● 11.22.17

● Links 22/11/2017: Qt 5.9.3 Released, FCC v the Internet

Posted in News Roundup at 4:48 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• There are many reasons why I came to appreciate Unix and then Linux and why they became such an important part of my life. These operating systems provided a focus and a career specialty that I’ve greatly enjoyed. I appreciate Linus Torvalds and the many thousands of developers who have contributed their time and energy into building a powerful, efficient and enjoyable operating system. I appreciate the many tools and commands that make them so easy to use and get my work done. And I appreciate the chances that I’ve had to share what I’ve learned with so many others. It’s been fun, and it’s been very rewarding.

Desktop

• A while back, there were articles circulating about the “World’s Cheapest Laptop,” but they really weren’t accurate. The PINEBOOK weighs in at $89USD for the 11″ model and $99USD for the 14″ model. But, can a sub-$100 laptop, new or used, really be worth it? It would almost be unanymously be argued not, but the PINEBOOK makes a very compelling case. Let’s tell you about it in detail.

• PINE64, the company behind the first budget/hobbyist 64bit single board computer by the same name, has started offering a lot more in the alternative computing arena. They have a wide variety of inventory on their website containing all sorts of odds and ends in addition to the flagship offerings. Everything a tinkerer might need, from microSD cards to USB wifi, USB ethernet, even power over ethernet broken-out into a DC barrel adapter and LCD panels, all for very appealing prices.

• The Surface Book 2 is aimed at graphic pros, but with a stout NVIDIA 1060 GPU, it’s a tempting gaming machine, too. As we observed during our review, gaming drains the battery pretty fast, though. Worse, The Verge noticed that the power supply can’t actually charge the battery fast enough to prevent it from draining in some cases. A Microsoft spokesman has confirmed to The Verge that “in some intense, prolonged gaming scenarios with Power Mode Slider set to ‘best performance’ the battery may discharge while connected to the power supply.”

Server

• The financial services company moves into proprietary waters with software it acquired in last years purchase of Critical Stack.

Kernel Space

• Renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the Linux 4.14.1 kernel, the first point release of the Linux 4.14 kernel series, which is the first to be supported for the next six years. The Linux 4.14.1 kernel is marked as “stable” on the kernel.org website, giving the green light to OS developers to add it to their repositories.

• Arch Linux developers have already pushed the Linux 4.14.1 kernel to the “Testing” repositories, for early adopters, so we may soon see a rebase of the operating system on Linux kernel 4.14, which brings major new features like support for AMD Secure Memory Encryption, Heterogeneous Memory Management to support upcoming GPUs, and bigger memory limits in x86 hardware.

• Stable kernels 4.14.1, 4.13.15, 4.9.64, 4.4.100, and 3.18.83 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

• A filesystem-eating bug has been found in Linux 4.14.

• First reported last week by developer Pavel Goran, the problem struck bcache, a tool that lets one use a solid state disk drive as a read/write cache for another drive. bcache is often used to store data from a slow disk on faster media.

• Goran noticed the problem after trying to upgrade Gentoo from version 4.13 of the Linux kernel to version 4.14. During that effort he noticed “reads from the bcache device produce different data in 4.14 and 4.13.”

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation works through our projects, training and certification programs, events and more to bring people of all backgrounds into open source. We meet a lot of people, but find the drive and enthusiasm of some of our youngest community members to be especially infectious. In the past couple of months, we’ve invited 13-year-old algorithmist and cognitive developer Tanmay Bakshi, 11-year-old hacker and cybersecurity ambassador Reuben Paul, and 15-year-old programmer Keila Banks to speak at Linux Foundation conferences.

• In 2014 when he was 12, Zachary Dupont wrote a letter to his hero Linus Torvalds. We arranged for Zach to meet Linus–a visit that helped clinch his love for Linux. This year, Zach came to Open Source Summit in Los Angeles to catch up with Linus and let us know what he’s been up to. He’s kept busy with an internship at SAP and early acceptance to the Computer Networking and Digital Forensics program at the Delaware County Technical School.

Graphics Stack

• If you are using the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver and anxious to try out the Linux 4.15 kernel for its many new features/improvements, unfortunately you will need to wait a few days as the current public driver is broken against this latest code.

Benchmarks

• In addition to looking at system boot times from Linux 4.6 to Linux 4.15, while doing this kernel testing session on the Lenovo ThinkPad I also took some battery power consumption measurements.

• Using the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Core i7 (Broadwell) processor, I also compared the battery power consumption on these tested mainline Linux kernels from 4.6 to 4.15.

• If you are looking out for a SATA 2.5-inch HDD/SSD to USB3 adapter, the Sabrent EC-SS31 is quite simple, works with Linux, supports USB 3.1, and retails for about $10 USD.

• With AMDGPU DC having been merged a few days ago for the Linux 4.15 merge window, it’s now possible to run the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards with display support using the mainline kernel without having to resort to using a patched/third-party kernel build or using the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver. Here are some tests I have carried out with the Radeon RX Vega 56, RX Vega 64, and other graphics cards from Linux 4.15 Git compared to a few NVIDIA GPUs.

• The ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been enjoying its time on Linux 4.15. In addition to the recent boot time tests and kernel power comparison, here are some raw performance benchmarks looking at the speed from Linux 4.10 through Linux 4.15 Git.

• With this Broadwell-era Core i7 5600U laptop with 8GB RAM, HD Graphics, and 128GB SATA 3.0 SSD with Ubuntu 17.10 x86_64, the Linux 4.10 through 4.15 Git mainline kernels were benchmarked. Each one was tested “out of the box” and the kernel builds were obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel archive.

Applications

• CodeBlocks is a free and open-source IDE for C, C++ and FORTRAN development. It features a consistent User Interface across all desktop platforms with a class browser, a tabbed interface, and its functions can be extended using plugins.

• It also features keyboard shortcuts, smart indentation, code folding, and a to-do list management panel that different users can use, among others. It is written in C++ and it does not require any interpreted languages or proprietary libraries.

• Unlike many other Electron podcast apps I have come across on Github this one is still being developed, is easy to install, and it supports Linux.

• qBittorrent, the open-source and cross-platform BitTorrent client written in Qt for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems, has been updated to version 4.0, a major release adding numerous new features and improvements.

• qBittorrent 4.0 is the first release of the application to drop OS/2 support, as well as support for the old Qt 4 framework as Qt 5.5.1 or later is now required to run it on all supported platforms. It also brings a new logo and a new SVG-based icon theme can be easily scaled. Lots of other cosmetic changes are present in this release, and the WebGUI received multiple enhancements.

• Earlier this month the FFmpeg project landed its initial NVDEC NVIDIA video decoding support after already supporting NVENC for video encoding. These new NVIDIA APIs for encode/decode are part of the company’s Video Codec SDK with CUDA and is the successor to the long-used VDPAU video decoding on NVIDIA Linux boxes. That NVDEC support has continued getting into shape.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Free software developer Roderick Colenbrander has made public his Wine-Vulkan repository that he is using to stage his work around better Vulkan support within Wine.

• Roderick’s Wine-Vulkan patches are in a state for experimenting with Vulkan on Wine and implements Vulkan 1.0.51 with few optional extensions currently. This is enough to run the Vulkan information utility, a Vulkan cube demo, and the vkQuake game along with other basic Vulkan apps. Both 32-bit and 64-bit programs should be working now.

Games

• BatMUD [Official Site], a text-based multiplayer game that’s been around in some form since 1990 is still alive and works well on Linux.

• Here’s one for the lovers of puzzle games, CompliKATed [Steam, Official Site] is on Linux and ready to fry your brain. It certainly gave my brain a good workout.

• If you’re short on time, but fancy a trip through a short Myst-like experience then Arkaia: The Enigmatic Isle [Steam, Official Site] is an interesting choice.

• I absolutely love watching Overload [Steam, Official Site] progress, as each fresh update makes the game even more fun. Let’s take a look at what’s new this time.

• Two major new additions for the 0.8 update are the new challenge map “Backfire” and a new cloaked Phantom robot. Together, they’re a pretty awesome boost for an already extremely fun game. The stealthy robot certainly does mix things up a bit!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A new KDE icon theme is bringing a sprinkle of Samsung Experience to the Plasma desktop.

• The Dex icon theme for KDE draws inspiration from the icons used on the Samsung Galaxy S8.

• Like its source Dex uses a “squircle” shape for the majority of its app icons. This reminds me (a little) of the Ubuntu Suru icon theme.

• I am pleased to inform that Qt 5.9.3 is released today. As a patch release Qt 5.9.3 does not add any new functionality, focus is in bug fixes and performance improvements.

• Compared to Qt 5.9.2, the new Qt 5.9.3 contains over 100 bug fixes and in total more than 500 changes since Qt 5.9.2. For details of the most important changes, please check the Change files of Qt 5.9.3.

• The Qt Company, through Tuukka Turunen, announced today the third maintenance and stability update to the latest Qt 5.9 LTS open-source and cross-platform application framework.

