● 11.01.17

● Links 1/11/2017: Wine 2.20, Cutelyst 1.10.0, F1 2017 Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 5:23 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Computer systems running Linux are everywhere. Linux runs our Internet services, from Google search to Facebook, and more. Linux also runs in a lot of devices, including our smartphones, televisions, and even cars. Of course, Linux can also run on your desktop system. If you are new to Linux, or you would just like to try something different on your desktop computer, this series of guides will briefly cover the basics and help you in migrating to Linux from another system.

• Switching to a different operating system can be a challenge because every operating system provides a different way of doing things. What is second nature on one system can take frustrating time on another as we need to look up how to do things online or in books.

Server

• I’ve been working on Kubernetes networking a lot recently. One thing I’ve noticed is, while there’s a reasonable amount written about how to set up your Kubernetes network, I haven’t seen much about how to operate your network and be confident that it won’t create a lot of production incidents for you down the line.

• Kubernetes isn’t even easy to pronounce, much less explain. So we recently illuminated how to demystify Kubernetes in plain English, so that a wide audience can understand it. (We also noted that the pronunciation may vary a bit, and that’s OK.)

• The Envoy open-source project was originally developed by ride-sharing service Lyft and officially became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project on Sept. 13. The CNCF is the home multiple open-source efforts, including the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

Kernel Space

• SCO. There’s a name I’ll bet you thought you’d never hear again. Guess what? It’s back.

• Wasn’t there a Bond film called “Live to Die Another Day.” Even if there wasn’t, that applies here.

• When last we talked about SCO, in March, 2016, we told you this might happen, although Judge David Nuffer had all but put a bullet through the already dead and bankrupt company’s brain (there’s an oxymoron if ever I wrote one) on February 29, 2016. But exactly a month after the judge’s ruling, the company had somehow managed to scrape together enough spare change to pay the filing fee for an appeal. Today, the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that that the appeal could go on, on a claim of misappropriation, but upheld Judge Nuffer’s other two orders.

• The nonprofit Linux Foundation has announced that is working on an open source AI project, and AT&T is one of the founding organizations. Called the Acumos Project, its goal, like many open source platforms, is to enable a free exchange of ideas and machine learning solutions using an artificial intelligence framework — and eventually become a marketplace for AI apps and services.

• The Acumos Project aims to provide tools for casual users, not data scientists, and will focus first on making apps and microservices. While The Linux Foundation’s announcement was light on details, it noted that it will sustain the Acumos Project for some time and AT&T and other founder Tech Mahindra will contribute code.

• AT&T and Tech Mahindra are developing an open source artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform that will be hosted within the Linux Foundation. The Acumos Project is expected to be launched early next year.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has shipped the 387.22 Linux driver today as their first stable release in the 387.xx series.

• The NVIDIA 387.22 Linux driver builds off their recent 387.12 beta driver. That earlier beta release introduced a number of Vulkan updates, including full-screen flipping using X11 swapchains for possible performance improvements. That beta had the Vulkan updates and mostly an assortment of bug fixes.

• The latest NVIDIA driver release 387.22 is now out. This is a stable driver release which builds upon the 387.12 beta driver that was released earlier this month.

• Two weeks ago AMD released an AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 driver intended for cryptocurrency mining systems while now that v17.40 series driver has been promoted to being their general purpose stable Linux hybrid driver.

• The headline feature of the AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 beta was introducing large page support intended to help blockchain compute workloads with OpenCL. Sure enough, AMDGPU-PRO 17.40 is much faster for cryptocurrency mining like Ethereum though we haven’t found many performance improvements in other OpenCL compute workloads.

• Eric Anholt of Broadcom has continued bringing up the VC5 Gallium3D driver for supporting the company’s next-generation graphics hardware that is much improved over the VC4 hardware found in the Raspberry Pi SBCs to date.

• Since earlier this month VC5 Gallium3D merged into Mesa but it does not yet work with any actual hardware due to the VC5 DRM driver yet to be completed kernel-side and merged, nor is that happening for Linux 4.15. But Eric has been making good progress on quickly getting the VC5 Gallium3D OpenGL driver up to par as he’s also been working towards a VC5 Vulkan driver too thanks to the new hardware’s capabilities.

• The developers behind the open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv KMS+Gallium3D driver stack for Vivante graphics support have been very busy recently.

• Etnaviv just recently reached OpenGL 2.0 support and then this week cleared OpenGL 2.1 support and now patches have emerged bringing up Vivante GC7000 series hardware support within their Gallium3D OpenGL driver.

• With the proliferation of deep learning, NVIDIA has realized its longstanding aspirations to make general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) a mainstream technology. The company’s GPUs are commonly used to accelerate neural network training, and are also being adopted for neural network inference acceleration in self-driving cars, robots and other high-end autonomous platforms. NVIDIA also sees plenty of opportunities for inference acceleration in IoT and other “edge” platforms, although it doesn’t intend to supply them with chips. Instead, it’s decided to open-source the NVDLA deep learning processor core found in its “Xavier” SoC introduced last fall.

• Nvidia released a new short-lived proprietary graphics driver for UNIX systems, Nvidia 387.22, which introduces support for the recently unveiled GeForce GTX 1070Ti graphics card.

• Support for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti was added only to the 64-bit and 32-bit Linux and FreeBSD drivers, as the Solaris build of the Nvidia 387.22 graphics driver doesn’t offer support for this cheaper video card designed for gamers. A comparison between GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and GeForce GTX 1070 is available here.

• Mesa developers Andres Gomez and Emil Velikov announced the availability of the fourth maintenance update of Mesa 17.2 stable series, and the second Release Candidate (RC) of Mesa 17.3.

• We reported last week on the upcoming availability of the Mesa 17.2.4 update to the open-source graphics stack for GNU/Linux distributions, and it arrived on October 30, 2017, bringing us another layer of fixes for the AMD Radeon RADV Vulkan, Broadcom’s VC4, as well as both the Intel i965 OpenGL and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers.

Benchmarks

• With going back to test Ubuntu 14.04 through Ubuntu 17.10′s Radeon OpenGL performance as part of marking AMD’s open-source strategy turning a decade old, I also took this opportunity while having an old Ubuntu installation running to also re-test the former Catalyst/fglrx driver stack that’s since been succeeded by AMDGPU-PRO and AMDGPU+RadeonSI.

• As SUSE has been working in conjunction with AMD on more tuning for AMD Zen CPUs under the GCC compiler, here are some fresh benchmarks of the GCC 8 compiler code being tested on an AMD EPYC system.

Applications

• NetworkManager has now bundled basic support for Open vSwitch so it’s possible to establish simple Open vSwitch configurations from this common Linux desktop network manager. NetworkManager doesn’t aim to offer the full configuration realm of Open vSwitch but for some common scenarios like only supporting the creation of Bridges/Ports/Interfaces, no VLANs, and no bonds. Details on the NetworkManager support for Open vSwitch is outlined in this new man page.

• Open Whisper Systems, the company behind the Signal IM service, has finally launched standalone desktop applications for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

• The company has also deprecated the Chrome app that up to this point was the only way to use Signal on a laptop or desktop computer.

• The new standalone desktop apps are identical to the old Chrome app, but users won’t need to install Chrome to use Signal on their desktops anymore, and nor would they need to start Chrome before they launch the Signal app.

• The KMarkdownWebView software is for the rendered display of Markdown documents, using web technologies (native wrapper around a webpage with a JavaScript library which creates HTML from the plain text handed in).

