● 12.07.17

● Links 7/12/2017: Qt 5.10, ReactOS 0.4.7, Guix and GuixSD 0.14.0

Posted in News Roundup at 3:03 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It started back in 1983 with another operating system known as UNIX, first released in 1971. In 1983, the GNU Project was started to create a complete UNIX-compatible operating system, but the project was stalled and had a missing kernel. Around 1987, a UNIX-like operating system for students was released called MINIX, but its licensing prevented it from being distributed freely. Irritated by the licensing of MINIX, Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki began working on his own operating system kernel. His kernel was released in 1991, and when combined with the GNU components and open source licensing, it became the Linux operating system we know today.

• It was last year, around this same time, that I predicted a monumental year for open source in 2017. I even went so far as to say open source would finally pass the 5% market share on the desktop. There was a moment when it looked like that was actually going to happen, only to find out it was a bit of false reporting. Even without hitting that magic number, Linux and open source had a stellar year.

• Will that success hold over to the upcoming year? I believe it will, and then some. Let’s gaze into that always questionable crystal ball and see what kind of predictions we can come up with for Linux and open source.

Desktop

• Back in July, I wrote about trying to get Endless OS working on DVDs. To recap: we have published live ISO images of Endless OS for a while, but until recently if you burned one to a DVD and tried to boot it, you’d get the Endless boot-splash, a lot of noise from the DVD drive, and not much else. Definitely no functioning desktop or installer!

• I’m happy to say that Endless OS 3.3 boots from a DVD. The problems basically boiled down to long seek times, which are made worse by data not being arranged in any particular order on the disk. Fixing this had the somewhat unexpected benefit of improving boot performance on fixed disks, too. For the gory details, read on!

Server

• If you are looking to adopt the benefits of containers, introduce and support a DevOps culture in your organization, run micro-services or in general try to get corporate IT to provide more immediate value to the business by shortening the time to market, you will at least evaluate Kubernetes. When you adopt it, it won’t be long until stateful applications find their way into the cluster—and with that the need for robust, persistent storage. Will databases be among those applications? Very likely. Or workloads, that share large content repositories or such that consume object storage? In either of those cases, you should definitely take a look at gluster-kubernetes.

• At KubeCon, Bitnami demonstrated a tool for deploying pre-packaged Kubernetes containers with the click of a mouse.

• Kubernetes is now — no question about it — the dominant cloud orchestration program. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) giving Kubernetes native support, all major clouds now support Kubernetes. This means more than just you can use the same program to manage your containers on different clouds. It also means you can use Kubernetes to manage all your containers on all your clouds in a single, cohesive fashion. This is what CoreOS brings to the table, with its latest release of Tectonic.

• CoreOS on Tuesday announced the release of Tectonic 1.8, a Kubernetes container management platform. Tectonic enables enterprises to deploy key automation infrastructure components that function like managed cloud services without cloud vendor lock-in.

• The CoreOS Open Cloud Services Catalog offers an alternative to cloud vendors’ proprietary services and APIs — the equivalent of cloud-based offerings developed on open source technologies that enable customers to build their infrastructures within the hybrid environments of their choice.

• It’s a good time to have experience in React, the JavaScript library used to create user interfaces, according to a study released this week by job search firm Indeed.com. Meanwhile, a growing number of job seekers are touting their Linux skills, but employers are less interested. And Python’s status is, well, complicated, the Indeed study showed.

• Indeed looked at the changes in search terms used by tech workers and by recruiters over the past two years, considering the October 2015 through September 2016 and October 2016 through September 2017 time periods. According to that analysis, React is up 313 percent year over year as a job seeker interest, and 229 percent as an employer interest. Cloud computing skills also appear to be blazingly hot, with interest in Amazon Web Services up 98 percent for job seekers and 40 percent for employers. Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform saw a 31-percent boost in searches by job seekers and a 62-percent jump for employers.

• Today, I did a presentation about Linux on Supercomputers at the Faculty of Industrial of UNMSM for its annivrsary. It was published the event in the Intranet of the School.

• In a recent post, we examined the rise of the Site Reliability Engineer in modern software organizations. But it’s one thing just to be called a SRE; we also wanted to know what it takes to become a great one.

• So we decided to look at some of the characteristics and habits common to highly successful SREs. As in most development and operations roles, first-class technical chops are obviously critical. For SREs, those specific skills might depend on how a particular organization defines or approaches the role: the Google approach to Site Reliability Engineering might require more software engineering and coding experience, whereas another organization might place a higher value on ops or QA skills. But as we found when we looked at what makes dev and ops practitioners successful, what sets the “great” apart from the “good enough” is often a combination of habits and traits that complement technical expertise.

• In the first part of this review of Blockchain Revolution by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, I presented some of the ways the authors suggest blockchain technology will impact organizations. In particular, I examined the open organization principles (transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, community) and the reasons we practice them (building a network of people dedicated to a purpose and sharing the same ethical standards, for example).

• [...]

• Open Networked Enterprises would best suit tasks that are high in complexity but low in repetition. At very low cost, smart contracts enable companies to craft clever, self-enforcing agreements with suppliers and partners. Collections of these agreements will start to resemble working networks, trusted company affiliations, or open organizations. In Blockchain Revolution, the authors mention the work of famous Harvard Professor Michael Porter with regard to this phenomenon. Porter considers these Open Networked Enterprises to have competitive advantages that are difficult to duplicate.

Kernel Space

• Security is paramount these days for any computer system, including those running on Linux. Thus, part of the ongoing Linux development work involves hardening the kernel against attack, according to the recent Linux Kernel Development Report.

• This work, according to report authors Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman, involves the addition of several new technologies, many of which have their origin in the grsecurity and PaX patch sets. “New hardening features include virtually mapped kernel stacks, the use of the GCC plugin mechanism for structure-layout randomization, the hardened usercopy mechanism, and a new reference-count mechanism that detects and defuses reference-count overflows. Each of these features makes the kernel more resistant to attack,” the report states.

• The team at NEC Laboratories Europe spent quite a bit of time over the last few years developing unikernels – specialized virtual machine images targeting specific applications. This technology is fascinating to us because of its fantastic performance benefits: tiny memory footprints (hundreds of KBs or a few MBs), boot times compared to those of processes or throughput in the range of 10-40 Gb/s, among many other attributes. Specific metrics can be found in these articles: “My VM is Lighter (and Safer) than your Container,” “Unikernels Everywhere: The Case for Elastic CDNs,” and “ClickOS and the Art of Network Function Virtualization.”

• The potential of unikernels is great (as you can see from the work above), but there hasn’t been a massive adoption of unikernels. Why? Development time. For example, developing Minipython, a MicroPython unikernel, took the better part of three months to put together and test. ClickOS, a unikernel for NFV, was the result of a couple of years of work.

• Observers of the kernel’s commit stream or mailing lists will have seen a certain amount of traffic referring to the addition of SPDX license identifiers to kernel source files. For many, this may be their first encounter with SPDX. But the SPDX effort has been going on for some years; this article describes SPDX, along with why and how the kernel community intends to use it.

• On its face, compliance with licenses like the GPL seems like a straightforward task. But it quickly becomes complicated for a company that is shipping a wide range of software, in various versions, in a whole set of different products. Compliance problems often come about not because a given company wants to flout a license, but instead because that company has lost track of which licenses it needs to comply with and for which versions of which software. SPDX has its roots in an effort that began in 2009 to help companies get a handle on what their compliance obligations actually are.

• It can be surprisingly hard to determine which licenses apply to a given repository full of software. The kernel’s COPYING file states that it can be distributed under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License. But many of the source files within the kernel tell a different story; some are BSD licensed, and many are dual-licensed. Some carry an exception to make it clear that user-space programs are not a derived product of the kernel. Occasionally, files with GPL-incompatible licenses have been found (and fixed).

• When he released 4.14, Linus Torvalds warned that the 4.15 merge window might be shorter than usual due to the US Thanksgiving holiday. Subsystem maintainers would appear to have heard him; as of this writing, over 8,800 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline since the opening of the 4.15 merge window. Read on for a summary of the most interesting changes found in that first set of patches.

• Despite the warnings that the 4.15 merge window could be either longer or shorter than usual, the 4.15-rc1 prepatch came out right on schedule on November 26. Anybody who was expecting a quiet development cycle this time around is in for a surprise, though; 12,599 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline during the 4.15 merge window, 1,000 more than were seen in the 4.14 merge window. The first 8,800 of those changes were covered in this summary; what follows is a look at what came after.

• Diligent developers do their best to anticipate things that can go wrong and write appropriate error-handling code. Unfortunately, error-handling code is especially hard to test and, as a result, often goes untested; the code meant to deal with errors, in other words, is likely to contain errors itself. One way of finding those bugs is to inject errors into a running system and watching how it responds; the kernel may soon have a new mechanism for doing this sort of injection.

• As an example of error handling in the kernel, consider memory allocations. There are few tasks that can be performed in kernel space without allocating memory to work with. Memory allocation operations can fail (in theory, at least), so any code that contains a call to a function like kmalloc() must check the returned pointer and do the right thing if the requested memory was not actually allocated. But kmalloc() almost never fails in a running kernel, so testing the failure-handling paths is hard. It is probably fair to say that a large percentage of allocation-failure paths in the kernel have never been executed; some of those are certainly wrong.

• Out-of-tree drivers are a maintenance headache, since customers may want to use them in newer kernels. But even those drivers that get merged into the mainline may need to be backported at times. Coccinelle developer Julia Lawall introduced the audience at Open Source Summit Europe to some new tools that can help make both forward-porting and backporting drivers easier.

• She opened her talk by noting that she was presenting step one in her plans, she hoped to be able to report on step two next year some time. The problem she is trying to address is that the Linux kernel keeps moving on. A vendor might create a driver for the 4.4 kernel but, over the next six months, the kernel will have moved ahead by another two versions. There are lots of changes with each new kernel, including API changes that require driver changes to keep up.

• That means that vendors need to continually do maintenance on their drivers unless they get them upstream, where they will get forward-ported by the community. But the reverse problem is there as well: once a device becomes popular, customers may start asking for it to run with older kernels too. That means backporting.

