● 10.30.17

● Links 30/10/2017: Linux 4.14 RC7, Acumos, Free/Open Source Software as Philanthropy

Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The Linux OS is flexible. If one Linux distro is an unfriendly fit, you can replace it with another one that has a more appealing options list on the desktop environment or user interface front.

• Debian-based Q4OS, developed by a team of software designers in Germany, has a lightweight design that allows it to run on nearly any hardware config. I have run it on ageing computers from the early days of Windows Vista.

Server

• The whole point of the convergence of the RS/6000 and the AS/400 families of systems – including pSeries and iSeries and System p and System i – was not only to get a common, converged hardware platform that made IBM’s life easier, but to also – or so we have always believed – give a consistent deal to customers using AIX or OS/400-i5/OS-IBM i.

• “A foolish consistency is,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “the hobgoblin of little minds.” While that may be true, a smart consistency is the Spider-Man of great minds. Or at least those that think alike. Like we all do out here in IBM i Land.

• IBM i customers need a deal, something to get them excited about modernizing their platforms and moving ahead.

• Kubernetes won the container war, but the question of who will win Kubernetes is very much in play. As the two highest contributors to the project, Google and Red Hat could be serious contenders.

Kernel Space

• Back home, and back to the normal Sunday afternoon release schedule.

• And rc7 is also normal in size – in fact looking at statistics for the 4.x rc7 releases, this is pretty much right smack the median size. It even looked smaller than usual right up until the network fixes merge today.

• Still, considering the issues we’ve had, I likely will do an rc8 unless this upcoming week ends up being _so_ quiet that there’s no point. Which while unlikely would be lovely – if I end up doing an rc8, that will also push the latter half of the next merge window into the Thanksgiving week, which is going to be inconvenient since I’ll be traveling again. So I’d really be very happy if things now suddenly calm down to the point where an rc8 wouldn’t make sense.

• My first encounter with Linux was back in the late 1990s. I had an Amiga growing up, exchanging floppy disks to share things. Running services on Linux and connecting computers in a network made a deep impression. Realizing that it was free to use and community-driven got me even more interested. The openness and accessibility of information backed by great minds collaborating really had me hooked.

• The Linux Foundation introduced a new project Monday called the Acumos Project, an effort backed by AT&T and India’s Tech Mahindra that will set up a common platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning development.

• “With the Acumos platform, we’re working to create an industry standard for making AI applications and models reusable and easily accessible to any developer,” The Linux Foundation wrote in a blog post announcing the effort. AT&T and Tech Mahindra, a large IT consulting company based in Mumbai, will provide code for the initial phase of the project. It’s expected to launch early next year.

• These projects simplify the task, but it’s still a challenge to turn these frameworks into something useful. AT&T is hoping to change that with a new AI platform called Acumos, which it plans to reveal at a Dallas event Monday.

• Hyperledger Quilt offers interoperability between ledger systems by implementing the Interledger Protocol (ILP), which is primarily a payments protocol and is designed to transfer value across systems – both distributed ledgers and non-distributed ledgers. It is a simple protocol that establishes a global namespace for accounts, as well as, a protocol for synchronized atomic swaps between different systems.

• Hyperledger Quilt aims to solve the tough problem of ledger systems today being siloed and disconnected. Sending value to someone on a different network or ledger is complex and often impractical. Where connections between ledgers do exist, they are manual, slow or expensive.

• The development of the Linux 4.14 kernel, the next LTS (Long Term Support) kernel series, is almost over now that the seventh, and probably the last Release Candidate (RC) milestone hit the streets.

• Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 4.14 RC7 last evening as part of his normal Sunday announcements, giving us a heads up to what’s coming next to the development cycle of the next LTS Linux kernel branch. Long story short, he didn’t yet decide if to push the final Linux 4.14 build next week or an extra RC, which could delay the development of Linux kernel 4.15.

• Linux kernel overlord Linus Torvalds wants to avoid an eighth release candidate for the new version of Linux, to avoid delays to the next version.

• The kernel community is currently hard at work on version 4.14, which got its seventh release candidate on Sunday. That release was only around for six days, after Torvalds struggled to get a decent internet connection the previous Sunday and rather than fighting it issued the release candidate six last Monday.

• Torvalds has now announced rc 7, saying that it is “pretty much right smack the median size”.

• Earlier this month I warned about using Linux 4.14 with AppArmor can cause headaches, namely with the stock rules on distributions like Ubuntu and Debian you can find your networking support broken. That work has now been reverted after Linus Torvalds realized this issue as well.

