● 04.20.17

● Links 20/4/2017: Tor Browser 6.5.2, PacketFence 7.0, New Firefox and Chrome

Posted in News Roundup at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Linux. What is it? At one point in time it was a niche operating system run by those who wanted to show off their PC prowess and feel more alternative and l33t than the rest. But something happened on the way to the convention — Linux became accepted. Not only did this platform become accepted, it was adopted as a must-have technology by enterprise-level businesses, where reliability, flexibility, and security are key.

• It’s the $89 price tag that makes the Pinebook Linux laptop such a tempting purchase

• But few real-world reviews exist for this cheap and cheerful device — until now.

• Well, sort of.

• Pine64, the company behind the 64-bit ARM-based Pinebook laptop, has begun to ship devices on a buy-to-order (BTO) basis.

• And some these early units have landed in the hands of fans and the tech press.

• Dell have been pretty good supporters of Linux with some of their systems in recent years and it’s set to continue. They have announced their Precision Workstation 5720 All-in-One device that’s now available with Ubuntu 16.04 or RHEL 7.3 (as well as Windows).

• If you know where to look you can find many great Linux-powered laptops. Besides Dell’s XPS 13, Dell also offers several other blazing-fast, Ubuntu-Linux powered laptops. System76 specializes in great Ubuntu laptops and ZaReason offers a variety of Linux distributions on laptops and desktops. A top-of-the-line, all-in-one desktop PC? That’s much harder to find. Now, Dell is offering a no-compromises all-in-one called the Precision Workstation AIO 5720.

Server

Kernel Space

• Linux supports a range of file systems, including ones used on other operating systems such as Windows FAT and NTFS. Those may be supported by embedded developers but normally a Linux file system like the 4 extended file system (ext4), XFS, or BTRFS will be used for most storage partitions. Understanding the options can help in selecting the right file system for an application.

• The Linux file systems covered here include ones that would typically be used in embedded applications. There is also a class of clustered file systems designed for multi-node environments like Red Hat’s Global File System (GFS), GlusterFS, and Lustre.

• With GStreamer 1.12′s first release candidate out for testing and the final release expected soon, here’s a brief preview of some of the (many) new features, bugfixes and improvements that will be arriving with this release. Of course, keep an eye out for the official release notes as they’ll provide considerably more information around these changes.

• Technologists, entrepreneurs, and some big companies are busy dreaming up new ways of using the core of Bitcoin—a distributed cryptographic ledger, or blockchain—to reinvent everything from business contracts and health records to carbon credits and new trading platforms (see “Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency”).

• However, one expert warns that they may be building their dreams on top of a precarious foundation. Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor at Cornell University, has been researching ways in which Bitcoin and blockchains can fail.

Graphics Stack

• Timothy Arceri at Valve has recently been working on OpenGL KHR_no_error support while now that initial code has been merged into Mesa 17.2-devel.

• For those curious if the Radeon RX 580 “Polaris Evolved” graphics card is worthwhile as a Linux gamer, here are the initial Phoronix figures for the RX 580 8GB graphics card that launched yesterday. These initial tests were done with AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV under a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan workloads.

• Bas Nieuwenhuizen continues being very busy with work on the open-source (unofficial) Radeon Vulkan driver, RADV.

• The latest patch sent out by Nieuwenhuizen today is an 18 line patch for allowing shader pre-fetch support in the RADV driver.

• For those tracking the growth of the Vulkan graphics API via GitHub, a gratifying milestone was reached today of having 1,000 projects now mentioning Vulkan.

Applications

• Tor Browser 6.5.2 is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

• This release features important security updates to Firefox.

• This should be the last minor release in the 6.5 series. This release updates Firefox to 45.9.0esr, Noscript to 5.0.2, and HTTPS-Everywhere to 5.2.14.

• Moreover, we included a fix for the broken Twitter experience and worked around a Windows related crash bug. To improve our censorship resistance we additionally updated the bridges we ship.

