● 10.17.17

● Links 17/10/2017: KDE Frameworks 5.39.0, Safe Browsing in Epiphany

Posted in News Roundup at 8:19 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• In my previous post, I wrote about assembling and using the Farnell element 14 Pi-Desktop kit. I limited that post to the basic installation, configuration and use of the Pi-Desktop enclosure itself. Now I am going to look at one of the optional expansion possibilities of that kit, adding an mSATA SSD (Solid State Disk).

• The first thing to consider, though, is why you would want to do this. There are three obvious reasons:

• AMD has announced the world’s first “Raven Ridge” APU with this notebook being powered by Ryzen 5 CPU cores paired with Vega graphics.

• [...]

• The Raven Ridge testing has been up and coming already within the AMDGPU code the past few cycles: Raven Ridge does require AMDGPU DC support so you’ll be looking for a Linux 4.15+ based kernel.

• The City Council was forced in an article entitled ‘Penguin, Adieu!’ to admit to the German Federation of Taxpayers that things weren’t going to work out.

• The TERES-I has been released as a do-it-yourself ARM 64-bit Linux laptop. The price isn’t bad, but it’s also not targeted as being a high-end/performance-oriented laptop.

• The TERES-I is designed around an Allwinner A64 SoC with quad-core Cortex-A53 processor. This laptop has an 11.6-inch 1366×768 laptop, 2GB DDR3L system memory, 16GB eMMC flash memory, WiFi/Bluetooth, HDMI, dual USB, and a 9500mAh laptop. The laptop weighs 980 grams.

Server

• First, ask yourself if you will dedicate the server to Docker containers. If a distribution will only serve up Docker containers, examine the Linux variants created for the specific purpose of deploying containers.

• Kubernetes’ perceived edge in the container orchestration market, as young as that market is today, is neither definitive nor definite. Its survival may yet depend on competitors’ ability to match customers’ expectations for the essential requirements for orchestration. In the future, enterprises may look for solutions that are bundled or included with larger platforms, or they may simply accept those solutions once they’ve discovered they were already bundled with the platforms in which they’ve already invested.

Kernel Space

• Renesas upgraded the Linux stack for its RZ/G SoCs to use CIP’s 10-year SLTS kernel. Meanwhile, the standard LTS kernel will expand from 2 to 6 years.

• The Linux Foundation launched the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project a year ago with the intention of developing base layer, open source industrial-grade software starting with a 10-year Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) kernel. The SLTS kernel is now ready to go, and is being incorporated by Renesas in its RZ/G Linux Platform stack for its ARM-based RZ/G system-on-chips.

• Renesas has launched its RZ/G Linux Platform with the industrial-grade Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) Linux kernel, which enables Linux-based embedded systems to be maintained for more than 10 years.

• Renesas Electronics, a provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, has launched the RZ/G microprocessor series, which the company says enables rapid development of high-performance Linux and Android applications.

Graphics Stack

• Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst has been working on an updated list of project ideas for new contributors or those that may be wanting to participate in an Endless Vacation of Code / Google Summer of Code.

• At the end of September initial Meson support landed in Mesa while hitting 17.3-devel Git now is support for more of the Mesa drivers under this new build system.

• As of Monday in Mesa Git, the Meson build system now supports building LLVMpipe, Softpipe, Nouveau, RadeonSI, Gallium3D winsys, Gallium3D state trackers and other components, and a variety of other changes. In other words, it’s now much more practical using Meson in Mesa now that it’s beginning to support almost all of the Mesa3D drivers/components.

Applications

• Hi folks am back with another interesting topic called wikipedia2text. It’s a small Shell script to query the Wikipedia articles in console, also it can open the article in any browser.

• This shell script uses text-browser to query and render Wikipedia articles. The output will be printed to standard out. It Currently supports around 30 Wikipedia languages.

• Most of us prefer Wikipedia to know the detailed information about any company or any product information & it’s history. For any google search by default Wikipedia link comes in Top 5.

• Howdy Arch Users! I’ve got a good news for you. Today, I stumbled upon yet another reliable AUR helper called “Yay”. Yep! the name of this AUR helper is Yay. Currently, I use Pacaur for installing AUR packages. It does great job and I really like it. I also have used other AUR helpers such as Packer and Yaourt in the past. After reading its features, I thought to give “Yay” a try and see how things works. So, here we go!

Instructionals/Technical

• Over the years I have found my way around many minor hurdles when using Ubuntu, the most recent being Using the DELL ULTRAHD 4K USB 3.0 DOCKING STATION (D3100).

• Hollywood has made many big promises about artificial intelligence (AI): how it will destroy us, how it will save us, and how it will pass us butter. One of the less memorable promises is how cool it will look.

• There’s a great example of amazing AI visualization in Avengers: Age of Ultron when Tony Stark’s AI butler Jarvis interacts with Ultron and we see an organic floating network of light morphing and pulsing. I wanted to make something similar to fill blank space on my apartment wall (to improve upon the usual Ikea art). Obviously, I couldn’t create anything as amazing as Jarvis as a floating orb of light; however, I could use a machine learning algorithm that looks interesting with quirky data visualization: a neural network! It employs biologically inspired elements that were meant to replicate how (we thought) the human brain works.

• Read more

• To make sure files aren’t removed accidentally when running the Linux find command, use the -ok command. It will ask for permission before removing any files.

Games

• Continuing on from the first part, Estranged: Act II [Steam, Official Site] is now available on Linux. The developer switched from Source to Unreal Engine for the second part as well.

• OpenMW [Official Site], the open source Morrowind game engine continues advancing with recent blog posts highlighting some changes sounding rather great.

• Speaking on their official blog, the developers noted back in September that they’ve had some new developers come on board, with thanks in part to the multiplayer “TES3MP” project (Morrowind Multiplayer), which is built from OpenMW.

• Following last week’s look at using the new “Coffee Lake” Intel Core i3 / i5 / i7 CPUs for Linux gaming comparison among our other ongoing tests of these new “8th Gen” processors, a frequent request has been a closer look at the gaming performance between the Core i7 8700K and the Ryzen 7 1800X. Here’s a look with two AMD Radeon graphics cards and two NVIDIA GeForce offerings.

• Football Manager 2018 [Steam] looks like it’s shaping up to be a really great release. They’re slowly giving out new details and now we have info on the new tactics screen.

• The indie singleplayer FPS ‘Ravenfield’ [Steam] has a new release out, which adds in custom weapon support, with an overhaul to the loadout UI.

• Need more ways to kill the infected? Dying Light’s [Steam] free ‘Content Drop #1′ is now available with brand new weapons and more.

• The developer of Let Them Come [Steam, Official Site], has said that they are looking into a Linux version of this rather fun sounding shoot ‘em up.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Frameworks are 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.

• KDE Frameworks 5.39.0 was released this weekend as the latest complementary add-ons/libraries to Qt.

