WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U. S. Supreme Court on Thursday rec­og­nized about half of Oklahoma as Native American reser­va­tion land and over­turned a tribe mem­ber’s rape con­vic­tion be­cause the lo­ca­tion where the crime was com­mit­ted should have been con­sid­ered out­side the reach of state crim­i­nal law.

The jus­tices ruled 5-4 in fa­vor of a man named Jimcy McGirt and agreed that the site of the rape should have been rec­og­nized as part of a reser­va­tion based on the his­tor­i­cal claim of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation - be­yond the ju­ris­dic­tion of state au­thor­i­ties.

The de­ci­sion means that for the first time much of east­ern Oklahoma is legally con­sid­ered reser­va­tion land. More than 1.8 mil­lion peo­ple live in the land at is­sue, in­clud­ing roughly 400,000 in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s sec­ond-largest city.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the rul­ing, join­ing the court’s four lib­er­als in the ma­jor­ity.

Gorsuch ref­er­enced the com­plex his­tor­i­cal record that started with the forced re­lo­ca­tion by the U. S. gov­ern­ment of Native Americans, in­clud­ing the Creek Nation, to Oklahoma in a trau­matic 19th cen­tury event known as the “trail of tears.” At the time, the U.S. gov­ern­ment pledged that the new land would be theirs in per­pe­tu­ity.

“Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised re­mains an Indian reser­va­tion for pur­poses of fed­eral crim­i­nal law. Because Congress has not said oth­er­wise, we hold the gov­ern­ment to its word,” Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch re­jected the state’s ar­gu­ments, which he said would re­quire turn­ing a “blind eye” to the fed­eral gov­ern­men­t’s past promises.

In a joint state­ment, the state, the Creek Nation and the other four of what is known as the “Five Tribes” of Oklahoma said they were mak­ing “substantial progress” to­ward an agree­ment on shared ju­ris­dic­tion that they would pre­sent to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. The other tribes are the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole.

“The Nations and the state are com­mit­ted to im­ple­ment­ing a frame­work of shared ju­ris­dic­tion that will pre­serve sov­er­eign in­ter­ests and rights to self-gov­ern­ment while af­firm­ing ju­ris­dic­tional un­der­stand­ings, pro­ce­dures, laws and reg­u­la­tions that sup­port pub­lic safety, our econ­omy and pri­vate prop­erty rights,” the state­ment said.

Unless changes are made, tribe mem­bers who live within the bound­aries would now be­come ex­empt from cer­tain state oblig­a­tions such as pay­ing state taxes, while cer­tain Native Americans found guilty in state courts would be able to chal­lenge their con­vic­tions on ju­ris­dic­tional grounds. The tribe also may ob­tain more power to reg­u­late al­co­hol sales and ex­pand casino gam­bling.

The rul­ing voided McGirt’s sen­tence of 1,000 years in prison but he could face a new trial in fed­eral court rather than state court.

Under U. S. law, tribe mem­bers who com­mit crimes on tribal land can­not be pros­e­cuted in state courts and in­stead are sub­ject to fed­eral pros­e­cu­tion, which some­times can be ben­e­fi­cial to de­fen­dants. Reservations were es­tab­lished be­gin­ning in the 19th cen­tury af­ter U.S. au­thor­i­ties ex­pelled Native Americans from their tra­di­tional lands.

McGirt, 71, has served more than two decades in prison af­ter be­ing con­victed in 1997 in Wagoner County in east­ern Oklahoma of rape, lewd mo­lesta­tion and forcible sodomy of a 4-year-old girl. McGirt, who did not con­test his guilt in the case be­fore the jus­tices, had ap­pealed a 2019 rul­ing by a state ap­peals court in fa­vor of Oklahoma.

McGirt is a mem­ber of the Seminole Nation. The crime oc­curred on land his­tor­i­cally claimed by the Creek Nation.

At is­sue was whether the Muscogee (Creek) Nation ter­ri­tory where the crime was com­mit­ted should be con­sid­ered a Native American reser­va­tion or whether Congress elim­i­nated that sta­tus around the time Oklahoma be­came a state in 1907.

Oklahoma ar­gued that the Creek Nation never had a reser­va­tion. But even if one ex­isted, the state and President Donald Trump’s ad­min­is­tra­tion ar­gued, it long ago was elim­i­nated by Congress.

A reser­va­tion is land man­aged by a tribe un­der the fed­eral Bureau of Indian Affairs and gen­er­ally ex­empt from state ju­ris­dic­tion.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U. S. Supreme Court on Thursday rec­og­nized about half of Oklahoma as Native American reser­va­tion land and over­turned a tribe mem­ber’s rape con­vic­tion be­cause the lo­ca­tion where the crime was com­mit­ted should have been con­sid­ered out­side the reach of state crim­i­nal law.

