● 12.18.17

● Links 18/12/2017: Linux 4.15 RC4, ScummVM 2.0, TheSSS 23.2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:39 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• What are containers? Do you need them? Why? In this article, we aim to answer some of these basic questions.

• But, to answer these questions, we need more questions. When you start considering how containers might fit into your world, you need to ask: Where do you develop your application? Where do you test it and where is it deployed?

• Whilst trying to introduce containers, the approach I’ve taken is to work up the history of Web site/server/app hosting from physical hosting and via Virtual Machines. This gives you the context for their popularity, but I find VMs are not the best way to explain container technology. I prefer to go the other way and look at a process on a multi-user system, the problems due to lack of isolation and steadily build up the isolation available with tools like chroot, etc.

• Kubernetes is actually an open source project, originally developed at Google, which is managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Over the last year, we’ve seen some of the biggest names in tech flocking to the CNCF including AWS, Oracle, Microsoft and others, in large part because they want to have some influence over the development of Kubernetes.

• By design, the Kubernetes open source container orchestration engine is not self-monitoring, and a bare installation will typically only have a subset of the monitoring tooling that you will need. In a previous post, we covered the five tools for monitoring Kubernetes in production, at scale, as per recommendations from Kenzan.

• Kubernetes, the cloud container orchestration program, expands even further and has grown more stable.

• Kubernetes, the open-source, production-grade container orchestration system for automating scaling, deployment, and management of containerized apps, has been updated to version 1.9.

• Coming two and a half months after version 1.8, Kubernetes 1.9 is here with a bunch of new features like the general availability of the Apps Workloads API (Application Programming Interface), which is enabled by default to provide long-running stateful and stateless workloads, as well as initial, beta support for Windows systems.

Kernel Space

• So it looks like 4.15 is finally calming down, with rc4 being about average size-wise for this time in the release process.

• Of course, we not only have the holiday season coming up, we *also* have some x86 entry and page table handling fixes pending. But that’s not for today, and not for rc4. Let’s enjoy the short normal phase of 4.15 today.

• The most noticeable thing to most normal users in rc4 is that we should finally have cleaned up and fixed the suspend/resume handling. That got first broken for some (unusual) kernel configurations due to excessive debugging at a very inopportune time in early resume, and when _that_ got fixed, we broke the 32-bit case. Not many developers run 32-bit builds in real life any more, so that took a bit to even notice.

• The development cycle of the Linux 4.15 kernel continues as usual, and Linus Torvalds announced the fourth Release Candidate (RC) over the weekend noting that things are finally calming down.

• While last week’s RC3 release of Linux kernel 4.15 was bigger than expected, it would appear that the RC4 build is “about average size,” according to Linus Torvalds. This is a good thing, of course, signaling that the final Linux 4.15 kernel release could land in time, but the winter holidays could stand in its way after all.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the addition of 21 Silver members. Linux Foundation members help support development of the greatest shared technology resources in history, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation.

• Juniper Networks is handing over the governance of the OpenContrail project to the Linux Foundation.

• OpenContrail is an open source network virtualization platform aimed at cloud environments and dealing mainly with the control plane – responsible for traffic routing. Juniper will continue developing and selling a commercial, fully supported version of the software, called simply Contrail.

• Cloud service providers tend to favor various implementations of the open source Xen hypervisor because it’s simply not cost effective for them to pay to license a commercial hypervisor at scale. It’s not clear to what degree enterprise IT organizations will want to follow suit. But The Linux Foundation that oversees development of Xen aims to increase the appeal of Xen by making available a more streamlined version that is simpler to use.

• George Dunlap, a Xen Project Contributor and a senior engineer at Citrix, says version 4.10 of the Xen Hypervisor Project includes a new user interface in addition to a trusted computing base (TCB) that has been made smaller and, by extension, more secure. The expectation is that a more compact implementation of Xen will not only consume fewer system resources, but also reduce the overall attack surface exposed, says Dunlap. Those attributes should make Xen a more attractive option, for example, in Internet of Things (IoT) projects where licensing a commercial hypervisor is likely to prove cost prohibitive, adds Dunlap.

• The Xen Project, a project hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced Bitdefender, a leading global cybersecurity technology company protecting 500 million users worldwide, is a new Advisory Board member. The Xen Project Advisory Board consists of major cloud companies, virtualization providers, enterprises, and silicon vendors, among others, that advise and support the development of Xen Project software for cloud computing, embedded, IoT use-cases, automotive and security applications.

• The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project, and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

• For the last 5 years OpenStack has been the training ground for a lot of emerging DC SDN solutions. OpenStack integration use case was one of the most compelling and easiest to implement thanks to the limited and suboptimal implementation of the native networking stack. Today, in 2017, features like L2 population, local ARP responder, L2 gateway integration, distributed routing and service function chaining have all become available in vanilla OpenStack and don’t require a proprietary SDN controller anymore. Admittedly, some of the features are still not (and may never be) implemented in the most optimal way (e.g. DVR). This is where new opensource SDN controllers, the likes of OVN and Dragonflow, step in to provide scalable, elegant and efficient implementation of these advanced networking features. However one major feature still remains outside of the scope of a lot of these new opensource SDN projects, and that is data centre gateway (DC-GW) integration. Let me start by explain why you would need this feature in the first place.

Graphics Stack

• The architecture name is hidden under SUPER_SECRET codename. Normally we would be seeing the real name of the GPU, but AMD is likely trying to avoid generating hype for architecture which is still months away (I heard something about late 2018), hence the secret.

• With AMD’s RX Vega now out and about, it is time to start looking towards the future. We’ve known for some time that Vega will be followed up by ‘Navi’ at some point between 2018 and 2020. Now, we know that progress is being made as AMD’s next-gen GPU has appeared in a new driver.

• This has been a big year for AMD, there is no doubt about that. Having launched a new CPU and GPU architectures (Zen and Vega, respectively), the company thrust itself back into relevancy in the high-end market, whereas previously the top shelf was the exclusive domain of rival Intel. So, what’s next? On the GPU side, AMD is expected to roll out its Navi architecture sometime next year, with references to its next generation GPU already showing up in driver code.

