● 01.25.18

● Links 25/1/2018: Qt 5.11 Feature Freeze Soon, GCC 7.3 Ready

Posted in News Roundup at 5:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Mirantis brought back its original CEO and Co-founder Adrian Ionel (pictured), to move the company beyond private cloud and help its customers adopt multi-cloud strategies. Alex Freeland, who is also a co-founder, will step down as CEO but remain a board member.

• Ionel served as CEO from the company’s launch in 2011 until 2015, when he left to start up Dorsal, an open source software support firm. During his initial tenure at Mirantis he led the company’s investment in OpenStack, growing its customer base to more than 200 enterprises.

Kernel Space

• A new Coreboot frame-buffer driver has been published for the Linux kernel that allows reusing of the frame-buffer setup by Coreboot during the hardware initialization process.

• Re-using the frame-buffer setup by Coreboot when initializing the graphics hardware can make for a faster booting system due to uselessly duplicating the FB setup process otherwise and for some small Linux systems just needing a basic frame-buffer can mean that the Linux kernel build doesn’t even need a full graphics driver.

• Renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman released new kernel updates for the Linux 4.14, 4.9 LTS, and 4.4 LTS series, which add more security fixes and updated drivers.

• Linux kernels 4.14.15, 4.9.78 LTS, and 4.4.113 LTS are now available, and they come with numerous improvements. While Linux kernel 4.14.15 is by far the biggest of them all, containing 104 files changed, with 1514 insertions and 447 deletions, Linux 4.9.78 LTS and 4.4.113 LTS kernels are pretty identical and include 60 changed files with 525 insertions and 167 deletions, and 64 changed files, with 960 insertions and 139 deletions respectively.

• Lennart Poettering and the systemd crew have begun with release preparations for systemd 237. As part of that, the change-log has been updated to provide a glimpse at what’s ahead.

• It’s so simple! The kernel decides to output a log message, so it calls printk() to send the message to a serial console—except it’s not simple at all. What if the kernel is in the middle of crashing, and the log message is the crucial clue needed to diagnose the problem? How do you output a log message when you don’t know what parts of the system you even can rely on? What if the system’s out of memory or trapped in an atomic context, unable to switch from whatever’s breaking to the code to execute the printk()?

• There are all sorts of corner cases that safely can be ignored by user code producing output, but that are essential to get right when the kernel is the one producing output.

• To make matters worse, these corner cases tend to occur in ways that are difficult to reproduce, creating potential controversy over whether a bug exists at all. How do you reproduce a bug that causes the very logging system to fail to tell you what happened?

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation has launched a new effort to promote collaboration between open source networking projects.

• The foundation this week unveiled the LF Networking Fund, which Arpit Joshipura described as a “platform for cross-project collaboration”.

• “LFN will form the basis of collaboration across the network stack, from the data plane into the control plane, to orchestration, automation, end-to-end testing, and more,” Joshipura, GM networking and orchestration at the Linux Foundation, wrote in a blog entry.

• Samsung has become a Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation Networking Fund (LFN), a new body that brings together the decision makers of participating organisations. The advantages are enhanced operational excellence, simpler member engagement, and increased collaboration across open source networking project and standards bodies.

• According to the Linux Foundation’s bylaws, Platinum Members “engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardisation of Linux and other open source-base technologies” and pay an annual fee of $500,000.

Graphics Stack

• It didn’t happen in time for the upcoming Mesa 18.0, but the R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting pre-GCN AMD Radeon graphics processors is now nearly at OpenGL 4.5 compliance! A needed OpenGL 4.4 extension is now scratched off the list completing the necessary extensions to effectively have GL 4.5, assuming it can pass the conformance test suite.

• The long-in-development X.Org Server 1.20 has yet another XWayland addition: XDG-Output protocol support.

• XDG-Output is a newer Wayland protocol extension for providing more display output device information with a focus on desktop display details not already exposed otherwise.

Benchmarks

• While we frequently do Linux OS/distribution performance comparisons on the latest Intel desktop and server hardware, some requests came in recently about looking closer at the fastest Linux distribution(s) when running on AMD’s Ryzen desktop processors. Here are benchmarks of ten popular Linux distributions tested out-of-the-box on Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1950X systems.

Applications

• One of the biggest selling points of desktop Linux, for me, is the centralized software distribution system. Ubuntu has Apt, Arch Linux has Pacman and Fedora’s got RPM. This centralized distribution means an increased stability, a superior integration between the apps and the operating system, and an enhanced security factor.

• Movit, the “Modern Video Toolkit”, that aims to provide high-quality, high-performance GPU-based video filters is out with a new release.

• The Movit 1.6 release today by Steinar Gunderson adds support for video effects that work as compute shaders. Gunderson’s hopes for using more compute shaders in Movit didn’t work out quite as planned with fragment shaders geberally being faster for this use-case. But this release does have compute shaders for deinterlacing as one area where it’s faster.

• I just released version 1.6.0 of Movit, my GPU-based video filter library.

• The full changelog is below, but what’s more interesting is maybe what isn’t in it, namely the compute shader version of the high-quality resampling filter I blogged about earlier. It turned out that my benchmark setup was wrong in a sort-of subtle way, and unfortunately biased towards the compute shader. Fixing that negated the speed difference—it was actually usually a few percent slower than the fragment shader version, despite a fair amount of earlier tweaks. (It did use less CPU when setting up new parameters, which was nice for things like continuous zooms, but probably not enough to justify the GPU slowdown.)

• Which means that after a month or so of testing and performance tuning, I had to scrap it—it’s sad to notice so late (I only realized that something was wrong as I started writing up the final documentation, and figured I couldn’t actually justify why I would let one of them chain with other effects and the other one not), but it’s a sunk cost, and keeping it in based on known-bad benchmarks would have helped nobody. I’ve left it in a git branch in case the world should change.

Proprietary

• The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 64 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

• As already known, Chrome 64 brings much-awaited fixes for the infamous Meltdown and Spectre CPU bugs that Google had already promised to deliver by the end of the month. Updates have been made to the browser’s V8 Javascript engine to enable protection against these speculative side-channel attacks.

• If the release of Firefox 58 yesterday didn’t excite you, Google has today rolled out to stable channel the Chrome 64.0 web-browser.

• Yesterday Chrome 64 released with much awaited features and some security patches. Chrome is used by more than a billion users around the globe. Taking this in mind, chrome has implemented a stronger pop-up blocker.

• Google has promoted its Chrome 64 web browser to the stable channel today for Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms, finally bringing the patches for the Meltdown and Spectre timing attacks.

• Chrome 64 has been in beta phase for the past six weeks, though it’s been in development since the end of October 2017. It’s the first release of the web browser to ship with security fixes to address the Meltdown and Spectre timing attacks. Google has detailed these patches earlier this month.

