● 10.23.17

● Links 23/10/2017: Wine Staging 2.19, GNOME 3.27.1

Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Last month, I penned my thoughts on what the future of Chrome OS could look like and how devices like the Pixelbook could play a big part in the implementation of containers on Chromebooks. Running non-native apps on top of the Chrome operating system without the need for hacky workarounds would be a monumental watershed for Google who has now tossed a hat in the ring to capture their share of the consumer PC market.

• Virtual Machines, like VMWare, aren’t new and as a third-party solution work very well. However, the development we have been tracking goes well beyond a traditional, web-based solution. The work being done here seems to remove the third-parties and eliminate a browser by creating a built-in container system that can run, in theory, any app the hardware will support.

Server

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Users Discuss DRM. Today my Brandon and I discuss encrypted media extensions, digital rights management and our freedom on the Linux desktop. So join Brandon and I as we as Linux Users Discuss DRM.

Kernel Space

• ZenStates is an independent effort to offer P-States-based overclocking from the Linux desktop of AMD Ryzen processors and other tuning.

• ZenStates-Linux is an open-source Python script inspired by some available Windows programs for offering Ryzen/Zen CPU overclocking from the desktop by manipulating the performance states of the processor.

• Hosted by The Linux Foundation, CIP addresses the needs of long-term software for the power generation and distribution, water, oil and gas, transportation and building automation industries. CIP members such as Codethink, Hitachi, Plat’Home, Renesas, Siemens and Toshiba are working to create a reliable and secure Linux-based embedded software platform that can be sustained more than 10 years and up to 60 years.

• ​Through a shared exertion bnb m from endeavors and groups put resources into the cloud, enormous information, and standard APIs, I’m eager to welcome the OpenMessaging project from The Linux Foundation. The OpenMessaging group will likely make a comprehensively embraced, merchant impartial, and open standard for dispersed informing that can be conveyed in the cloud, on-commence, and half and half utilize cases.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, has released the next three in a series of Open Source Guides for the Enterprise, created to help executives, open source program managers, developers, attorneys and other decision makers learn how to best leverage open source. These three new guides add to the six released last month at Open Source Summit North America.

Graphics Stack

• The AMDGPU DC display code has a final batch of feature updates that were sent in this weekend for DRM-Next staging and is the last set besides fixes for the “DC” code for the 4.15 target.

• Vulkan 1.0.64 is out this weekend as the newest specification refinement to this high-performance graphics/compute API.

• As usual, most of the changes for this minor Vulkan revision are just documentation clarifications and corrections. This week’s update brings just under a dozen fixes.

• While the Jetson TX2 has been out since this past March and it’s a phenomenal ARM development board, sadly the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver support for it still isn’t ready with the mainline Linux kernel.

• Thierry Reding of NVIDIA sent in the Tegra DRM driver changes for DRM-Next that in turn is staged for Linux 4.15. Reding commented that there is prepatory work for the TX2 (Tegra186) but it’s not all ready for upstream yet.

• Intel’s Jordan Justen has sent out his third revision to the recently renewed patches for allowing an OpenGL on-disk shader cache for the “i965″ Mesa driver.

• Just a few days back Jordan sent out a revised Intel shader cache implementation for this code that’s long been baking on the Intel side but yet to be merged for mainline Mesa while the RadeonSI shader cache and co has been present now for many months.

Applications

• Now having a rough idea of how the GPU works, it’s obvious that we need our codec to split the image into a lot of independent chunks to be parallel; we’re aiming for about a thousand chunks. We’ll also aim for a format that’s as simple as possible; other people can try to push the frontiers on research, I just want something that’s fast, reasonably good, and not too hard to implement.

• As D-Bus Broker from the BUS1 project continues to mature as delivering faster performance and more reliability than D-Bus itself, D-Bus itself isn’t letting up.

• D-Bus 1.12 will be the project’s next stable release and is currently undergoing testing via the 1.11 development branch.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine Staging release 2.19 is now available.

• Building off last week’s Wine 2.19 development update is now a new version of Wine-Staging that includes its wide assortment of extra experimental/testing patches.

• The new changes introduced with Wine-Staging 2.19 include support for depth bias clamping in Direct3D 11, the ability to verify RSA signatures with bcrypt, and various bug fixes and other improvements.

Games

• The Coma: Recut [Steam] is coming to Linux, with it currently in beta. I’ve tested the beta and it is running pretty well.

• Mushroom Wars 2 [Steam] released for Linux recently, this fast-paced strategy game is a little on the different side so here’s some thoughts.

• Team Fortress 2 [Steam], the free to play shooter from Valve has been updated once again with the Jungle Inferno update.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The developers of the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt) were proud to announce today the release and immediate availability for download of the LXQt 0.12.0 desktop environment.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.25.1, the first unstable release in the 3.28 development cycle, is now available. The porting of more modules to meson continues (which is great!), but It’s still causing some problems for some modules. See below.

• If you want to compile GNOME 3.27.1 by yourself, you can use the JHBuild modulesets available here…

• GNOME developer Javier Jardón is kicking off the development of the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment with the first snapshot, GNOME 3.27.1, which is now available for public testing.

• Let’s come back to retro-gtk. In the previous articles I explained how bad retro-gtk was, what I did to start improving it and more importantly what I did to prepare the terrain for further development. This article will detail the aforementioned planed improvements!

Distributions

Reviews

• ArchLabs is a great combination of lightweight and, thanks to its Arch base, constantly up-to-date software. While probably not for everyone, ArchLabs is a polished distribution that anyone looking for an Arch-based distribution that has a pre-configured desktop and software selection should check out. The only drawback is that, like many lightweight distributions, selecting applications based on what is deemed best for an individual task can result in an odd hodgepodge of applications that all behave differently. Of course, the choice of what to install is up to the user, so that might not be a problem for some, but having applications from Xfce, GNOME, KDE, etc., can lead to a jumbled user experience.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• If you’re using the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system, you should know that one of the latest snapshots removed the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6 packages from the default install and patched it against the WPA2 KRACK security vulnerability.

Red Hat Family

• With digitalization, open source technology is gaining momentum and governments are increasingly embracing open source solutions. In open government initiatives, open source has led to greater citizen participation and contribution. eGov Innovation speaks to Damien Wong, Vice President & General Manager ASEAN, Red Hat, on how government agencies can tap on open source to foster innovation, accelerate digital transformation and benefit citizens.

