• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

GNU/Linux – portrait

Here is a personal ‘portrait’ artwork. A bit unusual compare to my previous portraits and probably a bit more ‘digital’ than ‘painting’ this time. But it’s a concept I had in mind since a long time and wanted to paint it on this rainy Sunday afternoon at home.

Desktop

• System76 brings 4K display Ubuntu Linux laptop for Pro users

  Finally, some good news for Apple fans who crashed System76 website a few days back. Apple makes a good laptop. However, they lack the option to add additional RAM or ports or graphics card. The new System76 Oryx laptop has a 4K HiDPI display. If you are a sysadmin, DevOps, or developer, give it a try to System76.

Server

• Linux Now Runs On 99.6% Of Top 500 Supercomputers

  Linux may have just 2% in the desktop market share, but when it comes to supercomputers, Linux is simply ruling it with over 99% of the share.

Kernel Space

• Portable system services

  In the refereed track of the 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference, Lennart Poettering presented a new type of service for systemd that he calls a “portable system service”. It is a relatively new idea that he had not talked about publicly until the systemd.conf in late September. Portable system services borrow some ideas from various container managers and projects like Docker, but are targeting a more secure environment than most services (and containers) run in today.

  There is no real agreement on what a “container” is, Poettering said, but most accept that they combine a way to bundle up resources and to isolate the programs in the bundle from the rest of the system. There is also typically a delivery mechanism for getting those bundles running in various locations. There may be wildly different implementations, but they generally share those traits.

• Kernel 4.8.7 fixes Realtek card disconnects!

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is the day worth remembering. The long outstanding problem with the disconnects on a variety of Realtek Wireless devices, my RTL8723BE included, which has shown problems time and again in pretty much every single distro out there, has been finally resolved. Word.

  A reader emailed me a few days back and said the new kernel 4.8.7 fixes the issue. I decided to test this, and completed a long and arduous set of checks in Manjaro 16.10, which has the kernel 4.8.7 available in its repos. One of the perks of bleeding-edge Arch-based distros. The Manjaro review is still a few weeks away, but we can at least focus on this burning issue. Let me proudly and happily elaborate.

• Making WiFi fast

  The result of all this work is WiFi latencies that are less than 40ms, down from a peak of 1-2 seconds before they started, and much better handling of multiple stations running at full rate. Before the changes, a test involving 100 flows all starting together collapsed entirely, with at most five flows getting going; all the rest failed due to TCP timeouts caused by excessive buffering latency. Afterward, all 100 could start and run with reasonable latency and bandwidth. All this work, in the end, comes down to a patch that removes a net 200 lines of code.

  There are some open issues, of course. The elimination of the queuing discipline layer took away a number of useful network statistics. Some of these have been replaced with information in the debugfs filesystem. There is, he said, some sort of unfortunate interaction with TCP small queues; Eric Dumazet has some ideas for fixing this problem, which only arises in single-station tests. There is an opportunity to add better air-time fairness to keep slow stations from using too much transmission time. Some future improvements, he said, might come at a cost: latency improvements might reduce the peak bandwidth slightly. But latency is what almost all users actually care about, so that bandwidth will not be missed — except by Ham the monkey.

• Enhanced File Stats Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel

  Red Hat has been working on a new statx system call for the Linux kernel to provide “enhanced” file information.

  This new statx() system call would be able to return the file’s creation time, data version number, and other new attributes not currently provided. These new attributes wouldn’t work for all file-systems, but would work for a subset of them such as CIFS, NFS, and others that track such information.

• Btrfs Heatmap – visualize your filesystem

• RAID5/6 scrub race fix

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Now Has Patches For Fast Clears

    Building off the input attachments work earlier this week for the Intel open-source Vulkan driver (covered in More Intel ANV Vulkan Code Hits Mesa Git, Other Patches Pending), there are now patches up for review to implement support for fast clears.

    Jason Ekstrand at the Intel Open-Source Technology Center who has been leading the “ANV” Vulkan driver effort wrote this Saturday, “This little series builds on top of the input attachment series I sent out earlier this week and adds support for fast clears in Vulkan. I’ve tested it on both Sky Lake and Haswell and it has no regressions over the input attachments series.”

Applications

• Kodi v17 “Krypton” – Default skin: Next Gen

  Past March we announced that v17 would feature a brand new default skin called Estuary and since then it has been included in every build we have released. During this period our developers kept improving on how it looked, behaved and made use of the latest features that got included from what is shaping up to be the final release of v17. Since more and more users also started to use these development builds we started to receive a lot of feedback, where most was positive there was also some negative or at least constructive comments. As we are not deaf to these comments and try to create the best experience, our skin developer phil65 went back to the drawing board and rethought on how to incorporate this feedback into wat should become the final skin. With some help from ryanmah for the mockups, ichabod-fletchman for helping out this didn’t resulted in a total rewrite but simply reworking some parts of how the skin looks and behaves. The underlying skin code still remains the same for a very large part except for the parts where a smarter way of doing this magic was found. The visual top layer what you will see should still feel quite familiar if you have used any past v17 builds as not everything was redone.

• Fix Ubuntu/Linux Mint boot and grub issues with Boot-Repair

  Boot-Repair is around from quite sometime, released under license GNU-GPL and it is great tool to fix the issues with your Grub and Boot, it repair frequent boot issues you may encounter in Ubuntu like when you can’t boot Ubuntu after installing Windows or another Linux distribution, or when you can’t boot Windows after installing Ubuntu, or when GRUB is not displayed anymore, some upgrade breaks GRUB, etc. Boot-Repair lets you fix these issues with a simple click, which (generally re-installs GRUB and) restores access to the operating systems you had installed before the issue.

• Sayonara: Try another great audio player in Ubuntu/Linux Mint/other Ubuntu Derivatives

  Sayonara is a simple, lightweight and quite fast audio player only for Linux which is written in C++, it also supportet by Qt framework. For audio backend it uses gstreamer. It carries a lot of feature to manage big audio collections. While developing this program they focused on it’s performance, it consumes very low CPU and memory.

  One of Sayonara’s goals are intuitive and easy usability never leading to the impression you are using an unnecessary bloated program therefore it should be able to compete with the most popular music players. It has a lot of features like a library, id3 tag editor, equalizer, lastfm radio, lastfm scrobbler, stream recorder and so on..

• PacketFence v6.4 released

  The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence v6.4.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.

• Bypass ISP Website Censorship With Alkasir 2.0

  Alkasir is a free, open source website censorship circumvention tool, available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Android and iOS versions are “main objectives for 2016″. For now it only works with Google Chrome.

• “ANGRYsearch” and “FSearch” Helps You Find Your Files/Folders Quickly And Easily

  ANGRYsearch is a simple and lightweight tool to find files/folders from your mounted drives quickly and easily, it is written in Pythong and inspired from “Everything” which is available for Windows. It displays results as you type the name of the file/folder you are looking for.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Neofetch – Shows Linux System Information with Distribution Logo

  • Improvement in converting video/audio files with VLC

  • More Networking Tricks

  • How to Install and Use MS SQL Server on Linux

  • How to practically use your Linux terminal (part 2)

  • How To Install pdflatex in Ubuntu All Versions

  • How to Install GoLang (Go Programming Language) in Linux

  • How to use plugins (add-ons) in ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors

  • Fix “Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/)” in Ubuntu

  • 5 GNU AWK Practical Examples Part 1

  • Introduction to Audio Workstation Software Tracktion 5 DAW on Linux

  • How to Check Which Apache Modules are Enabled/Loaded in Linux

  • How to Check Timezone in Linux

  • How-to Install InvoicePlane on Ubuntu 14.04

  • Raspberry Pi Bluetooth Terminal

  • Using systemd-nspawn for some containerization needs

  • How To Use Bash History to Improve Your Command-Line Productivity

  • How difficult is it to move a file atomically?

  • How to automate an Arch Linux installation

  • 7 Essential Linux Commands Helpful for Programmers

  • How Daemons, the Init Process, and Process Forking Work

  • undistract me!

  • Using same soundcard among users with PulseAudio not in system mode

  • Rollback an apt-get upgrade if something goes wrong on Debian / Ubuntu Linux

  • How to setup HTTP Strict Transport Security With Lighttpd Web Server

  • How to add to bash $PATH permanently on Linux

• Games

  • Ultimate General: Civil War, the tactical war-game will come to Linux

    It’s worth noting that their previous game, ‘Ultimate General: Gettysburg’ also supports Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak – Cautiously good?

    Let us draw the verdict. It’s a strange one. Oddly, this is probably the best Kubuntu that I’ve tested in a long time. Sadly, that’s like saying losing one finger in a freak chainsaw accident is better than losing two fingers. Not the best measure stick. Not something to be proud of. There are many, many problems in Yakkety Yak Plasma, including but not limited to the application stack, stability, performance, package management, and the ability to customize. That’s not a happy list.

    Brave face on, we also have a lot of goodies to focus on. A very decent – and FIRST for Plasma – smartphone support stack and multimedia playback as they should be. Lots of old bugs have been fixed. If only we had Samba printing support out of the box, and the network card driver was given a little bit of love, this might be a reasonable distro.

    Kubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak is nothing to be proud of, but it is an okay Plasma release that has redeemed a whole generation of failed distributions in the past year or so. It’s funny how it’s gone from being my favorite to a pariah, and now it’s slowly recovering. Such a waste of effort. And why? There was really no need for this whole regression saga. Anyhow, the road to success is still a long and perilous one. It will take a lot more before Kubuntu becomes a recommended household item again. But at the very least, 16.10 is showing a little of that promise. 7/10, if I’m being generous, more like 6/10, but you might want to give it a spin and see what gives. QED.

  • fill bug reports!

    Everything starts with a good idea or a bug report. Someone asked for an app icon for claws mail (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371914) and Jens Reuterberg make one. As I don’t think that every application need an breeze specific app icon, I’m look more for a consistent look of the applications so I made an claws breeze icon theme. You can download the icon pack from the claws webpage and dont’t forget to give me feedback cause I don’t use claws.

  • Cutelyst benchmarks on TechEmpower round 13

    Right on my first blog post about Cutelyst users asked me about more “realistic” benchmarks and mentioned TechEmpower benchmarks. Though it was a sort of easy task to build the tests at that time it didn’t seem to be useful to waste time as Cutelyst was moving target.

  • KDE Applications 16.12 branches created

  • KSyntaxHighlighting – A new Syntax Highlighting Framework

    This year, on March 31st, KDE’s advanced text editor Kate had its 15th birthday. 15 years are a long time in the software world, and during this time Kate won the hearts of many users and developers. As text editing component, Kate uses the KTextEditor framework, which is used also by applications such as KDevelop or Kile.

    The KTextEditor framework essentially is an embeddable text editing component. It ships everything from painting the line numbers, the background color, the text lines with syntax highlighting, the blinking cursor to code completion and many more features. One major feature is its very powerful syntax highlighting engine, enabling us to properly highlight around 275 languages.

    Each syntax highlighting is defined in terms of an xml file (many examples), as described in Kate’s documentation. These xml files are read by KTextEditor and the context based highlighting rules in these files are then used to highlight the file contents.

  • KStars 2.7.2 for Windows is released

    Less than a month from the release 2.7.0, KStars v2.7.2 for Windows 64bit is now available for download on KStars website! Get it now and give it a go.

  • Multiple notifications across multiple monitors in KDE Plasma 5?

    I have 3 monitors, and on each monitor, I have a Plasma panel at the bottom. When any notification pops up, I get 3 notifications on each monitor. I have a full fledged panel on each monitor with everything including task bar and system tray.

  • Interview with Katharina

    I love the professionality of Krita. It really does not need to hide behind the big guys in business. You can use your photoshop or whatever brushes and formats and many more, there is no “Meh, that brush is not made by us, you can’t use it!“. The user interface is smart and chic, the brushes work smooth and I never had any problems with my hardware. It simply combines everything I need, without the need to check a manual too often. It feels effortless to use it! And also it is nice to find other Krita artists randomly on the internet, it is always a nice way to start a conversation.

  • Wiki(1.0), what’s going on? (Part17)

  • Minuet in KDE Applications 16.12: code convergence, tablet UX and Windows release

    Yesterday was the feature freeze for KDE Applications 16.12 and that’s the time where you look forward for all the new awesome features will land at users devices at 15th December. As for the Minuet land, I’d like to disappointingly let you know no new features are coming but that doesn’t mean things are not progressing. After some days of quite intense work ‒ trying to find some spare time between daily job, my fluffy 10 month old baby love, and the work on the KDE e.V. board ‒ I’m right now enjoying some booze while writing these words about recent advances in Minuet.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • This week in GTK+ – 24

    In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 46 commits, with 1541 lines added and 3471 lines removed.

Distributions

• This Week In Solus – Install #39

  We recently announced our partnership with Unixstickers to provide high-quality Solus stickers for our community and fans. If you have yet to read about it, click here.

• Solus Announces Partnership With Unixstickers

  The Solus project is happy to announce a partnership with Unixstickers, providers of high quality apparel and accessories for operating systems, programming languages, and software. This quality craftsmanship and their continuous support of the open source community made it the obvious choice for us while determining the best provider for Solus-related merchandise.

• Reviews

  • Storing files with NAS4Free 10.3.0.3

    A phrase I find myself repeating over and over, to family, friends and clients is “Make backups of your data.” If a file is not backed up then it is one electrical storm, hardware failure or accidental key press away from no longer existing. This naturally leads people to wonder where copies of their data should be stored. There are any number of solutions from optical media to external hard drives, cloud storage to backup tapes. This week I want to talk about a network attached storage (NAS) solution which uses the NAS4Free operating system to manage disks.

    [...]

