● 01.31.17

● Links 31/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9, OPNsense 17.1

Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If you are reading this article, chances are you are a new or prospective Linux user. Or perhaps you’re not – and are curious as to what I consider the 5 top reasons why someone would want to install Linux today.

• Either way, you are welcome to join me as I do my best to explain. If you bear with me enough to reach the end of this post, feel free to add your own voice using the comment form below.

Kernel Space

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is announcing today, January 30, 2017, the release of a new kernel update for the CloudLinux 7 operating system series to the Beta channels.

• As the executive director of Hyperledger , a distributed ledger initiative from The Linux Foundation, Brian Behlendorf leads a blockchain collaboration between leaders in finance, banking, supply chain, manufacturing and technology. Its membership includes IBM, JPMorgan Chase and American Express, among others.

• Today, acting as the executive director of the foundation, Zemlin issued a short, official response to Donald Trump’s actions, which have barred people from designated countries from entering the United States. We are sharing his words with you here. At FOSS Force, we offer a big thumbs up to Zemlin and the organization he heads for having the courage to speak out on this most important issue.

• The Linux Foundation today announced the speaker lineup for the Vault Linux Storage & Filesystems Conference, taking place March 22-23 in Cambridge, MA.

• Vault brings together the leading developers and users in filesystems and storage in the Linux kernel and related projects to forge a path to continued innovation and education. Linux has been at the center of the advances in data, filesystems and storage with its widespread use in cloud computing, Big Data and other data-intensive computing workloads. At Vault, hardware vendors collaborate within the Linux community to develop cutting-edge storage hardware, helping transform Linux into a leader in the storage industry.

Graphics Stack

• Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has begun aligning the latest Nouveau DRM patches that in turn will be submitted to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window.

• Less than 24 hours after RADV geometry shaders landed in Mesa Git along with other improvements, patches have been published for wiring up Float64 support for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver.

• It’s been quite a few days for the RADV Mesa Vulkan driver with receiving patches to support spilling yesterday and then today seeing new RADV patches land. Nearing the end of the day, there’s now geometry shaders support on Mesa master for this open-source Vulkan driver.

• Earlier this month David Airlie posted initial geometry shader support for testing in the RADV driver. That code has now been committed to mainline for Mesa 17.1-devel.

• Eric Anholt continues working on the open-source VC4 graphics driver stack for adding additional features and improving the OpenGL performance of the Broadcom GPU on the Raspberry Pi.

• Yesterday The Khronos Group hosted a one-day workshop in Vancouver, Canada with all things Vulkan.

Applications

• Exactly on the schedule, Weblate 2.11 is out today. This release brings extended stats available to users and various other improvements and bug fixes.

• For those continuing to make use of the FFmpeg-forked Libav project, a number of VA-API improvements have landed in recent days.

• The latest improvements to Libav pertaining to Intel’s Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are VP8 encode support, MPEG-2 encode support, VBR mode support, and other small improvements. More details can be found via this Git query.

• The second point release of darktable 2.2 arrived today, January 30, 2017, full of new features, multiple bug fixes, and support for new digital cameras, including noise profiles.

• Since darktable 2.2.1, which launched earlier this month, the developers managed to add a few goodies, such as re-enablement of tiling support for the Lens module, as well as the ability to read yet another white balance encoding method with the DNG decoder.

• Stacey helps you monitor system resource usage, clear app caches, uninstall unwanted apps, and even stop system processes from running in the background.

• Unlike most technology trends, DevOps’ focus is on the collaborative elements of delivery infrastructure bringing together software developers – those who know exactly why they are building a particular piece of software – and operations personnel – those who are maintaining the IT infrastructure. Bridging the silos between the two sides, the early pioneers of DevOps were hoping this would enable IT professionals to make better judgments about how to deploy and integrate software more effectively.

• Enter the new wave of powerful open logging and monitoring solutions. Some of these focus on targeted tasks, such as container cluster monitoring and performance analysis, while others qualify as holistic monitoring and alerting toolkits, capable of multi-dimensional data collection and querying.

• LNAV stands for Log file Navigator is an advanced console based log file viewer for Linux. It does the same job how other file viewers doing like cat, more, tail, etc but have more enhanced features which is not available in normal file viewers (especially, it will comes with set of color and easy to read format).

• The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence v6.5.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Pac-Man is an incredibly simple game which has more than stood the test of time both as a game and through its extensive merchandising. It is the sort of IP which many seek to emulate but few have followed successfully.

• In 2016, the website US Gamer named Pac-Man the highest grossing arcade game of all time (its spin off game, Ms Pac-Man came in at number 4).

• Anyone who has played the game will not be terribly surprised – it is a very addictive game.

• Canonical developer Alan Griffiths who has long been involved in the development of the Mir display server for Ubuntu has now announced Mircade.

• The PC port of the much-beloved tactical RPG is out on Steam, dood. Get ready to fight countless enemies in order to return the world back to normal.

• X-COM: UFO Defense is a true classic. I played it originally on Amiga for days on end and it has a fully functional open source engine from the community named ‘OpenXcom’. The game is free right now on Humble Store, so go grab it.

• It seems it will support Linux too, as it’s plainly listed in the description.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Folder View in Plasma 5.10 will allow you to navigate folders by hovering above them during drag and drop. This is supported in all three modes (desktop layout, desktop widget, panel widget), and pretty damn convenient. It’s a well-known feature from Dolphin, of course, and now also supported in Plasma’s other major file browsing interface.

• Folder View packs a lot of functionality – at some point I should write a tips & tricks blog on some of the lesser known features and how they can improve your workflow.

• Tuesday, 31 January 2017. Today KDE releases this year’s first Plasma feature update, Plasma 5.9. While this release brings many exciting new features to your desktop, we’ll continue to provide bugfixes to Plasma 5.8 LTS.

• We are delighted to announce the release of Qbs 1.7 “Technical Ecstasy”!

• While Qbs 1.7.0 was actually released back in mid-December, we decided to postpone the announcement until after last week’s 1.7.1 patch release in order to get in a few more bug fixes.

• For years and years already Ubuntu’s installer, Ubiquity, has an OEM mode. And for years and years I know it doesn’t really work with the Qt interface.

• An understandable consequence of not actually having any real-life use cases of course, disappointing all the same. As part of the KDE Slimbook project I took a second and then a third look at the problems it was having and while it still is not perfect it is substantially better than before.

• Today, January 30, 2017, KDE had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of the KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

• The development cycle of KDE Plasma 5.9 took only a few months, but considering the fact that it’s not a long-term supported (LTS) version like KDE Plasma 5.8, which is the recommended version right now for all users, we think that it’s a pretty hefty update adding quite a bunch of new features and improving Wayland support.

