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● 01.22.18

● Links 22/1/2018: Linux 4.15 Delayed Again, Libinput 1.9.901

Posted in News Roundup at 5:34 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ 20 Years of LWN

• Back in mid-1997, your editor (Jonathan Corbet) and Liz Coolbaugh were engaged in a long-running discussion on how to trade our nice, stable, reliably paying jobs for a life of uncertainty, poverty, and around-the-clock work. Not that we thought of it in those terms, naturally. We eventually settled on joining Red Hat’s nascent “support partner” program; while we were waiting for it to get started, we decided to start a weekly newsletter as a side project — not big and professional like the real press — to establish ourselves in the community. Thus began an amazing journey that has just completed its 20th year.

• After some time thinking about what we wanted to do and arguing about formats, we published our first edition on January 22, 1998. It covered a number of topics, including the devfs controversy, the pesky 2GB file-size limit on the ext2 filesystem, the use of Linux on Alpha to render scenes in the film “Titanic”, the fact that Red Hat had finally hired a full-time quality-assurance person and launched the Red Hat Advanced Development Labs, and more. We got almost no feedback on this issue, though, perhaps because we didn’t tell anybody that we had created it.

Server

=> ↺ This Oil Major Has a Supercomputer the Size of a Soccer Field

• Big Oil is now Big Tech. So big, in fact, that Eni SpA’s new supercomputer is the size of a soccer field.

• In the multimillion-dollar pursuit of the world’s most powerful computers, the Italian explorer says it’s taken the lead. Its new machine, located outside Milan, will scan for oil and gas reservoirs deep below the Earth over thousands of miles.

• “This is where the company’s heart is, where we hold our most delicate data and proprietary technology,” Eni Chief Executive Officer Claudio Descalzi said in an interview on Thursday.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ EzeeLinux Show 18.4 | Ubuntu 17.10 Revisited

• Canonical revised Ubuntu 17.10 with the new 17.10.1. Time to take another look…

=> ↺ PodCTL #22 – Highway to Helm

• One of the reasons that Kubernetes has gained so much traction in the marketplace is because it is flexible enough to allow innovation to happen all around the core APIs. One area where that has happened is in application package management, specifically with the Helm project.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 4.15 Expected To Be Released Today, But It Might Be 4.15-rc9

• After going through release candidates the past eight weeks, the Linux 4.15 kernel is expected to be released later today by Linus Torvalds.

• Normally after RC7, the kernel is baked, but all the changes last week due to the fallout from Spectre/Meltdown led to RC8. But this past week, the pace of change has continued with many fixes still coming in. We’ll likely see Linux 4.15.0 out today as Torvalds commented last week, but it wouldn’t really be surprising if overtime is extended and instead we get 4.15-rc9 due to all of the changes this week and ongoing work still happening around Spectre and Meltdown mitigation.

=> ↺ Skylake X Servers On Linux 4.16 Will Have P-State CPU Frequency Scaling Support

• When using Intel Skylake X / Xeon Scalable chips right now under Linux the ACPI CPUFreq driver is responsible for the CPU frequency scaling decisions. But with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle, Intel’s P-State driver will add support for Skylake X.

=> ↺ Spectre Variant One Mitigations Will Be Sent In For Linux 4.16

• The Linux 4.16 kernel will feature Spectre Variant One “Bounds Check Bypass” mitigations.

• Retpolines and the CPU microcode updates have been for Spectre Variant Two while now a set of Linux kernel patches have been called for merging into -next for the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle.

=> ↺ Some Of The Features Coming To The Linux 4.16 Kernel

• Linux 4.15 will hopefully be released later today and that will kick off the start of the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window. Here’s some of what is coming to this next kernel cycle.

=> ↺ Linux 4.15 Goes Further Into Overtime: Linux 4.15-rc9

=> ↺ Linus Torvalds Calls Linux Patch for Intel CPUs “Complete and Utter Garbage”

• The patch submitted by David Woodhouse, ex-Intel kernel engineer that now works for Amazon described a so-called new feature for Intel processors to address Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) by creating macros that would restrict or unrestrict Indirect Branch Speculation based on if the Intel CPU will advertise “I am able to be not broken.”

• The “x86/enter: Create macros to restrict/unrestrict Indirect Branch Speculation” feature implies that the IBRS (Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation) bit needed to be set at boot time to “ask” the processor not to be broken. Linus Torvalds immediately reacted to the patch calling it “complete and utter garbage” despite the developer’s efforts to explain why he implemented the nasty hack.

=> ↺ [RFC 09/10] x86/enter: Create macros to restrict/unrestrict Indirect Branch Speculation

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 4.15 Delayed Until Next Week as Linus Torvalds Announces a Rare RC9

• While the Linux community was looking forwards to the final Linux 4.15 kernel release today, Linus Torvalds just delayed it for another week, announcing the ninth Release Candidate (RC) instead.

• It’s not every day that you see a ninth Release Candidate in the development cycle of a new Linux kernel branch, but here we go, and we can only blame it on those pesky Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities that affect us all, putting billions of devices at risk of attacks.

=> ↺ Linux 4.15 becomes slowest release since 2011

• Linus Torvalds has decided that Linux 4.15 needs a ninth release candidate, making it the first kernel release to need that much work since 2011.

• Torvalds flagged the possibility of an extra release candidate last week, with the caveat that “it obviously requires this upcoming week to not come with any huge surprises” after “all the Meltdown and Spectre hoopla” made his job rather more complicated in recent weeks.

• Fast-forward another week and Torvalds has announced “I really really wanted to just release 4.15 today, but things haven’t calmed down enough for me to feel comfy about it”.

=> ↺ No 4.15 final release today

• As might have been expected from watching the commit stream, the 4.15 kernel is not ready for release, so we’ll get 4.15-rc9 instead. Linus said: “I really really wanted to just release 4.15 today, but things haven’t calmed down enough for me to feel comfy about it, and Davem tells me he still has some networking fixes pending. Laura Abbott found and fixed a very subtle boot bug introduced this development cycle only yesterday, and it just didn’t feel right to say that we’re done.”

=> ↺ PowerPC Memory Protection Keys In For Linux 4.16, Power Has Meltdown Mitigation In 4.15

• • Linux’s POWER code with the upcoming Linux 4.16 cycle will introduce support for PowerPC Memory Protection Keys. With the current Linux 4.15 cycle is also initial Meltdown mitigation for these CPUs too.

• Memory protection keys provides a means of enforcing page-based protections without the need for modification of page tables when an application changes protection domains. The many commits adding this Power memory protection key support is now staged in their PowerPC -next tree.

=> ↺ GFS2 To Support Hole-Punching With Linux 4.16

• The GFS2 file-system with the upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle will add hole-punching support.

=> ↺ Userspace RCU Will Be Much Faster For Its Next Release Paired With Linux 4.14+

• The liburcu Userspace RCU data synchronization library should be significantly faster when built with a modern Linux kernel release.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Bell Canada brings open source automation ONAP into production

• Bell Canada has implemented it’s first automation use case using the Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) as part of the telco’s Network 3.0 transformation initiative.

• With an initial focus on its data center network infrastructure, Bell Canada is working with its network integration and back-office partner Amdocs to reduce costs and delivery capabilities.

=> ↺ Bell Canada Reaches Milestone in Network 3.0 Vision with Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) and Strategic Partnership with Amdocs

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ AMDVLK Official Open-Source Radeon Vulkan Driver Updated

• It’s been one month now since AMD open-sourced their official Vulkan driver code and the associated XGL code-base. There has been about weekly code drops of new AMDVLK/XGL code over the past month while the separate, community-driven Mesa-based RADV Vulkan driver continues being developed as well.

• Marking one month since the open-sourcing of this Radeon Vulkan driver that is shared with the Windows code-base is a new code drop. Today’s code drop adds VK_AMD_buffer_marker and VK_EXT_debug_report support. There are also a number of internal Vulkan driver behavior changes and fixes to some conformance test suite bugs.

=> ↺ Deep Color Support For Radeon X.Org Driver Being Tackled

• Open-source contributor Mario Kleiner has continued his work on deep color support for the Radeon Linux driver.

=> ↺ [ANNOUNCE] libinput 1.9.901

• The first RC for libinput 1.10 is now available.

=> ↺ Libinput 1.10 Is On The Way To Remove Touchpad Hysteresis

• eter Hutterer of Red Hat has announced the first release candidate of libinput 1.10 today, which isn’t a big feature release but rather incorporates a few new features with many bug fixes for this input handling library used by X.Org and Wayland systems.

• Peter notes the most notable change for libinput 1.10 is the removal of the touchpad hysteresis code. This code was previously used to prevent pointer wobbles while now the code has been worked to analyze the event sequence for pointer wobbles and if none exist the hysteresis won’t be applied. This should lead to a more reactive pointer.

• Libinput 1.10 is also working on new button debouncing fixes, improvements for newer Wacom tablets, and a variety of fixes.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Performance With Mesa 18.0

• Given the very strong Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance in the recent low-end/older Linux gaming GPU tests with discrete graphics cards, I was curious to run some benchmarks seeing the current state of Intel’s open-source OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance. With the Mesa 18.0 release to be branched soon, it was a good time seeing how the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compare.

=> ↺ Intel Graphics On Ubuntu: GNOME vs. KDE vs. Xfce vs. Unity vs. LXDE

• For those wondering how the Intel (U)HD Graphics compare for games and other graphical benchmarks between desktop environments in 2018, here are some fresh benchmarks using GNOME Shell on X.Org/Wayland, KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, Unity 7, and LXDE.

