● 01.17.15

● Links 17/1/2015: Lennart Poettering in Headlines, Mageia 5 Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Last summer Microsoft talked its partners into trying to stop the growing popularity of Chromebooks in its tracks by making a big push during the holiday season. While full retail results won’t be in for a while, we do know the laptop sales results from the most important retailer of them all, Amazon. Guess what. With that retailer at least, Microsoft and its buddies failed. Miserably.

• Amazon reports that its top three computers sold over the holidays were — drum-roll, please — Chromebooks. It was that way last year too. Oh, wait, I’m wrong; Microsoft did worse this year. In 2013, one of Amazon’s top three sellers was a Windows machine, The Asus’ Transformer Book, a Windows 8.1 “2-in-1” device that transforms from a 10.1-in. tablet to a keyboard-equipped laptop.

• Collabora has been making improvements to the Tegra-based Chromebooks for running the non-ChromeOS Linux desktop.

• The Nyan Blaze and Big Tegra K1 powered Chromebooks should now work nicely with Linux given the eleven new patches done by Tomeu Vizoso of consulting firm Collabora.

Kernel Space

• The systemd-import command is now more powerful after the latest batch of changes committed by Lennart Poettering prior to starting the weekend.

• Asked about diversity in the workplace, a current focus of many tech companies, Torvalds responded: “All that stuff is just details and not really important.”

• Few pieces of software in history have been so fiercely debated as Systemd. Initially a replacement for Sysvinit, the boot scripts that start up a Linux installation, Systemd has grown into a hugely powerful – and sometimes complex – replacement for the “bag of bits” that make up the Linux base system. It’s growing all the time and now handles logging, device hotplugging events, networking, scheduled actions (like Cron) and much more. Almost every major Linux distribution has adopted Systemd, but there are still some unhappy campers out there, so Mike and Graham ventured to Berlin to meet the software’s lead developer and get his view.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman posted the thirteen KDBUS patches in their latest form on Friday to the kernel mailing list. This new version rewrites major parts of the meta-data implementation to allow for per-recipient namespace translations, KDBUS_ITEM_CREDS changes, removed KDBUS_CMD_CANCEL, monitors are now entirely invisible, compile warning fixes, and a variety of other changes.

• Yesterday ArsTechnica.com quoted Linus Torvalds saying a focus on diversity is distracting and apparently it didn’t set well with some folks. Today Torvalds emailed ArsTechnica.com in an effort to explain what he meant more precisely. Elsewhere, a mock distribution seems to be poking fun at feminists and diversity crowd. In other news, Mageia 5 Beta 2 is out after a bit of bad luck that may delay the final.

• On Friday, following comments made by Linux legend Linus Torvalds about diversity in the open source development community, a new Linux fork went online at Github, apparently to mock diversity advocates. Dubbed ToleranUX, the fork, created by a one-day-old Github account called The Feminist Software Foundation, was announced with a lengthy diatribe full of over-the-top mockery of feminist and diversity movements within the tech sector.

• Linus Torvalds, the internationally famous creator of the Linux operating system (which powers your Android phone and most of the internet), does not in way, shape or form suffer from Imposter’s Syndrome.

• Prominent for Util-linux 2.26 is a “completely new” sfdisk command that’s now based on the libfdisk library. This new sfdisk command now supports MBR and GPT disk labels (along with potential but untested SGI and SUN disk labels). Those dependent on sfdisk, a partition table management program for Linux, are encouraged to re-test their scripts against this new version, per the official release information on 2.26-rc1.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• In having 22 graphics cards out for testing and swapping them all in the same system for the recent Unreal Engine 4 Linux benchmarking and 22-Way AMD+NVIDIA Graphics Card Tests With Metro Redux On Steam For Linux, I ran some OpenCL tests on all of the graphics cards.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Just Add Water have just revealed when PS3, Xbox One and PC gamers can get their anxious little mitts on their delicious remake of Oddworld Inhabitants PSX classic, Abe’s Oddysee. Titled Oddworld: New n’ Tasty, the completely rebuilt game stays true to the Abe’s Oddysee formula, adding a glossy sheen of much needed beauty.

