● 10.06.17

● Links 6/10/2017: Systemd 235, Cockpit 152, More Kirigami

Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Ryzen 7 series was introduced early March 2017, I bought parts for my Ryzen workstation beginning June 2017 thinking that few months will allow AMD to settle down and release necessary BIOS updates and CPU microcode upgrade. I was wrong. Terribly wrong.

• I was excited when doing the build, mostly because of the new case I bought: Fractal Design Define R5 and Seasonic M12 EVO Bronze 520W. This is premium case and I enjoyed every bit of doing the build. Plenty of space for hard-drives, many cool ideas or things in the case design (screw-less mounting), huge and silent fans, modularity of the case. With a big enough SATA Seagate drive, I was planning to do bcache and never run out of space for home directory.

Server

• “Although Windows is predominantly used at the desktop, many organizations run Linux on their servers,” said Diane Roger, Chief Product Officer for Cloud Management Suite.

• Certain versions of the Linux kernel offer more complete and uniform support for paravirtualization than others due to the open source nature of Linux.

• Recently /u/Elezium asked the following question on Reddit: Tools to deploy k8s on-premise on top of Ubuntu. This is a question that a lot of people have answered using a combination of MAAS/VMWare/OpenStack for on premise multi-node Kubernetes. If you’re looking for something with more than a two or three machines, those resources are bountiful.

• However, the question came to “How do I do Kubernetes on an existing Ubuntu VM”. This is different from LXD, which is typically a good solution — though without a bunch of networking modifications it won’t be reachable from outside that VM.

• Kubernetes and Docker Swarm are both popular and well-known container orchestration platforms. You don’t need a container orchestrator to run a container, but they are important for keeping your containers healthy and add enough value to mean you need to know about them.

Kernel Space

• “Jprobes” are an ancient kernel mechanism used to trace entry into kernel functions; they were described in this 2005 LWN article.

• This blog post is based on the talk I gave at the Open Source Summit North America 2017 in Los Angeles. Let me start by thanking my employer Collabora, for sponsoring my trip to LA.

• Last time I wrote about Performance Assessment, I discussed how an apparently naive code snippet can hide major performance drawbacks. In that example, the issue was caused by the randomness of the conditional branch direction, triggered by our unsorted vector, which really confused the Branch Predictor inside the processor.

Graphics Stack

• It’s indeed looking like the AMDGPU DC display code stack will finally be pulled for the Linux 4.15 merge window, assuming Linus Torvalds has no issues with it in a few weeks.

• Alex Deucher of AMD today sent in a secondary AMDGPU DC update for staging alongside DRM-Next of this new display code.

• After running some basic OpenCL/Vulkan UHD Graphics tests yesterday using the brand new Core i7 8700K “Coffee Lake” processor, I next ventured into OpenCL computing with the UHD Graphics using Intel’s open-source Beignet CL implementation.

• VK_KHR_maintenance2 is the latest extension supported by this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. VK_KHR_maintenance2 was added in Vulkan 1.0.61 last month as various changes that were previously left out of Vulkan.

Benchmarks

• This morning I delivered the initial Linux processor benchmarks of the Core i7 8700K and Core i5 8400 for the just-launched “Coffee Lake” desktop processors. With these Intel “Gen 8″ processors, the integrated “HD Graphics” from Kabylake have been rebranded to “UHD Graphics”. While there wasn’t any real changes architecturally to the graphics hardware, right now the Linux support isn’t quite out-of-the-box.

Applications

• Codeanywhere is a feature-rich cross-platform cloud IDE that offers coding features you’d expect from an offline application even more with services like cloud services, sandboxed projects, collaboration features, and a revision system.

• It features a beautifully designed dark-themed User Interface with syntax highlighting, multiple panes, inbuilt console with FTP and SFTP capabilities, SSH for remote connection, Dropbox and Google Drive support, and many other features.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 152.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• In the mood to fly around and blow people up? Starblast [Steam, Official Site] might scratch that itch when the fast-paced online arcade space shooter releases next month.

• Thanks to SteamDB, it seems a A Hat in Time [Steam, Official Site] might actually be coming to Linux. It was leaked a while ago by Virtual Programming, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

• Overgrowth [Official Site, Steam, Humble Store], the spiritual successor to Lugaru from Wolfire Games has released the final beta version with a finalized story mode.

• Heroes of Hammerwatch [Official Site] isn’t quite Hammerwatch 2, but it this roguelike hack and slash RPG/adventure game should release for Linux.

• I know there’s a number of Hammerwatch fans in our readership, so hopefully this will be interesting for you!

• For those wanting Season 2, this will not be it. However, the developers have said to note down October 24th in your calendar.

• As usual, they will be adding in new “Featured Contracts” on October 13th, but also Colorado is set to get a Challenge Pack as it was the only one not to get one so far.

• Linux does have games. It has a lot of them, actually. Linux is a thriving platform for indie gaming, and it’s not too uncommon for Linux to be supported on day one by top indie titles. In stark contrast, however, Linux is still largely ignored by the big-budget AAA developers, meaning that the games your friends are buzzing about probably won’t be getting a Linux port anytime soon.

