● 10.09.18

● Links 9/10/2018: Plasma 5.14, Flatpak 1.2 Plan

Posted in News Roundup at 1:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Microsoft has taken the unprecedented step of pulling a Windows 10 release a mere four days after its arrival amid a clamour of users complaining about files not being where they had left them.

• Windows Insider supremo Dona Sarkar took to Twitter to announce that Windows fans would no longer be able to get their hands on the afflicted build. Redmond said the automatic rollout would also be paused until it works out just what in blue blazes is going on.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh and Kurt talk about Linus’ effort to work on his attitude. What will this mean for security and IT in general?

Kernel Space

• The Linux kernel strives to be fast and efficient. As it is written mostly in C, it can mostly control how the generated machine code looks. Nevertheless, as the kernel code is compiled into machine code, the compiler optimizes the generated code to improve its performance. The kernel code, however, employs uncommon coding techniques, which can fail code optimizations. In this blog-post, I would share my experience in analyzing the reasons for poor code inlining of the kernel code. Although the performance improvement are not significant in most cases, understanding these issues are valuable in preventing them from becoming larger. New-lines, as promised, will be one of the reasons, though not the only one.

• Freedreno/MSM maintainer Rob Clark sent in his MSM-next pull request on Sunday of new feature material slated for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel.

• The private bpftrace repository has just been made public, which is big news for DTrace fans. Created by Alastair Robertson, bpftrace is an open source high-level tracing front-end that lets you analyze systems in custom ways. It’s shaping up to be a DTrace version 2.0: more capable, and built from the ground up for the modern era of the eBPF virtual machine. eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is in the Linux kernel and is the new hotness in systems engineering. It is being developed for BSD, too, where BPF originated.

Graphics Stack

• People started using htop when the top just didn’t provide enough information. Now there is NVTOP, a tool that looks similar to htop but displays the process information loaded on your NVIDIA GPU. It works on Linux systems and displays detailed information about processes, memory used, which GPU and also displays the total GPU and memory usage.

• The first version of this tool was released in July last year. The latest change made the process list and command options scrollable.

Applications

• Mathpix is a nifty little tool that allows you to take screenshots of complex mathematical equations and instantly converts it into LaTeX editable text.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Earlier this year with Wine 3.9 its Direct3D code changed to default to OpenGL 4.4 core contexts rather than the legacy/compatibility context. NVIDIA GPUs ended up being left at the older value but now that has changed.

• As of yesterday in Wine Git, CodeWeavers’ Henri Verbeet has changed the WineD3D code now to also default to OpenGL core contexts for NVIDIA GPUs.

Games

• I honestly can’t get enough of gorgeous 2D action-RPG titles and Aloft Studio’s Hazelnut Bastille [Official Site] certainly looks good. While there seems to be no current release date scheduled, they’re now offering up a demo which does include a Linux build which wasn’t available last time I covered it.

• The demo does seem to work rather nicely, the little bit of humour at the start was quite nice and it seems to perform well. Worked fine with the Steam Controller too when paired up with SC Controller.

• Ironhide Game Studio have announced today that Kingdom Rush Origins will release on Steam on October 18th. I’ve no doubt it will make it to other stores too like GOG and Humble Store like previous games, however they’ve only mentioned Steam so far.

• I asked the developer on Twitter, if the Linux version would be released at the same time. They replied with “Yes!”, so that’s really great news for Linux gamers.

• For those of you craving your latest Linux gaming fix, Humble are doing a build your own bundle with TinyBuild.

• The way it works, is that a ton of games are on sale and if you add at least three to your basket you will get an additional discount. If you add four the discount is higher and higher again if you add five. The saving you can get is kind of ridiculous.

• I have to admit, I am quite surprised by this. Mojang (owned by Microsoft) are to open source more of Minecraft and they’ve already started to do so.

• It seems we have a few readers interested in Niffelheim emailing it in, a dark survival RPG that follows some elements of Norse mythology that recently released with Linux support.

• Unleashed, a 2D open-world sandbox RPG that was funded on Kickstarter is looking pretty good and it’s releasing soon with Linux support. I initially covered it back in March this year, as this promising RPG was emailed to us directly by the developer. I completely forgot about it, but thankfully they succeeded in getting funds on Kickstarter with around €10K being pledged. Not a lot, so hopefully the end result is still good.

• Nearly two years after the Kickstarter, Arcen Games are ready to bring in more players. AI War 2 is going to enter Early Access on October 15th.

• The sequel to their 2009 hit AI War: Fleet Command, AI War 2 has you take on an overwhelming “inhuman” enemy that has underestimated you. Their currently plan is to remain in Early Access until at least “Q2 2019″, although that does depend on how feedback goes and what they need to work on.

• A Gummy’s Life is a really fun multiplayer game that can be played with local players and online. It’s now left Early Access with a major update.

• I’ve had quite a lot of fun with this, especially with my Son who adores it because it’s completely silly. One thing that wasn’t too great was the movement system, which they’ve actually overhauled as part of the 1.0 update. Movement seems smoother, more responsive and you have a better amount of control with it now too making it an even better experience.

• KURSK [Official Site] seems like it’s going to be quite a compelling action-adventure game which follows the story of the Russian Kursk submarine disaster back in 2000. I’ve been following it now for years as it sounds quite interesting, although Linux native gamers have to wait a little longer.

• The developer, Jujubee S.A., has been emailing us their usual press emails about it and it has been clearly mentioning Linux support. However, the Steam store page doesn’t mention Linux. After trying to reach them for months over emails, I decided to try Facebook today and they actually responded with a clear “Yes, KURSK will be released on Linux.”. Sadly though, the Linux version will come later than the Windows build while they are working to “provide the best possible results on Linux”. I’ve been told the media folks will contact us sometime in regards to the Linux release.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Elisa is a music player developed by the KDE community that strives to be simple and nice to use. We also recognize that we need a flexible product to account for the different workflows and use-cases of our users.

• We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop of the KDE community without compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop environments, Windows and Android).

• We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data.

• Just under two years since this KF5/Qt5 music player started, 0.3 is its latest feature release. Elisa 0.3 brings a number of user-interface refinements, memory usage improvements, better scaling support, better support for Microsoft Windows, Baloo integration enhancements, and other improvements.

• Tuesday, 9 October 2018. Today KDE launches the first release of Plasma 5.14.

• Plasma is KDE’s lightweight and full featured Linux desktop. For the last three months we have been adding features and fixing bugs and now invite you to install Plasma 5.14.

• A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma’s software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• One of the easiest ways to help Flatpak is to get your favorite applications on flathub, either by packaging it yourself, or by convincing the upstream to do it.

• If you feel like contributing to Flatpak itself, please do! Flatpak is still a young project, and there are plenty of small to medium-size features that can be added. The tests are also a nice place to stick your toe in and see if you can improve the coverage a bit and maybe find a bug or two.

• Or, if that is more your thing, we have a nice design for improving the flatpak commandline user experience that is waiting to be implemented.

• Prolific open-source developer Matthias Clasen at Red Hat has shared some of the post-1.0 plans for the Flatpak app sandboxing/distribution tech. As it stands now, Flatpak 1.2 will likely be out around the end of the calendar year with the next batch of features.

• Flatpak developers have begun merging new feature work onto the Flatpak master branch. Some of the latest work includes better life-cycle control, logging and history support, file copy/paste and drag-n-drop, and a better test suite for regression testing.

