● 12.25.17

● Links 25/12/2017: Linux 4.15 RC5 and New Stable Kernels

Posted in News Roundup at 12:32 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Ok, so it’s not Sunday yet, but tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and while I’ve been in the US for over two decades, we still celebrate Christmas the only _right_ way – with Christmas Eve being the big day, and Christmas Day being just for recovery.

• So I’m doing the rc5 release a day early, in order to not have to do it during the actual Christmas festivities at our house.

• And it’s not like I expect to see a lot of patches or pull requests tomorrow anyway, so I guess it doesn’t really much matter when I do the rc release, the end result would look very similar even if I had done it on my normal Sunday schedule.

• This (shortened) week ended up being fairly normal for rc5, with the exception of the ongoing merging of the x86 low-level prep for kernel page table isolation that continues and is noticeable. In fact, about a third of the rc5 patch is x86 updates due to that. It all looks like very good cleanups, though, and it’s been through about two hundred iterations by now (no, seriously, Thomas has been keeping track of his iterative updates of the PTI series, and it apparently hit 196 in the last two months).

• A day early than expected, Linus Torvalds released the fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel for testing, just before the Christmas holidays.

• Because it’s almost Christmas, and the end of the year holidays are here, most Linux kernel developers took a short vacation to be with their family and friends, so Linux kernel 4.15 RC5 ended up being fairly normal, according to Linus Torvalds, except for an ongoing and noticeable merging of the x86 low-level preparation for kernel page table isolation. So a third of the RC5 patch is x86 updates.

• As an early Christmas gift for those wanting to do some kernel testing this weekend, Linus Torvalds has done the release of Linux 4.15-rc5 a little bit early.

• Linus Torvalds explained in the release announcement he ended up releasing 4.14-rc5 early due to Christmas Eve being the “big day” per European traditions and the day after for recovery. So now 4.14-rc5 is out there and overall he’s happy with the relatively light code churn for the week.

• The 4.14.9, 4.9.72, 4.4.108, and 3.18.90 stable kernel updates have been released with a large set of important fixes. The 4.14.9 update includes the kernel page-table isolation precursor patches that also just landed in 4.15-rc5.

Graphics Stack

• Collabora’s latest Wayland enablement effort is on getting the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) running nicely under Wayland with the Mus/Ozone infrastructure.

• Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have sent in their last planned set of feature changes for DRM-Next that in turn is targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window.

• Andres Rodriguez, one of Valve’s Linux GPU driver developers, has sent out his latest 22 patches for enabling semaphores support (GL_EXT_semaphore) within the RadeonSI driver.

• Making the rounds on the Internet this holiday weekend is an updated NVIDIA GeForce software license agreement prohibiting the use of their drivers in data-center deployments for consumer GPUs.

• Well known open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák has taken to some Christmas day hacking on Mesa with a significant performance improvement for AMD APU owners and those who care about glxgears.

• While glxgears is not a benchmark, all too often people still seem interested in glxgears. If you fall into that boat, you will now find better performance with RadeonSI Gallium3D. By not using fast color clears for small images, this simple chage makes glxgears about 20% faster on APUs and a little more for discrete GPUs.

• More AMDKFD changes are being queued for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel merge window with this being the kernel HSA driver for ROCm support, etc.

• The big work ongoing is getting the discrete GPU support upstreamed so that the stock mainline Linux kernel could work with the user-space ROCm open-source packages for OpenCL support, etc. Unfortunately this latest AMDKFD pull request still doesn’t have all the dGPU changes as it’s still waiting on a patch for the PCI subsystem that introduces the needed PCI-E atomics support.

• Rob Clark of the Freedreno project has landed his context priority patches in Mesa that originate from this past October.

• The time has come for gamers and enthusiasts to ditch their 32-bit operating system (assuming you haven’t already), because NVIDIA has announced that it will no longer support drivers for these operating systems. If you have been hobbling along on an old 32-bit version of an OS to save some money, perhaps Santa can bring you a 64-bit OS. NIVIDIA says that support will end after the 390 driver release.

Benchmarks

• With AMD’s release on Friday of the long-awaited open-source “AMDVLK” Radeon Vulkan driver here are our initial benchmarks of this official Radeon open-source Vulkan driver compared to the unofficial RADV Mesa-based Vulkan driver and the similar AMDGPU-PRO 17.50 closed-source Vulkan driver.

Applications

• we’re proud to finally announce the new feature release of darktable, 2.4.0!

• the github release is here: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/releases/tag/release-2.4.0.

• As a Christmas surprise for all photography fans, the development team behind the darktable open-source and cross-platform RAW image editor released the final darktable 2.4 update.

• darktable 2.4 is a massive update that incorporates numerous new features, but the biggest of them all is support for the Microsoft Windows operating systems. While there’s no printing support and a few bugs and limitations are still present, users can now run darktable on their Windows PCs.

• Darktable 2.4 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-acclaimed open-source RAW photography software.

• With the new year, come resolutions. On many a list will there be a determination to do better in the coming year, to be more organised, more efficient, more productive.

• I’m quite organised myself. I have lists, calendars, reminders, budgets, and all of that. Being a FOSS person, my first thought, inevitably, is to see if there’s a piece of software that would aid me.

• This post documents how one can get Taskwarrior, Timewarrior, and Gnome Pomodoro to work together to manage tasks, track them, and break those long hours into smaller bits with regular breaks.

• VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf has released the big VLC 3.0-RC3 update for Christmas.

• Two weeks back I wrote how the VLC 3.0 release candidates finally got underway while timed now for Christmas day is the 3.0-RC3 release that’s getting a fair amount of attention.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Godot 3.0 game engine is preparing to ship early next year.

• Developers behind this open-source 2D/3D game engine had been preparing their big 3.0 release to happen around Christmas, but that didn’t quite go as planned with the second beta shipping this week instead.

• Edit 22.12.2017: Windows binaries (both the editor binaries and the export templates) have been replaced by versions without OpenMP support, the latter forcing the installation of the MS Visual C++ Redistributable 2017 to get the OpenMP DLL. If you downloaded export templates before 22.12.2017 at 23:59 UTC, we advise to download them anew to get the proper portable Windows binaries.

• Looking for a bit of PC gaming nostalgia? You could dig those old floppy disks out of your closet…or you could grab the new, improved, open source versions of those games online for free.

• “Source ports” are older games like DOOM and SimCity that have been released as full open source code by their creators, then updated and improved by the community. The re-released games are passion projects, and almost always free to download on the PC. They typically include improved graphics, bug fixes, and new features, sometimes even entirely new weapons or game modes—perfect for a nostalgia trip that still feels fresh. They’re definitely worth a try if your Steam library is looking a bit dusty.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Linux is easy to customize from the desktop manager, file manager, down to the kernel. If you love “freedom,” you’ll definitely love Linux because you are never locked down when it comes to customizing your OS.

• Once in a while, you may want to change the look and feel of your desktop. A common change people make is using different themes and icon packs rather than the default. This is usually necessary, as some Linux distros have barely satisfactory user interfaces. Mind you, it doesn’t mean they are nonfunctional. They are just lean in their interfaces.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• If you find yourself with some extra time this holiday season and want to dive into a classic codebase on your modern Linux desktop, KDE developer Helio Castro has been working on his porting skills by porting KDE 2.2.2 and Qt2 to work on modern Linux systems.

• KDE 2 was released in 2000 with the use of the DCOP communication protocol, the still-living KIO I/O library, KHTML that at the time brought HTML 4.0 rendering, and Konqueror came as the default web-browser.

• So far he’s got kdelibs 2.2.2 working — tests are passing, graphics are working, and overall a bit beyond a “proof of concept” stage. As part of this “KDE 2 Restoration Project” he’s trying to maintain the original code as much as possible but along the way also replacing the Autotools build system with CMake.

• My name is Rositsa (also known as Roz) and I’m somewhat of a late blooming artist. When I was a kid I was constantly drawing and even wanted to become an artist. Later on I chose a slightly different path for my education and career and as a result I now have decent experience as a web and graphic designer, front end developer and copywriter. I am now completely sure that I want to devote myself entirely to art and that’s what I’m working towards.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Thanks professors from university give us very good panel discussion, thanks Emily Chen to host this great panel discussion. It’s import to get support in university when we want to promote open source and freeware all the time.

Distributions

• If you are looking for a Desktop Linux distribution that is simple yet different, reliable and runs well on legacy hardware, then MX Linux is a good choice. MX Linux is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities (hence the name MX). One can expect best of both worlds is put into MX Linux.

• MX Linux is a mid-weight operating system having Xfce as the desktop environment. The latest release MX Linux 17 has been released on Friday 15h December 17, 2017. MX Linux 17 is based on Debian 9.3 (Stretch) with Linux kernel version 4.13.0-1 and brings lot many changes when compared to its predecessor MX 16.1. Let us dig into further into MX Linux 17 (here onwards referred as MX 17) and see what its latest release offers to the Linux community.

New Releases

• Black Lab Software’s CEO has informed Softpedia today that the company behind the Black Lab Linux operating system is offering free copies of the Linspire 7.0 Linux OS during the Christmas holidays.

• Linspire is a Debian/Ubuntu-based full-featured computer operating system designed to accommodate Microsoft Windows or macOS users who want to migrate to Linux. Besides security and reliability, Linspire offers easy installation of apps using a Click-N-Run (CNR) technology.

• Powered by Linux kernel 4.10, Linspire 7.0 comes with all the apps you need for your daily computing tasks, including a web browser (Firefox), an email, news and calendaring suite (Thunderbird), an office suite (LibreOffice), a virtualization software (VirtualBox), a media player (VLC), and Wine for running Windows apps and games.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Today, I visited the OpenMandriva site and found a piece of news that caught my eye. It seems that Gaël Duval, the founder of Mandrake (later Mandriva) Linux, has started an ambitious Kickstarter project: eelo, a mobile platform that uses FLOSS and focuses on keeping user data on the hands of users.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• Slax 9.3 is now available as the latest feature release for this long-time Linux distribution that focuses on delivering a lightweight yet featureful Linux desktop experience.

• Most of you celebrate something today, so here is a little gift for you I’ve released Slax 9.3 just few minutes ago and I have to say that I am happy with the progress we are heading.

• Just in time for the Christmas holidays, Slax developer Tomas Matejicek announced on Christmas Eve the final release of the Debian-based Slax 9.3 GNU/Linux distribution.

• Slax 9.3 is the second stable update since the developer decided to give it another go after two years of hibernation, but this time based on Debian GNU/Linux instead of Slackware, to the disappointment of many. The latest version is based on Debian GNU/Linux 9.3 “Stretch.”