Applications

=> ↺ darktable 2.4 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Gets First Point Release

• darktable 2.4 arrived last Christmas with numerous new features and improvements, and now users can update to darktable 2.4.1, a minor maintenance release adding support for new digital cameras, including the Panasonic DC-G9 (4:3), Paralenz Dive Camera, Pentax KP, and Sjcam SJ6 LEGEND.

• It also adds a new filter rule to the Collect module to allow users to more easily find locally copied images, enables blending and masking in the Hot Pixels module, adds a speed boost to the Grain module, implements a debug print when compiling OpenCL kernels, and supports stdout handling on Windows systems.

=> ↺ Is Native Linux App Development In Decline?

• A blog like mine thrives, in part, on there being a steady supply of good quality native Linux apps to write about.

• We do news too of course, and tutorials, how tos, lists, eye candy, and even the odd opinion piece (like this post). But I know you like reading about new and updated Linux apps, and, to be fair, I like writing about them.

• And yet… Where have all the Linux apps gone?

• Bear with me as what follows is more of a ramble than a coherent essay. For background, I’m writing this on day four of an enthusiasm drought.

=> ↺ 10 Best Text Editors For Linux And Programming (2018 Edition)

• The year 2018 is here. Just in case you’re looking for some powerful text editor for Linux to kickstart programming new year, you’re at the right place. While the debate of the best programming editors for Linux won’t end anytime soon, there are many editors that bring an impressive set of features. While Vim, Emacs, and Nano are older and dependable players in the game, Atom, Brackets, and Sublime Text are relatively newer text editors.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Fabric MiniTutorial

=> ↺ Speeding up RGB to grayscale conversion in Rust by a factor of 2.2 – and various other multimedia related processing loops

=> ↺ Linux Add User To Group

=> ↺ Shell Scripting a Bunco Game

=> ↺ Install Webmin on Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) Server

=> ↺ OBS Studio NDI Plugin for Linux, send video from one Linux PC to another

=> ↺ A flying curl progress bar

=> ↺ Continuous integration testing of TeX Live sources

=> ↺ How to Upgrade Debian 8 (Jessie) to 9 (Stretch) safely

=> ↺ How to Overclock Your Intel Processor and Speed Up Your PC

=> ↺ How To Debug a Bash Shell Script Under Linux or UNIX

=> ↺ How to Change Boot Splash Image in CentOS 7

=> ↺ How to Block USB Storage Devices in Linux Servers

=> ↺ How To Install Ubuntu Unity Remix 18.04

=> ↺ How To Install LibreOffice 6.0 on Ubuntu & Trisquel

=> ↺ awk / cut: Skip First Two Fields and Print the Rest of Line

=> ↺ How to configure Nginx with Let’s Encrypt on CentOS/RHEL 7

=> ↺ Enable/Disable Notebookbar on LibreOffice 5.3 and 6.0

=> ↺ How to install LXD container under KVM or Xen virtual machine

=> ↺ Pet – A Simple Command-line Snippet Manager

=> ↺ 7 Essential Things To Do After Installing Arch Linux

=> ↺ Fix client intended to send too large body: xyz bytes in Nginx

=> ↺ Create your own Website with Joomla (Install Joomla on Linux)

=> ↺ Linux rm Command Explained for Beginners (8 Examples)

=> ↺ Plasma icons-only task manager: Multiple app versions

=> ↺ How To Create Virtual Hosts On Apache Server To Host Multiple Websites

• If you have apache installed, you probably know what localhost is. Localhost allows a single website to be hosted locally. However, when using virtual hosts, you can host multiple websites on the single server. The process is fairly simple and I will demonstrate it here itself.

=> ↺ How To Install Themes Or Icons In Elementary OS

• After installing Elementary OS, you may feel that you want to customize it to look more than Out-of-the-box system, and more of a personalized Operating system per se. It’s very easy to install themes and icons for your Elementary OS. The process is pretty much the same as installing icons and themes in any ubuntu system since it is built upon Ubuntu.

Games

=> ↺ It’s possible ‘Two Point Hospital’ from Two Point Studios & SEGA may be coming to Linux

• Two Point Hospital [Official Site, Steam], a new hospital building and management sim from Two Point Studios & SEGA might be coming to Linux.

• On SteamDB, it actually shows up with Linux, Mac and Windows all together in the “oslist”. This is by no means confirmation, as we’ve seen this happen before with a Linux version never releasing, but it’s still a good sign.

• As a huge Theme Hospital fan, a proper spritual successor sounds pretty awesome. The developer, Two Point Studios, actually has people from Bullfrog, Muckyfoot and Lionhead so they certainly know their stuff.

=> ↺ PLAY WITH ME, a mixture of horror and puzzles inspired by the SAW movies should come to Linux

• The developer of PLAY WITH ME [Steam, Official Site], a horror and puzzle game inspired by the SAW movies is looking to bring the game to Linux.

=> ↺ Tangledeep, the rather pretty dungeon crawler is leaving Early Access next month

=> ↺ Eco, a detailed sandbox simulation game is launching on Steam Early Access soon

• Eco [Official Site] is a hard game to properly describe, it’s a detailed sandbox simulation game where players construct buildings and towns, establish a government with laws and it’s backed up by a rich ecological simulation. It’s also heading to Steam Early Access on February 6th.

=> ↺ Cattle and Crops, a farming simulation and management game that seems to have Linux support

• Need your farming fix? Cattle and Crops [Official Site] is an in-development farming simulation and management game.

=> ↺ Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is confirmed for same-day Linux support

• Recently I wrote about how the adventure game Where The Water Tastes Like Wine [Steam, Official Site] would have a pretty interesting cast and I now have it confirmed Linux will see same-day support at release.

=> ↺ The Linux 2017 GOTY Awards are now over, here’s the winners

• Another year has completely flown by and with that another year of our GOTY Awards comes to a close, here’s the results of the Linux 2017 GOTY Awards, as voted by you!

• Some categories didn’t get a huge amount of votes, likely category fatigue since we had 16 of them. A little overkill, so we will probably tone it down a bit for next year to help with that. Also keep in mind, these are only the Top 10 from each category, there were plenty more votes for games that didn’t reach the top, so keep that in mind.

• First up, let’s take a look at what the current Favourite fully open source game is: 0 A.D. is the winner!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ This week in Usability and Productivity, part 2

• This is your weekly status update for the KDE community’s progress in the Usability and Productivity initiative. KDE contributors have been busy, and here’s a sampling of features, improvements, and bugfixes relevant to the initiative that KDE developers landed over the past week-and-a-half…

=> ↺ Interview with Baukje Jagersma

• How and when did you get to try digital painting for the first time?

• Probably when I first discovered Deviantart. I was already familiar with GIMP, which I used to create photo-manipulations with. But seeing all the amazingly talented artists on there made me want to try out digital painting for myself.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Builder happenings for January

• I’ve been very busy with Builder since returning from the holidays. As mentioned previously, we’ve moved to gitlab. I’m very happy about it. I can see how this is going to improve the engagement and communication between our existing community and help us keep new contributors.

• I made two releases of Builder so far this month. That included both a new stable build (which flatpak users are already using) and a new snapshot for those on developer operating systems like Fedora Rawhide.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ LibreELEC (Krypton) 8.2.3 MR

• LibreELEC 8.2.3 is released to change our embedded pastebin provider from sprunge.us (RIP) to ix.io (working) so users can continue to submit logs to the forums through a URL without copy/pasting text or direct uploading log files. This is our preferred way to receive and read your log files so if you are not familiar with using the paste function please read this wiki article to find out how. The 8.2.3 release also solves an issue with continuity errors on USB DVB adaptors that has been troubling some 8.2 users for some time; kudos to user @jahutchi for tracking down the problem kernel commit. We also address a long-running crashing issue with Intel BayTrail hardware that needed some users to force max_cstate in kernel boot parameters, and for bonus credit users with an Intel NUC equipped with an LED can fiddle with the colours, as we backported the LED driver from our master branch.

=> ↺ LibreELEC Linux OS Will Get Meltdown and Spectre Patches with Next Major Release

• The development team behind the Kodi-based LibreELEC (Libre Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) open-source HTPC operating system for embedded systems and PCs released LibreELEC 8.2.3.

• LibreELEC 8.2.3 is the third maintenance update to the LibreELEC 8.2 “Krypton” series of the Just enough Operating System (JeOS), which is based on the Kodi 17 “Krypton” open-source and cross-platform media center. It’s here a month after the LibreELEC 8.2.2 point release to address a few issues.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Leap 42.2 Linux Distribution Reaches End of Life on January 26, 2018

• Announced two years ago on November 16, OpenSuSE Leap 42.2 is a minor release of openSUSE Leap 42 operating system series, which brought the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel and KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment, as well as many other improvements and up-to-date components. openSUSE Leap 42.2 was based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2, but it will reach end of life this week on January 26.

=> ↺ openSUSE 42.2 to Reach End-of-Life This Week

• The minor release of openSUSE Leap 42.2 will reach its End-of-Life (EOL) this week on Jan. 26.

• The EOL phase ends the updates to the operating system, and those who continue to use EOL versions will be exposed to vulnerabilities because these discontinued versions no longer receive security and maintenance updates; this is why users need to upgrade to the newer minor; openSUSE Leap 42.3.

