● 11.17.17

● Links 17/11/2017: KDE Applications 17.12, Akademy 2018 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The land of powerful PCs and workstations isn’t barren anymore when we talk about Linux-powered machines; even all of the world’s top 500 supercomputers now run Linux.

• Dell has joined hands with Canonical Inc. to give Linux-powered machines a push in the market. They have launched five new Canonical-certified workstations running Ubuntu Linux out-of-the-box as a part of the Dell Precision series. An advantage of buying these canonical-certified machines is that the users won’t have to worry about incompatibility with Linux.

• The beauty of Chrome OS is that most of the “state” of your system is in the cloud, attached to your Google Account, but if you have any local documents those will be gone. This is because Developer Mode basically destroys the physically secure design of Chrome OS. Now you’re in Linux land, and local security is your job, not Google’s.

• Every time you boot up now, you’ll have the option to press Space bar and wipe the system again and return to the safety of vanilla Chrome OS. Press Ctrl-D to continue into the unknown.

Kernel Space

• More ARM platform upstreaming has taken place for the Linux 4.15 kernel development cycle among other ARM hardware improvements.

• While Intel Coffee Lake hardware is shipping already, a few bits of tardy kernel code for these “8th Gen Core” CPUs is only hitting the Linux 4.15 kernel. The Intel DRM driver is most notably enabling Coffee Lake graphics by default in 4.15, but there’s also some thermal code now landing among other changes now happening.

• Zhang Rui sent in the thermal updates for Linux 4.15 on Thursday and they include late additions for Coffee Lake but at the same time the relevant additions for Cannonlake that will be shipping in 2018 as the next-gen Intel CPUs.

• One day after submitting the main DRM feature pull request for Linux 4.15, David Airlie of Red Hat has submitted the secondary pull request that would feature the long-awaited introduction of AMDGPU DC into the mainline kernel.

Linux Foundation

Graphics Stack

• As a follow-up to OpenGL 4.2 Support Could Soon Land For AMD Cayman GPUs On R600g, the patches have landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git! Plus other R600g patches are on the mailing list for review.

• These shader image support patches for R600g expose OpenGL’s ARB_shader_image_size and ARB_shader_image_load_store for Radeon HD 5000/6000 series. In the process, this ends up taking Radeon HD 6900 “Cayman” GPUs to having OpenGL 4.2 compliance from 4.1 with the shader image support having been the last blocker. Other GPUs on R600g remain at OpenGL 3.3 due to lacking FP64 support, as outlined more extensively in that previous article.

• Frequent Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver contributor Karol Herbst has posted his latest patch series in working towards GeForce GTX 900 “Maxwell 2″ graphics processor re-clocking.

• DCN in this context is for current the DCN 1.0 Raven Ridge family of display engines. The just-launched Vega+Zen APUs feature a new display engine and that’s what this DCN code is for, which is also under a separate Kconfig tunable from the rest of AMDGPU DC.

Benchmarks

• Earlier this week I presented out initial Linux benchmarks of the Intel Optane 900P SSD with this 3D XPoint memory U.2 solid-state drive delivering incredible performance figures. Those tests were done with EXT4 while in this article are more tests with other mainline Linux file-systems and also testing some of the different mount options.

• I’ve complained previously about disliking benchmarking. More generally, I’m not really a fan of performance analysis. I always feel like I get stuck at coming up with an approach to “it’s going slower, why” beyond the basics. I watched a video of Brendan Gregg’s talk from kernel recipes, and ended up going down the black hole1 of reading his well written blog. He does a fantastic job of explaining performance analysis concepts as well as the practical tools to do the analysis. He wrote a book several years ago and I happily ordered it. The book explains how to apply the USE method to performance problems across the system. This was helpful to me because it provides a way to generate a list of things to check and how to check them. It addresses the “stuck” feeling I get when dealing with performance problems. The book also provides a good high level overview of operating systems concepts. I’m always looking for references for people who are interested in kernels but don’t know where to start and I think this book could fill a certain niche. Even if this book has been out for several years now, I was very excited to discover it.

Applications

• The Google Container Tools team originally built container-diff, a new project to help uncover differences between container images, to aid our own development with containers. We think it can be useful for anyone building containerized software, so we’re excited to release it as open source to the development community.

Proprietary

• It’s not that there aren’t already a lot of time tracker apps but my conscience wouldn’t let me sleep if I didn’t tell you about NATTT. So grab your cup of whatever you’re probably drinking as we delve into this app a little.

• NATTT is an acronym for “Not Another Time Tracking Tool”; a free and multi-platform app with which you can keep track of your work and how much you have spent at it.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Battlevoid: Sector Siege [Steam] is a real-time strategy game about spaceships battling it out, it’s now out with Linux support.

• The comedy adventure game West of Loathing [Official Site] is now available DRM free on GOG and they have the Linux version too.

• In the release on November 9th, the developers updated the game with planet customization enabling you to further modify the experience. This includes planet size, night length, water level and so on. On top of that, they’ve improved how the survival mode works to be more reactive and more responsive. Seeing how you’re affected by various conditions, like poor weather will become a lot more apparent.

• In early October 2017, the inaugural Open Jam, a video game jam focused on open source game development, took place. Creators were given 72 hours to build a video game from scratch using the best of the open source world. It was a fantastic weekend, with 45 games created and entered into the jam, and three outstanding entries making it to the final competition. Read on for a review of the event, lots of pictures, and heaping praise for the creators!

• In Jump Gunners [Steam, Official Site], as the name might suggest, you use your gun to propel you around and it’s really damn amusing.

• Thanks to a user comment on one of our older articles, we’ve been informed that The Signal From Tölva [Official Site] is now on Linux on Steam. I’ve checked myself and it does download and launch. Going by SteamDB, it was added a day ago with no word from the developer.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This must be one of the worst Kubuntu releases I’ve tried in a long time. Part of the fault lies with the parent distro, and the heartless switch to Gnome, which just shows that the passion to making Ubuntu an important desktop player is gone. This is just inertia and apathy. Still, there’s so much wrong with Kubuntu on its own that I feel like a total fool for investing my time in this effort. And it also proves that there is only one good release for every three, showing that distro teams are overstretched roughly by 300%. The whole fast-release bullshit is just the modern-era agile-crap nonsense. It helps no one. Shitty products serve no purpose. Being fast for the sake of it is like running head first into an industrial blender to have your outstretched arms finely chopped by spinning blades.

• Kubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark makes me sad. Makes me angry. Zesty was one of the finest distros ever created. This is one of the worst. That makes no sense. How can it be? Where’s the modicum of care and diligence to ensure this kind of stuff does not happen? Application crashes, kernel crashes, media bugs, weird artifacts. Horrible.

