● 11.30.17

● Links 30/11/2017: PHP 7.2 and Cutelyst 1.11.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:00 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Ah, 2017, it was a good year for Linux—one that continued the solidification of the open source platform on so many levels. From the consumer mobile space to supercomputers, Linux dominated certain sectors in a way no other platform could.

• Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from the year—both the highs and lows—and hopefully draw a conclusion that 2017 was a banner year for Linux.

Desktop

• Google’s Chromium evangelist François Beaufort shares today with us a new feature for Chromebooks, the ability to take Android-like screenshots in Chrome OS.

• Discovered last month via a commit in the Chromium Gerrit repository, the Android-like screenshot functionality has landed today in the Chrome OS Dev channel and you can enjoy it right now on your Chromebook if you enabled the developer channel.

Kernel Space

• Since the beginning, Linux has mapped the kernel’s memory into the address space of every running process. There are solid performance reasons for doing this, and the processor’s memory-management unit can ordinarily be trusted to prevent user space from accessing that memory. More recently, though, some more subtle security issues related to this mapping have come to light, leading to the rapid development of a new patch set that ends this longstanding practice for the x86 architecture.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced that 22 new organizations have joined the Foundation as Silver members. Linux Foundation members help support development of the greatest shared technology resources in history, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation.

Graphics Stack

• Igalia developers have published their latest version of the big patch-set implementing 16-bit support within Intel’s Vulkan driver and supporting the necessary 16-bit storage SPIR-V changes.

• Developers at consulting firm Igalia have been tasked the past few months with getting this 16-bit data “half float” support in place for the Intel open-source Vulkan driver with VK_KHR_16bit_storage and SPIR-V’s SPV_KHR_16bit_storage along with the necessary plumbing to Mesa’s GLSL and NIR code.

• There were many sizable open-source Radeon Linux driver accomplishments this year. It was this year in which the RadeonSI OpenGL driver matured enough to compete with — and sometimes surpass — the Radeon Windows driver when talking raw OpenGL performance, RadeonSI can also outperform the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL hybrid driver in many Linux gaming tests, the RADV Vulkan driver matured a lot, and many other milestones were reached.

• Given the latest round of Windows vs. Linux Radeon gaming tests yesterday and the end of the year quickly approaching, I figured I would provide a list now about some of the major feats reached this year for the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack.

• After recently getting some older Radeon GPUs to OpenGL 4.2 with new R600g patches and making other improvements to R600g, David Airlie has now sent out a set of patches for getting compute shaders and GLSL 4.30 working for some older pre-GCN GPUs with the R600 Gallium3D driver.

• Airlie sent out today patches getting compute shaders and GL Shading Language 4.30 working in R600g. It seems to be working out the best at the moment with the Radeon HD 6400 “Caicos” graphics cards while the HD 6900 “Cayman” series currently hangs on compute. For running OpenGL 4 on R600g, the HD 5800 series and HD 6900 series generally tends to be the best due to having real FP64 support working where as the other generations of hardware only expose OpenGL 3.3 by default (but can use a version override to later GL4 versions if not needing FP64 support).

Benchmarks

• As we end out November, here is a fresh look at the current Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator’s Update versus Ubuntu 17.10 with the latest Linux 4.15 kernel and Mesa 17.4-dev Radeon graphics driver stack as we see how various games compete under Windows 10 and Linux with these latest AMD drivers on the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards.

• To see which version of Linux is the quickest, Phoronix has conducted a set of benchmarks measuring the total boot time of 11 Linux distributions.

• The tests also measured the boot time of separate components, such as the loader and kernel of each distribution.

• Systemd benchmark, part of Phoronix Test Suite 7.4.0, was used to benchmark the boot time of the distributions, and the results were published on OpenBenchmarking.org.

• The tests show that the boot time of Linux distributions can vary substantially, with some systems taking over twice as long to boot up as others.

Applications

• Suplemon is a modern text editor for CLI that emulates the multi cursor behavior and other features of Sublime Text. It’s lightweight and really easy to use, just as Nano is.

• One of the benefits of using a CLI editor is that you can use it whether the Linux distribution that you’re using has a GUI or not. This type of text editors also stands out as being simple, fast and powerful.

• If you’re looking for an open-source Evernote alternative that works on Linux (and everywhere else) you need look no further than Joplin.

• Joplin is a free, open-source note-taking and to-do app with desktop clients for Linux, Windows, macOS, and mobile apps for Android and iOS. There’s even a CLI too.

• In this post we’ll look at its key features, and suggest a few reasons why you may prefer to use it over other similar services.

• Many business owners choose to use Linux as the operating system for their operations for a variety of reasons.

• Firstly, they don’t have to pay anything for the privilege, and that is a massive bonus during the early stages of a company where money is tight.

• Secondly, Linux is a light alternative compared to Windows and other popular operating systems available today.

• Of course, lots of entrepreneurs worry they won’t have access to some of the essential software packages if they make that move. However, as you will discover throughout this post, there are plenty of similar tools that will cover all the bases.

• There are great tools on the Linux desktop for taking screen captures, such as KSnapshot and Shutter. Even the simple utility that comes with the GNOME desktop does a pretty good job of capturing screens. But what if you rarely need to take screen captures? Or you use a Linux distribution without a built-in capture tool, or an older computer with limited resources?

• Turn to the command line and a little utility called Scrot. It does a fine job of taking simple screen captures, and it includes a few features that might surprise you.

• As part of the push for upstreaming VirtualBox guest driver support in Linux, not only are kernel drivers being upstreamed driver-by-driver, but their DDX driver has now done its official X.Org christening.

• Michael Thayer of Oracle announced this first release of the vboxvideo DDX driver as part of “upstream X.Org” today.

• A while ago, we published how to get notification when a Terminal activity is done. Today, I found out a similar utility called “undistract-me” that notifies you when long running terminal commands complete. Picture this scenario. You run a command that takes a while to finish. In the mean time, you check your facebook and get so involved in it. After a while, you remembered that you ran a command few minutes ago. You go back to the Terminal and notice that the command has already finished. But you have no idea when the command is completed. Have you ever been in this situation? I bet most of you were in this situation many times. This is where “undistract-me” comes in help. You don’t need to constantly check the terminal to see if a command is completed or not. Undistract-me utility will notify you when a long running command is completed. It will work on Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu and other Ubuntu-derivatives.

• I love to work and share about CLI apps since i’m very much interested on CLI applications. Basically i prefer CLI because most of the time i will be sitting in front of the black screen and it’s became habit for me to go with CLI apps instead of GUI.

• We have wrote many articles about CLI applications in past. Recently i came to know about google CLI utilities such as “Google Translator”, “Google Calendar”, and “Google Contacts”. so, i just want to share about it.

• Working on the terminal and using various commands to carry out important tasks is an indispensable part of a Linux desktop experience. This open-source operating system possesses an abundance of commands that makes it impossible for any user to remember all of them. To make things more complex, each command has its own set of options to bring a wider set of functionality.

• There is no doubt that Gmail is most popular and most-widely used free Email service provided by Google. The users can access Gmail on the web and through mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as through third-party programs. Today, we are going to see one such third-party program called “Inboxer”. It is a free, open source and unofficial Google inbox desktop client built with Electron. Using this application, you can access your Gmail as the way you do in web or through any mobile apps. The application looks almost the same as the Google Inbox web version and you won’t find any major difference while using it.

