● 02.07.17

● Links 7/2/2017: RethinkDB at the Linux Foundation, Kodi 17.0 Release

Posted in News Roundup at 4:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Not so long ago, Red Hat was about the only serious option for big enterprise customers seeking to make the move to Linux. Times have changed and Red Hat is no longer the only game in town. There are now three major enterprise ready Linux companies vying for corporate business: Red Hat, Canonical and SUSE — or four if noncommercial CentOS is counted.

Kernel Space

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation today announced it has purchased the source code to RethinkDB, relicensed the code under Apache, and contributed it to The Linux Foundation.

• RethinkDB is an open source, NoSQL, distributed document-oriented database that was previously licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3 (AGPLv3).

• The software is already in production use today by hundreds of technology startups, consulting firms, and Fortune 500 companies, including NASA, GM, Jive, Platzi, the U.S. Department of Defense, Distractify, and Matters Media. But the AGPLv3 license was limiting the willingness of some companies to use and contribute to the software.

• Today’s release of grsecurity® for Linux kernel version 4.9 makes good on our promise of publishing the implementation of the deterministic type-based return check portion of the Reuse Attack Protector (RAP) initially described at H2HC in October 2015. This release builds upon the indirect call checking published in RAP’s initial April 2016 publication in the grsecurity test patch for Linux 4.5. RAP is our patent-pending and best-in-breed defense mechanism against code reuse attacks. It is the result of years of research and development into Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) technologies by PaX. The version of RAP present in the test patch released to the public today under the GPLv2 is now feature-complete. As a demonstration of its high security benefit to performance cost ratio, we’re also providing the following benchmarks below, where RAP demonstrates a 5.4% performance hit in a “worst-case” kernel-bounded workload.

Graphics Stack

• The YouTube video provides additional insight into the open source graphics card. Interestingly enough, I’ve been looking into getting my hands on a classic Amiga, but the one I would want – an A3000 or A4000 – are quite hard to come by here in The Netherlands.

• Freedreno founder Rob Clark has sent in the MSM DRM driver changes to DRM-Next for Linux 4.11. Separately, Qualcomm’s Code Aurora is prepping more contributions for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver for Linux.

• The MSM DRM changes for Linux 4.11 include support for hardware cursor on newer MDP5 devices like the Snapdragon 820+ SoCs, a DSI encoder clean-up, and GPU DeviceTree binding clean-ups.

• Intel’s open-source Mesa DRI driver has passed The Khronos Group’s process for certifying it as a conformant OpenGL 4.5 implementation. This now rounds out the Intel open-source Linux stack with OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.2, and Vulkan 1.0 certification.

• Emil Velikov has kicked off the new release by announcing the third release candidate to the upcoming Mesa 17.0.

• He’s hoping to see Mesa 17.0.0 officially released by the end of the week. There still are a few blocker bugs open, but he’s planning to release v17.0.0 regardless of whether those bugs get addressed in a timely manner or not.

Applications

• Team Kodi are very happy to announce the immediate availability of Kodi 17.0 (Krypton) for Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS. Krypton brings updated default user interfaces, better organisation of settings, and many under-the-hood changes on VideoPlayer, Music Library, PVR, audio on Android, and thousands of small bugfixes and improvements to stability. Note: Kodi 17 downloads will be available in our Ubuntu PPA soon, so stay tuned for updates!

• Looking for parallax wallpaper, animated wallpapers, or a cute clock wallpaper for Ubuntu — why not combine them all in one stunning background?

• Five years ago we wrote about a project to run Mac OS X binaries on Linux, for what Wine is for allowing Windows programs on Linux/macOS/etc, Darling wants to let Mac binaries run under Linux. It’s been a while since last having anything to report on for the project, but they are making new progress in 2017.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• CodeWeavers’ Josh DuBois informs us today through an email announcement about the general availability of the CrossOver 16.1.0 commercial application for GNU/Linux and macOS operating systems.

• CrossOver is a powerful graphical user interface for the popular, open-source Wine program that implements a Windows layer allowing Linux and Mac users to run applications and games designed only for the Microsoft Windows operating systems. It makes installing various popular apps a breeze.

• Back in December marked the release of CrossOver 16.0 and powered by Wine 2.0. Shipping today is CrossOver 16.1.

Games

• After teasing users with the upcoming availability of the DiRT Rally racing game for Linux-based operating systems on March 2, 2017, the UK-based games publisher Feral Interactive is now announcing the official system requirements.

• Last week Feral Interactive announced DiRT Rally is coming to Linux while now they’ve announced the system requirements.

• DiRT Rally isn’t shipping until 2 March, but today a Feral representative confirmed the requirements.

• In 2013, people spent $21.53 billion USD on games and game-related merchandise. And games overtook movies long ago as the most popular form of entertainment. Despite their astonishing popularity, games and game development receive woefully little attention at open source events.

• As free and open source devotees, we do our cause a great disservice by ignoring this large swath of the software industry. That’s why I was so excited to see linux.conf.au host a Gaming Out in the Open: Open Source and Games miniconference in advance of the main event this year. Organized by Tim Nugent and Eloise Ducky, the miniconf featured 10 presenters, a session of lightning talks, and a “play session” for test driving open source games. The presentations themselves fell into four neat categories.

• More possible good news today. It seems Knockout Games might be doing the porting work of Killing Floor 2 [Steam, Official Site] for Linux.

• I had an email tip about a conversation the one-man porting studio Knockout Games had on Twitter. It seemed to hint that Aaron was porting Killing Floor 2 and it’s actually listed on his website now too.

• Essentially you’re guiding a neon-coloured bubble around an arena collecting small circles, but 90% of what you touch in the level will destroy you. It reminds me of Osmos just a little, for being both calming and infuriating at the same time.

• The game has a very simple style to it, but even so the level design is fantastic. It will feature different moving objects, some which follow you that you need to keep avoiding. Some parts of a level might have wind that keeps blowing you in the opposite direction you need to go and so on.

• If you like your fast-paced futuristic racers, you may want to know that Super Pilot [itch.io] could gain a Linux version with enough support.

• Aspyr Media announced earlier today that Civilization VI for Linux is finally shipping this week.

• Civilization VI will be shipping for Linux on Thursday, 9 February, at a discounted price of $47.99 per Aspyr Media.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We know that many Qt users want controls styled with a native look-and-feel. But offering that on platforms with no public styling API, is hard. A classic approach is to take snapshots of the native controls, tweak them, and use them as foreground or background in our own controls. Which is somewhat OK for static appearances. But when animations and transitions are involved, static pixmaps will only take you half the way. And since an OS can change style from one update to the next, taking snapshots runtime is risky. Using pre-grabbed snapshots is also something we don’t do because of legal considerations.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The development of the Epiphany 3.24 web browser continues for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, due for release on March 22, 2017, and a new preview release is now available for public testing.

• Most reviews have come from Fedora (which installs GNOME Software as part of the default workstation) but other distros like Debian and Arch are catching up all the time. I’d still welcome KDE software center clients like Discover and Apper using the ODRS although we do have quite a lot of KDE software reviews submitted using GNOME Software.

