● 11.27.18

● Links 27/11/2018: GCC 7.4 Coming Soon and a Rare ‘Supply Chain’ Incident

Posted in News Roundup at 2:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• An NCC Group graduate trainee who emailed 300 coworkers to ask for help with what she deemed to be “unusual” behaviour from her Kali Linux VM; contacted the firm’s incident response team to complain about a faulty laptop; and said the machine had been “deliberately sabotaged”, has had her victimisation claim thrown out by an employment tribunal.

• Nga Hoang, who joined NCC in June 2016 on its graduate trainee scheme, claimed to the London South Employment Tribunal that her litany of 13 protected disclosures and 17 “detriments”, as defined in employment law (here and here), began just 10 days after she started working for the infosec consultancy.

• The tribunal took place in Croydon, south London, from 25 to 29 June this year, and the outcome published this month.

• Employment Judge Baron, sitting with two lay members, dismissed her entire case on 1 November (PDF), saying there was “no merit in any of the multiplicity of allegations” Hoang had made. She alleged her work laptop had been hacked from within the company network and that she was sacked for, among other things, revealing this to a laptop repair technician from Dell.

• It is amazing how fast open source Linux displaced open systems Unix from the HPC datacenters of the world.

• This change, which started in the early 2000s, was not just about having a fully open source operating system, which stands in stark contrast to the closed source Unix variants with a common set of APIs that met the SPEC 1170 common API set. While those common APIs made application portability easier across different Unixes, this capability was nowhere near as friction free as having a single operating system span multiple processor architectures and interconnects.

Desktop

• As the global technology evangelist director of Red Hat’s portfolio product marketing group, I have a secondary focus on portfolio architectures. I research customer successes in solution implementation using our open source technologies, then produce generic higher-level architectural content so that others may benefit from these real-life experiences.

• If that sounds kind of heavy, it all started innocently enough with my studies at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where Andrew Tanenbaum was teaching networking and operating systems. Most people in our business know that Tanenbaum developed MINIX as a teaching tool, and he got into a bit of a flame war with Linus Torvalds when Linux first hit the scene.

• While doing practical programming exercises for my operating systems course in 1998, I was not able to install MINIX at home, so that led me to install Linux on my laptop for the first time. I quickly understood that there were no problems I couldn’t troubleshoot; there were always logs to dig into and more information to discover. The code was available for exploration and fixes could be applied. I was hooked.

• Nothing is certain in life but death, taxes, and Windows 10 update bugs. While we were enjoying the holidays, Microsoft acknowledged it broke everything from Windows Media Player to the sound output on some PCs.

Server

• Having spent decades writing about the fallout of enterprise technology mergers and acquisitions I think I can say, with expert confidence, that nobody ever calls these things correctly. A long-held tradition calls for rapid analysis, a glance at stock price movements, a weak pun on the potential new name for the company, a quick call around of the usual suspects, maybe an off-the-record chat with folks with an axe to grind and a hasty conclusion that the result will be either disastrous or epoch making. With that in mind, I’ve held back commenting on IBM agreeing to buy Red Hat… until now.

• Bitter experience has taught me the fraught dangers involved in bold analysis or confident prognostication, for your reporter is the man who once considered Apple “finished” and tipped you off that Amazon’s Kindle was a “crummy e-book format”. So I have waited and bided my time and only now sagely bring you the artfully back-covering five possible ways to look at IBM buying Red Hat.

• Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes (RHOAR) is a recommended set of products, tools, and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications on the Red Hat OpenShift platform. As part of this offering, Red Hat provides full support for developers using Spring Boot and related frameworks for building modern, production-grade, Java-based cloud-native applications.

• Spring Boot lets you create opinionated Spring-based standalone applications. The Spring Boot runtime also integrates with the OpenShift platform, allowing your services to externalize their configuration, implement health checks, provide resiliency and failover, and much more.

• Nexenta delivers a complete storage stack that provides the high performance, flexibility, and enhanced security often required by Red Hat OpenStack Platform implementations. The open source drivers for Nexenta products are part of the OpenStack integration testing framework, which validates Nexenta’s drivers on a continuous basis.

• With the beta release of the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat is setting the stage for making it easier for DevOps teams to consume emerging operating system services without having to upgrade their entire operating system.

• Think about all the devices on a network. Think of attempting to collect all the log files respectively from each device and attempting to combine them into one common file to manage or read. The labor involved to manually combine and search through the millions of log files would be challenging to say the least.

• This is where the syslog comes into action. It is able to provide a centralized area for all these files. The developers or system administrators are then able to classify, filter, and manage the files to target the issues or even just monitor the network proactively to keep the network healthy.

• Containers and microservices are two leading edge technologies that enable much greater efficiency in cloud computing. Although they don’t need to be used in in combination, when they are deployed together they provide maximum benefit.

• In the simplest terms, a container is a “wrapper” that allows software to travel between operating environments. Container technology greatly speeds and enhances cloud computing development.

• Cloud computing companies hail containers as a powerful tool for developing, managing and migrating applications and software components from one system or environment to another.In the simplest terms, a container is a “wrapper” that allows software to travel between operating environments. Container technology greatly speeds and enhances cloud computing development.

• Cloud computing companies hail containers as a powerful tool for developing, managing and migrating applications and software components from one system or environment to another.

• First of all, what are microservices? Microservices is a type of architecture that splits your application into multiple services that does a fine-grained function that’s a part of your application as a whole. Each of your microservices will have a different logical function for your application. Microservices is a more modern approach in an application’s architecture compared to a monolithic architecture where all your application’s components and functions are in a single instance. You can refer to a comparison of a monolithic to a microservices architecture on the diagram below.

• First, Docker transformed how we ran applications. Then, Kubernetes changed how we managed containers. Now, the open-source project Istio is building on both to add a network service mesh.

• Istio is built on the open-source Envoy proxy. This service mesh enables microservices sharing distributed applications to communicate and work with one another. As Matt Klein, Envoy’s creator wrote, Istio provides modern microservice and cloud-native applications with a “unified control plane that ties the pieces together in a coherent way.”

• Istio also enables DevOps. In a soon-to-be-released blog, Google Cloud’s Eric Brewer, VP Infrastructure, and Eyal Manor, VP of Engineering, point out that Istio provides vital DevOps framework “such as a common system for monitoring, logging, authorization, and billing.”

Audiocasts/Shows

• Digital books are convenient and useful ways to have easy access to large volumes of information. Unfortunately, keeping track of them all can be difficult as you gain more books from different sources. Keeping your reading device synchronized with the material that you want to read is also challenging. In this episode Kovid Goyal explains how he created the Calibre digital library manager to solve these problems for himself, how it grew to be the most popular application for organizing ebooks, and how it works under the covers. Calibre is an incredibly useful piece of software with a lot of hidden complexity and a great story behind it.

• The Fuchsia bomb ticks closer, Valve’s Steam Link end of life shocks us, and Amazon’s new, rather obvious feature.

• Plus the surprise use for Red Hat Enterprise, and an update on the Linux powered Atari VCS.

• stan lee, linux wins and loses, phones, 3d printing

• Marco Palladino is an inventor, software developer and Internet entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California. He is the co-founder and CTO of Kong, the most widely adopted open source API platform. Besides being a core maintainer, Marco is currently responsible for the design and delivery of the Kong products, while also providing the technical thought leadership around APIs and microservices within Kong and the external community.

• In this episode: An all-star show with TV appearances, new magazines, lots of finds and a flake of optimism.

• Although the title of this episode says that we’ll be talking about running a business on Linux, we focus most of our conversation beyond the operating system and onto other open source applications for use in business.

• Leo Setting up PiVPN and Pi-Hole on Pi’s and migrating them to a full Ubuntu VM. Testing out K/Ubuntu 18.10. Solus broke for me, gamingwise.

• Tony H Using a USB sound card so I could use my headset with integrated microphone on my Toshiba z30 with only a combined audio jack, while on the road last week. Worked flawlessly during the mumble discussion

• Welcome to Episode 259 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we talk with Pierros Papadeas, SV1QVE, of the SatNOGS project. We take a deep look into the Open Space Foundation, SatNOGS and the linked satellite ground station network they have put together. We look under the covers at the software and hardware that make the project work, talk about its past and its future direction, and much more information about satellites in amateur radio, rotators, single-board computers, networking, aggregated information databases and much more. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy.

• Listener feedback about otters and ZFS, and Klaatu tries Steam Play and the Proton (WINE) layer.

Kernel Space

• These are typical questions that developers (and sometimes lawyers) ask during their work. Most software development projects use version control software (such as Git or Subversion) to track changes and use the “blame” feature of these systems to answer these questions.

• Unfortunately, version control systems are only capable of tracking full lines of code. Imagine the following scenario: A simple file is created by developer A; later, it is changed by Developer B, and finally, by Developer C. The following figure depicts the contents of the files after each modification. The source code has been colored according to the developer who introduced it (blue for Developer A, green for Developer B, and red for Developer C; note that Developer B only changed whitespace –including merging some lines).

Graphics Stack

• Fresh out of our Radeon Vulkan Driver Benchmarks: AMDVLK 2018.4.2 vs. AMDGPU-PRO 18.40 vs. Mesa 18.2/19.0, RADV driver co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted a patch to help further the performance of the Mesa RADV driver.

• Bas reported in the forums today that they are seeing much better numbers with Linux 4.20. It turns out that is due to an AMDGPU DRM change by AMD’s Christian König for trying to allocate video RAM as a power of two.

• Vulkan 1.1.94 is out today as the latest update to this graphics and compute API. This latest refinement to Vulkan introduces two new extensions.

• Vulkan 1.1.94 brings a handful of issue corrections with the documentation itself, but catching our interest is a new KHR extension and a new EXT extension.

• Vulkan 1.1.94 was released today. According to Phoronix, this latest release of the graphics and compute API includes two new extensions: VK_KHR_swapchain_mutable_format, which allows the windowing system to use different formats of swap chain images, and VK_EXT_fragment_density_map, which lets you specify areas of the render target where the shader can be invoked few times, so you can reduce rendering quality in areas of the screen that are less important. For more details, see Vulkan-Docs.

Benchmarks

• In the benchmarks earlier this month looking at the Talos II POWER9 dual 22-core performance its performance was compared to various AMD Threadripper and Intel Core i9 CPUs. They were used as comparison points since all of those CPUs sport four memory channels, including the Sforza POWER9 CPUs, while IBM caters the larger LaGrange/Monza POWER9 modules with eight memory channels as competition to Xeon and EPYC. But for those wondering how the POWER9 Sforza performance compares to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors, here are some benchmarks.

• Here is a look at how the Linux kernel performance has evolved since Linux 4.10, which was released back in February of 2017, up through the current Linux 4.20 development cycle ahead of its debut at the end of December or early January. All of the Linux kernel benchmarks were done on the same venerable Intel Core i7 5960X system.

• The Intel Core i7 5960X running at stock speeds was running with the ASRock X99 Extreme3 motherboard with its latest firmware, 16GB memory, and AMD FirePro V7900 graphics. Tests were done while running Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS to avoid any packaging/systemd problems in running the older Linux kernel releases. Linux 4.10 through 4.19 were obtained via the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA using each series’ x.y.0 kernel release. For Linux 4.20 it was built from source against the STIBP V2 fixes for those patches that will soon be queued to mainline that correct the overhead of that security feature originally introduced as part of the 4.20 merge window. So these Linux 4.20 benchmarks should be fairly representative of the performance of 4.20 final unless any other big security kernel changes land besides that improved STIBP/IBPB code.

• With the interest coming about today from a RADV tweak after bisecting the Linux 4.20 kernel speed-up for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with the AMDGPU DRM driver, here are some benchmarks from Linux 4.16 through 4.20 looking at the performance on Polaris and Vega graphics cards.

• With the reports of RADV performance being better on Linux 4.20 and some of my basic tests in the past of 4.20 Git also trending higher, I decided to run a concentrated set of benchmarks today of Linux 4.16/4.17/4.18/4.19/4.20 with Mesa 19.0-devel from the Padoka PPA on Ubuntu 18.10.

• After poring over the data, the 9900K becomes an obvious upgrade to the 8700K, although if you’re already rocking last-gen’s six-core, there’s no strong reason why you should upgrade unless you know what you’re gaining – which is about 33% more processing power. In terms of cost, the next step-up to the 9900K would be AMD’s 12-core Threadripper 2920X, after which point the 16-core from AMD enters the scene at $1,000, which sits next to Intel’s 10-core 9900X.

• While the 8-core 9900K already carries a big premium over last-gen’s 6-core, to take the next step will require a fair bit more money, unless you think the 12-core 2920X from AMD is worth your extra $150. We’re not even sure of that answer, but will be soon, as that and the 2970X are in process of being benchmarked.

• Phoronix Test Suite 8.4 is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source and fully-automated benchmarking software for Linux, macOS, Windows, Solaris, and BSD operating systems.

Applications

• Just because Linux is a lot more secure than Windows, there is no reason you should not be cautious. There are a number of firewalls available for Linux that you can use to make your Linux system more secure. Today we will be taking a look at one of such firewall tool called OpenSnitch.

• This is the eleventh in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For this article, we’ll look at Neofetch. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table at the bottom of the article.

• Neofetch is a command-line interface system information script written in bash 3.2+. The script displays information about your system next to an image, your operating system logo, or any ASCII/image file of your choice. It’s designed to capture information about your system and display it in an aesthetic and visually pleasing way.

• The main purpose of Neofetch is to convey to others the operating system or Linux distribution running on a system, together with critical information such as its hardware specifications, desktop environment, theme, icons, and a lot more besides.

• nnn is a very fast terminal file manager whose main goal is seamless desktop environment integration. The Ncurses based keyboard-driven terminal application features basic, details (default) and disk usage analyzer modes, with navigate as you type, vidir integration, terminal locker, and more.

• The application supports basic operations like creating and renaming files and folders, with the ability to select multiple files, open files in graphical tool (using xdg-open or a custom application), as well as more advanced features like batch rename, move or delete using vidir, display media information for media files, and much more.

• Its developer says that nnn was created because he needed “something that performs on the Pi”, and that nnn, which has a binary of only ~60KB, “is probably the fastest and most resource-sensitive file manager you have ever used”. You can see a nnn vs ncdu, mc and ranger memory comparison on the project page.

• The less often you use the computer mouse the more productive you become. This is the most important reason why I consciously work with keyboard shortcuts and it is undeniably a workflow improvement.

• You will understand better when you launch apps with the convenience of app launchers via keyboard shortcuts and not browsing the app overview/menu.

• We are interested in improving your workflow that is why we bring you the best application launchers for Linux Desktops.

Instructionals/Technical

• The sudo command is meant to allow you to easily deploy superuser access on an as-needed basis, but also to endow users with very limited privileged access when that’s all that is required. You can run into problems that require a different approach than a simple “sudo command,” and the responses that you get from sudo should indicate what problem you’ve run into.

Wine or Emulation

• Built off Friday’s release of Wine 3.21, which is the last expected development release ahead of the upcoming code freeze for Wine 4.0, Wine-Staging 3.21 is now available with its hundreds of extra testing/development patches.

• Wine-Staging 3.21 is carrying roughly 850 patches on top of the vanilla/upstream Wine code-base, which is actually lower than previous releases thanks to a number of the patches being upstreamed around the oleaut32 module, X Input, WineD3D, and other changes.

Games

• With multiple stores have games on sale, here’s a slightly different look at some possible Linux games to buy. We often highlight exceptional indie games, the few AAA games we have and so on. However, we don’t often highlight some of the more underappreciated gems that aren’t hugely popular, but still worth looking into.

• To make the list, they had to be games I’ve personally played and enjoyed, not in Early Access while also not getting a lot of sales and recognition despite being really quite fun. On top of that, they all have less than one thousand reviews from users of Steam, which means they will be overlooked even more than others.

• As of the latest version, you can now go prone to become a smaller target. Doing so will also reduce recoil and bullet spread, making longer range shots easier.

• On top of that, you can now load skins from any mod into any map, which could present some interesting situations. There’s also a new photo mode for those amusing moments, a featured mods list along with plenty of bug fixes.

• INSOMNIA: The Ark, the crowdfunded sci-fi RPG from Mono Studio released for Windows at the end of September, it’s still missing the promised Linux version which they’ve now spoken about.

• Tower of Time is an impressive RPG, one that’s absolutely worth checking out has another rather good update showing how much the developer cares about giving players the best experience.

• For those who prefer a more relaxing and sweet survival experience, the single-player MewnBase continues to expand what you can build with the latest update.

• This is the first major update for a few months, so it’s good to see it alive and kicking. It’s not a finished game, one that’s still undergoing development and each major release does change it quite a bit.

• The latest build adds in damaged buggie and broken wheel art, adjustments to buggy driving to make it a bit easier, changes to make it easier to add more vehicles in future (that sounds fun), a new wood resource for Biofuel Generators (and a floor tile), a new Garden Patch to build which is a slower, low-tech alternative to the Greenhouse module.

• The developer of Sigma Theory sent word recently that they now have a Linux demo up for their futuristic global cold war espionage game.

• If you’ve read GamingOnLinux regularly, you will likely know how I am a big fan of SC Controller [GitHub]. It’s a user-made driver and interface for using and mapping the Steam Controller. It’s also now going under some major changes.

