● 12.19.17

● Links 19/12/2017: Mesa 17.3.1 RC, Mozilla Apologises, Builder 3.27 Progress

Posted in News Roundup at 5:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Having spent 20 years of my life on Desktop Linux I thought I should write up my thinking about why we so far hasn’t had the Linux on the Desktop breakthrough and maybe more importantly talk about the avenues I see for that breakthrough still happening. There has been a lot written of this over the years, with different people coming up with their explanations. My thesis is that there really isn’t one reason, but rather a range of issues that all have contributed to holding the Linux Desktop back from reaching a bigger market. Also to put this into context, success here in my mind would be having something like 10% market share of desktop systems, that to me means we reached critical mass. So let me start by listing some of the main reasons I see for why we are not at that 10% mark today before going onto talking about how I think that goal might possible to reach going forward.

• Longtime Fedora/GNOME developer Christian Schaller who leads the desktop engineering team at Red Hat recently commented on some bold Linux/tech predictions for 2018. He’s now also shared his personal opinion on why “the year of the Linux desktop” has yet to materialize.

• Christian believes that holding back to the Linux desktop from conquering has been the fragmented market, the lack of specialized and big name applications being natively available, Linux not having a stable API/ABI, Apple’s resurgence on the desktop, Microsoft being aggressive, Canonical’s business model not working out, ODM support lacking, and more.

• Microsoft’s Surface Book 2 has a power problem. When operating at peak performance, it may draw more power than its stock charger or Surface Dock can handle. What we’ve discovered after talking to Microsoft is that it’s not a bug—it’s a feature.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• In order to target around a mid-February release date, the Mesa 18.0.0 branching and first release candidate would be around mid-January, currently set for 19 January after which the branching occurs and all new feature development would be for Mesa 18.1 in Q2’2018.

• Weekly release candidates as usual come between RC1 and the official stable release. The rough schedule was posted today to Mesa-dev.

• Mesa 17.3.1 is on track to be released this week as the first point release to this quarter’s Mesa 17.3 feature release.

• Mesa 17.3.0 finally shipped in early December after facing delays. As is usually the case with the first point release of new Mesa branches, 17.3.1 is quite heavy on the fixes.

• Mesa 17.3.1 will ship with around three dozen fixes, including notable fixes for RADV / RadeonSI / i965 and even some Nouveau NVC0 and Freedreno bug fixes too. The GLSL shader cache should also be more robust in this release. For those on big endian architectures, there’s fixes for you too.

• A fun little spot has been made today, there is an AMD entry seen in the AMD Linux driver that is stirring up the web. The entry nearly reads out like a pun really, but does suggest NAVI, the successor to Vega. Nobody knows why or what, but 7nm isn’t surely ready for GPUs, so as to why that entry is in there, remains speculation.

• While details regarding the Navi GPU architecture have been scarce, we do know that AMD has a solid GPU roadmap and that next-generation Navi GPU will be based on 7nm manufacturing process and feature “next-gen memory”, possible either GDDR6 or HBM3.

• Intel has sent in another round of feature updates of their i915 DRM driver to DRM-Next of new material slated for Linux 4.16.

• At the start of December they began with their first round of i915 work for Linux 4.16 that included continued work on Cannonlake “Gen 10″ graphics, power-gating improvements, GEM proxy support, continued HuC/GuC clean-ups, GVT virtualization enhancements, and more. Then last week was a second round of feature additions that included execlist improvements, more Cannonlake “Gen 10″ graphics enablement, Geminilake workarounds, more robust GPU reset handling, and more.

• Since yesterday several (Windows-focused) publications have been running stories about how AMD’s next-gen “Navi” GPU was supposedly spotted in the AMD Linux driver code.

• AMD’s next generation GPU architecture, Navi, has interestingly been spotted in the latest Linux drivers. That said, it should be noted that the aforementioned drivers do not contain the word “Navi” specifically, but there are certain hints which show that this is indeed a new GPU from Radeon and AMD. The latest Linux drivers contains the following line of code:

• Today marks the release of Portable Computing Language “POCL” 1.0 for this originally CPU-based OpenCL implementation.

• Earlier this month marked the POCL 1.0 release candidate while out today is the official 1.0.0 release. POCL 1.0 is the best implementation to date for offering OpenCL support on CPUs.

• It remains to be seen how exactly the situation will play out with the existing open-source RADV Vulkan driver that’s in the Mesa tree and AMD’s to-be-opened “Radeon Open Vulkan” driver that is the company’s official Vulkan driver. At least though Vulkan drivers are lighter and less maintenance than OpenGL drivers.

• For those curious about the size of the RADV Vulkan driver, when checking out Mesa Git this morning, the src/amd/vulkan directory comes in at 36,253 lines of code.

Benchmarks

• As part of our end-of-year benchmarking, a Phoronix Premium supporter had brought up the idea of seeing how the Radeon RX Vega Linux driver performance has evolved since launch. Ask and you shall receive: here’s some numbers showing the state of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 performance with the open-source RadeonSI+AMDGPU performance as of this week compared to back on launch-day.

Applications

• It’s called ‘Dashboard’ and it is a dockable dialog that provides at-a-glance info on how GIMP is using cache and swap space.

• GIMP devs say the feature could be useful for anyone looking to improve the performance of GIMP as it lets them see how the editor copes with the default settings. I imagine the feature will also prove popular with developers who work on GIMP, too!