• The original game, which was released in 1997, was recently remade and fans of the puzzle platformer are patiently waiting for it’s release. Oddworld has already released remakes of some of their games, like Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD and Munch HD.

• Linux desktop gamers should know of a bug in Valve’s Steam client that will, if you’re not careful, delete all files on your PC belonging to your regular user account.

• Users have found out that Steam for Linux is capable of deleting the entire home directory under certain circumstances, which would present a major problem for users.

• While some are pondering the state of SteamOS and Steam Machines rumors, Valve has put out SteamOS Update 153 after being in the Alchemist Beta state for the past week.

• Cities: Skylines is an upcoming city-building game by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. It’s a sequel of sorts to the transportation-focused Cities in Motion franchise but with a much broader scope; it’s now a fully-fledged city simulation game. Zoning, construction, taxation and infrastructure management are some of the things that set apart the game from its predecessors. Some of you may be familiar with the game as GOL has covered it twice already (here and here) but the new information we’ve gotten in the past few months from the developers make it worth revisting.

• Aspyr Media, who are one of our favourite developers, has noted on reddit that they are getting close to breaking even on their Linux ports.

• If you are living under a rock: Aspyr ported Borderlands 2, Borderlands TPS, the latest two Civilization games and the newest Geometry Wars to Linux

• To summon your inner Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew, you don’t need to join a detective squad anymore. There are many new games that allow you to solve crimes, catch the bad guys, and prove to the world that there is a master detective in you waiting to be recognized. These games let you play as a detective or a cop for hours and make you rack your brain to come up with clues that will help solve the mystery.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I want to thank publicly the 788 donors that helped us raise over 22000 euro.

• The KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser has finished. Thank you everybody who supported us in this fundraiser. Go to the KDE donation page if you want to support us further.

• As a Krita developer, I’m not too happy comparing Krita to Photoshop. In fact, I have been known to scream loudly, start rolling my eyes and in general gibber like a lunatic whenever someone reports a bug with as its sole rationale “Photoshop does it like this, Krita must, too!”.

Distributions

Reviews

• Once in a while I run into a Linux distribution that surprises me in terms of how much I enjoy using it. MakuluLinux is definitely one of those distros. I found an article about it when I was doing my usual news roundup article for my blog Eye On Open on ITworld. I was intrigued enough to want to do a full review here on Desktop Linux Reviews.

• One of the things you can count on in the Linux community is love and understanding from the wider audience, especially if you write a less favorable review of a distribution favored by a particular segment of the community. The smaller they get the fiercer the response. Most people would decide the flak was not worth their time, file relevant distributions under the ignore label, and move on to friendlier crowds.

New Releases

• Parted Magic, an operating system that employs core programs of GParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, has been upgraded to version 2015.01.13 and is now ready for purchase and download.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Mageia is a Linux distribution that distinguished itself in the past year or so with some very interesting releases, and the users expect to see the same kind of quality from the current ones as well. The developers know this and they want to provide the best experience possible, which is also the reason they had to delay this release for short while.

• After several delays the beta 2 version of Mageia 5 is finally out! You can find more information here.

• After being challenged by delays, Mageia 5 Beta 2 was officially released on Friday. A revised release date for the Mageia 5 official ISOs has also been determined.

Red Hat Family

• Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has announced the release of libinput 0.8 and with this update comes many new features for the input handling library.

• Goldman Sachs downgraded shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research note released on Wednesday morning, TheFlyOnTheWall.com reports. They currently have $70.00 target price on the stock, up from their previous target price of $67.44.

Debian Family

• Diversity is something that society needs. In all aspects. Also within the Debian project.

• As I said, I did not certain events that begun with “lea” and end with “ing” prevent me from organising a Debian/m68k hack weekend. Well, that weekend is now.

Devices/Embedded

• There was a spin of Fedora for the Raspberry Pi during the early days of its release, but that was quickly dropped in favour of Raspbian when it proved to be a bit slow and buggy. It was almost two years after this incident that a proper version of Fedora was released on the Raspberry Pi in the form of Pidora. An almost straight-up port of the codebase to the specific ARM architecture of the Pi, Pidora has had a few tweaks to let it run on Pi hardware without much loss in performance, at least.

