● 02.03.17

● Links 3/2/2017: New Stable/LTS Linux Releases, Olimex DIY Laptop Kit Launches

Posted in News Roundup at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Derrik Diener today said that a lot of Mac users jumped ship recently and he has some Linux suggestions for them. Adam Shepherd shared his list of best distributions for desktop users, enterprise servers, and security buffs. Most of his picks are very familiar. Elsewhere, GIMPer Alexandre Prokoudine blogged of the 2.10 blockers and Mozilla has pulled the plug on Firefox OS. In case you missed it, LibreOffice 5.3 was announced yesterday with the most features ever in a single release and Carla Schroder posted a quick down and dirty tutorial to becoming an Arch user.

• A few months ago we reported that the “devil was in the details” about how Sony Playstation 3 owners could go about getting either $9 or $55 from Sony as part of a class-action settlement over a 2010 software update that removed the ability to run Linux on the popular gaming consoles.

Desktop

• One of the biggest reasons that GNU/Linux and Debian in particular gelled with me was that it’s incredibly flexible and generous. Nobody tells me which packages I should or shouldn’t have. I do right things, good, I do something wrong, an opportunity to learn and hopefully learn from my mistakes. In either case, one of the most forgiving kind of system to learn and hack on.

• Ever wonder where all of the Android tablets went?

• Lately, it seems like it’s just Amazon and a few other manufacturers keeping the good ship afloat. And, as it turns out, there’s a likely explanation for the recent quiet in a sector where there was once an endless flurry of options.

• Chromebooks. Yep, Chromebooks. Google announced that all 2017 models will run Android apps. So what’s the point of a tablet anymore?

• In late 2016 Apple released a new Macbook that they stated would be everything everyone wanted. The result was that the public wasn’t so happy with it. People found themselves needing to use dongles for everything, even SD card readers. The escape key and top command keys were replaced with a gimmicky “touch bar,” and as a result the Macbook had a lukewarm reception.

• As a result of all this, Linux PC manufacturer System76 reported getting the highest amount of Mac switchers in its history. It’s safe to say that when it comes to macOS, the honeymoon is over. Longtime users are starting to get fed up with Apple from the way they force everyone to use dongles, to their amateur file system, to the way their operating system takes away advanced functions longtime users are used to using.

• Hey folks! Here is the new year of 2017. As a new year comes we all are excited to know what is new in the world of Linux. Whether you are a newbie or a regular user we want to know which are the best and awesome distro for this year to have a new experience. So Here am I who is gonna help you to see and choose the best Linux distro to try in 2017.

• My base of selection of OS will depend on updates, stability, standout features so that my readers can get the best experience without any problem.

Kernel Space

• Jiri Slaby is announcing the release of the 70th maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series, which will be supported for a few more months in 2017.

• It’s time to upgrade the Linux kernel packages of our GNU/Linux distributions once more, as renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman today, February 2, 2017, announced the release of Linux kernel 4.9.7.

• While still not marked as “longterm” on the kernel.org website, the Linux 4.9 kernel series recently become LTS (Long Term Support), which means that it will be supported with security patches for a couple of years. It also means that OS vendors need to adopt the Linux 4.9 kernel series for their distros as soon as possible. Arch Linux and Solus are already powered by Linux kernel 4.9, so make sure you update your PCs right now.

• Immediately after announcing the availability of Linux kernel 4.9.7, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the immediate availability of the forty-sixth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.

• Linux 4.4 is currently the most popular LTS (Long Term Support) kernel branch, used by popular GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Alpine Linux, openSUSE Leap 42.2, as well as Arch Linux. Just like today’s Linux 4.9.7 kernel release, Linux kernel 4.4.46 LTS comes one week after the previous maintenance update to change a total of 32 files, with 152 insertions and 81 deletions.

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.9.7 kernel.

• All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

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

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has released a new beta of their Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux.

• Waking up this morning, Mesa has been trimmed up by over 58,000 lines of code.

• Mesa has been reduced in size since the Intel ILO Gallium3D driver has been retired from Mesa and sailed off into the sunset.

Benchmarks

Applications

• The oVirt project has announced their major v4.1 release with a lot of new functionality. The oVirt project is an alternative to VMWare’s vSphere for open-source virtualization management.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard is informing Softpedia today about the availability of a new snapshot of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.7 web browser, due for release sometime next week.

• Earlier this week we reported that Vivaldi 1.7 is just around the corner and will let you share things more efficiently thanks to a new functionality added to the built-in screenshot tool that allows insertion of certain areas of a web page on the web browser’s Notes feature. And now, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.7.735.29 is here to introduce a brand-new history panel.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• This newer additions has some improved graphics and new audio tracks, the previous version was not available for Linux.

• Linux users will be able to enjoy Full Throttle Remastered this year, but not until after the Windows version has released.

• We have been waiting for longer than expected, but GSC Game World will be delivering Cossacks 3 [Steam, GOG] for Linux on March 15th.

• Feral Interactive, the veritable heroes of Mac and Linux gaming, confirm a Dirt Rally Linux version, releasing next month.

• Codemasters recently announced that Dirt 4 is in the advanced stages of development, with a launch date set for June. That’s not to say that last year’s version of the game, 2016’s Dirt Rally is finished with yet, though.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The time has come for users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system to update their systems as openSUSE Project’s Douglas DeMaio informed the community today, February 2, 2017, about the availability of multiple updated packages.

• Today Plasma 5.9.0 became available in KDE neon User Edition. With it comes the return of global menus along with other awesome sauce features.

• To enable global menus open System Settings, go into the Application Style category, and in the Widget Style settings you will find a tab called Fine Tuning. On this tab you can find the new Menubar options. You can change to either a Title Bar Button, which will tuck the menu into a tiny button into the window decoration bar at the top, or the Application Menu widget, allowing the associated Plasma panel to supply the menu in a fixed location.

Distributions

• Ready to give your old computer a new lease on life? Even if it’s several years old and slow as molasses, you don’t have to consign it the junk heap. Instead, install a new operating system and put it back into the rotation.

• Forget Windows, though: Linux is an open-source (and free) OS that’s just as capable, but with lower system requirements and fewer security issues. Deploy it and your old desktop or laptop will feel very much like new.

• For most users venturing down this road for the first time, the biggest challenge lies in deciding which version (aka distribution, or “distro”) of Linux to choose. There are literally hundreds of them, all with similar underpinnings but often vastly different user interfaces, application bundles, update frequency, support options and so on. So how do you pick?

Gentoo Family

• Calculate Linux developer Alexander Tratsevskiy announced today, February 2, 2017, the general availability of an official Cinnamon edition of his Gentoo-based Calculate Linux 17 operating system.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• This is our first post in 2017 and looks like we must start apologizing. In our previous post we promised news about this blog, but the administrative part slowed us down and the surprise is still not ready. On the bright side, we have quite some news about YaST. So let’s go for it!

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat added the partnership will facilitate research, incubated projects and fellowship and internship programs for students and visiting scientists as part of efforts to integrate academic research and with open source technology.

• The agreement will also support research efforts from Red Hat and Boston University communities through the Red Hat Emerging Technology Lab at BU.

Finance

Fedora

• Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests (for x86_64 only), and also as base packages.

