● 02.24.15

● Links 24/2/2015: Xfce 4.12 a Week Away, GNOME 3.16 Previewed

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Most people use Docker for containing applications to deploy into production or for building their applications in a contained enviornment. This is all fine & dandy, and saves developers & ops engineers huge headaches, but I like to use Docker in a not-so-typical way.

Server

• What will 2015 bring for the Linux community? It is a good question, since over the past 20+ years the Linux community has virtually redefined IT development. It has created a paradigm where clients look for, and downright expect, to get the very best innovations from a broad community of the brightest and most passionate developers in the industry. For over 30 years, I have both engaged in and studied the changes and challenges in the IT industry very closely. I have seen Linux reshape a segment of the market that is now growing more rapidly than any other. New workloads and creative developers are gravitating to the dynamic world of Linux.

Kernel Space

• With last night’s release of the Linux 4.0-rc1 kernel, Linus Torvalds changed the kernel codename from “Diseased Newt” to “Hurr durr I’ma sheep.” While the codename may seem a bit odd, the Linux kernel codenames are generally quite awkward.

• The forthcoming UEFI 2.5 specification has an addition that will be exciting for many Linux enthusiasts… BIOS/UEFI updating from the Linux desktop will be a real and stable feature regardless of motherboard vendor and their general lack of Linux utilities.

• After letting users decide the version numbering of the Linux kernel software, as Softpedia reported two weeks ago based on the Linus Torvalds’ Google+ poll for Linux kernel 3.20/4.0, the time has come for a change, as Linus Torvalds was proud to announce today the immediate availability for testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) version of the forthcoming Linux 4.0 kernel.

• While Linux 4.0 is the next major kernel release and it does present a new lot of new functionality, there’s still a number of high profile features not mainlined.

• Usually, when a software release moves to a new single digit release, it’s a big deal. When Linus Torvalds decided to shift the Linux kernel from 3.2x it was just to make developers happy.

• For now, Kernel 4.0 is in its early development stages but the final version should bring the “Live Patching” feature, which would allow the users to install and use the kernel without rebooting the system. While this is not important for regular users, this feature is very good for Linux servers.

• In his latest post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Linus has decided to bump the kernel to version 4.0 after releasing the first release candidate. Despite such a big version change, 3.19 to 4.0, Linus claims the release is a smaller one than usual. The main reason, I think, that people wanted to have such a major version change was because the numbers after the point were beginning to get to high and confusing… or maybe it was something to do with Terminator, the machine is running Linux 4.1.15.

• Linus announced yesterday that his poll has concluded and 29,110 voters have spoken. Elsewhere, Julie Bort got a look at the Accidental Revolutionary’s workspace – which centers around his ‘Zombie shuffling’ desktop. In other news, two prominent distributions today announced the start of their community wallpaper contests.

Graphics Stack

• Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has laid out some plans for releasing libinput 1.0 and coming up with a stable ABI/API.

• After figuring out DisplayPort MST support for the open-source Intel graphics driver, David Airlie of Red Hat has moved on to publishing patches to the Radeon DRM driver for enabling DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport.

Applications

• Following up on yesterday’s release, I’ve released Danbooru Client 0.3.0. This early new release is mostly due to the fact that the QML view file wasn’t installed (sorry!) so part of the UI would not even load (or even crash).

• Code-in is a program from Google to encourage young people (ages 13-17) to participate in free software projects. This year some Code-in participants worked on improvements for KDE Connect, and today we are releasing all this work condensed into KDE Connect 0.8!

• we are pleased to announce version 0.5 of Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client.

• The Totem movie player app of the GNOME desktop environment has been updated to version 3.16 Beta 1, as part of the recently released GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 desktop environment, bringing a number of improvements and bug fixes.

Instructionals/Technical

• Vagrant is a great tool for development, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers have typically been left out, because it has been impossible to get RHEL boxes! It would be extremely elegant if hackers could quickly test and prototype their code on the same OS as they’re running in production.

Games

• The GNOME Chess app of the GNOME desktop environment has also been updated as part of the GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 release, which was announced by Matthias Clasen this past weekend. GNOME Chess (formerly glChess) is a software that lets users play the game of chess under GNOME and other open-source desktop environments.

• Besiege is a physics based building game in which you construct medieval siege engines and lay waste to immense fortresses and peaceful hamlets.

