● 12.20.17

● Links 20/12/2017: oVirt 4.2 I Released, Microsoft Censor/Blocks Chrome

Posted in News Roundup at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Docker and other application container platforms are rapidly becoming a fixture of modern enterprise IT environments.

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, whose parent organization is the venerated Linux Foundation, recently quizzed more than 550 members of its community to determine how containers are being used in the wild for its December 2017 survey. The results indicate that the container ecosystem is maturing, which in turn is encouraging businesses to entrust more of the application workloads to the technology.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Samuel Pitoiset working on Valve’s Linux GPU driver team has addressed the last of the minor F1 2017 rendering bugs encountered when using the open-source RADV Vulkan driver.

• Feral Interactive released F1 2017 last month as the first Vulkan-exclusive Linux game. RADV overall has been working out well for this game, but there have been some minor rendering issues coming up, particularly with Vega/GFX9 GPUs. In fact, RADV has competed with AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan performance in this particular game.

• After going through fourteen rounds of patch revisions, Daniel Stone of Collabora might be ready to land his 40+ patches implementing atomic mode-setting support within Weston.

• These patches allow Wayland’s Weston reference compositor to make use of the Linux kernel’s relatively new atomic mode-setting interfaces when dealing with mode-setting. Atomic mode-setting cleans up Linux’s display mode-setting code and can make for a cleaner experience by testing a desired mode in advance of the commit operation, reducing possible flickering situations, and also being faster than the traditional mode-setting code-paths.

• AMD’s Navi GPU sis already being referenced in AMD’s Linux drivers. As VideoCardz reports, AMD Vega was codenamed GFX9 and the current Linux driver set for Radeon cards includes a string mentioning a ‘gfx10’ chip of a ‘super secret’ nature, as reproduced below.

Benchmarks

• With the end of the year quickly approaching, here’s a look at how the current AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce GPU cryptocurrency mining performance is playing out for Ethereum Ethminer with OpenCL. Tests were done on 14 graphics cards using the latest drivers and in addition to looking at the raw GPU mining performance are also performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar metrics.

Applications

• Oracle released on Tuesday a new minor enhancement and bugfix update to the company’s open-source and cross-platform VirtualBox virtualization software for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems.

• VirtualBox 5.2.4 comes about one month after the November release of VirtualBox 5.2.2, and it’s a small update fixing a few regressions and bugs reported by users lately. For starters, the user interface received better HiDPI support and support for adjusting desktop file for X11 window managers.

• Kubernetes 1.9 was became generally available on Dec. 15, marking what is the final release for 2017 for the open-source container orchestration system. Kubernetes 1.9 is the fourth major release of Kubernetes in 2017 and follows the 1.8 release the became generally available on Sept. 28.

• Among the new features in Kubernetes 1.9 is the general availability of the Apps Workloads API which is the culmination of months of effort across several groups of APIs within Kubernetes.

• Admittedly you probably aren’t on the hunt for a new video player (what with there being plenty of players already available) but it never hurts to be aware of options.

• And Movie Monad, which is written in Haskell and uses GTK and Gstreamer, ticks the deliciously simple box that I, if no-one else, look for. The app can play local video files and remote video files with ease.

• With each new release, the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin becomes more refined and better suited for Xfce users. The latest release adds support for the MPRIS Playlists specification and improves support for Spotify and other media players.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 158.

• Published on Tuesday were a set of 60 kernel patches rolling out “hyper_dmabuf” as a means of allowing DMA-BUF buffers to be exchanged between virtual machines.

Instructionals/Technical

• I have like over 50k+ comments posted on this site. A commenter is allowed to leave their website or Github/Twitter URL in the comment section. Unfortunately, many websites are dead creating a mess. Many are just spam and nothing else. This is not good for anyone. Here is a quick way to delete all existing comment author URLs in WordPress using mysql command line option.

Games

• One of several side projects by the Solus Linux distribution project has been linux-steam-integration as a means of a helper package to improve the integration of the Steam client and Steam games running on Linux. LSI applies workarounds and other optimizations to get Steam games running better on Linux.

• The Linux Steam Integration project’s pillars are on upping the security, compatibility and performance of Steam Linux games. LSI is available not only for Solus but other Linux distributions like Arch and Fedora too. Out today is the Linux System Integration 0.7.2 release.

• Linux Steam Integration, the initiative from the Solus distribution developers has a fresh release showing how far their project to improve Steam on Linux has come.

• For those not clued up on it: Linux Steam Integration is a project to make Steam games and Linux play together a bit nicer. It comes with various optimizations and workarounds designed to fix issues in Steam and games, resulting in what should be a smoother gaming experience on Linux.

• Prison Architect [GOG, Steam, Official Site] is still being updated and this one is quite a big one adding a new Warden Mode where you play as a Warden while you build.

• Bridge Constructor Portal [Steam] is the latest from developer ClockStone and publisher Headup Games that pulls in the Portal franchise from Valve. It’s now out, here’s some thoughts.

• During my usual midnight browsing of the Steam store, I came across Super Slime Arena [Steam, Official Site]. It’s a 16-bit styled party fighting game for 2-50+ players and it looks mental.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• One of the best video editors for Linux, Kdenlive has released its most recent version 17.12.0. This may be the last major release that uses the current code base.

• According to the release statement, Kdenlive 17.12.0 “is a maintenance release focused on stability, while feature development is going in next year’s 18.04 version”.

Distributions

• The thing about Linux is that anyone can model it to their choice, this has led to many users/teams creating their own customized distributions. Since there is no fully fledged organization behind them, some of them are not able to sustain development. This may lead to the discontinuation of the project. So here in this article, let us have a look at some Linux distributions that discontinued unexpectedly.

Red Hat Family

• oVirt 4.2 is an altogether more powerful and flexible open source virtualization solution.

• We are delighted to announce the general availability if oVirt 4.2.0, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

• Red Hat developers working on the oVirt virtualization management platform have announced the release of oVirt 4.2.

• The oVirt 4.2.0 update is significant in that it has a completely new administrative portal that was designed using the Patternfly UI framework.

• ServerAdminz is specialized in 24/7 Web Hosting Support, Remote Infrastructure Management, NOC, Cloud and Enterprise Security Services. With over 10+ years of experience in working with major Data Centers and ISPs, they continue to manage more than 49,000 servers from 85+ countries and has bagged 5 international awards.

• Culture is an important part of DevOps, so many organizations have put an enormous amount of effort into trying to figure out what makes a great team. Google formed an entire initiative, called Project Aristotle, to study this question. The answer wasn’t free lunches, great benefits, or wonderful salaries. Rather, Google’s research determined that culture played a significant role in effective teams, particularly culture around creating physiological safety.