• While Qt 5.9.3 does not add any new functionality to the long-term supported Qt 5.9 series, it would appear to be a major bugfix release that adds more than 500 changes compared to the previous update, Qt 5.9.2, which is currently used by default in various Linux-based and other operating systems.

• The Qt Company has issued Qt 5.9.3 as the latest tool-kit update in the Qt 5.9 Long-Term Support series.

• As is standard practice for Qt point releases, no new functionality is presented by Qt 5.9.3 but there are bug fixes and performance improvements. There are more than 100 bug fixes for this latest update and more than 500 changes in total since Qt 5.9.2. There are also security fixes, noted are two vulnerabilities being addressed for Qt on Android.

• Two vulnerabilities have been identified in Qt for Android which could be used by a malicious application to hijack an existing Qt for Android application on the same device. The vulnerabilities in question were found by JPCERT Coordination Center, and have been assigned the following vulnerability IDs: JVN#27342829 and JVN#67389262.

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.5 RC!

• We think that we are pretty close to what we want to release as Qt Creator 4.5.0, so please take this opportunity to give us final feedback through the bug tracker, our mailing list, or on IRC (#qt-creator on chat.freenode.net). For information about the new features and improvements in this version, please have a look at the beta blog post or our change log.

Distributions

New Releases

• Raspberry Slideshow is another Linux-based operating system that runs on Raspberry Pi single-board computers, this time designed to provide image and video slideshows, as its name implies. The OS is capable of playing different media formats from a Windows (Samba), FTP, or web server share, or from a USB flash drive.

• The latest version, Raspberry Slideshow 10.0, is using packages from Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspbian Stretch release, which is based on the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system series. It also adds support for all the Raspberry Pi models available on the market, as well as a number of improvements for better performance.

• Coming two months after the previous release, Kali Linux 2017.3 is here with a new kernel, namely Linux 4.13.10, which adds better support for the latest hardware components, as well as all the security patches pushed upstream in the Debian Testing repositories, as well as various new tools.

• First off, the Linux 4.13.10 kernel adds SMB 3.0 support to CIFS by default, rises the EXT4 directories limit from 10 million entries to up to 2 billion, and enables TLS support. Second, Offensive Security updated several of the included tools for this release, such as The Social Engineering Toolkit, Reaver, Burp Suite, PixieWPS, and Cuckoo.

• TheSSS 23.1 is a small update to the open-source, server-oriented GNU/Linux distribution and it’s based on the recently released 4MLinux Server 23.1 operating system, which means that it runs the Linux 4.9.61 LTS kernel under the hood, along with other updates like OpenSSL 1.0.2m, Postfix 3.2.4, and Stunnel 5.43.

• On the server side of things, TheSSS 23.1 updates the MariaDB database server to version 10.2.10, the Apache web server to version 2.4.29, as well as the PHP packages to both 7.0.25 and 5.6.32 releases, the latter being available for compatibility reasons.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Powered by the Linux 4.13.12 kernel, OpenMandriva Lx 3.03 is an enhancement to the previous OpenMandriva Lx 3 releases, adding major improvements to the boot process. The OS also uses the Mesa 17.2.3 graphics stack with S3TC support enabled, the X.Org Server 1.19.5 display server, and systemd 234 init system.

• On the user-visible side of changes, OpenMandriva Lx 3.03 ships with the KDE Plasma 5.10.5 desktop environment and KDE Frameworks 5.39.0 software stack, along with the latest Firefox Quantum web browser compiled with LLVM/Clang 5.0.0 and Calamares 3.1.8 as default graphical installer.

• Following in the steps of Ubuntu 17.10 dropping 32-bit desktop images and other Linux distributions also lessening their focus on 32-bit support, OpenMandriva has issued its final i586 release.

• OpenMandriva Lx 3.03 was released on Tuesday with boot speed improvements, updates to Linux/systemd/Mesa, KDE Plasma 5.10.5, LLVM Clang 5.0, and other package upgrades. This is also going to be their last planned release in the OpenMandriva Lx 3 series.

• This release Lx 3.03 is an enhancement and upgrade to the previous Lx 3 releases.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora is one of the operating systems that users wait regularly and with big interest. Fedora is a playground of new technologies that will later come to RedHat and its derivatives like CentOS.

• Fedora 27 has been released on the 14th of November 2017. Let’s have a quick whistlestop tour through the GNOME version of this operating system.

Debian Family

• Shipping a few days after the release of SparkyLinux 4.7 “Tyche” stable operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch,” the SparkyLinux 5-dev20171120 development build includes up-to-date packages based on the repositories of the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system.

• Apart from rebasing the operating system on the latest Debian Testing repos as of November 20, 2017, the new SparkyLinux 5 development images are the first to enable full disk encryption by default in the Calamares graphical installer, as you can see from the screenshots attached at the end of the article.

• A Debian software package containing an “ASCII representation of zoophilia” has been installed automatically on some users’ machines.

• According to a bug report, Debian user Felicia Hummel installed a package called “cowsay”, which turns text into ASCII art of cows (or other animals) with speech or thought balloons. But with default settings of “install suggests” enabled, a controversial second “recommends” package called “cowsay-off” was also installed.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I’m happy to announce that MAAS 2.3.0 (final) is now available! This new MAAS release introduces a set of exciting features and improvements to the overall user experience. It now becomes the focus of maintenance, as it fully replaces MAAS 2.2 In order to provide with sufficient notice, please be aware that 2.3.0 will replace MAAS 2.2 in the Ubuntu Archive in the coming weeks. In the meantime, MAAS 2.3 is available in PPA and as a Snap.

• Ubuntu Mate 17.10 is a pretty stable and rock solid distribution which has got most things right. There is nothing unlikable about the distro. However, I feel it could have been a lot better if they had allowed 4 windows to be snapped on each corners and done something about the opaque top panel. The software included are very much standard and even though some of their names have been changed we all know what’s under the hood. Overall Experience has been good. Having already tested Ubuntu with Gnome 3, I can say that Ubuntu Mate 17.10 feels a lot faster and quicker in terms of GUI response.

• Bloomberg, Walmart, eBay, Samsung, Dell. Ever wonder how some of the world’s largest enterprises run on Ubuntu? This December, we are hosting our first ever Ubuntu Enterprise Summit to tell you how and help guide your own organisation whether it be running the cloud in a large telco to deriving revenue from your next IoT initiative. The Ubuntu Enterprise Summit is a two day event of webinars on December 5th and 6th where you can join Canonical’s product managers, technical leads, partners and customers to get an inside look at why some of the world’s largest companies have chosen Ubuntu. Whether you are focused on the cloud or are living life at the edge, the webinars will also look at trends and the considerations for your organisation when implementing such technologies. To kick off the event on December 5th, Canonical CEO and founder Mark Shuttleworth will deliver a keynote talk on 21st Century Infrastructure. Following Mark’s opening, there will be a series of other events and you can register now for those that spark your interest by clicking on the links below

• The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list.

• I am also very thankful for LaTeX2e and Tex Live. It has been a great thing to have to prepare devotional materials for church. I am thankful for the MOTU folks maintaining Gummi which is the editor I use on Xubuntu. Xubuntu is what I run on my laptop that goes many places with me. Tex Live is run both on the laptop and on the Raspberry Pi 2 at home.

• If you’re using the latest Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system on your personal computer, you should know that it received it’s first major kernel update since the official release back in October 19, 2017. The update addresses a total of 20 security vulnerabilities for Ubuntu 17.10′s Linux 4.13 kernel packages, including the Raspberry Pi 2 one.

• Among the security issues patched in this update, five are related to Linux kernel’s USB subsystem, including a use-after-free vulnerability, which could allow a physically proximate attacker to crash the affected system by causing a denial of service (DoS attack) or possibly execute arbitrary code. Other three are related to the ALSA subsystem, including a race condition.

Flavours and Variants

• ExLight Build 171121 replaces last week’s Build 171112, which used the older Enlightenment 0.20 desktop from the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) software repositories, to update Enlightenment to the latest 0.22 release that the developer compiled from sources. This makes ExLight one of few distros to use Enlightenment 0.22.

• “Version 171112 uses Enlightenment 0.20 installed from Ubuntu’s repositories. Build 171121 of ExLight uses Enlightenment 0.22 installed by me from source,” said the developer in the release announcement. “Only two Linux distributions in the whole wide world (besides ExLight) use Enlightenment 0.22 as desktop environment.”

• LXLE 16.04.3 is built upon Ubuntu Mini LTS. Lubuntu-core is used as a starting point.

• The developers of the Ubuntu-based LXLE GNU/Linux distribution have announced the release of LXLE 16.04.3, the latest update to the Eclectica series based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

• Incorporating all the updates and core components of Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, the LXLE 16.04.3 release is here to further integrate various of the components of the MATE and LXQt desktop environments, as well as some from the Linux Mint operating system.