• My suggestion is not to upgrade for now. And even then, the foundation of your sanity is shaken. Come the upgrade, you do not know what will happen. You’re hostage to arbitrary code decisions. There’s no peace and stability in the Linux desktop. You will always have to dread the update process, not knowing what will break next. That is the essence of amateurism. And I’m right there, advocating Plasma and Kubuntu like the biggest of fools in this universe. Anyway, for the sake of public sacrifice, I’ll also check 17.10 in-vivo upgrades on other machines, but my expectations are low. Aardvark gets 4/10. Don’t bother for now, give it six months for the bugs to be fixed before a new release erases the slate and the cycle of depression starts again.

• The beta of KDE Applications 17.12 is now available ahead of next month’s official debut for this quarterly update to the collection of official KDE programs.

• As previously covered, 17.12 is the point where only Qt5 / KDE Frameworks 5 apps will be included and any programs depending upon the older Qt4/KDE4 components will be dropped.

• Please join us in testing 17.12 pre-beta of KDE applications!

• Vienna Calling! This is not only a song by the famous austrian singer Falco, but could also the motto for next years Akademy.

• In 2018 Akademy will be held at the University of Technology (TU Wien) in Vienna, Austria, from Saturday 11th to Friday 17th August.

• The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE Community to discuss and plan the future of the Community and its technology. Many participants from the broad free and open source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend.

• Akademy 2018 is being organized together with Fachschaft Informatik (FSINF). Apart from representing and counseling computer science students, they engage in diverse political topics e.g. FOSS, Privacy and social justice.

• For some time now the KDE community has had a separate Continuous Integration system running which repeatedly generates Windows installers and macOS app bundles (DMG) for a specific subset of KDE projects.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Adding to the growing list of changes for GNOME 3.28 are improvements to the Calendar and To Do applications by Georges Stavracas.

• Stavracas has been reworking the month view of GNOME Calendar and it’s looking much better, some applications for Calendar via libdazzle, and more.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Matthias Eckermann (below, right), director of product management for SUSE Linux Enterprise at the the Nuremberg-based company, said in response to queries from iTWire that software-defined infrastructure would bring about a change in existing business processes, and allow new business processes to be implemented.

• But he said this did not necessarily mean that hardware businesses were staring down the barrel at extinction.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat released the latest iteration of its OpenShift Container Platform sporting tighter integration of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its own OpenShift Ansible Broker for provisioning and managing services.

• OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 users will now have direct access to a handful of AWS services. These services can be configured and deployed from within OpenShift.

• Cape Business News recently attended the Africom exhibition which took place at the CTICC from the 7th to the 9th of November. Africom is the continent’s largest telecoms‚ media and technology event.

• Apttus, the global leader in Quote-to-Cash and Contract Lifecycle Management solutions utilizing artificial intelligence, today announced that Red Hat has chosen to expand its end-to-end sales process with the Apttus CPQ and CLM solutions. Red Hat delivers an open source stack of trusted, high-performing technologies that are used by enterprises across industries. Selecting Apttus tools is part of Red Hat’s initiative to streamline and automate the Quote-to-Cash process.

Finance

Fedora

• Red Hat’s Hans de Goede is spearheading an effort to improve the Fedora battery life of laptops — and should conserve power too for desktops running Fedora Workstation — for the current Fedora 28 cycle.

• The Fedora 27 Atomic Host now supports multiple architectures! Along with the x86_64 architecture, Atomic Host is also available on 64-bit ARM (aarch64) and PowerPC Little Endian (ppc64le). Both aarch64 and ppc64le architectures receive Atomic OSTree updates in the same way x86_64 does.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Linux operating system has evolved from a niche audience to widespread popularity since its creation in the mid 1990s, and with good reason. Once upon a time, that installation process was a challenge, even for those who had plenty of experience with such tasks. The modern day Linux, however, has come a very long way. To that end, the installation of most Linux distributions is about as easy as installing an application. If you can install Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, you can install Linux.

• Here, we’ll walk you through the process of installing Ubuntu Linux 17.04, which is widely considered one of the most user-friendly distributions. (A distribution is a variation of Linux, and there are hundreds and hundreds to choose from.)

• A new Ubuntu flavor that uses the Unity 7 desktop by default is under discussion. The plans have already won backing from a former Unity developer.

• Earlier this week, Mozilla earned big praises in the tech world for launching its next-generation Firefox Quantum 57.0 web browser. The browser claims to be faster and better than market leader Google Chrome.

• Now, Firefox Quantum is available for all supported Ubuntu versions from the official repositories. The Firefox Quantum Update is also now available.

• ‘Suru’ is (apparently) going to be the default icon theme in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. That’s Suru, the rebooted community icon theme and not Suru, the Canonical-created icon theme that shipped on the Ubuntu Phone (and was created by Matthieu James, who recently left Canonical).

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Advantech’s Linux-ready “MIC-1810” and “MIC-1816” DAQ computers offer 12- and 16-bit analog I/O, respectively, plus 24x DIOs, Intel CPUs, and 4x USB ports.

• Advantech’s MIC-1810 and MIC-1816 are digital acquisition computers that run Linux or Windows 7/8/10 on Intel 3rd Gen “Ivy Bridge” processors. If the aging CPU is a turn-off, keep in mind that many DAQ applications don’t require that much processing power, and perhaps Advantech’s “entry-level” label for the systems extends to the price, as well. The 165 x 130 x 59mm, DIN-rail mountable systems should also prove useful for environments with limited space.

Tizen

Android

• Five months after it launched its OnePlus 5 flagship Android smartphone, OnePlus unveiled today its successor, the OnePlus 5T, running the latest Android 8.0 (Oreo) mobile OS.

• OnePlus held a live event today in New York City to tell us all about the new features it implemented in the OnePlus 5T, and they don’t disappoint as the smartphone features a gorgeous and bright 6.0-inches Optic AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with multitouch, a 1080×2160 pixels resolution, 18:9 ratio, and approximately 402 PPI density. The design has been changed a bit as well for OnePlus 5T, which is made of anodized aluminum.

• Whenever costly phones like iPhone X or Google Pixel 2 are bashed (here and here) and their alternatives are discussed, OnePlus is always mentioned. In the past few years, the company has amassed a fan base that has found the concept of “Never Settle” impressive.

• Android One has arrived in Europe, and HTC is one of the first manufacturers to ship an affordable, Google-branded phone. The Android One badge made its debut in India and parts of Asia, as Google emphasized quality software on super-cheap hardware. But with its latest round of “One” handsets, the prices are higher, the products more premium, and the hand on the software rudder a little firmer.

