● 10.27.17

● Links 27/10/2017: Kinect is Dead, SciPy Reaches 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 2:43 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Windows kept some of its worst malignancies intact, including its need to be rebooted half a dozen times on every install, but the past few versions have been fairly stable. I have Windows and Linux running side-by-side on my desk, and I can’t say that I notice the old Windows/Linux pattern, where Windows crashes at least once a day while Linux just goes (as the song says) “on and on…”

• I personally attribute this improvement in Windows to Linux. All that good stuff about competition, you know. So yes, every Windows user should say “thank you” to every Linux developer. It won’t happen, but I’ve long thought it should.

• Anyway, Linux and Windows are both far more usable by ordinary people than either one was 10 years ago. So why should I hate Windows or Microsoft? It doesn’t do any good.

• Chromebooks may be most popular in the classroom, but Google wants to ride that train out of schools and into the next phase of students’ lives. The Pixelbook is the manifestation of that idea, the piece of hardware that combines Google’s revamped design aesthetic and Internet-based software with the needs and wants of a younger generation.

• Google stopped selling the original Chromebook Pixel, but seemingly only because the company wants to shine the spotlight on its new Chrome OS laptop. No distractions, no other (potentially) cheaper options: if you’re someone who grew up using Chrome OS in school, this $999 convertible is the one you should get if you want to continue using Chrome OS later in life.

• The Linux laptop scene is perking up with ARM-based open hardware projects on the low end to high-end models rocking the latest Intel 8th Gen CPUs.

• Recently, Linux desktop usage has grown from 2.14 percent to 3.23 percent according to NetMarketShare. Much of this increase appears to have come from Linux-based Chromebooks, which are likely undercounted due in part to their widespread use in schools.

Server

• Kubernetes, an open source container management system, has surged in popularity in the past several years. Used by the largest enterprises in a wide range of industries for mission-critical tasks, it has become one of the biggest success stories in open source. How did that happen? And what is it about Kubernetes that explains its widespread adoption?

• A six-year veteran of continuously deploying swarms of microservices to various Platform-as-a-Service environments, Ben Dodd kicked off a recent London Continuous Delivery Meetup by asking: What is the relationship you want to have with your Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?

• Using the following metaphor of “Pizza-as-a-Service,” he says you’re only supposed to concentrate on what you want to accomplish, only focusing on the immediate task at hand: “Only care about our pizza, everything else is someone else’s concern.”

• I’ve been speaking about security in DevOps—also known as “DevSecOps”*—at a few conferences and seminars recently, and I’ve started to preface the discussion with a quick question: “Who here understands what a container is?” Usually I don’t see many hands going up,** so I’ve started briefly explaining what containers*** are before going much further.

• To be clear: You can do DevOps without containers, and you can do DevSecOps without containers. But containers lend themselves so well to the DevOps approach—and to DevSecOps, it turns out—that even though it’s possible to do DevOps without them, I’m going to assume that most people will use containers.

Kernel Space

• Oracle storage architect has called for Oracle to make the ZFS filesystem a first class part of Linux and says conversations have taken place within Big Red to consider the possibility.

• Speaking at the OpenZFS Developer Summit , Maybee said the decline of on-premises storage means ZFS’ future inside Oracle is uncertain. Oracle’s recent decision to spend less time on Solaris development also means ZFS needs less work, he said.

• While the filesystem underpins Oracle’s software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, it’s invisible to users.

• Maybee thinks ZFS is good enough that it deserves to be widely available, hence his wish that “What I would like to see happen inside Oracle is for ZFS becomes a core part of Linux, not an add-on part of Linux.”

• Any discussion involving the open source software cannot be completed without the mention of Linux kernel. This collaborative effort has become one of the most popular and successful open source development projects. If we talk about the current state, the Linux operating system runs 90% of the public cloud, has 62% embedded market share, and 99% supercomputer market share. Moreover, it powers 82% smartphones and nine of the top ten public clouds.

• With the help of regular updates in the form of stable releases every nine to ten weeks, Linux kernel significantly keeps improving hardware support. You can read about kernel’s working in our dedicated article. Last month, this project completed its 26th birthday. Recently, The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization which takes care of kernel development, released its 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report.

• Intel developers have been working on a new user-space file-system designed for persistent memory. This user-space file-system is designed to be high-performance and does not make use of FUSE.

• A new release is now available of Beignet, Intel’s open-source project providing Linux OpenCL compute support for their Iris/HD/UHD Graphics products.

• Out today is Beignet 1.3.2 and it basically boils down to being a point release. Beignet 1.3.2 has some new Intel Gemini Lake graphics IDs added in, LLVM 4.0 / LLVM 5.0 is officially supported, introduction of the cl_intel_required_subgroup_size extension, and an assortment of other bug fixes.

• The extent of growth of the use of Linux is mirrored in the latest State of Linux report which says that the operating system runs 90% of public cloud workloads, 99% of supercomputers, and has 62% of the embedded market.

• Linux also runs 82% of smartphones and nine of the top 10 public clouds, the report, compiled by developers Greg Kroah-Hartman and Jonathan Corbet, says. The report is published by the Linux Foundation.

• With a one-day delay, the sixth Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 4.14 LTS kernel arrived for public testers, announced by Linus Torvalds himself.

• The delay happened because Linus Torvalds had some Internet problems, and this made the Linux kernel 4.14 RC6 milestone a bit bigger than expected. This translates to the fact that it’s no longer clear if the next long-term supported kernel series will arrive on time, on November 5, 2017, or if it will get delayed with one week.

Graphics Stack

• Today’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti announcement is hardly a surprise given all the recent leaks about this new card, but NVIDIA announced it today and will be shipping in early November.

• The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti features 2432 CUDA cores compared to 1920 with the non-Ti 1070, a slightly higher base clock and the same boost clock speed, and 8GB of GDDR5 video memory.

• Following AMD on Twitter teasing new Ryzen announcements the past few days, today is expected to be the launch day for the new Ryzen Mobile hardware up to now known as “Raven Ridge”.

• We weren’t briefed ahead of time on the Ryzen Mobile launch and are not under any NDA for today’s event. We do know that it’s the Ryzen Mobile 5 2500U and Ryzen Mobile 7 2700U launching today and they are what was known as the “Raven Ridge” codename up until now with these mobile parts featuring Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics.

• Two developers from the Pengutronix embedded Linux company out of Germany presented at this week’s Embedded Linux Conference in Europe. There they talked about zero-copy video streaming on embedded systems, and as part of that, the Etnaviv open-source graphics driver.

• Etnaviv for new Phoronix readers is the long-standing effort providing open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver support for Vivante graphics. Developers at Pengutronix have been among those working on the Etnaviv driver stack, which currently consists of an in-tree kernel DRM driver and Gallium3D driver in Mesa.

Benchmarks

• One step below AMD’s current top-end EPYC 7601 server processor is the EPYC 7551. The EPYC 7551 costs around $800 USD less than the 7601 while still being a 32 core / 64 thread part but with slightly lower clock frequencies. In this article is a look at the EPYC 7251 / 7351P / 7401P / 7551 / 7601 Ubuntu Linux performance compared to various Intel Xeon CPUs in our lab.

Applications

• Hi, everyone! How many of us are still searching for music players? I’m glad to be of service. Today I introduce to you, an app born after the seeming death of another music player, Songbird.

• Nightingale is a beautifully designed open source and cross-platform music player built with the aim of playing various types of audio formats while being aesthetically pleasing to behold.

Proprietary

• Crello is a free cloud-based graphic design software and photo editor that can be used to create professional flyers, posters, pictures, cards, magazines, ebooks, etc.