• Taking inspiration from Capcom’s Puzzle Fighter, Puyo Puyo and Dr Mario the developer Pxlplz has put out their competitive puzzle game Robo Puzzle Smash.

• Note: Key provided by the developer to our Steam Curator.

• The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep from inXile Entertainment released for Windows in September after a successful Kickstarter, they say they’re continuing to work on the Linux version.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Kubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish is a good distro. Not perfect, not amazing. But good. Better than I’d expect from an interim release, better than either Xubuntu or Ubuntu MATE. Fewer glitches, more solid results overall, with an odd bug here and there to spoil the overall experience. Smartphone glitches, network support and Discover remain the unpolished parts of this distro. The rest was rather solid.

• But my comparison will always go back to Zesty, which was the ultimate Kubuntu distro EVAR. Now, after a while, I did get my 18.04 LTS on Slimbook working nicely, and several other test instances are behaving pretty well, and this Cosmic seems to be in the same group. It needs a bit of love before it will love you back, and the papercuts do leave a sore feeling on your fingers. However, so far this autumn, Kubuntu 18.10 is shaping up to be a cautiously fun choice. Grade 8/10. I’d suggest you take it for a spin. We’re done.

Distributions

• Bio-Linux was introduced and detailed in a Nature Biotechnology paper in July 2006. The distribution was a group effort by the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK. As the creators and authors point out, the analysis demands of high-throughput “-omic” (genomic, proteomic, metabolomic) science has necessitated the development of integrated computing solutions to analyze the resultant mountains of experimental data.

• From this need, Bio-Linux was born. The distribution, according to its creators, serves as a “free bioinformatics workstation platform that can be installed on anything from a laptop to a large server.” The current distro version, Bio-Linux 8, is built on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS base. Thus, the general look and feel of Bio-Linux is similar to that of Ubuntu.

• Applying a critical lens and picking a favorite is outside the scope of this article, but I encourage you to just try both! My personal preference is LibreHunt, because it’s dead simple and visually appealing. It makes an effort to cut out the fluff and get to the core of what you want. That’s where I’ll steer people when they ask “hey, I want to ditch Windows but what Linux OS should I use?”

• DistroChooser lets you really dial in your specific requirements and needs, but perhaps to a fault when it comes to certain beginners who just want an OS that works flawlessly out of the box. But I’ll emphasize again that they’re both incredibly valuable tools.

New Releases

• Packed with lots of bug fixes and cleanups, the IPFire 2.21 Core Update 125 patch is here to introduce support for the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard in the IPFire Access Point add-on, which should allow for better wireless coverage and higher network throughputs, especially in home environments. Of course, the machine running IPFire should have a network interface supporting the 802.11ac wireless protocol for this to work.

• “Although IPFire might not be the first choice as a wireless access point in larger environments, it is perfect to run a single office or apartment,” said Michael Tremer. “Additionally, a new switch allows disabling the so-called neighborhood scan where the access point will search for other wireless networks in the area. If those are found, 40 MHz channel bandwidth is disabled leading to slower throughput.”

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Digital transformation is the ‘catch-all’ phrase used to describe the acceleration of IT development to meet the fundamental changes in how businesses operate and deliver value to their customers. While this is different in many industry verticals, companies share some common characteristics on this internal-culture changing journey.

• We are happy to announce the release of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 Beta 4 !

• Meet EXTON OpSuS Rpi, a variant of Arne Exton’s old EXTON OpSuS Tumbleweed distribution optimized for Raspberry Pi devices. It’s a “remaster” of the official OpenSuSE Tumbleweed ISO image for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, using the Xfce desktop environment by default and all the necessary packages for daily use.

• “I did it mostly because it’s fun,” said Arne Exton in today’s announcement. “My version [EXTON OpSuS Rpi] has one big advantage though since you can enjoy sound. Good if you like YouTube, for example. I’ve also added some “necessary” packages and prevented installations of all KDE packages.”

• As today’s data explosion continues, there’s really no question that for the IT manager or anyone in a similar role, software-defined storage (SDS) is going to be a worthwhile investment. With it, your organization can scale your storage to match your rapidly ballooning data, while still keeping tight control of your costs and your maintenance burden.

• Without SDS, you’re going to need a budget that grows for every extra gigabyte your organization wants to store. Unless you work at an organization with a rapidly expanding IT budget—yeah, we thought not—SDS is the only realistic way to tackle the situation. In the long run (and maybe even quite quickly), SDS will save you two things: time and money.

• When an app is pushed in Cloud Foundry, cloud controller creates identifiers for the app plus some routing metadata (DesiredLRP + routing metadata) and then forwards those to Diego. At this point, Diego is scheduling the application by trying to find a home for it in any of the available running containers. Once the application is up and running, Diego’s BBS API notifies route-emitters about this app. Route-emitters then forwards the routes along with the IP and Port for that application container to two places. The first is NATS which is used by gorouter to receive it’s route updates and the second is Routing-API which provides routes to TCP router. Gorouter and TCP router then update their routing tables using all the updates that they received from NATS and Routing-API respectively.

• Earlier this month, a colleague from France asked why SUSE Manager doesn’t offer a system locking feature when you choose Salt as the client stack. This feature is still available if you’re using the traditional SUSE Manager client stack. It allows you to lock the system and prevent any changes like installing or removing packages until the system is unlocked again.

• The high CPU-GPU and memory density of modern HPC compute nodes provide sufficient resources for concurrent distributed workloads. Workloads on a compute node will usually belong to different users, and those workloads are understandably important to their respective owners. Moreover, research workloads may have normal runtimes measured in seconds, weeks or even months. If a user were to access that node and initiate work or processes, not managed by the cluster scheduler or resource management facilities, and cause the node to crash that would certainly not be fair.

Fedora

• Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year’s time.

• No, it doesn’t have anything to do with IBM acquiring Red Hat who leads Fedora and contributes a majority of its resources, but rather, it’s about trying to re-tool the distribution and restructure the way its developed to rely more upon automated testing, improving the release processes, and related infrastructure to make it more scalable and better for the longer-term.

• 30/11/2018 13:00 to 15:00hrs.

• In mid-October Sumantro Mukherjee and Martin Bříza attended the Mentor Summit for this year’s Google Summer of Code in Sunnyvale, California, USA. Besides talking about the hard points of the program, its future direction and ways how to improve the participation in it, it’s a great place to discover many interesting open source software (and even hardware!) projects. And most importantly, you get to meet the people who stand behind those projects.

Debian Family

• Despite the difference of our opinions, thanks for your hard work on Debian!

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We have already written about snaps and its advantages against other packaging application system. If we compare RPM and DEB packages to snaps we can see on snaps automatic background updates allowing up-to-date applications, with bugs fixes more frequently.

• As I publish this, the OTA-6 update for Ubuntu Touch may have just entered the Release Candidate (rc) channel. It also may not have. It’s our job to decide that over the next week.

• We have a set of 25 issues which were closed over the OTA-6 cycle. A summary of the changes can be found below, but for now I’d like to talk about our role in its release.

• The UBports community is in the process of rolling out the release candidate for their next Ubuntu Touch Over The Air update.

• UBports’ Ubuntu Touch OTA-6 is getting tidied up for entering the release candidate phase for interested testers while in early December the goal is to get the OTA-6 update officially released. In particular, their target for having Ubuntu Touch OTA-6 buttoned up is 7 December.

• Held between December 10th – 13th at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon will be a great opportunity to meet and talk with the Ubuntu team here at Canonical.

• The Ubuntu team will be showcasing their work across Kubernetes and containers and highlighting what makes Ubuntu the platform of choice for developers.

• Two weeks ago Samsung announced the final dates of the new Linux on DeX feature which would allow users to run Linux on Galaxy phones using DeX, their Continuum-like environment.

• The feature is still in beta and is under testing but the folks at XDA Developers managed to get their hands on the latest beta APK of DeX and have posted a review of the desktop environment running on the Samsung Galaxy S9.

Flavours and Variants

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Xubuntu 18.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• In this video, we look at Ubuntu Pack 18.04 (also known as UA Linux).

Devices/Embedded

• Kontron’s “SMARC-sAL28” module runs Linux on a dual-core, Cortex-A72 LS1028 SoC with -40 to 85°C support and up to 5x GbE ports with Time Sensitive Networking.

• Kontron invented the ULP-COM standard that formed the basis of the SMARC form factor, and it has delivered numerous SMARC modules over the years, including Arm products such as the Nvidia Tegra K1 based SMC-NTKE1. Now it has unveiled the first module we’ve seen in any form factor with NXP’s dual-core, Cortex-A72 powered QorIQ Layerscape LS1028 SoC.

• Garz & Fricke unveiled a compact “Nallino Core” SBC that runs Linux on an i.MX6 ULL SoC and offers LAN, USB, CAN, and serial I/O. G&F is also prepping a i.MX6 Solo based “SANTVEND Battery Core” SBC with a 4G modem.

• Braunschweig, Germany based embedded vendor Garz & Fricke has posted specs for a “coming soon” Nallino Core SBC that runs a Yocto Project based stack on NXP’s i.MX6 ULL SoC. We found out about the tiny new IoT board from UK-based Crystal Display Systems (CDS), which will be distributing the board in Europe and the UK. Garz & Fricke is also working on an i.MX6 Solo based, 4G modem equipped “SANTVEND Battery Core” SBC (see farther below).

Android

• Technologically, Fuchsia is also much different compared to Chromium and Android, Google’s current two most popular OS. For starters, it is not based on Linux. Rather it is based on Zircon Kernel and can be written in an array of languages such as, C, C++, Dart, Go, LLVM, Python, Rust, Shell, Swift, JavascriptCore etc. Fuchsia is based on a new microkernel called “Zircon”.

Free Software/Open Source

• Every time I tell my friends about my hobby—which became my career as the executive director at The Document Foundation—I face lots of questions. A worldwide community? Contributors around the globe? An open source community? Can you eat that?!

• Well, actually sometimes you can eat it. But seriously, today, I’d like to share my very personal view about what the open source community means to me and why being active is not only fun but also benefits your whole life.

• I read a very interesting article in the September-October 2018 issue of the Harvard Business Review entitled “Too Many Projects”, by Rose Hollister and Michael D. Watkins. The article, based on the author’s consulting work, detailed their observations around root causes of initiative overload, including impact blindness, multiplier effects, political logrolling, unfunded mandates, cost myopia and inertia. “Understanding those causes,” claim the authors “can help leaders diagnose the risks in their organizations and make smarter decisions about what to keep and what to kill.”

• On page 7 of the print edition (page 6 of the online edition), I noticed an interesting sidebar entitled “Questions to Ask Before You Launch an Initiative”. As I read through the sidebar I found my mind connecting the dots between these proposed project pre-launch questions and the selection of an open source security tool within an organization. All too often individuals suggest implementing an open source tool to address an organizational pain point because, at face value, open source tools have no upfront implementation cost. What happens, however, is that during the implementation the organization quickly realizes the unanticipated operational expenditures associated with their chosen tool.

• Yubico, the leading provider of hardware authentication security keys, today announced a new open source YubiHSM 2 (hardware security module) software development kit (SDK) available for developers and engineers to easily implement the YubiHSM 2 for an unlimited amount of use cases. The YubiHSM 2 delivers the highest levels of security for cryptographic digital key generation, storage, and management, supporting an extensive range of enterprise environments and applications, in a cost effective and minimalistic form factor.

• Continuous delivery platform provider Drone.io is giving back to the open-source community with the release of a continuous integration hosted service solution. Drone Cloud is being released to the open-source community for free with the help of bare metal cloud provider Packet.

• According to the company, the solution is being powered by infrastructure donated from Packet.

• “We were really excited about Brad’s (founder of Drone.io) reasons for rolling out Drone Cloud,” Jacob Smith, CMO of Packet, wrote in a blog post. “When he spoke about all of the Drone (and other) users who are building for an exploding set of architectures and operating systems. Pairing Intel, AMD, Arm and (hopefully soon) other bare metal systems with new features in Drone meant that our two small companies could make a real impact on a lot of projects.”

• In recent weeks, CVS Caremark announced that it will be using ICER’s cost-effectiveness reports to determine coverage for drugs, using a specific cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) threshold for those determinations. This decision has led to vocal opposition and debate. Patient groups have spoken out strongly against the CVS approach, specifically objecting to the use of QALYs.

• Journal of Clinical Pathways spoke with Mark Linthicum, MPP, and Jennifer Bright, both with the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI), regarding the need to find a rational middle ground and to work toward more tailored use of value information for decision-making.

• The original ARM operating system RISC OS has gone open source.

• The OS itself was originally developed by Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England and was first released in 1987.

• It was initially developed to run the 32-bit Arm processor family and was built using assembly language.

• RISC OS is open sourced and available under the Apache 2.0 licence — it was one of the first operating systems to support the Raspberry Pi.

• First, some background: An optical line system consists of optical amplifiers, multiplexers/demultiplexers and ROADMs. Historically, the line system has been tightly coupled with the terminal systems (i.e., transponders) with both line and terminal supplied by the same vendor. The end-to-end optical network has historically been a closed and proprietary system. Lately, though, some web-scale providers have concluded that this model stifles innovation and are bringing the concept of disaggregation to optical networking in the form of the open line system (OLS).

• An open line system decouples the optical line elements from the terminals to create several potential benefits for service providers, with rapid technology adoption being one of the biggest drivers. Coherent detection and photonic integration (including silicon photonics) have spurred rapid innovation in transponders, while line systems are evolving more slowly. Decoupling the line from the terminals allows service providers to advance through several generations of transponder technologies without having to change the line systems.

Events

• KDAB is presenting two great talks at Qt World Summit. At 13:30, you can get an in-depth look at a new concept for designers and developers with James Turner.

• At 14:30, Milian Wolff will be presenting some of KDAB’s renowned opensource tools, some of which, like Hotspot, he created himself.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Our roadmap is available online, including the overall plans for 2018.

• One of my favorite parts about Mozilla is mentoring and working alongside third party contributors. Somewhat surprisingly since I work on internal tools, I’ve had a fair amount of luck finding people to help work on projects within my purview: mozregression, perfherder, metrics graphics, and others have all benefited from the contributions of people outside of Mozilla.

• In most cases (a notable exception being metrics graphics), these have been internal-tooling projects used by others to debug, develop, or otherwise understand the behaviour of Firefox. On the face of it, none of the things I work on are exactly “high profile cutting edge stuff” in the way, say, Firefox or the Rust Programming Language are. So why do they bother?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• At our recent LibreOffice Conference in Tirana, Albania, we invited community members across the globe to join us. Cathy Crumbley from Massachusetts, USA, has recently been involved in the documentation project, and flew over to meet us. Here’s what she had to say:

Education

Amazon Spying/Openwashing

• But the announcement that received the loudest reception from the audience was the AWS Graviton processor.

• When AWS acquired Annapurna Labs in 2015, the company started to think about building a custom CPU that could scale on the cloud, DeSantis said.

• The result is EC2 A1, built around Arm cores and touted as a great fit for scale-out workloads where the load can be shared across a group of smaller instances.

• Amazon has designed its own 64-bit Arm server processors, dubbed Graviton, and is right now renting them out on AWS.

• Just in time for its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the internet titan today revealed its A1 family of EC2 instances, ranging from the a1.medium with 1 vCPU, 2GB of RAM, and up to 3.5Gbps EBS and 10Gbps network bandwidth, which costs $0.0255 per hour on-demand, all the way up to a1.4xlarge with 16 vCPUs and 32GB of RAM, costing $0.408 per hour.

• This can work out cheaper than, say, comparable T instances in terms of CPU; specifications differ between instance types, though. You can compare and contrast for yourself here. Amazon claims A1 instances are up to 45 per cent cheaper than their x86 virtual machines, depending on the configuration.

Funding

• Open source communities have never been as bustling, and joining the fray has never been easier. Are you looking for a new project to work on? Do you have some code that you’d like to donate? We take a look at some organizations that deserve a time in the sun and your attention.

• The distribution model for databases is shifting to the cloud. With this shift, the economics of open source communities are changing. One of the most important issues in modern software is building sustainable open source models in the age of the cloud.

• A challenge with being an independent open source project, however, is financial. The PostgreSQL community is committed to driving innovation on the world’s most advanced open source database. How does the funding model evolve over time to ensure the sustainability of Postgres?

• We sat down and had a chat with Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder of Citus Data to learn more about the open source community.

BSD

• Is your company based on opensource based software only? Do you have a bunch of developers hitting some kind of server you have installed for them to “do their thing”? Being it for economical reasons (remember to donate), being it for philosophycal ones, you may have skipped good alternatives. The BSD’s and Illumos.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• If you keep yourself updated with the latest happenings in the world of cryptocurrency, you must be aware of the fact that Bitcoin is currently facing one of the worst weekly losses since 2013. Currently, it’s trading below $4,000.

• In my view, it’s a perfect time to analyze if the current set of cryptocurrencies is our best bet. In a recent interview with CoinDesk, the Free Software founder Richard Stallman echoed similar sentiments.

• Richard Stallman is largely known for being the founder of the free software movement. This movement is over three decades old, and the non-profit organization focuses on supporting software developers to create free software. Recently, Stallman sat down for an interview with CoinDesk, discussing his theories of where the cryptocurrency industry can go from here.