Linux Foundation

• Two of the biggest cloud companies on the planet have agreed to support the work of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, adding their names to a list that includes nearly everyone shaping the direction of modern cloud computing.

• The rich complexity of Kubernetes — the open-source system for managing containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) — attracts diverse users and contributors. Everyone — from public cloud providers to small startups to enterprise users — has their hands in it; can they collaborate to control the chaos and bring standards to the maturing technology?

• Building a modern, distributed application can be a tough problem to tackle, especially for new users. They have to learn how to program, then learn the syntax for all of the tools necessary, which is often different.

• The two major cloud companies, Alibaba Cloud and Baidu, have announced their support of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) by becoming members of the organization, as noted this week at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017.

Graphics Stack

• Back in early November Intel finally landed its shader cache support for allowing GLSL shaders to be cached on-disk similar to the RadeonSI shader caching that has been present since earlier in the year. But this functionality isn’t yet enabled by default as it still needs more testing.

• Last month I covered some early test results of this Intel i965 Mesa shader on-disk cache within Intel’s Mesa GLSL Shader Cache Is Speeding Up Game Load Times. In my experiences thus far it’s been working out well but currently isn’t used by the Intel driver unless the MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE=0 environment variable is set.

• It’s always great waking up to new features landing in Mesa Git.

• For the past several months Igalia developers have been working on SPV_KHR_16bit_storage and VK_KHR_16bit_storage support for the Intel ANV Vulkan driver. As implied by the name, this is about supporting 16-bit data types in shader input/output interfaces and push constant blocks. This Vulkan “half float” support has now landed in Mesa Git across a number of patches affecting NIR, ANV, and the Intel shader compiler.

• One of the most exciting open-source OpenCL projects we have been following in recent years is POCL as “Portable C” for having an LLVM-based portable OpenCL implementation to run on CPUs as well as GPUs now via AMD HSA back-end and a new experimental NVIDIA CUDA back-end. The POCL 1.0 release is finally near.

• Alex Deucher of AMD sent in today their first batch of feature updates for Radeon/AMDGPU/TTM feature code for DRM-Next, which has already been queued, and will in turn land next year with the Linux 4.16 kernel.

• Back in September there were developers from Samsung’s Open-Source Group adding initial OpenGL ES 3.0 support to Cairo. The GLESv3 upbringing in Cairo is still ongoing and not yet fully vetted, but Bryce Harrington of Samsung OSG has now blogged about this effort.

• While there is the initial support for creating an OpenGL ES 3.0 context with Cairo, as Bryce explains in his new blog post, the work on GLES 3.0 for Cairo isn’t complete. Additional code is still to be written to leverage new GLES3 functionality and they originally started writing this code for their Tizen platform.

• Last month Red Hat developer David Airlie landed shader image support and other GL4 extension work for the R600 Gallium3D driver that is used for older, pre-GCN AMD graphics processors. For those still relying upon these aging GPUs, David Airlie is continuing with improvements on R600g this month.

• In between hacking on the RADV Vulkan driver, David has continued pushing more improvements to this Gallium3D driver that otherwise doesn’t see too much activity these days. In the past few days has been a number of R600 commits to Mesa 17.4-dev Git.

Benchmarks

• Some time ago I wrote a blog post comparing the real world performance of C and C++ by converting Pkg-config from C to C++ and measuring the resulting binaries. This time we ported it to D and running the same tests.

• Phoronix Test Suite 7.6.0-Alvdal is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software.

Applications

• At the end of 2013 we wrote about a new Qt5 web-browser inspired by Opera and in 2014 it entered alpha form. But since then we hadn’t heard much of that browser, Otter, until a Phoronix reader brought it up in our forums today.

• It turns out that the Otter web browser is nearing its hard feature freeze for their first major release and the latest release candidate was made available this week. The goal of Otter remains to “recreate the best aspects of the classic Opera (12.x)” while making use of the Qt5 tool-kit and offering packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux (including AppImage support).

• We have been using virtualization for quite some time now and unless you have been living under a rock, Docker containers have also been in the game for well over 4 years. ​Before we even begin discussing how they are different and unique from each other, let us get a short explanation of each of them.

Proprietary

• Raspberry Pi users now have one more browser to choose from besides Chromium, Firefox and Midori, with the newly announced availability of an experimental version of power-user focused Vivaldi.

• The Blink-based browser from former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner is expanding beyond Windows, macOS and Linux PCs to a range of Arm-based developer boards, including the Raspberry Pi, CubieBoard, Asus Tinker Board, and more.

• Vivaldi doesn’t yet have a mobile browser but it was its work on one that helped spawn the build for Raspberry Pi, according to the company. It also points to Samsung’s DeX project as a potential new platform for Vivaldi. DeX aims to run full Linux on a Galaxy phone connected to a display.

Instructionals/Technical

• testssl.sh is a free and open source, feature-rich command line tool used for checking TLS/SSL encryption enabled services for supported ciphers, protocols and some cryptographic flaws, on Linux/BSD servers. It can be run on MacOS X and Windows using MSYS2 or Cygwin.

• HTML, cascading stylesheets (CSS), and JavaScript have experienced massive growth and evolution over the past two decades, which should come as no surprise given the ever-expanding role of the internet in our lives. JavaScript development has come a long way since the early 1990s and IBM’s famous commercial depicting business’ early recognition of the internet’s significance. That commercial forever changed the role of the web developer. Before the business invasion, web developers were more artistic, but the influence of business and industry changed all of that.

• More than 25 years have passed since the first web pages produced with JavaScript were developed, and things have improved immensely. Today, IDEs are well structured to validate your code, and self-contained environments help with testing and debugging web frontend logic. Now, learning JavaScript goes well beyond simply studying the language’s syntax.

Wine or Emulation

• CrossOver 17 is now available. It brings support for Microsoft Office 2016 on Linux, WINE performance improvements, and a slate of bug fixes and features.

Games

• Here’s one we totally missed which looks very interesting. Just One Line [Steam, Official Site] is a fantasy gamebook-like RPG that’s currently in Early Access and it supports Linux.

• GZDoom [Official Site], the open source id Tech 1 engine that powers mods such as Project Brutality and standalone TCs like WolfenDoom: Blade of Agony or Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny, has a new version out with improved support for Mesa drivers on Linux.

• I only just heard about Iconoclasts [Steam, Official Site], a rather incredible looking story-based action platformer and it’s coming to Linux next year.

• A feature that was often requested by Linux gamers, was a way for us to show developers there’s a demand for a port. Valve has delivered something interesting to help. Although it does have a small caveat, it’s only if you pick one platform in your Steam settings.

• Valve has decided to stop supporting Bitcoin for settling transactions on Steam.

• Effective today, Bitcoin is no longer supported on Steam. This decision was due to the increased volatility of Bitcoin recently as well as increased transaction fees.

• When Valve first started accepting Bitcoin as an option for Steam purchases last April, the cryptocurrency was trading around $450. Today, with Bitcoin surging past $12,000 per coin, Valve has announced that “Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method on our platform due to high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin.”

• A wider audience will now be able to enjoy the original Corpse Party. Xseed Games has extended the range of the PC version of the game. In addition to Windows, it is now compatible with Linux operating systems.

• Bridge Constructor Portal has been officially announced today, this next title will blend together the well known engineering from previous games with Portal. The title is being developed by ClockStone Software and published by Headup Games, who also did the previous Bridge Constructor titles.

• I have it confirmed directly from the press information that Linux will be fully supported, which is fantastic news! It will officially release December 20th, which is quite surprising given it’s only just been announced.

• Empires of the Undergrowth [Steam, Official Site] is an Ant colony management and strategy game that’s now in Early Access, I took a look and here’s some thoughts.

• The Escapists 2 [Steam] has been updated with a prison editor and Steam Workshop support, the good news is it works on Linux too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Qt 5.10 is now officially out as the half-year update to the Qt5 tool-kit.

• Qt 5.10 is arriving just a few days late and is a big feature update. Qt 5.10 features many improvements to Qt Quick and QML, initial Vulkan support, support for streaming Qt UIs to WebGL-enabled browsers, OpenGL ES improvements, new functionality in Qt 3D, a new QRandomGenerator as a “high quality” RNG, OpenSSL 1.1 support in Qt Network, embedded improvements, updated Qt WebEngine, and Qt Network Authentication for OAuth/OAuth2 support and Qt Speech for text-to-speech capabilities. There’s a whole lot more as well.

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.5.0!

• I’m happy to let you all know that Qt 5.10 has just been released. Qt 5.10 comes with a ton of new functionalities that I’m thrilled to talk to you about.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It’s been a month since the Outreachy Round 15 results were announced . Yay! my proposal for adding a network panel to GNOME Usage was selected. I am glad to be working on something I personally have been longing for. Moreover, I finally have something to cut down on my Xbox addiction and channelize it into bringing the network panel to life.

• A quick post to tell you that we finally added UTC support to Clocks’ and the Shell’s World Clocks section. And if you’re into it, there’s also Anywhere on Earth support.

• You will need to have git master versions of libgweather (our cities and timezones database), and gnome-clocks. This feature will land in GNOME 3.28.

• Last week I took part in the GNOME Shell UX Hackfest in London, along with other designers and developers from GNOME and adjacent communities such as Endless, Pop!, and elementary. We talked about big, fundamental things, like app launching and the lock/login screen, as well as some smaller items, like the first-run experience and legacy window decorations.

• In the last few months it’s gone from being hardly used to being used multiple times an hour, probably due to the requirement that applications on Flathub need it as part of the review process. After some complaints, I’ve added a ton more explanation to each question and made it easier to use. In particular if you specify that you’re creating metadata for a “non-game” then 80% of the questions get hidden from view.

Distributions

Reviews

• POP!_OS is a rather average Gnome spin of a Gnome-based Ubuntu, which itself is a pale shadow of its former self. System76 did create their own operating system, but it is not drastic enough to warrant a special place in the charts as an independent entry – this is true for 94% of all distros – and not good enough in the first place. It does somewhat improve Aardvark, but it’s still a weak offering.