• Geary is an open source email client developed for reading, finding, and sending emails on the GNOME 3 desktop. With one of its main features being conversations, users can read entire conversations in their inbox without needing to search for and select the individual emails.

• If you use the GNOME desktop environment then you must know by now that there are more than a handful of email clients you can pick from. This one is particularly designed to integrate excellently with your desktop and system settings while helping you manage your emails and reminders with ease.

• Is your Linux system slow? Are the applications taking a long time to open? The best option you have is to use a light Linux distro. But it’s not always possible to reinstall an operating system, is it?

• So if you want to stick to your present Linux distribution, but want improved performance, you should use lightweight alternatives of the applications you are using. Here, I’m going to put together a small list of lightweight alternatives to various Linux applications.

• SSHGuard is an intrusion prevention utility that parses logs and automatically blocks misbehaving IP addresses (or their subnets) with the system firewall. SSHGuard version 2.1 was just released with new blocking services, the ability to block a configurable-sized subnet, and better log reading capabilities.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 2.20 is now available.

• The Wine developers have officially released Wine 2.20, the latest development build which adds in some new features.

Games

• With only a couple of days until the launch of the F1 2017 racing game on the Linux platform, Feral Interactive is today announcing the official system requirements for playing the game.

• Good news for all, as F1 2017 [Steam, Feral Store] for Linux will work on both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards with Vulkan goodness.

• Feral Interactive has now published the system requirements for their Linux port of F1 2017 with this racing game set to be released on Thursday.

• As previously mentioned, this racing game is using Vulkan and in fact exclusively uses Vulkan (ala no OpenGL).

• The second alpha release of the Godot 3.0 Game Engine is now available for testing.

• Godot 3.0 is a very big update for this open-source game engine. Back in July is when the first alpha rolled out with WebGL 2.0 support, WebAssembly, a lot of changes to its 3D renderer, and many other improvements. Out today is the second alpha.

• A little treat (or is it a trick?) for our community on this Halloween eve: Godot 3.0 alpha 2 is out, ready for your testing! It’s already been 3 months since our previous official development snapshot, and lots of bugs have been fixed, making us one big step closer to the final 3.0 stable release.

• In case you missed the deal back during a summer sale, Valve’s Steam Link streaming device can be found again for $15 USD rather than its normal $40~50 price.

• The expansive metroidvania with hand-drawn animations got a little bit bigger. The second of the slated free content updates dropped just in time for Halloween.

• When it’s finished, World of Castles [Steam] might be a reasonably interesting mix of online strategy and action. Right now, it’s just far too rough and unfinished.

• When I first started using Linux full time in 2007 gaming on the platform was dominated by id Software. Thanks to a flexible policy regarding unsupported binaries and a corporate culture open to experimentation, something which was lost not long after the Zenimax acquisition, Linux users were graced with both native closed source binaries for their latest games and a treasure trove of source ports for many of their older titles.

• Coming as it did only a few years after the fall of Loki Software and the dark age that followed it, Linux gaming received a major boost in 2004 with the release of Doom 3. Not only did it add one more title to the then nascent Linux gaming library, it was also one of the most anticipated games of the year and remained a graphical powerhouse for many years after.

• Not only were Linux users able to play the game on their systems mere months after the release of the commercial Windows version, they could play it with no loss of graphical fidelity. At a time when Linux was dismissed even more than it is today as just being a software toy or something only meant for servers, being able to play Doom 3 was a significant achievement which helped pave the way for the Linux gaming scene as we know it today.

• Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, a game originally released back in 2003 is being revamped by THQ Nordic and it will include a Linux release.

• ATOM RPG [Steam, Official Site] is a Fallout-inspired post-apocalypse that was funded by Kickstarter and it’s heading to Early Access next month. The plan is to release it on November 28th, with their current plan to remain in Early Access for five or six months.

• Intrinsic is one of the best looking open-source Vulkan game engines we have seen to date.

• Intrinsic has supported Vulkan since last year when it was open-sourced. We covered it one year ago nearly to the day: Intrinsic Is A Promising, Open-Source, Cross-Platform Vulkan Game Engine.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Another minor KStars release is now available for Linux, MacOS, & Windows. KStars 2.8.7 brings several bug fixes and new improvements!

• In the past weeks, we have noticed an increased interest in Plasma Mobile from different sides. Slowly, but surely, hardware vendors have discovered that Plasma Mobile is an entirely different software platform to build products on top of. For people or companies who want to work or invest into Plasma Mobile, it’s always useful to know where upstream is heading, so let me give an overview of what our plans are, what areas of work we’re planning to tackle in the coming months and years, where our focus will be and how it will shift. Let’s talk about Plasma Mobile’s roadmap.

• Our development strategy is to build a basic system and platform around our core values first and then extend this. Having a stable base of essentials allows us to focus on an achievable subset first and then extend functionality for more and more possible target groups. It avoids pie-in-the-sky system engineering something that will never be useful and designed for a unicorn market that never existed. Get the basics right first, then take it to the next levels.

• More than a year ago I elaborated whether KWin should or should not add support for NVIDIA’s proprietary Wayland solution. I think it is time to look at the situation of Plasma/Wayland and NVIDIA again. In case you haven’t read my previous blog post on that topic I recommend to read it as I use it as the base for this blog post.

• Compared to a year ago not much has changed: NVIDIA still does not support the standard Linux solution gbm, which is supported by all vendors and nowadays even going to enter the mobile space. E.g. the purism phone is going to have a standard graphics stack with gbm. So no additional code required. But NVIDIA doesn’t support gbm. Instead it has a proprietary implementation called EGLStreams, which no other vendor implements. Due to that Plasma/Wayland cannot support OpenGL for NVIDIA users.

• KDE KWin maintainer Martin Flöser remains less than interested in supporting NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux graphics driver as long as they continue pursuing the EGLStreams approach until the long talked about new memory allocation API is ready.

• Longtime KDE developer Sebastian Kügler has posted a Plasma Mobile roadmap of sorts for those interested in the direction of this mobile KDE stack.

• His roadmap basically covers they are done with their initial “prototype” and currently pursuing the requirements for Plasma Mobile to be fitting for a feature phone. Following that, they will pursue basic smartphone capabilities while their further out goal is for Plasma Mobile to be ready as a featured smartphone.

• Cutelyst the Qt Web Framework got a new release, another round of bug fixes and this time increased unit testing coverage.

• RoleACL plugin is a very useful one, it was written due the need for controlling what users could access, sadly the system I wrote that needed this got unused (although I got my money for this) so this plugin didn’t get much attention, partially because it was basically complete.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Over 10 years ago the dfu-programmer project was forked into dfu-utils as the former didn’t actually work at all well with generic devices supporting vanilla 1.0 and 1.1 specification-compliant DFU. It was then adapted to also support the STM variant of DFU (standards FTW). One feature that dfu-programmer did have, which dfu-util never seemed to acquire was support for the AVR variant of DFU (very different from STM DFU, but doing basically the same things). This meant if you wanted to program AVR parts you had to use the long-obsolete tool rather than the slightly less-unmaintained newer tool.

Distributions

• First off, it looks like the Solus devs plan to re-implement support for the next-generation Wayland display server in their GNU/Linux distribution, though the ISO images will come with the 2D X.Org graphics driver enabled by default and use open source drivers for Nvidia GPUs as they want to further improve Nvidia Optimus.