The jus­tices ruled 5-4 in fa­vor of a man named Jimcy McGirt and agreed that the site of the rape should have been rec­og­nized as part of a reser­va­tion based on the his­tor­i­cal claim of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation - be­yond the ju­ris­dic­tion of state au­thor­i­ties. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the court’s four lib­er­als in the ma­jor­ity.

The rul­ing means that for the first time much of east­ern Oklahoma is legally con­sid­ered reser­va­tion land. More than 1.8 mil­lion peo­ple live in the land at is­sue, in­clud­ing roughly 400,000 in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s sec­ond-largest city.

Tribe mem­bers who live within the bound­aries are now set to be­come ex­empt from cer­tain state oblig­a­tions such as pay­ing state taxes, while cer­tain Native Americans found guilty in state courts may be able to chal­lenge their con­vic­tions on ju­ris­dic­tional grounds. The tribe also may ob­tain more power to reg­u­late al­co­hol sales and ex­pand casino gam­bling.

The rul­ing could af­fect the other four of the “Five Tribes” in Oklahoma: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole tribes.

The rul­ing voided McGirt’s sen­tence of 1,000 years in prison but he could face a new trial in fed­eral court rather than state court.

Under U. S. law, tribe mem­bers who com­mit crimes on tribal land can­not be pros­e­cuted in state courts and in­stead are sub­ject to fed­eral pros­e­cu­tion, which some­times can be ben­e­fi­cial to de­fen­dants. Reservations were es­tab­lished be­gin­ning in the 19th cen­tury af­ter U.S. au­thor­i­ties ex­pelled Native Americans from their tra­di­tional lands.

McGirt, 71, has served more than two decades in prison af­ter be­ing con­victed in 1997 in Wagoner County in east­ern Oklahoma of rape, lewd mo­lesta­tion and forcible sodomy of a 4-year-old girl. McGirt, who did not con­test his guilt in the case be­fore the jus­tices, had ap­pealed a 2019 rul­ing by a state ap­peals court in fa­vor of Oklahoma.

McGirt is a mem­ber of the Seminole Nation. The crime oc­curred on land his­tor­i­cally claimed by the Creek Nation.

At is­sue was whether the Muscogee (Creek) Nation ter­ri­tory where the crime was com­mit­ted should be con­sid­ered a Native American reser­va­tion or whether Congress elim­i­nated that sta­tus around the time Oklahoma be­came a state in 1907.

Oklahoma ar­gued that the Creek Nation never had a reser­va­tion. But even if one ex­isted, the state and President Donald Trump’s ad­min­is­tra­tion ar­gued it long ago was elim­i­nated by Congress.

The jus­tices weighed a com­plex his­tor­i­cal record that started with the forced re­lo­ca­tion by the U. S. gov­ern­ment of Native Americans, in­clud­ing the Creek Nation, to Oklahoma in a trau­matic 19th cen­tury event known as the “trail of tears.”

A reser­va­tion is land man­aged by a tribe un­der the fed­eral Bureau of Indian Affairs and gen­er­ally ex­empt from state ju­ris­dic­tion in­clud­ing tax­a­tion.

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The Linux Mint pro­ject has made good on pre­vi­ous threats to ac­tively pre­vent Ubuntu Snap pack­ages from be­ing in­stalled through the APT pack­age-man­age­ment sys­tem with­out the user’s con­sent. This move is the re­sult of “major wor­ries” from Linux Mint on Snap’s im­pact with re­gard to user choice and soft­ware free­dom. Ubuntu’s par­ent com­pany, Canonical, seems open to find­ing a so­lu­tion to sat­isfy the pop­u­lar dis­tri­b­u­tion’s con­cerns — but it too has in­ter­ests to con­sider.

The Linux Mint dis­tri­b­u­tion is based on Debian and Ubuntu, pro­vid­ing over 30,000 pack­ages from these pro­jects. These pack­ages are pro­vided us­ing the well-known APT pack­ag­ing sys­tem used by both up­stream dis­tri­b­u­tions. Ubuntu, how­ever, in 2014 started dis­trib­ut­ing soft­ware in par­al­lel to APT us­ing a tech­nol­ogy called Snap.

