● 10.21.17

● Links 21/10/2017: Purism Against ME, Pop!_OS Ready

Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• LINUX PC MAKER Purism has devised a process to disable the flawed Intel Management Engine.

• The company’s line of Librem laptops, which run flexible open-source firmware Coreboot, are now running with Intel’s management service completely disabled.

• As a core part of Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), the management engine is present in all the company’s CPUs and is capable of powering a computer, even when it is powered off.

• Most computers that ship with recent Intel processors include something called Intel Management Engine, which enables hardware-based security, power management, and remote configuration features that are not tied to the operating system running on your PC.

• For free software proponents, this has been a pain in the behind, because it’s a closed-source, proprietary feature designed to provide remote access to a computer even when it’s turned off. While it’s designed to provide security, it also poses a potential security and privacy threat, since it’s a proprietary system that can only be patched by Intel

• Purism has announced today all laptops to be shipping from their company will now have the Intel Management Engine (ME) disabled.

• Thanks to work done by security researches in recent years for finding ways to disable ME, especially in light of recent security vulnerabilities, Purism’s Coreboot-equipped laptops are now shipping with ME disabled out-of-the-box. Those already with a Librem laptop are able to apply a firmware update to also disable it.

• There aren’t that many Linux hardware manufacturers around. Of the few that exist, System 76 is amongst the most well-known. It offers a slew of laptops and desktops, all shipping with the popular Ubuntu distro pre-installed, saving customers hours of wasted time dealing with driver hell.

• But it recently announced it’s changing gears and creating its own Linux distro, which will replace Ubuntu on its systems, called POP!_OS.

• The first ever stable release of Pop!_OS is finally here. You can go ahead and download it from this link. Don’t forget to share your feedback. Earlier this year in June, we reported that System76 is creating its own Linux distro called Pop!_OS.

• When you start comparing computers, you probably pit Windows against macOS—but Linux rarely gets a mention. Still, this lesser-known operating system has a strong and loyal following. That’s because it offers a number of advantages over its competitors.

• Whether you’re completely new to Linux or have dabbled with it once or twice already, we want you to consider running it on your next laptop or desktop—or alongside your existing operating system. Read on to decide if it’s time to make the switch.

• Ordinarily, I would not notice or even recommend a brief article in a magazine but this is Popular Science, the Bible of DIY types especially the young and restless who might actually take the plunge into FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software). It’s a general magazine with a million subscribers.

Server

• A comparison of Linux container images talks about the best-practices in choosing an image. Architecture, security and performance are among the factors, while commercial users would also look for support options.

• A Linux container allows separate management of kernel space and user space components by utilizing cgroups and namespaces, which are resource and process isolation mechanisms. Solaris and BSD also have abstractions similar to Linux containers but the article’s focus is on the latter only. The host running the container has the operating system kernel and a set of libraries and tools required to run containers. The container image, on the other hand, has the libraries, interpreters and application code required to run the application that is being distributed in the container. These depend on underlying system libraries. This is true for interpreted languages too as the interpreters themselves are written in low level languages.

• As organizations shift their application strategies to embrace the cloud-native world, the purpose of the cloud transitions from saving money to delivering and managing applications. Platforms such as Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and Docker redefine the possibilities for application environments that utilize the cloud. It’s time for us as operations professionals to rethink how we approach our jobs in this new world. We should be asking, how do our organizations take advantage of cloud-native as a new mode of application delivery?

• Microservices have been a focus across the open source world for several years now. Although open source technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Swarm make it easier than ever for organizations to adopt microservice architectures, getting your team on the same page about microservices remains a difficult challenge.

• For a profession that stresses the importance of naming things well, we’ve done ourselves a disservice with microservices. The problem is that that there is nothing inherently “micro” about microservices. Some can be small, but size is relative and there’s no standard measurement unit across organizations. A “small” service at one company might be 1 million lines of code, but far fewer at another organization.

• There are many different security capabilities that are part of the Docker container platform, and there are a number of vendors providing container security offerings. At the DockerCon EU 17 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, eWEEK moderated a panel of leading vendors—Docker, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Aqua Security, Twistlock and StackRox—to discuss the state of the market.

• To date, there have been no publicly disclosed data breaches attributed to container usage or flaws. However, that doesn’t mean that organizations using containers have not been attacked. In fact, Wei Lien Dang, product manager at StackRox, said one of his firm’s financial services customers did have a container-related security incident.

• Amazon Web Services wants to be a welcome home for developers and organizations looking to deploy containers. At the DockerCon EU conference here, a pair of AWS technical evangelists shared their wisdom on the best ways to benefit from container deployments.

• The terms microservices and containers are often used interchangeably by people. Abby Fuller, technical evangelist at AWS, provided the definition of microservices coined by Adrian Crockford, VP of Cloud Architecture at AWS and formerly the cloud architect at Netflix.

• Steve Singh has ambitious plans for Docker Inc. that are nothing less than transforming the world of legacy applications into a modern cloud-native approach.

• Singh was named CEO of Docker on May 2 and hosted his first DockerCon event here Oct. 16-19. The highlight of DockerCon EU was the surprise announcement that Docker is going to support the rival open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system.

• In a video interview with eWEEK, Singh explained the rationale behind the Kubernetes support and provided insight into his vision for the company he now leads.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Project, which works on blockchain technologies, added a sixth sub project — this one dubbed Quilt.

• Hyperledger Quilt started around 18 months ago and is an implementation of the Interledger Protocol (ILP), which helps facilitate transactions across ledgers.

• Chinese search engine giant Baidu has become the latest member of the Linux Foundation-led Hyperledger blockchain consortium.

• In joining the group – which focuses on developing blockchain technologies for enterprises – Baidu will assist the project’s efforts alongside other member companies including Accenture, IBM, JP Morgan, R3, Cisco and SAP, among others.

• While the 4.14 development cycle has not been the busiest ever (12,500 changesets merged as of this writing, slightly more than 4.13 at this stage of the cycle), it has been seen as a rougher experience than its predecessors. There are all kinds of reasons why one cycle might be smoother than another, but it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the fact that 4.14 is a long-term support (LTS) release has affected how this cycle has gone. Indeed, when he released 4.14-rc3, Linus Torvalds complained that this cycle was more painful than most, and suggested that the long-term support status may be a part of the problem. A couple of recent pulls into the mainline highlight the pressures that, increasingly, apply to LTS releases.

• As was discussed in this article, the 4.14 kernel will include some changes to the kernel timer API aimed at making it more efficient, more like contemporary in-kernel APIs, and easier to harden. While API changes are normally confined to the merge window, this change was pulled into the mainline for the 4.14-rc3 release. The late merge has led to a small amount of grumbling in the community.

• The kernel’s timer interface has been around for a long time, and its API shows it. Beyond a lack of conformance with current in-kernel interface patterns, the timer API is not as efficient as it could be and stands in the way of ongoing kernel-hardening efforts. A late addition to the 4.14 kernel paves the way toward a wholesale change of this API to address these problems.

• An attacker who seeks to compromise a running kernel by overwriting kernel data structures or forcing a jump to specific kernel code must, in either case, have some idea of where the target objects are in memory. Techniques like kernel address-space layout randomization have been created in the hope of denying that knowledge, but that effort is wasted if the kernel leaks information about where it has been placed in memory. Developers have been plugging pointer leaks for years but, as a recent discussion shows, there is still some disagreement over the best way to prevent attackers from learning about the kernel’s address-space layout.

• There are a number of ways for a kernel pointer value to find its way out to user space, but the most common path by far is the printk() function. There are on the order of 50,000 printk() calls in the kernel, any of which might include the value of a kernel pointer. Other places in the kernel use the underlying vsprintf() mechanism to format data for virtual files; they, too, often leak pointer values. A blanket ban on printing pointer values could solve this problem — if it could be properly enforced — but it would also prevent printing such values when they are really needed. Debugging kernel problems is one obvious use case for printing pointers, but there are others.

• Two separate talks, at two different venues, give us a look into the kinds of testing that the Intel graphics team is doing. Daniel Vetter had a short presentation as part of the Testing and Fuzzing microconference at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). His colleague, Martin Peres, gave a somewhat longer talk, complete with demos, at the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC). The picture they paint is a pleasing one: there is lots of testing going on there. But there are problems as well; that amount of testing runs afoul of bugs elsewhere in the kernel, which makes the job harder.

• Developing for upstream requires good testing, Peres said. If the development team is not doing that, features that land in the upstream kernel will be broken, which is not desirable. Using continuous-integration (CI) along with pre-merge testing allows the person making a change to make sure they did not break anything else in the process of landing their feature. That scales better as the number of developers grows and it allows developers to concentrate on feature development, rather than bug fixing when someone else finds the problem. It also promotes a better understanding of the code base; developers learn more “by breaking stuff”, which lets them see the connections and dependencies between different parts of the code.

Graphics Stack

• Besides Keith Packard working on the concept of resource leasing for the X.Org Server and resource leasing support for RandR, he’s also now proposing a “NonDesktop” property for the Resize and Rotate protocol.

• The resource leasing has already been worked out as a candidate for the next update, RandR 1.6, while now this veteran X11 developer is proposing a new “NonDesktop” property for identifying outputs that are not conventional displays.

• Adding to the excitement of Linux 4.15, AMD has queued some more changes that were sent in today for DRM-Next.

• Already for Linux 4.15, the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver should have the long-awaited “DC” display stack that brings Vega/Raven display support, HDMI/DP audio, atomic mode-setting and more. Other pull requests have also brought in a new ioctl, UVD video encode ring support on Polaris, transparent huge-pages DMA support, PowerPlay clean-ups, and many fixes, among other low-level improvements.

