● 02.19.18

● Links 19/2/2018: Linux 4.16 RC2, Nintendo Switch Now Full-fledged GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’ve been using open source since what seems like prehistoric times. Back then, there was nothing called social media. There was no Firefox, no Google Chrome (not even a Google), no Amazon, barely an internet. In fact, the hot topic of the day was the new Linux 2.0 kernel. The big technical challenges in those days? Well, the ELF format was replacing the old a.out format in binary Linux distributions, and the upgrade could be tricky on some installs of Linux.

Desktop

• While we’re still waiting on an AMD-powered Chromebook as well as for Cannonlake to materialize, it appears Google is prepping support for a Geminilake Chromebook as well.

• Gemini Lake was launched back in December and makes use of Goldmont Plus CPU cores with Gen9 (Kabylake) class graphics. The current Gemini Lake mobile parts are the Celeron N4000/N4100 and Pentium Silver N5000. The Celeron models are dual core while the Pentium Silver N5000 is quad-core, all of them have a 6 Watt TDP, 1.1GHz base frequency, and turbo frequency in the 2.4~2.7GHz range while the graphics clock up only to 650~750MHz.

• Botched updates keep making the rounds these days, and here’s a new one that was actually released in December, but whose effects haven’t been spotted until this month.

• Windows 10 update KB4058043, which is released to systems running the Fall Creators Update, brings reliability improvements to the Microsoft Store and fixes an issue which Microsoft says could cause app update failures and unnecessary network requests.

• But as it turns out, it also brings new problems to a number of systems installing it. A post on Microsoft’s Community forums, which got pinned earlier this week – meaning that it’s really an issue that all users should be aware of, reveals that Windows 10 update KB4058043 caused BSODs on a system before eventually pushing it to an unbootable state.

• Less than two weeks after demonstrating an exploit that allows Linux to be loaded unto a Nintendo Switch game console, fail0verflow is back with a new video showing what appears to be a full-fledged GNU/Linux-based operating system running on Nintendo’s tablet.

• The video shows a Switch running the KDE Plasma desktop environment, complete with support for touchscreen input, internet connectivity, and 3D graphics.

• The Nintendo Switch has easily become the darling of gamers and, unsurprisingly, a few modders seeking to push the handheld gaming console to the limits. And, no, were not just talking about homebrew game development. A little over a week ago, hacker fail0verflow demonstrated booting up Linux on the Switch, albeit with just an image of a bootup screen. Now to address doubts and maybe even stir up more speculation, fail0verflow releases a short video clip of the Switch running a more conventional and fully graphical Linux desktop setup.

Server

• So far, it’s a relatively benign, easy introduction to a new operating system that blends the familiar and new in a timid package. Perhaps that’s the goal, because a radical offering would right away scare everyone. Amazon Linux 2 is an appealing concept, as it gives users what Red Hat never quite did (yet) – A Fedora-like bleeding-edge tech with the stability and long-term support of the mainstay enterprise offering. But then, it also pulls a Debian/Ubuntu stunt by breaking ABI, so it will be cubicle to those who enjoying living la vida loco (in their cubicle or open-space prison).

• Having lived and breathed the large-scale HPC world for many years, I am quite piqued to see how this will evolve. Performance, stability and ease of use will be my primary concerns. Then, is it possible to hook up a remote virtual machine into the EC2 hive? That’s another experiment, and I’d like to see if scaling and deployment works well over distributed networks. Either way, even if nothing comes out of it, Amazon Linux 2 is a nice start to a possibly great adventure. Or yet another offspring in the fragmented family we call Linux. Time will tell. Off you go. Cloud away.

• Whenever I encounter incredibly stupid and functionally destructive configuration errors like this I tend to believe they’re down to simple incompetence and not malice.

• But this one has me wondering. If you essentially require incoming mail to include the contents of spf.outlook.com (currently no less than 81 subnets) as valid senders for the domain, you are essentially saying that only outlook.com customers are allowed to communicate.

• If that restriction is a result of a deliberate choice rather than a simple configuration error, the problem moves out of the technical sphere and could conceivably become a legal matter, depending on what outlook.com have specified in their contracts that they are selling to their customers.

Kernel Space

• Linux and recursion are on very good speaking terms. In fact, a number of Linux command recurse without ever being asked while others have to be coaxed with just the right option. When is recursion most helpful and how can you use it to make your tasks easier? Let’s run through some useful examples and see.

• GA_Switcheroo is the Linux kernel component for dealing with MUX’ed and MUX-less hybrid graphics laptops/systems for switching between GPUs. A new patch series is working to modernize and improve VGA Switcheroo.

• Announcing a new -ck release, 4.15-ck1 with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.170. These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload.

• Con Kolivas announced the release today of his patched Linux 4.15 kernel that includes the MuQSS scheduler, his successor to the BFS scheduler.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman released a slew of stable point releases today to supported Linux kernel series. For the 4.14 and 4.15 branches

• It’s been a quiet week, and rc2 is out.

• I take the fairly quiet rc be a good sign for 4.16, but honestly, rc2 is often fairly calm. That’s probably because people are taking a breather after the merge window, but also simply because it might take a while to find any issues.

• But let’s be optimistic, and just assume – at least for now – that it’s because all is well.

• The diffstat is fairly odd, but that often happens with small rc’s just because then just a couple of pulls will skew things easily in one or two directions. This time the patch is about one third architecture updates (arm64, x86, powerpc), one third tooling (mostly ‘perf’) and one third “rest”. And yes, the bulk of that rest is drivers (gpu, nvme, sound, misc), but those drivers are still distinctly *not* the bulk of the whole patch.

• Go out and test, it all looks fine.

Graphics Stack

• Back for Mesa 18.0 there was OpenGL bindless textures for Kepler GPUs on the open-source NVIDIA “Nouveau” driver while now for Mesa 18.1 that support is in place for Maxwell GPUs and newer.

• Bindless texture support is important for “AZDO” purposes for approaching zero driver overhead with OpenGL. ARB_bindless_texture reduces the API/GL driver overhead of resource bindings and allows accessing textures without needing to first bind/re-bind them.

• Yesterday well known open-source AMD developer Marek Olšák landed his RadeonSI 32-bit pointers support for freeing up some scalar general purpose registers (SGPRs) and he’s continued with a new patch series to alleviate register usage even more.

• Marek Olšák on Saturday released the big libdrm 2.4.90 DRM library update that sits between Mesa and other GPU user-space components and the kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager code.

• At the start of the new year Marek Olšák of AMD posted a set of patches for 32-bit GPU pointers in RadeonSI. That work has now landed in mainline Mesa Git.

• Nothing terribly exciting, but enough bug fixes to justify a release.

• Should you find yourself using the xf86-video-vesa DDX for one reason or another, a new release is now available and it’s the first in three years.

• The xf86-video-vesa 2.4.0 X.Org driver was released this week with the handful of commits that came in since v2.3.4 was tagged three years ago, it’s been eight years already since xf86-video-vesa 2.3.0. For most users, xf86-video-vesa is just used in select fallback instances when your main DDX driver fails but even still these days KMS is pretty solid with xf86-video-modesetting, fbdev and other DDX drivers working well, etc.

Applications

• GIMP stands for the Gnu Image Manipulation Program and is the first word that people usually think about when it comes to free image editors. It’s a raster graphics editor, available on multiple platforms on PC. It has a similar interface to Photoshop: you have your tools on one side, there’s an option for your tool window and then you have your layers window on another side. Perhaps one of the most useful features of GIMP is the option of plugins. There is a wide database for them and there’s a plugin for almost any task you might need to carry out.

• GIMP is extremely extensive, and it’s the choice of the FOSS community, thanks to the fact that it’s also open source. However, there are also some disadvantages. For example, GIMP has no direct RAW support yet (you have to install a plugin to enable it, which means a split workflow). It also has quite a bit of a learning curve as compared to Photoshop or Lightroom.

• If you want to use Anaconda for science projects, one of the first things to consider is the spyder package, which is included in the basic Anaconda installation. Spyder is short for Scientific PYthon Development EnviRonment. Think of it as an IDE for scientific programming within Python.

• SMPlayer is a free media player created for Linux and Windows, it was released under GNU General Public License. Unlike other players it doesn’t require you to install codecs to play something because it carries its own all required codecs with itself. This is the first release which now support MPV and some other features such as MPRIS v2 Support, new theme, 3D stereo filter and more. It uses the award-winning MPlayer as playback engine which is capable of playing almost all known video and audio formats (avi, mkv, wmv, mp4, mpeg… see list).

Instructionals/Technical

• Fortunately the openness of Linux still provides us with one way out of this problem. Although you can use modern Linux desktops and servers without knowing almost anything about how computers, networks or Linux itself works, unlike with other systems, Linux still will show you everything that’s going on behind the scenes if you are willing to look. You can set up complex networks of Linux servers running the same services that power the internet—all for free (and with the power of virtualization, all from a single machine). For the budding engineer who is willing to dive deep into Linux, you will have superior knowledge and an edge over all of your peers.

• ​LMMS stands for Linux Multimedia Studio. It is a very good open-source program that is used to create music tracks using sound files, predefined instruments, and sound effects. LMMS has versions for Windows and macOS in addition to Linux. Their website, of course, lists all of their features offered to users. This article will attempt to provide practical guides and tips for composing songs using LMMS.

• Having to type the same command over and over again can be a daunting task and tiresome for that matter. The shell scripts are really easy to create and run saving you from a lot of misery and anguish if you really prefer using the terminal over using the GUI for running tasks.

Wine or Emulation

• Some of you may have already wondered why there were no Wine Staging releases lately and whether anything has changed. There are indeed some major changes, which we want to explain in this post. Before doing so, let us take a quick look at the history of this project.

• Wine Staging originated from Pipelight, a software to use Windows browser plugins in Linux/FreeBSD web browsers. In order to support Silverlight and its DRM system PlayReady, we had to create our own Wine version as the development code did not support storing Access Control Lists (ACLs) for files. It turned out that getting the support into the development version was quite difficult and Erich E. Hoover tried this since 2012. We figured out that there must be more patches that are considered as too experimental for the development branch and started with Wine Staging in 2014. While the project got larger and larger in roughly 120 releases, the maintenance effort also increased, especially since we follow the 2 week release cycle of the development branch.

• There have been many people asking questions about the future of Wine Staging, turns out it’s no longer going to have any new releases.

• I won’t quote the entire post titled “Future of Wine Staging”, but the gist of it is that they just don’t have the spare time to put into it now. They have full time jobs, so naturally that doesn’t leave much for something like this. I fully understand their situation and wish them all the best, I’ve seen so many people appreciate the work they did to bring so many different patches together for testing.

• The good news, is that there’s already a fork available. On top of that, Wine developer Alexandre Julliard posted on the Wine mailing list about keeping it going in some form, so there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

• Wine-Staging as many of you have known it for the past four years is unfortunately no more. We’ll see if other reliable folks step up to maintain this experimental version of Wine but the original developers have sadly stepped away.

Games

• For fans of adventure and visual novels, you might want to know that The 25th Ward: The Silver Case [Steam] the follow-up to The Silver Case looks like it will be on Linux.

• The developer of Mercury Race [Kickstarter, Official Site] emailed us about their fast-paced racing game that’s inspired by Wipeout and F-Zero, as they plan to support Linux.

• Orwell: Ignorance is Strength [GOG, Steam], the sequel to Orwell will release with Linux support on February 22nd. The developers are promising a darker game this time around.

• OpenRA [Official Site], the fantastic open source game engine for classic Westwood strategy games has its first full release this year. When reading what’s changed, you might be thinking this is some kind of Déjà vu, that’s because we covered the test release from January as well.

• A casual kart racing game currently in early access, Hibby Kart aims to replicate an experience similar to old N64 karting games such as Diddy Kong Racing. The game is built in Unity Engine while the visuals and animations look pretty slick. My first run on the starting track had me collecting what appear to be Bitcoins (I am unsure if that is intentional) which level up your kart.

• Even so, Mac and Linux together making up nearly 10% of their overall sales is certainly nothing to sneeze at, especially if you’re not making a huge amount of sales, to me that says they’re quite important.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Raspberry Pi3 is a small single board computer that costs around $35 (USD). It comes with a network port, wifi , bt , 4 usb ports , gpio pins , camera port , a display out, hdmi, a TRRS for analog A/V out. 1GB of ran and 4 ~1GHz armv8 cores Inside small SOC. Its storage is a microSd card they are a low cost and low power device. The Touchscreen kit is an 800×480 display that hooks to the Gpio for touch and dsi port for video. To hold our hardware is the standard touch screen enclosure that often comes with the screen if you buy it in a kit.