• The Android One U11 Life — unlike the T-Mobile U.S. version we reviewed separately, running HTC Sense — runs Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box, and comes with the promise of timely updates to future versions. It takes the fundamentals of HTC’s flagship phone and downscales it into a smaller size, while trimming the specs back to the essentials.

• There’s a Snapdragon 630 processor — Qualcomm’s latest mid-ranger, and the successor to the very capable 625/626 — along with 3GB or 4GB of RAM, and 32 or 64GB of storage, plus microSD. I’ve been using the 3/32GB model for the past couple of weeks, however the UK will be getting the more capacious 4/64GB model when it goes on sale.

Free Software/Open Source

• Something that we’ve learned at The Linux Foundation over the years is that there is just no substitute for periodic, in-person, face-to-face collaboration around the open source technologies that are rapidly changing our world. It’s no different for the open networking projects I work with as end users and their ecosystem partners grapple with the challenges and opportunities of unifying various open source components and finding solutions to accelerate network transformation. This fall, we decided to take The Linux Foundation networking projects (OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, and others) on the road to Europe and Japan by working with local site hosts and network operators to host Open Source Networking Days in Paris, Milan, Stockholm, London, Tel Aviv, and Yokohama.

• Self-driving cars are set to revolutionize transport systems the world over. If the hype is to be believed, entirely autonomous vehicles are about to hit the open road.

• The truth is more complex. The most advanced self-driving technologies work only in an extremely limited set of environments and weather conditions. And while most new cars will have some form of driver assistance in the coming years, autonomous cars that drive in all conditions without human oversight are still many years away.

• One of the main problems is that it is hard to train vehicles to cope in all situations. And the most challenging situations are often the rarest. There is a huge variety of tricky circumstances that drivers rarely come across: a child running into the road, a vehicle driving on the wrong side of the street, an accident immediately ahead, and so on.

Events

• At Linux Plumbers, I ended up with a Le Potato SBC. I hadn’t really had time to actually boot it up until now. They support a couple of distributions which seem to work fine if you flash them on. I mostly like SBCs for having actual hardware to test on so my interest tends to be how easily can I get my own kernel running.

• Most of the support is not upstream right now but it’s headed there. The good folks at BayLibre have been working on getting the kernel support upstream and have a tree available for use until then.

• In the beginning of October, I attended a new PyCon in India, PyConf Hyderabad (no worries, they are working on the name for the next year). I was super excited about this conference, the main reason is being able to meet more Python developers from India. We are a large country, and we certainly need more local conferences

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• It didn’t take long, and just two days after its official launch, the Mozilla Firefox Quantum web browser (version 57.0) landed today in the stable software repositories of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).

• Firefox 57.0 a.k.a. Firefox Quantum is Mozilla’s latest and greatest web browser, offering speeds twice as fast as of previous releases, thanks to the implementation of an all-new Photon browsing engine that’s capable of leveraging the full potential of your personal computer, as well as a brand-new interface.

• This is the first public version of the Basilisk web browser, building on the new platform in development: UXP (code-named Möbius).

• The developers behind the Pale Moon web-browser that’s been a long standing fork of Firefox have rolled out their first public beta release of their new “Basilisk” browser technology.

• Basilisk is their new development platform based on their (Gecko-forked) Goanna layout engine and the Unified UXL Platform (UXP) that is a fork of the Mozilla code-base pre-Servo/Rust… Basically for those not liking the direction of Firefox with v57 rolling out the Quantum changes, etc.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

CMS

• WordPress 4.9 has debuted, and this time the world’s most popular content management system has given developers plenty to like.

• Some of the changes are arguably overdue: syntax highlighting and error checking for CSS editing and cutting custom HTML are neither scarce nor innovative. They’ll be welcomed arrival will likely be welcomed anyway, as will newly-granular roles and permissions for developers. The new release has also added version 4.2.6 of MediaElement.js, an upgrade that WordPress.org’s release notes stated has removed dependency on jQuery, improves accessibility, modernizes the UI, and fixes many bugs.”

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Intel deprecated Cilk Plus multi-threading support with GCC 7 and now for GCC 8 they are looking to abandon this support entirely.

• Cilk Plus only had full support introduced in GCC 5 while now for the GCC 8 release early next year it’s looking like it will be dropped entirely.

Licensing/Legal

• On November 3rd, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) wrote a blog post to let people know that the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) had begun legal action against them (the SFC) over the trademark for their name.

Programming/Development

• What is the best programming font? First, you need to consider that not all fonts are created equally. When choosing a font for casual reading, the reader expects the letters to smoothly flow into one another, giving an easy and enjoyable experience. A single character for a standard font is akin to puzzle piece designed to carefully mesh with every other part of the overall typeface.

• When writing code, however, your font requirements are typically more functional in nature. This is why most programmers prefer to use monospaced fonts with fixed-width letters, when given the option. Selecting a font that has distinguishable numbers and punctuation, is aesthetically pleasing, and has a copyright license that meets your needs is also important.

• Over the past few years, open source software has transformed the way enterprises operate and ship code. In an era where companies are striving to deliver the next best application, enterprises are turning to the sea of open source contributors to create projects faster and more effectively than ever before. For instance, 65 percent of companies surveyed in The Black Duck Future of Open Source Survey reveal they are contributing to open source projects – with 59 percent doing so to gain a competitive edge. As open source continues to have a positive influence on software development, it’s important for developers to continue to participate in and contribute to open source projects.

• In a short period of three years, GitHub’s open source code editor has become one of the most popular options around. In our list of top text editors for Linux, Atom was featured at #2. From time to time, GitHub keeps adding new features to this tool to make it even better. Just recently, with the help of Facebook, GitHub turned Atom into a full-fledged IDE.

• As GitHub is known to host some of the world’s biggest open source collaborative projects, it makes perfect sense to add the collaborative coding ability to Atom. To make this possible, “Teletype for Atom” has just been announced.

Leftovers

• A Twitter rules update rolled out on Wednesday to address the site’s “verification” system, and it attached a new set of standards to any user whose account receives a “blue check mark.”

• Twitter’s “verification” system is used to confirm accounts of celebrities and other accounts of “public interest.” However, the feature has long straddled a blurry line between identity confirmation and “elite” user status, especially since verified accounts receive heightened visibility and perks such as content filters. That issue returned to the headlines last week when Twitter gave a blue check mark to white nationalist Jason Kessler. Kessler is best known as an organizer of the Unite The Right white-supremacist rally, but before then, he had racked up a significant record of online hate propagation, particularly with anti-Semitic rhetoric about “cultural Marxism.”

Science

• This research provides important empirical support for nature involvement as an effective positive psychology intervention.

Health/Nutrition

• The state asked a judge on Friday to allow Mayor Karen Weaver to bypass the council no later than Tuesday, the same day she faces a recall election. But in response, Judge David Lawson says he’ll hold a hearing on Nov. 13.