• For fans of the Lightworks commercial-grade non-linear video editing software, their first beta update of the 14.1 series is now available.

• A new beta release of Lightworks, the professional-grade video editor, is available to download. It features various improvements, including GoPro support.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Few games catch me completely by surprise with their beauty as well as their gameplay, action-adventure game Figment [GOG, Steam] is one such title.

• Who doesn’t love games? We all play games no matter what our age is but there is a thing. We all search for the best gaming distro for our PC’s. Gone are the days when the games on linux were hard to get and gaming distro were hard to spot. Today I am going to mention some of the best gaming distro for Linux. Also check out the part 1 of this article we covered here. Without wasting more time let’s get started on the list.

• The developer told me they’ve been using Inkscape, Krita, Godot Engine, GIMP and also Blender to build the game. It’s inspired by games like Game Dev Tycoon, but it sounds like it will feature much more in-depth features. You will have the ability to buy and sell studios, decorate your studio, hire developers/designers/testers and so on.

• AER Memories of Old [Steam, GOG] is an open world adventure game, where you’re able to transform into a bird and explore. It just released with same-day Linux support.

• High Hell [Steam, Official Site], from the developer of Heavy Bullets, is an arcade-action first-person shooter with a rather colourful art-style is coming to Linux.

• Bomber Crew [Steam] is a cute simulation game about training and managing the crew aboard a bomber, it’s actually pretty good.

• Niche – a genetics survival game [Steam, GOG, Official Site] is a turn-based strategy game where you shape the future of your species and it’s now out in full.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Want to run the latest GNOME applications on Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 17.10? Actually, not just Ubuntu, many other distributions such as Fedora, Linux Mint and Debian that support snap.

• We have now packaged a pretty extensive list of the latest GNOME apps as snaps and provided them in the Snap store. Any of these snaps will work just fine on any distribution that supports snaps.

• You can now update the firmware just by clicking on a button in GNOME Software when using fwupd >= 1.0.0. Working with Jabra to add the required DFU quirks to fwupd and to get legal clearance to upload the firmware has been a pleasure. Their hardware is well designed and works really well in Linux (with the latest firmware), and they’ve been really helpful providing all the specifications we needed to get the firmware upgrade working reliably. We’ll hopefully be adding some different Jabra devices in the coming months to the LVFS too.

• Today I did a talk regarded to GTK on Fedora and GNOME. Thanks to the group Codefiis for organizing the workshop at the Faculty of Industrial and Systems Engineering UNAC.

• Running GTK3 applications on a KDE Plasma Wayland session will soon look better with GNOME’s toolkit now supporting the KDE server-side decorations.

• GNOME on Wayland relies upon client-side decorations (CSD) while KDE’s approach to Wayland support has been with server-side decorations (SSD), as was hotly debated a few years back.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Open source opens a space for bright ideas and the accomplishment of projects – together. The most impressive example is probably the history of Linux. Starting in 1991 as the invention of Finnish student Linus Torvalds, today Linux is the foundation for many of our everyday tools: from operating systems for PCs and servers (such as SUSE or Debian) to smart-phones (Android) and other mobile devices.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Open blocker bugs are preventing Fedora 27 from being released next week.

• Even after the Fedora 27 Beta delays, developers were trying hard to get F27 out on time, but that simply isn’t going to happen this cycle. At today’s Go/No-Go meeting, they decided it will be delayed at least one week.

• There are still a few open blocker bugs and as such will have another meeting next Thursday to see if it’s ready for release at that point.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth has confirmed that plan for an IPO for Canonical is in progress.

• Earlier this week, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth named the next major release of the Ubuntu Linux operating system as “Bionic Beaver,” and now the Ubuntu Kernel team shares some insights of what will be the default Linux kernel of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• Ubuntu 17.10: Unity is gone and gnome shell is in as the default desktop. But how does it function? What about the Linux software and how does it stack up against competing Linux OS? Will Unity users be happy? In this review, I take a look at Ubuntu 17.10 and try to answer those questions.

• Thinger.io is a Spanish start up founded in 2015 who aim to enable any developer or organisation to develop IoT applications across a range of sectors, with examples including smart cities, Industry 4.0 and energy monitoring. Thinger.io has already grown to have 10,000 registered users of their platform but with such growing demand, they needed a quicker way to deliver their systems and applications. With a philosophy of using flexible and open technologies, Thinger.io discovered snaps as their ideal solution. Using Snapcraft.io for building snaps has decreased their development time dramatically and streamlined the time taken to release new packages.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre announced that the upcoming Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia” operating system is the last release to ship with a KDE edition.

• So, believe it or not, Linux Mint is dropping the KDE Edition after the release of Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia” next month. Clement Lefebvre said that he and his team want to concentrate more on making Linux Mint a better GNU/Linux operating system, and they no longer want to focus on the Linux Mint KDE Edition.

• “With Linux Mint 18.3, we’ll release one more KDE edition. I wanted this announcement to come before the release,” said Clement Lefebvre. “It will hurt its popularity of course, but I wanted to give users time, either to react right now or to take their time, upgrade and adapt to this later on. I’m sure this edition will be missed, and I hope its users understand our decision.”

• Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has authored a new blog post detailing plans about the project’s future. He said the Linux Mint 19 will only be available in Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavours and that the KDE spin will be discontinued. Mint 18.3 will still be available with KDE out of the box.

• Last month, we told you that Linux Mint 18.3 will be codenamed Sylvia and gave you a preview of what features you should expect from the upcoming release. While there isn’t any specific release date fixed for Mint 18.3, we can expect to land somewhere in December 2017 with Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS base.

• With November fast approaching, the Linux Mint team is getting ready to push out version 18.3, the final release before Linux Mint 19. For a point release, it’s got some pretty nice changes included with it like support for Flatpak, and a better Private Internet Access client in the Software Manager to improve the experience for customers of that VPN service.

• In a blog post written Oct 25, the Linux Mint team has announced that Linux Mint will be ending the KDE flavor after 18.3 is released.

• “In continuation with what’s been done in the past, Linux Mint 18.3 will feature a KDE edition, but it will be the last release to do so.”

Devices/Embedded

• Dek Italia’s hackable, $249 “Telegea Smart Hub” IoT gateway is built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, and offers sensor, serial, I2C, and XBee I/O.

• Dek Italia’s Telegea Smart Hub is built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3), and is available as an SBC or as a 155 x 86 x 60mm “TSH-CM R3B0” DIN-rail system. Applications range from a “simple data logging device to a complete smart home solution,” says the Pomezia, Italy based company.

Android

• VIA’s “SOM-9X20” module runs Android 7.1.1 on a quad-core Snapdragon 820, with 4GB LPDDR4, 64GB eMMC, WiFi, BT, GPS, and an optional dev board.

• VIA Technologies has launched its VIA SOM-9X20 computer-on-module with an Android 7.1.1 BSP running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820. The SODIMM form factor, 82 x 45mm module, which is accompanied by a SOM-DB2 carrier board, joins other Snapdragon 820-based COMs like Mistral’s 51 x 26mm 820 Nano SOM, iWave’s SMARC 2.0 Snapdragon 820 SOM, and Intrinsyc’s 82 x 42mm Open-Q 820, among others.

Free Software/Open Source

• The prpl Foundation, an open-source, community-driven, not-for-profit consortium with a focus enabling the security and interoperability of embedded devices for the smart society of the future, has today announced that Fon has joined the Foundation. As the world’s leading WiFi software company, Fon joins prpl to accelerate the development of a common, open-source-based software framework which will enable deployment of new carrier services for the digital home and carrier WiFi hotspots.

• Next Generation Optical Networking (NGON) — The future for service providers seems to be a mixture of open source software and good old standardization, which means vendors are going to have to get used to the open source way of life, one AT&T executive believes.

• AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) does still need vendors to play the role of technology innovators. But “the way that vendors provide that in the future will be different from how they provide that today,” said Amy Wheelus, AT&T’s vice president of cloud and D2 platform integration.

• I often get called in to help companies make decisions about their open source strategy. They want to release key parts of their software as open source, but they need some help figuring out the best way to make it happen. I always ask them the same question:

• Why? Why are you planning to open any of your code?

• They rarely have a good answer. They’ve already decided that this is the right decision, because a board member, founder, or customer has said it’s necessary, and they are just trying to figure out how to do it. But it’s impossible to build a strategy to accomplish your goals if you’re unsure what they are.

• Are you trying to build a community? To get public review of core functionality? To grow adoption? Something else entirely? By now most people have realized that open sourcing software isn’t a route to magically get free contributions so you don’t have to write your own software, but there are plenty of other myths around it.

• The term open source gets thrown around a lot, and most of the time, the people saying it don’t even know what it means. The best way to think of it like a book everyone can edit and make their own version of it. The source code is available to all, which creates the option for developers to look at the code and come up with their own modifications. These modifications won’t necessarily be adopted, but they are at least out there for the community to consider and vote upon.

• Most of us get the principle of cryptocurrency, but even the most tech-savvy may struggle with the specifics. One name that is often used when discussing this increasingly popular trend is Ethereum.

• Ethereum is an open-source platform that lets you build your own decentralised applications, and earn a tradeable cryptocurrency called Ether. These apps are all built using blockchain technology, and Ether can be used to pay for services on the network.

Events

• Of more than 200 subjects discussed by more than 4,500 nerds, teachers, students and interested in new technologies, coming from various parts of Brazil, neighboring countries Argentina and Paraguay and outside countries, during three days of the 14th Latin American Congress of Free Software and Technologies (Latinoware), held last week at the Itaipu Power Plant in Foz do Iguaçu, one of the themes that most attracted public attention was how free robotics can improve education, especially in children.

• FOSDEM is a free software event that offers open source communities a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. It is renown for being highly developer-oriented and brings together 8000+ participants from all over the world. It is held in the city of Brussels (Belgium).

• Day two of Open Source summit for me started a bit slow for lack of sleep. The first talk I went to was on “Developer tools for Kubernetes” by Michelle Noorali and Matt Butcher. Essentially the two of them showed two projects (Draft and Brigade to help ease development apps for Kubernetes clusters. Draft here is the tool to use for developing long running, daemon like apps. Brigade has the goal of making event driven app development easier – almost like providing shell script like composability to Kubernetes deployed pipelines.

• I am wrapping up the ideas after the Google mentor summit 2017. In spite of having mentored my first GSoC student in 2008, this is the first time I ever attended this summit. There were ~300 mentors representative of many different open source communities. A triple-concentrate of all the main open projects in a not-too-noisy environment (unlike e.g. FOSDEM) – all in all, it has been a very pleasant experience!

• Google does a great job supporting the open source community, which is appropriate, as the company leverages the code too. The search giant gives back to the community through programs such as “Google Code-in.” If you aren’t familiar, it is an educational contest which teaches children about open source by having them working on an actual established project. Today, the Android-maker reveals the mentors that will be participating in Google Code-in 2017.

• Samsung Electronics will hold ‘Samsung OpenSource Conference’ at Samsung Electronics Seoul R & D campus in Ueon-dong, Seoul from October 25 to 26.

• The Samsung Open Source Conference, which has been held every year since 2014, is the largest open source conference in Korea with over 1,000 developers participating in the program every year.

• They are also awed by the conference itself. This year well over 3,000 people shelled out somewhere around a couple of hundred bucks each to attend the two-day event, which took place earlier this week and utilized more than 20 meeting rooms at the Raleigh Convention Center to house over 200 sessions.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• I attended the 5th Chrome Dev Summit this week. The talks were all recorded and are available via the schedule (the keynote and leadership panel on day 1 are perhaps of broadest interest and highest bang-for-buck viewing value). It was a high quality, well-produced event with an intimate feel – I was very surprised when Robert Nyman told me it was over 700 people! I appreciated the good vegetarian food options and noticed and was very impressed by the much-better-than-typical-tech-conferences gender representation and code of conduct visibility.

Databases

• AWS on Tuesday announced the general availability of Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. The service is now fully compatible with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, the company said. AWS also announced that customers migrating to Amazon Aurora from another database can use the AWS Database Migration Service free of charge for the next six months. Amazon Aurora is a cloud-optimized relational database that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Integration and analytics vendor Tibco has released its open source event-driven microgateway along with a new version of Project Flogo for deep learning microservices. Nio

Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Compiler Collection currently uses -O0 as the default optimization level when no other optimization level is passed. An ARM developer is proposing the default optimization level be changed to -Og.

Licensing/Legal

• The Linux Foundation has 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.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Idaho National Laboratory recently expanded its library of MOOSE-based, open-source modeling and simulation software with the MASTODON code. This code helps scientists and engineers design buildings and other structures to better withstand seismic events.

• MASTODON is the short name for the Multi-hazard Analysis for STOchastic time-DOmaiN phenomena. It is a finite element application that calculates the realistic response of soil and structures to earthquakes in three dimensions. With capabilities to simulate “source-to-site” earthquake energy release, the software tool enables detailed analyses of earthquake fault rupture, nonlinear seismic wave propagation, and nonlinear soil-structure interactions.

Programming/Development

• While it may be true that the best code is self-documenting, even the clearest written source code requires adequate documentation in order to be quickly parsed and understood by human readers.

• The SciPy project has announced the release of SciPy 1.0. The “Python-based ecosystem of open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering” has been around for 16 years since version 0.1 and, in reality, the 1.0 designation is overdue. “Some key project goals, both technical (e.g. Windows wheels and continuous integration) and organisational (a governance structure, code of conduct and a roadmap), have been achieved recently. Many of us are a bit perfectionist, and therefore are reluctant to call something ’1.0′ because it may imply that it’s ‘finished’ or ‘we are 100% happy with it’. This is normal for many open source projects, however that doesn’t make it right. We acknowledge to ourselves that it’s not perfect, and there are some dusty corners left (that will probably always be the case). Despite that, SciPy is extremely useful to its users, on average has high quality code and documentation, and gives the stability and backwards compatibility guarantees that a 1.0 label imply.” Beyond the Windows wheels (a binary distribution format) mentioned above, there are some other new features in the release: continuous-integration coverage for macOS and Windows, a set of new ordinary differential equation solvers and a unified interface to them, two new trust region optimizers and a new linear programming method, many new BLAS and LAPACK functions were wrapped, and more.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Kinect is some serious piece of technology which debuted with Xbox 360. But, certainly, the device couldn’t achieve the bright future that Microsoft had originally hoped. Probably, Microsoft wasn’t that successful in shaping Kinect as an alternative to hard-core gaming that revolves around gamepads. Microsoft has stopped the production of the Kinect devices.

Health/Nutrition

• Saline lakes, like the Caspian Sea, the Dead Sea, the Salton Sea, and of course the Great Salt Lake, have served as recreational playgrounds and tourist attractions, supported thriving fishing and shipping industries, and yielded minerals to be extracted for commercial and industrial applications. A slightly less quantifiable benefit they used to grant was providing habitats for waterbirds.

• Citing public health risks, New York is banning vaping in public indoor places—which is already the case for traditional cigarettes. The new law, following a host of similar regulations tied to e-cigarettes across the nation, kicks in next month after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation Monday.

