● 01.24.18

● Links 24/1/2018: New Tails and Firefox Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 5:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• ​The year 2017 has been an eventful year for open source community with highs and lows throughout the year. Open source and Linux continue to dominate with their presence from the mobile phones to supercomputers. Let’s quickly go through some of the major events in the year 2017.

Desktop

• Desktop icons aren’t just a Windows phenomenon. I’m sure if I used Ubuntu or another Linux distribution more often, I’d have a messy desktop in that operating system as well. But a recent move by developers of the GNOME desktop environment to remove desktop icons altogether has me wondering if I’d really miss them if they were gone.

Kernel Space

• Stable kernels 4.14.15, 4.9.78, and 4.4.113 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

• If you haven’t yet upgraded your operating system drive from a mechanical hard disk to a solid state drive, you are really missing out. Prices have dropped dramatically over the years, while at the same time, reliability has improved. Swapping an HDD for an SSD can be very easy too, thanks to cloning software that often comes with the drive.

• Before you buy some random SSD, please know that they are not all the same. True, SATA models largely have equal speeds these days, but the brand really matters from a reliability standpoint. If you want a dependable solid state drive for your data, you should take a look at Samsung. Its offerings are top notch, and today the company launches its newest SATA models — the 860 PRO and EVO.

• It’s been a while since last hearing of Huawei’s efforts around protectable memory support for the Linux kernel that seems to provide safe read-only protection for dynamically allocated data. The eleventh version of these “pmalloc” patches are now available.

• Igor Stoppa sent out “v11″ of these patches implementing protectable memory support for the Linux kernel. Memory marked as protected via pmalloc is forever read-only and can never be made read/write again as part of its design but can be released.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation is taking the first step to bring some commonality across its myriad network efforts by creating the LF Networking Fund (LFN).

• By creating a combined administrative structure, Linux Foundation said LFN will provide a platform for cross-project collaboration.

• LFN will form the foundation for collaboration across the network stack: the data plane into the control plane, to orchestration, automation and testing.

• Open source is transforming networking. Ever since OpenFlow appeared in 2011 and showed that we could use software to improve networking, open-source software, and not hardware, has blazed the future of networking. There was only one problem. There are far, far too many open-source networking projects. The Linux Foundation, home to nine of the 10 largest open-source networking projects, has decided enough is enough. These communities have come together to form the LF Networking Fund (LFN) for cross-project collaboration.

• The Linux Foundation announced a broad restructuring effort for its networking projects on Jan. 23 that will see a new grouping known as the LF Networking Fund (LFN) emerge as the top-level organization.

• Six Linux Foundation open source networking projects are combining into one new project known as the LF Networking Fund (LFN). The six initial projects are ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, FD.io, PDNA, and SNAS.

• Arpit Joshipura will serve as executive director of LFN for the Linux Foundation. Joshipura’s previous title had been general manager of networking and orchestration at the Linux Foundation. “We are going horizontal,” said Joshipura. “I will be driving the general business management of LFN.”

• Samsung Electronics announced today that it has become a Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation Networking Fund.

• The Linux Foundation Networking Fund (LFN) is a new entity that integrates the governance of participating projects in order to enhance operational excellence, simplify member engagement, and increase collaboration across open source networking projects and standards bodies.

• Samsung Electronics became a Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation Networking Fund. In line with the telecommunications industry’s growing awareness of open source, Samsung has been actively participating in a range of open source communities such as Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and OpenStack to come up with virtualisation products that meet all the criteria for commercial use. Samsung said these measures show its effort toward artificial intelligence-based automated network platforms that will deliver simple, flexible and cost-effective network management.

• Samsung has joined the Linux Foundation Networking Fund as a Platinum Member, which means the South Korean conglomerate will collaborate with the open source community to increase the availability of solutions for the next-generation networks. For the uninitiated, the Linux Foundation Networking Fund aims to streamline the management of open source projects by various members. In joining the LNF, Samsung also hopes to facilitate innovation for future networks including 5G.

• The Linux Foundation has decided the time is right for one administrative structure to cover all of its networking efforts, so has created the “LF Networking Fund ” to oversee them all.

• While the Fund is mostly a governance effort, the Foundation has decided to implement it because software-defined networking (SDN) is growing like a weed and is expected to accelerate further as 5G and cloud make it more useful. Participants in SDN projects have already told the Foundation they worry about overlap and interoperability, while end-users are asking for consistency between projects.

• Hot on the heels of Verizon’s joining the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), a membership it shares with arch-rival AT&T, the Linux Foundation has announced the details of a major shift in the way its telecoms-related open source projects are to be organised.

• It’s combining six major open source projects under a ‘horizontal umbrella’, with more to follow.

• The foundation is looking to gently narrow what many critics say is an over-crowded field of open-sourcery, to create a set of core Linux Foundation open source projects which, by implication, should form the basis of SDN/NFV and telcos’ technical transformation.

Graphics Stack

• The Qualcomm-aligned Code Aurora is working on supporting the latest-generation Adreno A6xx graphics hardware with the open-source Freedreno+MSM driver stack.

• Last May we reported on a Nouveau developer adding SPIR-V support to Gallium3D’s OpenCL state tracker. Finally the better part of one year later, Pierre Moreau is ready with the second version of these patches to accept this IR associated with Vulkan / OpenCL 2.1+ within Clover.

• I have spent some time this weekend trying out the DRM-Next code slated for inclusion in Linux 4.16 when its merge window opens next week. The DRM-Next state of the AMDGPU driver appears to be in good shape, at least for the RX 580 and RX Vega cards used for my initial testing.

• It was just a few days ago that Valve Linux developer Timothy Arceri enabled GLSL 4.50 support for RadeonSI’s NIR back-end after previously taking care of tessellation shaders and other requirements. Now he has taken to implementing some other extensions in RadeonSI’s NIR code-path.

• The first release candidate for Mesa 18.0.0 is now available.

• The plan is to have one release candidate every Friday, until the anticipated final release on 9th February 2018.

• The expectation is that the 17.3 branch will remain alive with bi-weekly releases until the 18.0.1 release.

• NOTE: Building the SWR with LLVM 3.9 is currently not possible. Please use newer LLVM version until the issue is resolved.

• Here are the people which helped shape the current release.

• Feature development on Mesa 18.0 has now ended with the release today of 18.0-RC1 following the code-base being branched.

• Emil Velikov of Collabora just announced the availability of Mesa 18.0-RC1. As usual, he’s planning on weekly release candidates until the 18.0.0 stable release is ready to ship. Velikov tentatively expects to ship Mesa 18.0.0 around 9 February, but as we know from past releases, it might end up slipping by some days.

• Posted a short time ago were 17 patches for the Intel DRM kernel driver to allow for basic display initialization, albeit at this time these patches are incomplete. These latest patches can be found on intel-gfx.

• LunarG has rolled out their “DevSim” device simulator for Vulkan so developers can easily test their applications/games in varying configurations without actually changing out the underlying Vulkan driver or graphics processor.

• LunarG has now officially rolled out ‘DevSim’, a rather fancy tool for developers to test their Vulkan games and applications against many different configurations.

Benchmarks

• For those that may be looking to assemble a new low-end Linux gaming system in early 2018, here is a look at the Linux gaming performance of an Intel Pentium (Kabylake) processor to an AMD Ryzen 3 while testing with the GeForce GTX 1050 and Radeon RX 560 graphics cards.

• Our latest in benchmarking the Linux 4.15 kernel is seeing how the performance has changed since Linux 4.0 and all subsequent releases on the same system. Here are those tests driven by curiosity, especially in light of the performance changes as a result of KPTI page table isolation and Retpoline additions.

Applications

• COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software.

• Here’s a set of new and interesting projects in COPR.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 160.

• curl 7.58.0 is the 172nd curl release and it contains, among other things, 82 bug fixes thanks to 54 contributors (22 new). All this done with 131 commits in 56 days.

• We have just opened up the registration site for curl up 2018, the annual curl developers meeting that this year takes place in Stockholm, Sweden, over the weekend April 14-15. There’s a limited number of seats available, so if you want to join in the fun it might be a good idea to decide early on.

• Taskcluster has always been open source: all of our code is on Github, and we get lots of contributions to the various repositories. Some of our libraries and other packages have seen some use outside of a Taskcluster context, too.

• MKVToolNix developer Moritz Bunkus released a major version of his open-source and cross-platform MKV (Matroska) manipulation utility for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.

• MKVToolNix 20.0 is an important release that comes with major changes at code and functionality end. These include the removal of numerous deprecated functions, implementation of the cmark library as a new requirement for package maintainers, and the complete rewrite of mkvinfo’s internals.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 3.0, which is a compatibility layer for Linux-based systems has been released. The version brings the ability to run Windows apps on your Android device. Until now, Wine allows users to run Windows apps on Linux and other Unix-like OS.

• Our smartphones are getting so powerful that they’re being used for sometimes crazy things, like bitcoin mining or running as a desktop. How about running a desktop? Been there, done that, at least as far as Linux is concerned. But running Windows programs on Android, without tricks like remote desktops or virtual machines, is a different thing entirely. It could, however, be close to becoming reality thanks to the latest WINE 3.0 release, which paves the way for running Windows win32 programs on Android almost natively.

• Wine, the Windows emulator that (typically) runs on Linux is coming to Android.

• The open-source compatibility layer has been a mainstay of Linux since 1993, enabling users to deploy applications built for Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system without having to install the OS itself – notwithstanding

• The newly-released Wine 3.0 includes graphics drivers that extend this functionality to Android.

Games

• If you need a game to sink a few hours into this is your chance, as the Humble Paradox Bundle 2018 is now live. As usual, I will only list the Linux games for you.