• KDE Plasma 5.9 introduces interactive previews for notifications, drag-and-drop improvements throughout the desktop, window switching in the task manager using Meta + number shortcuts, Breeze styling improvements, Global Menus have returned to the KDE desktop, general theme and UI improvements, a new network configuration module, and continued work on Wayland support.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

New Releases

• The OPNsense team is proud to announce the final availability of version 17.1, nicknamed “Eclectic Eagle”. This major release features FreeBSD 11.0, the SSH remote installer, new languages Italian / Czech / Portuguese, state-of-the-art HardenedBSD security features, PHP 7.0, new plugins for FTP Proxy / Tinc VPN / Let’s Encrypt, native PAM authentication against e.g. 2FA (TOTP), as well a rewritten Nano-style card images that adapt to media size to name only a few.

• OPNsense 17.1 is now available as the newest release of this network-focused FreeBSD-based operating system forked from pfSense.

• It’s now been two years since the first official release of OPNsense and to celebrate they have out a big update. OPNsense 17.1 re-bases to using FreeBSD 11.0, there’s now a SSH remote installer, new language support, more hardening features used from HardenedBSD, new plugins, integrated authentication via PAM, and many other improvements. Some of the new plug-ins include FTP Proxy, Tinc VPN, and Let’s Encrypt support.

Red Hat Family

• Raw data suggest the open-source community remains dominated by men, but women in coding are crusading against these statistics and finding ways to achieve inclusivity.

• One of these women is Marina Zhurakhinskaya, a longtime software engineer and Red Hat’s first senior outreach specialist, who is devoting her career to making communities like GitHub more open to both women and minorities.

• For many people, that requires a profound mindset shift in how to think about leaders. Yet in some ways, it’s what we all intuitively know about how organizations really work. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has pointed out, in any organization, you have the thermometers—people who reflect the organizational “temperature” and sentiment and direction—and then you have the thermostats—people who set those things for the organization.

• Monash University has implemented a multi-petabyte deployment at its eResearch Centre, giving the Melbourne-based advanced computing facility the capacity to store and manage massive workloads of data.

• The university implemented a software-defined solution that uses Red Hat Ceph Storage on Dell EMC PowerEdge R630 and R730xd rack servers that it expects will accelerate application performance, simplify systems management, and address the university’s growing data storage requirements.

• The Red Hat® OpenStack® Platform combines the power of Red Hat Enterprise Linux® with Red Hat OpenStack technology to deliver a scalable and secure foundation that allows Communications Service Providers to build and manage a virtualized carrier network.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform to deliver the scale and flexibility required to drive its Embassy Cloud project. The goal of Embassy Cloud is to transform the way collaborative research, such as pan-cancer analysis, tackles the world’s toughest biological challenges.

Finance

Fedora

• As I’m sure many of you know, living in the US is worrying right now.

• [...]

• The affinity mapping and brainstorming post contained a bunch of initial mockups which I basically threw together to try to cover the things we came up with during brainstorming. Máirín Duffy (Mo) reviewed and commented on each of those, both in the ticket and sometimes in IRC, email, and other such places.

• I want to get a better feel for CSS, so Máirín Duffy (Mo) and I spent three hours last week figuring out how to moving a pixel perfect mockup to CSS. This was made up almost entirely of background stuff, but we got a lot of useful information in the process. We will continue working on this sometime this week.

• Hello, I’d like to introduce a new sub-planet of Fedora Planet to you, located at http://fedoraplanet.org/quality/ (you don’t need to remember the URL, there’s a sub-planet picker in the top right corner of Fedora Planet pages that allows you to switch between sub-planets).

• Fedora Quality Planet will contain news and useful information about QA tools and processes present in Fedora, updates on our quality automation efforts, guides for package maintainers (and other teams) how to interact with our tools and checks or understand the reported failures, announcements about critical issues in Fedora releases, and more.

Debian Family

• It’s January, so it must be time for this year’s Scratch projects from my grade 10 students. We’re moving on to python, but I’ve posted their projects at http://scratch.lesbg.com Feel free to play them and rate them. This is a first attempt for students, so do please be gentle on the ratings.

• My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today, January 30, 2017, Canonical, through Michael Vogt, had the pleasure of announcing the availability of the snapd 2.22 Snappy daemon for Ubuntu Linux.

• Mark Shuttleworth’s company Canonical has been developing Ubuntu Linux for over a decade, with two new major milestone releases debuting every year. In 2017, the first release will be Ubuntu 17.04, codenamed the ‘Zesty Zapus’ set to debut in April. The big question that Ubuntu Linux fans have though is what the Ubuntu 17.10 release will be called, when it is released in October.

• Ubuntu and similar distros are widely considered to be as simple as it gets. With GUI installers, being FoSS friendly is easy. For the most part, 98% of the best user experience possible is found out of the box by default.

• But what about the other 2%? This article will address the top mistakes made by newer Ubuntu users and offer advice on how to avoid those Ubuntu snafus.

• It’s that time of development again when the Fedora Design Team sends out their call for supplemental wallpapers. Artists and photographers are encouraged to participate. Matt Hartley discussed today some of the mistakes new users make with Ubuntu and offered up his best advice for avoiding them. TecMint compiled the top five reasons to install Linux and the second round of voting has begun in FOSS Force’s Best Distro of 2016 contest. Some familiar names graced Google’s Code-in winners and Gaming On Linux has identified the best games of 2016 through a user polling survey.

• The Ibex Pro is one supercharged machine that will probably hurt your electric bill.

• System76′s fastest Ibex Pro with Ubuntu Server 16.10 packs some crazy horsepower with Intel’s latest 22-core Xeon E5 v4 chips and eight Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics processors.

• It’s got the same number of GPUs as Nvidia’s superfast DGX-1, which is being used for deep learning. System76 is targeting the Ibex Pro — which is a rack server — at the same market as the DGX-1. The server has fewer, but newer, CPUs, compared to the DGX-1.

• Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was supposed to ship in mid-January and then up until today was expected to be released on Thursday. But now it’s being delayed at least one more week.

• Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS had been delayed due to some parts of its hardware enablement (HWE) stack being changed, they decided in mid-January to push back the release to 2 February. Now today they’ve decided to delay it a second time due to an unrelated problem.

Devices/Embedded

• Asteroid OS is an open source, Linux-based smartwatch OS developed primarily by a French student and hoping to take on the might of Android Wear — so does it stand a chance?