• Google has started to roll out the latest version of its browser, Chrome 64, to Windows, Mac and Linux devices. The update will arrive to users throughout the next few days or weeks and comes with some handy features and important mitigation related to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.

• Chrome 64 is now available for Linux, Mac and Windows, featuring a stronger ad blocker and several security fixes, including mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown. See the release updates for more info.

• Google has released Chrome 64 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, bringing a stronger pop-up blocker, over 50 security fixes, and more mitigations for the Spectre attack.

• As Google promised last year, Chrome 64 introduces a stronger pop-up block to protect against sneaky tactics that lead users to unwanted content through redirects.

• The abusive experiences that the blocker targets are practices often used by shadier sections of the web, including ads or parts of a page that create bogus site warnings and error messages, ‘close’ buttons that that do something other than close a page element, and play buttons that open third-party sites offering to download an app.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you don’t want to do without the main advantages of Linux on the Windows platform, the Windows Subsystem for Linux offers another option. We delve the depths of the Linux underworld and explain how you can optimize the subsystem.

Games

• From their Tweet they showed that 60K players over the course of two months played 450K online co-op games, of that 1.5% of players where doing so on Linux, 4% on Mac and the rest on Windows. That’s pretty well in line with expectations and again far above what the Steam Hardware Survey shows as the current Linux market-share (it’s lower due to Asia growth).

• The report is a survey of around 4,000 game developers that’s released as a snapshot of the industry ahead of the annual Game Developers Conference. There are positive signs for Linux as a platform in the responses.

• Some slight bad news here, as the developers of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem [Steam, Official Site] (previously Umbra) have said the game will not be on Linux during alpha or beta, but at least it’s not cancelled.

• Hyped for the massive destructive capabilities Stellaris: Apocalypse [Paradox Store, Steam] is going to give you? You don’t have too long to wait!

• Two years on from the release of the original game, Arcen games have released an expansion to their sometimes over-the-top action shooter/dungeon crawler hybrid. After dodging my fair share of bullets and dying quite a few times, I have a few thoughts to share on the experience.

• I never thought I would see the day, as Facepunch has announced that Rust [Steam] will finally leave Early Access next month. To be specific, it will leave on February 8th.

• I’m always happy to see more party games on Linux, but Super Slime Arena [Steam] is quite disappointing overall.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Hey everyone…half the period of 40 days project of SoK has passed and if I had to describe it in 3-4 words, it would be: “Super awesome”, “Incredible learning experience”, “Helpful support” and “Hard work”.

• We have now soft branched ’5.11′ from dev so please start using ’5.11′ now. Qt 5.11 feature freeze and final downmerge from ‘dev’ to ’5.11′ will happen Wed 31.1.2018 so there is still enough time to finalize ongoing changes in ‘dev’.

• While it feels like Qt 5.10 was just released a short time ago, the scheduled feature freeze and branching for Qt 5.11 is imminent.

• Release manager Jani Heikkinen at The Qt Company announced today the soft branching of “5.11″ from their “dev” branch. The hard feature freeze for Qt 5.11 is next week on 31 January. Features that don’t get merged in time will be delayed to Qt 5.12.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you use macOS, the best way to use a recent development snapshot of WebKit is surely Safari Technology Preview. But until now, there’s been no good way to do so on Linux, short of running a development distribution like Fedora Rawhide.

• Enter Epiphany Technology Preview. This is a nightly build of Epiphany, on top of the latest development release of WebKitGTK+, running on the GNOME master Flatpak runtime. The target audience is anyone who wants to assist with Epiphany development by testing the latest code and reporting bugs, so I’ve added the download link to Epiphany’s development page.

• Thanks to several efforts coming together, there’s now an Epiphany Technology Preview project delivering you a bleeding-edge GNOME web-browser in a sane and easily deployable manner.

• Epiphany Technology Preview delivers the latest Epiphany browser code built atop the latest development release of WebKitGTK+ and is updated on a nightly basis.

Distributions

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Time goes by and the YaST wheel keeps rolling. So let’s take a look to what have moved since our previous development report.

• SUSE’s libstorage-ng back-end for YaST’s new low-level storage library is now active within the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution.

• Libstorage has traditionally been responsible for SUSE/openSUSE’s disk/partition/LVM management and other storage device management. After more than two years of work, libstorage-ng has replaced libstorage within Tumbleweed.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat released the beta version of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 (RHEL) server operating system on Jan. 24, providing an early look at multiple new features that will become generally available later this year.

• Red Hat’s last major milestone update for RHEL debuted in August 2017 with the general availability of RHEL 7.4, which added new cluster management capabilities as well as support for Network Bound Disk Encrypted (NBDE) devices.

• In 1994, if you wanted to make money from Linux, you were selling Linux CDs for $39.95. By 2016, Red Hat became the first $2 billion Linux company. But, in the same year, Red Hat was shifting its long-term focus from Linux to the cloud. Here’s how Red Hat got from mail-order CDs to the top Linux company and a major cloud player.

• My name is Daniela Rabiser and I’m a Technical Product Manager at Dynatrace. I’m currently focusing on broadening and deepening Dynatrace’s monitoring capabilities for OpenShift and Kubernetes environments. Before joining Dynatrace in 2017, I conducted research in the area of feature modeling and evolution support in industrial software ecosystems. I hold a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.

• The beginning of any new year is a time of reflection for many IT departments across industries and organizations big and small. At Red Hat, this means it is time once again to hear directly from our customers what is top-of-mind for their business in the new year. We surveyed more than 400 Red Hat customers from around the globe about their 2018 priorities, including top challenges, budget allocation, cloud deployment strategies, and plans for emerging technologies.

Finance

• Nomura analyst Christopher Eberle initiated coverage on Red Hat with a Buy rating and $152 price target.

Debian Family

• Yesterday’s interaction after seeing Mahametro’s interaction with the press, it seems the press or media seems to have a very poor understanding of the dynamics and not really interested in enriching citizen’s understanding of either the Pune Metro or the idea of Integrated Transport Initiative which has been in making for sometime now. Part of the issue also seem to lay with Pune Metro in not sharing knowledge as much as they can with the opportunities that digital media/space provides and at very low-cost.

• Creating a FOSS events calendar it is a big project that will most certainly continue beyond my Outreachy internship.

• Therefore, along with my mentors, we have established that my short term goal will be to contribute a bit to it by working on the MoinMoin EventCalendar so the events can be exported to the iCalendar format.

• I have been studying and playing around with the EventCalendar code and, so far, I’ve concluded that the best way to do this might be by writing a function to it. Just like there are other functions on this plugin to change the display of the calendar, there might be a function to just sort the data to the iCalendar format and to allow downloading the file.

Derivatives

• The privacy-oriented Linux distribution, Tails, has been updated with a new kernel to mitigate against Spectre. Tails 3.5 also comes with Tor Browser 7.5, a major upgrade in itself which includes some interface changes to make it more usable. There are also a plethora of smaller changes included in too.

