● 01.29.18

● Links 29/1/2018: Parrot 3.11, OPNsense 18.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The key to a good on-call or travel laptop is to get something cheap. As computers have continued to get faster, the fact is that many people can get their general work done (especially in a pinch) with laptops that are many years old. This is especially true on a Linux desktop, even if you aren’t someone who spends a decent amount of time on a terminal.

• Used Thinkpads are a great choice for travel laptops, because they have good Linux compatibility and are rugged and easy to repair with replacement parts that are easy to find. Because so many organizations have used them as company laptops, you almost always can find a used one cheap on an auction site. Keep an eye out for a model that is listed as having no OS. Those laptops tend to be cheaper because people want to avoid having to install an OS, but as Linux users, we would just overwrite the OS anyway! I’ve consistently found that if I’m patient, I can get a Thinkpad with reasonable specs for less than $50 on auction sites. If you are willing to splurge on extra RAM or an SSD, these old machines can be surprisingly speedy.

• Another option, especially if you want a more portable laptop, is a Chromebook. Although these machines normally are designed to run a limited, secured OS that centers on Google services, they also can run Linux well once you switch into developer mode. Some people use cheap Chromebooks as their default travel computers since they just want to check Gmail and browse the web while traveling. Personally, I found a used Acer C710 for $40 and was able to add RAM and an SSD from a spare Thinkpad, and it turned out to be a rather capable Qubes-compatible machine.

• Tell me how Apple’s doing their users a favour by getting rid of those crufty niche tools that “nobody” uses anyway, and how I can just deal. If this is what you want from your computer vendor, then good for you because by golly you’re getting it, good and hard. For me, this MacBook’s staying on Sierra and I’ll wipe it with Linux or FreeBSD when Sierra doesn’t get any more updates. Maybe there will be a nice ARMbook around by then because I definitely won’t be buying another Mac.

Kernel Space

• From the mid-2000′s to 2011 Allwinner was marketing their F-Series processors with ARM9 32-bit RISC processors while finally in 2018 these SoCs might have upstream Linux kernel support.

• Linux SunXI developer Icenowy Zheng last week sent out the initial kernel patches for supporting these “SUNIV” Allwinner ARM9 SoCs.

• We’re proud to announce the release of Linux Driver Management 1.0, a reworked implementation with the focus on being an agnostic, GObject-style library for the detection and enumeration of devices, with bindings for popular languages such as C, JS via GJS, Python, and Vala, as well as support for matching devices to driver packages.

• The Solus Project this week released Linux Driver Management 1.0, a library created by this innovative Linux distribution for enumerating system components and detecting matches between said components and packages/drivers providing additional functionality.

• This library is about improving the user experience for devices that may not be playing out-of-the-box on Solus or other Linux distributions. Among the hardware initially focused on supporting, for example, is the NVIDIA graphics cards with the proprietary drivers.

• After going through nine weekly release candidates, the Linux 4.15 kernel is set to be released today as the first major stable update of 2018.

• Due to all of the ongoing KPTI/Retpoline changes over the past month to address Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, the Linux 4.15 development cycle dragged on much longer than anticipated and the longest cycle in about seven years. But there is the initial KPTI and Retpolinue support baked in, which has also been backported to some recent stable series. However, further tuning and optimizations to these mitigation techniques are still expected for Linux 4.16 and beyond. Using this functionality can degrade performance particularly for I/O workloads and others interacting heavily with the kernel, but hopefully some of the work coming up will further lighten the impact. Among the many features coming to Linux 4.16 are also PowerPC and ARM work in this space for their relevant exposure.

• After a release cycle that was unusual in so many (bad) ways, this last week was really pleasant. Quiet and small, and no last-minute panics, just small fixes for various issues. I never got a feeling that I’d need to extend things by yet another week, and 4.15 looks fine to me.

• Half the changes in the last week were misc driver stuff (gpu, input, networking) with the other half being a mix of networking, core kernel and arch updates (mainly x86). But all of it is tiny.

• So at least we had one good week. This obviously was not a pleasant release cycle, with the whole meltdown/spectre thing coming in in the middle of the cycle and not really gelling with our normal release cycle. The extra two weeks were obviously mainly due to that whole timing issue.

• Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, had good and bad news about the chip security problems Meltdown and Spectre. The good news is the lead up to the Linux 4.15 was “quiet and small, and no last-minute panics, just small fixes for various issues”. The bad news? “It’s not like we’re ‘done’ with Spectre/Meltdown.”

• On the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Torvalds explained, “The bulk of the 4.15 work is all the regular plodding ‘boring’ stuff. And I mean that in the best possible way. It may not be glamorous and get the headlines, but it’s the bread and butter of kernel development, and is in many ways the really important stuff.”

• ‘This was not a pleasant release cycle’ says Linux overlord, who prefers things boring, ‘Because boring really is good’

• Linus Torvalds has hit the Go button for version 4.15 of the Linux kernel, blamed the Meltdown and Spectre CPU design flaws for the delay and warned of more pain to come as fixes trickle out for silicon architectures.

• “This obviously was not a pleasant release cycle, with the whole meltdown/spectre thing coming in in the middle of the cycle and not really gelling with our normal release cycle,” Torvalds wrote.

• While the just-released Linux 4.15 kernel brings AMD Zen CPU temperature reporting support for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors, an oversight in the k10temp driver code is yielding an incorrect temperature for the Threadripper 1900X.

• Not only is Linux 4.15 coming today but the first systemd stable release of 2018 is also now available.

• Once again being punctual with their releases, the GNU Linux-libre volunteers managed to release the GNU Linux-libre 4.15-gnu kernel a short time after Linus Torvalds on Sunday released the official Linux 4.15 kernel.

• Two new drivers to the upstream Linux 4.15 kernel needed deblobbing/cleaning work. Those new drivers were the HiDeep touchscreen and Broadcom BCM7xxx boards memory. The project’s deblobbing scripts also had to be updated for some existing drivers that were previously cleaned including i915, Adreno, AMDGPU, Tegra, and others.

• GNU Linux-libre 4.15-gnu sources and tarballs are now available at

• http://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/4.15-gnu/.

• It didn’t require any deblobbing changes since -rc6-gnu. Binaries are already available in the Freesh .deb repository (thanks, Jason Self!); others are expected to show up over the next few days.

• This release introduces changes in scripts/package, so that .deb and .rpm scripts built with the scripts in there will refer to GNU Linux-libre rather than upstream. This is in line with our goal of not leading users to non-Free Software.

• There are two new drivers that needed cleaning up: HiDeep touchscreen, and Broadcom BCM7XXX based boards memory (!!!).

• A number of drivers needed updating in their cleaning up: i915, adreno, amdgpu, tegra, silead dmi, and atomisp.

• Upstream has removed oss (sound) drivers, and the ap1302 driver from staging, so the logic to clean them up is gone from deblob-4.15.

• For up-to-the-minute news, join us on #linux-libre of irc.gnu.org (Freenode), or follow me (@lxoliva) on Twister http://twister.net.co/, GNU social at social.libreplanet.org, Diaspora* at pod.libreplanetbr.org or pump.io at identi.ca. Check my web page (link in the signature) for direct links.

