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● 01.16.17

● Links 16/1/2017: Linux 4.10 RC4, Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ KDE Edition Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 7:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ Turn an old laptop into a Chromebook-Linux hybrid

• Common scenario: You buy a new laptop, thinking you’ll sell, donate or hand down the old one… but it never happens. Maybe you don’t want to deal with the hassles of Craigslist or Ebay, not to mention wiping all your data, reinstalling Windows and so on.

• Whatever the case, now it’s just taking up space. But it doesn’t have to: You can give that old laptop new life.

• With Linux, right? Wrong! I mean, yes, you could install Linux, which has always been the go-to option, but not everybody needs or wants the complexity of that operating system. For some, Chromium might be the better choice.

• Chromium is the OS that’s at the heart of Chromebooks — those fast-booting, cloud-powered devices that are so popular these days. Think about it: For whatever reason, no one buys Linux laptops. They buy Chromebooks.

• If you like the idea of giving your old system a Chromebook-like lease on life, good news: It’s fast, free and easy. And it’s not even permanent unless you want it to be.

=> ↺ When Peer Pressure Nukes Linux for Windows

• Several months ago, my 16-year-old grandson decided he wanted a powerful computer for gaming. I showed him Steam and some other stuff in Linux and he thought that looked good, so I started accumulating parts. If it was substantially more powerful than anything I have for myself, it was on the list. Sorry I don’t have the details list nearby, but it had a motherboard with a name I had heard, a fairly fast AMD processor with six cores, maxed out RAM, 1TB hard drive, video that took up two slots and had two fans, power supply you could use for welding, and a pair of 22″ monitors.

• I installed Mint 17.3 KDE in less than half an hour (the usual), including separate swap and home partitions (it’s a neurotic thing), setting wallpaper and the like, and doing whatever came to mind at the time. It ran flawlessly and I was happy, so I played with it a while. I really liked it. If I could think of a use, I’d build one for myself.

=> ↺ That Other Operating System Continues Its Decline

• The big winner is the Linux kernel. The vociferous opponents of GNU/Linux who haunt this blog can’t have it both ways. If GNU/Linux is not “GNU” and is Linux, then Android/Linux can’t be just Android. It’s Linux underneath.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ FLOSS Weekly 417: OpenHMD

• Fredrik Hultin is the Co-founder of the OpenHMD project (together with Jakob Bornecrantz). OpenHMD aims to provide a Free and Open Source API and drivers for immersive technology, such as head-mounted displays with built-in head tracking. The project’s aim is to implement support for as many devices as possible in a portable, cross-platform package.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 4.10-rc4

• Things are still looking fairly normal, and this is the usual weekly Sunday rc release. We’re up to rc4, and people are clearly starting to find the regressions. Good, good.

• it’s a slightly more random collection of fixes from last week: the bulk of it is still drivers (gpu, net, sound, usb stand out), and there’s the usual architecture work (but mostly just x86 this time around), but there’s a fair amount of fixes all over. Filesystems (xfs, btrfs, some core vfs), tooling (mostly perf), core mm, networking etc etc.

• This is also the point where I start hoping that the rc’s start shrinking. We’ll see how the tiny rc2 affects things – this may technically be rc4, but with that one almost dead week, it feels like rc3. But I’m crossing my fingers that we’ll have less next week.

• Regardless, go out and test. This was not a huge merge window, I think we’re in pretty good shape for people to dive in..

• Linus

=> ↺ Linux 4.10-rc4 Kernel Released

• The fourth weekly test release of the Linux 4.10 kernel is now available.

• For those not up to speed on Linux 4.10, see our Linux 4.10 feature overview. There is a lot of great work included like Nouveau atomic mode-setting, Nouveau boost support, AMD Zen/Ryzen work, new ARM board/platform support, EXT4/XFS DAX iomap support, ATA command priority support, Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0, and much more.

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds Announces Fourth Linux 4.10 Kernel Release Candidate, Get It Now

• It’s Sunday evening, again, and Linus Torvalds just made his weekly announcement to inform the community about the immediate availability for download of a new Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel.

• One more week has passed in our lives, but the development of the Linux kernel never stops, and we’re now seeing the release of fourth RC (Release Candidate) build of Linux kernel 4.10, which appears to be fairly normal, yet again, bringing only a collection of assorted bug fixes and improvements from last week.

=> ↺ Linux 4.9.4

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.9.4 kernel.

• All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

=> ↺ Linux 4.4.43

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 4.9.4 Released with Various ARM/ARM64 and Networking Improvements

• Only three days after announcing the release of the third maintenance update to the Linux 4.9 kernel series, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman is now informing us about the availability of Linux kernel 4.9.4.

• If you were afraid that your patch did not land in Linux 4.9, which is currently the most advanced stable kernel branch available for GNU/Linux distributions, or if you thought that your device hasn’t yet received the right drivers, think again, because Linux kernel 4.9.4 is full of goodies. Yes, again, but this time the patch is a little smaller and fixes a total of 59 files, with 507 insertions and 205 deletions.

=> ↺ A Yet-To-Be-Merged Kernel Patch May Boost Kabylake Graphics In Some Cases

=> ↺ A Look At Where The P-State Linux Driver Does Bad Against CPUFreq, Clear Linux Tests

• I’m still running more benchmarks in investigating the Core i5 7600K Linux performance and with even its graphics performance being slower than Skylake. I fired up Clear Linux on this Kaby Lake system this weekend and it’s indeed faster than Ubuntu, though there still is some sort of fundamental issue at play with these new CPUs on Linux. But what is clear is that there are cases where the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver does perform very poorly over the mature, generic CPUFreq scaling driver.

=> ↺ The Linux Test Project has been released

• the Linux Test Project test suite stable release for January 2017 has been released.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ A Look At The Long TODO List Of Nouveau: Reclocking, More OpenGL, Video Accel

• With the recent news over the Nouveau Maxwell performance improvements and reaching OpenGL 4.3, among other milestones for this community-driven, open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, you may be wondering what else is on the road-map for this driver..

=> ↺ RadeonSI Nearly Clearing The OpenGL 4.5 Conformance Test Suite

• While RadeonSI in Mesa Git exposes OpenGL 4.5, it hasn’t yet formally passed the OpenGL 4.5 Conformance Test Suite (CTS) for certifying the OpenGL driver. But now it looks like this open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver has about all OpenGL CTS failures addressed.

=> ↺ Mesa Git Delivering Faster Intel Vulkan Performance, Closer To OpenGL Driver Speed

• In addition to Nouveau Gallium3D seeing a performance boost last week, last week Intel’s Vulkan driver also seen some interesting work around HiZ. Here are some fresh benchmarks showing recent performance improvements to the Intel “ANV” Mesa Vulkan driver plus some fresh OpenGL benchmarks too.

=> ↺ Mesa 17.0 Git Lands OpenGL 4.5 Support For Intel Haswell

• As a quick update from this morning’s article about Intel’s Mesa driver getting ready for OpenGL 4.5 on Haswell, that code has now landed.

=> ↺ Faster Raspberry Pi X.Org Desktop Performance With NEON

• Broadcom developer Eric Anholt has begun writing code within the VC4 open-source driver stack to make use of NEON in its acceleration code-paths.

=> ↺ Intel Haswell now supports OpenGL 4.5 with Mesa-git on Linux

• In another push towards Mesa finishing OpenGL for all vendors where possible, Intel Haswell chips now have support for OpenGL 4.5 with Mesa on Linux. It comes as of this commit to the mesa-dev list.

=> ↺ Intel’s Mesa Driver Set To Flip On OpenGL 4.5 For Haswell

• It was just two weeks ago that Intel’s Mesa driver finally crossed the threshold with Haswell for supporting OpenGL 4.0 and then last week OpenGL 4.2 was crossed for this older generation of Intel graphics hardware. Now, it looks like OpenGL 4.5 will be enabled for Haswell with the i965 Mesa driver.

=> ↺ RADV Vulkan Driver Support For Multiple Devices

• Open-source driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted a patch for allowing the open-source Radeon Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) to support multiple devices.

=> ↺ The open source Vulkan driver for AMD ‘radv’ now supports using multiple GPUs

• A commit that just landed in Mesa-git allows for ‘radv’, the open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs to use multiple devices.

• This will likely be useful in future for people who have two (or maybe even more) GPUs to really push their games.

