● 02.17.15

● Links 17/2/2015: TripleO, Pivotal

Posted in News Roundup at 7:59 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Vivaldi, a new web browser based on Chromium, built by an Opera founder and his team, has just received an upgrade and 32-bit versions for the application, among other things.

• Its not a secret that I’ve been working on sandboxed desktop applications recently. In fact, I recently gave a talk at devconf.cz about it. However, up until now I’ve mainly been focusing on the bundling and deployment aspects of the problem. I’ve been running applications in their own environment, but having pretty open access to the system.

• Now that the basics are working it’s time to start looking at how to create a real sandbox. This is going to require a lot of changes to the Linux stack. For instance, we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure. We also need to use kdbus to allow desktop integration that is properly filtered at the kernel level.

• Clearly, GNU/Linux is growing as rapidly at work as at home. Thanks to Dell, Canonical, the government of India and others who laid the groundwork for this growth. May it continue for years to come and accelerate.

Kernel Space

• Of course, the other option, if Linus wanted to be truly trendy, is to just call the next version Linux 10—and then perhaps thereafter give each new version the name of a large animal or an interesting location from Torvalds’ home country of Finland.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s clear the current KRecipes gardening effort is not having much traction, but before moving on to different applications, let’s try a different format, the Gardening Day.

• Last spring, Pivotal unveiled its Pivotal Big Data Suite, a subscription-based software, support and maintenance package that bundled its big data components into a single, simple licensing structure. The Big Data Suite was responsible for $40 million of the $100 million in total business Pivotal did in 2014. Today, the company took the unprecedented step of open sourcing all those components.

• Linux has a reputation for being geeky, esoteric, hard to get into and limited in terms of available software. But does the increasingly popular free OS and its ecosystem deserve such criticism, or are musicians missing out by not considering making the switch from Windows or OS X?

Distributions

• Linux is omnipresent, even if you don’t realize it. I have been using Linux as my only OS since 2005 and with every passing year I come to realize that it has much more to offer than I initially, back in 2005, understood. There is something for everyone. In this article, I have picked some of the best Linux distros to help you get the job done.

New Releases

• The first update pack has been released for Manjaro 0.8.12, the latest version of the distribution released only a couple of weeks ago. Numerous components have been upgraded, including some of the core ones.

• Bodhi Linux, a fast, minimalistic Linux distribution which uses Enlightenment (E19) by default, has reached version 3.0.0.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Open source vendor SUSE jumped into the distributed storage market this week with the launch of SUSE Enterprise Storage. Based on Ceph, the new offering positions the company to compete more strongly in the software-defined, scale-out storage market.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Feb. 17 announced the general availability of release 6.0 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (OSP), providing an enterprise-grade cloud platform based on the OpenStack Juno milestone release. Red Hat is also going a step beyond what was in the OpenStack Juno release by providing its users with a technology preview of the TripleO OpenStack-on-OpenStack project. Red Hat is one of the leading code contributors to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform, and has both a community distribution called RDO and an enterprise-supported release with OSP that it makes available to users. RDO, much like Red Hat’s community Fedora project, closely tracks and follows the upstream open-source community, while OSP is a more stable release that benefits from additional enterprise hardening. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.0 release follows the upstream OpenStack Juno release, which debuted on Oct. 16, 2014.

• Red Hat remains very focused on advancing its OpenStack-focused cloud business initiatives. The company has now released an update of its OpenStack distribution, marrying its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL) platform with the latest OpenStack release: Juno. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform sets a new standard for OpenStack deployments, with customers in production in every region, spanning industry verticals and enterprises of various sizes in education, financial services, government, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications,” claims the company’s announcement.

Devices/Embedded

• I’ve had my lovely new Raspberry Pi 2 for a few days now – it was shipped from the Swiss Pi-Shop less than a week after the announcement, so thanks once again to them for their prompt and courteous service. I’ve been trying it out since then, mostly comparing it to my original Models B and B+. The results have been interesting, generally what I expected, but with one or two surprises.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung unveiled their new 2015 Smart TV Lineup at CES 2015, which are Smart TVs that run Tizen, as well as offering Sony’s PlayStation Now service combined with Samsung’s latest screen technologies. The SUHD Re-Mastering Engine uses a colour grading tool to offer a high dynamic range and wider colour gamut, which is 64 times the colour expression thanks to quantum technology and 2.5 times the brightness when compared to conventional TVs.

