to use the Qt one. Everyone who bought the full version for the last two years will get a new activation code in a few days.

• Also, for people who like numbers, we are beyond 100000 downloads in the google play store.

• Behold, for we are doing it again. Several days ago, I’ve given you an interview with the MX Linux team developer Dolphin Oracle. It was a very interesting glimpse into how a small, passionate community runs their project.

• Now, we will expand and look at the far end of the Linux spectrum – the KDE community, one of the oldest, largest, most prolific, and most influential software and technology houses in the open-source world. And we will not have just one interviewee, but two! Sebastian Kugler and Bhushan Shah. Let us commence.

• Last week I received my Seasons of KDE T-Shirt and Certificate, along with a print of the KDE Mascot Konqi. Thanks to everybody at KDE for this!

• KDAB’s experience with using Qt in the motor industry has shown us that a specifically tailored automotive Qt solution would be very valuable. So, with our partners The Qt Company and Pelagicore we created the Qt Automotive Suite, a comprehensive solution with a licensing model specifically designed for the automotive industry.

• We’re adding an exciting raft of new trainings to our schedule for 2017 and some new locations, including San Francisco, Seoul and Beijing.

• Throughout the year you will be able to sign up for top class, always-up-to-date, original-authored trainings, presented by fully qualified KDAB trainers, all engineers actively involved in delivering KDAB’s high quality projects. Here’s what others are saying about our trainings.

• It is the time of the year when we take a look back and see who have been the Qt Champions this year.

• First I would like to point out that all the people nominated are all incredible!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It’s done! Everything that I wanted to do initially for the fundraising of gspell is implemented (for the milestone 1).

• I’m not sure if there is some confusion about the current development model of Shotwell. I noticed that some distributions seem to try to pick up the current development branch (0.25.x). I strongly advise against that at this point in time. It has just seen a major change in the Menu handling code and might still have severe usability regressions.

Distributions

New Releases

• To extensively support ethical hackers and white-hat cybersecurity experts, BlackArch Linux has released a new update with over 1,600 hacking tools. The latest version also comes with newer Linux kernel and includes enormous improvements and performance fixes.

• Emerged as BlackArch 2016.12.20, the update brings more than 100 new tools to support security professionals. These new tools have expanded the previous list to a total of 1,605 tools. Additionally, the distribution comes with Linux kernel 4.8.13 to deliver an improved and more stable experience than its previous release.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• SUSE’s YaST Team has shared the improvements they’ve been working on this holiday season for improving the distribution’s installer / setup tool.

• Among the improvements en route for SUSE YaST users are improved management of DHCLIENT_SET_HOSTNAME, ensuring installation of needed packages, some changes to the expert partitioner mode, further improving yast2-network, better handling of GPT disks, allowing the Snapper file-system snapshot tool to work without DBus, CASP functionality, and more.

Red Hat Family

• I call Red Hat the king of Linux for a reason. The second oldest Linux company just reported quarterly revenues of $615 million, an impressive growth of 18 percent over last year in the same period. If I round that up, it means Red Hat should be making somewhere around $2.4 billion in 2016. That’s a billion with a ‘b’ and that’s really incredible for a company that only offers pure open source solutions that anyone can copy and redistribute.

• After one year and a half at DxO working on the DxO ONE, a diminutive, yet highly capable camera that fits in your pocket and connects to an iPhone, I’ve decided to move on and join Red Hat to work on Spice, focusing on 3D acceleration for virtual machines. Free software, virtualization and 3D together, and working again with old colleagues from the HPVM era, Karen Noel and Denise Dumas. What’s not to love?

Finance

• The stock market slipped slightly on Thursday, once again failing to give investors the Dow 20,000 victory that they had hoped to see. Major market benchmarks were down as much as half a percent as investors appeared reluctant to push the market any further upward after a huge rally that has taken the Dow up more than 2,000 points since early November.

• Docker is sticking close to Red Hat’s playbook, open sourcing its code. Not content to stop there, however, Docker has also been buying companies and open sourcing their code, too—just as Red Hat has done (Gluster, 3scale, etc.). Docker founder Solomon Hykes, in boosting Docker’s most recent acquisition, Infinit, also pledged: “[W]e’re going to open-source the whole thing.”

• That’s great. But arguably, Docker’s larger need right now is cash, not code. This is where it diverges from the Red Hat playbook.

• I’m not suggesting the company is going out of business anytime soon. Rather, I’m suggesting that, to truly follow Red Hat’s model, Docker (and other open source companies like it) must figure out how to make open source pay. After all, some of its biggest competitors, like Red Hat, have already cracked the revenue code for the containers Docker popularized.

Fedora

• I think it’s important that the Fedora KDE / Spins Community speak out about how Fedora treats KDE and other spins. Given Fedora is about to have FESCo election, now is the perfect time to get community feedback on what candidates think.

• For those who know me, they know I enjoy and support Fedora/Red Hat and have for awhile. However, they also know I strongly dislike how Fedora treats KDE as a 2nd class citizen. Why do I say that? It’s well known the history of Fedora/Red Hat has been GNOMEcentric from the very beginning.

• Fedora has decided to end support for its long-term supported Fedora 23. The year-old released distribution received its last security update earlier this week, and users are now recommended to upgrade to its newer versions.

• “Upgrading to Fedora 24 or Fedora 25 before December 20, 2016, is highly recommended for all users still running Fedora 23,” reads the official statement.

• On November 22nd, 2016, the Fedora Project released Fedora 25, the latest and greatest version of our Linux-based operating system. For over thirteen years, the Fedora community has worked to bring the leading edge of open source development to the world. Fedora’s focus is guided by its Four Foundations: Freedom, Friends, Features, First. Freedom is representative of Fedora’s commitment to championing free and open source software and contributing back to upstream projects for the benefit of the open source community. Features stands for Fedora’s commitment to driving some of the newest features First. Some of these examples include the Wayland display server, systemd, and GNOME 3. Perhaps most importantly, Friends are for the friendships made by contributors from around the world who help make every release of Fedora possible. Part of why Friends is an important part of the Four Foundations is communication. Fedora community members come from all over the planet, including six out of seven continents. The tools we use to communicate help us collaborate, solve problems, and build friendships. IRC and freenode are an important part of how we communicate. Fedora registered our first channel on freenode on December 29, 2002. As we celebrate thirteen years of open source collaboration and the newest release of Fedora 25, the Fedora community wanted to reflect on our longstanding relationship with freenode.

• The Fedora distribution has had a habit of missing its release targets over the years, but has also tried to target releases at certain times of the year (early May and late October). That led to a rather short development cycle for Fedora 25 as its predecessor was substantially delayed. Fedora project leader Matthew Miller recently floated an idea on the fedora-devel mailing list that might plausibly help the chronic delayed-release problem and perhaps have other beneficial effects: move Fedora to an annual release cycle. There was more to it than just that, of course, and support for the idea was mixed at best, but the conversation makes it clear that Fedora is willing to look at fairly radical changes as it moves forward.