• Say aloha to Plotinus, a natty new HUD-like command palette for GTK3 applications. Which ones? How about all of ’em. A HUD Analog (Kinda) Since news broke that Ubuntu is to switch back to GNOME in upcoming releases plenty of you have been mailing in, shouting out, and spotlighting Unity-style features that have GNOME equivalents…

• The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence v7.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.

• Last week when GitHub launched Atom 1.16 as the latest stable release of the open-source and multi-platform hackable text editor loved by lots of developers around the world, they also announced the Beta release of Atom 1.17.

• While Atom 1.16 proved to be a minor maintenance update that only implemented a couple of new title bar options for macOS users, Atom 1.17 promises to be the first release in a long time to give a boost to the startup time of the application, on all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

• Mu is a Linux music player designed with the aim to provide users with the best music listening experience possible.

• It has a dark UI by default and support for a handful of media file formats including WAV, WMA, FLAC, and AAC. It is based on a number of open-source projects, and μ itself is open-source cross-platform application for media file managing.

Proprietary

• Lightworks is a professional multi-format non-linear video editing tool created for professionals and usable by beginners with a sleek and intuitive UI.

• On the 4th of April, it received its latest update which reportedly came with north of 400 changes and 70 new features which include a major UI redesign, an Effects panel and a new auto-effect capability.

Instructionals/Technical

• ​nano is a Command Line Interface text editor for GNU/Linuxdesigned to emulate Pico text editor. It is the standard de facto text editor of Linux for system maintainers, comes pre-installed on Ubuntu and its derivative including Linux Mint. It’s fairly advanced for newbies but not too hard to get accustomed to. Well, there is a saying that everything has a learning curve.

Wine or Emulation

• Since a lot of users were confused after reading the development version release notes, we would like to clarify, that the command stream multithreading (CSMT) patchset has not been fully merged yet. There has been a lot of progress during the last weeks, but unfortunately the performance related optimizations are still missing in the development branch. We expect them to be merged in one of the following releases. In the meantime, Wine Staging users can continue to use the CSMT performance improvements as usual (i.e. by enabling the CSMT in the winecfg Staging tab).

• Building off last week’s Wine 2.6 release that brought partial Command Stream Multi-Threading support is now Wine-Staging 2.6.

Games

• A big Terraria [Steam, GOG] update has landed and it looks like the developers spent a lot of time getting this right. It includes lots of really useful stuff.

• They’ve added in professionally done localisations for: German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Polish.

• Immortal Redneck [Official Site, Steam] looks like it could be something really fun for FPS fans! An FPS set in Egypt with rogue-lite and it looks pretty darn good.

• I’m sure I won’t offend too many people if I say that the Chromebook is not a gaming machine. Google’s nifty ChromeOS devices are designed to work and web browse at zippy speeds thanks to their super-lightweight operating systems that rely on cloud storage rather than cumbersome local processing. But gaming? Not really.

• However, thanks to certain games’ ability to be played from browsers, there are some great titles out there that you’ll be amazed will work on your Chromebook as well as some perfectly decent dedicated ChromeOS games. Here are the top ten.

• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is receiving a Vulkan port and will be released this summer.

• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation was released last November for Windows as a real-time strategy game out of Oxide Games and Stardock. Ashes of Singularity was notably the first game released with DirectX 12 support. The developers are moving ahead with their Vulkan API support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This global menu GNOME Shell extension brings a popular Unity feature to the GNOME desktop, and lets you interact with app menus from the top bar.

• We’re always monitoring everything that’s going on in the Open Source world, especially big projects like GNOME and KDE, and today we’d like to reveal some of the upcoming features of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.

• First off, a little background for those who missed our previous reports on GNOME 3.26. The desktop environment will be dubbed “Manchester,” after the name of the host city of the GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2017 event, and has been slated for release on September 13, 2017.

Distributions

New Releases

• The development team behind the Debian-based deepin Linux distribution announced today, April 19, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of deepin 15.4.

• deepin 15.4 has been in development for the past two months, during which it received several Beta and RC milestone that implemented many of the features users can now finally enjoy on their personal computers if they upgrade from the previous version or reinstall the operating system using the new Live ISO image.

• The development team behind the popular and open-source Tails amnesic incognito live system announced today, April 19, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of the Tails 2.12 maintenance update.