• Following on from yesterday’s 1st spin of the 17.10 RC images by the ubuntu release team, today the RC images (marked Artful Final on the QA tracker) have been re-spun and updated.

• Please update your ISOs if you downloaded previous images, and test as before.

• Please help us by testing as much as you have time for. Remember, in particular we need i386 testers, on “bare metal” rather than VMs if possible.

• I consider digital painting to be one of my weakest areas of art skills, so I spend a lot of time trying to improve it. Other areas of digital art I’m interested in include CAD, 3d modeling, digital sculpting, vector animation, and pixel art.

• “We are very happy to have the Private Internet Access/London Trust Media as a KDE Patron and KDE e.V. Advisory Board member. The values of Internet openness are deeply rooted in both organisations, as well as those of privacy and security. Working together will allow us to build better systems and a better Internet for everyone”, said Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Vice-President of the KDE e.V.

• “Private Internet Access is highly committed to giving back to those communities that have helped the brand and its parent company get to where it is today, and we are very much aware that vast proportions of the infrastructure we use on a daily basis, in the office and at home, is powered by Free and Open Source Software. We have made a pledge to show our gratitude by supporting FOSS projects to help encourage development and growth. We are proud to be supporting KDE and the crucial work that the project does for the Linux Desktop” said Christel Dahlskjear, Director of Sponsorships and Events at Private Internet Access.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Nearly 100 million files are downloaded from the LVFS every month, the majority being metadata to know what updates are available. Although each metadata file is very small it still adds up to over 1TB in transfered bytes per month. Amazon has kindly given the LVFS a 2000 USD per year open source grant which more than covers the hosting costs and any test EC2 instances. I really appreciate the donation from Amazon as it allows us to continue to grow, both with the number of Linux clients connecting every hour, and with the number of firmware files hosted. Before the grant sometimes Red Hat would pay the bandwidth bill, and other times it was just paid out my own pocket, so the grant does mean a lot to me. Amazon seemed very friendly towards this kind of open source shared infrastructure, so kudos to them for that.

• At the moment the secure part of the LVFS is hosted in a dedicated Scaleway instance, so any additional donations would be spent on paying this small bill and perhaps more importantly buying some (2nd hand?) hardware to include as part of our release-time QA checks.

• Epiphany 3.27.1 was released a short time ago as the first development release of this web-browser for the GNOME 3.28 cycle.

• For being early in the development cycle there is already a fair number of improvements with Epiphany 3.27.1. Some of the highlights include Google Safe Browsing support, a new address bar dropdown powered by libdazzle, and improvements to the Flatpak support.

• I am pleased to announce that Epiphany users will now benefit from a safe browsing support which is capable to detect and alert users whenever they are visiting a potential malicious website. This feature will be shipped in GNOME 3.28, but those who don’t wish to wait that long can go ahead and build Epiphany from master to benefit from it.

• The safe browsing support is enabled by default in Epiphany, but you can always disable it from the preferences dialog by toggling the checkbox under General -> Web Content -> Try to block dangerous websites.

Distributions

• Solus’ communications manager Joshua Strobl is reporting today on the latest goodies and software updates that landed recently in the software repositories of the Linux-based operating system.

Reviews

• Once upon a time there was Crunchbang Linux, and then it was no more, and then the community brought it back to life in another form known as BunsenLabs Linux. This distribution offers a lightweight and easily customizable Openbox desktop.

Red Hat Family

• The open source software company Red Hat is betting big on the Indian market and plans to take its offerings to tier-2 and tier-3 cities as well as neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as public and private sectors increasingly adopt open source software.

• In an effort expose its customers to open source solutions, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has entered into a new partnership with Red Hat, a global provider of open source solutions.

• In addition becoming part of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, Alibaba Cloud will soon be able to offer its clients access to Red Hat’s offerings, which includes the full range of open source cloud solutions, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The latter will be offered as a pay-as-you-go model in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.

• Red Hat to allow existing subscriptions to migrate to Alibaba Cloud through its Cloud Access program.

• Red Hat announced the official 1.0 general availability release of CRI-O on Oct. 16, providing a competitive alternative to running the Docker runtime in Kubernetes deployments. The news comes as the DockerCon EU conference gets underway in Copenhagen, Denmark from Oct. 16-19.

• CRI-O makes use the Container Runtime Interface (CRI) within Kubernetes that makes it easier for organizations to choose a container runtime, rather than just relying on Docker as a default.

• “Open source projects are like children; no two projects are exactly the same, with different communities, structures, governance and contributors,” says Benjamin Henshall, Director, AppDev Solutions, APAC at Red Hat.

• According to Henshall, open source, which is now the preferred model for consuming software will build the next generation IT systems. Speaking with Computerworld India, Henshall talks about how open source is the foundation for successful IoT deployment and how Red Hat is still the leader in this space.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• On 7th of October in Prishtina, Kosova’s capital, was hosted the first mini deb conference. The MiniDebConf Prishtina was an event open to everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about Debian or other free and open source projects. At MiniDebConf Prishtina there were organized a range of topics incidental to Debian and free software, including any free software project, Outreachy internship, privacy, security, digital rights and diversity in IT.

• Debian has generally always had, as a rule, “sane defaults” and “no surprises”. This was completely shattered for me when Vim decided to hijack the mouse from my terminal and break all copy/paste functionality. This has occured since the release of Debian 9.

Derivatives

• Debian Linux Security Advisory 3999-1 – Mathy Vanhoef of the imec-DistriNet research group of KU Leuven discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the WPA protocol, used for authentication in wireless networks. Those vulnerabilities applies to both the access point (implemented in hostapd) and the station (implemented in wpa_supplicant).

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Most of you would have noticed already, but most of GNOME modules have been updated to their 3.26.1 release. This means that Ubuntu 17.10 users will be able to enjoy the latest and greatest from the GNOME project. It’s been fun to follow again the latest development release, report bugs, catch up regressions and following new features.

• GNOME 3.26.1 introduces in addition to many bug fixes, improvements, documentation and translation, updates resizeable tiling support, which is a great feature that many people will surely take advantage of! Here is the video that Georges has done and blogged about while developing the feature for those who didn’t have a look yet:

• Ubuntu contributor Didier Roche shares today with the community some of the last minute finishing touches that he and the Ubuntu Desktop team had to add to the forthcoming Ubuntu 17.10 release.

• This past week, part of the team was back in New York for more planning meetings, getting the details of the next 6 months, including LXC, LXD and LXCFS 3.0 fleshed out.

Devices/Embedded

• Aaeon’s COM-KBUC6 is a COM Express Type 6 Compact module with “Kaby Lake” Core-U CPUs, 5x PCIe, 12x USB, and 3x SATA III.

• Aaeon has revised its Intel 6th Gen Core based COM-SKUC6 COM Express Type 6 Compact module, which we covered in brief in 2015 as part of Intel’s Skylake announcement, as a new “Kaby Lake” based COM-KBUC6. As you can see from a comparison of the side by side block diagrams below, not much has changed with the new COM-KBUC6 module except for a jump to slightly faster 7th Gen Core processors, once again using the dual-core, 15W U-Series.

