● 10.29.18

● Links 29/10/2018: Red Hat Being Bought

Posted in News Roundup at 3:21 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Today, Bryan Lunduke announced that he is officially joining the Linux Journal team as “Deputy Editor” of the illustrious — and long-running — Linux magazine.

• “I’ve been a fan of Linux Journal for almost as long as I’ve been using Linux,” beamed Lunduke. “To be joining a team that has been producing such an amazing magazine for nearly a quarter of a century? It’s a real honor.” In November of 2017, SUSE—the first Linux-focused company ever created—announced Lunduke’s departure to re-focus on journalism. Now, furthering that goal, Lunduke has joined the first Linux-focused magazine ever created.

• Lunduke’s popular online show, the aptly named “Lunduke Show”, will continue to operate as a completely independent entity with no planned changes to production schedules or show content.

Desktop

• While many people use Windows 10 every day, I sometimes wonder how many actually enjoy doing so. Look, Microsoft’s operating system is very popular, but that could be largely out of habit. The interface is very inconsistent, and with aggressive telemetry, it can feel like you are being spied on too. Computers running Microsoft’s OS are prone to malware, and even worse, users could find their important files deleted! Hell, even the Surface hardware feels uninspired these days. Once people start looking at alternatives, such as the excellent Linux-based Chromebooks, they may wonder why they need Windows 10 at all.

• In the past, Linux thin clients had too many shortcomings to be a realistic option for users to access their virtual applications and desktops from, but times have changed.

• Older Linux thin clients were cheap devices that really only worked for the simplest of tasks and couldn’t support many peripheral devices. Graphical performance was low and often only allowed for a single display with no dedicated graphics adapter. In addition, for users working with Windows apps and desktops, the Linux OS would often invade their experience. It might just be the Linux cursor replacing the Windows pointer, but in extreme cases, the whole Linux desktop would show up when users were expecting only Windows applications.

Kernel Space

• With the in-development Linux 4.20 kernel, it is now effectively VLA-free… The variable-length arrays (VLAs) that can be convenient and part of the C99 standard but can have unintended consequences.

• The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle, including more optimizations on the POWER9 front for these latest-generation IBM CPUs.

• The code around the IBM POWER SLB (Segment Lookaside Buffer) miss-handling has been rewritten in clean C code rather than Assembly and improved upon from there. This cleaned up and optimized C code for their SLB entries is seeing a 27% speed-up in the context switching performance on one of their internal POWER9 benchmarks.

• The Chinese C-SKY 32-bit CPU architecture looks now for sure that it will be added to the in-development Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel. This might also be the last new CPU architecture ever to be added to the mainline Linux kernel.

• On Sunday before deciding on merging the new C-SKY CPU support code to the kernel, Linus Torvalds was looking for long-time low-level kernel developer Arnd Bergmann to comment on the code. He ended up giving his approval to these patches that add over 11k lines of code to enable this CPU architecture. With that sign-off, Torvalds now looks poised to merge the new architecture.

• While we still don’t know yet whether Linus Torvalds intends to call this next kernel Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0, we do know that whatever the version ends up being, this is going to be a very big kernel release with a lot of new features.

Graphics Stack

• With the Freedreno Gallium3D driver’s reverse-engineered, open-source 3D/OpenGL driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware in pretty darn good shape these days even for the latest-generation Adreno 600 series, the developers have begun working on more optimizations — including a new effort trying to reduce the OpenGL driver’s overhead.

• The AMDGPU DRM Linux kernel driver has offered GPU reset recovery for a while now in case of hangs that can be toggled by a module parameter, but the default behavior for the next kernel release is slated to change where it will be enabled by default for the newer Radeon GPUs.

• With the amdgpu-drm-next code for what will eventually be either Linux 4.21 or Linux 5.1, that’s being changed where by default it’s on for GFX8/GFX9 GPUs. That GPU reset recovery code in the mainline Linux driver has been found to be “working for the most part” on Topaz, Tonga, Fiji, Polaris, and Vega graphics processors, according to this commit added on Friday to the AMDGPU DRM driver’s testing branch. Previously it was just on by default for GPU SR-IOV setups. The recovery is triggered after a ten second job timeout.

Benchmarks

• Beginning today the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX and 2920X processors are shipping and we are now allowed to share our performance benchmarks for these latest Zen+ Threadripper 2 processors. Here’s a look at the Linux performance and related metrics for these new 12-core/24-thread and 24-core/48-thread processors.

• The availability of the Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX round out the initial line-up of AMD Threadripper 2 processors announced this summer. It was back in August that was the launch of the Threadripper 2950X as a very viable upgrade over the first-generation Threadripper 1950X and then jaw-dropping was the top-end Threadripper 2990WX with its 32-cores and 64-threads.

Applications

• After using it for a week, here’s intro to 5 of my favorite apps from AppCenter on elementary OS 5.0 I’ve tried. So far it’s Torrential (BitTorrent client), Spice-Up (presentation editor), DesktopFolder (icons on desktop), Notes-Up (document editor & notetaking program), and Screencast (desktop recorder). Four of them are paid apps, while still free/libre open source software, as I humbly support this approach of selling free software. I hope this article encourages more developers to join this elementary LLC’s software publishing platform and encourages more users to appreciate paid free software and support them.

• It’s been a long time since we covered news aggregators, and there’s been notable entrants and leavers to the scene. With regard to the leavers, Google Reader was discontinued in July 2013. And software like Newsbeuter, RSSOwl, Blogbridge, and Bloglines have been abandoned by their respective developers. Fortunately, there’s a number of great replacements that have filled the void.

• A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.

• For individuals that read lots of weblogs, a news aggregator makes keeping track of them effortless, and particularly useful if the weblogs are only updated occasionally.

• There are a number of different file formats which information publishers use. The most frequently ones are RSS and Atom. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. It is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. In other words, RSS is a Web content syndication format.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Released on Friday was Wine 3.19 with some new I/O work, new synchronization primitives, better handling for 32-bit .NET binaries on 64-bit, better dealing with broken RPC connections, and other changes. Wine-Staging 3.19 is now available with even more work to this stack for running Windows games/applications on Linux.

• Wine-Staging 3.19 is still close to 900 patches on top of upstream Wine, but over the past two weeks more work has been upstreamed. Almost two dozen patches were upstreamed including various fixes and additions to ntdll/hnetcfg/kernel32, and other low-level bits.

Games

• Hypergate from developer Geoff Nagy seems like a pretty good space combat sim that will release with Linux support in December. It has a new trailer to show off.

• The Away Team recently had a rather big update to expand the game in many ways and it does make it quite interesting.

• For The King, the interesting and fun strategic RPG has been updated to include the new ‘(un)cooperative’ Gold Rush update.

• It introduces a new and rather different game mode, which pits you against one or two others to be the first to collect and return 100 gold coins to Lucky’s Vault. This is played out across a new realm named The Midnight Woods, which is a land of perpetual darkness.

• This is pretty sweet! Locomancer, a Virtual Reality game about building a model train set has added Linux support.

• Circle Empires, the rather unique strategy game where the map terrain is literally split into circles has a rather nice DLC release.

• [...]

• I have to admit, I’ve had quite a lot of fun with this one, especially since it works really nicely on my Intel laptop so it’s good when you’re on the go or sat in bed too. It’s a pretty good coffee break game too, since it’s reasonably quick to get going so there’s not a lot of waiting around.

• With this release, you can now build Cemeteries. These will be made up of a grave keeper’s hut along with cemetery tiles that fill up as your peasants die. They’re necessary too, since dead bodies left laying around can cause a deadly plague. Plagues will now often start off in residential areas and continue to spread, so to help with that they’ve introduced a new Clinic building that’s cheaper than a Hospital.

• On top of that, the map will also now spawn some empty caves. After time, they will end up being populated with Wolves which will attack anything except peasants employed by foresters making you defence even more important. Maps also now have a Witches Hut, depending on how you get on with the Witch you might get some interesting spells or a curse on your kingdom.

• It seems EA are doing some rather interesting things with their experimental Halcyon game engine which includes Vulkan and Linux support.

