● 09.09.18

● Links 9/9/2018: New Mesa and Nitrux 1.0.15

Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• With a touchscreen display, cornered Gorilla glass, backlit keyboard, 4 in 1 design that enables a more convenient use, 7th Gen Intel Core processor, fast charging battery that lasts 10 hours, and a premium aluminium build, the Google Pixelbook is the slickest and thinnest Chromebook yet.

• Just recently, I had the opportunity to purchase either the Google Pixelbook or a MacBook and I went for the Google Pixelbook.

• A lot of the software most of us use day-to-day is built with the assumption that Internet access is fast, cheap, unlimited*, and ubiquitous.

• For a lot of Endless’ current and target users, most of those assumptions are not true. Internet connectivity is often capped to low throughput and monthly quotas and may be relatively expensive or unreliable. Or it may be inaccessible entirely due to cost or lack of infrastructure.

• When these assumptions fail, a lot of modern software fails.

• This includes software updates.

Kernel Space

• On Intel systems affected by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, another minor optimization is on its way to the Linux kernel to ever so slightly lower the impact of the kernel-based page table isolation (PTI) mitigation.

• The minor optimization is removing the SYSCALL64 entry trampoline. On an Intel Skylake system with Retpolines and KPTI enabled, the syscall overhead dropped from about 237 ns down to 228 ns. It wouldn’t be noticeable by itself, but for months already and likely for the foreseeable future until corrected CPUs are on the market, kernel engineers will continue to pursue every micro-optimization possible to help offset the performance losses introduced by the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation techniques. They have certainly made improvements to the performance since the original KPTI and Retpoline work since January, but in I/O heavy syscall heavy workloads there remains a generally noticeable overhead.

• An Amazon developer working on the Linux kernel has posted perhaps their largest feature patch-set for the kernel: implementing co-scheduling support for the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS).

• Over a set of sixty patches, Jan H. Schoenherr of Amazon Germany has posted these patches to allow CFS to support coscheduling. The use-cases they had in mind while developing this kernel co-scheduling support includes possible virtual machine (VM) performance benefits, executing parallel applications with architecture-specific optimizations concurrently with other applications, reducing resource contention between independent applications, and supporting the management of multiple parallel applications. One of the important side benefits of this code is that it can close some side channel attack vulnerabilities or at least make them harder to exploit.

• This week Intel developers sent in their first batch of drm-intel-next feature changes to DRM-Next of new material that will be merged for the next kernel cycle whether it ends up being called Linux 4.20 or likely Linux 5.0.

• This first of several feature pull requests for this next kernel cycle is fairly basic and mostly is made up of continued work on Icelake support. Due to summer holidays drawing to an end, there isn’t too much feature work part of this week’s pull request but more features are expected to be queued in the weeks ahead.

• The NSA-designed Speck encryption algorithm will be removed from version 4.20 of the Linux kernel, after just recently being added to the Linux kernel version 4.17 in June. The move comes after the International Standards Organization (ISO) rejected two of NSA’s cryptographic designs, Simon and Speck, on the basis of not being trustworthy.

• [...]

• Both of the NSA-designed Speck and Simon algorithms were rejected by ISO because the NSA refused to provide certain technical details about their designs or answer certain questions about them. This is what ultimately led ISO to reject them as untrustworthy.

• This wouldn’t be the first time the NSA had attempted to get software or hardware providers to include weakened or backdoored cryptographic algorithms in their products. In the 1990’s the NSA tried to get all device makers to adopt the “Clipper Chip,” a crypto processor with a backdoor for the NSA, as well as forced browser vendors and other software providers to use weak encryption protocols via export restrictions and other government rules. Dan Bernstein, the inventor of the ChaCha algorithm that Google has now chosen for its low-end devices, was actually the one to sue the government and get those export restrictions on encryption invalidated.

• Even though the Speck algorithm will be removed from the next version of the Linux kernel (4.20), it will continue to live within kernel versions 4.17, 4.18, and 4.19. Those who run systems using these kernels will need to check whether or not their default storage encryption uses the Speck algorithm or not to be sure.

Linux Foundation

• The New York-headquartered blockchain startup ConsenSys that builds decentralized applications (dApps) and tools for Ethereum, has partnered with online education platform Coursera to offer a course ‘Blockchain: Foundations And Use Cases’, including topics such as foundational concepts of blockchain and decentralization as well as cryptography and consensus mechanisms.

• The Linux Foundation, in anticipation of much broader adoption of blockchain technologies in the enterprise, announced this week that a training course, dubbed LFD271 – Hyperledger Fabric Fundamentals, is now open for enrollment. That course complements an existing Professional Certificate Program – Blockchain for Business, launched earlier this year, that is tied to a free course entitled Blockchain: Understanding Its Uses and Implications.

• In addition, The Linux Foundation plans to add Certified Hyperledger Fabric Administrator and Certified Hyperledger Sawtooth Administrator exams later in the year.

Graphics Stack

• Released yesterday, both Mesa 18.1.8 as a bug-fix release and Mesa 18.2.0 as the latest full release of the open source graphics drivers are now out. As usual, the Mesa team are suggesting you wait for Mesa Mesa 18.2.1 if you plan to upgrade, at least if you want a fully stable experience.

• For the RadeonSI (AMD) driver, it now has compatibility profile support up to OpenGL 4.4. This is quite important for historic reasons, since there will be applications and games that rely on it that won’t be updated (including for us in Steam Play/Wine). Personally, I think that’s one of the more important features of this release, since it will give users a better experience. RadeonSI also now has compute shader support in the Mesa shader cache.

• The Mesa 18.2 driver for Linux has finally been released today after a few minor setbacks occurring in August. This latest driver update features Vega 20 support, OpenGL 4.4 compatibible profile, notable improvements to the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support, OpenGL ES 3.2 support for RadeonSI, and really just a huge handful of other significant improvements.

• The smallest amount of updates is for the Intel front, which received mainly NIR optimizations – development is still working on OpenGL 4.6 support with SPIR-V ingestion, and some new Vulkan driver extensions for ANV, plus general optimizations across the board for the latest hardware support.

• Commenting on an issue on the Vulkan-Ecosystem GitHub page, an NVIDIA developer has mentioned how transform feedback support will come to Vulkan.

• From what I understand, some DirectX games use it and Vulkan currently has no support for anything like it unless developers write their own workarounds. This is especially important for projects like DXVK which Valve’s Steam Play uses, because it’s translating DirectX calls into Vulkan and so it can’t exactly ignore it.

• It’s been a while since last having major progress to report on the Broadcom VideoCore 4 (VC4) open-source driver stack most notably used by the Raspberry Pi boards or the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore “V3D” driver stack. The lack of recent progress has been due to lead developer Eric Anholt being away on paternity leave, but he is back now with another update on this open-source ARM graphics undertaking.

• While in his limited time working he has been addressing some OpenGL ES conformance test suite failures with the VC4 Gallium3D driver, he did manage to score a big win for the texture upload/download performance.

• Earlier this week I reported on the RadeonSI Gallium3D code being tuned for AMD Zen CPUs in an attempt to deliver greater gaming performance for Ryzen processors. That work has now been merged into Mesa 18.3.

• As explained when the patches surfaced for tuning RadeonSI/Gallium3D for Ryzen CPUs, the work by AMD’s Marek Olsak is due to the CCX (core complexes) design of Zen, it will try to pin the application thread and driver execution threads to the same CCX so that they can share the same L3 cache. With these patches, Marek found in some OpenGL benchmarks that there was an increase by 25~32% in some micro-benchmarks, but real-world gaming performance has yet to be analyzed — I’ll be running some benchmarks shortly.

• There’s nothing like a new Vulkan spec update to help waking up on a Sunday morning. Vulkan 1.1.84 is out today and is the first since the minor 1.1.83 revision last month at SIGGRAPH.

• With Vulkan 1.1.84 there is the usual documentation churn with a variety of issues being rectified, mostly clearing up confusing elements of the specification. Given it’s been a few weeks since the last revision to the Vulkan documentation, it’s no surprise there are a few new extensions too. These newest additions include VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model, VK_EXT_astc_decode_mode, and VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block.

Applications

Proprietary

• Autobeat is an Electron-based music player that combines YouTube, SoundCloud, and tracks from your local music library into a simple user Interface.

• Like many apps that combine multiple services into a single app e.g. Rambox and Manageyum, Autobeat eliminates the need to chase (in this case,) music across multiple services because it houses the most popular ones in a single User Interface.

• It features a clutter-free and intuitive app window. Its channels, favorites, and library functions are located in the left panel while the player controls are positioned at the bottom of the page.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Another Beta version of Proton is available for Valve’s Steam Play for those who wish to give it a go with the latest fixes.

• To avoid some confusion: The Steam Play system as a whole is still in Beta, Proton (Valve’s Wine fork) which Steam Play uses has a “3.7-3″ version which is the default, but you can also switch to the Beta version of Proton itself in Steam’s settings (compatibility tool dropdown box) to get Proton “3.7-6″ which was just released today.

• While the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have matured into great shape particularly over the past two years for vastly improving the Linux gaming experience on Radeon and Intel hardware, with Valve’s Steam Play allowing more Windows games on Linux via Proton/Wine has opened up Mesa to needing a lot more optimizations, workarounds, and dealing with other intricacies. The latest receiving the special treatment is Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.

• [...]

• Separately, over in the DXVK space, hitting its tree minutes ago for this Direct3D-to-Vulkan compatibility layer is a workaround so NVIDIA graphics cards are spoofed as AMD for Grand Theft Auto V with Steam Play / Proton. That appears to be good enough to get GTA V working now on NVIDIA hardware under Linux if you are using the latest components.

• Google has teamed up with Unity to create an open-source, but engine-agnostic, matchmaking system called Open Match.

• The goal of the project is to give game developers access to a tool that doesn’t require them to build a matchmaking system from the ground up in order to implement multiplayer in their games.

• Developers instead can integrate Open Match into their projects and tweak inputs and player selection logic to best fit their own games, but the bulk of the grunt work has already been done for them.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Slimbook started just fine. Everything seems to be in perfect order. The system firmware was up to date, and the BIOS/UEFI was already configured for VT-d. Furthermore, both TPM and Secure Boot were disabled, which actually suits me well. The internal disk is labeled ubuntu, though. And the reason is …

• The Slimbook team also installed Ubuntu on the disk (they mentioned it alongside hardware upgrades), to make sure everything worked fine. I had the option to use their installation with a generic root/slimbook account combo, or wipe everything and start fresh. I had ordered the machine without any OS, and intended to do the setup myself, primarily because I also wanted to use full-disk encryption. Another downside of having a preinstalled system is that there’s no two-part OEM setup for Ubuntu, so the vendor must configure the user side for you too. No matter, it’s going away anyway.

• Now, the actual operating system choice – Linux. As I mentioned in the past, ever since my love-at-first-sight encounter with Kubuntu 17.04, I wanted to deploy Kubuntu in my production setup, and this purchase finally allowed me to do so. I grabbed the ISO, etched it to a thumb drive, and let the system boot. There were no issues. All the hardware was correctly initialized, including the Wireless.

• I did a bunch of speed tests, and I get a full, flat 80 Mbps rate that matches the test line, in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. No issues whatsoever, and this is important. In comparison, my significantly cheaper, older and driver-problematic Lenovo G50 with the Realtek card only does about 40 Mbps under the same conditions.

• I had been worried regarding the Wireless – but then I thought, the Slimbook guys wouldn’t be selling this hardware if there were problems, now would they? Of course, if you type any which Wireless card into a search engine, and then add the string linux, you will get tons of forum posts, bug threads and whatnot detailing a neverending story of problems. With my Slimbook Pro2, it was smooth sailing.

