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● 10.16.17

● Links 16/10/2017: Linux 4.14 RC5, Debian 9.2.1, End of LibreOffice Conference 2017

Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

=> ↺ Microsoft faces Dutch crunch over Windows 10 private data slurp

• Yet another European nation is turning up the heat on Microsoft for extracting heaps and heaps of telemetry and other intelligence from Windows 10 PCs.

• This time, it’s privacy authorities in the Netherlands who are calling out Redmond for its hog-wild harvesting of data from machines that run Windows 10 Home and Pro. The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) said on Friday it will impose sanctions on Microsoft should the American tech giant fail to make changes to its software.

=> ↺ Dutch slam Windows 10 for breaking privacy laws

• Dutch authorities claim Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system is violating data protection and privacy laws, and warned they may impose fines on the US technology giant.

• “Microsoft breaches the Dutch data protection law by processing personal data of people that use the Windows 10 operating system on their computers,” the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) said in a statement late Friday.

• The company fails to “clearly inform” users of Windows 10 that it “continuously collects personal data about the usage of apps and web surfing behavior through its web browser Edge, when the default settings are used,” the DPA said.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi 3 based laptop features DIY hacking bay

• Pi-top has revised its RPi based laptop with a 14-inch HD screen and a slide-off keyboard that reveals a cooling unit and DIY space for a breadboard kit.

• Pi-top’s Raspberry Pi driven laptop has received a major upgrade with a new model with a slightly larger 14-inch, HD screen and a 6 to 8 hour battery. The 2017 edition of the education-focused Pi-top features a modular design with a larger keyboard that slides forward to reveal a Raspberry Pi 3 with a new heatsink. It also includes an empty bay for DIY hacking, which can be filled with components from a free Inventor’s Kit. This DIY kit includes a breadboard, a motion sensor, LEDs, and a microphone, all mounted on a magnetic sliding rail.

=> ↺ Pi-Top: This Raspberry Pi And Linux-powered Laptop Is For New

• In late 2014, Pi-Top, U.K.’s education startup raised about $200,000 on Indiegogo to fund its first DIY laptop. It was followed by pi-topCEED, a cheap desktop computer that’s powered by Raspberry Pi.

• Their latest offering, the new Pi-Top, is a new tinkering machine that you can assemble on your own using modular approach. Compared to the past offerings, the number of steps needed to assemble the computer and start working are much less.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ KDE Plasma 5.11, Humble Bundle Acquisition, elementary OS & Snappy | This Week in Linux Ep.9

• Coming up on This Week in Linux. We take a look at some browser releases and a new crowdfunding project for socializing the command line.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 4.13.7

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.13.7 kernel.

• All users of the 4.13 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.13.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.13.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 4.15 Is Shaping Up To be An Exciting Kernel, Especially For AMD Users

• There still is a few weeks to go until the Linux 4.14 kernel will be released, but following that the Linux 4.15 kernel is shaping up to be a very exciting cycle.

=> ↺ F2FS Tools 1.9 Released With Encryption & More

• An updated version of the user-space F2FS (Flash Friendly File-System) utilities was quietly released a few weeks back.

• The f2fs-tools 1.9 update is a fairly big update for adding the bits for recent additions to the F2FS kernel driver. Now handled by f2fs-tools is dealing with encryption support, sparse support, inode checksum support, no-heap allocation is enabled by default, and support for the CP_TRIMMED_FLAG.

=> ↺ Improvements in the block layer

• Jens Axboe is the maintainer of the block layer of the kernel. In this capacity, he spoke at Kernel Recipes 2017 on what’s new in the storage world for Linux, with a particular focus on the new block-multiqueue subsystem: the degree to which it’s been adopted, a number of optimizations that have recently been made, and a bit of speculation about how it will further improve in the future.

• Back in 2011, Intel published a Linux driver for NVM Express (or NVMe, where NVM is the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface), which was its new bus for accessing solid-state storage devices (SSDs). This driver was incorporated into the mainline kernel in 2012, first appearing in 3.3. It allowed new, fast SSD devices to be run at speed, but that gave no improvement if the block subsystem continued to treat them as pedestrian hard drives. So a new, scalable block layer known as blk-mq (for block-multiqueue) was developed to take better advantage of these fast devices; it was merged for 3.13 in 2014. It was introduced with the understanding that all of the old drivers would be ported to blk-mq over time; this continues, even though most of the mainstream block storage devices have by now been successfully ported. Axboe’s first focus was a status update on this process.

=> ↺ Kernel prepatch 4.14-rc5

=> ↺ Linux 4.14-rc5 Released

• Linus Torvalds has just issued the Linux 4.14-rc5 kernel update.

• With this release out today, we’re three to four weeks out from seeing the official Linux 4.14 kernel release. Linux 4.14 has overall been a big cycle with the possibility of going up to a Linux 4.14-rc8 test release prior to declaring the stable release, but we’ll have to see Torvalds’ reactions in the weeks ahead.

=> ↺ Linux 4.14-rc5

• Things seem to be finally starting to calm down for 4.14.

• We’ve certainly had smaller rc5′s, but we’ve had bigger ones too, and this week finally felt fairly normal in a release that has up until now felt a bit messier than it perhaps should have been.

• So assuming this trend holds, we’re all good. Knock wood.

• So what do we have here? A little bit of everything, but what might be most noticeable is some more fixes for the whole new x86 TLB handling due to the ASID changes that came in this release. Some of the lazy TLB handling changes caused problems on a few AMD chips with particular settings, because it was all a little bit too lazy in flushing the TLB. Even when TLB entries aren’t used (and will be flushed before any possible use), the TLB may be speculatively filled, and that can cause problems if we’ve already free’d the page tables that the speculative fill ends up looking up.

• The other thing perhaps worth mentioning is how much random fuzzing people are doing, and it’s finding things. We’ve always done fuzzing (who remembers the old “crashme” program that just generated random code and jumped to it? We used to do that quite actively very early on), but people have been doing some nice targeted fuzzing of driver subsystems etc, and there’s been various fixes (not just this last week either) coming out of those efforts. Very nice to see.

• Anyway, rc5 is out, and things look normal. We’ve got arch updates (mostly x86and poweerpc, but some mips), drivers (gpu, networking, usb, sound, misc), some core kernel (lockdep fixes, networking, mm) and some tooling (perf, selftests).

• Go out and test,

• Linus

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds lauds fuzzing for improving Linux security

• Linus Torvalds release notification for Linux 4.14′s fifth release candidate contains an interesting aside: the Linux Lord says fuzzing is making a big difference to the open source operating system.

• Torvalds’ announcement says Linux kernel 4.14 is coming along nicely, with this week’s release candidate pleasingly small and “fairly normal in a release that has up until now felt a bit messier than it perhaps should have been.”

• This week’s most prominent changes concern “… more fixes for the whole new x86 TLB [translation lookaside buffer – Ed] handling due to the ASID [address space ID - Ed] changes that came in this release.”

Applications

=> ↺ Catching up with RawTherapee 5.x

• Free-software raw photo editor RawTherapee released a major new revision earlier this year, followed by a string of incremental updates. The 5.x series, released at a rapid pace, marks a significant improvement in the RawTherapee’s development tempo — the project’s preceding update had landed in 2014. Regardless of the speed of the releases themselves, however, the improved RawTherapee offers users a lot of added functionality and may shake up the raw-photo-processing workflow for many photographers.

• It has been quite some time since we last examined the program during the run-up to the 3.0 series in 2010. In the intervening years, the scope of the project has grown considerably: macOS is now supported in addition to Windows and various flavors of Linux, and the application has seen substantial additions to the tool set it provides.

• The competitive landscape that RawTherapee inhabits has also changed; 2010-era competitors Rawstudio and UFRaw are not seeing much active development these days (not to mention the death of proprietary competitors like Apple’s Aperture), while darktable has amassed a significant following — particularly among photographers interested in a rich set of effects and retouching tools. At the other end of the spectrum, raw-file support improved in the “consumer” desktop photo-management tools (such as Shotwell) in the same time period, thus offering casual users some options with a less intimidating learning curve than darktable’s. Where RawTherapee sits amid all of the current offerings can be a bit hard to define.

• The 5.0 release landed on January 22, 5.1 then arrived on May 15, and 5.2 was unleashed (in the words of the announcement) on July 23. The project also migrated its source-code repository and issue tracking to GitHub, launched a new discussion forum, and has assembled a wiki-style documentation site called RawPedia.

=> ↺ psdash – System And Process Monitoring Web Dashboard For Linux

• psdash is a system monitoring and information web dashboard for Linux written in python using psutils and flask. The GUI is pretty much straight forward and clean. All the data is updated automatically, no need to refresh.

• psutils (process and system utilities) is a cross-platform library for retrieving information on running processes and system utilization (CPU, memory, disks, network, sensors) in Python.

=> ↺ Tiling Terminal Emulator Tilix 1.7.0 Released with Minor Improvements

• Tilix, the modern tiling terminal emulator for Linux desktops, scored an update at the weekend.

• Although a modest release, Tilix 1.7.0 brings some timely bug fixes and feature improvements to the app formerly known as Terminix.

• This includes support for using tabs instead of a sidebar, a feature Tilix dev Gerald Nunn says was a frequent user request.

• There’s also preliminary Flatpak support, though there’s no specific information on how to text or make use of the Tilix Flatpak. It’d be great to see the app added to the (awesome) Flathub Flatpak app store.

=> ↺ Oceanaudio An Audio Editor For Linux

• Audios are an integral part of life. Playing our best songs, having a party or a special function, we require audio everywhere. That is why audio editors are there too to help us make the best of an audio file. When I say audio editor, many of you will just think of audacity. Sure that is a pretty cool software but I think it’s a bit complicated for the inexperienced one.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ 26 DNF Command Examples for Package Management (rpm) on Fedora Linux

=> ↺ Fixing vim in Debian

=> ↺ OxygenOS Android 8.0 Oreo Open Beta Available For OnePlus 3/3T, Here’s How To Set It Up

=> ↺ How to Create Hard and Symbolic Links in Linux

=> ↺ ScalaFX: ListView with CellFactory

=> ↺ Business accounting with Odoo

• Odoo is, according to Wikipedia, “the most popular open source ERP system.” Thus, any survey of open-source accounting systems must certainly take a look in that direction. This episode in the ongoing search for a suitable accounting system for LWN examines the accounting features of Odoo; unfortunately, it comes up a bit short.

• Odoo is the current incarnation of the system formerly known as OpenERP; it claims to have over two million users. It is primarily implemented in Python, and carries the LGPLv3 license. Or, at least, the free part of Odoo is so licensed; Odoo is an open-core product with many features reserved for its online or “Enterprise” offerings. The enterprise version comes with source code, but it carries a proprietary license and an end-user license agreement forbidding users from disabling the “phone home” mechanism that, among other things, enforces limits on the number of users. Online offerings are not of interest for this series, and neither is proprietary software (the whole point is to get away from proprietary systems), so this review is focused on the community edition.

=> ↺ TeX Live Manager: JSON output

=> ↺ Google App Engine: Using subdomains

=> ↺ How to Switch to Xorg from Wayland in Ubuntu 17.10 [Quick Tip]

=> ↺ tmux config

=> ↺ Secure and flexible backup server with dm-crypt and btrfs

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine 2.19 Supports 32-Bit Float Audio on Android, Has iTunes 11.1.x Improvements

• The bi-weekly release of Wine is here today with a new development release, versioned 2.19, which adds a few new features and fixes a total of 16 bugs in multiple Windows apps and games.

• Let’s start with the new features and improvements, as the Wine 2.19 release introduces support for 32-bit float audio on Android, support for a new Microsoft root certificate, the ability for the Wine server to fully handle named pipes, a bunch of optimizations to heap allocation, as well as an extra layer of transform fixes in GdiPlus.

Games

=> ↺ OpenRA has been updated with more Dune 2000 missions and plenty more

• OpenRA [Official Site], the fantastic open source game engine to run games like Red Alert, Command & Conquer and Dune 2000 has a new release today.

