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● 09.16.18

● Links 16/9/2018: Windows Plays ‘Nice’ Again, Elisa Music Player 0.3 Beta and Latte Dock 0.8.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:01 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

=> ↺ Windows derails Chrome, Firefox installation, promotes Microsoft Edge instead

• Microsoft is trying a new tactic to get people to use its Edge browser: a warning dialog box that interrupts the installation of other browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

=> ↺ Microsoft tests ‘warning’ Windows 10 users not to install Chrome or Firefox

• While the prompts can be turned off, they’re yet another example of Microsoft infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads and pop-ups. Some similar prompts already appear and attempt to push Chrome or Firefox users to use Edge, but this latest one steps up Microsoft’s war against Chrome even further. It’s not clear why Microsoft thinks it’s a good idea to include these irritating prompts, as all they’re likely to do is anger Windows 10 users rather than convince them to switch to Edge.

=> ↺ Microsoft Tests Warning Windows 10 Users About Installing Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox

• While the warning does not block the installation, it is a blatant move from Microsoft to try and stop users from downloading a rival’s Web browser. As per a CNET report, test was confirmed in Windows 10 version 1809, build 17758.1. It is worth noting that it is a preview release, which will not be available to the general public for another month or so. In a statement to CNET, Microsoft referred to its Windows test programme, and said, “We’re currently testing this functionality with insiders only. The Windows Insider Program enables Microsoft to test different features, functionality and garner feedback before rolling out broadly. Customers remain in control and can choose the browser of their choice.” The Verge, on the other hand, cites its sources to say the warning will not make its way to the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

=> ↺ Microsoft Rethinks Decision: Windows No Longer Shows A Warning When Trying To Install Other Browsers In Latest Insider Update

• Strong arm tactics like this don’t help anyone, people at this day and age won’t use an inferior product, specially ones that are free.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ It’s Looking Like WireGuard Could Be Ready In Time For Linux 4.20~5.0

• The latest revised patches were sent out on Friday evening for WireGuard, the very promising secure VPN tunnel technology developed over the past few years by Jason Donenfeld.

• This marks the fourth time these patches have been revised with this latest series fixing various issues discovered during earlier rounds of review, porting more crypto code to the new Zinc crypto library, documentation improvements, and other code improvements.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Igalia Sends Out Another 26 Patches Chipping Away On Intel ARB_gl_spirv Support

• OpenGL 4.6 has been out for more than a year but the Mesa-based drivers (namely RadeonSI and Intel) remain blocked from officially advertising this latest GL revision due to not yet supporting the ARB_gl_spirv extension and related ARB_spirv_extensions.

• Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers and consulting firm Igalia have been working on this key component to OpenGL 4.6 for allowing SPIR-V ingestion (the now common IR to OpenGL / Vulkan / OpenCL) but it’s a tall order and even with many patch series still isn’t quite to the finish line yet.

=> ↺ AMD Contributes 8.5x More Code To The Linux Kernel Than NVIDIA, But Intel Still Leads

• Given all the new hardware enablement work going into the Linux kernel recently, I was curious how the code contributions were stacking up by some of the leading hardware vendors… Here are those interesting numbers.

• As of this morning’s Linux 4.19 Git kernel state, I ran some Git statistics for some weekend numbers fun primarily to see how AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. Intel is doing for code contributions.

=> ↺ AMD Preps For A Big Linux 4.20 Kernel With Vega 20, Picasso, Raven 2, xGMI, Better DC

• It was a busy Friday for the open-source AMD folks as in addition to releasing AMDGPU DDX 18.1 and the big ROCm 1.9 release, their latest batch of feature changes were also submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle. This is going to be another exciting release for Radeon Linux users.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Multi-threaded Linux Performance: AMD’s Threadripper 2990WX vs. Intel’s Core i9-7980XE

• To deliver a full-featured article for launch, my look at AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and 2950X combined Windows and Linux performance in the same article. As it turns out, that was a mistake, since few people noticed we even had Linux benchmarks, despite there being an obvious demand for them.

• Before publication, I debated on whether or not I should break Linux performance into its own article, but in this particular case, I opted for the combo because I felt the bigger picture was needed. That’s because in Windows, performance scaling on such a big CPU is hit-or-miss, whereas the Linux kernel seems to support AMD’s biggest no problem.

• I am not going to stand here (or sit) and pretend to understand why the 2990WX doesn’t perform so well in all Windows tests, because getting a clear answer out of anyone is tough. No one wants to pass around the blame, but by all appearances, it looks like a bulk of the problem is Windows. This article exists to not only draw attention to that, but also highlight a bit better what the 2990WX is capable of – if the software in question can take advantage of it.

Applications

=> ↺ Release of Foundry (previously known as rlife) 0.2.0

• These past weeks, I’ve been working a lot on my side project and I’ve made a new release of it. First of all, the project has been renamed “Foundry” (instead of “rlife”). I wanted to find a better name for this project and as this project is now actually based on Vulkan (that was my primary objective when I started it), I thought it would be a good idea to give a name related to it. Plus, there was no crates already named “Foundry”.

=> ↺ Ducktype parser extensions

• When designing Ducktype, I wanted people to be able to extend the syntax, but I wanted extensions to be declared and defined, so we don’t end up with something like the mess of Markdown flavors. So a Ducktype file can start with a @ducktype/ declaration that declares the version of the Ducktype syntax and any extensions in use. For example:

Proprietary

=> ↺ AION Blockchain System Releases Desktop Wallets With Windows, Mac & Linux Compatibility

• AION has finally released its Desktop wallets; the product is Linux, Wndows and Mac compatible. The AION wallet underwent thorough tests and audits both internally and externally to have this milestone released for users. AION’s wallet is built for storing the AION altcoin as is the move by most of its peer competitors within the crypto space.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Reconfigure Installed Package in Ubuntu and Debian

=> ↺ How to Access Microsoft Exchange in Linux

=> ↺ Plasma desktop & HD scaling tutorial

• Say you have a small form-factor device with a high-resolution display. Case in point, my Slimbook Pro2 laptop, which comes with fourteen inches of equity and 1920×1080 pixel grid. This means things are rendered rather small, and if you wish to read or interact with the desktop environment and the applications in a meaningful way, you will strain your eyes – unless you’re twenty and a developer, in which case you have bionic eyes.

• Prompted by this serious ergonomic need, I started fiddling with different options and settings, to see if I could adjust the viewability in KDE, and make the small screen shows things in a slightly enlarged manner. This turned out to be a rather long and non-trivial exercise. In this guide, I will show you how to properly and elegantly scale the KDE desktop, GTK applications (both 2.0 and 3.0 editions), Firefox and Chrome browsers with tips that also apply to all operating systems and use cases, and then some. After me.

=> ↺ Backup Installed Packages And Restore Them On Freshly Installed Ubuntu System

=> ↺ Getting started with Tmux

=> ↺ Troubleshooting With Git – Git Series Part 3

• From time to time, you will encounter problems while using Git. The most common of these is a merge conflict. Fortunately, git will provide solutions to many problems for you. Sometimes, though, there are certain problems that do require the assistance of more experienced people. Most of these problems that I will describe are what I have encountered personally in my line of work.

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine-Staging 3.16 Released With ~880 Patches Still Atop Wine

• Busy since Friday’s release of Wine 3.16, the volunteers maintaining the Wine-Staging tree with the various experimental/testing patches atop upstream Wine are out with their adjoining update that continues with just under 900 patches being re-based.

Games

=> ↺ Some thoughts on State of Mind from Daedelic Entertainment

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE’s Elisa Music Player 0.3 Enters Beta

• Elisa is one of several options when it comes to music players for the KDE desktop. Elisa 0.3 entered beta this week as another step forward for this relatively young project.

=> ↺ The Krita 2018 Fundraiser Starts: Squash the Bugs!

• It’s time for a new Krita fundraiser! Our goal this year is to make it possible for the team to focus on one thing only: stability. Our previous fundraisers were all about features: adding new features, extending existing features. Thanks to your help, Krita has grown at breakneck speed!

• [...]

• As an experiment, Dmitry has just spent about a month on area of Krita: selections. And now there are only a few issues left with selection handling: the whole area has been enormously improved. And now we want to ask you to make it possible for us to do the same with some other important areas in krita, ranging from papercuts to brush engines, from color management to resource management. We’ve dug through the bugs database, grouped some things together and arrived at a list of ten areas where we feel we can improve Krita a lot.

• The list is order of number of reports, but if you support Krita in this fundraiser, you’ll be able to vote for what you think is important! Voting is fun, after all, and we love to hear from you all what you find the most important things.

=> ↺ KDE Itinerary – Static Knowledge

• In the previous post on writing custom data extractors for the KItinerary framework, I mentioned we are augmenting extracted data with knowledge from Wikidata. This post will cover this aspect in more detail.

• Static knowledge refers to information that with near certainty don’t change for the duration of your trip, or during a release cycle of our software. That’s things like name, location and timezone of an airport, or the country it belongs to, as opposed to dynamic knowledge like departure gates or platforms, delays, etc.

=> ↺ KMail Now Supports A Unified Inbox While KDE Keeps Getting Polished

• Come KDE Applications 18.12 in time for the holidays, the KMail KDE email client will finally offer a unified inbox.

