Desktop

• Huawei selling MateBook laptops with Linux preinstalled to consumers in China

  Despite the trade blacklisting of Huawei by the US government, the Chinese electronics giant’s notebook division is plugging along, despite reports of component order cancellations in June, prompting concern they could exit the PC OEM market.

  Huawei is now selling the Matebook 13, Matebook 14, and Matebook X Pro at VMALL, Huawei’s ecommerce marketplace in China, with Deepin Linux preinstalled. Deepin is a Chinese-domestic distribution, with their own desktop environment—appropriately also called Deepin—called “the single most beautiful desktop on the market” by TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen.

• Huawei Reportedly Shipping Cheaper MateBook Laptops With Linux in China

  According to Redditor, u/xi_save_earth, the Linux models include MateBook 14 (2019), MateBook X Pro (2019) and MagicBook Pro Ryzen edition, although only base models are apparently available with the Linux option, which means people choosing to buy more powerful models will still have to buy theirs’ with Windows.

  As per the report, the Linux models have been priced 300 yuan (around Rs. 3,000 / $42) cheaper than their Windows counterparts. The devices are identical with one another in terms of their hardware, although the Windows key on the keyboard is replaced with a ‘Start’ key in the Linux devices.

  Interestingly enough, Huawei’s distro of choice isn’t one of the biggies in the Linux world, like Ubuntu or Mint, but instead, the company is using a debian-based operating system called ‘Deepin’ that’s developed by Chinese tech firm, Wuhan Deepin Technologies.

  Formerly known as Linux Deeping and HiWeed Linux, Deepin is believed to have been in development in its various avatars since 2004. It has generally been praised for its aesthetics and usability, but had once courted controversy for using a statistical tracking service in its App Store. The controversial code is since believed to have been removed.

Server

• IBM

  • Better Flatpak Support For Firefox Appears To Be Coming

    One of the best and most practical use-cases for sandboxed Linux apps via Flatpak or Snaps is certainly web browsers. There has been unofficial Firefox Flatpaks offered to this point but it’s looking like better support for a Flatpak’ed Firefox could be coming down the pipe soon.

  • Deep dive into Virtio-networking and vhost-net

    In this post we will explain the vhost-net architecture described in the introduction, to make it clear how everything works together from a technical point of view. This is part of the series of blogs that introduces you to the realm of virtio-networking which brings together the world of virtualization and the world of networking.

    This post is intended for architects and developers who are interested in understanding what happens under the hood of the vhost-net/virtio-net architecture described in the previous blog.

    We’ll start by describing how the different virtio spec standard components and shared memory regions are arranged in the hypervisor, how QEMU emulates a virtio network device and how the guest uses the open virtio specification to implement the virtualized driver for managing and communicating with that device.

    After showing you the QEMU virtio architecture we will analyze the I/O bottlenecks and limitations and we will use the host’s kernel to overcome them, reaching the vhost-net architecture presented in the overview post (link).

  • RHEL 8 Now Powers SAP Solutions

Kernel Space

• Maintaining the kernel’s web of trust

  A typical kernel development cycle involves pulling patches from over 100 repositories into the mainline. Any of those pulls could conceivably bring with it malicious code, leaving the kernel (and its users) open to compromise. The kernel’s web of trust helps maintainers to ensure that pull requests are legitimate, but that web has become difficult to maintain in the wake of the recent attacks on key servers and other problems. So now the kernel community is taking management of its web of trust into its own hands.

  Some history

  As recently as 2011, there was no mechanism in place to verify the provenance of pull requests sent to kernel maintainers. If an emailed request looked legitimate, and the proposed code changes appeared to make sense, then the requested pull would generally be performed. That degree of openness makes for a low-friction development experience, but it also leaves the project open to at least a couple types of attacks. Email is easy to forge; an attacker could easily create an email that appeared to be from a known maintainer, but which requested a pull from a malicious repository.

  The risk grows greater if an attacker somehow finds a way to modify a maintainer’s repository (on kernel.org or elsewhere); then the malicious code would be coming from a trusted location. The chances of a forged pull request from a legitimate (but compromised) repository being acted on are discouragingly high.

  The compromise of kernel.org in 2011 focused minds on this problem. By all accounts, the attackers had no idea of the importance of the machine they had taken over, so they did not even try to tamper with any of the repositories kept there. But they could have done such a thing. Git can help developers detect and recover from such attacks, but only to an extent. What the community really needs is a way to know that a specific branch or tag proposed for pulling was actually created by the maintainer for the relevant subsystem.

  One action that was taken was to transform kernel.org from a machine managed by a small number of kernel developers in their spare time into a carefully thought-out system run by full-time administrators supported by the Linux Foundation. The provision of shell accounts to hundreds of kernel developers was belatedly understood to be something other than the best of ideas, so that is no longer done. No system is immune, but kernel.org has become a much harder target than before, so repositories stored there should be relatively safe.

• Kernel runtime security instrumentation

  Finding ways to make it easier and faster to mitigate an ongoing attack against a Linux system at runtime is part of the motivation behind the kernel runtime security instrumentation (KRSI) project. Its developer, KP Singh, gave a presentation about the project at the 2019 Linux Security Summit North America (LSS-NA), which was held in late August in San Diego. A prototype of KRSI is implemented as a Linux security module (LSM) that allows eBPF programs to be attached to the kernel’s security hooks.

  Singh began by laying out the motivation for KRSI. When looking at the security of a system, there are two sides to the coin: signals and mitigations. The signals are events that might, but do not always, indicate some kind of malicious activity is taking place; the mitigations are what is done to thwart the malicious activity once it has been detected. The two “go hand in hand”, he said.

  For example, the audit subsystem can provide signals of activity that might be malicious. If you have a program that determines that the activity actually is problematic, then you might want it to update the policy for an LSM to restrict or prevent that behavior. Audit may also need to be configured to log the events in question. He would like to see a unified mechanism for specifying both the signals and mitigations so that the two work better together. That is what KRSI is meant to provide.

  He gave a few examples of different types of signals. For one, a process that executes and then deletes its executable might well be malicious. A kernel module that loads and then hides itself is also suspect. A process that executes with suspicious environment variables (e.g. LD_PRELOAD) might indicate something has gone awry as well.

  On the mitigation side, an administrator might want to prevent mounting USB drives on a server, perhaps after a certain point during the startup. There could be dynamic whitelists or blacklists of various sorts, for kernel modules that can be loaded, for instance, to prevent known vulnerable binaries from executing, or stopping binaries from loading a core library that is vulnerable to ensure that updates are done. Adding any of these signals or mitigations requires reconfiguration of various parts of the kernel, which takes time and/or operator intervention. He wondered if there was a way to make it easy to add them in a unified way.

• Change IDs for kernel patches

  For all its faults, email has long proved to be an effective communication mechanism for kernel development. Similarly, Git is an effective tool for source-code management. But there is no real connection between the two, meaning that there is no straightforward way to connect a Git commit with the email discussions that led to its acceptance. Once a patch enters a repository, it transitions into a new form of existence and leaves its past life behind. Doug Anderson recently went to the ksummit-discuss list with a proposal to add Gerrit-style change IDs as a way of connecting the two lives of a kernel patch; the end result may not be quite what he was asking for.

  [...]

  Creation of this tag is relatively easy; it can be entirely automated at the point where a patch is applied to a Git repository. But it doesn’t solve the entire problem; it can associate a commit with the final posting of a patch on a mailing list, but it cannot help to find previous versions of a patch. Generally, the discussion of the last version of a patch is boring since there is usually a consensus at that point that it should be applied. It’s the discussion of the previous versions that will have caused changes to be made and which can explain some of the decisions that were made. But kernel developers are remarkably and inexplicably poor at placing the message ID of the final version of a patch into the previous versions.

  The most commonly suggested solution to that problem is not fully automatic. Developers like Thomas Gleixner and Christian Brauner argued in favor of adding a link to previous versions of a patch when posting an updated version. Gleixner called for a link to the cover letter of the prior version, while Brauner puts links to all previous versions. Either way, an interested developer can follow the links backward to see how a patch series has changed, along with the discussions that led to those changes.

• Examining exFAT

  inux kernel developers like to get support for new features — such as filesystem types — merged quickly. In the case of the exFAT filesystem, that didn’t happen; exFAT was created by Microsoft in 2006 for use in larger flash-storage cards, but there has never been support in the kernel for this filesystem. Microsoft’s recent announcement that it wanted to get exFAT support into the mainline kernel would appear to have removed the largest obstacle to Linux exFAT support. But, as is so often the case, it seems that some challenges remain.
  For years, the Linux community mostly ignored exFAT; it was a proprietary format overshadowed by an unpleasant patent cloud. A Linux driver existed, though, and was shipped as a proprietary module on various Android devices. In 2013, the code for this driver escaped into the wild and was posted to a GitHub repository. But that code was never actually released under a free license and the patent issues remained, so no serious effort to upstream it into the mainline kernel was ever made.

  The situation stayed this way for some years. Even Microsoft’s decision to join the Open Invention Network (OIN) in 2018 did not change the situation; exFAT, being outside the OIN Linux System Definition, was not covered by any new patent grants. Some people pointed this out at the time, but it didn’t raise a lot of concern. Most people, it seemed, had simply forgotten about exFAT, which has a relatively limited deployment overall.

• Linux Foundation

  • CHAOSS project bringing order to open-source metrics

    Providing meaningful metrics for open-source projects has long been a challenge, as simply measuring downloads, commits, or GitHub stars typically doesn’t say much about the health or diversity of a project. It’s a challenge the Linux Foundation’s Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project is looking to help solve. At the 2019 Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), Matt Germonprez, one of the founding members of CHAOSS, outlined what the group is currently doing and why its initial efforts didn’t work out as expected.

    Germonprez is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and helped to start CHAOSS, which was first announced at the 2017 OSSNA held in Los Angeles. When CHAOSS got started, he said, there was no bar as to what the project was interested in. “We developed a long list of metrics, they were really unfiltered and uncategorized, so it wasn’t doing a lot of good for people,” Germonprez admitted.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 430.50 Linux Driver Brings Color Fix For Pre-Turing GPUs

    While the NVIDIA 435 series is now stable, for those sticking to the previous NVIDIA 430 driver series that is their current “long-lived” driver branch, a new version is available.

    NVIDIA 430.50 was released on Wednesday as the latest Linux driver release in this driver series supported for an extended period of time. The only listed change for the NVIDIA 430.50 Linux driver is fixing the display color range handling for pre-Turing GPUs. When limiting the color range via the NVIDIA-Settings GUI, the output pixel values will now be properly clamped to the CTA range.

  • Mesa 19.2-RC3 Released While Final Release Expected Around Month’s End

    The third release candidate of the belated Mesa 19.2 is now available while a fourth and likely final RC is expected next week while the stable release of this quarterly Mesa3D update should be out at month’s end.

    Mesa 19.2-RC3 back-ports the new support for DriConf in Intel’s Vulkan driver (for a workaround with GfxBench), various NIR fixes, a GLX segmentation fault is fixed, a few RADV and RadeonSI fixes (including Navi/GFX10 fixes for RadeonSI), and the Intel glthread crash fix for KDE’s KWin.

  • AMDGPU Driver Looking To Re-Enable Performance-Boosting “Bulk Moves” Functionality

    AMD developers are looking at finally re-enabling the LRU bulk moves functionality in their AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver that has the ability to help with performance.

    The LRU bulk moves patches were posted back in August of 2018 with the ability to help improve OpenCL and Vulkan performance for Radeon graphics. But prior to the release of the Linux 5.0 kernel that functionality was disabled for bugs.

Instructionals/Technical

• FreeBSD Applying Security Updates Using pkg/freebsd-update

  am a new FreeBSD developer and user. I have root access to my VM running in AWS cloud. How do I update packages and apply security upgrades on FreeBSD? What is the procedure for applying security updates on FreeBSD?

  FreeBSD follows the concept of a base system and packages. One can apply security updates to the base system using freebsd-update command. You need to use the pkg command to upgrade FreeBSD packages. Let us see step-by-step instructions for implementing security updates polices for your FreeBSD server or desktop system.

• Use oathtool Linux command line for 2 step verification (2FA/TOTP)

• How to Install Laravel based PyroCMS with Nginx on CentOS 7

• How to download files faster on Linux with Motrix

• Hardware discovery and kernel auto-configuration in MAAS

• How to Install Etherpad on Debian 9

• How to stop, start, and restart Apache on various Linux distributions

• How To Perform Compression Of A File/Folder In Windows, Mac And Linux

• How to Set Up Wyliodrin on Raspberry Pi

Games

• Highly rated action rpg rogue-lite ‘Unexplored’ now has a Linux test build available

  Something we’ve been wait on quite some time, Unexplored from Ludomotion released in 2017 and now game porter Ethan Lee has given it a go with a Linux test build up.

  Turns out the port was a little different than usual, as Ethan Lee noted on the Steam post. The game has always been using their FNA magic, so it didn’t exactly have a lot of “porting” work to be done. However, due to some issues they had to do some decompiling and apply some manual fixes to get it here. However, it should be mostly “solid”.

• It’s the pre-weekend deals section, plus Endless Space – Collection (Steam Play) free on Humble

  It’s coming up to the weekend, here’s our usual column taking a quick look over what good deals are going on right now.

  First up, for you Steam Play fans there’s the Endless Space – Collection currently going free for 48 hours on Humble Store as part of their End of Summer Sale Encore.

• Valve have tweaked Steam’s mighty algorithms and fixed some bugs with a new store update out

  One of the main problems seemed to be the most popular games driving these sections, Valve claims this happened with the “Similar by Tags” section and it was a bug they’ve since fixed. There’s lots of other little bug fixes and changes done, which has also resulted in the “Recommended for You” section also now being less biased towards the most popular titles.

• Top 20 Funny Steam Games For Kids To Play Right Now [on Linux]

  There are ample of funny steam games for kids available on the store for the Linux system. A couple of years back, gaming on the Linux was almost impossible. Nevertheless, a vast range of games are now available in different Linux distros, thanks to steam. Moreover, playing games on Linux is no more difficult. However, many games even available for free. Additionally, there are different genres of games, such as indie, action, adventure, casual, strategy, simulation, RPG, Early Access, single-player, violent, and sports. Linux users can play all these genres of games on steam for absolutely free or spending a little buck.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kate in the Windows Store

    Our Windows team is small, any help is very welcome! Thanks again to all the people that made it possible to use Kate nicely on Windows.

  • Kubuntu Meets at Milan Akademy 2019

    We also discussed snaps and when Ubuntu possibly moves to “all snaps all the time” for applications at least. This may be in our future, so it is worth thinking and discussing.

    Tobias Fischbach came by the BOF and told us about Limux which is based on Kubuntu. This has been the official computer distribution of Munich for the past few years. Now however, unless the Mayor changes (or changes his mind) the city is moving to Windows again, which will be unfortunate for the City.

