● 01.17.18

● Links 17/1/2018: HHVM 3.24, WordPress 4.9.2

Posted in News Roundup at 12:21 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It’s been a busy two weeks here at Linux Journal 2.0, and we’ve been simply overwhelmed with all of your feedback and support—we can’t thank you enough for all of it. We have read every single word of every comment on the site and via email, and if we haven’t responded to you directly, please know you have indeed been heard. (Again, it’s been overwhelming.)

• The “Year of the Linux Desktop” is a fabled time when Linux finally rises up and becomes the dominant desktop operating system, supplanting Windows.

• Now, that might sound ridiculous, but the notion has been fueled over the years by Linux’s rise to dominance in every other market. The vast majority of servers run Linux. Just about every supercomputer runs on Linux. If you have an Android phone, it’s running the Linux kernel. Even the Internet of Things and automotive computers are primarily running some variation of Linux.

• The plan goes beyond just picking and choosing the best open-source alternatives to Microsoft products out there, as Barcelona will apparently be hiring developers to create bespoke software. The idea is that these projects could potentially be rolled out across other Spanish cities if they’re up to the task.

Desktop

• In October, Linux PC maker System76 released its homegrown version of Linux, Pop!_OS, giving users the choice between its legacy Ubuntu operating system or the new Pop!_OS flavor of Linux. Recently Opensource.com gave away a System76 laptop with Pop!_OS installed, which made me curious about the company and this new version of Linux, so I spoke with Cassidy James Blaede, Pop!_OS’s user experience (UX) designer.

• Blaede joined System76 in 2014, fresh out of college at the University of Northern Iowa and marriage to his wife, Katie. While in college, he co-founded the elementary OS project and interned at UX consultancy Visual Logic, both of which influenced his work for System76. He started at System76 as a front-end developer and was later promoted to UX architect.

Server

• The most popular docker base container image is either busybox, or scratch. This is driven by a movement that is equal parts puritanical and pragmatic. The puritan asks “Why do I need to run init(1) just to run my process?” The pragmatist asks “Why do I need a 700 meg base image to deploy my application?” And both, seeking immutable deployment units ask “Is it a good idea that I can ssh into my container?” But let’s step back for a second and look at the history of how we got to the point where questions like this are even a thing.

• In the very beginnings, there were no operating systems. Programs ran one at a time with the whole machine at their disposal. While efficient, this created a problem for the keepers of these large and expensive machines. To maximise their investment, the time between one program finishing and another starting must be kept to an absolute minimum; hence monitor programs and batch processing was born.

Kernel Space

Linux Foundation

• Verizon has joined the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project as a Platinum member, a move that reflects the service provider’s desire to drive industry harmony around network virtualization and automation.

• ONAP brings together several global carriers and vendors to build an automation and orchestration platform to transform the service delivery lifecycle for network, cable and cloud providers.

• Verizon and The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced today that Verizon has joined the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project as a Platinum member. ONAP brings together the majority of global carriers and vendors to build an automation and orchestration platform to transform the service delivery lifecycle for network, cable and cloud providers. ONAP enables nearly 60 percent of the world’s mobile subscribers.

• ONAP is a member community working on open-source platforms as part of a virtual access project within the Linux Foundation and spearheaded by AT&T. ONAP’s first platform release, ONAP Amsterdam, was unveiled in November.

• The trial is part of AT&T’s efforts to use software defined networking (SDN) and virtualization in its access networks. Use of Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) software is a key enabler

• As you probably know by now, I have been involved in the Civil Infrastructure Project (CIP), a Linux Foundation Initiative formed in 2016, representing Codethink, a founder Member and coordinating the engineering work in two areas within the project:

Graphics Stack

• For those using the 340 series legacy driver for NVIDIA GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 series GPU support, the 340.106 driver has been released.

• As you’ve know the Mesa 18.0.0 release plan has been available for a while on the mesa3d.org website [1].

• The Mesa 18.0 feature freeze and release candidate will be issued in the days ahead.

• Emil Velikov quietly updated the Mesa3D release schedule a while back though now he’s announced it to the mailing list. The original plan was to do the branching / feature freeze and RC1 on 19 January, but given the short notice, that might be kicked out until next week.

• The experimental RadeonSI NIR back-end is taking a final step forward for Mesa 18.0.

• Up until today when using the RadeonSI NIR code-path the GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) version was limited to 1.50 due to not having any tessellation shader support, but now it’s supported up through 4.50 — the GLSL version matching OpenGL 4.5.

• With the flurry of Mesa development activity with Mesa 18.0 being branched in a few days, the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver picked up support for another extension.

• Building off groundwork laid by Intel ANV, the RADV driver now implements VK_EXT_debug_report. At the moment it doesn’t output any messages but can be easily added during development for usage with RenderDoc and other Vulkan debuggers.

• With being past the cutoff of new features to be merged to DRM-Next for targeting the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, here is a recap of the prominent changes to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for this next kernel cycle.

Benchmarks

• We have looked several times already at the performance impact of Retpoline support in the Linux kernel, but what about building user-space packages with -mindirect-branch=thunk? Here is the performance cost to building some performance tests in user-space with -mindirect-branch=thunk and -mindirect-branch=thunk-inline.

• Beyond the Retpoline support already found in the mainline Linux kernel, developers are working on Retpoline Underflow support that would be used for Intel Skylake and Kabylake CPUs. RETPOLINE_UNDERFLOW protects against falling back to a potentially poisoned indirect branch predictor when a return buffer underflows and this additional protection is needed for Intel Skylake/Kabylake processors. I ran a couple benchmarks.

• For those curious about the performance impact of the Retpoline patches as found in the latest Linux 4.15 kernel, here are some benchmarks on an assortment of old and new AMD Linux systems.

Applications

• Despite what you may have been led to believe, there are in fact a number of solid Linux alternatives for Microsoft Office available. In fact, there are even options available with varied levels of docx support, if that is something relevant to your business.

• This article will explore my recommended Microsoft Office alternatives for Linux. Some of them you’ve likely heard of, others may be cloud/server based options that you might not have thought much about until now.

• Inkscape is a powerful, open source desktop application for creating two-dimensional scalable vector graphics. Although it’s primarily an illustration tool, Inkscape is used for a wide range of computer graphic tasks.

• The variety of what can be done with Inkscape is vast and sometimes surprising. It is used to make diagrams, logos, programmatic marketing materials, web graphics, and even for paper scrapbooking. People also draw game sprites, produce banners, posters, and brochures. Others use Inkscape to draft web design mockups, detail layouts for printed circuit boards, or produce outline files to send to laser cutting equipment.

• VirtualBox makes it easy to try Linux distros without replacing your current operating system or engaging in a game of reboot leap frog.

• But things are about to get even easier. Soon you won’t need to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions package to get a fully integrated Linux experience with your host OS.

• With the help of hypervisors like Oracle VirtualBox, one can run operating systems within another pre-installed host operating system and try out the features. When it comes to Linux, the beginners are often advised to try out user-friendly Linux distros in a virtual machine before making the brave jump.