• Besiege is a physics based building game in which you construct medieval siege engines and lay waste to immense fortresses and peaceful hamlets.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• After what seems like an eternity, a new release of Xfce is finally just around the corner. Xfce 4.10 was released in 2012, and since then development has happened in small bursts for each project. Once a release date was set, interest spiked and development along with it.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME shell theme has seen the first major refresh in a while. As part of this refresh, the theme has been rewritten in sass, and is now sharing much more code with the Adwaita GTK+ theme. Window decorations are now also sharing code between client-side and server-side.

• The UNCONFIRMED bug status (which can be disabled per product) will be removed as it is mostly not used and confuses reporters. Tickets with UNCONFIRMED status will be merged into NEW status as announced on desktop-devel-list and at the top of every GNOME Bugzilla page.

• The great and wonderful Matthias Clasen had the pleasure of announcing the immediate and limited availability for testing of the GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 desktop environment, which was supposed to see the light of day last Thursday, on February 19.

• Florian Müllner of the GNOME Project has announced the immediate availability for testing of Mutter 3.16 Beta 1, as part of the recently released GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 desktop environment. Mutter, GNOME’s default window and compositing manager, is in charge of displaying and managing your desktop via OpenGL technologies.

• While at last month’s Cambridge Hackfest, members of the GNOME Documentation Project team talked with Cosimo Cecchi of Endless Mobile about the user help in their product. As it turns out, they are shipping a modified version of Yelp, the GNOME help browser, along with modified versions of our own Mallard-based user help.

Distributions

• Q4OS is a Linux distribution built to offer users an experience similar to the one they would get from a Windows system. The devs have been making quite a few improvements and they are rapidly approaching version 1.0.

Reviews

• One of the nicest things I can say about any operating system is it is useful and running it is pleasantly boring. I like it when operating systems are easy to set up, they provide me with the tools I want so I can work (and play) and then they stay out of my way. Netrunner does exactly those things. The distribution is wonderfully easy to install, the operating system ships with lots of useful software and there are a minimum of distractions and notifications. The configuration panel offers a good balance of flexibility with easy navigation, the Muon Discover software manager is quick and easy to use and Netrunner worked well with my hardware.

• Linux Deepin remains a refreshing, unique offering on the distro market, with a truly beautiful composition and some rather lovely programs. It works well overall, but its attempt to look apart comes with the stability slash complexity price. The performance is not among the best, and some of the tools and applications could benefit from slight simplification, in that they ought to reduce the bling in favor of pure functionality.

• There are other problems, like the lack of the live session, the Store clutter and such. Still, if you are looking for something Ubuntu-like with charm and culture of its own, then Deepin realizes a reality that is so far different from others, it’s quite amazing. Not the best plug and play derivative, to be sure, but it could easily get there. The recipe has been laid out hereby. Final grade, something like 9/10. Not bad at all. You should definitely give it a try.

New Releases

• Robolinux is an easy-to-use Linux distribution based on Debian that features various flavors. The developers have just upgraded all the flavors and have announced that the new 7.8.2 version is out and comes with many interesting features.

Screenshots

Arch Family

• Manjaro is a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch. A new version based on the upcoming Xfce 4.12 has been released in anticipation of the actual launch.

Red Hat Family

• With its cross-platform charter expanding, Microsoft is making nice with its competitors — though sometimes in rather circuitous ways.

• OpenStack is at the center of a frenzy of engineering and marketing activity, and Red Hat is one of the major players making OpenStack an area of strength. The company just announced the sixth version of its OpenStack-based platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.

• Raleigh open-source technology firm Red Hat is featured in a recent article by design blog Design Milk as a workplace worth “waking up to go to.”

• The article highlights Red Hat’s colorful interior, communal space, outdoor terrace and other features available to the “lucky employees” of the downtown company.

Fedora

• Those installing the latest development snapshot of Fedora 22 will now experience a difference in the default X.Org input driver.

• Software is the biggest reason I love FLOSS and love Fedora. I love that the software is libre and it’s nice that it’s very often gratis. On both my desktop and netbook I’m running the latest Fedora (21 at this time). On my desktop I LOVE using KDE. Its use of Activities along with Virtual Desktops helps me to organize my work so perfectly.

• Time is flying, Fedora 21 is there just 2 months and Fedora 22 alpha is before the door. So it is time to open the Supplemental Wallpaper Contest. We will use again Nuancier Fedoras application fr the submission and the voting. There are also this time some changes, there is now a team of mentors, who look over the submissions and make suggestions how it can be improved. The submission phase is this time much much shorter, you have only until 19th of March to make your submission.

Debian Family

• Debian is on its way to becoming what could be the first operating system to prove the origin of its binaries, technologist Micah Lee says.