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi Zero and LimeSDR Mini have been used together to create what is claimed to be the world’s smallest open-sourced DVB transmitter.

• Lime Microsystems has launched a Raspberry Pi compatible “Grove Starter Kit” option for its LimeSDR Mini radio hacker board with a GrovePi+ board, 15 Grove sensor and actuator modules, dual antennas for 433/868/915MHz bands, a base plate, and cables.

• Lime Microsystems has added to its successful LimeSDR Mini crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply with a $249 Grove Starter Kit designed to work with a Raspberry Pi. The news came shortly after Lime unveiled a DVB transmitter prototype project that combines the open source LimeSDR Mini Software Defined Radio (SDR) board with a Raspberry Pi Zero.

• Logic Supply’s fanless, Apollo Lake based “ML350G-10” embedded PC offers 7x USB ports, up to 2x GbE, up to 2TB mSATA via 2x slots, optional WiFi/BT or LTE, and 2x DisplayPorts with optional CEC.

• Most of Logic Supply’s embedded PCs have run on Intel Core chips, but the Vermont-based company has produced a few Linux-ready, Intel Atom-based models including the Bay Trail Celeron based ML100G-10 and quad- or octa-core Avoton Atom C2xxx driven ML600G-10. Now, the company has launched an “ML350 Fanless Computer” series starting with the Apollo Lake-based ML350G-10.

• Purism, the computer technology company that sells Linux-powered laptops, is currently working hard on their first Linux phone, Librem 5, for which the company ran a successful crowdfunding campaign last year.

• Last week, Purism published their first report on the upcoming privacy-focused Linux smartphone since the crowdfunding campaign ended, saying they plan to use the i.MX8 ARM processor for the device and the next-generation Wayland display server for the UI (User Interface), which is still in the design phase as they spent last two months establishing a design team.

• Now that their design team is in place and ready to work on the most powerful Linux phone ever, Purism shared their plans on attempting to bring convergence across all devices running the PureOS Linux operating system, including the upcoming Librem 5 smartphone and any of Purism’s Librem Linux laptops.

• A project that raised money last year to build a mobile phone based on free software has finished assembling its design team and is in the planning phase of development.

• In an update on the development of the Librem 5 smartphone, creative director François Téchené said developers were now working on designing user interfaces and user experience for the device.

• The company behind the phone, Purism, raised a total of US$2.279 million in a crowd-funding effort, far above the target of US$1.5 million.

• “Free” refers to the hardware and software, with the phone to use Plasma Mobile, a mobile version of the KDE software that is used on the Linux desktop.

• GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has joined Purism as part of their effort of getting GTK+ applications on the Librem 5 smart-phone.

• As some of you may already know, I recently joined Purism to help developing GTK+ apps for the upcoming Librem 5 phone.

• Purism and GNOME share a lot of ideas and values, so the GNOME HIG and GNOME apps are what we will focus on primarily: we will do all we can to not fork nor to reinvent the wheel but to help allowing existing GTK+ applications to work on phones.

• In my previous article for Opensource.com, I introduced the OpenHPC project, which aims to accelerate innovation in high-performance computing (HPC). This article goes a step further by using OpenHPC’s capabilities to build a small HPC system. To call it an HPC system might sound bigger than it is, so maybe it is better to say this is a system based on the Cluster Building Recipes published by the OpenHPC project.

• The resulting cluster consists of two Raspberry Pi 3 systems acting as compute nodes and one virtual machine acting as the master node:

• Adlink’s Linux-ready “IMB-M43H” ATX board supports Skylake or Kaby Lake Intel Core CPUs with up to 32GB DDR4, 4x SATA III, 8x USB, PCIe and PCI, EN 55032 EMI protection, and USB power stabilization.

• Adlink’s industrial ATX form-factor (305 x 244mm) IMB-M43H is designed as a Skylake or Kaby Lake upgrade for legacy installations. It provides support for older technologies like PCI, VGA, LPT, and 32-bit Windows 7. The board also supports 64-bit Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, as well as three 64-bit Linux distributions: Fedora 25, OpenSUSE Leap 42.1, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Tizen

• A lot of app developers seem to be benefiting from the recent outburst in Blockchain technolog, more specifically in the cryptocurrency domain. While some developers are building cryptocurrency wallets, hedge funds, etc other developers are making apps which display the real-time value of the cryptocurrencies so users can decide on when to invest or trade their assets. But in recent times, there have been so many new cryptocoins emerging that it is getting harder and harder for people to keep a tab on their volatile values.

Android

• The annual developer conference, Google I/O, will be held between May 8-10 this year at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. Much like every year, Google dropped a puzzle for the curious minds to put their brains to work and figure out the dates.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Open Source Software Movement and the Open Source Initiative will celebrate our 20th anniversary in 2018. As part of that celebration, we’re asking open source luminaries to reflect on the past twenty years—the milestones, success, controversies, and even failures—to capture and understand our shared history, and the impact of the open source movement on not only software and technology, but also business, community and culture. We’re also curious to hear what those who have done so much to help drive open source to where it is today, on where it should go tomorrow.

Events

• I will be giving two talks about OpenHPC in the next weeks.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Canonical announced today that the recently released Mozilla Firefox 58.0 web browser is now available for download from the software repositories of all supported Ubuntu Linux releases.

• Mozilla officially launched the Firefox 58.0 “Quantum” web browser the other day, on January 23, 2018, bringing numerous improvements and new features like a two-tiered compiler and streaming compilation support to make WebAssembly even faster, WebVR support for Mac OS X users, and support for credit card info in the autofill feature.

• When Mozilla and Pocket joined forces less than a year ago, we said that together we will work to provide people everywhere with the tools to discover and access high-quality web content across platforms and silos, for a safer, empowered, independent online experience.

• Yet, as I said in my last post, I don’t think all is lost for the open internet, as headlines the headlines might suggest. The internet remains a place of joy, opportunity and empowerment for many. I want to make sure it stays that way — that we don’t end up with a divide between slow, ad-laden, compromised internet for most people, and fast, private, secure internet for those who can pay for it.

• The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer! We’re looking for an amazing developer to come on board to help make Thunderbird the best Email client on the planet! If you are interested you can apply via the link below, following the job description.

• Amazon Fire TV users! Here at Mozilla, we believe you should have the ability to watch what you want or view the web how you want. Firefox for Fire TV, our browser for discovering and watching web video on TV, is here on Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV stick. You can launch popular video websites, like YouTube or Vimeo, load any website address and search the web for videos to play full screen on your TV, all from the comfort of your couch.

• Besides Firefox 59 being the release doing away with GTK2 support, this next Mozilla web-browser release might be the one to achieve working native Wayland support.

• For seven years there has been Bug 635134 for tracking a Firefox Wayland port so the web-browser would play nicely on this next-gen alternative to the X.Org Server.

