● 05.28.15

● Links 28/5/2015: SourceForge Hijack, RIP Marco Pesenti Gritti

Posted in News Roundup at 2:55 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The future promises to bring us many things: solar powerered hoverboards, giant underground cities on Mars, and slightly less painful dentistry. But what about in Linux? How do you think our operating system will look like in 10 years? Maybe we’ll all be controlling our Wayland-powered Gnome 18 desktops via eye movement trackers, or perhaps the long-established desktop metaphors will ultimately win and not much will drastically change.

• The Intel Compute Stick has begun shipping, a tiny device that plugs into any HDMI TV or monitor and turns it into a fully-functioning computer. This low-power PC ships with Windows 8.1 or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, though at the moment the Windows version is first to market with the Ubuntu Compute Stick not widely shipping until June. I have an Intel Compute Stick at Phoronix for testing.

• Linux is one of the most astoundingly functional and utilitarian Operating Systems around when it comes to working from the command line. Need to perform a particular task? Odds are there is an application or script you can use to get it done. Right from the terminal. But, as they say in the good book, “All work and no play make Jack really bored or something.” So here is a collection of my favorite pointless, stupid, annoying or amusing things that you can do right in your Linux Terminal.

Desktop

• On Linux there are a few open source alternatives to the Thunderbird email client. There’s Evolution, KMail, Claws-Mail, Alpine (if you’re really old-school), and a handful of other clients (most of which, don’t live up to anyone’s expectations). There’s also a new kid on the email block. That kid is the brainchild of Yorba. Meet Geary, the new default IMAP email client for the GNOME desktop (and the likes of Elementary OS Freya).

• Dell has been moving a lot of interesting moves lately and it’s focusing on the Linux side of the business, which can only be a good thing for the open source platform.

Security

• Security researchers have published proof-of-concept code for a major router vulnerability leveraging a popular Linux kernel driver that could be used by hackers to compromise millions of connected devices.

• Last year was news about Russia wanting to design its own processors to be less reliant upon Intel and AMD. The initial “Baikal” processor was expected to be based on ARMv8 but it turns out now that it’s a MIPS design.

• Linux/Moose allows cybercriminals to skim unencrypted information about users’ social media accounts that then can be used to sign up those individuals as social media followers for people and businesses that pay for followers, according to James Quin, senior director of content & C-suite communities at CDM Media.

Kubuntu/Canonical Feud

• To me there seems to be a lot of similarities between above and personal experience with moderating. Basically: don’t moderate in threads you’ve participated in because you’re biased. If you think you’re unbiased, guess again and have fun dealing with the fallout if you still take a decision. I thought a few times that I really could be unbiased and was proven wrong each time.

• The Ubuntu Community Council has made a rather troublesome discovery regarding the accounting of $143,000 in donations. From the looks of it, no one knows how this money was spent.

• By now, you’ve probably met the donate page on Ubuntu, the one you see when you go to download an Ubuntu ISO. This donation page has led to a schism between the Ubuntu Community Council and Jonathan Riddell, the ‘leader’ of the Kubuntu project. All stemming from a perceived lack of transparency regarding donations made to Canonical.

• Jonathan’s questions to the CC about a legal issue and that of funds donated to the flavors were not personal, but done on behalf of the Ubuntu community, and on behalf of us, the Kubuntu Council and the Kubuntu community as a whole. We are still concerned about both these issues, but that pales in comparison to the serious breach in governance we’ve experienced this past week.

• He has also stated his intent to leave the Ubuntu community. “I also wish to extend my personal apology to the Kubuntu community for keeping this private for as long as we did. Generally, I don’t believe such an approach is consistent with our values, but I supported keeping it private in the hope that it would be easier to achieve a mutually beneficial resolution of the situation privately. Now that it’s clear that is not going to happen, I (and others in the KC) could not in good faith keep this private.”