• AMD’s upcoming next generation 7nm based graphics architecture code named “Navi” has been spotted in Linux driver code. The all new GPU architecture is officially slated to debut next year, with all whispers indicating a debut in the latter half of the year.

• More (X)Wayland improvements are en route for GNOME 3.28.

• The latest addition to the Mutter Wayland compositor is now handling XWayland keyboard grab support so an XWayland/X11 client can exclusively grab the keyboard input. And as part of that a new setting for controlling if XWayland clients can do keyboard grabs.

• ekka Paalanen of Collabora has begun the overdue task of providing documentation on XWayland.

• While XWayland has been around for a few years in allowing X11 applications/games run atop on an X.Org Server, up to now it’s not been officially documented. Pekka has taken up the task of starting to document XWayland within the Wayland Git repository’s documentation.

• In between hacking on the RADV Vulkan driver, David Airlie has found the time to land his patches enabling OpenGL 4.3 and GLSL 430 support within Mesa 17.4-dev Git for the R600g driver.

• The R600g driver is now able to officially expose OpenGL 4.3 support. But the big caveat is that’s only for the R600g-using hardware exposing FP64 support right now… That means just the Radeon HD 5800 series and HD 6900 Cayman series… All the rest of the HD 5000/6000 series and other R600g-supported hardware is still limited to OpenGL 3.3 support.

• Even with AMD open-sourcing their official Vulkan driver any day now, David Airlie, Bas Nieuwenhuizen, and others independently continue to advance the dissenting RADV Vulkan driver.

• The latest to report on RADV is that it now supports external fences and the associated VK_KHR_external_fence_fd extension. External fences for Vulkan is about allowing synchronized access to external memory using fences. Vulkan external memory in turn is about memory outside of the scope of the logical device and can be used for multi-process/device handling and among the current use-cases for Vulkan external memory is SteamVR on Linux.

• The libdrm Mesa DRM library that principally sits as the interface between Mesa and the kernel Direct Rendering Manager drivers is out with a big update.

• David Airlie released libdrm 2.4.89 as the latest version of this important library. New in this libdrm update is the new DRM mode lease ioctl wrappers, part of Keith Packard’s work on DRM leasing added to the Linux 4.15 kernel as part of improving VR HMD support on Linux.

Benchmarks

• Using the Linux 4.15 development kernel atop Ubuntu 17.04, I’ve been running some fresh Btrfs vs. EXT4 file-system benchmarks up through four SATA 3.0 SSDs. The tests were happening on the box comprised of an Intel Xeon Silver 4108 with Tyan Tempest HX S7100 motherboard, 6 x 4GB DDR4-2400MHz memory, a Corsair Force MP500 120GB NVMe SSD as the main OS drive and then the four ADATA SU700 consumer SATA 3.0 SSDs housed within the SilverStone TS421S enclosure.

Applications

• Talking of finding stations, the ‘add station’ and ‘search’ pages are now combined, while the Library no longer contains a separate tab for collections. The collection feature is still included, but is now surfaced when selecting multiple stations in the library.

• Various parts of the UI have been tweaked, including the selection toolbar, application menu and the collections popover.

• And, for peace of mind, your connection to the community-powered radio-browser.info database is now encrypted.

• LibreOffice is one of the best free Office alternatives to Microsoft Office suite. You also get the ability to open and edit the PDF files. If your PDF file contains just pictures/graphics, LibreOffice will automatically suggest the drawing tools to let you modify it. In case of text-oriented documents, you will get the necessary word formatting tools to help you edit it.The user interface may not be the best around but LibreOffice is a free-to-use open-source software with no purchases required.

• It’s a Sunday, which means it’s time for me to round-up a rabble of recent Linux releases that did get a mention during the week.

• With a lot of people busy getting ready for Christmas (and other festivals that happen this time of year) there aren’t too many major releases to mention from the past week, but there is a modest set of minor updates issued you may want to know about.

• This might be the final Linux Release Roundup before Xmas. If, like some sort of weekly Santa, you only pop by to read these posts I’ll use this moment to say thank you, and wish you a merry denomatively-appropriate holiday.

• The developers of the open-source, free, and cross-platform darktable RAW image editor announced the availability of the second Release Candidate for the upcoming and highly anticipated 2.4 release.

• darktable 2.4 RC2 comes only one week after the first Release Candidate, and it promises to bring support for Sony’s newest Alpha a7R III mirrorless digital camera (Sony ILCE-7RM3). Besides that, there are a few improvements to increase the overall stability, reliability, and compatibility of the application.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• First off, for the ShanWan PS3 joypad (a PlayStation 3 controller clone), they managed to disable the rumble motor that currently starts immediately after you plug the controller into the USB port of your Linux computer, as well as to hard-code the HID service that the joypad was supposed to offer but it didn’t because it’s not Bluetooth compliant.

• “The SHANWAN PS3 clone joypad will start its rumble motors as soon as it is plugged in via USB. As the additional USB interrupt does nothing on the original PS3 Sixaxis joypads, and makes a number of other clone joypads actually start sending data, disable that call for the SHANWAN so the rumble motors aren’t started on plug,” reads the kernel patch.

• Project 5: Sightseer [Steam] is a hard game to describe properly, but it certainly has managed to capture my attention.

• It’s now been a whole year since the game was funded on the Kickstarter, so to celebrate the developer has given a big status update on the progress of developing the game. They’ve grown as a studio, with 10 people now working on the game, they’ve put multiple types of enemies into the game and the base gameplay mechanics are actually in and the ASCII mode is also in.

• Need more shoot ‘em ups? Dimension Drive [Steam, Official Site] released recently and it came with Linux support. It looks absolutely nuts too!

• It wasn’t smooth sailing for this one, as their original Kickstarter was trolled with a large fraudelent pledge that resulted in their original campaign failing to hit the goal. They later put up a new Kickstarter, which actually was successful and a lot more so than the first one in terms of funding raised.

• I have to say, this looks incredibly fun! The developers of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes [Steam, Official Site] have put up a Beta build for Linux gamers.

• I should state, for the record, that this is entirely speculative of course. However, it’s interesting to note especially for Linux gamers since we do not have anything really like PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS and the developer has no plans for a Linux version. I would certainly appreciate something resembling it on Linux, as I do love those types of games.

