● 11.16.17

● Links 16/11/2017: Tails 3.3, Deepin 15.5 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• If you’re in the market for a new Dell laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled, you’re in luck!

• Dell has updated its range of Ubuntu-powered Precision laptops and desktops, meaning you can – hurrah – buy a machine pre-loaded with Ubuntu.

• The city government paid for a study to look at the IT problems that the city was having. It was done by Accenture, which is a Microsoft partner, so the FSFE and others expected the worst. It turned out not to be what they expected, he said. The study identified several problems, one of which was about an old version of Windows that was still in use, but the biggest problems were organizational rather than technical.

Server

• Linux might be struggling for a decent desktop market share but it is definitely ruling the world of supercomputers.

• Looking at the November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list one thing is particularly clear – the open saucy Linux is king.

• In 1998, Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list and it was regarded as unusual – indeed many just said it was because it was really Unix in drag. But the November list showed that all 500 of the world’s fastest supercomputers are running Linux.

• The latest Top 500 list of supercomputers has been released, and all of the world’s fastest supercomputers run Linux, reported ZDNet.

• Previously, there were two exceptions on the list – Chinese IBM POWER computers which ran AIX.

• Believe it or not, Linux is dominating all of world’s top 500 supercomputers as of November 2017, according to the Top500.org website, which maintains an up-to-date list of these supercomputers.

• This year marks the 24th anniversary of Top500 (www.top500.org), the website that compiles and releases a list with up-to-date information on world’s top 500 supercomputers. The list is released every June and November, and it became the standard for measuring high-performance computing (HPC).

• And this November, however, something amazing happened, but somehow expected. According to the Top500′s November list, it looks like all of the top 500 supercomputers are running a Linux-based operating system. In other words, Linux dominates all 500 of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, and that’s a great accomplishment.

• The Internet of Things is a powerful concept, especially in the industrial world—but it’s also full of potential security disasters and hidden computing and networking costs. But what if all you had to do to create a secure network of distributed Linux systems—complete with location awareness and custom application support capable of supporting location-based applications like asset tracking, robotic delivery, and “smart rooms”—was to change the lightbulbs?

• Not so the OS vendors. Red Hat, SUSE, and others offer 10-year support life-cycles for patching and supporting their enterprise OSes. To accomplish this they have to invest over half of their engineering resources on old technology. This simply isn’t the business model for the clouds, and likely won’t become such for many years.

• The bi-annual Top 500 supercomputer list has reached its fiftieth edition, bringing with it two important milestones: China has more machines on the list than the US, and every computer now runs Linux.

• Boasting 202 entries, China can now claim more supercomputers in the top 500 than ever before. At the same time, the US has its lowest number of places—144—since the list began 25 years ago. Back in June, China took 159 spots while the US led with 169.

• LINUX MAY well still be viewed as the preserve of ‘hobbyists’, but there’s one category of devices in which Linux rules the market: supercomputers.

• According to ZDNet, it’s the first time that Linux systems have taken all 500 spots in the TOP500 Supercomputer list – with the last two non-Linux supercomputers dropping off between the lists released in June and November of this year.

Kernel Space

• The changes to the MD RAID and block areas of the Linux kernel have been submitted for the 4.15 cycle.

• The HID and input pull requests have been submitted for the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window.

• Alex Deucher of AMD has submitted a set of last minute fixes for the AMDGPU DC code that’s expected to be sent this week as a pull request for the Linux 4.15 kernel.

• LINUX KERNEL 4.14 has been released with a number of key features, scheduled to represent the next Long Term Support (LTS) edition of the operating system – the first to have a six-year support cycle (previously, LTS has meant two years).

• The big news is that memory limits have been increased to 128PiB of virtual address space and 4PiB of physical address space. The fact that this is even remotely necessary reflects how far we’ve come since the early days of Linux. This is seen as a very future proof limit, but that’s what they probably said with the original.

• Stable kernels 4.13.13, 4.9.62, 4.4.98, and 3.18.81 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

• The 2017 Realtime Summit (RT-Summit) was hosted by the Czech Technical University on Saturday, October 21 in Prague, just before the Embedded Linux Conference. It was attended by more than 50 individuals with backgrounds ranging from academic to industrial, and some local students daring enough to spend a day with that group. What follows is a summary of some of the presentations held at the event.

• USBGuard is a security framework for the authorization of USB devices that can be plugged into a Linux system. For users who want to protect a system from malicious USB devices or unauthorized use of USB ports on a machine, this program gives a number of fine-grained policy options for specifying how USB devices can interact with a host system. It is a tool similar to usbauth, which also provides an interface to create access-control policies for the USB ports. Although kernel authorization for USB devices already exists, programs like USBGuard make it easy to craft policies using those mechanisms.

• Shuah Khan is the maintainer of the kernel’s self-test subsystem. At the 2017 Kernel Summit, she presented an update on the recent developments in kernel testing and led a related discussion. Much work has happened around self-testing in the kernel, but there remains a lot to be done.

• The tracking of kernel regressions was discussed at the 2017 Kernel Summit; the topic made a second appearance at the first-ever Maintainers Summit two days later. This session was partly a repeat of what came before for the benefit of those (including Linus Torvalds) who weren’t at the first discussion, but some new ground was covered as well.

• Thorsten Leemhuis started with a reprise of the Kernel Summit discussion, noting that he has been doing regression tracking for the last year and has found it to be rather harder than he had expected. The core of the problem, he said, is that nobody tells him anything about outstanding regressions or the progress that has been made in fixing them, forcing him to dig through the lists to discover that information on his own. He had, though, come to a few conclusions on how he wants to proceed.

• Laurent Pinchart ran a session at the 2017 Embedded Linux Conference Europe entitled “Bash the kernel maintainers”; the idea was to get feedback from developers on their experience working with the kernel community. A few days later, the Maintainers Summit held a free-flowing discussion on the issues that were brought up in that session. Some changes may result from this discussion, but it also showed how hard it can be to change how kernel subsystem maintainers work.

• The first complaint was that there is no consistency in how maintainers respond to patches. Some will acknowledge them right away, others take their time, and others will sometimes ignore patches altogether. James Bottomley defended the last group, saying that it is simply not possible to respond to all of the patches that show up on the mailing lists. The discussions can get nasty or, with some posters, a maintainer can end up stuck in a never-ending circle of questions and reposts. Arnd Bergmann suggested that maintainers could adopt a standard no-reply reply for such situations.

• A traditional Kernel-Summit agenda item was a slot where Linus Torvalds had the opportunity to discuss the aspects of the development community that he was (or, more often, was not) happy with. In 2017, this discussion moved to the smaller Maintainers Summit. Torvalds is mostly content with the state of the community, it seems, but the group still found plenty of process-related things to talk about.

• The kernel development process is going well, with one big exception, Torvalds said: developers still seem unable to distinguish the merge window from the period after -rc1 is released and he doesn’t understand why. An extreme example was the MIPS subsystem which, as a result, was not merged at all for two release cycles. Most of the issues are not so extreme, but the problem is ongoing.

• The 2017 Maintainers Summit, the first event of its type, managed to cover a wide range of topics in a single half-day. This article picks up a few relatively short topics that were discussed toward the end of the session. These include a new initiative to add SPDX license tags to the kernel, the perils of cross-subsystem development, and an evaluation of the summit itself.

Linux Foundation

• Since ECOMP and Open O merged earlier this year to create Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP), the Linux Foundation is seeing membership and interest continue to accelerate to automate more network functions via SDN and NFV.

• Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking and orchestration for The Linux Foundation, told attendees during this year’s MEF 17 event that ONAP has become widely accepted.

