● 10.18.17

● Links 18/10/2017: GTK+ 3.92, Microsoft Bug Doors Leaked

Posted in News Roundup at 6:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Chromium evangelist François Beaufort is sharing today information on a new Material Design refresh for Google’s Chrome OS’ “Do Not Disturb” mode, which landed in the latest Chrome Canary channel.

• According to the developer, the Material Design refresh for the “Do Not Disturb” mode will make the Notification Center look nicer, but also consistent with the Android user experience. Those using the Chrome Canary experimental channel can give it a try right now.

• The famed Linux-laptop seller also says, “The Lemur you know and love is now even better with the Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads, allowing you to multitask up to 40-percent faster. The slim, 3.6 lb laptop with impressive 14.1-inch 1080p IPS display is still your perfect travel companion; easy to carry from meeting to meeting or across campus.”

• New processors aside, these laptops should be pretty much identical to prior generations — which is a very good thing. If you want to configure a Lemur with a Coffee Lake chip, you can build your own here. A Galago Pro with an 8th Gen Intel Core processor can be configured here.

• The year of Linux desktop was a running joke. The concept of Linux being ready for the mainstream with users confidently running it on their desktops, sadly, never happened.

• Some bravely pushed the idea: the latest being Canonical with a more macOS-like desktop, easier to configure and use than the standard Linux distro. It came with an app-store concept too.

Server

• Ken Parmelee, who leads the API gateway for IBM and Big Blue’s open source projects, has a few ideas about open-source methods for “attacking” the API and how to create micro-services and make them scale.

• “Micro-services and APIs are products and we need to be thinking about them that way,” Parmelee says. “As you start to put them up people rely on them as part of their business. That’s a key aspect of what you’re doing in this space.”

• There’s been a lot of adoption of Kubernetes in the last few years, and as of Oct. 17 the open-source container orchestration technology has one more supporter. Docker Inc. announced at its DockerCon EU conference here that it is expanding its Docker platform to support Kubernetes.

• Docker had been directly competing against Kubernetes with its Swarm container orchestration system since 2015. The plan now is to provide a seamless platform that supports a heterogenous deployment that can include both Swarm and Kubernetes clusters.

• “Docker adapts to you because it’s open,” Docker founder Solomon Hykes said during his keynote address at DockerCon.

• Container software vendor Docker has announced that it will integrate with the popular open-source orchestration platform Kubernetes, providing users of its Enterprise Edition with the choice of either Kubernetes or Docker’s own clustering tool Swarm.

• At the DockerCon EU conference here on Oct. 18 Docker outlined multiple successes it has had with its Modernize Traditional Applications (MTA) program that was first announced at the DockerCon 17 conference in Austin, Texas in April.

• The MTA program is a bundle of Docker products and services from partners which at launch included Avanade, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft. At DockerCon EU, IBM announced that it too is now joining the MTA program.

• “We have found that successful modernization journeys start with existing skills, infrastructure, processes and applications, then figuring out how to apply those existing things to new technologies to solve problems for your business,” Docker Chief Operating Officer Scott Johnston said during a keynote address.

Kernel Space

• Recently making waves in our forums was talk of a kernel patch to address a case where the AMD CPB (Core Performance Boost) isn’t being exposed by Ryzen processors. Here’s more details on that and some benchmarks.

• Being talked about recently is f7f3dc0: “CPUID Fn8000_0007_EDX[CPB] is wrongly 0 on models up to B1. But they do support CPB (AMD’s Core Performance Boosting cpufreq CPU feature), so fix that.”

• Development of Linux 4.14, the next LTS (Long Term Support) kernel series, continues with the fifth RC (Release Candidate) milestone, which was announced by Linus Torvalds himself this past weekend.

• According to Linus Torvalds, things have finally starting to calm down for the development of the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel, and it looks like the RC5 snapshot is smaller than he would have expected, at least smaller than last week’s RC4, which is a good thing, meaning that there won’t be need for eight RCs during this cycle.

• The AMDKFD kernel driver that is a component of HSA support on Linux for Radeon GPUs is seeing more upstreaming work in Linux 4.15, but only for older APUs.

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for the connected car, is announcing that five new members have joined the project including Adobe, Desay SV Automotive, Fiberdyne Systems, Nuance and Trend Micro.

Graphics Stack

• The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source graphics support for Vivante graphics hardware is almost to exposing OpenGL 2.0.

• Etnaviv contributor Christian Gmeiner today posted a set of patches for adding occlusion queries support to the driver. The code at just over one thousand lines of code is the last major feature needed for exposing desktop OpenGL 2.0 capabilities with this community-driven driver.

• While the AMDGPU DC code is expected to land for Linux 4.15 with goodies like Vega display support, HDMI/DP audio, and atomic mode-setting, one of the sought after display features won’t be initially supported: FreeSync or the VESA-backed AdaptiveSync.

• As we’ve known for a while, while AMDGPU DC fills out the requirements for being able to support FreeSync, the last bits of the implementation are not present as the interfaces are basically yet to be decided among the open-source driver developers. While AMD can post their existing FreeSync code as found in AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver, they are trying to come up with a more standardized interface that will satisfy the other upstream Linux driver developers too that might want to support AdaptiveSync.

• AMD’s GPUOpen initiative has put out a new release of their Windows and Linux supported Radeon GPU Profiler program for profiling Vulkan (and Direct3D 12) games.

Applications

• Looking for Microsoft Office in Linux? Here are the best free and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 153.

• Oracle released VirtualBox 5.1.30, a minor maintenance update to the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software that addresses a few important issues reported by users from previous versions.

• Coming one month after the VirtualBox 5.1.28 release, which probably most of you out there use right now on your personal computers, VirtualBox 5.1.30 contains a fix for a Glibc 2.26 compilation bug for Linux hosts and a 3D-related crash for Windows guest that use the Windows Additions package.

• It was more than one year ago that VirtualBox 5.1 was released while today it’s finally been succeeded by a new feature release.

• Franz is a free to use application that combines different messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Telegram, Skype, Slack and other chat applications in one application.

• ClipGrab is a free software to download and convert videos from different famous sites of Internet. You can easily save your favorite videos from sites like Dailymotion or Vimeo. And you can convert these videos into “usable” formats like WMV, MPEG or MP3. You can check here which sites are supported by this software.

• Today, Gammu 1.38.5 has been released. After long period of bugfix only releases, this comes with several new noteworthy features.

• Just a quick public service announcement if you rely upon AppArmor for security on your Linux distribution like Ubuntu/Debian and plan to soon upgrade to the Linux 4.14 kernel…

Proprietary

• SteelCloud LLC announced today that it has enhanced ConfigOS, its patented STIG remediation software, to support the newly released Ubuntu, SUSE, and Oracle Linux STIGs. These new supported platforms bolster the product’s existing Red Hat Linux automated STIG remediation capabilities. The expanded ConfigOS Linux security content will be provided to new and existing customers at no additional charge.

Instructionals/Technical

• For many people, using a word processor is the fastest, easiest, and most familiar way to write and publish an e-book. But firing up your word processor and typing away isn’t enough—you need to follow a format.

• That’s where a template comes in. A template ensures that your book has a consistent look and feel. Luckily, creating a template is quick and easy, and the time and effort you spend on it will give you a better-looking book.

• In this article, I’ll walk you through how to create a simple template for writing individual chapters of an e-book using LibreOffice Writer. You can use this template for both PDF and EPUB books and modify it to suit your needs.

• All the developers out there love Sublime Text. It has been emerging as a great text editor for learners and advanced. It is available on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. Sublime text offers features like macros, recognition of a wide variety of languages, split view etc. The editor can also be customized using different themes. Some of these themes are already popular through Notepad++.

• Installing Linux Mint is a fairly straight forward process. Any perceived level of difficulty installing Linux Mint usually comes down to the end user deciding to make things more complicated.

• In this article, I’ll share my advice for making your Linux Mint installation really simple, plus I’ll walk you through the process from the very beginning to the very end.

• I’ve covered several scientific packages in this space that generate nice graphical representations of your data and work, but I’ve not gone in the other direction much. So in this article, I cover a popular image processing package called ImageJ. Specifically, I am looking at Fiji, an instance of ImageJ bundled with a set of plugins that are useful for scientific image processing.

