● 11.04.18

● Links 4/11/2018: Linux 4.20 RC1, DXVK 0.91, 4MLinux 26.2, FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 3

Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• This article is about how Linux simplifies various things from software installations, to secure repositories to an easy to use terminal. We divided the Making life easier with Linux article into three parts so that we could carter for three groups of computer users; A novice, a professional and a developer.

Desktop

• Since adding Linux app support for some Chromebooks in Chrome OS 69, Chrome developers slowly added support to more devices. However, they’ve also built a lengthy list of Chromebooks that will never see Linux app support.

• Chrome devs released a new batch of devices that will not see Linux app support this week, including the 2013 Chromebook Pixel.

• Several reasons exist that prevent Linux app support, some of which extend from how Google implemented support. Linux apps run in a container, which is a fancy way of saying they’re isolated from other parts of the OS for security.

Server

• IBM and Red Hat announced last week that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for US$190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately US$34 billion.

• This is the second-largest computer software deal ever recorded globally, according to Mergermarket data, which dates back to 1998.

• In terms of computer software M&A in the US alone, thus far in 2018 the sector has already hit a record high value of US$138.3 billion, having surpassed all previous full years on record. The IBM/Red Hat deal accounts for nearly a quarter of total US software deal value in the year to date.

• Globally, software M&A has seen 1,471 transactions this year, surpassing last year’s total of 1,328 but still behind 2017’s record high of 1,780. Global software M&A has reached US$187 billion to date this year, and is on track to at least meet 2015’s full-year record high of US$197 billion.

• IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat for $34billion is a win-win for both companies, according to analyst firm GlobalData and will give IBM a solid bridge between its existing on-premise hardware and its global cloud platform. But, despite its endorsement of the deal, GlobalData says the long-term and most profound ramifications of the deal will be felt within the Linux and broader open source communities.

• Last Sunday, IBM and Red Hat announced a merger agreement under which “Big Blue” (NYSE:IBM) would pay $34 billion, or $190 per NYSE:RHT share, to acquire the company that once started as a Linux distributor.

• I may very well talk about the strategic ramifications of the proposed transaction some other time, but the focus of this post is exclusively on what the stock market appears to think of the deal.

• On Monday (October 29), Bloomberg already reported on what was then a 12% spread, “among the highest for North American deals.” The article quoted a portfolio manager who said he didn’t want to bet on a deal that may be about a year away from closing, and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty as denying “any regulatory inhibitors,” which she obviously had to say.

• The time frame certainly affects demand, given that risk arbitrageurs could in the meantime use the money they would spend on RHT shares now to bet on a couple of other mergers, provided that those other deals would close more quickly and happen sequentially. But there’s more to it. The spread does indicate that merger-focused investors are far from convinced that the deal will materialize.

• On Friday (November 2), RHT closed at $172.24. If the deal went through, those investing now would then rake in a profit of more than 10%. Even if it took a year, a 10%+ gain would be a great deal. The only explanation for why there isn’t stronger demand, at a higher price, is skepticism. Since I can’t imagine anyone doubts that IBM is a serious buyer, the reason must be concern about the merger review process in the U.S. (DoJ), EU (European Commission, DG COMP), and China (MOFCOM). While China prevented Qualcomm from acquiring NXP, IBM reportedly claims it’s not critical for the Red Hat deal. I haven’t formed a definitive opinion on it yet, but for now I’ll take IBM’s word for it.

Kernel Space

• While there are a lot of great new features, hardware support improvements, and other changes with the Linux 4.20 development cycle, not found in this mainline kernel is the long-awaited WireGuard functionality for an in-kernel secure VPN tunnel.

• WireGuard didn’t make it into net-next and no pull request otherwise was issued for getting this big ticket networking feature into the next version of the Linux kernel. The code continues to be improved upon but looks like it came up just short of making it into this current development cycle.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman this morning released Linux 4.19.1 as the first point release to Linux 4.19 that debuted two weeks ago today.

• Linux 4.19 remains in good shape as is evident by the 4.19.1 release. Linux 4.19.1 doesn’t have any big fixes for fallout from 4.19 as there hasn’t been any glaring problems. Linux 4.19.1 has just a handful of fixes including some SPARC64 work, broken Wake-On-LAN from S3 suspend in the Realtek r8169 network driver, a potential Spectre V1 vulnerability in the vhost driver, and other mostly mundane changes.

• The Linux kernel will be ending 2018 on a high note with the current merge window for what will be called either Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0 is the biggest kernel update by lines of code in more than one year.

• The Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel merge window is expected to close later today when Linus Torvalds issues the first release candidate — and also clarifies what this new kernel will in fact be called between the two version numbers. On a lines of code count, this kernel is easily the largest since the Linux 4.13 merge window that happened in September of 2017.

• So I did debate calling it 5.0, but if we all help each other, I’m sure we can count to 20. It’s a nice round number, and I didn’t want to make a pattern of it. I think 5.0 happens next year, because then I *really* run out of fingers and toes.

• Anyway, 4.20-rc1 is tagged and pushed out, and the merge window is over. This was a fairly big merge window, but it didn’t break any records, just solid. And things look pretty regular, with about 70% of the patch is driver updates (gpu drivers are looming large as usual, but there’s changes all over). The rest is arch updates (x86, arm64, arm, powerpc and the new C-SKY architecture), header files, networking, core mm and kernel, and tooling.

• In fact, tooling is quite noticeable. A fair amount of selftest changes, but also various perf tooling updates.

• There’s a vfs pull request I declined and it might still go in later in a slightly reduced form, but apart from that I think everything got merged. We had one pull request that almost missed the merge windows due to a silly change in my email setup, but I verified that nothing else had happened to hit that special case.

• One thing I _would_ like to point out as the merge window closes: I tend to delay some pull requests that I want to take a closer look at until the second week of the merge window when things are calming down, and that _really_ means that I’d like to get all the normal pull requests in the first week of the two-week merge window. And most people really followed that, but by Wednesday this week I had gotten a big frustrated that I kept getting new pull requests when I wanted to really just spend most of the day looking through the ones that deserved a bit of extra attention.

• And yes, people generally kind of know about this and I really do get *most* pull requests early. But I’m considering trying to make that a more explicit rule that I will literally stop taking new pull requests some time during the second week unless you have a good reason for why it was delayed.

• Because yes, the merge window is two weeks, but it’s two weeks partly exactly _because_ people (not just me) sometimes need extra time to resolve any possible issues, not because regular everyday pull requests should spread out over the whole two weeks. The development for things meant for the next release should have been done by the time the merge window opens.

• Anyway, let’s see. Maybe it won’t be needed. It hasn’t become a problem, it just was starting to feel a bit tight there.

• Oh, and I did try to do the reply emails. And I’m _entirely_ sure that I must have missed acknowledging emails for a few pull requests. I’m hoping that by the time the next merge window rolls around, we’ll just have new automation for it, so that everybody just automatically gets notified when their pull request hit mainline. In the meantime, you have a good chance – but not a guarantee – that I’ll send a “Pulled” ack email when I start processing a pull request.

• And as usual for rc1, the log below is just the list of people I pulled from with a one-liner “mergelog”. Very much a high-level summary of merges, for details you need to look into the git tree..

• Linus

• The next kernel release was either going to be Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0 and today Linus Torvalds decided it would be the “4.20″ kernel version.

• Linux 4.20-rc1 was just tagged in Git while keeping to the “People’s Front” codename that was introduced with Linux 4.19 final. Sorry, no “420″ jokes for the codename at this stage and the kernel changes this merge window are in fact far from being blunt.

• With Linus Torvalds having just released Linux 4.20-rc1, here is our original feature overview looking at the major changes merged over the past two weeks for this new kernel. The Linux kernel will be ending 2018 on a high note with this kernel bringing more than 350 thousand lines of new code! This kernel began its life two weeks ago not knowing whether it would be called Linux 4.20 or Linux 5.0. As with the transition from Linux 3.20 being renamed to Linux 4.0, Linus Torvalds previously disclosed his preference after his fingers and toes are counted, to move onto the next big version bump. In today’s announcement, Linus Torvalds decided to stick to 4.20.

Graphics Stack

• Following this week’s release of SDL 2.0.9, Ryan Gordon has gone ahead and removed the Mir back-end from this portability/abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games.

• This removal is expected with Mir now offering great Wayland compatibility and in fact Mir’s developers encouraging the support of the Wayland protocol and projects that did adopt the direct Mir APIs to instead go the Wayland route as it ends up being better for everyone — Mir included.

• If you want to dive into the world of Wayland development or the Linux graphics stack as a possible career move, beginning with Weston would be a wise choice and they could really benefit from all the development resources they can receive.

• While many Linux desktop environments and other projects are working on their shiny new Wayland compositors, the Weston reference compositor hasn’t been receiving much help aside from Collabora and a few other developers/organizations. This reference compositor where new Wayland technologies are often experimented with is in even more need of help now that Samsung restructured their Open-Source Group and looks like they’ll no longer be contributing to Wayland/Weston. Samsung OSG had several developers working on Wayland, including often serving as release managers for the project.

• nother Sunday update to the Vulkan API is now available with the stabilized NVIDIA ray-tracing extension and a new AMD vendor-specific extension.

• As written about a few days ago, NVIDIA has stabilized its ray-tracing extension. The VK_NVX_raytracing extension was just introduced in September with the premiere of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards while already they are ready to promote it to stable. With Vulkan 1.1.91, the extension is renamed to VK_NV_ray_tracing for enjoying NVIDIA Vulkan ray-tracing on the latest GPUs. We’ll see though how long it takes before there are interesting Vulkan ray-tracing games or at least interesting Linux demos/benchmarks available.

• Unfortunately nothing has panned out from previous remarks made by AMD about potentially open-sourcing their Qt-based Radeon Settings control panel used on Windows so that it could be ported to Linux. The latest we’ve heard from AMD is that they aren’t officially pursuing a GUI control panel for their Linux graphics driver but leaving it up to the different desktop environments to implement their own driver user-interfaces. One of the new community solutions in the absence of an official Radeon GUI for Linux is WattmanGTK.

• The AMDGPU kernel driver and RadeonSI/user-space components offer much of the necessary driver tunables already, they just aren’t exposed through a nice GUI panel. WattmanGTK is an unofficial project for trying to offer AMD Wattman-like options on Linux that tap into the existing kernel driver’s interfaces.

Benchmarks

• For those wondering about air cooling with the AMD Threadripper 2970WX, I did some fresh thermal tests this week with the various Noctua TR4-SP3 heatsinks that work for AMD EPYC and Threadripper processors. Today’s tests are complementary data to our earlier Cooling AMD EPYC with Noctua heatsinks and Threadripper cooling benchmarks done in the past.

Applications

• Ever wondered what is really happening when you write to a disk? What blocks the filesystem writes to and so on? With our flexible, plug-in based NBD server called nbdkit and a little Tcl/Tk program I wrote you can now visualise this.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• DXVK [GitHub] continues to progress helping Linux fans play some of their favourite Windows only games with the 0.91 release now available.

• DXVK 0.91 continues the ongoing theme of further lowering the CPU overhead for this effort remapping Direct3D commands atop Vulkan. The latest batch of CPU overhead reductions should help in some instances like the Assassin’s Creed Origins game. DXVK 0.91 also has updates for its Stream Output / Geometry Shaders handling that was added in DXVK 0.90, and few fixes for specific games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and World of Warcraft.

Games

• If you have not heard about Steam Play for Linux before, it is what Valve has been working on to bring more Windows-only games to Linux devices. Valve first improved the compatibility with the games that were available on Steam. This announcement happened back in August, and two-months later, there are already more than 2,000 games available.

• Valve added Steam Play for Linux with Proton added to it just recently. These new updates and additions have helped even more Windows-only Steam games run on Linux PCs. We have all of the latest news on the Steam Play update and all of the games added to the system, so keep reading to learn more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Get ready for the flood, because have loads of amazing stuff for you in this week’s Usability & Productivity update!

• KDE developers had another busy week working on improvements to their open-source desktop environment on several fronts.

• KDE developer Nate Graham has done another great job summarizing the improvements in the KDE world over the past week, including with screenshots where relevant.

• The KMyMoney development team is proud to present version 5.0.2 of its open source Personal Finance Manager.

• Although several members of the development team had been using version 5.0.1 in production for some time, a number of bugs and regressions slipped through testing, mainly in areas and features not used by them.

• These have been reported by many of you and the development team worked hard to fix them in the meantime. The result of this effort is the new KMyMoney 5.0.2 release.

• Despite even more extensive testing than usual, we understand that some bugs may have slipped past our best efforts. If you find one of them, please forgive us, and be sure to report it, either to the mailing list or on bugs.kde.org.

