● 11.29.17

● Links 29/11/2017: Lakka 2.1, Huge Apple Flaw

Posted in News Roundup at 8:29 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux Gaming: Despite what you may hear from those gamers who are game title loyal to Windows-specific video games, 2017 has been a decent year for gaming on the Linux desktop. Some of the most notable games have come from video game publisher, Feral Interactive. Notable title examples provided by this publisher include XCOM 2, Tomb Raider, Mad Max, and Total War: WARHAMMER (among other great game titles).

• Discovery and installation of great Linux games is possible because of Steam (Valve), GoG.com, and the Humble Bundle. It’s also worth noting that crowd sourcing efforts on Kick Starter (among others) has also given Linux gaming a fair bit of traction. I think overall, Valve’s Steam client provides the best example of Linux game discovery and even curation thanks to the ample reviews and user generated lists to help gamers decide on their next purchase.

• It’s also worth mentioning that there are actually entire distros dedicated to Linux gaming. The first one, based on Debian is called Steam OS as it’s provided by Valve. Steam OS makes sense if you plan on running it as a dedicated gaming box or pre-installed on a “Steam Machine.”

• Another great gaming distro that I personally think is vastly more interesting than Steam OS is Sparky Linux. While it lacks the big company backing found with Valve’s offering, it does come with WINE support pre-installed. This is useful for those of you who also enjoy playing WINE supported Windows games on your Linux box. I also love how it utilizes a lightweight desktop environment which means more resources are dedicated to your Linux gaming.

• Letting go of old installation media can be hard. No, chances are you’re never going to install an old distribution with a 2.2 series kernel ever again (or maybe you are, who knows?). But there’s a certain nostalgia attached to the physical relics of your early days with computing, particularly if you managed to save your first Linux boot disk.

• So how long have you been holding on to your installers? Do you still have an install disk for which you no longer even have a computer that will read the disk? And if you do still have the appropriate disk reader, do you think your media aged gracefully enough to still work today?

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel 4.14 is not only the latest and greatest kernel available for Linux-based operating systems, but also a long-term support branch that will receive maintenance updates for the next couple of years. It brings support for new hardware and lots of performance optimizations, so it’s the recommended version for all Linux PCs.

• The latest release is Linux kernel 4.14.2, and you can now install it on your Slackware Current 14.2 operating system, as well as other Slackware derivatives, including Slax, Zenwalk, and Arne Exton’s SlackEX distro. The custom kernel is compiled by Arne Exton with support for more hardware devices and other optimizations.

• The UPower power management abstraction layer for Linux systems is out with another pre-1.0 release.

• AMD has sent out 14 new patches today for the AMDKFD HSA kernel driver in material that should be targeting Linux 4.16.

• The long-term future of Linux has been officially confirmed by the organisation behind the popular software.

• The Linux Foundation has revealed that Linux 4.14 will be supported until January 2020, whilst Linux 4.4. will last until 2022.

• The news was confirmed by Linux Foundation director of IT infrastructure security, Konstantin Ryabitsev, in a Google Plus post written after October’s news that the Linux kernel team agreed to extend the next version of Linux’s Long Term Support (LTS) from two to six years was met with plenty of confusion.

• The extension to the LTS will help Android, embedded Linux and Linux IoT developers, but not all future Linux LTS versions will have the same lifespan.

Linux Foundation

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gathers all Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects under one roof to further the advancement of cloud native computing. At the upcoming event in Austin, Animesh Singh and Tommy Li of IBM will discuss how to build, deploy, and connect Java microservices with Istio service mesh. In this article, Singh offers a preview of their presentation.

Graphics Stack

• Linux input expert and libinput creator Peter Hutterer of Red Hat is working on support for libinput to handle natively recording and replaying of input events.

• AMD’s GPUOpen team has announced the release of Compressonator 2.7, the newest version of their tools for dealing with compressed assets and for testing the impact of different compression techniques.

Benchmarks

• It’s been a few months since last running a Linux distribution / operating system comparison on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud, but given the ever-advancing state of Linux, here are some fresh benchmarks when testing the Amazon Linux AMI, Clear Linux, Debian 9.2, Gentoo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP3, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

• For this round of testing the c4.4xlarge instance type was used. The c4.4xlarge instance type has 16 virtual CPUs yielding 62 ECUs of compute power. This instance type has 30GB of system memory and in the US data centers generally costs around $0.8 USD per hour for on-demand pricing. In all of our testing of this instance type over the past few days, the c4.4xlarge is currently backed by Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 CPUs: the Haswell server processors that have 10 cores / 20 threads, 2.6GHz base frequency, 3.3GHz turbo frequency, 25MB smart cache. All of the instances were using Xen HVM configuration for testing.

• The 11 Linux distributions tested were Antergos 17.11, CentOS 7, Clear Linux 19260, Debian 9.2.1, Fedora Workstation 27, Manjaro 17.0.6, Solus 3, Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 17.10, openSUSE Leap 42.3, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

• For those curious about the current benefits of AVX-512, here are some benchmarks using a recent snapshot of the GCC 8 compiler and comparing the performance of the generated binaries for the skylake and skylake-avx512 targets.

• AVX-512 right now is limited to just the Intel server and X-Series processors, but as we’ve reported already, Intel has effectively confirmed AVX-512 support for the Cannonlake desktop CPU line-up through GCC/Clang patches noting the AVX-512 addition. So due to greater AVX-512 availability on the horizon and continued AVX-512 improvements in GCC8, I ran some fresh benchmarks using the high-end Core i9 7980XE test system running Ubuntu Linux.

Applications

• TLDR is a free command line utility for various Linux distributions that provides you with summaries of Linux commands on request.

• Linux commands can be quite intimidating, especially if you are a new user. While you may use the man command to get information on a particular command, man descriptions are often not the easiest to go through.

• Notes Up is an open-source notes editor and manager aimed at Elementary OS. Its main attractions include a minimalist User Interface, an intuitive Markdown editor, support for keyboard shortcuts, dragging and dropping images, plugin extensions, and exporting notes to PDF.