• Some of the other work being planned for Flatpak but not yet done is support for using the host OpenGL drivers via libcapsule, application renaming and end-of-life migration for apps, a Dconf/GSettings portal, a portal for web camera access, and greater test coverage.

• Released at the end of September was GNOME 3.30.1 as the first and only point release collection to the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment feature update that debuted earlier in February. Finally out today are the v3.30.1 updates for Mutter and the GNOME Shell.

• We’ve now moved my reporting to the board to a monthly basis, so this blog should get updated monthly too! So here’s what I’ve been up to in September.

• Application menus – or app menus, as they are often called – are the menu that you see in the GNOME 3 top bar, with the name and icon for the current app. These menus have been with us since the beginning of the GNOME 3.0 series, but we’re planning on retiring them for the next GNOME release (version 3.32). This post is intended to provide some background on this change, as well as information on how the transition will happen.

Distributions

New Releases

• Patrick d’Emmabuntüs informs Softpedia today about the availability of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 2 1.03 release of the Debian-based open-source operating system.

• Coming about five months after the release of version 1.02, Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 2 has been updated over the weekend to version 1.03, which is now available for download. It’s a bugfix release based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 “Stretch” operating system and featuring a mix of performance improvements, software updates, and cosmetic enhancements.

• “This update is released to improve the current Emma DE2 by adding some functional, ergonomic as well as cosmetic features.

• This month, the VyOS project turns five years old. In these five years, VyOS has been through highs and lows, up to speculation that the project is dead. Past year has been full of good focused work by the core team and community contributors, but the only way to make use of that work was to use nightly builds, and nightly builds are like a chocolate box a box of WWI era shells—you never know if it blows up when handled or not. Now the codebase has stabilized, and we are ready to present a release candidate. While it has some rough edges, a number of people, including us, are already using recent builds of VyOS 1.2.0 in production, and now it’s time to make it public.

• I am pleased to announce that a new version of PiCluster is out with some nice improvements. PiCluster aims to provide an easy-to-use solution to manage your Docker containers across multiple nodes. Let’s see what is new in this release.

Gentoo Family

• Alexander Tratsevskiy announced the release of Calculate Linux 18, a major version of his Gentoo-based operating system targeting the Russian Linux community.

• Coming ten months after Calculate Linux 17.12 New Year’s Eve release, Calculate Linux 18 brings faster boot times to the live ISO images, ports all the in-house built Calculate Utilities to the latest Qt5 application framework, adds a new way for managing network connections, and updates most of the core components and apps.

• “We are happy to announce the release of Calculate Linux 18! In this latest version, Calculate Utilities were ported to Qt5, your network is managed in a different way, and binary packages get checked using their index signature,” developer Alexander Tratsevskiy wrote in the release announcement.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Open source software which was previously perceived to be a geeky and slightly awkward alternative to mainstream software, has evolved to be trendy, fashionable and innovative. As 2018 nears its end, we’re seeing open source projects play an increasingly important role in all the top strategic technology trends that are reshaping the world around us.

• Open source has grown and matured to the point where everyone from small businesses to tech giants and global enterprises have open source at the core of their strategies.

• This two part series from SUSE identifies ten top tech trends where open source is taking centre stage.

Red Hat Family

• Bob Young, cofounder and former CEO of Raleigh-based Red Hat, is one of eight people to win top individual awards from the NC Technology Association.

• Young was chosen for the Beacon Award, which is for outstanding achievement.

• Over the last three decades, Young also founded and served as CEO of self-publishing company Lulu. And after investing in drone technology firm he later served as CEO and chairman. He also is CEO of Needlepoint.

• Every year we gather our partners, Red Hat executives and industry thought leaders together at our North America Partner Conference to network, learn and celebrate our robust partner ecosystem. This year’s event is especially exciting because 2018 marks Red Hat’s 25th anniversary. It’s a great time to reflect on how much our partner network has grown, look where we’re going in the future and showcase some of the partners who contribute to our success.

• ChRIS Research Integration System (ChRIS)—a collaboration between Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), the Mass Open Cloud (MOS), and Red Hat—has the potential to change medicine as we know it today.

• It all started in 2003, when the team at BCH set out to make vast amounts of data accessible to researchers and doctors. Ultimately, the team created ChRIS: an image processing application that allows doctors to compare hundreds of thousands of MRI scans in seconds.

• But like any major undertaking, it’s not the goal or the outcome that’s most interesting, it’s the how.

• Here’s a breakdown of how the team achieved their goal: three critical components that worked together to improve patient care.

• Red Hat Inc. has been associated with open source software for 25 years. The idea of the company, headquartered in North Carolina, US, took shape when its founder Bob Young started selling Linux and Unix software accessories in the 1990s. The company went public in 1999. A major portion of the company’s revenue still comes from subscriptions of the Linux open source operating system. It now faces tough competition from Amazon’s Linux.

• Yenepoya Institute of Technology (YIT) has initiated an academic membership with Red Hat Academy. As a prelude to this academic initiation, an extension lecture session on open source technology was organized on October 6.

• Moses G, COSS manager, and Harpreet Singh, Red Hat certified trainer from complete open source solutions(COSS) India Pvt Ltd, was the resource person for the programme and they spoke about the different Red Hat certification programmes and their benefits to the professional currier of the students.

• This post describes how to configure OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication using an external Identity Provider (IdP). With the new release of Red Hat 3scale API Management, version 2.3, it is possible to use any OIDC-compliant IdP during the API authentication phase. This is a very important new feature because it makes it possible to integrate any IdP already present in your environment—without having to use an Identity Broker—thus reducing overall complexity.

Finance

Fedora

• Like so many scripts, I started making Bodhi’s test running script in bash before realizing that it was growing too many tentacles and was becoming difficult to extend. I have plans to add an integration test suite to Bodhi that tests it against other dependant network services (such as Koji), and the prospect of getting my bash script to handle that as well with sane input/output options was daunting. Thus, I created bodhi-ci. By using click it was much easier to give it a nice set of subcommands and CLI flags that made it much easier to extend.

• The loss of GNU parallel was a little sad to me, but the features from it that I was using are mostly implemented in Python now. The main thing I’m still missing that I had with run_tests.sh is a fully working -x flag, which causes all tests jobs to exit immediately if any one of them fails. I plan to fix this by using Python’s async/await API in the future so that I can react to failures in a similar manner, but I’m quite satisfied with the script otherwise. The old run_tests.sh script will remain in the repository until I refactor the new script to fully support the failfast flag.

• [...]

• Enter the Jenkies Pipeline. With some help, I was able to accomplish something much more ideal with my new Jenkiesfile. This solves the resource contention problems described above as Bodhi is now back to using a single node per pull request, and it is able to run the build job once and then fan out to run the individual tests concurrently. In fact, I was able to run the builds in parallel, and have each of those jobs kick off the individual release tests in parallel inside those jobs for double-parallel action. This is very nice since the pip container typically takes about 80% longer to build than the rpm based containers, but we don’t have to wait for it to finish to start testing the rpm containers. This means that pull requests start getting results for Fedora 28 tests before the pip container is even finished building. The pipeline can now test a pull request in about 20-30 minutes instead of several hours due to the efficient sharing between tests and the use of a single node.

• As of last night Fedora 29 embarked upon its final freeze as the last step for reaching its official debut by month’s end.