Debian Family

• The maker’s of the Raspberry Pi computer have released an experimental version of the Pixel operating system, which can run on standard desktop computers.

• Today in Linux news Debian is considering automatic updates on upcoming releases. Debian isn’t the only distro considering the move as security concerns increase. Elsewhere, Dedoimedo interviewed KDE developers Sebastian Kugler and Bhushan Shah who said KDE Plasma is moving in the right direction. Shawn Starr said he’s tired of KDE being treated like a red-headed stepchild over there at Fedora and Christian Cawley suggested five distros to try in a virtual machine.

• The Debian project is looking at possibly making automatic minor upgrades to installed packages the default for newly installed systems. While Debian has a reliable and stable package update system that has been an inspiration for multiple operating systems (the venerable APT), upgrades are, usually, a manual process on Debian for most users.

Derivatives

• Today we present to you the first batch of siduction 2016.1, which consists of the flavours noX, Xorg, LXDE, Xfce and Plasma 5. We attempt to release a 2nd batch with the flavours Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate and LXQt as soon as possible in the new year. This release of siduction 2016.1 is named Patience, because that is what you and us both needed to find the right point in time to ship this to you.

• The released images are a snapshot of Debian unstable, that also goes by the name of Sid, from 2016-12-23. They are enhanced with some useful packages and scripts, our own installer and a custom patched version of the linux-kernel 4.9, accompanied by X-Server 1.19.0-3 and systemd 232-8.

• Devuan Linux is new to the Linux world. It can be a good lightweight option to your current system.Devuan Linux made it’s way into Linux world on November 2014. It is making nice and steady progress from that time. The distro entered a beta stage in April 2016. It is based on Debian Jesse.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With the latest “Zesty” development packages for Ubuntu 17.04, there is initial support for driver-less network printer support.

• Ubuntu 17.04 is supporting driver-less network printer support for those printers supporting IPP Everywhere and Apple AirPrint. Given the popularity of AirPrint / Apple printer support, this should expand the printer coverage for devices that previously didn’t play well with Linux.

• Ubuntu 17.04 Unity 8 update new system settings and working menus

Flavours and Variants

• Thanks to another heroic integration effort from Ola Jeppsson, we now have a much improved Parallella Linux Distribution based on Ubuntu 15.04. (Note the name change from “pubuntu” to “parabuntu”)

• Udara has taken a break to deal with urgent issues. We thank him very much for all of his hard work! Thus we definitely need to fill his considerable ‘shoes’.

Devices/Embedded

• For many of us 2016 flew by, and we didn’t complete all our New Year’s resolutions or mark everything off our “2016 To Do” lists. I didn’t have nearly enough time to play with the Raspberry Pi this year, and my list of projects I want to do keeps growing. In this article I’ve rounded up 8 recent Raspberry Pi projects that I haven’t made yet, but that made it onto my “2017 To Do” list.

• This board is being officially supported by Android and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I/O includes HDMI 2.0, PCI Express M.2, DP 1.2, eDP, USB 3.0, and more. Storage varies from 16GB eMMC and 2GB of RAM up to 4GB of RAM and 128GB eMMC. Pricing starts out at $139 USD for the base model.

• In May 2016, disgruntled developers of the embedded-Linux-for-routers distribution OpenWRT forked the project and headed off to do their own thing.

• The Linux Embedded Development Environment – LEDE – project felt that OpenWRT was heading in the wrong direction and lacked engagement with the wider developer community.

• Now, in the shadow of Christmas, it looks like the two factions have all-but made peace.

• Turn your Raspberry Pi into a wireless router/AP. Arch-WiPi is a tiny Arch Linux ARM + create_ap packaged into a downloadable image.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung Electronics have announced that they will support YouTube’s global HDR playback on their Tizen TVs via an updated YouTube application. Currently, the app is available on all 2016 Samsung Quantum dot TVs and UHD TVs, and beginning this month will begin a global rollout.

• What is HDR? High Dynamic Range is used differently in TVs opposed to Photos. In the TV it essentially expands the contrast ration and color palette, resulting in a more realistic and vibrant picture. When talking about HDR in Photos the camera combines multiple images that are taken with different exposures to create a single image, which then has a greater dynamic range.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Technology innovations have impacted every single industry sector in a tremendous way. Right from healthcare and education, to entertainment and gaming, there is no sector that has remained untouched by the influence of technology. The express evolution of technology means a win-win for both – users and the game developer are at a distinct advantage. The end users gain a much better gaming experience, while game programmers can apply these new technologies to create highly stimulating and enthralling games.

• As a response to the Snowden revelations, the number of messaging apps that promise security against surveillance has rapidly multiplied. There seems to be an emerging consensus – ranging from Edward Snowden to the New York Times – that Signal is the best choice for those nervous about the privacy of their messages.

• Indeed, Signal has a number of advantages that set it apart from many competitors: The encryption algorithm that it uses is well-reviewed and most experts in the field think that it can indeed protect against dragnet surveillance. It also allows experts to inspect the source code of the entire app for back doors which makes it more trustworthy than competitors such as WhatsApp. Finally, OpenWhisperSystems – the company that produces Signal – is known to log only minimal information about its users. As a result, when law enforcement agencies demand information about message “metadata” (who messages when with whom), they cannot supply them with much useful information.

Events

• Open Source Foundation Pakistan Holds Open Source Summit 2016. The 4th Annual Open Source Summit was held at Bahria University Islamabad Campus Yesterday. Mr. Asim Shahryar Hussain, MD PSEB, was the Chief Guest at the event.

• Managing Director Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) Asim Shehryar Hussain Thursday said the board aimed at migrating government sector organization from licensed softwares to Open Source Technologies in next 10 years.

• Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books, most recently In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want to be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age; and Homeland, the award-winning, best-selling sequel to the 2008 young adult novel Little Brother.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• About four months ago, we launched multi-process Firefox to a small group of Firefox 48 users. Shortly after the carefully measured roll-out, we increased to approximately 50% of our user base. That included almost every Firefox user not using extensions. Those users have been enjoying the 400% increase in responsiveness and a 700% improvement when web pages are loading.

• With Firefox 49 we deployed multi-process Firefox to users with a select set of well tested extensions. Our measurements and user feedback were all positive and so with Firefox 50 we deployed multi-process Firefox to users with a broader set of extensions, those whose authors have marked them as multi-process compatible.

SaaS/Back End

• While most people know that the hugely popular OpenStack cloud platform is used in many hybrid cloud deployments, lots of people still think of it as primarily for private clouds. That’s not necessarily the right mindset, notes a new report from Forrester Research this week.