• It’s been a while since the js13kGames 2017 competition ended in September last year, but it’s worth recalling as it was the first time with a brand new category – A-Frame. Let’s see what some of the competition participants have to say about the challenges of developing playable WebVR entries limited to just 13 kilobytes each.

• Technology is continually providing us with new ways to create and publish stories. For these stories to achieve their full impact, it requires that the tools to deploy them become accessible and easy to use.

• That’s one of the reasons why Mozilla has worked to develop A-Frame, a framework that makes it easy for anyone to build virtual reality experiences for the web.

• As we gear up to celebrate the tenth anniversary of International Data Privacy Day on January 28, we want to highlight Mozilla’s efforts to create awareness and help protect your personal information.

• As champions of a healthy and safer internet, we don’t care about your privacy just one day a year. Every day is data privacy day for us. And we don’t mean this as a gimmick. Mozilla isn’t your average tech company. We are a not-for-profit dedicated to keeping the web open and accessible to all. Privacy and safeguarding your personal data is the core of our mission. And of our products. Firefox Quantum and everything else we do from policy to advocacy or fun social media activities are rooted in that principle.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Tigera decided to go with an “open core” model that combines open source with the company’s closed-source tools as it’s building out its business.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Compiler Collection version 7.3 has been released.

• GCC 7.3 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 7 branch containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 7.2 with more than 99 bugs fixed since the previous release.

• This release includes code generation options to mitigate Spectre Variant 2 (CVE 2017-5715) for the x86 and powerpc targets.

• GNU Compiler Collection 7.3 is now available as the latest GCC7 point release and the prominent changes being support for helping mitigate Spectre variant two using some new compiler switches.

• GCC 7.3 has backported Retpoline support after GCC 8.0 development code initially received the support earlier this month. This GCC support building out a patched kernel can lead to “full” retpoline protection for the system.

• The Retpoline support adds a few new compiler switches, namely -mindirect-branch= for dealing with indirect branches to avoid speculative execution.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• We get a lot of awesome projects sent our way via the tip line. Well, mainly it seems like we get spam, but the emails that aren’t trying to sell us something are invariably awesome. Even so, it’s not often we get a tip that contains the magic phrase “determine Mach number” in its list of features. So to say we were interested in the Asgard Air Data Computer (ADC) is something of an understatement.

Programming/Development

• Almost immediately, you notice an interesting trend. Those in the 18 to 24 age group overwhelmingly started their programming journey in their late teens. 68.2 percent started coding between the ages of 16 to 20.

• When you look at older generations, you notice another striking trend: a comparatively larger proportion started programming between the ages of five and ten. 12.2 percent of those aged between 35 and 44 started programming then.

Leftovers

• Female hockey players from the rival Koreas were paired up with each other Thursday to form their first-ever Olympic squad during next month’s Pyeongchang Winter Games, as their countries press ahead with rare reconciliation steps following a period of nuclear tensions.

• A dozen North Korean hockey players wearing white-and-red winter parkas crossed the heavily fortified border into South Korea earlier Thursday, as about 30-40 conservative activists shouted anti-Pyongyang slogans at a nearby border area.

Science

• For that feat, Bugatti knew there was a Germany-based Laser Zentrum Nord in Hamburg, an institute that formed part of the Fraunhofer research organization. The latter party has a 3-D printer which Bugatti said was the largest printer in the world suitable for titanium, equipped with four 400-watt lasers.

• Frank Götzke, head of new technologies at Bugatti Automobiles, recognized the Hamburg group had the selective laser melting units needed for the job.

• The Trump administration is preparing to end support for the International Space Station program by 2025, according to a draft budget proposal reviewed by The Verge. Without the ISS, American astronauts could be grounded on Earth for years with no destination in space until NASA develops new vehicles for its deep space travel plans.

• The draft may change before an official budget request is released on February 12th. However, two people familiar with the matter have confirmed to The Verge that the directive will be in the final proposal. We reached out to NASA for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

• The ocean is crowded. As many as 10 million viruses can be found squirming in a single millilitre of its water, and it turns out they have friends we never even knew about.

• Scientists have discovered a previously unknown family of viruses that dominate the ocean and can’t be detected by standard lab tests. Researchers suspect this viral multitude may already exist outside the water – maybe even inside us.

• One of the enduring sci-fi moments of the big screen—R2-D2 beaming a 3-D image of Princess Leia into thin air in “Star Wars”—is closer to reality thanks to the smallest of screens: dust-like particles.

• Scientists have figured out how to manipulate nearly unseen specks in the air and use them to create 3-D images that are more realistic and clearer than holograms, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature . The study’s lead author, Daniel Smalley, said the new technology is “printing something in space, just erasing it very quickly.”

• In this case, scientists created a small butterfly appearing to dance above a finger and an image of a graduate student imitating Leia in the Star Wars scene.

Security

• Spectre and Meltdown are major design flaws in modern CPUs. While they’re present in almost all recent processors, because Intel chips are so widely used, Intel is taking most of the heat for these bugs. Nowhere has the criticism been hotter than on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). That’s because unlike Apple and Microsoft operating system developers and OEMS like Dell and HP, Linux programmers do their work in the open. But, when Linux and Intel developers aren’t arguing, they are making progress.

• There’s no perceivable slowness of any kind. So that further helps our experiment, as we have a completely different set of operating systems and kernels to confirm the Windows findings.

• I always felt that entropy available to the operating system must be affected by running said operating system in a virtual environment – after all, unpredictable phenomena used to feed the entropy pool are commonly based on hardware and in a VM most hardware either is simulated or has the hypervisor mediate access to it. While looking for something tangentially related to the subject, I have recently stumbled upon a paper commissioned by the German Federal Office for Information Security which covers this subject, with particular emphasis on entropy sources used by the standard Linux random-number generator (i.e. what feeds /dev/random and /dev/urandom), in extreme detail:

• Linus Torvalds slams Intel’s Spectre and Meltdown patches, calling them “COMPLETE and UTTER GARBAGE”. See LKML for more.

• This demo uses JavaScript to hook into the copy event, which will fire via ctrl+c or right-click copy. Right now this demo does works in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari but not with Internet Explorer, however there is a demo below which is IE compatible.

• With the passage of time and the absence of a brand overhaul, the word “hotmail” near your name started to be quite ageing; like “ntlworld” or “blueyonder”, it was a sign that you weren’t keeping up. It was a deduction that wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, but online it is inference, not certainty, that drags you down. When you could have an ageless Yahoo address, there is just no call to leave this kind of footprint, unless “incredibly old” is your calling card.

• Lowyat.net, which previously exposed a leak of 46m citizen records belonging to Malaysian communications firms – reported Tuesday (23 January) that the details appeared to be from a central database linked to state hospitals and national transplant resource centres.

• Complete entries of personal information included ID numbers, names, email addresses, home addresses and phone numbers of 220,000 citizens recorded between January 2009 and August 2016.