• With this weekend’s Linux 4.14-rc7 kernel release, Linus Torvalds has reverted the AppArmor change that caused all these issues in the first place.

• While the OpenRISC architecture has been supported by the mainline Linux kernel, it hasn’t supported symmetric multi-processing (SMP) for multi-core designs, but that is in the process of being changed.

• A federal appeals court has now partially ruled in favor of the SCO Group, breathing new life into a lawsuit and a company (now bankrupt and nearly dead) that has been suing IBM for nearly 15 years.

• Last year, US District Judge David Nuffer had ruled against SCO (whose original name was Santa Cruz Operation) in two summary judgment orders, and the court refused to allow SCO to amend its initial complaint against IBM.

• SCO soon appealed. On Monday, the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals found that SCO’s claims of misappropriation could go forward while also upholding Judge Nuffer’s other two orders.

Graphics Stack

• It’s been a while since last testing the older GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” graphics cards with the AMDGPU DRM driver rather than the default Radeon DRM driver. Here are some fresh comparison tests using some original GCN graphics cards with the two DRM drivers while pairing it with Mesa 17.4-dev, including Vulkan tests that are made possible by switching over to the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver.

• GCN 1.0 Sothern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands graphics cards continue to default to using the mature Radeon DRM driver rather than AMDGPU DRM, which is treated as experimental for GCN 1.0/1.1 while being the requirement for GCN 1.2 graphics processors and newer. Through Linux 4.15 at least, GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs will still be using the Radeon DRM by default, but the AMDGPU support for these older generations of Radeon GPUs is becoming more mature with less regressions, no display headaches this time around, some UVD porting for GCN 1.0 on AMDGPU being a work-in-progress, and PowerPlay fixes having recently landed in the kernel.

• In Mesa Core we have included a change to prevent KOTOR from breaking when in combination with the ATI fragment shader extension. Additionally, NIR has also received a correction.

• Mesa 17.2.4 is now available as the newest stable release of Mesa 3D while Mesa 17.3 is up to its second release candidate.

• Mesa 17.2.4 was released today with several Intel OpenGL/Vulkan fixes, memory leak fixes for the Mesa state tracker, a Vulkan windowing system integration memory leak fix for X11, and some other small fixes.

• It was just days ago that the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver made it to OpenGL 2.0 while now it’s reached the OpenGL 2.1 threshold.

Applications

• When asked about personal goals, getting a better handle on personal finances is high on most people’s list. Whether this means making and sticking to a budget, reducing unnecessary expenses, or simply getting a better understanding of their financial situation, pretty much any approach to personal finance is dependent on having a good idea of the numbers inside a person’s bank accounts, where they come from, and where they go.

• Looking for information on the web has become something that we do day in and day out. Whether it is support you are looking for, looking for a product or news about a particular topic, all you have to do is search on the web.

• Feel bored at work? Come on guys, let us play Piano! Yeah, you read it right. Who needs a real Piano? We can now play or learn how to play Piano from command line using our PC keyboard. Meet Piano-rs – a simple utility, written in Rust programming language, that allows you to play the Piano in Terminal using PC keyboard. It is free, open source and licensed under MIT license. You can use it on any operating systems that supports Rust.

Proprietary

• Depending on your specific needs as a photographer, there are also a lot of pieces of software that are totally free. Here is a list of the top 15.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• With WineConf 2017 going on, Wine [Official Site] founder Alexandre Julliard has given his keynote speech which covers a number of topics which I will summarise for you.

• The Wine developers met this weekend in Poland for the WineConf2017 annual Wine Conference to talk about the next major release of the open-source compatibility layer for running Windows apps and games on UNIX-like systems.

• Developer Marcus Meissner attended the even and recorded Wine leader Alexandre Julliard’s keynote at WineConf2017, talking about Wine 3.0, the next major release of the application, and its new features, which include Direct3D 11 support and an Android driver to allow users to use Wine on Google’s Android mobile OS too.

Games

• Most peripherals aren’t supported under Linux, right? Well, there’s a lot more support available than you probably think. While it’s true that most hardware manufacturers completely neglect Linux, it’s also true that the open source community is capable of just about anything. They’ve stepped up and created excellent open-source drivers for a lot of popular gaming hardware. Then, of course, you have mice that just don’t need drivers and will work out of the box. Those are a great option for gaming on Linux, too.