• We’ve been focusing like crazy on the Krita 4 release. We managed to close some 150 bugs in the past month, and Krita 4 is getting stable enough for many people to use day in, day out. There’s still more to be done, of course! So we’ll continue fixing issues and applying polish for at least another four weeks.

• One of the things we’re doing as well is redesigning the set of default brush presets and brush tips that come with Krita. Brush tips are the little images one can paint with, and brush presets are the brushes you can select in the brush palette or brush popup. The combination of a tip, some settings and a smart bit of coding!

• Our old set was fine, but it was based on David Revoy‘s earliest Krita brush bundles, and for Krita 4 we are revamping the entire set. We’ve added many new options to the brushes since then! So, many artists are working together to create a good-looking, useful and interesting brushes for Krita 4.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Are you tired of waiting for ages to build large C++ projects like WebKit? Slow headers are generally the problem. Your C++ source code file #includes a few headers, all those headers #include more, and those headers #include more, and more, and more, and since it’s C++ a bunch of these headers contain lots of complex templates to slow down things even more. Not fun.

• Fleet Commander has seen quite a lot of progress recently, of which I should blog about soon. For those unaware, Fleet Commander is an effort to make GNOME great for IT administrators in large deployments, allowing them to deploy desktop and application configuration profiles across hundreds of machines with ease through a web administration UI based on Cockpit. It is mostly implemented in Python.

• Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been heads down working on a new tool along with Patrick Griffis. The purpose of this tool is to make it easier to integrate IDEs and other tooling with GNU-based gadgets like phones, tablets, infotainment, and IoT devices.

• Years ago I was working on a GNOME-based home router with davidz which sadly we never finished. One thing that was obvious to me in that moment of time was that I’m not doing another large scale project until I had better tooling. That is Builder’s genesis, and device integration is what will make it truly useful to myself and others who love playing with GNU-friendly gadgets.

Distributions

Reviews

• DietPi makes it extremely easy to turn a single board computer into many different things. Installing and configuring Nextcloud, Kodi, etc., only require a few very basic steps. Every software package I tried installed with few issues, and worked great once installed. DietPi does almost all the hard work for the user, which makes it a great option for running on any single board computer or as a virtual machine. If you are looking for a lightweight and easy-to-use operating system for your single board computer, you cannot go wrong with DietPi.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Friday’s Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved of VA-API 1.0 video acceleration for this spring’s Fedora 28 release.

Debian Family

• Surprising as it might sound, there are still computers using the traditional Sys V init system, and there probably will be until systemd start working on Hurd and FreeBSD. The upstream project still exist, though, and up until today, the upstream source was available from Savannah via subversion. I am happy to report that this just changed.

• Seems Debian is talking about why they are unable to package whole categories of modern software, such as anything using npm. It’s good they’re having a conversation about that, and I want to give a broader perspective.

• This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about “What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?”. I’m commenting on that in my blog rather than the mailing list, since this got a bit too long to be usefully done in an email.

• Yesterday I overhauled my Debian package-hosting repository, in response to user-complaints.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The developers have been hard at work on Xenial!

• ARM64 now working on Ubuntu Touch, and applications launch! As many modern CPUs don’t include 32-bit compatibility mode, ARM64 native mode on UT can start to make use of more modern CPUs.

• While Canonical is no longer involved in Unity 8 development, the community-driven UBports team continues working on their “Unity 8″ and “Ubuntu Touch” efforts with a hope to deliver a developer ISO soon.

• Sadly the Yunit project that also forked Unity 8′s code-base doesn’t seem to be active at least not regularly anymore, but the UBports team is working on delivering. In their latest Q&A session they share that Unity 8 on the desktop is coming together. One of the developers commented, “While it’s both good and pretty, it’s not ‘pretty good’.”

• Besides Mir 0.30 being released this week, other Mir progress was also made by these Canonical developers working on forging Mir into a viable Wayland compositor.

• Gerry Boland of Canonical’s Mir team has shared that Snapd 2.31 now supports any Snap implementing the Wayland interface. This allows for Mir to be shipped as a Snap and support Wayland clients using Canonical’s app sandboxing approach alternative to Flatpaks.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Remember the days of 3GP videos? Gone are the days when we had to convert a video to low-quality file formats to view it on our mobile. Nowadays, video players take advantage of new generation hardware in our smartphones and can play almost all video file formats.

Free Software/Open Source

• Today I would like to explain my reasons for my candidacy at the board of the Open Source Initiative. I can think of two kinds of reason for my decision: one is personal, and the other one is directly related to current state of Open Source and software freedom. Let’s start with the first one: I’m currently helping the Open Information Security Foundation and the Suricata project in my capacity at ANSSI, while contributing in a minor way to the LibreOffice project and the Document Foundation.

• Since then, I have heard of another email provider that you may be interested in. It’s a little different, but it touts some of the same features ProtonMail does: privacy, security, open-source code, etc. It’s called Tutanota, and like ProtonMail, I am a very big fan.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• A big objection to tracking protection is the idea that the tracker will always get through. Some people suggest that as browsers give users more ability to control how their personal information gets leaked across sites, things won’t get better for users, because third-party tracking will just keep up. On this view, today’s easy-to-block third-party cookies will be replaced by techniques such as passive fingerprinting where it’s hard to tell if the browser is succeeding at protecting the user or not, and users will be stuck in the same place they are now, or worse.

• I doubt this is the case because we’re playing a more complex game than just trackers vs. users. The game has at least five sides, and some of the fastest-moving players with the best understanding of the game are the adfraud hackers. Right now adfraud is losing in some areas where they had been winning, and the resulting shift in adfraud is likely to shift the risks and rewards of tracking techniques.

• Here’s what happened on the MozMEAO SRE team from January 23 – February 16.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Modulo some minor details, the transition of our userland to GCC 6 is complete.

• The OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system has finally moved past GCC 4.9 as its base user-land compiler and is now using GCC 6.4.

• This comes while GCC 8.1 should be officially released in the next few weeks and they are already targeting GCC 7.3.0 as their next illumos-gate compiler.

• The Document Foundation announced recently that its LibreOffice 6.0 open-source and cross-platform office suite reached almost 1 million downloads since its release last month on January 31, 2018.

• That’s terrific news for the Open Source and Free Software community and a major milestone for the acclaimed LibreOffice office suite, which tries to be a free alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft Office.

• The 1 million downloads mark was reached just two weeks after the release of LibreOffice 6.0, which is the biggest update ever of the open-source office suite adding numerous new features and enhancements over previous versions.

Funding

• On Feb. 16, six large-scale Blockchain projects OmiseGo, Cosmos, Golem, Maker and Raiden, that have completed successful multi-million dollar initial coin offerings (ICOs) last year, along with Japanese venture capital firm Global Brain have created the Ethereum Community Fund (ECF), to fund projects and businesses within the Ethereum ecosystem.

• This week Google announced the participating organizations for GSoC 2018 for students wishing to get involved with open-source/Linux development. Also happening this week is the application period opened for those wishing to participate in the summer 2018 paid internship program.

BSD

• Landing in FreeBSD today was the mitigation work for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.

• It’s taken a few more weeks longer than most of the Linux distributions to be re-worked for Spectre/Meltdown mitigation as well as DragonFlyBSD, but with FreeBSD Revision 329462 it appears their initial fixes are in place.

• There is Meltdown mitigation for Intel CPUs via a KPTI implementation similar to Linux, the Kernel Page Table Isolation. There is also a PCID (Process Context Identifier) optimization for Intel Westmere CPUs and newer, just as was also done on Linux.

• Thanks to work done by Hans Petter Selasky and others, this drm-next-kmod port is working on FreeBSD 11 stable. What’s different with this package from the ports collection versus the ported-from-Linux Direct Rendering Modules found within the FreeBSD 11 kernel is that these DRM modules are using the linuxkpi interface.

Public Services/Government

Licensing/Legal

• Most people have heard of Google’s Tensorflow which was released at the end of 2015, but there’s an active codebase called PyTorch which is easier to understand, less of a black box, and more dynamic. Tensorflow does have solutions for some of those limitations (such as Tensorflow-fold, and Tensorflow-Eager) but these new capabilities remove the need for other features and complexity of Tensorflow. Google built a great system for doing static computation graphs before realizing that most people want dynamic graphs. Doh!

• [...]

• I wish PyTorch used the AGPL license. Most neural networks are run on servers today, it is hardly used on the Linux desktop. Data is central to AI and that can stay owned by FB and the users of course. The ImageNet dataset created a revolution in computer vision, so let’s never forget that open data sets can be useful.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the Mozilla’s IoT gateway, a new machine learning platform, Code.mil’s revamp, and more.

Open Data

• Since about 15 years ago, I have been thinking of creating a geo-referenced wiki of pubs, with loads of structured data to help searching. I don’t know if that would be useful for anybody else, but I know I would use it!

• Sadly, the many times I started coding something towards that goal, I ended blocked by something, and I keep postponing my dream project.

• That said, while I still believe in the goals of OpenStreetMap, I feel the OpenStreetMap project is currently unable to fulfill that mission due to poor technical decisions, poor political decisions, and a general malaise in the project. I’m going to outline in this article what I think OpenStreetMap has gotten wrong. It’s entirely possible that OSM will reform and address the impediments to its success- and I hope it does. We need a Free as in Freedom geographic dataset.

Leftovers

• If this is you, there’s a solution: stop bringing your phone to bed. Your tablet too. Glowing screens in the bedroom are destroying your sleep, and the only solution is to stop using them.

• This Friday, China is going to celebrate its new year, kicking off one of the planet’s great migrations.

• Also known as Spring Festival or Lunar New Year, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that this the event sees hundreds of millions of people leave their cities in order to visit their families in more rural parts of the country. In fact, practically all of China takes holiday at once, making the new year the biggest human event on earth.

Science

• He didn’t realize how strongly ideology tops science in one of the top tech companies in the world.

• Let’s play a little game along the NLRB’s decisional lines:

• Here’s a generalization: Men are vastly more likely to get prostate cancer than women.

• Here’s another: Women are vastly more likely to have ovaries.

• Discriminatory! Constitutes sexual harassment! “Nothwithstanding” my effort to cloak my comments in “basic physiology.”

• Are we seeing how wildly ridiculous this is?

• But the reality is that Musk’s ideas around transportation are at best “half-baked” or at worst designed to delay the construction of transportation infrastructure that could pull the United States into the twenty-first century.

• Like a lot of people, I was glued to a live broadcast from the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics the other night, watching American snowboarding phenom Chloe Kim kick competitors’ butts in the women’s half-pipe finals. Unlike most other spectators, though, I saw powder fly with a virtual-reality headset strapped to my face.

• Spintronics involves manipulating the spin of electrons and in this way differs from conventional electronics that manipulates their movement. It is this spin that is responsible for magnetism: When a majority of electrons in a material have their spins pointing in the same direction, the material is magnetized. If you can move all the spins up or down and can read that direction, you can create the foundation of the “0” and “1” of digital logic.

• Spintronic devices based on the porphyrin molecule exploit the magnetic atom—typically iron, which has spin-polarized states—that is in the middle of each molecule. There are a number of ways of exploiting the spin of these magnetic atoms to polarize the transported current. If magnetic molecules with a larger spin are used—the so-called a single-molecule magnet—a “1” or “0” state could be stabilized by a magnetic field and read by currents.

• Researchers at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) have made a major breakthrough in controlling the quantum properties of single atoms. In an international collaboration with IBM Research in San Jose, California, using advanced techniques, the scientists identified which mechanisms destroy the quantum properties of individual atoms by manipulating the magnetic state of a single iron atom on a thin insulator. Using a scanning tunneling microscope with an atomically sharp metal tip, they were able to image individual iron atoms and measure and control the time that they maintain their quantum behavior.

• A team of researchers led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated a new method for splitting light beams into their frequency modes.