• The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.0. This release marks the second feature update to the PHP 7 series.

• PHP 7.2 has made it out on time as the latest annual feature update to the PHP7 programming language.

Proprietary

• Now that Vivaldi 1.13 is out, Vivaldi Technologies have just kicked off the development of their upcoming Vivaldi 1.14 web browser a nd were more than happy to inform Softpedia today on the availability of the first snapshot, which ships with the long-anticipated Sync functionality.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Yesterday it was confirmed that Wine 3.0 will enter its code freeze next week and begin with the release candidates until the official v3.0.0 milestone is ready sometime around mid-January. Here’s a recap of all the Wine developments for 2017 if you are curious about all the features and improvements to be found in this big update.

• Among the changes that built up in the Wine 2.x unstable bi-weekly snapshots ahead of the official Wine 3.0 stable debut include:

• Alexandre Julliard has put out his plans for the release of the next major version of Wine and it’s going to be quite soon.

• The next release, due around December 8th, will be the first Release Candidate for Wine 3.0. From there, they will be doing weekly RC releases and he estimates this will last 4-6 weeks. So the final Wine 3.0 release should be due in January if all goes well and no major release blockers are found.

Games

• The Point & Click Horror game Black Mirror [GOG, Steam, Humble Store] from KING Art and THQ Nordic released day-1 for Linux, here’s some thoughts.

• I wasn’t sure what to expect from it honestly, it looked like it could have been a reasonably fun horde shooter with some kind of survival elements. However, the game as a whole is confusing and full of poor implementations. It seems like the developer isn’t really sure what they want it to be exactly. I appreciate multiple game modes, but none of them are even remotely polished. They feel like tiny, cut-down versions of other games, while being full of annoying issues.

• Albion Online [Official Site] is set to get a bit more interesting with the second fully featured expansion with Kay that’s due on December 6th.

• Another to add to your list of amusing co-op games is Cutthroat [Steam], a game about killing others and blending in with the crowd.

• Son of Scoregasm [Steam, itch.io], the latest arcade shooter from Charlie’s Games is now out for Linux and it’s nuts.

• Failed State [Steam] is another recent discovery that’s coming to Linux, a game where the earth is in ruins after earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions and more and you’re trying to survive.

• While a lot of people have likely moved onto the newer editions of games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, GemRB [Official Site] is still being updated if you wish to play the originals on Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Cutelyst the Qt Web framework got a new release, this is likely to be the last of the year and will be one of lasts releases of the 1.x.x series. I’d like to add HTTP/2 support before branching 1.x.x and having master as 2.0 but I’m not yet sure I’ll do that yet.

• For the next year I’d like to have Cutelyst 2 packaged on most distros soon due Ubuntu’s LTS being released in April, and H2 might delay this or I delay it since it can be done using a front-end server like Nginx.

• This Saturday ( December 2nd ) the second Kubuntu Kafe Live, our online video cafe will be taking place from 21:00 UTC. Join the Kubuntu development community, and guests as our intrepid hosts.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GXml performance has been improved since initial releases.

• First implementation parse all to libxml2 tree and then to a GObject set of classes, in order to provide GObject Serialization framework.

• Over time GXmlGom was added as a set of classes avoiding to use libxml2 tree improving both memory and performance on Serialization.

Distributions

Reviews

• I have been watching the progress with Solus Linux from afar for some time now. I’ve even had other Freedom Penguin contributors share their thoughts on Solus. So when I decided to give everyone my review, I wanted to make sure I cover the basics…then move on to the stuff I cared about – using it as a daily driver.

• Solus is not based on any other distro. It’s a Linux unto itself and this article shares my experience with it.

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• In 1994, if you wanted to make money from Linux, you were selling Linux CDs for $39.95. By 2016, Red Hat became the first $2 billion Linux company. But, in the same year, Red Hat was shifting its long-term focus from Linux to the cloud.

• Here’s how Red Hat got from mail-order CDs to the top Linux company and a major cloud player.

• Oracle Linux is engineered for open cloud infrastructure. It delivers leading performance, scalability and reliability for enterprise SaaS and PaaS workloads as well as traditional enterprise applications.

• Oracle Linux 7 Update 3 for ARM is the first public release of Oracle Linux on the ARM platform. The release is built from the same source packages as the corresponding Oracle Linux distribution for the x86 architecture, plus any required patches and modifications that are required to run on the ARM platform.

• Following Red Hat promoting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for ARM under general availability, Oracle with their RHEL7-derivative, Oracle Linux 7, also now supports ARM.

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora Media Writer is the tool to create live USB flash drives with Fedora. You can also use dd or GNOME Disks, but Fedora Media Writer is the only graphical tool that is tested with Fedora ISOs (please don’t use UNetbootin and such because they really cause faulty Fedora installations).

• Released last year on November 22, Fedora 25 was the first ever release of the Red Hat-sponsored GNU/Linux distribution to ship with the next-generation Wayland display server by default for the Workstation edition, which uses the GNOME desktop environment. Fedora 25 was also one of the first distros to make this major move.

• Like any other Fedora release, Fedora 25 received thirteen months of support, during various of the included components received updates to newer versions as they were pushed upstream. But, as all good things must come to an end, beginning December 12, 2017, the Fedora Project will no longer support Fedora 25.

• The Flatpak 0.10 stable branch of the open-source universal binary format for GNU/Linux distributions has been updated recently to first point release.

• Flatpak 0.10.1 is now the latest version of the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XDG-App), adding new commands to display information about applications in a remote (flatpak remote-info) and to allow you to search the appstream data from the command-line (flatpak search).

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Coming two and a half months after the second point release, Univention Corporate Server 4.2-3 is a small maintenance update that appears to mostly address various regressions reported by users from previous versions of the operating systems. These include more checks for Microsoft Active Directory (AD) domains and expanded configurability and usability of the management system.

• “The usability and configurability of the management system were further expanded. The design of the assistants and dialogues of the management system was revised with regard to usability aspects,” explains developer Nico Gulden. “Additional configuration options for the single sign-on of the management system have also been added, e. g. the configurability of the certificate used.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Long-time Ubuntu member Dale Beaudoin ran a poll last week on the official Ubuntu forums to take the pulse of the community and see if they are interested in an Ubuntu Unity Remix that would be released alongside Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) next year and be supported for nine months or five years.

• Thirty people voted in the poll, with 67 percent of them opting for an LTS (Long Term Support) release of the so-called Ubuntu Unity Remix, while 33 percent voted for the 9-month supported release. It also looks like this upcoming Ubuntu Unity Spin looks to become an official flavor, yet this means commitment from those developing it.

• Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia” has been released and is available to download from the official website. The release is based on Ubuntu 16.04, contains many improvements and new applications. Some important software were rewritten making them work much faster and look cleaner. Some less useful applications have also been removed to clean the system installation. So let’s look at the major improvements in Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia”.

Devices/Embedded

• Like most of us, perhaps you owned a Game Boy or a device like that. You spent so much time with it that it became an essential part of your childhood and now a part of your good old memories.

• But as the vintage clothes and style are back in fashion, so is vintage or should I say retro gaming. It’s not long that we heard about a retro gaming console from Atari and now we have another Kickstarter campaign that promises a Linux based device that you can use to play classic games from Atari, GB, GBA, NES, SNES etc.