• Although Notes-Up is aimed at Elementary OS, it is available for openSUSE and users of other Linux distros are free to try it out via its PPA.

• As you already know, all commands you run on your shell will be saved and you can view them at any time either by using history command or using UP/Down arrows keys or doing a reverse search using CTRL+R key combination from the Terminal. All commands that you run on the Terminal will be saved in .bash_history file. But you can view, access, and re-run them only from the same machine itself. What if you want to access your Terminal history from a different system on the network? No problem! Here is where “Bashhub” utility comes in help. It is a simple online web service where you can save all commands and access them from anywhere. Bashhub saves every commands entered across all sessions and systems, so you can access them from anywhere. To put this simply, your entire BASH history will be available in the cloud and the entire bash history is indexed, and searchable! Bashhub is completely free and open source.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine creator Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for the Wine 3.0 code freeze to begin next week.

• With Wine’s transition to a yearly, time-based release process, we’ve known Wine 3.0 would be coming soon. Today Alexandre communicated on wine-devel about the precise plans.

Games

• The good news just keeps coming, as Oxygen Not Included [Steam, Official Site] from Klei Entertainment is now officially available on Linux. It was only last week I noted about signs of it coming to Linux after a tip, since then I’ve been watching SteamDB like a hawk. You can see their official announcement here.

• It doesn’t yet have the SteamOS icon to indicate Linux support, but that should come soon.

• 2K and Firaxis Games have revealed a new expansion for Civilization VI [Steam] named ‘Rise and Fall’ which is due out early next year.

• While the Windows release is due for February 8th, the Linux version will likely be a few weeks later as is usually the case. Hopefully not too long though, I’m sure Aspyr Media will be on the job as soon as possible.

• Sky Force Reloaded [Steam, Official Site] isn’t your average shoot ‘em up, boasting some seriously good looking graphics and it’s coming to Linux in two days.

• I did quite like the previous game, Sky Force Anniversary, from the same developer which also supports Linux. It ran really well and it was quite challenging, so I’m looking forward to seeing how far the series has advanced with the latest title.

• You’re running out of time, the clock is ticking, it’s time to run and gun! ICEBOX: Speedgunner [Steam, Official Site] is an FPS platformer that’s fast-paced and challenging.

• The developer, Endless Loop Studios, also created Blueprint Tycoon, Game Corp DX and my personal favourite of theirs: Hyper Knights. Hyper Knights: Battles looks like it takes some of the work done in Hyper Knights with a similar style, but it’s a very different game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Coming three weeks after the KDE Plasma 5.11.3 update, today’s KDE Plasma 5.11.4 release introduces a total of 45 improvements and bug fixes for various of the desktop environment’s core components and apps, including the Plasma Discover package manager, KWin window manager, as well as Plasma Workspace, Plasma Desktop, Plasma Vault, KSysGuard, and the KWayland integration.

• “Today KDE releases a Bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.11.4. Plasma 5.11 was released in October with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience. This release adds a three week’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important,” reads today’s announcement.

• In the past, KDE software has come a long way in providing privacy tools, but the tool-set is neither comprehensive, nor is privacy its implications widely seen as critical to our success in this area. Setting privacy as a central goal for KDE means that we will put more focus on this topic and lead to improved tools that allow users to increase their level of privacy. Moreover, it will set an example for others to follow and hopefully increase standards across the whole software ecosystem. There is much work to do, and we’re excited to put our shoulder under it and work on it.

• I published a rant about problems with Qt accessibility on Windows a few months ago. This posting got some unusual amount of attention, as it was shared on HackerNews and almost went to the top for a few minutes.

Distributions

• This article mentions basic information and links about Trisquel 8 GNU/Linux operating system codenamed “Flidas”. This article is for beginners who interested in Trisquel but have difficulties to find collective resources about Flidas. This article is also for developers who want to help Trisquel development but don’t know where to go. This article may be updated later as Flidas is currently being developed for the final release. I hope this article helps Trisquel 8 development as much as possible.

New Releases

• Softpedia has just been informed by the Q4OS team about the general availability of their brand-new Q4OS for Windows 10 installer that lets you install the Linux distro alongside Windows.

• Q4OS is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution created with the ex-Windows user in mind. It uses the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) by default to make the Windows to Linux migration easier, and there’s now an official installer to help newcomers install Q4OS alongside their Windows 10 installations on the same computer.

• “We are happy to introduce a first stable release of the Q4OS for Windows 10 installer. It allows everyone to install Q4OS alongside Windows in an easy way, with no need of modifying an existing Windows operating system, nor any of software installed, even with no need of repartitioning your disk drive,” said the Q4OS team.

• After 6 month of intense development and bugfixes, the team is proud to announce the stable release of Lakka 2.1!

• This release is a huge step forward in many aspects: UI, emulator cores, and supported hardware.

• If you’ve ever wanted to turn your Raspberry Pi SBC (Single-Board Computer) into a powerful, secure, and reliable web kiosk system, then you should give Raspberry WebKiosk a try today as the latest release brings numerous improvements and optimizations, along with the latest Debian/Raspbian Stretch updates.

• Coming hot on the heels of the Raspberry Pi Digital Signage 10.0 and Raspberry Slideshow 10.0 operating systems, Raspberry WebKiosk 7.0 is also based on the latest Raspbian/Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” ecosystem and features smoother HTML5 video playback, Adobe Flash Player support, and H264/AVC video acceleration.

• The Sparky 4-dev20171127 ARMhf image is now available for testing on supported Raspberry Pi computers, and it comes with several optimizations and changes. First and foremost, this update replaces several apps that consumed a lot of system memory with lighter variants that are more friendly with the 1GB RAM of the SBC.

• Second of all, the SparkyLinux 4-dev20171127 ARMhf image introduces a new raspi-config menu entry, which makes it easier for users to access the operating system’s configuration options, and improves configuration of both wired (Ethernet) and wireless (Wi-Fi) networks through the NetworkManager Applet.

