● 01.31.18

● Links 31/1/2018: Red Hat to acquire CoreOS, Hyperledger Releases Sawtooth 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Google’s offering two open source operating systems, Android and Chrome OS, has drawn some criticism and market confusion. But this didn’t stop Chrome OS from carving out a sizeable market chunk for itself, primarily in the education field. With growing Android App support, it now appears to be expanding on to tablets as well. A photo has emerged in a now-deleted tweet that appears to be an Acer tablet running Chrome OS.

• At the recently concluded Bett education and technology show in London, Acer officially unveiled three Chrome OS devices: two Chromebooks and a Chromebox. However, one of the attendee at the event, Alister Payne, managed to get a photo of one more Chrome OS device from Acer. The photo, posted on Twitter by @Alister_Payne, clearly shows what would be the first Chrome OS tablet. There’s a visible Acer logo on the bottom bezel. The tweet has now been deleted, but not before ChromeUnboxed, preserved it.

• When choosing a Linux distro for your business, one of the factors you should consider is which desktop environment works best for your company. This can be made more complex when you consider individual workflows. In this article, I’ll share some of the best desktop environments for the enterprise environment while addressing different types of workflows.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• For the last few weeks, Benjamin Tissoires and I have been working on a new project: Tuhi [1], a daemon to connect to and download data from Wacom SmartPad devices like the Bamboo Spark, Bamboo Slate and, eventually, the Bamboo Folio and the Intuos Pro Paper devices. These devices are not traditional graphics tablets plugged into a computer but rather smart notepads where the user’s offline drawing is saved as stroke data in vector format and later synchronised with the host computer over Bluetooth. There it can be converted to SVG, integrated into the applications, etc. Wacom’s application for this is Inkspace.

• Tuhi is a new open-source project started by Red Hat’s Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoires to support Wacom SmartPad devices on Linux.

• Wacom SmartPad devices include the likes of the Bamboo Spark, Bamboo Slate Bamboo Folio, and Intuos Pro Paper although the two latter devices are yet to be supported by Tuhi. While there are drivers and various Wacom Linux support projects over the years, the SmartPad hardware falls into a special case as it’s simply not a drawing tablet to serve as an input device on Linux systems.

• Linux support for Wacom Smartpads, like the Bamboo Slate and Bamboo Spark, is in the works thanks to a new open source project from Red Hat developers.

• Herbert Xu has submitted the crypto subsystem updates for the Linux 4.16 kernel. This time around there are a number of ARM/ARM64 related improvements.

• In the ARM space some of the kernel-side cryptography work includes native SHA512 support on ARM64, ARM v8.2 Crypto Extensions for SHA3/SM3, support for Broadcom BCM63xx platforms within the bcm2835 driver, support for Exynos 5250+ SoCs in the Exynos PRNG driver, and a new driver is the Samsung Exynos True RNG driver. The Samsung Exynos True RNG driver is designed to support the true random number generator found within the Samsung Exynos 5250+ SoCs.

• With each Linux kernel cycle the F2FS file-system that has been part of the mainline kernel now for five years, this “Flash-Friendly File-System” gets a bit more mature and featureful.

• F2FS again has seen more feature work and other improvements queued for Linux 4.16. This cycle seems somewhat like a random assortment of improvements for this file-system designed for SSDs and other flash-based storage devices.

• While Linux kernel 4.15 is yet to receive its first point release and become the new stable series, Greg Kroah-Hartman released today new maintenance updates of the Linux 4.14, 4.9, 4.4, and 3.18 kernel series.

• Coming a week after the previous point releases, Linux kernels 4.14.16, 4.9.79, 4.4.114, and 3.18.93 are now available to download and promise to bring yet another layer of performance and security improvements. This time, there are fewer x86 changes and more driver updates and networking improvements.

• Jiri Kosina of SUSE has submitted his feature pull requests today for the Linux 4.16 kernel, including the HID subsystem updates.

• For Wacom device users, with the Wacom HID driver there is now support for second-generation “One by Wacom” drawing tablets. Some slight changes were needed but these Wacl CTL-472 and CTL-672 devices should now be working with the mainline kernel. The Wacom HID driver also had a few fixes for existing devices.

• The ASUS HID driver also has received support for the T100TAF, T100HA and T200TA devices. The work here was adding the IDs needed for these ASUS keyboard docks and supporting the special function keys on the T200TA Transformer Book.

• The well known FIO benchmark saw a +244% improvement in read bandwidth for one test case as a result of one change to be found in Linux 4.16.

• Jeff Layton of Red Hat has submitted a rework of inode’s i_version code for the Linux 4.16 merge window. The i_version field has traditionally incremented on every inode data or metadata change. But none of the code using i_version has required this behavior, rather just depending that the version changes if the inode has changed since the last time it was checked.

Linux Foundation

• Hyperledger is a collaborative cross-industry effort to advance blockchain technology that is hosted by The Linux Foundation. Today, January 30, 2018, sees the release of Sawtooth 1.0, the second active Hyperledger project to reach 1.0, following Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 in July 2017.

• The Hyperledger open source blockchain project has released the 1.0 code for its subproject Sawtooth. Hyperledger Sawtooth is one of several business blockchain subprojects hosted by the Linux Foundation.

• Today, we are pleased to announce Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 is now available!

• AT&T is introducing the disaggregated Network Operating System – dNOS – in an effort to stimulate the creation of flexible, open and less expensive equipment that fits easily into virtualized networks.

• The open source project will be hosted by The Linux Foundation. The idea is to create a software framework enabling a broad and diverse equipment ecosystem – software developers, network operators, cloud providers, hardware makers, networking application developers and others – to use generic white box infrastructure to provide cost and efficiency advantages.

• AT&T says it plans to open source the Disaggregated Network Operating System, or dNOS project, to offer the industry an open, flexible alternative to traditional integrated networking equipment. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the dNOS project will deliver a software framework to progress white box adoption and use in a service provider’s infrastructure. Software developers, cloud providers, network operators, hardware makers, and networking application developers will have the ability to develop new white box infrastructure to affordably meet customer’s changing demands, says AT&T.

• Open source platforms are becoming more and more fundamental to the new telecoms network architecture, raising exciting prospects for a more democratic ecosystem and rapid innovation. But open source also comes with the risk of fragmentation, which has already been seen in industry splits over different approaches to management and orchestration (MANO) in virtualized networks. A large number of open projects has emerged in the areas of virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), MANO and even telecoms hardware initiatives like Facebook’s OpenCellular.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the addition of 30 Silver members. Linux Foundation members help support development of the greatest shared technology resources in history, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation.

Graphics Stack

• The Khronos Group today has announced the OpenGL 4.6 Adopters Program with a new open-source conformance test suite (OpenGL CTS) for this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API released last year.

• Andres Rodriguez working for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver team has begun landing his work around OpenGL semaphores for Mesa/Gallium3D and following through with the necessary bits for RadeonSI with the EXT_semaphore work being needed by SteamVR.

• With the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature with more OpenGL coverage and now supporting GLSL 4.50, I decided to run some tests of Mesa 18.1-dev Git to see the impact when enabling NIR support.

• The Khronos Group has published their tentative list of sessions behind held at their Developer Day event coinciding with the Game Developers Conference in March.

Benchmarks

• With Mesa 18.0 now well into its feature freeze and this quarterly update to Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers bringing many new features and improvements as covered in our Mesa 18.0 feature overview here are some benchmarks comparing the Mesa 18.0 RadeonSI/RADV driver performance to the current 17.3 stable series and the older 17.2 series as well.

• Yesterday I posted some initial benchmarks of Mesa 18.0 on RADV/RadeonSI drivers for AMD GPUs now that feature development is over for this next quarterly installment of Mesa 3D. On the Radeon side there were mostly performance improvements to note with the RADV Vulkan driver, but what about on the Intel side? Today are benchmarks of the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compared to earlier Mesa releases for seeing how the Intel (U)HD Graphics performance has changed on the Linux desktop.

Applications

• While Clear Linux may be extremely performant as shown in our many benchmarks, its default repository serving “bundles” (their task-based approach to package management) can be a bit light if wanting to use this Intel open-source Linux distribution on the desktop. There has been yum available via a bundle while now next-gen Yum, DNF, is also now available on Clear Linux.

• CTparental is a parental control tool used to control how someone uses the computer, either for internet browsing or any other specific Computer usage. Design of CTparental was motivated by existing tools like iptables, dnsmasq, inguardian Privoxy which independently can do some parts but missing other pieces. So in essence, CTparental leverage all these tools to create a fully-fledged parental control solution with an intuitive and easy to use web interface powered by lighttpd. Now that you know what CTparental, we can go ahead and install it on our Operating system. We’ll cover installation for Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 9 since these are the latest release of both distributions as of this writing.

• A DVD ripper software allows you to copy the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. You transfer video on DVDs to different formats. You can make a backup of DVD content. One can convert DVD video for playback on media players, streaming, and mobile phone. A few DVD rippers software can copy protected disks so that you can make discs unrestricted and region-free.

Instructionals/Technical

• So yes, a Renegade DOS BBS running under a Linux-based DOS emulator in a container on a Solaris machine.

• if you’re using something other than OSX, say, FreeBSD, then a previous blog post might be the solution you are looking for.

Games

• I’ve been might impressed by Hollow Knight [GOG, Steam], not just because the game is beautiful, but their support in the form of free content updates is awesome. Hollow Knight: Gods & Glory has now been announced.

• After initially denying the request from Zachtronics to have Opus Magnum on GOG, it seems they changed their minds!

• Railway Empire [GOG, Steam], a game about building an elaborate and wide-ranging rail network officially released with same-day Linux support.

• It did have a few issues initially, but they seem to be supporting the Linux version well with a post-release Linux-specific patch to clear up some problems. In terms of performance and stability, at least for me personally, it’s been a smooth ride.

• The developers of Ballistic Overkill [Steam] have pushed out a new update which features a major change to the way Team Deamthmatch works, they also added in Steam Workshop support.

• Considering Valve has a majority grip on the PC gaming market, constant growth and quite likely more money than they know what to do with, it would obviously be a target for Microsoft. However, to me, those are also all reasons why it just wouldn’t happen. On top of that, Valve is privately owned and I doubt Gabe Newell will suddenly give it all over to Microsoft.

• Let’s not forget how Valve has also been paying people to improve Linux gaming. Valve has people working on SDL, Mesa, SteamOS (multiple updates this year already), Virtual Reality and plenty more towards making Linux a more attractive gaming platform. There’s also this recent interview with Timothee Besset from our friends at BoilingSteam which gives a little glimpse into the work Valve is doing behind the scenes for Linux gaming too. It also seems from that, the Linux port of Street Fighter V is not actually dead. It seems they have a habit of announcing things too early!

• If you’re a game developer on the look out for a game engine that’s free and open source, Godot Engine 3.0 [Official Site] looks to be a safe bet.

• Is there anything more amazing than a developer going through all their games to add Linux support? Jackbox Games, Inc. are continuing their effort with Quiplash [Steam] & Fibbage XL [Steam] now in beta for Linux.

• The hype is building inside me for the System Shock [Official Site] reboot, it certainly sounds and looks good and they continue to confirm Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Ever since Plasma Active was released in 2012, I’ve been waiting for KDE to release another desktop environment for mobile devices. Last week, that wait was finally over with the first alpha release of Plasma Mobile, Active’s successor. However, delay may have raised my expectations too high. While Mobile was full of innovations, so far, Active is simply another desktop for phones or tablets, appearing little different from what I currently have on my Android devices. Its main interest is the applications it includes, which seems to indicate Plasma Active’s design priorities.

• What made Plasma Active such a standout was its innovations. It was KDE with a different desktop environment — a proof of concept of KDE 4’s arrangement of the desktop as a sub-system that could be swapped out for another with relative ease. Even more importantly, it innovated. Like Ubuntu Touch — which I suspect it inspired — Plasma Active worked by the user swiping from the sides of the screen. It also included an OsS X-like spinner rack for changing Activities, a widget so efficient that I wished that standard Plasma would include it, too. As I wrote at the time, it was the first desktop for mobile devices that did not feel like a clumsy makeshift, and could even work well on a laptop or workstation. Unfortunately, however, Plasma Active never made it on to any shipped devices.