• The feat will allow anyone to independently confirm that Debian binaries were built from a reported source package.

• A USB-serial cable is a must for the install and for any subsequent major reconfiguration as the stock Debian installer does not have drivers for the video / audio. Various Cubietruck derivative distributions do – but the Sunxi kernel appears flaky

Derivatives

• After announcing the first point release of Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0 (Nestor) on February 13, 2015, as reported on Softpedia on that day, Alan Baghumian had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the Parsix GNU/Linux 7.5 Test 1 (codename Rinaldo) distribution, which brings a small number of changes and improvements compared to the last stable version of the OS, Parsix GNU/Linux 7.0r1.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The growth of the Internet of Things spreads, and Canonical wants to ensure that Ubuntu is involved.

• Canonical, the firm behind Ubuntu Linux, announced last week that Microsoft and Amazon agreed to publish their Internet of Things (IoT) application programming interfaces (APIs) on Ubuntu Core. The move showed that Canonical is forging meaningful partnerships with big time technology players, and showed how seriously the company takes the Internet of Things.

• Canonical has announced partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon, Texas Instruments and others related to IoT and Snappy Ubuntu Core, the transactionally updated variants of the open source Ubuntu Linux OS.

• Canonical came out with findings from its sixth annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey recently, which went out to respondents at the end of 2014. We covered it here. Among other things, it showed that “cloud adoption remains heavily weighted to private clouds,” which account for 35 percent of adoptions, Canonical said. On the other hand, RightScale’s 2015 State of the Cloud report, always one of the more definitive barometers for the state of cloud computing, found that private cloud popularity is waning, and hybrid clouds are all the rage.

• This is my first look at Ubuntu 14.04.2. This is not a major release but bug fixes from the earlier version of 14.04.

• Ubuntu is the perfect Linux for a Newbie to start off with. They have a very good online community to help with any questions. Why, just ask anything about Ubuntu in Google and you will get a response that will help you correct your problem. I have long been a fan of Ubuntu, and used it extensively in my early years of Linux.

• Unity 8 is making great strides and it’s looking more and more like a proper desktop. Canonical is getting ready to ship this new desktop by default next year in April, and everything is falling into place.

• Canonical has been developing LXCFS, a FUSE-based file-system for LXC containers that will premiere with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 15.04.

• The Ubuntu Touch OS from Canonical has been upgraded once again and a new RTM version has been released. The system is now more stable and users should be able to detect some noticeable improvements for UI responsiveness and some other changes.

• Canonical chooses a number of wallpapers after the community submits them, giving everyone the chance to see their work implemented by default into the Ubuntu operating systems. Now is that time for the 15.04 branch.

• Dear Softpedia Linux readers, it is with great pleasure I am announcing today, February 23, 2015, the Softpedia Linux web app for Ubuntu Touch (also known as Ubuntu Phone), the mobile version of the world’s most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux. The application is available for installation right now from the Ubuntu Touch Store.

• By now, most of you have likely heard about the new Ubuntu phone selling out fairly quickly after its release. In a crowded mobile market, any new entries to the smart phone operating system space must find their niche fairly quickly. We’ve seen how failing to address this can lead to mediocre results with Windows Phones.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• The OS on the smartwatch has been through a complete makeover, curtesy of the team behind WebOS. The interface has been made to display a list of recent notifications and is outfitted with different animations and tweaks.

• F&S Elektronik Systeme debuted a COM based on Freescale’s new MCU-enabled “i.MX 6SoloX” SoC, and offering dual GbE, multimedia, serial, and PCIe interfaces.

• Today marks the availability of the very latest beta release candidate for the popular Raspberry Pi educational platform. This ROM now includes support for the Mark 2 Model B Raspberry Pi hardware, using the newer BCM2836 system on chip and a total of 1GB of RAM. The model A, B, and B+ are still supported too.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• An Android developer has figured out a way to get Android Wear, the wearable-friendly version of Android, to work with an iPhone. While functionality is limited, the workaround pushes notifications from iOS to an Android Wear smartwatch without any jailbreaking required.

• Standalone app is free and ad-supported, offering a mixture of TV shows, educational videos, music and child-friendly vloggers

• Google expanded the availability of Android One to two new smartphones – the Cherry One and MyPhone Uno – in the Philippines last week. These affordable devices, as Google notes, come with the latest version of Android Lollipop offering the fastest and most responsive Android experience, which is confirmed to be Android version 5.1.

