● 09.17.18

● Links 17/9/2018: Torvalds Takes a Break, SQLite 3.25.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 2:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• I’m in a perpetual state of downsizing and ridding my life (and my family’s life) of things we don’t need: sometimes old computers. My main (nearly my sole) machine is my work-provided Thinkpad T470s: a fantastic laptop that works so well I haven’t had anything to write about it. However, I decided that it was worth keeping just one spare, for emergencies or other odd situations. I have two candidate machines in my possession.

• [...]

• Surprising myself perhaps more than anyone else, I’ve ended up opting for the Toshiba. The weight was the clincher. The CPU performance difference was too close to matter, and 3G RAM is sufficient for my spare laptop needs. Once I’d installed a spare SSD as the main storage device, day-to-day performance is very good. The resolution difference didn’t turn out to be that important: it’s still low enough that side-by-side text editor and browser feels crowded, so I end up using the same window management techniques as I would on the X61s.

• What do I use it for? I’ve taken it on a couple of trips or holidays which I wouldn’t want to risk my work machine for. I wrote nearly all of liquorice on it in downtime on a holiday to Turkey whilst my daughter was having her afternoon nap. I’m touching up this blog post on it now!

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Accessibility For The Visually Impaired. I received a comment from Milton asking me about text to speech options in Linux. He also wanted to know what I recommended for audio dictation under Linux. The first option is indeed, using FoSS awesomeness. However the later relies on Google’s Web Speech API. Also, here is that article on controlling your mouse cursor with your webcam and no hands.

Kernel Space

• Another week, another rc.

• Nothing particularly odd stands out on the technical side in the kernel updates for last week – rc4 looks fairly average in size for this stage in the release cycle, and all the other statistics look pretty normal too.

• We’ve got roughly two thirds driver fixes (gpu and networking look to be the bulk of it, but there’s smaller changes all over in various driver subsystems), with the rest being the usual mix: core networking, perf tooling updates, arch updates, Documentation, some filesystem, vm and minor core kernel fixes.

• So it’s all fairly small and normal for this stage. As usual, I’m appending the shortlog at the bottom for people who want to get an overview of the details without actually having to go dig in the git tree.

• I am also mindful of ego. None of us like to admit we have an ago, but we all do. You don’t get to build one of the most fundamental technologies in the last thirty years and not have an ego. He built it…they came…and a revolution was energized because of what he created. While Linus’s ego is more subtle, and thankfully doesn’t extend to faddish self-promotion, overly expensive suits, and forays into Hollywood (quite the opposite), his ego has naturally resulted in abrupt opinions on how his project should run, sometimes plugging fingers in his ears to particularly challenging viewpoints from others. His post today is a clear example of him putting Linux as a project ahead of his own personal ego.

• This is important for a few reasons. Firstly, being in such a public position and accepting your personal flaws isn’t a problem many people face, and isn’t a situation many people handle well. I work with a lot of CEOs, and they often say it is the loneliest job on the planet. I have heard American presidents say the same in interviews. This is because they are the top of the tree with all the responsibility and expectations on their shoulders. Put yourself in Linus’s position: his little project has blown up into a global phenomenon, and he didn’t necessarily have the social tools to be able to handle this change. Ego forces these internal struggles under the surface and to push them down and avoid them. So, to accept them as publicly and openly as he did today is a very firm step in the right direction. Now, the true test will be results, but we need to all provide the breathing space for him to accomplish them.

• So, I would encourage everyone to give Linus a shot. This doesn’t mean the frustrations of the past are erased, and he has acknowledged and apologized for these mistakes as a first step. He has accepted he struggles with understanding other’s emotions, and a desire to help improve this for the betterment of the project and himself. He is a human, and the best tonic for humans to resolve their own internal struggles is the support and encouragement of other humans. This is not unique to Linus, but to anyone who faces similar struggles.

• After writing yesterday about kernel contributions of AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. Intel, I kicked off the hours-long process of gitstats analyzing the Linux kernel Git repository for some fresh numbers on the current kernel development trends.

• Even on an EPYC server with Optane 900p NVMe SSD storage, the gitstats process on the hearty Linux kernel repository is quite a task. But the process is done and offering a fresh look at the current Linux kernel activity in Git. Here are some of the findings:

• The kernel repository is at 782,487 commits in total from around 19.009 different authors. The repository is made up of 61,725 files and from there around 25,584,633 lines — keep in mind there is also documentation, Kconfig build files, various helpers/utilities, etc.

• Prior to releasing Linux 4.19-rc4 and Linus Torvalds taking a temporary leave of absence to reflect on his behavior / colorful language, he did apply a Code of Conduct to the Linux kernel.

• Previously the Linux kernel had a “Code of Conflict” that some might feel is rather harsh. But now it’s been replaced by a Code of Conduct that is derived from the Contributor Covenant that has been used by the X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org projects, among others.

• In a surprising move, Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, is taking a break on his Linux kernel work to work on his behavior to other developers. In a note to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Torvalds wrote, “I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.”

• If you follow the trials and tribulations of Linux’s developments, this is mind-blowing. For the almost 30-years Torvalds has been working on the kernel, he’s been famous–or infamous–for his outbursts towards programmers and others who didn’t meet his high expectations.

• Over the decades, Torvalds has torn into security developers, open-source lawyers, and other kernel developers, such as Sage, formerly Sarah, Sharp. Every few months, there would be another four-letter Torvalds eruption. This became publicly accepted, but privately it left bad blood.

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds has made an uncharacteristic admission that he needs to change the way he interacts with people on the Linux kernel mailing list and says he will take some time off and get assistance “on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately”.

• Torvalds’s confession was part of a long email which he sent about the latest kernel release and how his inability to manage his schedule had led to him being his usual explosive self.

• No more F-words and angry outbursts from Torvalds anymore? Linux creator Linus Torvalds is taking a break from Linux kernel development in order to take professional help for improving his behavior.

• To me, this came somewhat as a surprise. I’m not really involved in Linux kernel development, and so the history of what led up to this email mostly passed unnoticed, at least for me; but that doesn’t mean I cannot recognize how difficult this must have been to write for him.

• As I know from experience, admitting that you have made a mistake is hard. Admitting that you have been making the same mistake over and over again is even harder. Doing so publically? Even more so, since you’re placing yourself in a vulnerable position, one that the less honorably inclined will take advantage of if you’re not careful.

• Last month we covered early work being done on an Intel 2.5G Ethernet Linux driver. That “IGC” driver for Intel I225-LM/I225-V 2.5G Ethernet adapters didn’t make it for Linux 4.19, but it looks like it will be on track for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel.

Linux Foundation

• Dr. Angel Diaz is the face of open source at IBM as Vice President of Developer Technology, Open Source & Advocacy. At the recent Open Source Summit in Vancouver, we spoke with Diaz to talk about the importance of open source at IBM and how it’s changing the world around us.

Graphics Stack

• Mir 1.0 was talked about for release last year but at the last minute they reverted it to Mir 0.28. There is now a patch pending that is once again attempting the Mir 1.0 milestone.

• Mir 1.0 was pulled back previously after Canonical shifted away from its mobile/convergence effort as well as slashed some of the Mir resources involved. Since then Mir has continued to mature but with a focus on offering Wayland protocol compatibility and a platform still catering to Snaps and Ubuntu IoT use-cases.

• With the Wayland support within Mir squared away for the essentials, now it seems they are preparing for the Mir 1.0 banner.