Graphics Stack

• The Crunch texture compression library developed by former Valve Linux/OpenGL engineer Rich Geldreich who cofounded the Binomial consulting firm is making much progress with showing off impressive compression capabilities for game engines.

• Unity 3D, which formerly employed Geldreich post-Valve, is finding encouraging results for this texture compression library with the Unity 2017.3 game engine that’s now in beta. Their updated Crunch library in Unity 2017.3 is compressing DXT textures up to 2.5x faster while having about a 10% better compression ratio. Additionally, the latest Crunch is now able to handle more texture formats as well, including for iOS and Android with ETC textures.

• Eric Anholt at Broadcom has continued his spree of bringing up the next-gen VC5 Linux graphics driver stack while also continuing to maintain and improve upon the VC4 driver most commonly associated as being the open-source GPU driver option for the Raspberry Pi.

• Spanish development outfit Igalia has posted their initial work on wiring up the OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions into core Mesa and the i965 OpenGL driver.

Applications

• Much more than just making pretty maps and helping us get from point A to point B, GIS technologies are what allow us to plan our cities, route the infrastructure that enables everything we do, preserve our natural resources, save lives in times of disaster, and so much more.

• If you’ve ever worked with geographic data on the desktop, chances are that you used Esri’s ArcGIS application in at least part of your work. ArcGIS is an incredibly powerful tool, but unfortunately, it’s a proprietary product that is designed for Windows. Linux and Mac users are out of luck unless they want to run ArcGIS in a virtualized environment, and even then, they’re still using a closed source product that can be very expensive to license. While their flagship product is closed source, I would be remiss not to note that Esri has made numerous contributions to the open source community.

• Kodi 17.6 has been released today as the last minor bugfix update to the Krypton series, bringing a fix for a crash that could occur in the Controller dialog, updates the standard scrapers to their lastest versions available at the moment of writing, as well as a fix for some connection issues that could occur with the internal web server.

• It also fixes a crash when the peripheral joystick add-on is disabled, and probably other minor issues that haven’t been added to today’s release notes, which mention the fact that from now on the upcoming Kodi 18 “Leia” series will be put in the spotlight and will receive more honorable mentions during its development cycle.

• QEMU 2.11-RC1 is available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

• - Dropped support for IA64 Itanium architecture. Also being dropped with QEMU 2.11 is AIX support.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• As covered back during XDC2017, Valve and LunarG have been working on more extensive testing of Mesa to catch regressions and meticulously spot any performance changes as they occur. That framework is now publicly available to see the results and for developers allows tracking their own Mesa development branches.

• The still-in-development DLC to the WW2 grand strategy game has gotten a name, trailer and its theme has been revealed. Expect new ways to command your armies as well as new possibilities for several nations.

• GOG have revived some more classic titles for Linux thanks to DOSBox! Battle Chess Special Edition which includes three games now supports Linux on GOG.

• For fans of classic Point & Click adventure games, Milkmaid of the Milky Way [Steam, Official Site] is now officially available on Linux.

• The game was developed by just one person, Mattis Folkestad, with a playtime of around 2-3 hours and the Steam/Google Play reviews give it a pretty good score overall. Milkmaid of the Milky Way was originally released back in January of this year, so we’re a little late getting it, but good things come to those who wait right?

• …it will have Linux support.

• I love seeing what people have been able to do with SteamOS and this might just be the most amusing. One dedicated gamer made their very own SteamOS tabletop car-cade to play DiRT Rally.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDevelop, the well-known open-source and cross-platform IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating system, has been updated recently to version 5.2.

• Almost half a year in the making, KDevelop 5.2 is a major release that introduces more analyzer plugins to the Analyzer menu entry implemented in the previous release, KDevelop 5.1. These include Heaptrack, a heap memory profiler for Linux apps written in C/C++ and Cppcheck, a popular static analyzer for the C++ programming language, which can be used from inside KDevelop by default.

• Kubuntu Cafe Live, is our new community show. This new format show is styled using a magazine format. We created lots of space for community involvement, breaking the show into multiple segments, and we want to get you involved. We are looking for Presenters, Trainers, Writers and Hosts.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME 3.27.2 unstable snapshot was announced a few moments ago by Tristan Van Berkom of the GNOME Release Team via an email announcement, which informs us that several more components of the GNOME Stack have been ported to the Meson build system, though some of them are failing to build for now.

• These include the GNOME Chess, GNOME Documents, GNOME Boxes, GNOME Terminal, GNOME Software, GNOME System Monitor, and fwupd. However, GNOME 3.27.2 includes many updated apps, such as the recently released NetworkManager 1.10.0, and brings various improvements to the Epiphany web browser and other apps.

• GNOME 3.27.2, the second unstable release in the 3.28 development cycle, is now available.

• The porting of more modules to meson continues (which is great!), but It’s still causing some problems for some modules. See the build failures below, along with a short list of other build errors.

• GNOME 3.27.2 is now available as the second development release in the road to next March’s GNOME 3.28 desktop stable update.

• Epiphany 3.27.2 is now available as the latest web browser release in the road to next year’s GNOME 3.28 desktop.

• One of the big changes with this Epiphany browser development release is restructuring how “web apps” are handled. They are now treated more like “silos, rather than prisons.” This bug report describes more of the reworking of these GNOME Web Apps. The updated implementation allows these web applications to support tabs, allowing external links, button changes, and more.

Distributions

• Almost every month, KaOS developers release an updated installation medium that contains all the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source applications. The KaOS 2017.11 ISO snapshot comes the recently released KDE Plasma 5.11.3 desktop environment, as well as both KDE Applications 17.08.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.40.0 software stacks, all compiled against the Qt 5.9.2 application framework.

• “KaOS repositories no longer provide Qt 4,” said the devs in the release announcement. “Any application that has not made the transition to Qt 5 in all this time can no longer be supported in KaOS. Either they actually are no longer maintained or their development is ignoring the implications of building on a possible insecure toolkit.”

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat just launched OpenStack Platform 12, the newest version of the company’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. This update is based on the “Pike” release of OpenStack.

• Red Hat’s SAP Vora solution is now available on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

• Red Hat has provided a presence (and a lot of free red Fedora giveaways) at SAP’s TechEd Europe 2017 conference in Barcelona this week.

• The open source champions (Red Hat, not SAP) have announced the availability of SAP Vora on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

• SAP Vora is a distributed computing solution for business that provides enriched interactive analytics across Hadoop and corporate data.

Finance

Fedora

• Several years ago, we organized two workshops focused on packaging software for Fedora. It was a success. Both workshops were full and several participants became package maintainers in Fedora. Packaging for Flatpak is becoming popular lately, so we decided to offer a workshop which is focused on flatpaking apps.

• Red Hat and the Fedora Project were pleased to announce the general availability of the Fedora 27 Linux operating system, the latest stable release of the free OS for desktops and servers.

• Fedora Linux is Red Hat’s free alternative to the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, which recently gained ARM server support, and it’s one of the most used GNU/Linux distributions out there besides Ubuntu, of course.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• This release fixes many security issues and users should upgrade as soon as possible.

• Tails 3.3 comes one and a half months after the release of Tails 3.2, and while it’s still based on the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system, the OS is now powered by the Linux 4.13 kernel series, which means more excellent support for running the distro on the latest hardware out there.

• This release also comes with some of the latest TOR software to provide users with the best support when surfing the Web anonymously. Tails 3.3 includes Tor 0.3.1.8 client and server for connecting to Tor anonymous networks or running a Tor relay, as well as the Firefox-based Tor Browser 7.0.10 web browser.