• On top of that, the application menu received improvements to its layout and how items are organization, the system theme was tweaked for consistency, LXhotkey replaces the Obkey Openbox key editor, and Pithos has been removed because it required a user account.

Devices/Embedded

• Aetina’s “ACE-N510” carrier for the Linux-powered Jetson TX1 and TX2 measures only 87 x 50mm, and offers HDMI, 2x USB 3.0, 2x CAN, and optional -20 to 70°C.

• When Aetina recently unveiled its Nano-ITX (120 x 120mm) ACE-N261 carrier for Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 and earlier, pin-compatible Jetson TX1 COMs, it mentioned an upcoming ACE-N510 that was even smaller. Now we have the details on the little beastie, which like Connect Tech’s Sprocket Jetson carrier, has a compact 87 x 50mm footprint that matches the Jetson modules it stacks on. The ACE-N510 is designed for smart cameras, robots, drones, industrial inspection, mobile medical, and deep learning.

• Opal Kelly’s “SYZYGY Brain-1” SBC, which runs Linux on a Zynq-7012S, is a proof of concept for its SYZYGY standard for FPGA-driven peripherals.

• FPGA development firm Opal Kelly has gone to Crowd Supply to launch a development board to showcase its SYZYGY standard for FPGA peripheral expansion. SYZYGY bridges the gap between Digilent’s low-speed Pmod connector and the higher-end VITA 57.1 FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card) standard. The open source, 110 x 75mm SYZYGY Brain-1 SBC runs Linux on a Xilinx Zynq-7012S SoC, a member of the FPGA-enabled Zynq-7000S family, which offers single Cortex-A9 cores instead of dual dual cores on the Zynq-7000 series.

• A new firmware for the Kobo ebook reader came out and I adjusted the mega update pack to use it. According to the comments in the firmware thread it is working faster than previous releases. The most incredible change though is the update from wpa_supplicant 0.7.1 (around 2010) to 2.7-devel (current). Wow.

• Avalue’s Linux-friendly, 3.5-inch “ECM-APL2” SBC features Apollo Lake SoCs, 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, 2x mini-PCIe, triple displays, and optional -40 to 85°C.

• Avalue’s 3.5-inch, Apollo Lake based ECM-APL single-board computer was announced a year ago, shortly after Intel unveiled its Apollo Lake generation. Now it has followed up with an ECM-APL2 3.5-incher with a slightly different, and reduced, feature set.

Tizen

• Remember when Canonical was doing everything they could to bring convergence between the Linux desktop and the Ubuntu Phone? They worked tirelessly to make it happen, only to fall short of that goal. This effort was preceded by Ubuntu Edge—a smartphone that, by itself, would bridge the mobile device and the desktop. That failed as well, but the intent was the same.

• For those that aren’t familiar, the idea behind convergence is simple: Offer a single device that could serve as both a smartphone handset, and when connected to a monitor work as a standard desktop computer. The idea is quite brilliant and makes perfect sense. Especially when you remember how many people use a smartphone as their only means of either connecting to the world or productivity. With that number growing every year, the idea of convergence becomes even more important. Give them one device that could function in two very important ways.

Android

• Office application is an essential suite that allows you to create powerful spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc., on a smartphone. Moreover, Android office apps come with cloud integration so that you can directly access the reports from the cloud, edit them, or save them online.

• To meet the productivity need of Android users, the Play Store offers an extensive collection of Android office apps. But, we have saved you the hassle of going through each one of them and provided you a list of the best office apps for Android. The apps that we have picked are all free, although some do have Pro version or extra features available for in-app purchases. You can also refer to this list if you’re looking for Microsoft Office alternatives for your PC.

• Mobile app developers are being forced to rewrite their code as Google attempts to tame Android’s Wild West.

• The developer of the power management app Greenify has been given 30 days to alter its code by the gatekeepers at Google’s Play Store, and stop using Google’s accessibility framework.

• The new OnePlus 5T is an excellent smartphone, but thing about it stands out from the rest — its $500 price.

• That amount is actually near the top of what OnePlus has charged for its past smartphones. But the price is hundreds of dollars cheaper than that of many other top-of-the-line devices. Indeed, many of the latest flagship smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone X and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8, cost more than $900.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s been 23 years to the FreeDOS project. FreeDOS founder Jim Hall shares some interesting insight into this veteran open source project.

• Less than nine months after AT&T and the Linux Foundation merged their open source projects to become the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), the group today rolled out its first code release, Amsterdam.

• The highly anticipated release, which integrates AT&T’s ECOMP and the Linux Foundation’s Open-O code bases into a common open source orchestration platform, aims to automate the virtualization of network services.

• Open source software, applications, and projects are becoming more commonplace, at least more than they ever have been. That’s because major organizations and brands have now embraced the development philosophy.

• Some of the more renowned examples of open source projects include WordPress, Android, FileZilla, Audacity, GIMP, VLC Media Player, Notepad++, Blender, and, of course, Ubuntu/Linux.

• There are many things to think about when building and starting a company. However, I’ll say a few things that are particularly different about building a business around open source technology. First, open source isn’t a business model; it is a go-to-market strategy. Done right, it really solves one of the hardest problems in building a business — getting traction for the product. Focusing on developer evangelism and community building is key to adoption of open-source technology. In the early days of Apache Kafka and even now, this is a big part of what I and the team do. Second, while building any business, it is important to understand the new buyer and then influence them. For most open-source businesses, the developer is the new buyer. This fundamentally changes the role of marketing in open-source companies. Third, there has been a constant evolution of open source software business models since Red Hat blazed the first trail. The two common OSS business models that are successfully pursued by many companies like Cloudera, Elastic and Confluent are:

Events

• One of today’s leading tech conferences, the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC), is back to bring together some of the brightest monitoring experts from different parts of the world. The four-day event will be held at Holiday Inn Nuremberg City Conference in Germany starting today, November 21st, until November 24th.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Announced today by Mike Saunders, the event will be held for the first time on a Monday, on November 27, 2017, from 8 a.m. UTC to 10 p.m. UTC. During the event, which will take place online, LibreOffice developers will try to triage and fix as many bugs as possible for the first LibreOffice 6.0 Beta.

• A few days before the event, The Document Foundation will release the LibreOffice 6.0 Beta 1 builds for GNU/Linux distributions using either the DEB or RPM binary formats, as well as for macOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems. These beta builds can run in parallel with the production version, LibreOffice 5.4.

• While LibreOffice Calc for a while now has been offering OpenCL support for speeding up spreadsheet computations, with not all drivers/GPUs supporting OpenCL, this Microsoft Office alternative is finally receiving proper multi-threading support.

• Collabora developers have landed their initial work on multi-threading / parallelism as they look to speed-up the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet program’s calculations.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

BSD

• We are excited to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.4.2, now available for new installations and upgrades!

• pfSense software version 2.4.2 is a maintenance release bringing security patches and stability fixes for issues present in previous pfSense 2.4.x branch releases.

• pfSense 2.4.2-RELEASE updates and installation images are available now!

• Netgate’s Jim Pingle announced the availability of the second maintenance and stabilization update to the latest 2.4 series of pfSense, world’s most trusted open-source firewall.

• pfSense 2.4.2 is a security and bugfix release that updates the OpenSSL packages to version 1.0.2m to fix two recently disclosed vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-3736 and CVE-2017-3735), addresses three potential XSS vectors, fixes the VLAN priority handling, and addresses issues with PPP interfaces that have VLAN parents.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Most people consider a college education the key to future success, but for many students, the cost is insurmountable. The growing open educational resource (OER) movement is attempting to address this problem by providing a high-quality, low-cost alternative to traditional textbooks, while at the same time empowering students and educators in innovative ways. One of the leaders in this movement is Robin DeRosa, a professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. I have been enthusiastically following her posts on Twitter and invited her to share her passion for open education with our readers. I am delighted to share our discussion with you.

Programming/Development

• Python is a powerful, versatile programming language that’s popular with open source software developers. Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to test your code, or you just want to learn the basics, the following resources might help.

• Google has given its mystery operating system Fuchsia an update to support Apple’s Swift programming language.

• Swift has quickly become one of hottest languages among developers. Google last week caused a stir after it forked Swift, causing speculation that Google wanted to take the language in a different direction.

• devRantron is a free, open-source, and cross-platform (unofficial) desktop client for the famous Dev Rant Android and iOS social media application for programmers, developers, and designers.

• Before now, devRant was only accessible on the mobile phones, but now users can post complaints and follow up on rants by developers from all around the globe even while working on their desktops and it’s thanks to a group of friends who concluded that devRant was taking too long to deliver a desktop client.

• With GCC 8 feature development over and onto bug fixing, here is a look at some of the changes to find with the GCC 8 compiler stack that will be released as stable early next year in the form of GCC 8.1.

Leftovers

Science

• Ten out of 12 water utilities in the United Kingdom admitted that their technicians use divining rods to find underground leaks or water pipes, according to an investigation by science blogger Sally Le Page.