• Since a few months KDE Connect has a Telegram group to discuss development. Since the over 100 people joined. I did not expect such an interest in it. Few people asked to have this group bridged to an IRC channel since they prefer IRC over Telegram. I’m happy to announce that we finally made this happen. Let’s celebrate the birth of #kdeconnect on Freenode. You can also access it from matrix.org (#freenode_#kdeconnect:matrix.org).

• The rest is up to you! If you are interested in contributing to KDE Connect go and share your ideas with us and ask any question you have!

• At the previous aKademy, one of the unformal discussions we had were about Plasma mods.

• One thing I always liked about the mobile platforms like Meego (Nokia N9) and Sailfish that were/are based on Qt/QML, is that there are many available mods for them created by the community.

• With QML, you basically have a lot of source files for an application (or shell) UI that get compiled when the application is run. This means that changing the look and behaviour of an application on your system is often as easy as editing a file with your favourite text editor like Kate or Vim.

• Sometimes modding gets so popular that some brave community member decides to create an application that allows automatic application of these mods. This was one of my favourite things about Sailfish OS.

• For this week’s Usability & Productivity report, we’ve got oodles of goodies, including some new features, a whole bunch of visual improvements related thumbnail previews in Dolphin, the open/save panels, and desktop icons (i.e. Folder View), icon improvements throughout KDE apps when using a High DPI screen, and lots of other miscellaneous goodies! We haven’t forgotten about Samba, and another very important fix landed.

• Following the look at how KDE Itinerary does data extraction, this post will cover custom data extractors in a bit more detail. Custom extractors are needed where we are unable to obtain the information we are interested in from structured annotations, or add information to incomplete structured data (such as boarding pass barcodes).

• The September release of KDE Plasma5 for Slackware contains the KDE Frameworks 5.50.0 (just released today), Plasma 5.13.5 and Applications 18.08.1. All this on top of Qt 5.11.1. Many bugs fixed and stability increased with these updates, but there’s no real new functionality on board compared to last month.

• My updates in the ‘extras’ section for Applications are new versions for ‘krusader’, ‘kstars’, ‘ktorrent’, ‘okteta’ and the KDE Development packages ‘kdevelop’, ‘kdev-python’ and ‘kdev-php’.

• It’s been another busy week for the crew polishing up the Plasma desktop and other KDE components. Say “hi” to HiDPI and hibernation work this week.

• First up, the KDE Plasma 5.14 logout screen will now show a “hibernate” option on systems that support it… There’s long been the suspend button there and there has been a hibernate option from the application launcher, but this simple button was finally added this week.

• Last month KDE Akademy was held in Vienna. It was the first Akademy I visited and there wasn’t yet time to write a bit about the impression I got from it, judging what was nice and what could be improved from the point of view of someone new to it. Time to catch up on that.

• Akademy came at a bad point in time for me. I was right in the middle of writing code for a larger feature in KWin’s Wayland session: drag-and-drop support between Wayland native and Xwayland windows. When I began the work on this feature back in July I hoped that I could finish it until Akademy. Not being able to do so felt demotivating, but I have to admit my plan was way too optimistic anyways. Only now, several weeks after Akademy, I feel comfortable enough about my code to use it on my work system without constant anxiety for fatal session crashes. But anyway, I went to my first Akademy with a bit less enthusiasm, as I otherwise probably would have shown. On the other side this gives me maybe also a more neutral take on it.

• Akademy is basically split into two phases: the talks at the beginning on Saturday and Sunday and the BoFs for the rest of the time from Monday till Friday.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME team delivers again with 6 months of developments and improvements.

• GNOME 3.30, the latest installment in GNOME 3 series released. This release comes after 6 months of development efforts contributed by developers, testers across the globe. This release boasts about major performance improvements that means GNOME 3.30 uses fewer system resources and can run more apps in parallel without performance drops.

• The 35th stable update for the free and open-sourced GNOME 3.30 desktop environment was released on 5th September, as announced by Gnome News. The release came just after the six months of the release of GNOME 3.28. GNOME 3.30 offered introduction of some major latest features, new applications and included small improvements here and there. All of these features were aimed at helping improve the way users use their desktop. Some of the main features in GNOME 3.30 included a faster GNOME Shell Desktop, new look to GNOME file manager Nautilus, a new desktop app known as Podcasts, automatic Flatpak Updates and a new ‘reader mode’ feature.

• Now it looks like development at GNOME is not going to stop any time soon as the release schedule for GNOME 3.32 has already been announced by GNOME Wiki. According to this release news, GNOME 3.32 is set to be released on Wednesday, 13th March 2019. The news stated, “GNOME 3.31.x is an unstable development series intended for testing and hacking purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status, so this unstable 3.31.x series will become the official 3.32 stable release.”

Distributions

• Quest For The Perfect Linux Distro. Today the gang and I discuss what we’d like to see in the perfect Linux distro or any OS for that matter. Additionally, we also discuss what we really would love to see improved and can’t believe in 2018 remains a problem even to this day.

New Releases

• Linux From Scratch version 8.3 has been announced by its renowned editor, Bruce Dubbs, along with Beyond Linux From Scratch on the 2nd of September, 2018. Linux From Scratch is a community oriented project that serves as an essential handbook and guide to creating one’s own Linux System from scratch. It’s for those who don’t want to simply lean into the already existing Linux distributions such as Debian and Rehat. Those who want to truly internalize how a Linux system ticks and want to install it on their own with full customizability can use this publication as a basic how-to for going about the whole process.

• In the release announcement for the book, Dubbs states: “”The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS version 8.3, LFS version 8.3 (systemd), BLFS version 8.3, and BLFS version 8.3 (systemd). This release is a major update to both LFS and BLFS. The LFS release includes updates to glibc 2.28, Binutils 2.31.1 and GCC 8.2.0.”

• The Debain-based Linux distribution Q4OS has just released its version 2.6. Still a part of the version 2.x branch, this update doesn’t introduce anything substantially noteworthy. The Q4OS distribution comes with either the Trinity desktop or the KDE Plasma 5 as seen in several recent Linux distributions. In that context, the release does, however, update its version of the Trinity desktop which is a continuation of the KDE 3 desktop environment. On the other end of this spectrum, the distribution also comes with the KDE Plasma version 5.8.6 which is seen in the Debian 9.

• Nitrux 1.0.15 has just hit the shelves following a release statement last week. Nitrux is an Ubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution operating system. Its most prominent feature is its Nomad desktop which integrates the K Desktop Environment (KDE)’s plasma desktop with enhanced and specialized graphics and display design.

• When this distribution was initially released, it came with several design and security flaws that pushed it down from its potential. Since then, its developers have worked hard to rewire the distribution to resolve the bugs, vulnerabilities, and inconveniences that come out of its fundamental design. With the release of the Nitrux version 1.0.15, the developers boast a far more stable and secure operating system for users.

• The official release statement for the product reads: “We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.0.15. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements and ready-to-use hardware support. Nitrux 1.0.15 presents an updated hardware stack, among other things.”

Red Hat Family

• Cloudera, Inc., together with Red Hat and Eurotech, recently launched an end-to-end, open source Internet of Things (IoT) architecture. This empowers enterprises with a modern IoT architecture that is not only secure but also scalable and technologically advanced sans the vendor lock-in. Cloudera with Red Hat and Eurotech collaborated to create an end-to-end architecture underpinned by open standards and is integrated, flexible and operates on the hybrid- or multi-cloud environments. This architecture is aimed at delivering the basic components that organizations need to swiftly and safely launch IoT use cases.

• Just a few months since NetworkManager 1.12 has passed and the NetworkManager 1.14 feature update is now around the corner.

• The latest improvements published by Red Hat’s Benjamin Tissoires for bettering the Linux input stack is expanded Logitech support within its HID++ (logitech-hidpp) driver.

• In particular, the Logitech G700 and G900 mice via wireless are now supported by this logitech-hidpp driver and expanded receiver coverage.

• In September 2003, I was asked by Gus Robertson to consider joining Red Hat – essentially to kickstart the Red Hat office in Singapore/ASEAN. I was at that time running my own open source consultancy – Maringo Tree Technologies.

• I did try to get Red Hat to acquire MTT, but that did not go far. Red Hat had just done a JV in India and was not looking to do another even as an acquisition so soon. In any case that JV was subsequently bought out fully by Red Hat in 2005.

• I stared at Red Hat as the Chief Technology Architect. I would not say that Red Hat was my dream company to be at, but most everything I did before was all about Free and Open Source Software.

Finance

Fedora

• Package managers have to deal with dependencies – too many of them. Over time things have gotten complicated: there are now soft dependencies, reverse dependencies and boolean conditions. So complicated that you can probably do general computation in the dependency solver now.

• [...]

• There is still more fine-tuning to be done. For example, Flatpak will happily use a runtime from the system installation to run an application from the user installation. But the uninstall command works only on a single installation, so it does not see these dependencies, and might remove the runtime. Thankfully, it is easy to recover, should this happen to you: just install the runtime again.

• This instalment of Fedora Test Day will focus on Virtualization in Fedora 29.

• Testers will be testing basic virtualization workflow, some cool functionality, as well as new features introduced in Fedora 28.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• If you want to skin your desktop with something else then you are on the right page. There is no doubt the default themes of Ubuntu looks great but if you want to switch to something else then nobody is going to stop you from doing that. Let us introduce you to two themes Ultimate Dark and Ultimate Maia, both themes are created by same person. Both themes packs are material design and dark version is easy on eyes. There are several variants for both themes, you can choose whatever you like on you desktop. These themes are compatible with Gnome 3.28 and compatible with other desktops as well such as Xfce and so on. You can find Gnome shell and Cinnamon themes in this pack.

• While Canonical divested from their Linux smartphone plans, they continue maintaining the Mir display server as any regular Phoronix reader should know. Mir continues to be developed with Wayland functionality for IoT and desktop use-cases but the Mir news, Alan Griffiths shared they have been working on a new Mir website, bug fixing, progress on improved Snap integration, and a new edge branch for the EGMDE desktop. But what was most interesting is seeing Mir back to running on phones.

Flavours and Variants

• A week later than expected, it’s the September development update! The theme for August (and early September) has been visual improvements, with a few bug fixes tossed in for good measure.

• The second release in the Linux Mint 19.x series will be named “Tessa”.

• Linux Mint 19.1 is estimated to be released around November/December 2018 and will be supported until 2023.

• Linux Mint 19 users will have the ability to upgrade. This upgrade will be both easy and safe and it will be performed via the Update Manager.

• Linux Mint is a rather great operating system. The distribution is based on the fabulous Ubuntu, so it is very stable and has plenty of compatible packages. Not to mention, the Mint developers focus heavily on the user experience. Linux Mint isn’t just designed for Linux experts (although they can totally use it), but beginners too — it is easy to start using straight away.

• The developers have a long history of using female names as the code name for each version of the operating system. For instance, in the past, they have used “Tara,” “Sylvia,” and “Sonya,” to name a few. Today, we learn the female name assigned to the upcoming Linux Mint 19.1 — “Tessa.”

• With just a few more months to go until the Linux Mint team releases the next major update of its operating system, it has announced that the upcoming release has been dubbed ‘Tessa’. All of the codenames in the 19.x series should begin with ‘T’, while the second letter should progress further through the alphabet. Linux Mint 19.0, for example, is called ‘Tara’.

• Wrapping up August, Clem Lefebvre, head of the Mint project, outlined some work the team has been doing to their software. The first improvement is to the Software Sources tool which has been given a new look similar to the welcome screen, it now uses an Xapp sidebar and a headbar. In addition, the optional sources section has been simplified and a new option is being planned to add debugging repositories.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Mobile browsing is on the rise around the world, and in some parts, it is commonly the only way people access the internet. In these same areas, there is often heavy surveillance and censorship online, so in the past year, we’ve focused on better supporting these users.