• “We’re working to improve the NVIDIA situation and investigating a switch to libglvnd, enabling of wayland-egl/eglstreams, etc.,” reads today’s announcement. “We’ve moved back to open drivers to allow Ikey to further research NVIDIA Optimus. [...] We have no timeline on this but we’re actively looking into it!”

• Both Manjaro vs Antergos are rolling release Linux distributions that are derived from Arch Linux. On the surface, they might appear to share a number of similarities. But it’s also important to realize that these two distros have some stark differences.

• Before we get too deep into the Manjaro vs Antergos similarities, let’s first look at the roots of these two distributions – Arch Linux.

Red Hat Family

• HCL and Red Hat have teamed up help customers speed up the process of building and deploying enterprise applications.

• The partnership means developers will be able to use Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform to create innovative applications using AI and machine learning, without the burden of managing traditional cloud or on-premise infrastructure, which HCL will do for them.

• “In organizations that are fit for the future,” writes Jim Whitehurst in The Open Organization, “Leaders will be chosen by the led. Contribution will matter more than credentials [...] Compensation will be set by peers, not bosses.” According to Whitehurst, an open organization is a meritocracy: “Those people who have earned their peers’ respect over time drive decisions.” But the way humans allocate their respect is itself prone to bias. And imagine what can happen when biased decision-making results in the wrong leaders being chosen, certain contributions being over- or undervalued, or compensation being allocated on something other than merit.

• Thales has enabled an extended encryption capability for Red Hat‘s (NYSE: RHT) OpenShift Container Platform in efforts to implement access control and logging for sensitive data, ExecutiveBiz reported Friday.

• The Vormetric Transparent Encryption tool will work to secure Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployments and comes with support for Docker use cases, Thales said Thursday.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• I was surprised today to learn that a friend in academia did not know there are easily available web services available for writing LaTeX documents as a team. I thought it was common knowledge, but to make sure at least my readers are aware of it, I would like to mention these useful services for writing LaTeX documents. Some of them even provide a WYSIWYG editor to ease writing even further.

• There are two commercial services available, ShareLaTeX and Overleaf. They are very easy to use. Just start a new document, select which publisher to write for (ie which LaTeX style to use), and start writing. Note, these two have announced their intention to join forces, so soon it will only be one joint service. I’ve used both for different documents, and they work just fine. While ShareLaTeX is free software, while the latter is not. According to a announcement from Overleaf, they plan to keep the ShareLaTeX code base maintained as free software.

• Halloween is here, time to upload a new set of scary packages of TeX Live. About a month has passed, so there is the usual big stream up updates. There was actually an intermediate release to get out some urgent fixes, but I never reported the news here. So here are the accumulated changes and updates.

Derivatives

• Powered by the Linux 4.13 kernel series and based on the Debian Testing (upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster”) and Debian Sid repositories, DebEX Barebone LXDE Build 171030 replaces the LXQt desktop environment that was used in previous versions with LXDE, probably to make the ISO smaller and the OS a bit faster.

• “The ISO has decreased from 1860 MB to 1330 MB, which makes it easier to run the system live from RAM,” said Arne Exton in the release announcement. “That ability allows DebEX LXDE to be very fast, since reading and writing data from/to RAM is much faster than on a hard disk drive.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As part of the multi-year comparisons for marking AMD’s open-source strategy being 10 years old, here’s a look back with fresh OpenGL Linux gaming benchmarks from Ubuntu 14.04 through Ubuntu 17.10 using a Radeon HD 7950 graphics card with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. There’s also a similar comparison with a Radeon R9 Fury.

• The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list.

• I’m happy to announce that MAAS 2.3.0 Beta 3 has now been released and it is currently available in PPA and as a snap.

• Last week @brauner and @stgraber were traveling to Prague for the Open Source Summit Europe. We got the opportunity to talk about LXD, system containers and various bits of ongoing kernel work as well as meet with a number of our users and contributors!

• All this travel and conference time reduced our ability to do feature work this week, so we’ve mostly been reviewing contributions and pushing a number of bugfixes with things going back to normal this week.

• Ubuntu 17.10 is the newest version of this world famous Linux distribution, and this one is especially interesting because Canonical decided to dump its controversial Unity baby and use GNOME desktop environment instead.

Flavours and Variants

• The Ubuntu desktop has evolved a lot over the years. Ubuntu started off with GNOME 2, then moved onto Unity. From there, it came home to its roots with the GNOME 3 desktop. In this article, we’ll look at the Ubuntu desktops and compare them.

Devices/Embedded

• Dan Tepfer’s piano worlds on NPR inspired me to explore my own universe of augmented piano playing. Could I write a program that learns in real time to improvise with my style in the music breaks in my own playing?

• The following article is pretty much a play-by-play on making PIanoAI. If you just want to try out PIanoAI, go to the GitHub for instructions and downloading. Otherwise, stay here and learn about my many programming follies.

• SinoVoip’s Linux-friendly, 60 x 30mm Banana Pi M2 Zero (BPI-M2 Zero) SBC closely mimics the Raspberry Pi Zero W, but has a faster Allwinner H2+.

• Just as we were trumpeting the $23 BPI-M2 Magic as being the “smallest, cheapest Banana Pi yet,” SinoVoip has launched an even tinier and more affordable Linux/Android hacker board on AliExpress. The WiFi-enabled Banana Pi M2 Zero (BPI-M2 Zero), which was revealed back in July, is now selling for only $15 with the standard 512MB RAM, or $21.53 including shipping to the U.S.

Tizen

Android

• One of the things I consider when it comes to reviewing new smartphones is whether it could comfortably replace whatever device I’m currently using.

• When I reviewed Google’s Pixel 2 XL, it made me want to switch from my iPhone 6s Plus, and I’ve been using the Pixel 2 XL ever since. The $800+ LG V30, on the other hand, has not made me want to switch.

• To be clear, that’s not to say that the LG V30 is a bad phone. Samsung’s mighty Galaxy phones haven’t made me want to switch, either, and the Galaxy phones’ success is a clear sign that people love those phones.

Free Software/Open Source

• Some of the largest forces in business today—consumer-facing companies like Google and Facebook, business-facing companies like SUSE, companies outside the tech industry such as BMW, Capital One, and Zalando, even first-gen tech corporations like Microsoft and IBM—all increasingly depend on open source software. Governments too, including the European Union, France, India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many others have discovered the benefits of open source software and development models. Successful collaborative development of software and infrastructure used by these organizations is enabled by the “safe space” created when they use their IP in a new ways… to ensure an environment for co-creation where the four essential freedoms of software are guaranteed.

• The latest release, OpenIndiana Hipster 2017.10 arrived today with numerous changes and up-to-date components, including the latest X.Org Server 1.19.5 display server and corresponding libraries and drivers, ABI compatibility for using Solaris 10u10 binaries, as well as updated cluster suite and text installer.

• “Text installer now can perform basic OpenIndiana installation to existing ZFS pool,” reads today’s announcement. “The option is considered advanced and should be used with care, but allows you to install minimal OI system to existing pool. To use it, press F5 on ‘Welcome’ screen.”

• OpenIndiana “Hipster” 2017.10 is now available as the OpenSolaris-derived operating system using the Illumos kernel build.

• OpenIndiana 2017.10 pulls in the MATE 1.18 desktop environment, upgrades to the X.Org Server 1.19.5 display server, their text-based installer can now support installing to an existing ZFS pool, the cluster suite was updated, there is ABI compatibility with Solaris 10 Update 10 binaries, and they have begun removing GNOME 2 packages in favor of MATE.