• ScummVM 2.0 has been released as a major update to this open-source game engine recreation project.

• ScummVM has advanced well past just supporting the original LucasArts adventure games and with today’s v2.0 rollout supports “23 brand new old games”, including many older Sierra adventure titles. Among the games that can now be played atop ScummVM 2.0 are Police Quest 4, Lighthouse, Leisure Suit Larry 6/7, King’s Quest VII, Full Pipe, and many other titles.

• Just in time for the holidays, the final release of ScummVM 2.0 is here! This version adds support for 23 brand new old games, including almost all of the 32-bit Sierra adventures…

• For those who enjoy the classics, you might want to check out the latest release of ScummVM which adds support for more classic titles.

• When it comes to the games, they’ve added support for 23 more titles like King’s Quest VII, King’s Questions, Leisure Suit Larry 6 (hi-res), Leisure Suit Larry 7, Riven: The Sequel to Myst and more. It’s a rather impressive list, but of course the 2.0 release doesn’t stop at adding support for more titles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The latest stable version of Epiphany is now available on Flathub. Download it here. You should be able to double click the flatpakref to install it in GNOME Software, if you use any modern GNOME operating system not named Ubuntu. But, in my experience, GNOME Software is extremely buggy, and it often as not does not work for me. If you have trouble, you can use the command line:

Distributions

Reviews

• Daphile is a minimal Linux distribution which is designed to be run on a computer dedicated to playing music. Daphile can be run on headless machines and its media controls are managed through a web-based interface. Basically, Daphile is intended to be run on a computer we can stick in the corner of a room and use it as a media centre without worrying about managing software, tweaking settings or navigating desktop environments. Daphile can be run from a CD or USB thumb drive for maximum portability and does not need to be installed directly on a hard drive to work.

• Daphile reportedly has the ability to rip audio CDs, play audio files from a local drive or stream music across network shares (Samba, NFS, FTP and OpenSSH services are supported). This gives us a pretty good range of media sources for our music collection.

• Under the hood, Daphile has its roots in Gentoo, though the operating system is somewhat stripped down and we cannot use Gentoo’s package management utilities. Daphile runs the Busybox userland tools and a light web server, and very little else. In fact, Daphile does not provide a login interface to allow us to tinker with the operating system. The operating system is dedicated entirely to the task of playing music and our sole access to the media controls are through its web interface.

• The distribution is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds and the ISO file we download for Daphile is 195MB in size. While Daphile is capable of running entirely without a screen, when we do boot from Daphile’s media the distribution displays the distribution’s IP address, which it obtains over DHCP. We can connect to the IP address using any modern web browser which automatically gives us access to Daphile’s media controls, there is no user authentication built into the web interface.

• Linux distributions designed for security analysis, penetration testing, and forensic analysis are all the rage these days. It seems like you can hardly swing a dead cat (or a dead computer) without hitting one.

• As a dedicated Linux user I consider that to be a good thing, simply because choice is always good, and it is always good to have several groups of talented and dedicated people working on something. But as a long-time user of Kali Linux (and BackTrack before that) I honestly believe that Kali is still the best in the field, so I am always pleased when I hear there is a new Kali release.

New Releases

• This is a minor (point) release based on the 4MLinux Server 23.2, meaning that the components of the LAMP server are now: Linux 4.9.69, Apache 2.4.29, MariaDB 10.2.11, and PHP (both 5.6.32 and 7.0.26). The following server software has also been updated: OpenSSL (1.0.2n) and Stunnel (5.44).

• KDE is a feature-rich and versatile desktop environment that provides several different styles of menu to access applications. An excellent built-in interface to easily access and install new themes, widgets, etc, from the internet is also worth mentioning. While very user-friendly and certainly flashy, KDE is also quite resource heavy and noticably slower to start and use than a desktop environment such as XFCE. A 64 bit installation of Manjaro running KDE uses about 550MB of memory.

• The official release is near for the Arch-based Manjaro 17.1 Linux distribution.

• Manjaro 17.1 “Hakoila” is the version that’s been in development since the Manjaro 17.0 release in March. Besides many updated packages from Arch in this time, the GNOME edition of Manjaro 17.1 has switched to using Wayland by default over X11.

• About 1.5 months after the release of Parrot 3.9 “Intruder,” The Parrot Project has announced the release of Parrot 3.10. Parrot is often seen as the best alternative to Kali Linux, and it continues to improve its reputation by shelling out regular updates.

• The Smallest Server Suite — also known as TheSSS — remains a live CD/DVD capable Linux operating system making it trivial to deploy a range of services.

• A minor update to the 23.0 stable series, TheSSS 23.2 is here about three weeks after version 23.1 to update a few core components of its built-in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP) server. Therefore, the live system now runs Linux kernel 4.9.69 LTS, Apache 2.4.29, MariaDB 10.2.11, and PHP 7.0.26.

• PHP 5.6.32 is installed as well to provide users with extra compatibility for older PHP5 scripts, and TheSSS 23.2 also ships with the latest OpenSSL 1.0.2n commercial-grade Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) toolkit and Stunnel 5.44 proxy tool.

Slackware Family

• December usually is a busy month, with the focus at work to wrap up as much of the ongoing projects as possible and prepare for the christmas holidays. And when there’s a lot of (paid) work to do, the voluntary work gets second place. That’s why there was not really a lot of time to churn out a Chromium 63 SlackBuild script. Two weeks ago the first sources for release 63 appeared online and fixed a lot of (security) bugs. Last week saw an update and this is what I grabbed and packaged, because you can’t wait too long with addressing security issues.

• Those of you who had examined my chromium-dev.SlackBuild a while ago will already know that the SlackBuild for versions beyond 63 needed a bit of re-work to cope with changes at the source level. I am glad I did that in November, as it made the transition for the stable browser much easier.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• ​Mint fans rejoice as the latest version of Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia with the KDE desktop is available to download on Linux Mint’s official website. The sad part is that this will be the last offering from Linux Mint that will feature the KDE desktop environment.