• Be Free! with GNU Linux-libre.

• One of the security improvements to Linux 4.16 is improving the default behavior for restricted access to /dev/mem for x86/x86_64 and ARM64 systems.

• The CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM Kconfig switch that has been around since the end of the 2.6 kernel days is now going to be enabled by default for x86/x86_64 and ARM platforms.

• Ingo Molnar began sending in his various Git pull requests this morning for targeting the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window, including the scheduler updates.

• One of the kernel scheduler changes catching our attention was Mel Gorman’s sched/fair: Only immediately migrate tasks due to interrupts if prev and target CPUs share cache.

• Not even a day after the release of the Linux 4.15 kernel, Linux Lite creator Jerry Bezencon managed, once again, to be the first to deploy the new kernel series for all users of his Ubuntu-based operating system.

• With the release of the Linux 4.15 kernel series out the door, it’s time to take a look at the contributions made by Collabora’s developers during this development cycle.

• Linux kernel 4.15 was released yesterday by Linus Torvalds, and it’s the first kernel series to come built-in with patches for the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities. However, the Linux 4.15 kernel also offers many new features like support for the RISC-V architecture and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization.

• In addition, there’s also support for the User-Mode Instruction Prevention feature for Intel processors, modesetting support and improves video support for the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver for supported AMD Radeon graphics cards, as well as better power usage for machines with the SATA Link Power Management feature.

Linux Foundation

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has agreed on the 15th project to grace its roster: Rook, a storage-oriented plugin for Kubernetes.

• Developed by Seattle’s Bassam Tabbara while he was CTO of Quantum Systems, Rook is an open-source project that allows Kubernetes users to enjoy the benefits of having storage more closely connected to their clusters. It’s the latest move by the CNCF community to make Kubernetes — the popular open-source project used to manage large deployments of applications built around containers — easier to use for a wider base of technology organizations.

• The Linux Foundation, said to host nine of the top 10 open source networking projects, is seeking to foster collaboration among those disparate offerings with a new “administrative structure” called the LF Networking Fund.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa 18.0 is currently being prepared for release by mid-February and is yet another feature-packaged, quarterly update to this open-source 3D graphics driver stack with significant improvements for OpenGL and Vulkan support and performance.

• Keith Packard has been consulting for Valve for the past year to get Virtual Reality devices hooked up and properly working on Linux. Take a look at his presentation from LinuxConfAu 2018 [Official Site].

• It’s all pretty technical as expected, but all very interesting too. It sounds like a massive amount of work, since they’ve had to come up with a way to have VR devices treated as a different type of display and not have your normal windowing system cause issues. The most important thing to note, is that he said at the end of the video “Virtual Reality in Linux is working great, and it should be coming to your desktop pretty soon”—nice!

• While we are seeing exciting projects at the moment about mapping Direct3D 11 over Vulkan (as well as D3D9 and D3D12 over Vulkan projects too), there are new open-source projects for mapping Vulkan over Direct3D 12 and Metal.

• This weekend I wrote how the AMDKFD discrete GPU support should be in place for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.17. This is going to allow discrete Radeon GPUs to have ROCm working off the mainline kernel for OpenCL/compute support, but for 4.17 it’s unlikely RX Vega GPUs will have compute working.

• Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 18.0-RC3 with 50+ changes comprising of many Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes.

• It was just last week that the Mesa 18.0 code was branched and first release candidate issued. If you’re wondering how we’re already up to RC3, the RC2 release was a “brown paper bag” release that happened almost immediately after RC1 after the version string for RC1 was accidentally messed up. So in reality, this is the second real release candidate for Mesa 18.0.0.

• After rolling out the 390.12 beta Linux driver in early January as the first public driver in the 390 series, NVIDIA is ending January by the first 390 stable release: 390.25.

• The NVIDIA 390.25 Linux driver is shipping this Monday as the first stable driver with various fixes, new product support, and other minor improvements over 390.12.

• New product support includes the GeForce GTX 1060 5GB and Quadro P620 Pascal graphics cards now being officially supported.

• While using Vulkan lowers the CPU utilization compared to OpenGL, in our testing of NVIDIA versus the open-source Radeon drivers we generally have found the red team’s drivers to consume more CPU resources. Thus it’s good to hear that RADV co-conspirator Bas Nieuwenhuizen is working on reworking how this Radeon Vulkan driver handles pipeline emitting.

• As a follow-up to the article a few days ago about nearly complete OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support for R600g, this pre-GCN older Radeon Gallium3D driver has landed in Mesa 18.1-dev Git support for its final OpenGL 4.4 extension.

• ARB_query_buffer_object is now in place inside Mesa Git following the patches David Airlie published a few days ago on the mailing list. This was the last OpenGL 4.4 extension incomplete for R600g in hitting OpenGL 4.4.

Applications

• Amp is a complete text editor for your terminal, which is inspired by vim’s modal approach to text editing. Amp aims to keep things as simple as possible (SAP). There are already plenty of highly-configurable editors available. At its core, amp aims to minimize configuration and provide a great out-of-the-box experience.

• As you already know vim editor similarly, Amp is a modal editor: keystrokes perform different functions based on the current mode. Many familiar modes (insert, normal, select, etc.) are available, as well as several new ones providing additional functionality. In this article, we show you how to install amp tool on ubuntu and arch Linux.

• I’ve got some great news for fans of Catfish, the fast and powerful graphical search utility for Linux. The latest version, 1.4.4, has arrived with performance improvements and tons of localization updates!

• But GTK fans needn’t feel like they’re missing out. Lollypop — arguably the best modern desktop music player for GNOME — is working on a responsive design too.

• There are many programs out there that help users manage partitions on their drives. Some, like fdisk, are command-line tools. Others have a GUI (graphical user interface), like GParted. I shall demonstrate, today, five very good Linux partition managers, both graphical and text-only.​

Instructionals/Technical

• As a long-time member of the documentation team at Scribus, I keep up-to-date with the latest updates of the source so I can help make updates and additions to the documentation. When I recently did a “checkout” using Subversion on a computer I had just upgraded to Fedora 27, I was amazed at how long it took to download the documentation, which consists of HTML pages and associated images. I became concerned that the project’s documentation seemed much larger than it should be and suspected that some of the content was “zombie” documentation—HTML files that aren’t used anymore and images that have lost all references in the currently used HTML.

Wine or Emulation

• No matter where you fall on the Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux debate, one thing remains true: you shouldn’t be forced to limit yourself to just one operating system. Of course, there are workarounds, like running a virtual machine, but they’re not always intuitive and can inhibit your programs’ performance.

• CrossOver 17 allows you to launch Windows apps natively on your Mac or Linux computer without buying a Windows license, rebooting, or using a virtual machine, and it’s on sale for $19.

Games

• Overload [Steam, Official Site] is a really quite fantastic six-degree-of-freedom shooter and they’ve said for a while they will add in multiplayer, turns out it’s not that far off now. I’ve covered their previous updates many times, because I’m excited to see it finished. It already feels great right now, but what’s even better is that they’ve announced their release plans.