• We had hardware issues before we ever got into the live session, all sorts of hardware problems in the installed system, the ergonomics are awful, Samba performance is flaky, overall system responsiveness is average. Package management and updates are rather robust and good and so is smartphone support, but then you need Gnome extensions and codecs to really experience the desktop as it’s meant to be. All in all, you can accomplish all of this on your own in any which Gnome, or use something that actually has a sane layout and offers genuine productivity, like Plasma or Windows.

• This is an interesting experiment, but ultimately, I can’t see a reason why anyone would prefer this over stock Ubuntu (with Unity, a good ole 14.04 LTS), Plasma or even any other tailored Debian-based Gnome system. The differences aren’t large or important enough, and there are way too many bugs and issues, making it an even more difficult choice. Overall, POP!_OS deserves something like its 4/10 for its debut. There’s only so much you can do with a broken foundation. Well, let’s see how this one evolves. For now, skip.

• In this review of Kali Linux, we try to answer regular questions like what is Kali Linux, what is the use of Kali Linux and whether beginners should use Kali Linux or not?

New Releases

• If you take a look at our popular list of lightweight Linux distros, you’ll realize that Puppy Linux has found a place near the top. Packaged in small size, this Linux distro is known for its ability to be built using the packages from other distros like Ubuntu and Slackware. To help you revive your outdated machine, the developers of Puppy Linux have shipped the latest release.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• GroupLink® Corporation is pleased to announce a new partnership with SUSE® collaborating on software solutions, support training and materials for academic organizations on Linux.

Slackware Family

• IcedTea release manager Andrew Hughes (aka GNU/Andrew) announced the announced a new release for IcedTea. The version 2.6.12 builds OpenJDK 7u161_b01. This release includes the October 2017 security fixes for Java 7. The announcement page contains a list of the security issues that have been fixed with this release. It is recommended that you upgrade your OpenJDK 7 to the latest version. If you have already moved to Java 8 then this article is obviously not relevant for you.

Red Hat Family

• A large Red Hat customer transitioned from a high-end RISC server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on x86 and was able to recoup the cost of the project in just over three months. This is without factoring in real estate, depreciation of hardware, and power/cooling. In parallel, they were able to decrease their risk profile: according to one of Red Hat’s chief technologists who has advised many customers on their Linux migration strategy, spares for some RISC vendors have become increasingly difficult to acquire. Some customers readily admit that online auctions have become their primary source for spares. This is troubling on many levels. Factor in the price/performance ratio of RISC vs. x86 and the choice to migrate can become even more appealing.

Finance

Fedora

• Client side decoration allows the application to use its own decorations. Traditionally the window manager is in charge of providing the title bar, close button, border, re-size grips, and so on. These graphical elements are called decorations. With client side decoration, an application can tell the window manager, “No thank you, I don’t want decorations.”

• Stratis is still at a pre-1.0 development stage and isn’t expected to be feature complete at least well into 2018, but the hope is getting it early in Fedora will help mature it faster and see its community interest and adoption.

• More details on the Stratis Storage proposal for Fedora 28 can be found on the Fedora Wiki. More details on the Stratis project itself can be found via GitHub.

• As you all know, swift is intended as a replacement for C-based languages (C, C++, and Objective-C). Note: Xcode includes a release of Swift that is supported by Apple.

Debian Family

• The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the second alpha release of the installer for Debian 10 “Buster”.

• The Debian project has issued the second alpha release of the Debian Installer that eventually will be used by Debian 10.0 “Buster”.

• Debian Installer Buster Alpha 2 was released today, three months after the initial installer alpha.

• The unattended-upgrades package is now installed by default for trying to ensure the automatic installation of security upgrades. The installer image now also makes use of the Linux 4.13 kernel, support for EXT4′s 64-bit feature in syslinux, new machine DB entries for some ARM boards, and various other updates.

• Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• For many Linux users, it’s easy to forget what the Linux landscape looked like before Ubuntu. Back then, newbie centric distros didn’t have Ubuntu as their core. Instead, they relied exclusively on, with the exception of Mandriva (Mandrake). In this spirit of remembrance, I want to take a look back at Ubuntu through the years. With Ubuntu’s shift from the desktop into more of an enterprise future, the timing is fitting to see that at one time Ubuntu was very much a desktop focused experience. In the interest of keeping this article focused, I will be touching on Ubuntu releases that offered something unique and interesting to Ubuntu’s features.

• The Canonical Landscape tool brings together multiple servers under a centralized management system. It provides Ubuntu server, package and update management and control at scale. With options such as tags, Ubuntu administrators can group servers for updates and other changes.

• The Landscape system seems fit for Ubuntu administrators who need a simple way to manage infrastructure updates. While some more advanced features are not available, it has a smaller learning curve than other products that provide centralized server management, such as Red Hat Satellite. The price is also a low barrier to entry.

• Today’s shoppers are looking for a consistent experience, no matter which channels they use, whether smartphone, tablet, wearable, digital point of sale, (POS), or other. Commercetools helps enterprises to digitally transform their entire sales operations across all channels. The Software-as-a-Service approach, open source philosophy, and strong support of an API and microservices architecture of Commercetools enable the company’s customers to rapidly build highly individual shopping experiences for their own markets, without having to change their whole IT ecosystem in the process.

• Every 6 months the Ubuntu Kernel Team is tasked to pick the kernel to be used in the next release. This is a difficult thing to do because we don’t definitively know what will be going into the upstream kernel over the next 6 months nor the quality of that kernel. We look at the Ubuntu release schedule and how that will line up with the upstream kernel releases. We talk to hardware vendors about when they will be landing their changes upstream and what they would prefer as the Ubuntu kernel version. We talk to major cloud vendors and ask them what they would like. We speak to large consumers of Ubuntu to solicit their opinion. We look at what will be the next upstream stable kernel. We get input from members of the Canonical product strategy team. Taking all of that into account we are tentatively planning to converge on 4.15 for the Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS release.

Flavours and Variants

• Uruk GNU/Linux officially reached version 2.0 at Tuesday, 5 December 2017. This article mentions the download links and more info about Uruk.

• deepin GNU/Linux 15.5 released at Thursday, 30 November 2017 with so many new features. Here are the official download links, with some mirrors, and unofficial torrents.

Devices/Embedded

• Libre Computer’s open source, $35-and-up “Renegade” SBC is a Raspberry Pi clone that runs Linux or Android 7.1 on a Rockchip RK3328 with up to 4GB DDR4.

• Earlier this year, Libre Computer went to Kickstarter to fund its quad -A53 Amlogic S905X based Le Potato SBC, and it’s a third the way toward its $100K KS goal for its Allwinner-based Tritium board with 37 days left. Now the Shenzhen-based company has shifted over to Indiegogo to launch the Renegade, the company’s first Rockchip-based SBC, and the first Raspberry Pi clone we’ve seen that ships with up to 4GB of speedy DDR4 RAM.

• Axiomtek’s “tBOX500-510-FL” transportation PC has a Kaby Lake U-series CPU, 2x swappable SATA III bays, 3x mini-PCIe, modular I/O, and -40 to 70°C support.

• The tBOX500-510-FL is a scaled back version of Axiomtek’s similarly Intel Kaby Lake U-series based tBOX324-894-FL. Designed for vehicle, railway, and marine transportation applications, the tBOX500-510-FL runs Linux or Windows 10 on dual-core, 15W TDP Kaby Lake chips ranging from the Core i7-7600U (2.8GHz/3.9GHz) to a 2.2GHz Celeron 3965U.

• Logic Supply’s fanless, Ubuntu-friendly “ML100G-31” NUC mini-PC has a dual-core Kaby Lake SoC, M.2 wireless and SSD expansion, and 2x HDMI 2.0 ports.

• Logic Supply’s ML100G-31 is the fourth in its ML-1000 series of industrial-focused mini-PCs based on the Intel (Next Unit of Computing) reference design. The system follows the Intel Bay Trail based ML100G-10 and 5th Gen “Broadwell” based ML100G-30, both of which launched in 2015.

• The best way to celebrate the coldest, darkest time of year is to build fun Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. These projects will light up the gloomiest gloom, fill your days with fun and your heart with joy, and all without draining your pocketbook. You can control lights and music, build a retro gaming console, build a cool weather station, build a photo frame, or just learn the basics and fiddle around randomly.

Tizen

Android

• Fossdroid is an alternate web interface for the F‑Droid repository of open source apps for the Android operating system. Unlike the official F‑Droid website, Fossdroid’s design is based on the Google Play Store, which gives users who have never used an external app repository a familiar interface to search, browse, and install Android apps. Users who use a lot of F‑Droid apps should install the F‑Droid app, which can install apps and keep them automatically updated, but Fossdroid provides a nice way to explore what the F‑Droid repository offers. Here’s how to use the Fossdroid website to find, download, and install apps.

• After more than a year of silence, VideoLAN recently updated the VLC for Android media player app with a lot of new stuff, numerous improvements, and much more.

• Coming more than a year after the VLC 2.0 release, VLC 2.5 has hit the Google Play Store over the weekend and it’s a major update that adds support for 360-degree videos, a more dynamic and Material Design-compliant user interface, Picture-in-Picture mode for Android Oreo devices, as well as DayNight mode integration.

• VLC for Android is now integrated with Google Now and comes with a new Search activity, refactors the MediaLibrary, adds support for latest Chrome OS operating system with Android apps support, improves RTL (Right-to-Left) support, implements custom equalizer presets, and boosts audio in the video player.

Free Software/Open Source

• Just about everyone I know takes notes, and many people use an online note-taking application like Evernote, Simplenote, or Google Keep. Those are all good tools, but you have to wonder about the security and privacy of your information—especially in light of Evernote’s privacy flip-flop of 2016. If you want more control over your notes and your data, you really need to turn to an open source tool.

• Whatever your reasons for moving away from Evernote, there are open source alternatives out there. Let’s look at one of those alternatives: Turtl.

• The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.7 as we continue to work on releasing every three months.

• We’re especially pleased to present this release as the very first one that’s been developed in our new Git/GitHub repository. Moving from Subversion to GitHub has proven to be an invaluable way to reach new testers, users and improve the overall awareness of the ReactOS project.

• At the end of October ReactOS 0.4.7-RC1 was released as the newest test release for this open-source operating system project continuing to work on re-implementing the Windows APIs. That official v0.4.7 release is now available.