• Later this week the GeForce RTX 2080 “Turing” GPUs begin shipping and one of the interesting additions with this new GPU architecture is support for mesh shaders.

• Mesh shaders are part of a new programmable geometric shading pipeline that allows the generation of compact “meshlet” meshes on-chip. Mesh shaders work with not only Microsoft Direct3D 12 but can also be setup with new OpenGL/Vulkan extensions.

Benchmarks

• Last week I provided a fresh look at the latest Linux performance on 22 Intel/AMD systems while for kicking off the benchmarking this week is a look at the current Linux performance on sixteen different ARM single board computers / developer boards from low-end to high-end.

• For those curious about the current ARM Linux performance or wanting to compare your own x86/ARM/POWER/MIPS performance to these 16 ARM boards, here are some fresh benchmarks using the latest ARM Linux image releases for these different boards under test. Without going into too old of ARM platforms and based upon what I had available, the sixteen ARM boards for this comparison were…

Applications

• While the paperless world isn’t here quite yet, more and more people are getting rid of paper by scanning documents and photos. Having a scanner isn’t enough to do the deed, though. You need software to drive that scanner.

• But the catch is many scanner makers don’t have Linux versions of the software they bundle with their devices. For the most part, that doesn’t matter. Why? Because there are good scanning applications available for the Linux desktop. They work with a variety of scanners and do a good job.

• Setting up a website is not an easy task especially when you have to maintain multiple websites including databases and other files. Its become more hectic, when you go for VPS servers or Cloud hosting those are not more than a just bare server machine with some Linux operating system such as CentOS or Ubuntu. Those are website developers or familiar to how to up and run a website on Linux server definitely looking for some kind of free & open source tools to manage a website’s hosting backend.

• To solve such situations we have web hosting control panels or admin panels software those comes really handy and helps to get rid of the command interface for setting up each and everything.

• A year or two ago I bought Lindsey Stirling’s Album Brave Enough. It’s wonderful all around, but I really fell in love with Gavi’s Song.

• Three weeks ago I took a stab at playing this on my guitar. It’s technically not actually that difficult – After listening to the original and trying to repeat it for several days, I can now actually play through it without too many hiccups (still far from being YouTube’able, though). At least the first two thirds – but what I have is enough to get the feeling across, and it has a proper ending.

• curl is quite literally used everywhere. It is used by a huge number of applications and devices. But which applications, devices and users are the ones with the largest number of curl installations? I’ve tried to come up with a list…

• I truly believe curl is one of the world’s most widely used open source projects.

• If you have comments, other suggestions or insights to help me polish this table or the numbers I present, please let me know!

Instructionals/Technical

• I think the first word I learned to type fast—and I mean really fast—was “fireball.”

• Like most of us, I started my typing career with a “hunt-and-peck” technique, using my index fingers and keeping my eyes focused on the keyboard to find letters as I needed them. It’s not a technique that allows you to read and write at the same time; you might call it half-duplex. It was okay for typing cd and dir, but it wasn’t nearly fast enough to get ahead in the game. Especially if that game was a MUD.

Wine or Emulation

• Happening back at the end of June was WineConf 2018 in The Hague as the annual Wine developer conference. The remaining video recordings from that event are finally available.

Games

• Overwatch players using the Linux operating system to play Blizzard’s hero-shooter found themselves banned from the game over the weekend. Those bans have since been overturned, but some players were finding that their choice of OS was landing them with permanent account closure.

• Gift of Parthax is an arena fighting game where you play as a Wizard who can create their own spells, looks interesting and it now has a Linux beta available for testing.

• For those of you who love over the top fast-paced action, Galaxy Champions TV is now officially available on Linux.

• The Windows version release on September 6th, with the developer stating a Linux version will come “hopefully next week”. True to their word, they delivered a Linux build on the 14th. Nice to see a developer put in the effort!

• Shovel Knight: King of Cards is the final campaign in the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove saga which has now been pushed back until next year. Also announced is Shovel Knight Showdown, a local multiplayer version of the game.

• I don’t think I will ever tire of seeing more games that let you build your own spaceship, BlockShip Wars: Roguelike added Linux support recently.

• It has two game modes available, the first is what they’re calling “Roguelike mode” featuring permanent death, no levelling or experience points and the other is the “RPG mode” which has experience, levelling and so on.

• Do you like your meditative exploration games? 0°N 0°W looks absolutely surreal and it added Linux support. They haven’t announced it yet, with Linux support being added two days ago as they’re currently working on the changelog. It is very much live though.

• Positech Games have announced Democracy 4 [Official Site], the next evolution of their political strategy game and it’s coming with Linux support. For those who think they can run a country or would like to have a go at it, this is probably the closest you will ever get.

• This is good to see, because we had Democracy 3 that supported Linux, but Democracy 3 Africa did not support Linux. A shame too, because I rather liked what I saw in Democracy 3 which is why I’m quite happy about this news.

• Ready for more adventures? The Darkside Detective: Season 2 will follow on from the original and it’s currently on Kickstarter.

• It seems NVIDIA have been working on some improvements to their Linux driver, as the 396.54.05 beta driver seems to have improved performance in various games.

• Tweeting about it, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said “Proton NVIDIA users: the latest 396.54.05 Vulkan Beta driver contains significant performance improvements in GPU-bound scenarios.”. He also noted that those on Ubuntu can grab it from a different PPA provided by Canonical for easy installation.

• Looking around, it seems he’s right on the money. Talking about it in our forum (also reddit), users noted improvements to games run on Linux. The improvements look pretty impressive too. The focus of everyone’s testing seems to be DXVK which benefits from the new driver, so I went to test.

• I’ve seen a lot of games in my time, yet developers somehow still find ways to surprised me. Pig Eat Ball looks totally weird, but also quite fun.

• Funded on Fig back in back in April, thanks to 252 backers along with a fair bit of help from Fig directly. The developer has now announced, that the release is expected on September 27th.

• Wizard of Legend, the dungeon crawler that has you take on the role of a Wizard is getting a fresh content update named Sky Palace.

• The update is going to include more enemy types, more special signature moves and a new location to fight in. I’m especially excited by this, because it’s a really damn fun game to play by yourself and with others. I’ve enjoyed it just as much alone, as I have playing in local co-op with the mini-me.

• Good news for those who want games that perform well, as Feral Interactive confirmed that Total War: WARHAMMER II will use Vulkan on Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• There’s some discussion on D15383 about the use of editorconfig in our sources, I belive that we should have this little file in *all* of our projects (actually I would put this in *every single project that exists*. This is a small file that handles common code conventions per project, for instance the tab vs spaces thing.

• Yeah I am not in the picture, but I was there! You can find me over on the left there, where several of us were cut off Akademy was held in the lovely city of Vienna, Austria this year. Hats off to the akademy team for a great job!

• This year at akademy I spent much of my time catching up with the Blue Systems team and meeting with the KDE Sysadmin team. I am happy to report Ben Cooksley is real! Due to my flights, I missed the first and last day. It was still a productive akademy. I attended some good sysadmin and KDE Neon BoFs . I also did a bit of volunteering

• Even though I am mostly packaging for Debian directly these days, KDE Neon is still near and dear to my heart. I hope to be able to merge debian packaging into Neon soon so that we can have better collaboration within the team.

• I met with Ben in regards to getting back into sysadmin/CI work. I am working on Appimage tooling for KDE Binary factory to begin. I hope to utilize the craft tooling to make everyone’s lives easier. This of course is on my free time, but do keep an eye out!