• Basingstoke [Official Site, Steam] looks like a roguelike that I could get along with, it mixes in stealth and arcade action with some fun visuals.

• When I first saw it, I thought the graphical style looked somehow familiar. Turns out it’s being developed by Puppy Games, who made the excellent Revenge of the Titans, Droid Assault and more that also support Linux. It’s really pleasing to know they will continue to support Linux, as I do love their games.

• 10tons Ltd (Crimsonland and Neon Chrome) certainly love their top-down shooters, they love them so much they’re doing another one. Tesla vs Lovecraft [Steam] is their next title and it releases with Linux support on the 26th.

• Celeste [Official Site], the narrative-driven platformer from the creator of TowerFall is now officially confirmed to be releasing on Linux. It’s actually releasing tomorrow, so you really don’t have long to wait!

• Feral Interactive, the absolute monster when it comes to big Linux game ports is asking what you want to see again.

• Tomorrow Corporation has announced ’7 Billion Humans’ [Steam, Official Site] as a followup to the puzzle game Human Resource Machine and it’s coming to Linux.

• Feral Interactive is the company behind a stack of well-known Linux game ports and now they’re asking which game you most want to see released on Linux.

• It’s not often I enjoy a game as thoroughly as Iconoclasts, there’s so much about it to love it’s something I will remember for a long time.

• Disclosure: Key provided by the developer and GOG. Also, GOG links are affiliate links.

• Iconoclasts took a long time to make, the developer said it took seven years of full time development to make it happen, the end result is something quite remarkable. A game that would have fit rather nicely on the classic Sega Mega Drive, yet it feels fresh, fun and absolutely full of life.

• Godot Engine [Official Site] is nearly ready to level up with the big 3.0 release, they’ve put out a second release candidate for testing.

• The final release of Godot 3.0 is getting closer and closer! We had a first Release Candidate (RC) last week, quite stable already but with some remaining blockers and late regressions.

• After a week of bugfixing with a tight control of what gets merged and what must wait for the 3.1 development cycle, we should now have a pretty good RC 2.

• Valve released today a new stable update of its Debian-based SteamOS gaming operating system that brings a new kernel version, new Nvidia and AMD drivers, and lots of up-to-date components.

• SteamOS 2.148 is now the newest stable release of the Linux-based operating system that ships pre-installed on Steam Machines. While it remains based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” operating system series, SteamOS 2.148 is powered by the latest Linux 4.14.13 kernel, which includes patches for Spectre and Meltdown flaws.

• Additionally, SteamOS 2.148 includes new Nvidia, AMD, and Intel graphics drivers. It uses the Nvidia 387.22 proprietary graphics driver for Nvidia GPUs, as well as the open-source Mesa 17.2.4 graphics stack for AMD Radeon and Intel GPUs. Other than that, the update comes with better upgrade support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Recent news in the Linux desktop community recall an interesting time in Plasma’s history: Release 4.1 in 2008, Plasma’s second release ever, that time we (in)famously abandoned desktop icons (sneak preview: they came back).

• Of course we never really abandoned them. Instead, in 4.1 we initially debuted the Folder View technology, which powers most of the ways to browse file locations on a Plasma desktop. Folder View gives you folder widgets on the desktop, folder popups on your panels – and yes, desktop icons, which always remained a supported option. An option we, crucially, did decide to tick default-off at the time. Instead we chose to place a folder widget on the default desktop, in part to reinforce the then-new widget-oriented ways of doing things in Plasma, things older KDE desktops just couldn’t do.

• [We made someone very happy]

• This feature was implemented by one of our newer contributors, Andreas Krutzler, who’s already making a name for himself with some high-quality work on Dolphin. Great Job, Andreas!

• Sometimes our labors can seem a bit abstract, but as the above screenshot shows, it makes a difference. Our software gets used every day by millions of real people with real needs, frustrations, challenges, and triumphs.

• A common user complaint about Discover has been that the design could use some improvement. We set out to remedy this in the soon-approaching release of Plasma 5.12, with the aid of KDE’s Visual Design Group. VDG members came up with endless ideas and mockups, and we spent weeks discussing things and iterating on the design. I wanted to share the evolution of a single view in Discover: the application page.

• See for yourself our spectacular demos showing our work in Qt, C++ and Qt 3D, including some of KDAB’s best known tools, GammaRay, Hotspot and Clazy, developed to enhance efficiency in our client projects, and Qt Automotive Suite – taking the hassle out of developing for automotive, using Qt.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The setup for my main production system that is still on Fedora Workstation 26 with GNOME Shell 3.24.3 has been working out fine. The two displays are the ASUS MG28UQ monitors that work out well on their own and do work with AMDGPU FreeSync on Linux. A GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is enough to power the dual 3840 x 2160 displays for desktop tasks mostly limited to many terminals, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, and other GNOME desktop applications. Certainly that lower-end Pascal GPU isn’t fast enough for 4K gaming, but it’s not like I have the time for any gaming and for a purely desktop system it’s working out fine paired with the 387.34 proprietary driver on Fedora 26 paired with Linux 4.14.

• Landing today in GNOME’s Mutter Git tree are some longstanding patches by Collabora’s Daniel Stone for supporting the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) with buffer modifiers for DRM.

• By Mutter supporting buffer modifiers when its serving as a Wayland compositor, it can now support tiling and compression of scanout surfaces when passing to the DRM drivers via Mesa’s GBM.

• Last month, we had the pleasure of interviewing Øyvind Kolås, aka “pippin,” about his work on GEGL — a fundamental technology enabling GIMP and GNOME Photos.

• Shobha’s history with GNOME began when she participated in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internship in December 2013, with GNOME as her mentoring organization. She attended her first GUADEC in 2014 while she was an OPW intern, and met Emily Chen, who introduced her to the GNOME.Asia Summit.

• Passionate about helping to spread GNOME throughout Asia, Shobha was resolute to rise to the challenge of bringing GNOME.Asia Summit to her home in Delhi, India. Fast-forward two years, Shobha is proudly leading the local organizing team of GNOME.Asia, which is ready to lift its curtain in Delhi, on April 21, 2016.

Distributions

• Perhaps, if you have ever thought about becoming a hacker or studying to be an IT security auditor, you might have wondered, “How do I do such and such?” or “What tools are used for that?” Linux pentesting distributions are useful and versatile tools for testing security on different platforms.

• And while a lot of security auditors stay faithful to their preferred distributions, let’s honor the saying “new year, new you” by giving ourselves the luxury of highlighting some new tools and looking at how to choose the one that suits us best. The idea is to offer a starting point for getting to know some of the most popular distributions for different aims and purposes.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• Nitrux OS 1.0.7 is the latest release of Nitrux OS, it now available to download and install on your PC/laptop. Nitrux is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu suitable for laptops and desktop computers. Nitrux provides all the benefits of the Ubuntu operating system combined with a focus on portable, distributable application formats like AppImages.

• Nitrux OS uses the development branch of Ubuntu as a basis using only the core system and then slowly building up to ensure a clean user experience. Nitrux is suitable for newcomers to Linux as well as *nix experienced users. Nitrux uses KDE Plasma 5 featuring Nomad Desktop and the latest KDE Applications.

Red Hat Family

• They’re not quite virtual systems, since they rely on the host OS to operate, nor are they simply applications. Dan Walsh from Red Hat has said that on Linux, “everything is a container,” reminding me of the days when people claimed that everything on Unix was a file. But the vision has less to do with the guts of the OS and more to do with explaining how containers work and how they are different than virtual systems in some very interesting and important ways.

• In this video, learn how the Open Service Broker API simplifies service provisioning across service providers and how the service broker works on OpenShift with this overview and demo from Veer Muchandi.

• With the advent of JUnit 5 we decided to develop a specific integration for JUnit 5 (vertx-junit5) that works great of course with Java but also with the languages that have seamless interoperability with Java and where using JUnit is popular: Kotlin and Groovy. It is important to note that vertx-unit is not being abandoned, as it remains useful for other JVM languages and for projects using JUnit 4.

• After more than a year the latest version of syslog-ng compiles again on Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6. This is thanks to a patch from Balázs Scheidler which resolves compatibility problems with older glib releases implementing the missing functions within syslog-ng. As someone living on the edge I consider RHEL 6 ancient (even sometimes RHEL 7), but this release is still in wide use. This is the last RHEL release without systemd and also forms the base of Amazon’s Linux AMI running millions of instances. RHEL 6 is supported by Red Hat almost until the end of 2020.

• The applications that run the modern enterprise rely upon, in some way, shape, or form, the operating system. Forming the linchpin of business IT, the operating system serves as the foundation for service and application innovation. Today, we’re pleased to announce the latest update to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform with the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5.

• Powering business applications with greater control, confidence, and freedom, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta is designed to provide a consistent foundation across the hybrid cloud and offers key new and enhanced features around security and compliance, platform efficiency, and manageability. Additionally, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues to support alternative architectures, with variants available for IBM Power, IBM System z, and Arm deployments as well as x86.

• Software provider Red Hat is now in the search for a new channel sales director after Colin Garro stepped down from the role.

• Garro left his role with Red Hat at the end of last year, and is set to commence a new role with cloud security provider Mailguard as its global director for direct and channel sales.

• Having Swagger Documentation in any developer portal is very important for developers to know how to use APIs. However, not all developers may be using the same applications. How can you make it so developers only see the docs relevant to them? Luckily some JavaScript magic can make this possible for the 3Scale developer portal.

Finance

Fedora

• One possible solution to these problems is actually to ‘move Qubes to the cloud.’ Readers who are allergic to the notion of having their private computations running in the (untrusted) cloud should not give up reading just yet. Rest assured that we will also discuss other solutions not involving the cloud. The beauty of Qubes Air, we believe, lies in the fact that all these solutions are largely isomorphic, from both an architecture and code point of view.