• I’m disappointed in the way the Ubuntu Community Council has handled this and I think the way they treated Jonathan is appalling, even taking into account that he could’ve communicated his grievances better. I’m also unconvinced that the Ubuntu Community Council is at all beneficial to the Ubuntu community in its current form. The way it is structured and reports to the SABDFL makes that it will always favour Canonical when there’s a conflict of interest. I brought this up with two different CC members last year who both provided shruggy answers in the vein of “Sorry, but we have a framework that’s set up on how we can work in here and there’s just so much we can do about it.” – they seem to fear the leadership too much to question it, and it’s a pity, because everyone makes mistakes.

• Canonical has a community team that interacts with the users and Nicholas Skaggs is part of that team. He wasn’t involved in the discussions regarding Jonathan Riddell, but he posted a lengthy post on his blog explaining what is the Community Council and why it’s important to respect its decisions. One phrase, in particular, is very interesting.

• “So please respect the authority of our community governance structure. Respect those who serve on both councils. Not satisfied? We vote again on Community Council members this year! Think we should tweak/enhance/change our governance structure? I welcome the discussion! I enjoyed learning more about ubuntu governance, and I challenge you to do the same before you let your emotions run with your decisions”, wrote Nicholas Skaggs.

• I’m very happy to join the Kubuntu Team and look forward to supporting the project through contributions in my spare time.

• You too can let folks know that you support Jonathan Riddell just like the Kubuntu Council has by tweeting with hashtag #ISupportJonathan or using this nifty banner on social media.

• A storm of accusations, claims, and furious counterclaims has hit the Ubuntu penguins, with a community cleaved of its head following allegations of unsavory behavior.

• Long-time Kubuntu dev Jonathan Riddell has been dismissed as head of Kubuntu and removed from all positions of responsibility within the Ubuntu community.

• It truly saddens me to see all this FUD being thrown around, by folks that up till recently I had great respect for. Couple things that do not sit well with me at all. 1) Absolutely zero communication to the Kubuntu Council about the “issues” with Jonathan prior to the shocking “request”. 2) The Kubuntu Council asked (repeatedly) for one thing: proof. This still has not been provided. So what was suppose to happen here? Evidently bow down, walk away and happily work away silenced. This is NOT the open source / FLOSS way. At least not to my understanding. Perhaps I have misunderstood the meaning all these years.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Wayland 1.7.93 and Weston 1.7.93 are now available, a.k.a. the second release candidates to Wayland 1.8.

Benchmarks

• Yesterday I ran some fresh tests of Intel Ivy Bridge on the latest Mesa Git code to see if the performance has changed much recently for the slightly-older generation of Intel HD Graphics. Today I’ve done some similar tests in kernel-space with the Linux 4.1 kernel.

• I ran benchmarks from the same Core i7 3770K system while testing the vanilla Linux 3.19, 4.0, and 4.1 Git kernels and running various graphics tests to see if there’s been any recent i915 DRM kernel changes affecting the Ivy Bridge graphics performance.

• From an Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 system with the Linux 3.19 kernel, I ran some tests on an Intel Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge desktop system in our labs. Compared was the stock Mesa 10.5.2 on Ubuntu 15.04 against Mesa 10.7-devel Git as of this week.

Applications

• Samba, the world’s most used software solution for accessing shared Windows directories over a network in GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, has been updated to version 4.2.2.

• The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.1.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.

• Midnight Commander (MC) is a text-based Command Line Interface (CLI) program. It is particularly useful when a GUI is not available but can also be used as a primary file manager in a terminal session even when you are using a GUI. I use Midnight Commander frequently because I often have need to interact with local and remote Linux computers using the CLI. It can be used with almost any of the common shells and remote terminals through SSH.

• As a reminder, Cinnamon 2.6.3 has been recently released, adding only fixes to the previous release from the Cinnamon 2.6 series.

• Among others, the use-system configuration key has been split into three different keys, the calendar applet is not properly refreshed, the pidgin tray icons have been updated, the on-screen keyboard has been enhanced and the date format setting is now respected in the notification applet. The full changelog can be read here.