• It’s not all bad, though. Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux, Mac, and BSD systems, is making huge strides in both the number of titles supported and performance. In fact, a lot of big name games now work under Wine. No, you won’t get native performance, but they are playable and can actually run very well, depending on your system. Here are some games that it might surprise you can run with Wine on Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Clazy is a clang plugin which extends the compiler with over 50 warnings related to Qt best practices ranging from unneeded memory allocations to API misuse. It’s an opensource project spawned by KDAB’s R&D efforts for better C++ tooling.

• And here I am writing on the blog after a long time. This time it’s about talking about my new project, becoming a developer! Unfortunately I can not study full time (in fact you see the results), however, I am to show you the “results” of my study. Thanks to the Kirigami module developed by Marco Martin and the ease of QtQuick here is my first application, that is, the Alpha version. The application for now is called “Notation”, but I will definitely make a vote for the names (suggest the names in the comments below).

• A new release of Kirigami is about to come with the new version of KDE Frameworks about to be released, 5.38.

• The refactoring branch of Kdenlive is progressing nicely and we hope to merge our code to master in the last days of october to meet the KDE Applications 17.12 release schedule. Today we updated the AppImages of both stable and refactoring branch.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This article is the first of a small series about retro-gtk, a library I develop in tandem with Games and which allows it to use Libretro cores. This first article focuses on the initial goals of the library, its design and the problems that arose during its development, while the next ones will focus on what I am working on to fix these problems.

• [...]

• To ease it’s development, the library was written in Vala, which at the time seemed like a good candidate to simplify the implementation of a GObject introspectable library — also, when I started writing it I was more proficient in Vala than in GObject C. To allow multiple cores to coexist, two solutions were explored. The first solution consists in storing the calling core in a thread-specific static variable and running each core in their own threads. This forces cores to be run from a different thread and doesn’t allow reentrant calls from callbacks. The second solution consists in pushing the calling core on a static stack before each call to one of it’s module’s functions, and in poping it out of the stack just after. This allows reentrant calls from callbacks but forces cores to be run from the same thread.

Distributions

• One of the many great aspects of the Linux operating system is its ability to bring new life to old hardware. This is not only a boon for your bottom line but also an environmentally sound philosophy. Instead of sending that older (still functioning) hardware to the trash heap, give it a second lease on life with the help of Linux. You certainly won’t be doing that with Windows 7, 8, or 10. Linux, on the other hand, offers a good number of options for those wanting to extend the life of their aging machines.

• And don’t think these distributions aimed at outdated hardware are short on features. Remember, when that hardware was in its prime, it was capable of running everything you needed. Even though times have changed (and software demands far more power from the supporting hardware), you can still get a full-featured experience from a lightweight distro.

• Linux users have the liberty to enjoy an unparalleled freedom while choosing the Linux distributions as per their needs. Using different open source technologies, the developers keep creating something new and surprising the enthusiasts. Here, in this article, I’ll be listing the most beautiful Linux distros that have impressed me and other Linux users. This list is a mixture of newcomers and popular distros.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the October 2017 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has been aggressive in building out its capabilities around containers. The company last month unveiled its OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes container platform for cloud native applications that added enhanced security features and greater consistency across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

• A couple of weeks later, Red Hat and Microsoft expanded their alliance to make it easier for organizations to adopt containers. Red Hat last year debuted OpenShift 3.0, which was based on the open source Kubernetes orchestration system and Docker containers, and the company has since continued to roll out enhancements to the platform.

• Red Hat has rolled out Container-Native Storage 3.6 as part of its efforts to offer a comprehensive container stack, following up on the release of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.6 in August.

• This container storage package is built atop its Gluster Storage technology and integrated with the OpenShift platform.

• As utilities strive to gain an integrated view of their systems and data, many work to bring together operational technologies – such as distribution management and real-time grid operations – with IT systems supporting smart metering, energy consumption and work and asset management.

• The Omnetric Group-Red Hat partnership offers utilities one provider for specialist information/operations technology (IT/OT) integration expertise, open source tools and capabilities, and smart grid technology from Siemens. This combination can enable utilities to transform their processes with less risk and advance their smart grid integration journey.

Finance

Fedora

• Today we released systemd 235. Among other improvements this greatly extends the dynamic user logic of systemd. Dynamic users are a powerful but little known concept, supported in its basic form since systemd 232. With this blog story I hope to make it a bit better known.

• The UNIX user concept is the most basic and well-understood security concept in POSIX operating systems. It is UNIX/POSIX’ primary security concept, the one everybody can agree on, and most security concepts that came after it (such as process capabilities, SELinux and other MACs, user name-spaces, …) in some form or another build on it, extend it or at least interface with it. If you build a Linux kernel with all security features turned off, the user concept is pretty much the one you’ll still retain.

• Lennart Poettering published the systemd 235 update today.