• By contrast, Plasma Mobile has already received publicity, thanks to the announcement that Purism’s free and secure phone the Librem 5 would include it as one of the available desktop environments. That announcement may have hastened the release of the alpha, perhaps pushing it out prematurely, since there is very little that you can actually do with Plasma Mobile when you install it on a virtual machine. Click any of the icons — at least in my experience — and most of the time you get a flickering or frozen screen, forcing you to shut it down and reboot. So far, only the Setting icon works reliably.

• Still, like Plasma Active, Plasma Mobile does show off the efficiency of the KDE environment, providing what by my count is the third alternative to standard Plasma (the other, for those keeping count, was Plasma Netbook, yet another desktop since faded into obscurity). Beneath it is the familiar KDE; the command line, for example, is Konsole.

• Nikolai Mamashev, of Pepper & Carrot animation fame, and his team are working on a new episode of the Morevna open-source animation series. As in the previous project, they’re using Krita for creating and processing the artwork and Blender and other open-source tools for animation. Everything will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The first Nautilus (Files) file manager release to ship without support for handling desktop icons was released today as version 3.27.4 for the upcoming GNOME 3.28 desktop environment.

• Nautilus 3.27.4 is now available for public testing, and it’s the first release of the popular file manager that ships pre-installed with numerous GNU/Linux distributions to drop support for handling desktop icons, a decision already discussed here a few weeks ago, and which will have an impact on various distros like Ubuntu.

• This means that Nautilus is done with handling desktop icons starting with the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment, not like GNOME 3 has offered support for desktop icons by default, as the user had to enable the functionality from the GNOME Tweaks app. But dekstop icons support is not dead in GNOME, at least not yet, as GNOME Project promises to re-implement the feature in the GNOME Shell interface.

• After all the Oracle/Solaris controversies last year, it’s good to see Oracle today releasing their first public beta of Solaris 11.4 as an update to the Solaris 11 operating system.

• As previously reported, Solaris 11.4 has switched finally from the GNOME 2 desktop to now using the GNOME Shell. Solaris 11.4 Beta is shipping with GNOME 3.24 components for those doing a desktop installation.

• For those of you who like to peek over the Linux fence from time to time, Oracle has just publicly released the first version of Solaris with a GNOME 3 desktop (3.24, to be precise), in the shape of the Solaris 11.4 Public Beta.

• GSVGtk is a library to provide GTK+ widgets you can use to access SVG files. It is powered by GSVG, in a way it can access each shape and its properties using a GObject API based on W3C SVG 1.1 specification.

• Currently, GSVGtk uses Clutter to encapsulate SVG shapes, render them inside Clutter Actors, through librsvg, and maps events to source SVG in order to eventually modify original definitions, like its position.

• In the following video, you can see GSVGtk’s Container based on Clutter, loading an SVG file, take some shapes from it to show on the scene.

• I added a logo.png to GNOME Tweaks at GNOME and it automatically showed up in Salsa when I imported the new version.

Distributions

New Releases

• While it doesn’t look like there will be a Solus 4 release in January, we’re looking forward to the upcoming optimizations that the Solus devs have planned for the next snapshot.

• Communications Manager Joshua Strobl shares with us today some details on the latest goodies that landed in the software repositories of Solus, as well as various of the upcoming improvements that the team plans for the next release of the Linux-based operating system. First thing first, in case you missed it, they released LDM (Linux Driver Management) 1.0.

• The development team behind the Netrunner Rolling Linux operating system announced last week the release of the first snapshot in 2018 with the latest update and some new features.

• Netrunner Rolling 2018.01 is here to replace last year’s 2017.07 version and ships with the Linux 4.14 kernel, Mozilla Firefox 57.0 “Quantum” web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 52.5.0 email and news client, LibreOffice 5.3 office suite, KDE Plasma 5.11.5 desktop environment, the KDE Applications 17.12.0 and KDE Frameworks 5.41.0 software suites, as well as Qt 5.10.

• Poised to be the last in the 3.x series, Linux Lite 3.8 is here with a bunch of changes and improvements, among which we can mention the implementation of the TLP power management tool for laptops in the Lite Tweaks utility, better support for the LibreOffice office suite, a new font viewer & installer, and regional support for DVDs.

• “If you have DVDs that are from another region other than your own, you can now easily change region so that it will play in VLC. Insert your DVD, open a terminal and type regionset and follow the onscreen instructions. See this thread here for more information,” says Jerry Bezencon in the release announcement.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• Peppermint OS 8 respin is the latest release of Peppermint OS Linux Distribution. This release based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), powered by linux kernel 4.10 series, using LXDE desktop environment with new “Pepirus” xfwm4, GTK+ and icon themes. Also, brings 64 bit and 32 bit installation images. The 64 bit release provides complete support for UEFI systems and secure boot.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Exactly like the rolling development model used to make openSUSE Leap 42.3, Leap 15.0 will use the same model until its final build. No concrete milestones will be used building up to the final release, which is expected in late Spring. As bugs are fixed and new packages introduced or excluded, snapshots of the latest beta phase builds will be released once they pass openQA testing; the first beta version build (Build 109.3) of openSUSE Leap 15 was recently released and there are currently two follow-on beta builds that would feature minor improvements if the beta builds pass openQA .

• Interested in giving KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS Desktop a spin (currently in beta)? Look no further than the latest snapshot releases of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

• Speaking of KDE Plasma, you now can test the mobile port in a VirtualBox or KVM virtual machine. ISO images are available here.

• The first public beta snapshots have begun for openSUSE Leap 15, the distribution that will be mirroring SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 that is under development for release this summer.

• Ruby is a wonderful programming language. Every year in December as a kind of Christmas present there is a new release. It’s great to be on a language which is kept up to date but it comes with the challenge to manage multiple Ruby versions. There are a couple of solutions around such as RVM, rbenv, or chruby but they all have their drawbacks.

• What would a Linux distribution do? At openSUSE, we package all the versions in the Build Service. We also package many gems but this is an effort which is sort of futile given the huge and growing number of gems and their versions. But you do reliably get the Ruby interpreter and gem tool as openSUSE package. To not create conflicts all the executables are suffixed with the Ruby version. That allows for parallel installation of multiple Ruby versions. It also works for all the executables installed through gems. The drawback is that you don’t get the executable names you would expect because of the additional suffix.

Slackware Family

• If you started using GNU/Linux in the last 10 years or so, there’s a very good chance your first distribution was Ubuntu. But despite what you may have heard on some of the elitist Linux message boards and communities out there, there’s nothing wrong with that. The most important thing is simply that you’re using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The how and why is less critical, and in the end really boils down to personal preference. If you would rather take the “easy” route, who is anyone else to judge?

• Having said that, such options have not always been available. When I first started using Linux full time, the big news was that the kernel was about to get support for USB Mass Storage devices. I don’t mean like a particular Mass Storage device either, I mean the actual concept of it. Before that point, USB on Linux was mainly just used for mice and keyboards. So while I might not be able to claim the same Linux Greybeard status as the folks who installed via floppies on an i386, it’s safe to say I missed the era of “easy” Linux by a wide margin.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc., an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million, subject to certain adjustments at closing that are not expected to be material. Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source. By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc., an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million, subject to certain adjustments at closing that are not expected to be material. Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source. By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.

• Red Hat’s betting big on the container game getting bigger with making public this afternoon their agreement to acquire CoreOS for $250 million USD.

• More than four years ago Red Hat made a bet. We bet big on containers as the future for how applications would be built, deployed and managed across the hybrid cloud. We bet on the emergence of new industry standards for container runtime, format, orchestration and distribution. We bet on key projects like Kubernetes to be the core of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. And ultimately, we bet on Linux as the foundation for this innovation, as it has been for so so many other innovations over the past 20 plus years. Specifically, we bet on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 as the new foundation for OpenShift 3, launched at Red Hat Summit 2015. And since that launch more than three years ago, many customers across every geography and industry vertical have bet on OpenShift to run their most critical production applications.

• In order for communication service providers (CSPs) to capitalise on increased customer experience, agility and cost reductions, as well as other digital services like 5G and IoT, a scalable, reliable and agile telco cloud is needed with the ability to enable network function virtualisation (NFV) and software defined network (SDN) architectures to use IT cloud technology.

• Red Hat announced that it is acquiring CoreOS, an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for $250 million. This deal will be completed shortly.

• By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, such as Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further improve its position as a hybrid cloud and container powerhouse.

• CoreOS’s technologies, including Tectonic, its Kubernetes distribution, and Container Linux, its lightweight, container-friendly Linux, will be combined with Red Hat’s Kubernetes and container-native product portfolio.

• Red Hat today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million, subject to certain adjustments at closing that are not expected to be material. Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source. By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.

• Red Hat has acquired CoreOS for $250 million, in a deal that brings further momentum to a Google-created technology used by companies to manage software running in data centers and in the cloud.

• Red Hat, a company best known for its enterprise Linux products, has been making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization in recent years with its OpenShift Kubernetes product. Today the company decided to expand on that by acquiring CoreOS, a container management startup, for $250 million.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, will discuss results of its fourth quarter fiscal year 2018 on Monday, March 26, 2018, beginning at 5:00 p.m. ET.

• A highly scalable, reliable and agile telco cloud – in which telecom NFV and SDN architectures use IT cloud technology – is critical in enabling CSPs to become digital service providers (DSPs) and profit from increased customer experience, agility and cost reductions as well as taking advantage of the latest digital services, IoT and 5G opportunities.

• Network assurance vendor Mycom OSI has moved to improve its cloud credentials through a partnership with Red Hat.

• The specific point of the partnership is to offer automated assurance across hybrid NFV networks. In the virtualized telco utopia most of the functions will exist in a massive, fluid cloud but, as we are continually reminded, the road to the promised land is a convoluted one. One of the many complexities to be contended with is how you monitor, maintain and optimize all this.

• The enterprise focused open source platform company has bought CoreOS, a specialist technology player known for its Kubernetes and container-native solutions.

Finance

Fedora

• The latest work by Fedora developers on feature work for Fedora 28 is shipping with VA-API 1.0 support for updated capabilities around the Video Acceleration API.

• The VA-API 1.0.0 API/ABI is provided by the libva 2.0 video acceleration library. Libva 2.0 was released last October with H.264 FEI support in its API, deprecating older parts of the API, fixing a race condition with the Wayland support, renaming some parts of the API, improving the logging capabilities, and various other changes. Libva 2.0 broke API/ABI compatibility with older versions of this Intel-developed Video Acceleration API.

• …some more dotnet discussions, we got to see nice, relatively big fireworks for the 10th devconf anniversary. Another race to the office to change back to my usual evul clothes (out of the Fedora loves .NET T-Shirt) and then smol dinner. I got home around 22:00 and did a little bit of critical bug fixing.

Debian Family

• Ok, we are in 2018, and for the first time in ages I wanted to burn a Audio CD, and dared to think about CD_TEXT. You know what – it is hard as in impossible for a normal user. And that in 2018. Debian, you could try to do better.

• Imagine a Kanban board that could aggregate issues from multiple backends, including your CalDAV task list, Bugzilla systems (Fedora, Mozilla, GNOME communities), Github issue lists and the Debian Bug Tracking System, visualize them together and coordinate your upstream fixes and packaging fixes in a single sprint.

• [...]

• If you’d like to see this or any of the other proposed projects go ahead, you don’t need to be a Debian Developer to suggest ideas, refer a student or be a co-mentor. Many of our projects have relevance in multiple communities. Feel free to get in touch with us through the debian-outreach mailing list.

Derivatives

• Patrick Emmabuntüs, creator and maintainer of the Debian-based Emmabuntüs Linux operating system informs Softpedia today about the release and immediate availability of the first Emmabuntüs Debian Edition release based on Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch.”

• Emmabuntus Debian Edition 2 1.01 is the first release of the GNU/Linux distribution designed from the offset to be used on the computers of various educational communities around the globe that don’t have the resources to use proprietary software to be based on on the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system series. Most specifically, this release is based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 9.3 release.

• “This release is intended to alleviate even more the refurbishing workload on all the associations using Emmabuntüs, notably our friends of the Eisenia with their reuse in solidarity project Linux & Populus, our friends from Ayiyikoh, from BabyLab, and from the JMSI in Ivory Coast, with Jerryvalentin, their future big reuse event, as well as this nice initiative from our WenakLabs friends who are using Emmabuntüs in a Chad camp to introduce refugee children to the computer world,” Patrick Emmabuntüs said in the announcement.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Plex is the leading streaming platform for personal media collections, also offering over-the-air Live TV and DVR capabilities, and curated news from over 200 global media partners. It’s the only solution that seamlessly combines your personal collection of TV shows, movies, music, photos, and videos alongside live and recorded TV. With a highly-customisable and easy-to-use interface, Plex is a top 10 most-watched app with 4+ star ratings on all major OTT platforms. Plex’s mission is to give users the very best OTT media experience.