• “These products are marketed as a healthier alternative to cigarettes but the reality is they also carry long-term risks to the health of users and those around them,” Cuomo said in a signing statement. “This measure closes another dangerous loophole in the law, creating a stronger, healthier New York for all.”

• Vaping is now prohibited in New York restaurants, bars, and other indoor public places like workspaces. The measure does not apply to people who want to use e-cigarettes in private homes, hotel rooms, or retail tobacco stores that permit smoking.

• A judge has thrown out a $417 million verdict against Johnson & Johnson, which came about when a jury sided with a terminally ill plaintiff who said that Johnson’s baby powder caused her ovarian cancer.

• On Friday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Maren Nelson granted (PDF) J&J’s motion for a new trial (PDF). The plaintiff, Eva Echeverria, won $70 million in compensatory damages and $347 million in punitive damages following a trial. Echeverria’s trial date was accelerated because of her poor medical condition, and she has since died.

Security

• A new strain of Windows ransomware, dubbed Bad Rabbit, is spreading in eastern Europe through drive-by attacks, the security firm Kaspersky Lab reported overnight.

• Beaumont went on to say that Bad Rabbit relies on hard-coded credentials that are commonly used in enterprise networks for file sharing and takes aim at a particularly vulnerable portion of infected computers’ hard drives known as the master boot record. A malicious file called infpub.dat appears to be able to use the credentials to allow the Bad Rabbit to spread to other Windows computers on the same local network, Kaspersky Labs’ blog post added. In a second blog post, Eset said the malware also uses the Mimikatz network administrative tool to harvest credentials from the affected systems.

• Yesterday we broke the crazy story of how the DOJ issued a subpoena to Twitter attempting to identify five Twitter users, not because of anything they had done, but because someone else the DOJ disliked — a security researcher named Justin Shafer — had tweeted an emoji at them in response to a discussion about a different case. You can read all the details in that original post, in case you missed it yesterday. There was so much craziness in that story that I didn’t even get to cover all of it. Some of those named in the subpoena have posted their thoughts — including Ken “Popehat” White and Keith Lee. I suggest reading both, as the subpoena directed at each of them was particularly silly, given that both freely make their identities public. The DOJ didn’t seem to do even the slightest research into the accounts it was demanding info on, or it would have known just how easy it was to “unmask” White and Lee.

• Quantum computing uses the power of atoms to perform memory and processing tasks and remains a theoretical concept. However, it is widely believed that its creation is possible. Most experts now agree that the creation of a quantum computer is simply a matter of engineering, and that the theoretical application will happen. Optimistic estimates for commercialization by the private sector vary between 5 and 15 years, while more conservative estimates by academics put it at 15-25 years.

• Docker-style containers aren’t just a way to deploy software more quickly or flexibly. They can also be a way to make software more secure. Automatic analysis of the software components that go into containers, behavioral policies that span container clusters and multiple application versions, and innovative new developments in tracking and managing vulnerability data are just some of the ways containers are bolstering security for the entire application lifecycle.

• How much of this comes out of the box, though, is another story. Container products provide the basics, but not always more than that, leaving more advanced monitoring or management solely in the hands of the admin. Here are four recently revamped products and services that bring additional kinds of security to containers, both in the cloud and in your own datacenter.

• The NSA worker’s computer ran a home version of Kaspersky AV that had enabled a voluntary service known as Kaspersky Security Network. When turned on, KSN automatically uploads new and previously unknown malware to company Kaspersky Lab servers. The setting eventually caused the previously undetected NSA malware to be uploaded to Kaspersky Lab servers, where it was then reviewed by a company analyst.

• Today this blog post turned up on Hacker News, titled “Obscurity is a Valid Security Layer”. It makes some excellent points on the distinction between good and bad obscurity and it gives an example of good obscurity with SSH.

• It’s been just over a year since the world witnessed some of the world’s top online Web sites being taken down for much of the day by “Mirai,” a zombie malware strain that enslaved “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as wireless routers, security cameras and digital video recorders for use in large-scale online attacks.

• Now, experts are sounding the alarm about the emergence of what appears to be a far more powerful strain of IoT attack malware — variously named “Reaper” and “IoTroop” — that spreads via security holes in IoT software and hardware. And there are indications that over a million organizations may be affected already.

• Reaper isn’t attacking anyone yet. For the moment it is apparently content to gather gloom to itself from the darkest reaches of the Internet. But if history is any teacher, we are likely enjoying a period of false calm before another humbling IoT attack wave breaks.

• Despite early reports that there was no use of National Security Agency-developed exploits in this week’s crypto-ransomware outbreak, research released by Cisco Talos suggests that the ransomware worm known as “Bad Rabbit” did in fact use a stolen Equation Group exploit revealed by Shadowbrokers to spread across victims’ networks. The attackers used EternalRomance, an exploit that bypasses security over Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing connections, enabling remote execution of instructions on Windows clients and servers. The code closely follows an open source Python implementation of a Windows exploit that used EternalRomance (and another Equation Group tool, EternalSynergy), leveraging the same methods revealed in the Shadowbrokers code release. NotPetya also leveraged this exploit.

• Eternalromance/Eternalsynergy exploit a bug in Microsoft’s SMB protocol. This bug was discovered or purchased by the NSA, who chose to withhold its existence from Microsoft, deliberately ensuring that the bug would remain intact on computers worldwide, so the NSA could attack them at will. This doctrine is called “NOBUS” — “No One But Us” — and it only works if no one ever independently rediscovers the NSA’s bugs, and if the NSA never loses control of its exploits. Both have been known to happen.

• This week a new breed of ransomware, which locks down computers until a victim pays a fee, ripped throughout Russia, Ukraine, and a selection of other countries. The ransomware, known as Bad Rabbit, had a trick up its sleeve: it utilized a previously leaked exploit from the U.S. National Security Agency, giving the malware more power to spread throughout networks.

• Computer algorithms have gotten much better at recognizing patterns, like specific animals or people’s faces, allowing software to automatically categorize large image collections. But we’ve come to rely on some things that computers can’t do well. Algorithms can’t match their image recognition to semantic meaning, so today you can ensure a human’s present by asking them to pick out images of street signs. And algorithms don’t do especially well at recognizing when familiar images are distorted or buried in noise, either, which has kept us relying on text-based CAPTCHAs, the distorted text used to verify a human is interacting with Web services.

• A US government hacker who lost National Security Agency malware after stashing it on his home computer had himself been hacked when he downloaded pirate software, Kaspersky Lab has suggested.

Defence/Aggression

• According to a National Security Agency (NSA) report released by The Intercept, the rocket attacks in March 2013 in the Syrian capital Damascus were ordered by a member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Salman bin Sultan, to help mark the second anniversary of the Syrian revolution. The report said Salman had provided explosives and other weaponry to Opposition forces and instructed them to “light up Damascus” and “flatten” the airport.

• First, we fought for the 9/11 Commission so that we might have an independent investigation into the attacks, learn lessons, fix problems, and hold those in government accountable for their failures that contributed to the vast devastation of that horrific day. Next, as an expressly granted right given to us by Congress in the creation of the 2001 Airline Stabilization Act (more commonly known as the 9/11 Victims’ Compensation Fund), we attempted to hold all the co-conspirators of the 9/11 attacks accountable in a federal court of law. Notably, to the 9/11 Families, the definition of “co-conspirators” was always a “both-and” situation, not the more exclusionary “either-or” scenario. In other words, we wanted any and all of those who played a hand (however large or small) in the murder of our loved ones held accountable.

• [...]