• Support for things like that on Linux should improve as Vulkan evolves and is adopted by more developers. Just how useful this will end up being is the real question.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ A Look At The Huge Performance Boosts With Nouveau Mesa 17.0-devel On Maxwell

• Landing this week in Mesa 17.0-devel Git was OpenGL 4.3 for NVC0 Maxwell and a big performance boost as well for these GeForce GTX 750 / 900 series NVIDIA “Maxwell” graphics processors. Here are some before/after benchmarks of the performance improvements, which the patch cited as “1.5~3.5x better”, when testing a GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 980.

=> ↺ Fresh Tests Of Intel Beignet OpenCL

• When firing up Intel’s Beignet OpenCL implementation on Clear Linux this weekend, I was surprised to see it was happily chugging along with many of our different CL benchmarks.

Applications

=> ↺ Top Software

• The number of open source applications and tools that are available on today’s popular operating systems is simply mind-blowing. They come in all forms. Small scripts and console tools that can be easily integrated into large projects, feature-rich applications that offer everything a complete solution, well designed tools, games that encourage real participation, and eye catching candy.

• Open source software holds many compelling advantages over proprietary software. Open source improves the quality of the code, keeps costs down, encourages innovation and collaboration, combined with superior security, freedom, flexibility, interoperability, business agility, and much more.

=> ↺ Kodi 17.0 “Krypton” Release Candidate 3 Updates Estuary Skin, Fixes More Bugs

• The wait is almost over, and you’ll finally be able to enjoy a much modern, improved, and full of new technologies Kodi media center on your PC or HTPC device, be it an Apple TV or Raspberry Pi.

• Martijn Kaijser announced the third Release Candidate (RC) development version for the Kodi 17.0 “Krypton” media center, and it looks to us like these pre-releases are getting smaller by the day, the RC3 build including only seven changes listed on the release notes attached to the official announcement.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Vivaldi 1.7 to Introduce Mappable Keyboard Shortcuts for the Screenshot Feature

• Work on the Vivaldi 1.7 web browser continues, and Softpedia was recently informed by Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard about two new snapshots published at the end of last week, which bring various improvements to the screenshot tool.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How To Use Google Translate From Commandline In Linux

=> ↺ How to debug C programs in Linux using gdb

=> ↺ Use Docker remotely on Atomic Host

=> ↺ Accessing Bingo Sites through Linux

=> ↺ Fedora – linux and shell.

=> ↺ Getting started with shell scripting

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine-Staging 2.0-RC5 Improves Compatibility For Origin, GOG Galaxy & More

• Wine-Staging 2.0-RC5 was released on Sunday as the newest version of this experimental/testing Wine build. This time around there are some exciting new patches.

• On top of re-basing off Friday’s Wine 2.0-rc5 release and continuing to maintain quite a number of patches that haven’t yet made their way into mainline Wine, a few more patches were added. Upstream Wine is currently under a code freeze until the 2.0 release later this month but that doesn’t stop the Wine-Staging crew.

=> ↺ Release 2.0-rc5

• Wine Staging 2.0-rc5 improves the compatibility of various applications that require at least Windows Vista or Windows 7. This includes Origin, Uplay, GOG Galaxy and many more. Several bugs were fixed in the PE loader to support loading of packed executables with truncated headers and/or on-the-fly section decompression. If you are using the 64 bit version of Wine, you may also benefit from the memory manager improvements, which allow applications to reserve/allocate more than 32 GB of virtual memory. The memory allocations are now only constrained by resource limitations of the hardware / the operating system and no longer by an artificial design limit in Wine.

=> ↺ Wine Staging 2.0-rc5 released, better support for Origin, GOG Galaxy and more

Games

=> ↺ Building on up in Block’hood, my early thoughts on this cute neighbourhood-building sim

• Block’hood [Steam, Official Site] is a neighbourhood-building sim that’s currently in Early Access. I couldn’t resist grabbing a copy when it released for Linux, so here’s some early thoughts.

=> ↺ Rise to Ruins (previously Retro-Pixel Castles) has a major content update now out

• “InDev 24 The Upgrade Update” is now live and it brings, as the title might suggest plenty of building upgrades for your villages. This makes the progression of your village feeling a little more worthwhile, as you upgrade them in stages.

=> ↺ Evolvation, an Unreal Engine online space shooter is now on Linux

• It has the same problem a lot of online indie games have: no one is playing it. The all-time peak users online was 112 people. In the last 24 hours a pitiful 5 people was the peak users online which shows how dead it is.

• As for other issues: When it asked me to pick a control configuration, I clicked an option and the screen just wouldn’t go away. I had to restart the game to get rid of it. It also gave me a black screen when I tried to do the AI tutorial mission.

=> ↺ Phoning Home, the story of two robots trying to survive will come to Linux

• Your robot actually has similarities to WALL-E, not that it’s a bad thing (it looks cool!). Anyway, feast your eyes on this trailer and tell me you’re not excited!

=> ↺ Looks like FPS game ‘Squad’ might be coming to Linux soon

• The game uses Unreal Engine and we know already how iffy their Linux support actually is. Hopefully they won’t come across too many troubles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Calligra 3.0 released

• A new wonderful era for the Calligra Suite has begun with the release of version 3.0.

• We have chosen to cut back on the number of applications. Krita has left us to be independent and although it was emotional it was also done with complete support from both sides. We are saying goodbye to Author, which never differentiated itself from Words. We also removed Brainstorm the purpose of which will be better fitted by a new application (nothing planned from our side). Flow and Stage has gone in this release but we intend to bring them back in the future.

=> ↺ Calligra 3.0 Officially Announced, Drops Some Apps, Ports To KF5/Qt5

• This six-year-old split from KOffice is finally living in the KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5 world with the Calligra 3.0 release. Besides the porting to KF5/Qt5, Calligra 3.0 does away with Krita since it’s moved onto releasing as its own project, the Author e-book application was dropped since it never became much different from Words, and the Brainstorm note-taking app was droped. The Flow flowchart software and Stage presentation program were also dropped from Calligra 3.0 but they are expected to be brought back in the future, such as when fully-ported to KF5/Qt5.

=> ↺ Kirigami 2.0 Released, KDE’s Framework for Convergent Mobile and Desktop UIs

• After being in development for the past six months, KDE’s Kirigami 2.0 open-source UI (User Interface) framework has been officially released in its final, production-ready state.

• If memory recalls, the first public release of the Kirigami UI framework saw the light of day at the beginning of August last year, allowing early adopters to test drive KDE’s brand-new tool for creating beautiful, convergent user interfaces written in Qt for both mobile and desktop applications.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ My next EP will be released as a corrupted GPT image

• Endless OS is distributed as a compressed disk image, so you just write it to disk to install it. On first boot, it resizes itself to fill the whole disk. So, to “install” it to a file we decompress the image file, then extend it to the desired length. When booting, in principle we want to loopback-mount the image file and treat that as the root device. But there’s a problem: NTFS-3G, the most mature NTFS implementation for Linux, runs in userspace using FUSE. There are some practical problems arranging for the userspace processes to survive the transition out of the initramfs, but the bigger problem is that accessing a loopback-mounted image on an NTFS partition is slow, presumably because every disk access has an extra round-trip to userspace and back. Is there some way we can avoid this performance penalty?

=> ↺ This week in GTK+ – 31

• In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 52 commits, with 10254 lines added and 9466 lines removed.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ 4MParted 21 Disk Partitioning Live CD Gets Beta Release, Based on GParted 0.26.1

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki is informing Softpedia today about the Beta release of his upcoming 4MParted 21.0 distribution, a small Live CD that you can use to partition disk drives without having to install any software application or script.

=> ↺ Q4OS 1.8.2, Orion

• New version 1.8.2 is based on the the most recent release of stable Debian Jessie 8.7, important security patches have been applied and core system packages have been updated. Q4OS Update manager has been rewritten from scratch to provide a robust and reliable tool for safe system upgrades. Other Q4OS specific fixes and under the hood improvements are delivered as usual. All the updates are immediately available for existing Q4OS users from the regular Q4OS repositories.

• Most attention is now focused on the development of the testing Q4OS ‘Scorpion’ version 2.2, based on Debian 9 Stretch. Q4OS 2.2 Scorpion continues to be under development so far, and it will stay as long as Debian Stretch will be testing, the release date is preliminarily scheduled at about the turn of April and May 2017. Q4OS ‘Scorpion’ will be supported at least five years from the official release date.