Finance

• Shares of Red Hat Inc. (RHT) were slumping 3.5% to $124.33 in after-hours trading on Tuesday, even after it reported better-than-expected earnings, gave upbeat guidance and secured a record number of seven-figure software deals in the third quarter.

• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told TheStreet that investors may have had higher expectations for growth in the cloud infrastructure company’s billings segment, which is a metric that measures recurring payments from customers. Billings grew 14% quarter-over-quarter in the most recent period compared to billings growth of 18% in the fiscal 2016 third quarter. The company landed some bigger deals in the 2016 fourth quarter, which generated a 29% increase in billings.

• The stock market is a strange beast. The SEC suspended trading on The Crypto Company, a Bitcoin company that has zoomed up 17,000 percent in the last three months in an ever-rising bubble. Meanwhile, Red Hat, the leading Linux company with its eye on the cloud, had great results, beat estimates on earnings and revenue, and saw its stock price drop by almost 5 percent. Given a choice between real value and fantasy, the market loves fantasy.

• I’ll tell you something that’s not fantasy. In the next few years, Red Hat will become the first billion-dollar-a-quarter open-source company, and that’s real money.

• Here’s how. First, as Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO, said in the earnings call, “We anticipate exiting the fiscal year with an annualized run-rate of approximately $3 billion for total revenue.”

Fedora

• 2017 was an active and busy year for Fedora. All year, contributors across all different sub-groups, working groups, special interest groups, and teams make the magic behind Fedora happen. With a project as large as Fedora, it is hard to keep others on different sides of the Project up to date. To help celebrate what we did together this year, consider sharing a “Year in Review” for your sub-groups, teams, or other group on the Fedora Community Blog!

• Earlier this month the Fedora Modular working group decided to throw in the towel on Fedora Modular Server 27 and instead to do a “classic” server edition. We now have more details on how the eventual re-architected Modular Server should look for F28.

• With the Fedora 28 cycle they will be taking a new stab at delivering the Fedora Modular Server as a more modularized version of Fedora. One of their biggest challenges in the beta testing of the Fedora Modular Server to date was how to install modules and related initial hurdles.

Debian Family

• One of the perks you get as a Debian Developer is a @debian.org email address. And because Debian is old and the Internet used to be a friendly place this email address is plastered all over the Internet. So you get email spam, a lot of spam.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• If you get a Lenovo laptop for xmas and plan on installing Ubuntu 17.10 on it take my advice and don’t.

• You heard me: do not install Ubuntu.

• According to bug reports filed on Launchpad, the official Ubuntu bug tracker, installing Ubuntu 17.10 may inadvertently corrupt the BIOS on a raft of Lenovo laptops, including the Lenovo Yoga line.

• Which is seriously bad news.

• Those affected say that after installing Ubuntu 17.10 the BIOS on their device is no longer able to save settings (like changing boot order and device, which is often required when dual-booting), that settings reset after a reboot, some are not able to exit BIOS, while others are left unable boot from USB.

• The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list.

• Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley informs us that many users are reporting corrupt BIOS on their Lenovo laptops when attempting to install the latest Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.

• The issue is causing the BIOS of several Lenovo laptops to no longer save new settings. Once you’ve installed Ubuntu 17.10 and you reboot the laptop, the system will start with the old BIOS settings. The cause appears to be related with the intel-spi-* drivers in the Linux kernel, which aren’t ready for use.

• Lenovo B40-70, Lenovo B50-70, Lenovo B50-80, Lenovo Flex-10, Lenovo G40-30, Lenovo G50-70, Lenovo G50-80, Lenovo S20-30, Lenovo U31-70, Lenovo Y50-70, Lenovo Y70-70, Lenovo Yoga Thinkpad (20C0), Lenovo Yoga 2 11″ – 20332, Lenovo Z50-70, Lenovo Z51-70, and Lenovo IdeaPad 100-15IBY are among the Lenovo laptops known to be affected by the issue. A Toshiba S50t-B laptop is also affected.

• Canonical has temporarily pulled the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” from the Ubuntu website due to ongoing reports of some laptops finding their BIOS corrupted after installing this latest Ubuntu release. The issue is appearing most frequently with Lenovo laptops but there are also reports of issues with other laptop vendors as well.

• This issue appears to stem from the Intel SPI driver in the 17.10′s Linux 4.13 kernel corrupting the BIOS for a select number of laptop motherboards. Canonical is aware of this issue and is planning to disable the Intel SPI drivers in their kernel builds. Canonical’s hardware enablement team has already verified this works around the problem, but doesn’t provide any benefit if your BIOS is already corrupted.

• Canonical has pulled downloads for its Ubuntu 17.10 Linux distribution following reports that it can trigger a bug in the UEFI firmware of selected Lenovo, Acer, and Toshiba laptops, corrupting the BIOS and disabling the ability to boot from USB Drives.

• Downloads of Ubuntu 17.10 have been disabled due to an issue that can cause it to corrupt the firmware on some laptops. Lenovo laptops appear to be the most affected, but the problem is apparently not limited to them. The intel-spi driver has been named as the source of the problem; it’s not clear whether other distributions may also be affected. If you downloaded 17.10, you might want to hold off on installing it.

• The past month has been exciting in the snap world, between getting ready to welcome our Google Code-in students, improving the developer dashboard and starting to land, piece by piece, the new store frontend, it’s time we take a small break to appreciate some new releases.

• This summary is intended to be a regular communication of activities and plans happening in and around Ubuntu OpenStack, covering but not limited to the distribution and deployment of OpenStack on Ubuntu.

• If there is something that you would like to see covered in future summaries, or you have general feedback on content please feel free to reach out to me (jamespage on Freenode IRC) or any of the OpenStack Engineering team at Canonical!

• Because of the distributed nature of Ubuntu development, it is sometimes a little difficult for me to keep track of the “special” URLs for various actions or reports that I’m regularly interested in.

• Therefore I started gathering them in my personal wiki (I use the excellent “zim” desktop wiki), and realized some of my colleagues and friends would be interested in that list as well. I’ll do my best to keep this blog post up-to-date as I discover new ones.

Devices/Embedded

• In 1998, Gaël Duval created Mandrake Linux (also known as Mandriva Linux) for the obvious reasons like love for open source uneasiness while using Windows. In those years of late 1990s, many enthusiasts began their Linux journey with this easy-to-install and user-friendly Linux distro. Eventually, things went wrong between Duval and Mandriva management, and he was laid off by the company in March 2006.