• Fifteen years later, the 9/11 families are still trying to hold the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia accountable in a federal court of law for the mass murder of our loved ones. And, unfortunately for us, the Kingdom seems to still remain “in favor” with the U.S. government — which is probably why our path to justice has taken so long and why our court case against the Saudis is constantly getting delayed and dismissed by the Judge.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Nix reportedly told a third party that he had reached out to Assange about working together to release Clinton’s emails, the Daily Beast reported, citing two sources familiar with a congressional investigation into ties between Trump’s team and the Kremlin. Assange, however, rejected the request.

• Declassified documents in the Central Intelligence Agency’s archives show that while the CIA was looking to include the Freedom Of Information Act in its war on leaks, the National Security Agency was seriously considering using the Espionage Act to target target Puzzle Palace author James Bamford for using FOIA.

• While Bamford has briefly discussed this on a handful of occasions, the declassified memos and briefings from NSA confirm that this was more than just an intimidation tactic or a passing thought – the NSA had truly wanted to jail a journalist for his use of public records. When the Agency determined that this was unlikely to happen, they moved on to exploring other legal avenues which could be used to punish Bamford for his FOIA work.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• On Tuesday, Italy’s economic development minister said the country will commit to phasing out coal in its energy mix, ending all use by 2025 according to Argus Media.

• The country follows the UK, Canada, and France in its pledge to end coal use in the coming years. For some countries, the pledge is more meaningful than for others.

• In the UK, coal provided around 30 percent of the country’s electricity in 2014, the year before the government pledged to end coal power generation by 2025. Early this year, the UK had its first 24 hours with no coal-fired generation since 1882. The news came along with data from 2016 that reported coal-generated electricity made up just nine percent of the country’s energy mix.

• Two weeks ago, battery makers Tesla and Sonnen pledged to build microgrids and deliver batteries to hospitals and other critical infrastructure in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which wiped out power to nearly all of the island’s electricity customers. Today, Tesla tweeted that Hospital del Niño, a children’s hospital in Puerto Rico, was the “first of many solar+storage projects going live.” The company didn’t immediately respond to requests for comments on the size of the installation or how much it cost.)

• But Tesla’s not the only company working on putting renewable energy in Puerto Rico. In an e-mail to Ars, a Sonnen spokesperson Hilary Donnell said that the company’s first microgrid in Puerto Rico would go live sometime next week, with 3 to 5 Sonnen microgrids serving communities on the island by mid-November.

• The US Government Accountability Office is a nonpartisan organization that performs analysis and investigations for the Senate and House. Recently, two senators—Maine Republican Susan Collins and Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell—asked it to look into what has become a contentious political issue: the government’s response to climate change. The report that resulted suggests that the US is already spending money to respond to climate change, and it will likely spend more as the Earth continues to warm. But it suggests that the US has no plans for figuring out how best to minimize these costs.

• It’s a message that’s unlikely to go over well with either the current administration or the Republican majority in either house of Congress.

• Over the last few decades, a warming Atlantic Ocean has produced a number of very powerful hurricanes, some of which retained strength much further north than usual. Fortunately for the US, however, few of them made landfall on the continental US, leading to talk of a “hurricane hiatus” that came to a decisive close this year.

• A new analysis of New York City’s hurricane risk suggests that a similar fate might be in store for the city. While warming waters will produce more powerful storms in the future, climate models suggest that they’ll generally track further offshore of the city, a combination that ends up cancelling itself out. Unfortunately, due to rising oceans, the risk of flooding will keep going up, with what was once a 500-year flood occurring every 25 years by mid-century.

• A University of North Dakota journalism professor said Thursday he’s quitting because the school would not let him conduct seminars on the Dakota Access oil pipeline protest.

• Mark Trahant said he was put in charge of a journalism lecture series and proposed two pipeline protest topics that were rejected. Last year he wanted to hear from reporters who covered the protests, and this year he suggested talking about how the protest played out on social media.

• “The whole of Puerto Rico is like this. I don’t think we are the only ones like this… We will survive,” Jose Torres, a resident of Puerto Rico, told an NPR reporter in late September. As a diabetic without access to medicine, he’s been working hard to keep up his blood sugar levels. Not an easy task when his fridge and stove don’t have power.

• It has been almost a month since Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Since then, most of the island’s 3.4 million residents have been without electricity or running water. The power grid was effectively destroyed, with only 7 percent back online to date. This means that the entire system, from generation to distribution, will need to be rebuilt. The question now is: how?

Finance

• The U.K. has been “screwed” in Brexit negotiations because it triggered Article 50 too soon, the country’s former EU ambassador said.

• Ivan Rogers, who resigned as the U.K.’s permanent representative to the EU in January, also warned that a “bloody” no-deal scenario could be set in motion as early as December, and could end up with the two sides in a “trade war” and wanting to “knock chunks out of each other.”

• The Koch Brothers talk a good game against “special-interest handouts” and “corporate welfare”—and support eliminating popular tax deductions that benefit the middle class—but they are happy to squeeze out every tax break they can get for their corporate operations.

• When their Koch Industries Georgia-Pacific unit decided to build a new lumber plant in Talladega, Alabama, the company asked for and received a generous handout from taxpayers.

• On October 9, the Talladega City Council approved a $5.2 million tax abatement for the facility, which is slated to open in 2018.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• There is something perverse about the fact that President Donald Trump, the exuberant and all-too-successful spinner of conspiracy theories, and deeply ignorant of American history besides, will oversee the release of the remaining classified files related to the assassination of his presidential predecessor, John F. Kennedy.

• In 1992, Congress approved, and former President George H.W. Bush signed, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. They were prodded by an Oliver Stone film on the killing released the year prior and the resulting flurry of public interest. The act mandated the disclosure of all assassination-related records no later than 25 years after its signing, by October 26, 2017 — this Thursday.

• This video and text post was “sponsored” – that is, someone from the prime minister’s office paid to promote the post as an advertisement.

• In light of recent Russia-related disclosures, American politicians have begun weighing in on the lack of transparency in the world of politically motivated online ads. On Tuesday, Twitter chose to get ahead of potential political and legal action by announcing plans to open its advertising disclosure process in a big way.

• A blog post titled “New Transparency for Ads on Twitter” detailed coming changes to “political” and “issue-based” advertising on the site. Political ads received a specific focus, and new rules will apply to any ads that fall under the FEC’s definition of political or “electioneering” ads. The interesting stuff here is how much data Twitter will force any political advertisers to disclose, including the following: exactly how much money a single advertiser has spent, other ad campaigns run by the same organization, and all targeting demographics (gender, age, geography).

• Late President Ronald Reagan’s son has called President Donald Trump “a deeply damaged human being.”

• Ron Reagan Jr, a radio host and political commentator, was speaking on MSNBC’s “Hardball” programme when he called Mr Trump a “sociopathic, malignant narcissist.”

• He went as far as comparing the President to a stain on a carpet that the Electoral College has “vomited” up.

• House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said in a joint statement that they are unsatisfied with how the probe into Clinton’s private e-mail server concluded. Among other things, the chairmen want to know why the bureau publicly said it was investigating Clinton while keeping silent that it was looking into President Donald Trump’s campaign associates and their connections to Russia.

• A matter of huge political import is taking place in scores of cities throughout the country. From Chicago to Charlottesville, San Diego to St. Louis, metropolitan areas big and small are making their best pitches to Amazon to move its second headquarters to their towns. These pitches typically involve some combination of groveling by city officials (New York City lit the city up orange) and massive tax breaks (New Jersey is offering $7 billion), all in hopes of reaping a massive economic bonanza from the relocation.

• For almost a year, Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, has struggled to hide the truth about his efforts to lobby the Trump administration to make it much harder for Americans to vote. Part of that struggle ended today when a federal court ordered excerpts of Kris Kobach’s testimony disclosed along with other documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in our challenge to his restrictive voter registration regime.