• Stallman spoke abut the way that right-wing comprise much of the Bitcoin pool of early adopters, quickly establishing himself as someone that doesn’t quite favor the technology involved. Though some of the reason seems to be political, it isn’t entirely so. He hasn’t used Bitcoin at all, despite creating a similar technology that allows for digital payments with the GNU Project. Still, he makes it clear that their Taler system is about cryptography and not cryptocurrency. Realistically, this project is meant for a “post-blockchain” world.

• While GCC 9 is releasing in early 2019, for those still depending upon last year’s GCC 7 compiler series, the GCC 7.4 point release will soon be out.

• SUSE’s Richard Biener is putting the finishing touches on GCC 7.4. He intends to issue the first release candidate towards the end of this week while the official GCC 7.4.0 compiler release shouldn’t be long after that. The GCC 7 branch remains open for bug and documentation fixes.

• For the past year the Btrfs file-system in the mainline Linux kernel has supported Zstd as one of its file-system compression options. With the very latest GRUB boot-loader code, it can now deal with your Zstd-compressed Btrfs file-systems.

• As of Monday, the GNU GRUB boot-loader pulled in a copy of the Zstd decompression code.

Programming/Development

• Gross domestic product, perhaps the most commonly used statistic in the world for evaluating economic progress, has some issues.

• Increasingly, one of the biggest problems is that GDP generally underestimates the value of free goods and services—checking facts on Wikipedia or sharing photos on Instagram, for instance. GDP is best at measuring the impact of TV and car sales—not of things available for free or that require you to view ads, like broadcast TV or Facebook, explains the Financial Times’s Gillian Tett.

• As a new research paper points out, this shortcoming also means GDP may be missing a lot of value created in the form of free programming languages (pdf). The most popular programming languages, like JavaScript and Python, are open source. This means that anyone can use them for free and modify them to develop new programs that they can then offer for free or for sale. JavaScript, for example, is used on about 95% of websites. Python, the most popular tool for data scientists, is used by companies like Google and Facebook to analyze data and develop new products.

• If you do an Internet search on the phrase, “Is Java dead,” more than 62 million hits will come up. The idea that Java has passed its useful life has been predicted for almost a decade. And yet Java remains the No. 1 programming language, according to surveys.

• At the same time, enterprises are becoming more comfortable with having a polyglot programming environment, allowing developers the flexibility to use the tools they consider appropriate for the task at hand.

• This makes it more likely – not less – that Java will continue to thrive. If enterprise environments are becoming more splintered, Java, with its huge installed base and experienced programmers, is unlikely to be overtaken by any new language for many years to come.

• Another alpha of Coverage.py 5.0 is available: 5.0a4. This fixes a few problems with the new SQLite-based storage. Please give it a try, especially to experiment with dynamic contexts.

• The challenge with this release was something that started as a seemingly simple fix. Coverage.py tries to emulate how Python runs programs, including how the first element of sys.path is set. A few people run coverage with sys.path fully configured, and coverage’s setting of sys.path[0] was breaking their stuff.

• The new 0.4.6 release of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN and Debian earlier today. It is two-fold update: catching up QuantLib 1.14 while also updating to Boost 1.67 (and newer).

• A special thanks goes to Josh for updating to the binary windows library in the rwinlib repository allowing us a seamless CRAN update.

• The package needs some help, though. There are two open issues. First, while it builds on Windows, many functions currently throw errors. This may be related to upstream switching to a choice of C++11 or Boost smart pointers though this throws no spanners on Linux. So it may simply be that some of the old curve-building code shows its age. It could also be something completely different—but we need something with a bit of time, debugging stamina, at least a little C++ knowledge and a working Windows setup for testing. I have a few of the former attributes and can help, but no suitable windows (or mac, see below) machine. If you are, or can be, the person to help on Windows, please get in touch at this issue ticket.

• With all the different programming languages available today, many organizations have become digital polyglots. Open source opens up a world of languages and technology stacks developers can use to accomplish their tasks, including developing and supporting legacy and modern software applications.

• Polyglots can talk with millions more people than those who only speak their native language. In software environments, developers don’t introduce new languages to achieve specifc ends, not to communicate better. Some languages are great for one task but not another, so working with multiple programming languages enables developers to use the right tool for the job. In this way, all development is polyglot; it’s just the nature of the beast.

• The creation of a polyglot environment is often gradual and situational. For example, when an enterprise acquires a company, it takes on the company’s technology stacks—including its programming languages. Or as tech leadership changes, new leaders may bring different technologies into the fold. Technologies also fall in and out of fashion, expanding the number of programming languages and technologies an organization has to maintain over time.

• A polyglot environment is a double-edged sword for enterprises, bringing benefits but also complexities and challenges. Ultimately, if the situation remains unchecked, polyglot will kill your enterprise.

• One great thing about programming languages is that there is such diversity that you can choose the best one to solve any given problem. But sometimes the worst thing can be when projects take advantage of this and build applications or systems of applications that require domain knowledge of many different languages. When this happens, it can be difficult for everyone, or even anyone, to fully understand the scope of the project.

• Paul talks about the beginning years of Python. Talking about Python’s beginnings is also talking about the Python community beginnings. Yes, it’s reminiscing, but it’s fun.

• This week we welcome Reimar Bauer (@ReimarBauer) as our PyDev of the Week! Reimar is a core developer of the popular Python wiki package, MoinMoin. He has spoken at PyCON DE, FOSDEM and EuroPython about Python. Let’s take a few minutes to get to know him better!

• One of the most passionate topics by readers in the Phoronix Forums is the Rust programming language. For about one year now “RLSL” has been in the works as a Rust-based shading language that can compile into SPIR-V. While initially I held off on writing about it to see if it would be just another small toy project, RLSL has continued maturing and seeing new functionality added in.

• In the previous blog post I wrote about how to write a RGB to grayscale conversion filter for GStreamer in Rust. In this blog post I’m going to write about how to optimize the processing loop of that filter, without resorting to unsafe code or SIMD instructions by staying with plain, safe Rust code.

• I also tried to implement the processing loop with faster, a Rust crate for writing safe SIMD code. It looks very promising, but unless I missed something in the documentation it currently is missing some features to be able to express this specific algorithm in a meaningful way. Once it works on stable Rust (waiting for SIMD to be stabilized) and includes runtime CPU feature detection, this could very well be a good replacement for the ORC library used for the same purpose in GStreamer in various places. ORC works by JIT-compiling a minimal “array operation language” to SIMD assembly for your specific CPU (and has support for x86 MMX/SSE, PPC Altivec, ARM NEON, etc.).

• In the previous blog post I wrote about how to write a RGB to grayscale conversion filter for GStreamer in Rust. In this blog post I’m going to write about how to optimize the processing loop of that filter, without resorting to unsafe code or SIMD instructions by staying with plain, safe Rust code.

• I also tried to implement the processing loop with faster, a Rust crate for writing safe SIMD code. It looks very promising, but unless I missed something in the documentation it currently is missing some features to be able to express this specific algorithm in a meaningful way. Once it works on stable Rust (waiting for SIMD to be stabilized) and includes runtime CPU feature detection, this could very well be a good replacement for the ORC library used for the same purpose in GStreamer in various places. ORC works by JIT-compiling a minimal “array operation language” to SIMD assembly for your specific CPU (and has support for x86 MMX/SSE, PPC Altivec, ARM NEON, etc.).

• One of the contracts I’ve been working on recently is working with Gurock building a test automation system for a PHP application, their test management app TestRail. As well as building the instrastructure for the application testing and the API testing I’ve once again been involved in the nitty-gritty of testing a web application with Selenium and all the fun that involved.

• And actually it has been fun. We’ve had a bunch of issues to overcome and despite the usual pain and trauma and running round in circles we seem to have overcome most of them and have a test suite that is robust against the three different platforms we’re testing against.

• When writing code on your own, the only priority is making it work. However, working in a team of professional software developers brings a plethora of challenges. One of those challenges is coordinating many people working on the same code.

• How do professional teams make dozens of changes per day while making sure everyone is coordinated and nothing is broken? Enter continuous integration!

• A couple weeks ago I gave a talk about usernames at North Bay Python. The content came mostly from things I’ve learned in roughly 12 years of maintaining django-registration, which has taught me more than I ever wanted to know about how complex even “simple” things can be.

• I mentioned toward the beginning of the talk, though, that it wasn’t going to be one of those “falsehoods programmers believe about X” things. If you’re not familiar with those, you can just Google for “falsehoods programmers believe” and get a bunch of typical examples. My issues with the “falsehoods” articles is, basically, that they tell you a bunch of things they say are wrong, but many don’t tell you why those things are wrong or what they think you should do instead. Which I suspect will just lead people to read the article, pat themselves on the back, and then find new and exciting ways to be wrong that weren’t mentioned, because they haven’t actually learned about the underlying issues.

• I regularly receive questions from students in the field of computer science looking for career advice.

• Here’s an answer I wrote to one of them. It’s not comprehensive or anything, but I thought people might find it interesting.

• The question about “9-5″ vs. “enterpreneur” is a complex one — not everybody can be a successful entrepreneur (who would do the work? and not everybody has the temperament for it. For me personally it was never an option — there are vast parts of management and entrepreneurship that I wouldn’t enjoy doing, such as hiring (I hate interviewing and am bad at it) and firing (too emotionally draining — even just giving negative feedback is hard for me). Pitching ideas to investors is another thing that I’d rather do without.

• All I can say is that I’m thankful for his considerable contributions to Mu’s code base, eagle-eyed code reviews and seemingly limitless Pythonic knowledge.

• Actually, when I met Zander for the first time in July, it turned out he’s a 17 year-old studying for his A-levels (the exams teenagers sit in the UK to help them to get into university). He’s doing A-levels in Maths, Physics and Computer Science. He’s third from the left in the picture below:

Leftovers

Science

• A nautical chart is a map of the sea. Just as a map helps us navigate on land, a nautical chart helps those traveling on the ocean get where they’re going safely and efficiently.

• In 2017, $1.6 trillion worth of goods moved through U.S. ports. With all that traffic, it’s important that those navigating through our ports and along our coastlines have the information they need about the shape of the shoreline and seafloor, water depths, potential hazards in the water, buoys, anchorages, and other features.

• Federal laws say most commercial vessels must have nautical charts while traveling in U.S. waters. NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey makes and updates all charts of U.S. coastal waters, the Great Lakes, and waters surrounding U.S. territories. So how do these important resources get made and updated? It’s a continuous process that involves many people from different disciplines and organizations.

Hardware

• That’s where Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. built a $6 billion plant to produce semiconductors as part of China’s goal of making the country a self-sufficient technology powerhouse. But after the U.S. President barred exports to the company, its dream is now in tatters with consultants from American suppliers gone, the factories silent and workers rattled.

Health/Nutrition

• On the morning of April 19, 2016, Melanie Lilliston received an urgent call from the Little Dreamers day care center, in Rockville, Maryland. Her 6-month-old daughter, Millie, was being rushed to the hospital. Doctors there found that Millie had fractured ribs, facial bruises and a severe brain injury. Melanie watched as her daughter was loaded onto a helicopter for emergency transport to Children’s National Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., where doctors discovered more injuries: a fractured leg and arm, as well as bleeding in her eyes. Millie died three days later.

• The day care operator, Kia Divband, told police that Millie had started choking while drinking a bottle of milk and lost consciousness. The Montgomery County medical examiner, however, determined that her injuries were caused by blunt force. Investigators discovered, on Divband’s phone and computer, internet searches for “broken bones in children” and “why are bone fractures in children sometimes hard to detect.” A former employer of Divband’s told them that the day before Millie was hospitalized, Divband had called to inquire about a job, and a baby could be heard wailing in the background. Divband told him the baby wouldn’t stop crying and that “he just couldn’t take it anymore,” the former boss recalled. Divband was arrested and charged with fatally abusing Millie.

• At Divband’s trial, last year, a radiologist named David Ayoub testified for the defense. Ayoub, who is a partner in a private radiology practice in Springfield, Illinois, told jurors he had reviewed X-rays and other medical records, and concluded that Millie had rickets, a rare condition that causes fragile bones. The disorder, which is usually brought on by a prolonged and severe lack of vitamin D, could explain Millie’s injuries, Ayoub said.

• The incredibly destructive Woolsey Fire in southern California has burned nearly 100,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, killed three people, destroyed more than 400 structures, and at the time of this writing, was finally nearly completely contained.

• The fire may also have released large amounts of radiation and toxins into the air after burning through a former rocket engine testing site where a partial nuclear meltdown took place nearly six decades ago.

• “The Woolsey Fire has most likely released and spread both radiological and chemical contamination that was in the Santa Susana Field Laboratory’s soil and vegetation via smoke and ash,” Dr. Bob Dodge, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA), told Truthout.

• The fire has been widely reported to have started “near” the Santa Susana Field Laboratory site (SSFL), but according to PSR-LA, it appears to have started at the site itself.

• The contaminated site — a 2,849-acre former rocket engine test site and nuclear research facility — is located just 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

Security

• The trojan seeks root permissions by using the Linux kernel exploits DirtyCow (CVE-2016-5195) and Linux.Exploit.CVE-2013-2094 to escalate its privileges. T

• Comprised of over 1,000 lines of code, Linux.BtcMine.174 (the company is better at identifying malware than giving it a headline-friendly name), is particularly malicious thanks to the number of ways it attacks its host computer.

• As the name suggests, the main function of the malware is to mine cryptocurrency – in this case Monero – but before it even gets to that point, it has some fun with its Linux host. At the start of the infection, it finds a folder it has write permissions for, so it can copy itself and download additional modules.

• It then tries a couple of privilege escalation exploits – including Dirty Cow (now that’s how you name an exploit!) – to obtain root access giving it root permissions and full access to the OS. It then sets itself up as a local daemon and gets the nohup utility if it’s not already there, and downloads and runs a DDoS malware strain called the Bill Gates trojan for good measure.

• Josh and Kurt talk about Cloudflare’s new Workers service. We spend a lot of time discussing how economics drives technology, not security. It’s quite likely this new service is less secure than existing alternatives, but it will be cheaper and faster which will matter more than security.

• York city officials face backlash after reporting security researcher who found a bug in one of their mobile apps to law enforcement.

• The United States Postal Service (USPS) has fixed its broken API that had exposed the account details of 60 million users who had signed up for the service “Informed Delivery”.

• Informed Delivery is a new service that USPS is providing through which people can see scanned pictures of all their incoming mails. The images are sent before the mail is actually delivered by the company. People can keep a track of their mails and find out beforehand whether any important mail is due to arrive today or not.

• The out-of-order execution features of processors, together with speculated execution and lacking permission checking recently lead to new two major classes of side channel attacks that could leak privileged information. The core issue is that some side effects of out-of-order execution are not being rolled back fully when the respective instructions flow is not executed, leaving some lingering effects, like cache presence of fetched data. The last year saw various attacks and mitigations being published for these effects, but so far they lacked classification and an overview of those attacks.

• Google developers have wanted to remove FTP support from Chrome for years and an upcoming change in how files stored on FTP servers are rendered in the browser may be the first step in its ultimate removal.

• Currently when a user opens a file on a FTP server using Chrome, it will try and render that file in the browser. For example, if you go to the URL ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/extaccel/landing.jpg, it will render the image directly in the browser as shown below.

• Google has wanted to remove FTP from Chrome for years, and Chrome developers are taking a new step towards that goal. After all, FTP is an old, unencrypted protocol. We should have stopped using it years ago.

• A script that mines for cryptocurrencies on Linux systems first needs to infect these systems, either by using brute force to guess SSH passwords or else by gaining entry through the use of stolen credentials that can be bought on dark web forums. Security researcher Alexander Vurasko, who runs the Dr Web anti-virus firm, told iTWire in response to queries that the malware itself — which he has named Linux.BtcMine.174 — was a long and complicated script that could do a number of things, including upping its privileges if the system was still vulnerable to a two-year-old flaw known as the Dirty Cow vulnerability.

• The malware has been reported by some without offering any perspective as to how it first gains entry to a system, with a bid to apparently protray it as a weakness in Linux itself.

• The malicious code was inserted in two stages into event-stream, a code library with 2 million downloads that’s used by Fortune 500 companies and small startups alike. In stage one, version 3.3.6, published on September 8, included a benign module known as flatmap-stream. Stage two was implemented on October 5 when flatmap-steam was updated to include malicious code that attempted to steal bitcoin wallets and transfer their balances to a server located in Kuala Lumpur. The backdoor came to light last Tuesday with this report from Github user Ayrton Sparling. Officials with the NPM, the open source project manager that hosted event-stream, didn’t issue an advisory until Monday, six days later.

• Many open source projects attain a level of “maturity” where no one really needs any new features and there aren’t a lot of new bugs being found, and the contributors to these projects dwindle, often to a single maintainer who is generally grateful for developers who take an interest in these older projects and offer to share the choresome, intermittent work of keeping the projects alive.

• Ironically, these are often projects with millions of users, who trust them specifically because of their stolid, unexciting maturity.

• A story broke recently about a backdoor added to a Node Package Manager (NPM) package called event-stream. This package is downloaded about two million times a week by developers. That’s a pretty impressive amount, many projects would be happy with two million downloads a year.

• The Register did a pretty good writeup, I don’t want to recap the details here, I have a different purpose and that’s really to look at how does this happen and can we stop it?

• Firstly, the short answer is we can’t stop it. You can stop reading now if that’s all you came for. Go tell all your friends how smart you are for only using artisan C libraries instead of filthy NPM modules.