Snap is a self-con­tained pack­age-de­ploy­ment sys­tem de­signed to make it eas­ier to man­age de­pen­den­cies of an ap­pli­ca­tion in a Linux en­vi­ron­ment. Developed by Canonical, Snap is de­signed so that its pack­ages con­tain all of the spe­cific de­pen­den­cies a soft­ware pack­age needs to run, bun­dled into a sin­gle filesys­tem im­age. This al­lows a soft­ware pack­age to run on a sys­tem that has oth­er­wise in­com­pat­i­ble ver­sions of needed li­braries, or even to have two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of a sin­gle soft­ware pack­age with dif­fer­ent de­pen­den­cies eas­ily co­ex­ist on a sin­gle ma­chine. Essentially, it al­lows one pack­age to be cre­ated per ar­chi­tec­ture that can run on any com­mon Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion.

The tech­nol­ogy solves im­por­tant pack­age-man­age­ment prob­lems for Canonical and Ubuntu. It also has a strate­gic busi­ness value, as it al­lows Canonical-managed soft­ware to be in­stalled on a com­pet­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion. The tech­nol­ogy prob­lem Canonical wants to solve is to sim­plify sup­port for soft­ware pack­ages, such as Chromium, across the mul­ti­ple ver­sions of Ubuntu. Relying strictly on APT re­quires in­de­pen­dent pack­ages to be main­tained for each Ubuntu ver­sion, since var­i­ous Ubuntu re­leases ship with dif­fer­ent and po­ten­tially in­com­pat­i­ble li­braries. This rep­re­sents a large work­load that Canonical would rather not deal with, and to which Snap pro­vides an el­e­gant tech­ni­cal so­lu­tion.

From a busi­ness per­spec­tive, wide­spread adop­tion of Snap as a uni­ver­sal pack­age-dis­tri­b­u­tion tech­nol­ogy would put Canonical in a strong po­si­tion to con­trol Linux soft­ware dis­tri­b­u­tion. This fact is not lost by Canonical’s com­pe­ti­tion — Red Hat sup­ports a sim­i­lar Flatpak tech­nol­ogy. Unlike Snap, how­ever, the Flatpak pro­ject aims to be an in­de­pen­dent com­mu­nity and a “true up­stream open source pro­ject, ded­i­cated to pro­vid­ing tech­nol­ogy and ser­vices that can be used by all, with no ven­dor lock-in.”

The prob­lems with Linux Mint came to a head when Ubuntu moved Chromium to Snap dis­tri­b­u­tion in Ubuntu 19.10. On the sur­face, that is­n’t a prob­lem in and of it­self — the Linux Mint pro­ject can al­ways start pro­vid­ing its own Chromium APT pack­ages. The prob­lem was the de­ci­sion to change the Ubuntu APT pack­age it­self up­stream in Ubuntu. Previously, that pack­age would sim­ply in­stall Chromium di­rectly. With the change, it would in­stead in­stall the Snap pack­age-man­age­ment tools first and then in­stall the Snap equiv­a­lent of the Chromium pack­age — with­out mak­ing it clear to the user what was hap­pen­ing.

This be­hav­ior is­n’t lim­ited to Chromium ei­ther, Canonical is

us­ing this ap­proach on other pack­ages as well, such as  . This de­ci­sion to use APT to in­stall a sec­ondary, com­mer­cially-con­trolled pack­age-man­age­ment sys­tem, which then in­stalls the soft­ware the user wanted, is the cen­ter of the con­tro­versy with Linux Mint. As was re­ported on the Linux Mint blog when the Chromium change was made:

The re­cent de­ci­sion by the Linux Mint pro­ject is­n’t about Chromium or any sin­gle pack­age, but rather about the en­tire ap­proach Canonical is tak­ing to Snap and APT. Snap pack­ages are ef­fec­tively black-boxes; they can­not be re­pro­duced in­de­pen­dently as the pack­ag­ing data is con­trolled by the pack­age maker alone. Further, the Snap pack­age man­ager is locked into Canonical’s li­brary (called the Snap Store) so in­de­pen­dent third-party Snap repos­i­to­ries aren’t cur­rently an op­tion, ei­ther. While Snap pack­ages can be down­loaded and in­stalled from other sources man­u­ally, do­ing so re­quires pass­ing along a rather omi­nous flag.