=> ↺ NuTyX 8.2.93 released

=> ↺ Linux Top 3: Parted Magic, Quirky and Ultimate Edition

• Parted Magic is a very niche Linux distribution that many users first discover when they’re trying to either re-partition a drive or recover data from an older system. The new Parted Magic 2017_01_08 release is an incremental update that follows the very large 2016_10_18 update that provided 800 updates.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ Ubuntu isn’t the only version of Linux that can run on Windows 10

=> ↺ OpenSUSE Linux lands on Windows 10

=> ↺ How to run openSUSE Leap 42.2 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 on Windows 10

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Security concerns remain as open source usage surges

• The use of open source software in the Asia-Pacific region is on its way up, with more than half of those surveyed in a new study by Red Hat already implementing or embracing the technology.

• At the same time, however, the research suggests that concerns around the security of open source software remains, despite its rising popularity among enterprises, with 56 per cent of respondents viewing open source security as a potential risk if not a major concern.

=> ↺ Aussie IT decision makers focusing on three priorities, survey finds

• A new survey from Forrester Consulting on behalf of Red Hat has revealed IT decision makers in Australia are focusing on three IT and business priorities in the next 12 months, as they look to successfully compete in the ‘age of the customer’.

• The study, Open Source Drives Digital Innovation, researched 455 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers from nine countries in Asia Pacific, including 51 from Australia.

=> ↺ Open source adopted for digital innovation

• The results of a new study about the use of open source in digital innovation in the Asia–Pacific region have been released by Red Hat.

• Research for the ‘Open Source Drives Digital Innovation’ study was carried out by Forrester Consulting and surveyed 455 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers from nine countries.

• It found that around half of the respondents from Australia have either implemented or plan to expand open source.

Finance

=> ↺ The Engineers Gate Manager LP Buys 11,619 Shares of Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

=> ↺ VC Score In Focus for Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ $0.39 EPS Expected For Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) In Quarter

=> ↺ Will The Needle Move For Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Shares This Earnings Season?

=> ↺ Stocks Ride on Analysts Coverage- Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX), Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

=> ↺ Trader Alert: Dana Incorporated (DAN), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), New Residential Investment Corp. (NRZ)

=> ↺ Option Market: Red Hat Inc Risk Hits A Substantially Lowered Level

=> ↺ Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Downgraded by Vetr Inc.

=> ↺ Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings Inc. Has $41,189,000 Stake in Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

Fedora

=> ↺ LXQt Spin Proposed For Fedora 26

• A new spin/flavor has been proposed for Fedora 26, one integrating the LXQt desktop environment.

• For those late to the party, LXQt is the formation of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects and built around the Qt5 tool-kit. Fedora currently has an LXDE spin while this proposed Fedora LXQt would continue to co-exist alongside the existing LXDE version. Christian Dersch who proposed the LXQt spin explained, “LXDE spin will exist until its maintainer will stop it, LXQt is independent from LXDE spin. So nobody is forced to change Also both projects are maintained upstream so there is no reason to drop anything here.”

=> ↺ F26 Self Contained Change: LXQt Spin

=> ↺ Digest of Fedora 25 Reviews

• Fedora 25 has been out for 2 months and it seems like a very solid release, maybe the best in the history of the distro. And feedback from the press and users has also been very positive.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian from 10,000 feet

• Many of you are big fans of S.W.O.T analysis, I am sure of that! Technical competence is our strongest suit, but we have reached a size and sphere of influence which requires an increase in organisation.

• We all love our project and want to make sure Debian still shines in the next decades (and centuries!). One way to secure that goal is to identify elements/events/things which could put that goal at risk. To this end, we’ve organized a short S.W.O.T analysis session at DebConf16. Minutes of the meeting can be found here. I believe it is an interesting read and is useful for Debian old-timers as well as newcomers. It helps to convey a better understanding of the project’s status. For each item, we’ve tried to identify an action.

=> ↺ Debian Outs First Release Candidate of Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” Installer

• Work on the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system is ongoing, and Debian Project’s Cyril Brulebois announced today the availability of the first Release Candidate of the Debian Installer for Stretch.

• A lot of things have been implemented since the eight, and last Alpha development release of the Debian Stretch Installer, but the most important changes outlined in the announcement for the RC1 build are the revert of the switch to merged-/usr as default setting for debootstrap and disablement of Debian Pure Blends support.

=> ↺ Debian Installer Stretch RC 1 release

• The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the first release candidate of the installer for Debian 9 “Stretch”.

=> ↺ Debian Installer Stretch RC 1 Arrives, The /usr Merge Has Been Postponed

• The Debian Installer is getting ready for the 9.0 “Stretch” release.

=> ↺ Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 “Jessie” Live & Installable ISOs Now Available for Download

• We reported the other day that the Debian Project released Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 “Jessie,” which is the seventh maintenance update to the current Debian Stable series of Linux-based computer operating systems.

• As promised, we told you then that installation mediums aren’t yet available for download, nor Live ISO images, which help users install the latest, most up-to-date version of Debian Linux on their PCs or laptops without having download hundreds of updates from the official software repositories.

=> ↺ Debian Project launches updated Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 with bug fixes

• An updated version of Debian, a popular Linux distribution is now available for users to download and install. According to the post on the Debian website by Debian Project, the new version is 8.7. This is the seventh update to the Debian eight distribution, and the update primarily focuses on fixing bugs and security problems. This update also includes some adjustments to fix serious problems present in the previous version.

=> ↺ Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2016

• The number of sponsored hours did not increase but a new silver sponsor is in the process of joining. We are only missing another silver sponsor (or two to four bronze sponsors) to reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position.

=> ↺ APK, images and other stuff.

• Also, I was pleased to see F-droid Verification Server as a sign of F-droid progress on reproducible builds effort – I hope these changes to diffoscope will help them!

Derivatives

=> ↺ Tails 2.10 Will Upgrade to Linux Kernel 4.8 and Tor 0.2.9, Add exFAT Support

• A new stable release of Tails, the beloved anonymous Live CD that helps you stay hidden online when navigating various websites on the Internet, is being prepared.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ MATE 1.16 Desktop Now Available for Ubuntu MATE 16.04, Here’s How to Install It

• The wait is finally over, as the MATE 1.16 desktop environment is now available for those who use the Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system or later versions, such as 16.04.1.

• After thoroughly testing them, Martin Wimpress and his team updated the PPA (Personal Package Archive) containing the MATE desktop packages for Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS, a long-term supported version of the officially recognized Ubuntu flavor built around the lightweight and customizable MATE desktop environment, to version 1.16.

• MATE 1.16.1 is, in fact, the current version of the desktop environment included in said PPA for Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS users, which they can install as we speak by using the installation instructions provided in the next paragraphs, and it looks like it was derived from those prepared for the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” release.

=> ↺ Intel Haswell GPUs Now Support OpenGL 4.2 for Ubuntu Gamers in Padoka/Oibaf PPAs

• Ubuntu gamers relying upon their Intel Haswell graphics card series to play various games that support these GPUs will be happy to learn that the open-source Intel drivers now support OpenGL 4.2.

• Until today, the Intel i965 graphics drivers offered by the well-known Padoka and Oibaf PPAs for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems exposed only OpenGL 4.0 for Intel Haswell GPUs, thus support for some demanding games just wasn’t there.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Ultimate Edition 5.1 Linux OS Is Out, Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Kernel 4.4

• After announcing the release of Ultimate Edition 5.0 Gamers Edition, an Ubuntu-based operating system designed for Linux gamers, last week, TheeMahn is now releasing Ultimate Edition 5.1.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ KDE Edition Beta is available for download now

• A Beta release for Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ KDE is here. There are already versions available featuring other desktop environments, such as Cinnamon, Mate, and Xfce. You’d think that would be enough, but no! Apparently a fourth edition is needed. Some people feel that a KDE version is a waste of resources, but either way, here we are.

• So what is new? The KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment is the star of the show — after all, if you do not want KDE, you wouldn’t choose this version. The shipping Linux kernel is 4.4.0-53, which is surprisingly outdated. Ubuntu-based operating systems are never known for being bleeding-edge, however.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” KDE Gets a Beta Release, Ships with KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS

• After landing on the official download channels a few days ago, the Beta version of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” KDE Edition operating system got today, January 16, 2017, an official announcement.

• The KDE Edition is the last in the new Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” stable series to be published, and it was delayed a little bit because Clement Lefebvre and his team wanted it to ship with latest KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment from the Kubuntu Backports PPA repository.

=> ↺ Linux AIO Ubuntu 16.10 — Ubuntu GNOME, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, and Xubuntu In One ISO

• Linux AIO is a multiboot ISO carrying different flavors of a single Linux distribution and eases you from the pain of keeping different bootable USBs. The latest Linux AIO Ubuntu 16.10 is now available for download in both 64-bit and 32-bit versions. It features various Ubuntu flavors including Ubuntu GNOME, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, and Xubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 Launched

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation this morning announced the Compute Module 3 (CM3) as the successor to their original Compute Module.