• Iguazio Systems Ltd. has raised $48 million and a lot of interest for its platform-independent approach to data analytics. Now the company is releasing some of the underlying serverless computing technology under an open-source license.

• Called nuclio, the platform is claimed to operate at faster-than-bare-metal speed, processing up to 400,000 events per second compared with 2,000 on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Lambda platform, according to Yaron Haviv (pictured), founder and chief technology officer of iguazio. The application program interfaces that expose the serverless processes run between 30 and 100 times faster than on AWS, Haviv claimed.

• A novel artificial intelligence tool that can accurately call out variants in sequencing data was released as open source on the Google Cloud Platform yesterday. The tool, called DeepVariant, was developed during a collaboration between the Google Brain team and researchers from fellow-Alphabet subsidiary, Verily Life Sciences. The release was announced in a press release cross-posted to the Google Research blog and the Google Open Source blog.

• Open Source is how the world runs. Somewhere, deep inside the box of thinking sand you’re sitting at right now, there’s code you can look at, modify, compile, and run for yourself. At every point along the path between your router and the horrific WordPress server that’s sending you this webpage, there are open source bits transmitting bytes. The world as we know it wouldn’t exist without Open Source software.

• Open source has come of age. It now represents the fastest growing segment of enterprise IT initiative and it has become the lingua franca for developers.

• This growth and acceptance has occurred despite one of the initial rationales for businesses going the open source route – cost – barely playing a role in these decisions any more.

• As Mike Matchett, senior analyst and consultant at the US-based Taneja Group pointed out, when it comes to cost, open source doesn’t mean “free” in a real economic sense.

• Oracle announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon it is open sourcing Fn project Kubernetes Installer and Global Multi-Cluster Management, two projects made to aid the development of the next generation of container native applications using Kubernetes.

• Kubernetes is a platform that allows developers to launch container clusters using advanced cloud native capabilities. Oracle originally released Fn, an open-source, cloud agnostic, serverless platform, in October. It comprises four main components, including Fn Server, Fn FDKs, Fn Flow and Fn Load Balancer. The Fn project Installer follows the foot trails of the Fn project, enabling developers to run serverless deployments on any Kubernetes environment.

• A couple of months ago, Reddit announced its plans to stop sharing its main website’s open source code base. The website gave a number of reasons, which weren’t welcomed by the open source community. So, we’ve decided to prepare a list of some free and open source Reddit alternatives that you can give a try. Some of these aren’t much popular, but we thought it’s a good time to spread the world and tell you about these options.

• Telcos have witnessed many years of legacy, closed systems that have stunted development and made it costly to interconnect data centres and networks.The industry is now seeing the commoditisation of hardware and software and the use of open transparanet technologies to drive down costs and provide access to more people.

Events

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation kicked off their KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference, dedicated to Kubernetes and cloud native technologies, in Austin, Texas today with the announcement of 31 new members, including AppsCode, CA, Datadog, Grafana Labs, InfluxData, HPE and Kasten.

• FAD I18N 2017 was held in Pune India last month. Fedora I18N members met together and there was very exciting and constructive event.

• I talked about IBus 1.6 plans there. I’ve been thinking to implement a new ProcessKeyEvent method to support Korean preedit with X11 applications. Peng Wu now provided a patch of ForwardKeyEvent method instead of the new ProcessKeyEvent method. We will ask the maintainer of ibus-hangul to release the new version to use ForwardKeyEvent.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chrome 63 is rolling out to Mac, Windows, and Linux today with an assortment of developer-focused features and security fixes. The biggest additions in this desktop release are a redesigned chrome://flags page and a tweaked permissions dropdown.

• More than a year ago, Google announced that Chrome Apps would be removed from Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of Chrome (but not Chrome OS) some time in 2017, and it seems we’ve come to that point today. Google has shut down the “app” section of the Chrome Web Store for those platforms, meaning you can’t install Chrome Apps anymore. Google has started sending out emails to Chrome app developers telling them that Chrome Apps are deprecated, and while previously installed apps still work, the functionality will be stripped out of Chrome in Q1 2018.

• Google on Wednesday promoted the Chrome 63 web browser to the stable channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

• Chrome 63 hit the Beta channel at the end of October, and it promised some significant changes for developers, including a new Device Memory API, async iterators and generators, dynamic module imports, as well as various permissions UI changes. It also brought major Blink engine improvements and other bug fixes.

• Google has now released a new software update for its Chrome browser. The new stable update brings the Chrome 63 web browser which is supported by all operating systems, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows as well as mobile platform.

• Google has started to roll out Chrome 63 to Mac, Windows, and Linux today following an early release for Android. The update brings a number of feature improvements along with security patches to over 37 vulnerabilities.

• Google Chrome’s latest software update, version 63, is now rolling out to all users on desktop (Linux, Mac, Windows) and mobile (Android), with updates for Chrome OS to follow shortly.

Office Suites

• OffiDocs offers you a complete service so you can work in the cloud with your Linux desktop apps. Thanks to this online platform, you can develop your projects from anywhere and at any time just using your Internet browser.

• The German software developer, SoftMaker, has announced the public beta release of its SoftMaker Office 2018 for Linux package. The Linux release comes hot on the heels of the Windows version of the suite which launch just a few weeks ago. Users can expect a re-designed interface which allows users to work with classic menus or ribbons. The company also touts seamless compatibility with Microsoft Office.

• LibreOffice and WPS Office are two common Microsoft Office alternatives for the Linux platform. There has been several debates as to which of these is the better alternative to Microsoft Office. The debates, surely, are not going to end anytime soon.

• There is no definitive answer here! The choice between the two is completely dependent on the user and the job at hand. LibreOffice and WPS Office both have their pros and cons. After sharing some pros and cons of each office suite, you will be better informed to make your choice should you get caught up in such a dilemma.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• Back in October I did some basic tests of the BSDs on AMD EPYC while now with having more of our extensive Linux testing of AMD EPYC complete, I went back and did a few fresh tests of the BSDs with an AMD EPYC 7601 processor housed within the Tyan Transport SX TN70A-B8026.

• I’d need any comments back by 2 January 2018.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We are pleased to announce the new release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.14.0!

• The release comes with GuixSD ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image of GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries.

• Today marks the release of GNU Guix 0.14 as well as the GNU Guix SD (System Distribution) that is the Linux-based operating system built around this package manager.

• The Guix SD operating system using the GNU Linux-libre kernel with GNU Shepherd init system has seen a lot of work this cycle. In fact, Guix SD 0.14 is the first release where the OS is produced as a ISO-9660 image that works both for a DVD or USB stick. Guix SD also has a new bootloader API to allow it for supporting more than just GRUB, including U-Boot and Extlinux. With these new bootloader options, Guix SD is currently being ported to ARM-based devices.

Licensing/Legal

• The Ethereum Foundation promises that ethereum “is both open-source software and Free software after the definition of the Free Software Foundation (so-called FLOSS).” In other words, licensees will generally receive broad rights to run, copy, distribute and improve the software.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• A research team led by Wei-Chuan Shih from the University of Houston, USA, reports creating a multicolor fluorescence microscope from a smartphone and a 3-D printer—and they’ve made the computer-aided designs available online for free (Biomed. Opt. Express, doi: 10.1364/BOE.8.005075). The scientists say the smartphone microscope, outfitted with a 3-D inkjet-printed elastomer lens and a polylactic-acid (PLA) housing, could help equip researchers and healthcare providers in developing and rural areas, as well as hobbyists and backpackers, with imaging techniques for diagnostic functions, including detecting waterborne pathogens.

Programming/Development

• Hazelcast, the open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) with tens of thousands of installed clusters and over 39 million server starts per month, announced it had joined the Eclipse Foundation, bringing extensive Java-driven community experience to a host of open source projects.

• Working collaboratively with other members of the Eclipse community, Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache, the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J.

• In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularise JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107) which specifies API and semantics for temporary, in-memory caching of Java objects, including object creation, shared access, spooling, invalidation, and consistency across JVM’s. These operations help scale out applications and manage their high-speed access to frequently used data. In the Java Community Process (JCP), Hazelcast’s CEO, Greg Luck, has been the co spec lead and then maintenance lead on “JCache – Java Temporary Caching API” since 2007.

• I have good news, after few meetings and discussions with GitLab we reached an agreement on a way to bring the features we need and to fix our most important blockers in a reasonable time and in a way that are synced with us. Their team will fix our blockers in the next 1-2 months, most of them will be fix in the release of 22th of December and the rest if everything goes well in the release of 22th of January. The one left that out of those 2 months is a richer UI experience for duplicates, which is going to be an ongoing effort.

• Apologies for the blockage for those that regularly asked to migrate their project, I wanted to make sure we are doing things in the right steps. I also wanted to make sure that I get feedback and comments about the initiative all around in my effort to make a representation of the community for taking these decisions. Now it’s the point where I’m confident, the feedback and comments both inside and outside of our core community has been largely that we should start our path to fully migrate to GitLab.

• SYCL as a reminder is Khronos’ higher-level OpenCL programming model based on C++. It’s been a while since the last update, but a new point release is now available.

• SYCL 1.2.1 is based on OpenCL 1.2 and improves support for machine learning tasks, supports TensorFlow acceleration, and aligns with the latest C++17 standard. SYCL 1.2 had previously been based on C++11/C++14. The C++17 standard was just firmed up this month.

• The reminder that the feature freeze for Python 3.7 is coming up fairly soon (January 29) was met with a flurry of activity on the python-dev mailing list. Numerous Python enhancement proposals (PEPs) were updated or newly proposed; other features or changes have been discussed as well. One of the updated PEPs is proposing a new type of class, a “data class”, to be added to the standard library. Data classes would serve much the same purpose as structures or records in other languages and would use the relatively new type annotations feature to support static type checking of the use of the classes.

• PEP 557 (“Data Classes”) came out of a discussion on the python-ideas mailing list back in May, but its roots go back much further than that. The attrs module, which is aimed at reducing the boilerplate code needed for Python classes, is a major influence on the design of data classes, though it goes much further than the PEP. attrs is not part of the standard library, but is available from the Python Package Index (PyPI); it has been around for a few years and is quite popular with many Python developers. The idea behind both attrs and data classes is to automatically generate many of the “dunder” methods (e.g. __init__(), __repr__()) needed, especially for a class that is largely meant to hold various typed data items.