Android

• Contrary to initial reports last week that it would be Motorola devices which shall be first receiving the Android 5.1 Lollipop, the major update to the problematic Android 5.0 Lollipop, it seems that Google Nexus devices will beat everyone else to the draw.

• Are you a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact owner? If you are, you have reason to rejoice: the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update is now available for your smartphone, according to reports.

• Sometimes companies do the stupidest things, and Sony is one of the latest examples. The company has decided to take on Google Glass with its own version of ugly glasses that no one will want to wear.

• Google has extended its Android One push to the Philippines, offering low-cost devices running the latest version of Android out of the box.

• Google has partnered with local operators Cherry Mobile and MyPhone for Android One’s launch into the Philippines, following the scheme’s debut in India last year. Both operators will release one Android One handset each.

• If you’re getting bored with your phone’s lock screen, maybe it’s time to try another. This is Android after all, so you’re not locked in to what came with your device—there are a ton of options to put impressive images, better notification controls, and a steady stream of news and updates right in front of you.

• One of the slick, new features touted by Google about Android Lollipop before its release in November is Project Volta, a collection of optimization settings that promise to offer better battery consumption for devices upgrading to Android Lollipop. Aside from a power-saving mode native to the platform, Project Volta allows developers to specify when their apps need to connect to data or Wi-Fi in order to save up on juice.

• It’s been splashing around in beta for a little while, but now your Pebble can respond to notifications directly from that monochrome screen — kind of like Android Wear, sans touchscreen. You’ll need to update your Pebble smartwatch firmware as well as download the very latest edition of of the companion Android app to get rolling. But given Pebble’s popularity and price, it should mean far more people are making wrist-based responses to messages. Aside from the ability to set multiple custom notification responses (available to you whenever a compatible app offers a reply option), you can toss money around with Square Cash. The update also adds support for Android 4.0 and over devices, as well as automatic app and watch face updates, even when your Kickstarted smartwatch is idle. Oh and you can reply with emoji. Hopefully, that will be enough to keep the Pebble on your wrist on until that fancy new interface arrives in the near future.

• Within the past six months, the mobile phone operating system battle seems to have come to a head with the release of Apple’s iOS 8 and Android’s 5.0 Lollipop. A report on Mashable on how both operating systems fare when compared with each other says that “iOS 8 has as many features as Android” while on the design side, which was historically Apple’s edge, the Android 5.0 Lollipop “has an almost iOS-level of fit polish and finish.”

Free Software/Open Source

• Facebook is among the most recognizable and advanced social media enterprises today. A major part of its success story is its professed love for open source software, which the company uses as means of augmenting innovation across multiple projects. In fact, open source is a key resource among Facebook’s web developers due to its flexibility in providing immediate security patches and collaboration across platforms.

• A growing number of educational institutions are adding classes or programs that focus on open source. There are some channel executives, however, who worry these initiatives are inadequate to meet business needs and are concerned their companies will continue to carry most of the technology’s training burden.

Events

• Politik has announced their third Subculture event to be held the evening before their flagship Interzone conference on March 10, 2015.

SaaS/Big Data

• Pivotal—the rather ambitious business software outfit spun off from big-name tech companies EMC and VMware—is open sourcing three of its key products, sharing the underlying software code with the world at large.

• Pivotal, the big data and software division of storage and IT giant EMC, will today announce plans to release open source versions of its big data and analytics software.

• Pivotal will make the majority of its big data suite open source, drawing inspiration from the Linux concept.

• Cloudera’s total ISV application and tools partners, companies that build applications that run on the platform, increased more than 60 percent to 267. System Integrators (SI) and solutions partners jumped 50 percent to 851. Cloudera says that it is working with SI partners on 18 industry solutions built on Cloudera, with more than 20 others in development. OEM application partners grew during the past year to 29–delivering full product solutions in verticals such as financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and technology.

• Only three years ago, Oracle wanted to do the cloud it own way, and ignore open-source cloud efforts in general and OpenStack in particular. After reflection, Larry Ellison thought better of that idea. By May 2014, Oracle announced OpenStack support for its Linux and the Xen hypervisor. On February 18, Oracle partner and DataBase as a Service (DBaaS) company Tesora is bringing the Oracle database management service (DBMS) and OpenStack together.