• “We are very pleased with the reliability, performance and longevity of Leap,” said openSUSE member Marcus Meissner. “Both the openSUSE community and SUSE engineers have done a fantastic job with security and maintenance of the Leap 42 distribution; users can be confident that their openSUSE operating system is, and will continue to be, receiving bug fixes and maintenance updates until its End-of-Life.”

Red Hat Family

Finance

=> ↺ Hartwell J M Limited Partnership Takes Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

=> ↺ Is the Stock Safe to Invest? – Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT)

=> ↺ A Side-by-side Analysis of Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) and Bazaarvoice, Inc. (BV)

=> ↺ Trading Earnings Optimism With Options in Red Hat Inc

=> ↺ Tenkan Bearish Signal Appears For Red Hat Inc (RHT)

Fedora

=> ↺ FESCo Approves A Big Round Of Fedora 28 Features

• The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved of a number of feature requests for the Fedora 28 release due out in May.

Debian Family

=> ↺ PrimeZ270-p, Intel i7400 review and Debian – 1

• Before diving into installation, I had been reading for quite a while Matthew Garett’s work. Thankfully most of his blog posts do get mirrored on planet.debian.org hence it is easy to get some idea as what needs to be done although have told him (I think even shared here) that he should somehow make his site more easily navigable. Trying to find posts on either ‘GPT’ and ‘UEFI’ and to have those posts in an ascending or descending way date-wise is not possible, at least I couldn’t find a way to do it as he doesn’t do it date-wise or something.

=> ↺ Rblpapi 0.3.8: Strictly maintenance

• Another Rblpapi release, now at version 0.3.8, arrived on CRAN yesterday. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg Labs (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required).

=> ↺ FAI.me build service now supports backports

• Currently, the FAIme service offers images build with Debian stable, stable with backports and Debian testing.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Our Favourite Apps for Ubuntu

• We enjoy using Ubuntu mainly for gaming, writing, listening to music and browsing the web. (Lots and lots of browsing the web.) There are other apps that we would love to have on Ubuntu like Affinity Photo, a stunning image editor that’s on par with Adobe’s Photoshop that’s available on Windows and Mac as well as Bear, a beautifully designed note taking app that we do most of our writing on that’s only available for macOS.

• However, the Ubuntu platform has moved forward in leaps and bounds in recent years when it comes to the official availability of popular apps and we are confident that this trend will continue.

=> ↺ Slack launches on Linux

=> ↺ Slack gets the Linux treatment: New snap available for Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, and more

• Slack is now available as a snap, which means Linux users can take advantage of the workplace collaboration platform, Canonical announced last week.

• Slack has recently debuted a number of features that make it more appealing to businesses, including Shared Channels and Private Shared Channels, which allow employees from different companies to work together on projects in private if they so choose. With more than 9 million weekly active users, Slack has gained a lot of traction in the enterprise, as noted by our sister site ZDNet.

• Back in October 2017, Linux overtook MacOS for the first time in terms of global operating system market share—which means the move opens up even more users to the Slack platform.

=> ↺ Canonical slaps Slack snap onto stack

• As the ‘company behind’ Ubuntu, Canonical has brought forward the first iteration of Slack as a snap on its software platform.

• Slack is a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services that go some way beyond core ‘messaging’ functionality into areas including project management.

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Review: Ubuntu MATE 17.10

• Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is a solid release with a few minor caveats about the Mutiny layout. The Traditional MATE layout is very nice, but Mutiny still needs some work. For users who want the classic GNOME 2 look-and-feel, Ubuntu MATE is an excellent choice. However, Unity users looking for a Unity-like experience should still give Ubuntu MATE with the Mutiny layout a try, but need to be aware that it does have some issues and it won’t work exactly like Unity. The Contemporary layout is also an option for Unity users, but is even further removed from the Unity experience than Mutiny is.

=> ↺ Revisited: Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia” KDE

• Long-time readers of the Linux distribution reviews on this blog know that I am a fan of Linux Mint, but I have had somewhat mixed experiences with KDE. When I’ve reviewed a new release of Linux Mint, I have occasionally reviewed its KDE edition in addition to its GNOME/MATE/Cinnamon and Xfce editions, generally finding that the KDE edition has too many minor bugs and not enough compelling features compared to the more mainstream editions. Apparently the Linux Mint developers feel similarly, as this is the last release of a KDE edition for Linux Mint; henceforth, they are only releasing MATE, Cinnamon, and Xfce editions for a tighter focus on GTK-based DEs and applications. With that in mind, I figured it was worth reviewing a KDE edition of Linux Mint one final time. I tested it on a live USB system made with the “dd” command. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Matrix Voice RPi add-on with 7-mic array relaunches

• Matrix Labs has publicly relaunched its FPGA-driven “Matrix Voice” voice input add-on board for the Raspberry Pi and Up board for $55, or $65 for a standalone model equipped with an ESP32.

• Matrix Labs has shipped its “mostly open source” Matrix Voice Raspberry Pi add-on board for Linux-compatible voice recognition and voice assistant technologies such as Alexa and Google Assistant. The circular board launched in February on Indiegogo, and earned over $130,000 in pledges. The Matrix Voice is now available from the Matrix Labs website for only $10 over the original $45 early bird price.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Alternatives

• The phenomenon behind the Raspberry Pi computer series has been pretty amazing. It’s obvious why it has become so popular for Linux projects—it’s a low-cost computer that’s actually quite capable for the price, and the GPIO pins allow you to use it in a number of electronics projects such that it starts to cross over into Arduino territory in some cases. Its overall popularity has spawned many different add-ons and accessories, not to mention step-by-step guides on how to use the platform. I’ve personally written about Raspberry Pis often in this space, and in my own home, I use one to control a beer fermentation fridge, one as my media PC, one to control my 3D printer and one as a handheld gaming device.

=> ↺ Debugging Tools

• That’s three strands (red, white, black) from a USB-to-serial converter, soldered on to a 3-pole screw-tightened connector. Clamped into that are the serial lines (red, green and blue) which were originally crimped straight to the lines. After a few months of use, the crimping failed and the red cable (RX) broke off.

• So I had to fix it, and in the process decided to make it more sturdy, more ugly, but also easier to use.

=> ↺ TP-Link Smart Wi-Fi Plug with Energy Monitoring Review

• Opening up the box reveals both plugs sitting in a plastic tray. A quick start guide, tech support contact information, and a copy of the GNU General Public License were found on top of the plugs. Following the quick start guide proved to be very straightforward.

=> ↺ Reading Buttons from a Raspberry Pi

• When you attach hardware buttons to a Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pin, reading the button’s value at any given instant is easy with GPIO.input(). But what if you want to watch for button changes? And how do you do that from a GUI program where the main loop is buried in some library?

Android

=> ↺ Rooting Android Just Isn’t Worth It Anymore

• Since Android is based on Linux and uses a Linux kernel, “rooting” effectively means allowing access to root permissions in Linux. It’s really that simple—these permissions aren’t granted to normal users and apps, so you have to do some special work to gain them.

=> ↺ What’s the Difference Between Android One and Android Go?

• In 2014, Google announced a lineup of low-cost, low-spec phones called Android One. In 2017, they announced Android Go, specifically designed for low-cost, low-spec phones. So…what’s the difference?

=> ↺ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week — Android Apps Weekly

=> ↺ Android 8.0 Oreo update for the Galaxy S8 is now painfully close

=> ↺ Pornographic malware found in Android apps for kids

=> ↺ Turn any Android 8.1 Oreo ROM into an Android Go-Optimized Version

=> ↺ HiSilicon Kirin 970 – Android SoC Power & Performance Overview

=> ↺ ZTE Axon 7 A2017U Android Oreo Update Now in Testing with Near Stock Android UI

=> ↺ Dark Caracal: Hacking group targets Android smartphones

=> ↺ How to set any song as an alarm on Android

=> ↺ Pornographic malware found in Android apps for kids

=> ↺ Rooting Android Just Isn’t Worth It Anymore

=> ↺ GoPro Fusion Support Arrives For Some Android Handsets

=> ↺ Android Dominates the Global Smartphone Market, but Falls Short in the US

=> ↺ This Android live wallpaper brings you a bird’s eye view of your location

=> ↺ Best Bitcoin wallets for Android in 2018

=> ↺ Here’s another sign that Android Oreo for the Galaxy S8 will be here soon

=> ↺ Security News This Week: Hacking Group’s Mobile Malware Spies on Thousands Worldwide

=> ↺ Roku Is Becoming the Android of Streaming Media

=> ↺ Amazon Prime Video can now be installed on Android TVs, but it doesn’t actually work

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy S8 Android Oreo update – Latest news could prove it’s coming soon

=> ↺ Dark Caracal: Hacking group tied to Android spyware traced to Lebanon

=> ↺ Android Users: To Avoid Malware, Try the F-Droid App Store

• In the early days of Android, co-founder Andy Rubin set the stage for the fledgling mobile operating system. Android’s mission was to create smarter mobile devices, ones that were more aware of their owner’s behavior and location.“If people are smart,” Rubin told Business Week in 2003, “that information starts getting aggregated into consumer products.” A decade and a half later, that goal has become a reality: Android-powered gadgets are in the hands of billions and are loaded with software shipped by Google, the world’s largest ad broker.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ This is Why you Must Consider Open-Source IoT Solutions

• The Internet of things is growing exponentially. Its applications are unique and that is one of the reasons that this technology has become renowned. Organizations are finding ways to utilize this technology for improving their workforce, while AI impacts IoT to create smarter applications. Making use of IoT seems to be costlier for companies who are still in their infancy phase. For companies like these, open-source IoT solutions have been created so that they too can reap the benefits of IoT as a technology.