=> ↺ Hell Warders, a mixture of action and tower defense that may come to Linux

• The developer of Hell Warders [Steam, Official Site], a mixture of action and tower defense has said that the game should be on Linux in future.

=> ↺ It’s Been Five Years That Ubuntu Has Tried To Improve For Linux Gaming

• Next month will mark five years that Steam has been available for Linux and it’s been about the same length of time that Ubuntu has tried to improve itself as a gaming platform, but has it worked?

=> ↺ Fedora 26 vs. 27 Beta Benchmarks, Wayland vs. X.Org Gaming Tests

• For your viewing pleasure this weekend are our first benchmarks of the current state of Fedora 27 post-beta with a variety of different workloads. Additionally, from the latest Fedora 27 packages is a fresh gaming comparison with GNOME Shell running on Wayland versus the X.Org session.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Celebrates 21st Anniversary with New Updates of KDE Applications, Frameworks

• Today, the KDE Project celebrates the 21st anniversary of the well-known and widely used desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-like operating systems with new releases of its KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications software stacks.

• KDE recently unveiled KDE Plasma 5.11 as the latest and most advanced version of the KDE desktop environment, and today they released KDE Applications 17.08.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.39.0, which are now available to download for users of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments, as well as GNU/Linux distros that use the KDE Stack.

=> ↺ Replacing Audacity with KWave

• KWave has been developed since 1998, yet few have heard of it. I only recently heard of it myself from writer and podcaster Marcel Gagné while I was setting up to do how-to-videos. Part of the reason for its obscurity might be that, despite its name, it only recently become an official KDE project in the last release. However, the major reason for its obscurity is probably that it has been overshadowed by the better-known Audacity — which is a pity, because in most ways, KWave is every bit as useful as an audio editor.

• Why would anyone want an Audacity substitute? For one thing, while Audacity is cross-platform, it is not well-integrated into Linux. Audacity handles its own resources, as you can tell by its lengthy load time. Often, Audacity frequently gives confusing options for input and playback sources, giving several names to the same device and offering irrelevant front and back options for mono devices, so that users can only find the one they need through trial and error. Sometimes, the necessary option for a particular source can change for no apparent each time Audacity starts.

=> ↺ Kubuntu Artful Aardvark (17.10) final RC images now available

• Artful Aardvark (17.10) final Release Candidate (RC) images are now available for testing. Help us make 17.10 the best release yet!

• The Kubuntu team will be releasing 17.10 on October 19, 2017.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ There’s One Week Left To Apply For Outreachy Round 15

• There’s one week left for women and other under-represented groups in the open-source world to apply for Outreachy Round 15 for a winter internship to work on various projects.

• Outreachy applications are due 23 October and accepted participants are announced in early November for this $5500 USD internship period that runs from December to March. This round is open to: “internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Internships are also open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.”

=> ↺ retro-gtk: Renaissance

• This is the second article in a small series about retro-gtk, I recommend you to read the first one, retro-gtk: Postmortem, before this one.

• In the previous article I listed some problems I encountered while developing and using retro-gtk; in this one I will present some solutions I implemented to fix them! All that is presented in this article is part of the newly-released retro-gtk 0.13.1, which is the first version of the 0.14 development cycle.

Distributions

Reviews

=> ↺ LinuxAndUbuntu Review Of Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” Xfce

• The mission for a swap Linux conveyance for Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce proceeds. With this post comes a review of the most recent MATE version of Linux Mint. Particularly for consistent perusers of this blog, I will simply say that with the most recent point discharge, it appears like the designers have put cleaner into the conveyance, including their new arrangement of “X-applications” intended to work crosswise over MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce, and GNOME, keeping away from the entanglements of more DE-particular applications. I need to perceive what has changed since my last review and to see whether this would be reasonable for the establishment and everyday use on my portable workstation. With that in mind, I made a live USB framework (once more, on my new SanDisk Cruzer USB streak drive) utilizing the “dd” order. Take after the bounce to perceive what it resembles. Note that I’ll often refer to past review, noticing just changes and general imperative focuses as required.

=> ↺ Star 1.0.1 – lightweight desktops on a Devuan base

• On the whole, I like the ideas presented in Star’s design. The distribution is basically Devuan and pulls packages from Devuan’s software repositories, but the live media and lightweight environments are great for testing the distribution and for breathing life into older computers. While this approach of starting light and adding only what we need is a solid concept, and proved to be very forgiving on resources, there are some rough edges in the implementation. The missing manual pages, for example, and the media player issues I ran into posed problems.

• A few programs I used flashed warning messages letting me know PulseAudio was not available as Star uses the ALSA sound system by default. Strictly speaking, PulseAudio is not required most of the time and, if we do run into a situation where it is needed, we can install PulseAudio easily enough by rerunning Star’s welcome script.

• The default JWM environment is very plain and empty, which suited me. My only complaint was the constantly updating Conky status panel at the bottom of the screen. I was able to disable Conky, but it required digging into JWM’s configuration files. Which brings me to another point: many users will probably prefer to try heavier editions of Star (like Xfce) to gain access to more user friendly configuration tools. The JWM edition is intentionally bare bones and probably best suited to more experienced users.

• One last observation I had while using Star is that it is based on Devuan 1.0.0, which presents us with software that is about three years old (or more) at this point. This means some packages, like LibreOffice, are notably behind upstream versions. Since Star is best suited for older computers, this may not be an issue for most users, but it is worth keeping in mind that Star’s software repository is a few years old at this point.

Gentoo Family

=> ↺ Sakaki’s EFI Install Guide/Disabling the Intel Management Engine

• The Intel Management Engine (‘IME’ or ‘ME’) is an out-of-band co-processor integrated in all post-2006 Intel-CPU-based PCs. It has full network and memory access and runs proprietary, signed, closed-source software at ring -3,[1][2][3][4] independently of the BIOS, main CPU and platform operating system[5][6] — a fact which many regard as an unacceptable security risk (particularly given that at least one remotely exploitable security hole has already been reported[7][8]).

Slackware Family

=> ↺ October updates for the Slackware Plasma5 desktop

• There’s been updates to all the major components of the KDE Software Collection (I know they stopped using that name but I think it is still fitting). So I tasked my build box to compile hundreds of new packages and today I have for you the October ’17 set of Plasma 5 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current. KDE 5_17.10 contains: KDE Frameworks 5.39.0, Plasma 5.11.0 and Applications 17.08.2. All based on Qt 5.9.2 for Slackware-current and Qt 5.7.1 for Slackware 14.2.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Red Hat software and services land on Alibaba Cloud

• With that in mind, Alibaba Cloud, which is the cloud computing arm of eCommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., said today that it’s partnering with the open-source software company Red Hat Inc. The alliance sees Alibaba Cloud join the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, which makes it possible for it to offer a range of popular Red Hat products to its customers. These will include the company’s flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, which will soon be made available via a pay-as-you-go pricing model in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.

Fedora

=> ↺ Korora 26 Bloat – More is less or less is more?

• Korora 26 Bloat is a noble concept, but it does not solve the fundamental problem it aims to solve: make Fedora usable. It tries to minimize the wreck that is Fedora 26 and fails to do so. Additionally, it introduces problems that the original did not have, making an even bigger mess. Korora comes with a slew of ergonomics issues, flaking hardware support, too much actual bloat, tons of niggles and issues that are technically Fedora’s legacy, and then the horrible Nvidia support that is just embarrassing in 2017. To answer my own question, more is less in this case, and there isn’t a justifiable reason why you should prefer Korora over Fedora, nor why you should use it against the likes of Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Mint. Alas, this is not a good release, 2/10. Unusable, which is a shame, because I did like what Korora managed to do in the past. But it just shows how fragile the Linux world is. Proper distro release QA is a joke, regressions are nothing but a silent excuse to move on and churn out more bad code, almost like industrial protein, and this is so depressing I sometimes wonder why I even bother.

• Anyway, to sum it up, Fedora 26 is worse than its predecessors, and Korora 26 is both worse than its own forefathers and the original article it seeks to tame, with appalling support for proprietary graphics drivers and other distros in a multi-boot setup that I really cannot recommend it. The cosmetic issues are also important, but in the end, the real deal breaker is the hardware side. Waiting for Korora 27. Peace.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian 9.2.1 is out

=> ↺ A New Debian/Ubuntu Kernel Build With The Latest AMDGPU DC Patches

• For those wanting to run the very latest bleeding-edge AMDGPU DC display code on an Ubuntu/Debian-based box, here is a fresh x86_64 kernel build of the latest DC kernel patches as of today.

• It was on Friday that more AMDGPU DC patches were pushed out as AMD works to have this code all tidied up and prepped for the upcoming Linux 4.15 cycle.

=> ↺ Debian Installer git repository

• While dealing with d-i’s translation last month in FOSScamp, I was kinda surprised it’s still on SVN. While reviewing PO files from others, I couldn’t select specific parts to commit.

• Debian does have a git server, and many DDs (Debian Developers) use it for their Debian work, but it’s not as public as I wish it to be. Meaning I lack the pull / merge request abilities as well as the review process.

=> ↺ Free software log (September 2017)

• I said that I was going to start writing these regularly, so I’m going to stick to it, even when the results are rather underwhelming. One of the goals is to make the time for more free software work, and I do better at doing things that I record.

• The only piece of free software work for September was that I made rra-c-util compile cleanly with the Clang static analyzer. This was fairly tedious work that mostly involved unconfusing the compiler or converting (semi-intentional) crashes into explicit asserts, but it unblocks using the Clang static analyzer as part of the automated test suite of my other projects that are downstream of rra-c-util.

• One of the semantic changes I made was that the vector utilities in rra-c-util (which maintain a resizable array of strings) now always allocate room for at least one string pointer. This wastes a small amount of memory for empty vectors that are never used, but ensures that the strings struct member is always valid. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a correctness fix, since all the checks were correct, but after some thought, I decided that humans might have the same problem that the static analyzer had. It’s a lot easier to reason about a field that’s never NULL. Similarly, the replacement function for a missing reallocarray now does an allocation of size 1 if given a size of 0, just to avoid edge case behavior. (I’m sure the behavior of a realloc with size 0 is defined somewhere in the C standard, but if I have to look it up, I’d rather not make a human reason about it.)

=> ↺ Free Software Efforts (2017W41)

• The issue that was preventing the migration of the Tasktools Packaging Team’s mailing list from Alioth to Savannah has now been resolved.

• Ana’s chkservice package that I sponsored last week has been ACCEPTED into unstable and since MIGRATED to testing.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Newbie’s Guide to Ubuntu 17.10 Part 2

• This is Part 2 of the newbie’s guide to operate Ubuntu 17.10. Here you’ll learn how to operate the Nautilus File Manager. You’ll do most of daily activities in Nautilus because it is your file manager, like Finder in Mac OS X or Explorer in Windows. You’ll learn basic skills such as selecting & navigating, creating & deleting, searching & sorting files/folders, and also basic knowledge for keyboard shortcuts and the user interface. I wish this article helps you best to run Ubuntu 17.10 easily and happily.

=> ↺ Do You Plan to Upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10? [Poll]

• Ubuntu 17.10 is set to be released on Thursday October 19 — which, if you haven’t been paying attention to the nearest calendar, is less than a week away!

• Having spent the past 6 months in development chances are you’ve some inclination as to whether or not you will upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10.

=> ↺ Kubuntu Artful Aardvark (17.10) initial RC images now available

• Artful Aardvark (17.10) initial Release Candidate (RC) images are now available for testing. Help us make 17.10 the best release yet!

=> ↺ Please get to testing Artful RCs (20171015)

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ The NumWorks graphing calculator

• As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes ever more populous, there is no shortage of people warning us that the continual infusion into our lives of hard-to-patch proprietary devices running hard-to-maintain proprietary code is a bit of a problem. It is an act of faith for some, myself included, that open devices running free software (whether IoT devices or not) are easier to maintain than proprietary, closed ones. So it’s always of interest when freedom (or something close to it) makes its way into a class of devices that were not previously so blessed.