• From here, we will continue to fix reported bugs, and working to add many requested additions and enhancements, as well as further improving performance.

• As of this month app updates uploaded to Google Play need to target Android 8. This has several implications. Targeting Oreo comes with an updated Support Library, which forces us to drop support for Android 4.0 and below. According to our Google Play data this will affect approximately 400 users. We are very sorry about that, but these users won’t receive further updates. Furthermore, Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.

• The Skrooge Team announces the release 2.16.2 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A recent trend in language design and devops deployment has been to not use shared libraries. Instead every application is rebuilt and statically linked for maximum performance. This is highly convenient in many cases. Some people even go as far as to declare shared linking, and with it any ABI stability, a dead relic of the past that is only unnecessary but actively harmful because maintaining ABI stability slows down language changes and renewal.

• This blog post was not written to argue whether this is true or not. Instead it is meant to list many reasons and use cases where shared libraries and ABI stability are useful and which would be hard, or even impossible, to achieve by relying only on static linking.

• Many of the issues listed here are written from the perspective of a modern Linux distribution, especially Debian. However I am not a Debian developer so the following is not any sort of an official statement, just my writings as an individual.

Distributions

• As a debianized Penguin, some time ago I reviewed Secure-K OS, a commercial Linux-based live operating system meant to be run from a USB key and “developed with security in mind”, according to its developers.

Reviews

• Clu Linux Live is a Debian-based distribution which “provides various processing command line utilities (CLU) and data rescue tools which can be used on a wired or wireless network.” The distribution provides a live CD that will automatically set up Samba network shares and the OpenSSH service to help users rescue files off a computer. The distribution also features such data recovery tools as ddrescue and Clonezilla.

• Clu Linux Live is based on Debian 9 and is built for 32-bit x86 computers. The distribution will run on 64-bit processors too and, given the nature of the utilities included, there should be no practical drawbacks to Clu being 32-bit only.

• The project’s ISO for version 6.0 is approximately 420MB in size. Booting from the ISO brings up boot menu where we can opt to launch the distribution in regular or safe graphics mode. We can also load the distribution entirely into RAM in case we want to remove the boot media.

• When the distribution finishes booting we are shown a text console where we are greeted by a series of prompts. The first one asks us to set a password for the root account. The second prompt asks if we would like to mount all attached storage devices. Later we will be told there is a command which will reverse this action, unmounting all hard drives and other attached storage volumes. The next two prompts ask if we would like to start the Samba and OpenSSH network services. These two services can be used to transfer files off the computer and, in the case of OpenSSH, it allows us to remotely manage a cloning or recovery process over the network.

New Releases

• This is a minor (point) release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel, which comes with the Linux kernel 4.14.74. The 4MLinux Server now includes Apache 2.4.35, MariaDB 10.3.10, and PHP 7.2.10 (see this post for more details).

• You can update your 4MLinux by executing the “zk update” command in your terminal (fully automatic process).

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the November 2018 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved. All articles may be freely reproduced via any and all means following first publication by The PCLinuxOS Magazine, provided that attribution to both The PCLinuxOS Magazine and the original author are maintained, and a link is provided to the originally published article.

• In the November 2018 issue:

• * Microsoft Open Sources Over 60,000 Patents To Help Linux * GIMP Tutorial: How To Apply A Sepia Tone * PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: Lifeless_User * Short Topix: Linux Is Changing The Face Of End-User Computing * ms_meme’s Nook: Booting From Both Sides * The Death Bell Tolls For G+ * Firejail, Easy Sandbox On PCLinuxOS * PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner * ANGRYsearch * And much more inside!

• This month’s cover was designed by parnote.

• Download the PDF (5.6 MB)

• https://pclosmag.com/download.php?f=2018-11.pdf

• Download the EPUB Version (4.3 MB)

• https://pclosmag.com/download.php?f=201811epub.epub

• Download the MOBI Version (4.4 MB)

• https://pclosmag.com/download.php?f=201811mobi.mobi

• Visit the HTML Version

• https://pclosmag.com/html/enter.html

Gentoo Family

Fedora

• It has been announced for some time to launch Fedora. Today I have appeared on the interface the possibility to change the old Fedora 28 to Fedora 29. The interface appeared and I had to click the Download button and then the Install button. The download process was fast. If you do not have enough disk space then the installation will not work. After you click the Install button, the installation process will take care of the installation. Finally, a reset of the distribution will start the new Fedora 29. I have not found any irregularities or operating problems. From now on, my posts, tests, and tutorials will be with Fedora 29.

• There is a lot of software available in NeuroFedora already. You can see the complete list here on Fedora SCM. Software that is currently being worked on is listed on our Pagure project instance. If you use software that is not on our list, please suggest it to us using the suggestion form.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu 19.04 release date is scheduled for April 18, 2019.

• This date appears on the draft release schedule for Ubuntu 19.04 (named the ‘Disco Dingo’), which was recently added to the official Ubuntu Wiki.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Last year, controversy stirred as Apple acknowledged that it had, in fact, purposefully inhibited iPhone performance when the battery neared the end of its useful life. The good news: It wasn’t just in your head! The less-good news: Apple will continue the practice with the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X.

• On the other hand, Apple’s business model is based around hardware. Yes their hardware is grossly overpriced, but the flagship Android phones are pretty much inline with Apple these days. So it’s a moot point really.

Free Software/Open Source

• In September, I attended KohaCon 2018, an international conference for the user group of Valnet’s integrated library system. A little bit of background: Koha…

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Just recently, we released a post on the 12 Google Chrome Extensions for Developers & Designers and while some of those extensions are available on Firefox, I wouldn’t repeat any here.

• In the same way, some of the extensions listed below are available on Chrome so consider such apps as bonuses for the respective browsers.

• Firefox on Linux can develop the habit to (rather randomly) ask again and again to be made the default browser. E.g. when started from Thunderbird by clicking a link it ask but when starting from a shell all is fine.

• The reason to this is often two (or more) .desktop entries competing with each other.

• For fans of the Rust programming language, it’s now running on 14 different Debian architectures — including all of the release architectures — as we move towards the Debian 10.0 “Buster” release next year.

• This weekend Debian developers are celebrating Rust working on 14 Debian architectures now that various flavors of MIPS and PowerPC have been squared away following some fixes to LLVM and Rust.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• It’s been almost a year since I’ve posted any articles, and I’m afraid I have a confession to make…I’ve joined the dark side! Most people know my site from the How to Run a Mail Server post, which targeted FreeBSD. A few months ago, I converted all that infrastructure to an automated OpenBSD platform. Turns out OpenBSD was so much easier, I decided to run it as a desktop too.

• You won’t find nearly as many online resources about setting up OpenBSD, because honestly, you really don’t need any. Unlike much of Linux and FreeBSD, the included manuals are high quality, coherent, and filled with practical examples. You also need very little third party software to do basic tasks—almost everything you need is well-integrated into the base system.

• You’ll notice that many features that require toil to achieve on FreeBSD, such as suspend on lid close, working volume buttons, and decent battery life, work out of the box on OpenBSD. You can tell the developers actually use this thing on their personal devices.

• The third BETA build of the 12.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

• Another weekly beta release of FreeBSD 12 is now available for testing with the official release still being several weeks out.

• FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 3 now allows NUMA support to be disabled via a new vm.numa.disabled sysctl tunable, the Bhyve hypervisor can now allow the VNC server to listen for incoming IPv6 connections, various hardware driver updates, and SPE exception handling for PowerPCSPE architecture.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• After over a year of hard work, we’re getting close to the release of GNU Health 3.4 ! GH 3.4 comes with lots of new and exciting features, including the Federation, Thalamus, updated genetics, calendar server, native client and mongoDB integration, GH embedded (raspi) among others. I just uploaded to pypi the Release Candidate 1 of the gnu health client (3.4rc1), thalamus (0.9.0), and the GNU Health HMIS component (3.4rc1)

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• SiFive this week announced their 7-Series RISC-V cores with the 32-bit E7, 64-bit S7, and 64-bit U7 series. These new RISC-V parts aren’t yet capable of running up against the fastest ARM Cortex CPU cores available today, but they are much more powerful than the previous-gen SiFive cores.

Programming/Development

• It was just days ago that AMD published their Zen 2 compiler patch for the GCC compiler but with the race on to merge new feature code before the feature freeze happening later this month, that “znver2″ tuning patch has now been merged to mainline.

• The latest GCC 9.0.0 development code as of this Sunday morning now has the “-march=znver2″ support for generating optimized binaries for the yet-to-be-released AMD Zen 2 processors. As covered in the article earlier this week, the Zen 2 GCC patch is an initial first stab at supporting the new AMD CPU micro-architecture in the GNU Compiler Collection.

• Endless Computers, the company behind the Linux GNOME/Flatpak-aligned Endless OS and that over the years has worked on various low-cost Linux PCs primarily for developing markets, is now pursing The Hack Computer as a low-cost laptop for teaching kids to code.

• A new release 0.4.13 of RProtoBuf got onto CRAN a few hours ago. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed fairly widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.

• It would also appear that I failed to blog about release 0.4.12 from July. Both releases contain a number of very nice and focused contributed pull requests – see below for more – as well as some standard packaging maintenance.

Leftovers

Science

• The FDA agreed to the idea of the partnered study, dubbed CLARITY-BPA, and it commenced under the direction of the agency, NIEHS, and the National Toxicology Program in 2012. At the time, Heindel “thought we were doing something good,” he recalls. Now, as the results roll out and FDA and the CLARITY-BPA grantees outside the agency prepare to produce their final report, he’s not so sure.

• The plant will be built adjacent to the Nornickel nickel and cobalt refinery owned by Russian mining firm Norilsk Nickel, a company which has signed a long-term, “market-based supply” agreement to supply BASF with nickel and cobalt from its metal refinery, according to a joint press release issued by the companies on Monday.

• Terrafame reports that a significant share of their nickel and cobalt sulphate production is already being allocated to manufacturing EVB chemicals, so building their own refining plant would bring them “closer to end users”.

Health/Nutrition

• There are fresh indications, even as the 2018 campaign enters its final stage, that Medicare for All is a reform that resonates with the young voters Democratic strategists and their allies have targeted as they seek to generate a “blue wave.” A new poll by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and MTV finds that “69 percent of young Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 favor a national health plan, known as a single-payer program. Eighty-eight percent of young Democrats and 40 percent of young Republicans favor a government-run health insurance program, according to the poll. Roughly two-thirds of young independents are in favor.” Only 17 percent of those surveyed expressed opposition to single payer.

• Released on Monday, the report from the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), a global coalition of 170 nongovernmental organizations working on drug policy issues, overviewed the failure of the 10-year global strategy from the United Nations, which intended to eradicate the illicit drug market by next year.

• Instead of curbing the problem, “consumption and illegal trafficking of drugs have reached record levels,” Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, wrote in the report’s foreword.

• The fact that some misuse opioids should not be reason to deny them to those who need them — any more than the fact that some people are alcoholics should be reason to deny the rest of us beer, wine, or liquor.

• Such a configuration, hovering at or near the so-called critical point, is ideal for the effective flow of resources, whether we’re talking about water, electricity (power grids), traffic, the spread of disease, or information (the stock market and the Internet). The tradeoff is that it can become much more sensitive to even tiny perturbations—so much so that a small outage in one part of the network can trigger a sudden network-wide cascading failure.

• Ethiopia’s ambitious project is designed to help lift its fast-growing population out of poverty. But the new dam also puts management of the flow of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia’s hands — and that has sparked a power shift in the region.

• For the Egyptians, the Nile is, literally, a lifeline. The vast majority of the country’s 97 million people live along its banks.

Security

• Some of the most potent forms of ransomware of 2018 are being offered for sale in a cut-price bundle deal on the dark web that also contains one of the most dangerous forms of file-encrypting malware to terrorise organisations this year.

• SamSam is part of the 23 ransomware bundle — significant because previously it’s only been deployed by a highly specialised group.

• To understand what port contention is, one should keep in mind that modern processors have multiple ports they assign to different instructions waiting for completion on a shared core. For example, a processor could have 2 ports for executing load operations. This would allow that processor to schedule two instructions doing a load at the same time. When ports get exhausted, a process will have to wait, thus introducing a measurable delay.

Defence/Aggression

• This funding increase, which Philip Hammond, British chancellor of the exchequer, said will be available in the next few months, comes after a $1.2 billion bump in defense spending over the summer.