    Most of the NAS operating systems I have used in the past were built around useful features. Some focused on making storage easy to set up and manage, others focused on services, such as making files available over multiple protocols or managing torrents. Some strive to be very easy to set up. NAS4Free does pretty well in each of the above categories. It may not be the easiest platform to set up, but it’s probably a close second. It may not have the prettiest interface for managing settings, but it is quite easy to navigate. NAS4Free may not have the most add-on services and access protocols, but I suspect there are more than enough of both for most people.

    Where NAS4Free does better than most other solutions I have looked at is security. I don’t think the project’s website or documentation particularly focuses on security as a feature, but there are plenty of little security features that I liked. NAS4Free makes it very easy to lock the text console, which is good because we do not all keep our NAS boxes behind locked doors. The system is fairly easy to upgrade and appears to publish regular security updates in the form of new firmware. NAS4Free makes it fairly easy to set up user accounts, handle permissions and manage home directories. It’s also pretty straight forward to switch from HTTP to HTTPS and to block people not on the local network from accessing the NAS’s web interface.

    All in all, I like NAS4Free. It’s a good, general purpose NAS operating system. While I did not feel the project did anything really amazing in any one category, nor did I run into any serious issues. The NAS ran as expected, was fairly straight forward to set up and easy to manage. This strikes me as an especially good platform for home or small business users who want an easy set up, some basic security and a solid collection of features.

• Arch Family

  • [manjaro] [Stable Update] 2016-11-19 – Mesa, LibDRM, Kernels, KDE Framework, Grub, Firefox

    With KDE Freamework 5.28.0 for example syntax-highlighting got introduced. Also the Wayland support got enhanced with this framework update. For our xorg-stack we updated libdrm and pushed some more updated haskell packages out. Since we are on the move to use alpm hooks also for our kernels, we updated grub to do the same. Additionally we have a lot of rebuilds, some newer kernels, updated Mesa, php and Eric plus the latest Firefox to check out.

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • openSUSE Leap 42.2 And Zorin OS 12 Released With Linux Kernel 4.4

• Slackware Family

  • [Slackware] Java 7 (openjdk) gets a security update

    Many people who have a need for Java, will already have switched to Java 8. Nevertheless there are still many places where Java 7 is preferred or even required. So, I am riding on the Q4 security updates for OpenJDK and used the recently released icedtea 2.6.8 to compile OpenJDK 7u121_b00 or “Java 7 Update 121 Build 00”. As always, there is a JDK and a JRE package.

• Red Hat Family

  • RHEL 7.3 Firewalld new features.

  • Finance

    • Stocks To Track: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance, Inc. (ARI), EnLink Midstream Partners, LP (ENLK)

    • Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Analyst Opinion

  • Fedora

    • Fedora – retiring xorg-x11-drv-synaptics

      The Fedora Change to retire the synaptics driver was approved by FESCO. This will apply to Fedora 26 and is part of a cleanup to, ironically, make the synaptics driver easier to install.

      Since Fedora 22, xorg-x11-drv-libinput is the preferred input driver. For historical reasons, almost all users have the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package installed. But to actually use the synaptics driver over xorg-x11-drv-libinput requires a manually dropped xorg.conf.d snippet. And that’s just not ideal. Unfortunately, in DNF/RPM we cannot just say “replace the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package with xorg-x11-drv-libinput on update but still allow users to install xorg-x11-drv-synaptics after that”.

    • OCaml 4.04, RISC-V, S/390, POWER and more …

      And talking about Fedora/RISC-V, it took a month, but the mass-rebuild of all Fedora packages completed, and now we’ve got about ⅔rds of all Fedora packages available for RISC-V. That’s quite a lot:

    • FUDCon 2016 Phnom Penh, Cambodia

      FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) is an important event in the world of free software that is held in different parts of the world organized by Fedora Organization. The FUDCon comprised of sessions, talks, workshops and hackfest in which project participants worked on specific initiatives. FUDCon Phnom Penh was conducted at Norton University, Phnom Penh along Barcamp ASEAN. Around 50 speakers from around the world gave talks related to entrepreneurship and open source software. I was traveling with one my friends, Abhinand N, who also got selected to deliver a talk on Mediawiki. Looked like, we were the only two undergrads who were invited to deliver talks.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • N900: 2016 Week 47

      On November 8, 2016, the proto_v2 schematics were updated to the current version. We finished the last few improvements and our layouter is scheduling the layout to start in one week. We repeat our invitation to give the schematics a peer review: it’s your last chance to peel your eyes on these schematics and be picky about details that our engineering team might have missed.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Unity 8 snap rev 178

      • Get A Live Preview Of A Window From Another Workspace With WindowSpy (Unity)

        WindowSpy is a new Unity AppIndicator that allows displaying a small live (well, almost) preview of a window on another workspace.

      • Recent Notifications Indicator Lets You Access Missed Desktop Notifications

        Recent Notifications is an Ubuntu Indicator that collects desktop notifications, displaying them in its menu. This is useful if you missed some important notification for various reasons, like being away from the computer, etc.

      • Making your snaps available to the store using snapcraft

        Now that Ubuntu Core has been officially released, it might be a good time to get your snaps into the Store!

      • MacBuntu 16.10 Transformation Pack for Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety

        MacBuntu (Macbuntu Yosemite/El Capitan) transformation pack is ready to take off and land on your Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak. It offers two themes for GTK (which supports: Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce), one theme for Gnome Shell, one for Cinnamon, two icon packs, and cursors. Unlike last time we are not sharing boot/splash for macbuntu and theme for lightdm-webkit because there are some issues within the Ubuntu 16.10. Slingscold which is known as launchpad, it does work on some desktops but it may don’t work for some users and you may see blank launcher. We are using and recommending Plank dock with this pack because it is lightweight and works with all desktops without any issues. Also credit goes to Jared for helping us with this transformation pack. By following these instructions you can change look of your Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety to look like Mac. In previous packs we used LightDM webkit theme which looks quite similar to Mac OS X login screen, this time we aren’t offering, because we experienced a lot of issues after installing it (like: not able to login/blank screen). Also Bootscreen has some issues.

      • Adding Sega Genesis to EmulationStation on Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Busting Major Myths Around elementary OS

          The open source desktop landscape is complicated. There are many distros, many desktop environments, and so many things to know about each of them. We often see folks fall into some of the same pieces of misinformation when reporting on or commenting about elementary OS. So here’s a look at some of the major myths around elementary OS and what the actual facts are.

Devices/Embedded

• A Glimpse at Nodio, the Blockchain-Based Router

  A new device called Nodio has been recently announced that can run multiple decentralized applications (dApps), a Tor node, and other functionalities. Nodio is a blockchain router that aims to give users a chance to create decentralized solutions.

• Packet.net strong-ARMs cloud for $0.005 per core per hour

  Packet.net, a bare-metal cloud aimed at developers, has flicked the switch on cloud-running servers powered by a pair of Cavium’s 48-core ARMv8-A ThunderX processors.

  CEO Zachary Smith told The Register that the company’s cooked up the cloud for a few reasons. Price is one: Packet will offer ARM cores at a tenth of the price it charges for Intel cores, at US$0.50 per hour per server, or $0.005 per core per hour. Smith thinks that will be a head-turner by itself.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung Offers Developers $10,000 Per App Via Tizen Mobile App Incentive Program

      In the first half of 2014, Samsung released the Samsung Gear S2 smart watch running on Tizen, an open source, Linux-based operating system. Early in 2015, Samsung released the Samsung Z1 smartphone, which also ran on Tizen, in India for approximately $127. It was followed by the Z3 that got rolled out in Oct. 2015.

  • Android

    • Android 7.0 Nougat Update For Huawei Mate 8: Here’s How To Download And Install

    • Beware: Hi Tech Digital Espionage of Android Smartphone Owners Sending Data Back To Servers In China

    • HTC 10 Running Android 7.0 Nougat Spotted, Update Coming In December

    • Google two-factor authentication prompts now work on Android Wear for some users

Minoca OS — An Interview With One Of The Engineers Of Open Source Operating System

Everyone benefits in some way when a new operating system comes out, especially when that operating system is open source. Minoca OS is a case of just that, and what’s more is that it has been written entirely from the ground up, further contributing to the software landscape.

Evan Green is the CEO of Minoca Corp, the organization currently maintaining Minoca OS, as well as a co-founder and engineer of Minoca OS. Evan has was kind enough to answer some questions about Minoca OS for us.

Open source and the problem of pure maintenance

One of the things that people using open source often wish loudly for (via) is software that’s stable and only gets bug fixes, including security updates, with no other changes at all. Oh, and they want this for free as part of an open source project.

As you may have guessed, there is a fundamental problem with this. Indeed it is a classical fundamental problem in software development in general, namely that doing only maintenance is boring and very few people want to do it (especially for free, such as with open source software). This is why it’s really quite hard to find anyone who does a good job of maintenance, especially over the long term and most especially for free. There are people who will provide you with well maintained systems that stay carefully stable for years, but generally they want money (often a fair amount of it).

List of RSS Feeds of GNU/Linux & Free Software/Open Source Related Websites

There are so many websites, planets, or blogs related to Free Software/Open Source (FLOSS) and GNU/Linux in English. It is difficult for someone to grabs many of their RSS feeds one by one. To solve this, I try to collect many URL of RSS feeds of them here. This is not complete by now (November 15th 2016) but I planned to complete the missing links below as soon as possible. I hope this list helps anyone in free software community worldwide.

Databases

• 8 Major Advantages of Using MySQL

  MySQL is a free-to-use, open-source database that facilitates effective management of databases by connecting them to the software. It is a stable, reliable and powerful solution with advanced features like the following…

Microsoft ‘Loves’ Linux

• Microsoft Warns Bash on Windows Users About Linux File Changes

• Hperledger May Benefit from Microsoft’s Linux Foundation Platinum Membership [Ed: Microsoft helping Windows by throwing slush funds at Linux]

• Brazil Is Ditching Open Source For Microsoft

  The latest trend in Europe and developing countries was to ditch proprietary Microsoft Office and adopt an Open Source solution such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice. The move was more concerned with cost saving than for the love of Open Source. Whatever may be the reason, at least several government organizations have started to look beyond Microsoft.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Project proposal: The GNUnet of autonomous Things

Programming/Development

• Under the (Linux) Hood

  We’ve often heard that you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car, but you can bet that professional race car drivers know. By analogy, you can build lots of systems with off-the-shelf boards like Raspberry Pis and program that using Python or some other high-level abstraction. The most competent hackers, though, know what’s going on inside that Pi and what Python is doing under the hood down to some low level.

  If you’ve been using Linux “under the hood” often means understanding what happens inside the kernel–the heart of the Linux OS that manages and controls everything. It can be a bit daunting; the kernel is simple in concept, but has grown over the years and is now a big chunk of software to approach.

• How to contribute to an open source project on GitHub

  A step by step guide that will show you how to contribute to an open source project on GitHub, one of the most popular and used git repository hosting services.

  GitHub is the home of many popular open source projects like Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Docker, Go and many others.

  The way people (usually) contribute to an open source project on GitHub is using pull requests. A pull request is basically a patch which includes more information and allows members to discuss it on the website.

  This tutorial will guide you through the whole process to generate a pull request for a project.

• The code I’m still ashamed of

  The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand and ensure that our ethics are ever-present in our code.

  Since that day, I always try to think twice about the effects of my code before I write it. I hope that you will too.

• Not only coders are hard to recruit

  The problem with technical positions such as programmers or system administrators is that there is an actual difference between knowing an algorithm/programming language/software and actually implementing it. For instance, Johnny found it hard to differentiate between someone who said he knows about Apache web server and someone who can actually administer it. Johnny said ( this later became our headline):

• PHP 7, LessPass, addrwatch, tmux, bash, PackPack & more!

Standards/Consortia

• Is SVG 2 really on life support?

  Between SVG 1.1 W3C Recommendation and SVG 2 in its current form, people have raised kids and sent them off to the college. And yet SVG 2 might arrive sometime in the future without quite a few useful features that have been already developed and tested. What’s up with that?

Danish high court declares Uber an illegal service

The ruling upheld a previous decision by the Copenhagen City Court that was thought to be a death blow to the popular ride-sharing service.

The Danish courts have ruled that that Uber’s profit motive means it is not a true ridesharing programme but instead is akin to an illegal taxi service.

Six Uber drivers were found guilt by Copenhagen City Court in July and Friday marked the first decision against divers who appealed against the initial ruling.

The High Court’s decision against the 28-year-old male driver now paves the way for the Copenhagen Public Prosecutor Office (Statsadvokaten) to bring a case against the San Francisco based company.

Health/Nutrition

• Government quietly privatises the NHS’s in-house agency staff provider

  The Government is to privatise the NHS’s in-house, publicly-owned provider of agency staff, ministers have announced.

  NHS Professionals, the health service’s main staffing agency, provides 90,000 health workers to around a quarter of NHS trusts, covering two million shifts a year.

  In a written statement issued on Thursday as most MPs headed back to their constituencies, the Government announced it would sell off a majority stake in the orgnaisation to the private sector with the aim of “creating a profitable business model”.

Security

• Announcing SSL Labs Grading Changes for 2017

  At SSL Labs, we have a major review of our grading criteria about once a year. As the security of the ecosystem matures, our goal is to push forward and make the requirements [for a good grade] stricter. In many ways, this process of continuous improvement is what really matters to us.

• Twice the bits, twice the trouble: vulnerabilities induced by migrating to 64-bit platforms

  64-bit is not exactly new anymore, but many codebases which started out as 32-bit have been ported to 64-bit. In this study, Wressnegger et al. reveal how a codebase originally written for 32-bit, and which is perfectly secure on 32-bit platforms, can have new vulnerabilities simply by compiling it for 64-bit systems. Beginning with a theoretical analysis of how such vulnerabilities might be introduced, the team then go and look for such vulnerabilities in the wild…

• PoisonTap – siphons cookies, exposes internal router & installs web backdoor on locked computers

Defence/Aggression

• Fear of Putin and a Baltic War Intensifies With Trump’s Victory

  War has been a buzzword for some time on both sides of the frontier between Russia and the Baltic states. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and as relations between Moscow and Washington deteriorated—over the annexation of Crimea, the war in eastern Ukraine, the catastrophe in Syria, and charges the Kremlin tried to influence the U.S. election—these three small countries found themselves caught in the middle.