• Especially in Europe, OpenStack is gaining traction as a public cloud solution notes Forrester’s report OpenStack’s Global Traction Expands For Its Newton Release.

• OpenStack is the most widely deployed open source cloud computing software. The December 2016 report focuses on Newton, the latest release of OpenStack software, and the plan for the 14th release of the software, codenamed Ocata and expected in February 2017. The report also details important next steps for infrastructure and operations leaders investing in the OpenStack platform.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation is celebrating today with their release of LibreOffice 5.2.4. The announcement also teased upcoming LibreOffice 5.3 that will feature the new MUFFIN interface. Elsewhere, there seems to be some disagreement as to whether Mint’s heart is in their upgrades and Jonathan Corbet published his latest Linux Forecast. A couple of sites have gathered some fun activities for the long boring holiday season and, in case you missed it, Fedora 23 reached its end of life Tuesday.

• The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.4 “still”, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family. Based on the upcoming announcement of LibreOffice 5.3, all users can start to update to LibreOffice 5.2.4 from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions.

• I saw a recent blog post from LibreOffice about an upcoming change to their user interface. They call it the MUFFIN, a new “tasty” user interface concept. You can also find more details at the Design blog, discussing how they are evolving past the restrictions of the toolbar. The new MUFFIN will appear in LibreOffice 5.3.

• Spreadsheets are a staple for both small and large businesses, data analysts and marketers among others, most opting for the convenience and familiar interface of Microsoft Excel. But there are many options out there from Google, Apache, Libre and more offering free and open source alternatives.

• In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Kickstarter making the code for its iOS and Android apps open source, UNICEF and Malawi announcing the first humanitarian drone testing corridor in Africa, and more.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• For those nervous about using LLVM Git/SVN of the current 4.0 development code but looking to have the latest fixes atop the stable LLVM 3.9 series, the LLVM 3.9.1 point release is now available.

• LLVM 3.9.1 is now available! Download it now, or read the release notes.

Public Services/Government

• The Dutch government’s data centre in Groningen (ODC-Noord) is setting a standard for government-hosted cloud services. Its combination of OpenStack (managing virtualised machines) and CEPH (handling storage) is attracting more and more central government services. The open source solutions are proving enormously scalable, while keeping costs low.

• Open source software provides an easy and affordable way to improve existing public services. According to the EC report ‘Analysis of the Value of New Generation of eGovernment Services and How Can the Public Sector Become an Agent of Innovation through ICT’, it allows a single developer to incrementally build human services based on publicly available source code.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• This month, the two Spanish cities of Toledo and Chiloeches joined the Madrid open source software project for citizen participation. The Consul platform was originally created by the City of Madrid last year when it launched its participation portal. At the same time, the software was made available for re-use on GitHub. Since then, the number of participants in the further development of this software package has grown to about thirty Spanish cities.

Open Data

• The Slovenian Ministry of Public Administration has launched a new National Open Data Portal (OPSI). The portal has been built on CKAN, the most popular open source software platform for storing and publishing open data.

Open Access/Content

• We love to spend time with collectives to learn why they do what they do, what their goals are and what they need to achieve them. We wanted to share one of these stories today: Open Source Design.

• [...]

• Free and open source software (FOSS) preserves privacy of its users and ensures they — rather than web oligopolies — are in control of their data. For free and open source software to be successful and reach adoption levels of proprietary apps, we believe good design and a seamless UX is essential.

• So, we bring together people currently working on design in open source projects as well as encourage new designers to join the movement and find projects which need their help.

• Members of our collective include people working on Mozilla, Wikimedia, Nextcloud, GNOME, OpenFarm, XWiki, Drupal, Transparency Toolkit, OpenStreetMap, Trustroots and more!

Open Hardware/Modding

• The work of Diane Trouillet uses living organisms to create open-source bioart that everyone can try to replicate at home.

• Diane Trouillet, a self-proclaimed artist-researcher from Toulouse, is moving the French art community. Back in 2013, the bioartist invented a bacterial paper that she is now exploring as an artistic medium.

• LaserWeb is open-source laser cutter and engraver software, and [JordsWoodShop] made a video tutorial (embedded below) on how to convert a cheap laser engraver to use it. The laser engraver used in the video is one of those economical acrylic-and-extruded-rail setups with a solid state laser emitter available from a variety of Chinese sellers (protective eyewear and any sort of ventilation or shielding conspicuously not included) but LaserWeb can work with just about any hardware, larger CO2 lasers included.

Programming/Development

• New to Python 3.6.0 on the syntax side is support for formatted string literals, a syntax for variable annotations, asynchronous generators, and asynchronous comprehensions are among the changes.

• Debuting a little more than a year ago, Python 3.5 hinted at how the language could become faster and more powerful without sacrificing the convenience and ease of use that characterize Python — without forcing everyone to toss out existing Python code and start over.

• Python 3.6 picks up where many of those improvements left off and nudges them into new realms. Python 3.5 added syntax used by static type checking tools to ensure software quality; Python 3.6 expands on that idea, which could eventually lead to high-speed statically compiled Python programs. Python 3.5 gave us options to write asynchronous functions; Python 3.6 bolsters them. But the biggest changes in Python 3.6 lie under the hood, and they open up possibilities that didn’t exist before.

• I wrote two recent articles on Python packaging: Distributing Python Packages Part I: Creating a Python Package and Distributing Python Packages Part II: Submitting to PyPI. I was able to get a couple of my programs packaged and submitted.

Leftovers

• Kevin Frayer’s photographs of illegal Chinese steel factories look like postcards from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Thick smoke spews out of tall stacks, steam rises from vast pits, and molten steel flows across the ground like lava. All around, men toil without even basic protective gear. “It was like stepping back in time,” says Frayer, who spent four days at two steel factories in Inner Mongolia in early November. “The way of working seemed unchanged and unaffected by technology.”

Hardware

• Apple launched a new series of MacBook Pro laptops this fall, and Consumer Reports’ labs have just finished evaluating them. The laptops did very well in measures of display quality and performance, but in terms of battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically from one trial to another.

• As a result, these laptops are the first MacBooks not to receive recommended ratings from Consumer Reports.

• Complaints about MacBook Pro batteries have been popping up online since the laptops first went on sale in November. Apple says that these computers should operate for up to 10 hours between charges, but some consumers in Apple’s support forums reported that they were only able to use their laptops for three to four hours before the battery ran down.

Health/Nutrition

• My grandmothers had measles. Your grandmothers had measles. In medicine, it is taken for granted that all people born before 1957 had measles, whether they remember it or not.

• Grandmothers invariably were invoked on questions of measles back when I was doing my residency in the 1980s in Boston. When there was a child in the emergency room with a truly striking and scary rash, a senior attending physician would stride in, look at the child, and announce something like, “Your grandmother could diagnose measles from across the room!”