• Our post today is about another Markdown editor – one that has been termed “the last Markdown editor you will ever use“, presumably because of its full-featured Markdown support and free accessibility.

• We told you about StackEdit the last time so today, we introduce to you, Dillinger.

• Dillinger is an AngularJS powered online HTML5 Markdown editor that is mobile ready, cloud-enabled, supports live preview and offline document storage.

• FBReader is an open source multi-platform ebook reader with a minimalist UI and support for a wide range of ebook formats including etf, mobi, ePub, plain text, and HTML, among others.

• It is lightweight and customizable with options for users to choose their preferred fonts, dictionaries, bookmarks, page-turning animations, colors, etc.

• FBReader users have automatic access to a network of book libraries from which they can download and sync both free and paid ebooks to their devices. If you are in need of a modern, lightweight, and ever-improving ebook application for your Linux, Windows, Mac, or smartphone, we recommend you try out FBReader.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It’s been a bit of a strange one this! With it initially being confirmed to release on Linux, then “technical issues” meant they had to delay it. Shortly after, they claimed they’re not working on it and a day later they asked to see requests for a Linux version on Steam. A few days later, they confirmed it once again. Then a few weeks later it was put on hold and now a few months later, it seems they’re finally working on it…confused yet?

• Remnants of Naezith [Steam, Official Site], a fast-paced grappling hook precision platformer is coming to Linux and it looks rather divine.

• Mixing in some retro looking visuals, with fast-paced travel using a grappling hook it certainly looks like a good game to challenge your friends and beat their times. It has no speed limits either, so your speed depends upon your skill with the hook.

• The very silly action RPG ‘Super Cane Magic ZERO’ has a major story update, broken on Linux now

• The Dead Island open world survival horror action RPG game that’s more than six years old should now work with Mesa’s Gallium3D drivers.

• InnerSpace [Steam], an exploration flying game set in the Inverse, a world of inside-out planets without horizons is now available for Linux.

• Disclosure: Key provided by Aspyr Media.

• In InnerSpace, you are an autonomous drone named Cartographer, which was created by the Archaeologist from information left over by the Ancients. The Archaeologist requires your help to reach areas of the Inverse where they cannot go and so your journey begins.

• I will start off by recommending a gamepad for InnerSpace. While it does work with Keyboard, it doesn’t feel good at all, you will have a much better experience with a gamepad in your hands.

• The turn-based mech strategy game developed by Harebrained Schemes won’t be on Linux at launch later this year. Other features have also been cut or altered and will be making into the game post-release.

• The upcoming expansion for Civilization VI [Official Site] will be introducing quite a few interesting changes to the game. You can see how exactly you’ll be spending just one more turn in this overview video.

• Valve has pushed out a new SteamOS Beta build for the Debian Jessie-based “Brewmaster” series.

• SteamOS Beta 2.145 is out with its main focus on transitioning to the Linux 4.14 (v4.14.13) stable kernel.

• Epic Games has rolled out their public preview build of the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.19 game engine update.

• Unreal Engine 4.19 features renderer improvements, new animation and physics capabilities, VR improvements, initial support for the HTC Vive Pro, Steam Audio Beta 10 integration, Live Link plug-in improvements, and a plethora of other work.

• Unreal Engine 4.19 will be available soon and it’ll include many new exciting features and fixes. The first Preview build is now available on the Epic Games launcher for you to download. You can explore a number of new animation and physics updates, including improvements to the Live Link plugin and Sequencer performance, and signficant changes to VR resolution settings. There are also a number of quality-of-life improvements.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Adventurous users, testers and developers running Artful 17.10 or our development release Bionic 18.04 can now test the beta version of Plasma 5.12 LTS.

• Yesterday the KDE Community released the Beta for Plasma 5.12 LTS. With that release the feature freeze for 5.12 is in place and also an eternal feature freeze for KWin/X11. To quote the release announcement: “5.12 is the last release which sees feature development in KWin on X11. With 5.13 onwards only new features relevant to Wayland are going to be added.” This raised quite some questions, concerns and misunderstandings in the social networks. With this blog post I try to address those question and explain why this change in policy is done.

• After sharing last week more info on the maturity of Flatpak support in KDE Plasma’s Discover package manager, now Nathaniel Graham published details on some new user-facing highlights of what’s done in Plasma Discover in the last week or so, and there’s quite a bunch of improvements for both Snap and Flatpak universal binary formats.

• For Snaps, Plasma Discover now no longer lets users click the “Install” button during the installation of Snaps, displays information on the license for Snaps, as well as the size of Snaps that aren’t installed on user’s computer. For Flatpak apps, it now shows the version number if that info is defined in the AppStream file.

• I guess I’m becoming a Discover developer, since it’s where I seem to spend most of my time these days. It’s just so darn fun since the lead Developer Aleix Pol is super easy to work with, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, and with Kirigami, it’s very simple to make consequential changes even when you’re a novice programmer and not very familiar with the codebase. That said, Aleix is still making about 99% of the code changes, and I’m mostly doing UI tweaks, bug screening, promotion, strategy, and work with apps to get their houses in order.

• While KDE Discover’s Flatpak support was declared “production ready”, that isn’t the only app sandboxing tech they are working on: their Ubuntu Snap support is also coming together nicely.

• Here’s a list of KDE-related stuff (mostly official FreeBSD ports) the KDE-FreeBSD team handled recently. You could call it “a week in the life of some packagers”, packagers who are also otherwise busy with $work-work.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• There appears to be a lot of fuss lately about the removal of an option from the GNOME desktop environment that allows users to display icons on their desktops.

• Long story short, last month, near the Christmas holidays, GNOME developer Carlos Soriano shared his plans on removing a so-called “the desktop” feature from the Nautilus file manager starting with the upcoming GNOME 3.28 release of the desktop environment, proposing its integration into the GNOME Shell component.

• The feature is there to handle application icons on the user’s workspace, but it shouldn’t have been implemented in Nautilus in the first place, according to the developer. So for the GNOME devs to be able to add new features to the Nautilus file manager, they need to remove its ability to handle desktop icons and place the code somewhere else.

• I have prepared a list of bugs which I’d like to be fixed in the 2.42.1 milestone. Two of them are assigned to myself, as I’m already working on them.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• In this briefing, Sysdig’s Knox Andersen walked us through security and forensic best practices for OpenShift and containers. We learned about how to simplify and strengthen an organization’s security posture by combining deep kernel-level container visibility with metadata from an OpenShift deployment to define your security policies. SysDig’s Knox Anderson also covered how the security landscape is changing, the architecture of Sysdig Secure, and even covered a live security instrumentation of a containerized environment.

• In this video from SC17 in Denver, Dan McGuan from Red Hat describes the company’s Multi-Architecture HPC capabilities with the Power9 architecture.

• Red Hat’s certification program provides validation of IT professionals’ skills and knowledge using our subscription products. Red Hat’s certifications carry credibility in the market because they are all earned by taking one or more hands-on, practical exams that last multiple hours. Like most programs offered by technology vendors, our most familiar certifications are those for system administrators.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

• For years Google used Goobuntu, an in-house, Ubuntu-based operating system. Goobuntu is now being replaced by gLinux, which is based on Debian Testing.