    Slightly off-topic but relevent is that KDE neon will be moving to 20.04 base soon after release, but they will not stay on the Plasma LTS or Qt LTS. So users who want the very latest in KDE Plasma and applications will continue to have the option of using Neon, while our users, who expect more testing and stability can choose between the LTS for the ultimate in stability and our interim releases for newer Plasma and applications.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Introducing GNOME 3.34: “Thessaloniki”

    GNOME 3.34 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 23929 changes, made by approximately 777 contributors.
    3.34 has been named “Thessaloniki” in recognition of this year’s GUADEC organizing team. GUADEC is GNOME’s primary annual conference and is only possible due to the amazing work of local volunteers. This year’s event was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, and was a big success. Thank you, Team Thessaloniki!

  • GNOME 3.34 Released

    The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. Version 3.34 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.

  • GNOME 3.34 released

    The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 3.34, Θεσσαλονίκη
    (Thessaloniki).
    
    This release brings performance improvements in the shell, Drag-And-Drop in
    the overview, improved mouse and keybord accessibility, previews in the
    background panel, support for systemd user sessions, and more.
    
    Improvements to core GNOME applications include new icons, sandboxed browsing
    in Web, gapless playback in Music, support for bidirectional text in the
    Terminal, more featured applications in Software, and more.
    
    For more information about the changes in GNOME 3.34, you can visit
    the release notes:
    
    https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.34/
    
    GNOME 3.34 will be available shortly in many distributions. If you want
    to try it today, you can use the Fedora 31 beta that will be available soon
    or the openSUSE nightly live images which include GNOME 3.34.
    
    https://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/
    
    
    http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/31/Workstation/x86_64/iso/
    
    
    http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Medias/images/iso/?P=GNOME_Next*
    
    To try the very latest developments in GNOME, you can also use Fedora
    Silverblue, whose rawhide branch always includes the latest GNOME packages.
    
    https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/rawhide/latest-Fedora-Rawhide/compose/Silverblue/x86_64/iso/
    
    If you are interested in building applications for GNOME 3.34, you can
    use the GNOME 3.34 Flatpak SDK, which is available in the sdk.gnome.org
    repository.
    
    This six-month effort wouldn't have been possible without the whole
    GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the
    world: developers, designers, documentation writers, usability and
    accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, students, system
    administrators, companies, artists, testers and last, but not least,
    our users.
    
    GNOME would not exist without all of you. Thank you to everyone!
    
    Our next release, GNOME 3.36, is planned for March 2020. Until then,
    enjoy GNOME 3.34!
    
    💓, the GNOME Release Team
    

  • GNOME 3.34 is Here. What’s New.

    GNOME 3.34 is the latest iterative release of open-source desktop environment for Linux systems. After 6 months long development cycle, GNOME 3.34 is released and this release brings some long-pending troublemaker feature fixes for this widely used desktop environment.

  • 09/12/2019

    It’s open source release day with GNOME 3.34 bringing a host of workflow and usability requirements and Manjaro 18.1 adding a new office suite installer option.

    Plus Mozilla’s recent addition of premium Firefox support and a quick look at the Sega Genesis Mini.

  • GNOME 3.34 Released With Its Many Performance Improvements & Better Wayland Support

    Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has just announced the release of GNOME 3.34 as this widely anticipated update to the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

    Making GNOME 3.34 particularly exciting is the plethora of optimizations/fixes in tow with this six-month update. Equally exciting are a ton of improvements and additions around the Wayland support to ensure its performance and feature parity to X11. GNOME 3.34 also brings other improvements line sandboxed browsing with Epiphany, GNOME Music enhancements, GNOME Software improvements, nd a ton of other refinements throughout GNOME Shell, Mutter, and the many GNOME applications.

  • GNOME 3.34 Desktop Environment Officially Released, Here’s What’s New

    The GNOME Project announced today the release and general availability of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.34 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.

    GNOME 3.34 is dubbed “Thessaloniki” after the host city of the GUADEC (GNOME User and Developer European Conference) 2019 event and it’s a major release that adds numerous new features and improvements. It’s been in development of the past six months and comes as a drop-in replacement for the GNOME 3.32 “Taipei” desktop environment series with many new features.

    “The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. Version 3.34 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features,” reads today’s announcement. “Highlights from this release include visual refreshes for a number of applications, including the desktop itself. The background selection settings also received a redesign, making it easier to select custom backgrounds.”

  • GNOME 3.34 Released with “Drastically Improved” Responsiveness

    And it’s here; the new GNOME 3.34 release is now officially available, six months after development first began.

    And the biggest change on offer in GNOME 3.34 isn’t one you can see, but it is one you can feel: speed.

    Now, yes: each new release of this particular desktop environment comes carrying claims of “faster” or “better performance”. And those claims don’t always feel accurate.

  • GUADEC 2019 wrap-up

    This year is the third edition of the GUADEC. Things were slightly different now: I was not a GSoC student anymore and I had my first jet lag. Three flights, some trains (including a type of train which rails were suspended in the air) were enough to go to Thessaloniki lands. When I arrived to Greece, I was a bit scared of the language since the alphabet would be almost impossible to type in my smartphone. However, I could easily reach the accomodation point.

    My purpose for this GUADEC was different than the past ones. In the past I went basically to talk about my Google Summer of Code projects, but this time I wanted to show to the attendees the project I was working on as part of my dissertation project. I wanted to re-write almost everything of what I did and in the best case my plan was to find a contributor to my project. I am very happy to say that I found one contributor to this project. The project I talk about consisted on adding face overlay effects to Cheese developing a GStreamer plugins which elements should be better than gstfaceoverlay and gstfacedetect. The code of the project I made for my dissertation project can be found on this link and the one that is being written from scratch can be found on this repository. The slides are available on Google Docs and the full details (actually the thesis document) is written (in Spanish) in this document.

    [...]

    After GUADEC I had some vacations in Greece for about one week more and then I was going to Poznan, Poland. As I mentioned, the first day of the event I met Mieszko Mazurek who actually lives in that city. He was showing me the city and his office in which he works were he develops low-level and high-level software to control batteries. He uses GNOME-based technology for this high-level software. I also continued to show him and explaining him about the Cheese Face Effects project. Finally, that day I could get the code I wrote during the event with the help of him to work as expected. Now I am on Krakow, and he is going to do an inter-city trip to continue talking about the mentioned project.

  • Gdk-pixbuf modules – call for help

    I’ve been doing a little refactoring of gdk-pixbuf’s crufty code, to see if the gripes from my braindump can be solved. For things where it is not obvious how to proceed, I’ve started taking more detailed notes in a gdk-pixbuf survey.

    Today I was looking at which gdk-pixbuf modules are implemented by third parties, that is, which external projects provide their own image codecs pluggable into gdk-pixbuf.

    And there are not that many!

    The only four that I found are libheif, libopenraw, libwmf, librsvg (this last one, of course).

    Update 2019/Sep/12 – Added apng, exif-raw, psd, pvr, vtf, webp, xcf.

Distributions

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Vulture Central team welcomed to our new nest by crashed Ubuntu that’s 3 years out of date

    As eagle-eyed readers may have noted, Vulture Central UK is on the move. Our migratory path has led us to London’s Grays Inn Road and, well, you can see what was waiting for us.

    We normally like to feature Windows machines in various states of distress, be it a Tesco or Boots self-service till, or the odd railway terminal having a very, very bad day.

    Today, courtesy of BT’s InLinkUK, we have a Linux-based device caught with its pants down on our doorstep.

    InLinkUK is an outfit that plops ad-slinging screens on the pavement, which lure punters with the promise of connectivity. Or, in this case, an insight into the OS on which the things actually run.

Devices/Embedded

• Make your own handheld gaming console with this DIY kit that’s on sale

  What if we told you that there’s a portable game console that you can customize to your heart’s content? One that will give you all the nostalgic feels? And one that will also let you sharpen your programming skills? What if we told you that such a device exists?

• Play Thousands of Classic Games With This DIY Gaming Handheld For 28% Off

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla VR Blog: Multiview on WebXR

      The WebGL multiview extension is already available in several browsers and 3D web engines and it could easily help to improve the performance on your WebXR application

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Bottom to top, left to right writing direction in Writer conference talk

    Yesterday I gave a Bottom to top, left to right writing direction in Writer talk at the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The room was well-crowded — perhaps because it was on the first day and in the largest room.

    It contains some details which are not available in previous btLr blog posts, like what natural languages use this direction, how to replace real-world clocks without breaking compatibility and more!

• CMS

  • Richard Best Releases Free Audio and Ebook: “A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL”

    If you’re itching to go deeper into the legal aspects of navigating WordPress’ relationship to the GPL license, Richard Best has recently made his ebook (and the audio version) called “A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL” available for free. Best, a technology and public lawyer based in New Zealand, had previously sold the book with other products as part of a business package that is still available for purchase. After receiving feedback on his most recent post titled “Taking GPL’d code proprietary,” he found that the issues addressed in the book are still relevant and decided to release it for free.

• Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • F5 Levels It Up With New Solutions At NGINX Conf

• Public Services/Government

  • The Pentagon Needs to Make More Software Open Source, Watchdog Says

    The Defense Department is not abiding by a federal mandate to promote the use of open source software and make common code more readily available to other agencies, according to the Government Accountability Office.

    In 2016, the Office of Management and Budget published a memorandum that required every federal agency to make at least 20% of their custom-built software open source within three years, meaning the code would be available for other agencies to use. However, as of July, the Pentagon had released less than 10% of its software as open source, according to GAO.

    The department has also failed to fully implement a number of other open source software initiatives required by the OMB memo, such as creating an enterprisewide open source software policy and building inventories of custom code, auditors said. Additionally, officials never created performance metrics to measure the success of their open source software efforts.

    In both industry and government, the popularity of open source software has exploded in recent years to keep up with the growing demand for fresh tech. By sharing and reusing code, organizations can reduce the cost of developing software and trust the code they’re using has been thoroughly tested by other users.

    However, relying on software that someone else developed requires a certain level of trust. If the developer overlooks a vulnerability in the code—or intentionally inserts one—that bug could end up in countless applications, and users wouldn’t know it’s there.

• Programming/Development

  • Bias and ethical issues in machine-learning models

    The success stories that have gathered around data analytics drive broader adoption of the newest artificial-intelligence-based techniques—but risks come along with these techniques. The large numbers of freshly anointed data scientists piling into industry and the sensitivity of the areas given over to machine-learning models—hiring, loans, even sentencing for crime—means there is a danger of misapplied models, which is earning the attention of the public. Two sessions at the recent MinneBOS 2019 conference focused on maintaining ethics and addressing bias in machine-learning applications.

    To define a few terms: modern analytics increasingly uses machine learning, currently the most popular form of the field broadly known as artificial intelligence (AI). In machine learning, an algorithm is run repeatedly to create and refine a model, which is then tested against new data.

    MinneBOS was sponsored by the Twin Cities organization Minne Analytics; the two sessions were: “The Ethics of Analytics” by Bill Franks and “Minding the Gap: Understanding and Mitigating Bias in AI” by Jackie Anderson. (Full disclosure: Franks works on books for O’Reilly Media, which also employs the author of this article.) Both presenters pointed out that bias can sneak into machine learning at many places, and both laid out some ways to address the risks. There were interesting overlaps between the recommendations of Franks, who organized his talk around stages, and of Anderson who organized her talk around sources of bias.

    When we talk about “bias” we normally think of it in the everyday of sense of discrimination on the basis of race, gender, income, or some other social category. This focus on social discrimination is reinforced by articles in the popular press. But in math and science, bias is a technical term referring to improper data handling or choice of inputs. And indeed, the risks in AI go further than protected categories such as race and gender. Bias leads to wrong results, plain and simple. Whether bias leads to social discrimination or just to lost business opportunities and wasted money, organizations must be alert and adopt ways to avoid it.

  • An introduction to Markdown

    For a long time, I thought all the files I saw on GitLab and GitHub with an .md extension were written in a file type exclusively for developers. That changed a few weeks ago when I started using Markdown. It quickly became the most important tool in my daily work.

    Markdown makes my life easier. I just need to add a few symbols to what I’m already writing and, with the help of a browser extension or an open source program, I can transform my text into a variety of commonly used formats such as ODT, email (more on that later), PDF, and EPUB.

  • Intel Tightens Up Its AVX-512 Behavior For The LLVM Clang 10 Compiler

    When targeting Skylake-AVX512, Icelake-Client, Icelake-Server, Cascadelake, or Cooperlake with the LLVM Clang compiler where AVX-512 is supported, it will now default to preferring the 256-bit vector width rather than 512-bit with AVX-512. Unless 512-bit intrinsics are used in the source code, 512-bit ZMM registers will not be used since those operations lead to most processors running at a lower frequency state. On current generation processors, the performance gains of AVX-512 can often times be negated due to the AVX-512 frequency hits.

  • 2019.3 EAP 1

    The first Early Access Program (EAP) for PyCharm 2019.3 is now available to be downloaded from our website!

  • PyCon: Call for Proposals for PyCon 2020 is open!

    The time is upon us again! PyCon 2020’s Call for Proposals has officially opened for talks, tutorials, posters, education summit, and charlas. PyCon is made by you, so we need you to share what you’re working on, how you’re working on it, what you’ve learned, what you’re learning, and so much more.

  • Welcome to the float zone…

  • Robin Wilson: I am now a freelancer in Remote Sensing, GIS, Data Science & Python

    Since I stopped working as an academic, and took time out to focus on my work and look after my new baby, I’ve been trying to find something which allows me to fit my work nicely around the rest of my life. I’ve done bits of short part-time work contracts, and various bits of freelance work – and I’ve now decided that freelancing is the way forward.

  • Talk Python to Me: #229 Building advanced Pythonic interviews with docassemble

    On this episode, we dive into Python for lawyers and a special tool for conducting legal interviews. Imagine you have to collect details for 20,000 participants in a class-action lawsuit. docassemble, a sweet Python web app, can do it for you with easy.

Civil Rights/Policing

• South Africans are not xenophobic: Mogoeng

  Mogoeng spoke about the attacks on foreign nationals while addressing today’s graduation ceremony at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Westville campus.

  The Chief Justice, who is the Chancellor at UKZN, says we need to get to the root of this issue.

• Thuli Madonsela receives ‘highest honour’ from UKZN, condemns xenophobia

  The ceremony, held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Westville Campus, saw the university chancellor, constitutional court chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, confer on Madonsela the university’s highest honour in law, the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa, during the institution’s annual graduation ceremony.

  Madonsela was awarded the honour for her “distinguished time in office as public protector, for her unwavering and steely determination to complete complex investigations with courage and conviction”.

  Madonsela was praised for taking risks and putting her personal life in danger and for “creating an awareness both in South Africa and globally that corruption will not be tolerated”.

  Mogoeng called her a “voice for the poor in South Africa, voice for women empowerment and voice for a transformed and just legal system”.