• MYIR’s tiny, rugged “MYC-Y6ULX” COM features an i.MX6 UL or ULL SoC, an optional baseboard, and 140-pin stamp hole expansion.

• COMs running NXP’s low power i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) and similar i.MX6 ULL are typically much smaller than other compute modules. Despite its trim, 39 x 37mm footprint, MYIR’s new MYC-Y6ULX falls only in the middle of the pack in the miniaturization competition. (For more information on other i.MX6 UL modules, see our coverage of Murata’s 40 x 40mm Aquila 6UL.)

• Among the sessions at the recent Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) — 57 of which are available on YouTube — are several reports on the Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux project. These include an overview from AGL Community Manager Walt Miner showing how AGL’s Unified Code Base (UCB) Linux distribution is expanding from in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) to ADAS. There was even a presentation on using AGL to build a remote-controlled robot (see links below).

• Here we look at the “State of AGL: Plumbing and Services,” from Konsulko Group’s CTO Matt Porter and senior staff software engineer Scott Murray. Porter and Murray ran through the components of the current UCB 4.0 “Daring Dab” and detailed major upstream components and API bindings, many of which will be appear in the Electric Eel release due in Jan. 2018.

• Despite the automotive focus of the AGL stack, most of the components are already familiar to Linux developers. “It looks a lot like a desktop distro,” Porter told the ELCE attendees in Prague. “All these familiar friends.”

• Router coverage gaps often have different causes, which repeaters and access points (APs) can remedy. A repeater usually connects to the router over WiFi and amplifies the signal into areas where the router alone is not sufficient, whereas an AP wired to the router by cable sets up a private WiFi network with its own network identifier (SSID). The AP therefore provides additional access to the local network.

• A highly portable Raspberry Pi is ideal for setting up a small and cheap WiFi AP suitable for many applications. For example, you could stretch a network into the back garden or provide Internet to an awkwardly located conference room.

• The easiest route is to use a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi3), which already has a WiFi module. Previous models can be prepared for the new task with a dongle, available for just a few dollars. Even the Rasp Pi 3 could benefit from a WiFi stick, because the internal connections of the installed module do not deliver the performance of a good dongle.

• In this article, you’ll see how to set up a wireless AP, and then I will show you how to provide an additional entry into your local area network through the integration of Nextcloud on an external disk connected to the Rasp Pi.

• Eurotech’s “CPU-162-23” COM Express Type 7 module runs Linux on Xeon and Pentium D-1500 CPUs with 2x 10GbE, up to x32 PCIe, and up to 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM.

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Danese Cooper is one of open source’s strongest advocates, credited with advancing the open sourcing of technology at major companies including Sun Microsystems, Intel, and now PayPal, where she has served as head of open source since 2014.

• In her Lightning Talk at All Things Open 2017, “Making Open Source Evergreen,” Danese presented a ringing call to arms about what she considers open source’s most pressing problem: “Not knowing how to make the right choices for the future of the movement.”

• Tech giants such as Google and Baidu spent from $20 billion to $30 billion on AI last year, according to the recent McKinsey Global Institute Study. Out of this wealth, 90 percent fueled R&D and deployment, and 10 percent went toward AI acquisitions.

• Research plays a crucial role in the AI movement, and tech giants have to do everything in their power to seem viable to the AI community. AI is mostly based on research advances and state-of-the-art technology, which is advancing very quickly. Therefore, there is no business need to make closed infrastructure solutions, because within a few months everything will be totally different.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has graduated Apache Impala to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

• Apache Impala itself is an analytic database for Apache Hadoop, the open source software framework used for distributed storage and processing of dataset of big data.

• Vespa, Yahoo’s big data processing and serving engine, has been released as open source by Oath, the Verizon subsidiary that’s been the owner of record of Yahoo since June 2017. It is now available on GitHub.

• With over 1 billion users, Vespa is currently used across many different Oath brands – including Yahoo.com, Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Gemini and Flickr, to process and serve billions of daily requests over billions of documents while responding to search queries, making recommendations, and providing personalised content and advertisements.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• You may have noticed the steady and sure progress of voice recognition tech in recent times – all the big tech firms want to make strides in this arena if only to improve their digital assistants, from Cortana to Siri – but Mozilla wants to push harder, and more broadly, on this front with the release of an open source speech recognition model.

• With the holiday, gift-giving season upon us, many people are about to experience the ease and power of new speech-enabled devices. Technical advancements have fueled the growth of speech interfaces through the availability of machine learning tools, resulting in more Internet-connected products that can listen and respond to us than ever before.

• At Mozilla we’re excited about the potential of speech recognition. We believe this technology can and will enable a wave of innovative products and services, and that it should be available to everyone.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Public Services/Government

• The European Commission has launched its first ever bug bounty. It will award between EUR 100 and EUR 3000 for bugs found in VLC media player. The programme will run until the first weeks of January or until the bounty budget is exhausted.

• Which bugs will qualify for an award is at the discretion of the VLC team, according to the announcement by HackerOne, a commercial bug bounty platform. “Qualified security vulnerabilities will be rewarded based on severity and impact,” HackerOne says.

• In the first phase, the programme will invite hackers with previous experience on the HackerOne platform to participate. After three weeks, the programme will be opened to everyone.

Licensing/Legal

• A coalition of tech giants including Red Hat, Google, Facebook, IBM, and more are adopting a more measured approach towards open source licensing agreements with GPLv3. Because apparently, lawsuits are not great at creating a productive collaborative environment. Who knew?

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Legal methods to retrieve paywalled articles for free are on the rise, but better self-archiving practices could help improve accessibility.

Open Hardware/Modding

• I’ve spent the last couple of evenings designing an OpenHardware USB 2.0 1-port hub tentatively called the ColorHub (although, better ideas certainly welcome). Back a bit: What’s the point in a 1-port hub?

Programming/Development

• After 16 years of evolution, the SciPy project has reached version 1.0. SciPy, a free-software project, has become one of the most popular computational toolkits for scientists from a wide range of disciplines, and is largely responsible for the ascendancy of Python in many areas of scientific research. While the 1.0 release is significant, much of the underlying software has been stable for some time; the “1.0″ version number reflects that the project as a whole is on solid footing.

• Most importantly, these tools and paradigms are going to help us achieve our (my) ultimate goal of shipping products faster. Stay tuned for the next post, where we discuss functions in JS, why they are special and how their characteristics enable functional programming.

Leftovers

• There have been different ransomware attacks, IT failures, data leakages and more which have affected organisations and customers around the world. Let’s take a look back at the worst software failures in recent history.

• In this article, I want to share with you of the power of an unconference—because I believe it’s a technique anyone can use to generate innovative ideas, harness the power of participation, and strengthen community ties. I’ve developed a 90-minute session that mimics the effects of an unconference, and you can use it to generate engagement with a small group of people and tap into their ideas surrounding a topic of your choice.

• An “unconference” is a loosely organized event format designed specifically to maximize the exchange of ideas and the sharing of knowledge in a group driven by a common purpose. While the structure of an unconference is planned, the content and exchange of ideas for breakout sessions is not. Participants plan and execute unconference sessions by voting on the content they’d like to experience.

Science

• The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives this week will propose sweeping legislation that aims to change where Americans go to college, how they pay for it, what they study, and how their success—or failure—affects the institutions they attend.