• It’s not a hidden fact that Google has been using Ubuntu-based Linux distribution called Goobunu for years.

• The home-baked distribution used by Google engineers is like a light skin on top of Ubuntu Linux LTS releases. The company has been a customer of Canonical as part of the Ubuntu Advantage Program, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The main highlight for this week was the inclusion of the new proxy device in LXD, thanks to the hard work of some University of Texas students!

• The rest of the time was spent fixing a number of bugs, working on various bits of kernel work, getting the upcoming clustering work to go through our CI process and preparing for a number of planning meetings that are going on this week.

Devices/Embedded

• Axiomtek’s compact “IFB125” DIN-rail IoT gateway runs Yocto Linux on an i.MX6 UL SoC with dual LANs, mini-PCIe expansion, extended temperature and vibration resistance, COM and USB ports, and a DB9 port that supports both SPI and I2C.

• Axiomtek has released a minor variation on its IFB122 IoT gateway. Like the IDB122, the new IFB125 runs Yocto Project code with Linux 3.14.52 on NXP’s 528MHz Cortex-A7 based i.MX6 UltraLight (UL) SoC. The headless gateway is designed for remote control and remote monitoring management applications such as unmanned control room, industrial automation, automatic parking lot, and traffic cabinets.

• Portwell’s 4×4-inch (eNUC) form factor “WUX-3455” SBC offers a choice of Apollo Lake SoCs plus up to 64GB eMMC 5.0, SATA III, 4x USB 3.0, M.2 expansion, and HDMI and DisplayPorts for up to 4K video.

• First, let me apologize for the silence. It was not because we went into hibernation for the winter, but because we were so busy in the initial preparation and planning of a totally new product while orienting an entirely new development team. Since we are more settled into place now, we want to change this pattern of silence and provide regular updates. Purism will be giving weekly news update posts every Tuesday, rotating between progress on phone development from a technology viewpoint (the hardware, kernel, OS, etc.) and an art of design viewpoint (UI/UX from GNOME/GTK to KDE/Plasma). To kickoff this new update process, this post will discus the technological progress of the Librem 5 since November of 2017.

• If you have been curious about the state of Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone project since its successful crowdfunding last year and expedited plans to begin shipping this Linux smartphone in early 2019, the company has issued their first status update.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• There are lots of superb free video editors around, but many are cut-back versions of commercial software. If you’re looking for something truly free that you can use for personal or commercial projects, open source software is the way to go. All of these video editors are developed by communities dedicated to making top quality software available to everyone.

• One of the advantages of open source software is that users are free to develop versions for different platforms. All of the open source video editors in this roundup are available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

• VLMC (VideoLAN Movie Creator) is another open source video editor to keep an eye on. It’s still under development and not yet available to download, but it’s being developed by the same team as the superb VLC Media Player, so we have high hopes.

• Open source software continues its meteoric rise, as more and more large enterprises weave open source code into various areas of their operations, increasingly shunning the big-name, proprietary software vendors.

• In fact, according to open source software development company, Sonatype, represented locally by 9TH BIT Consulting, 7,000 new open source software projects kick-off around the world every week, while 70,000 new open source components are released. Accessing this massive ‘hivemind’ of software development expertise is a highly attractive prospect for CIOs and business managers in all industries.

• What is open source software and how do vendors make their money? We answer your questions

• Open source is the foundation of modern technology. Even if you don’t know what it is, chances are you’ve already used it at least once today. Open source technology helped build Android, Firefox, and even the Apache HTTP server, and without it, the internet as we know it would simply not exist.

• The central idea behind open source is a simple one: many hands make light work. In short, the more people you have working on something, the quicker and easier it is to do. As it applies to software development, this means opening projects up to the public to let people freely access, read and modify the source code.

• Adblock Plus, the most popular Internet ad blocker today, joins The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) as corporate sponsors. Since its very first version, Adblock Plus has been an open source project that has developed into a successful business with over 100 million users worldwide. As such, the German company behind it, eyeo GmbH, has decided it is time to give back to the open source community.

• Founded in 1998, the OSI protects and promotes open source software, development and communities, championing software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure. Adblock Plus is an open source project that aims to rid the Internet of annoying and intrusive online advertising. Its free web browser extensions (add-ons) put users in control by letting them block or filter which ads they want to see.

Events

• Olemis Lang is one of the founders and very active in promoting open source in Cuba. We’ve had some similar experiences in running user groups (I founded the Python french one a decade ago), and were excited about sharing our experience.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• On Monday January 22, Mozilla is bringing together a panel of the top VR industry insiders in the world to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to explain how VR storytelling is revolutionizing the film and entertainment industry.

• “We want the storyteller’s vision to exceed the capacity of existing technology, to push boundaries, because then the technologist is inspired to engineer new mechanisms that enable things initially thought impossible” says Kamal Sinclair, Director of New Frontier Lab Programs at Sundance Institute. “However, this is not about creating something that appeals to people simply because of its novel technical achievements; rather it is something that has real meaning, and where that meaning can be realized by engineering the technologies to deliver the best experience possible.”

• Today, we’re launching the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellowship call for host organizations. If your organization is devoted to a healthy internet for all users, we encourage you to apply.

• The ability to customize and extend Firefox are an essential part of Firefox’s value to users. Extensions are small tools that allow developers and users who install the extensions to modify, customize, and extend the functionality of Firefox. For example, during our workflows research in 2016, we interviewed a participant who was a graduate student in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While she used Safari as her primary browser for common browsing, she used Firefox specifically for her academic work because of the extension Zotero was the best choice for keeping track of her academic work and citations.

• Popular categories of extensions include ad blockers, password managers, and video downloaders. Given the variety of extensions and the benefits to customization they offer, why is it that only 40% of Firefox users have installed at least one extension? Certainly, some portion of Firefox users may be aware of extensions but have no need or desire to install one. However, some users could find value in some extensions but simply may not be aware of the existence of extensions in the first place.

• Why not? How can Mozilla facilitate the extension discovery process?

• A fundamental assumption about the extension discovery process is that users will learn about extensions through the browser, through word of mouth, or through searching to solve a specific problem. We were interested in setting aside this assumption and to observe the steps participants take and the decisions they make in their journey toward possibly discovering extensions. To this end, the Firefox user research team ran two small qualitative studies to understand better how participants solved a particular problem in the browser that could be solved by installing an extension. Our study helped us understand how participants do — or do not — discover a specific category of extension.

• Set your calendars for January 23, 2018, to download the latest Firefox 58 release packed with performance/bottleneck and bug fixes, an even better site source code debugger and more.

• Monterail and Thunderbird are now working on the same team.

• Yes, that Monterail, the Poland-based development company whose stunning Thunderbird mock-up went viral last year, before becoming a real, working Thunderbird theme.

