● 02.08.17

● Links 8/2/2017: LinuxQuestions Members Choice Award Winners, OpenSUSE Site Cracked

Posted in News Roundup at 9:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Desktop Distribution of the Year – Slackware (16.03%) Server Distribution of the Year – CentOS (23.86%) Mobile Distribution of the Year – Android (68.24%) Database of the Year – MariaDB (41.29%) Office Suite of the Year – LibreOffice (89.60%) Browser of the Year – Firefox (51.74%) Desktop Environment of the Year – Plasma Desktop – KDE (28.57%) Window Manager of the Year – Openbox (24.04%) Audio Media Player Application of the Year – VLC (33.60%) Video Media Player Application of the Year – VLC (64.36%) Network Security Application of the Year – Wireshark (26.09%) Host Security Application of the Year – SELinux (36.62%)

Desktop

• If you were to ask any of my friends, they could readily attest to my profound passion for Linux. That said, it might surprise you to know that hardly two years ago, I barely knew what Linux was, let alone had any earnest interest in switching to it from Windows.

• Although a shift as dramatic as this seem astonishing when considered in hindsight, analyzing my path from one push or influence to the next paints a more telling picture. It is with this approach that I want to share my story of how I came to not only use, but indeed champion, the Linux desktop.

• We really want you to start using Linux. But as there are so many Linux operating systems to choose from, some of which we’ve featured here, it can be tricky to decide which one to get started with.

• Which is most productive? What about games? Should you choose a Linux distro that focuses on media production? What about programming? Or is there one that covers all bases?

• In the end, it comes down to personal preference, but if you’re looking for a recommendation, the MakeUseOf Linux contributors all run Linux either as their main OS or as a dual-boot alternative. While we already have a list of the top Linux distros, here you can see which Linux operating systems we’re actually using in 2017.

Server

• Today, MapR, one of the leaders in the Big Data space has announced a new environment that is optimized for Docker and container-based architectures, which the company bills as “critical for today’s modern architectures that require application development agility, fast time-to-value, and scale.” The company claims it is “the industry’s first persistent storage for containers that offers complete state access to files, database tables, and message streams from any location.” The MapR Converged Data Platform for Docker includes the MapR Persistent Client Container (PACC) that lets stateful applications and microservices access data for application agility.

• 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.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Timothy Arceri of Collabora has sent out his latest patches to Mesa in regards to the ongoing work for shader caches. The 40 patches published over night do benefit RadeonSI and R600g.

• Up to now Arceri’s GLSL shader cache has been about having a cache of the compiled shaders on-disk for the hardware being targeted and that focus up until recently was just for the Intel i965 driver. The shader cache effort being worked on now is adding support for caching of TGSI (Gallium3D’s IR) for drivers with RadeonSI caching now on his radar. With the TGSI effort, basically allowing an on-disk cache of the intermediate representation that is then consumed by the Gallium3D hardware drivers for generating their hardware-specific code.

• Intel’s Imad Sousou proudly announced that the open-source Intel Graphics Stack for Linux is now fully certified for the latest Khronos 3D industry-defined 3D graphics APIs, which include OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.2, and Vulkan 1.0.

• The roll-out of GLVND support in Mesa as a Fedora 25 update was arguably botched, but it’s an important feature and is still being discussed.

• For those that haven’t been reading Phoronix the past few years, GLVND is the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library and is a NVIDIA-backed effort but with support from the upstream Mesa community for basically forming a new “Linux OpenGL ABI,” as it’s been referred to as over the years. Working to address the situation of different drivers competing for the libGL.so.1, and when installing NVIDIA/AMDGPU-PRO drivers currently, they clash with the current OpenGL library. This new ‘Linux OpenGL ABI’ takes care of it in simple terms by postfixing the driver’s name to each supplied libGL so they can happily co-exist on the same file-system while the central (GLVND-supplied) libGL.so.1 effectively works as a dispatcher so applications/games end up using the right driver. It’s roughly along the lines of how OpenCL and Vulkan drivers are implemented, but sadly it’s taken many years to improve the situation for OpenGL drivers on Linux.

• As a quick update to yesterday’s article about RADV fast clears by default was being proposed, that change-over just happened in Mesa 17.1-devel Git.

• Bryce Harrington at Samsung’s Open-Source Group has announced the release of the Wayland 1.13 beta.

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced the availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) development snapshot of the upcoming Mesa 17.0.0 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux distributions.

• The Mesa 17.0.0 RC3 milestone comes two weeks after the release of the second RC build, and it brings numerous improvements across all the supported graphics drivers included in the stack. According to the release notes, a total of 66 changes have been implemented in this third, and probably the last Release Candidate.

Applications

• Monitoring memory utilization on Linux box is one of the important task for Linux Administrator to make the system up and running smoothly. There are plenty of commands/tools are available to monitor memory utilization on Linux, each one is working in different manner, today we are going to show you

• Recently, when I was visiting the Morevna Project, I discovered the Linux version of OpenToonz available for download. For those of you who don’t know about OpenToonz, it’s an open version of the software that Studio Ghibli co-developed with Digital Video and uses to create their breathtaking animations. In 2016, Dwango launched the OpenToonz project in cooperation with Digital Video and Studio Ghibli, opening up their code to users.

• Vim is one of the most popular text editors among programmers, web developers, and power users of GNU/Linux. This is not surprising, because Vim offers high-speed editing, has extensibility, and is pre-installed on most Linux-based distributions.

• In addition, Vim offers great benefits to writers, regardless of whether they are technically minded or not. I personally use it not only for editing configuration files and web pages, but for writing blogs, software documentation, notes, and presentation slides. In my opinion, the only potential issue it has might be its relatively steep learning curve. I remember that it took me about two weeks to become comfortable working in it, but since then, editing any kind of text has felt noticeably more fluent compared to other editors I used before.

• The major FFmpeg 3.2 “Hypatia” open-source multimedia framework recently received its third maintenance release, versioned 3.2.3, which brings up-to-date components and a bunch of various improvements.

• FFmpeg 3.2.3 was released on February 6, 2017, and comes exactly two months after the previous point release, namely FFmpeg 3.2.2, announced on December 5, 2016. It is now considered the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 3.2 “Hypatia” series, which was officially unveiled on October 26, 2016.

• Anyone who has been using Linux for a while is familiar with package managers and package management. Being a Fedora user, I have noticed a few projects that Fedora has in the works to augment package management. For example, Fedora Atomic does not the traditional package manager (dnf) but uses rpm-ostree instead. Why would Fedora be working on additional packaging systems? What is wrong with existing package managers? I have been asking myself those questions for some time now.

Proprietary

• Opera Software today announced that the Opera 43 web-browser is shipping, assuming you are still running this closed-source web-browser on Linux.

• Today, we are bringing you Opera 43, the fastest version ever, with instant page loading and Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) on board.

• Today, February 8, 2017, Vivaldi Technologies have had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Vivaldi 1.7 web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• Vivaldi 1.7 comes two months after the release of version 1.6, which launched on December 15, 2016, as the world’s first web browser to display notifications in tabs for web pages that offer content in real time, such as Facebook and Twitter, and promises to introduce various new features that we bet many of you will love. First off, you should know that Vivaldi 1.7 is based on the open-source Chromium 56.0.2924.88 browser.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• After informing the community that they will port the DiRT Rally racing game to Linux and SteamOS on March 2, UK-based games publisher Feral Interactive is now announcing the Linux port of HITMAN on February 16, 2017.

• Yes, you’re reading that right, IO Interactive’s new HITMAN episodic stealth video game is coming to Linux in a little over a week from the moment of writing this, allowing gamers to become the “ultimate assassin” in the sixth entry of the now very popular Hitman franchise.

• The port was handled by notorious Linux experts Feral Interactive, who have a great track record with this stuff, so expect it to run well. There isn’t any Vulkan support, if you were hoping for that, however.

• Civilization VI and DiRT Rally were recent AAA Linux game announcements and now HITMAN is the latest game receiving a confirmed Linux game port.

• Feral Interactive will be releasing HITMAN for Linux next week, 16 February. Feral just announced the game port on their site.

• Feral Interactive have officially announced their next Linux port and it’s going to be ‘HITMAN’ [Steam]. Another awesome game for our platform. This is the complete first season too, so we get plenty of content.

• They plan to release Hitman for Linux on Thursday 16th of February, so be sure mark your calendars.

• Just a note to not get overly excited about threaded OpenGL in Mesa. While it’s true it could help a bunch of games, there’s also games it likely won’t help or even make worse. Feral Interactive’s ports already do it, and I’m sure others do too.

• To be clear, I’m not saying it can’t help games that already have some form of it in future, and some it could easily help right now.

• Unigine Engine 2.4 was made available today by Unigine Corp. This release is exciting because there are a ton of new features and this engine update will be used by the soon-to-be-released Unigine Superposition Benchmark.

• Exciting us on the renderer side in Unigine 2.4 is support for Screen-Space Global Illumination (SSGI), Super-Sampling Rendering, and many updates for Screen-Space Reflections. There are also many other smaller renderer improvements, but sadly nothing to report on for Vulkan.

• When Aspyr Media announced yesterday that Civilization VI is shipping for Linux this week it was confirmed that only NVIDIA graphics are supported by this latest AAA Linux game release. But they later clarified that AMD “works”, but with issues. But it doesn’t sound too bad.

• Way back last year the developer of Banished was posting his thoughts on porting the game to both Linux & Mac. There has been silence for many months, but it appears he has been insanely busy.

• The developer has been working on a new game and they say they want to have it cross-platform all at once. This is really great news, but it has required plenty of effort on their part.

• Sadly, it does have major fullscreen issues with multiple monitors. Setting it to 1920×1080 fullscreen will plonk it on my secondary monitor with a 3840×1080 resolution. Luckily, ALT+ENTER put it back into windowed mode (thank god for hotkeys eh!). You can’t actually change the fullscreen resolution, which is annoying. Again, luckily, you can maximise the window and the game will scale to it, so it’s not the end of the world.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A few moments ago, the KDE project announced the general availability of the first point release of the KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.