• Dowsing is a centuries-old technique for locating underground water. Someone searching for water holds two parallel sticks—or sometimes a single Y-shaped stick—called divining rods while walking in an area where there might be water under the surface. The branches supposedly twitch when they’re over a water source.

• Needless to say, there’s zero scientific evidence that this technique actually works better than random chance. But Le Page got a bunch of UK water companies to admit that their technicians still employ the superstitious practice.

Hardware

• As part of its quarterly earnings report, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced Tuesday that CEO Meg Whitman would be stepping down from her position as of February 1, 2018.

Health/Nutrition

• The tasty Japanese seaweed nori is ubiquitous today, but that wasn’t always true. Nori was once called “lucky grass” because every year’s harvest was entirely dependent on luck. Then, during World War II, luck ran out. No nori would grow off the coast of Japan, and farmers were distraught. But a major scientific discovery on the other side of the planet revealed something unexpected about the humble plant and turned an unpredictable crop into a steady and plentiful food source.

• Nori is most familiar to us when it’s wrapped around sushi. It looks less familiar when floating in the sea, but for centuries, farmers in Japan, China, and Korea knew it by sight. Every year, they would plant bamboo poles strung with nets in the coastal seabed and wait for nori to build up on them.

• The World Health Organization is presenting its draft work program for 2019-2023 for consideration by member states this week.

• The 34-member WHO Executive Board is meeting in a special session on 22-23 November to consider the draft thirteenth General Programme of Work (GPW 13 [pdf]), recently published by the WHO (IPW, WHO, 1 November 2017).

• According to the draft programme of work [pdf], comments received this week will feed into a revised draft GPW 13 for consideration by the Executive Board at its 142nd session in January.

• Halford’s actions represent a flagrant violation of laws governing human clinical trials. They will likely further ensnare SIU and Halford’s company, Rational Vaccines, in controversy.

• Halford’s conduct has already drawn sharp criticism and rebuke following the August report of his unapproved trial on the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. Experts called the trial “patently unethical.” Scientists rejected data generated by the trial from publication. And authorities from St. Kitts opened an investigation into the trial, while US authorities from Health and Human Services sent an inquiry to SIU regarding Halford’s work.

• But conservative investors critical of US regulations, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, invested $7 million into Halford’s research based on results of the trial. Those results were considered “partly wishful thinking” by scientists. But Halford painted the trial and the vaccine as a success, as did Agustín Fernández III, the co-founder of Rational Vaccines.

Security

• Thanks to an investigation by third-party researchers into Intel’s hidden firmware in certain chips, Intel decided to audit its firmware and on Monday confirmed it had found 11 severe bugs that affect millions of computers and servers.

• The flaws affect Management Engine (ME), Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Server Platform Services (SPS).

• Josh and Kurt talk about GitHub’s security scanner and Linus’ security email. We clarify the esoteric difference between security bugs and non security bugs.

• Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has apologised – a bit – for calling some security-centric kernel contributors “f*cking morons”.

• Torvalds unleashed a profanity-laden rant at Google developer Kees Cook, over the latter’s proposal to harden the kernel.

• Another Google security chap, Matthew Garret, asked Torvalds “ Can you clarify a little with regard to how you’d have liked this patchset to look?”

• To which Torvalds responded that “I think the actual status of the patches is fairly good with the default warning.”

• Chipmaker warns of new flaws found in 6th, 7th, and 8th-gen Core processors.

• [...]

• The technology, which is a core part of Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), is present on many of the company’s CPUs and can even remain active when a PC is turned off.

• In a public statement, Uber has announced that it sustained a massive data breach in 2016: 57 million customers’ and drivers’ names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers were compromised.

• According to Bloomberg, no trip location info, credit card information, or Social Security numbers was taken.

• Uber did not respond to Ars’ questions—Matthew Wing, a spokesman, simply pointed us to the company’s blog post.

• Bloomberg also noted that Uber paid hackers $100,000 to delete the data and not publicize the breach. At the time of the breach, Uber was negotiating with federal regulators over different privacy concerns.

• Compromised data from the October 2016 attack included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, the company told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The personal information of about 7 million drivers was accessed as well, including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card information, trip location details or other data were taken, Uber said.

• The company’s failure to disclose the breach was “amateur hour”, said Chris Hoofnagle of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. “The only way one can have direct liability under security breach notification statutes is to not give notice. Thus, it makes little sense to cover up a breach.”

• On Tuesday, Uber revealed in a statement from newly installed CEO Dara Khosrowshahi that hackers [sic] stole a trover of personal data from the company’s network in October 2016, including the names and driver’s license information of 600,000 drivers, and worse, the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of 57 million Uber users.

• Ride-sharing company Uber has sacked its chief security officer Joe Sullivan and one of his deputies after it was found that both had played a role in hiding a data breach that exposed the personal data of 57 million users from around the globe.

• On Tuesday, federal authorities in New York indicted Behzad Mesri, an Iranian citizen, accusing him of hacking HBO earlier this year.

• Seeing as Iran and the United States lack an extradition treaty, it is unlikely that Mesri will be sent to the United States to face the charges, unless he somehow decides to come to the states of his own volition.

Defence/Aggression

• A disturbing report released today by researchers at the prestigious Colegio de Mexico provides new details about a 2011 massacre in Allende, a quiet Mexican ranching town less than an hour’s drive from the United States, and suggests that many more people were killed in the incident than estimated by Mexican authorities. The report’s authors also repeatedly cite an investigation of the incident by ProPublica and National Geographic in calling for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to provide information about its role in triggering the killing spree.

• In Nigeria, a suicide bombing at a mosque in the northeast has killed up to fifty people. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though local officials blamed it on Boko Haram.

• Lebanon is being accused by 5 GCC members and a growing list of allies regionally and globally of declaring war on Saudi Arabia by its corrupt ‘leaders’ essentially deeding the country to Iran. Consequently, the KSA and other countries have joined in demanding that the Lebanese “government” choose between peace or allegiance to Iran and Hezbollah. The new reactive strategy appears to include targeting Lebanon’s already challenged economy.

• [...]

• Mr. Sabhan’s declaration raises the distinct possibility of a GCC “Dahiyeh Doctrine” wherein Saudi Arabia and her allies could take a page from Israel’s 2009 “Dahiyeh Doctrine” wherein the occupiers of Palestine are now committed to targeting all of Lebanon in the next war and not just Hezbollah areas. The justification for both “total wars” is claimed to be that the Lebanese government has failed to effectively control or disarm Iran’s Hezbollah militia but instead has ceded Lebanon’s sovereignty. Some are suggesting that Saudi Arabia, along with her regional and even some global allies may well launch an economic “Dahiyeh Doctrine” wherein all of Lebanon’s economy is fair game for targeting much as Iran’s continues to be.

• We spend the hour looking at a damning new report that reveals how U.S.-led airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq have killed far more civilians than officials have acknowledged. The coalition’s own data shows 89 of its more than 14,000 airstrikes in Iraq have resulted in civilian deaths, or about one of every 157 strikes. But their an on-the-ground investigation by The New York Times magazine found civilian deaths in “one out of every five” strikes. We are joined by the two reporters who co-authored this investigation titled “The Uncounted.” Azmat Khan is an investigative journalist and a Future of War fellow at New America and Arizona State University; and Anand Gopal is a reporter and an assistant research professor at Arizona State University. A civilian survivor who lost his family and home to a 2015 U.S. airstrike in Mosul, Basim Razzo, also joins us from Erbil, Iraq.

• President Trump has officially designated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, escalating the rising tensions between the two countries. Other countries on the list are: Sudan, Syria and Iran. The diplomatic move comes amid an escalating threat of nuclear war, with Trump repeatedly threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea and to unleash “fire and fury” on the nation of 25 million people. This is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

• A U.S. Navy aircraft carrying 11 crew and passengers crashed into the ocean southeast of Okinawa on Wednesday afternoon, the Seventh Fleet said.

• The aircraft was traveling to the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, which is currently operating in the Philippine Sea, when it crashed. The cause of the crash is not known, the Seventh Fleet, based in the Japanese port of Yokosuka, said in a statement.

• In news on the U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force is on track to triple the number of bombs there dropped this year, compared with last year. The major increase in bombing comes as the Trump administration has deployed thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in recent months. By early 2018, there are slated to be about 16,000 U.S. troops there. The ongoing U.S. war in Afghanistan is the longest war in U.S. history.

• The U.S. government once wanted to plan false flag attacks with Soviet aircraft to justify war with the USSR or its allies, newly declassified documents surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy show.

• In a three-page memo, members of the National Security Council wrote, “There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack US or friendly installations to provide an excuse for U.S. intervention.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• With energy storage and a reliable, sustainable supply of power — and government energy policies — a hot topic in Australia, a group of Australian academics has warned that without proper planning and investment in energy storage, electricity costs in Australia will continue to rise and electricity supply will become less reliable.