  But now there’s a different reason for worry. Campaign proclamations by Donald Trump that NATO states must pay more for defense, his ambivalence about Crimea, and allusions to how America may not defend members against Russian military action had already unnerved many before Nov. 8. Now that this self-professed fan of Vladimir Putin is headed for the White House, the wonder on both sides of the border is what happens next.

• How the Iranian-Saudi Proxy Struggle Tore Apart the Middle East

  Behind much of the Middle East’s chaos — the wars in Syria and Yemen, the political upheaval in Iraq and Lebanon and Bahrain — there is another conflict.

  Saudi Arabia and Iran are waging a struggle for dominance that has turned much of the Middle East into their battlefield. Rather than fighting directly, they wield and in that way worsen the region’s direst problems: dictatorship, militia violence and religious extremism.

  The history of their rivalry tracks — and helps to explain — the Middle East’s disintegration, particularly the Sunni-Shiite sectarianism both powers have found useful to cultivate. It is a story in which the United States has been a supporting but constant player, most recently by backing the Saudi war in Yemen, which kills hundreds of civilians. These dynamics, scholars warn, point toward a future of civil wars, divided societies and unstable governments.

Finance

• Brexit and Trump have exposed the left’s crucial flaw: playing by the rules

  I know which I’d bet on. Next, imagine what would have happened if, as a result of that narrow win for remain, a gaping hole in the public finances had opened up as the economy reeled, and even leading remainers admitted the machinery of state could barely cope. Farage and the rest would have denounced the chaos, boasting that this proved they had been right all along, that the voters had been misled and therefore must be given another say.

  As we all know, reality did not work out this way. Next week the chancellor will deliver an autumn statement anchored in the admission that, as the Financial Times put it, “the UK faces a £100bn bill for Brexit within five years”. Thanks to the 23 June vote, the forecast is for “slower growth and lower-than-expected investment”.

• TPP nations eye a future without the US with Trump in the White House

  Leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership nations are openly considering going it alone, without the United States, in a so-called ‘TPP minus one’ in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

  The 12 countries are meeting on the margins of the 21-strong Apec meeting in Lima, Peru.

  Talking to reporters shortly after arriving in the Peruvian capital, Prime Minister John Key made it clear the grouping faced a critical crossroads with Trump’s election.

• Facebook approves $6 billion stock buyback

  The social network’s board has approved a plan to buyback as much as $6 billion of its stock starting in the first quarter of next year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

  “The timing and actual number of shares repurchased will depend on a variety of factors, including price, general business and market conditions, and alternative investment opportunities,” the company said in its filing.

• Facebook to Buy Back Shares for the First Time

  Facebook Inc. said it will buy back as much as $6 billion in shares, its first repurchase program, in a bid to appease shareholders awaiting the results of big investments in potentially risky new growth areas.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Wasserman Schultz: ‘If I was trying to rig the outcome of the primary, trust me, I could have’

  Wasserman Schultz stepped down as party leader during the Democratic National Convention, where she was booed by angry Sanders supporters. She was replaced by Donna Brazile, who is serving on an interim basis, until March, when an election for a new party chairman will take place.

• Breitbart wants to fuel another Trump-like upset in France

  During the 2016 presidential campaign, Breitbart News emerged as a haven for far-right factions that actively pushed for the election of Donald Trump. Its executive editor, Steve Bannon, played an instrumental role as CEO of the Trump campaign, and was recently appointed chief strategist for the president-elect’s administration. Now, the controversial news site is turning its attention to France, where the far-right politician Marine Le Pen hopes to pull off a Trump-like upset in next year’s presidential election.

• Neoliberalism’s epic fail: The reaction to Hillary Clinton’s loss exposed the impotent elitism of liberalism

  By the time last week’s presidential election was finally called for Donald Trump during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the initial disbelief felt by the millions of Americans who had been assured of a Clinton victory by the media had turned into shock and panic — if not yet full-blown despair. As pollsters collectively changed their predictions and news pundits started to resemble confused and dejected children, the fight-or-flight response kicked in for countless viewers. Hearts pounded, stomachs turned and some of the more privileged liberals started seriously considering whether to flee the country in the face of a national nightmare that had just become a reality (privileged, because the average American doesn’t have the resources to just pack up and run at will).

  The surreal night concluded with Canada’s immigration website crashing from too much traffic, as if every alt-right Twitter troll’s fantasy had come true.

  Although the instinct to flee from a Trump presidency is understandable, it reveals a great deal about the impotence of modern liberalism and its monumental failure to stop an unhinged and thoroughly unqualified demagogue like Trump.

Censorship/Free Speech

• How Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, restricted advertising for Trump’s campaign

  We had an “upfront deal” with Twitter, which is a common setup where we commit to spending a certain amount on advertising and in exchange receive discounts, perks, and custom solutions.

• Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new steps to counter fake news on the platform on Saturday, marking a departure from his skepticism that online misinformation is, as Barack Obama said this week, a threat to democratic institutions.

  “We take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Saturday. “We know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.”

  Zuckerberg said that the company has “relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not”, citing a tool to report false links and shared material from fact-checking sites. “Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize [misinformation] in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread,” he wrote.

• Mark Zuckerberg Outlines Plans for Fake News Controls on Facebook

  Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will develop “stronger detection” for fake news

  In a post late Friday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined a bevy of new initiatives to crack down on fake or misleading news. Facebook has faced intense criticism in the wake of the November 9th election, primarily from left-leaning critics arguing that huge volumes of false news spread on the site influenced the electorate, perhaps contributing to Donald Trump’s victory.

• Facebook fake news row: Mark Zuckerberg is a politician now

  I’ve long suspected that Mark Zuckerberg, who often refers to himself as the “leader” of Facebook, has dreams of high office.

  This week, a taster of what that might be like has been knocking at his door in the wake of the US election result.

  While Donald Trump’s visit to the White House was an apparently sobering experience about the level of responsibility he’d soon inherit, Zuckerberg has had a brutal political awakening of his own.

  Facebook’s “fake news” crisis has had the normally stoic 32-year-old visibly irritated, and that’s because for the first time he is being treated like a politician, rather than just a tech CEO.

• When students at the country’s top university for journalism start banning newspapers we know we’ve hit peak censorship

  I am a self-identified feminist, liberal, pro-immigration left-leaning alumna of City University’s journalism department.

  And today, I read the news that City University’s student union – an institution renowned for its media courses – voted to ban certain right-wing newspapers with frustration and dismay.

  Let me say right off the bat – when those students argue that papers like the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Sun demonise refugees and minorities, or fan a frenzy of Islamophobia, or are “inherently sexist”, I agree.

  But because I believe this, I take those papers very, very seriously. I would advise all other City journalists in the making to do the same.

• China says terrorism, fake news impel greater global internet curbs

• Facebook Fake News Stories: China Calls For More Censorship On Internet Following Social Media’s Alleged Role In US Election

• World Internet Conference closes in E China

• Alibaba, Tencent back Chinese cyber law facing overseas critics

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Snooper’s Charter passed into law this week – say goodbye to your privacy

  This week a law was passed that silently rips privacy from the modern world. It’s called the Investigatory Powers Act.

  Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the British state has achieved totalitarian-style surveillance powers – the most intrusive system of any democracy in history. It now has the ability to indiscriminately hack, intercept, record, and monitor the communications and internet use of the entire population.

  The hundreds of chilling mass surveillance programmes revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 were – we assumed – the result of a failure of the democratic process. Snowden’s bravery finally gave Parliament and the public the opportunity to scrutinise this industrial-scale spying and bring the state back into check.

  But, in an environment of devastatingly poor political opposition, the Government has actually extended state spying powers beyond those exposed by Snowden – setting a “world-leading” precedent.

• Manhattan D.A. reopens encryption battle with Apple

  A top law enforcement official wants to turn back the clock on iPhone security.

  Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that he wants Apple’s encryption to go back to how it was in early 2014. Back then, police could basically extract any information they wanted after getting a warrant.

  “Doing nothing about this problem will perpetuate an untenable arms race between private industry and law enforcement,” Vance said on Thursday. “Federal legislation is our only chance to lay these arms aside.”

• Canadians want judicial oversight of any new digital snooping powers for police: Poll

  Most Canadians feel strongly about their right to privacy online, but a new poll shows the vast majority are willing to grant police new powers to track suspects in the digital realm — so long as the courts oversee the cops.

  Nearly half of the respondents to an Abacus Data survey of 2,500 Canadians agreed that citizens should have a right to complete digital privacy. But many appeared to change their mind when asked if an individual suspected of committing a serious crime should have the same right to keep their identity hidden from police.

• Senior U.S. officials recommend removal of NSA director – sources

  The heads of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community have recommended to President Barack Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, be removed from his position, sources familiar with the matter said on Saturday.

  The recommendation by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, first reported by The Washington Post, was delivered to the White House last month.

  [...]

  U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and a Republican, said later on Saturday he had written to Carter and Clapper asking them to testify to the committee about the matter.

  The Obama administration wants to split leadership at the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, arguing that the job of leading two agencies with differing missions is too much for one person.

  But some members of Congress, led by Republican Senator John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, oppose that plan, saying that Cyber Command needs access to the NSA’s resources to do its job effectively.

• NSA turmoil could threaten chief’s job – and expand Trump’s power

  A potential structural change to the US surveillance apparatus has thrown the tenure of the National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers, into doubt and increased the likelihood that Donald Trump will have a chance to substantially reshape the US intelligence agencies.

  Even before Trump’s presidential victory, which Rogers last week said followed efforts by “a nation-state” to influence the electoral outcome, US intelligence was roiled by FBI director James Comey’s unprecedented interference in the election. US intelligence is experiencing internal turmoil just as Trump is placing hardliners in key national security roles.

• NSA director Rogers is top candidate for DNI under Trump: WSJ

  U.S. National Security Agency Director Admiral Mike Rogers is the leading candidate to become President-elect Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing two unnamed people familiar with the matter.

• Pentagon and intelligence community chiefs have urged Obama to remove the head of the NSA

  The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.

  The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Barack Obama will not pardon Edward Snowden unless he goes to court – while Trump’s CIA pick wants him executed

  There is very little chance President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden before his final term is up – leaving his fate to an unforgiving Trump administration and an incoming CIA director who had called for his execution.

  Mr Snowden has lived in Russia since he leaked documents revealing a secret surveillance programme helmed by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies. The Department of Justice charged Mr Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

• Turkey: Thousands protest against proposed child sex law

  Thousands have protested in Istanbul in Turkey against a bill that would let off men who assaulted underage girls if they marry their victims.

  The government insists the legislation is aimed at dealing with the widespread custom of child marriage, but critics say that it will legitimise child rape.

  Protesters clapped and chanted: “We will not shut up. We will not obey. Withdraw the bill immediately!”

• Turkish bill clears men of statutory rape if they marry

  A bill which would allow men accused of raping underage girls to be cleared if they marry the girl has been preliminarily backed by Turkish MPs.

  The bill would pardon men only if they had sex without “force or threat” and if they married the victim.

  Critics say it legitimises rape and child marriage, and lets off men who are aware of their crime.

  Violence against women in Turkey has increased in the past decade – 40% of women report sexual or physical abuse.

• When is rape not a crime? Turkey considers proposal for controversial sexual abuse law

  Turkey’s ruling AK Party has been widely condemned for a proposal that would, critics say, legalise rape in some cases.

  The suggested law would see people who have been convicted on charges of sexual abuse against girls have their sentences indefinitely postponed if they agree to marry the victim.

• Appeals Court To Cops: If You ‘Don’t Have Time’ For ‘Constitutional Bullshit,’ You Don’t Get Immunity

  A disabled vet with PTSD accidentally called a suicide prevention hotline when intending to dial the Veterans Crisis Line. Within hours, he was dealing with DC Metro’s finest, dispatched to handle an attempted suicide. This brief quote from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals opinion [PDF] — part of veteran Matthew Corrigan’s first conversation with responding officers — sets the tone for the next several hours of Constitutional violations.

• ‘Extreme surveillance’ becomes UK law with barely a whimper

  A bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law with barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside.

  The Investigatory Powers Act, passed on Thursday, legalises a whole range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services unmatched by any other country in western Europe or even the US.

  The security agencies and police began the year braced for at least some opposition, rehearsing arguments for the debate. In the end, faced with public apathy and an opposition in disarray, the government did not have to make a single substantial concession to the privacy lobby.

  US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”

  Snowden in 2013 revealed the scale of mass surveillance – or bulk data collection as the security agencies prefer to describe it – by the US National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ, which work in tandem.

• British woman arrested after reporting alleged gang rape in Dubai tells of ‘nightmare’ ordeal

  Ms Stirling added that she personally would not report a rape in the UAE, saying: “There’s so much manipulation when it comes to criminal accusations over there – I wouldn’t report a rape there if I were raped myself.”

  After posting an online appeal for help, the woman’s mother wrote: “Please help my daughter. She was raped while on holiday. She reported this to the police and now she is being held on the grounds of sexual activity outside marriage.

  “We are not a rich family and cannot afford to pay for the defense she so desperately needs. I am going out of my mind with worry.”

  A Foreign Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said: “We are supporting a British woman in relation to this case and will remain in contact with her family.”