• The unified mailbox support for KMail allows for a single “inbox” folder of emails from all of your accounts as well as unified sent/draft folders and other folders.

=> ↺ This week in Usability & Productivity, part 36

• Greetings, KDE-loving humans! This week’s Usability & Productivity is a heavy one in terms of importance. We scored awesome fixes and improvements through the KDE software stack for subjects as varied as Libinput mouse and touchpad device handling, Task Manager icon sorting for LibreOffice, and a snazzy new unified mailbox in KMail.

=> ↺ Latte bug fix release v0.8.1

• Latte Dock v0.8.1 has been released containing important fixes and improvements!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Behind the GNOME 3.30 Release Video

• With each video I experiment with new workflows. Traditionally I have been involved in every step of the production apart from the voice-over with very few opportunities for others to step in and contribute. With Gitlab’s powerful issue tracking system, this no longer needs to be the case. This has meant that I can spend more time on production in Blender and spread out the other aspects of production to the GNOME community.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

=> ↺ Summer’s End Roundup 2018

• Although it looked from the outside as if Mageians were sleeping through August, it wasn’t so! And now that it’s Autumn – fall for you folks in the North Americas – we’ll be more communicative, we promise.

Gentoo Family

=> ↺ Overriding misreported screen dimensions with KMS-backed drivers

• With Qt5 gaining support for high-DPI displays, and applications starting to exercise that support, it’s easy for applications to suddenly become unusable with some screens. For example, my old Samsung TV reported itself as 7″ screen. While this used not to really matter with websites forcing you to force the resolution of 96 DPI, the high-DPI applications started scaling themselves to occupy most of my screen, with elements becoming really huge (and ugly, apparently due to some poor scaling).

• It turns out that it is really hard to find a solution for this. Most of the guides and tips are focused either on proprietary drivers or on getting custom resolutions. The DisplaySize specification in xorg.conf apparently did not change anything either. Finally, I was able to resolve the issue by overriding the EDID data for my screen. This guide explains how I did it.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ Flatpaks Are Now Sort Of Working On Microsoft Windows

• Flatpak creator and lead developer Alexander Larsson of Red Hat has got the basics of Flatpak applications working under Microsoft Windows 10.

• Before getting too excited, while he has the basics working, obviously there are some shortcuts involved. In particular, the Flatpak support requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL / a.k.a. “Ubuntu Bash for Windows”) as well as needing to install a Win32 X11 Server.

Finance

=> ↺ Red Hat (RHT) Stock Rating Lowered by OTR Global

=> ↺ Gagnon Securities LLC Decreases Holdings in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

=> ↺ Commonwealth Equity Services LLC Purchases 800 Shares of Red Hat Inc (RHT)

=> ↺ Red Hat (RHT) Q2 Earnings Preview: What to Look Out For

Debian Family

Derivatives

=> ↺ A Summary of deepin 15.6 and 15.7

• Both deepin 15.6 and 15.7 were released at June and August 2018. Here’s a short summary of them showing the new features and improvements. You will find new Welcome Intro, new Dark Theme, new Power Saving Mode, reduced RAM usage and smaller ISO size, improvements in System Settings, and new ability of File Manager (renaming partition by right-click, for example). You will see them in this article with GIF animations and screenshots. This article also shows in brief why 15.7 is far better than 15.6 so you can choose it to start deepin for your first time. Enjoy!

Devices/Embedded

Android

=> ↺ iPhone to Android: The ultimate switching guide

=> ↺ Privacy Focused Android Rom Without Google Functionality Based On LineageOS Enters Beta

• A few years back there were a lot mobile OS systems, we had Symbian, Blackberry OS and IOS among many others. Google entered the market with Android, although it wasn’t an instant hit, they gained huge momentum overtime.

• Part of Android’s success was definitely due to its open source nature and the massive customisation it offered. Android somewhat bridged the gap between budget and premium smartphones at that time, because it enabled so many functions on budget devices, it was truly something back then.

• With time Android became a behemoth in mobile OS, but along with that Google was also benefitted. The OS used Google Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Google Play, YouTube and a lot of other customary Google software. This meant huge AD revenues but also privacy concerns as it’s well known that Google can pull out a lot of usage data from Android devices.

=> ↺ Pocophone F1 spotted on GeekBench running Android 9 Pie

=> ↺ 22 new and notable (and 1 WTF) Android apps from the last two weeks including Tor Browser, Yahoo!, and FameBit (9 …

=> ↺ OnePlus 6 picks up latest Android 9 Pie open beta w/ Google Assistant shortcut, stability fixes

=> ↺ Wear OS is on the brink of becoming irrelevant

=> ↺ /e/ is an Android-based smartphone OS stripped of Google’s proprietary components

=> ↺ Alpine Halo9 review: Android Auto and CarPlay are big and brilliant

=> ↺ Google remotely changed the settings on a bunch of phones running Android 9 Pie

=> ↺ Android TV Set-Top Box running Android Pie shown off at IBC

=> ↺ OnePlus 6 with Android 9 Pie: A sweeter experience

=> ↺ Gboard bug breaks glide typing for some Android users

=> ↺ The best iOS and Android games

=> ↺ Apple iPhone XS vs the Android competition

=> ↺ Android Circuit: Galaxy S10 Hardware Leaks, OnePlus 6T Confirmed, Samsung’s Impressive Note 9 Update

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Technology streamlines computational science projects

• Researchers use ICE to study topics in fields including nuclear energy, astrophysics, additive manufacturing, advanced materials, neutron science and quantum computing, answering questions such as how batteries behave and how some 3-D-printed parts deform when exposed to heat.

• Several factors differentiate ICE from other workflow management systems. For example, because ICE exists on an open-source software framework called the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, anyone can access, download and use it. Users also can create custom combinations of reusable resources and deploy simulation environments tailored to tackle specific research challenges.

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ Google Chrome 69 gives worldwide web a stay of execution in URL box

• Google Chrome 70 arrived as a beta release on Thursday, bringing with it a handful of meaningful improvements and some more esoteric features of interest to developers.

• Available on the Chrome Beta channel for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows – the iOS beta requires participation in Apple’s TestFlight program – Chrome 70 implements a Shape Detection API that allows web apps to do things like detect faces in images, read barcodes and parse text in images.

• The API is particularly promising for mobile web apps, which can now return the location of facial features within an image, turn barcodes and QR codes into strings and read Latin alphabet text found in pictures.

Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL 11 Won’t Ship With Its Faster JIT Support Enabled By Default

• One of the coolest innovations landing this year in PostgreSQL was LLVM-based JIT support to speed up database queries. But it’s not going to be enabled by default in the upcoming PostgreSQL 11 release.

• This functionality relies upon LLVM for JIT compiling SQL queries rather than passing those queries to the PostgreSQL interpreter. These LLVM JIT’ed queries have led to more efficient code being generated and particularly help with more complex queries.

BSD

=> ↺ n2k18 Hackathon report: Ken Westerback (krw@) on disklabel(8) work, dhclient(8) progress

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ Stop using GitHub as a measure of open source contributions

• It should go without saying, but apparently doesn’t, that GitHub hosts only a fraction of open source projects and activity.

• GitHub launched about 10 years ago. Open source and free software development predates GitHub’s existence by twenty years or so. A lot of projects have picked up and moved from their previous homes to GitHub, but many haven’t. GNU projects, for example, aren’t hosted there. Canonical’s Launchpad repository hosts a lot of projects that aren’t on GitHub. Fedora has Pagure, the Eclipse project has its own source control for its projects, as well as the Apache Software Foundation, etc.

• Some of those may mirror projects on GitHub, but it’s unclear to me how people who don’t have GitHub accounts are counted when people survey GitHub. I’m skeptical that using GitHub APIs to pull user data to see “what company does so-and-so work for?” is effective when that person hasn’t created a GitHub account.

• GitHub metrics are biased towards newer projects, corporate-founded projects, and projects that have a bent towards non-reciprocal licenses.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Redis does a Python, crushes ‘offensive’ master, slave code terms

• The open-source Redis database, like the Python programming language, is moving away from using the technical terms “master” and “slave” in its documentation and API – to the extent that’s possible without breaking things.

• For Python, the decision this week to replace the words “master” and “slave”, prompted by undisclosed complaints that they’re offensive, led to a backlash.

• Meanwhile, those overseeing Python’s CPython repo on Github today locked a pull request purging the words, and deleted several comments. But not before one developer highlighted the irony of executing the word change using the Git version-control software, which still relies heavily on “master” – for example, merging commits in the master branch. (Barely any instances of “slave” appear in Git code, though.)

• The Register asked Python developer Victor Stinner, author of the pull requests and Python bug report at the heart of the issue, whether he would like to discuss the controversy, but he declined. In previous comments, he justified his proposals to strip “master” and “slave” from the widely used programming language by saying some people object to the terms.

=> ↺ Backing the wrong horse?

• I started using the Ruby programming in around 2003 or 2004, but stopped at some point later, perhaps around 2008. At the time I was frustrated with the approach the Ruby community took for managing packages of Ruby software: Ruby Gems. They interact really badly with distribution packaging and made the jobs of organisations like Debian more difficult. This was around the time that Ruby on Rails was making a big splash for web application development (I think version 2.0 had just come out). I did fork out for the predominant Ruby on Rails book to try it out. Unfortunately the software was evolving so quickly that the very first examples in the book no longer worked with the latest versions of Rails. I wasn’t doing a lot of web development that at the time anyway, so I put the book, Rails and Ruby itself on the shelf and moved on to looking at the Python programming language instead.