• Here’s one we missed, Don’t Sink [Official Site, Steam] a sandbox adventure pirate RPG that’s currently in Early Access added Linux support last month.

• Linux support arrived with the December 24th update, which you can read here. Since Steam’s newly released list doesn’t update when a game has a new platform (like Linux), it’s up to us to make sure you know it’s on Linux!

• I simply can’t get enough of building games, so when I found Voxel Tycoon [Official Site] I was a little bit in love. Turns out it is coming to Linux!

• You will be sorting out transport, building factories and mining in an infinite world, so you never run out of space. It also has terraforming, so you can dig down and deep or raise a mountain—your choice. It sounds like it will be quite exciting if you like OpenTTD, Factorio and the likes.

• What would happen in a world where you could clone anything? Madness obviously and that’s a key theme in Overloop [Steam, Official Site].

• In Overloop you will be cloning yourself and then likely sacrificing your clone to overcome traps and it really does look quite good. I haven’t seen this type of game mechanic done too often, so hopefully it’s as good as the below trailer makes it look.

• Do you like strategy games? How about challenging people online to a duel? Insidia [Steam, Official Site] is now on Linux, free and it’s actually not bad.

• Feral Interactive are up to their usual funny business with a brand new Linux port teaser up on their radar.

• This is now the second unannounced Linux game they’re teasing (here’s the other), so I can’t wait to see what they have cooked up for us. The last teaser was put up a good few months ago now, so hopefully at least one of them will release soon. They’re both in the outermost part of the radar, so they could still be a while away. We don’t really know what “Quite Soon” actually means, it could end up being tomorrow, a week or more.

• The Last Time is a short but good point and click adventure written by a single developer.

• You’re starting in the seventies, when the protagonist was police officer. He and his colleague are called to the scene of a burglary, where thing go awry. Forty years later, the former policeman lives in a retirement home, when suddenly, his past is catching up with him…

• Can’t get enough of your city builders? Neither can I! Depraved [Official Site] is another, although it has survival elements and it’s set in the Wild West.

• It’s not actually released yet, with no date over than “2018″ being given at this current time.

• Full Metal Furies [Official Site] is an action RPG that puts an emphasis on team work with a unique combat system and it’s coming to Linux.

• I wrote about the cute looking MMO ‘Tale of Toast’ [Steam, Official Site] quite recently, although they didn’t have an actual date set for their Early Access launch. They’ve now put up a date and Linux support will be same-day!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Glad to announce the release of KStars 2.9.2 for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

• In addition to the usual bug fixes and enhancement, we finally have proper cross-platform theming support! Most of the code was based on Digikam’s theming code so Kudos to Digikam team for their great work!

• Now Windows and MacOS users can enjoy the KStars dark theme in all of its glory!

• After a somewhat prolonged hiatus (my move from Denmark to Germany and full-time job at SUSE Linux GmbH had something to do with this), a new revision of the digiKam Recipes book is ready for your reading pleasure.

• A new book cover is probably the most visible change, but it’s certainly not the only one. All the screenshots have been updated to reflect changes in the latest version of digiKam. Obsolete content has been pruned, and some of the existing material has been revised and updated.

• There’s a KDE stand where you can see some of the latest KDE bits and pieces, including Plasma 5 running on low-power hardware. 2GB ought to be enough for everyone, right? We might have a phone available running the existing Plasma Mobile code, since hardware continues to be tricky to come by (Nexus5X is fine).

• In addition, we fixed bugs, including a few corner-case issues for workflows where Flatpak apps are available alongside apps from your distro. Flatpak support is constantly improving!

• CryFS is considered beta software by its developers.

• While that is completely fine, it is a bit of a problem for the LTS release of Plasma Vault.

• The most recent problem that I was made aware of is that CryFS breaks its filesystem layout in new releases. While this is not a problem when using cryfs from the command line, it is a problem for UIs that use it like Plasma Vault, SiriKali and others.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Famed GNOME developer Matthias Clasen of Red Hat provided an update on the state of the GTK4 tool-kit during this week’s DevConf.cz event in Brno.

• Clasen covered the differences in drawing, input, and widgets between GTK3 and GTK4. He also reiterated how the Vulkan renderer, OpenGL renderer, new GDK APIs, event controllers, and composite widgets are among the headline features for GTK+ 4.0.

• Adding to the list of features for the long overdue GIMP 2.10 release is better debugging support.

• Being added to the GIMP code-base today is a backtrace GUI for displaying backtraces when critical crashes occur with this image manipulation program. With having this GUI, they hope those experiencing crashes will be more prone to reporting their bugs upstream to the developers. This backtrace GUI optionally supports GDB or LLDB debuggers.

• From time to time, I find myself being asked about various details about how content is thumbnailed in GNOME Photos, and the reasons behind various implementation decisions. I can never remember all the details, and always have to dig through Git history and bug reports across multiple modules to come up with an answer. I am hoping that this brain dump will be more persistent than my memory, and more holistic than random comments here and there.

Distributions

New Releases

• Parrot 3.11 is now available for download.

• This new release introduces many improvements and security fixes compared to the previous versions. It includes by default all the spectre/meltdown security patches currently available and an updated version of the Linux 4.14 kernel.

• A new car hacking menu now contains a collection of useful open source tools in the automotive industry to test real world cars or simulate CANBus networks.

• Metasploit and postgresql are now patched to work flawlessly out of the box in live mode.

• Other important updates include Firefox 58, increased installer stability, many updated security tools and some important graphic improvements.

• Parrot Studio was reintroduced with many improvements, this special derivative of Parrot is designed for multimedia production as an improved version of Parrot Home for workstations, with many useful productivity tools pre-installed.

• This release will probably be the last version of the 3.x series (except for eventual security updates), and we wanted to include some of the changes that we planned for parrot 4.x as a gift for our community.

• Dubbed Centaurus, the Q4OS 3.1 series of the open-source distro is based on the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system, which currently lives in the Debian Testing repositories, and uses the development branch of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), version 14.0.5.

• “Q4OS Centaurus will be in development until Debian Buster becomes stable, and will be supported at least five years from the official release date,” reads today’s announcement. “Anybody is invited to try out the brand new version and report bugs and glitches.”

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Apologies are due for the missing Roundup for Week 3; while the northern hemisphere has been freezing, down here in the south we have been boiling. Alas, all that heat doesn’t help with concentration! So, this is an aggregated Roundup.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• A public announcement was made last week by OpenSuSE Project’s Lars Vogdt to inform the community about the future of the openSUSE Education project, which tried to support schools in the past several years using the latest openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise technologies.

• The latest release of the openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) operating system was based on openSUSE Leap 42.1, and the team appears to still spend a lot of time maintaining more than 460 packages in the openSUSE Education project, but did not manage to find new contributors to maintain its repositories or create a new release.

• openSUSE Project’s Richard Brown has shared some insight into the work that the openSUSE Linux security team is doing to protect users against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities.

• openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed users were among the first to receive the patches against Meltdown and Spectre hardware bugs that put billions of devices at risk of attacks. The first kernel updates were made available early this month for both OpenSuSE Leap 42.2 and 42.3, though the former reached end of life on January 26, 2018.

Red Hat Family

• GRAB, Southeast Asia’s leading ride-hailing platform has grown rapidly and now manages more than 3.5 million journeys each day. With the extensive progress and frequent roll-out of new application features, the company now utilises Red Hat’s technology, Red Hat Ansible Tower to assist in a better handling of the growing demand for its services.

• MailGuard is set to boost its local and international channel play, with Red Hat’s former local channel sales and development director, Colin Garro, stepping in as the company’s new sales and channel global director.

• The Australian cloud web and email security vendor said that the freshly-created role will see Garro take the lead on strategic alliances and the pursuit of new markets, as MailGuard continues to expand its international footprint.

• “This is an exciting time for MailGuard,” the company’s CEO and founder, Craig McDonald, said. “Colin brings extensive experience and deep insights that align closely with our vision for the growth of the business.”

Finance

Debian Family

• Looks like there won’t be a release of Policy this month, but please consider contributing so we can get one out next month.

Derivatives

• Running siduction was a pretty good experience for me. The distribution is very easy to set up and the Calamares installer gets the user up and running with fewer steps than Debian’s system installer. The LXQt edition of siduction works quickly and the desktop environment is pleasantly lightweight. I found LXQt generally provided me with all the features I wanted to use while staying out of my way, which was appreciated.

• One of the few concerns I had was with the confusing way video playing worked on the distribution. I think it would have been easier if siduction simply shipped with VLC or Totem for playing videos. Otherwise, the applications which shipped with the distribution worked well and I found running siduction was generally pleasantly boring.

• For people who like running cutting edge software and want to take advantage of Debian’s massive supply of open source software, I think siduction is an excellent option. The user needs to be prepared to handle a lot of updates, dozens or (in my case) maybe even hundreds per week. But if you don’t mind installing waves of updates, then siduction offers good performance, an easy to use installer and a wide range of desktop editions. I especially appreciate the Synaptic feature which allows us to restart services which have been updated and I suspect people running network services will really like having this ability.

• siduction didn’t really do anything which stood out as different or amazing, but on the other hand I didn’t run into any serious problems. The distribution provided a solid, easy to use rolling release with a huge amount of software in the repositories and handled all my hardware beautifully. I think people who like running openSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch Linux may want to check out siduction as an alternative, especially since the distribution can be set up with little more than a few mouse clicks.

• For a Linux user, every new distro is a whole new experience. For normal to advanced users, SolydXK is a great opportunity to use the most out of the computer. SolydXK is a distro based on Debian, the core of Ubuntu. It’s highly like that you’re using Ubuntu or other Ubuntu flavors. As SolydXK is based on Debian, you’ll feel nothing different with the functionalities and features different than Ubuntu. SolydXK also provides optimized Raspberry Pi version.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Once upon time, I gleefully purchased a BQ Aquaris M10 FHD Ubuntu tablet, believing this would be one of the technology platforms to take the Linux operating system big and mighty. However this never happened, and I ended up with a device that had little day-to-day use. So I upgraded it to Android, to see if this would make a difference.

• However, early tests in the cozy comfort of my home are one thing. Actually using the tablet is another. Luckily, I had a chance to see how well it performs in a real-life situation, hence this article. It will also give us an opportunity to compare to my Samsung Galaxy Note device, which I also recently refreshed for new use. Follow me.

• Several years ago, I made the decision to replace proprietary technologies (mainly Apple products) with technology that ran on free and open source software (FOSS). I can’t say it was easy, but I now happily use FOSS for pretty much everything.

• The hardest part involved my mobile handset. There are basically only two choices today for phones and tablets: Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. Since Android is open source, it seemed the obvious choice, but I was frustrated by both the lack of open source applications on Android and the pervasiveness of Google on those devices.

• So I entered the world of custom ROMs. These are projects that take the base Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and customize it. Almost all these projects allow you to install the standard Google applications as a separate package, called GApps, and you can have as much or as little Google presence on your phone as you like. GApps packages come in a number of flavors, from the full suite of apps that Google ships with its devices to a “pico” version that includes just the minimal amount of software needed to run the Google Play Store, and from there you can add what you like.

• One of China’s top smartphone makers is targeting Japan for its next conquest.

• Oppo, which vanquished Apple Inc. and Xiaomi Corp. in just a few years to become No. 2 in its home market, will introduce its flagship R11s model next month, Deng Yuchen, chief of Japan operations, said in an interview. Oppo is aiming to reach a market position that matches its global sales standing within five years.

• No, 2017 was not a good year for smartphone shipments into China. According to research firm Canalys, for all of last year such deliveries declined 4% from 2016′s figure to hit 459 million units. That is the first time ever that the country experienced a year-over-year decline in shipments of intelligent handsets. Had the last three months of last year turned out differently, the growth streak might have continued. From October through December of 2017, just shy of 113 million phones made their way into China. That was a 14% decline from Q4 2016.

• Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi beat out Samsung as the No.1 smartphone vendor in India by shipments in Q4 2017, according to estimates from Canalys. During the quarter, Xiaomi shipped 8.2 million smartphone units in India, well above that of Samsung, which shipped 7.3 million smartphone units.

Free Software/Open Source

• Again, this goes back to the idea of open collaboration. A product gets better with more contributors than just a few of them. A large community gets built around a certain product, which helps it gain validation and feedback from a large audience. The beauty lies in seeing the product get better and better with contributions from a large vibrant set of users.

• Smart speakers are all the range in tech these days and soon it will be the battle of the titans. But as those giants scuffle, the small men, the consumers, sometimes get trampled on. Especially their privacy. It’s no secrets that the likes of Amazon and Google want your data. They promise to do no evil, but you can never really tell. Consumers have opted to just accept the status quo in exchange for convenience. Now, however, they don’t have to compromise just to get an Amazon Echo or Google Home experience, with the Mycroft Mark II Open Voice Assistant speaker.

Events

• For people planning on attending the openSUSE Conference 2018 in Prague, Czech Republic, from May 25 – 27, there are certain requirements necessary to receive a visa for those who are not citizen of the European Union.

• I’ve been very fortunate to have the support from several free software organizations to travel to events around the world and share what I do with other people. It’s an important mission in a world where technology is having an increasing impact on our lives. With that in mind, I’m always looking for ways to improve my presentations and my presentation skills. As part of mentoring programs like GSoC and Outreachy, I’m also looking for ways to help newcomers in our industry to maximize their skills in communicating about the great work they do when they attend their first event.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• In December, I gave an introduction to the theming API in Firefox. While it allows you to do many things like animated themes, macOS-style overscroll or interactive theme editors, the API has some limitations. One issue with dynamic theming API compared to traditional CSS theming is that it requires familiarity with JavaScript and WebExtension APIs to make a basic dynamic theme.

• Greetings! Time for issue #13 of your favorite newsletter, where you can follow the progress of WebRender and it’s integration in Gecko. We are still busy fixing correctness issues (as you can see by the number of times the word “fixed” appears in the lists below), modulo Glenn’s usual big perf optimization.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• AOCC 1.1 is the second public release of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler designed for Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC processors.