• US-bound passengers travelling via Stockholm may soon be subject to pre-clearance formalities

  Travellers from Finland heading to the US via Stockholm may experience delays in the future owing to a new agreement between Sweden and US that will see US Customs and Border Protection pre-clearance operations at Arlanda Airport. As for Finnish airport authority Finavia, it says that after previewing pre-clearance formalities, it’s not keen on introducing the system at Helsinki Airport.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Pirate App Store Operator Convicted for Criminal Copyright Infringement

    Four years ago the FBI took down several pirate Android app ‘stores’ and later arrested several people connected to the sites. This week one of the SnappzMarket operators, Joshua Taylor, was found guilty. During a bench trial, Judge Timothy C. Batten, Sr. convicted Taylor for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. .

  • Rightscorp Only Has Enough Cash to Last Until December

    Rightscorp’s dream of turning piracy into profit continues to be a nightmare. In its latest quarterly filing the anti-piracy outfit reports revenue down 35% over the same period last year, alongside a loss of $385,433. Year to date, the company has lost almost $1.4m and only has enough money to last until December.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Ubuntu Mate, Windows 10 and macOS Sierra: A marriage of 3 OSs

  I gave myself a little gift recently and revisited Ubuntu Mate by virtue of a transplanted hard disk.

  In my case, Mate was a gift that was giving and giving until it wasn’t.

  When the eMachines T6528 went belly up due to leaky logic board capacitors, I parted this tank of a tower out, half-heartedly vowing to get back to this low-footprint Linux distribution as soon as I could.

  Fast forward several months and with some precious free time on my hands, I was finally able to make good on the promise.

Server

• Cloud Native: Service-driven Operations that Save Money, Increase IT Flexibility

  I obsess about operations. I think it started when I was a department IT manager at a financial services institute. It was appallingly difficult to get changes deployed into production and the cost of change was spectacularly high. It felt like there had to be a better way, and most every decision I have made professionally since 2008 has led me to work on technology that makes that guy or gal’s life easier.

• Planning Microservices: Know the Tradeoffs With Monolithic Design

  By now, you no doubt understand the advantages of using a microservices architecture, especially in greenfield applications and in new organizations that need to achieve efficiencies wherever they can. But what about your legacy code and applications? Do you totally rewrite the monolith or do you chip away at it with new functionalities, added as microservices, over time?

• Docker Containers and Synnex Distribution? Oh My

  In a quiet corner at the Synnex Varnex conference, Rob Moyer is pulling back the curtain — just a bit — on the Synnex CloudSolv strategy for channel partners. The conversation with ChannelE2E includes some familiar themes. But there are also some surprises — including a serious bet on container technology and Docker.

  Synnex CloudSolv is a management and deployment platform that helps channel partners to activate cloud solutions for their end-customers. Moyer, VP of software and cloud services at Synnex, isn’t pursuing a toe-to-toe cloud marketplace battle against Ingram Micro, Tech Data and other distributors. Instead of vetting hundreds of software and SaaS solutions for online distribution, Moyer discreetly but purposely made a few strategic bets — including Docker, Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite (particularly for education) and Red Hats.

• 5 Common Myths about Containers

  Containers are faster. Containers work only on Linux. Containers are insecure. These are all examples of myths about Docker and other container platforms that continue to persist.

  Some of these misconceptions reflect popular misunderstandings of containers. Others are based on information that was once accurate, but is no longer true. Either way, these myths are important to clear up if you want to deploy containers effectively.

Kernel Space

• Kids Day Out: From Curiosity to Creativity

  This year at LinuxCon North America in Toronto, The Linux Foundation partnered with MakerKids and Kids on Computers to organize a day-long event focused on getting school-aged children interested in learning more about computer programming. The Kids Day workshops included projects around Linux, Arduino, robots, and more.

  “Kids on Computers has participated at SCALE and OSCON in years past, but this was our first time at LinuxCon. We do lot of hands-on training with students, teachers, and communities where we install computer labs (we have 12 in Mexico!), but this was our very first conference-based workshop. We are excited to see our Linux Foundation partnership grow and very much appreciated the opportunity to be at LinuxCon and conduct this workshop,” said Avni Khatri, President of Kids on Computers.

• Open Source Vet Sam Ramji Moves from Cloud Foundry to Google [Ed: Microsoft mole inside FOSS relocates from Linux Foundation to Google]

  As several media outlets are now reporting, open source veteran Sam Ramji, who has been the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, is joining Google in an executive position that is not fully announced yet. Cloud Foundry is managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and Abby Kearns will take over as Executive Director while Chip Childers will function as the organization’s CTO.

• Microsoft Trolls Small Biz With Outlook CRM Tool [Ed: Microsoft still evil and stabs yet another partner in the back. Just see this new article. When will people learn from history?]

• Microsoft just joined the Linux Foundation, but end users won’t notice right away [Ed: Microsoft infiltration for influence is not good news, it's just a victory for Microsoft]

• “Changed” Microsoft Can’t Kill Linux, Says Linux Foundation Director [Ed: Microsoft is taxing Linux using software patents, bribes and extortion. Not a friend...]

• Microsoft previews SQL Server on Linux, opens features across editions [Ed: Nothing open about it, it’s proprietary traps]

• It Turns Out The Btrfs RAID 5/6 Issue Isn’t Completely Fixed

  Earlier this week we reported on the Btrfs RAID5/RAID6 code being fixed, well, it appeared to. However, now the Btrfs developers have clarified that the situation isn’t entirely resolved.

• Linux 4.8.9

  I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.9 kernel.

  All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

  The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at:
  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

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

• Linux 4.4.33

• [PATCH 4.8 00/49] 4.8.10-stable review

• [PATCH 4.4 00/37] 4.4.34-stable review

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 375.20 Adds X.Org Server 1.19 Support, Stabilizes Other Changes

    NVIDIA today issued the 375.20 Linux driver release as their first in the stable 375 driver series for Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD.

  • New X.Org Driver Updates Roll Out For Xorg-Server 1.19 Support

    In addition to the Radeon and AMDGPU DDX updates yesterday, other X.Org drivers are seeing releases this week in order to support the brand new X.Org Server 1.19.

  • The Vulkan API spec has been updated again, now at its 34th revision since release

  • Nvidia 375.20 Linux Video Driver Adds Support for X.Org Server 1.19, Many Fixes

    Nvidia announced a new stable, long-lived version of its proprietary graphics driver for GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris platforms, versioned 375.20, which appears to be a major update that introduces numerous improvements and some new features.

    As expected, the biggest change in the Nvidia 375.20 proprietary video driver is the addition of support for the recently released X.Org Server 1.19.0 (ABI 23) display server for all supported operating systems, which means that most of the modern distributions will soon push an updated graphics stack to their users for better gaming and overall desktop graphics performance.

  • X.Org Server 1.20 “Shrimp & Grits” Open For Development

    Earlier this week was the X.Org Server 1.19 release as a major update with development going on for one year. Now, X.Org Server 1.20 development is open.

  • Nvidia 375.20 stable driver released, increases OpenGL shader cache size and more

  • New Heterogeneous Memory Management For Linux, Will Be Supported By NVIDIA/Nouveau

    Jerome Glisse has sent out the latest version of his patches now for Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM), which he’s been working on the Linux kernel since 2014.

    It’s been a while since hearing anything about Heterogeneous Memory Management and frankly I even forgot about these pending HMM patches or for seeing any new work from Jerome Glisse at Red Hat. For those that forgot, Jerome was one of the early contributors to the open-souce AMD driver work going back to the xf86-video-avivo (pre-RadeonHD) days when wanting to make an open-source R500 graphics driver.

  • Direct3D 9 Over Vulkan Hits New Milestone

    A developer’s effort to implement Direct3D 9 (D3D9) over the Vulkan API has now reached its “fourth milestone” but a lot of work remains.

  • EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync Patches For Mesa

    Rob Clark on Friday sent out the patches for implementing the EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync extension within Mesa’s EGL and Gallium3D code.

• Benchmarks

  • RadeonSI Benchmarks On Budgie, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma 5, LXDE, MATE, Unity, Xfce

    Last month when Ubuntu 16.10 was released I ran some desktop gaming benchmarks with Intel Skylake graphics under Unity, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, KDE, Openbox, and MATE. Following that article a few Phoronix Premium readers requested similar tests be done under the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack, so here are those numbers.

Applications

• BH 1.62.0-1

  The BH package on CRAN was updated to version 1.62.0. BH provides a large part of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R, possibly with Rcpp as well as other packages.

  This release upgrades the version of Boost to the upstream version Boost 1.62.0, and adds three new libraries as shown in the brief summary of changes from the NEWS file which follows below.

• Rcpp 0.12.8: And more goodies

  Yesterday the eighth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp made it to the CRAN network for GNU R where the Windows binary has by now been generated too; the Debian package is on its way as well. This 0.12.8 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, and the 0.12.7 release in September — making it the twelveth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. While we are keeping with the pattern, we have managed to include quite a lot of nice stuff in this release. None of it is a major feauture, though, and so we have not increased the middle number.

• Proprietary

  • Axcient Introduces Expanded Support for Linux on Fusion Platform

  • ESG Validates One-Hour Recovery of Data Centers with Axcient Fusion

  • Axcient Announces Linux Support and Enhanced Orchestration for Fusion

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install and use profiling tool Gprof

  • AltOS-Lisp-2

  • Python Advanced Dictionaries

  • How to monitor SNMP traffic on Ubuntu for free with MRTG

    Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a great way to monitor SNMP traffic on your network. It’s a free tool, and it’s fairly simple to install. By monitoring daily/weekly/monthly/yearly traffic going in and out of your network, you can get a very good snapshot of how much traffic your network sees and what times of the day/week/month/year it spikes.

  • How to set up ClamAV to periodically scan for badware on Fedora Linux

  • Python Dictionaries

  • Go Beyond Local with Secure Shell

  • Code Review Essentials

• Games

  • NES Classic runs Linux, a new 0 A.D. alpha, and more gaming news

    In this bi-weekly open gaming roundup, we take a look at Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition running Linux, SDL support for Unity 5.6, 0 A.D. Ulysses, and more gaming news.

  • Unity bugs are holding back ‘Syndrome’ from coming to Linux

    Syndrome [Steam], a good-looking sci-fi survival horror was supposed to come to Linux at release, but it seems Unity is holding it back with bugs.

  • Alien: Isolation – The Collection is currently rather cheap on the official Feral store

    If you still haven’t picked up Alien: Isolation, now is a good time. Feral Interactive have the game on sale on their official store.

  • GTX 1060 vs. RX 480 – The ~$200 GPU Decision For Linux Gamers

    Without a doubt, the Radeon RX 480 is a great ~$200 USD graphics card for someone caring a lot about open-source driver support. But with the Pascal-based NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 also costing about the same, what’s the better decision for a Linux gamer who may not be religious about his driver choices? Here is some food for thought.

    Eric Griffith, our 2015 summer intern, brought up he was deciding between a GTX 1060 and RX 480 for his Linux gaming box. He hadn’t bought a NVIDIA card in the past ten years and is currently using the venerable Radeon R9 290, but it’s certainly time for an upgrade to play the demanding Linux games of today.

  • Games Company Asks Canonical to Make Latest Mesa Drivers Available on Ubuntu

  • Feral Interactive are requesting that Canonical get Mesa updates into an official PPA

    With Mesa coming along rather nicely in the latest releases, Feral Interactive are requesting that Canonical push out Mesa updates to their official graphics driver PPA to help Feral officially support Mesa in their Linux ports.

  • Feral Joins The Bandwagon Of Wanting Newer Mesa On Ubuntu

    With Mesa drivers this year really improving a lot and reaching OpenGL ~4.5 compatibility for most drivers as well as the Intel and RADV Vulkan drivers getting into shape, they are becoming usable for day-to-day Linux gamers. While not all new Feral Linux game releases work with the Mesa drivers, a growing number of their games work well on Mesa 13.0+, and as such they are hoping Ubuntu will adopt a policy of making it easier to switch to newer Mesa releases.

  • A quick video on SC Controller’s new gestures feature, the standalone UI and driver for the Steam Controller

  • Some early thoughts on ‘CrossCode’, an Early Access 2D action RPG set in the distant future

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Ships Beta of KDE Applications 16.12

    Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of KDE Applications. With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

    Check the community release notes for information on new tarballs, tarballs that are now KF5 based and known issues. A more complete announcement will be available for the final release

    The KDE Applications 16.12 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We’re counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the team by installing the beta and reporting any bugs.

  • KDE Applications 16.12 Enters Beta Testing, Final Release Arrives on December 15

    Today, November 18, 2016, KDE announced the availability for public testing of the Beta build of the upcoming KDE Applications 16.12 software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.

    As reported last week, the KDE Applications 16.08 series reached end of life with the third and last maintenance update, versioned 16.08.3, which means that work begun on the next major branch, KDE Applications 16.12, which you can now take for a test drive using today’s Beta release.

  • KDE Applications 16.12 Now In Beta

    KDE Applications 16.12 is now in beta while this collection of KDE software is under a dependency and feature freeze ahead of next month’s official release.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Zorin OS 12 Core and Ultimate Are Here: Our Biggest Release Ever

    We’re proud to announce the availability of the Zorin OS 12 Core and Ultimate–the biggest release in the history of Zorin OS. With this new version, we’ve introduced an entirely new desktop experience that will make your computer more useful, more powerful and more enjoyable to use.

  • Zorin OS 12 Officially Released, the Biggest Release Ever of the Linux Distro

    The guys behind the Ubuntu-based Zorin OS Linux operating system were proud to announce the general availability of the final release of Zorin OS 12, which comes in both Core and Ultimate flavors.

    Zorin OS 12 is the result of many months of hard work, and it looks like it’s the project’s biggest release ever. The GNU/Linux distribution is now based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, and ships with the Zorin Desktop 2.0 desktop environment.