• Corvalent’s new “CorEdge Box PCs” offer Bay Trail or Haswell CPUs with up to 10x GbE, up to 6x serial, and 4x USB ports, plus an optional PoE model.

• At SOTI SYNC, the company’s global customer and partner conference, SOTI announced the first Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution to manage mixed mobility and IoT deployments, with the introduction of support for Linux.

• This is part of the newest update to the company’s flagship EMM product, SOTI MobiControl.

• SOTI is also announcing SOTI Central, the company’s online community and marketplace for partners and customers to get answers from product experts, interact, and browse a library of products and services built around SOTI ONE solutions.

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source has become an imperative part of every developer’s arsenal. The potential to gather assistance from the community and the capacity to link into a range of systems and solutions make open source incredibly powerful. As open source software becomes ubiquitous, and used by the vast majority of enterprises throughout the world, 2017 is all set for vendors of application delivery controller (ADC) to start providing improved and tighter integration packages for various open source projects, especially surrounding ADC-generated telemetry. Companies have been extensively using their analytics and machine learning capabilities for quite some time to identify actionable patterns from the collected data. With the rising demand for business intelligence, this year is foreseen to be the year of information superiority with businesses, leveraging data as a key differentiator. In the past couple of years, containers have been emerging as an imminent trend. As the business focus starkly shifts on rightsizing of resources, containers are expected to become a common phenomenon, giving businesses the ability to leverage highly portable assets and make the move into micro services much simpler. Adjacently, automation has become essential now. Mostly intensified by DevOps adoption, the automation of software delivery and infrastructure changes have freed developers to spend more time creating and less time worrying about infrastructure.

• Like chocolate and peanut butter, DevOps and open source are two great tastes that taste great together. For many DevOps pros, it’s the perfect cultural and technical match.

• He continues: “An open source model allows companies to see the assumptions behind the calculation and lowers the cost of entry into the cat modeling business. More importantly, the standardized and interoperable hazard, vulnerability and financial modules included in a true open source model facilitate the collaboration of data from insurers, reinsurers, entrepreneurs, scientists, computer programmers and individuals, all of which may result in a new generation of cat models.”

• DevOps is one of the most highly sought skills employers are seeking to fill among 57 percent of respondents in the 2017 Open Source Jobs Report, from Dice and The Linux Foundation. Specifically, firms are looking for developers (73 percent) and DevOps engineers (60 percent).

• Over the years, developers have shared with me how they use FreeDOS to run embedded systems. My all-time favorite example is a developer who used FreeDOS to power a pinball machine. FreeDOS ran an application that controlled the board, tallied the score, and updated the back display. I don’t know exactly how it was built, but one way such a system could work is to have every bumper register a “key” on a keyboard bus and the application simply read from that input. I thought it was cool.

• People sometimes forget about legacy software, but it pops up in unexpected places. I used to be campus CIO of a small university, and once a faculty member brought in some floppy disks with old research data on them. The data wasn’t stored in plaintext files, rather as DOS application data. None of our modern systems would read the old data files, so we booted a spare PC with FreeDOS, downloaded a shareware DOS program that could read the application data, and exported the data to plaintext.

• With its orange text on black interface and colour coded keyboard, the Bloomberg professional services terminal – known simply as ‘The Terminal’ – doesn’t appear to have changed much since it was launched in the early ’80s.

• But behind the retro (Bloomberg prefers ‘modern icon’) stylings, its delivery of financial markets data news, and trading tools has advanced rapidly.

• The terminal’s 315,000 subscribers globally are now able to leverage on machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing techniques developed by the company, as they seek an edge in their investment decisions. Bloomberg is also applying those same techniques to its internal processes.

• Leading the company’s efforts in the area is Bloomberg’s head of data science Gideon Mann, who spoke with CIO Australia earlier this month.

• [...]

• Behind much of Bloomberg’s recent builds has been an open source ethic. Mann says there has been a sea change within the company about open source.

• “When the company started in 1981 and there really wasn’t a whole lot of open source. And so there was a mentality of you know if it’s not invented here we’re not interested,” Mann says.

• [...]

• The organisation took some convincing, but, championed by the CTO, there has been a “huge culture change” towards open source.

• “There are two groups you got to convince: you’ve got to convince management that using open source is going to be safe and lead to better software, and then you also have to convince engineers that using open source is going to increase their skillset, will lead to software that’s easier to maintain and is less buggy and it’s going to be a more beautiful system. Once you can kind of convince those two then you’re set,” Mann says.

• The company is an active contributor to projects including Solr, Hadoop, Apache Spark and Open Stack.

• Looking back over the past decade, history has certainly demonstrated that trying to predict the pace and nature of technology development is a near impossible task.

Events

• Going to Open Source Summit EU in Prague? While you’re there, be sure stop by The Linux Foundation training booth for fun giveaways and a chance to win one of three Raspberry Pi kits.

• Last saturday the Japanese TeX User Meeting took place in Fujisawa, Kanagawa. For those who have been at the TUG 2013 in Tokyo you will remember that the Japanese TeX community is quite big and vibrant. On Saturday about 50 users and developers gathered for a set of talks on a variety of topics.

• The first talk was by Keiichiro Shikano (鹿野 桂一郎) on using Markup text to generate (La)TeX and HTML. He presented a variety of markup formats, including his own tool xml2tex.

• We had the opportunity of explaining how we at Collabora cooperated with igalians to implemented and optimise a Wayland nested compositor for WebKit2 to share buffers between processes in an efficient way even on broken drivers. Most of the discussions and some of the work that led to this was done in previous hackfests, by the way!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The best way to describe Firefox 57 is too little, too late, but better later than never. In a way, it’s a pointless release, because it brings us back roughly where Firefox was and should have been years ago. Only all this time in between was wasted losing user base.

• WebExtensions will be the thing that makes or breaks the browser, and with insufficient quality in the available replacements for those that don’t make the culling list, there will be no real incentive for people to stay around. Firefox 57 is better than earlier versions in terms of looks and performance, but that’s like saying you get 50% discount on a price that is twice what it should be. Ultimately unnecessary, just like graduating from university by the age of 68. There aren’t any major advantages over Chrome. This is essentially a Firefox that sucks less.

• So yes, on the positive side, if you do want to continue using Firefox, version 57 makes much more sense than the previous 53 releases. It has an almost normal look, some of the sorely needed security & privacy addons are available, and it offers a passable user experience in terms of speed and responsiveness. Bottom line, I will stick with Firefox for now. As long as my extensions keep working. Take care.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle had already announced it would be moving Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, and the announcements at JavaOne move the language further to a more vendor-neutral future. It’s worth noting that the keynote was preceded by a Safe Harbor disclaimer in which Oracle said it could not be held to plans made during the speech, so nothing is actually certain.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• More than six months after the release of the 4.8 series, the BSD-derived DragonFly BSD operating system has been updated today to version 5.0, a major new stable series that introduces new features and numerous improvements.

