● 11.02.17

● Links 2/11/2017: Valve Survey, MariaDB Funding

Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Windows is there in our life from a long time. From our school’s computer labs to our PC at home where we had been playing games to every neighbor in the hood everyone is using windows since a long time. Switching is never easy especially when most of the thing you own is compatible with Windows only not Linux. But there are reasons why you want to switch that’s why you are here, to find out the problems, their solutions and most likely reasons why you want to make the switch. ​I will help you in the best way I can because I also made that decision, so I know what could be problems and their solutions.

• You’ve likely heard of Ubuntu, Red Hat and Fedora, but there are strange, lesser-known versions of Linux worth knowing about.

Server

• Linux is free and open source, this has emanated into low total cost of ownership of a Linux system, compared to other operating systems. Although Linux operating systems (distributions) are not entirely doing well on desktop computers, they are commanding the stats when it comes to powering servers, mainframe computers as well as supercomputers in data centers around the world.

• There are several factors attributed to this: the first and most important that you might have thought of, is the general freedom associated with it, stability and security among others.

Kernel Space

• Announced last summer by Jason Donenfeld was the “WireGuard” project as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. It’s looking like this network addition could soon be reaching the mainline Linux kernel.

• Back in January they talked of their mainline kernel ambitions and while it might not be ready for merging in 2017 as it doesn’t look like it will make it for the 4.15 merge window, it’s sounding like it will be here soon enough.

• The seemingly endless legal battle between SCO and IBM battle over who owns UNIX, and perhaps bits of Linux, too has re-emerged. And this time SCO has had a win.

• As Groklaw records, this case kicked off in 2003. The dispute centres on “Project Monterey” a joint effort by SCO and IBM to build a unified UNIX capable of running on several different microprocessor architectures. SCO – at that time known as the Santa Cruz Organisation – sold versions of UNIX and tossed some of its source code into the Project Monterey mix, as did IBM. The parties signed a “joint development agreement” (JDA) to formalise the deal.

• The Linux Foundation this week announced an agreement with AT&T and Tech Mahindra to launch the Acumos Project, a new platform for open source development of artificial intelligence.

• The new platform is part of a broader effort to open up opportunities for AI collaboration in the telecommunications, media and technology sectors.

• The Linux Foundation has been working with AT&T and Tech Mahindra for months to put this deal together, in the hope of creating a framework for new development in a standardized environment.

Graphics Stack

• Building off an earlier update in DRM-Next of upstreaming more AMDKFD changes for Linux 4.15, a second batch of feature work was proposed today for merging into DRM-Next.

• Oded Gabbay has sent in a second batch of AMDKFD driver changes for Linux 4.15. AMDKFD, of course, being the HSA kernel driver. With this second batch of changes, it still is mostly focused on upstreaming APU work and not yet the discrete GPU bits needed.

• Andres Rodriguez of Valve has posted a set of 17 patches for implementing the OpenGL GL_EXT_semaphore extension within Mesa and wired through for RadeonSI.

• GL_EXT_semaphore is part of the OpenGL memory object support that was introduced as an extension this year for porting these semaphores / memory objects concepts from Vulkan back to OpenGL. Semaphores are synchronization primitives and the GL semaphores map to the semantics of Vulkan semaphores.

• The Etnaviv open-source driver stack providing reverse-engineered Vivante Linux graphics driver support continues on its feature streak.

• Some of the recent successes in the past several days for the Etnaviv driver have included Vivante GC7000 series patches for supporting this newer hardware, OpenGL 2.1 support, plans for eventually supporting OpenCL, and more.

• Among the projects recently adopting the Meson build system has been Mesa 3D. The build time benefits are quite encouraging for developers.

• The Mesa onboarding of Meson has been happening in their Git code the past several weeks. Similar to other projects, Meson with the Ninja back-end is allowing for much quicker build times than using GNU Autotools and alternatives.

Applications

• Open Whisper Systems launched Signal desktop app through Chrome browser back in 2016. The company is finally bringing a standalone app for the private messaging service. “Signal Desktop is now available in a new, standalone form, and the Chrome App has been deprecated,” the company said in an announcement blog post.