Hardware

• In a gleaming high-rise here in northern Beijing’s Haidian district, two hardware jocks in their 20s are testing new computer chips that might someday make smartphones, robots, and autonomous vehicles truly intelligent. A wiry young man in an untucked plaid flannel shirt watches appraisingly. The onlooker, Chen Yunji, a 34-year-old computer scientist and founding technical adviser of Cambricon Technologies here, explains that traditional processors, designed decades before the recent tsunami of artificial intelligence (AI) research, “are slow and energy inefficient” at processing the reams of data required for AI. “Even if you have a very good algorithm or application,” he says, its usefulness in everyday life is limited if you can’t run it on your phone, car, or appliance. “Our goal is to change all lives.”

Health/Nutrition

• As well as socializing the risk (and thereby helping to contain health care costs), health economist Robert H. Frank notes that Medicare’s administrative costs are substantially lower than a private health insurer, averaging only about 2 percent of total expenses, which is less than one-sixth the corresponding percentage for many private insurers. Frank explains that this occurs in large part because Medicare does not pre-screen anybody, and because the program:

• Researchers found that increased eligibility for a free bus pass led to an 8 percent increase in the use of public transportation among older people, and a 12 percent decline in depression symptoms among those who started taking the bus when they became eligible for the program.

• Heather Holland, a second-grade teacher at Ikard Elementary School with the Weatherford Independent School District died over the weekend, the Weatherford Democrat reports. Holland got sick about a week ago and took medication, but delayed picking up the prescription due to the $116 copay, according to the newspaper.

• Together, the archival and experimental findings suggest that exposure to air pollution, whether physical or mental, is linked with transgressive behaviour through increased levels of anxiety, researchers said.

• Human activities are driving phosphorus levels in the world’s lakes, rivers and other freshwater bodies to a critical point. The freshwater bodies on 38 percent of Earth’s land area (not including Antarctica) are overly enriched with phosphorus, leading to potentially toxic algal blooms and less available drinking water, researchers report January 24 in Water Resources Research.

• A problem for scientists investigating the physiological activities of pesticides is that herbicide-producing giants including Monsanto, Roundup’s developer, or Syngenta, which produces the glyphosate-containing herbicide Touchdown, aren’t required to make their full ingredients lists public.u

• “I think we need to stop private companies from being able to make a profit from public services. The collapse of Carillion demonstrates that it is completely immoral to allow a private company to make a profit from a service without taking on any of the associated risk because you can’t be allowed to fail. You can’t stop cleaning hospitals! You can’t stop providing school meals and when the company goes bust the public has to take on the debt.

• “Every penny of profit that a private company makes should be a penny that’s invested in an NHS service.”

• The second month of the year begins with London having already reached its legal air pollution limit for the whole of 2018. The city’s limit of 18 breaches of air quality regulations was used up in January.

• Carmelo Gallegos used to sow wheat in the cool winters and cotton in scorching-hot summers of the Mexicali valley. These days, water is so scarce he can only plant one crop a year.

• Officials warn of the likelihood of a Day Zero, when the level at the dams will drop below 13.5% and the city’s water supply will have to be turned off. (The 13.5% level is set by the city, which notes that it may be hard to extract any water at all if it falls below 10%.) Unless things change, Day Zero is due to fall on April 16th, though earlier estimations suggested both April 12th and April 21st. It will make Cape Town the world’s first big city to run dry.

• According to UN-endorsed projections, global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40% in 2030, thanks to a combination of climate change, human action and population growth.

• Tainted tap water isn’t just a problem in Flint, Michigan. In any given year from 1982 to 2015, somewhere between 9 million and 45 million Americans got their drinking water from a source that was in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to a new study. Most at risk: people who live in rural, low-income areas.

• “It’s a pneumonia, but what’s different about it is, we don’t share it like we do the flu or common cold,” explains Michele Swanson of the University of Michigan, who has been studying Legionnaires’ for 25 years. “It’s caused by a bacterium, Legionella pneumophila, that grows in water.”

• Read it again: That’s nearly a three-quarters drop in third-grade reading proficiency among children whose lives were affected by lead poisoned water during the Flint water crisis.

• Warning over wider global health impacts after findings reveal hundreds of tonnes of colistin – the ‘antibiotic of last resort’ – are being shipped to India’s farms

• In late August of 2017, White House counsel Donald McGahn issued a waiver for a new member of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), previously a lobbyist for the corn syrup industry, to advise the department on dietary guidelines:

• Female genital mutilation (FGM)–also known as khatna or khafz in the Muslim Bohra community, where it is practised in India–does not have any laws in India banning it. The United Nations has declared female genital mutilation a human rights violation, and yet, the act is not banned in India.

• His statement Tuesday says over 200 million women and girls in 30 countries across three continents have experienced genital mutilation.

• The UN Population Fund projects that the estimated 3.9 million girls subjected to genital cutting every year will rise to 4.6 million by 2030 due to expected population growth unless urgent action is taken.

• When Monsanto introduced a new kind of seed that wouldn’t die when exposed to the herbicide dicamba, it triggered a crisis in the southeastern United States. Farmers planted the seed and started spraying dicamba, and it worked great! Except that it drifted onto other farmers’ fields and killed their crops.

• And the dramatic plot twists keep coming. One farmer gunned down another in a confrontation over his withered crops. Then, states began to restrict the use of dicamba, with Arkansas completely banning it last summer.

• Licensed marijuana product growers and retailers have been very unhappy with Washington State’s new “seed-to-sale” marijuana tracking system that went live on 1 February.

• Buggy software has kept many suppliers from shipping their products because of manifest errors and, equally, retailers from accepting their orders. While Washington’s Liquor and Cannabis Board officials have insisted that the myriad software problems are being fixed or work arounds exist for most of them, it also has disclosed that the tracking system experienced a cyber intrusion.

• A federal judge in Delaware has overturned a jury’s verdict requiring Gilead Sciences Inc to pay a record $2.54 billion because its hepatitis C drugs Sovaldi and Harvoni infringed a patent held by rival Merck & Co Inc.

• The verdict had been the largest ever in a U.S. patent case but U.S. District Judge Leonard Stark in Wilmington, Delaware, on Friday ruled Merck’s patent was invalid. He said it did not meet a requirement that it disclose how to make the treatment it covered without undue experimentation.

Security

• Uncovered by Kromtech Security Center, the parent company of MacKeeper Security, the breach exposed data such as passport information, driver’s licenses and other high profile security IDs, all of which were hosted on a password-less Amazon S3 storage server.

• they include The City University of New York (cuny.edu), Uncle Sam’s court information portal (uscourts.gov), Lund University (lu.se), the UK’s Student Loans Company (slc.co.uk), privacy watchdog The Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk) and the Financial Ombudsman Service (financial-ombudsman.org.uk), plus a shedload of other .gov.uk and .gov.au sites, UK NHS services, and other organizations across the globe.

• Manchester.gov.uk, NHSinform.scot, agriculture.gov.ie, Croydon.gov.uk, ouh.nhs.uk, legislation.qld.gov.au, the list goes on.

• Replies ending up as comments appears to be a bizarre bug, but the spamming seems intentional.

• Remember now, it is a Police Force that allowed their website to be hijacked by this simple attack vector. The authority assigned to serve and protect. More specifically, the authority that argues that wiretapping is totally safe because the Police is competent in IT security matters, so there’s no risk whatsoever your data will leak or be mishandled.

• This is one of the websites that were trivially hacked [sic].

• It gives pause for thought.

• It also tells you what you already knew: authorities can’t even keep their own dirtiest laundry under wraps, so the notion that they’re capable or even willing to protect your sensitive data is hogwash of the highest order.

• In a bid to help domain registrars comply with the GDPR regulations, ICANN has floated several proposals, all of which would redact some of the registrant data from WHOIS records. Its mildest proposal would remove the registrant’s name, email, and phone number, while allowing self-certified 3rd parties to request access to said data at the approval of a higher authority — such as the registrar used to register the domain name.

• The most restrictive proposal would remove all registrant data from public WHOIS records, and would require legal due process (such as a subpoena or court order) to reveal any information supplied by the domain registrant.

• Intel Corp said on Friday shareholders and customers had filed 32 class action lawsuits against the company in connection with recently-disclosed security flaws in its microchips.

• Federal law enforcement officials in the United States have recently renewed their periodic demands for legislation to regulate encryption. While they offer few technical specifics, their general proposal—that vendors must retain the ability to decrypt for law enforcement the devices they manufacture or communications their services transmit—presents intractable problems that would-be regulators must not ignore.

• It’s finally out ! Michael W Lucas is one of the best authors of technical books out there. I was curious about this new edition. It is not a reference book, but covers the practical aspects of SSH that I wish everybody knew. Rather than aggregating different articles/blogs on SSH, this book covers 90% of the common use cases for SSH that you will ever encounter.

• First, the document describes that in France cyberdefence and cyberoffence are separated. This is directly opposed to the models employed in Anglo-Saxon countries. But it’s shown as an asset. Key argument: it respects freedoms and civil liberties.

• The document then lists the six general objectives of cyberdefence, namely: prevention, anticipation, protection, detection, attribution, reaction (remediation). The strategy itself is complete, it focuses on civil, military, domestic, external, and international levels. Let’s say it’s a rarity in the business in strategic cybersecurity documents.

• [...]

• The strategy then mentions that one of the solutions could be to release source code and documentation after an end of support date.

• Over the past five decades, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) has become the major global forum for the discussion of security policy. Each February, it brings together more than 450 senior decision-makers from around the world, including heads-of-state, ministers, leading personalities of international and non-governmental organizations, as well as high ranking representatives of industry, media, academia, and civil society, to engage in an intensive debate on current and future security challenges.

• New smart energy meters that the Government wants to be installed in millions of homes will leave householders vulnerable to cyber attacks, ministers have been warned.

• “The flaws—dubbed Meltdown and Spectre—are in chips made by Intel and other major suppliers. They can allow hackers to steal data from the memory of running apps, including password managers, browsers and emails.”

• The authors of the paper on arXiv, Caroline Trippel, Daniel Lustig, and Margaret Martonosi, discuss a tool they developed for “automatically synthesizing microarchitecture-specific programs capable of producing any user-specified hardware execution pattern of interest.”

• They said they show “how this tool can be used for generating small microarchitecture-specific programs which represent exploits in their most abstracted form—security litmus tests.”

Defence/Aggression

• Rebecca Henchke, who has been reporting in Indonesia for 12 years was uploading photos on Twitter showing the lack of adequate treatment of the health crisis by the Indonesian military

• Military Intelligence pulled Henschke in for five hours of questions; she was then held by Immigration, and, after another 24 hours, she and her crew were escorted onto a plane back to Jakarta.

• Jakarta says a number of Pacific countries have expressed appreciation for Indonesia’s new initiatives to develop the Papua region.

• India has given proof to United States that weapon systems like the US TOW-2A anti-tank guided missiles given to Pakistan for use against Taliban are now being used against Indian Army.

• The story of this hateful barrier’s fall and the ensuing 28 years, two months and 27 days of German history is one of expanded individual horizons: it has meant previously unimaginable travel, enterprise, friendships and relationships (the proportion of German couples with one “Ossi” and one “Wessi” partner passed the 10% mark in around 2008). Among the touching reflections on the anniversary today have been social media posts to that effect by Germans speculating on how much poorer their lives would have been #ohneMauerfall (without the fall of the wall).

• None of these steps has anything to do with “defence” or preserving peace. Rather in a world where geo-political tensions are accelerating, Australia is seeking the military means to pursue its own imperialist interests, either in league with the US, as it has done since World War II, or independently if need be. The military and political establishment is coming to the conclusion that in order to do this it needs the ultimate in “high-end weapons”—a nuclear arsenal.

• Up to 200 police will be guarding the courthouse for the trial.

• Speaking at a secret location on the outskirts of Baidoa, a former zaqat (tax) collector for al-Shabaab, who was captured in a recent raid by agents from Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency, confirmed that the extraction of tolls at roadblocks was one of the biggest sources of money for al-Shabaab.

• Conflicts between indigenous Papuans and Indonesian security forces are common in the impoverished region, which Indonesia annexed more than half a century ago.

• One example of the trend is the Buckeye Firearms Foundation’s funding of so-called “Faster” programs, three-day training sessions for teachers from around the country. In addition to target practice, one day of the training is devoted to “mindset development,” or bolstering teachers’ preparedness to shoot after split-second assessments. Trainees are asked “to close their eyes and imagine the student entering the classroom with a gun” and then are taught how to command the grit necessary to kill that student.

• Four people have been arrested as investigations widen into last week’s mystery death of two European men at two top Kampala hotels.

• Police sources say the suspects were arrested by Internal Security Organisation agents and have been detained at the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI).