• “Most of you celebrate something today, so here is a little gift for you. I’ve released Slax 9.3 just few minutes ago and I have to say that I am happy with the progress we are heading,” writes developer Tomas Matejicek in the release announcement.

• These are getting later and later despite the best of intentions, but I still have plans! Strategies! Intentions! Hopes! Next month’s might be a bit closer to on time.

• This month, I finally have some employer-sponsored free software work to report: overhauling the service account handling in Merou. Previously known as Grouper until I pointed out the Internet2 project of the same name, this is the system we use internally at Dropbox for privilege management. It’s essentially an account and group management framework with a delegated privilege model for assigning, managing, and auditing privileges.

• I adopted bundle to manage my personal systems and never quite got around to switching when we moved to Puppet for servers. (You can see my old notes on managing systems with bundle, which I left up as a historical curiosity.) But this year I finally finished the migration, and today I moved bundle into my obsolete software list and dropped the Debian package from the unstable section of my Debian repository.

• Debian Project’s Ben Hutchings reports on a new Linux kernel security update for the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system series that fixes several vulnerabilities discovered recently.

• According to the latest DSA 4073-1 Debian Security Advisory, it would appear that a total of 18 security vulnerabilities ranging from information leaks, privilege escalation, and denial of service were fixed in the Linux 4.9 LTS kernel of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system.

• Since summer we have worked on our git.debian.org replacement based on GitLab. I am really happy to say that we are launching the beta of our service today. Please keep in mind that it is a beta, we don’t expect any database resets, but under unexpected circumstances it might still happen.

• The new service is available at https://salsa.debian.org. Every active Debian Developer already has an account. Please request a password reset via https://salsa.debian.org/users/sign_in – your login is either your Debian login or Debian e-mail address.

• Rolling out as beta this Christmas is Debian Salsa.

• Debian Salsa (salsa.debian.org) is the project’s eventual replacement to git.debian.org. Debian Salsa is powered by GitLab and has been in development the past few months.

• Basically, Salsa is to be Debian’s collaborative development platform. GitLab is the open-source Git repository manager similar in nature to GitHub. GNOME and Debian have been among the free software projects working to migrate their development infrastructure around GitLab.

• Now that Salsa is in beta, it’s time to import projects (= GitLab speak for “repository”). This is probably best done automated.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Just a couple of days after releasing the OTA-3 software update for supported Ubuntu Phone devices, Ubuntu Touch maintainer UBports now teases users with upcoming support for Android apps.

• Remember Anbox (Android-in-a-Box)? It’s the open-source project that allows Linux users to run Android apps in a container inside their GNU/Linux distributions. Well, UBports has found a way to implement Anbox into the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system to let Ubuntu Phone owners run Android apps too.

• “People have come to depend on certain applications that are not available on Ubuntu Touch. In order to become a full-featured and mainstream mobile operating system, Ubuntu Touch needs to offer its users the proprietary services they depend on, at least until the point when free and open source alternatives are viable,” writes Dalton Durst.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia is a very reasonable distribution. First, it’s better than most 2017 offerings by a long shot. But comparing to bad stuff is hardly useful. When we stack it against a few rare gems, it holds quite well. You get familiar looks, most if not all of the stuff you need out of the box, and the rest is just a click away. Good networking, media and smartphone support, elegant package management, excellent stability, easy customization. Lots of perks and smart touches.

• The negatives would be an odd glitch or two, and some visual dust. Mint feels a bit archaic, and font quality can be improved mostly by altering the default theme actually. But there are no showstoppers, no cardinal problems, nothing to make you want to cry in a dark corner of an abandoned warehouse. Solid, predictable, practical. Grade 9.7/10, and it really is one of the more refreshing distro releases recently. Well worth testing. So you should. Right now.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Web Browsers are one of the most significant pieces of software on your device that serves as a window to access the World Wide Web. Mostly, a browser app is always pre-installed on every Android device. However, not all the browsers can provide you with a smooth and reliable browsing experience.

• There are a lot of third-party web browsers available in the Play Store which can give a fast browsing experience and will consume as little data as possible. We have hand-picked ten best Android browsers which come with all the necessary features and top-notch performance.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s that time of the year again. And what a year! Blender 2.8 is shaping up and made ready for use in daily production in a Blender open movie.

• Early in the year, we started sharing a daily build of 2.8 with all the latest changes. That lead to a great response by early adopters who embraced the potential of a real-time engine such as Eevee in Blender. We saw that in the demo we had at Siggraph, as well as the constant sharing of images and videos in social media.

• We also added a 2.8 hub on blender.org. A page where people could learn more about the 2.8 project. If you haven’t visited it, go check it out. You can find all the Siggraph demo files, as well as videos, documents and everything that is 2.8 related.

• Developers behind the Blender 3D modeling software have shared a “Christmas update” about their ongoing work towards Blender 2.8 as the next major release for this open-source, cross-platform modeling software.

• Blender 2.8 will premiere with Eevee as the real-time engine integrated with the Blender viewport. Eevee supports PBR rendering, subsurface scattering, light probes, and many other features used by today’s 3D games.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Notebookbar implementation Tabbed Compact is finished and can be tested.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GIMP’s user interface is currently available in 80 languages. So far ca. 20 translations have been updated in the unstable branch since the beginning of the work on v2.10, and only 8 translations in the ‘po’ directory (where most translatable messages reside) are at least 90% complete. So clearly we need to give our translators a head start.