• Back in May AMD released AOCC 1.0 as their optimized compiler stack for Ryzen CPUs. AOCC is the replacement to the company’s older AMD Open64 compiler designed for older CPUs. With Open64 sadly being a relic now of the past, AOCC is based upon LLVM/Clang.

• The OpenBSD Foundation needs your help to achieve our fundraising goal of $300,000 for 2018.

• Reaching this goal will ensure the continued health of the projects we support, will enable us to help them do more, and will avoid the distraction of financial emergencies that could spell the end of the projects.

• For more than 3 years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.

• We humbly present to you the sum of another major iteration of the OPNsense firewall. Over the second half of 2017 well over 500 changes have made it into this release, nicknamed “Groovy Gecko”. Most notably, the firewall NAT rules have been reworked to be more flexible and usable via plugins, which is going to pave the way for subsequent API works on the core firewall functionality. For more details please find the attached list of changes below.

• After hitting the RC phase a few weeks ago, OPNsense 18.1 has been officially released as the latest version of this pfSense-forked network/router-oriented BSD operating system.

• OPNsense 18.1 is based on FreeBSD 11.1 while pulling in the HardenedBSD security changes. OPNsense 18.1 reworks its firewall NAT rules, PHP 7.1 and jQuery 3 are powering the web interface, there is now OpenVPN multi-remote support for clients, IPv6 shared forwarding support, improvements for intrusion detection alerts, a rewritten firewall live log, reverse DNS support for insight reporting, and a variety of new plugins.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Compared to the computer interfaces of today, the display keyboard used by the Apollo astronauts aboard their spacecraft might look quaint — until you recall that it was central to flying to the first humans to the moon almost half a century ago.

Leftovers

• Starting at $999, the iPhone X is Apple’s most advanced model to date, but it’s apparently not selling well enough to keep manufacturing at current rates. Nikkei reports that Apple is cutting iPhone X production in half due to slower-than-expected sales in the U.S., Europe, and China. Notably, production is being ramped down on the device after it’s been on the market less than three months.

• China’s first online sharing platform for integrated circuits and microsystems has been launched by a state-owned enterprise.

• The platform, initiated by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), enables the public to have access to the CETC intellectual property database, software tools and production line.

• Google says it will allow netizens to block nuisance “reminder” adverts that follow them around across websites.

• The Mountain View advertising giant said the new feature, launching first on its own sites and in Android apps, will let users rid themselves ads that prod people about products they had previously viewed. You know the ones: you search for a camera, and then you get stalked by camera ads all over the place. The feature can be toggled on through an ad settings menu.

• “Today, we’re rolling out the ability to mute the reminder ads in apps and on websites that partner with us to show ads,” said Google data privacy and transparency group product manager John Krafcik.

• John Morris, a composer who had a long list of movie, theatre and television credits but was best known for a long association with Mel Brooks that earned him Academy Award nominations for Blazing Saddles and The Elephant Man, has died at his home in Red Hook, New York aged 91.

• Morris, a genial son of British parents, and Brooks, a boisterous comedy director from Brooklyn, had worked on two short-lived Broadway musicals when Brooks asked him to write the film score for The Producers (1967). It was Morris’ first movie score and Brooks’ first feature. Over the next 24 years, they would collaborate on 10 more films.

• Apple appears to have all but killed macOS Server by deprecating most of what distinguishes it from a desktop OS.

• The company slipped out news of the software’s demise in a nondescript forum post that details how Cupertino plans to stop supporting DHCP, DNS, mail, messages, NetInstall, VPN, the Web server, the Wiki, as well as calendar and contact support. There’s also a handy list of open source alternatives to each of these, so you can run them on proper, redundant, resilient server hardware.

Science

• After long negotiations over proposed price hikes for access to Elsevier’s academic literature database ScienceDirect, a consortium of 300 South Korean universities and college libraries came to an agreement with the Dutch publishing giant last week. The consortium had pushed back against a 4.5 percent price hike suggested by Elsevier, but agreed to price increases of up to 3.9 percent after the publisher threatened to withdraw access to the database.

• The National Science Board (NSB) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) has just released its Science & Engineering Indicators 2018, which it describes as, “Broad-based, objective information on the U.S. and international S&E enterprise” — S&E being short for science and engineering. The report shows that, for the first time, China is the world leader in the publication of scientific papers, besting the previous leader, the United States. While there are still lots of areas in which the U.S. leads China and the rest of the world, the new ranking reflects China’s increasing importance in the world of S&E.

• Alphabet’s Google, Tencent Holdings, and Sequoia Capital China have joined a $15 million B series funding round for Boston- and Shenzhen-based artificial intelligence (AI) pharmaceutical firm XtalPi.

• Sequoia led the round, which brings the startup’s total funding amount to $20 million, XtalPi and Google said in statements on Wednesday.

• XtalPi uses AI, cloud computing and quantum physics to improve drug design processes.

• President Trump is reportedly planning to request an end to funding for the International Space Station (ISS) by 2025, a move that would be a major hurdle to expanding space exploration efforts.

• The president’s official budget for fiscal year 2019 is scheduled to be released next month, but a draft proposal, seen by The Verge, would call for U.S. support for the program, which has been in place for more than 20 years, to end.

• Two years ago, we covered research out of the University of Manchester that demonstrated that graphene-based membranes could serve as a filter for cleaning up nuclear waste at nuclear power plants.

• While it’s not clear that this particular application for the graphene membranes ever made much headway in nuclear waste cleanup, they did discover an interesting phenomenon about these graphene membranes in the ensuing two years: protons can transport through graphene.

• Based on that knowledge, Andre Geim’s team at the University of Manchester began to investigate whether light could be used to enhance proton transport through graphene by the addition of other light sensitive materials, such as titanium dioxide (TiO2). Turns out that graphene did the job quite effectively on their own.

• For all the excitement surrounding the gene-editing tool CRISPR, it is not that efficient or precise. It’s hard to make many changes at once. My lab has set the record so far — making 62 modifications to the genome of a single cell — but we have compelling applications that need a greater number of simultaneous changes. Now, however, we have the technologies required to make this feasible.

Health/Nutrition

• The new WHO Global Antimicrobial Surveillance System (GLASS) released its report [pdf] (Early implementation 2016-17), which found that there is widespread antibiotic resistance among 500,000 people with suspected bacterial infections across 22 countries, according to a press release.

• Most commonly reported resistant bacteria were Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, and Streptococcus pneumoniae, followed by Salmonella spp.

Security

• Intel reportedly warned its OEM partners about the Meltdown and Spectre processor flaws on 29 November, the same day that its chief executive, Brian Krzanich, sold a tranche of stock and options and netted a healthy profit.

• The US Government was not on the priority list of entities which Intel chose to notify when it became aware of flaws in its processors that were finally divulged to the world earlier this month.

• In initial disclosures about critical security flaws discovered in its processors, Intel Corp. notified a small group of customers, including Chinese technology companies, but left out the U.S. government, according to people familiar with the matter and some of the companies involved.