Debian Family

• If you run Debian or one of its derivatives like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, sooner or later you come across apt-get and dpkg, the main commands for package management. However, these are only the most common Debian package tools. Over the years, Debian has evolved literally dozens of scripts and tools to make installing and configuring packages easier.

• Many of these scripts and tools aid in creating packages. However, many are useful for everyday users, too. Often, they include features you simply won’t find in desktop tools.

• Here are nine of the most useful package management tools in Debian. Most should be available in Debian-derivatives as well…

Derivatives

• The Amnesic Incognito Live System, also known more simply as Tails, is a privacy-focused Linux distribution loaded with tools and features to help users stay somewhat anonymous on the internet. Tails first rose to prominence in 2013 as the Linux distribution used by U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and reached the 1.0 milestone in April 2014. The latest Tails release is version 2.10, which became generally available Jan. 24, providing users with security patches and some incremental feature updates. Among the new features in the Tails 2.10 release is the Onion Share anonymous file-sharing tool. Staying anonymous online is a core element of Tails, thanks to the integration with the Tor (The Onion Router) network technology. Tor also is updated in the Tails 2.10 release, to version 0.2.9.9 and the included Tor Browser, which is based on Mozilla’s Firefox, is updated to version 6.5. To help protect users against online tracking in advertisements, Tails 2.10 now includes the uBlock Origin plugin with the Tor Browser, replacing the AdBlock Plus plugin that had been in previous releases. This slide show examines the important features of the Tails 2.10 release.

• A week ago, we introduced our readers to the Tails 2.10 anonymous live system based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and designed for those who want to stay invisible online and keep their anonymity.

• Today, I have released the first beta for Tails 3.0, that will be the first version of Tails based on Debian 9 (Stretch).

• Our automated test suite pretends it works pretty well and matches our safety expectations. I’m inclined to trust it. But as we learned after porting Tails to Squeeze, Wheezy and Jessie: quick, exploratory testing of pre-releases will not identify all the remaining regressions.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The development of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system continues at a fast pace, and Ubuntu Kernel team is hard at work these days testing the latest Release Candidates of Linux 4.10 kernel.

• Canonical’s Mir developers are working to get Mir 1.0 released in 2017 and in preparation for that stable milestone they have just landed a number of API changes.

• Just a few days ago we were talking about the Mir 0.26 features while the latest Mir happenings is a number of API changes. Today there were a number of new APIs published for the Mir client library, the Mir render surface APIs were deprecated, and other API changes.

• For developers packaging their software in Snaps for Ubuntu and other supported operating systems, Snapcraft 2.26 is now available.

Devices/Embedded

• Kontron has shipped three COM Express Basic and Compact Type 6 modules with Intel’s 7th Gen Kaby Lake CPUs, up to 32GB DDR4, and extended temp support. Kontron has stepped up to Intel’s “Kaby Lake” generation by launching three COM Express Type 6 modules supporting the latest 7th Generation Intel Core and Xeon processors.

• Based on the company’s successful range of single-board computers for educational, embedded, and industrial use, the Teres I laptop isn’t likely to win any awards for performance. At its heart is a quad-core 64-bit AllWinner A64 system-on-chip (SoC) based on the ARM Cortex-A53 core, linked to 1GB of RAM and with 4GB of eMMC flash storage. This is then linked to a keyboard, touchpad, and 11.6in 1,366 x 768 LCD display with webcam and housed in a compact chassis with a 7000mAh battery to keep it running.

• There are laptops that run open source software. And then there’s the Olimix Teres I laptop, which is not only designed to run Linux-based software, but which features open source hardware: you can find the CAD files necessary to build your own laptop at the project’s github page.

• Bulgarian open-source hardware outfit Olimex has released the final designs and components for DIY fans…

• The development team over at Olimex has created a new open source laptop kit in the form of the Teres I, which has been designed to provide an affordable DIY system which is supplied in kit form for around $240 or €225.

Phones

• In late December, the Korea Fair Trade Commission held Qualcomm in violation of antitrust laws, and after a reader pointed me to what appears to be Qualcomm’s unofficial translation of the decision, I promised “further discussion here at a later stage.” Then, a couple of weeks later, the United States Federal Trade Commission sought injunctions against Qualcomm (a complaint was filed in the Northern District of California). A little later, Apple brought its own lawsuit against Qualcomm (see PatentlyApple’s post, which contains the complaint, according to paragraph 4 of which Apple claims to have been “overcharged billions of dollars on Qualcomm’s illegal scheme” and now “seeks to recover its damages”).

• Its time to do the full-year smartphone numbers. I think we have just about all the data that will be made public, as increasingly many of the major players don’t release smartphone unit sales numbers, and even the number of major analyst houses who used to provide a lot of data has shrunk to two who reliably do that anymore (IDC and Strategy Analytics). So we will do our best. We do get the total market size simply as the average of the big 2 analyst houses. For Q4 that number is 433.6 Million units. It is a growth of 8% vs the same quarter one year ago. But as our industry experienced its first-ever recession earlier in the past year and for two quarters year-on-year sales actually declined, the total year turned up with only slight growth of 3%. We end the year 2016 with still not quite 1.5B smartphones sold, we reached 1,481 million, ie 1.48 Billion. So lets start with the big tables everybody wants. The Top 10 smartphone brands for year 2016:

Tizen

• Paweł Wieczorek describes how he and his colleagues at the Samsung R&D Institute Poland developed an Automated Testing Laboratory to streamline testing of Tizen Common on community-backed SBCs at ELC.

Android

• We’ll explain 15 reasons why Android is better than the iPhone with a 2017 Android vs iPhone comparison that looks at where Android is still King.

• We’re seeing more Android Nougat updates roll out, the Samsung Galaxy S8 is almost here and the LG G6 is on the way.

• On the other end of the spectrum, Apple’s iOS 11 update is set for an unveiling in June and we expect an iPhone 8 later this year.

Free Software/Open Source

• AT&T’s ECOMP platform is in production but needs more maturation. Without that progression, the carrier won’t be able to make its goal of virtualizing 75 percent of its network functions by 2020.

• AT&T made good on its plans to release its ECOMP SDN and NFV platform into the open source community through The Linux Foundation.

• AT&T officially moved on its plans to migrate its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform into the open source community through The Linux Foundation.

• The carrier said the move includes the release of source code, documentation, educational videos and a pair of sample use cases – one on virtual firewall and one on virtual domain name servers – into a public cloud for access to users and covered by the Apache 2.0 license. The code itself is said to use a continuous integration and continuous development environment and include 11 different modules set up as separate virtual machines with code in at least one container.

• Our library of 1700 research reports is available only to our subscribers. We occasionally release ones for our larger audience to benefit from. This is one such report. If you would like access to our entire library, please subscribe here. Subscribers will have access to our 2017 editorial calendar, archived reports and video coverage from our 2016 and 2017 events.

• Plus, vendors that have made major investments in MANO platforms for NFV environments are also validating NFV interoperability across their platforms. HPE, for example, has an OpenNFV partner program through which it tests and validates NFV interoperability.

• As many may know, the OSI has been involved in supporting the adoption of an open source elections system in San Francisco, California. The following is an update from Chris Jerdonek, Elections Commissioner & President of the San Francisco Elections Commission.

