Hundreds of Syrian and Turkish protesters hold anti-Russia demonstration against bombardment of northwest Syria.

More than 1,000 celebrities, government employees and politicians recognized in the U.K.'s traditional New Year's Honours list this year "have had their home and work addresses posted on a government website," reports the Guradian. Shimbo (Slashdot reader #100,005) quotes their report: The accidental disclosure of the tranche of personal details is likely to be considered a significant security breach, particularly as senior police and Ministry of Defence staff were among those whose addresses were made public. Many of the more than a dozen Ministry of Defence employees and senior counter-terrorism officers who received honours had their home addresses revealed, along with countless others who may believe the disclosure has put them in a vulnerable position. Prominent public figures including the musician Elton John, the cricketer Ben Stokes, NHS England's chief executive, Simon Stevens, the politicians Iain Duncan Smith and Diana Johnson, TV chef Nadiya Hussain, and the former director of public prosecutions Alison Saunders were among those whose home addresses were published... The vast majority of people on the list had their house numbers, street names and postcodes included. The director of the non-profit privacy group Big Brother Watch expressed concerns to the Guardian that the government "doesn't have a basic grip on data protection, and that people receiving some of the highest honours have been put at risk because of this. "It's a farcical and inexcusable mistake, especially given the new Data Protection Act passed by the government last year -- it clearly can't stick by its rules."

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BTW, for reference, here's a screen shot of the home page for Radio. See where we put the place to enter a new post? Right in the middle of the top page. The easiest place to get back to. See the menu at the top of the page. It's the same menu on every page. It gets you to the full functionality which included (in 2002) an RSS feed reader. How did we get there? Factoring. Over and over. Until it was logically organized for the person who we were designing it for. Full functionality doesn't have to be a maze for users, if you put the effort in.

'Yellow vests' join rally of several thousand people against French government's planned pensions shake-up.

"A Michigan woman got the Secret Santa gift of a lifetime this Christmas -- an 81-pound package from Bill Gates," reports CNN: The gifts included an original manuscript of "The Great Gatsby," signed by Gates; books; toys for her cat and Harry Potter and "Twin Peaks" memorabilia, according to her post on RedditGifts.com. It arrived in a box lit up inside by Christmas lights... "It's well documented that Bill Gates has been participating for years, but I never, ever thought he would be my Secret Santa," Shelby said. "It's really surprising." A spokesperson for Reddit confirmed that Gates sent the package. The billionaire has participated in the exchange since 2013... When she showed up at the FedEx office the next day to pick up the package, she said the employees were excited, shouting "You're the Bill Gates package!" according to her post.

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Political newcomer's appointment comes as country grapples with protest movement demanding systemic change.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: A North Carolina couple was watching a movie in their bedroom when they suddenly heard loud noises coming from downstairs. Worried that it was an intruder, the two called 911. The couple waited for police to arrive, hoping their 2-year-old daughter sleeping in her room wouldn't get up to check on the noise, said Thomas Milam, the husband, in his Facebook post shared to Forsyth County Sheriff's Office's page... Minutes after they called 911, police entered the home and began to search for an intruder. When the 911 operator told Milam to go downstairs to talk to the police, he said, the officers just had one question. "Is this Roomba yours?" Police had apprehended the suspect: the couple's brand new robotic vacuum. Milam said in the Facebook post that the vacuum had turned itself on in the night and gotten stuck in the hallway, where it had been repeatedly banging against the walls and making the sounds the Milams feared was an intruder.