• A Detroit federal judge is rejecting a four-day deadline the state Department of Environmental Quality requested in a Friday emergency motion, deciding instead to rule by mid-November whether to give Flint’s mayor the power to approve a new 30-year water lease with the Detroit area system.

• Hollins testified that he told Snyder in July 2015 and August 2015 that there were concerns about increased lead levels in Flint’s water.

• During congressional testimony in March 2016, Snyder testified that he didn’t even learn about the dangerous levels of lead in Flint’s water system until October 2015.

• Restoring oil-based power generation, Pakistan has sought Chinese technical help to fight repeated tripping triggered by smog in the transmission and distribution network.

• Delhi-NCR is in the midst of a health emergency. With air quality in areas breaching levels that are beyond hazardous, it’s time to be aware, to know what you are breathing and how your lungs are getting clogged.

• It would be a funnier story if it hadn’t been so closely replicated in Oviedo, a Florida city northeast of Orlando.

Security

• Hackers are constantly trying to break into Google accounts, so Google researchers spent a year tracing how hackers steal passwords and expose them on the internet’s black market.

• To gather hard evidence about the tools hackers use to swipe passwords, Google collaborated with University of California Berkeley cybersecurity experts to track activity on some of these markets. On Thursday, they published their results.

• The White House has released a new and apparently improved Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP), showing signs that there will be more transparency into the government’s knowledge and use of zero day vulnerabilities. In recent years, the U.S. intelligence community has faced questions about whether it “stockpiles” vulnerabilities rather than disclosing them to affected companies or organizations, and this scrutiny has only ramped up after groups like the Shadow Brokers have leaked powerful government exploits. According to White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Rob Joyce, the form of yesterday’s release and the revised policy itself are intended to highlight the government’s commitment to transparency because it’s “the right thing to do.”

• The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA)—an organization founded by law enforcement and research organizations to help reduce cyber-crime—has partnered with IBM and Packet Clearing House to launch a free public Domain Name Service system. That system is intended to block domains associated with botnets, phishing attacks, and other malicious Internet hosts—primarily targeted at organizations that don’t run their own DNS blacklisting and whitelisting services. Called Quad9 (after the 9.9.9.9 Internet Protocol address the service has obtained), the service works like any other public DNS server (such as Google’s), except that it won’t return name resolutions for sites that are identified via threat feeds the service aggregates daily.

• Blockchain has been hailed by some in the technology industry as a potential method to help improve cyber security. However, security researcher Majid Malaika warns that Blockchain can potentially be abused to enable a new form of botnet that would be very difficult to take down.

• Malaika detailed his Blockchain-powered botnet in a session at the SecTor security conference on Nov. 15. The overall attack method has been dubbed “Botract” by Malaika, as it abuses inherent functionality in the smart contracts that help to enable Blockchain.

• Embattled computer security firm Kaspersky Lab said Thursday that malware-infected Microsoft Office software and not its own was to blame for the hacking theft of top-secret US intelligence materials.

• Adding tantalizing new details to the cyber-espionage mystery that has rocked the US intelligence community, Kaspersky also said there was a China link to the hack.

• In early October, a story was published by the Wall Street Journal alleging Kaspersky Lab software was used to siphon classified data from an NSA employee’s home computer system. Given that Kaspersky Lab has been at the forefront of fighting cyberespionage and cybercriminal activities on the Internet for over 20 years now, these allegations were treated very seriously. To assist any independent investigators and all the people who have been asking us questions whether those allegations were true, we decided to conduct an internal investigation to attempt to answer a few questions we had related to the article and some others that followed it:

• Kaspersky Lab, the US government’s least favorite computer security outfit, has published its full technical report into claims Russian intelligence used its antivirus tools to steal NSA secrets.

• Last month, anonymous sources alleged that in 2015, an NSA engineer took home a big bunch of the agency’s cyber-weapons to work on them on his home Windows PC, which was running the Russian biz’s antimalware software – kind of a compliment when you think about it. The classified exploit code and associated documents on the personal system were then slurped by Kremlin spies via his copy of Kaspersky antivirus, it was claimed.

Defence/Aggression

• In Zimbabwe, longtime leader Robert Mugabe remains under house arrest and is reportedly refusing to resign as president after the country’s military seized Parliament, courts, government offices and the main airport in the capital, Harare. Mugabe has held power since Zimbabwe declared independence from the United Kingdom 37 years ago. We go to Johannesburg, South Africa, to speak with Knox Chitiyo of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, who just returned from neighboring Zimbabwe. We are also joined by Nigerian environmental activist Nnimmo Bassey, director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, and Jocelyn Alexander, professor at Oxford University and author of “The Unsettled Land: State-making & the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe, 1893-2003.”

• Between January and September 2017, Sweden experienced 6000 car-burnings. That equals roughly 22 car fires per day. Schools and other buildings are sometimes targeted by arsonists as well.

• Bibi, who is charged with murder, appeared in court Tuesday in the northeastern city of Muzaffargarh, where she told reporters that her parents had forced her in September to marry a relative, the Associated Press and ITV reported. Her family lives in nearby Ali Pur, a small village.

• The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let hundreds of IS fighters and their families escape from Raqqa, under the gaze of the US and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city.

• Claiming the right to launch preemptive wars and fighting an ill-defined “global war on terror,” the U.S. government has slaughtered vast numbers of civilians in defiance of international law, says Nicolas J S Davies.

• As the U.S. and its Western allies lurch into a new and dangerous confrontation with Russia, the different sides don’t even have a thorough understanding of the history behind the tensions, warns Alice Slater.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• By far the best thing about the WikiLeaks-Don Jr. controversy has been watching the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC who spent a year and a half priming everyone for President Hillary now saying, “Ha! WikiLeaks claims they’re a legitimate news organization, and yet here they are, advancing an agenda!” WikiLeaks has an agenda. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t exist. I have an agenda, too. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t write. And I’ll tell you right now that if I had the ear of the US president’s son, I would most certainly use it to advance my agenda.

• In the heat of the presidential election campaign last year, Xeni Jardin, a journalist and free speech advocate, developed a sickening feeling about WikiLeaks.

• Jardin had been a supporter of the radical transparency group since at least 2010, when it published hundreds of thousands of U.S. military and State Department documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. In 2012, Jardin was a founding member of the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit established as a censorship-proof conduit for donations to WikiLeaks after PayPal and U.S. credit card companies imposed a financial blockade on the site.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The final probe in the series, the unlaunched F-20, was dismantled last year after Congress stopped funding the programme.