• Fedora 29 development is now effectively over except for any granted freeze exceptions or blocker bug fixes. Any other updates will be queued to go down as package updates post-release.

• As of writing, there are eight accepted blocker bugs already ranging from DNF update fails to issues unlocking LUKS-encrypted USB/SD drives from within GNOME to a GNOME Shell Wayland crash.

• Red Hat / Fedora developers have updated Firefox packages pending for F27 / F28 / F29 that bring a slew of improvements for the web-browser operating under Wayland.

• The updated Firefox 63 and 64 Nightly packages for Fedora Linux users include patches to fix or provide better rendering support, v-sync is now working under Wayland, and there is also working HiDPI scaling support.

• The Firefox-Fedora packages also build with the currently out-of-tree Pipewire WebRTC support too.

• The builds also ship PipeWire WebRTC patch for desktop sharing created by Jan Grulich and Tomas Popela. Wayland applications are isolated from desktop and don’t have access to other windows (as X11) thus PipeWire supplies the missing functionality along the browser sandbox.

• I think the rendering is generally covered now and the browser should work smoothly with Wayland backend. That’s also a reason why I make it default on Fedora 30 (Rawhide) and firefox-x11 package is available as a X11 fallback. Fedora 29 and earlier stay with default X11 backend and Wayland is provided by firefox-wayland package.

• I decided to write a book (at the very least attempt to). And yes, there will be some Fedora inside!

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Recently, We have published articles focusing on education with titles including 10 best Linux educational software for your kids, and QupZilla – An Educational Lightweight Qt Web Browser.

• Today, we have a Linux distro that even though you may not have heard about, is doing a lot of great work for learners in various parts of the world and it goes by the name of Academix GNU/Linux.

• Academix GNU/Linux is a Debian-based distro that was created specifically for teaching. All of the bundled software that it ships with is free, open-source, and targetted at education fields ranging from primary to university level.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 548 for the week of September 30 – October 6, 2018.

• We’ve recently implemented the ability to include or exclude your Snap in certain territories. This functionality has been ported to improve the publisher experience on snapcraft.io. Part of the work is an implementation of a multi-select picker with filtering capabilities, that will be proposed to upstream Vanilla soon.

• OpenStack, the open source cloud of choice for many businesses, has seen broad adoption across a large number of industries, from telco to finance, healthcare and more. It’s become something of a safe haven for highly regulated industries and for those looking to have a robust, secure cloud that is open source and enables them to innovate – without breaking the bank.

• For those of you that don’t know, Ubuntu does OpenStack.

• In fact, Ubuntu is the #1 platform for OpenStack and the #1 platform for public cloud operations on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, too – meaning that we know our stuff when it comes to building and operating clouds.

• Which is great news because Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, helps to deliver OpenStack on rails, with consulting, training, enterprise support and managed operations that help your business to focus on what matters most – your applications, not the infrastructure.

• Available for the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series, the new Linux kernel livepatch is rolling out now to all subscribers of the Canonical Livepatch Service. It patches a total of seven security flaws, including the well-known L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF)/Foreshadow and SpectreRSB vulnerabilities.

• The two L1FT vulnerabilities fixed in this new kernel livepatch are CVE-2018-3620 and CVE-2018-3646, but it also addresses a flaw that reduced the effectiveness of Spectre Variant 2 mitigations for paravirtual guests (CVE-2018-15594), a use-after-free vulnerability in the IRDA implementation (CVE-2018-6555), and a critical stack-based buffer overflow in the iSCSI target implementation (CVE-2018-14633).

Devices/Embedded

• Pi Supply is Kickstartering Iot LoRa Gateway and IoT LoRa Node pHAT add-ons for the Raspberry Pi, as well as a LoRa Node that works with the Micro:bit. An Arduino node is also in the works.

• Pi Supply, which has produced a variety of Raspberry Pi add-on boards including the Papirus E-Paper display and Flick HAT gesture detector, has now returned to Kickstarter to launch a series of IoT LoRa Boards that work with the Pi. The offerings include an IoT LoRa Gateway HAT board starting at an early bird price of 120 UK Pounds ($157) and a LoRa Node pHAT node board with a 25 Pound ($33) early bird price.

Android/Chromebook

• Google has taken Chrome OS to a new level with its most recent updates—especially where tablets are concerned. The Pixel Slate is the company’s first Chrome OS tablet, and it’s an absolute beast.

• Chrome OS, while once thought of as a nigh-useless operating system, is shaping up to be a bold and different OS—one that can handle almost anything you throw at it, especially for tablets. It’s quite possibly the perfect tablet operating system that we’ve been waiting for.

• Asus Chromebook C423 comes in two variants – a 14-inch non-touch 1366 x 768 display and 1920 x 1080 display with touch. On paper, the device carries an Intel Celeron dual-core N3350 or Pentium quad-core N4200 processor. It has 4GB and 8GB RAM options.

• Asus Chromebook C423 will provide 10 hours of battery life. The device has a stunning 14-inch up to FHD NanoEdge display, coupled with 5.8mm bezels. Also, Asus Chromebook can be laid flat on the surface with 180-degree Hinge.

Free Software/Open Source

• A senior technology executive at Deutsche Telekom has warned the telecom sector it must avoid duplicating effort through the mishmash of industry associations and groups that have sprung up in recent years.

• Axel Clauberg, a vice president at the German operator, told an audience of telecom executives at this week’s SDN NFV World Congress that some groups would have to form partnerships to ensure they do not gobble up telco resources.

• “We have limited resources we can contribute into these organizations and the worst for me would be an overlap between organizations and duplication of efforts,” he said during a keynote presentation in The Hague. “Sometimes we have to step back and think about where we need to partner.”

• Clauberg’s warning follows a mushrooming of industry associations in the past decade as operators have wrestled with the technical and skillset challenges that surround the rollout of software-defined and virtualized networks.

• Databricks recently announced a new release of MLflow, an open source, multi-cloud framework for the machine learning lifecycle, now with R integration.

• Databricks recently announced a new release of MLflow, an open source, multi-cloud framework for the machine learning lifecycle, now with R integration.

• RStudio has partnered with Databricks to develop an R API for MLflow v0.7.0 which was showcased at the Spark + AI Summit Europe.

• According to a release issued by the company, before MLflow, the machine learning industry did not have a standard process or end-to-end infrastructure to develop and produce applications simply and consistently.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• TenFourFox Feature Parity 10 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). This version is mostly about expanded functionality, adding several new DOM and JavaScript ES6 features, and security changes to match current versions of Firefox. Not everything I wanted to get done for this release got done, particularly on the JavaScript side (only one of the ES6 well-known symbols updates was finished in time), but with Firefox 63 due on the 22nd we’ll need this period for sufficient beta testing, so here it is.

• The security changes include giving document-level (i.e., docshell) data: URIs unique origins to reduce cross-site scripting attack surface (for more info, see this Mozilla blog post from Fx57). This middle ground should reduce issues with the older codebase and add-on compatibility problems, but it is possible some historical add-ons may be affected by this and some sites may behave differently. However, many sites now assume this protection, so it is important that we do the same. If you believe a site is behaving differently because of this, toggle the setting security.data_uri.unique_opaque_origin to false and restart the browser. If the behaviour changes, then this was the cause and you should report it in the comments. This covers most of the known exploits of the old Firefox behaviour and I’ll be looking at possibly locking this down further in future releases.