• Halcyon is a research and development engine being built by Electronic Arts’ SEED group (Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division). While previously they talked up Microsoft DirectX ray-tracing and have been experimenting with it, they have also begun work on a Vulkan back-end for Halcyon that also includes Linux support.

• One of the SEED engineers presented at the Khronos/Vulkan meet-up Friday in Munich. There his talk was focused on the Halcyon R&D engine that the SEED team is working on and their experiments with Vulkan. SEED’s Graham Wihlidal also mentioned that besides Windows, macOS and Linux are support targets for this experimental engine.

• For those times when you gotta catch ‘em all, Monster Sanctuary is hoping to win over gamers with the interesting setting while crowdfunding on Kickstarter. They’ve also recently announced Linux support.

• Project Borealis, a fan-game that aims to create the long awaited 3rd episode for Half-Life 2 based on Marc Laidlaw’s Epistle 3 has put out a Performance Test for Linux gamers.

• Linux support arrived only a few hours ago in the 1.3.0 update which includes numerous other enhancements.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• On your next system upgrade you will receive all the latest versions of KDE’s Plasma , Applications and Frameworks , in addition to the usual package updates. All these have been compiled against the latest Qt 5.11.2.

• We make available Plasma 5.14 in its second bug-fix release, a brand new series that introduces many new features to our favorite desktop environment.

• I’m a comics artist and web developer from Oklahoma City. I’ve been creating comics and artwork for most of my life, though I didn’t seriously start making comics until several years ago. I’ve also worked variously as a writer, editor, layout artist, concert promoter, and art gallery director, among other things.

• The Qt Company has been supporting three different build systems for Qt programs. For Qt users, qmake is currently the most widely used build system. CMake is a clear second and growing in popularity. The third place is Qbs, with significantly smaller adoption. When asked about their preferences, most of our customers said they plan to use either CMake or qmake in the future.

• We have decided to deprecate Qbs and redirect our resources to increase support for CMake. Qbs will remain supported until the end of 2019 with the last planned release in April 2019, together with Qt Creator 4.9. Qbs is available under both commercial and open-source licenses, and we are happy to continue providing the infrastructure for further development by the Qt Project community.

• While Qt’s Qbs build system was once planned as the default build system for Qt6 and shaping up to be the de facto successor to QMake, there is a change of course with The Qt Company now announcing they are deprecating this custom build system.

• In recent months Qbs for Qt 6 began looking less certain and now The Qt Company has announced they are going to deprecate Qbs. From talking with their customers, they decided to focus on QMake and CMake.

• FreeBSD ports contain Qt 5.11.2 (except for WebEngine), KDE Frameworks 5.51, KDE Plasma 5.12.7 (LTS, but there’s movement lower in the graphics stack that should allow us to update to the current feature release soon-ish), and Applications 18.08. I just updated deskutils/latte-dock to the latest 0.8.2 release. Tobias has been doing everything, updating stuff all over.

• There are also things going away from FreeBSD ports. I’ll repeat for the hard-of-understanding: KDE4 ports are being removed on december 31st, 2018. We’ve notified those maintainers that we can — people using BitBounce deserve a special place and haven’t been informed, although we tried. New is that Qt4 ports are deprecated on FreeBSD and scheduled for removal on march 31st, 2019 (three months after KDE4, the main consumer, is removed). This is a bigger deprecation step, actually, since it touches applications maintained outside of kde@. The issue is simple though: Qt4 went EOL in 2015 and maintainence is increasing (e.g. for OpenSSL 1.1.1, changing C++ compilers, etc.). We have started updating default flavors (for things that have both) and informing maintainers.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Arrongin and Telinkrin themes are fairly new but looks great while giving a nice flavor to the Nautilus and Gnome Tweak Tool. These themes are modern and refined re-interpretation of Ambiance theme. Creator tried to give a modern look to Nautilus and Tweak-tool and worked on even smallest details of the theme. Both themes pack Gnome shell theme as well to match with Gtk theme and released under GNU General Public License V2 or later. If you are using distribution other than Ubuntu/Linux Mint then download the theme directly from its page and install it in this location “~/.themes” or “/usr/share/themes”. Arrongin and Telinkrin themes are in active development that means if you find any kind of bug or issue with theme then report it to get fixed in the next update. In the following screenshots, we have used Zafiro icon set.

Distributions

Reviews

• On October 18th the Ubuntu distribution and related community projects released new versions. These new releases are short term releases, receiving just nine months of support. For the most part, I did not find many big, new features listed in the announcements, but one exception was the changing of Lubuntu’s desktop environment: Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 18.10 has been released. This is the first Lubuntu release with LXQt as the main desktop environment. The Lubuntu project, in 18.10 and successive releases, will no longer support the LXDE desktop environment or tools in the Ubuntu archive and will instead focus on the LXQt desktop environment. The project has also reported that it plans to focus on being relatively light and modern, but will no longer focus on supporting older hardware.

• A shift in desktop environments, even related ones like LXDE and LXQt, struck me as interesting and I was curious to see what practical effect, if any, this would have on Lubuntu’s users. With that in mind, I would like to share some information on Lubuntu’s final release featuring LXDE (version 18.04) and then talk about Lubuntu 18.10 with the LXQt desktop.

Red Hat Family

IBM

• IBM and Red Hat have inked the deal. IBM is acquiring Red Hat for approximately $34 billion in order to become the number one hybrid cloud provider in the world.

• If you think open source projects doesn’t make money, it’s time to think again. A few months back Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion. SUSE Enterprise Linux was sold for $2.5 billion. Today IBM announced that it is buying Red Hat for approximately $34 billion.

• The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

• Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise container management system, the world quickly shifted from the Docker stack to Kubernetes in its raw and myriad commercialized formats. Much as Linux users had shifted their loyalties away from the Eucalyptus cloud controller to OpenStack in a heartbeat because of the completely open nature of OpenStack and the backing of Rackspace Hosting and NASA as founders and then a slew of open source developers and commercial entities piling on. Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration, and it is supported on Linux and Windows Server, the two dominant operating systems in the datacenter these days.

• Anyone remember the various commercials they’ve run over the years? I remember one specific one from… I don’t recall the year… but yeah, it is dated now. It shows a pre-teen boy. Years have passed. If they were to update the commercial, who should play that character? The commercial ends with “The Future is Open”. Let’s hope it still is.

Fedora

• This year, the first-ever Fedora Appreciation Week will run from Monday, November 5th to Sunday, November 11th. Fedora Appreciation Week is an annual event organized by the Fedora Community Operations (CommOps) team. It’s a week-long event to celebrate efforts of Fedora Project contributors and to say “thank you” to each other.

• This year, the Appreciation Week runs during the fifteenth anniversary of the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project has changed in many ways since 2003, but not the importance of our contributor community. This is a week to celebrate the friends, colleagues, and contributors who are part of this fifteen-year open source saga. Learn more about the event here.

• The first ever Fedora Appreciation Week will run November 5th to the 11th. This week-long event takes place during the 15th anniversary of the Fedora Project and was organized by the Fedora Community Operations team to “to celebrate efforts of Fedora Project contributors and to say ‘thank you’ to each other.” Go here to see how to participate.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• There are multiple open source SDN efforts in the market today that more well known than Fan, including the Tungsten Fabric and OVN, among others. Fan however, takes a different approach than other SDN models.

• “Fan is a zero configuration SDN,” Mark Shuttleworth CEO of Canonical Inc and Founder of Ubuntu, said. “What you trade is the ability to live migrate an IP address for simplicity.”

• Fan takes an overlay network address space and maps it mathematically to an underlay address space. As such, Shuttleworth explained that if a container is trying to get to a particular overlay address, it can be calculated, as opposed to being determined via a lookup method.

• “What is allows us to do for stuff that you don’t really want to live migrate

• While the concept of live migration was at one time a popular tool within Virtual Machine (VM) based environments, Shuttleworth said that in Kubernetes container environments live migration isn’t typically necessary.

• “You never want to live migrate a container IP address because you just shoot one and then grow another [container],” he said. “The Fan gives you an instant SDN with no central configuration, no database and no lookup mechanism.”