• Tails 2.12 is the second security update to the Tails 2.x series, and possibly the last one to be published as the development of the major Tails 3.0 release nears its end. Besides addressing various long-standing issues and patching recently discovered security holes, Tails 2.12 ships with the more recent Linux 4.9.13 kernel.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Flatpak provides a simple and user-friendly way to run, update and create self-contained desktop applications.

• It is possible to run proprietary, big and bloated software like Skype or Spotify on a lightning fast and sleek musl based Void Linux system.

• The Void Linux distribution has recently merged-in support for Flatpak, the new packaging format for Linux.

• If you haven’t heard of Void Linux, don’t fret, there’s a lot of distributions and it’s quite a task keeping tabs on all of them. Void is another rolling-release distribution, so you don’t need to do a big upgrade every few months, it just continually updates.

• Ben Williams from the Fedora Respins-SIG project, an initiative to produce regular Live ISO snapshots of the current stable Fedora Linux release, announced the availability of a new set of updated Fedora 25 ISOs.

• Fedora developers are planning to be prompt in offering Java 9 on their Linux distribution via OpenJDK.

• Java 9 / OpenJDK 9 is planned for release this summer — at the end of July to be exact. Therefore, Fedora developers are planning to get Java 9 into their release due out in H2’2017, Fedora 27.

• But due to new APIs of Java 9, this updated in OpenJDK in Fedora 27 will just be offered as a technology preview. OpenJDK 8 will continue to be the default in Fedora until at least F28.

• The Latin American Free Software Installation Festival (FLISoL, in Spanish “Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre”) is the biggest event for the dissemination of Free Software in Latin America.

• It’s that time again: we have another test day coming up this week! Thursday 2017-04-20 will be another Fedora Media Writer Test Day. We’ve run these during the Fedora 24 and 25 cycles as well, but we want to make sure the tool is ready for the Fedora 26 release, and also test a major new feature it has this time around: support for writing ARM images. So please, if you have a bit of spare time and a system to test booting on – especially a Fedora-supported ARM device – come out and help us test!

Debian Family

Derivatives

• There’s a new release of TinkerOS available to download on Asus’s website. TinkerOS is a Linux distribution for the Asus Tinker Board based on Debian. Not heard of the Asus Tinker Board? Read our two page review.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As most of you are aware, Canonical decided to no longer develop its Unity user interface for the main flavor of Ubuntu Linux and, instead, switch to the well-known GNOME desktop environment starting with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• The future of Ubuntu is not going to have Unity in the picture. But it won’t have X.org also, at least, not as the default display server on Ubuntu. It has been known that Canonical is ditching X.org for Wayland which flaunts itself as easier to develop and maintain than Xorg. The change is expected to arrive with the release of Ubuntu 17.10.

• If you’ve downloaded and installed the latest Ubuntu 17.04, one of the new features you probably didn’t notice is that the system was installed without a dedicated swap partition.

• That’s because a new installation of Ubuntu 17.04 uses a swap file, instead of a swap partition. Yup, just like Windows, swap file has come to Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Asus has launched its Tinker Board SBC in the U.S. for $60, featuring a quad-A17 RK3288 with 2GB RAM, a 40-pin RPi connector, and an updated TinkerOS 1.8.

• Asus’ Tinker Board, which launched in the UK in January for 46 Pounds ($58) is now selling on Amazon in the U.S. for $59.99. The Raspberry Pi-like Tinker Board is the first community backed SBC from a major PC manufacturer. The specs do not appear to have changed, but the device now has an updated 1.8 version of Asus’ Debian Linux-based TinkerOS, and Asus has posted some updated detail views since our last story.

• Portwell’s highly modular, Linux-friendly “XM-1” line of IoT gateways offers a choice of ARM or x86 CPUs and hot-pluggable ZigBee, LoRa, WiFi, or 2G/3G/LTE.

Phones

Android

• It’s hard to believe, but smartphones as we know them have been around for nearly a decade. And chances are good you’ve upgraded at least once during that time, if not many times.