Finance

• Red Hat Inc. announced that its board of directors has appointed Narendra K. Gupta as chairman of the board. Gupta, who has served on Red Hat’s board of directors since 2005, is a technology industry veteran with more than 40 years’ experience. In 2006, the Indian American entrepreneur co-founded Nexus Venture Partners, a leading venture capital fund, and he currently serves as the firm’s managing director. Gupta co-founded Integrated Systems Inc. in 1980 to develop products for embedded software development. He served as ISI’s president and CEO from its founding until 1994 and as chairman until 2000 when ISI merged with Wind River Systems Inc. He currently serves on the board of trustees of the California Institute of Technology, the advisory board of the Asia Society Northern California, and on the boards of several privately held companies.

Debian Family

• UNIX distributions used to come with the system source code in /usr/src. This is a concept which fascinates me: if you want to change something in any part of your system, just make your change in the corresponding directory, recomile, reinstall, and you can immediately see your changes in action.

• Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

• Wishing all Debian people a prosperous and auspicious Gujarati new year (V.S. 2074 called Saumya.)

• I just uploaded APT 1.6 alpha 1, introducing a very scary thing: Seccomp sandboxing for methods, the programs downloading files from the internet and decompressing or compressing stuff. With seccomp I reduced the number of system calls these methods can use to 149 from 430. Specifically we excluded most ways of IPC, xattrs, and most importantly, the ability for methods to clone(2), fork(2), or execve(2) (or execveat(2)). Yes, that’s right – methods can no longer execute programs.

• Here’s are some of the bugs against the Debian Policy Manual. In particular, there really are quite a few patches needing seconds from DDs.

• Here’s my weekly report for week 42 of 2017. In this week I have replaced my spacebar, failed to replace a HDD and begun the process to replace my YubiKey.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Last week we released Mir 0.28 and this week we settled down to tidy up a few bugs fixes and feature requests that didn’t make the release. I’ve started collecting these for a Mir 0.28.1 release to come in the next few weeks.

• The most interesting of these comes from conversations at the Ubuntu Rally: there were several requests from community members around getting Mir working (or even building!) on other distributions.

• Lead Mir developer Alan Griffiths has spent the time getting the Mir display server running on Fedora. This is part of a broader feature request of getting Mir running on more Linux distributions than just Ubuntu.

• The changes to get Mir running on at least Fedora should be merged for the upcoming Mir 0.28.1 point release. Mir 0.28.1 will also incorporate other bug fixes.

• I’m going to preface this review, and say that I liked Ubuntu 17.10 after using it for a few days. However, there were multiple issues with it, that ultimately ruined my experience; however, your mileage my vary.

• Ubuntu 17.10, code-named Artful Aardvark, is the latest Ubuntu Linux release from Canonical, and was released Oct. 19.

• It’s the first desktop release of the pure Ubuntu flavor, to not feature the Unity desktop, since Ubuntu 11.04. Now, Ubuntu uses the GNOME desktop environment now.

• Every new Ubuntu cycle brings many changes, and the arrival of Ubuntu 17.10, the “Artful Aardvark” release, brings more changes than usual. The default desktop has changed to GNOME Shell, with some very thoughtful changes by the desktop team to make it more familiar. And of course, the community wallpapers included with this exciting new release have changed as well!

• Every cycle, talented artists around the world create media and release it under licenses that encourage sharing and adaptation. For Ubuntu 17.10, 50 images were submitted to the Ubuntu 17.10 Free Culture Showcase photo pool on Flickr, where all eligible submissions can be found.

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu team announced the release and immediate availability for download of Lubuntu 17.10 and Lubuntu Next 17.10 distributions as part of the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.

• System76, the maker of Linux-based computers, is proud to announce the first-ever release of Pop!_OS Linux, its own GNU/Linux distribution based on Canonical’s Ubuntu OS.

Devices/Embedded

• Since Samsung debuted the DeX feature earlier this year with the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones, the company has been making small changes to improve the whole experience of using your smartphone as a PC. In order to further enhance Samsung DeX, the company has announced “Linux on Galaxy”, an app that will let developers run Linux-based distributions on their mobile device, allowing them to code on-the-go. The app is DeX-enabled, which means developers can code on a bigger device, powered by their Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+ or Galaxy Note8.

• The convergence of a smartphone with a PC/laptop is not new and has been in making for several years. In fact, the idea of such a convergence started with Nokia’s Communicator phone launched in 1996 when it was the undisputed king of feature phone and mobile phone arena.

• Ubuntu devs tried a similar theme with the now-dead Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets. The Ubuntu os was launched with the idea to run full Linux apps on your smartphone. The smartphone even gave users an option to connect a keyboard, mouse, and display. However, that did not sell.

• We recently published a post summarizing why the Beelink S1’s hardware specs look so promising for an inexpensive Linux mini PC. But I hit a brick wall when trying to install any flavour of Linux on the machine. I simply could not get the machine to boot a live Linux distro, either from a USB DVD or USB key.

• I contacted Shenzhen AZW Technology Co. Ltd., the manufacturer of the Beelink S1, twice to see if they could offer any support. They replied recommending I get used to running Windows 10, as they contend Ubuntu is difficult to install on this mini PC. The second email has yet to elicit a response. I must have exhausted my support quota. Undeterred, I made a call for help to Linux enthusiasts. And half a dozen good folk promptly stepped forward to offer a simple solution, which I’ll detail below. This is one reason why I love Linux; the community.

• Tomorrow marks the end of the crowdfunding campaign for Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone campaign.

• The campaign is looking like it will close at around two million dollars with the current tally as of this morning being at $1,962,517 in funds raised for this effort to build an original GNU/Linux smartphone stack with either GNOME Shell or KDE Plasma Mobile comprising the UI/UX elements.

• Purism and Nextcloud announced partnership to bring Nextcloud’s end-to-end encrypted file sync and sharing services to Purism’s mobile and desktop computing products

Android

• Android Central has reported that their Pixel 2 XL review unit is having screen burn-in issues. That’s a bad thing for the latest made-by-Google flagship which was announced earlier on October 4, ditching the headphone jack.

• The Android-x86 project derived from Google’s Android Open-Source Project code-base remains officially at Android 6.0, but there is an Android 7.1 “Nougat” build available for testing.

• Quietly released earlier this month was a second release candidate based on Android 7.1. The Android-x86 7.1-RC2 release is based on upstream AOSP 7.1-RC2 / Nougat-MR2 along with some extra improvements for this x86-targeted build.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) said the AssemblyLine tool is designed to analyse large volumes of files, and can automatically rebalance workloads.

• Cloud application marketplace company Wireline is working with open source blockchain project developer Qtum

• The new union is intended to provide a conduit to consuming microservices at [web] scale using blockchain at the core.

• As we know, microservices offer the ability to create Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) without having to manage the underlying hardware and software infrastructure.

• [...]