• Ten years ago, while struggling to bring the vision of the “Linux of Robotics” to reality, I was inspired by the origin stories of other transformative endeavors. In this post I want to share some untold parts of the early story of the Robot Operating System, or ROS, to hopefully inspire those of you currently pursuing your “crazy” ideas.

• Most of the universe is dark, with dark matter and dark energy comprising more than 95 percent of its mass-energy. Yet we know little about dark matter and energy. To find answers, scientists run huge high-energy physics experiments. Analyzing the results demands high-performance computing – sometimes balanced with industrial trends.

• More IT decision-makers are turning to open source to drive better efficiency and digital innovation, as its flexibility enables organisations to build new customer experiences, services and products more quickly.

• As more enterprises tap open source there are some misconceptions about what open-source means. Open source technology allows for incredible collaboration between people, communities and projects. Yet many inadvertently associate the words “free” and “easy” with open source which is not always true. Open source makes tech easily accessible and collaborative, which drives incredibly fast innovation. But open source is much more than easily accessible tech. Enterprise needs must be considered and that is why the business of open source tech is about more than just accessibility.

• In the age of the unstoppable rise in resolution and thus in video data rate, GoPro has unleashed CineForm – its most efficient codec yet – to the public.

• [...]

• CineForm was one of the first codecs to offer significant compression that balanced quality, speed and performance, even more than Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes which arrived later. From a technological point of view, its better performance over ProRes and DNxHD is due to its better compression methods (Full frame wavelet comparing to DCT). Without getting too geeky here, it means one can compress more with fewer artifacts.

• These days, it’s not hard to find a good open source project whether you’re looking for one or not. A casual glance at GitLab or GitHub renders quick results. Something a little more curated, however, is sometimes nice.

• OpenHatch is a site dedicated to connecting open source contributors like you to open source communities, tools, and education. It’s not just a list of open source projects in need of help, it’s a training resource with actual training missions that you can do to learn the basics of software development.

Events

• Last week was kernel summit in Prague. Based on feedback from Linus and other people, kernel summit was a 2 day open technical forum along with a half-day “maintainer summit”. Open Source Summit Europe was also happening at the same time and I attended somethings there as well.

• Darren Hart gave a talk about x86 platform drivers. Darren is the current maintainer of the x86 platform drivers. He gave a nice overview of what a platform driver actually is (a bunch of glue) and some history about how big or small drivers can be. One of the sticking points about drivers in general is that most hardware vendors only really focus on Windows and the driver philosophy there is different from Linux. This results in Linux needing to play catch-up and work around firmware that was only tested on Windows (see also the example of vendor “To be filled by O.E.M.”). Hardware vendors can make this easier by using standard interfaces and also open sourcing firmware, something the Fedora community cares deeply about.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• This is truly half-brutal, half-hilarious. A Microsoft employee was forced to pause his Azure presentation in the middle of a live demo session in order to install Google’s Chrome… because the company’s own Edge browser kept crashing.

• But here is the best part: this comical occurrence was recorded and uploaded to YouTube – by none other than Microsoft itself.

• The presentation in question aims to show potential customers how to migrate their applications and data to Redmond’s cloud service. But midway through the session, Edge crashes.

SaaS/Back End

• The Apache Software Foundation has announced a brand-new machine learning project, PredictionIO. Built on top of a state-of-the-art open source stack, this machine learning serve is designed for developers and data scientists to create predictive engines for any machine learning task.

• PredictionIO is designed to democratize machine learning. How? By providing a full stack for developers, they can create deployable applications “without having to cobble together underlying technologies”. Making it easier to use should widen the appeal and keep the machine learning bottleneck from getting any worse.

CMS

• But Reaction Commerce launched with a fresh take on things. Underpinned by a modern technology stack, it hopes to target the growing number of companies on the hunt for a new ecommerce platform. In fact, a recent Internet Retailer report found that around half of online retailers would like to switch ecommerce platforms.

Healthcare

• NHS Digital has announced plans for an new API Lab to be run in conjunction with the INTEROPen community. INTEROPen is a community formed to develop open standards for the health and social care sectors. By creating the API Lab, NHS Digital hopes to get a set of open source APIs. These can then be used by developers to create new apps and speed up integration between systems in both health and social care.

• NHS Digital plans on launching an API lab before the end of the year, with the goal accelerating development of interoperability in health and social care

• [...]

• “By partnering with INTEROPen we will be able to create APIs even faster, delivering real benefits for the health and care system,” he said.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• “Currently open source projects are underfunded and developers aren’t motivated to build new applications because maintaining them is a thankless task,” says Wireline CEO Lucas Geiger. “We want to change that by creating an ecosystem that rewards developers, and helps enterprises gain leverage from the extended open source community. We’re excited to open the application process, see the ideas and support the talented people building the next generation of cloud apps.”

• After over a year of development, FundRequest has released a new blockchain platform built specifically for the funding, claiming, and rewarding of open source contributions. The company aims to introduce a new approach towards open source development that benefits both the developers who are creating the code and the organizations that use it with the overall goal of further driving the applications of open source technology.

Radio

• The event was organized by Tom Rondeau, program manager in the microsystems department of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Before joining DARPA last year, Rondeau spent six years leading GNU Radio, an open source framework for SDR.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation today announced its participation as a beneficiary charity in the 2017 Combined Federal Campaign, the workplace giving campaign for United States federal government employees.

• The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) is the world’s largest annual workplace giving campaign, allowing US federal civilian, postal, and military employees to pledge donations to nonprofit charities such as the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Last year, federal employees voluntarily participating in the CFC contributed more than $167 million to charitable causes.

Licensing/Legal

• Just because the “compliance-industrial complex” wants you to fear reciprocity, that doesn’t mean you should. Each case needs understanding on its own merits. Who knows — in your case, embracing the GPL may well be the least-cost option.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• …call to action to architects, designers and engineers to join forces, share innovation and contribute knowledge about large-scale, modular wood construction.

• “Despite the documented advantages of the open sharing of code, to date, the practice has been extremely limited within the field of cancer drug prediction,” a group of Georgia Tech researchers write in a new PLOS ONE article. But they’re trying to change that.

• Calling its project “a gauntlet,” the team wants other researchers to take, use, modify, and expand upon a machine learning platform it built to judge cancer treatment effectiveness using genetic data.

• “We feed in genomic data. We use RNA expression data. Basically, we’re just looking for correlations,” John McDonald, PhD, told Healthcare Analytics News™. McDonald is the director of Georgia Tech’s Integrated Cancer Research Center and one of the study’s lead authors. “We put expression data in and we match that to responses to chemotherapeutic drugs.”

Programming/Development

• Our pinp package for snazzier one or two column vignette received it second update. Now at version 0.0.3, it arrived on CRAN on Saturday with minimal fuzz as an ‘CRAN-pretest-publish’ transition.

• Created for phone designers, The Chocolate Factory has decided the raw GNSS data is also valuable to researchers, writing that the data “allows you to see the behavior of the GNSS receiver in great detail, including receiver clock offset and drift to the order of 1 nanosecond and 1 ppb [part per billion – El Reg] and measurement errors on a satellite-by-satellite basis.

• Surely you will know that since 2015 it was agreed to update the Javascript standard every year in order to keep JS up to date in a smooth way. The changes of last year were very decaffeinated, but this year we have some juicier news.

Leftovers

• [...] according to legend, is where Luther posted the theses on October 31, 1517.