• That’s right, we’re talking about KDE Plasma 5.9.1, the first bugfix release to the latest stable series of the acclaimed and modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions. This maintenance update comes only one week after the launch of KDE Plasma 5.9, and it fixes a total of 62 issues discovered or reported by users since then.

• For those that wait until point releases before upgrading your KDE desktop stack, Plasma 5.9.1 is now available.

• KDE Plasma 5.9.0 was released last week with a variety of new features while coming out today is the first point release.

• Qt WebEngine remains the primary module on modern Qt5 tool-kit versions for having web capabilities provided by Chromium. The migration from Qt WebKit to WebEngine happened around four years ago but there still are some developers pursuing out-of-tree support for Qt WebKit.

• In 2016 we covered a few times the work being done to revive Qt WebKit while coming out this week is a fresh “technology preview” release of the Qt WebKit code for those interested in this alternative to the Chromium-based Qt WebEngine.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Apt Update Indicator is a GNOME Shell extension that keeps you informed about available updates in Ubuntu GNOME / Debian.

• Using it, you get a new icon on the GNOME Shell Top Bar which displays the number of package updates, while from its menu you can see exactly which updates are pending, apply the updates, and more.

• One of the advantages of maintaining a web browser based on WebKit, like Epiphany, is that the vast majority of complexity is contained within WebKit. Epiphany itself doesn’t have any code for HTML parsing or rendering, multimedia playback, or JavaScript execution, or anything else that’s actually related to displaying web pages: all of the hard stuff is handled by WebKit. That means almost all of the security problems exist in WebKit’s code and not Epiphany’s code. While WebKit has been affected by over 200 CVEs in the past two years, and those issues do affect Epiphany, I believe nobody has reported a security issue in Epiphany’s code during that time. I’m sure a large part of that is simply because only the bad guys are looking, but the attack surface really is much, much smaller than that of WebKit. To my knowledge, the last time we fixed a security issue that affected a stable version of Epiphany was 2014.

• The past two weeks we’ve had DevConf and FOSDEM back to back, so the development slowed down a bit. Expect it to pick up again, now that we’re close to the GNOME 3.24 release.

• In these last two weeks, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 34 commits, with 20973 lines added and 21593 lines removed.

• I went to FOSDEM again this year, my fourth year running. I go with a great group of friends and it is starting to become quite the tradition.

Distributions

• These are some of the best distributions out there, in my opinion. For better or for worse, the Linux world is full of distributions and there are passionate people who like ‘their’ distributions over others. Let us know which distribution you prefer for your own use case and why.

Reviews

• The MX Linux distribution is a relatively new name in the Linux world. However, its predecessors MEPIS and antiX were both popular some time ago. I even reviewed SimplyMEPIS 11.0 KDE back in 2012.

• I am not very sure what MX means. Is it a reference to Mexico? Or to Moto-cross? Of just a hybrid of Mepis and antiX? You can comment your ideas below.

• Debian Stable is the backbone of this distribution. It is Debian 8 Jessie version that was used as a base for the latest MX release.

• Solus is an independent Linux distribution where the rising Budgie desktop was born. Despite the fact it is relatively a new Linux distribution, Solus brings many stunning features. The most interesting feature is, of course, the superstar Budgie desktop that has catalyzed another important project called Ubuntu Budgie. The newest version of Solus, Solus 2017.01.01.0, was released on January 2017 and offers us plenty of new and interesting things to look around.

New Releases

• Univention’s Maren Abatielos is informing Softpedia today, February 7, 2017, about the general availability of the first milestone towards the major Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.2 operating system.

Gentoo Family

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton, who is known for many Linux-based operating systems, informs us about the general availability of a new version of his Gentoo-based exGENT Linux distribution.

Arch Family

• Arch Linux certainly has its share of fans, with some being quite passionate about their favorite distribution. Recently a writer at Linux.com wrote a post about Arch and considered it to be a “simpler kind of Linux.”

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Softpedia was informed by Dr. Roy Schestowitz that the openSUSE News (news.opensuse.org) website got defaced by Kurdish hacker MuhmadEmad on the day of February 6, 2017.

• It would appear that the server where the news.opensuse.org website is hosted is isolated from the rest of openSUSE’s infrastructure, which means that the hacker did not have access to any contributor data, such as email and passwords, nor to the ISO images of the openSUSE Linux operating system.

• We already talked with openSUSE Chairman Richard Brown, who confirms for Softpedia that the offered openSUSE downloads remain safe and consistent, and users should not worry about anything. The vigilant openSUSE devs immediately restored the news.opensuse.org website from a recent backup, so everything is operating normally at this time.

• The openSUSE team acted quickly to restore the site. When I talked to Richard Brown, openSUSE chairman, he said that “the server that hosts ‘news.opensuse.org’ is isolated from the majority of openSUSE infrastructure by design, so there was no breach of any other part of openSUSEs infrastructure, especially our build, test and download systems. Our offered downloads remain safe and consistent and there was no breach of any openSUSE contributor data.”

• The team is still investigating the reason for the breach so I don’t have much information. The site ran a WordPress install and it seems that WordPress was compromised.

• This site is not managed by the SUSE or openSUSE team. It is handled by the IT team of MicroFocus. However, Brown said that SUSE management certainly doesn’t want any such incident to happen again and they are considering moving the site to the infrastructure managed by SUSE and openSUSE team.

• In the latest Linux news, the news.opensuse.org got hacked and displayed “KurDish HaCk3rS WaS Here” for a while Monday and while the site has been restored, no comment on the hack has been issued. Elsewhere, Debian 9.0 has entered its final freeze in the last steps in preparations for release. FOSS Force has named their winner for top distro of 2016 and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his picks for the best for 2017. Blogger DarkDuck said MX-16 Xfce is “very close to the ideal” and Alwan Rosyidi found Solus OS is giving Elementary OS a run for its money. Phoronix.com’s Michael Larabel explained why he uses Fedora and Jeremy Garcia announced the winners of the 2016 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards.

Red Hat Family

• WORLD’S leading open source solutions provider Red Hat Inc has appointed Chew Kai Peng (pic above) as the country manager of Malaysia.

• As Red Hat’s country manager of Malaysia, Chew will lead the direction of the team in Malaysia, helping to establish strong ties with enterprise customers and partners in the country, and expand awareness of open source solutions in the country as organizations embrace modern technologies to meet the expectations of an increasingly digital society.

• Huawei and Red Hat have announced that they are expanding their cooperation to include public and network functions virtualization (NFV) clouds.

• The announcement expands upon previously announced collaborations between Huawei and Red Hat to deliver OpenStack-based solutions (December 2014) and carrier-grade software-defined networking (SDN) solutions (June 2016).

Finance

Fedora

• One of the big topics at Devconf and around the RH offices was the ongoing effort to modernize both Fedora and RHEL’s overall build processes to be more flexible and involve a lot more testing (or, as some people may have put it, “CI CI CI”). A lot of folks wearing a lot of hats are involved in different bits of this effort, but one thing that seems to stay constant is that ResultsDB will play a significant role.

• ResultsDB started life as the result storage engine for AutoQA, and the concept and name was preserved as AutoQA was replaced by Taskotron. Its current version, however, is designed to be a scalable, capable and generic store for test results from any test system, not just Taskotron. Up until last week, though, we’d never quite got around to hooking up any other systems to it to demonstrate this.

• Throughout 2016, the Fedora community in Latin America was active promoting Fedora in local events and showing the Fedora Project objectives and foundations to possible new contributors and helping them find their way into different subprojects, as part of the global Fedora community. We had a presence in all relevant events in Latin America with talks, workshops and stands promoting ours four foundations to the world.

• DevConf.cz featured many great talks and a fantastic hallway track. It also hosted the Fedora Activity Day for the Fedora Diversity team. The FAD spanned three days of working on ways we can learn more about our community, encourage greater diversity and more. This team has a high level of overlap with Marketing, CommOps, and the Magazine so we didn’t restrict ourselves to thinking about just diversity issues. More will be forthcoming as the team does its final outbound reporting, but I wanted to share some of my observations as a someone privileged to get to work with this amazing group of people.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• It’s been a month since we’ve told you about the newest security updates that landed in the stable software repositories of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system, and it’s time to keep you guys up to date with what’s going on.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• While the Ubuntu Phone efforts are basically on-hold until migrating to a Snap-based Ubuntu Phone/Touch image, OTA-15 was released today.

• Ubuntu OTA-15 is rolling out today to Ubuntu Phone users, but it’s not worth getting too excited about.

• We’ve been informed earlier by Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak, via an email announcement, that the Ubuntu Touch OTA-15 software update has been officially released for all supported Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices.

• Ubuntu Touch OTA-15 is now the latest software version for any officially supported Ubuntu-powered device, but it’s a small hotfix that only addresses three issues reported by users since OTA-14 and updates the oxide-qt web browser engine for Qt (QML plugin) to version 1.19.7 to address some security flaws.

• Ubuntu OTA 15 has been released, and is being rolled out to all supported Ubuntu Touch devices. As we previously reported, Ubuntu OTA-15 is primarily bug fix and security update, and addresses issues with loading HTTPS sites in the stock Ubuntu web-browser.

• Ubuntu Unity has been around for a while and debuted in release 11.04. Since then Canonical has been introducing new features in each release. Some features have been embraced by the Ubuntu community at large. As a result, these features are still talked about to this day. Other features are not so lucky.

• In this article we’ll talk about a few Ubuntu Unity features that you might not know exist. These aren’t hidden features by any means, just some useful aspects of Unity that are small but aren’t really talked about much anymore. Here are five Ubuntu Unity features you may not have known about!

Devices/Embedded

• It seems like every day new IoT devices with a very limited amount of RAM and storage space are appearing in homes, gardens, businesses, labs, and elsewhere. This includes things like heart rate monitors, thermometers, home automation components, and other devices that only need to perform small, limited tasks. About a year ago, Marcel Holtmann from Intel began looking at the challenge of shrinking Linux to run on these types of small, IoT devices as a hobby project, and at LinuxCon Europe, he presented what he’s learned about how to run Linux on tiny peripherals.

