● 11.16.17

● Links 16/11/2017: WordPress 4.9 and GhostBSD 11.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• As per the local reports, these moves are a result of the political scenario in Munich. In the past, city’s IT chief has also said that there isn’t any compelling technical reason to ditch Linux. In the wake of attacks like WannaCry, Green Party had already warned that a move to Windows 10 is too risky.

Server

• The BitScope system consists of five rack-mounted Pi Cluster Modules, each with 150 four-core nodes of Raspberry Pi ARM processor boards. They are fully integrated with network switching infrastructure. With a total of 750 CPUs or 3,000 cores working together, the system gives developers exclusive time on an inexpensive but highly parallelized platform for test and validation of scalable systems software technologies.

Kernel Space

• Overnight the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display/graphics driver updates were sent out and ultimately pulled into the mainline kernel for Linux 4.15. This doesn’t yet include though the separate AMDGPU DC pull request.

• Linux Kernel 4.14 is here. It is a long-term support release and as stated earlier, it is the first Linux Kernel that will be supported for six years. Until now Linux Kernel LTS versions were supported for two years.

Graphics Stack

• At the start of the month the Intel i965 Mesa driver finally landed its on-disk shader cache, months after the GLSL on-disk shader cache originally landed in core Mesa and wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. While you can’t play too many shader-heavy games with current Intel integrated graphics, this GLSL shader cache within Mesa 17.4-dev Git is working well for speeding up load times and does provide some frame-rate benefits in games dynamically loading shaders.

• In what appears to be research for potential use within in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, Bosch in conjunction with other organizations has been developing a 3D window manager that’s built atop Wayland/Weston.

• Wayland is already used within automobiles for IVI purposes, etc, but this is the first we’re seeing at least publicly of creating a 3D window manager around it. Harsha Manjula Mallikarjun of Bosch has talked about their work in developing a middleware framework for a 3D window manager that is making use of Wayland’s Weston library, libweston. The window manager maps client buffers to 3D shapes like cubes and cylinders.

• Intel developers have seen their MESA_program_binary_formats extension added to the official OpenGL registry.

• The extension is really quite simple and just documents the unique format designator to be used by Mesa for ARB_get_program_binary/OES_get_program_binary extensions. Overnight it was merged into the OpenGL Registry.

Applications

• Sure, we can get by with boring old GNOME terminal, Konsole, and funny, rickety, old xterm. When you’re in the mood to try something new, however, take a look at these five cool and useful Linux terminals.

• It wasn’t too long ago that we wrote about an IDE that was developed by adding support for advanced debugging and development functions to Atom text editor to create Atom-IDE. We’ve got another such application for you today and it goes by the name of Nuclide.

• Nuclide is a free Electron-based IDE created by combining a collection of Atom’s features to provide IDE-like functions for several programming languages and technologies.

• I was in Prague last month for the 2017 edition of the KVM Forum. There I gave a talk about some of the work that I’ve been doing this year to improve the qcow2 file format used by QEMU for storing disk images. The focus of my work is to make qcow2 faster and to reduce its memory requirements.

• Since I posted my suggestion for QEMU a few weeks ago, I’ve learned a few things about QEMU. Thanks so much to the folks who contacted me via email to help me out.

• A brief review of my issue:

• I like to run FreeDOS in QEMU, on my Linux laptop. QEMU makes it really easy to boot FreeDOS or to test new installations. During our run up to the FreeDOS 1.2 release, I tested every pre-release version by installing under QEMU.

• The Mailspring email client is now available as a Snap application on Ubuntu and other Linux distros.

• The part-Electron, part C++ mail app works with most major email providers, lets you add multiple accounts, has fast mail searching, and offers some advanced features, like read receipts and quick reply templates.

Instructionals/Technical

• There’s been a seven year old bug report about enabling OpenGL accelerated layers by default on Firefox for Linux on at least some supported hardware, but Mozilla still doesn’t have any plans to do so.