• We’d like to thank Chris for all of his hard work in raising awareness of open source software and its value for elections as well as keeping all of us up to date on the latest developments. If you’d like to learn more about the project, please contact Chris directly.

• Thus far in the Community Metrics Playbook column, I’ve discussed the importance of setting goals to guide the metrics process, outlined the general types of metrics that are useful for studying your community, and reviewed technical details of available tools. As you are deciding which metrics to track for your community, having a deeper understanding of each area is important so you not only choose good metrics, but also understand and plan for what to do when the numbers don’t line up with expectations.

Events

• Thorsten Leemhuis gave a talk about What’s up in Kernel Land. This was a general overview about new features and patches that are coming into the Linux kernel targeted at non-kernel developers. I was not the target audience but the talk was fantastic. It was easy to follow and gave a good picture of what the kernel community is doing. I appreciate when non-kernel developers give talks about the kernel since kernel developers can be a bit myopic in our topics (myself included).

• Excited for FOSDEM 2017? FOSDEM, or the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, is held every year in late January or early February. This year, FOSDEM is taking place on February 4th and 5th. At this year’s conference, an estimated 8,000 or more attendees are expected. As one of the largest open source conferences in Europe, there are many Fedora Project developers and representatives attending the event. In addition to our community stand, you will find 24 speakers from the community giving talks over the weekend. This post gives a quick way for you to find out who is speaking and where to find them in FOSDEM!

• It’s that time of year again for a new iteration of FOSDEM! FOSDEM, or the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, is held every year in late January or early February in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM 2017 is taking place over this coming weekend on February 4th and 5th. At this year’s conference, an estimated 8,000 or more attendees are expected. Several open source contributors, communities, and projects are represented at this event.

• As one of the largest open source conferences in Europe, there are many Fedora Project developers and representatives attending the event. In addition to our community stand, you will find 24 speakers from the community giving talks over the weekend. If you’re getting ready to make it into Brussels, here’s how to keep Fedora a part of your weekend.

• A couple of weekends ago, Kanika Murarka and I (Sumantro Mukherjee) went down to the Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering (SJCE) in Mysore, India to give a talk on GitHub and web virtual reality (VR) on their annual open source fest, FOSS Camp.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Fresh off last week’s release of Chrome 56 with WebGL 2.0 by default, FLAC audio support, and more, is now the Chrome 57 beta.

Mozilla

• Mozilla has laid off a team of about 50 people working on bringing Firefox OS to “connected devices” and is ending its attempts to build a commercial platform for such devices reports CNet.

• Firefox OS originally started life as Mozilla’s attempt at a smartphone platform. The ambition was to create a free and open source platform that used Web technology to build applications, suitable for low cost phones in emerging markets. Although a few products did materialize, Firefox OS was rapidly squeezed out by Android, so just over a year ago Mozilla repositioned the operating system. Instead of being a smartphone platform, it was aimed at devices such as smart TVs.

• Busy with all of January’s excitement, I finally now spent more time looking at the Firefox 52 Beta. Some of the feature additions to Firefox 52 include the ability to send/open a tab from one device to another with Firefox Sync, pages with insecure password fields are now clearly marked as insecure, NPAPI support has been removed for Firefox plugins except for Adobe Flash, an implementation of the Strict Secure Cookies specification, an improved file downloading experience, changes to the responsive design mode, and enabling of the CSS Grid Layout.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Open source’s premiere office suite keeps getting better with each new release. Here’s a look at some of the new features in LibreOffice 5.3.

CMS

• A couple of weeks ago I moved my WordPress blogs from a trivial shared hosting to a more sophisticated VPS running CentOS 7 since I was in search of more flexibility from my server.

• During these days, I learned a lot about managing a web server on my own and I’m still currently learning a ton of interesting things about this topic.

• One of the most annoying problems I faced a couple of days ago concerned, in particular, my WordPress installation. Everytime I was trying to update its core and plugins, the dashboard showed me a message similar to this…

• WordPress, what a CMS right? So many available plugins, themes, and tutorials. More than 27% of world websites are powered by a WordPress CMS. A staggering statistic which kinda indicates the level of functionality and flexibility it offers to webmasters. A complete website solution with an easy-to-use aura surrounding it.

• Chances are that while you are reading this another WordPress website has been launched into the vast ocean of information we call the Internet. Hell, you’ve probably reached this article by researching about WordPress after hearing that Joe from high school is making tons of money with his WordPress sites.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A new stable release of the open-source and cross-platform GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) image editor and viewer arrived recently for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

• The GEGL/GIMP team have decided some details concerning GIMP 2.10 as well as the future GIMP updates with GTK3, which may now be GTK4 instead.

• During WilberWeek 2017 in Barcelona, the GEGL/GIMP team discussed further development plans.

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF), which many of us on the open source scene instantly associate with Richard Stallman, has remained a steady champion of certain technology project concepts that are driven forward with purpose and good intent. One of the ways it recognizes such projects is through its High Priority Projects list.

• Now, The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced a major update to its High Priority Free Software Projects (HPP) list. The latest revision of the list includes nine project areas, encompassing software projects, advancements in free software-compatible hardware, and efforts to expand and deepen the inclusivity of the free software community. Also, there is now a changelog to document revisions to the list. The committee published a full explanation of its work in March, and several members of the committee shared its findings at last year’s LibrePlanet conference.

Public Services/Government

• The General Services Administration’s 18F organization has received a provisional authority-to-operate under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program to offer a cloud platform to federal agencies.

• 18F’s cloud.gov has now been authorized by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, making it the first fully open-sourced solution to complete the process, the General Services Administration announced Thursday.

• By sharing and reusing IT solutions public sector organisations can build interoperable and standardised services, while lowering costs.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Open data supporters have expressed trepidation over a new House bill that states Federal agencies will no longer be able to use geospatial information to create open databases on racial disparities and affordable housing.

• HR 482, or the Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017, moved to the House Committee on Financial Services on Jan. 12. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, sponsored the bill, which would render Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) ineffective. AFFH, a 2015 ruling of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), requires certain HUD grantees to conduct an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) planning process.

• Wallonia wants to modernise government service delivery and make it ‘digital by default’. It has created a online enterprise portal, aggregating 18 existing services. It has also made the first 150 government data sets publicly available on its open data portal and overhauled its geoportal, providing access to all of the region’s geodata.

Open Access/Content

• Openness invites greater participation and it takes advantage of the shared energy of collaborators. The strength of openly created educational resources comes paradoxically from the vulnerability of the shared experience of that creation process.

• One of the leaders in Open Educational Resources (OER) is Billy Meinke, educational technologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The University’s open creation model uses Pressbooks, which Billy tells me more about in this interview.

Programming/Development

• The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.15.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

• Although Serverless has become a bit of a buzzword recently, Steven Faulkner, Director of Platform Engineering at Bustle, disagrees that it is just a fad. In his talk at Node.js Interactive, he points out that much of the faults that people find in Serverless — that it doesn’t scale, that it is not production ready, that it’s too slow and expensive — are provenly false.

• This talk from Node.js Interactive provides concrete knowledge of what going serverless really means, so you can decide if it makes sense for your own infrastructure.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Earlier this week we posted Linux benchmarks of the Intel Pentium G4600 as a 3.6GHz processor for around $90 USD. It was an interesting processor for the value, but if your wallet is tighter, the Celeron G3930 is selling for about $40 as a dual-core sub-3GHz Kabylake processor. Here are those test results.

