● 02.18.15

● Links 18/2/2015: Linux Report, FlightGear 3.4

Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Sony is developing self-driving car technologies with ZMP, which sells autonomous RoboCar development platforms with Linux-based control and sensor systems.

Desktop

• Until Christmas or shortly before, GNU/Linux was kind of flat with just a small daily variation and little real growth. At Christmas there was obviously a huge influx of consumers’ PCs with GNU/Linux.

• Russia responded to the first sanctions over Ukraine by announcing a move to GNU/Linux, FLOSS and Postgresql in the Ministry of Health back in 2014, just when “Unknown” took off… Who needs salesmen when you have tyrants? It’s a small world and one action over here gives another reaction over there. It’s all good, I hope.

Server

• Sarah Novotny is a technology evangelist and community leader for NGINX. I first met her at OSCON, where she’s one of the program chairs. She makes it look easy on stage, but it’s a tough job to help organize one of the largest open source events held each year.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.19 was released, to be followed by either a version 3.20 or 4.0. Also, the 2015 Linux Kernel Report reveals a growing rate of kernel contributions.

• Linux kernel 3.19 was released on Feb. 8 (see farther below). Meanwhile, the next release has a good chance of being renamed from Linux 3.20 to Linux 4.0. As reported by LinuxPlanet, Linus Torvalds posted an entry on Google+ saying he is opening up the question of naming to the community before he makes a decision.

• For those unfamiliar with the VirtIO 1.0 implementation see the OASIS specification, “This document describes the specifications of the ‘virtio’ family of devices. These devices are found in virtual environments, yet by design they are not all that different from physical devices, and this document treats them as such. This allows the guest to use standard drivers and discovery mechanisms. The purpose of virtio and this specification is that virtual environments and guests should have a straightforward, efficient, standard and extensible mechanism for virtual devices, rather than boutique per-environment or per-OS mechanisms.”

• The Linux kernel is growing and changing faster than ever, but its development is increasingly being supported by a select group of companies, rather than by volunteer developers.

• That’s according to the latest survey of Linux kernel of development by the Linux Foundation, which it published to coincide with the kickoff of this year’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on Wednesday.

• The survey found that coders who claimed no company affiliation, or for whom an affiliation could not be determined, accounted for just 16.4 per cent of the total number of contributions to the kernel. Independent consultants made up another 2.5 per cent.

• The rest all came from coders working on behalf of companies large and small. And while individual contributors seldom made a huge impact on the kernel – most made ten or few changes to the kernel over the last three years – their combined efforts made a huge difference.

• The latest version of the Linux kernel to be released before the report was compiled, version 3.18, comprised some 18,997,848 lines of code.

• Linux recently saw “busiest development cycle” in its history.

• If there’s anyone left on the planet who thinks Linux is written by undateable guys in their parents basement, the latest Linux Foundation report, Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They Are Doing and Who is Sponsoring It, should put an end to that delusion.

• Working with Jon Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman to produce the ‘Who Writes Linux’ report is one of the most important research projects we do, as it surfaces important data and trends that offer some insight into how the Linux kernel development process is going and informs collaborative development practices across the industry. As the world’s largest collaborative development project, Linux can teach us much.

• Linux, without any doubts, is the most used technology in the world which is powering the modern IT infrastructure. From drones to space stations; from massive super computers to tiny smart-watches, from mission critical stock exchanges to your printers and routers everything is powered by Linux.

• Drone technology has also reached a maturity level that the embedded Linux, ROS (Robot Operating System) and drone communities are converging, Anderson said. Dronecode, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, is designed to bring these various communities together to work on a common open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology.

• Bloomberg, the global business and financial information company, has joined the Linux Foundation as a Gold member.

• The newest addition to systemd just a day after landing its new EFI boot manager is systemd-fsckd. This new addition was done by Ubuntu developers.

• With the next kernel — regardless of whether it be known as Linux 3.20 or Linux 4.0 — it will contain support for new ARM platforms.

• Intel, one of the world’s largest computer hardware companies, is now also among the biggest contributors to open-source software.

• The Linux Foundation has released their annual Linux kernel development report from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit taking place in Santa Rosa, California.

• A few weeks ago I wrote how systemd developers were planning to add Gummiboot as a UEFI boot manager to systemd. Now, following the just-released systemd 219, they’ve gone ahead and added their initial code for providing systemd with a EFI boot manager.

• Now more than ever, the development of the Linux kernel is a matter for the professionals, as unpaid volunteer contributions to the project reached their lowest recorded levels in the latest “Who Writes Linux” report, which was released today.

• Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin thinks the information security world needs fewer surgeons and more personal trainers, and he’s putting his organization’s money where his mouth is.

• Speaking at this year’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, an invite-only event taking place this week in Santa Rosa, California, Zemlin took a break from his customary Linux and open source cheerleading to stress that the open source community needs to do more to address security.

Graphics Stack

• Support for the GL_AMD_pinned_memory OpenGL extension has landed within Mesa and is implemented for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers. This patch series also lands the Userptr support for the open-source AMD graphics drivers on the user-space side.