• These days he is busy with a new project named eelo mobile OS to breathe a new life into your smartphone. In recent past, we’ve reported ongoing smartphone OS efforts from Purism and postmarketOS, and Duval’s endeavor seems like a step in the similar direction.

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• “Computer technology is complicated and new. Education about computers is extremely poor among all age groups. Technology companies have taken advantage of this lack of education to brainwash people into accepting absurd abuses of their rights.”

Events

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, North America took place in Austin, Texas from 6th to 8th December. But before that, I stumbled upon this great opportunity by Linux Foundation which would make it possible for me to attend and expand my knowledge about cloud computing, containers and all things cloud native!

• I’ve just wrapped up and I wanted to say thanks for the support throughout the process in having a nice place. Thanks to the staff of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru: Giohanny, Felipe Solari, Corrado and Walter. Congrats to the initiative of the Fedora Diversity team to foster more women involve in Linux. In addition, thanks to the help of Chhavi in the design and Bee for the help in planning the event. These were our FWD speakers:

• We, the Fedora Diversity Team, were thinking where else we could help organize a Fedora Women Day. Of course, that Fedora Kosovo Community came in my mind and I thought to contact Ardian and Renata to see when we could organize a FWD at Prishtina Hackerspace. Since Renata and I had some exams during September we thought to organize it in October. At the same time, Daniel Pocock, part of the Debian community, was thinking to organize a Mini DebConf, the first one in Prishtina. After talking with him we decided to combine both activities and organize something together. Personally, I was very happy to see two Linux distributions organize an event together in Prishtina and having so many people interested in it.

• For the second time in a short period of time I participated in an important Fedora event. November 20–22, 2017, an Internationalization FAD was organized by a group of Fedora contributors from Red Hat Pune. FAD stands for Fedora Activity Day, it is a mini-conference. It differs from large conferences like Flock because it is attended by small number of people and it is focused on one subject.

• This event – which happened way back in October – just keeps growing. It is already almost too big!

• Today (was) RISC-V Day 2017 Tokyo at the University of Tokyo (programme in English, more information in English). My colleague Wei Fu gave a talk on the status of Fedora on RISC-V. I hope it was recorded somewhere. If it appears online I’ll update this post.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• There are many reasons Google won’t likely bring Chrome to the Windows Store, but the primary reason is probably related to Microsoft’s Windows 10 S restrictions. Windows Store apps that browse the web must use HTML and JavaScript engines provided by Windows 10, and Google’s Chrome browser uses its own Blink rendering engine.

Mozilla

• In April 2017 Thunderbird released its successful Extended Service Release (ESR) version 52. This release has just seen it’s fifth “dot update” 52.5.0, where fixes, stability and minor functionality improvements were shipped.

• Thunderbird 57 beta was also very successful. While Thunderbird 58 is equally stable and offers further cutting-edge improvements to Thunderbird users, the user community is starting to feel the impact of Mozilla platform changes which are phasing out so-called legacy add-ons. The Thunderbird technical leadership is working closely with add-on authors who face the challenge of updating their add-ons to work with the Mozilla interface changes. With a few usually simple changes most add-ons can be made to work in Thunderbird 58 beta. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Add-ons_Guide_57 explains what needs to be done, and Thunderbird developers are happy to lend a hand to add-on authors.

• Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

• Firefox Quantum – version 57 – introduced number of changes to the network requests scheduler. One of them is using data of the Tracking Protection database to delay load of scripts from tracking domains when possible during the time a page is actively loading and rendering – I call it tailing.

• This has a positive effect on page load performance as we save some of the network bandwidth, I/O and CPU for loading and processing of images and scripts running on the site so the web page is complete and ready sooner.

• After twelve years of working on Adblock Plus, the time seems right for me to take a break. The project’s dependence on me has been on the decline for quite a while already. Six years ago we founded eyeo, a company that would put the former hobby project on a more solid foundation. Two years ago Felix Dahlke took over the CTO role from me. And a little more than a month ago we launched the new Adblock Plus 3.0 for Firefox based on the Web Extensions framework. As damaging as this move inevitably was for our extension’s quality and reputation, it had a positive side effect: our original Adblock Plus for Firefox codebase is now legacy code, not to be worked on. Consequently, my Firefox expertise is barely required any more; this was one of the last areas where replacing me would have been problematic.

• One quick question for anyone who still isn’t convinced that tracking protection needs to be a high priority for web browsers in 2018. Web tracking isn’t just about items from your online shopping cart following you to other sites. Users who are vulnerable to abusive practices for health or other reasons have tracking protection needs too.

Databases

• Experienced PostgreSQL users and developers rattle off the terms “MVCC” and “VACUUM” as if everyone should know what they are and how they work, but in fact many people don’t. This blog post is my attempt to explain what MVCC is and why PostgreSQL uses it, what VACUUM is and how it works, and why we need VACUUM to implement MVCC. In addition, I’ll include a few useful links for further reading for those who may want to know more.

• Dgraph is an increasingly popular open-source distributed graph database that uses a version of Facebook’s GraphQL as its default query language. Today, the company announced that it has raised $3 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, Blackbird Ventures and AirTree (this includes a $1.1 million seed round the company raised last year). The company also announced that its flagship database has hit the 1.0 stage.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice is an excellent office suite. These LibreOffice tips will enable you to use it more effectively.

Public Services/Government

• Firstly, using a computer requires developing basic skills with a mouse and keyboard. That means that from age seven or eight, children could be shown how to use child-oriented simple painting software like the free/open-source TuxPaint (www.tuxpaint.org).

• This will teach the basics of controlling a cursor on the screen by moving a mouse and performing various actions with mouse clicks.

• Secondly, a basic familiarity with the keyboard has to be gained. This can be done with the free/open-source TuxType (https://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxtype/) software, which has created a number of free arcade games based on typing speed.

Licensing/Legal

• Today, Software Freedom Conservancy announces the launch of its most ambitious match challenge ever, generously brought forward by Private Internet Access and an anonymous donor. All donations up to $75,000 will be matched dollar for dollar until January 15. Sign up as a Supporter today to have your donation count twice, but please act soon. January 15th will be here before we know it!

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Open Source helped to provide promising ground for digital transformation. Not too long ago open source transformed software and now it is having an impact in larger areas of business. However, it is important to note that this generation dates back much further than the Big Data revolution that is being promoted today.

• Open source refers to software licenses that can be redistributed and used to create works. The code is made available for the public and can often end in collaboration between programmers.