• Alex Larsson released at the end of last week a new stable update of the Flatpak 0.10 Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XDG-App) for GNU/Linux distributions.

• Bringing a month’s worth of improvements, Flatpak 0.10.2 is out with support for OSTree 2017.14, which is required for building the new release. An interesting feature of Flatpak 0.10.2 is the ability of the “flatpak update” command to update apps from both system and user installations by default.

• MKVToolNix, the open-source and cross-platform collection of tools developed by Moritz Bunkus for manipulating the MKV (Matroska) media container format, received its last release in 2017.

• Bringing a month’s worth of improvements and bug fixes, MKVToolNix 19.0.0 is here to update the mkvmerge component to take the first keyframe within 1ms of the requested value into consideration when splitting by duration, by timestamps or by timestamp-based parts.

Proprietary

• Google asked rival browser Vivaldi to add uninstall instructions on its website download page – something Google doesn’t do itself – after deactivating Vivaldi’s advertising account earlier this year.

• Vivaldi is among the many software vendors that advertise products with the search giant. AdWords customers appear at the top of a search for related keywords with a small “Ad” in a box next to them.

• “Google deactivated our advertising account a couple of days after I had a few interviews where I talked about privacy issues,” Vivaldi CEO and co-founder Jon von Tetzchner told us. “This is the second time they did this, but this time there was no indication in the AdWords interface that we had been blocked.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Vulkan graphics API has been particularly popular with some gaming console emulators from the Dolphin Emulator to RetroArch. The latest emulator now working on Vulkan support is PPSSPP on Linux.

Games

• Just a quick tip here! For those who enjoy the classics, Disney’s The Lion King & The Jungle Book now have Linux versions on Steam.

• The crafting MMO Wild Terra Online [Steam, Official Site] has now officially launched, come check out the launch trailer and decide if it’s the MMO for you.

• We don’t have a lot to choose from when it comes to MMOs, so it’s good to see Wild Terra Online support Linux. It’s come a long way since the early builds I’ve tested, the UI is looking a lot nicer that’s for sure.

• The Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III [Steam, Feral Store] has been updated for Linux to include the Endless War Update which brings in some fun free stuff.

• The slick deals just keep an appearing and naturally we don’t want you to miss out on any of them! Be quick and grab some more free games.

• Crashlands [Steam, Official Site] is a silly story-driven crafting ARPG and as of today it’s officially available for Linux gamers.

• In the first article in this series, I explained how to use Python to create a simple, text-based dice game. In the second part, we began building a game from scratch, starting with creating the game’s environment. And, in the third installment, we created a player sprite and made it spawn in your (rather empty) game world. As you’ve probably noticed, a game isn’t much fun if you can’t move your character around. In this article, we’ll use Pygame to add keyboard controls so you can direct your character’s movement.

• There are functions in Pygame to add other kinds of controls, but since you certainly have a keyboard if you’re typing out Python code, that’s what we’ll use. Once you understand keyboard controls, you can explore other options on your own.

• If you are exclusively using Linux for gaming, hopefully you aren’t hoping for an HTC Vive this Christmas as the SteamVR support on Linux still leaves a lot to be desired. At the start of the year Valve finally put out their first SteamVR developer build for Linux and now nearly one year later, it still feels like a very rough beta.

• When developer Radiant Entertainment announced that Riot Games had acquired it last year, the studio also revealed that it was shuttering its indie fighting game, Rising Thunder. But in a Reddit post today, Radiant unveiled Rising Thunder: Community Edition, a free, open-source version of the game that will be available in January 2018 for PC.

• Rising Thunder was a big deal in the fighting game community when it was announced way back in 2015. It was in development at Radiant Entertainment, a studio led by fighting game legend Seth Killian and EVO Tournament co-founders Tom and Tony Cannon. After Radiant was bought by Riot Games in 2016, however, work on Rising Thunder shut down–but now, it looks like the game will live again.

• Rising Thunder, the indie fighting game canceled in its alpha phase of development in 2016, will live on through one final build, with open-source server code, the game’s developers said today.

• Rising Thunder was a fighting game from Radiant Entertainment, built in part by FGC luminaries like Seth Killian and Evo founders Tom and Tony Cannon. It was to have all the depth of a traditional fighter, but with a simplified, infinitely more accessible control scheme, but was cancelled after Radiant were acquired by League of Legends developers Riot Games. Yet Rising Thunder is not gone, as the developers are releasing the final build of the game to the public.

• Last year, Riot Games acquired Rising Thunder developer Radiant Entertainment. Following that move, the promising robot fighting game was never finished and the team shifted its resources toward another project. It was a bittersweet note to end on, but the story isn’t over just yet.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• This is the third article in our series on migrating to Linux. If you missed earlier articles, they provided an introduction to Linux for new users and an overview of Linux files and filesystems. In this article, we’ll discuss graphical environments. One of the advantages of Linux is that you have lots of choices, and you can select a graphical interface and customize it to work just the way you like it.

• Some of the popular graphical environments in Linux include: Cinnamon, Gnome, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and MATE, but there are many options.