• The candidates running for the open seats for the X.Org Foundation Board if Directors has been released.

• A few weeks back at FOSDEM was a presentation by Luc Verhaegen on the Tamil Driver, which is focused on bringing open-source graphics driver support to ARM’s Mali T-Series and is the successor to his former Lima driver for older Mali graphics hardware.

• The latest OpenGL extension being implemented within Mesa Git for Mesa 10.6 is the ARB_pipeline_statistics_query extension.

• In getting Wayland’s input support ready for prime-time usage and with Fedora 22 switching its X.Org input stack to libinput, Red Hat developers have been very busy getting libinput to reach feature parity with the conventional X.Org input code.

Benchmarks

• For those looking for a very economically priced SSD that’s still reliable and from a well known vendor, the OCZ ARC 100 series might be the most tempting drive line-up yet. With the OCZ ARC 100 series, a 256GB SSD costs only $90 USD or a 480GB SSD for $197. Though in this article the OCZ ARC 100 120GB SSD is being tested and it retails for less than $70 USD.

Applications

Proprietary

• Having a modern graphical interface, Vivaldi tries to bring the quality of Opera 12.

• Adobe’s Flash has gotten a bad rap for quite a long time now. One redditor asked how people deal with Flash on their Linux computers, and his fellow redditors pulled no punches in their responses.

Instructionals/Technical

• For some time now I’ve been using Atom as a replacement for Kate, KWrite and GEdit, depending on the desktop environment I’m using.

• The first beta of version 14.2 “Helix” of the software formerly known as XBMC is now available.

• Kodi is a powerful media player and entertainment hub that you might know better under the name of the XBMC. The name change occurred a few months ago and this is the first major upgrade for the 14.x branch.

• In this article we are going to have look into the installation and basic usage of node.js application. Node is a set of libraries for JavaScript which allows it to be used outside of the browser. It is primarily focused on creating simple, easy to build network clients and servers.

Games

• The 2D adventure game Shipwreck is now available on Steam. It’s been covered previously before when it was only available for Linux gamers via Desura and the Humble Store.

• OpenMW, an open source implementation of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind game engine and functionality that is still under development, has just been upgraded to version 0.35.0 and is now ready for download.

• Hey Linux gamers, we are happy to inform you that a Trinity Bundle game sale is taking place these days, which includes no more than 10 awesome games for GNU/Linux operating systems. Of course, all games will also work on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X computer operating systems.

• Even if Valentine’s Day has already passed, gamers can still get the Humble Weekly Bundle: For Lovers (of games), which contains quite a few Linux titles and even a couple of pillowcases.

• Crytek announced a while ago that it was working on the CryEngine for the Linux platform, but little information has been made available since then. Now, it looks like they are finally ready to share some news about the engine during the upcoming GDC 2015 event.

• FlightGear 3.4 brings improved frame-rates, reduced memory occupancy for scenery titles, AI model improvements, SVG-based panel support, improving rendering of the runway and other lights under ALS, landing and spotlight support for ALS, and various other improvements to this open-source cross-platform flight simulator.

• The FlightGear devs had the pleasure of announcing earlier today, February 17, the immediate availability for download of the FlightGear 3.4 open-source and cross-platform cooperative flight simulator. The new release introduces a number of improvements and new features in various areas, such as aircraft, graphics, scenery, and JSBSim.

• FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language and an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

• Gallium Nine is a Direct3D 9 implementation for the Open Source Mesa drivers that use Gallium. Used with Wine, it enables you to play Direct3D 9 games with solid performance on Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The porting of KDE software from Qt4 to Qt5 is in full progress. The KDE core libraries were splitted to multiple manageable frameworks, ready to be used with any Qt5 application.

• One of the important design cornerstones of Plasma is that we want to reduce the amount of “hidden features” as much as possible. We do not want to have to rely on the user knowing where to right-click in case she wants to find a certain, desktop-related option, say adding widgets, opening the desktop settings dialog, the activity switcher, etc.. For this, Plasma 4.0 introduced the toolbox, a small icon that when clicked opens a small dialog with actions related to the desktop. To many users, this is an important lifeline when they’re looking for a specific option.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• For those wishing to experiment with the latest Wayland technologies, short of running the Weston compositor, the bleeding-edge development GNOME stack continues to serve as an excellent alternative with quickly adopting support for new functionality.

• It looks like that Google’s Material Design guidelines are making quite an impression, and developers have started to pay closer attention to them. Now we have a new theme that tries to respect the new guidelines and it’s probably just the first of many.

Distributions

• Ozon OS “Hydrogen” is a new Linux distribution based on Fedora 21 developed by a team from Nitrux and Numix. It’s been in the works for quite some time and it looks like a new Beta release is almost here.

Reviews

• Nvidia followed that device up this past summer with what it calls the “Shield Tablet,” an 8-inch device built to be a solid tablet, but with a clear focus on gaming. I’ve had one here for the last week, kicking the tires. And, let me tell you, it makes both an incredible tablet and an astoundingly good game console.