• “As if it wasn’t already crystal clear, every single other country in the world is moving forward together to tackle the climate crisis, while Donald Trump has isolated the United States on the world stage in an embarrassing and dangerous position,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune told EcoWatch, in response to Syria’s move.

• “We need to acknowledge that we are, unless we make dramatic changes, at the front of seeing refugees as a result of climate change,” Arden told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview, her first since taking office last Thursday.

• The Keystone oil pipeline spilled more than 5,000 barrels of oil on Thursday before workers took it offline, a large spill that comes days before operators hope to secure a key permit for a sister project.

• A TransCanada crew shut down the Keystone pipeline at 6 a.m. Thursday morning after detecting an oil leak along the line, the company said in a statement. The leak was detected along a stretch of pipeline about 35 miles south of a pumping station in Marshall County, South Dakota.

• TransCanada estimates the pipeline leaked 5,000 barrels of oil, or about 210,000 gallons, before going offline. The company said it shut off the pipeline within 15 minutes of discovering the leak, and it’s working with state regulators and the Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to assess the situation.

• A US Climate Action Center has been set up for delegates in Bonn, representing the climate change priorities of several thousand US cities, states, tribes and businesses. Corporate giants Mars, Walmart and Citi are expected to push for action on climate change. The center is in lieu of an official US presence—for the first time, the US government won’t have a pavilion at the annual UN climate summit.

• Top ten most polluted lakes

• Yangtze River, Yellow Sea, Asia Indus River, Arabian Sea, Asia Yellow River (Huang He), Yellow Sea, Asia Hai River, Yellow Sea, Asia Nile, Mediterranean Sea, Africa Meghna/Bramaputra/Ganges, Bay of Bengal, Asia Pearl River (Zhujiang), South China Sea, Asia Amur River (Heilong Jiang), Sea of Okhotsk, Asia Niger River, Gulf of Guinea, Africa Mekong River, South China Sea, Asia Plastic is an integral component of modern society, but this “miracle material” has a downside.

• A trophy hunter poses with pride beside the young elephant he has just killed. Philip Glass shows no remorse and even boasts: “God says we have dominion over the animals . That means we can do what we choose with them.”

• He is so convinced of his divine right to shoot big game, he also agreed to be filmed hunting a lion and hippo in South Africa for shocking new film Trophy.

• The UK and Canada have launched a global alliance of 20 countries committed to phasing out coal for energy production.

• Members including France, Finland and Mexico, say they will end the use of coal before 2030.

• Ministers hope to have 50 countries signed up by the time of the next major UN conference in Poland next year.

• However some important coal consuming nations, including China, the US and Germany have not joined the group.

• Reducing global coal use is a formidable challenge, as the fuel produces around 40% of the world’s electricity at present.

Finance

• Times are tough in Middle America, but the New York Times (10/22/17) says there’s hope on the horizon—conveniently packaged in the economic boom of e-commerce. The paper’s reporting, unfortunately, avoids confronting the insecurity inherent in relying on retail conglomerates for long-term work.

• Establishment media cover poverty sometimes, sometimes in a compassionate and compelling way. And they cover wealth and the rich, sometimes, sometimes in a thoughtful and critical way. When the discussion called for is about the relationship between the two, the limits of media’s spotlight approach are salient. Such a case may be presented by the Paradise Papers, a trove of some 13 million documents leaked to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, that describes various tax-hiding and avoidance schemes used by politicians and celebrities, along with corporations.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Owned in part by the influential Mercer family, U.S.-based billionaires and political donors, Cambridge Analytica compiles demographic information to build vast databases of voter profiles. It then delivers personalized advertisements to key voters in an attempt to sway them.

• Vitaly Bespalov, 26, told NBC News that the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, Russia, employed hundreds of workers around the clock to produce inflammatory political propaganda during the time of the election.

• Page’s testimony, all 200-plus pages of it, is popcorn-worthy entertainment, with him denying, obfuscating, and prevaricating under intense questioning from both Republicans and Democrats on the HPSCI.

• But George Papadopoulos’s guilty plea indicates that there were attempts in the Trump campaign to arrange a meeting with Putin, and that Sessions was aware of them. As CNN reports this morning, “The chairman of Trump’s national security team, then Alabama Senator and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, shut down the idea of a Putin meeting at the March 31, 2016, gathering, according to the source. His reaction was confirmed with another source who had discussed Sessions’s role.”

• Ginger Jentzen, an anti-establishment candidate for City Council, makes a critique of local media part of her campaign.

• Brazile first made headlines on Thursday after she published an op-ed in which she said Clinton’s campaign had exerted total control over the DNC since as early as August 2015, and that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was hardly treated fairly.

• On one side, Native American groups and environmentalists expressed anger and are ready to sue the U.S. government. On the other, conservative-leaning residents welcomed the decision, seeing it as a reversal of government overreach and a boost for traditional [sic] industries like drilling, mining and grazing.

• Brett J. Talley, President Trump’s nominee to be a federal judge in Alabama, has never tried a case, was unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Assn.’s judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee, denouncing “Hillary Rotten Clinton” and pledging support for the National Rifle Assn.

• On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, approved him for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

• To understand their importance it is necessary to go the recent article by Joe Lauria – in my opinion the single most important article anyone has written about Russiagate, and one which the Huffington Post disgracefully has sought to suppress – and a further article by Mike Whitney, which goes over the same ground though in rather more detail, and which is based on (as it admits) on Joe Lauria’s article.

• Many things that are actually said about investigations are simply not true. By way of example, it is very rare for motive to be a good or reliable guide to establishing the perpetrator of a crime.

• However “follow the money” is one of those things which is commonly said about investigations which in the great majority of cases is actually true. In this case the money does not point either to Moscow or to Donald Trump; it points to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

• “Given the magnitude of this constitutional crisis, there’s no reason to delay,” Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen said this week, as he and a group of colleagues announced five articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.

• The Tennessee Democrat, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee as the ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, explained: “There are already sufficient facts in the public record that warrant the start of impeachment proceedings in Congress.”

• Cohen is correct in this assessment. And he is correct when he says, “The train of injuries to our Constitution must be brought to an end.”

• Democrat Doug Jones has opened up an eight-point lead in the US Senate race in Alabama amid multiple sexual abuse allegations against Republican Roy Moore, according to a new Fox News poll released Thursday. Jones leads Moore by 50 to 42% among likely voters in the special election to fill the seat left vacant by Jeff Sessions when he became US attorney general, now less than a month away.

• It is a truism to say that everyone lies to someone. Since public officials entrusted with power in our democracy are no exception to this human trait—as historical research documents—it should be exceedingly acceptable to point out that all politicians, from your local city council right up to the White House, lie as well. The Framers afforded the press special constitutional protection in large part to ensure that such lies would not reach the public unchallenged.