• The Raspberry Pi Compute Module remains targeted as a offering for those manufacturing customized products based upon the Raspberry Pi. The Compute Module uses a DDR2 SO-DIMM interface and makes it easy and low-cost to integrate within custom hardware designs.

=> ↺ Giveaway: Win a Linux-friendly Raspberry Pi 3 and Eleduino Aluminum Case with Heatsinks!

• If you have been wanting one, I have good news. We here at BetaNews are giving away the best version — the Raspberry Pi 3. We aren’t stopping there, however, as we are also including a very nice aluminum case — including heatsinks for overclocking. It is the exact Raspberry Pi 3 and case as seen in the video above. In other words, the case has already been installed by yours truly. Want to enter to win? There are multiple ways to enter. Just click the link below!

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi 1 and Zero: Hands on with Manjaro ARM and PiCore Linux

• In the previous two posts I wrote about SUSE Linux and Fedora/Manjaro ARM/Ubuntu MATE for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. The results were mixed, at best.

• This time I’m taking on even more of a challenge because I’m going to be looking at the original Raspberry Pi Model B and B+, and the Raspberry Pi Zero. These models all have much more limited CPU power and memory than the Pi 2 and 3, so it will be interesting to see what can be done with them.

=> ↺ 64-bit Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 ships for $25 to $30

• The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 has arrived with 1GB RAM and the same quad-core -A53 SoC as the RPi 3, available for $30, or $25 without 4GB eMMC.

• Raspberry Pi Trading’s first 64-bit computer-on-module version of their flagship single board computer has finally arrived. Despite the name, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3) is only the second generation of the CM1. Its name syncs up with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B SBC, which uses the same quad-core, 64-bit Broadcom SoC. The CM3 is now shipping in $30 Standard (4GB eMMC) or $25 Lite versions, while the CM1 drops in price to $25.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi’s new computer for industrial applications goes on sale

• The new Raspberry Pi single-board computer is smaller and cheaper than the last, but its makers aren’t expecting the same rush of buyers that previous models have seen.

• The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 will be more of a “slow burn,” than last year’s Raspberry Pi 3, its creator Eben Upton predicted.

• That’s because it’s designed not for school and home use but for industrial applications. To make use of it, buyers will first need to design a product with a slot on the circuit board to accommodate it and that, he said, will take time.

=> ↺ ZeroPhone — An Open Source, Dirt Cheap, Linux-powered Smartphone Is Here

• ZeroPhone is an open source smartphone that’s powered by Raspberry Pi Zero. It runs on Linux and you can make one for yourself using parts worth $50. One can use it to make calls and SMS, run apps, and pentesting. Soon, phone’s crowdfunding is also expected to go live.

Phones

Tizen

=> ↺ Smartphone Game: Subway Surfers is now In the Tizen Store

• Subway Surfers is a popular game that has been available on all major mobile gaming platforms. In the Play Store, the game is listed as having between 500,000,000 – 1,000,000,000 installations, now that’s popular !!!!

Android

=> ↺ Samsung Chromebook Pro, Chromebook Plus will run Android apps

=> ↺ Nokia Android phone release date, price and specifications: Qualcomm denies showing upcoming Nokia 8 Android phone at CES

=> ↺ Three Hottest Android Smartphones That Will Rock 2017

• Android has the largest market share in the smartphone world. Also, Apple’s share is divided between just a few iPhones with obvious differences between them as there are hundreds of Android phones available to buy. As the choice gets even more confusing on which one you’ll consider and that each Android phone manufacturer has multiple Android phone product line up, each with its own unique features and benefits. Here are the top three from our list which we think are the best new Android Phones that were already announced officially early this year.

=> ↺ Best & Affordable Android Smartphones in 2017

=> ↺ Nvidia Shield TV (2015) updated to Android 7.0 Nougat, here is what’s new

=> ↺ Sony XAV-AX100 In-Car Audio System With Android Auto, Apple CarPlay Launched in India

=> ↺ Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X Users Report In-Car Bluetooth Issues on Android 7.1.1 Nougat

=> ↺ ZTE ZMax Pro Android Nougat Beta Program Kicks Off In U.S.

=> ↺ Oppo R6091 with MediaTek MT6750T SoC and Android Marshmallow spotted on GFXBench

• A new Oppo smartphone has been spotted on benchmarking website GFXBench. Listed as Oppo R6091, the device is powered by MediaTek’s MT6750T SoC with octa-core CPU, and sports a 5.5-inch 1080p display.

=> ↺ Huawei Launches P8 Lite 2017 Android With Nougat

• Chinese tech and telecommunications firm Huawei has launched an updated version of its P8 Lite smartphone, the P8 Lite 2017.

• The new version comes with plenty of new bells and whistles to attract Android users.

• “Huawei has refreshed the P8 Lite with a 2017 model that features upgraded hardware in the form of a 5.2-inch Full HD display and a Kirin 655 SoC. The phone also comes with 3GB of RAM and a rather disappointing 16GB internal memory, but there is a microSD card slot,” Android Central‘s Harish Jonnalagadda reports.

=> ↺ Father of Android II: A Hardware Comeback

• The “Father of Android” Andy Rubin is plotting a return to hardware – and he could beat Google’s own Android successor Andromeda to market.

=> ↺ Making Twitter Lists With Android

=> ↺ NVIDIA SHIELD TV (2015) Gets Android Nougat Update

=> ↺ NVIDIA Experience Upgrade 5.0 brings Nougat, Amazon Video, and more to the SHIELD (2015)

=> ↺ Original NVIDIA SHIELD TV Gets Huge 5.0 Update to Android Nougat With Amazon Video, More (Updated)

=> ↺ LG G6 promised to be safer from explosions and overheating

• Smartphones catching on fire was (quite literally) a hot topic in 2016. Samsung was specially in the spotlight after the Galaxy Note 7 managed to collect a good deal of explosion reports, only to later be recalled and removed from the market. How does the industry battle this issue and ensure consumer safety? LG has an idea.

• The Korean manufacturer is promising safer technology starting with the LG G6. The upcoming flagship handset will reduce overheating with the use of heat pipes, which are commonly used in laptops and desktops to quickly disperse heat away from processing units.

=> ↺ ZTE is testing out Android Nougat for its $99 ZMax Pro

• As the company prepares to release Android Nougat for its popular Axon 7 smartphone, ZTE is opening up access to an Android Nougat beta program for one of its less expensive devices, the $99 ZTE ZMax Pro.

• To register for the program, users will need, of course, a ZTE ZMax Pro as well as an account on ZTE’s Z-Community to access the registration page. From there, users will need to enter in information such as their name, email, phone number, and others as well as agreeing to use ZTE’s debugging tool while using the beta.

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy J7 (2017) Spotted On Geekbench Running On Android Nougat

=> ↺ Galaxy S7, S7 Edge Get Android Nougat Update, Rollout For HTC One Stopped

=> ↺ Android 7.0 Nougat tips and tricks for OnePlus 3

=> ↺ Panasonic Toughpad Rugged Tablet Muscles into Android Space

• Panasonic Jan. 12 unveiled a new tablet in its Toughpad series of devices designed for the corporate world. But unlike so many other rugged Panasonic machines, the FZ-A2 doesn’t run Windows. Instead, the device is running on Google’s Android Marshmallow, an operating system not typically associated with rugged PCs and mobile devices designed for rough-and-tumble field-service work. But the FZ-A2 is just the latest model in Panasonic’s expanding line of Android tablets. This new Toughpad includes several corporate-friendly features such as robust security, a hot-swappable battery and plenty of ports that allow connection to a wide range of accessories. The Toughpad is launching at a time when market reports have consistently shown a steady decline in popularity of tablets. But Panasonic says its device is coming along at the right time. This slide show will take a look at the Toughpad to see whether its features will convince field-service workers and corporate hardware buyers that the tablet really is as appealing a buy as Panasonic claims it is. Read on to learn more about Panasonic’s FZ-A2 Toughpad.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Google’s open-source Draco promises to squeeze richer 3D worlds into the web, gaming, and VR

• Google has published a set of open source libraries that should improve the storage and transmission of 3D graphics, which could help deliver more detailed 3D apps.

=> ↺ Why every business should consider an open source point of sale system

• Point of sale (POS) systems have come a long way from the days of simple cash registers that rang up purchases. Today, POS systems can be all-in-one solutions that include payment processing, inventory management, marketing tools, and more. Retailers can receive daily reports on their cash flow and labor costs, often from a mobile device.