• I should explain. It is absolutely true that if you deploy a larger vocabulary, if you use longer, more pompous sentences, many people will think you are smarter. The same is true with programming. If you can cram metaprogramming, pure functional programming, some assembly and a neural network into one program, many programmers will be impressed by your skills.

Leftovers

• The Digital Preservation Coalition’s International Digital Preservation Day was marked by a wide-ranging collection of blog posts. Below the fold, some links to and comments on, a few of them.

• That decision has only resulted in an ever-escalating game of tit for tat that has started to bubble over in recent months. Around three months ago, YouTube decided to block YouTube from working on Amazon’s Echo Show hardware, pushing the bogus claim it was due to a “broken user experience.” In response, Amazon expanded its blacklist of Google products by refusing to sell Google Nest hardware as well. This was already bad enough, but the escalating game of “who can be the most obnoxious to paying customers” was taken to yet another level this week.

• On Wednesday, a US District judge in Detroit sentenced Oliver Schmidt, a former Volkswagen executive, to seven years in prison for his role in the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal of 2015. Schmidt was also ordered to pay a criminal penalty of $400,000, according to a US Department of Justice (DOJ) press release. The prison term and the fine together represent the maximum sentence that Schmidt could have received under the plea deal he signed in August.

Science

• Boffins at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory speculate that by 2040 advances in AI disciplines like machine learning and natural language processing will shift most software code creation from people to machines.

• In a paper distributed via ArXiv, “Will humans even write code in 2040 and what would that mean for extreme heterogeneity in computing?”, ORNL researchers Jay Jay Billings, Alexander McCaskey, Geoffroy Vallee and Greg Watson suggest machines will be doing much of the programming work two decades hence.

Hardware

• This move means that owners of the 2011 Mac Mini will no longer be able to get the pint-sized PC repaired or serviced at Apple stores or Apple Authorized Service Providers, unless the repair is required by law.

Health/Nutrition

• On a melancholy Saturday this past February, Shalon Irving’s “village” — the friends and family she had assembled to support her as a single mother — gathered at a funeral home in a prosperous black neighborhood in southwest Atlanta to say goodbye and send her home. The afternoon light was gray but bright, flooding through tall arched windows and pouring past white columns, illuminating the flag that covered her casket. Sprays of callas and roses dotted the room like giant corsages, flanking photos from happier times: Shalon in a slinky maternity dress, sprawled across her couch with her puppy; Shalon, sleepy-eyed and cradling the tiny head of her newborn daughter, Soleil. In one portrait Shalon wore a vibrant smile and the crisp uniform of the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, where she had been a lieutenant commander. Many of the mourners were similarly attired. Shalon’s father, Samuel, surveyed the rows of somber faces from the lectern. “I’ve never been in a room with so many doctors,” he marveled. “… I’ve never seen so many Ph.D.s.”

• At 36, Shalon had been part of their elite ranks — an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the preeminent public health institution in the U.S. There she had focused on trying to understand how structural inequality, trauma and violence made people sick. “She wanted to expose how peoples’ limited health options were leading to poor health outcomes. To kind of uncover and undo the victim blaming that sometimes happens where it’s like, ‘Poor people don’t care about their health,’” said Rashid Njai, her mentor at the agency. Her Twitter bio declared: “I see inequity wherever it exists, call it by name, and work to eliminate it.”

Security

• Developed in September 2011, Andromeda, aka Gamarue or Wauchos, is known for stealing credentials from victims as well as downloading and installing up to 80 different secondary malware programs onto users’ systems, including spam bots. Over the last half-year, it has been detected or blocked on an average of more than 1 million machines per month, Europol added.

• Pho worked for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations Unit from 2006 until 2016 and had access to data and documents that included classified and top secret national defense information. “According to the plea agreement, beginning in 2010 and continuing through March 2015, Pho removed and retained U.S. government documents and writings that contained national defense information, including information classified as Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information,” the DOJ stated.

• What’s really interesting is that, if you’re thinking about moving to a permissioned blockchain or distributed ledger with permissioned actors, then you’re going to have to spend some time thinking about trust. You’re unlikely to be using a proof-of-work system for making blocks—there’s little point in a permissioned system—so who decides what comprises a “valid” block that the rest of the system should agree on? Well, you can rotate around some (or all) of the entities, or you can have a random choice, or you can elect a small number of über-trusted entities. Combinations of these schemes may also work.

• The Intel Management Engine (ME), which is a separate processor and operating system running outside of user control on most x86 systems, has long been of concern to users who are security and privacy conscious. Google and others have been working on ways to eliminate as much of that functionality as possible (while still being able to boot and run the system). Ronald Minnich from Google came to Prague to talk about those efforts at the 2017 Embedded Linux Conference Europe.

• He began by noting that most times he is talking about firmware, it is with his coreboot hat on. But he removed said “very nice hat”, since his talk was “not a coreboot talk”. He listed a number of people who had worked on the project to “replace your exploit-ridden firmware with a Linux kernel”, including several from partner companies (Two Sigma, Cisco, and Horizon Computing) as well as several other Google employees.

• The results they achieved were to drop the boot time on an Open Compute Project (OCP) node from eight minutes to 20 seconds. To his way of thinking, that is “maybe the single least important part” of this work, he said. All of the user-space parts of the boot process are written in Go; that includes everything in initramfs, including init. This brings Linux performance, reliability, and security to the boot process and they were able to eliminate all of the ME and UEFI post-boot activity from the boot process.

• In a 2 p.m. news conference at the Government Center, Diorio said third-party security experts believe the attack by a new strain of ransomware called LockCrypt originated from Iran or Ukraine. Forty-eight of about 500 county computer servers were affected.

• In November, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowashahi revealed that the company’s third-party server was compromised in October 2016 and the details of about 57 million customers were leaked. This information was made public after a report from Bloomberg claimed that Uber made a $100,000 payoff to destroy the hacked data.

• The company then paid the hacker [sic] $100,000 to destroy the information, but did not notify those affected by the breach.

• A Belarussian man who is said to be behind many of the biggest botnets has been caught, with investigators tracking him down because he used the ICQ number as a primary contact on both public and private websites.

• The NSA is not sure how many other pieces of its arsenal have been leaked. “The US is battling a rearguard action with respect to its reputation,” says Tim Stevens at King’s College London.

Defence/Aggression

• As Jared Kushner leads the U.S. government’s effort to develop an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, the Kushner Companies Charitable Foundation is funding a hardline Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

• The charitable fund made a donation of at least $18,000 at the “Master Builders” level to American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva Center, according to a donor book distributed at the group’s annual gala Sunday evening.

• The Kushner family has given money in past years to the group, which funds construction of the Bet El settlement outside the Palestinian city Ramallah, as Haaretz first reported. But this appears to be the first time they’ve done so while Kushner, whose title is senior adviser to the president, is the lead administration official brokering a peace plan.

• Out of fury against President Trump, many liberals have enlisted in the ranks of the New Cold War against Russia, seeming to have forgotten the costs to rationality and lives from the first Cold War, warns William Blum.

• A North Carolina cop who shot an unarmed black man in the back is going to jail for at least 19 years.

• Michael Slager killed Walter Scott in 2015, while an officer with the North Charleston Police Department. He was fired after video surfaced that showed Slager firing at Scott as he fled. It was clear from the footage that Slager was not in any danger: he just wanted to kill Scott.

• A year after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Franken criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.” What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation? The volunteer American troops in Iraq did not even have the defense of having been drafted against their wishes.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Forensic evidence acquired by the FBI is key to bringing the men accused of being the assassins of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia to justice, for her family and the international public opinion. The afternoon of the 16th October, a few minutes before the white Peugeot 108 rental car in which Daphne was travelling was torn apart by a powerful charge of explosives positioned under the car body, three mobile phones linked to Triq il-Bidnija, the location where the attack took place, communicate amongst themselves. Two phones record the communications of two men waiting for the passage of the Peugeot transporting Daphne home. A third, further away from the location of the explosion, sends an SMS to the transceiver connected to the charger which served as a detonator to the explosive. This triggered two powerful explosions in sequence, and transformed the car into a fireball. For eight weeks a secret investigation has been underway into the men who held those three mobile phones in their hands that afternoon. The Maltese Police are working with the island’s security services, Europol, and three teams of foreign investigators invited by the Labour government of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat – the FBI, Dutch police and Finnish police – to liberate the investigation from any suspicions of political manipulation.

• It really is no mystery why Daphne Caruana Galizia would never join the ‘Institute of Maltese Journalists’.

• Look at them celebrating “justice having prevailed” when three lowlifes were arraigned, accused of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder.

• Their words: “The fact that tonight three people were arraigned in Court following their arrest and subsequent interrogation during these past two days marks a historic moment for the Institute where justice prevails in favour of freedom of the press.”

• Of course no one is happier about this than the prime minister. Look at him gleefully retweeting the journalists’ fawning praise.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Courts shouldn’t let companies like Energy Transfer Partners use litigation to intimidate and bankrupt advocacy groups.

• If you want to experience 2017 in a nutshell, check out the billion-dollar lawsuit filed by an oil and gas company against Greenpeace and other environmental groups for their roles in the Standing Rock protests.

• In a 231-page complaint filed by Donald Trump’s old law firm, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, claims that Greenpeace and its partners are engaged in a criminal network of fraud and misinformation. The paranoiac complaint, which includes references to “wolfpacks of corrupt” environmental nongovernmental organizations and describes Greenpeace as a “putative Dutch not-for-profit foundation,” would be amusing if it weren’t so dangerous.

• It leverages the RICO Act, a statute that was meant for mob prosecutions, and defamation law to wage a scorched-earth campaign against nonprofits that spoke out against the pipeline’s construction near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Fortunately, as we argue in a friend-of-the-court brief filed yesterday with a coalition of public interest groups, the First Amendment prohibits companies from suing their critics out of existence.

• ETP’s lawsuit rests on two theories, neither of which holds water.