• We strapped on an LG G Watch and installed Asteroid OS to put it through its paces and see whether this fledgling OS has what it takes to ruffle Google’s feathers. On paper it ticks all the right boxes, with some interesting ideas and a stylish-looking interface, so we’re hopeful that it can eventually emerge as a genuine Android Wear alternative.

• At ISE 2017, Barix will introduce the Barionet 1000, the latest member of the company’s universal programmable I/O device family for IP-based control and automation applications. In contrast to other Barionet devices that use the proprietary Barix ABCL programming language, the Barionet 1000 is the first device to be programmable in Linux using the Open WRT framework. It is also the first Barionet device to integrate wireless support and a USB port for emerging control and automation connectivity needs.

Phones

• About 7.5 % of all smartphone sales last year were used smartphone, second-hand smartphones. Deloitte counts the market at 120 million units in 2016, up from 80 million the year before. While the total new smartphone sales were essentially flat for year 2016 vs 2015 (we’ll know in a few weeks when the final numbers are out, could be up or down about one percent) there WAS growth in actual purchases of smartphones last year, vs 2015. That was driven by the used-phone market. The second-hand smartphone market grew by 50% compared to year 2015. Deloitte counted 80 million total second-hand smartphone sales in 2015 and now 120 million in 2016 (ie 50% growth year-on-year). Seeking Alpha has the article relating to Deloitte’s count. If the global new sales smartphone market was exactly flat, at about 1.5 Billion smartphones sold last year, then the used market helped nudge the total market to an annual growth rate of 2.5%. And 120 million handset sales per year is nothing to sneeze at. Its more than total digital camera sales (and every used smartphone has a camera) and its about the same number as total desktop PC sales (this year 2017, used smartphone sales will be greater than total new desktop PC sales). And obviously, every smartphone, even if used, can do Facebook and Google and go to Amazon to do some e-commerce.

Android

• Green-and-black game hardware maker Razer announced today that it’s acquired Nextbit, a California-based startup responsible for the “Robin” (pictured) Android-powered smartphone.

• This is a notable purchase for Razer, which in recent years has snapped up both THX and Ouya as it launched first an Android-powered micro-console and then its own VR headset.

• The good: Long battery life, Good camera with a wide range of controls, Easy to grip without a case The bad: Includes excessive apps, Not water and dust resistant, No virtual assistant at launch Who should buy: Android fans looking for a great large phone with long battery life.

Free Software/Open Source

• I would bet that whoever is best at managing and influencing the open source supply chain will be best positioned to create the most innovative products. In this article, I’ll explain why you should be a supply chain influencer, and how your organization can be an active participant in your supply chain.

• All of us at the FOSS Force office have become big fans of this new open source news blog from Leon Anavi and can’t wait until the next edition comes out in February. Don’t worry Leon, your English is fine. Keep ’em coming.

• Drum roll please! We are very proud to announce the 2016 Google Code-in (GCI) Grand Prize Winners and Finalists. Each year we see the number of student participants increase, and 2016 was no exception: 1,340 students from 62 countries completed an impressive 6,418 tasks. Winners and Finalists were chosen by the 17 open source organizations and are listed alphabetically below.

• Google today announced that in March it will open-source its Google Earth Enterprise software, which lets organizations deploy Google Maps and Google Earth on their on-premises data center infrastructure.

• Google unveiled the software back in 2006 and stopped selling it nearly two years ago. Since then Google has released updates and provided support to organizations with existing licenses. Once it pops up online — on GitHub, under an Apache 2.0 license — organizations will be free to collaboratively or independently modify it for their own needs as open-source software.

• Google is quickly ramping up its efforts to put the Internet of Things (IoT) and Android on converging paths. In December, Google released the developer preview of Android Things, which is a trimmed down version of Android for smart devices.

• Google’s Chromium project lets developers poke around, test, and modify Google’s open-source browser code. But up until today, Chrome for iOS’s code wasn’t included in the open-source repository. Now, however, the company is making it public. The code wasn’t kept with the rest of the Chromium Project because of how complicated it is to actually get Chrome to run on a mobile Apple device.

• Tech leaders from several major open source cloud initiatives condemn President Donald Trump’s travel ban, and claim it could harm diversity and hinder the tech industry’s wider innovation potential

• If you’re like me, a term of art called the “Frozen Middle” meant nothing to you, except perhaps as a substance found inside a Klondike bar. It happens to be a business school term referring to middle management, specifically middle management that is “frozen” or not performing well. I first heard about it through a recent Twitter discussion and then looked up its source. The earliest reference I can find is from a 2005 HBS blog post, and that post references case studies from the automobile industry. I found the term intriguing because I am, in fact, middle management. And I have, as a matter of course, dealt with many many middle managers in the past. Some of those middle managers were exceptional, some were competent, and some were… hey, is that a Klondike bar??? “Great,” I can hear you say. “But what does this have to do with Open Source?”

• The move towards open source has had a somewhat divisive impact on the vendor community, with established telecom suppliers now having to share the attention – and budgets – of operators with new entrants.

• This new rivalry has not gone unnoticed by operators, who have been somewhat critical of the vendor community in terms of providing interoperable platforms that can tie together management of VNFs from various providers.

• How many times has this happened to you? You’re minding your own business one day, running your international delivery system for high-definition dramatic and comedic video with 16-channel stereo sound on tens of thousands of concurrent channels. Your content suppliers in Tokyo or Copenhagen or wherever, just like every other day, are flooding you with raw or semi-edited video, and are seeking your input on possible edits and scene changes. They’re using an international standard video delivery format created just for this purpose, and maybe you’re the only customer for this format, but that’s never bothered you before.

Events

• The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization promoting the adoption of the latest Linux and Open Source technologies to the enterprise industry, is announcing the upcoming schedule for LinuxCon, CloudOpen, and ContainerCon conferences.

• Taking in place for the first time in China, between June 19-20, 2017, the LinuxCon, ContainerCon and CloudOpen events will be held at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, where it is expected that thousands of attendees will share their knowledge, collaborate on new technologies, and learn about the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies, including cloud, containers, microservices, and networking.

• IPv6 has been around for a long time. The first IPv6 RFC was released more than 20 years ago, and we began exhausting the IPv4 address space in 2011. Thiago Macieira from the Intel Open Source Technology Center began his talk at LinuxCon Europe by saying that he didn’t think he would still need to be talking about this today, and he wished we had already solved this problem. But, many people have not yet made the switch to IPv6, so his talk contained a brief introduction to IPv6 and some of the differences compared to IPv4.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Many of us are already enjoying all the goodies implemented by Mozilla in the latest Firefox 51.0 update of the popular open-source web browser for Linux, Windows, and Mac, but the company is now working on the next major release.

