● 11.03.17

● Links 3/11/2017: IPFire 2.19 is Out, Black Duck to Vanish

Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• VMware announced the release of Project Photon OS 2.0 on Nov. 1, providing users with improved security and management capabilities.

Kernel Space

• The 4.13.11, 4.9.60, 4.4.96, and 3.18.79 stable kernels have been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman. There are, as usual, important fixes throughout the tree in these updates and users of those kernel series should upgrade.

• Linux 4.15 will be exciting for AMD Zen systems not only for working temperature reporting (finally) being in place for Ryzen/EPYC, but AMD EPYC CPUs should also benefit from a scheduler topology improvement.

• Suravee Suthikulpanit of AMD has been working on a patch for Family 17h / EPYC systems where currently the kernel’s setup of scheduler domains is less than optimal with not being properly balanced across the NUMA nodes.

• NOW-DEFUNCT UNIX VENDOR SCO has won a surprise victory in the US Court of Appeals against systems giant IBM.

• The victory will spark new life – not a lot, but some – into the company’s intellectual property claims.

• This particular judgement involves SCO’s Project Monterey Unix development effort with IBM to create a version of Unix for 64-bit servers – all the old Unix operating system vendors were cutting development deals in the late-1990s and early 2000s in the expectation of rationalisation of both the various Unix operating systems and server makers.

• However, Project Monterey – in which both SCO and IBM contributed code and know-how – proved too complex. Sequent and Intel were also involved.

• SCO, though, as part of its machine-gunning of legal claims as it went down, claimed that IBM was never interested in Project Monterey and improperly incorporated code from the Project Monterey into its AIX version of Unix.

Graphics Stack

• The GTX 1070 Ti is a great graphics card but a frustrating product. In the year and a half since the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070 launched, Nvidia has faced little competition from rival AMD, which has been stretched thin across the launch of mainstream graphics cards like the RX 480 and high-end processors like Ryzen Threadripper. As brilliant as those products are, particularly Threadripper, it took until August of this year for AMD to launch a competitor to Nvidia’s year-old graphics cards. The resulting RX Vega 64 wasn’t the graphical powerhouse many were hoping for, with high power consumption and performance that couldn’t quite top a GTX 1080.

• Besides the NVIDIA 387.22 Linux driver update released earlier this week, today they are issuing the 384.98 update in their long-lived driver branch.

• The NVIDIA 387 series is just being maintained for the short term, so if sticking to the long-term 384 driver branch for greater stability and maintenance, you can now upgrade to the 384.98 driver.

Benchmarks

• The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti has begun shipping.

• As NVIDIA announced last week, the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti is the company’s new $450 USD offering aimed to battle the Radeon RX Vega 56.

• The GTX 1070 Ti packs 2432 CUDA cores and a slightly higher base clock frequency over the non-Ti GTX 1070.

• Today marked the Linux release of F1 2017, which was ported by Feral Interactive and with this port it went from being a Direct3D 11 game on Windows to exclusively making use of the Vulkan graphics API on Linux. Radeon GPU benchmarks are still ongoing, but for these launch-day benchmarks, here are F1 2017 performance numbers on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of GeForce graphics cards.

Applications

• For many students in mathematics, physical sciences, engineering, economics, and other fields with a heavy numeric component, MATLAB is their first introduction to programming or scientific computing in general.

• It can be a good tool for learning, although (in my experience) many of the things that students and researchers use MATLAB for are not particularly demanding calculations; rather they could easily be conducted with any number of basic scripting tools, with or without statistical or math-oriented packages. However, it does have a near ubiquity in many academic settings, bringing with it a large community of users familiar with the language, plugins, and capabilities in general.

• Solus Project leader Ikey Doherty announced today the release and immediate availability for download of the Brisk Menu 0.5 application menu for GNU/Linux distributions.

• Brisk Menu 0.5 appears to be a major update coming five months after the last maintenance update to the 0.4 series, bringing highly requested features like a new Favourites category where users can pin their favorite apps simply by right-clicking on an item, support for .desktop file actions in the context menu, as well as the ability to pin and unpin app from the desktop.

• Brisk menu 0.5 has been released. The fast, efficient app menu applet for MATE desktop adds support for adding apps to a ‘favorites’ category.

• YakYak is a free and open source (unofficial) desktop client of Google’s Hangouts and it is available for Windows, macOS and Linux, with a wide variety of options.

• After six years of work, and bunch of different projects done with NoFlo, we’re finally ready for the big 1.0. The two primary pull requests for the 1.0.0 cycle landed today, and so it is time to talk about how to prepare for it.

• Calibre, the open-source and cross-platform ebook management software, received a new update today that brought support for Amazon’s latest Kindle device.