• Traditionally, the best word to describe Google’s Android operating system has been utilitarian. The engineers behind the world’s leading mobile platform have long emphasized features over aesthetics.

• A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit accusing Google Inc. of harming smartphone buyers by forcing handset makers that use its Android operating system to make the search engine company’s own applications the default option.

• Android: No matter how much space you have on your phone or tablet, you’ll eventually fill it up. If you’re running low on space, Memory Map will show you what’s using up the all that storage.

• I got curious to see how the different browsers identify themselves to the world via their User agent strings and I must say that each browser’s string reveals a lot about both the browser makers and their philosophies regarding user privacy.

• Google’s mobile payments app, Google Wallet, will come pre-installed on Android phones sold by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, beginning later this year.

• If you’re not happy with the default SMS app on Android, you can just change it to something else. This means that you can install an SMS app, set it as the new default and completely forget that the SMS app your phone came with even exists.

• LG G3 for Verizon Wireless is the latest version of the Korean company’s flagship smartphone to receive Android 5.0.1 Lollipop. The new OS build has the software version number VS98523A.

• Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop update has already replaced Android 5.0.2 Lollipop as the most current version of the Lollipop operating system. However, the Android 5.1 Lollipop release remains mysterious for most Android users including owners of Nexus devices like the Nexus 6 and Nexus 5. With details continuing to emerge ahead of an official announcement, we want to take a look at what we know so far about Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop update.

• We’ve still got nearly a week to go before HTC officially unveils their new top-tier Android phone at Mobile World Congress, but it looks like the details have already started dumping out.

Free Software/Open Source

• The open source movement is making waves in the networking space as more vendors are opting to build open switches and routers in favor of proprietary technology. HP is the latest vendor to join the open source networking movement, and some are speculating that open networking could give Cisco a run for its money.

• Since The Weather Company has been a major adopter of open source software, I’m often asked why we have chosen this path. Where is the value in taking the open source route to solve your business challenges? I’m a big advocate of open source, so I’m always happy to oblige. Here are my top five reasons:

• If tech distributors want to survive in the market, they’ll have to provide channel partners with more training and enablement on open source and cloud-based solutions. Here’s how distributors have responded.

• The open-source Nginx web server has been steadily gaining in popularity in recent years to become one of the most widely deployed web servers. To date, Nginx has delivered its traffic over HTTP 1.1, but at some point in the near future it will also enable HTTP/2.

• If you still harbored any doubts that the web is now driving the future of IT, last week’s announcement that HP will offer disaggregated products for web-scale data centers via deals with Cumulus and Accton should be enough to convince you.

• E-commerce giant eBay needs to deal with new usage data — to personalize content and detect fraud, among other things — within seconds. So engineers went and built something to perfectly meet the company’s needs: Pulsar.

• The company revealed details about the system for the first time today, and eBay is making it available for anyone to use under an open-source license.

• An opportunity for IBM’s individual businesses to come together and demonstrate how they best leverage each other’s technologies and capabilities, IBM InterConnect 2015 will touch on cloud, mobile, DevOps, security, asset management, Internet of Things, application integration, and smarter processes.

• I had some concerns about learning Middleman and HAML, but there was a solid ‘fork-and-go’ contribution mindset. I started lurking in the -devel list and the IRC channels to start, and picked a single piece of content that I thought could use an update. I got in touch with one of the project folks on IRC and asked about the best way to go about creating and submitting my first change.

Events

• The “world wide web” has been such an amazing success in large part because it was based on open protocols and formats that anyone can implement and use on a level playing field. This opened the way for interoperability on a grand and global scale, and is why http and HTML succeeded where many others failed previously.

• First things first: It’s a safe bet that Ruth Suehle could read the Raleigh phone book and make it sound interesting, with or without accompanying Lowenbrau slides. So it would come as no surprise that of all the great keynotes that have been given at the Southern California Linux Expo, Ruth’s Sunday keynote makes anyone’s SCALE short list as an all-time great.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• In part 2 of this series, we look at some new browser sandboxing developments in Firejail security sandbox. Since the first article was published, many new features have been added. Unlike other sandboxes, the main focus of Firejail project is GUI application sandboxing, with web browsers being, at least for the immediate future, the main target.

• A second major feature is support for the brand-new HTTP/2 protocol, which will enable a faster and more responsable web navigation. While HTTP/2 has been released last week, a lot of new technologies will adopt it shortly.