• A New York Times explainer in advance of the Bonn climate talks told readers the worst case scenario for the UN summit is it “could get bogged down by the traditional rift between richer and poorer nations.” That might “stall momentum right before the next big round of climate talks in 2018.” Of course, others may see different forces behind any stalled momentum, and might offer a different frame for questions of climate justice than that of a “traditional rift” between the world’s rich and poor.

• Karen Orenstein is the deputy director of the Economic Policy Program at Friends of the Earth US where she works on issues of international public finance and climate finance in particular. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Karen Orenstein.

• The lead story of the November 20 USA Today, “Drilling Closes In on Alaska Wildlife Refuge,” was supposed to give readers the basics surrounding proposed legislation to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The article is intended as an explainer—“Here’s What You Should Know,” its online headline concludes—but one idea is conspicuously absent from its explanation: climate change.

• Sales of drilling rights in the northeastern Alaskan coastal plain are slated to be attached to the Senate version of the tax bill, ostensibly as a way to raise revenue to offset the cost of massive tax cuts. The article’s lead frames the issue in terms of proponents’ view of the refuge “as an area rich with natural resources that could help fuel the United States’ drive for energy independence”—despite the fact that the United States became a net exporter of oil in 2013, and any increase in oil production would likely go to overseas markets.

• MPs have accused the government of failing to protect consumers over the price it has promised to pay for power from the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant.

• The Commons public accounts committee said the subsidy contract for Hinkley Point C, agreed in 2016 after years of delays, would hit poorest households hardest.

• The power station is expected to cost billpayers £30bn over the lengthy of the 35-year contract, adding £10-£15 to the average household energy bill.

• Roasted birds on the holiday table are often stuffed with a blend of breadcrumbs, herbs, and spices that includes chopped celery. Many stuffing recipes even call for chopped oysters, a briny bivalve that for centuries has been served raw on the half shell as a token of good luck in the coming year.

• But did you know that oysters and “celery” (the wild variety, a common seagrass) also serve as vital underwater habitats?

• As you celebrate the season, consider the diverse roles of oysters and celery (both wild and cultivated). Far more than delectable treats on the holiday menu, they provide protective lairs and nutritious fare for our fragile aquatic communities.

• An environmental “looting” spree is threatening biodiversity and pristine forests across 15 countries in central and eastern Europe, the UN has warned.

• Environmental crimes such as illegal logging, fishing, poaching and the caviar black market are putting “high pressure” on ecosystems in the Danube-Carpathian region, according to a report by the UN Environmental Programme (Unep) and WWF.

Finance

• 21st November 2017

• The UK government is encountering problem after problem with Brexit.

• There is a real prospect either of there being “no deal” or of a capitulation to the EU’s demands.

• In terms of administration – basic points such as customs and border control – the UK state is nowhere near ready.

• But the accumulation of these difficulties does not make Brexit any less likely.

• Unless something exceptional happens, the UK will leave the EU by automatic operation of law on 29 March 2019.

• Very little can prevent this.

• Five-a-day eating targets for fruit and vegetables could become unaffordable for millions of low-income families as a result of Brexit-related food price rises, a report says.

• The Food Foundation says that already-feeble consumption rates of healthy food in the UK could nosedive under Brexit because the triple impact of exchange rates, labour costs and tariffs could add up to £158 a year to the amount a family of four spends on fruit and vegetables.

• The thinktank warns that the poorest families – which spend the biggest proportion of their household budget on food – will be hardest hit, and calls for an expanded healthy food voucher system to help boost household nutrition in deprived areas.

• Airbus has told MPs that Britain risks losing the “crown jewels” of its aviation industry to China as a result of Brexit, putting up to 7,000 wing-manufacturing jobs in Wales at risk.

• The company’s senior corporate representative in the UK warned the business select committee that the threat of new customs bureaucracy and reduced employee mobility could deter long-term investment and accelerate a shift to Asia.

• Though there are no current plans to move, Katherine Bennett said, she was “fighting to ensure that wing design – the crown jewels of aerospace – remains in this country”.

• When the Chancellor gets up to deliver his Budget statement it will be too much to expect consistency between his view of the impact on the economy of Brexit now and what it was before the referendum. It is now party line for Conservative politicians to pay lip service to the marvellous opportunities that Brexit offers in stark contradiction to their view before the referendum.

• In this respect at least, the establishment of the independent Office for Budget Responsibility has been a blessing for us all. Their duty is to provide an objective, and apolitical, perspective on public spending. While public opinion can be swayed on issues such as the likelihood that our former colonies will rush to our aid, or the potential for us to export innovative jams to France and naan breads to India; or the likelihood that Argentina will vote for us to have tremendous terms at the WTO, the hard facts of economic statistics remain unmoved.

• Colorado authorities have issued an $8.9 million fine against Uber for authorizing drivers who had prior disqualifying criminal or vehicle-related offenses.

• According to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, Uber allowed 57 drivers over the last 18 months to drive who should not have been permitted to drive for the company.

• France’s second largest bank has asked the Front National to close all its accounts and take its business elsewhere. The bank, Société Générale, told the far-right party, led by Marine Le Pen, that it wished to end its 30-year “banking relationship”. It gave no specific reason for the decision.

• FN officials said they were fighting the move and claimed that the party was being persecuted. The party headquarters in Nanterre, outside Paris, and local FN federations, have all been targeted, the news website Mediapart and France Inter radio reported on Tuesday.

• According to an internal party communication leaked to Mediapart, the bank is seeking to close all current and savings accounts held by the party.

• Martin Docherty-Hughes MP grilled the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland on a secret fine charged to the DUP’s dark-money Brexit funders.

• [...]

• Martin Docherty-Hughes, the SNP MP for West Dunbartonshire, used Northern Ireland Questions to ask the Secretary of State James Brokenshire why the DUP’s Brexit donors had been charged a record fine by the Electoral Commission. The secretive donors to the Tories’ partners in government are protected from public scrutiny by Northern Irish secrecy laws.

• Regardless of how one feels about migrants, protecting them in the labour market will bring benefits to all workers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The European Commission brokered a “global political solution” with Hungary over its controversial Russia-backed nuclear power station rather than escalate a fight amid already fraught relations with Budapest, according to internal documents obtained by an MEP and reviewed by POLITICO.

• More than 200 pages of Commission memos, emails and meetings minutes from 2016 show that Commission officials expressed serious doubts about Hungary’s numerous attempts to justify awarding the contract to build the €12 billion Paks II nuclear project to the Kremlin-owned Rosatom without opening up the project for bids.

• The former head of a U.S. government ethics watchdog said on Wednesday he had filed a complaint claiming senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway violated a law barring executive branch employees from engaging in political activity when she spoke on television against a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Committee voted to remove the obligation for [I]nternet platforms to employ technologies like automated content recognition to surveil all user uploads and try to pre-empt copyright infringement. It also proposes strengthening people’s ability to contest the takedown of works they’ve uploaded. This is the same balanced approach previously taken by the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee.

• New powers allowing pre-publication censorship of the media would have a “chilling effect” on investigative journalism, the BBC has warned.

• The newspaper industry has also raised objections to the Data Protection Bill, which is passing through parliament. It seeks to give individuals more control over their personal information and imposes harsher penalties on companies that misuse it. Journalists are granted significant exemptions to the rules if they are working to expose wrongdoing and criminality.

• The former Chinese official in charge of internet censorship, who hobnobbed with top executives from Facebook, Apple and Amazon and flatly denied that his government engaged in censorship, has been put under investigation by the Communist Party’s anti-corruption agency, state media reported on Tuesday.

• The downfall of the censorship official, Lu Wei, was a long time coming. He once held a cluster of titles that gave him formidable influence over internet policy. But he was removed from many posts last year, suggesting that his career was under a cloud.

• Another leading academic publisher has been warned that it may have to censor in China or be forced out of the market, as Beijing intensifies its control over foreign education and publishing.

• The editorial board at the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health accuses its publisher of promoting corporate interests.

• ONE day before its official opening, a group of Malaysian and Indonesian artists withdrew today from the Kuala Lumpur Biennale (KL Biennale) 2017, claiming that their artworks have been removed from the exhibition.

• The group, a collaboration of five Malaysians from Pusat Sekitar Seni (PSS) and two Indonesians from Population Project, had produced an installation entitled Under Construction.

• The censors seem to be out in force lately on the American college campus. November saw Brandeis University cancel the world premiere of a play about Lenny Bruce. Then Knox College in Illinois cancelled the staging of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Person of Szechwan.” In both cases, the charge against the dramas was racial insensitivity. And in both cases, only cloudy reasoning could lead viewers to ignore the clear anti-racist intent of these plays.

• The ironies are overwhelming, with poor Lenny and Bertolt bludgeoned first from the right and now from the left. In 1947, Brecht found himself face-to-face with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, charged with his creation of “a number of very revolutionary poems, plays, and other writings.” In 1961, Bruce, a quintessential counter-culture figure, was prosecuted for “obscenity.”