Devices/Embedded

• Still based on Google’s Android 7.1.2 Nougat mobile operating system, RaspAnd Build 171215 comes with the GAPPS (Google Apps) package pre-installed offering users a working Google Play Store to install Android apps, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi improvements, and the latest TeamViewer 13 for controlling other PCs from a Raspberry Pi 3 SBC.

• “The video performance is generally much better than in previous versions,” writes Arne Exton in the release announcement. “Your Wi-Fi connection is stable and it will reconnect after every reboot of your Raspberry Pi 3. RaspAnd Nougat 7.1.2 Build 171215 is an Android 7.1.2 Nougat system which can run on Raspberry Pi 3.”

• Axiomtek’s Linux-friendly “CEM510” is a COM Express Type 6 module with Kaby Lake-H CPUs, -40 to 85ºC and triple display support, and an optional carrier.

• The CEM510 updates Axiomtek’s Intel Skylake based CEM500, offering the same 125 x 95mm COM Express Type 6 form factor and almost identical features. It ships with a new “CEB94011” carrier board (see farther below).

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• When I first discovered open source, the idea of building a business around it seemed counterintuitive. However, as I grew more familiar with the movement, I realized that open source software companies were not an anomaly, rather a result of the freedoms open source offers. As GNU project founder Richard Stallman said of free software, it’s “a matter of liberty, not price.” Open source is, above all, about the unhindered liberty to create. In this sense, the innovation and creativity demonstrated in open source business models is a testimony to the ideals of open source.

• The widely experienced and indefatigable Deirdré Straughan presented a talk at Open Source Summit NA on how to market an open source project. Deirdré currently works with open source at Amazon Web Services (AWS), although she was not representing the company at the time of her talk. Her experience also includes stints at Ericsson, Joyent, and Oracle, where she worked with cloud and open source over several years.

• Through it all, Deirdré said, the main mission in her career has been to “help technologies grow and thrive through a variety of marketing and community activities.” This article provides highlights of Deirdré’s talk, in which she explained common marketing approaches and why they’re important for open source projects.

• Some people think it’s extremely complex and expensive to transition to a circular economy, especially at the scale and speed we need to solve the current problems related to food, energy, pollution, toxic chemicals, transportation, and climate change.

• Companies hold an important role, in moving from contributing to many of these environmental problems to solving them. But to devote resources to the circular economy, businesses need to justify to their boards that it will be financially beneficial over the long term to do so. And creating circular solutions sometimes feels like a barrier to profitability and convenience. If businesses can find new ways to work smarter, not harder, they can dramatically increase the chances of spreading a circular and profitable innovation. The key is sharing circular innovations in open source.

• [...]

• But simply putting an open source label isn’t a magic bullet. Creating and opening innovation documentation is an important start, but it’s only half the battle. An organisation can’t just hope others will follow.

• Ian Marius Peters, a co-author of the study and a research associate at the MIT Photovoltaics Research Laboratory, highlights the advantages of their tool – it’s free and accurate. “Tools used by developers to predict energy yields of solar panels and plan solar systems are often expensive and inaccurate. They’re inaccurate because they were developed for temperate climates like the United States, Europe, and Japan.”

• Barely even featuring as an item on its press room pages, news has filtered out this week of Czech virus deerstalking firm Avast releasing its machine code decompiler RetDec to open source.

Events

• The 12th Open Source World Summit Forum opened in Beijing recently. Partner of Testin, Wang Jun participated and delivered a speech in the forum panel discussion. He talked about open source software and the great success it brings to the internet and mobile application.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla took a bit of heat this week after the organization force-installed a Mr. Robot promotional add-on in some Firefox browsers.

• The add-on, called Looking Glass, was intended to promote the season 3 finale of Mr. Robot that aired on Wednesday, December 13, but the whole media stunt failed miserably.

• This extension was sideloaded into browsers via the “experiments” feature. Not only are these experiments enabled by default, but updates have been known to re-enable it if you turn it off. The advertisement addon shows up like this on your addon page, and was added to Firefox stable. If I saw this before I knew what was going on, I would think my browser was compromised! Apparently it was a mistake that this showed up on the addon page, though – it was supposed to be silently sideloaded into your browser!

• There’s a ticket on Bugzilla (Firefox’s bug tracker) for discussing this experiment, but it’s locked down and no one outside of Mozilla can see it. There’s another ticket, filed by concerned users, which has since been disabled and had many comments removed, particularly the angry (but respectful) ones.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Is that commercial software that you’re using really commercial? Yes, but… increasingly open source software is being repackaged and repurposed for use in a specific vertical. The 2017 Synopsys Coverity Scan Report finds that it is common for open source components to be packaged into commercial offerings with as much as 90 percent of the software in the commercial offering being composed of open source components. Many of today’s commercial software packages would not be possible without OSS. Many startups too are being built totally around open source software.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GnuCash is a personal and small business finance application, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash allows you to track your income and expenses, reconcile bank accounts, monitor stock portfolios and manage your small business finances. It is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

• GnuCash can keep track of your personal finances in as much detail as you prefer. If you are just starting out, use GnuCash to keep track of your checkbook. You may then decide to track cash as well as credit card purchases to better determine where your money is being spent. When you start investing, you can use GnuCash to help monitor your portfolio. Buying a vehicle or a home? GnuCash will help you plan the investment and track loan payments. If your financial records span the globe, GnuCash provides all the multiple-currency support you need.

• GCC 7 is in regression and documentation fixes mode and it is time to think about backports you want/need to do for GCC 7.3. The plan is to do a release candidate for GCC 7.3 in the second week of January following by a release a week after that.

• Richard Biener of SUSE is preparing to release GCC 7.3 next month.

• GCC 7 has been in only a regression/bug-fix mode for many months now and GCC 7.3 will be the latest installment of that with all of the latest fixes. But right now there are twenty-two more P2 regressions (161 in total) since the last update and overall that puts them at 174 P1-P3 regressions.

Public Services/Government

• The Asian Development Bank has advised Sri Lanka to go for open source software as opposed to branded software in using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education.

• “Software is a prime concern in learning. Therefore, open source is recommended for a developing country like Sri Lanka to achieve international quality standards of ICT education,” the ADB said in a recent study.