• Similar to other browsers, Firefox supports push notifications but for some reason, it never used the Microsoft Windows 10 Action center for notifications. However, that is about to change with the in-development Mozilla Firefox build 64, as reported by Tech Radar.

• The browser is getting updated soon to support Windows 10 Action Center for notifications. The aim here is to improve the overall user experience and make it seamless to access your notifications from Mozilla Firefox.

BSD

• Since the release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this past April there have been many improvements to this popular BSD operating system, including on the performance front. I recently wrapped up some fresh benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD 5.3-DEVELOPMENT for seeing what the performance is looking like in what will eventually be released as DragonFlyBSD 5.4.

• A lot of recent DragonFlyBSD coverage has been around its support/optimizations for Threadripper 2 with lead DragonFlyBSD developer Matthew Dillon being a big fan of these new high-core count CPUs. In this article though tests are being done from an Intel Xeon “Skylake” CPU for looking at the performance work outside of that scope.

Licensing/Legal

• After Redis Labs added a new license clause, Commons Clause, on top of popular open-source, in-memory data structure store Redis, open-source developers were mad as hell. Now, instead of just ranting about it, some have counterattacked by starting a project, GoodFORM, to fork the code in question.

Programming/Development

• In the previous article I gave you tips for how to receive feedback, especially in the context of your first free and open source project contribution. Now it’s time to talk about the other side of that same coin: providing feedback.

• If I tell you that something you did in your contribution is “stupid” or “naive,” how would you feel? You’d probably be angry, hurt, or both, and rightfully so. These are mean-spirited words that when directed at people, can cut like knives. Words matter, and they matter a great deal. Therefore, put as much thought into the words you use when leaving feedback for a contribution as you do into any other form of contribution you give to the project. As you compose your feedback, think to yourself, “How would I feel if someone said this to me? Is there some way someone might take this another way, a less helpful way?” If the answer to that last question has even the chance of being a yes, backtrack and rewrite your feedback. It’s better to spend a little time rewriting now than to spend a lot of time apologizing later.

• In the free and open source software world, there are few moments as exciting or scary as submitting your first contribution to a project. You’ve put your work out there and now it’s subject to review and feedback by the rest of the community.

• Not to put it too lightly, but feedback is great. Without feedback we keep making the same mistakes. Without feedback we can’t learn and grow and evolve. It’s one of the keys that makes free and open source collaboration work.

• Contributing to an open source project can be… Nervewracking! Magical. Boring?

• Regardless of how you felt that first time you contributed, the realization that the project is open and you really can contribute is quite awesome.

• If you’re looking for talented people you can turn into cultural doppelgängers—rather than seeking to align productive differences toward a common goal—you’re doing it wrong.

• Ada Lovelace, daughter of the English poet Lord Bryon and Anne Isabella Noel Byron (née Milbanke), was arguably the world’s first computer programmer. Her notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, published as additions to her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage contain an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers.

• Some biographers downplay, or outright dismiss, Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computing, but James Essinger, author of “Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age” is a firm supporter of Lovelace’s place in the history of computing.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• It was eight years ago in a train station car park. Alan Glynn’s name came up on my phone and I answered immediately, hoping to hear gossip from the set of The Dark Fields, the movie adaptation of his 2001 debut novel, which was shooting in Philadelphia and New York at the time.

• “They want to change the title. To Limitless.”

• “No.”

• “I’m not going to let them.”

• “No?”

• “I can’t stop them though, can I?”

• You might have heard of Limitless. It starred Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, it grossed $161 million (€139 million) and it was that rare thing: a cinematic adaptation that did more than justice to its ingenious source material.

• [...]

• The allure of MDT-40, Glynn’s mind-enhancing wonder drug that will not only unleash your full potential but induce other humans to engage favourably with you, is less equivocal in Under the Night.

• “It’s a broader application of what a drug like that might be able to do, it’s more positive. There’s a sense now that humans can and will be able to transcend what we think of as human limitations, the rate of technological development is so fast and so staggering that we will actually be able to do things that 20 years ago seemed like science fiction.”

• A win because it would fend off competition from generics for a few extra years. That, of course, means a loss for makers of lower-price meds known as biosimilars. In Canada, they’d have to wait an extra two years to get to market, and that would keep prices high, said Jim Keon of the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association. He said some U.S. biologic drugs make a billion dollars every year in Canada alone.

• “If you could introduce a biosimilar effectively into the market, the savings could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, just on that one product alone,” Keon said.

Security

• Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will shut down the Google+ social network after confirming on Monday that data from up to half a million user accounts may have leaked due to a bug in the system.

• Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai knew of the glitch and the decision not to publicly disclose it, the WSJ reported. Based on a two-week test designed to measure the impact of the API bugs before they were fixed, Google analysts believe that data for 496,951 users was improperly exposed. According to the report:

• One bright spot in all this: the defect in Google+ was discovered through “Project Strobe,” a serious privacy and security audit of every Google product.

• Many third-party apps, services and websites build on top of our various services to improve everyone’s phones, working life, and online experience. We strongly support this active ecosystem. But increasingly, its success depends on users knowing that their data is secure, and on developers having clear rules of the road.

• Google has decided to shut down the consumer version of its failed social network Google+. This news comes in the wake of a previously undisclosed security flaw that exposed the data of the profile of users.

• The bug in question remained active between 2015 and 2018, and Google discovered it in March; during this period, the flaw affected more than 500,000 users. However, Google claims to have no evidence that suggests that any external developer or app had access to the data.

• Google opted in the Spring not to disclose that the data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users had been exposed because the company says they found no evidence of misuse, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Silicon Valley giant feared both regulatory scrutiny and regulatory damage, according to documents reviewed by the Journal and people briefed on the incident.

• In response to being busted, Google parent Alphabet is set to announce broad privacy measures which include permanently shutting down all consumer functionality of Google+, a move which “effectively puts the final nail in the coffin of a product that was launched in 2011 to challenge Facebook, and is widely seen as one of Google’s biggest failures.”

• Earlier this year, Google started a project to review third-party developer access to Google accounts through the use of APIs. It found a security breach surrounding Google+, and is now shutting the service down, at least for consumers.

• The long and short of the issue is that there was a security hole that allowed third-party developers to access Google+ users’ account data, including name, email address, occupation, gender, and age—even if the account was set as private.. This isn’t particularly sensitive data, but regardless, a breach is a breach.

• The bug was discovered in March of 2018, but was presumed to have been open since sometime in 2015. To make matters slightly more troubling, Google only keeps this particular API’s data log for two weeks…so the company has no way of knowing which users were affected. Presumably, however, some 500,000 users were on the list.

• A new side-channel attack called TLBleed abuses the Hyper-Threading feature of Intel chips. Researchers say there is a high success rate of TLBleed exploits, but Intel currently has no plans to patch it. How does TLBleed work, and what are the risks of not patching it?

• Providing a web browser that you can depend on year after year is one of the core tenet of the Firefox security strategy. We put a lot of time and energy into making sure that the software you run has not been tampered with while being delivered to you.

• In an effort to increase trust in Firefox, we regularly partner with external firms to verify the security of our products. Earlier this year, we hired X41 D-SEC Gmbh to audit the mechanism by which Firefox ships updates, known internally as AUS for Application Update Service. Today, we are releasing their report.

• Four researchers spent a total of 27 days running a technical security review of both the backend service that manages updates (Balrog) and the client code that updates your browser. The scope of the audit included a cryptographic review of the update signing protocol, fuzzing of the client code, pentesting of the backend and manual code review of all components.