Health/Nutrition

• Hundreds of young girls in Kenya’s ethnic Kuria community will be spared female genital mutilation (FGM) in 2017 because of a superstition that the number seven is unlucky, campaigners say.

• They called on the government to take advantage of the suspension to step up education around the ritual, which can cause serious health problems.

• The Kuria, who number around 260,000 in southwest Kenya, normally cut girls in the school holidays in December. The break means they are unlikely to resume the ritual until the end of 2018.

• Kenya is fighting female genital mutilation by sheltering at-risk girls at a boarding school in the Maasai region.

• Deputy head teacher Lucy Itore has rescued more than 100 girls and sheltered them at the Ilbisil Boarding Primary School in Kajiado, where the Maasai live and practice FGM.

• FGM is a cultural practice that practitioners say ensures a girl’s purity and eligibility for marriage. A family member or practitioner often performs the cutting and mutilation of a girl’s genitals.

• Sometimes the cut removes the clitoris. Sometimes the vulva is sliced and sewn up, leaving a small channel. Sometimes all a girl’s external genitalia are removed.

• Moving to dismantle former President Barack Obama’s legacy on the environment and other issues, House Republicans approved a measure Wednesday that scuttles a regulation aimed at preventing coal mining debris from being dumped into nearby streams.

• Lawmakers also voted to rescind a separate rule requiring companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments relating to mining and drilling.

• Part of the reform of the organisation is to find ways to make the meetings of its governing bodies more efficient. Proposals to put a cap on the number of agenda items or to reduce the time for interventions were not approved this week. Separately, some members raised concerns at the characterisation of an advisory group to the director general, and remarked that the director general bears sole responsibility for her decisions.

Security

• Chacha20 is a secure, fast, and amazingly simple encryption algorithm. It’s author Daniel J. Bernstein explains it well in his Salsa20 and Chacha20 design papers (which I recommend), but did not dwell on details experts already know. Filling the gap took me a while.

• Quick summary: Chacha20 is ARX-based hash function, keyed, running in counter mode. It embodies the idea that one can use a hash function to encrypt data.

• These sorts of attacks are becoming more commonplace and, as mentioned before, can be avoided with good backup practices. Sadly not every computer in every hospital, county office or police department is connected to a nicely journaled and spacious hard drive, so these things will happen more and more. Luckily it improves cryptocurrency popularity as these small office finally give up and buy bitcoin to pay their ransom.

• HackerHouse have been investigating social engineering attacks performed with Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected media content. Attackers have been performing these attacks in the wild to spread fake codec installers since Microsoft introduced DRM to it’s proprietary media formats. Despite their prevalence we could not find many tools to misuse these formats. We found only a small number of blog posts [2] on identifying the files being used to spread malware. We observed some interesting behaviours during our analysis which we have shared here. DRM is a licensing technology that attempts to prevent unauthorised distribution and restrictive use of a media file. It works by encrypting the video and audio streams with an encryption key and requesting a license (decryption key) from a network server when the file is accessed. As it requires network connectivity it can cause users to make network requests without consent when opening a media file such as a video file or audio file. WMV is using Microsoft Advanced Systems Format (ASF) to store audio and video as objects. This file format consists of objects that are labelled by GUID and packed together to make a media package. A number of tools such as ffmpeg & ASFView support opening, viewing and browsing these objects. There are three objects with the following GUID’s which are of interest for these attacks.

• With the Internet of Things, we’re building a world-size robot. How are we going to control it?

• A team made of former Cisco and Nuage Networks veterans has developed an open source project it released this week named Trireme that takes an application-centric approach to securing code written in containers.

• Linux is well known for being a highly secure platform. One of the reasons for said security is the Netfilter system. For those that don’t know, Netfilter is a framework, provided by the Linux kernel, that allows for various networking operations, such as packet filtering, network address translations, port translation, and the ability to block packets from reaching specific locations. For most distributions, Netfilter is implemented through the user-space application, iptables. Although many would agree that iptables is the most powerful security tool you can work with, along with that power comes a level of complexity that stumps many an IT administrator.

• That’s where the likes of Shorewall comes into play. Shorewall is an open source firewalling tool that not only makes the task of network security easier, it also allows for much easier handling of zones. Shorewall uses zones to define different portions of a network. Say, for instance, you want to create a private internal network that can only be accessed by specific machines, a guest network that can be accessed by anyone, a network dedicated to production machines, and a network that can be accessed from machines outside your Local Area Network (LAN). With Shorewall, you can easily do this.

Defence/Aggression

• Donald Trump defended his unpredictable approach to foreign policy, which has shaken the political establishment and roiled activists across the country, during a speech at the annual interfaith prayer breakfast in Washington on Thursday.

• Just five days after taking office, over dinner with his newly installed secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Trump was presented with the first of what will be many life-or-death decisions: whether to approve a commando raid that risked the lives of American Special Operations forces and foreign civilians alike.

• President Barack Obama’s national security aides had reviewed the plans for a risky attack on a small, heavily guarded brick home of a senior Qaeda collaborator in a mountainous village in a remote part of central Yemen. But Mr. Obama did not act because the Pentagon wanted to launch the attack on a moonless night and the next one would come after his term had ended.

• White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer asserted at Thursday’s press briefing that Iran had attacked a U.S. naval vessel, as part of his argument defending the administration’s bellicose announcement that Iran is “on notice.”

• National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Wednesday said he was “officially putting Iran on notice” following the country’s ballistic missile test and an attack on a Saudi naval vessel by Houthi rebels in Yemen (the Houthis are tenuously aligned with Iran’s government but are distinct from it).

• The White House press corps wanted to know what being put “on notice” entailed, and Spicer responded by claiming that Iran’s government took actions against a U.S. naval vessel, which would be an act of war. “I think General Flynn was really clear yesterday that Iran has violated the Joint Resolution, that Iran’s additional hostile actions that it took against our Navy vessel are ones that we are very clear are not going to sit by and take,” he said. “I think that we will have further updates for you on those additional actions.”

• Norwegian journalist Eirik Vold identifies current vice presidential candidate for the right-wing CREO party as a key U.S. contact in the country.

• In his new book, “Ecuador In the Sights: The WikiLeaks Revelations and the Conspiracy Against the Government of Rafael Correa,” released this week in Quito, Norwegian journalist Eirik Vold details attempts by the U.S. government to topple Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa and derail his Citizens’ Revolution.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• What’s up, FBI? Back in early 2015, when the FBI and (specifically) Director James Comey ramped up their silly “going dark” moral panic about how strong encryption was making us less safe, I sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI for all of the FBI’s internal talking points about “going dark” or other views on encryption. My main reason for this was really to see if I might uncover some of the reasoning for why the FBI had quietly deleted a page on its website that encouraged people to encrypt their phones. It took until May of last year, but the FBI finally delivered me a stack of talking points, mostly focused on talking point lists and speeches given by Comey. I never wrote about it because the talking points alone weren’t even that interesting.