• One thing that is often confusing to new Linux users is that, although specific Linux distributions have a default graphical environment, usually you can change the graphical interface at any time. This is different from what people are used to with Windows and Mac OS. The distribution and the graphical environment are separate things, and in many cases, they aren’t tightly coupled together. Additionally, you can run applications built for one graphical environment inside other graphical environments. For example, an application built for the KDE Plasma graphical interface will typically run just fine in the Gnome desktop graphical environment.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• And the winner is …

• Well, it’s kind of obvious. Kubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus is the uncontested king of this contest. It just did everything superbly – from the live session to prolonged, heavy use on several machines, it maintained and still maintains quality, elegance, flair and stability that no other Plasma rival – or for that matter, any rival – can offer. There are still some issues, like the Samba timestamp or screenshot shadows, and a handful of other papercuts, but the benefits outweigh these nuisances.

• Kubuntu 17.04 is most likely the best KDE/Plasma release ever made, and it is a culmination of years of hard work. But then, It also sets a dangerous precedent, because once you have perfection, it is very hard to retain it, and consequently, the backlash is going to be ever more severe. As other tests show, including the Kubuntu family itself, it takes only a few short months to undo the stellar record with nothing more than some regressions and overstretched development resources.

• But let’s stay in the happy zone. Kubuntu 17.04 is the perfect distro and the perfect Plasma desktop, and it’s the ultimate demonstrator of what this desktop environment can do, with a range of splendid features, great quality, deep forethought, excellent consistency, excellent ergonomics, and of course, all the fun stuff that people need. There’s little else that needs to be sad except lament the fact it’s not an LTS but just an interim release.

• Conclusion

• It is fun reading your own articles, and seeing how things change. And they did change. I believe that Plasma has progressed heavily since last year. Gnome went down, and Plasma went up. The cycle of Tux. I was rather cautious about Plasma, and it is still a volatile desktop environment. Good results are a gamble, but I believe that’s an outcome of shoddy QA and insufficient attention to details and less an integral failing of the Plasma desktop. As a whole, Plasma is a lot better than it was. But then, it’s also more difficult to put together than before. You either get amazing or horrible. There’s no middle ground. To be honest, I prefer that to gray mediocrity.

• While Kubuntu 17.04 is the unrivaled star of the year, Mageia 6 also deserves a lot of praise. Like Antergos in the Gnome space, we have an underdog quietly slipping under the radar and delivering a bombshell. Quality, originality – such a rare trait nowadays – cunning, great ergonomics and then some. Side by side, these two show that Plasma is an excellent choice for the desktop. 2017, I am far more optimistic about Plasma even as my passion for other options is fading fast. You still need to be cautious and risk it, but the reward is so much higher than last year. Plasma is on a good trajectory, and hopefully it will continue into the next year. Meanwhile, you have some awesome distros to test and play with and sample the best of Plasma.

• After an exciting and successful year, we give you all an opportunity to help us recharge our proverbial batteries.

• You’ve always wanted to contribute to a Free and open source project, right? Maybe you wondered how you could do that. Well, supporting our fundraiser is a perfect way to get started. Donations are also a great way to show gratitude to the developers of your favorite KDE applications, and to ensure the project will continue.

Distributions

• Endless OS 3.3.6 is currently rolling out to existing users, and it introduces sign-on improvements by allowing users that use a mix of English and non-English words in their passwords to more easily unlock their computers. Moreover, the new release adds the latest Flatpak and Flatpak Builder tools to improve the apps ecosystem.

• These include hardware-acceleration graphics support for apps on ARM devices like Endless Mini and Mission Mini, improvements to language and localization selection, add missing icons for some apps, as well as to prevent situations where apps can’t connect to the Internet when switching between wireless networks.

• When it comes to the popularity of different operating systems, Linux enjoys a better position in the servers market. Due to many unbeatable benefits like stability, security, freedom, and hardware support, Linux is often the favorite platform to work upon for system administrators and expert users. Just like other special uses (including gaming, programming, or hacking), the category of Linux server distros too is vast.

• Ikey Doherty, founder and lead developer of the Solus Project developing the Linux-based Solus operating system, released today a much-improved version of the Linux Steam Integration (LSI).

• Linux Steam Integration 0.7.2 is now available with several new features and improvements that might worth your attention if you’re an avid Linux gamer. These include initial support for Canonical’s Snappy daemon Snapd, a workaround for the Unity3D “black screen of nope” bug, as well as enhanced vendoring rules and shim system.

• To improve the shim implementation, Linux Steam Integration 0.7.2 brings a new generic lsi-exec entry point used by both steam and lsi-steam binaries. It also includes support for the XDG specification, a more robust environment bootstrap, and various other improvements.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• As we’ve been covering since the original patches back in October, SUSE has been working on a very interesting in-kernel bootsplash system. It’s growing into an interesting alternative to the user-space-based Plymouth, but one of the leading common criticism of it is the use of FBCON rather than interfacing with the DRM/KMS APIs.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora’s Modularity initiative aims to make it easy for packagers to create alternative versions of software and for users to consume those streams simply. We’ve been working on this for several years, resulting in the “Boltron” prototype this summer and the recent Fedora Modular Server beta. Feedback shows that these test releases didn’t meet the goal, and we’re incorporating that in a modified design which we think will. We plan to demo the new approach by DevConf.cz and FOSDEM.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• For Ubuntu fans the past 12 months have been a strange mix of dramatic and the ecstatic moments.

• The world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution began the year with one desktop environment, yet ends it with another.

• But despite several controverisal decisions along the way Ubuntu is, arguably, in better shape than it’s ever been. It’s found its mojo, refined its focus, and heads into the next year emboldened and renewed.