• NTT TechnoCross Corporation has signed a partnership agreement with Canonical to provide strengthened OSS support to its customers in Japan including OpenStack deployments.

• NTT TechnoCross will provide Japanese support for domestic customers and will be the first contact for customer enquiries and fault isolation and resolution phase.

• NTT TechnoCross has extensive experience with OSS including OpenStack and provides a wide range of support options to customers from OS to middleware.

• Working with Canonical, NTT TechnoCross will increase its presence in cloud platform with a combination of technical support on OSS and OpenStack and expand its presence in IoT/Edge Computing.

Devices/Embedded

• Pine64 has released a budget-friendly single-board computer with the high-powered Rockchip RK3399 system on chip (SoC).

• Available from around $60, the RockPro64 board comes in two flavors, either with the hexa-core RK3399 SoC or the RK3399Pro, Rockchip’s first “artificial-intelligence processor”. Unveiled at CES 2018, it combines a CPU, GPU, and neural-network processing unit (NPU).

• As noted by CNX-Software, a number of RK3999-based boards have been released in the past week but, priced at around $200 each, they’ve been aimed at business customers rather than home developers.

• Shenzhen Xunlong has launched a $109, open source “Orange Pi RK3399” SBC that runs Android 6.0 or Debian 9 on Rockchip’s hexa-core RK3399 SoC, and offers HDMI 2.0 in and out ports, DP 1.2, eDP, MIPI DSI and CSI, SPDIF, GbE, mSATA, mini-PCIe, a 40-pin header, and more.

• One by one, ARM hacker board vendors and commercial x86-centric board vendors are following Firefly’s lead in experimenting with Rockchip’s ARM-based SoCs, which offer x86-type features like HDMI 2.0, mSATA, and mini-PCIe along with powerful, and relatively power-efficient ARM cores. We just saw Aaeon make the plunge with its OEM-oriented RICO-3399 PICO-ITX SBC, and now Shenzhen Xunlong has launched its first Rockchip based Orange Pi single-board computer with the $109 Orange Pi RK3399. Meanwhile, according to a Pine64.org forum post, the quad Cortex-A17 Rockchip RK3328-based Rock64 SBC will soon be joined by an RK3399-based RockPro64, due in March.

• Artila’s “Aport-213” is a low-power, industrial strength, single port serial-to-WiFi gateway that offers WiFi-based remote access to devices such as meters, sensors, and switches without requiring the development of wireless LAN drivers and security supplicants.

• The Airport-213 is the newest member of Artila’s industrial communications gateways family. The device runs FreeRTOS on an unspecified 166MHz Cortex-M3 SoC, and offers 802.11 wireless connectivity to serially-interfaced devices for monitoring and control functions. The compact, low-power device can be configured as a transparent bridge, allowing a serial device to be accessed wirelessly without requiring modifications to existing software, says the company.

• Sailfish OS reached a major milestone last year as we launched for the first time a downloadable, fully supported Sailfish OS – Sailfish X for the Sony Xperia™ X device.

• Sailfish X has been a fun program for us and we can see that our customers are feeling the same way. We have received a lot of positive feedback and seen the OS spread far and wide. The amount of downloads has been a positive surprise for us and we’ve seen downloads in many places we didn’t expect. All in all, 2017 was a great start for Sailfish X. This year we want to continue on this exciting path and want Sailfish X to reach even more people.

• Jolla has shared some of their plans for improving Sailfish X, their mobile operating system available for purchase to load on Sony Xperia devices. There are some interesting Sailfish X plans this year with this continuing to be one of Jolla’s main focuses.

• It’s been 10 days since our awesome Kickstarter campaign is over!

• During these days, I’ve spent a lot of time answering many, many people. I’m getting requests of any kind: encouragements and kind words, questions about eelo, press requests, potentiel partnerships, …

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• It started out as this fun, little hack, tickling your own fancies. You chipped away at it on weekends and in the evenings. Eventually, you sculpted it into a respectable shape. You were rightfully proud of it, so you did a kind deed and shared your creation with the world.

• Now, your curiosity has taken you elsewhere, or you’re busy with other facets of your life. But concurrently, your Free / Open Source project has become popular. It’s a hit! The canonical solution to frondubling within the Marnostacean community. And users are filing issues. And sending pull requests that require your review. And building Serious Software that depends critically on your project.

• Owned by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, the telco believes that it is high time India developed products and services tailored specifically to the Indian market. “If you observe, a lot of effort has been put into the IT space [in India], but what has not happened is a focused effort [for innovation] in the telecom space,” says Matthew Oommen, RJio’s president of networks, global strategy and service development, on the sidelines of India’s recent Digital Open Summit.

• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) will celebrate its 20th anniversary on Friday, Feb. 2, and the global non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness and adoption of open source software is gonna par-tay. By which I mean, the OSI has scheduled activities around the world this year to commemorate the event. (I’m hoping there will be snacks.)

Events

• The Debian Project announced the winner city where next year’s DebConf19 Debian conference for Debian Linux contributors, developers, and users will be hosted.

• DebConf is the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference, and the Debian team responsible for organizing the next DebConf event has started preparing for 2019′s one, a.k.a. DebConf19, by announcing Curitiba as the host city.

• Next year, DebConf celebrates 11 years since the event was first held in South America, in Mar del Plata back in 2008, so they decided to celebrate this milestone by choosing Curitiba, the capital of the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, as the host city for DebConf19.

• At the recently concluded Kubecon in Austin, TX, attended by over 4000 engineers, Kubernetes was front, left and center. Due to the nature of workloads and typical heavy compute requirements in training algorithms, Machine Learning topics and its synergy with Kubernetes was discussed in many sessions.

• Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Atlassian, joins us in this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast to talk about the difference between diversity and inclusion and why anyone should care.

• One of the most significant challenges developers face is keeping up with the increasingly rapid pace of change in our industry. With each new innovation comes a new crop of vendors and best practices, and staying on top of your game can become a second profession in itself.

• Cloud, containers, data, analytics, IoT, AI, machine learning, serverless architecture, blockchain: Behind all of these rapidly evolving technologies are the programming languages and developers who are leading the charge into the next era of innovation.

• An ideal way for developers to understand all this is through conversations with other developers. We believe conversation about development—like innovation itself—is best when it happens in the open. This idea was the catalyst for Index, a first-of-its-kind, developer-focused event that will take place in San Francisco Feb. 20-22 at Moscone West.

• Last month Thiruvananthapuram witnessed one of the biggest Free and Open Source Software conference called Swatantra17. Swatantra is a flagship triennial ( actually used to be triennial, but from now on organizers decided to conduct in every 2 years.) FOSS conference from ICFOSS. This year there were more than 30 speakers from all around the world. The event held from 20-21 December at Mascot hotel, Thiruvananthapuram. I was one of the community volunteer for the event and was excited from the day it announced .

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• 2017 was a big year for the Rust systems programming language. Now, members of the open source project are looking to consolidate last year’s progress – making Rust easier to learn and use – and publish the first major update to the stable 2015 Rust release.

• “We’re making Rust a much nicer place to be,” said Aaron Turon, a Rust core team member and engineering manager at Mozilla. “We’re working to create a more productive environment for programmers – especially those new to the language.”

• Every year there are multiple Rust events around the world, bringing together the community. Despite being early in the year, we’re excited to be able to highlight several events that are already being organized!

• Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

• In December, we launched a tv show tie-in with Mr. Robot, Looking Glass, that alarmed some people because we didn’t think hard enough about the implications of shipping an add on that had the potential to be both confusing and upsetting. We’re deeply sorry for this and we understand why it’s important for us to learn and grow from this experience. As mentioned last month, we conducted a post-mortem to better understand how and why this happened and how we can do better.

• To help prevent third party data leakage while browsing privately, Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers sent to third parties starting in Firefox 59.

SaaS/Back End

• Let’s first clarify what exactly we mean by “monolith” and “microservice.”

• Microservices are an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery.

• This week, Kuyda and her team are releasing Replika’s underlying code under an open source license (under the name CakeChat), allowing developers to take the app’s AI engine and build upon it.

• If you work with OpenStack, you know it can be challenging to keep up with all of the various features, tools, related project, and other technical details that you need to do your job, whether that’s as a developer, an architect, or a sysadmin.

Databases

• To put this another way, it is in general true that PostgreSQL’s VACUUM implementation has gotten progressively better at reclaiming space occupied by dead tuples more quickly and with less expenditure of effort. And that’s really good, because the faster you reclaim space, the less new space you end up allocating, which keeps tables small and performance high. However, the examples above show that VACUUM isn’t the whole problem. In these examples, even if VACUUM ran at the earliest instant when it could reclaim the space occupied by dead tuples and ran infinitely fast, the table would still become bloated. In the case where the bloat is caused by many short queries run while one long-running transaction remains open, we could, with smarter snapshot management, limit the worst-case bloat to approximately a factor of two — that is, we’d keep the version of the tuple visible to the old snapshot and the current version, and discard the intermediate versions, a trick PostgreSQL currently can’t manage. However, even a factor of two is a lot, and what if there are multiple distinct open snapshots? Further, in the case where the bloat is created by a SQL statement that induces scattered updates throughout the table, no improvement to VACUUM can possibly help. By the time that SQL statement finishes, the damage is already done.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OPEN SOURCE productivity suite LibreOffice has reached version 6.0 with a bevvy of tweaks.

• The popular alternative to Microsoft’s paid for product celebrates its 7th anniversary with a major update across Windows, Linux and macOS, with cloud augmentation to allow users to work on the web too.

• Improvements in multimedia embedding within Microsoft formats like .docx and .pptx has been significantly improved, thanks to improved ActiveX compatibility, plus there’s now an option to turn your documents straight into E-PUB e-books. You can also import files from QuarkExpress.

• LibreOffice 6.0—the latest version of the popular open source office suite—was released by The Document Foundation on Tuesday. While the project has been on an approximate six-month release cadence since the debut of LibreOffice 3.3, the release of 6.0 brings significant improvements as well as code refactoring under-the-hood to ease development of new features going forward.

• As language evolves, new words are often invented to describe new ideas. This is particularly prevalent in IT, as new concepts are invented rapidly. Often, these new terms are compound words such as “crowdfund” or “middleware,” which office suites interpret as being incorrect for purposes of spell-check. LibreOffice introduces a “Grammar By” function allowing new words to be automatically recognized in the same format as other words.

• The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 6.0 – the latest major upgrade to the open source free office suite. The new version is available now for Windows, macOS, Linux and the cloud, and new features will be rolled out to the Android edition in the coming months.

• “This is the start of a new development cycle,” explained Italo Vignoli, co-founder of The Document Foundation. “We want to make out software easier and simpler for users all over the world. They want to be able to access features easily, including people who are used to Microsoft Office.”

• Numerous months in the making, LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it’s the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen.

• LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project.

• At this moment, i have pushed the changes for SBo and it will be part of the next public update, which will be this weekend.

• You can now download LibreOffice 6.0, the latest major release of this hugely popular free office software. The release of LibreOffice 6.0 marks the first major update to the productivity suite since the LibreOffice 5.4 release back in July 2017.

CMS

• The more open source CMSs surfaced, the more extensible they became. Well, some open source CMSs focused on a particular thing while most of them tried to become an “all-in-one CMS” – with the help of which you can design and customize your website as you’d prefer.

• With the advancements in CMS’, you do not need to hire a web developer to set up your website – even if you want to create an e-commerce platform. You can do it all by yourself – without requiring any coding skills. Yes, it’s that easy!

Education

• Once again, it’s time for this year’s Scratch projects from my grade 10 students. Up next is python, but their final projects are available at https://scratch.lesbg.com. Feel free to play them and rate them. This is a first attempt for students, so do please be gentle on the ratings.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The anonymous Pineapple Fund has donated $1 million worth of Bitcoin to promote and defend free software, computer user freedom, and digital rights.

• BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Tuesday, January 30, 2018 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced it has received a record-breaking charitable contribution of 91.45 Bitcoin from the Pineapple Fund, valued at $1 million at the time of the donation. This gift is a testament to the importance of free software, computer user freedom, and digital rights when technology is interwoven with daily life.