• Greetings fellow Gnomies

• At Codethink over the past few months we’ve been revisiting our approach to assembly of whole-stack systems, particularly for embedded Linux systems and custom GNOME based systems.

• We’ve taken inspiration, lessons and use-cases from various projects including OBS, Reproducible Builds, Yocto, Baserock, buildroot, Aboriginal, GNOME Continuous, JHBuild, Flatpak Builder and Android repo.

• The result of our latest work is a new project, BuildStream, which aims initially to satisfy clear requirements from GNOME and Baserock, and grow from there. BuildStream uses some key GNOME plumbing (OSTree, bubblewrap) combined with declarative build-recipe description to provide sandboxed, repeatable builds of GNOME projects, while maintaining the flexibility and speed required by GNOME developers.

• It’s been a while since we last talked here about the Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier, and it looks like its developers are finally preparing to unleash the next major release for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.

• Orca 3.24 has entered development recently, and, a first preview, versioned 3.23.4, is now ready for public testing for those of you who want to get an early taste of what’s coming in the final release of the application, which will launch this spring on March 23, as part of the GNOME 3.24 Stack.

• There are numerous improvements implemented so far in the Orca 3.23.4 snapshot, and among those that caught our attention, we can mention better support for handling web pages whose content is constantly and quickly replaced, the introduction of custom support for ARIA switch role, along with improvements to how ARIA regions are displayed.

• A new version of the immensely popular GNOME extension ‘Dash to Dock’ is now available. The extension moves the GNOME Shell application launcher bar (known as the ‘dash’) from the overview window and places it on the desktop.

Distributions

• SalentOS is a Linux distro that easily can put a smile on your face. It is a flexible and accommodating desktop platform that balances demands on system resources with efficient performance.

• SalentOS is not well known, but it has much to offer. This distro makes it easy to leave behind whatever other computing choice you currently use.

• What are the best Linux distros of 2017? That’s a big question as this new year gains speed. This article will present what I believe – based on various types of Linux users ¬– are arguably the best Linux distros for 2017.

Arch Family

• For the second year in a row, Arch Linux wins both rounds in our poll to determine the winner of our Readers’ Choice Award for Best Linux Distro.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• OpenSUSE’s Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution continues rolling forward with new package updates and other features.

Red Hat Family

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is announcing the availability of an updated kernel version in the Beta repositories of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based CloudLinux 7 operating system.

• The kernel packages of CloudLinux 7 have been updated to version 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.37, and they are now available for installation directly from the updates-testing repository. Since kernel version 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.35, CloudLinux’s team managed to backport a fix for a known “Kernel panic” issue.

• The new updated CloudLinux 7 kernel build also attempts to implement the ability to ignore root-owned links when checking symlink ownership. Therefore, it is recommended that you update your systems to kernel version 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.37 as soon as possible.

• Open source specialist Red Hat is pumping €12.7m into its Waterford offices, aiming to offer 60 new roles over the next three years.

• Red Hat’s global hub for research and development in Waterford is due an upgrade, after multimillion-euro plans emerged from the US company.

• For example, Fedora is an upstream project for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. OpenStack is an upstream project for RDO. Did you know that Red Hat is the second biggest contributor to Docker and Kubernetes? Both are upstream projects for products offered to Red Hat customers. When Red Hat acquires a company, they open source the source code. Right now I’m working with two different teams in Red Hat to see how we can best help them open source their products and create communities around them. They are facing all the same questions about open sourcing that any product would. What license should they use? How do they replace non open source dependencies? Should they open all the existing known bug reports? What if they contain proprietary customer data? Lots of fun questions.

• Harvey said these emerging technologies enable customers to be agile and to change their business models to digitally transform globally and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although traditional portfolios like Linux are growing faster than other operating system environments, it is the next generation technology like cloud application platforms that are driving the demand, he adds.

• “The industry is telling us that Linux is growing by 11 – 12% year on year while the Red Hat Linux market is growing at about 18 – 19% globally. The growth spurt has allowed the company to invest in Africa……opening offices in SA and looking at entering other markets.

Finance

Fedora

• Founder of the Fedora Unity Project and Fedora Ambassador Ben Williams is proud to announce the availability of another set of updated Fedora 25 Linux ISO images for all the official spins.

• Michael Larabel is an entrepreneur, software engineer and technology analyst. Larabel founded Phoronix Media in 2004. Phoronix is the leading destination for Linux hardware reviews and enthusiast-oriented Linux news. Michael also develops an automated open source benchmarking suite named the Phoronix Test Suite. The results from the suite are published on OpenBenchmarking.org.

• Michael was also the lead developer involved in a startup that was building a home monitoring and communication device to help those with neurodegenerative conditions and the elderly. That startup stalled due to burdensome regulations in the US around commercial health related devices. The device leveraged Linux and Larabel hopes to bring the project back to life one day. “I hope one day to find the time to clean-up and improve the code as it could be an interesting open-source project.”

• With the Linux benchmarks at Phoronix there is a wide-range of Linux distributions (as well as BSDs, macOS, and the occasional Solaris and Windows) tested, but the operating system I end up running on my most-important production system is still Fedora Workstation. Recently I was interviewed by Fedora Magazine about my thoughts on the Red Hat backed distribution and more.

• [...]

• For Phoronix readers, here were some extra questions from the interview that didn’t make the final cut on Fedora Magazine…

Debian Family

• Debian/Stretch has been frozen. Before the freeze I got almost all the bugs in policy fixed, both bugs reported in the Debian BTS and bugs that I know about. This is going to be one of the best Debian releases for SE Linux ever.

• Systemd with SE Linux is working nicely. The support isn’t as good as I would like, there is still work to be done for systemd-nspawn. But it’s close enough that anyone who needs to use it can use audit2allow to generate the extra rules needed. Systemd-nspawn is not used by default and it’s not something that a new Linux user is going to use, I think that expert users who are capable of using such features are capable of doing the extra work to get them going.

Derivatives

• The Parsix GNU/Linux development team announced today, February 6, 2017, that the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” operating system will reach end of life on March 31, 2017.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• New year, new Linux – or, in the case of Ubuntu, two. As in years past, Canonical’s distro gets two updates in 2017 – the spring and autumn releases numbered and named respectively 17.04, Zesty Zapus, and 17.10 – name TBD, actually.

• As ever there will be UI and experience fiddling – Zesty Zapus sees changes in windows management, the organisation of applications and there a new Mir abstraction is planned called Miral.

• What about some really big changes, like the Unity 8 shell and Mir itself?

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley is announcing today, February 7, 2017, the upcoming deprecation of daily build ISO images for the PowerPC (PPC) hardware architecture for the upcoming Lubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.

• As you probably know already, the Ubuntu Linux developers discussed last year the removal of support for 32-bit PowerPC systems, which means that starting with Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) there won’t be any ISO images available to let you install Ubuntu or any of the official flavors on the PowerPC (PPC) 32-bit architecture.

Devices/Embedded

• This promises to be great fun! I’m going to be combining two of my favorite things: Kali GNU/Linux software and various models of Raspberry Pi hardware. I have been looking forward to doing this since I first heard that there was a Kali Linux installation image for the Raspberry Pi.