• Boomaga is an open source virtual printer software, having support for the most popular printers, via CUPS and Gutenprint.

• Unlike CUPS and Gutenprint which provide drivers for printers, the Boomaga virtual printer enables the users to view the document before printing, adjust the margins of the page, manage the number of documents per page, export the to be printed files as PDFs and others.

• Indicator Netspeed Unity is an Ubuntu AppIndicator which displays the current network upload / download speed on the panel. Despite its name, it should work with any panel that supports AppIndicators.

• System administrators are aware as how important their systems security is, not just the runtime of their servers. Intruders, spammers, DDOS attack, crackers, are all out there trying to get into people’s computers, servers and everywhere they can lay hands on and interrupt the normal runtime of services. Being able to identify tools and techniques to harden your systems is a key play on securing your systems. Moreover, choosing the right tools is a matter of experience. You should try most of them, or perhaps the ones that are popular. I chose free and open source software because, if I want to, I can check the applications source code and see for myself how did programmers wrote the software, how did they manage to keep the software easy to understand etc.

• Though Linux is often seen as being immune to malware it’s still important to have protection, partly because Linux malware does exist, even if it’s rare, and partly to prevent the passing on of viruses to more vulnerable operating systems like Windows and Android.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

• This past week I’ve been reading up on a variety of B-tree algorithms. These have been around since the early 1970s and are extremely common in all sorts of software, so one might expect that after 40+ years of continuous use of such a simple concept that there’d be very little to talk about, but it’s quite a vast territory. In fact, each year for the last two decades Donald Knuth has held a public lecture around Christmas-time about trees. (Yes, they are Christmas Tree Lectures. Some of the papers I’ve been reading were published in just the last few years, with quite a bit of interesting research having gone on in this area over the last decade.

• You may be aware that Debian has switched from SysV to systemd as the init system. As a result systemd is the default init system for the recently released Debian 8.

Games

• We wrote about the game when developer Sparweed was looking for beta testers in September. I took part in the beta, along with a Steam friend, and was able to play it then. The game was very prone to crash for no apparent reason at the time though, and it also had several other issues, including problems with input and the Steam overlay. Thankfully, the game is in a much better state now, and after playing for about half an hour yesterday, neither I nor my friend encountered any of the issues we experienced before.

• I bought Hero of the Kingdom and was going to just give it a quick test before writing it up, but before I knew it an hour had flown by. The premise is that your farm has been burned down by bandits, and not having anywhere to stay, you go out on a quest to find your father. Along your way, you meet all sorts of people who will help you find your way, as long as you help them with various tasks. The story isn’t deep and the writing is simple stuff, but it has its charm and is definitely serviceable.

• So this just happened! It would appear that Valve just took the decision, without asking users first, to change the Tux logo with the SteamOS one on both the Steam website and the desktop client.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• As Bastien hinted in his last blog post, we now have some new test firmware for the ColorHugALS device. The ever-awesome Benjamin Tissoires has been hacking on an alternative device firmware, this time implementing the Sensor HID interface that Microsoft is suggesting vendors use for internal ambient light sensors on tablets and laptops for Windows 8.

• I unfortunately have some terrible news, Marco Pesenti Gritti passed away last Saturday in London, after a long fight against cancer. He was with his family and in good medical hands. He leaves behind his girlfriend Daniela and 4 year old daughter Daniela. I had the chance to say goodbye last week, and convey thoughts and support for his coworkers, current and passed.

• I was lucky to have worked with Marco for many years at litl, on a very broad range of projects, and had the chance to count him as a good friend. He was the most passionate and dedicated hacker I knew, and I know he was extremely respected in the GNOME community, for his work on Epiphany, Evince and Sugar among many others, just like he was at litl. Those who knew him personally know he was also an awesome human being.

• We will try to help his family as much as we can. He will be sorely missed.

• GNOME’s Mutter window manager was updated to v3.17.2 today as the latest development version in the road to GNOME 3.18.