Arch Family

• Arch is one of my favorite GNU/Linux distributions, along with openSUSE and Kubuntu. However, unlike openSUSE or Kubuntu it’s not easy to install Arch Linux. I have created a little guide of my own which I follow whenever I install Arch on any system – and I have done it dozens of times since 2011. I would suggest that you should also open the official wiki of Arch Linux, while you follow this tutorial so you can better understand the wiki.

Slackware Family

• The KDE 5_15.02 increment contains the KDE Frameworks 5.7.0, Plasma 5.2.0 and Applications 14.12.2. Also present is a bunch of the “good old” KDE 4: most of kdebase, kdebindings and all those “extragear” packages like k3b and kdevelop which were missing in my 5_15.01 release.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is making lots of noise. The firm is bullishly ebullient about containers; the firm has this year partnered with 3scale for its API management platform; and the firm has just announced its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 offering. In less product branded terms then, this is software to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for businesses that we can label as “advanced cloud users” today.

• Last year, Red Hat decided that the 64-bit ARM architecture was ready for the data center and cloud. This year, Red Hat announced that its Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program has expanded to include more than 35 companies. It also expects them to contribute open-source system-specific software and drivers to the upstream Linux ARM community.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program has expanded to include more than 35 member companies, ranging from silicon vendors and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to independent software vendors (ISVs).

• ARM is not yet a primary target for Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux server, but it will be at some point in the near future. Red Hat has grown its ARM Partner Early Access program to 35 members, including both software and silicon vendors.

Fedora

• The GNOME desktop is well integrated into the Korora distro. Korora 21 also is available with the Cinnamon, KDE and Xfce desktops. Korora developers did an awesome job tweaking the integration of each desktop into the distro’s performance. You must download each ISO file separately. Like most full-service Linux distros, Korora no longer includes all of the desktop options in one humongous ISO.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I recorded and posted a video with a detailed review of the bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu phone, complete with wider commentary on the scopes and convergence strategy and the likelihood of success.

• People tend to think about Ubuntu for Phones like a separate platform, but the truth is that it’s a lot closer to the PC than most users think. The fact that an app like GCompris can be made to run on phones is good proof of that.

• On the 11th of February, over 12.000 BQ Aquaris E4.5 have been sold in two flash sales. The next flash sale will take place tomorrow, at 9 AM CET (Central European Time). The Ubuntu phone from BQ will be available for ordering via the bq website, for €169.90.

• For those of you who didn’t have the chance to buy the Ubuntu Phone last week, BQ announced a few minutes ago on Twitter that a new flash sale for its Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone device, which uses the Ubuntu Phone (Ubuntu Touch) operating system, would take place tomorrow morning starting at 9 AM CET (Central European Time).

• Mark Shuttleworth clearly feels that what consumers and developers need, they will in time learn to want.

• A new arrival into an extremely competitive market, the first Ubuntu-powered phone has finally gone on sale in Europe – two years after a failed attempt to generate crowdfunding nevertheless raised US$12m. A sleek, polished rectangle, it appears much like other smartphones, but promises a different experience.

• In case you didn’t know, BQ, the Spanish phone manufacturer that produces the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone, has a YouTube channel, called Canal bq. There, you will find all sorts of instructive videos, some of which are about the brand-new Ubuntu Phone device.

• Meet the $89 Remanufactured Ubuntu Linux web workstation. Encased in 12.5×12.5×6.25 of 1/8th inch black recycled ABS plastic and shipped in 100% non-virgin fiber packaging, this little marvel is the culmination of years of hard work, dedication and focus. Averaging only 50% of the shipping weight of a standard desktop tower, and offering at least 2GB of RAM, 2.8Ghz of desktop-class processing power and at least a 80GB SATA hard drive, the Symple PC gives classroom labs, non-profits and call centers a planet-friendly, privacy-conscious choice for computing at an outstanding value. Complete with an available 1 Year Advanced Replacement Warranty, provided you ship the unit back to be planet-conscious, Symple PCs arrive at your organization with Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS pre-installed. They handle local document processing, web work, and are completely private and stand-alone, not requiring any 3rd party accounts to login and be productive.

Flavours and Variants

• Jeff Hoogland today announced Bodhi Linux 3.0.0. This is the first release after the scare of losing founder and lead developer; a release many thought may never come just a short while ago. Over at Linux.com Swapnil Bhartiya penned an article describing the best Linux contenders in a variety of categories for the coming year. Elsewhere, five developers say Linux should be used for making music.

• Version 3.0 of Bodhi Linux is now available, the distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that features a customized Enlightenment E19 desktop.

Devices/Embedded

• Enea (STO:ENEA), a leading operating system solution vendor within the communication domain announces Enea Linux support for the 64-bit AMD embedded R-Series system-on-chip (SoC) processor, codenamed “Hierofalcon”.