• Outdoor retailing giant Patagonia on Wednesday joined a flurry of lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to chop up two large national monuments in Utah could finally bring an answer to the much-debated question of whether presidents have the legal authority to undo or change monuments created by past presidents.

• Until that question is answered months or years from now, the fate of the contested lands in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments will remain unresolved.

• Proclamations signed Monday by the president allow lands no longer protected as a national monument to be opened up in 60 days to mining, but conservation and tribal groups will likely try to keep that from happening.

• Tuesday evening, Columbia University’s Earth Institute hosted a panel that was meant to focus on an issue we’re likely to be facing with increasing frequency: the need to move entire communities that are no longer viable due to rising seas or altered weather. But the discussion ended up shifting to how people in at-risk locations aren’t moving, and the entire governmental structure in the US is focused on keeping them right where they are.

• As a result, the entire US population is already paying for climate change, whether we accept the science behind it or not. And things will almost certainly get worse.

Finance

• In October 2014, less than two months after entering North Augusta High School in Aiken County, South Carolina, Logan Rewis paused to drink from a fountain in the hallway between periods. As he straightened up, water fell from his mouth onto the shoe of his social studies teacher, Matt Branon, who was standing nearby. Logan says it was an accident, but Branon thought Logan had spat at him.

• “My bad,” the 15-year-old with bushy sandy-brown hair and blue eyes says he told Branon after the teacher confronted him.

• Branon, who is also the school’s baseball coach, was incensed. “Freaking disgusting,” he shouted at Logan as the teen walked away. Branon pursued Logan and grabbed the freshman by his backpack.

• “Get your freaking hands off me,” Logan recalls yelling. School officials say he used a different “f” word.

• Though Branon had arguably escalated the conflict, he wasn’t disciplined — but Logan was. In a decision that changed the course of his education and life, the school district banished Logan to its alternative school, the Center for Innovative Learning at Pinecrest.

• A top juvenile official testified Tuesday that guards at a southern Illinois youth correctional facility have created a “pipeline to prison” that is hampering the state’s ability to fulfill its juvenile justice mission.

• More than 100 people gathered at a nearly five-hour hearing before the House Appropriations-Public Safety Committee to address reports of violence in Department of Juvenile Justice facilities and the state’s adult prisons.

• Kathleen Bankhead, the state’s independent juvenile ombudsman, focused her testimony on a series of alleged assaults by teenagers on staff at the Illinois Youth Center at Harrisburg in southern Illinois.

• ProPublica Illinois reported in October that guards and other employees there have pursued more criminal charges for youth-on-staff assaults since 2016 than all other state juvenile correctional facilities combined.

• The cryptocurrency hit a 24-hour high of $15,340 per unit and 24-hour low of $12,662.86, as of 10 am IST, data available on coingecko.com suggested.

• So many Koreans have embraced bitcoin that the prime minister recently warned that cryptocurrencies might corrupt the nation’s youth. The craze has spread so far that, in Korea, bitcoin is trading at a premium of about 23 percent over prevailing international rates.

• The current value of the digital currency bitcoin is estimated at US$180 billion, exceeding the total cash in circulation in the UK and a number of other countries including Australia, it has been claimed.

• So the energy cost of Bitcoin is tied to its cash value, not its supply (though the supply and the value have a relationship, obviously). There is a similar (but different) dynamic in play for the reward for block-processing.

• The skyrocketing value of Bitcoin is leading to soaring energy consumption. According to one widely cited website that tracks the subject, the Bitcoin network is consuming power at an annual rate of 32TWh—about as much as Denmark. By the site’s calculations, each Bitcoin transaction consumes 250kWh, enough to power homes for nine days.

• Naturally, this is leading to concerns about sustainability. Eric Holthaus, a writer for Grist, projects that, at current growth rates, the Bitcoin network will “use as much electricity as the entire world does today” by early 2020. “This is an unsustainable trajectory,” he writes.

• What could have been a wealthy fortune for a British man has turned into a task that now requires an extensive amount of hard work. A Newport-based IT worker James Howells claims that he mistakenly dumped his hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoins back in mid-2013.

• Howells might have started to regret his mistake even more as the value of the cryptocurrency has soared past $14,000. He believes that his hard drive worth millions is buried in a landfill and his recovery plan seems to be like finding a needle in a haystack.

• The fallacy of “neutral,” “both sides” journalism rings loud and clear in corporate media reporting on the Republican Party’s tax plan. The GOP bill, passed by the Senate in the early hours of December 2 and described by major media outlets as a “tax cut,” is in reality an explicit handout to large companies and the ultra-rich that will actually increase taxes on working-class Americans.

• But under the cover of a shallow understanding of “balance,” corporate media have internalized the outlandish idea that it is “partisan,” and thus not “neutral,” to acknowledge the undeniably destructive effects of particular political policies. These inconvenient facts are hence not emphasized in news reporting, and cannot be presented alone without being “balanced” with an opposing perspective—even if that contrary view is demonstrably false.

• In the case of the GOP legislation, which will slash the corporate tax rate and add some $1.4 trillion to the national debt, the deception took a variety of forms.

• The hundreds of protesters in D.C. Tuesday chanting “Kill this bill, don’t kill us”at GOP lawmakers who passed the scourge of a tax scam have myriad kindred spirits here in Maine, where voters – many older and with much at stake – have long supported health care access and last month became the first state to pass a ballot initiative to expand Medicare. People are justifiably aiming their fury at perennially coy Susan Collins, who’s earned a reputation as a “moderate” and “independent” Republican by occasionally bending to “constant and intense pressure from her constituents” to do the right thing – most notably, by voting against the latest assault on Obamacare.

• Now, by providing a key vote for tax cuts to billionaires and corporations unfathomably far away on every level from the reality of most Mainers’ lives, she has been deemed “beneath contempt.” Adding insult to injury, she based her vote in part on health care compromises and economic claims that turn out to be specious: Two headlines on her vote describe “promises written in vanishing ink” and ask, “What in the world was Susan Collins thinking?” The result, says one fed-up resident: “This betrayal will not be forgotten.” Evidently.

• Four days after Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin held a big Washington event to tout the Trump administration’s promise to house all homeless vets, the agency did an about-face, telling advocates it was pulling resources from a major housing program.

• The VA said it was essentially ending a special $460 million program that has dramatically reduced homelessness among chronically sick and vulnerable veterans. Instead, the money would go to local VA hospitals that can use it as they like, as long as they show evidence of dealing with homelessness.

• Amid the most tumultuous real estate market since the Great Depression, Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios produced valuations for thousands of commercial and industrial properties in Chicago that did not change from one reassessment to the next, not even by a single dollar.

• That fact, one finding in an unprecedented ProPublica Illinois-Chicago Tribune analysis of tens of thousands of property records, points to a conclusion that experts say defies any logical explanation except one:

• Berrios failed at one of his most important responsibilities — estimating the value of commercial and industrial properties.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Wednesday he was ousted as head of President Donald Trump’s transition due in part to his opposition to the hiring of Michael Flynn as national security adviser.

• “I thought it was a significant reason,” Christie said at an unrelated press conference at his office in Trenton.

• President Trump is standing by his endorsement of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused by at least nine women of sexually harassing or assaulting them when they were teenagers. One of the women says Moore removed her shirt and pants, then touched her over her bra and underwear, when she was only 14 years old. She says she recalls thinking, “I wanted it over with—I wanted out. Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” This is Trump, speaking Tuesday.

• “President’s Trump Card May Be N. Korea If Flynn Is Threat to Him” ran the headline in the Saturday New York Daily News. The Daily News does not use the phrase “Wag the Dog,” but the association is obvious. Wag the Dog was a 1997 film, based on a novel, in which an American President engineers a war in order to distract the public’s attention from a sex scandal (molesting an underage “Firefly Girl.” Roy Moore, take note.)

• The war in Wag the Dog was faked, conjured up by a Hollywood film director (Dustin Hoffman) acting at the behest of a Washington spin doctor played by Robert De Niro. (You want me to fake a war, the director asks? No, no, De Niro assures him. Not a war: a “pageant.”)

• If it is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the producers of Wag the Dog must have been tickled pink when their script came true—with one major difference. This time the war was real.

• Wag the Dog was released in December 1997. In January 1998, President Bill Clinton’s Oval Office shenanigans with White House intern Monica Lewinsky were revealed. A grand jury was impaneled to investigate whether the President had lied under oath about the affair. On August 20, 1998, the second day of Lewinsky’s testimony, Clinton launched cruise missiles at suspected Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and a factory in Sudan. Clinton claimed that the factory was producing nerve gas for Al-Qaeda. What it was actually producing was medicines. With one blow, the US destroyed the source of half of Sudan’s pharmaceuticals. Former CIA analyst and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, Professor Melvin Goodman of Johns Hopkins University, is just one authority who maintains that Clinton knew perfectly well that the factory was not producing chemical weapons.

• Keep on staring just like you’ve been doing, just like we’ve all been doing since he rode down that escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 and, while you have your eyes on him, I’ll tell you exactly why you shouldn’t stop.

• [...]

• To begin with, it’s time to think of Donald J. Trump in a different light. After all, isn’t he really our own UnFounding Father? While the Founding Fathers were responsible for two crucial documents, the Declaration of Independence (1,458 words) and the Constitution (4,543 words), our twenty-first century UnFounding Father only writes passages of 140 characters or less. (Sad!) Other people have authored “his” books. (“I put lipstick on a pig,” said one of his ghostwriters.) He reportedly doesn’t often read books himself (though according to ex-wife Ivana, he once had a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside). He’s never seen a magazine cover he didn’t want to be on (or at least that he didn’t want to claim, however spuriously, he had decided not to be on). He recently indicated that he thought the Constitution had at least one extra article, “Article XII,” which he promised to “protect,” even though it didn’t exist. (My best guess: he believed it said, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved neither to the States respectively, nor to the people, but to Trump and his heirs and there will be no inheritance tax on them.”)

• When Congress authorized Robert Mueller and his team of lawyers to investigate “links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” opponents of the president sensed that sooner or later, hard evidence of Trump’s collusion with the Russian government would emerge.