Science

• The educational system was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of “private affluence and public squalor.” Funding for public education has sharply declined. Tuition has exploded, leading to a plague of unpayable student debt. As higher education is driven to a business model in accord with neoliberal doctrine, administrative bureaucracy has sharply increased at the expense of faculty and students, developments reviewed well by sociologist Benjamin Ginsburg. Cost-cutting dictated by the revered market principles naturally leads to hyper-exploitation of the more vulnerable, creating a new precariat of graduate students and adjuncts surviving on a bare pittance, replacing tenured faculty. All of this happens to be a good disciplinary technique, for obvious reasons.

• For those with eyes open, much of what has happened was anticipated by the early ’70s, at the point of transition from regulated capitalism to incipient neoliberalism. At the time, there was mounting elite concern about the dangers posed by the democratizing and civilizing effects of 1960s activism, and particularly the role of young people during “the time of troubles.” The concerns were forcefully expressed at both ends of the political spectrum.

• One of the advantages of this idea is that it recognizes that publishing in non-academic titles can be just as valid as appearing in conventional peer-reviewed journals. It also has the big benefit of encouraging academics to communicate with the public — something that happens too rarely at the moment. That, in its turn, might help experts learn how to explain their often complex work in simple terms. At the same time, it would allow non-experts to hear about exciting new ideas straight from the top people in the field, rather than mediated through journalists, who may misunderstand or distort various aspects.

• However, there are clear risks, too. For example, there is a danger that newspapers and magazines will be unwilling to accept articles about difficult work, or from controversial academics. Equally, mediocre researchers that hew to the government line may benefit from increased exposure, even resulting in them being promoted ahead of other, more independent-minded academics. Those are certainly issues. But what’s interesting here is not just the details of the policy itself, but the fact that it was devised and is being tried in China. That’s another sign that the country is increasingly a leader in many areas, and no longer a follower.

• We just have news from Nikon the Japanese camera giant, sadly, shutting down a giant factory of 2,500 employees in China. That reminded me, that I could do an update to the first-ever case study of what happens to an industry when it is hit by the mobile revolution. It is a severe case of the ‘digital’ revolution which powers the internet and before it, the PC-related disruption. Mobile also combines obviously the effects of the parallel ‘social media’ revolution which only gained true power after social media discovered mobile (as chronicled on this ‘Communities Dominate’ blogsite).

• But the camera industry is the first case study of an ‘outside’ industry being hit by the mobile revolution. [...]

Hardware

• Apple and Qualcomm’s feud appears to be escalating further heading into the fourth quarter, as a new report by The Wall Street Journal this evening indicates Apple is designing iPhones and iPads that would not include Qualcomm’s components.

• The latest news in the Apple-Qualcomm saga suggests that Apple may be trying to leave the chipmaker behind as soon as next year. A report by The Wall Street Journal states that Apple is designing iPhones and iPads that do not use Qualcomm components. Instead, the tech giant may source modem chips from Intel or MediaTek.

• Apple began stepping away from Qualcomm chips with the introduction of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, both of which use a combination of Qualcomm and Intel chips. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which came out in September, also use a combination of Qualcomm and Intel chips.

• Apple, which is locked in a fierce battle with Qualcomm over patents and licensing fees, is designing iPhones and iPads for next year that would ditch the chipmaker’s components, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The company is instead looking to get its modem chips from Intel and possibly MediaTek, sources told the newspaper.

• Sunet got the opportunity to test Junipers new DWDM card for the QFX switching platform. It was on beta testing run in Europe and we got to steal it for a week before it was going back to the US.

Health/Nutrition

• It would surely have been a first. A councillor sent to prison because the council they sit on didn’t just bring its own legal action against them, it called for a custodial sentence.

• Alison Teal, a Green councillor in Sheffield, has long opposed the council’s plan to fell thousands of roadside trees. On this occasion, she was accused of breaching an earlier court injunction, which forbade people from entering “safety zones” the council has set up around trees it wants to fell. Teal said she had been “fastidious” in respecting the terms of the injunction.

• On Friday, a judge threw out Sheffield council’s case against her. But the authoritarian and heavy-handed approach of the Labour majority council is symptomatic of a problem that is widespread across England.

• Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) announced today that it has secured deals for two key generic hepatitis C medicines, dropping prices dramatically.

• In a statement, MSF said it secured generic medicines for sofosbuvir and daclatasvir for as low as US$1.40 per day, or US$120 per 12-week treatment course.

• The two medicines were launched in 2013 by Gilead (sofosbuvir) and in 2015 by Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) (dacatasvir) for respectively US$1,000, and US$750 per pill, leading to a combination treatment course of US$147,000 per person for a 12-week treatment course, the statement said.

• Law enforcement agencies aren’t going to stop using cheap, faulty field drug tests. But they might soon be spending a lot more of the public’s cash settling lawsuits springing from false arrests. NPR has rounded up a few stories of field drug tests declaring normal, legal “substances” to be illegal contraband, starting with a man whose Krispy Kreme donut residue led to an arrest… and a $37,500 payout.

• But Riggs-Hopkins had noticed some crystals on the floorboard of the car, and when officers used a field testing kit, the white substance tested positive for methamphetamine.

Security

• Concerns at the effect of The Netherlands’ new security laws could result in the country’s certificate authority being pulled from Mozilla’s trust list.

• The nation’s Information and Security Services Act will come into force in January 2018. The law includes metadata retention powers similar to those enacted in other countries, and also grants broad-based interception powers to Dutch security services.

• Private equity firm Francisco Partners announced on Oct. 31 that it has acquired the SSL/TLS Certificate Authority (CA) business from security firm Comodo Group. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.

• “This is a carve-out of the Comodo SSL business, which is now going to be a separate legal and operational entity,” Bill Holtz, CEO of Comodo CA told eWEEK.

• As we have promised, will will continue to deliver security and stability fixes to the pfSense 2.3.x line even after we have released pfSense 2.4.0, since i386 and NanoBSD were deprecated in pfSense 2.4.0. These updates will continue for a minimum of one year after the pfSense 2.4.0 release date, which means they will continue through at least October 2018.

• The open source file sharing project scanned the web to find numerous vulnerable and unpatched instances of its software on critical websites.

• Canonical published today a new set of Linux kernel security updates for all supported Ubuntu releases, which patch up to 12 vulnerabilities discovered lately by various security researchers.

• Affected Ubuntu releases include Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Ubuntu 12.04 ESM (Extended Security Maintenance), as well as all official derivatives, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu Budgie.

Defence/Aggression

• Tensions continue to mount between the United States and North Korea, after U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis’s week-long visit to Asia and ahead of Trump’s 12-day visit later this week. Mattis emphasized a diplomatic resolution to the standoff between the two countries, but warned that the U.S. would not accept a nuclear North Korea. Congressional Democrats are pushing legislation that would prevent President Trump from launching a preemptive strike against North Korea. We speak with Christine Ahn, founder and executive director of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War.

• Sixteen years after voting for a war on terrorism that turned the world into a global battlefield, the Senate is taking a tentative step at reconsidering the law that authorized that conflict, the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force. Yet the leading replacement for the AUMF might, in the guise of reasserting congressional power over the war, be even more of a blank check.

• Late on Monday afternoon, the secretaries of State and Defense, Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis, are scheduled to tell the Senate’s foreign relations committee how Donald Trump’s administration views its war powers and their limits under the AUMF.