=> ↺ Ellcrys is a Breath of Fresh Air for Open Source Collaborators

• Ellcrys is an up and coming blockchain network that aims to revolutionize the way developers work together. In addition to trying to revitalize collaborative efforts, the company has an ICO that promises to make the mining and distribution of its native cryptocurrency fairer and more accessible.

=> ↺ Genode OS Framework Making Plans For 2018

• The Genode open-source operating system framework project has shared some of their planned goals for 2018.

• Genode in 2018 is looking to advance their “Sculpt” general purpose system scenario for the operating system. Back during the Genode OS 17.11 release they described Sculpt as “the approach to start with a minimalistic generic live system that can be interactively shaped into a desktop scenario by the user without any reboot. This is made possible by combining Genode’s unique dynamic reconfiguration concept with the recently introduced package management, our custom GUI stack, and the many ready-to-use device-driver components that we developed over the past years.”

=> ↺ How Open Source, Crowdsourcing Aids HIT Development

• HIT development is important for health IT infrastructure growth as organizations continue to go through their digital transformations. Entities are interested in the most innovative and advanced technology to assist with increased workflows and improve patient care.

• Open source and crowdsourcing to improve innovation are key to quickly building on technology being developed for healthcare. This is especially true when it comes to newer technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.

• Healthcare organizations and healthcare technology companies cannot simply wait around for advanced technology to develop around them.

=> ↺ Open source in the enterprise: Trends and opportunities in 2018

• Some big events are set to come in 2018 – the recently announced Royal Wedding, the football World Cup in Russia and the incoming general data protection regulation (GDPR) to name just a few. And 2018 is also set to be a significant year for business technology.

• Some of the key trends in enterprise IT will include the continued move to hybrid cloud, the emergence of the container infrastructure ecosystem and ongoing growth in software-defined infrastructure and storage.

• Most interestingly, we foresee a number of significant open source developments here. So what exactly should we expect to see? And how can IT teams make the most of these emerging opportunities?

=> ↺ Keeping an Irish home warm and free in winter

• This issue would also appear to fall under the scope of FSFE’s Public Money Public Code campaign.

• Looking at the last set of heating controls in the house, they have been there for decades. Therefore, I can’t help wondering, if I buy some proprietary black box today, will the company behind it still be around when it needs a software upgrade in future? How many of these black boxes have wireless transceivers inside them that will be compromised by security flaws within the next 5-10 years, making another replacement essential?

• With free and open technologies, anybody who is using it can potentially make improvements whenever they want. Every time a better algorithm is developed, if all the homes in the country start using it immediately, we will always be at the cutting edge of energy efficiency.

=> ↺ The Meaning of Open

• Open systems create gravity wells. Systems that are truly open tend to attract others to join them at an ever-accelerating pace. In ecosystems that are ruled by a despot no matter how successful other participants in the ecosystem are, they fundamentally just empower the despot to have more leverage over them, because they have more to lose and their success feeds the despot’s success. In open systems, on the contrary, participants see that they don’t have to fear their own success fueling their own increasing subservience to a despot. Each individual entity who can’t plausibly build their own similarly-sized proprietary ecosystem to compete — the overwhelming majority of entities — is incentivized to pitch in on the open ecosystem. Investment in an open ecosystem by any one entity helps the entire ecosystem as a whole. This fact, combined with the fact that ecosystems generally get exponentially more valuable the more participants there are, means that in many cases over sufficient time scales truly open ecosystems create gravity wells, sucking more and more into them until they are nearly universal.

=> ↺ French Gender-Neutral Translation for Roundcube

• Here’s a quick blog post to tell the world I’m now doing a French gender-neutral translation for Roundcube.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox 58.0 “Quantum” Arrives With Faster Page Load Speeds And Code Compilation

• In November 2017, Mozilla launched its Firefox 57 web browser that was also called Firefox Quantum. It was hailed as a strong competitor to powerful Chrome web browser and we conducted a comparison of both browsers to give you a better idea. But, the story doesn’t end here; Mozilla is continuing to improve its work to deliver better performance with each release.

=> ↺ Paying it forward at Global Diversity CFP Day

• A CFP is a “Call for Papers” or “Call for Proposals” – many technical and academic conferences discover and vet speakers and their talk topics through an open, deadline-driven, online proposal submission process. This CFP process provides a chance for anyone to pitch a talk and pitch themselves as the presenter. Submitting a CFP, and having your proposal accepted, is one great way to get a foot in the door if you’re just getting started as a new speaker. And, for some developers, public speaking can be the door to many types of opportunity.

=> ↺ Firefox Nightly

• Creating a Gnome Dock launcher and a terminal command for Firefox Nightly

• About 18 months ago, Wil Clouser wrote a blog post on the very blog titled Getting Firefox Nightly to stick to Ubuntu’s Unity Dock.

• Fast forward to 2018, Ubuntu announced last year that it is giving up on their Unity desktop and will use Gnome Shell instead. Indeed, the last Ubuntu 17.10 release uses Gnome Shell by default. That means that the article above is slightly outdated now as its .desktop file was targeting the Unity environment which had its own quirks.

=> ↺ Lantea Maps Updates to Track Saving and Drawing

• After my last post on Lantea Maps (my web app to record GPS tracks), I started working on some improvements to its code.

• First, I created a new backend for storing GPS tracks on my servers and integrated it into the web app. You need to log in via my own OAuth2 server, and then you can upload tracks fairly seamlessly and nicely. The UI for uploading is now also fully integrated into the track “drawer” which should make uploading tracks a smoother experience than previously. And as a helpful feature for people who use Lantea Maps on multiple devices, a device name can be configured via the settings “drawer”.

Funding

=> ↺ Bluzelle closes $19.5m funding from ICO to build decentralized internet

• It includes Brian Fox, creator of GNU Bash, Alex Leverington, one of the original Core Ethereum developers, Prashant Malik, co-creator of Apache Cassandra and Ryan Fugger, the original creator of Ripple.

BSD

=> ↺ Some FreeBSD Users Are Still Running Into Random Lock-Ups With Ryzen

• While Linux has been playing happily with Ryzen CPUs as long as you weren’t affected by the performance marginality problem where you had to swap out for a newer CPU (and Threadripper and EPYC CPUs have been running splendid in all of my testing with not having any worries), it seems the BSDs (at least FreeBSD) are still having some quirks to address.

• This week on the FreeBSD mailing list has been another thread about Ryzen issues on FreeBSD. Some users are still encountering random lockups that do not correspond to any apparent load/activity on the system.

=> ↺ European LLVM Developers’ Meeting lands in Bristol

• It’s been announced that the LLVM European conference, will be coming to Bristol this April.

• Celebrating LLVM technologies and the developers who have contributed to them, LLVM is an open-source project that has benefitted some of the world’s most successful technology companies.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ GCC 7.3 Scheduled For Release On Thursday

• SUSE’s Richard Biener is making preparations for officially releasing GCC 7.3.0 on Thursday, 25 January.

• GCC 7.3 is the point release to GCC 7 that’s quickly being prepared to ship the Spectre patches. Earlier this month the Spectre work was back-ported to GCC 7 and now this next point release is quickly being prepared.

=> ↺ Ten More Things I Wish I’d Known About bash

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Octogenarianhood

• 2018 began for me with an absolutely incredible 80th birthday celebration called Knuth80, held in the delightful city of Piteå in northern Sweden. It’s impossible for me to thank adequately all of the wonderful people who contributed their time to making this event such a stunning success, certainly one of the greatest highlights of my life. Many of the happenings were also captured digitally in state-of-the-art audio and video, so that others will be able to share some of this joy. I’ll link to that data when it becomes available.

=> ↺ Celebrating Donald Knuth’s 80th Birthday

• Don suggests that some of the participants who have a little free time might like to look at a few conjectures about set partitions and generating functions that he has put online at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/caspagf.txt

=> ↺ Tidyverse and data.table, sitting side by side … (Part 1)

=> ↺ Rcpp 0.12.15: Numerous tweaks and enhancements

• The fifteenth release in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN today after just a few days of gestation in incoming/.

• This release follows the 0.12.0 release from July 2016, the 0.12.1 release in September 2016, the 0.12.2 release in November 2016, the 0.12.3 release in January 2017, the 0.12.4 release in March 2016, the 0.12.5 release in May 2016, the 0.12.6 release in July 2016, the 0.12.7 release in September 2016, the 0.12.8 release in November 2016, the 0.12.9 release in January 2017, the 0.12.10.release in March 2017, the 0.12.11.release in May 2017, the 0.12.12 release in July 2017, the 0.12.13.release in late September 2017, and the 0.12.14.release in November 2017 making it the nineteenth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency.

• Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 1288 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with another 91 in BioConductor.

=> ↺ My DeLorean runs Perl

• My signature hobby project these days is a computerized instrument cluster for my car, which happens to be a DeLorean. But, whenever I show it to someone, I usually have to give them a while to marvel at the car before they even notice that there’s a computer screen in the dashboard. There’s a similar problem when I start describing the software; programmers immediately get hung up on “Why Perl???” when they learn that the real-time OpenGL rendering of instrument data is all coded in Perl. So, any discussion of my project usually starts with the history of the DeLorean or a discussion of the merits of Perl vs. other, more-likely tools.