• In this post we present 12 images from our archives that (somewhat) illustrate Ubuntu in 2017.

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux Mint team continues to release fresh versions of their operating system approximately every 6 month, following the updates in Ubuntu LTS versions. You could read the quick screenshot overview of Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon back in July 2017. It is now turn of Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon. Let’s have a whistle-stop tour through it.

Devices/Embedded

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Over the years, I’ve watched first hand as enterprise-centric companies took open source technologies and found ways to make millions (and sometimes many millions) by providing trustworthy support. But what about those open source applications that lack enterprise level financial backing, how are the developers of these applications supposed to pay their bills?

• In this article, I’m going to address one of the biggest issues facing those who want to see non-enterprise open source software – funding.

• As 2017 draws to a close, we look at some of the reasons why the use of open source software is growing and will continue to grow in the year ahead.

• A solid ecommerce platform can help smooth out the whole shopping experience for your customers, from click, to cart to payment.

• From massive corporations to sole traders, ecommerce platforms can meet the needs of most businesses, and those that don’t are constantly improving operations to keep up with the fierce competition.

• So, why go open source? If you want total control and absolute customisation, open source software lets you inspect, copy and alter that software to make the perfect package for you.

• So, why Mastodon? The new social media service is a non-profit, open-source project that has attracted many Twitter refugees over the last year, including myself. Founder Eugen Rochko (gargron@mastodon.social) wrote in March that Mastodon was aiming to learn from the “mistakes” of Twitter and be an inclusive, decentralized microblogging platform. The result is a social media service where users actually feel comfortable being themselves, as opposed to a performative, more sarcastic version of who they actually are.

• The Rochester Mini Maker Faire is an annual event that takes place at the Joseph A. Floreano Riverside Convention Center in Rochester, NY. Each year, makers, creators, artists, and others from upstate New York and beyond show their crafts and creations to the community. Open source tools are popular at the Rochester Mini Maker Faire, where you’ll find countless Raspberry Pis, Arduino boards, and open source-powered projects and creations.

• Bloomberg has adopted Kubernetes, the open source system for deploying and managing containerized applications which has gained a great deal of industry momentum, in its infrastructure. As a result, systems are becoming more distributed than ever before, running on machines scattered around the globe and across the cloud. This means there are more moving parts, any of which could fail for a long list of reasons.

• Systems engineers want to feel confident that the complex systems they’ve built will withstand problems and keep running. To do that, they run batteries of elaborate tests designed to simulate all sorts of problems. But it’s impossible to imagine every potential problem, let alone plan for all of them.

Events

• xTuple open source ERP ended their 2017 series of on-the-road events at the Pittsburgh Technology Council (PTC), the largest regional tech trade association in the nation. The open-forum discussion focused on digital marketing strategies for manufacturers using next generation business management software, including xTupleCommerce, the online Customer Web Portal.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• If you use Firefox instead of Chrome, do you do so because you prefer Mozilla’s stance on privacy? Some loyal Firefox users and even employees were up in arms after Mozilla surreptitiously installed the add-on Looking Glass last week. It didn’t happen to all Firefox users, but the ones affected did not give the browser permission to install it.

• Over the course of the year Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show and, as part of this relationship, we developed an unpaid collaboration to engage our users and viewers of the show in a new way: Fans could use Firefox to solve a puzzle as part of the alternate reality game (ARG) associated with the show.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 6.0 just exited beta testing and the development cycle will continue this week with the first Release Candidate, which should be available to download by the end of the week as The Document Foundation plans a third bug hunting session just before the Christmas holidays, on December 22, 2017.

• “On December 22 we will have an international Bug Hunting Session (BHS), testing the RC1 (first release candidate) of LibreOffice 6.0,” writes Mike Saunders. “You can download, try out and test this RC1 version – and if you spot any bugs, let our QA (Quality Assurance) community know.”

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• Obviously I still use FreeBSD on the desktop; with the packages from area51 I have a full and modern KDE Plasma environment. We (as in, the KDE-FreeBSD team) are still wrestling with getting the full Plasma 5 into the official ports tree (stalled, as so often it has been, on concerns of backwards compatibility), but things like CMake 3.10.1 and Qt 5.9 are sliding into place. Slowly, like brontosauruses driving a ’57 Cadillac.

• In the meantime, I do most of my Calamares development work — it is a Linux installer, after all — in VMs with some Linux distro installed. Invariably — and especially when working on tools that do the most terrible things to the disks attached to a system — I totally break the system, the VM no longer starts at all, and my development environment is interrupted for a bit.

Programming/Development

• Yesterday, we published a beginners guide to manage Python packages using PIP. In that guide, we discussed how to install pip, and how to install, update, uninstall Python packages using pip. We also discussed the importance of virtual environments and how to create a virtual environment using venv and virtualvnv tools. However managing multiple environments using venv and virtualenv tools is tedious task. No worries! There is an another python package manager named pipenv, which is the new recommended Python Packaging tool by Python.org. It can be used to easily install and manage python dependencies without having to create virtual environments. Pipenv automatically creates and manages a virtualenv for your projects. It also adds/removes packages from your Pipfile as you install/uninstall packages.

• As normal, I’ve been busy since our last update. Here are a few highlights of features in addition to all those bug fixes.

• The GNOME Builder development environment has already been working on many new features for next year’s GNOME 3.28 desktop environment while even more features are now on track.