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2016/46

    Now this is a week I call fully rolling. There was a full 7 snapshots since the last review – which is about the maximum we can do in a week with one snapshot per day (or we have to change the versioning to not be only ‘date’ based). So, this review is about the snapshots {20161110..20161116}.

  • When Trying Out Tumbleweed, It’s Easy To See Why OpenSUSE Leap Disabled Nouveau

    I’ve been running some fresh benchmarks of the recently released openSUSE Leap 42.2 compared to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed and friends. Those benchmarks will be posted shortly, but after using the Nouveau experience on Tumbleweed I found the need to comment.

  • OpenSUSE 42.2 Merges Best Features of Enterprise, Community Models

    In the world of Linux distributions, users are often faced with the option of choosing an enterprise-grade distribution or a community distribution. With the openSUSE Leap approach, SUSE is attempting to merge the best of both the enterprise and community models into a new type of Linux distribution. In the pure community-first model the upstream open-source code is packaged in a distribution, which can then be further hardened to eventually produce an enterprise-grade Linux product. The open-source openSUSE Leap 42.2 Linux distribution became generally available on Nov. 16 and takes a different approach. Code from the SUSE Linux Enterprise Service Pack 2 release, which debuted on Nov. 8, is now in the freely available openSUSE Leap 42.2 update. As part of its enterprise community stability focus, openSUSE Leap benefits from the Linux 4.4 Long Term Support Kernel (LTS). SUSE expects to support openSUSE Leap releases for 36 months. The new release also includes the latest in open-source application packages with LibreOffice and Firefox as well as developer and graphics tools. This slide show eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the new openSUSE 42.2 Linux operating system release.

• Red Hat Family

  • Permabit pulls on Red Hat, opens arms for a Linux cuddle

    The Mad Hatter of Linux is getting Alice in Wonderland style physical space virtualisation with thin provisioning, compression and deduplication courtesy of Permabit.

    Building on its June 2016 Linux availability announcement, Permabit and Red Hat have a go-to-market partnership based on the former’s Albireo deduplication and HIOPS compression technology being added as a kernel module to Red Hat Linux. Up until now dedupe and compression have largely been storage array features, and then appearing in software-only storage running on servers and direct-attached disks, SSDs or JBODs.

  • Red Hat CEO on Microsoft, Google, and Cutting Edge Software

    Even among technology companies, Red Hat has to stand out as one of the geekiest firms in the business.

    The enterprise company offers services and support around the Linux open-source operating system, which non-techies can think of as a free equivalent of Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s MacOS. Developers and IT operators, however, regard Linux as more than just a free service: It’s the underpinning of some of the most popular apps and software used today.

    For instance, if you’ve ordered a car ride from Uber or bought digital storage from Amazon, it’s likely Linux OS was in a corporate data center somewhere along the line, making sure the appropriate software was chugging along.

  • Finance

    • Volatility Levels in Focus for Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Essex Investment Management Co. LLC lowers its Position in Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

    • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Upgraded to “Buy” at Zacks Investment Research

    • Notable Stock Analyst Ratings: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), The Allstate Corporation (NYSE:ALL)

  • Fedora

    • Introducing Fedora Hubs

      The goal of the Fedora Hubs project is to provide a consistent contributor experience across all Fedora teams. Hubs serve as an “intranet” for the Fedora Project. The many different projects in Fedora each have different processes and workflows. Hubs will be a single place where contributors can learn about and contribute to these projects in a consistent way.

      Hubs is also a social tool for Fedora contributors. It’s designed to help you keep up with everything and everybody across a big open source project in ways that aren’t currently possible. Hubs solves obstacles so new contributors can get in touch with experienced ones.

      Do you want to learn more about the history behind Hubs? Fedora Design team lead Máirín Duffy wrote a few blog posts on the progress of Hubs.

    • Fedora Loves Python at SeaGL 2016

      The Seattle GNU/Linux conference, SeaGL, intentionally attracts a variety of attendees, students from Seattle Central College, local Linux enthusiasts, curious neighbors, and programmers from big software companies, indies and start-ups. About 500 people attended the exhibits and talks on the two days. The exhibit area was closed for the keynotes so I saw Corey Quinn tell us the Art of Personal Failure and Allison Randal presented Free as in Freedom. Bill Wright received the Cascadia Community Builder Award for his efforts building LinuxFest NorthWest.

    • Flock Stories 2016, Episode 4: Matthew Miller

      Today’s guest is Matthew Miller (mattdm)! He’s a long-time Fedora user and contributor, as well as the founder of Boston University Linux. However, perhaps most important of all, he is the current Fedora Project Leader! In this interview, we ask Matthew questions like…

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Tails 3.0 Anonymous Live OS to Be Based on Debian 9 “Stretch”, Require 64-bit PC

      A few days after the announcement of Tails 2.7, the development team behind the popular amnesic incognito live system based on Debian GNU/Linux unveiled a few technical details about the next major release.

      Yes, we’re talking about Tails 3.0, which is now in development and appears to be the next major update of the anonymous live OS that ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden used to protect his identity online. Tails is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution built around the popular Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser anonymous browser.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • This Ubuntu Linux laptop packs a 4K display and Nvidia’s beastly GeForce GTX 1070

        System76’s Ubuntu-based Oryx Pro is a Linux laptop loaded with features also found in some of the fastest Windows laptops.

        The Oryx Pro can be the ultimate Linux gaming laptop. It can be configured with a 15.6-inch 4K screen and Nvidia’s latest Pascal GeForce GTX 1070 GPU.

        The laptop with those features starts at $1,987, and goes higher as more storage and memory are added. The ultimate 4K Oryx Pro configuration with 9TB of SSD storage prices out at $7,012. It comes preloaded with Ubuntu 16.04 or 16.10.

      • Ubuntu Core 16 Enables Snappy IoT

        Ubuntu Core 16 is now available. It is a tiny, transactional implementation of Ubuntu Linux that targets embedded applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). It uses a new packaging system with modules called snaps that include metadata about their connectivity and interface requirements (Fig. 1).

        A snap can have one or more interfaces that are either a plug or a slot providing connections between snaps. A snap exists as a read-only, immutable, compressed squashFS blob, while an instance also includes a private, writeable directory. Communication with the operating system services uses the interface mechanism. Snaps can be given access to other directories.

      • Ubuntu Core [Comic]

        Nowadays, Linux processes are forever in conflict. Is there somewhere out there for them to live together in harmony… perhaps by separating them via full resource isolation?

Devices/Embedded

• Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk

  Powered by Ubuntu and Robot Operating System (ROS), the Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk open development hardware and software kit enables drones to transform into smart robots. Parrot’s S.L.A.M.dunk (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) technology enables the design of advanced applications that enable the drone to understand and map its surroundings in 3D and self-navigate in environments with multiple barriers or lack of a GPS signal.

  Because Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk exploits ROS, the leading Linux-based versatile robotic development environment, it can be used not only for standard drone applications but also for a much wider set of “robots”—that is, flying wings, articulated arms and roving robots.

• Open source AI voice interface mounts on dashboards

  The Next Thing’s “Dashbot” is an automotive gizmo that offers voice control of a phone’s music, nav, and texts. Inside is a CHIP Pro COM running Linux.

  A little over a month after announcing a computer-on-module version of the CHIP (Computer Hardware in Products) SBC called the CHIP Pro, The Next Thing went to Kickstarter to launch a hands-free automotive/mobile interface called the Dashbot, based on the COM. At publication time, the open source device was more than halfway to its $100K goal, with the funding round open until Dec. 17. Don’t expect to see your Dashbot under the Christmas tree, however. The $49 device won’t ship until July 2017.

• The Dashbot is a $49 gadget that turns your car into Knight Rider’s KITT

• Dashbot is a $49 hands-free, in-car controller for your phone (crowdfunding)

• Phones

  • Quick Notes from Smartphone Wars – Kodak, Nintendo, Lenovo and Blaupunkt

    A few quick notes from a few less-familiar players in smartphone wars. So yes, I’ll do the math shortly on Q3 smartphone market (nothing exciting there, we know Samsung, Apple, Huawei are the top 3, the excitement is long gone from that ‘race’).

    But first off, as I was doing some back-log Tweets of old tech news items to cover, on Twitter, today, I noticed a few interesting tidbits of smartphone-related news. These are all October-timeframe news items (so they’re old but went to cover them anyway).

  • Tizen

    • Samsung Launches Tizen RT and Tizen 3.0 at SOSCON 2016

      Samsung Open Source Conference (SOSCON) 2016 as been in full flow at the Samsung Seoul R & D Campus in Umyeon-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul, for the last two days. The conference saw over 2,000 open source developers discussing the Internet of Things (IoT), Tizen platform, web, big data, cloud, and also machine learning.

    • New Video to Audio Converter app available on Tizen Store

      One of the mostly requested apps by Tizen smartphone users is a Video Audion convertor. Now, Videoaudio converter is now available in the Tizen Store by Om Prakash. It’s a very easy app to use for end users, just tap on the video file and convert it to audio. You can convert MP4, MKV, 3GP & AVI files to M4A, AMR, OGG & AAC formats. The files will save in your music folder in your device storage.

    • Developer Online Meeting 28 Nov: IoT on Tizen Wearables

      Its time for the Tizen Community to meet once again and discuss what is important to us all. This time the subject is going to be IoT on Tizen Wearables. As ever there is no special format for the discussion but it is hoped that we cover everything in the allocated 1 hour time slot.

      The meeting is scheduled for 28 November 2016 at 09:00 UTC. You can find your local time by following this link. Some discussion points will be “How to deploy to a commercial device”, think Gear S2, and there will also be hints about other Tizen wearables that we can also discuss.

  • Android

    • Nokia’s Android Phones Could Debut in February After 2017 ‘Return to Smartphones’ Confirmed

      Nokia fans around the world have been expecting the company’s return to smartphones. Rumours and leaks in the past had all suggested that the company will come out with Nokia-branded mobiles this year, but with the year all-but-over, everyone’s eyes are already on next year.

    • Study crazily suggests 70% of Android users want pre-installed apps

      A new study suggests that 70 percent of European Android users want pre-installed apps.

      No, it is not opposite day.

      The Application Developers Alliance asked 4,000 Android users in France, Germany, Spain and Italy about their app install preferences. It’s worth noting that Google helped develop the study, and the company is currently locked in battle with the EU over whether its default Android apps are anti-competitive.

      The results seem to lie in Google’s favor. The vast majority of Android users change their home screen setup (90 percent), and that while Google apps were generally within the top few apps used, they were rarely #1.

    • Hottest Android Black Friday 2016 deals on tablets, phones & more

      $250 gift cards being bundled with Android smartphones, up to $100 being knocked off Android tablets by big retailers for Black Friday 2016

    • Powerful backdoor/rootkit found preinstalled on 3 million Android phones

    • Watch Out! Certain Android Mobile Devices Can Steal Your Bitcoin

    • Android 7.0 Nougat Latest News, Release Date & Update: What Phones Will Get The Update? Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony Launch Dates Revealed

    • Chinese company caught preinstalling Android spyware on budget devices

    • Android 7.0 Nougat Samsung Galaxy S7 Beta Tests Continue; Galaxy Note 5 And Galaxy Tab S2 On Schedule For Update

    • Android 7.0 Nougat OnePlus 3T, OnePlus 3 Update Download Expected In December; Beta Testing Begins

    • Nexar turns any Android phone into an always-on AR dashcam

    • Sony XAV-AX100 Android Auto headunit available for pre-order

    • Samsung Pay on the Gear S3 works with any Android smartphone

    • The most beautiful Android BlackBerry ever: DTEK60 – first impressions

      The DTEK60 is the latest BlackBerry-branded smartphone manufactured by partner TCL, the Chinese company behind the Alcatel handsets. The difference in hardware design is immediately obvious. Spotting a gorgeous glass back and a smooth, curvy body just 6.99mm thick, the phone (HK$4,488) is by far the most beautiful BlackBerry phone that runs on the Android system.

      Like its predecessor, the DTEK50, the overall design remains minimalist, but the new release comes with a fingerprint sensor that is conveniently located at the back of the phone right below the camera lens.

    • Samsung Updates Android Nougat Beta For Galaxy S7 Devices

      Samsung announced the beta release of Android 7.0 Nougat for its 2016 Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge devices a week ago in three important smartphone markets: the United Kingdom, United States of America and South Korea. Beta programs are designed to allow customers or users to experience an unfinished product so as to provide feedback to the company. For a major software version such as Android Nougat, a developer – or in this case the smartphone manufacturer – will conduct a large number of internal tests, but because smartphones are both extremely complicated and customers can download and install large numbers of third party applications, it is useful to allow the pre-release version of the operating system to be tested “in the wild.” This way, Samsung can hope to capture many different device configurations and uncover bugs and glitches that might otherwise not be found until the software is officially released.

    • Android 7.0 Beta For Galaxy S7 Family Now Available In China

      As many of you know by now, Samsung had launched the Galaxy Beta Program last week, and the company is essentially allowing Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge consumers in specific markets to try out Android 7.0 Nougat beta firmware. Needless to say, Android 7.0 Nougat is the last big iteration of Android, even though the company had released Android 7.1 Nougat as well. In any case, Samsung has just started rolling out the Galaxy Beta Program in yet another region, read on.

Open source Solves and Supports Today’s Business Needs

Open source is free software that developers make available to benefit the community. The original developer of the software benefits from making their code freely available because doing so increases the number of end users with the ability to enhance the software. These enhancements can make the software more valuable for all. Some examples of open source software include Android, Wikipedia, Mozilla Firefox, WordPress and Drupal.

Calendar sharing in the XXIth century

But the point is this one: It is 2016 and shared calendars that should be simple and straightforward are both complex and obscure. People should not think twice about what to use: they should be able to share their calendars seamlessly, post it online, move from one provider to another with very little hassle. Instead of this most are locked in and when they want to move to another provider the notion that they should learn about the various calendar sharing protocols is simply outlandish.