• Traditional Linux graphics systems (like X11) mostly did not use planes. But modern graphics systems like Android and Wayland can take full advantage of it.

• Android has the most mature implementation of plane support in HWComposer, and its graphics stack is a bit different from the usual Linux desktop graphics stack. On desktops, the typical compositor just uses the GPU for all composition, because this is the only thing that exists on the desktop.

• Most embedded and mobile chips have specialized 2D composition hardware that Android is designed around. The way this is done is by dividing the things that are displayed into layers, and then intelligently feeding the layers to hardware that is optimized to handle layers. This frees up the GPU to work on the things you actually care about, while at the same time, it lets hardware that is more efficient do what it does best.

• With Mesa 17.3 expected to be branched this weekend and this marking the end of feature development for this last stable Mesa series of 2017, the RADV Radeon Vulkan drivers in particular have been busy landing a lot of last minute code.

• Landing in Mesa Git this morning ahead of the imminent 17.3 branching is support for OpenGL occlusion queries.

• Jani Nikula has sent in another drm-intel-next update for David Airlie’s DRM-Next tree. They continue prepping more updates to their Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) for targeting the upcoming Linux 4.15 cycle.

• There have already been several Intel “i915″ DRM driver updates queued in DRM-Next for this new kernel version. Past pulls have included marking Coffeelake graphics as stable, continued Cannonlake “Gen 10″ graphics enablement, various display improvements, and quite a lot of other low-level code improvements.

Benchmarks

• Given the Ubuntu 17.10 release this week and its massive desktop changes from GNOME Wayland to Mesa/kernel upgrades, we’ve been busy benchmarking this new Ubuntu OS release. Complementing the Radeon Ubuntu 17.04 vs. 17.10 gaming comparison are now some OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks when using Intel Kabylake graphics hardware on Ubuntu 17.04, 17.10 with X.Org and Wayland, and the performance if upgrading against Linux/Mesa Git.

Applications

• Narabu is a new intraframe video codec. You may or may not want to read part 1 first.

• The GPU, despite being extremely more flexible than it was fifteen years ago, is still a very different beast from your CPU, and not all problems map well to it performance-wise. Thus, before designing a codec, it’s useful to know what our platform looks like.

• Since Ubuntu 17.10 has just been released, I have added new feature to the ucaresystem Core that can be used by the user to upgrade his distribution to the next stable version or optionally to the next development version of Ubuntu.

• For those who are not familiar with the ucaresystem app it is an automation script that automatically and without asking for your intervention performs some crucial Ubuntu maintenance processes, which otherwise would be done one by one and pressing Y / N each time.

• Whatsapp may be the best player in the game when it comes to instant messaging apps, but Telegram Messenger is the entire game itself.

• Because Telegram is not just an app, it is an entire communication platform. It is not bound by restrictions or limitations like other apps.

• About 6 months have passed since April, during which the major mainstream breakthrough of our decentralized social network took place. From 20,000 users to almost a million! What better time to run through a couple examples of what’s been introduced since then?

• Mastodon is defined by its focus on good user experience, polished design and superior anti-abuse tools. In that vein, the web app has received numerous updates. Using the latest browser features, the web app receives real push notifications, making it almost indistinguishable from a native mobile app. It works faster and looks smoother thanks to many performance and design improvements.

• The Linux desktop has come a very long way from its humble beginnings. Back in my early days of using Linux, knowledge of the command line was essential—even for the desktop. That’s no longer true. Many users might never touch the command line. For Linux system administrators, however, that’s not the case. In fact, for any Linux admin (be it server or desktop), the command line is a requirement. From managing networks, to security, to application and server settings—there’s nothing like the power of the good ol’ command line.

• But, the thing is… there are a lot of commands to be found on a Linux system. Consider /usr/bin alone and you’ll find quite a lot of commands (you can issue ls /usr/bin/ | wc -l to find out exactly how many you have). Of course, these aren’t all user-facing executables, but it gives you a good idea of the scope of Linux commands. On my Elementary OS system, there are 2029 executables within /usr/bin. Even though I will use only a fraction of those commands, how am I supposed to remember even that amount?

Instructionals/Technical

• ​All kinds of software are currently available on Linux but every now and then, there is that Windows software or Game which is not available or has no equivalent on Linux Wine makes it possible to run those Windows programs and Games on your Linux desktop. So let’s look at how to install Wine on Linux and run Windows apps on Linux desktop.

• Several commands can help you see what’s up with your network on Linux systems, including ip, ethtool, traceroute, tcptraceroute, and tcpdump.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine maintenance release 2.0.3 is now available.

• For those relying upon the Wine 2.0.x stable releases rather than the bi-weekly development releases, Wine 2.0.3 is now the latest stable version.

• Wine 2.0.3 was released today to offer FreeType 2.8.1 compatibility fixes as well as a variety of bug fixes. There are 37 known bug fixes with this latest update.

Games

• Valve never do manage to keep sale dates hidden for long, but for the dates of the three next major sales to slip is a bit embarrassing. Not really much they can do about it though, unless they want to hide the dates from developers for longer, or restrict who is able to actually see them.

• Skirmish Line [Steam, Official Site], a game inspired by an older flash game Mud and Blood 2 is now in Early Access with Linux support.

• Pet lovers gather around, as your off-world colonists will now have some pets! This might be one of the biggest updates Maia [itch.io, Steam] has ever had.

• Blade Runner 2049 might not be a commercial smash, but Denis Villeneuve’s film has fortunately turned out to be an excellent, and worthwhile, follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 future-noir masterpiece.

• Fugl [Steam, Official Site] is a relaxing exploration game where you take flight, with no set goals or timers it’s time to chill out.

• If there’s one thing I truly love, it’s FPS games. Merge an FPS with a space sci-fi setting where you’re killing aliens in close-combat and I’m happy. Say hello to Return to Planet X [Steam].

• Only a few days ago I wrote about JASEM [Steam] possibly coming to Linux. This self-described ‘insanely hard’ twin-stick arcade blastathon is now available for Linux gamers.

• The developers behind the challenging puzzle games TIS-100 and SHENZEN I/O are at it again and have released their latest title into Steam’s Early Access today.

• It’s time to throw your wallet at your screen, as we’re going to take a look at some awesome Linux games on sale.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Almost three months after Akademy 2017, I finally found the time to write a blog post about how I experienced it.

• Akademy is where I learn again about all the amazing things happening in our community, where I connect the dots and see the big picture of where all the effort in the various projects together can lead. And of course, I meet all the wonderful people, all the individual reasons why being in KDE is so amazing. This year was no different.

• Some people voiced their concern during the event that those who are not at Akademy and see only pictures of it on social media might get the feeling that it is mostly about hanging out on the beach and drinking beer, instead of actually being productive. Everyone who was ever at Akademy of course knows this impression couldn’t be further from the truth, but I’ll still take it as a reason to not talk about any of the things that were “just” fun, and focus instead on those that were both fun and productive.

• I had the privilege to attend the KDE Edu sprint in Berlin that happened from the 6th to the 9th of October.

Distributions

Arch Family

• Arch-Anywhere/Anarchy Linux is one of the nicest Arch-based distributions I have encountered. However, Anarchy Linux still requires familiarity with terminology and processes that usually are not needed to install Linux distros from a fully-functioning live session installation disk. Not having a demo mode to preview how the OS runs on your particular hardware can be a time-consuming setback.

• However, once you have Anarchy Linux up and running, it will give you a very pleasing computing experience. Much of what happens after installation depends on the desktop environment you selected.

• If you have a desktop preference or prefer one of the included window manager environments instead, you can forget about the sullied reputation that comes with Arch Linux distros. For many reasons, Anarchy Linux is a winning choice.

Slackware Family

• chromium_iconEarlier this week, Google released a security update for its chrome/chromium browser. The new version 62.0.3202.62 plugs the holes of 35 more or less serious issues, several of them have a CVE rating.

• When the topic of Chromium 62 came up in the comments section of a previous post, I mentioned that I was unable to compile it on Slackware 14.2. Errors like “error: static assertion failed: Bound argument |i| of type |Arg| cannot be converted and bound as |Storage|” yield some results when looked up on the Internet, and they indicate that Slackware’s own gcc-5.3.0 package is too old to compile chromium 62.

Red Hat Family

• Is server patch management the best part of your job? Stop reading here. Many IT organizations struggle with OS patching processes. For Red Hat administrators who are willing to invest some initial energy to simplify later tasks, Satellite provides infrastructure lifecycle management, including capabilities for provisioning, reporting and configuration management. To this end, follow this Red Hat Satellite tutorial to set up a simple server for updates. Once we review how to install the basic update server, we’ll create one example client.

• Red Hat bolstered Gluster storage for its OpenShift Container Platform, adding iSCSI block and S3 object interfaces, as well as greater persistent volume density.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is set to hold its annual symposium on federal information technology on Nov. 9 where the company will host discussions on open source collaboration and its potential benefits for government, GovCon Executive reported Oct. 11.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that several of Red Hat’s open source technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, as well as the knowledge of Red Hat Consulting, were chosen by SoftBank Corp (“SoftBank”), a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp., to implement DevOps methodology for its Service Platform Division, IT Service Development Division, Information Technology Unit, and Technology Unit, the company’s in-house IT organization. This large, varied organization develops, maintains and operates SoftBank’s IT systems for internal work and operations, supporting 600 diverse systems.