• Since then I’ve written lots of Python, both professionally and personally. Whenever it looked like a job was best solved with scripting, I’d pick up Python. I hadn’t stopped to reflect on the experience much at all, beyond being glad I wasn’t writing Perl any more (the first language I had any real traction with, 20 years ago).

=> ↺ Google’s Dataset Search, Julia programming language, and more news

• TechRepublic described this programming language, originating from 2012 and just released as version 1.0, as follows: “designed to combine the speed of C with the usability of Python, the dynamism of Ruby, the mathematical prowess of MatLab, and the statistical chops of R.”

• Liked by data scientists and mathematicians, Julia is also used in industries, such as the automotive industry for self-driving cars, and for 3-D printing.

• Julia is open source, counts 700 active contributors, 1,900 registered packages and two-million downloads. Details, download, and documentation can be found on julialang.org.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Where in the World Is Larry Page?

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ Are Aging Americans Too Old to Work?

=> ↺ The ‘Liquidators’ Who Risked It All to Clean Up Chernobyl

• It was, obviously, not an easy task. Remote-controlled bulldozers and other robots proved too weak for the job, their circuitry fried by radiation. So the Soviet Union sent in humans—600,000 of them. These brave firefighters, soldiers, janitors, and miners—the so-called “liquidators”—did everything from hosing down streets to felling trees to building a concrete sarcophagus around the exposed reactor … all the while charged subatomic particles ravaged their cells and shortened their life spans.

• “No personal sacrifice was too much for these men and women,” says photographer Tom Skipp. Moved by their story, he visited Slavutych, Ukraine in April to photograph survivors, now in their golden years. The portraits make up his haunting series The Liquidators.

=> ↺ Mega-rich family behind opioid crisis has second, secret opioid company

• The Sacklers own the infamous drug company Purdue Pharma, which in 2007 pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for misleading doctors, regulators, and patients about the addictiveness of its branded oxycodone opioid drug, OxyContin. Yet the guilty plea seemed to do little to reform the company’s ethics or curb sales, according to a new report in the FT. Purdue continued to recklessly push the drugs on doctors, insiders told the outlet, and in 2010, it was raking in more than $3 billion in OxyContin sales.

=> ↺ Arkansas scraps Medicaid coverage for thousands of individuals

• A total of 4,353 individuals have been booted from the program for not reporting to the state how they’re meeting the requirements or for not working enough hours. Under the new program, those who are out of compliance three months in one year become ineligible for coverage the remainder of the year.

=> ↺ New research suggests possible link between sudden infant death syndrome and air pollution

• The research, published in BMJ Open and carried out in collaboration with the University of Oulu in Finland and the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia in Africa, examines the relationship between the effects of short-term variations in air pollution and the onset of cot death or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

• [...]

• The research found an increased risk for SIDS two days after exposure to NO2, while exposure to PM10 was shown to have an effect for up to five days after exposure.

=> ↺ Michael Moore’s Flint water movie claims county faked kids’ lead blood tests

• Cook-Hawkins repeated her allegations during the “All In With Chris Hayes” show that was taped in Flint and broadcast Wednesday, Sept. 12, on MSNBC.

• The former health department secretary told The Journal that other witnesses and documents will support her story if it is tested and said she will share what she knows with Flint water investigators working for Attorney General Bill Schuette.

=> ↺ Lead in US school water “disturbing”—Detroit just shut off all fountains

• Students returning to school in Detroit next week will find their water fountains entirely shut off over concerns of elevated lead and copper levels—something that federal lawmakers say is part of a “disturbing and unacceptable” nationwide issue.

• The decision to shut off the drinking water in Detroit was based on a first round of results from testing that the school district carried out in its 106 schools earlier this year. The results from just 24 schools so far surfaced 16 that had water sources tainted with excessive levels of lead, copper, or both. For instance, tests at the district’s Academy of the Americas Elementary school found a kitchen and drinking faucet in a basement cafeteria that had lead levels of 182 micrograms per liter (ug/L) and 154 ug/L, respectively. Those are more than ten times the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended limit of 15 ug/L. The full testing results can be found here.

=> ↺ Detroit schools shutting off drinking water because of lead, copper

• The Detroit school district is shutting off drinking water to all of its schools after test results found elevated levels of lead or copper in 16 out of 24 schools that were recently tested.

=> ↺ Sitting is being considered the new smoking, your desk job is to blame

• The rat race of modern life is making bad back a lifestyle disorder, with most people complaining of a catch or a longer period of pain that may keep recurring. Lower back pain can emerge abruptly due to an exercise injury, if you’ve lifted anything heavy or it may just be an age-related disintegration in the body. However, if you have a desk job and spend over 4-5 hours sitting constantly in the incorrect posture, you are prime candidate for recurrent lower backache. Newer scientific studies also point out that sitting is perhaps the new smoking.

=> ↺ About Half of Clinical Trials Go Unreported in EU

• Approximately half of all clinical trials registered in the European Union have not reported results on the European Union Clinical Trials Register as required by the European Commission, according to a study published September 12 in The BMJ. While 68 percent of pharmaceutical companies disclosed their trial data, only 11 percent of academic institutions including hospitals and universities had done so.

• “This problem strikes to the heart of evidence based medicine. We cannot make informed choices about which treatments work best, as doctors and patients, unless all results are reported,” coauthor Ben Goldacre of the University of Oxford says in a statement. A new tracker was launched along with the study to help keep a check on clinical trial reporting in the European Union (EU).

=> ↺ Emirates flight with dozens of sick passengers lands at JFK

• An Emirates flight from Dubai was quarantined Wednesday morning at JFK Airport, where it landed with about 100 of its 521 passengers feeling sick, according to reports.

Security

=> ↺ Course Review: Software Defined Radio with HackRF

• Over the past two days, I had the opportunity to attend Michael Ossman’s course “Software Defined Radio with HackRF” at Toorcon XX. This is a course I’ve wanted to take for several years, and I’m extremely happy that I finally had the chance. I wanted to write up a short review for others considering taking the course.

=> ↺ WPScan – A Black Box WordPress Vulnerability Scanner

• WordPress is all over the web; it’s the most popular and most used content management system (CMS) out there. Is your website or blog is powered by WordPress? Did you know that malicious hackers are always attacking WordPress sites every minute? If you didn’t, now you know.

• The first step towards securing your website or blog is to perform a vulnerability assessment. This is simply an operation to identify common security loopholes (known to the public), within your site or its underlying architecture.

=> ↺ Are BGPs security features working yet?

• This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at NLNOG 2018, You can watch the talk below if that’s your preferred medium: [...]

• BGP has had a problem for quite a while, most of the time when we hear about this in the news outside of the networking word it is referred to as a “BGP Hijack”. Which can be better phrased as “someone routed someone else’s addresses to them”.

=> ↺ Illegally Released NSA Hacker Tool EternalBlue Being Used to Mine Cryptocurrency

=> ↺ Microsoft’s collusion with NSA

• One Year After Their Illegal Release, the NSA’s Classified Exploits Are Still Being Used to Mine Crypto

• One year ago, the National Security Agency suffered one of the worst leaks in its history: a series of classified exploits built by the NSA were stolen and published online. Today, those exploits continue to be used to attack cryptocurrency miners worldwide.

• One of the exploits, called EternalBlue, is a particularly effective backdoor exploit. EternalBlue can be used to silently break into virtually any Windows machine in the world.

• Hackers have used EternalBlue to install ransomware on thousands of computers worldwide. Government organizations, corporations, and even entire towns have ground to a halt due to EternalBlue ransomware attacks.

=> ↺ Kodi users fall victim to malware due to malicious add-on

=> ↺ x86 finds its way into your iPhone

• The baseband cpu is a standalone core that lives in your phone and is responsible for managing 2g/3g/4g/cdma/5g wireless communications. Given the absurd complexity of these standards, today a baseband cpu must be very powerful and enough general purpose, so the days of custom FPGA based IPs are long gone, at least for the main part. A lot has been said and written about basebands on modern smartphones, so I won’t repeat it. For our purpose, you just need to know that usually basebands are implemented using embedded friendly CPUs, like for example ARM (Cortex-M, Cortex-R or something inbetween), Qualcomm Hexagon (a kind of general purpose, VLIW dsp) or other more or less known architectures.

• Apple is nothing special in this regard, up until the iPhone8/iPhoneX, they used to have two different basebands, one for CDMA markets and one for everything else. The CDMA one was based on Qualcomm Hexagon dsp, while the GSM one was based on Intel XMMxxxx architecture. For those that like to play around with iPhone firmwares, you might have seen MAVxxx and ICExxx files in the ipsw, well those two files contain the firmware respectively for Qualcomm based devices (MAV) and Intel based ones (ICE).

• As you may know, Apple decided to drop Qualcomm and now they’re using exclusively Intel based basebands, so we will concentrate on this.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Colombian activists face ‘extermination’ by criminal gangs

• Since the beginning of 2016 – the year that a peace agreement was signed with Colombia’s largest leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc) – some 311 activists, community leaders, and human rights defenders have been murdered, according to the national human rights office.