Devices/Embedded

• My NAS uses the ODROID-XU4 as the main computing platform, and so far, I’ve found its octo-core ARM CPU and the rest of its resources to be adequate for a home NAS. When I first set it up, I visited the official wiki page for the computer, which provides a number of OS images, including Ubuntu and Android images that you can copy onto a microSD card. Those images are geared more toward desktop use, however, and I wanted a minimal server image. After some searching, I found a minimal image for what was the current Debian stable release at the time (Jessie).

• Although this minimal image worked okay for me, I don’t necessarily recommend just going with whatever OS some volunteer on a forum creates. Since I first set up the computer, the Armbian project has been released, and it supports a number of standardized OS images for quite a few ARM platforms including the ODROID-XU4. So if you want to follow in my footsteps, you may want to start with the minimal Armbian Debian image.

• If you’ve ever used a Raspberry Pi before, the process of setting up an alternative ARM board shouldn’t be too different. Use another computer to write an OS image to a microSD card, boot the ARM board, and at boot, the image will expand to fill the existing filesystem. Then reboot and connect to the network, so you can log in with the default credentials your particular image sets up. Like with Raspbian builds, the first step you should perform with Armbian or any other OS image is to change the default password to something else. Even better, you should consider setting up proper user accounts instead of relying on the default.

• It has been nearly two years since I tried Fedora, Manjaro and Ubuntu MATE on the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3, and there have been a lot of changes since then. Most for the better, such as the introduction of the Pi 3B+, but a few for the worse, such as the end of the Manjaro Pi development. So I think it’s time to take a fresh look at this.

• But, first, why would anyone even want to do this, when Raspbian Linux is available, free, and supports all the special features, quirks and capabilities of the Raspberry Pi hardware?

• Well; the most common reasons seem to be that users want to work with a “familiar” distribution, meaning one that they are already using on a PC, such as Ubuntu. Another common reason is that companies have “standardized” on a specific version of Linux for servers, desktops and laptops; this is frequently the case with SUSE and Fedora, for example. Yet another reason might be a specific use of the Raspberry Pi; for example, Kali Linux for penetration testing. Finally you might just be curious (or masochistic) like me, and want to see how (or if) all of this works together.

Android

• Even though members of the younger generations are trying to bury email as “communication for old people,” the reality is email isn’t anywhere near its deathbed. While collaboration tools, social media, and texting are important, they aren’t ready to replace email as an essential business (and social) communications tool.

• Given that email isn’t going away and most of it is now read on mobile devices (according to a host of studies), having a good mobile email client is critical. If you’re an Android user who wants an open source email client, things get a little bit tricky.

Free Software/Open Source

• According to the Square’s official Medium page, this mobile payment company is open sourcing tools, documentation, and code for their Subzero crypto cold storage solution.

• The payment app recently added cryptocurrency trading and invested heavily into security to protect user funds given its custodial role.

• US business services provider 8×8 has acquired Jitsi, an open source video communications technology, and its team, from Atlassian, for an undisclosed amount. 8×8 said the deal will extend its cloud technology platform and add to its video collaboration capabilities.

• After announcing earlier this year that it planned to shut down HipChat and Stride and sell the IP of both to Slack, today enterprise software company Atlassian made another move related to its retreat from enterprise chat. It is selling Jitsi, a popular open-source chat and videoconferencing tool, to 8X8, a provider of cloud-based business phone and internal communications services. 8X8 says it plans to integrate Jitsi with its current conferencing solutions, specifically a product called 8X8 Meetings, and to keep it open source.

• Terms of this latest sale to 8×8 have not been disclosed. Both the tech and the engineering team working on Jitsi, led by Emil Ivov, are coming with the acquisition.

• According to the whitepaper, the OFGP uses the Byzantine Fault Tolerant Raft technology. It enables constant fast speed for transfers between blockchains. Moreover, this technology will help the Mallow protocol scale up as its developers add more features and cryptocurrencies in the future.

• iBitcome and Dex.top emphasize the open source nature of their protocol. The organisations give users the freedom to build their own gateways and encourage competitors to come up with similar solutions.

• They believe that Mallow will open a new era in digital trading. The protocol ensures transparency in the transfer process. Thus, there will be an increased number of transactions on and between the public blockchains.

• Technology entrepreneur Marc Andreessen once famously declared that software will eat the world. Joseph Jacks (pictured), founder general partner of OSS Capital, has a different twist on Andreessen’s opinion. He believes that open-source software will simply eat everything.

• Developments in the open-source space over the course of 2018 alone could lead some to agree with Jacks’ point. In January, Red Hat Inc. announced that it would acquire Kubernetes solutions provider CoreOS Inc. A month later, the open-source enterprise content management firm Alfresco was purchased by a Boston-based private equity firm.

• There’s never been a better time to be a developer, with a smorgasbord of no-cost, innovative open source software and low-cost, innovative cloud “hardware” at your disposal. Whether building software for use or sale, developers have been loading up on open source, with Forrester Research positing that only 10-20% of new code in applications is proprietary. Yes, really.

• While that’s great, it also overlooks a looming problem: Not all open source software is created equal. Or, rather, not all open source software is maintained equally. While some projects, such as Linux, come with big vendors like Red Hat to ensure disparate components are polished and up-to-date, a new wave of software like, for example, React may depend on hundreds or thousands of components, without anyone bothering to ensure they’re secure, up-to-date, etc.

• It’s potentially a big problem. Or, as Tidelift sees it, a big opportunity.

• How do companies that provide and package open source tools stand on this ‘open-source’ business model? Do they really capture the tech market on this basis? In this article, we discuss how popular companies like the recently IBM-acquired RedHat and Pivotal that follow an open-source business model have sustained in the long run.

Events

• ELCE 2018 has been a key event each of my 3 years at Codethink. It is an interesting conference from the technical and business point of view. This year the event was collocated again with several others, like the Open Source Summit Europe (OSS EU). It took place in Edinburgh, UK, I city I find particularly beautiful and enjoyable.

• CIP, the Linux Foundation Initiative for Civil Infrastructure, has the event as a key milestone. The group organises a booth and a face to face meeting of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) the day before the event starts. So for me ELCE is a day longer. The other main task for me at this event is supporting Codethink business development and community engagement actions, since I represent the company at the Linux Foundation.

• During the CIP TSC face to face meeting, I did a short presentation of one of the projects I am putting effort on lately: BuildStream. I also described the project among several people I know during the event, asking them to try out the integration tool and provide me feedback. The tool has matured quite a lot the last few months and I am interested in collecting feedback from experienced developers and software integrators.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Some of you know I have been recently experimenting a bit more with WebXR than a WebVR and when we talk about mobile Mixed Reality, ARkit and ARCore is something which plays a pivotal role to map and understand the environment inside our applications.

• I am planning to write a series of blog posts on how you can start developing WebXR applications now and play with them starting with the basics and then going on to using different features of it. But before that, I planned to pen down this series of how actually the “world mapping” works in arcore and arkit. So that we have a better understanding of the Mixed Reality capabilities of the devices we will be working with.

SaaS/Back End

• Finally, Edwards warns that you should challenge that aforementioned conventional wisdom and bring Operations into your digital transformation strategy — it has of DevOps, after all — and take time to understand how the four horsemen are undermining Ops work. Focus on taking down silos and limiting queues for them as well. Encourage them to focus on self-service Operations as a Service (OaaS) as much as possible.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• “It doesn’t surprise me that GitHub users are uneasy with this acquisition,” Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open Xchange said to INQ.

• “After all, the world’s largest open source repository is now following in the footsteps of Nokia and Skype, who have both become infinitely less popular and innovative since being acquired by Microsoft. Also, Microsoft seems to be competing with everyone on GitHub, which doesn’t ease the pain it creates with the acquisition. Microsoft has a history of being a very bad partner.”

• In today’s news, technology is often maligned with stories of how the industry is driving racial and gender biases, eroding personal privacy, destabilising democracies and isolating communities. At the same time, technology such as open source software is bringing together people from all walks of life to address pressing social issues, one line of code at a time.