• The SuperTuxKart Android release is go! You can now play the famous open-source kart racing game on your phone, tablet or compatible Chromebook.

• Open source racing game SuperTuxKart [Official Site] has release 0.9.3 RC1 they’re calling the ‘Halloween Update’. Sounds like progress is going well!

• To get this out of the way first, networking support is not yet in. They’re still working on it and they’ve said it’s “well underway”, so hopefully we will see online racing in a future release. They could use help too, see how to get involved here.

• SuperTuxKart is the best kart racing game not available on Nintendo consoles — and it’s just scored a spooktacular new update in time for Hallowe’en!

• The development team behind the famous open-source arcade racer have issued a new release candidate build that features new tracks, a new arena, new karts, and lots more besides.

• Want to become the shadow ruler of the world? That might be possible in Plutocracy [Official Site], a game of wealth, power and corruption.

• If you’re excited about F1 2017 [Steam, Feral Store] coming to Linux with Vulkan here’s a chance to get a glimpse of it before the release on Thursday.

• Feral Interactive have announced that F1 2017 will be released for Linux on the 2nd November. F1 2017 has been available on the Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Windows PC since August and will be the latest game for Linux users from Feral Interactive. A new trailer has been released showcasing the game on Linux. Watch this below…

• After announcing the F1 2017 racing game for Linux last week, Feral Interactive confirmed it will support the Vulkan graphics API while today they confirmed it’s going to be a Vulkan-exclusive title on Linux.

• The Untold Legacy [Kickstarter, Official Site] is a story-rich action adventure game, with hack and slash gameplay and a little sprinkle of RPG elements it promises to be quite an interesting title.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’m Erica Wagner, a STEAM Nerd, Teenpreneur, Author, Instructor, YouTuber and self-taught 2D and 3D artist. I’ve been doing graphic design for two years, 3D sculpting, voxel art, and 3d modeling for one year, and digital drawing for a little over six months. I’m a homeschool student. My mom uses the majority of my projects as a part of school.

• We’ve just been informed by Kubuntu developer Rik Mills on the availability of the latest KDE Plasma 5.11.2 desktop environment in the Kubuntu Backports PPA for Kubuntu 17.10 users.

• Launched on October 19, 2017, the Kubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system arrived with the KDE Plasma 5.10.5 as default desktop environment, which was accompanied by the older KDE Applications 17.04.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.38.0 software stacks, but not users can update their systems to KDE Plasma 5.11.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.39.0.

• The 2nd bugfix update (5.11.2) of the Plasma 5.11 series is now available for users of Kubuntu Artful Aardvark 17.10 to install via our backports PPA.

• Please note that 3 more bugfix releases are scheduled by KDE for Plasma 5.11, so while we feel these backports will be beneficial to enthusiastic adopters, users wanting to use a Plasma release with more stabilisation/bugfixes ‘baked in’ may find it advisable to stay with Plasma 5.10.5 as included in the original 17.10 Artful release.

• See the Plasma 5.11 release announcement and the release video below for more about the new features available.

Distributions

• We’ve already reviewed the Linux Lite 3.6 distro some time back and even concluded that it is an excellent distro for any beginner to start with linux and then stay on forever. With a lot of wow factors in that distro, Linux Lite has come up with a more enhanced version in Linux Lite 3.6. And with the 3.6 release, Linux Lite has introduced some major changes since the release of 3.4. Let’s look at all the changes and also a step by step installation guide to install Linux Lite 3.6 in your system.

Reviews

• Over the past six months I have reviewed five minimal Linux distributions that are optimized for running containers: Alpine Linux, CoreOS Container Linux, RancherOS, Red Hat Atomic Host, and VMware Photon OS. Generically known as “container operating systems,” these stripped down, purpose built Linux distributions are not the only way to run containers in production, but they provide a base that does not waste resources on anything besides container support.

• The state of the industry with container deployment systems is very much like the early days of Linux distributions. You have one key element, in this case the Docker container, that is surrounded by a number of competing ecosystem components. Just as the traditional Linux distros bundled different package managers, desktop environments, system utilities, services, and apps, most container distributions mix and match various components to create what they consider an optimum solution. Take for example distributed configuration and service discovery. There are several solutions for this such as Etcd, Consul, and ZooKeeper.