BSD

• A couple of weeks ago I described the host key rotation support forthcoming in OpenSSH 6.8. Almost immediately after smugly declaring “mission accomplished”, the bug reports started rolling in. First Mike Larkin noticed an interaction with ssh’s CheckHostIP option that would cause host key warnings, then Theo de Raadt complained about the new code unnecessarily rewriting known_hosts when no changes needed to be made, finally Philipp Kern and Jann Horn pointed out a way for a hostile server to abuse the extension.

Public Services/Government

• If you have the right to use, examine, modify and distribute the software, your costs go down, just as they go down for everyone who uses FLOSS. It’s about sharing. If everyone shares in the cost of producing and distributing software, everyone pays less because folks like M$ are not siphoning off $billions and imposing software slavery to keep you coming back for more abuse.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Good news for OpenStreetMap: the main website now has A-to-B routing (directions) built in to the homepage! This will be huge for the OSM project. Kudos to Richard Fairhurst and everyone who helped get this up and running.

Open Hardware

• At $5,995, the printer isn’t exactly a steal. Autodesk more so built it to be the perfect exhibitor for its open-source Spark 3D printing software, which is currently in beta.

Programming

• HP says that while R is an open-source language used by millions of data scientists, it has been, up to this point, inherently limited. It’s that increased scale that HP stresses as providing a new level of predictive analytics capabilities.

Leftovers

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• I told them that I thought we could, because if a cloud in the stratosphere were created (the most commonly proposed method of control) that was thick enough, large enough, and long-lasting enough to change the amount of energy reaching Earth, we could certainly see it with the same ground-based and satellite instruments we use to measure stratospheric clouds from volcanic eruptions. If, on the other hand, low clouds were being brightened over the ocean (another suggested means of cooling the climate), we could see telltale patterns in the tops of the clouds with satellite photos. And it would also be easy to observe aeroplanes or ships injecting gases or particles into the atmosphere.

• A leading climate-change scientist has warned that the US secret service’s interest in geoengineering technology may not be benign. But it’s not the first time a government has tried to control weather patterns

• Weaponising the weather is nothing new. U.K. government documents showed that, 99 years ago, one of six trials at the experimental military station of Orford Ness in Suffolk sought to produce artificial clouds, which, it was hoped would bamboozle German flying machines during the first world war. Like so many military experiments, these trials failed but cloud seeding became a reality in 1967/8 when the U.S.’s Operation Popeye increased rainfall by an estimated 30 per cent over parts of Vietnam in an attempt to reduce the movement of soldiers and resources into South Vietnam.

• Decades-old weapons long past their expiration date, most of the chemical arms recovered in Iraq were not close to usable in the traditional sense. Officials did say they were surprised, however, at the potency of some of the chemicals despite many years in storage.

• Mohammed Saleh Tauiman was just 13 years old in 2014 when the Guardian newspaper gave him a camera so he could record life under the drones that flew over Marib province, Yemen.

• His father and teenage brother had been killed in a US drone attack in 2011 while they were herding the family’s camels. Afterward, he lived in constant fear of what he called the “death machines” that circled above him in the sky.

• The Obama administration will permit the widespread export of armed drones for the first time, a step toward providing allied nations with weapons that have become a cornerstone of U.S. counterterrorism strategy but whose remotely controlled power to kill is intensely controversial.

• As drone warfare proliferates, the stings of the drone become more lethal and terrifying.

• The conference was informed that 364 of the 415 drone strikes (until early February 2015) on targets inside Pakistani territory had killed nearly 4,000, including over 1000 civilians, mostly women and children. A case study of 24 such strikes by the Centre for Research and Security Studies, too, had exposed the extremely disproportionate civilian harm caused by these attacks which increased seven-fold under the Obama Administration.

• An alliance of militant organizations has called for the expulsion of United States Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg in light of reports that the US government was heavily involved in the planning and implementation of the Jan. 25 covert police operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.

• In a statement issued Monday, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) secretary general Renato Reyes Jr. accused the US government of “blatantly interven[ing]” in the Philippines’ domestic affairs in pursuit of high-profile terrorists Zulkifli bin Hir alias Marwan and Abdul Basit Usman.