• “Free software is more than open source; it is a movement that encourages community collaboration and protects users’ freedom,” wrote Pine, the Pineapple Fund’s founder. “The Free Software Foundation does amazing work, and I’m certain the funds will be put to good use.”

• The Free Software Foundation’s largest-ever single contribution came in the form of one million dollars worth of Bitcoin.

• The Free Software Foundation announced today it received a donation of 91.45 Bitcoin. As of writing, 1 BTC is roughly $10,364. FSF plans to use the proceeds to “empower free software activists and developers around the world.”

• The Free Software Foundation, has announced that it received its largest donation ever, 91.45 bitcoin from an anonymous entity called Pineapple Fund. The 91.45 bitcoin, at the time of payment, was roughly equal to $1 million. The Free Software Foundation is an organisation that promotes the concept of free software, which is defined by the ‘four essential freedoms’.

• Release 8.1 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous FTP. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants.

• Version 8.1 of the GNU Debugger (GDB) is now available for developers.

• The GDB 8.1 debugger update brings Python scripting enhancements, improved Rust language support, breakpoints on C++ functions are now set on all scopes by default, a number of new commands have been added, the GDBserver has received a few enhancements, there is better auto-completion support for this debugger, and a variety of other improvements to help developers debug their code in a variety of languages.

• Version 8.1 of the GDB debugger is out. Changes include better support for the Rust language and various other improvements to make debugging easier; see the announcement and the news file for the full list.

Public Services/Government

• The use of open source technology is not new in state and local government, but the potential to dramatically change the way agencies operate could bring the concept new life.

• With an ever-increasing demand for better services coming from citizens, state and local government agencies are finding a need to change the way they operate internally in order to move toward creating a more seamless experience of working with technology.

• In a roundtable discussion with several c-level state and local government technology officials from around Northern California in January 2018, leaders said they were “open” to open source, but had certainly not leveraged the full capabilities the technology represents.

Licensing/Legal

• Even when a business does not distribute software (for example, because the business operates on a SaaS model), it is still important to be aware of and track OSS usage. One reason is that OSS usage is a very common subject of due diligence during acquisitions and other corporate transactions. Buyers are likely to investigate a target’s software development practices and may even hire third parties to audit key software assets for OSS, including by using technology that scans for the presence of OSS. Developing clear policies and procedures around software development, including by carefully vetting, tracking and managing third party code including OSS, and operating a systematic approach to license compliance, can save on time and transaction costs down the line, and will give buyers and investors less grounds for raising concerns on a deal. OSS presents many potential benefits, but those benefits are only fully realized if a business takes some steps to appropriately manage the use of OSS within their organization.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• ngineering for medical, automotive, and aerospace is highly regulated. It’s not difficult to see why: lives are often at stake when devices in these fields fail. The cost of certifying and working within established regulations is not insignificant and this is likely the main reason we don’t see a lot of work on Open Hardware in these areas.

• Ashwin K. Whitchurch wants to change this and see the introduction of simple but important Open Source medical devices for those who will benefit the most from them. His talk at the Hackaday Superconference explores the possible benefits of Open Medical devices and the challenges that need to be solved for success.

• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently finalized its publication on additive manufacturing (commonly referred to as 3-D printing) for medical devices. According to FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, the guidance is meant to “help manufacturers bring their innovations to market more efficiently by providing a transparent process for future submissions and making sure our regulatory approach is properly tailored to the unique opportunities and challenges posed by this promising new technology.” He further points out that this is only intended to provide the FDA’s initial thoughts on the subject of 3-D printing. For our purposes, this guidance also extends the discussion regarding innovation and patenting in the field of 3-D printing and its intersection with regulatory issues.

• Erich] is the middle of building a new competition sumo bot for 2018. He’s trying to make this one as open and low-cost as humanly possible. So far it’s going pretty well, and the quest to make DIY parts has presented fodder for how-to posts along the way.

• Despite its rich ecosystem and growing number of real-world implementations, misconceptions about RISC-V are keeping companies around the world from fully realizing its benefits.

Programming/Development

• Shawn Pearce, a longtime contributor to the Git community (and beyond), has passed away. The thread on the Git mailing list makes it clear that he will be missed by many people.

• A few days ago we found out that at the end of 2017 AMD quietly released their AOCC 1.1 C/C++ compiler. AOCC is AMD’s compiler succeeding AMD Open64 that existed years ago as their optimized Fortran/C/C++ compiler for past CPU microarchitectures while the “AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler” is designed for current-generation Zen processors. Here are benchmarks of the new AMD AOCC 1.1 release compared to GCC 7, GCC 8, Clang 5.0, Clang 6.0, and Clang 7.0 SVN.

Standards/Consortia

• Because there are rumours spreading about a presumed “MPEG-Video collapse” and Brownian motion-like initiatives trying to remedy – in some cases by the very people who have contributed to creating the “crisis”.

• [...]

• In its 30 years of operation MPEG has created digital media standards that have enabled the birth and continue promoting the growth of digital media products, services and applications. Here are a few, out of close to 180 standards: MP3 for digital music (1992), MPEG-2 for digital television (1994), MPEG-4 Visual for video on internet (1998), MP4 file format for mobile handsets (2001), AVC for reduced bitrate video (2003), DASH for internet streaming (2013), MMT for IP broadcasting (2013) and more. In other words, MPEG standards have had and keep on having an impact on the lives of billions of people.

• [...]

• In 2013 MPEG approved the HEVC standard which provides the same quality as AVC at half the bitrate. The licensing situation is depicted by the picture below (courtesy of Jonathan Samuelsson of Divideon): there are 3 patent pools, one of which has not published their licence and a significant number of patent holders that have not joined any pool (and not published their licences either).

• I saw the threat coming and one year ago I tried to bring the matter to the attention of the higher layers in ISO. My attempts were thwarted by a handful of NPEs.

• Alliance for Open Media (AOM) has occupied the void created by MPEG’s outdated video compression standard (AVC), absence of competitive Options 1 standards (IVC) and unusable modern standard (HEVC). AOM’s AV1 codec, due to be released soon, is claimed to perform better than HEVC and will be offered royalty free.

• [...]

• The work of patent pools would be greatly simplified because they could define profiles with technologies that are “available” because they would know who owns which tools. Users could switch on tools once they become usable, e.g. because the relevant owner has joined a patent pool.

• These are just examples of how the MPEG standard development process can be adapted to better match the needs of entities developing licences and without becoming part – God forbid – of a licence definition process.

• [...]

• Companies will slash their video compression technology investments, thousands of jobs will go and millions of USD of funding to universities will be cut. A successful “access technology at no cost” model will spread to other fields.

• So don’t expect that in the future you will see the progress in video compression technology that we have seen in the past 30 years.

Leftovers

• More A-grade sneering from Rob Wolchek of Fox 2 News Detroit, called in by professional photographer Kelly, who tracked down the guy flogging her stolen gear on eBay…

• How the arrival of containers and intermodalism revolutionized the shipping industry. Containers could be efficiently stacked, allowing more and more goods to be transported across the seas. Labor costs were dramatically lowered and, since containers were sealed, theft was reduced. Over time, the marine transportation industry and the size of ships, trucks, trains, docks, and ports increased and expanded to handle the growing use of containers. The impact on global commerce was enormous, leading to a boom in international trade due to lower transportation and handling costs.

• As container ships continue to grow in size and ports grow more congested by the year, NOAA plays an increasingly critical role in U.S. marine transportation. NOAA services and products improve the efficiency of ports and harbors, promote safety, and help to ensure the protection of coastal marine resources.

Science

• Today’s computer chips contain tens of kilometers of copper wiring, built up in 15 or so layers. As the semiconductor industry has shrunk the size of transistors, it has also had to make these interconnects thinner. Today, some wiring layers are so fine that electrical current can actually damage them. And chipmakers are running out of new ways to deal with this problem.

• Companies are now eyeing other materials, such as cobalt, ruthenium, even graphene, to replace copper for on-chip wiring. In December at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), in San Francisco, some seemed ready to anoint cobalt as the chosen metal. Intel described adopting the metal in its ­10-nanometer chips’ finest interconnects; Intel and ­GlobalFoundries both presented details about the performance of devices that rely on cobalt as a replacement for other electrical contacts currently made of tungsten.

• If you had to copy billions of letters from one sheet of paper to another, you’d probably make a few mistakes. So it might not come as a surprise that when DNA makes a copy of its three-billion-base genetic code, it can slip up too.

• The human’s excuse could be fatigue or boredom, but scientists have long wondered how DNA’s nearly infallible replication machinery makes the mistakes that it does. Now, they think they may know a big part of the answer.

• New research led by at team at Keele University has revealed that human skeletal muscle has an epigenetic memory determined by earlier growth. This very literal discovery of “muscle memory” not only offers new insight into how exercise and rehabilitation programs can better target genes responsible for muscle growth, but potentially has dramatic implications for the long-lasting effects of performance-enhancing muscle building drugs.

• The study examined eight untrained male subjects over a 22-week period. Each subject participated in a period of targeted resistance exercise, followed by a period of inactivity, and then another stretch of exercise. Muscle biopsies were taken at several points across the study and over 850,000 genomic sites were analyzed for epigenetic alterations.

• After years of upgrades and new sensors, Wozniak said Elon Musk and his company have promised too much and delivered too little. “I love that car, but the trouble is Elon Musk is portrayed in a lot of movies with a lack of faith and trust. . . . What he says, can you really believe in him? Is he just a good salesman, like [Steve] Jobs, and may not be there [in the end]?”

• An international collaboration of quantum physicists from the University of Bristol, Microsoft, Google, Imperial College, Max Planck Institute, and the Sun Yat-sen University have introduced a new algorithm to solve the energy structure of quantum systems on quantum computers.

• They have tested this algorithm on a silicon quantum photonic processor which performs the computation using photons, the elementary particles of light.

• The energy structure of a quantum system is made of quantised energy levels, the lowest energy level is called ground-state, while the higher energy levels are called excited states.

• Rutgers engineers have invented a “4D printing” method for a smart gel that could lead to the development of “living” structures in human organs and tissues, soft robots and targeted drug delivery.

• The 4D printing approach here involves printing a 3D object with a hydrogel (water-containing gel) that changes shape over time when temperatures change, said Howon Lee, senior author of a new study and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Hardware

• Samsung Electronics sold silicon chips worth $69 billion, outperforming Intel’s $62.8 billion, Bloomberg reports. The company has reported full-year revenue of KRW 239.58 trillion (USD 225 billion) and operating profit of KRW 53.65 trillion (USD 50.7 billion) in the financial year 2017.

• Samsung Electronics Co. just knocked Intel off its perch as the world’s biggest chipmaker by revenue, a spot the U.S. company has held since 1992. On Tuesday, Samsung reported 2017 chip sales of $69 billion, blowing past Intel’s $63 billion from last year.

Health/Nutrition

• To attack the disease, researchers replace patients’ damaged copies of a gene called dystrophin by introducing viral particles that carry a correct copy. Reaching the countless muscle cells in a boy’s body requires extremely high doses of these particles—400 trillion or more per pound of body weight.

• [...]

• The concerns that caused Wilson to resign now appear to be, at least partly, those detailed in his new report, published January 30 in the journal Human Gene Therapy. He would not say whether Penn had alerted the FDA and the European Medicines Agency about his results before submitting them for publication.

• Among the many achievements and areas of growth mentioned of the rising economy was its prowess in generic medicines production.

• With an estimated 81,000 to 138,000 deaths per year worldwide due to snakebites, and physical and psychological disability for close to 400,000 survivors of snake attacks, the time seemed ripe for the WHO to step in.

• As all governments are faced with affordability problems for new medicines, HTA has become an important tool for national decision-makers. That said, HTA is primarily about improving the quality of healthcare, more than cost-containment. It offers solid evidence for policy-makers, operates as a gatekeeper to ensure that new medicines can show added benefits, and most importantly, as a spur for genuine public health needs-driven innovation. HTA is not about rationing medicines, but about rationalizing public spending. In most national settings, HTA appraisals affect pricing and reimbursement decisions one way or another. This is why some governments are concerned about EU involvement – including both mandatory participation and mandatory uptake is raising alarm bells – and strongly defend exclusive national competence in designing and implementing pricing and reimbursement plans. Moreover, there are fears of a possible convergence towards the lowest common denominator in clinical assessments as HTA standards (such as the choice of the comparator, the role and selections of endpoints) are not equally strict across the continent.