• Tragically, one of the most honest rhetorical tools that journalists have in the fight for truth has been struck from the lingua franca of US journalists. Within the stilted framework of mainstream news “objectivity,” the simple act of calling out “lies” or “lying” by a politician—especially a president—is now taboo. It imputes impossible-to-determine motives to those accused, the thinking goes, so the use of these words to identify a documented falsehood is now considered controversial, partisan, inflammatory, unfair.

• Last fall, NPR editorial director Michael Oreskes constructed his own Orwellian logic to defend his news organization’s refusal to use “liar,” asserting that the word constitutes “an angry tone” of “editorializing” that “confirms opinions” (FAIR.org, 3/1/17). In January, Maggie Haberman, one of the New York Times’ preeminent political reporters, said much the same, claiming that her job was “showing when something untrue is said. Our job is not to say ‘lied.’”

• I suppose because too many of my fellow citizens in America have devolved into hyper-partisan rage-beacons, I have to issue the following stupid caveat that I shouldn’t have to issue at all: this post is not a commentary on Trump’s border wall policy. Great. I’m sure that will keep our comments free and clear of anyone insisting otherwise. With that being said, a common topic we discuss here is how one of the chief benefits of the internet is how it has removed gatekeepers that have long stood in the way of new businesses, or have governed how established businesses do their business. Typically, we have focused on the former, detailing how the internet has allowed for new players in everything from the entertainment industry to products that would have previously existed solely at the pleasure of brick and mortar retail stores.

• President Trump and his son-in-law bet that the young Saudi crown prince could execute a plan to reshape the Mideast, but the scheme quickly unraveled revealing a dangerous amateur hour, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

• The opinion column in Scientific American headlined “The Caveman and the Bomb” conveys, just a little more colorfully, the sense one got from the Senate hearing on the process involved in the use of a nuclear weapon. Put simply, folks are scared that Donald Trump may not understand the difference between threats to “rain fire and fury” on the people of North Korea and the devastating reality of nuclear war. But while we’re talking about the dangers of Trump having his hand on the figurative button, we should also be asking why we maintain a world-ending arsenal at all. We’ll hear from William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, about what drives nuclear-weapons production.

• Two weeks ago, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman carried out a brutal crackdown on his political opponents, arresting dozens of high-ranking relatives, kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon, and seeing eight of his political rivals die in a convenient helicopter crash. The “consolidation of power” by the de facto Saudi ruler comes as his government ramps up its siege of Yemen and gets even closer to its US sponsor, thanks to a Trump’s dopey love affair with—and direct assistance of—the regime.

• The cynical plan has been met, in some media quarters, with condemnation, but for many in the Western press, Mohammed’s self-serving power grab is the action of a bold “reformer,” a roguish bad boy doing the messy but essential work of “reforming” the kingdom—the “anti-corruption” pretext of the purge largely repeated without qualification.

• [...]

• The article painted the “consolidation of power” by Mohammed as an inevitability with broad support—using the dubious “reform” narrative without irony. With Guardian editors again painting Mohammed as a populist hero by insisting he “upended” “previously untouchable ultra-elite,” one is left to wonder why they don’t consider the absolute-monarch-in-waiting—who just bought a $590 million yacht—part of the “ultra elite.” It’s a curious framing that reeks more of PR than journalism.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Twitter Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and a host of companies have been put on notice by Indonesian Communications Minister Rudiantara, who warned that “all platforms” now face serious consequences if they don’t adhere to government requests to block content.

• By now it’s become something of a pattern over the past few months, after many of the recent accusations come out about sexual harassment, abuse (or worse), lawyers representing the powerful men accused of such horrible acts threaten or promise to sue, often on incredibly flimsy reasons. In most cases, no such lawsuits will ever be filed. This is, in part, because the accusers know they have no case and in part because they know that if the case gets that far, going through discovery is likely to backfire big time. But, of course, for decades people have (often falsely) believed that in place of a real basis for making a legal threat, pure bluster will suffice.

• The bluster in these letters is often impressive, but we have a new entrant that I think may quickly shoot to the top of the list. Roy Moore, of course, was the former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, which would lead you to believe he knows a lot of good lawyers. And, yet, somehow, he ended up with Trenton Garmon. Garmon made some news earlier this week when he went on CNN with Don Lemon and called him “Don Lemon Squeezy Keep It Easy” But then he followed it up by sending one of the most profoundly ridiculous threat letters we’ve ever seen to the Alabama Media Group, the publisher of al.com, which has been reporting on Moore. You can click the link, or see it embedded below. It’s fairly astounding. Beyond the poor grammar and the typos, it makes no sense.

• While the particular reasons for banning a musical show in Belarus change from event to event, the possibility of concerts taking place unchangeably depends on the authorities.

• The official motivation of concerts’ cancellation often refers to extremism, the “low quality of lyrics,” or logistical obstacles such as overlaps with other events. Although excuses vary, there exists a clear pattern: Belarusian authorities attempt to restrain musicians for social and political reasons.

• In other media news, the lower chamber of Russia’s parliament has approved legislation to require foreign journalists to register as foreign agents and declare details about their funding and finances. Amnesty International described the vote as a serious blow to press freedom in Russia. The vote comes shortly after the United States forced the international Russian broadcaster RT to register as foreign agents.

• MacDonald, who has since transferred out of UT San Antonio to study at another college, said the affair is indicative of a larger problem.

• “I have received numerous calls regarding the offensive display on this truck as it is often seen along FM 359,” he wrote on Facebook. “If you know who owns this truck or it is yours, I would like to discuss it with you. Our Prosecutor has informed us she would accept Disorderly Conduct charges regarding it, but I feel we could come to an agreement regarding a modification to it.”

• The easily-offended Nehls, himself reportedly considering a run for political office, has a problem: the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to upset the delicate feelings of public officials like him and president Trump — even if the words are naughty.

• The key point: Chinese officials, some of who have warned for years of “hostile foreign forces” using the internet to subvert China, believe they have found the solution to managing the political risks from the internet while harnessing its economic and technological power. The interference in the U.S. presidential election process by Russia, a “hostile foreign force” to America, only strengthens their resolve.

• A decision by a California appeals court on Monday recognized that online platforms can fight for their users’ First Amendment rights, though the decision also potentially makes it easier to unmask anonymous online speakers.

• Yelp v. Superior Court grew out of a defamation case brought in 2016 by an accountant who claims that an anonymous Yelp reviewer defamed him and his business. When the accountant subpoenaed Yelp for the identity of the reviewer, Yelp refused and asked the trial court to toss the subpoena on grounds that the First Amendment protected the reviewer’s anonymity.