Standards/Consortia

• Last year The Khronos Group announced NNEF as a open-source, royalty-free neural network format to combat the proprietary formats used today. In their last standards update of 2017, NNEF 1.0 is now available.

Leftovers

• This week Microsoft has altered a longstanding corporate policy, eliminating forced arbitration agreements for employees who file claims of sexual harassment—it is believed to be the largest such tech firm to make this notable change.

• “The silencing of people’s voices has clearly had an impact in perpetuating sexual harassment,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, told The New York Times on Tuesday. In a blog post, Smith also said that the company would support new federal legislation to end the use of arbitration in sexual harassment cases.

• From time to time, discussions which claim that Apple slows down old iPhones, intentionally, to boost sales keep on appearing on different online forums and discussion. A new report from Geekbench seems to support his narrative but it has got an important point that you shouldn’t miss.

• As per the finding of Geekbench’s John Poole, the iPhone slowdown reports are only going to get more common as phones like iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 continue to age. With time, we expect the battery capacity to decrease but we expect the processor performance to remain same. So, what’s happening here? Pretty confusing, right?

• A Reddit post from last week has sparked a discussion regarding iPhone performance as a function of battery age. While we expect battery capacity to decrease as batteries age, we expect processor performance to stay the same. However, users with older iPhones with lower-than-expected Geekbench 4 scores have reported that replacing the battery increases their score (as well as the performance of the phone). What’s going on here? How many phones are experiencing decreased Geekbench 4 score?

• To answer these questions I’ve plotted the kernel density of Geekbench 4 single-core scores for the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 7 running different versions of iOS. Scores obtained in low-power mode are not included in the distribution.

• Keeping up my bi-yearly blogging cadence, I thought it might be fun to write about what I’ve been doing since I left Mozilla. It’s also a convenient time, as it coincides with our work being open-sourced and made public (and of course, developed in public, because otherwise what’s the point, right?) Somewhat ironically, I’ve been working on another machine-learning project, though I’m loathe to call it that, as it uses no neural networks so far, and most people I’ve encountered consider those to be synonymous. I did also go on a month’s holiday to the home of bluegrass music, but that’s a story for another post. I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Security

• After all, if 90 percent of our global software products are built on top of open-source software (OSS) then it seems to me that everyone stands to benefit from a coordinated way to vet new components that make their way into our products through DevOps.

• That brings me back to consensus, or rather a topic some of you may have heard buzzing around in the news — blockchain and its less popular yet equal alter-ego hashgraph. Both are technologies adept at solving the aforementioned peer review problem at scale. But what does it all really have to do with code security and shifting your DevOps left?

• If you want to get malware on your Android device, it’s pretty easy. Forget about unofficial sources, malicious apps can be found on the “safe” Google Play where they can even live unnoticed for years.

• Seven months after the WannaCry ransomware ripped across the internet in one of the most damaging hacking operations of all time, the US government has pinned that digital epidemic on North Korea. And while cybersecurity researchers have suspected North Korea’s involvement from the start, the Trump administration intends the official charges to carry new diplomatic weight, showing the world that no one can launch reckless cyberattacks with impunity. “Pyongyang will be held accountable,” White House cybersecurity chief Tom Bossert wrote in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

• 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.

• Researchers at Cupertino-based virtualised security company Bromium discovered a technique being used by hackers which they describe as ‘polymorphic’, attacking both primary and secondary executables.

• Researchers have discovered a new ‘multi-staged attack’ campaign dubbed Zealot which hackers are running to mine cryptocurrency by leveraging known NSA exploits like EternalBlue and EternalSynergy.

• Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday December 3 and Saturday December 9 2017…

• Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday December 10 and Saturday December 16 2017…

• The Mirai botnet that swept through poorly-secured devices last year resulted in unprecedented denial-of-service attacks. At one point, the botnet turned its wrath on security researcher Brian Krebs’ site, resulting in a sustained attack that saw Krebs’ DDoS protection service (Akamai) say it was getting too old for this shit uninterested in providing further protection for this particular user.

• What is worrisome about the Zealot Campaign is that it is being carried out with the assistance of two exploits developed by the United States National Security Agency; these two cyber warfare weapons were stolen by mysterious hacker group known as “Shadow Brokers,” who have been leaking the source code of these exploits to the public over the last two years. Intelligence analysts believe that the Shadow Brokers may be associated with Russian political interests that seek to destabilize the U.S. government.

Defence/Aggression

• Washington Post editorial page editor and human avatar for DC national security orthodoxy Fred Hiatt published Sunday (12/17/17) what would be an otherwise non-sequitur love letter to John McCain, the DC national security state’s loudest champion and favorite branding exercise—if it weren’t for the obvious subtext that McCain’s health is rapidly deteriorating. As such, Hiatt’s proto-obituary sets the standard for all other flattering, ahistorical profiles of the senator that will invariably come down the pipe.

• US corporate media’s love affair with McCain has been well-documented by FAIR over the years (e.g., FAIR.org, 2/24/00; Extra!, 5–6/08; FAIR.org, 7/24/17). McCain has charmed the press to mold his brand as Moderate, Reasonable Man of Principle—despite decades of evidence to the contrary. H

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• All this week, EFF is at the 12th annual meeting of the global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva. Last year we co-organized the first ever main session of the IGF on trade and the Internet, recognizing how trade negotiations are incorporating an increasing number of Internet-related issues, many of which—such as copyright, domain name dispute resolution, and spam control—are already being dealt with in more transparent and inclusive fora.

• One of the key outcomes of that main session was the formation of a new IGF Dynamic Coalition on Trade and the Internet. This self-organized working group, currently led by EFF, carries on its work throughout the year, and reports back to the IGF annually. Although the Dynamic Coalition is new and its outputs do not have a formal status, its influence is already growing. For example, last month, the Dynamic Coalition was name-checked in the European Parliament’s new report on its digital trade policy.

• Finnish police have raided the home of a Helsingin Sanomat journalist, apparently without a warrant, after the newspaper published a weekend article about an intelligence-gathering centre in Jyväskylä, based on secret leaked documents.

• The paper reports that officers spent four hours on Sunday evening searching the home of Laura Halminen, one of the journalists who wrote Saturday’s story.

• They showed up without a court order to authorise such a search, and confiscated phones, computers and memory sticks according to Helsingin Sanomat.

Finance

• The European Court of Justice has ruled Uber is a taxi firm and should be regulated as such, dealing a regulatory blow to the American company.

• Wednesday’s decision came after taxi drivers in Barcelona launched a legal challenge. It will apply across the European Union, including in the UK.