• The unsealed materials confirm what many have suspected: Kobach has a ready-made plan to gut core voting rights protections enshrined in federal law. And he has been covertly lobbying Trump’s team and other officials from day one to sell them the falsehood that noncitizens are swinging elections.

• A server and its backups, believed to be key to a pending federal lawsuit filed against Georgia election officials, was thoroughly deleted according to e-mails recently released under a public records request.

• Georgia previously came under heavy scrutiny after a researcher discovered significant problems with his home state’s voting system. A lawsuit soon followed in state court, asking the court to annul the results of the June 20 special election for Congress and to prevent Georgia’s existing computer-based voting system from being used again. The case, Curling v. Kemp, was filed in Fulton County Superior Court on July 3.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israeli organization that exposes incitement in the Palestinian media, says Youtube is censoring the organization by shutting down their account.

• “YouTube closed down Palestinian Media Watch’s main account, making hundreds of important videos inaccessible to governments, think tanks and media who find this material of critical importance,” the organization said on its website.

• As it always goes, the freedoms of the people are once again sacrificed to the whims of politicians. Pakistan’s problem of missing activists, which was renewed by the arrests of two Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supporters, continues again with Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal purporting to further this problem by developing a policy to patrol social media.

• Internet companies like Facebook are abusing their power to demonetize people and content they don’t like and are in cahoots with the US deep state to censor the news, says investigative journalist Martin Summers.

• Facebook users in Bolivia, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Cambodia, and Guatemala have hit back at the social media giant, which is trialing a scheme to charge news outlets for their posts. It could have a significant impact on the organizations using the social network to distribute information and material.

• Today, the situation is no better. Take the case of Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher, who recently received death threats and was suspended from teaching due to his well-founded recognition of the structural origins of mass shootings in the United States.

• For many years now, we’ve pointed out that whenever people — generally legacy content companies and politicians — started pushing for internet platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter to “police” content, that no matter what those platforms did, it was never going to be enough. For example, after years of resisting, Google finally caved to the demands of the MPAA and the RIAA and started using DMCA notices as a signal for its ranking mechanism. This was the first time that Google ever allowed outside actors to directly have some level of control in how Google ranked them in organic search. And in doing so, we feared two things would happen: (1) it would just encourage others to start demanding similar powers over Google and (2) even those to whom Google caved would complain that the company wasn’t doing enough. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened.

• Rozcomnadzor has been featured in our pages often as of late. The Russian agency tasked with censoring the internet for any number of reasons including copyright, discussions about illicit behavior, and supposed security risks from anonymous speech, has actually proven itself to be far better at sweeping up innocent sites in its efforts in the kind of collateral damage normally reserved for cluster bombs. This was always going to be the case with a censorship operation such as this, with the only real question being whether it would be corruption or ineptitude that would take center stage.

• The last two posts I wrote about SESTA discussed how, if it passes, it will result in collateral damage to the important speech interests Section 230 is intended to protect. This post discusses how it will also result in collateral damage to the important interests that SESTA itself is intended to protect: those of vulnerable sex workers.

• Gab alleged Google’s booting of its app from the Play store amounted to a anti-competitive action in service of its “partnership” with Twitter. Twitter had given Google access to its fire hose for its search engine. Google’s booting of Gab, however, appeared to amount to little more than an inconsistent application of Play Store standards. This made Google look bad, but didn’t seem to back up claims of a Google-Twitter conspiracy to keep Gab’s app out of the public’s hands. (Adding to this lack of evidence was the fact Twitter was never listed as a defendant.)

• A conservative media company has sued YouTube, saying that the online video giant illegally censors the short videos it produces.

• PragerU was founded in 2011 by Dennis Prager, a prominent conservative writer and radio talk show host. The organization is a nonprofit that espouses conservative viewpoints on various issues by means of short, animated videos, which it posts on its own website, as well as its YouTube channel.

• We’ve made this point over and over again: if you give people the power to force down someone else’s content, it will be abused. We see this most clearly in things like DMCA takedown notices, which are rife with abuse — either through automated takedowns or just by people who want certain things to disappear. But here’s a variation we haven’t seen quite as much: DMCA abuse as extortion. This story involves musician/composer Keitaro Ujile who variously goes by Ujico* and Snail’s House and who has a pretty big following. As an aside, he describes his electronic music as “Happy Music” and, damn, is it ever. I’ve been listening to it while writing this post, and you can too at Soundcloud, Bandcamp or… YouTube.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Many groups in the Electronic Frontier Alliance work to ensure that their neighbors have the tools they need to maintain control of their information. Others devote their efforts to community organizing or advocacy, assuring that authorities respect the civil and privacy rights of people in their community. For over four years, Oakland Privacy has been a notable example of the latter.

• Initially organizing as the Occupy Oakland Privacy Working Group, Oakland Privacy began meeting in July of 2013, with a mission to stop Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center (DAC). The DAC, first approved by the City of Oakland City Council as a port security monitoring system, was moving toward approval of a second phase by the Summer of 2013. Phase II would have expanded the DAC into a city-wide surveillance apparatus that would have combined feeds from cameras, microphones, and other electronic monitoring assets throughout the city. Local authorities and their partners would have had an unprecedented ability to surveil the people of Oakland.

• A ruling has been handed down by a federal judge finding the government’s demands for fingerprints from multiple residents of a house does not implicate the Fifth Amendment. [h/t Brad Heath]

• The underlying case — still under seal — bears some resemblance to one we discussed here about a year ago. Law enforcement sought a search warrant for a residence, which would allegedly house devices containing child pornography. The devices were suspected to be Apple products, which can be opened with fingerprints. The warrant asked for permission to compel the residents to supply their fingerprints — both to unlock the devices and to ascribe possession to the person whose fingerprint unlocked them.

• In Jan 2017, the IDC found that 84% of consumers expressed concern for their personal information, and 70% reported greater concern than just a few years ago.

• As we detailed yesterday, a bill introduced this week by Sens. Ron Wyden and Rand Paul would represent the most comprehensive reform so far of Section 702, the law that authorizes the government to engage in mass warrantless surveillance of the Internet. EFF supports the bill, known as the USA Rights Act, because it closes the backdoor search loophole and addresses other glaring problems with Section 702.

• But the bill also makes changes to lesser-known provisions of Section 702. One of these amendments raises it own questions about how the government has been enlisting private companies to provide access to our communications, including whether it has required circumvention of encryption as in the recent fight between Apple and the FBI. It may well also call into question the response EFF received from the government in FOIA litigation seeking records to determine whether such a case exists.

• When a California state legislator proposed new broadband privacy rules that would mirror the federal rules previously killed by Congress, broadband industry lobbyists got to work.

• The lobbyists were successful in convincing the state legislature to let the bill die without passage last month, leaving Internet users without stronger rules protecting the privacy of their Web browsing histories.

• Earlier this year the GOP and Trump administration rushed to kill consumer broadband privacy rules. While the broadband industry cried like a colicky toddler when the rules were originally proposed, they were relatively modest — simply requiring that ISPs clearly disclose what they’re selling, who they’re selling it to, and provide working opt out tools. The rules were proposed after ISPs repeatedly showed they were incapable of self-regulating on this front (see Verizon’s zombie cookies, AT&T’s attempts to charge you more for privacy, and CableOne’s declaration it wanted to use credit scores to provide even worse customer support).

• As promised, Ron Wyden (along with Rand Paul) has delivered an antidote to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s completely terrible Section 702 “reform” bill. That bill, authored by Sen. Burr, would extend the NSA’s 702 powers until 2025 while allowing US law enforcement to use collected intelligence for normal law enforcement purposes. It also would have turned the NSA’s “about” collection back on, provided no one opposed it with directly-targeted legislation. This program’s ability to “inadvertently” sweep up US persons’ communications was so concerning the NSA voluntarily shut it off. (It asked to have it turned back on less than two months later, however.)