Debian Family

• For years now Google has used Ubuntu as the base for their own private in-house OS, Goobuntu, to what they are now calling gLinux, which will be based off the unstable Debian-Testing branch for Debian 10 “Buster.”

• Using the testing branch of Debian does mean that the stability of the OS could be questioned, since Debian Stable is known as virtual unshakable, but Debian testing is almost the complete opposite at times.

• My home server is still running Debian Jessie. I’m happy that it just works and my services are up, but I’m sad that I couldn’t find time for an upgrade to Debian stable (which is now Debian 9 Stretch) and maybe reinstall it with another config. I have lots of photos and videos to upload in my GNU MediaGoblin instances, but also couldn’t find time to do it (nor to print some of them, which was a plan for 2017, and the files still sleep in external harddrives or DVDs). So, this is a TODO item that crossed the year (yay! now I have almost 12 months ahead to try to complete it!). I’ll try to get this done before summer. I am considering installing my own pump.io instance but I’m not sure it’s good to place it in the same machine as the other services. We’ll see.

• [...]

• We still have servers running Debian Wheezy which is in LTS support until May. I’m confident that we’ll upgrade before Wheezy reaches end of life, but frankly looking at my work plan, I’m not sure when. Every month seems packed with other stuff. I’ve taken some weeks leave to attend my family and I have no clear mind about when and how do things. We’ll see.

• Debian is applying as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2018, an internship program open to university students aged 18 and up.

• Debian already has a wide range of projects listed but it is not too late to add more or to improve the existing proposals. Google will start reviewing the ideas page over the next two weeks and students will start looking at it in mid-February.

• Please join us and help extending Debian! You can consider listing a potential project for interns or listing your name as a possible co-mentor for one of the existing projects on Debian’s Google Summer of Code wiki page.

• Every year I participate in a number of initiatives introducing people to free software and helping them make a first contribution. After all, making the first contribution to free software is a very significant milestone on the way to becoming a leader in the world of software engineering. Anything we can do to improve this experience and make it accessible to more people would appear to be vital to the continuation of our communities and the solutions we produce.

• I asked her about how she interacted with her mentors and how often, so I knew what I could ask for. She told me about her weekly meetings with her mentors and how she could chat direcly with them when she ran into some issues. And, indeed, I felt like things like that what I wanted to happen.

• Before I could reach out and discuss this with my mentors, though, Daniel himself read last week’s post and brought up the idea of us speaking on the phone for the first time. That was indeed a good experience and I told him I would like to repeat or establish some sort of schedule to communicate with each other.

Derivatives

• Tails, the open-source Linux-based operating system designed to protect user’s privacy while surfing the Internet, also known as Anonymous OS, was updated today to version 3.5.

• Coming only two weeks after the Tails 3.4 release, which included patches for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities publicly disclosed earlier this month, today’s Tails 3.5 update is here to bump the Linux kernel to version 4.14.13 and include the microcode firmware for AMD CPUs to mitigate the Spectre flaw.

• Just earlier this month, the creators of Tails Linux distribution released their updated version that included the steps taken by Linux kernel devs to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Within one month, they’re here with a new and updated version with more security fixes.

Canonical/Ubuntu

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

• Nothing too major happened this past week. Part of the time was at an internal planning meeting and the rest have been working on clustering, preparation for 3.0 and fixing a variety of bugs.

• The Kernel Team is completely focused on addressing any Spectre and Meltdown issues as they arise. A secure Ubuntu is our top priority. No new Livepatches are being produced and our regular SRU cycles are suspended while we address Spectre and Meltdown.

• As details of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities1 have become clearer a number of statements have been published by the multiple vendors affected; Canonical has issued advisories and updates on fixes and mitigations, the latest of which mitigate known Spectre attacks. However, most of these statements focus on the mechanics of applying fixes and corresponding damage control, and not on explaining what the problems are, how the mitigations work, and how they may affect you.

Devices/Embedded

• Lime Microsystems anounced an open source prototype hack that combines a LimeSDR Mini board, a Raspberry Pi Zero, and a PiCam, and is billed as one of the world’s smallest DVB transmitters.

• Lime Microsystems is promoting an open source prototype developed by Evariste Okcestbon that it speculates is the world’s smallest DVB (digital video broadcasting) transmitter. A YouTube demo video (see farther below) demonstrates the hardware/software hack, which streams video from a 65 x 30mm Raspberry Pi Zero equipped with the official Raspberry Pi Camera (PiCam) to the 69 x 31mm LimeSDR Mini board via USB.

• An important feature of the Raspberry Pi is the row of GPIO pins, where GPIO stands for general purpose input/output. It will allow us to communicate between Pi and the outside world. We have 40pins on Pi, we count these pins from left to right out of which seventeen pins are GPIO pins. Different pins are used for the different functions and can be connected to a number of external peripherals such as buttons, lights, relays, sensors, etc.

• Keynote Photonics has launched a $499 “LC3000G2-Pi” light-steering and 3D vision add-on for the Raspberry Pi, and will soon ship a “LC3000G2-PRO,” which similarly offers TI’s DLP3000 chipset, but runs TI Lightcrafter APIs on its own DM365-based Linux board.

• Texas Instruments’ Linux-driven DLP (digital light processing) technology was originally launched as a projection technology, and is still primarily used for projection applications ranging from pico projectors you can plug into your laptop to advanced digital cinema projection machines. Yet, the technology is increasing moving into machine vision.

• We have spent the last two months building our design team for the Librem 5 Phone project. We have been studying the current state of mobile design within the free software community as well as large companies that have shown success in mobile. We have been in the planning phases of development attempting to produce an ethically designed device and now that we have a working prototype we have shifted to the process of designing User Interfaces (UI) and User eXperience (UX) for the Librem 5.

• Last week Purism shared a progress update on the Librem 5 smartphone project where they outlined their plans to continue pursuing the i.MX8M SoC and other plans. They’ve kept up their word of delivering weekly status updates and out today is their latest summary of work.

• This week’s update by Creative Director François Téchené covers their plans for a unified (and convergent) experience across the Purism devices running PureOS from the Librem 5 smartphone to their laptops.

Android

• Android’s file manager app is a vital piece of software on the device. The user-visible file system allows you to browse files, downloads, manage storage space, move things around and lot more.

• Google has made another addition to their list of Go branded Android apps that are intended for low-powered devices mostly running the Android Oreo Go edition. The new member of the Go family is a stripped down version of Google’s keyboard app called Gboard.

Free Software/Open Source

• Some weeks ago I’ve read somewhere in Twitter about how good will be to adopt and share the practice of thanking the opensource developers of the tools you use and love. Don’t remember neither who or where, and probably I’m stealing the method s/he proposed.

• Researchers in automated software engineering now have access to proven industrial strength tools to automate common programming tasks. GrammaTech, Inc., a leading developer of commercial embedded software analysis and transformation tools, announced immediate availability of their Software Evolution Library (SEL) as open source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We accept things in the online world that we wouldn’t accept in the physical one. For instance, how would you feel if you popped your head in a store and that store now had the ability to keep sending you flyers even if you didn’t buy anything? Online, we often visit sites that track us, but it isn’t clear when this is happening or how the information is being used. Adding insult to injury, this often invisible tracking actually slows down web pages.

• Mozilla has set free Firefox 58.0 today as their latest “Firefox Quantum” release that continues work on being a performant web browser.

• Mozilla is rolling out Firefox Quantum 58.0 for desktop, along with Firefox for Android 58.0. It arrives over two months after the landmark release of Firefox Quantum 57.0.

• The latest build focuses on performance and security, while an update to Firefox’s user profile feature means it’s no longer backwards compatible with previous versions. Android users also gain the ability to pin favorite websites to their home screen for use like native apps.

• The Mozilla Foundation has made Firefox 58 files available for download on its official FTP servers. An official announcement will be made later today when the organization will also release the final changelog.

• We just can’t stop making Firefox faster — and with our most recent release, we also made it easier for you to control how much you’re tracked.

• 2017 was a big year for Mozilla, culminating in the release of Firefox Quantum, a massive multi-year re-tooling of the browser focused on speed, and laying the groundwork for the years to come. In 2018, we’ll build on that incredible foundation, and in that spirit our next several releases will continue to bear the Quantum moniker. Let’s take a look at some of the new goodies that Firefox 58 brings.

• Firefox 58, out today, continues to deliver Project Quantum, Mozilla’s far-reaching modernization effort that’s boosting the browser’s performance, security, and maintainability. The initiative allows Firefox to take better advantage of modern multicore processors and makes the browser better suited to the demands of today’s Web applications.

• Here’s what happened on the MozMEAO SRE team from December 2017 – January 23.

• For over a year now, I’ve been hacking on WebRender. It was born in Servo as an experimental way to batch the painting and compositing of the web content on GPU. Today it’s a solid piece of engineering that’s going to mainline Firefox as the next big Rust-written component within the Quantum project. You can read more about WebRender on our team’s blog as well as this wonderfully illustrated article by Lin Clark.

• Many of your favorite sites keep track of what you do online. They may do it to understand if you’re interested in a particular article, item or activity. They may do it to make your experience of their site easier. They may also track you so they can try to sell you things.

• Online ads can be customized on the fly based on what you do. Been searching for a new pair of Chucks? Mega Shoe Company has a great deal for you. To serve those custom ads at just the right time, the shoe company needs to know where you go online. Is that bad? Some argue that customized (targeted) ads are much better than traditional billboards or radio spots. At least with targeted ads, there’s a good chance you’ve been looking for what they’re selling. But you may not want companies following you around the web.