Can Node.js Scale? Ask the Team at Alibaba

Alibaba is arguably the world’s biggest online commerce company. It serves millions of users and hosts millions of merchants and businesses. As of August 2016, Alibaba had 434 million users with 427 million active mobile monthly users. During this year’s Singles Day, which happened on November 11 and is one of the (if not the) biggest online sales events, Alibaba registered $1 billion in sales in its first five minutes.

Five Tenets of Thriving with Open Source without Risking Your Business

Vendors, university researchers, students, and developers find that open source is a very effective tool for validating a solution to a particular problem. However, these solutions are often born within the context of a specific company’s use case or a specific research problem. Therefore, these projects are similar to code built in the context of a professional services engagement and often don’t have the polish and finish of an enterprise product. Some may not even have solved basic enterprise requirements like availability, resilience, security, and so on.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Firefox 50.0 Web Browser Lands in All Supported Ubuntu OSes, Update Now

    Three days after we reported on the official availability of the Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, it looks like users of the Ubuntu Linux OS can now install the application.

  • Mozilla Thunderbird 45.5.0 Supports Changes to Character Limit in Twitter

SaaS/Back End

• New Business Intelligence Performance Benchmark Reveals Strong Innovation Amongst Open-Source projects

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• A New Tool for LibreOffice

  Tony Get, my colleague, showed me an interesting tool available in Android: it’s an app to turn your Android device into a remote control to work with your LibreOffice Impress presentations. It is called Impress Remote and it is very easy to use.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Centiq’s open source contribution speeds up HANA DevOps

Funding

• Nothing good is free: How Linux and open source companies make money

  We all know how popular and helpful Linux and open source products are. But since most of them are available for free, how do the companies that produce them make any money to pay their bills? As it turns out, lots of ways.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Intel Quark SE Support Added To GCC Compiler

  Support for Intel’s low-power Quark SE micro-controller has been added to the GNU Compiler Collection.

Public Services/Government

• GDS Appoints Anna Shipman As Open Source Lead

  The Government Digital Service (GDS) has appointed its first open source lead, with the goal of driving the use of open source platforms and frameworks throughout Whitehall and beyond.

  Anna Shipman, who has been at GDS for several years will step into the role, having worked extensively with open source as the development lead for GDS’s open source infrastructure provisioning project vCloud Tools.

  Shipman also has experience working with open source projects outside of GDS with her work on government-as-a-platform, the GDS objective to create a range of open and reusable digital components that can be used to create digital services without the need for costly, bespoke systems.

• Director’s Forum: A Blog from USPTO’s Leadership

  Improving the way the government delivers information technology (IT) solutions to its customers isn’t just a goal, it’s our mission. We at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office know that by publishing our open source code, the public can help us come up with new and better IT solutions. In advance of the new Federal Source Code Policy and in support of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative, we have been publishing content on Github for over a year, and it now includes source code for a mobile application for trademarks.

Licensing/Legal

• Choosing Your Open-Source Licenses

  Open-source development covers a lot of bases. There’s everything from documentation to development that is freely available on the web. It’s rather magical to know that you’ve got access to the code that drives some of the industry’s most widely used platforms like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, and much more.

  As a purveyor of some open-source goodness myself, I’ve started to become more aware of the nuances of each of the various open-source licenses. There is much more to these licenses than many of us may realize. It is a legal contract, so it is important to be aware of the differences in each license.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Data Pipeline goes open, changing business models, and more open source news

  The world of open source software is a busy place. Sometimes keeping up with all of the news, announcements, and cool things to be discovered can be difficult. Here’s a look at some of what we’re reading today.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • AMD announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform

    AMD announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) featuring software support of new Radeon GPU hardware, new math libraries, and a rich foundation of modern programming languages, designed to speed development of high-performance, energy-efficient heterogeneous computing systems. AMD also announced planned support of OpenCL™ and for a wide range of CPUs in upcoming releases of ROCm, including support for AMD’s upcoming “Zen”-based CPUs, Cavium ThunderX CPUs, and IBM Power 8 CPUs. The advances further cement ROCm’s position as the most versatile open source platform for GPU computing.

  • AMD Goes Open Source in Newest ROCm Platform Update

    Processor maker is going all in for developing and sharing GPU-related hardware and software for high-end computing use cases.
    In days gone by, one rarely heard of IT companies getting involved in the open sourcing of hardware blueprints. It was always about software. This is happening more frequently all the time and making a significant impact in many enterprises. It’s yet another seismic change that has hit the larger-picture IT world.

    This is relevant now because companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Brocade, Cisco Systems and a number of others through the Open Compute Project are now dedicated to designing and open sourcing items such as new-gen servers, racks, routers, switches, specialized teleco equipment and storage appliances, in addition to offering previously proprietary expertise to others in how to build new-gen IT hardware.

  • RusEFI open-source engine-control hardware now working in the real world

    RusEFI isn’t anywhere near a works-right-out-of-the-box system, even now. It’s hardware for the expert user who is comfortable doing everything from soldering to writing code, and it’s all absolutely open-source, on both the hardware and software sides. The advantage of this? According to RusEFI developer Andrey Belomutskiy, “You are free to criticize/change software and hardware without being yelled/threatened/banned, in the spirit of open source.”

Science

• What Electronics Can Do to Your Infant’s Brain

  Have you ever watched a baby stare at a TV? The TV is huge, flashing and mesmerizing, and you’ll notice that while watching, infants do not turn their heads – they just sit and stare straight ahead. Because infants become so transfixed on the screen, they stop doing anything and everything else and ultimately, they miss out on human interaction and the opportunity to explore their new and exciting world.

  The same is true of certain electronic toys. The graphics and sounds are mesmerizing and hold a child’s attention for longer than a traditional toy. Studies have shown that during the time kids are watching a screen or playing on an electronic toy, they are not interacting and learning as much as they could with other types of toys. Electronics also change how we interact with our children – sometimes the toy becomes the babysitter, and parents do not have to interact.

• We Should Think of American Education as a National Security Issue

  The election of Donald Trump to the White House left great segments of the US population elated, and others feeling deflated and terrified. It still isn’t clear what he will do after he’s inaugurated, although certain policies and approaches are beginning to take shape. But as observers take stock of how a novice politician who’s never held elected office snagged the highest one in the land, something has become abundantly clear—America is divided, and one of the starkest divisions is around education.

  People voted along lines that reflect levels of education. While Hillary Clinton led college graduates by nine points (52/43 percent), Trump led non-college graduates by eight (52/44 percent). According to Pew Research, this is the widest gap in support between college-educated and non-college educated voters recorded in exit polls since 1980.

  To hold Trump, or any president, accountable to the people they represent, the US needs an informed electorate. According to some experts, this is literally an issue of national security. More uniformly educated populations are better equipped to resolve chronic policy problems, bolster economic growth, and keep pace with rapidly shifting geopolitical dynamics, which contributes to stability at home.

Health/Nutrition

• Michigan Officials Seek to Block Court-Ordered Bottled Water Delivery in Flint

  State officials in Michigan asked a federal court in Detroit on Thursday to block a court order requiring bottled water deliveries to homes in Flint, Michigan, where residents are still waiting for clean tap water two years after municipal water supplies were contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

  The state’s motion requests the court to temporarily block the water delivery order while officials appeal the requirement. The order was issued by a federal judge last week and requires city and state officials to deliver bottled water to Flint residents unless they have a functioning faucet filter or refuse the delivery service.

Security

• Security updates for Friday

• Serious Linux Vulnerability Found By Just Holding Down The Enter Key For 70 Seconds

  Security researchers have found a rather frightening vulnerability in Linux that could ultimately allow an attacker to copy, modify, or destroy the contents of a hard drive, along with with configure the network to exfiltrate data. That in and of itself is cause for concern, but the real harrowing part about this is how easy it is to activate—an attacker need only boot up the system and hold down the enter key for 70 seconds.

• Open Source Software: Secure Except When It Isn’t

  There is still a flaw in the open source security model which the Core Infrastructure Initiative only partly addressed. Remember the thousands and thousands of eyes looking for vulnerabilities in the code? While that may be true in a generalized sense, there are some small but important projects that are flying under the radar and don’t seem to be getting the necessary attention.

• Adobe Fined $1M in Multistate Suit Over 2013 Breach; No Jail for Spamhaus Attacker

  Adobe will pay just $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by 15 state attorneys general over its huge 2013 data breach that exposed payment records on approximately 38 million people. In other news, the 39-year-old Dutchman responsible for coordinating an epic, weeks-long distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam provider Spamhaus in 2013 will avoid any jail time for his crimes thanks to a court ruling in Amsterdam this week.

  On Oct. 3, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story that Adobe had just suffered a breach in which hackers siphoned usernames, passwords and payment card data on 38 million customers. The intruders also made off with digital truckloads of source code for some of Adobe’s most valuable software properties — including Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop and ColdFusion.

• Half of companies have been hit with ransomware in the past year

  MORE TERRIFYING SECURITY RESEARCH has discovered that almost half of a collection of firms surveyed admitted that they have been the victim of a ransomware attack.

  Endpoint security outfit SentinelOne said that the ransomware attacks do not just go after monies these days, but have darker aims and can be used to threaten and terrorise people.

  “[Our] results point to a significant shift for ransomware. It’s no longer just a tool for cyber crime, but a tool for cyber terrorism and espionage,” said Tony Rowan, chief security consultant at SentinelOne, in the firm’s Ransomware Research Data Summary (PDF).

• Security Of FLOSS

  I’ve worked with IT since the 1960s. I’ve seen systems that fell down just idling. I’ve seen systems that were insecure by design. Their creators just didn’t seem to care. I’ve seen systems that were made to get you. Their creators wanted to own your soul. I’ve also used FLOSS.

Defence/Aggression

• Report: Trump to pick Michael Flynn for national security adviser

• Trump offers national security adviser post to campaign adviser: Reports

• Trump offers influential NSA post to his trusted military aide

• Trump offers NSA job to Obama administration critic Michael Flynn

  Flynn has called for Washington to work more closely with Moscow, echoing similar statements from Trump. But his warmth toward Russia has worried some national security experts.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Attribution of Russia in DNC hack has curtailed Kremlin’s hacking, Clapper says

  In what might be viewed as a slight disagreement in assessment, or at the very least, semantics, Clapper told the committee Thursday that there was not strong evidence of a connection between WikiLeaks, which provided a frequent drip of leaked emails from top Democratic officials aimed at damaging the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and the Russian hacking campaign against Democratic party entities and individuals, for which many believe provided WikiLeaks the stolen contents for their leaks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• New peatland coalition targets cutting climate change, saving thousands of lives

  A new global initiative, launched today at the climate meeting in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of lives by protecting peatlands – the world’s largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

  The Global Peatlands Initiative will mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in a targeted effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

  Greenhouse gas emissions from drained and burning peatlands account for up to 5 per cent of anthropogenic carbon emissions. These emissions are rising due to increasing peat degradation and loss from agriculture and fires, and driving the world closer to a dangerous tipping point.

  Rising temperatures can cause a chain reaction in which thawing permafrost switches boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gas. Peat carbon stocks are equivalent to at least 60 per cent of all atmospheric carbon, meaning they hold the potential to send climate change spiraling out of control.

• New UN initiative aims to save lives and cut climate change by protecting peatlands

  A new global initiative was launched today at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 22) under way in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of live by protecting peatlands – the largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

  According to the UN environment Programme (UNEP), the Global Peatlands Initiative seeks mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in an effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

  If global temperatures continue to rise, this could lead to thawing permafrost, switching boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, resulting in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and potentially causing climate change to spiral out of control.

  Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment stressed that despite the Paris Agreement, global temperatures will rise over 3 degrees Celsius this century. “This will cause misery and chaos for millions of vulnerable people, so we cannot afford to let any opportunity to reduce emissions slip by,” he added.

• 69 Million People Exposed to ‘Killer Haze’ During Wildfire in Indonesia

  Latest study from Scientific Reports reveals that massive wildfires in Indonesia and Borneo had produced unhealthy air pollution, exposing 69 million people and causing thousands of cases of premature deaths.

  The wildfire greatly affected the forests and peatland of Equatorial Asia during the autumn of 2015. Experts have found that a quarter of people living in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia were severely exposed to the killer haze between September and October 2015.

  In an article by Eureka Alert, the lead author of the study, Dr. Paola Crippa, from Newcastle University, UK, said: “Our study estimated that between 6,150 and 17,270 premature deaths occurred due to breathing in the polluted air over that short two month period. To put this into perspective, we estimate that around 1 in 6,000 people exposed to the polluted haze from these fires died as a result. The uncertainty in these estimates is mostly due to the lack of medical studies on exposure from extreme air pollution in the area.”

• Why It Matters That Trump’s Attorney General Pick Is a Climate Change Skeptic

  Jeff Sessions, the ultra-conservative Republican senator from Alabama, has been a controversial political figure for decades. His early career as a US attorney was threatened by allegations of racist remarks in the 1980s, but he remained popular in his home state and managed to carve out a congressional career for himself as a staunch opponent of, among many other things, consensus climate science.

  But Sessions is about to get a whole lot more influential to the lives of all Americans: President-elect Donald Trump has picked him to be the next attorney general of the United States.

  In what’s become a daily routine during the Trump transitionary period, the president-elect’s pick of Sessions has been met with exasperated outcries. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are preparing for a long period of conflict under the Trump Administration, and Sessions is sure to be a part of it.