=> ↺ An overview of the Perl 5 engine

• As I described in “My DeLorean runs Perl,” switching to Perl has vastly improved my development speed and possibilities. Here I’ll dive deeper into the design of Perl 5 to discuss aspects important to systems programming.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ DXVK Is Making Significant Progress In Implementing Direct3D 11 Over Vulkan

• The DXVK project that started towards the end of 2017 for implementing Direct3D 11 over Vulkan with a focus on improving the D3D11 Wine support is already beginning to run some titles.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Should we consider adolescence to last until age 24?

• Thinking of adolescence as lasting until age 24 “corresponds more closely” to how the lives of young people today work, writes an expert in adolescent health.

• Compared to earlier generations, youth today are staying in school longer, marrying and having kids later, and buying a house later, writes Susan Sawyer, the chair of adolescent health at the University of Melbourne, in an op-ed published today in the journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. The transition period from childhood to adulthood lasts far beyond age 19, when it is popularly thought to end. As a result, she writes, we should change our policies and services to better serve this population.

• Sawyer is hardly the first to notice these lifestyle changes. In 2010, The New York Times published a much-read article about how the experience of being a 20-something is changing. As the piece noted, adolescence itself is a social construct, and a century ago there was no such thing. Researcher Jeffrey Jensen Arnett told the Times that, now, there is a stage of “emerging adulthood” — which essentially means being in your 20s but still feeling conflicted about “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, [and] feeling in-between.”

Science

=> ↺ Fast computer control for molecular machines

• Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a novel electric propulsion technology for nanorobots. It allows molecular machines to move a hundred thousand times faster than with the biochemical processes used to date. This makes nanobots fast enough to do assembly line work in molecular factories. The new research results will appear as the cover story on 19th January in the renowned scientific journal Science.

=> ↺ How a Small Nuclear Reactor Could Power a Colony on Mars or Beyond (Op-Ed)

• When we imagine sending humans to live on Mars, the moon or other planetary bodies in the not-so-distant future, a primary question is: How will we power their colony? Not only will they need energy to create a habitable environment, they’ll also need it to get back to Earth. For distant planetary bodies, like Mars, it’s inefficient to bring fuel for the trip home; it’s just too heavy. That means the astronauts need a power source to make liquid oxygen and propellant.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ US life expectancy just dropped for the second year in a row. Let’s stop the trend now

• U.S. gross domestic product is at an all-time high. U.S. life expectancy is not.

• Life expectancy has fallen for the second time in two years – from a high of 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.6 years in 2016. It fell for men and women, whites, blacks and Hispanics. Statistics show that thousands were preventable, premature deaths.

• Life expectancy is not supposed to fall in countries that are this rich, spend this much on health and pride themselves on taking care of each other. As a demographer working in a school of public health, I am astounded by the complacency at the loss of so many Americans in the prime of life.

=> ↺ Tom Petty died of accidental drug overdose, coroner says

• More than three months after rocker Tom Petty died, his official cause of death has been determined as an accidental drug overdose.

• Los Angeles County coroner spokesman Ed Winter confirmed Petty’s autopsy results, which were written by Chief of Coroner Investigations Brian Elias, in a statement to USA TODAY.

• Petty had a mixture of fentanyl, oxycodone, temazepam, alprazolam, citalopram, acetylfentanyl and despropionyl fentanyl in his system. The musician,66, was found unconscious and in cardiac arrest at his Malibu home on Oct. 3 and died at the UCLA Medical Center that evening.

=> ↺ First There Was Prince. Now Tom Petty. When Will America Finally Wake Up to the Opioid Crisis?

• When pop star Prince died in April 2016, a gaggle of health care researchers and reporters—including me—tried to see the silver lining in his surprising, opioid-linked death. If even Prince, a famous teetotaler with access to the best medical care, could end up addicted to painkillers, surely that would show that the opioid epidemic was reaching every corner of America. Maybe in death, his celebrity could illuminate the high stakes of the crisis and force a reckoning.

• We were very wrong. More than 55,000 Americans—rich, poor, famous and not—have since died from their own opioid overdoses. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that the death rate in 2018 could be even worse. And Friday night’s news that rock star Tom Petty died from his own preventable painkiller overdose, more than a year after Prince, underscores how far there is to go.

Security

=> ↺ PC desktop build, Intel, spectre issues etc.

• Apart from the initial system bought, most of my systems when being changed were in the INR 20-25k/- budget including all and any accessories I bought later.

• The only real expensive parts I purchased have been external hdd ( 1 TB WD passport) and then a Viewsonic 17″ LCD which together sent me back by around INR 10k/- but both seem to give me adequate performance (both have outlived the warranty years) with the monitor being used almost 24×7 over 6 years or so, of course over GNU/Linux specifically Debian. Both have been extremely well value for the money.

• As I had been exposed to both the motherboards I had been following those and other motherboards as well. What was and has been interesting to observe what Asus did later was to focus more on the high-end gaming market while Gigabyte continued to dilute it energy both in the mid and high-end motherboards.

=> ↺ Security updates for Monday

=> ↺ RedHat reverts patches to mitigate Spectre Variant 2

• RedHat previously released patches to mitigate this issue, however, in a rather controversial move, has decided to roll back these changes after complaints about systems failing to boot with the new patches, and instead is now recommending that, “subscribers contact their CPU OEM vendor to download the latest microcode/firmware for their processor.”

=> ↺ Red Hat dumps Spectre CPU patches that brick servers

• Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat will no longer distribute microcode patches to mitigate against the Spectre processor flaw after bugs in the patches stopped user systems from booting up.

• The company advised of its decision late last week after being alerted by its customers to problems with the patches.

• Red Hat is now reverting the microcode_ctl and linux-firmware packages it includes with its enterprise Linux distribution to older versions that are known to be stable.

• Microcode, also known as millicode and firmware, is software distributed by vendors to correct specific errors for processors.

=> ↺ ‘Jeopardy!’ champ hacked [sic] accounts of college president, vice president

• [...] and using a computer to commit a crime, both felonies. [...]

• Jass was able to access the accounts because of an April 24 issue with the college email system, hosted by Google. Hribar said there was network outage caused by loss of power.

• On April 25, users received a text message with a generic, standard passcode: “Please attempt to login to Gmail using this password. You should be prompted to change password after login…”

• Not everyone, however, was prompted to do so. Some did make the change using a tutorial. Some received an error and were unable to create a new password, the timeline states. Others did not alter the password at all. Neither Docking nor Caldwell immediately changed the password.

=> ↺ Health records firm badly hit by Windows ransomware

• A billion-dollar electronic health records company in Chicago is struggling to recover from an attack of a variant of the SamSam Windows ransomware.

=> ↺ Allscripts recovering from ransomware attack that has kept key tools offline

• In a conference call for customers on Saturday, which Salted Hash listened-in on, Allscripts’ Jeremy Maxwell, director of information security, said their PRO EHR and Electronic Prescriptions for Controlled Substances (EPCS) services were the hardest hit by the ransomware attack.

• Other services had availability issues as well, but those have since been restored, such as direct messaging and some CCDA functionality.

=> ↺ Android Bug Hunter Gets $112,500 Bounty From Google For Pixel Remote Exploit Chain

=> ↺ Beware! These “Forced” Chrome And Firefox Extensions Are Almost Impossible To Remove

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ China Urges U.S. to Abandon ‘Cold War’ Mindset in Bilateral Ties

• China’s National Defense Ministry said the U.S. should abandon a “Cold War” mindset and view Chinese national security and military efforts “rationally and objectively.”

• The instigators of militarization of the South China Sea are “other countries” that don’t seem to want to see peace in the region and are using the banner of “navigational freedom” to undertake military activities in a tyrannical manner, ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang said in a statement released late Saturday.

• The statement was in response to a U.S. Defense Department strategy report, released last week, that singled out China’s military modernization and expansion in the South China Sea as key threats to U.S. power. China has undertaken massive land reclamation in the contested waterway that hosts $5 trillion in trade a year, to strengthen its claim to more than 80 percent of the area. That has strained ties with other claimant states, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as the U.S.

=> ↺ Symbolic Violence In Neoliberalism

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Inside Snapchat: Amid new layoffs, secret memos reveal ‘leakers threatened with jail

• According to Cheddar, a New York-based media outlet founded by the former president of Buzzfeed, the firm sacked employees “across 8 different teams” on Thursday (18 January). Others, it revealed, have been asked to relocate from the UK to Los Angeles.

=> ↺ Assange a ‘Problem’ That Created ‘More Than a Nuisance’ – Ecuador President

• In an interview the president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, stated that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an “inherited problem” that has created “more than a nuisance” for his government.

• “We hope to have a positive result in the short term,” Lenin Moreno said in an interview with television networks.

• Ecuador wanted to resolve the Assange issue, so the Australian whistleblower was “granted Ecuadorian citizenship and a diplomatic rank so that he could leave the territory of the embassy” in London, Moreno said.

=> ↺ WikiLeaks: Ecuador president calls Julian Assange a ‘problem’ as extended stay at London embassy strains patience of hosts

=> ↺ Ecuador president calls Julian Assange a ‘problem’

=> ↺ Assange ‘more than a nuisance’ – Ecuadorian president

=> ↺ Ecuador leader calls Julian Assange an ‘inherited problem’

=> ↺ Ecuador President Lenin Moreno Calls Julian Assange A “Problem”

=> ↺ Ecuador president calls WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange an ‘inherited problem’

=> ↺ Ecuador president labels WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a ‘nuisance’

• Mr Moreno said his country was continuing to seek mediation involving “important people” without specifying whom he meant.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Pair of giant pandas arrive from China to Finland

• The four-and-a-half-year-old male panda, Pyry, did not lose his appetite on the 6,500-kilometre flight from China to Finland but munched on a bamboo stem upon his arrival at Helsinki Airport on Thursday, 18 January, 2018.