Finance

Fedora

• So I have over the last few years blogged regularly about upcoming features in Fedora Workstation. Well I thought as we putting the finishing touches on Fedora Workstation 27 I should try to look back at everything we have achieved since Fedora Workstation was launched with Fedora 21. The efforts I highlight here are efforts where we have done significant or most development. There are of course a lot of other big changes that has happened over the last few years by the wider community that we leveraged and offer in Fedora Workstation, examples here include things like Meson and Rust. This post is not about those, but that said I do want to write a post just talking about the achievements of the wider community at some point, because they are very important and crucial too. And along the same line this post will not be speaking about the large number of improvements and bugfixes that we contributed to a long list of projects, like to GNOME itself. This blog is about taking stock and taking some pride in what we achieved so far and major hurdles we past on our way to improving the Linux desktop experience.

• Since I became a Fedora contributor in August 2015, I’ve spent a lot of time in the community. One of the great things about a big community like Fedora is that there are several different things to try out. I’ve always tried to do the most help in Fedora with my contributions. I prefer to make long-term, in-depth contributions than short-term, “quick fix”-style work. However, like many others, Fedora is a project I contribute to in my free time. Over the last month, I’ve come to a difficult realization.

• For those wanting to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 within a GNOME Boxes driven virtual machine, you can do so for free now with Fedora Workstation 27.

• Red Hat has made it possible to easily deploy RHEL7 from within the GNOME Boxes virtualization software even if you are not a paying Red Hat customer. All that’s required is a free Red Hat developer account.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• So you’ve installed Ubuntu 17.10 but you’re not 100% sold on the direction Ubuntu has taken the GNOME desktop in — no shame in that.

• The customized version of GNOME that Ubuntu 17.10 uses is very much in the mould of the (now defunct) Unity desktop, so it won’t be to everyone’s tastes.

• If you’d like to sample GNOME Shell as GNOME developers intend it to be sampled you can do so very easily.

• Believe it or not but today is Ubuntu’s 13th birthday!

• Thirteen terrific, and occasional tumultuous, years to the day since Mark Shuttleworth sat down to tap out the first Ubuntu release announcement.

• Ready for a really new Ubuntu desktop? Then start downloading Ubuntu 17.10 today. Canonical has abandoned its Unity interface in favor of the new GNOME 3.26 desktop, and has replaced its homegrown Mir display server with Wayland.

• That may sound like a radical change, but it you look closely at the new Ubuntu 17.10, Artful Aardvark, desktop, it will look familiar. That’s because while the underlying technologies have changed, Ubuntu’s developers have customized its default GNOME desktop to look and feel like Unity.

• So there you have it finally, Ubuntu 17.10. The release which we have been talking about because of its switch to Gnome from Unity. We’ve talked about most its features in a previous article here but let’s again look at the final version of Ubuntu 17.10. At the end of this article, do take a poll and tell us if you’re going to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 or not.

• Ubuntu 17.10, Artful Aardvark, has now been officially released. I have not been much of an Ubuntu fan for a long time now, but this release includes a lot of significant changes, many of which might address some of my most serious objections about Ubuntu. So I think I should take a closer look at it than I normally do.

• The release announcement mentions the major updates and changes – including the biggest of all, the switch from Unity back to Gnome 3 / Gnome Shell for the desktop. As I have not liked Unity from the very first time I saw it (that’s a polite way to phrase it), I am very, very pleased with this change.

• The release notes (for all versions) give a more complete list of packages updated, and a list of known issues. It also includes a statement that I know some users will not be pleased with

• ​The New Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” launch with GNOME3 has brought a big change and got a lot of people excited to try it as soon as they can. If you don’t know yet the new stuff in Ubuntu 17.10, read the article we published today.

• Ubuntu 17.10 is the first to return to the GNOME runtime following the decision to abandon Unity 8 and therefore end the company’s official involvement with mobile phone development.

• In October 2010, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu open-source operating system and CEO of Canonical, announced his grand plan to build a converged Linux desktop that would work on mobile devices, desktops and even TVs. He called the effort “Unity” and poured significant financial resources into it.

• Seven years later, the Unity dream is dead.

• On Oct. 19, Ubuntu 17.10 was released as the first Ubuntu Linux version since 2010 that didn’t use Unity as the default Linux desktop. In a video interview with eWEEK, Shuttleworth details the rationale behind his decision to cancel Unity and why he has now put his company on the path toward an initial public offering (IPO).

• Because Ubuntu has moved into the mainstream in a bunch of areas, including the cloud, he said some of the things his company had been doing were never going to be commercially sustainable.

• Ubuntu has done a good job of integrating a few plugins that improve GNOME’s user experience compared to stock GNOME – most notably a modified version of the Dash-to-Dock and the App Indicator extensions, which go a long way toward making GNOME a bit more like Unity. It’s worth noting that Ubuntu’s fork of Dash-to-Dock lacks some features of the original, but you can uninstall the Ubuntu version in favour of the original if you prefer. In fact you can really revert to a pretty stock GNOME desktop with just a few tweaks. Canonical said it wasn’t going to heavily modify GNOME and indeed it hasn’t.

• This week we’ve been protecting our privacy with LineageOS and playing Rust. Telegram get fined, your cloud is being used to mine BitCoin, Google announces a new privacy focused product tier, North Korea hacks a UK TV studio, a new fully branded attack vector is unveiled and Purism reach their funding goal for the Librem 5.

• This is Part 3 of the newbie’s guide to operate Ubuntu 17.10. Here you’ll learn most basic settings in Ubuntu divided in 2 parts (basics & installing applications) plus special part (GNOME Tweaks and Shell Extensions) at end. Basic needs such as changing wallpaper and enabling touchpad are explained with pictures, including repositioning the dock to bottom (many users will like it) and choosing repository mirror source too. I wish this simple tutorial helps you to operate Ubuntu fluently. This is the last part and I will republish them soon as an ebook. Enjoy!

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux desktop needs a reset. We’re now in a post-Ubuntu world, with Unity gone, and we’re back in sad and forlorn 2005. There isn’t a single major project out there where you can look and say, wow, there’s gonna be a fun and exciting year ahead of us. Well, maybe one or two. The rest? Just run-of-the-mill stuff. The forums are quiet, because there isn’t anything to report, and rehashing kernel versions and desktop versions isn’t really worth anyone’s time.

• I think elementary OS represents this crisis quite well. On its own, it’s a badly cobbled release, with too many issues and inconsistencies and a dreadful approach to ergonomics, making it useless to most people, all other things notwithstanding. But it was too buggy for me to even attempt to install it. Not going well. Alas, unless something cardinal changes, I cannot recommend this one at all. The combo of visual glitches, mediocre performance and middling hardware support does not warrant a longer adventure. Perhaps one day this will change, but for now, you’re better off with stock Ubuntu. And by that I mean up to Zesty, ad I haven’t tried Aardvark yet. Take care, and stay golden.

• Ubuntu MATE 17.10 was released today as part of today’s Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, bringing six month’s worth of improvements and new features for fans of the MATE desktop environment.

• Earlier this year I worked a bit with our logo to propose a small change to it – first change to the logo in 5 years. The team approved, but for various reasons the new logo did not make it to 17.10. Now we’re ready to push it out to the world.

Devices/Embedded

• YouTuber NODE has released a new video unveiling his third generation Handheld Linux Terminal which builds on the features from the previous creations and is once again fantastically awesome.

• Check out the video below to learn more about the Handheld Linux Terminal Version 3 powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 mini PC. Great job NODE.

• Kingdy’s new ultra-compact tiny embedded platform for space limited solution, based on the ARM Cortex-A9TM iMX6 Dual Lite / Quad Core processor, delivers optimum I/O design for maximum connectivity with Pre-install Yocto 1.8 on eMMC.

• Samsung on Thursday announced a new app, Linux on Galaxy, designed to work with its DeX docking station to bring a full Linux desktop experience to Galaxy Note8, Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphone users.

• Samsung earlier this year introduced DeX, a docking station that connects to a monitor to give Galaxy smartphone users a desktop experience.

• Samsung is bringing desktop Linux to its smartphones. The ‘Linux on Galaxy’ project will let users “run Linux-based distributions on mobile devices”.

• echnology companies have worked in the past to let your smartphones work like desktop computers; Microsoft’s Continuum is the most notable effort in this direction. The latest attempt was made by Samsung. The company, with the launch of its flagship Galaxy S8, introduced the new DeX dock.

• After unveiling its next-generation Bixby 2.0 intelligent assistant, Samsung today announced that it plans to bring the Linux PC experience to the Samsung DeX ecosystem.

• What kind of cell phone would emerge from a concerted effort to design privacy in from the beginning, using free software as much as possible? Some answers are provided by a crowdfunding campaign launched in August by Purism SPC, which has used two such campaigns successfully in the past to build a business around secure laptops. The Librem 5, with a five-inch screen and radio chip for communicating with cell phone companies, represents Purism’s hope to bring the same privacy-enhancing vision to the mobile space, which is much more demanding in its threats, technology components, and user experience.

• The abuse of mobile phone data has become a matter of worldwide concern. The capture and sale of personal data by apps is so notorious that it has been covered in USA Today; concerns over snooping contribute to the appeal of WhatsApp (which has topped 1.3 billion users) and other encrypted and privacy-conscious apps. But apps are only one attack vector. I got in touch with Todd Weaver, founder and CEO of Purism, to find out what the company is doing to plug the leaks in mobile devices.

• So I went for OpenBSD because I know the stuff and who to har^Wkindly ask for help. Spoiler alert, it’s boring because it just works.

Tizen

Android

• Haven’t we all loved the good old flip-phones? But the year is 2017 and just a flip phone isn’t going to work. So ZTE, the company behind the highly successful Blade series of Phones has a new offering called Axon M.