• The vector for the attacks, which are described as being specifically targeted versus random attempts, was not through usual email attacks but camouflaged through several layers. The first attempt involves a phishing email disguised as a message from Federal Express, while the second attempt involves a malicious link pretending to be a link to Google Drive.

• It requests users to click on a link to download and print out an “attached label” that needs to be submitted in order to receive the parcel. The malicious link itself is disguised as a Google Drive link. Once a user clicks on it, the hackers’ website pops up with the malicious “Lebal copy.exe” file ready to download.

• It said that as as a result, victims globally lost US$172 billion – an average of US$142 per victim. The figure for Australia was US$1.9 billion in total. Each of these people also spent about 24 hours — or almost three full workdays — dealing with the aftermath.

• While 1.5 million web-facing computers currently run Microsoft web server software, a slightly larger number – 1.8 million – run Windows operating systems. The bulk of the difference is made up of Windows computers that either run Apache or reverse-proxy traffic from backend Apache servers. The most commonly used Windows version is Windows Server 2008, followed by 2012 and then the aging, unsupported Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2016 accounts for only 3.7% of all Windows web-facing computers at the moment, but it is steadily growing – this month, the number of Windows Server 2016 computers grew by 14% to 66,800.

• Security is always changing and failure always exists.

• This toxic scenario requires a fresh perspective on how we think about operational security. We must understand that we are often the primary cause of our own security flaws. The industry typically looks at cybersecurity and failure in isolation or as separate matters. We believe that our lack of insight and operational intelligence into our own security control failures is one of the most common causes of security incidents and, subsequently, data breaches.

Defence/Aggression

• Growing concerns about a possible nuclear war and other global threats have pushed forward the symbolic Doomsday Clock by 30 seconds – to just two minutes before midnight.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Harlo Holmes helps journalists learn how to use the anonymous whistleblower platform SecureDrop and how to stay safe online.

• Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has not stepped outside the heavily surveilled confines of the Ecuadorian embassy in London since he entered the building almost six years ago. Naturally, much of the media attention has focused on his international legal drama and threats to his safety, including arrest and possible extradition to the US. In contrast, ongoing violations of his human rights, including his fundamental right to healthcare in the context of his unusual confinement, have received less coverage.

• An attorney representing bank whistleblower Rudolf Elmer claims Assange threw his client ‘under the bus for the benefit of his own ego’

• WikiLeaks founder and leader Julian Assange is a polarizing figure. That was the case even before the 2016 US presidential campaign, during which WikiLeaks communicated with members of Donald Trump’s entourage, including his son, Donald Jr., and made public internal emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

• Sweden dropped the investigation in May 2017 and applied to revoke the European arrest warrant.

• Doctors who examined WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange found that nearly six years confined within the Ecuadorean Embassy in London has had a “dangerous” impact on his physical and mental health, citing limited access to proper care.

• Three medical professionals who evaluated Mr. Assange, 46, last year raised concerns about his condition in an editorial published Wednesday by The Guardian.

• Two doctors are warning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s physical and mental health is dangerously deteriorating, amid his more than 5-year stay in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Assange first sought refuge there in 2012, when he faced possible extradition to Sweden amid a sexual assault investigation that has since been dropped. The doctors called for Assange to be granted safe passage to a London hospital.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Future skyscrapers will harvest energy from the sun with photovoltaic windows

• Clean Technica reports that China blew the top off expectations for its solar installations in 2017, It put in 52.83 gigawatts.

• The incredible 2017 solar surge in China brought its total solar installed capacity up to 130 gigawatts. As a cursory look at these statistics makes obvious, in one year China increased its solar by nearly 70 percent. In short, it wasn’t so far from doubling its ability to generate electricity from solar sources.

• Floating solar power plantA lot of attention has been given over to watching China’s solar capacity additions in 2017, as the country seemed hell-bent on stupefying analyst expectations. China installed a total of 34.2 GW (gigawatts) of new solar PV capacity in 2016 which was well up on analyst expectations at the time. Looking forward, analysts seemed not to have learned their lesson, with Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) predicting that China would install “more than 30 GW.”

• On Monday, President Donald Trump slapped a 30 percent tariff on imported solar cells and panels.

• But while the White House said the goal was to punish China for an industrial policy aimed at taking over the global solar market, the harsh reality is that the president is going to end up punishing the states that voted for him the most. On top of that, U.S. taxpayers are actually going to end up paying for half of any tariff.

Finance

• While the MEPs and the law were real, the lobbyists were not: They were participating in a larp called Parliament of Shadows, based on the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade. The MEPs played themselves in a larp seeking to bring reality and fiction as close as possible in the world of vampire lobbying.

• In short, all personal user information stored on the iCloud — including photos, videos, text files, contacts, calendars and iCloud email — will be shared with Guizhou-Cloud Big Data and could be available to the Chinese authorities as well. Apple has said that G.C.B.D. will not have access to the personal data stored in its facility without Apple’s permission, but the new terms and conditions agreement appears to say the opposite.

• Orrin Hatch’s bill, which he said, could be folded into an immigration measure now being discussed by members of Congress, would raise the number of H-1B visas issued each year to 195,000 from the current number of 85,000.

• In addition to the provisions for high-skilled immigrants, the legislation would eliminate caps on how many permanent residents can come from a particular country — a provision that has often stymied workers from India and China. It would also create more exemptions from an overall cap on those authorized to live and work in the U.S. permanently, including for some family members and those with advanced degrees in science and technology.

• If it signs the latest version of this controversial deal, Jacinda Ardern’s government can hardly expect people to take the promise of a progressive new model for New Zealand’s international trading relations seriously, argues leading TPPA critic Jane Kelsey.

• [...]

• To be fair, the Labour-led government was handed a poison chalice. National excluded the opposition parties from information about the negotiations, leaving them dependent on leaks like everyone else. It expected – and senior Labour officials had hoped – the agreement would have been in force before the 2017 election.

• After over a year of testing (some of which didn’t go so hot), Amazon is ready at last to unveil its automated 7-Eleven killer to the public today. Doors opened at 7 o’clock this morning at the inaugural Amazon Go, which is located, conveniently, at the bottom of Amazon’s main Seattle office tower, a symbolic reminder that Jeff Bezos & Co. are watching over your every move once you step inside this fancy, checkout-free store.

• China invested more than ever before, €11bn, in German companies in 2017, according to a study from consulting firm EY, reported by Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Most transactions involved Hong Kong-based investors who are not affected by strict Chinese capital controls. The European Commission is pondering wether to set up a screening mechanism to sound the alarm bell on investments in sensitive sectors.