• GitHub — a cloud based platform for developers — is at the centre of the open source movement, playing host to a community of 31 million programmers globally contributing their time and expertise to software projects.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Programming/Development

• The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has a new language front-end! The D language support has finally been merged.

• The D language support for GCC has long been sought after with over the past two years going through several revisions. Back in June of 2017 is when the GCC Steering Committee approved of adding the D front-end but it’s taken more than a year to get the code in adequate shape for merging.

• Last month there was a renewed push for D in GCC 9 while on Sunday evening that front-end and related code was finally merged to mainline GCC.

• Six years after AMD introduced “Piledriver” as the successor to the original Bulldozer CPUs, the LLVM Clang compiler is seeing a revised scheduling model for these processors that can yield faster performance of generated code targeting this older class of AMD CPUs.

• Piledriver cores ended up a range of CPUs from the FX-8300 series through the FX-9590, many APUs including the A10-6800K, more than a dozen mobile parts, and also some Opteron CPUs. Piledriver as a reminder was based on a 32nm SOI process, offered better IPC over the original Bulldozer microarchitecture, bumped the clock speeds, and other incremental improvements.

Leftovers

Science

• On Thursday (October 25), the blog Retraction Watch, which tracks problematic scientific literature, released an online database of more than 18,000 papers and conference materials that have been retracted since the 1970s.

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about Bloomberg’s story about backdoors and motherboards. The story is probably false, but this is almost certainly happening already with hardware. What does it mean if your hardware is already backdoored by one or more countries?

• Operating one’s own local DNS resolution servers is one of the simplest and lowest-cost things an IT administrator can do to monitor and protect applications, services, and users from potential risks.

• An Indian researcher discovered an important local privilege escalation vulnerability that poses a security threat to most Linux distros and BSD variants. Exploiting the bug in the X.Org server could allow an attacker to gain root access.

• Uncovered by security researcher Narendra Shinde, the issue arises because of an “incorrect command-line parameter validation.”

• Phishing attacks these days are a common phenomenon. Fraudsters use technical tricks and social engineering to deceive users into revealing sensitive personal information such as usernames, passwords, account IDs, credit card details and social security numbers through fake emails.

• Gophish provides a framework to simulate real-world phishing attacks. This enables industries to avail phishing training to make employees more aware of security in their business. Gophish is an open-source phishing toolkit written in Golang, specially designed for businesses and penetration testers. It is This means that the Gophish releases do not have any dependencies. It’s easy to set up and run and can be hosted in-house.

• [...]

• Damage caused by phishing in a corporate environment can have dangerous repercussions like loss or misuse of confidential data, ruining the consumer’s trust in the brand, use of corporate network resources etc.

• The Gophish framework aims to help industry professionals learn how to tackle phishing attacks with its ease of setup, use, and powerful results.

• A browser is hijacked by software that has been installed on your system, sometimes something you’ve installed on purpose, sometimes something you’ve installed without knowing it. Hijackers often redirect your traffic to ad-heavy sites and inject ads directly into your browser. They can change your browser settings, including your homepage and search engine preference.

Defence/Aggression

• It might be interesting to start your stopwatches the moment an act of terrorism or mass killing is first reported and note how long it will be until someone on the internet chimes in about how the violence is a “false flag” operation or another nefarious conspiracy of some kind.

• In the case of the recent spate of explosive devices mailed to leading liberal political figures and CNN, the stopwatch would have run only a few minutes. Almost immediately, conspiracist websites were posting theories about the “fake bombs.” Some people learned about the bombs by reading the “false flag” theories first.

• Within the day, conspiracists and other far-right extremists were competing to cook up the wildest variations on the false-flag theories, as well as to demand investigations into who really sent the bombs, with many implying that the victims sent the bombs to themselves. The meme was especially popular on white nationalist websites.

• Milo Yiannopoulos praised the would-be bomber on Instagram, saying it was “disgusting and sad (that they didn’t go off, and the daily beast didn’t get one).”

• Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has called the suspected murder of a journalist at a Saudi consulate in Istanbul “horrible”, but did not immediately support calls to halt arms exports to Saudi Arabia.

• [...]

• Swedish military exports rose by 2 percent last year, totalling 11.3 billion kronor, of which exports to Saudi Arabia accounted for 7 million kronor.

• Down through the ages, presidents and princes around the world have been murderers and accessories to murder, as the great Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden document in statistical detail in their masterwork Power and Morality.

• One of their main findings was that the behaviour of ruling groups tends to be more criminal and amoral than that of the people over whom they rule.

• What rulers crave most is deniability. But with the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by his own government, the poisoning of former Russian spies living in Britain, and whispers that the head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, may have been executed in China, the curtain has been slipping more than usual of late. In Riyadh, Moscow, and even Beijing, the political class is scrambling to cover up its lethal ways.

• There’s a small section of land on Google Earth that wasn’t updated for eight years.

• From afar, the area looks relatively insignificant. There are a few dry lake beds, scattered in an otherwise empty Nevada desert. But those lake beds are located just a few miles from the Tonopah Test Range, located within the Nellis Test and Training Range and controlled by the Department of Energy and Air Force. The land is used by the government to test highly-secretive weapons and technology.

• Satellite imagery of an experimental military base that was missing from Google Maps for years is now available … but you’ll have to go to New York City to see it.

• Engineer Dhruv Mehrotra, a resident at the technology and art nonprofit Eyebeam, and writer Brendan Byrne leased the swatch of satellite imagery from the company Apollo Mapping for $1,984.50, after noticing that Google Maps hadn’t updated an area over the Tonopah Test Range in southwestern Nevada for eight years.

• The leased imagery can be shown only to people within Mehrotra and Byrne’s “company,” so the pair hosted an event yesterday (Oct. 25) called “Internal Use Only” to showcase the bird’s-eye view of the experimental military installment. Visitors had to sign paperwork declaring themselves temporary employees of Eyebeam in order to legally see the satellite shot. [15 Secretive Places You Can Now See on Google Earth (And 3 You Can't)]

• So, Trump’s fans want to send time-bombs through the mail and Trump recommends violence against those with whom he disagrees (CNN, Dems, Liberals, blacks, women, …). So now he reaps what he sows. Membership in the Republican Party (Government of Pigs) is declining. Support of women and youth are declining. The old white men are dying off… The GOP are going to lose control of the House of Representatives next week and losing control of the Senate is still possible. Folks like Heitkamp are raising tons of money for the final week of campaigning. The “toss-up” seats in the Senate have some very narrow margins. Last week may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

• Dr Hanan Ashrawi, an executive committee member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, who released the names of the boys, called the killings a “war crime”.

• I knew just what Jamal Khashoggi’s murder really meant in the context of the Middle East last week when I realised just who I’d have to call to explain it to me. Whom would I telephone to learn what was going on? Why, of course, I’d call Jamal Khashoggi. And that’s why his murder is so important. Because he was, as he knew, a lone and important Arab journalist who did not listen – not any more — to His Master’s Voice. And that, of course, was his problem.

• This disgusting, dangerous, frightening, dirty murder – and don’t tell me a man of 60 who dies in a “fistfight” with 15 men isn’t murder – shows not just the Saudi government up for what it is, but it shows us up for what we are, too. How come we keep falling in love with Arab states – Israel does this, too – and then cry out with shock when they turn out to be extremely unpleasant and very violent?

• To answer this question, there are already several clues. Trump’s initial reaction that the Saudi story was “credible” – when it clearly was not – was a start. Then the murder became “the worst cover-up in history”. It was the quality of the murder that was troubling him, you see. These chaps didn’t know how to cover their tracks. He had already blurted out that he didn’t want to give up US arms sales to Saudi Arabia. We had our own beloved prime minister referring to Jamal’s gruesome murder as a “killing”, rather than a murder. Then – and this was indicative because it was not contradicted – we had Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, referring to the murder as a “huge and grave mistake”. “MISTAKE”. Let me repeat that. MISTAKE!

• A fascinating FT article suggests Western intelligence agencies have now dumped Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman after he’s been personally accused by world leaders — foremost among them Turkey’s President Erdogan and US President Trump — for ordering the brutal murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Implicit in the article, rich with quotes from current and former US and Western intelligence officials, is the further suggestion that these very intel operatives appear to now be actively seeking MbS’ ouster.