Red Hat Family

• By releasing its AWS Service Broker this Wednesday as open-source code, Amazon Web Services will further facilitate enterprise digital transformation projects and deployment of seamless hybrid clouds, said an AWS solutions architect who specializes in helping partners migrate customers to DevOps and big data services.

• Around 90 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are known to use Linux, an open source operating system that’s growing exponentially in usage. Its rising popularity continues to fuel the demand for qualified Linux professionals worldwide. Red Hat, Inc., named by Forbes among the world’s most innovative corporations, remains the global leader in professional Linux education.

Finance

Fedora

• Ubuntu’s Mir display server stack is now available in the Fedora archive for Fedora Rawhide, Fedora 27, and Fedora 26 packages are also on the way.

• Over the past two months or so Canonical developers have been working on getting Mir running on Fedora and released that support as part of Mir 0.28.1. They’ve been working to get Mir running on non-Ubuntu distributions to try to encourage more community support and adoption around this display server that’s morphing into a potential Wayland compositor for helping the likes of MATE, Ubports, and others with basic Wayland support.

• The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 4.14. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test day for this Thursday, November 30. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate.

Debian Family

• As usual, biblatex and Biber updates go hand in hand, so here we are with the newest version of the next-generation bibliography management for LaTeX.

• Other than this, nothing spectacular here but the usual flow of updates and new packages. Notably might be the IBM Plex font family (see the CTAN packages plex and plex-otf), which replaces Helvetica Neue on official IBM communications. A complete family with sans, serif, and mono in various weights.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• This week has been split between some upcoming feature work (infiniband and clustering), helping some new contributors get started with contributing to LXD and doing a lot of backports to the stable branches.

Flavours and Variants

• The upgrade path from the Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” operating system is now officially open and users can upgrade their installations to the latest Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia” release.

• Linux Mint 18.3 launched the other day with both Cinnamon and MATE editions, which were previously available for download from the project’s main FTP mirror. And now, the upgrade path is already open for Linux Mint 18.2 users, allowing you to upgrade your installation to the latest Linux Mint 18.3 release.

• Linux Mint 18.3 – aka “Sylvia” – is here to remind users that, hey, sometimes Linux can work a little bit more like Apple, Google and Microsoft software. (Just kidding, don’t kill us.)

• In a blog post, the devs touted multiple interface improvements for usability, with an updated app store as “star of the show”. Features elsewhere included improved backups, system reports and automatic login.

Devices/Embedded

• CompuLab’s IOT-GATE-RPi mini-PC/gateway builds on the RPi CM3 with 2x GbE, RPi HAT expansion, and optional WiFi, BT, 3G, LTE, and -40 to 80°C support.

• CompuLab has added another Linux-friendly member to its IOT-GATE family of ultra-compact mini-PCs, following the IOT-GATE-iMX7, which is built around its NXP i.MX7 based CL-SOM-iMX7 computer-on-module. For the new IOT-GATE-RPi, CompuLab opted for a third-party COM: the popular Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, a COM version of the Raspberry Pi 3.

• If you often feel nostalgic about that Game Boy of your childhood and all those games you played on it, there is a good news for you. A Linux based device GameShell aims to bring it back to you. It is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter.

• NXP unveiled an “Open Industrial Linux” (OpenIL) distribution with real-time Xenomai extensions, crypto security, and support for OpenTSN networking.

• NXP announced a Buildroot-based, Xenomai-hardened “Open Industrial Linux” (OpenIL) distribution designed for industrial, networking, and secure connectivity applications that require real-time, determinist performance. OpenIL is billed as being open source, community backed, and hardware agnostic.

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Technology is always evolving. New developments, such as OpenStack, Progressive Web Apps, Rust, R, the cognitive cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things, and more are putting our usual paradigms on the back burner. Here is a rundown of the top open source trends expected to soar in popularity in 2018.

• Open source software is often the ugly stepchild of technology development. Because developers are largely donating their time and efforts, progress lags on building better versions of apps, blockchains and other software. That stifles progress, and leaves advancement in the hands of for-profit ventures, many of them without the public’s best interests at heart.

• Open source technologies like OpenStack are expanding their presence within service provider environments, emerging as a critical solutions set for operators looking to drive agility and cost efficiency in their infrastructure through automation and digitalisation. That role will only increase with technologies like containers, MEC and 5G come online to drive up demands on the network and deliver new service architectures and capabilities. But even as OpenStack matures inside service provider environments, it must now learn to play with others that form the greater service provider ecosystem, including other open source communities like ONAP and ETSI NFVI, says Ericsson’s Susan James.

• To Aaron Ault’s eyes, ag technology right now is something like a walled garden — not unlike the Microsoft of yesteryear, which attempted to gain dominion over the emerging online world by pushing exclusive use of its Windows OS and for-pay Internet Explorer browser.

• “Microsoft was wrong for a long time,” says Ault, who is Senior Research Engineer for the Open Ag Technology and Systems (OATS) Group at Purdue University. “They wanted to own the internet. Now they’re a huge open-source shop” — joining what Ault calls the “business model of success” found today at Android, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

• Agricultural technology needs a similar open-source awakening, Ault says. The current state of ag data, he says frankly, “stinks.” Most farmers don’t share their data, and often justify their stance by noting there’s not much data out there anyway so what does it matter. And because the little data that is out there isn’t used much, a perception lingers that it doesn’t have to be particularly good data.

• Anyone who’s trying to navigate the telecom waters that are open source these days may appreciate that there are entities out there that want to help.

• Montreal, Canada-based Inocybe is targeting Tier 2 and 3 wired/wireless service providers globally and enterprises to talk open source. The company has been involved with OpenDaylight since the beginning and is one of its top five contributors, and it wants to help entities that don’t have the type of resources the bigger Tier 1 operators have to devote to open-source projects, of which there are many.

Events

• Although you hear a lot about containers and Kubernetes these days, there’s a lot of mystery around them. In her Lightning Talk at All Things Open 2017, “From 0 to Kubernetes,” Amy Chen clears up the confusion.