Distributions

Reviews

• On the whole, I liked running LMDE 3 a lot. The distribution was easy to set up, I liked the quick access to common tools in the welcome window. The change from ranked upgrades to having the system safeguarded by Timeshift snapshots may make things a little harder for newcomers (it’s harder to recover a system than to not have it break in the first place), but the new approach probably offers better security in the long run.

• One thing I appreciated about LMDE 3 is that it looks beautiful. I usually don’t focus much on a theme, or icon style, but Mint looks incredible to me. Everything is high contrast and attractive. The fonts are a little thin for my taste, but this can be easily changed with a few clicks in the settings panel.

• I was a little disappointed the system installer defaults to using ext4 instead of Btrfs. Since Mint recommends and relies on Timeshift for system recovery, and Btrfs snapshots are much more efficient than rsync snapshots, it makes sense to me to use Btrfs by default. On a related note, when Timeshift is set up to use rsync snapshots, the rsync command will drag down system performance for about 20 minutes at a time. Having the snapshots run as a lower priority in the background would have avoided slowing down the desktop once a day.

• I would have preferred if LMDE had shipped with MATE instead of Cinnamon. I realize Cinnamon is an in-house desktop project and it makes sense for the Mint developers to focus on using and promoting Cinnamon. However, since I suspect many of the people who want to use the Debian branch over the Ubuntu branch will be doing so for performance reasons, I think MATE would make the sensible default. MATE is lighter than Cinnamon, does not require special video driver/hardware support and will run better in virtual environments. Cinnamon is a solid desktop and I think it looks and performs wonderfully on physical hardware, it just doesn’t feel like the optimal choice for people who want to run the lighter, more conservative Debian branch of Mint.

• Finally, I want to give credit to the Mint team for integrating Flatpak support into the software manager. It is easy to find Flatpaks without having them blend in with other packages, potentially confusing users. I think Flatpak support was handled well by the Mint team.

• On the whole, the above points are minor style preferences for a distribution that I was impressed by. Mint’s Debian edition performed smoothly, offered a lot of great software out of the box and was easy to use. I think the Debian branch might be slightly less appealing to beginners than the main, Ubuntu-based edition, but there are few practical differences and most people will probably find either branch works for them. I think LMDE will be a good fit for most people, whether beginners or more experienced users.

Red Hat Family

• With the 1.0 release, Istio is preparing itself for prime time by companies developing container-native applications with a desire for adopting a service mesh solution.

• However, there is a potential issue that may slow down the adoption rate: Pods that belong to the Istio mesh require elevated privileges in order to function properly.

• In this article we will present the istio-pod-network-controller, a solution to mitigate this issue.

• [...]

• The istio-pod-network-controller is an option to make Istio deployments more secure. It does so by removing the need to run pods in the Istio mesh with the privileged SCC and allows them to run just with the nonroot SCC. If you decide to adopt this solution, please keep in mind that this is currently a best effort project and not officially supported by Red Hat.

• Mark your calendar for AnsibleFest 2018 taking place in Austin, Texas, Oct. 2-3, at the JW Marriott. AnsibleFest is an annual user conference for the Ansible community and Red Hat Ansible Automation users. The event brings together Ansible users, contributors, developers and industry partners to share innovative practices, case studies, Ansible news and much more.

• Avaloq is collaborating with Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, to simplify and further standardize the deployment and operation of software components by means of Red Hat’s Kubernetes1 application platform Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform to run cloud-native apps. The collaboration with Red Hat reflects Avaloq’s commitment to promoting cloud-based processes and providing market-leading solutions to its clients.

• Red Hat will add support for the Container Storage Interface to its existing OpenShift container platform and storage products next year, according to Red Hat executives who spoke to Computer Weekly last week.

• [...]

• Gerald Sternagl, storage business unit manager for Europe, the Middle East and Asia at Red Hat, said: “If customers want to do something with containers, then, in the long term, the path is from on-premise deployments to hybrid cloud.

• “You can’t achieve this with a hardware agenda. Look at NetApp. Its Trident storage orchestrator is the only one it supports and storage can only be NetApp storage.”

• Sternagl said Red Hat also plans to support the Container Storage Interface (CSI) from next year.

• A portion of downtown Raleigh had to be cleared Monday morning after a gas leak in front of Red Hat.

• The Raleigh Fire Department responded to the intersections of Wilmington and Davie streets and Davie and Blount streets just before 7:30 a.m. Monday and had to evacuate the immediate area.

• [...]

• “We’ve just cleared up,” said Allen Wilson, Raleigh fire division chief, around 8:30 a.m. “This happens from time to time where we have a gas line leak or rupture. They were able to get PSNC on the scene and get it under control.”

• Rather than having customers approach the technology company first, Red Hat decided to take a more proactive approach by cramming a bevy of open source platforms and technologies into an 18-wheeler trailer and visit customers directly across North America. The tour has been a resounding success, says Red Hat’s marketing lead for the West region, Chris Hawyer.

• “It’s hard for everyone to attend the summit and all of our other events,” Hawver told CDN during a stop in Toronto. “This seemed like a perfect way to go directly to our customers.”

• [...]

• “All of the presentations are done by our solution experts,” says Hawver, noting those experts are either there in-person or working remotely from their office. Even CEO Jim Whitehurst has made brief appearances via teleconferencing. “We’ve been recommending that you bring as many customers together as possible, and get them to test out their ideas and collaborate. We’ve never had a session end on time.”

Finance

Debian Family

• GIMP 2.10 landed in Debian Testing a few weeks ago and I have to say I’m very happy about it. The last major version of GIMP (2.8) was released in 2012 and the new version fixes a lot of bugs and improved the user interface.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Plane Theme and Icons Gives Your Desktop An Appearance Boost Another theme pack with icons for your Linux Desktop. Plane theme is designed to make desktop more elegant and simple, it goes very well along with its own icon pack. Now a days many themes are under development for Gnome and Plane is one of them, it is constantly updating since 2017, fixing and making theme look better. It has some parts from Arc and Adwaita themes, also some other themes inspired author to make Plane more eye catching. There are two versions in this theme: light version and dark version which gives comfort to your eyes. This pack includes Gnome shell themes as well, which lets you match your Gnome shell with your Gtk theme. Primarily, this pack targets Gnome Shell desktop but can be used on other desktops as well such as: Cinnamon, Xfce, Mate etc. Icons are designed to use with this theme pack but if you want then you can use them with any theme of your choice. Themes are available for Ubuntu 18.10/18.04 and Linux Mint 19 via our PPA. Icons available for Ubuntu 18.10/18.04/16.04/14.04/Linux Mint 19/18/17. If you find any kind of bug or problem with this theme pack then report it to author and it will get fixed in the next update.

• Shadow icon theme is a new comer for Linux desktop, it looks beautiful with all kind of themes. It is meant to be modern clean and customizable, the primary color of this set most likely bluish and many apps icons are in round shape. So basically this theme is mixture of round and normal (square) shape icons, lets see where this theme will head in the future, it should choose shape what users asks. As creator mentioned this icon theme is his first so please bare any bugs or missing icons. You can report bugs or suggest new icons to include in this set via this link. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool to change themes/icons.

Devices/Embedded

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• On behalf of the Apache SpamAssassin Project Management Committee, I am very pleased to announce the release of Apache SpamAssassin v3.4.2. This release contains security bug fixes. A security announcement will follow within the next 24 hours.