• Just yesterday, TOP500 refreshed its list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. For the first time, all top 500 supercomputers are powered by Linux. While a normal user can’t get his hands on such a beast, you can surely get an amazing Linux experience on your familiar desktop PC.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.9.16 This new version includes:

• Performance is now almost twice as responsive and smoother, videos also plays faster Designs improved buttons, window borders, and faster effects Desktop automatic scaling, font selection and sizing based on your screen, organization of elements are more accessible too Installer has a lot of improvements, fixes, fine-tuning and options to choice for the installed system, included privative drivers like Nvidia / Ati

Canonical/Ubuntu

• While it was only months ago that Canonical let go of several Mir developers at the same time as other staff reductions for the Unity team and different areas as the company changed their focus, they are now looking for new Mir hires.

• Canonical is looking to hire “engineers with experience and passion” with a focus of getting Mir onto “desktops of the future and all IoT devices.”

Flavours and Variants

• deepin is a Linux distribution devoted to providing beautiful, easy to use, safe and reliable system for global users.

• Compared to previous editiond, deepin 15.5 Beta applied the new Web application framework, added Wi-Fi hotspot sharing and color temperature adjustment besides fully compatible WUXGA screen and Flatpak application format supported. More importantly, network module and desktop environment are fully optimized.

• About the optimization on network module and desktop environment, let’s have a look at some new and small features.

• Back in September, we told you some interesting Linux Mint news — version 18.3 would be named “Sylvia.” That is hardly the most exciting recent Mint news, however. Actually, the bombshell that the operating system would be abandoning KDE was far more intriguing. While some people will mourn Linux Mint KDE, I certainly won’t. Quite frankly, it should never have existed in the first place as it fragments the user experience, but I digress.

• The developers of the Deepin Linux operating system announced today the availability of the first beta release of Deepin 15.5, the next maintenance update to the stable series.

• Continuing to provide the Linux community with one of the most beautiful, safe, reliable, and easy to use computer operating system, Deepin 15.5 entered beta today with a bunch of new security features, such as support for importing and exporting VPN (Virtual Private Network) profiles and an application proxy function.

• The application proxy function works by allowing the user to open a certain program that requires an Internet connection through the system-wide, default proxy server. All you have to do is to right-click on an app’s shortcut and choose the new “Open by proxy” option from the context menu.

• System76 is one of the most well-known hardware companies in the free and open source software world. That’s not to say the brand is by any means a household name. Nonetheless, System76 has been selling computers that run Ubuntu for over a decade. That’s why the company made news when it announced that it would provide its own Linux-based operating system, Pop!_OS.

• In the past few weeks, the first official release of Pop!_OS became available for download. Now it’s shipping as an option on new computers from System76. Should you check it out?

Devices/Embedded

• Habey’s “EMB-2230” SBC runs Linux on an i.MX6, and offers LVDS and MIPI-DSI/CSI links, -10 to 60°C support, a 40-pin GPIO header, and optional PoE.

• Habey promotes its Pico-ITX (100 x 72mm) EMB-2230 SBC as being smaller and more expandable than its 3.5-inch (146 x 102mm) EMB-3200 SBC. Like the EMB-3200, the EMB2230 runs Linux on Dual Lite or Quad versions of NXP’s 1GHz, Cortex-A9 i.MX6 SoC, and is aimed primarily at panel PCs. Due to its smaller size, the Ubuntu 12.04 or Yocto Linux driven EMB-2230 can also be used for tablet-based devices, says Habey.

• Clockwork’s hackable “GameShell” retro game console runs Linux on a quad -A7 SoC, and offers a 2.7-inch LCD, gaming controls, GPIO, and Arduino links.

• Hangzhou, China based Clockwork has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal for a handheld GameShell device that is billed as “the world’s first modular, portable game console with a GNU/LINUX embedded operating system.” The GameShell is available in kit form through Dec. 19 in identical Kickstarter early bird packages ranging from $89 to $119, with shipments due in April 2018.

Tizen

• As times change, the way we consume television content has been changing too. Cable TVs, Satellite broadcasts, Direct to Home and now internet streams thanks to the faster internet and Smart TVs have all made it easier to watch content that we like. One company that has been evolving with time to deliver better content is the popular Swedish commercial broadcaster TV4 which is a part of Bonnier Group.

Android

• Android has been a great boon to the kernel community, having brought a great deal of growth in both the user and the development communities. But Android has also been a problem in that devices running it ship with kernels containing large amounts (often millions of lines) of out-of-tree code. That fragments the development community and makes it impossible to run mainline kernels on this hardware. The problematic side of Android was discussed at the 2017 Maintainer Summit; the picture that resulted is surprisingly optimistic.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman started by saying that he has been working for some time with the system-on-chip (SoC) vendors to try to resolve this problem, which he blames primarily on Qualcomm for having decided not to work upstream. Qualcomm has since concluded that this decision was a mistake and is determined to fix it, but the process of doing so will take years. The other SoC vendors are also committed to closing the gap between the kernels they provide and the mainline but, again, getting there will take a while.

• Another six months, another LG flagship phone. Typically the V series has been LG’s wacky, experimental line with an extra “ticker” screen on the front. This year, though, the V30 is all business. The ticker is gone in exchange for a slim-bezel device and a clean look.

• With the V30, LG is still basically following the same path that Samsung travels by shipping a heavily skinned phone with a glass back and slow updates. When you do all the same things as Samsung without the marketing budget, it’s hard to stand out.

Free Software/Open Source

• Traditionally, the telecom industry was driven by large standards bodies such as 3GPP, ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions), the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), which defined standards for everything in telecom right down to the telephone poles. These standards bodies have had dedicated individuals from across the industry working together for years to develop industry standards that are comprehensive to meet stringent requirements across many use cases.

• ETSI Open Source MANO group (ETSI OSM) announces the general availability of OSM Release THREE, keeping the pace of a release every 6 months. This release includes a large set of new capabilities as well as numerous enhancements in terms of scalability, performance, resiliency, security and user experience that facilitate its adoption in production environments.

• “OSM Release THREE provides a highly functional and reliable component for NFV Orchestration that enables all industry players to accelerate their deployment plans, with no need to change their target architectures for NFV infrastructure or OSS transformation.” declares Francisco-Javier Ramón, chairman of ETSI OSM group.

• The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has published the third release of OSM, its open source management and orchestration (MANO) stack for network function virtualisation.

• Networking has been transformed with the advent of SDN (software-defined networking) and NFV (network functions virtualizations). What has traditionally been a closed and proprietary environment dominated by a few vendors has opened up to innovation and a much more rapid pace of development than in past decades.

• Open source projects are generally started as a way to scratch one’s itch — and frankly that’s one of its greatest attributes. Getting code down provides a tangible method to express an idea, showcase a need, and solve a problem. It avoids over thinking and getting a project stuck in analysis-paralysis, letting the project pragmatically solve the problem at hand.

• Next, a project starts to scale up and gets many varied users and contributions, with plenty of opinions along the way. That leads to the next big challenge — how does a project start to build a strategic vision? In this article, I’ll describe how to walk through, measure, and define strategies collaboratively, in a community.

• Strategy may seem like a buzzword of the corporate world rather something that an open source community would embrace, so I suggest stripping away the negative actions that are sometimes associated with this word (e.g., staff reductions, discontinuations, office closures). Strategy done right isn’t a tool to justify unfortunate actions but to help show focus and where each community member can contribute.

• The US military is set to charge ahead into open source next year after an amendment to the National Defense Authorisation Act for Fiscal Year 2018.

• The amendment introduced by Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) and co-sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) will mean that the Pentagon will be going open source.

• Kingsley Wood, Director, Infrastructure Business Group, Asia Pacific – Red Hat, said, “The interesting thing about the open source approach is that many people from the community can contribute a lot of fresh ideas, which can help identify problems quicker.”