• “Free and open source software provides a greatly flexible environment – economically, operationally, and technically – to implement ICT applications in education.”

• Administrative authorities of the school education system should be motivated and provided with guidelines for the use of free and open source software in the school environment, said the study on opportunities of ICT for education equity, quality, and efficiency in South Asia.

Programming/Development

• Most of the fields in the tech industry demand a regular learning from you as they are dynamic in nature. You need to be up-to-date with the latest trends and make sure that your skillset matches the needs of your target industry.

• For developers, this change becomes even more necessary. For example, today’s mobile app developers need to eventually make a shift from Java and Objective-C to Kotlin and Swift, respectively. This growing adoption and demand is reflected clearly in different lists of the popular programming languages.

• [...]

• Coding Dojo analyzed the data from job listing website Indeed.com. This job posting data revolved around twenty-five programming languages, frameworks, and stacks. It’s worthing noting that some most loved programming languages like Ruby and Swift didn’t make the cut as their demand was lower as compared to other biggies. The other growing languages that didn’t make the cut were R and Rust.

• I wrote these when I woke up one night and had trouble getting back to sleep, and spent a while in a very philosophical mood thinking about life, success, and productivity as a programmer.

• The fourth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-year history as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

• littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. In my very biased eyes better as it allows for piping as well shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. Last but not least it is also less silly than Rscript and always loads the methods package avoiding those bizarro bugs between code running in R itself and a scripting front-end.

Leftovers

Science

• iThe question is, why? People tailgating and bunching up, maybe. But a new study in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems mathematically models the implications of the larger problem: You’re not keeping the right distance from the car behind you.

Health/Nutrition

• As we grow as a culture, especially for newer generations, we need to start asking important questions: ‘how as a species do we begin the education process of device addiction?’ And more importantly, ‘how do we begin taking back control?’

• A report, published by the World Health Organization and the World Bank on Wednesday, found the poorest and most vulnerable people are routinely forced to choose between healthcare and other necessities for their household, including food and education, subsisting on $1.90 (£1.40) a day.

• Rosenthal was originally charged with misconduct in office, neglect of duty and tampering with evidence, which could have resulted in possible time in prison and a fine if convicted.

• In a cause for concern, an international team of researchers including those from the University of Hyderabad (UoH) has found superbugs in 46 per cent of the chicken meat samples sold in Hyderabad city and parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. These superbugs have developed resistance to a plethora of antibiotics, which will only increase the cost of hospitalisation or medication in affected individuals.

• The Trump administration said Friday it will not issue a regulation to ensure that hard-rock mining companies can pay for the costs to clean up their mines when they’re finished.

• Most hospitals do not make these fees public. Patients typically learn what their emergency room facility fee is when they receive a bill weeks later. The fees can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. That’s why Vox has launched a year-long investigation into emergency room facility fees, to better understand how much they cost and how they affect patients.

• Left unchecked, rapidly rising obesity rates could slow or even reverse the dramatic gains in health and life expectancy that much of the world has enjoyed over the past few decades. And by forcing its food culture on countries like Mexico and Canada, the United States is making the problem worse.

• The suicide rate for farmers is more than double that of veterans. Former farmer Debbie Weingarten gives an insider’s perspective on farm life – and how to help

Defence/Aggression

• The Tehreek-i-Labaik Barelvi movement emerged in 2016 after the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of the Punjab province’s former governor, Salman Taseer. Qadri, who was the ex-governor’s bodyguard, shot Taseer in broad daylight for speaking out in favor of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death over blasphemy allegations. Bibi has been languishing in jail since 2009.

• Weapons supplied by the United States and Saudi Arabia to opposition fighters often fell into the hands of ISIL, significantly enhancing the “quantity and quality” of the group’s armaments, a new report alleges.

• The number of weapons goes “far beyond those that would have been available through battle capture alone”, according to the study by arms-monitoring group Conflict Armament Research (CAR) published on Thursday.

• Police on Wednesday recovered bodies of a Hindu boy (15) and a Muslim girl (14) from different places in Bihar’s West Champaran district and suspected the two might have been killed over an affair.

• The father, brother and two uncles of a 21-year-old have been arrested in Muzaffarnagar for allegedly gang-raping her for eloping with a man. The woman as well as her 32-year-old lover, a father of three, are residents of Dhaneda village.

• It was a secret wartime project, with a code name and an urgent mission: develop a more powerful bomb, one that could be mass produced in time to fend off the German forces ravaging Europe. It was 1940.

• British chemists toiled with a tripod-shaped bond of nitrogen and oxygen molecules linked by carbon and hydrogen they referred to as “research department explosive” — a substance one and a half times as powerful as TNT, but so delicate it had to be mixed with beeswax to be stable and pliable enough to fit into warheads. Even then, it wasn’t good enough. Only 70 tons could be made in a week. Defeating the Nazis would require more.

• The United Nations’ top human rights official is investigating whether Burma’s military and the country’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, committed genocide against Burma’s Rohingya Muslim minority. Speaking with the BBC, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein called for an international criminal investigation into a campaign that saw more than 600,000 Rohingya flee to neighboring Bangladesh to escape rape, murder and arson.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Whistleblowing stories have become something of a commonplace, as a stream of Techdirt posts attests. Some leaks offer massive revelations, like the documents released by Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden. Others are smaller scale, but expose unsuspected activities that powerful people were trying to keep in the shadows. Here, for example, is a recent leak published in the Guardian about big companies spying on law-abiding organizations that dare to disagree with them:

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• A new Climate Disinformation Database, launched by DeSmog UK today, gives details on these and almost 70 other key players forming a shadowy network promoting fossil fuels and casting doubt on climate science in the UK. This new map illustrates how they all connect.

• The next morning, he ran to the library, where he read a 2001 Science paper by Austrian modeler Michael Obersteiner theorizing the same idea, which was later dubbed “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”—BECCS.

• The term “climate change” is disappearing from government websites, despite criticism from environmental groups and scientists who say the deletions are scientific censorship.

• More than 20 rice, wheat and yam plants have been listed as threatened on the latest version of the IUCN’s Red list.