• The leaked draft shows that the Commission is proposing a Regulation to cover the overarching issues, but is purposefully vague in parts and leaves many of the details to be decided much later through delegated and implementing acts. This will add to national governments’ suspicions. And it also means that deliberations around this proposal will keep all interested parties busy for the foreseeable future.

• Every year in January, February, and March, volunteers count whales from the shores of Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island for the annual Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary Ocean Count.

• The Sanctuary Ocean Count launched in 1996 when 150 volunteers took to the shorelines of Oahu to count Hawaii’s endangered whale population and document the animals’ surface behavior. The event now draws more than 2,000 volunteers across Oahu, Kauai, and Hawaii.

• The goal of the Ocean Count project is to increase public awareness of the sanctuary and current ocean issues, including threats to humpback whales while also promoting responsible viewing of all marine wildlife. The project offers Hawaii residents and visitors an opportunity to monitor humpback whales in their breeding grounds by conducting a yearly shore-based census during the peak season.

• A new study conducted by Ohio University scientists suggests that a little more sunlight might help restore damage to your cardiovascular system.

• The study shows that vitamin D3 – which is made by the body naturally when skin is exposed to the sun – can significantly restore the damage to the cardiovascular system caused by several diseases, including hypertension, diabetes and atherosclerosis. Vitamin D3 supplements are also available over the counter.

Security

• Walden’s remarks come after the Journal reported that Intel had notified a small group of companies — including Chinese firms — about Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities which, if exploited, allow hackers to access sensitive information stored on computers, phones and servers using Intel, AMD and ARM chips.

• Today, Jan. 29, is officially the first day of the 2018 tax-filing season, also known as the day fraudsters start requesting phony tax refunds in the names of identity theft victims. Want to minimize the chances of getting hit by tax refund fraud this year? File your taxes before the bad guys can!

• What’s worse, he added that “nearly every state is using some machines that are no longer manufactured, and many election officials struggle to find replacement parts.” Before millions of electronic votes were cast for the next US president, Norden told press that “everything from software support, replacement parts and screen calibration were at risk.”

• So it’s no wonder voting machine makers are keen to get their gear off eBay and keep it out of the hands of white-hat hackers equally keen to expose their collective security failings.

• The keylogger is part of a malicious package that also installs an in-browser cryptocurrency miner that’s surreptitiously run on the computers of people visiting the infected sites. Data provided here, here, and here by website search service PublicWWW showed that, as of Monday afternoon, the package was running on 2,092 sites.

• If you want to check to see if your Debian GNU/Linux computer is patched against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, it’s now easier than ever to install the original spectre-meltdown-checker script.

• Yes, you’re reading it right, you can now install the very useful Spectre and Meltdown vulnerability/mitigation checker for Linux-based operating systems created by developer Stéphane Lesimple from the stable software repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system.

• A computer security exploit developed by the US National Security Agency and leaked by hackers last year is now being used to mine cryptocurrency, and according to cybersecurity experts the number of infections is rising.

• Last April, a hacking group called the Shadow Brokers leaked EternalBlue, a Windows exploit that was developed by the NSA. Less than a month later, EternalBlue was used to unleash a devastating global ransomware attack called WannaCry that infected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries. A month later, in June, the EternalBlue exploit was again used to cripple networks across the world in an even more sophisticated attack. Now, security researchers are seeing the EternalBlue exploit being used to hijack people’s computers to mine cryptocurrency.

• If you just read the headlines, it sounds like Android is a security mess. There’s a report about one Android malware program after another. What’s not said is that often these Android viruses require a user to be a sucker to get them. But since a sucker is born every minute, Google does its best to stop malware in its tracks.

• Linus Torvalds released version 4.15 of the Linux Kernel on Sunday, again, and for a second version in a row, a week later than scheduled. The culprits for the late release were the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, as these two vulnerabilities forced developers to submit major patches well into what should have been the last cycle. Torvalds was not comfortable rushing the release, so he gave it another week.

• Unsurprisingly, the first big bunch of patches worth mentioning were those designed to sidestep Meltdown and Spectre. To avoid Meltdown, a problem that affects Intel chips, developers have implemented Page Table Isolation (PTI) for the x86 architecture. If for any reason you want to turn this off, you can use the pti=off kernel boot option.

• The 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code changes were mailed in a short time ago for the Linux 4.16 kernel and it includes mitigation work for Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities.

• The main additions to the ARM64 Linux code for the 4.16 kernel is security changes concerning Variant Two of Spectre and Variant Three (Meltdown). This is the initial work ready for Linux 4.16 at this time while ARM developer Catalin Marinas notes that an improved firmware interface for Variant Two and a method to disable KPTI on ARM64 is coming next week. It’s noted that Cavium ThunderX doesn’t work with Kernel Page Table Isolation due to hardware erratum.

• On January 25th, Reuters reported that software companies like McAfee, SAP, and Symantec allow Russian authorities to review their source code, and that “this practice potentially jeopardizes the security of computer networks in at least a dozen federal agencies.” The article goes on to explain what source code review looks like and which companies allow source code reviews, and reiterates that “allowing Russia to review the source code may expose unknown vulnerabilities that could be used to undermine U.S. network defenses.”

• The spin of this article implies that requesting code reviews is malicious behavior. This is simply not the case. Reviewing source code is an extremely common practice conducted by regular companies as well as software and security professionals to ensure certain safety guarantees of the software being installed. The article also notes that “Reuters has not found any instances where a source code review played a role in a cyberattack.” At EFF, we routinely conduct code reviews of any software that we elect to use.

• You might be able to recall the NSA exploit called EternalBlue which was leaked by the hacker group in April last year. The Windows exploit was later used to launch worldwide cyber disaster in the name of WannaCry. Another ransomware, also based on EternalBlue, followed a month later.

• Security researchers have discovered a new strain of malware that uses the National Security Agency’s EternalBlue exploit to hijack computers and secretly mine cryptocurrency. In April last year, the exploit was leaked as part of a cache of alleged NSA hacking tools released by the hacker group Shadow Brokers.

• Cybersecurity experts had warned that the exploit would soon be leveraged by other threat actors to power their own sophisticated and likely frequent cyberattacks. Shortly after, the Windows exploit was used to launch the massive global WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks in May and June.

• The 2015 breach of spyware vendor Hacking Team seemed like it should have ended the company. Hacking Team was thoroughly owned, with its once-secret list of customers, internal emails, and spyware source code leaked online for anyone to see. But nearly three years later, the company trudges on, in large part thanks to a cash influx in 2016 from a mysterious investor who had been publicly unknown until now.

• The hack hurt the company’s reputation and bottom line: Hacking Team lost customers, was struggling to make new ones, and several key employees left. Three years later—after the appearance of this new investor—the company appears to have stopped the bleeding. The company registered around $1 million in losses in 2015, but bounced back with around $600,000 in profits in 2016.

• Motherboard has learned that this apparent recovery is in part thanks to the new investor, who appears to be from Saudi Arabia—and whose lawyer’s name matches that of a prominent Saudi attorney who regularly works for the Saudi Arabian government and facilitates deals between the government and international companies.

• SAY HELLO to WannaMine, the cryptojacking malware that’s using leaked NSA hacking tools to infiltrate computers and syphon processor power to crunch calculations needed to ‘mine; cryptocurrencies.

• But first a history lesson. You may remember the EternalBlue, a Windows exploit developed by the NSA that was leaked by hacking group Shadow Brokers.

• Pretty soon after the exploit was used to launch the massive WannaCry ransomware attack that locked down NHS systems and affected some 230,000 computers across 150 countries. EternalBlue was then used to spearhead the arguably more dangerous NotPetya attacks.

• EternalBlue, EternalSynergy, EternalRomance and EternalChampion formed part of the arsenal of NSA-developed hacking tools that were leaked by the Shadow Brokers group before they were used (in part) to mount the devastating NotPetya cyber attack.

• [...]

• “After that, the exploit module will drop to disk (or use a PowerShell command), explains zerosum0x0, and then copy directly to the hard drive.”

• Offloading the responsibility for making your app secure onto QA testers or an information security office is tempting, but security is everyone’s responsibility. The Django Admin is one of our favorite features of Django, but unless it’s locked down correctly, it presents opportunities for exploitation. To save your users from compromised data, here are 10 tips to make the Django Admin more secure.

Defence/Aggression

• US drone strikes in Yemen have tripled under the Trump administration, as the US targets Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula while at the same time providing support to ally Saudi Arabia in its attacks there, a new study shows.

• “The Trump administration’s subservience to Saudi Arabia’s military adventurism in Yemen has lead to 8x the drone assassination rate of Obama,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote on Twitter. “Most killed are civilians. Obama, in turn, had 10x the drone kills of Bush.”

• It was the eve of battle. Ngo Van Giang, known as Captain Ba Den to the Viet Cong troops he led, had spent weeks smuggling arms and ammunition into Saigon under boxes of tomatoes. Ba Den was about to lead 15 sappers, a section of the J-9 Special Action Unit, against an unknown target. Only eight of the unit were actually trained experts in explosives. The other seven were clerks and cooks who signed up for the dangerous mission mainly to escape the rigors of life in their jungle camp near Dau Tieng, 30 miles northwest of Saigon.

• On the morning of January 30, 1968, Ba Den secretly met with U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s chauffeur, Nguyen Van De, an embassy driver who was in fact an agent for the Viet Cong. De drove Ba Den in circles around the Embassy compound in an American station wagon. De revealed that Ba Den’s mission was to attack the heavily fortified Embassy. Learning the identity of his target, Ba Den was overwhelmed by the realization that he would probably not survive the attack. Pondering his likely death, and since it was the eve of Tet, Ba Den wandered into the Saigon market, had a few Ba Muoi Ba beers and bought a string of firecrackers to light as he had done for every Tet celebration since he was a child.

• January 29 had been seen as a kind of “D-Day” in Russia, with anticipation and apprehension building for weeks over what many Russians believed could mark a critical change for the worse in relations with the United States. Russian media pitched their coverage to the country’s elites, who were under the Sword of Damocles of new U.S. sanctions that might be directed against them, but also to the general Russian public, who have watched with uneasiness, concerned over the effects of sanctions on the economy, on their livelihoods and living standards.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The murder of blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia last October was not only a tragedy for her family and a slur on Malta’s reputation but it was a shining example of the impunity facing Europe, whistleblower Julian Assange told the European Parliament on Tuesday.

• Speaking by Skype from London, where the man behind Wikileaks has been in asylum for five years, Mr Assange said that there were specific things to focus such as an end to impunity, including censorship and extra-judicial detention. He called for a pragmatic view of how a Whistleblower Act could be skirted by those in power – which meant countries should be open to offering asylum to whistleblowers, activists and even politicians. He made a plea to stop cross-border censorship, stressing that attempts to control data transfer on the pretext of reducing peer-to-peer piracy should be carefully looked at. He also called for anti-trust legislation to ensure that media and telecommunications companies did not grow so big that they could act with impunity.

• He was speaking during a discussion with the theme ‘Safety for journalists, whistleblowers’. organised by a group within the European Parliament in Brussels.

• The discussion, organised by the European United Left/Nordic Green Left was held in honour of the slain journalist, and was addressed by her son Andrew.

• It’s not always nice to be wanted. In a time of heightened geopolitical drama, here’s a look at a handful of the “most wanted” characters that have captivated the world’s attention, and what their specific stories tell us about the state of the globe in 2018…

• [...]

• The Australian national rocketed to worldwide fame as head of Wikileaks, which he founded in 2006. In 2007, the website posted the U.S. procedures manual being used in Guantanamo Bay; in 2008, it posted Sarah Palin’s emails from her private Yahoo account. In 2010, Wikileaks dumped more than 90,000 classified documents about the Afghanistan War.

• That was also the year that two female Wikileaks volunteers came forward to Swedish authorities and alleged Assange sexually assaulted them. Assange turned himself in to London authorities, but appealed his extradition request to Sweden. After a series of appeals, the U.K. decided it would honor the extradition request, prompting Assange to flee to the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012. He’s been holed up there ever since. Although Sweden withdrew its arrest warrant last year, U.S. prosecutors are mulling their own charges over the exposure of classified material.