• Calibre 3.11 is the latest stable release of the application, and, according to the release notes, it now supports the all-new Kindle Oasis e-reader from Amazon, which is also company’s very-first waterproof Kindle device. Support for Kindle Oasis was implemented in the Kindle driver so you can connect it to Calibre to sync books.

• Secure messaging service Signal now has a dedicated desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux.

• Until now, the only way to continue an encrypted chat from your mobile to the desktop was to use a Chrome web app. That app is now deprecated, replaced by a new, cross-platform Electron-based program.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Following last weekend’s WineConf 2017 and its announcement, Wine project founder Alexandre Julliard has sent out a detailed action item list as a result of the developers’ meeting in Poland.

• Perhaps most exciting is that they will be developing VKD3D in its own Git repository. The VKD3D code-base is to be a Direct3D 12 to Vulkan library for eventually allowing D3D12 Windows games to run on Linux via translations to Vulkan, similar to the project’s work on converting Direct3D calls to OpenGL.

Games

• Complete guide to answer your questions and doubts on Linux gaming.

• If you want to grab a DRM free copy on GOG of some more games you have on Steam, act fast as GOG Connect has some more.

• I managed to complete the brain-hacking horror game Observer in two sittings live on our Twitch, here’s some thoughts.

• Welcome back to Formula 1! Feral Interactive have given Linux gaming another great title, with the release of F1 2017 today.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today we are releasing Krita 3.3.2, a bugfix release for Krita 3.3.0.

• Elisa is a music player designed to be simple and nice to use.

• I have missed those regular posts due to real life interrupting me a lot the last two weeks.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME.Asia 2017 was held in ChongQing, China. It is my first time to ChongQing, and I like it very much in many aspects. The city is built around mountains, so the there are lots of roads that are not straight, which is completely different with the roads in Beijing. There are lots of ups and downs, too. That’s why you can barely see someone riding a bike there. It can be dangerous and tiring, too. Besides, there are lots of overpasses, which makes the city more 3D. The city is also built along the Yangzi River, so you can see many bridges(like London, I think). Here are some photos of the city:

• Now, the idea is to select 12 Peruvian students students to offer a special technical training during six Sundays during November and December 2017 to apply to the next round of the GSoC through the GNOME and the Fedora project, thanks to the support of the Linux Foundation.

• A few minutes ago I merged a PR that moves the database of supported and quirked devices out of the C code and into runtime loaded files. When fwupd is installed in long-term support distros it’s very hard to backport new versions as new hardware is released. The idea with this functionalty is that the end user can drop an additional (or replace an existing) file in a .d directory with a simple format and the hardware will magically start working. This assumes no new quirks are required, as this would obviously need code changes, but allows us to get most existing devices working in an easy way without the user compiling anything.

Distributions

New Releases

• finally, we are releasing the long-awaited IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 115 which brings the shiny new Captive Portal and various security and performance improvements as well as fixing security vulnerabilities.

• This is a large Core Update with a huge number of changes and to support our efforts to develop new features and maintain the existing system as well as constantly improving it, we would like to ask you to donate!

• OSMC’s October update is ready with a wide range of improvements and fixes to keep your OSMC device running in tip-top shape. Kodi 17.5 has been released with a variety of fixes, and OSMC now ships with this version.

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki‏ is informing us today on the general and immediate availability for download of the final release of his 4MLinux 23.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

• 4MLinux 23.0 has been in development for the past three-four months, during which it was available only for public testing as a beta version. Only now it’s been promoted to stable, and we can finally have a more in-depth look at the new features implemented in this new stable branch.

Gentoo Family

• Since I received some positive feedback about my previous DELL XPS 9350 post, I am writing this summary about my recent experience in installing Gentoo Linux on a DELL XPS 13 9365.

Arch Family

• It’s been almost a year since RaspArch OS received an update, and the latest build (171102) brings support for installing the Arch Linux-based GNU/Linux distribution on your Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer from a Windows machine, using the win32 disk imager utility.

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Having just purchased a Lenovo Yoga 920, I thought I would offer the following (probibly too detailed) review for any interested parties.

• History / Background:

• This is now the third yoga laptop I have owned. First a yoga 2 pro in 2013, then a yoga 900 in 2015 and now the 920 here in 2017. Lenovo does come out with new models every year, but for me at least they don’t become compelling to jump to until another model, so I have skipped the yoga 3 pro and the 910 models (and all the other side models they have now like the yoga 700). This cycle I seriously considered moving over to a dell xps 13 developer edition, but in the end a few things drove me to the yoga 920: 8th gen cpu (which tuns out to be a pretty big deal, see below), higher screen resolution, and no “nostil cam” (webcam at the bottom of the screen looking up). I use a laptop as my primary machine, so I am sitting at it typing away for many many hours a day, which makes it well worth it to me to get something nice. The dell xps 13 developer still definitely has some advantages, like firmware updates via fwupd seamlessly in Linux instead of needing to keep windows 10 around just to do that.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Not only are the Canonical developers that are left working on the Mir display server trying to make it easier to run Mir on other Linux distributions, but they have now punted the project to GitHub.