• Apache SpamAssassin can be downloaded from https://spamassassin.apache.org/downloads.cgi and via cpan (Mail::SpamAssassin).

• Our project website is https://spamassassin.apache.org/

• Our DOAP is available at https://spamassassin.apache.org/doap.rdf

• Back in June, Valve announced “Moondust” as a new VR technical demo to showcase their hardware efforts (primarily with the Knuckles EV2 VR controllers) and consists of some mini games. It looks like this tech demo might be soon open-sourced.

• If you missed Valve’s original announcement of Moondust, you can find it on SteamCommunity.com granted this tech demo is primarily aimed at VR-enabling game developers.

• London: Zinc, a UK based start-up, today launches its blockchain based hiring software, which promises to eliminate many of the inefficiencies associated with recruitment within the technology sector. Available to the public from today, Zinc has been successfully tested in beta with customers including GoCardless and Booking.com.

• Open source networking leader Lumina Networks today announced the addition of three industry leaders to their engineering team. Avinash Parwaney joins Lumina’s executive team as VP of Engineering. Parwaney is formerly from Cisco where he was Senior Director of Engineering. Prem Sankar Gopannan has joined Lumina as Director of Engineering and Iyappa Swaminathan has joined as Director of Technical Product Management.

• “I am pleased to welcome Avinash to lead the Lumina engineering team. He brings a wealth of real-world experience in large scale service provider networking,” said Andrew Coward, CEO of Lumina Networks. “Avinash will help Lumina accelerate our open source-based networking platforms and applications from proof of concept trials into production deployment. The addition of Prem and Iyappa to the team will further strengthen our ability to help lead the open source networking community, driving innovation and productization.”

Databases

• SQLite 3.25 was released this weekend as the newest feature update to this embed-friendly SQL database library.

• The big feature to SQLite 3.25 is support for window functions inspired by PostgreSQL where input values are taken from a “window” of 1+ rows in the results set of a SELECT query. SQLite window functions should be compatible with similar PostgreSQL queries and described well in the documentation.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The open banking Data Standards Body, which is being run by the CSIRO’s Data61 unit, is using the online service to manage feedback and comments for the technical standards that will govern the movement of data in the new economy. All decision proposals and final decisions for the open banking standards will be published on GitHub.

• eBay have discussed how they are conducting a replatforming initiative across their entire technology stack, which includes building and releasing as open source both the new hardware and software created. Open source is “fueling the transformation” of eBay’s infrastructure, and they intend to use cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, Envoy, MongoDB, Docker and Apache Kafka.

• As part of a three-year effort to replatform and modernise their backend infrastructure, eBay has recently announced that they are building their own custom-designed servers “built by eBay, for eBay”. The plan also includes making eBay’s servers available to the public via open source in the fourth quarter of this year. Although many large scale technical organisations and cloud vendors custom build their own hardware, including Google, AWS and Azure, they do not typically release this as open source. eBay have stated that they “are using servers and hardware that we designed, reducing our dependence on third parties”.

BSD

• The final version of 7.0.0 has been tagged from the branch at r342370. It is identical to rc3 modulo release notes and docs changes.

• The LLVM/Clang 7.0 release had been running a bit behind schedule and warranted a third release candidate, but this week LLVM 7.0.0 is now ready to ship.

• Release manager Hans Wennborg announced minutes ago on the mailing list that the 7.0.0 release has been tagged in their source tree. This ends up being the same as last week’s 7.0-RC3 except for release notes and documentation updates.

• One of the features that didn’t materialize for LLVM / Clang 7.0 is the SPIR-V support within the compiler toolchain.

• While there has been a SPIR-V / LLVM translator out-of-tree and various developers at different vendors have been discussing for months the prospects of adding SPIR-V intermediate representation support to LLVM/Clang, it has yet to materialize.

• The latest developer discussion is to have a roundtable talk on the SPIR-V integration at the 2018 LLVM Developers’ Meeting. This year the LLVM Developers’ Meeting is happening at the San Jose Convention Center from 17 to 18 October.

Public Services/Government

• In November, Bulgaria’s state eGovernment agency SEGA (Държавната агенция „Електронно управление“ ДАЕУ) will award a contract for building the country’s open source code repository. SEGA began studying submitted proposals this Tuesday. The repository, to be based on Git, will be hosting source all software newly developed by or for Bulgaria’s public services.

• [...]

• Published under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) the Data-Gov-BG provides custom code for Bulgaria’s open data portal, including documentation about access and reuse of public sector information. The portal uses CKAN – open source software for data repositories.

Programming/Development

• Daniel writes, “An obsessive programmer, frustrated with not only the inefficiencies of mainstream OSes like Windows, but what he sees as their ‘imperialistic oppression,’ built an entire operating system using a subleq architecture. Subleq is a OISC, a language with only a single command. It lacks the most basic features of programming languages, and yet is Turing Complete.

• Released this week was the first RC milestone for the PHP 7.3 feature update due out before year’s end. This weekend I ran some fresh PHP benchmarks looking at its performance.

• The PHP 7.3 release candidate is made up of many fixes ranging from memory corruption and segmentation faults to undefined symbols and other problems. The list of changes can be found via the NEWS entry.

Leftovers

• Ridership is down on nearly every major public transit system in the country. The argument is that agencies have failed to invest in basic upgrades which would have improved service and frequency. But on the other hand, these agencies can’t be effective when governments continue to prioritize cars—both financially and physically.

• Sweden, for example, subsidizes infrastructure improvements meant to eliminate the need for cars as part of a nationwide strategy to eliminate traffic deaths. The U.S. subsidizes widening highways.

• But what most Americans don’t know is that, in most cases, riding public transit is the best way to get public transit back on track. Especially if it helps get a car off the road during rush hour.

• The company did not specify how Fortnite contributed to the separations, though its highly addictive, time-consuming nature is a sure contender. Addiction to drugs, alcohol, and gambling are often cited as reasons for relationships ending, and as digital technology increasingly takes over our lives, many argue that social media is as addicting as drugs.

• I seriously feel games are going to take over this world real soon. Earlier, it was Fortnite coaching where parents paid up to $20 for their kids to get better in the game, now this!

• According to a recent report by U.K divorce resource site Divorce Online, over 200 couples have filed divorce citing Fortnite game addiction as the root of their split.

• Fortnite is all over the news right now as one of the most addictive digital games ever played.

• It’s not only teenagers that are being affected by its drug like qualities.

• The iPhone reveal saw Pornhub traffic drop a staggering 11.3 per cent on Apple devices and 4.4 per cent on Android. The Apple Watch Series 4 was also briefly popular (down 9.9 per cent and 3.7 per cent) before talk moved onto the health benefits, at which point viewers were inspired to have a brief 20-minute workout back on Pornhub.

Science

• The last remaining paper exam is in mathematics, which will only be offered digitally as of next spring.

Security

• Yet, more than a year since Microsoft released patches that slammed the backdoor shut, almost a million computers and networks are still unpatched and vulnerable to attack.

• Although Microsoft indicated that they have closed the backdoor used by this ransomware, more computers globally are not fully secured to prevent the infection by the malware. Interestingly, the hackers have shifted their game from asking for ransom and are now infecting new computers with cryptojacking malware.