• Zambian Church pleads for end to xenophobic ‘chaos’

  UNZA students burning the sign outside the South African Embassy in Lusaka during a demonstration to protest against xenophobic attacks in South Africa.

• Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe – an Opportunist, Ambitious Failure Who Hijacked a People’s Revolution
  

  Born in 1924, Robert Gabriel Mugabe became one of Zimbabwe’s most talked about nationalists.

  Much of the publicity surrounding the name Robert Mugabe took place from around 1960, when he was voted as Secretary General of the National Democratic Party [NDP] at its first Congress in October 1960.

  The NDP had been formed on January 1, 1960 amazingly in the absence of Mugabe, leading to some of his critics arguing that he was never where things began.

  The NDP lasted for a year and was banned in December of 1961, resulting in the same organisation reviving itself as the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union [ZAPU].

  Mugabe continued as ZAPU’s Publicity Secretary of which the president was Joshua Nkomo since the time of the NDP.

Monopolies

• Voice-overs, peer-to-peer recruitment platforms and IP rights: a survey of 200+ performers

  This Kat has previously discussed the potential (negative) impact of online peer-to-peer recruitment platforms on intellectual property rights (see here and here).

  Remember peer-to-peer recruitment platforms? They are online platforms that operate like ‘Uber’. But instead of arranging taxi rides, they broker the commissioning of bespoke creative content, such as logo design, video making or voice-over acting.

  This Kat brings you more research on artists’ experience of these platforms and of their intellectual property rights – read on!

• CJEU’s Advocate General expounds on the availability of SPCs where the basic patent claims a functionally defined active ingredient or a Markush formula in the joined cases Royalty Pharma (C-650/17) and Sandoz v. Searle (C-114/18)

  In the field of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) in the European Union, the majority of all CJEU referrals resolved to date have dealt with the interpretation of the – presumably simple – requirement that an SPC can be only granted for an active ingredient (or a combination of active ingredients) that is “protected” by the basic patent relied upon. Ever since the CJEU endorsed the “identification test” (rather than the “infringement test”) in its landmark decision Medeva (C-322/10), concluding that an active ingredient must be “specified” or “identified” in the claims of the basic patent in order to be “protected” within the meaning of Article 3(a) of the SPC Regulation, an intense controversy has emerged in relation to the question just how specifically an active ingredient has to be identified in the basic patent in order to allow the grant of an SPC.

• Anti-trust tech suits: Deja vu

  These types of cases can have useful outcomes, even if the decisions are not ones any of the parties expects or anticipates. The messy antitrust case against Microsoft that spanned two centuries didn’t save Netscape nor break up Microsoft. But since then the browser market has remained a competitive area, even to the point of Microsoft using Chromium open source software for its Edge browser.

• Patents and Software Patents

  • Munich court schedules first hearings in two Sharp v. Daimler patent cases for late November, another anti-antisuit hearing for early October

    The question is whether Sharp is now going to seek a prophylactic anti-antisuit-injunction injunction (“AAII”) from the Munich court, given that Daimler supplier Continental may in the not too distant future file an antisuit-injunction motion with Judge Lucy H. Koh in the Northern District of California targeting at least Sharp, Nokia, a couple of patent assertion entities Nokia had fed with patents, and the Avanci patent pool firm. On Tuesday, after Continental’s miserable failure over the course of four days (two weekend days, but well-run litigants wouldn’t care) to respond to a letter Sharp had addressed to Judge Koh, the world’s #1 technology industry judge dismissed a pending antisuit-injunction motion without prejudice so as to avoid piecemeal resolution with two or more antisuit injunction motions in the same case. While Continental was too slow and/or unprofessional to clarify promptly that Sharp wasn’t meant to be included by the original antisuit motion, it could have brought a subsequent antisuit motion targeting Sharp. Also, Continental had withdrawn parts of its motion even with respect to Nokia (most importantly the ten aformentioned pending German cases) to comply with the first Munich AAII, but by doing so without prejudice, the automotive supplier reserved the right to revive those parts in the event of a successful appeal to the Munich Higher Regional Court. And then the Avanci pool has various other members, so if Continental refiles, it should target all Avanci contributors (in case its lawyers are conflicted with regard to any of them, it should simply find new ones, which may be a good idea anyway given how things have gone wrong so far with respect to the antisuit effort).

    There are two AAIIs in place, one (the first to come down) against Continental Automotive Systems, Inc. of Auburn Hills, MI, and one against Continental AG, the Germany-based parent company of the entire group (and, as part of that, an indirect parent of the U.S. entity). The first one had been granted ex parte without a hearing and without Continental even having a clue until the decision had come down. But there was a service-of-process dispute as the U.S. entity pointed to the Hague Convention (which according to the Avanci defendants’ motion to dismiss Continental’s U.S. lawyers may have failed to comply with when attempting to serve Sharp Japan). The second one didn’t raise that kind of issue, but the court initially denied an AAII because Nokia had not made it sufficiently clear what complicit or intermediary role Continental AG, which is not a plaintiff in the case before Judge Koh, had played in the U.S. antisuit effort. Nokia didn’t take no for an answer, so the court held a hearing, and then decided in Nokia’s favor.

  • Federal Circuit Rejects Patenting Designs “in the Abstract”

    The district court dismissed Curver’s design patent infringement lawsuit for failure-to-state-a-claim. Asserted U.S. Design Patent D677,946 is titled “Pattern for a Chair”

    [...]

    On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed — holding that claim language specifying a particular article of manufacture (a chair) limits the scope of the design patent in cases where “the claim language supplies the only instance of an article of manufacture that appears nowhere in the figures.”

    In this case, the patentee essentially asked for the Federal Circuit to construe the patent as covering a disembodied design that could be applied to any article of manufacture. In rejecting that argument, the court first noted that it “has never sanctioned granting a design patent for a surface ornamentation in the abstract such that the patent’s scope encompasses every possible article of manufacture to which the surface ornamentation is applied.”

  • Patent case: Innovative Memory Systems Inc. v. Micron Technology Inc., USA

    Concluding that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board improperly construed certain claims in a patent for memory system circuits owned by Innovative Memory Systems, Inc. in an inter partes review filed by Micron Technology, Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has reversed the Board’s finding of unpatentability. The Federal Circuit reversed the Board’s construction for the term “wherein the correspondence of blocks to zones is adjustable by controller” in the patent claims and the Board’s conclusion about a limitation in the patent claims based on prior art references (Innovative Memory Systems, Inc. v. Micron Technology, Inc., August 27, 2019, Prost, S.).

  • Danish High Court radically changes its course on costs awards

    On 29 August 2019, the Danish High Court (Eastern Division) rendered a decisive new decision regarding legal costs in Danish patent (and IP) litigation, markedly changing the previously conservative tendency in awarding costs in Danish patent cases:

    In one among several parallel cases regarding an SPC (Tenofovir), the Maritime and Commercial High Court in April 2018 granted a PI against a generic pharmaceutical (Sandoz Padviram).

    The PI was appealed to the High Court, but the scheduled oral hearing never took place as in the meantime, the Sandoz successfully convinced the Maritime and Commercial Court to repeal the PI while the appeal was still pending at the High Court (Eastern Division).

    Consequently, the High Court was asked to rule on the issue of costs.

    [...]

    With this decision, the High Court (Eastern Division) explicitly acknowledges the general applicability of article 14 of the Enforcement Directive as adopted by the ECJ in United Video Properties, which means that prevailing parties in patent litigation (and by inference in IP litigation in Denmark) may now expect to receive costs that reflect the actual costs incurred as a result of patent litigation.

  • CRISPR Interference: Motion Practice

    CVC also contends that granting its motion and imposing a protective order would not prejudice the public, particularly because the Board authorized the Broad to file a motion to substitute the count, raising the possibility that “CVC will have revealed its preliminary assessment of bases for entitlement to a judgment on priority for a count that is never adjudicated.”

  • Prosecution History Disclaimer 1880 – 2019

    The patent at issue here (5,809,336) stems from a 1989 application and a divisional filed just before the 1995 change-over to the 20-year-from-filing patent term. The microprocessor system claims require an “oscillator.” In interpreting that limitation, the court added some additional negative limitations that (1) the oscillator “does not require a command input to change the clock frequency” and (2) the oscillator’s frequency “is not fixed by any external crystal.” The addition was based upon arguments that the patentee made during prosecution. That narrowing, the patentee argues “runs afoul of the separation of powers among Congress, the USPTO, and the federal courts embodied in the Patent Act.”

    The most interesting aspect of the petition here is reliance on so many 19th century decisions by the Supreme Court:

• Trademarks

  • What’s in a name? General Court rules conceptual comparison of names normally not possible

    The case concerns an opposition against the sign LUCIANO SANDRONE on the basis of the word mark DON LUCIANO, both registered for ‘Alcoholic beverages (except beer)’. The Opposition Division found no likelihood of confusion and rejected the opposition [here], but the Board of Appeal (BoA) reversed and allowed the opposition [here]. The GC reversed again and held that there is no likelihood of confusion between the signs.

  • Cannot Register “IGP” for Paint in Switzerland – because It Could Be a PGI

    Kat readers familiar with geographical indications (GI) may primarily think of cheese, wine or bakery products when discussing this topic. One of the peculiarities of the (recently revised) Swiss legislation on protected designations of origin (PDO) and protected geographical indications (PGI) is the possibility to register a geographical indication for non-agricultural products (think knives, watches or minerals, for example). Whereas this new IP instrument does not seem to have sparked a huge interest among prospective right holders [as of today not a single geographic indication for non-agricultural products has been registered in Switzerland], it does seem to have sealed the fate of a trade mark application that could easily have sailed through registration in another place at another time.

• Copyrights

  • AG Szpunar advises CJEU to rule that internet downloads of ebooks are covered by right of communication to the public, not distribution (so, no, there is no digital exhaustion under InfoSoc Directive)

    As readers know, the CJEU has already found – in UsedSoft – that there is such thing as ‘digital exhaustion’ in relation to software under the Software Directive. However, that piece of legislation is both lex specialis and has a rather narrow field of application (for instance, it does not cover videogames, as the CJEU clarified in Nintendo).

    Hence, in the aftermath of the UsedSoft ruling, it has remained unclear whether the same consequences envisaged in relation to the first lawful sale of the copy of a computer program could extend to subject matter protected under the InfoSoc Directive.

    Certain national courts have attempted to tackle all this, though have done so with diverging outcomes.

    For instance, in 2014, the Court of Appeal of Hamm in Germany excluded that the right of distribution under the InfoSoc Directive, as transposed into German law, could be exhausted in the case of audiobooks (OLG Hamm, 22 U 60/13).

  • Anne Black copyright dispute – originality: how low can you go?

    n June 2019, the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court gave a landmark decision – at least from a Danish point of view – concerning the question of originality in the sense of copyright law. The dispute concerned a hanging flowerpot, a vase and a jar, all created by the Danish designer Anne Black and all made of clay and sold in various colours and sizes. As shown by the photos, the products were all characterized by a lean and simple design.

  • Case preview: design rights at play in baby baths battle

    After the Trunki v Kiddee design case made its way up to the UK Supreme Court, another dispute, Shnuggle v Munchkin, is brewing

    This oddly named dispute might sound like something out of a fairy tale but the case, due to be heard before the England and Wales Intellectual Property Enterprise Court this month, could make for an interesting design dispute.

    The claim, filed by baby product maker Shnuggle, alleges infringement of two registered Community designs (RCDs) – 002224196-0001 and 002616763-0001 – as well as various UK unregistered designs, directed to its ‘Shnuggle Baby Bath’.

  • BREAKING: CJEU confirms that German press publishers’ right is unenforceable due to missed notification to the European Commission

    Readers with an interest in related rights, especially those in favour of press publishers, will know not only that there is now an EU-wide right for press publishers (Article 15 of the DSM Directive), but will also remember that its national predecessor – ie the German related right in favour of press publishers – has been challenged in courts and a referral was made to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) regarding its actual enforceability.

  • BREAKING: CJEU rules that only requirement for copyright protection of designs is their originality

    Copyright in designs: what are the relevant requirements for protection? Is it compatible with EU law that a certain national law requires a design to be a ‘work of art’, an ‘artistic creation’ for copyright to vest in it?

    This, in a nutshell, was the twofold issue at the heart of the referral from the Portuguese Supreme Court to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Cofemel, C-683/17.

    As readers will remember, this referral originated in the uncertainties arisen in the aftermath of earlier CJEU case law, most notably the Flos ruling, which suggests that – in fact – Member States (contrary to what appears from the wording of Article 17 of the Design Directive) would have no freedom whatsoever in determining the conditions at which designs are eligible for copyright protection.

  • Split views after CJEU advised on digital copyright exhaustion

    Exhaustion does not apply to the resale of e-books, advocate general says, in an opinion that has attracted a mixed response among lawyers

Desktop

• Huawei Just Started Selling Laptops With Deepin Linux Pre-Installed

  Some of the best and most affordable premium laptops on the market are now shipping with Linux pre-installed. More specifically they’re shipping with Deepin, a beautiful and polished desktop Linux distribution which, like Huawei, are based in China. Whether this is a result of the ongoing trade dispute between the United States and China is unknown, but it’s a nice step forward for the proliferation of Linux alternatives promoted by major OEMs.

  Let’s get the disappointing news out of the way first. Right now these select Huawei laptops with Linux are only rolling out in China, via Huawei’s official e-commerce store VMall.com.

  The exact models available with Deepin Linux are the Huawei MateBook X Pro, Huawei MateBook 13 and Huawei MateBook 14. It also looks like you’re stuck with the stock options for each model.

Server

• SLE 12 SP5 Release Candidate 1 is available for testing

  SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 5 (SLE 12 SP5) is the last Service Pack of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (SLE 12) code stream.

• Not Enough Open Source Monitoring Solutions For Enterprise

  In this interview, Greg Pattison, GM of Blue Medora talks about the state of monitoring and logging solutions for enterprise workloads. The interview was conducted at VMworld.

• OpenStack Foundation’s StarlingX 2.0 Expands Cloud Computing to the Edge

  The OpenStack Foundation’s StarlingX has reached another major milestone, with the 2.0 release of the edge computing platform project.

  Based on code contribution from Wind River Systems, StarlingX debuted in late 2018 to enable the development and deployment of edge computing cloud software

• This is the 75th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

  This is the 75th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

• IBM

  • Kubeflow + OpenShift Container Platform + Dell EMC Hardware: A Complete Machine Learning Stack

    Kubeflow is an open source machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes. It bundles popular ML/DL frameworks such as TensorFlow, MXNet, Pytorch, and Katib with a single deployment binary. By running Kubeflow on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, you can quickly operationalize a robust machine learning pipeline. However, the software stack is only part of the picture. You also need high performance servers, storage, and accelerators to deliver the stack’s full capability. To that end, Dell EMC and Red Hat’s Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence recently collaborated on two white papers about sizing hardware for Kubeflow on OpenShift.