• “We got in touch with […] the Thunderbird core team to discuss possibilities. We wanted to establish how to enhance user retention and make Thunderbird more user-friendly for potential and current users. We also learned how Thunderbird is built which helped with planning iterations,” Monterail’s Krystian Polański explains in a new blog post on the company’s website.

SaaS/Back End

• MapR is a Silicon Valley-based big data company. Its founders realized that data was going to become ever increasingly important, and existing technologies, including open source Apache Hadoop, fell short of being able to support things like real-time transactional operational applications. So they spent years building out core technologies that resulted in the MapR products, including the flagship Converged Data Platform, platform-agnostic software that’s designed for the multicloud environment. It can even run on embedded Edge devices.

• With virtualization, organizations began to realize greater utilization of physical hardware. That trend continued with the cloud, as organizations began to get their machines into a pay-as-you-go service. Cloud computing further evolved when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its Lambda service in 2014, introducing a new paradigm in cloud computing that has become commonly referred to as serverless computing. In the serverless model, organizations pay for functions as a service without the need to pay for an always-on stateful, virtual machine.

• Bonitasoft, a specialist in open source business process management and digital transformation software, is partnering with the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud to broaden the reach of its low-code development platform.

• That platform, just released in a new version called Bonita 7.6, comes in an open source version and a subscription version with professional support and advanced features.

• There has been an undeniable popularisation of so-called ‘low-code’ programming platforms.

• This is a strain of technology designed to provide automated blocks of functionality that can be brought together by non-technical staff to perform specific compute and analysis tasks to serve their own business objectives.

CMS

• There’s a short history of publishers fancying themselves as technology companies and building a business selling their tech to other publishers. Publishers realized that building a whole new side business around licensing their tech is a headache and that they needed to focus on what they’re good at, and leave the tech to others.

• New York magazine is trying out a different approach. It built its own content management system (publishers like to give their homegrown CMSes cute names; this one is called Clay, for the magazine’s founder Clay Felker) in 2015 and then licensed the software to the online magazine Slate. Slate started using Clay a year ago and was set to fully migrate its site to Clay this week. But instead of New York charging Slate a licensing fee, Slate is paying New York in the form of code. The CMS is open-source, and developers from both titles contribute to it.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU developers are preparing to quickly ship GCC 7.3 now in order to get out the Spectre patches, a.k.a. the compiler side bits for Retpoline with -mindirect-branch=thunk and friends.

• It was just this past weekend that the back-ported patches landed in GCC 7 while now GCC 7.3 is being prepared as the branch’s next bug-fix point release.

• The keynote speakers for the tenth annual LibrePlanet conference will be anthropologist and author Gabriella Coleman, free software policy expert and community advocate Deb Nicholson, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff technologist Seth Schoen, and FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

• LibrePlanet is an annual conference for people who care about their digital freedoms, bringing together software developers, policy experts, activists, and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments, and tackle challenges facing the free software movement. The theme of this year’s conference is Freedom. Embedded. In a society reliant on embedded systems — in cars, digital watches, traffic lights, and even within our bodies — how do we defend computer user freedom, protect ourselves against corporate and government surveillance, and move toward a freer world? LibrePlanet 2018 will explore these topics in sessions for all ages and experience levels.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• We often cover the work of prolific Dr. Joshua Pearce, an Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech); he also runs the university’s Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Research Group.

• Dr. Pearce, a major proponent for sustainability and open source technology, has previously taught an undergraduate engineering course on how to build open source 3D printers, and four of his former students, in an effort to promote environmental sustainability in 3D printing, launched a business to manufacture and sell recycled and biodegradable filaments.

• Slot die coating is a means of adding a thin, uniform film of material to a substrate. It is a widely used method for the manufacturing of electronic devices – including flat screen televisions, printed electronics, lithium-ion batteries and sensors.

• Up until recently, slot die components were only machined from stainless steel, restricting development and making the process expensive. Now slot dies for in-lab experimental use can be made on a 3D printer at a fraction of the cost.

• Three-dimensional (3-D) printing technology has caught the logistics world’s attention for its potential to save on warehouse and shipping costs by producing items on demand at any location. In the past two years, for example, UPS Inc. announced plans to partner with software developer SAP SE to build a nationwide network of 3-D printers for use by its customers, and General Electric Co. spent nearly $600 million to buy a three-quarters stake in the German 3-D printing firm Concept Laser GmbH.

• Recently, transportation companies have begun turning to the same technology for another application, creating the actual hardware used in vehicles that move the freight. For instance, in late 2016, global aircraft maker Airbus S.A.S. contracted with manufacturing firm Arconic Inc. to supply 3-D printed metal parts for its commercial aircraft.

Programming/Development

• HHVM 3.24 is released! This release contains new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, and supporting work for future improvements. Packages have been published in the usual places.

• The Facebook crew responsible for the HHVM project as a speedy Hack/PHP language implementation is out with its 3.24 release.

• HHVM 3.24 is important as it’s the project’s last release focusing on PHP5 compatibility. Moving forward, PHP5 compatibility will no longer be a focus and components of it will likely be dropped. As well, Facebook will be focusing on their Hack language rather than PHP7. Now that PHP7 is much faster than PHP5 and all around in a much better state, Facebook developers are focusing on their Hack language rather than just being an alternative PHP implementation.

• I’ve observed a sharp uptick of developers and systems administrators interested in “getting into DevOps” within the past year or so. This pattern makes sense: In an age in which a single developer can spin up a globally distributed infrastructure for an application with a few dollars and a few API calls, the gap between development and systems administration is closer than ever. Although I’ve seen plenty of blog posts and articles about cool DevOps tools and thoughts to think about, I’ve seen fewer content on pointers and suggestions for people looking to get into this work.

• Am update of RcppMsgPack got onto CRAN today. It contains a number of enhancements Travers had been working on, as well as one thing CRAN asked us to do in making a suggested package optional.

• MessagePack itself is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it is faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves. RcppMsgPack brings both the C++ headers of MessagePack as well as clever code (in both R and C++) Travers wrote to access MsgPack-encoded objects directly from R.

• SourceForge wants to be more than just another GitHub alternative, but an additional repository for developers to utilize to help gain users.

• 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.

Leftovers

• YouTube will drastically cut down on the number of its partners who can make money from the platform, making it possible only for those who have 1000 subscribers and at least 4000 hours of viewing to earn anything from ads.

• • Delete all social media apps from your phone; check these only from a desktop computer.

• • Turn all banner-style/pop-up/sound notifications off all other apps (keep the badge-type notifications where you have to visually check the app).

• • Leave your phone in your pocket or keep it out of sight for meetings/get-togethers/conversations/meals involving other people.

• • Keep your phone out of sight during your commute.

• • Don’t take your phone with you into the bathroom or toilet.

• Why? · Ob­vi­ous­ly, in­dex­ing the whole Web is crush­ing­ly ex­pen­sive, and get­ting more so ev­ery day. Things like 10+-year-old mu­sic re­views that are nev­er up­dat­ed, no longer ac­cept com­ments, are light­ly if at all linked-to out­side their own site, and rarely if ev­er visited… well, let’s face it, Google’s not go­ing to be sell­ing many ads next to search re­sults that turn them up. So from a busi­ness point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google in­dex­ing ev­ery­thing, no mat­ter how old and how ob­scure.