SaaS/Back End

• OpenStack experience continues to be among the most in-demand skills in the tech world, with more and more organizations seeking to build and manage their own open source clouds. But OpenStack is a huge domain of knowledge, containing dozen of individual projects that are being actively developed at a rapid pace. Just keeping your skills up to date can be a challenge.

BSD

• Developers working on the FreeBSD-derived GhostBSD distribution are working to get their 11.0 release out the door that’s based off last year’s FreeBSD 11.0 code-base.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Another late feature addition to GCC 7 is C++ support for libcc1.

• Libcc1 is the GCC cc1 plugin for the GDB debugger. With the latest GCC SVN/Git code tonight is now C++ support to complement the C interfaces.

Public Services/Government

• Public administrations in Austria need to increase their use of free and open source software, the government of Austria says in its Digital Strategy. The strategy proposes to ‘push’ (forcierung) open source by public administrations. This is intended to accelerate its uptake, explains Federal Chancellery for Digitalisation.

• The Italian Association for Free Software Geographic Information Systems (GFOSS.it) is conducting a survey to collect information about the use of this kind of software in Italy’s public sector. The results will be made public at the GFOSS.it meeting, in Genoa from 8 to 11 February.

• One of the potential winners is the Latvian National Archive, which was nominated because of its use of open technologies for its online audiovisual archive. Another nominee is the municipality of Ventspils, for its use of open source software on workstations and server hosts, across the administration and in the town’s schools.

• The award ceremony is part of LATA’s Open Technology for Growth conference at the Latvian University of Natural Sciences in Riga.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Where open source fits in

• At or near the core of any platform cooperative lies open source; not necessarily open source technologies, but the principles and the ethos that underlie open source—openness, transparency, cooperation, collaboration, and sharing.

Open Data

• As children use digital media to learn and socialize, others are collecting and analyzing data about these activities. In school and at play, these children find that they are the subjects of data science. As believers in the power of data analysis, we believe that this approach falls short of data science’s potential to promote innovation, learning, and power.

• Motivated by this fact, we have been working over the last three years as part of a team at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Washington to design and build a system that attempts to support an alternative vision: children as data scientists. The system we have built is described in a new paper—Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists—that will be published in the proceedings of CHI 2017.

• Motivated by this fact, we have been working over the last three years as part of a team at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Washington to design and build a system that attempts to support an alternative vision: children as data scientists. The system we have built is described in a new paper—Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists—that will be published in the proceedings of CHI 2017.

Open Access/Content

• Learning a language is a challenging endeavor. Digital technologies have been developed over the last several decades to aid the process, ranging from (probably) familiar platforms like Rosetta Stone to immersive virtual environments.

• In recent years, the web and mobile app Duolingo has risen to prominence by developing a novel learning model that focuses on maximizing user engagement. While Duolingo is free to use, it is not “open” in the sense that it can broadly invite users to collaborate and contribute. Duolingo learning features come and go, as the company determines what works best for the majority of users and supports financial growth.

Leftovers

• Remember the LG UltraFine 5K Display that Apple says was specifically designed to work with the New MacBook Pro and as a replacement for the Thunderbolt Display? Well apparently it wasn’t designed to work next to routers. According to 9to5Mac, the 27-inch monitor is useless when it’s within two meters of a router, as the UltraFine 5K Display will flicker, disconnect, or freeze computers due to electromagnetic interference.

• Delta Air Lines flights are departing and a ground stop has been lifted after a systems outage Sunday night led to departure delays and cancellations.

• In a statement posted on the Atlanta-based airline’s website at 11:45 p.m., CEO Ed Bastian apologized to customers who were impacted by this “frustrating situation.”

• Dropbox’s latest tool for businesses, a piece of collaborative editing software called Paper, is launching globally today. Paper has been in the works at Dropbox for quite some time, having first been announced in October of 2015 before entering a public beta phase in August of last year. Dropbox’s software is similar to Google’s suite of workplace cloud apps. Paper — itself a minimal document editor and writing tool like Google Docs — is the focal point, while all of Dropbox’s other services and features now plug into and augment the experience.

• Some Playstation Network users tried to use Sony’s messaging system to transfer child porn back and forth. The ad hoc Playstation Playpen was reported by users, and Sony went digging into their messages and discovered illegal images, which it then — as it is statutorily required to do — turned this information over to law enforcement and reported it to NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children). Unsurprisingly, this led to the arrest of one of those trading illegal images.

Hardware

• If you are looking to upgrade to a Kabylake processor but the Core i7 7700K at $350 and other higher-end models are too expensive, the Pentium G4600 is available at under $90 USD for a dual-core processor with Hyper Threading and clocks up to 3.6GHz.

Health/Nutrition

• More than 1,700 residents of Flint, Michigan who say the Environmental Protection Agency mismanaged the water crisis that exposed thousands of children to lead poisoning have sued the U.S. government, seeking class action status for their claims.

• The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Michigan on Monday, asserted that the EPA failed to warn them of the dangers of the toxic water or take steps to ensure that state and local authorities were addressing the crisis. The plaintiffs seek $722 million in damages.

• “This case involves a major failure on all levels of government to protect the health and safety of the public,” the 30-page lawsuit claims. “Local, state and federal agencies and employees, working individually and at times in concert with each other, mismanaged this environmental catastrophe.”

• A high-level meeting at the World Trade Organization today welcomed in an amendment to international trade rules for intellectual property aimed at boosting exports of affordable medicines. It also set out the way ahead to make it work.

• The World Health Organization Executive Board ended its meeting a day early today, and agreed to have five new institutions to enter into official relation with the organisation, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, despite protests from civil society groups, and Knowledge Ecology International, led by activist firebrand James Love. Meanwhile, the WHO is pursuing the implementation of its framework of engagement with non-governmental actors adopted in 2016. WHO members urged the organisation to speedily provide implementation tools such as a register of all such actors. The WHO said all is on track and is expected to be ready by the next World Health Assembly.

• Finding resources to fund research and development for diseases primarily affecting developing and least-developed countries is a continuous challenge. Hopes were raised in 2015 with projects to launch a Global Observatory on Health Research and Development, and a voluntary pooled fund for research and development projects. However, the lack of funding is jeopardizing those initiatives despite some contributions by developed and middle-income countries.

• World Health Organisation members tried to agree on a draft resolution on cancer during the WHO Executive Board but consensus escaped them, in particular on intellectual property issues, according to sources. The text is expected to be discussed informally with a view to reaching common language on the remaining issues by the annual World Health Assembly in May.

• The Government will cut the National Health Service’s budget per person in real terms next year, ministers have admitted in official figures for the first time.