  • Wherefore Art Thou CentOS 8?

    IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (and I’m not sure if Red Hat likes me putting IBM in front of it or not) was released on May 7th, 2019. I write this on Sept. 11th, 2019 and CentOS 8 still isn’t out. RHEL 7.7 came out on August 6, 2019. In an effort to be transparent, CentOS does have wiki pages for both Building_8 and Building_7 where they enumerate the various steps they have to go through to get the final product out the door.

    Up until early August they were making good progress on CentOS 8. In fact they had made it to the last step which was titled, “Release work” which had a Started date of “YYYY-MM-DD”, an Ended date of “YYYY-MM-DD”, and a Status “NOT STARTED YET”. That was fine for a while and then almost a month had passed with the NOT STARTED YET status. If you are like me, when they completed every step but the very last, you are thinking that the GA release will be available Real-Soon-Now but after waiting a month, not so much.

  • Develop with Flask and Python 3 in a container on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

    In my previous article, Run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 in a container on RHEL 7, I showed how to start developing with the latest versions of languages, databases, and web servers available with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 even if you are still running RHEL 7. In this article, I?ll build on that base to show how to get started with the Flask microframework using the current RHEL 8 application stream version of Python 3.

    From my perspective, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 application streams in containers is preferable to using software collections on RHEL 7. While you need to get comfortable with containers, all of the software installs in the locations you?d expect. There is no need to use scl commands to manage the selected software versions. Instead, each container gets an isolated user space. You don?t have to worry about conflicting versions.

    In this article, you?ll create a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Django container with Buildah and run it with Podman. The code will be stored on your local machine and mapped into the container when it runs. You?ll be able to edit the code on your local machine as you would any other application. Since it is mapped via a volume mount, the changes you make to the code will be immediately visible from the container, which is convenient for dynamic languages that don?t need to be compiled. While this approach isn?t the way to do things for production, you get the same development inner loop as you?d have when developing locally without containers. The article also shows how to use Buildah to build a production image with your completed application.

  • IBM brings Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift together

    At the Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague, IBM today showcased its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment on Red Hat?s OpenShift container platform.

    For the longest time, the open-source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service ecosystem and Red Hat?s Kubernetes-centric OpenShift were mostly seen as competitors, with both tools vying for enterprise customers who want to modernize their application development and delivery platforms. But a lot of things have changed in recent times. On the technical side, Cloud Foundry started adopting Kubernetes as an option for application deployments and as a way of containerizing and running Cloud Foundry itself.

  • SAN vs. NAS: Comparing two approaches to data storage

    For a new sysadmin, storage can be one of the more confusing aspects of infrastructure. This confusion can be caused by lack of exposure to new or different technologies, often because storage needs may be managed by another team. Without a specific interest in storage, an admin might find one’s self with a number of misconceptions, questions, or concerns about how or why to implement different solutions.

    When discussing enterprise storage, two concepts are at the core of most conversations: storage area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS). Both options provide storage to clients across a network, which offers the huge benefit of removing individual servers as single points of failure. Using one of these options also reduces the cost of individual clients, as there is no longer a need to have large amounts of local storage.

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 546: CockroachDB

  Cloud-based apps and services deserve a database that scales across clouds, eases operational complexity, and improves reliability. CockroachDB delivers resilient, distributed SQL with ACID transactions and data partitioned by location.

• Recapping vBSDcon 2019 | BSD Now 315

  vBSDcon 2019 recap, Unix at 50, OpenBSD on fan-less Tuxedo InfinityBook, humungus – an hg server, how to configure a network dump in FreeBSD, and more.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 825

  fiftyonefity passes, sony walkman, ham radio software, manjaro

• Linux Headlines – 09/11/2019

  The Fairphone 3 gets a perfect 10 from iFixit, Acer joins LVFS, and Facebook has a user-space killer for a distro near you.

  Plus an updated RAW file editor for Linux and Full Circle’s plea for help.

• Jeff Atwood on Discourse, Stack Overflow, and Building Online Community Platforms

  Jeff Atwood has an enormous amount of experience doing precisely this. Not only was he the co-founder of Stack Overflow (and later Stack Exchange), but he is also the founder of Discourse, an enormously popular Open Source platform for online discussions.

  In this episode of Conversations With Bacon we get into the evolution of online communities, how they have grown, and Jeff’s approach to the design and structure of the systems he has worked on. We delve into Slack vs. forums (and where they are most appropriately used), how Discourse has designed a platform where capabilities are earned, different cultural approaches to communication, and much more.

• The First One | Self-Hosted 1

  You’ve been wanting to host a Nextcloud instance (or anything else) for your family for a while now. Where on Earth do you start? We share some hard learned lessons about self-hosting, discuss the most important things to consider when building a home server, and Chris gives Alex a hard time about Arch as a Server OS.

• CubicleNate Noodlings | Episode 02 Desktops and Window Managers, BDLL and openSUSE News

  I view KDE Plasma as the pinnacle of all things that are the Desktop and portal into your digital life. This is of course my own opinion but really, what else can do as much as Plasma, in as little resources and be as flexible as it is.

  Xfce is the GTK desktop that is, in my estimation, the benchmark to which all GTK desktops should be measured against. It is what I would call a “classic” Redmond style interface that is familiar to nearly everybody.

• Video: Opening session of LibreOffice Conference 2019

  Here’s the opening session – there’s a quick introduction in Spanish, followed by English at 00:40…

Kernel Space

• Working on Linux’s nuts and bolts at Linux Plumbers

  Linux is built on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and numerous other more specialized development mailing lists. But email and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) can only get you so far. Sometimes, to get things done, top Linux programmers really need to talk face-to-face with each other. That’s where the Kernel Maintainers Summit and Linux Plumbers comes in.

  The Kernel Maintainers Summit, Linux ceator Linus Torvalds told me, is an invitation-only gathering of the top Linux kernel developers. But, while you might think it’s about planning on the Linux kernel’s future, that’s not the case. “The maintainer summit is really different because it doesn’t even talk about technical issues.” Instead, “It’s all about the process of creating and maintaining the Linux kernel.”

Benchmarks

• AMD/Intel Benchmarks: Building The Mainline Linux x86_64 Kernel With LLVM Clang

  With the upcoming LLVM Clang 9.0 compiler release there is an amazing achievement more than a decade in the making… The mainline Clang compiler can finally build the mainline Linux x86_64 kernel. The AArch64 state has been in better shape in recent years with multiple Arm vendors using Clang as their default compiler including to build the Linux kernel, but finally in 2019 the mainline Clang can build mainline Linux x86_64. There are a few caveats, but in this article is my experience in doing so with LLVM Clang and the Linux 5.3 kernel as well as running some preliminary benchmarks on AMD and Intel hardware.

  It has taken years of work to address various GCC’isms within the Linux kernel to improve its code portability for different compilers. There’s also been various features implemented in LLVM/Clang to help in building the Linux kernel. The most recent addition was finally supporting “asm goto” for satisfying Linux x86_64 kernel builds. LLVM Clang 9.0 will soon be released with this support and for today’s testing I was using the Linux 5.3 development code as of earlier this week.

Applications

• Starship Is A Minimal And Fast Shell Prompt Written In Rust

  Over the years I’ve tried various fancy shell prompts, but I’ve always come back to the plain default username@host because I found the others too distracting and cluttered, or too slow for my taste.

  Until I came across Starship, a cross-shell / cross-platform prompt. Using the defaults is simple but also very useful, providing extra information only when it’s needed. It’s highly customizable too, and you can make it look as fancy as you like, but I only made some minor changes for my needs: I made it show the prompt on a single line, and disabled the new line it adds above the start of the prompt, because that needs more scrolling.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Find and Replace a String in File Using the sed Command in Linux

• How to Disable Image Hotlinking in Apache

• How to Install Icinga 2 on Ubuntu 18.04

• How to display gif files in Ubuntu Terminal

• GScan2PDF 2.5.6 Released with Stability Improvements (How-to Install)

• Accessing SELinux policy documentation

  There are many excellent man pages for the confined domains included with SELinux policy. These man pages describe booleans and context types for each domain. They also include sample semanage commands for adding context mappings, changing booleans, and more.

  Unfortunately for the sysadmin getting started with SELinux configuration, these man pages are often not installed by default. The SELinux policy man pages are available from two locations. The upstream Reference Policy repo has a handful of pre-built man pages. The rest can be generated from the policy content with a tool found in the policycoreutils-devel package.

• How To List Users and Groups on Linux

• How to Allow Remote Connections to MySQL Database Server

• How to Install Java on RHEL 8

• Use an SSH key to log into a remote server

Games

• Harvested, a game that blends city-building strategy with a top-down shooter

  Nice to see more games blend entirely different genres together. Harvested has you build a city like a strategy game and become a soldier on the field in a top-down shooter style.

  Speaking to the developer on Steam, Vashta Entertainment, they confirmed Linux support is planned. Their previous game, Trenches of War, is also available on Linux.

• Hotel design and management sim Hotel Magnate should be on Linux at release

  After a successful crowdfunding campaign, it looks like Hotel Magnate will actually be coming to Linux. A few days ago their Kickstarter campaign ended, with over $70K Australian Dollars pulled in from over a thousand backers.

• War Thunder 1.91 ‘Night Vision’ is out with the Chinese nation, new sound engine and Easy Anti-Cheat

  The online free to play combat sim War Thunder just had a huge new release, adding in an entirely new nation with China and plenty of upgrades elsewhere.

  Some highlights include: Night Vision and Thermal Sight devices; Chinese air and ground forces; a map rotation filter; a new sound engine; three new locations; new ground vehicles, helicopters, naval vessels and aircraft for various nations, plus numerous fixes and updates for existing machines and game mechanics.

• ‘Far Cry New Dawn’ Never Released For Linux, But It’s Matching Windows 10 Performance Anyway

  The takeaway is clear: same minimum framerates, and an average framerate only 2.6% lower than Windows 10. Effectively within margin of error, and certainly not discernible when we’re talking about 112 FPS versus 115 FPS.

  (The eagle-eyed among you may even notice slightly lower frametimes on the Linux side when watching the benchmark video.)

  When you step back and realize that Far Cry New Dawn was never intended to run on Linux, yet does so this smoothly, it’s a testament to how far Linux gaming has come.

  My own benchmarks – albeit for different titles – back this up. And when games are released natively on Linux, the performance is often better than the Windows 10 counterparts. It’s not a consistent conclusion, but as Codeweavers and Valve continue to refine and improve what they’re doing, the outlook gets brighter and brighter.

• Shiro Games have announced that Northgard is getting a big free expansion with Northgard Conquest

  Northgard Conquest, that’s the name of the next big free expansion coming to Northgard, the strategy game based on Norse mythology.

  In the announcement on Steam, Shiro Games noted that Northgard Conquest is a “standalone game mode” which they confirmed to GamingOnLinux over email is just an update for the existing game, not a full standalone game.

• Ultra Strangeness will bring clay graphics and stop-motion to Linux next year

  I absolutely love hand-made clay stop-motion animation, ever since watching Trap Door when I was much younger it left a lasting impression so I’m always keen to see what games can do with it. Ultra Strangeness is one such title that caught me here.

  Developer Michael Rfdshir announced it late last year, with us now only noticing it thanks to Steam’s Discovery Queue feature I sometimes use to pick up missed games and it often delivers in times like this.

• While not on Linux officially, Far Cry New Dawn seems to work amazingly well on Linux

  A recent benchmark video is currently doing the rounds showing off Far Cry New Dawn from Ubisoft, despite it not supporting Linux thanks to Wine, DXVK and Steam Play it seems to run beautifully.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Plasma 5.12.9

    Today KDE releases a Bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.12.9. Plasma 5.12 was released in February 2018 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

    This release adds six months’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…

  • KDE Plasma 5.12.9 LTS Desktop Environment Released with More Than 20 Bug Fixes

  • KDE Plasma 5.18 Desktop Environment Will Be Next LTS Series, Lands February 2020

    The current LTS (Long Term Support) series of the KDE Plasma desktop environment is KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS, which recently got its last scheduled maintenance update, KDE Plasma 5.12.9, which means that it actually reached end of life and will no longer receive point release except only if critical security issues or bugs need to be addressed.

    Therefore, the KDE Project talked with various GNU/Linux distribution vendors about which next LTS series of the KDE Plasma desktop environment will suit them, and two of the biggest distros requested that the next long-term supported KDE Plasma series will be KDE Plasma 5.18, which was slated for release early next year.

  • Kate got submitted to the Windows Store

    Since a few years Kate is working well on Windows. You can grab fresh installers since then from our download page.

    But the visibility of it was very low for Windows users.

  • FOSS painting program Krita now has the Linux version on Steam

    Okay, not exactly gaming news but good to see anyway. Krita, the high quality FOSS painting program now has a Linux version available on Steam.

    They made a bit of a splash about releasing the Linux version on Steam too, in their announcement they mentioned how they’re proud of it being “free, open source and community-driven software” with the Steam release meant as another direct way to support the development since it requires a purchase.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Shell Picks Up Performance Improvements For Extensions

    While days too late for squeezing into GNOME 3.34.0, the GNOME Shell has landed a one year old merge request providing various fixes and performance improvements to its extension system.

    This MR was finally honored providing performance improvements around extensions, particularly those with a longer setup/start-up process.

Distributions

• A 2019 View of Manokwari Desktop and BlankOn 11 Uluwatu

  BlankOn is a GNU/Linux system developed by YPLI group from Indonesia with its own desktop environment called Manokwari. Its latest release is XI under the name Uluwatu. However, this desktop system is not too well known in international community, although I’ve also been reviewed it in 2017, so I think it’s my chance to present you how it looks like and what’s inside of it you could try. Enjoy!

  Uluwatu is a place in Bali island, Indonesia. It is the eleventh codename released 2018 after Tambora, or BlankOn X, released 2017. Since this release BlankOn available only as 64-bit version.

• New Releases

  • Manjaro Linux 18.1 Is Officially Released, And You Have A New Choice To Make

    The headlines continue to roll out for Manjaro (which is now an official company), and this one puts to bed the short-lived controversy surrounding the company’s decision to include the proprietary office suite FreeOffice in Manjaro 18.1. The latest stable version of the Arch-based Linux distribution is available now with a ton of new features, and a new choice to make during installation.

    First let’s highlight the big changes to the distribution itself.

    The standout feature is definitely the integrated FlatPak and Snap package support, which is managed through “bauh” (you may formerly recognize it as “fpakman”). Between the Manjaro repositories, the AUR and now FlatPaks and Snaps, there’s no shortage of available software and that’s certain to be a major draw for a lot of people.

  • Manjaro 18.1 Released With Choice Of Office Suite

    Manjaro 18.1 pulls in the latest Arch packages and has various other improvements on its own. One of the most user-facing changes with Manjaro 18.1 comes at installation time where the user now has their choice of office suite: users can continue selecting LibreOffice as what’s been the default, go for the free but proprietary FreeOffice, or have no office suite installed. Manjaro’s decision to offer the proprietary Freeoffice in its distribution is what caused controversy recently but the developers prefer content with that decision with FreeOffice dealing better with some document formats and features than LibreOffice.