• Usually, that upgrade leaves you with your old phone and a question: What should I do with it? Most common answer: sell it. That’s a good way to help defray the cost of the upgrade.

Free Software/Open Source

• Jos Poortvliet from Nextcloud informed us about the availability of a new external storage app developed by the Sia folks to provide Nextcloud users with blockchain-based cloud storage support.

• Sia is known as a blockchain-based, decentralized cloud storage technology, and starting with version 1.1.2, the platform appears to integrate with Nextcloud, providing users with an affordable, distributed, and last but not least encrypted external storage.

• I’ve been an open source guy for many years now – since 1998. Over the years I’ve been a proud open source user, sometime developer, and overall advocate. Seeing the success of open source has been a real joy, but I’ve also been mystified by the myths that permeate the industry when it comes to business models and product development and where they intersect with open source software. Now that open source has “won” the focus now shifts to opimization. As in, how do you optimize your processes to fully participate in and get maximum benefits from all the things happening right now in open source ecosystems?

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 58 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

• Not long after the Firefox 53 release, Google has promoted Chrome 58 to stable.

• Chrome 58 is now available with a number of fixes, new features, and a number of security fixes too. A list of the CVE fixes can be found in the release announcement.

• Google announced a few moments ago the promotion of the Chrome 58 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Mozilla

• Mozilla is killing the channel it introduced for developers to test experimental new features in Firefox and keep pace with Chrome.

• The Aurora channel will stop receiving new code releases from 18 April, Mozilla has said.

• New code will revert to the established Firefox Nightly builds from where it will land in beta builds of Firefox Developer Edition.

• Today’s Firefox release makes Firefox faster and more stable with a separate process for graphics compositing (the Quantum Compositor). Compact themes and tabs save screen real estate, and the redesigned permissions notification improves usability. Learn more on the Mozilla Blog.

• Firefox 53.0 drops pre Pentium 4 and Opteron Linux support. Firefox 53.0 also has support for WebM videos with alpha channel, lightweight theme changes along with new light and dark lightweight/compact theme options shipping, the Reader Mode can now display a time estimate for reading a given web page, and more. Mozilla also decided to remove the Aurora channel from their release cycle. There are also other changes in Firefox 53.0, but mostly affecting macOS and Windows users (like a “Quantum Compositor” being used now by Firefox on Windows)

• The Firefox 53.0 web browser was made available for download earlier today, for all supported platforms, but and an official announcement was published by the Mozilla folks a few moments ago with details about the new features.

• As revealed already, most of the new changes implemented in Mozilla Firefox 53.0 are related to the Windows platform, including the improved graphics stability by using the Quantum Compositor in a separate process, which should reduce browser crashed with approximately 10 percent.

• Today’s release of Firefox includes the first significant piece of Project Quantum, as well as various visible and the under-the-hood improvements.

• Mozilla have now officially announced Firefox 53.0 and it ends support for older processors on Linux. If you’re on a CPU older than a Pentium 4 or AMD Opteron it’s time to upgrade if you want to continue being supported.

• Write, as I have, about Firefox and you receive the usual slew of critics who demand to know why Firefox matters? Who cares if Firefox continues to exist? This is often accompanied by “Chrome is better! Chrome is all we need!”

• Clearly a lot of people do think Chrome is better. StatCounter, which offers reasonably reliable numbers on browser market share, puts Chrome at just over 50 per cent of all web browsers.

• That’s an impressive market share, one that leaves the remainder of the browser world as a fight among minor fiefdoms, with Mozilla holding about 14 per cent and Microsoft (combining Edge and IE) about the same. Safari and Opera are hardly worth mentioning on the desktop (though you should see Opera’s worldwide mobile stats, nothing to sneeze at there).

SaaS/Back End

• IBM is working with Continuum Analytics to offer the latter’s Anaconda open data science platform as part of IBM’s Cognitive Systems. Anaconda will also integrate with IBM’s PowerAI software for machine learning and deep learning.

• Hadoop, while it may be synonymous with big data, and while it may be free to access and work with, engineering teams globally will admit that behind every Hadoop undertaking is a major technical delivery project.