• Recently, Marcel Holtmann from Intel began looking at the challenge of shrinking Linux to run on small, IoT devices as a hobby project, and at LinuxCon Europe, he presented what he’s learned about how to run Linux on tiny peripherals.

• Linaro released AOSP TV for the HiKey, enabling development for Android TV using 96Boards SBCs without requiring Google Services and verification.

• The Linaro Digital Home Group (LHG) has released a sample build of the Android TV version of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) distribution for Linaro’s 96Boards Consumer Edition spec. The firmware is initially available on the 2GB RAM version of the LeMaker-built, community-backed HiKey SBC, the official Android reference board for 96Boards.

• DFI’s “FS700” Qseven 1.2 module expands upon NXP’s i.MX6 with up to 2GB of DDR3, up to 16GB eMMC, a microSD slot, SATA, CAN, and PCIe.

• Embedded board vendors never seem to tire of the venerable Cortex-A9-based i.MX6 SoC. The latest is DFI Technologies’ FS700, which joins other 70 x 70mm Qseven modules running the i.MX6, including Aaeon’s AQ7-IMX6.

• Read more

• If these patches land soon, the Raspberry Pi could beat newer AMD graphics cards to having mainline HDMI audio support via their respective Linux kernel DRM drivers (with the AMDGPU audio support still being held up by DAL/DC mainlining efforts). Eric Anholt managed to finally put out the VC4 HDMI audio code for review.

Phones

Tizen

• We have had concept Tizen smartphones in the past, but now we have a new model named Samsung Project Valley that has been created by Matti Farhang. This is a foldable device that is apparently based on all the Information that has been currently leaked for these types of handsets.

Android

• In January, ZTE CEO Lixin Cheng told CNET that his company would release its first Android Wear smartwatch in 2017 — one with an LTE cellular connection and longer battery life than typical, so you can use it independent of a phone.

• Now, we may be getting our first glimpse of the device, which will reportedly be named the ZTE Quartz.

• As we anticipate the influx of Android Wear 2.0 devices, ZTE is set add its name to the list with the ZTE Quartz, its first Wear-running smartwatch.

• Ahead of Google’s Android Wear 2.0 launch later this week, all sorts of details are spilling out about new hardware on the horizon. Today, VentureBeat got its hands on leaked marketing material for ZTE’s very first Android Wear smartwatch, called the Quartz. There’s not very many details about the device, but it’s likely it will support cellular connectivity to make use of Android Wear’s more robust standalone features.

• What’s the best Android tablet? The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 is the best Android tablet to buy in 2017, but there are plenty of other options in our round-up of the best Android tablets. Best Android tablet reviews. Best Android tablet buying advice.

• Set for release later this month at Mobile World Congress, the LG G6 could be one of several new impressive Android flagship devices coming your way soon ahead of the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 later this year.

• For many years, there have been several debates about which smartphone OS is better — Android, or iOS. Even among the writers of Gadgets 360, there are strong opinions about why some choose one over the other. But, fact of the matter is that the two have been closing the gaps in the past few years, with Android becoming more fluid and beautiful, and iOS becoming more flexible and customisable.

• Once again, Stagefright Android mediaserver flaws are being patched by Google to help protect Android users from potential security risks.

• Google released its second Android patch update of 2017 on Feb. 6, providing users of the mobile operating system with patches for 58 different vulnerabilities, up significantly from the 13 flaws Google fixed in its February 2016 Android update.

Free Software/Open Source

• The security vulnerabilities that you need to consider when developing open source software can be overwhelming. Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) IDs, zero-day, and other vulnerabilities are seemingly announced every day. With this flood of information, how can you stay up to date?

• “If you shipped a product that was built on top of Linux kernel 4.4.1, between the release of that kernel and now, there have been nine CVEs against that kernel version,” says Ryan Ware, Security Architect at Intel, in the Q&A below. “These all would affect your product despite the fact they were not known at the time you shipped.”

• Throughout 2016, Software Defined Networking (SDN) continued to rapidly evolve and gain maturity. We are now beyond the conceptual phase of open source networking, and the companies that were assessing the potential of these projects two years ago have begun enterprise deployments. As has been predicted for several years, SDN is beginning to redefine corporate networking.

• Market researchers are essentially unanimous on the topic. IDC published a study of the SDN market earlier this year and predicted a 53.9 percent CAGR from 2014 through 2020, at which point the market will be valued at $12.5 billion. In addition, the Technology Trends 2016 report ranked SDN as the best technology investment for 2016.

• “Open source” is now officially a word according to Merriam-Webster, according to my good friends at Ars Technica. Actually, I don’t know anybody at Ars Technica, but whenever you’re stealing news from another news source, you’re traditionally allowed to refer to everyone who works there as “my good friends.” The theory is that if they think you’re a friend of theirs, they won’t sue you.

• I say “according to Ars” because I can’t find proof anywhere that “open source” was indeed just added to the dictionary, as it’s not included as an example in the article my good friends at Merriam-Webster posted announcing the introduction of 1,000 new words on Tuesday. Or, if it’s there, the “find” function on my browser couldn’t find it, which would be really strange since the browser is designed and built by my good friends at Google.

• OPEN source has become an integral piece of every developer’s arsenal. The power of the community, the wisdom of many, and the ability to hook into various systems and solutions make open source incredibly powerful.

• At A10, we contribute to and embrace open-source solutions and provide APIs to empower developers to integrate their tools into our systems.

• Netflix announced today the release of HubCommander, an open source Slack bot to track and manage GitHub organizations and repositories.

• Netflix is the second large company to launch a Slack bot today. Earlier in the day, PayPal released its Slack bot for peer-to-peer payments.

• Today, IBM began a new push to make applications accessible to users with disabilities. The company announced that is has made two accessibility projects available under open-source licenses. These projects are designed to help developers determine if their applications support the needs of those with limited mobility or vision.

• The two new projects are AccProbe and Va11yS. AccProbe is a standalone Eclipse RCP application designed to help developers test and debug accessible applications.

Events

• More than 600 open source professionals, developers and operators will convene in Tokyo this year to collaborate, share information, and learn at Open Source Summit Japan. The technical conference will cover the latest in open source technologies, including Linux, containers, cloud computing, software-defined networking, and more.

• This year Open Source Summit Japan will also be co-located with Automotive Linux Summit, to be held May 31 – June 2 at the Tokyo Conference Center. Automotive Linux Summit gathers the most innovative minds from the automotive arena including automotive systems engineers, Linux experts, R&D managers, business executives, open source licensing and compliance specialists and community developers. The event connects the developer community with the vendors and users providing and using the code in order to drive the future of embedded devices in automotive.

• Today I got early up, going with Andreas to the venue, arriving at 8.30 AM. He was going there to open the Open Source Design room, I was going there to open the GNOME booth. After the shift I then decided to wandered around to collect stickers and speak to various projects at their booths.

• I spent the weekend at Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, or as it is better known: FOSDEM – as I did in the past several years as well. This time I delivered two presentations on syslog-ng, and as usual, I spent the rest of the time in devrooms and in the exhibition areas.

• The DebConf Content team would like to Call for Proposals for the DebConf17 conference, to be held in Montreal, Canada, from August 6 through August 12, 2017.

• You can find this Call for Proposals in its latest form at: https://debconf17.debconf.org/cfp

• Please refer to this URL for updates on the present information.

• ApacheCon gathers attendees from over 60 countries to learn about core open source technologies directly from the Apache developer and user communities.

SaaS/Back End

• Metis, which bills itself as “an accredited intensive data science bootcamp,” is steadily moving forward with its big data processing courses, which teach students how to work with Hadoop and Spark, two of today’s most widely used distributed computing paradigms. As we’ve reported, enterprises are finding tools like Hadoop hard to work with. Gartner, Inc.’s Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years. The study found that there are difficulties in implementing Hadoop.

CMS

• My WordPress blog got hacked two days ago and now twice today. This morning I purged MySQL and restored a good backup from three days ago, changed all DB and WordPress passwords (both the old and new ones were long and autogenerated ones), but not even an hour after the redeploy the hack was back. (It can still be seen on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. Neither the Apache logs nor the Journal had anything obvious, nor were there any new files in global or user www directories, so I’m a bit stumped how this happened. Certainly not due to bruteforcing a password, that would both have shown in the logs and also have triggered ban2fail, so this looks like an actual vulnerability.

• When WordPress originally announced their latest security update, there were three security fixes. While all security updates can be serious, they didn’t seem too bad. Shortly after, they updated their announcement with a fourth and more serious security problem.

• I have looked after the Debian WordPress package for a while. This is the first time I have heard people actually having their sites hacked almost as soon as this vulnerability was announced.

• Ah, the venerable survey. It can be a fast, simple, cheap, and effective way gather the opinions of friends, family, classmates, co-workers, customers, readers, and others.

• Millions turn to proprietary tools like SurveyGizmo, Polldaddy, SurveyMonkey, or even Google Forms to set up their surveys. But if you want more control, not just over the application but also the data you collect, then you’ll want to go open source.

• Let’s take a look at four open source survey tools that can suit your needs, no matter how simple or complex those needs are.

Education

• Charlie Reisinger is the IT Director of the Penn Manor School District, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He recently finished writing a spellbinding book describing how his school district decided to adopt open source software and methods. When reading this book, I sent an email to Charlie saying: “This book reads as if it’s your doctoral thesis — it’s a multiyear capstone project.” Charlie responded, “It felt in some way like that while writing the book.” Charlie went on to tell me that the reason he wrote the book was to help other school districts make the plunge into open source. “Come on in – the water is warm!” is the reassuring tone throughout the book.

• Here is my video review of this book. Note — at 27-minutes long, it’s much longer than my other video book reviews. I had no choice but to give the book its due. It’s a masterful piece of storytelling that offers hope to students and teachers everywhere.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Hacking IKEA furniture is a global trend, attracting creatives and technologists alike from around the globe to give items alternative usages or personalized touches. Their modest price tag and widespread availability make IKEA furniture a true gem for the hacker community who share their designs on dedicated websites, blogs, Pinterest boards and even books.

BSD

• In a bit of a hurry, but here’s some random stuff that happened.

• Add connection timeout for ftp (http). Mostly for the installer so it can error out and try something else.