=> ↺ We’re about to kill a massive, accidental experiment in reducing global warming

• Studies have found that ships have a net cooling effect on the planet, despite belching out nearly a billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. That’s almost entirely because they also emit sulfur, which can scatter sunlight in the atmosphere and form or thicken clouds that reflect it away.

• In effect, the shipping industry has been carrying out an unintentional experiment in climate engineering for more than a century. Global mean temperatures could be as much as 0.25 ˚C lower than they would otherwise have been, based on the mean “forcing effect” calculated by a 2009 study that pulled together other findings (see “The Growing Case for Geoengineering”). For a world struggling to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, that’s a big helping hand.

=> ↺ Here’s the reason we’d never halt a geoengineering project midway through

• If we can’t reduce greenhouse-gas emissions fast enough to ward off catastrophic climate change, geoengineering may offer a fallback plan. Serious researchers are increasingly exploring measures, such as spraying tiny particles into the air to reflect more sunlight back into space, that wouldn’t reduce emissions but could offset the rise in global temperatures.

• A study published January 22 in Nature Ecology & Evolution suggests this is a bad idea. If the world ever starts doing geoengineering, the study warns, it may be too dangerous to ever stop.

• The problem, explains the paper, is that deliberately cooling the planet would mask any additional warming produced by greenhouse gases. This means that if the world decided to stop geoengineering, say, 50 years later, the greenhouse effect that had built up during that time would warm the planet very rapidly.

Finance

=> ↺ EU Tells Apple It Still Has to Show Them the Money

• Ireland’s delay in extracting some 13 billion euros ($15.9 billion) in tax from Apple has already raised the ire of EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. The EU is taking the Irish government to court for failing to recoup the money. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said it will start collecting the tax bill in the second quarter. Any funds will be held in escrow while Ireland and Cupertino, California-based Apple fight the EU order at court.

=> ↺ UK: Office for Students spearheads privatisation and policing of universities

• As early as 2012, the BBC reported that the government had approved more than 400 degree and diploma courses at private universities, without checking the quality of courses offered or student completion rates. In the same year, the amount of money paid to private colleges through unregulated courses trebled to £100 million. The number of students on those courses doubled in the same period.

=> ↺ The Chinese think Palo Alto is dumpy

• Good news! The great Raw Water Story of 2017 is finally over. Google tells me that searches went up ten-fold over the raw water craze, but thankfully, humans seem to have filtered out any more stories or follow ups. Silicon Valley can rest easy.

• But wait! There is another crisis brewing, and it isn’t the animal fecal matter in your algae water.

• Over the past few days, we’ve seen the creation of a brand new genre of tech press article which might be called “the Chinese are really bored with Silicon Valley.”

=> ↺ Beijing Says U.S. Piracy List Lacks Objectivity, Relies on Third Parties

• Earlier in the week, Alibaba said it had become a “scapegoat” in “a highly-politicized environment” after being included on the latest list. It added that the Notorious Marketplaces list “is not about intellectual property protection, but just another instrument to achieve the U.S. government’s geopolitical objectives,” a reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to get tougher on China for what he sees as an imbalanced trade relationship.

=> ↺ Rise Of The Contract Workers: Work Is Different Now

• In an old metal-stamping factory that was once part of Wheeling, W.Va.’s industrial past, a law firm has set up a futuristic model for how to get legal work done. Unlike the old factory, it relies heavily on new kinds of work arrangements.

• “Contractors are hired by the hour,” says Daryl Shetterly, director of the Orrick firm’s analytics division. “So we might have 30 people working today, and tomorrow we might have 80.”

• Tenure for workers in the building used to be measured in decades. Now it might last a few days for the workers there today. While the building has had a facelift, Shetterly says, “it is a factory in that we work to drive efficiency and discipline into every mouse click.”

=> ↺ PFI – A Cautionary Tale

• Here is my personal experience of the great push for the public sector to use the Private Finance Initiative.

• When I was Deputy High Commissioner in Accra, the British government was paying a very large sum to rent over 80 residential properties in a city where rents are very high for quality properties. However the British government owned a lot of land there, and it was an obvious saving to build our own residential compound.

• We accordingly drew up plans and got quotes, which were submitted to the FCO with details of the very substantial savings from the medium term. The response was that we had to invite private sector bids for a PFI scheme. This amounted to no more than asking the companies who had already submitted construction bids to submit pre-financing and maintenance plans. Needless to say this increased costs very substantially.

• But here is the kicker – in comparing the “build it ourselves” plan with the PFI plan, we were instructed to give an 8% cost advantage to the PFI scheme – the “public sector comparator” – to allow for the extra efficiency of the private sector. No matter we were comparing real costs to real costs, somehow magically an 8% saving would accrue from using the private sector, in a manner the Treasury refused to define. I simply shelved the whole scheme in disgust, but I understand this “efficiency saving” allowance was a standard feature of the PFI scam.

=> ↺ In 4 Days, Top CEOs Paid More than Bangladesh Garment Workers Life Earnings

• A CEO from one of the world’s top five global fashion brands – including Zara’s parent company Inditex – has to work for just four days to earn what a garment worker in Bangladesh will earn in an entire lifetime, campaigning group Oxfam International said Monday. In the run-up to the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, Oxfam has sought to put inequality at the heart of this week’s deliberations of the rich and powerful.

• “The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system,” said Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam International’s executive director. “The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited to ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, and swell the profits of corporations and billionaire investors.”

=> ↺ Reskilling Revolution Needed for the Millions of Jobs at Risk Due to Technological Disruption

• The global economy faces a reskilling crisis with 1.4 million jobs in the US alone vulnerable to disruption from technology and other factors by 2026, according to a new report, Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All, published today by the World Economic Forum.

• The report is an analysis of nearly 1,000 job types across the US economy, encompassing 96% of employment in the country. Its aim is to assess the scale of the reskilling task required to protect workforces from an expected wave of automation brought on by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

=> ↺ Massive cost overruns threaten to derail the bullet train. Here’s what has to change

• Over the next year, Brown, the Legislature and the next governor will have to decide whether to create new revenue sources, dramatically delay its construction or scale it far back from a complete 550-mile system, among other possibilities.

• “The financial demand for this is so enormous,” said Martin Wachs, a UCLA transportation expert and a member of a peer review panel that oversees the project. “We should have been more ready for this. The costs always rise and the schedule always slips, but that doesn’t mean the project isn’t justified.”

• The rail authority last week named a new chief, longtime government executive and political insider Brian Kelly, who faces a big task to shore up the rail authority, restore the confidence of skeptical officials and fix a broad range of management, financial and political problems facing the authority across the state.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Facebook Wants to Open Special ‘Community Skills Hubs’ in Europe and Train a Million People

• Facebook also committed to having trained one million people and business owners by 2020.

=> ↺ President Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims in his first year

• One year after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made 2,140 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. That’s an average of nearly 5.9 claims a day.

• We started this project as part of our coverage of the president’s first 100 days, largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements. Readers demanded we keep it going for another year. The database has proved so useful — and even sparked the interest of academicians — that we now plan to keep it going for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

• Our interactive graphic, created with the help of Leslie Shapiro and Kaeti Hinck of The Post graphics department, displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. We also catalogued the president’s many flip-flops, since those earn Upside-Down Pinocchios if a politician shifts position on an issue without acknowledging he or she did so.

=> ↺ Farewell, unpaid blogger: HuffPost drops free contributor platform that drove its growth

• The news was broken by HuffPost itself (which, like TechCrunch, is part of Oath, owned by gigantic carrier Verizon), which directly tied the move to the changing tides (not Tide Pods, although I personally think there is a connection) in the world of news media and how technology is used to distribute it.

=> ↺ HuffPost, Breaking From Its Roots, Ends Unpaid Contributions

=> ↺ Why Facebook has abandoned news for the important business of trivia

• Note the impersonality of all this. Somehow, this pestilential content has “exploded” on Facebook. Which is odd, is it not, given that nothing appears in a user’s news feed that isn’t decided by Facebook? What was actually going on, of course, was that the company’s algorithms explicitly selected the aforesaid objectionable content and displayed it, in order to ensure the continued growth of Facebook’s advertising revenues. The company’s annual results are due at the end of this month and will doubtless demonstrate the astonishing profitability of polluting the news feed in this way.

=> ↺ Facebook is done with quality journalism. Deal with it.

• For Facebook, journalism has been a pain in the neck from day one. Now, bogged down with the insoluble problems of fake news and bad PR, it’s clear that Facebook will gradually pull the plug on news. Publishers should stop whining and move on.

=> ↺ US Politics: Year 1 of President Trump aka Record Chaos: the Early Years. Oh and a Shutdown

• Let us take a look at US politics. (This blog article has nothing to do with our regular topics in mobile, tech & media). So I told you back in the summer of 2015, that the 2016 election cycle would be epic, and that for that reason, I would do articles about it. And boy did that year and a half deliver. The most drama-filled and wild circus in politics culminating in Hillary Clinton winning three million more votes than Trump, but due to US Presidential Election rules, Trump became President (there was no fraud, it is just that many of Hillary’s votes were grouped in states that she had ‘already won’ so Trump’s votes were more cleverly spread-out across more states. This is not the first time that the guy with less votes became President in the USA, only that Hillary’s was the biggest margin by far. Yes, she got 3 MILLION more votes than Trump. For context Finland total population is only 5.5 million). (PS this is another of my ‘long’ articles. Is about 10,000 words or about one chapter-length from one of my hardcover books. It will take you about half an hour to read, go get a good cup of coffee first before you start. But if you are interested in US politics, this will be worth your while.)