• In fact, I’d almost totally forgotten about that entire request. But then, a few weeks ago, right here on this site, Tim Cushing wrote about the latest escapades of Jason Leopold, the reporter whose use of FOIA requests is so prolific that he’s been dubbed a “FOIA terrorist” by the DOJ. It turns out that Leopold had made a similar request to the FBI… and was told that while they had found 487 responsive records, they were giving him a grand total of 0 of them, because they were all subject to restrictions on release. In that article, Cushing, rightly explains why this is ridiculous. The whole point of “talking points” is to share them with the public. There is simply no FOIA exemption that allows for blocking them.

• Spies and civil servants who leak national security secrets face up to 14 years in jail, in a major overhaul of the Official Secrets Act in the face of the growing threat from Russia, the Daily Telegraph has learnt.

• Foreign spies who steal information from the Government and leak it overseas, or those who snoop on British embassies, will also face prosecution in British courts for the first time, under plans to be considered by ministers.

• Under the proposals, which are published today, officials who leak “sensitive information” about the British economy that damages national security could also be jailed.

• Scott Pruitt is on his way to approval as Donald Trump’s environment chief after Republican senators waved him through a committee vote on Thursday.

• The controversial choice, who as Oklahoma attorney general sued the Environmental Protection Agency he is about to lead, got through despite a Democrat boycott. He is expected to pass a full senate vote next week.

• Even before he takes up the position, mentions of climate cooperation have been scrubbed from the EPA website, in a clear signal of intent from the new US administration.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• In the small hours of Thursday morning, US congressman Jason Chaffetz announced that he would withdraw a bill he introduced last week that would have ordered the incoming secretary of the interior to immediately sell off 3.3m acres of national land.

• Chaffetz, a representative from Utah, wrote on Instagram that he had a change of heart in the face of strong opposition from “groups I support and care about” who, he said, “fear it sends the wrong message”.

• House bill 621 had ignited a firestorm of indignation from conservationists but also from hunters and fishermen, who contribute to the $646bn generated by outdoor recreation across the US each year.

• “Once that bill was introduced, the hornet’s nest was kicked,” said Land Tawney, president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a group that supported public land rallies in opposition. “What happened last week was just a small fraction of the ire the sportsman community has been feeling.”

• The original Earth Day is seen by many as a turning point in the environmental movement. The year itself also marks a major turning point for the U.S. government and environmental policy. In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence and it began operating that December.

• Lawmakers in the House of Representatives voted 235-187 on Wednesday to repeal an anti-corruption rule included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, as regulations on industry come into Republican crosshairs.

• The Cardin-Lugar amendment required oil, gas, and mining companies to publicly disclose all payments made to the governments of foreign countries where they operate. Subject to disclosure are taxes, royalties, licensing fees, and a wide range of other project-level payments.

• The push to repeal seems to reflect the Republican Party’s shift away from expansive foreign-policy idealism and toward a business-first approach. And it highlights the United States’ retreat from the forefront of international transparency efforts, amid extractive-industry legal challenges that delayed the amendment’s finalization until 2015.

• Some supermarkets are rationing the number of iceberg lettuce and broccoli customers can buy – blaming poor growing conditions in southern Europe for a shortage in UK stores.

• Tesco is limiting shoppers to three iceberg lettuces, as bad weather in Spain caused “availability issues”.

• Morrisons has a limit of two icebergs to stop “bulk buying”, and is limiting broccoli to three heads per visit.

• Prices have also risen, with Lidl’s iceberg lettuce up to £1.19 from 42p.

• One of the bedrocks of modern culture and technological growth is the scientific method. The open transfer of peer-reviewed publications across the world leads to innovation in post-industrial and developing countries, thus increasing public awareness outside of political and partisan ideology.

• However, Doug Ericksen, communications director for President Donald Trump’s 2017 transition team at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, recently stated to the Associated Press that the new administration would mandate some existing scientific literature on the EPA’s website undergo review by political appointees before being released to the public.

• Although an EPA worker later reported to E&E News that they’ve since been told to stand down on the order — the climate-change research described by Ericksen to be put on “temporary hold” is still available online — the proposition from Ericksen and the new administration has brought up concerns in the scientific community. Many data specialists even downloaded the research files to independently preserve their contents.

Finance

• The report also noted, that at current employment levels, halving the “disability employment gap” would require an extra 1.2 million to 1.5 million disabled people to find work.

• ADOBE HAS become the latest company to hike its prices in the wake of Brexit (it says).

• The company sent out an email to Creative Cloud subscribers explaining: “Currency exchange rates have fluctuated significantly over the last few years.

• “Like many US-based global companies, Adobe is making pricing adjustments to offset fluctuations in foreign exchange rate. A number of markets have been impacted including Brazil, UK and Sweden. Existing customers will receive information about their subscription pricing directly from Adobe.

• Five years after the launch of Snapchat, Snap is planning to go public. The company filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange today, picking the ticker symbol “SNAP.” The company hopes to raise $3 billion and says it has 158 million daily active users. The IPO would reportedly value the company above $20 billion.

• The filing comes at an exciting but challenging time for Snap. The company — originally named Snapchat — has declared its intentions to become “a camera company,” rather than just an app developer. And it’s already found some success with Spectacles, its fun pair of video-recording sunglasses.

• Goldman’s willingness to give Cohn a chunk of that fortune ahead of schedule is causing unease among ethics experts, who say the huge payout will make him beholden to the Wall Street firm he worked at for 25 years. They say that Cohn should have to recuse himself from Trump administration matters linked to his former firm.

• CNNMoney reported earlier this week that Goldman Sachs said Cohn was leaving with more than $100 million. A separate filing by Cohn himself shows that he’s actually leaving with around $285 million.

• Goldman Sachs (GS) is immediately paying Cohn $65 million in cash in exchange for the stock awards he earned in recent years, the company said in a filing.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The European parliament’s main political parties have made an unprecedented call for Donald Trump’s likely choice as ambassador to the EU be blocked from EU buildings.

• In a move that threatens a major diplomatic row, the leaders of the conservative and liberal groups in Brussels have written to the European commission and the European council, whose members comprise the 28 EU states, to reject the appointment of Ted Malloch. It is understood that the socialist group is also sending a letter, but a spokesman declined to comment.

• Malloch, a businessman who stridently supported Brexit ahead of the vote in June, is said to have been interviewed for the post by Trump.

• When recently asked by the BBC why he was interested in moving to Brussels, Malloch replied: “I had in a previous career a diplomatic post where I helped bring down the Soviet Union. So maybe there’s another union that needs a little taming.”

• Prince Charles has issued a warning over the “rise of populism” in a veiled apparent reference to the election of Donald Trump and increasingly hostile attitudes towards refugees in Europe.

• The Prince of Wales said there were “deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s”, adding that “evil” religious persecution was taking place across the globe.

• The “suffering doesn’t end when they arrive seeking refuge in a foreign land,” he said in the pre-recorded message for BBC Radio 4′s Thought For The Day.

• Imagine you’re a midlevel staffer in a federal department—any federal department. You come into work one morning in your drab Washington office and learn that President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that directly affects your job. Reading the order, you realize that to fulfill it, you’d need to act in a way you’re not comfortable with. In fact, the thing Trump’s asking you to do might be illegal. What now?