Licensing/Legal

• Advising clients on open source issues is a ton of fun—you often get to do deep dives into the technology to understand how it works, you can have a huge impact on their products and bottom line, and you can also help build healthy communities of paid developers and volunteers who are creating better tech.

• A thread on an open source project mailing list offers seven lessons on how to engage an open source community over legal issues.

• A thread on an Apache mailing list (Now safely in the past) provides a great illustration of what not to do when your employer’s interests seem to need engagement in an open source community. Instead of asking a suitably-trained lawyer to directly engage, the company asked an engineer to engage when they wanted special terms for a contribution. They went on to propose custom terms, a custom CLA and even implied that they wanted private bilateral negotiations. This session runs through the thread and draws seven lessons for approaching an open source community with your legal issues.

• In this talk I will summarize the case law on the contract or license question in the U.S. Certain obligations under the GPL may be merely contractual, meaning there are less damages and enforcement mechanisms available to a plaintiff, while other obligations may have more teeth. I will use this analysis to help the community think about how it might craft software licenses in the future.

• Who owns the copyright to my open source contributions? You should carefully review any employment contract because some companies may claim ownership of anything you create while employed by them, regardless of whether it was created during your personal time. There is no right or wrong, but it is good to know before you start. Understanding the equipment and time that you can use for your personal open source contributions is of the upmost importance when signing any contracts.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• In his book The Open Organization, Dr. Philip Foster defines governance as “the system and process by which power is managed and thus instills order where potential conflict threatens the opportunities to realize mutual gains which is essential for open organizations.” According to Dr. Foster, open governance models for 21st Century businesses should contain five core elements: independence, pluralism, representation, decentralized decision making, and autonomous participation.

Leftovers

• News came last week that Oracle has, in effect, doubled the price for running its products on Amazon’s cloud. It has done so with a bit of sleight-of-hand on how it counts AWS’s virtual CPUs. It also did so without fanfare. The company’s new pricing policy went in effect on January 23, and pretty much went unnoticed until January 28, when Oracle follower Tim Hall stumbled on the change in Big Red’s “Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment” document and blew the whistle.

• Believe it or not: Oddball comedy Wayne’s World made its debut on the big screen 25 years ago on Feb. 14. The movie, adapted from the Saturday Night Live sketches with Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers), the enthusiastic host of a public access cable show from his parents’ couch, and Garth Algar (Dana Carvey), his socially inept and genius sidekick, went on to surpass $100 million at the box office and develop a cult following.

Health/Nutrition

• Lettuce rationing probably wasn’t in most pundits’ predictions for 2017. But this winter our supermarket shelves have been emptying of the green vegetables we take for granted.

• An extreme weather cocktail of drought, flooding and freezing conditions has wiped out crops in Southern Spain, while Italy, Turkey and Greece are struggling with poor conditions. Lettuce is currently the main casualty, with spinach, aubergines and broccoli also under threat.

• Everyone’s having great fun tweeting about the #lettucecrisis and the earlier #courgettecrisis. Complaining about price rises, sharing photos of shortage signs, listing all the supermarkets they’ve trekked to, searching for a humble aubergine.

• Much of the country has been watching in horror as Donald Trump has made good on his promises to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency — delaying 30 regulations, severely limiting the information staffers can release, and installing Scott Pruitt as the agency’s administrator to destroy the agency from within. But even those keeping their eyes on the EPA may have missed a quieter attack on environmental protections now being launched in Congress.

• On Tuesday, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is expected to hold a hearing on a bill to undermine health regulations that is based on a strategy cooked up by tobacco industry strategists more than two decades ago. At what Republicans on the committee have dubbed the “Making EPA Great Again” hearing, lawmakers are likely to discuss the Secret Science Reform Act, a bill that would limit the EPA to using only data that can be replicated or made available for “independent analysis.”

• Thousands of girls in Germany face genital mutilation on top of the tens of thousands of women who have already suffered it, a new government report claims.

• The study, published on Monday by the Family Affairs Ministry, found that 48,000 woman and girls living in Germany have been victims of female genital mutilation (FGM), an increase of 30 percent since 2014.

• According to the authors, between 1,600 and 5,700 girls in Germany are faced with undergoing the illegal operation to remove external parts of their genitalia.

• Women who work at night or do irregular shifts may experience a decline in fertility, a new study has found.

• Shift and night workers had fewer eggs capable of developing into healthy embryos than those who work regular daytime hours, according to researchers at Harvard University.

• There was also a reduction of around 15 per cent in the number of eggs ready for fertilisation in women with jobs requiring heavy lifting, including nurses and interior designers, they said.

Security

• First i want to tell you about system security before going deeper about Lynis. Every system administrator should know/understand about system security, Hardening, etc,. So that we can make our system up and running smoothly without any issues otherwise we have to face so many issues.

• As software makers, we face a unique threat model. The computers or accounts we use to develop and deliver software are of more value to an attacker than what ordinary computer users have—cloud service keys can be stolen and used for profit, and the software we ship can be loaded with malware without our knowledge. And that’s before we consider that the code we write has a tremendous value of its own and should be protected.

• Last summer at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge pitted automated systems against one another, trying to find weaknesses in the others’ code and exploit them.

• “This is a great example of how easily machines can find and exploit new vulnerabilities, something we’ll likely see increase and become more sophisticated over time,” said David Gibson, vice president of strategy and market development at Varonis Systems.

• His company hasn’t seen any examples of hackers leveraging artificial intelligence technology or machine learning, but nobody adopts new technologies faster than the sin and hacking industries, he said.

• “So it’s safe to assume that hackers are already using AI for their evil purposes,” he said.

• Security vendor Secdo has added Linux to the list of operating systems supported by its Pre-emptive Incident Response product. It has provided a short list of supported versions of Linux including RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS. While it doesn’t name SUSE Enterprise Server (SES) it does say that it is also supporting other versions of Linux.

• For many of us, the most important part of security is making our personal data safe. The best security will withstand any abuse, theoretically. However, in the real world, you can’t cover all possible situations of abuse. Therefore, the best strategy is to use multiple techniques for increasing security. Most normal people don’t need complicated schemes and cryptography to be safe. But it’s good to make it hard for intruders to get access to your data.

• A Windows Server zero-day security vulnerability has been released into the wild after Microsoft failed to issue a patch, despite having been warned of the problem three months ago.

Defence/Aggression

• As many as 13,000 opponents of Bashar al-Assad were secretly hanged in one of Syria’s most infamous prisons in the first five years of the country’s civil war as part of an extermination policy ordered by the highest levels of the Syrian government, according to Amnesty International.

• Many thousands more people held in Saydnaya prison died through torture and starvation, Amnesty said, and the bodies were dumped in two mass graves on the outskirts of Damascus between midnight and dawn most Tuesday mornings for at least five years.

• Discussing western reporting of the Syrian war, veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn recently noted “fabricated news and one-sided reporting have taken over the news agenda to a degree probably not seen since the First World War”.

• The White House has released a list of 78 terrorist attacks that it says were underreported. The Trump administration, under fire for immigration restrictions and other policies it says are designed to curb terrorism, has portrayed the media and other institutions as playing down the threat.

• But the list, which was released on Monday night and details episodes from September 2014 to December 2016, includes dozens of attacks that were heavily covered in the press, including The New York Times. (Examples are included in the list below.)

• Just as striking was what the list excluded: attacks targeting Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Islamist terrorism victims.

• President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations justifiably led to much outcry from activists, politicians and foreign leaders. The list—currently struck down by a federal judge in Seattle—was arbitrary, motivated by disjointed racist panic and was reportedly causing deaths worldwide. But while it’s important to lay primary blame for the ban at the feet of the man who signed it, years of Islamophobic coverage in corporate media—right-wing, centrist and “liberal”—laid the propaganda groundwork to get us here.

• Surveys have found support for Trump’s Muslim ban ranging from 42 to 47 percent. This in line with the 43 percent of Americans willing to admit to having at least some prejudice against Muslims. Trump’s order exploits an irrational fear that media have spent at least 15 years conditioning.

• Attention has rightly been paid to the Islamophobia industry—a loose consortium of professional far-right trolls such as Pam Geller, Frank Gaffney, Steve Emerson, Breitbart, Infowars, etc. And while these forces certainly were major factor in creating the Trump-friendly Muslim-fearing climate, it’s important not to lose sight of at least three other media phenomena that also had a major role: 1) the presentation of “terrorism” as a unique, existential threat, arbitrarily defined as applying almost exclusively to Muslim violence, 2) New Atheist liberal bigots and 3) disproportionate news coverage of the ISIS spectacle.

• Shai Masot, the Israeli “diplomat” who had been subverting Britain’s internal democracy with large sums of cash and plans to concoct scandal against a pro-Palestinian British minister, did not appear in the official diplomatic list.

• I queried this with the FCO, and was asked to put my request in writing. A full three weeks later and after dozens of phone calls, they reluctantly revealed that Masot was on the “technical and administrative staff” of the Israeli Embassy.

• This is plainly a nonsense. Masot, as an ex-Major in the Israeli Navy and senior officer in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, is plainly senior to many who are on the Diplomatic List, which includes typists and personal assistants. There are six attaches – support staff – already on the List.

• Yemen has withdrawn its permission for the US to conduct special operations missions in the country after the raid on an al-Qaeda base last month which killed up to 30 civilians and a US Navy Seal.

• There has been widespread anger in Yemen at the reported loss of life in a ground raid in which “almost everything went wrong,” as one US military official described it, leading Yemeni officials to suspend the counter-terror programme.

• Neither Yemen nor the US have officially announced the decision, which was reported by the New York Times, citing unnamed American officials.

• Why are we everywhere in the world, so often with guns drawn? The provocative reporter Stephen Kinzer has covered a number of our “regime-change” interventions in the world, from Guatemala to the Middle East. And in book after book, he’s sharpened the question: how did our country that was born in proud rebellion against the British Empire become the mightiest empire of them all — taking on the sorrows and burdens and expenses that come with most of a thousand military bases around the world. And how has the instinct to intervene persisted through so many bitter mistakes and losses, from the first de-stabilization of democratic Iran in the 1950s to Vietnam in the 60s to Iraq yesterday and Afghanistan today?