• At least 123 of those killings took place in the first six months of this year, in what the country’s human rights ombudsman described as “an extermination”.

=> ↺ ‘Only bones remain’: shattered Yazidis fear returning home

• Her village is Kocho, only a short drive away. In the vast catalogue of Isis’s war crimes, Kocho set a new bar for brutality. About 400 men, the entire male population, were rounded up, shot or beheaded. Old women were killed and dumped in mass graves, younger ones sold in markets as sex slaves, boys turned into child soldiers.

=> ↺ The NRA’s Catch-22 for Black Men Shot by Police

• A National Rifle Association spokesperson says Botham Jean would still be alive if he’d had a firearm. But when African Americans legally bearing arms are shot by police, the organization’s media outlet doesn’t defend them.

=> ↺ US military to cancel $300m in Pakistan aid over terror groups

• The Haqqani network is a militant group that focuses most of its activities on neighbouring Afghanistan, which has complained for years that Pakistan allows it to operate unimpeded from its soil across the border.

• The group is linked to the Afghan Taliban – a hardline Islamist movement that poses a major threat to the Afghan government. Pakistani Taliban groups, while associated with the Afghan Taliban, focus on attacks within Pakistan.

=> ↺ 5 Bizarre Problems Modern Militaries Are Facing

• The challenges facing modern militaries are very real … and very stupid.

=> ↺ With New Niger Drone Base, Trump’s CIA Poised for Expanded African Footprint: NYT

• The CIA under President Donald Trump has expanded its drone program in Africa with a recently built-up airbase in northeastern Niger the likely launchpad for surveillance and bombings across the region, the New York Times reported Sunday.

• The expansion reflects the agency’s reclaimed authority to conduct covert lethal drone strikes—a capacity President Barack Obama curtailed but which Trump returned to the CIA soon after taking office.

=> ↺ CIA broadening drone strike operations in Africa: report

• The CIA is broadening its drone strike operations in Africa, reversing an Obama-era decision to significantly scale back attacks, according to The New York Times.

• The intelligence agency is reportedly moving aircraft to Niger in order to conduct drone strikes against al Qaeda and Islamic State fighters in Libya.

• Nigerien and American officials told the Times that the CIA has been conducting surveillance missions with drones for several months, and will soon be using the drones in lethal missions.

• A CIA spokesman declined to comment for the report while a Defense Department spokeswoman, Maj. Sheryll Klinkel, insisted the military does not launch drone missions from the Dirkou airport, the alleged base of the recent surveillance missions.

=> ↺ How a C.I.A. drone base grew in the desert

• Officials from the U.S. and Niger have confirmed the location of a new C.i.A. drone base to The New York Times. They’ve analyzed its construction and location.

=> ↺ Marines are on Sweden’s coast preparing for largest NATO exercise as Russia grumbles

• Marines are also training with Sweden’s Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle.

=> ↺ Saudis Created ‘Little Crucible’ for 9/11 Hijackers, CIA Never Told FBI

• On the 17th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Towers and damaged the Pentagon, Radio Sputnik spoke with the authors of a new book that hit shelves last month about the failures of the US intelligence community and heretofore unknown connection the hijackers had with the Saudi monarchy.

• On Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear Tuesday, hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou spoke with Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, about their new book: “The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror,” and some of the shocking facts it brings to light about how competition between intelligence agencies for information overlapped with the creation of “a little crucible” in California for two key 9/11 hijackers by figures with high-up connections in the Saudi state in the year before the attacks, and that those same people were allowed to keep their jobs and advance in the CIA.

=> ↺ Abbas Threatens to Terminate CIA Intelligence Briefings

• The Palestinian Authority (PA) is threatening to terminate security and intelligence coordination with the American Intelligence Central (CIA) following the Trump Administration’s decision to close the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington. In a report on Israeli state-run Kan radio, a senior PLO official said the Ramallah government is reconsidering their ties with the United States and is considering severing security ties with the United States.

• Relations between the Palestinian intelligence apparatus, under Majad Farah’s command, and the CIA had been in good standing until now; despite the tense political relations between the White House and the Muqata (the headquarters of the Palestinian government in Ramallah). Security cooperation includes constant meetings between representatives of the CIA and Palestinian intelligence officials, as well as the exchange of information.

=> ↺ CIA Veterans Get Chance to Fly Restored Makasi Plane

• In the mid-1960s, the CIA financed a clandestine air force in the congo. The mission: drive Russian and Chinese communists and Che Guevera’s Cuban troops out of the mineral-rich country.

• Who flew those planes? Cuban exiles, many of them veteran pilots from the Bay of Pigs.

• [...]

• The plane looks a lot different almost 55 years later. It’s the same plane, restored in U.S. Navy markings but carrying the logo of the Makasi, the nickname for the secret CIA air force.

• “This airplane is part of my life,” said Dario Filpes, a Makasi pilot. “Today I am 80. I feel good but I can’t fly anymore.”

=> ↺ Jordan’s Salt Cell Planned Drone Bomb Attack

• Members of a terrorist cell, who carried out a bombing in the town of Fuheis near the capital Amman on August 9, have admitted to planning for bigger attacks, including attempts to target a military base with a drone.

• The country’s General Intelligence Department (GID) said Friday that during confessions, the terrorists who were arrested in a joint gendarmerie and police raid in the city of Salt, northwest of Amman, admitted to having had the intention to carry out a series of operations across the Kingdom just after the Fuheis attack with a homemade explosive device planted near a police van, which killed a policeman and injured six others.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Mystery of missing Dutch cyber-security expert linked to WikiLeaks whose belongings were found in sea off Norway… before his phones were switched on 1,000 miles away

• The belongings of a leading Dutch cyber-security expert who went missing in August have been discovered floating in the sea around 30 miles from Bodø, Norway.

• This has led to speculation over the fate of Arjen Kamphuis who was last seen in the Arctic Circle after checking out of a hotel in Bodø, with plans to travel to Trondheim by train, which is ten hours away.

• Mr Kamphuis, an associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, never boarded the train or the connecting flight to Amsterdam.

• A thorough search led by Norwegian police has failed to locate Mr Kamphuis, however a kayak believed to belong to him has been recovered from the sea.

=> ↺ Mysterious Disappearance of WikiLeaks Associate Takes New Turn

• The man disappeared in Norway three weeks ago, but police still haven’t come up with an official version of what happened with the cyber security expert and tech guru.

• A new piece of evidence has surfaced in the case of tech expert and WikiLeaks associate Arjen Kamphuis, who disappeared on August 20 after leaving his hotel room in the northern Norwegian town of Bodo. According to SBS News, local police found his kayak, which he had recently bought. The boat was found roughly at the same spot as some of Kamphuis’ other belongings, which were spotted by a fisherman floating in the water 50 kilometers away from Bodo on September 12.

=> ↺ Julian Assange was involved in Melbourne’s rave scene in the 1990s, Techno Shuffle book reveals

• In early ’90s Melbourne it was difficult to find electronic dance music on the radio or at the record store.

• But almost every weekend, somewhere in the city, a dancefloor would be filled with ravers wearing brightly-coloured home-made costumes.

• “If you wanted to hear this music — you know, techno music, acid house, house music — you could only really hear it in a club, at a party or at a rave,” says Paul Fleckney, author of Techno Shuffle: Rave Culture and the Melbourne Underground.

• These events were put on by English expats and local DJs, supported by rave devotees who looked after the lights, décor and chill-out zones.

• One of these devotees, according to Fleckney, was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ No more BBC platform for climate change deniers? It’d be about time

• The other major factor behind the BBC’s occasional troubles on climate change is lobbying. The newspaper commentariat is amply stocked with columnists who routinely lambast the corporation for bias; and the weight of rhetoric has had an impact.

=> ↺ Wildlife group details growing illicit animal trade on Facebook

=> ↺ Facebook animal trade exposed in Thailand

• The anti-trafficking body analysed membership of the Facebook groups in 2016 and then again two years later. It found that, while two groups had ceased to exist, total membership had almost doubled – up from 106,111 in 2016 to 203,445 in 2018.

=> ↺ Hey, Army Corps of Engineers—Show Us Your Work in Your DAPL Report

• So what’s the Corps hiding? Its reassessment of the potential environmental impacts of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, or DAPL, ordered by a federal judge in 2017. (You probably recall the massive demonstrations and international outcry that took place beforehand.) Under the terms of the court order, the Corps was instructed to reexamine whether a leak in the pipeline would pose a disproportionately high risk to the Standing Rock Sioux’s “distinct cultural practices”—which, in this case, include the ability of its 8,000 members to obtain food and water from the Missouri River and Lake Oahe.

=> ↺ Trump and Friends Cash In

• Members and backers of the Trump administration are profiting from DAPL while scheming to make even bigger bucks shipping oil and petrochemicals overseas.

=> ↺ Trump’s Disregard of Puerto Rico’s Death Toll Is Putting Lives at Risk

• I’m not laying those two studies out to re-report their conclusions but to indicate that claims have to be delivered with evidence and methods. That’s how scientists talk to each other and give policymakers tools to make decisions. In this case, both studies also contained information and recommendations of what could be improved the next time a hurricane comes to Puerto Rico—which could be any week now.