• The new standalone desktop version of Signal means that it will run independently of the browser. “If you’re a Firefox or Safari user, you don’t need to install Chrome to send and receive Signal messages on your computer. If you’re a Chrome user, having your browser open will no longer be synonymous with having Signal Desktop open,” explains the company in a blog post. The standalone Signal desktop app has been launched with support for platforms including Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 as well as macOS 10.9 and above. The company has also released a standalone app for Linux distributions supporting APT like Ubuntu or Debian.

• Signal Desktop is now available in a new, standalone form, and the Chrome App has been deprecated.

• The new desktop version of Signal runs independently of your browser. If you’re a Firefox or Safari user, you don’t need to install Chrome to send and receive Signal messages on your computer. If you’re a Chrome user, having your browser open will no longer be synonymous with having Signal Desktop open.

• Lucidor is a cross-platform ebook reader and manager with support for catalogs in the OPDS format and the EPUB file format.

• As a XULRunner application, it resembles the look and feel of the famous Firefox web browser with its tabbed layout and configuration settings panel.

• As simple as it is, you can use it to convert web pages and web feeds into ebooks, update your library’s metadata from the internet, and even search for and download ebooks online.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It’s easy to see why though, China is now the biggest market on Steam according to their survey. Simplified Chinese has increased by +26.83% making their share of Steam’s market at 56.37%. That’s a huge influx of users from that region, which can easily account for the reason Linux has been dropping recently.

• Days ahead of the five year anniversary of Steam being publicly available on Linux and well off the ~2% highs for Steam’s Linux marketshare, the numbers for October 2017 are now being reported.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Last week I was part of the expedition by KDE (together with Kenny and Petra) to visit the local team that is helping us organize Akademy 2018 in Vienna.

Distributions

• Two teenagers created a Linux distribution 8 years back. Today it has become a prominent name in the Linux world. Artyom Zorin tells the inside story of Zorin OS and its future goals.

Arch Family

• Every month, the Arch Linux developers bake an up-to-date installation image (a.k.a. ISO) that includes all the security patches and package updates that they’ve pushed through the stable software repositories of the GNU/Linux distribution during the month that just ended.

• Arch Linux 2017.11.01 is the ISO snapshot for the month of November 2017, powered by the Linux 4.13.9 kernel and incorporating all the updates released during October 2017. Weighing around 523 MB in size, the Arch Linux 2017.11.01 installation image is supported only on 64-bit platforms as 32-bit installations aren’t possible anymore.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As mentioned earlier, I’ve been using Ubuntu 17.10 for more than a week now. Compared to Ubuntu 17.04 it is a bit slow while booting, yet slightly lightweight, very responsive (again, I had to manually tweak the I/O scheduler to make it responsive), power efficient, shuts down fast and is very stable. Even though there is no Unity desktop shell anymore, they’ve tweaked GNOME to look a lot alike as well. So all in all, I’m quite happy with this release.

• That said, I’ve been using KDE plasma desktop that came with Manjaro 17.02 for the past few months, and I’m beginning to love KDE more & more. One of the reasons why I was forced to look for an alternative was because of some of the limitations of the GNOME desktop (I’m not going to go into the details since I’ve mentioned some of the these reasons in my other reviews). Therefore, despite my judgement derived from this Ubuntu 17.10 review, I’ve decided to switch to KDE (well, for now at least).

• But I wanted to stay closer to the core Ubuntu platform, thus I’ve chosen the old girl, Debian, Debian 9 (‘Stretch’) KDE edition, to be precise. I’ve already downloaded it and going to give it a go. That said, if you’re an Ubuntu fan, and want to try out the 17.10 release, then why not, it looks good to me.

• We roundup some of the best GTK themes for Ubuntu. Our list includes Arc, Adatpa, and Numix, and other GTK themes guaranteed to give your desktop a makeover.

• But what really drew me in was the stunning iconography, which was particularly surprising. Despite Linux being synonymous with customization and there being too many icon sets to count, many of them, while attractive in their own right, fail to embody what we expect in a professional or commercial product. That’s not to say that their artwork itself is unprofessional, but many are intended to be playful or are created with a particular style in mind that is not typical of professional environments. System76 has created a stunning set of icons that don’t undermine the power of Linux and will hopefully attract professionals from all fields to try out Linux as a part of their productivity suite.