• Seven months later, after three indictments that did little, if anything, to confirm the grand collusion narrative, Mueller had former National Security Council advisor Michael Flynn dragged before a federal court for lying to the FBI. The Russia probe had finally netted a big fish.

• Vice reporter Eve Peyser spent a weekend on the road with Bernie Sanders, and writes vividly and charmingly about the personal habits and behind-the-scenes homeliness of the famously non-materialistic, idealistic senator.

• But where the story is most charged and vivid is when Peyser ruminates on how Sanders is able to reach out to people — even people who voted for Trump — to articulate a vision of a better America, not grounded in the white supremacist fantasy of the lost “greatness” that he alone can return us to, but a new world, built on solidarity, decency, fairness and mutual aid. It’s a vision that cuts across party lines and speaks directly to the best in all of us.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Under the presidency of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt has experienced a steep increase in censorship policies from the national government. With a faltering approval rating and an election coming up in 2018, Sisi is trying to ensure his success in the election by suppressing the opposition to guarantee that he runs unopposed. Unfortunately, one of the Sisi administration’s main targets is libraries, some of which have been raided and shut down because they were considered to be “seditious spaces,” according to a report from The Atlantic. Sisi’s attack on libraries is detrimental to both education and democracy in Egypt and must not be permitted.

• Despite RT and Sputnik News conceding to US demands to register as foreign agents, Google has announced its intention to “de-rank” their articles, in a bid to reduce the exposure and reach of content published on both sites. Russia’s foreign ministry subsequently warned such a move would constitute censorship.

• [...]

• As free and unimpaired access to information is a cornerstone of democracy, and since the internet is contemporarily the largest, most-readily available hub of information, it’s unsurprising Google’s announcement has been dubbed an attack on democracy, and triggered an outcry.

• Irony of ironies: Much of the official emphasis at China’s fourth annual World Internet Conference, held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province in the east of the People’s Republic, was on the “openness” of the country’s heavily policed Internet. However, it did not escape the notice of many overseas delegates that the conference took place at the end of a year of unparalleled increases in Internet control and censorship in China – although there was little public acknowledgement or debate about that in the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of the “Wuzhen Summit”.

• The World Internet Conference first took place in 2014 under the tutelage of Lu Wei, who, at that time was the man who wielded the iron rod of control over China’s Internet by dint of his role as the head of the PRC’s Cyberspace Administration. In 2015 he actually took the stage at the conference to deny that China imposes any censorship on its domestic Internet. He said, “It is a misuse of words if you say ‘content censorship.’ But no censorship does not mean there is no management.” It was a piece of sophistry worthy of a Ming Dynasty mandarin never mind a communist party apparatchik in the 21st century.

• China’s “new era” of increased global power poses a threat to academic freedom across the world and could result in global university leaders seeking to appease the country’s Communist Party, experts have warned.

• China’s president Xi Jinping heralded the dawn of a “new era” of Chinese power during a recent speech at the Communist Party congress and said that it was time for his nation to transform itself into “a mighty force” that could lead the world on political, economic, military and environmental issues.

• The move to give provincial authorities oversight of censorship and film exhibitions has led to greater politicization of censors’ review boards, critics say.

• On November 14, the Punjab Censors’ Board decided to ban the film ‘Verna’, three days before it was due to be released. This meant that the film’s premiere, scheduled just after that, was also canceled.

• Pakistan’s Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC) lifted the ban on film ”Verna” on 16 November 2017, one day before its scheduled opening, reported International Business Times.

• The film was originally reportedly banned for scenes of violence and rape, and in the case of the censor board of Punjab, the portrayal of “government institutions in an undesirable manned”, reported Samaa TV.

• The film was released in Punjab on 18 November after film director agreed to make minor cuts, reported Asia Times.

• Both the ban and its subsequent lifting saw an outburst on social media.

• So… that’s the kind of “truth” we’re dealing with, often pronounced “conspiracy theory.” J.K. Sheindlin is the person behind NBT Films and the author of a book that has supposedly blown minds of Islam adherents everywhere, resulting in them renouncing their faith on camera.

• One popular video on NBT’s YouTube channel shows a supposed Islamic man angrily and bitterly decrying the religion after having his eyes opened by Sheindlin’s book. But the video isn’t what it seems: it’s actually footage taken from somewhere else, dealing with an entirely different issue, but with NBT’s fabricated subtitles giving the impression Sheindlin’s book has unconverted another follower of Islam.

• There is a growing consensus within the ruling establishment that the Internet must be purged of oppositional, left-wing, socialist and anti-capitalist ideas, with the ending of net neutrality being yet another major step toward the implementation of Internet censorship.

• The recently released plan by the Federal Communications Commission to abolish net neutrality has evoked mass opposition across the US and around the world.

• In early 2016, a group of academics from Turkey published an open letter to the government, condemning military action in the country’s Kurdish region. The group, calling themselves ‘Academics for Peace’, were denounced as terrorist-sympathizers.

• Then, in July 2016, tanks rolled across Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge. The Turkish Parliament and the Presidential Palace were bombed. There was violence on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara—the failed coup killed more than 200 people.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A rather strange ruling has been handed down by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court. It’s a ruling that could have an adverse effect on anonymous speech, although it does mitigate the potential damage by booting it back to the lower court for a final determination. But that still might not stop an aggrieved multi-level management company from learning the identity of one of its critics.

• Signature Management Team is the plaintiff/pyramid scheme. John Doe posted a link to a copy of one of SMT’s books on his “Amthrax” blog. SMT filed a DMCA takedown notice with the blog’s hosting service, Automattic. After being served with the notice, Doe removed the link to the copyrighted instruction book.

• This quick concession didn’t stop SMT from suing Doe. It alleged one count of copyright infringement. Doe asserted a fair use defense and alleged copyright misuse, i.e., the use of copyright to silence a critic. He also asserted his right to speak anonymously and argued against being unmasked.

• Who knew that there was money in stolen circuit breakers?

• Late last month, Riverside County prosecutors, east of Los Angeles, indicted two men on charges of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of circuit breakers from businesses and movie theaters in southeastern California in recent years.

• According to The Desert Sun and court filings that were provided to Ars by that newspaper, the two suspects were identified by a combination of “security footage, facial recognition software, and a license plate scanner.”

• The Mozilla Manifesto states that “Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.”

• Today, Mozilla is seeking artists, media producers, and storytellers who share that belief — and who use their art to make a difference.

• Mozilla’s Creative Media Grants program is now accepting submissions. The program awards grants ranging from $10,000 to $35,000 for films, apps, storytelling, and other forms of media that explore topics like mass surveillance and the erosion of online privacy.

• Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA (and now, a national security analyst at CNN), has recently emerged as a leading critic of the Trump administration, but not so long ago, he was widely criticized for his role in the post-9/11 surveillance abuses. With the publication of his memoir, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, Hayden launched his reputational rehab campaign.

• As information technology has become ubiquitous, privacy has become a real concern for the average American. Sophisticated, connected devices make our life easier, giving us easy access to a wide array of services from cheap taxi rides to online shopping. From cell phones and gaming consoles to cars, the objects we use daily are connected in an endless flow of digital information known as the internet of things (IoT).

• This information technology also enables intelligence organizations, law enforcement agencies, corporations, and criminals to unlawfully collect and exploit private information. Americans today are becoming increasingly aware of the perils connected devices hold, and looking for legal mechanisms to protect their basic right to privacy.

• In less than a month, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is set to expire. As the clock runs out on one of the U.S. government’s most important counterterrorism and counterintelligence tools, public discussion of the program and possible legislative changes remain mired in misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and political sound bites.

• More answers have been provided to Senate Intelligence Committee questions (most of those penned by the always-inquisitive Ron Wyden) by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Some, like how often the NSA “incidentally” collects domestic communications, remain unanswered. But the ODNI’s answers [PDF] — given to the Committee in July — have finally been made public. There are a few things worth noting in this rare display of transparency. (By which I mean a lack of redactions, rather than expansive openness by the ODNI).

• GDPR offers a groundbreaking overhaul of rules first implemented two decades earlier, when the impact on the internet was a mere fraction of what it is today. For consumers, these new rules promise greater data protection. For businesses, however, the rules will require significant overhauls, as the cost of running afoul of rules can be stiff. Here are a few steps to ensure your business is in compliance.

• “Not sure this is the right direction at all,” he tweeted. “Facebook told me they would come back with ideas to PREVENT underage use of their product, but instead they are actively targeting younger children. Stay away from my kids please Facebook and act responsibly!”

• The emails were specifically designed to entice each individual to click a malicious link. Had the targets done so, their internet connections would have been hijacked and surreptitiously directed to servers laden with malware designed by a surveillance company in Israel. The spies who contracted the Israeli company’s services would have been able to monitor everything those targets did on their devices, including remotely activating the camera and microphone.

• Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives authorities additional powers to compel service providers to build backdoors into their products. Though Section 702 is set to expire at the end of the year, it remains vehemently supported by intelligence agencies, and the current Republican-controlled Congress is generally not the type of crowd to oppose them.

• Social activists have asked the Supreme Court to stop the Centre from making the linking of Aadhaar mandatory for bank accounts and mobile phone numbers, contending that it violates people’s right to privacy

• The Attorney General, however, made clear that February 6 next year would remain the deadline for linking Aadhaar for availing uninterrupted mobile services as it had been mandated by the apex court.

Civil Rights/Policing

• But beyond press releases touting its successes, the department does not inform people who have applied for a license that their photos will be scanned perpetually for law enforcement purposes. No such disclosure appears on the license application.

• A new report from the ACLU of Kansas shows how diversion programs can combat mass incarceration.

• When it comes to reducing mass incarceration, some solutions are actually staring us right in the face. That is certainly the case when it comes to diversion programs in the state of Kansas.

• Although diversion can come in many forms, the basic principle is well-established and straightforward: A person charged with a crime fulfills certain requirements, such as completing treatment, paying restitution, or performing community service, instead of being incarcerated and saddled with a lifelong criminal record.

• Put plainly, diversion is a positive tool that should be used in our nation much more frequently. By targeting the underlying problems that led to the crime in the first place, effective diversion programs can improve long-term community safety and reduce recidivism far more effectively than warehousing someone in a prison cell before turning them back onto the streets.