• In trying to encourage more community engagement around Mir, they have decided to transition from Launchpad to GitHub. In the process that’s also shifting from their Bazaar repository to now using Git.

• Earlier this year is when Canonical shared they were creating a new Ubuntu Server installer as an eventual replacement to the text-based Debian Installer that their server edition has been using up to this point. It’s looking like this “Subiquity” installer could be in good shape by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• When trying the new Ubuntu Server installer earlier this year (April) it was in extremely rough shape. It was a mess and really not any better than the Debian Installer or any other text-based installers of other server distributions.

• Technologic Systems is now offering Ubuntu Core for its TS-7970 single board computer, via a partnership with Canonical. The TS-7970 is built for industrial applications or for smart devices, medical systems and more, according to a press release.

• NEO Cloud is built on OpenStack technology, the first cloud computing service in Indonesia providing Multiple Availability Zones and Multiple Regions. NEO Cloud will be a more reliable and secure cloud computing service for Indonesian app developers across various level of businesses, from SME, Startups, to Corporations.

• If you’re using a network security and scanning tool at home then there is a strong chance you have adopted Fing – the free network scanner for iOS and Android with over 25 million downloads. Following the success of their app, the founders of Fing decided to launch their first hardware product called Fingbox. Less than a year ago, Fing kicked off an Indiegogo campaign to raise the necessary funds and today sees the public availability on Amazon (in US and Canada initially) for their new device, Fingbox. With over USD $1.6m raised, all 20,000 backers have already received their Fingbox devices.

• Just a quick update, I have pushed a new version of ucaresystem core to the PPA. The new release fixes a bug in Linux Mint and also adds a new feature – EOL Upgrades

Flavours and Variants

• The KDE version of Linux Mint 18.3 that will be released soon will be the last to feature a KDE Plasma Edition. Which means Linux Mint 19 and above will not have KDE edition.

Devices/Embedded

• Intel unveiled an “Arduino Create” toolkit for Intel-based systems running Linux. It debuts on a new Ubuntu-based “UP Squared IoT Grove Development Kit.”

• Intel may have killed its Curie-enabled Arduino 101 SBC when it discontinued the Curie, but now it’s working to improve Arduino connectivity on Intel based systems running Linux with its cloud-based Arduino Create development software. Arduino Create is debuting on a kit version of Aaeon’s Intel Apollo Lake based UP Squared SBC called the UP Squared IoT Grove Development Kit. The kit adds Seeed’s Arduino compatible Grove Pi+ extension board, a display, and Grove sensors.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• With open source solutions rapidly growing across the telecoms industry, we’re seeing a major shift with the migration from voice and data services to an encompassing set of networking tools. Operators are moving away from traditional hardware and software systems, says Robin Kent, director of European operations, Adax, with open source solutions now viewed as a key enabler of transformation and innovation.

• While open source solutions do have clear advantages, allowing third-party deployment without having to solely manage or develop the software, challenges still remain. For example, if there’s a bug that causes reliability problems or a crash in the network, how long does it take to fix the bug and who’s accountable for it? Until such industry issues are properly addressed, it seems that open source solutions will not be taking the high ground in the industry anytime soon.

• There’s been a lot of talk recently about blockchains beyond its original use for supporting Bitcoin. Earlier this year, we covered a session in London where the takeaway from the panel was there are too many problems to be solved. But that was in February, and a lot has changed since then.

• Judging from some of the blockchain sessions at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference, the emerging potential uses for blockchain are kind of staggering.

• There is a communications exercise this weekend that is being held by the United States Department of Defense involving the amateur radio community. That is to say, ham radio operators are doing a drill with the military in the United States. The subject of the drill is a simulation where a simulated Coronal Mass Ejection event causes a simulated nation-wide power grid failure and there is a call-up of stations on an interoperability frequency in the 60 meter frequency band to see who in all the three thousand counties of the United States of America is out there. The lights will not actually go out and there will not be an actual mass of charged particles hurtling towards Earth from our local star’s corona that would make a human-created EMP generator’s output look miniscule in comparison.

• [...]

• If anything, this will be fun. This is a simulation on a continental scale. Sadly, I don’t have any working transmitting gear so I won’t be able to fully take part. I will be able to set up the RadioShack DX-398 and listen in, though. Folks without radios at home can utilize the WebSDR (Software Defined Radio) network of receivers perhaps by learning more by pointing their browsers at http://websdr.org/.

Events

• The Linux Foundation has posted 13 videos of Open Source Summit Europe keynotes and 57 videos of Embedded Linux Conference Europe sessions on YouTube.