• Kim recently told delegates in Germany about his work, speaking at a site intricately linked with the history of political persecution: Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen Memorial, a former Soviet secret police prison and later remand center for the East German secret police, the Stasi.

• A site “with walls and fences,” just like his native North Korea, 56-year-old Kim told the audience.

• Two reports unhappily complement each other. In “Anti-coup elements in the crosshairs”, Thai authorities boast “that many [with dissenting opinions] have already been detained”, solidly confirming the Freedom House report that Thailand’s internet freedom of speech has been downgraded to “not free”.

• The ruling politicians making up a rule of law to force their agenda on the nation plainly do not want and are not willing to allow Thai citizens to understand or even be aware of matters of great importance to the Thai nation, the sole reason for such censorship against free speech being to enforce ignorance on the censored topics so that lawful opinion is untested, unchecked, unsubstantiated, and hence worthless.

• 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.

• It’s a little hard to see how an entire nation might sue successfully for defamation, but that’s not the point. Once again, the mere threat of litigation was enough to cause someone — in this case a publisher — to self-censor. Interestingly, the ABC News article notes that the Australian government is expected to unveil soon new legislation to counter foreign interference in the country, which suggests that it is becoming a serious problem. We can expect more such attempts to censor overseas sources of information it doesn’t like from the increasingly self-confident and intransigent China.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On Nov. 29, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in an important case called Carpenter v. United States. Although the question in the case may feel very modern — whether government agents can obtain the location data generated by cellphones without a warrant — history can tell us a lot about how the court should answer that question.

• The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” The amendment arose from the Founders’ concern that the newly constituted federal government would try to expand its powers and undermine rights that were guaranteed to Americans by the common law and their state constitutions. Based on experience, they knew that equipping government officers with unfettered discretion to search and seize would be a formidable means of oppressing “the people.”

• Prior to the American Revolution, British subjects in the colonies and in England had lived with threats posed by “general warrants.” Unlike contemporary search warrants — which require probable cause, judicial approval, and limits on the place to be searched and the things to be seized — general warrants gave government agents license to search wherever they pleased, no matter their reasons, with impunity. And because the king’s ministers could issue general warrants on their own authority, these devices also opened the door to unchecked executive power.

• This, of course, was a recipe for abuse.

• We already knew Jeff Sessions was a throwback. The new head of the DOJ rolled back civil rights investigations by the agency while calling for harsher penalties and longer jail terms for drug-related crimes, while re-opening the door for asset forfeiture abuse with his rollback of Obama-era policy changes.

• But it’s more than just the new old-school DOJ. The FBI is just as regressive. Under its new DOJ leadership, the FBI (inadvertently) published some speculative Blue Lives Matter fanfic [PDF] — an “Intelligence Assessment” entitled “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Police Officers.”

• There’s no hedging in the title, despite what the word “likely” usually insinuates. According to the FBI, this means there’s an 80-95% chance it believes its own spin.

• The European Court of Human Rights last week held a hearing in a challenge to the United Kingdom’s mass surveillance practices, brought by the ACLU, Privacy International, Liberty, and seven other human rights organizations from around the world.

• The case challenges practices, revealed by Edward Snowden, that breach the rights to privacy and freedom of expression, which are guaranteed not only under U.S. domestic law, but also under international human rights law.

• EFF is urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to end its programs of social media surveillance and automated “extreme vetting” of immigrants. Together, these programs have created a privacy-invading integrated system to harvest, preserve, and data-mine immigrants’ social media information, including use of algorithms that sift through posts using vague criteria to help determine who to admit or deport.

• EFF today joined a letter from the Brennan Center for Justice, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, and more than 50 other groups urging DHS to immediately abandon its self-described “Extreme Vetting Initiative.”Also, EFF’s Peter Eckersley joined a letter from more than 50 technology experts opposing this program. This follows EFF’s participation last month in comments from the Center for Democracy & Technology and dozens of other advocacy groups urging DHS to stop retaining immigrants’ social media information in a government record-keeping system called “Alien Files” (A-files).

• You may know that most websites have third-party analytics scripts that record which pages you visit and the searches you make. But lately, more and more sites use “session replay” scripts. These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers. Unlike typical analytics services that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for the recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Yes, they took the family home. The police did apparently fine some cocaine and about $18,000 in cash in the house. But they never proved the family had anything to do with the drugs, or that the home was bought with drugs. They didn’t need to. They needed only to allege the most spurious of connections, and finding the drugs and the house was more than enough. The family hired an attorney with their life insurance money to try to keep the house. They lost. Then this happened:

• However, until we are honest about Islam — until we stop pretending it is “a religion of peace,” which is it the antithesis of — we will not be able to do anything about it.

• Of 8,136 given shelter in the UK in 2015 and 2016, only 70 were Christians. A mere 22 were Yazadis, a religious group that combines Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

• She also wrote she was taking legal action against Uber after a driver reportedly named Mohammed allegedly wouldn’t take her to her hotel after he overheard her talking about the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah.

• Having to denounce an act committed in the name of their faith is a double standard, say Muslim leaders, who reluctantly step into that role even as other groups aren’t asked to do the same.

• Simply put: I am for defending the rights of all people who have them violated. Whether they are male or female is immaterial. If you’re human and your rights are violated, you’re of concern to me.

• More recently, Freeport, the world’s largest publicly listed copper producer, has been grappling with labour problems at Grasberg and a mine rights dispute with Indonesia.

• All Indonesians must obtain a national ID card at age 17 and are required to apply for official documents including birth, marriage, and death certificates. For decades, the religious identity category of national ID cards and their implicit blasphemy prosecution threat for officially unrecognized religions have led some members of those communities to avoid applying for ID cards, depriving themselves of essential state services. Some local governments have imposed even more onerous discriminatory rules restricting religious minorities’ access to ID cards. In June, representatives of the Ahmadiyah community in Manislor district in West Java’s Kuningan regency filed a formal complaint against a local government requirement that they renounce their faith to obtain a national ID card.

• He said, people should not be fooled by politicians who say Muslims can only vote for Muslim candidates. Hard-line Muslim groups accused Ahok of blasphemy, of insulting Islam. And he was put on trial during the campaign.

• Nearly 20 percent of high school and university students in Indonesia support the establishment of a caliphate in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country over the current secular government, a new survey showed this week.

• Family members told the Sun that Miss Plummer, 33, signed a 38-page statement in Arabic thinking it would lead to her release, but instead she has been kept in a cell with 25 other women for nearly a month.

• They also say they have been told she could face up to 25 years in prison, or even the death penalty.

• The comments come after the Egyptian capital of Cairo was last month branded the “most dangerous” megacity for women in the first international poll which looked at how women fare in cities with over ten million people. Women’s rights campaigners in the city say this stems from deeply entrenched centuries-old traditions of discrimination there and women having limited access to good healthcare, education, and finance.