• On January 11th, 2018, Mozilla held the first in-person meeting of the MDN Product Advisory Board (PAB) in London. The goal of the MDN Product Advisory Board, in collaboration with Microsoft, Google, and other industry leaders, is to provide guidance that helps MDN be the best reference for web developers.

• To that end, I’m pleased to announce that the web platform consultancy Bocoup, represented by Rick Waldron, will be joining the MDN Product Advisory Board starting in February. Bocoup brings a practitioner’s perspective to the the standards process and participates in a wide range of open source projects. Rick has actively contributed to MDN since May of 2011, writing documentation, reviewing contributions, and participating in the maintenance of the JavaScript Reference sub-articles. He’s written proposals and specifications for new JavaScript APIs and syntax, participated in ECMAScript® 2015, 2016, 2017 Language Specifications, and represents Bocoup at ECMA TC39 meetings. I’m very excited Rick will be adding his considerable industry knowledge and JavaScript focus to the board and look forward to him joining our next meeting.

• We’ve just published MOSS’s Q4 2017 update, bringing you up to speed on what’s going on in the world of MOSS (Mozilla Open Source Support, our program for giving back to the open source and free software community).

• Mozilla released its first web browser update for 2018 on Jan. 23 with the debut of Firefox 58. The new release includes features designed to accelerate performance as well as patches for 32 security vulnerabilities.

• Firefox 58 is the second major release in the Quantum series, which became generally available in November 2017 with Firefox 57. A core element of the Firefox Quantum browser series is performance, and that has been improved even more in Firefox 58, thanks to a capability called Off-Main-Thread-Painting (OMTP).

• Firefox 58.0 was released yesterday, and Project Quantum continues to deliver performance gains. Read the release notes for more information on all the improvements.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The major LibreOffice 6.0 release is coming next week, and The Document Foundation’s Mike Saunders talked with members of the community to get their perspectives on LibreOffice’s new design.

• While it won’t bring a massive redesign, as most users may have expected, LibreOffice 6.0 will include a few noteworthy design changes, including new table styles, new gradients, updated motif/splash screen, improved Notebookbars, menu and toolbar improvements, and the Elementary icons.

• It’s unfortunately too late for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.0 open-source office suite that was branched two weeks ago, but its next release will feature a KDE5 desktop back-end.

• Being merged today to LibreOffice mainline Git is a KDE5 back-end that is mostly the existing KDE4 back-end ported to using Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

• Immediately following that commit was the GTK3_VC5 VCL plug-in. This code mostly displays the GTK3 version of the LibreOffice user-interface but replaces the file and folder picker with that of KDE’s KF5 dialogs.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The way big companies are open sourcing significant AI is both gratifying and slightly worrying. AI is the biggest revolution since we discovered fire and started making tools. FaceBook AI Research has added to the list of what is available by open sourcing its Detectron project.

• Facebook’s artificial intelligence research (FAIR) team today announced it would open-source its object detection platform Detectron, as well as the research the team has done on it.

• acebook has brought us one step closer to a Skynet future made a commitment to computer vision boffinry by open-sourcing its codebase for object detection, Detectron.

• Written in Python and powered by the Caffe2 deep learning framework, the codebase – which implements object-sniffing algos such as Mask R-CNN and RetinaNet – is available under the Apache 2.0 licence.

• British designer Tom Dixon’s portfolio is an eclectic one, including everything from high-concept paperweights to masculine scented candles. But his recent collaboration with Swedish furniture retailer IKEA might be one of his most fascinating: the design of a modular sofa with seemingly endless combinations and configurations.

• Quest Software on Monday announced a series of updates to its Toad open source database software applications, including new versions of its Toad Edge, Toad Data Point and Toad Intelligence Central products.

• After launching the first version of Toad Edge last summer, the company began seeing an uptick in downloads of freeware that supported MySQL on its Toad World community site. It also received requests to support MariaDB and Postgres, according to Julie Hyman, senior product manager at Quest.

• “The customers are now champing at the bit for support of those additional platforms and we are delivering,” she told LinuxInsider.

• The company began supporting MariaDB last month. It will provide support for Postgres with a Toad World preview release in February and commercial availability by April or May.

• Rajeev Peshawaria discusses his new book: Open Source Leadership: Reinventing Management When There’s No More Business as Usual.

Funding

• Says it will use the money to expand outside the US, bring more Fortune 500 companies into the fold

• Mozilla was born out of, and remains a part of, the open source and free software movement. Through the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program, we recognize, celebrate, and support open source projects that contribute to our work and to the health of the Internet. That’s why in 2017 we invested $1,650,000 in supporting open source projects around the globe. Half a million of which we dispersed just since our last update in October.

Licensing/Legal

• Though open source is thoroughly mainstream, new software technologies and old technologies that get newly popularized sometimes inspire hand-wringing about open source licenses. Most often the concern is about the GNU General Public License (GPL), and specifically the scope of its copyleft requirement, which is often described (somewhat misleadingly) as the GPL’s derivative work issue.

• One imperfect way of framing the question is whether GPL-licensed code, when combined in some sense with proprietary code, forms a single modified work such that the proprietary code could be interpreted as being subject to the terms of the GPL. While we haven’t yet seen much of that concern directed to Linux containers, we expect more questions to be raised as adoption of containers continues to grow. But it’s fairly straightforward to show that containers do not raise new or concerning GPL scope issues.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• The beginning of the year 2018 brought new challenges in the form of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in most of the processor architectures. In layman terms, both of these vulnerabilities allow hackers to steal sensitive data like passwords. This vulnerability is applicable to Intel, AMD, and ARM. This means the problem is universal as it affects almost all devices ranging from embedded devices, smartphones, desktops, and servers to supercomputers.

• Nobody likes it when kernels don’t work and even less so when they are broken on a Friday afternoon. Yet that’s what happened last Friday. This was particularly unsettling because at -rc8, the kernel is expected to be rock solid. An early reboot is particularly unsettling. Fortunately, the issue was at least bisected to a commit in the x86 tree. The bad commit changed code for an AMD specific feature but oddly the reboot was seen on non-AMD processors too.

• It’s easy to take debug logs for granted when you can get them. The kernel nominally has the ability for an ‘early’ printk but that still requires setup. If your kernel crashes before that, you need to start looking at other debug options (and your life choices). This was unfortunately one of those crashes. Standard x86 laptops don’t have a nice JTAG interface for hardware assisted debugging. Debugging this particular crash was not particularly feasible beyond changing code and seeing if it booted.

• Electronics enthusiasts, hobbyists and makers looking for a handy tool to help you troubleshoot their latest project, may be interested in an open source PantoProb created by Kurt Schaefer. As you can see from the image above the open source probe requires a few 3D printed parts as well as some off-the-shelf hardware which is easily sourced. Kurt has also provided full instructions and a Github repo with all the necessary files to make your very own 3D printed testing probe. Check out the video below to learn more.

• Recently Apple has been granted a patent for a color 3D printing idea whereby the printed object is first made and then colored in afterwards. This idea is a straightforward one; using it one could print an object using FDM for example and then later color it with an inkjet print head. This method would play to both technologies’ strengths with FDM making for strong objects that are very dimensionally accurate but often suffer from poor surface quality. By having a separate print head then color in and, more importantly perhaps, strengthen and smooth over the object as well as add things such as conductivity, the resulting object would look nice as well. This could be a potential breakthrough in expanding 3D printing.

Programming/Development

• ActiveState, a leader in providing commercial open source language distributions, announced today its plans for a SaaS Platform. The platform will fulfill enterprises’ unaddressed need for open source language solutions. The company leads the offering with the ability to verify open source Python applications at runtime; Python distros have security built into the language runtime. IT Security & DevSecOps teams benefit from automatic runtime verification.

• The basic idea behind threading is a simple one: just as the computer can run more than one process at a time, so too can your process run more than one thread at a time. When you want your program to do something in the background, you can launch a new thread. The main thread continues to run in the foreground, allowing the program to do two (or more) things at once.

• What’s the difference between launching a new process and a new thread? A new process is completely independent of your existing process, giving you more stability (in that the processes cannot affect or corrupt one another) but also less flexibility (in that data cannot easily flow from one thread to another). Because multiple threads within a process share data, they can work with one another more closely and easily.

• 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.

Standards/Consortia

• I’m happy to announce that after three years of standardization work in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Social Working Group, ActivityPub has finally been made an official W3C recommended standard. Hooray!

• ActivityPub is a protocol for building decentralized social networking applications. It provides both a server-to-server protocol (i.e. federation) and a client-to-server protocol (for desktop and mobile applications to connect to your server). You can use the server-to-server protocol or the client-to-server protocol on their own, but one nice feature is that the designs for both are very similar. Chances are, if you’ve implemented support for one, you can get support for the other with very little extra effort! We’ve worked hard to make ActivityPub easy to understand. If this is your first time reading about it, I recommend diving into the overview.

Leftovers

• There, she records, the group was debating the arguments of poet and chemist Sir Humphry Davy and discussed “the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated”.

• For decades his poster remained all but forgotten. Then, in the early 1980s, a copy came to light — most likely from the National Archives in Washington. It quickly became a feminist symbol, and the name Rosie the Riveter was applied retrospectively to the woman it portrayed.

Science

• Since 2000, our time spent online each week has steadily increased, rising from 9.4 hours to 23.6 hours — nearly an entire day, according to a recent report by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. The internet has become an integral component of our home lives as well, with time spent rising more than 400 percent over that period from 3.3 hours to 17.6 hours each week, according to the report, which surveys more than 2,000 people across the US each year.