• A broader ideological conflict is also at play. Mr Erdogan and the Saudis represent two rival visions of political Islam. His authoritarian instincts and the sorry state of Turkey’s democracy notwithstanding, Mr Erdogan owes his legitimacy to elections and public support. Prince Muhammad owes his to the Saudi bloodline and palace support. “The Turkish example scares MBS,” says Mr Ozkan, particularly in the wake of the Arab spring, when Islamist movements helped bring down authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and consolidated their gains through elections. “The Saudis and the Emiratis fear their populations might also want elections one day.” But Mr Erdogan does not want to overplay his hand. There is a chance that releasing evidence (if such evidence exists) connecting Prince Muhammad to Mr Khashoggi’s murder might force the ageing King Salman and the Americans to withdraw their support for the prince. But there is a much higher risk it will not. (Mr Trump has already suggested he would not allow a journalist’s death to get in the way of his government’s relations with Saudi Arabia.) Mr Erdogan will not try to dislodge the prince on his own, without American support. A young, unpredictable Saudi king bent on revenge against him is the last thing Turkey’s president needs.

• President Donald Trump made a “serious misstep” in holding the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as it harmed the world’s determination to enforce sanctions against Pyongyang, top former Treasury official and former CIA Deputy Director David Cohen told CBS News.

• “We had President Trump, I think quite prematurely, jump into this summit with Kim Jong un, and then on the way out of Singapore, declare that the problem has been solved,” Cohen said, explaining “the effect of that was to weaken the resolve of the international community to apply pressure on North Korea.”

• The vague outcome of the summit, with a joint statement on disarmament that did not include a timetable or specifics on North Korea’s obligations, “weakened the willingness of the Chinese to continue to work with us,” Cohen said, adding “the effect has been that the sanctions are not nearly as powerful today as they were nine months ago.”

• A government watchdog has ordered the CIA and the Pentagon to re-investigate retaliation allegations brought by two intelligence employees who accused their agencies of major institutional failings.

• The action by the intelligence community inspector general is the first public indication that a new intelligence appeals system is underway. The panel was set up by President Barack Obama as an independent forum that can evaluate whether whistleblowers were improperly fired or otherwise punished for disclosures after their agencies rejected their claims.

• The cases, nonetheless, demonstrate that the whistleblower system continues to be beset with problems and bureaucratic delays despite being overhauled by Congress and the Obama administration.

• Iran apparently infiltrated the communications network of CIA agents who allowed their secret websites, used to exchange messages with informants, to be crawled by Google.

• A report from Yahoo! news claims that a 2009 breach of the US spy bods’ communications channels came after the Iranian government infiltrated a series of websites the CIA had used to talk to its local sources in places like Iran and China.

• “We’re still dealing with the fallout,” said one former national security official. “Dozens of people around the world were killed because of this.”

• Dozens of American spies were killed in Iran and China after a flawed communications service that allowed foreign foes to see what the agents were up to using Google, official sources have claimed.

• Between 2009 and 2013 the US Central Intelligence Agency suffered a “catastrophic” secret communications failure in a website used by officers and their field agents around the world to speak to each other, according to a report in Yahoo News, which heard from 11 former intelligence and government officials about the previously unreported disaster.

• “We’re still dealing with the fallout,” said one former national security official. “Dozens of people around the world were killed because of this.”

• The web-based network which was used by the CIA to communicate with its sources was overcome by Iranians using text-book Google queries, a new exposé claims. The agency knew about the vulnerability, but failed to act on it. Probably the biggest failure of US intelligence since 9/11 has been the compromise of the CIA’s communication network, which it had used to keep in touch with agents and assets in foreign nations. The Chinese busted and executed dozens of US spies because of it. A new exposé by Yahoo News says a similar upheaval happened in Iran and that the Iranians managed to defeat the system relatively easily – because it was never intended for the purpose it was used for.

• A new exposé by Yahoo News about one of the biggest intelligence failures in history is based on conversations with eleven former US intelligence and government officials familiar with the case, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

• Yahoo News has reported, citing several unnamed intelligence and government sources that the internet-based communications system used by the CIA to communicate with its operatives around the world was exposed by Iranians using Google search.

• UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are already part of the kill web for the U.S. military, forming teams with manned aircraft, dropping bombs, and providing persistent surveillance across the globe and soon will be equipped with lasers to provide even more lethality. UAVs have reshaped warfare in modern times, but you may be surprised to learn that they have actually been around since 1849.

• In a strongly-worded joint statement released by Germany’s Foreign Ministry, the two nations said the long-range drone had gone missing on October 27 at night shortly after having spotted a surface-to-air missile system in an area that was not controlled by the Ukrainian government near the Russian border.

• “Evidence collected by SMM suggests Russia and the separatists it backs bear responsibility for the targeting and downing of the (drone), blinding the mission at this particular spot,” they said. According to a statement from the OSCE, “Prior to the loss of communication, the UAV ["unmanned aerial vehicle," or drone] had been flying in stable flight at an altitude of approximately 7,000 feet. The weather conditions were good with clear skies. All recorded flight parameters were normal and the UAV camera was recording.”

• In October, President Trump announced he plans to withdraw the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, carving out a path to a 21st century US-Russian Cold War. The move demonstrates once again that ignorance compounded with the need for domination makes for an extremely dangerous nuclear cocktail of renewed arms racing that endangers human survival.

• While the Russian military may indeed be in technical violation of the Treaty by testing a new medium-range cruise missile, less well known is the fact that a joint commission is currently exploring whether the US has also violated the Treaty with its own deployment of a missile defense system in Romania. Of course, the answer to Russia’s cruise-missile testing should not have been to rip up the famous treaty that ended the Cold War. Rather, it should have prompted intensifying nuclear disarmament diplomacy.

• Former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev had it right when he remarked that Trump’s announcement was not the work “of a great mind.” As Gorbachev wrote in The New York Times, “With enough political will, any problems of compliance with the existing treaties could be resolved” and, “There will be no winner in a ‘war of all against all’ – particularly if it ends in a nuclear war.” One need not love Russian President Vladimir Putin to acknowledge the importance of Russia’s Foreign Ministry saying, “There is still room for dialogue.”

• It will still be weeks at best until the so-called “migrant caravan” — a movement of a few thousand refugees fleeing Central America in hopes of starting new lives in the U.S. — makes it to the border. But it’s already become clear that those seeking safety in the United States may sadly find their lives even more at risk than they ever were in their former homes.

• President Donald Trump — intent on turning a flood of refugees into a menacing “invasion” of terrorists, criminals and drug lords seeking to wreak havoc on U.S. citizens — announced his intention to send about 800 military troops to the border in an attempt to stop the asylum seekers from entering the country.

• As Ukraine develops unmanned fighting vehicles and Russia says it has deployed its remote-controlled tank on the battlefield in Syria, we look at some of the world’s front-line robots.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Assange has never been charged with a crime in Sweden. At the secret urging of the UK government, Sweden refused for several years to question Assange in London regarding sexual assault allegations. That kept the case in “preliminary investigation” limbo, while Sweden also refused to guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to the United States, where he is likely to face prosecution for his work as a publisher.

• Emails between UK and Swedish officials show that Swedish officials were getting “cold feet” in 2013, and were considering dropping the “preliminary investigation” into Assange, but the UK argued forcefully against it. Last year, Sweden finally dropped the investigation (shortly after it finally agreed to interrogate Assange in London, as it could easily have done years earlier), but the UK has been using the fact that Assange skipped bail as a way to hold the threat of extradition to the United States over his head.

• In March of this year, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno made the conditions of Assange’s arbitrary detention much worse. For seven months, Assange has been without any means to directly communicate with the public—in other words, to defend himself from relentless attacks and ridicule in Western media. Moreno has not only cut off Assange’s internet and telephone access, but also severely restricted visits. Moreno has openly stated that he silenced and isolated Assange because he objected to Assange’s political statements, but rather than blast Moreno for trampling Assange’s right to free expression and other basic rights, the international press and prominent “human rights” organizations have responded with silence, distortions and even smirks.

• [...]

• In contrast, CPJ frequently criticized Moreno’s predecessor, Rafael Correa (who made the original decision to give Assange asylum) over alleged violations of press freedom. Moreno won the presidency in 2017 by running as a staunch Correa loyalist. Immediately after taking office, Moreno shifted dramatically to the right, disavowed the longstanding ties to Correa that he used to get elected, and, crucially, ensured that public media no longer provided a counterweight to Ecuador’s right-wing private media that always attacked Correa.

• Ecuador’s private media is similar to Brazil’s, which did so much to bring an outright fascist to victory in its presidential election. An Ecuadorian journalist was just convicted in Belgium for threatening and harassing Rafael Correa and his daughter. Moreno’s alliance with the private media has enabled him to make audacious attacks on the constitution and judicial independence, while receiving flattering press coverage internationally. As noted in an interview I did with Ecuadorian legal scholar Oswaldo Ruiz-Chiriboga (CounterPunch, 10/12/18), Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch, has frequently applauded Moreno for those attacks.

• An attempt was made on Oct. 29 to break-in to the Ecuadorian embassy, where security has been removed and new surveillance devices installed, reports Joe Lauria.

• [...]

• On the scaffolding electronic devices, presumably to conduct surveillance, can be seen, just feet from the embassy windows.

• Later on the day of the break-in, Sean O’Brien, a lecturer at Yale University Law School and a cyber-security expert, was able to enter the embassy through the front door, which was left open. Inside he found no security present. Someone from the embassy emerged to tell him to send an email to set up an appointment with Assange. After emailing the embassy, personnel inside refused to check whether it had been received or not.

• [...]

• The new Ecuadorian government indicated in the Spring that Assange would eventually have to leave the embassy. Assange fears that if leaves the British government will arrest him on a minor charge of skipping bail when he legally sought asylum inside the embassy in June of 2012.

• Assange and his lawyers fear that if he is detained by British authorities he would be extradited to the United States where they believe there is a sealed indictment against him possibly on espionage charges for simply publishing classified documents that he has not been accused of stealing.

• Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, was in the news this week as his lawsuit against Ecuador’s Foreign Affairs Ministry was due to begin.

• Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, has filed the suit against Foreign Minister, Jose Valencia, following the introduction of new rules regarding Assange’s extended stay at the Embassy. Assange, who became an Ecuadorian citizen in December last year, is arguing that the new rules are a violation of his rights under the Ecuadorian constitution. The rules included a ban on Assange commenting on politics and a requirement that he clear any visitors to the embassy three working days in advance. Failure to adhere to the rules could see Assange expelled from the embassy.

• The first hearing into the suit, however, didn’t proceed as scheduled. Assange was reportedly having trouble understanding the court appointed translator, indicating that the court-appointed translation service was “not good enough”.

• Ecuadorian Judge, Karina Martinez, agreed, indicating that it was vital that Assange testify and that the court had erred by appointing a Spanish translator who only spoke English. She then called for a replacement who was “fluent in Australian”.

• The investigation revealed that he had sent classified information to third parties, including through an encrypted email account, they said.

• Prosecutors said Schulte was placed in more restrictive detention conditions on Oct. 1 during the latest probe.

• “The issue of secrecy has barely been off the front pages of our newspapers over the past 15 years,” Aldrich said in a phone interview from the UK. “It’s important that historians and political scientists explore these things, but it’s difficult for scholars to research information that is secret.”

• He emphasized the importance of history to challenges of our current world. “The CIA takes its history very seriously,” he said. “How Americans think about the CIA’s past has reverberations in the present.”

• And tonight on 60 Minutes, Pamela Anderson invites reporter Liam Bartlett to her new home in the South of France to send possibly her strongest political message yet to the other side of the world.

• Speaking directly down the barrel of the camera to the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, she demands he bring Wikileaks founder Julian Assange back home to Australia.

• “Okay well Scott, get Julian his passport back and take him back to Australia and be proud of him,” she says.

• The “Halloween Massacre,” the most horror movie-sounding thing to ever happen to the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bureaucratic nightmare that pushed out the Agency’s most senior employees. CIA officers were so outraged at the “massacre” that they reportedly responded with everything from screen-printing protest shirts, leaving graffiti in Agency buildings and even cussing out the newly-appointed CIA Director Stansfield Turner (via telegram).

• A Virginia federal judge Friday sentenced a former CIA contractor to 90 days behind bars for illegally obtaining and taking classified material from his former workplace and lying about it to…

• A former CIA contractor was sentenced Friday to 90 days in jail for unauthorized retention of classified materials at a hearing that shed little light on his motives.

• Reynaldo Regis, 54, of Fort Washington, Maryland, had been seeking probation at his sentencing hearing in federal court in Alexandria. His lawyers pointed to probation sentences received by retired Gen. David Petraeus and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in their high-profile document retention cases.

• “The shit-filled showers where you leave dirtier than when you entered; the flooding of the tiers and cages with ice cold water; the constant blast of cold air as we are exposed to extreme cold without blankets or long-sleeve shirts; the uncontrollable lights that are always on as we are sleep deprived…. No human being should ever have to experience this torture,” he wrote.