Phones

Tizen

• South Korean tech giant Samsung seems to have some really big plans around the Tizen open source operating system this year. After launching its first commercially available Z1 Tizen smartphone in India, the company is now looking to launch numerous Tizen based devices throughout 2015, reports Phone Arena.

Android

• We brought you our last top 5 Android list back in October and, as it’s already the first quarter of this year, it’s time to revisit that list. There are certainly some new models to discuss, the G Flex 2 was just introduced during CES 2015, for example, but we’re also just a couple of months away from Mobile World Congress, where it’s almost certain that the following phones will be replaced by the next batch of flagships.

• Everyone and their mother (in Tech News) is monitoring Xiaomi, the *fourth largest smartphone maker in the world behind Samsung, Apple and Lenovo (owners of Motorola). But that doesn’t mean everything they put out is gold.

• When Google acquired Android back in 2005, Android quickly became the “open” mobile platform of choice, a haven for developers that didn’t like all of Apple’s rules and the walled garden of iOS.

• It’s time for this week’s Android and iOS app round-up. As usual, the apps included will be a combination of the best of what has been released this week, but also my favourite must-have apps that I’ve recently come across.

• Google will this year launch its modular DIY smartphone, dubbed Project Ara, but only in the US territory of Puerto Rico.

• Ara, announced by Google 15 months ago, was developed by Motorola’s Advanced Technologies and Products (ATAP) group as a fully modular system where components such as batteries, screens, GPS and cameras, can be swapped in and out of a basic smartphone framework.

• To root or not to root? It’s a question that most people don’t ever ask themselves, because Android devices are powerful and customizable from the get-go, and rooting can be risky.

• But it’s not that risky. And if you want to really unlock the full potential of your device—if you want to be able to control everything, backup everything, customize everything, and do all sorts of fun things like install custom ROMs and get Android Lollipop ahead of the pack—you’ll need to root your phone.

Free Software/Open Source

• Citrix announced that CDFMonitor – the Swiss Army knife of CDF trace collection – is being released as an open source project under the MIT license.

• Facebook has released as open source some software modules that can speed image recognition, language modeling and other machine learning tasks, in a move to advance computer artificial intelligence for itself and others,

• Security researcher and member of SoundCloud security team, Michael Henriksen has developed a open source command line tool that can crawl the GitHub repositories and reveal sensitive information back to him.

• Free online code repositories such as GitHub provide a valuable collaboration service for enterprise developers. But it’s also a trove of potentially sensitive company and project information that’s likely to warrant attention from hackers.

Events

• This year’s program showcases how free software is used around the world, from “Engaging Nepali kids with free software” to “Implementing electronic medical record systems in rural Haiti​”. We’re also taking a close look at how international treaties will affect free software users, with sessions from April — a French free software activist organization — and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

SaaS/Big Data

BSD

• Following last month’s LLVM 3.6 plans, the mainline code of LLVM was branched for preparing the 3.6 release so now the master/trunk code is for LLVM 3.7.

• The FreeBSD Foundation has issued their latest quarterly status report for covering from October to December 2014.

Project Releases

• An update of the open-source Xen Hypervisor to v4.5 brings reduced footprint, increased power efficiency, and new “experimental” real-time services.

Public Services/Government

• Sweden’s public administrations will increasingly turn to open source and open standards, expect ICT procurement specialists at the National Procurement Services, the central purchasing body for the country’s public sector. The agency is readying a new approach for the acquisition of sofware and ICT services. When using these frameworks, only open standards and open source can be mandated. This greatly facilitates public administrations to prefer this type of software.

Openness/Sharing

Standards/Consortia

• Since last year the Khronos Group and their partners have been busy working on “OpenGL-Next” as the first huge overhaul to the OpenGL API and designed to compete with AMD’s Mantle, Microsoft DirectX 12, and Apple’s Metal. They’re still working towards this new API but they need your help.

Leftovers

• The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida has gone to the dogs. Well, at least its rugs have.

• Department spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda said Wednesday that a new, $500 rug at the sheriff’s administration building said “In Dog We Trust” instead of “In God We Trust.”