• The combined Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) and Open Source Summit Europe event held Oct. 23-25 in Prague, is now available for all to see. The Linux Foundation has posted 70 videos of events on YouTube, including videos of 57 ELCE presentations.

Databases

• MariaDB’s wallet just got a little thicker with a strong Series C investment round that featured Alibaba as the lead investor.

• The round, which saw the open source database company raise $27m in investment, was led by the Chinese company to the tune of €20 million of the total €22.9 million raised, according to Tech Crunch.

• MariaDB Corporation announced that it raised $27 million in an investment led by Alibaba Group. Combined with a recent $27 million investment from the European Investment Bank (EIB), this latest capital brings MariaDB’s total funding this year to $54 million. MariaDB will continue its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to deliver new solutions for the cloud and emerging use cases. MariaDB reaches more than 60 million developers worldwide through its inclusion in every major Linux distribution, as well as a growing presence in the world’s major cloud providers. The latest investments reflect the rising interest in MariaDB from every commercial region around the world.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 5.3.7 is now available as the latest update for the series, bringing a total of 49 bug fixes for various of the office suite’s components, including Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, Base, and Math. To see what exactly was changed in this point release, you can study the changelog attached at the end of the article.

CMS

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Public Services/Government

• When building or rebuilding ICT systems, public services should make more use of open source software solutions, the Ministers of the European Union Member States and EFTA countries agreed in Tallinn (Estonia) on 6 October. The recommendation is part of the ‘Tallinn Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment’.

• By signing the Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment, the ministers agree that using open source solutions and open standards helps to avoid IT vendor lock-in. They call on public services to make their ICT solutions publicly available, and to encourage the private sector and civil society to reuse the software.

• In addition, the ministers call on the Commission “to consider strengthening the requirements for use of open source solutions and standards when (re)building of ICT systems and solutions takes place with EU funding – including by an appropriate open licence policy – by 2020.”

• Expressions of interest are invited from suppliers and INTEROPen members to get involved in new API Lab

• NHS Digital has announced plans to develop a new API Lab in Leeds to solve information exchange problems for patients and clinicians.

• The objective is to make patient information and securely accessible to healthcare professionals at the point of need.

• The API Lab will pool the expertise of developers from both industry and NHS Digital to accelerate the development of open source APIs designed to improve system integration across the NHS and social care.

• The Lab will work according to open standards group INTEROPen’s openness and transparency principles to address information exchange problems for patients and clinicians.

Licensing/Legal

• Earlier this year, a small Vancouver software firm called Equustek earned an extraordinary legal win against Google. The Supreme Court of Canada ordered the search giant to de-index all pages from a former Equustek distributor—not just in Canada, but worldwide.

• Google’s response to that was to file a lawsuit in US federal court asking a judge to rule that the Canadian order is unenforceable in its home country. Google called the Canadian order “repugnant” to the First Amendment, and it pointed out that the Canadian plaintiffs “never established any violation of their rights under US law.”

Programming/Development

Leftovers

• While it wasn’t always called “the cloud” people have been talking about and predicting the future of remote computing for the past few decades (and, sure, I know that in the early days of mainframes and terminals, that’s how things worked, but I’m talking about in the modern internet era). And some argue that we’ve now finally reached the true age of the cloud. After all, tons of people can survive with most of their documents really stored in the cloud. Indeed, for many people, they have little use for much storage on their own computers (and, sure, I know some of you will get snooty and talk about how crazy that is, but the simple fact is that many people are not like you and don’t need much in the way of local storage).

• But, as I’ve said before, and will say again, I think by letting companies like Google and Amazon control “the cloud” we’ve actually missed out the real possible benefit of the cloud. The version that I had always pictured separated out the storage layer from the service layer. I’ve made this point in the past concerning online cloud music services (which are now pretty obsolete due to streaming services) where I’d prefer the ability to store all of my (legal) MP3s in one spot, and then point a music playing service at those files. Instead, every cloud music service required you to upload local tracks to servers somewhere, and you’d have to do it all over again if you switched. This is obvious lock-in for those services, but it’s a pain for end users, and diminishes the possibilities for more innovative services.

• Staff discover homeless people had been carefully hiding books under shelves at Auckland library so they could return to them without losing their place

Science

• Yesterday, the Trump administration’s pick for a science post at the Department of Agriculture withdrew his name from consideration. Sam Clovis, who was a talk radio host before joining the Trump campaign, had been a controversial pick to begin with due to his complete lack of experience with either agriculture or science. But his nomination was terminated due to his role in the Trump campaign, where he supervised George Papadopoulos, the first person to plead guilty due to Robert Mueller’s investigation of the campaign’s Russian ties.

• Since Trump’s inauguration, Clovis has served as a White House advisor within the Department of Agriculture. Earlier this year, Trump nominated him to a formal position within the department: the Undersecretary of Research, Education, and Economics. That position coordinates research within the department, and the person who holds the position is often referred to as Agriculture’s chief scientist. The law that created the position indicates that the person nominated for it should be chosen “from among distinguished scientists with specialized training or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics.”