• These days, government secrets tend to be leaked digitally with the help of the Internet and weak firewalls. Not so in Australia, where a leak can happen with the simple sale of a secondhand cabinet.

• Thousands of pages of Australian government documents, many of them top secret, were locked in two file cabinets that somehow ended up at a used furniture shop in the country’s capital city Canberra, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

• The shop, which isn’t identified, often sells off furniture formerly used by the government. But that furniture isn’t usually packed with nearly a decade’s worth of documents from five government administrations.

• With no luck so far in ending Julian Assange’s confinement at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, could taking it up a notch – at the Hague – be the direction the South American country and the whistleblower’s team be moving?

• Julian Assange has been residing at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, where he sought refuge while facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden.

• In May 2017, the allegations were dropped but the Wikileaks founder would still get arrested if he left the embassy premises — by the UK police for failing to surrender to the court in 2012.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lambasted Hillary Clinton for her reportedly refusing to fire her adviser accused of sexual harassment during the 2018 presidential campaign.

• Commenting on a New York Times report about Hillary Clinton keeping the alleged sexual harasser advising her presidential campaign in 2008 on his Twitter page, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lashed out at what he described as Clinton’s “outrageous” step to “cover up sexual impropriety” and reminded her of the sufferings of the women in Libya.

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wanted to provide Fox News host Sean Hannity “some news” about Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, which is investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

• Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on Monday dismissed reports of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange offering damaging information on a Democratic senator investigating Russia’s election meddling, calling it “epitome of fake news.”

• A woman in Texas impersonated Fox News host Sean Hannity and duped WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with a series of direct messages on Twitter, according to a report.

• She continued, “Assange is, according to a WikiLeaks source, suffering from the potentially life-threatening heart condition arrhythmia and has a chronic lung complaint and dangerously high blood pressure.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• It’s tricky to pinpoint the exact reasons for these changes, but the authors suggest it’s a combination of remote work and services like streaming video and online shopping.

• There may not be blood, but there will be plenty of losses for those who still hold hope for an age that is passing away..

• Soon after the Trump Administration announced a tariff would be imposed on imports of Chinese PV cells and modules, The New York Times ran a headline declaring this was a ‘threat’ to solar. What struck me was not that President Trump had done so much to harm solar, but that the Times knew so little about why this action will amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things — where the outcome is no longer in doubt that renewables will sweep all contenders (even the mightiest fossil fuels) from the playing field.

Finance

• Chinese officials plan to take aim at U.S. companies if President Trump inflicts tariffs, a key American business lobby warned Tuesday, potentially veering both countries toward a trade war that could cripple global markets.

• The Trump administration this month fired what many saw as the opening salvo in a simmering dispute over trade. The U.S. imposed tariffs on imports of solar panels and washing machines, which largely targeted China. U.S officials are currently investigating whether Beijing is stealing American business’ intellectual property or dumping steel in the U.S. market.

• Here’s a look back at National School Choice Week and the facts about school vouchers.

• Indiana has one of the most expansive private school voucher programs in the country, courtesy of Mike Pence. During his time as governor, Pence “removed the cap on the number of students who could qualify for a voucher to a private school, increased the limits on qualifying family income, and removed [a] stipulation that the student had to try the public school first,” according to a searing analysis of the state’s school choice failures by The Washington Post yesterday.

• The result?

• Last year alone, Indiana taxpayers financed private school education — nearly all religious — to the tune of $146.1 million “with most of it going to families who would have sent their children to private school anyway.” Oh, and by the way, a 2017 study of Indiana students in grades 3-8 who actually did use the voucher to transfer from a public to a private school showed that the voucher program had a negative impact on students’ academic achievement.

• Those are the type of important details you didn’t hear or read last week from voucher proponents who dubbed the week, “National School Choice Week.” President Trump issued an official proclamation recognizing the “celebration,” while school choice supporters, such as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Pence, wrote op-eds and deluged social media with platitudes about empowering parents and helping children achieve the “American dream.” There’s no question that parents should feel empowered when it comes to their child’s education, or that every student should be positioned to pursue their dreams, but that is not what the “school choice” movement is really about.

• The total network of computers plugged into the Bitcoin network consumes as much energy each day as some medium-size countries — which country depends on whose estimates you believe. And the network supporting Ethereum, the second-most valuable virtual currency, gobbles up another country’s worth of electricity each day.

• When President Donald Trump imposed steep tariffs on imported washing machines last week it was a “Not Again” moment for officials in this north Tennessee city that has lost jobs to an international trade dispute before.

• Riordan says that the Office for Students, the new regulator for English universities, seems to have been set up with a view that it should be possible for universities to go under. The only clear stipulation in its terms is that all universities should have a pre-planned “exit strategy” for looking after their students in the event of closure.

• Riordan says: “The Higher Education Funding Council for England [the predecessor of the OfS] had a definite role in averting failure. It wasn’t just a matter of bailing institutions out, it was about ongoing scrutiny and oversight and becoming involved in the day-to-day affairs of the university if necessary. All those safeguards have now gone in England. The Office for Students has set its stall out very clearly and it is not there to ensure the sector’s health.”

• He says letting a university go bust would have serious repercussions, especially in a depressed area. “As well as possibly being the main employer, the university may be the main route for the local population to advance themselves. If people want to get a better career or make some progress in life they may find it pretty difficult with their university gone.”

• Huawei‘s head of domestic sales Teng Hongfei was detained by authorities as part of a corruption investigation in the company’s home country of China, the world’s third largest smartphone vendor said Tuesday, as first reported by local media outlet Yicai. Mr. Teng is being suspected of taking bribes but no specifics of the criminal probe into the matter have been provided by the company. The development will likely lead to his departure from the Shenzhen-based tech giant which is expected to replace him in the coming months. In a statement sent to some media outlets, a Huawei representative said the vagueness of the company’s comments on the matter is a result of the ongoing state of the investigation that led to the detention of Mr. Teng. It’s currently unclear how long the probe will take, though Huawei’s executive is understood to be close to official charges.

• Only 4% of companies have increased wages and 3% said they will next year. A further 13% are considering wages and 80% said they aren’t considering giving raises at all.

• Apple’s market value has fallen $46 billion in a week amid reports that iPhone X isn’t selling.

• A growing number of analysts and news outlets have claimed that Apple is cutting production due to weaker-than-expected demand for its flagship device. The Wall Street Journal is the latest to corroborate the claims.

• After several years of boring upgrades, iPhone X was the smartphone fans had been waiting for. Its new design, coupled with exciting new features like an edge-to-edge display and Face ID, has been unanimously praised by users and reviewers.

• U.S. regulators are scrutinizing one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges as questions mount over a digital token linked to its backers.

• The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission sent subpoenas on Dec. 6 to virtual-currency venue Bitfinex and Tether, a company that issues a widely traded coin and claims it’s pegged to the dollar, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The firms share the same chief executive officer.

• Tether’s coins have become a popular substitute for dollars on cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide, with about $2.3 billion of the tokens outstanding as of Tuesday. While Tether has said all of its coins are backed by U.S. dollars held in reserve, the company has yet to provide conclusive evidence of its holdings to the public or have its accounts audited. Skeptics have questioned whether the money is really there.

• As a part of their refreshed advertising policy, Facebook won’t allow advertisements related to cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings (ICO), and binary trading, according to a post made by company’s product management director Rob Leathern.

• The government’s new analysis of the impact of Brexit says the UK would be worse off outside the European Union under every scenario modelled, BuzzFeed News can reveal.

• The assessment, which is titled “EU Exit Analysis – Cross Whitehall Briefing” and dated January 2018, looked at three of the most plausible Brexit scenarios based on existing EU arrangements.

• Under a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU, UK growth would be 5% lower over the next 15 years compared to current forecasts, according to the analysis.

• The “no deal” scenario, which would see the UK revert to World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, would reduce growth by 8% over that period. The softest Brexit option of continued single-market access through membership of the European Economic Area would, in the longer term, still lower growth by 2%.

• Japan’s Fujifilm Holdings said it is cutting 10,000 jobs globally at its joint venture with Xerox Corp, saying it needed to overhaul the photocopying business amid a tough market environment.

• The company said it would book restructuring costs of 49 billion yen ($450.95 million) in the current fiscal year, lowering its operating profit forecast for the year to 130 billion yen from a previous 185 billion yen outlook.

• Fujifilm Holdings Corp. said Wednesday it would take a majority stake in Xerox Corp., marking the end of independence for a stalwart of 20th-century American industry.

• There is everything, and nothing, to say about Brexit.

• The same hard facts are still there, and looming.

• The UK will leave the EU by automatic operation of international law on 29 March 2019, unless something not now in view happens.

• The UK government does not know what it wants, and there is no UK Brexit policy worth the name.

• The EU27 do know what they want and, again unless something not now in view happens, that will be what the UK gets – both in terms of transition arrangements and future relationship.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Zuckerberg told the newspaper people consistently told him they wanted more local news on Facebook. Zuckerberg said the prioritization of local news sources is part of an effort to help people engage with the communities where they live.

• By promoting local news stories, Facebook could benefit regional publishers, who have historically struggled to reach audiences in the News Feed. It could also help reduce the spread of hoaxes and misinformation on pages that are designed to mimic local news sources. In 2016 a malicious site that calls itself the Denver Guardian published a story with the headline “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide,” and it was shared half a million times, likely in part because it appeared to be the work of a trusted local publisher.

• The kickback scheme was allegedly hashed out over weeknight drinks at a steakhouse in a border county in south Texas. Amid surf and turf and expensive scotch, a Hidalgo County official said he would meet with contractors in the clubby confines of the restaurant in a strip mall in McAllen.

• There, Godfrey Garza Jr., director of the county’s drainage district, cajoled company executives to hire a firm owned by his family in exchange for a cut of lucrative construction contracts, according to new documents filed in state district court in Hidalgo County. The target of the plan: a $232 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the county to build a border fence and rehabilitate aging dirt levees along the Rio Grande.

• [...]

• The new allegations come a month after an investigation by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica revealed that Homeland Security poured more than $174 million into the project while largely ignoring safeguards to protect taxpayer funds. The levee-fence in Hidalgo County was erected as part of a race to build 654 miles of barriers between the U.S. and Mexico a decade ago. Today, of course, President Donald Trump is pushing to spend billions of dollars to build a more imposing and lengthy border barrier across much of the entire U.S./Mexico border, an aim he is likely to spell out again in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address.

• The linguistic gymnastics needed to report on police violence without calling up images of police violence is a thing of semantic wonder. Officers don’t shoot, they are merely “involved” in shootings; victims are not victims, but “suspects” “fleeing”; human beings become premortem cadavers as bullets “enter the torso” rather than the chest of a person; guns and bullets act on their own as they “discharge” or “enter the right femur,” rather than being fired by autonomous individuals with agency and purpose. Headlines become 14-word, jargon-heavy tangles where a simple five-word description would suffice.

• Late last year I published Part I of a project to map out all the complaints we hear about social media in particular and about internet companies generally. Now, here’s Part 2.

• This Part should have come earlier; Part 1 was published in November. I’d hubristically imagined that this is a project that might take a week or a month. But I didn’t take into account the speed with which the landscape of the criticism is changing. For example, just as you’re trying to do more research into whether Google really is making us dumber, another pundit (Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times) comes along and argues that Apple — a tech giant no less driven by commercial motives than Google and its parent company, Alphabet — ought to redesign its products to make us smarter (by making them less addictive). That is, it’s Apple’s job to save us from Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other attention-demanding internet media — which we connect to through Apple’s products, as well as many others.

• For several years now, Project Censored has sought to feature a graphic chapter. Those efforts have yielded stirring results with the inclusion of Adam Bessie and Peter Glanting’s “Trump Universe” in Chapter 5 of our latest book, Censored 2018: Press Freedoms in a “Post-Truth” World.

• The order to keep the prison open doesn’t just reverse Obama’s order to close it. It also rewrites the facts of its history.

• Moments before his State of the Union speech last night, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep open the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The order describes the prison’s operations as “legal, safe, humane, and conducted consistent with United States and international law.” This does more than undo Barack Obama’s order to close the prison, signed on his third day in office. It also rewrites the plain, sordid facts of its history.

• The moral and legal stain of Guantánamo started with the fact of its existence. The Bush administration opened the prison in 2002 because it wrongly believed that its location outside U.S. borders would allow it to operate without any legal constraints. It became a laboratory for the torture methods associated with that administration’s so-called war on terror and for improvised judicial proceedings that violate basic principles of due process and justice. While the prison was largely emptied by the Bush and Obama administrations, 41 men remain. Five have been cleared for release. Twenty-eight have never been charged with a crime.