Defence/Aggression

• The statement described those killed as “very dangerous” and said they were in possession of automatic rifles, ammunition, grenades and a drone.

• Sajid Javid “gave up” on attempts to ensure the US did not execute two British Isis militants because he feared sparking outrage in Donald Trump’s administration, a court has heard.

• El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, who were allegedly members of a cell dubbed “The Beatles” and who killed a series of hostages in Syria, have been the subject of a legal dispute between the US and UK since being captured in January.

• Venezuela’s government said on Monday that a jailed opposition lawmaker killed himself by jumping from the 10th floor of the state intelligence agency headquarters (SEBIN) where he was being held, but his party said he was murdered by the government.

• Municipal lawmaker Fernando Alban, 56, was jailed last Friday for alleged involvement in the explosion of two drones during a military parade in August that was led by President Nicolas Maduro, Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said.

• “At the moment he was going to be transported to court, while he was in the SEBIN waiting room, he jumped from the window of the building and fell, causing his death,” Reverol wrote in a post on Twitter.

• The opposition First Justice party, for which Alban was a Caracas municipal counselor, said he was murdered.

• “With great pain and thirst for justice we tell the people of Venezuela … that Councilman Fernando Alban was murdered at the hands of the regime of Nicolas Maduro,” the party said.

• Alban had been arrested on Friday. His First Justice party blamed the government for his death.

• “We hold Maduro and his regime of torture responsible,” it said in a statement.

• According to mainstream video games, modern warfare is all about cyborg arms, laser shields and jarheads blowing up baddies under the guidance of recognisable character actors. However, the frenetic antics of the Call of Duty series and its ilk are behind the times. The drone pilot protagonist of 2012’s free indie game Unmanned is a more accurate representation of a modern soldier: a man who plays video games with his son every weekend, and who has also killed countless foreigners from a grey-walled cubicle in Nevada.

• You play an American warrior, square of jaw and beefy of build, who works from an office out in the desert. A click of his mouse sends tons of missile plummeting from anonymous drone planes with an eerie blank space where you’d expect to see a cockpit. Beneath his grainy monitor’s crosshairs, the insurgents-planting-IED pixels are indistinguishable from the children-playing-catch pixels. He is death from above by day and suburban family man by night.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• There are many ways to see colonialism. A breakneck rush for riches and power. A permanent pillage of life. A project to appropriate nature, to render it profitable and subservient to the needs of industry.

• We can see colonialism as imposition, as the silencing of local knowledges, and erasure of the other. Colonialism as a triple violence: cultural violence through negation; economic violence through exploitation; and political violence through oppression (2).

• Colonialism was not a monolithic process, but one of diverse expressions, stages and strategies. Commercial colonialism, centred around ports, differed from settlement colonialism. But its common factor is that colonialism took states to seek access to new lands, resources and labourers. Impelled by God, fortunes or fame, with almost limitless ambition, countries and companies scrambled to acquire control of land. New territories were seen as business enterprises. Local inhabitants were either obstacles to be removed or workforces to be subjugated.

Finance

• Amazon Go, for those unaware, is a store without checkouts – not even those automatic ones that yell about unidentified items in baggage areas. Instead, you scan in on your smartphone when you enter the store, and then just take items off the shelf and walk out the store. Your phone will register your exit, and your card will be charged later. Here it is being demoed by some impossibly good-looking people buying healthy things, rather than a six-pack of Stella and a scratch card.

• The social media giant’s accounts show that while Facebook increased its UK income by more than 50% in 2017, its pre-tax profits increased by only 6% to £62.7m. The Silicon Valley-based company’s UK taxable profits were reduced by a £444m charge for unexplained “administrative expenses”.

• Globally, Facebook made $20bn (£15.3bn) of profit on total sales of $40bn last year, meaning it converted half of its sales into profits. However, in the UK only 5% of sales were converted into UK-taxable profits.

• So we’ve noted for a while now how the U.S. government has deemed Chinese hardware vendor Huawei a nefarious spy for the Chinese government, and largely blackballed it from the U.S. telecom market. From pressuring U.S. carriers to drop plans to sell Huawei phones, to the FCC’s decision to ban companies from using Huawei gear if they want to receive federal subsidies, this effort hasn’t been subtle. But there’s numerous problems with the Trump administration’s efforts here, ranging from protectionism to blistering hypocrisy.

• While it’s certainly possible Huawei helps the Chinese government spy on American consumers en masse, nobody has been able to provide a shred of actual public evidence supporting that allegation. That despite an eighteen month investigation by the White House finding no evidence of actual spying on U.S. consumers. Also ignored: the fact that U.S. hardware vendors like Cisco routinely like to hype this threat to scare gullible lawmakers toward protectionism and providing Cisco an unearned advantage in the network and telecom market.

• Even if you want to ignore those facts and still claim Huawei routinely spies, you’d have to ignore the fact that countless hardware, including gear made by U.S. companies, contains an ocean of Chinese-made parts that could just as easily be used to spy on Americans. The reality is that China doesn’t even need Huawei to spy on Americans. The internet of broken things sector alone provides millions of new potential attack vectors annually that are often exploited by intelligence agencies.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Sen. Heidi Heitkamp was ready to vote ‘yes’ on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

• We launched a new collaboration on Monday that will make it even easier to be part of our Facebook Political Ad Collector project.

• In case you don’t know, the Political Ad Collector is a project to gather targeted political advertising on Facebook through a browser extension installed by thousands of users across the country. Those users, whose data is gathered completely anonymously, help us build a database of micro-targeted political ads that help us hold Facebook and campaigns accountable.

• On Monday, Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, is launching the Firefox Election Bundle, a special election-oriented version of the browser. It comes pre-installed with ProPublica’s Facebook Political Ad Collector and with an extension Mozilla created called Facebook Container.

• The election is only 28 days away. If you’re planning to vote, either on Nov. 6 or during your state’s early voting period, we need you to be our eyes and ears as we look for voting problems across the country.

• We’re on the lookout for any problems that prevent people from voting — such as long lines, registration problems, purged voter rolls, broken machines, voter intimidation and changed voting locations.

• Last week, Barack Obama endorsed several hundred Democratic Party candidates running in key state and congressional midterm races around the country. “Today, I’m proud to endorse … Democratic candidates who aren’t just running against something, but for something,” declared the former US president.

• Most politically significant among Obama’s endorsements was Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is running for Congress in New York. In response to Obama’s endorsement, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a courteous “Thank you, [Barack Obama]. Time to bring it home this November. Help us organize for healthcare, housing, education, and justice for all.”

• This effective reverse endorsement by Ocasio-Cortez for Obama, whom she has never criticized, is also a declaration of solidarity with the Obama administration’s policies. The administration oversaw the bailout of Wall Street and a massive transfer of wealth to the corporate and financial elite; an attack on health care fraudulently packaged as a reform; the deportation of 3 million immigrants, more than any president before him; and eight years of unending war, including drone assassinations and the expansion of the intelligence apparatus’ spying on the population.

• Electionland is gearing up for the midterms, and we’re looking for experts in election administration and election law to be part of an expert database. We’d love to have you participate. Our goal is to ground real-time coverage of elections in fact and context — you could be a huge part of helping us achieve it.