Slackware Family

• In my previous blog post about Chromium 62, I described the issues I had while attempting to compile it on Slackware14.2. The gcc compiler suite on Slackware 14.2 is “too old” for Chromium because it lacks the required C++11 support. More to the point, the Google developers use clang instead of gcc for their own compilations and therefore gcc support is becoming stale. Response by Google developers when they encounter a gcc-related bug report is to ‘please switch to clang’.

Red Hat Family

• HCL Technologies announced a collaboration with Red Hat to offer HCL Application Platform-as-a-Service to enterprise customers globally.

• At 12:35 hrs HCL Technologies was quoting at Rs 846.05, down Rs 11.65, or 1.36 percent. The share touched its 52-week high Rs 941.00 and 52-week low Rs 786.05 on 23 October, 2017 and 15 November, 2016, respectively.

• Based on CentOS 7.4 (1708), the latest release of the open-source Linux server system based on Red Hat’s commercial RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) platform, NethServer 7.4 incorporates all the stream packages and technologies, but also introduces several new features and enhancements of its own.

• Designed to make the life of system administrators a lot easier, NethServer 7.4 improves the local Active Directory (AD) account provider to automatically apply updates to the Samba DC instance, which was bumped to version 4.6.8, and to add support for remote AD and LDAP (local too) locations.

• For Slashdot’s 20th anniversary — and the 23rd anniversary of the first release of Red Hat Linux — here’s a special treat.

• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers.

Finance

Fedora

• Flatpak works well. I am pleased with my short test, and I am convinced with the benefits and flexibility that this framework offers. It seems to be quite intuitive, and it did not spew errors. That said, the road to being a first-class product is still a long one. People don’t need the dirty detail. They want beautiful application stores and sod the nuts and bolts.

• I hope the distro-agnostic software takes off. It should help bring together the fragmented world of Linux, and make both maintenance and development easier, and give users the transparency that their peers on Windows enjoy. Technically, even if there’s fragmentation in the background, a clever GUI will disguise that, so we might stay with the old system, but the problem with that is, the distros suffers, and as a result, users suffer, too. The way forward is clear. The only question is, will it be one way or many? History has a way of repeating itself. To be continued. Flak away.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu is one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions. The distribution is available in several flavours, the two most widely recognized being the Desktop and Server editions. The release of Ubuntu 17.10 introduces a number of important changes, the most visible ones mostly affecting the Desktop edition which I will focus on in this review. As 17.10 is an interim release rather than a long term support release, it will received security updates for just nine months.

• One technical change in version 17.10 is the phasing out of 32-bit builds of the Desktop edition, though the Server edition is still available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds for the x86 architecture. Another significant change is the Ubuntu distribution has swapped out its in-house Unity desktop and replaced it with a customized version of the GNOME Shell desktop. Unity is still available in Ubuntu’s software repositories if we wish to install it later.

• I opted to download the Desktop edition of Ubuntu 17.10. The ISO for this edition is 1.4GB in size and booting from this media brings up a graphical window where we are asked if we would like to try Ubuntu’s live desktop mode or launch the system installer. This screen also lets us select the system’s language with the default being English.

Devices/Embedded

• Numerous people have come up to me and asked “So will you get Fedora to run on your Librem phone?” and when my response is “No, I’ve not backed it” I get weird looks with a question of “Why?” I had thought it was time to do document my concerns with this laudable venture. This was certainly further qualified when I had to inform someone from the EFF that they’re delirious about the “it doesn’t need closed source firmware” on the i.MX chips that are being proposed. While I applaud the general principals and ideas of a fully open rights protecting phone I can’t help but feel that the group doing it either are being false at worst or naive at best with some of their statements.

Tizen

• The new Gear Sport is not only a great successor to 2015′s Gear S2, but also Samsung’s best ever all-around smartwatch. It manages to be notably smaller and lighter than the Gear S3, while keeping nearly all of its capabilities. Samsung’s wearables still attempt to do too much with overbearing software on a tiny screen. But that’s worthwhile in order to get the great fitness tracking, which doesn’t tie you into a specific ecosystem, and an overall great interface.

Android

• The original Moto X should hold a special place in smartphone history. It wasn’t the most powerful device, and the camera struggled, but it was the first major phone with contextual awareness baked in, giving you a hands-free assistant with voice recognition. We all yell at Alexa from across the room these days, but in 2013 it was magic. Every Moto X was different, too. You could customize it however you liked—deck it out in bright neon colors, backed in football leather, or covered in bamboo—and Motorola would ship it to you from its assembly plant in Texas, not China.