• The POS is the lifeblood of a business, and that means you need to choose one carefully. There are a ton of options out there, but if you want to save money, adapt to changing business needs, and keep up with technological advances, you would be wise to consider an open source system. An open source POS, where the source code is exposed for your use, offers significant advantages over a proprietary system that keeps its code rigidly under wraps.

Events

=> ↺ Brian Behlendorf to provide Hyperledger Blockchain Project update at Open Source Leadership Summit 2017

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, has announced the program for Open Source Leadership Summit, scheduled to take place on February 14-16 in Lake Tahoe, CA.

=> ↺ Linux.Conf.Au 2017 Kicks Off In Tasmania: Kernel Fun, Vulkan, GPU-Accelerated JPEG

• Linux.Conf.Au 2017 kicked off a short time ago in Hobart, Tasmania.

=> ↺ Terrible Ideas in Git

• “Git does let you do some extraordinarily powerful things. Powerful, of course, in this talk, is a polite euphemism for stupid,” says Corey Quinn of FutureAdvisor at LinuxCon North America. Who hasn’t experienced at least one moment of feeling like a complete dunce when using Git? Sure, Git is wonderful, everyone uses it, and you can do most of your work with a few basic commands. But it also has mighty powers to make us feel like we have no idea what we’re doing.

=> ↺ Terrible Ideas in Git by Corey Quinn, FutureAdvisor

• In this presentation at LinuxCon, Corey Quinn takes you on a magical tour through the (mis)use of Git to do things its creators never intended.

SaaS/Back End

=> ↺ Target CIO explains how DevOps took root inside the retail giant

=> ↺ They use a lot of Microsoft Mindows i.e. back doors

• When I arrived at Target in mid-2015, I was excited to find an active grassroots DevOps and agile movement in pockets of the technology team. We’d already seen some great results with our digital teams and our enterprise architecture group moving to agile and DevOps. And we had a lot of engineers and team members who were hungry to start working this way.

=> ↺ OpenStack Vendor Mirantis Offers Managed OpenContrail SDN Services

• The open-source OpenContrail Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology is one of the most widely used and deployed networking approaches in the OpenStack cloud market. That’s a fact that is not lost on OpenStack vendor Mirantis, which is why today Mirantis is announcing commercial support for OpenContrail.

=> ↺ Cloud Kindergarten preps students for OpenStack careers

• Cloud Kindergarten began this year to offer students a chance to learn about OpenStack and how to work with it. The students taking part in this program have access to Devstack so that they can learn about different commands and how to best utilize them in practice. Students are also able to create a tenant or network with routers and host an application like WordPress with databases and web servers.

=> ↺ OpenStack private cloud: benefits, challenges and what the future holds

• Many businesses in the UK have turned to private cloud to run mission-critical applications, with 80 percent of senior IT professionals having moved, or planning to move, to the OpenStack private cloud.

• The impact and adoption rates of this “cloud of choice” were explored in a recent study by SUSE, looking into the key benefits of private cloud and the effect its growth is having on UK businesses.

=> ↺ Navigating OpenStack: community, release cycles and events

• Hopefully last week we piqued your interest in a career path in OpenStack. Like any other open source project, if you’re going to use it—professionally or personally—it’s important to understand its community and design/release patterns.

=> ↺ Containers on the CERN cloud

• We have recently made the Container-Engine-as-a-Service (Magnum) available in production at CERN as part of the CERN IT department services for the LHC experiments and other CERN communities. This gives the OpenStack cloud users Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm on demand within the accounting, quota and project permissions structures already implemented for virtual machines.

=> ↺ Effective OpenStack contribution: Seven things to avoid at all cost

• There are numerous blogs and resources for the new and aspiring OpenStack contributor, providing tips, listing what to do. Here are seven things to avoid if you want to be an effective OpenStack contributor.

=> ↺ Tips for contributors, managing containers at CERN, and more OpenStack news

• Are you interested in keeping track of what is happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ GIMP’s Progress In 2016, What’s Ahead For 2017

• GIMP contributor Alexandre Prokoudine published a lengthy blog post today looking back at what were the accomplishments for this open-source image manipulation program in 2016 and some of what’s ahead for the program this year.

• [...]

• Among the work still being done before GIMP 2.10 is released includes cleaning up libgimp, changing linear/gamma-corrected workflows, and 16/32-bit per color channel support, a new color management implementation, and more. GIMP 2.10 will hopefully ship later in 2017.

=> ↺ How To Install The Latest GIMP 2.9 Development Build on Ubuntu

=> ↺ What To Expect In GIMP 2.10

• The GIMP is our favorite image editing app for Linux, and this year it’s set to get even better. The development team behind the hugely popular open-source project this week shared word about ‘what’s next for GIMP‘ in 2017.

=> ↺ AMD HSA IL / BRIG Front-End Still Hoping To Get Into GCC 7

• For many months now there’s been work on an AMD HSA IL front-end for GCC with supporting the BRIG binary form of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language (HSA IL). It’s getting late into GCC 7 development and onwards to its final development stage while this new front-end has yet to be merged.

• Developer Pekka Jääskeläinen has been trying to get in the finishing reviews and changes for getting approval to land this BRIG front-end into the GNU Compiler Collection. It’s a big addition and with GCC 7 soon just focusing on wrong-code fixes, bug fixes, and documentation fixes starting on 19 January, there would be just a few days left to land this new front-end for GCC 7 to avoid having to wait until next year for it to debut in stable with GCC 8.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

=> ↺ Can academic faculty members teach with Wikipedia?

• Since 2010, 29,000 students have completed the Wiki Ed program. They have added 25 million words to Wikipedia, or the equivalent of 85,000 printed pages of content. This is 66% of the total words in the last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. When Wiki Ed students are most active, they are contributing 10% of all the content being added to underdeveloped, academic content areas on Wikipedia.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Can RISC-V – Linux of Microprocessors – Start an Open Hardware Renaissance?

• I share the hope with many people that we will soon have access to modern, capable devices powered by both open hardware AND software. There have been advancements in recent years and more hardware is being opened up, but the microprocessors in our pc’s and other devices are stuck running one of the dominant, closed Instruction Set Architectures. RISC-V aims to fix this.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Rcpp 0.12.9: Next round

• Yesterday afternoon, the nineth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp made it to the CRAN network for GNU R. Windows binaries have by now been generated; and the package was updated in Debian too. This 0.12.9 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, and the 0.12.8 release in November — making it the thirteenth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency.

• Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 906 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by sixthythree packages over the two months since the last release — or about a package a day!

Leftovers

Hardware

=> ↺ MSI X99A RAIDER Plays Fine With Linux

• This shouldn’t be a big surprise though given the Intel X99 chipset is now rather mature and in the past I’ve successfully tested the MSI X99A WORKSTATION and X99S SLI PLUS motherboards on Linux. The X99A RAIDER is lower cost than these other MSI X99 motherboards I’ve tested, which led me in its direction, and then sticking with MSI due to the success with these other boards and MSI being a supporter of Phoronix and encouraging our Linux hardware testing compared to some other vendors.

=> ↺ First 3.5-inch Kaby Lake SBC reaches market

• Axiomtek’s 3.5-inch CAPA500 SBC taps LGA1151-ready CPUs from Intel’s 7th and 6th Generations, and offers PCIe, dual GbE, and optional “ZIO” expansion.

• Axiomtek’s CAPA500 is the first 3.5-inch form-factor SBC that we’ve seen that supports Intel’s latest 7th Generation “Kaby Lake” processors. Kaby Lake is similar enough to the 6th Gen “Skylake” family, sharing 14nm fabrication, Intel Gen 9 Graphics, and other features, to enable the CAPA500 to support both 7th and 6th Gen Core i7/i5/i3 CPUs as long as they use an LGA1151 socket. Advantech’s Kaby Lake based AIMB-205 Mini-ITX board supports the same socket. The CAPA500 ships with an Intel H110 chipset, and a Q170 is optional.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Veterans’ Corner: Contaminated water at Camp Lejeune

• The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) plans to expand disability compensation eligibility for Veterans exposed to contaminated drinking water while assigned to Camp Lejeune.

• Water sources at Camp Lejeune were contaminated from 1953-1987 with industrial solvents that are correlated with certain health conditions. The Secretary of Veterans Affairs has proposed presumptions of service connection for certain conditions associated with these chemicals.

• The drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated with perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride, benzene and other petroleum contaminants from leaking storage tanks. It has been determined that prolonged exposure to these chemicals increases the risk of certain health conditions.