• In this case, the device is the humble scientific calculator. Many people now use their smartphones when they need to do sums, but others still find a calculator a useful thing to have at hand. Recently, NumWorks, a new scientific graphing calculator with an open-design ethos was released. Although it is far from fully free at this point, it is a major step forward from the user-hostile position most calculator manufacturers have taken, and it is interesting to see to what extent it fulfills its promise.

• [...]

• It also would not require NumWorks to try to make the in-browser support work on all the browsers that people use on their many Linux distributions; so Linux support may get better soon. For readers who want to get up and running now, the toolchain isn’t all that painful to assemble.

Android

=> ↺ Weekend Gaming: 11 Games You Just Have To Play On Your Android Smartphone Right Now

=> ↺ Android 8.0 Oreo beta is now available for OnePlus 3/3T users

=> ↺ OnePlus 5 is mysteriously unavailable to purchase

=> ↺ Kotlin Programming Language Will Surpass Java On Android Next Year

=> ↺ Google drops Pixel 2 headphone jack adapter down from $20 to just $9

=> ↺ Don’t miss the week’s biggest new Android apps and games

=> ↺ Fake Adobe Flash malware locks your Android phone’s data unless you pay up

=> ↺ Neither NVIDIA Shield tablet will get updated to Android Oreo

=> ↺ Nokia 6 is Receiving Android 7.1.2 Update Along with October’s Security Patches

=> ↺ Kotlin Expected to Surpass Java as Android Default Programming Language for Apps

=> ↺ PC and Console games that should be ported to Android

=> ↺ OxygenOS Android Oreo Open Beta for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T Released!

=> ↺ 5 best Walking Dead games for Android

=> ↺ 10 best road trip apps for Android

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ How to define a metrics strategy for your community

• Data sets are everywhere, and because open source communities produce plenty of information in addition to source code, most community infrastructures require tools to support the software development process. Examples include bug-reporting systems such as Jira and Bugzilla, versioning systems such as Git, and code review tools like Gerrit. Although communication also takes place through these tools, most is done through mailing lists, IRC, supporting systems like Discourse, and even Twitter and other social channels (especially for marketing and announcements). In fact, most open source communities utilize at least five or ten tools, if not more.

Events

=> ↺ LibreOffice Conference 2017

• This week the annual LibreOffice conference was held in Rome and I had the pleasure to attend. The city of Rome is migrating their IT infrastructure to open software and standards and the city council was kind enough to provide the awesome venue for the event, the Campidoglio.

=> ↺ More from the testing and fuzzing microconference

• A lot was discussed and presented in the three hours allotted to the Testing and Fuzzing microconference at this year’s Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), but some spilled out of that slot. We have already looked at some discussions on kernel testing that occurred both before and during the microconference. Much of the rest of the discussion will be summarized below. As it turns out, a discussion on the efforts by Intel to do continuous-integration (CI) testing of graphics hardware and drivers continued several hundred miles north the following week at the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC); that will be covered in a separate article.

=> ↺ Opensource.com Lightning Talks at All Things Open 2017

• Join the Opensource.com community for a set of amazing lightning talks you won’t want to miss during the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. Speakers have five minutes to enlighten the audience about an open source topic they are passionate about. We’ve got everything from DevOps and Kubernetes, to wearables, cloud, and more. Grab your lunch, find a seat, warm up your Twitter fingers, and get ready for the fastest hour at All Things Open 2017. Share your favorite thoughts using hashtage #ATO2017.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ LibreOffice: SharePoint integration. A year of progress

CMS

=> ↺ 4 website maintenance mistakes to avoid

• Maintenance is a good idea for every website, but it’s a requirement for websites using open source code. The upside of open source is that everyone can participate. The downside is that means keeping up with everyone’s changes. Code gets patched, which causes other code to stop working and need patches in turn. Exploits are found and then blocked. Fancy new features are developed, and your users want them. All of this means you need to keep up! The most important weapon to combat these forces is maintenance. Maintenance is a simple process, but there are basic mistakes that many people make at least once. Avoid these and you’ll be well on your way to a safer, cleaner website that isn’t a huge pain to keep running.

• [...]

• Even if you could do better, are you being paid to rewrite something that’s already mostly working? If you’re frustrated enough to take it on as a hobby project, is that what you want to spend your weekend on? GitHub is chock full of not-all-that-unique content management systems (CMSes) and static site builders. Most of them are abandoned, clones of more popular systems, or both. Don’t be yet another one.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

=> ↺ ​Windows Subsystem for Linux graduates in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

=> ↺ Open-source mapping being used to help first responders in Puerto Rico

• Satellite images of rural towns, sprawling woodlands and grooved mountainsides fill the computer screens as homeowners and students scroll across digital maps.

• This group of a few dozen people gathered on Friday at the Perry Castenada Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus for a four-hour disaster relief mapathon to bolster humanitarian efforts in Puerto Rico, where 91 percent of the island is still without electricity, and Mexico, which was ravaged by a 6.1 earthquake.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Kotlin Programming Language Will Surpass Java On Android Next Year

• At Google I/O 2017, Google announced the newly added support for Kotlin programming language in Android, along with the existing languages Java and C++. As per the experts, Kotlin came as a breath of fresh air in Android development ecosystem to make “Android development faster and more fun. But, what about the numbers? How many developers are making a shift to Kotlin? Let’s find out.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Progress Being Made On New “WebGPU” Web Graphics API

• There continues to be progress made on the new Apple/W3C backed web graphics API dubbed “WebGPU” that has the backing of major stakeholders.

• Separate from the work being done by The Khronos Group on “WebGL-Next” there is the “WebGPU” initiative being organized by the W3C.

Leftovers

=> ↺ How China Has Built Major Roads In Doklam: Exclusive

• India backs Bhutan’s claim to the Doklam Plateau, which lies North of the “Chicken’s Neck” – a narrow strip that links India to its northeastern states. Any roads in or around this area are a cause of concern for Delhi because they could give Beijing access to this strategically sensitive terrain.

=> ↺ Car accidents killed 37,000 people last year — it’s time to act

=> ↺ Finnish military grants athlete status to e-sports conscripts

• Young people pursuing a career in the increasingly-lucrative field of e-sports will be able to serve their compulsory service in the Finnish Defence Forces as an athlete in future. The Finnish Defence Forces will allow the e-sports players to serve with the same status as elite sportspeople, giving them special privileges as they undertake their compulsory service.

• Conscripts meeting the requirements will be assessed as part of the special forces selection associated with every round of call-ups. The Finnish E-sports Federation will assist in the assessment of possible candidates.

• “By completing their military service in the Sports School, e-sports professionals will have enough time to practice and compete,” the federation’s director Joonas Kapiainen said in a press release.

=> ↺ Outlook, Office 2007 slowly taken behind the shed, shots heard

• A decade after their release, Microsoft Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 today fell out of extended support. Gaze teary-eyed at your installation discs. The software has entered the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

• The cutoff has been coming for some time, of course, but if you’re of a nostalgic bent, the Outlook 2007 epitaph is here, and the somewhat longer (with more dates to absorb) Office 2007 farewell is here.

• With extended support ending for both 2007-era families, no new features, bug fixes, security patches, nor support, will be available in future for the programs.

=> ↺ Catalonia and the ‘Europe of Regions’

• One of the solutions that emerged was to promote the notion of a “Europe of Regions,” i.e. along with the centralization of power on certain matters at the supranational level, there would also be a devolution of powers towards local authorities in other fields. The idea of emphasizing regional characteristics on an ethnic basis was not new, but it received renewed attention in the 1990s as avenues were sought to advance E.U. integration.

Science

=> ↺ Humans Made the Banana Perfect—But Soon, It’ll Be Gone

=> ↺ Studying human tumors in mice may end up being misleading

• Cancer is, unfortunately, governed by the same evolutionary rules that drive life itself. Cells in tumors are essentially competing to see which can divide the fastest. This competition drives them to pick up new mutations that can help them divide faster, survive immune attack, resist drugs, and expand to new areas of the body.

• We can tell this by looking at the genetic changes that occur as tumors progress. Over time, we can trace the appearance of new mutations that confer abilities that are, from cancer’s perspective, useful for tumor cells.

• Now, a new study suggests that an unfortunate side effect of these evolutionary changes is that human tumors are really difficult to study. Whether the tumor cells are put in a culture dish or grown in mice, they evolve changes that help them grow in this new environment. And some of these changes influence how the tumor cells respond to drugs.

Hardware

=> ↺ The impossible dream of USB-C

• I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.

• In practice, it’s not even close.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Labor’s Stake in the Fight for Veterans’ Health Care

• In January President Trump delivered on his promise to shrink the federal government: he announced a hiring freeze, despite thousands of federal job vacancies.

• As a candidate, Trump campaigned as a great friend of veterans. He pledged to make big improvements in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the arm of the Veterans Administration (VA) that operates the largest health care system in the country.

• But Trump’s hiring freeze deepened an already existing staffing crisis at VHA hospitals and clinics throughout the U.S., where there are 49,000 vacant positions.

=> ↺ Vulnerable people left to suffer chronic loneliness as services ‘underfunded and overwhelmed’, Labour warns

• Vulnerable people are being left to suffer chronic loneliness as nearly half of all local authorities are spending nothing on specialist social isolation services, new figures suggest.

• A probe by Labour found crucial services had been left “underfunded and overwhelmed” as dedicated spending fell by around £1m in two years amid a squeeze on town hall budgets.

• It comes as the leader of Britain’s GPs warned that being lonely could be as harmful to older people’s health as a chronic long-term condition such as diabetes or high blood pressure, with around 1.1 million elderly people believed to be affected.

=> ↺ Finnish police weigh criminal probe into tobacco industry

• Police will decide by the end of October whether to launch a pre-trial investigation into allegations that Finnish tobacco executives should be held personally liable for misleading marketing of “light” cigarettes, with the terminology banned 15 years ago. Experts estimate that the products led to some 60,000 deaths in Finland.

=> ↺ Early Medicaid Expansion Associated With Reduced Payday Borrowing In California

• The early Medicaid expansion was associated with an 11 percent reduction in the number of loans taken out each month. It also reduced the number of unique borrowers each month and the amount of payday loan debt.

=> ↺ Why Do Republicans (and Some Democrats) Vilify Single Payer?

• Unfortunately, very bad ideas never die in a corrupted political process. It’s all about bottom lines: for billionaire campaign donors and for the powerful recipients of those campaign donations.

=> ↺ Your Boss Shouldn’t Get to Have ‘Religious’ Objections to Your Health Care

• When Obamacare — aka, the Affordable Care Act — became law in 2010, it mandated coverage of birth control without co-payments.

• Some employers didn’t like the rule, and Hobby Lobby hated it so much that the company filed a lawsuit to stop it. Company owners said they didn’t believe in contraception and claimed that covering it for female employees violated their religious freedom.

• Understand, the Obama administration went to great lengths to exempt churches and church-related institutions from the rule, while still guaranteeing their female employees the right to birth control if they wanted it.

=> ↺ NHS chiefs spend £100,000 on failed bid to stop whistleblowing doctor having his day in court

• NHS chiefs spent more than £100,000 on a failed bid to stop a whistleblowing junior doctor having his day in court.

• Dr Chris Day, 32, said his career was “destroyed” after he raised fears over a short-staffed intensive care unit in Woolwich, London.

• Yet he was blocked from taking his claims to an employment tribunal after Health Education England (HEE) argued it wasn’t his employer.

=> ↺ Neonicotinoid pesticides found in honey from every continent

• The evidence has been mounting for years that the world’s most widely used pesticides, neonicotinoids, harm bees and other pollinating insects. Now it seems the problem isn’t limited to Europe and North America, where the alarm was first sounded. It’s everywhere.

=> ↺ Bad news for bees: three-quarters of all honey on Earth has pesticides in it

• Scientists analyzed 198 honey samples from all continents, except Antarctica, for five types of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are known to harm bees. They found at least one of the five compounds in most samples, with the highest contamination in North America, Asia, and Europe. The results are published today in the journal Science.

=> ↺ Did Monsanto Ignore Evidence Linking Its Weed Killer to Cancer?