• The Qtum a blockchain application platform combines the functions of Bitcoin Core, an account abstraction layer allowing for multiple virtual machines and a proof-of-stake consensus protocol aimed at tackling industry-use cases.

• The Qtum Foundation, headquartered in Singapore, is the decision-making body that drives the project’s development.

• The idea of a multi-user operating system is almost a tautology today but back in the 1980s it wasn’t all that common – at least when it came to personal computing. PC-MOS was a multi-user operating system that, like DR-DOS and others, competed with Microsoft’s MS-DOS before eventually disappearing at the Redmond juggernaut crushed almost all its competition. Now, Roeland Jansen, Gary Robertson and Rod Roark have put the operating system onto GitHub as an open source project so we can all mess with its source code.

• Increasingly, people want to contribute to projects casually—when they want to, rather than adhering to a schedule. This is part of a broader trend of “episodic volunteering” noted by a wide range of volunteer organizations and governments. This has been attributed not only to changes in the workforce, which leave fewer people able to volunteer with less spare time to share, but also to changes in how people perceive the act of volunteering. It is no longer seen as a communal obligation, rather as a conditional activity in which the volunteer also receives benefits. Moreover, distributed revision-control systems and the network effects of GitHub, which standardize the process of making a contribution, make it easier for people to contribute casually to free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) projects.

Events

• Taking place this weekend in Prague has been the 8th annual GStreamer Conference, which is preceding next week’s Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference Europe.

• With the CCC moving from Hamburg to Leipzig, there are not only logistic changes to be done but also some organisational changes. We are still figuring out the details, but in the context of this call, one of the major changes will be the loss of free available rooms to book for self-organised sessions. Instead, assemblies that match with each other are asked to cluster around 1 of several stages and use that as a common stage for self-organized sessions together. To make the most of this situation, the FSFE will for the first time not join the Noisy Square this year but form a new neighbourhood with other freedom fighting NGOs – in particular with our friends from European Digital Rights. However, at this point of time, we do not yet have more information about the concrete or final arrangements.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• At the Web Engines Hackfest in A Coruña at the beginning of October 2017, I was working on adding some proof-of-concept code to Servo to render HTML5 videos with GStreamer. For the impatient, the results can be seen in this video here

Education

• A couple of years ago, I was talking to PayPal senior director of software development Harper Reed at All Things Open in Raleigh, N.C., when he suggested that the best way to invigorate education would be to purchase Raspberry Pis en masse and put them in public libraries.

• Although many schools have made sizeable investments in classroom technology, those investments have done little to advance students’ understanding of how the technology works. That’s where the Raspberry Pi comes in, as it’s the ideal vehicle to demonstrate the educational efficacy of open source software and open hardware in the classroom.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Ikea Group will also roll out a new digital platform called ‘Co-Create Ikea’ which mimics its IT division’s open-source software development, where customers have the chance help develop and test new products.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A few days back I wrote about Intel’s work on Control-flow Enforcement Technology beginning to land in GCC. This “CET” work for future Intel CPUs has now landed in full for GCC 8.

• The bits wiring up this control-flow instrumentation and enforcement support are now all present in mainline GCC SVN/Git for next year’s GCC 8.1 release.

• After having moved from FSFE’s wordpress instance I thought long about whether I still want to have comments on the new blog. And how I would be able to do it with a statically generated site. I think I have found/created a pretty good solution that I document below.

• The GNU C Library, glibc, has picked up support for some additional functions as FMA-optimized versions.

• The newest functions now getting the fused multiply-add (FMA) support are powf(), logf(), exp2f(), and log2f(). The FMA instruction set is present since Intel Haswell and AMD Piledriver generations and like past FMA optimizations, the benefits can be quite noticeable.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• he Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) family of open data agreements. In an era of expansive and often underused data, the CDLA licenses are an effort to define a licensing framework to support collaborative communities built around curating and sharing “open” data.

Open Access/Content

• For more than a decade, Creative Commons has developed and stewarded legal tools that give creators the opportunity to share their work on open terms. We have focused on tools that empower sharing at the moment of publication, leaving out an important group of creators: what about those who previously signed away their rights to their works long ago, but who now want to share on open terms under a CC license or renegotiate unfavorable publishing terms?

Programming/Development

• Aaron Wolen and I are pleased to announce the availability of the initial 0.0.1 release of our new linl package on the CRAN network. It provides a simple-yet-powerful Markdown—and RMarkdown—wrapper the venerable LaTeX letter class. Aaron had done the legwork in the underlying pandoc-letter repository upon which we build via proper rmarkdown integration.

Leftovers

• By 2003, Scoble took a job at Microsoft as a tech evangelist, and later worked at other tech and media firms, including Rackspace and Fast Company. In 2014, he publicly wrote about his own experience as a child victim of sexual abuse. More recently, Scoble was the company’s “entrepreneur-in-residence” at a company called Upload VR. Scoble, who in his Twitter profile calls himself an “authority on the future,” also founded a consultancy called “Transformation Group” earlier this year.

Health/Nutrition

• This week, President Donald Trump’s nominee for drug czar, Republican Congressmember Tom Marino, had to withdraw from consideration after a Washington Post/”60 Minutes” investigation found he led a drug industry-backed effort to pass a law that weakened the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to crack down on addictive opioids. Meanwhile, calls are growing to look at the major pharmaceutical companies that have fueled the opioid crisis. A new investigation by Esquire magazine reveals how the secretive Sackler family, owners of the company that invented OxyContin, downplayed the risks of addiction and exploited doctors’ confusion over the drug’s strength. We speak with Christopher Glazek, the Esquire reporter behind the story.

• The descendants of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, a pair of psychiatrist brothers from Brooklyn, are members of a billionaire clan with homes scattered across Connecticut, London, Utah, Gstaad, the Hamptons, and, especially, New York City. It was not until 2015 that they were noticed by Forbes, which added them to the list of America’s richest families. The magazine pegged their wealth, shared among twenty heirs, at a conservative $14 billion. (Descendants of Arthur Sackler, Mortimer and Raymond’s older brother, split off decades ago and are mere multi-millionaires.) To a remarkable degree, those who share in the billions appear to have abided by an oath of omertà: Never comment publicly on the source of the family’s wealth.

• That may be because the greatest part of that $14 billion fortune tallied by Forbes came from OxyContin, the narcotic painkiller regarded by many public-health experts as among the most dangerous products ever sold on a mass scale. Since 1996, when the drug was brought to market by Purdue Pharma, the American branch of the Sacklers’ pharmaceutical empire, more than two hundred thousand people in the United States have died from overdoses of OxyContin and other prescription painkillers. Thousands more have died after starting on a prescription opioid and then switching to a drug with a cheaper street price, such as heroin. Not all of these deaths are related to OxyContin—dozens of other painkillers, including generics, have flooded the market in the past thirty years. Nevertheless, Purdue Pharma was the first to achieve a dominant share of the market for long-acting opioids, accounting for more than half of prescriptions by 2001.