• Motorola has gone through a lot of changes since 2013, and is now owned by Lenovo, but DNA from that first Moto X shines through in the Moto X4. It’s still not all that powerful, but is comfortable to hold, now waterproof, and has a suite of useful features unique to Motorola’s handsets.

Free Software/Open Source

• Less than two months after the ReactOS 0.4.6 release, ReactOS 0.4.7-RC1 is available for testing.

• This first release candidate for ReactOS 0.4.7 comes with many bug fixes but also some new features.

• ReactOS 0.4.7 is introducing quick launch support, hotplug / power / sound icons, made progress on their filter dirver, started work on a “storport” driver to enable plug-and-play for many drivers and AHCI driver support, re-enabled support for deleting to Recycle Bin, enabled the application compatibility framework, support for enabling a theme by command, an fsutil command was added, and many other updates — including syncing the user-mode DLLs against Wine Staging 2.16.

• GMO Internet Inc. (TYO:9449) continues to push further with the GMO Blockchain Open Source Software Project (GMO Blockchain OSS). Earlier today, the company announced that the project has entered its sixth phase, with the focus now being on payments.

• 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, 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.

• “With the formation of our Carrier Interest Group last year, we set out to strengthen the ties between telecommunications carriers, major chipset vendors and the open source community,” said Art Swift, president of the prpl Foundation.

• It is increasingly important that any serious enterprise—whether startup, media brand, government agency, foundation, or nonprofit organization—have access to cutting edge, reliable, and useful digital tools that extend their reach and accelerate their success. While commercial software continues to play a role for many organizations, more and more institutions are tapping into the less constrained and often less expensive world of open source software for solutions. Open source is vital for the digital community, providing an accessible, predominantly free forum for building everything from websites to analytic data platforms. Open source also spurs creativity and resource sharing among groups that otherwise would rarely connect. It’s a form of collaboration that is becoming mission-critical for many nonprofits that lack the budgets to build robust digital products on their own. When properly supported, open source software can spark innovation, accelerate social good, and ultimately help change the world.

• Kazi Farms Group is the largest poultry company in Bangladesh. One of the basic problems that has to be solved by any poultry company is formulating nutritious poultry feed at the lowest possible cost.

• Until now, the global feed milling industry was dependent on expensive feed formulation software sold by multi-national vendors.

• However, thanks to creative use and development of free/open-source software, Kazi Farms Group has been able to make our feed operation independent of foreign software.

• As companies in and out of the technology industry move to advance their open source programs, they are rapidly learning about the value of participating in open source communities. Organizations are using open source code to build their own commercial products and services, which drives home the strategic value of contributing back to projects.

• However, diving in and participating without an understanding of projects and their communities can lead to frustration and other unfortunate outcomes. Approaching open source contributions without a strategy can tarnish a company’s reputation in the open source community and incur legal risks.

• The Linux Foundation’s free online guide Participating in Open Source Communities can help organizations successfully navigate these open source waters. The detailed guide covers what it means to contribute to open source as an organization and what it means to be a good corporate citizen. It explains how open source projects are structured, how to contribute, why it’s important to devote internal developer resources to participation, as well as why it’s important to create a strategy for open source participation and management.

• One of the most important first steps is to rally leadership behind your community participation strategy. “Support from leadership and acknowledgement that open source is a business critical part of your strategy is so important,” said Nithya Ruff, Senior Director, Open Source Practice at Comcast. “You should really understand the company’s objectives and how to enable them in your open source strategy.”

• Software integration, analytics and management company TIBCO is loving, embraces and heart-ing open source this month with its newly available Project Mashling.

• In fact, there are several open source remote display protocol options out there, including Spice and Chrome Remote Desktop. Each open source remote display protocol works a little differently and is compatible with particular OSes and endpoints. So, it’s important to understand the differences.

Events

• But Lays, how JavaScript connects to Hacktoberfest? Last week, a friend of mine, Andre Garzia, made a HackDay meetup at Amora Labs office, where the event had the goal to develop add-ons for Mozilla Firefox. For me, is on this kind of meetups that I can get my hands dirty on JavaScript. And talking with my friends I discovered about Hacktoberfest.

• If you’re new to OpenStack deployment using Juju and the OpenStack Charms then the general project update on Tuesday at 3.20 pm would be a good introduction. The session is only 20 minutes long so won’t take up to much of your day – Ryan and I will be doing a short 101 and providing some detail on new features for Pike and plans for Queens!