• The Tokyo-based company’s image sensor business is likely to weaken amid slowing momentum for Apple Inc.’s iPhones, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. wrote as he downgraded the company to neutral from overweight. IPhone X production will probably fall 50 percent quarter over quarter and the weakness is likely to continue for the first half of the year as demand for high-end smartphones plateaus, according to J.J. Park. Sony shares fell as much as 5.2 percent by midday in Tokyo.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This market paradigm encourages a subtle and unwitting alignment: These sites sustain themselves by finding like-minded groups and selling information about their behavior; disinformation propagators sustain themselves by manipulating the behavior of like-minded groups. Until this system is restructured, it is unlikely political disinformation operations can be stopped or even slowed. That rebuilding would be enormously difficult, since digital advertising is absolutely central to Internet commerce. But it is essential.

• Days ago, the Democratic Party disappointingly caved to Republicans and President Donald Trump and ended the government shut down without achieving anything meaningful. They were promised the potential for action by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that could help 800,000-plus immigrants known as Dreamers avoid deportation, but there are few signs that will materialize.

• Democrats balked at an opportunity to take a stand because they did not want to be divisive and disruptive. They did not have the fortitude to stick to a message that would communicate to Americans that the political party in power was shirking its responsibility to protect immigrants whose lives hang in the balance.

• Enter the New York Times and its opinion section, which published an “online conversation” on January 24 under the headline, “Enough Trump Bashing, Democrats.”

• What exactly do the editors overseeing the opinion section believe about Trump? Do the editors really think Democrats can negotiate in good faith or compromise with the president? What do they think Democrats can work on and get done with Trump when Republicans pay lip service to a policy change and then pursue a different and destructive policy?

• Taylor Weyeneth is America’s number two official in charge of drug policy. He’s a 24-year-old former Trump campaign volunteer whose resume is singularly unimpressive: apart from being a frat brother in good standing at St John’s University and organizing a single charity golf tournament, the only real jobs he’s ever held were working in his daddy’s chia seed factory (which closed when his dad went to jail for illegally processing Mexican steroids) and working as a legal assistant at the New York white shoe law firm of O’Dwyer & Bernstien.

• But this job was a bit of a mystery, because different versions of Weyeneth’s resumes listed different tenures at this firm. However, one of the partners at the firm, Brian O’Dwyer, has clarified the mystery. Weyeneth was fired because he “just didn’t show.”

• Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele blasted Family Research Council president Tony Perkins for giving President Donald Trump a “mulligan” on paying hush money to former adult film star Stormy Daniels.

• “When it comes down to giving Trump a pass, some top evangelical leaders are turning a blind eye to his past indiscretions and came to his defense following recent reports about his alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels,” MSNBC host Chris Matthews explained.

• “I have very simple admonition: just shut the hell up and don’t preach to me about anything ever again,” Steele suggested.

• “After telling me who to love, what to believe, what to do and what not to do and now you sit back and the prostitutes don’t matter, the grabbing the you-know-what doesn’t matter, the outright behavior and lies don’t matter, just shut up!” Steele blasted.

• Neil Gorsuch is supposed to be a good writer. In fact, he once was: During his tenure on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch produced a number of witty, lucid, and pithy opinions. But since his elevation to the Supreme Court, Gorsuch’s prose has curdled into a glop of cutesy idioms, pointless metaphors, and garbled diction that’s exhausting to read and impossible to take seriously. It may even be alienating the conservative justices whom Gorsuch was supposed to beguile with his ostensibly impeccable reasoning.

• Federal employees may not use their positions for private gain, according to federal law in the United States. Yet, this is exactly what Ivanka Trump is doing, according to Democracy Forward. The nonpartisan watchdog organization, which scrutinizes Executive Branch activity across policy areas and challenges unlawful actions through litigation, sent a formal letter to the Office of Government Ethics claiming that Ms. Trump is the latest member of the administration to run afoul of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations by using her position as a highly-ranking government employee to promote her fashion brand.

• Democracy Forward’s most central claim in its letter to David J. Apol, Acting Director of the Office of Government Ethics, stems from 5 CFR 2635.702, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. Listed under the heading, “Subpart G—Misuse of Position,” the statute states that a federal employee “shall not use his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of friends, relatives, or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity, including nonprofit organizations of which the employee is an officer or member, and persons with whom the employee has or seeks employment or business relations.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• “We will build on existing capabilities by creating a dedicated national security communications unit. This will be tasked with combating disinformation by state actors and others. It will more systematically deter our adversaries and help us deliver on national security priorities.”

• It should be no surprise that I’m an unabashed supporter of free speech. Usually essays that start that way are then followed with a “but…” and that “but…” undermines everything in that opening sentence. This is not such an essay. However, I am going to talk about some interesting challenges that have been facing our concepts of free speech over the past few years — often in regards to how free speech and the internet interact. Back in 2015, at our Copia Summit we had a panel that tried to lay out some of these challenges, which acknowledged that our traditional concepts of free speech don’t fully work in the internet age.

• There are those who argue that internet platforms should never do any moderation at all, and that they should just let all content flow. And while that may be compelling at a first pass, thinking beyond that proves that’s unworkable for a very basic reason: spam. Almost everyone (outside of spammers, I guess) would argue that it makes sense to filter out/moderate/delete spam. It serves no useful purpose. It clutters inboxes/comments/forums with off-topic and annoying messages. So, as Dave Willner mentions in that talk back in 2015, once you’ve admitted that spam can be filtered, you’ve admitted that some moderation is appropriate for any functioning forum to exist. Then you get to the actual challenges of when and how that moderation should occur. And that’s where things get really tricky. Because I think we all agree that when platforms do try to moderate speech… they tend to be really bad at it. And that leads to all sorts of stories that we like to cover of social media companies banning people for dumb reasons. But sometimes it crosses over into the absurd or dangerous — like YouTube deleting channels that were documenting war crimes, because it’s difficult to distinguish war crimes from terrorist propaganda (and, sometimes, they can be one and the same).

• A few weeks ago we posted an update on Montagna v. Nunis. This was a case where a plaintiff subpoenaed Yelp for the identity of a user. The trial court originally denied Yelp’s attempt to quash the subpoena – and sanctioned it for trying – on the grounds that platforms had no right to stand in for their users to assert their First Amendment rights. We filed an amicus brief in support of Yelp’s appeal of that decision, which fortunately the Court of Appeal reversed, joining another Court of Appeal that earlier in the year had also decided that of course it was ok for platforms to try to quash subpoenas seeking to unmask their users.

• Unfortunately, that was only part of what this Court of Appeal decided. Even though it agreed that Yelp could TRY to quash a subpoena, it decided that it couldn’t quash this particular one. That’s unfortunate for the user, who was just unmasked. But what made it unfortunate for everyone is that this decision was fully published, which means it can be cited as precedent by other plaintiffs who want to unmask users. While having the first part of the decision affirming Yelp’s right to quash the subpoena is a good thing, the logic that the Court used in the second part is making it a lot easier for plaintiffs to unmask users – even when they really shouldn’t be entitled to.

• The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of speech. Any state that accrues this kind of power will use it. And for that reason I traveled last week to Detroit to join David North, the chairperson of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, in a live-stream event calling for the formation of a broad front to block an escalating censorship while we still have a voice.