• It is hard to believe that the Raspberry Pi has been around for three years already. Launched back in 2012, the credit card-sized PC attracted quite a bit of attention due to its $35 price and potential ability to encourage programming with children. Today, it was revealed that over 5 million units of Raspberry Pi have been sold to date.

Phones

Tizen

• Terminology version 0.8 has been released and is available for immediate download. Terminology is a terminal emulator program that is written with Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), and has some extra features when compared to standard Terminal apps.

Android

• When it comes to Android, there is never a dearth of messaging apps. From WhatsApp to Line, you can switch to pretty much any messaging service, whenever you want. However, if you are running a company, there are many factors involved before you add a messaging app in the mix. The same solutions that teenagers use to keep up with their buddies won’t work amongst your employees. Can be quite frustrating, don’t you think?

• The Android 5.0 Lollipop is now being seeded to various Samsung smartphones like the Galaxy S5, Galaxy S4, Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Note 2. The update is being rolled out in phases which mean that all the others will not receive the Lollipop update simultaneously. This report talks about the status update of the latest Android build for the aforementioned smartphones.

• We’ll explain 15 reasons why Android is better than the iPhone with a new for 2015 Android vs iPhone comparison. In the last six months Apple’s iOS 8, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus changed the playing field and removed some of the advantages Android offered, but the Android 5.0 Lollipop release and excellent phones still set Android apart in several important areas.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Android 5.0 Lollipop has been out and about for almost four months now and during this time it has slowly been making its way to phones and tablets. More phones than tablets, to be precise.

Free Software/Open Source

• The information jobs for the remainder of the 21st century will not be managed by operating systems. Today, we perceive Twitter as one of a very few examples of services that run at “Internet scale” — at a scale so large that the size of its domain is meaningless. Yet Twitter is actually an example of what one day, within most of our lifetimes, will be considered an everyday job, the sort of thing you expect networks of clustered servers numbering in the tens of thousands to do.

• At least that’s how Dmitry Pushkarev sees it. His new company, ClusterK, is releasing its genomics pipeline to illustrate how complex workflows like the Broad Institute’s GATK can be run efficiently—and much faster—on the cloud. The pipeline breaks the GATK pipeline into thousands of different tasks, each taking 10-20 minutes, which can be run in parallel. “It allows the entire workflow to be distributed across dozens of compute nodes,” Pushkarev says, and results are returned much faster.

• HP has released a product that checks off many of the boxes on the hot-technology list for 2015: big data, business intelligence, predictive analytics, and open source.

• HFOSS organizers need to make is easier to help people get involved. One recommendation that I have is a simple navigator that asks people what they want to do or what they want to give. The aggregator would then help match them to tasks and communities. Think of it as a global Match.com for giving. We would give love to open source organizations, corporations, nonprofits, community-based organizations, and citizens. Truly, this is all hands on deck to make it possible for anyone and any organization to connect. We could tailor it with the code to help people choose their own adventure based on topic, time, location, and their learning/doing/giving path. Really, we need to dream big more and build it.

• Zack Urlocker was just named COO of Duo Security, a Benchmark and Google Ventures-backed security company that aims to make two-factor authentication omnipresent and painless. Is this Urlocker’s next unicorn? After all, as SVP of products and marketing at MySQL, he helped to drive a $1 billion sale by Sun. Later, he went on to run operations at pre-IPO Zendesk (now worth $2 billion).

• From the corporate world I frequently hear how hard it is to predict and track what upstream developers do. On the other side, developers that work part or full time upstream frequently underestimate the need for communicating what they do in a way that enable others (or themselves) to provide deadlines and effort estimations. Upstream and product “time lines” and cultures often differ too much to be compatible under the same environment.

Events

• The Linux Foundation describes its annual Collaboration Summit as a gathering of its corporate members along with invited participants including core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors, and representatives of community organizations. This year’s Summit takes place Feb. 18-20 in Santa Rosa, Calif., and is expected to draw more than 450 participants.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Every so often, a bug shows up in an open-source application that just make me go ..huH? That’s the case with Mozilla firefox bug 949446 which has the ominous title of: “Source Code Disclosure of every possible project”

SaaS/Big Data

• IBM, GE, Teradata, Infosys, VMware, Pivotal, SAS and others will develop on and test out Apache Hadoop open source tools

• MapR has a new release today that provides some perspectives on the influences that are shaping new data-centric architectures. In particular, it shows the importance of Yarn, Mesos and the continued value that Docker plays as the need increases for developing new patterns that reflect the forces of data gravity and container density.

• All the way back in 2013, the folks at Cloudscaling were adamant that the future of OpenStack depended on embracing Amazon Web Services (AWS), and there has continued to be much debate on the topic. Eucalyptus Systems, among other open cloud players, proved that by integrating Amazon’s command interfaces exactly, many users would react positively.