• Amy, a software engineer at Rancher Labs, describes containers as baby computers living inside another computer that are suffering an “existential crisis” as they try to figure out their place in the world. Kubernetes is the way all those baby computers are organized.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla engineers aren’t letting up after their Quantum work in Firefox 57 that made the browser much faster. Next they have been improving WebRender and can be tested easily with Firefox Nightly.

• WebRender as a reminder is Mozilla’s GPU-based renderer used currently within the Servo engine and has also been fitted into Firefox with Gecko. Those unfamiliar with WebRender can learn more about its architecture on their GitHub Wiki and this Mozilla Hacks blog post from last month.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Its arrival allows anyone running a modern Linux distribution to install the latest stable release of LibreOffice in a click or two, without having to hunt down a PPA, tussle with tarballs or wait for a distro provider to package it up.

• A LibreOffice Flatpak has been available for users to download and install since August of last year and the LibreOffice 5.2 release.

• What’s “new” here is the distribution method. Rather than release updates through their own dedicated server The Document Foundation has opted to use Flathub.

• I’m simply going to talk about what I’ve been currently working on in Collabora Online or LibreOffice Online, as part of my job at Collabora.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The libmicrohttpd GNU project is the C library that makes it easy to run an HTTP web-server as part of another application while being as small as about ~32k compiled.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• RISC-V has a big new hardware backer… Western Digital.

• Western Digital just announced at the RISC-V Workshop conference that they will be getting behind RISC-V for the next generation of big data and fast data. They plan to switch over “one billion cores per year to RISC-V.” By the time their transition is complete, they anticipate to be shipping two billion RISC-V cores per year.

• SiFive, the first fabless provider of customized, open-source-enabled semiconductors, and Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC), a leading provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, at the 7th RISC-V Workshop today announced the companies have formed a strategic relationship to meet the growing interest and demand in the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The companies have previously collaborated to provide RISC-V soft CPU cores for Microsemi’s PolarFire® FPGAs, IGLOO™2 FPGAs, SmartFusion™2 system-on-chip (SoC) FPGAs and RTG4™ FPGAs, currently available as part of the Microsemi Mi-V RISC-V ecosystem.

Programming/Development

• DevOps often stymies early adopters with its ambiguity, not to mention its depth and breadth. By the time someone buys into the idea of DevOps, their first questions usually are: “How do I get started?” and “How do I measure success?” These five best practices are a great road map to starting your DevOps journey.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• A New Hampshire state judge has dismissed a case brought by an elderly doctor who recently gave up her medical license following a handful of allegations against her.

• Among other accusations, Dr. Anna Konopka, 84, has refused to use a computer and participate in the state’s new law for an online opioid monitoring program.

• “The Court has admiration for Dr. Konopka’s devotion to her patients,” Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John Kissinger wrote in his Monday order to dismiss the case, according to New Hampshire Public Radio.

Health/Nutrition

• A doctor offers a surgical add-on that leads to a $1,877 bill for a young girl’s ear piercing. A patient protests unnecessary scans to identify and treat her breast cysts. A study shows intensive-care-level treatment is overused.

• ProPublica has been documenting the myriad ways the health system wastes money on unnecessary services, often shifting the costs to consumers. But there are ways patients can protect themselves.

• We consulted the bill-wrangling professionals at Medliminal, one of a number of companies that negotiate to reduce their clients’ charges for a share of the savings. After years of jousting with hospitals, medical providers and insurers, their key advice for patients and their families is to be assertive and proactive.

• Her daughter emerged from surgery with her tongue newly freed and a pair of small gold stars in her ears.

• Only months later did O’Neill discover her cost for this extracurricular work: $1,877.86 for “operating room services” related to the ear piercing — a fee her insurer was unwilling to pay.

• At first, O’Neill assumed the bill was a mistake. Her daughter hadn’t needed her ears pierced, and O’Neill would never have agreed to it if she’d known the cost. She complained in phone calls and in writing.

• Over at Quartz, there’s a very interesting article about how patents may have contributed to the opioid crisis in the US. It’s based on a recent paper, May Your Drug Price Be Ever Green, by law professor Robin Feldman (who has done lots of great work about problems in our patent system) and law student Connie Wang.

• For many years, we’ve written about how the pharmaceutical industry has become so overly reliant on patents for their business model, that’s it’s become destructive. We’ve argued that the misaligned incentives of the patent system, especially in pharmaceuticals has so distorted incentives that the big drug companies basically have become focused solely on keeping exclusivity that it has lead to a lot of tragic game playing, where the cost has literally been people’s lives. This went into overdrive a decade or so ago when big pharma realized that many of their biggest sellers had patents expiring, and their pipeline had failed to come up with new drugs to replace the monopoly rents of the old. This resulted in all sorts of gamesmanship designed to allow big pharma to retain monopoly rights even after a drug should have gone off patent. This included pay for delay schemes, whereby big pharma effectively paid off generic makers to keep them out of the market for longer.

• On Monday, 27 November 2017, the WHO published the recommendations of the overall programme review of the global strategy and plan of action on public, health innovation and intellectual property (EB142/14). The full report of the overall programme review (OPR) will be published on Tuesday, 28 November 2017. The mandate for this work is provided resolution WHA68.18 (2015) which requested the Director-General to establish a “panel of 18 experts” to conduct an OPR of the global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property. (Source: EB142/14). The composition of this expert panel can be found here: http://www.who.int/medicines/innovation/gspa-review/members-list/en/

• The expert panel provided 33 recommendations which included 17 forward looking”high-priority actions” including on transparency and delinkage.

• WHO launched its Global Surveillance and Monitoring System for substandard and falsified medicines, vaccines and in-vitro diagnostic tests in July 2013. This first report is based on data collected during the first 4 years of operation up to 30 June 2017.

• The second report is a study on the public health and socioeconomic impact of substandard or falsified medical products conducted by WHO and the Member State Mechanism

Security

• It has now been a full week since the jaw-dropping revelations that Uber sustained a massive data breach in 2016, which affected more than 57 million people.