• Eight Americans were monitoring from the Special Action Force (SAF) command post the operation against a Malaysian terrorist in the marshland 11.8 kilometers away that went wrong and left 44 police commandos dead on Jan. 25, the Inquirer has learned.

• A US drone located trapped SAF commandos as they were battling their way out after killing their target, Zulkifli bin Hir, alias “Marwan,” according to three sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

• U.S. bombings and drone attacks have killed thousands of innocent people. This has resulted in hatred toward America. How about making a serious effort at diplomacy instead?

• The Islamic State group is expanding beyond its base in Syria and Iraq to establish militant affiliates in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and Libya, U.S. intelligence officials assert, raising the prospect of a new global war on terror.

• The collapse of the American-backed government in Yemen took the U.S. intelligence community by surprise, the Obama administration’s senior counterterrorism official admitted on Thursday as he testified before Congress, according to The Associated Press.

• The international airport in Donetsk was opened to facilitate the thousand of football fans flooding the country for the 2012 European Championships – a $1 billion dollar symbol of Ukraine’s modernity. It now sits as rubble, destroyed by the conflict in which Russian-backed separatists have waged a bloody civil war with forces loyal to Kiev.

Finance

• The new governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, is a hedge fund manager whose salary last year was $60 million. He spent $65.9 million—including $27.6 million of his own money—buying his last election, and he’s about to introduce an austerity program that will make most folks in Illinois think they are living in austerity-wracked Greece, with less idyllic weather. While he’s generating national headlines by trash talking unions, he is quietly taking a scalpel to every important social program in the state, starting with an Illinois program that subsidizes high-quality childcare for 160,000 low-income kids. Instead of extending a small tax increase that passed the Illinois legislature in 2011, staving off a crisis, he’s letting the increases expire. Rauner is methodically manufacturing an economic crisis for his state, one that will let him do what he has long been set on doing: shrink the government and squeeze the 99 percent.

• The Supreme Court of Iceland today upheld prison sentences issued by Reykjavík District Court in December 2013 on four former key executives and majority owners of Kaupþing Bank in the so-called Al-Thani case in what is the heaviest sentence ever given in Iceland for economic fraud, ruv.is reports. The four were charged with market manipulation in relation to Sheik Mohammed Bin Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar’s acquisition of more than five percent of shares (worth ISK 25.7 billion) in Kaupþing Bank shortly before it collapsed in autumn 2008.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Daily Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.

• [...]

• No one has ever expressed quite as well as Utley the quiet decency and pragmatism of British conservatism. The Mail is raucous and populist, while the Times is proud to swing with the wind as the voice of the official class. The Telegraph stood in a different tradition. It is read by the nation as a whole, not just by the City and Westminster. It is confident of its own values. It has long been famous for the accuracy of its news reporting. I imagine its readers to be country solicitors, struggling small businessmen, harassed second secretaries in foreign embassies, schoolteachers, military folk, farmers—decent people with a stake in the country.

• [...]

• With the collapse in standards has come a most sinister development. It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart. There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed.

• Late last year I set to work on a story about the international banking giant HSBC. Well-known British Muslims had received letters out of the blue from HSBC informing them that their accounts had been closed. No reason was given, and it was made plain that there was no possibility of appeal. “It’s like having your water cut off,” one victim told me.

• When I submitted it for publication on the Telegraph website, I was at first told there would be no problem. When it was not published I made enquiries. I was fobbed off with excuses, then told there was a legal problem. When I asked the legal department, the lawyers were unaware of any difficulty. When I pushed the point, an executive took me aside and said that “there is a bit of an issue” with HSBC. Eventually I gave up in despair and offered the article to openDemocracy.

Censorship

• Media outlets and Middle East analysts have expended considerable energy assessing whether and how Jordan’s war on ISIS in the aftermath of the Kassasbeh capture and death represents a game changer. It is difficult to find a sustained critique of this war on ISIS in the local Jordanian media, whether in the mainstream or the more critical online venues. This is not surprising. After all, Jordan is an authoritarian state. Both historically and in the contemporary moment, the regime has carefully drawn red lines around public speech and political opposition.