Public Services/Government

• As a longtime proponent of open source solar photovoltaic development, I am happy that the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has shared all the source code for System Advisor Model (SAM), its most powerful renewable energy economic analysis software.

• SAM is now SAM Open Source. It is a performance and financial model designed to help make decisions about renewable energy. This is perfect timing, as the costs of solar have dropped so far that the levelized cost of electricity for solar power is less than what you are probably paying for electricity from your utility.

Licensing/Legal

• Software Freedom Conservancy congratulates the Linux community for taking steps today to promote principled, community-minded copyleft enforcement by publishing the Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement. The Statement includes an additional permission under Linux’s license, the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 (GPLv2). The additional permission, to which copyright holders may voluntarily opt-in, changes the license of their copyrights to allow reliance on the copyright license termination provisions from the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) for some cases 1.

• Conservancy also commends the Linux community’s Statement for reaffirming that legal action should be last resort for resolving a GPL violation, and for inviting noncompliant companies who work their way back into compliance to become active participants in the community. By bringing clarity to GPLv2 enforcement efforts, companies can adopt software with the assurance that these parties will work in a reasonable, community-centric way to resolve compliance issues.

• Based on the recent Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement and the article describing the background and what it means , here are some Questions/Answers to help clear things up. These are based on questions that came up when the statement was discussed among the initial round of over 200 different kernel developers.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman on the behalf of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board has today announced the Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement. This statement is designed to better fend off copyright trolls.

• Among the copyright troll concerns is how a Netfilter developer has been trying to enforce his personal copyright claims against companies for “in secret and for large sums of money by threatening or engaging in litigation.”

• The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory board, in response to concerns about exploitative license enforcement around the kernel, has put together this patch adding a document to the kernel describing its view of license enforcement. This document has been signed or acknowledged by a long list of kernel developers. In particular, it seeks to reduce the effect of the “GPLv2 death penalty” by stating that a violator’s license to the software will be reinstated upon a timely return to compliance.

Leftovers

Science

Health/Nutrition

• If anyone told a young woman today that she was expected to quit school after eighth grade or leave her job once she got married, most Americans would be outraged. Not fair! Women should have the same range of economic choices as men.

• Through the years, one door after another has opened, as women have become astronauts and neurosurgeons, run Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations, and started their own businesses. Sure, there’s still a lot of ground to make up, but the country has headed in the direction of greater equality for decades now.

Security

• Librarian and privacy advocate Jessamyn West was outraged when she heard about the massive data breach affecting 134 million people at credit reporting agency Equifax. So the Randolph librarian decided to sue the multi-billion dollar company in Vermont Small Claims Court.

• West said in her summons to the credit reporting company asserts the company “acted recklessly,” and ignored the basics of good data security.

• Google and IBM, together with a few other partners, released an open-source project that gathers metadata that developers can use to secure their software.

• According to an IBM blog post, the goal of the project is to help developers keep security standards, while microservices and containers cut the software supply chain.

• We live in a world where cyber security has become more important than physical security, thousands of websites and emails are hacked daily. Hence, It is important to know the Top hacking techniques used by hackers worldwide to exploit vulnerable targets all over the internet.

• You may have heard about KRACK (for “Key Reinstallation Attack”), a vulnerability in WPA2-protected Wi-Fi. This attack could let attackers decrypt, forge, or steal data, despite WPA2’s improved encryption capabilities. Fear not — fixes for Fedora packages are on their way to stable.

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Monday rejected Equifax’s bid to retain its $7.25 million “taxpayer identity” contract—the one awarded days after Equifax announced it had exposed the Social Security numbers and other personal data of some 145 million people.

• Security researchers have discovered a new Adobe Flash vulnerability that has already been exploited by hackers to deploy the latest version of FinSpy malware on targets. Kaspersky Lab researchers said a hacker group called BlackOasis has already taken advantage of the zero-day exploit – CVE-2017-11292 – to deliver its malicious payload via a Microsoft Word document.

• For instance, criminals who potentially gained access to the personal data of the Equifax customers exploited an Apache Struts CVE-2017-5638 vulnerability.

• Two months ago, Troy Hunt, the security professional behind Have I been pwned?, released an incredibly comprehensive password list in the hope that it would allow web developers to steer their users away from passwords that have been compromised in past breaches.

Defence/Aggression

• The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war and naval blockade in Yemen has sparked a cholera epidemic that has become the largest and fastest-spreading outbreak of the disease in modern world history. There are expected to be a million cases of cholera in Yemen by the end of the year, with at least 600,000 children likely to be affected. The U.S. has been a major backer of the Saudi-led war. But in Washington, opposition to the U.S. support for the Saudi-led war is growing. Lawmakers recently introduced a constitutional resolution to withdraw all U.S. support for the war. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Congressmembers Ro Khanna, Walter Jones and Mark Pocan wrote that they introduced the resolution “in order to help put an end to the suffering of a country approaching ‘a famine of biblical proportions.’ … We believe that the American people, if presented with the facts of this conflict, will oppose the use of their tax dollars to bomb and starve civilians.” We speak with Ro Khanna, Democratic congressmember from California.

• The story seemed straightforward: The unarmed security guard approached Stephen Paddock’s room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, distracting the gunman and potentially saving lives.

• With a gunshot wound to his leg, he helped point officers to the gunman’s location and stayed behind to evacuate hotel guests.

• He was hailed a hero by many, even as the story changed. Twice.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• As part of her ongoing “Thank God You Didn’t Elect Me” tour, Hillary Clinton made her debut on Australian television last night in an interview with the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson. Though she didn’t repeat her infamous “17 intelligence agencies” lie, which she’d continued to regurgitate long after that claim had been conclusively debunked, there were still plenty of whoppers to be heard. From her ridiculous claim that the aggressively protested DNC convention was “very positive” to her completely baseless assertion that Bernie Sanders “couldn’t explain his programs” during the primaries, Clinton did a fine job of reminding us all why the average American finds her about as trustworthy as a hungry crocodile. But while she has blamed her loss on James Comey and Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and self-hating women and the media and uninformed voters and voter suppression and her campaign staff and the DNC and campaign finance laws and Jill Stein and the Electoral College and Anthony Weiner and sexism and Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton reserved the lion’s share of her deceit for the organization she hates most of all: WikiLeaks.

• Daphne Caruana Galizia, a leading Maltese journalist who had reported extensively on government corruption, was killed in a car bombing Monday, according to TVM, the country’s public broadcaster.

• The explosion took place near her home in Bidnija at approximately 2:30 p.m., minutes after her last blog post was published.

• Caruana Galizia, 53, had spent the last year publishing stories about allegations of corruption involving Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his closest allies. The story first came to light in the Panama Papers scandal — a leak in April 2016 of more than 11 million documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca.