• My pain here is pure­ly per­son­al; I freely con­fess that I’d been us­ing Google’s glob­al in­fras­truc­ture as my own per­son­al search in­dex for my own per­son­al pub­li­ca­tion­s. But the pain is re­al; I fre­quent­ly mine my own his­to­ry to re-use, for ex­am­ple in con­struct­ing the cur­rent #SongOfTheDay se­ries.

Science

• The marketplace for science search engines is competitive and crowded. But a database launched on 15 January aims to provide academics with new ways to analyse the scholarly literature — including the grant funding behind it.

• Dimensions not only indexes papers and their citations, but also — uniquely among scholarly databases — connects publications to their related grants, funding agencies, patents and clinical trials. The tool “should give researchers more power to look at their fields and follow the money”, says James Wilsdon, a research-policy specialist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Health/Nutrition

• Illegal immigrants are “too frightened” to access healthcare because of a data-sharing agreement between the NHS and the Home Office to track, MPs have heard.

• One domestic worker died because she was too afraid to see a doctor out of fear that her immigration status would be shared with the Home Office, evidence presented to the Health Committee stated.

• Immigrants are being “driven underground” by the legislation, MPs heard at a session which explored the impact of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) published last January, setting out how patient data may be provided to the Home Office by the NHS.

• At a Catcher Technology Co. manufacturing complex in the Chinese industrial city of Suqian, about six hours’ drive from Shanghai, workers stand for up to 10 hours a day in hot workshops slicing and blasting iPhone casings for Apple Inc., handling noxious chemicals sometimes without proper gloves or masks.

• These conditions — some described in a report Tuesday by advocacy group China Labor Watch and others in Bloomberg News interviews with Catcher workers — show the downside of a high-tech boom buoying the world’s second-largest economy. Chinese recruiters play up the chance to build advanced consumer electronics to attract the millions of typically impoverished, uneducated laborers without whom the production of iPhones and other digital gadgets would be impossible.

• First, it was the “gallon challenge” and the “cinnamon challenge.”

• Then some teenagers started playing the “bath-salt challenge.”

• They have dared each other to pour salt in their hands and hold ice till it burns, douse themselves in rubbing alcohol and set themselves ablaze, and throw boiling water on unsuspecting peers.

• Now videos circulating on social media are showing kids biting into brightly colored liquid laundry detergent packets. Or cooking them in frying pans, then chewing them up before spewing the soap from their mouths.

Security

• WordPress 4.9.2 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release for all versions since WordPress 3.7. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

• An XSS vulnerability was discovered in the Flash fallback files in MediaElement, a library that is included with WordPress. Because the Flash files are no longer needed for most use cases, they have been removed from WordPress.

• The Debian-based SolydXK Linux operating system has been updated today with patches for the Meltdown security vulnerability, as well as various other new features and improvements.

• To mitigate the Meltdown security exploit that allows a locally installed program to access the memory, including the kernel memory, and steal sensitive information like passwords and encryption keys, the SolydXK 201801 ISO images are now powered by the latest kernel release with patches against this vulnerability.

• It’s time for users of the Chakra GNU/Linux operating system to patch their systems against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities as new kernel updates landed today in the repos.

• Publicly disclosed earlier this month, the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities are affecting us all, but OS vendors and OEMs are trying their best to mitigate them so that no user can be the victim of attacks where their sensitive data is at risk of getting in the hands of the wrong person.

• Even though the popularity of streaming websites is rising at a fast pace, BitTorrent remains a premier source of entertainment content source for a large chunk of people using the web. With the help of tons of popular torrent sites (there are some completely legal ones as well) and BitTorrent clients, people download content.

• Transmission, one of the most used non-commercial BitTorrent clients, has a vulnerability that allows outsiders to gain control over people’s computers. The flaw affects users who have remote control enabled with the default password. The vulnerability was revealed by a Google researcher, who plans to disclose similar remote code execution flaws in other torrent clients as well.

• Researchers at the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm described the spyware, named Skygofree, as a sophisticated mobile implant “designed for targeted cyber-surveillance” that can be potentially used as an “offensive security” product.

• Nielsen did not go into detail about the active defense measures that the Homeland Security Department is supporting in the private sector.

• Authentication is not the place where coercion can be mitigated — locking the Facebook account of an arrested dissident is more important than a “duress finger” option for a phone. Allowing organisations to securely compartment access to data, and remotely wipe a seized device, is more important than the limitations of FaceID.

• Cures for the pervasive Meltdown and Spectre chip flaws aren’t working, and hacks may soon be incoming.

• Yves here. It is telling that the very measured Bruegel website is pretty bothered that Intel looks likely to get away with relatively little in the way of financial consequences as a result of its Spectre and Meltdown security disasters. This is a marked contrast with Volkswagen, where the company paid huge fines and executives went to jail.

• However, it was the US that went after a foreign national champion. The US-dominated tech press is still frustratingly given the Intel train wrecks paltry coverage relative to their importance.

Defence/Aggression

• “The more of us speak out, defend our freedom and refuse to give up on our liberties, the less the danger will be … focused on certain people,” El Rhazoui told AFP on the sidelines of a conference hosted by the Danish parliament on Saturday.

Finance

• The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender has applied for or received at least 43 patents for blockchain, the ledger technology used for verifying and recording transactions that’s at the heart of virtual currencies. It is the largest number among major banks and technology companies, according to a study by EnvisionIP, a New York-based law firm that specializes in analyses of intellectual property [sic].

• Maersk, the Danish conglomerate that owns the world’s largest container shipping line, will be the first to use the new platform, while International Business Machines Corp. will provide the back end and support for the technology. The new company said it expects to sign up large shippers, ports and customs officials for the service, set to become available in the second half of 2018.

• Davos will have a three-part feature, he said: a collaborative approach since nobody alone can solve the issues of the global agenda, an integrated approach, and a constructive approach. There are many opportunities and perils like never before, and faced with the danger of the collapse of the global system, “it is in our hands to improve the state of the world, that’s what the World Economic Forum stands for,” Schwab said.

• Can you imagine travelling to work in a robotic “Jonnycab” like the one predicted in the cult Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall? The image from 1990 is based on science fiction, but Mercedes Benz does have a semi-autonomous Driver Pilot system that it aims to install in the next five years and Uber is also waging on a self-driving future. Its partnership with Volvo has been seen as a boost to its ambitions to replace a fleet of self-employed drivers with autonomous vehicles.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin [Md.], has become a big star in national media by routinely denouncing Russia as a dire threat to American democracy. The senior senator from Maryland personifies the highly dangerous opportunism that has set in among leading Democrats on the subject of Russia.

• Chelsea Manning confirmed on Sunday that she is challenging Senator Cardin’s re-election effort in the Democratic primary this June. Her campaign has real potential to raise key issues. One of them revolves around the kind of bellicose rhetoric that heightens the dangers of conflict between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

• In the first year of Trump’s presidency, the courts have acted exactly how the Founders intended them to.