• By now, the contours of Pharma’s opioid prescription scam which has driven a heroin epidemic have emerged. Between 1996 and 2002, Purdue Pharma, who makes OxyContin, funded more than 20,000 pain-related “educational” programs reports Vox Media and “launched a multifaceted campaign to encourage long-term use of [opioid painkillers] for chronic non-cancer pain.” It gave money to groups like the American Pain Society, the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the Federation of State Medical Boards and “grassroots” patient groups to advocate “for more aggressive identification and treatment of pain,” says Vox.

• Since 2015, the number of Salmonella infections from contact with backyard poultry has quadrupled across the nation. This year, nearly every state has been pecked by outbreak strains; only Alaska and Delaware can crow about dodging them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 1,120 cases. Nearly 250 of those involved hospitalization, and one person died.

• But that is likely just scratching the surface of the real numbers, according to CDC veterinarian Megin Nichols. “For one Salmonella case we know of in an outbreak, there are up to 30 others that we don’t know about,” she told the AP.

• Zimbabwean human rights activists have accused the World Health Organization of hypocrisy after it appointed Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador.

• Mr Mugabe, who regularly flies abroad for his own medical treatment and has been accused of running his country’s health system into the ground, received the honour at a conference on non communicable diseases in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, on Wednesday.

Security

• The article explores how cryptography, especially hashing and code signing, can be use to establish the source and integrity. It examines how source code control systems and automated build systems are a key part of the software provenance story. (Provenance means “a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality.” It is increasingly being applied to software.)

• A judge in Milwaukee has modified the pre-trial release conditions of Marcus Hutchins, also known online as “MalwareTech,” who was indicted two months ago on federal criminal charges.

• Under US Magistrate Judge William Duffin’s Thursday order, Hutchins, who is currently living in Los Angeles, will no longer be subject to a curfew or to GPS monitoring.

• A teenager attempted to hack senior US government officials’ computers from his home.

• Kane Gamble, 18, from Coalville, Leicestershire, pleaded guilty to 10 charges relating to computer hacking.

• His targets included the then CIA director John Brennan and former FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano.

• The recent Wi-Fi “KRACK” vulnerability, which allowed anyone to get onto a secure network (and which was quickly patched by reputable vendors), had been in plain sight behind a corporate-level paywall for 13 years. This raises a number of relevant, interesting, and uncomfortable questions.

Defence/Aggression

• On the 5th of June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Egypt, and Bahrain suddenly “cut diplomatic and commercial ties with Qatar …accusing it of supporting terrorism, meddling in their internal affairs and advancing the agenda of regional foe Iran.” Qatar vehemently denies the allegations and has been working with both US and UK security services in the wake of a Russian hacking and disinformation offensive. According to extensive reporting “The following day, Trump stunned lawmakers on both sides of the aisle by unexpectedly joining in on the Qatar-bashing.”

• A Gloucester man was arrested and charged late Friday with setting off an improvised explosive device in a parking lot Thursday evening near Colonial Williamsburg.

• Stephen Powers, 30, was arrested at his home in Gloucester and was charged with possessing and using an explosive device and committing an act of terrorism, according to Williamsburg Police.

• But there are occasional moments when some reporter at an MSM outlet behaves responsibly and those instances should be noted at least under the classic definition of “news” – something that is unexpected – or as the old saying goes, “dog bites man is not news; man bites dog is news.”

• One such moment occurred earlier this month when a Times science editor assigned science reporter Carl Zimmer to look into the mysterious illnesses affecting U.S. diplomats in the recently reopened U.S. embassy in Cuba.

• About two dozen U.S. diplomats supposedly were suffering hearing loss and cognitive difficulties due to what has been labeled a “sonic attack.” The Trump administration blamed the Cuban government even though the Cubans claimed to be mystified and would seem to have little motive for disrupting a long-sought détente with Washington along with the expected boon to their tourist industry. President Trump “retaliated” by expelling 15 Cuban diplomats.

• The U.S. Air Force is preparing to put nuclear-armed bombers back on 24-hour ready alert, a status not seen since the Cold War ended in 1991.

• That means the long-dormant concrete pads at the ends of this base’s 11,000-foot runway — dubbed the “Christmas tree” for their angular markings — could once again find several B-52s parked on them, laden with nuclear weapons and set to take off at a moment’s notice.

• “This is yet one more step in ensuring that we’re prepared,” Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview during his six-day tour of Barksdale and other U.S. Air Force bases that support the nuclear mission. “I look at it more as not planning for any specific event, but more for the reality of the global situation we find ourselves in and how we ensure we’re prepared going forward.”

• The Trump administration is scrambling to defend the president’s characterization of his communications with grieving military families, including rush-delivering letters from the president to the families of servicemembers killed months ago. Donald Trump falsely claimed this week that he had called “virtually” all fallen servicemembers’ families since his time in office.

• Timothy Eckels Sr. hadn’t heard anything from President Trump since his son Timothy Eckels Jr. was killed after a collision involving the USS John S. McCain on August 21. But then, on October 20, two days into the controversy over the president’s handling of a condolence call with an American soldier’s widow, Eckels Sr. received a United Parcel Service package dated October 18 with a letter from the White House.

• Did US agents and diplomats warn their Russian counterparts that Russian troops would “come home in body bags” and that the western media would launch a propaganda campaign against them?

• Yes, again.

• Did US officials say the western media would concoct a phony story about “Russian hacking” that would be used to persuade the American people that Russia was a dangerous enemy that had to be reigned in with harsh economic sanctions, provocative military maneuvers, and threats of violence?

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Trump Administration is continuing its war on leakers. It’s probably meant to keep whistleblowers at bay as well. This isn’t necessarily a trait unique to Trump’s White House. There really hasn’t been a whistleblower-friendly administration in pretty much ever, but this particular administration has been awash in leaked documents, each one prompting more severe crackdowns.

• But it’s going to come to a head at the national security level. The “Intelligence Community” — sixteen agencies participating and partaking in intelligence analysis and collection under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — is basically ousting its internal oversight. Jenna McLaughlin, writing for Foreign Policy, has the details.

• The Maltese government offered a reward in a bank heist case a few years ago, but this was believed to be the first time it posted a reward in a murder case. In the last 10 years, there have been 15 Mafia-style bombings or similar attacks in Malta, and many of the crimes have gone unsolved.