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In October the Register reported that 20 Stack Exchange moderators had distanced themselves from the geeky Q&A site to protest policy changes and the removal of moderator Monica Cellio "over alleged violations of as-yet unpublished Code of Conduct changes." Cellio just posted an update to the GoFundMe page where she'd raised $25,314 for legal action -- a new announcement from Stack Overflow: Stack Overflow and Monica Cellio have come to an agreement. We believe that Ms. Cellio was not acting with malicious intent. We believe she did not understand all of the nuances and full intent and meaning of our Code of Conduct and was confused about what actions it required and forbade. We acknowledge our responses to her requests for clarification were not satisfactory. The verbiage in our Code of Conduct could have been more explicitly detailed about what was expected. We always valued Ms. Cellio's contributions to the community and respect her intelligence, integrity, and professional writing skills. While our initial statement did not address her specifically, we regret that we used her name when responding to a reporter's follow-up. We regret any damage to Ms. Cellio's reputation and any other damage she may have suffered. We have since updated some of our policies and processes to help ensure we are more careful in our public communications, and that there is a clearer process anytime a moderator's status is revoked as well as a process for reinstatement. We respect Ms. Cellio and believe she is a good person with much to offer and contribute. We sincerely hope she remains an active member of our community. In recognition of the mistakes that led us here, we invited Ms. Cellio to apply for possible reinstatement on all six sites following our new reinstatement process. Ms. Cellio expressed concerns about the new process and has not applied." That announcement was also published at Meta.StackExchange.com -- where it's been downvoted 886 times. At GoFundMe, Cellio posted only that "No further donations are needed. Thank you everybody for your support!" And she plans to honor earlier pledges to donate all funds raised in excess of costs to The Trevor Project, "an organization providing crisis-intervention services to LGBTQ+ youth and related resources to everyone."

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Ukraine president says exchange should take place on Sunday but details of the planned swap are scarce.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters' reports on some more bad news for the Geneva-based Libra Association: Facebook's Libra project has failed in its current form and needs reworking to be approved, said the president of Switzerland where the cryptocurrency is seeking regulatory consent. "I don't think (Libra has a chance in its current form), because central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it," Ueli Maurer, who is Switzerland's finance minister and outgoing president, told Swiss broadcaster SRF. "The project, in this form, has thus failed," he added in an interview. Libra did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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DevNull127 writes: The Debian Project has announced the results of its vote on how much to support non-systemd init systems. The eight options voted on included "Focus on systemd" and "Support for multiple init systems is required" (as well as milder choices like "Support for multiple init systems is Important" and "Support non-systemd systems, without blocking progress.") The winning option? "Systemd but we support exploring alternatives." Here's the position for the Debian project described by that option: The Debian project recognizes that systemd service units are the preferred configuration for describing how to start a daemon/service. However, Debian remains an environment where developers and users can explore and develop alternate init systems and alternatives to systemd features. Those interested in exploring such alternatives need to provide the necessary development and packaging resources to do that work. Technologies such as elogind that facilitate exploring alternatives while running software that depends on some systemd interfaces remain important to Debian. It is important that the project support the efforts of developers working on such technologies where there is overlap between these technologies and the rest of the project, for example by reviewing patches and participating in discussions in a timely manner. Packages should include service units or init scripts to start daemons and services. Packages may use any systemd facility at the package maintainer's discretion, provided that this is consistent with other Policy requirements and the normal expectation that packages shouldn't depend on experimental or unsupported (in Debian) features of other packages. Packages may include support for alternate init systems besides systemd and may include alternatives for any systemd-specific interfaces they use. Maintainers use their normal procedures for deciding which patches to include. Debian is committed to working with derivatives that make different choices about init systems. As with all our interactions with downstreams, the relevant maintainers will work with the downstreams to figure out which changes it makes sense to fold into Debian and which changes remain purely in the derivative.

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Chief of parliament in Libya's east says Turkey's willingness to dispatch troops would amount to breach of sovereignty.

Every time I write about what's missing in blogging software, as I did a few days ago, someone tells me about Gutenberg, and how that's the solution to the problem I've identified.

I've never used Gutenberg, so I want to keep an open mind, even though I'm pretty sure that Gutenberg, even if it's great, is not the answer to the problem I keep seeing with WordPress, have been seeing since its inception. The problem is flow. Let me explain.

I have an idea for a post. How many steps is it before I'm writing what I'm thinking. The more steps, and the less memorable they are, the more likely it is that I will either forget the idea before I start writing, or decide not to detour because it takes too much time to record it.