• Work already being addressed is improved Flatpak support, pseudo-terminal support in the build pipeline, improved search, better CMake and Meson build system integration, support for unit tests, and more.

• Lead GNOME Builder IDE developer Christian Hergert has written another status update on his latest improvements for the project.

• Developers wanting to use the Google Go language, aka Golang, for web programming can try the beta open source Joy compiler, which promises—when it reaches production release—to turn Go code into JavaScript code.

• With Joy, idiomatic Go code will be translated into JavaScript that will work in every browser (as ECMAScript 3 code, with ECMAScript 5 code on the roadmap as well), the open source project claims. It also means JavaScript developers will be able to use Go’s type system and tools. Joy project creator Matthew Mueller says the Go-to-JavaScript translation work is about 90 percent complete.

Leftovers

• A diver examines an anchor at the Two Brothers shipwreck site, located on a reef off French Frigate Shoals, hundreds of miles northwest of Honolulu. Two Brothers was captained by George Pollard Jr., whose previous Nantucket whaling vessel, Essex, was rammed and sunk by a whale in the South Pacific, inspiring Herman Melville’s famous book, Moby-Dick.

Security

• Zealot campaign used Eternalblue and Eternalsynergy to mine cryptocurrency on networks.

• Security researchers have found a new hacking campaign that used NSA exploits to install cryptocurrency miners on victim’s systems and networks.

• They said that the campaign was a sophisticated multi-staged attack targeting internal networks with the NSA-attributed EternalBlue and EternalSynergy exploits.

• Hackers are using leaked NSA cyberweapons to mine cryptocurrency over vulnerable servers.

• The weapons can be used to take over Windows and Linux systems, and download malware that can mine the digital currency Monero, according to security provider F5 Networks.

• Network security vendor F5 has discovered a new attack that makes use of known vulnerabilities including the same Apache Struts vulnerability linked to the Equifax breach to mine the Monero cryptocurrency.

• F5′s threat researchers have dubbed the campaign “Zealot”, which is also the name of a file that is part of multi-stage attack. The Zealot files include python scripts that trigger the EternalBlue and Eternal Synergy exploits that were first publicly disclosed by the Shadow Brokers hacking group and were allegedly first created by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) linked Equation Group.

• HP has recently come under fire for allegedly bundling a keylogger into its drivers, allowing the company or cybercriminals who could hijack it to record every keystroke of the user.

• But Synaptics, the company that builds and provides TouchPads for HP and other OEMs on the market, says the keylogger in question isn’t actually a keylogger, as it was implemented solely with the purpose of serving as a debug tool.

• In a security brief published recently, Synaptics says HP isn’t the only company that offers drivers with this debug tool included by default, but all OEMs featuring its hardware.

• “Each notebook OEM implements custom TouchPad features to deliver differentiation. We have been working with these OEMs to improve the quality of these drivers. To support these requirements and to improve the quality of the experience, Synaptics provides a custom debug tool in the driver to assist in the diagnostic, debug and tuning of the TouchPad. This debug feature is a standard tool in all Synaptics drivers across PC OEMs and is currently present in production versions,” the firm says.

• The researchers used Google’s proprietary data to see whether or not stolen passwords could be used to gain access to user accounts, and found that an estimated 25 per cent of the stolen credentials can successfully be used by cyber crooks to gain access to functioning Google accounts.

• Drawing upon Google as a case study, we find 7–25\% of exposed passwords match a victim’s Google account.

• Security researchers have spotted a new multi-stage attack campaign using NSA exploits to infect victim machines with Monero mining malware.

• The attack begins by scanning for vulnerable servers: specifically ones that are still open to the Apache Struts flaw (CVE-2017-5638) which led to the infamous Equifax breach, and CVE-2017-9822, a DotNetNuke (DNN) content management system vulnerability.

• If a Windows machine is detected, the attackers deploy two NSA-linked exploits leaked by alleged Russian state hackers the Shadow Brokers earlier this year.

• A recent Request for Comment at the Internet Engineering Task Force calls for SSH developers to deprecate 1,024-bit moduli.

• RFC 8270 was authored by Mark Baushke (at Juniper Networks but working as an individual) and Loganaden Velvindron (of Mauritian group Hackers.mu) in response to demand for a response to the 2015 Logjam bug.

• Logjam, discovered by Johns Hopkins cryptoboffin Matthew Green, would let a state-level actor attack Diffie-Hellman cryptosystems using 1,024-bit primes.

Defence/Aggression

• What just happened and what will happen in Honduras are painfully unclear right now. There’s still no resolution to the November 26 presidential election, in which opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla was leading when the electoral commission—controlled by allies of incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernandez—suspended the count for a day and a half, citing technical problems, only to resume it and declare that Hernandez had, in the meanwhile, overtaken his opponent and won. Hardly surprisingly, this was met with public protest, in turn met by a state crackdown. We hear at least 11 people have been killed by security forces, and there’s a public curfew, which at least some police are reportedly refusing to enforce.

• On Dec. 8, 2017, a lawyer for the U.S. government stood before a federal appeals court to defend President Donald Trump’s third attempt to ban immigrants and visitors from predominantly Muslim countries. He argued that while there may be legal limits on presidential power to ban noncitizens from the United States, the courts should still defer to the executive branch, taking Donald Trump’s word for it that he is no longer intent on banning Muslims from the United States.