  • Arch Linux-based Manjaro 18.1.0 ‘Juhraya’ now available with GNOME, KDE, or Xfce

    Manjaro may have lofty goals of becoming a successful company, but let’s be honest — users of the Linux-based operating system don’t really care about that. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure most members of the Linux community are rooting for the newly-formed company’s success, but they are probably more interested in the excellent operating system itself.

    Today, Manjaro Linux 18.1.0 “Juhraya” finally becomes available for download, and it isn’t without some controversy. You see, rather than just offer up LibreOffice like most distributions, Juhraya offers an alternative choice at installation — FreeOffice.

  • Manjaro Linux 18.1.0 ‘Juhraya’ has been officially released

    Manjaro, the Linux distribution based on Arch has just put out a major new release with Manjaro 18.1.0 – Juhraya.

    Something of a controversial decision was the Manjaro team were possibly going to replace the FOSS office suite LibreOffice in favour of the proprietary FreeOffice. After they took on plenty of feedback, they decided to drop that plan. Instead, when installing you now get the choice between the two or no office suite at all. Additionally according to what the Manjaro team said, SoftMaker (the developer), actually expanded FreeOffice to support more Microsoft formats due to the demand from the Manjaro community so thats’ quite nice.

  • KaOS 2019.09

    KaOS is pleased to announce the availability of the September release of a new stable ISO.

    As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.61.0, Plasma 5.16.5 and KDE Applications 19.08.1. All built on Qt 5.13.1.

    With almost 60 % percent of the packages updated since the last ISO and the last release being over two months old, a new ISO is more than due. News for KDE Applications 19.08 included Dolphin’s information panel has been improved in several ways. You can, for example, choose to auto-play media files when you highlight them in the main panel, and you can now select and copy the text displayed in the panel, Okular’s support for EPub documents has also received a push in this version, Konsole had a boost to the tiling feature and Spectacle comes with several new features that regulate its Delay functionality.

    For the installer Calamares, two major CVE’s were addressed among the many changes for 3.2.13. CVE-2019-13178 and CVE-2019-13179

    Since LibreOffice 6.2, it is now possible to supply this as a pure Qt5/kf5 application. LibreOffice has thus replaced Calligra as the default Office Application for KaOS.

  • KaOS 2019.09 Linux Distro Released with KDE Plasma 5.16.5 and Linux Kernel 5.2

    KaOS 2019.09 comes two months after the release of KaOS 2019.07 earlier this summer and brings with it all of the latest KDE technologies that have been released during this period, including the KDE Plasma 5.16.5 desktop environment, KDE Applications 19.08.1 and KDE Frameworks 5.61 software suites, as well as the Qt 5.13.1 application framework.

    “With almost 60 % percent of the packages updated since the last ISO and the last release being over two months old, a new ISO is more than due,” reads the release announcement. “As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.61.0, Plasma 5.16.5 and KDE Applications 19.08.1. All built on Qt 5.13.1.”

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • LXLE 18.04.3 Run Through

    In this video, we are looking at LXLE 18.04.3.

• Debian Family

  • Norbert Preining: TeX Services at texlive.info

    I have been working over the last weeks to provide four more services for the TeX (Live) community: an archive of TeX Live’s network installation directory tlnet, a git repository of CTAN, a mirror of the TeX Live historic archives, and a new tlpretest mirror. In addition to the services that have already been provided before on my server, this makes a considerable list, and I thought it is a good idea to summarize all of the services.

  • FAI.me service now support backports for Debian 10 (buster)

    The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images now supports a backports kernel for stable release Debian 10 (aka buster). If you enable the backports option, you will currently get kernel 5.2. This will help you if you have newer hardware that is not support by the default kernel 4.19. The backports option is also still available for the images when using the old Debian 9 (stretch) release.

  • Jonas Meurer: debian lts report 2019.08

    This month I was allocated 10 hours. Unfortunately, I didn’t find much time to work on LTS issues, so I only spent 0.5 hours on the task listed below. That means that I carry over 9.5 hours to September.

  • Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, August 2019

    I prepared and, after review, released Linux 3.16.72, including various security and other fixes. I then rebased the Debian package onto that. I uploaded that with a small number of other fixes and issued DLA-1884-1. I also prepared and released Linux 3.16.73 with another small set of fixes.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu?s New Look: Are You a Fan? [Poll]

    As mentioned in yesterday?s new report, Ubuntu?s community design team have elected to change the look of Ubuntu. The dark header bars used in the ?current? Yaru GTK theme (Ubuntu 19.04) have been replaced by lighter, greyer (though apparently bluer) ones.

    The new lighter header bars are said be in keeping with the upstream Adwaita GTK theme (on which Yaru is based). Additionally, the lighter look is said to resolve and address a number of usability issues resulting from the ?mixed? theme set-up.

Devices/Embedded

• Play Your Favorite Classic Games, Then Make Your Own

  The world’s first modular, portable gaming console with a GNU/LINUX embedded operating system, the GameShell Kit allows you to connect to your TV to play all of your favorite old games from Atair, GB, GBA, NES, NAME, MD, PS1 and other consoles. But it doesn’t end there. GameShell also supports programming languages like preset C, Python, Lua, and LISP, so not only can you modify your childhood favorites, but you can build your own games. TechCrunch calls Gameshell “totally unique” and “entirely refreshing when it comes to gaming on the go.”

• Habanero Qualcomm IPQ4019/IPQ4029 SoM Brings 802.11ac Wave2 WiFi to Linux Gateways and Routers

  Last April, we first wrote about Qualcomm IPQ4019 quad-core Cortex-A7 processor with built-in 802.11ac Wave 2 WiFi, as it was found in Qualcomm Mesh Networking DevKit with support for Amazon Alexa. A few months later, we discovered router boards powered by either IPQ4019 or IPQ4029 processor such as Dakota DR40X9 or MikroTik RB450Gx4. The latter does not come with WiFi at all and instead leverages the hardware IPSec encryption built-into the processor.

  Today, we’ve come across the first IPQ4019 / IPQ4029 system-on-module we’ve countered so far, courtesy of 8devices with their Habanero and Habanero-I 802.11ac Wave 2 modules based on the respective processors.

  The company provides an OpenWrt Linux image for the board that boots from the NOR Flash. Both OpenWrt and U-boot (Caraboot) source code appears to be available on Github here and there.

  There’s no detailed information about the differences between Habanero (IPQ4019) and Habanero-I (IPQ4029), but last time we have seen IPQ4029 supports “Qualcomm IoT Connectivity”, and is also available with an extended temperature range of -40°C to +110°C.

• Fairphone 3 Gets a Perfect 10 in iFixit Repairability Score

  …Launched just a few weeks ago, Fairphone 3 is a socially responsible phone that aims to be modular, easy to repair…

• Raspberry Pi clone sports 1.84GHz Intel Cherry Trail processor

  Radxa has posted specs for a new member of its community backed “Rock Pi” Raspberry Pi lookalike SBC family, this time with an Intel Cherry Trail Atom x5-Z8300, USB 3.0, MicroSD, HDMI, eDP/MIPI, and GbE, plus optional WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 LE.

  In June, Radxa unveiled its Rock Pi S SBC that runs Linux on a RK3308 and updated its RK3399-based Rock Pi 4 with extra memory. Now, Radxa is preparing to add to that family of Raspberry Pi pseudo clones with an SBC called Rock Pi X, based on the Intel “Cherry Trail” Atom x5-Z8300. We learned about the new board from our friends at Hackerboards, who added the Rock Pi X to its database yesterday.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Samsung is delivering Android Pie to the ancient Galaxy Tab S3 stateside

  • Google to rival Apple Arcade with ‘Play Pass’ subscription service for Android

  • What Android games are you playing right now?

  • Best Android Chargers to buy in 2019

  • Twitter’s Lights Out Mode for Android Gets Delayed

  • How to view dismissed notifications on Android

  • Xiaomi promises Android 10 for the Mi 9T as early as next month

  • How does the iPhone 11 Pro compare to Android rivals? Here’s the stats

  • Act surprised: iPhone 11 Pro obliterates Note 10+ and every other Android phone in performance tests

  • You can get a good Android phone for the same iPhone dollars

  • Many Flashlight Apps On Android Require 50+ Unnecessary Permissions

  • Android Makes Health Records App to Boost Patient Data Access

  • These Android Flashlight Apps Could Be Spying on You

  • AirDroid Business Announces Release of Kiosk Mode to Support Android Digital Kiosks

  • Another Pixel 4 hands-on gives us a glimpse of face unlock and new camera settings

  • Android Pie now rolling out to the T-Mobile Galaxy S8 Active

  • Google Chrome Canary adds a Shared Clipboard feature for Android and PC

  • IBC 2019: STBs readying Android TV for 5G devices

  • Teracube hands-on: Affordable mid-range Android phone with unique 4-year warranty service

  • The specs just leaked for the iPhone 11 Pro’s biggest Android rival

  • Gmail adds dark mode on Android 10, so you won’t get blinded by email

  • Android 10 Gets Its First Security Patch, 49 Security Vulnerabilities Fixed

  • Here’s how to get the battery percentage back on Android 10

  • Google Translate 6.2 fixes ‘Tap to Translate’ on Android 10, preps ‘Continuous Translation’ [APK Insight]

  • Android 10 custom ROMs now available for the Xiaomi Mi A2, Mi Mix 2, and Mi Mix 2S

  • T-Mobile’s Samsung Galaxy S8 Active finally gets Android 9 Pie

  • Samsung PlayGalaxy Link for Android now available for download

  • Vivaldi for Android offers alternative mobile browsing experience

  • ‘Joker’ Malware Infects 24 Android Apps: Delete Them Now

  • Google Chrome for Android is almost usable!

  • Google revamps Jamboard on Android and iOS to be more like G Suite apps

  • Google seemingly scraps ‘touchless’ Chrome for Android feature phones

  • Gmail dark mode is now rolling out to Android devices, blinding light

  • Play Store slices start showing up in Android 10′s settings

  • Top 6 Android 10 features you must know about

  • Most Android flashlight apps request an absurd number of permissions

  • Hands-on with Assistant Ambient mode for Android devices [Video]

  • How will Project Mainline for Android devices help mobile IT?

  • The best web browsers for Android

With the Intimidation of Tech Expert, Ola Bini Case Hits A New Low

In the early hours of last Thursday in Ecuador, members of the Judicial Police, assisted by the Prosecutor’s Office, broke down the door of Fabián Hurtado at his apartment in Quito. Hurtado is a cybersecurity expert at the International University (UISEK) in Ecuador and a digital forensics expert currently employed by Ola Bini’s defense. The police refused to let Hurtado read or have a copy of their warrant, and by immediately seizing his mobile phone and other digital equipment prevented him from contacting an attorney.

This raid was prompted, according to the authorities, by a belief that Hurtado “incorporated misleading information in his resume to try to mislead the authorities and citizens.” If so, the police action was wildly disproportionate to the alleged crime. Hurtado is a well-known, impartial forensics expert in Ecuador, employed by businesses, law enforcement, and defendants and plaintiffs alike. If there is a problem with Hurtado’s resume, the correct step would be to move to have him rejected as a court expert – not to storm into his home in the middle of the night.

Which Compression Format to Use for Archiving

The last criteria is the most important; the format has to be resilient. It has to expect that damage will happen, and have a strategy for dealing with that damage. Or at least work around the damage.

Events

• Announcing Linux Autumn 2019

  Summer is not yet over (in my climate zone) but it’s time to think about the autumn. Yes, I mean the Linux Autumn, the annual Polish conference of Linux and free software enthusiasts organized by PLUG. I wrote about this event many times in the past, I don’t want to make you bored by the same things again. This year we hope to invite more foreign guests and make the conference more international, possibly with one day full of English talks.

  [...]

  Remember that the conference is paid for attendees. The money is spent to pay for the accommodation and food for everyone. Why do I ever write in the article for Fedora Planet about a paid and not strictly Fedora-oriented event? First of all, the participation (including accommodation and food) is fully refunded for speakers. I’m not encouraging you to attend a paid event, although if you want you are most welcome. I’m encouraging you to give your talks and participate in a three-days long event for free. Second, this is a Linux event and Fedora is still a Linux distribution. Third, as we all know, many Fedora contributors live and work in the Czech Republic, especially in Brno, and this event is organized in Poland just across the Czech border. It cannot be closer.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Reality 1.4

    With this release, we’re excited to announce that users can enjoy browsing in multiple windows side-by-side. Each window can be set to the size and position of your choice, for a super customizable experience.

    And, by popular demand, we’ve enabled local browsing history, so you can get back to sites you’ve visited before without typing. Sites in your history will also appear as you type in the search bar, so you can complete the address quickly and easily. You can clear your history or turn it off anytime from within Settings.

    The Content Feed also has a new and improved menu of hand-curated “Best of WebVR” content for you to explore. You can look forward to monthly updates featuring a selection of new content across different categories including Animation, Extreme (sports/adrenaline/adventure), Music, Art & Experimental and our personal favorite way to wind down a day, 360 Chill.

  • Turn off DoH, Firefox. Now.

    DoH means that Firefox will concentrate all DNS traffic on Cloudflare, and they send traffic from all their users to one entity. So what does that mean? It means people outside the US can now be fully tracked by US government: now some of you might wonder if this is actually in line with GDPR (The EU General Data Protection Regulation). It is indeed very questionable if DoH is rolled out as default, since users do NOT opt in, but have to opt out.

  • DoH disabled by default in Firefox

    Disable DoH by default. While encrypting DNS might be a good thing, sending all DNS traffic to Cloudflare by default is not a good idea. Applications should respect OS configured settings. The DoH settings still can be overriden if needed. ok landry@ job@

  • Niko Matsakis: AiC: Shepherds 3.0

    What I’m proposing, at its heart, is very simple. I want to better document the “agenda” of the lang-team. Specifically, if we are going to be moving a feature forward1, then it should have a shepherd (or multiple) who is in charge of doing that.

    In order to avoid unbounded queues, the number of things that any individual can shepherd should be limited. Ideally, each person should only shepherd one thing at a time, though I don’t think we need to make a firm rule about it.

    Becoming a shepherd is a commitment on the part of the shepherd. The first part of the lang team meeting should be to review the items that are being actively shepherded and get any updates. If we haven’t seen any movement in a while, we should consider changing the shepherd, or officially acknowleding that something is stalled and removing the shepherd altogether.