• Now you can visit websites from your Android smartphone without leaving any internet footprint with the newly launched Tor Browser for Android.

• The Tor Project announced today that they are launching an official web browser for Android devices. The Tor Browser for Android is in an experimental stage, and an alpha version has been released as of now.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Haiku operating system has been in development since 2002 as an open-source BeOS-inspired platform and nearly a decade since they reached the alpha stage for their first release, they are nearly ready to deliver the beta.

• While they have delivered a few Haiku R1 alpha releases since 2009, the beta release has remained elusive but over the next week that should finally materialize. Last month we were elated to hear the beta should come in September with their release schedule putting that R1 Beta 1 milestone between 10 and 18 September. That appears to remain on track for likely seeing the official beta release over roughly the next week.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google Chrome team released latest installment of Chrome version 69 for Linux, Windows and Mac. Here are the updates.

• Google Chrome completed 10 years this month and with the anniversary, Chrome team presented users with new changes, updates. It has been a decade when Chrome first version released and since then it has been quite a journey with incremental updates which leads to this day.

Mozilla

• Mozilla has pushed out a whole round of updates to its web browsing products over the last few days. Mozilla Firefox’s Version 62.0 was released just a few days ago on the 5th of September for the desktop using mass public. Version 62.0.1 was just released on the 7th of September for Android devices as well. Other simultaneous releases from Mozilla include the latest Firefox Nightly version 64.0a1 released on the 4th of September, the latest beta & developer’s edition version 63.0beta released on the 5th of September, and the latest beta version 63.0beta for Android released on the 5th of September as well.

• According to the release notes available on Mozilla’s website, version 62.0 ties in a long list of fixes, new inclusions, and modifications. The first new feature is that the Firefox Home tab now shows upto four rows of frequently visited sites, pocket stories, and important highlights. In addition to this, users with Containers can use the “Reopen in Container” tab menu to reopen tabs in different containers.

• Tor Browser version 8.0 was released this week. This is the first stable release based on Firefox 60 ESR, and it includes “a new user onboarding experience; an updated landing page that follows our styleguide; additional language support; and new behaviors for bridge fetching, displaying a circuit, and visiting .onion sites.” You can download it from here.

• Mozilla recently dropped support for Firefox XUL extensions.

• The initial threat of this prompted me to discover how to re-enable XUL extensions by modifying Firefox’s omni.ja file. That clearly is not going to last very long since Mozilla is also deleting XPCOM interfaces but I note the Tor Browser is temporarily still using XUL extensions.

• Since I have some extensions I wrote for myself, I will need to rewrite them as WebExtension add-ons.

• The first thing to do is check how to install WebExtension add-ons. My local XUL extensions are run from the corresponding git trees. Using an example extension I discovered that this no longer works. The normal way to install add-ons is to use the web-ext tool, upload to the Mozilla app store and then install from there. This seems like overkill for an unpolished local add-on. One way to workaround this is to disable signing but that seems suboptimal if one has installed Mozilla-signed add-ons, which I will probably have to do until Debian packages more add-ons. Luckily Mozilla offers alternative “sideloading” distribution mechanisms and Debian enables these by default for the Debian webext-* packages. Installing a symlink to the git repository into the extensions directory and adding a gecko identifier to the add-on manifest.json file works.

• libcurl has done internet transfers specified as URLs for a long time, but the URLs you’d tell libcurl to use would always just get parsed and used internally.

• Applications that pass in URLs to libcurl would of course still very often need to parse URLs, create URLs or otherwise handle them, but libcurl has not been helping with that.

• At the same time, the under-specification of URLs has led to a situation where there’s really no stable document anywhere describing how URLs are supposed to work and basically every implementer is left to handle the WHATWG URL spec, RFC 3986 and the world in between all by themselves. Understanding how their URL parsing libraries, libcurl, other tools and their favorite browsers differ is complicated.

• Several months ago a Google employee told me not to panic about the removal of XUL because Firefox had probably mainlined the functionality I need from my ossified xul-ext packages. This appears to have been wildly inaccurate.

• [...]

• It appears that Waterfox is not in Debian so I cannot try that out.

CMS

• WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) and blogging platform in the world. There are a lot of good reasons for that. It is accessible, simple and intuitive to use, and highly flexible, with a bewildering range of professional plugins and themes. Over the years, it has asserted itself as the dominant choice for those looking to create dynamic, responsive websites. I am a happy user, too. I’ve been using it myself since 2012, on my book writing blog. Unfortunately, all this goodness is poised to go down the drain.

• WordPress 5.0, the next major release, is going to feature a revised UI (the backend) using a framework called Gutenberg. This new UI looks like it’s going to take away all the good things that made WordPress so cool, and destroy the beautiful elegance, efficiency and simplicity with something that feels like an abstract, touch-optimized experiment. Let’s discuss.

• [...]

• Unholy Crusade against the desktop

• Ever since mobile (touch) became the prevalent consumer platform, there’s been a lot of focus on developing mobile solutions. This is fine. Except these mobile solutions are also pushed onto the desktop, where they utterly fail. Touch software does not work on the desktop. It just does not.

• Moreover, there’s a bigger problem here. While most of the content is consumed on the mobile, most of the content is created on the desktop. It makes sense. The desktop is an infinitely superior platform for writing and image processing. The full keyboard + mouse combo and the multi-application usability beat all and any touch solution.

• I do not consider social media “updates” content. I consider content to be meaningful articles that provide new and unique information, of which there is less and less every day. I am extremely confident than the vast majority of actually valuable articles and posts are made using the classic desktop formula. Just imagine writing 500 words on a keyboard versus touch.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• NetBSD has come out with a new release for the 7.x series. The second feature update of NetBSD 7, NetBSD version 7.2, comes with a few new features and enhancements including, most prominently, the support of the USB 3.0 device as well as improvements for the Linux emulation. The latest release also supports the Raspberry Pi 3 computer range, adapting the release to be compatible for running on those devices, and the release ramps up updates for several drivers to make all of this possible.

• The release announcement for the NetBSD 7.2 states that this update incorporates substantial bug fixes and enhancements for overall improvement of the stability and security of NetBSD. The update also introduces new features such as the few mentioned above and other fixes in binary compatibility for ancient NetBSD executables. The iwm(4) driver for Intel Wireless 726x, 316x, 826x, and 416x has also been incorporated and a legacy network adapter has been improved to resolve a setup interruption found in the Hyper-V VMs.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Since the FSFE Fellowship elected me as representative in April 2017, I’ve received a lot of questions from fellows and the wider community about what the Fellowship actually is. As representative, it is part of my role to help ensure that fellows are adequately informed and I hope to work towards that with this blog.

• The FSFE Fellowship was started in 2005 and has grown over the years.

Licensing/Legal

• There are two key reasons to not use AGPL in this scenario, an open-source license that says that you must release to the public any modifications you make when you run AGPL-licensed code as a service.

• First, AGPL makes it inconvenient but does not prevent cloud infrastructure providers from engaging in the abusive behavior described above. It simply says that they must release any modifications they make while engaging in such behavior. Second, AGPL contains language about software patents that is unnecessary and disliked by a number of enterprises.

• Many of our portfolio companies with AGPL projects have received requests from large enterprises to move to a more permissive license, since the use of AGPL is against their company’s policy.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• During the recent FOSSCON 2018 in Philadelphia, Daniel Pikora gave attendees a comprehensive look at the intersection of open source development and the world’s most popular brand of construction toys. A software developer with a penchant for open source code by trade, he’s also an avid member of what’s known as the Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL) community who’s exhibited his creations at shows across the United States and Canada. Such a unique perspective, with a foot in both the FOSS and LEGO camps, makes Daniel an ideal tour guide for this particular microcosm of toys and tech.

• In a whirlwind presentation that took attendees through 49 slides in about as many minutes, Daniel covered LEGO’s beginnings in the 1930s to the rise of 3D printed custom bricks, and everything in between. Some of the engineering-centric product lines, such as Technic and Mindstorms, were already fairly well known to the types of folk who spent a beautiful Saturday in Philadelphia at an open source conference. But Daniel’s deep-dive into the long history of open source LEGO projects brought to light the work of so many dedicated developers that everyone walked away with a newfound respect for the amount of work the AFOL community has put into elevating LEGO from a child’s toy to a legitimate tool. Join me below for a look at the particulars of that deep dive.

• In addition to Le Potato and Renegade, another line-up of ARM boards being offered by Libre Computer is Tritium. The Libre Computer Tritium boards are Allwinner-based boards with options from the H2+ for IoT use-cases, the H3 as a mid-range offering, or H5 for a better-performing ARM board that is well supported by the open-source Linux community.

• When you’re debugging a board which has an ESP32, Raspberry Pi, or Arduino, it’s easy to slap on a small LCD display or connect via WiFi to see what’s wrong. At least, that’s what the kids are doing. But what if you’re old-school or you don’t have one of those pimped-out, steroid-filled boards? A resistor and an LED will often suffice. Powering the LED means one thing and not powering it means another. And with seven more LEDs you can even display 0-256 in binary.

• [Miguel] is clearly in the latter camp. To make debugging-with-LEDs easy, he’s come up with an 8-LED board complete with resistors. He’s even included the Gerber files needed for you to make your own. One row of pins are all connected together and the other row are not. So whether you’re using common cathode or common anode depends on how you orient the LEDs when you solder them in place. You might perhaps have one board of each type at the ready.

Programming/Development

• My return to the IBM mainframe was delayed by my high school’s acquisition of a a teletype connected via a 110-baud serial line to a timesharing system featuring the BASIC language. I was quite impressed with this teletype because it could type quite a bit faster than I could. But this is not as good as it might sound, given that I came in dead last in every test of manual dexterity that the school ever ran us through. In fact, on a good day, I might have been able to type 20 words a minute, and it took decades of constant practice to eventually get above 70 words a minute. In contrast, one of the teachers could type 160 words a minute, more than half again faster than the teletype could!

• Aside from output speed, I remained unimpressed with computers compared to paper and pencil, let alone compared to my pocket calculator. And given that this was old-school BASIC, there was much to be unimpressed about. You could name your arrays anything you wanted, as long as that name was a single upper-case character. Similarly, you could name your scalar variables anything you wanted, as long as that name was either a single upper-case character or a single upper-case character followed by a single digit. This allowed you to use up to 286 variables, up to 26 of which could be arrays. If you felt that GOTO was harmful, too bad. If you wanted a while loop, you could make one out of IF statements. Not only did IF statements have no else clause, the only thing that could be in the THEN clause was the number of the line to which control would transfer when the IF condition evaluated to true. And each line had to be numbered, and the numbers had to be monotonically increasing, that is, in the absence of control-flow statements, the program would execute the lines of code in numerical order, regardless of the order in which you typed those lines of code. Definitely a step down, even from FORTRAN.

• This is a ‘milestone’ release, which introduces image texture measures. In addition (a) the default installation locations have changed; (b) there is a new configure option; (c) some new interfaces; (d) matrix multiplication performances have been greatly improved; (d) a few interface (name) have changed.

• For a list of changes since the previous version, visit the NEWS file. For a complete description, consult the git summary and git log

Leftovers

• Which brings me to the techlash: the post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-Equifax turning point where suddenly a lot of people start to pay attention to the rules we set for technology users, companies, and practitioners.