• The case involving the alleged murder of a Swedish reporter by Peter Madsen—engineer, inventor, and the man behind one of two Danish efforts to create a sub-orbital rocket to put a person into space—has taken yet another twist. About the only fact that Madsen had previously admitted to was that Kim Wall, who was writing a feature story about Madsen’s mission to put himself into space, had died on the evening of August 10 aboard UC3 Nautilus—the submersible craft he designed, built, and maintained with crowdsourced funding and the assistance of members of Copenhagen Suborbitals (another group of space enthusiasts).

• [...]

• While Madsen previously confessed to dismembering Wall’s body, he still asserted that her death was an accident, claiming she was overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning from a leak in the exhaust of the submarine’s diesel engine. Steen Hansen, a press officer for the Copenhagen Police, said Madsen is “claiming that there wasn’t enough oxygen in the submarine and that she suffocated, and that he was upstairs and didn’t notice and found her when he came back.”

• Madsen’s latest claim, Hansen told reporters, will be followed up with further forensic investigation. “Now we have to talk to people who know the submarine to see if it’s a possibility,” he said. Also today, officials announced that Madsen’s trial date has been set for a block of eight days in March and April of next year.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• MuckRock has been digging into a large pile of declassified CIA documents for the past several months and has come up with some surprising finds. It recently liberated nearly 13 million pages of CIA documents — known as the CREST archive — via a FOIA lawsuit. Since this monumental release, MuckRock has covered everything from a CIA report on an Italian pasta shortage to deeper, darker topics like a CIA asset in Mexico being linked to a long list of atrocities.

• Digging through the CIA’s archives has dug up dirt on other agencies as well. Emma Best details another MuckRock/CIA gem — one that shows the NSA attempting to prosecute a journalist for obtaining documents via FOIA requests.

• An unemployed London man discovered a USB flash storage device lying on the street as he was headed to the library to check the Internet for job listings. When he got to the library, he plugged it in and found it was filled with security details for London’s Heathrow International Airport—including security measures and travel details for Queen Elizabeth II. The man turned over the drive to a reporter at the Sunday Mirror.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Five years ago, Post-tropical Cyclone Sandy struck at high tide, driving catastrophic storm surge into coastal New Jersey and New York unlike anything seen before. Thirty-four New Jersey residents lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed, causing over $62 billion in damage.

• Five years later some areas have recovered. Some have not.

• “Nature is ferocious, and a major coastal storm can devastate a community in a matter of hours. Severely impacted communities need both patience and inspiration to recover: patience with the time it takes to repair the economic and social fabric that sustains communities, and inspiration to envision and plan for a future that is less vulnerable to coastal storms,” says Darlene Finch, Mid-Atlantic Regional Coordinator with NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management.

• The fever-pitch from those that claim that violent video games lead to real-life malicious activity is such that it produces some truly dumb diatribes and soundbites. Despite vast evidence that human beings are at least intelligent enough to separate digital violence from real-world violence, and given how rife with error and purposeful obfuscation the opposing research has been, we still get the silliness. Dr. Oz spouts off about the harm video games do to teenagers, forgetting to back it up with anything resembling evidence for his position. Dan Brown was sure video games lead to real-life violence, forgetting apparently that his own novels are stuffed with violent episodes. And Pat Robertson told his addled audiences that killing in a game is no different at all than killing someone in real life, indicating that we are a nation chock full of mass murderers that will be judged harshly by the Lord his god.

• The game sends an obvious message in support of political activism, offering advice on its website for users who want to take action against fossil fuel extraction. That’s not pipeline-advocate Energy Builders’ apparent problem, though. Its issue it has is with users blowing up pipelines, according to a press release. Energy Builders considers this signature move “an act of domestic terrorism.”

Finance

• The token business model isn’t convincing because there’s little reason for the end service providers to accept these tokens over actual money or even bitcoins, but Adams seems to have tried to get his legal ducks in a row concerning the ICO itself.

• All that processing guzzles a lot of electricity: one of the latest estimates put the annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining at 23.07 terawatt hours, roughly the amount of electricity used by Ecuador each year.

• President Donald Trump swept into office on a platform that included support for charter schools and other alternatives to public schools, and his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, an ardent supporter of “school choice” in all its forms, recently announced her department would provide over a quarter-billion dollars to help expand charters.

• So it’s surprising to see the Center for American Progress, originators of the #Resist campaign, issue a “Progressive Case for Charter Schools” that decries the “waning” support for charters among Democrats and scolds charter school skeptics for being against progressive institutions.

• The Brexit department has refused to release key details about the 58 secret studies into how leaving the EU will impact the economy, saying officials need to make policy in a “safe space”.

• Seema Malhotra, a Labour MP on the Brexit committee, had asked to know the scope, terms of reference and state of completion of the work on 58 sectors of the economy, but the department refused to release the details under freedom of information laws.

• “There is a strong public interest in policy-making associated with our exit from the EU being of the highest quality and conducted in a safe space to allow for design and deliberation to be done in private,” the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) said.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• I think anyone who voted for Trump should be asking themselves why Trump surrounded himself with so many liars and cheaters with close contacts with Russia. Trump always said he was going to put USA first in everything he did, but it hasn’t been so.

• Democracy Now! has just returned from Puerto Rico, where we interviewed Ángel Figueroa Jaramillo, head of the Puerto Rico electrical workers’ union, just as the island’s governor announced he was instructing the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, to cancel its controversial $300 million contract with the tiny Montana-based company Whitefish Energy. The move came after enormous pressure and scrutiny of the contract to reconstruct Puerto Rico’s electrical power grid devastated by Hurricane Maria. Whitefish Energy is based in the tiny hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The head of the private equity company that backs Whitefish, Joe Colonnetta, was a Trump campaign donor. All of this comes as a leaked copy of the contract sparked even further outrage last week, when it revealed that the terms barred penalties for work delays and prohibited the project from being audited.

• Jan Jambon, the interior minister and deputy prime minister from the N-VA, was not aware Puigdemont was coming to Brussels, his spokesman Olivier Van Raemdonck said. “Everyone knows Jan Jambon and the N-VA are sympathetic towards the Catalans. But that’s something completely different than sitting down with the man as a member of the federal government,” he added.

• Still, Francken’s original suggestion to harbor the Catalan leader — echoed on Twitter by the minister later as well — is read as a frank endorsement of Catalonia’s separatist agenda.

• That’s a problem for Michel, because the unity of his government rests on a deal between liberals and nationalists, under which the nationalists have put their separatist agenda on ice.

• The pollster for President Trump’s campaign says that he believes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would have defeated Trump in the general election had he secured the Democratic nomination.

• Tony Fabrizio said at a Harvard University Institute of Politics event Monday that Sanders could have prevailed where Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did not.

• Reports from The Washington Post and Recode separately claim that Facebook’s Tuesday testimony will state that up to 126 million people were exposed to Russian operations on its site during the 2016 presidential election season. Facebook’s official statements have previously focused solely on the reach of paid advertisements. This new, larger number is due to Facebook now counting non-ad operations conducted by the Internet Research Agency, a disinformation organization with Russian ties. Reports have pointed to the IRA creating seemingly legitimate American accounts with aims of indirect political disruption.

• RT was thereby forced to reveal some details of the 2016 negotiations during which Twitter representatives made an exclusive multi-million dollar advertising proposal to spend big during the US presidential election, which was turned down.

• Having since been banned, and in order to set the record straight, we are publishing Twitter’s presentation and details of the offer in full.