• Microsoft says that unstable systems could lead towards data loss or corruption.

• He suggested making two points in particular. The primary one is the basic security argument about Equifax. “They can’t be trusted with data, and they’ve proven that over and over again,” said Mr. Sullivan, who is also the author of “Gotcha Capitalism.”

• There is also the matter of internal communications, given that most employees (including me, until recently) have no idea whom their employers are working with. “If all employees understood that every single pay stub was going to Equifax every week, there would be a mini-revolt,” he said.

• Malicious attackers have been caught using cryptocurrency mining scripts in ads served by YouTube, with Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform being used to serve the scripts to users in some countries.

• The Scottish and Welsh Governments want to run trials of electronic voting. They are asking the public’s opinion on this in online consultations. These pieces of electronic democratic participation are great.

• E-voting isn’t. In an effort to generate greater democratic participation, the Welsh and Scottish Government risk undermining democracy itself.

Defence/Aggression

• Whenever we drive on the Ronald Reagan Expressway, my daughter asks me to remind her what Reagan was famous for, and I have to recount as much as I can recall: brought us to the brink of nuclear extinction, murdered a generation through homophobic indifference to the AIDS crisis, put the War on Drugs on overdrive, funded terrorists throughout Latin America, grew the national debt by trillions, and literally allowed astrology to steer the course of the nation.

• And yet, he was rehabilitated in the public imagination, so much so that Republicans and Democrats in the 2016 election vied to declare themselves the second coming of Ronald Fucking Reagan.

• If that wasn’t evidence enough of the short memories of the American public, consider that the torturer GW Bush’s popularity has more than doubled since he left office, having presided over the destruction of the world’s economy and a war based on a lie that destabilized the Middle East and led to literally uncounted deaths (because he refused to count them), spending the country into a Reagan-sized hole while clearing brush on his ranch and affecting a Texas accent.

• Actor Will Ferrell revived his role as former President George W. Bush, and opened this week’s “Saturday Night Live” sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office to deliver a stern warning about the dangers of rehabilitating his image in the wake of a Donald Trump presidency.

• The faux Bush said he’s been “too busy doing oil paintings,” to keep up with the news lately, but referenced a new poll that recently revealed his approval to be at an all-time high. Bush said that Trump came into the White House “and suddenly I’m looking pretty sweet by comparison.”

• Since Trump took office there has been plenty of nostalgia for the Bush presidency, and last week, a new poll showed that 61 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Bush.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• We live in an age where privacy is quickly becoming a relic from the past, much like dial-up modems and AMC Gremlins. No longer can we have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in our communications, whether online or on our smartphones.

• An outspoken internet activist killed himself in a New York hotel in eerily similar circumstances to fellow hacker and Reddit co- founder Aaron Swartz.

• James Dolan, 36, took his own life at a newly opened hotel, Gowanus Inn and Yard, in Brooklyn just after Christmas.

• He is the second developer of the whistle-blower submission system SecureDrop to commit suicide by hanging in the same area.

• Soon after his death, the internet started drawing similarities between Dolan’s suicide and that of Swartz who hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment in 2013 as he was being pursued by federal agents.

• Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asked a British judge on Friday to drop a 2012 arrest warrant, a request that if granted could allow Mr. Assange to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been living for five and a half years, and fly to Ecuador, which has granted him citizenship.

• British police have said the charge of skipping bail is a much less serious offence than rape, but he could still face a one-year prison sentence if convicted, which in effect would mean six months behind bars.

• Ecuador said this month it had given citizenship to Assange, hours after the British government refused a request for him to be given diplomatic status, which could have given Assange immunity from arrest should he try to leave the embassy.

• England Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot said she would make her ruling on the arrest warrant on 6 February.

• The longtime investigative journalist Robert Parry has died at the age of 68. As a reporter at the Associated Press in the 1980s, he helped expose how the Reagan administration was secretly sending arms to Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Parry also revealed the role of the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras in drug trafficking here in the United States.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Pollution in the form of tiny aerosol particles—so small they’ve long been overlooked—may have a significant impact on local climate, fueling thunderstorms with heavier rainfall in pristine areas, according to a study released Thursday.

• The study, published in the journal Science, found that in humid and unspoiled areas like the Amazon or the ocean, the introduction of pollution particles could interact with thunderstorm clouds and more than double the rainfall from a storm.

• When roads turn into ice rinks, consider trying beet juice, molasses, and even beer or cheese waste to make them safer. So say experts who fear road salt is starting to take a toll on the nation’s waterways, putting everything from fish and frogs to microscopic zooplankton at risk.

• Tossed onto sidewalks and dumped onto highways, salt for decades has provided the cheapest and most effective way to cut down on traffic accidents and pedestrian falls during winter storms. But researchers cite mounting evidence that those tons of sodium chloride crystals — more than 20 million nationwide each year — are increasing the salinity of hundreds of lakes, especially in the Northeast and Midwest.

Finance

• You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

• Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

• Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

• America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.

• Also similarly in the context of median age of Americans rising which was shared in the previous article, I don’t see them replenishing their own ranks with young blood. The baby boom years for America seem to be over (for now and bit into the future). On the medicine side, since we have been talking about nursing. another observation is it seems that the American Government will cut off whole lot of Americans from medical care which Mr. Trump did few days back. The statements shared therein seems much a spin story as no numbers were shared or anything. There was this report I read last year which tells how an urban middle-class American family might suffer depending on how much medicare is cut.

• [...]

• On the labor front I don’t see a way out for Americans to work. For e.g. Patels (a caste and a community) went to States and found that most Americans do not or did not like maintaining motels and they provided/took over the that service, partly as it’s a risky business and partly most motels are run-down etc. Apart from the spin being put in the context of both legal and illegal immigration in States, it seems, at least to me there would be more undocumented illegal Americans living then those coming legally and America would suffer economically due to that.

• So when Broadcom Ltd. went public with a hostile $105 billion bid for Qualcomm Inc. — potentially creating a colossal maker of chips used in wireless handsets — mobile phone makers had cause for concern. Chief among them: Apple Inc.

• If Broadcom succeeds in buying Qualcomm, itself seeking to close a deal for chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV, the transactions would bring a quarter of the chip suppliers used in the iPhone X under one roof. That kind of market concentration should be anathema to a customer like Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, a master manager of his company’s long, diverse, global chain of parts providers.

• Since the election, President Trump has made 31 specific claims about companies adding or saving American jobs thanks to his intervention. We went back to see what’s become of those announcements.

• Anglo American’s (AAL.L) diamond unit De Beers aims to launch the first industry-wide blockchain this year to track gems each time they change hands starting from the moment they are dug from the ground, its chief executive said on Tuesday.

• De Beers, the world’s biggest diamond producer by the value of its gems, has led industry efforts to verify the authenticity of diamonds and ensure they are not from conflict zones where gems could be used to finance violence.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• While bots by themselves aren’t automatically illegal, the company also offered “at least” 55,000 accounts using the personal details of real people, some of whom live in New York. That’s “impersonation and deception,” Schneiderman said, and it’s made all the worse when some of those people aren’t legal adults.