• The DEF CON 2018 Voting Machine Hacking Village aimed to raise awareness in voting security through a full day of speakers and panel discussions along with a challenge for attendees to hack more than 30 pieces of voting equipment. A partnership with rOOtz Asylum offered youths between 8 and 16 years old an opportunity to hack replicas of the websites of secretaries of state to demonstrate that even hackers with limited years of experience can easily compromise critical systems. The goal was to break as many voting machine pieces as possible in order to draw attention to the vulnerabilities that will be present in the upcoming 2018 elections.

• The focus on election equipment, however, ignores the greater danger caused by hacking into the diverse collection of sensitive information that flows through political campaigns and the electoral process, and using that to influence and sow distrust among voters. While changing a vote or voting results can be traced back to a particular stakeholder, changing people’s understanding of facts is far more insidious.

• Josh and Kurt review Bruce Schneier’s new book Click Here to Kill Everybody. It’s a book everyone could benefit from reading. It does a nice job explaining many existing security problems in a simple manner.

• Users of Alpine Linux are advised to update their installations – especially those used for Docker production environments – after a researcher found a remotely exploitable bug in the distribution’s package manager.

• Alpine Linux is popular with Docker users due to its small size and package repository.

• Crowdfunded bug bounty program BountyGraph co-founder Max Justicz managed to exploit Alpine .apk package files to create arbitrary files which could be turned into code execution.

• Wireshark is the world’s leading network traffic analyzer, and an essential tool for any security professional or systems administrator. This free software lets you analyze network traffic in real time, and is often the best tool for troubleshooting issues on your network.

• Common problems that Wireshark can help troubleshoot include dropped packets, latency issues, and malicious activity on your network. It lets you put your network traffic under a microscope, and provides tools to filter and drill down into that traffic, zooming in on the root cause of the problem. Administrators use it to identify faulty network appliances that are dropping packets, latency issues caused by machines routing traffic halfway around the world, and data exfiltration or even hacking attempts against your organization.

• [...]

• While Wireshark supports more than two thousand network protocols, many of them esoteric, uncommon, or old, the modern security professional will find analyzing IP packets to be of most immediate usefulness. The majority of the packets on your network are likely to be TCP, UDP, and ICMP.

• Given the large volume of traffic that crosses a typical business network, Wireshark’s tools to help you filter that traffic are what make it especially useful. Capture filters will collect only the types of traffic you’re interested in, and display filters will help you zoom in on the traffic you want to inspect. The network protocol analyzer provides search tools, including regular expressions and colored highlighting, to make it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Defence/Aggression

• Aug. 5, 2018. In the heart of Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, Nicolás Maduro was delivering of a rousing speech. He stood high on a podium, speaking to a parade of military troops. The event was broadcast live on national TV. An hour in, the Venezuelan president flinched. His eyes widened. An unexpected object flew by.

• It was a drone, carrying explosives along the city’s historic Bolívar Avenue. Allegedly, this was an assassination attempt using a remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle — the kind of drone you can buy from any electronics store — fitted with explosives.

• Jai Galliott, a nonresident fellow of the Modern War Institute calls the event in Caracas a “modern form of assassination.”

• The US Central Intelligence Agency’s drone program in Africa is expanding, the New York Times said on September 10.

• Just south of the Libyan border, a covert military base in Dirkou, Niger has been deploying fleets of drones on surveillance missions for several months, a Defense Department spokeswoman, Major Sheryll Klinkel told the NYT.

• The United States have built another large hangar to house unmanned aircraft at Camp Chabelley in Djibouti, despite Defense Secretary James Mattis announcing in August that he would wind down special operations on the African continent a year after four US troops were killed in Niger.

• When a suspected hit man for Russian intelligence arrived in Florida about four years ago, F.B.I. surveillance teams were alarmed.

• The man approached the home of one of the C.I.A.’s most important informants, a fellow Russian, who had been secretly resettled along the sunny coast. The suspected hit man also traveled to another city where one of the informant’s relatives lived, raising even more concerns that the Kremlin had authorized revenge on American soil.

• At F.B.I. headquarters, some agents voiced concern that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, himself a former intelligence officer known to reserve scorn for defectors from their ranks, had sent an assassin to kill one he viewed as a turncoat. Others said he would not be so brazen as to kill a former Russian spy on American soil.

Finance

• Salesforce.com Inc. founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne agreed to acquire Time magazine from Meredith Corp. for $190 million in cash, joining Jeff Bezos among tech billionaires buying venerable print publications.

• The move thrusts the brash 53-year-old entrepreneur, who helped lead the shift of software to an on-demand model, into a new role: media baron.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) campaign to retain his House seat took another blow Thursday, when former CIA officer Evan McMullin endorsed Democrat Andrew Janz — and slammed Nunes in the process.

• McMullin, who is also a former House Republican staffer, wrote on Twitter that “Andrew Janz is an honorable man who has made a career of upholding the law.”

• He added that Janz will “do a much better job” for the district than Nunes, whom McMullin said “ignores the district, while promoting himself and enabling our indecent president.”

• “When you don’t have all the information, you’re left to fill in the blanks, and so people come up with these crazy theories,” says Doug Eklund, the co-curator of possibly the first ever exhibition to tackle art and conspiracy theories. “The way that I look at the subject of conspiracy is, it’s about aspects of history that are hidden,” Eklund says. “I think of it as almost a political occult.”

• Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy at the Met Breuer includes around 70 works by 30 artists, made between 1969 and 2016 (up to, but not including, the last presidential election), looking at covert power and the ways governments and citizens interact.

• Retired Adm. William McRaven, former head of Special Operations Command, resigned from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board last month after asking President Trump to revoke his security clearance.

• Defense News first reported McRaven’s exit Thursday and the Pentagon confirmed to CNN that he resigned four days after publishing his op-ed.

• In his editorial for The Washington Post, McRaven tore into the president for revoking the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, calling Brennan “one of the finest public servants I have ever known.”

• Bill McRaven, former chancellor of the University of Texas System and a current UT-Austin professor, resigned on Aug. 20 from the Pentagon’s technology advisory board, multiple news outlets reported Thursday.

• His resignation came four days after The Washington Post published an opinion piece he wrote that criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan.

• “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation,” McRaven wrote. “If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken.”

• Former CIA Director John Brennan recently lost his top secret security clearance, a move that will negatively impact his ability to make money in the lucrative world of U.S. government contracting.

• Mr. Brennan complained bitterly that his First Amendment free speech rights were violated by the action — a ridiculous argument since Mr. Brennan remains a paid commentator and speaks his mind freely on NBC and MSNBC national news networks seemingly at will. In fact, the lack of a clearance will enhance Mr. Brennan’s ability to speak out on issues he thinks are important.

• Not being read in to current intelligence means Mr. Brennan needs to worry less about mixing classified information with his on-air remarks or tweets and thus lowers the risk of breaking the law.

• I served 24 years in such a system, joining the State Department under Ronald Reagan and leaving during the Obama era. That splay of political ideologies had plenty of things in it to disagree with or even believe dangerous. Same for people in the military and the intelligence agencies, who, for example, were sent to train Afghan mujaheddin under one president and then kill them under another, more significant than wonky disagreement over a trade deal. An amoral president, in Anonymous’ words? How about one who set Americans to torturing prisoners to death?