• But the other fascinating aspect to FT’s commentary is what it reveals about both the mainstream media and intelligence ‘deep state’ perspective on the kingdom and Middle East politics in general: a head of state is deemed good or bad insofar they are amenable to the goals of Western intelligence agencies. While this might be obvious to any student of the history of covert action in the 20th century, it is rare to see it acknowledged so out in the open in a mainstream publication. The FT article reads like a “bragging rights” competition over which crown prince could be better formed by US intelligence: MbS or his recently ousted cousin Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN)?

• [...]

• Or rather we should say, as a prior (and rare) New York Times piece pointed out, the Saudis are in reality “both the arsonists and the firefighters” regarding jihadi terrorism in the region and the globe, suppressing the extremist threat domestically while channeling it as a tool or extension of the Washington-Riyadh axis’ geopolitical goals (essentially using al-Qaeda to thwart Iran, and as a blunt force proxy for regime change from 1980s Afghanistan to Kosovo to Libya to Syria).

• Last week CIA chief Gina Haspel flew to Turkey to gather more details on Jamal Khashoggi’s murder — no doubt she’s also weighing MbS’s relationship with the agency.

• As far as we can know, that was the first visit of Ms. Haspel to Turkey in her new capacity after she was sworn in as the first female CIA director five months ago. Haspel is not a stranger to Turkey. She had served as an intelligence officer in Turkey presumably in the early 2000s and speaks Turkish. As CIA director, her counterpart in Turkey is crystal clear. What stroke me in stories in Turkish media on her trip was the rambling that suggested “She may or may not have met the chief of the National Intelligence Organization [MİT].”

• [...]

• It is quite likely that the intelligence committees at the Senate and the House would invite Haspel to closed sessions to testify on what evidence she was shared in Turkey over Khashoggi’s killing. If that happens, we can be almost certain that precious details of her testimony will be leaked.

• Haspel’s appearance in front of the committees at the U.S. Congress might leave an exit strategy, which is silently being shaped between Ankara, Riyadh and Washington, open to serious challenges.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• This is the next stage of the Julian Assange chronicles: from the summit of information disclosures and meddlesome revelations on classified state matters, the Australian rabblerouser now finds himself the subject of a new round of jokes and ribbing. WikiLeaks, in short, must be wary of the dangers posed by a new campaign of farce.

• Satire, humour and ad hominem attacks can have the effect of wounding and deflating. When directed against dissidents from the vantage point of tradition, the effect can be calculating and delegitimising. For Chelsea Manning, a querulous attitude to the US military, a confused matter of gender and lingering resentment were furnished as weapons against her role as a genuine whistleblower. Whistleblowers, or so goes this line of reasoning, cannot suffer “delusions of grandeur”. They must be calm, focused, and scrupulously clean.

• Assange, as with others associated with the vocation of exposing the asymmetrical nature of power and its impacts, has found himself repeatedly depicted in fashions that supposedly undermine the rationale for transparency politics. He is an enemy of conventional forms of stratified power, and must duly account for dirtying that sty in advancing an approach that insists upon transnational networks “which function,” writes Raffi Khatchadourian, “outside norms of state sovereignty that have held for centuries.”

• Ecuadorean Judge Karina Martinez has said it is absolutely crucial that Assange testifies and that another translator who understands his dialect is found.

Finance

• Saudi Arabia’s massive investments in American tech companies have been hard to ignore. The kingdom contributed $45 billion to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has invested in American tech companies like Doordash, Wag, WeWork, Slack, and Uber. Saudi investors have also directly joined fundraising rounds totaling $6.2 billion over the last five years, according to data gathered by Quartz, though their exact contributions were not disclosed. In the last two years, those investments have included Lyft, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company), and the virtual reality startup Magic Leap.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• An advisory to county clerks and elections administrators issued earlier this week by Keith Ingram, the secretary of state’s office’s director of elections, said, “We have heard from a number of people voting on Hart eSlate machines that when they voted straight ticket, it appeared to them that the machine had changed one or more of their selections to a candidate from a different party.”

• A Brennan Center analysis shows both Republicans and Democrats have found a new way to set up super PACs and rake in dark money, further weakening our campaign finance system

• How little do elected officials care about climate change? Look no further than a recent U.S. Senate hearing about the biggest threats facing the country, where lawmakers asked a single question about global warming during the entire three-hour event.

• Sadly, this hearing occurred just days after the world’s leading scientific body on climate change warned that the world has a mere dozen years to avoid catastrophic impacts.

• Despite the urgency of the climate crisis, getting elected officials in the United States to commit to genuine solutions has been slow going, to say the least.

• Nathaniel Stinnett has some idea of why and what to do about it.

• Stinnett worked for years as a consultant and advisor on political campaigns and for advocacy nonprofits. A few years ago he noticed that polls showed that climate change and environmental issues were usually last among priorities for likely voters.

• For all the talk about election interference from nation-states, there’s been not nearly as much concern about devices themselves threatening the integrity of the voting system. E-voting machines have long been an insecure mess. On top of that, they’re prone to introducing errors — either through flaws in the devices themselves or by users who aren’t familiar with how they work.

• The latter seems to be the issue in Texas, where voters have been complaining about their votes being switched. What sounds like just another crazy conspiracy theory may be nothing more than software not behaving the way people think it should behave.

• Driven by women’s anger at Donald Trump, 125 to 150 female members could take seats in Congress next year.

• Native Bay Area Black folks like myself are all too familiar with a form of NIMBYism that lives in progressive places. This strand of parochialism is less about the ills of urban development (although that certainly exists), than the dogged belief that this region has somehow escaped the litany of “isms” that plague the rest of the country. Over the years, friends, colleagues, and even random strangers have earnestly assured me that prejudice and discrimination do not exist in _____, fill in the city or the organization or the industry; that my experiences of bias, unequal treatment, or disrespect were isolated events or misunderstandings—on my part; and that we (really, me) were fortunate to live in a place that embraced difference and where moving up in life came to those who had earned it. Racism? Not here. Not in our backyard. And then the 2016 Presidential race with its virulent celebration of rage took us all down the rabbit hole into this country’s foundational hatreds and landed squarely in the Bay Area.

• [...]

• Walking to my car, I came across a group of large White men making their way up to Sproul Plaza, the campus’s public square. Three men broke away from the current of the crowd and lunged towards me with unexpected speed. A wall of rosy, fleshy faces wearing down vests, blue jeans, and MAGA caps backed me up against the side of a building, chanting, “Build the Wall! Build the Wall! Build the Wall!” In that moment, all I could see was their faces, their eyes, their curling, sputtering lips animated with mirthful rage. Within seconds, it was over, and they disappeared back into the roiling mass.

• So here is what’s true: Despite the extensive media coverage, the motley mix of White supremacists, neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and Trump supporters in Berkeley, as well as at extremist rallies around the country, were vastly outnumbered by opposing protesters at every turn. And while these events were not always free of violence, the majority of those protesting were animated but peaceful.

• Jair Bolsonaro, conservative candidate in Brazil’s presidential race, is likely to achieve a historic victory Sunday despite an assassination attempt limiting his campaign schedule and reports of censorship on Facebook.

• [...]

• The 63-year-old former army captain has also had the disadvantage of recovering from a near-fatal last month at the hands of a socialist who told police he was “sent by God” to kill the candidate. The incident rendered him largely unable to campaign and participate in public events. Rival Haddad criticized Bolsonaro’s failure to turn up to presidential debates, his opponent as a “fool” who was unable to defend his ideas.

• When UK party leaders regale their conferences with promises on health, schools, social care and housing their actual writ runs no further than the English border. Outside England most domestic policy will be determined by other politicians, usually from different parties, and elected – with no English input – to their own parliaments. That has been the effect and the intention of 20 years of devolution.

• While the leaders do address major UK-wide issues, of course- not least Brexit and the ‘end of austerity’ – for the larger part these are conferences in and about England. Yet, quite bizarrely, England, as England, plays almost no part in the language or vision of the party leaders. This year Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Vince Cable managed to name England just once between them. Even the leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru named England four times between them (though not necessarily in the most complimentary context).