• engaluru: Contributing code to the open source world is regarded increasingly as a badge of honour. Yet, Indian IT services companies lag in embracing the open source code culture, shows data from open source code repository GitHub.

• Among GitHub’s 75,000 engineers from India, IT services & ITES (IT enabled services) companies have the highest numbers on the platform, but most of the open source contributions were made by employees working for technology product companies and MNCs in India.

• GitHub is a platform where developers host and review codes, manage projects, and even build open source software along with other community members. Open source, which refers to software whose source code (the medium in which programmers create and modify software) is freely available on the internet, has become a major trend in software development today. It stands in contrast to proprietary commercial software whose source code is usually a closely guarded secret.

Events

• Last weekend I attended the first Linux Developer Conference Brazil at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). It was an event focused on the upstream development of low level components related to Linux, such as gcc, systemtap and the Linux kernel itself. The event was organized by a few contributors of some of these upstream projects, like the kernel, and was sponsored by companies that work directly with it (among them were openSUSE and Collabora).

• Compared to other events, it’s a tiny happening with something between fifty and hundred people or so. I was presenting on how I think GNOME pushes the envelope regarding making secure operating systems (slides, videos to follow). I was giving three examples of how GNOME achieves its goal of priding a secure OS without compromising on usability. In fact, I claimed that the most successful security solutions must not involve the user. That sounds a bit counter intuitive to people in the infosec world, because we’re trying to protect the user, surely they must be involved in the process. But we better not do that. This is not to say that we shouldn’t allow the user to change preferences regarding how the solutions behave, but rather that it should work without intervention. My talk was fairly good attended, I think, and we had a great discussion. I tend to like the discussion bit better than the actual presentation, because I see it as an indicator for how much the people care. I couldn’t attend many other presentations, because I would only attend the second day. That’s why I couldn’t meet with Jim :-/

• A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to talk at the 7th Privacy Enhancing Techniques Conference (PET-CON 2017.2) in Hamburg, Germany. It’s a teeny tiny academic event with a dozen or so experts in the field of privacy.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Mozilla Foundation has officially launched a radical rewrite of its browser, a major cross-platform effort to regain relevance in a world that seems to have forgotten Firefox. The much-rewritten browser claims to be 30 per cent faster with half the memory load, although this comes at the cost of compatibility, as Scott Gilbertson found here.

• The proof’s in the pudding, and this pudding doesn’t feel like the old Firefox behemoth at all. It’s long overdue.

• “Firefox is 13 years old – and very few applications have been around for 13 years without accruing technical debt,” Nick Nguyen, Mozilla’s VP of technology told us.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• If you have anything approaching a memory you may recall that The Document Foundation is on the hunt for a LibreOffice mascot. Ring any bells?

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Programming/Development

• Azul will Provide Continued Support for Embedded builds of OpenJDK on x86, Arm and PowerPC Processors

• If you’re working on documentation, a website, or other user-facing content, it’s helpful to know what users expect to find—both the information they want and how the information is organized and structured. After all, great content isn’t very useful if people can’t find what they’re looking for.

• Card sorting is a simple and effective way to gather input from users about what they expect from menu interfaces and pages. The simplest implementation is to label a stack of index cards with the sections you plan to include in your website or documentation and ask users to sort the cards in the way they would look for the information. Variations include letting people write their own menu headers or content elements.

• Uber’s self-driving car ambitions have been an open secret surrounding the company for some time now. If the ride share company’s ambitions are met, someday when you hail a ride using its app it’ll be an autonomous car that shows instead of a human looking to supplement his income. The company has been actively recruiting engineering talent toward its autonomous car program – even running into some legal trouble with Google along the way over accusations of poaching talent and technology.

• There’s a notion in DevOps that our work begins when we understand the strategic business goals that we’re trying to meet, then we deliver on them. This is typically a two-step process where one team creates goals, then hands them off to another team to implement them.

Standards/Consortia

• Once upon a time – oh, say fifteen years ago – the terms open standards and open source software (OSS) were often used interchangeably. Not because they were the same thing, but because many people didn’t really know what either really was, let alone the differences between them. That was unfortunate, because at that time the two had little in common, and were developed for very different purposes.

• Recently, many people (especially OSS developers) have begun referring to the software they develop as “a standard.” This time around they’re a lot closer to being right.

• So, what’s going on here? And is it a good thing?

Leftovers

• Twitter warned users Wednesday that they can lose “verified” status on its platform, releasing a set of rules for keeping the “blue checkmark” that verifies their identity.

• The social media giant, in an update on the help center portion of its website, explained how users can lose the blue check marks denoting that their profiles are verified. The violations include misleading users on Twitter, as well as promoting hate and harassing others, among other types of behavior that violate Twitter’s rules.

Health/Nutrition

• In August, Kaiser Health News reported that Thiel and other conservative investors had contributed $7 million for the live-but-weakened herpes virus vaccine, developed by the late SIU researcher William Halford. The investments came after Halford and his private company, Rational Vaccines, had begun conducting small clinical trials in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. With the off-shore location, Rational Vaccines’ trial skirted federal regulations and standard safety protocols for human trials, including having approval and oversight from an institutional review board (IRB).

• Experts were quick to call the unapproved trial “patently unethical,” and researchers rejected the data from publication, calling the handling of safety issues “reckless.” The government of St. Kitts opened an investigation into the trial and reported that health authorities there had been kept in the dark.

Security

• Asking the crowd for help in fixing security problems is going mainstream. Microsoft, Facebook, and other tech giants have offered “bug bounties”—cash rewards or other prizes and recognition—to individuals discovering vulnerabilities in their products for years. (Ars even made it onto Google’s security wall of fame in 2014 for reporting a Google search bug, though we didn’t get a cash payout.)

• Uploaded by Attaullah Malik on YouTube, the 41-second clip shows his 10-year-old son unlocking Face ID on an iPhone X which was configured to accept the mother’s face.

• Malik offered to let Ammar look at his phone instead, but the boy picked up his mother’s, not knowing which was which. And a split second after he looked at it, the phone unlocked.

• Although Apple says Face ID is more secure than Touch ID, this raises questions about the possibility of false positives not only happening with twins and siblings around the same age, but with people of different sexes and significantly different ages. It is possible that the son’s age played a role as Apple has said that the “undeveloped facial features” in those under the age of 13 could cause issues with Face ID.

• At least some commercial aircraft are vulnerable to wireless hacking, a US Department of Homeland Security official has admitted.

• A plane was compromised as it sat on the tarmac at a New Jersey airport by a team of boffins from the worlds of government, industry and academia, we’re told. During the hack – the details of which are classified – experts accessed systems on the Boeing 757 via radio-frequency communications.

• “We got the airplane on September 19, 2016. Two days later, I was successful in accomplishing a remote, non-cooperative, penetration,” said Robert Hickey, aviation program manager within the cyber-security division of the DHS’s science and technology directorate, while speaking at the CyberSat Summit in Virginia earlier this month.

• More substantial and more security minded businesses often also perform regular penetration tests to identify vulnerabilities in their systems that go beyond the reach of standard vulnerability scanners.

• When it comes to penetration testing, Offensive Security’s Kali Linux is one of the most widely used tool sets in the industry. It is a free, Debian-based Linux distribution that contains hundreds of specific penetration testing tools.

• The demand for security professionals is real. On Dice.com, 15 percent of the more than 75K jobs are security positions. “Every year in the U.S., 40,000 jobs for information security analysts go unfilled, and employers are struggling to fill 200,000 other cyber-security related roles, according to cyber security data tool CyberSeek” (Forbes). We know that there is a fast-increasing need for security specialists, but that the interest level is low.