=> ↺ Medicare for All should replace Obamacare: Column

• Even before the election of Donald Trump, Obamacare was in trouble. Premiums on the government exchanges for individual policies are projected to increase an average of 11% next year, nearly four times the increase for employer-based family policies. And some large insurers are pulling out of that market altogether in parts of the country.

• Those who buy insurance on the exchanges often find that even with subsidies, they can’t afford to use the insurance because of mounting deductibles (about $6,000 for individual Bronze plans). It has become clear that health insurance is not the same as health care.

Security

=> ↺ Microsoft slates end to security bulletins in February

=> ↺ this

• Microsoft next month will stop issuing detailed security bulletins, which for nearly 20 years have provided individual users and IT professionals information about vulnerabilities and their patches.

• One patching expert crossed his fingers that Microsoft would make good on its pledge to publish the same information when it switches to a new online database. “I’m on the fence right now,” said Chris Goettl, product manager with patch management vendor Shavlik, of the demise of bulletins. “We’ll have to see [the database] in February before we know how well Microsoft has done [keeping its promise].”

=> ↺ Reflected XSS through AngularJS sandbox bypass causes password exposure of McDonald users

• By abusing an insecure cryptographic storage vulnerability (link) and a reflected server cross-site-scripting vulnerability (link) it is possible to steal and decrypt the password from a McDonald’s user. Besides that, other personal details like the user’s name, address & contact details can be stolen too.

=> ↺ DragonFlyBSD Installer Updated To Support UEFI System Setup

• DragonFlyBSD has been working on its (U)EFI support and with the latest Git code its installer now has basic UEFI support.

=> ↺ Monday’s security updates

=> ↺ What does security and USB-C have in common?

• I’ve decided to create yet another security analogy! You can’t tell, but I’m very excited to do this. One of my long standing complaints about security is there are basically no good analogies that make sense. We always try to talk about auto safety, or food safety, or maybe building security, how about pollution. There’s always some sort of existing real world scenario we try warp and twist in a way so we can tell a security story that makes sense. So far they’ve all failed. The analogy always starts out strong, then something happens that makes everything fall apart. I imagine a big part of this is because security is really new, but it’s also really hard to understand. It’s just not something humans are good at understanding.

• [...]

• The TL;DR is essentially the world of USB-C cables is sort of a modern day wild west. There’s no way to really tell which ones are good and which ones are bad, so there are some people who test the cables. It’s nothing official, they’re basically volunteers doing this in their free time. Their feedback is literally the only real way to decide which cables are good and which are bad. That’s sort of crazy if you think about it.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Taiwan’s President Takes a ‘Walk on the International Stage’ While Trump Baits Beijing

• The U.S. President-elect’s insistence that recognition of the “one China” policy is negotiable has infuriated China

• Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has risked Beijing’s wrath by remarking that her trip to Central America via the U.S. has allowed “Taiwan to walk on the international stage,” just a day after President-elect Donald Trump reiterated that American recognition of the “one China” principle was up for negotiation.

• China and Taiwan effectively split in 1949 following a civil war, though Beijing considers the self-governing island of 25 million a breakaway province with which it must one day be reunified — by force if necessary. Chinese officials are extremely wary of any statement — like Tsai’s — that might give the impression that Taiwan is an independent nation.

=> ↺ Donald Trump warned Beijing will ‘take off the gloves’ if he continues Taiwan agenda, says Chinese state media

• President-elect Donald Trump has been warned he is “playing with fire” and that Beijing will “take off the gloves” if he continues to provoke China’s government by suggesting the “One China” policy could change.

• Mr Trump once again suggested the “One China” principle, in which the US recognises the self-governing island of Taiwan as part of China, is up for negotiation in a recent interview.

• Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, the President-elect said: “Everything is under negotiation, including One China”. China’s foreign ministry responded to the comments by stating that the “One China” principle is the foundation of US ties and is non-negotiable.

=> ↺ Yemen death toll has reached 10,000, UN says

• At least 10,000 people have been killed in the war in Yemen, according to the United Nations, which is urging both sides to come together to end nearly two years of conflict.

• The UN’s humanitarian affairs office said the figure, which is a low estimate, was reached using data from health facilities that have kept track of the victims of the war, which has largely been ignored by the international community.

• The figure does not include those recorded by hospitals and health centres as having died, which is likely to be most of the combatants on both sides of the conflict.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Julian Assange: Scapegoat or villain?

• One of the most banal tropes of Hollywood blockbuster trailers is about one man pitted against an all-powerful enemy, and ultimately prevailing. The figure of the lone ranger battling on with his back to the wall is a popular figure of American pop culture. How ironic, then, that this very figure seems to have become the bane of the country’s righteous political establishment.

• So one man, holed up in the embassy of a tiny Latin American nation, a man who hasn’t seen much sunlight in four years, who is under round-the-clock surveillance, and is subject to arbitrary denial of Internet access, has managed to swing the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world in a direction it ought not to have gone. Or so we are told by influential sections of the Western press.

=> ↺ Media beware, your credibility is all you have: Column

• BuzzFeed News drew a tongue-lashing from President-elect Donald Trump this week for publishing a 35-page bombshell document with inflammatory allegations about his ties to Russia.

• Disclosing the Trump dossier — with its errors and unproven claims — reflects BuzzFeed’s principles “to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” editor Ben Smith said in a memo to his staff. He said it also reflects “how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”

• But many journalists and critics aren’t so sure. “It’s never been acceptable to publish rumor and innuendo,” Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Washington Post. The Atlantic’s David Graham, meanwhile, worried about the ethics of publishing specific claims other reporters had tried to verify but could not.

• Once again, it comes down to credibility — the only real currency journalism has.

=> ↺ Social media, “WikiLeaks” and false news in the 18th century: Thomas Jefferson and the “Mazzei letter”

• In today’s public discourse, nothing is more super-charged than social media, “WikiLeaks” and false news.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Japan criticised after whale slaughtered in Australian waters

• Australia’s federal environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, has criticised Japan following the release of photographs allegedly showing the slaughtering of protected whales inside Australia’s Antarctic whale sanctuary.

• Frydenberg’s statement came as conservationists called for tougher action from Australia.

• “The Australian government is deeply disappointed that Japan has decided to return to the Southern Ocean this summer to undertake so-called ‘scientific’ whaling,” Frydenberg said.

=> ↺ Green MEP calls on police chief to investigate ‘threats’ against anti-drilling campaigners

• Keith Taylor, Green MEP for the South East, has written to Chief Constable Giles York of Sussex Police urging the force to investigate ‘harassment’ claims made by various anti-drilling campaigners.

• In November, Keith visited constituents at the peaceful anti-drilling protection camp in Leith Hill, Dorking before meeting with the Keep Billingshurst Frack Free campaign group. During the meetings, and in subsequent correspondence, campaigners reported escalating levels of ‘stalking’ and ‘harassment’ by individuals they allege to be shareholders of the drilling company, UK Oil and Gas (UKOG).

Finance

=> ↺ A Republican Privatization of Social Security Is a Real Possibility

• Social Security was among the most important issues heading into the 2016 election. Yet, interestingly enough, it wasn’t paid very much attention during the debates, which is surprising when you consider that 61% of current retired beneficiaries count on Social Security to provide at least half of their monthly income.

• The reason Social Security is causing such concern among retirees and working Americans is an expected budgetary shortfall in the program that’s being caused by the retirement of baby boomers from the workforce and the relatively steady lengthening of life expectancies since the mid-1960s. According to the Social Security Board of Trustees, the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance Trust is slated to exhaust its more than $2.8 trillion in spare cash by 2034. Should Congress fail to find a way to generate more revenue, cut benefits, or enact some combination of the two, the Trustees report estimates that a 21% across-the-board benefit cut would be needed to sustain Social Security through the year 2090. For those aforementioned reliant seniors, a 21% cut in their benefits is a terrifying reality.

• During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump offered one simple solution to the American public: that he would leave Social Security alone. Trump opined that it was the duty of congressional leaders to fulfill their promise to retired workers of a steady monthly benefit check.

=> ↺ World’s eight richest men own as much as poorest 50%

• The gap between the super-rich and the poorest half of the global population is starker than previously thought, with just eight men, from Bill Gates to Michael Bloomberg, owning as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, according to an analysis by Oxfam released on Monday.

• Presenting its findings on the dawn of the annual gathering of the global political and business elites in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, Oxfam says the gap between the very rich and poor is far greater than just a year ago. It’s urging leaders to do more than pay lip-service to the problem.

• If not, it warns, public anger against this kind of inequality will continue to grow and lead to more seismic political changes akin to last year’s election of Donald Trump as US president and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.