• The final release of Pop!_OS has been released, and since I encountered no bugs while playing with the alpha, I’d be hard-pressed to believe there are any show-stoppers in the final release, so I highly recommend you give it a try and show your non-Linux using friends how cost-free doesn’t necessarily mean aesthetic-free.

• Find the high-resolution Golago Pro pictures here on Google Drive.

• Did you find this System76 Golago Pro review interesting? Don’t forget to share your views with us.

Devices/Embedded

Tizen

• GuestTek Interactive Entertainment Ltd. has announced that they have completed the integration of the Samsung’s Tizen platform into GuestTek’s North American product offerings. Headquartered in Calgary, Canada, Guestek is a global leader in broadband technology and interactive solutions for the hospitality industry. Guestek and Samsung have been partners for years, and they continue to provide hotels ever evolving state-of-the-art in-room entertainment solutions.

• “We are proud to work with Samsung as we continue to grow our partnership. GuestTek has deployed Samsung’s exceptional televisions in guest rooms across the globe, and we appreciate the opportunity to upgrade our offerings with Tizen powered hospitality TVs,” says Arnon Levy, GuestTek’s President and CEO.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• I have been involved in open source software since 1993. And in 1994, I believed so strongly in the ability for people to come together to write code that I created the FreeDOS Project, to replicate the functionality of MS-DOS. And twenty-three years later, I’m still using and developing FreeDOS.

• My desktop system is Linux, and I run FreeDOS using QEMU (Quick EMUlator). QEMU is very easy to use, and provides great flexbility to define your virtual machine. I run FreeDOS in QEMU when I want to play an old DOS game, or when I want to test some legacy software, or when I want to write code to update a FreeDOS program.

• But one problem pops up occasionally when using QEMU. A lot of old DOS software uses the function keys to do various things. The most extreme example is WordPerfect, which was arguably the most popular commercial word processor of the day. WordPerfect is notorious for using all of the function keys, in every combination, including use of Ctrl and Alt to access all the common features. I think WordPerfect probably used all of the expanded keys too, like Home and End.

Databases

• Open source database startup MariaDB has announced a new $27 million round of funding led by Alibaba, confirming the news that TechCrunch reported in September.

• As we wrote then, Alibaba contributed the majority of the round, supplying €20 million of the total €22.9 million raised.

• US and Finland based MariaDB Corporation, which provides an open source database, has raised $27 million in a series C funding led by Alibaba Group.

• The investment will see the company expanding its reach globally as the open source database standard.

• The source of the investment is part of what MariaDB Chief Executive Michael Howard (pictured) called “a funding hat trick” with nearly equal parts of the company’s total cash hoard coming from U.S., European and Asian investors. That reflects a new, more global way of doing business.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Microsoft has increased its commitment to open-source technologies recently and has a wide variety of Linux virtual machines (VMs) available for Azure users to deploy. In September, the company revealed that it was working with Canonical for a custom Linux kernel for Ubuntu VMs on Azure.

• The tool itself could offer game developers an alternative to tools like CMake and Premake, specifically one that Ubisoft says generates 100 to 200 times faster and works well with both big C++ code bases and multiplatform projects.

• VMware has open-sourced a “VR Data Center Experience” that puts a virtual reality overlay over its vSphere product, to give you a virtual view of virtual machines.

• The company first demonstrated this code at VMworld Europe, after it was whipped up at an earlier hackfest.

BSD

• We intend to only build syspatches for one release in the future. Errata patches will continue to be generated for 2 releases.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• A culture of transparency permeates the Dataverse project, contributing to its adoption in dozens of research institutions around the world. Headquartered at Harvard University, the Dataverse development team has more than a decade of experience operating as an open source project within an organization that values transparency: the Institute of Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). Working transparently helps the Dataverse team communicate changes to current development efforts, provides opportunities for the community to support each other, and facilitates contribution to the project.

• Thanks to Tesla’s decision to open-source its patents, Chinese startup Xiaopeng Motors has already manufactured several Model X clones.

• Here’s an open invitation to steal. It goes out to cancer fighters and tempts them with a new program that predicts cancer drug effectiveness via machine learning and raw genetic data.

• The researchers who built the program at the Georgia Institute of Technology would like cancer fighters to take it for free, or even just swipe parts of their programming code, so they’ve made it open source. They hope to attract a crowd of researchers who will also share their own cancer and computer expertise and data to improve upon the program and save more lives together.