• Shortly before a Toronto City Council vote in December on whether to tighten regulation of short-term rental companies, an entity called Airbnb Citizen ran an ad on the Facebook news feeds of a selected audience, including Toronto residents over the age of 26 who listen to Canadian public radio. The ad featured a photo of a laughing couple from downtown Toronto, with the caption, “Airbnb hosts from the many wards of Toronto raise their voices in support of home sharing. Will you?”

• Placed by an interested party to influence a political debate, this is exactly the sort of ad on Facebook that has attracted intense scrutiny. Facebook has acknowledged that a group with ties to the Russian government placed more than 3,000 such ads to influence voters during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

• Facebook has also said it plans to avoid a repeat of the Russia fiasco by improving transparency. An approach it’s rolling out in Canada now, and plans to expand to other countries this summer, enables Facebook users outside an advertiser’s targeted audience to see ads. The hope is that enhanced scrutiny will keep advertisers honest and make it easier to detect foreign interference in politics. So we used a remote connection, called a virtual private network, to log into Facebook from Canada and see how this experiment is working.

• That indicting statistic points to two kinds of citizen depravity: (1) citizens who do not vote, who cravenly surrender their power to those who do vote. Voting is an act of social justice, a citizen’s minimal duty to the common good. Those who don’t vote are therefore unjust, immoral, and only half alive. (2) Vote-and-run citizens. These citizens make the little effort to vote, and then drop dead politically. No follow up. No participation. Pop the bubbly when Obama wins, and then hang him out to dry.

• Voting without follow-up participation in politics is a symbolic, feel-good activity. The predatory one percent have nothing to fear from vote-and-run citizens.

• The old Roman Juvenal said that all that is needed to sucker the people into passivity is “bread and circus.” Pizza, beer, and football for some: latte, escargot and golf for others. All good things in their place as long as you are staying morally alive, i.e. a citizen in motion.

• The coming weeks will show whether the U.S. intelligence establishment (the FBI/CIA/NSA, AKA the “Deep State”) will be able to prevent its leaders from being held to account. Past precedent suggests that the cabal that conjured up Russia-gate will not have to pick up a “go-to-jail” card. This, despite the widespread guilt suggested by the abrupt way that several senior-echelon DOJ and FBI rats have already jumped ship. Not to mention the manner in which FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, was unceremoniously pushed overboard yesterday, after Director Christopher Wray was given a look at the extra-legal capers described in the House Intelligence Committee memorandum.

• Granted, at first glance Deep State’s efforts to undercut candidate Donald Trump at first seem so risky and audacious as to be unbelievable. By now, though, Americans should be able to wrap their heads around, one, the dire threat that outsider Trump was seen to be posing to the Deep State and to the ease with which it held sway under President Barack Obama; and, two, expected immunity from prosecution if Deep State crimes were eventually discovered after the election, since “everybody knew” Hillary Clinton was going to win. Oops.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A Reddit thread has suggested that Apple’s Weather app is censoring air quality data in China when it reaches unhealthy or hazardous levels.

• From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there’s been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike—have ramped up restrictions on speech, adding new rules, adjusting their still-hidden algorithms and hiring more staff to moderate content. They have banned ads from certain sources and removed “offensive” but legal content.

• These moves come in the midst of a fierce public debate about what responsibilities platform companies that directly host our speech have to take down—or protect—certain types of expression. And this debate is occurring at a time in which only a few large companies host most of our online speech. Under the First Amendment, intermediaries generally have a right to decide what kinds of expression they will carry. But just because companies can act as judge and jury doesn’t mean they should.

• [...]

• First Casualty: Anonymity

• In addition to the virtual certainty that private censorship will lead to takedowns of valuable speech, it is already leading to attacks on anonymous speech. Anonymity and pseudonymity have played important roles throughout history, from secret ballots in ancient Greece to 18th century English literature and early American satire. Online anonymity allows us to explore controversial ideas and connect with people around health and other sensitive concerns without exposing ourselves unnecessarily to harassment and stigma. It enables dissidents in oppressive regimes to tell their stories with less fear of retribution. Anonymity is often the greatest shield that vulnerable groups have.

• Current proposals from private companies all undermine online anonymity. For example, Twitter’s recent ban on advertisements from Russia Today and Sputnik relies on the notion that the company will be better at identifying accounts controlled by Russia than Russia will be at disguising accounts to promote its content. To make it really effective, Twitter may have to adopt new policies to identify and attribute anonymous accounts, undermining both speech and user privacy. Given the problems with attribution, Twitter will likely face calls to ban anyone from promoting a link to suspected Russian government content.

• As the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interference reaches a fever pitch, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed alert Monday night. The bulletin told users who followed pages created by Russian trolls that those pages have been removed. And some of the affected users did not like this.

• A brief search revealed that numerous people believe that this is an act of censorship by Facebook. Some users argued that they should be allowed to decide what’s “true, fake, or otherwise,” a challenge that’s bound to be a slippery slope in this era of algorithm-based confirmation bias.

• Wong came up against similar problems at Google. In June 2009, a video of a dying Iranian Green Movement protestor shot in the chest and bleeding from the eyes was removed from YouTube as overly graphic and then reposted because of its political significance. YouTube’s policies and internal guidelines on violence were altered to allow for the exception. Similarly, in 2007, a YouTube video of a man being brutally beaten by four men in a cell and was removed for violence, but restored by Wong and her team after journalists contacted Google to explain that the video was posted by Egyptian human rights activist Wael Abbas to inform the international community of human rights violations by the police in Egypt.

• Facebook plans to have its users rank news sites’ “reliability”.

• This decision is in reaction to the 18-month-long “fake news” scandal and is being promoted as the most “fair and balanced solution” to the issue. The idea is that the community at large would determine which sites are credible and which aren’t, and the lowest-ranking ones would somehow be penalized, possibly by appearing even less on users’ newsfeeds. Facebook said that they don’t want to make this decision themselves for ethical reasons so they’re instead leaving it up to others to do so for it, believing that this is somehow a “democratic” approach to the problem. In reality, however, Facebook is only just encouraging “mob rule” because it’s probable that there will be a partisan split among Mainstream Media outlets that leads to inconclusive results for its experiment, thus putting the onus back on the company to make the executive decision for resolving this problem.

• [...]

• Facebook’s experiment, however, isn’t able to capture that, as it’s only going to ask users about a site’s “reliability”, which essentially is an opinion survey asking people if they agree with the editorial angle most commonly taken by the platform in question. If a critical mass of individuals disagrees with RT or Sputnik’s approach, for instance, then the company will list them as “unreliable” and possibly suppress their reach on people’s newsfeeds, all because of the “mob rule” that it initiated. Accordingly, the most probable outcome of this endeavor will be that Facebook uses the pseudo-scientific “evidence” that it manipulatively produced in order to “prove” that Alternative Media is “unreliable” and therefore “justifiably” subject to de-facto censorship against it.

• Across the country, a growing number of immigrants’ rights advocates and outspoken members of the immigrant community are ending up in immigration detention, facing deportation, or being threatened with criminal charges.

• In New York, Jean Montrevil and Ravi Ragbir — both prominent immigrants’ rights activists and leaders of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City — were arrested within a week of each other. In an opinion ordering Mr. Ragbir’s release from detention, the judge expressed “grave concerns” that Mr. Ragbir was “targeted as a result of his speech and political advocacy on behalf of immigrants’ rights and social justice.”

• Issuing the first decision of its kind, a federal judge today blocked enforcement of a Kansas law targeting boycotts of Israel, ruling in an ACLU lawsuit that the First Amendment protects the right to engage in political boycotts.

• The Kansas law requires that any person or company that contracts with the state sign a statement that they are “not currently engaged in a boycott of Israel.” The ACLU brought the lawsuit in October on behalf of Esther Koontz, a schoolteacher who refused to sign the certification. Today’s decision, an important victory for political speech, will allow her to resume her work. Thanks to the order, Kansas is prohibited from enforcing its law while the case proceeds.

• The Adana State Theater’s play “India Bank,” which was on a tour in the southeastern province of Batman, was removed from the stage after two of its scenes were deemed “obscene.”

• The two-act absurdist comedy premiered in February last year in the southern province of Adana. It depicts capitalism as seeking to capture the lives and moral values of individuals and impoverish them. The play toured Batman on Jan. 23-24 and Mardin on Jan. 26-27.

• It was reported that the play was not staged during the Batman tour because of an intervention by Batman provincial Culture and Tourism Directorate officials. Investigating the reason for the cancelation of the play, the State Theaters Artists Association (DETİS) made a report.

• Facebook has announced new algorithms that will help them weed out so-called “fake news” and also recalibrate how much news and political content is shown in your news feed versus personal content from friends. Most Americans use social media regularly, but they oppose regulating what is posted on such sites.

• Kenya took several television and radio stations off air today after they began to broadcast live coverage of an imitation presidential “swearing in” ceremony promised by the opposition leader Raila Odinga.

• About 2,000 supporters of Mr Odinga’s opposition coalition gathered at Uhuru Park in central Nairobi early today to watch the planned ceremony, but before senior party leaders arrived independent media stations were forced off air by government, they claimed.

• Kenyans were yesterday outraged by the Government’s decision to block live TV coverage of Raila Odinga’s oathing, saying this eroded major gains in media freedoms and access to information.

• Tens of radio stations were also barred from covering the event.

• Yesterday’s shutdown of media outlets confirmed earlier threats by the State which had promised to interrupt operations and, in a more extreme measure, withdraw licences.

Privacy/Surveillance

• If Germany goes ahead with these plans, it will drastically reduce the scope for Facebook to make money by using consolidated data about its users to sell advertising space, and may well encourage other EU nations to follow suit.

• The obvious parts of it are maintained by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Amazon and other “platforms”. Much more of it is provided by names you never heard of. If you haven’t already, equip your browser with a form of tracking protection that identifies tracking sources (examples: Baycloud Bouncer, Disconnect, Ghostery, PrivacyBadger and RedMorph). Then point that browser to the website of a publisher whose business side has been assimilated by the Agent Smith of advertising called “adtech”—The Los Angeles Times, for example. Then check the tracking protection tool’s list of all the entities trying to spy on you.

• Though it received disturbingly little attention – perhaps a symptom of desensitization to news that we are constantly being surveilled – it was recently revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) destroyed data about some of its surveillance activity that it was under court order to preserve. The NSA was ordered to save the data in 2007 because of pending lawsuits over the questionable legality of Bush ordered warrantless wiretaps of American digital and telecommunications. The data was evidence, and the NSA destroyed evidence.

• It seems that the NSA not only destroyed evidence but serially mislead the courts by claiming that it was complying with court orders while it simultaneously was not in compliance: the NSA was not preserving internet communications that were intercepted for several years between 2001 and 2007. Though as late as 2014, the NSA was assuring the court that it was “preserving magnetic/digital tapes of the Internet content intercepted under the [Presidential Surveillance Program] since the inception of the program,” the NSA has now confessed that assurance “may have been only partially accurate.”

• We’ve written a few times about the GDPR — the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation — which was approved two years ago and is set to go into force on May 25th of this year. There are many things in there that are good to see — in large part improving transparency around what some companies do with all your data, and giving end users some more control over that data. Indeed, we’re curious to see how the inevitable lawsuits play out and if it will lead companies to be more considerate in how they handle data.

• However, we’ve also noted, repeatedly, our concerns about the wider impact of the GDPR, which appears to go way too far in some areas, in which decisions were made that may have made sense in a vacuum, but where they could have massive unintended consequences. We’ve already discussed how the GDPR’s codification of the “Right to be Forgotten” is likely to lead to mass censorship in the EU (and possibly around the globe). That fear remains.

• But, it’s also becoming clear that some potentially useful innovation may not be able to work under the GDPR. A recent NY Times article that details how various big tech companies are preparing for the GDPR has a throwaway paragraph in the middle that highlights an example of this potential overreach. Specifically, Facebook is using AI to try to catch on if someone is planning to harm themselves… but it won’t launch that feature in the EU out of a fear that it would breach the GDPR as it pertains to “medical” information. Really.