• The ubiquity of large-scale data and improvements in computational hardware and algorithms have provided enabled researchers to apply computational approaches to the study of human behavior. One of the richest contexts for this kind of work is social media datasets like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

• We were invited by Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell to write a chapter about computational methods for the Sage Handbook of Social Media. Rather than simply listing what sorts of computational research has been done with social media data, we decided to use the chapter to both introduce a few computational methods and to use those methods in order to analyze the field of social media research.

• Newton’s law of gravity — remember that? The force between two massive bodies decreases with the inverse square of the distance and so on?

• To use it, you need a constant, “Newton’s constant,” also called the “gravitational constant,” usually denoted G. You can determine G to reasonable accuracy with a few simple measurements.

• Once you have fixed the gravitational constant, you can apply Newton’s law to all kinds of different situations: falling apples, orbiting planets, launching rockets, etc. All with only one constant!

Hardware

• Smartphone battery explosions make the headlines every once in a while, but this is pretty much the first time one incident takes place after someone… bites the device.

• As weird as that might sound, that’s literally what happened in a Chinese pawn shop, where a potential iPhone buyer decided to check if the device was real just like he wanted to test a gold coin: by biting it.

• The CCTV footage shows the man checking what’s believed to be an iPhone before taking it close to his mouth, apparently to determine if it’s a clone or not. It takes just a couple of seconds before the device suffers a massive blow just next to the man’s face, with everyone around stepping away, including the woman next to the sales counter and who appears to be kind of groggy.

• The PowerVR Series8XT GT8540 is the latest graphics processor from Imagination Technologies and is designed to drive up to six 4K screens at 60 FPS.

Health/Nutrition

• World Health Organization Executive Board members and observer countries today are preparing to discuss recommendations on ways to make medicines more accessible. This includes a new proposal to increase transparency in research and development costs that is reportedly causing concern among some developed countries.

• The decision by Sessions on Jan. 4 to rescind an Obama-era memo that allowed states to decide for themselves whether to legalize marijuana is in many ways a direct challenge to federalism. It also may hasten a showdown in Congress, which is under growing pressure to allow states alone to either regulate or prohibit the plant.

• Under court order, the National Frequency Agency (ANFR) of France recently disclosed that nine out of ten cell phones exceed government radiation safety limits when tested in the way they are actually used, next to the body. As the Environmental Health Trust reported, French activists coined the term “PhoneGate” because of parallels to the Volkswagen emission scandal (referred to informally as “Dieselgate”) in which Volkswagen cars “passed” diesel emission tests in the lab, but actually had higher emissions when driven on real roads. In the same way, cell phones “passed” laboratory radiation tests when the “specific absorption rate” (SAR), which indicates how much radiation the body absorbs, was measured at a distance of 15mm (slightly more than half an inch). However, the way people actually carry and use cell phones (for example, tucked into a jeans pocket or bra, or held in contact with the ear) results in higher levels of absorbed radiation than found in lab tests.

• The Access to Medicines Foundation is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Kingdom, and the Dutch governments, she said, and the Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark is supported by both the UK and the Dutch governments.

• The benchmark seeks to clarify the role of the pharmaceutical industry, she said, and what is expected from them in tackling the issue of growing resistance to antibiotics. Apart from developing new medicines and vaccines, the industry is also expected to manufacture antibiotics responsibly so that their factory waste water does not release antibiotics into the environment, and that products are promoted and distributed carefully so they are available but not overused.

• Three new draft proposals at the World Health Organization Executive Board this week underline the importance of access and affordability, whether it is vaccines and medicines, including antivenoms, or assistive technology. The draft resolutions call on member states as well as the WHO secretariat to urgently take action to facilitate access to products and technologies at affordable prices.

Security

• The LLVM code has been merged to mainline for the Retpoline x86 mitigation technique for Spectre Variant 2. This will be back-ported to LLVM 6.0 and also LLVM 5.0 with an immediate point release expected to get this patched compiler out in the wild.

• The compiler-side work — similar to GCC’s Retpoline code — is to avoid generating code where an indirect branch could have its prediction poisoned by a rogue actor. The Retpoline support uses indirect calls in a non-speculatable way.

• The teenage hacker who tore CIA director John Brennan a new AOL-hole is awaiting sentencing in the UK. Kane Gamble, the apparent founder of hacker collective Crackas With Attitude, was able to access classified documents Brennan has forwarded to his personal email account by posing as a Verizon tech. Social engineering is still the best hacking tool. It’s something anyone anywhere can do. If you do it well, a whole host of supposedly-secured information can be had, thanks to multiple entities relying on the same personal identifiers to “verify” the social engineer they’re talking to is the person who owns accounts they’re granting access to.

• Despite claiming he was motivated by American injustices perpetrated around the world (Palestine is namechecked in the teen’s multiple mini-manifestos), a lot of what Gamble participated in was plain, old fashioned harassment.

• The first known, and perhaps the most successful of these, was the joint US/Israeli Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear programme in 2009. Since then there has been increasing evidence of attacks of this sort by Russia – against Estonia in 2009, and then against Ukraine, where tens of thousands of attacks on everything from power supplies to voting machines have opened an under-reported front in an under-reported war. Across the Baltic, the Swedish government has just announced a beefed-up programme of civil defence, of which the most substantial part will be an attempt to protect its software and networks from attacks. Meanwhile, North Korean state hackers are blamed by western intelligence services for the WannaCry ransomware attacks which last year shut down several NHS hospitals in the UK. Persistent reports suggest the US has interfered in this way with North Korea’s nuclear missile programme.

• By now, almost everybody has probably seen the press coverage of Linus Torvalds’s remarks about one of the patches addressing Spectre variant 2. Less noted, but much more informative, is David Woodhouse’s response on why those patches are the way they are.

• Just before Christmas I found a likely exploitable bug in the libgcab library. Various security teams have been busy with slightly more important issues, and so it’s taken a lot longer than usual to be verified and assigned a CVE. The issue I found was that libgcab attempted to read a large chunk into a small buffer, overwriting lots of interesting things past the end of the buffer. ALSR and SELinux saves us in nearly all cases, so it’s not the end of the world. Almost a textbook C buffer overflow (rust, yada, whatever) so it was easy to fix.

• The exploitation of IoT devices and innovation from DDoS attack services are leading to more frequent and complex attacks, according to a newly published infrastructure security report from application and network performance management company Netscout.

• “We found that on comparison website GoCompare, Admiral charged a Hotmail driver £467.04 and a Gmail one £435.68 — £31.36 less,” the reporters said.

• Admiral admitted that it does use email domains as one variable in its risk estimation algorithm saying: “Certain domain names are associated with more accidents than others.”

• Researchers at Tel Aviv-based security firm Checkmarx found that Tinder’s iOS and Android mobile apps still lack the standard HTTPS encryption.

• Cryptocurrency’s roots go back further than bitcoin. In fact, bitcoin was just the first cryptocurrency to use the blockchain rather than the first cryptocurrency ever.

• Other early cryptocurrencies include now venerable names like World of Warcraft (WoW) gold, a digital currency designed for use as a store of value and a transfer medium in the gaming universe of World of Warcraft. It used a proof-of-work mining algorithm in which users would engage with the WoW ecosystem via their computer’s graphical interface and complete various digital tasks to be rewarded with gold.

• As the fiat currency value of WoW gold increased, it attracted more miners without any corresponding difficulty adjustment, eventually leading to substantial inflation and a collapsing economy.

• Today’s cryptocurrencies seem to have learned from the problems of the past. For example, bitcoin and many others will adjust mining difficulty to prevent massive inflation when mining power increases.

• It’s no surprise that almost everything cryptocurrency, from the coins to the exchanges to the wallets, are built on open-source software. This paper from 1999 might be more relevant than ever, especially with a few wallets and coins still being partly or entirely closed source.

• Spyware has long been a privacy and security risk for personal computers and has been used by a number of groups—ranging from creeps who spy on and blackmail people through Remote Access Trojans, to marketers who want ever more data about you for targeted ads (such as through the Superfish malware we’ve seen preinstalled on some “big brands” computers), to government intelligence agencies.

Defence/Aggression

• In the new U.S. National Defense Strategy, military planners bemoan the erosion of the U.S.’s “competitive edge,” but the reality is that they are strategizing to maintain the American Empire in a chaotic world, explains Nicolas J.S. Davies.

• Noted journalist and filmmaker John Pilger’s collection of work has been archived by the British Library, but deep-rooted problems of Western media create an increasingly difficult landscape for ethical journalism, as Pilger explained in an interview with Dennis Bernstein and Randy Credico.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Pamela Anderson has described Julian Assange as a “genius” and claims the rape allegations made against him are likely part of a much wider conspiracy.

• The former Baywatch pin-up, who met with the WikiLeaks founder at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London this week, said she thinks the accusations were a “setup” aimed at extraditing him to the US.

• Hollywood actress Pamela Anderson has described WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a ‘genius’ and called a rape allegation against him a ‘setup’ in an explosive BBC interview.

• The former Baywatch star, 50, who visited Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Monday, where he has been living since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, made an impassioned defense of the controversial computer programmer.

• She spoke of their close relationship in the interview on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme on Tuesday, telling her: ‘I would rather be a friend to Julian than anybody.

• It appears Sen. Stuart likes the power that comes with political office, but none of the obligations to the public that come with it. Stuart blamed scheduling conflicts for being unable to attend meetings that occur roughly every sixty days. He’s adding zero value to the Council and spends more of his time in the legislature actively thwarting it. It may be tough to remove Stuart from office, but there’s certainly no reason the FOIA Advisory Council needs to continue posting his name to its masthead and inviting him to meetings he just not going to attend.

• Julian Assange’s long stay in the Ecuadorian embassy in London is having a “dangerous” impact on his physical and mental health, according to clinicians who carried out the most recent assessments of him.

• The pair renewed calls for the WikiLeaks publisher to be granted safe passage to a London hospital.