Games

• One of the people behind Project Hospital [Official Site] emailed in about the project, which aims to be a full hospital management sim much like Theme Hospital. Also, it’s partially made on Linux.

• The developer who emailed it in, let us know that the team involved in it has the choice of which operating system they can develop on. One of the programmers has been using Unity on Linux and said how it works just fine. Hearing that, fills me with hope about the future on Linux as a development platform as well as a gaming platform. The amount of people emailing in saying they use Unity on Linux to develop has been increasing.

• Another day another bundle eh? The Humble Care Package Bundle released recently and it does actually have a few good Linux games.

• This bundle is a little different, as 100% of it goes to charity and Humble themselves will match $300K (the bundle has hit over $800K). The charities seem like a good pick too, all of them dedicated to helping with disaster relief.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It’s been a long time with no news. I guess work and masters are really getting in the way… good news is that I’ll finish masters in 2 months, and will have some free time to devote to this beloved project.

• “Bad” news is that, after almost 6 years, I’ll finally take some time to have a real vacation. I’ll stay 3 weeks out of the loop in February, a time where I’ll be traveling to the other side of the world, watching the sunset at the beach with my wife. Without a computer. While it’s unfortunate to the community, I think this time is necessary for my mental health – I’ve gone way too many times through the almost-burned-out state recently.

Distributions

• MX-17 Beta 1 images are available for download here. If you are looking for a computing platform that is a bit different and very reliable, check out the latest MX 17 Beta releases. Try out the various installation options. See how they work on your slowest legacy hardware.

• If you like what you see, keep using the Beta release on USB until the final release of MX 17 comes out shortly. Then you can install it to your computer’s hard drive in frugal mode, keep your existing Linux distro where it is, and choose which one to run with each new boot-up.

• The beauty of MX Linux is you do not have to deal with wiping or partitioning your hard drive or fussing with the unpredictability of maintaining a dual-boot setup.

• MX Linux is a powerful, easy-to-use computing platform that goes beyond lightweight performance without filling your computer with software bloat.

Slackware Family

• Slax 9.2.1 is now available for download as the latest stable release of the Linux distro, and it’s the first to be based on Debian GNU/Linux. That’s right, Slax no longer lives up to its name and drops Slackware for Debian. As its version number suggests, Slax 9.2.1 is based on Debian GNU/Linux 9.2.1 “Stretch.”

• “After several years of inactivity Slax project has been brought to life again in new version 9.2.1,” said the developer in today’s release announcement. “I’ve decided to go for Debian because it made my life much easier and I believe that it will make yours too.”

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today launched Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform. As application complexity and cloud incompatibility loom, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps IT organizations to build and manage applications that use services from the datacenter to the public cloud. The newest iteration of the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform includes native integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Brokers that enable developers to bind services across AWS and on-premise resources to create modern applications while providing a consistent, open standards-based foundation to drive business evolution.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• ExLight Build 171112 is the latest update to the Linux distro, which is based on the recently released Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, but also borrows some package from the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” repositories (a.k.a. Debian Testing).

• The biggest change in this release is the replacement of the Linux 4.9 LTS kernel used in previous versions of the distribution with the more recent Linux 4.13 kernel series. ExLight Build 171112 runs a specially crafted kernel 4.13.0-16-exton based on upstream’s Linux 4.13.4 kernel.

• First off, the development of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 starts based on the core components of its bigger brother, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, such as the Linux 4.13 kernel, X.Org Server 1.19 display server, Mesa 17.1 graphics stack, and many of the latest security patches from upstream, a.k.a. Debian Testing (Buster) repositories.

• And now for the goodies coming to the final Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS release next year, as Martin Wimpress and his team promise to bring hardware acceleration to Marco, MATE desktop environment’s default window manager, as well as undecorated windows for the Mutiny layout for ex-Unity users.

Devices/Embedded

• Technexion’s Wandboard.org unveiled open source “Wand-Pi-8M” SBCs that run Linux on a quad-A53 i.MX8M, and offer WiFi/BT, GbE, HDMI 2.0, and a 40-pin RPi link.