• This weekend we remember our founding director Gavin MacFadyen, who died of lung cancer a year ago.

• It was impossible not to like Gavin. His enthusiasm, love of life, courage and incredible capacity for friendship won you over immediately.

• An investigative journalist and a filmmaker, he founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism in 2003. Since then the CIJ has gone from strength to strength, establishing itself as the bastion for tough investigative reporting and training.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• MacLean is also deeply concerned about how the radical right-wing is much more sophisticated in their strategic thinking than are Democrats, liberals and progressives.

• Explosive wildfires have raged in Northern California over the last two weeks. Forty-one people are dead, and at least 6,700 structures have been destroyed, making these the most destructive fires in the state’s history. Parts of the city of Santa Rosa have burned to the ground. Extremely hot and dry conditions, continuing impacts of the state’s drought, and high winds combined to create fires so fast-moving, many residents were forced to flee for their lives with only minutes notice. Tens of thousands have been forced to evacuate. In the last several days, better weather has been helping firefighters fight the blazes, though many are still continuing. Air quality in the region has been called the worst in recorded history due to wildfire smoke.

• The agency had been considering some changes to rules set by the Obama administration that ratchet up the amount of renewable biofuel that refineries must blend into the gas and diesel they sell. According to Bloomberg, the EPA had specifically been considering “a possible reduction in biodiesel requirements” as well as “a proposal to allow exported renewable fuel to count toward domestic quotas.” In early October, the EPA asked for public comment on cutting biodiesel quotas.

• The Bloomberg story cited unnamed sources who said President Trump personally directed Pruitt to back off any proposals that would relax biofuel quotas after pressure from lawmakers from corn-producing states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois. Trump, who courted both fossil fuel interests and corn-belt states in his campaign, has had pressure from each side on this debate. Uncertainty surrounding the future of biofuel use during Trump’s administration has caused volatility in biofuels markets for months, Reuters notes.

• The hurricanes and wildfires that have severely damaged large areas of the United States in recent weeks have had no impact on US president Donald Trump’s determination to ignore the perils of climate change and support the coal industry.

• In a deliberate denial of mainstream science, the Trump administration has issued a strategic four-year plan for the US nnvironment Protection Agency that does not once mention “greenhouse gas emissions”, “carbon dioxide” or “climate change” in its 48 pages.

• Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager of the Union of Concerned Scientists, describes this as “stunning” in its ignorance. “This was not an oversight,” she says, “this is a deliberate strategy by this administration.”

• New Zealand’s new Prime Minister elect, Jacina Ardern, is not wasting time to commit to fighting climate change. With the help of her coalition government, Ardern has set a target for New Zealand to become a zero-carbon nation by the year 2050. This includes promises to reduce overall carbon emissions and to offset what remains with international carbon credits and tree planting.

• It’s a common suggestion that we should just plant trees to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, but this isn’t quite the solution it may seem. Reforestation would roughly make up for the carbon added to the atmosphere by past deforestation, but our burning of fossil fuels is another matter.

• Still, that’s no argument to ignore reforestation. There is no silver bullet solution to climate change, and many things like reforestation add up to make meaningful contributions. And reforestation has a host of other benefits, including improving air quality and providing species with habitats.

• So how much of a difference could efforts to save and regrow forests—together with conservation of other ecosystems—really do? That’s the question asked by a group led by Bronson Griscom, an ecologist at The Nature Conservancy. By including a broad set of possible reforestation actions, Griscom and his colleagues found a larger opportunity than we’d previously estimated.

• As the Puerto Rico disaster unfolds before our horrified eyes, shortages of water, food, housing, medicine, and healthcare threaten countless lives. As of October 13, 2017, 30,000 Puerto Ricans have arrived at the Orlando International Airport– which has established a disaster relief center to aid incoming islanders who are hungry, thirsty, and need essential living assistance. Florida has taken other steps towards welcoming Puerto Ricans to the state as well. After all, the Sunshine State is already home to over 1 million Puerto Ricans, right? Already embroiled in widespread class bludgeoning and racial engineering tactics, the state is ill-prepared to meet this historic humanitarian challenge as it already faces job, housing, food, healthcare, and quality education shortages. Governor Rick Scott’s publicly funded services–like education, food stamps, and medicaid programs– are like Trump’s Puerto Rico paper towel toss: grandstanding displays, with zero substance, that brazenly and condescendingly reward almost randomly fortunate recipients. Let them eat paper towels!

Finance

• Bitcoin soared to another milestone Friday, as the digital currency breached $6,000 for the first time to put its gain in 2017 to more than 500 percent.

• They owe their dominance to innovation, but also to tax avoidance.

• Startups drive job creation and innovation, but the number of new business launches is at a 30-year low and some economists, investors and entrepreneurs are pointing their fingers at big tech.

• Senators Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin led the opposition with a pair of amendments that challenged a “horrible bill.”

• The government will struggle to deliver the “huge changes” required to the UK’s borders in time for Brexit, Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the Commons public accounts committee. The Labour MP was responding to a report by the National Audit Office, the UK’s spending watchdog. The report warned of a significant increase in workload for border forces following Brexit. The government said it would ensure border forces had adequate resources.

• Prophets of doom are not much fun to be around. Nobody wants a “Jeremiah next door”, which is how the Daily Mail recently described Philip Hammond’s relationship to Theresa May. The chancellor was accused of spooking the prime minister with Old Testament fire-and-brimstone economic forecasts. His refusal to spread the Good News about Brexit was cited as grounds for dismissal.

• Brexit could cause “catastrophic” damage to the UK’s booming culture industry, according to a survey of over 1,000 creative companies.

• The Creative Industries Federation report into the impact of international talent on Britain’s thriving arts sector, suggests a severe skills shortage is only going to worsen when freedom of movement comes to an end after leaving the European Union.

• The likelihood of the UK crashing out of the EU seems to be increasing with every step of the negotiation. For those of us that believe in the merits of the EU, this would be a disaster, but the counter point used by some opponents of the EU[1] is that, even if we leave with no deal, we can fall back onto the tariffs agreed under the World Trade Organisation

• openDemocracy’s investigations into Leave donor Arron Banks and the DUP make global headlines, prompting calls for transparency.

• If you’re one of those sad, unsaved souls still losing sleep about Britain’s messy divorce from Europe then I have some advice: cheer up. Remember being British doesn’t mean you have to be miserable all the time; a little bit of optimism is OK. So, please, I implore you: take a deep breath, ignore all logic and reason, dismiss any inconvenient truths and look on the bright side of Brexit. If you’re having trouble doing that then help is at hand: I’ve compiled a six-point plan on how to stop worrying and learn to love Brexit.