• Nowadays, pediatricians worry that we’ve lost our collective memory and therefore some of our healthy fear of the disease and its serious complications — at least until an exposure happens and people start to panic.

• Gov. Rick Snyder said Wednesday he has “no reason to be concerned” that Attorney General Bill Schuette will bring criminal charges against him in connection with the Flint drinking water crisis, and most of the $3.5 million he is spending on outside criminal legal defense fees is to pay for work on turning over documents to investigators.

• In an interview with the Free Press at his Capitol office, Snyder said he “can’t speak for the attorney general,” but asked if he is getting concerned that Schuette might decide to bring criminal charges against him, Snyder said: “I have no reason to be concerned.”

• Gov. Rick Snyder has approved adding $1.5 million to a contract for legal services with a law firm that’s defending him against possible criminal charges tied to the Flint water crisis.

• The State Administrative Board received notice of the action at its meeting Tuesday, Dec. 20, the same day Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette filed new criminal charges against two former Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder and two former city officials.

• The governor’s emergency managers were running Flint before and during a water emergency that unfolded after a change in the city’s source water.

• Lead leached into the city’s drinking water after the state Department of Environmental Quality allowed the use of the river without requiring treatment to make it less corrosive to lead and lead solder in home plumbing and transmission lines.

• In medical news, a new study finds an experimental vaccine was 100 percent effective in protecting West Africans against the Ebola virus during an outbreak in 2014-15, raising the prospect that the future spread of the deadly disease could be halted. The finding was reported Thursday in the British medical journal The Lancet. An assistant director-general of the World Health Organization said the study compared about 6,000 residents of Guinea who received the vaccine with a similar-sized group who hadn’t.

Security

Defence/Aggression

• The hijacking of a Libyan plane has ended peacefully after armed men who seized control surrendered in Malta.

• The domestic flight with 118 people on board was hijacked after taking off from Sabha, bound for the Libyan capital Tripoli.

• Instead, the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A320 was diverted to Malta International Airport.

• It appears the two hijackers are supporters of Libya’s late deposed leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

• RBB reported Thursday that Anis Amri was filmed exiting a mosque in Berlin on Dec. 14 and 15. He was again filmed hours after Monday’s attack, at the same mosque in the capital’s Moabit district.

• The mosque was raided by police Thursday, two days after documents naming the 24-year-old Tunisian were found in the cab of the truck that smashed into a Christmas market in the west of the city, killing 12 and injuring dozens more.

• The United States on Friday allowed the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement building, defying heavy pressure from long-time ally Israel and President-elect Donald Trump for Washington to wield its veto.

• A U.S. abstention paved the way for the 15-member council to approve the resolution, with 14 votes in favor, prompting applause in the council chamber. The action by President Barack Obama’s administration follows growing U.S. frustration over the unrelenting construction of Jewish settlements on land Palestinians want for a future independent state.

• Bernie Sanders has urged Congress to stop Donald Trump launching a Cold War-style nuclear arms race.

• “It’s a miracle a nuclear weapon hasn’t been used in war since 1945,” the Vermont Senator said in a post on Twitter. “Congress can’t allow the Tweeter in Chief to start a nuclear arms race.”

• Earlier on Friday, the US President-elect was asked to clarify the meaning behind an ambiguous tweet in an interview with MSNBC.

• “Let it be an arms race,” he is reported to have told co-host Mika Brzezinski,in a telephone call.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• When they appeared on the scene for the first time in 2006, few noticed them. And when four years later they hit worldwide media headlines with their publication of over 700,000 secret US government documents, many assumed that Julian Assange and his organisation, WikiLeaks, would be annihilated very shortly.

• Since 2010 Assange has lived first under house arrest and then confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been granted asylum by Ecuador. The country’s officials judged his concerns of being extradited to Sweden and then to the US to be put on trial for the WikiLeaks’ revelations well-grounded.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Medical waste, broken bottles and household trash are some of the items found in more than 100 tonnes of garbage salvaged near a drinking water reservoir in Shanghai.

• The suspected culprits are two ships that have been dumping waste upstream in the Yangtze river. It has then flowed downstream to the reservoir on Shanghai’s Chongming island which is also home to 700,000 people.

• The reservoir at the mouth of the river is one of the four main sources of drinking water for the country’s largest city, according to local media.

• China has struggled with air, soil and water pollution for years during its economic boom, with officials often protecting industry and silencing citizens that complain. China’s cities are often blanketed in toxic smog, while earlier this year more than 80% of water wells used by farms, factories and rural households was found to be unsafe for drinking because of pollution.

• Bloomberg released a new report this week with some startling findings about solar energy. To wit:

• * Solar energy can now be generated for about half the cost of coal. Coal had been the cheapest energy source, but it has now been overtaken by solar. That means it is crazy to build new coal plants– you’d be costing yourself money.

• In a legal first, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that a climate science researcher can proceed with defamation claims against writers who made false allegations about his scientific work.

• The ruling by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, found that a “reasonable jury” could find that two writers defamed Michael Mann — known for the famous “hockey stick” graph showing that modern climate change is unprecedented in human history — by making false claims about his work, and comparing him to a notorious child molester.

• The court found that two writers for the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, may have defamed Mann by comparing him to Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of molesting dozens of children in 2012.

• After the Supreme Court ruling clarifying that the EPA had an obligation to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency developed the Clean Power Plan to target greenhouse gases. That’s not the only pollutant that is reduced by cutting emissions and moving away from coal for power generation, though. Limiting the rest of the stuff that comes out the smokestack has health an economic benefits, as well—“co-benefits” in the policy lingo.

• One type of pollution on that list is the compounds that react to produce ozone in the lower atmosphere. While ozone up in the stratosphere shields us from skin-burning UV radiation, ozone at the surface is a lung irritant. It harms plants, as well, reducing the uptake of CO2 that fuels growth.

• China’s smoggiest city closed schools Wednesday as much of the country suffered its sixth day under an oppressive haze, sparking public anger about the slow response to the threat to children’s health.

• Since Friday a choking miasma has covered a large swathe of northeastern China, leaving more than 460 million gasping for breath.

• Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, was one of more than 20 cities which went on red alert Friday evening, triggering an emergency plan to reduce pollution by shutting polluting factories and taking cars off the road, among other measures.

• Nowhere has been hit as hard as Shijiazhuang, which has seen a huge rise in pollution.

• On Thursday, the temperature there was almost 30 C warmer than average, and it continued into Friday morning. Ocean buoys recorded temperatures near the North Pole of 0 C or warmer. That’s right: It’s warmer in the Arctic than it is in Thunder Bay, Ont.

• This isn’t an isolated event. Arctic temperatures have been unusually warm for the past few months, though perhaps not quite as dramatically different as we’re seeing now.