=> ↺ The Fight to Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline Continues—in the Bayous of Louisiana

• This Labor Day weekend, L’Eau Est La Vie put out a national call for reinforcements for a new wave of actions. It offered newcomers training in using ropes and climbing gear to scale a cypress tree and then establish and defend a tree sit, and led lessons in boat-based resistance, in which “kayaktivists” row up to remote swamp construction zones. Hands were also needed for ongoing construction projects: compost toilets, showers, and a library. I came down to learn why they are so determined. I also wondered why their fight has been almost completely ignored.

=> ↺ Australian Youth Activists Are Trying to Shut Down the World’s Largest Coal Port

=> ↺ Scientist who thinks more CO₂ is great joins National Security Council

• In the end, Happer was not tapped as Science Advisor by the Trump administration, but E&E News reported Tuesday that he is now a member of the National Security Council.

• Happer was previously listed as the director of a group called the “CO2 Coalition,” which has a website that claims that CO2 released from fossil fuels is just good news for global plant growth while having no real effect on Earth’s climate. (These claims are false.) He has also taken to referring to the field of climate science as a “cult movement.”

=> ↺ Sick salmon at Scottish fish farm revealed on film

• A video shot underwater on 27 August 2018 inside a cage at Vacasay fish farm in Loch Roag showed hundreds of sea lice feeding on salmon with open wounds and damaged tails and fins.

• The video has been passed to the Scottish Government and Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA), both of which have launched investigations. Campaigners said that lice from the fish farm have spread to wild salmon in a nearby river, and killed them.

=> ↺ Campaigners claim fish farms are to blame for wild salmon deaths

• Campaigners claim wild salmon returning to a river in the Isle of Lewis are infested with sea lice originating from local fish farms.

=> ↺ Scottish Salmon : Silent, contagious and deadly… the sea lice devastating Scotland’s wild salmon

• Shocking images from Loch Roag on the Isle of Lewis show fish covered in hundreds of deadly sea lice, which campaigners claim are being spread by salmon farms.

• They say the farm parasites are having “devastating consequences” on Scotland’s wild salmon and have called for legislation to be introduced to protect the species.

=> ↺ Dozens of elephants killed near Botswana wildlife sanctuary

• Carcases of nearly 90 elephants have been found near a famous wildlife sanctuary in Botswana, conservationists say.

• [...]

• With 130,000 elephants, Botswana has been described as their last sanctuary in Africa as poaching for ivory continues to wipe out herds across the rest of the continent.

=> ↺ If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer

• So there’s a huge responsibility here: unless you’re sourcing your vegan products specifically from organic, “no-dig” systems, you are actively participating in the destruction of soil biota, promoting a system that deprives other species, including small mammals, birds and reptiles, of the conditions for life, and significantly contributing to climate change.

• Our ecology evolved with large herbivores – with free-roaming herds of aurochs (the ancestral cow), tarpan (the original horse), elk, bear, bison, red deer, roe deer, wild boar and millions of beavers. They are species whose interactions with the environment sustain and promote life. Using herbivores as part of the farming cycle can go a long way towards making agriculture sustainable.

=> ↺ Tropical Forests Are Flipping From Storing Carbon to Releasing It

• Apart from the human toll, the violence in the Amazon is also driving an ominous trend in the earth’s climate system. Last October, Science published one of the most important—and least noticed—climate studies in years. Tropical forests in the Amazon and around the world have been so degraded by logging, burning, and agriculture that they have started to release more carbon than they store, according to scientists from the Woods Hole Research Center and Boston University. In the parlance of climate change, these forests are flipping from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

• [...]

• “We’re dangerously approaching a point where the convergence of all these drivers might reach irreversibility,” Nobre says. Cross that threshold, and much of the Amazon rain forest will begin to die. The Amazon could reach that tipping point if 20 to 25 percent of its original forest cover is destroyed, Nobre estimates. In that case, more than half the Amazon would transition from rain forest to savannah, releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere as the trees die and burn. Such a “dieback” is one of the scenarios that could trigger runaway global warming, according to the “hothouse Earth” study published by the Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute in August.

=> ↺ To Prevent ‘Major Extinction Crisis,’ Scientist Call for Designating Half of Planet as Protected Areas by 2050

• The demand comes in the form of an editorial published in the journal Science on Friday by chief scientist of the National Geographic Society Jonathan Baillie and Chinese Academy of Sciences biologist Ya-Ping Zhang.

• In their piece, Baillie and Zhang argue, “If we truly want to protect biodiversity and secure critical ecosystem benefits, the world’s governments must set a much more ambitious protected area agenda and ensure it is resourced.”

• “Given the evidence to date and the implications of an underestimate,” the editorial urges policymakers “to set minimum targets of 30 percent of the oceans and land protected by 2030, with a focus on areas of high biodiversity and/or productivity, and to aim to secure 50 percent by 2050.”

• “This will be extremely challenging, but it is possible,” the editorial asserts, “and anything less will likely result in a major extinction crisis and jeopardize the health and well-being of future generations.”

• The scientists concede that “estimating how much space is required to protect current levels of biodiversity and secure existing ecosystem benefits is challenging because of limited knowledge of the number of species on this planet, poor understanding of how ecosystems function or the benefits they provide, and growing threats such as climate change.”

=> ↺ Pope urges action on plastic in the ocean

• The Pope addressed about 100 business leaders invited to the Vatican for the occasion, saying that “each of us has to be responsible for others and for the future of our planet”.

• United Nations figures show eight million tonnes of plastic – bottles, packaging and other waste – enter the ocean each year, killing marine life and entering the human food chain.

• Scientists have urged tougher restrictions on plastic waste.

=> ↺ U.N. Chief Warns of a Dangerous Tipping Point on Climate Change

• One of the big tests at those talks, which start Dec. 3 in Katowice, will be whether countries, especially industrialized countries that produce a large share of global emissions, will set higher targets for reducing their emissions.

=> ↺ Here’s how climate change is fueling Hurricane Florence

• Reed talked with Science News about what a forecast attribution study is, how the new study suggests climate change may have altered Florence’s rainfall and size, and the future of real-time attribution. His responses are edited for space and clarity.

Finance

=> ↺ Women suffering more than men from austerity policies, finds gov’t report

• The report concluded that changes to taxation and social programmes benefitted 61 percent of men compared to 54 percent of women. As a result women’s disposable incomes have seen a greater decrease compared to men’s during the period under review.

• One finding was that government policies have resulted in roughly half a million people losing more than 50 euros in income every year. Some 55 percent of these economic underdogs have been women, whose disposable income declined by 0.41 percent more than their male peers’, the report said.

=> ↺ Zambia’s looming debt crisis is a warning for the rest of Africa

=> ↺ Why PayPal’s crackdown on ASMR creators should worry you

• In June, China banned and excised videos of sound effects while claiming to cleanse its internet of pornography. YouTube had already demonetized the genre in a sex panic; now PayPal is banning people for life and holding individuals’ funds, ignorant of the facts and marching lockstep to the tune of 8chan trolls enacting a campaign to punish “whores.”

• The most bitter punchline in all this? A tiny percentage of the entire video genre is even remotely sexual, and those suffering — female creators — aren’t even making sex content.

• This past week, nonsexual ASMR video creators Sharon DuBois (ASMR Glow), Scottish Murmurs, Creative Cal, and Rose ASMR have been permanently banned from PayPal and had their funds frozen for 180 days.

• [...]

• Capitalizing on entrenched and easily exploitable anti-sex policies by internet giant payment processors and a new internet sex panic ushered in by FOSTA, 8chan trolls have started a campaign to mass-report attractive women who make ASMR videos. Listing names of women making these sound-effect videos in a forum thread called “PayPal lowering the hammer on ASMRtits” they’ve declared war by posting links to report pages for PayPal, and called upon fellow haters to get the women kicked off YouTube and Patreon as well. They’re laughing at the women’s anguish over creating nonsexual content and losing their revenue streams, saying things like “another whore for the deep-freeze” — in between posting anti-Semitic and Pepe the frog images, of course.

• If you’re unfamiliar with ASMR, it’s essentially a genre of videos where the creator makes sound effects in a variety of scenarios that are geared toward evoking a sense-memory of tingling sensations from the back of the head. If anyone ever played with your hair and you felt a funny but calming shiver, you get the idea. The performance artists in these videos do things to create sounds like playing with hair, brushing microphones with makeup brushes, chewing ice and lots of other things that evoke a feeling for viewers. Not everyone tunes into the sensations, but those who do find it very beneficial.

=> ↺ Bitcoin [BTC]’s censorship resistance will propel it towards mass adoption, says mining firm Argo’s head

• On Friday, 14th September, Jonathan Bixby, the Chief Executive Officer of Argo, a mining company stated that the demand for cryptocurrency has actually suffered from the bearish market but there is still hope for mass market adoption.

• He stated that the affiliation of normal market users to cryptocurrencies is still in the early stages with a majority of them being early adopters. The CEO went on to say that the main problem that affects the industry is misconceptions with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. People just need to simplify and understand what the fintech industry is really about and that will solve almost all the insecurities related to cryptocurrencies, he said.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ ‘Swedish politicians have abandoned the nation’

• spiked caught up with Swedish historian Lars Tragardh to discuss what lies behind Sweden’s populist moment.