• Uber has long argued it is a technology company, not a taxi firm, and the ruling will mean the company could potentially face new regulations limiting its operations.

• The court’s ruling said that, as a taxi firm, Uber “must be excluded from the scope of the freedom to provide services in general as well as the directive on services in the internal market and the directive on electronic commerce.”

• A GAO report found that many states with voucher programs and education savings accounts don’t inform parents of students with disabilities how their rights change when a child transfers to private school through a “choice program.” Private schools aren’t subject to some of the same legal safeguards, like the requirement to provide something like speech therapy. About half of the private schools the GAO surveyed offered little or no information about special education services on their websites.

• In a recent interview, Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) described the Republican approach to government as “survival of the fittest.”

• “If you’re well off, great, if you’re not—too bad,” he said.

• McGovern is right. The Republican tax bill, on which Congress is expected to vote on Tuesday, is effectively a bid to weed out people struggling to make ends meet. It could have dire consequences for the social safety net—and for the 70 percent of us who will turn to a means-tested program like Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at some point in our lives. And it could impact millions who expect to rely later in life on Medicare and Social Security.

• The most generous charitable deduction in the federal tax code is being manipulated to make big profits — and there’s no sign that Congress has any intention of fixing the problem.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• We The People, the petition section of the White House’s website, is shutting down for a promised January relaunch. Summarily ignored since Donald Trump took office, its a wonder anyone in the current administration is expending the effort to turn off the lights.

• A White House official said all existing petitions and responses will be restored next year, when petitions that reach the required 100,000 signatures will begin receiving responses.

• The Trump administration has yet to respond to any of the 17 petitions that have reached that threshold since Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017.

• At an event last Thursday to tout his administration’s efforts to rid the federal government of what he contends is burdensome red tape, President Donald Trump used oversized gold scissors to cut a piece of red ribbon strung between two stacks of paper.

• In short order, he promised, his administration would excise some 165,000 of the more than 185,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations.

• That’s no easy task. Changing federal regulatory laws can mean a congressional slog. And for federal agencies to rescind rules, they must engage in a time-consuming process that opens them to public scrutiny and potential legal challenges.

• But there are ways to get around these impediments. Collectively, you might call them dark deregulation.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Howard Sherman, director of communications and education for the New York City-based Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, said decisions on what plays should be staged in American high schools should never be made from one scene or line taken out of context, or apart from the message the playwright means to convey.

• You would think that to become a state Supreme Court Justice you need to be familiar with the basics of the law — including famous legal rulings. For example, New York Times Company v. United States from 1971 is a pretty important and well known First Amendment case, in which the court specifically said that preventing newspapers from publishing information was unconstitutional prior restraint. That case relies on a number of other super famous First Amendment cases such as Near v. Minnesota and Bantam Books v. Sullivan. I mean, I’m not a lawyer and I know these cases. You would think that an Iowa Supreme Court Justice would as well.

• Last year, the Russian authorities ordered LinkedIn to be blocked in the country, supposedly for failing to store personal data locally. Since other US companies like Google and Facebook had also ignored this data localization requirement, it was curious that only LinkedIn was affected. Now the German news site Deutsche Welle is reporting that Twitter and YouTube risk being locked out of Russia, but for quite different reasons. These involve Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the wealthiest person in Russia, and a long-time vocal opponent of President Putin. Khodorkovsky spent a number of years in prison, allegedly for fraud and embezzlement. He now lives outside Russia, and has set up the NGO Open Russia, which promotes democracy and human rights in Russia.

• Open Russia was put on the official list of “undesirable organizations” in April of this year. The Russian government has shut down Open Russia’s web site, and now it is demanding that the NGO’s presence on social media be deleted as well. Roskomnadzor, the country’s media regulatory agency, gave YouTube and Twitter a deadline to delete Open Russia’s accounts on their services, or be blocked entirely. The deadline has now passed, but the accounts are still accessible within Russia. The question is: what happens now?

• Wisconsin businessman Paul Nehlen is running for the other Paul’s (Ryan) House seat in next year’s midterm elections, and we can only hope this man is never allowed to operate law-making apparati at a federal level. He has big ideas for the nation — most of them sounding exactly like President Trump’s big ideas: A wall! Paid for by Mexico! Killing off Obamacare! Making abortions illegal! Bulk, untargeted deregulation!

• Nehlen also has big ideas about the First Amendment. Big ideas and a toddler-like grasp on tricky terms like “censorship.” Nehlen hates (HATES!) government regulation but feels the government should step in and, under the color of law, prevent internet companies from monitoring their platforms as they see fit.

• The highly-problematic Nehlen wants Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. to stop kicking like-minded people off their platforms. It’s undeniable Twitter has been deleting accounts held by far-right persons more often than those veering widely to the left. Some feel Facebook and Google have been doing the same thing, but the complaints of unfair moderation are loudest on Twitter. Nehlen is one of those complaining. But if he gets elected to Congress, he’ll be able to do actual damage.

• Going Brexit is to swear off logic, apparently. TorrentFreak reports that, in addition to everything else the UK’s newfound independence will muck up, it’s going to start doing an even more horrendous job policing the internet.

• A recent report that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were banned from using “science-based,” “transgender” and other terms has caused an uproar in the medical community, and local doctors say it could have a chilling effect on future research proposals.

• Do you want your medical treatment to be based on science? The Trump administration disagrees. It apparently banned the top US public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from using 7 words, including “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

• Prominent public health advocates have expressed outrage about these measures. For example, Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, tweeted “This is astonishing. It would be a parody of a flailing effort to limit the effectiveness of #publichealth if it did not suggest a real problem. #7words.” Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, stated that “Among the words forbidden to be used in CDC budget documents are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘science-based.’ I suppose one must not think those things either. Here’s a word that’s still allowed: ridiculous.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• It would be naïve to think that the authorities won’t use this massive DNA database in order to increase their surveillance of the Uyghur population. DNA is the ultimate identity number. It is present in nearly every cell in the body; it is difficult to change in a non-random way unless you have lots of money and top-flight CRISPR scientists at your disposal — unlikely in the case of Xinjiang residents; and we leave it everywhere we go, and on everything we touch. DNA also has the virtue — for the authorities — that it provides information about related individuals, since they all have some of their genetic code in common. That means it would be possible to determine everyone in the close family of a someone under investigation, by finding related DNA sequences. It’s the kind of information that could be abused by the police in multiple ways.