• This is why GIMP’s master branch is now entering a tentative strings freeze phase in preparation for 2.10 release. We expect further changes between today and the v2.10 final release to affect no more than 1% of translatable messages. So it’s safe to start updating user interface translations now.

• The long-awaited GIMP 2.10 stable update should indeed materialize in 2018 with the release now being under a tentative string freeze.

• Released two weeks back was the GIMP 2.9.8 development release and since then more feature work has landed like support for the FreeDesktop.org screenshot API. But in trying to get translators jumping on the translation work for GIMP 2.10, a tentative string freeze is now in place with developers thinking not more than 1% of the translations should change ahead of the 2.10 release.

• While GIMP has support for 80+ languages, only 20 of them have been updated in the unstable branch for 2.10 and only eight languages have at least 90% completion.

• Pagers use a protocol — POCSAG — that predates our modern (and well-founded) obsession with privacy and security. That isn’t surprising although the idea that private medical data is flying through the air like this is. Decoding POCSAG isn’t hard. GNU Radio, for example, can easily handle the task.

Licensing/Legal

• A judge in San Francisco has granted a motion by noted open source advocate Bruce Perens to dismiss a defamation suit filed against him by Grsecurity, a group that supplies a patch for hardening the Linux kernel.

• Magistrate judge Laurel Beeler agreed to Perens’ (right, below) motion on Thursday but denied his bid to invoke the anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law in California.

• This law deals with legal complaints that are directed at stopping public discussion and free speech. California put in place an anti-SLAPP law in 1992.

• The defendant Bruce Perens — who is a respected programmer known for his founding of the Open Source Initiative — criticized OSS’s business model for distributing its security patches on the ground that it violated the open-source license and thus potentially subjected users to liability for copyright infringement or breach of contract. The plaintiffs [sued, basically for defamation -EV]….

Leftovers

Science

• It is, of course, hard to see anything other than a commercial reason for universities doing this. One, which ‘held out’ for some years before recently capitulating, states ‘the fact that you received an unconditional offer will look pretty good on your CV!’

• And as the Select Committee were told, the rise has been dramatic. 40 percent more unconditional offers were made in the last application cycle than the year before; the rise has been from a few hundred in the years to 2012, to 2,985 in 2013-14, 36,825 in 2014-15 and 51,615 last year. Unconditional offers are now given in response to 5 percent of applications, [...]

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• Every year in the U.S., nearly 4 million women give birth, the vast majority without anything going amiss for themselves or their babies. But more than 135 expectant and new mothers a day — or more than 50,000 a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — endure dangerous and even life-threatening complications that often leave them wounded, weakened, traumatized, financially devastated, unable to bear more children or searching in vain for answers about what went wrong.

• For the past year, ProPublica and NPR have been examining why the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the industrialized world. The 700 to 900 deaths each year related to pregnancy and childbirth, though, overshadow a more pervasive problem that experts call “severe maternal morbidity.” For every U.S. woman who dies as a consequence of pregnancy or childbirth, up to 70 suffer hemorrhages, organ failure or other significant complications, amounting to more than 1 percent of all births. The annual cost to women, their families, taxpayers and the health care system runs into billions of dollars.

Security

• We facilitated two webinars with the Electronic Frontier Alliance and learned more about the digital security training scene in various cities around the US. These conversations with trainers helped us to assess what seasoned digital security trainers are already doing, what kind of resources they are using, what kinds of resources are missing, and where more guidance is needed for newer teachers of digital security. We learned that many trainers use our Surveillance Self-Defense resources to inform their training, and we learned where trainers felt that these existing resources fell short. We shared these comments back with our SSD team, and we have worked hard to address these concerns.

• We decided to narrow our audience to new teachers of digital security who would be teaching to their friends and neighbors.

Defence/Aggression

• Donald Trump’s decision to officially “recognize” Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, including possibly moving the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, was widely reported as a surprising break with previous US policy. Not surprising in that overturning previous policy is Trump’s favorite thing, but perhaps in its potential to stir up questions that US policy and media often artfully avoid.

• Here to help us with some context for this recent move is Phyllis Bennis. She directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies; author of many titles, including Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, now in its sixth, updated edition. She joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Proposals to reform and rewrite Britain’s aged Official Secrets Acts have been postponed for at least a year, the government’s Law Commission has confirmed to The Register.

• Campaigners and media organisations now hope that the new “journalistic ice age” threatened earlier this year may not happen after all.

• As proposed, the plans would have threatened reporters, as well as whistleblowers, with jail sentences of up to 14 years, regardless of the public interest in revelations, and even if what was revealed was not likely to cause damage.

• The Commission’s plan for the “first overhaul of the Official Secrets Act in 100 years … to meet 21st century challenges” and using so-called “future proofed” laws will not now be completed until late 2018 at the earliest. Plans for new laws had initially been proposed for publication this summer, newspapers were told, but were then held back.

• For reasons unknown the official Twitter account of Julian Assange, the leader of disgraced transparency organization Wikileaks, has been deleted. The Internet Archive—or someone availing themselves of its services—appears to have been preserving snapshots of Assange’s account once every hour since September 18th of this year. Based on that information, it’s likely the @JulianAssange account was deleted between midnight and 1am GMT.

• The account does not appear to have been suspended by Twitter, and the most recent cached version of his account suggests he had not tweeted since Friday. Strangely, the official account of Wikileaks itself remains intact and has not commented on the disappearance of its founder from the platform.