• The jailhouse plea appeared on the public docket in Schulte’s case on Monday, but was later removed with a notation that it had been “incorrectly filed in this case.”

• Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee suspected of leaking classified hacking tools to WikiLeaks, pleaded not guilty Friday to new counts related to allegedly leaking additional material while in custody awaiting trial for espionage.

• Mr. Schulte, 30, entered the plea during a hearing in Manhattan federal court while being arraigned on two new charges concerning his conduct behind bars, according to his case docket.

• A former CIA computer engineer, Mr. Schulte was being held at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) on charges related to allegedly leaking agency secrets. On Thursday, he was hit with a 15-count superseding indictment containing a pair of fresh charges: illegal transmission and attempted transmission of unlawfully possessed national defense information, a felony, and contempt of court.

• Pamela Anderson has called on Scott Morrison to defend WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and help bring him back to Australia.

• The former Baywatch star said the prime minister should be proud of the work done by Australian-born Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six years.

• Anderson denied rumours she was anything more than a close friend of Assange, but told the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes that their relationship was a “romantic struggle”.

• Anderson, who struck up a friendship with Assange over their shared interest in activism, believes the Australian government should be doing more to help him.

• AMELA Anderson has opened up about her relationship with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The Baywatch bombshell — who has been campaigning to free the Australian activist — described her situation with Assange as a “romantic struggle”. The star is regularly photographed entering and leaving the Ecuadorean Embassy in London’s Kensington, where Assange is holed up. Anderson, a longtime animal rights activist, said she arranged a meeting with Assange just over two years ago.

• Pamela Anderson has called on Australian prime minister Scott Morrison to defend WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and help bring him back to Australia.

• The former Baywatch star said the prime minister should be proud of the work done by Australian-born Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six years.

• Pamela Anderson has called on Scott Morrison to stand up for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and help bring him back to Australia.

• The former Baywatch star said the prime minister should lend his support to Australian-born Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six years.

• Baywatch star Pamela Anderson has called on Scott Morrison to grant Julian Assange free passage into Australia, describing her relationship with the WikiLeaks founder as a “romantic struggle”.

• In an interview with Nine Network’s 60 Minutes at her home in the south of France, Anderson said she hoped the Prime Minister would help Mr Assange to finally leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has lived for six years.

• In a message to Mr Morrison, Anderson said: “Defend your friend and get Julian his passport back and take him back to Australia and be proud of him, and throw him a parade when he gets home.”

• Despite recently splitting from 32-year old French soccer star Adil Rami, Anderson, 51, denied rumours she was anything more than a friend of Assange.

• Scott Morrison has laughed off calls from Pamela Anderson to bring Julian Assange back to Australia and throw him a welcome home parade.

• The former Baywatch star says the Prime Minister should lend his support to the WikiLeaks founder, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six years.

• In a message to Mr Morrison, Anderson said: “Defend your friend and get Julian his passport back and take him back to Australia and be proud of him and throw him a parade when he gets home.”

• Asked if he intended to heed the advice aired on the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes, Mr Morrison chuckled loudly before replying: “No.”

• Over the past few days, there has been increased activity around the Ecuadorian embassy in London, sparking fears Julian Assange faces imminent detention by British authorities. Helen Razer weighs in on truth, on Assange, and why you should care about both.

• Stubborn as a mule. Me? No. When I commit to tell a truth rarely told, a mammal has nothing on me. For five years now, I’ve been stubborn as a stone. The truth as I tell it and see it is this: Julian Assange must be free. He has committed no crime. But the man who is no criminal is observed today with what may be even greater state scrutiny, per this account from Consortium News.

• The mother of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange fears her son is in “immediate and critical danger” after spending nearly six years in limbo inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where his health has sharply deteriorated. As fears for Assange’s health have grown, his mother Christine spoke about how her son is undergoing a “slow and cruel assassination” in an online vigil dubbed #ReconnectJulian on Saturday.

• “The modern-day cage for political prisoners is no longer the Tower of London, it is the Ecuadorian Embassy,” she said, adding that her son has been detained for nearly eight years without charge, “cut off from all contact” and “tortured in the heart of London.”

• “For the past six years the UK government has refused his request to access to basic health needs, fresh air, exercise, sunshine for Vitamin D, and access to proper medical and dental care. As a result, his health has seriously deteriorated,” she added.

• The Baywatch bombshell appears to regularly see the WikiLeaks founder and editor, while he has been confined within the four walls of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the past few years, “getting no sun whatsoever,” Pamela remarked. During the airing of a 60 Minutes segment on Sunday night, Baywatch icon Pamela Anderson asserted that she and Julian Assange “are very close” and that he “trusts her.”

• The Blonde and Blonder pin-up star noted after her long-lasting visits to the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has been residing under political asylum since 2012.

• When asked to elaborate on their relationship, Anderson said:

• “We don’t have a romantic relationship like that, but I feel very close to him. And I feel closer to him than a lot of people have and he trusts me. Yes, it’s a friendship,” yet going on to state there is a “romantic struggle” that the pair share, which is their mutual strong dedication to activism and social action. Pamela, for instance, is known to be a passionate animal rights campaigner.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• With no explanation and no indication of a timetable for compliance, the State Department missed its Jan. 1, 2018 deadline to publish a critical quadrennial climate report, and has remained silent internationally ever since.

• A recent UN climate report said that if global temperatures rose above 1.5 C it could lead to catastrophic climate change. Bitcoin alone could raise global temperatures by 2 C within two decades.

• Four detained Iranian environmental activists could face the death penalty after the charges levelled against them were changed, the Tehran prosecutor said on Wednesday.

• “After completion of the investigation, the charges against four of the defendants have been changed to corruption on earth,” said Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, cited by Mizan Online, a news outlet run by the judiciary.

• “Corruption on earth” is one of the most serious charges in Iran and can be punishable by death.

• Global wildlife populations have fallen by 60% in just over four decades, as accelerating pollution, deforestation, climate change and other manmade factors have created a “mindblowing” crisis, the World Wildlife Fund has warned in a damning new report.

• [...]

• Current rates of species extinction are now up to 1,000 times higher than before human involvement in animal ecosystems became a factor.

• Air pollution caused the premature deaths of 600,000 children in 2016, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released Monday. The report found that a staggering 93 percent of people under 15 years old—some 1.8 billion children and teenagers—are breathing toxic air.

• The new study, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, adds more evidence that human-generated noise pollution interferes with marine life. Our oceans are getting noisier due to increasing human activity, including shipping, military sonar, underwater construction and seismic blasts for oil and gas. Scientists have previously found that these auditory onslaughts can threaten the health and lives of various sea creatures.

• Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty.

• And they warn that in the coming decades, it is likely to push millions more people north towards the US.

• In theory, courts are a good place for climate science. Unlike legislative bodies, where bills based on science can be derailed just because a few people say they don’t “believe in” climate change, the courts have evidentiary standards. If something’s real, it’s real. The facts accepted by 98 percent of scientists worldwide represent pretty persuasive evidence.

• The horrifying effects of climate change are evident seemingly everywhere you look. Now, a report from researchers at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) suggests that climate change favorable to a parasite is impacting the moose population in New England. According to their findings, winter ticks that gorge themselves on a moose’s blood by the tens of thousands during the fall and winter were responsible for killing roughly seven in 10 moose calves over the course of the three-year study.

• Air pollution is killing fewer people than it used to, according to a study published in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Journal Friday. Deaths related particulate matter (nasty stuff that gets lodged in the lungs and can reach the heart) dropped more than 50 percent nationwide between 1990 and 2010—largey thanks to regulations like the Clean Air Act and federal and state rules on vehicle emissions, according to the report’s authors, who include researchers from the EPA and Department of Energy.

• The authors of the UN report said immediate action was needed to prevent the current rise, including taxes on carbon emissions and getting rid of coal energy. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly said he wants to burn more coal, and promised that he will withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, the largest international treaty set to reduce emissions.

• Lesley Stahl: Do you still think that climate change is a hoax?

• Alaska has a “linguistic emergency,” according to the Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker. A report warned earlier this year that all of the state’s 20 Native American languages might cease to exist by the end of this century, if the state did not act.

• American policies, particularly in the six decades between the 1870s and 1930s, suppressed Native American languages and culture. It was only after years of activism by indigenous leaders that the Native American Languages Act was passed in 1990, which allowed for the preservation and protection of indigenous languages. Nonetheless, many Native American languages have been on the verge of extinction for the past many years.

• Languages carry deep cultural knowledge and insights. So, what does the loss of these languages mean in terms of our understanding of the world.

• Over & Above Africa, an LA-based charity, is dedicated to fighting the poaching battle on all fronts and have teamed up with Giant Films to direct and produce The Guardian. The aim of the project is to raise funds to supply drones to wildlife reserves.

• The film was made by an international team of creatives led by Fackrell who is currently based in Amsterdam, with Coleman from Cape Town-based Giant Films taking the lead in the director’s chair.

Finance

• Amazon, which is headquartered in Seattle, is seriously considering an area known as Crystal City, a large residential and office complex in Arlington, Virginia, just south of Washington, the Post reported, citing unidentified sources.

• But we can’t emphasize enough just how wrong many of the initial analyses of the wage increase have been. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. If your ideology includes the belief that all government attempts at raising living standards are doomed, then of course you are going to be against mandated minimum wages. The problem occurs when these folks are confronted by facts that are at odds with their belief systems. The options are to either rethink your ideology or alternatively ignore the data. Most participants seem to have done the latter. Kudos to the University of Washington team for at least trying to incorporate the facts into their latest research.

• A return trip between Helsinki and Bangkok pollutes the environment more than eating eight years’ worth of domestic beef, reports agricultural sector newspaper Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, citing a study by Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), a government agency.

• Brexit donor Arron Banks lied to MPs about the political work that his insurance company did for his controversial Leave campaign, according to whistleblowers who worked at Banks’s Bristol headquarters during the Brexit vote.

• Hundreds of emails leaked by former employees of Eldon Insurance and Rock Services to openDemocracy show insurance staff frequently working on the Leave campaign in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. Banks, who was referred to the National Crime Agency this week, repeatedly told MPs that his insurance businesses and his political campaigning were separate.

• Damian Collins, chair of parliament’s inquiry into fake news and disinformation, said that the evidence appeared to “flatly contradict” what Banks told his committee in June and that Banks could have “deliberately misled the committee and parliament on an important point.”

• “If Eldon employees were being paid to work on the campaign, it should have been a declared expense. We asked him directly if he’d used his insurance employees to work on the campaigns and he said they didn’t,” Collins added.

• Under British electoral law, campaigns cannot co-ordinate or ‘work together’ unless they declare their spending jointly. However, emails and testimony from insiders suggest that insurance staff in Bristol frequently worked not just for Leave.EU but also for other Brexit campaigns at the same time. This was not declared to the Electoral Commission, raising questions about whether Banks’s campaign could have breached electoral law (again).

• Whether you are a victim of crime, accused of a crime, or simply someone who believes in the value of fair play, we all have an interest in ensuring rights are safeguarded in the criminal justice process.

• When it comes to future policing and security cooperation with the European Union (EU), the UK Government has been singular in its focus on fighting crime. Headlines like ‘Brexit could lead to security threat’ and ‘Brexit will make it harder to bring foreign criminals to justice’ reflect the Government’s fears over maintaining policing and security arrangements and determination to maintain access to the full arsenal of cooperation measures. Theresa May has made it clear, for example, that she is determined to keep the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) – the EU’s fast-track extradition measure – after the UK leaves the bloc.

• At Fair Trials and Liberty, we have serious concerns over how new security cooperation may erode fundamental fairness and result in worse outcomes for the human rights of everyone living in the UK post-Brexit.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Azoria Morales, a 28-year-old single mother of two sons, was in school to become a dental assistant when a car accident left her with nerve damage in her hand. No longer able do that job, she’s now saddled with student debt.

• Today, she works full time in housekeeping at a nursing home in St. Louis, Missouri, making $8.50 an hour. With such low pay, it’s difficult for her to provide for her sons. “Putting food on the table for my family is a constant struggle,” she said on a recent call with media. Morales can rarely afford to pay all of her bills in full. She recently had to replace her car’s alternator, and the price proved “devastating.”

• “Costs keep going up, but my wages haven’t kept pace,” she said. “I work so hard to take care of my kids, but it just doesn’t add up.”

• Not long ago many voters knew little about Tom MacArthur. A low-key moderate Republican congressman in a district that twice went for Barack Obama, he burnished his reputation as the guy who worked with Democrats to help rebuild in the years after Hurricane Sandy.