According to Canonical Engineering Manager Ken VanDine, the de­ci­sion to re­place APT pack­ages with Snap is dri­ven by ef­fi­ciency, and to ap­ply pres­sure in ways ben­e­fi­cial to Canonical. Regarding mov­ing the

APT pack­age to Snap, VanDine said:

So while the Linux Mint pro­ject took ac­tion specif­i­cally when Ubuntu’s de­ci­sion im­pacted the pop­u­lar pack­age, it seems this was more of the tip­ping point for the pro­ject than an iso­lated con­cern. According to the pro­ject, these moves from Canonical “could re­duce ac­cess to free (as in beer) soft­ware and free (as in free­dom) soft­ware.” It was­n’t a sud­den de­ci­sion ei­ther — a year ago the Linux Mint pro­ject wanted to find a rea­son­able so­lu­tion to the prob­lem by work­ing with Canonical, how­ever noth­ing seems to have come of those con­ver­sa­tions. In fact, it is un­clear if any con­ver­sa­tions hap­pened at all.

What is known is that, when Ubuntu 20.04 was re­leased a year later, the APT pack­age that in­stalled Chromium still in­stalled the Snap ver­sion with­out the con­sent (or nec­es­sar­ily even knowl­edge) of the user. In re­sponse, the Linux Mint pro­ject made good on its pre­vi­ous threat; start­ing with Linux Mint 20 “Chromium won’t be an empty pack­age which in­stalls snapd be­hind your back. It will be an empty pack­age which tells you why it’s empty and tells you where to look to get Chromium your­self.” In ad­di­tion, Linux Mint 20′s APT pack­age man­ager “will for­bid snapd from get­ting in­stalled.” The pro­ject does­n’t ap­pear to be out­right for­bid­ding users from us­ing Snap if they want to, but do­ing so would re­quire ex­plicit

ac­tion from the user as “by de­fault APT won’t al­low repos­i­tory pack­ages [to in­stall Snap] on your be­half.” Presumably this ap­plies to any pack­age that Ubuntu has mi­grated to Snap up­stream — in­clud­ing both and .

It ap­pears the de­ci­sion had an ef­fect, and prompted Canonical to at least dis­cuss a change in course

ac­cord­ing to re­cent re­port­ing by ZDNet. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Canonical, quoted by ZDNet, said:

Canonical’s com­mu­nity man­ager for Ubuntu en­gi­neer­ing ser­vices, Alan Pope, pro­vided a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion specif­i­cally for the mi­gra­tion of Chromium to Snap. The jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, how­ever, did­n’t cite the idea of keep­ing “pressure” ex­pressed by VanDine re­gard­ing other pack­ages like  :

It will be in­ter­est­ing to see what if any­thing comes out of this to fa­cil­i­tate a res­o­lu­tion be­tween the par­ties. In its blog posts, Linux Mint has men­tioned var­i­ous changes to Snap, such as al­low­ing third-par­ties to run in­de­pen­dent Snap pack­age servers, that might help get to a so­lu­tion. As the pro­ject wrote, “snap could work both as a client and a file for­mat, if it did­n’t lock us into a sin­gle store.” Doing so, how­ever, would likely run con­trary to Canonical’s strate­gic goals.

It’s im­por­tant to re­al­ize that, fun­da­men­tally, a tech­nol­ogy like Snap would be use­ful for those who cre­ate pack­ages, in­clud­ing pro­pri­etary soft­ware ven­dors. The prob­lem in this case does­n’t seem to be the tech­nol­ogy, but Canonical’s sole con­trol over it — and the way it’s be­ing in­tro­duced through APT. As the Linux Mint pro­ject stated in its 2019 post:

Ultimately there are mul­ti­ple in­ter­ests at play here lead­ing to un­cer­tainty on how things will work out. On one hand, you have com­pa­nies like Canonical that see the strate­gic value of con­trol­ling the tech­nol­ogy be­hind ap­pli­ca­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion, and is us­ing it to ap­ply pres­sure where it wants to see change. On the other hand, you have dis­tri­b­u­tions like Linux Mint that are pre­pared to ac­tively block the tech­nol­ogy while it is con­trolled by a sin­gle com­mer­cial in­ter­est. Hopefully this lat­est move by Linux Mint will prompt a change to­ward more open­ness, as a pack­ag­ing sys­tem like Snap im­ple­mented in an open way would be a win for the en­tire Linux com­mu­nity.

Recently, I was us­ing a page on Reddit (i.e. the main re­design do­main, not old.red­dit.com), when I saw a yel­low bar from Firefox:

Why did Reddit want to use DRM? This pop-up was ap­pear­ing on all pages, even on pages with no au­dio or video. To find out, I did a bunch of source code analy­sis and found out.