• For the past 12 months, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has been slurping up video feeds, social media data, traffic information and other data from Hangzhou city for its City Brain project. The stated goal was to improve life in Hangzhou by letting artificial intelligence process this data and use it to control aspects of urban life. It seems to have worked. The trial has been so successful that the company is now packaging the system for export to other places in China – and eventually the rest of the world.

• The new director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has apparently decided to take up James Comey’s anti-encryption fight. He’s been mostly quiet on the issue since assuming the position, but the DOJ’s recent calls for “responsible encryption” has emboldened the new FBI boss to speak up on the subject.

• And speak up he has. Although the FBI still hasn’t released the text of his remarks to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, more than a few sites are reporting it was the usual “go team law enforcement” boosterism, but with the added zest of phone encryption complaints.

• I know that the cynical among you already assume — falsely — that the surveillance state ignores all rules and spies willy nilly on everyone. That is not true. However, they do have a long and scary history of “reinterpreting” or stretching the definitions of things to do widespread surveillance in ways that clearly violate the letter and spirit of the law, even as they try to justify it. For many years now, we’ve written about concerns with Executive Order 12333 — a Reagan-signed Executive Order that enabled much greater surveillance oversees. In the summer of 2014, State Department whistleblower Stephen Napier Tye revealed that everyone focusing on other programs — such as Section 215 under the PATRIOT Act or Section 702 under the FISA Amendments Act — were missing the point: nearly everything was being done under EO 12333, and those other programs were just used to fill in the gaps.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Like many people today, I have a decent amount of experience using Facebook’s language translations. With Geigners the world over, including an eyebrow-raising number of them in South America, I’ve found the translations to be a useful if imperfect way for me to interact with distant family members that reside in countries and continents far from the States. Imperfect is a key word there, however, as some of the garbled nonsense that results from translations can range from somewhat funny to downright perplexing. It goes without saying that relying on a website’s translation alone to interpret someone writing in a different language is a harrowing experience fraught with error.

• It appears public pressure — coming in the form of lawsuits and gag order challenges — has finally had an effect on the DOJ. Ellen Nakashima is reporting the Justice Department will no longer attach indefinite gag orders to routine requests for data and communications.

• The study’s length suggested positive long-term results but the small sample size may have skewed the results. Another contributing factor could have been the “newness” of the devices themselves — something that may have led officers to act with more restraint than usual.

• But as more and more police departments have deployed body cameras, the results have been less and less positive. A study published last year suggested body worn cameras actually led to an increase in violence — a 3.64% uptick in fatal shootings by officers. Of course, this increase may have been nothing more than a deviation from the mean. But it still pointed towards cameras being anything but a cheap, scalable fix for officer misconduct.

• Since the incident, Daulatzai has offered her version of what happened. She said that while she does have an allergy to dogs, it is not one that is life threatening. Southwest allows passengers to choose their seats upon boarding and Daulatzai was happy to find a seat away from the dog. However, according to Daulatzai, Southwest representatives did not believe her statements about her allergy and ordered her off the plane. She attempted to negotiate a reasonable solution, but appears to have come up against a perception that, as a woman of color, she was just meant to follow orders without discussion. Maryland Transportation Authority Police (MTAP) officers then boarded the plane, violently removed her from her seat and dragged her through the aircraft. The MTAP officers ignored her repeated protests that she was pregnant.

• MuckRock, a nonprofit journalism organization that focuses on public records requests, obtained the contracts between prison phone companies and some parish jails in Louisiana.

• Prison phone company Correct Solutions Group has a contract with the Union Parish Detention Center that requires it to pay the jail a commission of 60 percent of the total gross revenue of phone calls.

• Parish jails in Louisiana receive as much as 60 percent of prisoner phone call revenues – though they’ve been offered upwards of 68 percent by other prepaid phone services – according to materials recently released as part of a MuckRock investigation into Bayou State inmate communication commissions.

• Dead human bodies are critical to medical training, physicians and researchers say. And thousands of Americans are happy to donate their meat suits for the greater good after they’re gone. But in the US, a body’s trip from a morgue to a medical school or lab can be gruesome, shady, and expensive. Some don’t make it at all. Instead, bits and pieces of donated loved ones—sometimes disassembled with chainsaws—end up decomposing in parking lots, forgotten in unplugged freezers, and tossed unceremoniously into incinerators.

• And law enforcement can do nothing—there are few to no laws that regulate the grim industry of human body brokering. Grieving families, who are often misled and in the dark about the fate of their loved ones, can be left horrified.

• The company stacked brochures in funeral parlors around Sin City. On the cover: a couple clasping hands. Above the image, a promise: “Providing Options in Your Time of Need.”

• The company, Southern Nevada Donor Services, offered grieving families a way to eliminate expensive funeral costs: free cremation in exchange for donating a loved one’s body to “advance medical studies.”

• But, literally days later, the FBI was raiding Justin Shafer’s home and taking all of his computers. This was not specifically about the Harry Schein case, but since Shafer had continued to investigate poor data security practices involving dentists, he’d come across an FTP server operated by another dental software company, Patterson Dental, which makes “Eaglesoft,” a dental practice management software product. Shafer had discovered an openly available anonymous FTP server with patient data. Shafer did the right thing as a security researcher, and alerted Patterson. However, rather than thanking Shafer for discovering the server they had left with patient data exposed, Patterson Dental argued that Shafer had violated the CFAA in accessing the open anonymous FTP server. Hence the FBI raid.

• October 24 should have marked the end of President Trump’s 120-day ban on refugees entering the United States, a lesser known but no less damaging part of the Muslim ban executive order from March 6. Instead, it will be remembered as a new low in the Trump administration’s response to the world’s growing refugee crisis.

• Under the guise of furthering national security, the administration announced new restrictions on certain groups of refugees. As a result, citizens of 11 countries — as well as the minor children and spouses of refugees in the United States — will be placed on hold and barred from resettlement, while the government undertakes yet another round of reviews. In a memo from the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, the government imposed a 90-day review period on countries already requiring additional security checks, during which time refugees from those 11 countries cannot be resettled. Additionally, the “follow-to-join” program for close relatives of refugees already in the U.S. has been paused indefinitely until further review, barring refugees from reuniting with their spouses and minor children.

• Seventy years ago this week, the oldest civil rights organization in the world, the NAACP, submitted a petition to the newly established United Nations demanding accountability for human rights violations against African Americans in the United States. The 96-page petition was written over the course of a year under the editorial supervision of W.E.B. Du Bois. Its six chapters, each written by a leading expert, cover topics ranging from slavery and Jim Crow to voting rights, criminal justice, education, employment and access to health care – areas in which discrimination remains deeply rooted to this day.

• In September, the Trump administration brutally up-ended the lives of some 800,000 young people who have lived in America since they were children. After months of telling Dreamers they “should rest easy” about being allowed to stay, President Trump’s promises turned out to mean nothing. The administration announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which for years has permitted young undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children to live and work here without fear.

• Last night was the first night in a month that I was able to fall asleep without worrying about whether Jane Doe would get the medical care she needs. Jane, a 17-year-old unaccompanied immigrant minor, received her abortion yesterday after being held hostage by our federal government for over a month. But while the legal drama and Jane’s plight captured the country’s attention, her battle is part an overall war being waged by the Trump Administration against reproductive rights and immigrants’ rights.