• Today is an extremely unusual December day at the North Pole, with temperatures getting very close to the melting point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0 degrees Celsius.

• For perspective, the temperature at the North Pole is about 40 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the date.

• Data from a buoy located about 80 miles south of the dark, windswept pole hit 32 degrees on Thursday morning as storm systems dragged unusually mild air into the high Arctic. Aiding the warm spell is the fact that these winds passed over Arctic waters that would normally be covered with sea ice but are open ocean this year after a severe sea ice melt season and record-slow winter freeze-up.

• The bizarre Arctic heat wave, which will be brief, lasting only two days, is similar to another warmup that occurred in December 2015, and there is scientific evidence showing that these extreme events are becoming more frequent and extreme in the Arctic as sea ice melts and air temperatures increase.

• Half of the UK’s electricity came from wind turbines, solar panels, wood burning and nuclear reactors between July and September, in a milestone first.

• Official figures published on Thursday show low carbon power, which has been supported by the government to meet climate change targets, accounted for 50% of electricity generation in the UK in the third quarter, up from 45.3% the year before.

• The rise was largely driven by new windfarms and solar farms being connected to the grid, and several major coal power stations closing.

Finance

• The Irish government’s unwavering protection of Apple has infuriated the very people who stand to gain the most.

• The residents of Cork are souring on the tech giant — the city’s biggest employer — and fanning the flames of Euroskepticism.

• The European Commission slapped Apple with a €13 billion penalty for allegedly accepting a sweetheart tax deal from Ireland earlier this year. Cork residents resent Dublin’s unwavering defense of the tech giant, most recently its support of the company’s appeal Monday that claimed the EU Commission overstepped its powers. Instead of banking an amount roughly the size of the country’s annual health budget, Irish leaders recoiled at the order and defended its four-decade-long relationship with Apple.

• In four years, China’s anti-corruption campaign has made huge inroads despite doubts about its sustainability. It is now time for the country to enforce a unified mechanism with universal coverage to curtail corruption and abuses of power.

• Last month, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which runs the party’s daily operations, issued a directive to the provinces of Zhejiang in the east and Shanxi in the north, as well as to the Beijing Municipality, asking each to build a supervisory body overseen by their local legislative systems. This was an unprecedented measure, as it implied that real power was to be ensconced in an extra-party institution.

• Trump transition team tell sources that they are talking about the possibility of imposing tariffs through executive action. Jim Acosta reports.

• This has been a bumper autumn for political publishing. I’ve recently finished five of the main books on the EU referendum campaign and, although some of the key revelations have already been serialised in newspapers, there is plenty of material in them worth reporting that hasn’t yet been flagged up anywhere. So, as a Christmas service for anyone who has not read enough about the EU referendum already this year, here are 30 things about it that you might not know.

• Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s on-demand services unit is close to securing $1.2 billion of funding for expansion after getting backing from first-time investors including Silver Lake Management and China’s sovereign wealth fund, people familiar with the matter said.

• The latest round for Koubei, which deals in local services such as food delivery, will surpass a $1 billion target with backing from China Investment Corp., according to the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. The round also includes Yunfeng Capital, a fund backed by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, and values the two-year-old startup at about $8 billion, they said.

• Come the new year, millions of the lowest-wage workers across the country will get a raise.

• Some of those raises will be very minor — a cost of living adjustment amounting to an extra nickel or dime an hour. But in several places the jump will be between $1 and $2 an hour.

• Three long-serving primary school cleaners, who went on strike over claims their wages and conditions were cut when a private company took over the contract, have been sacked days before Christmas.

• The women – Lesley Leake, Marice Hall and Karen McGee – sparked a debate over outsourcing when they went on strike for 14 weeks after their school in West Yorkshire was turned into an academy earlier this year.

• Known as the “Kinsley cleaners”, the women said they had their wages cut from £7.85 an hour to the minimum wage of £7.20 once the contract switched from Wakefield council to C&D Cleaning in April.

• Carl Icahn told CNBC on Thursday it’s “crazy” to say he should sell his holdings to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest while serving as an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump.

• Trump on Wednesday named the billionaire activist investor, a frequent critic of some Obama administration rules and a major fossil fuel investor, a special advisor on regulation. Critics say Icahn could use the role to craft regulatory policies that would help his companies and benefit him personally.

• Science confirms what high performers have known for years: It’s not easy being so competent.

• A study from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business suggests that people with high self-control — the kind of people who remember birthdays, choose the salad instead of the fries, take on extra projects at work, and resolve conflicts easily — might actually pay a price for those virtues.

• “People always talk about how having high self-control is a good thing,” says researcher Christy Zhou Koval, a Ph.D. candidate and first author on the study, which was published in this month’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And in many ways, it is a good thing: “Go-getters get what they go after,” she points out. “They’re better at goal pursuits. They make very good relationship partners.”

• We welcomed the Prime Minister’s pledge at Conservative Party Conference (repeated by Ministers) that workers would keep their current rights – and gain new rights – after Brexit. It’s not enough, but it’s a start (we want it guaranteed, not just pledged, and we want to make sure British workers don’t fall behind those across Europe.) And it’s clearly not a done deal, as REIDsteel boss Simon Boyd showed this week by writing to every single MP urging them to use Brexit to scrap a whole swathe of protections for working people, including working time, holiday pay and health and safety.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Halfway through a recent late lunch at the Trump Grill—the clubby steakhouse in the lobby of Trump Tower that has recently become famous through the incessant media coverage of its namesake landlord, and the many dignitaries traipsing through its marbled hall to kiss his ring—I sensed the initial symptoms of a Trump overdose. Thanks to an unprecedented influx of diners, we were sitting at a wobbly overflow table outside the restaurant, in the middle of a crush of tourists, some of whom were proposing to their partners, or waiting to buy Trump-branded merchandise, or sprinting to the bathroom.

• As my companions and I contemplated the most painless way to eat our flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings with their flaccid, gray innards, as a campy version of “Jingle Bells” jackhammered in the background, a giant gold box tied with red ribbon toppled onto us. Trump, it seemed, was already fighting against the War on Christmas.

• So far, so normal. There are plenty of rights groups, big and small, which have worked on the issue of migrant workers in Qatar in the context of the World Cup. The fact that we hadn’t previously heard of this organization was not that surprising.

• President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Health and Human Services Department traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.

• It was a chilly afternoon in April 2013 when Roy Roberts, a former GM executive now charged with righting the struggling Detroit Public Schools, appeared in the auditorium of Oakman Elementary/Orthopedic, a school on the city’s northwest side. Roberts had arrived with an entourage of district officials and he didn’t waste any time with small talk. “We’ll be closing Northwestern,” he announced.