• The general information about Kali Linux for the Raspberry Pi is included in the Kali Linux Official Documentation. It describes two general concepts of putting Kali on a Pi, either using a pre-built installation image, or by creating a custom build. I will stick to the pre-built version for the time being, but I am sorely tempted to make a custom build of Kali with the i3 desktop for the Raspberry Pi.

• Teres I is a budget laptop powered by open source hardware and software. While there are many other devices based on open source hardware, this laptop is a little different. You’ll have to assemble Teres I on your own after you unbox it.

• Over the last four years, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a great deal of effort into optimizing Raspbian, its port of Debian, for Pi hardware, including creating new educational software, programming tools, and a nicer looking desktop.

• In September, we released an update that introduced Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight (PIXEL), the Pi’s new desktop environment. Just before Christmas, we released a version of the OS that runs on x86 PCs, so now you can install it on your PC, Mac, or laptop.

• Read more

• From down under, Steven Howell of SRKH Designs flags his Virtualette V1 dual stack microcomputer. The 76 x 37 x 18 mm dual board stack is said to support Linux/Android operating systems and is ‘deployable out of the box’ for diverse applications such as drone or a robot controlling, an M2M node in a security system or … you name it.

• US company Digilent Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of National Instruments and a provider of technology-based educational design tools, has launched a portable multi-function programmable instrumentation module, dubbed OpenScope on kickstarter.

Phones

Android

• Google announced today that it’ll be further integrating web apps into Android. Now, web apps will appear in the app drawer alongside full applications, and offer the same notification controls, where previously Google had set them to only appear as home screen icons.

• Google has found an unlikely ally in one of its many battles with the European Commission. As the Telegraph reports, UK telecoms provider BT has sent a letter defending Google’s ownership of Android and the promotion of its own apps and services. While the exact wording is unclear, a spokesperson for the company confirmed its existence and the gist of its contents for Engadget.

• Imagine that you could influence the next big Android release: that your opinions and ideas could shape software in a way that makes it more functional and more efficient. And all without writing a single line of code. That’s possible with Sony’s Concept for Android – an alternative Android development initiative that has been live for a couple of years now. Think of it as a virtual sandbox where select Xperia phone owners test-drive experimental features and tweaks. Meanwhile, the accumulated feedback helps Sony in deciding what is worth keeping and what should be scrapped.

• Google has planned to launch the Android Wear 2.0 and intends to increase the adoption rate so as to get them to as many customers as possible. The search engine giant has teamed up with many companies so as to release many smartwatches in the next couple of months.

• Lenovo today is introducing the Yoga A12 convertible tablet, a variation on its $500 Yoga Book with a larger display, stripped down specs, and a rose gold color option, alongside the more typical gunmetal gray. The device will be available on February 8 through Lenovo’s website, starting at $300.

• Whereas the Yoga Book was available with full Windows 10 or Android, the Yoga A12 is only available with Android. And while the Yoga A12 includes the Yoga Book’s controversial flat Halo keyboard — whose keys light up and provide distinctive haptic feedback when tapped — it doesn’t come with the ability to use the keyboard as a writing surface with the included “real pen” and paper for digital capture.

Free Software/Open Source

• Up to 96 nano nodes fit in OpenIO’s SLS-4U96 chassis. Each ARM CPU manages a single high-capacity disk and a small amount of flash storage for fast metadata access.

• The founder of Gluster is ready to push storage further, as his new startup, Minio, is announcing general availability of its container-based object storage yesterday.

• The catch is that it’s not really about storage — not in the long term. Minio founder Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy — who wrote the open source GlusterFS file system and also founded the startup Gluster, now owned by Red Hat — says his Palo Alto, California-based company is about data — specifically, using the data to help pay for the storage.

• Apache Kafka, the open source distributed streaming platform, is making an increasingly vocal claim for stream data “world domination” (to coin Linus Torvald’s whimsical initial modest goals with Linux). Last summer I wrote about Kafka and the company behind its enterprise rise, Confluent. Kafka adoption was accelerating as the central platform for managing streaming data in organizations, with production deployments of Kafka claiming six of the top 10 travel companies, seven of the top 10 global banks, eight of the top 10 insurance companies, and nine of the top 10 US telecom companies.

• Tech companies often prefer hiring those who have open source experience because quite simply open source experience is more valuable. This preference is only growing stronger now that open source software dominates the industry and free and open source hardware is gaining momentum. For example, a Indeed.com salary analysis shows that jobs with the keywords “Microsoft Windows” have an average salary of $64,000, while jobs with the keyword “Linux” have an average salary of $99,000. Enough said.

• There are many good open source jobs available to those with Bachelor’s degrees, but if you want to control your destiny, a higher degree will give you the freedom to be paid more for following your interests.

• This was very important to me when deciding what education I would choose, and I think it is true of most other PhDs. However, even if you do not put much stock in intellectual freedom, there is a pretty easy case to be made for “doing it for the Benjamins.”

• With 2017 ramping up, Google is on an absolute tear as it open sources impactful new projects. Just recently, it open sourced a series of 3D graphics and virtual reality toolsets. And, we covered the arrival of Google’s Tilt Brush apps and virtual reality toolsets as open source contributions.

• Now, in a post on the Geo Developers blog, Google has announced that it plans to open source Google Earth Enterprise (GEE), the enterprise product that lets developers build and host their own maps and 3D globes.

Events

• Another edition of DevConf.cz took place last week. It was already the second edition I didn’t organize. This year, I was involved in the organization even less, just helping with the program and serving as a session chair for one day. So I could enjoy the conference more than ever before.

• The PyLadies Pune February Meetup was held on 6th Feb at reserved-bit. Kushal took a session on MicroPython on the MicroBit boards. Thanks to @ntoll for sending over the MicroBits for workshops.

• Heya! First of all I’m really sorry for such a delay with PyCon India 2016 blog post.

• GS Shop is one of the largest TV shopping networks in Asia, and one of the largest e-commerce sites in Korea with more than 1000 employees and 1.5 million users daily. Vivek Juneja of GS Shop’s Container Platform Team, at MesosCon Asia 2016, shares how he and his team moved this behemoth to the new agile way of running the datacenter.

• We know that change is not easy, and Juneja shares many valuable insights in how to successfully manage completely revamping your IT department. Progress is hard even when the old way is difficult. Juneja describes their old practice of “yawn-driven deployment”: “We practice something called Yawn-Driven Deployment, deploying at 3:00 a.m. That’s what we were doing for a long time. Everybody gets together at 3:00 a.m. It’s a party. We deploy, and we have a lot of yawns, and that code goes to production.” Nobody really like working this way, but it’s what they are used to.

• While Linux is the most prominent operating system each year at the Free Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM), it’s not a conference limited to just Linux. Once again there was a developer room dedicated to other operating systems like the Rust-written Redox OS.

• One big job that needs to happen after the conference is to review and release the video recordings that were made. With several hundreds of videos to be checked and only a handful of people with the ability to do so, review was a massive job that for the past three editions took several months; e.g., in 2016 the last video work was done in July, when the preparation of the 2017 edition had already started.