• US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt took another step to reshape the independent boards that advise the agency on science Tuesday. The newly announced directive bars scientists who receive EPA research grants from serving as science advisers to the agency. The move follows previous decisions to dismiss a number of academic researchers in favor of greater representation from industry representatives.

• In a news release, the EPA described the move as ensuring that advisers are “independent and free from any real, apparent, or potential interference with their ability to objectively serve as a committee member.” Pruitt and some other conservative critics of environmental regulations have recently argued that scientists who have performed EPA-funded research have a conflict of interest—that they are biased toward approving new regulatory efforts. “Whatever science comes out of EPA, shouldn’t be political science,” Pruitt said in the agency’s release.

• Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today acknowledged he is retiring at the end of his current term. Smith was one of the key sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which attracted widespread criticism for the powers it would grant companies going after copyright infringement. For the past five years, he has been chair of the House Science Committee, where he has intruded on peer review at the National Science Foundation and gotten into fights with NOAA because he refuses to accept the evidence for climate change.

Health/Nutrition

• The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday publicly scolded and threatened companies claiming that marijuana-based products could treat or cure cancer.

• In the harshly worded announcement, the agency suggested that the “deceptive marketing” was tantamount to “health fraud” and that the agency was “increasingly concerned at the proliferation of products claiming to treat or cure serious diseases like cancer.”

• Several genetically modified crops that are more resilient to drought, flooding, saline or acid soils and temperature extremes resulting from climate change are already being researched in Uganda and are in advanced stages. The enactment of an enabling law, the Uganda National Biosafety Bill 2017, is intended to enhance the development of modern biotechnology.

Security

• Electronic design automation company Synopsys released the findings of its 2017 Coverity Scan Report, which shows an increased of “project maturity” in the over 4,600 open source software projects analyzed based on certain secure development strategies.

• FireEye has released GoCrack, an open source tool for managing password cracking tasks across multiple machines.

Defence/Aggression

• Three years on, ISIS’ slave trade continues to prosper, even as the extremist group’s power and influence wane. ISIS has been largely driven out of its former Syrian stronghold, Raqqa, in recent days — only sleeper cells are thought to remain in the city.

• The Trump Administration’s shady ties to the Turkish government may have had something to do with the decision. [...]

• On November 1, the US Navy issued its report on the collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain this summer. The Navy’s investigation found that both collisions were avoidable accidents. And in the case of the USS McCain, the accident was in part caused by an error made in switching which control console on the ship’s bridge had steering control. While the report lays the blame on training, the user interface for the bridge’s central navigation control systems certainly played a role.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years, with serious implications for all life on Earth, scientists say

• The nascent market for electric cars will suffer a big setback if the Republican tax plan released on Thursday enters into law. Among the changes to the current tax code would be an end to the Plug-In Electric Drive Vehicle Credit. That’s the tax incentive that currently means up to $7,500 back from the IRS when you purchase a new battery or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

• The previous National-led government failed to take appropriate action over some of its climate change emissions targets, according to the High Court, but it won’t face any consequences because it’s no longer in power.

• Justice Jillian Mallon released her decision on Thursday after Waikato law student Sarah Thomson took former Environment Minister Paula Bennett to court in June over alleged inadequate action to address emissions targets.

• The High Court dismissed the judicial review. But in her written decision, Justice Mallon acknowledged that when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fifth assessment reports in 2014, the Government failed to undertake a satisfactory review of its 2050 emissions targets.

Finance

• The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a statement warning celebrities that they may be violating the law if they make paid endorsements of cryptocurrencies without disclosing the payments.

• Just a few months ago, there would have been no need for such a warning because there were very few celebrities endorsing blockchain products (though Mike Tyson has been endorsing Bitcoin products since at least 2015). But with billions of dollars flooding into initial coin offerings, celebrities like Floyd Mayweather and Paris Hilton have begun promoting new cryptocurrencies on social media.

• Six weeks ago, it looked like Bitcoin’s latest boom might be coming to an end. The virtual currency had been worth almost $5,000 in early September, but then Chinese regulators announced a harsh crackdown on China’s Bitcoin economy. On September 15, Bitcoin’s price reached a low of $3,000.

• But then the currency bounced back, and it has been on a tear ever since. Last night the price of one bitcoin soared to about $7,000 for the first time—that’s a ten-fold increase over the last year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• According to corporate media, the top general who just complimented the commander of the slavery-defending Confederacy is the greatest hope to rein in President Donald Trump’s extremism.

• Since retired Marine Corps four-star Gen. John Kelly was promoted to White House chief of staff in July, pundits have insisted that the former head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command is a positive, moderating influence on the far-right president.

