An anonymous reader quotes The Register: Late last month, open-source contributor Raymond Nicholson proposed a change to the manual for glibc, the GNU implementation of the C programming language's standard library, to remove "the abortion joke," which accompanied the explanation of libc's abort() function... The joke, which has been around since the 1990s and is referred to as a censorship joke by those supporting its inclusion, reads as follows: 25.7.4 Aborting a Program... Future Change Warning: Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program. On April 30, the proposed change was made, removing the passage from the documentation. That didn't sit well with a number of people involved in the glibc project, including the joke's author, none other than Free Software Foundation president and firebrand Richard Stallman, who argued that the removal of the joke qualified as censorship... Carlos O'Donnell, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, recommended avoiding jokes altogether, a position supported by many of those weighing in on the issue. Among those voicing opinions, a majority appears to favor removal. But in a post to the project mailing list, Stallman wrote "Please do not remove it. GNU is not a purely technical project, so the fact that this is not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this." He added later that I exercise my authority over glibc very rarely -- and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous. But that is not the case. On this particular question, I made a decision long ago and stated it where all of you could see it." The Register reports that "On Monday, the joke was restored by project contributor Alexandre Oliva, having taken Stallman's demand as approval to do so."

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Iraq will be caught in the middle of the anti-Iran approach the US is adopting, analysts say.

I got the response from Lexis/Nexis re the mapping of radio.weblogs.com, doc.weblogs.com and scoble.weblogs.com. Here's what they said.

• "During a recent security audit related to the GDPR, we removed the DNS entries for doc.weblogs.com, radio.weblogs.com , and scoble.weblogs.com . We had concerns about cross-domain issues such as cookie sharing, along with general concerns about having subdomains that were not under our control. At this point, the only suggestion we can make is for you to update the links on scripting.com to point to the newer domain names that are under your control."

Of course it's not just links from scripting.com that are broken. Radio UserLand was a large early blogging community. All links into blogs from that community are broken too.

The sites are still on the web, but at this address:

• http://radio-weblogs.com/

That isn't going to change in the immediate future.

Also thanks to Automattic for hosting the archive of the Radio UserLand sites.

Doc Searls an old radio guy wrote about podcasting in the same month of September 2004. He followed this with another piece in October, explaining that podcasting is not radio. October was an incredible month, lots of adoption, new aggregators, tools, an audio version of weblogs.com, and signs of the grief that was about to happen, starting to happen.

Cutting Nasa's research jeopardises the ability to measure climate change progress, a journal reveals.

Three assailants on the run after killing an imam during midday prayers and critically wounding two other victims.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers have introduced legislation that would block the federal government from requiring technology companies to design devices with so-called "back doors" to allow law enforcement to access them. From a report: The bill represents the latest effort by lawmakers in Congress to wade into the battle between federal law enforcement officials and tech companies over encryption, which reached a boiling point in 2015 as the FBI tussled with Apple over a locked iPhone linked to the San Bernardino terror attack case. Top FBI and Justice Department officials have repeatedly complained that they have been unable to access devices for ongoing criminal investigations because of encryption. FBI Director Christopher Wray has suggested that devices could be designed to allow investigators to access them, though he insists the bureau is not looking for a "back door." The bipartisan bill introduced Thursday would prohibit federal agencies from requiring or requesting that firms "design or alter the security functions in its product or service to allow the surveillance of any user of such product or service, or to allow the physical search of such product" by the government.

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Mahathir Mohamad, 92, makes a stunning comeback by ousting the ruling party he used to lead.

Build.PL install path logic made easy

Noura Hussein, 19, was forced by her parents to marry her cousin three years ago, activists say.

The White House has set up a new task force dedicated to US artificial intelligence efforts, the Trump administration announced today during an event with technology executives, government leaders, and AI experts. From a report: The news and the event, which was organized by the federal government, are both moves to further the country's AI development, as other regions like Europe and Asia ramp up AI investment and R&D as well. The administration will be further investing in AI, deputy CTO of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios said at the event. "To realize the full potential of AI for the American people, it will require the combined efforts of industry, academia, and government," Kratsios said, according to FedScoop. According to the Trump administration, the federal government has increased its investment in unclassified R&D for AI by 40 percent since 2015. In his speech, Kratsios highlighted ways the US could improve AI advancement, such as robotics startups in Pittsburgh that are models for how to spur job growth in areas hurt by workplace automation. Startups like those now hire engineers, scientists, bookkeepers, and administrators, he said, and are evidence that AI does not necessarily mean massive unemployment is on the horizon. Further reading: The White House says a new AI task force will protect workers and keep America first (MIT Tech Review).

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Thursday's early voting did not include the popular mobilisation units, but there are hopes that the successful merger of factions on the battlefield can be translated into cooperation in the political arena.

Health minister confirms first death from Ebola outbreak in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Analysts dispute significance of Hezbollah's gains at the expense of Saad Hariri's party as poll fever cools.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: A survey compiled last month at the RSA security conference reveals that most companies are still behind with proper security practices, and some of them even intentionally ignore security flaws for various reasons ranging from lack of time to lack of know-how. The survey, which compiled answers from 155 security professionals from the companies present at the RSA conference, revealed that only 47% of organizations patch vulnerabilities as soon as they are known. Most worrisome is that some companies wait quite some time before applying patches, exposing their IT infrastructure to attacks. More precisely, 16% wait for one month, while 8% said they only apply patches once or twice a year.

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