• Now, as he wages a bitter fight for re-election to a seat he won by 20 percentage points just two years ago, even some of his supporters have turned virulently against him. The reason? His new reputation as the turncoat whose legislation almost repealed the Affordable Care Act.

• Like many Republican candidates struggling to explain how they could support protections for preexisting conditions while also supporting changes that would gut them, MacArthur has offered vague but persistent promises to shield Americans with medical conditions.

• But he also wrote the Republican legislation that would have allowed states to charge those Americans higher premiums or limit what services are covered, gaining enough support for the repeal bill to clear the House last year.

• Recent years have seen the far and extreme right wing building international coalitions to disseminate propaganda in an attempt to bring the public around to their talking points, including the development of large networks of online activists and trolls who deliver sophisticated coordinated campaigns. These digital militias operate across a range of platforms, but have especially come to be associated with the ‘Politically Incorrect’ (/pol/) boards of the 4chan and 8chan sites.

• Such campaigning became particularly pronounced in Donald Trump’s campaign to become the Republican’s presidential nominee, and his subsequent presidential race. Overnight fringe memes like Pepe the Frog became public talking points as these troll armies shitposted themselves to fame, flooding social media with a range of far-right talking points and conspiracy theories designed to boost Donald Trump’s image and denigrate his opponents. Such activity also aligned with Kremlin objectives, and the different groups of internet trolls enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, disseminating and provoking a range of complementary disinformation.

• Following the US election these communities continued their activity, seeking to replicate their perceived success in 2016. In the run-up to the French election we observed American activists engaging in a range of activities designed to sway the public in favour of the Front Nationale. Some of these were poorly considered, with American activists attempting to replicate their strategy from the US election with little consideration for the French context. However, there were more serious efforts, including the dissemination of Macron’s leaked emails which occurred with potential support from Russia. Perhaps most interestingly US alt-right activists outlined sophisticated propaganda efforts which included the microtargeted dissemination of disinformation.

• As soon as it became clear that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes in the 2016 election, he started looking for a pretext to explain his failure to pass the most basic test of democratic legitimacy.

• Trump conjured up the most outrageous and transparent lies to explain his loss, grumbling about widespread voter fraud and blaming “the millions of people who voted illegally” for depriving him of a popular vote victory.

• But these lies were more than an incurable megalomaniac trying to save face in front of a skeptical world. Soon after his inauguration, Trump moved to act on his lies, creating a commission to “investigate” the nearly non-existent phenomenon of voter fraud.

• He recruited Kansas Secretary of State and current gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach — a frequent Breitbart contributor with white supremacist ties who also happens to be the Grand Wizard of Republican voter suppression efforts — to lead it.

• The commission was drowned in lawsuits and forced to disband before it could achieve anything concrete. But it was emblematic of the way in which Trumpian bravado — which on its face can appear to be a stark departure from the more sedate form of traditional Republican statesmanship — corresponds comfortably in practice with well-established conservative policies.

• The results of the 2016 election were deeply marred by Republican-led voter suppression efforts, and the upcoming 2018 midterms stand to follow much the same pattern.

• That’s because despite all the advances in voting rights that have been made since the days when only educated, property-owning European males could legally participate in the U.S. political system, the manipulation of laws by the ruling parties to prevent people from participating in the political process remains common today.

• The midterm elections are widely expected to usher in this century’s “year of the woman” – an explosion of women entering government.

• Massachusetts will likely elect its first Black woman to Congress, Arizona is poised to send its first woman to the US Senate, and fully 50 percent of Democratic congressional nominees this year are women.

• But California – a policy trendsetter that in 1993 became the first state to be represented simultaneously by two women in the US Senate – won’t be making history this year when it comes to women.

• All of California’s 53 House seats are on the ballot, and a record 57 women entered the primaries. But the Golden State’s midterm election contests skew very male.

• Since none of the 39 Democratic representatives are facing a serious challenge, Democrats hoping to take back the House of Representatives are targeting California’s 14 Republican-held congressional districts – particularly the seven that favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

• Next week, Floridians have a chance to engage in a uniquely democratic act — and not just by casting a ballot in Tuesday’s election. In Florida, they can do something more — they can vote for voting.

• Thanks to a movement led by affected citizens, Floridians will vote on Amendment 4 — the Voting Restoration Amendment. If it passes, Amendment 4 will restore the eligibility to vote to 1.4 million Floridians with felony convictions in their past, who are currently barred for life from voting. This amendment, and what it means for democracy, should have particular significance for the Latino community — but perhaps not for the reasons you may think.

• It’s tempting to think about Amendment 4 in partisan terms. These days, commentators are quick to speculate on whether voting laws will benefit Democrats or Republicans. But Latino voters are not monolithic — especially not in Florida, where 6 in ten registered Latino voters are Republican or unaffiliated. It’s difficult to say what effect Amendment 4 might have on party politics in the Latino community.

• Abigail Spanberger is a former CIA agent running as the Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. She is seeking to defeat and replace the Republican incumbent Rep. Dave Brat. The 7th Congressional District is a large sprawling area spanning Culpeper and Nottoway Counties. It includes a large portion of Richmond suburbs, with otherwise mainly rural areas. The district has a population of 775,000, 72 percent of which lives in urban areas, with a median income of $73,580. Spanberger spent eight and a half years as an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), working both overseas and at home. The CIA has long ago taken its place as one of the most hated organizations in human history. It is reviled by the vast majority of the world for toppling democratically elected governments, supporting fascist coups and political massacres, allying itself with the most reactionary elements of society, including Al Qaeda, and carrying out sadistic, medieval-style torture on its victims.

• Plame and Wilson saw the leak as payback for an episode in the run-up to the Iraq War where, after President George W. Bush falsely alleged that Saddam Hussein “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” in order to build a nuclear bomb, Wilson penned an op-ed in The New York Times refuting the claim—since Wilson, a former diplomat, was the actual man the CIA had sent to Niger to investigate the yellowcake tale.

• Italian politics, however, does not always follow the logic of rational choice so dear to American political science. Otherwise Italians would not have voted for Silvio Berlusconi, who might have done a great job impersonating a leading role in Italy’s commedia dell’arte. As an impersonator of a statesman at the helm of the world’s eighth largest economy, however, the convicted tax fraudster and former president of AC Milan (newly-owned by Chinese investors) was clearly out of his league (pun intended). Outmaneuvered in the weeks following the parliamentary election of 2018, Berlusconi saw himself sidelined by Matteo Salvini, the new strongman of Italy’s populist radical right.

• [...]

• Anxiety in the face of the growing visibility of Italy’s Muslim minority groups is one reason for the success of the Lega’s populist mobilization, yet certainly not the most salient one.

• The campaign of Democratic challenger Abigail Spanberger announced on Thursday that it had discovered and removed an operative for James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas who had posed as a volunteer and infiltrated its staff.

• The operative, who went by the name Monica Nelson, appears to have been Marisa Jorge, a New York-based official who has been previously exposed after embedding with other political campaigns. Justin Jones, Spanberger’s communications director, said that Nelson had been on the campaign as a volunteer for several weeks. She had shown up at the offices with the appearance of being pregnant and said she was bored at home and wanted to help out.

• The campaign, which has an estimated 5,500 volunteers, brought her on board.

• By virtue of being born, each of us has the absolute right to safety, shelter, food, education and health care. This is the agenda of the organization I co-direct, the Dream Defenders. It is also the agenda that Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis has attacked as being too “radical” for the Sunshine State and proof that Mayor Andrew Gillum is unfit for governorship.

• Through conversations with thousands of everyday Floridians and backed by dozens of Florida organizations, we built “The Freedom Papers,” a left, populist vision for the future of our society — a future that prioritizes the needs of everyday people over the profits of big corporations. Rather than debate the substance of this agenda, or present an alternate plan, DeSantis stoked fear over the Freedom Papers to keep voters divided so that he and his corporate bakers can continue to do their dirty work behind the scenes.

• In Florida and across the country, the right has been using scare tactics, stirring up a racist frenzy and promoting extreme white-nationalist violence, steering people away from what’s best for everyone and in favor of a right-wing, pro-corporate, and anti-people agenda.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The government will also not prevent protesters legally challenging the Supreme Court decision to release her.

• The French government report [FR] detailing these regulatory plans was released last month, and translates as “Strengthening the fight against racism and antisemitism on the Internet,” the release states.

• The report specifically aims to address the “perverted connection between hate speech and advertising,” explaining that “people who write offensive or extremist remarks are the ‘money makers’, because one of them can cause fifty or a hundred others. From this perspective, it is valuable for these networks to host and disseminate this kind of speech,” says the report, according to the release.

• To neutralize the profitability of hate speech, “the government wants to reinforce the obligations imposed on these platforms: more transparency and vigilance duty,” the release says, arguing that “this solution will never be sufficient enough to counter the abuses caused by the profitability of hate speech.”

• The Vatican Youth Synod was supposed to help young people acquire holiness, not be used to muzzle faithful Catholic media.

• Buried in paragraph 146 of the final approved synod document is a line on censorship coming from the homosexual current. The paragraph speaks of setting up “certification systems for Catholic websites, to counter the spread of fake news regarding the Church.”

• [...]

• They can start with censoring Fr. Thomas Rosica who, in July, wrote the fake news that the Catholic Church is no longer ruled by Scripture and Tradition.

• “Our Church has indeed entered a new phase,” writes Rosica, “with the advent of this first Jesuit pope it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.”

• The #metoo movement has been one of the most influential social movements of the last few years, calling out sexual assault and harassment in both everyday life and high profile industries such as Hollywood.

• One of the reasons for the success of #metoo was its prominence on social media which emboldened many to share their stories.

• This was also the case in China but with a bit of a twist. Those involved in woyeshi, the Chinese spelling of “Me Too.” , posted their stories on popular social media platforms, though the movement eventually took on the name of ‘rice bunny’ which is the pronunciation of metoo in Chinese.

• However, government censorship kicked in, and the stories shared were filtered out from public viewing.

• To combat this, people began moving to online platforms that used blockchain technology to share their stories, using the name ‘Every snowflake’.

• Gab, the fringe social network apparently used by the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting suspect, is planning to return online this weekend.

• Chatter on the social media site, a Twitter alternative that’s popular among some conservatives and white nationalists, went silent by Monday after GoDaddy pulled the domain registration from the site. GoDaddy said it made the decision after receiving complaints and finding content on Gab that “promotes and encourages violence against people.”

• Social media site Gab, popular among far-right extremists, has found a new domain host and expects to be back online by Sunday, it tweeted on Saturday. Gab’s earlier domain host, GoDaddy, dropped the site following the news that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers had been an avid poster on the site.

• In a lengthy blog post, Rob Monster, founder and CEO of Gab’s new domain host Epik.com, wrote that he “did not take the decision lightly,” but “de-platforming is digital censorship.” Monster said he had spoken to Gab founder Andrew Torba as part of his “own search for truth.”

• Gab tweeted Saturday that it is “getting close” to being live on the new domain host.

• [...]

• Gab launched in 2016 and bills itself as a “social network for creators who believe in free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online.” But the site has run into controversy over the years for allowing extremist content with very little oversight.

• After the Pittsburgh shooting, the site was not only dropped by GoDaddy but also by its cloud host, Joyent, and payment processor Stripe.

• The Gab social media platform, suspended from the internet after last week’s mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, was under investigation by Dauphin County authorities and the FBI for a possible hate speech incident this year.

• The site gained national attention Oct. 27 when authorities said synagogue shooting suspect Robert Bowers posted a message there threatening violence shortly before 11 worshipers were killed at the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh. Bowers had a long history of anti-Semitic postings before the massacre, according to authorities.

• Victor Marchetti, a former C.I.A. employee and co-author of the first book, about the agency’s inner workings, that the federal government sought to censor before its publication, died on Oct. 19 at his home in Ashburn, Va. He was 88.

• The cause was complications of dementia, his son Christian said.

• Mr. Marchetti worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for 14 years as a Soviet-military specialist and executive assistant to the deputy director, Rufus L. Taylor. Disillusioned by what he saw as the agency’s unchecked excesses and its increasing involvement in attempted assassinations, coups and cover-ups, he resigned in 1969.

• He and John D. Marks, a former State Department intelligence officer, then wrote a nonfiction book, “The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence,” which was ultimately published in 1974.

• “The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy,” they wrote. “It seeks largely to advance America’s self-appointed role as the dominant arbiter of social, economic, and political change in the awakening regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”

• One of the most serious criticisms Facebook faced over its handling of hate speech against the Rohingya people in Myanmar concerned a lack of content moderators who could speak the local language.