• The leaders’ distain for England is mirrored by their juniors. James Brokenshire, whose responsibilities at Communities and Local Government are almost entirely English, spoke at his party conference for 19 minutes without naming England once. John Healey only makes Labour housing policy for England alone but also failed to name the nation. Vague formulations like ‘our country’, or even saying ‘Britain’ when the target audience is England is endemic across the body politic.

• [...]

• The Prime Minister’s tortuous European negotiations are constrained by voters (and MPs) who don’t value the union or the peace process as much as she. Jeremy Corbyn struggles to win working class English voters even when they support many Labour policies. Across Western Europe ignored and unrepresented communities have proved fertile ground for dangerous populist movements. Rather than ignore the English it might be better if our parties began to talk to them and work out how to give them a democratic voice.

• With midterms just weeks away, tribes are mobilizing voters in response to the recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld a 2017 North Dakota Voter ID law requiring residents to provide identification with a current street address to vote.

• The law disproportionately affects Native voters in North Dakota and could curtail the Native vote in a state where Democratic incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is trailing Republican challenger U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer. Native voters typically vote for Democrats.

• Tribes are now pushing back against disenfranchisement of Native voters by Republican leadership in North Dakota, but it remains to be seen if that will save Heitkamp’s seat.

• “Whatever happens in the Dakotas can be a prediction of what the country could look like,” Allison Renville, a citizen of the Sisseton Sioux Tribe, said. “The bigger question is, how can we see each other as human beings who are vulnerable to poverty and suffering instead of in partisan ways?”

• Her reservation is called “the Triangle” locally because of its shape. Like the Standing Rock Sioux reservation on the other side of the state, it straddles both North and South Dakota.

• Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger, Daniel Stein, Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Bernice Simon and Sylvan Simon. Those are the names of the 11 worshipers who were gunned down Saturday in Pittsburgh, when a 46-year-old white man named Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life synagogue and opened fire, yelling “All Jews must die.” It is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. We speak with Ari Lev Fornari, a rabbi at Kol Tzedek Synagogue in West Philadelphia who has worked with HIAS, a Jewish agency that aids refugees that the gunman targeted online. We also speak with Dr. David Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist who has volunteered with HIAS in Philadelphia. Glosser is the uncle of Stephen Miller, a key political adviser to President Trump who has pushed for a crackdown on immigrants. Glosser speaks directly to his Stephen Miller, saying, “It’s absolutely unacceptable to utilize hatred and bigotry to advance your political ends. This is a shallow, shabby expression of ambition. It’s poisonous to the country, destructive to society, and a complete repudiation of your own background and your own past.”

• Facebook seems surprised that its monopolistic platform has been weaponised by political actors. So who’s going to tackle the perfect storm, asks John Naughton?

• Ponder this: in 2004 a Harvard sophomore named Zuckerberg sits in his dorm room hammering away at a computer keyboard. He’s taking an idea he ‘borrowed’ from two nice-but-dim Harvard undergraduates and writing the computer code needed to turn it into a social-networking site. He borrows $1,000 from his friend Eduardo Saverin and puts the site onto an internet web-hosting service. He calls it ‘The Facebook’.

• Fourteen years later, that kid has metamorphosed into the 21st-century embodiment of John D Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst rolled into one. In the early 20th century, Rockefeller controlled the flow of oil while Hearst controlled the flow of information. In the 21st century Zuckerberg controls the flow of the new oil (data) and the information (because people get much of their news from platform that he controls). His empire spans more than 2.2bn people, and he exercises absolute control over it — as a passage in the company’s 10-K SEC filing makes clear.

• You may recall that, back in June, I wrote about a bizarre situation in which an election simulation game, that I helped co-design, called “Machine Learning President,” somehow had some of the rules sheets leaked to Rebekah Mercer, from which they were leaked once again to Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who wrote up an article there, not knowing the provenance of the game. This caused many, many people to assume that the Mercers had somehow made up this game to “relive” the success of the 2016 election. This resulted in a ton of angry headlines and tweets — including the host of NPR’s comedic news-based “game show” Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Peter Sagal, who alerted his friend, Cards Against Humanity designer, Max Temkin, who tweeted angrily about the game.

• The next day, when I wrote up my post explaining what the game really was about — we had a lot of people reach out to ask if they, too, could play the game. Unfortunately, it’s a ton of work to put on, and the crew who designed the game — lead by Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath from Scout.ai and Guardians.ai, who initially conceived of the game, along with Randy Lubin (who is our partner in our CIA game project, and science fiction writer, Eliot Peper — are all super busy. However, by far the most aggressive in getting us to play the game were Max Temkin and Peter Sagal.

• Donald Trump has given rise to a great deal of handwringing by those conservatives who seek to distance themselves from him. Salon’s Chauncey DeVega recently interviewed one of the most thoughtful of those, Max Boot, whose new book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right,” is more honest than most. But the “corrosion” of the title betrays a lingering sense that something noble has been betrayed — in contrast, say, with John Dean’s starkly titled “Conservatives Without Conscience” from 2006.

• Nonetheless, as Jonathan Chait’s review puts it, “the truly radical act in ‘The Corrosion of Conservatism’ is its clear-eyed excavation of the movement’s history,” which entails recognizing that the crazies have always been there. William F. Buckley, for instance, “renounced the president of the John Birch Society while continuing to endorse the organization itself, which was a large and powerful constituency,” Chait notes.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A woman with a flower in her mouth and hair blowing in the wind.

• This was an attractive illustration that painter Thanh Chuong drew for the cover of a local newspaper in Hanoi for its spring issue.

• However, soon after the paper was published, a cultural czar, a bureaucrat tasked with reviewing and censoring art and culture-related products in the country, demanded that all issues be recalled, because, kid thee not, the woman’s hair was too “unkempt.”

• The official maintained that such a hairstyle was unbefitting of a “civilized city” like Hanoi. What’s more, the fact that she was holding a flower in her mouth implied that the country was too poor to afford its citizens a decent meal, so they had to resort to chewing on “blades of grass.”

• The European Union (EU) summit on October 18 resolved to further tighten the censorship of the Internet. It also threatened with sanctions and penalties any party that diverges from the prescribed political line in the 2019 European election campaign. This is the response of European governments to growing opposition to militarism, social cuts and right-wing extremism. In the summit’s official conclusions, the European Council calls for “measures to combat cyber and cyber-enabled illegal and malicious activities and build strong cybersecurity.” The EU should be empowered to “respond to and deter cyber-attacks through EU restrictive measures.”

• Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released draft regulations for blockchain firms who operate in the country of 1.4 billion people, and it’s inviting public feedback until Nov. 2. The internet regulator on Oct. 19 proposed rules that, according to Article 1, will “safeguard national security and public interests … and promote the healthy and orderly development of blockchain technology.”

• But China’s ruling party has an interesting notion of what constitutes “healthy and orderly.”

• CAC’s document is raising eyebrows for removing internet-based anonymity; censoring controversial views; requiring the collection of national ID card numbers; and subjecting blockchain providers and users to 24/7 monitoring. Firms will also need to store people’s data and their usage of services, and to provide this information to officials when requested.

• Ironically, all this is done via distributed ledger technology (DLT) that has been applied in the West and elsewhere to protect privacy and free speech. And to implement a decentralized framework to governance. What Chinese officials didn’t clarify is how operators can comply with the above requirements given that blockchain captures unchangeable, immutable records that are publicly viewable.

• The People’s Republic of China, known for its strong censorship of the Internet, is at it again. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released a draft proposal on Oct. 19 that determines how companies and individuals interact with blockchain networks.

• Under the proposal, individuals have to provide their real names and national identification card numbers before making use of blockchain-related services. Blockchain companies can censor content deemed to be a threat to national security and are not allowed to publish information prohibited by the country’s laws.

• A civil lawsuit filed by the Human Rights Defense Center claims inmates at the Forrest County Jail are being denied access to reading materials due to unconstitutional censorship policies. The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, names Forrest County, Sheriff Billy McGee and unnamed jail staff as defendants. The HRDC is a non-profit organization that provides inmates across the country with information about their legal and civil rights and ways to access education while behind bars. The lawsuit claims most books and publications are banned under Forrest County Jail policies, and inmates are only allowed to read “the Bible and sometimes other Christian publications.”