• The name Fiji is a recursive acronym, much like GNU. It stands for “Fiji Is Just ImageJ”. ImageJ is a useful tool for analyzing images in scientific research—for example, you may use it for classifying tree types in a landscape from aerial photography. ImageJ can do that type categorization. It’s built with a plugin architecture, and a very extensive collection of plugins is available to increase the available functionality.

Games

• Combining elements from many different genres, Dungeons 3 [Steam, GOG] has arrived for you to spread evil across the world. Dungeons 3 was a same-day release for Linux, but how does it feel to to be bad?

• The Humble Down Under Bundle features nine games, all of which have a Linux version and it’s a rather nice selection.

• Hiveswap: Act 1 [Official Site, Steam, Humble], based on the popular, long-running webcomic Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, has released for Linux, just over 1 month following release of the Windows and Mac versions.

• Battlevoid: Sector Siege [Steam] promises to be an RTS where the action is never far away, I liked the previous Battlevoid game for its simplicity and Battlevoid: Sector Siege seems better in every way.

• This is sadly a familiar story, the Linux version of Beyond Enemy Lines [Steam, Official Site] is now waiting on bugs being fixed in Unreal Engine 4.

• If you’re in the mood to slow down a bit with a puzzle game, perhaps Slide!! [Steam, Official Site] from Red Chain Games Ltd. might help.

• Nowhere Prophet [Official Site, itch.io], a single-player tactical roguelike with card-based battles is currently going through ‘First Access’ (itch’s version of Early Access) and it has Linux support.

• For fans of the classic first-person dungeon crawlers, Ebony Spire: Heresy [Steam] looks like it might scratch the itch.

• One interesting thing to note, is that Linux is the primary platform for the development of the game. It’s really great to hear about more games actually developed on Linux!

• Even better, is that the source code for the game is under the MIT license. You can find the source on GitHub. The source is currently a little outdated, but the developer has told me that it will be updated when the Beta becomes available.

• The developer of The First Tree [itch.io, Steam, Official Site] email in to let everyone know that their beautiful 3rd-person exploration game is now on Linux ‘due to a ton of requests’.

• Linux support arrived as part of a major patch, which improves gamepad support, adds an option to invert the Y-axis and Camera Sensitivity options are in too. On top of that, a bunch of bugs were also squashed.

• Another classic game is getting closer to being fully playable natively on Linux. The project to recreate The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in the Unity engine has hit an important milestone and now the the main quest is completely playable.

• Daggerfall is the second entry in Bethesda’s long-running Elder Scrolls series of role-playing games and was originally released way back in 1996. It was an ambitious game, with thousands upon thousands of locations to explore in an virtual game area the size of a small real-world nation. It’s a game that I personally lost a lot of time to way back in the day and I’m happy to see that a project that allows me to play it natively on Linux is coming along swimmingly.

• Croteam has just released The Talos Principle VR, the virtual reality edition of their award-winning The Talos Principle puzzle game. SteamOS/Linux with the HTC Vive is supported alongside Windows.

• This VR-enhanced version of The Talos Principle is retailing for $39.99 USD.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• After quite some development time I have decided to push out xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0 today. This is not just a bugfix, but a feature-packed release.

• For users of the Xfce4 desktop environment, a new release of xfce4-notifyd 0.4 is now available as the project’s newest feature release.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Just one week after the release of the major KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment, the KDE Project on Tuesday announced the immediate availability of the maintenance update to the series, KDE Plasma 5.11.1.

• A couple of years ago, I made a blog post, KDE makes Qt, with data about which percentage of Qt contributions came from people starting in KDE. Basically, how many Qt contributions are made by people who used KDE as a “gateway” drug into it.

• Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, although it has image processing capabilities, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response.

• Now that the KDE Applications 17.08 software suite got its second point release, it’s time for the KDE developers to concentrate their efforts on the next major update, KDE Applications 17.12.

• Just a few short days ago, the KDE team released Plasma 5.11, the latest edition of this desktop environment, plied with a range of bug fixes as well as some new features. Reason enough to celebrate, but even more so when you consider the fact that Plasma has been slowly, steadily – and consistently – improving over the past few years.

• For me, the culmination of this effort is my great satisfaction with Plasma – epitomized in the shape and form of Kubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zoltan, including the most excellent twining of the distro with my HP Pavilion laptop. And on this very machine, I will be testing the KDE neon live edition, furnished with the latest desktop version. So let’s see what it does.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Mutter 3.27.1 has just been released as the first development release for the GNOME 3.28 cycle of this compositor / window manager.

• The change most interesting to us about Mutter 3.27.1 is support for hybrid GPU systems. The context for the hybrid GPU system support is explained via this bug report, “supporting systems with multiple GPUs connected to their own connectors. A common configuration is laptops with an integrated Intel GPU connected to the panel, and a dedicated Nvidia/AMD GPU connected to the HDMI ports.”

• The development cycle of the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment kicked off with a bunch of updates for various of the core components and apps, including Mutter and GNOME Shell.

• Matthias Clasen has today released GTK+ 3.92 as the latest test release in the long road towards the major GTK4 tool-kit update.

• GTK+ 3.92 features Vulkan improvements, more widget reworking, continued Emoji support, and more. Highlights of changes found in this GTK+ 3.92 update include:

Distributions

New Releases

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki‏ is informing us today on the immediate availability for download of the Beta release of his upcoming 4MRecover 23.0 live system designed for data recovery tasks.

• The Parrot Project began work on a new version of their Linux-based ethical hacking and penetration testing operating system, Parrot Security OS 3.9, and they recently put out a call for testing.

Red Hat Family

• Last year, the Kubernetes project introduced its Container Runtime Interface (CRI) — a plugin interface that gives kubelet (a cluster node agent used to create pods and start containers) the ability to use different OCI-compliant container runtimes, without needing to recompile Kubernetes. Building on that work, the CRI-O project (originally known as OCID) is ready to provide a lightweight runtime for Kubernetes.

• Alibaba Cloud has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, with Red Hat solutions to become directly available to Alibaba Cloud customers in the coming months.

• The Amsterdam-based company behind Elasticsearch and Elastic Stack said the new offering would be available to Alibaba Cloud customers as an add-on, giving them access to real-time search, logging, and data analytics capabilities.

• InfluxData Brings Time Series Data to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with Red Hat Certified Containers — InfluxData Now Published in Red Hat Container Catalog, Enabling Simpler Deployment for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Users

Finance

Fedora

• Today marks the final freeze for Fedora 27 with hopes of shipping the official release soon.

• Only being permitted to land in the F27 repository until the official release will be accepted blocker bug fixes and feature freeze exceptions.

• Fleet Commander is now declared “production ready” by the Red Hat developers working on this software project for easing the process of deploying and managing Fedora/Red Hat desktops across a large number of systems.

• Fleet Commander builds off the Cockpit web-based administration tools and FreeIPA for making it easier for system administrators to deploy Fedora and Red Hat based systems on a large scale within an organization.

• Fedora 27 is now under its final freeze for release in the next few weeks so here’s a recap of the prominent changes coming to this next installment of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

• First and foremost, the Fedora Workstation 27 release is making use of GNOME 3.26 and its many exciting improvements, many of which upstream improvements were worked on by Fedora / Red Hat developers. GNOME 3.26 offers better Wayland support, some HiDPI improvements, initial built-in screencast / remote desktop support through Mutter, the reworked GNOME Control Center UI, many app improvements, and more as outlined in that aforelinked article.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth is one of the most prominent people in open source software.

• Ubuntu, the GNU/Linux-based operating system that he helped birth in 2004 is now one of the best-known open source projects in the world, accounting for a vast proportion of the Linux VMs in the public cloud and huge numbers of connected devices.

• Ubuntu contributor Didier Roche shared today the last blog article for the development cycle of the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, which is expected to launch tomorrow, October 19.

• All good things must come to an end, however, in that particular case, it’s rather a beginning! We are indeed almost done in our road to Artful, which means that 17.10 is just around the corner: official Ubuntu 17.10 release is due tomorrow. Of course, it doesn’t mean we stop right away working on it: you will have bug fixes and security updates for 9 months of support! It’s thus time to close this series on Artful, and for this, we are going to tackle one topic we didn’t get to yet, which is quite important approaching the release: upgrading from a previous Ubuntu release! For more background on our current transition to GNOME Shell in artful, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post.