• Twitter is Mr Assange’s most public means of communication with the world outside London’s Ecuadorian embassy – where he has been holed up for five years over fears he will be arrested the moment he sets foot out the door.

• But the controversial figure’s account, @JulianAssange, mysteriously disappeared between 12-1am on Christmas Morning.

• Mr Assange’s last tweet was on the 22nd December, leaving not hint as to why the account may have been removed.

• His last post was a notable quote from the man himself, which read: “A knowledgeable public, is an empowered public, is a free public.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Electricity generation from renewable energy has reached a “record high”, according to new government statistics.

• The third quarter of 2017 saw the share of electricity generated from renewable sources increase by nearly 5 per cent from the same period last year, reaching 30 per cent.

• The latest record is “yet another nail in the coffin for the claim that renewables cannot be a sizeable part of the UK’s electricity mix”, according to Dr Jonathan Marshall, energy analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.

• The zoo was on lockdown on Saturday after a devastating blaze destroyed the Animal Adventures section of the wildlife park, forcing keepers to risk life and limb to get animals to safety.

• Sadly nine-year-old aardvark Misha was killed by the blaze which also claimed the lives of four meerkats, who were all brothers.

Finance

• The UK will never be granted a free trade agreement with the European Union if it seeks to take advantage of Brexit by setting itself up as an offshore tax haven for businesses and the wealthy, the EU economic affairs commissioner has warned.

• Pierre Moscovici also warned that UK tax jurisdictions such as Jersey could find themselves moved from an EU grey list to its black list if they fail to comply with EU standards on exchanging tax information. The black list was set up earlier this month, and Moscovici is still urging the EU to set out clear sanctions to enforce compliance.

• They apparently got the wrong address, but their intent was pure.

• A large box wrapped in Christmas paper and addressed to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin shut down the swanky Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air for a couple hours on Saturday evening.

• The box was delivered to one of Mnuchin’s neighbors by accident, prompting several law enforcement agencies to swarm the scene, including the bomb squad and the Secret Service. This pissed off local residents, who were confined to their $50 million homes just when they had a lot of holiday parties to attend.

• The head of the secretive European Research Group won’t reveal which senior ministers are members of the hardline anti-EU group. Why not? Because the answer and the reach of the ERG leaves the Prime Minister looking like a Brexit hostage.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Russian interference in the 2016 election hovered over the company all year.

• There’s too much yelling these days, so we made this a silent video. (The only casualty was my arm, which ached for days afterward.) Hope you find it helpful. Best wishes for a 2018 that’s better for America than 2017 was.

• Robin DeFabbio wants Donald Trump to delete his Twitter account. She said, “We’re wasting so much time. He’s like a very bad child that I’m glad I didn’t raise.”

• Numerous Wisconsin voters are fed up with the political landscape and the country’s landscape in general due to Trump’s presidency.

• Kari Walker said, “I am a political science major. I am starting to hate politics. Actually, not starting, I do hate politics: the vitriol and the vulgarity and the lack of willingness to talk to people.”

• When North Korea began the Korean War with an invasion of South Korea in June 1950, the armed response was waged under the flag of the United Nations thanks to the Soviet Union having absented itself from the Security Council. The Soviets were boycotting the council to protest the fact that China’s seat had not been given to Mao Zedong’s communists, who had won the Chinese civil war the previous October. With no Soviet veto in the way, the Security Council quickly passed the resolutions necessary to bestow U.N. sanction on the U.S.-led military resistance to the North’s aggression.

• [...]

• More generally, the result of the vote is one more illustration of how much less is the capacity of the United States to push the rest of the world around than those Americans of an assertive nationalist stripe seem to think. This discrepancy between reality and uber-nationalist belief predates Trump and has existed at least since the post-Cold War “unipolar moment” that was barely a moment, if that. Trump’s policies and rhetoric have caused international confidence in the United States to plummet to even lower depths. The United States’ pushing ability has dropped along with the confidence.

• The U.S. president’s lies have deceived millions, fomented hate and left the world unable to accept even the most trivial words of its most powerful person. The Star has been keeping track.

• The chief of staff for Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Wendy Teramoto, still owns a stake in a shipping company tied to associates of Vladimir Putin, despite the fact that her former role as a board member for the same company prompted six Senate Democrats to request an investigation into her apparent conflicts of interest last month.

• “We have not been notified, nor are we aware, of a formal investigation by the inspector general,” Commerce Department spokesperson James Rockas said in a statement. “But we continue to answer any questions that are raised by department ethics officials or the inspector general.” The statement said that Teramoto has recused herself from any matters relating to her investments. (The same senators also requested an investigation of Ross, who initially retained an estimated $3.4 million stake in the company, Navigator Holdings, but has since sold it.)

• As long as Teramoto hangs onto her own investments, she will likely remain under scrutiny, especially since there is evidence that her official actions are affecting the shipping industry, in which she is heavily invested.

• Teramoto previously worked for Ross at his private equity firm WL Ross & Co. She invested in funds that held Navigator stock, as well as owning shares directly, and also served on the board of the shipping company from 2014 to July 2017. From 2014 to 2016, Navigator did $68 million worth of business with a Russian petrochemicals company named Sibur. That company is partially owned by two billionaires in Putin’s inner circle, Kirill Shamalov and Gennady Timchenko.

• In its annual report filed in March, Navigator said Teramoto directly owned $118,000 of the company’s stock. The Commerce Department spokesperson confirmed that Teramoto had not sold her Navigator stake or interests in WL Ross funds that held other shipping companies, such as Diamond S. Shipping.