• About a dozen parents were there, among them Aliya Moore, the president of the parents’ organization. Moore’s older daughter, Chrishawana, was in fifth grade and her final year at the school, where she’d been since kindergarten. Her youngest, Tylyia, just a toddler at the time, had become a fixture on the campus, often seen coloring in the back of one of the kindergarten classrooms. Moore wasn’t sure what to make of the robocall she’d received the night before summoning her to the meeting, but she knew she had to be there.

• Hi. I’m Cracked editor David Bell. Before I wrote columns, I was a full-time researcher for the site. During that time, I wrote scores of articles calling out the terrible instances of fake news occurring weekly online. The series strove to be bipartisan, from exposing fake racism against Obama to misguided outrage about Obama to generally batshit stories reported anyone from Gawker to Breitbart. It’s not hard to remain objective when your brain is a flood of deadline stress mixed with throbbing Odin rage toward the mainstream media. In the thick of it all, I hoped my humble contribution would be joined by an internet-wide embracing of reason.

• From all the recent hand-wringing about “fake news,” you would think that the hand-wringers had never stood in a supermarket checkout line, surrounded by 72-point headlines about alien abductions and miracle cures. Fake news has been around as long as real news, as any historian of early modern Europe can tell you (Renaissance readers gobbled up stories about women giving birth to rabbits, and men from Africa with faces in their chests). Social media has certainly transformed how fake news circulates, speeding up its circulation and extending its reach and impact. The temptation to blame many of our current ills on it—and by extension, on Mark Zuckerberg—is understandable. But the hand-wringing has in fact distracted attention from a much more important problem involving the American media. That problem is not fake news but the continuing delegitimization of real news by American conservatives. This delegitimization has been taking place for a long time (as The Nation’s Eric Alterman has meticulously reported, and as even some conservative media figures have admitted), but during the past year it has taken a frightening new turn. If the mainstream American news media are to have any hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic results—both for themselves and for American democracy—they need to change how they report on American politics, and on the ideological apparatchiks they continue to describe, misleadingly, as “journalists.”

• U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is increasingly isolated as her demands to control all areas of policy alienate key colleagues, according to more than a dozen officials who worry tensions will undermine planning for Brexit.

• Speaking anonymously because the subject is delicate, many of the government figures said an early period of goodwill toward May had given way to division and resentment, leading to policy mistakes that had to be hastily corrected. Much of that stems from the influence wielded by her joint chiefs-of-staff, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, the people said.

• President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for national security adviser partnered in recent months with a technology company co-led by a businessman who pleaded guilty to trying to sell stolen scientific material in the 1980s to the KGB, the former Soviet intelligence service.

• Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn joined the advisory board of Brainwave Science in February, company documents show. The Massachusetts firm develops controversial “brain fingerprinting” technology designed to assess whether people under interrogation are being truthful by measuring their brain waves. The firm offers training in how to use the technology, in partnership with Flynn’s consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, according to Brainwave’s website.

• Now that the 2016 election has formally ended, and there’s no denying Donald Trump the presidency, Democrats can finally and fully focus on their strategy for opposing him. I say “opposing him,” because everything Trump has done since November 8 shows beyond a reasonable doubt that there’s not going to be some shockingly moderate Trump administration as open to Democratic as to Republican policies and priorities. Becoming a “loyal opposition” is not an option, and if Democratic leaders actually went in that direction (beyond a few formulaic expressions of willingness to cooperate with Trump if he turns out to be someone other than himself), the Democratic rank and file would probably find themselves new leaders.

• There is not much question that most congressional Democrats will be taking as a template Mitch McConnell’s declaration of scorched-earth opposition to all Barack Obama’s policies and initiatives in early 2009. Partly it’s a matter of payback, but the more important motive is that it worked: Democrats lost their control over Congress at the very first opportunity, in the 2010 midterms; even before that, major elements of Obama’s agenda — including climate-change legislation — were derailed. But there are some major differences between the situation of Democrats today and that of Republicans in 2009 and 2010 that should be reflected in the party’s strategy.

• Nearly half the population in Britain and America oppose the current attack on decent values. That’s not marginal, it’s mainstream – and strong

• President-elect Donald Trump will descend on Washington next month, buoyed by his upset victory and Republican control of Congress to implement his agenda.

• But he’s facing a major obstacle: Trump will enter the White House as the least-popular incoming president in the modern era of public-opinion polling.

• Everybody knows that North Korea is a failed state basket-case full of starving people and multigenerational concentration camps, but South Korea is hardly the model of good governance: from the long-serving leader who stole $200M and gave it to his kids (who now live happily in America off his nest-egg) to those long-ago days of 1988 when the government kidnapped homeless people and developmentally delayed people and put them into forced labor camps — some of which still operate today.

• More recently, South Korean President Park Geun-hye has been revealed to be a stooge of a Rasputin-like cult leader, leading to her impeachment (of course, they didn’t impeach her when she passed an incredibly invasive surveillance bill despite a brave filibuster.

• Presidential recounts are not about changing election results. At least, that is not their primary purpose. At their core, recounts are about ensuring confidence in the integrity of the voting system.

• It is unfortunate, if not all that surprising, that the two largest corporate-controlled political parties have chosen to stand in the way of these grassroots-demanded recounts—in the case of Republicans, actively blocking them in the courts; in the case of Democrats, capitulating in their refusal to push for them. In an election marked by so many irregularities, public distrust, and outright evidence of hacking, Americans deserve to know now more than ever that the election was accurate and secure.

• That is the ultimate goal of this and every recount: to restore confidence in our elections and trust in our democracy.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Over the past year, there has been much hue and cry about Facebook’s fake news problem. The company deferred dealing with it first by saying that a better machine-learning model will fix the problem and then by saying it will rely on third-party fact checkers to flag “disputed” stories when they are shared. Both of these ideas are OK, but they are missing one crucial ingredient. That ingredient, as Charlton Heston screams in Soylent Green, is people.

• Economist Brad DeLong has been saying for a while that robots may take over many jobs, but there are some things robots cannot do alone. Humans will always be needed to make decisions that require a nuanced understanding of how culture works, especially in political and social debates where context is everything. An algorithm might be able to learn some of the signs of fake news—certain hashtags perhaps, or a viral reach that starts with shares happening at bot-like speed. But a human is always going to be needed at some point to determine whether those signs point to fake news or real news that’s blowing up organically because it’s actually important. And these humans need to be well-trained in media analysis themselves, able to spot hoaxes and lies better than an average reader.

• Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, appears to have finally conceded that the social network is a media company, just not a “traditional media company”.

• In a video chat with Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg said: “Facebook is a new kind of platform. It’s not a traditional technology company. It’s not a traditional media company. You know, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it’s used.

• “We don’t write the news that people read on the platform. But at the same time we also know that we do a lot more than just distribute news, and we’re an important part of the public discourse.”

• And if you want to find out what is “fake news,” ask perhaps the top investigative reporter in journalism.