Reddit’s source code uses bundling and mini­fi­ca­tion, but I was able to in­fer that in ./src/reddit/index.tsx, a script was con­di­tion­ally loaded into the page. If the show_white_ops A/B test flag was set, then it loaded an­other script: https://​s.ud­kcrj.com/​ag/​386183/​clear.js. That script loads https://​s.ud­kcrj.com/​2/​4.71.0/​main.js (although it ap­pears to test for a browser bug in­volv­ing run­ning JSON.parse with null bytes, and some­times loads https://​s.ud­kcrj.com/​2/​4.71.0/​JSON-main.js in­stead, but I haven’t an­a­lyzed this file (it looks fairly sim­i­lar though), and also does noth­ing if due to an­other browser bug, !(“a” == “a”[0]) eval­u­ates to true).

The pur­pose of all of this ap­pears to be both fin­ger­print­ing and pre­vent­ing ad fraud. I’ve de­ter­mined that ud­kcrj.com be­longs to White Ops. I have in­fered this from the name of Reddit’s fea­ture flag, and men­tions of White Ops which is a “global leader in bot mit­i­ga­tion, bot pre­ven­tion, and fraud pro­tec­tion”. They ap­pear to do this by col­lect­ing tons of data about the browser, and an­a­lyz­ing it. I must say, their sys­tem is quite im­pres­sive.

Back to the DRM is­sue, it ap­pears that the script is check­ing what DRM so­lu­tions are avail­able, but not ac­tu­ally us­ing them. However, just check­ing is enough to trig­ger Firefox into dis­play­ing the DRM popup. Specfically, it looks for Widevine, PlayReady, Clearkey, and Adobe Primetime.

main.js does a bunch of other in­ter­est­ing things, but there’s so many that I’ve writ­ten a whole seper­ate blog post about all of the ones I found. Here are some high­lights:

* Contains what ap­pears to be a Javascript en­gine JIT ex­ploit/​bug, “haha jit go br­rrrr” ap­pears in a part of the code that ap­pears to be do­ing some­thing weird with math op­er­a­tions.

* Has an ob­fus­cated ref­er­ence to res://ieframe.dll/​acr.js, which can be used to ex­ploit old Internet Explorer ver­sions (I think)

* Many checks for var­i­ous global vari­ables and other in­di­ca­tors of head­less and au­to­mated browsers.

* Checks if browsers have float­ing point er­rors when round­ing 0.49999999999999994 and 2^52

* Detects if some Chrome ex­ten­sions are in­stalled

* Checks if func­tion bod­ies that are im­ple­mented in the browser con­tain [native code] when stringi­fiedit get’s kinda meta, it checks if toString it­self is im­ple­mented in na­tive code (although it does­n’t go any lev­els deeper than data)

* it get’s kinda meta, it checks if toString it­self is im­ple­mented in na­tive code (although it does­n’t go any lev­els deeper than data)

Did you ever dream about cre­at­ing your own chip? I mean, a phys­i­cal chip. One which you can hold in your hand, and which does ex­actly what you’ve de­signed it to do?

Until to­day, there were two ma­jor road blocks: you had to get ac­cess to a process de­sign kit (PDK) from a chip man­u­fac­tur­ing house (a foundry), and you had to have enough money to ac­tu­ally pay for the man­u­fac­tur­ing. These times are over. Today.

Today, in a FOSSi Dial-Up talk, Tim Ansell of Google an­nounced SkyWater PDK, the first man­u­fac­turable, open source process de­sign kit. What dif­fer­en­ti­ates this PDK from pre­vi­ous at­tempts is the fact that it is man­u­fac­turable: with this PDK, you can ac­tu­ally pro­duce chips with the SkyWater foundry in the 130nm node.

That leaves you as chip de­signer only with one road block: money. Manufacturing chips is ex­pen­sive — even for more than a decade old nodes like the 130nm node, you need to spend at least a cou­ple thou­sand dol­lars.

You know what? Don’t worry — Google and efa­b­less have got you cov­ered! They are pro­vid­ing com­pletely free of cost chip man­u­fac­tur­ing runs: one in November this year, and mul­ti­ple more in 2021. All open source chip de­signs qual­ify, no fur­ther strings at­tached!

Learn more about all of that by re-watch­ing Tim’s Dial-Up talk or click through the slides.

This is cer­tainly a dream come true for us at the FOSSi Foundation. We helped the Free and Open Source Silicon com­mu­nity, our com­mu­nity, grow and tackle huge chal­lenges over the years. An open, man­u­fac­turable PDK was the main blocker in a fully open flow be­tween RTL and a phys­i­cal chip, and we’re ex­tremely ex­cited to see that blocker re­moved.

As al­ways, re­mov­ing one road­block only high­lights more chal­lenges: RAM, ROM and flash com­pil­ers, ana­log blocks, op­ti­miza­tions to var­i­ous tools, and much, much more. Now is the per­fect time to get in­volved in the Free and Open Source Silicon ecosys­tem — or learn more about the ac­com­plish­ments and chal­lenges ahead of us. A good start­ing point are the next Dial-Up talks.