=> ↺ The Coming Crusade Against Public Education

• Betsy DeVos, whose nomination for secretary of education will be reviewed by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Tuesday, has never taught in a classroom. She’s never worked in a school administration, nor in a state education system, nor has she studied pedagogy. She’s never been to public school, and neither have her children. She has no record on higher education, except as an investor in the student-loan industry, which the Department of Education oversees. As Massachusetts Senator (and HELP Committee member) Elizabeth Warren wrote recently, there is “no precedent” for an education secretary with DeVos’s lack of experience in public education.

=> ↺ Sterling Options Signal More Turmoil as May Speech, Ruling Loom

• A measure of anticipated swings for the pound climbed to the highest in three months before U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech on Brexit plans Tuesday and a court ruling this month on whether the British leader or Parliament carries the power to invoke the exit.

=> ↺ World’s eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%

• The world’s eight richest billionaires control the same wealth between them as the poorest half of the globe’s population, according to a charity warning of an ever-increasing and dangerous concentration of wealth.

• In a report published to coincide with the start of the week-long World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam said it was “beyond grotesque” that a handful of rich men headed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth $426bn (£350bn), equivalent to the wealth of 3.6 billion people.

• The development charity called for a new economic model to reverse an inequality trend that it said helped to explain Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.

=> ↺ [Old] Gates Foundation accused of ‘dangerously skewing’ aid priorities by promoting ‘corporate globalisation’

• They are among the richest people on earth, have won plaudits for their fight to eradicate some of the world’s deadliest and prolific killers, and donated billions to better educate and feed the poorest on the planet.

• Despite this, Bill and Melinda Gates are facing calls for their philanthropic Foundation, through which they have donated billions worldwide, to be subject to an international investigation, according to a controversial new report.

• Far from a “neutral charitable strategy”, the Gates Foundation is about benefiting big business, especially in agriculture and health, through its “ideological commitment to promote neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalisation,” according to the report published by the campaign group Global Justice Now. Its influence is “dangerously skewing” aid priorities, the group says.

• [...]

• The report is critical of the close working relations between the Foundation and major international pharmaceutical corporations and points out many of the same firms have been criticised for their over-pricing of life-saving vaccines. It warns that philanthropic influence is skewing health priorities “towards the interests of wealthy donors (vaccines) rather than resilient health systems”.

• [...]

• It accuses the Gates Foundation of promoting specific priorities through agriculture grants, some of which undermine the interests of small farmers. These include promoting industrial agriculture, use of chemical fertilisers and expensive, patented seeds, and a focus on genetically modified seeds. “Much of the Foundation’s work appears to bypass local knowledge,” the report claims.

• The criticism echoes the accusations made by the Indian scientist Vandana Shiva who called the Gates Foundation the “greatest threat to farmers in the developing world.”

• [...]

• It calls for the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development to carry out an inquiry into the foundation’s work on top of a British Parliamentary inquiry.

=> ↺ The Clinton Foundation Shuts Down Clinton Global Initiative

• The Clinton Foundation’s long list of wealthy donors and foreign government contributors during the 2016 elections provoked critics to allege conflicts of interests. Clinton partisans defended the organization’s charitable work, and dismissed claims that it served as a means for the Clintons to sell off access, market themselves on the paid speech circuit, and elevate their brand as Hillary Clinton campaigned for the presidency.

• But as soon as Clinton lost the election, many of the criticisms directed toward the Clinton Foundation were reaffirmed. Foreign governments began pulling out of annual donations, signaling the organization’s clout was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather than its philanthropic work. In November, the Australian government confirmed it “has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million.” The government of Norway also drastically reduced their annual donations, which reached $20 million a year in 2015.

=> ↺ Looking forward to Theresa May’s speech on Brexit

• This week’s speech is expected to say that the United Kingdom is prepared to leave the single market. But, as I have set out on this blog and at the FT, the departure of the United Kingdom from the single market is the necessary implication of the positions which the prime minister has admitted to holding.

• Perhaps the speech will reveal something about how the United Kingdom is seeking to attain the objectives. Perhaps there will be some statements about still-unknown issues such as the United Kingdom’s position on a customs union.

• Or perhaps it will be a sequence of slogans and ambitions, without any substance on how they will be converted into reality.

• More important may be the interview from the chancellor of the exchequer Phillip Hammond with a German newspaper. He often seems to be the only grown-up in the cabinet.

=> ↺ Swedish minister ‘shocked’ by xenophobia towards Swedes in UK

• The Swedish government wants the issue of the rights of EU citizens in the UK and British people settled elsewhere in Europe to be resolved urgently and removed from the Brexit negotiating table as quickly as possible.

• Ann Linde, the Swedish minister for EU affairs and trade, said she was shocked by the uncertainty and xenophobia experienced by Swedes in the UK since the referendum.

• She said the future of an estimated 100,000 Swedish people in Britain and 30,000 British people in Sweden, had to be urgently dealt with. She said: “This is one of the very most important issues and we have to solve it in a very constructive way in the first part of the negotiations.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ French progressives dare to hope as maverick Macron surges in polls

• From the stage in a packed concert hall, France’s youngest presidential candidate looked up at the thousands of people who had come to witness his trademark thunderous speaking style.

• “Never accept those who promote exclusion, hatred or closing in on ourselves!” Emmanuel Macron urged the audience in Lille, a city surrounded by France’s leftwing northern heartlands that are increasingly turning to Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National. “When the Front National promises to restore security points at the border, they are lying,” he said.

=> ↺ Donald Trump v. the Spooks

• In that corner, we have a deal-making, billionaire “man of the people” who, to European sensibilities at least, reputedly espouses some of the madder domestic obsessions and yet has seemed to offer hope to many aggrieved Americans. But it is his professed position on building a rapprochement with Russia and cooperating with Moscow to sort out the Syrian mess that caught my attention and that of many other independent commentators internationally.

• In the opposite corner, Trump’s opponents have pushed the CIA into the ring to deliver the knock-out blow, but this has yet to land. Despite jab after jab, Trump keeps evading the blows and comes rattling back against all odds. One has to admire the guy’s footwork.

• So who are the opponents ranged behind the CIA, yelling encouragement through the ropes? The obvious culprits include the U.S. military-industrial complex, whose corporate bottom line relies on an era of unending war. As justification for extracting billions – even trillions – of dollars from American taxpayers, there was a need for frightening villains, such as Al Qaeda and even more so, the head choppers of ISIS. However, since the Russian intervention in Syria in 2015, those villains no longer packed as scary a punch, so a more enduring villain, like Emmanuel Goldstein, the principal enemy of the state in George Orwell’s 1984, was required. Russia was the obvious new choice, the old favorite from the Cold War playbook.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Calling Something Hate: The New Form Of Silencing

• See how easy it is to tar someone as an unacceptable person?

• They say something you don’t like.

• Or maybe they’re in your way for some reason — perhaps keeping you from having an entirely clear path to the top.

• “J’accuse!” time!

• I think this is becoming — and will continue to become — an extremely convenient way to go after people who’ve done nothing wrong…well, that is, in a society that values civil liberties, including free speech, enough to protect them.

=> ↺ ‘Telly viewers hate censorship more than swearing’, say academics

• Television viewers are less offended by swear words than censorship when it comes to regulators, academics have found.

• Researchers from Leicester and Birmingham City universities travelled the country – and Germany – to study people watching daytime TV.

• They watched programmes reported to be offensive or problematic and discussed these with the viewers.

• Dr Ranjana Das, from Leicester’s School of Media, Communication and Sociology, and Dr Anne Graefer, from the Birmingham School of Media, found swear words, bad language or flashy lighting were rarely considered worth complaints to regulators.

=> ↺ IMDb Draws Support In Fight Against California Censorship Law

• A California law requiring Amazon’s IMDb to scrub actors’ ages from its site could pave the way for other new measures aimed at squelching truthful information, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says in new court papers.

• “If it is constitutional for the government to suppress IMDb’s public site from reporting age information, there will be virtually no limit to the government’s ability to suppress the reporting of many other truthful facts by many other sources,” the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argues in a friend-of-the-court brief filed last week. “In an age where the media is struggling to combat the pernicious effects of false news, the truth should not be suppressed.”

• The organization, along with a host of legal scholars, is backing IMDb’s effort to block enforcement of the new law, which was passed last year at the urging of the Screen Actors Guild and took effect on January 1.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Obama administration signs off on wider data-sharing for NSA

• The Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) has signed off on new rules to let the National Security Agency (NSA) share globally intercepted personal information with the country’s other 16 intelligence agencies, before it applies privacy protection to or minimizes the raw data.