• Failures are so commonplace that even the experts don’t have great expectations of 2017: at the recent Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney, research director Nick Heudecker claimed that 70% of Hadoop deployments in 2017 will either fail to deliver their estimated cost savings or their predicted revenue.

• In my keynote address a year ago at the OpenStack Summit Austin, I offered the OpenStack community an ultimatum. First, I described how our world was exploding with connected devices (50 billion by 2020) and that 400 million new servers would be needed to process and store that data, which creates a massive challenge for those of us in the infrastructure business. How will we meet the needs of users at that scale?

• That time again, when members of the OpenStack community vote on the release name for the upcoming series of milestones. The current release is called Ocata, the next release is code named Pike and is set to debut August 28.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• As reported the other day, The Document Foundation announced that the first bug hunting session for the upcoming LibreOffice 5.4 office suite would take place on April 28, 2017, debugging the first Alpha build that’ll be released early next week.

• However, as promised, in this article we’ll take a look at the upcoming features of LibreOffice 5.4, at least those that have been already revealed. These include new “Edit Section” and “Footnotes and Endnotes” entry in the context menu of the Writer, which work if the cursor is in a section, as well as in a footnote or endnote. Check out the screenshot gallery below to see them in action.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• [...] I realized that the pop3 gropers were actually not much fun to watch anymore. So I used the traffic shaping features of my OpenBSD firewall to let the miscreants inflict some pain on themselves. Watching logs became fun again.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• In today’s episode of the Lunduke Hour, I talk with Ben Malouf, the Director of Marketing with LulzBot. We talk about their 3D printers, the differences in various materials used, and their dedication to Free/Libre Software and Hardware.

Programming/Development

• In a previous blog post we introduced clazy, a clang plugin which makes the compiler understand Qt semantics, allowing you to get compile-time warnings about Qt best practices ranging from unneeded memory allocations to misuse of API, including fix-its for automatic refactoring.

• Back in 2015 we wrote about the “Clazy” static analyzer for Clang as a way to uncover various coding shortcomings for KDE/Qt programs. Since then, Clazy has become much more capable.

• KDE developer and KDAB employee Sérgio Martins has written a new blog post about 32 of the best practices that Clazy can now spot at compile-time to point out to developers. He confirmed in a message to Phoronix that most of the issues brought up by Clazy are in regards to performance-sensitive areas that could be improved by the developer analyzing their code with this tool.

• I first started using MySQL at a college IT job in 2003, and over the years I eventually began tackling much larger-scale deployments at Tumblr and Facebook. I’ve spent most of the past decade working on social networks, where massive high-volume database technology is fundamental to the product. I love the technical challenges present in that type of environment, as well as the huge potential impact of database automation and tooling. In companies with giant databases and many engineers, a well-designed automation system can provide a truly enormous increase in productivity.

• I developed my first web app as part of my final project in college. Instead of developing a web app only for the purpose of completing my project, I chose to develop one that could solve a real-world problem. I decided to create Cyber Manager, an online cyber cafe management system for cyber cafe administrators, which has been downloaded nearly 3,000 times since I first uploaded it on SourceForge.net in 2011. In this article, I’ll walk through five lessons I learned during the process, which might help you during and after developing your own web app. I’ll end with a quick look at Cyber Manager and how it works.

• ApacheCon is just a couple months away — coming up May 16-18 in Miami. We asked Shawn McKinney, Software Architect at Symas Corporation, to share some details about his talk at ApacheCon. His presentation — “The Anatomy of a Secure Web Application Using Java EE, Spring Security, and Apache Fortress” will focus on an end-to-end application security architecture for an Apache Wicket Web app running in Tomcat. McKinney explains more in this interview.

• Algorithms are almost as pervasive in our lives as cars and the internet. And just as these modes and mediums are considered vital to our economy and society, and are therefore regulated, we must ask whether it’s time to also regulate algorithms.

• Let’s accept that the rule of law is meant to provide solid ground upon which our society can function. Some laws stop us taking each other’s stuff (property, liberty, lives) while others help us swap our stuff in a way that’s fair to the parties involved (property, liberty, time).