Finance

• Bannon: With negative interest rates around world, ‘rebuild everything’

• If Steve Bannon is serious, Trump’s infrastructure plan is going to be a disaster

• Incendiary Trump adviser Steve Bannon thinks negative interest rates are ‘the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything’

• Steve Bannon’s dangerous campaign to rebrand racism as American “nationalism”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Why Anti-Trump Protests Matter

  Since election night, U.S. cities and towns have rung with protest. Hundreds of thousands of people, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Columbia, South Carolina to Salt Lake City, Utah took to the streets en masse to protest the election of a man who promised, among other things, to force Muslims to register and to repeal a health care bill that helps some 20 million people get health insurance, and who has been accused of sexual assault by at least 13 women. Hand-scrawled signs declared “Not My President,” “No To Bigotry,” “Trump Puts My Life In Danger,” and “Protests Are Patriotic.”

• Anna Soubry: ‘What’s happened to our country? We’ve lost the plot’

  The Tory MP was one of David Cameron’s modernisers, and campaigned to remain in the EU. Now she is angry at everyone – at Labour, her own party, the Daily Mail, even herself – but feels she must vote for article 50 regardless

• Donald Trump Agrees to Pay $25 Million in Trump University Settlement

  Donald J. Trump has reversed course and agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign.

  The settlement was announced by the New York attorney general on Friday, just 10 days before one of the cases, a federal class-action lawsuit in San Diego, was set to be heard by a jury. The deal, if approved, averts a potentially embarrassing and highly unusual predicament: a president-elect on trial, and possibly even taking the stand in his own defense, while scrambling to build his incoming administration.

  It was a remarkable concession from a real estate mogul who derides legal settlements and has mocked fellow businessmen who agree to them.

  But the allegations in the case were highly unpleasant for Mr. Trump: Students paid up to $35,000 in tuition for programs that, according to the testimony of former Trump University employees, used high-pressure sales tactics and employed unqualified instructors.

  The agreement wraps together the outstanding Trump University litigation, including two federal class-action cases in San Diego, and a separate lawsuit by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. The complaints alleged that students were cheated out of thousands of dollars in tuition through deceptive claims about what they would learn and high-pressure sales tactics.

• Who Will Advise Trump on Science?

  In 1976, President Gerald Ford appointed physicist H. Guyford Stever as the first Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Having previously advised the military during World War II, and directed the National Science Foundation for four years, Stever became the first of a long line of advisors who counseled the White House on matters of science and technology—everything from disease outbreaks to climate change to nanotechnology.

  [...]

  But amid that certainty, there is also lots of room for variability. (Buckle up; here be acronyms.) Holdren currently wears many different hats. He’s also the president’s Science Advisor or, to quote the formal title, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. He co-chairs (with Obama) the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—a group of leading scientists and engineers who offer policy recommendations on everything from the reliability of forensic science to preparing for a biological weapons attack. And he sits on the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a group that coordinates research and development efforts across all federal agencies; it is chaired by the president and includes the vice-president and several cabinet secretaries.

  So Holdren’s a busy guy. But of these jobs, only the OSTP directorship is a non-negotiable Senate-confirmed post. The rest are essentially optional, and depend on the president’s attitudes to science and willingness to continue the legacy of past offices. Trump might not convene the PCAST or the NSTC; both are established by Executive Order. He could appoint an OSTP Director and never seek advice from them.

• The End Of Trump’s Reign Could Be Way Sooner Than You Think

  So that election sure was pretty crazy, huh? There are lots and lots and lots of really pissed-off people right now, and since we’ve said quite a bit on the subject, I won’t add more to that here. What I will tell you is that you absolutely have a real-world, tangible way to fight. And I’m not talking about having to wait four years for the next presidential election.

• Michael Moore’s to do list for a revolution: an intervention for liberals

  We have a new leader in America. Known for his distinct regional accent and often seen wearing a baseball cap at rallies, he starred in a show on NBC, and holds strong opinions about guns and the NRA. He may not be the leader you saw coming, but you’re going to see a lot more of him: Michael Moore. The documentary filmmaker shuns the activist label he is often given. In a recent LA Times interview Moore asserted, “I’m not an activist, I’m a citizen. It’s redundant to say I’m an activist. We all should be active.” Moore has been very active, and has made films that take on some of America’s most complex and controversial topics — globalization, gun violence, 9/11, our healthcare system, the economy, war, and most recently, Donald Trump, someone he did see coming. Unlike the Democrats.

  Moore tried to warn the left in July, when he wrote a piece titled simply “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win. In it, he did not mince words: “Go ahead and say the words, ’cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: ‘PRESIDENT TRUMP.’ Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.” With his midwestern directness and efficiency, Moore then proceeded to list how and why Donald Trump was going to win.

  A week after Trump’s election, Democrats and progressives are still raw with shock and grief. The agony is acute. The mood of over half the country? Political satirist Barry Crimmins nailed it in a tweet, saying “We’re now kids trapped in the back of our blowhard, road-raging, shitty-driver, dad’s car for a 4-yr trip and he’s issued a “No Talking” edict.”

• Donald Trump daughter Ivanka pictured in meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

  Donald Trump’s daughter has been pictured attending a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, heightening concerns the President-elect’s family will wield unprecedented influence over his political duties.

  Ivanka Trump, who features in handout photos of the impromptu gathering, plays a significant role in managing Mr Trump’s businesses, along with his other adult children.

  Unlike other presidents, Mr Trump’s children are part of his transition team, which has been beset by problems since its inception.

• In Their Coastal Citadels, Democrats Argue Over What Went Wrong

  Republican America is now so vast that a traveler could drive 3,600 miles across the continent, from Key West, Fla., to the Canadian border crossing at Porthill, Idaho, without ever leaving a state under total GOP control.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Dunja Mijatović: Online threats of killing, rape and violence everyday reality for too many female journalists

  No job comes without sacrifices, but how many downgrading comments, criticism or even threats can one person take before it becomes too much?

  Just consider the experiences of a female journalist that I know:

  She had her phone number shared on dating websites, her email and other accounts were hacked, she received death threats on Skype, the website publishing her articles was hacked and a sex video was posted with the implication that she had participated in an orgy. Anonymous articles with lies about her and her family were also posted online.

  Imagine being forced to shut down your accounts on social media platforms because of such massive attacks with detailed images of rape and other forms of sexual violence.

  At one point, you would probably be inclined to ask yourself if it is really worth it. Is this a career I want to continue to pursue?

  In the past few years, more and more female journalists and bloggers have been forced to question their profession. Male journalists are also subject to hate speech and online abuse, but research findings suggest that female journalists face a disproportionate amount of gender-based threats and harassment on the internet. They are experiencing what Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, has described as a “double attack”: they are being targeted for being both a journalist and a woman.

  How do these attacks affect female journalists’ lives, their work and society in general? Journalists are used to being in the frontline of conflict and they often deal with difficult and even dangerous situations. But what if you cannot shield yourself from these threats? What if the frontline became your own doorstep, your office or your computer screen?

• European Union Orders British Press NOT to Report when Terrorists are Muslims

  So, according to the ECRI and scholars of Teesside University, when Muslim jihadists murder people and the press reports that killers are Muslims, the press, and not Islamists, is encouraging “Islamophobic incidents” in Britain. According to ECRI Chair Christian Ahlund, “It is no coincidence that racist violence is on the rise in the UK at the same time as we see worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech in the newspapers, online and even among politicians.”

• More dialogue needed on censorship: Singapore International Film Festival chief

  Yuni Hadi has been promoting independent Singapore films for many years. She has helmed the film programme at The Substation Centre for the Arts, creating milestone projects such as the annual Fly-by-Night Video Challenge and the Singapore Short Film Festival. She also helms Objectifs Films, a Singapore-based international film distributor. She is also the co-producer of award-winning Singapore film Ilo Ilo which saw its box-office takings in Singapore surge, after it attained international accolades.

  Today, she is executive director of the Singapore International Film Festival which takes place from No 23 to Dec 4.

  She went “On the Record” with 938LIVE’s Bharati Jagdish about censorship and growing the local film industry. They started by talking about the perceived bias against local content.

• Junk Scientist Greets Skepticism With Legal Threats, Sues Blogger For Criticizing Him And His Work

  There’s nothing those operating on the fringes of science hate more than people questioning their means, methods, and conclusions. To question is to be sued, unfortunately. Ken White has again fired up the Popehat signal in hopes of securing a skeptical blogger some legal assistance in fighting off a clearly bogus defamation suit by a junk scientist offended by the blogger’s dismantling of his junk science.

• Bhutan journalist hit by defamation suit for sharing Facebook post

  It is known as the land of gross national happiness, a country that puts contentment before the trappings of wealth and power. But discontent is growing in Bhutan after one of the country’s best-known journalists was hit with a defamation suit for sharing a story on Facebook.

  In a case that will test the boundaries of freedom of speech in the tiny Himalayan kingdom, independent journalist Namgay Zam, a former presenter on the state-run broadcaster Bhutan Broadcasting Service, faces imprisonment or a fine equivalent to 10 years’ salary if she is found guilty of defaming a prominent businessman.

• Rap star handed five YEARS in jail after Sharia court says his songs are blasphemous

  A Sharia court convicted the 29-year-old singer after he was banned from performing due to the nature of his music.

  Amir Tataloo’s fans reacted furiously to the news that he had been apprehended while walking down a street in the capital Tehran in August.

  He has been held in custody until his trial this week and will now be forced to endure physical punishment after defying the Ministry of Culture.

  According to reports Mr Tatoloo refused to leave the country he was born in and defied orders to stop performing.

• The Failure of Facebook Democracy

  In December of 2007, the legal theorist Cass R. Sunstein wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the filtering effects that frequently attend the spread of information on the Web. “As a result of the Internet, we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches—much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we’re likely to like,” Sunstein noted. In the piece, “The Polarization of Extremes,” Sunstein argued that the trend promised ill effects for the direction—or, more precisely, the misdirection—of public opinion. “If people are sorted into enclaves and niches, what will happen to their views?” he wondered. “What are the eventual effects on democracy?”

• It’s time to get rid of the Facebook “news feed,” because it’s not news

  In the wake of the US election, critics have blamed Facebook for bringing about—at least in part—Trump’s surprise win. A BuzzFeed report showed that Facebook users interacted far more with “fake news” stories about both candidates than they did with mainstream news outlets before the election. This wouldn’t seem like such a big deal if it weren’t for a Pew Research Center survey showing that 44% of Americans rely on Facebook to get all their news.

  But proving whether fake news influenced the election more than the usual political propaganda is impossible. What’s certain is that fake news on Facebook is a symptom of a larger problem: the company is trying to play contradictory roles as both trustworthy news publisher and fun social media platform for personal sharing. The problem is that it cannot be both—at least not without making some changes.

• James Woods Quits Twitter Over ‘Censorship’ of Alt-Right After Suing User Who Called Him a Coke Addict

• Actor James Woods quits Twitter, citing censorship

• ‘Buh-bye’: Twitter zaps ‘dramatic b*tch’ James Woods for quitting site over ‘censorship’ of racists

• I QUIT! James Woods to leave Twitter over alt-right ban and censorship

• Conservative Actor James Woods Quits Twitter Over Censorship Concerns

• He’s done! Fed-up James Woods bids Twitter a not-so-fond farewell over political censorship

• How attacking the alt-right only adds to the flames

  What blissful days these must be for the alt-right.

  Their preferred candidate for president is transitioning into the White House.

  Their champion, Steve Bannon, formerly CEO of the most mainstream media platform for alt-right voices on the internet, Breitbart.com, has secured a place in the West Wing at elbow’s length from the new president.

  And the conventional media seem to be stumbling around trying to decide whether to explain the alt-right, ignore it, censor it or refuse to even speak its name.

  Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, fears the very term “alt-right” is a sinister “branding move” to give cover to racists. Instead, he suggests journalists should use phrases such as “the alt-right, a white nationalist, anti-Semitic movement.”

• 60 percent of Russians think Internet censorship is necessary, poll finds

  Sixty percent of Russians believe that Internet censorship — in particular, the banning of certain websites and material — is necessary, according to a new poll.

  Just 25 percent opposed the idea; the rest of the respondents didn’t know or declined to answer.

  The poll was conducted by the Levada Center, an independent polling firm, which asked Russians questions about trust in media and censorship between Oct. 21 to 24. On the subject of political censorship, 32 percent of Russians said that denying access to certain websites would infringe upon the rights and freedoms of activists, while 44 percent said it did not and 24 percent could not answer.

• Russia starts blocking LinkedIn network

• U.S. says concerned over Russia blocking access to LinkedIn

• LinkedIn Blocked In Russia; Government Says It Threatens Russian Online Censorship Drive

Privacy/Surveillance

• Argentina Orders Telecoms To Create A Permanent Database Of All Mobile Phone Users

  Even one is a problem, for reasons that Edward Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang pointed out earlier this year: a mobile phone is “the perfect tracking device.” The new register may indeed help tackle the theft of mobile phones in Argentina. But it will also create a powerful and dangerous new resource that the authorities will surely be unable to resist dipping into for other purposes.

• Look Inside the Windowless New York Skyscraper Linked to the NSA

  Since publishing a story about an apparent National Security Agency surveillance site in New York, The Intercept has obtained several previously unseen photographs from within the building, offering a rare glimpse behind its thick concrete and granite walls.

  On Wednesday, we reported that top-secret documents indicate there is an NSA spy hub inside the massive, windowless skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, used by AT&T to route communications across the world. The 550-foot tower contains equipment that covertly monitors phone calls, faxes, and internet data, according to the documents. But with the exception of employees who have worked at the building, few people have ever been allowed inside the iconic brutalist structure, which was built to withstand a nuclear attack amid the Cold War.

  Stanley Greenberg, a 60-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, shared a series of photographs he took in September 1992 while visiting 33 Thomas Street. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks, security was not as tight. At the time, Greenberg was carrying out research for a book, Invisible New York, and AT&T granted him access. The photographs never made it into the book, but Greenberg revisited his photo archive this week and sent the pictures to The Intercept after reading the revelations about the building’s apparent role as an NSA site, code-named TITANPOINTE.