Free Software/Open Source

• Given the power of today’s browser platform technology and web frontend performance, it’s not surprising that most things we want to do with the internet can be accomplished through a single browser window. We are stepping into an era where installable apps will become history, where all our applications and services will live in the cloud.

• The problem is that most operating systems weren’t designed for an internet-first world. Flint OS (soon to be renamed FydeOS) is a secure, fast, and productive operating system that was built to fill that gap. It’s based on the open source Chromium OS project that also powers Google Chromebooks. Chromium OS is based on the Linux kernel and uses Google’s Chromium browser as its principal user interface, therefore it primarily supports web applications.

• Open source software delivers a huge amount of value. But it stands to offer even more. Here’s a list of the ways open source can evolve to meet the needs of developers and organizations even better than it does today.

• Opportunities for continued evolution and improvement in open source include

• “What was once considered fringe and anti-establishment has now become the norm powering some of the largest technological innovations of our times. In the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous driving and block chain, OSS leads the way,” said Mel Llaguno , open source solution manager at Synopsys Software Integrity Group.

• If you are a big Android enthusiast, then you’re probably familiar with the name F-Droid. If not, it’s an extensive repository of open source apps, as well as the name of its accompanying client. Today that client has been updated to v1.0.

• If you remember our coverage of v0.103, v1.0 should look pretty familiar. While there have been some significant changes behind the scenes, apart from a general improvement in performance and ease of use, you’re not likely to notice much.

• Rackspace has ended a program under which it offered “generous discounts on hosting for more than 150 OSS projects and communities”, but flubbed the announcement.

• The closure of the program came to our attention after Reg operatives noticed the Tweet below from Eric Holscher, who posted an image in which it appears the fanatical services company planned to withdraw the discount entirely.

• Oracle has released Fn, a new open-source, cloud-agnostic, serverless platform. While supporting ‘any programming language’, it initially launched with extensive Java capabilities and a JUnit test framework.

• Fn comprises four of main components: Fn Server, Fn FDKs, Fn Flow and Fn Load Balancer. Written in Go, Fn Server is the platform that runs the code.

• In a meeting at the SCTE-ISBE Cable Tec Expo show yesterday, Randy Levensalor, lead architect at CableLabs involved with the group’s software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) work, mentioned that CableLabs is planning to announce an open source group soon. He didn’t provide any further detail other than to say CableLabs will be making an announcement in about a month.

• We can speculate that it relates to CableLabs’ SNAPS initiative. SNAPS stands for “SDN/NFV Application development Platform and Stack.” The key objectives for SNAPS are to make it easier for NFV vendors to onboard their applications and to reduce the complexity of integration testing. The initiative attempts to accelerate the adoption of network virtualization, wrote Levensalor in a recent blog posting.

• Experienced open source developers are in short supply. To attract top talent, companies often have to do more than hire a recruiter or place an ad on a popular job site. However, if you are running an open source program at your organization, the program itself can be leveraged as a very effective recruiting tool. That is precisely where the new, free online guide Recruiting Open Source Developers comes in. It can help any organization in recruiting developers, or building internal talent, through nurturing an open source culture, contributing to open source communities, and showcasing the utility of new open source projects.

• Why does your organization need a recruiting strategy? One reason is that the growing shortage of skilled developers is well documented. According to a recent Cloud Foundry report, there are a quarter-million job openings for software developers in the U.S. alone and half a million unfilled jobs that require tech skills. They’re also forecasting the number of unfillable developer jobs to reach one million within the next decade.

• Open source software delivers a huge amount of value. But it stands to offer even more. Here’s a list of the ways open source can evolve to meet the needs of developers and organizations even better than it does today.

• As part of the announcement, Lightning Labs also introduced Neutrino, the new open-source Bitcoin light client that powers the Lightning Desktop App. As a main benefit, Neutrino users don’t need to download the entire Bitcoin blockchain, which is currently over 140 gigabytes in size. This makes the desktop app much more accessible to regular users who transact small amounts, for which the lightning network is particularly suited. And because Neutrino uses a new method of transaction filtering (client side instead of bloom filters), it offers more privacy than most light clients, too.

• Collect Earth is part of Open Foris, a set of free and open-source software tools developed by FAO with Google Earth, Bing Maps and GEE to facilitate flexible and efficient data collection, analysis and reporting. It is hosted on GitHub, a platform for collaborative software development.

• As part of AdaptiveScale’s newly released Custer Manager 1.3 software, we are proud to announce that we have released LXDUI as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license.

• Lamden, the Switzerland-based technology company behind a new innovative blockchain development suite for enterprise applications, has just announced the token sale of their Lamden Tau Token.

Events

• I gave my “Midburn – creating an open source community” talk in Hacktoberfest 2017 @ Tel Aviv. This is the local version of an initiative by DigitalOcean and GitHub.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today, Mozilla is announcing a new development program for Mixed Reality that will significantly expand its work in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for the web. Our initial focus will be on how to get devices, headsets, frameworks and toolsets to work together, so web developers can choose from a variety of tools and publishing methods to bring new immersive experiences online – and have them work together in a fully functional way.

• Over the past year, Mozilla has been working on a series of major changes to the Firefox browser, mainly for performance and security. These changes are referred to as Project Quantum. Some improvements arrived already with no major differences for its users.

• Last month the major changes landed in the developer channel. These changes mark a major deadline for how extensions work. This deadline gave third party developers a chance to look at their extensions and make changes to remain compatible. It was an important milestone date for the various Firefox add-ons. Firefox 57 marks an end to the legacy XUL based extensions. Starting with version 57, Firefox supports only a new type of extension, named WebExtension.

Databases

• MongoDB had a good first day of trading with share prices popping roughly 25% over their opening. As the latest big data platform company to IPO, Mongo’s fortunes are being compared and equated to Cloudera and Hortonworks.

• As upstarts, each is in a race to grow business while whittling down the red ink. Cloudera and Hortonworks are a bit further along this path as their operating losses have begun trending downward – but that happened only after those companies went public.

• The folks at MongoDB raised a whole lot of money today in their debut on NASDAQ.

• Yesterday the open source company announced it was going to be asking $24 a share for the 8 million Class A shares it was letting loose in its IPO, which had some Wall Street investors scratching their heads and wondering if the brains at Mongo were suffering from some kind of undiagnosed damage. Analysts had been estimating an opening price of between $20-22 per share, and on October 6 the company had estimated an opening price in the range of $18-20.

• Shares of fast-growing cloud database provider MongoDB closed well above the initial asking price of $24, finishing the day at $32.07 after the company successfully raised $192 million in an initial public offering Thursday.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Apparently AWS is B-A-D because it’s a net consumer of open source software. You know, like every single company on earth, inside or outside of tech, probably even including Red Hat. The simple truth is that everyone consumes far more open source software than they contribute. It’s just how the world works.

• For those trying to keep score, however, and paint Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a bad open source citizen, the question is “Why?” Accusations of open source parsimony don’t seem to have damaged developers’ love for AWS as a platform, so exactly what are critics hoping to accomplish? Is it simply a matter of “paying a tax,” as some suggest? If we’ve been reduced to inventing taxes to be paid, with no apparent reason for imposing them, we’re doing open source wrong.

BSD

• The normal ISO and IMG files are available for download and install, plus an uncompressed ISO image for those installing remotely.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is one of the fundamental tools that allows a distributed group to have trust in its communications. Werner Koch, lead developer of GnuPG, spoke about it at Kernel Recipes: what’s in the new 2.2 version, when older versions will reach their end of life, and how development will proceed going forward. He also spoke at some length on the issue of best-practice key management and how GnuPG is evolving to assist.

• It is less than three years since attention was focused on the perilous position of GnuPG; because of systematic failure of the community to fund its development, Koch was considering packing it all in. The Snowden revelations persuaded him to keep going a little longer, then in the wake of Heartbleed there was a resurgent interest in funding the things we all rely on. Heartbleed led to the founding of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII). A grant from CII joined commitments from several companies and other organizations and an upsurge in community funding has put GnuPG on a more secure footing going forward.

Licensing/Legal

• Today, the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) announced the formation of its new Open Source Center (OSC), and two partners – Digital Square and Software Freedom Conservancy – who will support the Center’s work. The Center will act as a resource to open source software projects serving international development and humanitarian response, providing a variety of shared services, insights and mentorship from partners, as well as funding opportunities. The Center is currently offering its first round of catalytic grants to address a range of challenges including effectiveness and momentum. In this first round, four grants will be made, up to $25,000 each, to projects that foster a healthy, sustainable open source community and products. Applications for funding of new participating members is now available, with a November 8 deadline for initial letters of interest.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• It is a rare kind of woman who enjoys a project so vast that it’s practically unfinishable, but Nana Oforiatta Ayim, a Ghanaian gallerist, writer, and historian, never quits what she has started. She’s discussing her work on the “Cultural Encyclopaedia”, an attempt to “facilitate the re/ordering of knowledge, narratives, and representations from and about the African continent” through an online resource that includes an A-to-Z index and vertices of clickable images for entries. Eventually, a 54-volume book series—one for each country on the continent—will be published with selections from the encyclopedia’s long, long list. Oforiatta Ayim is working with a small team of editors, and, starting with her native country, she has taken on the task of documenting all significant cultural touchstones in the thousands of years of African history. Plus, it will be open source to prevent it from having a top-down logic. “I’m a little bit crazy to take it on,” she says. “But if I’m not going to do it, who is going to be as crazy as me?”

Programming/Development

• Eclipse may not be the first open source organization that pops to mind when thinking about Internet of Things (IoT) projects. After all, the foundation has been around since 2001, long before IoT was a household word, supporting a community for commercially viable open source software development.