• The most dramatic and far-reaching element of the plan is a radical revamp of the $1.34 trillion federal student loan program. It would put caps on borrowing and eliminate some loan forgiveness programs.

• The ambitious package—a summary of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—would be the biggest overhaul of education policy in decades. The rising expense of higher education is deeply troubling to many Americans and many increasingly question its value. Despite a steady rise in the share of high-school graduates heading to college, a skills gap has left more than 6 million jobs unfilled, a significant drag on the economy.

Security

• After the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosed in September that its EDGAR corporate filing system had been hacked [sic] a year earlier, Chairman Jay Clayton declared cybersecurity one of his agency’s top priorities.

• Concern about the ME goes back further. Sparked by a talk given at the Chaos Computer Conference by [Joanna Rutkowska] of the Qubes OS project, back in January 2016 Brian Benchoff at Hackaday wrote:

• Extremely little is known about the ME, except for some of its capabilities. The ME has complete access to all of a computer’s memory, its network connections, and every peripheral connected to a computer. It runs when the computer is hibernating, and can intercept TCP/IP traffic. Own the ME and you own the computer.

• A newly discovered bug in macOS High Sierra enables the root superuser on a Mac with a blank password and no security check, essentially giving anyone full access to your Mac.

• Apple is likely already working on a fix, but in the meantime, there’s a temporary workaround — enabling the root user with a password.

• However, The Verge has been able to confirm the major security issue remains present as of MacOS 10.13.1, the current release of High Sierra. When the problem is exploited, the user is authenticated into a “System Administrator” account and is given full ability to view files and even reset or change passwords for pre-existing users on that machine. Apple ID email addresses tied to users on the Mac can be removed and altered, as well. There are likely many more ways that someone taking advantage of the issue could wreak havoc on a Mac desktop or laptop.

• A Canadian man has pleaded guilty to hacking charges related to a 2014 spear-phishing operation of Yahoo employees. The hack ultimately compromised 500 million Yahoo accounts.

• The operative, Karim Baratov, appeared in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday afternoon. He also admitted that his role was to “hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB,” the Russian internal security service. Baratov then sent those passwords to his alleged co-conspirator, Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev.

• The advent of cryptocurrencies was bound to spark the interest of cybercriminals who are always looking to exploit some technology to steal some clicks or install malware. In the recent times, we’ve come across reports of a huge number of websites using your PCU power to mine cryptocurrency; the browser extensions and Android apps aren’t untouched by this epidemic. Developers have also come up with different options to ban this practice altogether.

• In the previous research work conducted by security firms, it was found that a miner could be run as long as the browser was running; close the browser and mining activity stops. However, as per the latest technique spotted by Malwarebytes, some dubious website owners can mine digital coins like Monero even after browser window is closed.

• Using simple hacks, a hacker can know about your personal unauthorized information which you might not want to reveal. Knowing about these common hacking techniques like phishing, DDoS, clickjacking etc., could come handy for your personal safety.

• On October 30, 2017, a group of Czech researchers from Masaryk University presented the ROCA paper at the ACM CCS Conference, which earned the Real-World Impact Award. We briefly mentioned ROCA when it was first reported but haven’t dug into details of the vulnerability yet. Because of its far-ranging impact, it seems important to review the vulnerability in light of the new results published recently.

Defence/Aggression

• The Trump administration is holding talks on providing nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia — a move that critics say could upend decades of U.S. policy and lead to an arms race in the Middle East.

• The Saudi government wants nuclear power to free up more oil for export, but current and former American officials suspect the country’s leaders also want to keep up with the enrichment capabilities of their rival, Iran.

• Saudi Arabia needs approval from the U.S. in order to receive sensitive American technology. Past negotiations broke down because the Saudi government wouldn’t commit to certain safeguards against eventually using the technology for weapons.

• Erdbrink summarizes the overall effect this way: “In short, it appears that Mr. Trump and the Saudis have helped the government achieve what years of repression could never accomplish: widespread public support for the hard-line view that the United States and Riyadh cannot be trusted and that Iran is now a strong and capable state capable of staring down its enemies.”

• Such an effect is unsurprising. Nor are the underlying dynamics unique to Iran. Two fundamental processes are at work in Iran to produce the effect Erdbrink is observing. Both are foreshadowed by many earlier experiences of countries that felt especially threatened by a foreign power.

• One is the tendency of nations to unite and to overcome internal differences in the face of such a threat. This is the familiar phenomenon of rallying around the flag. Iranians are rallying around their flag today.

• President Trump’s continued Afghan War pursues the same failed path as the prior 16 years, with the U.S. political/media elites learning no lessons, says former Marine officer Matthew Hoh in an interview with the American Herald Tribune.

• At first, American officials couldn’t believe it. In 1993, the Israelis began pressuring the Clinton administration to view Iran as the greatest global threat. Only a short time earlier, in the 1980s, Israel had been cooperating with the Iranians militarily and selling them weapons to fight Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War.

• Trump has always been petty, but this was particularly obnoxious. He had already demanded gratitude from the players themselves, and they had thanked him publicly for speaking to the Chinese president on their behalf. He simply couldn’t rise above his voracious need for approbation to let LaVar Ball’s criticism go and behave like a mature statesman. Worse, he showed foreign leaders once again that he can be manipulated through even the smallest slights or granting of favors. The man simply cannot play it cool.

• His trips overseas have shown that he knows nothing of diplomacy and has no natural instinct for it. Trump has been rude and aggressive toward America’s European allies until they figured out that he needs to be treated like a spoiled dauphin and treated to big spectacles, as French President Emmanuel Macron did when he invited Trump to the Bastille Day celebrations in July.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The House Intelligence Committee, as part of its Russia-gate investigation, has issued a subpoena demanding the testimony of journalist-activist-and-satirist Randy Credico presumably because he produced a series on WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, who oversaw the publication of leaked Democratic Party emails in 2016.

Finance

• Hardline Tory Eurosceptics will protest to No 10 about Theresa May agreeing to pay a £60bn Brexit divorce bill over many years, with some warning they could be prepared to vote down a final deal if they do not ultimately get what they want.

• One Conservative MP said some members of the Brexit-supporting European Research Group were demanding a meeting with Julian Smith, the new chief whip, to make clear their unease with the idea of phased payments lasting many years.

• As vulture capitalists and profiteers circle the devastation in America’s hurricane-struck island colonies, the Trump administration has nothing for them but more loans to pile onto their existing, crippling debt (even as affected mainland cities where more white people live get direct government aid).

• But the left wing of the Democratic Party has articulated a different vision for the future of the American citizens who live in these places: a “messaging bill” proposing $146 billion in aid to the islands, accompanied by debt forgiveness, in a package they call “A Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico.”

• Cold Storage is one of the most interesting features of Bitcoin as it allows us to reserve cryptocurrency with extra precaution. It could be done using a USB drive, a paper wallet, an offline Bitcoin hardware wallet, etc. However, if you lose the access to such cold storage device, your digital currency gets lost.

• There is a campaign running at the moment to inform people of the dangers of drug resistance. “Taking antibiotics when you don’t need them puts you and your family it risk,” shout the posters. GPs are familiar with the problem. Patients want medicine and don’t like hearing that their flu is caused by a virus. Antibiotics, which treat bacterial infection, won’t work. Misusing the pills nurtures vicious bugs that defy treatment when it is actually required.