• Legal scholars and progressives have long expressed doubt about the utility of courts in advancing social justice. They argue that courts are inherently conservative, that victories often prompt costly backlashes, and that focusing on courts diverts attention from the more important work that needs to be done in the political arena.

• The first year of the Trump administration suggests that this skepticism is overstated. Much to the president’s dismay, those he calls “so-called judges” have repeatedly ruled against the Trump administration. Judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats alike have enforced constitutional guarantees against a president who has shown little regard for the Constitution.

• In this respect, the courts have performed just as Alexander Hamilton hoped they would. In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton argued that a judiciary with life tenure and the power to declare the political branches’ actions unconstitutional was essential, so that judges could serve as “the bulwarks of a limited Constitution.” Rarely has that role been more essential.

• Martin Luther King often spoke of the need for unconditional love. In 1955 he told Black America, “We want to love our enemies — be good to them. This is what we must live by; we must meet hate with love. We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us.” In his remarks on the King holiday President Trump referred to love five times in three sentences.

• “[King] would later write, ‘It was quite easy for me to think of a god of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central.’ That is what Reverend King preached all his life. Love. Love for each other, for neighbors, and for our fellow Americans. Dr. King’s faith in his love for humanity led him and so many heroes to courageously stand up for civil rights of African-Americans,” Trump said.

• [...]

• King stood up for much more than love. And the kind of love that praises King one day after making repeated racist statements, most recently calling African countries and Haiti “shithole countries,” is really no love at all.

• >From Facebook’s standpoint, this move is a pretty easy one to make. Even though it had spent the past few years heavily courting news publishers (including directly paying large publishers many millions of dollars to “pivot to video”), the company hadn’t totally succeeded in becoming the go to source for news (that remains Twitter’s strength). And yet, Facebook was also getting more and more grief over news items in its feeds, especially post-election when people incorrectly wanted to “blame” news on Facebook for Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

• On top of that, this move will only enforce something that Facebook had been inching towards for a while: forcing businesses and publishers to pay to have their news reach a larger audience. So… if this means that Facebook makes more money, distresses fewer people, and doesn’t get attacked as much for the so-called problem of “fake news” it looks like a total win from Facebook’s perspective.

• Publishers, on the other hand, were generally freaked out. Many have spent the past 5 years or so desperately trying to “play the Facebook game.” And, for many, it gave them a decent boost in traffic (if not much revenue). But, in the process, they proceeded to lose their direct connection to many readers. People coming to news sites from Facebook don’t tend to be loyal readers. They’re drive-bys.

• There is no honor among anti-immigrant advocates and liars, I suppose. After dutifully lying on behalf of the president regarding his abhorrent language (“shithole countries”), Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) were outed by the White House.

• Haitian officials on Monday evening held an emergency high court session which resulted in an agreement to unseal and publicly released documents relating to Jean-Claude Duvalier’s indictments for money laundering through Trump tower, during his brutal 15 years dictatorship.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Foreign press organisations and human rights groups have rallied behind Rappler, joining a chorus of domestic outrage among the media and political opposition at what they saw as move to muzzle those scrutinising Duterte.

• ocial Democratic Party (SDP) chief Davor Bernardić on Wednesday criticised Prime Minister Andrej Plenković for censorship, asking him “Where’s the money?” which in Croatian (Di su pare?) is the name of a satire Facebook profile, to which Plenković responded there was no censorship in Croatia and that everyone was allowed to speak their mind responsibly and in accordance with the law.

• “Why can’t the ‘Di su pare?’ Facebook profile continue to be open in Croatia? It had over 300,000 followers, I followed it and I laughed when they wrote satirically about me. The government cannot ban satire or a Facebook profile,” Bernardić said during Question Time in Parliament.

• Fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said that Google and Facebook, two of the world’s biggest technology and social media companies, are an “existential threat” to humanity.

• The chief of the anti-secrecy and whistleblowing platform, who describes himself as a “geopolitical analyst” on his Twitter profile, believes the tech giants have evolved into powerful “digital superstates”.

• “While the internet has brought about a revolution in our ability to educate each other, the consequent democratic explosion has shaken existing democratic establishments to their core,” Assange said Tuesday (16 January), in a statement later posted online.

• His comments were read during an “Organising Resistance to Internet Censorship” webinar, sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) this week.

• It was a programme, Laurie Taylor says, that wasn’t supposed to be – something he succeeded in “sneaking in” because BBC management’s attention was elsewhere. “Entirely bogus” is how he describes the launch of Thinking Allowed in 1998, but, 20 years on, Taylor’s weekly Radio 4 series that looks at research arising from the academic world is long established as the genuine article, and one of the best-loved half-hours on the network.

• Last week, officials at the American Civil Liberties Union made public a letter they had written to the New Jersey Department of Corrections, accusing the department of violating inmates’ rights: Several prisons were refusing to allow inmates access to the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander. Restricting prisoners from reading about injustices in the U.S. prison system struck many as a shocking and ironic overreach. And the state apparently agreed. After being challenged by the ACLU, the department decided to reinstate the book and vowed to review restriction policies for prison libraries.

• This was hardly the first time prison library censorship has drawn criticism. At the end of 2017, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice came under fire when it was discovered that the prison system banned such books as “The Color Purple” and a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, while inmates were free to read Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” And this month, news that New York’s state prison system is restricting what books an inmate may receive through the mail to a handful of claptrap titles generated instant outrage.

• For most of modern history, the easiest way to block the spread of an idea was to keep it from being mechanically disseminated. Shutter the news­paper, pressure the broad­cast chief, install an official censor at the publishing house. Or, if push came to shove, hold a loaded gun to the announcer’s head.

• This actually happened once in Turkey. It was the spring of 1960, and a group of military officers had just seized control of the government and the national media, imposing an information blackout to suppress the coordination of any threats to their coup. But inconveniently for the conspirators, a highly anticipated soccer game between Turkey and Scotland was scheduled to take place in the capital two weeks after their takeover. Matches like this were broadcast live on national radio, with an announcer calling the game, play by play. People all across Turkey would huddle around their sets, cheering on the national team.

• Legacy media organizations can be counted on to squawk when their voices aren’t heard in Republican-controlled forums – such as White House press conferences.

• But when it’s conservatives who are censored on powerful, widely read platforms, it’s hard to find any journalists who care.

• Such was the case last week when Project Veritas exposed, in an undercover investigation, how Twitter systematically diminishes – and even bans – access to posts published by those on the Right. One Twitter manager in charge of gatekeeping called their censorship victims “shi**y people.”

• Social media platform Twitter may be trying to reshape the online narrative by editing out conservative voices, a new undercover video released by Project Veritas alleges.

Privacy/Surveillance

• For many years now, we’ve been among those raising concerns about India’s giant identity database known as Aadhaar. A few weeks ago, we wrote that there appeared to be a fairly massive breach of data from that database, and that the information was now available on the dark web for cheap.

• [...]