• The new chairman at the Film Censorship Board is Grace Showan and her deputy is Fabian Todd.

• Campus censorship is a myth. That’s the new line being spun by student union officials and university leaders in response to the campaigners, commentators and politicians raising concerns about the increasingly censorious culture on British campuses. The extent of No Platforming, Safe Space censorship and newspaper bans, they say, is being exaggerated by right-wing hacks desperate for something to fulminate about.

• Up to now, it’s an argument that’s been easy enough to dismiss given the very people making it are usually the ones responsible for the campus censorship we read about. But a BBC ‘Fact Check’, purporting to back-up their claims, has, irritatingly, given them a bit of a boost.

• The video was of a speech Farrakhan gave in Detroit earlier this month to mark the 23rd anniversary of the Million Man March, his famous rally in Washington, D.C.

• The website noted that Bowers posted accounts on other social media platforms.

• A study released Friday by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that tracks anti-Jewish sentiment, reported the existence of “online propaganda offensives” containing anti-Semitic content designed to intimidate Jewish people and Jewish journalists ahead of the 2018 midterms.

• Bots have played a critical role in anti-Semitic attacks online. Nearly 30 percent of the accounts that repeatedly tweeted terms meant to denigrate Jews were judged to likely be bots, according to the analysis. These accounts made more derogatory comments about Jews on average than accounts that seemed to be from humans – 43 percent of the tweets even though they represented just 28 percent of the accounts.

• Cesar Altieri Sayoc, the suspect in the nationwide bombing campaign against critics of President Trump, regularly took to Twitter to make thinly veiled death threats against other users and peppered some of the targets with abuse, according to a quick review of an account authorities believe belongs to Sayoc. Twitter initially allowed the posts to remain despite its stated policy barring threats.

• After the account was surfaced on Friday, Rochelle Ritchie tweeted several screenshots of threatening tweets that @hardrock2016 sent to her. She also posted a screenshot of the Twitter’s response to her report: “we have reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior.”

• Earlier today, a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and killed eleven people before being apprehended by police. The suspect has since been identified as 46-year-old Robert Bowers, who appears to have had a history of anti-Semitic speech on the social network Gab. Following these revelations, Paypal banned the site from its payment platform — the latest action taken against the troublesome social network by a major technology company.

• Shame on all those who have been silent—or, worse, supported the president’s agenda.

• Access to the monthly magazine Prison Legal News (PLN) is one of the few ways prisoners learn about criminal justice issues, including their rights as prisoners. Most incarcerated individuals across America have access to the publication.

• The exception? Every prisoner in Florida.

• Since 2009, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) has banned every issue of PLN, claiming that the advertisements in the magazine raise security concerns. FDOC’s blanket ban on PLN makes Florida an outlier. No other state, county or even our federal government has a de facto ban on PLN because of its ads.

• Actor-producer Shahnaab Alam on Saturday said “subtle censorship” is more prominent in India instead of the legal one, and that people’s sentiments are getting hurt more easily due to films than in the past.

• The filmmaker also batted for complete elimination of the censorship process and advocated the rating system like in the US and some European countries.

• “There are two kinds of censorships in India — one is the legalised one. But, there is a whole lot of subtle censorship in India. Many sections do not agree and we have backlashes. There is no law and order support,” Alam said.

• Ans. Today, more than ever, the people in the West are being drawn towards Asian cinema and culture at large. There is a greater audience for films from India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Iran. Also, let’s not forget that Asian cinema is very rich in terms of human emotions, as opposed to Hollywood which is unable to look beyond superhero franchises at this point of time.

• “He fought against censorship — something that we are also grappling with now ourselves. He talked about identities which were beyond national, religious and caste. That is what is dividing us today, not just in India but the world over. He’s so relevant,” said Das in an interview in August when she was in Dubai to attend Mehfil-e-Urdu 2018.

• [...]

• Manto was tried for obscenity six times and every single time he fought it because he believed in true literature and what art is. He knew why art cannot be deemed as obscene just because you take a word or sentence out of context. He fought against censorship — something that we are also grappling with now ourselves. He talked about identities which were beyond national, religious and caste. That is what is dividing us today, not just in India but the world over. He’s so relevant. This film was my way of responding to what’s happening around me. I took refuge in Manto. I am not trying to appease anybody here. I told a story that moved me.

• Last week, the Bangladesh government revealed its proposals for a four-month project to monitor social media sites such as Facebook and Whatsapp, ahead of the upcoming general election. The project led by the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime unit, will detect anti-state propaganda on the internet, bdnews24 reports. This is the latest development in a series of media reforms introduced by the Bangladesh government in its vigorous clampdown on political dissent.

• Lee Camp speaks with Ajamu Baraka about the bipartisan war agenda, and why dissident voices are being silenced. Then, he discusses poverty in America with Naomi Karavani.

• Xnet (https://xnet-x.net/en/), an activist group working for civil rights in the Internet, is the founder member in Spain of the #SaveYourInternet coalition, which has among its participants groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), European Digital Rights (EDRi) and others. We have come together to organise a campaign to inform the public about the hidden dangers of the new European Copyright Directive.

• With the approval in the European Parliament of the final text of the Copyright Directive, which will be definitely put to the vote in a very few months’, the European Union has lost a historic opportunity to produce copyright legislation adapted for the Internet in the twenty-first century. What the European Parliament will finally vote on is a technophobic text, tailor-made for the interests of the copyright monopolies which, moreover, doesn’t guarantee the right of authors to have a reasonable standard of living as a result of their work.

• If the law is eventually passed, it will be used for wholesale curtailment of freedoms and more censorship, in keeping with the bizarre idea that anything that doesn’t produce hard cash for the major players – which doesn’t mean authors! – has to be prohibited and eliminated.

Privacy/Surveillance

Civil Rights/Policing

• To turn towards suffering and make that the centerpiece of your decisions takes guts and determination.

• [...]

• In the media world we need new codes of conduct that commit newspaper editors to steer clear of personal slander and stereotyping language. Under such a code, corrosive attacks on the press as “enemies of the people” by President Trump and others, or Boris Johnson’s incendiary description of Muslim women as looking like “letterboxes,” would never be allowed or tolerated.

• It’s also important to work with politicians on reforms to the policy-making process that make cross-party working easier, while helping to boost the numbers of representatives in parliament or Congress from less privileged backgrounds so that those entering politics have a better understanding of the lives of the people they govern.

• DiEM25 will contest the European elections in Italy, with a European programme offering a coherent alternative to the implicit but destructive alliance between the oligarchic establishment and Salvini’s nationalism.

• The government is violating a federal judge’s order to stop medicating immigrant children held at a troubled Texas shelter without proper consent and to move the children to other housing, attorneys for the children allege in new court filings.

• U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee ordered July 30 that immigrant children held at Shiloh Treatment Center could no longer be medicated with psychiatric drugs without the consent of a parent or court authorization and that any children not deemed a danger to themselves or others be moved to less restrictive housing. Gee also found the children should be allowed access to private phone calls.

• Like so many, when I first heard the news of the horrific shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue yesterday, I went immediately to the news and could not turn away. The initial reports were sketchy and inconclusive. Eventually it became clear that the outcome was as horrible as we could possibly have feared. As of this writing, 11 Shabbat worshippers at Tree of Life synagogue have been killed. Six people have been wounded.

• Then, like so many, I sought any information I could find about the alleged shooter. I learned that he was a white supremacist named Albert Bowers and that among other things, he had a particular fixation with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the venerable Jewish organization that works to aid and resettle refugees from Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

• Whenever new protest movements emerge, people look to history for lessons from activists and thinkers who came before. We all stand on the shoulders of those who struggled, sacrificed, and organized to push for a more humane society.

• #MeToo is one such movement. It has not only raised awareness about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault—particularly of women—but is also an example of what happens when those who are relegated to a second-class citizenship status come together to speak out.