• Sondra Crosby, a doctor and associate professor at the Boston University’s school of medicine and public health, and Brock Chisholm, a London-based consultant clinical psychologist, examined Assange for 20 hours over three days in October.

• In an article for the Guardian, they wrote: “While the results of the evaluation are protected by doctor-patient confidentiality, it is our professional opinion that his continued confinement is dangerous physically and mentally to him and a clear infringement of his human right to healthcare.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Most people who work over 30 stories up do so in the safe confines of a skyscraper. Meredith Halfpenny, however, can feel the breeze in her hair from the top of a wind turbine.

• By her own estimation, Halfpenny has helped build around 400 turbines and made more than 1,200 trips up and down their giant towers. And she finds herself in what can aptly be described as a job of the future: her skills are in high demand both where she works in Ontario, Canada, and south of the border, where in 2017 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said it expected wind turbine technicians to represent the second-fastest-growing occupation in America, more than doubling in overall number of employees through 2026 (number one was solar-panel installer).

Finance

• Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief operating officer, will take control of loan company SoFi on March 1.

• Twitter hired Noto, 49, as CFO in 2014 with a stock award worth more than $60 million, following a career in banking at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where he helped Twitter go public. He served as the social-media company’s finance head before taking over as chief operating officer in 2016. Noto has played a leading role in directing the company’s product vision, especially in shaping the platform’s future around live video streaming.

• Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies diapers and Kleenex tissues, announced Tuesday it will cut about 13 percent of its workforce globally, or at least 5,000 jobs, in a bid to reduce costs as sales wane.

• The company plans to shutter or sell 10 of its 91 production factories worldwide.

• In all, it is anticipating more than $2 billion in cost cuts by 2021. About $1.5 billion will come from reducing costs within its business. An added $500 million to $550 million will come from the efforts to streamline its manufacturing supply chain and overhead.

• Shannon Daves is a 47-year-old transgender woman who has been homeless in Dallas County, Texas, since last August. On January 17, she was arrested for an alleged misdemeanor and taken to the county jail. Hours later, she was brought before a judge who told her she could go home — but only if she paid $500 bail. She could not afford that amount, so she had to go back to jail.

• Shannon is a victim of Dallas County’s money bail system, which uses wealth to decide who stays locked up. That’s illegal. The constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process prohibit people from being jailed simply because they cannot afford a monetary payment. But the judge did not even ask Shannon if she could afford her release, and instead followed Dallas County’s bail schedule, a document that automatically sets money bail amounts according to the charged offense.

• The jail is transparent about the fact that it values money over civil rights. It maintains an ATM for people to get cash to post their bail. Shannon didn’t have the money, and because she is transgender, the county put her in solitary confinement. For days she was isolated in a cramped cell 24 hours a day and denied contact with other people.

• As Shannon told us, “I never know what time of day it is, or when meal time will be.” Tragically, her story is common throughout Texas and the nation.

• In 2013, ProPublica published an investigation of the subprime lender World Finance. World was charging annual interest rates that could exceed 200 percent, often trapping customers in cycles of debt by enticing them to renew the loans over and over. In states where laws barred such high rates, the installment lender loaded many loans with nearly useless insurance products that bloated the cost. The company boasted over 800,000 customers, part of an installment loan industry that claimed to loan to millions.

• The following year, World disclosed that it was under investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB, the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and under the leadership of Richard Cordray, the agency took action against credit card lenders, mortgage servicers, payday lenders and others for unfair practices against consumers.

• But after Cordray left last November, President Donald Trump installed Office of Management and Budget head Mick Mulvaney as acting director. To say that Mulvaney has been a critic of the CFPB is a vast understatement. In a 2014 interview given when he was still a Republican congressman, Mulvaney said of the CFPB, “some of us would like to get rid of it” and called it “a joke … in a sick, sad kind of way.”

• A Trump administration appointee to the National Labor Relations Board benefited the interests and clients of his former law firm when he cast the deciding vote to undo rules protecting workers’ rights in two cases last month.

• The decisions, which were both resolved 3-to-2, are instances of what some former NLRB members describe as a side-door means of evading government ethics requirements — a way to do indirectly what conflict of interest rules prevent the appointee from doing directly.

• William Emanuel, who joined the NLRB in September, has recused himself from involvement in more than four dozen cases involving the firm he left to join the labor board. That firm, Littler Mendelson, is known for representing corporations in labor disputes. Littler was not representing any parties in the disputes that Emanuel helped resolve in December.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In the latest episode of the Have You Heard podcast, AlterNet education contributor Jennifer Berkshire and co-host Jack Schneider talk to Klein about the extreme ideological teachings on offer at private religious schools, now being funded by public tax money.

• The following is an edited transcript.

• Since the earliest days of Facebook, social scientists have sent up warnings saying that the ability to maintain separate “contexts” (where you reveal different aspects of yourself to different people) was key to creating and maintaining meaningful relationships, but Mark Zuckerberg ignored this advice, insisting that everyone be identified only by their real names and present a single identity to everyone in their lives, because anything else was “two-faced.”

• To early users, the [I]nternet held such promise for people and communities. Now, on the eve of Facebook’s 15th birthday, social media is making people depressed. What happened?

• As for why the account was blocked … Stormy’s rep tells TMZ there was no evidence of profanity or nudity. In fact, the rep says the account was laced with inspirational quotes and professional photos, fully clothed.

• In the 2016 US elections, social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others played a big part in shaping the public opinion. Initially, Mark Zuckerberg refused to accept the fact that Facebook might have played a big–direct as well as indirect–role in amplifying the noise insides “echo chambers.” However, with time, the $400 billion social networking company has learned to soften its approach.

• On Tuesday, just four days after the Facebook CEO announced his intention to revamp the News Feed in favor of “high quality content,” we were gifted a sneak peek at the means by which he will deliver us from the scourge of so-called fake news.

• It takes the form of a survey, and, sadly, we regret to inform you that things aren’t looking so good.

• “American leadership” is one of a long list of vague, seemingly benign pseudo-concepts our media throw around to justify increased spending on soft power and military adventurism. It’s a difficult concept to pin down, but it’s almost always presented as something the United States is “failing” to do when it doesn’t “engage” the world with enough war, sanctions or arbitrarily applied human rights scolding.

• Lamenting a “lack of American leadership” is, therefore, a time-honored Serious Person cliche for those operating at major US papers, and one Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl phoned in Sunday with his op-ed “Genocide, Famine and a Democratic Retreat—All After One Year of US Inaction” (1/21/17).

• Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned fake news as satanic, saying journalists and social media users should shun and unmask manipulative “snake tactics” that foment division to serve political and economic interests.

• “Fake news is a sign of intolerant and hypersensitive attitudes, and leads only to the spread of arrogance and hatred. That is the end result of untruth,” Francis said in the first document by a pope on the subject.

• The document was issued after months of debate on how much fake news may have influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the election of President Donald Trump.

• “Spreading fake news can serve to advance specific goals, influence political decisions, and serve economic interests,” the pope wrote, condemning the “manipulative use of social networks” and other forms of communication.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Dr. Douglas Berger, an American psychiatrist offering services to ex-pats in Japan, recently sued a bunch of Redditors for telling other Redditors to steer clear of his services. Berger’s lawsuit was exhaustive, covering several months of disparaging comments delivered by Redditors, but much of what Berger considered libel fell under the category of “protected opinion.”

• Berger’s ultimate goal appeared to be a revamp of his Google search results. Sitting ahead of multiple URLs linked to Berger and his Japanese business (many which appear to be owned by Berger himself) were links to multiple Reddit threads with unhelpful (for Berger anyway…) titles like “Stay away from ‘psychiatrist’ Doug Berger.” In these threads, Berger was accused of everything from a lack of attentiveness during sessions to harassment to dodging income taxes.

• No one knows how to handle “fake news.” Rather than step back and see what light-touch approaches might work, governments all over the world are rushing forward with bad ideas that harm speech and threaten journalism. No one seems to be immune to the “do something” infection and everything proposed is just another way to give governments more direct control of social media platforms and news outlets.

• In Italy, the government control of speech under the guide of “fake news” deterrence is being done in the worst way possible. It’s not being handed to a regulatory body with instructions to sort of keep an eye on things. Instead, as Poynter reports, it’s rolling out as a heckler’s veto backed by armed officers.

• The report states the campaign’s purpose is to help YouTube build a bridge with the music industry, and that non-disparagement clauses are a safeguard to keep these artists from saying negative things about the company. They also say the agreements apply to partners who make original series for its paid service and “go beyond a requirement not to criticize the video site.” What exactly that means is not explained.

• Cho Yoon-sun will serve two years in prison for conspiring in a government-endorsed blacklisting of artists, including the likes of ‘Oldboy’ helmer Park Chan-wook.

• South Korea’s former culture minister, Cho Yoon-sun, has been sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring in a state-sponsored blacklisting of local artists and entertainment figures who did not support the country’s ousted ex-president, Park Geun-hye.

• Cho had previously been cleared of involvement in the censorship scandal and was given a one-year suspended sentence for perjury. An appeals court in Seoul on Tuesday reviewed the case and found further evidence in documents from the Presidential Blue House. Cho was arrested in court and taken into immediate custody.

• Military historian Sir Anthony Beevor is urging politicians to fight censorship after one of his books was banned in Ukraine.

• The 1998 bestseller Stalingrad was barred for import last week alongside 24 other books for being “anti-Ukrainian”. The accusation was levelled at Beevor’s examination of the Second World War battle due to passages about Ukrainian militias slaughtering Jewish children on SS orders.