• Systemd 235 introduces some new options for units, Automake support has been dropped in favor of exclusively using Meson as its build system, more aggressive caching of client metadata by systemd-journald, various networking improvements, systemctl’s poweroff/reboot/halt commands are now asynchronous, and a variety of other fixes and improvements.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As you may know the LoCo council members are set with a two years term. Due this situation we are facing the difficult task of replacing existing members and a whole set of restaffing. A special thanks to all the existing members for all of the great contributions they have made while serving with us on the LoCo Council.

Devices/Embedded

• Hologram on Thursday launched Nova, the first open source modem for cellular connectivity.

• Nova is a USB cellular modem purpose-built for Internet of Things development. Its Hologram software tools are compatible with most single board computers, such as Raspberry Pi.

• The Nova modem is open source and unlocked, so its use is not limited to Hologram’s SIMs. Though it targets the developer community, it has potential uses for everyone from makers to system architects. It sells for US$49.

• Aaeon announced a compact “FWS-2272” networking appliance with a Celeron N3350, 2x USB 3.0, 4x GbE, SATA III, mini-PCIE, and 8GB of RAM and eMMC.

• Aeon’s new Apollo Lake based FWS-2272 updates last year’s Bay Trail FWS-2251 with a faster processor, a second USB 3.0 port, and eMMC storage, among other minor upgrades. However, it also drops from 3x mini-PCIe slots to one. The device supports firewall, load balancing, network access control, software define management, vCPE,and UTM applications, says Aaeon.

• This is the latest in my adventures to see what sort of useful things can be done with a Raspberry Pi. The friendly people at the Pi-Shop.ch recently added the Farnell element 14 Pi Desktop to their offerings. This kit is not only a nice case, it also includes an add-on board which contains a power on/off button (yes!), a Real Time Clock with battery backup, and an mSATA socket so that you can add an SSD (Solid State Disk) if you want.

• There is also a software download available from the element 14 Pi Desktop page which adds the necessary functionality to the Raspbian operating system to make the On/Off switch, RTC and SSD work. Note that this software is required for any of these new hardware bits to work; the printed installation document included with the Pi Desktop implies that it is only necessary if you want to boot from SSD or USB, but that is not true.

• Slipping under our radar back during the recent Linaro Connect event in San Francisco was word that Linaro, Gigabyte, and Socionext are coming together to produce an interesting microATX-based, 24 x ARM Cortex-A53 desktop / developer box.

• When it released its first open-source system on a chip, the Freeform Everywhere 310, last year, Silicon Valley startup SiFive was aiming to push the RISC-V (“risk five”) architecture to transform the hardware industry in the way that Linux transformed the software industry. Now the company has delivered further on that promise with the release of the U54-MC Coreplex , the first RISC-V-based chip that supports Linux, Unix, and FreeBSD.

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Amdocs has announced Amdocs Network Function Virtualization (NFV) powered by Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) – a portfolio featuring modular capabilities that accelerate service design, virtualization and operating capabilities on demand.

• As the communications and media industry moves from static appliance-based networks to software based, elastic networks, carriers will be increasingly capable of providing services and capacity on demand or based on predictive traffic patterns.

• Instead of building networks for high peak periods, carriers want to spin them up dynamically to provide better network services in the right locations at lower price points. Service providers using technologies developed in ONAP and its ecosystem of capabilities can provide enterprises the ability to design their own networks as part of a richer set of service features.

• SecSmash is available free of charge on GitHub. Its modular framework allows for integration with any available technology solutions.

• If you live in Singapore and have started using the newly-minted parking.sg app developed by the government to pay for street parking at public car parks, you may have noticed something in fine print in one corner of the app’s menu that says “built with open source software”.

• Cloud Foundry Applications Runtime is an open source application development platform for cloud-native application. The platform is used and modified constantly to help organizations quickly gain access to the latest development technology.

• The tool has been a part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation for three years. It was originally created at VMware in 2010 and then moved to Pivotal in 2013 before it was donated to Cloud Foundry.

• Even if one of these applies, you still might be smarter to join an existing “umbrella” like Software Freedom Conservancy in the US or Public Software in the UK. But if you do end up devising your own organization, you won’t go far wrong my starting with the Apache Software Foundation’s principles.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has announced it will end support for its Firefox browser on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

• The organisation offers Firefox Extended Support Releases (ESRs) that keep getting bug fixes for 54 weeks, even though nine new versions of Firefox should come along during that time. Mozilla offers ESR releases so that organisations with standard desktop environments can pick a version of Firefox and run it for a year, without the need to update their gold images.

• Enterprise software vendors also like this arrangement: Oracle only certifies its wares for ESRs because keeping up with a six-weekly release cycle is too much effort.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• As this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2017 draws to a close, I’m convinced that the best seat in the house to watch this one wasn’t anywhere near San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center, the event’s venue, but sitting in front of a computer in your home or office.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Last fall, one of the co-founders of Duke University eNable published an article describing our club’s beginnings and visions for the future. In the spring of 2016, we started out as six engineering students with a passion for innovation and design, supported by a small stipend from the Innovation Co-Lab and a grant from OSPRI (Open Source Pedagogy, Research and Innovation), a project supported by Red Hat.