• September’s Eclipse IoT Day, held in conjunction with RedMonk’s ThingMonk 2017 event, emphasized the big role Eclipse is taking in IoT development. It currently hosts 28 projects that touch a wide range of IoT needs and projects. While at the conference, I talked with Ian Skerritt, who heads marketing for Eclipse, about Eclipse’s IoT projects and how Eclipse thinks about IoT more broadly.

• Intel compiler engineers have begun landing “GFNI” support within the GNU Compiler Collection as one of the new ISA extensions not expected until the Icelake processor debut.

• Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) support has begun landing within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for this code safety feature.

• Patches have been in the works for several months while now the start of the patches are being merged to mainline. Coincidentally, at the same time Intel is also landing their GFNI instruction patches in GCC as well.

• Learning how to do sequential computing, where one calculation is made after the other, is easy. Anyone who learns programmings gets that. Parallel programming, which empowers super-computing calculations to be made simultaneously, is much harder, but doable. Concurrent computing, where multiple calculations are made within overlapping time frames, now that’s hard. It’s also extremely useful whether it’s tracking multiple trains on a single train-line or multiple comments on a single Facebook page. That’s why Facebook has worked hard on concurrent programming. Now, Facebook is sharing its newest debugger tool: RacerD, its new open source race detector.

• I could argue (to varying degrees of success) that pair programming isn’t productive. Productivity of a practice is an easy thing to attack because, in our capitalist dystopia, it’s the end-all-be-all metric. But I hate pair programming, and it’s not just because I don’t feel productive. It’s a lot more than that.

Leftovers

• I believe sunlight is the best disinfectant and I always admire companies who are open about both their successes and failures. It reminds me when GitLab had their downtime incident: instead of battening down the hatches, they spun up a Google Doc, a live YouTube stream and brought their customers in to help rectify the issue. They got a lot of goodwill from their community.

• If you work for an organization where this article smacks a little close to home, I would be open about it, identify where there are failings, and bring your customers in where they can help you to understand the primary value they are seeking and how you can craft that. People respect humility in cases of failure.

• The reason I am writing this is because I suspect the folks at Bark are good people making some mistakes, and I suspect other companies are making similar mistakes, so I figured this might be a useful article to mull on.

Science

• Loeb says an event as powerful as the 1859 one could cause about $10 trillion of damage to power grids, satellites and communications. A flare just a bit stronger could even damage the ozone layer.

Health/Nutrition

• The federal government is holding a young woman hostage to force her to carry her pregnancy to term against her will.

• After Jane Doe, a 17-year-old immigrant from Central America, found out she was pregnant last month, she decided to have an abortion. But the Office of Refugee Resettlement — the federal government agency charged with caring for unaccompanied immigrant minors once they enter the country — is prohibiting her from getting one.

• The federal government has a new policy that allows it to veto an unaccompanied minors’ abortion decision, and government officials are doing everything imaginable to prevent Ms. Doe from accessing abortion. They have instructed the shelter where Jane Doe is staying not to transport Ms. Doe or allow Ms. Doe’s court-appointed guardian to transport her to the health care center to have an abortion — essentially holding her hostage.

• Pesticides, once used, do not dissolve into thin air, but persist in the environment, contaminating soil, air and water. This is the most recent red flag to emerge as a result of a new joint study by the University of Wageningen, the Joint Research Center of the European Commission and RIKILT laboratories – recently published in the scientific journal “Science of the Total Environment” – which shows that almost half of European soils are contaminated. Results of the analysis of 300 soil samples in 10 different European countries reveal that 45% of agricultural land in Europe contains glyphosate and its metabolite AMPA. This is just the latest, and certainly not the last blow to the theories on the presumed, and never proven safety of agrochemicals in agriculture.

Security

• Security researchers have discovered that at least eight malware-laced apps on Google Play Store are ensnaring devices to a botnet to potentially carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and other malicious attacks. These apps claimed to provide skins to tweak the look of characters in the popular Minecraft: Pocket Edition game and have been downloaded as many as 2.6 million times.

• This week security researchers announced a newly discovered vulnerability dubbed KRACK, which affects several common security protocols for Wi-Fi, including WPA (Wireless Protected Access) and WPA2. This is a bad vulnerability in that it likely affects billions of devices, many of which are hard to patch and will remain vulnerable for a long time. Yet in light of the sometimes overblown media coverage, it’s important to keep the impact of KRACK in perspective: KRACK does not affect HTTPS traffic, and KRACK’s discovery does not mean all Wi-Fi networks are under attack. For most people, the sanest thing to do is simply continue using wireless Internet access.

• The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Thursday proposed new mandatory cybersecurity controls to protect the utility system from the threat posed by laptops and other mobile devices that could spread malicious software.

• The standards are meant to “further enhance the reliability and resilience of the nation’s bulk electric system” by preventing malware from infecting utility networks and bringing down the power grid, according to the nation’s grid regulator.

• Check Point first unearthed the botnet, codenamed ‘IoT_reaper’, at the beginning of September and claims that, since, it’s already enslaved millions of IoT devices including routers and IP cameras from firms including GoAhead, D-Link, TP-Link, Avtech, Netgear, MikroTik, Linksys and Synology.

• “Google Play is working with the independent bug bounty platform, HackerOne, and the developers of popular Android apps to implement the Google Play Security Reward Program. Developers of popular Android apps are invited to opt-in to the program, which will incentivize security research in a bug bounty model,” says HackerOne.

Defence/Aggression

• “Standing by,” however, is not what the United States did during the Indonesian genocide of 1965–66; rather, it actively supported the massacres, which were applauded at the time by the New York Times.

• Indonesia in 1965 was run by President Sukarno, an anti-colonial nationalist who had irritated Washington with friendly ties to the Indonesian Communist Party, known as the PKI. When an abortive coup attempt was dubiously blamed on the PKI, this was seen by both the Indonesian military and the US as an opportunity.

• It’s beginning to look like we may never fully understand Stephen Paddock’s “military-grade” assault on the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. Law enforcement keeps looking in vain for some sort of motive in the dark abyss of Paddock’s odd life. Alt-Right conspiracists are churning out click-baited concoctions that often border on the comical. And the rest of us are left to ponder how and why a wealthy cipher amassed a huge arsenal of weapons that allowed him to become a one-man army.

• White House aides were “hustling” to secure an up-to-date list of soldiers who died this year after President Trump claimed in an interview earlier this week that he had contacted the families of “virtually everybody” in the military who was killed since he took office, Roll Call reported Friday.

• An email exchange between the White House and Defense Secretary James Mattis’ office reportedly shows the White House asking the department for information regarding the families of service members killed after the president’s inauguration in January.

• The White House asked for the information on surviving family members so Trump could make sure to contact all of them, according to Roll Call.

• The report said that the email exchange came hours after the president said in a Fox News Radio interview Tuesday that he had called nearly all of the families of those killed since he took office.

• The general mindlessness in choosing a stock photo is what makes them so pernicious. Editors reach for an image that captures the overall theme of the article while drawing the eye of distracted media consumers—typically as an afterthought, something that accents a piece rather than defines it. It’s not an easy task, but it’s one that, left unexamined, can become a form of propaganda independent of any written text.

• One of the most overused and toxic stock photos–and one that highlights perfectly this genre of image making—is the “Woman in Chador Walks by Anti-US Mural” image accompanying countless stories about US/Iran relations. In several variants, the photo shows one or two Iranian women clad in black chadors, faces usually barely visible, walking past a mural of the Statute of Liberty with a skull face.

• Capturing the wisdom and the beauty of Donald J. Trump in just one statement escaping from his charming mouth: “Our military has never been stronger. Each day, new equipment is delivered; new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world – the best anywhere in the world, by far.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• On 16 October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired an interview with Hillary Clinton: one of many to promote her score-settling book about why she was not elected President of the United States.

• Wading through the Clinton book, What Happened, is an unpleasant experience, like a stomach upset. Smears and tears. Threats and enemies. “They” (voters) were brainwashed and herded against her by the odious Donald Trump in cahoots with sinister Slavs sent from the great darkness known as Russia, assisted by an Australian “nihilist”, Julian Assange.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• At least 27 accidents happened at BP’s oil and gas operations in Alaska this year, including five that risked the lives of dozens of workers, BuzzFeed News has learned.

• Now BP’s top officials are scrambling to “reset” the company’s safety culture before one of these scares turns into a human or environmental catastrophe on the Alaskan North Slope, according to internal emails, recordings, interviews, and other documentation obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Finance

• On October 17th trade representatives of the three countries gathered to mark the end of the fourth round of talks. A collapse does not seem imminent. Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative (pictured, centre), denied that abandoning the deal was even being discussed, and announced an extension of negotiations into the first quarter of 2018. But he also played down the damage that would be done if no agreement is reached. And Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian foreign-affairs minister, said that in a “no-fuss Canadian way” she was preparing for “the worst possible outcome”.

• The British public have delivered a damning verdict on the Government’s Brexit strategy after a new poll revealed a huge majority think negotiations with Brussels are going badly.

• The exclusive BMG Research survey carried out before and during the European Council summit at which the Prime Minister won a small concession from EU leaders, shows more than three-quarters of people still think her strategy is failing.

• Almost half also think that the no-deal scenario threatened by ministers would be “bad” for Britain, and reject outright the hard Brexit plan to abandon talks at Christmas if the EU does not allow progress, according to the poll.

• Researchers have uncovered new evidence of networks of thousands of suspect Twitter bots working to influence the Brexit debate in the run-up to the EU referendum.