• Seeing the slogan, I find it hard not to think that Brexit will one day be recorded as case of quack political medicine on an industrial scale. The obvious diagnosis of the referendum outcome was a majority desire to leave the EU, so the response necessarily begins with a commitment to do just that. The democratic treatment of an election cannot be to ignore the result.

• University students across Puerto Rico organized a national strike that sparked demonstrations and protests on May 1, 2017, as reported by David Cordero, Sarah Vázquez, and Ronald Ávila Claudio for the Metro. The strike, el Paro Nacional, resulted from public outrage over announced austerity measures affecting education and pensions, as well as outrage over the lack of transparency in the process through which those measures were approved. Due to a mass promotion effort, multiple civic organizations, student groups, and individual citizens came together to stop all work and engage in protest.

• The austerity measures, including $512 million in cuts to university funding, were to be implemented by a fiscal joint committee, la Junta de Control Fiscal, as part of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), a US federal law responding to the island’s fiscal crisis. PROMESA, introduced by Representative Sean Duffy (R-WI) on May 18, 2016 and signed into law by President Barack Obama on June 30, 2016, established the joint committee as “an Oversight Board with broad powers of budgetary and financial control over Puerto Rico.”

• The Republican tax plan winding its way through Congress includes a special middle finger to the nation’s graduate students.

• It’s a little bit wonky, so stay with me here. I’ll explain how it affects me, since I’m an actual graduate student.

• Going to grad school would’ve been entirely out of reach for me if I had to pay full tuition for my education. Getting a PhD takes at least five years and often more. I don’t have a spouse, trust fund, or parents to cover my cost of living or my tuition.

• If I had to pay for my own education, it would’ve been simply out of the question. This is hardly uncommon.

• Republican tax plans passed in the House and out of the Senate Finance Committee contain provisions that their defenders claim will help small businesses by lowering top tax rates on “pass-through” income. The House Republican plan includes a new top tax rate of 25 percent on pass-through income. The Senate version of this proposal is different and more complicated, but the broad outcome is the same—a new, lower top tax rate on income that comes from pass-through businesses.

• These changes will not help genuine small businesses, however. The most important thing to remember in this debate is simply that while all small businesses are pass-through businesses, not all pass-through businesses are small businesses. This report fills in some details about the relationship between pass-through businesses and small businesses.

• In theory, the global financial system is supposed to help every country gain. Mainstream teaching of international finance, trade and “foreign aid” (defined simply as any government credit) depicts an almost utopian system uplifting all countries, not stripping their assets and imposing austerity. The reality since World War I is that the United States has taken the lead in shaping the international financial system to promote gains for its own bankers, farm exporters, its oil and gas sector, and buyers of foreign resources – and most of all, to collect on debts owed to it.

• Each time this global system has broken down over the past century, the major destabilizing force has been American over-reach and the drive by its bankers and bondholders for short-term gains. The dollar-centered financial system is leaving more industrial as well as Third World countries debt-strapped. Its three institutional pillars – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organization – have imposed monetary, fiscal and financial dependency, most recently by the post-Soviet Baltics, Greece and the rest of southern Europe. The resulting strains are now reaching the point where they are breaking apart the arrangements put in place after World War II.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Iowa-based publisher, Meredith has agreed to pay $18.50 a share for Time —the New York publisher of People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, which Meredith announced in a press release Sunday night.

• As frustrating as it is to have the President and others in position of power lie to the public, the question can be fairly asked: What does the Supreme Court have to say about this mendacity?

• The answer may disappoint you. Recent cases show that the Supreme Court has given Americans wide latitude to lie in everyday life. Take the case of Xavier Alvarez, a board member of the Three Valleys Water District in Claremont, California. At his first public meeting, Alvarez introduced himself by saying “I’m a retired marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy.”

• None of what Alvarez said was true. Not only had he not won the Congressional Medal of Honor, he had never even served in the U.S. military. Alvarez stepped on something of a land mine by claiming he won the Congressional of Medal of Honor. President George W. Bush signed into law the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it a misdemeanor to falsely represent that one had received any U.S. military decoration or medal. Although the Act set the usual penalty at up to six months in prison, special opprobrium was reserved for the Medal of Honor: the prison term could be as much as a year.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Two years after the controversial Section 66A of the Information Technology (IT) Act was struck down by the Supreme Court, new research points at how another section of the Act is being similarly misused with grave consequences for freedom of expression, sexuality and digital rights.

• A research study by Point of View, a non-profit organisation that works on gender-rights, against sexual violence, and on digital rights of women, has drawn attention to the indiscriminate and increasing use of Section 67 of the IT Act by the police. The first ever in-depth study of Section 67 finds that it is leaning suspiciously towards the draconian Section 66A.

• Should the United States standardize what needs to be taught to students? Where is the line drawn on censoring ideas in education?

• Because of so-called “ag-gag” laws enacted in eight states, people in animal rescue videos often blur out their own faces and keep their identities private, Butler reported. However, DxE activists do not hide their identities, despite the risks involved. DxE activist Wayne Hsiung said, “We’re daring these industries to try us in the court of public opinion and in the court of law… We are happy to have the debate with the industry. They are terrified that the public will side with us.” The group says that, to date, its twelve open rescue videos on Youtube have received over three million views combined.

• A few days before the Halloween hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, where powerful tech companies would provide testimony about their roles disseminating “fake news” during the 2016 election, Twitter announced it would no longer accept advertising from the Russian government-sponsored broadcast channel Russia Today (RT), or the state-owned Sputnik.

• In a Twitter PublicPolicy blog post (10/26/17), the company said it would “off-board advertising from all accounts” owned by RT and Sputnik. The decision was based on its own assessment of the 2016 US election “and the US intelligence community’s conclusion that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election on behalf of the Russian government.” As substantiation, Twitter merely provided a link to the January 6, 2017, intelligence report (ODNI).

• BuzzFeed (11/1/17) reported that Twitter based its decision on the intelligence report that called RT “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet,” also providing a link to the report without a word about its documentation or quality. Most reporting did the same, including the New York Times (10/26/17), which said Twitter’s decision “was informed by specific findings of the United States intelligence community, made public in January.”

• Does the Constitution allow a public official to block people on social media? It depends.

• Thanks to a growing number of state and local government officials, not to mention national actors like President Trump, questions abound these days about the constitutionality of public officials blocking people on social media.

• The answers to those questions are complicated and depend on the facts of any given case. But, as we explain in a brief we filed in a Virginia lawsuit this week, the proper framework for courts to use in considering these cases should ensure that as our democracy increasingly moves online, the Constitution applies with no less force on the internet than it does offline.

• Two main principles should govern these cases: First, individuals do not lose their First Amendment rights just by virtue of gaining public office, no matter how powerful they are. Second, when they act on behalf of the government, elected officials are also subject to the limits that the First Amendment imposes on them as government actors.

• To answer this conundrum, courts must begin by asking which role a public official embodies on a given social media account: that of a private speaker or a government actor. If the answer is “private speaker,” she can limit her audience and curate the messages on the page, just like any other member of the public. But if the answer is “government actor,” the First Amendment dictates that she can’t prohibit access to her social media in three specific circumstances.