Leftovers

• For businesses wanting an online suite that is most simple to use, Google is the ideal option. Its one-stop-shop approach is particularly attractive to businesses starting out and those looking for a clean and responsive productivity suite. Yet Office 365′s user interface is one that most will be familiar with, drawing on Microsoft’s extensive experience with productivity tools.

• We’ve been discussing for some time how John Deere, Apple, Sony and Microsoft are among a laundry list of companies fighting against so-called “right to repair” bills. The bills, currently being pushed in a handful of different states, make it easier for consumers to repair their own products and find replacement parts and tools. The bills are an organic consumer response to the attempts of many of these companies to monopolize repair, driven in large part by John Deere’s draconian lockdown on “unauthorized repairs” — forcing tractor owners to pirate tractor firmware and maintenance tools just to repair products they thought they owned.

Health/Nutrition

• An international civil society tribunal has found that agro-business multinational Monsanto conducts activities that violate basic human rights. The five international judges of the Monsanto Tribunal presented their condemning verdict yesterday.

• The Monsanto Tribunal “to hold Monsanto accountable for human rights violations, for crimes against humanity, and for ecocide,” is a so-called “opinion tribunal”.

Security

• Oracle today emitted a huge batch of 299 security fixes for its software – including a patch for a vulnerability exploited by a leaked NSA tool that can hijack Solaris systems.

• Details of the massive April dump can be found here: Oracle describes the updates as “critical,” and urges admins to install them “without delay.”

• The worm, known as Hajime, has infected tens of thousands of easy-to-hack products such as DVRs, internet cameras, and routers. However, the program so far hasn’t done anything malicious.

• Instead, the worm has been preventing a notorious malware known as Mirai from infecting the same devices. It’s also been carrying a message written from its developer.

• The autonomous car will redefine how we travel, ship inventory, and design infrastructure. As physical objects become more deeply integrated into the Internet of Things, the connected car will soon become an essential component of the IoT ecosystem.

• An important element as we look towards actually implementing the autonomous car is understanding how mission-critical safety software and the Internet of Cars will operate within the car ecosystem. This is a blog that tries to explain what is happening currently; the importance of creating a security-first approach with open source software; and how we at EPAM are approach and solving some of the common problems.

• Starting in 2012, Tanium apparently had a secret weapon to help it compete with the wave of newcomers, which the company’s executives used in sales demonstrations: a live customer network they could tap into for product demonstrations. There was just one problem: the customer didn’t know that Tanium was using its network. And since the customer was a hospital, the Tanium demos—which numbered in the hundreds between 2012 and 2015, according to a Wall Street Journal report—exposed live, sensitive information about the hospital’s IT systems. Until recently, some of that data was shown in publicly posted videos.

• Cybersecurity startup used hospital’s computer network for sales pitches without permission

Defence/Aggression

• Three white men have been shot and killed by a black gunman in Fresno, California, in a suspected race attack, police have said.

• The suspect, Kori Ali Muhammad, allegedly said “God is great” in Arabic before he was arrested, the police chief, Jerry Dyer, said at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon.

• However, Dyer said the shooting did not appear to be connected to terrorism.

• “He [Muhammad] did clarify that the reason he had made that statement was that in the event that anything did happen to him he was in fact pledging his allegiance to God for protection,” he said.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Most people know the what about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks – that they publish secret information – but they don’t know the why. And that’s a great loss, because the reason behind all the leaks is both brilliant and illuminating. It Usually Starts with the Cypherpunks

• The first thing to understand is that WikiLeaks, like Bitcoin, came from the cypherpunks. In particular, WikiLeaks was spawned by a cypherpunk group that formed (spontaneously) in Melbourne, Australia.

• [...]

• I hope you can see how brilliant the WikiLeaks strategy really is. They’re not reacting after the events, as in exposing dirty laundry. They are acting in advance, disrupting their enemy’s ability to function in the future.

• And here’s where it gets even better: A network of this type invariably reacts to leaks by closing itself tighter against untrusted links. And so, by closing itself off from intrusion, the network becomes less and less able to engage with anything outside itself. And the less it engages with things outside itself, the less it can enact power outside itself.