• “Among the suspects, there are three security operatives and Faridah Nakaye who was identified as one of the deceased’s (Tuomas Juha) girlfriend. They are being interrogated by ISO operatives and their case is also connected to dealing in narcotics,” a source said.

• U.S. empire loyalists are so close to telling the truth when they babble about “Russian propaganda.” They are openly admitting that it is wrong to use media to manipulate the ways that Americans think and vote. Now all we need is for them to admit that they themselves do this constantly, and we’ll be on the right track.

• [...]

• The focus instead is on people disguising their identities to troll Americans on social media, which we have now learned constitutes a “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” As Disobedient Media’s Elizabeth Lea Vos rightly points out, it is also behavior that the Hillary Clinton campaign is known to have funded and engaged in extensively.

• Feeling apocalyptic right now? You’re probably not the only one.

• But of course, who you think the bad guys are depends a lot on where you live. Which is what makes this map really interesting.

• After three different imams in the U.S. declared in December that Muslims will one day eliminate the Jews, citing sacred Islamic text, a Washington-based Islamic group known for its concern about “hate speech” was noticeably silent.

• The ongoing trial of veteran terrorist Suryadi Mas’ud has revealed how Indonesian militants linked up with fellow networks in Marawi, southern Philippines, to procure M-16 assault rifles and handguns.

• In the wake of the stabbings police discovered a manifesto heavily influenced by Islamist and ISIS ideas, posted by the suspect on various social media channels, which included numerous disparaging references to western religions. The attack, which took place on 18 August 2017 and started in Turku’s Market Square.

• It’s predictable after every new mass-shooting horror: The political right’s reflexive call for “thoughts and prayers,” which is then mocked by people who favor more gun restrictions for lacking any accompanying ideas for preventing future killings.

• But there’s an equally predictable refrain on the center-left and in the media, too: “Once again, nothing will be done.”

• Barely had the death toll of 17 been announced last week after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida than The Washington Post declared, “The gun debate is going nowhere quickly after Parkland.” CNN offered: “Amid continued string of mass shootings, gun control going nowhere in Congress.” After 59 concert-goers were mowed down in October, former Democratic congressman Steve Israel put to rest any hope for reform in a New York Times op-ed column titled “Nothing Will Change After the Las Vegas Shooting.”

• Honour killing took three lives in Kohistan as son shot dead mother, brother’s wife, and her paramour in the name of honour on Saturday in district Kolai Palas of Kohistan

• But Swedish TV reported there were over 300 shootings, mostly in turf battles between gangs over drugs, protection rackets and prostitution.

• Stacey comes face to face with ISIS as she revisits Iraq to unearth the harrowing story of Yazidi women kept as ISIS sex slaves.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The warrant was upheld, and whether section 6 proceedings are initiated under the Bail Act 1976 will depend on Assange’s circumstances when he is finally produced to the court.

• The alleged influence of Russian Internet Research Agency LLC, indicted by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller for its alleged interference in the US 2016 election, was “insignificant” regardless of what kind of activities the company was engaged in, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said.

• It is nearly six years since Julian Assange disguised himself as a motorcycle courier and entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London to seek political asylum. His subsequent legal battle, so vast and protracted a CPS lawyer once deemed it “like an industry” in itself, comes to a pivotal moment on Tuesday, when a judge will rule on whether the warrant for his arrest has become disproportionate.

• It’s no secret that Julian Assange used WikiLeaks to support the Donald Trump campaign in 2016. In September of 2016, a WikiLeaks account sent a series of private messages to Donald Trump Jr. over Twitter detailing attack points against Hillary Clinton and attempting to form a sort of partnership between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign. Now, new private chats have surfaced which further show WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange professing a preference for the Republican Party in the 2015 general election, The Intercept reports.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has rejected contentions by The Intercept that he supported the Republican party during the 2016 presidential election in a series of tweets.

• The report from The Intercept is based on 11,000 messages in a private Twitter chat group of WikiLeaks’ loyal supporters that were turned over by a longtime supporter of Assange known only as Hazelpress. The messages were sent to The Intercept after the WikiLeaks Twitter account, believed to be run by Assange, made what Hazelpress considered anti-Semetic remarks about an Associated Press reporter. Also included were messages about why WikiLeaks allegedly wanted the Republican Party to win the 2016 presidential election.

• Last Tuesday, senior British district judge Emma Arbuthnot rejected Julian Assange’s appeal for freedom. Meaning that Assange will continue to face arrest if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy and will be confined to the meagre room available to him in the embassy building, where he has managed to survive for almost six years.

• In 2012 Julian Assange had taken refuge in this embassy to avoid extradition at the hands of British imperialists to Sweden or the U.S. over allegations of sexual assault, and subversive activities against the US imperialist state. Though Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation against him, he still faces arrest if he leaves the building. Ecuador recently granted him citizenship and asylum. It had tried unsuccessfully to persuade British officials to give Assange diplomatic status, which might have made it possible for him to leave Britain even if US officials sought him.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• All in all, the report identified $38 million in reimbursement payments that the Office of Fossil Energy made to Summit without proper and thorough documentation. But before the partnership between Fossil Energy and Summit ended, a third-party auditor had signed off on most of those payments, so the OIG said it wouldn’t tread that ground again, despite its reservations. However, at least $2.5 million in expenses that were paid out during the lifetime of the project potentially broke the rules about what federal government funds can and can’t reimburse.

• Virtually all of Australia’s shellfish reefs have disappeared, making them the country’s most threatened ocean ecosystem, scientists said on Thursday (Feb 15), calling for more investment to rescue the important marine habitats.

• Hidden beneath the ocean waters, coral reefs teem with life. Coral reefs support more species than any other marine environment and rival rainforests in their biodiversity. Countless numbers of creatures rely on coral reefs for their survival. These important habitats are threatened by a range of human activities. Many of the world’s reefs have already been destroyed or severely damaged by an increasing array of threats, including pollution, unsustainable fishing practices, and global climate change. However, we can still protect and preserve our remaining reefs if we act now. NOAA is leading U.S. efforts to study and conserve these precious resources for future generations.

• Consumption of shark fin soup in China has fallen by around 80 per cent since 2011, government figures and private surveys show, after a celebrity-driven public awareness campaign and a government crackdown on extravagant banquets.

• But the good news is offset by an alarming rise in the consumption of this prestige dish in places like Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Macao, according to a new report by WildAid, a San Francisco-based group that campaigns to curb demand for wildlife products.

• The team from India is presently collecting primary data to draw up a conservation plan with the eventual aim of creating a “protected area network.” Spread across 20,000 sqkm, Myanmar has the largest tiger landscape in the world but its dwindling tiger population has been a concern.

• An Iranian-Canadian dual citizen and environmental activist imprisoned by Iranian authorities last month has died in prison, his son wrote on Twitter on Saturday. Kavous Seyed-Emami was managing director of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, which seeks to protect Iran’s rare animals, and a U.S.-trained scholar in sociology.

• [...]

• Iran faces a number of serious environmental crises, including water scarcity, air pollution and wildlife poaching. Human rights groups say activists in Iran face the risk of arbitrary arrest and harassment by authorities.

• “Nearly all tuna today are caught before they are five years old, because of overfishing, which means they only spawn once or twice in their lifetimes. If we’re going to protect this resource, it’s very important that we allow the fish to spawn.” The Iki fishermen have asked for studies to determine the effects of their moratorium. The Fisheries Agency has refused, claiming it has no budget for such work.

• By the end of the year, Saudi Arabia aims to invest up to $7 billion to develop seven new solar plants and a big wind farm. The country hopes that renewables, which now represent a negligible amount of the energy it uses, will be able to provide as much as 10 percent of its power generation by the end of 2023.

• One of the world’s leading investigators of the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn has been killed in Kenya.

• Esmond Bradley Martin, whose groundbreaking investigations helped the fight against elephant poaching, died after being stabbed at home in Nairobi

• Hundreds of thousands of acres of land that were part of two US national monuments shrunk by Donald Trump are being opened on Friday to mining claims for uranium and other minerals.

• The researchers found mosquito net fishing is seen across the globe. East Africa had the greatest concentration, but the practice was also seen from Bangladesh to the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. It was reported in both freshwater, as seen in Africa’s great lakes and in Nepal, and in the sea, in west Africa.

• In next five years greenhouse gases may push global warming past threshold set by Paris deal

• But there’s something about those two-degrees scenarios you may not know, which climate scientists have been talking a lot about recently. Those scenarios involved a substantial deployment of technologies to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Without those technologies, we’re even further from sufficient emissions cuts.

• Humanity would be nothing without plants. It’s high time we recognize their crucial role in sustaining life on Earth.

• Environmental rights groups have urged successive governments to protect Thailand’s palm-fringed beaches, which are frequently voted among the world’s most beautiful, from unregulated development and littering, among other things.

• In solar industry news, there have been a number of conversations surrounding the Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) thin film solar panels from Hanergy Thin Film Power Group’s US subsidiary Alta Devices, based in Sunnyvale California.

Finance

• So what hope is there of defending ourselves against US farming practices and their many impacts on human health, including the zombie resurgence of defeated bacteria? Well, as always, hope lies with us. Through massive resistance, led by campaigners in Britain, the people of Europe managed to defeat the noxious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), despite the vast resources of the US, the European commission and the UK government.

• Some 1.36 million Americans are without power right now, and it isn’t coming back any time soon. This is a national embarrassment.

• We’re talking about Puerto Rico, in the throes of the longest and largest blackout in US history following Hurricane Maria, the Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds and 36 inches of rainfall that toppled 80 percent of the island’s power lines and flooded its generators last September.

• The McDonald’s case, dating back to 2012, aims to undo a precedent that held that fast-food mega-chains like McDonald’s aren’t technically “bosses” of workers at their chain restaurants, and instead just license franchise owners to manage their workforces and labor conditions. Holding McDonald’s responsible as a joint employer might pave the way for collective-bargaining rights, and hence unionization, under a broad contract for McDonald’s employees nationwide. (McDonald’s restaurants in other countries in fact allow unionization and, surprise, workers can earn living wages and have real power to advocate for their rights.)

• Trump not only broke his promise to preserve Elliott’s job; he and his fellow Republicans are working overtime to make life harder—much harder—for her in her likely future. For instance, let’s say Elliott, who will receive a one-time payment, severance pay, and six months of health insurance from Carrier, goes on unemployment, something she is proud to say she’s never done. Uh-oh. The Labor Department has indicated it wants to give states greater leeway to drug-test unemployment recipients, which is pretty humiliating.

• But a greater worry is that it might close off her plans to work in Sweden after graduation.

• “As I tried to give my remarks at the public hearing this morning on HB 4268 in defense of our constitutional property rights, I got dragged out of House chambers,” Lucas said. “Why? Because I was listing out who has been donating to Delegates on the Judiciary Committee.”

• Since Margaret Thatcher came to power, 10% of the area of Britain has left public ownership. No wonder there’s a housing crisis

• Monday’s eviction was the largest in a string of recent homeless encampment sweeps in the capital of Silicon Valley. Caltrans, which owns the acreage at the massive interchange of Highway 101 and Interstates, 280 and 680 near Story Road in San Jose, oversaw the operation. About a dozen homeless advocates showed up and, in a jab at tech companies whose success has helped spawn a crippling housing crisis, called the encampment “Googleville.”

• “This is an international disgrace,” said protest organizer Sandy Perry, president of the nonprofit Affordable Housing Network of Santa Clara County. “As tech companies get richer, richer and richer, the people here are getting poorer, poorer and poorer.”

• After nearly four decades of lax antitrust policy, during which a handful of corporations have been allowed to gobble up market share like a horde of deranged amoebas, the consequences of unfettered monopoly have become painfully apparent. Competition has fizzled, replaced by pockets of extreme concentration. The number of new businesses has plunged. Wages have stagnated. Inequality has spiked. And extreme wealth—alongside its evil twin, extreme power—has pooled in fewer and fewer hands.

• It should be possible to meet the basic physical needs of everyone on the planet without using up physical resources too quickly. But it wouldn’t be possible to extend a first-world standard of living to everyone without needing “a level of resource use that is two-six times the sustainable level,” researcher Daniel O’Neill and his colleagues report. Only a drastic improvement in efficiency would allow the planet to manage this higher standard of living.