• One of the most valuable assets listed on Teramoto’s financial disclosure form, which she filed in July, is her carried interest — a cut of the managers’ profits — in a fund called WLR Recovery Fund IV, which she valued at between $1 million and $5 million. An examination of that holding demonstrates how easily Teramoto’s portfolio could pose conflicts of interest.

• WLR Recovery Fund IV counts Navigator, as well as other shipping interests, among its holdings. It also includes investments such as Amalgamated Bank and Exco Resources. Another entity in which Teramoto is invested, WLR Recovery Associates V, includes additional positions in shipping companies, as well as a stake in the Russia-connected Bank of Cyprus.

• If those funds perform well, they will make up a significant chunk of Teramoto’s net worth. In total, she listed personal net assets worth $6 million to $19.3 million on the disclosure.

• For over a year, US media have insisted that the tactic of deflecting criticism by pointing to others’ flaws was the devious Soviet tool of “whataboutism,” and anyone using it was practicing “one of Russia’s favorite propaganda tactics.” If so, when it came time for CNN’s Jake Tapper (12/21/17) to spin for the Trump administration’s provocative and deeply unpopular move of the US embassy in Israel, the most trusted name in news was peak Pravda.

• Borrowing straight from Trump administration talking points, Tapper reported on the UN voting 128 to 9 in an emergency session against the US moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a gesture effectively solidifying 50 years of illegal military occupation—by heavily implying antisemitism was to blame. In the segment, Tapper employed a popular, superficially appealing pro-Israel talking point that the UN was “singling out” Israel at the expense of other Bad Countries. “Among the 128 countries that voted to condemn the US on this issue,” Tapper charged, “were some countries with some questionable records of their own.”

• Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, delivered a powerful warning to the Trump administration and its Republican allies this week, when he declared on the Senate floor that a move by the president to fire special counsel Robert Mueller or to undermine Mueller’s inquiry would cross one of the “red lines” that Congress must maintain.

• “Any attempt by this President to remove special counsel Mueller from his position or to pardon key witnesses in any effort to shield them from accountability or shut down the investigation would be a gross abuse of power and a flagrant violation of executive branch responsibilities and authorities. These truly are red lines and [Congress] simply cannot allow them to be crossed,” explained Warner. “Congress must make clear to the President that firing the special counsel or interfering with his investigation by issuing pardons of essential witnesses is unacceptable and would have immediate and significant consequences.”

• Warner’s right. Though Trump aides deny that the president is angling to shut down Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 presidential election—and a host of other issues that cut close to the president and his inner circle—there can be no question that the Trump team and its media allies have launched a campaign to discredit the special counsel. This has stirred speculation on Capitol Hill that Mueller and his investigation are being attacked in order to clear the way for a firing. So high marks to Warner, and to others who have raised concerns. It is vital to get ahead of these threats.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In a mysterious turn of events, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s Twitter account has suddenly gone offline. Although it appears to have been just a couple of hours since the account went down, speculation about the account’s mysterious disappearance are already doing the rounds on Twitter.

• Gizmodo reported that Assange’s Twitter account was likely deleted between midnight and 1am GMT. While some of Assange’s die-hard supporters are outraged by what they consider to be Twitter’s censorship of free speech, others are celebrating the account’s disappearance.

• Assange joined Twitter in February this year and has been a fairly active user. Over the past year, Assange has tweeted out several provocative posts, including mysterious codes believed to be a “dead man’s switch”, a post teasing that he may run for UK parliament, and more.

• At a meeting earlier this month, analysts were reportedly given a list of seven words they were not going to be allowed to use when formulating their budget documents in 2018. The offending terms were, in no particular order, “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

• The DOJ demand for RT America to register as a foreign agent is an attempt to silence undesired voices, the Libertarian Party has said, echoing views that the move is the worst attack on press freedom since the McCarthy era.

• Forcing RT America to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) under the pretext of its alleged links to perceived Russian meddling in the US 2016 elections, de facto amounts to government “censorship,” the party said in a statement. US government officials are using FARA “in an effort to silence views they don’t like,” it said further.

• On Thursday, it was revealed by DOJ official Adam Hickey that the Department based its decision regarding RT America on the controversial report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) dating back to January. Riddled with factual inaccuracies and not providing any hard evidence, the report also featured a quite hollow 7-page annex devoted to RT.

• Hickey also outrageously disputed that RT America was somehow forced to register under FARA, claiming, instead, that it was a “voluntary decision” by the channel.

• Recent cases in which courts have banned the press from reporting judicial proceedings violate India’s Constitution. Before his timely retirement, Justice C.S. Karnan made a series of shocking orders in two high courts against judges of the Supreme Court of India. He was sentenced to a term in prison for contempt of court. Then Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar made an order on May 9, 2017 forbidding the media from publishing the contents of the orders passed by Justice Karnan. The public surely has every right to know why he was sent to prison and the contents of his orders.

• Late last year, the novelist Keira Drake announced that her publisher was giving away copies of her upcoming young adult novel, “The Continent,” a fantasy set in a world where two nations have been at war for centuries. “It’s raining books!” she wrote.

• Her enthusiasm was quickly punctured. Online reviews poured in, and they were brutal. Readers pounced on what they saw as racially charged language in the descriptions of the warring tribes and blasted it as “racist trash,” “retrograde” and “offensive.” Ms. Drake and her publisher, Harlequin Teen, apologized and delayed the book’s publication.