• The decentralized social world is on. It’s been four years since the project was transferred to its community. Discover with us what we accomplished and where we’d like to go.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla filed a legal brief against the Executive Order on immigration, along with nearly 100 other major companies across different industries.

• We joined this brief in support of the State of Washington v. Trump case because the freedom for ideas and innovation to flow across borders is something we strongly believe in as a tech company. More importantly it is something we know is necessary to fulfill our mission to protect and advance the internet as a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.

Databases

• For quite some time now, as the OpenStack cloud computing arena has grown, a whole ecosystem of tools is growing along with it. Tesora, familiar to many as the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, has focused very heavily on Database-as-a-Service tools for OpenStack deployments. The company has also developed a promising partnership with OpenStack heavy-hitter Mirantis.

• Now, Stratoscale, a startup focused on AWS-compatible environments within enterprise data centers, has acquired Tesora. The terms of the deal aren’t announced, but it could take Tesora in new directions.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• Instead of speaking about successful parts of the projects, this talk will focus on the weakness of both OpenBSD and FreeBSD, exploring conceptual differences between them and also exploring directions where motivated contributors can start working on to improve the projects. While being general purpose operating systems we will see that one size doesn’t fit all and how one or the other may be a better solution to a particular problem. Trolls are to be left at the door.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Last month the RISC-V GCC port was approved for landing in GCC 7 while today that merge finally happened.

• The RISC-V GCC port has been a work in progress for a long time and was held up by university lawyers while that was all cleared up, the code went through a few rounds of code revisions, and the steering committee approved landing RISC-V support even as the codebase has moved onto only bug/regression fixes. Today all of that code finally was merged into the GCC7 code-base.

• GNU ddrescue continues work on being a capable data recovery tool for copying data from a file or block device to another, doing more than just the dd command. GNU ddrescue 1.22 was released over the weekend as the newest version of this tool.

• GNU C Library v2.25 available

• The GNU C Library, which is the library in the GNU system and in the GNU/Linux systems, released version 2.25 yesterday.

• The library is primarily designed to be a portable and high-performance C library. The news that comes along with this release includes the “feature test macro __STDC_WANT_LIB_EXT2__, from ISO/IEC TR 24731-2:2010, is supported to enable declarations of functions from that TR. Note that not all functions from that TR are supported by the GNU C Library,” according to its release notes.

• I’ll talk more on this later in a dedicated post, detailing what is there or not, and why, with feedback on the Flatpak project. Bottom line: GIMP will have an official Flatpak, at least starting GIMP 2.10!

Leftovers

Hardware

• Intel won’t even tell its shareholders how much the damage is. Lots of ordinary customers are probably past their guaranteed lifetime and SOL. Meanwhile, I pay lower prices for stuff that isn’t from Intel and I’m OK.

• Intel’s Atom C2000 processor family has a fault that effectively bricks devices, costing the company a significant amount of money to correct. But the semiconductor giant won’t disclosed precisely how many chips are affected nor which products are at risk.

• On its Q4 2016 earnings call earlier this month, chief financial officer Robert Swan said a product issue limited profitability during the quarter, forcing the biz to set aside a pot of cash to deal with the problem.

Health/Nutrition

• The NHS could not cope without EU nurses and the government must offer clarity over their working rights, the Royal College of Nursing says.

• The number of European nursing staff registering in the UK has fallen by 90% since the Brexit referendum, figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council show.

• “It was also revealed today that nine in 10 hospitals have reached unsafe levels of overcrowding so far this winter [2] and one in six A&Es may be closed or downgraded over the next few years [3]. It’s clear our NHS is in a dire state but the Government seems more interesting in pushing the blame for this crisis onto foreign patients.

• “Health tourism is not the real threat to our NHS, underinvestment is. The biggest impact that foreign born people have on our NHS is as doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals. It’s time the Government owns up to its own failure rather than attempting to shift the blame elsewhere.”

• Seeking to address the growing issue of cancer, and in particular the lack of access to diagnosis and treatment in low and middle-income countries, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have entered into a collaboration.

• IFPMA said in a press release that it will support the IAEA Programme of Action for Cancer Therapy (PACT).

• This is the first collaboration of its kind and “will open new avenues for joint public-private efforts to curb cancer,” according to the release

• An online crowdmapping tool being used to chart unmarked villages in remote parts of Tanzania is helping young runaways escaping female genital mutilation (FGM) find their way to safety.

• Last month global mappers, working with people on the ground in Tanzania, caused the disruption of a planned FGM ceremony on a teenage girl by using open-source maps and smartphones to find her. The 16 year old was freed from the home in which she had been locked ahead of the ceremony, which though illegal under Tanzanian law is still practised in some regions. An estimated 15% of women and girls aged between 15 and 49 in the country have undergone the procedure.

• A national campaign carrying the symbol of a red triangle will be rolled out across the UK to mark the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.

• The National Police Chiefs’ Council has partnered with the Freedom charity to encourage people to provide the police with information that can help detect and prevent FGM in the UK and abroad.

• A youth-led charity has had online success with a music video that rejects claims that there are “minor” forms of female genital mutilation (FGM). Integrate UK created #MyClitoris to educate on the impact of Types I and IV FGM. The video has praised by Lily Allen and Caitlin Moran.

• The video, which has over 15,000 views was initially inspired by an article in The Economist, which suggested there were “minor” forms of FGM – the partial or full removal of the female genitalia for non-medical reasons.

Security

• Once exclusively the domain of hospitals with comically-bad IT support, crippling ransomware attacks are increasingly beginning to impact essential infrastructure. Just ask the San Francisco MTA, whose systems were shut down entirely for a spell last fall after a hacker (with a long history of similar attacks) managed to infiltrate their network, forcing the MTA to dole out free rides until the threat was resolved. Or you could ask the St. Louis public library network, which saw 16 city branches crippled last month by a bitcoin-demanding intruder.

• We’ve also seen a spike in ransomware attacks on our ever-expanding surveillance and security apparatus, DC Police acknowledging this week that 70% of the city’s surveillance camera DVRs were infected with malware. The infection was so thorough, DC Police were forced to acknowledge that city police cameras were unable to record much of anything during a three day stretch last month…

• Hackers infected 70 percent of storage devices that record data from D.C. police surveillance cameras eight days before President Trump’s inauguration, forcing major citywide reinstallation efforts, according to the police and the city’s technology office.

• Laws that have been proposed by the Australian Government to guard communications networks and businesses from cyber attack and sabotage may have the opposite effect from that intended, a coalition of industry groups has warned.

• The warning came jointly from the Australian Industry Group, the Australian Information Industry Association, the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association and Communications Alliance in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.

• In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold. Since code isn’t prone to sudden fits of madness, the only plausible explanation was that someone was cheating.

• Casino security pulled up the surveillance tapes and eventually spotted the culprit, a black-haired man in his thirties who wore a Polo zip-up and carried a square brown purse. Unlike most slots cheats, he didn’t appear to tinker with any of the machines he targeted, all of which were older models manufactured by Aristocrat Leisure of Australia. Instead he’d simply play, pushing the buttons on a game like Star Drifter or Pelican Pete while furtively holding his iPhone close to the screen.