• The Debian community is already planning for the next year’s DebConf conference for Debian developers, contributors, and users, which will take place in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

• As expected, DebConf17, this year’s annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference, was another success, so it’s normal for the Debian team responsible for organizing the DebConf event to start preparing for the next one.

• DebConf18 is months away, but you can start preparing today because the official dates have been published in the Debian Wiki, suggesting that the conference will take place from July 29 to August 5, 2018, and it will be preceded by DebCamp between July 21-27.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google recently pushed the Chrome 63 web browser for beta testing for all supported platforms, giving us a heads up to what we should expect from this release when it hits stable next month.

• Google Chrome 63 now lives in the Beta channel pocket, and it can be installed on Chrome OS, Linux, Android, Mac, and Windows operating systems. It promises big changes for developers, including dynamic module imports, a new Device Memory API, permissions UI changes, as well as async generators and iterators.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Public Services/Government

• This week a US federal judge unsealed the source code for a software application used by New York City’s crime lab to help analyse DNA evidence from crime scenes. The Forensic Statistical Tool (FST) was developed by the office of the city’s Chief Medical Examiner. It is used to substantiate the statistical likelihood that someone’s DNA profile matches DNA from a sample that may be tiny or degraded, or represent more than one person.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Last week, academia collaborated project Open Source University announced launched its global social innovation platform, which enables decentralized academic a professional development globally.

• [...]

• Once the ICO campaign is completed, the immediate next steps are for the team to proceed with on-boarding around 60+ million learners, enrolled in massive open online courses (MOOCs) through the integration of the distributed ledger with platforms such as “Coursera” and “EdX.” The presale starts on November 20th.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Wozniak revisits the question: “Would Apple exist without John Draper?” he asks.

• “It’s hard to guess. Steve Jobs said—and I agree—that without the blue box there might never have been an Apple,” Wozniak says. “A lot of people have success and make money, but fewer achieve notoriety and fame like John has.”

Health/Nutrition

• An anthropogenic mass extinction is underway that will affect all life on the planet and humans will struggle to survive the phenomenon. So claims Dr Rosemary Mason in a paper (2015) in the Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry. Loss of biodiversity is the most urgent of the environmental problems because this type of diversity is critical to ecosystem services and human health. Mason argues that the modern chemical-intensive industrialised system of food and agriculture is the main culprit.

Security

• With the WikiLeaks release of the vault7 material, the security of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware used in most PCs and laptops is once again a concern. UEFI is a proprietary and closed-source operating system, with a codebase almost as large as the Linux kernel, that runs when the system is powered on and continues to run after it boots the OS (hence its designation as a “Ring -2 hypervisor”). It is a great place to hide exploits since it never stops running, and these exploits are undetectable by kernels and programs.

• From time to time, the security researchers continue to make us realize that Windows operating system is full of loopholes that can be exploited by hackers to steal our data. One such vulnerability was patched by Redmond in recent patch Tuesday.

• Several research firms have named EternalRomance as the tool BadRabbit used to spread through an organisation once the ransomware was installed in a host computer. When the cyber-attack first sprang up on 24 October there were many reports claiming that EternalBlue, the tool made famous with the Petya/NotPetya attacks that took place earlier this year, was the culprit, but this was quickly disproven by researchers. However, EternalRomance does share at least one similarity with the other attack, each exploits the same Microsoft vulnerability.

Defence/Aggression

• The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has saved an al-Qaeda-affiliated Turkish jihadist group that has been infiltrating diaspora groups in Germany and France while punishing prosecutors and police investigators who had dealt a heavy blow to degrade this radical organization’s capabilities in the past.

• The group, called Tahşiyeciler in Turkish, is led by 66-year-old radical cleric Mehmet Doğan (aka Mullah Muhammed) who had been on the Turkish government payroll until his retirement from the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) in 1998. This al-Qaeda-affiliated Turkish group has been active in Turkey and among Turkish expat communities in Europe as part of a jihadist campaign to recruit militants, raise funds and plan suicide attacks. The cache of intercepted communications and the physical evidence uncovered during the search and seizure in suspects’ homes and offices clearly paint a picture of a dangerous, albeit small, group that follows slain al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s lead.