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Nine years ago, Karger helped expose the Mormon Church’s role in Proposition 8, the successful ballot initiative that struck down same-sex marriage in California. The Church of Latter-day Saints, a religion founded in the mid-19th century by Joseph Smith, a merchant’s son turned prophet, donated millions of dollars to the effort. The church also offered volunteers and considerable resources to Project Marriage, the anti-LGBT group backing Prop 8. After the church became involved, the campaign was pulling in $500,000 a day in donations.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has finished its review of the Dakota Access Pipeline and will issue an easement under the Missouri River/Lake Oahe as early as Wednesday afternoon, but the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has pledged to challenge the decision in court.

• The decision comes two weeks after President Donald Trump asked federal agencies to speed up their review of the crude oil pipeline that tribal and environmental activists have protested for months.

• In a memo called “Compliance with Presidential Memorandum” and dated Tuesday, a senior Army Civil Works official said he reviewed all the corps study of the pipeline and decided the easement was warranted.

• Climate change is already wrecking some of Britain’s most significant sites, from Wordsworth’s gardens in Cumbria to the white cliffs on England’s south coast, according to a new report.

• Floods and erosion are damaging historic places, while warmer temperatures are seeing salmon vanishing from famous rivers and birds no longer visiting important wetlands.

• An EU review has revealed multiple failings by the UK in applying environmental law, on the same day that the commission escalated its action against Britain for breaching air pollution limits.

• Britain has been in breach of EU nitrogen dioxide (NO2) limits since 2010, with London overshooting its annual air pollution limit for the whole of 2017 in just the first five days.

• The Guardian understands that a “reasoned opinion” will now be sent on 15 February to the UK and four other countries: Germany, France, Italy and Spain. If a satisfactory response is not received within two months, a case at the European court could follow.

• A rapidly advancing crack in Antarctica’s fourth-largest ice shelf has scientists concerned that it is getting close to a full break. The rift has accelerated this year in an area already vulnerable to warming temperatures. Since December, the crack has grown by the length of about five football fields each day.

• There’s been much outrage over the Republican party’s disdain toward the Environmental Protection Agency. On Friday, Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz presented the most radical idea yet—eliminate the agency entirely. He proposed HR 861, a bill “to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.”

• Archambault II said he knows the Standing Rock movement has inspired people around the world to shape their world at home and abroad.

• The U.S. Army will grant the final permit for the controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline after an order from President Donald Trump to expedite the project despite opposition from Native American tribes and climate activists.

• In a court filing on Tuesday, the Army said that it would allow the final section of the line to tunnel under North Dakota’s Lake Oahe, part of the Missouri River system. This could enable the $3.8 billion pipeline to begin operation as soon as June.

• Energy Transfer Partners is building the 1,170-mile (1,885 km) line to help move crude from the shale oilfields of North Dakota to Illinois en route to the Gulf of Mexico, where many U.S. refineries are located.

• Outside Southeast Asia, few people know of Palembang, a city on Sumatra, the sixth largest island in the world. A gloomy and immense city, with almost two million inhabitants, most of them living in cramped and squalid conditions.

• The tropical River Musi bisects the city, a desperately polluted waterway, bordered by slums built on stilts and a few old colonial buildings. Vessels of all types use the Musi, hauling everything that can be sold abroad or to the rest of Indonesia. The river is jammed with enormous barges filled with coal, oil tankers, makeshift boats carrying palm oil fruit bunches, as well as countless ships carrying timber.

• Plunder is done openly; there is no attempt to conceal it.

• Ms. Isna Wijayani, a Professor at Bina Darma University in Palembang, laments on the situation.

• “There is no primary forest left in a wide area around Palembang,” she says. “However, illegal logging doesn’t get reported in the local media. It is because powerful forces, including police and the army (TNI) are involved or directly behind much of the illegal logging and other profitable commercial activities in South Sumatra.”

• The world’s most valuable company isn’t Apple or Google’s owner, Alphabet. It’s an outfit in a league of its own: Aramco, as Saudi Arabian Oil Co. is better known. This sprawling state-owned producer, sitting atop one-fifth of the globe’s petroleum reserves, pumps more crude than the top four publicly traded oil companies combined. It’s valued at more than $2 trillion — or about four times the biggest technology giants — though no one really knows what it’s worth because its profits are shrouded in secrecy. The veil could soon be lifted as the Saudi government is planning a partial privatization of Aramco to create a war chest and prepare the country for the post-hydrocarbon age.

• Putting solar panels on rooftops and arrays is a labor-intensive process. You need people to design and manufacture the panels. Then people to market the panels to homes, businesses, and utilities. Then people to come and install them.

• It all adds up to a lot of jobs. Even though solar power still provides just a fraction of America’s electricity — about 1.3 percent — the industry now employs more than 260,000 people, according to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation. And it’s growing fast: Last year, the solar industry accounted for one of every 50 new jobs nationwide.

Finance

• The Government is to outline a series of tweaks to planning laws it says will help solve the housing shortage.

• Ministers want to require councils to come with a local plan to meet housing demand in an area, give them more powers to speed up developments, and require developers to use land more efficiently.

• Crucially, the Government’s long awaited housing white paper includes measures that would effectively scrap the Coalition 2010 housebuilding planning framework and return to a system that bears stronger similarities to the one they inherited from Labour in 2010.

• The government has begun its controversial sale of the student loan book, which it expects to recoup £12bn in the long run for the exchequer, and assured graduates that they will not have to pay more.

• The universities minister, Jo Johnson, said the move would have “no impact” on student borrowers paying off loans, as terms and conditions would remain the same after the sale was completed.

• Critics, however, were sceptical of the minister’s assurances, noting that the government had already moved the goalposts once on student loan repayments. Others raised doubts that the sale would result in value for money for taxpayers.

• One night I tuned in to the Democrats’ presidential debate to see if they had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was denouncing America’s crooked version of “casino capitalism” that floats the already-rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we ought to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”

• Betsy DeVos, the education secretary in waiting who has emerged as Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet nominee, is likely to be confirmed in a dramatic vote on Tuesday. But opponents of the Republican megadonor insist the fight has only just begun.

• Democrats mounted a marathon 24-hour takeover of the Senate floor that was still continuing on Tuesday morning, marking a show of overnight resistance against Trump’s divisive choice to head the Department of Education. With the chamber currently split 50-50, mostly along party lines, on DeVos’s nomination, Vice-President Mike Pence is expected to cast a rare tie-breaking vote in her favor on Tuesday after two Republicans came out against her confirmation last week.

• The Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as the nation’s 11th Education secretary Tuesday in a historic vote, ending a tumultuous battle over her nomination.

• DeVos, 59, has long been a polarizing figure in Michigan’s political and education circles for her support of school vouchers and charter schools. In the weeks since a rocky confirmation hearing, she became a cause celebre for opponents who say she is unfit and unqualified to serve. Congressional offices were inundated with angry calls urging her to be rejected, she was the subject of angry teacher protests nationwide, and her performance as a nominee was ridiculed on Saturday Night Live.

• Theresa May will allow MPs to vote on any proposed Brexit deal before it is put to the European parliament, in a move designed to see off the threat of a Conservative backbench rebellion.

• David Jones, a Brexit minister, made the announcement on Tuesday in the House of Commons at the start of a four-hour debate on how MPs will be asked to approve the final form of a deal with the EU, after two years of talks.

• A new set of science and technology indicators shows that the business sector is expected to remain the driving force behind research and development growth, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD released its main science and technology indicators today and found that government-financed research and development expenditures have been declining for some years.

• The Main Science and Technology Indicators (MSTI) database “provides a set of indicators that reflect the level and structure of efforts in the field of science and technology undertaken from 1981 onwards by OECD Member countries and seven non-member economies: Argentina, China, Romania, Russian Federation, Singapore, South Africa, Chinese Taipei [Taiwan],” according to the OECD website. The OECD consists of 35 wealthier countries.

• “Everybody is concerned about trade wars. If trade stops, war starts,” he said in Melbourne, where the e-commerce giant Alibaba opened its Australia and New Zealand headquarters.

• “But worry doesn’t solve the problem. The only thing you can do is get involved and actively prove that trade helps people to communicate,” said Alibaba’s CEO, as quoted by Business Insider Australia.

• The globalized economy is more than just transactions of money and goods, according to Ma.

• “We have to actively prove that trade helps people to communicate. And we should have fair trade, transparent trade, inclusive trade,” he said.

• “Trade is about a trade of values. Trade of culture,” said the billionaire, stressing that he felt a personal responsibility to fly more than a hundred thousand kilometers in the past month to promote global commerce.

• Late last month, Uber sued the city of Seattle, challenging the city’s authority to implement a landmark law allowing drivers in the gig economy to unionize. It was an opening shot in what is likely to be a long and costly legal battle.

• Uber’s legal challenge comes at an awkward time for the ride-hailing juggernaut. The company recently named 2017 “the year of the driver” and has said it will devote energy and resources to improving its relationship with the hundreds of thousands of people who drive on its platform. But the company’s bungled response to a taxi strike during the recent JFK protests led to a grassroots #DeleteUber campaign that saw 200,000 riders canceling their accounts. This latest situation in Seattle may further complicate Uber’s attempts to reverse the negative effects of that campaign.

• The Resolution Foundation’s Living Standards 2017 is an eye-opening look at the current state of the British experiment in allowing wealth inequality to expand without any check, to use a combination of austerity, the elimination of protection for tenants, reckless lending, offshore money-laundering and public subsidies for speculators to turn the human necessity of shelter into the nation’s leading asset-class.

• The result is that normal working people who bought property before hyperinflation in housing prices are now richer than they could have dreamed, and everyone else is much, much poorer. Meanwhile, the offshore investors — including many criminals who are laundering their ill-gotten gains through the London property market — are inflating the bubble to unheard-of size. Combine that with wage stagnation (which is really wage reduction, when your shelter bill is undergoing hyperinflation) and you have a recipe for wealth disparity that makes Dickens look like Karl Marx.