• On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System”. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair, but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were?

• Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated: what you buy at the shops and online; where you are at any given time; who your friends are and how you interact with them; how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). It’s not hard to picture, because most of that already happens, thanks to all those data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook and Instagram or health-tracking apps such as Fitbit. But now imagine a system where all these behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school – or even just your chances of getting a date.

• A futuristic vision of Big Brother out of control? No, it’s already getting underway in China, where the government is developing the Social Credit System (SCS) to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.3 billion citizens. The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance “trust” nationwide and to build a culture of “sincerity”. As the policy states, “It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Amazon spent $3.4 million on federal lobbying over the past three months, a new record for the company in a quarter that saw its acquisition of Whole Foods quickly approved by the Federal Trade Commission.

• With a total of $9.5 million spent so far in 2017, Amazon, which declined The Hill’s request for comment, is on track to surpass the $11 million it spent last year.

• The Pirate Party won seats for the first time, coming in third with 10.8 percent of the vote, [...]

• Pirates 10.79

• UPDATE 1: The final score appears to be close to 10.79%, which makes the Czech Pirates the third largest party, ahead of such parties as the Social Democrats (7.27%), Christian Democratic Union (5.80%), and Greens (1.46%). It also means the Pirates are getting a full 22 seats, tentatively indicating that all fourteen districts’ list-toppers and some of the list-seconds have a new job. At this time (20:07 on Saturday), the list of new MPs is not yet presented by the Czech Election Authority.

• [...] with 10.7 percent, doubled its proportion from the previous election. That was just a fraction of a percentage point behind the youth-oriented Czech Pirate Party, an anti-establishment movement from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

• In the hours after President Donald Trump said on an Oct. 17 radio broadcast that he had contacted nearly every family that had lost a military servicemember this year, the White House was hustling to learn from the Pentagon the identities and contact information for those families, according to an internal Defense Department email.

• The email exchange, which has not been previously reported, shows that senior White House aides were aware on the day the president made the statement that it was not accurate — but that they should try to make it accurate as soon as possible, given the gathering controversy.

• Public attitudes about the political system broadly and the national government specifically vary considerably around the world, though many are critical. Opinions are closely related to the status of the economy and domestic politics. Publics who have experienced high economic growth and are happy with their country’s economy are more confident in their national government. Similarly, people who support the governing party or parties in their country tend to give more positive evaluations of their democracy than those who support either the opposition or no political party at all.

• In fact, the example Daily Beast reporter Ben Collins found was a single account, @crystal1johnson, getting two juicy retweets from Twitter’s very own “@jack.” The discovered posts (which are now archive-only, thanks to the account being deleted in August) date back to March 2016. Both revolve around black identity in the United States.

• You’d never guess it, but Britain is a lucky country. Across the democratic world, Russia pursues its interests by corrupting elections with black propaganda. But in their insouciance, our government and intelligence services show dear old Blighty has no reason to worry. On the rare occasions it bothers to discuss the subject, the British state says “it can’t happen here”, even though “it” is happening everywhere else.

• The FBI is investigating how Russia hacked the Clinton campaign and used Facebook and Twitter to spread fake news. Ukrainians are preparing for the next stage of resistance to Russian forces. European foreign ministries and intelligence services have finally understood that Russia’s imperial strategy is to weaken the EU and Nato in every country except, it seems, this sceptred isle.

• Russia knows its best tactic is to use migrant crises to stoke nativist fears. “German government threw their country under feet of migrants like a rug, now try wipe their crimes under carpet,” tweeted the Russian embassy in London in 2016 as the Kremlin began a successful campaign to promote the interests of the chauvinists in Alternative for Germany. A bank close to Vladimir Putin loaned $10m to Marine le Pen’s anti-EU Front National. He encouraged the anti-immigrant Freedom party in Austria, the Lega Nord in Italy and Jobbik in Hungary.

• Yesterday, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced plans to remove the democratically elected regional government of Catalonia and replace them with direct rule by the national government in Madrid.

• Those two interventions were in some ways very different. Snow, who delivered the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival in August, spoke movingly of the Grenfell fire, and not only of the social distance between journalists and the residents of Grenfell, but also the former’s proximity to the rich and powerful.

• He worried that broadcasters were on the ‘wrong side of the terrible divide that exists in present day society’, having lined up ‘comfortably with the élite, with little awareness, contact, or connection with those not of the elite’. Snow also criticised Facebook and Google in his lecture, noting that the multinationals were profiting from journalism, but not contributing, and were thereby undermining the profession. ‘Facebook,’ he said, ‘feasts on our products and pays all but nothing’.

• The European Union may have decided that Catalans should forget all about independence for the sake of the peace of mind of everyone, but these people honestly don’t seem to give a damn.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Philippine House of Representatives has not renewed the licence of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines to operate dozens of radio stations across the country.

• The bishops lodged an application to renew the licence in January, because their previous one was due to expire on August 7, reported ucanews.com. The application, which sought the extension of the licence, or franchise, for another 25 years, remains stuck at the committee level of the Lower House of Congress.

• But the truth is that SESTA could create calls for even more censorship. The legislation would revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms such as search engines and social media from being charged for the misconduct of their users. That immunity is premised on the idea that online services are simply neutral tools.

• Facebook Explore Feed is rolling out globally this week. Most people around the world can see it in their bookmarks and they can discover new content here. But in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Cambodia it works differently: all posts by pages are moved from newsfeed to Explore Feed. In main newsfeed are now just friend and sponsored posts.

• A group of concerned community members organized a protest against the series and sent a letter to the society’s board asking that the series be canceled and the course removed from the society’s website.

• Teachers should not fear that their interpretation of class material or historical figures will be censored or the class canceled because it is upsetting to someone else.

• The Florida Department of Corrections has stepped up its censorship of the Militant over the last several months. On Sept. 19 the prison system’s Literature Review Committee upheld the impoundment of the July 17 issue. Prison authorities claimed that an article reporting on the fight against censorship of two previous issues — which the committee itself had reversed — was a “threat to the security, good order, or discipline” of the prison.

• That same day the Militant received notice that the Sept. 11 issue had been barred. The reason this time? A front-page article on a San Francisco protest against racism and one explaining why working people should defend the right to free speech. Both articles appeared under a banner headline reading, “Socialist Workers Party: Protest Racist Attacks!”

• In the beginning of 2017, Twitter said it would take on harassment and hate speech. CEO Jack Dorsey said the company would embrace a “completely new approach to abuse on Twitter” with open dialogue along the way.