• X.Org Server is not as secure as we’d like, that’s why more and more GNU/Linux distributions are trying to migrate to the next-generation Wayland display server, whose design offers us an extra layer of security.

• Canonical recently published a new security advisory informing users of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating systems about a recent security vulnerability affecting the xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-16.04, and xorg-server-lts-xenial packages.

Flavours and Variants

• Besides Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” launching tomorrow, System76 is also expected to issue their first official release of the Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS operating system they plan to begin shipping on their laptops/desktops. Curious about their modifications to Ubuntu 17.10, I decided to give the latest snapshot of it a ride.

• For those that missed the earlier news this summer, back in June is when System76 announced Pop!_OS as the Linux distribution to be shipped on their future PCs/laptops. System76 had been shipping stock Ubuntu installations on their systems since its founding in 2005, but with Ubuntu shifting from Unity back to GNOME Shell and other changes, System76 found it time to give their own take on a Linux desktop OS.

Devices/Embedded

• Gumstix has added NXP’s tiny, Linux-driven SCM-i.MX6 module to its Geppetto design library, and has launched a “Cobalt MC” SBC to showcase the tiny COM.

• Portwell’s compact “WEBS-13D1” computer offers Apollo Lake options, 4K-ready DP and HDMI, 6x USB, -20 to 60°C support, and shock and vibration resistance.

• MYIR has launched a $239, HMI touch panel with a 7-inch resistive screen that runs Linux on a TI AM335x, and offers -10 to 70°C support and a 4G LTE module.

• MYIR’s Linux-based “MY-EVC5100S-HMI” touch-panel computer is designed for HMI systems in industrial control, manufacturing, vending, food and beverage, automation, and utilities applications. MYIR has already used the platform to develop a billing display application for electric vehicle charging pile stations.

Android

• Budget Android company ZTE is launching what has to be its craziest-looking smartphone ever, the Axon M. The M looks like someone took a Nintendo DS, removed the controls, and stuck two big smartphone screens on each side.

• The Axon M is a whopping 12.1mm thick. A hinge runs along the long side of the phone, and it opens up, just like a Nintendo DS. On each side of the phone, you get a 5.2-inch, 1080p TFT LCD. Open the whole thing up, and when combined the screens sort of become a 6.75-inch, 8:9 aspect ratio, 1920×2160 display. I say “sort of” because of course there’s a big seam down the middle.

• As Google’s new Pixel 2 smartphones get ready to hit the shelves, reviews of the models have begun mushrooming online.

• While the new phones generally have received positive grades, many reviewers found the their design boring.

• “The Pixel 2 hardware is ho-hum,” observed Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

• If I had to pick the moment I most appreciated the Google Pixel 2, it would be when our airboat driver-slash-tour guide put a hot dog and a piece of raw chicken in his pocket, dove into the New Orleans swamp, and began playing with a giant gator named Who Dat. I’m no social media whiz, but I knew there was Instagram gold unfolding in front of me. So I pulled out my Pixel 2 XL, the larger of Google’s two new models, double-clicked on the power button to open the camera, and started snapping.

• Welcome to year two of Google Hardware. In 2016, Google jumped into the Android hardware space with its first self-branded device, the Google Pixel. Google’s software prowess shined on the Pixel 1, offering up exclusive features like the Google Assistant, the best Android camera thanks to advanced software processing, fast day-one OS updates and betas, and the smoothest, best-performing overall build of Android. The killer software package made it the best Android phone of the previous generation.

• The Pixel still represented Google’s first foray into smartphone hardware, though, and it didn’t offer anything special in the hardware department. It was a bland-looking iPhone clone. It had the same specs and basic design as everything else. The Pixel even skipped water resistance, which had become an expected feature at that price point. Google said it wanted to make its own hardware, but it didn’t actually build special hardware.

• My phone is dead. I’m not exactly sure what happened to it, but for some reason, my beloved Sony Xperia Z5 Compact no longer turns on. Granted, it’s not my main work phone, but it’s my personal phone and also my audiobook player. The biggest problem is that when I’m exploring new Android apps, the Sony is the device I use for testing. Thankfully, there are other options.

• I really wanted a simple way to demo Android apps, and I figured an emulator would be the way to go. The problem is, running Android isn’t as simple as booting an Ubuntu ISO in VirtualBox. Thankfully, it’s actually not much more difficult than that either! There are several different ways to emulate Android on a computer, at least one of which actually does use VirtualBox. Since I’m currently sitting in front of an OS X machine, I needed something I could install easily on an Apple. Enter: Xamarin’s Android Player. Only after I started using it did I discover that Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned company. For some reason, emulating Android on a Macintosh using Microsoft software made me giggle.

Free Software/Open Source

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a famous computer scientist and academic who invented the World Wide Web in 1989—so when he talks about new technologies it’s worth paying attention.

• Today, one of the topics on his mind is blockchain, a revolutionary way of creating permanent, tamper-proof records across a disparate network of computers.

• Blockchain is most famously associated with the digital currency bitcoin but the technology is increasingly being used for record keeping by banks and retailers. It will also come to be used by more ordinary citizens in the near future, says Berners-Lee.

• The Eclipse Science Working Group, a working group of the Eclipse Foundation, today announced the new releases of five open source projects used by the scientific research community to advance and simplify the software used by science projects, like genomic, astrophysics, nuclear simulations, etc. The new project releases are part of an annual release train that is managed by the Science WG.

• We have an operation around the region; in South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Kenya and Rwanda. And this has exposed us to different levels of talent across the region. As a result, we have come to a conclusion that Uganda has special talents in the area of information technology, specifically, product development or software engineering.

Events

• Join 2000 technologists and community members next week as they convene at Open Source Summit Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Prague. If you can’t be there in person, you can still take part, as The Linux Foundation is pleased to offer free live video streaming of all keynote sessions on Monday, Oct. 23 through Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2017. So, you can watch the event keynotes presented by Google, Intel, and VMware, among others.

• The LibrePlanet call for sessions closes November 2nd–only two weeks away–and we want to hear from you!

• Speaking at a conference, and even submitting a proposal, can be intimidating or hard. Luckily, some great, experienced speakers are volunteering their time by holding CFS Office Hours.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google quietly promoted the Chrome 62 web browser to the stable channel today for desktops, including Mac, GNU/Linux, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

• Google has released Chromium/Chrome 62 as the latest update to its widely-used web browser.

• Landing in the Chromium browser code-base this morning is a JPEG encode accelerator interface.

Mozilla

• Community contributions are at the core of MDN’s success. Thousands of volunteers have helped build and refine MDN over the past 12 years. In this year alone, 8,021 users made 76,203 edits, greatly increasing the scope and quality of the content. Cross-browser documentation contributions include input from writers at Google and Microsoft; Microsoft writers have made more than 5,000 edits so far in 2017. This cross-browser collaboration adds valuable content on browser compatibility and new features of the web platform. Going forward, Microsoft writers will focus their Web API documentation efforts on MDN and will redirect relevant pages from Microsoft Developer Network to MDN.

• Says Mark Surman, Mozilla’s Executive Director: “The Internet is layered into our lives like we never could have imagined. Access is no longer a luxury — it’s a fundamental part of 21st century life. A virus is no longer a nuisance consigned to a single terminal — it’s an existential threat that can disrupt hospitals, governments and entire cities.”

• But much of the Internet’s best nature is flourishing, too. Each day, new communities form despite members being separated by whole continents. Start-ups and artists have access to a global stage. And open-source projects put innovation and inclusion ahead of profit.

SaaS/Back End

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Now that the LibreOffice Conference 2017 event is over, it’s time for The Document Foundation to start the bug hunting sessions, and the first one was set for the end of the week, October 20, 2017, for the first Alpha release of the LibreOffice 6.0 office suite.

• Work on LibreOffice 6.0, the next big release of the popular open-source and cross-platform office suite for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating system, begun this week with a focus on revamping the user interface as well as various of its core components, including Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, Base, and Math.