Defence/Aggression

• Argentine prosecutors are considering possible criminal charges against Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as he plans to attend the G20 summit this week in Buenos Aires, according to reports. The investigation focuses on allegations of war crimes during the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen and allegations of torture including the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The probe was initiated by a complaint filed by Human Rights Watch on November 26 to an Argentine federal prosecutor.

• Following an escalation in the Saudi-led assault on the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, most Americans said in a survey released Monday that the U.S. must end the support that has made possible the Saudis’ war in the impoverished country.

• A poll commissioned by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and taken by YouGov found that three-quarters of 1,168 respondents were opposed to U.S. military support of the war—support which has included hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons sales, refueling support, and intelligence.

• Americans across the political spectrum expressed strong disapproval of U.S. involvement in the war, which, by some estimates, has left more than 15,000 civilians dead, more than three million displaced, 14 million on the brink of famine, and 85,000 children dead of starvation. More than half of conservatives joined nearly nine in 10 liberals and progressives who took the survey, in calling for an end to American support.

• The Middle East, like the rest of the world, is a “very dangerous place!” according to President Trump. The Saudis, with America’s tacit help, made it so.

• President Trump’s bizarre and strange recent statement giving Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) a pass on his involvement in journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder raises a number of serious issues that Trump cavalierly dismisses or doesn’t know about in the first place. Beyond the half-truths and the lame rationale he has offered in defense of MbS, the president is in fact undermining America’s long-term interests in the region and putting the lives of American citizens—civilians, diplomats, and military—in that part of the world at risk.

• To ascribe theories of political realism, international trade, or regional power competition to Trump’s apologia of Saudi Arabia is to give unwarranted credit to the rambling statement that Trump reportedly dictated. By attributing such lofty “transactional” doctrines as the realpolitik and liberal order paradigm to the statement is to presume that the president had studied the realities of the Middle East, the history and dynamics of American-Saudi relations over the years, the Saudi role in preaching a radical version of Sunni Islam in the past half century, or the emergence of the international order since World War II. The piece failed to show any such analytic depth or informed expertise. Instead, it was no more than a disjointed, truth-challenged, strategy-devoid, and Iran-bashing ode to Arab dictators, tribal Sunni potentates, and MbS in particular. It takes the president’s dystopian view of the world to another level.

• The numbers are mind-blowing: Since the beginning of the conflict in Yemen, an estimated 85,000 children under five may have died from extreme hunger and disease, according to the last analysis by Save the Children, the international health and human rights organization. Although children are the most affected by the conflict, 14 million people are at risk of famine, according to data compiled by the United Nations.

• For almost four years, Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, has been ravaged by a bloody conflict between Houthi rebels and supporters of Yemen’s internationally recognized government. In 2015, Saudi Arabia formed a coalition of Arab states to fight the Houthis, which included Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, and Senegal. These countries have either sent troops to fight on the ground in Yemen or have carried out air attacks.

• Iran has reportedly sent armaments and military advisers to help the Houthis, thus exacerbating their long-held animosity against the Saudis. In addition to fighting the Houthis in Yemen, the Saudis are backing the rebels fighting against Bashar al-Assad’s government, while Iran has a strong influence over the Assad regime. In Lebanon, while Iran has shown strong support for Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia supports the Sunni Future Movement, led by Lebanon Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

• The Yemen war, however, goes beyond a Saudi-Iranian geopolitical or Sunni-Shia conflict. The Houthis’ demands have been primarily economic and political, trying to take the Yemenis out of a cycle of poverty. The brutal and indiscriminate attacks of the Saudi-led coalition have left a ravaged country, with millions of civilians fighting for survival.

• Last Tuesday, within about an hour of his announcement on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi announcement, in the heat of the moment, I commented on the president’s acceptance of the Riyadh royals’ explanation of the Istanbul consulate incident. I called his statement “crude” and “buttheadedly amoral.” I should have stated the obvious broader point: It was wrong.

• Marxists have historically inveighed (appropriately) against capitalism, imperialism, semi-feudalism etc.—neutral moral categories—using such terms as “reactionary” and “opportunist” when desiring to add a moral edge. And certainly capitalist profit and imperialist hegemony factor into Trump’s response to the cold-blooded crime. But sometimes it’s best to go back to the basics, and draw upon primordial human vocabulary. The murder of the dissident Saudi journalist was pure evil.

• The prohibition on killing occurs in the earliest law codes and taboo lists. It’s understood to have limited application; rulers can use military force to maintain power and “preserve order.” But generally speaking humans concur that it’s wrong to kill someone. It’s wrong. This is basic. For those arriving from outer space it is Humanity 101. It is of course the Sixth Commandment in the Bible. It is fundamental to the contrat social of Rousseau.

• Killing means something different to those who believe in an afterlife and those who believe we die and disappear. Those of us who believe the latter perhaps value life more since it’s all we expect. The taking of another’s life seems especially presumptuous when you cannot, for example, pray for the soul of the person you’ve slain encouraging its rebirth somewhere, like in the Pure Land of Amida. The warrior Kumagae supposedly prayed for Atsumori after killing him during the Genpei War in Japan in the 1180s, to alleviate his sorrow and guilt..

• Writing for the Washington Post, the daughters of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi declared: “This is no eulogy, for that would confer a state of closure.”

• Trump has openly and consistently given Saudi control of oil prices as the reason for which he doesn’t want to sanction Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for having dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi murdered and then dismembered.

• Trump is, as usual, wildly exaggerating. Saudi Arabia produces perhaps 11% of the oil pumped daily in the world. It cannot dictate prices, since if it reduces production, other countries– Iran, Russia, Kuwait and others– would likely just step in to replace lost Saudi production. Only if Saudi Arabia can convince the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) jointly to reduce production across the board can Riyadh hope to have a big impact on the price of oil. Such concerted efforts at dictating to the oil markets are rare and are usually born of a moment of contentious politics.

• The U.S. president inherited a remotely piloted weapon of death from his predecessor. In his earliest period in office, he used this lethal robot force promiscuously, sharply escalating attacks on suspected terrorists away from his declared wars. As time went on, his use of drone strikes in those places diminished.

• Barack Obama? Well, yes. But a look at available statistics for drone strikes on America’s undeclared battlefield shows that this description also applies to Donald Trump.

• In 2009 and 2010, Obama launched 186 drone strikes on Yemen, Somalia, and especially Pakistan. Donald Trump’s drone strikes during his own first two years on three pivotal undeclared battlefields, however, eclipse Obama’s – but without a corresponding reputation for robot-delivered bloodshed, or even much notice. In 2017 and 2018 to date, Trump has launched 238 drone strikes there, according to data provided to The Daily Beast by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and the drone-watchers at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.

• Those numbers come with a slew of asterisks. The amount of drone strikes on the full-fledged acknowledged battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have, ironically, proven far more difficult to track than those in shadow warzones—and knowledgeable observers like Chris Woods of the UK’s Airwars organization believe that the true center of the drone strikes is found there. Additionally, the toll of how many people, particularly civilians, those strikes on shadow battlefields have slain is, at best, a rough estimate.

• Comedian Michelle Wolf offered a succinct, withering reply to President Donald Trump’s early Wednesday attack on her by drawing attention back to his continued support for Saudi Arabia in the face of a report linking the kingdom to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—after his clear attempt to distract from the matter.

• After Trump claimed Wolf had “bombed so badly” in her viral remarks at the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner last year, Wolf suggested that the president would likely have come to her defense if she’d killed a journalist, as Saudi Arabia has admitted it did—with the CIA reporting that Trump ally Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) likely ordered the murder—instead of simply telling the truth about his administration.

• U.S. Republican Senator Mike Lee on Sunday said he “disagrees” with President Donald Trump’s dismissal of CIA assessment that Saudi crown prince ordered murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

• Lee was speaking in an interview on NBC News in response to Trump’s Thursday remarks that the CIA “did not come to a conclusion” about Mohammed bin Salman’s involvement in the murder.

• [...]

• Khashoggi’s murder also put a spotlight into Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, with US lawmakers pushing the Trump administration to stop its support for the Kingdom as a punishment for the killing.

• Lee said the war in Yemen is “unauthorized” and “unconstitutional” from the U.S. standpoint.

• Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. You do not need to slog through the 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” to figure this out. But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power.

• As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism was a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank and shut out of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman were groomed in places such as the University of Chicago and given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand. Once we knelt before the dictates of the marketplace and lifted government regulations, slashed taxes for the rich, permitted the flow of money across borders, destroyed unions and signed trade deals that sent jobs to sweatshops in China, the world would be a happier, freer and wealthier place. It was a con. But it worked.

• Given that people who espouse neo-Nazi ideology are attracted to the military, it is disappointing to learn what a poor job the generals do to uncover and expel them. Or perhaps the inaction reflects a deeper problem.

• A recent stream of stories about right wing extremists in the Canadian military prompted the leadership to scramble to get ahead of the story. But, the Chief of the Defence Staff’s effort to simply blame low-ranking individual members was neither convincing, nor satisfying.

• Ricochet reported that three soldiers in Alberta operated an online white supremacist military surplus store that glorifies white ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

• VICE concluded that Nova Scotia reservist Brandon Cameron was a prominent member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division.

• The three founders of Québec anti-Islam/immigrant “alt right” group La Meute are ex-military. Radio-Canada found that 75 members of La Meute’s private Facebook group were Canadian Forces members.

• On Canada Day 2017 five CF members disrupted an indigenous rally in front of a statue of violent colonialist Edward Cornwallis in Halifax. The soldiers were members of the Proud Boys, which described itself as “a fraternal organization of Western Chauvinists who will no longer apologize for creating the modern world.”

• In a sharp break from the caution and inertia of his predecessors, President Donald Trump has slashed U.S. military aid to Pakistan and warned that Washington will take further punitive measures unless the Pakistani government acts decisively against Islamist terrorists.

• “They were just one of many countries that take from the United States without giving anything in return,” the president tweeted about Pakistan on Nov. 19. “That’s ENDING!”

• But while the Trump Administration has freely vented its frustration with Islamabad, current and former officials said it has been slow to seek justice for the 2008 massacre of 166 people — six of them Americans — in Mumbai, India, by a terrorist group that has worked closely with Pakistan’s intelligence service.

• In 2011, federal prosecutors in Chicago indicted four Pakistanis, including a serving officer of the country’s powerful intelligence service, in connection with the Mumbai attacks. Yet after an initial flurry of effort by the Obama administration, the government has done little to press Pakistan to arrest those suspects or to condition U.S. support on progress in the hunt for the suspects, the officials said.

• Ukraine’s president demanded Monday that Russia immediately release Ukrainian sailors and ships seized in a standoff around Crimea that sharply escalated tensions between the two countries and drew international concern.

• Ukrainian lawmakers were set to consider a presidential request for the introduction of martial law in the country on Monday following an incident in which Russian coast guard ships fired on Ukrainian navy vessels.

• An emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council was also called for Monday. The European Union and NATO called for restraint from both sides.

• Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said at a meeting of Ukraine’s national security council Monday that “we demand that (the ships and crews) are urgently turned over to the Ukrainian side” and called for a “de-escalation” of the crisis around Crimea.

• The Ukrainian navy said six of its seamen were wounded when Russian coast guards opened fire on three Ukrainian ships near the Kerch Strait and then seized them late Sunday.

• Pillar says an irony is that European self-sufficiency in defense, as a European military force would embody, would mean Europe assuming more of the burden for its own defense–which is what Donald Trump has been calling for every time he complains about NATO and its members.

• One reason drone strikes increased is that the rules have been loosened up: Now drone strikes are allowed when there’s a “reasonable certainty” of hitting a particular senior terrorist rather than the “near certainty” previously required. As a result, there have been 35 drone strikes in Somalia in 2017, more than the 33 that took place there during Obama’s entire term.

• [...]

• But we’re still risking military lives in Afghanistan without any evidence that we’re making anything better over there. On Saturday, Sgt. Leandro A.S. Jasso, 25, of Leavenworth, Washington, was killed in the Helmand Province, apparently after getting shot. The details are thin and his death is still under investigation. We do know that this was Jasso’s third deployment to Afghanistan after enlisting in 2012. That means he was barely of legal age when he joined the Army and yet had been sent to a war zone three times by the time he hit 25.

• Tensions between Ukraine and Russia escalated dangerously on Monday as an emergency UN Security Council meeting was held and the two nations exchanged a volley of threats after conflagrations in the Black Sea on Sunday resulted in Russia seizing Ukrainian vessels by force and left outside observers warning that simmering disputes—mixed with unintended consequences and political instability in Ukraine—could spark wider war between the former allied nations.

• The Russian foreign ministry accused Kiev of coordinating with the U.S. and the E.U. in a “planned provocation” that took place in the Kerch Strait, a body of water that separates the Black Sea from the smaller Sea of Azov, which hugs the contested Crimean peninsula.

• In the wake of the Russian Navy seizing three vessels and protests in the capitol of Kiev, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Monday called for the Ukrainian parliament to approve his request to impose martial law as a way of restoring order in the country where both anti-Russian protests have broken out alongside new reports of fighting in the country’s eastern region along the Russian border.

• On 2nd November, Jamiat Ulema Islam-Sami (JUI-S) chief and former Senator Mulana Samiul Haq was assassinated at his residence in Rawalpindi. According to reports he stabbed multiple times. Samiul Haq’s spokesperson Mulana Abdul Majeed said there was no one present at the residence when he was killed. He further said “We do not know who attacked him. He was alone, the person who was supposed to be with him had gone to the market.”The assassination of Maulana Samiul Haq, chief of his faction of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), has sent shockwaves and sorrows throughout the country. The respected religious scholar exercised significant influence through his seminary Darul Uloom Haqqania based in Akora Khattak, which produced many leaders of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. He also wielded political weight, having served as a senator for many years, and was currently aligned with the ruling PTI. He was also connected to the politics in Afghanistan and was sought after for advice by many stakeholders.

• India has paid tribute to the more than 160 people killed in a 2008 Islamist militant attack on the city of Mumbai, the 10th anniversary of an assault that raised fears of war with Pakistan. Senior state politicians laid wreathes and paid tribute to the victims at a Martyrs’ Memorial in downtown Mumbai, while other events were held at some of the sites of the three-day attack, which began on November 26, 2008. Six Americans were among the 166 people killed by 10 gunmen who infiltrated the financial hub by boat and spent three days spraying bullets and throwing grenades around various city landmarks. “A grateful nation bows to our brave police and security forces who valiantly fought the terrorists during the Mumbai attacks,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter.

• In the wake of Trump’s announcement this week that his administration would continue to “stand with Saudi Arabia” despite the recent murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, America’s mainstream media elites erupted in their usual paroxysms of despair and condemnation of the president. Although this time the typical “orange man bad” stories tended to omit calls for Trump to be immediately overthrown by the military or his own cabinet, almost every other major trope was preponderant.

• This was especially true of Khashoggi’s former place of employment at the Post, where journalists almost universally portrayed Trump as having blood on his hands for his refusal to directly take action against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, now widely believed to have ordered Khashoggi’s murder.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The official WikiLeaks Twitter account denied that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort ever met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and slammed The Guardian — which originally reported the news — and its sources for the report.

• Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, right around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, according to The Guardian, which as is now the norm in reports of this kind refers to unnamed “sources.”

• [...]

• The 69-year-old Manafort has denied any involvement in the release of the emails, and has said that the claim is “100% false.”

• While Manafort was jailed this year under a plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller, on Monday, Mueller said that Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, breaching his deal. According to documents filed in court, Manafort committed “crimes and lies” covering a “variety of subject matters.”

• According to The Guardian, Manafort’s first visit to the Ecuadorian embassy occurred one year after Assange was granted asylum inside, according to two sources. To add icing to the cake, “a separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senian intelligence agency and seen by The Guardian lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of Assange’s several well-known guests, along with… “Russians.”

• “Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. ⁦‪@wikileaks⁩ is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.”

• WikiLeaks said in a statement that it’s “willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.”

• Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed by Clinton in 1993, heavily sided with the government’s arguments against making any potential charges public prior to his arrest. She agreed to allow both sides to bring in additional material next week.

• In what appears to have been a copy and paste error in a filing, it was revealed last week that the Justice Department had filed secret charges against Assange. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press promptly filed a lawsuit seeking access to any criminal complaint, indictment or other charging documents relating to the case.

• An apparent criminal complaint against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is the subject of a federal court hearing in Virginia.

• Supporters of embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are expected to ask a U.S. district court judge Tuesday to unseal the mystery case against Assange that prosecutors mistakenly revealed recently in an unrelated criminal case in Virginia.

• But in a line right out of a spy movie, the U.S. government on Monday said in a court filing that they won’t even “confirm or deny” there is an Assange case at the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

• Court documents dated from August in a sex crimes case with no connection at all to Assange or WikiLeaks appeared to have been a cut and paste job gone awry — a federal prosecutor using what was apparently an Assange-related document as a template failed to delete two references to Assange’s last name in the unrelated case’s motion to seal. Seamus Hughes, a terrorism researcher at George Washington University, discovered the error this month, which revealed that Assange appears to have “been charged” with a federal crime.

• For years, American prosecutors have struggled with what has become a fundamental question of 21st century journalism: how to distinguish WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, from mainstream news outlets, since both regularly publish leaked classified material.