• “It’s telling that even when Trump had full control of the legislative and executive branches, he could only get DeVos confirmed by an unprecedented tiebreaking vote by his vice president,” Ms. Weingarten said. “That’s because DeVos shows an antipathy for public schools, a full-throttled embrace of private, for-profit alternatives and a lack of basic understanding of what children need to succeed in school.”

• Another day, another grim historical first for America. The Senate just confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary after a ‘historic tiebreaking vote’ from Vice President Mike Pence.

• Both DeVos and Pence are fans of widely discredited LGBT ‘conversion therapy,’ a damaging and inhumane bullshit practice we’ll probably see a lot more of now, along with guns in schools to protect kids from grizzly bears and jihadists.

• Just two Senate Republicans voted against DeVos: Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both of whom came out as opposed to the nominee last week. Lawmakers gave continuous speeches on the Senate floor late into the night Monday, arguing that DeVos was unqualified because she knows nothing about public schools or basic laws of our country that protect the rights of students, among many other well-documented reasons that mean nothing anymore because facts don’t matter and there is no God.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• President Donald Trump on Monday falsely claimed the “dishonest press” has failed to report on terrorist attacks, asserting the media deliberately ignores attacks for unspecified “reasons.”

• “All across Europe you’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice,” Trump said in a speech to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. “All over Europe it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.”

• “They have their reasons, and you understand that,” he said without elaborating.

• After questions were raised about his unsubstantiated claim, the White House released a long list of attacks — the majority of which have been extensively covered by major US news organizations.

• While she’s no longer in charge of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla., continues to move up her party’s ranks in Congress.

• Wasserman Schultz took over the DNC in 2011 and helped then President Barack Obama win a second term in 2012. But Democrats suffered some major losses in 2014 and, after Wikileaks released emails indicating Wasserman Schultz and the DNC helped ensure former U.S. Sec. of State Hillary Clinton would defeat U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for the party’s presidential nomination, she resigned that post back in July. Sanders backed law professor Tim Canova against Wasserman Schultz in a congressional primary at the end of August but she took 57 percent to win renomination and went on to beat Republican Joe Kauffman in November.

• During his House tenure Pence wasn’t particularly influential. The former radio talk show host was always known more for communication skills than policy chops. But he was generally well liked and trusted, developing long-standing friendships with rabble rousers who now hold powerful posts, particularly Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

• [...]

• Even Democrats, so far, don’t mind having Pence around so much. Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) said Trump’s “propensity for alternative facts” might mean Pence has to translate: “Mike Pence could probably come over, clearly as anybody, and say: This is what’s really going on. “

• During his inaugural address, Donald Trump deployed rhetoric that was familiar to anyone who spent time in the Balkans in the 1990s. “You will never be ignored again,” Trump thundered, with Congress as his backdrop. He expanded on the idea a few days later, during a visit to the Department of Homeland Security, where he said, “To all of those hurting out there, I repeat to you these words, we hear you, we see you, and you will never, ever be ignored again.”

• Trump’s message was a variation, directed at his largely white constituency, of the you-shall-not-be-beaten-again rhetoric used with malignant effect by Slobodan Milošević during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Trump is not Milošević and the United States is not Yugoslavia, of course, but the echoes between these paragons of national shamelessness reveal the underlying methods and weaknesses of what Trump is trying to pull off.

• In 1987, Milošević was sent to Kosovo to soothe angry Serbs who felt threatened by Albanians who dominated the province. A low-profile communist official at the time, Milošević visited a municipal office and spoke to a crowd of unhappy Serbs who had gathered outside. Milošević was uncertain as he addressed them, but everything changed when he voiced a nationalist message they had never heard before: “No one will be allowed to beat the Serbs again, no one!” he said.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren has earned a rare rebuke by the Senate for quoting Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor.

• The Massachusetts Democrat ran afoul of the chamber’s arcane rules by reading a three-decade-old letter from Dr. Martin Luther King’s widow that dated to Sen. Jeff Sessions’ failed judicial nomination three decades ago.

• [NEWS OF THE DAY: Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters Dig In, as Army Halts Construction]

• The chamber is debating the Alabama Republican’s nomination for attorney general, with Democrats dropping senatorial niceties to oppose Sessions and Republicans sticking up for him.

• The Senate voted to bar Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) from speaking on the floor Tuesday night, after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said her blistering comments about fellow Sen. Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s pick for attorney general, broke Senate rules.

• Senators rebuked Warren in a 49-43 party-line vote, rejecting Warren’s push to overturn a ruling by Senate Republicans that she had violated the rules during a Senate floor speech.

• Warren needed a simple majority to overturn the ruling by Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who was presiding over the the Senate during the Massachusetts Democrat’s speech.

• It happened fast. Just like everything else in Trumpland.

• On January 10th, CNN published an explosive story: a dossier alleging President-elect Donald Trump had been embarrassingly compromised by the Russian government had been circulating among high-ranking government officials and journalists for months. But CNN, along with a number of other organizations that had access to the dossier, stopped short of publishing it. Their reasoning? They couldn’t confirm any of the file’s salacious details or damning allegations.

• An hour later, BuzzFeed went ahead and published the documents. BuzzFeed described the dossier’s allegations as “unverified” and pointed out some obvious errors that suggested sloppy work, such as misspellings and easily debunked claims, but didn’t weigh in on the truthfulness of its most damning charges

• In a little-noticed 6-3 vote today, the House Administration Committee voted along party lines to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states run elections and is the only federal agency charged with making sure voting machines can’t be hacked. The EAC was created after the disastrous 2000 election in Florida as part of the Help America Vote Act to rectify problems like butterfly ballots and hanging chads. (Republicans have tried to kill the agency for years.) The Committee also voted to eliminate the public-financing system for presidential elections dating back to the 1970s.

• “It is my firm belief that the EAC has outlived its usefulness and purpose,” said Committee chair Gregg Harper (R-MS), explaining why his bill transfers the EAC’s authority to the Federal Election Commission.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Every few months, it seems like Twitter execs swear that the company will do a better job at shutting down abusive trolls. And yet, hate and harassment continue to plague the platform, making it impossible for some high-profile users to remain active. This week, Twitter is making three changes to ramp up its efforts, and they might actually make a huge difference.

• First up: Twitter will now identify repeat offenders—people whose accounts have been permanently banned—and will keep them from creating new accounts. Trolls who churn through accounts to terrorize others will no longer be able to do so. This is major.

• Twitter is also building a “safe search” tool that won’t show potentially offensive tweets, or tweets from accounts you’ve muted or blocked, in your search results anymore.

• Such ripple effects, even if unintended, are especially potent when their target belongs to an already vulnerable group. After 9/11, for example, journalists and activists reported extensive fear throughout Arab and Muslim communities in the United States, inspired by the detention of 1,200 to 5,000 Muslim and Arab men. This was a fear not just of detention, deportation, or vigilante violence, but of speaking out on politically controversial issues of American foreign policy, which might—and often does—attract scrutiny, surveillance, or harassment from the federal government and police. “There’s fear in the Arab community,” reported Mino Akhtar. “What I hear Arabs and Muslims saying is, ‘Let’s keep a low profile. Don’t step out there. We need to stay quiet and let this blow over,” a claim confirmed by numerous press reports.

• A Zimbabwean pastor arrested after leading an anti-Robert Mugabe campaign which went viral has been shortlisted for the 2017 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards.

• Pastor Evan Mawarire’s #ThisFlag protest movement won widespread support among Zimbabweans on social media last year after he called on President Mugabe’s government to address a failing economy and to respect human rights.

• The Maryland suit against Mail Media was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds earlier this month. Trump’s new suit has been filed with the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. She is seeking at least $150 million in damages. Her lawyer, Charles Harder, successfully represented another high-profile figure in a suit against a media organization: Harder’s client Hulk Hogan won $140 million and bankrupted Gawker Media last year.

• Of course, what changed between the first complaint and the second complaint was Melania’s husband becoming President of the United States. Thus, the clear implication — that many in the media are making — is that the “once in a lifetime” opportunity is to somehow cash in on the Presidency. Of course, I do wonder how much damage to her brand could really be attributed to those articles, which have since been deleted, seeing as her reputation — and the fact that she will now be “one of the most photographed women in the world” — certainly seems to have massively boosted her reputation and massively increased her areas of opportunity if she does choose to cash in (i.e., it seems that she might have had a stronger case if she had not become First Lady). Separately, in an era where people like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton have become massive licensing juggernauts, I’m curious how much damage the Daily Mail reports could actually do to potential brand/licensing deals.

• Either way, Harder and Trump will continue pushing forward in their lawsuit against the Daily Mail, just in New York, rather than Maryland. And, yes, if you were wondering, New York has an unfortunately weak anti-SLAPP law.

• As headlines go, this one might not look especially exciting; “What Can We Expect from the Liberalization of the Foreign Currency Market?”

• But the article, by respected economist Yuliy Yusupov, became an instant sensation when it was published January 17 by the Uzbekistan-focused online business news outlet Kommersant.uz.

• Tight official controls over currency and trade — and the flourishing of a black economy in both these areas — had made the subject off-limits for any local media in the days of the late President Islam Karimov. Thus, it is no surprise that the January 17 article touched off a flurry of social media chatter among Uzbek news consumers.

• An independent group of Russian filmmakers is protesting what it says are efforts by a State Duma deputy from Russia-annexed Crimea to “censor” a controversial film centered on a love affair between the future Tsar Nicholas II and a young ballerina.

• Kino Soyuz (Union of Filmmakers) on February 7 published an open letter protesting Duma Deputy Natalya Poklonskaya’s calls for investigations of the unreleased film, Matilda, by director Aleksei Uchitel.

• The protest letter, signed by more than 40 Russian directors, also charges that nationalists belonging to a group called “Orthodox State — Holy Russia” have been threatening “arson attacks and violent acts against theaters that would dare to show the film.”

• Censorship does not trump the First Amendment, not in Compton, not anywhere; mute the voice and this might as well be North Korea

• A chilling development of recent years has been an effort by Beijing to buy or bully the right to apply its censorship rules or spread propaganda across borders. This can be seen from state media produced “China Watch” pullouts inserted into mainstream newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Telegraph in London, to denying visas to journalists from publications that report on dubious wealth acquisitions at the top of the Chinese Communist Party leadership.