• I’m genuinely delighted that this moment has arrived. Tech policy is like climate change: every year we fail to fix it is a year that we accumulate more bad tech debt (insecure systems full of sensitive data and attached to machines, sensors and actuators that can harm or kill us). We are in a race between the point of no return, when it’s too late to fix things, and the point of “peak indifference,” when the number of people who care starts to rise of its own accord, thanks to the gaudy disasters detonating all around us.

• But it’s not enough to do something: we have to do something good. And we’re getting it really wrong.

Science

• Valley of Genius details how following the release of the Macintosh, Steve Jobs would be driven from the company he founded and started a new computer company, NeXT, and even gambled on a new and exciting digital animation company called Pixar. A struggling Apple eventually invited Jobs back, acquiring NeXT in the process. The book describes how by leveraging the NeXT ecosystem, the iMac, in all its colors, was conceived. Apple was back.

• The book also explores how Napster went away as quickly as it arrived and how its legacy changed the shape of the internet. Next it follows the Dot-com bubble (ca. 2001) and how the internet was becoming more than just a source of research and information, and was turning into a channel for commerce and communication—a hub for sharing, opening the door for average individuals to experience a more personalized web.

Health/Nutrition

• One of the world’s top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet.

• The researcher, Dr. José Baselga, a towering figure in the cancer world, is the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has held board memberships or advisory roles with Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb, among other corporations; has had a stake in start-ups testing cancer therapies; and played a key role in the development of breakthrough drugs that have revolutionized treatments for breast cancer.

• According to an analysis by ProPublica and The New York Times, Baselga did not follow financial disclosure rules set by the American Association for Cancer Research when he was president of the group. He also left out payments he received from companies connected to cancer research in his articles published in the group’s journal, Cancer Discovery. At the same time, he has been one of the journal’s two editors in chief.

• The Institute of Psychiatry in London has begun recruiting volunteers for a study on depression treatment using psilocybin, the psychedelic component in magic mushrooms. Late last month the Food and Drug Administration authorized a similar study in the US. About once a week, give or take, we are now seeing new studies, academic reports, books and mainstream media articles about psychedelics and their potential effects on human wellbeing.

• They’re calling it the psychedelic renaissance, the first resurgence of mainstream scientific interest in the benefits of psychedelic substances since the government slammed that door and threw away the key in the 1960s. More and more studies are showing that ingesting psychedelics can be a powerful tool for treating disorders ranging from anxiety to depression to addiction to fear of death in hospice patients. These studies are always new and surprising revelations to people who have never tripped.

Security

• A few thoughts after reading The History of a Security Hole about a series of bugs in the OpenBSD kernel. It’s a good explanation of an instance of a problem I’ll call hard state soft state confusion, which can lead to some serious bugs, occurs with some regularity, but doesn’t seem to be often discussed.

• A username privilege escalation vulnerability has been found in the network manager VPNC plugin. This injection vulnerability is exploited by the Metaspoilt module of the program to gain root privilege access.

• This was discovered by Denis Adnzakovic who found that the network-manager-vpnc plugin for VPNC support in NetworkManager could be exploited with a privilege escalation vulnerability using a newline character to inject a password helper parameter into the configuration scheme that is responsible for conveying information to the vpnc. This vulnerability poses a risk because it allows a local user exploiting it to get the access desired to change the system’s settings as well as execute arbitrary commands with root privilege.

• ownCloud is a client-server software which grants administrators several privileges such as carrying out commands by acting as the intended user, essentially impersonating another user to carry out desired tasks. For security reasons, group administrators are only able to do things under the umbrella of fellow group member users. Despite this measure being put in place, the exploitation of a crucial user impersonation authorization bypass attack.

• The vulnerability was first discovered by Thierry Viaccoz on the 15th of March. The first vendor notification was sent on the 16th of March and the vendor responded back with a message of acknowledgement the very same day. Just over a month later, the corrected version of the software version 0.2.0 was released on the 17th of March and a public disclosure date for the matter was set to the 29th of August which was just a few days ago.

• It turns out that Google Safebrowsing had listed those two sites. Visit https://listen.gw90.de/ or https://mail.gw90.de/ today (and maybe for some weeks or months in the future) using Google Chrome (or any other browser that uses the Google Safebrowsing database) and it will tell you the site is “Dangerous” and probably refuse to let you in.

• One thing to note is that neither of those sites has any real content, I only set them up in Apache to get SSL certificates that are used for other purposes (like mail transfer as the name suggests). If Google had listed my blog as a “Dangerous” site I wouldn’t be so surprised, WordPress has had more than a few security issues in the past and it’s not implausible that someone could have compromised it and made it serve up hostile content without me noticing. But the two sites in question have a DocumentRoot that is owned by root and was (until a few days ago) entirely empty, now they have a index.html that just says “This site is empty”. It’s theoretically possible that someone could have exploited a RCE bug in Apache to make it serve up content that isn’t in the DocumentRoot, but that seems unlikely (why waste an Apache 0day on one of the less important of my personal sites). It is possible that the virtual machine in question was compromised (a VM on that server has been compromised before [1]) but it seems unlikely that they would host bad things on those web sites if they did.

• Now it could be that some other hostname under that domain had something inappropriate (I haven’t yet investigated all possibilities). But if so Google’s algorithm has a couple of significant problems, firstly if they are blacklisting sites related to one that had an issue then it would probably make more sense to blacklist by IP address (which means including some coker.com.au entries on the same IP). In the case of a compromised server it seems more likely to have multiple bad sites on one IP than multiple bad subdomains on different IPs (given that none of the hostnames in question have changed IP address recently and Google of course knows this). The next issue is that extending blacklisting doesn’t make sense unless there is evidence of hostile intent. I’m pretty sure that Google won’t blacklist all of ibm.com when (not if) a server in that domain gets compromised. I guess they have different policies for sites of different scale.

• Google Chrome Password suggestion

• Similar to other Password managers out there, Chrome has added native support for password suggestions. In other words, when you will type in a new password, Chrome browser will automatically generate a password suggestion for you.

• This undoubtedly leaves out the question of using those puppy names and including your first name in your passwords. Now, don’t ask me why they are considered weak passwords.

• Fail2ban has some good features. I don’t think it will do much good at stopping account compromise as anything that is easily guessed could be guessed using many IP addresses and anything that has a good password can’t be guessed without taking many years of brute-force attacks while also causing enough noise in the logs to be noticed. What it does do is get rid of some of the noise in log files which makes it easier to find and fix problems. To me the main benefit is to improve the signal to noise ratio of my log files.

• British security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who is awaiting trial in the US over allegations that he created and help distribute a banking trojan, has claimed that on one occasion in the past he located and contacted an attacker who had launched a massive DDoS attack in the UK, and asked the individual who was behind it to desist from doing so, a request that was ultimately heeded.

• The British Airways website breach appears to have been done through a cross-site scripting flaw, according to the chief executive of a Web automation company in the UK.

• A well-known security researcher claims that, between 20 July and 20 August, British Airways changed the third-party JavaScript code it loads on its website as a result of a privacy complaint he had made.

• The US Department of Justice has filed a criminal complaint against a North Korean cracker named Park Jin Hyok for allegedly being behind a 2104 hack of Sony Pictures and the May 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack.

• An affidavit filed by FBI special agent Nathan Shields also alleged that Park was behind the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh Bank, the central bank of that country, in February 2016. One glaring omission was the fact that an NSA exploit used to craft WannaCry had been leaked on the Web by a group known as the Shadow Brokers in April 2017.

• He was also accused of being behind numerous other unspecified break-ins at various private and government institutions.

• Park was alleged to have worked for a North Korean front company known as Chosun Expo; some of the employees in branches of the firm abroad also did private work for clients. Park was said to have worked with a group in Dalian, China.

• Web Analytics

Defence/Aggression

• The US military will begin flying armed drones out of a remote base in Niger in the coming months, marking a significant escalation of the Defense Department’s little-noticed war against violent extremists in Africa.

• The MQ-9 Reapers will operate from new facilities the US Air Force is building at an existing Nigerien base in Agadez for nearly $100 million. Until recently, the drones have been based in Niger’s capital and used solely to collect intelligence on militant groups operating in the region.

• But last November, following an attack that killed five Nigerien and four American troops near the village of Tongo Tongo, the government of Niger requested that the United States begin deploying armed drones against jihadi groups.

• American forces in Africa will soon escalate their war against militants in the Sahel by using armed drones to attack them, reports an American news website on global affairs.

• The attacks will be launched in the coming months from new facilities which the United States Air Force is building at Agadez in central Niger, says the Washington-based Foreign Policy news service.

• The U.S. military has killed al Shabaab militants in drone strikes in Somalia for some time. But Foreign Policy reports that in the Sahel, the drones have until recently been based in the Nigerien capital, Niamey, and used only to collect intelligence.

• The Defense Department’s cutting-edge research arm has promised to make the military’s largest investment to date in artificial intelligence (AI) systems for U.S. weaponry, committing to spend up to $2 billion over the next five years in what it depicted as a new effort to make such systems more trusted and accepted by military commanders.

• The people of Yemen are experiencing the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet, according to the United Nations. They are devastated by a war that the United States supports. Why is the U.S. involved in a conflict that has left an estimated tens of thousands dead and millions more displaced? Why is the U.S. providing weapons to a coalition that launched an airstrike killing dozens of children? How did Yemen get to this point? Shireen Al-Adeimi has the answers for us, having worked tireless to raise awareness of the civil war in the country she calls home.

• The attempted assassination of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last month using a pair of drones armed with explosives made international headlines and is a harbinger of future high-profile attacks using common drones.

• [...]

• Drones are an example of how technology is created for one purpose and then is “redomained” for another. Sometimes this process can be for the common good, other times it’s a disaster. Most of the time the creators of these technologies don’t think about those possible future consequences beforehand. It’s not that they don’t care, but that it’s really difficult to do that, especially with emerging technologies that have to precedents to analyze. Technology is created and released into the wild, then it follows its own course. It evolves. This is the nature of technology. We like to think that we humans fully control technology because we are the ones who created it, but we do not.

• What does it say about the state of the nation that many on both the left and right are banking their hopes for the future of American democracy on the patriotism and competence of cloak-and-dagger spooks?

• If you tune in to left-leaning mainstream cable news shows on MSNBC or CNN, you’ll see a steady parade of such stalwarts of the intelligence community as former CIA director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Former FBI director James Comey, once the bane of the left for reopening the Clinton email inquiry two weeks before the 2016 election, is now lauded in Democratic circles for his attacks on President Donald Trump.

• The view of many on the left that the president is an existential threat to the safety and security of the country is a sentiment shared with many right-wing #NeverTrumpers.

• Meanwhile, to Trump and his loyal followers, this cabal of current and former intelligence figures represents a usually invisible “Deep State” faction, whose intention is to overturn the democratic will as expressed in the Electoral College.

• But perhaps there’s an upside to this seismic realignment of public opinion: the American people are coming to terms with the notion that the intelligence community — far from being an above-the-fray servant of a popularly elected government — is in fact inherently political, serving long-term shadowy interests, including its own.

• A Turkish pro-government news channel has uncovered dramatic footage revealing one American Middle East scholar’s activities in Turkey’s Ottoman archives.

• Shockingly, the footage of Alan Makovsky, the “agent” who went on to work at the U.S. state department and then a prolific career at think tanks including the Center for American Progress, was shot by none other than the Turkish state broadcaster TRT.

• Apparently the credulous producers at TRT did not foresee the danger that the harmlessly bookish looking Makovsky would go on to pose.

• A Haber’s sensationalist headline, which accused Makovsky of being an “agent,” and the implication during the clip that he had played a role in coup attempts, drew condemnation from commentators on social media as well as comment from the scholar himself.

• [...]

• The A Haber has deleted the tweet since then without any apology or explanation.