• The details on the “police complaint” remain sparse, so perhaps it’s not a huge deal — but any attempt to investigate and/or intimidate (and those can be one and the same in some cases) a reporter for merely exposing a fairly big possible data breach that could effect over a billion people at least suggests an interest in covering up the breach, rather than in understanding the breach and preventing further damage.

• Privacy advocates hailed incremental steps taken to reduce surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency since widespread abuses were first reported about four years ago.

• The reassurances are apparently enough for Congress to approve the continuation of a long-standing program that, while aimed at foreign communications traffic, nonetheless picks up the communications of millions of Americans along the way.

• The biggest controversy in the recent House vote was the stance of President Trump, who tweeted out mixed messages about his support of continuing Section 702 of the post-9/11 foreign intelligence act. The section allows the government to collect internet and email date from Americans if it has any relationship to a foreign country.

• A number of US senators from both sides of the aisle have said they will filibuster an effort to approve the continuation of a controversial American government spying program.

• This mass snooping effort was authorized by section 702 of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act, which expired at the end of last year, and the NSA wants it renewed with a new law passed. Section 702 is supposed to allow Uncle Sam’s g-men to keep close tabs on non-Americans abroad.

• However, the rules have been interpreted by the Feds over the years to give the FBI warrantless access to the NSA’s database so agents can investigate crimes using records on American citizens on American soil. You’d think now would be a good time, while renewing section 702, to rein in the intelligence agencies so that truly only foreigners are targeted.

• A bill to continue the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs for five more years advanced Tuesday in the Senate, overcoming objections that it did not do enough to protect Americans’ civil liberties.

• Opponents came close to filibustering the measure, which was approved by the House last week. But the Senate’s narrow 60-38 vote puts it on track for final passage this week.

• Voting stretched more than an hour as senators lobbied key holdouts in dramatic fashion on the Senate floor.

• As was unfortunately expected, after a very short (and fairly stupid) debate that was full of misleading statements that focused more on “but… but… terrorism!” than anything substantive, the Senate has voted for cloture on the same bill the House approved last week that extends and expands the NSA’s 702 surveillance program, opening it up to widespread abuse and refusing to do simple things like adding in a warrant requirement when used to spy on Americans. The vote was actually surprisingly close — going right down to the wire. They needed 60 votes to get this bill over the top and they almost didn’t get them. The final vote was 60 to 39 with the final vote (well over an hour after the vote starting) coming from Senator Claire McCaskill in favor of warrantless spying on Americans.

• The Senate narrowly voted to begin winding down debate over legislation renewing government surveillance powers, defeating a filibuster by privacy hawks.

• Senators voted 60-38 to wrap up debate on the legislation, which cleared the House last week and extends the surveillance program with only a few small changes.

• The program, absent congressional action, is scheduled to expire on Jan. 19.

• Last week, the House of Representatives voted to reauthorize the FISA Amendments Act—and its controversial Section 702, which establishes general warrants for wiretapping foreigners—and rejected an amendment offered by Rep. Justin Amash that would have at least required the FBI agents to obtain a warrant before sifting through the NSA’s massive database of intercepted communications for Americans’ messages. As I noted in a blog post at the time, the few supposed “reforms” embedded in the authorization bill are cosmetic at best, and more likely will serve to actually expand the scope of warrantless surveillance. But at least Amash’s amendment got a vote, although without the benefit of much in the way of substantive debate.

• The U.S. Senate on Tuesday advanced a bill to renew the National Security Agency’s warrantless internet surveillance programme, as a final push by privacy advocates to derail the measure came up one vote short.

• The U.S. Senate on Tuesday planned to vote to advance a bill to renew the National Security Agency’s warrantless internet surveillance program, as privacy advocates made a final push to derail the measure.

• In 2013, documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden ignited a national debate on the agency’s warrantless surveillance program and citizens’ right to privacy in the digital age. Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives held a vote that may have put an end to that debate.

• The NSA’s warrantless surveillance program was created following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. In 2008, Congress passed Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, a law legalizing the previously secret program. The 256 to 164 vote permitted a six-year extension of the soon-to-expire law, while also legalizing the controversial practice of “about” surveillance.

• It’s also that the transactions of our digital children are permissioned. When our digital children buy a bottle of water with a debit card, a transaction clears somewhere in the background. But that also means that somebody can decide to have the transaction not clear; somebody has the right to arbitrarily decide what people get to buy and not buy, if this trend continues for our digital children. That is a horrifying thought.

• E-governance expert Anupam Saraph said that the decision to come up with virtual ID was admission by UIDAI that storage of Aadhaar number was “dangerous and wrong”.

• If someone knows your Aadhaar number, then they can find out with which bank you have an account easily by dialling a USSD code provided by Aadhaar helpline number.

• The result is that carmakers have turned on a powerful spigot of precious personal data, often without owners’ knowledge, transforming the automobile from a machine that helps us travel to a sophisticated computer on wheels that offers even more access to our personal habits and behaviors than smartphones do.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The sharing occurred in late 2017 and depicted a sexual encounter between two 15-year-olds. The young people charged with sharing the materials ranged in age from 15 to the early 20s. When Facebook learned that the material was being shared, the company notified US authorities, who in turn alerted authorities in Denmark.

• If you grew up in New York City in the 1970s, the number can be hard to get your head around: 291. If you were a reporter in New York City in the early 1990s, the number can almost make your head explode: 291 murders in 2017, the lowest total since the 1950s.

• But the number is perhaps most striking when set not against the numbers of murders in other years, but against this figure: the roughly 10,000 police stops conducted in 2017.

• Who benefits from wealth-based incarceration? The bail sharks.

• If you got arrested, could you come up with the bail needed to buy your immediate freedom?

• For most people, the answer is no. Even though those arrested haven’t been convicted of a crime, the only way for them to get out of jail while they await their day in court is to come up with an alternative source of money. Enter big insurance companies like Lexington National. They’ll get you out, but you have to pay them a fee that you’ll never get back, which guarantees them a hefty profit regardless of the outcome of the case.

• If you think this is corporate greed run amok, you aren’t alone. The legal right to turn a profit on bail is a rare phenomenon globally: It’s only legal in the U.S. and the Philippines. And for good reason.

• After all, the people accused of a crime — and their families desperate to have them home — are hardly in a position to bargain. Since they run the risk of losing their job or home, the accused are at the mercy of bail bond companies, which have a huge amount of leverage over people who sign their exploitative contracts. That’s why bail contracts often contain terms like installment plans and high interest rates that lead to years of debt.

• Danish police have charged 1,004 young people (some under 18) after Facebook notified authorities that Messenger users were sharing a video of two teens under 15 years old having sex, violating laws against the distribution of indecent images of children. Many of those who shared the video did so ‘just’ a few times, police said, but others shared it hundreds of times — they knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t realize it was illegal.

• Anyone found guilty would face no more than 20 days in prison, but they’d also be added to an offender registry for the next 10 years.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• It’s a lost cause — after the Senate passes its CRA resolution, Congress would have to follow suit and then Trump would have to go along with the gag and not veto them — but it’s still a useful one, forcing lawmakers to publicly declare a position on Net Neutrality, an issue that has an improbably high recognition and approval from voters regardless of political affiliation.