• Daphne Caruana Galizia, one of Malta’s best known investigative journalists, was killed after a powerful blast blew up her car, local media reported Monday.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• According to analysts from Energy Research & Social Science (ERSS), there is an 80% probability of a “serious accident” at one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants before the year 2020. This is due both to the increased burden on the nuclear plants caused by the widespread shutdowns of Ukraine’s thermal power plants (the raw material they consumed – coal from the Donbass – is in critically short supply) and also because of the severe physical deterioration of their Soviet-era nuclear equipment and the catastrophic underfunding of this industry.

• The system formerly known as Hurricane Ophelia is moving into Ireland on Monday, bringing “status red” weather throughout the day to the island. The Irish National Meteorological Service, Met Éireann, has warned that, “Violent and destructive gusts of 120 to 150km/h are forecast countrywide, and in excess of these values in some very exposed and hilly areas. There is a danger to life and property.”

• Residents of England awoke on Monday morning to a sky that looked very much like a scene from the movie Blade Runner—red and hazy. Fortunately this isn’t science fiction—or even pollution. Rather, it’s a combination of the rare, powerful ex-hurricane Ophelia’s winds and African dust.

• The large, extra-tropical cyclone that brought high winds and damaging seas to Ireland on Monday also produced a huge swath of powerful southerly winds that brought Saharan dust from the West Coast of Africa all the way north across the Atlantic and Western Europe into the United Kingdom.

• Late last week, power company Vistra Energy announced that it would close two of its Texas coal plants by early 2018. In a press release, the company blamed “Sustained low wholesale power prices, an oversupplied renewable generation market, and low natural gas prices, along with other factors.”

Finance

• The European Commission published an impact assessment of a multilateral reform of investment dispute resolution. The current supranational system is known as investor-to-state dispute settlement or ISDS. ISDS gives multinationals far reaching supranational privileges to challenge government decisions.

• Instead, they played Rick like a fiddle, burned out all of his talent and skill, and once Rick was considered damaged goods, kicked his ass to the curb for the good of the company’s productivity. How brave! How heroic!

• Slowly, but yes, governments across the world are giving cryptocurrencies a place in their economy. Earlier, we heard about India in talks to launch their cryptocurrency called LakshmiCoin. Soon, there might be a Russian digital money called CryptoRuble as well.

• In an interview with the BBC, Andrew Bailey said the young were having to borrow for basic living costs.

• The regulator also said he “did not like” some high-cost lending schemes.

• He said consumers, and institutions that lend to them, should be aware that interest rates may rise in the future and that credit should be “affordable”.

• The lunatics have taken over the asylum. The Labour and Conservative conferences were proof positive that the moderates no longer hold sway. The cheers were for the zealots, whether that was John McDonnell or Jacob Rees-Mogg. And, whether from front or back benches, it is they who rule the roost when it comes to leaving the EU. So where have the centrists (and I acknowledge, as Helen Lewis has underlined, that the term is imprecise and potentially misleading, but I can think of no better one) gone? And how should they react?

• The message from the billionaire-led Koch network of donors to President Trump and the Republican Congress it helped to shape couldn’t be more clear: Pass a tax overhaul, or else.

• As the donors mixed and mingled for a policy summit at the St. Regis hotel in midtown Manhattan last week, just a block south from Trump Tower, it came up again. And again. And again.

• “It’s the most significant federal effort we’ve ever taken on,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-aligned group with offices in 36 states. “The stakes for the Republicans, I’ve never seen them this high.”

• I work with many compassionate and thoughtful employees, who try their hardest every day to help vulnerable claimants. However, we can only act within the remit of strict guidelines which don’t offer us the flexibility we sometimes need to prevent unnecessary suffering.

• The problem is compounded by employees’ lack of knowledge about the universal credit regulations which can have an especially devastating impact on care leavers, the disabled and those with mental health conditions. It is not uncommon for charities and support workers to inform case managers – the ones whose job it is to assess people for universal credit and other benefits – of the law, rather than the other way round.

• At least there was an agreement about no leaks.

• When U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last shared an intimate dinner focused on Brexit, it was a debacle. Leaks from the Brussels side claiming May was “deluded” about Brexit infuriated London, sparking condemnation on the steps of Downing Street by the PM.

• A number of major political donors have denied they are the source of a controversial £435,000 donation to the DUP’s Brexit campaign, openDemocracy can reveal today – with only one person refusing to distance themself from the secret donation.

• openDemocracy has investigated a list of key figures in relation to the donation, and all apart from one have either denied involvement or have made public statements indicating opposition to Brexit. The only person we contacted who has told us he will not comment is Henry Angest, a banker and longstanding Conservative party donor, who is known to be a supporter of Brexit.

• Britain is £490 billion poorer than everyone thought.

• The Office for National Statistics has revised its assessment of the country’s accounts, and decided Britain has overestimated its international assets.

• And we owe far more to foreign investors than previously thought.

• Overall it amounts a quarter of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product.

• It comes just six weeks ahead of Philip Hammond’s first Autumn budget – and Treasury officials are reportedly braced for “gloomy” forecasts.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Metaphorically anyway, Trump supporters like Goril were right. Not one of these career politicians had the gumption to be frank with this crowd about what had happened to their party. Instead, the strategy seemed to be to pretend none of it had happened, and to hide behind piles of the same worn clichés that had driven these voters to rebel in the first place.

• The party schism burst open in the middle of a speech by Wisconsin’s speaker of the State Assembly, Robin Vos. Vos is the Billy Mays of state budget hawks. He’s a mean-spirited little ball of energy who leaped onto the stage reminding the crowd that he wanted to eliminate the office of the treasurer to SAVE YOU MONEY!

• Paul Ryan speaks at the Wisconsin Fall Fast, avoiding the the topic of Donald Trump.

• Vos went on to brag about having wiped out tenure for University of Wisconsin professors, before dismounting with yet another superawkward Trumpless call for Republicans to turn out to vote. “I have no doubt that with all of you standing behind us,” he shouted, “and with the fantastic record of achievement that we have, we’re going to go on to an even bigger and better victory than before!”

• There was scattered applause, then someone from the crowd called out:

• “You uninvited Donald Trump!”

• Boos and catcalls, both for and against Vos and the Republicans. Most in the crowd were Trump supporters, but others were angry with Trump for perhaps saddling them with four years of Hillary Clinton. These camps now battled it out across the field. A competing chant of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” started on the opposite end of the stands, only to be met by chants from the pro-Trumpers.

• Ferocious hurricanes and other climate-fueled disasters are nature’s stress tests. They expose faulty infrastructure and systemic inequalities, to say nothing of incompetent leadership. With payments on its massive debt to Wall Street long prioritized over safe electricity, Puerto Rico’s archaic power grid was already prone to blink out in a windstorm. Then Maria hit. Help has been grudging; President Trump took eight days just to waive shipping restrictions.