• The LibreOffice community has returned from a great conference in Rome (more on that later this week), and we’re now working eagerly on LibreOffice 6.0, which is due to be released at the end of January 2018. This version will include a large number of new features – and those already implemented are summarised on the release notes page.

• During the LibreOffice Conference 2017 event that took place in Rome, Italy, from October 10 to October 13, there were talks about the status the Qt 5 port of LibreOffice’s VCL plugin for KDE Plasma.

• Every year, The Document Foundation plans and organizes a LibreOffice Conference event where developers, contributors, sponsors, users, and other members of the LibreOffice community can gather to talk about the future of the Open Souce office suite.

• And this year they planned the new features of the next major release of the cross-platform office suite, LibreOffice 6.0, which will arrive in late January 2018 with a new look for the KDE Plasma desktop environment, work that will be sponsored by the LiMux project.

CMS

• The Control Group released Voyager version 1.0 on GitHub on Sept. 18, 2017. As of publication, the open source Laravel admin package has earned nearly 4,500 stars. Voyager makes it easy to quickly build out websites and applications with maximum control over appearance and functionality.

Healthcare

• The first phase of the campaign comprises immediate disaster response. The collaborators will deploy a version of the open-source cloud platform OpenEMR-Plus, which proved successful in response efforts after Hurricane Harvey in Houston. They will also provide supply chain assistance.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Licensing/Legal

• We recently updated our list of various licenses and comments about them to include the Eclipse Public License version 2.0 (EPL).

• In terms of GPL compatibility, the Eclipse Public License version 2.0 is essentially equivalent to version 1.0. The only change is that it explicitly offers the option of designating the GNU GPL version 2 or later as a “secondary license” for a certain piece of code.

• Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman and several other senior Linux figures have published a “Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement” to be included in future Linux documentation, in order to ensure contributions to the kernel don’t fall foul of copyright claims that have already seen a single developer win “at least a few million Euros.”

• In a post released on Monday, October 16th, Kroah-Hartman explained the Statement’s needed because not everyone who contributes to the kernel understands the obligations the GNU Public Licence 2.0 (GPL 2.0), and the licence has “ambiguities … that no one in our community has ever considered part of compliance.”

• After many years of working on it, it is with immense pleasure to see the FLA-2.0 – the full rewrite of the Fiduciary License Agreement – officially launch.

• In a recent conversation on the Apache Legal mailing list, a participant opined that “any license can be Open Source. OSI doesn’t ‘own’ the term.” He went on to explain “I could clone the Apache License and call it ‘Greg’s License’ and it would be an open source license.”

• As long as the only people involved in the conversation are the speaker and people who defer to his authority, this might be OK. But as soon as there are others involved, it’s not. For the vast majority of people, the term “open source license” is not a personal conclusion resulting from considered evaluation, but rather a term of art applied to the consensus of the community. Individuals are obviously free to use words however they wish, just like Humpty Dumpty. But the power of the open source movement over two decades has arisen from a different approach.

• The world before open source left every developer to make their own decision about whether software was under a license that delivers the liberty to use, improve and share code without seeking the permission of a rights holder. Inevitably that meant either uncertainty or seeking advice from a lawyer about the presence of software freedom. The introduction of the open source concept around the turn of the millennium solved that using the crystalisation of consensus to empower developers.

• By holding a public discussion of each license around the Open Source Definition, a consensus emerged that could then by crystalised by the OSI Board. Once crystalised into “OSI Approval”, the community then has no need to revisit the discussion and the individual developer has no need to guess (or to buy advice) on the compatibility of a given license with software freedom. That in turn means proceeding with innovation or deployment without delay.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• 3D printing feels a bit stuck. At the dawn of the 2010s, the device seemed destined to reimagine the creative process, putting the power of additive manufacturing within anyone’s grasp. But trend has gone cold since reaching its popular zenith in 2013. While people continue to create amazing things with 3D printing, the “one in every household” promise has been put on temporary—or possibly permanent—hold.

• But the leader of the once great 3D printing revolution hasn’t gone away quietly. In fact, it’s done the opposite. Makerbot, the Brooklyn-based startup that sold its first printers back in 2009, is launching a brand new platform, Makerbot Labs, to help turn its 3D printing community into super-users, able to access parts of the printer that were otherwise inaccessible. Makerbot describes this new platform as a place, built for creators, who want to experiment with 3D printing but still have the bedrock of the platform to fall back on if need be.

Standards/Consortia

• Industry body IEEE and the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) announced the formation of a task force to develop IEEE P802.3ch—Standard for Ethernet physical layer specifications and management parameters for greater than 1 Gbps automotive Ethernet. The new standards development project aims to meet the demand for higher speed Ethernet in the automotive environment to support ongoing technological developments, such as connected cars, advanced driver assisted systems and infotainment systems.

Leftovers

• If you’re a geek, a do-it-yourselfer, a maker, or just plain curious, you need to get your hands on some reading material from No Starch Press, which bills itself as “The Finest in Geek Entertainment.” I have used its books as reference materials when teaching students about the Linux operating system and helping them learn to code.

• I recently chatted over email with Bill Pollock, owner of No Starch Press, which he founded in 1994. Bill didn’t set out to be a book publisher; he enrolled at Amherst College to study biology, with the goal of becoming a medical doctor, but became fascinated by his political science coursework and, in 1983, earned his bachelor’s degree in that discipline. Even so, he put his interest in medical science to use in his first editorial job, with Springer-Verlag Publishing, where he edited medical books for fun. While there, he tried (and sometimes failed) to teach others how to use the new personal computer in the office.

Science

• For decades, the court has struggled with quantitative evidence of all kinds in a wide variety of cases. Sometimes justices ignore this evidence. Sometimes they misinterpret it. And sometimes they cast it aside in order to hold on to more traditional legal arguments. (And, yes, sometimes they also listen to the numbers.) Yet the world itself is becoming more computationally driven, and some of those computations will need to be adjudicated before long. Some major artificial intelligence case will likely come across the court’s desk in the next decade, for example. By voicing an unwillingness to engage with data-driven empiricism, justices — and thus the court — are at risk of making decisions without fully grappling with the evidence.

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• In January President Trump delivered on his promise to shrink the federal government: he announced a hiring freeze, despite thousands of federal job vacancies.

• As a candidate, Trump campaigned as a great friend of veterans. He pledged to make big improvements in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) the arm of the Veterans Administration (VA) which operates the largest healthcare system in the country.

• Yet Trump’s hiring freeze deepened an already existing staffing crisis at VHA hospitals and clinics throughout the U.S where there are 49,000 vacant positions.

• Union activists believe that the resulting understaffing is designed to generate patient complaints and negative publicity that will cause veterans and their families to lose faith in VA-provided care.

• Honey from across the world is contaminated with potent pesticides known to harm bees, new research shows, clearly revealing the global exposure of vital pollinators for the first time.

• Almost 200 samples of honey were analysed for neonicotinoid insecticides and 75% contained the chemicals, with most contaminated with multiple types. Bees range over many kilometres to collect nectar and pollen, making the honey they produce an excellent indicator of the pesticide pollution across their local landscape.

• Bees and other pollinators are vital to three-quarters of the world’s food crops but have been in serious decline in recent decades. The destruction of wild habitats, disease and widespread pesticide use are all important factors. Scientists responding to the new work say a crackdown on the industrial-scale use of the nerve agents is urgently needed.

Security

• Hackers broke into Microsoft’s secret, internal bug-tracking database and stole information related to vulnerabilities that were exploited in later attacks. But the software developer never disclosed the breach, Reuters reported, citing former company employees.

• In an article published Tuesday, Reuters said Microsoft’s decision not to disclose details came after an internal review concluded the exploits used in later attacks could have been discovered elsewhere. That investigation relied, in part, on automated reports Microsoft receives when its software crashes. The problem with that approach, Reuters pointed out, is that advanced computer attacks are written so carefully they rarely cause crashes.

• Reuters said Microsoft discovered the database breach in early 2013, after a still-unknown hacking group broke into computers belonging to a raft of companies. Besides Microsoft, the affected companies included Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. As reported at the time, the hackers infected a website frequented by software developers with attack code that exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software framework. When employees of the targeted companies visited the site, they became infected, too.