Head over to the Dial-Up web site for a list­ing of the up­com­ing talks on OpenROAD, cell de­sign, OpenRAM, and Magic, an old, but sur­pris­ingly up-to-date tool! To stay up-to-date with the lat­est de­vel­op­ments in the FOSSi ecosys­tem sub­scribe to El Correo Libre, our monthly newslet­ter bring­ing all the im­por­tant news bits di­rectly to your in­box (or read it on­line).

Don’t close your MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with a cover over the cam­era

Closing your Mac note­book with a cam­era cover on it might dam­age your dis­play. De­signed to pro­tect your pri­vacy, Mac note­books have a cam­era in­di­ca­tor light to let you know when the cam­era is on.

If you close your Mac note­book with a cam­era cover in­stalled, you might dam­age your dis­play be­cause the clear­ance be­tween the dis­play and key­board is de­signed to very tight tol­er­ances. Covering the built-in cam­era might also in­ter­fere with the am­bi­ent light sen­sor and pre­vent fea­tures like au­to­matic bright­ness and True Tone from work­ing. As an al­ter­na­tive to a cam­era cover, use the cam­era in­di­ca­tor light to de­ter­mine if your cam­era is ac­tive, and de­cide which apps can use your cam­era in System Preferences.

We de­sign Apple prod­ucts to pro­tect your pri­vacy and give you con­trol over your in­for­ma­tion. Our prod­ucts and fea­tures in­clude in­no­v­a­tive pri­vacy tech­nolo­gies and tech­niques de­signed to min­i­mize how much of your data we — or any­one else — can ac­cess. And pow­er­ful se­cu­rity fea­tures help pre­vent any­one ex­cept you from be­ing able to ac­cess your in­for­ma­tion.

The FaceTime HD cam­era built into your Mac com­puter is de­signed with your pri­vacy in mind and uses a cam­era in­di­ca­tor light that glows green when the cam­era is ac­tive. So you will al­ways know when the cam­era is on.

The cam­era is en­gi­neered so that it can’t ac­ti­vate with­out the cam­era in­di­ca­tor light also turn­ing on. This is how you can tell if your cam­era is on.

Control which apps can use the cam­era

As an added se­cu­rity mea­sure, you can con­trol which apps have ac­cess to the built-in cam­era. Before any app can use your cam­era in ma­cOS Mojave or later, you must first give it per­mis­sion. To see which apps have per­mis­sion to use your cam­era and to re­voke or grant app ac­cess, learn how to con­trol ac­cess to the cam­era on your Mac in System Preferences.

If your work en­vi­ron­ment re­quires a cam­era cover at all times

If your work en­vi­ron­ment re­quires you to cover the cam­era on your Mac note­book, fol­low these guide­lines to avoid dam­ag­ing the dis­play:

Make sure the cam­era cover is not thicker than an av­er­age piece of printer pa­per (0.1mm).

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Ennio Morricone, Prolific Italian Composer for the Movies, Dies at 91

Renowned for scor­ing Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, the Oscar win­ner also pro­duced the sounds and mu­sic for ‘Days of Heaven,’ ‘The Mission,’ ‘Cinema Paradiso’ and ‘The Hateful Eight.’

Ennio Morricone, the Oscar win­ner whose haunt­ing, in­ven­tive scores ex­pertly ac­cen­tu­ated the sim­mer­ing, di­a­logue-free ten­sion of the spaghetti Westerns di­rected by Sergio Leone, has died. He was 91.

The Italian com­poser, who scored more than 500 films — seven for his coun­try­man Leone af­ter they had met as kids in el­e­men­tary school — died Monday in Rome fol­low­ing com­pli­ca­tions from a fall last week in which he broke his fe­mur.

A na­tive and life­long res­i­dent of the Eternal City whose first in­stru­ment was the trum­pet, Morricone won his Oscar for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and also was nom­i­nated for his orig­i­nal scores for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1991) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000).

Known as “The Maestro,” he also re­ceived an hon­orary Oscar in 2007 (presented by Clint Eastwood) for his “magnificent and mul­ti­fac­eted con­tri­bu­tions to the art of film mu­sic,” and he col­lected 11 David di Donatello Awards, Italy’s high­est film hon­ors.

Morricone’s ripe, pul­sat­ing sounds en­riched Leone’s low-bud­get shoot-’em-ups A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) — those three starred Eastwood — Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Duck, You Sucker (1971).