• The time has come for the U.S. government and other governments around the world, to start regulating Internet of Things (IoT) security, according to Bruce Schneier, CTO of IBM’s Resilient Systems.

• Schneier delivered his message during a keynote address at the SecTor security conference here. He noted that today everything is basically a computer, whether it’s a car, a watch, a phone or a television. IoT today has several parts including sensors that collect data, computing power to figure out what to do with the collected data and then actuators that affect the real world.

• Enigma Software makes Spyhunter, a malware-fighting program with a very questionable reputation. But the company isn’t known so much for containing threats as it’s known for issuing threats. It sued a review site for having the audacity to suggest its pay-to-clean anti-spyware software wasn’t a good fit for most users… or really any users at all.

• Bleeping Computer found itself served with a defamation lawsuit for making fact-based claims (with links to supporting evidence) about Enigma’s dubious product, dubious customer service tactics (like the always-popular “auto-renew”), and dubious lawsuits. Somehow, this dubious lawsuit managed to survive a motion to dismiss. Fortunately, Bleeping Computer was propped up by Malwarebytes’ developers, who tossed $5,000 into Bleeping Computer’s legal defense fund.

Defence/Aggression

• In Yemen, the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition bombed the main airport in the capital Sana’a Tuesday, damaging the runway and destroying navigation equipment. The attack came after Saudi Arabia shut air, land and sea routes into Yemen, drawing warnings from the United Nations that the clampdown could worsen Yemen’s massive cholera epidemic and set off the largest famine the world has seen in decades, with millions of victims. Tuesday’s attack drew condemnation from Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who tweeted, “The US/Saudi coalition took out the Sanaa airport last night. Now no humanitarian relief by air. This is barbaric.”

• Zimbabwe’s military has placed President Robert Mugabe under house arrest in the capital Harare, South African President Jacob Zuma says.

• Mr Mugabe told Mr Zuma in a phone call that he was fine, the South African leader’s office said.

• Troops are patrolling the capital, Harare, after they seized state TV and said they were targeting “criminals”.

• Just in time for the travel season to kick in, the TSA is operating at peak efficiency. Streamlining travelers’ pre-boarding procedures this year — just like every year preceding it — will be the agency’s inability to keep dangerous items from making their way onboard.

• Two years ago, the TSA’s Inspector General discovered it could sneak contraband — including explosive devices — past the agency’s pizza box recruits 95% of the time. A follow-up audit two years later was just as unimpressive. The IG’s “Red Team” audit team called it quits after sneaking 17 of 18 forbidden items past TSA screeners. At 94.4%, it’s hard to tell whether this is the TSA’s idea of improvement or just the result of a smaller sample size. (The first audit team made 70 smuggling attempts, succeeding 67 times.) Theoretically, given enough attempts, the TSA may have been able to push this number much closer to 100%.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A story published in The Atlantic on Monday afternoon (US time) used selectively edited tweets from WikiLeaks in order to paint the organisation as being pro-Trump and pro-Russia.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Hurricanes strike the US with regularity, but there’s nothing on record that is at all like Hurricane Harvey’s pummeling of Houston. Understanding the risk of that kind of wind and rainfall happening again is critical if we intend to rebuild infrastructure that’s going to survive to its expected expiration date. But freakish storms like Harvey make risk calculations challenging. These storms have no historic precedent, so we have no idea how often they occur; and the underlying probability of these events is shifting as our planet grows warmer.

• A new analysis concludes what many in African-American communities have long experienced: Low-income, black Americans are disproportionately exposed to toxic air pollution from the fossil fuel industry.

• More than 1 million African Americans live within a half-mile of oil and natural gas wells, processing, transmission and storage facilities (not including oil refineries), and 6.7 million live in counties with refineries, potentially exposing them to an elevated risk of cancer due to toxic air emissions, according to the study.

• When the authors looked at proximity to refineries, they found that about 40 percent of all people living in counties with refineries in Michigan, Louisiana and Pennsylvania are African American, and 54 percent in Tennessee are.

• In three other states—Oklahoma, Ohio and West Virginia—they found that about one in five African-American residents statewide lives within a half-mile of an oil or gas facility.

• Researchers studying state-level climate policy in the US confirm what high school teachers already know: if you make an assignment voluntary and offer no incentives for completing it, no one’s gonna do it.

• In an assessment of 17 climate and energy policies enacted by US states between 1990 and 2014, researchers from Emory University found that mandatory policies usually had a positive effect on emissions reduction while voluntary policies always had negligible or no effect.

• What may be more interesting, however, is to look at which policies worked best. Such an analysis has growing practical implications. This year, the Trump administration reversed many of the Obama administration’s federal emissions-reducing guidelines, rules, and regulations, meaning states that want to curb emissions are left to their own devices. Legislators who are serious about crafting good environmental policy would do well to look at what has worked for others before making proposals.

Finance

• Billionaire entrepreneur and potential presidential candidate Mark Cuban said on Wednesday that a cut in the U.S. corporate tax rate would have little to no effect on his investment decisions.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This comes as Attorney General Jeff Sessions is heading to Capitol Hill today to testify before a congressional hearing on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Some Democratic lawmakers have accused Sessions of committing perjury for previously telling Congress that he was not aware of any Trump campaign official talking to the Russians. Sessions’s remark contradicts the statements of two former Trump campaign aides, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, who have admitted they had contacts with Russians during the campaign. Meanwhile, Sessions has asked officials to look into whether a special prosecutor is needed to investigate the Clinton Foundation and an Obama-era deal to sell a uranium company to Russia.

• Elections and referendums in at least 18 countries over the past 12 months have been influenced by carefully planned “manipulation and disinformation tactics”, new research suggests.

• It found governments including Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were using “paid pro-government commentators” to shape opinions online, often to give the impression of grassroots support for government policies.

• Governments around the world are dramatically increasing their efforts to manipulate information on social media, threatening the notion of the internet as a liberating technology, according to Freedom on the Net 2017, the latest edition of the annual country-by-country assessment of online freedom, released today by Freedom House.

• My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am the editor in chief is one of the unfortunate lab rats.

• Last month, I noticed that our stories had stopped appearing on Facebook as usual. I was stunned. Our largest single source of traffic, accounting for more than half of our monthly page views, had been crippled.

• Surely, I thought, it was a glitch. It wasn’t.

• Democrats in Oklahoma picked up a key state Senate seat in a Tuesday special election, marking the fourth seat Democrats have gained in special elections in the state this year.

• The Tulsa World reports Democrat Allison Ikley-Freeman won a close race over Republican Brian O’Hara in Oklahoma’s Senate District 37. The race was held to fill the seat of Republican Dan Newberry, who was leaving the state Senate.

• Ikley-Freeman, a 26-year-old lesbian, defeated O’Hara by 31 votes.

• President Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp” was just one more empty promise as he adds to the muck with military contractors in key Pentagon jobs and other industry lobbyists at regulatory posts, says Jonathan Marshall.

• Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment was surely a campaign gaffe, but she wasn’t wrong about Donald Trump’s exploitation of white grievances and other ugly attitudes, writes Lawrence Davidson.

• A House Democrat demanded on Tuesday that a former pesticide lobbyist who was appointed to the Department of Agriculture by the Trump administration release all emails she has exchanged with lobbyists or other representatives from her former industry.

• North Carolina’s two Republican senators said Wednesday they oppose President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee chemical safety at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting his nomination at serious risk.

• Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis issued statements saying they will vote against Michael L. Dourson to serve as head of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

• Brett Talley, the Alabama lawyer Donald Trump has nominated to be a federal district judge, is a 36-year-old ghosthunter who has never tried a case and who failed to disclose to the Senate that he is married to the chief of staff to the White House counsel. He also seems to have written 16,381 posts—more than 3½ per day—on the University of Alabama fan message board TideFans.com. As BuzzFeed has reported, a user who is almost certainly Talley posted for years under the handle BamainBoston. (BuzzFeed managed to identify him because BamainBoston wrote a message headlined “Washington Post Did A Feature On Me,” linking to a 2014 Ben Terris profile of Talley. BuzzFeed reported that a “Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on Talley’s behalf.”)

Censorship/Free Speech

• According to the new rules, national consumer protection authorities can order any unspecified third party to block access to websites without requiring judicial authorisation.

• [...]

• Tragically, the Parliament’s negotiator, MEP Olga Sehnalová from the Czech Social Democrats (S&D group), agreed to a compromise that adopted the Council’s proposal on website blocking.

• Here’s the important bit, though, in Article 9(4), which covers minimum enforcement powers

• In a new bill just passed by the European Parliament, the European Union decided to give Internet censorship powers to each state’s consumer protection agency, completely without judicial oversight or a court order. These are the agencies typically dealing with defective electrical products or dangerous chemicals.

• After a prolonged battle through every stage of the Austrian legal system, the Supreme Court has now ruled that local ISPs must prevent their subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The case, filed by a collecting society representing around 3,000 artists, also involves top 10 torrent site 1337x and long defunct index h33t.to.

• At the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), we are proud to be ardent defenders of §230. Even before §230 was enacted in 1996, we recognized that all speech on the Internet relies upon intermediaries, like ISPs, web hosts, search engines, and social media companies. Most of the time, it relies on more than one. Because of this, we know that intermediaries must be protected from liability for the speech of their users if the Internet is to live up to its promise, as articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in ACLU v. Reno, of enabling “any person … [to] become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox“ and hosting “content … as diverse as human thought.”

• As we hoped—and based in large measure on the strength of the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Zeran—§230 has proven to be one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet. In the past two decades, we’ve filed well over 20 legal briefs in support of §230, probably more than on any other issue, in response to attempts to undermine or sneak around the statute. Thankfully, most of these attempts were unsuccessful. In most cases, the facts were ugly—Zeran included. We had to convince judges to look beyond the individual facts and instead focus on the broader implications: that forcing intermediaries to become censors would jeopardize the Internet’s promise of giving a voice to all and supporting more robust public discourse than ever before possible.

• A federal appeals court has issued an alarming ruling that significantly erodes the Constitution’s protections for anonymous speakers—and simultaneously hands law enforcement a near unlimited power to unmask them.

• The Ninth Circuit’s decision in U.S. v. Glassdoor, Inc. is a significant setback for the First Amendment. The ability to speak anonymously online without fear of being identified is essential because it allows people to express controversial or unpopular views. Strong legal protections for anonymous speakers are needed so that they are not harassed, ridiculed, or silenced merely for expressing their opinions.

• Earlier this year I wrote about Yelp’s appeal in Montagna v. Nunis. This was a case where a plaintiff had subpoenaed Yelp to unmask one of its users and Yelp tried to resist the subpoena. In that case, not only had the lower court refused to quash the subpoena, but it sanctioned Yelp for having tried to quash it. Per the court, Yelp had no right to try to assert the First Amendment rights of its users as a basis for resisting a subpoena. As we said in the amicus brief I filed for the Copia Institute in Yelp’s appeal of the ruling, if the lower court were right it would be bad news for anonymous speakers, because if platforms could not resist unfounded subpoenas then users would lose an important line of defense against all the unfounded subpoenas seeking to unmask them for no legitimate reason.

• Africa’s largest television platform has pulled a talk show after it asked questions about police brutality and media freedom in Zambia.

• Radio and television promos for Talk With Kwangu were pulled off air after they featured a sound bite from the wife of Zambia’s opposition leader, Hakainde Hichilema, the Mast newspaper reported. The show, hosted by journalist Kwangu Liwewe, airs on M-Net’s Zambezi Magic channel in six southern African countries.

• Reading our coverage of Rozcomnadzor, the Russian government agency tasked with keeping the internet clean of piracy, you would know that the agency has a laughably bad track record for pretty much everything. Even as ranking members of the agency have been embroiled in a corruption scandal in which they bilked Russian taxpayers by creating fake employees, the statistics out on Rozcomnadzor’s ability to carry out its stated mission — blocking sites used for piracy on the internet — are horrendous. Put simply, the agency has managed to take down 4,000 “pirate” sites through legal cluster bombs that have inflicted 41,000 sites worth of collateral damage. Any honest look at those kinds of numbers would lead a sincere government to seriously consider whether such an agency was worthy of existence at all.

• I am receiving messages from my family warning me not to speak up. They know all too well about the unspoken systems of white retaliation that exist in the “real world” and are afraid that I may lose school scholarships, career opportunities, or be hurt.

• With censorship so prominent in Myanmar, it is vital that artists from this country are especially applauded for their works and the challenges they faced to simply offer their perspectives. Below are a few spotlight artists that went beyond censorship limitations to share their work with the world.

• It’s hard to escape the watchful eye of the internet – it will follow you through life. But if something put on the internet about you is wrong, misrepresents you or even endangers you, should you have a right to remove it from the internet? A new paper from the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC looks at the European Union ‘right to be forgotten online’ rule and considers its applicability in Latin America.

• [...]

• According to Inter-American Dialogue, “The authors conclude with four recommendations: (1) that governments in the Americas face these questions head-on; (2) that courts and authorities throughout the hemisphere work to apply the existing and hard-fought inter-American standards protecting the freedom of expression; (3) that a transatlantic dialogue be initiated to discuss the right to be forgotten online; and (4) that governments search for alternative legal and technological mechanisms to protect privacy so as to limit the tensions while taking into account the very real concerns that the right to be forgotten attempts to address.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• It’s hard to say which is more disturbing: Reports that hackers have obtained some of the National Security Agency’s most classified cybertools and are auctioning them off on the internet — or that, 15 months into its investigation, the agency still doesn’t know if it’s dealing with an outside hack, a leak or both.

• In short, the agency is reeling. What the NSA needs most of all — aside from finding out how the hackers, suspected to be a Russian group known as the Shadow Brokers, got the material — is a change in culture. Fortunately, there are precedents for a security agency seeking to restore its reputation and credibility: the actions taken by the FBI and CIA after the moles Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, respectively, were exposed in 2001 and 1994.

• Since the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures began showing up in the Washington Post and the Guardian, the political debate over the American surveillance state has been stuck in the 20th century.

• The public has feared a secretive, all-seeing eye, a vast bureaucracy that could peer into our online lives and track the numbers our smartphones dialed. Privacy as we knew it was dead. The era of Big Brother was here.

• President Barack Obama responded to the Snowden leaks by commissioning a blue-ribbon panel that ended up concluding the way the National Security Agency did business often trampled on legitimate civil liberties concerns. The government did not need to store our metadata, or the numbers, times and dates of our phone calls.

• One more thing we can give Ed Snowden credit for: the possibility we may be seeing even more public access to FISA court opinions and other FISA docs in the future. [h/t Mike Scarcella]

• There’s still a long way to go procedurally, but this latest ruling from the FISA court will allow a First Amendment lawsuit by the ACLU and the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic to move forward. Being granted the standing to actually challenge government surveillance is a rarity. The cover of national security darkness has prevented many plaintiffs from being able to allege harm, but the Snowden leaks have provided many public entities the information they need to shore up these allegations.

• Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein continues his push for law enforcement-friendly broken encryption. The ultimate goal is the same but the arguments just keep getting worse. Trying to pitch worthless encryption (i.e., encryption easily compromised in response to government demands) as “responsible” encryption is only the beginning of Rosenstein’s logical fallacies.

• After a month-plus of bad analogies and false equivalents, Rosenstein has managed to top himself. The path to Rosenstein’s slaughtering of a metaphor runs through such highlights as the DAG claiming device encryption is solely motivated by profits and that this is the first time in history law enforcement hasn’t had access to all forms of evidence. It’s an intellectually dishonest campaign against encryption, propelled by the incredibly incorrect belief that the Fourth Amendment was written to provide the government with access, rather than to protect citizens from their government.

• Around mid-2016 the United States National Security Agency (NSA) was breached – and it has been revealed the ‘leaker’ might still be at play.

• The breach was reported as ‘catastrophic’ and even more damaging than Edward Snowden’s massive data leak.

• Since August 2016, a group called the Shadow Brokers has been releasing information on NSA cyberweapons.

• Yes, Netflix is paying attention to when, where, and how people consume TV and movies, and has actually started studying how their habits are changing.

• Of the 37,056 people Netflix polled globally between August and September, 67 percent revealed themselves to be public bingers. Most of them, 77 percent, upon noticing snoopers, refused to turn off their show or film and just casually continued watching.

• The survey was conducted by SurveyMonkey from August 24 – September 7, 2017 and based on 37,056 responses. The sample was balanced by age and gender and representative of an adult online population who watch movies and TV shows via streaming services in public settings in The United States, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey.

• The patch sends the date and time of pill ingestion and the patient’s activity level via Bluetooth to a cellphone app. The app allows patients to add their mood and the hours they have rested, then transmits the information to a database that physicians and others who have patients’ permission can access.

• Watch our video below to see just how easy it is for anyone to take over the voice control of a popular connected toy, and speak directly to your child through it. And we’re not talking professional hackers [sic]. It’s easy enough for almost anyone to do.

• The Trump administration is expected to publicly release on 15 November its rules for deciding whether to disclose cybersecurity flaws or keep them secret, a national security official told Reuters.

• Step onto any city street and you may find yourself subject to numerous forms of police surveillance—many imperceptible to the human eye.

• A cruiser equipped with automated license plate readers (also known as ALPRs) may have just logged where you parked your car. A cell-site simulator may be capturing your cell-phone data incidentally while detectives track a suspect nearby. That speck in the sky may be a drone capturing video of your commute. Police might use face recognition technology to identify you in security camera footage.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Guantánamo military commissions, the scheme created by the government to try 9/11 and other detainees, have devolved into an unacceptable and alarming assault on defense lawyers attempting to provide fair representation to their clients.

• A new letter, drafted by the ACLU and joined by 150 death penalty lawyers and law professors, registers the capital defense community’s outrage over the legal breakdown, which clearly violates federal and international law.

• For years, the city of Sherwood, Arkansas, home to about 30,000 people, had a practice of jailing people who could not afford to pay court costs incurred from bounced checks. Thousands of Arkansans were locked up—sometimes after bouncing checks in small amounts—when they could not pay crushing fees, fines, and other costs that compounded their debt by as much as 10 times the original amount.

• One of the greatest and sweetest media critics ever, Edward S. Herman, has passed away. Ed was the main author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with Noam Chomsky—the 1980s masterwork that exposed how elite US media typically function as propaganda organs for US empire and militarism.

• In 1984, when I was part of a lawyers’ delegation monitoring an “election” in death squad-run El Salvador, I remember a gaggle of progressive attorneys at the Salvador Sheraton tussling with each other to get their hands on a shipment of hot-off-the-press copies of Demonstration Elections, Ed’s devastating book (with Frank Brodhead) on the US “staging” elections as PR shows to prop up repressive puppet regimes, from the Dominican Republic to Vietnam to Salvador.

• Fundación Karisma in cooperation with EFF has released its third-annual ¿Dónde Estan Mis Datos? report, the Colombian version of EFF’s Who Has Your Back. And this year’s report has some good news.

• According to the Colombian Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies, broadband Internet penetration in Colombia is well over 50% and growing fast. Like users around the world, Colombians put their most private data, including their online relationships, political, artistic and personal discussions, and even their minute-by-minute movements online. And all of that data necessarily has to go through one of a handful of ISPs. But without transparency from those ISPs, how can Colombians trust that their data is being treated with respect?

• EU nationals who become British citizens do not lose the right to bring a foreign-born spouse to the UK, the European Court of Justice has ruled.

• London’s High Court referred the case of an Algerian man, who lived in the UK with his wife, but who British authorities were trying to deport.

• His wife had dual Spanish and British nationality, which gave the man a “derived” residence right, judges said.

• Tesla’s factory in Fremont is a “hotbed for racist behavior,” according to a legal complaint filed in California’s Alameda County Superior Court on Monday and reported by Bloomberg.

• Marcus Vaughn is an African-American who worked on Tesla’s factory floor from April to October of this year. Vaughn charges that workers and managers on the factory floor routinely used the n-word within his earshot. When he complained to the human resources department, Vaughn says, he was fired for “not having a positive attitude.”

• According to Bloomberg, Vaughn is seeking to be the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of more than 100 black Tesla workers.

• The lawsuit was filed by Lawrence Organ, the same civil rights lawyer who sued on behalf of three other black Tesla workers for racial discrimination last month. Those men also said they routinely heard people on the factory floor using racial epithets. A third lawsuit, alleging similar facts, was filed in March.

• Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has taken a brief vacation from his “Responsible Encryption World Tour” to defend the merits of something equally questionable: civil asset forfeiture.

• [...]

• From there, Rosenstein says the expected stuff: civil asset forfeiture is just a way of crippling criminal enterprises, despite it being predicated on one-sided accusations about the allegedly illegitimate origin of seized property and tied to a judicial process that discourages citizens from attempting to reclaim their possessions.

• The opening paragraph also makes it appear as though civil asset forfeiture is often used to return unlawfully obtained assets to victims of crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. While this occasionally happens in criminal forfeiture cases, the lack of criminal charges in civil forfeiture cases makes it extremely unlikely there will be any “victims” to “return” seized assets to.

• North Carolina passed a law making it all but impossible for the state’s only farmworkers union to operate effectively.

• Dolores Huerta, the legendary civil rights icon and farmworker activist, had it right: “Organized labor is a necessary part of democracy.” Day in and day out, unions struggle to make sure that farmworkers have a voice in in their workplace and in their communities, but they face enormous obstacles.

• Farmworkers, most of whom are people of color and many of whom are in this country on temporary visas, have long been excluded from federal and state labor laws. That means they don’t enjoy many of the key protections under the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and numerous state minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and youth employment laws. As a result, they face high risks to their health and safety, substandard living conditions, and abuse and exploitation by their employers.

• Now North Carolina has mounted a direct assault on the state’s only farmworkers union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), which works tirelessly to protect those workers. A new state law, sponsored and supported by legislators who have a financial interest in suppressing farmworker organizing, would make it all but impossible for the union to operate effectively in the state. Together with a coalition of civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the North Carolina Justice Center, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the law violates farmworkers’ constitutional and civil rights. We have also asked the court for a preliminary injunction, which would suspend the law’s operation during the course of the litigation.

• It is with great sadness that we report the death of the brilliant and prolific Edward Herman…he was 92. He gave us a great chapter for our latest book, Censored 2018: Press Freedoms in a ‘Post-Truth’ World— “Still Manufacturing Consent: the Propaganda Model at Thirty.” He takes on critics of the Propaganda Model and argues how it continues to stand the test of time. Grateful that we got to work with him this past spring through late June during his writing of the chapter, which may be his last published work (done after his work on Fake News/Russia for Monthly Review).