• As you are aware, there’s a major WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access II) security vulnerability in the wild, affecting virtually any device or operating system that uses the security protocol, including all GNU/Linux distributions.

• Former Fedora Project leader Paul W. Frields talks today about how to protect your Fedora computers from the dangerous WPA2 KRACK security vulnerability that affects virtually any device using the security protocol to connect to the Internet.

• How did a bug like krack fester in WPA2, the 13-year-old wifi standard whose flaws have rendered hundreds of millions of devices insecure, some of them permanently so?

• Thank the IEEE’s business model. The IEEE is the standards body that developed WPA2, and they fund their operations by charging hundreds of dollars to review the WPA2 standard, and hundreds more for each of the standards it builds upon, so that would-be auditors of the protocol have to shell out thousands just to start looking.

• It’s an issue that Carl Mamamud, Public Resource and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting hard on for years, ensuring that the standards that undergird public safety and vital infrastructure are available for anyone to review, audit and criticize.

• The issue — tracked as CVE-2017-15265 — is a use-after-free memory corruption issue that affects ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), a software framework included in the Linux kernel that provides an API for sound card drivers.

• Announcing the fifth release candidate for the Linux kernel version 4.14, Linus Torvalds has revealed that fuzzing is producing a steady stream of security fixes.

• Fuzzing involves stress testing a system by generating random code to induce errors, which in turn may help identify potential security flaws. Fuzzing is helping software developers catch bugs before shipping software to users.

• According to some, blockchain is one of the hottest and most intriguing technologies currently in the market. Similar to the rising of the internet, blockchain could potentially disrupt multiple industries, including financial services. This Thursday, October 19 at Sibos in Toronto, Hyperledger’s Security Maven Dave Huseby will be moderating a panel “Does Blockchain technology alleviate security concerns or create new challenges?” During this session, experts will explore whether the shared nature of blockchain helps or hinders security.

• We’re excited that support for getting and managing TLS certificates via the ACME protocol is coming to the Apache HTTP Server Project (httpd). ACME is the protocol used by Let’s Encrypt, and hopefully other Certificate Authorities in the future. We anticipate this feature will significantly aid the adoption of HTTPS for new and existing websites.

• We created Let’s Encrypt in order to make getting and managing TLS certificates as simple as possible. For Let’s Encrypt subscribers, this usually means obtaining an ACME client and executing some simple commands. Ultimately though, we’d like for most Let’s Encrypt subscribers to have ACME clients built in to their server software so that obtaining an additional piece of software is not necessary. The less work people have to do to deploy HTTPS the better!

• Chrome 62 is now rolling out to desktops in the stable channel with a number of new features for developers, as well as some changed security behaviors as Google continues to encourage HTTPS adoption.

• The US Department of Homeland Security will require federal agencies to use web and email encryption practices to enhance their security posture.

• Adobe Systems Inc (ADBE.O) warned on Monday that hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in its Flash multimedia software platform in web browsers, and the company urged users to quickly patch their systems to prevent such attacks.

Defence/Aggression

• Could a president’s overconfidence in U.S. defensive systems lead to deadly miscalculation and nuclear armageddon? Yes. Yes, it could. Last Wednesday, referring to potential American responses to North Korea’s missile and nuclear program, President Donald Trump told Sean Hannity “We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97 percent of the time, and if you send two of them it’s gonna get knocked out.” If Trump believes — or is being told — that American missile defenses are that accurate, not only is he factually wrong, he is also very dangerously wrong. This misperception could be enough to lead the United States into a costly war with devastating consequences.

• Here’s why: If Trump believes U.S. missile defenses work this effectively, he might actually think a first strike attempt to disarm North Korea of its missile and nuclear forces would successfully spare U.S. cities from North Korean nuclear retaliation. They probably wouldn’t. Believing that each ground-based midcourse missile defense (GMD) interceptor can provide anything close to a 97 percent interception rate against retaliation raises the temptation to attempt a so-called “splendid first strike” based on the assumption that missile defenses can successfully intercept any leftover missiles North Korea could then fire at the United States.

• Rescue operations continue in Mogadishu, Somalia, after two massive truck bombs exploded Saturday, killing at least 300 in the country’s deadliest attack since the rise of the al-Shabab militant group a decade ago. The disaster is being referred to as the “Mogadishu massacre,” and some are calling it “the 9/11 of the Somali people.” The explosions came after the Trump administration stepped up a U.S. campaign against al-Shabab in Somalia. We speak with Somali scholar Abdi Samatar and journalist Amanda Sperber, who splits her time between Nairobi, Kenya, and Mogadishu, Somalia.

• It was March 2003, the invasion of Iraq was underway, and Major General David Petraeus was in command of the 101st Airborne Division heading for the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Rick Atkinson, Washington Post journalist and military historian, was accompanying him. Six days into a lightning campaign, his division suddenly found itself stopped 30 miles southwest of the city of Najaf by terrible weather, including a blinding dust storm, and the unexpectedly “fanatical” attacks of Iraqi irregulars. At that moment, Atkinson reported,

• [...]

• So as American air power in places like Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan is ramped up yet again, as the latest mini-surge of troops arrives in Afghanistan, as Niger enters the war, it’s time to put generals David Petraeus, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly in context. It’s time to call them what they truly are: Nixon’s children.

• The CIA’s attempt to use Glomar to keep the public in the dark about its role in the Yemen raid is absurd.

• Just days after Donald Trump assumed the powers of the presidency, he convened a group of top intelligence and military officials for dinner at the White House. The group included Secretary of Defense James Mattis and CIA Director Michael Pompeo. Presumably they were not there for the steak.

• Instead, they were there to discuss and sign off on an intelligence-gathering raid in al Ghayil, Yemen — the first of its kind under the Trump presidency, though planning for it had commenced under his predecessor. Days later, Navy SEAL Team 6 carried out the raid, but early reports were that the raid went awry. One service member and multiple Yemeni civilians — the exact number remains disputed — were killed.

• Still, the White House defended the raid as a success. From the White House podium, then–Press Secretary Sean Spicer explained that “the goal of the raid was intelligence-gathering. And that’s what we received, and that’s what we got. That’s why we can deem it a success.”

• But criticism continued, and reports surfaced that prior to the raid, President Trump had exempted the area of Yemen in which the raid took place from rules governing the United States’ use of lethal force outside of war zones. Those rules were put in place by President Obama and were intended — however flawed they were — to limit civilian casualties.

• The problem with all of these excerpts: Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. It has a civilian nuclear energy program, but not one designed to build weapons. Over 30 countries have civilian nuclear programs; only a handful—including, of course, the US and Israel—have nuclear weapons programs. One is used to power cities, one is used to level them.

• If you are skeptical, just refer to a 2007 assessment by all 16 US intelligences agencies (yes, those 16 US intelligence agencies), which found Iran had “halted” its nuclear weapons program. Or look at the same National Intelligence Estimate in 2012, which concluded again that there “is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.” Or we can listen to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, which concurred with the US intelligence assessment (Haaretz, 3/18/12).

• The “Iran Deal,” formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is built on curbing Iran’s civilian nuclear program, out of fear—fair or not—that it could one day morph into a nuclear weapons program. But at present, there is no evidence, much less a consensus, that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. JCPOA cannot be used as per se evidence such a program exists today; indeed, it is specifically designed to prevent such a program from developing down the road.

• The Los Angeles Police Department, one of the nation’s largest municipal police forces, approved a one-year pilot program for drones—making it the largest city in the nation to undertake such an evaluation.

• According to the Los Angeles Times, the LA Police Commission approved a set of policies that limits “their use to a handful of tactical situations, searches or natural disasters.” Each drone flight must also be signed off by a “high-ranking officer on a case-by-case basis.” The drones are also not to be weaponized. The decision, which was announced Tuesday, was made despite vociferous protest.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A police sergeant who yesterday celebrated the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia has been suspended, with the Office of the Prime Minister describing his remarks on Facebook as ‘reprehensible’. He will be investigated by the Public Service Commission. The shadow minister for justice, Jason Azzopardi, the Malta Police Association and the Police Officers’ Union all condemned the comments. The post, by Ramon Mifsud, was uploaded yesterday.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Officials at the Department of Defense and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) accidentally included a Bloomberg climate reporter on an internal email distribution list that included discussions on how to present Puerto Rico recovery efforts to the media.