• A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.

• On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down

• Alamgir and Julfikar also reportedly used the loudspeakers of the mosques to spread hateful messages.

• It’s like someone died. But Gurbaksh Kaur — crying intermittently as relatives hug her — insists it’s her second birth. She returned from Saudi Arabia on November 4 after three months of “torture” while working for a family there. She’s crying because the fate of her daughter, Reena, 21, wasn’t known till two days ago.

• Mr Banks is not alone in pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit. Of the 149 Americans absolved of crimes in 2015, 65 had pleaded guilty. The Innocence Project, an organisation that uses DNA evidence to re-examine convictions, has proven the innocence of 300-odd people, most of them convicted for rape and murder. At least 30 had pleaded guilty. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, a collaboration between several law schools, a quarter of Americans cleared of murder between 1989 and 2012 had confessed. But such figures only hint at the scale of the problem. Often, plea bargains are conditional on giving up the right to challenge a conviction later. And exoneration efforts focus on serious crimes, where sentences are long and there is more likely to be forensic evidence.

• Charged protesters are demanding the federal government immediately remove Law Minister Zahid Hamid for allegedly pushing a constitutional amendment favoring Pakistan’s persecuted Ahmadi religious minority.

• The University of Hamburg has imposed a new religious code of conduct for its students. It reportedly comes after numerous complaints about Muslim students praying loudly in the library and crowding the bathrooms to wash their feet.

• Turkey has passed a new law to allow Islamic muftis to conduct civil marriage ceremonies, a move which liberal critics say undermines Turkey’s secular constitution and opens the door for child marriages.

• About 100 French politicians have marched on a street in a Paris suburb in protest at Muslims holding Friday prayers in public.

• Black men who commit the same crimes as white men receive federal prison sentences that are, on average, nearly 20 percent longer, according to a new report on sentencing disparities from the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC).

• These disparities were observed “after controlling for a wide variety of sentencing factors,” including age, education, citizenship, weapon possession and prior criminal history.

• For more than three decades, the state of Georgia has charged anyone who wants to see its official state law hundreds of dollars for that privilege. Now the state is suing the non-profit website that purchased a copy of that official compilation and put it on the internet for the public to see.

• The problem with all of this? Knowing the law is a right, not a privilege.

• The federal program that delegates immigration enforcement duties to local police is about to expand to as many as 24 additional jurisdictions across the country. The program, known as 287(g), deputizes state and local police to carry out federal immigration enforcement orders. After several years of decline, these arrangements are growing again under the Trump Administration.

• Sixty jurisdictions in 18 states have existing agreements under 287(g). This week Immigration and Customs Enforcement began the process of reviewing applications for 24 more jurisdictions, most of which have troubling civil rights records.

• In a rejection of President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tough-on-crime approach, a new ACLU poll finds that a large majority of Americans believe the criminal justice system is unjust and needs to be significantly reformed.

• Nine out of 10 Americans from across the political spectrum told our pollster that our criminal justice system needs fixing. This is an astounding number, but the results are even more impressive when you drill down into them. They show that criminal justice reform is a political issue the American people care about.

• Yes, some Christian women cover their heads for religious reasons. No, you can’t discriminate against them for it.

• See that woman in the photo to the right?

• That’s me, Audra Ragland, wearing one of my many head coverings. As a Christian, I’ve come to believe that Scripture requires me to cover my head in public to show my submission to, and reverence for, God. I wear my head covering everywhere.

• Last year, however, when I tried to visit my brother in the United States Penitentiary Atlanta, a prison officer demanded I remove my headscarf before entering the visitation area. According to the officer, the headscarf would have been allowed if I were Muslim or Jewish but, he claimed, the prison did not recognize “Christian head covering.”

• Ohio’s bungled execution of an elderly man shows that the death penalty is broken and barbaric.

• The famous appellate judge Richard Posner once wrote, “A civilized society locks up [criminals] until age makes them harmless, but it does not keep them in prison until they die.” The state of Ohio apparently hasn’t heard of Judge Posner, as they went one step further and tried to execute an elderly Alva Campbell and failed.

• Ohio’s lethal injection team spent more than 30 minutes poking Alva Campbell’s decrepit body in search of any decent vein into which they could inject their lethal cocktail to no avail. They finally relented — but only temporarily.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Last week, Karl wrote a post about Senator Al Franken’s keynote speech at the Open Markets Institute — a group that has been getting plenty of attention of late for arguing that big tech companies are too big and too powerful. Karl’s post focused on Franken’s weird argument that “net neutrality” should apply to edge companies like Google and Facebook, which made no sense. But what’s more troubling to me is that Franken’s whole speech was bordering on incomprehensible. This is disappointing, as I tend to think that Franken is pretty thoughtful and careful as a Senator (even when I disagree with him at a policy level — such as with his support of PIPA).

• The speech seems to basically be Franken throwing off random quips that attack just how big internet companies are, which is certainly red meat for the Open Markets crowd. And I don’t deny that there are some very serious questions to be asked about the size and power of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like… but Franken’s speech was not that. But because it has a few quotable lines and is attacking everyone’s favorite punching bags, it’s being hailed by sites like Wired as “the speech big tech has been dreading.” If this is the speech that big tech has been dreading, they’ve been worrying about nothing.

• Pai plans to seek a vote in December, said two people who asked not to be identified because the matter hasn’t been made public. As the head of a Republican majority, he is likely to win a vote on whatever he proposes.

• The FCC voted in a 3-2 split along party lines favoring Republicans to reform [sic] the program during the agency’s monthly open meeting.

• The spread of misinformation and propaganda online has exploded partly because of the way the advertising systems of large digital platforms such as Google or Facebook have been designed to hold people’s attention.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The document says it follows the same kinds of limitations and exceptions as countries already provide in their national legislation in the context of copyright in literary and artistic works, and the protection of related rights.

• Center for Justice, a Washington non-profit organization, has asked a federal court to unseal several documents that may provide more insight into the financial agreements between filmmakers, lawyers and piracy tracking outfits. The so-called copyright trolling operations may, in fact, be well-coordinated “illegal settlement factories” that prey on people with limited financial resources.

• Two Kodi addon developers, both of whom distributed addons via the popular Colussus addon repository, have been told to cease and desist their activities. A letter delivered to one, apparently by hand in the UK, reveals that the MPA/MPAA led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, which counts Netflix and Amazon among its members, is behind the action.

• Noting that “the web was built specifically to share research papers amongst scientists,” Josh Nicholson and Alberto Pepe report on the dismal state of the web for accessing the most-cited scientific papers across the literature — 65 of the top 100 most-cited papers being behind paywalls.

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