• For months, though, the company has offered few details about what it would do, or when. That changed late yesterday, when Twitter posted a timeline with specific promises on actions it will take.

• US senator Ted Cruz, who just last year expressed his support for a governmental backdoor into the iPhone, is absolutely outraged that Apple would restrict the freedom and privacy of Chinese citizens by removing VPN apps from its App Store in China. And he’s sent a strongly worded letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook demanding answers.

• Earlier this month, the Supreme Court of Georgia answered a question that has long tormented American youth—or at least me when I was an American youth: If I flip off the pastor, can the police put me in jail?

• The answer, in Georgia at least, is no: “a raised middle finger, by itself, does not, without more, amount to fighting words or a true threat,” the state court said. For that reason, a disgruntled parishioner could not be convicted of acting “in a violent or tumultuous manner” and placing another person “in reasonable fear of” their safety.

Privacy/Surveillance

• By now, many people have probably heard about the company Cambridge Analytica. By its own admission, it played a major role in the success of Donald Trump. There are also numerous indications that it was involved in the Brexit campaign.

• Because Cambridge Analytica is intimately bound up with the London-based company SCL it is possible to make a subject access request in order to find out what information is held about you. This applies to both UK and US citizens.

• The linking of Aadhaar to seek abortion services poses risk of life to the life of a woman, doctors at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) at Chandigarh have stated. According to the latest paper published in British Medical Journal (BMJ), a 28-year-old housemaid was forced to seek services from an unqualified quack after being turned away by the government hospital at Chandigarh, because she did not have an Aadhaar card.

• After having not menstruated for two-and-a-half months, she realised she was pregnant and visited a government dispensary. Weighing 45 kilos, the woman already had three children.

• Privacy International has told a tribunal this week that MI5 and MI6 sidestepped legal safeguards when they shared huge amounts of data with foreign intelligence services and partners.

• The tribunal has also heard that GCHQ shared enormous amounts of data with researchers at Bristol University.

• Documents unearthed by Edward Snowden indicate researchers at the university are given access to GCHQ’s entire raw unselected datasets – including internet usage, telephone call logs, online file transfers and websites visited as well as others.

• For several years now, Google has been exerting pressure to increase the usage of HTTPS across the internet. By defaulting to secure connections on both ends, users can be protected from anyone who may intercept or even manipulate data as it flows back and forth — quite useful in a world where you can’t even trust WiFi. For its own products, Google says HTTPS use is up to 89 percent overall, up from just 50 percent at the beginning of 2014. The number of top 100 websites defaulting to HTTPS has nearly doubled since last year (way to catch up), growing from 37 to 71.

• I want to focus on the rhetorical framing Rosenstein used. Much of it is transparently hyperbolic. Yet its confrontational tone also signals that the Justice Department believes it may yet be able to seize the upper hand in the current round of the crypto wars.

• As in any war, propaganda is an indispensable component here. Branding is key. As cryptography professor Phil Rogaway pointed out in an award-winning paper, even the label “going dark” has a Lakoffian aspect to it, evoking our ancient fear of the dark. When we call this the “going dark” debate (or a “war”), we’re giving more power to that framing. Whoever dictates the labels we use has already begun to channel the discussion in their preferred direction, as Rogaway observed.

• As of 2016 there were more than 165,000 health and wellness apps available though the Apple App Store alone. According to Rice University medical media expert Kirsten Ostherr, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates only a fraction of those. Americans should be concerned about how these apps collect, save and share their personal health data, she said.

• [...]

• And, she said, the likelihood that the data from the unregulated health apps makes its way back into a medical setting where a patient could benefit from a physician’s review of that data is “almost nil.”

• While Aadhaar is compulsory to avail of most government services, now even the private sector has started relying on it.

• The RBI clarification followed media reports quoting a reply to a Right to Information (RTI) application that suggested the apex bank has not issued any order for mandatory Aadhaar linkage with bank accounts.

Civil Rights/Policing

• On September 11, 2001, the purposes and methods of war radically changed. A group of unsophisticated thugs, in service to a charismatic leader, used a few thousand dollars to mount a surprise attack. Armed with box cutters, airline tickets and some rudimentary knowledge of flying, they executed one of the most successful military strikes in the history of the world, obliterating the heart of the international financial industry and nearly scoring a direct hit on the Pentagon, America’s supreme military command.

• A slew of major companies—including tech giants Uber, Intel, Facebook, and Google—are forming a bloc to seek Congressional immigration reform.

• According to Reuters, which first reported the news late Thursday evening, the companies will band together under the name “Coalition for the American Dream” and seek support to extend Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

• This Obama-era executive action allowed “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who arrived as minors, to register with the government and legally study or work without fear of deportation. The newly organized Coalition appears to be unrelated to an Oklahoma-based group founded in 2006 that shares the same name: Coalition for the American Dream. (The Oklahoma group also “advocate[s] for and protect[s] the rights of disenfranchised immigrants and new Americans from all nations.”)

• The NYPD is actively opposed to transparency. It does all it can to thwart outsiders from accessing any info about the department’s inner workings. This has led to numerous lawsuits from public records requesters. It has also led to a long-running lawsuit featuring the Bronx Defenders, which has been trying to gain access to civil forfeiture documents for years.

• The NYPD has repeatedly claimed it simply cannot provide the records the Bronx Defenders (as well as other records requesters) have requested. Not because it doesn’t want to, even though it surely doesn’t. But because it can’t.

• The department has spent $25 million on a forfeiture tracking system that can’t even do the one thing it’s supposed to do: track forfeitures. The Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS) is apparently so complex and so badly constructed, the NYPD can’t compile the records being sought.

• In response to an Ars report on a court hearing in New York on October 17, New York City and New York City Police Department officials attempted to clarify the nature of the issues surrounding a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit legal defense organization Bronx Defenders. In response to reporting that the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS) did not have database backups, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Stephen Davis said via e-mail, “Contrary to some published reports suggesting that NYPD does not electronically back up the data in its Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS), all such data is backed up continuously in multiple data centers.”

• According to Bloomberg, the snafu was due to an e-mail that the SEC sent on August 10 to the company’s new chief financial officer—however those messages were quarantined in a spam filter, and he seemingly did not see them.

• That is, there has been a profound reduction in the percentage of Britons affected by violent crime over the past twenty years. At the same time, millions of immigrants have come in, including Muslims (the Muslim population in Britain has doubled over this period). So we can only conclude that high immigration rates, which began after 1995, go along with a reduction in the proportion of the population affected by violent crime.

• Predictably, Trump managed falsely to blame the increases on Britain’s small Muslim population, which is 4.3 percent of the population of 65 million.