• Bloomberg’s Christopher Flavelle said he repeatedly alerted officials at the Pentagon to the error but kept receiving emails for five days.

• “Those messages, each of which was marked ‘unclassified,’ offer a glimpse into the federal government’s struggle to convince the public that the response effort was going well. That struggle was compounded by the commander-in-chief, and eased only when public attention was pulled to a very different disaster,” writes Flavelle in a Bloomberg story published Friday.

• The hurricanes of 2017 affected many coastal areas. Guided by the CZMA over the past 45 years, the coastal programs have gained the experience, scientific information, and policies needed to address reconstruction and recovery needs. As a result, coastal communities stand a better chance of weathering future storms and day-by-day challenges. Two examples illustrate this approach.

Finance

• Technical debt is no different. It allows companies to create software faster, with the understanding that they will slow down software development in the future. Companies will eventually be forced to spend more time fixing the debt than the amount of time it took them to produce the best solution at the beginning.

• When French President Emmanuel Macron’s secured his sweeping majority of the Elysee Palace and parliament in May and June, it was said that only the unions had a chance of checking his power. So this week’s show of unity and strength by public sector unions – after months of squabbling – will have him worried.

• For the first time a decade all nine unions representing 5.4 million public workers protested in the streets of France on Tuesday. At issue are Macron’s plans to axe 120,000 public sector jobs, to reduce sick leave compensation and freeze public sector pay. Workers in health, education, local government, air traffic controllers and train drivers are among those who went on strike.

• Carwyn Jones has argued there would have to be a general election in 2019 if Theresa May failed to secure a Brexit deal by that deadline. Talks at securing a deal with the other 27 EU states on trade and on any remaining budget payments have stalled. Some MPs have backed a “no deal” Brexit while others warn of economic chaos. The first minister told S4C’s O’r Senedd programme the UK government had an unrealistic view of Britain’s influence in the world.

• Same time, same place, same speech. The humiliation is now almost complete. Five times David Davis has come back to the Commons to report on the progress of his talks with Michel Barnier, and on each occasion the Brexit secretary has had little to say. In the early days, he used to claim that the lack of progress was a sign of how much progress had been made, but now he has lost the will to even bluster. The former SAS man has barely got the strength to fight his way out of a paper bag.

• Throughout his five-minute statement, Davis could barely bring himself to raise his eyes towards the opposition benches. The contempt he could have taken. But it was the pity that got him every time. Some important steps had been made, he said in a barely audible mumble. He couldn’t say exactly what they were but they had been made. The negotiations were being conducted in a good spirit. As in, no one had actually walked out yet. But he was reaching the limits of what was possible.

• The European Parliament’s Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, criticized David Davis for conducting a “witch hunt” against British MEPs who voted to delay trade talks.

• Davis has called for 18 Labour MEPs and one from the Liberal Democrats to be sacked “in the national interest” for supporting a European Parliament resolution critical of the British government’s approach to the negotiations.

• The Government has rejected calls to reverse Brexit after economic experts said a second referendum would have a significant, positive effect on the economy.

• The decision to leave the EU has “raised uncertainty and dented business investment” in the UK, a new report warned.

• Real wages are being stripped back amid soaring inflation despite low unemployment, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

• Its 140-page annual report outlines the state of Britain’s economy 16 months after last year’s EU Leave vote.

• Economic experts have made an explosive suggestion of a further referendum to reverse Brexit, to avoid the crippling of the British economy.

• The influential Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said the deadlock in the exit talks now threatened a “disorderly Brexit”, with severe consequences.

• Its report controversially puts the case for a dramatic rethink on the agenda – suggesting halting EU withdrawal is a route to avoiding that fate.

• Global food security — its availability, affordability, quality and safety — is beginning to slip for the first time in half a decade. Britain, being far from self sufficient in its food production, is taking a massive risk in quitting the safety of the single market.

• In response to concerns about the impact of a no-deal Brexit on food prices and the UK’s food security, Brexiteer Chris Grayling suggested recently that British farmers will just have to grow more food.

• Alongside this ‘Dig For Victory’ bravado was the suggestion that we should also increase imports from across the world: two diametrically opposed food and farming policies in one breath.

• Such ‘solutions’ come easily if you’ve never had to think deeply about where food comes from; if all it has ever meant is a stroll to the nearest supermarket.

• Somewhere out there is the immigration officer who made the decision. As a result of what they did, my husband and I were locked in a legal ordeal for seven months, separated for four, lived in rural Sweden for three, and spent over £10,000. What we went through provides an instructive lesson in the failures and mean-spiritedness of the Home Office.

• Politics, runs the cliche, is the art of the possible. The compromise. The curbed expectation.

• Not any more. Not in the age of Brexit and Trump. In 2017, politics is the art of the impossible. Of writing blank cheques and scattering them to the wind. Of peddling fantasies and promising the voters they will be made flesh by tomorrow.

• Growing numbers of foodbanks are distributing emergency parcels amid problems with the roll out of universal credit, a new report reveals.

• More than 2,000 foodbanks are now recorded as operating in Britain, with around 700 independent and 1,235 Trussell Trust centres, figures up slightly on earlier this year.

• The report highlights problems with the roll out of the welfare reform as a reason for recent “dramatic increases” in demand, the Press Association reported.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Friends say President Donald Trump has grown frustrated that his greatness is not widely understood, that his critics are fierce and on TV every morning, that his poll numbers are both low and “fake,” and that his White House is caricatured as adrift.

• So on Monday, the consummate salesman — who has spent his life selling his business acumen, golf courses, sexual prowess, luxury properties and, above all, his last name — gave the Trump White House a Trump-sized dose of brand enhancement.

• With both the Roosevelt Room and the Rose Garden as backdrops, he mixed facts and mirage, praise and perfidy in two head-spinning, sometimes contradictory performances designed to convince supporters and detractors alike that everything’s terrific, moving ahead of schedule and getting even better. His opponents were cast as misguided, deluded or even unpatriotic.

• President Trump “goes there, on just about every topic imaginable,” as NBC’s Brian Williams put it, during a pair of Q&As, two hours apart yesterday — one in the Cabinet Room and one with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Rose Garden.

• Why it matters: It’s almost impossible for the media to cover these press conferences — or for Republicans to discern what he wants and how he plans to get it — because Trump spreads fake news while calling real news fake. This isn’t new. And, yes, 35% of voters don’t seem to care. But that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

• President Donald Trump broke his silence Monday over the deaths of four U.S. Army Green Berets who died in an ambush in Niger two weeks ago, saying he would contact the families of the soldiers—while falsely claiming that President Barack Obama did not reach out after U.S. troops were killed in combat. Trump’s comments came only after he was questioned over his silence by reporters during a press conference at the White House with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

• A panel at the Royal Television Society Convention in Cambridge this year revealed a broad range of concerns regarding class in television. Ofcom released a report coincident with the Convention reporting on diversity and equal opportunities in television. While Ofcom focused on race, gender and disability, it also reported on broadcasters’ initiatives to promote social mobility. Ofcom added that it will explore what new information can be provided on social background.

• Broadcasters, including the BBC, have recently begun to address social class in terms of diversity. Undoubtedly, this has been aided by existing initiatives on diversity with reference principally to gender, race, disability, age and sexual orientation. Much of this engagement with class seems tentative and in development. Some commentators are concerned variously with ‘class’, ‘socioeconomic background’, or ‘social mobility’. Different variables are proposed to measure class. Proponents tend to rely exclusively on a metrics-based approach.

• At this stage, key issues must be addressed: what is the problem against which these initiatives are directed? Is ‘class’ a valid category for analysis and, if so, how might class be monitored? If class is insufficient as a category to address the diagnosed problem, what other categories and interventions might be warranted? I will explore these questions with particular reference to the BBC. I do so in part because the BBC is a public service broadcaster whose duties raise distinctive issues regarding class.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Over four years ago, we first wrote about the bizarre and convoluted attempt by a lawyer named Richard Goren to remove a negative review on Ripoff Report. As we noted, he may very well have a totally legitimate defamation claim against the guy who wrote the review, but it’s the events that happened later that were questionable. Goren did sue the author of the post — “Christian Dupont” — for defamation and won a default judgment when Dupont ignored the lawsuit. But here’s where things get problematic: the state court where the case was brought, as part of the default judgment, assigned the copyright on the posts to Goren. He then turned around and claimed that the post on Ripoff Report was infringing on his copyright and sued the company behind Ripoff Report, Xcentric (he also, somewhat bizarrely, added Dupont as a plaintiff in the case alongside himself — something Ripoff Report claims was invalid). It also tossed in a bunch of other claims, including libel and intentional interference with prospective contractual relations.