• “The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans,” Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said in a statement issued in support of the event. “Between the democratization of communication and usurpation of communication by artificial intelligence. While the Internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. While still in its infancy, the trends are clear and of a geometric nature. The phenomena differs in traditional attempts to shape cultural and political phenomena by operating at scale, speed and increasingly at a subtlety that eclipses human capacities.”

• few days back, Facebook said they would bring down the amount of news content in people’s News Feed and fill it with personal content from friends and family. But it might take some time for the company to do that.

• There was another change that CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted in a post last week. Facebook would show news content from high-quality, trustworthy sources. And rather than taking the help of some expert or AI-powered system, Facebook would go the old-school way and conduct public surveys.

• U.N. human rights experts called on the Philippines government on Thursday to allow independent news website Rappler to operate, voicing concern at rising rhetoric against voices critical of President Rodrigo Duterte.

• The country’s Securities and Exchange Commission revoked Rappler’s licence on Jan 11 for ownership violations. Maria Ressa, chief of Rappler (www.rappler.com), met state investigators on Monday to answer what she called a suspicious complaint about a 2012 story.

• “We are gravely concerned that the government is moving to revoke Rappler’s licence,” three U.N. human rights experts said in a joint statement. “We are especially concerned that this move against Rappler comes at a time of rising rhetoric against independent voices in the country.”

• The Facebook page for teleSUR English, a leftist online news site oriented to English-speaking audiences launched in 2014 by teleSUR, a public Latin American multimedia news company, appeared to have been deleted on Tuesday night.

• By Wednesday morning, teleSUR English’s Facebook page was up and running again.

• Developers of platforms such as Facebook have admitted that they were designed to be addictive. Should we be following the executives’ example and going cold turkey – and is it even possible for mere mortals?

• The second half of 2017 saw an unprecedented number of Twitter accounts banned in Germany and France thanks to an increase in removal requests from governments, NGOs, and other entities, according to data gathered by BuzzFeed News. The data also reveal that demands from the Turkish government have led Twitter to block hundreds of users for what appear to be political reasons.

• Lawyers for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who have been refused permission to transfer artwork from the jail – some of it containing images of torture and abuse – have urged the US Defence Secretary to overturn a ban that activists claim amounts to “censorship”.

• A number of the 41 prisoners still being held at the prison camp located at the US naval base in Cuba, often turn to art for relaxation. At the beginning of last year, the authorities there reportedly made it easier for prisoners to participate in drawing, painting and model-making.

• But last November, after a number of works of art were displayed at a New York gallery, officials suspended all transfers of art. In addition, the inmates were told all their art was government property and would be destroyed if they were ever released from the prison.

• Former doctoral student Luo Qianqian was “amazed” that her sexual assault story went viral in China, inspiring other women to denounce rampant harassment on campuses and unleashing a #MeToo movement in the country despite censorship challenges.

• Before she accused her professor of assaulting her, under the pretence of asking for help watering his plants, #MeToo had been slow to catch on in China.

• [...]

• But in a rare show of solidarity among intellectuals, more than 50 professors from over 30 colleges have signed an anti-sexual harassment manifesto.

• Amid the uproar, the education ministry said it had a “zero tolerance” policy and will establish a new mechanism to prevent sexual harassment.

• “The ministry’s response was really a surprise, because it’s a commitment from our country. I’m very glad my country is finally making this move,” Luo told AFP.

• Misinformation online is a relatively new problem for platforms, researchers, and communities. Understanding the problem, and staying abreast of the latest insights from social science and computer science research about how misinformation is created, spreads online, and affects users are necessary steps towards designing and launching impactful projects.

• To help surface actionable insights for researchers and communities working on information-pollution challenges, the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative (MITI) is supporting a community repository of recently published articles from thoughtful researchers across disciplines, spanning from communications to political science to human-computer interaction.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The National Security Agency has subtly edited its mission statement to remove any references to “honesty,” “openness” and “honor.”

• Theresa May has signalled her desire to crack down on encrypted messaging apps, arguing that the services provide a safe haven for terrorists and extremists and hinting that the government may take more concrete action if developers do not act themselves.

• Whistleblowing protections, crowdsourcing, anonymous voting processes, and even Glassdoor reviews—anonymous speech may take many forms in organizations.

• As well-established and valued as these anonymous feedback mechanisms may be, anonymous speech becomes a paradoxical idea when one considers how to construct a more open organization. While an inability to discern speaker identity seems non-transparent, an opportunity for anonymity may actually help achieve a more inclusive and meritocratic environment.

• Mark Zuckerberg has taken another step in his relentless quest for world domination with the acquisition of a Boston-based – that’s Boston in Massachusetts, not Boston in Lincolnshire – software company that authenticates identification cards issued by the government.

• We’ve seen how our digital children’s privacy is violated in everything they buy with cash or credit, in a way our analog parents would have balked at. But even worse: our digital children’s privacy is also violated by tracking what they don’t buy — either actively decline or just plain walk away from.

• A big blow for Facebook today after Europe’s top court delivered a verdict in a long-running legal challenge that opens the door for plaintiff and privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, to sue Facebook in his home city of Vienna.

• The company had sought to argue that Schrems’ does not have consumers rights on account of his privacy campaigning activities. But in its judgement today the CJEU rejects that argument, saying Schrems’ campaigning activities do not cancel out his status as a consumer with a private Facebook account.

• “After throwing dirt at me for three years and circulating that I would try to make a profit from my political activities, it’s maybe the time now for Facebook to apologize,” said Schrems in a statement on the judgement.

• Facebook has previously tried to argue that Austrian courts do not have international jurisdiction over its business, which has its European HQ in Ireland. But in 2015 a local appeals court ruled Schrems can file personal claims in his local court in Vienna.

• Although Schrems can pursue his legal challenge against Facebook, the court ruled he will not be able to bring his more than 25,000-strong class action suit against the company.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Dartmouth researchers, Julia Dressel and Hany Farid, decided not to focus on bias but on the overall accuracy. To do so, they took the records of 1,000 defendants and extracted their age, sex, and criminal history. These were split up into pools of 20, and Mechanical Turk was used to recruit people who were asked to guess the probability that each of the 20 individuals would commit another crime within the next two years.

• It’s been nearly a year since the Trump Administration issued its first Muslim ban, unleashing chaos at airports across the country. A new report provides some details about why that chaos unfolded the way it did.

• Last week, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general issued a long-delayed review of the agency’s implementation of the first Muslim ban. Despite redactions and a delay in the report’s release of more than three months by DHS, this report still confirms an alarming lack of guidance, preparation, and information given to government officers that weekend. It also shows that Customs and Border Protection, the agency tasked with implementing the ban, repeatedly violated court orders as they were issued in the week following the announcement of the ban. Similar conclusions have emerged from FOIA documents released to ACLU affiliates that filed 13 separate lawsuits seeking information on the ban’s implementation from CBP offices across the country.