• This sort of conspiracy theory is extremely dangerous, and is the sort of thing that led to the Nazi genocide of German Jews. As it is, Trump is feeding into the trend toward increased hate crimes against minorities in the UK with which I began this essay.

• The slight increase in violent crime, after two decades of steep decline, is completely unrelated to British Muslims.

• Violence is connected to poverty, but it is as connected to white Christian poverty as to any other kind.

• According to a spate of recent reports, accounts tied to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency—a Russian “troll factory”— used social media and Google during the 2016 electoral campaign to deepen political and racial tensions in the United States. The trolls, according to an interview with the Russian TV network TV Rain, were directed to focus their tweets and comments on socially divisive issues, like guns. But another consistent theme has been Russian trolls focusing on issues of race. Some of the Russian ads placed on Facebook apparently targeted Ferguson and Baltimore, which were rocked by protests after police killings of unarmed black men; another showed a black woman firing a rifle. Other ads played on fears of illegal immigrants and Muslims, and groups like Black Lives Matter.

• Except for the technology used, however, these tactics are not exactly new. They are natural outgrowths of a central component of covert influence campaigns, like the one Russia launched against the United States during the 2016 election: make discord louder; divide and conquer. “Covert influence campaigns don’t create divisions on the ground, they amplify divisions on the ground,” says Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and then became CIA director. During the Cold War, the Kremlin similarly sought to plant fake news and foment discontent, but was limited by the low-tech methods available at the time. “Before, the Soviets would plant information in Indian papers and hope it would get picked up by our papers,” says John Sipher, who ran the CIA’s Russia desk during George W. Bush’s first term. The Soviets planted misinformation about the AIDs epidemic as a Pentagon creation, according to Sipher, as well as the very concept of a nuclear winter. “Now, because of the technology, you can jump right in,” Sipher says.

• [...]

• The Soviets also exploited the oppression of Southern blacks for their own economic benefit. It was the height of the Great Depression, and the Soviet Union was positioning itself not only as a workers’ utopia, but as a racial utopia as well, one where ethnic, national, and religious divisions didn’t exist. In addition to luring thousands of white American workers, it brought over African-American workers and sharecroppers with the promise of the freedom to work and live unburdened by the violent restrictions of Jim Crow. In return, they would help the Soviets build their fledgling cotton industry in Central Asia. Several hundred answered the call, and though many eventually went back—or died in the Gulag—some of their descendants remain in Russia. One of Russia’s best-known television hosts, for instance, is Yelena Khanga, the granddaughter of Oliver Golden, an agronomist from Tuskeegee University who moved with his communist Jewish-American wife to Uzbekistan to develop the cotton industry there.

• Priscilla Presley has reportedly quit Scientology, the infamous religion which counts Tom Cruise among its members.

• Presley joined Scientology after the death of her husband Elvis in 1977, after reaching out to her friend John Travolta, who has also been a long time member of the church.

• A LOT OF GROSSNESS oozes out of Donald Trump’s White House. Yesterday, though, something happened that I’m a bit embarrassed to say left me stunned; I say embarrassed because nothing that the Trump team does should surprise anyone at this point, but they keep finding new ways to lower the bar on integrity and decency. In a snap press conference on Thursday, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly took time out to address the latest controversy that is enveloping his boss — not just the death of four troops in Niger, but Trump’s controversial call to the family of a fallen soldier, Sgt. La David Johnson.

• In that press conference, he took direct aim at Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, by recounting the dedication of a new FBI building in her district. Kelly, a retired general, recalled being present for that dedication and used his memory of the event to defame her character and integrity. She spoke at the dedication and he was not pleased. I’ll give background on that in a second, but first, read his words on her.

• With more than 800,000 young immigrants facing the possibility of deportation following President Donald Trump’s widely denounced decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program last month, immigrant rights groups took to social media and the streets Thursday to demand that their representatives work to pass a “clean” DREAM Act and reject the Trump administration’s “xenophobic” policy wish list.

• Haffkine was soon thereafter exonerated. Some called this incident the “Little Dreyfus Affair” (here, for Dreyfus Affair), suggesting that Haffkine’s Jewish background played a role in the handling of the accusations against him. While it does not appear that anti-Semitic motivations played an overt role, at least as reflected in the official record, the issue is still debated. In any event, by the time that Haffkine returned to India, the position at the Institute was occupied and so he moved to Calcutta, where he was appointed the director of the Biological Institute there, reportedly warmly welcomed by the local Indian staff, less so by his English colleagues. He retired in 1914 and returned to France.

• The home secretary, Amber Rudd, has been warned by a cross-party group of MEPs that her plans to force EU nationals to add their names to a register in the transition period immediately after Brexit would be illegal and unacceptable to the European parliament.

• The MEPs from across Europe have written to Rudd following her suggestions to the home affairs committee that she would expect EU nationals to have to register with the authorities in the period immediately after Britain left the EU. Brussels is planning to insist that a transition period after the UK leaves in March 2019 would involve Britain remaining under EU law and all its institutions, without exception.

• The MEPs wrote: “Is the Home Office suggesting that only non-UK EU citizens needs to register? Article 26 of the freedom of movement directive makes it very clear that residency cards are for everyone, or no one.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For years we’ve noted how if you want to really understand the dysfunction at the heart of the U.S. broadband industry, you should take a closer look at West Virginia. Like most states, West Virginia’s state legislature is so awash in ISP campaign contributions it literally lets incumbent ISPs write state law, only amplifying the existing lack of broadband competition in the state. So when the state received $126.3 million in broadband stimulus funds, it’s not particularly surprising that a report by the US Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General (pdf) found more than a few examples of fraud and waste.

• More specifically, Frontier was accused of buying and storing miles of unused fiber to drive up costs, as well as the use of various “loading” and “invoice processing” fees to milk taxpayers for an additional $5 million. The report’s findings come on the heels of previous reports that found Frontier and the state used taxpayer money on unused, overpowered routers and overpaid, redundant, and seemingly purposeless consultants. As is often the case with regulatory capture, efforts to hold anybody accountable for any of this have so far gone nowhere.

DRM

• If you’ve followed our series of posts about Denuvo, the DRM once claimed to be the end of video game piracy, you may have thought we had reached the end of its saga a couple of weeks ago when Denuvo-”protected” title Total War: Warhammer 2 was cracked and defeated within a day of its release. After all, once a game has been cracked in a time increment that can be measured in hours, you likely thought that was the finish line of Denuvo’s lifespan.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The CCIA, which represents global tech firms including Amazon, Google, and Netflix, is cautioning the US Government against blaming open source media players such as Kodi for streaming box piracy. Any enforcement actions should be aimed at those who misuse the software for infringing means, not those who code it.

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