=> ↺ Malmö pulls ‘democracy ambassadors’ after shootings

• Hyrije Matarova, who is leading the project, said that the city had decided to cancel two planned outdoor election events in response to the threat of gun violence.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Google a cult of censorship, fear and discrimination

• In the past days, weeks, months, and years the mask has come off Google, the company that was once considered cool and benevolent, to reveal a festering, pus-filled pit of hypocrisy and corrupt values.

=> ↺ Don’t Force Google to Export Other Countries’ Laws

• We’ve come a long way from the 1990s, when the internet evangelist John Perry Barlow, in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” asserted that governments “have no sovereignty” online. These days, many critics call for more state intervention online, to curb the spread of disinformation and other internet-borne harms, and to limit the power of platforms like Google and Facebook to shape political discourse. Those are legitimate concerns, and rightly the subject of debate.

• We should be equally worried, however, about the prospect of platforms like Google and Facebook, with their international reach and pervasive role in our lives, doing the bidding of governments around the world.

=> ↺ Blasphemy: Pakistan’s curse

=> ↺ How Chinese influence in US universities relies on self-censorship

• A research project looking into Chinese influence in US universities has found that it is far more nuanced than many China critics have suggested.

• The Asia Society study identifies self-censorship by academics and students as the biggest impediment to independent research on China.

• The author is Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Centre on US-China Relations in New York, Isaac Stone Fish and he joined The World Today from New York.

=> ↺ China scholars agree ‘self-censorship is a problem in the China field.’ But whose problem?

• The conservative National Association of Scholars and the liberal American Association of University Professors have both warned about the influence of Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes on American college campuses.

• A recent research paper by University of Missouri and Princeton University political scientists probes a related issue: how Chinese pressure on scholars of China studies has affected their research.

• Sheena Chestnut Greitens and Rory Truex conducted a survey of more than 500 China scholars to collect the first “systematic data on how common it actually is for China scholars to have their work affected by PRC [Chinese government] repression,” they write in the paper.

=> ↺ Amazon opposes voluntary censorship code move mooted by industry

• Amazon is opposing a move by its peers in the video-on-demand industry in India to consider adopting an industry-wide voluntary censorship code, fearing that it will alienate viewers.

• [...]

• ET reported last week that top VOD companies were exploring the adoption of a voluntary code in anticipation of the Indian government coming up with its own rules, which some players expect will be onerous. AltBalaji, the VOD arm of Balaji Telefilms, opposes such a move and has stayed away from these discussions.

=> ↺ Amazon India Says ‘No’ To Self-Censorship, Urges Other OTT Players To Follow

• The Seattle-based company is reportedly trying to dissuade other players to drop the idea, fearing that it will alienate viewers in India.

• It was earlier reported that OTT players in India, including Amazon, allegedly met in New Delhi to discuss the possibility of censorship codes and what they would look like.

=> ↺ I don’t believe in song censorship – M.anifest

• Ghanaian rapper, M.anifest says he doesn’t believe in censoring lyrics of songs.

• According to him, just like a writer or poet is allowed to use any diction to express a concept, he believes rappers must have the same privilege.

• “I don’t believe in censorship. I don’t go into a song saying ABC, its like any writer. Just like Ama Atta Aidoo, she uses whatever she wants to use. Its not something done for short value but if needs be. We have to be real. People have grown to know authenticity so for me to censor myself, it will be a big fail…

• He, however, added that, he adheres to the censorship rules when writing his songs.

• “We do the radio and clean versions, we master all of these. I always have a radio edit…” he said.

=> ↺ Burlington school district rescinds principal’s article review policy

• Editors at the Burlington High Register, the student paper, said Friday that principal Noel Green was re-instituting a policy that required all articles be reviewed by administrators 48 hours prior to publication.

• The students and their allies immediately criticized the move as a violation of the ‘New Voices’ legislation passed by the Vermont legislature in 2017 to protect student journalists from censorship.

=> ↺ Burlington School Officials Seek to Quell Censorship Controversy

• The Burlington School Board and Superintendent of Schools Yaw Obeng on Saturday attempted to quell the controversy over censorship of the city high school’s newspaper, saying that a new policy will be developed.

• The board and Obeng announced that guidelines for material to be published in the Burlington High School Register are no longer in effect. Instead, the board and administration will develop a policy that is consistent with the free speech and student journalist protections under Vermont’s New Voices law, the announcement said.

=> ↺ Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Nick Ut on his Napalm Girl shot, censorship and taking it slow

• I kept thinking that I had a bad picture. I kept thinking if it was any good at all,” says Nick Ut, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, whose iconic photograph — The Terror Of War or Napalm Girl — taken in 1972 is one of the most hard-hitting images of the Vietnam War. “We — there were other media personnel as well — used to travel with the soldiers, in the helicopters, everywhere. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese (Army) troops were at a stand-off and the highway was shut. We were walking just outside a village in Trang Bang, it was early in the morning, there was random bombing happening, and we were taking pictures. And then we saw this huge airplane fly low, then came a second one that dropped the napalm, and everyone screamed and started running,” says Nick Ut at a Networking India Series event in Delhi’s Unesco auditorium, organised by Yes Arts and Culture Institute and Leica.

• It’s a tale that he has recounted innumerable times, to the likes of actors Warren Beatty and Joan Collins. Even the reclusive actor Marlon Brando, who did not like to be photographed, gave Ut an audience because of the defining photograph. “I think seconds later, after the bomb dropped, I saw this deluge of children and women running on the road towards us. I started shooting. First, I saw a woman, she had a baby in her arms. Then on the periphery of my lens I saw this small girl, she was naked. She was crying. I started running towards her, but I kept shooting,” says Ut, who was born Huynh Công Út, in a village just outside of Saigon, Vietnam. After having shot eight rolls of film, Ut piled on as many children and women as possible in a van, including the nine-year-old napalm girl — he first wrapped her up in a raincoat — and drove them to a hospital, after having used his media card at check points to drive unhindered all the way to Saigon. “I kept thinking she would die. She had torn off her clothes because she was burning,” says Ut in heavily-accented English.

• Clicked on June 8, 1972, The Napalm Girl — which the 21-year-old thought was a bad picture — and other pictures were sent to the Associated Press in the US, after being routed through Tokyo. “The photo was a subject of debate. Associated Press (AP) had a strict policy on nudity. Horst Faas, the editor and senior journalist, argued that the photo rose above the clauses of nudity. It got published on June 12, 1972, in The New York Times and then everything changed for me,” says Ut, 67. The photo won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, and was also the World Press Photo of the year. The napalm girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, survived severe third-degree burns that affected her deeper tissues. Fourteen months after multiple surgeries, she returned home. Kim, now 55, lives in Canada and is a grandmother. She speaks to Ut every week till date. He even attended her son’s wedding.

=> ↺ Hong Kong airport accused of censorship after Taiwanese airline’s logo disappears from photo

• Hong Kong International Airport has been accused of censorship after it removed the logo of a Taiwanese airline in a photo posted to Facebook.

• HKIA’s Facebook page was posting about the iconic Boeing 747, which is often nicknamed the “Queen of the Skies.”

• “Have you ever come across her at the airport?” the post on Tuesday read.

=> ↺ CPJ: Pakistan’s Press Freedom Climate Fraying

• A global media monitoring group said the climate for press freedom in Pakistan is deteriorating and accused the country’s powerful military of “quietly, but effectively” encouraging “self-censorship.”

• In a report released Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said its findings are based on interviews with journalists during a mission to Pakistan this year. They “painted a picture of a media under siege,” CPJ noted.

• The research, however, noted a drop in murders and violence against journalists in Pakistan, which, until recently, had been condemned as one of the deadliest for reporters.

=> ↺ Freedom of press on the decline in Pakistan: Committee to Protect Journalists

=> ↺ Press freedom in Pakistan under pressure by military: Report

=> ↺ Pakistan military ‘quietly’ stifles press with intimidation: group

=> ↺ CPJ: Pakistan’s Military Curbing Press Freedoms Using Fear, Intimidation

=> ↺ How Pakistan’s military intimidates journalists and silences dissent, according to press watchdog

=> ↺ Acts of Intimidation: In Pakistan, journalists’ fear and censorship grow even as fatal violence declines

=> ↺ Target is reportedly censoring words like “Nazi” and “queer” from book descriptions

=> ↺ Allison Varnes writes a cautionary tale about censorship for young readers

=> ↺ This Vietnamese singer tried to battle state censorship. Now she only performs in secret.

=> ↺ Constitution After-Dark: Obscenity, Censorship, and Speech Rights in the Digital Age

=> ↺ EDITORIAL: The latest examples of academic censorship

• There are many valid reasons for an academic journal to reject a scientific paper, but concerns over the political implications of its findings aren’t among them.

• Yet that’s what happened to Theodore Hill, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Georgia Tech. He chronicled his saga at Quillette.com earlier this month. It started last year with a paper on the “greater male variability hypothesis,” which contends that men are more likely to be both geniuses and dolts. This isn’t a new idea. Charles Darwin studied this back in the 19th century, finding a greater variability among males, compared to females, in many animal species.