• As well as concerns about the human rights of Uyghurs being harmed, another issue is that Xinjiang’s Population Registration Program may be used as a trial before rolling out DNA collection to the entire Chinese adult population, just as is happening with a national facial recognition database. Although such a large-scale genetic database would have been infeasible a few years ago, advances in sequencing and dramatic falls in data storage and processing costs mean that it could probably be built now. And if China goes down this route, the fear has to be other countries will follow, just as they are doing in the realm of online surveillance.

• Two false assertions and we’re barely getting started:

• 1. At best, the “much of today’s evidence” is an assumption. Locked devices can’t prove or disprove this theory, but the biggest courtroom battle over encryption ended with a third party cracking the San Bernardino shooter’s phone and the device yielding up a whole lot of nothing.

• 2. Smartphone encryption is not “designed to keep law enforcement out.” It’s designed to keep everyone who isn’t the phone’s owner out. Law enforcement just happens to be in the “everyone who isn’t the phone’s owner” group. Maybe if people like Cy Vance stopped taking this so personally he might have more fruitful discussions with tech companies.

• Another court has decided compelled password production isn’t a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Massachusetts case [PDF], titled “In the Matter of a Grand Jury Investigation,” concerns allegations of child abuse. The grand jury requested access to the contents of the suspect’s phone. The government obtained a warrant but sought a court order compelling the suspect to produce a password to unlock it. The court granted it and the suspect challenged the order after being hit with contempt charges for failing to turn over the password. (via FourthAmendment.com)

• The court finds no problem with the government’s reasoning. According to the court, the ownership of the phone is the only “foregone conclusion” the government needs to reach.

• The Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said Facebook was a “quasi-monopoly” that was abusing its position to force its users to give up data.

• The ruling is significant because it comes from a competition regulator.

• “We are mostly concerned about the collection of data outside Facebook’s social network and the merging of this data into a user’s Facebook account,” said Andreas Mundt, the president of Germany’s competition authority. “This even happens when, for example, a user does not press a ‘like button’ but has called up a site into which such a button is embedded. Users are unaware of this.”

• A statement released on Tuesday criticised the world’s largest social media site for collecting data via Facebook-owned services, such as WhatsApp or Instagram, and then absorbing it into users’ Facebook accounts.

• “We are mostly concerned about the collection of data outside Facebook’s social network and the merging of this data into a user’s Facebook account,” said Andreas Mundt, the president of the Bundeskartellamt, or federal cartel authority.

• The French data protection agency, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), said on Monday that WhatsApp did not have a legal basis to share user data under French law for “business intelligence” purposes. The messaging app must cease data sharing within a month, paying particular attention to obtaining users’ consent.

• The National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) said on Monday that it had given WhatsApp a month to comply with the order. It emphasised that particular attention should be given to getting consent from users, Reuters reported.

• France’s ultra-strict privacy watchdog CNIL has ordered WhatsApp to stop sharing user data with parent company Facebook. The app has a month to comply with the order, according to a public notice posted to the French website.

• Earlier this year, it was announced that PAN and Aadhaar had to be mandatorily to linked irrespective of whether one files income tax returns (ITR) or not. The government, in the previous budget, introduced a law which made it a must for everyone with a PAN to link it with Aadhaar.

• According to reports published Tuesday evening by Politico, a group of surveillance hawks in the House of Representatives is trying to ram through a bill that would extend mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. We expect a vote to happen on the House floor as early as tomorrow, which means there are only a few hours to rally opposition.

• The backers of this bill are attempting to rush a vote on a bill that we’ve criticized for failing to secure Americans’ privacy. If this bill passes,we will miss the opportunity to prevent the FBI from searching through NSA databases for American communications without a warrant. Worse, nothing will be done to rein in the massive, unconstitutional surveillance of the NSA on Americans or innocent technology users worldwide.

• As we wrote, the bill, originally introduced by Chairman Devin Nunes before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “allows warrantless search of American communications, expands how collected data can be used, and treats constitutional protections as voluntary.”

• Biometric screening, surveillance drones, social media snooping, license plate readers—all this and more would be required by new federal legislation to expand high-tech spying on U.S. citizens and immigrants alike at and near the U.S. border.

• Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced “the SECURE Act” (S. 2192) on December 5. It borrows liberally from two other federal bills—H.R. 3548 and S. 1757—that EFF opposed earlier this year. Those bills were respectively introduced by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) in the House of Representatives and Sen. John Coryn (R-TX) in the Senate.

• Sen. Coryn’s bill, called the Building America’s Trust Act, raises concerns about digital rights, many of which are likely to be ongoing issues in Sen. Grassley’s SECURE Act.

• Legislation to extend a major U.S. surveillance program that’s about to expire was being hashed out by Senate and House leaders, and details could be presented by Tuesday night, according to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.

• “It would be a combination” of pending proposals, Nunes of California told reporters. There are five proposals, including separate measures approved by the House Judiciary and Intelligence panels as well as versions offered in the Senate.

• The Rules Committee is expected to announce a hearing for Wednesday or Thursday for a measure that would be moved to the House floor as a standalone bill, according to an official familiar with the plans who asked not to be identified discussing the evolving plan. Congress is seeking to resolve the issue this week ahead of its year-end holiday break.

• This is a big decision — somewhat on par with the revamp of the Section 215 metadata program here in the US that took place following the Snowden leaks. But it might be bigger than that. BND collects over 11 billion records every year. And it shares this haul with the NSA and GCHQ. This was revealed via documents leaked to German news agency Die Zeit. The BND was grabbing metadata at a rate of 220 million records per day. This is only a small part of the BND’s haul, much of which appears to be harvested from internet cables and satellite transmissions. These revelations caused some problems for the German government, which has generally been careful to keep Stasi comparisons to a minimum. The BND claimed these collections were lawful, but top government officials weren’t so sure. This lawsuit appears to have settled the “metadata” question at least.

• The current generation has utterly failed to preserve the presumption of innocence, as it applies to surveillance, in the shift from our analog parents to our digital children.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Authorities say a San Francisco police officer shot and killed himself after a traffic stop in northern California. Law enforcement sources tell CBS San Francisco the officer was being investigated for sex with a minor in Las Vegas.

• Richmond police said they pulled the suspect — who was later identified as the police officer — over in the Hilltop Mall parking lot, near J.C. Penney.

• We’re nowhere closer to reaching a Unified Theory of Police Body Cameras, but at least we’re still compiling data. So far, there’s no definitive proof body cameras reduce police misconduct, but there’s at least some evidence they’re better than nothing at all.