• Librarians are stepping into the breach to help students become smarter evaluators of the information that floods into their lives. That’s increasingly necessary in an era in which fake news is a constant.

• According to a lawsuit, Corey King, a police captain in Washington County, Georgia, conspired with his friends magistrate Ralph O. Todd and Sheriff’s Investigator Trey Burgamy to arrest King’s ex-wife, Anne King, and her friend, Susan Hines, for a Facebook exchange in which they commiserated over Captain King’s refusal to pick up medicine for his sick children.

• Both women were jailed (Ms King was handcuffed!) and then released by a real judge (as opposed to a dipshit, small-town magistrate) who blasted all three for the two women’s arrest (“I don’t even know why we’re here”) and the state’s attorney dropped the charge. Captain King has threatened to re-arrest his ex-wife, saying, “don’t make the mistake of going to Facebook with your little shit you found to fuss about” and suggesting she could face “willful contempt” if she does so.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Justice Department was sued in federal court Tuesday on behalf of hundreds of donors whose otherwise anonymous political contributions were secretly monitored by the FBI.

• Attorneys filed the class-action complaint in San Francisco federal court this week on behalf of individuals who previously contributed to a now-defunct legal fund established for Barrett Brown, a Texas-based journalist who was arrested in September 2012 and subsequently indicted on more than a dozen counts related to the FBI’s investigation of a 2011 cyber intrusion, among other charges.

• Hundreds of contributors from throughout the United States ultimately donated more than $40,000 towards the journalist’s legal fund through Free Barrett Brown, an online crowdfunding campaign launched shortly following his arrest by Kevin Gallagher, a San Francisco-based systems administrator. According to Tuesday’s lawsuit, however, the Justice Department violated the constitutional rights of those contributors when it secretly obtained information about Mr. Brown’s supporters from the internet company that hosted the fundraising site.

• Turkle is an anthropologist who interviews people from different generations about their communication habits. She has observed cross-generational changes thanks to (a) the proliferation of instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger; and (b) fast web searching from smartphones.

• Her main concern is that conversation is being trivialised. Consider six or seven college students eating a meal together. Turkle’s research has shown that the etiquette among such a group has shifted such that so long as at least three people are engaged in conversation, others at the table feel comfortable turning their attention to their smartphones. But then the topics of verbal conversation will tend away from serious issues – you wouldn’t talk about your mother’s recent death if anyone at the table was texting.

• On the face of it, there do not appear to be many parallels between being a sex blogger and a secret service agent. However, there is one key similarity: maintaining anonymity at all times and thus leading a double life.

• For Girl On The Net, remaining anonymous is a constant source of consternation, angst and exhaustion. From using a burner phone which can’t be traced, to fastidiously wiping the internal location data for every photo she uploads, to keeping her job a secret from friends and relatives, there is the always omnipresent, never shakeable fear that someone is going to come along and uncover her identity.

• The 24 hour task of maintaining anonymity has had a knock-on effect on GOTN’s mental health. After her panic attacks became daily occurrences and her anxiety became unmanageable, the stress eventually culminated in a breakdown.

• Can the US government demand that it be able to reach into the world’s servers with the tech sector’s assistance? International relations issues aside, the answer to that legally thorny question depends on which US court is asked.

• Consider that a federal magistrate judge in Philadelphia answered that question Friday in the affirmative, ordering Google to comply with US warrants and transfer e-mail stored overseas to the US so the FBI could examine it as part of a criminal probe. Yet just two weeks ago, a New York-based federal appeals court let stand its highly publicized July decision that allowed Microsoft to quash a US court warrant for e-mail stored on its servers in Dublin, Ireland.

• VENONA, a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and decryption program run by the NSA and its predecessor, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, intercepted and ultimately decrypted thousands of Soviet messages, most infamously helping to finger the Rosenbergs. These decrypted messages have been a useful resource to historians, and the NSA boasts that “over the course of five more releases, all of the approximately 3,000 VENONA translations were made public” and put on their website.

• The efforts to reform ECPA — the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act — have been going on for basically two decades at this point. The law, which was passed in 1986, has a whole bunch of problems, with the biggest one (as we’ve discussed dozens of times) being that it considers any email that’s been on a server for more than 180 days “abandoned,” and thus freely searchable by law enforcement without a warrant. That’s because there was no concept of cloud computing back in 1986. People who got email “retrieved” those emails off of a server and downloaded them to local storage. Many in Congress have been trying to fix this for so, so, so many years. And it always gets blocked. The IRS and the SEC have both been fairly proactive in trying to block ECPA reform bills that will require a warrant (funny: I thought it was the 4th Amendment that made such a warrant necessary, but, silly me, no one cares about the 4th Amendment any more).

• Last year, a plan to fix ECPA, called the Email Privacy Act, with an astounding 315 co-sponsors, passed the House unanimously. As we noted at the time, this is fairly incredible. In these contentious times — especially on issues related to surveillance and law enforcement — to have a unanimous vote on a law that says “get a warrant” if you want access to emails, is quite incredible. But, of course, even with that much support on that side of Congress, the Senate has a way of killing ECPA reform each and every year. Last year, a few Senators — including Jeff Sessions, who is likely to be our next Attorney General — tried to bury it with ridiculous amendments that would expand surveillance.

• Disruptive.Asia asked Microsoft to comment on a recent publication on the state of surveillance in Thailand by Privacy International, in which they discovered that Windows 10 was recently updated to include the Thai government’s root CA in its list of trusted certificates. This would allow anyone controlling the certificate to perform a man-in-the-middle attack and intercept SSL encrypted websites and email traffic to spy on Thai citizens.

• The Microsoft country manager shuffled round uncomfortably and said that he had heard about the Privacy International allegations in briefings but he does not know the technical aspects and is not qualified to answer.

• “I dare not answer. I am not the expert. It is too complex. But I am sure that your data with us is secure,” he said.

• Vizio got in trouble with the FTC this week and had to pay $2.2 million to settle charges around having monitored the viewing habits on more than 11 million TVs without consent over the course of two years.

• The main problem was that Vizio TVs had tracking features turned on by default, instead of an opt-in setting like many other manufacturers use (and, as you’ll see, sometimes hide or trick you into accepting). Newer Vizio TVs that run the company’s SmartCast system have the tracking turned off by default.

• It was a bad practice that people had been complaining about for years — a possible class action lawsuit was even filed in 2016 — but the situation is now a relatively good one for Vizio TV owners: the company is specifically prohibited from tracking your viewing habits without explicit permission.

• Security isn’t the only thing being ignored as hardware vendors rush to connect televisions, toasters, and tea kettles to the internet. Consumer privacy and data-collection transparency has also become a distant afterthought as companies rush to cash in on the ocean of data these connected-devices collect. The “smart” television sector has been notably problematic, with Samsung busted a few years back for not only recording customer living room conversations, but transmitting that data unencrypted back to the company mothership.

• These are lessons that hardware vendors appear incapable or unwilling to learn. Case in point: this week the FTC announced that it had struck a $1.2 million settlement with discount TV vendor Vizio. According to the full FTC complaint (pdf), Vizio began using the company’s smart televisions to track user behavior in 2014, without informing customers that this was happening. The FTC notes that Vizio for years heavily advertised a “Smart Interactivity” feature that “enables program offers and suggestions.” But the complaint notes this feature never provided customers with a single suggestion.

• Surveillance laws should always be written as if the government we most fear is in power. It is one of the most insidious controls authorities can wield and, if unchecked, can corrode democratic institutions and give governments a sinister degree of power over their citizens.

• Yet the exact opposite has happened in Europe since Edward Snowden revealed mass surveillance abuses by the United States. Despite the outrage he sparked, governments across Europe have steadily adopted the US “collect it all” approach. With growing support for populist extremist parties, now is not the time to abandon privacy protections. Doing so risks enabling abusive surveillance by future illiberal governments.

• The House passed the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 387) yesterday, bringing us one step closer to requiring a warrant before law enforcement can access private communications and documents stored online with companies such as Google, Facebook, and Dropbox. But the fight is just beginning.

• We’ve long called for pro-privacy reforms to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the outdated law that provides little protection for “cloud” content stored by third-party service providers. H.R. 387 would codify the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in U.S. v. Warshak, which held that the Fourth Amendment demands that the government first obtain a warrant based on probable cause before accessing emails stored with cloud service providers. While imperfect—the House-passed bill doesn’t require the government to notify users when it obtains their data from companies like Google—the reforms in the Email Privacy Act are a necessary step in the right direction.

• The $10k price tag for proper licensing is a deterrent to small-time malware purveyors. But it would only be a drop in the bucket for a well-funded government agency and/or any NGOs they employ. It’s basically the Network Investigative Technique the FBI deployed in the Playpen cases — only one able to be buried inside media files which could be scattered around like mini-honeypots.

• The DRM-based attack certainly wouldn’t be limited to law enforcement agencies. It would also be deployed by spy agencies for use against terrorists (who love to share media files) and, unfortunately, by governments every bit as malicious as the software they’re deploying. The exploit could just as easily be deployed to target dissidents, journalists, and other “enemies of the state” through booby-trapped, DRM-laden files that strip away anonymity while delivering information these entities might find intriguing/useful.

• Underneath it all is Microsoft’s apparently misplaced faith in properly-signed media files put together with its development kits. Rather than warn users that the redirect to the codec installer may still be risky despite the proper signature, Windows will automatically open a new browser instance and download the file with no further user interaction.

• Fighting ISIS with Facebook. “Sometime today, a teenager in Tunis will check his smartphone for the latest violent video from the Islamic State. But the images that pop up first will be of a different genre: young Muslims questioning the morality of terrorists who slaughter innocents and enslave girls for sex. ‘Don’t you kill our own Muslim brothers?’ a mop-haired youth asks a terrorist recruiter in one animated video showing up on Arabic Facebook accounts in North Africa. ‘So much of this, it doesn’t seem right.’”

• Once again, legislation that would give American citizens better privacy protections for their emails has passed the House of Representatives, but we’re going to have to see what happens in the Senate.