• Hill was interested in why this was and worked on “a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles.” Mathematical Intelligencer, a research journal, decided to publish a paper by Hill detailing his work. That’s when the backlash started.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Chinese tech firm fights GCHQ warning

• A Chinese state-backed technology giant is recruiting MPs and peers for a campaign to overturn GCHQ advice that its equipment may be a threat to national security.

• ZTE, which makes network gear and is owned by the Chinese state, is ­battling advice issued in April by GCHQ’s National Cyber ­Security Centre (NCSC) that use of its “equipment or services within ­existing ­telecommunications infra- structure would present a risk to UK national ­security that could not be mitigated effectively or practicably”.

=> ↺ UK mass surveillance broke human rights convention, European court rules

• The UK’s mass surveillance program is in violation of human rights, the European Court of Human Rights has declared. The challenge was instigated following the revelations from US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

• The court stated there is “insufficient oversight” and “inadequate safeguards” over the government’s ‘bulk interception’ of communications. Furthermore, it found the UK “was not in accordance with the law” over it’s obtaining of communications data from service providers.

=> ↺ UK Surveillance Programs Violated Privacy Rights, Court Says

• The European Court of Human Rights said that some U.K. surveillance programs, including the bulk interception of communications exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, violate rules that protect privacy and family life.

• The seven judges at the Strasbourg, France-based court said in a 5-2 ruling that such interceptions violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which also deals with the privacy of communications. There was insufficient oversight of how information in the bulk scoop of data was intercepted and filtered, and the safeguards governing the selection of “related communications data” for examination were inadequate, the judges said in a statement published Thursday following their decision.

=> ↺ Top European Court Says British Spies Broke Human Rights Rules With Their Mass Surveillance Tactics

=> ↺ “Bulk interception” by GCHQ (and NSA) violated human rights charter, European court rules

• The Court found that sharing intelligence information gathered from bulk surveillance—as GCHQ does with the NSA and other members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence and security alliance—does not violate the human rights charter. But the judges did warn that using such intelligence sharing to bypass restrictions on surveillance of a member state’s own citizens would be a violation of the charter.

• In the ruling, the judges found that there was insufficient oversight through the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (the UK equivalent of the US’ Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) over the UK’s bulk interception, filtering, and search of communications by the GCHQ. The judges also found that there were insufficient safeguards put in place to govern access to communications data. While the case has no direct impact on US intelligence gathering, the case could have a ripple effect because of the close connections between US and UK intelligence and law enforcement organizations.

=> ↺ British spies broke law in GCHQ mass surveillance, says European Court of Human Rights

• Britain broke human rights law when the GCHQ intelligence agency carried out the mass snooping operation that was exposed by Edward Snowden, a European court has ruled.

• The European Court of Human Rights said spies broke the right to privacy and ignored surveillance safeguards when they carried out the data harvesting and intercepted private online conversations in bulk. Judges ruled that UK intelligence agencies sharing the data with foreign governments, such as the US, was not illegal.

=> ↺ AT&T Users Lack Standing In NSA Spying Suit, Court Told

• The National Security Agency is pressing a California federal judge to ax a long-running putative class action accusing the agency of illegal spying, arguing that the AT&T customers leading the dispute lack standing because they have failed to offer any “competent evidence” that their communications were scooped up by the challenged surveillance.

• A group of American citizens who are AT&T telephone subscribers first sued the NSA and several high-ranking government officials in 2008, claiming that several NSA intelligence-gathering programs that involve the collection of noncontent data about…

=> ↺ Tech Firms Push Gov’t For Limits In Hoarding Security Flaws

• Members of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, which includes Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc., HP, Cisco Systems Inc. and Dell, called Monday for the U.S. government and other major powers to develop criteria for deciding whether to disclose software and hardware vulnerabilities to the public.

=> ↺ Bay Area transit system approves new surveillance-oversight policy

• On Thursday, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board of Directors voted to approve a new policy that requires that it be notified if the local police department wishes to acquire new surveillance equipment.

• BART is one of the largest mass transit agencies in northern California, with a system that stretches from the San Francisco International Airport, through San Francisco itself, across to Oakland, north to Antioch and south to Fremont—adjacent to Silicon Valley. This new policy puts it in line with a number of other regional cities that impose community oversight on the acquisition and use of surveillance technology. It is believed to be one of the first, if not the first, such policies for a transportation agency in the nation.

=> ↺ Edward Snowden Reconsidered

• The Snowden phenomenon was far larger than the man himself, larger even than the documents he leaked. It showed us the first glimmerings of an emerging ideological realignment—a convergence, not for the first time, of the far left and the far right, and of libertarianism with authoritarianism. It was also a powerful intervention in information wars we didn’t yet realize we were engaged in, but which we now need to understand. To this day, Snowden speaks often, and uses his platform. So whether we trust him matters. And it certainly matters if we conclude that he is a well-intentioned whistleblower who has shown bad judgment or has allowed himself to become an unwitting pawn of the Russians.

=> ↺ U.S. Mobile Giants Want to be Your Online Identity

• Tentatively dubbed “Project Verify” and still in the private beta testing phase, the new authentication initiative is being pitched as a way to give consumers both a more streamlined method of proving one’s identity when creating a new account at a given Web site, as well as replacing passwords and one-time codes for logging in to existing accounts at participating sites.

• [...]

• All four major mobile providers currently are struggling to protect customers against scams designed to seize control over a target’s mobile phone number. In an increasingly common scenario, attackers impersonate the customer over the phone or in mobile retail stores in a bid to get the target’s number transferred to a device they control. When successful, these attacks — known as SIM swaps and mobile number port-out scams — allow thieves to intercept one-time authentication codes sent to a customer’s mobile device via text message or automated phone-call.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Ending Child Marriage in the United Kingdom

• In allowing some children to marry the UK is out of step with the international standards it claims to support. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child supports a global minimum of 18 years for marriage, without exceptions, and recommended in 2016 that the UK raises the minimum marriage age to 18, including in its overseas territories.

=> ↺ Criminalizing Childhood: School Safety Measures Aren’t Making the Schools Any Safer

• By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested.

• More than 3 million students are suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for minor misbehavior, such as “disruptive behavior” or “insubordination.”

• Black students are three times more likely than white students to face suspension and expulsion.

• Zero tolerance policies that were intended to make schools safer by discouraging the use of actual drugs and weapons by students have turned students into suspects to be treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, while criminalizing childish behavior.

=> ↺ Dallas cop faces homicide charge after killing neighbor in his [own] apartment

=> ↺ Dallas officer who shot man in his own apartment was involved in 2017 shooting of a suspect

=> ↺ Texas officer charged with manslaughter over ‘wrong flat’ killing

=> ↺ Dallas Cop Claims Botham Jean Ignored Her ‘Verbal Commands’

=> ↺ Hate preacher Anjem Choudary, to be freed in weeks, is ‘still a threat’

• Around 25 Muslim chaplains are to receive a week’s training on how to deal with prisoners with Islamist extremist ideologies as part of a pilot to be launched before the end of the year, the Ministry of Justice confirmed.

• [...]

• There are already about 300 Muslim chaplains working in prisons. Stewart’s proposal would lead to one or two specially-trained chaplains assigned to prisons on a regional basis.

=> ↺ Pope Francis summons his bishops to discuss sexual abuse

=> ↺ When Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Hits Home

• Sadly, Olivia is one of many Native women who have gone missing in the United States. Native Americans and Alaska Natives represent only 0.8% of the U.S. population, but in 2017, they made up 1.8% of missing persons cases in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database.

=> ↺ “It Was Us Against Those Guys”: The Women Who Transformed Rolling Stone in the Mid-70s

• “Some of it was about drugs, and some of it was about sex,” recalls Sarah Lazin, who went from editorial assistant to director of Rolling Stone Press over the course of a decade. “But it was really about doing challenging work, and being on the cutting edge of journalism and history.”

=> ↺ Labor Day 2018: How the Ongoing Prison Strike is Connected to the Labor Movement

• The striking prisoners of today have released a list of ten demands, which calls for improvements to the current living conditions in prisons, increased rehabilitation programs, educational opportunities, and specific policy goals. This essentially articulates the idea of non-reformist reforms, a central plank of prison abolition. By illuminating the barbarity of the current prison system and calling for its abolishment while advocating for an improvement in current conditions, they are—to paraphrase French socialist André Gorz—asking not for what can be achieved within a current system, but for what should be possible.

• [...]

• The prison strike was organized by workers both inside and outside detention facilities, spearheaded by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS), and supported by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) and the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), and sparked by [deadly uprisings at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina earlier this year that cost seven prisoners’ lives. The strike began on August 21 and ends on September 9, dates that reflect the legacy of rebellion in American prisons: on August 21, 1971, George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin, and his death was met by protests from other prisoners across the country, culminating in the famed September 9 uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. By choosing these dates, participants in the prison strike of 2018 are drawing a direct line between their current struggle and the struggles of those who have come before, emphasizing the stark fact that very little has changed in terms of conditions or opportunities for those who are locked up and held by the state since the birth of the modern prison system.

=> ↺ US inmates claim retaliation by prison officials as result of multi-state strike

• As a multi-state prison strike continues through a second week, many participants have been hit by prison officials with swift and vicious reprisals, advocates, prisoners and their families said.