• He was incredibly kind in our exchanges. When I reached out to him last spring to talk about the upcoming 30-year anniversary of his book with Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent), he was a bit reluctant as he had two other chapter-length projects in the hopper (yes, into his 90s), but said he really wanted to do the retrospective on the Propaganda Model for Project Censored. He eventually wrote back and said…”I’ll do it.” We were delighted that he agreed.

• Over the past 18 months, the New York Times has dedicated 21 columns and articles to the subject of conservatives’ free speech on campus, while only three covered the silencing of college liberals or leftists. A review of Times articles, columns, op-eds and reports shows a clear emphasis on documenting and condemning perceived suppression of conservative voices at American universities, while rarely mentioning harassment campaigns against leftist professors and/or the criminalization of leftist causes such as the pro-Palestinian BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement.

• Last month, I had two blog posts about a particularly insane lawsuit being pushed by the Justice Department against a computer security researcher, Justin Shafer. As we explained, the arrest and prosecution of Shafer appeared to be the result of a truly ridiculous vendetta against Shafer by the FBI because Shafer got angry over a previous (and totally misguided) decision to raid his home, after he properly disclosed security problems involving some dental practice software. It seems clear that Shafer never should have been arrested (and never should have had the FBI raid his house three times over just a few months). Of course, what first brought the case to my attention was an even more ridiculous part of the story, in which the DOJ had sent a subpoena to Twitter demanding basically all info on five Twitter users — even though two of them don’t hide their identity — because Shafer tweeted a smiley emoji at them.

• The Republican attorney general of Missouri has launched an investigation into Google’s business practices. Josh Hawley wants to know how Google handles user data. And he plans to look into whether Google is using its dominance in the search business to harm companies in other markets where Google competes.

• “There is strong reason to believe that Google has not been acting with the best interest of Missourians in mind,” Hawley said in a Monday statement.

• What do Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Devin Kelley the Texas church killer and a host of other killers have in common? They tortured animals and delighted in the pain they inflicted.

• Dahmer, who murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991 tortured frogs and cats and decapitated dogs. He mounted their heads on sticks including his own puppy. Mass murderer Ted Bundy watched as his father tortured animals and then did the same.

• “The “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo trapped dogs and cats in wooden crates and shot them with a bow and arrow, reports the New York Post. “John Wayne Gacy, who murdered 33 men and boys in his suburban Chicago home, tortured turkeys by throwing balloons filled with gasoline and then igniting the birds.”

• In Libya, human rights monitors who toured the country’s migrant detention camps say nearly 20,000 people are enduring “horrific conditions.” This is United Nations spokesperson Jeremy Laurence.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Federal Communications Commission will vote Thursday on a plan that, according to Chairman Ajit Pai, will strip away regulations that prevent telcos from upgrading their networks.

• But in doing so, the Republican-controlled FCC plans to eliminate a requirement that telcos provide Americans with service at least as good as the old copper networks that provide phone service and DSL Internet. The requirement relates to phone service but has an impact on broadband because the two services use the same networks.

• As carriers like AT&T and Verizon turn off copper networks throughout much of the country, many people fear that the networks won’t be replaced with fiber or something of similar quality. That’s why the FCC in 2014 created a “functional test” for carriers that seek permission to abandon copper networks. In short, carriers have to prove that the replacement service is just as good and provides the same capabilities as what’s being discontinued.

• One of the reasons for the U.S.’ pricey and mediocre broadband is our historical habit of throwing oodles of tax breaks and subsidies for fiber optic networks at giant ISPs, then letting them tap dance over and around those obligations when it comes time to deliver. Verizon, for example, has gobbled up millions in subsidies and tax breaks from cities and states up and down the Eastern seaboard for fiber optic networks it fails to fully deploy. Given the stranglehold large ISPs have on federal and state regulators and lawmakers, efforts to hold these companies accountable for any of this have been decidedly mixed.

• The broadband industry is stepping up its attack on states that dare to impose privacy or net neutrality rules on Internet service providers.

• Mobile industry lobby group CTIA urged the Federal Communications Commission to preempt state laws on privacy and net neutrality in a recent meeting and filing. Comcast and Verizon had already asked the FCC to preempt such laws; CTIA represents AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile USA, Sprint, and other mobile companies.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trade ministers negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) without the United States have dropped many problematic provisions related to intellectual property and health, Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) reported today. Also removed from the agreement appears to be the investor-state dispute settlement provisions, according to a source.

• “Ministers from the eleven countries assessing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal have suspended many of the damaging provisions that would have restricted access to medicines and vaccines, a victory for millions of people who rely on affordable medicines worldwide,” MSF said in a press release.

Trademarks

• The last time we checked in with the city of Portland, it was attempting to navigate some perilous waters regarding a trademark the city has on a famous city sign. Beer-maker Pabst, which I am to understand somehow won a blue ribbon a long time ago, built a logo for a concert series it wanted to promote in Portland that served as an homage to the famous sign, which includes an outline of the state and a stag leaping across the top of it. Because of this, the city saw fit to send a cease and desist notice to Pabst, despite beer not generally being a competitor for a city’s tourism business. When everyone pointed this out to the city, it decided to not pursue any legal action. But the city continued to threaten local businesses with its trademark, including Vintage Roadside, which sells a “Made In Portland” series of photos on Etsy, some of which included the famous sign. Vintage Roadside decided to sue the city to have the trademark declared invalid, prompting Portland officials to issue a covenant not to sue to avoid any ruling on the matter.

• You might have thought that this series of slapdowns would have deterred Portland officials from this bullying course of action, but you’d be wrong. Portland attempted to expand the trademark it has for the sign into the alcohol designation, thinking that it could license the image to beermakers and make some coin. Unfortunately for the city, a local brewery already has a trademark for the sign for the beer business.

Copyrights

• The dispute with ResearchGate is just the latest in a series of actions by academic publishers against websites and social networks that make copyrighted academic articles freely available to users. In 2013, Elsevier sent another paper-sharing site, Academia.edu, around 2,800 take-down notices in a single month. And earlier this week, a US judge issued an injunction that allows ACS to demand that Internet service providers block access to pirate site Sci-Hub, which hosts more than 60 million research articles.

• Trade ministers negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement have released the list of provisions they have suspended, including a range of articles related to intellectual property rights, such as patentable subject matter, test data protection, biologics, copyright terms of protection, and technological protection measures.

• Ministers from the 11 countries issued a statement and the list of suspended provisions, after concluding their latest negotiations in the margins of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings in Da Nang, Vietnam earlier this week.

• The ministerial statement and list of provisions are available here. The TPP is now named the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

• The United States Copyright Office has issued a reminder to all online service providers and agents that they must renew their registration with the office by end of year in order to claim liability limitations from copyright infringing content.

• Today, over seventy international copyright law experts called for NAFTA and other trade negotiators to support a set of balanced copyright principles. The experts urge trade negotiators to support policies like fair use, safe harbor provisions, and other exceptions and limitations that permit and encourage access to knowledge, flourishing creativity, and innovation. Signatories include preeminent intellectual property professors and experts from law schools, think tanks, and public interest organizations in the US, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Argentina, Australia, China, Ireland, and Switzerland.

• Nobody among members of the World Intellectual Property Organization disputes the importance of the public services provided by libraries and archives. However, positions are different when it comes to providing exceptions to copyright to those entities so they can continue to dispense their services, in particular in the digital age. An updated study presented today in a WIPO committee shows that most countries have exceptions relating to libraries, but termed in very different ways, and are hesitant on how to deal with digital technologies.

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