• Soon, that question may be tested in a U.S. courtroom. This week, reporters discovered that a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia inadvertently revealed in a court filing the existence of criminal charges against Assange. According to the Wall Street Journal, Justice Department officials have grown more confident that they will be able to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom, where has lived in internal exile inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after receiving asylum in 2012.

• That way of acting is critical to maintaining the organizational agility that helps us stay ahead of challenges. But while we often speak of agility as it relates to actions, we rarely apply the term to beliefs.

• In truly agile environments, where situations change unexpectedly and today’s best practices become tomorrow’s “legacy thinking,” positions you once held may no longer be valid. And when those positions get recorded, they can be weaponized.

• Weaponized transparency occurs when someone uses information about a person as an argument against them. It doesn’t matter that something was knowingly made transparent; what matters here is how that something is used.

• Need an example? Just watch what happens to any politician who takes a position contrary to one they held in the past. Weaponized transparency can deter openness, so it poses a real problem to open organizations.

• So what’s the solution to balancing transparency and agility in an open organization?

• Not becoming less transparent. Instead, we should foster “compassionate transparency.”

• Warning that it could threaten the ability to hold the department accountable, a watchdog group on Monday urged the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to refuse a request (pdf) from the Interior Department to destroy records including ones related to oil and gas leases and endangered species issues.

• “It’s unacceptable that Interior is already turning their efforts to destroying documents when they can’t even respond to the public records requests they have coming in,” said Chris Saeger, executive director of Western Values Project (WVP).

• “Despite his claims to the contrary,” Saeger added, “[Interior Secretary Ryan] Zinke is trying yet again to pull wool over the eyes of the American people by keeping the public in the dark while his department wages attacks on public lands and wildlife.”

• The accidental revelation in mid-November that U.S. federal prosecutors had secretly filed charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange underlines the determination of the Trump administration to end Assange’s asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been staying since 2012.

• Behind the revelation of those secret charges for supposedly threatening U.S. national security is a murky story of a political ploy by the Ecuadorean and British governments to create a phony rationale for ousting Assange from the embassy. The two regimes agreed to base their plan on the claim that Assange was conspiring to flee to Russia.

• Trump and his aides applauded Assange and WikiLeaks during the 2016 election campaign for spreading embarrassing revelations about Hillary Clinton’s campaign via leaked DNC emails. But all that changed abruptly in March 2017, when WikiLeaks released thousands of pages of CIA documents describing the CIA’s hacking tools and techniques. The batch of documents published by WikiLeaks did not release the actual “armed” malware deployed by the CIA. But the “Vault 7” leak, as WikiLeaks dubbed it, did show how those tools allowed the agency to break into smartphones, computers and internet-connected televisions anywhere in the world — and even to make it look like those hacks were done by another intelligence service.

• The CIA and the national security state reacted to the Vault 7 release by targeting Assange for arrest and prosecution. On March 9, 2017 Vice President Mike Pence called the leak tantamount to “trafficking in national security information” and threatened to “use the full force of the law and resources of the United States to hold all of those to account that were involved.”

• Less than a decade ago, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had media outlets eating out of his hand and governments with secrets to hide on high alert. Now, he’s at the mercy of an Ecuadorian government that’s running out of patience – and he may be running out of time.

• Last week, in court papers filed in the United States, in a case completely unrelated to Assange, was a paragraph confirming that a secret indictment had been filed against him. Prosecutors called it an administrative mistake, meaning a supposed clerical error.

• It seemed to confirm something that Assange had always feared, but that the US Department of Justice never admitted: It wants him in jail.

• However, what hasn’t been revealed in that paragraph is “what the charges are and what period of WikiLeaks activity they relate to,” points out James Ball, author of WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era.

• The news media has no legal right to learn whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was charged in a sealed proceeding, despite an inadvertent filing in an unrelated case that said the Justice Department has accused him of wrongdoing, the U.S. said.

• The Justice Department responded Monday to a Nov. 16 lawsuit by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, which seeks access to any criminal complaint, indictment or other charging documents relating to Assange.

• Prosecutors said that if a record of charges isn’t publicly available, that means the person hasn’t been charged or the case is under seal.

• “In either event, the government is not required to publicly acknowledge which of those two possibilities happens to be the case with respect to any individual,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg wrote in a filing in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. “The First Amendment does not require the government to confirm or deny the existence of criminal charges in this case.”

• They are destroying him slowly. They are doing it through an indefinite detention which has been going on for the last eight years with no end in sight. Julian Assange has become one of the most widely known icons of freedom of the press and the struggle against state secrecy. Recently, his detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been joined by isolation, strict rules and various forms of pressure which seem to have no other purpose than to break him down. A grip meant to destroy his physical and mental ability to resist until he either breaks down or he steps out of the Ecuadorian embassy, unleashing the beginning of his own end. Because if he does step out, he will be arrested by the UK authorities, and at that point the US could request his extradition so that they can put him in jail for publishing classified US documents. Julian Assange is in extremely precarious conditions.

• After eight months of failed attempts, la Repubblica was finally able to visit the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after the current Ecuadorian president, Lenin Moreno had cut him off from all contacts last March with the exception of his lawyers. No contact with friends, stars, journalists, no phone calls, no internet access. Indeed a very heavy isolation regime for anyone, but for Julian Assange in particular, considering that he has been confined to that tiny embassy for the last six years, and also considering that for Assange the internet is not an optional like any other: it’s his world.

• So it turns out it’s really really important for powerful people to be able to lie to us with impunity, you guys. I know this because an actual, literal spy told me that that’s what I’m meant to believe in an article published by Newsweek yesterday. If you were wondering how long it would take the imperial propagandists to ramp up their efforts to explain to us why it is good for the Trump administration to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after we learned that sealed charges have been brought against him by the United States government, the answer is eight days. If you were wondering which of those propagandists would step forward and aggressively attempt to do so, the answer is Naveed Jamali. To be clear, I do not use the word “propagandist” to refer to a mass media employee whose reliable track record of establishment sycophancy has propelled him to the upper echelons of influence within platforms owned by plutocrats who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, as I often mean when I use that word. When I say that Jamali is a propagandist, I mean he is a current member of the United States intelligence community telling Newsweek’s readers that it is to society’s benefit for the US government to pursue a longstanding agenda of the US intelligence community in imprisoning Julian Assange.

• “Any contrary rule would completely undermine the proper functioning of the criminal process at this stage: anyone could petition the Court to require the government to confirm whether the time was right to flee or evade arrest,” prosecutor Gordon Kromberg wrote.

• Assange has been staying in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 under a grant of asylum and has long expressed fear of a US prosecution.

• Federal prosecutors are fighting a request to unseal an apparent criminal complaint against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

• In papers filed Monday in Alexandria, prosecutors argued that the public has no right to know whether a person has been charged until there has been an arrest.

• Federal prosecutors have told a United States District Court judge that they oppose a request by a journalists’ group for the unsealing of any pending U.S. criminal indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and declined to admit whether such charges exist.

• In a filing submitted on Monday to Judge Leonie Brinkema, prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia said a recent disclosure in a court document filed in an unrelated criminal case that prosecutors had obtained a sealed indictment against Assange was an “unintentional error.”

• Prosecutors said the erroneous filing does not constitute a confirmation or denial by them as to whether sealed criminal charges against Assange exist, and argued that neither the U.S. constitution nor U.S. common law “require that the government provide such a confirmation or denial.”

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has or hasn’t been charged, the government said in a cagey Monday court filing.

• The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) responded to the news that federal prosecutors had erroneously exposed Assange as a target of criminal charges by requesting that the government unseal Assange’s criminal prosecution. The government’s response? Get lost.

• The Justice Department said Monday it is not required under the law to reveal whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged in a sealed case, even after an accidental filing in an unrelated case said he had been accused of a crime.

• The argument came in response to a Nov. 16 lawsuit by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. That group is seeking to unseal the government’s possible charges against Assange that appeared to be revealed accidentally.

• Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg said in a court filing Monday that the Justice Department will neither confirm nor deny whether such charges exist because “neither the First Amendment nor the common law require that the government provide such a confirmation or denial.” Because the possible charges have not been made public, Kromberg said, Assange has either not been charged or the charges are under seal.

• U.S. officials had no comment on the disclosure and the exact nature of the charges against Assange was not immediately known.

• Prosecutors sought to keep the charges confidential until after Mr. Assange’s arrest, saying the move was essential to ensure he did not evade or avoid arrest and extradition in the case.

• U.S. officials have previously acknowledged that federal prosecutors based in Alexandria, Virginia, have been conducting a lengthy criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder.

• Senior officials in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have publicly called for Assange to be aggressively prosecuted.

• A leaked WikiLeaks document reveals how the Congress party played politics over the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. It did not escape the notice of even the then U.S. ambassador to India, David Mulford.

• Minority Affairs Minister Antulay’s remarks

• In the leaked memo, Mulford is seen talking about the Congress party’s politics over the 26/11 Mumbai tragedy. He mentions that P. Chidambaram officially denied any Hindutva link to the terror attacks after the UPA Minority Affairs Minister made outrageous claims. Antulay had claimed that Hindutva element was behind the death of Hemant Karkare. Antulay said, “Superficially speaking, they (terrorists) had no reason to kill Karkare. Whether he (Karkare) was a victim of terrorism or terrorism plus something I do not know.” “Karkare found that there are non-Muslims involved in acts of terrorism in some cases. Any person going to the roots of terrorism has always been the target,” Antulay had said, adding: “There is more than what meets the eye.”

• After the volunteers are settled and briefed on housekeeping protocols (silencing phones, estimated duration of the workshop, etc.), Coburn and Hatcher explain that remote viewing is the technique whereby an individual in one location psychically travels to another physical site and records what they can ‘see’, first in writing and drawing, then in clay.

• Along with a number of other experiments in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, remote viewing was developed in the 1970s as part of the US’s Cold War-era covert intelligence programme, eventually known by the 1990s as the ‘Star Gate Project.’ Applications included spying on military facilities behind enemy lines and the location of missing aircraft, personnel, fugitives and hostages. It was defunded in 1995, and remote viewers involved in the government programme today give workshops for civilian purposes such as industrial espionage. (It has been alleged that active intelligence personnel secretly consulted military-trained psychics for information following the 9/11 attacks.)

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• This story has been updated.

• President Donald Trump is trying to bury the findings of a new climate change report commissioned by his own administration.

• The National Climate Assessment, which is required to publish its findings every four years, released its latest 1,656-page report during the holiday doldrums on Black Friday. In the process, the administration effectively buried the scientists’ conclusions on how man-made climate change will devastate America’s public health, economy, infrastructure and coastlines, as well as cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage to the planet over the next few decades.

• “This report will be used in court in significant ways. I can imagine a lawyer for the Trump administration being asked by a federal judge, ‘How can the federal government acknowledge the seriousness of the problem, and then set aside the rules that protect the American people from the problem?’ And they might squirm around coming up with an answer,” Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University, told the Times.

• Balanced between the Russian and Chinese superpowers, both of which are mineral- and energy- hungry, Mongolia is rich in resources. Three million people share a landmass one-sixth the size of the United States. Because of the sparseness of the population, several of its ecosystems are complex enough to host rare and endangered large mammal species. Wild camels, for example — distinct from their domesticated cousins used for transport and food — shyly evade human contact in southern Mongolia. An aboriginal herding tradition is surviving even as it changes. Even though dirt bikes (rather than horses) are often used for herding, for example, traditional grazing and hunting routes are still used because the land is not parceled into private property.

• One of the first things Donald Trump did upon taking office was to reverse the Obama administration’s permit rejection for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move crude from oil sands in Canada to Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast. Restarting work on this extension of the existing Keystone pipeline, along with greenlighting the likewise hotly contested Dakota Access pipeline, was part of what one newspaper called Trump’s “ambitious plans” for a US “makeover.” A federal judge has just blocked construction on Keystone XL again, however, seeming to suggest, essentially, that Trump’s “because I want to” reasoning was insufficiently persuasive.

• Here to help us understand this ruling and where it leaves us is Jackie Prange, senior attorney and managing litigator with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jackie Prange.

• Ernesto Araújo has praised US president Donald Trump and accused the political left of appropriating climate change to serve an ideological agenda. He currently runs Brazil’s US and Canada department, a relatively junior position in the foreign service, and only became an ambassador this year.

• On Twitter announcing his new minister, Bolsonaro called Araújo a “brilliant intellectual”.

• During the election campaign, Araújo started a blog, which he used to question the moral underpinnings of internationalism. In a post on 12 October, Araújo wrote that the left twisted legitimate causes “to serve their political project of total domination”.

• Each morning at Camp Constitution’s summer camp, the kids and parents go off to classes while staff members do a room inspection.

• “What we look for is not just cleanliness, but a patriotic and Godly theme,” says camp director Hal Shurtleff in a video of the 2016 camp.

• “We are looking for creativity — are they learning what we are teaching them?”

• And what are they being taught? Conspiracy theories about the United Nations (UN) and how climate change is a hoax, and they’ve drafted in two of the world’s most notorious climate science denialists to do the job.

• The rooms — named after “places of refuge in the old testament” — are covered with U.S. nationalistic garlands and flags. A “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hat is perched on a wooden bunk post.

• Children take quotes they’ve learned from classes, and turn them into posters. One encourages the United Nations to keep out.

• Deniers are crowing over a new study in Nature that’s supposedly claiming wind turbines are killing 3/4ths of birds in the areas around them. Obviously that’s absurd, so what the flock is going on?

• This new myth took flight with a Daily MailOnline story with a headline claiming “Wind farms are the ‘new apex predators’: Blades kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby, study shows.” The GWPF quickly posted the Mail story on its site, WUWT lazily copied GWPF’s copy of the Mail, and JoNova excerpted it.

• The problem is that the study did not, at all, in any way or at any point, show that wind turbine blades “kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites.” While it mentions once, in passing, that turbines can kill birds and bats by direct impact, the study has no tally of bird corpses or anything dealing with avian mortality at the study site.

• Harken! Good news (maybe) “encouraging news” is a better description, as Negative Emissions Technology (“NET”) starts coming into focus. Conceptually, carbon removal or direct air capture removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which would be great for suppressing climate change.

• In that regard, Elizabeth Kolbert recently interviewed (Yale Environment 360) Stephen Pacala (Princeton professor) chairman of the US scientific panel studying carbon removal under the auspices of the National Academies. Which means the project has top-notch clearances, in fact, blue chip.

• Of course, the big question about direct carbon capture is whether it can fix a very big problem created by humans burning fossil fuels like crazed Madhatters portending an ecological disaster-in-waiting because of excessive levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, possibly leading to human extinction way ahead of schedule, too early, or looked at another way, extinction occurring well ahead of scientists’ models. But really, honestly and truly who in his/her right mind “models” human extinction?

• Negative Emission Technology -NET- that removes carbon dioxide (“CO2”) from the atmosphere would be a dream come true, assuming it happens fast enough to prevent already-collapsing ecosystems from further total collapse, e.g., permafrost throughout the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the East Siberian Arctic Sea, ESAS, where subsea permafrost covers massive quantities of methane (CH4) in extraordinarily shallow waters. It’s the world’s largest reservoir, and CH4 is the most potent of the greenhouse gases. Problem: The subsea permafrost protective cap is rapidly thinning because of global warming. Already a Russian/American research team has witnessed alarmingly large columns of methane escaping into the atmosphere in the ESAS.

• On my last day of teaching Environmental Studies, I posed a question to my students. I explained that for some time in my childhood, my father worked in the airline industry. “What does this have to do with the environment?” I asked. Sadly, even after an entire semester, few if any of my students could make the connection. Air transportation is one of the most polluting industries. Depending on the type of car you use and the amount you use it, one to two flights can generate the same amount of carbon emissions as a whole year of driving. From the consumption of fossil fuels, to the toxic substances utilized or emitted such as jet fuel and de-icing fluid, to all of the disposable products and packages within the plane and the airport, to so much more, there is nothing sustainable at all about air travel. Thus, for a part of my childhood, the majority of our family income was derived from a highly polluting industry that has contributed greatly to the dire environmental predicament we are currently facing.

• Of course, mine is not the only family whose income is linked to environmental destruction. In fact, one could make the case that nearly all American households, especially the most affluent, have made their money through directly or indirectly exploiting and polluting the environment (and often exploiting people as well). For example, a conference on “Peace Engineering” just concluded, which implored engineers to consider “ethics, social good, the biases and unintended consequences of the technology they build.” Clearly, this implies that engineering does not usually contemplate the deleterious environmental and social effects of its work. My point in bringing this conversation to my students was to help them think about the career paths they were exploring or embarking upon and for them to keep in mind the ecological impact these careers. At this crucial time in history, when thus far we have all but ignored the warnings to drastically reduce our resource consumption, toxic waste, and carbon emissions for the sake of our incomes, it is imperative that this generation of students take bold steps to help make the fields in which they work more sustainable and to help to permanently put to rest unnecessary industries that are not. In fact, a group of French college students are trying to do just that.

• Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump said of the National Climate Assessment (NCA4), “I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine.” Asked about the report’s conclusions on the climate crisis’s economic impact on the country, Trump declared, “I don’t believe it.”

• “We cannot afford a leader who sticks his head in the sand while people suffer the consequences,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.

• “The climate assessment, put forth by Donald Trump’s own administration,” Brune added, “makes it clearer than ever that if we don’t act now, the catastrophic effects of climate change will reshape the United States and the world to the detriment of those alive today, and for generations to come.”