• In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, some inside government were privy to information about the non-presence of weapons of mass destruction, and understood the president was exaggerating the case for war if not lying about it. Three senior officials resigned from the State Department and left a clear marker in the history books the policy was wrong. Another State Department official, a former Marine, resigned in protest over the war in Afghanistan. He stated in the New York Times (a signed letter, not an anonymous Op-Ed) “[I] tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside.” More than a decade earlier, four State Department officials quit over the Bosnian conflict, also via public letters of resignation.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In a conversation with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Facebook Live on Wednesday, Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell declared the recent censorship of conservatives “the greatest worldwide censorship” of free speech in “the history of man.”

• “In recent months, there has been a debate that has now exploded on the national scene dealing with the subject of censorship and the power of a handful of tech companies,” Bozell said. “When you consider that Twitter and Facebook have over a billion of an audience – NBC News has four million, Twitter and Facebook have a billion – it’s worldwide.”

• Attorneys filed a lawsuit Thursday on behalf of historian Heather Thompson, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy was censored by Illinois prison officials.

• Attorneys from Uptown People’s Law Center and Sidley Austin filed the lawsuit. It alleges that this censorship is “arbitrarily applied,” as the book was sent to three different prisons and censored only at Pontiac and Logan Correctional Centers. It argues this censorship is a violation of Thompson’s First Amendment right to communicate with incarcerated people, as such communication should only be restricted when there is a legitimate penological interest. The lawsuit also claims that Thompson’s Fourteenth Amendment right to due process was violated because she did not receive notice of this restriction, and as such was not provided an opportunity to challenge it.

• Two Illinois prisons have censored Blood in the Water, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by historian Heather Ann Thompson about the 1971 Attica prison uprising. Today, the Chicago-based Uptown People’s Law Center where I work is filing a lawsuit to challenge this unconstitutional and unethical censorship.

• Communication with prisoners is vital to ensure they know what is occurring on the outside — as well as to ensure that those on the outside know what is happening inside prisons. If injustices inside prisons are not brought to light, they won’t be corrected.

• By their very nature, prisons isolate those they lock up. It is difficult for the press, let alone the general public, to learn what is going on inside prisons, and it is equally hard for people in prison to learn what is happening beyond the prison walls. This was most recently made apparent by the difficulty reporters had covering the recent nationwide prison strike, timed by prisoners to commemorate the 1971 uprising by prisoners at Attica prison, which lasted from September 9 to 13.

• The Dramatists Legal Defense Fund (DLDF) in partnership with PEN America will present the third annual Banned Together: A Censorship Cabaret in 13 cities as a part of Banned Books Week (September 23-29), the annual celebration of the freedom to read.

• “The Section of Disapproved Books” grapples with prison system censorship through collaborative processes

• The student newspaper at Burlington High School, the BHS Register, broke a story Monday about school guidance director Mario Macias being charged with unprofessional conduct by the Agency of Education.

• But Tuesday, school administrators censored the article, according to paper staff.

• “The BHS Register is like very, very accessible to the students. So I think it, like, shouldn’t be taken down. It makes sense that they would report it and the students would hear about it first,” said McKenna Weston, a BHS student.

• Burlington School Board members heard from livid student journalists, former employees and parents on Thursday, who took the district to task for keeping a director of guidance on staff after the Agency of Education filed misconduct charges with the state’s licensing board.

• Three student editors of the high school’s paper, the Register, which on Monday night broke the story regarding the Agency’s charges against Mario Macias, were first to speak during the public comment portion of the meeting.

• A Vermont school district says it will adopt a new policy in line with a state law aimed at protecting student journalists after students accused the Burlington High School of censoring a recent school newspaper article.

• Last week the principal asked the students to take down a story they broke on the student newspaper website about a school employee facing unprofessional conduct charges.

• They took the story down on Tuesday and later vowed to fight the school’s action based on the new law. The principal said Thursday that the students could repost the story since the story had appeared in other media.

• The devil is back, my God! Nothing fully charges the battery in Slim Shady’s back quite like a good ol’-fashioned street fight. Eminem courts more smoke than a firefighter. He likes his beef red, rare, and bloody, and anyone who dares get in the kitchen with him better not bring too many napkins. Machine Gun Kelly did just that last week, when he dropped “Rap Devil,” a song and accompanying video made in response to a shot Em fired at MGK on his new album.

• MGK ran right in with a fully loaded clip and a song that was honestly better than anyone who hasn’t paid money for an MGK show expected it to be. But Eminem isn’t Drake—there was never any question of whether he’d respond. It was just a matter of when, and how viciously, on a scale from “The Warning” to one of those Benzino drone strikes.

• Kuwaiti liberals are calling for demonstrations on Saturday against what they describe as staggering levels of book censorship which has blocked an estimated 4,400 titles from reaching the state’s bookshops and libraries during the past five years.

• #Banned_In_Kuwait and #Don’t_Decide_For_Me have trended on Twitter as authors and followers of literature protested against the authorities’ decision to ban works including One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez as well as books by Palestinian Mourid AlBarghouti and Egypt’s Radwa Ashour.

• As part of its 23rd annual celebration of reading, free speech, and artistic expression, the Greater Pittsburgh Chapter of the ACLU of Pennsylvania will distribute banned and challenged books around the city Sept. 23-29.

• The ACLU has teamed with Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Book Fairies for “F READ om,” a series of free events in honor of national Banned Books Week.

• “Self-expression is an essential part of the human condition and an essential part of the American experiment. We as Americans honor freedom of speech and encourage it in the broadest possible terms. It serves our political, artistic, religious souls. Any attempt by government to curtail speech is a denial of human dignity,” Marshall Dayan, ACLU Greater Pittsburgh Chapter president, says in a release.

• While Justin Bieber might be a worldwide sensation, there’s at least one country where he is no longer welcome: the People’s Republic of China, whose government recently released a shocking set of standards regarding what media is morally fit for public consumption. As part of an overreaching crackdown on “low taste content,” the country has recently banned most references to hip-hop culture as well as musicians, celebrities, actors, and other performers with tattoos, or whose lifestyle is considered to be out of line with the ruling party’s standards of morality.

• According to Gao Changli, the publicity department director at the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of China (SAPPRFT), there are four major”absolutes” (or rules) that outline the Chinese state-run media’s standards for decency as stated to The Independent: “Absolutely do not use actors whose heart and morality are not aligned with the party and whose morality is not noble. Absolutely do not use actors who are tasteless, vulgar and obscene. Absolutely do not use actors whose ideological level is low and have no class. Absolutely do not use actors with stains, scandals and problematic moral integrity.” Furthermore, in an interview, the Chinese state-run news media outlet Sina reported that the regulator now “specifically requires that programs should not feature actors with tattoos [or depict] hip hop culture, sub-culture and dispirited culture.”

• The media in Pakistan is not showing an accurate picture of critical issues facing the country. The reason, according to a special report published by the Committee to Protect Journalists, is increasing instances of self censorship by journalists.

• The report, released earlier this week, also finds that the number of red lines that ought not to be crossed is higher than expected. These include not just the usual suspects: national security policies, civil-military ties, enforced disappearances, insurgency in Balochistan, Pashtun activism for basic rights and civil liberties and religious extremism, etc, but also issues with no apparent bearing on the high politics of state institutions. In this latter category, the CPJ report includes reporting on labour rights and peasants’ struggle for land ownership. It refers to the threats received by a Karachi-based journalist for covering labour-related malpractices of foreign brands. The journalist was told that reporting on labour rights is anti-state, the report says. Similarly, it documents the case of an Okara-based correspondent who was wrongly implicated in multiple terrorism cases for covering peasant protests in support of their claim over vast tracts of agrarian land held by the armed forces.