• Since November 21, the company has been hit with 10 federal lawsuits (including the two Ars reported on last week). On Monday, the city of Chicago and Cook County also sued Uber in Illinois state court, while numerous senators are now demanding answers as well.

• Once again the US government displays a level of ineptitude that can only be described as ‘Equifaxian‘ in nature. An AWS bucket with 47 viewable files was found configured for “public access,” and containing Top Secret information the government designated too sensitive for our foreign allies to see.

• The disk image, when unpacked and loaded, is a snapshot of a hard drive dating back to May 2013 from a Linux-based server that forms part of a cloud-based intelligence sharing system, known as Red Disk. The project, developed by INSCOM’s Futures Directorate, was slated to complement the Army’s so-called distributed common ground system (DCGS), a legacy platform for processing and sharing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information.

• Each branch of the military has its own version of the intelligence sharing platform — the Army’s is said to be the largest — but the Army’s system struggled to scale to the number of troops who need it.

• Red Disk was envisioned as a highly customizable cloud system that could meet the demands of large, complex military operations. The hope was that Red Disk could provide a consistent picture from the Pentagon to deployed soldiers in the Afghan battlefield, including satellite images and video feeds from drones trained on terrorists and enemy fighters, according to a Foreign Policy report.

• Once the ransomware infects a machine, it encrypts files and adds “[[email protected]].scarab” extension to affected files. A ransom note with filename “IF YOU WANT TO GET ALL YOUR FILES BACK, PLEASE READ THIS.TXT” is also dropped in the affected directory.

• The arrival of the holidays heralds another season soon to arrive: the tax season and, with it, the tax-return fraud season. And while the Internal Revenue Service has made some moves toward stanching the flow of fraudulent tax returns filed by cyber-criminals, another government agency may be offering up fresh fuel to fraudsters’ efforts: the US Department of Education.

• With the growing size of software every year, it’s entirely possible that some unattended vulnerability can allow hackers to take advantage of the software and compromise computers.

• The case of MS Office is no different. A recently patched 17-year-old remote code execution bug (CVE-2017-11882) is known to have acted as the Nitrous boost for the Cobalt malware which uses the famous tool Cobalt Strike used for penetration testing.

• After uncovering a massive trove of social media-based intelligence left on multiple Amazon Web Services S3 storage buckets by a Defense Department contractor, the cloud security firm UpGuard has disclosed yet another major cloud storage breach of sensitive intelligence information. This time, the data exposed includes highly classified data and software associated with the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A), an intelligence distribution platform that DOD has spent billions to develop. Specifically, the breach involves software for a cloud-based component of DCGS-A called “Red Disk.”

• The program, led by U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, a division of the National Security Agency, was supposed to help the Pentagon get real-time information about what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan in 2013 by collecting data from U.S. computer systems on the ground, according to tech news site ZDNet. But the agency killed the initiative in 2014 because of technical problems that it described in the leaked documents as “a major hindrance to operations.”

• A leaked document shines new light on a surveillance program developed by the National Security Agency.

• The program, known as Ragtime, collects the contents of communications, such as emails and text messages, of foreign nationals under the authority of several US surveillance laws.

• Magento Released two updates today to address some security concerns with Magento 1.x installations. While 2.x received some recent security updates, this is the first 1.x in some time.

Defence/Aggression

• BRITISH support of the Saudi Arabian military “should appal us all”, according to the SNP’s spokesman for international affairs, amid claims that Scottish regiment has been training a Saudi unit in Yemen.

• The role of the UK armed forces in the conflict has come under scrutiny after a picture was posted on a Scottish battalion Facebook page which appeared to members of 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland (2 Scots) helping to train Saudi troops.

• The battalion are said to be teaching Irregular Warfare (IW) techniques to officers from the Royal Saudi Land Forces Infantry Institute.

• Mike Cronk was sitting half-naked on a street corner, hands covered in blood, when the TV news reporter approached. The 48-year-old, who had used his shirt to try to plug a bullet wound in his friend’s chest, recounted in a live interview how a young man he did not know had just died in his arms.

• Cronk’s story of surviving the worst mass shooting in modern US history went viral, but many people online weren’t calling him a hero. On YouTube, dozens of videos, viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, claimed Cronk was an actor hired to play the part of a victim in the Las Vegas mass shooting on 1 October.

• The Pentagon says it detected and tracked a single North Korean missile launch and believes it was an intercontinental ballistic missile.

• Pentagon spokesman Col. Rob Manning said Tuesday that the missile was launched from Sain Ni, North Korea, and traveled about 1,000 kilometers (about 620 miles) before landing in the Sea of Japan.

• Manning says the Pentagon’s information is based on an initial assessment of the launch. He says a more detailed assessment was in the works.

• Twenty-first century slave markets. Human beings sold for a few hundred dollars. Massive protests throughout the world.

• The American and British media have awakened to the grim reality in Libya, where African refugees are being sold in open-air slave markets. Yet a crucial detail in this scandal has been downplayed or even ignored in many corporate media reports: the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in bringing slavery to the North African nation.

• In March 2011, NATO launched a war in Libya expressly aimed at toppling the government of longtime leader Moammar Qadhafi. The US and its allies flew some 26,000 sorties over Libya and launched hundreds of cruise missiles, destroying the Qadhafi government’s ability to resist rebel forces. American and European leaders initially claimed the military intervention was being carried out for humanitarian reasons, but political scientist Micah Zenko (Foreign Policy, 3/22/16) used NATO’s own materials to show how “the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start.”

• Change is clearly afoot in Saudi Arabia — with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) engineering the dubious resignation of Lebanon’s Prime Minister and arresting some of the kingdom’s richest businessmen and rivals within the royal family on charges of corruption — but exactly what it foretells is hard to read.

• The Saudis also are reeling from the apparent defeat of Saudi-backed Sunni jihadists in Syria, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants. So what are the consequences for Saudi Arabia and its regional allies?

• On Nov. 20, after Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri left Saudi Arabia and resurfaced in France, I spoke with Vijay Prashad, professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut. (Hariri has since returned to Lebanon where he remains prime minister at least for the time being.)