• Numbers released by ministers show NHS England will face a sharp reduction of 0.6 per cent in real terms of per head in the financial year 2018-19.

• The numbers corroborate claims by NHS chief Simon Stevens earlier this month that “in 2018-19, real-terms NHS spending per person in England is going to go down”.

Security

• Linux encryption app Cryptkeeper has a bug that causes it to use a single-letter universal decryption password: “p”.

• The flawed version is in Debian 9 (Stretch), currently in testing, but not in Debian 8 (Jessie). The bug appears to be a result of a bad interaction with the encfs encrypted filesystem’s command line interface: Cryptkeeper invokes encfs and attempts to enter paranoia mode with a simulated ‘p’ keypress – instead, it sets passwords for folders to just that letter.

• John Gilmore wrote an interesting mail about how Cygnus.com worked on reproducible builds in the early 1990s. (It’s eye opening to see how the dealt with basically the very same problems we’re dealing with today, how they solved them and then to realize that most of this has been forgotten and bit-rotted in the last 20 years. How will we prevent history repeating it)self here?)

• Earlier this month, Salted Hash reported on a surge in attacks against publicly accessible MongoDB installations.

• Since January 3, the day of that first report, the number of victims has climbed from about 200 databases to more than 40,000. In addition to MongoDB, those responsible for the attacks have started targeting Elasticsearch and CouchDB.

• No matter the platform being targeted, the message to the victim is the same; send a small Bitcoin payment to the listed address, or forever lose access to your files.

• The arrests sent rumors flying online because the breach had been claimed by Phineas Fisher, a hacker who first won notoriety in 2014 for publishing data from Britain’s Gamma Group — responsible at the time for spyware known as FinFisher. The hacker, or group of hackers, cemented their reputation by claiming responsibility for a breach at Italy’s Hacking Team in 2015 — a spectacular dump which exposed the inner workings of government espionage campaigns — and appearing as a hand puppet in an unusual interview in 2016.

• A data encryption app for Linux users named Cryptkeeper has a bug that allows anyone to decrypt locked content using the password “p”.

• Facebook, like Google, has shown itself to be a strong contributor to the open source community, and is now out with a steady stream of open source security tools. Late last year, A couple of years ago, Facebook open sourced osquery, an SQL-powered detection tool for Linux and OS X that provides real-time insight into the state of corporate infrastructure. Then, it ported osquery to Windows and open sourced it.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• EDRi observer Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte’s (GFF) most recent Constitutional Court case in Germany concerns an anti-whistleblowing provision threatening the freedom of the press. Part-time journalists and bloggers, as well as the legal or IT experts on which journalists rely, now risk a prison sentence of up to three years for handling “leaked” data.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The environmental movement is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world”, according to an adviser to the US president Donald Trump’s administration.

• Myron Ebell, who has denied the dangers of climate change for many years and led Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until the president’s recent inauguration, also said he fully expected Trump to keep his promise to withdraw the US from the global agreement to fight global warming.

• Ebell said US voters had rejected what he dubbed the “expertariat” and said there was no doubt that Trump thinks that climate change is not a crisis and does not require urgent action.

• A Washington state judge has sparked outrage for remarks questioning the existence of climate change and the role of humans in global warming.

• During the high-profile trial of Ken Ward, a climate activist facing 30 years in prison for shutting down an oil pipeline, Judge Michael E Rickert said: “I don’t know what everybody’s beliefs are on [climate change], but I know that there’s tremendous controversy over the fact whether it even exists. And even if people believe that it does or it doesn’t, the extent of what we’re doing to ourselves and our climate and our planet, there’s great controversy over that.”

• The Skagit County judge made the comments on 24 January while addressing Ward’s request to present a “necessity defense” in court, meaning he would argue that the grave threat of climate change justified civil disobedience.

Finance

• Smartphone app-based ride-share company Uber has been a controversial figure in Seattle for years. The company has been fighting its drivers’ unionization efforts since last autumn. Additionally, in December, Uber Technologies CEO Travis Kallanick was among the executives tapped to be on President Donald Trump’s economic advisory commission.

• President Donald Trump’s clash with Silicon Valley over immigration is about to become even more contentious.

• After the new president banned refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Microsoft and others railed against the move, saying it violated the country’s principles and risked disrupting its engine of innovation. Trump’s next steps could strike even closer to home: His administration has drafted an executive order aimed at overhauling the work-visa programs technology companies depend on to hire tens of thousands of employees each year.

• If implemented, the reforms could shift the way American companies like Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. recruit talent and force wholesale changes at Indian companies such as Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. Businesses would have to try to hire American first and if they recruit foreign workers, priority would be given to the most highly paid.

• “Our country’s immigration policies should be designed and implemented to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest,” the draft proposal reads, according to a copy reviewed by Bloomberg. “Visa programs for foreign workers … should be administered in a manner that protects the civil rights of American workers and current lawful residents, and that prioritizes the protection of American workers — our forgotten working people — and the jobs they hold.”

• One of the slogans used by those in favor of the UK leaving the European Union — aka Brexit — was that it would allow Brits to “take back control.” In particular, it was claimed, Brexit would stop the European Union and its top court from “imposing” their decisions that took precedence over national laws. It was an appealing slogan for many — a bit like “Make America great again” — but as with other appealing slogans, with time it proved rather hollow. In the wake of the UK referendum in favor of Brexit, the British government is faced with the task of coming up with large numbers of trade deals that will somehow compensate for the almost-certain loss of preferential access to the EU. Naturally, the most important of these “new” trade deals is with the US. Unfortunately, the British negotiating position is fatally undermined by the fact that the UK is desperate for a deal, whereas the US doesn’t need it at all. Inevitably, then, the US will get to dictate its terms, and UK government will be forced to accept them, however bad they are, because it has no alternative. So much for “taking back control.”

• Rather belatedly, people are beginning to wake up to what that is likely to mean in practice. Here, for example, is an analysis on BuzzFeed of a key problem with the UK government’s plan to sign lots of new trade deals to plug the gap left by exiting the EU…

• The idea of inviting the 45th president of the United States on a state visit to the UK was conceived at a time when the Conservative government was desperate to interpose itself between Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader.

• The government had been blindsided by Trump’s victory, and Farage, the eternal thorn in the side of the Conservative leadership, was taunting the Foreign Office about his proximity to Trump and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

• The photograph of Farage beaming in the gilded Trump Towers was a humiliation for British officials, as was his one-hour meeting with Trump, which made him the first British politician to meet the president-elect.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Though polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling his job, one group of elites seems enthusiastic about the new White House occupant: CEOs of companies with big business before Trump’s administration.