• There are two European Unions, it seems. There is the EU that stands up for the citizen, for his or her rights; the EU that can face down the behemoths of global capitalism and rein in their avarice and callousness; the EU that has legally enshrined workers’ freedoms, and which exists as a bulwark against untrammelled neoliberalism. And then there is the real EU.

• Jobs are precarious, health-care costs are skyrocketing, and wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living—no wonder young people are organizing.

• Karen Batts, 52, died from hypothermia Saturday in the Smart Park parking garage in Portland, Oregon, homeless over $338 in delinquent rent. Batts is the second person to freeze to death, alone, on Portland’s streets in 2017.

• Labor Department leadership scrubbed an unfavorable internal analysis from a new tip pooling proposal, shielding the public from estimates that showed employees could lose out on billions of dollars in gratuities, four current and former DOL sources tell Bloomberg Law.

• By the fall of 2016, the share of online shoppers bypassing search engines and heading straight to Amazon had grown to 55 percent.

• Cutting men’s wages is a terrible idea. It does nothing for women, it does nothing for equality, but it does make life easier for bosses, who are always keen to find ways to trim the workforce’s pay. It doesn’t matter that this is the state-funded BBC we’re talking about here, or that these men earn more money than most of us would know what to do with — on principle, cutting someone’s wage when they are still doing the same job is a bad idea, and a bad precedent.

• Avoiding those mistakes, and doing so efficiently, is key to the company’s survival. The boom in e-commerce means UPS now delivers as many as 31 million packages a day. Keeping track of all that is an immensely difficult problem. It’s made worse because fulfilling online orders often requires driving to far-flung residences. That is more expensive for UPS than delivering to businesses, where drivers typically can leave and pick up multiple packages at each stop.

• At a time when commercial media outlets like the Financial Review are misleading Australians about company tax cuts, the ABC’s censorship of Emma Alberici further undermines trust in our media.

• Much has been written about the key questions of the 21st century; first, can the liberal international order survive the rise of China, and second, how will the rise of China revise the extant international order? This is the first of a multi-part series designed to establish a frame for how to think about these questions; how we got here, and how to proceed in light of undeniable structural realities.

• To begin, it’s worth considering why the United States was slow to note the rise of Chinese power. U.S. policymakers worried a great deal about the expansion of Chinese economic and military power in the 1950s and 1960s, but less so in the 1970s and 1980s. The best answers to why the United States stepped back from steps intended to check China’s rise run as follows. First, the rise of China was advantageous in geopolitical competition against the Soviet Union. Second, the development of the Chinese economy worked to the advantage of both U.S. businesses and U.S. consumers, although not to all labor sectors. Third, U.S. policymakers were optimistic that China would reform politically as it reformed economically, thus removing it as an international threat. Of these, the first was true, but became irrelevant in 1991; the second largely remains true, as the U.S.-China trade axis has underwritten global economic growth since the 1980s; the third has not been realized in any meaningful way.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In this op-ed, writer Kelly Hayes explains why President Donald Trump’s decision to revoked the protected status of Bears Ears National Monument must be fought, for the sake of the Earth as we know it.

• Mr Yameen may have become a full-blown dictator, but he seems to see himself as the victim of a monstrous injustice. The court, he claims, was paving the way for a coup by nefarious forces. How else to explain its actions on February 1st, when it ordered the release of political prisoners and the reinstatement of MPs who had crossed over to the opposition? The chief justice must have been bribed, he says. To make matters worse, two police chiefs had to be fired before a third could be found who would ignore the court’s orders. (He is said to be so unpopular that underlings shout at him in the canteen.)

• “Security Forces literally throws an MP out of the Majlis premises! The Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed was telling the truth when he said he was forcefully dragged on the floor from his chambers,” tweeted MDP Secretary General Anas Abdul Sattar.

• Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) on Tuesday barred a group of opposition lawmakers from entering the parliament house.

• US President Donald Trump’s old tweets have once again come back to haunt him after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi resurfaced a 2015 post about Medicaid and Medicare cuts. On Monday (12 February), the Trump administration unveiled a $4.4 trillion budget plan that proposed massive and historical cuts to several programmes, executive departments and agencies.

• He is one of reportedly dozens of White House officials who have been operating with temporary clearances during Trump’s first year in office, and his clearance could be in jeopardy following chief of staff John Kelly’s changes to the clearance process, the Post said

• Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of ads, posted a series of tweets reiterating what the social media giant had discovered in recent months about Russian efforts to interfere with the election using the platform.

• Facebook disclosed in September that it had sold $100,000 worth of advertisements to the Internet Research Agency, which was named in Friday’s indictment.

• Ten of the defendants were allegedly employed by the Internet Research Agency, a “troll [sic] farm” funded by the Russian government for disinformation efforts. “Defendants, posing as US persons and creating false US personas, operated social media pages and groups designed to attract US audiences,” the indictment reads. “They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”

• One of the most surprising lessons of the indictment is just how seriously the Russians took their fake identities. We might associate troll [sic] accounts with spam or weird visuals, but at least some of the accounts described by Mueller were backed up by full-scale identity theft. According to the indictment, defendants used stolen Social Security numbers to build entire false personas, complete with fraudulent photo IDs and PayPal accounts. Crucially, the stolen Social Security numbers meant all of it was happening in a real US citizen’s name. If anyone looked into the person behind the account, they’d see a long paper trail and plenty of government-issued verification to settle their suspicions.

• On Friday, shortly after Department of Justice officials announced the indictment of 13 Russians accused of being involved in a multi-year effort to spread false information online surrounding the 2016 presidential campaign, the DOJ also announced the guilty plea of a California man, Richard “Ricky” Pinedo.

• In recent years, there has been rapid growth in support for Medicare for All, a single-payer healthcare system that would guarantee the universal medical coverage that the Affordable Care Act failed to achieve with its passage in 2010. Sixty-four percent of Democrats support single-payer healthcare, while over half of Americans believe that the government should be responsible for ensuring coverage, according to surveys by Pew Research Center.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All Act (SR 1804) has been cosponsored by 16 senators, while former Rep. John Conyers’ Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (HR 676) has received endorsements from the majority of the Democratic caucus, amounting to 120 cosponsors. Numerous advocacy groups have been campaigning to make Medicare for All a signature part of the upcoming Democratic Party election campaigns in 2018 and 2020.

• David Shulkin, the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, showed up to what he thought would be a routine Senate oversight hearing in January, only to discover it was an ambush.

• Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., was the sole holdout among members of the veterans affairs committee on a bill that would shape the future of the agency. The bipartisan bill had the support of 26 service groups representing millions of veterans. But Moran was pushing a rival piece of legislation, and it had the support of a White House aide who wields significant clout on veterans policy. Neither proposal could advance as long as there was any doubt about which President Donald Trump wanted to sign.

• As you’ve certainly heard by now, earlier today the Justice Department announced that it had indicted thirteen Russian individuals and three Russian organizations for various crimes related to trying to influence the US election. You should read the full indictment if you haven’t already. Not surprisingly it focuses on the infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA), which was the giant Russian online trolling operation that we’ve discussed going back to 2015.

• While many are trying to position the indictment as a “significant” bit of news, I have to admit to being a bit underwhelmed. It really does not reveal much that wasn’t already widely known. It’s been widely reported that the Russians had interest in disrupting our democracy and sowing discord, including setting up and pushing competing rallies from different political sides, and generally stoking fires of distrust and anger in America. And… the indictment seems to repeat much of that which has already been reported. Furthermore, this indictment actually reminds me quite a bit of a similar indictment four years ago aginst various Chinese officials for “hacking” crimes against the US. As we noted then, indicting the Chinese — who the US would never be able to arrest anyway — just seemed to be a publicity stunt, that had the potential to come back to haunt the US. It kinda feels the same here.

• Media organizations he doesn’t like suddenly find themselves blacklisted from campaign rallies and press briefings. One failed business deal in Mexico, and later he’s ranting about how most Mexicans are “rapists” who “bring in drug and crime.” When he won the Republican presidential primary in 2016, he took almost no steps toward reconciliation with his former foes, instead dishing out insults left and right to people he no longer needed to attack. And when Puerto Rico was stricken by a hurricane this summer, Trump dedicated a lot more effort than “none at all, are you crazy?” to a running feud with the mayor of San Juan.

• As American communities continue to be victimized by gun violence — including the mass shooting yesterday, in Parkland, Florida — the National Rifle Association continues to wield immense influence over American legislators, primarily through enormous campaign contributions.

• But when it comes to funding, the NRA may have finally gone too far: the FBI recently launched an investigation to determine whether a Russian central banker, and Putin ally, illegally funneled money through the organization to help the Trump campaign.

• The future of the United States as a democracy is at risk. That’s plenty scary. More scary is that many Americans know this, but don’t care. And even more astonishing is that this same thing happened 45 years ago.

• I remember it clearly. January 30, just a couple weeks ago. On that day, we had the news that FBI deputy director McCabe — a frequent target of apparently-baseless Trump criticism — had been pushed out. The Trump administration refused to enforce the bipartisan set of additional sanctions on Russia. And the House Intelligence Committee voted on party lines to release what we all knew then, and since have seen confirmed, was a memo filled with errors designed to smear people investigating the president, but which nonetheless contained enough classified material to cause an almighty kerfuffle in Washington.

• I told my wife that evening, “I think today will be remembered as a turning point. Either to the downfall of Trump, or the downfall of our democracy, but I don’t know which.”

• I have not written much about this scandal, because so many quality words have already been written. But it is time to add something.

• [...]

• One comfort from all of this is the knowledge that we had been there before. We had lived through an era of great progress in civil rights, and right after that elected a dictatorial crook president. We survived the president’s fervent supporters refusing to believe overwhelming evidence of his crookedness. We survived.

• And yet, that is no guarantee. After all, as John Dean put it, Nixon “might have survived if there’d been a Fox News.”

• The indictment released Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller makes plain how prosecutors believe Russia pursued its multiyear scheme to undermine the 2016 presidential election — by wielding the social media-driven internet that the United States itself did so much to create.

• They had help, digital experts say, from decades of accepted U.S. policy about how to help the internet thrive: The U.S. government has taken a largely hands-off approach, while the anonymity that protects people’s privacy and liberty online also allowed Russian trolls to deceive overly trusting Americans. And the same freedom to innovate that has made Silicon Valley wealthy and powerful meant that there were few eyes on the ball as Russian actors began figuring out how to manipulate the internet’s few dominant platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and the Google-owned YouTube.

• One of my least favorite questions is: “Did Russian interference cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election?” The question is newly relevant because of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians on Friday on charges that they used a variety of shady techniques to discourage people from voting for Clinton and encourage them to vote for Donald Trump. That doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to answer, however. But here are my high-level thoughts in light of the indictment. (For more detail on these, listen to our emergency politics podcast.)

Censorship/Free Speech

• “This is a dark day for press freedom and for justice in Turkey and sets a chilling precedent for scores of other journalists facing trials on similar trumped-up terrorism charges,” said Gauri van Gulik, Europe director for Amnesty International, of the sentencing.

• But some shopping malls have decided not to have images of dogs, sparking an online backlash, CNN reported.

• The policy, also announced in a Facebook post, will go into effect next week — rather than immediately — so that students can have a full week to get used to the change.

• We had just been talking about Instagram and YouTube facing site blocks in Russia all because a billionaire didn’t like his dirty laundry exposed online. For brief background, a noted Russian dissident, Alexy Navalny, had published photos of billionaire Oleg Deripaska and Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko relaxing on a yacht with a young woman variously described as a model and escort fawning over them. Importantly, the salacious nature of the photos and videos is only half of the reason Navalny is drawing attention to them. The other reason is his accusations of corruption in government, as a massively wealthy oligarch consorts in this fashion with a high-ranking member of the federal government. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Russian courts had handed Deripaska a legal victory and ordered sites hosting the images, including Instagram and YouTube, to take them down. Russia’s notoriously corrupt site-blocking agency, Rozcomnadzor, issued an edict that the images be removed or the sites would face a potential full block in Russia.

• She had pitched the show a year ago to Artspace Jackson Flats, the live/work art building where she lives. But when a fellow resident took issue with the nudity in the show, Artspace, the nonprofit that owns the building, asked Harsma to alter her show.

• Harsma says that’s censorship. In light of a complaint, two of the pieces depicting nude women are still hanging in public view, though with body parts obscured by a paper marked “Censored.”

• Two weeks ago, the Turkish government proposed a bill to allow the Turkish media authority the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) to regulate all content posted online to prevent broadcasts that “jeopardize national security” and “destroy moral values.”