• In a statement to the press, a spokesperson for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “North Korea fired an unidentified ballistic missile early this morning from Pyongsong, South Pyongan [Province], to the east direction. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff is analyzing more details of the missile with the US side.”

• The US Department of Defense and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) have made an initial assessment that the missile was an ICBM, according to Office of the Secretary of Defense spokesperson Col. Robert Manning. The missile traveled 1,000 kilometers, flew over Japan, and landed in the sea east of Japan within its exclusive economic zone.

• The launch comes as South Korea is preparing for the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. South Korean officials had hoped that North Korea would forego any further provocations in hopes of an “Olympics of Peace.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WikiLeaks published new information thought to be from the CIA in mid-November, releasing source code from a tool known as “Hive,” which allows operators to control malware. The dump, dubbed Vault 8, marked the first time WikiLeaks has released source code for a CIA spying tool.

• In a post on its website, WikiLeaks said: “This publication will enable investigative journalists, forensic experts and the general public to better identify and understand covert CIA infrastructure components. Source code published in this series contains software designed to run on servers controlled by the CIA. Like WikiLeaks’ earlier Vault 7 series, the material published by WikiLeaks does not contain 0-days or similar security vulnerabilities which could be repurposed by others.”

• Over the past several months, WikiLeaks has released information detailing the extent and sophistication of the CIA’s offensive cyberspace efforts. Despite countless hours searching, investigators still don’t know who is behind the CIA leaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• A mere 100 meters (328 feet) from the damaged reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine, a one-megawatt, $1.2 million solar panel installation will likely be commissioned next month, according to Bloomberg. Back in summer 2016, the Ukrainian government said it was eager to get solar projects on the 1,000 square miles of radioactive land, and Ukrainian engineering firm Rodina Energy Group appears set to be an early arrival on the scene.

• As the co-leader of the Green Party, I’ve seen some pointless environmental destruction in my time. But I’m starting to think that HS2 might be this government’s most outrageous attack on our natural world yet.

• A high speed rail link might sound like a sensible enough idea – or a benign extravagance at worst. But the truth is that it’s environmental vandalism of the highest order, and it has to be stopped.

Finance

• This post tells the early story, based on public domain sources, of the UK government’s 58 analyses of sectors which will be affected by Brexit.

• There has now been a binding vote by the House of Commons for the government to provide these panalyses to Parliament.

• The tax bill being debated in the Senate this week would affect nearly every American. Numerous analyses have estimated the average impact of the bill on household finances, and advocates on both sides have produced examples of “typical” families that would win or lose under the plan.

• Such analyses, however, tend to gloss over the remarkable diversity of Americans’ financial situations. In truth, there is no “typical” American household. Even families that look similar on the surface can differ in ways that radically alter their situation come tax season.

• The 25,000 dots on the chart above each represent an American household in the broadly defined middle class. The vertical axis represents income; the horizontal axis represents how big a tax cut (or tax increase) each household would get under the bill in 2018, according to a New York Times analysis using the open-source tax-modeling program TaxBrain. (For details on how we did this analysis, including how we defined the middle class, see the note at the end of this article.)

• The Democrats and the entire progressive community are up in arms about the Republican tax-cut plans, which budget experts say will shower the wealthy with tax breaks while raising taxes on some middle- and working-class families. The plans also could flood the federal debt with another $1.5 trillion in red ink over the next decade.

• On Tuesday evening, the value of one bitcoin shot above $10,000. It has been a remarkable run for a currency that was only worth about $12 five years ago.

• The run has been particularly remarkable because it’s still not clear what Bitcoin is useful for. During its early years, the cryptocurrency garnered a lot of optimistic talk about how it would disrupt conventional payment networks like MasterCard or Western Union. But almost nine years after Bitcoin was created, there’s little sign of it becoming a mainstream technology. Few people own any bitcoins at all. Even fewer use it as a daily payment technology.

• Yet that hasn’t prevented the cryptocurrency’s value from zooming upward. One factor driving Bitcoin’s growth has been the emergence of a broader cryptocurrency ecosystem. Bitcoin serves as the reserve currency for the Bitcoin economy in much the same way that the dollar serves as the main anchor currency for international trade.

• The ongoing fight for control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may have significant effects on the bureau’s mass acquisition of private financial records, according to privacy advocates.

• The CFPB pools vast quantities of data for research purposes, including millions of Americans’ credit card records, which it says are anonymized, commercially available and tracked to help consumers, not to spy on them.

• Critics doubt the adequacy of safeguards, however, and liken the credit data-collection to the National Security Agency’s monitoring of internet and phone records under laws that allow tracking of spies and terrorists.

• I clearly remember pondering, on 24 June 2016, why there was not more public and political outrage at the idea of a British government putting itself above the law, and using the royal prerogative to execute the referendum result. I find myself in exactly the same mindset in terms of the potential undermining of our democracy, government and sovereignty by a hostile foreign power – Russia – in what appears to be a secretive coup.

• As a transparency campaigner and a passionate believer in our British values, as well as political and democratic systems, I am worried. People were told that walking out of the EU would liberate us from the clutches of unaccountable bureaucrats and would allow us to “take back control”. Auberon Waugh’s “junta of Belgian ticket inspectors” would be sent packing, the British people would reclaim sovereignty and British courts would decide British law for British people. The fog of bureaucracy would be blown away by the accountability and transparency that we supposedly enjoyed in the days before 1973.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Victories in state-level elections in New Jersey and Virginia on Nov. 7 have buoyed Democratic hopes for an anti-Trump wave among the population that will lead to a big victory in next year’s mid-term elections, and permanently damage President Trump heading towards 2020. Yet there is significant risk in hoping that anti-Trump sentiment will be enough for the Democrats to return to power.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Countries all over the world are restricting their citizens’ internet access, building online borders, and fragmenting the network, with negative consequences for human rights, education, and even the global economy, according to security researcher Stefan Tanase.