• This week, there are a lot of interesting big data announcements coming out of Strata + Hadoop World. MapR Technologies, Inc. has announced at Strata + Hadoop World the latest release of the MapR Distribution including Hadoop, which, the company notes, “has new features that accelerate the data-centric enterprise by supporting applications on globally-distributed, big data.” The company’s new MapR Distribution including Hadoop, version 4.1, features interesting table replication features and more.

• Bowing to customer pressure, enterprise software and services vendor Pivotal will release as open source the remainder of its software suite for analyzing data.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice is the flagship office suite for Linux. It’s also quite popular with Windows users. As a free, open-source and cross-platform solution, LibreOffice allows people to enjoy the world of writing, spreadsheets, presentations and alike without having to spend hefty sums of money. The only problem till now was that it didn’t quite work as advertised. Microsoft Office support was, for the lack of a better word, lacking.

• Version 4.4 is out, and it promises a great deal. A simplified interface, new looks, much improved proprietary file format support. Sounds exciting, and as someone who has lambasted LibreOffice for this very reason in the past, I felt compelled to give this new edition its due rightful try. On top of Plasma 5 no less. So let’s see.

Funding

• I wrote a column a while back called “Distro developers need dollars” where I included links to distro donation pages. My thought then was that it was a good idea for distro developers to get financial support from users whenever possible. I still feel that way, however, there’s a flip side to that idea too.

BSD

• Anyhow, some comments in my recent posts (“Has modern Linux lost its way?” and Reactions to that, and the value of simplicity), plus a latent desire to see how ZFS fares in FreeBSD, caused me to try it out. I installed it both in VirtualBox under Debian, and in an old 64-bit Thinkpad sitting in my basement that previously ran Debian.

• If you are running a current kernel r273872 or later, please upgrade your kernel to r278907 or later immediately and regenerate keys.

• It was fixed and subsequently reported yesterday that the FreeBSD kernel has been subject to a faulty random number generator for the past four months.

• [...]

• Update: To clarify, this issue is/was only in the FreeBSD -CURRENT kernel and not the 10.x releases.

• Coming soon is the HHVM 3.6 release for making PHP even faster and Facebook’s Hack derivative even better, but further out into 2015 are even more exciting improvements.

Openness/Sharing

• The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has announced the launch of a new open source software community and code repository at OpenSourceSDN.org. The foundation said the new site is designed to be a resource for those looking to commercially deploy open SDN (Software-Defined Networking) solutions, free from vendor lock-in.

Open Data

• OpenStreetMap has been for almost 11 years and at long last routing has arrived on the main website. The functionality is actually provided by 3rd parties including OSRM, MapQuest and GraphHopper. One shortcoming of the new map implementation is that you cannot add multiple destinations to your journey. Nonetheless the new update is a huge one for the open source map software.

• The OpenGov platform has been gaining traction as a tool for governments to demonstrate their transparency by providing better access to government spending data in a user-friendly, digital format.

Open Access/Content

• Subha Panigrahi is an educator and open source activist based in Bangalore, India. He is currently works at the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program where he builds partnership with universities, language researchers, and GLAM organizations. Their goal is to bring more scholarly and encyclopedic content under free licenses. During his work at the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program, Subha was involved in designing community sustaining and new contributor cultivation models.

Open Hardware

• VR ecosystem is now supported by 38 members; Academia Support Program announced to support developers worldwide

Standards/Consortia

• On February 11 at the State Council Executive Meeting in Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang confirmed the final framework agenda for China’s standardization reform. According to a report on the State Council website, the key target of reform is improving China’s economic performance and enhancing the overall competitiveness of China’s products and services.

• The HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications have been formally approved by the IESG.

Leftovers

• The ‘90s rapper known as Vanilla Ice has been arrested and charged with burglary and grand theft for allegedly stealing an array of items from a vacant Florida home.

• Lantana police told TMZ that furniture, a pool heater, bicycles and other items were stolen from the property in the 100 block of N. Atlantic Drive.

Health/Nutrition

• The numbers are startling. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1.8 million more children in the US were diagnosed with developmental disabilities between 2006 and 2008 than a decade earlier. During this time, the prevalence of autism climbed nearly 300%, while that of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder increased 33%. CDC figures also show that 10 to 15% of all babies born in the US have some type of neurobehavorial development disorder. Still more are affected by neurological disorders that don’t rise to the level of clinical diagnosis.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• There was a great power that was worried about its longtime rival’s efforts to undermine it. Its leaders thought the rival power was stronger and trying to throw its weight around all over the world. In fact, this longtime rival was now interfering in places the declining state had long regarded as its own backyard. To protect this traditional sphere of influence, the worried great power had long maintained one-sided relationships with its neighbors, many of them led by corrupt and brutal oligarchs who stayed in power because they were subservient to the powerful neighbor’s whims.

• Further, Bush misrepresented the strength of ISIS, saying they have some 200,000 men, which is far greater than U.S. intelligence community’s estimates. Last week National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen pegged the fighting strength of ISIS at between 20,000 and 31,500.