• Wilfrid Laurier University officials have offered one of their T.A.s an apology for the way they handled a complaint surrounding her tutorial.

• The issue started when Lindsay Shepherd, a master’s student, played a controversial YouTube clip about gender-neutral pronouns in her tutorial for students in a communications class.

• Last week, we wrote about the truly ridiculous letter sent by Senate candidate Roy Moore’s nutty lawyer, Trenton Garmon, threatening to sue Alabama Media Group for defamation for daring to write about reports of Moore’s sketchy behavior towards girls and young women. In that piece, we noted that AMG made it clear it wasn’t going to back down, noting that it stood behind its reporting and the threats only made the news organization that much more interested in “doggedly” pursuing the truth. Now, as pointed out on Boing Boing, we see the official response from Alabama Media Group’s lawyer, John G. Thompson Jr.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Do your friends and family rope you into providing tech support when you’re home for the holidays? Use this opportunity to be a digital security hero and rescue your family from tracking cookies, unencrypted disks, insecure chats, and recycled passwords.

• Check out EFF’s Security Education Companion for ideas and inspiration. And remember: People learn by doing! Encourage friends and family members to walk through new security concepts and tools with you, and avoid the pitfalls of taking over their devices and doing it yourself.

• Another court has decided warrants must accompany Stingray use. (via the New York Times) The ruling handed down earlier this month clarifies the distinction between the records obtained and the records requested. In this case, police used a pen register request to deploy their Stingray device. As the court points out, Stingray devices grab a lot more than just phone numbers.

• [...]

• The decision also notes Stingray use was “conceded” by the prosecution, suggesting it fought this disclosure for as long as it could.

• This is good news for residents of New York and another small step towards a unified judicial view on Stingray deployments. Better yet, it has probably resulted in audible wailing and gnashing of teeth in the upper levels of the NYPD bureaucracy.

• In short, this is the tech world telling DHS and ICE that its belief that there’s a “nerd harder” solution to using computers and algorithms to sniff out terrorists is a load of pure hooey. It may be true, as Arthur C. Clarke once stated, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but the corollary does not apply: not all magical solutions can be implemented in technology. It’s kind of ridiculous that actual technologists were needed to explain this to DHS, but that’s where things are these days.

• Google has been tracking Android users even if they had location tracking turned off and did not have a SIM in their smartphones, according to a published report.

• Since January, all kinds of Android phones and tablets have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers and sending the encrypted data to Google’s push notifications and messaging management system when connected to the internet. It’s a practice that customers can’t opt out of — even if their phones are factory reset.

• So much for going off the grid. There are some caveats to Google’s permissionless collection of cell site location data, with the most significant being the fact Google didn’t store the auto-collected cell tower info. That doesn’t excuse the practice, but it at least keeps it from becoming tracking data the government can access without a warrant.

• Google’s collection of cell tower data occurred when notifications were pushed or phone users utilized the phone’s built-in messaging service. In both cases, it’s reasonable to assume users weren’t expecting Google to be collecting this data. (It wouldn’t be necessarily reasonable to assume cell providers weren’t, as that’s what’s needed to deliver messages and notifications if the user isn’t using a WiFi connection.) But no one would reasonably assume the operating system would still send cell tower info to Google with the SIM card pulled.

• This is a troubling practice to be engaged in, no matter how temporary the storage of cell site data. It flies directly in the face of what phone users expect when they shut off location services or undertake other affirmative actions to minimize their digital footprint.

• The difference between most people in 2017 and myself is which email providers we use. I am going to throw out a wild guess and say you use a Gmail account as your main email address. And if you don’t I bet you know SEVERAL people that do.

• Another scandal that’s currently still gaining speed in the US is connected to the major US intelligence agency – the National Security Agency (NSA). This Monday, the New York Times reported that a year ago unknown hackers infiltrated the NSA network and stole secret programs for cyber break-ins. Because one of its employees had Kaspersky anti-virus software on his computer, the NSA claimed ‘Russia did it’.

• Texas authorities have recently gotten formal permission from a state judge to search the deceased Sutherland Springs shooter’s seized iPhone SE and LG candybar-style phone. In addition, the Texas Rangers have also submitted a formal request to Apple in order to access Devin Patrick Kelley’s iCloud data.

• The problem here isn’t so much a fear of hackers [sic] – it’s the things that parents are doing with these smartwatches. Not only are they listening to their kids as they go about their daily lives; they’re also using the kid-borne gadgets to listen to what their teachers are saying. And in a country that takes privacy very seriously, that’s a no-go.

• We urge the Government to allow for not for profit bodies, as defined in Article 80(1) of the GDPR, to act in the public interest to help groups of affected people to seek collective redress from those in breach of their data protection obligations.

• We live in the golden age of leaks. That’s not to say that leaks didn’t happen before. But the move to digital data and the availability of high-speed Internet connections has made the exfiltration of data on a massive scale much easier. Where in 1971 Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy 7,000 pages of what became known as the Pentagon Papers before he could leak them to the New York Times, Chelsea Manning was able to give 750,000 military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks in 2010 by copying them onto writable CDs. Later, Edward Snowden is believed to have gathered and removed around 1.7 million intelligence files – something that would have been impossible had it been analog data. All those leaks were made by whistleblowers who wanted the public to know about US government activities. But alongside the actions of Manning and Snowden there have been an increasing number of thefts of personal data on a massive scale.

• As the clock winds down to the end of the year, the NSA (along with the FBI, CIA, and other government components with access to NSA collections) is hoping it won’t have its internet surveillance programs limited in any way. So far, it’s receiving plenty of help from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has offered up a zero-reform package. (The House has its own version, which actually includes a few reforms, but it still leaves plenty of loopholes for domestic surveillance.)

• To that end, the NSA has released a highly-misleading Q&A on Section 702 surveillance — one that conveniently ignores its historic problems with incidental collection and the other authorities being renewed that actually do allow it to target US persons.

• The NSA chooses to focus solely on Section 702 and the issue of targeting. But these focal points are misleading. The NSA has plenty of ways of obtaining US persons’ communications without targeting them. On top of that, the NSA has a few options for targeting US persons that go completely unmentioned. And the FBI is allowed to target US persons for a number of reasons using NSA surveillance programs — again, something the Q&A ignores completely.

• Three years ago, EFF exposed how hundreds of law enforcement agencies were putting families at risk by distributing free ComputerCOP “Internet safety” software that actually transmitted keystrokes unencrypted to a third-party server. Our report also raised serious questions about whether the company was deceiving government agencies by circulating a bogus letter of endorsement from a top official in the U.S. Treasury Department.

• This month, our suspicions were confirmed. A document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that, in response to EFF’s research, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General launched an investigation into ComputerCOP. The final report concluded that the company had, in fact, doctored a government letter to improperly convince law enforcement agencies to spend asset forfeiture funds to buy the product.

• If the government can access cellphone location records without a warrant, journalism suffers. So does democracy.

• For today’s journalists, cellphones are mobile newsrooms that go where a reporter goes. They’re used to contact sources, record interviews, write notes and articles, take photos and videos, share work on social media, follow breaking news, and more.

• So when the government can access — without a warrant — cellphone location records that could be used to reconstruct a person’s movements over time, it not only infringes upon the public’s Fourth Amendment right to privacy, but also threatens reporters’ ability to maintain the confidentiality of their sources and gather the news without being surveilled.

• That’s why the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 19 other media organizations are urging the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn an appeals court ruling in Carpenter v. United States and require the government to obtain a warrant to acquire cellphone location data.

• This morning, the European Parliament has adopted its position on a new Directive regulating ‘contracts for the supply of digital content’. It has enacted a fundamental principle, already drawn few weeks ago in the ePrivacy Regulation: “personal data cannot be compared to a price, and therefore cannot be considered as a commodity’.

• On 26 October 2017, the European Parliament has adopted its position on the ePrivacy Regulation, specifying that ‘no user shall be denied access to any [...] service [...] on grounds that he or she has not given his or her consent [...] to the processing of personal information [...] that is not necessary for the provision of that service’ (see art. 8, paragraph 1a, of the LIBE report).

• Last week, Privacy News Online reported on a worrying trend of increased surveillance in the workplace. This kind of spying includes capturing every keystroke workers make. The practice is regarded in many jurisdictions as acceptable because people are working on equipment provided by their employer, and use it to carry out tasks for the company that pays their wages. So the logic is that an employer has permission to check that the equipment is being used properly, and that employees are working diligently. But a blog post on the Freedom to Tinker blog reveals that keystroke capture and more is taking place on public websites too:

• Once we attached cameras to computers, people predictably started sending each other nudes over the internet. Research now indicates the majority of Americans are sending and receiving explicit messages online: 88 percent of the 870 people who participated in a 2015 Drexel University study said they’ve sexted.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Police in schools criminalize students and don’t make anyone safer. They’ve got to go.

• Families in Louisville, Kentucky, are rightly calling for an end to police in schools following the recent assault on two Black students perpetrated by law enforcement at a local high school that was caught on camera.