• The New York Times has published a massive exposé on how disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein built an industry-wide “complicity machine” to allow him to perpetrate rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment for decades. Weinstein is now facing criminal investigation in multiple cities, after more than 100 women came forward to accuse him. The exposé chronicles how he was able to get away with the violence by building a web of lawyers, agents, journalists, editors and publishers to help him cover his tracks and intimidate potential accusers. The piece says Hollywood agents and managers repeatedly sent actresses to private meetings with Weinstein, even though they knew about previous assaults. The article also says Weinstein used his political connections to protect himself, often saying during the Obama presidency, “I know the president of the United States. Who do you know?”

• I don’t know which is sadder: the fact that this case — the absolute nadir (so far!) of stupid teen sexting prosecutions — even exists or that the lower court somehow found in favor of the officer (now deceased) being sued.

• A cop engaged in the act of producing child pornography by attempting to force a teen to arouse himself while surrounded by police officers supposedly for the purpose of matching the teen’s erect penis to photos the cop already had in his possession as part of a sexting “investigation.” The officer was told by prosecutors to do this, which shows the twisted logic of this abhorrent request didn’t spring entirely from the mind of Detective David Abbott. He, however, did not turn down the prosecution’s request. The prosecutor who ordered this “production” of evidence was Claiborne Richardson. Unfortunately, he has the sort of immunity cops like Abbott can only wish they had: absolute immunity. Richardson walks away from this with little more than reputational damage.

• A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in favor of a Virginia man who, as a teen, was once ordered by a lower court to be photographed while masturbating in the presence of armed police officers.

• That warrant was ostensibly part of an ongoing sexting investigation into the then-teen, Trey Sims, who had exchanged explicit messages with his then-15-year-old girlfriend. Her mother reported the incident to the Manassas City Police Department in January 2014.

• Eventually, the detective assigned to the case, David Abbott, obtained a signed warrant to take photographs of Sims’ naked body—including “the suspect’s erect penis”—so that he could compare them to Sims’ explicit messages.

• The government recently revealed for the first time that federal agents maintained an open investigation of our client, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, for six years despite never finding any evidence that she committed a crime or was a threat to national security.

• Coming up empty handed after Poitras had been subjected to dozens of border searches, the FBI finally closed the investigation, according to agency documents we obtained.

• We’ve learned about this fishing expedition through documents we obtained in a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit filed on Poitras’s behalf to find out why she was constantly being stopped by federal agents during her travels. Border agents detained Poitras at airports over 50 times from 2006 to 2012. The detentions began after she directed and released documentary films about post-9/11 life in Iraq and Yemen that challenged the U.S. government’s narrative about the war on terror.

• Poitras was subjected to hours of questioning, and had her belongings searched and notes seized at U.S. and international airports. Border agents once threatened to handcuff her when she tried to take notes during a stop.

• The World Trade Organization (WTO), the multilateral global trade body that has almost all countries as members, has been eyeing an expansion of its work on digital trade for some time. Its current inability to address such issues is becoming an existential problem for the organization, as its relevance is challenged by the rise of smaller regional trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) that do contain digital trade rules.

• That’s one reason why some experts are now arguing that the WTO ought to retake leadership over digital trade rulemaking. Their reasoning is that a global compact could be more effective than a regional one at combatting digital protectionism, such as laws that restrict Internet data flows or require platforms to install local servers in each country where they offer service.

• Here’s what you need to know as the Muslim ban goes into effect.

• Earlier this week, the Supreme Court allowed President Trump’s Muslim ban to go into full effect while it is being litigated. Prior to the court’s Dec. 4 order, large portions of the ban were blocked by preliminary injunctions in the cases of IRAP v. Trump and Hawaii v. Trump.

• Let’s be clear: The fact that the ban is moving forward is devastating for Muslims in the United States and abroad — and for anyone who values the fundamental constitutional principle of religious equality. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from favoring or disfavoring one religion among others, but that’s precisely what President Trump’s Muslim ban does.

• It’s important to recognize that the Supreme Court did not express any views about the merits of the ban — and in particular, it did not find or suggest that the ban is constitutional or compatible with our immigration laws. We have been challenging this and previous versions of the ban since President Trump started down this path, and the courts that have reached the merits have repeatedly found the bans unconstitutional and illegal. That is one reason why we believe that the ban will ultimately be struck down.

• On Dec. 8, we will be in court, along with our co-counsel from the National Immigration Law Center and the International Refugee Assistance Project and colleagues from Muslim Advocates, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, fighting to strike down the Muslim ban in its entirety. Here’s what you need to know.

• Partisanship has reached such extremes in U.S. politics that Republicans are prepared to brush aside multiple allegations that Roy Moore preyed on teen-age girls to keep a Democrat from winning in Alabama, writes Michael Winship.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Net neutrality supporters plan a nationwide series of protests starting Thursday outside Verizon stores, where they will express their opposition to the pending repeal of net neutrality rules.

• You can find local protests by going to this webpage and searching by ZIP code.

• Verizon stores aren’t the only places where there will be protests. In Washington, DC, for example, there will be a protest at the annual FCC Chairman’s Dinner on Thursday. There will be another protest outside the FCC building on December 13, one day before the vote to repeal net neutrality rules. Many protests will be happening on Saturday as well.

• If you’ve followed the whole net neutrality debate for a while, you may remember one of the more ridiculous talking points when the 2015 rules were put in place: it was the line that the rules were “400 pages of regulation on the internet.” People kept listing out the page numbers to suggest how crazy it was, and just how much bad stuff the FCC must be doing in “regulating the internet.” Ajit Pai kicked it all off with his tweet with a picture of himself holding the initial version of the rules, complaining that it was “Obama’s 332-page plan to regulate the internet.”

• When FCC boss Ajit Pai first proposed killing popular net neutrality protections (pdf), he insisted he would proceed “in a far more transparent way than the FCC did” when it first crafted the rules in 2015. That promise has proven to be a historically-hollow one.

• Pai’s agency is already facing numerous lawsuits for refusing to disclose conversations with ISP lobbyists about the plan to kill net neutrality, refusing to disclose net neutrality complaints filed with the agency, refusing to be transparent about a DDoS attack the FCC apparently concocted to downplay the “John Oliver effect,” and for ignoring FOIA requests related to its failure to police website comment fraud during the public comment period.

• Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler took aim at his successor’s plan to eliminate net neutrality rules today, saying that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is selling out consumers and entrepreneurs at the behest of major Internet service providers.

• “ISP monopoly carriers have been trying for four years to get to this point,” Wheeler said, pointing to a 2013 story in The Washington Post about how telecoms were trying to “shift regulation of their broadband businesses to other agencies that don’t have nearly as much power as the FCC.”

• The agency, led by Republican Chairman Ajit Pai, will vote next week on scrapping the 2015 net neutrality rules, which prevent internet service providers from blocking or slowing down websites or creating internet “fast lanes.”

• For a decade now one major ISP talking point against net neutrality is that it hurts the sick and disabled. Verizon, for example, has tried to pretend that net neutrality rules hurt the hearing impaired because it prevents them from getting access to prioritized medical services like video relay or other technologies.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• A brief review of all of the articles I’ve written in these here pages about sweet, delicious alcohol mostly have to do with trademark spats between drink-makers, including many in which I’ve made the point that it’s high time for the USPTO to get a little more subtle when it comes to its alcohol marketplace designations. Beer isn’t wine, and wine isn’t liquor, and the public looking to buy one of those is quite unlikely to confuse one product for another. The focus of many of those posts was how this lack of distinction between the alcohol markets has resulted in too many aggressive trademark lawsuits and threat letters that hardly seemed necessary.

• But there is a flip side to all of this that serves as another perfectly good reason for the USPTO to make a change. Recently, one liquor distiller sued another in what seems like a fairly plausible trademark infringement case.

Copyrights

• Should the European Parliament consider regulation on 3D printing with regard to intellectual property protection and civil liability? Members of the Justice Committee (JURI) today at their session in Brussels were divided with representatives from the Green Party group as well as the conservatives and liberals cautioning against erecting barriers to the technology.

• The rapporteur of the own-initiative report of the committee, Joelle Bergeron, a member of the populist party group “Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy,” listed problems like the potential decline of value of a piece of art once it can be re-produced by anybody, as well as the question of liability for damage from 3D printed spare parts. Several members of the committee also pointed to the potential creation of 3D weapons.

• As you may have heard, Rep. John Conyers recently stepped down from his role as Ranking Member (basically top member of the minority party) on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, and this week has announced his retirement, in response to multiple accusations of sexual harassment. That has kicked off something of an interesting and important debate over who should replace him as ranking member on the Judiciary Committee.

• The next in line by seniority is Rep. Jerry Nadler. But right behind him is Rep. Zoe Lofgren. By way of disclosure, I’ll note that I’ve gotten to know Lofgren over the years, and have donated to her election campaign. But even before I’d ever spoken to her, I’ve noted how she remains one of the few people in Congress who seems to consistently do the right thing on basically all of the issues that we care about at Techdirt. You can see our past coverage of stories involving Lofgren. Most specifically on copyright and surveillance, she hasn’t just been on the right side, she’s been leading the way. She is, almost single-handedly, the person who stopped SOPA from passing. She has consistently raised important issues and introduced important bills and amendments concerning copyright, NSA surveillance and the CFAA among other things.

• Safe harbour provisions protect internet service providers from court action when their users upload material that violates copyright to their platforms. The only fiat is that the providers must be adopting reasonable steps to get rid of the offending content.

• The compromise of safe harbour provisions is a win for content creators who have argued that commercial operators monetising content or images not created or owned by them should pay some sort of licence due to the cost incurred creating things such as music, television, films and journalism.

• The Australian Recording Industry Association, Foxtel, the Australian Football League and News Corp are among the groups that have lobbied the government not to include Google and Facebook in extending the provisions.

• In an effort to tackle online copyright infringement, the Danish Government has set up a new task force of investigators who will exclusively deal with IP [sic] crimes. The new police unit, which is operating on a trial basis, will help copyright holders deter piracy and may also request site blockades in the future.

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.