• Since then we have established ourselves as a presence on campus, grown into a large interdisciplinary team, and connected with multiple recipients—including a young boy in Milot, Haiti. The resources offered through Duke and the sponsorship we’ve received allow us to continuously transform our ideas into things we can share with open source enthusiasts, makers, and dreamers alike.

Programming/Development

• The Developer Experience team at SendGrid is a small, but mighty force of two. We attempt to tackle every problem that we can get our hands on. This often means that some items get left behind. At the outset, we surveyed everything that was going on in our open source libraries and we quickly realized that we needed to find a way to prioritize what we were going to work on. Luckily, our team lives, organizationally, on the Product Management team, and we had just received a gentle nudge and training on the RICE prioritization framework.

• On our company blog, I wrote an article about how employing this framework, using a spreadsheet, helped us double our velocity as a team within the first sprint. Our development velocity doubled because the most impactful things for the time spent are not always the biggest things, but the biggest things tend to attract the most attention due to their size.

• Writing code is hard. Writing secure code is harder—much harder. And before you get there, you need to think about design and architecture. When you’re writing code to implement security functionality, it’s often based on architectures and designs that have been pored over and examined in detail. They may even reflect standards that have gone through worldwide review processes and are generally considered perfect and unbreakable.*

• However good those designs and architectures are, though, there’s something about putting things into actual software that’s, well, special. With the exception of software proven to be mathematically correct,** being able to write software that accurately implements the functionality you’re trying to realize is somewhere between a science and an art. This is no surprise to anyone who’s actually written any software, tried to debug software, or divine software’s correctness by stepping through it; however, it’s not the key point of this article.

• Scale was big at the JavaOne conference this week. Spotify lauded its success scaling with Java, and Oracle execs practically squealed as they reeled off adoption statistics. Big Red believes the next ten years belong to Java.

• “We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always,” vice president Mark Cavage said on stage.

• Of course Java is already big and among those on stage was Alibaba, one of the world’s largest Java users, which talked up its ability to run more than a million JVM instances at once.

Leftovers

• Today, Microsoft sells more to businesses and enterprises than it does to consumers. The emphasis today is on subscriptions and abstract services, rather than on shrinkwrapped products it can put on store shelves.

• I registered the domain name ‘Slashdot.org’ 20 years ago today. I really had no idea.

• Today we’re marking Slashdot’s 20th birthday.

• The Senate Commerce Committee just took the next step in creating what could be the new national standard for the testing and deployment of self-driving cars. The committee unanimously agreed to send its bill, called AV Start, to the Senate floor on Wednesday.

• The bipartisan bill would establish nation-wide regulations for how companies like Uber, Tesla, Lyft, GM and others safely and legally test and then roll out their self-driving cars on public roads.

Science

• The highest possible resolution we can get in a typical image is limited by the wavelength of the light we’re using. Although there are some clever ways around this limit, one alternative has been to use something with a smaller wavelength. That “something” turns out to be electrons, and the electron microscope has provided a glimpse of the details inside cells, showing us how their parts are ordered and structured.

• But this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a group of individuals who pushed the electron microscope to its very limit, figuring out how to use it to determine the position of every single atom in large, complex molecules. The award goes partly to a researcher who successfully used electron microscopes to image proteins. But it also goes to two people who developed some of the techniques to make the whole thing work: figuring out how to freeze water quickly enough that it formed a glass and developing an algorithm that could take a large collection of random data and convert it into a coherent picture.

• Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster

• According to a paper published by a team of academics from Nottingham Trent University, digital alerts from smartphones and tablets can have a direct and immediate effect on mood.

• Almost two-thirds of pupils say they would not care if the technology did not exist and talk of negative impact on wellbeing

Health/Nutrition

• The Trump administration is rolling back the Obama-era requirement that employer-provided health insurance policies cover birth control methods at no cost to women.

• According to senior officials with the Department of Health and Human Services, the goal of the new rule is to allow any company or nonprofit group to exclude the coverage for contraception if it has a religious or moral objection.

• “This provides an exemption, and it’s a limited one,” said Roger Severino, director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights. “We should have space for organizations to live out their religious identity and not face discrimination.”

Security

• The zero-day vulnerability in macOS’s Keychain has been addressed by Apple, along with some other issues in High Sierra. But other recent versions of the operating system are still vulnerable.

• A Brazilian software developer has uncovered a bug in Apple’s macOS High Sierra software that exposes the passwords of encrypted Apple File System (APFS) volumes in plain text.

• This edition of the WordPress Attack Report is a continuation of the monthly series we’ve been publishing since December 2016. Reports from the previous months can be found here.

• This report contains the top 25 attacking IPs for September 2017 and their details. It also includes charts of brute force and complex attack activity for the same period, along with a new section revealing changes to the Wordfence real-time IP blacklist throughout the month. We also include the top themes and plugins that were attacked and which countries generated the most attacks for this period.