• The judges might have asked, “What is the historical precedent that supports President Trump’s position on the travel ban?” None of them asked that precise question, but the President himself gave a chilling answer when he proposed the ban: Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 Supreme Court decision upholding Executive Order 9066, which banished Japanese Americans from their homes and forced them into prison camps. The Korematsu ruling came down 73 years ago today and the lessons from it could not be more relevant.

• The Trump administration has publicly blamed North Korea for unleashing the so-called WannaCry cyber attack that crippled hospitals, banks and other companies across the globe earlier this year.

• The US has declared North Korea the perpetrator of the widespread and financially devastating WannaCry ransomware cyberattack that rapidly spread across the globe in May, hitting hospitals, companies, and other critical institutions in countries around the world. The announcement came in the form of an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal authored by President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, Thomas Bossert.

• He said the world community needs to recognise Pakistan’s sacrifices in the war against terrorism as the country suffered the most as compared to other nations. “Pakistan has suffered a lot in the war on terror both in terms of lives lost and damage to economy, but international community has not looked upon our sacrifices in this war with a positive attitude,” Nasser complained.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The revelation this week that Donald Trump Jr. corresponded with WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign has added a new wrinkle to the competing probes into Russian interference.

• Legal experts say the development is likely to intensify scrutiny of Trump’s eldest son, who is already under the microscope for a controversial June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer.

• Separately, a pair of senators revealed Thursday that Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had received correspondence about WikiLeaks prior to the election. They said Kushner has not yet turned over those documents to congressional investigators.

• Here are five things you need to know about Russia, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• In June, a team of European researchers traveled to Papua New Guinea on a mission of global significance. They came to search for the Giant Banana plant.

• The scientists traveled through the jungles of the South Pacific nation, by car and on foot, accompanied by two armed guards. They were tantalized by images circulating online, purportedly taken by locals, that depict a towering banana corm, several stories high, with leaves about 5 yards long.

• Mendip District Council has voted to go NSUP (No Single Use Plastics) last night 19th December by passing the following motion:

• ‘That this council will become a ‘single-use plastic free’ council by phasing out the use of ‘single use plastic’ (SUP) products such as bottles, cups, cutlery and drinking straws in a council activities, where it is reasonable to do so, by April 2018 and to encourage our facilities’ users, local businesses and other local public agencies to do the same, by championing alternatives, such as reusable water bottles.’

Finance

• Eighteen months on from the Brexit referendum, the story that the ‘people have spoken’ is only one version of the truth. There was only a very small majority for leaving the EU: more than 16 million people were on the electoral register but did not vote, and a further 2 million were not even registered. It is now evident that many of those who voted to leave had no idea what this entailed, or the likely costs. Surveys confirm that enough people have now changed their position that, if there was a second referendum, a majority would now vote to remain in the EU.

• But both the Government and the Labour opposition seem determined not to have a second referendum, despite the mounting evidence of the massive destruction Brexit will cause to the British economy. There is a daily record of companies preparing to leave the UK and establish themselves elsewhere in the EU. Cumulatively, the impact on GDP, employment and the public finances are going to be extremely large and yet these costs are simply shrugged off as if they were obviously worth enduring.

• The wealth of America’s middle class, under siege for four decades, is now hanging on life support. That life will end if the basic Republican tax plan, as now envisioned by House and Senate majorities, ever becomes law.

• By “middle class,” we mean America’s “Middle 40,” that stratum of American households that has more wealth than the nation’s poorest 40 percent and less wealth than the nation’s most affluent 20 percent.

• In 2001, according to the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer Finances, the most systematic official survey of who owns what in the United States, the nation’s Middle 40 held 15.2 percent of the country’s wealth.

• The new century has not been kind. By 2016, that share had dropped to 10.6 percent, a figure that leaves the entire Middle 40 — about 128 million Americans in all — sharing slightly less wealth than the 32,000 exorbitantly wealthy individuals who make up the nation’s richest .01 percent. In other words, each American in that top .01 percent holds as much wealth as 4,000 of the Americans in the Middle 40.

• Those provisions in the GOP tax plan that reduce the tax benefits that come with mortgage interest and property tax payments and increase the effective tax homeowners pay when they sell their homes will depress the wealth of the middle class much more than the wealth of the wealthy.

• The House of Representatives is poised to pass a massive rewrite of the U.S. tax code today that will overwhelmingly benefit corporations and the wealthiest Americans. The bill would also end the federal health insurance mandate, endangering the Affordable Care Act, while opening up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. On Capitol Hill, hundreds of protesters flooded the offices of lawmakers Monday in civil disobedience protests. Among those arrested was Cincinnati resident Megan Anderson, who uses a wheelchair and has a degenerative neuromuscular disease. Anderson says the tax bill will lead to Medicaid cuts that could shorten her lifespan.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Republicans in the House of Representatives have just passed a tax bill that would devastate graduate research in the United States. Hidden in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a repeal of Section 117(d)(5) of the current tax code, a provision that is vital to all students who pursue master’s degrees or doctorates and are not independently wealthy.

• Assume for a moment that the popular allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election are all true. How should the US government retaliate?

• Short answer: it shouldn’t (any more than it already has). If the Kremlin sneakily helped Donald Trump to victory, then it is likely that our government’s longstanding and provocative “punishment” of Russia largely motivated the interference. To reduce the chances of something so appalling from happening in future elections, we should therefore move to relieve the dangerously high tensions that have been mounting between the US and Russia for decades.