• After the election I felt it inappropriate to continue my snide remarks and ridiculing of Trump because he had won, fair and square, and had not even taken office. I wanted to give him a fair shake and the benefit of the doubt. It was theoretically possible that Trump would be a good or efficent President, and that maybe his election politics ‘persona’ was just weird. I don’t care if the President has infidelities (Bill Clinton) or speaks weirdly (Daddy Bush) or can’t pronounce ‘nuclear’ (W Bush), or is of different color than me (Obama) it is the results of the Presidency that count. So I wanted to give Trump a chance. The President’s term in the USA is 4 years, so now we have exactly the 1 year anniversary of his term (he started in January, not election day in November) and we have a record. One quarter of his time is done (of the first term, he could win re-election and get a second 4 years of course). And boy has this been a circus, even more wild than the election.

=> ↺ I’ve Got Another Nut Job Here Who Thinks He’s Running Things”: Are Trump and Kelly Heading for Divorce?

• Donald Trump’s relationship with John Kelly, his chief of staff, fraught from the beginning, may finally have gone past the point of no return. Two prominent Republicans in frequent contact with the White House told me that Trump has discussed choosing Kelly’s successor in recent days, asking a close friend what he thought about David Urban, a veteran Washington lobbyist and political operative who helped engineer Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania. Ivanka is also playing a central role in the search, quietly field-testing ideas with people. “Ivanka is the most worried about it. She’s trying to figure who replaces Kelly,” a person who’s spoken with her said.

• Kelly’s departure likely isn’t imminent, sources said. “He wants to stay longer than Reince [Priebus],” an outside adviser said. Trump can also hardly afford another high-level staff departure, which would trigger days of negative news cycles. “This could be like [Jeff] Sessions,” one of the Republicans explained, referring to Trump’s festering frustration about not being able to replace his attorney general.

=> ↺ NAFTA is close to falling apart with time running out

• Round 6 of the renegotiation of NAFTA, the pact between Mexico, Canada and the U.S., starts Tuesday in Montreal, Canada.

• No major progress has been made on key issues through the first five rounds. Only one more round after this week is scheduled, and Trump continues to repeat his threat that if he doesn’t get the deal he wants, he’ll withdraw.

• “It’s going to be the decisive round,” says Scott Sinclair, senior fellow at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

=> ↺ Reinventing Represent

• We asked readers to help us reconceive and redesign an interactive database that tracks Congress.

=> ↺ The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!

• The complete and unmitigated irrationality of the current epidemic of Russophobia does nothing to reduce its incredible virulence, as it continues to infect the entire political and media class. There is a zero chance that Russia will launch an attack on the UK, yet the entire corporate and state media is leading today with the “need” to spend billions against that most unlikely threat, as propounded by General Nutty McNutter.

• Researching Sikunder Burnes gave me crucial insights into the recurrence of Russophobia as a key element of British politics for two centuries, despite the fact historians can demonstrate that at no stage in that period has Russia ever planned an attack on the UK, or seriously considered it as an option. But the current Russophobia has new elements.

• We are currently in some sort of crisis of capitalism, as the concentration of wealth continues apace and the general population of western countries increasingly feel insecure, exploited and alienated. It is still very hard for voices that reject the neo-liberal establishment view to get a media platform, but Russia does provide comparatively small platforms in the West – like Russia Today and Radio Sputnik – which allow greater democratic freedom than western media in the range of views they invite to be expressed. So the ultra-wealthy, their politician servants and media lackeys view Russia as some kind of threat to the dominance of neo-liberalism .

• There are a number of ironies to this, not least the very real deficiencies in Russia’s domestic democracy and media plurality, and the fact Russia has an even worse oligarchic capitalism than the West and has a 1% completely integrated with their Western counterparts. But despite these ironies, the Western 1% perceive Russia as some sort of threat to their dominance. This leads in to the intellectually risible attempts to prove that Russia somehow “fixed” Trump’s election, for which no solid evidence can ever be adduced as it did not happen; but nevertheless vast resources continue to be spent in trying.

=> ↺ A Coming Russia-Ukraine War?

• A new draft law adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament and awaiting Petro Poroshenko’s signature threatens to escalate the Ukrainian conflict into a full-blown war, pitting nuclear-armed Russia against the United States and NATO, reports Gilbert Doctorow.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Why Hiring Sensitivity Readers Isn’t Supporting Censorship

• The first time I read a book starring a main character who looked like me, I was in high school. The book is titled “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” by Benjamin Alire Saenz, focusing on two teenage Mexican-American boys and their budding relationship. Saenz depicts two different aspects of the incredibly varied experience Latinx people can have in the United States through his principal characters.

• What surprised me the most about the novel was how intensely I related to Dante’s experience — he often felt disconnected from his extended family: neither Mexican enough for his cousins nor American enough for his friends at his new school. Dante articulated thoughts in his letters to Ari that I had never been able to on my own. It was life-changing.

=> ↺ ‘Indirect censorship, rightwing agenda’, journalists react to Hoot report

• Kashmir was the most muzzled place in India, said a report, The Indian Freedom Report: Media Freedom and Freedom of Expression in 2017, by media watchdog, The Hoot.

• The internet was disconnected 77 times in the entire country last year, 40 times in Kashmir alone, the report said. Kashmir fared badly on other parameters too.

• For veteran journalist Yusuf Jameel, there is no official censorship as such but the authorities create circumstances in which journalists find it difficult, impossible sometimes, to carry out their professional work.

• “For instance, they impose curfew and they don’t issue curfew passes, and if passes are issued they are not honored by the forces,” he said.

=> ↺ Censorship Office: Respect Starts at Home

• The Office of Censorship censors all films viewed in public places, or sold in video shops.

• Lovelyn Douglas, Enforcement & Compliance Director from the Office of Censorship, said parents must also be responsible for what they allow their children to view.

• In an exclusive interview with EMTV, the Office of Censorship allowed EMTV News a sneak peek into the process of film Censorship.

=> ↺ Student journalists testify for Missouri bill that would protect them from official censorship

• The “New Voices” movement seeks to protect student media from official censorship in public schools by codifying their rights in state laws.

• The effort has foundered twice before in Missouri, the setting for a 1988 Supreme Court decision that blessed censorship of K-12 student media and has also been used to censor college students.

=> ↺ Lebanon Decides Against Censorship of Spielberg Film

• The Post, a critically acclaimed American film about The Washington Post’s coverage of the 1971 Pentagon Papers, was banned in Lebanon due to director Steven Spielberg’s outward support of Israel.

=> ↺ Samourai Wallet Introduces Bitcoin via SMS Text Message for Censorship Resistance

• Bitcoin privacy wallet pioneers Samourai Wallet have announced a new proprietary app called Pony Direct, a transaction payment method (or to act as a relay) to send bitcoin via short message service (SMS), popularly used for texting. It’s a creative way to improve upon censorship resistance.

=> ↺ Palantir: The PayPal-offshoot Becomes a Weapon in the War Against Whistleblowers and WikiLeaks

• Peter Thiel, who once compared writers at Gawker to Al Qaeda after they wrote about his sexuality, is a close confidant of Donald Trump — who, as president, continues to crack down on whistleblowers (even denying them bail) and whose administration has named arresting WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange a top priority.

• [...]

• Palantir began at PayPal as an antifraud algorithm that detected “unusual account activity.” However, following September 11, PayPal co-founder Thiel theorized it could be used to look for “terrorists.” He, along with his long-time associate Alex Karp, decided to name their offshoot company, which was based around the algorithm, after the all-seeing crystal from The Lord of the Rings. It was launched in 2004, two years after PayPal was acquired by eBay’s Pierre Omidyar.

• Upon launching, Palantir was largely funded by Thiel himself as well as by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA – an agency also connected to Pierre Omidyar. Since its founding, Thiel has long had a hand in how Palantir is run and currently serves as its chairman. As of 2015, PayPal employees still composed 80 percent of Palantir’s management team.

=> ↺ U.S. Sanctions Abet Iranian Internet Censorship

• President Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement if Tehran does not agree to renegotiate its terms this spring. But rather than tear up the nuclear agreement, the Trump administration should work to support the next #IranProtests — which would be far more likely to bring change to Tehran than would a U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal.

• Over the past several weeks, Iranian repression and internet censorship have stifled the widespread protests that, beginning late last month, shook Iranian politics and drew global support. Rapidly escalating events caught many in Washington off-guard and struggling to find opportunities to assist the protesters — an all too common pattern when it comes to Iran. But the underlying tensions that drew the protestors into the streets — low wages, unemployment, and government corruption — remain. Now is the time for the Trump administration to ensure that the United States will be prepared when Iranians come back out to demand change.

=> ↺ Europe Moves Ahead With Internet Censorship Enforcement As More Platforms Join

=> ↺ Mickey Huff Of Project Censored: A Year Into Post-Truth Presidency

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Take a former NSA head hacker, a Raspberry Pi, weird Kiwi radios and what do you get?

• The news that Rob Joyce, former head of the NSA’s elite hacking squad and now White House cybersecurity coordinator, was giving a talk at the Shmoocon infosec conference raised hopes he would offer up some juicy insights into the surveillance state or Donald Trump’s cyber policies.