• Meaning: The scale of censorship will broaden to include online platforms such as YouTube and Netflix in the very near future. The RTÜK already monitors Turkish media. Couples making love or kissing are considered obscene and “against moral values” so even Oscar-winning movies are “simplified” and scenes cut. All kinds of alcohol and smoking scenes are blurred. (I remember watching a documentary about Einstein a couple of years ago and even his pipe was blurred. Yes, his pipe.)

• I am among those who have been “de-platformed” for speaking critically about the political and ideological aspects of Islam that are not compatible with American values and human rights. The usual justification for disinviting us is that speaking critically of Islam is “hate speech” that is “hurtful” to Muslims.

• Germany passed laws prohibiting Volksverhetzung—“incitement to hatred”—in 1960, [...]

• As part of the College of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences lecture series, Purdue Northwest welcomes University of Chicago professor Ada Palmer who will discuss, “Censorship and Information Control from the Inquisition to the Present.”

• The original novels (by Kumo Kagyu and Noboru Kannatsuki) and the manga (Kōsuke Kurose) focus on the adventures of the two characters and their newly formed adventuring party, with the tale centering around Goblin Slayer’s quest to kill as many of the creatures as possible; things usually get pretty gory as the adventurers carve their way through hordes of the things.

• A fire broke out at one of the most sacred temples in Tibetan Buddhism, prompting concern and suspicion that information on the incident is being controlled by authorities.

• Chinese State media said the fire at “part of” Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, the capital of the south-western Chinese region of Tibet, “was soon put out” after it began at 6.40pm on Saturday.

• Images posted online showed flames billowing from a pagoda at the sacred building, which was built in the seventh century.

• Porn Literacy, which began in 2016 and is the focus of a pilot study, was created in part by Emily Rothman, an associate professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who has conducted several studies on dating violence, as well as on porn use by adolescents. She told me that the curriculum isn’t designed to scare kids into believing porn is addictive, or that it will ruin their lives and relationships and warp their libidos. Instead it is grounded in the reality that most adolescents do see porn and takes the approach that teaching them to analyze its messages is far more effective than simply wishing our children could live in a porn-free world.

• Susma (Don’t Be Silenced) Platform, part of the initiative to support and promote editorial independence in the Turkish press, P24 Platform for Independent Journalism, published its first censorship report covering the period from September 2016 to December 2017.

• The report, published in Turkish and according to the platform’s website soon to be published in English as well, documents the violations of freedom of speech and art in Turkey since the July 15th coup attempt.

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was granted wide-ranging state of emergency powers by Turkish Parliament in the wake of the July 15, 2016, coup attempt. The state of emergency rules (OHAL) allowed Erdoğan and his party, Justice and Development Party (AKP) to rule the country by decree, sidelining the democratic political process, and enabling him to implement sweeping changes to the Turkish state, constitution, and economy.

Privacy/Surveillance

• China is experimenting with a dystopian “social credit system” which grades every citizen based on their behavior. The head of an expert panel argues that Germany is sleepwalking in the same direction.

• Decades ago, philosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted a future world war fought using information. While World War I and World War II were waged using armies and mobilized economies, “World War III [will be] a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” McLuhan said, a prophecy included in his 1970 book of reflections, Culture Is Our Business.

• We are now seeing this information war play out in real time. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment on Friday of 13 Russian nationals who allegedly attempted to “sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election” can be seen as the culmination of the intelligence community’s efforts to ferret out trolls engaging in “Information Operations” against the United States. But in some cases, this may be the product of the West’s own Information Operations – often utilizing private “intelligence” companies, or “spies for hire.”

• In parts one and two of this series, we looked at the private companies serving the deep state. We have seen how the top levels of the deep state interact with smaller companies and individual actors.

• Computers experts are warning that the Government’s roll-out of a new type of smart energy meter will leave households vulnerable to cyber attack. The consequences, they say, could be dire with homes potentially losing their power supply and hackers selling stolen details to criminals.

• Fraud is also a worry if hackers are able to inflate meter readings and intercept payments.

• For a moment, it seemed the hackers had slipped up and exposed their identities. It was the summer of 2013, and European investigators were looking into an unprecedented breach of Belgium’s telecommunications infrastructure. They believed they were on the trail of the people responsible. But it would soon become clear that they were chasing ghosts – fake names that had been invented by British spies.

• The hack had targeted Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, which serves millions of people across Europe. The company’s employees had noticed their email accounts were not receiving messages. On closer inspection, they made a startling discovery: Belgacom’s internal computer systems had been infected with one of the most advanced pieces of malware security experts had ever seen.

• According to the support page, the marks are apparently caused by “oils diffusing between the silicone base and the table surface.” In addition to the previously stated advice about hoping the marks go away or cleaning the surface, Apple also said for customers who are concerned about the issue, “We recommend placing your HomePod on a different surface.”

• Has Nokia had enough of the health tech world? Just two years after entering the industry with its $190 million purchase of French company Withings, the company has announced it’s launching a “strategic review of its digital health business.” A terse blog post said the firm was considering its “strategic options” with regards to health care, and that this “may or may not result in any transaction or other changes.”

• We’ve noted for some time how Chinese hardware vendor Huawei has been consistently accused of spying on American citizens without any substantive, public evidence. You might recall that these accusations flared up several years ago, resulting in numerous investigations that culminated in no hard evidence whatsoever to support the allegations. We’re not talking about superficial inquiries, we’re talking about eighteen months, in-depth reviews by people with every interest in exposing them.

• The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a much-anticipated report yesterday that attempts to influence the encryption debate by proposing a “framework for decisionmakers.” At best, the report is unhelpful. At worst, its framing makes the task of defending encryption harder.

• The report collapses the question of whether the government should mandate “exceptional access” to the contents of encrypted communications with how the government could accomplish this mandate. We wish the report gave as much weight to the benefits of encryption and risks that exceptional access poses to everyone’s civil liberties as it does to the needs—real and professed—of law enforcement and the intelligence community.

• Specifically, the provisions in C-59 would allow the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) to launch cyber attacks against foreign governments and engage in covert operations that such as impersonating reporters, programming computer malware, and spreading misinformation abroad to influence foreign elections.

• Facebook must stop tracking Belgian users’ surfing outside the social network and delete data it’s already gathered, or it will face fines of 250,000 ($312,000) euros a day, a Belgian court ruled.

• Facebook “doesn’t sufficiently inform” clients about the data it gathers on their broader web use, nor does it explain what it does with the information or say how long it stores it, the Brussels Court of First Instance said in a statement.

• Onavo, on the other hand, expressly combs through, analyzes, and tracks user data over time, feeding it directly to Facebook. The service also states that it may retain users’ data for as long as they have an account and beyond. And Facebook does leverage that data for its own purposes; the Wall Street Journal reported in August that the company used data from Onavo to track the popularity of competitive startups and other user preferences, and to inform acquisition decisions.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The survey released by the MacArthur Foundation, a private organization that supports grants in a variety of policy areas, was developed to measure knowledge of local criminal justice systems and perceptions of fairness in them. Respondents were found to mostly support rehabilitation efforts for people in early phases in the justice system, particularly for those with mental illnesses, and backed treatment over prosecution in response to the opioid crisis:

• Struck by these new developments, Craig set out to understand what had changed. His subsequent film “Do Not Resist,” premiering Feb. 12 on PBS’s POV, reveals some startling trends. From police conventions to equipment expos to officer training sessions, Craig’s footage gives the best on-the-ground look at the rapid militarization of municipal police forces.

• For a quiet country, New Zealand has a peculiar problem with gangs. It is reckoned to have one of the highest membership rates in the world. In a population of 4.7m, police count over 5,300 mobsters or “prospects” who are angling to join. Cumulatively, that makes the groups larger than the army. Bikers like the Hells Angels and posses from Australia are among its 25 recognised groups, but two Maori crews dominate: Black Power and the Mongrel Mob. They are remarkable for their subcultures as much as for their size. Members signal their allegiance by sewing patches onto leather jackets or branding themselves with dense tattoos. A closed fist marks Black Power, which took its name from the American civil-rights movement, and a British bulldog signals the Mongrels. In all, Maori people make up three-quarters of the country’s gangsters.

• The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists”.

• Because “boundaries” include coasts, the “100-mile zone” includes entire states — all or almost all of New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, the American Civil Liberties Union notes.

• The zone also includes Houston and Los Angeles. All in all, well over half of Americans, more than 175 million people, live in a place where the Border Patrol believes it has the right to question people, search their vehicles and detain people it believes are unlawfully present.

• The bus and train checks are not new. But they appear to be happening more often near the Canadian border than they did in the five years prior to Trump’s tenure. And they have attracted renewed scrutiny around the country as Trump touts his crackdown on illegal immigration and gives the Border Patrol more money and leeway.

• Miriam Aukerman, senior staff attorney at Michigan’s ACLU, said Border Patrol checks far from the border are a violation of Americans’ constitutional right against unreasonable search and seizure.

• ICE now houses the evidence of the INS’ failures, and it too isn’t cooperative on the subject of war criminals. It has been extremely reluctant to release its files through the Freedom of Information Act, and when it does, it routinely applies unwarranted redactions to their contents, demonstrating a higher concern for the privacy of deceased accused war criminals than for transparency about the agency’s history.

• U.S. District Judge Esther Salas ruled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can’t deport the Indonesians while their cases are pending. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class-action lawsuit that requested a stay for the migrants so they have more time to challenge their deportations.

• “This case involves life-and-death stakes, and we are simply asking that these longtime residents be given opportunity to show that they are entitled to remain here,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project, said in a statement. “As in other cases … involving mass deportations, we are asking the court to make clear that the fundamental protections of due process apply to noncitizens.”

• Her experience playing in Dubai proved a sign of more ominous things to come as public profile and personal life overlapped and she was targeted on the very social media platforms that had given her celebrity. “I was harassed, my family was harassed,” Spiranac adds. “I was receiving death threats, people were invading my privacy, I was being blackmailed. This was going on whilst I was trying to play.”

• Kurdish officials accused fighters allied with Turkey of “playing with her corpse” and mutilating it.

• But to recognise the reality of sharia councils operating here is the first step towards limiting any harm that they can do. That should start with more funding for legal aid for those who want to access justice and a closer look at how legally compliant these bodies are in matters of arbitration. Awareness campaigns to ensure people know their rights would help too. Small steps, perhaps, but ones away from the idea that discrimination could be entrenched on the basis of religious identity.

• Midway through the piece, reporter Sam Levin describes an audio recording of a phone call between CHP detective D. Ayres and the TWP organizer, Doug McCormack. The conversation centers around a public records request filed by an unnamed member of the public. The officer had taken it upon himself to alert McCormack that his name might be released as a result.

• Reading it, I immediately recognized that it was me who filed the request. A year and a half ago, I had asked for the event permit application, the final permit, communications with protesters and counter-protesters, relevant departmental policies, the estimated cost of overtime for security at the protest, and other assorted records.

• i“This is a battle for a narrative,” said Standing Rock Sioux member and attorney Chase Iron Eyes, when I asked how he felt about activists’ being referred to as terrorists or “jihadists.” Iron Eyes was arrested during a police raid on another protest camp a few weeks before the eviction of Oceti Sakowin, and charged with a felony for “inciting a riot” as well as criminal trespass. He’s facing five years in prison. Daniel Sheehan, who serves as chief counsel for the Lakota People’s Law Office and is defending Iron Eyes, believes that Iron Eyes was surveilled and selectively prosecuted with felony charges because he was particularly outspoken in his opposition to the pipeline. His name appeared on several intelligence documents prepared by TigerSwan, including one labeling him as one of the “most radical” members of the protest movement.

• New Vision senior reporter, attached to the weekend, Charles Etukuri has been abducted by armed men in military uniform. He was picked near New Vision offices on Tuesday afternoon, around 2:00pm.

• Eskinder has been detained in Ethiopian jails since September 2011. He was accused and convicted of violating the country’s Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, primarily by virtue of his warnings in online articles that if Ethiopia’s government continued on its authoritarian path, it might face an Arab Spring-like revolt.

• Ethiopia’s leaders refused to listen to Eskinder’s message. Instead they decided the solution was to silence its messenger. Now, within the last few months, that refusal to engage with the challenges of democracy has led to the inevitable result. For two years, protests against the government have risen in frequency and size. A new Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, sought to reduce tensions by introducing reforms and releasing political prisoners like Eskinder. Despite thousands of prisoner releases, and the closure of one of the country’s more notorious detention facilities, the protests continue. A day after Eskinder’s release, Desalegn was forced to resign from his position. A day later, and the government has declared a new state of emergency.