• Electionland 2016 was the largest-ever collaborative journalism project around a single event, with more than 1,000 journalists and technologists participating. We covered the voting experience on Election Day — from long lines to equipment failures to voter intimidation. We sifted through thousands of call-center records, social media posts and text messages, referring real problems to local journalists who covered the issues in real time. You can read an entire case study about it here.

• Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a blind spot in campaign finance laws to undercut a candidate from their own party this year — and their fingerprints remained hidden until the primary was already over.

• Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Their alarm shows just how widely the crackdown is being felt. Whatever the ultimate fate of Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s new zero-tolerance approach to dissent is being broadcast loud and clear.

• On October 2nd, 2018, Saudi journalist-in-exile and frequent critic of the country’s ruling monarchy Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to obtain routine documentation for his upcoming marriage to his Turkish fiancée Hatice Cengiz. He was never seen leaving—and, according to the New York Times, Turkish officials are anonymously confirming that investigators believe he was killed inside. Other sources said he may have been later dismembered to smuggle his body out of the building.

• Much remains unknown about what happened inside the embassy. The Times noted that Turkish officials have been reluctant to publicly accuse the Saudi government of killing Khashoggi, and the Saudi government has been adamant no such thing happened. It’s possible that instead of being brazenly murdered, Khashoggi was the subject of a brazen kidnapping. The Washington Post’s sources, however, said one source relayed that investigators believe a 15-man Saudi assassination team arrived in Turkey as part of a “preplanned murder.” And the incident has put Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the day-to-day ruler of the kingdom who has promoted himself as a reformer and robot-loving tech innovator while simultaneously cracking down on dissent, right in the spotlight.

• Bezos is pictured with the same Saudi prince whose regime journalists and the Turkish government believe has murdered a Washington Post contributor.

• Jamal Khashoggi entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain official recognition that he’s divorced his ex-wife. Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancée waited outside for 11 hours, but the dissident journalist reportedly never returned.

• Turkish officials insist that’s because a 15-man Saudi hit squad murdered him. They say they have “concrete proof”, although they haven’t yet provided any. Saudi Arabia said the allegations were “baseless”. Meanwhile, journalists familiar with Khashoggi are treating a Saudi-planned murder as the most likely story. Middle East Eye editor and former Guardian chief foreign writer David Hearst called it “a murder that comes straight out of a scene of Pulp Fiction“.

• Khashoggi left Saudi Arabia for self-imposed exile in the US after he was allegedly warned to stop tweeting, and his al-Hayat newspaper column was canceled. The 59-year-old started writing for the Washington Post’s opinion section in 2017, and has more than 1.6 million Twitter followers.

• Three students at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have ended a 44-hour-long hunger strike after the school agreed to their demands on Sunday.

• The students were protesting the university’s decision to take back parts of the “Democracy Wall,” a campus bulletin board. The decision was made after the student union refused to remove messages supporting Hong Kong independence, which started appearing on the wall in late September.

• [...]

• Since September 24, the student union converted parts of the Democracy Wall to a “Lennon wall” in commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the Umbrella Movement, during which a similar wall was set up in Admiralty.

• The Fall 2018 anime season is packed to the brim with major returns and premieres, but the standout among these new releases is the mysterious Goblin Slayer. Setting itself up to be the darkest series of the season, the premiere unleashes a gross level of brutality.

• But there were a few changes from the brutal events of the manga, which were major, but the anime was more effective with its scenes thanks to the censorship of a certain traumatic event.

• The European Film Festival in Yangon cancelled screenings of an Austrian movie about painter Egon Schiele after the Myanmar censorship board banned scenes in the film containing nudity on 21 September, reported Frontier.

• The Goethe-Institut in Yangon was due to show the film Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden as part of the 27th annual European Film Festival on 22 and 30 September. But when the censorship board said it wanted to censor the film’s nude scenes, the screenings were cancelled.

• “We want to keep our independence and we do not accept censorship in our institution, therefore we decided not to screen the movie at all,” Franz Xaver Augustin, director of the German cultural association Goethe-Institut Myanmar, told Frontier.

• The EU’s wide-ranging plan for indiscriminate internet censorship has progressed from a vote in the European Parliament and now reps from the EU will meet with reps from the 28 countries that make up the EU to hammer out the final text that will be put to the Parliament for what might be the final vote before it becomes law.

• Normally this next phase — the “trilogues” — would be completely secret. But a European Court of Justice recently ruled that the public has a right to know what happens behind the trilogues’ closed doors, and Julia Reda, the German Pirate Party MEP who led the fight over censorship in the new Copyright Directive, has promised to publish all the documents from the trilogues. It’s a European first.

• You’ll recall, of course, that prior to the GDPR, there was a big case against Google in the EU that created, out of thin air, a “right to be forgotten” (perhaps, more accurately, “a right to be delinked”) saying that for certain classes of information that showed up in Google’s search index, it should be treated as personal data that had to be delinked from that user’s name as no longer relevant. This never made any sense at all. A search result is not like out-of-date customer database info, yet that’s how the Court of Justice in the EU treated it. Unfortunately, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect earlier this year, the “right to be forgotten” was even more officially coded into law. We’ve noted recently, there have been a few attempts to use the GDPR to delete public information on American sites, and now we at Techdirt have been hit with what appears to be just such an attempt.

• This particular attempt goes back to some previous attempts under the pre-GDPR “right to be forgotten” setup. We need to dig into the history a bit to understand the details. You see, soon after the floodgates opened on delinking names from Google, we wrote about an article in the NY Times discussing how five of its articles had been delinked via RTBF claims. It was not 100% clear who had made the requests, but we did highlight some of the names and stories, including one where we called the removal “questionable.” It involved a NY Times article from 2002 about a legal action by the FTC which went after a group of companies allegedly run by a guy named Thomas Goolnik. The companies — TLD Network, Quantum Management and TBS Industries — were accused of “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” by selling domains that did not exist at the time (specifically, they were trying to sell domains using top level domains that did not exist, including .sex, .bet, .brit, and .scot.)

• The lawsuits against social media companies brought by victims of terrorist attacks continue to pile up. So far, though, no one has racked up a win. Certain law firms (1-800-LAW-FIRM and Excolo Law) appear to be making a decent living filing lawsuits they’ll never have a chance of winning, but it’s not doing much for victims and their families.

• The lawsuits attempt to route around Section 230 immunity by positing the existence of terrorists on social media platform is exactly the same thing as providing material support for terrorism. But this argument doesn’t provide better legal footing. No matter what approach is taken, it’s still plaintiffs seeking to hold social media companies directly responsible for violent acts committed by others.

• Eric Goldman has written about another losing effort involving one of the major players in the Twitter terrorism lawsuit field, Excolo Law. Once again, the plaintiffs don’t present any winning arguments. The California federal court doesn’t even have to address Section 230 immunity to toss the case. The Anti-Terrorism Act allegations are bad enough to warrant dismissal.

• Mr Boochani regularly contributes to the Guardian and the Saturday Paper in Australia but said other publications supported the Australian government’s efforts to restrict information about its offshore detention regime.

• “The Australian government couldn’t keep two thousand people, including children and women, in a harsh prison camps on Manus and Nauru without systematic censorship,” Mr Boochani said.

• “I have many experiences working with the media in Australia and also internationally over the past five years and I know that the government always tries to manage the information and censor the situation,” he said.

• “But after five years I think they are defeated because international media and public opinion are aware completely of what the government has done on Manus and Nauru.”