• Kelly swiftly dispelled such a notion in an October 30 interview with right-wing Fox News host Laura Ingraham. Kelly spoke highly of Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Confederate army that fought to preserve chattel slavery during the Civil War.

• President Trump pushed back Thursday on concerns about a lack of nominees for key positions at the State Department, arguing it wouldn’t affect his agenda.

• “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me, I’m the only one that matters because when it comes to it that’s what’s the policy is going to be,” Trump said on Fox News when pressed about vacancies by Laura Ingraham.

• “We don’t need all the people that they want,” Trump continued. “Don’t forget, I’m a business person and I tell my people, well you don’t need to fill slots, don’t fill them.”

• As you may have heard, this week there were three Congressional hearings in two days, allowing various Congressional committees to drag out officials from Facebook, Twitter and Google and slap them around for the fact that some bad things happen on those platforms. The general sentiment appeared to be sputtering anger that social media companies haven’t magically figured out how to “stop bad stuff” on these platforms.

• Facebook, which has conceded that Kremlin-backed ads might have been seen by as many as 126 million people, has been taking the biggest beatings in these hearings.

• Today, the House Intelligence Committee finally, and officially, released some of the Facebook ads and the handles of several thousand fake Twitter accounts—all of which were designed to foment discord in the United States.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The last time we talked about Germany’s Strafgesetzbuch law, specifically section 86a that prohibits the display of Nazi symbols, iconography, or historical figures with few exceptions, was when Ubisoft accidentally sent the country versions of a South Park video game chock full of swastikas. I feel much the same today about the law as I did then: I get why the law was created, but it’s probably time for it to be retired. While the law does make room for Nazi symbols to be displayed for the purposes of art and education, too often those exceptions are either not actually adhered to in real-world examples, while those that might be able to fit their work within those exceptions don’t bother trying, too chilled by the law that limits their speech. Coupling that along with the simple fact that German citizens who really want to see Nazi symbols don’t have to work particularly hard to circumvent the law resolves the whole matter as being somewhat silly.

• The Estonian Presidency compromise proposal on the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market has been published and guess what… Oops: they did it again.

• With York College hosting REWIND, an art exhibit focusing on the history of racism and racial injustice — – in the United States, local artists reflect on the impact this kind of art can and should have on society.

• [...]

• The National Coalition Against Censorship recently interviewed Rucker about his exhibit and the college’s handling of it.

• Twitter announced Thursday evening that an employee, on his or her last day of work at the company, deactivated President Donald Trump’s notorious Twitter account. The president’s account was only absent for 11 minutes before it was restored.

• For a few minutes on Thursday afternoon, Pacific Time, the Twitter account of US President Donald J. Trump ceased to exist – sensationally deleted by a Twitter staffer on their last day of work, we’re told.

• The absence of such a distinctive, dare we say divisive, social media voice was immediately noticed, and welcomed by some.

• “For a brief moment Trump’s twitter was down & outside my window white nationalists were paying reparations to black people,” commented writer and Harvard PhD candidate Clint Smith. “Then I awoke.”

• What can you do on your last day at work? Possibly, delete the Twitter account of the President of the United States. The handle @realDonaldTrump was back on the microblogging site after straight 11 minutes of exile.

• An initial response from Twitter’s Government and Elections team blamed a “human error” as the cause of Trump’s account getting “inadvertently deactivated” by an employee. They also said that the deactivation was initiated by a Twitter customer rep on their last working day.

• One of the world’s largest academic publishers has confirmed that it blocked access to some 1,000 journal articles to Chinese internet users because they contained banned keywords relating to political topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, or the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

• Springer Nature, which publishes Nature and the Scientific American, blocked the articles, all of which appeared in the Journal of Chinese Political Science and International Politics, the company said in a statement.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Gaining access to the global network used by spies to track phone calls and intercept communications is relatively cheap and easy for hackers, criminals, or even anyone, a Daily Beast investigation has found.

• The network, known as SS7, has faced renewed attention in the past few years, especially after researchers exploited it to eavesdrop on a congressman’s calls in real-time from the other side of the world. But a major concern is that more sinister hackers could conduct this sort of surveillance. To test just how possible opening the door to SS7 really is, The Daily Beast posed as a small potential customer to a telecom in Europe, and was offered SS7 access for just a few thousand dollars.

• While it’s an uphill battle, if enough pressure is put on representatives in the coming months, there is a real chance some of the most controversial NSA surveillance powers exposed by Edward Snowden could be substantially restricted.

• Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) – the controversial spying provision that allows the NSA to spy on hundreds of thousands of foreign individuals and warrantless access to Americans’ emails – expires at the end of the year. The Trump administration and intelligence agencies are lobbying for the law to be permanently reauthorized, but a bipartisan coalition of congressmen are pushing for important reforms.