• Republicans want the memo in question — a classified report created by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that supposedly offers proof of malfeasance in the investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia — declassified and released to the public.

• The company revealed to lawmakers on Thursday that the Russian-linked accounts had retweeted Trump nearly 470,000 times from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016. The accounts retweeted Hillary Clinton less than 50,000 times during the same timeframe.

• “Social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections,” Soros said.

• In a Friday release, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, wrote that the Facebook Journalism Project Scholarship program will partner with four organizations focused on increasing newsroom diversity.

• Now we have the first layer of PropOrNot and our first four contestants. We have a slew of new media organizations that are influenced by, or feeding PropOrNot. Remember, fake news got off the ground and got its wings because of the attention this website received from the Washington Post in Dec. 2016.

• At the Interpreter Mag level, here are the people:

• Michael Weiss is the Editor-in-Chief at the InterpreterMag.com. According to his Linkd profile, he is also a National Security Analyst for CNN since July 2017 as well as an Investigative Reporter for International Affairs for CNN since April 2017. He has been a contributor there since 2015. He has been a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast since June 2015.

• I remember asking him why he had to go, why he couldn’t just stay at home with us. He replied that it was important to go to these places and tell the truth about what was happening there. He mentioned that children my age were being killed in these wars and that somebody had to tell their stories. I remember asking, “Kids like me?” He replied, “Yes, kids just like you.”

• Bob was deeply impacted by the dirty wars of Central America in the 1980s and in many ways these conflicts – and the U.S. involvement in them – came to define the rest of his life and career. With grisly stories emerging from Nicaragua (thanks partly to journalists like him), Congress passed the Boland Amendments from 1982 to 1984, which placed limits on U.S. military assistance to the contras who were attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government through a variety of terrorist tactics.

• The Reagan administration immediately began exploring ways to circumvent those legal restrictions, which led to a scheme to send secret arms shipments to the revolutionary and vehemently anti-American government of Iran and divert the profits to the contras. In 1985, Bob wrote the first stories describing this operation, which later became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.

• Finland’s moderate President Sauli Niinisto cruised to a rare first round election win on Sunday as his delicate balancing of ties with neighbor Russia and the U.S.-led NATO military alliance resonated with voters.

• The 69-year-old Niinisto, known for cultivating good relations with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, won his second six-year term with an overwhelming 62.7 percent of the vote. His closest rival, Pekka Haavisto of the Greens of Finland, secured just 12.4 percent.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Over time, you learn to deal with social media slander, the hatred, the memes, the personal attacks. But nothing prepares you for the real, non-virtual consequences.

• The lower house of the Polish parliament has approved legislation that would be laughable if it was not about genocide. The bill proposes fines and jail terms of up to three years for writers who employ phrases such as ‘Polish death camps’ when referring to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek, or any of the other 450 extermination and slave labour camps established and run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland.

• Twitter has faced criticism after the account of a prominent Egyptian journalist and campaigner was suspended.

• Wael Abbas wrote on Facebook that Twitter had sent “an email saying my account is suspended for an allotted time, which they did not specify, and for reasons they did not specify too”.

• At the time of the suspension last week, Abbas had 350,000 followers on Twitter. Notable figures backing the restoration of his account include Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and chairman of the Human Rights Foundation.

• Following The New York Times investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment, the #MeToo movement exploded on social media and soon spread across the globe.

• Women in China heard these “silence breakers,” and were inspired to post their own experiences and circulate petitions to bring accused sexual harassers from various industries to justice.

• The Chinese government, however, has attempted to limit the presence of #WoYeShi (#MeToo) through recently implemented censorship on the Internet and various social media platforms.

• The Supreme Court today directed the registry to list for final hearing a plea by veteran actor-director Amol Palekar seeking guidelines for pre- censorship of films.

• The Centre told the top court that the plea should be referred to a high court given the “pressure” of pendency of cases on the apex court.

• It is not yet an official policy because censorship is not openly accepted by the current authorities, but de facto vetoes on artistic expressions are increasing due to moralistic pressures in Brazil.

• In revoking The Death of Stalin’s distribution license, Medinsky said the film’s mockery was an affront to “the victims of Stalinism”, a preemptive strike against those who would accuse the ministry of conservative censorship.

Privacy/Surveillance

• No sense crying, as the genie is now out of the bottle. As a result, the NSA is emboldened and reinvigorated, as it hasn’t been since the early years of the Obama presidency. What is remarkable and bears further scrutiny, is the extent of liberal lawmakers’ support for it, in conjunction with their usually liberal acolytes in the media who exhorted passage.

• The Pentagon has encouraged military personnel to use Fitbits, the Post reported. In 2013, the Pentagon distributed 2,500 Fitbits as part of a pilot programme to combat obesity.

• On Saturday (27 January), 20-year-old Australian student Nathan Ruser tweeted about the information located in the map.

• U.S. soldiers may have inadvertently mapped remote military bases including in sensitive locations such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, through publicly sharing their jogging routes with a GPS tracking app.

• UCA analyst Nathan Ruser has discovered that Strava’s publicly available activity map includes the fitness routes of soldiers and agents in sensitive locations, including American bases in Afghanistan and Syria, the UK’s Mount Pleasant airbase in the Falkland Islands, a suspected CIA base in Somalia and even Area 51. It’s mostly American and British troops who show up, but Russian bases have also been outlined by the Strava data.

• Strava is the maker of a fitness-tracking app that uses a phone’s GPS to track when and where a user is exercising, with an aim of being a type of social network for athletes. Last November, the site released a heat map showing the activity of its users from around the world, containing information from a billion activities across three trillion latitude and longitude points. The result is a pretty-looking image of people working out, but one analyst points out that the map makes it very easy for someone to figure out the locations of military bases and the routines of their personnel.

• The likely coda of the digital economy is not pretty: addicted to junk content and losing our way in the infinite memes of dubious provenance, we, the online surplus population, will be eventually asked to fend for ourselves. The tech firms will surely have superb AI protection to sell us. The cognitive elites will prosper, fasting on the digital equivalent of kale and quinoa and browsing the artisanal, handcrafted content hidden from the uninitiated.

• If there is one wish I have for this Data Privacy Day, is for people to start considering the services they are using and how this affects everyone else around them. I do not choose to have my phone number indexed by Google, you do that for me when you add me to your contacts. I do not choose to have my face indentified and indexed by Facebook, it’s you who do that every time you upload a picture with me to your timeline. But, most of all, it’s not me who choses to be ‘out of reach’, ‘not to participate in your community or your meeting’, ‘to isolate myself from communicating on the internet’ (even though I am constantly online). It’s you who choose to hide behind proprietary services with terms I cannot consciously agree to.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Human Rights First today condemned President Trump’s reported decision to sign an executive order to keep open the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, a move that threatens the United States’ national security and is out of step with American ideals. In response to the news, the first commanding officer of Guantanamo Bay, Major General Michael Lehnert, issued the following statement:

• “There is substantial evidence that Guantanamo does not provide any useful options to deter our adversaries. In fact, its continued existence provides a recruiting tool and a rallying cry for our enemies. Guantanamo, therefore, is contrary to our national interests. For those terrorists we capture, federal courts and prisons have been much more effective in bringing our enemies to justice. We need to close Guantanamo for the security of our nation and our historic legacy.”