• Perhaps your first worried thought is of Sally Yates. When Yates announced Monday that (for “as long as I am the Acting Attorney General”) she would not defend President Trump’s ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, she was fired, of course. Yates wasn’t simply refusing to execute a policy she found unwise. She was refusing to execute one that is probably illegal, just as she assured none other than Sen. Jeff Sessions she’d do during her 2015 confirmation hearings.

• Federal employees worried that President Donald Trump will gut their agencies are creating new email addresses, signing up for encrypted messaging apps and looking for other, protected ways to push back against the new administration’s agenda.

• Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology as well as more old-fashioned approaches — such as private face-to-face meetings — to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent.

• For those who say “This is not who we are,” look again. Sadly, it’s who we’ve always been.

• President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travelers and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries is only the latest twist of dark threads that have long been present in America. The executive order is not unprecedented. It is evolutionary.

• The countries affected by Trump’s executive order – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – have been singled out under American immigration law since the days following 9/11.

• The most intellectually important essay of the 2016 election cycle, and possibly of the whole political era that has begun, is “The Flight 93 Election.” Its previously anonymous author turns out to be former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Anton, reports Michael Warren. Anton is now working as a senior national security official in the Trump administration. Anton’s role in the administration lends his signature essay all the more importance as a statement of Trumpism. The essay has many interesting aspects, which made it the subject of fervent debate during the election. But its most notable characteristic is its almost textbook justification for authoritarianism.

• The premise of democracy is that — unlike dictatorships, in which the winning side gains total and essentially permanent power — the losers can accept defeat, because they know they have a chance to win subsequent elections. Without that predicate in place, the system collapses. Anton’s essay makes the case that conservatives should support Trump because, despite his manifest flaws, they cannot survive a single election defeat.

• For sanctions-watchers, the familiar rhythm of responding to new general licenses issued by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is typically uneventful. You receive an email from OFAC announcing the measure, you momentarily consider its impact, and then return to whatever you were doing before. The era of Donald Trump, however, has injected “observe Twitter have a complete meltdown” into the cycle. I admire the passion and welcome new devotees to the exciting world of sanctions, but for today, a deep breath is required.

• So many people have been deleting their Uber accounts, the company has set up an automated process.

• #DeleteUber was trending for much of the weekend after Uber lifted surge pricing around John F Kennedy airport during protests about Trump’s ban on migration from seven Islamic nations. Whether Uber was actively attempting to counter the strike is a matter of dispute – the company ended its “surge pricing” shortly after the end of the protest – but its actions, combined with a number of other aspects of perceived support for Trump including chief executive Travis Kalanick’s membership of a presidential advisory board, proved the final straw for many.

• Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is stepping down from Donald Trump’s economic advisory council following intense criticism and an online boycott of the company over its ties to the new administration, the company confirmed Thursday.

• Travis Kalanick needed everyone to take a deep breath.

• The chief executive of Uber was holding a regularly scheduled all-hands meeting on Tuesday at the ride-hailing company’s San Francisco headquarters when he faced an onslaught of questions from upset employees.

• Uber was under attack — unfairly, many staff members believed — after people accused the company of seeking to profit from giving rides to airport customers in New York during weekend protests against President Trump’s immigration order.

• But there was another matter disturbing the employees: Mr. Kalanick himself. He had joined Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council in December. After the immigration order against refugees and seven Muslim-majority countries, many staff members wondered why Mr. Kalanick was still willing to advise the president.

• On the same day that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick stepped down from Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has justified his presence at its meetings. In a statement, Musk said that his attendance does not mean that he agrees with the current administration’s actions and that he understood objections to his presence, but that he believed “at this time that engaging on critical issues will on balance serve the greater good.”

• The Tesla boss still plans to attend the next meeting of the advisory board, where he says he — and others — will “express objections to the recent executive order on immigration.” Earlier this week, Musk said that refugees “don’t deserve to be rejected.” But rather than condemn the president’s recent executive order outright as some of his peers did, Musk turned to Twitter to crowdsource potential amendments, arguing that while there was no possibility Trump would rescind the order, he could be convinced to tweak it.

• The Senate will vote at 6:30 a.m. Friday morning to advance the nomination of Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s controversial pick to serve as secretary of Education.

• The unusual Friday morning vote will set up a final vote on DeVos for Monday or Tuesday where Vice President Pence may have to cast the deciding vote.

• Defections by two GOP senators — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — have given the GOP zero margin for error.

• But it does not appear that opponents of DeVos have succeeded in picking off another GOP vote.

• Billionaire charter school advocate Eli Broad sent a letter to Senate leaders on Wednesday calling for them to oppose President Donald Trump’s choice for education secretary, Betsy DeVos. In the letter written to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Broad said he watched DeVos’ confirmation hearing with “dismay” and listed several of his top concerns with her nomination.

• A speech by conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled at UC Berkeley on Wednesday amid violent protests that prompted President Trump to suggest cutting federal funding to the university.

• “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Trump wrote on Twitter.

• Little-known editorial cartoons by Dr. Seuss re-emerged online this past week, as critics of President Donald Trump’s order on immigration and refugees drew parallels between the beloved children’s author’s warnings and America’s current political climate.

• The cartoon most spread across social media depicts a woman reading a story about “Adolf the Wolf” to two children, all three drawn in the author’s unmistakable style.

• U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday will direct the Labor Department to delay implementation and review a rule designed to prevent conflicts of interest when advisers give retirement advice, a senior White House official said.

• “We think that they have exceeded their authority with this rule and we think this is something that is completely overreaching,” the official told reporters at a briefing on Thursday.

• Trump has pledged to sharply reduce U.S. regulations, which he says have harmed American businesses.

• Wondering what the Americans might want from Canada in a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement? Multiple clues might be embedded in a document published by the U.S. government.

• The U.S. publishes an annual list of complaints about trade practices in other countries.

• This list was cited in a policy paper written for the Trump campaign by Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro — both of whom now have senior administration roles.

• I’m all for Canada being able to supply its own food, which is the nominal intent of this policy, but it’s out of control. The other demands expected from Trump of Canada are generally inoffensive, reflecting new technology like “cloud”, except that Trump will likely insist on the right to spy on the Canadian government… which should be open anyway as we taxpayers aren’t getting enough GNU/Linux and openness as it is. Perhaps there will be some good come out of Trumpism after all, but I doubt it will balance out.

• Forty percent of registered voters support impeaching President Trump, according to a poll released Thursday from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP).

• Nearly half of voters, 48 percent, are opposed to impeaching Trump, and 12 percent remain unsure, according to the poll.

• Pollsters also found that a majority of voters, 52 percent, would prefer former President Obama in his old role rather than Trump; 43 percent prefer Trump, and 5 percent are uncertain.

• “Usually a newly elected president is at the peak of their popularity and enjoying their honeymoon after taking office,” PPP President Dean Debnam said in a statement.

• There’s a certain logic there, but it does set a worrying precedent. If there’s an official digital ambassador, why not have an energy ambassador for the giant oil and gas companies, and a drug ambassador for Big Pharma? And won’t that kind of political apparatus provide yet more ways for already influential companies to bend and shape government policy in a country — tipping the balance against ordinary people even further?

Censorship/Free Speech

• Amos Yee, the 18-year-old teenager who ran away from Singapore to seek political asylum in the United States, will remain largely unaffected by President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders aimed at temporarily barring refugees and increased detention for asylum seekers.