• The Guardian reported that the award’s organisers paid tribute to Boochani’s “commitment to condemning a fact which has been intentionally kept out of the spotlight”.

• When he announced another US$60-billion in financing for Africa last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised that the money had “no political strings attached.”

• But a series of recent incidents, including cases of media censorship and heavy-handed academic controls, have cast doubt on that promise. China’s financial muscle is rapidly translating into political muscle across the continent.

• At a major South African newspaper chain where Chinese investors now hold an equity stake, a columnist lost his job after he questioned China’s treatment of its Muslim minorit

• When he announced another US$60-billion in financing for Africa last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised that the money had “no political strings attached.”

• But a series of recent incidents, including cases of media censorship and heavy-handed academic controls, have cast doubt on that promise. China’s financial muscle is rapidly translating into political muscle across the continent.

• At a major South African newspaper chain where Chinese investors now hold an equity stake, a columnist lost his job after he questioned China’s treatment of its Muslim minorit

• Two student journalists at Metea Valley High School in Aurora say their work was censored when administrators prevented them from airing a broadcast story about a new restaurant because of footage showing alcohol.

• But student reporters for “The Mane,” a show that airs every two weeks, say they’ve made their case and it’s time to move on.

• Instead of continuing to push to air their review of VAI’s Italian Inspired Kitchen + Bar or taking legal action, reporters Triya Mahapatra and Laurel Westphal say they’re on deadline and focused on their next stories.

• But for many in the media this was nothing new, as intimidation and violence is an almost daily threat. Uganda is now ranked 117th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2018 World Press Freedom Index, five places lower than in 2017.

• Uganda has a long history of media censorship. The country’s first post independence head of government, Milton Obote who became prime minister in 1962, banned the intellectual Rajat Neogy’s Transition magazine. Idi Amin overthrew Obote in 1971 – during his regime, key journalists disappeared without trace.

Privacy/Surveillance

• William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe had been working on a technology that could help to prevent terrorist threats. With over 30 years of experience in the National Security Agency (NSA), the pair worked relentlessly on systems and protocol that would aid security enhancement to millions of people across the country and further across the world.

• A pair of NSA analysts who blew the whistle on the spy agency’s misuse of their security and privacy controls have come out of retirement to form a startup providing data analytics services based on a proprietary “decision intelligence” framework.

• Whistleblowers Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe announced they are launching Pretty Good Knowledge to provide “strategic advisory and project services” to commercial and government clients. Those services include real-time decision intelligence that scales.

• The partners said they have completed prototype projects over the last year involving European government agencies and financial services companies.

• Since leaving NSA, Binney and Wiebe have been working with data scientists “on how to conduct data analysis in ways which are more powerful in producing relevant results, while respecting the law and the human right to privacy,” according to the startup, which emerged on Monday (Oct. 8).

• If you’re looking for an ordinary story of Silicon Valley startup founders, then keep looking, because Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe aren’t your run-of-the-mill tech presidents. The two men spent decades at the National Security Agency before making their legacies known as whistleblowers when they alerted politicians, and ultimately the public, to an abusive spy program called Trailblazer.

• Though Binney and Wiebe had developed their own safer prototype that they say could have identified and prevented the 9/11 attacks, the NSA chose to ignore the model in favor of the more expensive and less efficient Trailblazer.

• [...]

• As data companies become bigger and more influential – the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates international revenues for big data businesses will grow to more than $203 billion by 2020 – Pretty Good Knowledge wants to position itself as a helping hand that can reveal important insights into a given operation.

• “Most organizations are wasting money trying to manage more data than they can handle. Others are missing out on business value by not utilizing the data they already have,” said Wiebe, the Director of Analytics at Pretty Good Knowledge. “At Pretty Good Knowledge we work closely with you to make the impact of data on your business measurable, meaningful and scalable.”

• On September 9, Hong Kong-based Initium Media published a lengthy article by freelancer Jiang Yannan which included several oral accounts from journalists and media employees working in various publications and websites in China. In their interviews, they discuss the current state of journalism in China and how the increasing restrictions on the media under Xi Jinping are impacting their day-to-day work. These accounts provide valuable firsthand details about dealing with propaganda directives, sensitive words on internet platforms, and other forms of censorship that they face as a matter of routine. One interviewee asks, “Right now, the scariest thing is that we don’t know where the ‘bottom line’ is. In the end, how low will it go?”

• Beijing is expanding its draconian measures to police the internet to include service providers and any company that uses the internet in China, according to a recent announcement by Chinese state media.

• The latest “internet safety supervision and inspection regulations” announced by China’s Ministry of Public Security were reported by China’s state-run Xinhua on Oct. 4.

• Chinese internet-service providers include China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile.

• Last week Bloomberg unveiled a weighty report which pointed the finger at the Chinese government for an in-depth and delicate espionage campaign which would have shaken the telco industry’s global supply chain. By allegedly compromising motherboards produced by Super Micro, the security protocols and trade secrets of more than 900 companies have been directly compromised. Who knows how wide the web could spread when you look at the indirect implications, partners who use the infected networks or collateral damage.

• While the claims have been refuted by all the parties involved, including Apple and AWS, and despite confidence from the DHS and the National Cyber Security Centre, a division of GCHQ, without a denial from the body likely to be conducting the supposed investigation, the CIA, or a flat-out rejection from the White House, there is still an air of possibility.

• This latest blunder also builds on our picture of Facebook as unreliable and undependable, but this time it’s because they can’t protect us, not because they won’t. The Cambridge Analytica story was shocking but unsurprising: it revealed that Facebook didn’t care about our data, except insofar as it could sell it off, packaging it up for the consumption and use of the highest bidder. While it was scandalous that data-hungry, advertiser-friendly Facebook had even allowed such a feature as the one that allowed people to click away their friends’ data, it was in line with their data-hungry, advertiser-friendly MO. The truth about the social network, only vaguely obscured, became clear –Facebook was happy for advertisers to leach our data, to look the other way, as long as it kept advertisers’ happy – but we kept on using it, taking more personal care. Being on Facebook, for those of us who remained, hasn’t felt the same since.

• Ronald Langeveld has had enough, but realized you have to do more than simply quit: you gotta get years of your stuff out, too. He posted instructions on exfiltrating all your photos, comments and posts before ridding yourself of Facebook.

• While the USMCA will primarily impact North American residents, there are a number of changes that could have greater implications for the broader digital community. The deal also highlights key negotiating priorities for member countries, which may be reflected in future global trade agreements.

• The patent states that “the shopping cart, upon being moved, ‘wakes up’ from being in a low-power or ‘sleep’ state mode.”

• Then, readings on temperature, pulse, speed, and the force at which someone grips the handle or pushes the cart would be used to create a baseline of the customer’s condition.

• Internet Australia, a not-for-profit that claims to represent Internet users in the country, has urged Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to interv ene in what it characterises as “the inadequate consultation process” over the encryption bill that was presented to Parliament last month.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It’s part of a wider movement to formulate an ethical basis for technical work (here’s a list of more than 200 university tech ethics syllabi) and a sense among established and new engineers that their work has an all-important ethical dimension.

• Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.

• That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration’s policies and the larger role of technology in government.

• On Wednesday, China’s tax authorities slapped Fan with a fine equivalent to about $130 million (nearly 892 million yuan) for tax evasion and other offenses. She then issued her first public statement in months — a groveling apology to the Communist Party of China and the public at large, admitting to all wrongdoing and begging for forgiveness.