• Internet of Things (IoT) devices are soon expected to outnumber end-user devices by as much as four to one. These applications can be found everywhere—from manufacturing floors and building management to video surveillance and lighting systems.

• Big things are expected of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a plethora of industries, and healthcare is no exception. The market is poised to reach $117 billion by 2020 according to business intelligence company MarketResearch.com.

• IoT covers a broad spectrum of interconnected devices communicating across the net that together can have benefits for the treatment of patients, the workloads of practitioners, and the wealth of the nation.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• In this new political era, climate scientists and their science are under attack. The attack is from multiple fronts, from threats to pull funding of the important instruments they use to measure climate change, to slashing their salaries and jobs. But there is a real fear of renewed personal attacks, and it appears those fears are now being realized. What the attackers do is identify and isolate scientists – a process termed the “Serengeti Strategy” by well-known and respected scientist Michael Mann who suffered these types of attacks for years.

• A Green party councillor was among seven people arrested after a standoff with police during the latest protest against tree-felling in Sheffield.

• Alison Teal and six others were detained on suspicion of preventing workmen from chopping down a tree in Chippinghouse Road, Nether Edge, at about 9.30am on Monday.

• Teal’s partner, Simon Crump, accused the police of “ramping up the situation” and “turning a peaceful demonstration into a mass arrest”.

• South Yorkshire police said four women and three men had been arrested on suspicion of preventing lawful work under section 241 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1992.

• The protest was the latest in an increasingly bitter dispute over the city council’s plans to remove hundreds of roadside trees deemed to be dangerous. A total of 12 people have now been detained by police over tree-felling protests in Sheffield since November.

• The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is set to press on in its legal battle against the Dakota Access pipeline Monday after leaders issued statements over the weekend condemning recent violence against demonstrators and clarifying that they don’t want to see activists forcibly removed from the protest site.

• They also have called on allies to join the tribe in demanding a fair legal review of the multi-billion dollar project that U.S. President Donald Trump plans to usher through to completion.

• On Wednesday, law enforcement officers arrested 76 protesters who were camped on land owned by the Dakota Access pipeline’s developer, Energy Transfer Partners. While the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said leaders were working with federal authorities to stabilize the situation at the protest site, they indicated that they did not want protestors to be arrested or ousted from the spot by force.

• Unfortunately, as the article points out, the truth is that HSBC is one of the lenders responsible for funding that led to a massive deforestation of Indonesia’s tropical rain forests without the “free, prior and informed consent” of local communities.” Their claims they did not act “knowingly” ring hollow.

• Confession time: I’m an optimist, especially about the ideas of social progress that emerged in Europe at the end of the middle ages and became mainstream in western politics in the early 20th century. I called the outcome of the Brexit referendum wrong (by underestimating the number of racist bigots and Little Englanders in the UK population: Brexit is a proxy for English nationalism, which is absolutely not the same as British nationalism), and I called the US presidential election wrong (underestimating the extent of gerrymandering and micro-targeted black propaganda driven by data mining in the campaign).

• Since January 20th we’ve seen a degree and type of activity emanating from the new US administration that is markedly different from anything in my politically aware lifetime (loosely: since Reagan). Blanket bans on entry to the USA by anyone associated with certain nationalities, mass firings at the State Department, a president railing against a “so-called judge”, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff being booted off the National Security Council and replaced by a white nationalist ideologue, and a former CEO of Exxon in the Cabinet: what’s going on?

• Thousands of people converged on downtown Los Angeles on Sunday to protest the proposed $3.8-billion Dakota Access pipeline, which activists across the country say threatens the water supply and sacred sites of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota.

• Standing Rock Sioux Tribe officials said this weekend that although they were working with federal authorities to stabilize the situation at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest site, they were not calling on law enforcement to forcibly remove activists there.

• After months of protests, both tribal officials and residents in the town of Cannon Ball, N.D., have asked those opposed to completion of the controversial, 1,170-mile pipeline to leave. A few hundred activists remain, both on the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation and on neighboring land.

Finance

• American greatness was long premised on the common assumption was that each generation would do better than previous one. That is being undermined for the emerging millennial generation.

• The problems facing millennials include an economy where job growth has been largely in service and part-time employment, producing lower incomes; the Census bureau estimates they earn, even with a full-time job, $2,000 less in real dollars than the same age group made in 1980. More millennials, notes a recent White House report, face far longer period of unemployment and suffer low rates of labor participation. More than 20 percent of people 18 to 34 live in poverty, up from 14 percent in 1980.

• I am old enough to remember the gogo days of cable TV when entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new cable channel would go, hat in hand and cap table in tow, to the big cable companies and beg to get distribution on their networks.

• When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we saw something completely different. Here was a level playing field where anyone could launch a business without permission from anyone.

• We had a great run over the last 25 years but I fear it’s coming to an end, brought on by the growing consolidation of market power in the big consumer facing tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc, by the constricted distribution mechanisms on mobile devices, and by new leadership at the FCC that is going to tear down the notion that mobile carriers can’t play the same game cable companies played.

• [...]

• It is sad to see this era ending. It was a lot of fun and quite profitable too. I am hopeful that some new competitive vector, like the Internet, will come along and make all of this moot and we are spending a lot of our time looking for it. Because backing startups on a field tilted in the favor of the incumbents is not fun and not particularly profitable either.

• British workers face “cut-rate, bottom-of-the-league protections” after Brexit, with more zero-hours contracts and fewer guarantees over holiday and equal pay, the TUC has warned, as it publishes a damning report highlighting the soaring number of insecure jobs in the UK.

• The number of workers without guaranteed hours or basic employment rights has risen by more than 660,000 in the past five years, the study found.

• Labour said an “explosion” of insecure jobs was likely unless fundamental workers’ rights were protected.

• And the dire situation many employees now face is predicted to intensify once the Government drags the UK out of the EU.

• Decades ago, Fred Rogers, host of the classic show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” gave a moving speech to the U.S. Senate defending public programming, and his words seem more important now than ever.

• After being elected in 1968, President Richard Nixon showed his support for cutting federal funding in half for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Rogers responded to the president’s proposal in 1969 with a passionate speech in front of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Communications.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• During what seemed to be a successful visit with UK Prime Minister Theresa May at the White House Friday, Trump announced he had accepted an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II for a state visit later this year with first lady Melania.

• But Trump’s tweeting past might make the royal visit trip slightly uncomfortable. More than four years ago, Trump tweeted out some thoughts on Kate Middleton sunbathing in the nude and his thoughts on her looks.

• [...]

• The sunbathing incident Trump was tweeting about refers to photographers, who are now on trial, who allegedly took photos of a topless Middleton. The photos were then leaked to the press.

• Much of the public is eager for the impeachment of President Trump. A poll last week found that 40 percent of Americans already “support” impeaching him, and the same survey — by highly regarded Public Policy Polling — found that another 12 percent are “not sure.”

• From the outset of his presidency, Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution in a way that we have not seen before and should not tolerate. It’s time for members of Congress to get the impeachment process underway.

• The Constitution states that to start impeachment proceedings, a document or “resolution calling for a committee investigation of charges against the officer in question” must be introduced in the House of Representatives. Such a move would have been appropriate from the moment that Trump became president.