Censorship/Free Speech

• When I started writing this essay I was wondering whether to close my Twitter account. To be honest with you, all the Twitter shit was bringing me very fucking close to a mental health red flag, which is a thing I need to look out for. I still haven’t decided whether to close it or not. But I have decided that in writing all this shit down and having said my peace I can step back a little bit, at least for a little while. This isn’t about Twitter anymore. This is about something bigger. When Donald Trump tweets us into war, the bombs don’t fall inside Twitter. When Donald Trump tweets us out of the social contract, citizens who’ve never used the service are left to suffer.

• Over the past week there has been a significant focus on the correlation between commercial and political interests and media organisations.

• Many concerned locals have reached out to me, voicing their concerns regarding perceived bias by some media organisations who are driven either by political affiliations, personal beliefs or commercial arrangements deriving lucrative sponsorship.

• It would be unethical and unprofessional for any media outlet to prioritise publications or broadcasts based upon commercial or political motives.

• A potential ban in China on software to avoid the country’s censors could make it “impossible” to communicate privately online, the German ambassador warned Monday.

• German envoy Michael Clauss said the possible prohibition of virtual private networks (VPNs) and the recent blockage of WhatsApp have raised concerns among foreign businesses.

• China has one of the world’s most restrictive mechanisms for online censorship, deleting content deemed politically sensitive while blocking certain Western websites and apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.

• Ticked-off WhatsApp users in China began experiencing service disruptions in July.

• Most people are well aware that China isn’t known for its freedom of speech. In fact, the country is home to the Great Firewall of China, which is renowned for online censorship and restricting access to certain services. It seems the Chinese government is fortifying this firewall once again, which is not surprising. The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is almost upon us.

• In the United States, some of the world’s most powerful technology companies face rising pressure to do more to fight false information and stop foreign infiltration.

• China, however, has watchdogs like Zhao Jinxu.

• [...]

• For years, the United States and others saw this sort of heavy-handed censorship as a sign of political vulnerability and a barrier to China’s economic development. But as countries in the West discuss potential internet restrictions and wring their hands over fake news, hacking and foreign meddling, some in China see a powerful affirmation of the country’s vision for the internet.

• President Trump does not have the power to “revoke” licenses of television networks, nor to “challenge” them as he has suggested. The impotence of these threats, however, doesn’t make them harmless.

• By advocating censorship, Trump sways his supporters and followers towards the censorious views that have taken over academia and much of the Left. He thus weakens the Right’s embrace of free speech and open debate and makes it harder for Americans of all stripes to disagree civilly. In the long run, this illiberal attitude towards the media and disagreement will hurt conservatism and Republicans and help the Left.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Australia is providing a fairly stunning case study in how not to set up a national hotline for sexual assault, rape, domestic abuse and other such situations. It has a service, called 1800Respect, which lets people call in and be connected to trained counselors from a variety of different call centers around the country. However, as Asher Wolf informs us, a change in how the system will be managed has created quite a shit storm, and leading one of the major providers of counselors to the program to remove itself from the program — meaning that it will likely lose government funding and may go out of business entirely.

• The issues here are a bit convoluted, but since its inception, 1800Respect has actually been run by a private insurance company, Medibank Health Solutions, who partners with organizations who can provide qualified counselors. One of the big ones is Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia (RDSVA). While it already seems somewhat troubling that a private insurance company runs the “national” rape and domestic violence hotline — it’s even more troubling when you find out that the company views the service as a profit center:

• This week, MEPs on the Civil Rights Committee will vote on the ePrivacy regulation, which will determine how secure our data is when we are online. For the past 16 months, industry lobbies, including all those who collect or use citizens’ personal online data for advertising purposes, have been vigorously opposing new proposals on ePrivacy. On the other side of the debate, digital rights campaigners demand that citizens should enjoy optimum data privacy when online.

• A key legal linchpin for the National Security Agency’s vast Internet surveillance program is scheduled to disappear in under 90 days. Section 702 of FISA—enacted in 2008 with little public awareness about the scope and power of the NSA’s surveillance of the Internet—supposedly directs the NSA’s powerful surveillance apparatus toward legitimate foreign intelligence targets overseas. Instead, the surveillance has been turned back on us. Despite repeated inquiries from Congress, the NSA has yet to publicly disclose how many Americans are impacted by this surveillance.

• As the deadline to renew the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance powers looms, proposed bills and speculations of bills drive the conversation on national security versus privacy.

• Senate Republicans led by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., proposed a bill in June to completely renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without any changes or sunset provision. Section 702, which expires at the end of the year, allows the NSA to collect data from foreign nationals without obtaining a warrant.

• Proponents of Section 702 said that it would be impossible for the NSA to protect the country effectively without the law, because of the backlog that would be created by having to go to the FISA court every time the agency wanted to spy on suspicious foreign activity.

• “This program has provided our national security agencies vital intelligence that has saved American lives and provided insights into some of the hardest intelligence targets,” said Cotton. “Section 702 also includes extensive privacy protections for American citizens. We can’t handcuff our national security officials when they’re fighting against such a vicious enemy. We’ve got to reauthorize this program in full and for good, so we can put our enemies back on their heels and keep American lives safe from harm.”

• Over 16 years after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent repeated passage or renewal of draconian “temporary” but “emergency” domestic surveillance laws in response, it’s fair to ask: Have we officially abandoned the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights?

• With the expiration of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) less than three months away, now is a good time to review the effects of these surveillance laws in the seemingly endless “War on Terror.” But first, a quick recap of America’s embrace of mass surveillance in the post-9/11 era.

• Within six weeks of the terrorist attacks in 2001, and with virtually no serious debate, Congress passed the behemoth PATRIOT Act. The law created vast new government surveillance powers that abandoned the Fourth Amendment’s across-the-board probable cause warrant requirement. In an October 11, 2001 speech discussing the Senate version of the legislation, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) assured terrified civil libertarians that the PATRIOT Act’s five-year “sunset” clause governing 15 of the bill’s provisions would serve “as a valuable check on the potential abuse of the new powers granted in the bill.”

• InvizBox, a small Irish company focused on building Wi-Fi routers with built-in Internet privacy, has successfully crowdfunded the next generation of its eponymous privacy platform. The InvizBox 2 and InvizBox 2 Pro are more than an evolution from the team’s original product, which was an open source modification of the OpenWRT router code focused on use of the Tor anonymizing network. These new devices are more powerful and faster, and they focus more on usable networking that avoids ISPs’ prying eyes (and defeating geo-blocking of online content) rather than striving to avoid the long arm of state surveillance.

• The InvizBox team is doing a livestream event today, despite the arrival in Ireland of Hurricane Ophelia—which has caused widespread closures of businesses in the country. But the project is already fully funded, which bodes well for delivery based on the team’s previous track record. Working with an industrial design team in China, InvizBox has created a much more attractive privacy tool, both aesthetically and practically.