• In the year since, “The Continent” has changed drastically. Harlequin hired two sensitivity readers, who vetted the narrative for harmful stereotypes and suggested changes. Ms. Drake spent six months rewriting the book, discarding descriptions like her characterization of one tribe as having reddish-brown skin and painted faces. The new version is due out in March.

• In today’s hair-trigger, hyperreactive social media landscape, where a tweet can set off a cascade of outrage and prompt calls for a book’s cancellation, children’s book authors and publishers are taking precautions to identify potential pitfalls in a novel’s premise or execution. Many are turning to sensitivity readers, who provide feedback on issues like race, religion, gender, sexuality, chronic illness and physical disabilities. The role that readers play in shaping children’s books has become a flash point in a fractious debate about diversity, cultural appropriation and representation, with some arguing that the reliance on sensitivity readers amounts to censorship.

• China, under Xi Jinping’s “new era” has attested to be the heir apparent of a world order erstwhile dominated by the United States of America since the Second World War. Claiming to export the “China model” globally (economic liberalisation minus political liberalisation) as an alternative to the liberal order established by the US, China has been working towards revising existing international institutions and creating new ones of its own design in order to facilitate its rise and influence.

• Shaping public opinion is also a key facet of that plan. The active shaping of the Chinese narrative is a “battlefield” upon which a highly disciplined political struggle must be waged and won. While domestically, the interpretation of this battlefield has been tested successfully through the web of information control and censorship, China aims to export this abroad in order to shape/manipulate its message.

Privacy/Surveillance

• If you care about maintaining privacy over medical records and prescriptions, this was not a good year.

• Both the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued disappointing decisions that declined to recognize a significant privacy interest in prescription records. In California, the state’s high court ruled that the Medical Board of California can rifle through records of prescriptions for controlled substances—used to treat anxiety, depression, pain, and insomnia—without notifying patients, obtaining a court order, or showing any suspicion of wrongdoing. The Ninth Circuit reversed on procedural grounds a good ruling out of Oregon, which found that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) couldn’t access sensitive prescription records without a warrant. Both courts punted to another day the question of whether the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement protects prescription records.

• This precedent is concerning, especially in an era of digital pills that use stomach acid to generate electronic data about exactly when you take your medication. Prescription records reveal our medical and mental health conditions and histories. They are a subset of our medical and mental health files, and they are just as sensitive as any other medical or mental health records, which are afforded a heightened degree of privacy protection. Prescription records should be, too. Just as with any other medical records, the government should need a warrant supported by probable cause before accessing them.

• The courts may be responding to the opioid crisis in declining to address whether law enforcement’s warrantless access of controlled-substance prescription records violates the Constitution, but everyone should be able to expect privacy in their drug prescriptions and law enforcement should be required to get a warrant to access those records. Thanks to technology, getting a warrant is easier than ever. And it’s not too much to ask when we are talking about highly sensitive medical information.

• “As an actor or an artist, you should be socially responsible. I really don’t want to do films where I am spreading hatred. Or do something that will influence 10 more boys in small towns, who follow me… I am very aware of that,” Rajkummar Rao said at Express Adda in Mumbai on Saturday.

• There is little doubt that 2017 belongs to the 33-year-old actor, who has appeared in no less than seven feature films this year, including the critically acclaimed Trapped, and Newton, which was chosen as India’s entry for the Oscars’ Best Foreign Language Film category.

• It’s time to push back on the US government’s “backdoor” spying on its citizens under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and introduce stricter controls to protect civil liberties, attorney Michael Flanagan believes.

• Now there is another addition to the list of ways you can reuse your old smartphone: by turning it into a personal surveillance system to catch any unexpected guest or intruder trying to circumvent your privacy and security.

• One by one, the New York Times warns of the dangers of every hot smart toy your kids are begging for this Xmas: Furbies, Cayla, kids’ smart watches, the ubiquitous Vtech toys (they omit the catastrophic Cloudpets, presumably because that company is out of business now).

• They warn of privacy dangers to your kids and your family, of adding vectors for attacks to your home network and its devices, and remind you that the FBI has issued a warning to parents not to buy these things.

• In 2017, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the number of high-profile cases where law enforcement has deployed digital surveillance techniques against political activists. From the arrest and prosecution of hundreds of January 20, 2017 Inauguration Day (J20) protestors to the systematic targeting, surveilling and infiltration of Water Protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the Black Lives Matter Movement over social media, law enforcement and private security firms have taken advantage of the wealth of information available online to thwart activists’ credibility and efficacy.

• While government surveillance and investigation of opposition groups may not be anything new, the tools and methods for conducting such surveillance and the sheer scope of information that can be captured about these groups is staggering. The magnitude of information now available in the digital age via platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, continues to grow exponentially, documenting your location information, contact networks, calendars, and communications. Independently, consent-less access to these discrete data-points may seem little more than intrusive, but when aggregated together, this information creates a very intimate portrait of our day-to-day lives that law enforcement can and has used against dissenting voices.

• Several of the programs Snowden revealed are authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. The 2008 law was scheduled to sunset on December 31, but in a last-ditch effort Thursday, Congress extend its authority through January 19.