• A team of researchers from Atlanta-based Georgia Institute of Technology introduced an open-source algorithm Oct. 26 that predicts a cancer drug’s effectiveness based on a patient’s genetic data.

• The researchers developed the machine learning algorithm using gene expression and drug response data from the National Cancer Institute’s panel of 60 human cancer cell lines. Their goal was to create an algorithm that predicts optimal drug therapies based on individual patient tumors.

• In a study of 273 cancer patients, researchers found the algorithm to be about 85 percent accurate in assessing the effectiveness of nine drugs. By releasing the algorithm on an open-source platform, they hope other researchers will participate in refining their work.

Programming/Development

• The Go programming language, sometimes referred to as Google’s golang, is making strong gains in popularity. While languages such as Java and C continue to dominate programming, new models have emerged that are better suited to modern computing, particularly in the cloud. Go’s increasing use is due, in part, to the fact that it is a lightweight, open source language suited for today’s microservices architectures. Container darling Docker and Google’s container orchestration product Kubernetes are built using Go. Go is also gaining ground in data science, with strengths that data scientists are looking for in overall performance and the ability to go from “the analyst’s laptop to full production.”

• As an engineered language (rather than something that evolved over time), Go benefits developers in multiple ways, including garbage collection, native concurrency, and many other native capabilities that reduce the need for developers to write code to handle memory leaks or networked apps. Go also provides many other features that fit well with microservices architectures and data science.

• It’s a well-known fact that your choice of a programming language decides the growth of your career as a developer. For example, if you’re an Android developer, you must start learning Kotlin programming and join the army of developers who are ready to walk with the changing trend. The same could be said for iOS developers who are learning Swift.

• But, what if you are a programming novice and looking for a new language? In this scenario, it’s advisable to start with easy-to-learn programming languages like Python or JavaScript. To help you out in this decision and give you a good idea of the languages which are disliked by the programmers, Stack Overflow has published a blog post.

Leftovers

Science

• Ping Fu, who researches library science at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, is concerned that the policy will blur the distinction between peer-reviewed academic publications and popular writing. This could affect the top levels of scholarship in China, he says. Liu Jin-ping, a biologist at Hainan University in Haikou, also worries that the policy will give prominence to stories that “flatter the government”. Some academics will aim to “become Internet stars” so they can be promoted, he wrote on his blog.

Health/Nutrition

• Caveman Chuck Coker/flickrCaveman Chuck Coker/flickrSince legal recreational marijuana sales began in Colorado in January 2014, the state has seen a 6 percent drop in opioid deaths, according to research published in the American Journal of Public Health. The drop follows 14 years of rising opioid deaths, going back to the first year for which the esearchers had data.

Security

• The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hitlist obtained by the Associated Press.

Defence/Aggression

• The militant group promotes strict sharia law, which includes amputating the hands of thieves. The group’s attacks have added to the difficulties faced by Farmajo, who was elected in February to lead the country of 14 million people that ranks among the poorest nations in the world.

• When I was British Ambassador in Uzbekistan I very explicitly warned that the support NATO countries were giving the appallingly repressive Uzbek regime – military, financial and political support – would cause hatred of the West among Uzbeks. I felt so strongly about this I was prepared to give up my career for it, and in Murder in Samarkand (Dirty Diplomacy in the USA) I published a 440 page account of how our policy was fundamentally wrong. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to be vindicated in this way.

• The Department of Defense periodically releases a “cost of war” report. The newly released version, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog, covers the time from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.

• The Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2014 and Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 account for the bulk of expenses: more than $1.3 trillion. The continuing presence in Afghanistan and aerial anti-ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria since 2014 have cost a combined $120 billion.

• The report’s costs include only direct war-related expenses such as operating and maintaining bases, procuring equipment, and paying for and feeding troops. It most notably does not include the expense of veteran’s benefits for troops who serve in these wars or the intelligence community’s expenses related to Global War on Terror.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Levels of industrial solvents in some of the wells at the Dorado Superfund site are too high for drinking water

• The European Union is being influenced by big polluters and corporate interests in a way that is “threatening” the realisation of the Paris Agreement, according to a new report.