• The tribal government of the Navajo Nation is preparing to sue President Trump to reverse his decision to significantly shrink Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.

• On Monday, the president is expected to unveil a plan to drastically reduce the size of two national monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, by 85 percent and nearly 50 percent, respectively, according to documents leaked from the Interior Department.

• The trouble begins where everything begins: with soil. The UN’s famous projection that, at current rates of soil loss, the world has 60 years of harvests left, appears to be supported by a new set of figures. Partly as a result of soil degradation, yields are already declining on 20% of the world’s croplands.

• “There was no saving this individual bear,” he noted on social media. Instead he highlighted the threat facing the species as a whole, which has become emblematic of the ravages of climate change. “The simple truth is this – if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and entire polar ecosystems.”

• The Trump administration will drop climate change from a list of global threats in a new National Security Strategy the president is due to unveil on Monday.

• Betsy Southerland knew something was wrong the moment she walked into her office at the Environmental Protection Agency.

• It was 8 a.m. on a Thursday in April and already, her team was waiting at her door, computer printouts in hand.

• For months, staffers in the Office of Water had been in help-desk mode, fielding calls from states implementing a federal rule that set new limits on water-borne pollution released by coal-fired power plants. The rule on what is known as “effluent” had been hammered out over a decade of scientific study and intense negotiations involving utility companies, White House officials and environmental advocates. The EPA had checked and rechecked its calculations to make sure the benefits of the proposed change outweighed the cost to the economy.

• But now, members of Southerland’s team were handing her a press release, firing questions as her eyes skimmed the page. Did she know about this? Had she seen it? What happened?

Finance

• The Republican tax bill, which will be voted upon this week, will provide 15 of the largest and most profitable American corporations a $236 billion tax cut, according to a report prepared for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by the Senate Budget Committee Democratic staff.

• In the final legislation released Friday night, Republicans are offering corporations a nearly 20 percent tax cut to repatriate trillions of dollars stashed in offshore tax havens. The proposed 15.5 percent rate would be a boondoggle for profitable, multinational corporations.

• After making $59 billion in profits last year, Apple would be the biggest winner with a tax break as large as $47.97 billion on the $246 billion it has stashed in offshore tax havens.

• Britain cannot have a special deal for the City of London, the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator has told the Guardian, dealing a blow to Theresa May’s hopes of securing a bespoke trade agreement with the bloc.

• Michel Barnier said it was unavoidable that British banks and financial firms would lose the passports that allow them to trade freely in the EU, as a result of any decision to quit the single market.

• “There is no place [for financial services]. There is not a single trade agreement that is open to financial services. It doesn’t exist.” He said the outcome was a consequence of “the red lines that the British have chosen themselves. In leaving the single market, they lose the financial services passport.”

• Tomorrow, Theresa May’s Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire is going to try to sneak a big favour to the DUP, the small party now propping up May’s government in parliament – and in effect holding the future of Britain, Ireland and Europe hostage.

• Hoping that journalists and MPs will be too hung-over after yet another Christmas party to pay much attention to a new legislative detail, Brokenshire has chosen the quiet moment before the break to smuggle through a measure which will deny the people of Northern Ireland the right to know who funds their political parties. And in particular, it will block all of us from knowing who gave the DUP a highly controversial £435,000 donation to campaign for Brexit last year.

• Of course, that’s not what Brokenshire says he’s doing. Listen to his speeches, and you’d believe that his parliamentary order – which comes before a specially convened committee of 15 MPs on Tuesday – is designed to deliver long-awaited transparency in Northern Ireland.

• In a sense, it will. Unlike in the rest of the UK, donors can give any amount of money to political parties in Northern Ireland and still keep their names secret. Brokenshire’s move will change this.

• According to a report by US-based cyber security firm SecureWorks, a hacker collective called Lazarus Group is believed to be conducting spearphishing attacks against the people who work in the cryptocurrency industry as an attempt to steal Bitcoin.

• When is the official end of days? Perhaps when there are homeless nurses. In a report on English homelessness, the local government and social care ombudsman said that even people with stable jobs were now struggling to find somewhere affordable to live. This included people from many different walks of life – council workers, taxi drivers, hospitality workers and nurses, who were among the people who’d been placed in emergency accommodation, sometimes for unlawful amounts of time, and who’d ended up seeking advice about their unsafe, insanitary and otherwise unacceptable conditions.

• As the ombudsman pointed out, this further undermines the notion that homelessness is only suffered by people with chaotic lives, drunk/drug habits, and no steady jobs. This is the whispered subtext of certain attitudes and rationalisations about homelessness – that it only happens to Other People. This distancing may have contributed to the Home Office feeling justified in rounding up, detaining, and even deporting east European rough sleepers. (The high court has just ruled that this is illegal and discriminatory.) On a human level, an emotional detachment regarding the homeless may explain how it becomes possible to walk past people, young and old, huddled in shop doorways; to buy into the narrative that, in every case, they have not only unfortunate, but also incomprehensible and messy lives, or have simply brought it upon themselves.

• A big red bus emblazoned with the words “we send the EU £350m a week, let’s fund our NHS instead” is credited as being decisive in Britain’s vote to leave the EU last year.

• It promised — in absolute terms — financial gains for the British public if they voted to leave, a stark counterweight to a majority of economists who warned that a departure would hurt Britain. The pre-referendum estimates of the long-term pain ranged from a hit to the economy of 1 per cent to 9 per cent of national income — an annual loss of gross domestic product of between £20bn and £180bn compared with remaining in the EU.

• The Leave campaign won the battle of the slogans, and the referendum. But who is winning the economic argument? Almost 18 months on from the Brexit vote and with 15 months of detailed UK data, it is now possible to begin to answer that important question.

• Economists for Brexit, a forecasting group, predicted that after a leave vote growth in GDP would expand 2.7 per cent in 2017. The Treasury expected a mild recession. Neither proved correct. The 2017 growth rate appears likely to slow to 1.5 per cent at a time when the global economy is strengthening.

• NICOLA Sturgeon needs to hold a second referendum by early 2019 if an independent Scotland wants to move smoothy to European Union membership, according to a leading expert.