• While the report finds a drop in instances of violence against journalists, including murders, it correlates the finding to i) security agencies’ crackdown on terrorist outfits in western provinces and on militant wings of parties like the Muttahhida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and, ii) an unprecedented suppression of editorial autonomy across newspapers and private TV channels allegedly by elements within the security establishment.

• Vatican News sites, Ucan, AsiaNews.it all blocked. Yet the Chinese constitution defends religious freedom. The considerations of a priest, whose personal blog has been taken down.

• Back in August, MuckRock user Paul Galante requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on its wartime “Postal Censorship” program. This week, the Bureau responded, having located approximately 83,000 pages. Despite the fact that the files will be released electronically through the FBI’s supposedly cost-saving portal, the Bureau is insisting Galante pay $2,485 in duplication fees.

• The editors of the Burlington High School student newspaper say that Principal Noel Green is reinstating a student media policy which requires administrative review of stories they plan to publish.

• But the editors and press advocates say the policy, which was in place for the student newspaper before the passage of so-called “New Voices” legislation in 2017, violates the Vermont law.

• Green has not responded to a request for comment. Nor has Burlington Superintendent Yaw Obeng.

• On Monday, four student journalists at The Register, the Burlington High School student newspaper, broke the news that the Vermont Agency of Education had filed six counts of unprofessional misconduct charges against BHS guidance director Mario Macias.

• The latest clue emerged Tuesday after a state-affiliated think tank and Beijing university ranked Fan dead last in their annual “Social Responsibility Report,” citing her “negative social impact.”

• Imagine if one day Jennifer Lawrence was walking the red carpet in Los Angeles and the next she vanished completely with no word about where she was.

• It might sound ludicrous, or terrifying, but it’s the reality in China, where one of the country’s most famous actresses has disappeared without a trace amid an uproar over tax evasion by celebrities.

• Fan Bingbing, one of China’s highest-paid and most bankable stars, has appeared in both Chinese and Western films, including the multimillion-dollar X-Men franchise.

• This week on the right-wing site Breitbart News, a video surfaced of one of Google’s weekly “T.G.I.F.” meetings, where employees and the leadership engage in heated debates over everything from healthier snack stations to the election of Donald Trump.

• Breitbart News described the 2016 video as a “smoking gun” because it showed Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, telling everyone how he felt about the new leader of the free world.

• Spoiler: Not good.

• “Myself, as an immigrant, as a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do, too,” he said in his flat, nasal voice. He was obviously rattled, as were the other top Google executives on stage with him. “I think it’s a very stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values.”

• Some of Google‘s top executives made critical remarks of President Donald Trump shortly after his election in 2016, according to a leaked video published by Breitbart.

• In the video, which was the company’s first all-hands staff meeting following Trump’s election, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he found Trump’s victory “deeply offensive” and added that the election “conflicts with many of our values.”

• “There are two dominant reasons to be upset,” Brin says in the video. “One is because so many people apparently don’t share many of the values that we have. I guess we’ve known that for many months now… and secondly confronting the reality of an administration that’s now forming and, look, we have no idea what it’s going to do.”

• [...]

• In response to Breitbart leaking the video, a Google spokesperson said people were expressing personal views, and that nothing in the video suggested “any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products,” according to Bloomberg.

• A right-wing news site published an internal video from 2016 showing top Alphabet Inc. executives expressing disappointment about the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, potentially giving conservative lawmakers and activists new fuel for their allegations that the internet-search giant is politically biased.

• Website Breitbart published a more than hour-long video of an all-hands meeting at Alphabet’s Google that happened soon after the election. Google co-founder Sergey Brin says “most people here are pretty upset,” and “myself as an immigrant and refugee I certainly find this election deeply offensive.”

• Maybe China’s authoritarian leaders were on to something after all.

• In 2011 and 2012, the Chinese government began imposing a series of tough new restrictions designed to rein in what was then the country’s most popular and freewheeling social media platform, Sina Weibo.

• It began with new rules making all weibo (microblogging) account users register with their real names and identity numbers, aiming to end one of microblogging’s most popular features – its anonymity. It made internet companies liable for content spread on its platforms. Individuals and groups were prohibited from using the internet to spread rumours, disrupt social stability, subvert state power or to organise or incite illegal gatherings. Scores of websites were shut, weibo accounts closed and microbloggers jailed.

• Banned Together is a celebration of songs and scenes from shows that have been censored or challenged on America’s stages, created to raise awareness around issues of censorship and free expression in the theater. The performances will feature selections from Cabaret, Chicago, Almost, Maine, Rent and Angels in America, among other notable works, with a libretto by John Weidman (Assassins, Pacific Overtures) and JT Rogers (Oslo, Blood and Gifts) directed by Ari Edelson (Building The Wall, 24 Hour Plays) Banned Together: A Censorship Cabaret will be performed in thirteen cities across the U.S. as a part of Banned Books Week (September 23rd-29th), the annual celebration of the freedom to read.

Privacy/Surveillance

• We took the opportunity to ask the global CEO of the company, Yang Yuanqing, affectionately known around the office as ‘YY’ a question that has been bugging us for a while.

• After ZTE was brought to its knees recently by accusations of privacy violations and with Huawei facing bans from supplying sensitive areas in the US, Lenovo, the other really big Chinese player in the space, has had a fraction of the flack from certain quarters.

• Why? They’re all Chinese companies, aren’t they?

• As sensors on connected cars become more sophisticated, and the data they provide more fine-grained, so the usefulness of that information will increase, and with it applications in everyday life. For example, insurance companies are already offering reduced premiums for those willing to install so-called “black box” systems in their vehicles. These are essentially specialized versions of the connected vehicle tracking devices discussed above, and contain similarly personal data. The danger is that what are undoubtedly useful systems that can improve our cities and save us money could also become yet another way to undermine our privacy.

• Britain’s spy agency GCHQ is found to have violated human rights just three days after announcing an open call for startups to join its accelerator in the Greater Manchester area in 2019.

• The UK government breached human rights rules by failing to ensure proper oversight of its mass surveillance programmes, according to the European Court of Human Rights.

• In a judgment handed down today, the court said the safeguards within the government’s system for bulk interception of communication were not robust enough to provide guarantees against abuse.

• The court said this violated the right to privacy under the European convention – as did the way in which GCHQ obtained communications data from service providers.

• GCHQ, the British government’s intelligence and security organisation, has breached human rights in its mass surveillance programme, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said in a landmark ruling on Thursday (13 September).

• The ECHR found that Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the respect for one’s private and family life, was violated as the UK did not take out the necessary measures to ensure that only individuals relevant to the government’s security operation were watched.

• The court also observed that of the data under surveillance, no safeguards were put in place to ensure the protection of confidential material that was obtained, breaching Article 10, freedom of expression. The judges found that the data retrieved by GCHQ’s surveillance program “could reveal a great deal about a person’s habit and contacts.”

• A major court ruling on Thursday said that the UK had violated European law, serving as a victory to privacy advocates worldwide. The news comes days after five nations charged with global surveillance released a memo urging tech companies to use workarounds to internet encryption.

• The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled Thursday that Britain’s Cheltenham-based surveillance bureau, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had violated personal privacy laws.

• The Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom case concerned complaints lodged against GCHQ on the bulk interception of communications, intelligence sharing with foreign governments, and obtaining communications data from communications service providers, a press statement said.