• It is claimed that inmates – especially those seen as organizers – have been subject to solitary confinement, revocation of communication privileges and long-distance transfers, in attempts to weaken the effects of work stoppages and to chill dissent.

=> ↺ Woman lay dead in Nevada jail cell for hours after deputy found her unresponsive

• Locked away in a Nevada county jail for failing to take care of her traffic tickets, 27-year-old Kelly Coltrain asked to go to the hospital. Instead, as her condition worsened, she was handed a mop and told to clean up her own vomit. She died in her jail cell less than an hour later.

• Despite being in a video-monitored cell, Mineral County Sheriff’s deputies did not recognize that Coltrain had suffered an apparent seizure and had not moved for more than six hours. When a deputy finally entered her cell and couldn’t wake her, he did not call for medical assistance or attempt to resuscitate her. Coltrain lay dead in her cell until the next morning when state officials arrived to investigate.

• [...]

• According to the investigation report, the 20-minute section of video depicting Gulcynski entering her cell was missing entirely from the files the state obtained for its investigation from the sheriff’s office. But a Reno Gazette Journal reporter found the video in files provided by Keyser-Cooper.

=> ↺ Vigilantes With A Badge: Warrior Cops Endanger Our Lives And Freedoms

• So when I say that warrior cops—hyped up on their own authority and the power of the badge—have not made America any safer or freer, I am not disrespecting any of the fine, decent, lawful police officers who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace.

• My beef is with the growing squads of warrior cops who have been given the green light to kill, shoot, taser, abuse and steal from American citizens in the so-called name of law and order.

• These cops are little more than vigilantes with a badge.

=> ↺ Duterte Jokes About Rape, Again. Philippine Women Aren’t Laughing.

• “Instead of seriously addressing the problem, the misogynist Duterte has added insult to the scars of rape survivors,” a coalition of a women’s groups called #BabaeAko (I Am Woman), said in a statement.

=> ↺ US envoy denies CIA hand in coup plot

• United States Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim has denied accusations that the US Central Intelligence is involved in the alleged destabilization plot against President Rodrigo Duterte.

• “I can assure you with great confidence and conviction that there is actually no effort in the US government, including the CIA, to come up with some effort to undermine President Duterte’s administration,” Kim said in a rountable discussion with journalists.

=> ↺ Ambassador Kim denies CIA kill plot against Duterte: President’s fears have no impact on US-PH ties

=> ↺ US envoy on ‘CIA slay plot’: No efforts to undermine Duterte admin

=> ↺ No CIA destab effort vs. Duterte: US envoy

=> ↺ Why sex assault survivors are fuming over DeVos proposal

• The proposed changes — from the federal Department of Education led by Michigan’s Betsy DeVos — would limit colleges to investigating only those sex assaults that happen on campus. Assaults that occur just off campus, in places like fraternity houses or off-campus housing, wouldn’t be investigated by the institutions.

=> ↺ Stephon Clark-inspired bill to limit police killings in California shelved for the year

• AB 931 would have raised the state standard for using lethal force from “reasonable” — when a reasonable officer in similar circumstances would have acted the same way — to “necessary,” when there are no alternatives for police to consider in that situation.

=> ↺ Met police sergeant cleared over strip search of academic

• “They are effectively saying: ‘This is our policy; Met police policy is to strip search anyone who stands up for their rights or the rights of somebody else.’

• “This makes very clear that we are not dealing with one bad apple, they are closing ranks and saying this is Met police policy. That’s my sense of what this judgment means.

=> ↺ The Trajectory Of The Restriction Of Privacy And Freedom

• Recently, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced a plan to begin deploying full-body scanners in the LA subway system.

=> ↺ Man who bought sex doll online ends up in court because it was child-sized

• He added that pictures of the doll on the website showed it set against a white background and that there was no way to compare its height and he had cohosen than particular model because it was on sale.

• Ayelen Tunon, defending, told jurors that while it may be a short version it had an adult face and breasts, which a child would not have.

=> ↺ Women caned in Malaysia for attempting to have lesbian sex

• Rare punishment was carried out in a courtroom and witnessed by up to 100 people

=> ↺ Christian girl attacked for refusing to marry and convert to Islam

• Binish Paul, a high school student, was being stalked by a Muslim man who was her friend, and when she said no to his petition, he got angry and after beating her, he took her to the second floor of a building and pushed her from there.

• The Pakistani girl survived, but has suffered severe fractures in her spine and legs, and she will no longer be able to walk.

=> ↺ Vision and strategy: on solidarity, multiculturalism, identity politics, Muslims, Islamists and the Western Left

• The problem occurs when multiculturalism becomes social policy. There is more emphasis on differences then similarities. This leads to communities living separate, but unequal lives. For example, in Britain we have faith-based schools and faith-based services as if we can’t go see a doctor that doesn’t have the same beliefs as we do. We also have faith-based courts such as Jewish courts or Sharia courts where there is discrimination against women. You have citizens in this country who don’t have the same access to the same rights, services and education as the rest of the country. You have children from Muslim parents that are going to Islamic schools where they are taught that they need to be veiled, they can’t listen to music, they can’t take pictures of themselves and they can’t mix with boys. This is happening to children from a very young age. These are not prescriptions for a multicultural, plural society as people envision it to be, but a society that is completely segregated, separated and unequal.

=> ↺ Indonesia: Ban on Unmarried Couples Dining Together Spawns Criticism

• However, the head of Bireuen’s sharia office, Jufliwan, said the guidelines were intended to protect the honor of women.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia arrests man who filmed video of himself eating breakfast with female colleague

• The owner of the hotel has also been summoned for questioning, according to the ministry.

• The footage, which has been shared widely on social media, shows a woman dressed in a burqa eating breakfast with a man and, at one point, feeding him some food.

=> ↺ Muslims ‘proselytizing’ at U.S. school assemblies

• However, both the California and U.S. Constitutions prohibit the government from aiding religious sects or favoring one religious organization over another. The legal team explained courts repeatedly have ruled students suffer spiritual and psychological harm if they are exposed to religious indoctrination in a compulsive educational environment.

=> ↺ Two sisters die after undergoing FGM in Somalia, campaigner says

• “Unfortunately, they never made it to the hospital as they all died on the way,” said Aden Mohamed, who has been calling for legislation banning the practice commonly done on young girls in Somalia.

=> ↺ UK schoolgirls have been pressured by peers to have FGM, campaigner says

• She is frustrated that there have been no convictions in the UK to date, although FGM has been illegal since 1985. Hussein ascribed that failure partly to a lack of evidence available to the police, PA said.

=> ↺ U.S., U.K. authorities to work more closely on ending female genital mutilation

• “FGM is an international issue. No one country can deal with it on its own,” Ivan Balhatchet, Commander in the London Metropolitan Police and the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for FGM, told CBS News.

=> ↺ Factbox: Female genital mutilation around the world: a fine, jail or no crime?

• World leaders have pledged to eliminate FGM, which affects an estimated 200 million girls and women worldwide. But a report launched in London by campaign group 28 Too Many says there are major gaps in legislation across countries in Africa where FGM is prevalent.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Starting an Internet Service Provider – Part 2 – Deploying Fiber

• Nearly 2 years ago I wrote Starting an Internet Service Provider. When I sat down to write that post I initially intended it to be a weekly or monthly log of events to look back on, but it turned into one long blog post about the struggles of starting an ISP. That post ended up receiving over 20,000 visits in one day while at the top of Hacker News and roughly 40,000 total. I obviously haven’t written weekly or monthly since then; mainly due to lack of time.

=> ↺ Here’s why you can’t use dual SIM iPhones in India

• Moving on to the network part, the type of carrier you are using decides if you can use two SIMs simultaneously in your iPhone. Notably, amongst the two SIM cards you’ll be integrating, one of them needs to support the eSIM standard. Only then can you use two carriers together. Not all companies provide cards with the support for eSIM standard and in India, Airtel and Reliance Jio are the only two providers.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

=> ↺ Time for a break – catching up with KitKat

• By now, the fate of the four fingered KitKat shape mark is old news – Joined Cases C‑84/17 P, C‑85/17 P and C‑95/17 P

• Rumours of the mark’s death have been greatly exaggerated – it is now for the EUIPO to reconsider the evidence in light of the CJEU’s ruling and reach a decision as to whether or not the mark is valid.

• Whilst the press may have put the cart before the horse, the CJEU’s decision does suggest that the mark will not remain registered long term.

=> ↺ The Most Significant Unresolved Legal Issue In Trademark Licensing

Copyrights

=> ↺ You Don’t Really ‘Own’ That Movie You Bought, But Pirates…

• In this day and age ownership of digital media is often an illusion. When you buy a book or movie there are severe restrictions on what you can do with these files. In some cases, purchased content can simply disappear overnight. These limitations keep copyright holders in control, but they breed pirates at the same time.

=> ↺ ISP Can Charge Money to Expose Pirates, Canadian Supreme Court Rules

• The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs are entitled to compensation for looking up the details of alleged copyright infringers. This is the result of a dispute between Rogers and movie company Voltage Pictures, which demanded details of tens of thousands of alleged pirates. The scale of compensation is yet to be determined.

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