• The Trump administration, meanwhile, believes that the authorization doesn’t really expire until April, leaving lawmakers several months to either reform or strengthen the provision. Hanging in the balance is the legal framework the government largely relies on to conduct mass surveillance of foreigners, and Americans who communicate with them. Which makes it all the more concerning that the fight over Section 702′s future has taken place largely in the dark.

• At worst, WhatsApp faces a fine, which presumably it could easily afford. But the censure at least draws more attention to an already controversial move, and hopefully reminds people that if WhatsApp knows something about you, Facebook probably does too.

• In an ideal world, the trust and intimacy of allowing a stranger to know your sexual orientation, your religion, or your politics would be a welcome part of finding a potential partner. In reality, it requires more caution than that. OKCupid’s decision isn’t just ignoring what its users want; it’s mocking them while it takes that away. It’s dismantling their ability to stay safe, and it’s doing so with a sneer.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the early hours of Labor Day, Brooklynites woke up to the sound of steel-pan bands drumming along Flatbush Avenue, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered to celebrate J’ouvert, a roisterous Caribbean festival that commemorates emancipation from slavery. But having been marred by gang violence in recent years, this J’ouvert was markedly different, as The New York Times described. The event, which derives its name from a Creole term for “daybreak,” was heavily staffed by the New York City Police Department. Floodlights and security checkpoints were scattered along the parade route, and many revelers were piqued by what they saw as excessive police presence—an overwhelming show of force in response to a comparatively small number of bad actors.

• “There’s a criminalization of our neighborhood,” Imani Henry, the president of the police-accountability group Equality for Flatbush, told me recently. After the NYPD declined Henry’s public-information request about security ahead of and during the festival, citing safety concerns, his group decided to sue for it. (The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.)

• “Somewhere in Iraq, a United States citizen has been in the custody of the U.S. armed forces for over three months.”

• That is how a federal Judge on Saturday begins her ruling, describing the situation of a never-charged American classified as an enemy combatant, as she ordered the Pentagon provide the prisoner with “immediate” access to a lawyer.

• The still-unnamed man was captured by the Syrian militia in mid-September and handed over to the U.S. military as a suspected member of the Islamic State.

• A couple weeks later, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a habeas corpus petition and seeking to represent the man, who, by the government’s own account, requested an attorney after being read his Miranda rights.

• The Defense Department argued that the circumstances did not warrant the ACLU’s having immediate access to the detainee.

• In a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to silence dissent, the first trial of people arrested at Inauguration Day “Disrupt J20” protests ended Thursday with all of the defendants found not guilty of all charges. Six people faced multiple felonies and 50 years in prison for just being in the area where anti-fascist and anti-capitalist protesters were marching. During the protest, police blockaded more than 200 people into a corner in a process known as “kettling” and carried out mass arrests of everyone nearby, including medics, legal observers and some journalists. This first case was closely watched as a bellwether for free speech, because one of the six people on trial was Alexei Wood, an independent photojournalist from San Antonio, Texas, whose work focuses on resistance movements. He came to document protests during the inauguration on January 20 and live-streamed the street detentions by police and even his own arrest. Alexei Wood joins us from Washington, D.C., and we speak with Jude Ortiz, a member of the organizing crew of Defend J20 and the Mass Defense Committee chair for the National Lawyers Guild.

• Russia’s central election commission voted on Monday to bar opposition leader Alexei Navalny from running in a presidential election next year, saying he was ineligible because of a past criminal conviction.

• The commission said the conviction, for which Navalny received a suspended sentence and which he has repeatedly described as politically-motivated, meant he could not run for president in March.

• Twelve members of the 13-member commission voted to bar Navalny. One member of the commission abstained, citing a possible conflict of interest.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The question is whether the outrage on Reddit forums can translate into votes for Democratic candidates next fall given the fact that younger people engaged on the issue are often the least reliable voters — particularly in midterm elections.

• The fight between the Federal Communications Commission’s choice to abandon the principles of net neutrality and the majority of Americans started early in 2017 and continued into the very last month of the year. But even with the FCC’s bad vote coming so late, we fought all year to build up momentum that will allow us to fix their blunder in 2018.

• 2017 started out with a warning: in his final address as chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler said that the future of a free and open Internet safeguarded by net neutrality was hanging by a thread. “All the press reports seem to indicate that the new commission will choose an ideologically based course,” said Wheeler. Wheeler also offered up the argument that “Network investment is up, investment in innovative services is up, and ISPs’ revenues—and stock prices—are at record levels. So, where’s the fire? Other than the desires of a few [providers] to be free of meaningful oversight, why the sudden rush to undo something that is demonstrably working?”

• That would be a constant question posed throughout 2017: why would the FCC, under its new chairman, former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai, move to eliminate something as functional and popular as net neutrality? After all, net neutrality protections guarantee that all information transmitted over the Internet be treated equally, preventing Internet service providers from prioritizing, say, their own content over that of competitors. It’s a logical set of rules that preserves the Internet as we know it. Net neutrality has been protected by the FCC for over a decade, culminating in the 2015 Open Internet Order, which we worked hard to get adopted in the first place.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• US Internet provider Armstrong warns that persistent pirates can have their Internet access throttled. As a result, they may no longer have full control over their thermostats. Those who continue pirating after an obligatory copyright education may have their full service terminated.

• A dispute between the French recording industry and search engines Google and Bing could find the latter pair filtering searches containing the word torrent, initially in connection with three local artists. The issue is currently under discussion by the parties’ lawyers. Meanwhile, a blocking injunction has just been handed down targeting several popular torrent sites.

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