• “Less than three decades after the Berlin Wall collapsed and ended an era of division between the East and the West, the world seems on the brink of making the same mistakes over again, only this time we’re making these mistakes in the cyberspace,” Ixia’s Tanase told a TEDx talk in Bucharest, Romania, last week.

• The battle to control South African resources has now become a battle of ideas and monopoly capital which no longer has authority to control the monopoly of ideas since the creation of ANN7 is panicking and using the Gupta narrative to deflect attention of its economic control and trying to ensure that the black majority does not awake from its mental slumber.

• Censorship in China has spiked in recent days as the government scrambles to contain public anger over the forced evictions of migrant workers and claims of child abuse at a kindergarten in Beijing, according to a monitoring group.

• The percentage of posts deleted on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, has risen sharply in the wake of the controversies, according to Weiboscope, a University of Hong Kong project tracking censorship on the social media platform.

• Keywords in posts most frequently deleted on Monday included “kindergarten”, “low-end”, “population” and “Beijing”.

• Disney and Pixar’s Coco came out to rave reviews last weekend and took the number one spot at the box office. It did very well domestically and rumor is Mexico is completely obsessed with the new movie. The international market means just as much if not more when it comes to the real success of a big studio production. One of those huge international markets that can make or break your box office totals is China. For Coco and its subject matter that could have been a real problem as detailed by Forbes.

Privacy/Surveillance

• As Congress and the Federal Elections Commission explore ways to counter foreign influence in U.S. elections through greater campaign finance disclosures, EFF has filed comments reminding policy makers of the danger of going too far. While the FEC’s goals are understandable, it must take care not to undermine the right of ordinary Americans to speak anonymously about political issues. What we need is transparency from Internet companies about their advertising practices across the board—not laws that strip ordinary people of their constitutional rights and undermine our democratic values.

• For everyday Americans, the Internet offers one the most effective and inexpensive ways to make their voices heard in our nation’s political debate. It’s also a way to do so without fear of retaliation if your voice offers an unpopular view. An LGBTQ individual who is not “out” to their family or employer may fear ostracism, harassment, or threats of violence if they openly purchase a small ad on a social media platform advocating for a candidate who supports federal legislation banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And a conservative person living in a small liberal community may fear social or professional harm if they openly spent a small sum to amplify on social media their support for a conservative local political candidate. But today both people can avoid that retaliation by purchasing these small ads anonymously.1

• The FEC should not prevent that choice. Anonymous speech is a critical component of our online political debate. Not only do we need to protect it, we need to be doing more as a society to bolster the power of those who lack access to resources to make their voices heard.

• What we really need is for Internet companies to provide more transparency regarding the mechanics of how and why all manner of advertisements are targeting them, and to give users greater control over the data collected about them and how it is used.

• New York City is considering a range of legislative measures to increase civilian control over the New York Police Department (NYPD). Earlier this year, EFF endorsed the proposed Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act to increase transparency into the NYPD’s acquisition of surveillance technology, such as license plate readers and cell site simulators. Now EFF also supports the proposed Right to Know Act to guard the digital rights of New Yorkers and visitors impacted by so-called “consent” searches of their digital devices during stop and frisks.

• The NYPD is the nation’s largest police department, with global operations and an unfortunately long history of acting outside its authority. Given its size and presence among domestic law enforcement agencies, NYPD policies can set national norms, which are why its abuses—and policies enacted to curtail them—are important not only to New Yorkers but all Americans.

• In New York, the frequency of racially disparate detentions and searches of innocent New Yorkers exploded under an era of “broken windows policing” championed by former police commissioner Bill Bratton. (Bratton also worked in similar capacities in Boston and in Los Angeles, where his record prompted sustained criticism from local residents and communities.) “Broken windows policing” encourages police to aggressively pursue low-level crimes, driving NYPD officers to issue 1.8 million summonses between 2010 and 2015 for quality-of-life misdemeanors and infractions such as public drinking.

• In October 2014, the microblogging and incitement platform filed a lawsuit against the Feds for permission to publish, as part of its government surveillance transparency report, the number of secret court orders it received seeking twits’ data.

• In the US, authorities can slap companies with National Security Letters (NSLs) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court orders for information that prohibit recipients from telling anyone about the demand, based on the claim disclosure would harm national security.

• The social networking giant Facebook is testing a new type of captcha to verify your identity. According to a report, the company may soon ask you to upload your picture to prove you’re not a robot.

• As per a screenshot shared on Twitter, this new selfie upload prompt says — “Please upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face.” The prompt also promises to check the picture and permanently erase it from the servers. In a somewhat similar story, Facebook had already suggested asked users to upload their nude photos to fight revenge porn.

• A new documentary tells the story of ex-NSA official William Binney and his fight to get the federal bureaucracy to accept an inexpensive system for detecting terrorists while respecting the U.S. Constitution, writes James DiEugenio.

• There are enough problems with police these days and how they interact with the public. They shouldn’t be contributing to making computer security worse by handing out dangerous software.

• The Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems has appeared a few times on Techdirt, as he conducts his long-running campaign to find out what Facebook is doing with his personal data, and to take back control of it. In 2011, he obtained a CD-ROM (remember those?) containing all the information that Facebook held about him at that time. More dramatically, in 2015 Schrems persuaded the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the Safe Harbor framework for transferring personal data from the EU to the US was illegal under EU laws because of the NSA’s spying, as revealed by Edward Snowden. As Schrem’s detailed commentary (pdf) on that CJEU judgment explains, the case was specifically about Facebook, although it applied much more generally. Last month, we wrote about another case, currently being referred to the CJEU, concerning Facebook’s use of standard contractual clauses (SCCs) (pdf), also known as “model clauses”. It’s an alternative legal approach for transferring data across the Atlantic, and if the CJEU rules against Facebook again, it could make things rather difficult for the big US Internet companies (but ordinary businesses won’t be affected much.)

• A curious Navy officer on deployment in Iraq in 2011 got in hot water with the National Security Agency when she used a top-secret NSA signals intelligence database to snoop on the prepaid-phone habits of boyfriend’s son, according to a just-released, heavily redacted NSA inspector general’s report.