• Be aware that the CIA/Pompeo has desperately vowed to “end” Wikileaks “now”.

• I feel the French especially understand how important it is to seek the truth.

Finance

• The company announced the long-anticipated move on Thursday, and according to Business Insider reported is looking for warehouse space in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne to become its first 93,000 sq m Australian “fulfilment centre”.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Censorship/Free Speech

• ‘I understand that the CBFC is also bound by laws that go back to the 1970s. We have gone ahead, but they are still following the same law. Perhaps, there comes the problem.

• In the wake of the explosion of livestreaming apps such as Periscope, Youtube Live, and Facebook Live, many are realizing that these livestreams represent more than just a way for people to interact directly.

• But what is equally, if not more, disturbing is the rising trend of non-state actors such as the PAS Youth behaving and thinking in a manner that parallels that of the state, i.e. to liberally call for the censorship (in various forms) of something…

• Every once in a while, something in China that sounds like it came out of a dystopian movie catches my attention.

• China’s great surveillance machine seems to know no bounds. China has already cracked down on unauthorized VPN use. Last month, we learned that if you want toilet paper at one UNESCO World Heritage Site in China, then you must submit to facial recognition in order to be issued a strip of toilet paper. This time, we are looking at China requiring surveillance technology on public Wi-Fi and Chinese loan startups determining credit-worthiness by the model of smartphones used and if the battery runs low.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Despite its lack of end-to-end encryption, Microsoft’s Skype remains the top communications tool used by most English-speaking cyber criminals, and among the top five tools used by five other language groups, a study has found.

• We’ve long documented how there’s a growing array of websites that seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to “defeating” ad blocking. Quite often that includes punishing customers for a website’s own misdeeds, or using ham-fisted (and frankly often broken) systems that attempt to block the ad blockers. Of course, this tends to obfuscate why these users are using blockers in the first place, whether it’s to keep ads from eating their broadband usage allotments, or simply as an attempt to protect themselves from “ads” that are often indistinguishable from malware.

• The bottom line is that thanks to aggressive, poorly designed or downright hostile ads, many consumers quite justly now feel that ad blockers are an essential part of their privacy and security. Here at Techdirt, we long ago decided to let our visitors decide what their ad experience looks like, letting visitors disable ads entirely if that’s they’re preference (we just, of course, hope they’ll try to support us in other ways). Elsewhere though, websites are engaged in what feels like a futile game of Whac-a-Mole that seems increasingly obvious (to some) won’t be “winnable.”

• New developments on the ad block front seem to indicate this game of Whac-a-Mole may soon end up with the mole being — well — most decidedly whacked.

• A new EU agreement could mean WhatsApp user data is shared with Facebook, despite user protest over privacy incursions. The new deal amends WhatsApp’s relationship to Facebook in what would be a radical new way forward for the messaging app, which has long celebrated its encrypted nature.

• Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde has a new privacy-oriented startup. Today he launches the domain registration service Njalla, which offers site owners full anonymity, shielding them from the prying eyes of outsiders.

• However, for many, it’s simply a colossal waste of time.

• Regardless of why you want to cut ties with Facebook, here’s how to deactivate and delete your account now.

Civil Rights/Policing

• If you want people to respect your religion, then accept that there are problematic verses and reform them. Do not try to tell us that we are making a big deal. Let me reiterate, it’s not that these commands are not taken as being symbolic, it is that they exist.

• There are not enough social workers and social activists who can go out and combat this issue or try to amend this biased judicial system. Those who try to voice their opinions and bring change are silenced.

• In the neighbourhoods of Jakarta, banners claiming that Muslims who vote for Ahok will be denied burial rites have been strung up at local mosques.

• He said without a permanent presence, khurafat practices would go on, despite enforcement officers periodically raiding the area, as the heretical groups would simply return to the island, as they have done in the past.

• Remarks by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fellow of the Future of Democracy Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation, and Niall Ferguson, senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, upon accepting the 2016 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education. The award was presented on October 28, 2016.

• He added that it is also ridiculous to solely target petty traders, adding that if the state government wanted all businesses to stop operations temporarily, then it must do the same for its banking system.