• As documented in depth on the ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org website — where more than 600,000 people have already signed a petition for impeachment — the president continues to violate two “emoluments” clauses in the Constitution. One prohibits any gifts or benefits from foreign governments, and the other prohibits the same from the U.S. government or any U.S. state.

• Cathy “Weapons of Math Destruction” O’Neil nailed Trump’s tactics when she compared him to a busted machine-learning algorithm, throwing a ton of random ideas out, listening for his base to cheer the ones that excited their worst instincts, and then doubling down on them.

• Now, in office, Trump has doubled down on that tactic, but while his feedback mechanism during the campaign was the crowds of angry racists who came to his rallies, today, he mostly plays for a single racist, Steve Bannon, who serves as surrogate for all the xenophobes and frightened people whose adulation steered Trump during the campaign.

• There’s been some controversy over when Donald Trump decided to run for president. Some say it was at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, when he was roasted by both Seth Meyers and President Obama. I think it happened much earlier: August 29th, 1997, the date that Skynet became self-aware.

• Trump promised that he would create jobs once president, but he could have never guessed that the jobs he would create would be those in stark opposition of everything he stands for.

• Thanks to the massive influx of donations to the ACLU, the legal organization has announced that they will be hiring 200 additional staff members, most of them attorneys, to join their team and fight for Americans’ civil liberties.

• There are times in life that really do count. Times when a person’s character is revealed, when the important is separated from the unimportant. Soon decisions are taken that will determine the further path a person takes. With some, this can be tragic, and the moment comes too soon in their youth at a time when they aren’t mature enough yet to foresee all the potential consequences. They make the decisions cheerfully and they lead to either luck or bad luck. But countries and governments are seldom as innocent when it comes to their decisions.

• That’s the kind of situation now approaching. The people who will soon have to decide are already grown up. They now have to start preparing, even if it will be painful.

• Germany must stand up in opposition to the 45th president of the United States and his government. That’s difficult enough already for two reasons: Because it is from the Americans that we obtained our liberal democracy in the first place; and because it is unclear how the brute and choleric man on the other side will react to diplomatic pressure. The fact that opposition to the American government can only succeed when mounted together with Asian and African partners — and no doubt with our partners in Europe, with the EU — doesn’t make the situation any easier.

• Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan is hoping this is the year to bring to fruition a decades-long desire of Western Republicans: splitting up the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

• They say it’s overloaded and overly liberal. But they’ll still face the difficulty of getting a plan past California Democrats, who have traditionally wanted nothing of it.

• Sullivan and Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana have introduced two bills. One establishes a commission to study the appeals court system and find a quick and effective way to divide up the 9th Circuit’s caseload. The other would split the court into two: the 9th Circuit and a newly created 12th Circuit. The 9th Circuit would include California, Guam, Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands. The new circuit would include Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

• Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.

• How you see the believers determines how you fight them and seek to protect liberal society from its enemies. And I don’t just mean how you fight that object of liberal despair and conservative fantasies, the alternately despised and patronised white working class. Compulsive believers are not just rednecks. They include figures as elevated as the British prime minister and her cabinet. Before the EU referendum, a May administration would have responded to the hitherto unthinkable arrival of a US president who threatened Nato and indulged Putin by hugging Britain’s European allies close. But Brexit has thrown Britain’s European alliance into crisis. So English Conservative politicians must crush their doubts and believe with a desperate compulsion that the alleged “pragmatism” of Donald Trump will triumph over his undoubted extremism, a belief that to date has as much basis in fact as creationism.

• Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders accused President Donald Trump of falling short of commitments to middle-class voters, pointing to his Cabinet and senior advisers’ ties to Wall Street. “This guy is a fraud,” Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” Sunday.

• “This guy ran for president of the United States saying, ‘I, Donald Trump, I’m going to take on Wall Street — these guys are getting away with murder.’ Then suddenly, he appoints all these billionaires,” Sanders said.

• Trump selected Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs trader and hedge fund manager, as his treasury secretary nominee; Wilbur Ross, a billionaire former banker, to lead the Commerce Department; and Gary Cohn, a top Goldman Sachs executive, to lead his National Economic Council.

• While we’ve been selfishly worried about human rights and the economy, everyone forgot how truly terrible the Trump presidency must be on Trump himself. Luckily, I’ve managed to compile a definitive look into our brave new POTUS’s hour-by-hour struggle. Prepare for the seriously researched, definitive schedule of Donald Jamillah Trump that is in no way designed to antagonize him or his supporters …

• There’s been a certain trend of late of attempting to insult hired professionals by placing “so-called” in front of their job title.

• A completely meaningless phrase, yet that hasn’t deterred Donald Trump from using it to attack the (definitely called, as it is his profession) federal judge who temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order banning entry into the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries.

• US District Judge James Robart, who was appointed by President George Bush in 2003, issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration’s restrictions, ruling that the ban would be immediately stopped nationwide.

• The Senate is poised to vote on Betsy DeVos’s confirmation as secretary of Education at noon Tuesday, with Vice President Pence possibly casting a tie-breaking vote backing President Trump’s controversial Cabinet pick.

• Republicans have only 50 votes behind DeVos with the defections of GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), which could lead to a historic moment for Pence.

• He would be the first vice president to ever cast a decisive vote in a 50-50 tie over confirming a Cabinet nominee.

• Pence would also be the first vice president to break a Senate tie since 2008, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney cast a vote on a tax adjustment plan.

• No Democrats are backing DeVos, and no other Republicans are expected to break with her, despite a last-ditch effort by the minority party to put pressure on the GOP.

• MPs from across the political divide have voiced their support for Speaker John Bercow after he spoke out against Donald Trump addressing Parliament.

• In an extraordinary piece of political rhetoric in the Commons, Mr Bercow said he would not be inviting the US President to speak to the House because of its opposition to “racism and sexism”.

• “Before the imposition of the migrant ban I would myself have been strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall,” Mr Bercow said. “After the imposition of the migrant ban by President Trump I am even more strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall.”

• The election of Donald Trump was a catastrophe for progressive America, but the damage may be mitigated over the long term by a remarkable surge of energy on the left in response to his election. As many as 5.2 million people participated in hastily organized Women’s Marches across the country, senators’ phones have reportedly been jammed with calls protesting Trump’s cabinet nominees and other early moves, and, according to a poll conducted by The Washington Post, more than one in three Democrats say they plan to become “more involved in the political process in the next year” as a result of the election. That’s true of 40 percent of Democratic women, and almost half of self-identified liberal Democrats.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Perhaps more than any other time in history, politics appear to be playing a larger role than ever in the Super Bowl. Bill O’Reilly interviewed President Trump in an interview that aired before the game; former president George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, did the coin toss; and some of the ads have tackled controversial social issues such as immigration.

• EFF recently received dozens of pages of documents in response to a FOIA request we submitted about Operation Choke Point, a Department of Justice project to pressure banks and financial institutions into cutting off service to certain businesses. Unfortunately, the response from the Department of Justice leaves many questions unanswered.