• Or, as Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), put it in an interview with the New York Times, 17 intelligence agencies are now going to be “rooting… through Americans’ emails with family members, friends and colleagues, all without ever obtaining a warrant”.

• The new rules mean that the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, and intelligence agencies of the US military’s branches and more, will be able to search through raw signals intelligence (SIGINT): intercepted signals that include all manner of people’s communications, be it via satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, as well as messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

=> ↺ Obama Expands NSA Spying. Attack against Democratic Rights

=> ↺ Barack Obama Allowed NSA to Share Surveillance Data With All Government Intelligence Agencies

• Barack Obama, the outgoing US president, allowed the NSA (National Security Agency) to share surveillance data with all government security and intelligence agencies. The new rules were signed by Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General, on January 3, 2017. There are 16 government security and intelligence agencies in total, some of them are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

=> ↺ White House Approves New Rules for Sharing of Raw Intelligence Data

• President Obama last week approved a change in the way the National Security Agency shares raw signals intelligence data with the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, a shift that privacy experts worry will erode the civil liberties of Americans.

=> ↺ Pardon Snowden Campaign Delivers Over One Million Signatures to Obama

• With less than a week left of Obama’s presidency, a coalition of organizations has collected more than a million signatures on a petition urging Obama to issue a full pardon to Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who revealed the size and scope of the surveillance conducted by the NSA and other federal agencies. Snowden (shown) fled the country and has lived in exile in Russia since May of 2013. If pardoned, he could return to American soil a hero to many.

=> ↺ Records show timesheet falsifications at NSA

• The National Security Agency’s internal watchdog has found more than 100 cases in five years in which civilian employees and contractors falsely claimed to have been at work.

• Details about the cases were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Baltimore Sun (http://bsun.md/2iuZO9g ). An NSA spokesman says the incidents cost the agency almost $3.5 million, though about 80 percent of the money lost to the fraud has been recovered.

=> ↺ Amazon snapped up an AI security startup for around $20 million

• Amazon has acquired a San Diego security startup called Harvest.ai for around $20 million (£17 million), TechCrunch reports.

• The acquisition was reportedly made through Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud services group.

• Founded by two former NSA employees, Harvest.ai has developed technology that can help companies to find and stop targeted attacks on their data.

=> ↺ 3Apple, please help to save private e-mail encryption

• After the latest Mac OS upgrade (Sierra) – GPG encryption of mail doesn’t work. Apparently, the GPGTools-people need to do a lot of reverse engineering. And as they kindly offer the world encryption for free their resources are limited.

• This might lead to people turning away from e-mail encryption, at a point in time where more people ought to take it up. This should be an argument strong enough for Apple to give the GPG-team a helping hand.

=> ↺ When It Comes to Police Surveillance, Local Politics Matter

• On Friday, the Boston Police Department said that it would not go ahead with a controversial plan to spend $1.4 million dollars on software used to monitor social media activity.

• “After reviewing the submitted proposals I felt that the technology that was presented exceeds the needs of our department,” Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said in a statement.

• The announcement comes after a sustained campaign led by the American Civil Liberties Union, Fight for the Future, and other community organizers to defeat the proposal, which was first made public in late October.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Obama’s Legacy: A Historic War On Whistleblowers

• As President Barack Obama soared into office eight years ago, he promised, on his first day in the White House, to launch “a new era of open government.”

• “The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears,” Obama said in a Jan. 21, 2009 memorandum.

• Obama was urging the attorney general to issue new guidelines protecting The Freedom of Information Act. “In the face of doubt,” Obama proclaimed, “openness prevails.”

=> ↺ Sick Muslim migrant gang that broke girl’s jaw accused of REGULAR ‘Sharia patrol’ attacks

• The girl, named only as Leonie, heads up the gang of six migrants who are purported to have carried out several Sharia-inspired attacks across the European capital of Vienna.

• Leonie, 15, was among the six Muslim youths from Chechnya who allegedly beat up a teenage girl, named as Patricia, in the centre of the Austrian capital city.

• Patricia, a Polish schoolgirl, was falsely accused of pulling off a Muslim woman’s headscarf.

• The attack, which left her with a broken jaw in two places, shocked Austria when footage of the beating went viral.

=> ↺ Pastor vandalized for fourth time after anti-mosque remarks

• A pastor who has been outspoken about his opposition to construction of a mosque in Bayonne is the victim of vandalism for the fourth time.

• [...]

• Basile says he asked the men in charge if they believed in Sharia law and they refused to answer. Their lawyer wouldn’t let them answer.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia cleric warns of ‘depravity’ of cinema, concerts

• Saudi Arabia’s highest-ranking cleric has warned of the “depravity” of cinemas and music concerts, saying they would corrupt morals if allowed in the ultra-conservative kingdom. “We know that singing concerts and cinemas are a depravity,” Grand Mufti Abdulaziz al-Sheikh said in a television interview cited by Sabq news website late Friday. The head of the Saudi supreme council of clerics was responding to a question about the plans of the kingdom’s General Authority for Entertainment to licence concerts and study opening cinemas.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia religious chief says legalising cinemas risks ‘mixing of sexes’ and ‘rotten’ influence

• Saudi Arabia’s religious authority has said the legalisation of cinemas and concerts could lead to the “mixing of sexes” and “atheistic or rotten” influences in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh made the statements on his weekly television programme as the Saudi government prepares to begin cultural and economic reforms known as Vision 2030.

• The head of the General Authority for Entertainment, Amr al-Madani has raised the potential for opening cinemas and holding concerts as early as this year.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ In Final Speech, FCC Chief Tom Wheeler Warns GOP Not to Kill Net Neutrality

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler delivered an impassioned defense of US net neutrality protections on Friday, one week before Republicans who have vowed to roll back the policy are set to take control of the agency.

• In his final public speech as the nation’s top telecom regulator, Wheeler warned that Republican efforts to weaken FCC rules ensuring that all internet content is treated equally will harm consumers, stifle online innovation, and threaten broadband industry competition.

Intellectual Monopolies

=> ↺ Patents and know-how power new GE move into China battery market

• The fact that GE is willing to eventually part with the concerned patents altogether, if the price is right, is a good sign that this particular technology is a decent candidate for an external partnership in China. It signals that not having control of the relevant IP is an eventuality the business is prepared to face – to the extent that it has put an approximate dollar price on. GE does appear to know its way around China’s patent sales market – this blog reported last year on its transfer of 131 LED-related patents to Beijing-based display maker BOE Technology.

=> ↺ New Book Highlights IP Trade Law Flexibilities For Public Health

• “Private Patents and Public Health: Changing intellectual property rules for access to medicines” by Ellen ’t Hoen, an authoritative public health advocate who previously led the global Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) Access to Essential Medicines Campaign, and the Medicines Patent Pool.

• Ellen ‘t Hoen is a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Policies and Management, and a researcher at the University Medical Centre at the University of Groningen, Netherlands.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Don’t Go Back on the Deal – IFLA, EIFL and EBLIDA call on EU Member States to Deliver on Marrakesh Treaty Ratification

• As IFLA and partner organisations have underlined, this is an opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of people with print disabilities – who cannot pick up and read a book in the same way as everyone else – both in Europe and beyond.

=> ↺ Understanding the fundamental, irreconcilable conflict between copyright enforcement and privacy of communication

• Enforcement of copyright is fundamentally, conceptually incompatible with privacy of correspondence. You can’t have the sealed and private letter in existence at the same time as you enforce copyright, once communications have gone digital. This is the reason you see VPN companies and other privacy advocates fight copyright enforcement and copyright law: because society has to choose between privacy and copyright, and basic civil liberties are considered more important than one particular entertainment business model.

• Why is a VPN company interested in copyright law? Why does a VPN company even question copyright law expansion and enforcement? Why do the most appreciated internet operators talk back a lot to the copyright industry – and are appreciated by their customers for that very reason? Why does the net generation generally say, as a blanket statement, that copyright law just has no place in an Internet world?

• Is it, as some would claim, because BitTorrent users make up a majority of the paying customers of a VPN company or an internet operator? That the net generation just wants everything for free? That the VPN company profits from protecting criminals? You know, there are people who would actually claim this with a straight face, apparently serious. The facts are clear on the matter, though: BitTorrent usage is neither a majority reason for using a VPN, nor are heavy-bandwidth users particularly profitable. And the net generation has no illusion about everything-for-free being sustainable or even desirable – but they do defend their liberty ferociously.

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