• The findings, from researchers at City, University of London, include a network of more than 13,000 suspected bots that tweeted predominantly pro-Brexit messages before being deleted or removed from Twitter in the weeks following the vote.

• The research – which is published in the peer-reviewed Social Science Computer Review journal and was shared exclusively with BuzzFeed News – suggests the suspected bot accounts were eight times more likely to tweet pro-leave than pro-remain content.

• “This is research that corroborates what Facebook and others say: that there are bots that serve to falsely amplify certain messages,” co-author Dan Mercea told BuzzFeed News.

• “There is a potential distortion of public communications and we want to get to the bottom of that. This amplification is of concern as it gives us a false sense of momentum behind certain ideas… If there is false amplification, how do we know if someone is genuine?”

• It’s 2002 and you’ve agreed to have your name emblazoned across the top of the tallest residential tower in Canada, a $500-million, five-star condo-hotel in downtown Toronto.

• Here’s the thing: Only months into the project, your lead developer is publicly exposed in the pages of the Toronto Star as a fugitive fraudster on the run from U.S. justice. Your major institutional partner — the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company — bails shortly after.

• The English-speaking world is in an ideological bubble. The fall of the Soviet Union was the failure of pure socialism. Now, ironically, the fall of the Anglo world is it’s perfect, almost precise, mirror image: the failure of pure capitalism. The simple lesson of the last century is this: either system alone cannot last, endure, or work. Now, the rest of the world knows this. Even Rwanda is building public healthcare — Rwanda, which just three decades ago, was the byword for genocide. Even Pakistan is building public transport and hospitals and schools. The entire rest of the world knows that capitalism is just one tool in the box of building genuinely prosperous societies — and quite often it is precisely the wrong tool. Yet on the Anglo world goes, impotent but still monogamously wedded to capitalism, so now you can get same-day drone delivery of anything at all from Amazon, recommended by your Fakebook friends — but you can die for lack of basic medicine, you don’t have savings, and you’ll never retire, while everyone else knows that trying to use capitalism alone to build, say, working healthcare or educational or financial systems is like trying to water a garden with napalm.

• Limited by that childish belief, in America, for example, public investment has become completely verboten, sacrosanct, beyond imagining, to the point that hospitals are closing down. Have you ever heard of a society closing hospitals? Why would a sane society ever do that, if its population is growing (or even if it isn’t, because healthcare is always advancing)? Such insensible, unreasonable, thoughtless, inhumane, grotesquely foolish extremism is the precise mirror image of a few decades ago, when, it was forbidden in the Soviet Union to, say, even set up a little dry cleaning shop. In just this way, the ideological bubble that the Anglo world is in trapped in, like a web holding a fly, condemns it to fall behind the world, and it’s future resembles that of Russia’s. We’ll discuss that more in a moment.

• ‘The fundamental difference between the UK vision of what this is about and the Franco-German view is that the British still think this is a negotiation,” Pascal Lamy, the former director general of the World Trade Organisation, told the Financial Times this week. Certainly, six months into the Brexit talks, London appears not to have adjusted its expectations to reflect the cold reality it faces. In advance of the European Council summit in Brussels this week, the chief UK negotiator, David Davis, complained, as if some conspiracy were afoot, that the EU was “using time pressure to see if they can get more money out of us” – a reference to the EU’s refusal to move the talks to the next phase before agreement on the UK’s financial liabilities. Of course that’s what the EU is doing – using its vastly stronger negotiating position to make London pay its outstanding bills.

• The EU has no interest in seeing the talks fail, but London’s claim that each side has as much to lose as the other is fantasy. For the EU, the worst case scenario is bad. For the UK, it’s catastrophic. While European leaders could do more to recognise the limited room for manoeuvre that prime minister Theresa May enjoys at home, the truth is that the British Conservative Party created its own problem by failing to level with its own public about the costs and the pain Brexit would entail.

• The new edition of The Big Issue is out, which means Malcolm Tucker’s thoughts on Brexit are in.

• Armando Iannucci has guest-edited this week’s magazine, the centrepiece of which is a conversation between his beloved characters Malcolm Tucker and Alan Partridge.

• We still hear from Alan a fair amount through his various TV shows, so it is The Thick of It’s PR man who is the main draw here, and unsurprisingly he has some pretty caustic thoughts on Brexit (via iNews) and the ensuing omnishambles (to use a Thick of It term):

• Tucker: “Brexit’s idiotic. It’ll be like committing suicide by walking into a door over and over again for years, leavers are imbeciles.”

• “[Brexit is] a f****** death cult.”

• Cocoa has been one of the most successful areas of endeavour for the Fairtrade movement, but all of that has only resulted in that 5.5% figure, which without Fairtrade would be still lower. It is possible to buy Ghanaian made finished chocolate product in British supermarkets now, and excellent it is too, but it has a very small market share. Producing finished chocolate in Africa has its problems; chocolate is a much more delicate cargo than cocoa beans and reacts badly to either heat or refrigeration. Recipes which overcome this problem result in a certain harshness.

• Sisi is whipping up homophobia and targeting gay people to distract his base from rising unemployment and inflation.

• Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein is planning to spend a lot more time in Frankfurt, he said on Thursday, as the Wall Street bank pushes ahead with plans to make the German city a major base after Britain leaves the European Union.

• Although the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has dropped off the radar completely since Donald Trump’s election, for some years it was a key concern of both the US and European governments, and a major theme of Techdirt’s posts. One of the key issues was transparency — or the lack of it. Eventually, the European Commission realized that its refusal to release information about the negotiations was seriously undermining its ability to sell the deal to the EU public, and it began making some changes on this front, as we discussed back in 2015. Since then, transparency has remained a theme of the European Commission’s initiatives. Last month, in his annual State of the Union address, President Jean-Claude Juncker unveiled his proposals for trade policy. One of them was all about transparency:

• Bitcoin was hatched as an act of defiance. Unleashed in the wake of the Great Recession, the cryptocurrency was touted by its early champions as an antidote to the inequities and corruption of the traditional financial system. They cherished the belief that as this parallel currency took off, it would compete with and ultimately dismantle the institutions that had brought about the crisis. Bitcoin’s unofficial catchphrase, “In cryptography we trust,” left no doubt about who was to blame: It was the middlemen, the bankers, the “trusted” third parties who actually couldn’t be trusted. These humans simply got in the way of other humans, skimming profits and complicating transactions.

• You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace it with another. When we develop the right story, and learn how to tell it, it will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum. Those who tell the stories run the world.

• The old world, which once looked stable, even immutable, is collapsing. A new era has begun, loaded with hazard if we fail to respond, charged with promise if we seize the moment. Whether the systems that emerge from this rupture are better or worse than the current dispensation depends on our ability to tell a new story, a story that learns from the past, places us in the present and guides the future.

• Cities around the country are pulling out all the stops to entice Amazon to set up its second headquarters in their area.

• The online retail giant is taking proposals from around North America, and today’s the deadline. Some of the proposals include massive tax breaks, while other cities are trying out humorous gimmicks to get the company’s attention.

• New Jersey has offered the biggest tax incentives, consisting of up to $7 billion in state and local tax rebates if Amazon locates in Newark and hires the 50,000 workers it has said it would. The company has also promised $5 billion in spending on construction of the headquarters. The New Jersey offer, announced Monday, is $2 billion more than what Republican Governor Chris Christie and the Democratic-led New Jersey legislature agreed to last month.

• One month after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, we hear from longtime Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera, who was released in May and is now in San Juan to visit with community members affected by Hurricane Maria. Until earlier this year, Rivera had been in federal prison for 35 years—much of the time in solitary confinement—after he was convicted on federal charges of opposing U.S. authority over the island by force. President Obama commuted his sentence in January.

• It’s funny how some numbers that sound big are actually small, isn’t it? If 111,507 people turned up at your door demanding you do something, you’d probably feel under quite some pressure to do it.

• But there are more than 65 million people in the UK: those 111,507 people are less than 0.2 per cent of the population. So it is that Theresa May’s government feels quite happy to ignore them and get on with doing exactly what it wanted to do anyway.

• That, at least, is the subtext of its response to a petition on the official parliamentary website demanding that it “hold a referendum on the final Brexit deal”. At time of writing, it’s been signed by 111,512 people (ooh, that’s five more since I started writing) – and the rules state that any petition which tops 100,000 signatures “will be considered for debate in parliament”.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• At the Cabinet meeting, the government would invoke Article 155 of Spain’s constitution allowing it to strip Catalonia of its self-governance. That would take effect on Saturday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s office said in a statement.

• Madrid had given Puigdemont a 10 a.m. (4 a.m. ET) deadline to clarify his government’s stance on a non-binding declaration of independence passed by the regional legislature following a successful referendum on secession.

• There is a fundamental disconnect between the real Catalonia and the Catalonia the political Establishment and its lackey media want us to believe exists.

• All of the major Western broadcasters, plus newspapers like The Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times, have repeatedly pumped out the mantra that it is only a minority in Catalonia that support Independence. They have never attempted to explain why therefore Carles Puigdemont is President, and why the pro-Independence parties got 48% at the last Catalan elections while the Spanish Nationalist parties got 39%.

• A Montana Republican party official “would have shot” Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs if he had approached her as he did Greg Gianforte, who assaulted Jacobs one day before he was elected to Congress.

• Jacobs approached Gianforte in May, in a room where he was about to give a television interview. The Republican slammed Jacobs to the floor, breaking his glasses, and then punched him several times.