Science

• When the war poet Wilfred Owen wrote of “men whose minds the Dead have ravished” he was attempting to describe the mysterious effects of shellshock which started appearing during the First World War and of which he himself was a sufferer.

Security

• Those following me on various Intarweb Media may have noticed I’ve spent half the week staring at openssl source code and weeping. Here’s one of the results of that.

• OpenSSL has two somewhat different mechanisms for deciding what uses a certificate is good for: trust and purpose. This is quite subtle and not terribly well documented, so I thought I’d write it up here.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Lithuania is publishing a manual to advise its citizens on how to survive a war on its soil as concerns grow that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine heralds increased assertiveness in its tiny Baltic neighbors.

• “Keep a sound mind, don’t panic and don’t lose clear thinking,” the manual explains. “Gunshots just outside your window are not the end of the world.”

• The manual, which the Defence Ministry will send to libraries next week and also distribute at army events, says Lithuanians should resist foreign occupation with demonstrations and strikes, “or at least doing your job worse than usual”.

• Thousands of buildings were burned, damaged or destroyed in northern Nigerian towns in recent days when Boko Haram militants stormed through, using scorched-earth tactics against civilians, according to a new analysis of satellite images by human rights groups.

• In a succession of attacks, fighters from Boko Haram, an Islamist insurgent group that has gripped northern Nigeria and battled the government for years, have swept through a cluster of villages along the shores of Lake Chad in a “systematic campaign of arson directed against the civilian population in the area,” according to Human Rights Watch.

• An anti-terror court on Wednesday indicted Pervez Musharraf over the 2006 killing of a separatist leader, the latest legal hurdle facing the former military ruler since his return from self-imposed exile two years ago.

• The charges by the court in Quetta are unlikely to cause any immediate problems for the 71-year-old, who has not attended a single hearing in the case since it began in 2013. He was previously indicted for treason in March last year over his imposition of emergency rule in 2007, but proceedings have stalled since then as the country’s civil authorities and judiciary appear to lack the will to take on the military.

• “The anti-terrorist court has indicted Musharraf along with former interior minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao and former home minister [of] Balochistan province Shoaib Nosherwani in Nawab Akbar Bugti’s murder case,” said public prosecutor Taimur Shah. He added the court would resume hearings in the case on Feb. 4.

• Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in a military operation in 2006, sparking deadly nationwide protests and inflaming a separatist insurgency in resource-rich but impoverished Balochistan.

• Reports that emerged on Thursday evening that a Burmese woman was publicly beheaded in Mecca by Saudi authorities for allegedly killing her step-daughter has outraged social media users.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Is this the right way or the wrong way to cover the news of the record heat? That depends. Is the purpose of an article like this to convey how open-minded the New York Times is? If so, then the piece is a success, managing to give one-third of its quotes to a proponent of a fringe theory without giving any indication that his eccentric views are virtually absent from peer-reviewed science.

• Although it may not have been warm where you live, scientists announced Friday that 2014 was the Earth’s hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. The climate milestone was made possible in large part by exceptionally mild ocean temperatures and above-average temperatures on most continents.

• Remarkably, the warmth came without the assistance of an El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean. These events are naturally occurring ocean and atmospheric cycles that tend to boost global temperatures. Previous El Niños have been responsible in part for the prior warmest years, such as 1998 and 2005, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

• The planet’s warmest year on record was 2014, federal scientists announced Friday.

• “Humans are literally cooking their planet,” said Jonathan Overpeck, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Arizona.

• The global temperature from 2014 broke the previous record warmest years of 2005 and 2010 since record-keeping began in 1880.

• Two separate data sets of global temperature — from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — confirmed the record. Another data set released last week by the Japan Meteorological Agency also found 2014 was the planet’s warmest.

Finance

• On Thursday afternoon Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel filed a settlement in a class-action lawsuit [PDF] involving former employees of the companies, agreeing to pay them $415 million. The 64,000 employees and former employees who made up the class alleged that their employers had agreed not to cold call or poach each others’ employees, creating artificially low wages for the employees for years.

• In the following interview, New School professor and economist Richard Wolff provides his analysis of the causes of the economic crisis in Greece and in the eurozone, debunks claims that the Greek economy is recovering and offers his proposal for what a post-capitalist future could look like for Greece and the world.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• “This isn’t an election–it’s a rerun,” he complains. He’s talking about all the people that are running or might be running who have run before or have relatives who have run.