• The original InvizBox launched two years ago in response to the somewhat poorly conceived crowdfunding launch of another product aimed at Internet privacy. Ars tested InvizBox (and its competitor, Anonabox) in 2015. An open source Wi-Fi router with built-in support for the Tor anonymizing network, InvizBox was a good implementation of an idea with some major roadblocks to wide adoption—the most obvious one being the limitations of Tor itself. Then InvizBox followed up with the InvizBox Go, which shifted the focus away from Tor and toward a more consumer-friendly and mobile-friendly form of privacy. This was a battery-powered Wi-Fi router that could act as a protected bridge to public Wi-Fi networks.

• The US government appealed, contending it has the legal right, with a valid court warrant, to reach into the world’s servers with the assistance of the tech sector, no matter where the data is stored.

• The current state of the law doesn’t mean that US law enforcement has no access to data stored on foreign servers. If domestic disclosure warrants cannot be served on the foreign servers of US companies, US law enforcement can lean on treaties with the country that the servers are based in.

• Early last week, the Deputy Attorney General (Rod Rosenstein) picked up the recently-departed James Comey’s Torch of Encroaching Darkness +1 and delivered one of the worst speeches against encryption ever delivered outside of the UK.

• Rosenstein apparently has decided UK government officials shouldn’t have a monopoly on horrendous anti-encryption arguments. Saddling up his one-trick pony, the DAG dumped out a whole lot of nonsensical words in front of a slightly more receptive audience. Speaking at the Global Cyber Security Summit in London, Rosenstein continued his crusade against encryption using counterintuitive arguments.

• After name-dropping his newly-minted term — responsible encryption™ — Rosenstein stepped back to assess the overall cybersecurity situation. In short, it is awful. Worse, perhaps, than Rosenstein’s own arguments. Between the inadvertently NSA-backed WannaCry ransomware, the Kehlios botnet, dozens of ill-mannered state actors, and everything else happening seemingly all at once, the world’s computer users could obviously use all the security they can get.

• Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein recently pitched a new form of backdoor for encryption: “responsible encryption.” The DAG said encryption was very, very important to the security of the nation and its citizens, but not so important it should ever prevent warrants from being executed.

• According to Rosenstein, this is the first time in American history law enforcement officers haven’t been able to collect all the evidence they seek with warrants. And that’s all the fault of tech companies and their perverse interest in profits. Rosenstein thinks the smart people building flying cars or whatever should be able to make secure backdoors, but even if they can’t, maybe they could just leave the encryption off their end of the end-to-end so cops can have a look-see.

• This is the furtherance of former FBI director James Comey’s “going dark” dogma. It’s being practiced by more government agencies than just the DOJ. Calls for backdoors echo across Europe, with every government official making them claiming they’re not talking about backdoors. These officials all want the same thing: a hole in encryption. All that’s really happening is the development of new euphemisms.

• Earlier, security clearances were deactivated once an official or intelligence worker left their government job. Now, they can be carried over to private sector jobs so long as the position still requires access to classified information.

• Workers with such clearance can access information classified by the U.S. government. Facebook plans to use these people — and their ability to receive government information about potential threats — to search more proactively for questionable social media campaigns ahead of elections, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.

• With just your mobile IP address, a website can find out all of your billing information, and even your precise location. This has been going on for years, largely behind the scenes – but recently the issue has been re-highlighted and the benefits of hiding your IP address are super clear.

• Facebook has been trying to push into the enterprise space for some time with Facebook at Work (now known as Workplace), and if confirmed, this would see the social network going head to head with LinkedIn owner Microsoft in the same space.

• After several days of radio silence, VPN provider PureVPN has responded to criticism that it provided information which helped the FBI catch a cyberstalker. In a fairly lengthy post, the company reiterates that it never logs user activity. What it does do, however, is log the IP addresses of users accessing its service.

• Something quite bizarre just happened on Twitter: the Swedish Minister of Justice went out of his way to lash out at the ISP most known for privacy in Sweden, criticizing the ISP for following the direct orders of the European Court of Justice instead of agreeing to covert illegal wiretapping. The Minister of Justice criticized the ISP for “not helping investigations against severe cases of child pornography”. The CEO of the ISP responded in the only way possible: “we cooperate with the police, but we also follow the law and due process”.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A leaked FBI counterterrorism memo claims that so-called black identity extremists pose a threat to law enforcement. That’s according to Foreign Policy magazine, which obtained the document written by the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit. The memo was dated August 3, 2017—only days before the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis killed one anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, and injured dozens more. But the report is not concerned with the violent threat of white supremacists. Instead, the memo reads: “The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” Civil liberties groups have slammed the FBI report, warning the “black identity extremists” designation threatens the rights of protesters with Black Lives Matter and other groups. Many have also compared the memo to the FBI’s covert COINTELPRO program of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, which targeted the civil rights movement. We speak with Malkia Cyril, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice as well as a Black Lives Matter Bay Area activist.

• Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who started the movement of taking a knee during the anthem, filed a “grievance” against the National Football League. He alleged owners colluded to prevent him from playing another NFL game because he engaged in protest.

• “If the NFL (as well as all professional sports leagues) is to remain a meritocracy, then principled and peaceful political protest — which the owners themselves made great theater imitating weeks ago — should not be punished,” one of his attorneys, Mark Geragos, said in a posted statement. “And athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the executive branch of our government. Such a precedent threatens all patriotic Americans and harkens back to our darkest days as a nation.”

• The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home.

• Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the car into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.

• A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state.

• Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.

• Todd Weiler, a state Senator in Utah, has appeared on our pages before. When last we checked in with the good senator, he was quite oddly attempting to purge his notoriously prudish state from the dire threat of pornography. His plan was more than a bit heavy-handed in that it centered on mandating porn-filtering software on all smartphones under his stated theory that “A cell phone is basically a vending machine for pornography.” This tragic misunderstanding by a sitting state senator of what a phone is and exactly what its primary functions are aside, government mandates that infringe on free and legal expression are kind of a no-no in these here secular United States. Even setting constitutional questions aside, attempts like these are immediately confronted by the obstreperous demands from the public for a definition of exactly what constitutes “pornography.”

• In the wake of the news about Harvey Weinstein’s apparently serial abuse of women, and the news that several of his victims were unable to tell anyone about it due to a non-disclosure agreement, the New York legislature is considering a bill to prevent such NDAs from being enforceable in New York state. According to the Buzzfeed article the bill as currently proposed still allows a settlement agreement to demand that the recipient of a settlement not disclose how much they settled for, but it can’t put the recipient of a settlement in jeopardy of needing to compensate their abuser if they choose to talk about what happened to them.

• It’s not the first time a state has imposed limits on the things that people can contract for. California, for example, has a law that generally makes non-compete agreements invalid. Even Congress has now passed a law banning contracts that limit consumers’ ability to complain about merchants. Although, as we learn in law school, there are some Constitutional disputes about how unfettered the freedom to contract should be in the United States, there has also always been the notion that some contractual demands are inherently “void as against public policy.” In other words, go ahead and write whatever contractual clause you want, but they aren’t all going to be enforceable against the people you want to force to comply with them.