• A lawsuit filed against President Trump alleges a host of First Amendment violations stemming from Trump’s Twitter blocklist. According to the suit filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, an official government account shouldn’t be allowed to block users from reading tweets. Sure, there’s an actual official presidential Twitter account, but nothing of interest happens there. Everything from retweets of questionable GIFs to arguable threats of nuclear war happen at Donald Trump’s personal account. But everything’s all mixed together because the president insists on using his personal account (and its blocklist) to communicate a majority of his thoughts and opinions.

• Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), along with Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), are supporting the bill, which aims to put social media companies on par with radio and TV in their disclosure requirements.

• Donald Trump’s flailings are ever more terrifying. In the course of a few days, he tossed a grenade into the health-care markets that millions rely on, traduced the Iranian nuclear deal, threatened to abandon US citizens ravaged by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, continued to sabotage action on climate change, tweeted about censoring the media, and so undermined his own secretary of state that Republican Senator Bob Corker accused him of castration. For all of that, Trump’s grotesqueries are exceeded by a Republican Congress intent on a course so ruinous as to be, one hopes, impossible to sustain.

• This week, Senate Republicans will seek to push through a budget resolution for the current fiscal year. The resolution provides guidelines for spending and tax cuts, with projections for the next decade. Although its provisions are destructive and absurd, it has the support of virtually all of the Republican caucus.

• A few years ago, Russian whistleblowers like Lyudmila Savchuk began to reveal that Vladimir Putin had built a massive new internet propaganda machine. At the heart of this machine sat the “Internet Research Agency,” a Russian government front company tasked with operating warehouses filled with employees paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas — specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation 24 hours a day. Initial reports on these efforts were often playful, suggesting little more than shitposting and memes.

• Author Charlie Sykes was best known as a top Wisconsin conservative talk show host who frequently interviewed fellow cheeseheads and GOP favorites Paul Ryan and Reince Preibus. But when candidate Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, Sykes became a vocal member of #NeverTrump, warning his listeners about this “dangerous” candidate.

• CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the US intelligence community determined that Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election did not affect its outcome — a statement that was quickly clarified by his own agency.

• The “intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election,” Pompeo said, speaking at an event hosted by Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

• The CIA issued a clarifying statement after Pompeo’s remarks.

• In 2008 and 2012, Wisconsin ranked second in the USA for voter turnout; in 2016, following the enactment of a series of racist voter-suppression tactics, the voter turnout was the worst it had been since 2000.

• The voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin are a combination of poll-tax; fraudulent promises of easy access to voter ID (whose hollow nature was repeatedly verified by undercover voting rights activists, who recorded officials directly contradicting the policies that supposedly ensured access to voting ID); special measures aimed at reducing student participation in elections; and out-and-out sleaze.

• The Democratic loss in Wisconsin is unquestionably due to voter suppression, and Trump’s fake voting fraud panic is aimed at repeating the feat in other states.

• She’d lost her driver’s license a few days earlier, but she came prepared with an expired Wisconsin state ID and proof of residency. A poll worker confirmed she was registered to vote at her current address. But this was Wisconsin’s first major election that required voters—even those who were already registered—to present a current driver’s license, passport, or state or military ID to cast a ballot. Anthony couldn’t, and so she wasn’t able to vote.

Censorship/Free Speech

• They risk becoming hangouts rather than places of discovery.

• Think we’re unduly worried about how “trafficking” charges will get used to punish legitimate online speech? We’re not.

• A few weeks ago a Mississippi mom posted an obviously joking tweet offering to sell her three-year old for $12.

• [...]

• This story is bad enough on its own. As it stands now, actions by the Mississippi authorities will chill other Mississippi parents from blowing off steam with facetious remarks on social media. But at least the chilling harm is contained within Mississippi’s borders. If SESTA passes, that chill will spread throughout the country.

• If SESTA were on the books, the Mississippi authorities would not have had to stop with the mom. Its next stop could be Twitter itself. No matter how unreasonable its suspicions, it could threaten criminal investigation on Twitter for having facilitated this allegedly trafficking-related speech.

• Over the last few days, I have seen with a sense of dismay a ‘tu-tu main-main’ over NDTV censoring its journalists. One of NDTV’s senior-most journalist and well-known face, Sreenivasan Jain, on Tuesday, alleged that a report by him on loans given to companies owned by BJP chief Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah was taken down from NDTV’s website. This was done in the name of ‘legal vetting’ he said in a detailed Facebook post.

• If you’re a resident of a small Texas city and in need of hurricane recovery funds, you’ll have to certify that you’re not boycotting Israel.

• Dickinson, Texas, announced earlier this week that it was accepting applications for grants to help residents rebuild homes and businesses damaged by Hurricane Harvey, which took a particularly devastating toll on this Houston-area town of some 20,000 people. The application is mainly comprised of unremarkable legalities, with one notable exception: a clause stating that the applicant will not take part in a boycott of Israel for the duration of the grant.

• “The First Amendment protects Americans’ right to boycott, and the government cannot condition hurricane relief or any other public benefit on a commitment to refrain from protected political expression,” said ACLU of Texas Legal Director Andre Segura. “Dickinson’s requirement is an egregious violation of the First Amendment, reminiscent of McCarthy-era loyalty oaths requiring Americans to disavow membership in the Communist party and other forms of ‘subversive’ activity,” Segura added.

• First, if you are someone who likes stepped-up ICE immigration enforcement and does not like “sanctuary cities,” you might cheer the implications of this post, but it isn’t otherwise directed at you. It is directed at the center of the political ven diagram of people who both feel the opposite about these immigration policies, and yet who are also championing SESTA. Because this news from Oakland raises the specter of a horrific implication for online speech championing immigrant rights if SESTA passes: the criminal prosecution of the platforms which host that discussion.

• Much of the discussion surrounding SESTA is based on some truly horrific tales of sex abuse, crimes that more obviously fall under what the human trafficking statutes are clearly intended to address. But with news that ICE is engaging in a very broad reading of the type of behavior the human trafficking laws might cover and prosecuting anyone that happens to help an immigrant, it’s clear that the type of speech that SESTA will carve out from Section 230′s protection will go far beyond the situations the bill originally contemplated.

• Two US senators have written to Apple CEO Tim Cook asking why the company reportedly removed VPN apps from the company’s store in China. “If these reports are true,” the senators wrote, “we are concerned that Apple may be enabling the Chinese government’s censorship and surveillance of the Internet.”

• In a letter that was released by the senators on Thursday, Cruz and Leahy criticized Apple for going along with China’s internet regulations.

• A pair of senior US Senators are calling out Apple CEO Tim Cook for what they call “enabling the Chinese government’s censorship and surveillance of the internet.”

• Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Ted Cruz (R-Zodiac) said this week they are concerned with how quickly Apple caved to demands from the Chinese government to remove VPN apps from its China App Store.

• The National Symbols Officer of Australia recently wrote to Juice Media, producers of Rap News and Honest Government Adverts, suggesting that its “use” of Australia’s coat of arms violated various Australian laws. This threat came despite the fact that Juice Media’s videos are clearly satire and no reasonable viewer could mistake them for official publications. Indeed, the coat of arms that appeared in the Honest Government Adverts series does not even spell “Australian” correctly.

• It is unfortunate that the Australian government cannot distinguish between impersonation and satire. But it is especially worrying because the government has proposed legislation that would impose jail terms for impersonation of a government agency. Some laws against impersonating government officials can be appropriate (Australia, like the U.S., is seeing telephone scams from fraudsters claiming to be tax officials). But the proposed legislation in Australia lacks sufficient safeguards. Moreover, the recent letter to Juice Media shows that the government may lack the judgment needed to apply the law fairly.

• I’ve audited a few courses in nearby colleges and was deeply disappointed to discover that a large number of students are not familiar with Jack London’s books and short stories. I was told that London’s writings have “racists language”-translation-not politically correct. I also discovered that our children do not know how to write or read cursive penmanship. These are just two examples, but what else is being abolished by education administrators to keep our children from achieving their full decision-making potential.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Kaspersky Lab has come under intense scrutiny after its antivirus software was linked to the breach of an NSA employee’s home computer in 2015 by Russian government hackers; U.S. government sources, quoted in news reports, suggested the Moscow-based company colluded with the hackers to steal classified documents or tools from the worker’s machine, or at least turned a blind eye to this activity. The Department of Homeland Security banned Kaspersky products from civilian government systems, and Best Buy has removed the software from computers it sells based on concerns that the software can be used to spy on customers.

• But a closer look at the allegations and technical details of how Kaspersky’s products operate raises questions about the accuracy of the narrative being woven in news reports and suggests that U.S. officials could be technically correct in their statements about what occurred, while also being incorrect about collusion on the part of Kaspersky.

• The ACLU and CMJ are demanding more information on why the FBI recently named “Black Identity Extremists” a threat.

• A recently leaked FBI “Intelligence Assessment” contains troubling signs that the FBI is scrutinizing and possibly surveilling Black activists in its search for potential “extremists.”

• The report, which the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division prepared, identifies what it calls “Black Identity Extremists” as security threats. Their “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans … will very likely serve as justification” for violence against law enforcement officers, the report claims. Today, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Center for Media Justice seeking other records regarding the FBI’s surveillance of Black people on the basis of a supposed shared ideology, including records using the term “Black Identity Extremists.”

• E-Verify is a massive federal data system used to verify the eligibility of job applicants to work in the United States. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) administer E-Verify. Until now, the federal government has not required private employers to use E-Verify, and only a few states have required it. However, a proposed bill in Congress, the Legal Workforce Act (HR 3711), aims to make E-Verify use mandatory nationwide despite all the very real privacy and accuracy issues associated with the data system.

• EFF recently joined human rights and workers rights organizations from across the United States and sent a letter to Congress pointing out the flaws of E-Verify.