• Human Rights Watch has documented how under Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system, adult women must obtain permission from a male guardian to travel abroad, marry, or be released from prison, and may be required to provide guardian consent to work or get health care. These restrictions last from birth until death, as women are, in the view of the Saudi state, permanent legal minors.

• Parties in Bordj Bou Arreridj Province had been showing hijabs surrounding blank spaces alongside photos of male candidates.

• While it doesn’t go so far as to establish a conviction requirement, it does make it a little more difficult for law enforcement agencies to walk off with citizens’ possessions. Unfortunately, not much has been done to address the terrible recourse process, which dumps the burden of proof back on the citizen whose possessions have been taken.

• Navigating this particular legal thicket often requires a lawyer and there’s a good chance the best possible outcome will be a partial release of the property seized. Fortunately, going the lawsuit route will be a little less risky in the future: the new law also ensures legal fees will be awarded to winning parties who manage to litigate the return of seized property.

• Even if Governor Ducey had been opposed to the reform bill, he wouldn’t have been able to defend a veto in the same way Idaho Governor Butch Otter did when shooting down a popular reform effort there. There’s plenty of evidence the state’s asset forfeiture laws have been abused.

• The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has affirmed a lower court’s stripping of a federal officer’s qualified immunity in a… moon rock sting case. This is a thing. Relatives and friends of NASA personnel have received what they believe are gifts from them — items containing moon rock pieces, or heat shield fragments, or whatever. The problem here is the government believes it owns anything related to its exploration missions.

• It’s not always illegal to be in possession of these items, but as Lowering the Bar’s Kevin Underhill explains, it’s almost always going to be treated as illegal by the federal government.

• Referring to the recent mob-lynching of a university student for ‘blasphemy’, Pakistani Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, in a strongly-worded video message, said no one but Pakistan is to blame for the poor image it has in the world.

• “We talk about Islamophobia and how people give a bad name to our country and our religion. No one is giving a bad name to our country or our religion. We are doing that all by ourselves. We are enough for that,” Yousafzai said in the video message.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Back in 2008, Comcast sued the city of Chattanooga shortly after the city-owned utility (Electric Power Board, or EPB) announced plans to deliver the kind of cheap, ultra-fast broadband Comcast long refused to. After being saddled with legal expenses, EPB ultimately won that lawsuit, and in 2010 began offering ultra-fast fiber broadband. But it wasn’t long before the community-owned broadband network ran into another obstacle: a Tennessee state protectionist law — quite literally written by AT&T and Comcast — that hamstrung the operation and prohibited it from expanding.

• Fast forward nearly a decade, and EPB now offers symmetrical gigabit connections for around $70 a month — at least to the parts of Chattanooga ISP lobbyists have allowed it to. A 2016 survey by Consumer Reports ranked EPB, outside of Google Fiber, as the only ISP with a truly positive consumer satisfaction rating among the 30 national ISPs ranked by the magazine. Chattanooga’s Mayor, meanwhile, has cited EPB as a major contributor to the city’s reinvention.

• It’s no secret that the hotel industry hates competition from Airbnb. Hell, politicians have even admitted to crafting anti-Airbnb policies to keep hotels from being disrupted. But, now, the NY Times has got its hands on a specific plan from the hotel industry to basically hamper Airbnb and burden it with legal and policy challenges (I should note, by way of some sort of disclosure, that I’m typing this while sitting at a desk at an Airbnb apartment in Washington DC — and, similarly, that it’s much nicer and significantly cheaper than comparable hotels, but I digress…).

• That’s why Roku has hired a pair of Republican lobbyists through an outside government-affairs firm, according to a federal ethics reports filed this week, specifically to focus on net neutrality. It’s the first time the company has ever retained lobbyists in Washington, D.C.

DRM

• Brewster Kahle, who invented the first two search engines and went on to found and run the Internet Archive has published an open letter describing the problems that the W3C’s move to standardize DRM for the web without protecting otherwise legal acts, like archiving, will hurt the open web.

• I asked our crawler folks what the impact of the EME proposal could be to us, and what they came back with seems well reasoned but strongly negative to our mission.

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