OK, that's the preamble, now let me record the steps that I have to take to create a new blog post in WordPress. I disclaim I am far from an everyday WordPress user. But I have posted a lot of stuff to various WordPress blogs I have over the years. I am not a neophyte.

1. I'm at the main page of my website, called Unberkeley. Here's a screen shot. Show me where it says New Post. It isn't there, even this is the first thing everyone wants to do when they come here.
2. I clicked on WP Admin, which turns out to be the correct guess. I must've been here before? Or maybe I'm just lucky. Screen shot. (BTW, imho this is not the WP-Admin page. That would be a page for a system manager, not a writer. No writer is going to seem themselves as an admin, nor should they. This betrays a perspective, imho an incorrect one.)
3. On this page is a Quick Draft section. I will enter the text of my post there and give it a title as the form requests I do. I like how the Content area expands to the size of the text I entered. Much better than adding a vertical scroll bar. Here's a screen shot of the Quick Draft area before I click on Save Draft.
4. Now my post is in the Your Recent Drafts list. Clearly it has not been posted, nor is there any indication of how to post it. I'm guessing I should click on its title and see what I can do from there.
5. Now I'm at the Edit Post page. Imho this page should be directly linked in big bold letters from the home page of the editorial control panel. This page should be the easiest page to get to. This page also has the Publish button which I will now press.
6. I would have expected it'd take me to the published page and it would have a big Edit This Page button on it in case I see anything that needs fixing. This is where it takes me instead. But there is a Permalink on the page. I'm going to try clicking that. And sure enough now I am at the published post.

If you accept the premise that publishing a post is the Hello World of blogging software, as I believe based on 25 years experience, there is a method to straigntening this out. You go through the list above and start eliminating steps, moving the New Post functionality closer and closer to the top and making it more obvious in every step.

BTW, there is a very small Edit link on the page, presumably because I'm the author and am logged in. Clicking on it takes me to a page I've not seen before. A much nicer-looking post-editing page. I think this should be the home page of the editing function. But even this isnt Gutenberg apparently. There's a prompt at the bottom of the page asking me to try the new block editor to level up your layout. If this is the elusive Gutenberg, they might say so. If you're going to use that as its name publicly the software should use it too. And for crying out loud there is nothing for me to click to try the new block editor. I can get Info or learn more. I just want to try it. Help.

So I click on the More info button and twice it confirms that I am ready to try Blocks. I have to convert the post it warns. OK, since it's just a test post, what the heck. First I have to page through a listicle-like tutorial. And when I get there damn if it doesn't look just like it did before. I don't know why this is so momentous. I'm going to come back to this in my next visit.

Flow is the writer's problem for blogging. I have been working on this since I started in 1994. I solved the problem for myself in 1997, and ever since I've been working on solving it for everyone else. Had WordPress designers simply looked at Radio UserLand, shipped in 2002, and copied its menu structure, they would have had a much better flowing blog platform. But since then Facebook and Twitter have matched or bettered Radio in flow. There's a new benchmark. WordPress appears oblivious. So no I don't think Gutenberg, which is a new text editor for WordPress, is the answer. It is the answer to other problems, how to mix text and other elements in a blog post. Certainly a good thing to do. But WordPress imho remains the klunky monolith that it always has been.

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Spotify announced Friday that it will suspend political advertising on its platform next year, making it the latest in a series of tech and social media platforms to publicly address how it will handle content targeting voters. The music streaming company said that its decision was made because it does not yet have the means to screen political advertising content. "At this point in time, we do not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our processes, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content. We will reassess this decision as we continue to evolve our capabilities," a spokesperson said in a statement to media outlets. The move by Spotify, which was first reported by AdAge, comes after a wave of backlash against Facebook, which said it would not fact check content in political ads... Twitter also committed to stop accepting political ads in a stance against "forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people." And Google has said it will restrict the way political advertisers can target specific audiences.

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They claim Kurdish party HDP has been forcibly recruiting or luring their children and relatives to fight for the outlawed group.