• For détente to succeed, leaders in the US must try to understand and allay Russia’s legitimate security concerns. That begins with acknowledging the deep Russian trauma caused by World War II, a tragedy to which the Soviet Union lost hundreds of towns and more than 20 million people in less than a decade. Given the depth of that horror, the US should appreciate why Russians today get squeamish when foreign powers start flexing their muscles on Russia’s western border.

• Once again the country watches in horror as firefighters struggle to contain blazes of historic voracity — as we watched only a couple of months ago when at least 250 wildfires spread across the counties north of San Francisco. Even after long-awaited rains brought by an El Niño winter earlier in 2017, years of drought have left my state ready to explode in flames on an increasingly warming planet. All it takes is a spark.

• [...]

• The crazy comes so fast and furious these days, it’s easy to forget some of the smaller brushfires — like the one President Trump lit at the end of November when he retweeted three false and “inflammatory” videos about Muslims that he found on the Twitter feed of the leader of a British ultra-nationalist group.

• The president’s next move in the international arena — his “recognition” of Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel — hasn’t yet slipped from memory, in part because of the outrage it evoked around the world. As Moustafa Bayoumi, acclaimed author of How Does It Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, wrote in the Guardian, “The entire Middle East, from Palestine to Yemen, appears set to burst into flames after this week.” Not surprisingly, his prediction has already begun to come true with demonstrations in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon, where U.S. flags and posters of President Trump were set alight. We’ve also seen the first rockets fired from Gaza into Israel and the predictable reprisal Israeli air attacks.

• Special counsel Robert Mueller has obtained tens of thousands of emails from members of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team, adding to speculation about whether more indictments could follow in the wake of the arrests of Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and two other former Trump officials. Axios reports the emails include documents from seven different accounts, including one operated by Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. At the White House Sunday, President Trump blasted Mueller’s move, saying the situation was “not looking good.” But Trump said he has no plans to fire Mueller.

• Over the course of our nation’s history, we have faced inflection points — times when we had to decide who we are as a country and what we stand for. Now is such a time. Beyond policy disagreements and partisan gamesmanship, there is something much more fundamental hanging in the balance. Will we remain faithful to our country’s core values?

• Our founding documents set forth the values that make us who we are, or at least who we aspire to be. I say aspire to be because we haven’t always lived up to our founding ideals — even at the time of our founding. When the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were being enslaved by their fellow Americans.

Censorship/Free Speech

• “Internet content regulation is coming, in fact it is already here,” said David Kaye, United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, during a panel organised by the Global Network Initiative on day one of the 12th Internet Governance Forum in Geneva this week.

• The examples presented for the trend to block more and more controversial content were not from authoritarian countries, though. “You can best see this trend in Europe at the moment,” Kaye said.

• With pornographic content flooding the internet, the government is set to use a censorship machine starting next year to surf the net to block porn.

• The machine would begin operations in January after a handover process on Dec. 29, Communications and Information Ministry’s information applications director general Samuel Abrijani said.

• “The control room is located on the eighth floor of the Ministry’s office,” he said on Monday as reported by Antaranews.com.

• The censorship machine uses a “crawling” system to automatically analyze inappropriate content based on inputs and categories set by the ministry. Samuel said the system was different to surveillance.

• A previously canceled production of Andrea Dunbar’s Rita Sue and Bob Too will now go ahead at London’s Royal Court in January 2018. The co-production with British theatre company Out of Joint was canceled last week amid sexual harassment allegations against Max Stafford-Clark, Out of Joint’s founding artistic director and former artistic director of The Royal Court.

• Censorship in British theatre was abolished after the staging of Edward Bond’s Saved at London’s Royal Court in 1968. Lord Chamberlain’s office insisted on severe cuts to the script, including a scene that featured the stoning to death of a baby. After a public outcry and a court challenge, the censorship office caved, the Royal Court’s actions were a victory that defined the freedom that endures today.

• The internet’s most hated man, Ajit Pai, was taken down from YouTube for seven hours after a copyright complaint from the record label Mad Decent. Earlier this week, The Daily Caller posted a video of the FCC chairman dismissing concerns over net neutrality by while dancing around in a Santa suit to “Harlem Shake” and swinging a lightsaber. The flippant tone he took to the hot button issue of net neutrality was unpopular, and as of writing, the video currently stands at 7k likes to 169k dislikes.

• For the past few years, one foreign government, an autocratic adversary in all but name, has jailed the families of American journalists, unleashed hackers and social media trolls by the tens of thousands, and injected a campaign to silence critics throughout the West, forcing publishers to back down and convincing American academic institutions to look the other way.

• This dictatorship, building a police state and cult of personality at home, has attempted to export its one-party model abroad, attracting autocrats and smothering liberal democrats at every turn – all while, if recent photo ops are anything to go by, finding a sympathetic ear in the White House.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the Librarian of Congress today to limit the legal barriers people face when they want to repair and modify software-enabled products, so that they—not manufacturers— control the appliances, computers, toys, vehicles, and other products they own.

• In comments filed in Washington D.C. today, EFF continued its years-long fight to enable owners and creators to repair, modify, and enhance products, or use snippets of films or songs, free of onerous threats that doing so somehow infringes companies’ copyrights. Software-enabled devices and Internet-connected products and appliances are ubiquitous in modern life, and people aren’t infringing anyone’s copyright when, for example, they choose to permanently disable the embedded, on-all-the-time camera or microphone in their kids’ toys, or send their car to their favorite mechanic, rather than high-priced dealerships, to be repaired.