• Sharyl Attkisson spotted the fake news trend long before it became a recent catchphrase.

• And she doesn’t portray it, as do many in the mainstream media, as some right-wing conspiracy. In fact, Attkisson told WND she often sees the mainstream media as prime culprits when they push suspect stories.

• So, what is really behind the mainstream media’s war on fake news?

• Cyberbullying and online harassment is a major global problem. The lack of a physical presence only means that people are more mentally exposed in the digital realm. A majority of children in India encounter online harassment in one form or another, but their parents are oblivious of the fact. Facebook recently launched a portal to tackle cyberbullying, and allow parents to let their children navigate the social network safely. We discussed online harassment with Mishi Choudhary, the Executive Director of Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), a Delhi-based not-for-profit legal services organization. SFLC.IN brings together students, lawyers, technologists and policy analysts to defend freedom in the digital realm.

• One of the world’s leading historians on the Jewish communities in Arab countries is being prosecuted in France for alleged hate speech against Muslims.

• The Morocco-born French-Jewish scholar Georges Bensoussan, 64, is due to appear next month before a Paris criminal court over a complaint filed against him for incitement to racial hatred by the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, the group recently announced on its website.

• The complaint, which leading French scholars dismissed as attempt at “intimidation” in a statement Friday, was over remarks about anti-Semitism by Muslims that Bensoussan, author of a definitive 2012 work entitled “Jews in Arab Lands,” made last year during an interview aired by the France Culture radio station, the Collective said.

• A passenger on the Delta Airlines flight from which YouTube star Adam Saleh was ejected on Wednesday has come forward to claim the prankster was not on the phone to his mother when he was removed.

• In fact, the supposed passenger said in a Reddit post, Mr Saleh had goaded a friend into shouting in Arabic across the plane and filmed fellow passengers’ reactions, before being told to be quiet. The claim tallies with a statement released by the airline.

• The US Government has listed some of the largest piracy websites and other copyright-infringing venues. The USTR calls on foreign countries to take action against popular piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, which has important “symbolic value,” according to the authorities. In addition, stream-ripping is mentioned as an emerging threat.

• Journalists, artists, and the purveyors of other potentially controversial material have reason to be wary that their content may be taken down and censored, even more so as some of the top United States journalists warn that Donald Trump’s administration could have a chilling effect on journalistic freedom.

• Online domains that are registered with DNS (Domain Name System) are registered under centralized control and are ultimately able to be taken down, meaning that a website can be essentially censored at whim by a sufficiently controlling government. NameCoin set out to solve this vulnerability by creating a distributed domain name registration system, unable to be taken down through centralized control. However, due to various developmental flaws, NameCoin never reached more than a historical and novelty significance.

• Film censorship in India has always been subject to, and defined by the whims and caprices of those appointed as the tsars of dictating the terms for movie and documentary viewership. There was no mandatory legal requirement to give a fair and proper hearing to film-makers before arriving at a final decision. Similarly, there have been cases galore – like the Supreme Court’s ruling in the KA Abbas case- that a film must be seen as a whole before deciding upon censoring it. Moreover, there have been many instances where the censors have been sitting over decisions, resulting in mounting losses for directors and producers alike. Doughty directors had to knock on the doors of the courts to get their films released, and were often compelled to insert excisions as the censors demanded.

Privacy/Surveillance

• In August 2013, David Miranda was detained for nine hours and searched at Heathrow Airport in London while he was trying to board a plane back home to Rio de Janeiro. Working on a journalism assignment for the Guardian, he was carrying an encrypted USB stick that contained classified government documents. When I first learned about this story, I knew there must be safer ways to move sensitive documents across the world than physically carrying them, one that didn’t involve putting individual people at risk from border agents and draconian “terrorism” laws that are used to stifle award-winning journalism.

• With weeks to go in his tenure, President Obama on Friday moved to end the controversial “dual-hat” arrangement under which the National Security Agency and the nation’s cyberwarfare command are headed by the same military officer.

• It is unclear whether President-elect Donald Trump will support such a move. A transition official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the next administration’s plans, said only that “cybersecurity has been and will be a central focus of the transition effort.”

• Pressure had grown on Obama to make such a move on the grounds that the two jobs are too large for one person to handle, that the two organizations have fundamentally different missions and that U.S. Cyber Command, or Cybercom, needed its own leader to become a full-fledged fighting force.

• Between the revelations of mega-hacks of Yahoo and others, Russia’s meddling in the US electoral system, and the recent spike in ransomware, it’s easy to look at 2016 as a bleak year for security. It wasn’t all so, though. In fact, the last 12 months have seen significant strides in one of the most important aspects of personal security of all: encryption.

• End-to-end encryption, which ensures that the only people who can see your communications are you and the person on the receiving end, certainly isn’t new. But in 2016, encryption went mainstream, reaching billions of people all over the world. Even more significantly, it overcame its most aggressive legal challenge yet, in a prolonged standoff between Apple and the FBI. And just this week, a Congressional committee affirmed the importance of encryption, giving hope that future laws around the topic will include at least a modicum of sanity.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is keenly worried that President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will step up surveillance activities and pass laws to curtail electronic rights.

• As a result, the EFF is advising the tech sector to use end-to-end encryption for every transaction by default, and to scrub logs. “You cannot be made to surrender data you do not have,” the EFF said.

• So what have you downloaded lately?

• If you’re using BitTorrent without a VPN, proxy or seedbox, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world can see without asking.

• Several companies have made it their job to monitor and report files that are shared through torrent sites. This is also how tens of thousands of people end up getting warnings in their mailboxes from copyright holders, or worse.

• The past five years have witnessed a seemingly unending series of high-profile account take-overs. A growing consensus has emerged among security practitioners: even long, randomly generated passwords aren’t sufficient for locking down e-mail and other types of online assets. According to the consensus, these assets need to be augmented with a second factor of authentication.

• Now, a two-year study of more than 50,000 Google employees concludes that cryptographically based Security Keys beat out smartphones and most other forms of two-factor verification.

• The Security Keys are based on Universal Second Factor, an open standard that’s easy for end users to use and straightforward for engineers to stitch into hardware and websites. When plugged into a standard USB port, the keys provide a “cryptographic assertion” that’s just about impossible for attackers to guess or phish. Accounts can require that cryptographic key in addition to a normal user password when users log in. Google, Dropbox, GitHub, and other sites have already implemented the standard into their platforms.

• The US government has started asking visitors from countries that have a visa waiver arrangement with it to provide details of their social media accounts when applying for the waiver.

• A report on the website Politico said the practice, which iTWire reported about in June, had begun on Tuesday this week.

• Australia is among the 38 countries that have a visa waiver agreement with the US; prospective visitors have to visit the electronic system for travel authorisation (ESTA) website and apply for a waiver before they travel.