• Facebook, Google and Twitter are in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday for the first of three public hearings with congressional committees to discuss Russia’s attempt to influence last year’s U.S. presidential election by spreading misinformation online.

• The three companies have already admitted that, unknown to them, Russian-backed accounts used their respective sites to share and promote content aimed at stirring political unrest. On Facebook, as many as 126 million people may have seen content from accounts tied to Russian sources.

• Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, has been suspended from Twitter following a rant against two CNN reporters.

• It is one of the highest-profile account suspensions since Twitter has said it will take stronger action against bullying and threats of violence on its service.

• By now, few American elected leaders dispute that elements of the Russian state meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — though President Donald Trump has continued to say it “could have been a lot of different groups.” What remains unknown, or at least unproven, is whether anybody from Trump’s winning campaign assisted in that meddling. As Trump dismisses talk of collusion as “a total hoax,” a wide-ranging criminal investigation continues. It’s produced one guilty plea and two indictments so far, but no proof yet of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

• Meanwhile, the White House confirmed Friday that its official position is that all 16 women who have accused President Trump of sexual misconduct are lying. This is White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, being questioned by CBS’s Jacqueline Alemany.

• With several reports about data breaches occurring over the past few years, we’ve developed something of a mantra around here: it’s always, always worse than first reported. Yahoo just went through this having finally admitted that literally every email account was compromised way back in 2013 after having first said it was only a few hundred thousand accounts that were impacted. Deloitte and Equifax followed this same playbook with their own breaches, trickling out little by little just how wide an impact those hacks had achieved.

• Top officials from Facebook, Google, and Twitter told a congressional panel Tuesday that their platforms hosted a disinformation campaign carried out over their networks by Russian state actors. The propaganda centered on the presidential election, immigration, gun rights, gay rights, and racial issues, the companies said. None of the three organizations said they supported proposed legislation requiring them to disclose who is buying political advertisements on their platforms, although these Web companies promised more public transparency about who is buying ads on their networks.

Censorship/Free Speech

• That major technology companies are openly stifling the free speech of people trying to counter jihad is bad enough; what is beyond unconscionable is that they simultaneously enable Islamic supremacists to spread the very content that the counter-jihadists have been exposing.

• Former revenge porn site owner Craig Brittain is now a Senate candidate in Arizona. He’s not a viable candidate, mind you, not even with Arizona senator Jeff Flake recently announcing his retirement. But he has filed the proper paperwork and is now engaged in a charm offensive offensive offensive to win the hearts and minds of whatever demographic feels the public would be best served by someone who reacts to every perceptible slight with unhinged personal attacks.

• As a former revenge porn entrepreneur, Brittain has a bit more pre-run reputation management to engage in than most candidates. Just shortly after his candidacy was announced, Brittain issued two bogus “privacy” takedown requests targeting videos criticizing his ridesharing vaporware and his voluntary interview with journalists about his revenge porn site operations.

• Brittain followed this up with more reputation mismanagement, raining down insults on a Twitter user who dared to unfollow him. He’s continued to poll the electorate in similar ways on Facebook, telling people they’re wrong about everything if they don’t agree with him, but especially about free speech and the concept of consent.

• Here’s one I certainly didn’t expect. A group known for spreading a bunch of bogus RIAA talking points about the evils of YouTube seems to be admitting two odd things: (1) that it’s impossible to expect YouTube to accurately police all the content on its site and (2) that sharing entire published news articles is clearly not copyright infringement. The group in question is the “Content Creators Coalition” — last seen around these parts whining about the DMCA’s safe harbors on a site that only exists because of them. And it seems that bizarre and self-contradictory publicity stunts are basically the norm for this group. They’ve specifically been whining about how one of their videos got taken down on YouTube over an apparent terms of service violation. They complained, and YouTube reviewed it, and put the video back up. But, the Content Creators Coalition is using this to argue… something about how YouTube is trying to censor criticism?

• The record-breaking video game did not pass the censors’ test as it “severely deviates from our socialist core values and traditional Chinese culture,” the China Audio-Video Digital Publishing Association, a division of the censorship body State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, ruled in a statement released on its website Monday, quoted by Reuters.

• The South Korean–made game became a huge hit, counting more than two million concurrent players at a time and selling more than 15 million copies since its release in March, according to the database of online gaming platform Steam.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Two clocks are ticking for US tech companies in the power centers of the modern world. In Washington, lawmakers are working to reform FISA Section 702 before it expires on December 31st, 2017. Section 702 is the main legal basis for US mass surveillance, including the programs and techniques that scoop up the data transferred by non-US individuals to US servers. Upstream surveillance collects communications as they travel over the Internet backbone, and downstream surveillance (better known as PRISM) collects communications from companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.

• Both programs have used Section 702’s vague definitions to justify the wholesale seizure of Internet and telephony traffic: any foreign person located outside the United States could be subjected to surveillance if the government thinks that surveillance would acquire “foreign intelligence information”—which here means information about a foreign power or territory that “relates to [] the national defense or the security [or] the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States.”

• Most of the innocent people whose emails and phone calls the government spies on never find out. Not so for Professor Xiaoxing Xi, a Chinese-American physics professor at Temple University.

• One morning in May 2015, FBI agents showed up at Professor Xi’s house before dawn. They arrested him at gunpoint while his wife and daughters looked on, and went through the family’s home from top to bottom. The government charged Professor Xi with wire fraud, but in its court filings, it cast him as a spy for China who shared sensitive technology.

• Sen. Ron Wyden is again raising concerns about NSA tactics, this time through his recently-submitted Section 702 reform bill. The USA RIGHTS Act contains a number of improvements, including addressing backdoor searches of NSA data by federal agencies and increasing the reporting requirements for access of US persons communications and data. It also permabans the NSA’s “about” collection — one it shut down voluntarily after years of misuse but recently expressed an interest in restarting.

• The U.S. government and the private sector need to work together much more in order to prevent cyber attacks, said the former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency at a cybersecurity event Monday. Keith Alexander, former director of the NSA, said at the Rethink Cyber conference…

• The MDI (Mobile Device Identifier) technology — which mimics cell towers and intercepts data from nearby phones — is controversial in part because in at least one Canadian case, prosecutors have taken watered down plea deals rather than disclose information related to the device.

• Microsoft’s Senior Applied Researcher Manish Gupta partnered with professors from IIT Kharagpur to conduct a study on extracting meaningful information from social conversations to help search engines answer social list queries better by deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning.

• Kelli Burns, a professor at the University of South Florida, last year used a Facebook microphone feature available to US users to test whether discussion translated into ads.

• It seemingly did. In one experiment, Burns read “I’m really interested in going on an African safari” directly into the smartphone. Within minutes, safari trip and Jeep ads had popped up.

• Another fact that has bolstered suspicions is that, since almost every Facebook user will have shot video or photos with it or Instagram at some point, or used Messenger to carry out a video or audio conversation, the app already has the permissions it would need to – hypothetically – carry out the eavesdropping.

• Earlier today, the apex court questioned the West Bengal government for filing a plea challenging the Centre’s move to make Aadhaar mandatory for availing benefits of various social welfare schemes while asking how a state can challenge the mandate of Parliament.

• The apex court today questioned the West Bengal government’s petition challenging the Centre’s decision to make Aadhaar mandatory for availing benefits of government welfare schemes, saying it was against the federal structure.

• We’ve just written about China’s ambitious plans to add voiceprints to its existing national biometrics databases. Given the country’s long record of keeping a close watch on its citizens, it’s easy to see this as part of China’s surveillance exceptionalism – the common belief that it is “different”, and that its experiences don’t have much relevance for Western nations. But that would be a mistake.