• The UK’s mass surveillance programs haven’t been treated kindly by the passing years (2013-onward). Ever since Snowden began dumping details on GCHQ surveillance, legal challenges to the lawfulness of UK bulk surveillance have been flying into courtrooms. More amazingly, they’ve been coming out the other side victorious.

• In 2015, a UK tribunal ruled GCHQ had conducted illegal surveillance and ordered it to destroy intercepted communications between detainees and their legal reps. In 2016, the UK tribunal declared GCHQ’s bulk collection of communications metadata illegal. However, the tribunal did not order destruction of this collection, meaning GCHQ is likely still making use of illegally-collected metadata.

• As the UK negotiates its future relationship with the EU, two former intelligence chiefs have warned that Britain’s security expertise should not become a “bargaining chip”.

• When terror attacks hit Paris in late 2015, British intelligence scrambled to find out what it could about the attackers – at the UK’s spy agency, GCHQ, a team worked on tracing their communications while MI5 looked for connections to the UK.

• It was all a sign that modern threats – whether terrorism, cyber attacks or Russian subversion – rarely respect borders.

• A fitness tracker which uploads a user’s cycling and running routes to an online map appears to highlight GPS routes by GCHQ.

• The Cheltenham intelligence base was among sensitive locations including Sandhurst which has routes mapped on the app.

• Strava works with your mobile phone to track your athletic activity via satellite navigation and is used by millions to record their cycling and jogging routes.

• Barring an intervention from the heavens, the so-called Nunes memo will be #released at some point over the course of the next week, either because President Trump actively chooses to release it or because he does nothing for four more days.

• Two administration sources say the classified memo alleging abuses by the Justice Department and FBI is being reviewed Tuesday by representatives from the Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

• The memo is said to detail, written by GOP staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, may soon be available to the public, after Republicans on the committee voted Monday to release it. A congressional statute allows the committee to release the memo if the president does not object.

• President Donald Trump is expected to pick Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of the Army’s digital warfare branch, to head the clandestine National Security Agency, according to multiple people on and off Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon with knowledge of the situation.

• The NSA is looking for a new leader after its current director, Adm. Mike Rogers, announced he will retire this spring, ending a near four-year run.

• President Trump is expected to tap Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone to oversee the National Security Agency after the current director, Adm. Mike Rogers, retires in the spring, according to a new report.

• When it comes to the Fifth Amendment, you’re better off with a password or PIN securing your device, rather than your fingerprint. Cellphone manufacturers introduced fingerprint readers in an effort to protect users from thieves or other unauthorized access. But it does nothing at all to prevent law enforcement from using their fingerprints to unlock seized devices.

• The US Supreme Court hasn’t seen a case involving compelled production of fingerprints land on its desk yet and there’s very little in the way of federal court decisions to provide guidance. What we have to work with is scattered state court decisions and the implicit understanding that no matter how judges rule, a refusal to turn over a fingerprint or a password is little more than a way to add years to an eventual sentence.

• The California Senate has rejected a bill to allow drivers to protect their privacy by applying shields to their license plates when parked. The simple amendment to state law would have served as a countermeasure against automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that use plates to mine our location data.

• As is the case with many privacy bills, S.B. 712 had received strong bipartisan support since it was first introduced in early 2017. The bill was sponsored by Sen. Joel Anderson, a prominent conservative Republican from Southern California, and received aye votes from Sens. Nancy Skinner and Scott Wiener, both Democrats representing the Bay Area.

• Communication requires mutual agreement about the medium. Think about it another way: if you go to a meeting with your doctor and some stranger in a foreign military uniform is in the room, you might choose to leave and find another doctor rather than communicate under surveillance.

• The Government is breaking the law by collecting the nation’s internet activity and phone records and letting public bodies grant themselves access to these personal details with no suspicion of serious crime and no independent sign-off – meaning significant parts of its latest Snoopers’ Charter are effectively unlawful.

• Judges at the Court of Appeal have today backed a challenge by MP Tom Watson, represented by Liberty, to the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) – a previous law covering state surveillance.

• DRIPA expired at the end of 2016 – but the Government replicated and vastly expanded the same powers in the Investigatory Powers Act, which started to come into force in 2017. Liberty is challenging this latest law in a major separate case, to be heard in the High Court later this year.

• In anticipation of this ruling, the Government has already conceded that the Investigatory Powers Act will need to change. But its half-baked plans do not even fully comply with past court rulings requiring mandatory safeguards – and they continue to allow public bodies to indiscriminately retain and access personal data, including records of internet use, location tracking using mobile phones and records of who we communicate with and when.

• Britain will need to amend its law allowing for sweeping powers to carry out mass digital surveillance after a court ruled on Tuesday that previous legislation was illegal, civil rights campaigners said.

• London’s Court of Appeal backed a challenge led by lawmaker Tom Watson, deputy leader of the opposition Labour party, that it was not lawful to access personal data such as internet use and phone records where there was no suspicion of criminal activity or where there was no proper oversight.

• The Government’s mass surveillance programme to collect people’s internet activity and phone records has been ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal.

• Judges said the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (Dripa) 2014 breached EU law as it allowed the data to be harvested for reasons other than fighting serious crime.

• This app is tracking your every move!—a hyperbolic headline I’m sure we’ve all seen before. While the sentiment here is a over-the-top, it does raise an important question: do you know how private your location actually is?

• Every day it’s something new. Today it’s headlines about activity-tracking app Strava (iOS, Android) and how it “gave away” locations of secret army bases.

• Despite my personal feelings on that particular story, it still raises an important question: do you know how private your location data is? Do you even know which apps are tracking your location and sharing it publicly?

• “Once again, another UK court has found another piece of Government surveillance legislation to be unlawful. The Government needs to admit their legislation is flawed and make the necessary changes to the Investigatory Powers Act to protect the public’s fundamental rights.”

• ETICAS surveyed a total of nine Internet companies. These companies’ logs hold intimate records of the movements and relationships of the majority of the population in the country. The five telecommunications companies surveyed—Movistar, Orange, Vodafone-ONO, Jazztel, MásMóvil—together make up the vast majority of the fixed, mobile, and broadband market in Spain. ETICAS also surveyed the four most popular online platforms for buying and renting houses—Fotocasa, Idealista, Habitaclia, and Pisos.com. ETICAS, in the tradition of Who Has Your Back?, evaluated the companies for their commitment to privacy and transparency, and awarded stars based on their current practices and public behavior. Each company was given the opportunity to answer a questionnaire, to take part in a private interview, and to send any additional information they felt appropriate, all of which was incorporated into the final report. This approach is based on EFF’s earlier work with Who Has Your Back? in the United States, although the specific questions in ETICAS’ study were adapted to match Spain’s local laws and realities.

• China was able to do this because it financed and built the new building itself to act as the African Union’s new headquarters and gifted it under false pretenses of cordial partnership, Le Monde reports. The spying has reportedly been happening since 2012 when the building opened in downtown Addis Ababa. The backdoor into the African Union’s computer systems was first discovered in January 2017, when engineers in the IT division noticed an unusual spike of activity late into the evening when the building was no longer staffed.

• A coalition of 97 child health advocates sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday asking him to discontinue Messenger Kids, a new advertising-free Facebook app targeted at 6-to-12-year olds. Advocates say the app likely will undermine healthy childhood development for preschool and elementary-school-aged kids by increasing the amount of time they spend with digital devices.

• The firm uses phone or smartwatch GPS to track a user’s activity in order to work out their workouts and calculate calorie-burning activities. Strava, clearly feeling proud as punch at its app’s abilities, released a heat map in November showing the activity of users worldwide.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The lawsuit [PDF] was brought by Chelline Carter, who had her camera warrantlessly seized and searched by Officer Shannon Brasseaux of the Lafayette PD. Carter had been called to a local drugstore because her son had just been arrested. After helping the officer find her son’s ID card, Carter walked over to the vehicle her son had been placed in and took a photo of him.

• Officer Brasseaux then took Carter’s phone from her, claiming she had broken the law by taking pictures of “evidence” [?]. He then swiped her phone to open it, searched for the photo she had taken of her son, and deleted it.

• In a perfectly timed move, one that coincided with the New York Times’ exposé that revealed handfuls of allegations that famed photographer Bruce Weber and Mario Testino were engaging in repeated sexual harassment behavior, Condé Nast announced that it was working on a Code of Conduct. Given that Weber was responsible for imagery for both British and American Vogue for their December 2017 issues (which were revealed just before male model Jason Boyce filed a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against Weber), and Testino was linked to Vogue as recently as its February 2017 issue (he shot the Serena Williams cover), just one month before the Times’ story broke, Vogue’s parent company needed to do something.

• Marine Le Pen election campaign posters, France 2017. Photo: Winfried Rothermel/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Dozens of feature articles have recently marvelled at the increasingly female face of the far right in Europe and North America. The New York Times reported, for instance, on the increased visibility of women in the upper-echelons of far-right parties, from France to Norway. A Vogue feature described this as “the friendly face of right-wing politics,” and “an attempt to soften and feminise” the European far right’s extreme views.

• In North America, numerous reports have asked what draws women to radical conservative and ‘alt-right’ movements. In Canada, the Montreal Gazette said far-right women are “coming out of the shadows” in Quebec to participate in anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim campaigns in growing numbers. Marie Claire said such apparent trends were nothing less than “shocking.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Trump administration labored to clarify on Monday that it currently has no plans to build its own ultra-fast 5G wireless network, despite publication of a memo that suggested the idea was under consideration.

• At issue is a proposal put forth by an unnamed official at the National Security Council, a White House-based body that advises the president on critical U.S. and foreign policy matters. The document, first reported by Axios last night, called for the U.S. government to effectively nationalize a portion of the telecom sector — a radical departure from current policy — in a bid to combat Chinese influence.

• Last year we noted how the FCC had been hyping the creation of a new “Broadband Deployment Advisory Panel” purportedly tasked with coming up with solutions to the nation’s broadband problem. Unfortunately, reports just as quickly began to circulate that this panel was little more than a who’s who of entrenched telecom operators with a vested interest in protecting the status quo. What’s more, the panel featured few representatives from the countless towns and cities that have been forced to build their own broadband networks in the wake of telecom sector dysfunction.

• One report showed how 28 of the 30 representatives on the panel had some direct financial ties to the telecom sector, though many attempted to obfuscate this connection via their work for industry-funded think tanks.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Over time the issue of whether and how to protect cultural heritage and folklore has attracted increasing attention. Discussions in this sense have famously taken place in a number of jurisdictions, including Australia and some African countries.

• With particular regard to the latter, a few days ago the Financial Times published an interesting article, discussing the case of ‘Maasai IP’.

• Maasai are are an ethnic group that has traditionally led a semi-nomadic life across southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. They are are famous as warriors and cattle-rustlers.

• “I will submit that one of the biggest impediments to innovation in health care is Epic, because the way that Epic thinks about their [intellectual property] [sic] and the IP [sic] of others that develop on that platform,” Hereford said at a panel discussion hosted by the Business Journal last week. “There are literally billions of dollars in the Silicon Valley chasing innovation in health care. And Yet Epic has architected an organization that has its belief that all good ideas are from Madison, Wisconsin. And on the off chance that one of us think of a good idea, it’s still owned by Madison, Wisconsin.”

Trademarks

• A couple years ago, my youngest son was “drafted” onto the Indians Little League team. It was cringeworthy. The name was bad enough (and I’m thankful my alma mater had the good sense to abandon it nearly 50 years ago), but right there on the hat was Chief Wahoo. Needless to say, among the many baseball caps we have in our family, that one hasn’t seen the light of day since the season ended.

• Yesterday, the Cleveland team and Major League Baseball announced that they are retiring the logo from uniforms in a year (they had already removed it from in and around the stadium apparently). It’s unclear why it cannot be done sooner, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that manufacturing for next season is already underway and cannot be changed. Good riddance.

• Buried in this news is an interesting IP theory and policy tidbit worth discussion. The team is not abandoning the logo altogether. To maintain trademark rights, it will continue to sell Chief Wahoo merchandise in the Cleveland area. That’s right, trademark law is forcing the team to keep selling merchandise with an offensive logo that it claims to no longer be using.

Copyrights

• The Copyright Royalty Board in the United States has issued an initial determination and accompanying regulations that raise the amount of royalty available to songwriters for streaming, which will impact services such as Pandora, Spotify, Apple and YouTube. Variety has an excellent article on the impact of the decision, which seems substantial—almost boosting royalties by 50%.

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