• Technexion and its Wandboard.org community project opened pre-orders on three successors to its i.MX6 based Wandboard and almost identical Wandboard Reload SBCs that tap NXP’s long awaited, quad-core, Cortex-A53 i.MX8M SoC. Unlike the Wandboards, the smaller, Raspberry Pi like (85 x 56 x 19.3mm) Wand-Pi-8M-Lite ($89), Wand-Pi-8M-Pro ($99), and Wand-Pi-8M-Deluxe ($119), are standard SBCs rather than sandwich-style COM-and-carrier products. The boards ship in Spring 2018.

• Libre Computer’s open source “Tritium” SBCs run Ubuntu or Android on Allwinner H2+, H3, or 64-bit H5 SoCs, and have an RPi 3 like layout and 40-pin header.

• Earlier this year, Shenzhen-based Libre Computer successfully funded its quad Cortex-A53 Amlogic S905X based Le Potato SBC on Kickstarter for $25 to $35. Now, the company has returned to Kickstarter to launch a second hacker SBC with a Raspberry 3-like form factor, layout, and 40-pin expansion interface. The Tritium is available in packages of $9, $19, or $29, depending on whether you want it configured with the Allwinner H2+, Allwinner H3, or Allwinner H5.

• Timesys Corporation (https://www.timesys.com), industry pioneer and leading provider of embedded, open source development tools and engineering services, today announced its Timesys University webinar series titled “Developing for Industrial IoT with Linux OS on DragonBoard™ 410c.”

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• First, we should accept that no software is perfect6. Not proprietary software, not open source software. Second, we should accept that good proprietary software exists, and third, there is also some bad open source software out there. Fourth, there are extremely intelligent, gifted, and dedicated architects, designers, and software engineers who create proprietary software.

• But here’s the rub: fifth, there is a limited pool of people who will work on or otherwise look at proprietary software. And you can never hire all the best people. Even in government and public sector organisations—who often have a larger talent pool available to them, particularly for cough security-related cough applications—the pool is limited.

• The use of open source software is commonplace in enterprises, but many organisations are still reluctant to contribute their own code, despite the benefits it can bring

• A renaissance is happening with open source software. IT managers are constantly searching for new ways to harness the power of open code, especially as more companies move to the cloud.

• [...]

• Anyone can freely use, change, and share open source software in modified or unmodified form. While companies working in commercial open source add value by turning what may appear as raw material to other enterprises into whole products. Embracing an open source mindset is an invitation for innovation, and enables organisations to break free from proprietary vendors.

• “26,000 new blockchain projects last year!” screamed the headline. “But only 8 percent remain active!” The implication is that blockchain’s future is at risk, given the high mortality rate among its offspring. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, we need many more blockchain projects to fail to clear out some of the noise, leaving room for “Linux of blockchain”-type projects to remain.

• And yet there is cause for concern, though not in blockchain specifically. Instead, the greater concern should be for open source, which has never been more popular with software users even as the developer population feeding it has remained flat. Unless we can find ways to encourage more contributions, open source efforts like blockchain threaten to crumble under the weight of user expectations unmet by developer productivity.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• As you’ve no doubt seen, over the last few months we’ve been looking for a LibreOffice mascot. This is just something fun for our community to use, for instance on T-shirts at events, so it doesn’t have to be ultra slick and professional – it isn’t a replacement for the official branding and logos that we use in the software, website and marketing materials. At the start, we asked for your submissions and received over 300 of them – thank you so much to everyone who contributed!

• Many of them were excellent, but we had to remove quite a few from the following voting round for various reasons (such as potential copyright issues, conflicts with other FOSS projects, and use of the official LibreOffice document logo). If your submission didn’t make it to the voting round, we still really appreciate your input, and we apologies if we didn’t make it clearer why some didn’t get through!