    Assigning a shepherd is a commitment on the part of the rest of the lang-team as well. Before assigning a shepherd, we should discuss if this agenda item is a priority. In particular, if someone is shepherding something, that means we all agree to help that item move towards some kind of completion. This means giving feedback, when feedback is requested. It means doing the work to resolve concerns and conflicts. And, sometimes, it will mean giving way. I’ll talk more about this in a bit.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• International Day Against DRM (IDAD): Defending the right to read on Oct. 12

  A global community of students, teachers, and activists are taking part in the Defective by Design campaign’s 13th annual International Day Against DRM. Though from different backgrounds, countries, and perspectives, participants in the campaign share the common cause of opposing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), a widespread technology that places heavy restrictions on how people access digital media.

  On Saturday, October 12th, there will be two events held in Boston: a protest outside of the Pearson Education offices at 501 Boylston Street, followed by an evening “hackathon,” or collaboration session, on unrestricted and truly shareable educational materials at the offices of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at 51 Franklin Street.

Licensing/Legal

• Introducing Craig Topham, FSF copyright and licensing associate

  My name is Craig Topham, and I’m the latest to have the honor of being a copyright and licensing associate for the Free Software Foundation (FSF). I started work in November, and the delay in assembling my introductory blog post is a testament to how busy I have been. Although my post feels late, it gives me a chance to share my experience here at the FSF, along with sharing a little bit more about myself.

  From 2005 to 2017, I worked as a PC/Network Technician for the City of Eugene, Oregon. The role had the inherent reward of allowing me to be a part of something much larger than myself. I was helping local government function. From the mayor and city council all the way to the summer staff that worked the front desk at the recreation department’s swimming pools, I was one of many making it all work. It was even a part of my job to support some free software the city used! Sadly, a vast majority of the software that we used was proprietary, but despite the painful duty of supporting nonfree software, the overall experience felt pretty great. As I close that chapter of my life with all the wonderful memories and marks made, I am beset with a wild sense of relief. Like finding a rock in my shoe after twelve years, the alleviation is palatable: I never have to labor to master proprietary software again!

  For unknown reasons (which I contemplate often), I did not learn about the free software movement until 2004, despite a lifetime of using computers. Like so many before me, my initial education on the movement came via Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. What so instantaneously drew me to free software was the simplicity of the four freedoms: run, edit, share, contribute. These freedoms, coupled with the ethical nature of the movement, made it a natural fit for me. It did not take me long to realize that this is what I needed to soothe my “How can I make the world a better place?” angst. Inevitably, I became an FSF associate member on October 28, 2007 because it was (and still is) the easiest way to help out. If you are reading this and you are not a member, I encourage you to change that and help make the world a better place.

Programming/Development

• Jakarta EE 8: The new era of Java EE explained

  Java EE is a fantastic project. However, it was created in 1999, under the name of J2EE, and is 20 years old, which means it also faces challenges in keeping pace with enterprise demands.

  Now, Java EE has a new home and a new brand. The project was migrated from Oracle to the Eclipse Foundation, and it is called Jakarta EE, under the Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J) project. The Eclipse Foundation released Jakarta EE 8 on September 10, and in this article, we’ll look at what that means for enterprise Java.

  Java EE was a very strong project that was widely used in many kinds of enterprise Java applications and many big frameworks, such as Spring and Struts. Developers may have questioned its features and evolving processes, but looking at its high usage and time in the market, its success is undeniable. Nonetheless, the enterprise world doesn’t stop, and new challenges emerge all the time. The speed of change has increased, with new technologies such as cloud computing being developed to provide better solutions, and Java EE needed to keep pace as well.

• Unit-testing static functions in C

  An annoying thing about C code is that there are plenty of functions that cannot be unit-tested by some external framework – specifically anything declared as static. Any larger code-base will end up with hundreds of those functions, many of which are short and reasonably self-contained but complex enough to not trust them by looks only. But since they’re static I can’t access them from the outside (and “outside” is defined as “not in the same file” here).

  The approach I’ve chosen in the past is to move the more hairy ones into separate files or at least declare them normally. That works but is annoying for some cases, especially those that really only get called once. In case you’re wondering whether you have at least one such function in your source tree: yes, the bit that parses your commandline arguments is almost certainly complicated and not tested.

• Node.js VS Python: Which is Better?

  Both Node.js (majorly used as a backend framework ), and Python ( front-end and back-end programming language) are used extensively for programming of a web app. It is vital to select a suitable framework or programming language for web app development because it is the backbone of every web app.

  Node.js and Python are extensively used for this purpose. When you talk about Node.js or python, you are actually comparing JavaScript with Python . This is because Node.js is actually a framework built on Google Chrome’s JavaScript.

  Both of them are among the top programming languages according to the TOIBE index.

• Episode #147: Mocking out AWS APIs

• Python Testing 201 with pytest

  For Python Frederick?s September presentation, I presented on Python testing. In the presentation, I explained more of the features of pytest that went beyond the basics that we explored in March.

• Excellent Free Books to Learn Logo

  The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. It features interactivity, modularity, extensibility, with flexibility of data types.

  Logo offers a rich programming environment providing multimedia tools, robotics and network access. Full-featured Logo packages provide hundreds of commands for exploring all sorts of applications, from the simplest turtle graphics to artificial intelligence.

  None of the books featured below are released under an open source license. There seems to be a dearth of open source programming books for Logo. But the books featured below are available to view without charge.

• How to fix common pitfalls with the Python ORM tool SQLAlchemy

  Object-relational mapping (ORM) makes life easier for application developers, in no small part because it lets you interact with a database in a language you may know (such as Python) instead of raw SQL queries. SQLAlchemy is a Python ORM toolkit that provides access to SQL databases using Python. It is a mature ORM tool that adds the benefit of model relationships, a powerful query construction paradigm, easy serialization, and much more. Its ease of use, however, makes it easy to forget what is going on behind the scenes. Seemingly small choices made using SQLAlchemy can have important performance implications.

• Presentation Mode in Wing 7

  Presentation Mode, added in Wing 7, temporarily applies a selected magnification to the entire user interface, so the screen can be read more easily during meetings or talks.

  [...]

  To disable Presentation Mode, uncheck the high-level configuration menu item again.

  That’s it for now! We’ll be back soon with more Wing Tips for Wing Python IDE.

• 3 ways to handle transient faults for DevOps

RIP Robert Frank: It Is Important To See What Is Invisible To Others

Robert Frank, the radical photographer and filmmaker who famously documented the darkness, racism and inequality of an ostensibly shiny post-war America, has died at 94. A Swiss immigrant who “made the margins (his) home,” Frank’s classic book “The Americans” unsparingly portrayed things “as they really were – unaestheticized, somewhat plain, more than a little dour.”

Science

• Oliver Sacks, the “Neurological Philosopher”

  Oliver Sacks, the “neurological philosopher”, did a “different sort of medicine on behalf of chronic often warehoused and largely abandoned patients.” It combined art and science. Lawrence Weschler, in How Are You, Dr. Sacks?, says Sacks was from “the period before the science and the humanities split apart”.[1]

Health/Nutrition

• Government Will Propose Banning Flavors Used in E-Cigarettes

  President Donald Trump said Wednesday his administration will propose banning thousands of flavors used in e-cigarettes to combat a recent surge in underage vaping.

• Tentative Opioids Settlement Falls Short of a Nationwide Deal

  A tentative settlement announced Wednesday over the role Purdue Pharma played in the nation’s opioid addiction crisis falls short of the far-reaching national settlement the OxyContin maker had been seeking for months, with litigation sure to continue against the company and the family that owns it.

• Medicine For All: The Case for a Public Option in the Pharmaceutical Industry

  Too many Americans are suffering and dying prematurely because we have ceded control over a key part of our infrastructure for public health—the pharmaceutical industry—to unaccountable corporations, for whom the pursuit of profit trumps the needs of patients and communities. Instead of continuing to push the boulder of regulation up the hill in hopes that it one day finally proves effective, we can displace corporate power over our health and lives by moving towards a democratic, publicly-owned pharmaceutical sector, designed to respond to public health needs and deliver better health outcomes at lower costs.

  Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical development, production, and distribution in the U.S. is necessary to combat the increasingly harmful impacts of Big Pharma which decades of regulation have failed to counteract.

  [...]

  Public control of pharmaceutical manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail pharmacies could serve as the basis for large-scale upstream investments in public health3 through the development of associated educational opportunities and job pipelines—part of an inclusive industrial strategy for economic development and stabilization, with profit now captured by corporations reinvested to meet public needs. Existing public resources like the Veterans Health Administration and the US Postal Service could be leveraged to help deliver medications, and public, unitary pricing on medications and their distribution would create transparency in the pharmaceutical supply chain that could inform further policy efforts.

  Public ownership in pharmaceutical R&D would ensure that more intellectual property related to drug development would be held by public institutions and utilized in the public interest. Right now, a small number of newer medications are responsible for the majority of pharmaceutical spending by public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Ensuring that new drug development is done in the public interest assures that not only do we get the medications that we need for the most pressing public health concerns (rather than the most profitable health issues), but also that those medications come at an accessible price.

Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availability)

• Security updates for Thursday

  Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (exim, firefox, and webkit2gtk), Debian (libonig and opensc), Fedora (cobbler), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (flash-plugin, kernel, kernel-rt, rh-maven35-jackson-databind, rh-nginx110-nginx, and rh-nginx112-nginx), Scientific Linux (kernel), Slackware (curl, mozilla, and openssl), SUSE (ceph, libvirt, and python-Werkzeug), and Ubuntu (vlc and webkit2gtk).

• Android 10 Gets Its First Security Patch, 49 Security Vulnerabilities Fixed

  Google has released the Android Security Patch for September 2019 to address the most important security vulnerabilities and bugs discovered since August 2019, which also happens to be the first security patch for the recently released Android 10 operating system.

  Consisting of the 2019-09-01 and 2019-09-05 security patch levels, the Android Security Patch for September 2019 addresses a total of 49 security vulnerabilities across various core Android components, including Framework, Media framework, System, kernel components, Nvidia components, and Qualcomm components, including closed-source ones. The most critical flaw fixed in this patch may allow remote attackers to execute code.

• Infrastructure Updates

  This is a post to the developers and other people who contribute to the IPFire project and have an account on our infrastructure.

  Since we have rolled out loads of changes recently, some change in client configuration is required. This was announced on the development mailing list, but for those who have missed it, here is a little blog post.

Defence/Aggression

• US Forces May Have Committed War Crimes in Syria: UN Report

  The conflict, now in its ninth year, “continues to torment civilians who bear the brunt of hostilities”

• Will It Be Business as Usual for Saudis at London’s Arms Fair?

  “The future for our defence sector is a very bright one.” So said Fleur Thomas, head of exports for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, as her government prepares to help host Europe’s biggest arms fair in London this week.

• Tracks to Nowhere

  Reporting on the failed Camp David plan to sign an agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, on 8 September, 2019, a CNN reporter stated that Trump’s plan for talks on an agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, and, by extension, Trump’s foreign policy, “went off tracks.”

• Is Killing Peasants Protecting America’s Interests?

  The war drags on. There is no end in sight. Peace negotiations are thwarted again. Republicans and Democrats alike appear in the press decrying the possibility of the enemy coming to talk peace and staying at Camp David. Personally, I was surprised by the Camp David aspect of the story only because I figured Trump might try and get the Taliban negotiators a floor or two in one of his hotels or resorts. Why go to Camp David if the family Trump can make a few bucks? If Trump properties are good enough for the Chinese and the US Air Force, why not the Taliban, too?

• On 18th Anniversary of 9/11, Bernie Sanders Calls for End to Endless War

  “U.S. power should be measured not by our ability to blow things up, but to bring people together around our common humanity.”

• Trump Leaves Afghanistan and Pakistan at His Mercy

  The Doha talks between the United States and the Taliban to work out a peace deal to end Afghanistan’s 18-year conflict began with a whimper a year ago. They ended Saturday with a presidential tweet from the White House that was no less than a bang that resounded around a startled world.

• A Morning in Afghanistan

  n a very warm September morning in Kabul, several dozen men, women, and children sit on the carpeted floor of a room at the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ Borderfree Center. The women cluster together. All wear burqas, but because of the heat they push the steel blue veils back, revealing their faces. Most of the men wear traditional tunics and pakol hats.

• Reflections on “Peace” in Afghanistan

  When the conflict that the Vietnamese refer to as the American War ended in April 1975, I was a U.S. Army captain attending a course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In those days, the student body at any of our Army’s myriad schools typically included officers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

• Afghanistan May Never Recover From the U.S. Invasion

  When the conflict that the Vietnamese refer to as the American War ended in April 1975, I was a U.S. Army captain attending a course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In those days, the student body at any of our Army’s myriad schools typically included officers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

• 18 Years Later, America Vows to ‘Never Forget’ 9/11

  Americans commemorated 9/11 with solemn ceremonies and vows Wednesday to “never forget” 18 years after the deadliest terror attack on American soil.

• The CIA’s alleged Kremlin asset reportedly spent at least five years working inside Russia’s presidential administration

  Oleg Smolenkov, the CIA’s reported asset inside the Kremlin, worked for at least five years in the office of Yuri Ushakov, now a presidential adviser on foreign policy, a source close to Russia’s intelligence community told the newspaper Vedomosti. 

• Knowledge in the Blood: Stories About 9-11

  A Saudi Arabian exchange student starting 12th grade in an American high school this fall is bullied because his name is Osama. “Something about 11th of September?” I learn.

• 9/11, An Anniversary of Unity or Division?

  The U.S. needs to make a serious appraisal assessing our bridges—of unity—and walls—of hate and division. What benefits, if any, are provided by increasing isolationism? Do they outweigh the blessings of collaboration, connection, and friendship?

• A Day that Changed the World

  A new anniversary of a catastrophe brings back strong feelings and sad memories. Such is the case of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, a tragedy that had long-lasting effects. New York, and the world, has not been the same since the events of September 11, 2001.

• Never Forget

• The Catastrophic Tenure of John Bolton

  John Bolton’s tenure was a complete disaster. The national security architecture after Bolton looks like the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian.

• John Bolton’s Dismissal

  The power of identity politics as a tool of the Establishment to divert and derail opposition to the wealthy elite was demonstrated to me in a stunning and graphic way back in January 2013. I was entering the Oxford Union to attend the presentation of the Sam Adams award for Integrity to Tom Fingar, a senior American intelligence officer who had successfully blocked a push for military action against Iran by insisting on the barring from assessments of highly exaggerated accounts of Iran’s nuclear programme. A person of integrity in the right place had been able to stop a repeat of the extreme horrors of war engendered by the Iraqi WMD scam perpetrated by Blair and Bush.

• On 18th Anniversary of 9/11, Media Worry About ‘Premature’ End to Afghan War

  On the 18th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the illegal US occupation of Afghanistan continues as the longest overseas war in American history. Although President Donald Trump recently declared that peace negotiations over the withdrawal of US troops with the Taliban are “dead,” reportedly because of the death of a US soldier from a suicide bomb attack in Kabul last week, the status of future negotiations is still unclear.