• According to The Straits Times, Yee’s lawyer, Sandra Grossman, said Trump’s executive order would at most indirectly affect the Singaporean’s asylum-seeking bid.

• The South China Morning Post reported that Yee’s asylum bid could be “encumbered” by Trump’s immigration order.

• Over the last few months, we’ve talked about the weird obsession some people upset by the results of the election have had with the concept of “fake news.” We warned that focusing on “fake news” as a problem was not just silly and pointless, but that it would quickly morph into calls for censorship. And, even worse, that censorship power would be in the hands of whoever got to define what “fake news” was. Thus, it was little surprise to see China and Iran quickly start using “fake news” as an excuse to crack down on dissent online.

• And, of course, just recently a pretty thorough study pointed out that “fake news” didn’t impact the election. It turns out that — just as we said — fake news didn’t really change anyone’s mind. It just served as confirmation bias.

• Either way, there are still a bunch of people who are really focused on this idea of “fake news” and how it must be stopped. The latest to step in with a suggestion is MSNBC’s chief legal correspondent Ari Melber, who is suggesting that “fake news” can be regulated by the FTC in the same way that it goes after fraudulent advertisers who put up “fake” websites pretending to be impartial news sites talking up the wonders of acai berries or whatever. To be fair to Melber, his suggestion is carefully framed and includes many of the important caveats. This isn’t a piece that’s filled with the “you can’t yell fire” kind of tropes, but it’s still problematic.

• A Senate panel voted Thursday to give student newspapers new freedom from censorship by school administrators.

• SB 1384 specifically declares that student editors — and not administrators — “are responsible for determining the content of school-sponsored media.” More to the point, the legislation would prevent administrators from censoring publications and preventing publication except under four narrow circumstances.

• The unanimous approval by the Education Committee came after a parade of student editors and advisers told lawmakers of situations where administrators had stepped in to block stories or cartoons.

• Reza Ghazinouri remembers the importance of pirate radio as a teenager growing up in in the city of Mashhad in northeast Iran. His father tuned in multiple times a day to the banned Farsi version of the BBC transmitted from neighboring countries, to hear the truth about Iranian political scandals like the impeachment of the country’s liberal minister of culture, and the shutdown of dozens of its newspapers. While Ghazinouri studied for his college entrance exams in 2003, he’d listen to the US government-funded Radio Farda coverage of student protests against university privatization. “I still remember those programs so clearly,” Ghazinouri says, “Every night I’d imagine myself protesting like the students.”

• This is how the documentary Bangalogia from Angolan artist and director Coréon Dú starts. While it might seem like a harsh place to begin a film, the rest of the documentary does a rather convincing job of explaining why Angolan vanity is, in fact, something to celebrate.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Because there’s always room for more outrage, herewith A Good American, an absolutely infuriating documentarytweet about how 9/11 could have been stopped by intelligence software the National Security Agency had in its hands but didn’t use because of “corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse” within the agency, as a lawsuit brought by its inventor alleges.

• Bill Binney resigned from the NSA in October 2001, after 30 years with the agency where he was viewed as one of their best analysts: he quit because he believed that Bush-appointed leaders in the Agency had chosen to respond to the challenge of electronic communications by building out illegal, indiscriminate mass-surveillance programs that left the country vulnerable to terrorists while diverting billions to private contractors with political connections.

• The House Judiciary Committee wants to help police track terrorists and criminals who hide using encrypted communication tools this Congress, but undermining encryption is a nonstarter, Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Wednesday.

• A bipartisan joint report from the Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees in December urged against any legislative effort to weaken the encryption that protects internet activity from prying eyes but endorsed various workarounds to help the FBI and police officers track terrorists and criminals.

• The Public Accounts Committee said ministers must “raise their game” to ensure Britain’s infrastructure could withstand a “high level cyber attack”.

• Britain is “particularly vulnerable” to cyber attacks from states like Russia which do not operate under the same legal standards, a former GCHQ deputy director of intelligence and cyber operations has warned.

• The chief technical director of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre has rebuked infosec companies for spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about hackers to sell products.

• At the Enigma 2017 conference this week, Dr Ian Levy said world-plus-dog were trying to flog security defenses to tackle “advanced persistent threats,” usually using photos of hoodie-cloaked blokes poised over a keyboard with Matrix-style green lettering in the background. But such figures – seen as untouchable, unbeatable, and untraceable – are chimeras, and it’s just “adequate pernicious toe-rags” who are doing the hacking, he argued.

• Facebook has long been able to recognize the people in your photos and sort images by where they were taken. But it hasn’t been as precise at understanding what’s actually happening in a photo. That’s now beginning to change, thanks to new developments in the Menlo Park, Calif.’s artificial intelligence software.

• Facebook says the new tech will improve its user experience in two ways. First, it’ll make it possible to search Facebook for photos based on what’s in them, rather than just by date taken, tags, or location. If you’re trying to find a photo of a paella dish you cooked last year, for example, you’ll be able to simply type “paella” in the Facebook search bar. This, Facebook hopes, will help its users quickly find images without having to remember when they were taken or how they were tagged.

• It has been confirmed that Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) – who merely lease connectivity from infrastructure providers – will not be exempted from new legislation in Thailand which requires that a fingerprint be associated with all mobile SIMs distributed in the nation from March this year.

• In November the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) announced the mandate, outlining February 2017 as the deadline for operators to facilitate the ID registration scheme, which was ostensibly created to prevent online fraud and increase security in mobile banking.

• MNVOs had appealed for exemption due to the additional operating costs, on top of line lease tariffs. But NBTC Secretary General Takorn Tantasith is reported to have turned the request down, stating that consumer interests must be prioritised. “Any violation will face penalties ranging from a fine, to a ban on receiving new mobile numbers from the regulator, to a licence revocation.”

• Doctor-patient confidentiality: This central tenet of health care in the United States may make you think your private medical details — from that weird mole to that laxative prescription to that test result — are just that. Private.

• But you would be wrong.

• Americans’ medical data are regularly sold — often without the knowledge of patients. It’s part of a trade worth billions of dollars.

• And even though your details are supposed to be anonymous, businesses actually have easy ways of finding more identifying information of yours.

• Investigators used the data from a Middletown man’s pacemaker to help get an indictment in a fire that caused about $400,000 in damages.

• Ross Compton, 59, has been indicted on felony charges of aggravated arson and insurance fraud for allegedly starting the fire on Sept. 19 at his Court Donegal house.

• If you are dependent upon an embedded medical device, should the device that helps keep you alive also be allowed to incriminate you in a crime? After all, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects a person from being forced to incriminate themselves.

• Nonetheless, that’s what happened after a house fire in Middletown, Ohio.

• WCPO Cincinnati caught video of the actual fire, as well delivered news that the owner’s cat died in the fire. As a pet owner, it would be hard to believe that a person would set a fire and leave their pet to die in that fire. The fire in question occurred back in September 2016; the fire department was just starting an investigation to determine the cause of the blaze.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Finland, which in recent years received a fair share of asylum seekers, is increasingly questioning the applicants’ age. According to preliminary estimates, two thirds of asylum seekers posing as children are in fact adults.