• There are two bills racing through Congress that would undermine your right to free expression online and threaten the online communities that we all rely on. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865) might sound noble, but they would do nothing to fight sex traffickers. What they would do is force online web platforms to police their users’ activity much more stringently than ever before, silencing a lot of innocent voices in the process.

• We’ve already written extensively about SESTA and the dangers it would pose to online communities, but as the House of Representatives considers moving on FOSTA, it’s time to reiterate that all of the major flaws in SESTA are in FOSTA too.

• Gendarmes reportedly stormed the premises on November 27, 2017, shortly after the ‘forbidden’ interview and carried out the orders of the governor of Labe to close down the station. The action of the governor, Mamadou Saïdou Diallo, came just two days after President Alpha Conde threatened to shut down any radio station which will give coverage to Aboubacar Soumah, Deputy Secretary General of the Free Union of Teachers and Researchers of Guinea (SLECG). Soumah is the coordinator of a general strike by members of the SLECG which in its second week and which President Conde has described as a rebellion.

• The Swedish government is now officially questioning free speech. A government agency has declared so-called Swedish “new media” — news outlets that refuse to subscribe to the politically correct orthodoxies of the mainstream media — a possible threat to democracy. In a government report, tellingly called “The White Hatred” written by Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut (Total Defense Research Institute), a government agency under the Swedish Ministry of Defense, Swedish new media such as Samhällsnytt (formerly known as Avpixlat), Nyheter Idag and Nya Tider are lumped together with neo-Nazi media such as Nordfront.

• The Bollywood film ‘Padmavati’ is swirling in controversy, so much so that its release in India has been postponed and its international debut left uncertain.

• The film recounts the story of a Muslim sultan who attacks a kingdom in an attempt to capture a beautiful Hindu queen. Critics say the film “disrespects the sentiments” of the Rajput caste. And despite historians pointing out that the queen portrayed in the film is a fictional character, Rajput groups have been using their political capital to block the film with much success.

• The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is backing the efforts of Rajput groups, like the Karni Sena, who’ve been holding protests in several states across India. The group is also accused of vandalising cinemas this week and earlier this year reportedly stormed the set of the film and assaulted the director.

• We could reasonably have expected the digital revolution to have ushered in the heyday of media freedom. The miniaturisation of technology and spread of mobile connectivity have massively increased our ability to share, interact with, and access information.

• However, this has been matched by censorship in the name of national security and countering extremism, demands for protection against offensive speech and misinformation, as well as unprecedented surveillance and collection of our data. A new report by Article 19 maps this trend, showing that media freedom is at its lowest level since 2006, with a particular increase in the government censorship of those who expose corruption and abuse.

• We at Article 19 document the relentless toll of assaults against journalists, media workers and social media commentators. And besides state agents, we have seen an increase in new perpetrators of violations on media freedom, including organised crime, religious militant groups, and even corporations and economics groups. In the worst cases, state censorship operates through one of these groups or they operate with state acquiescence.

• Violence and censorship remain a threat in democratic and authoritarian states. But it is often those with nascent democratic or judicial structures where critical opinions are persecuted by illegitimate and often illegal means. Although the causes vary according to country, the combination of weak institutions and limited legal frameworks, as well as a lack of both political will and appreciation for diversity and pluralism, produce hostile environments for press freedom.

• There are two bills racing through Congress that would undermine your right to free expression online and threaten the online communities that we all rely on. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693) and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865) might sound noble, but they would do nothing to fight sex traffickers. What they would do is force online web platforms to police their users’ activity much more stringently than ever before, silencing a lot of innocent voices in the process.

• For a number of years now, I have been periodically interviewed as a source or a commentator on news programs and as an occasional panel participant on RT TV, the Russian government-funded English-language television station. For the past year, I’ve been paid a small amount for my work.

• Effective Monday, November 13, something changed, though. RT suddenly became a“registered foreign agent.” The Russian government-funded news service, which has its headquarters in Washington, with bureaus in several other US cities, filed the required papers under protest — the only foreign news service operating here that is required to do so — and said it intends to sue. Russia is also retaliating and will be requiring some US news organizations operating in Russia, including Voice of America, to similarly register as foreign agents.

• This means that as of two weeks ago, I have been working, at least on a minimal basis of perhaps one short 5-10-minute interview per week, for a “foreign agent.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• More than 75% of the 300+ apps analyzed by Exodus contain the signatures of trackers, though this data does not tell the whole story. There is an entire industry based upon these trackers, and apps identified as “clean” today may contain trackers that have not yet been identified. Tracker code may also be added by developers to new versions of apps in the future. The Exodus platform identifies trackers via signatures, like an anti-virus or spyware scanner, and thus can only detect trackers previously identified by researchers at the time of the scan.

• A combined study conducted by a French research organization Exodus Privacy and the Privacy Lab, Yale University concludes that around 3 out of every 4 Android apps track users in some way, using third-party trackers.

• The exact details of the renewal are still up for debate, however, with both the House and the Senate pushing different versions, and several lawmakers are trying to push different reforms.

• Section 702 has been shown to be vulnerable to major abuse. Serious reform, however, is facing a lot of resistance, with pro-surveillance officials saying it would weaken the ability to surveil in general.

• So while some lawmakers are promising they won’t support any renewal without some “meaningful” reforms, anything that seems too meaningful is unlikely to ever get through in the first place.

• Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee are close to an agreement on how to overhaul a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program and hope to complete legislation soon, the top Democrat on the panel said on Wednesday.

• Representative Adam Schiff said he had proposed a compromise that would let intelligence agencies query a database of information on Americans in national security cases without a warrant, but would require a warrant to use the information in other cases, such as those involving serious violent crime.

• “This would prevent law enforcement from simply using the database as a vehicle to go fishing, but at the same time it would preserve the operational capabilities of the program,” Schiff told reporters.

• Ragtime is more than a decade old, but apparently still in use. It was part of the Stellar Wind warrantless surveillance bundle put together by the agency and the Bush administration shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. While Stellar Wind is no longer in use thanks to domestic surveillance concerns (it’s actually just been offshored to dodge FISA obligations), Ragtime appears to still be running, although there’s little publicly-available information discussing its use in surveilling American citizens. An undated document leaked by Snowden in 2013 discusses Ragtime collection in the context of thwarting Congressional oversight.

• What is known is Ragtime’s super-secret status. It’s a “need to know” program that only certain analysts can access. Collections from this program are considered so sensitive they aren’t shared with foreign allies, with the exception of the Ragtime-C variant, which allows UK intelligence agency access.

• A newly discovered document has revealed seven hidden variants of the National Security Agency’s Ragtime program. Though Ragtime is intended for NSA’s foreign surveillance, one of the components apparently targets Americans.

• Ragtime is a NSA surveillance program that collects the contents of private communications of foreign nationals, including emails and text messages. A newly revealed component of the program, called US-P, seems to be aimed at American citizens.

• The term ‘USP’ (US Persons) is used in intelligence circles to refer to American citizens. A document dated November 2011, seen by both ZDNet and UpGuard, revealed the existence of US-P and six other previously unknown Ragtime components. In addition to Ragtime US-P, the newly revealed variants are called Ragtime-BQ, F, N, PQ, S, and T, according to ZDNet.

• ANOTHER NSA LEAK has seen the contents of a hard drive with highly sensitive data get posted online, shedding light on a US Army intelligence project.