• IT teams all over world tend to increasingly use blockchain as the technology that would massively advance cost efficiency of resources spent. The majority of those teams arrive at the conсlusion that revolutionary changes in the industry will be driven by something more than mere optimization of existing technologies. The Privatix project team that have announced their plans to develop a marketplace for idle traffic, told about their vision of the global network and their bid to contribute to finding a proper solution.

• Internet censorship in China is a problem both for critical domestic users and for a lot of foreign companies. The government is now threatening to close down VPNs, which tunnel data traffic abroad. For firms, a shock.

• A coalition of civil liberties groups in South Dakota is sending a clear message to Senator John Thune: don’t turn your back on our right to assemble online.

• The ACLU of South Dakota, Indivisible 605, Indivisible Rapid City, and Queer South Dakota signed a letter [.pdf] urging Senator Thune to put the brakes on the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (S. 1693, SESTA). Thune is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which is currently considering the bill.

• The country’s National Congress is a hugely influential political summit that takes place every five years, and includes the selection of central party leadership. It is also a time when Chinese censors are on high alert, particularly when it comes to online media.

• The next summit, the 19th, takes place on Wednesday, and is likely to last around a week. Already, on the eve of the gathering, we have the first glimpse of internet restrictions for Chinese users.

• When the jury verdict against Gawker came down a year and a half ago, we warned of how problematic it was. We pointed out that it was a big deal even if you absolutely hated Gawker and wanted to see them destroyed. Because, as we noted, the playbook used against Gawker could be used against lots of other publications. And it’s clearly impacting a number of others as well. A couple months ago, we wrote about how the “Gawker Effect” had made it very difficult for a huge investigative piece on R Kelly “holding women against their will” by Jim DeRogatis (a music reporter who has broken a number of R Kelly related stories over the years) to find a home to get published. Lots of publishers wouldn’t touch it, not because the reporting wasn’t solid, but because they didn’t want to face the possibility of libel lawsuits, no matter how silly.

• Founding festival director of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) Ong Keng Sen is calling for transparency within the arts community.

• [...]

• This is also what SIFA stands for – as not just a festival, but also an intervention and an alternative space for discussion in Singapore.

• In just the past two weeks, students in Texas sought to shout down an invited speaker, and Oregon students silenced their own college president.

• But on college campuses and in state legislatures, defenders of free speech are pushing back. With some adjustment, a new proposal in Ohio looks promising.

• Now, however, Republican President Donald Trump wants to bring it back.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On the last day to act on legislation in 2017, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill creating a firewall between the state’s data and any attempt by the federal government to create lists, registries, or databases based on a person’s religion, nationality, or ethnicity.

• S.B. 31 was one of the earliest bills introduced by the legislature to oppose discriminatory policies floated by Pres. Donald Trump and his surrogates during the 2016 campaign. S.B. 31, authored by Sen. Ricardo Lara, was a direct response to Trump’s and his surrogates’ support of a so-called “Muslim Registry.” Although the bill places California at odds with the White House, both parties in the California Senate unanimously approved the bill, as did an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Assembly.

• Kaspersky antivirus scans were further implicated in the NSA breach by reports last week from The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal; anonymous sources claimed Israeli intelligence officers hacked into Kaspersky’s network in 2015 and observed Russian hackers using the company’s antivirus software to search millions of computers around the world for classified government documents. The reports also claimed the U.S. government determined that Kaspersky antivirus scans were specifically designed to search for classified U.S. data.

• Well. The latest revelations from the UK’s crusading Privacy International show not only that the GCHQ spy agency has been assembling databases of people’s social media data by gaining access to private companies’ own troves of data, but also that the agencies shared their databases with foreign governments and their law enforcement agencies – without the knowledge of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, the supposed provider of oversight.

• MI5 and MI6 may be circumventing legal safeguards when they share bulk datasets with foreign intelligence services and commercial partners, a court has been told.

• Most of the bulk personal datasets relate to UK citizens who are not of “legitimate intelligence interest”, the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) heard.

• Internet giants Comcast and Verizon have brought along some friends to their fight against three local towns considering adopting online privacy ordinances.

• Representatives of the two companies have partnered with four national lobbying groups to convince officials in Falls, Lower Makefield and Middletown not to pass laws that would prohibit internet service providers from sharing customers’ “personally identifiable information” with advertisers without the customers’ permission.

• The information could include web search activities, medical and financial information, and video viewing habits

• It seemed like the (mostly) one-man War on Encryption had reached a ceasefire agreement when “Going Dark” theorist James Comey was unceremoniously ejected from office for failing to pledge allegiance to the new king president. But it had barely had time to be relegated to the “Tired” heap before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein resurrected it.

• Rosenstein has been going from cybersecurity conference to cybersecurity conference raising arguments for encryption before dismissing them entirely. His remarks have opened with the generally awful state of cybersecurity at both the public and private levels. He says encryption is important, especially when there are so many active security threats. Then he undermines his own arguments by calling for “responsible encryption” — a euphemism for weakened encryption that provides law enforcement access to locked devices and communications on secured platforms.

• Considering recent events, this isn’t the direction the DOJ should be pushing. Russian hackers used a popular antivirus software to liberate NSA exploits from a contractor’s computer. Equifax exposed the data of millions of US citizens who never asked to be tracked by the service in the first place. Yahoo just admitted everyone who ever signed up for its email service was affected by a years-old security breach. Ransomware based on NSA malware wreaked havoc all over the world. These are all issues Rosenstein has touched on during his remarks. But they’re swiftly forgotten by the Deputy Attorney General when his focus shifts to what he personally — representing US law enforcement — can’t access because of encryption.

• In August, New York University and the Library Freedom Project – an organization that trains librarians on using privacy tools to protect intellectual freedom – received a $250,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency. Its purpose: to train librarians to implement secure protocols on their own web services, and to teach members of the community to evade the prying eyes of governments, corporations, and criminal hackers. According to the Library Freedom Project’s website, the group aims to create what it calls “a privacy-centric paradigm shift in libraries and the communities they serve.”

• Forgive me for being an ingrate, but I’m trying to engage seriously on Section 702 reform. Surveillance boosters are already fighting this fight primarily by waging ad hominem attacks. Having TSB call me out really makes it easy for surveillance boosters to suggest I’m not operating in the good faith I’ve spent 10 years doing.

• The article says that the system will use cloud computing facilities to process images from the millions of CCTV cameras located across the country. The company involved is Isvision, which has been using facial recognition with CCTV cameras since 2003. The earliest deployments were in the highly-sensitive Tiananmen Square area. Other hotspots where its technology has been installed are Tibet and Xinjiang, where surveillance has been at a high level for many years.

• However, the report also cautions that the project is encountering “many difficulties” due to the technical limits of facial recognition and the sheer size of the database involved. A Chinese researcher is quoted as saying that some totally unrelated people in China have faces so alike that even their parents cannot tell them apart. Another issue is managing the biometric data, which is around 13 terabytes for the facial information, and 90 terabytes for the full dataset, which includes additional personal details on everyone in China.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the name of fighting sex trafficking, legislators are willing to make the internet mostly worthless. Punching a hole in Section 230 protections will encourage incumbents to limit user participation and prevent startups from ever making it off the ground. Proponents claim it’s narrowly-targeted and abuse-proof, but the language would allow any service provider to be held accountable for the criminal actions of users. If traffickers can’t use Facebook or Google thanks to heavier moderation, they’ll move onto other websites and services until those too are rendered useless by government action.

• Part of the problem with legislation like this is mission creep. It may start with sex trafficking, but it will inevitably be expanded to cover other illicit content. And sex trafficking itself is its own dodge. All the government has to do is claim something is trafficking and the hammer begins to fall.