• The Commission’s recommendation urging Niger to ensure that armed drone use complies with international law comes at a particularly significant moment and foreshadows concerns about the potential expansion of drone use from Niger’s territory. Even before expanding its military footprint to Niger, the U.S. actively operated drones (both armed and unarmed) on and from the African continent to counter suspected terrorist threats for years. The U.S. military is also just one of several foreign militaries that has expanded its military presence in Niger and across the African continent in recent years. (Note, however, that U.S. military policy in the region is in a state of flux: after the Niger raid, the Defense Department considered withdrawing all its special operations forces from Niger and recently submitted a plan that seeks to reduce the number of special operations troops and missions in West and Central Africa, even as it continues construction of a new air base in Niger. With fewer ground forces, it is possible that the United States will rely more heavily on drones to counter presumed threats in the region.)

• Despite this presence, until the Commission’s recommendation to Niger earlier this year, African human rights institutions have not provided explicit guidance to member states on these kinds of consent-based foreign military operations and drone use. The Commission’s timely remarks to Niger mark the first time it has seriously assessed the issue of armed drones on the continent and urged a state to take action.

• Four anarchists have been detained on Thursday while heading to Thessaloniki two days ahead of the city’s annual international fair. The vehicle of the four was stopped by police officers on the national highway from Athens to Thessaloniki and during the search that followed the police found hammers, gas masks and helmets.

• One of the suspects had been arrested in 2014 for similar offences, while the other three are known members of the anti-establishment movement, with police officers linking their presence in Thessaloniki with the upcoming international fair and the expected protest scheduled for the weekend, when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will deliver his annual speech during which he will present his government’s financial program for the year ahead.

• The above incident, only a few hours after members of the Rouvikonas anarchist group raided into the headquarters of the Federation of Industries of Northern Greece in downtown Thessaloniki, is indicative of the Greek authorities’ high-security alert ahead of the 83rdThessaloniki International Fair (TIF).

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• WIKILEAKS publisher Julian Assange is in extremely poor health and unless he is released from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, his condition may deteriorate to the point where his life is in jeopardy.

• Australian lawyer Greg Barns, who is a member of Assange’s legal team and also an adviser to WikiLeaks, told iTWire that Assange had not been able to access medical treatment for six years.

• “What is remarkable is that Julian remains so mentally alert and is able to function physically given the inevitable impact of six years of detention without natural light or access to fresh air on a constant basis,” the lawyer said.

• It’s not entirely clear what medical ailments Assange is suffering from, though studies show that experiencing less sunlight can be linked to major depression.

• During long winters, for example, the absence of sunlight is believed to contribute to a unique type of depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. Temporary periods of darkness in one’s environment and mood last several months with SAD patients on an annual basis; Assange’s environs have not changed for six years.

• Assange has been sought by US authorities for publishing leaked, classified documents through WikiLeaks. The Australian national has been the subject of intense scrutiny by US officials since the 2010 publication of thousands of secret documents leaked by then-US Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, including a video of US helicopter gunning down a pair of Reuters employees.

• This was because the UK Government won’t let him leave the Ecuadorean Embassy to see a doctor, according to Mr Barns — in case he is arrested.

• “This is a cruel and inhumane stance from a government professing to be a liberal democracy,” Barns said.

• WikiLeaks founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange is in extremely poor health and requires immediate medical treatment, according to a lawyer for the transparency organization.

• Australian attorney and WikiLeaks advisor Greg Barns says Assange has been denied medical treatment since being granted political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012. “What is remarkable is that Julian remains so mentally alert and is able to function physically given the inevitable impact of six years detention without natural light or access to fresh air on a constant basis,” Barns told Australian technology news outlet iTWire. “However if there is not a resolution to his case — in other words, the UK guaranteeing that he will not be extradited to the US — the reality is Julian’s health will deteriorate to the point where his life is in serious danger.”

• An interview with Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst convicted of espionage for sharing classified documents with WikiLeaks, abruptly ended when she declined to discuss her reaction to hearing that some of that material may have reached Osama bin Laden.

• Triple J, an Australian government-funded radio station, published audio of a brief interview Friday in which Ms. Manning refused to weigh in on a claim raised by prosecutors during her military court-martial, quickly bringing the conversation to an unexpected close.

• Convicted leaker Chelsea Manning’s interview with the government-funded Australian radio station Triple J was cut short after the interviewer asked Manning about the documents Manning released that were found in Osama Bin Laden’s compound.

• “Some of your leaked documents were found in Osama Bin Laden’s compound though, after his death, that’s information in the hands of one of America’s biggest enemies,” host Tom Tilley said to Manning. “Do you have any regrets about that outcome? What did you think when you heard that?”

• “Ah, look, I can’t really talk about specifics of my court-martial,” said Manning, who leaked over 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks. “The record of the trial is still classified.”

• Wellington protestors say they haven’t forgotten the plight of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, even if the world has.

• They’ve gathered outside the Embassy Theatre where US whistleblower Chelsea Manning is speaking tonight.

• Manning, who spoke in Auckland last night, is in the country for a speaking tour.

• Protestor Alex Hills says New Zealand should offer Mr Assange political asylum.

• Ms Hills says the world has forgotten about him and it’s appalling.

• She says they’ve gathered more than 2,000 signatures on a petition supporting their cause.

• Amnesty International has backed calls to not extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, arguing that this would put his human rights at serious risk of abuse.

• The statement, issued Friday by the group’s Australian branch, backed Assange’s lawyers and supporters’ claim that if he is sent to the US, “he would face a real risk of serious human rights violations due to his work with WikiLeaks.”

• Amnesty said that Assange could face several human rights violations in the event that he is extradited to the US, including: violation of his right to freedom of expression; right to liberty; right to life if the death penalty were sought; and being held in conditions that would violate his right to humane treatment.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• A new batch of red tide could be brewing west of Tampa.

• A University of South Florida underwater glider, an autonomous robot that collects subsurface data vital to understanding how the ocean works, discovered elevated levels of chlorophyll in the middle of the West Florida Continental Shelf during a mapping exercise.

• “The indications are it might be” red tide, said Robert Weisberg, a professor of oceanography at the USF College of Marine Science. “If that’s the case, there will be more coming in from offshore.” Read more: Complete coverage of red tide in Southwest Florida

Finance

• The Fitness Marshall has over a million subscribers and over 150 videos on his channel. His paltry take after three years of work comes to about $20 a video after record labels and everyone else take their cuts.

• Every time you log on to YouTube you are presented with videos chosen by the algorithm. The idea is that a clip particularly well suited to your tastes will inspire you to click the Subscribe button – which, hopefully, will bring you back to watch a new episode tomorrow. The viewer feels that YouTube understands what he or she likes, while advertisers are reassured that the video in front of which their five-second commercial will run will reach an appropriately targeted audience.

• When your income is dependent on the number of people who watch your videos each week, this code can decide what, or even whether, you eat. And, 13 years into YouTube’s existence, many believe it has come to sit at the core of a growing mental health crisis among video creators.

• On 8th September, a new version of Litecoin called Litecoin Core v0.16.2 was released, as announced by the official Medium blog for the cryptocurrency. The release contains minor tweak with added features, multiple bugfixes and improvement in performance and more. The update was also posted on Twitter by the official Twitter handle of the Litecoin project, as claimed by the party.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Trump’s anonymous lieutenant was wrong to reject a constitutional remedy for an erratic and amoral presidency.

• delete

• “What the American people need are people willing to put their names where their faux concern and so-called patriotism is.”

• Admitting they were a little reluctant to put their faith in the same flawed bureaucracy that, for decades now, has failed to close the ever-widening achievement gap and cannot fix painfully apparent budget inadequacies, the nation’s K through 12 pupils told reporters that what eventually sealed their decision to return to school was a deep, unshakable faith that the richest, most powerful country in the world would be able to meet the highest global standards for education.

• In this era of “fake news” and misinformation, it may be irresponsible to use mockery to make a point about the public school system. However, a kernel of truth is found in satire: Young people have every right to be angry at a school system that touts intellectual strength and academic success while seeming to be on the brink of collapse. Perhaps students are angry because their teachers have not been thoroughly trained or prepared for the dynamic demands of the classroom.

• Barack Obama is making headlines today. In a speech at the University of Illinois, Obama called out the “politics of fear” which are used by his successor and criticized an insufficient denunciation of “Nazi sympathizers” by the current administration.

• “How hard can that be?” asked the former president. “Saying Nazis are bad?”

• Also in the news, getting far less attention than the sparkly spectacle of Fauxgressive Jesus wagging his finger at Orange Hitler for being too nice to Nazis, is a report from the Washington Post (open it in a private browser to get around the paywall) that the Trump administration has done a complete 180 degree reversal of its prior position on Syria. And before you jump on me about believing anonymously sourced reports from an establishment outlet that is fully owned by a CIA contractor, this isn’t one of those: the sources are senior State Department officials who are named in the article.

• Just weeks after Emmanuel Macron took office last year, his team went over the French state’s most sensitive activities. What it found provided a wake-up call.

• The team learned that the country’s intelligence agency — which, among other things, tracks French citizens for homegrown terrorism or anarchist activities — uses software from a CIA-backed startup. Its code is provided by Palantir Technologies Inc., a data-mining company that started out working for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

• The use of U.S. technology deep inside the French state isn’t unusual, but for the tech-savvy team of the 40-year-old president, it was a sign that the country needs to make technological independence a top priority — a sentiment that’s become even more urgent after President Donald Trump called the European Union a “foe.”

• They put their lives on the line in foreign war zones, conducted secret missions to collect valuable intelligence and made enormous sacrifices for their country — only to see their former colleagues disrespected by President Donald Trump.

• Now, driven by the president’s conduct, they’re taking matters into their own hands and gearing up for a different challenge: running for Congress as Democrats.

• Fed up with what they see as Trump’s disdain and distrust of the intelligence community — and his refusal to embrace fully the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — an unusually large number of former intelligence officers and operatives are campaigning for office as Democrats in this fall’s midterm elections, according to experts.

• A race for Congress in the Seventh District of Virginia between a CIA Democrat and a far-right Trump supporter has turned into a battlefield in the ongoing conflict within the US ruling class between sections of the military-intelligence apparatus and the Trump administration.

• Democrat Abigail Spanberger, whose main political “credential” is eight years as an undercover CIA operative, is denouncing the Republican Party for obtaining a copy of her full federal security clearance document, known as an SF-86, from when she applied for a job as a postal inspector, prior to joining the CIA. The SF-86 is supposed to be confidential and was released by the US Postal Service (USPS) to the Republicans, allegedly by mistake.

• The irony of a CIA operative complaining of “dirty tricks” on behalf of her political opponent is hard to top. Spanberger was an undercover CIA agent in Europe, during the period that the CIA operated torture prisons in eastern Europe for alleged “terrorists,” and CIA-chartered planes regularly flew prisoners, bound, gagged and blindfolded, between European locations, and other secret prisons in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay.

• or Americans’ civil liberties. But very few could have guessed the strange way this nightmare would manifest itself over the past 18 months. Of course, Trump has used his executive power to implement countless cruel and rights-violating policies. But he has also, with an assist from a frenzied media, turned many of the individuals and agencies responsible for creating our unaccountable national security apparatus into folk heroes at the same time.

• It’s an infuriating and depressing state of affairs for civil liberties advocates, many of whom have fought the CIA, FBI, and Justice Department in the past two presidential administrations as these agencies expanded executive power, restricted privacy rights, and shielded officials from accountability under the guise of “national security” — the same tools Trump now regularly uses for his benefit.