• Before the video begins, two students at Jeffersontown High School were said to have been in a fight over a pair of headphones when a police officer intervened. He reportedly called for additional officers after being attacked by the student. The video clip shows three police officers on top of a teenager. One officer presses the teen’s head into the linoleum floor while another holds his legs, and the third can be seen kicking him multiple times. As students look on, some crying out for the police to stop, an officer waves what appears to be a stun gun at the onlookers. The stun gun had reportedly been used on the detained student.

• As the video comes to an end, someone can be heard telling the student to turn off the recording.

• Outrage at the incident started within the community and was then shared widely on social media after activists posted video of the disturbing incident on Twitter. This assault on students of color at a high school by police represents the latest evidence that police do not belong in our schools.

• Rashida Jones is still credited as a writer on Toy Story 4, the next installment in the beloved franchise. But, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, the actress and her writing partner at the time, Will McCormack, left the project early on after John Lasseter, the acclaimed head of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, made an unwanted advance.

• John Lasseter, the head of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios and one of the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry, acknowledged Tuesday that he had crossed the line with employees. He is taking a six-month leave of absence.

• Lasseter sent a memo to staff apologizing for making employees feel disrespected or uncomfortable, Variety has confirmed.

• “That was never my intent,” he wrote. “Collectively, you mean the world to me, and I deeply apologize if I have let you down. I especially want to apologize to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of an unwanted hug or any other gesture they felt crossed the line in any way, shape, or form.”

• Lasseter is taking a leave as several prominent Hollywood figures are grappling with allegations of sexual harassment. His name has continued to be mentioned privately, with a number of former Pixar employees telling Variety that he has behaved inappropriately and describing a culture at the company as “toxic” and “sexist” for women. His leave was first reported by the Hollywood Reporter.

• Not one person with a discrimination complaint was referred to see a legal aid lawyer in the last year, BuzzFeed News has learned.

• New Ministry of Justice figures reveal the impact of legal aid cuts on people who cannot afford a lawyer to bring discrimination cases against their employer or companies they use.

• Funding for almost all employment cases was scrapped in 2013 as part of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO). To soften the blow, the government said legal aid would be available in discrimination cases – but could only be accessed after first getting advice over the phone.

• A report in the Financial Times claims Foxconn has employed teenaged students to manufacture iPhone X components and that those students worked illegal overtime. Additionally, according to one of the students cited in the report, a school had students working at the factory as part of their educational programs.

• “We sincerely hope that Harvard will quickly correct its non-compliance and return to a collaborative approach,” the letter said, adding that “Harvard has not yet produced a single document.” The inquiry is related to a federal lawsuit filed by a group of students in 2014 alleging Harvard limits the number of Asian Americans it admits each year. A similar complaint was made to the Justice Department.

• In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment, or credit.

• But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company’s monitoring of the rental market.

• Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users, such as African-Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina, and Spanish speakers.

• An Inspector General’s report showing Customs and Border Protection violated court orders during its implementation of Trump’s travel ban appears to be headed for a burial by the DHS. A letter from the Inspector General to high-ranking senators says the department has indicated it will invoke an unchallengeable privilege to withhold large portions of the report, if not its entire contents.

• In East Ramapo, a white voting bloc has taken control of the school board and shut out public school supporters.

• Even if your school district isn’t as deeply troubled as the East Ramapo Central School District in the Lower Hudson Valley, it might very well be suffering from the same Voting Rights Act violation.

• East Ramapo is a racially diverse district — a little less than half of the residents in the district are people of color — but it has a very segregated school system. Ninety-six percent of the district’s public school students are children of color, while 99 percent of its private school students are white.

• But because of a very common method of electing school board members, the entire East Ramapo Board of Education consists of candidates preferred by the district’s white voters. The district uses at-large elections, which means that board members are elected by all the voters of the school district, rather than voters from individual geographic areas. Extreme racial polarization in the school system is reflected in racially-polarized voting in district elections. The white majority tends to vote as a bloc to support candidates who favor low taxes and high investment in private school services, while black and Latino voters tend to support candidates who favor investment in the public schools.

• The U.S. government has long abused its “terrorism list” by including disfavored nations while leaving off “allies” implicated in 9/11 and other terror attacks, a practice President Trump has resumed, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• [...]

• Other countries besides North Korea have been the subject of misuse of the state sponsor list. The Reagan administration took Iraq off the list as part of its tilt toward Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. The George H.W. Bush administration returned Iraq to the list after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Neither move had to do with any change in Iraqi behavior regarding international terrorism.

• [...]

• Misusing the list of state sponsors of terrorism sends the message that the United States does not care all that much about terrorism itself. It undermines the credibility of efforts that really are focused on countering terrorism. Most fundamentally, it diminishes the incentive of the targeted regime to get out or stay out of international terrorism. If the North Korean regime sees that it is going to be branded a state sponsor of terrorism regardless of what it is doing terrorism-wise, it has that much less disincentive against sliding back into the reprehensible things it was doing in the 1980s.

• In early August 2017, the counterterrorism division of the FBI released a report warning of the danger of “Black Identity Extremists.” Jana Winter and Sharon Weinberger reported for Foreign Policy that, as “white supremacists prepared to descend on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, the FBI warned about a new movement that was violent, growing, and racially motivated. Only it wasn’t white supremacists; it was ‘black identity extremists.’”

• The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch Staff reported that the FBI report used the term BIEs (the Bureau’s acronym for “Black Identity Extremists”) to describe “a conglomeration of black nationalists, black supremacists, and black separatists, among other disaffiliated racist individuals who are anti-police, anti-white, and/or seeking to rectify perceived social injustices against blacks.” According to the SPLC report, the FBI was “taking some heat from historians, academics and former government officials for creating the new ‘BIE’ term,” which categorized a range of activists, not by their common ideologies or goals, but by race.

• The Department of Immigration & Customs Enforcement is taking new steps in its plans for monitoring the social media accounts of applicants and holders of U.S. visas. At a tech industry conference last Thursday in Arlington, Virginia, ICE officials explained to software providers what they are seeking: algorithms that would assess potential threats posed by visa holders in the United States and conduct ongoing social media surveillance of those deemed high risk.

• The comments provide the first clear blueprint for ICE’s proposed augmentation of its visa-vetting program. The initial announcement of the plans this summer, viewed as part of President Donald Trump’s calls for the “extreme vetting” of visitors from Muslim countries, stoked a public outcry from immigrants and civil liberties advocates. They argued that such a plan would discriminate against Muslim visitors and potentially place a huge number of individuals under watch.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Obama administration’s network neutrality rules are in danger, and the activists who helped get those regulations enacted aren’t giving up without a fight. They’re planning a series of protests nationwide to pressure the Federal Communications Commission to reject Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back network neutrality protections.

• The protests will be held outside Verizon stores on December 7, a week before an expected December 14 vote on Pai’s proposal. They chose Verizon because Verizon has been a leading opponent of the net neutrality rules and because Pai worked as Verizon’s associate general counsel from 2001 to 2003.

• “The company has been spending millions on lobbying and lawsuits to kill net neutrality so they can gouge us all for more money,” the protest organizers write. “We’re calling on our lawmakers to do their job overseeing the FCC and speak out against Ajit Pai’s plan to gut Title II net neutrality protections.”

• As we noted yesterday, the FCC is trying to use the Thanksgiving holiday to distract the press and public from its blatant handout to one of the least liked and least competitive industries in America. As we also noted yesterday, trying to bury such an epic middle finger to consumers behind the cranberry sauce is an obvious underestimation of just how unpopular this plan is, and the policy, political, and cultural backlash it’s going to generate for years.

• That said, all six of you not currently driving long distances, buying turkeys and potatoes, or otherwise distracted by holiday preparation can now read a fact sheet provided by the FCC (pdf) explaining what Ajit Pai and his lobbying friends in the telecom industry have planned for you.

• New York’s attorney general has been trying to investigate fraud in public comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s anti-net neutrality plan but alleges that the FCC has refused to cooperate with the investigation.

• Michelle Conrow picks up a book about the history of the US postal service lying next to her laptop, flicking through the pages.

• “It talks about when there was a debate over whether we should have service to rural areas. It was all the same arguments about why we shouldn’t – too expensive, it doesn’t return the investment – and why we should – farmers need the news, people need to order things. It was a similar debate with the telephone, electricity … we’ve been here before.

• The Internet is essential infrastructure for our economy and culture. It has ushered in an unprecedented era of freedom for communication. And thanks to strong net neutrality rules, users have been in the driver’s seat of choosing what is successful online, without interference from government or Internet service provider (ISP) gatekeepers.

• The Internet Association, a trade group that represents web 40-some web companies including Google and Facebook, pointed to lack of ISP options as a critical flaw in the plan. “Consumers have little choice in their ISP,” the organization said, “and service providers should not be allowed to use this gatekeeper position at the point of connection to discriminate against websites and apps.” And ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley issued a similar warning, saying, “Gutting net neutrality will have a devastating effect on free speech online. Without it, gateway corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T will have too much power to mess with the free flow of information.”