• With the general elections in India due early in 2019, greater attention is being paid to the digital space, which many believe will have a deep impact on the polls. Much of this attention is focused on Facebook, which was heavily criticised for its conduct in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential elections after it emerged that political consultation firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed the private information of 87 million Facebook users world-wide for targeted political advertising.

• Since August, media reports in India have quoted several journalists accusing Facebook of censoring political content. The internet company has been accused of doing this by temporarily suspending accounts, labelling news as “spam”, and not permitting news organisations to promote their articles. But what sort of material invited such action by Facebook, and is the company picking sides as some have alleged?

• Facebook started off simply as a way for people to connect. But it quickly grew into a massive public square, with the company having to decide what kinds of speech it would allow on its platform and what would get taken down.

• Speaking before an elite audience in Washington in March 2000 , then US President Bill Clinton summarized much of Western thinking on the internet when he hailed a new century in which “liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem.”

• Screenshot comparisons from the community reveal an option for “chest bounciness” has been removed from the game entirely, as well as an example of more steam being added to a particularly racy CG image that obscures more of the skin on display. Something called “touch mode,” a feature that fans feared would be on the chopping block, does appear to remain intact.

• Amnesty International on Friday urged the Sudanese government to halt what it describes as “relentless harassment, intimidation and censorship of journalists” in the country.

• In a report documenting the arrests of at least 15 journalists by state security forces between January and October, the rights group says the media in Sudan are frequently targeted by the National Intelligence and Security Agency for their reporting, especially for publishing articles criticizing government policies.

• Sudan has been ranked 174 out of 180 countries in 2017 world press freedom index by Reporters Without Borders, a media watchdog.

• Back in 2014, YouTuber Meghan Tonjes posted a photo of her clothed size-16 bum and Instagram removed it, citing community guidelines regarding nudity. “There has been a long history of Instagram deleting photos of fat bodies that don’t actually violate any guidelines,” Sarah says.

• The latest round of censorship on social media platforms Twitter and Facebook has been a coordinated effort spanning a diverse set of players, from NATO and neoconservative think tanks to the Chinese Communist Party, says Elizabeth Voz, editor of Disobedient Media.

• In March, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was cut off from the internet in what has amounted to the silencing of the world-famous publisher of secret diplomatic, military and political documents. Assange’s removal from the digital public square “was the first domino to fall in a series of increasingly draconian censorship measures” that have surpassed Voz’s worst expectations, she wrote in an op-ed for Disobedient Media published in late October.

• The third edition of “Maskoon”, the first festival in the Arab region, specializing in horror, fantasy, thriller, action and science fiction movies, was launched on Wednesday at the Metropolis Cinema, Ashrafieh. The opening saw the display of “The Guilty” movie – its original title: Den Skyldige – by the Danish Gustav Mueller; the movie won the Audience Award at the Sundance and Rotterdam Film Festivals.

• Maskoon’s organizers announced during the opening that the censorship authorities banned two films from being showed at the festival: one short Lebanese film enlisted in the festival competition, and the second is a French film that won one of Cannes Festival awards.

• Myriam Sassine, the festival’s director, said in a speech that censorship had decided to ban two films for vague and unclear reasons: The Climax, winner of the Directors’ Week Award at the Cannes Film Festival this year, directed by the French-Argentine director Gaspard Noé, and a short Lebanese film entitled “Nocturnal Deconstruction” by Laura El Alam.

• On this episode of Fault Lines, hosts Garland Nixon and Lee Stranahan discuss the danger of censorship in the modern political age. US Air Force Veteran and triple amputee Brian Kolfage recently had his pages removed by Facebook, and he will detail his story and fight for free speech with social media companies on today’s show.

• The presenter of Keeping It Real with Adeola, which is watched by millions for its sharp observations on geopolitical, social and economic issues in both Nigeria and around the world, joins Myf Warhurst to discuss the highs and lows of the having a prominent public voice as a woman, and why she hopes her opponents are listening.

• The media industries are still relying on identifiers that were designed for physical products such as printed books, magazines or CD’s. Traditional content identifiers (like ISBN or ISRC) are often expensive and managed by centralized institutions, and they fall short of the requirements for digital trade. Freely accessible standard identifiers, which are specifically designed to manage digital content, are a fundamental prerequisite for efficient transactions in a decentralized and increasingly heterogeneous media environment. The ISCC (International Standard Content Code) is the first open, generic identifier designed for digital media content. It can be used to register content on the blockchain and also in off-chain environments.

• Artists and rights activists are pushing the Cuban government to change a law that they fear will hurt creativity and increase censorship.

• The law is to take effect next month. It bars artists and musicians from “providing their services” in any place open to the public, including privately owned spaces, without first getting government approval.

• The Cuban government in 2010 adopted a reform measure to require government approval only for state-run places. Since then, artists and musicians have presented their work in private as part of a wider push for economic, social, and political reforms in Cuba.

• Artists and musicians have been able to produce more work and expand their offerings, with increased internet access and greater freedom to travel. But that has also made it harder for the government to collect taxes and oversee their works.

• The new law worries some independent artists, who fear they will not be able to get state approval. That could cost them their livelihood.

• Since then, the government had tolerated artists independently presenting their work in private venues, as part of a broader Cuban economic, social and political opening.

• Cuban artists’ greater autonomy, thanks also to increased access to the internet and freedom to travel, led to a blossoming of cultural activity. Independent recording studios and art galleries have burgeoned.

• Cuban artists and international rights activists are pushing the government to revise legislation due to take effect in December that they fear will hamper creativity and increase censorship on the Communist-run island.

• The decree, published in July, bars artists, be they musicians or painters, from “providing their services” in any space open to the public, including private venues, without prior government approval.

• It updates a decree redacted before the market reforms launched in 2010 by former President Raul Castro, which required them only to get approval to operate in state-run spaces.

• Cuban artists and international rights activists are pushing the government to revise legislation due to take effect in December that they fear will hamper creativity and increase censorship on the Communist-run island.

• The decree, published in July, bars artists, be they musicians or painters, from “providing their services” in any space open to the public, including private venues, without prior government approval.

• It updates a decree redacted before the market reforms launched in 2010 by former President Raul Castro, which required them only to get approval to operate in state-run spaces.

• Backlash is mounting over a planned debate in Toronto this week featuring Steve Bannon, the controversial strategist that helped U.S. President Donald Trump win the 2016 election.

• Calls to cancel the Friday debate are being met with outrage over what a cancellation might mean for free speech.

• By nearly all accounts, except those of his loyal fans, Steve Bannon is a nasty piece of work.

• He said the “women’s liberation movement” would backfire and only “pro-family” women would hold office.In 1996 he faced domestic abuse charges. His wife said in court documents he didn’t want their daughters to go to a certain school because there were too many Jewish students. He led the alt-right news site Breitbart News, known for publishing headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.” Under his leadership Breitbart compared Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust.

• It also featured “violent, sexist, extremist and radical political content,” according to one corporation that joined over 2,000 other organizations and companies who pulled their advertising last year. He describes refugees to Western nations as a “civilizational jihad personified by this migrant crisis.”

• A coalition of anti-racist community groups, as well as some Canadian politicians, are calling on organizers of the Munk Debates to rescind an invitation to Steve Bannon and cancel his debate this Friday with David Frum. It’s a justifiable request and one I fully support. In the wake of recent racially and religiously motivated shootings in the United States and Canada, it is absurd and unconscionable to provide a coveted speaking platform to a hate monger.

• Organizers of the Munk Debates, under some misguided notion of promoting free speech and encouraging uncomfortable or polarizing conversations, felt it necessary to invite Bannon to “debate” “the rise of populism” at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. The Munk Debates are self-described as a neutral public forum to discuss “challenging issues and ideas.” I can’t help but wonder what exactly is challenging, enlightening or edifying about ideas like racism, bigotry, and white supremacy? What haven’t we figured out about these belief systems so far that we need Bannon to clarify for us?

• The wave of deeply disturbing hate crimes in recent days – the killing of two African-Americans, allegedly by a white supremacist in Kentucky, the mail bombs sent to numerous former and current officials, the massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh – has led to new calls to ban hate speech.

• Although the government may impose greater punishments on crimes motivated by hate, the law is clear that the expression of hate is protected by the First Amendment. The government cannot punish speech even if it is deeply offensive – and there is no reason to believe that censoring hate speech will make hate crimes less likely.

• The suspected shooter who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue left a trail of virulent anti-Semitism on a social network frequented by right-wing extremists. The man who allegedly mailed bombs to Barack Obama and other prominent figures had been reported for making threats on Twitter.

• When online hate spills over into real-life violence, it highlights what is arguably the greatest technological challenge facing the Internet: Media companies have not figured out what to do about the threats and abuse that pollute their platforms.

• Despite the promise of artificial intelligence, algorithms have so far proved no match for the nuance of human language; monitoring posts requires not just finding specific words, but understanding meaning, intent, and context.

• Shortly after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, I noticed that the word “Jews” was trending on Twitter. As a social media researcher and educator, I became concerned that the violence would spread online, as it has in the past.

• The alleged synagogue shooter’s activity on the Gab social media site has drawn attention to that site’s role as a hate-filled alternative to more mainstream options like Facebook and Twitter. Those are among the social media platforms that have promised to fight hate speech and online abuseon their sites.

• A majority of college students support the First Amendment in theory, but not in practice, a new survey shows. Yale’s 2018 Buckley Program Survey showed 79 percent of undergraduates still say that freedom of speech is important to society. Nearly 60 percent also acknowledged that hate speech is protected under the First Amendment.

• The organisation was established in 1941 to research and advocate for political freedom and human rights. It publishes three annual reports: ‘Freedom in the World’, which monitors political freedom; ‘Freedom of the Press’, which looks at censorship and intimidation of journalists; and ‘Freedom of the Net’, which looks at the state of Internet freedom. The ‘Freedom of the Net’ report considers a diverse range of countries and accounts for factors such as filtering, manipulation and blocking of websites, diversity of online news, infrastructural and economic barriers to access, government and business control over internet access, and violation of internet user rights.

• The human rights group Freedom House reports that countries are embracing China’s model of digital authoritarianism.

• As China’s leaders gather in Beijing this week for the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), an ideological war is under way on the country’s internet.

• Some experts predict President Xi Jinping will use the meeting to establish a level of control and influence over the Party not seen since Mao Zedong, the strongman founder of the People’s Republic. While the internet has always been a key battleground for the Party, the past 12 months have seen a marked increase in censorship, with new laws and regulations targeting online expression even in areas or on certain topics where dissent was once tolerated or passed undetected.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The social-media ideological purge continues. Facebook has now banned Gavin McInnes, the host of CRTV’s Get off my Lawn and the founder of the Proud Boys organization, which is known for confronting vicious Antifa agitators during their usually violent, anarchist protests. The social network has also begun banning individuals with ties to McInnes or Proud Boys.

• Instagram joined Facebook, also banning McInnes and Proud Boys content. Twitter had already banned McInnes earlier this year.

• The purge is ongoing, as the main pages of McInnes and Proud Boys have been removed but several associated pages remain functional for the time being.

• A former CIA contractor was sentenced Friday to 90 days in jail for unauthorized retention of classified materials at a hearing that shed little light on his motives.

• Reynaldo Regis, 54, of Fort Washington, Maryland, had been seeking probation at his sentencing hearing in federal court in Alexandria. His lawyers pointed to probation sentences received by retired Gen. David Petraeus and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in their high-profile document retention cases.

• After a four-and-a-half year wait, one of the Senate’s key whistleblower advocates succeeded in arranging the declassification of documents he says show that the CIA inappropriately monitored congressional staff correspondence with whistleblowers.

• Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on Thursday released a pair of “congressional notifications” from 2014 just delivered to him by newly installed inspector general for the Intelligence Community Michael Atkinson.

• The Central Intelligence Agency surveilled and analyzed the emails of Congressional staffers during the Obama administration, according to recently declassified Congressional notifications detailing the snooping.

• The CIA was collecting information specifically related to CIA whistleblowers and dumping it into a report that was sent to Congress. This week, that report was declassified.

• A Department of Defense official said Nov. 1 that U.S. Cyber Command needs to have its own infrastructure and not lean as heavily on the National Security Agency for some cyber tools, a transition that may foreshadow an eventual split between the two dual-hatted agencies.

• Cyber Command has operated on the NSA’s networks since its conception in 2009, but is in the process of building systems “by which we can do our own operations and not rely as heavily on the NSA infrastructure,” said Capt. Ed Devinney, director of corporate partnerships and technology outreach at Cyber Command.

• “Building our own infrastructure is probably the biggest thing that will impact both organizations,” Devinney said at the CyberCon conference hosted by Fifth Domain Nov. 1.