• The nauseating sight this weekend of George W. Bush being deified on social media because he passed a piece of candy to Michelle Obama was only the latest example. The combination of Trump’s relentless and inaccurate Twitter feed and the stampede of pundits who instinctively feel the need take the exact opposite view has created a nonstop cycle that has destroyed our ability to see the truth.

• The examples come so fast that they are almost impossible to enumerate. In just the past couple weeks, Trump has gone after the FISA court, the Justice Department, and the FBI — all due to personal grievances or feuds he has because of their perceived role in the Mueller investigation.

• Former CIA Director John Brennan, who had his security clearance revoked by the Trump administration in mid-August, said on NBC’s “The Today Show” that he sees “all the warning signs of a looming disaster” at the White House.

• “Clearly, things are reaching a boiling point” the former director said. “What happens in the days, weeks and months ahead is going to determine just how much damage will be done to this country.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Once upon a time we all knew what censorship was, who the good and bad guys were, and what could be done to make the world a better place. Look up the noun ‘censor’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and you’ll find an outline of a much-told story under definition 2 (b):

• ‘An official in some countries whose duty it is to inspect all books, journals, dramatic pieces, etc, before publication, to secure that they shall contain nothing immoral, heretical, or offensive to the government.’

• Attributing the first instance of this usage to the English poet John Milton, the lexicographers illustrated it with a quotation from his anti-censorship pamphlet , Areopagitica (1644):

• ‘He (the author) … must appear in print like a punie (i.e. a new schoolboy) with his guardian, and his censors hand on the back of his title, to be his bayl and suretye that he is no idiot, or seducer.’

• Premier Daniel Andrews stands rightly and widely condemned for recklessly revealing the private information of members of the community when he took the controversial step of breaking a convention under which successive governments suppress information the public has the right to scrutinise. The stupid error has distracted from the key issue: the suppression of crucial information about government decisions undermines the public interest by reducing transparency and accountability.

• [..]

• The entire cache of documents relates to Opposition Leader Matthew Guy’s astounding decisions several years ago as planning minister to rezone land on Phillip Island against repeated official advice; to then reverse that only days later amid internal and public outrage; to then seek to cover up the incident by engineering an excessive payout of public funds to a litigant indignant at being denied the windfall profit she expected; and to then refuse to comply with a request from the Ombudsman to provide documents to an inquiry into the scandal.

• Facebook’s strategy to provide “alternative facts” to combat “fake news” will only result in political censorship that will cater for the interests of the Democratic Party, the Libertarians’ presidential hopeful told RT.

• The world’s largest social media platform is now focusing its efforts on serving millions of their users with “alternative facts,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

• “In the case of misinformation, what we do is we refer it to third-party fact-checkers. We don’t think we should be the arbiter of what’s true, what’s false, and we think that’s really important,” she told the lawmakers examining alleged Russian interference in US elections. “If it’s marked as false, we dramatically decrease the distribution on our site, we warn you if you’re about to share it, we warn you if you have shared it, and importantly we show related articles next to that so people can see alternative facts.”

• Populism and hate speech is on the rise. But is stricter legislation, surveillance and censorship the right policy to counter this trend?

• They found that the system uses two methods to decide what to censor: any text in images is run through an optical character recognition system and then compared to a list of banned terms; then the whole image is checked to see whether it appears to match a blacklist of banned images.

• Both systems are vulnerable to easy circumvention; the researchers probed them until they were certain of how they were checking user-submissions and then designed and tested successful systems for evading censorship: text that matches the hue of its background is reliably missed by the OCR filter, while the visual filter can be defeated by rotating/flipping images, changing their aspect ratios, adding a variety of borders, or blurring their edges.

• In this work we present experiments uncovering implementation details of WeChat’s image filter that inform multiple effective evasion strategies. While the focus of this work has been WeChat, due to common implementation details between image filtering implementations, we hope that our methods will serve as a road map for future research studying image censorship on other platforms.

• Seeing how each company moderates content is encouraging. The two firms no longer regard making such decisions as a peripheral activity but as core to their business.

• Facebook, though, has standards, and those images of Reynolds sprawled on a bear-skin rug may have passed muster back in 1972 when he appeared in Helen Gurley Brown’s magazine, but they were too much for the pearl-clutching community of today. The image was repeatedly flagged, according to social media reports. The postings were pulled and account holders were notified that they were violating Facebook’s very high standards.

• Twitter (the last refuge for people kicked off Facebook) is currently filled with stories of people who said they tried to pay tribute to Reynolds by posting his not-even-nude centerfolds on Facebook—and then getting booted.

• Apple has permanently banned InfoWars’ app from its app store, just weeks after the tech giant announced it was monitoring the right-wing conspiracy newscast app for possible content policy violations.

• Infowars’ app, which allowed users to read Infowars articles, shop, and livestream all of Jones’ programming 24 hours a day, served as a window into the incendiary conspiratorial content that led to the outlet’s ban from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Twitter. While Apple removed Jones and Infowars from its podcast platform in early August, the company took no action against the Infowars app; nor did it explain why it was allowed to remain. It’s worth noting, however, that the Infowars app does not store content, which presumably made violations of Apple’s guidlines more difficult to police.

• Late last year, Maine governor Tom LePage was sued by the ACLU and two of the state’s residents. It wasn’t over his vocalized desire to shoot a local political cartoonist or his tone deaf handling of the Net Neutrality debate. This lawsuit deals with LePage’s moderation of his official Facebook page. LePage (or more likely, his staff) swing the banhammer pretty freely, blocking users and deleting critical comments.

• If LePage is using this Facebook page as an official extension of the governor’s office, he can’t engage in this kind of moderation without doing damage to the First Amendment. LePage has tried to claim the page isn’t official, but it’s been used to deliver official statements from his office. In addition, the page states it’s Lepage’s “official” page, and the page itself has been “verified” as official by Facebook, which requires the input of LePage and his office to make his official page official.

• So, when LePage argues it’s just some sort of unofficial campaign page with no ties to his current position in the government — as he did in his motion to dismiss — it’s a Hail Mary play. The court isn’t going to buy these assertions, not when there’s plenty of evidence pointing to the Facebook page’s officialness. For an official mouthpiece of a government entity, blocks and bans of critics aren’t just a PR black eye, it’s likely a First Amendment violation as well.

• When Cambridge University Press’s prestigious China Quarterly journal temporarily capitulated to Chinese censors last year and removed hundreds of articles, it was a wake-up call for the global academia community facing Beijing’s increasing attempts to export the stifling of academic freedom overseas.

• A new study conducted by two US academics attempts to find out how pervasive and damaging Chinese repression in academia is. Sheena Greitens and Rory Truex, at the University of Missouri and Princeton University, respectively, found in a survey of over 500 China scholars that “repressive research experiences are a rare but real phenomenon, and collectively present a barrier to the conduct of research in China.”

• Attention over academic censorship in China studies is also growing in light of increasing coverage and awareness worldwide of Beijing’s repressive policies in Xinjiang, resulting in the recent expulsion of American BuzzFeed journalist Megha Rajagopalan from China, likely because of her in-depth reporting of the region. China-focused academics themselves have been discussing to what extent they should risk putting their livelihoods and personal safety at stake in order to conduct research on areas like Xinjiang—and whether that raises questions of potential self-censorship.

• Repressive experiences during the conduct of research on China may be rare but they are a “real phenomenon” and a barrier to doing research in the country, leading some scholars to self-censor and others to change research focus or abandon it altogether, according to a new study. It analyses data from the first ever survey of self-censorship among China scholars overseas.

• The survey of some 562 China scholars in North America, Europe, Australia and Hong Kong found 70% of respondents agreeing that self-censorship is a problem in the field of academic China studies, with only 7% disagreeing, according to the paper by Sheena Chestnut Greitens, assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and Rory Truex, assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University in the United States.

• An article in The New Republic examines the issue of self-censorship among scholars who study China and U.S. universities that want to stay in good standing with Beijing. The article includes allegations that in 2015 Columbia University canceled several talks at its global center in Beijing that were deemed politically sensitive. A Columbia spokesman denied that the university canceled events in Beijing because of their political content.

• The article also says that some graduate students reported censoring themselves. One student, quoted anonymously, said she would not do anything to jeopardize her ability to get a visa to China in the future.

• Why are America’s elite universities censoring themselves on China?

• Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain Wednesday said the government discourages censorship on media and did not receive any complaint in this regard.

• Talking to a news channel, he said that the Senate Committee for Human Rights had given two days to complain about any censorship in media content but received no complaint there off.

• He said that the entertainment and sports industry should flourish as it shows stability in the country instead of news channels which shows instability. He said constructive criticism should be made on media but there was a difference between sensationalism and criticism.

• The University of Minnesota (UMN) has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against the university that contends top-level administrators actively engaged in “viewpoint-based censorship” of conservative students.

• The University of Minnesota filed a motion in late August to dismiss a lawsuit by Young America’s Foundation and Ben Shapiro which accused UMN of “banishing [a] conservative event to [an] inadequate venue.”

• YAF and Shapiro filed a lawsuit against the school in July after UMN allegedly capped the number of people who could attend the event, which is an action that YAF believes puts UMN in a position where they violated the First Amendment.

• In a motion filed on August 22, UMN calls the Ben Shapiro lecture a “success,” as the university worked with Students for a Conservative Voice, the student group that invited Shapiro, and found a venue that “virtually matched” the capacity of the venue originally requested.

• The university additionally made the argument that although the student group may have requested a room with a larger capacity, the university does not have an obligation to grant the request, also stating that the venue choice was based on security concerns raised by SCV.

• The Banned Books Week Coalition website will feature “Banned Spotlight” stories featuring different banned books in the lead-up to Banned Books Week 2018.

• Banned Books Week is the annual celebration of the freedom to read. This year’s September 23–29 celebration will be centered on the theme “Banning Books Silences Stories,” a reminder that everyone needs to speak out against the tide of censorship.

• Myanmar’s first independent competitive film festival, Wathann Film Festival (WFF), is in its eighth year and changing up its style adding a panel discussion with lauded international filmmakers and brand new screening sections as part of this year’s exciting line-up of events.

• The ongoing film festival is taking place at two top venues in Yangon—Waziya Cinema and Goethe-Institut— and it will run from September 5 to 10.

• “In recent years, Wathann has always been held at the same place that is Waziya Cinema. Luckily, we got another venue to screen the films and we are really thankful to Goethe Institut,” said Ko Thaid Dhi, a filmmaker and co-founder of the festival.

• This time its censorship. Not just any censorship, because I’m not averse to censorship when it’s reasonable and understandable, but censorship seemingly only in place to benefit the company. In this case, Electronic Arts have censored the word DLC.

• While Facebook and Twitter executives remain under pressure from lawmakers about concerns over misinformation on social media platforms, Virginia Tech expert Mike Horning says Congress showed greater willingness to work together to address the problem of foreign influence in our democratic processes, following tech hearings on Capitol Hill this week.

• Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Thursday secretly tried a prominent anti-censorship campaigner on subversion charges after holding him for more than a year, RFA has learned.

• Zhen Jianghua was initially detained at his home in Guangdong’s Zhuhai city on the night of Sept. 1, 2017 on suspicion of “incitement to subvert state power.”

• He stood trial in Zhuhai on Aug. 10, according to a brief statement that appeared on the Case Information Disclosure website of China’s state prosecutor, the People’s Procuratorate, but which was later deleted, sources said.

• A cached copy of the statement was still accessible via Google search on Thursday.

• “Defendant Zhen Jianghua stood trial in open court on Aug. 10, 2018 at the Zhuhai Intermediate People’s Court on charges of incitement to subvert state power,” the Aug. 23 statement said.