“The mu­sic is in­dis­pens­able, be­cause my films could prac­ti­cally be silent movies, the di­a­logue counts for rel­a­tively lit­tle, and so the mu­sic un­der­lines ac­tions and feel­ings more than the di­a­logue,” Leone, who died in 1989, once said. “I’ve had him write the mu­sic be­fore shoot­ing, re­ally as a part of the screen­play it­self.”

Morricone’s spare fo­cus on one in­stru­ment — like the trum­pet solo in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or the oboe, which soared over a lushly rev­er­ent back­drop in The Mission — en­riched his con­tri­bu­tions.

The com­poser loved the sound of the elec­tric gui­tar and the Jew’s harp and em­ployed whis­tles, church bells, whips, coy­ote howls, chirp­ing birds, tick­ing clocks, gun­shots and wom­en’s voices to add tex­tures to scores not as­so­ci­ated with the typ­i­cal stu­dio arrange­ment.

“All kinds of sounds can be use­ful to con­vey emo­tion … it’s mu­sic made up of the sound of re­al­ity,” he said.

Morricone also teamed with Leone one last time on the Prohibition-era tale Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and part­nered about a dozen times with Tornatore, in­clud­ing on Cinema Paradiso (1988), win­ner of the Oscar for best for­eign-lan­guage film.

He did not like the term “spaghetti Western” and noted that his work in that genre rep­re­sented just a frac­tion of his ca­reer.

That is ob­vi­ous, as his bril­liant body of work in­cludes col­lab­o­ra­tions with other no­table di­rec­tors like Gillo Pontecorvo (1966’s The Battle of Algiers), Don Siegel (1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sara), Bernardo Bertolucci (1976’s 1900), John Boorman (1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic), Edouard Molinaro (1978’s La Cage aux Folles), John Carpenter (1982’s The Thing), William Friedkin (1987’s Rampage), Brian De Palma (1987’s The Untouchables), Pedro Almodovar (1989’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), Franco Zeffirelli (1990’s Hamlet), Wolfgang Petersen (1993’s In the Line of Fire), Mike Nichols (1994’s Wolf) and Warren Beatty (1998’s Bulworth).

He was asked but never scored a film for Eastwood the di­rec­tor, a de­ci­sion he said he re­gret­ted, and missed out on a chance to do Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) when Leone in­sisted that the com­poser was too busy fin­ish­ing up one of his films (he was­n’t).

His theme “Chi Mai” for the 1981 BBC drama The Life and Times of David Lloyd George be­came an in­ter­na­tional hit, and he re­ceived a Grammy for his Untouchables score.

Tarantino, a big fan, used some of his com­po­si­tions for the Kill Bill films, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds. In a January 2016 in­ter­view, Morricone said work­ing with the di­rec­tor on Hateful Eight was “perfect … be­cause he gave me no cues, no guide­lines.

“I wrote the score with­out Quentin Tarantino know­ing any­thing about it, then he came to Prague when I recorded it and was very pleased. So the col­lab­o­ra­tion was based on trust and a great free­dom for me.”

In November 2018, he came out as highly crit­i­cal of Tarantino and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in an in­ter­view that was pub­lished in the German edi­tion of Playboy, but Morricone de­nied mak­ing the dis­parag­ing re­marks and threat­ened to sue.

Ennio Morricone was born on Nov. 10, 1928, in a res­i­den­tial area of Rome. His fa­ther, Mario, was a trum­pet player, and the trum­pet was the first in­stru­ment the young­ster played. He be­gan writ­ing mu­sic at age 6.

When he was about 8, Morricone first met Leone in el­e­men­tary school (the two would not con­nect again for more than two decades). He at­tended the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, where he stud­ied un­der Goffredo Petrassi, a ma­jor Italian com­poser.

Morricone com­posed mu­sic for ra­dio dra­mas and played in an or­ches­tra that spe­cial­ized in mu­sic writ­ten for films. “Most of these scores were very ugly, and I be­lieved I could do bet­ter,” he said in a 2001 in­ter­view. “After the war, the film in­dus­try was quite strong here in Italy … but these new re­al­is­tic movies did­n’t have great mu­sic. I needed money, and I thought it would be a good thing to write film scores.”

He worked with Mario Lanza, Paul Anka, Charles Aznavour, Chet Baker and oth­ers as a stu­dio arranger at RCA and with di­rec­tor Luciano Salce on a num­ber of plays. When Salce needed a com­poser for his 1961 movie Il Federale, he hired Morricone.