• But the future of the ubiquitous herbicide is in question. Monsanto is currently fighting allegations that glyphosate might not be as safe as advertised, particularly when combined with other chemicals in Roundup. In 2015, an international science committee ruled that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen, countering previous determinations by regulatory agencies in the United States and other countries. Soon after, more than 200 people sued Monsanto in a federal case now centralized in California, claiming that Roundup caused them to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a common blood cancer. Over 1,000 people have filed similar suits against the company in state courts in Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, Nebraska, and elsewhere.

=> ↺ Multi-State Suit Targets Trump’s “Reckless Assault” on Healthcare as Anger Flows

• Warning of the decision’s “great human cost,” 19 attorneys general on Friday filed suit in a federal court to stop President Donald Trump’s decision to cut off key Obamacare cost-sharing subsidies, as outrage from advocacy groups continued to pour in.

• “Taking these legally required subsidies away from working families’ health plans and forcing them to choose between paying rent or their medical bills is completely reckless. This is sabotage, plain and simple,” said California Attorney Xavier General Becerra, who’s leading the coalition of states.

• New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who’s also a party to the suit, called it “a reckless assault on the healthcare of thousands of New Yorkers and millions of Americans,” which is part of a “partisan campaign to sabotage our healthcare system.”

Security

=> ↺ N. Korea stole cyber tools from NSA, carried out WannaCry ransomware attack – Microsoft chief

=> ↺ North Korea behind devastating ‘WannaCry’ cyberattack that hit NHS and systems across US, says Microsoft head

=> ↺ gives the NSA back doors

=> ↺ installing on its system an OS

• North Korea was behind the devastating WannaCry ransomware attack that temporarily crippled dozens of NHS trusts, the president of Microsoft has said.

=> ↺ Kaspersky asks for proof of claims made in American media

• Under pressure after a series of articles in the US press made various claims about its links to Russian state authorities this week, security firm Kaspersky Lab appears to be reluctant to dismiss the allegations out of hand.

=> ↺ Google, IBM, and Others Introduce Grafeas Open Source API

=> ↺ My Blogging

• Blog regulars will notice that I haven’t been posting as much lately as I have in the past. There are two reasons. One, it feels harder to find things to write about. So often it’s the same stories over and over. I don’t like repeating myself. Two, I am busy writing a book.

=> ↺ Sexual assault allegations levied against high profile security researcher and activist

=> ↺ Let MalwareTech Surf! Status Report

=> ↺ 500 million PCs are being used for stealth cryptocurrency mining online

• A month or so ago, torrent search website The Pirate Bay raised concern among the community as visitors noticed their CPU usage surged whenever a page was opened.

=> ↺ Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography with TPM2

• One of the most significant advances going from TPM1.2 to TPM2 was the addition of algorithm agility: The ability of TPM2 to work with arbitrary symmetric and asymmetric encryption schemes. In practice, in spite of this much vaunted agile encryption capability, most actual TPM2 chips I’ve seen only support a small number of asymmetric encryption schemes, usually RSA2048 and a couple of Elliptic Curves. However, the ability to support any Elliptic Curve at all is a step up from TPM1.2. This blog post will detail how elliptic curve schemes can be integrated into existing cryptographic systems using TPM2. However, before we start on the practice, we need at least a tiny swing through the theory of Elliptic Curves.

=> ↺ Linux vulnerable to privilege escalation

• An advisory from Cisco issued last Friday, October 13th, gave us the heads-up on a local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).

• The bug is designated CVE-2017-15265, but its Mitre entry was still marked “reserved” at the time of writing. Cisco, however, had this to say about it before release:

=> ↺ Pizza Hut was hacked, company says

• According to a customer notice emailed from the pizza chain, those who placed an order on its website or mobile app between the morning of Oct. 1 and midday Oct. 2 might have had their information exposed.

• The “temporary security intrusion” lasted for about 28 hours, the notice said, and it’s believed that names, billing ZIP codes, delivery addresses, email addresses and payment card information — meaning account number, expiration date and CVV number — were compromised.

=> ↺ Want to see something crazy? Open this link on your phone with WiFi turned off

• These services are using your mobile phone’s IP address to look up your phone number, your billing information and possibly your phone’s current location as provided by cell phone towers (no GPS or phone location services required). These services are doing this with the assistance of the telco providers.

=> ↺ Telcos “selling realtime ability to associate web browsing with name & address”

=> ↺ Severe flaw in WPA2 protocol leaves Wi-Fi traffic open to eavesdropping

• An air of unease set into the security circles on Sunday as they prepared for the disclosure of high-severity vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi Protected Access II protocol that make it possible for attackers to eavesdrop Wi-Fi traffic passing between computers and access points.

=> ↺ WiFi Security Is Borked – We’re All Screwed… Maybe

• KRACK – or the Key Reinstallation AttaCK – looks like the new infosec word we all need to know. According to the authors of a paper that will be presented at conference in a couple of weeks, Mathy Vanhoef of KU Leuven and Frank Piessens say they have found a way to circumvent WPA2 security – one of the key tools used for protecting wireless networks. If KRACk proves to be true, all bets are off when it comes to stopping eavesdroppers from listening in to your wireless network.

=> ↺ Your Wifi router could be hiding a scary vulnerability

• Anybody that has a WiFi router might want to be sure to have their login details close at hand throughout the course of today.

• That’s because later today security researcher Mathy Vanhoef will reveal a potentially disastrous vulnerability in the WPA2 protocol.

• The Wifi Protected Access protocol appears to have been cracked by Vanhoef according to Gizmodo which took a look at the source code of the researcher’s website Krack Attacks and found this throw forward.

=> ↺ Wi-Fi WPA2 encryption possibly cracked

• Just to add on to your Monday morning blues, WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access Version 2) which is the de-facto encryption method used by the majority of Wi-Fi routers is rumored to have been cracked.

=> ↺ Researchers Reveal Critical KRACK Flaws in WPA WiFi Security

• The WPA2 protocol which is widely used to secure WiFi traffic is at risk from multiple vulnerabilities, collectively referred to as “KRACK Attacks” that were publicly disclosed on Oct. 16

• “Attackers can use this novel attack technique to read information that was previously assumed to be safely encrypted,” the vulnerability disclosure warns.”The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks.”

• KRACK is an acronym for Key Reinstallation Attacks, which were discovered by security research Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens working at Belgian University KU Leuven. The researchers have disclosed the details of the KRACK attack in a research paper and plan on discussing it further in talks at the Computer and Communications Security (CCS) and Black Hat Europe conferences later this year.

=> ↺ The World Once Laughed at North Korean Cyberpower. No More.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ When Cities Fall

• Recovery, as in other parts of formerly IS-held cities, appears a near impossibility. All the military and political plans aimed at driving Islamic State out seem to take little account of the aftermath.

=> ↺ Trump’s North Korea Delusions

• A combination of ignorance and rashness is making President Trump a particularly dangerous leader as he crashes ahead with a possible preemptive war on North Korea, writes Jonathan Marshall.

=> ↺ How Trump’s Iran Decision Invites War

• By decertifying the Iran-nuke deal, President Trump opts for another Mideast war of choice, but war on Iran is really the choice of Israel and Saudi Arabia wanting the U.S. to do the killing and dying, as Trita Parsi explains.

=> ↺ Police investigate blast in Malmö apartment block

• A large explosion caused severe damage to an apartment building in the southern Swedish city of Malmö early on Friday morning, which police believe was caused by dynamite. “It’s lucky that no one was in the area because it clearly would have been fatal,” said regional police officer Hans Nilsson.

=> ↺ Marseille attack: Two young women stabbed to death

=> ↺ West Papua petition: Australia made a human rights promise that’s about to be tested

• Many Australians wouldn’t think twice about putting their name to a petition to support a cause close to their hearts, but in Indonesia’s Papuan provinces, where free speech is routinely and severely curtailed, “acts of treason” such as supporting calls for independence can land you in jail for 15 years.

• So it is truly remarkable that 1.8 million Papuans (about 70 per cent of the population) have signed a petition — specifically banned by the Indonesian Government — calling on the United Nations to conduct a free vote about independence.

=> ↺ Rockin’ for West Papua Peace Concerts held around the world!

• Free West Papua music and the West Papuan flag are outlawed by the Indonesian government in occupied West Papua but Rockin’ For West Papua; organised by the Free West Papua Campaign and the music collaborative Rize Of The Morning Star brought people together from across the world to play Free West Papua music and raise the West Papuan flag!

=> ↺ ‘Soldier of Allah’ avoids terror charge due to Facebook settings

• However, he could not be charged under the Terrorism Act because his profile was set to private, meaning he was jailed for just 18 weeks.

=> ↺ Ex-Taliban hostage says group killed infant daughter, raped wife

=> ↺ From estate agent to IS recruiter: How woman became ‘different person’ & kidnapped her son

=> ↺ Migrant Crisis: As Rule of Law Crumbles, Denmark Deploys Army, Depleting its Capacity to Fulfill NATO Obligations

• Skyrocketing terror and crime following increased numbers of migrants and refugees from Islamic countries has seriously depleted police resources. Yet another EU country will see a decrease in its ability to fulfill international military obligations as a result of domestic instability.

=> ↺ Death toll rises to 276 in Somalia truck bomb attack

• The death toll from the single deadliest attack in Somalia’s history rose to 276 Sunday as emergency workers feverishly dug through the rubble of a Mogadishu bomb blast that collapsed buildings and set nearby cars ablaze.

• About 300 people were injured when the truck explosion rocked a crowded shopping district Saturday. On Sunday, Mayor Tabid Abdi Mohamed issued a plea for residents and businesses that owned earth-moving equipment to bring it to the blast site to help the desperate search for survivors — and bodies.

=> ↺ Union rep for hero Las Vegas security guard addresses ‘highly unusual’ disappearance

• The Mandalay Bay security guard shot in the moments leading up to the Las Vegas massacre checked into a “quick clinic” instead of appearing in a series of previously scheduled interviews, but his union representative does not know his exact condition or location.

=> ↺ Macron: ‘I told Trump not to tear up Iran deal’

• French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday he told U.S. President Donald Trump not to tear up a nuclear arms deal with Iran, as doing so could lead to a similar standoff as the one with North Korea.

• “What I told him was not to tear up the deal,” Macron told TF1 and LCI in his first live TV interview since taking office. “After that I told him, let’s have a demanding dialogue, let’s continue to conduct checks, but let’s be much more demanding with Iran on its ballistic activity.”

=> ↺ Trump Ignores Israeli/Saudi Abuses

• By offering a propagandistic tirade on Iran’s role in the Mideast – a classic neocon screed – President Trump has demonstrated his inability to bring any fresh or honest thinking to the regional crises, as Kathy Kelly explains.

• Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for 18 years because he blew the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had “an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs” at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel’s capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included 11 years of solitary confinement.

• [...]

• Vanunu, designated by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg as the “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear era,” helped many people envision nations in the region making progress toward a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.

• In fact, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jawad Zarif, spoke eloquently about just that possibility, in 2015, holding that “if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.”

=> ↺ Jeremy Corbyn’s minister for peace calls for arms embargo on Yemen coalition

• A Labour government would ban exports of British-made weapons to all members of the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Yemen, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow minister for peace has told Middle East Eye.

• “We should not be selling weapons to any state that uses, or could potentially use, weapons we supply for internal repression or for foreign wars,” said Fabian Hamilton MP in his first major interview since he was appointed shadow minister for peace and the Middle East last year.

• Hamilton said that the Labour leader’s recent calls to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia over its bombardment of Yemen would be widened to include all nations involved in the bloody conflict.

=> ↺ Why North Korea Wants Nuke Deterrence

• In September 2016, North Korean cyber-defense forces hacked into South Korean military computers and downloaded 235 gigabytes of documents. The BBC has revealed that the documents included detailed U.S. plans to assassinate North Korea’s president, Kim Jong Un, and launch an all-out war on North Korea. The BBC’s main source for this story is Rhee Cheol-Hee, a member of the Defense Committee of the South Korean National Assembly.