• The swimsuit change into brought by Gargantuan Brother Survey, Amnesty Worldwide, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a quantity of different civil liberties organizations from Europe and North The United States, as successfully because the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and others. “The resolution sends a transparent message that the same surveillance packages, equivalent to those performed by the NSA, are also incompatible with human rights,” claimed ACLU legal educated Patrick Toomey. “Governments in Europe and the United States alike have to seize steps to rein in mass spying and undertake prolonged-past due reforms that the truth is safeguard our privacy.”

• GCHQ’s methods in carrying out bulk interception of online communications violated privacy and failed to provide enough surveillance safeguards, the European court of human rights (ECHR) has ruled in a test case judgment.

• But the Strasbourg court found that GCHQ’s regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal. It is the first major challenge to the legality of UK intelligence agencies intercepting private communications in bulk, following Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing revelations.

• The long awaited ruling is one of the most comprehensive assessments by the ECHR of the legality of the interception operations operated by UK intelligence agencies.

• “If these invasions of privacy go unchecked, we risk setting the path for a tomorrow that apes China, a country where the government is using cyber-surveillance to remove all privacy from an individual’s life.”

• A Florida man who worked for a National Security Agency contractor in Maryland has been charged with submitting fraudulent timesheets that billed the federal government at least $250,000 for work he didn’t perform.

• U.S. Attorney Robert Hur’s office on Thursday charged Todd Andrew Leasure with making false statements.

• A court filing says Leasure submitted false timesheets in which he claimed to have worked on a services contract more than 1,500 hours more than he actually did between 2014 and 2017.

• A Florida man who worked for a National Security Agency contractor in Maryland has been charged with submitting fraudulent timesheets that billed the federal government at least $250,000 for work he didn’t perform.

• U.S. Attorney Robert Hur’s office on Thursday charged Todd Andrew Leasure with making false statements.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Recent sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the Trump administration have forced the Empire Files program, hosted by American investigative journalist Abby Martin, to shut down. The decision to officially announce the show’s end came after blocks on wire transfers originating in Venezuela and sent to the U.S. were recently imposed, thereby cutting off the show’s primary source of funding. Issues with funding caused by the U.S.’ Venezuela policy had, however, been a problem for some time, leading Martin and her staff to halt production in late May. While Martin and her team had hoped conditions would improve, the recent sanctions make that such a distant possibility that the decision to shut down the show was made on Wednesday.

• The doctrine of qualified immunity was conjured up by the US Supreme Court in 1982 and victims of rights violations have been paying the price for more than three decades. The doctrine was created by the Court, not by Congress. This is an important distinction, especially since qualified immunity directly contradicts the liability Congress created as an avenue of redress for citizens.

• Congress specifically said anyone who uses governmental power to deprive others of rights can be sued.

• [...]

• The arguments for keeping the qualified immunity intact are weak. Holes have been poked in these by multiple lawyers and law profs, but the doctrine lives on, propped up by the parade of litigation that would certainly result if government employees were held directly responsible for their actions.

• One of the weakest of the arguments is that the removal of qualified immunity would result in long stream of impoverished cops. As this amicus brief submitted for a QI-centric Supreme Court case points out, government employees are rarely, if ever, held directly accountable for their actions. It’s almost always taxpayers paying other taxpayers for rights the government violated.

• Apple, Facebook, Spotify and Youtube banded together this week in a decision to stop hosting audio and video content from Alex Jones, a controversial conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars.

• Denounced by some as censorship and supported by others as a reasonable enforcement of company policies, the move has again raised questions about the control a small handful of social media companies have over what constitutes acceptable speech online.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Back in July, New York State took the historically-unprecedented step of voting to kick Charter Communications (aka Spectrum) out of New York State. Regulators say the company misled them about why the company repeatedly failed to adhere to merger conditions affixed to the company’s $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, going so far as to falsify (according to the NY PUC) the number of homes the company expanded service to. The state has also sued the company for failing to deliver advertised broadband speeds, for its shoddy service, and for its terrible customer support.

• But the threat to kick Charter out of the state appears largely to have been a negotiation tactic, as the two sides are now purportedly making progress and engaging in “productive dialogue” as they attempt to hash out their differences.

DRM

• DRM is the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. DRM creates a damaged good: it prevents you from doing what would be possible without it. This concentrates control over production and distribution of media, giving DRM peddlers the power to carry out massive digital book-burnings and conduct large-scale surveillance over people’s media viewing habits.

• Organized by the Defective by Design team, IDAD has occurred annually since 2006. Each year, participants take action through protests, rallies, and the sharing of DRM-free media and materials. Participating nonprofits, activist groups, and companies from around the world include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Open Rights Group, Public Knowledge, the Document Foundation, and others (for a complete list, see: https://dayagainstdrm.org). These groups will share the message by writing about why DRM is harmful, organizing events, and offering discounts on DRM-free media.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• The arguments against the scandalous clause are several. Trademark law, it is argued, should concern itself with consumer efficiencies and commercial goodwill—not the psychological protection of children or the majoritarian morality. Consumers choose whether they will view a mark; so by trademarking a scandalous image, no one is forcing anything on anyone. Besides, it’s inevitable that children will hear and see much worse in schools and on the internet. Furthermore, given the diverse moral views in society, a moral-based criterion seems very subjective to enforce. Trademark eligibility, it is argued, should not reflect the moral code of the PTO, a judge, or anyone else for that matter. It should reflect laissez-faire ideals: if there is demand, let the market supply it. So go the arguments.

• [...]

• As already stated, these reasons do not necessarily imply that Congress should have enacted the scandalous clause. Indeed, the clause may be criticized for various reasons. The clause certainly calls for subjectivity in its enforcement—as much subjectivity as enforcing the distinction between descriptive and suggestive marks; assessing the presence of secondary meaning; or determining that a mark has become generic. The clause certainly does not represent a laissez-faire approach—much like the regulation of public television and airwaves (restricting pornographic and vulgar content), or the very trademark system itself (creating an artificial monopoly). The clause certainly does not further source identification—just like the clauses that prevent registration of government flags or insignia, portrayals of deceased presidents, portrayals of living individuals, and surnames. The clause may even result in market inefficiency—although not as much inefficiency as results from trademark’s dilution rights. All these problems with the scandalous clause may be lamented and bemoaned, but they do not suggest that Congress has abused its discretion by abridging the freedom of speech. These problems are relevant to a much different discussion—a discussion about whether we—through Congress—should change this law. They do not inform the discussion about whether the Constitution gives courts power to reject our will.

Copyrights

• The committee is still deliberating on the public submissions received after it published specific clauses of the Copyright Amendment Bill for comment, committee secretary Andre Hermans told Intellectual Property Watch in a recent phone interview.

• “Our intention is to finalise in the month of October,” Hermans said.

• The Copyright Amendment Bill was tabled in Parliament in May 2017.

• The Portfolio Committee of Trade and Industry has met several times since last month, sifting through and debating the merits and practicalities of the submissions it has received. During this process, the committee again identified clauses of the Copyright Amendment Bill to be re-advertised and as a result, specific clauses dealing with the accreditation of collecting societies have been published for comment.

• The US Government is recommending a six-month prison sentence for a California man who uploaded a pirated version of the movie Deadpool to Facebook. In just a few days the copy was viewed 6,386,456 times. A strong sentence is needed to deter the defendant, other Facebook users, and the public at large, the US argues.

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