• Arthur Wagner was a leading member of a state chapter of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose slogan “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany” encapsulates its extreme nativist and anti-Muslim views.

• The AfD, which is now the third-largest political party in Germany after its stunning success in last September’s elections, has tried to ban the construction of mosques in Germany, called on the country’s border police to shoot refugees and migrants if necessary to stop them from entering the country, and run ads reminiscent of World War II-era Nazi propaganda warning of the threat posed by Muslims coming into Germany.

• Lacey was not interested in the chaotic debris in the hallway, or the swarm of bluebottle flies on the stairs, as she made her way through the house at No 9 Downshire Hill in Hampstead on a warm June afternoon in 2006. But as she approached a room to her right, which was piled high with an assortment of papers, she let out a bark and started digging at the mess in front of her with her paws. What had caught the interest of Lacey, a black-and-tan German shepherd attached to the Metropolitan police’s dog unit, was a decomposing body.

• [...]

• Hall, who said he had taken part in BDSM activities in the past, believes Chappelow’s death could well have been a sex encounter that ended in murder. He said that the wax burns and asphyxiation were indications of this kind of sexual encounter, and that he is surprised that the police did not look further into Chappelow’s private life. “Most of the crimes that occur on the Heath at night go unreported for various reasons,” said Hall. “This (Chappelow’s murder) was very unlikely to have been a burglary gone wrong.”

• Despite what the appeal court said, the jury in the first trial “clearly concluded” nothing: they could not reach a verdict at all, and a small majority of them actually favoured acquittal. Their deliberations might have been very different if the evidence from both Jonathan Bean and Peter Hall had been available.

• “When I submitted the application to the CCRC, I was confident that the fresh evidence – particularly that obtained by the Guardian – would lead to a referral back to the court of appeal,” said Kirsty Brimelow QC, who has represented Wang. “Evidence of a person stealing mail and threatening violence would have had a significant impact upon the jury. Also, the prosecution case focused on Mr Chappelow’s life as a recluse who never went out, and could not have met his assailant other than surprising a mail thief. Evidence of another side to his life would have challenged this focus, and in my view may well have changed the verdict. There always must be potential for unfairness with secret hearings.”

• Geoffrey Robertson QC agrees. “Had the fresh evidence been available at the first trial, I do think it likely that Wang Yam would have been acquitted. I had, for example, raised the possibility of an assailant picked up on the Heath, but without the evidence that emerged years later that gave credence to the theory, consistent with some of the pathology, of a sadomasochistic ritual gone wrong. You cannot prove Wang Yam innocent – until someone confesses or they identify the DNA on the cigarettes – but doubts about his guilt are reasonable.”

• The crumbling house in which Chappelow was murdered was later bought by developers, who demolished it and rebuilt a home in the Regency style, complete with an indoor swimming pool, private cinema and staff quarters. It went on the market last year for £14.5m, and has since been sold. This week, a black Range Rover stands in its driveway, there is not a leaf out of place in the garden, and the immaculately painted letterbox has the word “Post” painted helpfully on it. All traces of Allan Chappelow are gone.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• keeping your blog lightweight is important, I show you how to design a blog fitting in less than 10kB.

• You’re already convinced weight really matters when it comes to web pages? You can skip the introduction and directly see how you can reduce your blog’s weight through a practical example.

• Unfortunately, the telecoms are notoriously shortsighted—and litigious. As such, it’s likely that there will be legal wrangling over the Montana order. Bullock and his team think they have gotten around FCC attempts to prevent state action by creating a requirement for companies that seek to contract with the state—rather than simply ordering restoration of net neutrality.

• We’ve long noted how state legislatures are so corrupt, they often quite literally let entrenched telecom operators write horrible, protectionist laws that hamstring competition. That’s why there’s now 21 states where companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have successfully lobbied for laws banning towns and cities from building their own broadband networks, even in instances where the incumbent refuses to. In many states, these laws even ban public/private partnerships, often the only creative solution for better broadband in low ROI markets.

• In the ad, Burger King customers discover that the typical Whopper price only gets them a “slow access Whopper pass,” meaning they’ll have to wait longer for their burger unless they pay as much as $26 to receive their food quickly. The spot features Burger King employees explaining the new rules to angry and confused customers by calling it “Whopper neutrality.”

• AT&T is lobbying Congress for a net neutrality law that isn’t nearly as strict as the rules just recently repealed by the Federal Communications Commission. But the most notable aspect of AT&T’s rather vague proposal is that the telco wants this law to apply to website operators in addition to Internet service providers.

• AT&T’s legislative campaign aims to head off what many analysts say could be another swing of the regulatory pendulum against broadband providers. In December, the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its net neutrality rules — a move that largely benefited AT&T and other broadband companies. But that decision is being challenged in court and in Congress. Many states are also moving to pass their own net neutrality rules to replace the federal regulations.

• The FCC’s net neutrality repeal received more than 22 million comments, but millions were apparently submitted by bots and falsely attributed to real Americans (including some dead ones) who didn’t actually submit comments. Various analyses confirmed the widespread spam and fraud; one analysis found that 98.5 percent of unique comments opposed the repeal plan.

• Activists and lawmakers are still trying to restore net neutrality protections at the federal level, but former FCC enforcement chief Travis LeBlanc says state and local action probably has the best chance of making an impact in the short term.

• Net neutrality: the notion that all data on the Internet should be treated the same, without discrimination or differential pricing — is at risk in the United States but protected by law in Europe. But is it really being enforced?

Intellectual Monopolies

• The availability of federal jurisdiction under the DTSA and powerful DTSA procedural tools, like ex parte seizure of allegedly purloined trade secrets, mean that conditions are ripe for trade secret litigation to increase.

Trademarks

• A recent decision of Geoffrey Hobbs QC, sitting as an Appointed Person, has rejected an appeal against the Hearing Officer’s decision to refuse to register ALEXANDER as a UK trade mark for mirrors an picture frames, on the ground of bad faith, following an opposition from Paper Stacked Limited.

Copyrights

• Grumpy Cat Limited sued the owners of US coffee company Grenade for exceeding an agreement over the cat’s image.

• The company only had rights to use the cat to sell its “Grumppuccino” iced drink, but sold other Grumpy products.

• The cat, real name Tardar Sauce, went viral in 2012 after photographs of her sour expression emerged online.

• A tool just released by the TVAddons team might carry interesting copyright implications. Github Browser enables Kodi users to install third-party addons directly from development platform Github. This removes the requirement for sites like TVAddons to host repositories containing potentially infringing add-ons, something which forms the basis of two lawsuits against the platform.

• Following in the footsteps of the United States, the European Union plans to launch its own piracy “watch list”. Based on input from relevant stakeholders, the list will identify sites and services that facilitate copyright infringement, to encourage foreign governments to take action in response. Unlike the USTR’s version, the EU list can include American companies as well.

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