• Facebook has refused to carry an advert for my book of early collected works, Zionism is Bullshit. At first it refused the ad on grounds of “profanity”. I then removed the title of the book from the advert (though it might still be dimly discerned on a small photo if you squint) and resubmitted, but approval was denied again. I then appealed, and this time the ad was refused because it “denigrates the religious views of others”. The text was standard book blurb and in no way did that.

• The Council for Electronic Media will make monitoring and find out whether there is pluralism in BNT, bnr.bg reported.

• The decision was taken at today’s meeting. For this purpose, a review of the month-to-month discussions will take place to see if there is a balance in the guests’ invitation and themes.

• Yesterday, the hosts and producers of “The Day Starts With Culture” complained about the pressure from the program director Emil Koshlukov as to who they are inviting and what questions they ask. He explained that he had made them work more for higher ratings and met resistance.

• Thanks to the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Centre), any music deemed “inappropriate” was labelled as so, censoring free speech across all music platforms. Back then the only way to get your musical fix was through vinyl or radio but the internet makes everything available to everyone – so why do people still care about music censorship? Why are people even bothering to censor music anymore?

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• Broadcasters in the UK and US of course still have their own guidelines – BBC radio stations are owned by the government so a lot of their decisions are down to what is appropriate, which of course means they will never play anything that goes against the government, their decisions or basically any song which has a strong political message. For examples, read more here

• Two of the most important developments in China’s clampdown on the digital world took place last year, when the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declared that all VPN providers needed prior government approval to operate, and then apps stores were forced to remove the many VPNs on offer there. In some parts of China, VPNs were banned completely, but such a total shutdown is not really an option for cities with many businesses that require secure overseas communication channels. That put the Chinese authorities in something of a quandary: how could they reconcile their desire to prevent VPNs being used to circumvent online controls, while ensuring that the country’s increasingly important corporate sector had access to the encryption tools it needed for operating globally? An article in the FT provides us with the answer (paywall).

• It’s the most wonderful time of the (economic) year when the world’s top politicians and economists gather in the snowy Swiss town of Davos.

• This year, the World Economic Forum at Davos kicked off with a speech by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with more politicians set to speak at the event – perhaps most interestingly of whom will be US President Donald Trump who is likely to counter everyone else’s views on global trade.

• A University of Toronto professor, whose online accounts were briefly shutdown in January, is accusing Google (GOOG) and YouTube of censoring him because of his conservative beliefs.

• A former politician in Austria wants to censor what people around the world read about her on social media.

• Having already won an injunction against Facebook regarding posts that insulted her, former Green Party leader Eva Glawischnig is now appealing for the courts to compel Facebook to seek out and delete similar posts across its entire global platform.

• The #MeToo movement has freed women, many of whom have kept silent about sexual harassment or assault, to tell their stories. Finally, survivors’ voices are being heard. But there are still many survivors who don’t feel free to share their stories because they have signed nondisclosure agreements.

• Nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs, are provisions frequently included in settlement agreements that prohibit survivors of sexual harassment or assault from publicly discussing both the settlement and what happened to them. Many women fear legal liability if they violate the terms of their agreements.

• They call themselves “silence breakers,” circulate petitions demanding investigations into sexual harassment and share internet memes like clenched fists with painted nails.

• But Chinese women are finding it difficult to organize a far-reaching #MeToo movement, going up against not just a male-dominated culture but also the ruling Communist Party itself.

• Government censors, apparently fearing social unrest, are trying to hobble the campaign, blocking the use of phrases like “anti-sexual harassment” on social media and deleting online petitions calling for greater protections for women. And officials have warned some activists against speaking out, suggesting that they may be seen as traitors colluding with foreigners if they persist.

• “So many sincere and eager voices are being muted,” said Zhang Leilei, 24, an activist in the southern city of Guangzhou who has helped circulate dozens of petitions among college students. “We are angry and shocked.”

• The Ban imposed on some songs and certain artists by the Censorship Board of PNG may have to be reconsidered, says Anna Solomon, Secretary, Department for Community Devt and religion.

• Secretary Solomon and the Minister for Youth Religion and Community Development, Soroi Eoe, believe that there should be another way of addressing issues involving artists and music.

• Referring to the controversial video capturing a band member of Wild Pack band physically assaulting another musician, Ragga Siai, Secretary Solomon said one person’s action shouldn’t affect the livelihood of others.

• Last week, Lebanon’s military tribunal sentenced Hanin Ghaddar, a Lebanese journalist working at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, to six months in prison, in absentia. Ms Ghaddar was accused of “insulting” the Lebanese army, because at a panel discussion in 2014, she had said that the army was clamping down on Lebanese Sunnis, thereby “creating injustice.”

• The decision was remarkable for two reasons. The military tribunal’s decision to condemn Ms Ghaddar for statements made abroad sent a worrisome message that Lebanese citizens could be pursued legally wherever they might be, for whatever they might say that displeased the state. Rarely has the military sought to engage in such a broad interpretation of its censorship power.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is perhaps the most sweeping data privacy law in history. Within its nearly 100 articles, it outlines new requirements for organizations that have access to the personal information of European Union (EU) citizens, giving average consumers far more power over how their data is used.

• Failure to comply will mean heavy fines of approximately $24 million (€20 million), or 4% of a company’s global annual revenue — whichever is greater.

• The National Security Agency made headlines last week when Politico reported that the agency had made a court filing informing a federal judge that it had accidentally deleted data related to ongoing litigation—Jewel v. NSA—in violation of a court order. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the NSA in Jewel on behalf of AT&T customers in 2008. EFF alleges that certain NSA surveillance programs authorized under the Bush administration, including those targeting the contents of communication and those related to the collection of metadata, were unconstitutional. In March 2014, a federal judge in northern California issued a temporary restraining order in that case, requiring the NSA to preserve evidence related to the case.

• The National Security Agency maintains a page on its website that outlines its mission statement. But earlier this month, the agency made a discreet change: It removed “honesty” as its top priority.

• Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four “core values” listed on NSA.gov, alongside “respect for the law,” “integrity,” and “transparency.” The agency vowed on the site to “be truthful with each other.”

• The US federal legal system will continue to protect the National Security Agency (NSA) from any penalties or other consequences even though it defied a court order to preserve data, analysts told Sputnik.

• The NSA destroyed surveillance data it pledged to preserve in connection with pending lawsuits and appeared not to have taken some of the steps it told a federal court it had taken to make sure the information was not destroyed, Politico reported last week.

• Sqrrl’s team and underlying technology tie back to the NSA. In 2011, the agency open-sourced database software called Accumulo, and in 2012, “a group of the core creators, committers and contributors” of Accumulo founded Sqrrl, according to the start-up’s website. Sqrrl, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, raised capital from Spring Lake Equity Partners, Matrix Partners, Rally Ventures and Accomplice.

• Cloud security is going to be an even more important topic this year than ever, thanks to the Meltdown and Spectre debacle, and Amazon Web Services bolstered its security story Tuesday with the acquisition of Sqrrl.

• On the 21st January 2018 at 6.15pm Pacific Time, Private Internet Access was alerted by close contacts in South Korea that law enforcement would be seeking to mirror our servers tomorrow, 24th of January 2018, at 10:00 A.M without due process. Upon learning this information, we decided to remove and wipe the South Korea region from our network immediately.

• Since we do not log any traffic or session data, period, no data has been compromised. Our users are, and will always be, private and secure.

• Facebook will roll out a new set of tools aimed at making it easier for users to make informed choices about their privacy in response to sweeping new European privacy laws, according to the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.

• On January 16, the United States Senate passed a six-year reauthorization of a controversial surveillance program.

• Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), first passed in 2008, allows the U.S. government to collect data, like text messages and e-mails, on foreign intelligence targets outside the United States without obtaining a warrant. It also lets the government collect the communications of foreigners from U.S. companies, like Google and Facebook, even if the person is speaking with an American.

• Last year brought news both good and bad in the fight against terrorism. On the positive side, the Islamic State’s brutal “caliphate” has virtually collapsed under a U.S.-led military campaign, and large parts of Iraq and Syria are free of its tyranny. At the same time, terrorist attacks in New York City and in Europe reminded all that the terrorist threat to the United States and its allies persists.

• Mindful of recent victories and enduring challenges, Congress last week reauthorized one of the U.S. government’s most important intelligence tools in the fight against terrorism. Section 702 is on its face as obscure as it sounds—a recent addition to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. In practice, it allows the government to collect the electronic communications of non-Americans located overseas if they are involved in terrorism or other activities affecting U.S. security. By reauthorizing Section 702, and by adding additional limits on how the law can be used, Congress moved to keep the nation safe while protecting Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.

• The U.S. Senate last week approved a six-year extension to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISA), in a move that could put journalists at risk. Because people targeted by Section 702 are often of interest to the press as well as the NSA, journalists are more likely than most to have their communications inadvertently collected under the act.

• Facebook Inc (FB.O) is buying a software firm that specializes in authenticating government-issued identification cards, the two companies said on Tuesday, a step that may help the social media company learn more about the people who buy ads on its network.

• Confirm, which says on its website that it has more than 750 clients, will wind down its operations and its employees will join Facebook in Boston, the source said.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Gui, 53, was seized by plainclothes police officers while aboard a Beijing-bound train on Saturday, according to his daughter Angela. The incident occurred in front of diplomats who were accompanying him for a medical examination at the Swedish embassy.

• So-called “nuisance ordinances” create a perverse incentive not to report crime and endanger domestic violence victims.

• The second time that Laurie Grape called the police during an attack by her then-boyfriend, they told her that a third call would get her evicted. Under a local law in East Rochester, New York, three police responses to the same property within a 12-month period were once grounds for a person to be kicked out of her home. The next time her ex-boyfriend attacked her, Laurie decided to stay silent rather than risk eviction.