• The Real Charles Manson

  The 50th anniversary of the Manson family slayings have inspired a rash of new essays and retrospectives, and almost ubiquitous among them is the same basic premise: that the seven murders committed by Charles Manson’s cultists in August 1969 marked not just the “death of the ’60s” but the indefinite deferral of the dream they contained. From the very titles of the works exploring the family’s crimes to a new summer blockbuster starring Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, this notion continues to dominate the public imagination.

Environment

• The Courage of Saying No: Children, Rebellion and Greta Thunberg

  There is something to be said of wariness when it comes to revolutionary voices. As Albert Camus argued in that beautiful tract of illumination and contradiction, The Rebel, “All modern revolutions have ended in the reinforcement of the power of the state.” But he also argued that humankind were the only creatures refusing to be what they are, a permanent self-deluding bunch bound to cause various neuroses. The true rebel, then, is the one who says no, and can maintain credibility even as he risks becoming an ideologue, another dogmatist.

• Healthcarecan worsen global climate crisis

  Healthcare workers urging zero carbon emissions say chemicals used increasingly to anaesthetise patients are potent greenhouse gases.

• Sand and dust storms pose global threat

  The standard bearer of the United Nations’ effort to combat desert spread and the threat from sand and dust storms, meeting here, is determined to be remembered as not just a global talking shop, but a launchpad for action.

  The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has launched a coalition to energise the UN’s response to the problem. One focus for the new body will be to develop the sand and dust storms (SDS) source base map to improve the monitoring of the storms.

  Iran told the meeting that both traditional and modern knowledge on SDS hot spots could help to create a stronger knowledge base for regional initiatives. The coalition’s members include the International Civil Aviation Organization and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

• Immigrant Rights and Green Groups Join Forces in Rally at CBP, Demanding Trump Welcome Bahamians and All Climate Refugees

  “In the climate crisis, we must not deny entry to survivors of disasters.”

• Amnesty International Chief’s Plea to 30,000+ Schools Worldwide: Let the Students Climate Strike!

  “Children should not be punished for speaking out about the great injustices of our age.”

• What It Will Take to Actually Fight Climate Change

  Ponder the onrushing disaster of climate change, and the towering task of getting greenhouse gas emissions down in time to avoid existential calamity, and one can be led very easily to an enervating political despair. The battle is basically lost, or so says the famed novelist Jonathan Franzen in a New Yorker essay this week. While we should try to reduce emissions, he writes,

• Leaked Email Suggests Trump Admin Pressuring UN Agency to Self-Censor on ‘Political Sensitivities’ Like Climate Crisis or Risk Defunding

  Critics called the administration’s reported threat to cut funding “deeply worrying” and “blackmail.”

• It’s Not About Your Straws or Your Light Bulbs

  A few years ago, I had a cupcake problem. I’d go to the cupcake store almost daily and I’d eat at least one cupcake, sometimes more. At the same time, I wanted to lose weight, or at least stop gaining it. So I kept looking up information about diets and superfoods, just looking for some magical solution to present itself.

• Energy

  • New Report on Trans Mountain Pipeline Highlights ‘Dangerous’ Construction Hot Spots

    “Canadians taxpayers—who are the ones paying for this multi-billion dollar pipeline—have a right to know the impacts that construction will have on communities and the environment.”

  • Oil Tycoon T. Boone Pickens Dies at Age 91

    T. Boone Pickens, a brash and quotable oil tycoon who grew even wealthier through corporate takeover attempts, died Wednesday. He was 91.

  • Fees on Electric Cars, Inspired by Koch Network, Are Unfairly Penalizing Drivers, Says Consumer Reports

    Drivers of electric cars are being unfairly punished by punitive fees in several states, according to a newly published analysis by Consumer Reports. Legislators in 26 states have enacted or proposed special registration fees for electric vehicles (EVs) that the consumer advocacy group found to be more expensive than the gas taxes paid by the driver of an average new gasoline vehicle.

    These punitive EV fees have been pushed in many states by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate-funded group which produces model legislation and voted on a model resolution supporting “equal tax treatment for all vehicles” — a move that bears the fingerprints of the fossil fueled–Koch network.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • The Truth About Electric Eels Has Long Been Overlooked

    Carlos David de Santana, a Brazilian researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, thinks differently. By comparing 107 specimens pulled from museum drawers and the Amazon basin, he and his team of mostly Brazilian scientists have found that the infamous electric eel is actually three distinct species.

    There are dozens of different ways of defining a species, and none are universally accepted. That said, de Santana says that his team “used many lines of evidence to prove that there’s more than one electric eel species.” This trinity differs not only in physique, but also in genetics, habitat, and electric power. Tellingly, the eels’ DNA suggests that they last shared a common ancestor 7 million years ago, which means that they started to diverge well before brown bears and polar bears, lions and tigers, and even humans and chimpanzees.

Finance

• ‘Socialism’ Made America Great

  From single-payer health care to climate change, the 2020 Democrats have ambitious plans. But these new, grand, and green deals aren’t as radical as some make them sound. In fact, big public projects are what made America great.

• ‘Historic Win’ for Gig Economy Workers in California Exposes Telling Rift Among 2020 Democrats

  While Sanders, Warren, Harris, and Buttigeig have come out in favor of state’s bill that would offer far-reaching labor protections, Biden has remained quietly on the sidelines.

• Steadily Gaining Ground in Polls, Elizabeth Warren Embraces Wall Street Fear of Her Campaign

  “The Warren campaign should play this clip everywhere,” one supporter said of two CNBC anchors saying executives feel the progressive candidate “has got to be stopped”

• What to Build Instead of Prisons

  It’s a midweek summer afternoon, and staff and supporters of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights are standing in a room newly furnished with cubicles, desks, and chairs. They are enjoying snacks, chatting easily, and posing in a space designated as a photo booth for the day.

• ‘Internment Camps for the Homeless’: Housing Advocates Horrified by Trump Push for ‘Crackdown’ on California Homelessness

  “Further efforts to criminalize or otherwise harm people experiencing homelessness are unconscionable.”

• Scholar reports receiving salary of zero rubles for teaching at Moscow State University as administrators deny his claims

  Askold Ivantchik, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told journalists that the leadership of Moscow State University (MGU) has asked him to teach without a salary this academic year.

• Faced With Soaring Costs of Private Insurance, Poll Shows 58% of Small Business Owners Support Medicare for All

  “Medicare for All is the only solution to our healthcare cost crisis that will offer relief to workers and small businesses alike.”

• Healthcare Ad Spending Exceeds $65 Million in 2019 as Insurance Industry Ramps Up Effort to Kill Medicare for All

  “The insurance companies are working hard to shift the blame and stop the movement for Medicare for All.”

• Why Would We Trust Plutocrats to Save Us From Plutocracy?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a loud-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.

• Africa’s most valuable company has just created the biggest [Internet] company in Europe

  The new company, named Prosus, was valued at $105 billion as it was listed today (Sep. 11)—the largest for an European consumer tech stock. The company’s shares soared as much as 29% on its first day of trading. It is currently the third most valuable company listed on the Euronext exchange in Amsterdam.

  Assets held by Prosus include Naspers’ Tencent stake as as well as investments in Swiggy, the Indian e-commerce startup and Mail.Ru, a major Russian internet platform. The company’s savvy international bets include more than doubling its $616 million investment in Flipkart, the Indian e-commerce company, when it sold its 11% stake for $1.6 billion last year. Prosus will trade on Euronext with “PRX” as its ticker.

• $400 TRILLION HOLE? Actual US debt may be 2,000% of GDP, says Wall Street report

  A new report suggests that the real US debt level may be $400 trillion, or 20 times higher than the country’s gross domestic product. The calculation includes government, state, local, financial and so-called entitlement debt.
  AB Bernstein, a global asset management firm based on Wall Street, came up with these figures by including in its analysis not only traditional levels of public debt, such as bonds, but also financial debt as well as future obligations for entitlement programs. These include social security, Medicare and public pensions.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• St. Petersburg police completely ignored an attack on an election monitor inside a polling station, even though it happened right before their eyes

  Last Sunday, as Russians across the country cast ballots in local races, election commission members were attacked at two polling stations in St. Petersburg. Georgy Medvedinsky, a member of the № 1619 precinct commission with a consultative vote, says he was jumped in the street, near his polling station. After the elections were over, the watchdog group “Petersburg Observers” published video footage of another attack inside precinct 1619 itself.

• ‘We have no politics, so we have no politicians’ Leading journalist Ilya Azar offers an inside look at how media involvement and leaderless organizing drove Moscow’s summer of protest

  Ilya Azar is a special correspondent for Novaya Gazeta and a former special correspondent for Meduza. He also serves as a municipal deputy in Moscow. In early June, he helped organize a march against fabricated criminal cases following the arrest of Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov. That proved to be only the beginning of a highly eventful summer for Azar. He went on to take part in organizing several demonstrations demanding fair elections for the Moscow City Duma, including the August 10 protest that brought more than 60,000 Muscovites into the streets for the first time since 2012. Meduza correspondent Vladislav Gorin spoke with Azar about the line between journalism and politics and about the shift within Russia’s opposition movements toward spontaneous, democratic organizing tactics.

• Happy days for managed democracy Sources say the Kremlin welcomes recent election results, and Russia’s ruling political party lives to fight another day

  Multiple sources close to Russia’s presidential administration told Meduza that the Kremlin is happy with pro-government candidates’ performance in the September 8, 2019, elections. Officials are especially pleased in the State Council’s Department of Affairs, which is managed by Alexander Kharichev, a close associate of Sergey Kiriyenko, President Putin’s deputy chief of staff and “domestic policy curator.” Responsible for overseeing Russia’s gubernatorial races, Kharichev’s office had a clear task: don’t allow any second-round votes. The Kremlin was eager to avoid a repeat of 2018, when the Putin administration’s candidates couldn’t win first-round elections and lost runoffs in four gubernatorial contests — including elections in the strategically important Primorsky and Khabarovsk regions.

• Power and Tragedy

  Starting with the Trojan War in the thirteenth century BCE, the Greeks embarked on a gigantic Grexit that lasted for centuries. They migrated to other more prosperous lands.

• EU Commission Wants the Fox in Charge of the Henhouse

  Yesterday, the new European Commission president, Ursula Von der Leyen, proposed Hungarian politician László Trócsányi as enlargement commissioner. Given his background, it’s a move that threatens the credibility of the Commission’s role to promote human rights, rule of law, and fundamental values in the European Union and third states. 

• Revive the True Spirit of Constitutionality and Federalism in India: Article 370

  The process of nationalist self-imagining in India is likely to remain in a nebulous state so long as the destiny of regional politicians is etched by the calligrapher in New Delhi and determined by maneuvers in the murky den of centralized federalism.

• ‘Red Flag for Whole World’: Undocumented Workers in India Fear They May Soon Be Prisoners in Detention Camps They Are Building

  “This is the world that the global war on terror made.”

• The Myths of the “Genius” Behind Trump’s Reelection Campaign

  On the evening of May 30, Brad Parscale, the campaign manager of Donald J. Trump for President Inc., gave a speech to a gathering of the faithful. Parscale is a striking figure: 6-foot-8, with a trademark Viking beard and a penchant for bombast. He was a phenom of the 2016 election, rising, in a matter of months, from an anonymous web designer in San Antonio to the Trump campaign’s reputed digital savior. Parscale has become a frequent warmup act at Trump rallies and a prized attraction in GOP fundraising circles.

  On this occasion, he was speaking to the Miami Young Republicans. Parscale regaled the audience with his litany of Trump’s achievements, according to a recording of the speech (provided by Palm Beach Post reporter Christine Stapleton). He warned of the “crazy socialist Democrats” who want to “slaughter” babies in the third trimester; admit “all of South America” to the U.S. through open borders; and render jet-fueled planes illegal and “farming cows” extinct. “I don’t know about you guys,” Parscale told them. “I really like steak.”

• The Imperative to Restore Congressional Powers

  You have to give President Trump credit for one thing — he has so abused executive authority that even the most conservative members of Congress are now clamoring to restore our vital constitutionally-established checks and balances.

• The Bill of Rights Turns 230: What Do We Have to Show for It? Nothing Good

  It’s been 230 years since James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, and what do we have to show for it?

• Bojo Johnson’s Magic Carpet Ride Wearing Nigel Farage’s Clothes

  Boris Johnson (“BoJo”) has been a chancer all his adult life.

• Tongan Prime Minister ‘Akilisi Pohiva, who is credited with helping bring democracy to the small Pacific island nation, has died. He was 78.

  Pohiva was an immensely significant figure in Tonga who was behind the push for democracy and getting away from politics being dominated by the royal family, said Graeme Smith, a research fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at Australian National University.

• Destroy the MIT Media Lab

  The Media Lab was founded in the mid-1980s by Nicholas Negroponte, the son of a Greek shipping magnate who served as its director until 2000, and a tech gadfly straight out of central casting (his 1995 bestselling book Being Digital prophesied a world in which digital “bits” would overtake our physical world of “atoms”). Though it’s branded a little less earnestly, the Media Lab is what happens when this techno-utopian sentiment congeals into an entire institution, a reputation launderer for corporate America and the billionaire class.

• [Old] Future Schlock

  The most important of the Lab’s interfaces is the one that connects academic research to commerce. In Negroponte’s scheme, there could be no point in giving the world’s most imaginative minds free rein unless that would also appeal to major corporations and venture capital. Hence his pioneering business plan, unique for a university lab at the time, under which corporate sponsors front most of the budget by kicking in a few hundred thousand dollars a year each for nonexclusive rights to the Lab’s intellectual property [sic]. This funding mechanism is fussily calibrated to rake in cash while preserving a façade of independence. A diversified industrial average of seventy-odd sponsors—including Bank of America, Google, News Corporation, Northrop Grumman, and Hasbro—pay for access to a broad “consortium” of research groups but can’t direct their money to a particular project or dictate terms to a specific scientist. All they buy, ostensibly, is a chance to take notes on and adapt for their own ends whatever breakthroughs surface unbidden from the Lab’s creative ferment.

• The Perils of Billionaire Philanthropy

  At this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, billionaire Michael Dell, the 25th-wealthiest man in the world, weighed in on new proposals to tax the very wealthy. Dell said he was “much more comfortable” giving through his private foundation “than giving…to the government.” He’s not the first billionaire to confuse his obligations to society and conflate charitable giving with paying taxes.

  Indeed, the discussion about solutions to most social problems are too often sidetracked by stories of beneficent billionaires and their charitable deeds. Lost in a fog of generosity is the recognition that philanthropy is not a substitute for a fair and progressive tax system and robust public investments in poverty alleviation, infrastructure, economic opportunity, and social protection.

Censorship/Free Speech

• FSB expert says YouTuber’s ‘do everything you can’ remarks are tantamount to inciting armed rebellion

  The newspaper Novaya Gazeta has published a copy of the linguistic expertise carried out in the extremism case against Higher School of Economics student and popular YouTuber Egor Zhukov.