• At this point we’ve pretty well documented how the “internet of things” is a privacy and security dumpster fire. Whether it’s tea kettles that expose your WiFi credentials or smart fridges that leak your Gmail password, companies were so busy trying to make a buck by embedding network chipsets into everything, they couldn’t be bothered to adhere to even the most modest security and privacy guidelines. As a result, billions upon billions of devices are now being connected to the internet with little to no meaningful security and a total disregard to user privacy — posing a potentially fatal threat to us all.

Defence/Aggression

Finance

• Anti-corruption activists hoping to shine a light on the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled through London every year are organizing tours of properties allegedly bought with dishonest money.

• The service began two years ago in India, and Amazon has been slowly marketing it to U.S. merchants in preparation for a national expansion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the U.S. pilot project is confidential. Amazon is calling the project Seller Flex, one person said. The service began on a trial basis this year in West Coast states with a broader rollout planned in 2018, the people said. Amazon declined to comment.

• The average American worker has $95,000 in their 401(k), which will not even allow them to starve with dignity; this is a sharp contrast from earlier generations of American workers, whose employers provided defined-benefits pensions — but it also is quite a distance from the CEOs of the biggest US companies, whose average pension benefit is $253,088/month.

• Wiseman said it’s not much of a stretch to call this “collusion.”

• Goldman Sachs is pushing ahead with making Frankfurt, Germany, its key European base. This week, the Wall Street giant agreed to lease multiple floors for offices in a 38-storey building, as part of its Brexit contingency plans.

• The Marienturm tower is located in the heart of Frankfurt’s business district and Goldman is looking to take around the top eight floors, which is said to accommodate around 1,000 workers. “This expanded office space will allow us to grow our operations in Germany to serve our clients, as well as provide us with the space to execute on our Brexit contingency plan as needed,” said a Goldman Sachs spokesman to Bloomberg. Quartz also contacted Goldman for comment.

• Britain will refuse to tell Europe how much it is prepared to pay to settle the so-called “Brexit bill” when Brexit negotiations re-open in Brussels next week, the Telegraph can reveal, in a move that risks plunging the Brexit talks into fresh crisis.

• The British move comes as doubts emerged across Europe that Theresa May has the political clout to seal a Brexit deal following her disastrous party conference speech and public disagreements with Boris Johnson.

• Senior Whitehall sources said that negotiators will refuse to say which financial “commitments” Britain will honour, setting up a fresh showdown with Brussels.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Notably, the compromised phone was Kelly’s personal device, rather than the secure phone issued by the government. The White House told Politico that Kelly rarely used the device since joining the administration, although even occasional use could have exposed sensitive government information to attackers.

• White House tech support discovered the suspected breach after Kelly turned his phone in to tech support staff this summer.

• He revels in a public discourse that threatens, humiliates and bullies.

• He has used language as a weapon to humiliate women, a reporter with a disability, Pope Francis and any political opponent who criticizes him. He has publicly humiliated members of his own cabinet and party, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a terminally ill John McCain, not to mention the insults and lies he perpetrated against former FBI Director James Comey after firing him.

• Trump has humiliated world leaders with insulting and belittling language. He not only insulted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with the war-like moniker “Rocket Man,” he appeared before the United Nations and blithely threatened to address the nuclear standoff with North Korea by wiping out its 25 million inhabitants.

• It takes a very special kind of chutzpah systematically to assault voters, and drag them from polling booths by their hair, and then say that a low turnout invalidates the vote. That is the shameless position being taken by the Europe wide political Establishment and its corporate media lackeys. This Guardian article illustrates a refinement to this already extreme act of intellectual dishonesty. It states voter turnout was 43%. That ignores the 770,000 votes which were cast but physically confiscated by the police so they could not be counted. They take voter turnout over 50%.

• That is an incredibly high turnout, given that 900 voters were brutalised so badly they needed formal medical treatment. The prospect of being smashed in the face by a club would naturally deter a number of people from voting. The physical closure of polling stations obviously stopped others from voting. It is quite incredible that in these circumstances, over 50% of the electorate did succeed in casting a vote.

• The day after the presidential election, the Washington lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck touted its Republican team’s “significant relationships … with those who will steer the incoming Trump administration.” It highlighted Marc Lampkin, managing partner of its Washington office and a Trump fundraiser.

• Such efforts are among the ways lobbyists advertise their connections and ability to influence. One posted a pre-inauguration photo with the president on his firm’s website; another maintained a former campaign title on Facebook; others made sure to stress the backgrounds of their connected staff members online or in press releases.

• Despite Donald Trump’s campaign vow to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and special interests, Washington’s influence industry is alive and well — and growing. Former members of the Trump transition team, presidential campaign and administration, as well as friends have set up shop as lobbyists and cashed in on connections, according to a new report compiled by Public Citizen, a public interest group, and reviewed by The Associated Press.

• Records through Aug. 31 showed at least 44 registered federal lobbyists with ties to Trump or Vice President Mike Pence. These firms have collectively billed nearly $41.8 million to clients — seven of the 10 most lucrative being foreign interests, according to the analysis of federal lobbying disclosure filings.