• The government shouldn’t be able to spy on Americans without a warrant. Yet that’s what Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the National Security Agency to do.

• With the provision set to expire at the end of the year, it is critical that Congress stand up for the constitutional rights of Americans and put hard limits on the surveillance powers of the federal government.

• This may end the line of discovery as it relates to law enforcement’s IMSI catchers, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the prosecution will be able to move forward. The defense plans to challenge the lawfulness of the prosecution itself. Withholding evidence possibly crucial to the defense doesn’t make for a fair trial and it appears the defense will argue charges should be dropped if information isn’t going to be produced. It’s not like there isn’t any precedent to work with. Earlier this year, the government chose to let 35 accused Mafia members go free rather than discuss Stingray use in court.

• Clayton Rice, who is representing one of the accused in this case, has graciously sent over a copy of the court’s ruling [PDF] on the issue. (This ruling was under a publication ban until mid-morning Tuesday.) Rice points out this is only an interim ruling and doesn’t necessarily represent the final word on the subject. The court has granted the government the (possibly temporary) right to withhold certain information about its cell tower spoofers, which includes its make and model. The order is heavily redacted, which is one of the reasons it’s only now being released despite having been decided back in August.

• The government should protect privacy and security. Secretive and unregulated government hacking endangers both.

• The FBI is making increasing use of an investigative technique that puts the public’s internet security at risk. This month, the ACLU filed amicus briefs in two cases to challenge the FBI’s use of this technique, which has significant cybersecurity implications for everyone.

• The technique — government hacking — involves sending malware over the Internet to search computers remotely, often for information that is transmitted by or stored on anonymous targets’ computers. The malware can give investigators total control over a computer system. Absent extraordinary circumstances, courts should not grant this kind of power to law enforcement — much less with just a run-of-the-mill search warrant.

• Malware — software designed to covertly damage a computer, take control of a system, or steal data — is not new to the federal government. The FBI has been deploying tools to search anonymous users’ computers since at least 2002. More recently, however, the FBI has expanded its use of this technique. Rather than deploying tailored malware against individual targets, the agency is now conducting “watering hole” operations that deliver malware to everyone who visits a particular webpage or pages. This can result in hundreds or thousands of computers being compromised, as well as the uncontrolled distribution of malware around the globe.

• 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.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hollywood star Dustin Hoffman has apologized after a former female intern named Anna Graham Hunter said Hoffman touched her without her consent when she was only 17 and working on the set of the movie “Death of a Salesman” more than 30 years ago.

• Kim Dotcom has settled a lawsuit against the New Zealand Police over alleged unreasonable use of force in a raid of his north Auckland Coatesville mansion in January 2012, according to a statement from his lawyer today.

• Kim Dotcom and Mona Dotcom announce that they have resolved their lawsuit against the New Zealand Police in which the Dotcoms sought a remedy for their claim about the unreasonable use of force in the military-style raid of their family home in January of 2012. The Dotcoms also raised the concern that their home and family had been under intrusive visual surveillance by the Police which had not been authorised by the Court.

• Kim Dotcom and his former wife Mona have accepted a confidential settlement from the police over the raid which saw him arrested, saying he did so to protect their children and because the Government “recently changed for the better”.

• He said that their previous desire to see accountability had been trumped by wanting to “do what was best for our children” by bringing an end to the court case.

• A third Appeals Court has ruled on the tactics the FBI used to track down users of a dark web child porn site. And the third one to rule — the First Circuit Appeals Court — continues the government’s shut out of suppression orders at the appellate level.

• In the two previous cases to reach this level (Tenth and Eighth), the judges found the FBI’s Network Investigative Technique to be a search under the Fourth Amendment. This wasn’t much of an issue because the FBI had a warrant. The real issue was the warrant’s reach: it was issued in Virginia but the NIT found a home in computers all over the US, not to mention the rest of the world.

• A Utah nurse who was roughed up and arrested on July 26 by a Salt Lake City cop because she told the officer that he needed a warrant to draw blood from an unconscious patient has settled for a $500,000 payout.

• Body cam footage from the scene shows University Hospital nurse Alex Wubbels calmly telling the officer, who was trained for the task of blood withdrawal, that he cannot take a blood sample because the patient, who was involved in a vehicle crash, had neither been arrested nor gave consent. Then the cop lunges and grabs the nurse as she was fearfully backing away. He rushes her outside the hospital, and handcuffs her. All the while, she’s screaming that there’s no reason for her detainment.

• However, the Twitter account @granmarga belongs to Wikileaks lawyer Margaret Kunstler, who posted this message identifying herself as a Wikileaks lawyer. Her identity can be confirmed because the article that she tweeted out identifies herself as an attorney for Wikileaks who is writing in support of that organization, in an article entitled, “Wikileaks Attorneys Blast Citizen Four Maker Poitras.” It should be noted that Kunstler is a New York civil rights attorney with the law firm HRBEK Law, according to their website. The site notes that Kunstler “has spent her career providing movement support and protecting the rights of activists.”