• Laurie, however, didn’t stay silent for long. In 2010, Grape and another domestic violence survivor settled a lawsuit against East Rochester, resulting in the village changing its so-called “nuisance abatement” law. Unfortunately, similarly harmful ordinances continue to be in force across the state of New York.

• Today, a coalition of rights groups called on 11 of these municipalities to repeal their nuisance laws. The New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, the Empire Justice Center, and the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence sent letters emphasizing that repeal is necessary because these ordinances violate people’s constitutional and civil rights and undermine community safety.

• The district attorney also will not solicit contributions personally and will have his campaign shield him from the identities of his donors. Candidates for judgeships in New York state follow similar guidelines.

• In October, ProPublica, WNYC and The New Yorker reported that Vance had overruled prosecutors who wanted to bring felony fraud charges against two of the president’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The office had been investigating the two for making misleading statements as their father’s company attempted to sell apartments in a struggling condominium and hotel in downtown Manhattan called the Trump SoHo.

• During the investigation, in 2012, Vance met with Donald Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz. Kasowitz had donated $25,000 to Vance for his first re-election campaign. Vance returned the donation before the meeting. Then he declined to prosecute anyone in connection with the investigation. A few months later, Vance accepted more than $50,000 from Kasowitz and lawyers at his New York firm, Kasowitz Benson. Vance, in comments to ProPublica at the time, denied that Kasowitz influenced his decisions, but announced that he would return the second donation from the lawyer.

• In a second report, The New Yorker wrote that Vance’s office had declined to bring charges against Harvey Weinstein, after an Italian model went to the police with an allegation that the film producer had groped her. Attorneys associated with that case also donated to Vance.

• Tories who actively supported apartheid are still very influential in the Tory party, notably the St Andrews Federation of Conservative Students originating group, including Michael Forsyth. Even David Cameron’s contacts with South Africa in this period are a very murky part of his cv. It is important the Tories are not allowed off the hook on this. The moral taint should rightly be with them for generations.

• Janine Jackson: Donald Trump’s vituperative language was his own, as he lamented the presence of Haitians in the United States, including the 60,000 whose temporary protected status he was ending. But when CBS News described Haiti as “a shamble, made worse by a corrupt government,” or the Washington Post declared its “chronic instability rivals its profound poverty as a source of suffering,” they were likewise reflecting a particular story US elites tell about Haiti and its relationship to the US.

• Journalists like Jonathan M. Katz at the Washington Post and Amy Wilentz at The Nation noted the galling absence of basic history from public conversation, the decades of repeated invasions, occupations and exploitation and a special animus towards a country where former slaves gained independence.

• It’s been said that Haiti needs new narratives. The prevalent one, that says the country is inherently chaotic and corrupt, and the US and UN are just helpers doing their best, could be upended by simply steadier, contextualized reporting on events.

• Along with National Geographic and the Washington Office on Latin America, the event will feature the relatives of those killed in a deadly assault on a Mexican town triggered by a botched U.S. drug operation. The event will also preview an Audible original series that tells the story through the voices of those left behind.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As we’ve been warning for a while, the next phase in the war on net neutrality for giant ISPs is pushing a new “net neutrality law” in name only. ISPs are nervous that the FCC’s net neutrality repeal won’t survive a court challenge due to the numerous instances of fraud and other procedural gaffes. As such, they’ve convinced blindly-loyal lawmakers like Marsha Blackburn to push fake net neutrality legislation whose entire purpose is to prevent the FCC’s 2015 rules from being restored, or real, tough rules from being passed later.

• These proposed “solutions” ban behaviors ISPs had no intention of doing (like the ham-fisted blocking of websites), but avoid addressing any of the numerous areas where net neutrality violations now occur, from usage caps, overage fees and zero rating, to interconnection shenanigans designed to drive up costs for streaming video competitors like Netflix. But with Democrats hoping to use net neutrality as a wedge issue in the coming midterms (and pushing for a repeal reversal via the CRA), these bogus solutions haven’t seen much traction outside of paid editorial support by telecom lobbyists.

• A new report by the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) shows “great strides” in mobile phone penetration in least-developed countries. However, those countries are well behind developed countries when it comes to internet usage.

• The ITU thematic report, link here, on achieving universal and affordable internet in least-developed countries (LDCs) found that more than four out of five people in LDCs have access to a mobile-cellular network.

• “Netflix’s fortress is so strong now that net neutrality has become background noise for them,” said GBH Insights analyst Daniel Ives.

• If you’ve been napping, Comcast lobbyists recently convinced the government to kill net neutrality rules, dismantle broadband privacy protections, and bury efforts to make the cable box market more competitive. And they’re just getting warmed up. Comcast lobbyists have also successfully convinced the Trump administration to eliminate nearly all state and federal oversight of large telecom monopolies. Should they be successful, consumers and innovators will face a massive new era of little to no accountability for one of the most despised, least-competitive business sectors in America.

• This new wave of regulatory capture comes at an inopportune time for American consumers and the nation’s startups. Comcast was already facing less broadband competition than ever in many markets thanks to incumbent telcos effectively giving up on upgrading millions of aging DSL lines. With neither government oversight nor healthy competition present to keep Comcast in check, the company’s awful customer service has become legend, and the rise of arbitrary, unnecessary fees and usage caps have become the norm.

• As an added bonus for Comcast, the conditions applied to the company’s 2011 merger with NBC just expired over the weekend, raising additional concerns about the potential impact of an unshackled Comcast on the emerging streaming video market. Those conditions prohibited Comcast from charging streaming competitors unfair rates, or from meddling in Hulu management to prevent disruption of Comcast’s own services. They also required Comcast adhere to some aspects of the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules, even if they were dismantled in court (they were).

• In the wake of the federal repeal of net neutrality rules, numerous states have responded by proposing their own net neutrality rules that either mirror the FCC’s discarded rules, or impose new restrictions on net neutrality violating ISPs trying to secure state telecom contracts. New York, Massachusetts, Washington and California are among a dozen states considering their own rules. These efforts come despite the fact that Comcast and Verizon successfully lobbied the FCC to include provisions trying to ban states from protecting consumers in the wake of federal apathy on the subject.

• Mr. Bullock, a Democrat, said the executive order was the fastest and surest way to bring back net neutrality rules and to head off any decisions by internet service providers to begin throttling or charging websites more to reach consumers.

DRM

• Recently there’s been an effort to add support for digital rights management (DRM) into the Linux kernel. The goal of DRM is to prevent users from making copies of music, video and other media that they watch on their own computers, but it also poses fundamental questions about the nature and fate of general-purpose computers.

• Hackers seem close to publicly unlocking the Nintendo Switch After years of work, hackers have finally managed to unlock the PS4 hardware with an exploit that lets the system run homebrew and pirated PS4 software. In a somewhat more surprising discovery, those hackers have also unlocked the ability to run many PS2 games directly on the console, using the same system-level emulation that powers legitimate PlayStation Classics downloads.

Intellectual Monopolies

• U.S. companies rich in intellectual property are looking at a new tax-friendly regime: the U.S.

• Patent protection of this sort will be extremely vital in the esports-VR space as the filings of patent applications for VR technology drastically increase. Just last year, more than 30,000 patent applications were filed directed specifically to VR-related technologies. Although patent law does not protect abstract concepts that may be implicated in a virtual gaming universe, filing appropriate patent applications to protect new technology implementations in the space can and should be done.

Trademarks

• Do you suspect that the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the United States Army might have some sort of affiliation?

• This question lies at the heart of a notice of opposition filed Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Army in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (a.k.a. the USPTO, the government agency that administers the national trademark registry). Among other points, the Army stresses that the U.S. Army Parachute Team, which over the last 55 years has performed in more than 16,000 shows, has long been nicknamed the Golden Knights—quite unlike the expansion NHL team that adopted the name only 14 months ago. And, for sports and entertainment purposes, the Army has for decades used a color scheme similar to that now employed by said NHL team.

• This post will come as no surprise to those of us super-interesting people that for some reason have made trademark law and news a key fulcrom point in our lives, but the United States Army has filed an opposition to the trademark application for the Las Vegas Golden Knights. Some background is in order should you not be one of the roughly twelve of us in America that are hockey fans.

• Starting around 2007, the United States Army went on something of a trademarking spree, filing for marks long in use, including some of the monikers for well known units and/or what I would call “show units”, or units that chiefly serve to be seen at entertainment venues such as air and water shows. Included in these marks were the Army’s “Black Knights” mascot for its military academy athletic teams and its Golden Knights paratrooping unit that performs at air and water shows all over the country. The army uses these trademarks to rake in millions of dollars in merchandise.

• The Las Vegas Golden Knights is an NHL expansion hockey team started by a graduate of West Point, Bill Foley, who wanted the team’s garb and name to serve as an homage to his military roots. To that end, he had initially wanted to name the team “The Black Knights”, but switched to “The Golden Knights” after the Army voiced its displeasure. The color scheme for the team is a clear call back to the paratrooping team that shares the name.

Copyrights

• As the sixth round of talks over a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) kicks off in Montreal, Canada, this week, EFF has joined with 15 other organizations and 39 academic experts to send the negotiators an open letter [PDF] about the importance of platform safe harbor rules, a topic that has been proposed for the deal’s Digital Trade chapter. The proposed rules, which are based on S47 U.S.C. section 230, a provision of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA 230″), would require that Internet intermediaries—whether giants like Facebook, or just your neighbour with an open Wi-Fi hotspot—can’t be held liable for most speech of their users.

• To what degree should Internet services be shielded from liability for the copyright infringements of their users? With the NAFTA negotiations underway this has become a hot topic once again. Content industry groups believe that these safe harbors should be tightened, while Internet law experts and advocacy groups want to expand US-style safe harbors to Mexico and Canada.

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