• A Navy officer stationed in Iraq “deliberately and without authorization” used an NSA database to try to pry into the mobile phone of her boyfriend’s son, according to a top secret NSA inspector general report obtained by BuzzFeed News.

• The 2014 report — one of dozens the NSA just declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — provides a rare, behind-the-scenes look into how the spy agency responded to an instance of illegal surveillance on an American citizen.

• The Navy officer did not access the information on the phone — she was halted by a warning signal. But the inspector general’s report says the officer, whose name was redacted, violated federal regulations and a presidential executive order designed to protect Americans from being spied on by intelligence agencies without a warrant.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Good Technology Collective (GTC), a new European think-tank addressing ethical issues in technology, will officially open its doors in Berlin on December 15th. The grand opening will kick off at 7:30PM (CET) at Soho House Berlin and I shall be one of the guest speakers.

• How do we get to 26 kilos from less than a gram of actual cocaine? It happens like this…

• Martin Pena needed money for rent. He agreed to meet some other men at a taqueria to run some sort of an errand for $500. One of the men took Pena’s car and returned with it a short while later. When he returned, there was a black ice chest in Pena’s car. Pena was instructed to drive it to another location and park his vehicle, leaving the keys inside.

• Pena was pulled over by Houston police officers who arrested him for an outstanding warrant. The vehicle was impounded and an inventory search performed. The 26 kilos of “cocaine” in the ice chest were discovered and Pena was convicted of transporting 400 grams of cocaine — enough to trigger a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence.

• So lots of people were gearing up for the Waymo/Uber trial starting next week over Uber’s alleged efforts to get Waymo’s (Google’s self-driving car project) trade secrets. There are a whole bunch of issues around this case that are interesting — from questions involving what really is a trade secret to where the line is between controlling former employees and allowing people to switch jobs within an industry. But… all of that has been completely tossed out the window as more and more evidence piles up that beyond those key legal issues, Uber sure did some shady, shady stuff. This morning, the latest bombshell (in a long line of bombshells) is that the judge has delayed the trial after the Justice Department got involved, totally unprompted. No, really.

• Oklahoma is home to a large percentage of uninsured drivers. Nearly a quarter of the state’s drivers get behind the wheel as latent threats to insured drivers’ insurance rates. The state thinks it’s found a solution to this problem — one that will net a private company and the state’s district attorney offices lots of money.

• US District Judge William Alsup has delayed an upcoming trial, Waymo v. Uber, in which Alphabet’s self-driving car division has accused Uber of massive data theft.

• The postponement came as a former Uber security employee, Richard Jacobs, made startling accusations in court Tuesday about his former colleagues’ tactics of what he dubbed “overly aggressive and invasive” actions, including seeking code accidentally made available on GitHub and internal use of “ephemeral and encrypted” communications including through Wickr and “non-attributable machines.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For years, Comcast has been promising that it won’t violate the principles of net neutrality, regardless of whether the government imposes any net neutrality rules. That meant that Comcast wouldn’t block or throttle lawful Internet traffic and that it wouldn’t create fast lanes in order to collect tolls from Web companies that want priority access over the Comcast network.

• This was one of the ways in which Comcast argued that the Federal Communications Commission should not reclassify broadband providers as common carriers, a designation that forces ISPs to treat customers fairly in other ways. The Title II common carrier classification that makes net neutrality rules enforceable isn’t necessary because ISPs won’t violate net neutrality principles anyway, Comcast and other ISPs have claimed.

• If you’re a Techdirt reader or just a general regular on the ol’ internet, our topic this week — the current situation with net neutrality and the FCC — needs little introduction. And we’ve got two very special guests joining us to discuss it: former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler (author of the rules that Ajit Pai is currently undoing) and his former advisor Gigi Sohn (who joined us on the podcast in February to predict pretty much exactly what is now happening). There are few people as qualified to talk about these issues, so enjoy this week’s episode looking at Trump’s FCC and the future of the internet as we know it.

• Internet users have made it clear to US telecom regulator Ajit Pai that his proposal to scrap net neutrality rules is unpopular with the masses. But with two weeks left before the Federal Communications Commission votes to eliminate net neutrality rules, Pai today blamed actress/singer Cher and other celebrities for boosting opposition to his plan.

• There’s numerous methods incumbent ISPs use to keep broadband competition at bay, from buying protectionist state laws to a steady supply of revolving door regulators and lobbyists with a vested interest in protecting the status quo. This regulatory capture goes a long way toward explaining why Americans pay more money for slower broadband than most developed nations. Keeping this dysfunction intact despite a growing resentment from America’s under-served and over-charged broadband consumers isn’t easy, and has required decades of yeoman’s work on the part of entrenched duopolies and their lobbyists.

• Case in point: Google Fiber recently tried to build new fiber networks in a large number of cities like Nashville and Louisville, but ran face first into an antiquated utility pole attachment process. As it stands, when a new competitor tries to enter a market, it needs to contact each individual ISP to have them move their own utility pole gear. This convoluted and bureaucratic process can take months, and incumbent ISPs (which often own the poles in question) often slow things down even further by intentionally dragging their feet.

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has consistently argued that FCC regulation of net neutrality is “a solution in search of a problem.”

• Pai’s claim is frequently countered with the actual history of Internet service providers blocking or throttling Internet traffic or applications. The most prominent example is Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing. Pai thus had to contend with these real-world examples in his new proposal to eliminate net neutrality rules.

• The Internet hasn’t been healthy for a while. Even with net neutrality rules in the United States, I have my Internet Service Provider neutrally blocking all IPv6 traffic and throttling me. As you can imagine, that now makes an apt update quite a pain. When I have asked my provider, they have said they have no plans to offer this on residential service. When I have raised the point that my employer wants me to verify the ability to potentially work from home in crisis situations, they said I would need to subscribe to “business class” service and said they would happily terminate my residential service for me if I tried to use a Virtual Private Network.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.