• A meeting of key cabinet members from the US-led Five Eyes global spying network, held in Australia on August 28-29, shed light on the ousting of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull three days earlier, as well as the intensifying social media censorship.

• Despite the high-profile character of the gathering, the event received almost no publicity. Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton hosted the summit. Leading the other delegations were US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid, along with Canada’s Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and New Zealand Justice Minister Andrew Little.

• As exposed by ex-US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, the five-country intelligence web conducts bugging, hacking and other forms of mass surveillance over the world’s population, as well as targeted governments. Its cyber warfare operations are dedicated to tracking and suppressing political and social discontent and preparing for wars to reassert US global hegemony.

• As executives from Facebook and Twitter prepare to testify Wednesday on Capitol Hill, the social media monopolies are scrambling to demonstrate how far they have gone to implement censorship measures demanded by the intelligence agencies and dominant sections of the political establishment.

• These actions are inevitably couched in the language of combatting “foreign interference” and “meddling” in “American democracy” via the promotion of “fake news.” However, the real target is the growth of social opposition among millions of workers and young people.

• Throughout the United States, hundreds of thousands of workers are entering into struggle against low wages, the attack on social programs and the decay of social infrastructure. As the school year begins, teachers in the state of Washington have launched strike action, as the unions seek desperately to contain the anger of educators. There is overwhelming opposition among 230,000 US-based UPS workers to a new concessions contract demanded by their employers and the Teamsters union. The ruling class knows that any eruption of class struggle, in any sector, could set off a social explosion.

• Last September, the New York Times published an article, appearing on the first page of its business section, reporting allegations by the World Socialist Web Site that the internet search monopoly Google was censoring left-wing, anti-war and socialist web sites.

• The article prominently cited, and linked to, the WSWS’s open letter to Google, “Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site!” The open letter presented evidence that “Google is manipulating its internet searches” in order to “block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.”

• But on Wednesday, the Times posted on its website (and published Thursday on the front page of the business section of its Thursday print edition) an article by the same author, Daisuke Wakabayashi, which is a white-wash of Google’s censorship regime, echoing the company’s self-serving denials without any serious examination of the facts.

• The article is the latest in a series of similar pieces by major US news outlets, which, using as a foil President Trump’s claims that the company is censoring right-wing news sources, uncritically parrot Google’s denials that it is blacklisting sites based on their political views.

• To the surprise of many, Google plans on re-entering the Chinese market through developing a censored version of its search service, eight years after being deemed illegal by the Chinese government. The project coded under “Dragonfly” has been underway since the spring of 2017 and according to Reuters, “Progress on the project picked up after a December meeting between Google’s Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official.” In the censored version of Google, the results will be filtered through certain key search items, such as democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. In the era of rising populism around the world, Google’s decision on returning to China invites criticism from international human rights organizations who argue that Google is supporting the repression of freedom of speech in China. Many people scratch their heads and wonder why Google, whose motto was “Don’t be evil,” makes such a move now.

• In an effort to address some of the concerns related to Google’s relaunch, John L. Hennessy, the president of Alphabet Inc. (which owns Google), shared his view on the decision of returning to China in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “The question to ask yourself is, are the Chinese people better off with a limited version of Google, or are they better off with no access at all? And that’s not so clear to me,” Hennessy said. In his view, Google is not defying their core values by introducing a limited service in China because the total benefits for Chinese consumers to have Google’s limited service will outweigh the cost of compliance with Chinese cyber security laws. Under such utilitarian thinking, a change in viewing ethics from when the company left China, Google is on track to bring more equality in information access to the second largest country in the world in terms of nominal GDP. Google has evolved over the years in recognizing the need to deal with business in societies that have drastically different attitudes toward the internet.

• The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS today condemned the persistent attacks that journalists and media in Nicaragua are going through, which also includes being subject to political pressure and indirect censorship by the government, reported dpa news.

• “The Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the IACHR condemns the persistence of constant threats against the safety of journalists, surveillance and political pressure on the media in Nicaragua,” said the organization in a press statement.

• The Office of the Special Rapporteur also made an “urgent appeal” to the State of Nicaragua “to stop these actions and guarantee the free and independent functioning of the media in the country,” which since April has experienced its worst political crisis in several decades.

• According to the IACHR, one of the cases that has been verified by its mission in Nicaragua is that of Channel 10, whose reporters and management are “under governmental pressure” since the political crisis began.

• In the wake of the Chemnitz demonstrations, Germany is facing tough questions. Civil rights lawyer Nadine Strossen tells DW why the best way to deal with hate is free speech, not censorship.

• If there’s one way to describe Q’s work, it’d be that his film is not likely to come to a theatre near you. But it may have a way of coming closer, through your phone, tablet or laptop, courtesy online streaming services that are soaking up the controversial products of Q’s fervid imagination.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On Friday, during the final day of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had an interesting exchange over recent privacy cases with the Supreme Court judicial nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

• “I’ve talked repeatedly in this hearing about how technology will be one of the huge issues with the Fourth Amendment going forward,” said Kavanaugh, who serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

• Opening their six-minute tête-à-tête, Leahy began by asking the appellate court judge about about what Kavanaugh wrote in November 2015 in a case known as Klayman v. Obama. In that case, a well-known conservative activist attorney, Larry Klayman, sued the then-president on June 7, 2013—the day after the Snowden revelations became public. The complaint argued that the National Security Agency’s telephone metadata program (“Section 215″), which gathered records of all incoming and outgoing calls for years on end, was unconstitutional.

• Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testified Thursday night that “I don’t see how I could” stand by a 2015 opinion he wrote upholding the dragnet collection of domestic call records, citing a recent ruling that limited police access to cellphone location data.

• But Kavanaugh’s disavowal didn’t win over attorneys who challenged the National Security Agency program, who say they remain concerned about his interpretation of the Fourth Amendment and his still-murky role in post-Sept. 11 surveillance programs.

• “I don’t know if that puts him on the pro-privacy side. He’s just recognizing that Carpenter is the law,” said Jameel Jaffer, who led the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit against the NSA program. “In my view, Kavanaugh’s defense of the program was wrong when he wrote it.”

• Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman, whose case was shot down by Kavanaugh, called the late-night testimony “a cop-out.”

• Not since the days of the US Clipper chip in the early 1990s, have backdoors put there by government decree to bypass encryption been this fashionable with governments.

• Clipper – an encryption chipset with a US-government-accessible backdoor backed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) – foundered on the stubborn resistance of one man in his spare room, Phil Zimmermann, and a modest home-brew application, PGP, that even some experts struggled to use. But the NSA, which at the time had asked private firms to use Clipper in their telephone and modem designs, never gave up hope. Now it looks as if it’s back for another go.

• The US and UK governments have been dropping hints about backdoors for some time, which optimists took as aspiration rather than policy. Last week, backdoors stepped back into the realm of the possible with the publication of an Australian memo issued on behalf of the Five Eyes Alliance, which includes the UK, US Canada and New Zealand.

• The apps in question include popular ones like ASKfm, Photobucket, Homes.com, Tapatalk, NOAA Weather Radar, etc. The monetization firms buying the data include Cuebiq, Sense360, Teemo, Fysical, etc.

• While the app developers claim that such practice is harmless as they don’t get personally identifiable data, security researchers have told TechCrunch that latitude and longitude coordinates can be easily used to locate a person with high accuracy.

• A group of security researchers say dozens of popular iPhone apps are quietly sharing the location data of “tens of millions of mobile devices” with third-party data monetization firms.

• Almost all require access to a user’s location data to work properly, like weather and fitness apps, but share that data often as a way to generate revenue for free-to-download apps.

• In many cases, the apps send precise locations and other sensitive, identifiable data “at all times, constantly,” and often with “little to no mention” that location data will be shared with third-parties, say security researchers at the GuardianApp project.

• Sadly this is nothing new: Apple often doesn’t react to stuff like this until someone points it out. I wrote that the Mac App Store is full of scams back in 2016, and all the apps I mentioned were taken down or given less vague descriptions a few weeks later. It would be nice if Apple caught stuff like this before someone pointed it out publicly.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Revenge porn — or, more accurately, “non-consensual pornography” — is unquestionably bad. We’ve spent plenty of time mocking the jackasses who have been involved in these awful sites, and have been happy to see them flail around as the stench of their association with these sites sticks.

• However, we have not supported the attempts by a small group of legal academics to criminalize running such a site for a variety of reasons. First, such an action would make plenty of protected speech illegal causing massive collateral damage to speech and internet platforms. Second, as we’ve repeatedly documented, these revenge porn sites don’t seem to last very long, and those involved with them have a fairly permanent stain on their reputations. Third, in many cases, the type of people running these sites often seem to have already violated other laws, for which law enforcement is able to go after them.

• In recent years, the Supreme Court has made it pretty clear that it has little interest in expanding the categories of speech that are exempted from the First Amendment. I’ve often pointed to lawyer Mark Bennett’s 2014 blog post entitled First Amendment 101 in which he details out the very short list of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment. That post is actually about attempts to outlaw revenge porn and claims that it’s not protected by the First Amendment, but the list is a useful one to point to any time anyone suggests that this or that speech shouldn’t be subject to the First Amendment.

• Some people insist that revenge porn would clearly be exempt from the First Amendment because it’s so bad. But they ignore that, in recent years, the Supreme Court has made it clear that such awful content as video depictions of cruelty to animals and picketing military funerals with truly hateful signs is protected under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has it’s very short and narrow list of exceptions, and hasn’t shown any indication that it’s ready to expand that list.

• Nothing says America 2018 like a spate of stories on how back-to-school shopping includes bulletproof backpacks. Arming teachers and gearing kids up like commandos are presented as more-or-less reasonable responses to concerns about school safety.

• Any violence in schools is too much, of course, but a conversation about school safety that’s focused on guns and bullets is a narrow and distorted conversation. Recasting our definition of a “safe school environment” could lead us in some very different directions.

• Karen Dolan is director of the Criminalization of Race and Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author, with Ebony Slaughter-Johnson and Myacah Sampson, of the recent report Students Under Siege: How the School-to-Prison Pipeline, Poverty and Racism Endanger Our Schoolchildren. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Karen Dolan.

• Yevgeny Popov, a Russian dissident writer, can laugh about it now, but it was a serious matter in 1979 when he was banned by Soviet authorities as part of “the Metropol affair,” a literary scandal involving a ribald collection of fiction and essays published outside the USSR to avoid censorship.

• Popov was an editor of the outlaw underground collection, titled Metropol, which included sexual references and scatological words that government censors labeled an anti-Soviet plot designed to denigrate Soviet literature. Popov deemed it satire of a repressive regime.

• Popov was expelled in 1979 from the state-sanctioned Union of Soviet Writers after just seven months of membership. “I think it was a Guinness Book of World Records for being kicked out of a literary organization,” Popov said with a deep chortle that caused his large belly to quake.

• I met up with Popov and writer Boris Evseev during a summer trip to Russia with my wife Mary, who is a fluent Russian speaker. Galina Evtushenko, a Russian filmmaker and visiting Fulbright scholar in the history department at the University at Albany, made the introduction to her writer friends.

• We were sipping strong black Russian tea and devouring pastries — Popov ate his with crumb-cascading gusto — at a museum adjacent to the apartment of Mikhail Bulgakov, a dissident Russian novelist of an earlier generation. His satirical novel “The Master and Margarita,” which began in 1928, featured a visit to Moscow by Satan and mocked Soviet mores, was banned during Bulgakov’s lifetime by Stalin regime censors. Parts of the heavily redacted manuscript were leaked in 1966, but it was not reconstructed in its original version and published as Bulgakov intended until 1969 in Germany. It became an international sensation and received wide acclaim as a masterpiece of literary satire, but Bulgakov had died long before, of kidney disease in 1940 at age 48.