• In corporate earnings calls since the election, top executives from the fossil fuel, defense contracting, border security and pharmaceutical industries have said they are looking forward to potentially lower corporate taxes, less regulation and — in some cases — more government largesse.

• The leader of oil colossus Chevron, for instance, praised Trump in an earnings call just a few weeks after the firm poured $500,000 into Trump’s inaugural committee. The CEO of the company — which spends millions lobbying the federal government on issues like environmental rules and climate policy — specifically lauded Trump’s promise to slash government regulations in an earnings call only days after scientists said 2016 was the hottest year in recorded history.

• Donald Trump has joined Russia, China and radical Islam as a threat to the European Union, EU leaders were told on Tuesday by the man chairing a summit where they will debate relations with the United States.

• European Council President Donald Tusk, a conservative former premier of Poland, wrote to EU national leaders to lay out themes for discussion when they meet in Malta on Friday to discuss the future of their Union as Britain prepares to leave.

• In vivid language that reflects deep concern in Europe at the new U.S. president’s support for Brexit, as well as his ban on refugees and people from several Muslim countries, Tusk called on Europeans to rally against eurosceptic nationalists at home and take “spectacular steps” to deepen the continent’s integration.

• Thousands turned out at an anti-Trump rally outside St George’s Hall in protest of the President’s travel ban.

• Protesters flocked to Lime Street from around 6pm on Monday, January 30 to object to Trump’s treatment of people from Muslim countries.

• Yesterday afternoon, just before the Government made a statement in the House of Commons about Donald Trump’s barbaric travel ban, I was asked onto the BBC News channel to talk about why I believe a state visit to be wholly inappropriate. The final question I was asked was a bit of a surprise: “Aren’t these the actions of someone who doesn’t have yet the experience, who’s learning very fast in a new job?”

• The White House has shut down its public comment line some time in the past few weeks, instead telling callers, with an automated message, that they should contact the administration via Facebook Messenger instead. There’s only one problem: Neither the new White House administration nor President Donald Trump seem to currently maintain an active Facebook Messenger account.

• The White House had long kept a public comment line, which in recent years had been staffed by volunteers of the Obama administration. In addition, it also offered a number to reach the White House switchboard, where paid staffers would pick up the phone and take messages for the administration.

• “The acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States. This order was approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.

• Ms. Yates is an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.

• It is time to get serious about protecting our country. Calling for tougher vetting for individuals travelling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.

• President Trump fired his acting attorney general on Monday night, removing her as the nation’s top law enforcement officer after she defiantly refused to defend his executive order closing the nation’s borders to refugees and people from predominantly Muslim countries.

• In an escalating crisis for his 10-day-old administration, the president declared in a statement that Sally Q. Yates, who had served as deputy attorney general under President Barack Obama, had betrayed the administration by announcing that Justice Department lawyers would not defend Mr. Trump’s order against legal challenges.

• At the dedication of his Library, President Ronald Reagan, then 80 years old, reflected on the pendulum swings he had seen in his lifetime, such as the rise of big government and totalitarianism. “I also remember a time when America was advised to keep a low profile in the world as if by hunkering down and muzzling her deepest beliefs she might avoid foreign criticism and placate her enemies,” Reagan said.

• J ust a week into his infant presidency, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that affirmed his deepest beliefs loudly to the world: He will rule an incompetent, huge government dependent on fear-mongering, which (for starters) means banning lawfully admitted immigrants based on their birth nationality. It could mean a wall on our border with Mexico, whether it’s a new tax on Americans or diplomatic fallout over who picks up the $40 billion tab. It may mean reversing protections for LGBT government employees.

• As we witness daily public panic caused by a White House possessing not enough professionalism and a toxic abundance of narcissism, a crisis of character is quickly becoming a crisis of the American experiment.

• Social media erupted Sunday night when users noticed that an index titled “Our Government” did not include an entry for the judicial branch.

• One user pointed out that an archived version of the page from Jan. 19 included “The Judicial Branch” alongside the Executive and Legislative branches.

• Anyone who has not spent the last five years living on another planet will be familiar with the term Big Data. Big Data means, in essence, that everything we do, both on and offline, leaves digital traces. Every purchase we make with our cards, every search we type into Google, every movement we make when our mobile phone is in our pocket, every “like” is stored. Especially every “like.” For a long time, it was not entirely clear what use this data could have—except, perhaps, that we might find ads for high blood pressure remedies just after we’ve Googled “reduce blood pressure.”

• On November 9, it became clear that maybe much more is possible. The company behind Trump’s online campaign—the same company that had worked for Leave.EU in the very early stages of its “Brexit” campaign—was a Big Data company: Cambridge Analytica.

• To understand the outcome of the election—and how political communication might work in the future—we need to begin with a strange incident at Cambridge University in 2014, at Kosinski’s Psychometrics Center.

• Irony isn’t a concept with which President Donald J. Trump is familiar. In his Inaugural Address, having nominated the wealthiest cabinet in American history, he proclaimed, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth.” Under Trump, an even smaller group will flourish—in particular, a cadre of former Goldman Sachs executives. To put the matter bluntly, two of them (along with the Federal Reserve) are likely to control our economy and financial system in the years to come.

• Infusing Washington with Goldman alums isn’t exactly an original idea. Three of the last four presidents, including The Donald, have handed the wheel of the US economy to ex-Goldmanites. But in true Trumpian style, after attacking Hillary Clinton for her Goldman ties, he wasn’t satisfied to do just that. He had to do it bigger and better. Unlike Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, just a sole Goldman figure lording it over economic policy wasn’t enough for him. Only two would do.

• Stephen Bannon’s appointment to the National Security Council (NSC) is stirring alarm among former government officials who fear that crucial White House decisions could be politicized under President Trump.

• Last week was a busy one for controversial executive orders, and this week started with another.

• On Monday, President Trump signed a far-reaching Executive Order directing federal agencies to get rid of two existing regulations for every new regulation added—regardless of almost any other consideration. Specifically, the order says that “unless prohibited by law,” agencies “shall identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed.” The EO also states that “the total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations, to be finalized this year shall be no greater than zero.”

• In other words, the costs imposed by repealed rules will have to, at a minimum, equal the costs imposed by any new rules.

• I became a lawyer because of a story told to me about Watergate, by my uncle, Richard Cates. Cates was a lawyer from Madison. When the House started investigating Nixon, he was hired to be counsel to the House Committee on Impeachment. His job was to put together the facts supporting a case against Nixon, and convince the members of the House that those facts merited impeachment. (Working for him, just out of law school: Hillary Clinton.)

• We should keep clear a critical point that the press is so sloppily ignoring.