• “It’s absurd that a law intended to protect copyrighted works is misused instead to prevent people from taking apart or modifying the things they own, inhibit scientists and researches from investigating safety features or security enhancements, and block artists and educators from using snippets of film in noncommercial ways,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The exemption process is one highly flawed way of alleviating that burden.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• A nonpartisan government watchdog group Monday announced it will push for reforms to the Cook County assessor’s office, citing Chicago Tribune/ProPublica Illinois findings that call into question the accuracy and fairness of the county’s property tax assessment system.

• The Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a nonprofit advocacy group, called for oversight of the assessor’s office, an explanation from Assessor Joseph Berrios of the methods his office used to value property and a plan to address inequities.

• If the assessor’s office fails to take those steps, the group said the county should create an independent board to increase transparency and improve fairness and accuracy.

• “We think these are some pretty basic measures that are absolutely necessary for the assessor’s office to engage in,” ICPR Executive Director Sarah Brune said in an interview.

• In urging change, the group cited reporting from “The Tax Divide” series, which launched in the Tribune in June and has continued this month in partnership with ProPublica Illinois.

• Myanmar’s presidential spokesman said Monday that the president authorized the arrest last week of two Reuters reporters for allegedly violating the state secrets act.

• Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested Dec. 12 after police accused them of violating the Official Secret Act, which is punishable by up to 14 years in prison, for acquiring “important secret papers” from two policemen. The police officers had worked in Rakhine state, where abuses widely blamed on the military have driven more than 630,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee into neighboring Bangladesh.

• Tuesday, the lawyers for an accused NSA leaker are back in a Richmond County federal courtroom.

• Two hearings are being held for Reality Winner.

• Her attorneys are seeking more classified documents from the government to help them in building their case.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Open Garden launched its mesh networking platform at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. Since then, the company has gone through a few iterations and found unexpected success in its Firechat offline messaging service. Now, it’s ready for the next step in its evolution. The company now wants to make it easier for anybody with an Android phone to share their Wi-Fi connections with anyone who is nearby. And to incentivize people to do so, the company plans to launch its own Ethereum token (called OG…) in early 2018.

• Open Garden Inc. announced today the launch of a new Internet service. Unlike traditional, centralized ISPs, where one large retailer delivers service, Open Garden is a peer-to-peer network that will grow to millions of crowdsourced providers. Participants download the Open Garden app from Google Play to get started – no additional hardware is required to build the network. The Open Garden app enables all users to turn their Android phones into Open Garden hotspots and securely share their WiFi connections with anyone nearby. In early 2018, Open Garden will launch its own cryptocurrency, an Ethereum token called OG, that enables each user to earn tokens in exchange for sharing their bandwidth.

• A core Republican talking point during the net neutrality battle was that, in 2015, President Obama led a government takeover of the internet, and Obama illegally bullied the independent Federal Communications Commission into adopting the rules. In this version of the story, Ajit Pai’s rollback of those rules Thursday is a return to the good old days, before the FCC was forced to adopt rules it never wanted in the first place.

• “On express orders from the previous White House, the FCC scrapped the tried-and-true, light touch regulation of the Internet and replaced it with heavy-handed micromanagement,” Pai said Thursday prior to voting to repeal the regulations.

• But internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General—acting on orders from Congressional Republicans—investigated the claim that Obama interfered with the FCC’s net neutrality process and found it was nonsense. This Republican narrative of net neutrality as an Obama-led takeover of the internet, then, was wholly refuted by an independent investigation and its findings were not made public prior to Thursday’s vote.

• The Internet Governance Forum Dynamic Coalition on Trade and the Internet, a group formed in 2016, held its formal inaugural meeting today and adopted a resolution on transparency in trade negotiations, in particular on trade rules that affect the online and digital environment.

Intellectual Monopolies

• For obviousness analysis, the first consideration is typically the scope-and-content of the prior art. Any reference used must qualify as prior art under Section 102 and must also be considered analogous or pertinent. The key prior art reference – Hendrix discussed the pharmacokinetics and use of plerixafor – but was focused on use of the drug in HIV treatment. The district court excluded Hendrix – finding that it was not analogous art since one of skill in the art would not have been looking for this type of drug in researching stem cell mobilization. On appeal, the Federal Circuit did not review that particular holding – instead finding that even if considered pertinent to an obviousness analysis, it still would not be sufficient to render the claim invalid.

Trademarks

• Opposed mark (see below) designating goods of tapioca beverages, tapioca fruit juice beverages in class 32 and retail or wholesale services for tapioca beverages, tapioca fruit juice beverages in class 35 was applied for registration on May 10, 2016 by a Japanese individual. As a result of substantive examination, JPO granted a registration on October 28, 2016.

Copyrights

• Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has responded to last week’s Usenet related raids. The Hollywood-backed group describes Usenet as a refuge for pirates of all ilks, with uploaders, site owners and resellers working in tandem to facilitate copyright infringement. “It’s stinking on all sides,” Kuik says.

• This week, tabloid headlines screamed that so-called “Kodi Boxes” are a threat not only to the entertainment industries, but also to life itself. Claiming that devices could kill their owners due to electrical safety standards failures, we took a look at the actual report. Forget just throwing set-top boxes in the trash, it looks like anything electrical without a brand name needs to be discarded immediately.

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