• Renowned Pakistani poet, social activist and academic Salman Haider was abducted on January 6 from Islamabad Highway while he was on his way back home. His wife received a text from his own number, telling her to pick the car from a place few hundred meters away from their house. As the news about his abduction emerged in the mainstream media, the families of two other bloggers, Aasim Saeed and Ahmed Waqas Goraya, reported to the police that they had been missing since January 4. Two other activists, Ahmed Raza Naseer and Samar Abbas, also went missing in the following days. All of them are well-known for holding a progressive worldview, often critical of the military’s policies.

• Freedom of the press could soon be legally protected in Arizona’s high-school halls.

• A Supreme Court decision has ruled student newspapers don’t have the same constitutional rights as other publications. But an Arizona state senator saw that as having a chilling effect and introduced a bill to stop school administrators from censoring or preventing publication.

• The bill, which passed a Senate panel, says student editors, not administrators, are the ones who can give final approval on school-sponsored media. The legislation prevents administrators from censoring any news stories or preventing publication except under certain circumstances.

• A false release date announced on the website Bookmyshow.com for the long-awaited sequel to the Hindi-Tamil-Telugu tri-lingual Vishwaroopam/Vishwaroop had fans of Kamal Haasan agog. Looks like that turned out to be more of wishful thinking.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On Wednesday, one of the individuals who was arrested at protests over the inauguration of Donald Trump received an email from Facebook’s “Law Enforcement Response Team.” (CityLab obtained the email from the individual’s attorney on the condition of anonymity for both the client and their representative.)

• The U.S. House of Representatives approved on Monday the Email Privacy Act, which would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search email and other data stored with third parties for longer than six months.

• The House approved the bill by voice vote, and it now goes the Senate for consideration.

• The Email Privacy Act would update a 31-year-old law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Some privacy advocates and tech companies have pushed Congress to update ECPA since 2011. Lax protections for stored data raise doubts about U.S. cloud services among consumers and enterprises, supporters of the bill say.

• Advertisers would give just about anything to be able to lurk over your shoulder as you browse the internet. They want to know what sites you visit, how you get to them, how long you spend on them, and where you go next—along with as much personal information about you as they can get.

• The draft policy leaves the scope of Trump’s cybersecurity advisor Rudy Giuliani undefined. “It’s an open question what he’ll do,” Bay told El Reg. Giuliani could occupy a similar role as Howard Schmidt, the cybersecurity coordinator of the Obama Administration.

• Senators on the Armed Services Committee will be briefed by a top intelligence official on cyber threats Tuesday morning.

• The hearing, which will be closed to the public, will feature testimony from Adm. Michael Rogers, who holds the dual-leadership role at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency (NSA).

• A resolution introduced in the Michigan House would put before voters a state constitutional amendment to protect electronic communications and data from the prying eyes of state and local law enforcement. The amendment would also effectively block a small but intrusive practical effect of federal spying within the state.

• A ballot measure introduced by a bipartisan group of Michigan legislators is sure to encounter some heavy resistance on its trip through the lawmaking machinery. The proposal amends the state’s constitution to add a warrant requirement to data that law enforcement is used to obtaining without one.

• As we’ve been noting, broadband providers have wasted no time pressuring Congress to kill the FCC’s new broadband privacy rules. These rules, passed last year, simply require that ISPs are transparent about what data they’re collecting and who they’re selling it to, while requiring they provide working opt-out tools. But the rules went further in requiring that broadband customers opt in to more sensitive data collection, including financial data. Given an informed, empowered consumer means less advertising revenue, ISPs quickly went to work throwing a monumental hissy fit.

• On Monday, The Washington Post reported one of the most stunning breaches of security ever. A former NSA contractor, the paper said, stole more than 50 terabytes of highly sensitive data. According to one source, that includes more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the Tailored Access Operations. TAO is an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys some of the world’s most sophisticated software exploits.

• Federal prosecutors in Baltimore are expected to seek an indictment as early as this week against a former National Security Agency contractor who is accused of carrying out the biggest theft of classified information in U.S. history.

• The indictment against Harold T. Martin III is expected to contain charges of violating the Espionage Act by “willfully” retaining information that relates to the national defense, including classified data such as NSA hacking tools and operational plans against “a known enemy” of the United States, according to individuals familiar with the case.

• Just south of the Second Circuit Court of Appeal’s district, a Pennsylvania (3rd Circuit) federal judge has come to (nearly) the opposite conclusion on law enforcement’s access to emails stored overseas. This case deals with two FBI SCA (Stored Communications Act) warrants seeking emails that Google says aren’t stored in the United States. Google, however, also says the sought emails could be at any of its data storage sites — which would include those in the US. It all depends on when it’s asked to retrieve the communications.

• And there’s where this decision parts ways with the Second Circuit, which found that emails stored in an Irish data center weren’t subject to US-issued warrants. The court explains [PDF] Google’s process for handling user data, which is built for efficiency, rather than what’s central to the FBI’s demands: efficiency of retrieval in response to law enforcement requests.

• Google and Firefox have been key drivers in the quest to get more people using HTTPS online, and starting this week the hammer is coming down.

• In a speech at Usenix Enigma 2017, Emily Schechter, a product manager for Chrome security, said that progress on HTTPS adoption was going well – currently over half of the top 100 websites support HTTPS and 44 per cent default to it. However there’s still a lot of work to be done, and she outlined future plans.

• LePage, in the video, says: “Until now, the ability to communicate with Bluetooth devices has been possible only for native apps. With Chrome 56, your Web app can communicate with nearby Bluetooth devices in a private and secure manner, using the Web Bluetooth API.

• “The Web Bluetooth API uses the GATT [Generic Attribute Profile – ed.] protocol, which enables your app to connect to devices such as light bulbs, toys, heart-rate monitors, LED displays and more, with just a few lines of JavaScript.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• In a New York Times op-ed today, John Yoo wrote the following words: “even I have grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power.”

• That should get your attention, since Yoo, a fancy law professor at Berkeley, is best known for authoring much of the legal advice claiming the U.S. could legally engage in torture when he served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

• In fact, Yoo believed this so fervently that in 2005 he said that a president can torture children if necessary, and there’s nothing that Congress or international law can do to stop him.

• Faced with President Trump’s executive orders suspending immigration from several Muslim nations and ordering the building of a border wall, and his threats to terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement, even Alexander Hamilton, our nation’s most ardent proponent of executive power, would be worried by now.

• Article II of the Constitution vests the president with “the executive power,” but does not define it. Most of the Constitution instead limits that power, as with the president’s duty “to take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” or divides that power with Congress, as with making treaties or appointing Supreme Court justices.

• Hamilton argued that good government and “energy in the executive” went hand in hand. In The Federalist No. 70, he wrote that the framers, to encourage “decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch,” entrusted the executive power in a unified branch headed by a single person, the president.

• Is Donald Trump in the process of transforming the United States into an autocracy? His first weeks in office make it look as though that is his aim. The president is hewing closely to the ideas of his chief strategist, making Stephen Bannon the most dangerous man in America.