• Donald Trump is our President. Despite failing to win the popular vote, he is our President. Other Presidents have served as President despite not winning the popular vote — after an election (JQ Adams, RB Hayes, B Harrison, GW Bush) or after death in office, resignations, or assassinations (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt, Chester Arthur, Andrew Johnson). What those Presidents had is the constitutional entitlement to serve, subject to the constraints of the Constitution.

• But what Donald Trump doesn’t have is any democratic mandate for his policies. He did not win a majority of the popular vote. Neither a majority nor even a plurality of the voters stood with him. And while his party controls Congress, he is not Congress. He is a minority President, who ought to be working to lead a nation the majority of whom don’t share his policies.

Censorship/Free Speech

• These truths are about the nature of race and gender.

• These truths are about the necessary function of religious substructures.

• These truths are about the significant moral superiority of our world versus, for example, the Islamic World.

• These truths are about key the issues of our time — about matters like fetal development, the “wage gap,” the transgender movement and more.

• Here, down in the Hive, when the news broke, people were, as was to be expected, up in arms. A contract had been awarded to XNexSt. It was for a system for monitoring citizens which would also create a unified registry system for the identification and targeting of deviants — you know, those who are threats to society, those who do not belong to civil groups, those who refuse to belong to communities, those who refuse to get jobs like the rest of us, those who refuse to play by the norms that were so clearly laid out for our collective good, you know, groups representing low proclivity to consume.

• These deviants, of course, are also those who do not belong to the clearly defined minorities, defined around gender, colour, sexual orientations, allergies – peanuts, lactose intolerance, etc – and who do not perform well on our happiness indexes. The system was meant to identify these deviants and dispose of them. Everyone must belong to a minority. And everyone must demonstrate that they are happy. Otherwise, the system cannot assign a value to them.

• Paul Alan Levy is once again reporting on stupid legal threats made by a stupid company with a stupid non-disparagement clause hidden deep in its clickwrap. In addition, there’s an apparently stupid lawyer involved.

• I do not use the word “stupid” lightly.

• First off, any company that thinks it’s a good idea to hide a non-disparagement clause in its contractual agreements deserves to be called “stupid.” There’s no better way to set your reputation on fire than to demand that customers never criticize you, no matter how terrible your goods or services are. Well, there is one “better” way: enforcing it.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Law enforcement keeps bumping into Tor, as Techdirt has reported many times over the years. So it’s understandable that the authorities are always looking for ways to subvert and circumvent the extra protection that Tor can offer its users when used properly. For obvious reasons, we don’t often get to hear exactly how they are doing that, but a fascinating post on the Dutch site Buro Jansen & Janssen purports to give some details of what happened when the country’s secret service tried to recruit a Tor admin.

• Techdirt stories about China have been relentlessly grim in recent years, offering a depressing vision of an online world under ever-greater surveillance, with correspondingly more systems for censoring every digital thought. But it’s important not to get too apocalyptic, and to remember that life goes on. Just like their counterparts in the West, people in China are using the Internet for more and more of their daily lives. Arguably a greater problem than government surveillance for most people is the lack of privacy protections under Chinese law, which has led to highly-personal online information routinely being gathered and sold by third parties.

• In this context, the Caixin site has details of what it calls a “landmark privacy case” that may help to rein in some of that widespread abuse. The original complaint was brought by Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, against an erstwhile partner, Maimai, which offers an enterprise chat app of the same name.

• The Children’s commissioner has warned that children as young as eight are signing up to social media terms and conditions without reading or understanding the agreements they are entering.

• Let’s be honest, that probably goes for a lot of adults too – and most of these lengthy legal documents that we never bother to read include some rather unexpected clauses. Here are some of the more wide-reaching and most bizarre.

• Last week, President Trump signed an executive order affecting the privacy rights of non-US citizens with respect to data residing in the US.

• [...]

• At issue is the EU-US Privacy Shield, which is the voluntary agreement among the US government, US companies, and the EU that makes it possible for US companies to store Europeans’ data without having to follow all EU privacy requirements.

• Belgium has sealed an agreement with France and the Netherlands to draw up passenger lists and introduce passport checks on Thalys and Eurostar international rail services.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Should what’s on your Facebook page be a factor in determining whether you’re allowed to re-enter the United States? That’s a question to ponder in the wake of President Donald Trump’s ban on immigration that began on Friday.

• Border patrol agents are checking the Facebook accounts of people who are being held in limbo for approval to enter the US, according to a Saturday tweet by immigration lawyer Mana Yegani that was spotted by The Independent.

• At some points, up to 1,000 people a minute were signing a petition backing the permanent cancellation of the trip later this year, to avoid causing the monarch “embarrassment” over the ban on visitors to the US from seven mainlyMuslim countries.

• Having started on Saturday with just 60 signatures, the petition quickly gained more than 100,000 – the threshold that means MPs will consider holding a Commons debate – and had last night soared above 500,000.

• A new study from the Austrian Academy of Sciences shows that 40 percent of refugees in Austria believe religious commandments take precedence over the nation’s laws, prompting the country’s foreign minister to push for a rigorous new integration package.

• The Gambia’s new President Adama Barrow has removed “Islamic” from the official name of his country pledging more reforms in the tiny West African nation. In his first press conference since taking over as leader, Barrow said he would soon be overhauling government institutions to make the administration more effective.

• “The rule of the law, that will be the order of the day,” said Barrow, adding that The Gambia, where Muslims constitute 90% of the population, would no longer be an “Islamic republic”. The word “Islamic” was added to the country’s name in 2015.

• Calling on the nation to unite, the 51-year-old former businessman promised to develop the country by implementing a series of democratic reforms.

• The lone suspect has been identified as Alexandre Bissonnette, 27. There’s no evidence he overlaps with the groups of people Trump’s executive order seeks to ban from the US.

• [...]

• Trump’s travel ban, signed last Friday, created immediate chaos at airports as travellers and border officials struggled to figure out who was, and wasn’t, allowed into the United States. It was later confirmed that Canadian citizens would not be affected by the ban.

• Senator Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department, once praised a 1924 immigration law whose chief author in the House once declared was intended to end “indiscriminate acceptance of all races.”

• Sessions has long been a proponent of immigration restriction, and was one of the first to back Trump’s call on a ban on Muslims entering the United States during the primary.

• Mike covered Twitter’s release of two FBI NSLs it had received in the last few years — more evidence that the USA Freedom Act, if nothing else, has made review of NSL gag orders more timely and the orders themselves more easily challenged.

• Not that there hasn’t been significant pushback from Twitter along the way. The social media platform sued the government in 2014, claiming that the de facto government-imposed secrecy was a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights.