• The continent must brace itself for the big heat: a hotter climate will cost Europe dear if average global temperatures soar by 3°C near the end of the century, when heat extremes could claim an additional 132,000 deaths a year.

• Labour productivity in some southern European countries could fall by 10 to 15%. As sea levels rise, there could be a five-fold increase in coastal flood damage, to affect more than 2 million people and wreak economic tolls of €60 billion (US$68 bn) a year.

• As extremes of rainfall increase, swollen rivers could expose three times as many people to inland flooding, and the damage from river floods could rise from €5.3m a year to €17.5m.

• If, on the other hand, the world keeps the promise it made to itself in Paris in 2015, and contains global warming to 2°C or less by the century’s end, coastal flooding – which already affects 100,000 people and costs €1.25 bn a year – will affect only an estimated 436,000 and total €6 bn a year in annual damage.

• By now, everyone knows about the Friday news dump — the penchant for sleazy companies or even sleazier government agencies to hold onto a piece of really bad news until late on a Friday afternoon, so that any headlines that are generated come out when everybody’s working for the weekend, or in Saturday newspapers that nearly nobody reads.

• So, when the bad news involves mass death and disease, a never-ending bowl of natural disasters, the extinction of species, etc. — and when your boss is on the wrong side of the mass-death issue — that calls for the Mother of All News Dumps. That would be a news release at 2 p.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when no one works and most Americans are either waiting on a rope line at Walmart or couch-prone in a tryptophan coma.

• “This is, unfortunately, par for the course for this president that he would try to bury this news and deny it,” Jake Levine, who’d worked on climate issues during Barack Obama’s presidency, said on MSNBC right after the Trump administration realized that Black Friday — while a month ahead of schedule — was their preferred day to drop a congressionally mandated report on climate change that predicted dire consequences if America and the world do not respond quickly.

• Don’t let Trumpian government dump on your right to this life-or-death information. Now that Thanksgiving is over and blood sugar is returning to normal-albeit-elevated levels, you should read the government’s Climate Assessment (the work of 13 different federal agencies) or check out some of the better summaries of its findings from the New York Times or Vox.

Finance

• Last year’s Republican tax cut was sold to the American people as a plan to boost growth and wages. The centerpiece of the plan was a large cut in the corporate income tax, with the tax rate reduced from 35 percent to 21 percent.

• Most immediately, this looks like a big handout to shareholders, which means the wealthy, since stock ownership is so heavily skewed to the top. The richest 1 percent of households hold close to half of the stock held by individuals, and the richest 10 percent of households hold almost 90 percent.

• So when we give a tax break to corporations, we are handing money to those at the very top and those close to it.

• But the Trump administration promised that the benefits would trickle down. They claimed the tax cut would lead to a massive investment boom, which would then lead to a surge in productivity, and finally translate into higher wages.

• We were promised an average wage gain of $4,000 a year above baseline growth for an average family within four years.

• As we approach the end of year one, we are not on track to hit the Trump administration’s target. Wages are growing modestly above the rate of inflation. Over the last year, average hourly earnings have risen by just 0.7 percent more than prices.

• While that is going in the right direction, there is no evidence of any speed-up in wage growth due to the tax cut. Wages are in line with baseline projections. At this pace, workers are going to have to wait a very long time to make up the ground lost during the recession.

• The lack of any pick-up in wage growth is hardly surprising. Again, there is no evidence of any tax cut-generated investment boom. Investment is modestly higher in 2018 than in 2017, but there were several years in the Obama administration with more rapid investment growth.

• In the runup to the 2016 election, candidate Donald J. Trump proposed, if elected, to run government “like a business.” As President, he has largely done just that.

• The Republican Party has become in effect his board of directors; a fawning “base,” his shareholders. As President, Trump hires and fires appointees like a CEO, demanding unfailing personal loyalty. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation in accordance with established conflict of interest rules, Trump forced him to resign.

• More like a corporate CEO than an elected head of state, Trump rules by tweets and executive order. With a closed circle of ideologue advisors, he decrees without regard to institutional limits and regularly threatens “enemies of the people”—his term for the media.

• Former business executives dominate the President’s cabinet. They often abolish regulations that impose environmental or other limits on their actions. When there is a choice, they prefer to hire private firms rather than rely on government agencies to deliver public services. Secretary of Education DeVos, for example, promotes private charter schools at the expense of public education.

• An expanding reliance on private companies to manage federal prisons and immigrant detention centers has led to a skimping of services. Corporate responsibilities run more to shareholders than to the prison inmates they serve or the federal government. By reducing the costs of food and labor (to the detriment of prison quality), management can reward its shareholders and top management with higher dividends and salaries.

• Tax reform and labor advocates were among those who expressed outrage Monday at the news that General Motors—one of the corporate giants that benefited immensely from the Republican tax plan last year—would cut 15 percent of its workforce, shuttering production facilities in three states as well as Canada to trim costs.

• To make themselves self-dependent in the aerospace industry and to topple the Western dominance, China is also developing rivals to the planes run by Airbus SE and Boeing Co. Chinese investors are also funding domestic startups that would challenge Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

• So where are we now on Brexit?

• We are in a fog.

• We are in a situation the outcome of which nobody can predict, at least with any certainty.

• There is no pundit, no official, no politician who knows what will happen with Brexit.

• In this fog, however, there are paths which are currently more visible than any others.

• Offshore hoarding of private American wealth is estimated to be $3.3 trillion (4% of U.S. $82 trillion financial wealth).

• The safety net costs about $400 billion per year, or, including Medicaid, about $900 billion per year.

• Taking on the tax cheaters seems like an obvious response, instead of cutting the safety net. But the IRS budget itself has been steadily cut. Amazingly, and perversely, the Internal Revenue Service, which could be recovering much of our hidden money, has seen its staff and budget slashed 14 to 18 percent since the recession.

• Calling on broadcasters to include the Green Party in any TV debate on the Government’s Brexit deal, Caroline Lucas MP said:

• “It’s good to hear the Prime Minister is considering reaching out to the public with a TV debate on her bungled Brexit deal. But for this conversation about our collective future to have any semblance of democracy, it must represent the views of everyone.

• “That means it must be cross-party, featuring a diverse range of voices representing every nation, as well as every stance on this deal and our relationship with the EU – not just the Government and an opposition party who are falling far short of actually opposing the Prime Minister’s approach.

• If you didn’t grow up hungry as a child, you probably have fond memories of the holidays. When the bell rang for the last time, you got two whole weeks of freedom from class. But for the one in five children who live in poverty, the holidays can be less-than-jolly, because they rely on school lunch to meet some or all of their nutritional needs.

• Over 12 million children experience food insecurity – and that doesn’t just mean they don’t always know when their next meal is, although that’s bad enough. Food insecurity goes hand-in-hand with poverty, and it can be accompanied by poor health outcomes, difficulties in school, emotional disturbances and much more.

• [...]

• If your school doesn’t have a backpack program, consider getting more information about the school’s demographics to see if there are low-income students who might benefit from a similar program. Approach stakeholders like the local food bank, community children’s organizations and the school itself to explore the possibility of starting one and ask how you can help bring it into action.

• Be aware that issues around childhood nutrition and programs like these can get complicated. If you haven’t been involved with these challenges before, you may encounter some skepticism from people who feel like you appeared from nowhere to tell them they’re doing it wrong.

• I guess French tax collectors will be scrolling through social media profiles with lists of tax dodgers and a keen appraiser’s eye. There may be several reasons people have expensive items showcased on social media, and not all of them will have anything to do with ill-gotten net gains. A very common internet pastime is presenting your life as more exciting, dynamic, and filled with material goods than it actually is. Photoshop may be involved. Some of what tax officials come across will be evidence of nothing more than self-esteem issues.

• However, this statement may not actually reflect what French tax officials have in mind. This may just be an inelegant (and partially inaccurate) depiction of the program being put in place. It appears this social media monitoring will follow the UK’s lead, which doesn’t have much to do with scanning social media posts for inexplicable luxury cars. If the French are on the UK Plan, as this article suggests, auditors will bury themselves in mountains of data and hope the algorithm sorts the cheats from the dreamers.

• France’s tax administrators will start searching through social media accounts in early 2019, a pilot project in the fight against tax avoidance, Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin told weekly business TV show Capital.

• The idea is to identify potential frauds by analyzing publicly-available data on individuals’ social media accounts, Darmanin said, according to excerpts of the show to be broadcast on Sunday.

• The NYT reported that the Trump administration is considering replacing the tariffs is imposed on aluminum and steel imports from Mexico and Canada with a system of quotas. There is an important economic dimension to such a shift that was left out of the piece.

• If the U.S. imposes a tariff on an import then it is effectively imposing a tax on U.S. consumers. The government gets to keep the revenue. For example, if steel is imported at a price of $700 a ton and we impose a 10 percent tariff, then the price to steel consumers rises to $770 a ton with the government getting $70 for each ton that is imported. (For simplicity, this assumes that the tariff does not affect the price of the steel. In reality it will fall somewhat in response to the tariff.)

• There is an argument that carries considerable currency on the right about the need to force the poor to do things that are actually good for them. This comes up frequently in the context of work requirements for people receiving benefits like Medicaid or food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

• The claim is that people will be made better off by working, since that will give them a foot into the labor market. They can eventually move up and earn enough so they no longer need these benefits. A major flaw in this argument is that the vast majority of non-disabled people who receive these benefits are already working.

• While the idea of forcing people to help themselves doesn’t make much sense for these anti-poverty programs, they could make considerable sense for the governance of major US corporations. The problem is that shareholders seem to be unable to avoid paying out tens of millions of dollars to CEOs, even when these CEOs are not especially competent.

• The problem is the structure of corporate governance. The people who most immediately determine the CEO’s pay are the corporation’s board of directors. These directors have incredibly cushy jobs. They typically get paid several hundred thousand dollars a year for perhaps 150 hours of work.

• That comes as no surprise. Lynn Swann says he would like to have as much money as Bill Gates. Gates’s foundation is a major investor in private prisons. Swann, after having often introduced President Bush when he ran for re-election, ran unsuccessfully for governor of Pennsylvania in 2006 as a Republican on a program of lowering corporate taxes even further. His running mate, mortgage banker Jim Matthews, was later convicted of perjury. Swann, who’s served on the boards of Hershey and H.J. Heinz, didn’t even bother to vote in the majority of elections in which he could have participated.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This is also by design. Because social networks are built to maximize engagement, the global news economy — which has again moved to those same platforms — is just another product that boosts time spent online. The churn flattens and packages human lives and human misery into something that’s easy to parse and easy to become apathetic to. Time is different now, and so are we.

• While affirming that he “strongly” disagrees with former Newt Gingrich, who led the GOP in the House in the mid-1990s, “on virtually every issue,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling on Democrats in Congress to rip a page of out the Georgia Republican’s playbook by creating—and aggressively pushing—a new progressive version of the Contract With America in order to galvanize the nation, offer real solutions to its most urgent problems, and go beyond being simply anti-Trump.

• In stark contrast to Gingrich’s original version—”a radical right-wing agenda full of tax breaks for the wealthy, massive cuts to programs vital to working families, and racist and cruel bills to ‘reform’ welfare and our criminal-justice system”—Sanders argues in a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday that Democrats should instead forge a vision that “reflects the needs of working Americans — centered on economic, political, social, racial and environmental justice.”

• Trump’s statement on his policy toward Saudi Arabia in the wake of the murder in Istanbul of dissident Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi brought a profound shame on the United States that will, as FDR put it, live in infamy. Trump began by saying he was putting America first, but that was the last thing he was doing. He was putting his own personal predilections and policies, and perhaps profit, above the interests of the United States.

• The company had also hired Definers Public Affairs, a Washington, D.C. consulting firm, to seed opposition research on Facebook critics. Definers also linked George Soros, the liberal financier, to anti-Facebook groups. Facebook cut ties with the firm after The Times investigation was published.

• In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg criticized what Definers had done on behalf of his company and said he and Ms. Sandberg were not aware of the specific work the outside firm was doing. He added that someone on the company’s communications staff probably hired Definers, although he later complimented the communications staff for their “hard work.”

• “In general, we need to go through all of our relationships and evaluate what might be more typical D.C. relationships and decide if we want to continue with them,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call.

• Not a big fan of reality television, I never did see why so many Americans wanted to watch a jackass fire people from fake jobs on a weekly basis. Like most reality TV shows, The Apprentice appeared to be specifically designed to humiliate those lucky enough to appear on it. But The Apprentice took it one step further and turned the phrase “You’re fired” into part of the national vernacular. As someone who had to actually fire people in real life, I never found any pleasure in it, and did not understand why the viewing audience would want to watch it happen to some stranger. Still don’t, but in those days I had an easy out: I could simply change the channel.

• Until the same people who enjoyed watching an idiot degrade people on television decided that he needed a wider audience and so went to the polls on November 8, 2016, and cursed our nation with his constant presence.

• What were they thinking? That somehow this smarmy blowhard with a bad comb-over would become statesman-like? That he would magically gain the intelligence necessary to begin to understand how our government works? Did they think he could grow a brain or a heart in the few months between the election and the inauguration? Did they even think at all, or were they just hell-bent on owning those dangerous, politically correct liberals that Fox had been warning them about for 20 years?

• If that was the case, then they should have been gratified when Americans began turning to mental-healthcare providers to help them deal with their increasing anxiety.

• The BBC spreads fake news. We all know that. From the uncritical parroting of the British government’s Iraqi weapons of mass destruction claims to the unchallenged lies spouted by war-mongering politicians, that Libya’s dictator (who was armed and trained by Britain, incidentally) was going to commit a “bloody massacre” in Libya’s Benghazi region. (A postwar British government report confirmed that the “ethnic cleansing” claim was based on what they cautiously called poor intelligence. The cruel irony is that after the BBC helped whip up support for the invasion, it reported on a real ethnic cleansing of black Libyans committed by the Islamist terrorists organized by the US and Britain to topple Gaddafi.)

• But what if the BBC had legal protection to tell and spread lies? As I document in my book Real Fake News, the answer to a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that, as an arts, literature, and news organization, the BBC has no legal obligation to give its audience any information about its sources. Often, journalists cannot and should not name their sources, for obvious reasons; the main one being that no one will tell them anything in confidence ever again. However, when general claims that contradict the customary understanding of things are made, and without supporting evidence, it’s only fair to ask where the person making the claim obtained their information.

• Our democracy just won the trophy for Most Improved: The 49.4% voter turnout this month was higher than any midterm election in a century. But once we finish patting ourselves on the back, we need to look at the numbers again to take stock of what’s missing: half of the eligible voters in the United States.

• We’re never going to see 100% voter turnout. But when half of the electorate is abstaining, we install elected officials who don’t necessarily represent the majority opinion. We can’t “vote the bums out” if we don’t vote.

• Beyond any reasonable doubt, in substance if not in appearance, Donald Trump is a thoroughly conventional American politician. It’s a wonder that anyone requires proof at this late date.

• This couldn’t be clearer than in foreign policy. Some of us who understand the links among freedom, free trade, durable prosperity, and a noninterventionist foreign policy always doubted the sincerity of Trump’s occasional renegade soundbites during his presidential campaign. But some fantasists fell for them, and they refuse to let go of their tissue-thin hope that this execrable man will liquidate the American empire. Nothing will convince them, so efforts at persuasion are futile.

• The funny thing is that Trump himself seems to be working hardest to persuade those supporters that he has no intention of changing U.S. foreign policy. He would no more liquidate America’s global empire than liquidate his own global business empire. Alas, America is not going anywhere. Sure, he may hector imperial allies to spend more on their militaries (while insisting he respects their sovereignty), but that’s just a show. He’s an all-in imperialist, so we shouldn’t be fooled by the staged populism that sometimes is mistaken for come-home-Americanism. America First in practice embodies George H. W. Bush’s summation of America’s foreign policy: “What we say goes.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• After Twitter banned the account of far-right provocateur Jesse Kelly on Sunday…

• A little-reported federal parliamentary hearing last week became a forum, involving Labor, Liberal-National and Greens MPs, media representatives and academics, on expanding the censorship of the internet. The November 20 session was part of an inquiry into the “conduct of the 2016 federal election and matters related thereto.” Its ostensible purpose was to review whether social media or the internet had been used improperly to “influence” that election. None of those who testified, however, provided any evidence that it had. Instead, those who spoke claimed it was necessary to combat “fake news.” This is the banner under which the major technology giants, operating in lockstep with the US government, have sought to restrict access to progressive, anti-war and socialist content online. The speakers warned against growing suspicion of the mainstream media among broad layers of the population and the accompanying interest in alternative sources of information. Dr Michael Jensen claimed, without any evidence, that Twitter accounts-linked to Russia had sought to “influence” discussions on Australian politics. Jensen is a senior research fellow at the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, a government-funded think tank with close ties to the state apparatus and intelligence organisations.

• Origo’s editors were never imprisoned and its reporters were never beaten up. But in secret meetings — including a pivotal one in Vienna — the website’s original owner, a German-owned telecommunications company, relented. The company, Magyar Telekom, first tried self-censorship. Then it sought a nonpartisan buyer.

• But, ultimately, Origo went to the family of Mr. Orban’s former finance minister.