• The U.S. government quietly began requesting that select foreign visitors provide their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts upon arriving in the country, a move designed to spot potential terrorist threats that drew months of opposition from tech giants and privacy hawks alike.

• Since Tuesday, foreign travelers arriving in the United States on the visa waiver program have been presented with an “optional” request to “enter information associated with your online presence,” a government official confirmed Thursday. The prompt includes a drop-down menu that lists platforms including Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, as well as a space for users to input their account names on those sites.

• Cameras are missing one feature that may help journalists in sticky situations: encryption. Last week, over 150 documentary filmmakers and photojournalists signed an open letter to major camera manufacturers such as Nikon and Sony urging the companies to adopt encryption into their products.

• But the manufacturers aren’t exactly jumping at the chance. Out of five companies contacted by Motherboard, only two, Nikon and Olympus, responded, and neither said they would be pursuing any changes.

• In a 33-page report, Congress calls former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a liar and says his leaks mostly put US military at risk. Snowden disagrees.

• The Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has issued its recommendations on the use of cell site simulators (a.k.a. “Stingrays,” presumably to Harris Corporation’s trademark erosion dismay) by law enforcement. Its recommendations are… that something needs to be done, preferably soon-ish.

• Reuters has an interesting piece looking at how many experts are concerned that mass surveillance efforts by the federal government are making a mockery of the 4th Amendment. The focus of the article is on the scan of all Yahoo email that was revealed back in October, but it certainly touches on other programs as well.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte wants to amend the process to declare martial law, further emboldening the strongman amid his controversial war on drugs that has killed more than 6,000 people.

• In a speech addressed to female volunteers on Dec. 22, Duterte criticized the process required for the president to declare martial law, which requires approval from other branches of government.“What if there is already a war?” he said. “Should I still go to Congress, to [the Supreme Court]? What if the Congress and the SC have differing opinions? Who should the police follow?”

• The remarks come after a number of contradictory statements from Duterte about martial law. In August, he threatened to declare martial law after the chief justice questioned him for not following proper trial procedures in his war on drugs. His communications secretary immediately retracted the statement. Earlier this month, the president, however, said it “would be stupid” of him to declare martial law.

• Is Romania Europe’s last, great bastion of progressive politics?

• Well, this week the land better known for Dracula and corruption took a step closer to having not just a woman but a Muslim woman as prime minister. Sevil Shhaideh would lead the increasingly rare government in Europe controlled by the Left, which won this month’s parliamentary elections. Oh, and this ethnic Tatar is married to a Syrian.

• President Klaus Iohannis — incidentally, a German Lutheran in an overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox Balkan nation — on Thursday said he’d formally nominate a new prime minister after the Christmas break.

• Ann Arbor police say there is no evidence to support a Muslim University of Michigan student’s claim that a man threatened to light her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab.

• Five men have been convicted of sexually abusing and trafficking six teenage girls in Coventry.

• Waqaar Khan, Kadeem Bourne, Kenan Kelly, Marcus Woolcock and Zahid Chaudhary were accused of almost 40 offences, Warwick Crown Court heard.

• Ringleader Khan befriended the girls, aged 15 to 17, on social media before picking them up and forcing them to have sex, sometimes filming it.

• West Midlands Police described them as “brazen, calculating and evil”.

• The court heard the men took the girls, some of whom were in care, to secluded areas of the city and sometimes gave them alcohol or drugs before abusing and trafficking them for sex.

• Pakistani singer Tahir Shah,who became an online sensation with his ‘Angel’ song, has left the country after receiving life threats, his agent said today.

• Shah who rose to fame and became an Internet sensation with his viral debut single, ‘Eye to Eye’ in 2013 and followed it up with another song ‘Angel’ left from Karachi yesterday. According to his agent, Shah had been receiving death threats for a while now.

• A Tennessee man who served 31 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit is petitioning the state to compensate him $1 million for the years of his life that were taken away. All he’s gotten so far is $75. In October 1977 a Memphis woman was raped in her home by two intruders. She later identified one of them as her neighbor, Lawrence McKinney, who was 22 at the time. He was convicted on rape and burglary charges in 1978 and sentenced to 115 years in jail.

• A 61-year-old man from Tennessee, who was imprisoned for 31 years for a crime he didn’t commit, had petitioned the state to offer him USD 1 million as compensation but has so far received only USD 75.

• According to a CNN report, Lawrence McKinney, who was 22 at the time, was accused of raping a Memphis woman at her home. The woman was raped by two intruders and McKinney was identified as one of them by her in the year 1977.

• First, I’m from Detroit, and my boyfriend is also from Detroit but, like me, lives in LA, where we met. Well, for years, he flew back and forth to Detroit about every week and a half to two weeks for his job as the late crime writer Elmore Leonard’s literary researcher. Flew back and forth on Delta — which was Northwest until it morphed into Delta.

• Let me also explain something about Detroit. It’s both a major Delta hub and a major Islamic hub, with, for example, a big Muslim community in Dearborn, not far from the airport.

• I have been on a number of Delta flights on which I’ve heard other passengers speaking Arabic, and I’ve even seen people praying on prayer rugs at Detroit Metro Airport. Nothing happened to any of them — because they weren’t yelling and being disruptive assholes. Which is what seems to have happened on this flight.

• And really — think about what a terrible business model this would be: operating out of a hub with a good many Muslim travelers and escorting people off planes simply for speaking Arabic. If this actually were a common practice at Delta, we would have known about it.

• Iranian officials have told a British woman jailed on unspecified security charges to take her 2-year-old daughter to prison with her or give up custody.

• Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 37, a charity worker with dual British-Iranian citizenship, was sentenced to five years in jail on “national security charges” in September, one of three Britons being held by Tehran. Amnesty International reported Thursday her health has suffered since she was incarcerated.

• Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whom Amnesty has designated a prisoner of conscience, is being held in Evin Prison, which has no suitable facilities for children.

• A video has surfaced on social media of a police officer in Fort Worth, Texas, aggressively arresting a mother and her teenage daughter after the mother called police to report an assault on her seven-year-old son.

• A recording of the incident posted on Facebook Live by an extended family member showed the mother, who has been identified as Jacqueline Craig, and her teenage daughter being wrestled to the ground and arrested one by one with a stun gun held against their backs.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• It has been nearly 20 years since Titanic hit cinemas worldwide and slightly more than 100 since the eponymous ocean liner hit an iceberg. Despite these somewhat mixed associations, many businesses have sought to use the Titanic name for products and services ranging from spas to property developments.

• It just won’t stop when it comes to trademark disputes involving the alcohol industry. Such disputes between wine, beer, and liquor companies are legion. In such a crowded industry, it needs to be hammered home that the purpose of trademark law is not so that big companies can bully smaller companies, but rather so that customers are protected from imitation products and from being confused as to who they are buying from.

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