• The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has let some more stash house sting convictions stand. But not without considerable discussion of the government’s tactics. And not without one judge appending a long rebuke to her reluctant concurrence.

• Once again, the ATF has managed to secure multiple convictions predicated on nonexistent evidence. The sting, helmed by veteran ATF agent Richard Zayas, involved a made-up drug stash house “containing” at least enough drugs to trigger 10-year mandatory minimum sentences for the defendants. Zayas’ sting operations always include fictitious armed stash house guards, otherwise the ATF’s involvement would be unnecessary.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• FCC boss Ajit Pai has been busy ignoring the public while he kills popular net neutrality rules. But he’s also been working hard to weaken broadband deployment standards to obfuscate a lack of broadband competition, to gut programs that provide broadband to the poor, killing previous FCC efforts to improve cable box competition, to protect prison telco monopolies from oversight, and to make it easier for business broadband monopolies to rip off smaller competitors. All while proclaiming to be a stalwart defender of the little guy and a champion for bridging the digital divide.

• AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner Inc. is reportedly hitting a speed bump as the Trump administration’s Department of Justice considers filing a lawsuit to block the merger.

• This wouldn’t be a death knell for the merger because the DOJ often files lawsuits against deals that it ultimately approves, and AT&T today said it still expects to get approval. The DOJ’s antitrust division could file a lawsuit to block the proposed merger while at the same time filing a proposed settlement that would allow the deal to be approved, as it did last month with CenturyLink’s purchase of Level 3.

• We’ve been discussing how Sprint’s plan to merger with T-Mobile would be notably awful for the wireless industry. Not only do Wall Street analysts predict it would kill anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 jobs (potentially more people than Sprint even currently employs), but it would reduce the number of major competitors in the space from four to three — dramatically reducing the industry’s incentive to compete on price and service. The resulting competitive lull could derail many of the good things a resurgent T-Mobile has encouraged in the sector (like the death of long-term contracts and the return of unlimited data plans).

Intellectual Monopolies

• Qualcomm Inc. has sued Apple Inc., accusing the iPhone maker of failing to abide by the terms of a software license and said it may have used its unprecedented access to that code to help Qualcomm-rival Intel Corp.

• The chipmaker filed the lawsuit against Apple on Wednesday in California state court in San Diego, adding yet another front to their bitter legal battle. Apple is being sued for breach of a contract that governs the use of software needed to make chips work with other parts of mobile phones and communicate with networks.

• On balance, all this technology is probably making our lives better. But there’s a downside, too: The stuff often malfunctions. Unlike the 30-year-old mixer on your kitchen counter that refuses to die, new technology—especially the smart devices with fancy, embedded electronics—breaks more quickly. That trend, confirmed by a recent study by the German government, applies not just to delicate products like smartphones and tablets but also to equipment we would expect to last for a long time—like televisions, washing machines, and even tractors.

• And so—the question: Is there a compelling explanation why the legislator should enact such a right to repair? Unlike the rationale for a user’s right with respect to copyright, e.g., the better to maximize the milieu in which copyright creation takes place, a user’s right to repair does not directly address any core element of an IP right. But there still is a connection. After all, it is the public, through the legislative branch, that provides the statutory authority for (most) IP rights. One can imagine a dystopian world where digital products of all kinds are more and more prone to repair. A refusal to enable repair, forcing the need for more and more replacement purchases of an item, could then lead to a situation where the public throws in the towel and orders their legislators to cut back on IP protection so as to make self-help repair more feasible. Yes, there is TRIPS, the Berne Convention and the like. But none of them is self-enforcing. “Repair” may yet find its way to the pantheon of rights.

• The argument for intellectual property is well-known. The government grants individuals and corporations monopolies for a period of time, which allow them to charge well above the free market price for the items on which they have a patent or copyright. This monopoly gives them an incentive to innovate and do creative work.

Trademarks

• In another ruling demonstrating the difficulty for UK trade mark owners to protect their designs, the Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling that The London Taxi Company’s trade marks are invalid. The case would present some interesting issues were it to be pursed to the Supreme Court

Copyrights

• Over the summer, we discussed how laughably bad Russia’s efforts at blocking so-called “piracy sites” has been. In the course of four years of attempting to stamp out copyright infringement in the country, the Russian government managed to block 4,000 sites it intended to target as piracy sites, and 41,000 sites it had not intended to target that were caught up as collateral damage. Those are the kind of numbers that would make a cluster bomb blush.

• Even so, you might have imagined that this heavy-handed iron-fist routine must surely have had some reduction effect on the rate of piracy in Russia. The short answer to that is: nooooooope. Instead, over the course of the past few years, the market for pirated video content in Russia has doubled.

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