• Instead Joyce talked about his very unusual hobby: uber-geek grade Christmas lights.

=> ↺ ‘NSA Reigns Supreme’ in Voice Recognition, Intercept Reports

• Citing documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, a report by The Intercept on Friday reveals that the agency has used highly refined voice recognition software for more than a decade. The software was instrumental in identifying former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who went into hiding after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the report says.

=> ↺ US renews NSA’s internet surveillance programme

=> ↺ Donald Trump signs bill to renew NSA’s controversial spying law

=> ↺ Stop Calling It “Incidental” Collection of Americans’ Emails: The Gov’t’s Renewed Surveillance Powers

• Now that the President has signed legislation reauthorizing the use of surveillance powers, it is important to reflect on how the terms of the public debate likely skewed public understanding of the privacy interests at stake. This is not simply an exercise in reflection on the past. It is also important to understand what powers have been handed this administration under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—especially as questions will continue to be raised about the use and abuse of these powers. The language of the public debate has obscured the ways in which the law allows the government to acquire Americans’ communications without a warrant.

=> ↺ Cameroon has been putting the [I]nternet back on in its Anglophone regions for diplomatic visitors

• Since Jan. 17, 2017, the [I]nternet in Cameroon’s South West and North West regions has been completely off or severely slowed down for a total of 206 days as of Jan. 19 this year, according to Internet Sans Frontieres.

=> ↺ Never accept an MDM policy on your personal phone

• As you can see, once an MDM Policy is installed on your personal phone, your phone is no longer yours.

=> ↺ Nineteen Eighty-Four and India’s Severe Case of ‘Aadhaaritis’

• A fantastical view of the stupidities, fallacies, misconceptions, whims and fancies regarding Aadhaar.

=> ↺ NSA “Sincerely Regrets” Deleting All Bush-Era Surveillance Data It Was Ordered To Preserve

• Since 2007, the NSA has been under court orders to preserve data about certain of its surveillance efforts that came under legal attack following disclosures that President George W. Bush ordered warrantless wiretapping of international communications after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. In addition, the agency has made a series of representations in court over the years about how it is complying with its duties.

• However, the NSA told U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in a filing on Thursday night and another little-noticed submission last year that the agency did not preserve the content of [I]nternet communications intercepted between 2001 and 2007 under the program Bush ordered. To make matters worse, backup tapes that might have mitigated the failure were erased in 2009, 2011 and 2016, the NSA said.

=> ↺ The end of passwords? Swedes embrace biometric login

• The technology [sic] magazine PC för alla’s annual password study found that nearly every second Swede uses their body to log on to their smartphones, tablets or computers. Of the magazine’s 5,000 respondents, almost half said they use some kind of biometric login such as their fingerprint or face.

=> ↺ Inside Amazon’s surveillance-powered no-checkout convenience store

• On the philosophical side, I’m troubled, of course — a convenience store you just walk out of is a friendly mask on the face of a highly controversial application of technology: ubiquitous personal surveillance.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Report Shows US Law Enforcement Routinely Engages In Parallel Construction

• A long report by Human Rights Watch delves into the secretive world behind the evidence given in criminal cases. Multiple law enforcement entities are making use of DEA tips to build cases and secure convictions, but they’re burying the original evidence using parallel construction, whitewashing it of possible Fourth Amendment violations.

• Parallel construction is nothing new. The DEA has been a long-time participant in the practice. Documents obtained by C.J. Ciaramella in 2014 included training materials laying out explicit directions for hiding the origin of questionably-obtained intelligence. The DEA has had full access to domestic phone records thanks to the Hemisphere program. Records obtained via this legally-dubious method have been passed on to local law enforcement agencies with instructions to obscure the origin of “new” criminal investigations.

• The FBI has also encouraged parallel construction, most notably with the non-disclosure agreements its forces local agencies to sign before acquiring cell tower spoofers. Agencies are told to keep info about Stingray devices out of court at all costs — up to and including dismissing charges. Consequently, Stingray deployments have been hidden behind ping requests and pen register orders, preventing courts from examining the origin of the evidence for Constitutional issues and preventing defendants from challenging the legality of the evidence used against them.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ FCC Backs Off Plan to Weaken Broadband Definition, But Still Can’t Admit Limited Competition Is A Problem

• You might recall that a few years ago the FCC under Tom Wheeler bumped the standard definition of broadband to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. This greatly upset the broadband industry (and the numerous lawmakers and policy flacks paid to love them) because it highlighted a lack of broadband competition and deployment. That’s especially true at higher speeds, where two-thirds of the U.S. lacks access to more than one ISP at that speed.

• But recently, the FCC under industry BFF Ajit Pai began playing around with the idea of weakening this definition. Under Pai’s plan, the FCC would have declared that 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up wireless also counts as “broadband competition,” letting the industry effectively say “mission accomplished.” The problem is that wireless is often more expensive, capped (especially in rural areas), and inconsistently available (carrier coverage maps are notoriously unreliable).

• Fortunately, the FCC last week stated that for some, unspecified reason they’d be backing away from the plan. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires the FCC to continually assess whether broadband is being deployed on a “reasonable and timely basis,” and if not — to do something about it. While the FCC hasn’t released its full assessment yet, Pai ponied up a statement (pdf) last week that makes it clear that Pai believes everything is going swimmingly in the broadband market, thanks largely to his front assault on consumer protections like net neutrality…

=> ↺ Wehe: This App Tells If Your ISP Is Violating Net Neutrality Or Not

• Now that net neutrality in the US is moving towards its extinction, the internet providers have become free of the limitations of keeping the internet equal for websites. Although it might not be much visible currently, it’s possible for the internet providers to regulate the internet speed for websites as per their will.

• If you think you have trust issues with your internet provider, an app created by the researchers from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts might be able to help you out. Known as Wehe, the app can tell you whether your ISP is throttling speeds or blocking some websites.

DRM/Showbiz

=> ↺ Disney hires former Apple, Samsung exec for its streaming service

=> ↺ Facebook hires TV network CEO to land worldwide sports deals

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Image rights and the unauthorized use of one’s own portrait on cigarette packs

• This question may have different answers, depending on both the context in which the relevant image is used and the legal system considered. With particular regard to the latter, in countries that envisage ‘image rights’ (or publicity rights), the availability of protection may be even irrespective of the context in which one’s own image is being used.

• [...]

• Newspapers do not report whether Plescia’s case has come to an end, but it seems quite incredible – if true – that one could be photographed without their authorization and the resulting image could be included in the Directive’s picture library and subsequently used for combined health warnings without obtaining all necessary permissions.

• In this sense, Plescia’s case is a useful reminder that, when it comes to using third-party images, wannabe users should not be just concerned about copyright issues (including the non-assignable moral rights of the author of the photograph), but also the rights of the person(s) portrayed in the photograph.

=> ↺ Julia Reda-Led Panel Discussion Reveals – Publishers’ Right Faces High Resistance From Academic Circles

• As in the case of Justitia holding up a set of scales and sword, the European Commission again pulled out their sword of justice recently to balance inequalities in our increasingly knowledge-based economies. In light of the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission presented on 14 September 2016 a legislative initiative to further harmonise the EU copyright framework taking into account the increasing digital and cross-border uses of protected content.

• Every time new technology and innovative creations take shape in the marketplace, copyright law as the mirror of a balanced compromise between the rights and interests of the copyright owner and the general public has to provide adequate answers. In order to enable balance to be maintained for all stakeholders in a dispute, the legislator has the choice to answer on two levels.This is either through turning the scales to the more strict, traditional side and thereby remaining a strong position for the copyright owners so that new creations fall outside the definition of copyrighted work, which can if applied too strictly, risk stifling creativity. Or he can allow an open-minded approach by, for example, extending the exception catalogue, which then in turn can jeopardize the interests of already existing copyright owners – a continuously delicate operation since creating copyright law either on the national, European or international level.

=> ↺ Kim Dotcom sues New Zealand government for damages

• Kim Dotcom, the founder of file-sharing site Megaupload, is suing the New Zealand government for billions of dollars in damages over his arrest in 2012. The internet entrepreneur is fighting extradition to the US to stand trial for copyright infringement and fraud. Mr Dotcom says an invalid arrest warrant negated all charges against him. He is seeking damages for destruction to his business and loss of reputation. Accountants calculate that the Megaupload group of companies would be worth $10bn (£7.2bn) today, had it not been shut down during the raid.

=> ↺ Kim Dotcom Sues Government for ‘Billions’ Over Erroneous Arrest

• Kim Dotcom is seeking billions of dollars in damages from the New Zealand Government over an invalid arrest warrant. The entrepreneur accuses the authorities of negligence and misfeasance, which resulted in the destruction of the highly profitable Megaupload service.

=> ↺ Copyright Trolls Obtained Details of 200,000 Finnish Internet Users

• In general terms, Finland was targeted by copyright trolls fairly late in the day, during 2013. But according to information compiled by an NGO activist, they’re certainly making up for lost time. Since December 2013, the Market Court has ordered local ISPs to hand over the personal details of more than 200,000 Internet users, so that copyright trolls can pursue them for cash settlements.

=> ↺ China Seriously Doubts Objectivity of US ‘Pirate Site’ List

• Every year the US Government pinpoints some of the largest piracy websites and other copyright-infringing venues. The USTR calls on foreign countries to take appropriate action in response, but not all are convinced of the objectivity of the “notorious markets” list. China’s commerce ministry, for one, notes that the US claims lack conclusive evidence and relevant data.

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