• Tumblr users say they are witnessing a tougher response to music piracy by the blogging platform. A wave of complaints suggest that increased anti-piracy activity by the music industry is resulting in Tumblr more readily banning users as part of a “three strikes” policy.

Privacy

• The US National Security Agency (NSA) has infected hard disk firmware with spyware in a campaign valued as highly as Stuxnet that dates back at least 14 years and possibly up to two decades, according to an analysis by Kaspersky Labs.

• In a new report, Kaspersky revealed the existence of a group dubbed The Equation Group capable of directly accessing the firmware of hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron, Samsung and other drive makers. As such, the group has been able to implant spyware on hard drives to conduct surveillance on computers around the world.

• A few weeks back, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that GCHQ had been spying unlawfully on British citizens, using the NSA’s Prism and Upstream tools to gain access to private communications. Anyone may have fallen foul of GCHQ’s secret snooping. But it doesn’t have to remain secret. Here’s how to go about finding out if you’ve been spied on by the GCHQ and, hopefully, have the data acquired destroyed.

• Once the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal has determined whom was affected, it has to inform them. Though participants should find out whether their data were unlawfully obtained by GCHQ from the millions of private communications hoovered up by the NSA up until December 2014, it won’t be anytime soon. Privacy International warned in its FAQs: “Count on it being many months, and likely years before this action is completed.”

• Security researchers have uncovered a trove of highly-sophisticated hacking tools used over the last 15 to 20 years to break into thousands of targets’ computers. There’s little doubt the malware and exploits used belonged to the National Security Agency, according to security experts.

• [...]

• The GRAYFISH tool, which works with almost all versions of Windows, including 8, was another of the more impressive malware types. It sat in the Microsoft MSFT -1.13% Windows registry, which stores information on most activities and settings on a PC. GRAYFISH used a bootkit, a malware that resides at a low level of the operation system so it can execute every time a computer starts up. That was the most complex bootkit Kaspersky had ever seen. GRAYFISH also stole files and stored them in its own encrypted Virtual File System (VFS).

• Russian security experts say that an advanced persistent threat team has infected thousands of computers in more than 30 countries using tools and tactics not unlike what’s already been attributed to the National Security Agency.

• Kaspersky Labs of Moscow declined to specifically implicate the United States and its spy office in a report published by the security firm on Monday this week. The researchers, however, say that it’s been monitoring a group of computer hackers that have waged attacks since 2001 and that share similarities with operations of the NSA.

• A cyberespionage group with a toolset similar to ones used by U.S. intelligence agencies has infiltrated key institutions in countries including Iran and Russia, utilizing a startlingly advanced form of malware that is impossible to remove once it’s infected your PC.

• Kaspersky Lab released a report Monday that said the tools were created by the “Equation” group, which it stopped short of linking to the U.S. National Security Agency.

• The tools, exploits and malware used by the group—named after its penchant for encryption—have strong similarities with NSA techniques described in top-secret documents leaked in 2013.

• President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that will attempt to protect America’s crucial computer networks by sharing knowhow between g-men and techies.

• License plate readers can record up to 1,800 license plates per minute. However, it seems these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. The Drug Enforcement Agency has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.

• Just as it did when launching its “GigaPower” service in Austin, Texas in late 2013, AT&T offers different prices based on how jealously users guard their privacy. AT&T’s $70 per-month pricing for gigabit service is the same price as Google Fiber, but AT&T charges an additional $29 a month to customers who opt out of AT&T’s “Internet Preferences” program.

• To counter the PR hit from Google Fiber, AT&T has recently been proclaiming that it too is now offering 1 Gbps services under the company’s “Gigapower” brand — but pretending that Google has nothing to do with it. On the surface, it looks like AT&T is taking on Google blow for blow, and that this is a wonderful example of how competition works. And while that’s true up to a point, as we’ve discussed previously, AT&T’s offering is highly theatrical in nature. AT&T’s actually been slashing its fixed-line CAPEX each quarter, but is offering 1 Gbps speeds to a few, scattered high-end developments where fiber is already in the ground.

Civil Rights

• The European Court of Human Rights today confirmed that the Polish government was complicit in the CIA’s secretive programme of rendition, detention and interrogation.

• The Court in Strasbourg today rejected a challenge from the Polish government to a landmark ruling from last July, a decision which now makes that original judgement final.