• This is because the term leaves no room for intelligent conversations. Proponents know people aren’t likely to speak up against efforts to fight sex trafficking, especially when they point out this sometimes includes children. It becomes a governmental blank check for enforcement action — something that deters questioning of the government’s activities, much in the way the term “national security” has limited legislative and judicial discussion about surveillance overreach.

• A British stroke victim who uses a wheelchair, requires 24-hour supervision to keep him alive and cannot speak, write or reliably understand what is said to him, has been told by the Home Office that he must become the sole carer for his two young British children while his wife travels to the Philippines to apply for a visa to care for the family.

• Simon Waterman was living with his Filipino wife, Leah, and their children Kimi and Bryce, aged 10 and seven, in the Philippines when he had a severe stroke in September 2015. The family moved back to Abergavenny in South Wales in December so Simon could be near his family. When they applied for a visa for Leah to remain in the country, however, they were told there were “no exceptional circumstances” preventing her following the conventional route of applying for her visa from outside the UK.

• The USA Liberty Act fails to safeguard whistleblowers—both as federal employees and contractors—because of a total lack of protection from criminal prosecution. These shortcomings—which exist in other whistleblower protection laws—shine a light on much-needed Espionage Act reform, a law that has been used to stifle anti-war speech and punish political dissent.

• Inside the recent House bill, which seeks reauthorization for a massive government surveillance tool, authors have extended whistleblower protections to contract employees, a group that, today, has no such protection.

• The Liberty Act attempts to bring parity between intelligence community employees and contract employees by amending Section 1104 of the National Security Act of 1947.

• According to the act, employees for the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and National Reconnaissance Office are protected from certain types of employer retaliation when reporting evidence of “a violation of any federal law, rule, or regulation,” or “mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.” Employees working at agencies the President deems have a “primary function” of conducting foreign intelligence or counterintelligence are also covered by these protections.

• Cannizzaro and elected district attorneys like him must answer to the communities that elect them.

• Renata Singleton was the victim in a criminal case and served five days in jail. That’s right, the victim. And Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro is to blame.

• In the fall of 2014, Renata Singleton and her boyfriend got into an argument at her apartment. He took her phone and slammed it on her porch. She wanted him out of the house, so she called the police, and they took him away. A criminal case was brought against her boyfriend. After Singleton told the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office that she had resolved things with him and wanted to move on, Cannizzaro’s office didn’t listen. Instead, agents left two “subpoenas” at her door demanding she appear at its office for a private interview.

• Only they were not subpoenas at all.

• Here’s how to start making workplace sexual misconduct and discrimination a thing of the past.

• In the wake of bombshell reports by the The New York Times and The New Yorker detailing three decades of sexual misconduct by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the revelations keep coming. So do the questions: How did such flagrant misconduct stay an “open secret” for so long? Just how many women were harmed? And how do we make sure that such an egregious abuse of power never happens again?

• Sexual harassment that is “severe or pervasive” was deemed by the Supreme Court to be illegal sex discrimination more than 30 years ago, when Mechelle Vinson, a bank employee in Washington, D.C., challenged her manager’s three-year campaign of abuse, including rape. And it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the court clarified that conduct becomes illegal harassment at the point that a “reasonable person” would find it abusive, even if it never gets physical.

• A little over a month ago, body cam footage of a police officer trying to bully a nurse into breaking the law went viral. Salt Lake City police detective Jeff Payne wrapped up his failed intimidation attempt by arresting nurse Alex Wubbels for following her hospital’s policy on blood draws. If there are no exigent circumstances and the person not suspected of criminal activity, police need a warrant to draw blood.

• None of those factors were present when Detective Payne demanded the hospital draw blood from an accident victim. The victim was, in fact, a reserve police officer from an Idaho law enforcement agency, who had been hit head-on by a fleeing suspect. This officer later died from his injuries. He was in a coma when Detective Payne began demanding the hospital hand over some blood, obviously in no condition to consent to the search.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• You might recall that when HBO comedian John Oliver originally tackled net neutrality on his show in 2014, the FCC website crashed under the load of concerned consumers eager to support the creation of net neutrality rules. When Oliver revisited the topic last May to discuss FCC boss Ajit Pai’s myopic plan to kill those same rules, the FCC website crashed under the load a second time. That’s not particularly surprising; the FCC’s website has long been seen as an outdated relic from the wayback times of Netscape hit counters and awful MIDI music.

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai initially resisted calls to tell President Trump that the FCC won’t revoke broadcast licenses from stations whose news coverage Trump dislikes.

• But today, six days after Trump first said that NBC and other networks should have their licenses challenged, Pai said the FCC won’t pull licenses based on the content of news reports.

• Last Wednesday President Donald Trump took to Twitter to suggest the government should challenge broadcasting licenses for stations that air “fake news.”

• Over the last few years AT&T and Verizon have been desperately trying to pivot from stodgy, protectionist old telcos — to sexy new Millennial media juggernauts. And while this pivot attempt has been notably expensive, the net result has been somewhat underwhelming. Verizon, for example, spent billions to gobble up AOL and Yahoo, but its lack of savvy in the space has so far culminated in a privacy scandal, a major hacking scandal, a quickly shuttered website where reporters couldn’t write about controversial subjects, and a fairly shitty Millennial streaming service even Verizon’s own media partners have called a “dud.”

• AT&T’s efforts have been notably more expensive, but just as underwhelming. The company first decided to shell out $70 billion for a satellite TV provider (DirecTV) on the eve of the cord cutting revolution. And the company’s putting the finishing touches on shelling out another $89 billion for Time Warner in a quest to gain broader media and advertising relevance. That was paired with the launch of a new streaming service, DirecTV Now, which the company hoped would help it beat back the tide of cord cutting.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• For that reason, Characters For Hire is claiming that both the copyright and trademark claims from Disney aren’t valid. The characters are altered and renamed in an effort to gain protection from the idea/expression dichotomy, with those same changes and the disclaimer making it clear to the public that the company has no affiliation with the IP owners of the original characters from which these generics are inspired. That said… yeah, but no. The point made in the disclaimer that the likenesses are strictly coincidental is laughable at best. It’s very likely that the copyright portion of Disney’s claims will hold up in court. The trademark claims have less a chance of success, as it’s abundantly clear that these are not licensed characters or associated in any way with companies like Disney. But, still, the so-called generic characters of Characters For Hire appear to be more than merely “inspired” by the originals and are instead near identical characters with alterations made only to get around copyright law. But the larger point is: hey, Disney, why? Given that the copyright claims are the most substantive, there was nothing requiring Disney to take this action. Certainly it is laughable for Disney to claim any serious harm from a copyright perspective due to Characters For Hire’s actions. All this is really doing is keeping some fun, if unoriginal, characters from entertaining kids and people at birthdays and related events. Is giving up the stated aim to make children happy really worth smacking around a relatively small company that works these sorts of parties?

• The upload filtering mandate in Article 13 isn’t the only provision of the proposed Directive that concerns us. Another provision of concern, Article 11, would impose a new “link tax” payable to news publishers on websites that publish small snippets of news articles to contextualize links to those articles. Since we last wrote about this, an interesting new report has come out providing evidence that European publishers—who are the supposed beneficiaries of the link tax—actually oppose it.

• Dozens of influential civil rights groups have called on EU decision-makers to abandon proposals for compulsory proactive copyright filters. Their open letter, addressed to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and colleagues, warns that monitoring citizens’ Internet traffic would restrict fundamental rights while running counter to the Electronic Commerce Directive.

• On 17 October, 56 respected academics co-signed a recommendation on measures to safeguard fundamental rights and the Open Internet in the framework of the EU copyright reform. This effort is a reaction to the multiple questions regarding the legality of the so-called censorship filter (Article 13 and its Recitals) that were raised by seven Member States, including Germany (see here and here).

• A newly announced coalition of major entertainment companies including Disney, Fox, HBO, NBCUniversal and BBC Worldwide has set its eye on pirate streaming boxes. The Coalition Against Piracy (CAP) will coordinate local enforcement efforts in Asia, hoping to disrupt the “criminal syndicates” behind these devices.

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