• Early adopters showed a surprising amount of reduction in use of force by officers. A 2012 study in Rialto, California showed a 67% drop in force usage by officers wearing cameras. Since then, results have been all over the map. The largest study conducted to date — covering the Washington DC PD’s rollout of its body camera pilot program — suggested cameras weren’t reducing force usage or lowering the number of citizen complaints. A second study of the same group seemed to indicate the problem wasn’t that cameras had no deterrent effect, but that officers were still very selective about camera activation — hence the lack of improvement.

• On its face, Florida’s pedestrian statute 316.130(11) seems straightforward enough: fail to cross a street in a crosswalk where required, and you are liable for a ticket ranging from $51 to $77. The authorities across the state issue hundreds of the tickets every year with the public claim that they were trying to cut down Florida’s outsize number of pedestrian deaths.

• But a Times-Union/ProPublica examination of statute 316.130(11) tickets given in four large counties from 2012 to 2017 found them rife with mistakes — errors that can cost people not only money, but also put them at risk of losing their driver’s licenses or having their credit ratings damaged.

• In Broward County, for instance, around 70 percent of the more than 3,300 crosswalk tickets issued in those years were given in error, according to the Times-Union/ProPublica examination. In Hillsborough County, where more than 500 crosswalk tickets were given, the percentage of bad tickets was around 80 percent; in Orange County, around 56 percent of the almost 650 tickets were given erroneously.

• If cops have the ability and opportunity to record a traffic stop, should it be held against them when they don’t? Arguments have been made to that effect for a few years now. Dashcams have been in wide use for at least a couple of decades. Law enforcement agencies all over the US are issuing body cameras to officers. But it seems whenever something questionable happens, footage is nowhere to be found, or what there is of it is almost useless.

• Unfortunately, years of discussion by (mainly) defense lawyers hasn’t resulted in policy changes. Worse, it hasn’t budged the judicial needle much. In rare cases, the absence of footage is used against officers, but in those cases, it mainly seems to be because efforts were made to destroy footage already captured.

• In this case [PDF] reviewed by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court, no effort was made post facto to destroy footage. Instead, an officer proactively prevented footage from being created by disabling the dashcam recording the traffic stop.

• Earlier this year, we covered the horrific story of the death of a 5’4″ 110-lb. 18-year-old at the hands of the Mesquite (TX) police department. The teen, suffering from a bad acid trip, was tased multiple times, threatened with death by an officer, and left to die in a jail cell with little more than a cursory nod towards his health and wellbeing.

• Graham Dyer’s parents were unable to obtain any details about their son’s death from the Mesquite PD. The department refused to turn over records, pointing to state law allowing it to withhold records on arrested suspects who never faced criminal charges. This exemption may have made sense to lawmakers at the point it was passed. But in-custody deaths are inherently questionable. This exemption does little more than give law enforcement agencies everything they need to cover up misconduct.

• Fortunately, Dyer’s parents didn’t stop there. They asked the FBI to open an investigation into their son’s death. The FBI closed its investigation without forwarding it to the DOJ for charges but the investigation did serve at least one purpose: it allowed Dyer’s parents to finally obtain records related to their son’s last night on earth.

• What they found was horrifying. Video showed their son thrashing around in the back of a police car, incoherent and completely unrestrained. Captured audio captured an officer threatening to kill their son if he didn’t calm down. The in-car video also showed the same officer repeatedly tasing their son in the testicles. (The officer claims he was aiming for the “inner thigh” but Dyer kept moving. Considering a taser is effective almost anywhere it’s placed, why place it so close to a person’s testicles unless you’re hoping to “accidentally” tase that part of the arrestee?) They also saw their son dragged from the police car at the jail sally port, laying on the floor with an officer’s foot on his head.

• Without these records from the FBI, the Dyers would never have known what led to their son’s death. The Mesquite PD’s refusal to turn over records also served its own purpose: it ran the clock on the statute of limitations. The state can no longer bring criminal charges against the officers — despite the DA saying there’s evidence of criminal behavior.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For years now we’ve pointed out how one of the telecom industry’s sleazier lobbying tricks involves paying minority groups to parrot awful tech policy positions. That’s why you’ll often see groups like the “Hispanic Technology & Telecommunications Partnership” support competition-killing mergers or oppose consumer-centric policies like more cable box competition or increased wireless competition. This quid pro quo is never put into writing, so when these groups are asked why they’re supporting policies that undermine their constituents, they can deny it with a wave of breathless indignation.

• But this tactic remains very real, and very harmful all the same. It played a huge role in ginning up bogus support for the attack on net neutrality. AT&T and Comcast have co-opted countless minority groups in this fashion, with a lot of it coordinated through a telecom-funded organization dubbed the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council (MMTC). In short: if you want to keep the funding flowing, it’s expected that you’ll parrot telecom industry policies, even if they harm your constituents. This has been a problem for years that nobody much likes to talk about.

• A Republican lawmaker is proposing a net neutrality law that would ban blocking Recently the FCC voted down the previously held rules on net neutrality. I think that this is a bad decision by the FCC, but I don’t think that it will result in the amount of chaos that some people are suggesting. I thought I’d write about how I see the net changing, for better or worse, with these regulations removed.

• If we think about how the Internet is today, basically everyone pays to access the network individually. Both groups that want to host information and people who want to access those sites. Everyone pays a fee for ‘their connection’ which contributes to companies that create and connect the backbone together. An Internet connection by itself has very little value, but it is the definition of a “network effect”, because everyone is on the Internet it has value for you to connect there as well. Some services you connect to use a lot of your home Internet connection, and some of them charge different rates for it. Independent of how much they use or charge you, your ISP isn’t involved in any meaningful way. The key change here is that now your ISP will be associated with the services that you use.

• Let’s talk about a theoretical video streaming service that charged for their video service. Before they’d charge something like $10 a month for licensing and their hosting costs. Now they’re going to end up paying an access fee to get to consumer’s Internet connections, so their charges are going to change. They end up charging $20 a month and giving $10 of that to the ISPs of their customers. In the end consumers will end up paying for their Internet connection just as much, but it’d be bundled into other services they’re buying on the Internet. ISPs love this because suddenly they’re not the ones charging too much, they’re out of the billing here. They could even possibly charge less (free?) for home Internet access as it’d be subsidized by the services you use.and throttling, but the bill would allow ISPs to create paid fast lanes and prohibit state governments from enacting their own net neutrality laws. The bill would also prohibit the FCC from imposing any type of common carrier regulations on broadband providers.

• Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced the “Open Internet Preservation Act” in a video posted to Twitter.

• “We can do this now that [FCC] Chairman [Ajit] Pai has successfully done his job of getting the net neutrality rules off the books,” said Blackburn, who is chairperson of a congressional telecommunications subcommittee.