• These plans for aggressive war have actually been long in the making. In 2003, the U.S. scrapped an agreement signed in 1994 under which North Korea suspended its nuclear program and the U.S. agreed to build two light water reactors in North Korea. The two countries also agreed to a step-by-step normalization of relations. Even after the U.S. scrapped the 1994 Agreed Framework in 2003, North Korea did not restart work on the two reactors frozen under that agreement, which could by now be producing enough plutonium to make several nuclear weapons every year.

=> ↺ History Blinded by Anti Socialism: Ken Burns’ Vietnam

• It’s not surprising that an Americana-obsessed filmmaker botched a history of the Vietnam War. National pride doesn’t mesh with the Empire’s lost war. And though Ken Burns’ Vietnam is worth the watch for its footage alone, Vietnam war experts such as John Pilger and Nick Turse have offered blistering critiques that, when combined, allow for accusations of “whitewash” to be levied against the film.

• Why does Burns make such glaring mistakes of analysis? He did his best to be objective, but ultimately Burns made yet another film “about America” for an American audience, which colors the entire film in red, white and blue. But there’s also a deeper bias that further distorts the history he’s trying to tell.

=> ↺ Profiting from America’s Longest War: Trump Seeks to Exploit Mineral Wealth of Afghanistan

• In an effort to justify the continued and expanded presence of US troops in the country, President Trump is seeking a plan to have US companies extract minerals from resource-rich Afghanistan. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue/flickr/cc)

• October 7th marked sixteen years since the start of the US War in Afghanistan – America’s longest war. In an effort to justify the continued and expanded presence of US troops in the country, President Trump is seeking a plan to have US companies extract minerals from resource-rich Afghanistan.

• Afghanistan’s deposits of iron, copper, zinc, gold, silver, lithium and other rare-earth metals are estimated to be worth roughly $1 trillion, a price tag which has intrigued the business mogul-turned-President Trump.

• Afghan President Ashraf Ghani brought up the matter in one of his first conversations with Trump, suggesting it would be a great opportunity for US businesses.

=> ↺ EU vows to save Iran deal, fears for North Korea mediation

• The European Union vowed on Monday to defend a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers and urged U.S. lawmakers not to reimpose sanctions after President Donald Trump chose not to certify Tehran’s compliance with the accord.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Manning Meets With Students In Low-Profile, Off-Campus Event

• The Institute of Politics may have stripped Chelsea Manning of her visiting fellowship last month, but that did not stop her from coming to Cambridge and meeting with Harvard students.

• In a small, unpublicized event held at the Democracy Center on Oct. 3, Manning met with around 30 students from organizations including the Kennedy School’s Progressive Organizing Committee and the Harvard Trans Task Force.

=> ↺ The Death of Che Guevara Declassified

• A top-secret CIA memo shows that US officials considered his execution a crucial victory—but they were mistaken in believing Che’s ideas could be buried along with his body.

=> ↺ Julian Assange is squabbling with Ecuador’s new president. That could put his London refuge at risk.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Talvivaara: Finland’s biggest environmental crime case returns to court

• Under scrutiny in the trial are the construction and use of Talvivaara’s gypsum waste pond, alleged scheduled and uncontrolled dumping of effluents into nature, as well as issues surrounding the handling and placement of the mine’s various waste components.

=> ↺ The defenders: recording the deaths of environmental defenders around the world

• This year, in collaboration with Global Witness, the Guardian will attempt to record the deaths of all these people, whether they be wildlife rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or indigenous land rights activists in Brazil. At this current rate, chances are that four environmental defenders will be killed this week somewhere on the planet.

=> ↺ Catholic church to make record divestment from fossil fuels

• More than 40 Catholic institutions are to announce the largest ever faith-based divestment from fossil fuels, on the anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi.

=> ↺ A Final Fight for the Keystone Pipeline

• Kleeb is already organizing for an intensified struggle in the event that the Keystone XL survives the PSC’s decision. “We have two years of eminent-domain lawsuits” mixed with direct action and civil disobedience of the type seen at Standing Rock, she says. It is all part of Bold’s larger legacy: a new environmentalism, galvanized by a lack of access to clean water in ever more places, that has taken root in rural America. In 2014, Art got “so pissed off at TransCanada” that he installed an array of solar panels by his barn – “It’s the only crop I made money on last year,” he says – and now rolls to the town coffee shop in a Chevy Volt. “It’s good,” Helen says, “to feel like part of the solution.” If the bulldozers come, they say, TransCanada will meet massive resistance. “Money’s nice, but it’s not important,” Art tells me. “If one of your grandchildren drinks a drop of benzene, that’s important. If our grandchildren decide not to have children because they’re worried about the planet they’ll grow up on, that’s important.”

=> ↺ The Sioux Lost a Key Battle in Their Struggle Against the DAPL

• A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) may continue to operate, keeping the oil flowing while the government completes a court-ordered environmental review.

=> ↺ MLPs: Careful What You Wish For

• The Dakota Access Pipeline is cannibalizing other pipelines, creating new winners and losers in the Bakken Region, says AB Bernstein.

=> ↺ The Grain That Tastes Like Wheat, but Grows Like a Prairie Grass

• For 12,000 years, human agriculture has cultivated grains that are replanted every year, at enormous environmental cost. Kernza represents a new way forward.

=> ↺ Why Rick Perry’s proposed subsidies for coal fail Economics 101

• In a controversial proposal, Energy Secretary Rick Perry has asked federal regulators to effectively subsidize coal and nuclear power plants at ratepayers’ expense. Under Perry’s proposal, plants that operate in deregulated electricity markets – where generators normally compete to provide power at the lowest cost – would be guaranteed positive profits so long as they stockpile 90 days’ worth of fuel on site.

• To rationalize this proposal, which a former Republican member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has dubbed “the antithesis of good economics,” Secretary Perry points to uncompensated benefits generated by coal and nuclear plants.

• As energy economists, when we think about coal-fired electricity generation, what usually comes to mind are unaccounted-for costs – not benefits. This emerging pro-coal narrative is worth unpacking.

Finance

=> ↺ British MPs want to force Theresa May to sign soft Brexit deal

• A cross-party group of British lawmakers is trying to make it impossible for Prime Minister Theresa May to withdraw from the EU without soft transition and trade deals, the Guardian reported.

• The group, which includes several former Tory and Labour ministers and other prominent parliamentarians, wants to write a transition deal — including acceptance of EU rules — into the U.K.’s withdrawal bill. If such a transition does not happen, one tabled amendment to the bill says, Britain should not be allowed to leave the EU.

=> ↺ Britain’s missing billions: Revised figures reveal UK is £490bn poorer than previously thought

• Global banks and international bond strategists have been left stunned by revised ONS figures showing that Britain is £490bn poorer than had been ­assumed and no longer has any reserve of net foreign assets, depriving the country of its safety margin as Brexit talks reach a crucial juncture.

• A massive write-down in the UK balance of payments data shows that Britain’s stock of wealth – the net international investment position – has collapsed from a surplus of £469bn to a net deficit of £22bn. This transforms the outlook for sterling and the gilts markets.

=> ↺ Beloved local restauranteur can’t sell coffee or tea because Starbucks strongarmed the landlord

• But when they applied for a liquor license, they revealed a curious circumstance: the Arepa Lady wanted a license to sell beer, wine and spirits because their landlords wouldn’t let them sell coffee.

• That’s because their landlord has also rented a storefront to a Starbucks cafe, and Starbucks insisted on a clause in their lease that banned the landlord from renting to anyone who competed with them to sell coffee or tea.

=> ↺ Tories to give private firms like G4S and Serco POWERS TO ARREST people in shocking 290m privatisation deal

• That’s right, Serco and G4S – the same two companies who were stripped of contracts for tagging prisoners because a Serious Fraud Office investigation revealed they were charging for tagging people who didn’t exist – are going to be trusted with the handcuffs by the Tory government.

=> ↺ China’s 1 percenters are now worth as much as the GDP of the United Kingdom

• China’s latest rich-list of 2,030 people controlling fortunes of $300M or more now totals $2.6 trillion, as much as the UK GDP.

=> ↺ I’m a working class woman. The British Dream is unachievable for me

• Let’s assume it means owning your own home, progressing well in your chosen career and feeling financially comfortable – and that all of this is achievable no matter what your background. If that’s the case, as a working class woman, nothing about the ‘British Dream’ feels achievable for me.

=> ↺ Detroit evictions: Crackdown could worsen issues

• “It got pretty bad,” Garner said. “The investors would belly up the money to do a rehab on a property. We’d go in and put new cabinets in, carpet, paint and show up the next day to finish up a project, and someone would have broken into the property and steal everything out, including the carpet, toilet and cabinets. We’d be starting all over again.”

=> ↺ When Growing Old Means Living in Your Car, Working in an Amazon Warehouse

=> ↺ Five things to know about Trump and NAFTA

• A fourth round of talks is taking place this week in Washington, and the negotiations seem surrounded by angst and gloom for those with the most invested in the pact’s future.

=> ↺ Tesla Fires Underperforming Workers After Annual Evaluation

=> ↺ Tesla fires hundreds of workers

• Tesla has a reputation as a demanding place to work, and the company lived up to its reputation this week when it fired hundreds of workers. The San Jose Mercury News estimates that between 400 and 700 workers were let go, based on employee reports.

=> ↺ Tesla fires hundreds after company-wide performance reviews

• Tesla fired hundreds of workers this week, including engineers, managers and factory workers, even as the company struggles to expand its manufacturing and product line.

=> ↺ How to Wipe Out Puerto Rico’s Debt Without Hurting Bondholders

• How did the president plan to pull this off? Pam Martens and Russ Martens, writing in Wall Street on Parade, note that the U.S. municipal bond market holds $3.8 trillion in debt, and it is not just owned by Wall Street banks. Mom and pop retail investors are exposed to billions of dollars of potential losses through their holdings of Puerto Rican municipal bonds, either directly or in mutual funds. Wiping out Puerto Rico’s debt, they warned, could undermine confidence in the municipal bond market, causing bond interest rates to rise, imposing an additional burden on already-struggling states and municipalities across the country.

=> ↺ Yanis Varoufakis: ‘I would like to live in a world where we’re all privileged’

=> ↺ The British right’s propaganda is an affront to democracy

• It’s easy to dismiss the Tory right as stupid: too easy if you wish to stop Brexit or limit the damage it will cause. As insults go, it is mild. The right has no plan beyond a desire to turn Britain into a Randian dystopia where regulations vanish and the state withers. It has no policy beyond a nostalgic hope that Britain will sail across the wide blue oceans and conquer new markets as our imperial ancestors conquered them before.

• The right offers religion, not politics. Its faith is without blemish, the gospel runs. If Brexit fails, that is not because the faith is false but because heretical traitors, judges, civil servants and EU governments have schemed to defeat it. “He that doubteth is damned,” said St Paul. “For whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Boris Johnson agrees.

• Thatcherism, Britain’s last revolt of the right, was preceded by years of hard planning in the Centre for Policy Studies and Institute of Economic Affairs. If you were around in the 1970s, you might have loved or loathed it. But you could not deny the right had built a programme for government. Today, there is no plan, no programme, no nothing. Instead of being populated by serious thinkers, Brexit’s thinktanks are filled with propagandists, tabloid hacks and tax-exile newspaper proprietors. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are columnists turned politicians. The Sun, Telegraph, Mail and Express do not just cheer on the cause while the grown-ups make the real decisions, as they did in Margaret Thatcher’s day. They are what brains the Brexit campaign possesses.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Why the 25th Amendment Won’t Save Us

• This may only be a minor accent in the vast symphony of outrage we are confronted with on a daily basis, but it is worthy of note. You are aware, I’m sure, of the ongoing shouting match Donald Trump is having with the NFL over players standing for the national anthem. Well, Trump found himself last week at the Air National Guard Base in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with Fox fiend Sean Hannity. By tradition, “Retreat” was bugled on the base as the flag was lowered for the day.

• The same tradition requires all military personnel and civilian leadership to stand at attention out of respect for the flag. Neither Trump nor Hannity stood, flouting that tradition. Laughing as the bugle call filled the air, Trump asked Hannity, “Are they playing that for you or for me?” Referring to Hannity’s show, Trump then addressed the crowd with, “They’re playing that in honor of his ratings.”