• Published days before countries head to Bonn for the next round of international climate talks, it claims that big polluters have infiltrated the negotiations process and are pushing for “false solutions” and lobbying against tougher regulations.

• Despite media focus on the role of the US since Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the report — co-authored by NGOs Corporate Accountability and Corporate Europe Observatory — suggests that the EU is “perhaps worse” than America in “undermining climate policy”, despite often being hailed as “a climate hero”.

• Last month, the EU Parliament agreed to push to curb the access of fossil fuel lobbyists at the international climate negotiations. But Europe’s environment ministers later omitted any mention of stopping vested interests participating in negotiations in a formal statement outlining its priorities for the talks – reducing the chance of the progress on curbing conflicts of interest in Bonn.

Finance

• These three factors explain why there is some demand for Bitcoin but not the recent surge.

• Britain’s Electoral Commission is investigating whether a leading anti-EU campaigner breached referendum finance rules, after speculation mounted that Russia may have meddled in the Brexit vote.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• So what should be happening? Twitter should own up to its values, acknowledge it’s a public news platform (in contrast to other social media networks), and stop editing the news. After all, Twitter designed its service in a way that gives every single regular post a publicly accessible and unique URL, no login required to view. Such openness has been a key ingredient in the company’s recipe for success. Tweets are on the public record, indeed some have become the public record.

• Even if that happened, it would likely be a partial picture. National security experts testified that they don’t believe these companies have found more than the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to Russian interference. Nor did they believe the likes of Facebook and Twitter, with their Earth-sized footprints, have the ability to figure out the true identities of their millions of advertisers.

• Our research surveyed 3,938 Twitter users1 who together generated 4.8 million tweets that we downloaded in August 2016. We then coded the most common 12,000 words based on whether they were political, either because they used an explicitly political term (say, “president”) or a proper noun that was likely to be political (“Romney,” “Maddow” or “CNN”). In all, we found just 293 of the 12,000 words to be political.

• “When he is old he won’t be living in a democracy but in a technocracy, or a dictatorship. It’s sad as hell. I am sorry to say it, but I am 100 percent sure. We are in the process of dismantling democracy.”

• Earlier this year, the Halmstad municipality reportedly sold 7,000 square meters of land intended for a mosque. The decision was railroaded through despite the fact the mosque imam had previously made controversial statements on the internet, comparing homosexuality to a virus. Henrik Oretorp of Halmstad housing committee told the Swedish national broadcaster that it was impossible for the municipality to waver in such an important land sale agreement. According to SVT, the municipality receives SEK 1.4 million ($170,000 or roughly $25 per square meter) for the land sold to the Islamic Children and Culture Association.

• In an instance typical of the morally abhorrent neoliberal propaganda rag that the Guardian has become, it reports that the latest respectable opinion poll puts support for Catalan Independence at 48.7% – while failing to report that the same poll puts opposition to Catalan Independence at 43.6%. By excluding the don’t knows and failing to admit it has done so, the Guardian quite deliberately leads readers to presume that the 48.7% support for Independence means there is a majority against. In fact the true figures are roughly Yes 53%, No 47%, excluding don’t knows.

• It is difficult to understand the provenance of this “sex list” of Tory MPs. What was the standing of the junior Tory researchers who allegedly compiled it, and at whose behest? Assuming this copy is genuine, we know that at least some of it is accurate because individuals like Mark Garnier have admitted the detail of the allegation. But I publish it as a matter of intense public interest at the moment, and I publish it as evidence that this is what is alleged. This list is already extremely widely available online. I am not in any sense endorsing or promoting as true any of the specific individual allegations, which may be groundless nonsense. I understand that in some cases these allegations are strongly denied.

• Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, his protégé Rick Gates and the less well-known Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos have all faced scrutiny before Monday. Here are our favorite stories on them.

• President Donald Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort and his former business associate Rick Gates surrendered to the FBI, after being indicted on charges that include money laundering, acting as unregistered agents of Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government and conspiracy against the United States. The White House said the indictments have nothing to do with the president’s 2016 campaign. However, Trump stopped tweeting yesterday after his former campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. We speak with Marcy Wheeler, who in a new piece writes, “George Papadopoulos’s Indictment is Very, Very Bad News for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”

• Georgia state officials said Monday that the recent reports of server deletion “were not undertaken to delete evidence.” The conclusion came as part of a two-page “investigation report” authored by Ryan Germany of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

• As Ars reported last week, a university server and its backups, believed to be key to a pending federal lawsuit filed against Georgia election officials, were deleted, according to e-mails recently released under a public records request.