• In its latest economic report, the government stated that India’s future development hinges on how women and girls are treated in society. The “intrinsic values” of gender equality are incontestable, it states. And the economy will keep growing only “if women acquire greater personal agency, assume political power and attain public status, and participate equally in the labor force.”

• Time and time again, courts remind officers of the law don’t actually have to know the law to enforce the law. Yes, that’s how it all works out for citizens, who are just as frequently reminded ignorance of the law is no excuse. This has lead to the prevalence of pretextual stops where minor traffic violations (that may not even be violations) are used to initiate long conversations with law enforcement officers with the end goal of obtaining consent for a search or to bring a drug dog onto the scene.

• Qualified immunity, along with the good faith exception, have allowed an untold amount of law enforcement abuse. This has completely skewed judicial perception, turning law enforcement into noble fools and raising expectations of citizens’ legal knowledge to that of seasoned criminal defense lawyers.

• Lundgren wanted to provide buyers of used computers a restore disc of Windows, so they wouldn’t throw their computers away. Microsoft, and the government, objected.

• Expressions of migrant solidarity through the #1DayWithoutUs campaign sought to counterbalance xenophobic sentiments, offering a multiplicity of migrant voices and experiences in the UK today.

• Google didn’t violate labor laws by firing engineer James Damore for a memo criticizing the company’s diversity program, according to a recently disclosed letter from the US National Labor Relations Board. The lightly redacted statement is written by Jayme Sophir, associate general counsel of the NLRB’s division of advice; it dates to January, but was released yesterday, according to Law.com. Sophir concludes that while some parts of Damore’s memo were legally protected by workplace regulations, “the statements regarding biological differences between the sexes were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive as to be unprotected.”

• The British government rejected the recommendation of a governmental review board to formally regulate sharia councils, saying to do so would recognize the legitimacy of sharia law in Britain.

• The Government department, headed up by Boris Johnson, offered all employees the chance to wear a hijab for part of their day to mark the worldwide event on February 1.

• [...]

• Free scarves for all those that choose to wear it for the day or part of the day.

• A Christian woman has been brutally attacked with a machete by her Muslim husband for refusing to convert to his religion, sources told World Watch Monitor. The attack led to the death of the woman’s one-week-old twins.

• According to the men who beat her, they discovered her with a man at her home while her husband was away in Iran, and so they decided to punish her in the main village square.

• In an alleged case of ‘love jihad’ in the city, a 25-year-old techie from the city was forced to convert, sexually assaulted, and then dumped for allegedly failing to follow religious customs. Though she was being confined in Dubai by her fiancé, the girl managed to escape, return home and lodged a complaint with the Malkajgiri Police.

• Others have questioned whether it is right that a post on what is deemed to be a private Facebook page and not shared publicly could be called into question in this way.

• I and my fellow members of the Kurdish Women’s and People’s Protection Units, often known as the Y.P.J. and Y.P.G., have fought hard for years to keep the Islamic State out of this autonomous region of Syria known as Rojava. We endured Turkey’s barrages and avoided returning fire, even after civilian casualties, so as not to provide a pretext for this invasion.

• [...]

• One would imagine the international community and especially the United States, which has been more than happy to partner with us in the fight against the Islamic State, would firmly oppose such an unprovoked attack executed in the name of racial hatred — Mr. Erdogan has stated his intention to commit ethnic cleansing of Afrin’s Kurdish population, or, as he says, to give the region to its “real owners” — but instead, it has been greeted largely with silence, and therefore tacitly condoned.

• Three segments of society are “Very Strong[ly]” responsible for the persecution of Copts: (1) “non-Christian religious leaders”—meaning Muslim clerics, sheikhs, imams, and ulema— “at any level from local to national”; (2) “violent religious groups,” meaning violent Islamic groups, the Islamic State being only the most notorious;” and (3) “Normal citizens (people from the general public), including mobs.”

• In other words, Muslims from every rung of society—from highly educated Muslim clerics, to members of Islamic organizations, to the passionate and volatile masses, “whose views are shaped by intolerant and radical imams”—are “Very Strong[ly]” responsible for and “significant drivers of persecution.”

• According to Lagos State Commissioner of Police, CP Imohimi Egdal, the suspects, Adeola Adebayo; 50 and Rita Adebayo; 40 were arrested for harboring pregnant women and selling their babies without their consent.

• Germany’s federal police recorded almost 100 attacks on Christians or Christian institutions in Germany in 2017. Most violent incidents occurred among asylum seekers living together in refugee homes.

• One of the books titled Men In Captivity is the tale of a 13-year-old boy who convinces his mother to allow him to perform a “jihad” or holy war against Christians.

• The suspects were arrested but later set free after swearing on the Quran to deny the charges, while the victim was told she needed four witnesses in order to press charges, GECPD said.

• A Pakistani court issued the death sentence to a man involved in the lynching of a university student falsely accused of blasphemy.

• Aasia Bibi, 51, has been on the death row since November 2010 after being convicted of committing blasphemy. In 2014, the Lahore High Court upheld her death sentence.

• Gulalai’s Aware Girls organization, which is based in Peshawar, has been working for gender equality, education and female empowerment in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Her work as an activist has brought other cases of harassment as well.

• Amanda Spielman says religion [sic] is being used to ‘actively pervert’ education and school leaders should not fear causing offence when setting policies

• Inspectors are increasingly coming across those who want to “actively pervert” the purpose of education, according to Amanda Spielman.

• But an association of about 30 Islamic associations called No to Freemasonry and Homosexuality have asked the government to cancel her visit.

• The charge of murder aggravated by racial hatred was excluded from what is now the indictment against Traore by the examining magistrate — a function designed to oversee prosecutors and intercept flawed indictments before they form the basis of an active trial.

• Sina did not respond to a Facebook message and could not otherwise be reached for comment. The Fourth Congressional District includes nearly all of Ramsey County, including St. Paul.

• The threat posed by the radicalization of minors has become a major political issue in Germany. Three out of five radical Islamist attacks in the country in 2016 were carried out by minors.

• In some cases, the schools laid down that girls should cover not only their heads but their entire bodies (in other words, wear a jilbab) or their faces. At the somewhat more liberal end, the study found 18 schools which said the hijab was optional.

• Last Sunday, Muslim extremists organised protests in Banguntapan (picture 1) to exclude Catholics from the locations where the latter had planned to carry out their initiatives. Ominous gatherings were also held in Jaranan, where other beneficial projects had been planned.

• ‘Sharia law has no jurisdiction in the UK and we would not facilitate or endorse regulation, which could present councils as an alternative to UK laws,’ read a Home Office statement.

• [...]

• Although it recognised Sharia councils existed, the government said there was no point in banning them as they would end up going underground.

• The driver of an SUV that was shot at by police outside the National Security Agency campus at Fort Meade after ramming a security barrier is reportedly an unlicensed teen who was following GPS directions when he made a wrong turn, panicked and hit the gas.

• Passenger Javonte Brown told the Washington Post that the 17-year-old driver was following GPS directions while heading to a friend’s house on Wednesday when he turned onto a restricted-access road. The SUV that the teen was driving then rammed into a security barrier.

• A Wall Street Journal article by Juan Forero (2/13/18) ran with the headline “Venezuela’s Misery Fuels Migration on Epic Scale.” The subhead stated, “Residents Flee Crumbling Economy in Numbers That Echo Syrians to Europe, Rohingya to Bangladesh.”

• Forero’s article quoted a UN official: “By world standards, Colombia is receiving migrants at a pace that now rivals what we saw in the Balkans, in Greece, in Italy in 2015, at the peak of [Europe’s] migrant emergency.” Further on, Forero says, “The influx prompted Colombian officials to travel to Turkey last year to study how authorities were dealing with Syrian war refugees.”

• The two women went public with the allegations late last year when women began sharing accounts of sexual harassment and assault as part of the #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc (“squeal on your pig”) campaign triggered by the revelations against the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

• She was alleged to have been raped by the eight men, including her neighbour, an elderly Imam of a mosque who molested her severely.

• Maryam said, “They usually call me and give me N500 naira when l am coming back from school and when I went out hawking, they usually forced me into it, and they have been warning me not to tell my parents, they vowed to kill me if I dared tell my parents.

• In his book, Human Rights in Islam and Common Misconceptions, Abdul-Rahman al-Sheha writes that “the non-Muslim residents of an Islamic state are required to pay a minimal tax called ‘Jizyah.’”

• Since then, Selim’s comments have come under sharp criticism from various quarters, with healthcare professionals, family organisations, and activists campaigning against the FGM culture refuting his claims.

• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 200 million females alive today have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). Aliens from the 30 countries where this practice is concentrated are immigrating to the United States, and a serious effort is not being made to prevent them from practicing FGM here.

• A case of female genital mutilation (FGM) is reported in England every 109 minutes new figures show – however experts warn this could be the “tip of the iceburg”.

• The latest six months figures published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre show that 2,421 cases of FGM were reported between April and September 2015.

• The survey on the prevalence of FGM or “khafd” among the Bohras in the country also highlighted that in the urban areas increasingly doctors in medical facilities also performed FGM in addition to traditional cutters.

• The report titled “The Clitoral Hood a Contested Site: Khafd or Female Genital Mutilation in India” was released by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor at an event here.

• In stark contrast to the “world’s first” feminist government’s ambition to create a truly gender-equal society, Sweden has seen a dramatic upsurge in rapes and sexual assault, with the spike reaching a mind-boggling 400 percent in parts of the country, compared with the pre-2000s.

• In the short video he says that interfaith work is haram and encourages onlookers not to take part in visits to other religious places of worship.

• The Islamic State footprint on Iraq’s environment may be unprecedented and permanent, with a toxic legacy that includes wide-scale cattle deaths, fields that no longer yield edible crops and chronic breathing complications in children and the elderly, doctors and experts said.

• Up to 2 million barrels of oil were lost — either burned or spilled — between June 2016 and March 2017, when firefighters put out the final blaze, according to a U.N. report citing Iraq’s Oil Ministry. Environmental experts worry that much of the oil has seeped into the groundwater and the nearby ­Tigris River — a lifeline for millions of Iraqis stretching more than 1,000 miles to Baghdad and beyond.

• Macy’s has announced a new collaboration with a modestwear brand to stock Islam-friendly fashion for both Muslim and non-Muslim women.

• Muslims in his Cabinet would set policy direction in Malaysia while the non-Muslim ministers would only be tasked with carrying out what had been decided, said Abdul Hadi Awang, president of Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS).

• The 93-page report, I Needed Help, Instead I was Punished: Abuse and Neglect of Prisoners with Disabilities in Australia, examined how prisoners with disabilities, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners, were at serious risk of bullying, harassment, violence and abuse from fellow prisoners and staff.

• The federal judge overseeing the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the man convicted of creating the underground Silk Road drug website, has denied the Ulbricht legal team’s attempt to extend the normal three-year window for “post-conviction relief.” In essence, the move stifles Ulbricht’s new attorney’s extraordinary effort to re-open the case with new exculpatory evidence, on the off-chance that it exists.

• It is not Diyanet’s first eyebrow-raising ruling in recent months. In January, it appeared to have endorsed the marriages of boys and girls at the age of 12 and 9 respectively. The statement, that appeared in an online religious glossary on its website, immediately caused an uproar, with opposition parties demanding a parliamentary investigation into the authority. Diyanet subsequently took down the entry, denying it was ever in favor of child marriages which is outlawed in Turkey, and said it was merely interpreting Islamic law.

• It’s clear the man is asking about ISIS terrorists and not regular immigrants or refugees. He wants to know why Trudeau isn’t taking a tougher stance against those who travelled to Syria and Iraq to wage a war in the name of an evil ideology.

• The child was made to undergo these “punishments” because Nur Aina did not recite prayers before bedtime, made mistakes while reciting the Quran, or did not obey the man’s instructions, reports said.

• Asif had threatened to kill his family if they raised the matter of the girl’s marriage with the suitor again, the FIR said.

• When the man saw his family members agree that Komal would marry her suitor against his wishes, he shot his wife and three children dead. Following the incident, Asif Shah fled the crime scene, DPO Nisar said.