Censorship

• The Turkish government has been battling with Twitter for quite some time. It’s gone after citizens for comments on Twitter, blamed Twitter for social unrest and even tried (temporarily) banning Twitter entirely in the country. There was even a lawsuit by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, filed with the Constitutional Court, over his own government’s “failure” to implement rules for removing content on Twitter.

• The only people who still feel they can clearly define who is and isn’t a journalist are legislators. They’re almost always wrong. Journalism isn’t a career. It’s an activity. Anyone can do it and, thanks to the internet, anyone can find a publishing platform and readers. But, according to many politicians, it ain’t the press unless it involves one.

• Leaders in Europe are justifiably trying to figure out what they should be doing to prevent terrorist attacks like the recent massacre at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Regrettably, some politicians are proposing the kind of Internet censorship and surveillance that would do little to protect their citizens but do a lot to infringe on civil liberties.

• In Paris, a dozen interior ministers from European Union countries including France, Britain and Germany issued a statement earlier this week calling on Internet service providers to identify and take down online content “that aims to incite hatred and terror.” The ministers also want the European Union to start monitoring and storing information about the itineraries of air travelers. And in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the country should ban Internet services that did not give the government the ability to monitor all encrypted chats and calls.

• The French authorities are moving aggressively to rein in speech supporting terrorism, employing a new law to mete out tough prison sentences in a crackdown that is stoking a free-speech debate after last week’s attacks in Paris.

• More recently, the Saudi Arabian government announced that it had hacked and disabled about 9,000 Twitter accounts associated with the publication of pornography and arrested many of the handles’ owners. The move was organized by the Commission for the Promotion and Prevention of Vice, also known as Haia, the Saudi religious police.

• Raif Badawi was flogged in public 50 times last week. He has 950 lashes and nearly a decade in prison left to serve – simply for blogging about free speech.

• The latest issue of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has ignited controversy in the Middle East and elsewhere due to a caricature of the prophet Muhammad depicted on its cover.

• Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the journal’s central Paris headquarters last week and murdered 12 people, they said to avenge the publication’s regular lampooning of Muhammad. Many Muslims regard depictions of the Prophet as blasphemous and the decision to again publish a cartoon of Muhammed has caused widespread debate.

• The cartoon itself depicts the Prophet shedding a tear while holding a sign that says “Je suis Charlie” — the slogan which has become popular around the world as a declaration of solidarity with the victims of the attack — under a headline that reads “All is forgiven.” It was drawn by the weekly’s cartoonist Luz, who escaped the massacre because he was late arriving for work.

Privacy

• Ladar Levison, who ran Edward Snowden’s email account, said moves to allow government access to encrypted data would weaken safety online for everyone

• The Justice Department secretly kept a database of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more than a decade, according to a new court filing and officials familiar with the program.

• The cypherpunks are winning the second crypto-war against government spies. What will happen when everyone is anonymous?

• In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on the European Commission to deliver on its “promise” of a new EU-wide data retention directive to replace the one struck down by the EU’s highest court last year.

• Merkel wants to implement this new directive into German law. There’s only one problem: the Commission doesn’t seem to have promised any such thing, at least not in public.

• This week the Prime Minister introduced a policy of banning strong encryption in the UK in order to deny terrorists ‘safe spaces’ in which to operate. Sounds robust, doesn’t it? In practice such a policy is impossible to implement and so would never yield any security benefit. It would, however, leave all of us vulnerable to trivial cyber-attacks and David Cameron’s vision of a Digital Britain in tatters.

• We’re usually very happy to see the government release documents shed light on unconstitutional surveillance. We’re less happy when the release is done Christmas week, in an attempt to ensure that they will get as little attention as possible.

• Last week we wrote about how a ruling by Europe’s highest court, the EUCJ, that blanket data retention was “invalid,” had received a further boost from an analysis by the European Parliament’s legal services. That, in its turn, made it more likely that more overbroad data retention laws in EU nations would be challenged, as has already happened in the UK and Sweden.