• Catalonia’s parliament will defy a Spanish court ban and go ahead on Monday with a debate that could lead to a declaration of independence, a regional government official said, as Spain’s worst political crisis in decades looked set to deepen.

• “Parliament will discuss, parliament will meet. It will be a debate, and this is important,” the Catalan government’s head of foreign affairs, Raul Romeva, told BBC radio on Friday.

• It was the pro-independence regional government’s first clear response to a Constitutional Court decision on Thursday to suspend Monday’s planned parliamentary session, and it raised the prospect of a tough response from the central government.

• In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that “there’s no room in American society” for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK.

• But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

• During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

• Delegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance. The world’s third biggest arms manufacturer, BAe Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.

• It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is now led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different and is rare in British establishment politics.

• Addressing the conference, the campaigner Naomi Klein described the rise of Corbyn as “part of a global phenomenon. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’ historic campaign in the US primaries, powered by millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future.”

• The team captain of Spain’s storied football club Barcelona, which has become a focal point of secessionist Catalan sentiment, is urging politicians in Madrid and the Catalan capital to start negotiating about the future of Spain’s restive northeast province.

• “Before we do ourselves more damage, those in charge must open dialogue with each other. Do it for all of us. We deserve to live in peace,” Andrés Iniesta wrote on his Facebook page, apologizing at the same time for weighing in on “situations that are complex.”

• His appeal came as a top EU official Thursday warned that the separatist dispute, exacerbated by Catalan secessionists holding an illegal independence referendum Sunday, risks escalating into armed conflict.

• Back in April, Facebook published a report called “Information Operations and Facebook” that detailed the company’s efforts to combat fake news and other misinformation campaigns on the site. The report was released in the midst of an uproar over potential Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the report doesn’t mention Russia by name, saying only that Facebook’s data “does not contradict” a January report by the Obama administration detailing Russian meddling in the election.

• On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision not to mention Russia was hotly debated inside Facebook. An earlier draft of the report discussed what Facebook knew at that time about Russian meddling, but that material was ultimately removed from the report before publication.

Censorship/Free Speech

• We have a quick update today on the defamation lawsuit that Shiva Ayyadurai filed against us earlier this year. Last month, Judge Dennis Saylor dismissed the lawsuit, pointing out that everything we said concerning Ayyadurai’s claim to have invented email (specifically us presenting lots and lots of evidence of email predating Shiva’s own work) was clearly protected speech under the First Amendment. Unfortunately, despite us being a California corporation, Judge Saylor did not grant our separate motion to strike under California’s anti-SLAPP law — which would have required Ayyadurai to pay our legal fees.

• On the heels of The New York Times’ bombshell exposé published Thursday about “decades of harassment” on the part of Harvey Weinstein, the mogul’s attorney Charles Harder says he’s preparing a lawsuit against the paper.

• “The New York Times published today a story that is saturated with false and defamatory statements about Harvey Weinstein,” he writes in an email to The Hollywood Reporter. “It relies on mostly hearsay accounts and a faulty report, apparently stolen from an employee personnel file, which has been debunked by nine different eyewitnesses. We sent the Times the facts and evidence, but they ignored it and rushed to publish. We are preparing the lawsuit now. All proceeds will be donated to women’s organizations.”

• Harder is perhaps most famous as the lawyer who represented Hulk Hogan in the litigation that brought down Gawker. He also represented Melania Trump in a defamation action against the parent company of The Daily Mail. That case settled earlier this year. Harder also sent a cease-and-desist letter last year on behalf of Roger Ailes to New York Magazine, and in his career, he has represented many popular stars in entertainment including Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock.

• Responding to University of Zimbabwe lecturer, Ruby Magosvongwe’s concerns over the suitability of “semi-naked” Brazilian Samba girls performing at the Harare International Carnival, Chigwedere told a stakeholders meeting that his board would take corrective measures.

• Developer Big-O-Tree games has halted development and promotion of a planned mobile game called Dirty Chinese Restaurant after the title drew negative attention from sources including a US Congresswoman for racist portrayals of Asian-Americans.

• Egypt’s broadcast regulator, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, has banned all forms of support to the LGBTQ community, allegedly to “maintain public order.” The move came after a rainbow flag was raised at a concert of the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila in Cairo on Sept. 11. The band supports LGBTQ rights, and its lead singer, Hamed Sinno, is openly gay.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Members of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee have this week launched a new piece of legislation which is intended to completely overhaul the National Security Agency’s (NSA) ability to undertake warrantless online surveillance.

• Better late than never, there finally appears to be some Section 702 reform efforts underway in Washington DC. Tech companies have been oddly silent over the last several months, allowing the government to fill the void with demands for a clean, forever reauthorization.

• The reform bill [PDF], titled the USA Liberty Act, allows for the renewal of Section 702 authorities, but with some minor alterations. First off, the bill codifies the NSA’s voluntary shutdown of its “about” email collection. If passed intact, the bill would prevent the NSA from collecting “about” communications until 2023. It also adds some warrant requirements for searches of 702 content by law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.