CMS

• Version 4.9 of WordPress, named “Tipton” in honor of jazz musician and band leader Billy Tipton, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.9 will smooth your design workflow and keep you safe from coding errors.

• Featuring design drafts, scheduling, and locking, along with preview links, the Customizer workflow improves collaboration for content creators. What’s more, code syntax highlighting and error checking will make for a clean and smooth site building experience. Finally, if all that wasn’t pretty great, we’ve got an awesome new Gallery widget and improvements to theme browsing and switching.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• CA Technologies has announced a competition that aims to encourage U.S. developers to present novel open source software-based platforms designed to enhance the “citizen experience” across federal agencies.

• In 2016, Hitachi developed high performance data processing technology using FPGA(3). As this technology however was developed for Hitachi’s proprietary database, it could not easily be applied to the Hadoop platform as it employed a different data management method and used customized database management software.

BSD

• More than a year in development, GhostBSD 11.1 is based on FreeBSD 11.1 and comes with Xfce and MATE flavors both available for 64-bit (amd64) systems as 32-bit (i386) support is being dropped starting with this release. This is also the first release of the BSD-based OS to ship with its own software package repository.

• “After a year of development, testing, debugging and working on our software package repository, we are pleased to announce the release of GhostBSD 11.1 is now available,” reads today’s announcement. “With 11.1 we drop 32-bit i386 supports, and we currently maintain our software packages repository for more stability.”

Public Services/Government

• If a proposed amendment to the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act for next year gets the nod, it will enable the Department for Defense to use open-source software for several of its digital activities.

• Essentially, the bill notes that any unclassified, custom-developed software that is created starting 180 days after the section is passed must be managed as open source software. However, a waiver on this requirement can be given by the service acquisition executive.

• Open source, by its nature, is a shared tool, much more like creative commons than copyright. One big advantage is that, often, the agreements to run open-source software are much more relaxed than those behind proprietary code, and come without licensing fees.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Many contemporary definitions of “collaboration” define it simply as “working together”—and, in part, it is working together. But too often, we tend to use the term “collaboration” interchangeably with cognate terms like “cooperation” and “coordination.” These terms also refer to some manner of “working together,” yet there are subtle but important differences between them all.

Standards/Consortia

• The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China officially promulgated China’s Standardization Law on November 4, 2017. The original Chinese version can be accessed on the China legislature site. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has been closely monitoring the rollout of the reform of China’s standardization system, and has actively engaged the Chinese government throughout the process of updating the standardization law.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The Conservatives have been accused of “economic murder” for austerity policies which a new study suggests have caused 120,000 deaths.

• The paper found that there were 45,000 more deaths in the first four years of Tory-led efficiencies than would have been expected if funding had stayed at pre-election levels.

• On this trajectory that could rise to nearly 200,000 excess deaths by the end of 2020, even with the extra funding that has been earmarked for public sector services this year.

• Real terms funding for health and social care fell under the Conservative-led Coalition Government in 2010, and the researchers conclude this “may have produced” the substantial increase in deaths.

Security

• A team of government, industry and academic officials successfully demonstrated that a commercial aircraft could be remotely hacked [sic] in a non-laboratory setting last year, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said Wednesday at the 2017 CyberSat Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

• The need for robust personal digital security is growing every day. From grassroots groups to civil society organizations to individual EFF members, people from across our community are voicing a need for accessible security education materials to share with their friends, neighbors, and colleagues.

• We are thrilled to help. Today, EFF has launched the Security Education Companion, a new resource for people who would like to help their communities learn about digital security but are new to the art of security training.

• It is a tale as old as time. Developers and security personnel view each other with suspicion. The perception is that a vast gulf of understanding and ability lies between the two camps. “They can’t possibly understand what it is to do my job!” is a surprisingly common statement tossed about. Both groups blame the other for being the source of all of their ills. It has been well-known that fixing security bugs early in the development lifecycle not only helps eliminate exposure to potential vulnerabilities, but it also saves time, effort, and money. Once a defect escapes into production it can be very costly to remediate.