• Chris Vickery, director of cybersecurity research firm UpGuard, found a virtual image of the hard disk left on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) server.

• Millions of users are trying to protect their privacy from commercial tracking online, be it through their choice of browser, installation of ad and tracker blocking extensions, or use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This guide focuses on how to correctly configure the blocking extension in your browser to ensure that it’s giving you the privacy you expect. We believe that tools work best when you don’t have to go under the hood. While there is software which meets that criteria (and several are listed in the final section of the guide), the most popular ad blockers do not protect privacy by default and must be reconfigured. We’ll show you how.

• Today we’re launching a new version of Panopticlick, an EFF site which audits your browser privacy protection.

• Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Carpenter v. United States, a major Fourth Amendment case that questions whether the police can access your phone’s location data without a warrant. The government argues that it should always be entitled to that information, no questions asked, because the 95 percent of American adults who own cell phones choose to give up that information “voluntarily.” Because cell phones transmit that data automatically, however, cell phone users have no choice in revealing their location. Therefore, the only action that could be “voluntary” is owning or using a cell phone.

• The problem is that cell phones are no longer meaningfully voluntary in modern society. They have become central to society’s basic functions, such as employment, public safety, and government services. The cell phone is a revolutionary technology, but its real value comes not from its technical capabilities, but from its near-universal adoption.

• The company is using a new kind of captcha to verify whether a user is a real person. According to a screenshot of the identity test shared on Twitter on Tuesday and verified by Facebook, the prompt says: “Please upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face. We’ll check it and then permanently delete it from our servers.”

• In the letter written by his lawyer, Jacobs said Uber created a secret unit in order to obtain trade secrets from its rivals, as reported by The Los Angeles Times. Under questioning, Jacobs then claimed Uber hired multiple contractors who “employed former CIA agents to help the ride-hailing company infiltrate its rivals’ computers.”

• Uber’s espionage team also hired contractors who employed former CIA agents to help with its surveillance, Jacobs said.

• He reportedly made other bombshell allegations in the letter, including that employees at Uber were trained to “impede” ongoing investigations, multiple media outlets reported.

• Under questioning, Richard Jacobs, Uber’s manager of global intelligence, said that Uber hired several contractors that employed former CIA agents to help the ride-hailing service infiltrate its rivals’ computers. Jacobs said the surveillance occurred overseas.

• The probe under way at the U.S. Justice Department centers on a 37-page letter that described allegations made by Richard Jacobs, Uber’s former manager of global intelligence. Jacobs had the letter sent in May to an Uber lawyer. The letter contended that Jacobs had been wrongfully demoted and then fired for trying to stop the company’s alleged misconduct.

Civil Rights/Policing

• To become a police officer in the U.S., one almost always has to enroll in an academy for some basic training. The typical academy session lasts 25 weeks, but state governments — which oversee police academies for local and state law enforcement officers — have wide latitude when it comes to choosing the subjects that will be taught in the classrooms.

• How to properly identify and investigate hate crimes does not seem terribly high on the list of priorities, according to a ProPublica review.

• Only 12 states, for example, have statutes requiring that academies provide instruction on hate crimes.

• In 2006, Cyntoia Brown was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and killing a 43-year-old man who had picked her up for sex. At the time of the crime, she was 16 years old.

• Cyntoia is now in her 20s, and her appeal is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Last week, after a local Fox 17 news report on her case, celebrities like Rihanna took to social media to condemn the sentence and call for her release. The attention to this case is understandable and justified. Cyntoia had run away from home and was living with a pimp who had raped and abused her. The legal team handling Cyntoia’s appeal says she suffers from an alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder, a type of fetal alcohol syndrome that impairs brain development and that more recent testing found her to have the functioning level of a 13 or 14-year-old.

• Black pedestrians face unacceptable discrimination by law enforcement in the city of Jacksonville.

• Walking is a lot of things. It’s great exercise. It’s a cost-free mode of transportation. But for Black people in Jacksonville, Florida, evidence suggests that it’s leading to discriminatory encounters with police.

• Black pedestrians in Jacksonville are ticketed a stunning three times as often for pedestrian violations, like jaywalking, as white pedestrians, according to ProPublica and The Florida Times-Union. In a recently published exposé, the outlets examined 2,200 tickets issued in Jacksonville between 2012 and 2016. They found that although representing only 29 percent of the city’s population, Black people received a whopping 55 percent of all pedestrian tickets. Disproportionate enforcement also occurred for lesser known offenses. For instance, 68 percent of people who received tickets for “failing to cross the road at a right angle or the shortest route” were Black.

• In Jacksonville, crossing the street on a yellow light or walking on the street where there is no sidewalk can result in getting a ticket with a $65 price tag. If you are poor or working but struggling to make ends meet, this is an especially hard pill to swallow. Failure to pay may impact your credit score or possibly result in suspension of your driver’s license.

• Facebook said it would temporarily stop advertisers from being able to exclude viewers by race while it studies the use of its ad targeting system.

• “Until we can better ensure that our tools will not be used inappropriately, we are disabling the option that permits advertisers to exclude multicultural affinity segments from the audience for their ads,” Facebook Sheryl Sandberg wrote in a letter to the Congressional Black Caucus.

• ProPublica disclosed last week that Facebook was still allowing advertisers to buy housing ads that excluded audiences by race, despite its promises earlier this year to reject such ads. ProPublica also found that Facebook was not asking housing advertisers that blocked other sensitive audience categories — by religion, gender, or disability — to “self-certify” that their ads were compliant with anti-discrimination laws.

• Under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, it’s illegal to “to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

• In recent months, our ability to forget has become increasingly apparent. In our blind, deaf and dumb First World – in Spain, for instance -, there have been cries against oppression and struggles for freedom. Many have taken to the streets to fight for civil and political rights and analysts have defended the right to vote and the rule of Law.

• The headiness of the fight has resulted in shows of intolerance, police overreaction and injuries – all in the name of freedom, independence or the constitutional order.

• But what if we contextualized First World struggles? What if we reminded ourselves of where we are and what is happening elsewhere?

• After the 2016 U.S. election, the prospects for digital rights under the incoming administration seemed particularly grim. A silver lining in this dark cloud has been the concerted efforts we’ve seen by groups working to defend digital rights at the local level. Over the past year, a growing network of grassroots groups, the Electronic Frontier Alliance, has taken substantial steps forward in protecting online civil liberties in dozens of communities across the U.S.

• Our preliminary concerns about the Trump administration’s attacks on digital rights unfortunately proved valid.

• President Trump inherited a surveillance apparatus that threatened privacy in a number of ways, from warrantless surveillance of Americans’ electronic communications to monitoring the social media accounts of immigrants, including naturalized U.S. citizens. The administration’s escalating attacks on other digital rights came quickly, with various departments targeting access to knowledge by removing publicly funded research from the web and issuing unconstitutional subpoenas to web hosts seeking the identities of visitors to websites used to coordinate protests of the Trump administration. Less than year into the new administration, free expression is under threat in Congress in the form of bills like SESTA that would likely push marginalized voices offline.

• Ahead of the Thanksgiving feast, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) hit midtown Manhattan on Monday to face down the suits with chants of “Exploitation has got to go!” CIW was there to demand humane working conditions on their farms.

• Peppered with brass-band musicians and street puppets, the protesters rallied at the New York, N.Y. offices of the fast food giant Wendy’s.