Business

• “Open source is a production model. In some cases, it is a distribution model … . You need a business model for any business that you build, but open source in itself is not that business model. Just like if you have a manufacturing branch and you use robots or you don’t use robots. That is a production question, but it is not a business model for the business you are in.”

Public Services/Government

• Reuse is one of the main reasons for the development as open source of OpenTele, a Danish e-health telemedicine project. The health sector is crying out for open source ICT solutions, says Mike Kristoffersen, a senior software architect at the Danish Alexandra Institute. “Doctors and hospitals are seriously locked into medical ICT systems, making it difficult to do research, even for small scale projects.”

Licensing

• Samsung is a top-five contributor to the Linux kernel and contributes upstream to more than 25 other open source projects. Yet the public perception that the company doesn’t care about open source has persisted, despite its efforts, said Ibrahim Haddad, head of the Open Source Innovation Group at Samsung in a presentation at Collaboration Summit last week.

• Not too long ago, acquiring software was pretty easy: gather requirements, meet with vendors to evaluate products, select the winner. Legal review took place late in the process, and the final terms that both customer and vendor could live with were generally agreed to quickly.

Openness/Sharing

• And with desktop 3D printers becoming increasingly affordable and reliable—and open source software such as Cura being versatile, easy to use, and free to update—barriers to further 3D printing innovation are quickly disappearing. What was once only available to well-funded practitioners has now become genuinely accessible to every patient, nurse, doctor, surgeon, hospital, and teaching facility.

• After a few hours of work alongside an electrical engineering buddy this week, my home garden drip system became powered by a Raspberry Pi. I can control the entire thing locally from my iPhone and, to be frank, it’s pretty flippin’ cool.

• For some background, I’m a very lazy gardener. When my wife and I bought our house in 2012, our horticultural mission was Hippocratic (do no harm). In other words, we wanted—at the very least—to not kill the plants we inherited from the previous owners. So while some people relax when they do weeding or other green thumb-related activities, we find it tedious and uninspiring. I’m the guy who jumped at the chance to review the Estonian-made Click and Grow.

• Three years ago, Bastian Greshake spit in a vial and sent it off to personal genomics company 23andMe for analysis. He’d spent years studying the genetics of other organisms, but didn’t know much about his own DNA. He was curious.

Open Access/Content

• A plan to use online open-source curricula for more classes at Purdue University starting this fall could collectively save students up to $1 million.

• The Journal and Courier reports the plan would be an alternative to online programs that can cost students more than $100 per class to access.

Leftovers

Hardware

• An Israeli company known as EZchip has introduced their TILE-Mx processors that ship in up to 100-core 64-bit ARM configurations with up to 200 Gigabit Ethernet throughput.

Health/Nutrition

• In 2013 the United Nations released a report indicating that the world’s food needs could be met through organic, local farms. The United Nations report stated that food security, poverty, gender inequality, and climate change can be addressed with a significant shift towards organic, localized farming. In contrast with industrialized farming, organic and local farms cut down on the energy and pollution that transporting food requires. Another study revealed that organic farming utilized less water than industrialized farming, as well as a general reduction in pollution related to production.

Security

• Lots of people are talking about the Superfish malware debacle. People are starting to understand just how bad this situation is.

• [...]

• I’d like to see the tech press dig into this. And the venture capitalists involved, particularly the board members, should talk about what they knew and didn’t know.

• My current Lenovo X201 laptop has been with me for over four years. I’ve been looking at new laptop models over the years thinking that I should upgrade. Every time, after checking performance numbers, I’ve always reached the conclusion that it is not worth it. The most performant Intel Broadwell processor is the the Core i7 5600U and it is only about 1.5 times the performance of my current Intel Core i7 620M. Meanwhile disk performance has increased more rapidly, but changing the disk on a laptop is usually simple. Two years ago I upgraded to the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB disk, and this year I swapped that for the Samsung 850 Pro 1TB, and both have been good investments.

• It’s true, RMS was right. The folks at LinuxBSDos.com are right. The world needs to use Free Software.

• Last week, reports surfaced which claimed that Lenovo Notebooks have been issued to consumers containing a preloaded security flaw. Originally, the Chinese tech giant said the Superfish adware was not a security concern — however, eventually the company realized and admitted that the software was able to install its own self-signing man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy service which has the potential to hijack SSL and TLS connections — a severe, nasty security vulnerability.

• Richard went on to publish the SHA1 cryptographic hashes he used to identify software that contained the Komodia code libraries. He invited fellow researchers to use the hashes to identify still more potentially dangerous software circulating online.