• By now you’ve probably noticed that FCC boss Ajit Pai isn’t particularly popular online after he voted last week to kill popular net neutrality protections. A big reason for that unpopularity is Pai’s tendency to simply make things up as he rushes to coddle broadband duopolists, whether we’re talking about his bogus claims that net neutrality killed broadband investment, his claims that net neutrality only emboldens tyrants in Iran and North Korea, or his claims that the broadband market is amazingly competitive.

• So in the wake of the repeal (which of course still needs to survive legal challenge) it’s not too surprising to see Pai engaging in more blatantly false nonsense as he tries to frame net neutrality supporters as hysterical hyperbolists. For example, Pai tried to argue last week on Fox and Friends that net neutrality supporters were clearly wrong to worry about the repeal because Twitter and Facebook still worked the day after the repeal…

• Recently the FCC voted down the previously held rules on net neutrality. I think that this is a bad decision by the FCC, but I don’t think that it will result in the amount of chaos that some people are suggesting. I thought I’d write about how I see the net changing, for better or worse, with these regulations removed.

• If we think about how the Internet is today, basically everyone pays to access the network individually. Both groups that want to host information and people who want to access those sites. Everyone pays a fee for ‘their connection’ which contributes to companies that create and connect the backbone together. An Internet connection by itself has very little value, but it is the definition of a “network effect”, because everyone is on the Internet it has value for you to connect there as well. Some services you connect to use a lot of your home Internet connection, and some of them charge different rates for it. Independent of how much they use or charge you, your ISP isn’t involved in any meaningful way. The key change here is that now your ISP will be associated with the services that you use.

• Let’s talk about a theoretical video streaming service that charged for their video service. Before they’d charge something like $10 a month for licensing and their hosting costs. Now they’re going to end up paying an access fee to get to consumer’s Internet connections, so their charges are going to change. They end up charging $20 a month and giving $10 of that to the ISPs of their customers. In the end consumers will end up paying for their Internet connection just as much, but it’d be bundled into other services they’re buying on the Internet. ISPs love this because suddenly they’re not the ones charging too much, they’re out of the billing here. They could even possibly charge less (free?) for home Internet access as it’d be subsidized by the services you use.

• It’s bittersweet, since I’ve been running an anonymous FTP server since some time around 1996 (longer than HTTP has been a widely-used thing), and at ftp.eyrie.org for nearly that long. The original service was wu-ftpd, as one did at the time, but it’s been vsftpd for the past decade plus. (Amusingly, I now work for the author of vsftpd.)

• All of the data is still there, at archives.eyrie.org as has been the case for more than a decade. I doubt anyone but me and a few people with ancient bookmarks will ever notice. The whole world switched over to HTTP many years ago, and about the only thing that ever connected to the anonymous FTP server was search engines. I was keeping it running out of nostalgia.

• Explaining why I finally pulled the plug requires a bit of background on the FTP protocol. Many of those reading this may already be familiar, but I bet some people aren’t, and it’s somewhat interesting. The short version is that FTP is a very old protocol from a much different era of the Internet, and it does things in some very odd ways that are partly incompatible with modern networking.

• As we’ve been noting for a while, the FCC’s 3-2 vote to kill net neutrality is really only the beginning of a new chapter in the fight for a healthy, competitive internet. The rules won’t truly be repealed until 60 days after they hit the federal register in January. And even then, the repeal will have to survive a multi-pronged legal assault against the FCC, accusing it of ignoring the public interest, ignoring feedback from countless experts, and turning a blind eye to all of the procedural oddities that occurred during its proceeding (like, oh, the fact that only dead and artificial people appear to support what the FCC is up to).

• ISPs know that this legal fight faces a steep uphill battle with all of the procedural missteps at the FCC. That’s why we’ve been warning for a while that ISPs (and their army of think tankers, sock puppets, consultants, and other allies) will soon begin pushing hard for a new net neutrality law. One that professes to “put this whole debate to bed,” but contains so many loopholes as to be useless. The real purpose of such a law? To codify federal net neutrality apathy into law, and to prevent the FCC from simply passing tougher rules down the road.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• When it comes to frivolous trademark lawsuits, you think you’ve seen it all, but then one comes along that makes you throw up your hands. Here at Techdirt, we understand that the average individual might not know some of the broader nuances of trademark law, such as the focus on customer confusion, or the requirement, in most cases, that the parties reside within the same industry or market. But that understanding goes out the window when we’re talking about a lawsuit brought by a large corporation that, like, totally has lawyers and stuff. I use that tone and vernacular specifically as preparation for stating that Five Below, the large retailer with trendy products for less than five bucks, has sued 10 Below, a small chain of ice cream shops.

Copyrights

• The video is bad and dumb and misleading and, yes, very, very cringeworthy. The pure awfulness of the video is what got people worked up initially, with Pai’s supporters gleefully laughing at Pai’s opponents for getting upset about it. If you can’t see it for some reason, it involves Pai claiming that nothing is going to change on the internet following his bad decision to kill the FCC’s net neutrality rules, and then attempts to show some examples: posting images of food and dogs to the internet, doing some online shopping, being a dorky Star Wars fan and, finally, “ruining a meme.”

• That meme? The Harlem Shake. If you were online in 2013, you almost certainly remember it. Because it was everywhere. For a couple months or so, everyone on the internet seemed to feel it was their obligation to create a video showing people crazy dancing to a snippet of the song “Harlem Shake” by “Baauer” the stage name of a music producer named Harry Rodrigues. The song, the Harlem Shake uses a sample from another song, Miller Time, by Philadelphia’s Plastic Little. Also, the “con los terroristas” line was sampled from a singer named Hector Delgado.

• A little over a year ago, we wrote about an unfortunate case in which Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to sue for copyright and trademark infringement over an attempt to create a (pretty funny) parody that mashed up Dr. Seuss with Star Trek, called “Oh, The Places You’ll Boldly Go.” As we noted at the time, this seemed to be a clear parody (which is protected by fair use). It was clearly transformative, and was commenting on the differences between Trek and Seuss. We also noted some extraordinary (and extraordinarily silly) claims in the lawsuit. The defendants in the case, Comicmix, won a round earlier this year, when the judge tossed out the trademark claims. However, he let the copyright claims stand for the time being. After, Dr. Seuss Enterprises filed an amended complaint on all the claims, leading to a new motion to dismiss.

• Facebook has published data on the number of piracy takedown notices the company receives. During the first half of 2017, the social media giant removed 1.8 million posts or files, following copyright holder requests. Interestingly, the company rejected nearly a third of all requests in their entirety.

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