• The Email Privacy Act aims to correct a flaw in federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Passed in the relatively early days of home computer use, it established a policy that private electronic communications held by third parties that were more than 180 days old could be accessed by law enforcement and government investigators without the need for a warrant. A subpoena delivered to the communication provider was enough. A law this old obviously preceded the arrival and dominance of private email communications, and tech privacy activists and tech companies have been pushing for reform. The way the system stands now can result in people having their old private communications searched and read by authorities without the citizen’s knowledge.

• Police in Washington, D.C. want Facebook to hand over data on protesters.

• The D.C. police department subpoenaed Facebook for information regarding several protesters arrested while demonstrating against the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Jan. 20.

• A document obtained on Monday by CityLab shows the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia issued a subpoena to Facebook on Jan. 27, which was signed by an officer at the police department. The document appears to show D.C. police are looking for the social data of several protesters.

• Once you connect any device to a network, it has the potential to become a valuable tool for data collection and becomes a candidate for easier management. Some of the 451 Research respondents noted that they were utilizing IoT in their security systems.

• “Predominantly, they have cameras and electronic systems like doors and sensors that they are then bringing back into a monitoring scheme,” Renaud said. “Video analytics with the cameras, [and] occasionally we’ll hear facial recognition and more esoteric things like that.”

• The FBI has always been hostile to Freedom of Information Act requests: it habitually violates the law by allowing these requests to go more than 30 days without a response, and maintains a lab full of 1980s-vintage computers that it uses to (badly) fulfill public records request, so that it can reject requests on the basis that it lacks the technology to respond to them. But it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

• The FBI has announced that, as of March, it will no longer accept FOIA requests by email. If you want to get FOIA documents, you’ll have to mail or fax them Bureau, or, if you want, you can use their web portal, which will only accept a single request per person, per day, and which makes you sign off on a long set of terms of service through which you surrender your statutory rights.

• As tech-savvy government efforts like 18F and the USDS take technological strides forward, other parts of the government are abandoning modern technology altogether.

• Starting next month, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by email. In lieu of its popular email service, the FBI suggests sending a fax or snail mail, a procedural change that has more to do with obstructing the law than a dearth of resources.

• It’s unclear how many Americans are under surveillance by the FBI. Not only would the agency be extremely unwilling to even provide a broad estimate, but the underlying basis for a preliminary investigation is so thin it could conceivably cover a majority of US residents.

• A previously-classified document [pdf] obtained by The Intercept gives more insight into the FBI’s use of “assessments” — an investigation the agency doesn’t consider an investigation.

• If an NHS doctor divulged personal information about a patient, they could be struck off. But the government pays the NHS to do just this. A patient’s name, date of birth and address are among the data which are passed on to the Home Office. If you are in the UK illegally, they can find you and force you onto a secret chartered plane before your lawyer has even had breakfast.

• Buried in the recent constitutional uproar over the triggering of Article 50 and President Donald Trump’s flurry of objectionable executive orders, was the news that the NHS has been passing on data to the Home Office so it can track down people who are living in the country illegally and deport them.

Civil Rights/Policing

• FBI agents posed as journalists and tricked the Bundy ranching family and their supporters into giving on-camera interviews that prosecutors may use in upcoming trials, according to defense attorneys and court records.

• The FBI’s “fake film production company” and “wide-reaching deceptive undercover operation”, as lawyers described it in a court filing, is one of multiple controversies that some say could derail the government’s prosecution of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, his four sons and a dozen of their followers. A recent Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ethics scandal involving tickets for the popular Burning Man festival could further hinder prosecutors in the high-profile trial, which began this week in Las Vegas federal court.

• Vladimir Putin has signed into law a controversial amendment that decriminalises domestic violence.

• The amendment, which sailed through both houses of Russian parliament before Tuesday’s presidential signing, has elicited anger from critics who say that it sends the wrong message in a country where one woman dies every 40 minutes from domestic abuse.

• From now on, beatings of spouses or children that result in bruising or bleeding but not broken bones are punishable by 15 days in prison or a fine, if they do not happen more than once a year. Previously, they carried a maximum jail sentence of two years.

• Recently, University of California Berkeley officials cancelled a planned speech by right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos following vigorous protests, prompting President Trump to suggest withdrawing federal funds from the campus. In light of Trump’s connections to the ultra-right, what will be the nature of political protest in the Trump years? Author and columnist David Talbot examines this issue. Then Arif Humayun summarizes the principles of Islam, and explains why the advocacy of terror has no basis in authentic Islamic doctrine.

• Being poor shouldn’t be a crime. New guidelines direct judges to make sure it isn’t.

• Last week, state court leaders from across the nation took critically important action against debtors’ prisons to ensure that people are not locked up simply because they are poor.

• Following reports of the devastating effects of debtors’ prisons across the country — including in Ferguson, Georgia, Washington, Michigan, Mississippi, and Colorado — the top national organizations of state court leaders formed the National Task Force on Fines, Fees, and Bail Practices in 2016. This task force has now issued a bench card on the Lawful Collection of Legal Financial Obligations — a step-by-step guide for state and local judges to use to protect the rights of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees.

• The principle of fairness enshrined in the Constitution and the way courts treat the poor are too often separate things in America. The Supreme Court ruled more than 30 years ago that people should never be locked up behind bars solely because they are unable to pay court fines and fees they cannot afford. But we have seen time and again that despite this ruling debtors’ prisons are a reality, with devastating impact on low-income people and their communities.

• Have you ever violated a website’s terms of use, such as by using something other than your real name on a website that requires one, or by sharing your account password with a family member when doing so is prohibited? Probably. Have you ever clicked “I agree” without actually reading the terms in full? Again, highly likely. Violating corporate terms of use agreements should not be a crime—not only because people rarely read these agreements, but because the bounds of criminal law should not be defined by the preferences of website operators. And criminalizing terms of use violations would turn millions of people—practically all Internet users—into criminals on the basis of innocuous conduct.

• We’ve convinced the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) shouldn’t be read to criminalize corporate computer use restrictions, such as terms of use agreements. But last year, a federal district court in Nevada found a defendant guilty under both the California and Nevada state computer crime statutes for nothing more than that—violating Oracle’s website’s terms of use.

• The case, Oracle v. Rimini Street, is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, and we just filed an amicus brief explaining to the court why an overbroad interpretation of the state computer crime statutes would have the exact same disastrous outcome as an overbroad interpretation of the CFAA. The Ninth Circuit should listen to its own reasoning and avoid an interpretation of these statutes that turns innocent Internet users into criminals.

• Last week, I was flying home from a work trip and faced Customs and Border Protection questioning unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in over 25 years of travel into and out of this country, including more than 10 years of travel for my work as an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups.

• Compared to the hardship and suffering of the tens of thousands of people impacted by President Trump’s Muslim ban executive order, it was nothing. But it said something personal to me about the tenor of these dark times.

• Islamic political parties and Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh are planning to launch a movement demanding the removal of a sculpture of Lady Justice from the High Court premises.

• Speaking to the Dhaka Tribune, leaders of several Islamic political parties and Hefazat-e-Islam called the sculpture a “Greek idol” and demanded its immediate removal, claiming it was in violation of Islamic principles.

• They threatened to launch a movement against the government if their demand is not met.

• Secretary General of Islami Oikkaya Jote (IOJ) and the convener of Dhaka city unit of Hefazat Mufi Fayzullah said: “We will go for a strong movement against the government to compel them to remove the Greek idol. We do not know why the government installed that idol there.”

• Three top Islamist leaders were working to unite various Islamist parties and organisations to make the movement a success, the Dhaka Tribune found.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Not to be outdone, Pai also actually made it harder for poor people to get discounted broadband by unnecessarily disqualifiying nine, already approved small ISPs (Spot On, Boomerang Wireless, KonaTel, FreedomPop, AR Designs, Kajeet, Liberty, Northland Cable, and Wabash Independent Networks) from participating in the FCC’s Lifeline program. That program, founded by Reagan and expanded by Bush, doles out $9.25 per low-income household for them to use on phone or broadband service. Last year the FCC expanded it marginally so low-income homes could use that money to pay for stand-alone broadband, cellular, or fixed-line phone service (Pai, digital divide closer extraordinaire, voted down that effort).

• [...]

• So yes, when your definition of “helping the poor” includes ensuring cable boxes stay expensive and closed, allowing duopolies to abuse net neutrality and drive up service costs, protecting prison monopoly telcos that have price-gouged families for years, and preventing smaller ISPs from actually helping the poor you profess to love — you have to wonder what it looks like when Pai actively wants to harm something.

• In his first days as President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai has aggressively moved to roll back consumer protection regulations created during the Obama presidency.

• Mr. Pai took a first swipe at net neutrality rules designed to ensure equal access to content on the internet. He stopped nine companies from providing discounted high-speed internet service to low-income individuals. He withdrew an effort to keep prison phone rates down, and he scrapped a proposal to break open the cable box market.

• In total, as the chairman of the F.C.C., Mr. Pai released about a dozen actions in the last week, many buried in the agency’s website and not publicly announced, stunning consumer advocacy groups and telecom analysts. They said Mr. Pai’s message was clear: The F.C.C., an independent agency, will mirror the Trump administration’s rapid unwinding of government regulations that businesses fought against during the Obama administration.

• Mr. Pai took a first swipe at net neutrality rules designed to ensure equal access to content on the internet. He stopped nine companies from providing discounted high-speed internet service to low-income individuals. He withdrew an effort to keep prison phone rates down, and he scrapped a proposal to break open the cable box market.

• In total, as the chairman of the F.C.C., Mr. Pai released about a dozen actions in the last week, many buried in the agency’s website and not publicly announced, stunning consumer advocacy groups and telecom analysts. They said Mr. Pai’s message was clear: The F.C.C., an independent agency, will mirror the Trump administration’s rapid unwinding of government regulations that businesses fought against during the Obama administration.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The wave of so-called ‘copyright-trolling’ piracy lawsuits in Finland has resulted in the first win for an accused file-sharer, totaling €28,000 in legal fees. A local court ruled that the copyright holders lacked sufficient evidence to show that the person in question downloaded the files, in part because the Wi-Fi network was open to the public.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.