=> ↺ 5 of the Biggest Corporate Media Disasters This Week

=> ↺ On what should happen if the unthinkable happens

• This “if” has got to be specified very precisely. The question is not whether Trump obstructed justice, or is guilty of tax evasion, or has violated the Emoluments Clause or done any other act justifying impeachment. The “if” here is quite specific: It relates explicitly to the validity of the election. The question I’m asking here is what should happen if Trump conspired with a foreign government to get elected? If he did that, then what should happen.

=> ↺ It’s the One-Year Anniversary of the Leak of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” Tapes About Sexual Assault

=> ↺ What happened: Hillary’s view

• There are many lessons Clinton learned. There is extraordinary wisdom and insight that her book teaches us. But I fear that this point is still lost on too many on our side. That blindness leaves the field wide open for the party of no — no taxes, no immigration, no health care, no (more) social security, no protection for privacy, no network neutrality, no family planning, no dreamers.

=> ↺ It’s What Bob Corker Does Next That Counts

• For reporters, there is a logical extension from the opening Corker has given. Get Mitch McConnell, get Paul Ryan, get John Thune and John Barrasso and John Cornyn, get Kevin McCarthy, get every Republican in a position of responsibility to answer: Do you agree with your colleague that Donald Trump is a danger to the country and the world? Who’s right here: Your comrade who is the veteran chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee? Or a president who can’t stop tweet-threatening “Little Rocket Man”? And what about Corker’s claim that the White House is a daily battleground to keep the incumbent under control? Are you going to call one of your own a liar? Or is he right about Trump?

=> ↺ ‘It’s a Shame the White House Has Become an Adult Day Care Center’

=> ↺ Mike Pence’s NFL Walkout Was a Cheap, Transparent Stunt

• It’s not what happened. It’s how it happened. This was staged: a taxpayer subsidized stunt aimed at attacking dissenting black athletes. It was revealed in record time to be yet another toxic effort by this administration to divide people along racial lines and distract us from a train wreck of an administration, described by Senator Bob Corker as “an adult day care center” that looks after a big orange baby.

=> ↺ Noam Chomsky Diagnoses the Trump Era

• The president has abetted the collapse of a decaying system; Chomsky explains how.

=> ↺ Why Christian conservatives supported Trump — and why they might regret it

• For many of these self-described “value voters,” Trump was a walking contradiction of nearly everything they claim to believe in — a vulgar, thrice-married real estate tycoon whose brand is built on money, women, and debauchery.

=> ↺ Were Trump Voters Irrational?

• I am afraid that my Democratic friends are just going to have to reconcile themselves to the conclusion that the cognitive science of rationality does not support their judgment of the Trump voters. You can say whatever you want about the rationality or irrationality of Trump himself, but cognitive science does not support the claim that his voters were irrational—or, more specifically, that they were any less rational than the Clinton voters. Politics is not the place to look for objective rightness or wrongness—and that is what judgments about the rationality of voting entail. Our judgments in this domain are uniquely susceptible to myside bias.

=> ↺ What Justice Kennedy’s Silence Means For The Future Of Gerrymandering

=> ↺ The Media Needs To Stop Rationalizing President Trump’s Behavior

• His outburst on Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico shows that not everything is a clever ploy to rally his base.

=> ↺ Hustler Magazine founder offers $10 million for info to help impeach Trump

• Flynt cites several reasons he believes Trump should be impeached in the ad, including Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate change agreement. The adult magazine founder also ripped Trump for his “unconscionable defense of the KKK and neo-Nazis after the Charlottesville riots,” and argued that Trump’s “worrisome” ability to “trigger a nuclear world war” is one of the more “horrifying” reasons Trump should be impeached.

• “Impeachment would be a messy, contentious affair, but the alternative – three more years of destabilizing dysfunction – is worse,” Flynt writes in the ad. “Both good Democrats and good Republicans who put country over party did it before with Watergate.”

=> ↺ Harvey Weinstein and the Trump children show why the US shouldn’t have elected prosecutors

• Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr is a Democrat who has been New York County’s chief prosecutor since 2008. He is also, at the moment, a very controversial figure.

• On Oct. 4, the New Yorker (paywall) revealed that Vance had ordered his prosecutors to drop an investigation into Donald Trump’s children, Ivanka and Donald Jr, for allegedly inflating the worth of a property in New York to prospective buyers. Just a few days later, the same magazine (paywall) revealed that he had decided not to press sexual abuse charges against Harvey Weinstein, the high-powered Hollywood producer, after listening to a police tape of Weinstein aggressively propositioning a model, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. Weinstein has now been accused of sexual harassment and rape by a host of women.

• What links these two cases is that in both of them, Vance received hefty campaign donations from lawyers for the people involved. Donald Trump’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, had given $25,000 to Vance’s campaign, the New Yorker reported. Vance had returned the money after Kasowitz asked him to intercede on the Trump children’s behalf—as is customary with people involved in investigations. But a few months after deciding not to prosecute them, Vance accepted another, larger donation and fundraising help from Kasowitz, worth a total of about $50,000. Similarly, a few months after Vance decided to drop the case against Weinstein, the producer’s attorney, David Boies, donated $10,000 to the prosecutor’s campaign.

=> ↺ Germany’s Dangerous Lean: What the Far-Right Victory Means for the Rest of Europe

• The German election last month once again secured Chancellor Angela Merkel and her centrist Christian Democratic Union’s position in government, but it also heralded the dramatic rise of Germany’s populist far-right party, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), the country’s first right extremist group to enter the Bundestag since World War II.

• In an unprecedented turn, the AfD – which was founded in 2013 primarily as a Eurosceptic party, before its deeper xenophobic message took hold – garnered nearly 13 percent of the national vote, placing third after the CDU and the Social Democratic Party. The bulk of its supporters hailed from formerly Communist-occupied parts of East Germany; according to voters in AfD strongholds, the “Revenge of the East” resulted from Merkel’s “lack of respect” for Germans in the region, who accused her CDU of wasting money on immigrants while their local economies crumbled.

=> ↺ Trump and Weinstein

• Trump is actively assaulting women in other ways. The Trump administration’s Education Department has moved to make it harder for women at universities to prove sexual harassment. Trump’s Health and Human Services Department has made it harder for women to get contraceptives. Trump has nominated 32 men and just one woman to become U.S. Attorneys. Trump’s 2018 budget calls for a 93 percent cut in funding for federal programs that aid survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.

=> ↺ Is Trump Unraveling?

• Last week, Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview with the New York Times that Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

• Corker said he was concerned about Trump. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation,” Corker said, adding that “the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here … the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

• Corker’s interview was followed by a report from Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, who wrote that the situation has gotten so out of control that Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis have discussed ways to stop Trump should he order a nuclear attack. Kelly has tried to keep Trump focused by intercepting outside phone calls to the White House and restricting access to the Oval Office. Many of Trump’s advisors believe he is “unstable” and “unravelling” quickly.

=> ↺ Trump and Pence’s War on Black Athletes Has Nothing to Do With Sports

• Like his boss Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence is a lazy racist. Trump’s public demands nothing more because they are easily satisfied by the thought of humiliating black and brown people. Last Sunday, Pence spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to fly from Las Vegas to an NFL game in Indiana. His plan? To stage a political stunt where he showed his displeasure towards “uppity” black football players who are protesting police brutality and social injustice in America.

=> ↺ Promise the Moon? Easy for Trump. But Now Comes the Reckoning.

=> ↺ California secessionists think their path to independence is easier than Catalonia’s

• The world has been watching the play-by-play of Catalonia’s bid for independence from Spain, but one group is tuning in more closely than most: California secessionists.

• The California Freedom Coalition, the campaign that has taken the lead in the effort to break California off from the United States, sees similarities with Catalonia’s secessionist movement. But there’s an important caveat: they believe California has more legal tools at its disposal, creating an easier path to secession – if that’s what Californians decide they want.

• “There are definitely similarities in the fiscal situation – we both give more than we get back,” said Dave Marin, director of research and policy for the California Freedom Coalition. “But there’s more flexibility in the U.S. Constitution for secession than there is in the Spanish one. California has more tools available to it.”

=> ↺ Where’s the Beef? The Senate Intel Committee and Russia

• The Senate Intelligence Committee has made it clear that it is not conducting an open and independent investigation of alleged Russian hacking, but making a determined effort to support a theory that was presented in the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.

=> ↺ The Bizarre Story of How Trump Won’t Stop Claiming a Fake Renoir Painting He Owns Is Real

• Biographer Tim O’Brien told Vanity Fair an amazing anecdote about how President Donald Trump owns a Renoir print and straight-up refuses to acknowledge it’s not the original painting.

• O’Brien spotted the print on Trump’s plane and asked him if it was an original, apparently to see if he’d lie.

• Trump told O’Brien it was. The biographer responded, “No, it’s not Donald.” Instead of letting it go, Trump argued with him.

• “I grew up in Chicago, that Renoir is called Two Sisters on the Terrace, and it’s hanging on a wall at the Art Institute of Chicago,” O’Brien countered. “That’s not an original.” The conversation was eventually dropped.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Twitter CEO promises to crack down on hate, violence and harassment with “more aggressive” rules

=> ↺ Goodbye, Toilet Town

• Right! Have been thinking about it for a while, but I’m going to deactivate my Twitter account. With Twitter such a cesspool, the least I can do is rob @jack and @biz of one blue tick. I can’t be complicit anymore.

=> ↺ Father Ted co-creator leaves Twitter because of ‘Nazis with blue ticks’

• Linehan was an early adopter of the platform and his following had grown to nearly 700,000 after sending 148,000 tweets.

=> ↺ France: Facebook Islamists Hunt in Packs

• The “moderating hubs” for France’s social media are generally located in French-speaking countries with cheap labor, in North Africa and Madagascar. In France, rumors abound that Facebook’s moderators are located in French-speaking Muslim countries such as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Facebook never confirms or denies outsourcing its “moderation” work to companies employing cheap Muslim labor in North Africa.

• Notably, Muslim hate-speakers continue to proliferate on Facebook, while anti-Islamists face harassment and the loss of their accounts.

=> ↺ Bits and pieces: Social media censorship is biased

• Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are growing more hostile toward people with remotely conservative views. Accounts are being suspended without clear explanation other than to show this post or that post fails to goosestep with the left. Liberals are blessed for posting hate and threats.

=> ↺ Tom Wheeler to Ajit Pai: “Why the silence” about Trump’s media threats?

• Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, implored his successor, Ajit Pai, to say something publicly about President Donald Trump’s threats to take NBC and other networks off the air because of their news coverage of the chief executive.

=> ↺ Heard the One About Asia’s Comedy Scene? First, You’ll Need a Permit

• Every comedian takes the stage wanting to make people laugh. But it is less satisfying when the audience has been ordered to do so before the first joke has been told.

• Storm Xu, a Chinese comedian, found that out during a surreal experience of performing for the country’s military.

• In Asia, where a youthful stand-up comedy scene is still developing, comedians in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia are finding creative ways to tell jokes about sex and politics, while coming up against cultures of censorship and taboos.

• Among them is Mr. Xu, 30, who lives in Shanghai and ekes out a full-time living from stand-up comedy. Mr. Xu said Shanghai’s small comedy scene involves about 20 regulars who could perform at least 10 minutes of material, and most are Western expatriate men, not Chinese like him.

=> ↺ Kansas Won’t Let Me Train Math Teachers Because I Boycott Israel

• The state should not be telling people what causes they can or can’t support.

• I’m a member of the Mennonite Church. I’ve also been a math teacher for almost a decade. Because of my political views, the state of Kansas has decided that I can’t help it train other math teachers.

• I was chosen last spring to participate in a program that trains public school math teachers all over Kansas. After completing a two-day preparation course in May, I was ready to take on the role.