Transparency Reporting

• Last month, WikiLeaks wrote an open letter to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt admonishing the tech giant for waiting over two and a half years to reveal that it gave the Department of Justice the emails and other data of three Wikileaks staffers. Google was finally successful in overturning the gag order in December, which was when the staffers in question – Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell – were made aware of the investigation into their activities.

• Adrian Humphreys of the National Post, who last year wrote an award-winning 5 part investigative piece on Matt DeHart’s case, reports: “The decision by the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) offered him a moral victory — finding no ‘credible or trustworthy evidence’ he committed the child pornography offences alleged by the government — but extended him no protection, denying him refugee status, which would have allowed him to remain in Canada.” — See full story here.

• The sea is rising and our remaining hills are few and far between. This is not a discussion of climate change despite its perils. This a discussion of the anonymous archipelago in the global sea of surveillance and our loss of collective privacy. While our individual privacy is in grave danger today, there are still countermeasures to protect our thoughts and words from hostile eyes and ears. It cannot listen to yet the voice in our heads nor can they follow everyone at all times. It cannot yet steal the ideas from our minds nor can they accurately predict our intentions short of our overt behavior. They do not yet have this power, but they will try. They will try because we have ceded to them our right to collective privacy.

• When Private Chelsea Manning – the former soldier currently serving a 35-year prison term for leaking thousands of classified documents – came out as transgender in August 2013, major media outlets proved just how ill-prepared they were to cover transgender stories. Both Fox News and CNN repeatedly misgendered Manning, disregarding GLAAD’s Media Reference Guide, which calls on news organizations to refer to transgender people by their preferred gender pronouns.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• You don’t have to look 85 years into the future to see what a sinking world looks like—you only need to look as far as Miami.

Finance

• Or maybe people think inequality hasn’t stopped rising because it hasn’t. The problem with Leonardt’s argument is that it’s cherry-picking: If you start from 2007, which was the height of a financial and real-estate bubble that mostly benefited the wealthy, then of course the income of the wealthy won’t return to where it was; a bubble is by definition unsustainable. (If the recovery amounts to reinflating the bubble, as some observers fear, that would be bad news for the elite as well as for the rest of us.)

• [...]

• Leonhardt can sometimes be an effective debunker of conservative spin, but the trick of starting your measurement of inequality from an unrepresentative peak is reminiscent of the chicanery of Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Barkley, who wrote an entire book, The Seven Fat Years, based on manipulating the timeframe of economic comparisons.

• Of course, income inequality is still at historically troubling rates, and could potential even worsen, as the Times repeatedly noted.

• Geneva’s public prosecutor searched the premises of HSBC Holdings PLC in Geneva on Wednesday and said it had opened a criminal inquiry into allegations of aggravated money laundering.

• “A search is currently underway in the premises of the bank, led by Attorney General Olivier Jornot and the prosecutor Yves Bertossa,” Geneva’s prosecutor said in a statement.

• HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, apologised to customers and investors on Sunday for past practices at its Swiss private bank following allegations that it helped hundreds of clients dodge taxes.

• Investigation into suspected ‘aggravated money laundering’ comes after Belgium and France begin scrutinising tax affairs of Europe’s biggest bank

• The Swiss subsidiary of HSBC was searched on Wednesday by officials after prosecutors in Geneva said they are opening a money laundering investigation into the bank’s alleged illegal tax activity.

• The premises of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) were searched by authorities, AP reported, and the investigation could possibly extend beyond the bank to any clients participating in money laundering.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Conservative media figures criticized the Obama administration for suggesting terrorism is tied to poverty, ignoring the fact that former President George W. Bush also explicitly cited alleviating poverty as a fundamental tool to fighting terrorism.

• The Wall Street Journal is celebrating a ruling from a lower-court judge who has temporarily blocked President Obama’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion over undocumented immigrants by repeating a litany of right wing-media myths, some of which were repeated in the legal decision itself.

• You can see propaganda being manufactured before your eyes: “According to one new poll” becomes “Poll Shows”; “more support it than object” becomes “Americans Want.” Any subtleties are ironed out to create an assertion that the American people are calling for Netanyahu to speak.

Censorship

• The First 100 Days featured actress Priyanga Burford as the party’s only Asian woman MP, who is elected for Romford in an imagined landslide making Mr Farage Prime Minister.

• Former Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne has said that “poor editorial judgement” has been exercised at the newspaper he stepped down from.

• Following his announcement that he had resigned from his position as The Telegraph’s chief political commentator, Oborne appeared in a strongly-worded interview on BBC Radio 4, where he repeated his comments that the paper had “failed” its readers in its alleged underreporting of the HSBC scandal.

• The Daily Telegraph’s former chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, has called for an independent inquiry into the paper’s editorial guidelines over its lack of coverage of the HSBC tax story, which he described as a “fraud on its readers”.

• In September 2013, Peter Oborne wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph in praise of Ed Miliband, calling him a brave and adroit leader. I remarked at the time that he was a columnist renowned for going against the grain of the newspaper for which he writes.