• The European Court of Human Rights refused on Tuesday to reconsider its ruling that Poland hosted a secret CIA jail, a decision that will now oblige Warsaw to swiftly hold to account Polish officials who allowed the jail to operate.

• The court’s decision will add to pressure on other European countries to end years of secrecy about their involvement in the CIA’s global programme of secret detention after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

• John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent who helped reveal the agency’s use of waterboarding in a 2007 interview, was released from prison on February 3 after serving a two-year sentence.

• “Hypocritical” is how CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou describes his arrest and imprisonment for exposing the spy agency’s use of torture while those who actually committed the heinous acts go unpunished.

• North Korea’s mission to the United Nations has criticized the upcoming human rights conference to be held in Washington, pointing to torture crimes committed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

• “The United States and South Korea are going to convene so-called ‘Conference on North Korean Human Rights: the Road Ahead’ on 17 February in Washington…The Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK] to the United Nations condemns the convening of such human rights gathering as a political human rights plot against the DPRK,” the mission said in a statement on Sunday.

• That’s right, America. While the resolution makes some fair points about crowded U.S. prison systems and the questionable ethics of using drones to kill suspected enemies, lumping the U.S. – and Israel – in with nations that routinely violate fundamental rights, while failing to mention far more egregious violators, like much of the Arab world, is certainly a sophomoric stretch.

• Machine Guns, MRAPs, Surveillance, Drones, Permanent War, and a Permanent Election Campaign

• [...]

• Keep in mind that New York City already has a police force of more than 34,000 — bigger, that is, than the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, Laos, Switzerland, or Zimbabwe — as well as its own “navy,” including six submersible drones.

• All the pillars of the earth would shake if a Christian or a Jew is killed or if a Buddhist statue is destroyed or comes to any harm. International forces wherever they may be join together to condemn the killing of an individual so long as he or she is not of Arab or Muslim background. These same leaders do not hesitate to condemn any infliction that comes to a Buddhist statue in Afghanistan.

• Police and Canadian Justice Minister Peter MacKay said the plot was not related to terrorism.

• We have heard of no measures taken to protect the beleaguered Muslim communities—the “banlieues” that surround Paris, largely populated by impoverished African and Middle Eastern immigrants—where unemployment ranks highest in the nation and social services rank lowest. Unemployment among Muslim youth approaches 40 percent. Close to half of the residents of Muslim communities lack a high school diploma. As in the U.S., police harassment and profiling—stop and frisk, French style—are taken for granted. There has been little mention of the 50 recorded post-Charlie Hebdo fire bombings or of the racist graffiti-tagged and bullet-ridden mosques; such atrocities meant to terrorize the Muslim population are ongoing and proceed with impunity. France’s Central Council of Muslims reported 21 shootings that targeted Muslim buildings.

• The bill, titled “An Act to provide for the resumption of rail service operations,” will be presented by Labour Minister Kellie Leitch, who took part in the talks. In a statement issued Saturday night after negotiations broke down, Leitch made it clear that the government was prepared to act quickly.

• Virginia House Bill 2144 (HB2144) expands on the state’s current anti-indefinite detention law by setting the stage for ending some state-federal partnerships. (read about the bill here). It passed successfully through the state house on Feb. 10 by a 96-4 vote. The bill now must pass successfully through the Senate Committee for Courts of Justice before it can receive a full vote in the state senate. Follow the action steps below to support this important bill.

• As video cameras begin to sweep post-Ferguson policing — and policymakers grapple with whether to bar the public from watching the images — one such recording sits at the heart of a new lawsuit.

• It shows St. Louis police making an arrest that would later be called abusive, and catches an apparently surprised officer yelling, in part, “Everybody hold up. We’re red right now!” before she abruptly shuts off the camera.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Attorney Matt Wood, the policy director for advocacy group Free Press, told the FCC last week that it faces “legal obstacles” in how it intends to regulate Internet service providers. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposes to reclassify Internet service providers as common carriers in two parts. ISPs will be common carriers in their relationships with home Internet consumers. They will also be common carriers in their business relationships with “edge providers,” companies that offer services, applications, and content over the Internet.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• City of London ‘police’ have not yet arrested a single #hsbc banker or tax evader; instead they go after poor people for petty things.

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