• A central issue that remained unclear, however, was where Fan had been during the intervening months, and whether she had regained her freedom. The star, usually a ubiquitous presence at glamorous events of East and West, still hasn’t been seen in public since July 1.

• More than a month ago, former NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced to federal prison. Yet, instead of directly transferring Winner to the facility where she will serve her sentence, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has shuffled her around from county jail to county jail for the past weeks.

• Winner was charged with violating the Espionage Act after she mailed a copy of a classified report from the NSA on alleged Russian hacking of voter registration systems to the Intercept. She accepted a plea deal on June 26 and was sentenced to five years and three months in prison on August 23, which was the longest sentence ever for a person accused of an unauthorized disclosure.

• As of October 8, Winner is at Grady County Jail in Chickasha, Oklahoma, which is a facility the Bureau of Prisons uses for overflow when there are not enough beds. She has heard she could be at the facility for up to 30 days but hopes she will be on a bus to Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, on October 9, where she will serve the bulk of her sentence.

• Winner said she tries “not to dwell on the negative,” but also declared, “We keep saying it can’t get any worse, and it seems like they’ve taken that as a challenge,” when referring to Grady County Jail.

• “It’s one filthy warehouse, eighty-plus women. One shower. Couple toilets. There’s no services. No programs. No recreation. We’re just in here 24/7,” Winner shared.

• An influential state commission issued a highly critical assessment on Friday of a second key player in the murder conviction of Joe Bryan, saying a Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab chemist had “overstated findings, exceeded her expertise and engaged in speculation” when she testified in 1989.

• In a report issued at its quarterly meeting, the Texas Forensic Science Commission also found that the now-retired chemist, Patricia Retzlaff, failed to do thorough analysis of key DNA evidence in 2012, after a judge allowed such testing.

• Washington did not give Lithuania the information on alleged illegal transfer of people across the border to be kept in secret jails run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Lithuanian Prosecutor’s Office said on Monday.

• The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in May that Lithuania and Romania were knowingly hosting CIA secret prisons in 2000s.

• “In response [to the prosecutors' request], it was said that the United States is not able to supply the required information or responses to the questions of Lithuanian prosecutors,” the statement of the Prosecutor’s Office read.

• According to the prosecutors, the preliminary trial is ongoing.

• “The prosecutor’s office is stressing that all circumstances can be determined and assessed only after all the necessary information has been collected,” the statement read.

• The Lithuanian Prosecutor’s Office noted that the requests were sent to the United States, Poland and Romania as well as other states in 2015.

• So much has been said past weeks about a possible takeover of our great country, Zambia by the Chinese, an impossible thing to imagine, there has been the issue of Chinese policemen, then Chinese nationals seen driving state owned Zesco vehicles, could this be a sign that we are already bought as a people, and that we are headed for slavery and potential re-colonization? Well let’s break this down, and to do this we will have to take a peek into both African Slave trade and colonization.

• I will first deal with the results of both slavery and colonization before talking about how we got to that point.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Supreme Court has already taken on one patent case and two copyright cases. We preview those and ask what other intellectual property cases have a chance of being granted cert

• But, when it’s not clear: I’ve written about this issue a few times, and there are six or so cases where lawyers have been sued, disqualified, or a privilege has been lost. (Search for DePuy on patentlyo and you’ll find the last of these).

• So, that brings me to Connecticut Informal Ethics Opinion 2012-02, here. It says that even if the agreement says “Company A’s lawyers don’t represent Company B, or its employees” in-house lawyer for Company A has an attorney client relationship with Company B and its employee-inventors. Company A’s lawyer can never be adverse to Company B in the same/related matter.

• In 2014, Nash Manufacturing, Inc. (“Nash”) brought its wakeboarding invention, the “Versa Board,” to market. The Versa Board had several holes on the top surface of the board that allowed users to attach handles or foot bindings in various configurations, but Nash warned its users against having the handles attached to the board while standing. If a user theoretically ignored Nash’s warnings, the user could attach the handles and foot bindings in a configuration that paralleled the method of riding that ZUP described in the ZUP Board patent.

• ZUP filed an infringement claim against Nash. Nash counterclaimed, seeking a declaration of non-infringement and invalidity on obviousness grounds. ZUP presented evidence of secondary considerations to the district court. However the district court found the claims obvious in light of a combination of six prior patents involving water recreational boards. Images of some of the prior art patents are shown below.

Trademarks

• Tensions have grown in recent weeks after Florida-based Ross Kashtan trademarked the common Fijian greeting for his bar Bula on the Beach, sparking heated online debate and a petition by those seeking to protect the word.

• Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said Fiji’s Government was “shocked and outraged” and described the bula trademark as a “blatant case of heritage-hijacking”.

• “We would never give permission for anyone — particularly someone outside of Fiji looking to profit — to effectively claim ownership of bula, a word so deeply-rooted in our national identity that it has become synonymous with Fiji itself,” Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said.

• [...]

• “It will be really good as well for the trademark office in America and also trademark offices around the world — with the support of WIPO in Geneva — that there should be some sort of guidelines that have to be developed so that questions needed to be asked to business people who want to trademark words, or music, or designs, or whatever they want to trademark, that it’s not theirs.”

• The Fiji Government’s move comes after a Fiji opposition MP, Niko Nawaikula, said he would consider taking the fight to the United Nations’ mechanisms of redress for indigenous peoples.

• The word bula, or combinations of words including bula, have been trademarked at least 43 times in the United States, as well as in other countries, including Australia.

• The ABC sought comment from the Bula bar but were asked to make all requests via their website.

Copyrights

• World Intellectual Property Organization delegates have been negotiating a treaty aimed at protecting broadcasting organisations against signal piracy without success for the last two decades but has started to show signs of movement at the UN agency. A seminar held by a civil society group last week explored the potential implications of such a treaty on access to culture. At the event, a well-known copyright specialist argued that the current draft treaty being discussed, intended to update a 1961 treaty, does not take into consideration changes that took place since then, and in particular the transformation of broadcasting in the digital age.

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• In the Rome Convention, this is exactly why neighbouring rights for phonogram producers and broadcasting organisations were justified, he said. Both industries, at the time, required huge up-front investments and both were vulnerable to piracy. From the emergence of broadcasting in the 1930s, the industry required massive investments for a number of things such as the production, recording, broadcasting studios, and transmission infrastructures. “It was a very expensive operation,” he said.

• However, with the proliferation of low-cost and high-quality digital recording technologies, the technical costs of radio and television production costs “dramatically” fell, and with the broadband internet, the costs of distributing audiovisual content are approaching zero, he said.

• In 2018, “all you need to be in broadcasting is a smartphone, a microphone, a headset, and a broadband internet connection with access to a radio or a television streaming channel,” according to Hugenholtz. He went on citing the numerous video channels on the internet, such as YouTube, and the social medial and “countless” radio stations and podcasts available online.

• Many of those low-budget or no-budget broadcasts reach a sizeable audience and make substantial amounts of money without the incentive of broadcasters rights, he said.

• Negotiations on possible exceptions to copyright for specific actors such as libraries, archives, universities and research institutions at the World Intellectual Property Organization have been stalling for years. Last week, a group of civil society organisations published a proposed draft treaty text for copyright exceptions for educational and research activities. Now they are seeking support from WIPO members to shoulder the text.

• Limitations and exceptions to copyright will be discussed again at the 37th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, which will take place from 26-30 November.

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