• If the FCC abandons its commitment to net neutrality, Congress can and should step in to put it back on course. That means enacting real, forward-looking legislation that embraces all of the bright-line rules, not just the ones ISPs don’t mind. And it means forcing the FCC to its job, rather than handing it off to another agency that’s not well-positioned to do the work.

• Pai’s FCC is also planning to remove monopoly regulations in the media sector, including bans on cross ownership of TV stations and newspapers in major sectors.

• As the Trump administration guts oversight of some of the least liked and least competitive companies in America in one of the most brazen examples of crony capitalism in tech policy history, ISPs like Verizon and Comcast seem intent on insisting that none of this is actually happening. Verizon, you’ll recall, went so far as to publish a comical video in which the company used a fake journalist to try and construct an alternate timeline; one in which Verizon hasn’t been trying to undermine net neutrality and a healthy, competitive internet for the last fifteen years:

• Most major internet sites have said that they disagree with plans to axe net neutrality – even those such as Amazon and Netflix which represent a large proportion of internet traffic in the US, and could afford to pay the fees (though may well end up passing the costs on to end customers.

• Fight For The Future which is spearheading protests and lobbying senators to delay or even challenge the decision on legal grounds has reacted furiously.

• Of course, well-established services from deep-pocketed companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft will likely remain widely available. But net-neutrality advocates argue that smaller companies that don’t have the money to pay for fast lanes could suffer. In other words, protecting net neutrality isn’t about saving Netflix but about saving the next Netflix.

• It’s expected to be approved on Dec. 14 in a party-line vote by the agency’s five commissioners. But some companies will probably put up a legal fight to prevent it from taking hold. This video explains how net neutrality works.

• INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS like Comcast and Verizon may soon be free to block content, slow video-streaming services from rivals, and offer “fast lanes” to preferred partners. For a glimpse of how the internet experience may change, look at what broadband providers are doing under the existing “net neutrality” rules.

• When AT&T customers access its DirecTV Now video-streaming service, the data doesn’t count against their plan’s data limits. Verizon, likewise, exempts its Go90 service from its customers’ data plans. T-Mobile allows multiple video and music streaming services to bypass its data limits, essentially allowing it to pick winners and losers in those categories.

• In addition to ditching its own net neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission also plans to tell state and local governments that they cannot impose local laws regulating broadband service.

• This detail was revealed by senior FCC officials in a phone briefing with reporters today, and it is a victory for broadband providers that asked for widespread preemption of state laws. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposed order finds that state and local laws must be preempted if they conflict with the US government’s policy of deregulating broadband Internet service, FCC officials said. The FCC will vote on the order at its December 14 meeting.

• Open internet advocates warned that “we’re running out of time” to save the web from corporate control and called on Americans to make their representatives’ phones “ring off the hook” Tuesday after FCC chairman Ajit Pai unveiled his long-awaited plan to scrap net neutrality that critics slammed as “naked corporatism” designed to give a major gift to the telecom industry at the expense of the public.

• “The reckless wrecking ball strikes again,” former FCC commissioner and current special adviser at Common Cause Michael Copps said in a statement. “FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s scorched-earth plan for net neutrality displays callous disregard for both process and substance. The chairman’s plan to do away with net neutrality will be a disaster for consumers and yet another handout for big business.”

• Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, said Pai’s plan “makes no sense” for a variety of key reasons.

• The Federal Communications Commission today announced its plan to deregulate the broadband industry and eliminate net neutrality rules, setting up a December 14 vote to finalize the repeal.

• As expected, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to reverse the commission’s classification of home and mobile ISPs as common carriers, eliminating the legal justification for the net neutrality rules and numerous other consumer protections. The Republican-controlled FCC is likely to vote 3-2 along party lines in favor of Pai’s plan at its regular monthly meeting in December, ignoring Internet users who voiced widespread support for net neutrality rules.

• Except this obfuscation plan isn’t “devilishly brilliant,” it’s a massive underestimation of the brutal backlash awaiting the broadband industry and its myopic water carriers. Survey after survey (including those conducted by the cable industry itself) have found net neutrality has broad, bipartisan support. The plan is even unpopular among the traditional Trump trolls over at 4chan /pol/ that spent the last week drinking onion juice. It’s a mammoth turd of a proposal, and outside of the color guard at the lead of the telecom industry’s sockpuppet parade — the majority of informed Americans know it.

• Net neutrality has been a fifteen year fight to protect the very health of the internet itself from predatory duopolists like Comcast. Killing it isn’t something you can hide behind the green bean amandine, and it’s not a small scandal you can bury via the late Friday news dump. This effort is, by absolutely any measure, little more than a grotesque hand out to one of the least competitive — and most disliked — industries in America. Trying to obfuscate this reality via the holidays doesn’t change that. Neither does giving the plan an Orwellian name like “Restoring Internet Freedom.”

• Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission’s Trump-appointed chairman, is moving to gut the net neutrality rules that progressive activists and a massive online movement successfully pushed for during the Obama administration.

• The effort to kill net neutrality adds to a long list of deregulatory moves that media rights advocates say will hurt people the FCC is charged with protecting: everyday consumers, low-income families, underserved Indigenous communities, disabled people, as well as women and people of color, who remain underrepresented in broadcast media.

• Last week, Pai and the FCC’s Republican majority began overhauling the Lifeline program that subsidizes phone and internet service for low-income people, an effort that Democratic commissioners say will punitively cripple the crucial safety net. Commissioners also voted along party lines to repeal a list of media ownership regulations, a move that critics say will usher in a new era of media consolidation in local markets and help a massive, right-leaning broadcasting company gobble up TV stations without selling others off.

• Today, we heard from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about its plans to devastate Network Neutrality. Instead of responding to the millions of Americans who want to protect the free and open Internet, the FCC instead is ceding to the demands of a handful of massive ISPs, like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.

• EFF will be analyzing the full plan when it is released. But based on what we know so far, it’s clear that Chairman Pai is seeking to reverse the 2015 Open Internet Order that established clear but light touch protections for Internet users and Internet innovation. The FCC’s new approach invites a future where only the largest Internet, cable, and telephone companies survive, while every start-up, small business, and new innovator is crowded out—and the voices of nonprofits and ordinary individuals are suppressed. Costs will go up, as ISPs take advantage of monopoly power to raise rates on edge providers and consumers alike. And the FCC’s proposed plan adds salt to the wound by interfering with state efforts to protect consumer privacy and competition.

• Today, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced the next step in their plan to roll back net neutrality. The FCC still has time to remove the vote from the docket, which we hope they do before the December 14 meeting.

• If the FCC votes to roll back these net neutrality protections, they would end the internet as we know it, harming every day users and small businesses, eroding free speech, competition, innovation and user choice in the process.

• Our position is clear: the end of net neutrality would only benefit Internet Service Providers (ISPs). That’s why we’ve led the charge on net neutrality for years to ensure everyone has access to the entire internet.

• If you’ve been paying attention, the Trump admninistration has been engaged in a frontal assault on everything from net neutrality to media consolidation rules, its legacy-industry-cozy policies driving a new wave of mergermania in telecom and media. As such, few thought the administration would block AT&T’s $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. After all, AT&T wasn’t acquiring a direct competitor, and the harms caused by vertical integration — however real — haven’t been a genuine concern in regulatory telecom oversight from either party for years (see Comcast NBC Universal or Sinclair Tribune).

• But then rumors began to emerge that the Trump DOJ was contemplating suing to block AT&T’s latest megamerger — unless it was willing to sell either DirecTV (acquired by AT&T last year) or Turner Broadcasting, owner of CNN. Reports indicate that AT&T refused both options and was primed for a court showdown

Intellectual Monopolies

• For well over a decade, we’ve noted that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz has been one of the many, many economists who are skeptical of the benefits of our current patent system, noting that it appears to do a lot more harm than good, both to the process of innovation and (importantly) to the wider distribution of the gains from innovation. He’s been particularly critical of pharmaceutical patents over the years. And, it appears that he may sense a somewhat unique opportunity to actually get countries around the world to actually rethink traditional patent and copyright regimes — in part because the US, under the Trump administration, is pulling back from various international agreements and fora.

• Earlier this year, along with Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev, Stigliz authored an interesting paper about ways to rethink innovation, intellectual property and development. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the paper, but I do agree with much of it — especially the presentation of the problems of today’s systems.

Copyrights

• So for several years now consumers have faced a growing number of obnoxious retransmission blackouts, which occur when broadcasters and cable providers can’t agree on new programming contracts. Such feuds usually go something like this: a broadcaster will demand a fairly obnoxious price hike for the same content, to which the cable provider (already awash in complaints about higher rates) will balk. Instead of negotiating their differences like adults, this content is subsequently blacked out for paying customers, who never see refunds for the inconvenience.

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