• Dr Kirsty Hughes, Director of the Scottish Centre on European Relations, explained if a new plebiscite within this timescale resulted in a Yes vote it would give the country two years to become independent before UK left the single market.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Notice the implicit assumption here – namely, that impartial fact-checking would find an equal number of false claims from each party. But what if – bear with me a minute – Republicans actually make more false claims than Democrats?

• JILL HARTH: He groped me. He absolutely groped me. And he just slipped his hand there, touching my private parts. TEMPLE TAGGART: He turned to me and embraced me and gave me a kiss on the lips. And I remember being shocked and—because I would have just thought to shake somebody’s hand. But that was his first response with me. JESSICA LEEDS: It was a real shock when all of the sudden his hands were all over me. But it’s when he started putting his hand up my skirt, and that was it. That was it. KRISTIN ANDERSON: The person on my right, who, unbeknownst to me at that time, was Donald Trump, put their hand up my skirt. He did touch my vagina through my underwear. LISA BOYNE: As the women walked across the table, Donald Trump would look up under their skirt and, you know, comment on whether they had underwear or didn’t have underwear. I didn’t want to have to walk across the table. I wanted to get out of there. KARENA VIRGINIA: Then his hand touched the right inside of my breast. I felt intimidated, and I felt powerless. MINDY McGILLIVRAY: Melania was standing right next to him when he touched my butt. JESSICA DRAKE: When we entered the room, he grabbed each of us tightly in a hug and kissed each one of us without asking permission. After that, I received another call from either Donald or a male calling on his behalf, offering me $10,000. His actions are a huge testament to his character, that of uncontrollable misogyny, entitlement and being a sexual assault apologist. SAMANTHA HOLVEY: I’m, you know, sitting there in my robe and having, you know, my makeup and hair done and everything, and he comes walking in. And I was just like, “Oh, my goodness!” Like what is he doing back here? I saw him walk into the dressing room. TASHA DIXON: He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked. Waltzing in, when we’re naked or half-naked, in a very physically vulnerable position. SUMMER ZERVOS: And he came to me and started kissing me open-mouthed as he was pulling me towards him. He then grabbed my shoulder, and he began kissing me again very aggressively and placed his hand on my breast. And I said, “Come on, man. Get real.” He repeated my words back to me—”Get reeeeeal”—as he began thrusting his genitals.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A report published by the Committee on Standards in Public Life advises the UK government to bring forward legislation “to shift the liability of illegal content online towards social media companies” upon Brexit. While the report’s focus is on the problem of online intimidation, the advice envisages the UK moving away from the safe harbors offered by the EU’s E-Commerce Directive.

• The clumsily named Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture is a cross-border exhibition whose premise is to bring Shenzhen and Hong Kong together; in fact, in an echo of China’s “one country, two systems” formula for ruling Hong Kong, the show operates on the principle of “one biennale, two systems”.

• The event’s seventh edition, which opened last week, continues to see the two sections run as separate entities with their own curators – and the result is two very different shows, each with its own problems.

• It remains a rare and important platform for architects, artists and urban planners to consider the future of urban living while being informed by the unique geography of the biennale’s host cities, smack in the heart of the world’s most populated city cluster around the shores of the Pearl River Delta. But the time has surely come to review whether it should continue in its current form.

• Theatres creating potentially controversial work can now receive training on how to handle sensitive subjects, as part of a new scheme from the Index on Censorship.

• Funded by Arts Council England and created in partnership with arts advocacy group What Next? and social enterprise Cause4, the support scheme is aimed at chief executives and chairs of arts organisations to ensure they can appropriately handle difficult subjects.

• The Index on Censorship said the prospect of controversy, protest, police intervention or possible cancellation if work is provocative can be “powerful disincentives” for theatres and arts organisations from staging certain stories.

• Julian Assange has exposed an apparent attempt by the US intelligence apparatus to undermine funding to WikiLeaks, using institutions he established for the express purpose of protecting potential donors from the authorities.

• In a Twitter thread, posted Sunday, Assange alleges “politically induced financial censorship” that violates not only US donors’ First Amendment rights but also their right to freedom of association. “US donors are the majority of our donor base,” Assange wrote, as he nears the conclusion of what will be his eighth year of exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

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

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

Privacy/Surveillance

• The algorithms that play increasingly central roles in our lives often emanate from Silicon Valley, but the effort to hold them accountable may have another epicenter: New York City. Last week, the New York City Council unanimously passed a bill to tackle algorithmic discrimination — the first measure of its kind in the country.

• The algorithmic accountability bill, waiting to be signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, establishes a task force that will study how city agencies use algorithms to make decisions that affect New Yorkers’ lives, and whether any of the systems appear to discriminate against people based on age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or citizenship status. The task force’s report will also explore how to make these decision-making processes understandable to the public.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The CCA say that a three-member pastoral solidarity team spent four days in West Papua with an “intensive” programme of visits and meetings. “Indigenous West Papuans shared with the CCA delegation about the on-going repression and systematic human rights violations in West Papua, including the passing of laws that suppress freedom of speech and freedom of association,” the CCA said.”

• West Papua had been on the list in the early 1960s before being removed when Indonesia controversially took control of the territory.

• Ms Wall said West Papua was a “growing and emerging issue in the Pacific”

• Start with England, which presents an extreme case of the pathologies facing Muslim minorities in the West. In no other country have so many “sharia councils” sprung up to adjudicate the affairs of Muslim people, especially women who are trapped in unhappy marriages and want a religious divorce. (Some say these councils should be regulated, others want them abolished.) And in no other country is it so common for young Muslim couples to have religious-only marriages or nikahs which are never registered with the state, so that in the event of a breakdown the financially vulnerable partner, usually female, has few entitlements.

• The wife of Raïf Badawi has been living with hope for years, but after learning that her husband’s name is on a royal pardon list in Saudi Arabia, “for the first time,” that hope has become more tangible.

• “These are prisoners of conscience, political prisoners,” said Cotler. “I’ve learned it’s a combination of effective public advocacy and effective private diplomacy that secures their release.”

• A majority of child-trafficking victims were also found to be British.

• A neighbor who witnessed the brutal attack chose to ignore the it. He later stated to the police that he has “learned not to see or hear too much.” The man has lived for 15 years in Fittja, a Muslim dominated area.