• History is filled with courageous and heroic women who launched crusades for women’s liberation and workers rights, and campaigns against rape and other forms of sexual assault. These women were writers and thinkers such as Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ella Baker, Betty Friedan, Dolores Huerta, and many more.

• Another is Rose Schneiderman, an unsung forerunner of the #MeToo movement, who organized women to fight for laws to protect them from, among other exploitation, sexual harassment and assault by higher-ranking men in their work spaces.

• Right-wing conspiracy theories appear to be the source of two of the most recent horrifying high-profile attacks in the United States this week. First, a series of bombs was sent to multiple Democratic figures and CNN, allegedly by a man who promoted delusional and conspiratoral beliefs about these individuals. And second, on Satuday, a mass shooting killed 11 people and injured several more at a Pittsburgh synagogue, and it was allegedly carried out by a a man who believed anti-Semitic consiracy theories about immigration.

• To discuss this troubling trend, MSNBC brought on a right-wing commentator who has himself trafficked in troubling conspiracy theories — even in recent weeks — but barely acknowledged his checkered past.

• That figure was Erick Erickson. As Media Matters for America documented, he helped promote a right-wing conspiratorial attack against David Hogg, one of the prominent survivors of the Parkland shooting. Those survivors, and Hogg, in particular, were subject to outrageous conspiracy theories and vicious attacks in the right-wing press, and Erickson was a part of that.

• During his presidential campaign, President Donald Trump faced heavy criticism for repeatedly lying when he claimed that he saw “thousands” of “Arabs” celebrating in New Jersey when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. This was widely panned as an outrageous lie — and a deeply racist one at that — and yet his campaign continued and eventually succeeded.

• Now that he’s president and under fire for his reaction to multiple hateful and terrorizing attacks this week, he’s taken to lying about 9/11 again.

• In addition to the criticism saying Trump stokes irrational and bigoted climate among his followers, many noted that he continued to hold his starkly partisan campaign rallies, despite a need for national unity in the wake of the attacks.

• In politics it does matter how your opponent is conducting their campaign. Political races are not like running or swimming races, wherein the most competent, the fastest and the most skilled wins the race regardless of how others compete. Political races are more like very long and protracted Sumo wrestling matches. Why Sumo? Because in Sumo wrestling, although there are rank classifications (the Yokozuna being the highest in terms of power, skill and dignity/grace, and Komusubi the lowest), anybody can go against anybody in official tournaments, and it is not uncommon for a lower ranked rikishi (or wrestler) to throw higher ranked ones. If you’re skilled enough, know a few good tricks, know your opponent’s weaknesses and are agile enough, you can throw down wrestlers twice your size. The flip side, as pertains to political races, is that if you’re wrestling somebody who’s not as skilled as you are or is weaker than you, you seem stronger than you actually are.

• Trump knew Clinton’s weaknesses and knew the vulnerabilities of the electoral system and was able to manipulate those liabilities to persuade enough people to get his way into the presidency, by appealing to the fears and insecurities of workers and lower middle-classes trapped in industrial dead zones created by globalization.

• In seeing how, in retrospect, Trump’s rise to presidency arose partly out of his ability to energize his base (thanks to his racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric), as opposed to Clinton’s inability to energize hers (thanks to her self-avowed standing as the representative of the status quo, a status quo which sucks for millions of voters), and knowing how his presidency has seen a steady level of support among his base due to his ‘rule-by-deepening-divisions’, the report may have presumed that one of the multiple explanatory factors (divisive issues such as race and immigration) was the only operative factor explaining the Trump win in the presidential elections of 2016. Based on this, the report concludes that issues of race and immigration will be the deciding factors in the new electoral coalitions of the future.

• The news that the US and the Palestinian Authority are planning for CIA Director Gina Haspell to visit Ramallah comes just as Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report which accuses Hamas and the PA of torture. Titled “Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent”, is based on a two-year investigation during which 86 cases in Gaza and the occupied West Bank were analyzed.

• An American illegally detained in Iraq by the U.S. military for more than a year has finally won his freedom.

• On Sunday, after a long court battle, the Trump administration let our client go. Under a settlement agreement, he was released in a third country, where he will once again be a free man. Parts of the agreement are confidential, and he is officially remaining unidentified for his safety and privacy.

• From the moment the American was imprisoned, his own government tried to deny him his constitutional rights. It kept his detention secret, denied his requests for a lawyer, and attempted to forcibly transfer him to a dangerous war zone.

• Fortunately, the courts fulfilled their role and upheld his due process rights. What the Trump administration tried to do was unprecedented, and a series of historic court rulings forced the government to respect the Constitution at virtually every turn. The end result: Unwilling to justify our client’s detention to a court, the government had few choices but to set him free.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• When Charter Communications (Spectrum) proposed merging with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016, the company repeatedly promised that the amazing “synergies” would lower rates, increase competition, boost employment, and improve the company’s services. Of course like countless telecom megamergers before it, that never actually happened. Instead, the company quickly set about raising rates to manage the huge debt load. And its service has been so aggressively terrible, the company recently almost got kicked out of New York State, something I’ve never seen in 20 years of covering telecom.

• Cities like Lexington, Kentucky continue to explore their legal options in efforts to hold Charter accountable (something it’s clear the Trump FCC won’t do). Charter, meanwhile, has informed many of these users that they’ll be seeing yet another rate hike in November across the company’s entire, 41-state territory.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Reiterating the new “markedly different” approach to questions of infringement, Lord Justice Kitchin in a recent case found that Ice-World’s patent was invalid but Icescape’s temporary ice-rink would have infringed as an immaterial variant

• The UK Court of Appeal has applied the Supreme Court decision Actavis v Lilly in a decision involving Icescape and Ice-World, in a decision issued on October 10.

• Now, the General Council of the Judiciary (“Consejo General del Poder Judicial”) has decided to extend the exclusive jurisdiction to hear not only patent but also trademark and design cases to the Commercial Courts of Granada (Andalusia), Las Palmas (Canary Islands), A Coruña (Galicia) and Bilbao (Basque Country). According to the press release from the General Council of the Judiciary, the creation of additional specialised courts throughout the Spanish territory “combines the principles of proximity and decentralisation of justice and, at the same time, creates deeper specialisation, in line with other EU legislation on intellectual property. The aim is to optimise the material and human resources, speed up processing times of judicial proceedings and unify the approach to particularly complex matters, in which it is advisable that the Judge be familiar with the specific legal concepts of this branch of law”.

Trademarks

• The trade mark at issue is “闪银” in class 36 (Filing No 13675000). Wuhan Zhongjun Ltd (hereinafter referred to as Wuhan Zhongjun) applied for registration in December 2013, and the trade mark was registered in February 2015.

• In December 2015, Beijing Shanyin Qiyi Ltd (hereinafter referred to as Shanyin Qiyi) initiated the invalidation proceeding against the “闪银” registration. It claimed that Wuhan Zhongjun was a trade mark squatter and had hoarded over 1,000 trade marks in bad faith.

• On 19 October 2016, the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board of China (TRAB) invalidated the disputed trade mark. Dissatisfied with the unfavourable decision, Wuhan Zhongjun brought the case before the Beijing Intellectual Property Court and then the Higher People’s Court of Beijing. Both courts upheld the TRAB’s decision. Wuhan Zhongjun then submitted the retrial petition to the SPC.

Copyrights

• All this month, the European Union’s “trilogue” is meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the final wording of the new Copyright Directive, a once-noncontroversial regulation that became a hotly contested matter when, at the last minute, a set of extremist copyright proposals were added and voted through.

• One of these proposals is Article 11, the “link tax,” which requires a negotiated, paid license for links that contain “excerpts” of news stories. The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a “link” or a “news story” and implies that an “excerpt” consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).

• Article 11 is so badly drafted that it’s hard to figure out what it bans and what it permits (that’s why we’ve written to the trilogue negotiators to ask them to clarify key points). What can be discerned is deeply troubling.

• JustWatch, a search engine that directs consumers to legal movie and TV streaming options, has aired a rather controversial opinion on how to reduce piracy. The service believes the MPAA and Google should maintain a ‘pirate blacklist’ to ensure that infringing websites are removed from search results.

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