• It is to his credit that he did so and was to the Telegraph’s credit that it hired him and published him for five years. He never subscribed to the paper’s large-C Conservative line on many subjects.

• THE report released on Thursday by Reporters Sans Frontières reminds us that politics around the world today has inevitably taken a heavy toll on media freedoms, squeezing both the public’s right to know and journalists’ duty to inform.

• “Press freedom … is in retreat in all five continents,” said the RSF 2015 World Press Freedom Index.

• The head of the RSF told the media that the deterioration is linked to a range of factors, “with information wars and actions by non-state groups acting as news despots”.

Privacy

• New research done by Russian cyber-security firm, Kaspersky, suggests that the NSA (although not confirmed by Kaspersky) has spyware deeply embedded into hard drives from manufacturers including Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and others, covering much of what’s on the market. The software embedded in the hard drives is part of a group of spyware which Kaspersky found out about.

• The UK already has a pretty awful reputation when it comes to surveillance, what with millions of CCTV cameras, DRIPA and two recent attempts to shove the Snooper’s Charter through Parliament without scrutiny. So perhaps it should come as no surprise to discover that UK police forces have created a giant facial recognition database that includes hundreds of thousands of innocent people….

• Police forces in England and Wales have uploaded up to 18 million “mugshots” to a facial recognition database – despite a court ruling it could be unlawful.

• They include photos of people never charged, or others cleared of an offence, and were uploaded without Home Office approval, Newsnight has learned.

• Security researchers have uncovered highly sophisticated malware that is linked to a secret National Security Agency hacking operation exposed by The Intercept last year.

• Russian security firm Kaspersky published a report Monday documenting the malware, which it said had been used to infect thousands of computer systems and steal data in 30 countries around the world. Among the targets were a series of unnamed governments; telecom, energy and aerospace companies; as well as Islamic scholars and media organizations.

• Kaspersky did not name the NSA as the author of the malware. However, Reuters reported later on Monday that the agency had created the technology, citing anonymous former U.S. intelligence officials.

• Kaspersky’s researchers noted that the newly found malware is similar to Stuxnet, a covert tool reportedly created by the U.S. government to sabotage Iranian nuclear systems. The researchers also identified a series of code names that they found contained within the samples of malware, including STRAIGHTACID, STRAITSHOOTER and GROK.

• On Monday, London-based human rights group Privacy International launched an initiative enabling anyone across the world to challenge covert spying operations involving Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the National Security Agency’s British counterpart.

• The campaign was made possible following a historic court ruling earlier this month that deemed intelligence sharing between GCHQ and the NSA to have been unlawful because of the extreme secrecy shrouding it.

• As the Snowden leaks continue to dribble out, it has become increasingly obvious that most nations planning for “cyber-war” have been merely sharpening knives for what looks like an almighty gunfight.

• Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower on the run, spoke at ACLU Hawaii’s First Amendment Conference live Saturday, via a video link from Moscow, Russia.

• Google is warning that the government’s quiet plan to expand the FBI’s authority to remotely access computer files amounts to a “monumental” constitutional concern.

• The search giant submitted public comments earlier this week opposing a Justice Department proposal that would grant judges more leeway in how they can approve search warrants for electronic data.

• The UK Government has today conceded that its policies governing the ability of intelligence agencies to spy on lawyer-client communications were unlawful, in response to a case brought by two victims of an MI6-orchestrated ‘rendition’ operation.

• Abdul-hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar were tortured and rendered to Libya in 2004 in a joint MI6-CIA operation. They filed a case in 2013 with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) concerning alleged eavesdropping by UK intelligence services on their confidential communications with their lawyers.

• The regime under which UK intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for the past five years is unlawful, the British government has admitted.

• The admission that the activities of the security services have failed to comply fully with human rights laws in a second major area – this time highly sensitive legally privileged communications – is a severe embarrassment for the government.

Civil Rights

• No country on the planet is untouched by the United States government. In fact, the US has the most powerful military on Earth and arguably the most powerful military in the history of the world. There is no more important “affair of the state” during the life of a nation than its participation in war. Yet instead of defending the country, the United States government often uses the military, the CIA, and a variety of international organizations to intervene in foreign affairs on behalf of powerful US based multinational corporations often to the detriment of the great majority of the people in the United States and billions of people around the world.

• This is the third article (see PART 1 & PART 2) in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how public ambivalence toward a justice system which operates for profit not public good has created a breeding ground for corruption.

• French police have opened an investigation after Ffans of Chelsea football club were filmed repeatedly pushing a black man off a Paris Metro train, before chanting “We’re racist and that’s the way we like it”.

• The University of Massachusetts Amherst today announced that it will accept Iranian students into science and engineering programs, developing individualized study plans to meet the requirements of federal sanctions law and address the impact on students. The decision to revise the university’s approach follows consultation with the State Department and outside counsel.

• In August 2010, Stephen Kim, a highly-regarded intelligence analyst in the State Department, was indicted under the Espionage Act for divulging classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen. If convicted at trial, he faced 10 to 15 years in prison.