• In its latest report, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) found the global trend of what it calls “a democratic recession” has persisted and that democracy continues to experience setbacks in places where it has long been considered safe.

• In the so-called democracy index, comprising 60 indicators across five broad categories – electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties – the survey concluded that less than 5 per cent of the world’s population currently lives in a “full democracy.”

• Iranian parliament member Ali Reza Rahimi had said that the authorities arrested about 5,000 people during the recent protests which took place in more than 100 cities in different parts of the country.

• According to the study, two-thirds of the asylum seekers are men, mostly under 30 years old. They are all in favor of preserving their traditional, conservative, Islamic values. The migrants are extremely religious; 70% go to the mosque every Friday for prayers.

• The women are just as religious, if not more: 62.6% pray five times a day, notably more than the men (39.7%). In addition, 66.3% of the women wear a headscarf in public, and 44.3% refuse to shake hands with a man.

• Mousmi’s parents lodged a police complaint against Md. Sreyash Raj, a youth from Raiganj and a medical student who also stays in Karnataka, alleging that he used to blackmail their daughter by showing a video clip of hers.

• The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has started a probe into alleged conversion of a Gujarat-based girl after registering a case against nine people hailing from Kerala and Bengaluru. They were allegedly involved in forcibly converting a Hindu woman to Islam and then trying to sell her to Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Saudi Arabia.

• The year was about 2006 when the real nightmare started. Alicia’s family brought her from her home in Gothenburg on a trip down to Iraq to be married away. She still remembers the night clearly of her wedding. She had to stand on a stool during the ceremony. He was about 25-years-old.

• The Islamic State in 2014 had undertaken systematic killing of Yazidis, a community of about 50,000 members and whom the terrorist group refers to as “devil worshippers”. One can only be born a Yazidi and believe in sun worshipping. The United Nations has termed it as an attempted genocide. There are about 2,000 Yazidi women in the captivity of the Islamic State and the fleeing population is forced to live in camps in the Kurdistan region.

• Spielman’s use of the term “British values” in her speech to a Church of England schools conference is likely to put people’s backs up further. This isn’t a term that I would associate with someone who cares about cohesion. Her comments about Muslims using “education institutions, legal and illegal, to narrow young people’s horizons, to isolate and segregate, and in the worst cases to indoctrinate impressionable minds with extremist ideology” seem more likely to divide people than bring them together. But it would be dangerous to respond to Spielman’s provocation by defending the idea that children should be allowed to wear headscarves. I feel uncomfortable every time I see well-meaning people defending parents’ right to send young girls to school wearing the hijab.

• The arrests, which were made in Iran’s capital Tehran, came after demonstrators took to the streets, waving their hijabs as a symbol of their resistance against the country-wide dress code. According to CNN, police believed that the protests were motivated by foreigners; however, activist Masih Alinejad told the outlet that this was not the case at all. “The movement started inside Iran. It has nothing to do with forces outside of Iran,” Alinejad, who also started the “White Wednesday” social media campaign, explained. Photos of the protests made the rounds on social media, showing women standing atop utility boxes, hijabs dangling from sticks.

• Tehran police suggested that their actions were incited by foreigners, saying those arrested were “deceived” into removing their hijabs, Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim News Agency reported. The 29 protesters have been transferred to judicial authorities, the report said.

• Women have increasingly flouted the Islamic republic’s clothing rules in recent years and often let their headscarves fall around their necks.

• At the heart of Beijing’s main concerns about China’s jihadist crisis is the reality that terror and unrest in the northwest significantly threatens the country’s ambitious One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative that aims to establish China as the center of global trade in the 21st century. As OBOR relies on Xinjiang as a corridor linking eastern China to Central Asia and, by extension, Europe, China has sought to protect its Eurasian frontier from terror threats with a security-centered strategy.

• Second, New Delhi is now looking with increasing alarm at Chinese plans to build connections to the Indian Ocean through Pakistan. The CPEC has only magnified fears that China is consolidating Pakistan’s hold on Pakistan Occupied Kashmir; that China will economically build up Pakistan to become a greater threat to India; and the potential for a direct Chinese military presence in Pakistan. As a result, Indian government is now looking for levers to disrupt the CPEC (or at least threaten to do so), including in Balochistan and other frontier provinces. India’s decision to boycott China’s 2017 BRI Summit is a statement that India does not want to be seen as playing to Beijing’s regional tune.

• Around 25 families living in a small village in South Tripura were turned away by a mosque for joining Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) two years ago. They are now forced to worship in a temporary mosque.

• Many Muslims have recently joined the armed forces and law enforcement in other EU countries with large Muslim populations as well, such as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

• The situation has resulted in a looming danger that more people can be radicalized and use their knowledge, access to security data, and training to help Islamists by procuring weapons for them, training them, or simply informing them about ongoing surveillance or other security activities.

• Conflicts between indigenous Papuans and Indonesian security forces are common in the impoverished region, which Indonesia annexed more than half a century ago.

• For several years, these smugglers have worked with complete impunity as they transferred thousands of people across the Mediterranean. Many of the people who undertook these dangerous journeys died as they attempted to made the perilous journey towards Europe.

• “Armed groups, which were party to larger political-military coalitions, have specialized in illegal smuggling activities, notably human smuggling and trafficking,” experts reported to the 15-member Security Council committee. They said most of these armed groups “were nominally affiliated to official security institutions.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• FCC boss Ajit Pai is being investigated by his own agency over potential corruption allegations.

• The already-unpopular agency boss has been on a tear in recent months gutting decades old media-consolidation rules designed to protect consumers and the nation’s media markets from any one broadcaster becoming too powerful.

• Pai’s efforts arrived, not coincidentally, at the same time Sinclair Broadcasting Group is attempting to acquire Tribune Media as part of a $3.9 billion dollar megamerger. It’s a deal a bipartisan chorus of critics say would demolish media diversity, resulting in Sinclair owning more than 230 local stations across 72 percent of the United States.

• The 27 states with pending legislation are Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Free Press has links to the pending bills or articles about the pending bills in nearly all of these states. (Free Press listed 26 states with legislation but we found out after this article published that Kansas also has pending net neutrality legislation, bringing the total to 27.)

• I think we — collectively, and definitely not just technologists on their own — need to figure out the societies we want first. The future we want. Have the hard conversations, better understand the compromises, be forced to make clearer priorities and decisions. Then we can figure out the technology, the tools, that can help get us there.

• But what can technologists – and everyone else – do now?

• As technologists, we must question our gods: the laws, thinking and habits that we assume true and guide our work.

• That, apparently, was a step too far for the FCC’s Inspector General, the watchdog that is charged with rooting out corruption in the FCC’s ranks. A year ago, the IG opened a corruption investigation into Pai himself, on the basis of irregularities in his handling of the Sinclair affair.

• Pai hasn’t helped his case by repeatedly, publicly making jokes about how he is a corporate shill.

• I’ve spend days trying to figure this out in the past. There just had to be a way! But aside from using JavaScript, which is also pretty complicated, I just couldn’t figure it out for the longest time. Now that I have it figured out, I hope it can help you as well. God bless and happy coding!

• At a time when net neutrality seems to be coming to an end, one of its biggest proponents, John Perry Barlow, has died on Feb. 7 at 70. Here, those who knew his work best reflect on how the Grateful Dead lyricist and digital-rights activist who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helped shape the way the Internet works today.

DRM

• Video games pirates have reason to celebrate today after scene cracking group CODEX defeated Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform system on Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection. While the game it was protecting isn’t exactly a fan favorite, it was reportedly protected by five layers of DRM within the UWP package, including the Denuvo-like Arxan anti-tamper technology.

• John Deere, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, AT&T, Tesla, and the vast majority of big tech firms have spent the last decade monopolizing repair: “Authorized service providers” who pay money to these companies and the companies themselves are the only ones who have access to replacement parts, tools, and service manuals to fix broken machines; they are also the only ones who have software that can circumvent encryption locks that artificially prevent people like Schwarting from working on equipment. So people like Schwarting find enterprising ways around these locks by finding unauthorized versions of software or by hacking through firmware altogether.

• But what started as hacking out of necessity has quickly transformed into a bonafide political movement.

Intellectual Monopolies

• America has long been the land of innovation. More than 13,000 years ago, the Clovis people created what many call the “first American invention” — a stone tool used primarily to hunt large game. This spirit of American creativity has persisted through the millennia, through the first American patent granted in 1641 and on to today.

• One group of prolific innovators, however, has been largely ignored by history: black inventors born or forced into American slavery. Though U.S. patent law was created with color-blind language to foster innovation, the patent system consistently excluded these inventors from recognition.

• In a recent speech, Delrahim explained his general position – that patent holders rarely create antitrust concerns. Rather, it is equally likely that the problem lies with companies implementing new technologies without first obtaining a license from the relevant patent holders. He explained that the DOJ’s historic approach has been a “one-sided focus on the hold-up issue” in ways that create a “serious threat to the innovative process.”

• In response to Delrahim’s approach, a group of technology implementer companies (also known as downstream innovators) and law professors wrote to Delrahim arguing that “patent hold-up is real, well documented, and harming US industry and consumers” — especially in the area of Standards Essential Patents (SEP) — and in ways that the antitrust laws should help fix.

• It’s only in the last 40-or-so years, since 1980, that U.S. universities have made sizable chunks of change from intellectual property. That’s when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act.

• Uber is settling a lawsuit filed by Google’s autonomous car unit alleging that the ride-hailing service ripped off self-driving car technology.

Copyrights

• A California district court has dismissed Playboy’s copyright infringement complaint against Boing Boing. Playboy’s allegations that the popular blog induced or contributed to copyright infringement by publishing hyperlinks are not strong enough, Judge Olguin writes. The complaint is dismissed with leave, allowing the magazine publisher to file an improved version within two weeks.

• “The court is skeptical that plaintiff has sufficiently alleged facts to support either its inducement or material contribution theories of copyright infringement,” he wrote.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents Boing Boing in the case, said in a blog post that it was “puzzled” as to why Playboy brought the case in the first place.

• Blockchain need not be limited to patents; it might also be used in the field of copyright-protected works. Publishing a song, text or other work, under a blockchain database may provide a solid proof of authorship or date of publication that can be used in court proceedings. Furthermore, blockchain could provide a platform for the registration of copyright transfers (not otherwise registered) facilitating parties interested in entering into a licensing agreement, thereby significantly reducing transaction costs.

• Based on the foregoing, a strong argument can be made that blockchain technology will be able to facilitate the management of IPRs; as well, publications under a blockchain environment might be used as evidence in IP-related law proceedings. What more can it do for IP? Let’s wait and (presumably) see.

• Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, announced the change on Twitter yesterday, saying it would “help connect users and useful websites.” Later Sullivan admitted that “these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week” and that “they are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value.”

• Electonic Arts, Nintendo, Ubisoft and other major game publishers have asked the US Copyright Office not to make an exemption to preserve abandoned online games for future generations. The companies argue that libraries, museums, and their affiliates might exploit such a right for commercial purposes, competing with other games.

• The Sports Coalition, which includes prominent leagues such as the NBA, NFL, and MLB, has shared its concerns over sports piracy with the US Trade Representative. The coalition urges the US Government to place the Netherlands and Switzerland on the Priority Watch List, as many pirated games are broadcast from these European countries.

• Following complaints from Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner, a court in Spain has ordered several ISPs to begin blocking a pair of pirate sites. Describing the action as “necessary”, the MPA says that the blocks will assist with the “sustainability of the creative community.”

• A New York federal court has ruled that people can be held liable for copyright infringement if they embed a tweet posted by a third party. The case was filed by Justin Goldman, whose photo of Tom Brady went viral and eventually ended up at several news sites, which embedded these ‘infringing’ tweets.

• A judge in a New York district court has ruled that embedding a tweet on a web page could be a violation of copyright, overlooking years of precedent that say otherwise.

• This week, Judge Forrest sided with Goldman and argued that the publications violated his “exclusive display right,” despite the fact that they didn’t host the photo on their servers (more on that in a second). By simply embedding a tweet—a function which Twitter makes simple—Forrest says the publications engaged in a “technical process.” She readily admits that none of them downloaded the photo and then uploaded it to their own sites, but, she argues, it doesn’t matter that the publications weren’t hosting the photos themselves.

• [...]

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior staff attorney Daniel Nazer believes Forrest’s interpretation of the Perfect 10 case is new, and not what the original ruling argued. “This is a distinction that’s being drawn really for the first time in this case,” he says.

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