• An unexpected declaration by whistleblower Edward Snowden filed in court this week adds a new twist in a long-running lawsuit against the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

• The case, filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation a decade ago, seeks to challenge the government’s alleged illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of Americans, who are largely covered under the Fourth Amendment’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures.

• It’s a big step forward for the case, which had stalled largely because the government refused to confirm that a leaked document was authentic or accurate.

• On this last day of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, which is also Halloween, let’s look at something “scary” – if you value privacy and security – as was pointed out recently by the NSA.

• Years ago, it became a challenge to find a decent new TV which wasn’t “smart,” but now the NSA has warned that the same may become true for office furniture!

• Why is the NSA talking about IoT office furniture? Because the agency has to buy desks and chairs the same as any other business. If that furniture is “smart”? Well then, that’s one more potential entry point into a network or an avenue for threat actors to gather sensitive information.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The system is currently far from being universally in place; however, the country’s communist government has plans to rank every citizen — all 1.4 billion of them — by 2020.

• But various bizarre and rigid policies are already being felt and reported in different parts of China – from the state confiscating pets to dire recorded audio warnings threatening reprisal should commuters on a bullet train not bide by the rules.

• A 68-year-old priest of a Sai Baba temple near Pochamma Maidan junction in Warangal was beaten up by the imam of LB Nagar Masjid Syed Natiq Hussaini after the two argued over the use of the temple loudspeaker.

• This changed under the military rule of General Zia Ul Haq when in 1982 and 1986 two further sections were added to protect the sensibilities of Muslims.

• In the methodology of Islam, Friday prayers have emerged as a tool of mass mobilization. Most Muslims attend Friday prayers in a mosque. It is then easy for Islamic clerics of all persuasions to organize mass protests after the prayer. On October 12, a Friday, rallies and mass protests were organized by the TLY, led by Maulvi Khadim Hussain Rizvi. According to a report in the Urdu daily Roznama Ummat, rallies were held in 105 towns in all four provinces of Pakistan and in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.[5] The Urdu daily Roznama Jang put the number of towns where protests were held at more than 200.[6]

• The resolution states that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) urges member states to “put an end to any foreign funding of Islam which is used for the purpose of national political expansion into other States under the guise of Islam.” Considering the accompanying report extensively quoted Turkey and Erdoğan’s long-arm Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), which has been funding imams and mosques in Europe, the message is clearly directed at Turkey. Among the 47 member states, only Turkey has been engaged in extensive foreign funding of partisan imams in Turkish and Muslim diaspora groups across Europe, which at times amounted to gathering foreign intelligence on regime critics.

• The lawsuit states that off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger shot Jean though there was “no immediate threat of harm,” and says that she used excessive force, which violated Jean’s constitutional and civil rights, Dallas News reported.

• “By simply following proper police procedures and the best police practices and not the protocol of the DPD to ‘shoot first and ask questions later’, Defendant Guyger would have not shot Jean,” the lawsuit states. “Essentially, Officer Guyger was ill-trained, and as a result, defaulted to the defective DPD policy: to use deadly force even when there exist no immediate threat of harm to themselves or others.”

• Damond, whose legal last name was Ruszczyk, but who went by Justine Damond professionally, had called 911 to report a possible rape in the alley behind her south Minneapolis home. Prosecutors say she was shot as she approached the SUV’s driver side window, with Noor firing past his partner, who was behind the wheel. Both officers have denied wrongdoing.

• Speaking to KSTP-TV from Sydney, Australia, John Ruszczyk is critical of the two officers who responded to his daughter’s call about a possible sexual assault near her home last year for failing to have their body cameras on. Justine Ruszczyk Damond’s was killed by officer Mohamed Noor, who is charged with murder and manslaughter.

• He hopes the suit will force accountability and transparency that he says is needed in order to bring reforms to the department – from strict body camera policies to training and conduct.

• And if CCA’s treatment of staff is appalling, their treatment of prisoners is horrifying. When Bauer was writing “American Prison,” the state of Louisiana paid CCA $34 per inmate per day: money to cover prisoners’ housing, food, clothing and medical care – all to be kept at a low enough cost that CCA makes a profit. During his second week of training Bauer met Robert Scott, an inmate missing both his legs and a few fingers. He had arrived at Winn with all his appendages, but prison infirmary staff ignored his complaints of pain and sore spots on his feet. In four months he made at least nine requests to see a doctor, and was threatened with a disciplinary write-up for malingering. When he was finally taken to a local hospital, amputation was the only option. Another Winn inmate who attempted suicide has been sued by CCA for reimbursement of the cost of his hospital visit.

• While 18 is the minimum age to get married in Finland, the justice ministry has granted a handful of exceptions for 17-year-olds, usually on religious grounds.

• Twitter said Wednesday that it will not suspend Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan over a tweet comparing Jews to termites, the company confirmed to The Hill.

• Barbie, once a beacon of femininity and feminism, now dons a hijab so that she does not entice men who might rape her. Marks and Spencer, one of the UKs largest department stores, sells hijabs for three-year old girls. The free West, where these girls used to look to as beacons of light and hope, is supporting their oppressors and ultimately fighting against their progress.

• Ignoring the existence of such a parallel system is negligent on the part of the UK authorities. We cannot even estimate how many times Muslim women have to go through religious courts that frequently endorse the sexual, physical, and mental exploitation of Muslim women. This mind-set provides impunity to some men in minority groups and allows them to ruin the lives of children and women.

• People living in the free world need to respect Muslim women’s tireless struggle for justice. Only one law based on secular values can safeguard women’s human rights, regardless of their faith, caste, creed or colour. It is time to end the complacency about discrimination against Muslim women within their own religious communities.

• Can MeToo succeed in a culture where children are married off for social or economic exigencies?

• She was working in a hospital supported by ICRC in a displacement camp in the remote town of Rann outside Maiduguri in Borno State.

• Liman was the second aid worker murdered in as many months.

• The 51-year-old has served only half of a five-and-a-half-year sentence for encouraging support for the Islamic State group.

• He is thought to have inspired hundreds of British jihadis, and even youths in Australia, and is widely believed to remain dangerous.

• Public Knowledge, a Washington, DC advocacy group, today released a paper calling for the formation of a new federal government authority to develop expertise and capacity on artificial intelligence (AI), to be able to effectively regulate and govern these technologies in the future.

• The paper, The Inevitability of AI Law & Policy: Preparing Government for the Era of Autonomous Machines, was released on 31 October and written by Ryan Clough, general counsel at Public Knowledge.

• The paper “argues that the rapid and pervasive rise of artificial intelligence risks exploiting the most marginalized and vulnerable in our society.”

• In order to mitigate these harms, a new national authority on AI will be needed, it says, to “provide the rest of the government with the expertise and experience needed to achieve five goals crucial to building ethical AI systems:

• Humans — as long as we have walked, we have moved and explored. We spread to cover the whole world, and then mixed among each other. We continue to do that. Our movement expresses so many elements of our being: our curiosity, our vulnerability, our arrogance. We have generally been the main limit to our own movements in all that time. As humans, we have mobility in common. It is a core part of who we are. And yet it is perhaps precisely that mobility that has often made us afraid of others and controlling over them.

• At a demonstration during the COP21 protests in Paris a few years ago, somebody carried a banner that read “migration is a force of nature.” The message was striking. In its simplicity, it neatly expressed the inevitability of human mobility. But it also said something about the inevitability of human struggles to be free to move. Those struggles have always been there too — and they continue today, ultimately, because borders inhibiting our freedom of movement persist. Would those struggles even exist, after all, if there were no borders to cross?

• In its latest issue of the World Factbook, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) speaks of Serbia as the country of cheap labour, inefficient judiciary and prevailing corruption, but also the country of economic reforms with a good strategic position.

• The report also states free trade agreements with the EU, Russia, Turkey and the countries of the Central European Free Trade Agreement as favourable factors.

• As the main economic challenges, the CIA has highlighted stagnant household incomes, the need to create new jobs in the private sector, structural reforms of state-owned enterprises, and public sector reforms.

• Other challenges cited include an ineffective justice system, a high level of corruption and the ageing of the population. The CIA report also mentions that Serbia is a “transhipment point” for Southwest Asian heroin moving to Western Europe on the Balkan route, while the country’s economy is “vulnerable to money laundering.”

• After a man was shot and killed by a Green Bay police officer, a man has been charged for threatening to kill that officer. It happened two weeks after officials arrested 26-year-old Jonathan C. Tubby, of Green Bay.

• Family, friends and strangers came together Friday evening to remember Jonathon Tubby. Dozens were seen gathered on Green Bay’s City Deck for a candlelight vigil to remember the 26-year-old.

• Tubby died at the Brown County Jail last month after being arrested on a felony warrant. He was shot by police at the jail’s sally port, an area where vehicles pull into the jail.

• The Department of Justice, which is handling the investigation of what happened, has said Officer Erik O’Brien shot Tubby during a confrontation. It happened inside the sally port of the jail–which is a secure exchange area. Authorities say there are no video cameras inside the sally port.

• Holding battery-powered candles and standing in a semi-circle on the City Deck, more than a hundred people gathered, all hoping for answers on why Tubby was shot and killed.

• More and more Indian women are coming forward to recall and record their traumatic experience of having been preyed upon by their male bosses. Because of the fresh complaints, the #MeToo movement still grabs a headline, though the TV studio discussions have stopped. The cases of man-woman interaction, consensual or non-consensual, may soon be superseded by the report of another surgical strike against the beef sellers or a march demanding the building of a Hindu temple.

• The women victims who broke their silence initially belonged to the worlds of print and visual media, films, advertising and public relations. Now even a respected corporate entity in the hotel industry faces the charge of ignoring a sexual harassment complaint by a woman employee who felt compelled to resign her job. Some more media men have figured as accused in the latest news stories. A professor has been forced to resign because of students complaining against his use of inappropriate language.

• Joanildo Burity is a lead researcher at the Social Research Institute at Fundação Joaquim Nabuco. He is near the east coast of Brazil. His work involves research projects and post-graduate teaching in the areas of Brazilian and Latin American politics and religion and politics.

• During this week’s “Unauthorized Disclosure” episode, Burity provides his initial analysis of why the far-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, won the election. He provides a brief rundown of what led up to the election, which includes mention of the police forces that were deployed to universities to investigate election materials that teacher unions were sharing.

• He talks about the issue of how Brazil’s democracy is young and faces a particular threat to its institutions, as well as the threats posed to the Amazon rain forest and other natural lands that Bolsonaro is intent to sell off to mining or logging corporations.

• Finally, Burity shares his views on whether or not Brazil could return to military dictatorship (whether the threat is real) and notes the role the American right, including Steve Bannon, played in Bolsonaro’s rise to power.

• “Every word has consequences, every silence too.” Jean Paul Satre’s famous epithet was a popular feature of news headlines when a wave of bombs were sent to high profile Liberals at the end of October 2018, including George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as to CNN’s offices in New York. Reports of a mass shooting in a Synagogue in Pittsburgh two days later seemed to confirm hate-fuelled violence as a defining characteristic of Donald Trump’s presidency, with dangerous linguistic abstractions reproducing themselves in reality.

• This conviction has been strengthened over the past two years as Trump’s tweets and calls-to-action have become increasingly incendiary. When the president describes right wing extremists as “very fine people,” encourages supporters to “knock the crap” out of protestors and endorses attacks on the press by his party’s congressional representatives it seems reasonable to draw a correlation between political rhetoric and the mainstreaming of violent extremism.

• McCarthyism took place during the Korean War when Democrat Harry Truman was president. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fellow Republicans were happy to go along with his outrageous, made-up stories about subversives in the State Department or wherever to try to capture the power that they lost during the major political realignment of the New Deal in the 1930s—particularly the right-wing, isolationist Republicans led by Robert Taft who wanted to dismantle Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and Keynesian management of the economy. The moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower who generally accepted the New Deal and were relatively liberal on race may have won the presidency in 1954 within this cauldron, but they lost the party in the long run, as we have seen.

• [...]

• Movements do not always reveal all the roots of their positions when they are fighting their opponents, not the alt-Right nor the anti-communist movement I studied in the 1950s. That means we have to do our research. The women I studied did not foreground their anti-Semitic, right-wing Christian worldview until the conspiratorial bullying of Senator McCarthy lost some of its potency and their more secular-minded allies ran for cover. Many of those who claimed President Obama was an imposter, a secret Muslim born abroad, were racist right-wing Christians who saw him as the anti-Christ. The Tea Party’s overlay with the Christian Right was often overlooked by secular reporters covering the movement who were tone-deaf to its underpinnings.