About a dozen other films fol­lowed, and Leone, do­ing his first Western, put Mor­ri­cone to work on Fist­ful of Dollars. (The di­rec­tor and com­poser were billed as Bob Robertson and Dan Savio, re­spec­tively, in a bid to con­vince Italian movie­go­ers, who were grow­ing weary of home­grown Westerns, that the film was a prod­uct of Hollywood.)

“Gradually over time, he as a di­rec­tor and me as a com­poser, we im­proved and reached our best, in my opin­ion, in Once Upon a Time in America,” Morricone said.

A new law be­ing pro­posed in Germany would see all 19 fed­eral state in­tel­li­gence agen­cies in Germany granted the power to spy on German cit­i­zens through the use of tro­jans. The new law would force in­ter­net ser­vice providers (ISPs) to in­stall gov­ern­ment hard­ware at their data cen­ters which would reroute data to law en­force­ment, and then on to its in­tended des­ti­na­tion so the tar­get is bliss­fully un­aware that their com­mu­ni­ca­tions and even soft­ware up­dates are be­ing prox­ied. Specifically, Netzpolitik pointed out that the law calls for the fol­low­ing:

“the redi­rected data should re­main in­tended for for­ward­ing to the ad­dressee af­ter the mea­sure has been car­ried out.”

The state spon­sored tro­jans would likely be uti­liz­ing soft­ware called FinFly ISP from a com­pany called FinFisher which has al­ready been used by German law en­force­ment in the past. FinFisher claims to be able to in­ject tro­jans on tar­get de­vices from the ISP level with ease::

“FinFly ISP is able to patch files that are down­loaded from the des­ti­na­tion on-the-fly or to send fake soft­ware up­dates for pop­u­lar soft­ware.”

FinFly ISP has been around for al­most a decade and a 2011 ad­ver­tis­ing brochure avail­able via WikiLeaks em­pha­sized that their soft­ware has al­ready been used:

“A se­cret ser­vice used FinFly ISP in the net­work of the most im­por­tant na­tional Internet ser­vice provider. It was suf­fi­cient that the sys­tem only knew the tar­get per­son’s log-in in­for­ma­tion into the provider net­work in or­der to in­stall a re­mote mon­i­tor­ing so­lu­tion on their com­puter and mon­i­tor them from there.”

Amnesty International noted that this vec­tor of tro­jan in­ser­tion has been pre­vi­ously used on a Morrocan jour­nal­ist by the NSO Group.

The BKA (Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office) has pre­vi­ously been us­ing tro­jans on in­di­vid­ual smart phones as a way to have ac­cess to en­crypted com­mu­ni­ca­tions be­fore they are en­crypted. It’s im­por­tant to re­mem­ber that all the en­cryp­tion in the world is use­less if your de­vice is com­pro­mised and clear text can be ac­cessed be­fore it be­comes end-to-end en­crypted. The same holds true if there hap­pens to be a cam­era be­hind your screen that can see what you’re typ­ing. Hell, even the changes in the gy­ro­scope/​ac­celerom­e­ter in your smart­phone can be used to de­rive what your PIN or pass­word is. We can in­fer that the BKA has seen suc­cess with their tro­jan use and now are seek­ing to in­stall hard­ware in the dat­a­cen­ters of ISPs that would al­low them to send these tro­jans to new smart­phones, com­put­ers, and other de­vices dur­ing an up­date.

Many groups in­clud­ing the Society for Freedom Rights are al­ready fil­ing suit against the gov­ern­ment for their use of tro­jans and plan to bring a con­sti­tu­tional chal­lenge if this ex­pan­sion of state tro­jan use comes to pass. Even the ISPs them­selves are not happy with this de­vel­op­ment, cit­ing a fun­da­men­tal loss of trust. Bitkom, a group which counts Germany’s top ISPs as mem­bers com­mented that the pro­ject:

“fails to rec­og­nize the enor­mous risks to the over­all net­work in­tegrity of the providers and the as­so­ci­ated loss of trust.”

The pro­posed law is al­ready the re­sult of lots of back and forth within the gov­ern­ment and many ex­pect it to pass when it is pre­sented to Germany’s con­gres­sional body, the Bundestag, af­ter next week. Germany has long been seek­ing this state tro­jan power to read en­crypted mes­sages with gov­ern­ment mal­ware and oth­er­wise con­trol tar­get de­vices for years now and the fight is fi­nally com­ing to a head. Notably, Germany’s top court re­cently ruled that con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tions on in­ter­net ac­tiv­ity stem­ming from the right to pri­vacy ex­tend to non-Ger­mans, as well; how­ever, the use of tro­jan soft­ware to “support the di­ver­sion of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions” seems to be a clear step in the op­po­site di­rec­tion, even if it is only used un­der war­rant.