• For the overwhelming majority of banned books, it takes only the vaguest understanding of their premises to guess why they were banned. 1984, the eternal and easiest example of a banned book, has been censored because of its overt political themes. Stalin removed it from bookshelves across the USSR for its supposedly anti-communist message, while Jackson County FL removed it for its supposedly pro-communist message. Other books are banned because of moral objections: Nabokov’s Lolita reigns supreme in this category for its less-than-damning portrayal of pedophilia. Of the 4,390 books that the Kuwaiti government has banned in the last five years, the Encyclopedia is probably the most difficult to pin down as objectionable in any way.

• The reason for the banning of an Encyclopedia was stated to be a picture of Michelangelo’s David within the book. Kuwait’s Ministry of Information ostensibly objected to David’s nude, sans-fig leaf portrayal. While banning the apotheosis of 16th century renaissance sculpture for indecent exposure seems singular in its absurdity, David is not alone. Ariel, the little mermaid, was similarly banned from Kuwaiti bookstores because of the alleged promiscuity of her bikini top.

• We’ve taken Internet service companies and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to task for bad content moderation practices that remove speech and silence voices that deserve to be heard. We’ve catalogued their awful decisions. We’ve written about their ambiguous policies, inconsistent enforcement, and failure to appreciate the human rights implications of their actions. We’re part of an effort to devise a human rights framing for removing or downgrading content and accounts from their sites, and are urging all platforms to adopt them as part of their voluntary internal governance. Just last week, we joined more than 80 international human rights groups in demanding that Facebook clearly explain how much content it removes, both rightly and wrongly, and provide all users with a fair and timely method to appeal removals and get their content back up.

• These efforts have thus far been directed at urging the platforms to adopt voluntary practices rather than calling for them to be imposed by governments through law. Given the long history of governments using their power to regulate speech to promote their own propaganda, manipulate the public discourse, and censor disfavored speech, we are very reluctant to hand the U.S. government a role in controlling the speech that appears on the Internet via private platforms. This is already a problem in other countries.

• The University of Delaware has a long history of infringing on academic freedom and the free speech of its faculty and students. In 1976, UD President Arthur Trabant fired theater professor Richard Aumiller for publicly defending homosexuality. A federal judge, ruling that Trabant had violated Aumiller’s academic freedom, fined not only the university, but also Trabant personally. In another well-known episode, for several years in the early 1990’s UD made strenuous efforts to block the research funding of two professors, Jan Blits and Linda Gottfredson. Its stated reason: the granting agency, the Pioneer Fund, had an ideology inconsistent with the university’s own. Again the censorship effort failed in the legal process. Apparently, however, some UD administrators have learned nothing from UD’s disgraceful history of ideological censorship. On the contrary, they now send armed police to suppress ideas they do not like. At UD, “thought police” is now not a metaphor, but a literal fact.

• A conservative journalist, banned on Twitter for criticizing an Islamic congresswoman, is threatening to file a lawsuit.

• Laura Loomer, an investigative journalist, was banned by Twitter on November 21 after commenting that Minnesota Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar is a radical islamist who supports female genital mutilation (FGM), the oppression and killing of homosexuals and women, and hatred of Jews.

• She threatened on Friday to sue the social media giant for suppressing her right to free speech.

• The Court of Appeals of Kuwait has canceled the decision of the Kuwaiti ministry of information to prevent the circulation of a number of books. The court justified its decision by stating that censorship was no longer feasible in these changing times and this open world!

• In my opinion, the Kuwaiti court based its decision on the current reality in dealing with the issue of banned books. The traditional tools used to ban published opinion no longer work, as the barriers between countries are eliminated because of the Internet and developments in technology and communication.

• Professors and staff at several different universities are researching how they can contribute to Big Tech’s censorship push, by means of developing a new system that can “flag” social media posts containing “prejudice.”

• How a left-leaning writer fell afoul of the left wing social media site began last August when she wrote, then tweeted about Kreut.

• [...]

• What triggered the spat was Murphy and others upset at Kreut being asked to speak at the annual Women’s March because of her views on rough sex and prostitution.

• Murphy said: “This was, after all, a march for women.”

• Batten down the safe spaces!

• And after Murphy wrote about the march, Twitter locked her account. She was only allowed back on after she agreed to delete the tweet.

• “A bright spot in our research on the region is Malaysia, where the change of government in May 2018 has resulted in some progressive steps towards enhancing civic freedoms,” said Civicus Civic Space Research Officer Josef Benedict in a statement accompanying the report.

• The report noted that scores of activists and government critics previously facing prosecution over their views or for taking part in peaceful rallies have either been acquitted or have had their charges dropped.

• Google’s plans to launch a censored search app in China could irreparably damage internet users’ trust in the tech company, Amnesty International said today, warning that going ahead with the app would set a dangerous precedent for tech companies enabling rights abuses by governments.

• [...]

• Following a public outcry from Google’s own workforce, Amnesty International is reaching out to the company’s staff through protests outside Google offices and targeted messages on LinkedIn calling on them to sign the petition. A spoof promotional video offering Google staff the chance to participate in Project Dragonfly ends with a twist on Google’s motto: “Don’t be evil – unless it’s profitable”.

• “This is a watershed moment for Google. As the world’s number one search engine, it should be fighting for an internet where information is freely accessible to everyone, not backing the Chinese government’s dystopian alternative,” said Joe Westby, Amnesty International’s Researcher on Technology and Human Rights.

• Division of cybersecurity company Alphabet, Jigsaw has developed a product designed to provide maximum data security combined with ease of setup and use. In fact, it is a project of Google, so the quality of the product can not survive. It is designed for people without deep technical knowledge of journalists and activists who are forced to work in conditions of censorship.

• Jesse Kelly, a conservative writer, radio host, and failed Republican political candidate is no longer welcome on Twitter: The social media site permanently banned him on Sunday, for reasons unknown.

• Many on the right saw this as evidence that Twitter is unfairly silencing conservatives; others were neither surprised nor particularly sad to see Kelly disappear. Twitter is a private company, and can ban anyone it wants, of course. But it would be helpful if the site administrators explained what exactly Kelly did to merit such draconian measures—especially if Twitter wishes to put a damper on the right-wing notion that social media censorship is a serious issue meriting federal intervention.

• It’s unknown if Kelly will run for office again, but if he does he’ll have to do so without a Twitter account — a major disadvantage for a politician in the digital era.

• Kelly currently hosts The Jesse Kelly Show on iHeart Radio. He frequently appears as a guest on Fox News and other cable networks. Coincidentally, his most recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show was about internet censorship, which Kelly now appears to be a victim of.

• Federalist Contributor Jesse Kelly was permanently suspended from Twitter on Sunday for “repeat violations of the Twitter rules,” according to a message from Twitter Support. Kelly is a combat Veteran Marine, conservative radio host, and former Republican candidate for U.S. Congress.

• Twitter did not explain what rules Kelly violated, or if there was a specific tweet in question.

• Iraq War veteran and former Republican congressional candidate Jesse Kelly has been banned from Twitter for unclear reasons, becoming yet another conservative personality to be kicked from the platform. Kelly’s account on Twitter was disabled on Sunday, drawing anger from many conservative commentators, as the ban was apparently affected with no prior notice.

• A guessing game started about what might have prompted Kelly’s suspension, while liberal Twitter welcomed the move, accusing the Marine Corps vet of stoking violence.

• Russia has filed charges to fine Google (GOOG, GOOGL) — though not much — for failing to go along with government censorship on banned websites.

• All references to God and religion were removed from the reading materials for children, including the Ten Commandments.

• In Hongdong county of the northern province of Shanxi, a Hong Kong-based charity recently set up a Sunday school for “left-behind children.” The term refers to children whose parents have gone to work in the city, leaving them in the countryside in care of their relatives or friends. According to official statistics, in 2016, there were 61 million children left behind in villages across China by their migrant worker parents.

• Plans to build a “mega-collider” somewhere in China appear to be moving forward with construction set to begin as early as 2022.

• Apparently, Mariah Carey’s ample cleavage is way too hot for international censors, so it was blurred out during a broadcast of her appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

• The songstress shared a laugh with fans on Twitter on Saturday after she saw photos of her chest blurred out during a re-broadcast of her Tonight Show appearance in Asia and clapped back in her own distinctive style.

• With Kingdom Hearts 3 set to release in around two months, for many, it’s one of their most anticipated games. One particularly character in the Disney umbrella is, however, causing more than a few problems in China. You see, believe it or not, Winnie the Pooh is actually censored within the media.

• Why? Well, more than a few people have used him as a comparison to their current Chairman. As you might imagine, not for flattering reasons either.

• Therefore, with the Chinese media beginning to report on the game, they are having to make a few rather amusing omissions. Namely, Winnie the Pooh has been deleted!

• I try my best not to complain about the curveballs of life that come my way, but I wish people understood the tremendous burden that comes with being a clairvoyant genius who sees the future. You see, Twitter banned my account yesterday. They did not suspend it. They banned it.

• I had almost 80,000 followers and those poor people are now left aimlessly wandering the social media landscape in search of a greatness they’ll never find again. Now, I don’t really care because I’m just going to start a new account and it will be even better than my last one (if that’s possible). This isn’t about me. This is about what kind of country we have become and what kind of country we want to be.

• We have become a nation of sensitive losers who care about words. We care about how things “make us feel.” The exception these days is the man who just wants to put his talent and his thoughts in the marketplace of ideas and see if people will buy it.

• Increasingly stringent censorship in China under president Xi Jinping’s regime could be a barrier to the otherwise unparalleled growth of the art market in mainland China, a Western dealer has said. Speaking during Shanghai Art Week in November, as the West Bund Art & Design and Art021 fairs opened alongside the Shanghai Biennale and numerous exhibitions, the dealer—who wished to remain anonymous—said the week compares to Frieze week in London or Fiac week in Paris. “It has the same intensity. But the government will have a big say in the growth of this art market, because the last few years have not shown an opening in attitudes, but almost the opposite.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation only came into force in May of this year. Since then, privacy regulators across the EU have been trying to work out what it means in practice. As Techdirt has reported, some of the judgments that have emerged were pretty bad. A new GDPR ruling from France has just appeared that looks likely to have a major impact on how online advertising works in the EU, and therefore probably further afield, given the global nature of the Internet.

• The original decision in French is rather dense, although it does include the use of the delightful word “mobinaute”, which is apparently the French term for someone accessing the Internet on a mobile device. If you’d like to read something in English, Techcrunch has a long and clear explanation. There’s also a good, shorter take from Johnny Ryan of the browser company Brave, which is particularly interesting for reasons I’ll explain below.

• We waved goodbye to general warrants with the Fourth Amendment back in 1791. Now, thanks to tech companies collecting tons of info on site visitors and the FBI’s apparent inability to craft a narrow warrant, it’s the late 1700s all over again!

• With a wealth of information a subpoena or warrant away, law enforcement is asking for everything and promising to sort it all out properly. This hasn’t worked as well in practice as it has in theory. Investigators looking for evidence of one crime have found others to charge defendants with simply by sifting through the digital haystacks they’re able to acquire with a single piece of paper.

• In other cases, investigators have decided everyone is a suspect and that the massive amount of data obtained with this dubious legal theory will somehow point them to the real criminals. That’s the theory behind law enforcement’s “reverse” searches: ones where they demand all cell site location info from everyone connecting to certain cell towers before paring down the list of suspects from “everyone” to “everyone in certain locations at certain times.”

• A warrant requested by the FBI related to a bombing in New York last year is operating under this same premise. The search warrant ostensibly seeks to obtain information about defendant Victor Kingsley’s YouTube viewing habits. Kingsley is facing federal charges for killing a New York City landlord with a handmade bomb. Kingsley was allegedly targeting a police officer who he thought lived at that address as revenge for his arrest by that officer three years earlier.

• I explain this in detail about every three years, but it is plain from my twitter stream today I have made no significant inroads into public consciousness.

• MI6 officers, when operating abroad, do so 99% of the time disguised as British diplomats. They serve three or four year postings like other Embassy staff and will have a “cover job” doing something else in the Embassy. Back home in the UK their “cover job” is working in the FCO.

• A proportion of them will be “declared” to their host country, including the Head of Station, and operate in liaison with the host intelligence services. A portion will be “undeclared” and spy on the hosts themselves or on others in territory without the hosts’ knowledge.

• Those are MI6 officers, British career spies. The great advantage of the Embassy cover is that they have diplomatic immunity and when they mess up and get caught, they are simply expelled.

• “Agents” are not “officers”. In MI6 terminology “agent” is another word for “informant”. The fictional James Bond is not in fact a “secret agent”. He is an officer.

• Agents are usually nationals of the host country, but not always. They are “recruited” and “run” by MI6 officers. Motives vary but in the large majority of cases agents provide information for cash. British people who provide information to the Embassy from motives of patriotism will usually do so to a normal diplomat and not to MI6, but British people can be recruited as agents for MI6, in situations where the information being provided is in some sense deeply secret.

• Agents of course run far greater risks than the actual MI6 officers and do not have diplomatic immunity.

• So for years digital rights activists have worried about insurance companies getting their hands on everything from your smart car data to your pacemaker information and using that to deny you coverage, charge you more money, or make an extra buck selling said data to the highest bidder. That’s especially a problem in an era where consumer privacy rights are under constant siege, alongside the right to repair and open access these devices (and any data they might store about you).

• If you thought this rather dystopian future was activist hyperbole or still a decade or so out, you may be disappointed.

• Something strange and disturbing happened in the UK this weekend. That it targeted pariah du jour Facebook doesn’t make it any less bizarre or worrisome.

• The short story is this: peeved at being blown off repeatedly by Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook representatives, members of Parliament shook down an American third party for documents possibly related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The long story — broken by Carole Cadwalla of The Guardian — fills in the details.

• But first a little background: Six4Three, developers of a scuzzy app that scanned profiles for bikini photos, is currently suing Facebook for yanking its API access. The lawsuit has traveled from the federal court system to a California state court, where Six4Three is hoping for a ruling declaring Facebook’s actions to be a violation of various state-level competitive business laws.

• During the course of this suit — which was filed in January 2017 — Six4Three has obtained internal Facebook documents through discovery. These documents may contain info related to Facebook’s data-sharing and data-selling practices, which could possibly include its deals with Cambridge Analytica.

• Google is famous for tracking users and showing them targeted advertisements even if users do not want to see it. The search giant’s new patents for smart-home technology suggest that Google now wants to enter your bedroom to track you more efficiently.

• The first patent talks about a smart device that could scan and analyze the surroundings of your home, and offer targeted ads on the basis of it. For instance, the device would be capable of scanning Will Smith’s face on a T-shirt lying on the floor of a closet. The device would then offer you suggestions related to Will Smith’s movies.

• The US Department of Homeland Security has published a new proposed rule that would make people ineligible for US citizenship if their credit-scores were poor.

• Notionally, the rule-change is meant to prevent immigrants from becoming burdens on the welfare system (migrants do not make disproportionate use of any public welfare system).

• However, the credit reporting bureaus are notoriously inaccurate and arbitrary in the credit-scores they assign; if you have a lot of assets but do not borrow money, you will have a much lower credit-rating than if you unwisely enroll in a number of high cost/high fee store cards and pay them off after running up debts on them and paying significant interest (I am allergic to debt, and with the exception of my mortgage have no debts at all; because of this I have a fairly low credit-score, despite the fact that both my wife and I earn very good livings).

• The case centers on the mother of a teenage boy, who brought a suit against Six Flags after her son’s thumbprint was scanned for season pass entry. Lawyers for the family argue that the move violated the law, but the company has said that, since there was no actual harm done by the collection of the print, they aren’t liable.

• This week, after rulings from lower courts, the State Supreme Court heard arguments. Whatever the court decides, it could have major ramifications: [...]

• Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and NYU school of medicine announced yesterday that they’re releasing new open source AI research models and data as a part of FastMRI. FastMRI is a new collaborative research project by Facebook and NYU School of medicine, that was announced back in August this year.

• FastMRI makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make the (MRI) scans up to 10 times faster. By releasing these new AI models and the MRI data, the FastMRI team aims to help improve diagnostic imaging technology, which in turn can increase patients’ access to more powerful and life-saving technology. The latest release explores new AI models, and the first large-scale MRI data set for reconstructing MRI scans.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “This latest discovery is one more rock on top of a mountain of evidence that the Trump administration is trying to rig the Census to pursue their radical, white supremacist agenda. We will fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. Immigrants founded this country, and we will be here long after Donald Trump is President.”

• The New York Immigration Coalition filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York in conjunction with the ACLU and four other immigrant rights groups against the administration’s attempt to target immigrant communities, challenging the addition of the citizenship question by adding an intentional discrimination claim. The lawsuit argues that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census violates the Constitution and reverses seven decades of precedent without a factual basis.

• “This ban is illegal, will put people’s lives in danger and raises the alarm about President Trump’s disregard for separation of powers,” said Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, which along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Center for Constitutional Rights had challenged the president. “There is no justifiable reason to flatly deny people the right to apply for asylum, and we cannot send them back to danger based on the manner of their entry.”

• In October, two Black grandparents were gunned down by a white supremacist in a Kroger supermarket in Louisville, Kentucky, sending shock waves through the Black community. The shooter was recorded on surveillance video trying to get into a predominately Black church just before the killing.

• Michelle Randolph, who teaches fourth grade in a school with a majority of Black and immigrant students in Jefferson County, Kentucky, lives in the neighborhood and shops at the Kroger that was targeted. Randolph helped organize the over 5,000 Kentucky educators who shut down schools in 30 counties and rallied with students, parents and unionists on the state Capitol for education funding.