• Kuwait’s controversial mandatory DNA collection law has been overturned by the country’s Constitutional Court in a Thursday ruling.

• “Forcing civilians who have not been accused of violating the law to take and save their DNA in a database violates basic human rights and privacy,” the court ruled, according to a translation provided to Ars.

• The solutions proposed by legislators, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and multiple direct beneficiaries of amped-up surveillance in the wake of acts of terrorism are always the same: more of the stuff that didn’t prevent the last attack.

• London is a thicket of CCTV cameras and yet it’s suffered multiple attacks in recent years. The NYPD and New York’s former mayor idolized the London system: cameras everywhere (but not on NYPD officers). Despite this, New York City’s relative safety appears to based more on policing tactics than hundreds of passive eyes.

• Considering the unshakable belief “more cameras = more safety,” how do surveillance supporters explain the recent shooting in Las Vegas, perhaps the most heavily-surveilled city on the planet?

• It’s not yet clear if either Martin or the most recent contractor to breach the agency’s secrecy rules had any intention of selling or exploiting the documents they took. The latest incident in particular seems to be a case of carelessness, rather than profit or malice, according to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting. Both of those leaks contrast with the whistleblowing-motivated data thefts of Edward Snowden—another Booz Allen contractor—who stole [sic] his thousands of top secret files with the intention of giving them to media.

• Prosecutors in Germany have found no reason to continue their preliminary inquiry into the NSA’s alleged systematic spying on German citizens, saying that the leaks by Edward Snowden didn’t provide good enough evidence of any crime to dig further.

• The probe was launched in 2013 after Snowden revealed mass surveillance of phone and internet data by the American and British spy agencies in the US and abroad.

• Russian state-sponsored hackers stole highly classified US cyber security information from the NSA in 2015, it has been claimed.

• According reports from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, the breach occurred when a person working in the US spy agency’s “elite hacking unit” Tailored Access Operations (TAO) loaded the information onto their home computer.

• Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm, called allegations of role in government hack ‘like the script of a C movie’

• According to these reports, an NSA affiliate in early 2016 took highly classified information home—a gross violation of a raft of security rules and regulations—and placed it on a home computer, where they were stolen by hackers connected to the Russian government. This information was compromised thanks to this individual’s use of Kaspersky anti-virus software, although the precise role the software played here is under debate.

• Russian hackers managed to steal sensitive files from the home computer of an NSA contractor who used Kaspersky Lab’s antivirus, according to the The Wall Street Journal. The revelation sheds light on the secretive reasons behind the US government ban of Kaspersky Lab products, and former NSA hackers I spoke to said they weren’t surprised by the story, saying that it could explain rumors of a leaker at the NSA that have swirled for a year.

• On Thursday, the Journal reported that in 2015 Russian hackers identified sensitive NSA files on the home computer of an NSA contractor thanks to their use of Kaspersky Lab antivirus, which apparently detected samples of NSA files on the contractor’s computer. According to the report, the hackers detected that the contractor had files it deemed valuable because the contractor used the Kaspersky antivirus software on their computer. The Journal didn’t provide details on exactly how the hackers retrieved those files, whether Kaspersky was aware its software was being used this way, or if it alerted the Russian government to these findings.

• Russian government spies extracted NSA exploits from a US government contractor’s home PC using Kaspersky Lab software, anonymous sources have claimed.

• In 2015, Russian agents stole highly classified NSA materials from a contractor, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a major breach of internal security, made possible after the contractor transferred the materials to his home computer in violation of known security procedures.

• Russian government-backed hackers in 2015 stole U.S. secrets on how to penetrate foreign computer networks and protect against cyberattacks after a National Security Agency contractor put highly classified information on his home computer, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing unidentified sources.

• [...] Apple allowed Uber to use a powerful tool that could record a user’s iPhone screen, even if Uber’s app was only running in the background, security researchers told Gizmodo.

• On 11 October, the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament votes on the draft e-privacy regulation. As the landscape of generation, collection, and other processing of data in the digital sphere evolves, the proposal seeks to update the rules on confidentiality and security of electronic communications and online activities.

• Unsurprisingly, companies whose business models rely on tracking individuals online have been busy lobbying against the new regulation. [...]

• A team set to publish a book on the untold history of Spotify were threatened by the company, one of its researchers has revealed. Earlier this year, Rasmus Fleischer, who was also one of the early figures at The Pirate Bay, said that Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s to launch its beta. Soon after, the researchers were contacted by a lawyer, with strong suggestions to stop what they’re doing.

• The decision to create a national facial recognition database system in Australia is a giant step by the Labor and Liberal parties down an Orwellian path of Big Brother surveillance and ultimately towards a surveillance and police state, Greens Justice spokesperson Senator Nick McKim claims.

• Helsinki University’s administrative law professor Olli Mäenpää has taken issue with the Finnish Parliament’s handling of visitor logs. He says that by deleting the information daily, the public institution is violating its legal obligations not just in terms of openness, but also archiving.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The photo was fake, but that didn’t seem to matter; within a day, it had racked up more than 10,000 shares, likes, and comments from furious people all over the country.