• In the midst of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency routinely collected information about the methods of control employed by the Soviet Union to capture, incarcerate, and punish those opposed to the state. While the CIA used this information to denounce the USSR in reports such as this one available in the CREST archives, a modern reader will note how several of the criticized policies resemble those of the criminal justice system in modern day America.

• Ministers are routinely providing legal cover for the intelligence services where there is a possibility of information being extracted through torture abroad, under a so-called “James Bond clause”, a human rights group has alleged.

• Reprieve is planning to launch a judicial review of the practice of repeatedly granting protection – in effect immunity from prosecution – for MI6 or GCHQ officers in cases involving detainees held overseas.

• The legal challenge follows a report by parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) earlier this summer on rendition and mistreatment of terrorist suspects since 9/11.

• The claim will add to pressure on the government to hold a judge-led inquiry into the UK’s involvement in human rights abuses. The Council of Europe’s new commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatović, has sent a letter to the prime minister saying it would send out “a positive signal to other … states” which still have to “provide a full account of their involvement in rendition and secret detention programmes”.

• The government is facing a legal challenge over its use of a secretive law that can authorise the involvement of British intelligence officers in torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

• A section of the Intelligence Services Act 1994 allows ministers to permit British personnel to commit criminal acts abroad.

• In June two reports from parliament’s intelligence and security committee revealed that current and former cabinet ministers including Theresa May, Philip Hammond and Boris Johnson said they could authorise operations even when there was a serious risk of complicity in torture or mistreatment.

• In the old days, law enforcement and intelligence agencies misbehaved.

• 1) CIA officer E. Howard Hunt planted spies in the 1964 Goldwater campaign. “My subordinates volunteered inside, collected advance copies of position papers and other material, and handed them over to CIA personnel,” Hunt confessed in a memoir. A Goldwater secretary provided advance copies of speeches and press releases, and a “journalist” from Continental Press news service—a CIA front—picked them up and delivered to a CIA officer assigned to the National Security Council at the White House.

• “They seemed to know everything I was going to do, everything I was going to say,” Goldwater sighed.

• John Roche, speechwriter for President Johnson, confirmed that “Somehow or other, we used to get advance texts of Senator Goldwater’s key speeches. The consequence of this was that before Goldwater had even opened his mouth, we had five speakers primed to reply. . . . All I know is that when I innocently inquired how we got them, the reply was ‘Don’t ask.’”

• According to Goldwater’s communications director, reporters asked specific questions about travel plans that had been discussed only behind closed doors.

• Goldwater’s plane was bugged. So was Richard Nixon’s plane in 1968; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told Nixon after Nixon won.

• I worked at the NFL. The players were never protesting the military, but racial injustice – police brutality, mass incarceration, and systemic racism.

• I started my professional career in the communications department of the National Football League. It was a dream job right out of college. I grew up a passionate New York Giants fan, but more importantly, I recognized the invaluable experience I’d gain working for an organization that managed to draw more than 100 million viewers to the Super Bowl each year.

• This is not a novel observation, but the NFL is more than a sports organization. Football is — sorry baseball — America’s pastime, and the league’s steps and missteps on player discipline, health and safety, and executive compensation have become part of the national conversation. Knowing this, leadership has clear instructions: Focus on the game; deflect from a scandal; protect the shield.

• At the end of the day, it’s a business. Pontificate all you want about the selective outrage of the fanbase — denounce signing a domestic violence abuser unless he boosts that defensive line — but that fanbase buys tickets, merchandise, and expensive cable packages to justify multi-year broadcast deals.

• The International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) demands the immediate end to all connections, partnerships and agreements between UIC and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). We call on all students, student clubs, faculty, and campus workers to take up and fight for this demand: CIA out of UIC!

• Behind the backs of students and educators, UIC agreed in February to partner with the CIA as part of the Signature Schools Program, which includes a handful of other colleges around the country.

• The university has provided little information to students about the program. According to a brief statement published on UIC News, which few students read, the CIA will now have “a regular recruiting presence on the UIC campus”; students “will have opportunities to engage in on-campus interviews, information sessions, workshops, simulations and networking activities with CIA personnel”; and “students will participate in unclassified discussions, presentations and seminars that discuss the business of intelligence and learn about employment opportunities within the CIA.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Google’s move to strip out the www in domains typed into the address bar, beginning with version 69 of its Chrome browser, has drawn an enormous amount of criticism from developers who see the move as a bid to cement the company’s dominance of the Web.

Intellectual Monopolies

• On Aug. 27, 2018, the United States District Court for the District of Delaware denied Hospira Inc.’s motion for judgment as a matter of law and found substantial evidence supported an earlier jury verdict that certain batches of drug product manufactured by Hospira failed to qualify for the safe harbor created by 35 U.S.C. § 271(e)(1).

• …Federal Court of Justice held that when inventive step is assessed it is of the utmost importance to consider all aspects of the claimed subject-matter and in particular effects and advantages of these aspects in order to avoid a hindsight assessment of inventive step.

• The German Federal Patent Court has rejected the application for a preliminary court order for a licence to use the European patent of two French pharmaceutical companies

• The German Federal Patent Court announced today that it has dismissed an application for a preliminary court order for licence to use the European patent of two pharmaceutical companies.

• Strafford will be offering a webinar entitled “3D Printing: Implications for Patents, Trademarks, Trade Secrets and Copyrights — Challenges With Additive Manufacturing, Policing and Enforcement Strategies to Protect IP” on September 18, 2018 from 1:00 to 2:30 pm (EDT). Elizabeth D. Ferrill of Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner, Christopher Higgins of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, and Marc H. Trachtenberg of Greenberg Traurig will examine 3D printing and its current and potential implications for patents, trademark, trade dress, trade secret, and copyrights, and offer guidance for developing enforcement strategies to police and protect IP rights in the emerging world of additive manufacturing.

• There’s a third summary judgment motion related to Qualcomm’s business practices that is worth talking about, though it is admittedly a distant third given the enormous potential of the FTC’s motion regarding the licensong of rival chipset makers and Apple’s motion targeting Qualcomm’s “double-dipping” (chipset sales + patent royalties). In a lower-profile motion that nevertheless highlights a major issue, Apple has asked Judge Gonzalo Curiel of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California to throw out Qualcomm’s counterclaims according to which Apple has to repay rebates amounting to billions of dollars because it breached a “Business Cooperation and Patent Agreement” (BCPA) through its efforts to instigate and broaden antitrust investigations into Qualcomm’s conduct (this post continues below the document):

• Huawei is indeed torn between two roles: that of a licensor of standard-essential patents (SEPs), and that of a licensee.

• Just at a time when Huawei is trying to prove Samsung’s infringement of some of its SEPs in court (and seeking a whopping 1.5% royalty), a group of three affiliated non-practicing entities (Optis Wireless TEchnology, Optis Cellular Technology, and Panoptis Patent Management) has prevailed over Huawei in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on all five patents-in-suit: four FRAND-pledged wireless SEPS and one non-FRAND-pledged (but potentially still essential) H.264 codec patent. And the jury awarded a total of $10.6 million, with each of the four FRAND-committed patents, however, accounting for only an average of approximately $0.7 million. In other words, the non-FRAND patent was deemed roughly ten times more valuable. While it’s theoretically possible that the non-FRAND H.264 patent was considered more valuable for technical reasons than the FRAND-pledged wireless SEPs, Judge Rodney Gilstrap, the nation’s busiest patent judge in recent history, had instructed the jury that the FRAND promise needed to be kept in mind when determining damages.

• [...]

• Huawei makes very good devices. I’ve bought some for my app development company, and it’s one of two Android brands that I’ve repeatedly recommended to others. It would be great if Huawei’s priority was its product business, in which case it should be in the FRAND camp. Its dispute with ZTE earlier this decade was more of a statement. To me it looked like Huawei wanted to demonstrate that it takes pride in its contributions to wireless innovation. But the longer its dispute with Samsung takes, the more I fear that Huawei is actually aspiring to become the next Qualcomm…

• It will be interesting to watch the further proceedings in the Eastern District of Texas.

Trademarks

• Morality judgments have been a core governmental activity for millennia. However, when it comes to limiting speech – morality is unlikely to be a sufficient justification to overcome today’s expansive Free Speech principles.

• The Lanham Act requires the USPTO to bar registration for marks that are either “immoral” or “scandalous.” 15 U.S.C. 1052(a). A separate portion of the provision prohibits registration of marks that “may disparage . . . persons” — but the Supreme Court found that portion uncontitutional in Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. ___ (2017). In Brunetti, the Federal Circuit expanded Tam by holding that the prohibition on registering “immoral” or “scandalous” marks is also an unconstitutional. The court suggested that the government could draw some lines – such as barring obscene marks — but those dilenations are the province of Congress.

• The CJEU has dismissed a trade mark appeal over a German castle name in a decision that overrules the German Federal Court and opens the gates for other European heritage-site owners to monopolise their marks

• We just recently discussed the very good ruling by Judge T.S. Ellis in a trademark lawsuit between Express Homebuyers USA and WBH Marketing Inc. over the latter’s once-valid trademark, “We Buy Houses.” Ellis not only concluded that Express Homebuyers’ advertising that it too “buys homes” was not trademark infringement, but also went so far as to proclaim that WBH’s mark was generic and invalidated it. The generic nature of the mark was obvious and it’s a wonder the USPTO ever approved it, but in the end the ruling was good.

• Separately, WBH sued Express Homebuyers for false advertising, trade libel, and conspiracy as well. Much of these accusations either relied on the trademark WBH once held or targeted Express Homebuyers’ discussion of the dispute in public. In yet another good ruling from Ellis, however, those claims were all tossed out as invalid.

Copyrights

• Recording first-run movies in cinemas, an activity known as “camming”, has long been a thorn in the side of movie companies everywhere. In Italy, there are moves underway to tackle the problem, by upgrading the practice to a criminal offense with more severe penalties. Cinema owners may also install monitoring equipment to detect people illegally recording on site.

• Back in June, I wrote a long post about the proposed update to EU copyright law. As I explained, there are some bad ideas being proposed, notably upload filters (Article 13), and ancillary copyright for news publications (Article 11), that will seriously harm the Internet in the EU. I won’t repeat everything I wrote there: the bad ideas are still in play, despite minor amendments that have been proposed to give the impression that problems have been addressed. They haven’t.

• But I will ask you to write, once more, to your MEPs, as I did again in July, asking them to defend the Internet in the key European Parliament vote on Wednesday, 12 September. Once more, a short email is quite sufficient: the most important thing is to convey the seriousness of the situation. At its simplest, we need to remove Article 11 and Article 13 completely – they are not salvageable – and to amend Article 3 to allow companies to carry out text and data mining (TDM).

• Copyright and tattoos is one of The IPKat’s favourite topics. Over time a few posts have been devoted to exploring the intricacies of copyright law as applied to this type of works: see, eg here, here, here, here, here, here, here. However, as Jeremy recalled – despite all this interest – The IPKat sports no tattoos, not least because of the mess it would make of the fur.

• YouTube has published a blog slamming Article 13 of the EU Digital Single Market Copyright Directive. It is unclear how the website would handle the provision making it directly liable for copyright infringement

• YouTube has voiced its stance on the argument on the EU’s Digital Single Market Copyright Directive ahead of the vote on the proposed legislation in the EU Parliament on September 12.

• BitTorrent has proven to be an ideal tool for pirates. The protocol’s decentralized nature makes it impossible to interfere with transfers between users. Torrent sites and indexes are the only weak link in the chain, but there are novel solutions to that ‘problem’ as well, it appears.

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