• Mustafa Kaplan, the 77-year-old chief aide to Mullah Muhammed, has been identified as a man who is responsible for the group’s operations in Europe and made trips to cities in France and Germany to organize cells. His speeches that were recorded in the German cities of Bonn, Ahlen, Dortmund and Anderten contain chilling accounts of what they plan to do. In one recording he claims that Turks are hostages and prisoners in Germany and says Germany would soon face the wrath of Muslims. He promises to Turks in Germany that the Germans would soon regret sending troops to Afghanistan since fighters would come to Germany to punish them for Berlin’s contribution to NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Whitefish Energy’s $300 million deal to repair Puerto Rico’s grid was made public in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The deal quickly drew scrutiny after the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) did not seek mutual aid—that is, offers from other US utilities to come help out—shortly after the hurricane struck. The choice also caused concern as Whitefish had only been in operation since 2015 and it employed just two full-time employees at the time the hurricane struck (the company hires contractors to complete projects). Furthermore, Whitefish is based in the same town that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is from, and one of its financial backers, HBC Investments, has contributed thousands of dollars to Republican candidates, including Trump, according to the Associated Press.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A former adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian agents.

• According to an unsealed court document, Mr Papadopoulos lied to Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who were interviewing him after Mr Trump’s January inauguration, when the FBI was investigating the Russian government’s effort to interfere in the 2016 US presidential campaign.

• Donald Trump’s former presidential campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has been charged with conspiring to defraud the US in his dealings with Ukraine.

• The 12 charges brought against Mr Manafort and one of his business associates, Rick Gates, include conspiracy to launder money.

• Facebook Inc (FB.O) said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about 80,000 posts on the social network over a two year period in an effort to sway U.S. politics, and that about 126 million Americans may have seen the posts during that time.

• Another top GOP official has raised doubts about whether President Donald Trump will run for re-election.

• Senator Rand Paul said Sunday night that even though the president is raising millions for a 2020 campaign, Republicans should not assume he’s running.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Last week, the DOJ changed its policy on gag orders. In the past, the DOJ loved attaching indefinite gag orders to nearly everything it submitted to service providers. This prompted some backlash in the form of courtroom challenges. It appears the DOJ has decided to choose its battles more carefully. Gag orders can still accompany warrants and subpoenas, but they now have a more definitive end date.

• This past month, Evanston Township High School administrators trampled over their student journalists. It’s a recurring story at high schools — a student paper publishes a mildly controversial article and the school overreacts, pulling the paper off stands and claiming its material challenges school policy.

• Mark Trahant, an endowed professor of journalism at the University of North Dakota, said he’s quitting because the institution won’t let him hold seminars on the Dakota Access oil pipeline protest, the Associated Press reported. Trahant said he proposed two pipeline protest topics as part of a journalism lecture series he was planning, and both were rejected. Last year, he said, he wanted to hear from reporters who covered the protests, and this year he wanted to talk about social media’s role in the same events. Trahant did not specify who turned down his requests but said he was told that the university’s “senior administration” feared the state Legislature would retaliate against the campus if lectures on the pipeline protests proceeded. He said he was “disgusted” that the university did not seem interested in being a policy leader in the state. The university in a statement denied any suggestion that it was trying to censor Trahant based on political concerns.

• You can’t get results tailored for another country just by changing the country code anymore.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Techdirt has mentioned a couple of times the EU’s important ePrivacy Regulation that is currently working its way through the legislative process. It’s designed to complement the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force next year, and which is likely to have far-reaching effects. Where the GDPR is concerned with personal data “at rest” — how it is stored and processed — the ePrivacy Regulation can be thought of as dealing with personal data in motion. That is, how it is gathered and flows across networks. Since that goes to the heart of how the Internet works, it will arguably have an even bigger impact than the GDPR on the online world — not just in the EU, but globally too.

• In the US, there has been recent concern over ISPs turning over logs to the government. During the past few years, the idea of people snooping on our private data (by governments and others) really has made encryption more popular than ever before. One of the problems with encryption, however, is that it’s generally not user-friendly to add its protection to your conversations. Thankfully, messaging services are starting to take notice of the demand. For me, I need a messaging service that works across multiple platforms, encrypts automatically, supports group messaging and ideally can handle audio/video as well. Thankfully, I found an incredible open-source package that ticks all my boxes: Wire.

• Moscow-based multinational cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab on October 25 said that it obtained suspected National Security Agency (NSA) hacking code from a personal computer in the U.S. During the review of file’s contents, a Kaspersky analyst discovered it contained the source code for a hacking tool later attributed to what it calls the Equation Group.