Defence/Aggression

• Trump must’ve gotten an old memo, and apparently has a short memory to boot. The people of Sutherland Springs, TX – 26 of them – were massacred by a gunman on November 5, not yesterday.

• The history of governments attempting to demonstrate either their own military prowess or the dastardly actions of others — usually America — is long and storied. South Korea used footage from war games to show off weapons I guess it must not have, Egypt attempted to pass off game footage as Russian airstrikes against ISIL/ISIS/whatever they’re supposed to be called, and North Korea attempted to show off its nuclear capability by pinching some Modern Warfare 3 footage. Even Russia has tried its hand at this, attempting to show that America was arming Ukrainian rebels with Stinger missiles with some stills from the game Battlefield 3. That any of these countries thought they would get away with these fakes is nearly as funny as their having not considered how much international egg they’d have on their faces once they were found out.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Reporting from COP23 in Bonn, Germany, Democracy Now! travels to the nearby blockade of the Hambach coal mine, the largest open-pit coal mine in Europe. Activists say the mine extracts an extremely dirty form of coal called lignite, also known as brown coal, which causes the highest CO2 emissions of any type of coal when burned. For more than five years, they have been fighting to shut down the mine and to save the remaining forest from being cut down to make way for the expanding project. Only 10 percent of the ancient forest remains.

• The Trump administration will allow American trophy hunters to import the bodies of elephants they kill in Zimbabwe and Zambia, reversing a ban put in place by President Obama. The Interior Department’s rule change comes even though African elephants are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The policy could affect President Trump’s two adult sons, Eric and Donald Jr., who are longtime trophy hunters who have repeatedly posed for photos with dead animals they killed in Africa. A 2012 picture of Donald Trump Jr. in Zimbabwe shows him standing in front of the corpse of an African elephant, holding a knife in one hand and a severed tail in the other. We speak with Nnimmo Bassey, Nigerian environmental activist and director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation.

• The Trump administration will allow American hunters to import elephant trophies to the US, reversing an Obama-era 2014 ban, US media report. A federal government agency said imports could resume on Friday for elephants that are legally hunted only in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

• The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) said hunting fees could aid conservation of the endangered animals.

• Experts say that populations of African elephants are plummeting.

Finance

• SoftBank aims to deploy up to $15 billion in a new city called Neom that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman plans to build on the Red Sea coast, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. The Japanese company’s Vision Fund also plans investments of as much as $10 billion in state-controlled Saudi Electricity Co. as part of efforts to diversify the utility into renewables and solar energy, the people said. SoftBank also will have some of its portfolio companies open offices in Neom, they said.

• By getting WeChat onto almost a billion smartphones in China, Tencent has leveraged the instant message service into an entertainment and gaming platform that is driving advertising sales. Although the Shenzhen-based company remains largely absent overseas, it’s built a 12 percent stake in Snapchat-owner Snap Inc. and is exploring new sources of growth in the cloud, financial services, movies and music.

• Imagine there was a single policy that would slash unemployment and underemployment, tackle health conditions ranging from mental distress to high blood pressure, increase productivity, help the environment, improve family lives, encourage men to do more household tasks, and make people happier. It sounds fantastical, but it exists, and it’s overdue: the introduction of a four-day week.

• The liberation of workers from excessive work was one of the pioneering demands of the labour movement. From the ashes of the civil war, American trade unionism rallied behind an eight-hour day, “a movement which ran with express speed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California”, as Karl Marx put it. In 1890 hundreds of thousands thronged into Hyde Park in a historic protest for the same demand. It is a cause that urgently needs reclaiming.

• Johnson also told The Wall Street Journal that he is not able to vote for the bill as it’s currently written. “If they can pass it without me, let them,” Johnson told the WSJ. “I’m not going to vote for this tax package.” Johnson has previously expressed concerns about how small businesses are treated in the Senate bill, but he had not formally announced his opposition until Wednesday.