  [...]

  One of Greenberg’s photos (featured at the top of this article) clearly shows some of AT&T’s “4ESS switch” equipment that is used to send phone calls across networks. The NSA’s documents describe the TITANPOINTE facility as containing a “RIMROCK access,” which is what the agency calls the 4ESS switches that it taps into. By 2004, at least one of these was an “international gateway” used to route foreign calls to and from the U.S., a former AT&T engineer has said.

  Another photograph taken by Greenberg (below) shows a room full of large batteries, which were likely used as a back-up energy source for the building in the event of a power failure. Original planning documents for 33 Thomas Street state that it would have enough emergency power to last two weeks, enabling it to become a “self-contained city” in the event of a catastrophe.

  [...]

  Klein later moved to California, where he continued his work for AT&T. In 2006, he alleged in a sworn court declaration that the company had maintained a secure room in one of its San Francisco offices, which he stated had been equipped with NSA technology to spy on phone and internet traffic. Klein told The Intercept that he didn’t know of any NSA presence at 33 Thomas Street, but it did not surprise him to discover its apparent role as the TITANPOINTE surveillance site.

  “I always assumed and gathered information back then that there were numerous other offices like the one in San Francisco,” he said. “I was only aware of the ones on the West Coast, from talking to people. But logically I assumed there had to be some in places like New York or Chicago, the major telecom centers.”

• ‘National Bird’ Confronts Perils Of Becoming Drone Whistleblower

  President Barack Obama’s administration institutionalized a drone program that involves a targeted assassination policy for individuals put on kill lists. It not only devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in countries, like Afghanistan, but it traumatizes the military officers, who are part of the system which makes strikes possible. But for them, there is little to no support for the depression, suicidal ideations, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) they develop as a result of the horrible things they are asked to do.

  As the documentary, “National Bird,” shows, the officers struggle with the morality of their actions, but they face a presidential administration, which has criminalized more whistleblowers than all other previous presidential administrations combined. Officers who speak out about the drone program face the prospect of harsh prosecution under the Espionage Act, as if talking about what they saw as officers is treasonous. That weighs heavy on veterans of the drone program and makes them terrified to be labeled whistleblowers because they know how the government could destroy their lives if they become known to the public as whistleblowers.

• Law updating GCHQ’s power passes final hurdle in Parliament

  A new law giving GCHQ increased powers is set to become law.

  The Investigatory Powers Bill has been passed by peers in the House of Lords and there only remains some discussion of possible amendments in both houses of Parliament before Royal Assent by the Queen makes it law.

  Privacy campaigners have criticised the bill as ‘Snooper’s Charter II’ after the 2012 Draft Communications Bill which was blocked by Liberal Democrats in the coalition government.

• Trump’s CIA Director Pick Thinks Using Encryption ‘May Itself Be A Red Flag’

  Donald Trump announced on Friday that he’s chosen Congressman Mike Pompeo to run the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the premiere spy agency of the United States.

  Pompeo, a Republican lawmaker from Kansas and a former Army officer, has little-to-no experience in the world of intelligence (other than being part of the House Intelligence Committee), but he’s distinguished himself for being a strong supporter of mass surveillance and for thinking that using encryption, by itself, might be a sign that you’re a terrorist.

  “Forcing terrorists into encrypted channels, however, impedes their operational effectiveness by constraining the amount of data they can send and complicating transmission protocols, a phenomenon known in military parlance as virtual attrition,” Pompeo wrote in an op-ed published in January by The Wall Street Journal. “Moreover, the use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag.”

• TfL to track Tube users in stations by their MAC addresses

  Transport for London is to start a four week trial of reading Wi-Fi connection request data from London Underground passengers’ mobile phones.

  The trial, which will last four weeks from 21 November, “will help give TfL a more accurate understanding of how people move through stations, interchange between services and how crowding develops,” according to the transport authority.

  The idea is to develop a more accurate picture of how passengers make interchanges on the Tube network.

  Data available to TfL at present only records where people enter the London Underground and where they leave it, meaning figuring out their movements in between those points is a matter of educated guesswork.

• Local Muslims express concerns about Flynn being tabbed as NSA director

  The selection of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for National Security Adviser has local Muslim leaders concerned about what it could mean for their community members.

  There’s already been some talk of a Muslim registry under a Trump administration, but the appointment of Flynn is adding to the concerns of Muslims in south-central Wisconsin.

  Flynn has been outspoken in his opposition to radical Islam, but that is not the part that bothers local Muslim leaders.

  He’s also taken aim at the religion as a whole, tweeting in February – “Fear of Islam is RATIONAL.”

• NSA pick Flynn a critic of Muslim militancy, culture

  Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence officer who is Donald Trump’s pick to serve as his national security adviser, is a harsh critic of Muslim extremism and the religion itself, calling “radical Islam” an existential threat to the United States.

  In strident speeches and public comments, including a fiery address at the Republican National Convention, Flynn has aggressively argued that Islamic State militants pose a threat on a global scale and demanded a far more aggressive U.S. military campaign against the group.

• No Snoopers’ Charter – Donate

• Top US intelligence official: I submitted my resignation

• Clapper, US intel chief, resigns

• Intelligence Director James Clapper Resigns

• Next for the DNI

• Intelligence chief to leave as Trump arrives

• World Briefs: US spy chief resigns, to leave in January

• Trump weighs dismantling top spy agency: report

• Donald Trump Is Plotting to Eliminate a Cabinet-Level Position: Report

• Adm. Michael Rogers Leading Candidate to Be Trump’s Director of National Intelligence

• Donald Trump Hopes to Abolish Intelligence Chief Position, Reverse CIA Reforms

  Donald Trump’s national security team is discussing plans to dismantle the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the organization that was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, according to an adviser to the president-elect and a former senior intelligence official. The news comes as the current director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced his resignation Thursday.

  The Trump national security team has been meeting in recent days, planning the removal of the cabinet-level position and assessing how to fold parts of the organization into the 16 federal intelligence agencies it oversees, according to both people with knowledge of the plans. If the restructuring is accomplished, it would undo legislation passed by Congress in 2004, dismantle the biggest American intelligence bureaucracy created since the end of World War II, and roll back a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

• Police Just Found Phone & USB Stick Belonging To Paris Suicide Bomber, After Misplacing It For Almost Two Years

  Remember how, right after the Paris bombings, people started blaming encryption for the attacks, despite the fact it was later revealed that most of the planning was done in the open and communication occurred via unencrypted SMS messages? As we noted, it seemed pretty clear that the bombings were an intelligence and law enforcement failure rather than an encryption problem.

  Now, just to add more evidence to that conclusion in the most ridiculous way possible, apparently Brussels police just found a mobile phone and USB stick that had belonged to one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks, Brahim Abdeslam. The police had seized the phone and USB stick during a drug raid back in February of 2015… and promptly misplaced them entirely. They were found under a stack of papers. Really.

• Mystery death of former spy worker found drowned in bath with his front door unlocked

  A former GCHQ employee once suspended from work because of an “incident” was found drowned in his bath with his flat’s front door unlocked, an inquest heard.

  Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed any suicidal thoughts to those closest to him and was actively seeking a new job at the time of his death.

• SPY BATH DEATH RIDDLE Mystery surrounds case of GCHQ worker, 28, left face down in bath for up to three weeks

• Mystery surrounds the death of a former spy worker, 28, who was found drowned in the bath with his front door unlocked

  A former GCHQ worker who was looking for a new job was found drowned in his bath with the front door of his flat unlocked by his parents.

  Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed suicidal ideas and seemed ‘completely normal’ when he last saw his parents a couple of months ago, an inquest heard.

  They found him laying face-down in his bath when they went to his Cheltenham flat – near the spy base – on April 17 because they had been unable to contact him.

Civil Rights/Policing

• U.S. allowed Italian kidnap prosecution to shield higher-ups, ex-CIA officer says

  A former CIA officer has broken the U.S. silence around the 2003 abduction of a radical Islamist cleric in Italy, charging that the agency inflated the threat the preacher posed and that the United States then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from responsibility for approving the operation.

• New CIA Director Mike Pompeo on torture, Muslims, terror, Iran, NSA spying

  Pompeo on Guantanamo Bay:

  “GTMO has been a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism. I have traveled to GTMO and have seen the honorable and professional behavior of the American men and women in uniform, who serve at the detention facility,” Pompeo said in a statement on Nov. 18. “The detainees at GTMO are treated exceptionally well – so well that some have even declined to be resettled, instead choosing to stay at GTMO. It is delusional to think that any plan the president puts before Congress to relocate radical Islamic terrorists to the U.S, and potentially Fort Leavenworth Kansas, will make our country safer. The reality is that this proposal will ultimately put Kansans and Americans in danger.”

• Stopping Turnkey Tyranny: What The Obama Administration Can Do About The NSA On The Way Out

  Last week, I was a little unfair to our friends over at Fight for the Future in noting that it was too late for President Obama to “dismantle the NSA” as was suggested in a Time article written by FftF’s awesome campaign director Evan Greer. I was focusing on why the President should have limited the NSA much more seriously earlier on (like way earlier…), but some interpreted it to mean that I was suggesting that FftF had only just jumped on the bandwagon to stop mass surveillance. That’s clearly not true — as it’s been one of the leading voices in the fight to get the President to scale back mass surveillance since the group took on that issue many years ago.

• Barack Obama will not pardon Edward Snowden unless he goes to court – while Trump’s CIA pick wants him executed

  There is very little chance President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden before his final term is up – leaving his fate to an unforgiving Trump administration and an incoming CIA director who had called for his execution.

  Mr Snowden has lived in Russia since he leaked documents revealing a secret surveillance programme helmed by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies. The Department of Justice charged Mr Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

• Obama suggests Snowden pardon unlikely

• Obama: Pardon for Snowden Couldn’t Be Contemplated Until US Court Appearance

• Snowden Fields Questions at Pen Int’l Session Dedicated to Imprisoned Writers

• Amal Clooney told the UN they did nothing to help Isis sex slaves. Now she’s asking women to help instead

  After appearing before the United Nations for the first time and telling delegates she was “ashamed” to stand before them while they did nothing to prevent the rape and abuse of Yazidi women, Amal Clooney stood before a conference of women and urged them to join the fight for women’s rights in countries where they are most under threat.

  The renowned human rights lawyer gave the keynote speech at the Texas Conference for Women on Tuesday, where more than 100 leading women from different sectors also delivered talks.

  In September, Clooney condemned world leaders for their inaction over the persecution of the Yazidi community, a religious minority in northern Iraq who have been targeted by Isis. In her speech on Tuesday, Clooney spoke more about the plight of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was trafficked by Isis as a sex slave and now advocates on behalf of Yazidi women.

• Trump’s Choice For Attorney General Is A Fan Of “Civil Asset Forfeiture”

  Civil asset forfeiture is victimization by government — removing any possibility of a defense. It’s taking without any sort of proof of wrongdoing by the person whose money has been hoovered up by the government; it’s the antithesis of our legal standard, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

  It turns citizens who have been convicted of nothing into victims of greedy law enforcement workers and officials, who typically get to keep the proceeds or part of the proceeds from stopping somebody on the road who’s carrying some cash and declaring it the result of ill-gotten gains…sometimes simply because people who are in the drug trade use a road and sometimes without as much as a bullshit excuse like that.

• Jeff Sessions’ Nomination as Attorney General Alarms Civil Libertarians

  President-elect Donald Trump has nominated US Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to be his administration’s attorney general, a move that civil liberties advocates are decrying as a likely catastrophe for privacy and immigration.

  While many of Trump’s forthcoming nominations will amount to little more than inside-the-Beltway gossip, Sessions stands out. He’s an advocate for surveillance and an enemy of encryption; an opponent of criminal justice reform; and a hardliner on immigration. First elected to the US Senate in 1996, he has long stood to the right even among his conservative Republican colleagues as a champion of security above all. As Attorney General, Sessions would have the power to radically recast the Obama administration’s definition of civil liberties online and off.

  The Senate Judiciary Committee must still approve Sessions’ nomination. But civil rights groups are already sounding the alarm over the possibility that he could become the most powerful law enforcement officer in the land. Sessions’ track record also suggest he’s also going to find himself at sharp odds with the tech industry’s liberal and libertarian-leaning leadership.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Facebook’s detailed open-source maps show the gaps in global internet connectivity

  The open-source maps were created in collaboration with the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network and World Bank statistics to create datasets that incorporate population demographics, infrastructure development and existing internet penetration to identify the connectivity gaps and how to fix them. Making them open source means NGOs, innovators or companies can access them. They plan to release more maps over the coming months.

• Say good-bye to net neutrality

  In the wake of a Donald Trump’s upset victory, telecom industry players are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of eviscerating Barack Obama’s fledgling net neutrality rules.

  It was one of the crowning achievements of Obama’s administration when the FCC passed rules that barred broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic, or providing paid “fast lanes” for select content. The rules enshrined the principal that all data traveling through ISPs’ pipes had to be treated equally.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Tech Companies Urge Trump To Protect DMCA Safe Harbors

    Donald Trump isn’t in the White House yet is but already under pressure from people hoping to benefit from his influence. Among them Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which have written to the president-elect hoping that he’ll uphold the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA to prevent service providers from being held liable for user-uploaded content.

  • Librarians, Archivists, Call On WIPO Members To Create Safe Harbour Against Copyright Liability

    The age of digitisation has opened new doors to distribution of information including for libraries and archives. However, librarians and archivists are often confronted with risk of liability for copyright infringement, nationally and in cross-border activities. This week, they asked the World Intellectual Property Organization copyright committee to provide them not only with some exceptions to copyright, but with protection against liability.