• The NY Times Got It Backwards: Section 230 Helps Limit The Spread Of Hate Speech Online

  A few weeks back, we wrote about the NY Times absolutely terrible front page of the Business Section headline that, incorrectly, blamed Section 230 for “hate speech” online, only to later have to edit the piece with a correction saying oh, actually, it’s the 1st Amendment that allows “hate speech” to exist online. Leaving aside the problematic nature of determining what is, and what is not, hate speech — and the fact that governments and autocrats around the globe regularly use “hate speech” laws to punish people they don’t like (which is often the marginalized and oppressed) — the entire claim that Section 230 “enables” hate speech to remain online literally gets the entire law backwards.

• Months After Christchurch Shooting, The Australian Government Is Issuing Site-Blocking Orders Targeting Footage Of The Incident

  Following the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand, governments sprang into action to declare the internet to be the real villain. It wasn’t. And isn’t. But that didn’t stop a strange series of policies from being enacted.

• That Time Taylor Swift Threatened To Sue Microsoft Over Its Racist Chatbot

  I don’t know much about Taylor Swift, but I do know two things. First, she apparently has built a career out of making music about men with whom she’s had breakups, real or fictitious. Second, it sure seems like she spends nearly as much time gobbling up every type of intellectual property right she can and then using those rights to threaten everyone else. She trademarks all the things. She tosses defamation and copyright claims around to silence critics. She sues her own fans just for making Etsy fan products. Some of these attacks are on more solid legal ground than others, but there appears to be a shotgun approach to it all.

• That Time EFF Got a Copyright Takedown Demand

  Earlier this week, EFF received an email claiming that our body-camera police officer illustration (shown in the banner above) violated the sender’s copyright in a graphic they used to illustrate a tweet (cropped screenshot shown on the right). The email demanded we remove the image or provide a link to their e-commerce website, which sells police body cameras. For those interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a link from EFF can be very beneficial to their page ranking. The funny thing was, the police officer illustration is an original EFF work.

  It’s not a problem for someone to use our works in their own—they are available to the public under a Creative Commons attribution license—but that certainly doesn’t give a claim against our original. And their graphic had no attribution. (The Action Camera skateboarder illustration on the left appears to be an Adobe stock image.)

Privacy/Surveillance

• Yes, News Sites Need To Get Out Of The Ad Surveillance Business — But Blame The Advertisers As Well

  Doc Searls has a great recent blog post in which he rightly points out why Bernie Sanders’ “plan to save journalism” is completely misguided and will fail. It’s worth reading — with the key point being that Sanders’ plan to save journalism assumes a world that does not exist, and one where heavy regulations will somehow magically save journalism, rather than stifle it. As Searls notes, that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world of informational abundance, which changes everything…

• DOJ Wants Apple, Google To Hand Over Names And Phone Numbers Of 10,000 App Users

  Let’s hope this isn’t the only scope discussed by the court handling this case, detailed here by Thomas Brewster of Forbes.

• New Report Finds Border Communities Inundated with Surveillance Technologies

  San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today published “The Atlas of Surveillance: Southwestern Border Communities,” the first report from a new research partnership with the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism.

  EFF and a team of students compiled profiles of six counties along the U.S.-Mexico border, outlining the types of surveillance technologies deployed by local law enforcement—including drones, body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, and face recognition. The report also includes a set of 225 data points marking surveillance by local, state, and federal agencies in the border region.

• Facebook’s cryptocurrency project to pursue payments license in Switzerland

  The Libra Association said it has asked the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to offer more insight into how the coin – called the “Libra” – will be regulated by the country’s government.

• Victory! California Senate Votes Against Face Surveillance on Police Body Cams

  The California Senate listened to the many voices expressing concern about the use of face surveillance on cameras worn or carried by police officers, and has passed an important bill that will, for three years, prohibit police from turning a tool intended to foster police accountability into one that furthers mass surveillance.

  A.B. 1215, authored by Assemblymember Phil Ting, prohibits the use of face recognition, or other forms of biometric technology, on a camera worn or carried by a police officer in California for three years.  The Assembly passed an earlier version of the bill with a 45-17 vote on May 9. Today’s vote of the Senate was 22-15. We are pleased that the Senate has listened to the growing number of voices who oppose the way government agencies use face surveillance.

• California Bill Would Halt Facial Recognition on Bodycams

  The bill, which needs approval by the state Assembly and the governor’s signature to become law, has been celebrated by the ACLU as an positive step. Matt Cagle, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, says that body cameras, which have been touted as tools for accountability after shootings of unarmed people of color, are poised to turn into tools of surveillance instead. “It’s a bait and switch,” he says. The bill would ban the use of facial recognition algorithms in real time, when the body cameras are rolling, and in subsequent forensic analysis of footage. It carves out an exemption for algorithms that detect and redact faces from body camera footage, so that the rules don’t slow public records requests.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Court issues much-anticipated order in favor of Russian theater directors accused of embezzlement

  Judge Irina Akkuratova of Moscow’s Meshchansky Court has refused to rule on the Seventh Studio criminal case, which has sparked widespread opposition among Russian activists and artists since it was opened in 2017. Akkuratova ordered the case to be returned to prosecutors for further development, writing, “The case as it stands cannot be considered by the court.”

• Supreme Court OKs Enforcement of Trump Asylum Limits

  The Supreme Court is allowing nationwide enforcement of a new Trump administration rule that prevents most Central American immigrants from seeking asylum in the United States.

• After string of similar cases, Russian court frees Chinese student who faced drug charges for foreign prescription

  The Perm Regional Court has canceled the deportation of Liu Yankun, a Chinese citizen studying for a graduate degree at Perm University. Liu’s attorney, Lyudmila Chegrina, said he was released from the police holding cell where he had been kept in custody since August 31.

• The 1994 Crime Bill and Beyond: How Federal Funding Shapes the Criminal Justice System

  September 13 marks 25 years since the signing of the most far-reaching crime bill Congress ever passed.

• As AOC and Ayanna Pressley Demand Answers on Trump Policy That Would Deport Sick Kids, ICE Officials at Hearing Refuse to Talk

  “This is a threat to the rule of law.”

• ‘The Moron Fascists’: ICE Fails to Properly Redact Document Proposing ‘Hyper-Realistic’ Urban Warfare Training Facility

  “Sure feels like ICE is positioning itself to become an all encompassing, no accountability, paramilitary force.”

• U.K. Court Rules Johnson’s Suspension of Parliament Unlawful

  A Scottish court dealt another blow to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit plans Wednesday, ruling that his decision to suspend Parliament less than two months before the U.K. is due to leave the European Union was an unlawful attempt to avoid democratic scrutiny.

• This We’ll Defend

  The monsters in power marked another 9/11 with their usual grace and gravitas. As Trump whined about the polls, lied about the day, and boasted me me me, smarmy sycophant Rudy Giuliani, concluding his ugly mutation from America’s Mayor to Fascism’s Mayor, posted a deranged, “truly evil” video celebrating police brutality against Americans exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

• China: Ban on Tibet Religious Activity Toughened

  A Chinese Communist Party notice banning retired Tibetan government employees from taking part in religious activities violates China’s commitment to religious freedom, Human Rights Watch said today. The notice obtained by Human Rights Watch is undated but appears to have been issued in early August 2019.

• The Revival of Non-Self

  The 21st century is witnessing the revival of Non-Self, such as Herrenvolk and Hindutva, which assert a binary division of “Self” and “Non-Self.” Selfism advocates the exclusion of Non-Self, variously defined as immigrants, refugees, gypsies, indigenous people, minorities, or “others.” Nationalism, majoritarianism, and exceptionalism are its noxious crops. Ethnic cleansing, apartheid, segregation, settler colonialism, denial of citizenship, incarceration, and deportation are its blunt tools. Selfism has no tolerance for plurality or heterogeneity.

• Belarus: Homophobic Attack on Filmmaker

  Police in Belarus are investigating a brutal attack on a filmmaker and two colleagues early on the morning of August 25, 2019, Human Rights Watch said today. Unidentified assailants in Minsk verbally threatened the three men and then violently attacked Nikolai Kuprich, the filmmaker. He was hospitalized for days after the attack with serious head injuries. 

• The Need for Non-Violence in Hong Kong

  The gloves are off in Hong Kong. Judging from the pictures on today’s BBC News the police no longer have any compunction about beating protestors.

• US: How Abusive, Biased Policing Destroys Lives

  Abusive policing in Tulsa, Oklahoma that targets black people and poor people, diminishes the quality of life in all our communities. Human Rights Watch released the report on the eve of the third anniversary of the killing of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man. 

• Being Black is Not a Crime: Yunek’s Story of Police Brutality

  My name is Yunek Moore. I am a Black woman, a college graduate, and a survivor of police brutality. I’m choosing to tell my story because, sadly, this wasn’t the last time something like this happened to a person of color in Peoria, Illinois, and that must change.

• How To Avoid Getting Banned From the US Over Weed

  Jones said many of these scenarios play out the same way for tourists. A traveller catches the eye of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer or they may be coming in and out of the country too often.

  “Maybe they get a little bit too feisty with CBP in CBP’s eyes, or maybe they don’t like the person. That’s when they start to dig,” Jones said.

  Jones said once someone gets pulled into secondary screening, it’s unlikely that they’ll be admitted in the U.S. He describes the ensuring interrogation as “an answer looking for a question.”

  “They’ve already determined they’re going to bar this person and they need a legal route to do it so they start fishing,” he said, noting that a person doesn’t have a right to a lawyer or any constitutional rights at the airport.

  [...]

  And she said to clean your phone and expect it will be gone through at the border, even if you’re a U.S. citizen.

• Running for Office With Student Loans Is Practically Impossible

  Running for office is time-consuming and emotionally exhausting. It’s also a full-time, unpaid job that barrels through weekends and evenings, without allowing for a moment off the clock. This is part of the reason we’re saddled with candidates who have millions to spend, and in turn, that our current congressional class has more than a billion dollars in combined wealth. These representatives may have graduated debt-free from college or inherited trust funds they used to buy a first home. Many are able to pay sky-high health insurance premiums without flinching. Their bank accounts are full, their debt nonexistent; being unpaid for a year while campaigning sometimes has little effect on their savings.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Hotel Lobbyists Push Forward Their Plan To Kill The Internet Because They Hate Competing Against Airbnb

  In the midst of this “techlash” atmosphere, it seems that basically every industry whose business models have been upended by competition brought about by the internet is now cynically using the anger directed at successful internet companies as an opportunity to kneecap the wider internet. We’ve recently pointed out that many of the efforts to undermine Section 230 of the CDA (the law that makes much of the good parts of the internet possible) are actually being pushed by Hollywood out of frustration that they’re no longer able to maintain their monopoly rents in a gatekeeper business. Similarly, the big telcos have been using this opportunity to pull a “but look over there!” to point at the big internet companies, while trying to distract from the much greater privacy violations they regularly engage in.

• Verizon Can’t Stop Over-hyping 5G; This Time In NFL Stadiums

  We’ve noted for a while that 5G is being aggressively over-hyped. While it’s an important evolutionary step in wireless connectivity, it’s far from the revolution hardware vendors and cellular carriers are promising. Verizon, for example, insists that 5G is the “fourth industrial revolution” that will almost miraculously spur the smart cities and smarter cars of tomorrow. While 5G is important (in that faster, more resilient networks are always important), the idea that 5G will fundamentally transform the world tends to overshoot the mark.

• “Father of the [Internet]” Vint Cerf says we need to be less naive if we’re going to fix it

  The promise of the [Internet] is one of an open global network for communication and commerce, and the foundation for a more prosperous and equitable world. But its potential is limited if we can’t trust it.

  We trust that water will come out of our kitchen tap and electricity will flow when we turn on the lights. In much the same way, the [Internet] carries critical information and services for our daily lives, our businesses, and the operation of our cities and governments. The [Internet] is critical infrastructure for the modern fabric of our societies.

  Lack of confidence in it will undermine our trust in everything from personal communications and e-commerce to digital stop lights and online elections.

Monopolies

• Uber says it won’t classify drivers as employees despite California bill

  California’s legislature sent the bill, known as AB 5, to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) desk on Wednesday, and he has vowed to sign it. The legislation would make it harder for companies such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash to classify their workers as contractors.

  But West argued Wednesday that the test the new law would apply to company’s classification of workers is not impossible for Uber to work around. He also anticipates that the company’s stance will prompt lawsuits from its drivers.

• In California, Gig Workers Are About to Become Employees

  Labor experts expect the bill to prompt similar efforts in other states and cities where public sentiment has shifted against tech companies like Uber and toward labor efforts like unionization drives. “All eyes are on California,” says Rebecca Smith, who directs the Work Structures program at the National Employment Law Project.

  AB 5 codifies a 2018 California Supreme Court decision that established a three-part test to determine whether a worker is an independent contractor or an employee, eligible for a minimum wage, unemployment and workers’ compensation, health care benefits, and other traditional protections. According to the test, a worker is only considered an independent contractor if she is not under the control or direction of a company while working and if she performs work that is “outside the usual course” of the company’s business. The bill does not address workers’ rights to collectively bargain.

• Uber argues its drivers aren’t core to its business, won’t reclassify them as employees

  West said Uber could pass the ABC test because drivers aren’t core to its business. “Under that three-part test, arguably the highest bar is that a company must prove that contractors are doing work ‘outside the usual course’ of its business,” West said. ”Several previous rulings have found that drivers’ work is outside the usual course of Uber’s business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces.”

• California just dropped a bomb on the gig economy — what’s next?

  Uber and Lyft will try to staunch the bleeding by doing what they do best: spending obscene amounts of money. The companies say they will fund a ballot initiative in 2020 to ask voters to approve the creation of a new category for ride-hail drivers. The enforcement of the law will present a range of obstacles for state regulators. And drivers will still face tough hurdles before they can achieve their ultimate goal: the formation of an independent union.

• Trademarks

  • USPTO Gets One Right: Refuses To Allow Farmers Market To Trademark City’s Nickname

    We don’t spend a great deal of time here patting the USPTO on the back for getting things right, but occasionally the agency surprises us. When it comes to trademarks being granted for city or town names, the Trademark Office has a higher bar for approval but is still far too permissive. When it comes to widely used nicknames for cities and towns, the Trademark Office’s rubber-stamp methods have caused issues. The point here is that, whether its a city’s name or nickname we’re talking about, neither are good source identifiers, given both their wide use and the fact that both serve as geographic descriptors.

• Copyrights

  • Congress Continues to Ignore the Dangerous Flaws of the CASE Act

    The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) is one of those (mostly) bad ideas that just won’t go away. It feels like a simple and easy solution to a thorny problem in copyright law: streamlining the dispute process. But as often happens, this solution is neither simple nor easy.

    The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary followed its counterpart in the Senate by passing the CASE Act out of committee. This means that the whole House could vote to pass it, without bothering to fix any of its many flaws.