• Instead, the Trumpists decide to give the wealthy a huge tax break permanently, ordinary people a short-term tax-break mostly but some will get an increase in taxes, and to reduce the increase in the debt they will cut out another leg from under ObamaCare causing still larger increases in premiums and loss of insurance which people need and appreciate.

• President Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, looked out from the stage at a sea of CEOs and top executives in the audience Tuesday for the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting. As Cohn sat comfortably onstage, a Journal editor asked the crowd to raise their hands if their company plans to invest more if the tax reform bill passes.

• Very few hands went up.

• Cohn looked surprised. “Why aren’t the other hands up?” he said.

• President Donald Trump has insisted, for months, that the Republican tax plan he supports won’t benefit him.

• “It’s not good for me. Believe me,” he said at a Sept. 27 event in Indiana to sell the plan. “My plan is for the working people, and my plan is for jobs. I don’t benefit,” he also said that day.

• And earlier this month, according to NBC News, Trump told a group of Democratic senators in a phone call, “My accountant called me and said ‘you’re going to get killed in this bill.’”

• One-time digital media darling Mashable has agreed to sell itself to trade publisher Ziff Davis for around $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter, a fraction of the site’s valuation less than two years ago.

• The price is approximately one-fifth of the company’s $250 million valuation based on its last investment round in March 2016.

• It is a troubling sign for the broader outlook for digital publishers, particularly those that have embraced the “pivot to video” strategy in an effort to lure more lucrative video ad sales.

• The UK government is on the verge of giving up on its plan to put a specific date for Brexit into domestic law, after facing a rebellion of pro-EU MPs from within prime minister Theresa May’s Conservative party.

• The government had proposed that March 29 2019 — at 11pm London time — be inserted into the EU withdrawal bill, which sets out the legal framework for Brexit. But pro-EU MPs, including more than a dozen Conservatives, opposed the idea, saying it would remove the government’s ability to extend talks with Brussels.

• On Thursday David Lidington, the justice secretary, said there had been “various constructive suggestions” on the issue, and the government would “listen to ideas”. It was the clearest hint yet that the government would climb down on the measure, which is due to be voted on next month.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Exhibit A of right-wing decay is Rupert Murdoch, who, more than any single individual, has plotted the course of the GOP for the past 20 years.

• “The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false,” the staffers wrote then. “We were not publishing with a goal to get any specific candidate elected.”

• It is not surprising that Brown felt personally betrayed by Assange, since, as he explained on Facebook Tuesday night, “I went to prison because of my support for WikiLeaks.” Specifically, Brown said, the charges against him were related to his role in “operations to identify and punish members of the government and members of private companies that had been exposed by Anonymous hackers of my acquaintance, via email hacks, as having conspired to go after Assange, to go after WikiLeaks.”

• That sort of activism, dedicated to making public secret wrongdoing, Brown argued, is very different from “colluding with an authoritarian presidential campaign backed by actual Nazis while publicly denying it.”

• “Plainly,” he observed with bitterness, “the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.”

• Before his private messages to Trump Jr. were leaked, Assange himself had categorically denied that he or WikiLeaks had been attacking Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump. “This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election,” he wrote in a statement released on November 8 as Americans went to the polls.

• Even though Assange had by then transformed the WikiLeaks Twitter feed into a vehicle for smearing Clinton, he insisted that his work was journalistic in nature. “The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks — an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself,” Assange wrote. “Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us,” he added. “It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.”

• A sheriff in Texas is looking for a truck bearing a profanity-laced anti-Trump sticker and said authorities are considering charging its owner with disorderly conduct — a threat that immediately raised alarm among free speech advocates.

• Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy E. Nehls posted a photo of the truck Wednesday on Facebook after, he said, he’d received several complaints about the display from unhappy people in the Houston-area county.

• A graphic on the rear window of the GMC Sierra reads: “F‑‑K TRUMP AND F‑‑K YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM.” (The profanity is spelled out on the sticker.)