• It’s amazing what effect a little public scrutiny has on government overreach. In the wake of inauguration day protests, the DOJ started fishing for information from internet service providers. First, it wanted info on all 1.2 million visitors of a protest website hosted by DreamHost. After a few months of bad publicity and legal wrangling, the DOJ was finally forced to severely restrict its demands for site visitor data.

• Things went no better with the warrants served to Facebook. These demanded a long list of personal information and communications from three targeted accounts, along with the names of 6,000 Facebook users who had interacted with the protest site’s Facebook page. Shortly before oral arguments were to be heard in the Washington DC court, the DOJ dropped its gag order.

• Facebook is Struggling to live up to the responsibility it faces for adequately securing the vast amount of personal information it amasses, the social network’s top security executive said in a leaked phone call with company employees.

• “The threats that we are facing have increased significantly and the quality of the adversaries that we are facing,” Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said during a taped call, which was reported Thursday by ZDNet. “Both technically and from a cultural perspective, I don’t feel like we have caught up with our responsibility.”

• The European Parliament has just adopted its position on ePrivacy. It is bad. Major threats pushed by Internet giants were rejected, but the so-called “pro-privacy” groups failed to reject them all. Liberals, left-wing and ecologist groups lost sight of our fundamental rights in an absurd attempt to reach compromises at any cost.

• The so-called “pro-privacy” groups (the liberals of ALDE, left-wing S&D and Greens) have lost months in negotiating with regressive right-wing groups (EPP and ECR), pursuing unreachable compromises. At the last minute, right-wing groups left the negotiation table, creating an opportunity for a reasonable text to be adopted. But this opportunity was not seized at all: the groups pretending to defend our privacy did not even try to improve the draft ePrivacy Regulation but only focused on winning today’s vote. Shame on them.

• Governments all around the world hate encryption. Unless they are being incredibly cunning by pretending they can’t break strong encryption when they can, this seems to be because crypto really does keep messages and data safe from prying governmental eyes. Banning strong encryption is clearly a non-starter – even the most clueless politician knows by now that e-commerce would collapse without it. As a result, the favorite approach has been the backdoor – that magical weakness that somehow is only available to those operating lawfully, and not criminals or hostile governments. That’s despite the fact that every top security expert has explained that it is simply not possible to add backdoors to encryption while retaining the protection it is meant to offer.

• The funding round was led by CapitalG (formerly known as Google Capital), the strategic investment arm of Google’s corporate parent Alphabet, and takes the valuation of Lyft up to $11bn.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Federal Aviation Administration recently recommended that the U.N. agency that sets global aviation standards prohibit passengers from putting laptops and other large personal electronic devices in their checked bags.

• And award-winning journalist Rita Henley Jensen has died at the age of 70. Jensen was a domestic violence survivor who in 2000 founded Women’s eNews, then the only independent daily news service focusing on women. She also founded the Jane Crow Project, an investigative news outlet focused on how racial and gender bias affects women’s health and reproductive rights. She died Wednesday morning after a long battle with cancer.

• John Thompson was many things: death row exoneree, abolitionist, advocate for prosecutorial accountability, spokesperson, founder of an exoneree-run re-entry program, and mentor. Before the news cycle moves on from John, we are compelled to acknowledge the way he most profoundly affected the world.

• After his untimely death on October 3rd, the media described him as a man who saw the world as it should be, as angry, and as a warrior. To those of us who enjoyed the enormous privilege of knowing and loving John, he was so much more.

• John survives as a symbol of the impunity with which prosecutors may disregard the life and rights of a young black man. Yet he was a wonderfully regular man with a sharp wit and irreverent humor. He loved his wife, family—especially his grandchildren—and friends. He liked a strong coffee in the morning and a beer in the evening. He went to church, and then cursed at the football game. John didn’t sugarcoat anything. He had 100 big ideas a week. He issued straight line challenges—to his colleagues and to the world. Consequently, those who truly knew and loved him maintained a more real, raw and rewarding relationship with John Thompson, compared to others in their lives. He was our friend, and a brilliant, honest, funny, smart, present, and—at times—difficult colleague.

• In imprisoning Catalan leaders for peaceful campaigning for Independence, and in choosing both in rhetoric and in court to treat support for Independence as “sedition”, the Spanish government is acting way beyond the limits of a democratic society. It is ignoring the basic human rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. It is also undertaking massive blocking of communication and censorship of the internet in a manner never seen before in a “Western” state.

• To move now to suspend the democratically elected Catalan administration, which is explicitly offering dialogue as an alternative to UDI, is to escalate the crisis in an unreasonable fashion, in the true meaning of the word unreasonable. All of this is truly dreadful, without even mentioning the violence inflicted on voters taking part in the peaceful Independence referendum.

• As regular readers know, the EU reaction to the peaceful movement for Catalan independence has caused me to rethink my entire position on that institution. The failure to condemn the violence and human rights abuse has been bad enough, but the EU has gone still further and offered unqualified support to Spain, with the Commission specifically declaring Spain has a right to use violence, and Juncker saying straight out that the EU opposes Catalan Independence.

• Three men who traveled from Texas for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s Thursday speech at the University of Florida were charged with attempted homicide for allegedly opening fire on protesters, authorities said.

• No one was injured in the shooting after the Gainesville speech, which drew hundreds of protesters and a smaller group of Spencer fans, along with a massive deployment of police trying to prevent a repeat of the street violence that marked a Spencer-related rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, police said.

• A federal judge this week unsealed the source code for a software program developed by New York City’s crime lab, exposing to public scrutiny a disputed technique for analyzing complex DNA evidence.

• Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York lifted a protective order in response to a motion by ProPublica, which argued that there was a public interest in disclosing the code. ProPublica has obtained the source code, known as the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, and published it on GitHub; two newly unredacted defense expert affidavits are also available.

• “Everybody who has been the subject of an FST report now gets to find out to what extent that was inaccurate,” said Christopher Flood, a defense lawyer who has sought access to the code for several years. “And I mean everybody — whether they pleaded guilty before trial, or whether it was presented to a jury, or whether their case was dismissed. Everybody has a right to know, and the public has a right to know.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Frontier Communications’ purchase of FiOS and DSL networks from Verizon last year led to immediate problems for customers that took weeks to resolve.

• More than a year later, some ex-Verizon customers in Florida say they are still having major problems with their new provider.

• The American prison system is home to one of the greatest market-failures in the history of telephony (which is saying something): a monopolistic system in which sole-supplier, hedge-fund owned telcoms operators charge as much as $14/minute for prisoners to talk with their lawyers, families and loved ones.

• These services are provided by companies—the two largest are owned by private equity firms—that are willing to skirt rules to turn a profit. For instance, when the FCC banned the practice of charging exorbitant fees to connect calls, the companies simply renamed the fees, calling them “first minute” charges. On top of that, these companies charge to put money into inmates’ accounts. They charge to take money out of their accounts. They even limit the amount inmates and their families can put into that account at one time, thereby enabling them to charge the same fees over and over again. They also charge to refund any money left over in the accounts once prisoners are released.

• For the better part of a decade we’ve noted how if America really wanted to improve its horrible broadband problem it would stop letting industry giants like Comcast write shitty protectionist state telecom law. Over the last fifteen years, more than twenty states have passed laws preventing towns and cities from building their own broadband networks even when no incumbent broadband provider will. In many instances these bills also hamstring public/private partnerships, which are often the only way to creatively bring better broadband to under-served or unserved areas of the country.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Author Dan Brown is certainly not a stranger to copyright claims and lawsuits over his bestseller The Da Vinci Code. Not long after publishing the book in 2003 to wide acclaim, several legal actions took place against Brown and his publisher, as well as some action initiated by the publisher to stave off claims of copyright infringement and plagiarism. One such case that we did not cover here was brought by Jack Dunn of Massachusetts, who authored a book called The Vatican Boys, and sued Brown in Massachusetts for copyright infringement over the usual claims: there were claimed similarities in characters, plots, and factual assertions (including some that are erroneous in both). In 2007, Judge Michael Ponsor threw out the case, claiming that all the evidence Dunn’s legal team provided amounted to thematic and structural similarities, which are not copyrightable.

• Science fiction usually mirrors contemporary challenges and anxieties better than the future it tries to predict. Nevertheless, that does not stop creators from imagining that future. Rightfully so, even if as nowadays the technology advances so fast that some concepts age before they have a chance to be applied.

• Centrum Cyfrowe, a Polish COMMUNIA member, does not usually deal with science fiction, but the ongoing yearlong debate on the copyright reform has unexpectedly directed them towards speculative design in modeling the future. A Future not Made in the EU campaign presents future objects and services that may enhance cultural and educational experience, but their future is uncertain – their utility does depend on whether the copyright reform addresses future challenges properly.

• Article 13 of the Proposed EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and the accompanying Recital 38 are amongst the most controversial parts of the European Commission’s copyright reform package. Several Members States (Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany) have submitted questions seeking clarification on aspects that are essential to the guarantee of fundamental rights in the EU and to the future of the Internet as an open communication medium. The following analysis discusses these questions in the light of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It offers guidelines and background information for the improvement of the proposed new legislation.

• A man who sold devices loaded with Kodi and ‘pirate’ third-party addons has been handed a suspended sentence. After protesting his innocence and insisting he wanted to test the limits of the law, last month Brian Thompson pleaded guilty, ending the possibility of a landmark case testing unchartered areas of copyright law.

• Cloudflare has responded to the repeated criticism of entertainment industry groups, which accuse the company of helping pirate sites. The CDN provider informs the U.S. Government that it operates in accordance with the law and that the complaints bring nothing new to the table.

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