• “We’re publishing this analysis to raise awareness about the scope of local SSL MITM software so that the community can also help protect people and their computers,” he wrote. “We think that shining the light on these practices will help the ecosystem better analyze and respond to similar situations as they occur.”

• Samba is the most commonly used Windows interoperability suite of programs, used by Linux and Unix systems. It uses the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide a secure, stable, and fast file and print services. It can also seamlessly integrate with Active Directory environments and can function as a domain controller as well as a domain member (legacy NT4-style domain controller is supported, but the Active Directory domain controller feature of Samba 4 is not supported yet).

• The Samba development team has announced earlier today, February 23, the immediate availability for download of Samba 4.1.17, a security release that addresses the CVE-2015-0240 security vulnerability related to an unexpected code execution in Samba daemon (smbd).

• Linux admins were sent scrambling to patch their boxes on Monday after a critical vulnerability was revealed in Samba, the open source Linux-and-Windows-compatibility software.

Finance

• Like other large companies with globalized production chains, Walmart exploits workers outside of the United States, but the consequences of these exploitative practices impact everyone. In the U.S., social and economic pressures force Walmart employees to accept low wages.

• I bet every one of you can remember the first time financial reality smacked you in the face like a Hulk-thrown engine block. (“I work two jobs, shouldn’t I be able to afford to get this festering wisdom tooth taken out?”). That’s because unless your parents were wealthy, you left school knowing jack shit about how money worked. We have a trillion dollars in credit card debt to show for it, along with an upper class who just can’t figure out what the rest of us are bitching about.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• NBC’s Brian Williams exaggerates the dangers he faced while reporting on a couple of stories and gets suspended for half a year. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly does the exact same thing and nothing happens to him. What gives?

• Could it be that News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is a deeply unethical institution with much lower journalistic standards even than Comcast, which owns NBC?

Censorship

• As an independent journalist who contributes to various organizations inside and outside the U.S., Twitter is my virtual newsroom. It is where I get story ideas, connect with sources and engage with my readers. On average I spend at least four hours daily on Twitter. As the Islamic State’s (ISIS) atrocities started to dominate the news cycle during the mid part of last year, most of my Tweets have become very ISIS-focused. I tweet about their latest actions, and the reactions that followed. As an native Arabic speaker, I spend a big chunk of my time following Arabic hashtags, Arabic-speaking influencers, and news organizations, and boy, let me tell you what I found. The world of Arabic Twitter is a scary one. I’m stunned by the amount of support that ISIS enjoys on Twitter, and mostly among Arabic speakers.

Privacy

• Advertising is not a “near term” priority for Facebook’s Internet.org initiative to get more people online in the developing world, according to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

• Facebook launched the scheme in 2013 with fellow technology firms including Samsung, Qualcomm, Ericsson and Nokia as its effort to connect “the next few billion people” to the internet.

• The social network has since worked with mobile operators in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Zambia and Kenya to provide free access to basic internet services from their mobile phones.

• Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has a big, expensive goal: to connect the world to the Internet. He spoke with Emily Chang about his plans, after returning from a trip through Southeast Asia and India last year as part of his Internet.org initiative. The interview airs Feb. 19 on Bloomberg Television’s Studio 1.0. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

• Al-Jazeera has obtained hundreds of confidential “spy cables” from some of the world’s top intelligence agencies, in what the news channel is calling “the largest intelligence leak since Snowden.”

Civil Rights

• The case against Tadrae McKenzie looked like an easy win for prosecutors. He and two buddies robbed a small-time pot dealer of $130 worth of weed using BB guns. Under Florida law, that was robbery with a deadly weapon, with a sentence of at least four years in prison.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Three years ago I began a series of articles about ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA was originally about tackling counterfeit goods, but had a completely inappropriate digital chapter added, which tried to ride on the coat-tails of the initial plan by suggesting that digital copies were somehow as dangerous as fake medicines or aircraft parts. After a fierce battle that saw hundreds of thousands of Europeans writing to their MEPs, and even taking to the streets, ACTA was thrown out by the European Parliament.

Copyrights

• The Pirate Party of Australia has been unhappy with the structure functioning of Pirate Parties International for some time and after the PPAU membership gave their board the power to potentially leave international organisation at their last national conference.

• Rights holders and ISPs have published a draft of the Government mandated code intended to combat online copyright infringement.

• After being chased down by a coalition of mainstream entertainment companies, a French court has just handed a former torrent site operator a six month suspended sentence. ‘Boris P’ must also pay two million euros in damages, an amount he predicts could be cleared in approximately 227 years.

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