• “The opposite of objectivity isn’t partisanship, or needn’t be,” Linda Greenhouse writes in her new book Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between. “Rather, it is judgment, the hard work of sorting out the false claims from the true and discarding or at least labeling the false.”

• In December of 2006, I embarked on my ninth USO Tour to entertain our troops, my eighth to the Middle East since the 9/11 attacks. My father served in Vietnam and my then-boyfriend (and now husband, Chris) is a pilot in the Air Force, so bringing a ‘little piece of home’ to servicemembers stationed far away from their families was both my passion and my privilege.

• [...]

• I couldn’t believe it. He groped me, without my consent, while I was asleep.

• I felt violated all over again. Embarrassed. Belittled. Humiliated.

• How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it’s funny?

• I told my husband everything that happened and showed him the picture.

• People who listened to Thursday morning’s Today programme on BBC Radio 4 heard Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell set out his five budget priorities. But they noticed a gap between what McDonnell said on the show and how the show reported it on Twitter.

• Two more women have come forward to accuse Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct or making sexual advances toward them when they were teenagers. This brings the total number of women to nine. One woman said, “I’ve known for over 20 years that he was a predator, that he preyed upon girls in the mall. It’s common knowledge.” As Moore’s approval ratings continue to fall, Republican Party leaders met Wednesday to discuss what to do about the growing crisis.

• Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Thursday disclosed that White House senior adviser Jared Kushner received an email about WikiLeaks in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

• The two senators sent a letter to Kushner’s lawyer Thursday demanding additional documents from Trump’s son-in-law as part of the committee’s ongoing investigation of Russia’s election interference. In the letter, Grassley and Feinstein say Kushner received an email about WikiLeaks in September 2016 that he passed on to an official within President Trump’s campaign, in addition to communication about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite.”

• Cambodia’s Supreme Court has dissolved the country’s main opposition party, leaving the government with no significant competitor ahead of elections next year. The Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) is accused of plotting to topple the government – charges it denies, and describes as politically motivated. More than 100 party members are now banned from politics for five years. Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, has ruled for 32 years.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In the old days, universities tended to deal with the ‘problem’ of controversial meetings on campus by simply banning them. Then legislation was passed in 1986 to protect free speech on campus, and this rightly made such outright bans more difficult. However, as anyone familiar with campus debates in recent years will be aware, the problem of censorship at universities hasn’t gone away. It simply takes a new form. One form is universities micromanaging what their students and staff say on and also off campus. Consider events over the past year involving Sheffield University.

• On October 19, the bill proposed by Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar, and later supported by Republican Senator John McCain, attempts to regulate online ads in a way that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has done with TV, radio and print for generations. The FCC stated that the internet is “a unique and evolving mode of mass communication and political speech that is distinct from other media in a manner that warrants a restrained regulatory approach.”

• China’s top cyber authority on Thursday rejected a recent report ranking it last out of 65 countries for press freedom, saying the internet must be “orderly” and the international community should join it in addressing fake news and other cyber issues.

• China has slammed a report criticising its tightening laws on internet censorship and control.

• The country’s government lashed out following a report that ranked it among the worst countries in the world for internet freedom.

• The country’s cyber security authority is apparently unhappy with the fact it was recently ranked as the worst country for online freedom of speech.

• According to Reuters, the country believes that the internet must be organised in an “orderly” fashion and that the international community needs to do more to tackle cyber security.

• Well, I was wrong: last week I lamented that we might never know how the Ninth Circuit ruled on Glassdoor’s attempt to quash a federal grand jury subpoena served upon it demanding it identify users. Turns out, now we do know: two days after the post ran the court publicly released its decision refusing to quash the subpoena. It’s a decision that doubles-down on everything wrong with the original district court decision that also refused to quash it, only now with handy-dandy Ninth Circuit precedential weight.

• Like the original ruling, it clings to the Supreme Court’s decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, a case where the Supreme Court explored the ability of anyone to resist a grand jury subpoena. But in doing so it manages to ignore other, more recent, Supreme Court precedents that should have led to the opposite result.