• The Zimbabwe pastor who fled to the United States after launching the popular #ThisFlag protest movement faces up to 20 years in prison for organizing protests against President Robert Mugabe in New York.

• Evan Mawarire was arrested at Harare International Airport on his return home Wednesday. He is yet to appear in court.

• Mawarire has been charged with subverting a constitutionally elected government, which carries up to 20 years in prison.

• Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Donald Trump, has come in for criticism and ridicule after blaming two Iraqi refugees for a massacre that never happened.

• Conway, the US president’s former campaign manager who has frequently faced the press to defend his controversial moves, cited the fictional “Bowling Green massacre” in an interview in which she backed the travel ban imposed on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.

• In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that aired on Thursday night, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway managed to get two huge things wrong in a short, 19-second answer. First, she said that the Obama administration banned Iraqi refugees from entering in the United States for six months in 2011 — which is flatly untrue.

• The former head of the NSA and CIA says an executive order on immigration signed by President Donald Trump last week is “an abomination,” and it won’t make America or its allies any safer.

• Gen. Michael Hayden, in Ottawa on Thursday for a conference at Carleton University, sat down with Global News’s Vassy Kapelos to discuss the new Trump administration and what it might mean for the world. Hayden was one of the most prominent critics of Trump’s run for the presidency.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Add internet access to the list of issues that the Trump administration wants to handle differently.

• On Friday, Politico, Bloomberg, and other news outlets quoted unnamed industry sources saying that President Trump has selected Ajit Pai to chair the Federal Communications Commission. No official announcement has come yet. But Mr. Pai, who previously served on the FCC’s five-member board after stints at Verizon and the Justice Department, is a vocal critic of the agency’s current “net neutrality” policy.

• “Net neutrality, or an open Internet, is the concept that ISPs [internet service providers] should give consumers equal access to all legal content and applications. That means ISPs could not favor or block some content-makers or charge them to provide faster delivery of their content, in what are known as ‘fast lanes.’” When The Christian Science Monitor’s Cristina Maza explained net neutrality in February 2015, the FCC had just adopted the policy, with support from consumer groups, internet firms such as Google and Netflix, and the Obama administration.

• AT&T’s a master in promising broadband deployment it never actually delivers in exchange for regulatory favors and government handouts, and has been doing it for decades without much fact-checking from the media. AT&T’s also incredibly good at bullshitting the press and public into falsely believing that massive telecom megamergers actually create jobs, despite thirty years of documentable history proving the exact opposite.

• So despite Trump’s campaign-trail promise to block AT&T’s latest megamerger (largely believed to be little more than pouting over negative CNN coverage), there’s an incredible opportunity here to field a merger sales pitch bullshit supernova — the scope and scale of which we’ve never seen before.

• Except it’s not cable box innovation that’s helping Comcast fend off cord cutting, it’s the company’s growing monopoly over the broadband last mile.

• In countless markets Comcast competes solely with AT&T and Verizon, who have made it abundantly clear they’re no longer interested in the fixed-line residential broadband business. Both companies have made slinging ads and content at Millennials their primary focus, as evident by Verizon’s acquisition of AOL and Yahoo and focus on creative new snoopvertising technologies. As a result, these telcos are quite literally trying to drive many of these customers away with a combination of apathy and price hikes. If these users want broadband connections any faster than 3-6 Mbps, their only option is, increasingly, Comcast.

• When these users arrive at the nation’s biggest cable giant, they discover that signing up for TV and broadband is notably cheaper than just signing up for broadband alone. The problem is: while many have claimed that Comcast’s “bucking cord cutting,” there’s no evidence that many of these users are even watching the cable connections they pay for, nor that they’ll stick around as a traditional television viewer long term. Many just signed up because having television was actually less expensive than getting rid of it.

• But should they try and get rid of it Comcast’s got that angle covered too: the company’s growing monopoly means less broadband competition than ever in many of its markets, allowing it to impose draconian and unnecessary usage caps on the company’s customers. Caps that apply to competing streaming services, but not Comcast’s own content. All told, between bundling and usage caps, Comcast’s broadband monopoly means it simply doesn’t feel the pain a company would feel in the face of real competition, which is why it has little to no incentive to fix its historically bad customer service.

DRM

• The ongoing fight at the W3C over Encrypted Media Extensions — the HTML5 DRM scheme that several companies want ensconced in web standards — took two worrying turns recently. Firstly, Google slipped an important change into the latest Chrome update that removed the ability to disable its implementation of EME, further neutering the weak argument of supporters that the DRM is optional.

Intellectual Monopolies

• As it published the three-millionth international patent application under its Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) on 2 February, the World Intellectual Property Office suggested that there may be ways to improve the system in the future.

• Health advocacy groups called on the European Commission yesterday to change the way it funds research and development for new medicines so that innovations can serve a larger public.

• The call from eight civil society groups comes following the Commission’s public consultation for the mid-term review of the European Union’s research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020 (H2020), which administers a funding pool of nearly €80 billion, according to a press release.

• The groups co-authored a submission to the H2020 consultations with several recommendations. The submission was endorsed by another 16 groups.

Trademarks

• Nine years ago we had a post about some of the ridiculousness surrounding trademarks and the Super Bowl (a popular topic this time of year). In particular, we mocked the fact that the New England Patriots had filed for some trademarks in the week before the Super Bowl. Then, as now, the Patriots made it to the Super Bowl, but that year they had done it with a perfect record, winning all 16 games in the regular season and the first two playoff games to go 18-0. They were heavily favored to win the Super Bowl, and had filed for trademarks on both “Perfect Season” and “19-0.” Of course, the NY Giants came away with quite the upset and sent the Patriots home as losers. Given that, we were kind of surprised a few months later to discover that the Patriots were still seeking the trademark on “19-0,” despite the fact that its actual record for the season was a demoralizing 18-1.

Copyrights

• Six years ago the Czech branch of the Pirate Party declared open war on a local anti-piracy outfit, opening several ‘pirate’ sites to draw fire from copyright holders. But, after being prosecuted in a criminal court last year, the matter has now been dropped after it was deemed the Pirates acted in accordance with a recent landmark EU ruling.

• The US Department of Justice and the legal team of alleged KickassTorrents owner Artem Vaulin went head to head in court this week. Defense lawyer Ira Rothken asked the court to drop the case as there’s no proof of actual criminal copyright infringement. The US prosecutor disagreed, describing the site as a piracy haven that made millions of dollars per year.

• Ready to go toe-to-toe against the likes of Steph Curry or LeBron James? You could with Take-Two Interactive’s MyPlayer feature of its NBA 2K15 and NBA 2K16 games, which — through the magic of facial scanning — puts your face on one of the virtual players. But if you’re worried about how Take-Two will store and use your biometric data, you might want to think twice about the feature.

• It’s that face-scanning feature that was the subject of an attempted lawsuit by a brother and sister in Illinois, however, who argued that Take-Two was violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, which seeks to ensure that businesses that store biometric data for their customers are protecting that data and not using it in ways the customer had never intended. The idea is that if your bank requires a fingerprint to access your account, and either loses that data to theft or uses that data for some other purpose, the public can get monetary and injunctive relief from the court. To do so, however, the plaintiff must suffer actual harm from a violation of BIPA.

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