• Israel is hiring civilian “immigration inspectors” to crack down on “illegal aliens and their employers,” marking a turning point in the Middle Eastern nation’s relationship with migrants and refugees. In an advertisement this month, the Population and Immigration Authority said it would pay up to 30,000 Israeli shekels ($8,845) for civilians to carry out an “enterprise of national importance.” That included undertaking “enforcement tasks” against migrants that involved detecting, investigating, and arresting them. Candidates are expected to start in March 2018, a month before the country starts its designated “voluntary” process to return migrants to their country of origin or a third one. The move comes a few weeks after Israel said it would help purchase tickets, obtain travel documents, and give $3,500 to African illegal migrants to leave—threatening them with arrest if they are caught after the end of March.

• We speak with Oscar-winning musician and actor Common, who was nominated again for an Oscar on Tuesday for his song “Stand Up for Something” from the film “Marshall” about former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Common is also starring in “The Tale,” a film about child sexual abuse. On Saturday, Common also performed at the Respect Rally in Park City. He discusses civil and voting rights, Colin Kaepernick, the late anti-police brutality activist Erica Garner and President Trump.

• The Health Ministry condemned the TTB and called for its central committee to resign and apologise to society for its “non-national” statement, the newspaper said.

• Internet services have also been suspended till 10 pm on January 28 in trouble-torn areas in western UP.

• To fuel true cultural change, we need to start long before anyone enters the workforce.

• When I was in middle school, I got some very basic sex ed. For one week, a very uncomfortable health/gym teacher taught me about body parts and reproduction, that sex — always heterosexual — can lead to pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and that we should therefore abstain from sex or use condoms. I was lucky because most people I know didn’t get the condom bit.

• What I didn’t learn was key information and skills that would have equipped me to have healthy relationships. I didn’t learn about gender and power. I didn’t learn what consent meant and how to give, refuse, or make sure you have it. There was nothing about what sexual harassment is or how gender stereotypes play out in harmful ways. And I most certainly didn’t learn how to navigate the many unsafe, threatening, harassing, and violent situations I’ve experienced in the workplace and beyond. I wish I — and all the men who have harassed, demeaned, and harmed me — had.

• We’ve long complained about civil asset forfeiture in the United States. Law enforcement agencies, thanks to a series of perverse incentives, have grown to love taking people’s property (usually cash) without charging them for crimes. The excuse is that lifting a few thousand dollars from some random person somehow chips away at drug cartels located overseas.

• It would seem to be more crippling if criminal charges were pursued and suspects interrogated, jailed, and flipped. But law enforcement has no time for that, not when a pile of cash is only a few pieces of paperwork away from changing ownership.

• Police in the Dutch city of Rotterdam have launched a new pilot programme which will see them confiscating expensive clothing and jewellery from young people if they look too poor to own them.

• Officers say the scheme will see them target younger men in designer clothes they seem unlikely to be able to afford legally – if it is not clear how the person paid for it, it will be confiscated.

• The idea is to deter criminality by sending a signal that the men will not be able to hang onto their ill-gotten gains.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Trump national security officials are considering an unprecedented federal takeover of a portion of the nation’s mobile network to guard against China, according to sensitive documents obtained by Axios.

• Why it matters: We’ve got our hands on a PowerPoint deck and a memo — both produced by a senior National Security Council official — which were presented recently to senior officials at other agencies in the Trump administration.

• Once a month like clockwork, somebody in the tech press proudly decides to inform their readers that you can’t save any money by cutting the traditional TV cord and going with cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. The logic in these reports almost always goes something like this: “Once I got done signing up for every damn streaming video service under the sun, I found that I wasn’t really saving much money over traditional cable.”

• Writers leaning into this lazy hot take almost always tend to forget a few things.

• One, the same broadcasters dictating cable TV rates dictate streaming video rates, so in some ways pricing will be lateral. Two, adding a dozen streaming services to exactly match your bloated, 300 channel cable subscription misses the entire point of cord cutting, which is about customization and flexibility. Three, if writers actually stopped and talked to real consumers (like in the cord cutting subreddit), they’d be told (repeatedly) how customers routinely save money each month by breaking free of the traditional, bloated cable TV bundle.

• Federal regulators and major telecommunication companies pushed back on Monday against the idea of the government running a next-generation mobile broadband network as a way to address economic and security concerns related to China.

• The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, said he opposed the notion. He argued that the federal government taking control of developing 5G networks, as the mobile technology is called, could hurt the private sector and the economy.

• “The market, not the government, is best positioned to drive innovation and investment,” Mr. Pai, a Republican, said in a statement. “Any federal effort to construct a nationalized 5G network would be a costly and counterproductive distraction from the policies we need to help the United States win the 5G future.”

• This map shows how the huge, complicated network of undersea cables which keep the internet running is spread around the world.

• The map, by telecom analytics company Telegeography, uses coloured lines to show how there are many hundreds of fibre optic cables running under the world’s oceans.

• It shows the sheer scale of the infrastructure which keeps the internet running. It’s built up over decades, mainly as a result of private enterprise rather than coordinated state infrastructure projects, like road or water networks.

• Lines shown on the map above are not exactly geographically correct, but they show the broad path of the cables and which territories they connect.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Every year, right about this time, this site is forced to remind everyone that the NFL is completely full of crap when it comes to how it enforces its supposed trademark rights for the Super Bowl. While the NFL does indeed have some rights to the phrase and to controlling how it’s used, those rights generally amount to prohibiting companies from falsely implying sponsorship of the game or a relationship with the NFL in commercial speech. What the NFL pretends is the case, on the other hand, is that it can somehow prohibit any company from even mentioning the Super Bowl in any context, up to and including simple factual statements.

• All of this leads to the absurdity of every company that has chosen not to sponsor the NFL diving into the euphamism business, gleefully referring to the Super Bowl by any other name. “The Big Game” is the most popular of these, although the NFL has actually gone so far as to look into trademarking that phrase as well. The end result is the Picasso-ing of reality in which companies make references which every member of the public gets but that fall short of calling the NFL’s biggest show by its proper name, something you would think the NFL would want everyone everywhere talking about.

• Travelling on your way to work in the morning can sometimes be a real struggle and, to enlighten the travel experience, spoiling oneself by purchasing a cup of coffee is not a bad idea.

• But can a wannabe coffee drinker look at coffee shops’ logos, and be confused and think that a circular figurative sign which depicts a musical note and contains the words ‘COFFEE ROCKS’ is similar or associated with the logo of Starbucks?

Copyrights

• A new academic paper published in the Information Economics and Policy journal shows that piracy can help many artists to sell more music. Results from the peer-reviewed paper are consistent for both digital and physical sales and affect mid-tier artists. Top musicians are not so lucky, as they sell less.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.