• The controversial dropping of the two movies from the festival’s Indian Panorama section has resulted in the head of jury Sujoy Ghosh resigning from his position. The Congress has also accused the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of trying to “interfere with jury decisions”.

• Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar stood by the information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry’s decision to exclude director Ravi Jadhav’s Nude and Sanal Sasidharan’s S Durga from being screened at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2017.

• The European Union (EU) is launching the construction of an authority to monitor and censor so-called “fake news.” It is setting up a High-Level Expert Group on the issue and soliciting criticisms of “fake news” by media professionals and the public to decide what powers to give to this EU body, which is to begin operation next spring.

• An examination of the EU’s announcement shows that it is preparing mass state censorship aimed not at false information, but at news reports or political views that encourage popular opposition to the European ruling class.

• The term “fake news” is taken from the campaign in the United States promoting unsubstantiated accusations that Donald Trump’s victory was attributable to Russian manipulation of the 2016 US presidential elections that publicized material harmful to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. This campaign has developed into ever more aggressive demands for censorship of the Internet to prevent the expression of critical views and social protests.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “It’s crazy, a few windows got smashed,” 23-year-old Olivia Alsip said, two months after her arrest on felony riot charges. “Why are 214 people looking at ten years in prison?”

• Alsip only knew one other person at the protest march that day. The political science graduate student from the University of Chicago had met her partner in November, when the two had joined the camps at Standing Rock opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. When they heard about calls to protest Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in D.C. on January 20th under the banner “Disrupt J20,” they felt they had to be there. “I identify as an anarchist, and I’ve been an activist for women’s and queer rights since the 8th grade,” Alsip told me over the phone from Chicago.

• [...]

• Anarchists and anti-fascist activists across the country have responded to Trump’s ascendancy, and particularly the attendant emboldening of white supremacists, with confrontational protest. Rivers of digital ink were spilled approving and denouncing the meme-friendly punch delivered to neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, as well as the militant demonstrations that prevented far right troll Milo Yiannopoulos from waxing hateful at UC Berkeley. But while scattered vandalism and punching (a neo-Nazi) were deemed headline-grabbing militancy, the media relegated the most extreme incidents involving anarchists and antifascists—namely, recent treatment of them—to footnotes.

• A trial that could send independent journalist Alexei Wood and six others to prison for decades started on Wednesday.

• When Wood, 37, travelled from his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, to Washington, DC, to cover the anti-fascist bloc demonstration against the inauguration of US President Donald Trump on January 20, he did not imagine he would wind up with a slew of felonies.

• But on that day, Wood, who livestreamed the march on his Facebook page, was kettled and arrested by police with more than 230 others, including protesters, bystanders, legal observers and medics.

• “I feel righteous in my innocence,” he told Al Jazeera the day before the trial, “but a lot is riding on it: the future of journalism and protesting.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Given the Trump administration’s rubber stamping of every mono/duopolist desire (killing net neutrality, broadband privacy rules, media consolidation limits), most expected the AT&T Time Warner merger to see approval without much fuss. After all, while the problems caused by vertical integration deals like Comcast NBC Universal are very real, it didn’t seem likely that an administration running rough shod over consumer protections would give much of a damn. Especially given that Trump DOJ antitrust boss Makan Delrahim had already been on record stating he saw no problems whatsoever with the deal.

• That’s why leaked reports that the DOJ was suddenly considering blocking the deal came as such a surprise. Said reports indicated that the DOJ was considering a lawsuit to thwart the deal unless AT&T was willing to divest either CNN-owner Turner broadcasting, or DirecTV — which AT&T acquired last year.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Letters being sent out to Internet account holders in Sweden accusing them of copyright infringement are under investigation by Sweden’s Data Protection Authority. Since the letters demand a cash payment, they could be considered a debt collection measure. If that’s indeed the case, they must comply with strict legislation.

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