• In the wake of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI assumes an importance and influence it has not wielded since J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972. That is what makes today’s batch of stories from The Intercept, The FBI’s Secret Rules, based on a trove of long-sought confidential FBI documents, so critical: It shines a bright light on the vast powers of this law enforcement agency, particularly when it comes to its ability to monitor dissent and carry out a domestic war on terror, at the beginning of an era highly likely to be marked by vociferous protest and reactionary state repression.

• Secret FBI rules allow agents to obtain journalists’ phone records with approval from two internal officials — far less oversight than under normal judicial procedures.

• The classified rules, obtained by The Intercept and dating from 2013, govern the FBI’s use of national security letters, which allow the bureau to obtain information about journalists’ calls without going to a judge or informing the news organization being targeted. They have previously been released only in heavily redacted form.

• Media advocates said the documents show that the FBI imposes few constraints on itself when it bypasses the requirement to go to court and obtain subpoenas or search warrants before accessing journalists’ information.

• The rules stipulate that obtaining a journalist’s records with a national security letter requires the signoff of the FBI’s general counsel and the executive assistant director of the bureau’s National Security Branch, in addition to the regular chain of approval. Generally speaking, there are a variety of FBI officials, including the agents in charge of field offices, who can sign off that an NSL is “relevant” to a national security investigation.

• There is an extra step under the rules if the NSL targets a journalist in order “to identify confidential news media sources.” In that case, the general counsel and the executive assistant director must first consult with the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

• But if the NSL is trying to identify a leaker by targeting the records of the potential source, and not the journalist, the Justice Department doesn’t need to be involved.

• If the FBI had its way, the infiltration loopholes would still be secret. They are detailed in a mammoth document obtained by The Intercept, an uncensored version of the bureau’s governing rulebook, the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, or DIOG. The 2011 edition of the book, which covers everything from wiretapping to how to read Miranda rights, was made public in redacted form thanks to a lawsuit brought by civil liberties groups. Beneath the FBI’s redaction marks were exceptions to rules on “undisclosed participation” that could be easy to exploit.

• Carlson said the only time families and lawyers receive information is when detainees are released. Other than that, there’s much confusion.

• “They’re having a very hard time,” she said. “They’re not getting information until someone is released from detention.”

• Others who were detained included green card holders and people from Jordan, Vietnam and India, according to Meena Nanji representing the ACLU.

• President Trump is poised on Tuesday to announce his nominee to the Supreme Court, a decision certain to touch off a bruising ideological clash that could shape his presidency and have sweeping consequences for American law.

• Mr. Trump is scheduled to reveal his choice during an evening ceremony in the White House East Room. It is set to unfold in prime time, an attention-grabbing way for the president — consumed in recent days with questions about his hard-line order cracking down on immigration and refugees — to frame what conservatives and liberals see as a battle for the future of the nation’s highest court.

• You can already hear the screaming from the political left over President Donald Trump’s nomination of a conservative to the Supreme Court.

• But don’t allow yourself to be mesmerized by the flecks of spittle flying from angry mouths. Don’t worry about jesters like that Hollywood actor at the Screen Actors Guild gala who wanted to punch those who disagree with him in the face —”with soul, with heart and with joy.”

• A former military analyst and Marine who served in Vietnam, Ellsberg worked at the Rand Corp. and the Pentagon. He risked decades in prison to release 7,000 top-secret documents to The New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. The Pentagon Papers demonstrated how five presidents consistently lied to the American people about the Vietnam War that was killing thousands of Americans and millions of Indochinese.

• Ellsberg’s courageous acts led directly to the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, called Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America” who “had to be stopped at all costs.” But Ellsberg wasn’t stopped. Facing 115 years in prison on espionage and conspiracy charges, he fought back.

• Weinglass represented Ellsberg and Tony Russo, who helped Ellsberg copy the Pentagon Papers. The case was ultimately dismissed due to egregious misconduct by the Nixon administration. Ellsberg’s story was portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film, “The Most Dangerous Man in America.” Edward Snowden told Ellsberg that film strengthened his resolve to release the National Security Agency documents.

• “Inartfully applied” just means “applied.” The DOJ has “inartfully” attempted to get officers in numerous police departments to stop beating and tasing individuals simply because they weren’t immediately compliant or responded disrespectfully. It has attempted to set a reasonable suspicion standard for police stops and searches. It has attempted to prevent officers from acting in a retaliatory manner against people exercising their First Amendment rights. It has attempted to scale back excessive removals of citizens’ life and liberty by law enforcement officers. It has largely failed to do so because it encounters massive amounts of resistance, much of it led by police unions.

• And here come the unions to undo what little good has been done. The union reps say things like “inartfully applied decrees” and “wastes of money” but what they’re really saying is they would rather not have to be limited by the rights of others. And, according to Trump’s own statement, the President himself has little respect for the rights of non-badge-wearing individuals.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has taken his predecessor’s cable TV set-top box plan off the table.

• The proposal from former Chairman Tom Wheeler was officially “on circulation,” meaning that commissioners could vote on it at any time. That was the case until Friday, when Pai removed the set-top box proposal from the list of items on circulation, an FCC official confirmed. (Pai also removed a Wheeler proposal to lower the price caps for business data services.)

• Republican members of Congress had previously asked Pai to close the set-top box proceeding entirely. But while Wheeler’s proposal can no longer be voted upon, the proceeding is still open, and Pai could circulate an alternative proposal. There’s no word on whether he has any plans to do so, though.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The (still) new Librarian of Congress created a bit of a fuss last year in effectively forcing the existing Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante, (the head of the US Copyright Office) out of a job. Pallante has since (of course) found a new gig heading up an industry trade group, the Association of American Publishers, with a fairly long history of being against the public, against the internet, against the blind and against fair use.

• The removing of Pallante kciked off a bunch of ridiculous conspiracy theories that made little sense and had almost no basis in reality. It’s pretty clear that Pallante was removed from her job because she had actively, and publicly, reached out to Congress to ask that she no longer have to report to Hayden. That seems like fairly basic insubordination and a fairly standard reason why a boss might fire you.

• Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden invites the public to provide input to the Library of Congress on expertise needed by the Register of Copyrights. Beginning today, December 16, an online survey is open to the public. The survey will be posted through January 31, 2017.

• With more than two billion downloads, VLC is one of the most popular media players around. The open source tool can play virtually every video file available and comes recommended by many, including some pirate sites. The latter has drawn the attention of France’s Tax Investigation Branch, which suggested that VideoLAN might be doing ‘shady’ deals. Luckily, they soon admitted their mistake.

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