• With a third version of the Muslim ban set to go into effect on October 18, President Donald Trump’s administration has asked the Supreme Court to vacate lower court rulings on previous versions of the ban.

• If allowed to stand, the lower courts’ decisions threaten to undermine the executive’s ability to deal with sensitive foreign policy issues in strategically important regions of the world,” Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco writes in a letter to Scott S. Harris, the clerk of the Supreme Court.

• Francisco adds, “The court should not permit that unnecessary consequence, especially when the rulings below are preliminary injunctions litigated on a highly expedited basis.”

• The letter celebrates supposed “time limits” on entry and refugee suspensions as features that were not part of any attempts to “evade judicial review.” They were “temporary measures to facilitate the government’s inter-agency review processes and to protect national security in the interim.”

• After years of listening to tough-on-crime legislators and the tough-on-crime lawmen that love to hear them talk about filthy criminals beating the system by getting off on technicalities, it’s somewhat funny to discover lots of what’s complained about is nothing more than good old-fashioned due process and/or the collateral damage of crooked, inept, or lazy cops.

• We’ve seen a lot of en masse criminal case dismissals recently. Thousands of convictions and charges were dropped in Massachusetts as the result of a state crime lab tech’s years of faked drug tests. All over the nation, cops are letting perps walk rather than discuss law enforcement’s worst-kept secret: Stingray devices.

• A Miami Beach man is facing criminal charges after he created a parody account purporting to be Ernesto Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Miami Beach Police Department. The defendant, Ernesto Orsetti, is charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer, a third-degree felony, according to a press release posted by the Miami New Times.

• “Defendant falsely created and assumed the identity of the victim (active police officer/police information officer) via Twitter,” the police report says. “The Twitter account, @ernierodmb, had a marked Miami Beach police vehicle and a photo of the victim in uniform.”

• John Kiriakou, a prominent ex-CIA officer, and among the first to reveal the agency’s torture program, was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident earlier this week in Washington, D.C., according to one of his attorneys.

• Kiriakou suffered broken ribs, a fractured clavicle and lumbar spine damage, according to Jesselyn Radack, one of the attorneys who represented him when he was charged in 2012 with leaking classified information about CIA waterboarding of an Al-Qaeda suspect at a secret site in Thailand. He eventually pleaded guilty to one count of leaking the identity of a fellow CIA officer to a reporter and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In 2015 the FCC passed some fairly basic net neutrality rules designed to keep broadband duopolies from abusing a lack of broadband competition to hamstring internet competitors. Despite the endless pearl clutching from ISP lobbyists and allies, the rules were relatively modest, falling well short of the more comprehensive rules we’ve seen passed in places like Canada, Japan, and India. Still, ISPs have spent every day since trying to claim that the rules somehow utterly devastated broadband sector investment, despite the fact that independent economists and journalists have repeatedly proven that to be a lie.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Back in February, we wrote about a disturbing court decision that said that standards that are “incorporated by reference” into law, could still be copyright infringing if posted to the internet. In that earlier post I go into much more background, but the short version is this: lots of laws point to standards put together by private standards bodies, and say, effectively, “to be legal, you must meet this standard.” For example, fire codes may be required to meet certain standards put together by a private standards body. Carl Malamud has spent years trying to make the law more accessible, and he started posting such standards that are “incorporated by reference” into the law publicly. His reasoning: once the government incorporates the standard into the law, the standard must be publicly available. Otherwise, you have a ridiculous situation in which you can’t even know what the law is that governs you unless you pay (often a lot) to access it.

• Standards bodies weren’t happy about this — as some of them make a large chunk of money from selling access to the standards. But from a straight up “the law should be public” standpoint, the answer should be “too bad.” Unfortunately, the district court didn’t see it that way, and basically said it’s okay to have parts of our laws blocked by copyright. We thought that ruling had some serious problems, and Malamud and his organization Public.Resource.Org appealed. A bunch of amicus briefs have been filed in the case — which you can see at EFF’s case page on the lawsuit. There’s a good one from some law professors about how the lower court got it wrong, as well as a ton of library associations (and also other law professors and former gov’t officials). Public Citizen also filed a good brief on the importance of having access to the law. It’s worth reading them all.

• For those of us that pay attention to copyright matters throughout the world, a story out of Iran has had us riding a strange sort of roller coaster. Late in September, the Iranian government arrested six people it says run the movie-streaming site TinyMoviez. That site is like many others on the web, focusing on the streaming of Hollywood movies in a manner that is pretty clear-cut piracy. Iran does have copyright laws on the books, which include punishments for “anyone who publishes, distributes or broadcasts another person’s work without permission,” ranging from imprisonment for a few months to three years for violating that law. There are, however, no agreements on copyright between American and Iran, for obvious reasons, so the application of Iranian copyright law tends to be focused on Iranian content. Many were left scratching their heads wondering why the arrest had been made.

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.