• Google’s smartglasses have ‘graduated’ from the company’s development lab placed under the control of the father of the iPod

Civil Rights

• Before the Law chronicles sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder’s arrest, three-year incarceration in the Rikers Island Correctional Facility, and the months following the dismissal of his case without a trial. On May 15, 2010, Roberto Bautista reported to the police that he had been robbed. The police detained Kalief, but he was not in possession of any of the stolen items. When they spoke with Bautista after the search, he changed the date of the robbery to two weeks prior. On Bautista’s inconsistent accusation alone, Kalief was arrested on multiple felony charges and held without bail.

• The prisoner could barely stand. He and a group of fellow detainees at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, had started a riot in a cell and the unit of soldiers that I led, the Quick Reaction Force, had quelled the violence with whatever it took — fists, boots, clubs, shields and rubber bullets.

• That’s because the state’s contract with private prison corporation Corrections Corp. of America includes the stipulation that CCA can impose penalties on the state if the number of prisoners from Vermont drops below 380, Pallito said.

• Hanging out in an IRC chat room giving advice to people now makes you a member of a “criminal enterprise”, allowing the FBI to sweep in and confiscate all your assets without charging you with a crime.

• Some two years following her rape, Ripley attended a Salt Lake City council meeting and discovered that it was not only her case that had been brushed aside. Approximately 79% of SLCPD’s rape kits had never been sent to the lab for testing. Ripley’s kit was one of over 1,000 collected by the SLCPD in an eight year period – of these, 788 were either destroyed or still sitting on a shelf in the police department. Salt Lake City’s unprocessed rape kits make up only a small portion of the number across the United States – which, according to a January 2014 White House report total well over 20,000.

• Mount Holyoke College, the historical women’s college in western Massachusetts, will no longer participate in the now-decades-old tradition of performing “The Vagina Monologues” in February, to raise awareness of gender-based violence, out of concern that the play is not inclusive of transgender students. The school, which recently changed its definition of “woman” to include male-to-female trans students, has become a site of controversy over the decision to retire Eve Ensler’s 1996 feminist classic permanently.

• Oklahoma executed Charles Warner on Thursday night, the state’s first lethal injection since the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.

• Attorneys for Warner and three other Oklahoma inmates asked the US supreme court for a stay, but the court denied the request in a 5-4 decision. The lawyers argued that the first of three drugs in a lethal cocktail – midazolam – would not properly sedate a person, even if the drug were properly administered.

• Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.

• Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

• Riseup, a tech collective that provides security-minded communications to activists worldwide, sounded the alarm last month when a judge in Spain stated that the use of their email service is a practice, he believes, associated with terrorism.

• The worst offenders include Northumberland and Leeds local councils, both of which have more than 500 officials with powers of entry, whilst Hertfordshire, Chorley and Cornwall all have more than 300.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Draft net neutrality legislation released Friday by Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or selectively slowing legal Web content, but it would allow them to engage in “reasonable” network management.

• The proposal would give broadband providers wide latitude to engage in network management, with a management practice deemed reasonable “if it is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose.”

• The draft legislation would also prohibit the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from reclassifying broadband as a regulated public utility, and it would stop the agency from creating any new net neutrality rules.

• Net neutrality legislation unveiled by Republicans today would gut the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the broadband industry.

• As expected, the bill forbids the FCC from reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service, preventing the commission from using authority it has under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This is the statute the FCC uses to regulate landline telephone providers.

• Ajit Pai, part of the commission’s Republican minority, has clashed with Netflix over its use of technology that is not compatible with “open caching software” used by Internet service providers. Netflix says that it “obscured certain URL structures to protect our members from deep packet inspection tools deployed to gather data about what they watch online,” which apparently had the side effect of forcing ISPs to use different caching systems. Netflix does offer caching appliances to Internet service providers, but the bigger carriers have refused, demanding payment for connections to their networks.

• Last month I noted how longtime domain registrar Tucows had decided to try and kick-start stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a “shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing” to a fixed-line residential broadband market all-too-often dominated by just one or two giant, apathetic players. Ting promised to offer 1 Gbps speeds at a sub-$100 price point, while at the same time promising to respect net neutrality.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.