• CIW members hoisted tomato and bucket-shaped picket signs with slogans like “freedom from sexual violence” and “Justicia” to face off against Wendy’s cheery, red pigtails. They demanded fair wages and freedom from violence and exploitation.

• A recent article by two Georgetown University civil-liberties attorneys, Yael Bromberg and Eirik Cheverud, “Anti-Trump protesters risk 60 years in jail. Is dissent a crime?,” warns that the Trump Justice Department may be establishing a 21st century “subversives” list. The trial of the first six defendants has just started in Washington, DC.

• The authors’ note that in the wake of Pres. Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, federal prosecutors brought charges against over 200 protestors that included felony rioting, felony incitement to riot, conspiracy to riot and five property-damage crimes. The attorneys remind readers, “Each defendant is facing over 60 years in prison.”

• Since the advent of the smartphone, it seems that every few years or so, one government entity or another suddenly has the brilliant idea that its constituency ought to have fines levied on them for “distracted walking.” This catchall term has a much more specific meaning with in the laws in question: walking and using a phone at the same time. While this nonsense began mostly in foreign countries, there a few states in America that have some flavor of this kind of law on the books.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We wrote earlier this week about how Comcast has changed its promises to uphold net neutrality by pulling back from previous statements that it won’t charge websites or other online applications for fast lanes.

• Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice has been claiming that we got the story wrong. But a further examination of how Comcast’s net neutrality promises have changed over time reveals another interesting tidbit—Comcast deleted a “no paid prioritization” pledge from its net neutrality webpage on the very same day that the Federal Communications Commission announced its initial plan to repeal net neutrality rules.

• Starting in 2014, the webpage, corporate.comcast.com/openinternet/open-net-neutrality, contained this statement: “Comcast doesn’t prioritize Internet traffic or create paid fast lanes.”

• You should root for email to work, because it’s the only open, free, universal communications tool we have left. And, like it or not, you’re stuck with it.

• The Internet, as we know it now, is not likely to exist for much longer. Let me walk you through why I know that.

• On Cyber Monday, more than 200 internet companies and businesses, including Twitter, Reddit, Airbnb and Tumblr sent a letter to the FCC, imploring them to keep net neutrality intact. It stated, “An internet without net neutrality protections would be the opposite of the open market, with a few powerful cable and phone companies picking winners and losers instead of consumers.” This followed Pai’s release of a plan to kill the Obama era rules if he gets the support of the rest of the commission in a vote that is scheduled for December 14.

• The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said it was not in favor of any “discriminatory treatment” with data, including blocking, slowing or offering preferential speeds or treatment to any content.

• Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks fairly, without improper discrimination in favor of particular apps, sites or services. Even as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is pushing a plan to end net neutrality protections in the U.S., India’s telecom regulator has called for strengthening the principle of non-discriminatory access to the Internet.

• This week the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recommended amending all existing ISP licenses in India to explicitly prohibit discriminatory traffic management practices. TRAI’s recommendations on licensing issues are not binding. While TRAI has the power to frame regulations on issues such as pricing, QoS, and interconnection, the Department of Telecom (DoT) has final authority on matters related to granting or modification of licences in India. But if TRAI’s recommendations are accepted by the DoT, ISPs in India will be explicitly prohibited from and will be penalised for blocking, throttling, slowing down, or granting preferential speeds or treatment to any content on their networks. Having rules in place that restrict ISPs and telecom providers’ ability to control access to content via their networks is important for a free and open Internet. Such rules prevent ISPs from degrading the quality of service or blocking access to apps to earn revenue or to limit competition. The FCC’s Open Order 2015 had also banned throttling, blocking and paid prioritization in the provision of broadband Internet access service. The FCC’s new proposal issued last week would eliminate these bright-line rules against blocking, throttling, and pay-to-play in favor of a simplistic transparency requirement.

• To be very clear, there are numerous subjects Mark Cuban has a very solid understanding of, ranging from his support of patent reform and the benefits of improving antiquated film release windows to highlighting the SEC’s disdain for the 14th and 4th Amendments during his fight over insider trading allegations. But when it comes to net neutrality, modern telecom competition, and the problems caused by letting unchecked duopolists like Comcast run amok, Cuban has pretty consistently made it abundantly clear he has absolutely no earthly idea what he’s talking about.

DRM

• These patches and user-space ABI are based on what Google has already been using within Chrome OS. This implementation includes adding a new DRM connector protector for indicating when content protection is desired or enabled, adding a DHCP framework, and implementing HDCP over HDMI and DisplayPort.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• There’s a line in Ian Fleming’s opus Goldfinger that goes: “Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action.” It appears that as far as strange trademark attacks issued from entertainment properties upon canine-related services are concerned, we’ve officially reached the coincidence stage. You will recall that we were just discussing an odd trademark opposition filed from RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan against a dog-walking service calling itself Woof-Tang Clan. On the heels of that, we learn that Activision is mulling an opposition on a trademark application for a dog-poop removal service calling itself Call of DooDee.

Copyrights

• While most people are focused on net neutrality, surveillance, and tax reform, a few legislators are quietly mulling over a different problem: copyright reform.

• Five years ago, Representative Bob Goodlatte, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, launched a series of hearings and studies that he said would lead to comprehensive copyright reform. EFF and many others testified on the merits and problems in virtually every facet of copyright law, and we all waited expectantly for the “Next Great Copyright Act.” For better or worse, that dramatic reform never happened. Instead, we got the CASE Act, a bill to create a small claims process for copyright. The impetus behind this bill comes largely from photographers and other visual artists, who want a way to bring small-value copyright claims with lower expenses. They are legitimately concerned that the cost of litigation puts strong copyright protection out of reach for many artists.

• But the CASE Act is not the right solution. First, it would create a new quasi-court within the Copyright Office. Aside from the constitutional questions that raises, the Copyright Office is not known for its neutrality on copyright issues. Second, the powers given to this new tribunal would invite gamesmanship and abuse. Third, it would magnify the existing problem of copyright’s unpredictable civil penalties. Finally, it would put this new tribunal in charge of punishing DMCA abuse, but sharply limit the punishment available, undermining what little deterrent effect still exists in the statute.

• Let’s break it down.

• The fifth round of negotiations over a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) wound up last week in Mexico. Following conclusion of the round, Mexican Trade Minister Ildefonso Guajardo told reporters that he hoped that the next round, to be held in Washington, DC in the week of 11 December, could see sufficient progress made that the agreement’s Digital Trade chapter could be closed… all before the public has seen a single word of it.

• The history of such predictions leads us to suspect that this may be an optimistic timeline, but the fact that the Minister made it at all does go to confirm that the Digital Trade chapter is seen as being uncontroversial in the negotiations. But it isn’t unimportant. The provisions likely to be found in this chapter include some topics that are critical to the digital economy.

• Website blockades are spreading throughout Europe, where they’ve become a common tool for copyright holders to target piracy. This is also the case in Lithuania, where a court has ordered ISPs to prevent subscribers from accessing the hugely popular BitTorrent tracker Linkomanija. The affected ISPs are likely to appeal the case as it could restrict freedom of expression and speech.

• For many people The Pirate Bay has been hard to reach over the past few days, causing concern among some BitTorrent users. The outages are likely caused by technical issues, which will be resolved in the near future. Meanwhile, some proxies and the Tor domain are still working fine.

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