• Kim allowed me to film his life in intimate detail from the period after his guilty plea early last year — he accepted a sentence of 13 months — until his surrender at a federal prison this past July. I watched him simultaneously disassemble the physical components of his life while he retraced the journey that brought him from speaking zero English as a young Korean immigrant, to the nation’s top universities, to the State Department and ultimately to the courtroom where he faced federal prosecution.

• Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This Is His Story.

• New York Times reporter James Risen slammed Attorney General Eric Holder in a series of tweets Tuesday evening, calling the Obama administration “The greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”

• “Eric Holder has been the nation’s top censorship officer, not the top law enforcement officer,” Risen tweeted. “Eric Holder has done the bidding of the intelligence community and the White House to damage press freedom in the United States.”

• Risen was tweeting in response to a speech Holder gave earlier on Tuesday at the National Press Club, where he defended the administration’s record on prosecuting leakers, saying they could have prosecuted far more than they actually did.

• At almost the same time, lawyers for Jeffrey Sterling moved for acquittal on all charges. As part of that, they made an argument very similar to the one I made: Jeffrey Sterling was convicted on three charges relating to the possession of a copy of a letter that appeared in Risen’s State of War that not only did the FBI admit they never found, but which Sterling had no possible way of possessing.

• Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper issued guidance this month on polygraph testing for screening of intelligence community personnel. His instructions give particular emphasis to the use of the polygraph for combating unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

• Speaking at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Holder, noting that he was speaking in a personal capacity and not as a member of the administration, said the “inevitable” possibility of executing an innocent individual is what makes him oppose capital punishment.

• The human rights abuses revealed in the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report released in December sparked global outrage, leaving some begging for senior officials from the George W. Bush administration to be held accountable. But CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou is certain the U.S. government will do nothing of the sort.

• Just two weeks after Kiriakou was released from prison after agreeing to a plea deal in which he admitted to violating one count of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, he spoke with HuffPost Live’s Alyona Minkovski on Tuesday about where the accountability should lie.

• Members of the Zambrano family began arriving here three decades ago, picking apples in nearby orchards. Over time they have become part of the fabric of this harvesting town, growing to more than 50 and settling in tiny candy-colored homes, some ringed by white picket fences.

• For the record, I believe our country needs some kind of program to divert wayward young men — of whatever race, religion, and ideology — rather than ensnaring them in stings that will result in a wasted life.

• Mind you, the government is going about it with the Muslim community badly. In part, that’s because the US doesn’t have much positive ideology to offer anymore, especially to those who identify in whatever way with those we’ve spent millions villainizing. In part, that’s because we’d have to revamp FBI before we started this CVE stuff, starting with the emphasis on terrorist conviction numbers as the prime measure of success. You’ll never succeed with a program if people’s primary job measure is the opposite.

• Finally, and most obviously, you have to start by building trust, which will necessarily require a transition time between when you primarily rely on dragnets and informants to that time when you can rely on community partners (it will also require an acceptance that you won’t stop all attacks, regardless of which method you use).

• This is for the courageous whistleblower John Kiriakou. He was the first U.S. government official to confirm in December 2007 that waterboarding was used to interrogate Al Qaeda prisoners, which he described as torture. On October 22, 2012, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to disclosing classified information about a fellow CIA officer that connected the covert operative to a specific operation. He was the first person to pass classified information to a reporter, although the reporter did not publish the name of the operative.[6] He was sentenced to 30 months in prison on January 25, 2013, and served his term from February 28, 2013 until 3 February 2015 at the low-security Federal correctional facility in Loretto, Pennsylvania.[7]

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In countries where Internet access is widespread there’s active conversations going on regarding net neutrality as more and more users tax ISP’s infrastructures thanks to heavy data usage. The fear surrounding a tiered Internet is that people will lose access to some sites and therefore lose out on information. Facebook’s attempt to provide some sites for free in India also raises net neutrality issues, rather than included sites being democratically chosen by it’s users, they’ve been pre-selected by Facebook.

• More antitrust woe for Google on the international front. Search giant Yandex, often described as the “Google of Russia”, has filed a request with Russia’s antimonopoly regulator to investigate Google over possible violations of Russia’s antitrust laws.

Intellectual Monopolies

• London’s Conway Hall was the venue for a Guardian Membership event held this week to debate the pros and cons of TTIP. The discussion was chaired by Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott and the panel comprised Claude Moraes, Labour MEP; Owen Tudor, head of European Union and International Relations, TUC; John Hilary, executive director of charity War on Want; and Vicky Pryce, chief economic adviser at the Centre for Economics and Business Research. There was also a room full of impassioned Guardian members. So what did we learn?

Copyrights

• The Pirate Bay has been back online for more than two weeks but thus far it’s been rough sailing. The notorious torrent site has had to jump from hosting service to hosting service just to stay online and is still looking for a safe haven. At the same time, scammers keep hounding the site with fake files and malicious links.

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