• Also this week, the state’s Office of the Attorney General (OAG) told plaintiffs that it would no longer be representing state election officials. The lawsuit will now be taken over by Barnes Law Group, headed by former Georgia Governor Ray Barnes.

• Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

• I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Testimony from social media giants to the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed that Twitter censored #PodestaEmails tweets and had strange criteria for defining “Russians,” while Google is now backing a think tank close to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

• Legal representatives for Facebook, Google and Twitter testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday, as part of the ongoing Congressional investigations into Russia’s alleged efforts to influence the 2016 US election.

• Prepared remarks revealed Twitter’s censorship of the hashtags #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeaks, along with criteria for identifying Russian accounts that are questionable to say the least.

• Also revealed was Google’s close relationship with politicians and governments and increased support for Defending Digital Democracy, a Harvard-based project staffed by former Pentagon and NSA officials, along with Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager and the CEO of Crowdstrike, a Democratic National Committee contractor behind the accusation that Russia hacked the DNC emails.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Stories about privacy have a depressing tendency to be about its loss, and the increasing threats to it in the future. Perhaps we need to spend more time thinking about how to protect it, to prevent the loss and head off the threats. That’s easier said than done, since the latter come from many quarters, and take many forms. But even if it is not possible to draw up a complete and definitive approach to defending privacy, it is worthwhile looking at what has worked in the past in order to bear it in mind for future battles.

• One episode in the annals of privacy has been taking place in Oakland, California. Back in 2013, Oakland residents discovered that the City of Oakland City Council was intending to approve a second phase of a port security monitoring system. This entailed extending Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center (DAC) into a city-wide surveillance apparatus that would have combined feeds from cameras, microphones, and other electronic monitoring assets throughout the city – see DAC Technical Requirements slide above for details.

• Ever since Edward Snowden helped reveal the true extent of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive spying program, U.S. politicians have attempted to “fix” the program’s gross violations of the Fourth Amendment with legislation. While some legislative efforts were “fake fixes,” others were well-meaning but have fallen short, as legislators still lack key information regarding how the government interprets and uses Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Section 215 of the Patriot Act to legally justify its dragnet collection of citizen phone records and other information.

• Indeed, over the past four years, Congress has been stonewalled by the NSA in its attempts to learn more about the program. The NSA has repeatedly refused even to estimate how many Americans are spied on by the agency’s most invasive programs and has even refused to reveal whether it spies on members of Congress or other elected officials in the United States.

• Verizon does not want states or localities to have the ability to enact their own net neutrality rules should the FCC vote to destroy net neutrality under the guise of “Restoring Internet Freedom” later this year. A recent Verizon whitepaper (pdf), which was mailed to the FCC last week, reveals the company’s incessant pushing. And the valid concern is that the FCC, currently chaired by a former Verizon employee – is actually listening.

• Today we are releasing the implementation guide for EFF’s Do Not Track (DNT) policy. For years users have been able to set a Do Not Track signal in their browser, but there has been little guidance for websites as to how to honor that request. EFF’s DNT policy sets out a meaningful response for servers to follow, and this guide provides details about how to apply it in practice.

• At its core, DNT protects user privacy by excluding the use of unique identifiers for cross-site tracking, and by limiting the retention period of log data to ten days. This short retention period gives sites the time they need for debugging and security purposes, and to generate aggregate statistical data. From this baseline, the policy then allows exceptions when the user’s interactions with the site—e.g., to post comments, make a purchase, or click on an ad—necessitates collecting more information. The site is then free to retain any data necessary to complete the transaction. We believe this approach balances users’ privacy expectations with the ability of websites to deliver the functionality users want.

• The UK and Ireland arm of energy giant Centrica has nearly finished migrating its enterprise systems and data from an on-premise data centre to Microsoft Azure, shifting to Office 365 and Dynamics 365 in the process.