=> ↺ The Facebook post which led to Barrow PC’s sacking

=> ↺ Banned in Biloxi, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ raises old censorship debate

=> ↺ Book Ban: As To Kill A Mockingbird Is Pulled From Mississippi Classrooms, Here’s Five More Times Censorship Has Won the Day

=> ↺ The ironic, enduring legacy of banning ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ for racist language

=> ↺ ‘Uncomfortable’ language gets To Kill a Mockingbird pulled from Mississippi schools

=> ↺ Miss. School District Axes To Kill a Mockingbird Because It Made Some People ‘Uncomfortable’

=> ↺ Mississippi School District Removes ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ From Its Curriculum Because It “Makes People Uncomfortable”

=> ↺ To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee taken off Mississippi school reading list

=> ↺ China’s Communist Party Congress and Xi’s Next Five Years

• The Chinese government has tightened security and regulatory measures in recent weeks to maintain stability and attain optimal conditions in preparation for the week-long summit. Factories around the country have been ordered to shut down or reduce output to ensure the congress is held under blue skies. Security has heightened considerably to silence potential troublemakers and censors are working overtime to monitor news reports and online discourse surrounding the congress. Authorities have reportedly cancelled TV shows and visited the homes of foreigners as part of the new security measures,

=> ↺ People’s Daily launches English app in soft-power push

=> ↺ Great Firewall Of China Closes Loopholes

=> ↺ The ideological war playing out on China’s internet

=> ↺ China congress: How authorities censor your thoughts

=> ↺ Great Firewall Of China Closes Loopholes

=> ↺ The ideological war playing out on China’s internet

• While the internet has always been a key battleground for the Party, the past 12 months have seen a marked increase in censorship, with new laws and regulations targeting online expression even in areas or on certain topics where dissent was once tolerated or passed undetected.

=> ↺ 3 Ahmadi Men Sentenced to Death in Pakistan on Blasphemy Charges

• The men were tried under Section 295-B of Pakistan’s penal code, commonly referred to as the blasphemy law, which recommends either life imprisonment or the death penalty for anyone found guilty of deliberately insulting Islam.

=> ↺ Three Ahmadis sentenced to death for blasphemy

• Three members of Pakistan’s persecuted Ahmadi sect have been sentenced to death for blasphemy by a court in the central town of Sheikhupura, a community spokesperson said.

• Mubasher Ahmad, Ghulam Ahmed and Ehsan Ahmed were convicted by the court on Wednesday for insulting Prophet Mohammad under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, Ahmadi community spokesperson Saleemuddin told Al Jazeera.

=> ↺ Hollywood & Highland censors sculpture in response to Weinstein scandal

• In the tumultuous aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal, which has ripped a jagged hole in gauzy popular fantasies of Hollywood celebrity and show business success, one of the finest works of public art commissioned in Los Angeles in the last quarter-century has been censored.

=> ↺ Censorship battle and an antisemitic charge cause anger

• We write to express our deep concern at the actions of senior figures within the University of Manchester in relation to an event organised by the student Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign earlier this year (UK university censors Holocaust survivor’s speech criticising Israel, theguardian.com, 29 September). While the event went ahead, the speech of a Jewish Holocaust survivor was arrogantly censored and labelled antisemitic, the right to superintend the meeting by university academic staff was usurped by institutional appointees, restrictions were placed on advertising the event, and the whole thing was filmed in what amounted to an implicit threat of potential further action.

• [...]

• The latest such move is the exclusion of Professor Moshe Machover, an academic and Israeli socialist, long resident in the UK. His offence? Two infringements: his insistence that anti-Zionism and support for Palestinian rights are not antisemitic; and his willingness to write articles about this in any leftwing publication. For this, he has been expelled from the party. In this strange linguistic wonderland, it is antisemitic to argue that anti-Zionism is not antisemitic.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Learn the ins and outs of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

=> ↺ How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

• Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them.

• Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

• Her “real identity”—the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics—joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.

=> ↺ DreamHost Wins Challenge Against DOJ’s Overbroad Data Demands

• DreamHost has been fighting the DOJ and its breathtakingly-broad demand for information on all visitors to an anti-Trump website. This has gone on for a few months now, but the origin of the DOJ’s interest in the DreamHosted disruptj20.org site traces all the way back to protests during Trump’s inauguration.

=> ↺ Strategies for offline PGP key storage

• While the adoption of OpenPGP by the general population is marginal at best, it is a critical component for the security community and particularly for Linux distributions. For example, every package uploaded into Debian is verified by the central repository using the maintainer’s OpenPGP keys and the repository itself is, in turn, signed using a separate key. If upstream packages also use such signatures, this creates a complete trust path from the original upstream developer to users. Beyond that, pull requests for the Linux kernel are verified using signatures as well. Therefore, the stakes are high: a compromise of the release key, or even of a single maintainer’s key, could enable devastating attacks against many machines.

• That has led the Debian community to develop a good grasp of best practices for cryptographic signatures (which are typically handled using GNU Privacy Guard, also known as GnuPG or GPG). For example, weak (less than 2048 bits) and vulnerable PGPv3 keys were removed from the keyring in 2015, and there is a strong culture of cross-signing keys between Debian members at in-person meetings. Yet even Debian developers (DDs) do not seem to have established practices on how to actually store critical private key material, as we can see in this discussion on the debian-project mailing list. That email boiled down to a simple request: can I have a “key dongles for dummies” tutorial? Key dongles, or keycards as we’ll call them here, are small devices that allow users to store keys on an offline device and provide one possible solution for protecting private key material. In this article, I hope to use my experience in this domain to clarify the issue of how to store those precious private keys that, if compromised, could enable arbitrary code execution on millions of machines all over the world.

=> ↺ Intel leaders urge Congress to reauthorize NSA surveillance program

• FBI Director Christopher Wray said Friday that members of Congress who are trying to restrict the bureau’s access to information obtained through the monitoring of foreign nationals are jeopardizing national security.

• The Section 702 program, first amended to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 and reauthorized in 2012, allows intelligence agencies to legally monitor emails and phone calls of foreign nationals outside of the US and is set to expire at the end of the year.

=> ↺ Policing in the future involves citizen detectives and a Pokémon Go-like app

• A loose translation of what Akerboom described is that citizens would photograph license plates to find out if the car is stolen via the Pokémon-inspired app Automon. If it is, then the citizen-turned-detective scores points. And if a vehicle is reported stolen, citizens in that neighborhood might also be tasked to search for that specific license plate. The more you find, the higher your score.

=> ↺ Someone Created a Tor Hidden Service to Phish my Tor Hidden Service

• SMS Privacy is available as a Tor hidden service, and it turns out ~10% of users actually use it that way. This post details what I found when somebody created a phishing site of my Tor hidden service.

=> ↺ Judge Limits DOJ’s Warrant For Records From Anti-Trump Site

• The judge’s new order instructs DreamHost to redact identifying information of “innocent persons” who visited the website before providing the records to the government. It also dictates a protocol for incorporating procedural safeguards to comply with “First Amendment and Fourth Amendment considerations.” Among other stipulations, the government must submit to the court its plan for permanently deleting from its possession all information not within the scope of the warrant.

• [...]

• The company says it does not intend to appeal the court’s ruling.

=> ↺ French intelligence texts jihadist by mistake, inadvertently warning of surveillance operation

• A French intelligence agent sent a text message by mistake to the mobile phone of a jihadist, inadvertently warning him that he was under surveillance and undermining an investigation, it emerged on Friday.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ After Harvey, Texas Inmates Were Left in Flooded Prisons Without Adequate Water or Food

• The treatment allegedly follows a pattern of neglect set during previous years’ hurricanes.

=> ↺ Turkey sentences Wall Street Journal journalist to jail in absentia: WSJ

• Ayla Albayrak, a Wall Street Journal reporter with dual Turkish and Finnish citizenship, was sentenced over a 2015 story about ongoing clashes between Turkish security forces and militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in southeastern Turkey.

=> ↺ Outrageous charges against jailed Amnesty staff in Turkey must be rejected

=> ↺ Dalit Girl Raped by Muslim Man in MP, Act Recorded on Mobile by Accused’s Female Relative

• Such instances of Muslim women facilitating rape or sexual grooming of non-Muslim girls are disturbingly common. In January, we had reported on the case of a Bengaluru teen who was gang-raped, confined & tortured for 40 days by a Muslim family (including women of the family).

=> ↺ Dalit woman raped, video uploaded on net in MP’s Agar-Malwa dist

• The act was recorded by a woman who facilitated the crime and put on online platforms to shame the girl. The matter came to fore when the 18-year-old girl approached the police [...]

=> ↺ Turkey Issues Arrest Warrant For Second US Consulate Worker, Lira Plunge Accelerates

• One day after an escalating diplomatic spat, in which both the US and Turkey halted the issuance of non-immigrant visas to each other’s citizens following last week’s arrest by Turkey of a US consulate worker, on Monday Turkey issued another detention warrant for a second US consulate employee, Ahaber newspaper reports.

=> ↺ Turkish prosecutors demand up to 15 years in prison for Amnesty International activists

• Turkish prosecutors have demanded up to 15 years in prison on charges of backing a terror group for 11 activists, most of whom were detained in a raid on a workshop led by Amnesty International, a report said on Sunday.

=> ↺ Jammu and Kashmir clerics of Majlis-e-Shura issue fatwa banning women from travelling alone

• According to Times Now, the religious conglomerate issued a list of diktats imposing restrictions on women in the state. According to the diktat, women can’t go to markets and public events alone, they must not interact with men on the streets and there will be separate classrooms for boys and girls in schools as co-education is ‘un-Islamic’.

=> ↺ Malaysia’s moderate Muslim nation image dented?

• The Economist says what happened to prominent Turkish intellectual Mustafa Akyol sends sombre message about Islam and the current situation in Malaysia.

=> ↺ I’m on Probation and It’s Like Another Form of Incarceration

=> ↺ He was 20 and unarmed. A police shooting brings Seattle’s Vietnamese Americans into the world of activism

=> ↺ Trump Thinks Protest Is a Worse Offense Than Treason

• There are at least two grave legal implications to what the president has been urging—one of private law, the other constitutional.

=> ↺ Pakistan is “mainstreaming” misogynist tribal justice

• Instead of trying to stamp out jirgas, however, the government has decided to integrate them into the formal justice system. Earlier this year it won parliamentary approval for a law that gives their rulings force, subject to certain reforms. The government will appoint “neutral arbitrators” to each jirga, who must approve their verdicts—a measure it hopes will eliminate misogynist horrors.

=> ↺ Girls wearing mini-skirts made me convert to Islam- Bishop

=> ↺ Less judgement, more action is needed on female genital mutilation

=> ↺ ‘FGM Should Be Everybody’s Business’ – We Spoke to a FGM Activist About the Lifelong Impact of Cutting

• Due to the secrecy that surrounds FGM, the true extent of the practise in Western countries isn’t known. We spoke to the director of No FGM Australia, the Human Rights Award-winning charity that works to abolish FGM and supports those at risk.

=> ↺ Campaign Tackles Baby-killing Ritual in Nigeria

=> ↺ Cameroon palm oil campaigner arrested in crackdown on activists

• Nasako Besingi has been jailed after opposing a US-funded palm-oil plantation and supporters say this is linked to Cameroon’s ‘anglophone crisis’

=> ↺ On-duty NYPD officers admit handcuffing teenage girl, putting her in van, and having sex with her, but say it wasn’t rape

=> ↺ Is the Republican Party a Threat to the Constitution?

• Anti-Constitution politics is an opposition to democracy as both practice and ideal. This is different from being against effective campaign-finance reform or for spurious voter-fraud measures. Elite dominance of national politics long precedes PACs and dark money. And the poor and people of color have been excluded from polling stations as long as ballots have been in the United States. However pernicious, these are retail assaults on constitutional democracy—all serious, but nonfatal to the enterprise as a whole. A full-scale version of the same attack requires more. If the movement accepts elections, it does so only if they serve as rituals to sanctify what is already known to be the true voice of the people.

=> ↺ The burden of reform and why we do it

• As patriarchal misogyny slowly dawned on us, we realised it was institutional and these lives being revealed before us were either vocal, aggressive cries for help or the last moment breaking of silences in shared confidences by those who elected to stay mute for years. The inner harem of our homes where women turned to women for help, advice, a shoulder to cry on, we girls had front seats to the sadness and tragedy permeating Muslim society because of laws that were unjust and biased towards us.