• In many ways, China is not different, just in the vanguard. Ideas that are tried out first in China, where there is little hope of organizing resistance to them, have a habit of turning up later in Western countries, despite local and vocal protests. The main difference is that China is generally not shy about announcing ever-more surveillance of its people, on the grounds that it will supposedly make society safer, whereas Western governments do it surreptitiously, for example by gradually extending the reach of systems that they initially present as mainly aimed at foreigners. That’s been the case for the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden, where local laws were sidestepped on the grounds that the spying took place abroad, or only targeted those in other countries.

• Deleting your Facebook account, on the other hand, kills it completely. You won’t be able to log back in to retrieve or view anything you’ve posted to Facebook, and if you want to use Facebook again, you’ll have to start from scratch. You can find all the details if you hit the help icon at the top right of your Facebook account page (it looks like a question mark) and type deactivate account into the search bar that appears. Hit the let us know link in this description to start the deletion process.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A retired Chicago detective accused of framing at least 51 people for murder testified today for only the second time in eight years, expanding on a brief appearance two weeks ago for the appeal of a grisly double homicide case he oversaw in 2000. Accused of beating the two defendants into confessing, he told the court that he had no recollection of the incident and declined to review the evidence he was presented with.

• A Cook County State’s Attorney asked the detective, Reynaldo Guevara, 74, to review police reports and testimony he’d previously given in the case. Guevara refused, quickly flipping the pages and then handing them back.

• “Are you refusing to even look at” the report, Assistant State’s Attorney James Papa asked.

• “I don’t remember,” the detective answered.

• We joined a lawsuit to halt the deportation of more than 50 Indonesians who fear religious persecution.

• In 2009, the Boston Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office initiated a program called “Operation Indonesian Surrender,” which it characterized as “a humanitarian effort” meant to “bring folks out of the shadows” and send the message to Indonesian Christian community members that “we will work with you.” Eight years later, ICE is trying to deport all the participants.

• Prosecutors in the United Kingdom didn’t think Josh Walker was an actual terrorist. But they treated him as if he were one anyway, because of a book they found in his bedroom.

• Fortunately, they failed. But the case, highlighted at The Intercept, details some of the terrible consequences of trying to criminalize dangerous thoughts or ideas rather than actions.

• Walker was prosecuted for downloading and having in his possession a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, an infamous guide to homemade explosives (and other tools for lawbreaking) that was first published in 1971.

• “I think the demonstration is unfortunate,” Weigel said. “The question of slavery is a very serious issue and the people out there make some interesting points and valid points about the horrors of slavery. But I believe to have a protest just about the idea that Robert E. Lee can be seen positively is a mistake because we have the right to have differing opinions about historical figures.

• “We shouldn’t demonize historical figures … because of the fact they were slave owners. There were 12 presidents who owned slaves. Washington, Jefferson and Madison stand out.”

• The Francoist ultras of the Spanish government have gone the whole hog, and are charging Puigdemont and his colleagues with sedition and rebellion. And before anyone can interject with any nonsense about prosecutorial independence, let me assure you that in no country, ever, in the history of the world, has anybody been tried for sedition or rebellion without the explicit approval of the political rulers.

• Puigdemont is in excellent company. Gandhi was jailed for ten years for sedition in 1922 for seeking Indian independence from Britain.

• At this very moment, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is detaining Rosa Maria Hernandez, a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who recently underwent gallbladder surgery, and is refusing to release her into the care of her family, despite her doctor’s advice. How exactly did this child with developmental delays become the Trump administration’s target for deportation? It’s an egregious case of government overreach, and now the subject of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit.

• For the second time in less than a month, a judge — the same judge — has tossed out lawsuits from anonymous law enforcement officers filed against the social movement known as Black Lives Matter. Much like the no-name cop in the other idiotic lawsuit, this anonymous cop swore up and down (as one tends to do in legal filings) Black Lives Matter was responsible for injuries he sustained during an ambush.

• Judge Brian Jackson warned the unnamed plaintiff his suit was on its way to the dustbin of history shortly after tossing the first officer’s suit — one that included a hilarious attempt to hold a Twitter hashtag responsible for injuries sustained during a protest. Finding this suit to be more of the same, the judge warned the officer to start making some actual actionable claims or face dismissal. No such claims have been stated apparently, as Courthouse News Service reports.

• A database system that will now be used by Indiana to automatically purge voter registrations that have duplicates in other states is 99 percent more likely to purge legitimate voters, according to a paper published last week by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, and Microsoft Research. Using the probability of matching birth dates for people with common first, middle, and last names and an audit of poll books from the 2012 US presidential election, the researchers concluded that the system would de-register “about 300 registrations used to cast a seemingly legitimate vote for every one registration used to cast a double vote.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• “The FCC’s approval of CenturyLink’s acquisition of Level 3 is great news and means we now have all the regulatory approvals we need to close the transaction,” CenturyLink Senior VP John Jones said in an announcement today. The merger, valued at $34 billion, previously received approvals from the US Department of Justice and regulatory bodies in more than 20 US states including California and New York.

• And while these mock ups were tongue in cheek, large ISPs have given every indication that this idea of freedom costing extra isn’t too far from their ideal. And abusing a lack of broadband competition to force users to shell out additional funds to access to the content and services of their choice isn’t too far off of what has already happened, whether we’re talking about AT&T’s decision to block Facetime from working unless users shelled out for more expensive plans, or Verizon’s recent decision to charge users $10 more just to avoid arbitrary video throttling.

• I don’t pretend that these are easy questions to answer. But if we need technology that’s not simply fast or pretty, but just, it’s worth putting AMP under a critical lens. (As well as, yes, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News, and, and, and.) If we fail to do that, we can’t be sure how well it measures up to our needs, much less the needs of the web as an open medium. And we definitely won’t know how well it serves entities other than Google.

• I don’t think those statements are even truthy, much less true. In fact, if I were looking for the right term to semantically describe any one of those statements, the closest in meaning would be this: A statement used intentionally for the purpose of deception. That is the dictionary definition of a lie.

DRM

• Assassin’s Creed Origins gamers are reporting massive CPU utilization. While the game is said to be quite resource-hungry already, game cracker Voksi informs TorrentFreak that anti-piracy efforts are to blame. With Denuvo in trouble, Ubisoft has called in reinforcements which are reportedly dragging down all but the most powerful machines. “It’s anti-consumer and a disgusting move,” he says.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• There are a lot of people out there that don’t understand intellectual property issues. But perhaps no one misunderstands them quite as badly as internet marketing guru Dan Dasilva. And Dasilva has no excuse. He’s been on the losing end of a copyright infringement lawsuit. Despite this, Dasilva continues to express his ignorance — and proclaim his victimhood — publicly on his YouTube channel. (h/t Techdirt reader Andy Gural)

• Dasilva snagged an image from Google’s image search and used it on a website he set up for one of his clients. The photographer who took the picture — Michael Grecco — sued Dasilva for infringement, ultimately ending up with $27,000 settlement and $10,000 in legal fees.

• CBS Broadcasting has launched one of the most unusual copyright infringement cases in recent history. The media giant is suing a New York man who posted a screenshot of a 1958 episode of the TV-series ‘Gunsmoke’ on social media. The man now faces $150,000 in potential damages, but since he sued CBS first, it’s likely that the case will not come to that.

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