• The encampments by Native Americans at Standing Rock, N.D., from April 2016 to February 2017 to block construction of the Dakota Access pipeline provided the template for future resistance movements. The action was nonviolent. It was sustained. It was highly organized. It was grounded in spiritual, intellectual and communal traditions. And it lit the conscience of the nation.

• Native American communities—more than 200 were represented at the Standing Rock encampments, which at times contained up to 10,000 people—called themselves “water protectors.” Day after day, week after week, month after month, the demonstrators endured assaults carried out with armored personnel carriers, rubber bullets, stun guns, tear gas, cannons that shot water laced with chemicals, and sound cannons that can cause permanent hearing loss. Drones hovered overhead. Attack dogs were unleashed on the crowds. Hundreds were arrested, roughed up and held in dank, overcrowded cells. Many were charged with felonies. The press, or at least the press that attempted to report honestly, was harassed and censored, and often reporters were detained or arrested. And mixed in with the water protectors was a small army of infiltrators, spies and agents provocateurs, who often initiated vandalism and rock throwing at law enforcement and singled out anti-pipeline leaders for arrest.

• In a small office in the Midlands the telephone rings every half hour or so. On the line are women desperate for help, trying to flee domestic violence. But there is no space in the refuge, there is almost never any space.

• “Last week”, says a volunteer, “we had a lady call; she had four children, and the closest space we could find for her was the Orkney Islands.” They do not know if the woman took the 600 miles trip to safety; she did not call back.

• An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found domestic violence refuges across England struggling under huge budget cuts. More than a thousand vulnerable women and children have been turned away from refuges in just six months.

• Days after two leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus got Facebook to commit to hiring a black member to its board of directors, they again pressed major tech firms to diversify the hiring of executives and rank-and-file employees.

• In brief remarks before dozens of assembled employees at the downtown offices of Hustle, a texting startup, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-North Carolina) said Monday morning that they have been meeting with companies including Uber and Salesforce to improve on a longstanding issue of underrepresented minorities in Silicon Valley.

• The ruling [PDF] restates common sense, albeit in 33 pages of legalese. It is excessive force to restrain preteens who weigh less than 60 lbs. with handcuffs meant to keep full-grown adults from moving their arms. The procedural history notes school personnel are forbidden from using mechanical restraints on students by state law. This law, however, does not forbid law enforcement officers from using handcuffs on students.

• In both cases, the students cuffed by a sheriff’s deputy had been combative. School personnel turned both students over to the SRO once it became obvious they would not be able to calm the students down. The combativeness didn’t stop once the deputy entered the picture. These would appear to be arguments in the deputy’s favor but only if other factors weren’t considered — like the students’ ages and sizes. Both children also suffered from behavioral disorders.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) will investigate DDoS attacks that allegedly targeted the Federal Communications Commission’s system for accepting public comments on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back net neutrality rules.

• Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) requested the investigation in August, and the GAO recently confirmed that it accepted the Schatz/Pallone request.

• [...]

• The FCC’s public comment website suffered an outage on May 8, just as the commission was receiving an influx of pro-net neutrality comments spurred by comedian John Oliver’s HBO segment on the topic.

• The FCC attributed the downtime solely to “multiple” DDoS attacks and said the attacks were “deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host.”

DRM

• Today my Patreons and I discuss encrypted media extensions, digital rights management and our freedom on the Linux desktop.

• [Teresa Nobre, Communia Association, Link (CC-0)] The European Union is currently discussing a reform of its copyright system, including making mandatory certain copyright exceptions, in order to introduce a balance into the system. However, no one, except Julia Reda, is paying any attention to one of the biggest obstacles to the enforcement of copyright exceptions in the digital age: technological protection measures (TPM), including digital rights management (DRM). In this blogpost we will present the reasons why the European Parliament should not lose this opportunity to discuss a reform of the EU anti-circumvention rules.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• The Supreme Court declined Monday to review a petition asserting that the term “google” has become too generic and therefore unqualified for trademark protection.

• Without comment, the justices set aside a legal challenge claiming that Google had fallen victim to “genericide” and should no longer be trademarked. A lawsuit claimed the word “google” had become synonymous with the term “search the Internet” and therefore could no longer sustain a trademark. For the moment, Google will keep its trademark—unlike the manufacturers of the teleprompter, thermos, hoover, aspirin, and videotape. They were once trademarked but lost that status after they were deemed too generic.

• On 26 September, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) announced, for the first time ever, the grant of protection to three sound trademarks consisting solely of a sound element.

Copyrights

• Copyright on home design has always been a really sketchy idea. Earlier this year, we wrote about a disturbing trend of housing copyright trolls and have had some other similar stories over time. For reasons that are beyond me, the Berne Convention requires copyright on architecture, and that creates silly situations, such as the one in Australia, where a homeowner was forced to modify their home due to “infringement.”

• And this nonsense has spread to Canada. The Toronto Star has the story of a couple, Jason and Jodi Chapnik, living in Forest Hill, Toronto (one of the “most affluent neighborhoods” in Toronto), who sued their neighbors for $2.5 million for the horrific faux pas of renovating their house to look too much like the Chapniks.

• On 16 October, over 50 NGOs representing human rights and media freedom (see the full list below) sent an open letter to the European Commission President, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council asking them to delete the censorship filter proposal (Article 13), as it would “would violate the freedom of expression set out in (…) the Charter of Fundamental Rights” and “provoke such legal uncertainty that online services will have no other option than to monitor, filter and block EU citizens’ communications“. It is especially striking that organisations such as Reporters without Borders and Human Rights Watch, which are known to intervene for the protection of human rights in less democratic countries, have now been moved to the point where they felt the need to voice their concerns in this matter to ensure that EU citizens are safeguarded from the EU’s copyright agenda crushing their fundamental rights.

• Today a range of civil society organisations sent an open letter to European Union policymakers calling for the removal of a provision they say would violate citizens’ rights by forcing monitoring and filtering of copyrighted materials.

• “The European Commission tabled a proposal that would force [I]nternet companies that share and store user-generated content, such as video or photo-sharing platforms or even creative writing websites, to filter uploads to their services,” said the group in a note to interested parties.

• “The signatories argue that the proposal would lead to excessive filtering and deletion of content, while at the same time constantly monitoring users’ activity online. These conditions would violate freedom of expression, freedom of information and also privacy. Therefore, the organisations are asking Members of the European Parliament to delete Article 13 from the proposal”.

• The Pirate Bay’s iconic .SE domain name has expired and will be deactivated soon if no action is taken. This means that thepiratebay.se, which played a central part in the site’s history, is no longer redirecting to the most current Pirate Bay domain.

• In its continuing legal battle, popular hip-hop mixtape site and app Spinrilla is striking back against the major record labels. The company accuses the labels of maliciously hiding crucial piracy data, which puts it at a severe disadvantage. Spinrilla now wants to see the entire case dismissed.

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