=> ↺ Unholy Alliance: Why do left-wing Americans support right-wing Muslims?

• Now, try to imagine the shock, betrayal and sadness I feel seeing fellow liberals celebrating right-wing, conservative aspects of Islam. On February 1, I was so upset over World Hijab Day that I spent the day in bed with a migraine. Hijab Day? Would it make sense to have Wings Day to celebrate the garment that women in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ are forced to wear? Is there a Mormon underwear day? What about a chastity belt day? I risked my life, and my daughter’s life, to escape from the darkness into the light — only to find the light celebrating and fetishising darkness.

=> ↺ Love jihad a fact in Kerala: Yogi Adityanath

=> ↺ Pakistani Christian On Death Row Among Nominees For Sakharov Prize

• She was convicted and sentenced to hang after an argument with a Muslim woman over a bowl of water. Her supporters maintain her innocence and insist it was a personal dispute.

• Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam can be sentenced to death. Rights groups say blasphemy laws are often abused to carry out personal vendettas, mainly against minority Christians.

=> ↺ Chess player banned by Iran for not wearing a hijab switches to US

• A chess player banned from the Iranian national women’s team for attending an international competition without wearing an Islamic headscarf has joined the US team.

=> ↺ Donald Trump is letting Turkey hold an American citizen hostage

• Erdogan, a frequent recipient of Trump’s praise, has refused to release an American citizen being held hostage

=> ↺ The Quiet Islamic Conquest of Spain

• The Saudis also launched a new Spanish television channel, Cordoba TV, as did Iran.

=> ↺ A Proposal for Islam

• “We heard that you will speak about commonalities between Islam, Judaism and Christianity,” one officer said. “We don’t like that kind of stuff.” Then they left.

=> ↺ A one-way wall on the border?

• Do the people in USA supporting this wall really believe it is a one way wall, only keeping people on the outside from getting in, while not keeping people in the inside from getting out?

=> ↺ Justice for José Antonio, a 16-Year-Old Boy Killed By U.S. Border Patrol

• There is no Constitution-free zone where border patrol agents can kill unarmed civilians, no matter their country.

• If a U.S. Border Patrol agent uses excessive and unnecessary force to kill a noncitizen in a foreign country, are there consequences under the U.S. Constitution? The answer might seem to be obviously “yes” to most people. Unfortunately, our own government believes the answer is “no.”

• On October 10, 2012, José Antonio Elena Rodriguez, a 16-year old boy, was shot and killed on Calle Internacional, a street in his hometown of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico by a U.S. Border Patrol Agent. He was four blocks away from his home.

=> ↺ Changing the Politics of Mass Incarceration

• It’s been almost 50 years since President Richard Nixon played the law-and-order card to help him win the presidency. Decades later Donald Trump has adopted the same playbook, telling his own version of the forgotten American who is at the mercy of a crime wave. It didn’t matter that facts didn’t support candidate Trump’s arguments. Politically speaking, it worked.

• Nixon’s tough on crime political playbook, used by generations of American politicians after him, including Bill Clinton during the introduction and passage of the 1994 crime bill, has resulted in a mass incarceration crisis. On any given day, 2.3 million people are locked up, more than in any other nation. This mass incarceration crisis has devastated families and communities, particularly low income communities of color.

=> ↺ Louise Godbold: “My Encounter with Harvey Weinstein and What It Tells Us About Trauma”

• We continue our look at two shocking investigations by The New Yorker and The New York Times, which revealed a slew of rape and sexual assault allegations against disgraced and now-fired movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood for decades. We speak with Louise Godbold, who recently wrote a blog post titled “My Encounter with Harvey Weinstein and What It Tells Us About Trauma.” Now executive director of Echo Parenting & Education, Godbold calls on others to believe and support survivors of sexual assault and harassment, saying, “We need to educate everyone about trauma.”

=> ↺ 5 Shocking Failures Of Criminal Justice You’ve Never Heard

• The legal system isn’t run by all-knowing super-robots (yet), so we’re stuck with regular old law enforcement officers, who are human beings. Ones who are going to make mistakes. Sometimes authorities make the right call. Sometimes they make honest mistakes. But then there are the times you get stories like…

=> ↺ These Muslim Students Built an App to Document Islamophobia on Campus

• In the aftermath of the Chapel Hill shooting in February 2015—when Deah Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Abu-Salha, 19, were killed by their 44-year-old neighbor—police hesitated to call the shooting a hate crime. After Craig Hicks’s arrest, Chapel Hill police announced that the ruthless killings were “motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking.” But for many in the Muslim community, the Chapel Hill shooting wasn’t an isolated event. It was just one of many instances of Islamophobia that Muslims in America experience on a regular basis.

• “After the shooting, I remember going on YikYak, and the hate speech was just blowing my mind,” said Ayesha Faisal, current president of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill’s Muslim Student Association. “It was hours after the shooting. Out of nowhere there were people saying…‘It was justified because Muslims are terrorists.’”

=> ↺ If Ahmadis want equal status, they should stop pretending to be Muslims: Sanaullah

• Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan on Friday said the Ahmadi minority community should stop declaring themselves as Muslims if they want to be treated in the same manner as other religious minority groups in Pakistan.

• Addressing a press conference organised to ‘clear his position’ on the issue, Rana Sanaullah said that some media outfits had quoted his statement on Ahmadis out of context.

• “I said that Ahmadis pretend to be Muslims as they quote Quranic verses and perform religious rituals just like us in a bid to propagate their faith. But let me state it very clearly that, according to Islam and Pakistan’s constitution, those who do not believe in Khatam-e-Nabuwwat (finality of Prophethood) are not Muslims,” he said.

=> ↺ ‘I was not aware of what I was doing at the time,’ says UBC attempted murder suspect

• When asked by Sgt. Jeffrey why he might have attacked Mary Hare with a knife Almestadi said, “I started listening to the Koran and understanding the meanings differently.”

• “If you read something and your mind is thinking something else, you understand differently.”

• Almestadi — who was 18 at the time of the incident — said he even began seeing things that weren’t real.

• “At that point I thought Mary was the devil,” he said.

=> ↺ Judge rules Kentucky county liable for handcuffed children

• A federal judge says it was unreasonable for a Kentucky sheriff’s deputy to handcuff two unruly elementary school students and says the county government is liable for the officer’s conduct.

• The lawsuit was filed by the parents of two children, an 8-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, identified in court documents only by their initials. In 2014, both children were handcuffed in separate incidents at separate schools after officials called for assistance from Kevin Sumner, a Kenton County Sheriff’s deputy and a school resource officer.

• The lawsuit and an accompanying video uploaded to YouTube by the ACLU ignited a nationwide debate about school discipline. The video, captured by a teacher, showed the boy handcuffed above his elbows and squirming in a chair with his arms behind his back while crying that he was in pain.

=> ↺ Utah police officer who dragged screaming nurse is fired

• A Salt Lake City Police spokesman told the AP that police chief Mike Brown decided to fire the officer on Tuesday after an investigation into the incident.

=> ↺ BREAKING: Utah officer fired after nurse’s arrest caught on video

• Authorities say a Utah police officer who was caught on video roughly handcuffing a nurse because she refused to allow a blood draw has been fired.

=> ↺ QB Colin Kaepernick files grievance for collusion against NFL owners

• Free-agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick has filed a grievance under the latest collective bargaining agreement against NFL owners for collusion, according to his attorney, Mark Geragos.

• Kaepernick is not going through the NFL Players Association but has instead hired Geragos, who has represented several high-profile clients, including Michael Jackson, former NASCAR driver Jeremy Mayfield and musician Chris Brown.

=> ↺ California Police and Civil Liberties Groups Agreed on a Simple Transparency Measure. Gov. Brown Vetoed It Anyway.

• California Gov. Jerry Brown used the weekend to veto one of 2017′s last remaining bills to shine light on police practices.

• S.B. 345 was pretty straightforward: every law enforcement agency would have to upload its policies and training materials to its public website—but only documents that would be available anyway under the California Public Records Act (CPRA). The bill had uncommon support from both law enforcement associations and civil liberties organizations, like EFF and the ACLU of California.

=> ↺ Russia’s anti-corruption protests: detentions, detentions, detentions

• On 7 October, supporters of Alexey Navalny held events in 79 Russian cities. Jointly with Meduza, we have made an interactive map of the protests. According to our data, between 2,560 and 21,520 people took part in the various protests. In total, the number of those detained was 321 in 30 cities; some of the activists were detained before the start of the protests.

• The interactive map shows how many people took part in the protests, whether the rallies had official permission or not, how many people were detained, and in addition the various specifics of how each rally was held. You can tell the story of your own detention by using the form on our website (click on the megaphone in the top righthand corner) or add to the information about detentions on the map if we have missed something.

=> ↺ No evidence torture produces reliable info: former investigator

• Torture is not only immoral and illegal, it is also counterproductive to effective intelligence gathering, an independent international security consultant has said.

• Mark Fallon spent more than three decades with the US Government, mainly as a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Since the 1990s he has been working in counter-terrorism operations, particularly related to Al-Qaeda, and is the author of a forthcoming book on torture.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ How Many “Parts” (or “Labels”) Does A Domain Name Typically Have?

• Summarizing that graph, 99.98% of all unique RRnames seen have 10 or fewer labels, and 78.36% have just 1, 2 or 3 labels

=> ↺ TV Stocks Tumble After AT&T Cord-Cutting Disclosure

• The research firm eMarketer says that by the end of last year 16.7 million U.S. adults had already cut the cord and that by the end of this year it will be 22 million.

=> ↺ Google Fiber Gives Up On Traditional TV, And Won’t Be The Last Company To Do So

• While Google Fiber was initially hailed as the be-all-end-all of broadband disruption, the bloom has come off the rose in recent months. Last fall, Google executives began to have doubts about the high cost and slow pace of the project, resulting in a not-yet cooked pivot to wireless and the departure of two CEOs in less than a year. Company PR reps seem unable to answer basic questions about cancelled installations and the unsteady direction of the project, which has also faced more than a few obstacles erected by incumbent ISPs unhappy about the added competition.

• But Google Fiber has another problem: the slow but steady death of traditional television.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

=> ↺ Monster Energy Loses Trademark Bid To Push Around Japanese Software Company

• There must be something about using the word “monster” in one’s business that turns that business into a true monster from a trademark bully perspective. Readers of this site will be familiar with the two largest offenders along these lines, Monster Cable and Monster Energy Corporation. It’s the latter that has continued its prolific trademark bullying ways to date, as recently as earlier this year, when it threatened a root beer company with the word “beast” in its name, claiming that this was too close to “monster” for the purposes of trademark law.

Copyrights

=> ↺ EU Study Finds Even Publishers Oppose the “Link Tax”

• Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament representing Germany, writes about a EU study which finds that even publishers oppose the proposed “link tax” which is currently up for consideration by legislators. Interestingly, the report also finds that many journalists are afraid to cover the issue. Several publications declined to comment giving various reasons, including differences of view between the online editions and their parent publications. In other words, the subject is being silenced.

=> ↺ Popular Zer0day Torrent Tracker Taken Offline By Mass Copyright Complaint

• A popular content-neutral torrent tracker has been forced offline following pressure from an anti-piracy outfit. Zer0day was tracking more than five million peers earlier this month but a mass complaint from SCPP, an outfit that represents Warner, Universal, Sony and thousands of others, caused its host to terminate service.

=> ↺ Netflix Expands Content Protection Team to Reduce Piracy

• Netflix-type streaming services are among the best and most convenient alternatives to piracy but they have failed to make unauthorized consumption a thing of the past. Netflix understands this and by continuing to expand its content protection team, the company hopes to reduce piracy to a fringe activity.

=> ↺ ‘Pirate’ EBook Site Refuses Point Blank to Cooperate With BREIN

• A site focusing on eBooks is being pressured by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. Among other things, Eboek.info says it provides digital versions of comics to people who’ve already bought a physical copy but BREIN insists this is illegal. The site says it won’t be giving in to BREIN’s demands, adding that Cloudflare’s services offer no protection against copyright groups.

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