• Kaspersky said it assumed the 2014 source code episode was connected to the NSA’s loss of files. The antivirus software-maker spokeswoman Sarah Kitsos was quoted saying as “we deleted the archive because we don’t need the source code to improve our protection technologies and because of concerns regarding the handling of classified materials”.

• Kaspersky Lab has been bombarded with an unending stream of claims that its Russian roots equate to being part of the Russian national team when it comes to national security interests. We previously discussed the rationale behind the ban of Kaspersky Lab security products in any U.S. government device, and how the company is believed to be a part of the Russian effort to put a bullseye on the National Security Agency (NSA). The publicly available information asks us to trust the U.S. government’s claim that under all that smoke about Kaspersky, there is actually a fire. It turns out that it’s true—well, at least partially true.

• A significant provision in a contentious surveillance law is set to expire at the end of the year, and a number of lawmakers are scrambling to either re-enact the legislation permanently or find its statutory replacement.

• At the end of 2017, one of the NSA’s most important legal powers is set to expire. Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act gives the director of national intelligence and attorney general the authority to target anyone outside the US for surveillance, but that authority has to be reauthorized by Congress every few years. With old congressional allies like Dianne Feinstein newly skeptical of the NSA — and President Trump openly feuding with the intelligence community — surveillance reformers are seeing their best chance in years to make real changes to the US surveillance apparatus.

• The DOJ’s reps — along with the new FBI boss — keep making noises about device encryption. They don’t like it. What they want is some hybrid unicorn called “responsible encryption,” which would keep bad guys out but let law enforcement in. The government has no idea how this is supposed to be accomplished, but it has decided to leave that up to the smart guys at tech companies. After all, tech companies are only in it for the money. The government, however, answers to a higher calling: public safety — a form of safety that apparently has room for an increase in criminal activity and nefarious hacking.

• There’s one cellphone company that’s been conspicuously absent from these discussions. A lot of that conspicuous absence has to do with its conspicuous absence from the cellphone marketplace. Pretty much relegated to governments and enterprise users, Blackberry has been offering encrypted messaging for years. But it’s been offering a different sort of encryption — one it can remove if needed.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A student has been cleared of having a copy of terrorism [sic] manual The Anarchist Cookbook in a drawer under his bed.

• The war on security researchers continues. But then, it’s never really shown any sign of abating, has it? Report after report comes in of security researchers being threatened with lawsuits or arrest simply for finding and reporting security breaches.

• The war on Jean Camp continues to this day, with the researcher on the receiving end of multiple legal threats from the American law firm representing Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. Camp came under fire from the bank last year, after a story came and went mistakenly insinuating a Trump server was in engaged in lively conversation with Alfa Bank’s servers during the run-up to the presidential election.

• That was back in March. Law firm Kirkland & Ellis sent legal threats and communication retention demands to Camp. In addition to demanding she retain all communications possibly relevant to Alfa Bank’s vendetta, the firm also threatened to file CFAA charges.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to impose a budget cap on the Lifeline program that helps poor people buy broadband and phone service.

• Under previous Chairman Tom Wheeler, the 32-year-old Lifeline program was expanded to let poor people use a $9.25 monthly household subsidy to buy Internet service. Previously, the subsidy could only be used for phone service.

• But when Pai took over the chairmanship, he quickly got to work rolling back some of Wheeler’s Lifeline changes. Pai, a Republican, ramped up his attempts to place limits on Lifeline last week with a proposal that will likely be approved by the commission at its meeting on November 16.

• But the outgoing Chair of the GAC, Thomas Schneider, pointed out that assuming that trademark rights to a name automatically resulted in an exclusive right to a TLD was a fallacy. Amazon Associate Counsel for IP Dana Brown Northcott said after the clash with the governments that the company would continue to seek a compromise solution, but certainly had to consider all options.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• A federal appeals court is declaring a gag order that was imposed on the backers of a Comic-Con convention to be an unconstitutional infringement of speech. A San Diego federal judge had prohibited the organizers of Salt Lake Comic Con from taking to social media like Twitter, Facebook, and even the event’s website to discuss being sued for allegedly infringing the “Comic-Con” trademark.

• “Petitioners assert that the court-ordered prior restraints on their speech violate the First Amendment. We agree,” the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

Copyrights

• Two of the most used YouTube to MP3 conversion sites have closed their doors to UK traffic. The surprise move follows shortly after another popular stream ripper, YouTube-MP3, closed its site as part of a settlement with major music industry groups. Is this the start of a ripple effect?

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