• Right now the resolution has the support of all 49 Democrats in the Senate and one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine. But Schumer and the rest of the caucus will have to win over one more Republican vote to prevent Vice President Mike Pence from breaking tie and allowing the repeal to stand.

• Communities across the United States are considering strategies to protect residents’ access to information and their right to privacy. These experiments have a long history, but a new wave of activists have been inspired to seek a local response to federal setbacks to Internet freedom, such as the FCC’s decision to roll back net neutrality protections, and Congress’ early 2017 decision to eliminate user privacy protections.

• Internet service providers (ISP) have a financial incentive and the technical ability to block or slow users’ access, insert their own content on the sites we visit, or give preferential treatment to websites and services with which they have financial relationships. For many years, net neutrality principles and rules, most recently cemented in the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order, helped prevent much of this activity. Net neutrality helped create a landscape where new ideas and services could develop without being crowded out by political pressure or prioritized fast lanes for established commercial incumbents.

• So we’ve repeatedly noted how the FCC’s assault on popular net neutrality protections sits on pretty shaky legal ground. The agency not only ignored the public in trashing the rules, it ignored the nation’s startups, the people who built the internet, and any and all objective data. They also ignored the rampant comment fraud that occurred during the public comment period of the proceeding, a ham-fisted attempt by “somebody” to downplay the massive public opposition to the plan. For good measure the agency also blocked a law enforcement investigation into said fraud and even made up a DDOS attack.

• ISP lawyers and lobbyists know their victory could be short lived if looming lawsuits are able to convince a court that the FCC rushed to pass an “arbitrary and capricious order” while disregarding the public and violating FCC procedure. That’s why they’ve begun pushing hard for new net neutrality legislation they’re claiming will put the debate to bed, but has one real purpose: to pass flimsy, loophole-filled rules now to prevent the FCC (or a future, less cash-compromised Congress) from passing tougher, better rules down the road.

• Just days after Comcast began pushing harder for such legislation, the telecom industry’s most loyal ally in the House, Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn, began pushing a law that perfectly mirrors everything Comcast asked for. Namely, it makes everything but the most ham-fisted abuses (like outright blocking of websites) legal, effectively codifying federal apathy on net neutrality into law. The law doesn’t ban paid prioritization, zero rating, interconnection shenanigans, or any of the areas the modern net neutrality debate currently resides.

• Today, Mozilla filed a petition in federal court in Washington, DC against the Federal Communications Commission for its recent decision to overturn the 2015 Open Internet Order.

DRM

• Copyright law is slow. Whenever you hear about a case of alleged copyright infringement and you think, “What was illegal about this?” consider that the law probably came many, many years before anyone conceived of the activity it’s being used to target. Then it starts to make a little bit more sense.

• Look at how U.S. copyright law treats DRM, the annoying array of methods that digital content providers use to restrict their customers’ behavior. Passed in 1998, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it illegal to bypass DRM or give others the means of doing so. When Congress passed Section 1201, it was mostly thinking of restrictions intended to stop users from making infringing copies of music and movies. The DMCA passed well before manufacturers began putting digital locks on cars, microwaves, toilets, and every other electronic product. We’re now living in a world where it might be a crime to modify the software on your rice cooker. If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is.

• You can almost forgive Congress for this mess—it didn’t know that DRM would soon crawl into every aspect of your life. On the other hand, Congress helped bring the infestation on. The DMCA encouraged manufacturers to build DRM into their products, because doing so gave them ammunition to fight people using their products in ways they didn’t approve of. Can’t compete with unauthorized repair shops? Make them illegal.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• You may recall that the middle of last summer saw us reporting on a somewhat odd trademark dispute between two breweries, Shipyard Brewing Co. and Logboat Brewing Company. Chiefly at issue was the fact that both breweries used images of schooners on their respective labels, except that the images used were laughably different. Also at issue was that Logboat’s “Shiphead” beer used the word “head”, which Shipyard says it uses in a variety of other beers, such as Pumpkinhead, Melonhead and other variations. Shipyard, notably, does not have a beer called “Shiphead”, making this all the more eyebrow-raising.

Copyrights

• Following the conclusion of the 6-month Estonian presidency, the presidency of the Council of the European Union is now Bulgarian, and will be so for the first semester of 2018.

• The Council is one of the key EU institutions and brings the voice of Member States’ governments into the decision- and law-making process. In fact and among other things – together with the European Parliament – the Council is in charge of adopting EU legislation.

• When last we checked in with Venice PI, the copyright troll claiming to hold rights to the movie Once Upon A Time In Venice and attempting to claim in court that a 91 year old man with dementia was part of a torrent swarm offering the movie who, oh by the way, had recently passed away, it was being lightly slapped around by judge Thomas Zilly. Zilly had barred Venice PI from contacting the family of the deceased, halted the trial, questioned the quality of the evidence Venice PI had put before the court, and likewise demanded more information on how that evidence was collected in the first place. Given that the evidence mostly amounted to IP addresses obtained by Venice PI, I had written that this particular judge was likely to be unimpressed by whatever the copyright troll provided.

• Well, hoo-boy, was that ever an understatement. The end result of what Venice PI put before the court in response was the judge issuing a minute order declaring that the company essentially explain its copyright trolling efforts entirely across several cases and slapped the company around for some truly stunning misbehavior. The order goes into three different areas in which Venice PI appears to have really, truly screwed up, starting with the fact that the troll’s claims of ownership and affiliations can’t even be substantiated.

• Kodak’s stock price has tripled since Tuesday as the company announced plans to develop a new blockchain-based digital rights management platform for photographers. Called KodakOne, the new platform, which isn’t available yet, will allow photographers to publicly register their rights in digital photographs on an immutable blockchain.

• The platform will include a digital currency called Kodak Coin that will be used to make licensing payments. There’s an initial coin offering scheduled for January 31.

• “KodakOne provides continual Web crawling in order to protect the IP of its members,” the KodakOne website says. “Where unlicensed usage of images is detected, KodakOne can efficiently manage the post-licensing process.”

• For a few years now I’ve debated writing up a post about why a “blockchain-based DRM” is an idea that people frequently talk about, but which is a really dumb idea. Because the key point in the blockchain is that it “solves” the “double spend” problem of anything digital, there are always some who have argued that it could be useful in stopping the infinitely copyable nature of digital content. But… actually doing that is a much more difficult proposition. Instead, we just get simplistic ideas around using a blockchain ledger merely to establish a form of a rights database. Which… is fine, but hardly all that compelling a use of the blockchain (a regular old database is probably a lot more useful and efficient for that use case).

• But, last week, there was an awful lot of hype, fuss and confusion around what was billed as Kodak launching its own cryptocorrency / blockchain effort called KODAKone and Kodak Coin, that would “create an encrypted, digital ledger of rights ownership for photographers to register both new and archive work that they can then license within the platform.”

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