• What processes and procedures should someone wanting to change gender have to follow? This is the focus of the government’s consultation on reform to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). None of the 22 questions asks if people can or should be able to change gender. Nowhere does it ask about biology or morality; there’s no mention of hospitals or hormones. The processes and procedures up for discussion are the legal hoops people should have to jump through in order to have their new gender officially recognised – by police and health professionals, on passports and driving licenses, by universities or sports clubs.

• In less than two years as president, Donald Trump has already put two radical right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, cementing a conservative majority on the Court for decades. He has also placed 29 right-wing judges on the federal circuit courts of appeals with more in the works by the end of the year. These judicial appointments threaten to endanger our rights for years to come.

• We are painfully aware of how Trump and his GOP congressional leadership stole a Supreme Court appointment from Barack Obama and installed Neil Gorsuch, who has delivered conservative decisions as expected. And millions of us watched horrified as Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second Supreme Court pick, laid bare his right-wing bona fides as he lied under oath about a number of things and rallied conservatives in defense of rape culture.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Inc., 134 S.Ct. 1962 (2014), and SCA Hygiene Prods. Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Prods., LLC, 137 S.Ct. 954 (2017), this Court held that laches is unavailable to bar actions for copyright and patent infringement brought within the respective statutes of limitation. In these cases, however, this Court noted that in contrast to laches, equitable estoppel remains a viable equitable remedy “long recognized as available in actions at law” against “unscrupulous patentees” where there is “misleading and consequent loss.”

• For over a century, this Court and the Federal Circuit have held that a finding of equitable estoppel gives an accused infringer an implied license to a patented invention for the life of the patent, thereby constituting a waiver of the right to sue by the patentee. Yet for the first time, the Federal Circuit panel held that an implied license arising by equitable estoppel does not extend to the entire patented invention, but is instead restricted on a claim-by-claim basis to exclude claims added or substantially amended through ex parte reexamination, resulting in the implied license applying to select individual claims of a patent but not all.

• The question is not whether Clifford showed himself by the description to be the first inventor. By putting it in that form, it is comparatively easy to take the next step and say that he is not an inventor in the sense of the statute unless he makes a claim. The question is whether Clifford’s disclosure made it impossible for Whitford to claim the invention at a later date. The disclosure would have had the same effect as at present if Clifford had added to his description a statement that he did not claim the thing described because he abandoned it or because he believed it to be old. It is not necessary to show who did invent the thing in order to show that Whitford did not.

• It is said that, without a claim, the thing described is not reduced to practice. But this seems to us to rest on a false theory helped out by the fiction that, by a claim, it is reduced to practice. A new application and a claim may be based on the original description within two years, and the original priority established notwithstanding intervening claims. Chapman v. Wintroath, 252 U. S. 126, 252 U. S. 137. A description that would bar a patent if printed in a periodical or in an issued patent is equally effective in an application so far as reduction to practice goes.

• In In Re Smith International, the Federal Circuit stated that the broadest reasonable interpretation of a claim term must be consistent with the specification, as discussed in a previous post. So does that have any effect on the Examiner’s ability to use extrinsic evidence, such as a dictionary definition, to interpret a claim term? The two ex parte PTAB appeals discussed below cite In Re Smith Internationaland provide some guidance.

• In Ex parte Boeke, Appeal 2016-002873 (decided May 2018), the claim included “at least one discharge slot having a first portion that includes an oval geometry.” The specification distinguished “oval” from “racetrack shape” with reference to Figures 4 and 5, reproduced below. Specifically, the specification defined “oval” as having “no straight portions, see Fig. 5,” and defined “racetrack shape” as “ “includes two flat sides 90, 92, see discharges slots 80B of FIGS. 3 and 4.”

• David Smith, chief executive of IQ-AI Limited’s (LON:IQAI) operating subsidiaries, spoke to Proactive London’s Andrew Scott about the recent filing of a patent for gadolinium-free magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.

• Over the past decade, research has shown the potential toxicity of gadolinium-based products and how they are retained in the body for several years.

• It appears from the documentation that the new patent focuses on multiple notches at all corners rather than a single notch on the top side. It will give manufacturers an ability to extend functionality either by adding up quad cameras or introducing 3D display using those cameras. Alternatively, documents also mention a dual notch display device with more thinner bezels. The sensors can be organised in different ways, either by placing dual cameras on both the corners or by placing single cameras on all four corners. Although, the display has rounded corners around dual or quad notches.

• Software and Services has long had three components – Enterprise SW, Technology Solutions, and IP licensing – although all three have evolved substantially over the years, and especially since the beginning of FY/17. IP Licensing for example has evolved from a low-revenue, walled-off foundation of protective patents for the smartphone business into a multi-branched division generating $200m per year. The technology solutions division took a quantum leap forward with the acquisition of QNX in 2010, and QNX presently dominates revenue in BTS.

• [...]

• Under John Chen, the Berry has struck back. Yes, VMware has continued to outperform, but BB managed to swallow Good alive, and MobileIron is fighting its own desperate fight right now to stay alive. The mere fact that BB is keeping its percentage of market share along with VMware and Microsoft is remarkable in its own right, especially when so many of the other EMM providers are not keeping pace.

• Apple is locked in a battle with Qualcomm over patent infringement allegations and royalty demands. Qualcomm claimed Apple owes it $7 billion in a federal court hearing in San Diego on Friday.

• Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple claimed that Qualcomm charges a fee for each iPhone manufactured, a range of devices which utilizes Qualcomm patents.

• While this isn’t necessarily a problem, Apple says that Qualcomm is doubling its profit by also charging a fee for the technology itself.

• Apple claims that such a system is “double-dipping,” leading to the tech giant withholding royalty payments until the matter was resolved.

• The roughly 100 pages on which meanwhile-retired Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Thomas B. Pender discussed the statutory public interest factors in the investigation of Qualcomm’s first ITC complaint against Apple warrant further commentary. There are antitrust cases pending against Qualcomm around the globe, and Apple raised an affirmative antitrust defense against Qualcomm’s German patent assertions, but ALJ Pender’s public-interest analysis is the first detailed judicial holding–based on extensive briefing and a multi-day hearing.

• That’s why I will soon dedicate a blog post to the subject of inhowfar ALJ Pender’s public-interest analysis overlaps with key antitrust questions at issue in various other proceedings. But before we get there, I wanted to provide some procedural background.

• It’s important to understand that the United States International Trade Commission, a trade agency with quasi-judicial powers, clearly delineates the question of a “violation” (typically, the infringement of a patent not shown to be invalid; I sometimes refer to this as the “merits” part) from “remedies and bonding” (which I’ll briefly refer to as “remedies”). This is one major difference from the public interest eBay factor, which is considered together with the other three factors.

• The ALJ in charge of an investigation finishes his job by issuing an Initial Determination (ID) on the alleged violation and a Recommended Determination (RD) on the remedy sought. The Commission (the six-member decision-making body at the top of the organization) makes the final (apart from appeals or a Presidential veto) decision on both, but there is a technical difference: the ID becomes the final decision if the Commission declines to review it (which parteis can request); the RD is just a recommendation, and the Commission makes the first actual decision on remedies, which is why parties cannot seek a review of the RD (though they can, of course, voice any disagreement).

Trademarks

• A design patent is infringed when the defendant’s goods are too visually similar to the claimed design. (Yes, this is true even under Gorham v. White, as I explained at p. 177 here.) A trademark is infringed when consumers are likely to be confused as to the source, sponsorship, or origin of goods or services. Thus, factors like labeling, marketing, etc. are (at least in theory) relevant to the question of product-design trade dress infringement. But they’re not relevant to the question of design patent infringement.

• It’s true, as the majority points out, that visual similarity is one element of the various likelihood-of-confusion tests. To the extent that these judges are suggesting that they’d like to import the (very high) degree of visual similarity required for a finding of design patent infringement into the trade dress infringement test, that would be a wise and welcome addition to the law. But I’m not sure that’s what they’re trying to say.

• The ITC found that the mid-sole portion of these Converse All Star shoes was not a protected trademark — invalidating the Chuck Taylor trade dress registration (Reg. No. 4,398,753) and rejecting the existence of common-law rights. Although it found no trademark rights — the ITC did explain that the accused shoes would be infringing if the mark was valid. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has vacated and remanded.

• Distinctiveness is a threshold requirement for trademark rights. In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Bros., Inc., 529 U.S. 205 (2000), the Supreme Court held that a product design (such as a shoe portion) is never inherently distinctive, but that distinctiveness may be acquired and proven with “a showing of secondary meaning” — i.e., that the relevant consumers associate the particular product features with a particular source of goods. Thus, a trade dress rights are established over time as consumers become more familiar with the product design.

• Nusret Gökçe, nicknamed Salt Bae (the applicant), is a Turkish chef who owns ‘Nusr-Et’, a chain of steak houses. His art of cooking and preparing meat has become somewhat of an internet sensation [see here and here for some salty videos]. Salt Bae became widely known in 2017 for the way he ‘elegantly’ cuts meat and sprinkles salt. In particular, his fame comes from a viral video, ‘Ottoman Steak’, posted in January 2017 on his Twitter account. It has been viewed 10 million times on Instagram. After that Gökçe was dubbed ‘Salt Bae’ because of his iconic way of sprinkling salt by letting salt fall down on his forearm then spread on the meat.

Copyrights

• In 2015, Australia created the most aggressive copyright censorship system in the world, which allowed the country’s two major movie studios (Village Roadshow and Fox) along with an assortment of smaller companies and trolls to get court orders forcing the country’s ISPs to censor sites that had the “primary purpose” of infringing copyright.

• When the legislation was passed, opponents said that it would not curb copyright infringement. After all, the only thing that had ever significantly reduced copyright infringement in Australia had been to bring Australian prices into line with those paid in the rest of the English-speaking world (instead of gouging, as had been customary), and bringing Australian release-dates into sync with other English-speaking countries (instead of imposing long delays, as had been customary). The data had showed that the vast majority of Australians were willing to pay for their media — they just objected to getting ripped off by paying high prices for media that arrived months after all their internet friends had seen it.

• The Music Modernization Act also makes several significant changes to how the people who create music — songwriters, vocalists, and instrumentalists — are compensated, and for the first time in US copyright law, the work of producers and engineers is specifically recognized. SoundExchange®, which manages the payment of digital streaming royalties for post-1972 works, is tasked with payments to all stakeholders for the now-covered pre-1972 works. This is a much needed revenue stream for producers and engineers whose sound recordings were used for many years on a royalty-free basis. In a stark change from prior practice, royalty rates will be negotiated using the fair market value concept of the “willing buyer, willing seller;” the goal is to increase compensation to the music creators when digital platforms (who had earned millions from streaming) use their music.

• This fair market value approach will also be utilized in setting royalty rates for works in the databases of performance rights organizations ASCAP and BMI, and instead of one Southern District of New York judge assigned to all of these cases, the assignment will be random.

• On Friday, October 19th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a decision in Code Revision Commission v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., which reversed-in-part, vacated-in-part and remanded a lower court’s ruling in a copyright infringement case involving an annotated version of Georgia’s official state code. Applying U.S. Supreme Court case law from the 19th Century, the last time the nation’s highest court decided issues relevant to this case, the Eleventh Circuit found that no valid copyright interest can be asserted in any part of the annotated state code.

• In July 2015, the Code Revision Commission, a body established by the Georgia General Assembly in 1977 to recodify Georgia’s state laws, filed suit in the Northern District of Georgia seeking injunctive relief to prevent Public.Resource.Org (PRO), a non-profit working to improve public access to government materials, from publishing all 186 volumes of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA) online for free public access. PRO responded to the lawsuit by arguing that the state of Georgia didn’t hold an enforceable copyright to the OCGA. Although a LexisNexis Group subsidiary publishes the OCGA and is responsible for its ongoing maintenance, the publication agreement between LexisNexis and Georgia retains the copyright to the annotations in Georgia’s name. The Northern Georgia court entered a permanent injunction against PRO, finding that the annotations are not in the public domain because they lack the force of law.

• The Internet is littered with millions of images that are easy to find through a variety of search engines, including Google. These files are regularly downloaded and used by people without permission. To address this, Pixsy is offering photographers a service to “fight and find image theft,” which includes license demands and legal threats. A brilliant scheme according to some, while others brand it a ‘scam’.

• Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof issued a rather unusual press release on Thursday. Instead of regular company updates, it explained in detail how sites such as The Pirate Bay can be unblocked. While Bahnhof doesn’t block the site itself, the guide does come in handy for its customers.

• [...]

• The company has been a fierce opponent of copyright trolling, invasive data retention laws, and website blocking. At Bahnhof, user-privacy and unrestricted access to the Internet take priority.

• Search engines operating in Russia are obliged to connect to a centralized database to ensure that permanently blocked sites do not appear in search results. According to local telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor, Google has failed to connect with the blacklist as required, so must now face fines for non-compliance.

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