• For more than a year, former top CIA officials have assured anyone who would listen that the agency had no intention of heeding Republican Donald Trump’s campaign call to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

• Likewise, the spy agency’s new director, former Representative Mike Pompeo (R-Mich.), promised Congress during his confirmation hearings that he would “absolutely not” jump-start waterboarding or other “enhanced interrogation techniques” that had been outlawed by President Barack Obama after years of exposés, scandals and bitter debate.

• I’ve been quite clear how I feel about Donald Trump’s awful executive order that places a blanket ban on people entering the US (even if they had valid visas) from 7 countries, including a permanent block on Syrian refugees. Tons of people have been protesting this decision, and multiple courts have ruled against it. There has been some discussion over whether or not the tech industry was really going to stand up against this move, and some of the early statements about the executive order were a bit weak. However, late Sunday night, basically the entire technology industry (plus some companies from other industries as well) signed onto an amicus brief calling the order illegal and unconstitutional (technically, it’s a motion asking for permission to file the amicus brief, with that brief attached).

• The brief was filed in the Ninth Circuit appeals court, which is one of the first appeals courts considering the executive order, after a federal judge in Seattle issued a nationwide temporary restraining order on enforcing the exec order. On Sunday, the appeals court refused to reverse the lower court, keeping the TRO in place. However, it also gave both parties (the lawsuit itself was filed by the state of Washington) a very quick turnaround time to file written arguments to be considered.

• Generally speaking, federal partnerships are forever… especially in Forever Wars. Local law enforcement agencies have been working side-by-side with federal agencies since the Drug War began. The same goes for the War on Terror. Wars keep government agencies in good health, awash in perpetual funding and repurposed military gear. Local governments are seldom interested in ending these lucrative arrangements, whether or not the underlying activity is productive.

• But San Francisco already sees its supply of federal funding drying up. President Trump has made it clear he’ll cut off this flow to cities that care more about immigrants than he does. So, there’s some gamemanship in this move — one that sends a message to Trump while expressing some resignation to the eventual fiscal punishment to come. The city of Austin, Texas is doing the same thing, but fighting the battle on two fronts, as its decision to call itself a “sanctuary city” has also earned it the displeasure of the state’s governor.

• In a joint statement, Amnesty International, Civil Rights Defenders, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists call on the Cambodian authorities to immediately drop the politically motivated criminal investigation of human rights defenders Am Sam-at and Chan Puthisak. Sam-at, a respected human rights monitor at the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO) for nearly 20 years, and Puthisak, a land rights activist from Boeung Kak Lake and former prisoner of conscience, have been accused of instigating violence at a 10 October 2016 peaceful demonstration.

• I couldn’t understand back then why it would be challenging to have your husband watching movies with another woman when he never did so with you. How torn up inside it must feel to finally have a friend who spoke your language but having to negotiate that with the lust of men and their dominating Islamic patriarchy.

• There was an argument one day. My eldest sister, who would have been in her twenties, tried to calm my parents down. The argument was across the chasm; mum upstairs in her room, dad downstairs in the living room shouting, somehow the distance and volume didn’t ever impact the coherency of dialogue.

• An innocent single mother who was framed for trying to kill a baby died of a drink and drug overdose after being told she would have to testify in court against her accusers.

• Jayne Pearce, 23, had been wrongly locked up in jail for three months charged with attempted murder after friends falsely claimed to police she had tried to smother the three month child – and then confessed on Facebook.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Surprising nobody, new FCC boss Ajit Pai used a flurry of late-Friday announcements to roll back a number of consumer-friendly FCC initiatives the former Verizon lawyer (and the large ISPs that already love him) didn’t like. Among them was the Wheeler-led FCC’s attempt to crack down on zero rating, the practice of an ISP exempting its own content from its own arbitrary usage caps, while still penalizing competitors. The former FCC had just belatedly ruled that both AT&T and Verizon’s zero rating efforts were anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and dramatically damaged the open streaming video market.

• That was then, and this is now.

• [...]

• There’s more than a little cognitive dissonance required to insist you’re a stalwart defender of “free markets,” then immediately turn a blind eye to the demolition of a level streaming video playing field by giant, lumbering monopolists. And, of course, this is just the opening cannons in the latest battle over net neutrality; while Pai gets to work refusing to enforce the agency’s existing FCC rules, the GOP is getting to work on a Communications Act rewrite that will not only kill the net neutrality rules, but defang and defund the FCC as a consumer watchdog altogether.

• There’s nothing new about mesh-networking technology. What is new is that mesh networking is finally cheap enough to be deployed in both homes and small businesses.

• It’s no surprise that US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai rolled back some of the changes made by former Chair Tom Wheeler. After Donald Trump’s election ensured that the FCC would switch to Republican control, Pai warned Wheeler against “midnight regulations” that can “quickly be undone” by new leadership. On Friday last week, Pai undid a few Wheeler-era decisions while saying that actions no longer supported by the commission’s majority “should not bind us going forward.”

• But one decision in particular is galling to advocates for low-income Americans who can’t afford broadband Internet service. As we reported, the FCC on Friday told nine companies that they can no longer provide subsidized broadband to customers who qualify for the Lifeline program. This 32-year-old program gives poor people $9.25 a month toward communications services, and it was changed last year to support broadband in addition to phone service.

DRM

• Compact discs are officially old news, if you ask Finnish library staff at least. While CDs only seem to interest older folks nowadays, sheet music and music-related books have retained their popularity.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The creation of the Caribbean Patent Convention under the auspices of Caricom is a long awaited and most welcome development towards the harmonization of intellectual property laws in the region. Even more importantly, it is an indication that Caricom leadership has at long last, after a lengthy period of stagnation and indeterminacy, finally decided to engage the process of thought and action necessary for the promulgation of a legal and regulatory framework for Caribbean intellectual property. The convention is expected to be enacted later in 2017.

• Perhaps cocktails are in order, but for whom? Should Caricom nationals celebrate in anticipation of the realization of a substantial catalyst for innovation and trade? Should international firms with an eye on the region rub their hands in glee? Should those who have publicly pressed for action on intellectual property rights breathe a sigh of relief?

Trademarks

• We’ve made the point before. In the pantheon of trademark disputes, the most commonly trotted out excuse for overt protectionism is nothing but a headfake. While companies often proclaim their bullying actions are a requirement under trademark law’s provision for active policing of infringement, the fact is that this requirement does not mandate that companies roadblock any and all similar uses to their marks. Instead, the idea is that trademark holders cannot allow actual infringements to go unchallenged.

• For an example of the difference, we can point to the current dispute between two companies in the food mart business, Dawa Food Mart and Wawa Inc. The former is a single store in New Jersey that has operated for two years now. The latter is a mid-sized chain that only recently decided that Dawa infringed on its trademarks.

• That means even the slightest hint of encroachment now warrants the attention of Wawa’s legal team, which is not very happy with a certain rhyming establishment in Paterson, New Jersey.

• According to The Courier-Post, Wawa has filed a federal trademark infringement lawsuit against Dawa Food Mart, located at 15 Lafayette Street in Paterson, Passaic County.

• The Korean owner of Dawa Food Mart, identified only as Han in the report, explained to the Courier-Post that “Dawa” means “welcome” in his native language. The shop has been open for about two years now.

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