• Former President George H.W. Bush has apologized for repeatedly groping women, after being accused of sexual assault by two actresses. Actress Heather Lind says that when she met the president in 2014, “He touched me from behind from his wheelchair … He told me a dirty joke. And then, all the while being photographed, touched me again.” Actress Jordana Grolnick then also accused the former president of groping her during a photo in 2016, saying, “He reached his right hand around to my behind, and as we smiled for the photo he asked the group, ‘Do you want to know who my favorite magician is?’ As I felt his hand dig into my flesh, he said, ‘David Cop-a-Feel!’”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Federal Communications Commission today eliminated a decades-old rule that required TV and radio stations to maintain studios in the local communities they serve.

• The FCC’s Republican majority claims that the change will produce cost savings that broadcasters can use to improve “programming, equipment upgrades, newsgathering, and other services that benefit consumers.” But Democrats say the change will instead make it easier for stations to abandon the cities and towns they serve.

• Net neutrality is the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks fairly, without improper discrimination in favor of particular apps, sites or services. It’s a principle that’s faced many threats over the years from ISPs and government agencies seeking to exercise control over the free and open Internet.

• With the roll back of net neutrality protections looming, many people are now asking, “What if there is no net neutrality?”

• We’ve long noted how one of the sleazier telecom industry lobbying tactics involves paying minority, diversity, or other groups to parrot policies that actually undermine their constituents, but provide the illusion of public support for shitty positions. Like when the cable industry paid Jesse Jackson to claim that trying to bring competition to the cable box was akin to racism in the 1960′s American South. Or when AT&T paid the The Hispanic Institute to support the company’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile, ignoring that the deal would have killed tens of thousands of jobs, while driving up wireless rates for all Americans.

• Yesterday, the EU officially signed the WIFI4EU Regulation, intended to promote Internet connectivity in local communities. By ignoring the open letter of the European open-Wifi community, this Regulation undermines the telecom ecosystem diversity. It dismisses the promotion of non-profit Internet Service Provider and enforces an authentication mechanism, forbidding what could have been free and open WiFi hotspots.

• The European Commission’s WIFI4EU inital proposal of September 2016 established the goal of developing Internet access in under-served areas by inciting local authorities to provide free WIFi hotspots. The European Parliament made some useful amendments, especially by calling for the promotion of non-profit ISPs. After six months of negotiations, it gave in to almost all of the dangerous propositions pushed by European governments. Thus, operators willing to benefit from the WIFI4EU funds will have to comply with requirements contradictory to the idea of free and open networks.

• The Federal Communications Commission will vote next month on ending a rule that prevents joint ownership of newspapers and TV or radio stations in the same geographical market.

• The change is part of a larger overhaul of media ownership rules announced yesterday by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Currently, the FCC says its newspaper/broadcast station cross-ownership rule “prohibit[s] common ownership of a daily newspaper and a full-power broadcast station (AM, FM, or TV) if the station’s service contour encompasses the newspaper’s city of publication.”

• Pai is proposing to eliminate that rule and others. He announced the move during an FCC oversight hearing in Congress yesterday, saying he wants to “pull the government once and for all out of the newsroom.”

• Verizon Wireless customers will soon regain the ability to stream mobile video at the highest resolution, but it’s going to cost extra. Starting November 3, Verizon Wireless customers will have the option of paying another $10 a month to remove the cap on video resolution.

• This is the latest in a series of changes at Verizon related to unlimited data plans and video quality. In February, Verizon offered unlimited data plans for the first time in years, boasting that it would not impose limits on video quality (unlike some other carriers).

• But that changed in August when Verizon imposed video limits on both unlimited data plans and plans with monthly data caps. This resulted in a somewhat confusing array of options.

• It probably goes without saying that while improving in spots, American broadband isn’t much to write home about. Americans pay more money for slower service and worse customer support than a long list of developed countries. Some of that’s thanks to geography, but more of it’s due to a lack of competition. That lack of competition is, by proxy, thanks to our refusal to address the stranglehold these giant companies have over our federal and state regulators and lawmakers. Instead of fixing this problem, current regulators seem more interested in weakening deployment definitions to help industry pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

• In a growing number of towns and cities, residents have increasingly pushed to either build their own broadband networks, or strike public/private partnerships to help improve service quality and availability. Instead of trying to make these efforts irrelevant by offering better service at lower rates, incumbent ISPs have focused on paying often clueless lawmakers to help pass protectionist bills restricting what locals can and can’t do with their own local infrastructure and taxpayer dollars. More than twenty states have now passed laws to this effect quite literally written by ISP lobbyists.

Intellectual Monopolies

• It’s been just over a year since HP got caught using dirty tricks to force its customers to use its official, high-priced ink, and now it’s Epson’s turn to get in on the act.

• Epson claims that ink-cartridges that are compatible with its printers violate a nonspecific patent or patents in nonspecific ways, and on the strength of those vague assertions, they have convinced eBay to remove many third-party ink sellers’ products, without any scrutiny by eBay.

• Epson are engaging in a campaign to stop resellers from stocking certain Epson-compatible ink cartridges, alleging patent infringements. No manufacturer has been taken to court, and no court judgment exists to date.

• eBay allow Epson and other trusted manufacturers to remove listings under their VeRO programme, but appear to only allow patent violations as a reason for a trusted takedown in Europe.

Trademarks

• Just Google it. Can you Google the score? Have you Googled the restaurant’s reviews? These are all common phrases in today’s internet-reliant society, and it’s entirely due to the creation of Google and its widespread success. By all measures, this should be a good thing for Google. Its company’s primary trademark, Google, has become such an integral part of society that it is now ingrained in our everyday vocabulary as a verb, and even further ingrained in our everyday usage. But for a company with valuable intellectual property rights in its Google trademark, its everyday usage in a general sense, meaning to perform an internet-based search, whether through Google or another search engine, could prove disadvantageous at some point in the future.

Copyrights

• Members of 1960s rock band The Turtles have lost a major legal battle in their quest to collect copyright royalties from their old hit songs.

• The Florida Supreme Court held today (PDF) that the state doesn’t recognize any copyrights in pre-1972 music recordings, despite the band’s arguments to the contrary. All seven justices concurred in the ruling.

• A photographer and a photo agency are teaming up to restart a legal war against online linking in the United States.

• When Internet users browse websites containing images, those images often are retrieved from third-parties, rather than the author of the website. Sometimes, unbeknownst to the website author, the linked image infringes someone else’s copyright.

• That’s great, as is the free availability of Hawking’s PhD. But the question for both has to be: why has it taken so long — 50 years in the case of the thesis? Even allowing for the fact that the Internet was not a mass medium for 30 of those 50 years, there was nothing stopping Cambridge University putting PhDs online from the mid-1990s. Similarly, why make depositing theses as open access optional? The University would be quite justified in requiring the thesis of any PhD it grants to be online and freely downloadable immediately under a suitable CC license. The moment to make that happen is now, not in another 10 years’ time.

• For years we’ve written about the idiocy of the DMCA’s 1201 triennial review. If you don’t recall, Section 1201 of the DMCA is the “anti-circumvention” part of the law, saying that anything that gets around DRM is, itself, copyright infringement. This was so obviously stupid and counterproductive when it passed, and Congress knew it was so obviously stupid and counterproductive, that it included an even stupider “safety valve” to deal with the obviously bad results of the law. That safety valve, known as the “triennial review” is that every three years, people need to beg and plead with the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress to make explicit exemptions from the law, where circumventing DRM won’t be considered infringing. Over the years, this lengthy and costly process has at least allowed certain key exemptions for security and academic research. Though, of course, even when exemptions are granted, it’s often a hot mess.

• On 26 October, Statewatch leaked 2 new Council documents on the censorship filter in Article 13. Both documents touch upon the notion of a ‘communication to the public’ and the interplay with the e-Commerce Directive.

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