• It’s just another one of those amazing coincidences and a harbinger of things to come in the United States. It was the news that Democracy’s greatest champion in Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a Trump wannabe, was presiding over a parliament last June that was drafting anti-immigrant legislation.

• The parliament’s efforts were preceded by the Hungarian parliamentary election, that took place on April 8, 2018. During that election, Mr. Orban ignored the problems in Hungary, such as corruption scandals, low wages, or the depressing state of health care. His campaign was focused exclusively on keeping immigrants out of Hungary. The choice, he said when campaigning, was (a) a national government over which he would preside, or (b) a government formed by George Soros.

• The legislation that was drafted, following the election, was aimed at immigrants seeking asylum, and criminalized the activities of anyone giving them assistance. It was called the “Stop Soros Bill.”

• Mr. Soros is the American-Hungarian billionaire who has had a large presence in Hungary. The government was, however, accusing him of encouraging refugees to go to Hungary. According to Mr. Orban’s acolytes, NGOs financed by Mr. Soros operate as “a network to facilitate illegal migration.” In mid-June the Hungarian parliament passed the Stop Soros legislation.

• The bill creates a crime called “promoting and supporting illegal migration.” It bans organization and individuals from giving any help to undocumented immigrants. It is drafted in such a way that, as simple an act as providing food or shelter to an immigrant, would be a violation of the law.

• As legal experts and human rights advocates overnight and Monday morning continued to denounce the tear gassing of children and other asylum seekers by U.S. forces at the Mexico border on Sunday, Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among Democratic lawmakers who slammed the Trump administration for its treatment of refugees as she issued a reminder that vulnerable people fleeing violence and persecution have the right, codified by domestic and international law, to apply for asylum protection.

• Amid widespread outrage and condemnation over the tear gassing of mothers, their children, and other asylum seekers and migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday, Ronald Colburn, president of the Border Patrol Foundation and former national deputy chief of the CBP, appeared on Fox & Friends Monday morning and claimed the gas—which reports said led to children “screaming and coughing in the mayhem” that resulted from it—was really just a “natural” product and “you actually could put it on your nachos and eat it.”

• [...]

• Actually BOTH tear gas and pepper spray were fired at migrants. I’ve been in a tear gas chamber for training purposes and know its effects. Either way, it’s unconscionable.

• Attorney General Sessions proved how dangerous the nation’s top prosecutor can be to criminal justice reform. In his 636 days in office, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions secured a legacy that has been described as “unprecedented” and “dark.” But Sessions’ unwavering actions against criminal justice reform may also earn another descriptor for his time in office: successful. Whether it’s civil asset forfeiture, sentencing, or police accountability, Jeff Sessions has reversed or hamstrung Obama-era policies at the Justice Department that sought to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

• In July of 2017, Sessions restored the federal government’s full use of civil asset forfeiture, which allows state agents to seize property even if someone hasn’t been accused, much less convicted of a crime. Sessions revived the “federal adoption” loophole, reformed by former Attorney General Eric Holder, which allows local law enforcement agencies to circumvent more restrictive state forfeiture laws by partnering with the federal government.

• In doing so, Sessions ignored the ways in which asset forfeiture has created a policing-for-profit paradox for police departments, which are always seeking more funding. In one of his speeches on the matter, Sessions insisted, “We need to send [a] clear message that crime does not pay.” But, as has been documented, poorly regulated asset forfeiture policies ensure that crime does pay — it pays law enforcement — which, as civil liberties organizations have proved, can be unconstitutional.

• In the latest episode of his new Netflix show “Patriot Act,” comedian Hasan Minhaj explains the different branches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and tries to make sense of Stephen Miller, the mastermind behind the administration’s immigration policies.

• Beginning with an explanation of how immigration was once handled by the Department of Labor, Minhaj explores how the U.S. “went from, ‘Immigrants are coming to work,’ to ‘Immigrants are coming to kill you’ ” in the post 9/11 years, an approach that has been consistent (and consistently heinous) throughout the George W. Bush and Barack Obama tenures.

• In a quarter of the world’s countries, no laws exist protecting women and girls from what a new United Nations study says is the crime most likely to kill them: violence perpetrated by their intimate partners and family members.

• Marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime on Sunday released a global study on homicide, focusing on gender-related killings, and revealed that out of 87,000 women who were murdered around the world in 2017, 58 percent of them were killed by family members or partners.

• U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called violence against women “a moral affront to all women and girls, a mark of shame on all our societies and a major obstacle to inclusive, equitable, and sustainable development.”

• On the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, U.S. Border Patrol fired tear gas on Central American migrants at the Mexican border. Many of the victims were children, brought with their parents who are fleeing violence in their home countries. The Trump administration views, or at least claims to view, these families as a threat to American safety. However, as a new report from The Washington Post shows, perhaps they should be looking closer to home.

• “Over the past decade,” the Post writes, “attackers motivated by right-wing political ideologies have committed dozens of shootings, bombings and other acts of violence, far more than any other category of domestic extremist.”

• The trend has only gotten worse. As the Post observes, “while the data show a decades-long drop-off in violence by left-wing groups, violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency—and has surged since President Trump took office.”

• Anti-Semitic attacks in particular have surged, with a 17 percent rise in such hate crimes in 2017, as the FBI found in Hate Crime Statistics 2017, a report released this month.

• U.S. border patrol officers fired tear gas into a crowd of desperate Central American asylum-seekers Sunday in Tijuana, Mexico as some tried to push their way through the heavily militarized border with the United States. Mothers and small children were left gagging and screaming as the tear gas spread. The migrants are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, and are fleeing widespread violence, poverty and mass unemployment. We speak with Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach.

• Mississippi voters will head to the polls Tuesday in the state’s hotly contested runoff senate election, as incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith faces off against Democrat Mike Espy. In a state that Donald Trump won by 20 percentage points two years ago, Espy is attempting to become Mississippi’s first African-American senator since Reconstruction. His opponent, incumbent Sen. Hyde-Smith, attended and graduated from an all-white segregationist high school and recently posed for photos with a Confederate Army cap and other Confederate artifacts. Earlier this month, a viral video showed Hyde-Smith praising a campaign supporter, saying, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Mississippi was once considered the lynching capital of the United States. We speak with Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach. He recently traveled to Mississippi to get out the vote.

• When life and liberty are on the line, law enforcement lab techs are there to turn hard science into a roulette wheel. Once you get past the fact that a lot of forensic investigative techniques are little more than junk science, you run directly into the failures of the humans staffing forensic/drug testing labs.

• In the state of Massachusetts alone, more than 30,000 cases are in the process of being tossed due to lab tech misconduct. One lab tech faked most of her work, speeding through her workload by faking tests and test results. Another used the drug lab as her own personal drug stash, using whatever substances she wanted from incoming evidence and replacing it with filler.

• Forensic science is plagued with incompetence and overconfidence, which is an incredibly bad combination when people’s freedom is on the line. Only in recent years has the DOJ instructed forensic experts to stop overstating the certainty of their findings. But that hardly fixes the problem. Outside debunkings have led to zero changes in law enforcement forensic work — a fact so disheartening a judge very publicly resigned from a committee seeking to fix these problems when it became apparent the committee wasn’t actually supposed to fix anything.

• There are at least six million Syrian refugees who have fled the war-torn country since 2011. Millions are in countries, where they fled, waiting in camps for a chance to sail to freedom. They yearn for an opportunity to rebuild their lives in Europe, even as the rise of virulent strains of right-wing politics threaten their ability to seek asylum.

• Ryan Harvey, Kareem Shimara, and Shireen Lilith call attention to the plight of Middle Eastern refugees, especially Syrians, with their protest song, “Thin Blue Border.”

• The song refers to the “coast guard on the horizon” taking bribes. “Revolutionaries and widows, orphans, survivors, and heroes” will have to get past them to continue their harrowing journey.

• When Mayela Sanchez Miles finally fled her abusive marriage toward the end of 2016, she pinned all her hopes on filing for a green card through the Violence Against Women Act. But she had to wait over 16 months for her paperwork to process. Unable to work legally, she was trapped in a sort of immigration limbo dependent on friends and her local Houston church.

• “It was so hard,” said Miles, swallowing tears. “Breaking from him, standing alone with my pain, my trauma, my four children, not able to work. I thought we would be on the street.”

• Form I-360 is a green card petition that immigrants who are on a path to receiving an Immediate Relative Immigrant Visa can use under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). If they begin experiencing intimate partner violence, VAWA allows them to continue on that path without being forced to stay with the abuser.

• According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the processing time for this petition is 16 to 20.5 months, up from an average of 4.8 months two years ago.

• Suzanne Tomatore, an attorney at the New York City Bar Justice Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, called this timeline “insane.”

• When a crowd is exposed to tear gas, an aerosol containing the chemical agent 2-chlorobenzaldene malononitrile (CS), nasal passages begin to run, eyes water uncontrollably and breathing grows short and painful. Those directly exposed can experience vomiting or diarrhea. Effects take hold within 30 seconds, and the symptoms can last up to 10 minutes, even after the air has cleared or the afflicted have managed to scramble to safety.

• For these reasons, nearly every nation in the world banned the compound’s use in warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Yet despite ratifying these agreements, the United States continues to utilize tear gas for domestic riot control. Police shot dozens of canisters at protesters over several days in Ferguson, Mo., and now U.S. Border Patrol agents have fired upon Central American migrants and their toddlers in Tijuana, Mexico, seeking asylum in the United States—an act of aggression that almost certainly violates international law.

• Rage and horror fatigue from seeing the spectacle of U.S. thugs of the state use chemical weapons against poor, brown, terrified, exhausted people, many of them children, seeking to escape nightmarish political conditions that we often helped create. The atrocity came after US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents closed down San Ysidro Port of Entry between Tijuana and California, stranding hundreds of thousands of travelers and deliberately slowing the processing of entirely legal asylum cases by already distraught people; cursed with one more hardship, about 30 frustrated migrants tried to take down the fence, and a few others threw stones. Once again, they were victims of mindless, cruel incompetence by those in power, who have known for weeks the migrants were coming. If they were normal, sentient humans, they could have sent tents or buses or medical workers or case managers. Because they’re not, they sent tear gas.

• [...]

• As appalling as the vile actions – there was no more reason to close the crossing than there was to lock kids in cages – are the viler reactions. Citing the handful of futile stones tossed, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the migrants “sought to harm CBP personnel by throwing projectiles at them.” Dismissing outrage at attacking women and children with tear gas, the racist morons at Fox blathered no worry – it’s natural and you can put it on tacos – while resident Fascist Tomi Lahren declared the sight “the highlight” of her weekend. Likewise rejecting criticism, the CBP’s head henchman said gassing people “prevented a dangerous situation from getting worse.” And Liar-In-Chief Trump – “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” – said it didn’t happen, and besides, these were “stone-cold criminals.” In Nazi Germany, it’s said, a third of the people killed another third, while a third watched. Speak up. And seriously, fuck these people and what they’re doing to our country.

• I WANT to begin by naming the region I am writing about as America, I don’t mean the United States of America — I mean America, the continent.

• For us in Latin America, America is one continent, not a single country. As Eduardo Galeano writes in his book Open Veins of Latin America, “We even lost the right to call ourselves Americans.”

• The reason to talk about the continent of America, not the country of the United States of America, is that many people continue to live with the illusion that a simple change of elected leadership in a Latin American country can bring a fundamental change for the region. I would argue that this is not possible.

• When we focus only on who is elected into power in one country or another in America, there can be a tendency to ignore the ruling class forces that hinder the possibilities for social change and the working class forces that fight for liberation.

• The U.S. military has quietly said it wants 70 unmanned self-driving supply trucks by 2020. And seeing as $21 trillion has gone unaccounted for 21 trillion has gone unaccounted at the Pentagon over the past 20 years, when the Pentagon wants something, it tends to get that something.

• Of course supply trucks in and of themselves don’t sound so bad. Even if the self-driving trucks run over some poor unsuspecting saps, that will still be the least destruction our military has ever manifested. But because I’ve read a thing or two about our military, I’ll assume that by “supply trucks,” they mean “ruthless killing machines.” In fact, it’s now clear the entire “Department of Defense” is just a rebranding of “Department of Ruthless Killing Machines.”

• And even if they do mean simple supply trucks, once those unmanned trucks are commuting themselves around the Middle East like a cross between “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Platoon,” how long do you think it will be until some a-hole general blurts, “Why don’t we put a missile or two on those things?”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Putting up an antenna is easy, but before you buy one you’ll need to figure out what channels are available where you live, how strong the signals are likely to be, and what direction they’re coming from. See TechHive’s guide to choosing an antenna to figure all that out.

• It is commonly assumed that Wi-Fi connections offer faster downloading speed than mobile networks, but that isn’t necessarily true — as in some countries, using Wi-Fi for downloading can be a pain.

• OpenSignal recently conducted a study to analyze downloading speed in different countries. It found that mobile data is faster than Wi-Fi in 33 countries, including several African, European, Latin American and Middle Eastern nations.

• Fight for the Future announced Wednesday that on Nov. 29, supporters of restoring nationwide net neutrality rules—which the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rolled back last year—are planning “an epic, final protest to pressure lawmakers before a crucial deadline to save the internet.”

• I’m happy to tell that the booklet HTTP/3 Explained is now ready for the world. It is entirely free and open and is available in several different formats to fit your reading habits. (It is not available on dead trees.)

• The book describes what HTTP/3 and its underlying transport protocol QUIC are, why they exist, what features they have and how they work. The book is meant to be readable and understandable for most people with a rudimentary level of network knowledge or better.

• These protocols are not done yet, there aren’t even any implementation of these protocols in the main browsers yet! The book will be updated and extended along the way when things change, implementations mature and the protocols settle.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Certainly, the move in judgment of 25 July 2018 will disappoint those who pushed for the removal of substantive patent law from the text of Regulation 1257/2012 implementing enhanced cooperation in the area of the creation of unitary patent protection, hoping that this trick would prevent the CJEU from interpreting substantive patent law. From this perspective, the recent Teva v. Gilead decision may be interpreted as a word of warning for Unified Patent Court (“UPC”) seafarers.

• Four years is a long time in politics but not a particularly long time in the land of government reports. Just under four years ago the UK Intellectual Property Office commissioned research to address the lack of existing data on design infringement. The results of that research were published last week.

• Designs are an important part of the UK economy. In 2015, the UK design economy was worth 6% of the nation’s total economy. It was therefore considered a worthwhile exercise to review the current designs regime and identify opportunities for improvement.

Trademarks

• You will recall that several years back there was a very stupid trademark dispute between Notch, maker of MineCraft, and Bethesda, which owns the rights to the Elder Scrolls franchise. At issue was Notch’s new game Scrolls (which has since been retitled Caller’s Bane) with Bethesda crying trademark infringement, claiming it owned the trademark rights to basically everything “scrolls.” Disappointingly, the whole thing ended in a settlement with Notch getting to keep his game’s name but not getting his trademark.

• While in that case one could at least lend Bethesda the acknowledgement that Elder Scrolls games are very much still active in the marketplace and haven’t become simply methods for retro enjoyment, the same cannot be said of Square’s ownership of the Conflict series. And, yet, Square has decided to oppose the trademark application of an indie developer in Malta for its title Conflict Of Nations: World War 3.

Copyrights

• With every blog post or update I write, I try to illustrate why today is decisive in the negotiations for the copyright reform. The legislative process may seem neverending and repetitive – indeed, the same criticisms of articles 11 and 13 hold today, as they did a year ago – but fact is that we are nearing the end. Every meeting is more decisive than the last.

• Tonight the European Parliament and Council negotiators enter the third intransparent, closed-door trilogue meeting. On the draft agenda today you will find some of the most controversial articles, including article 11 on the link tax and article 13 on upload filters. A few weeks ago we laid out where individual member state governments stand on these issues. As they are represented in the negotiations by the Austrian Council Presidency, we will see tonight whether they have softened or hardened their approach.

• As we’ve been talking about for some time, Australia is set to amend its copyright laws to expand what were site-blocking provisions into search-blocking ones. It’s an odd bit of mission creep, as the copyright industries in Australia have at once praised site-blocking as being very effective at curbing piracy while also insisting that search-blocking needs to be done to curb piracy. Despite this, the amendment appears to have broad government support, with the exception of a few detractors. The Australian government is still taking comments about the proposed changes and Google has decided to wade in. As is typical with Google, the arguments it makes are nuanced and careful, whether you agree with them or not.

• Online games have finally found their way into the video game preservation exemption to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This is a small expansion of user protections against an overbroad law. While the expansion is limited to particular users, it is nonetheless a small victory that will allow the preservation of video game history to develop further. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, assisted by the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at Berkeley Law, championed this year’s effort.

• Over the past decade the number and revenue of online games have reached new heights in the video game industry. From the success of popular titles like League of Legends and Fortnite, there does not appear to be any indication that the online gaming community will stagnate soon. The success of games has also encouraged scholars to research the potential social and behavioral impacts on the people who play them. From analyzing teamwork for collaborative in-game missions to cyber-bullying and romantic relationships, online games of the past and present can be fertile ground for research, furthering our understanding of how the digital era shapes social interactions. Sadly, many games eventually become discontinued, unplayable, and forgotten. For many games, no one, including researchers, can play or legally access them once game developers pull the plug.

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