Civil Rights/Policing

• U.S-based Qiao Mu, a former dean of Beijing Foreign Studies University’s Center for International Communication Studies, said punishments for failure to memorize speeches are rare in post-Mao China, and recall the days when any self-respecting Chinese citizen could spout quotations from Mao Zedong on command.

• Violence broke out in Togo’s second city, Sokode, after the arrest of an imam close to the country’s main opposition, fuelling tensions after weeks of anti-government protests.

• The US knew people were being “delivered for slaughter” during a political purge in Indonesia during the 1960s, declassified documents reveal.

• Sources said that Kitchloo, as head of the Majlis-e-Shoura Committee, an amalgam of more than 300 religious and social organisations in Kishtwar district, had in the last fortnight issued a series of fatwas — from banning musical nights during marriage and other functions to asking women to observe hijab and terming co-education un-Islamic.

• Though I’m sure there are some well-meaning people, in practice, the social justice movement is so often just another racket: a nifty means to unearned power over others.

• Germany’s Interior Minister, Thomas De Maizière, has just announced that he is “ready to discuss” recognition of Islamic holidays in regions of the country which already have become Muslim-dominant. Federal recognition is not yet on the agenda, but likely could come at a later time.

• There’s a specific statute at play, and it’s 18 U.S.C. sec. 227.

• Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer Mark Geragos says he expects the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback to be signed “within 10 days”.

• Kaepernick, 29, has been without a team since he opted out of his contract with the 49ers in March.

• Last month he filed a grievance against NFL team owners he believes are conspiring not to hire him because of his protests against racial injustice.

• The “extreme vetting” that Trump wants to see more of refers to a host of policies intended to make it harder for certain people to immigrate to this country. Who those people are is no secret: Trump made that clear on his campaign trail when he called for a “total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” He later admitted that because an explicit Muslim ban could offend sensitivities or the Constitution, the ban had “morphed” into nationality-based proposals and “extreme vetting.”

• The comments by John Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, about the Civil War either reflect his ignorance on the topic or a desperate attempt to deflect attention from the other serious troubles facing the administration he serves. Sadly, ignorance is the more forgiving assumption.

• Kelly said: “I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

• That’s from the latest Inspector General’s report [PDF] on DHS components’ ability to secure items that might wreak havoc — ranging from inappropriate access to multiple deaths — if left improperly secured. This includes current presidential faves CBP and ICE — both DHS components.

DRM

• There are really two themes when it comes to DRM, software supposedly created to stop video game piracy. The first and most notorious theme is what an utter failure DRM has been in accomplishing this core mission. Even once-vaunted DRM platforms like Denuvo have been reduced to code-bloat within the games they’re meant to protect. And that’s the DRM on the effective end of the spectrum, relatively speaking. But the other theme, one that is arguably far more important and impactful, is how absolutely great DRM software tends to be at annoying customers and prohibiting them from enjoying the games they legitimately purchased. This theme presents itself in multiple forms, from people being flatout unable to use the software they purchased at all, to performance hits due to the DRM software slowing down the customer’s computers, to opening up grand new security holes through which malicious actors happily dive into the lives of those very same customers.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• (CC-BY) PIJIP’s Copyright User Rights Database tracks changes to copyright user rights (aka limitations and exceptions) over time in a sample of 21 countries of different development levels. The data assesses the degree to which other countries have adopted exceptions that are as open as the US fair use right – i.e. open to a use of any kind of work, by any kind of user and for any purpose. The instrument and results are available at infojustice.org/survey.

• On November 4 and 5, the Internet Archive will host the Fifth Annual Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon. Aaron would have turned 31 on November 8. The late activist, political organizer, programmer, and entrepreneur was a dear friend of EFF’s who made a lasting imprint on the Internet and the digital community. Aaron’s life was tragically cut short after overzealous prosecutors sought to make an example out of him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for using MIT’s computer network to download millions of academic articles from the online archive JSTOR. At EFF, we carry on Aaron’s legacy every day through our work on open access and CFAA reform. And this weekend, we’ll join our friends at the Internet Archive in celebrating Aaron’s life and work.

• New legal cases filed on behalf of copyright trolls are requesting authority to seize alleged pirates’ computers after they failed to pay cash settlement offers. A Finnish law firm says there’s a risk of another ‘Chisugate’, the massive controversy that ensued when police raided a home and confiscated a child’s Winne the Pooh laptop in 2012.

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