• “We began thinking we would debunk the media narrative that Asians are over-represented in this specific crime. But, when the final numbers came in we were alarmed and dismayed. For both of us being of Pakistani heritage, this issue is deeply personal and deeply disturbing,”

• Daniel Shaver was unarmed and begging for his life. This week, a jury found the police officer who killed him not guilty of murder or manslaughter.

• The case hasn’t attracted the higher degree of attention from the press, the public, or policing reform activists, partly because body-cam footage of the killing has been withheld from the media and partly because the cop and the dead man were both white, rendering the killing less controversial than one possibly animated by racism. But it warrants more attention than it has received.

• “I just don’t understand how anybody could watch that video and then say, ‘not guilty,’ that this is justified that Daniel deserved this, and that Philip Brailsford doesn’t deserve to be held accountable for his actions,” Sweet said.

• “The actual torture … occurred at a remote hiding place where they’d sometimes take certain suspects. I found that out later on after my arrest. They had a hidden place on the southeast side of Chicago where they would perform all kinds of despicable acts on people that they had arrested.” We should note that this isn’t based solely on Darrell’s word. Chicago has admitted that this torture program existed. It’s part of the school curriculum now.

• He used red, green and blue filters – red being the most effective – to achieve 90% legibility. That was done with commercial software, but multispectral analysis – technology used by police and secret services – is even more effective.

• An Egyptian lawyer has been sentenced to three years in prison for saying that women who wear ripped jeans should be raped in punishment.

• Turkey’s strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, may have exhibited all possible features of political Islam since he came to power fifteen years ago, but at least he has been bold and honest about his understanding of Islamism: There is no moderate Islam, he recently said again.

• This comment does not mark any U-turn, or a radical deviation from his earlier freshman-self back in the 2000s. The problem is that his Western “allies” have stubbornly preferred to turn a blind eye to his poster-child Islamism. Worse, they still do.

• Under the “medium” and “high” projections in Pew’s scenarios, how can Europe preserve all its most precious gifts: freedom of expression, separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, rule of law and equality between men and women?

• What’s going on in Sweden reflects a changed demographic and psychic reality. The “Arab street,” if that abstraction ever existed, is no longer restricted to Arabic-speaking countries. Arab and other Muslim immigrants now living in Europe increasingly play just as active a role in enacting collective political opinion as their counterparts who did not leave their home countries.

• [...]

• And what’s happening today in Sweden can happen tomorrow throughout the rest of Europe.

• Preliminary data, recently leaked to German public radio, indicate that in terms of violence against German law enforcement officers, 2017 will be a record-breaking year. In Berlin alone, attacks against police this year are up 70% in Görlitzer Park, 35% at the Warsaw Bridge and 15% at Kottbusser Tor, according to the Berliner Morgenpost.

• The report said: “Tensions between belief systems and British values create a motivation for some communities to try avoiding the educational and safeguarding standards expected of schools. This matters because the British values of democracy, tolerance, individual liberty, mutual respect and the rule of law are the principles that keep society free from the radical and extreme views that can often lead to violence.”

• Bin Salman is a man who makes President Assad look like a wet liberal. Since seizing power, he has set about crushing dissent at home and embarking on a series of disastrous foreign-policy misadventures abroad. And yet the British and American media have been all over him.

• Take Thomas Friedman’s love letter to ‘MBS’ in the New York Times, entitled ‘Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at last’. In the manner of a swooning teenager, Friedman holds up bin Salman as a man bringing liberty to the people (he recently lifted the ban on women driving and has allowed some cinemas to be reopened).

• The Guardian has been a cheerleader for every catastrophic military intervention since the Cold War. And now its diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, has discovered in bin Salman a kinder, gentler kind of despot he can get along with. He’s called him a ‘risk-taker with a zeal for reform’, and praised him for rooting out corruption. (Quite what that means in a state that is literally the private property of a ruling family is hard to work out.)

• We’re suing the Webster Parish School District in Louisiana to put an end to its constitutional violations.

• It’s been over half a century since the Supreme Court first ruled that public schools cannot impose prayer on students. But in the Webster Parish School District in Louisiana, it might as well be the 1950s because school officials at Lakeside Junior/Senior High School and other district schools start every morning with a prayer delivered over the school’s public-address system. Student “volunteers” may read Bible verses, or they may read the Lord’s Prayer, the text of which is conveniently taped near the microphone.

• But the school district’s backward time travel doesn’t end there. School officials are imposing religion at every turn, even though the law has been clear for decades that promotion of religion by public schools is illegal and violates students’ rights under the First Amendment. Nearly every Lakeside school event features an official prayer. Graduation services are held in churches and often resemble religious services.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Who does not like to have the possibility to shop online, or benefit from online services? No one disputes the advantage of the digital age, but in a world in which a very small number of actors, such as Google and Facebook, hosted by rich countries, reap most of the advertising benefits, developing countries are wary of binding rules which would only serve to enhance the digital and economic divide, according to speakers on an opening panel today at this week’s Internet Governance Forum.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A few months ago this blog reportedon the very interesting decision of the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH), that refused the idea of having to apply the GS Media [Katposts here]presumption of knowledge for for-profit link providers to search engines.

• The German court did so on consideration of the particular importance of search services for the functioning of the internet. According to the BGH, the provider of a search function cannot be expected to check the lawfulness of the images automatically retrieved from publicly accessible websites.

• The US Department of Justice is known to target and prosecute pirate site operators within its own borders. However, the authorities also help other countries to do the same by providing training, forensic tools, and legal expertise to law enforcement around the globe.

• The New Zealand government has announced an overhaul of the country’s copyright laws. A review of the Copyright Act 1994 was announced by the previous government and will now go ahead next year. Speaking with TF, Kim Dotcom says that current legislation is mostly good, since it protects both consumers and ISPs. However, he does have some advice for the judiciary.

• A groundbreaking lawsuit is underway in Canada that will test key elements of the country’s copyright regime. If successful, it would set up what one prominent intellectual property lawyer called a legal “machine” for cheaply and easily getting cash settlements from scores of people who illegally download movies online.

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