• Of importance to Mutter 3.17.2 is that it now supports X11/Wayland clipboard interoperation. Now the clipboard contents from copying and pasting can be done between native X11 and Wayland applications, which previously wasn’t possible up until now for those running a mix of X11 and Wayland programs on the desktop.

• Gnome is a great great desktop environment that offers an elegant and simplified Linux experience. These are the 5 best distros for Gnome that offer it as the default DE.

• The GNOME Project is about to release the second development release towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which will see the light of day on September 23, 2015.

• The Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier software that is used by default in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, including Ubuntu, has received a new update in preparation for GNOME 3.17.2.

• Cinnamon developers have just released a new version of the desktop environment today, 2.6.3. The packages are now available for testing in Linux Mint 17.1 and Linux Mint Debian 2, via the Romeo unstable repository.

Distributions

• Modern Linux distros are designed to appeal to a large number of users. As a result, they have become too bloated for older machines or systems with limited resources. If you don’t have several gig of RAM to spare and an extra core or two, these distros may not deliver the best performance for you. Thankfully, there are many lightweight distros that you can use to breathe new life into older hardware.

• But there’s one caveat when working with lightweight distros – they usually manage to function with limited resources by cutting away just about everything you take for granted, such as wizards and scripts which make everyday tasks easier.

New Releases

• Clonezilla Live is a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that lets users back up their systems and perform other kinds of maintenance work for the OS. New updates are released all the time, and the main packages are always getting upgraded to newer versions.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The Paris-based company behind the Mandriva Linux distro has gone into liquidation.

Ballnux/SUSE

• An estimated 45,000 students from a province in Indonesia have enhanced their education and computer-usage knowledge through a pilot program using Linux and openSUSE that is expected to become a nationwide educational program.

• From 2009 to 2014, the project called “Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Utilization for Educational Quality Enhancement in Yogyakarta Province” used openSUSE and created material with Linux to enhance educational quality and equality in Yogyakarta Province schools.

Slackware Family

• I am trying to keep up with a monthly release of KDE 5 (Plasma5) packages for Slackware-current. So far, so good, and every month I have been able to make a significant difference. Today the KDE developers released an update to Plasma 5 while earlier this month you could have noticed updates for Frameworks and Applications. Time for some new packages for Slackware land!

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has announced Cloud Suite for Applications, an accelerated way to develop, deploy, and manage applications at scale using open source technologies. The new cloud offering helps enterprises reduce silos and enable more efficient OpenStack cloud deployments. Through the platform, Red Hat is offering IaaS, PaaS and management in an open environment, supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the ability to leverage certified hardware of choice.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat CloudForms 3.2, the latest version of its award-winning solution for managing private and hybrid clouds. CloudForms 3.2 delivers innovative management features that enable customers to automate the deployment and management of OpenStack infrastructures, using advanced management instrumentation available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 release (based on OpenStack Kilo).

Jim Whitehurst

• Want a job at Red Hat? If so, prepare to buy your interviewer coffee, lunch and maybe even the petrol needed to drive to the coffee shop.

• That’s what happened to the company’s CEO Jim Whitehurst when he was interviewed by his predecessor Matthew Szulik.

• In a brand-new book, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst explains what he’s learned from leading the largest open source company and how the lessons can be applied

• In The Open Organization, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst presents a compelling, modern alternative to the traditional, top-down hierarchy of business organization. I had the pleasure of interviewing Whitehurst for TechCrunch.com in early 2012, and the seeds of many of the ideas in the book were clearly present even then. Reading The Open Organization felt, in some ways, like the conclusion to that interview.

• In my line of work, I get a lot of questions. Most of these are along the lines of “What’s it like to be CEO of an open source company” or “Where do you see technology moving over the next year?”

Fedora

• Fedora 22 was released on Tuesday, luckily avoiding a deadline setback. Users who upgrade to the new release should be able to expect a new package manager which will be faster than the YUM which it, DNF, is replacing.

• As was the case with Fedora 21, Fedora 22 is available in cloud, server and workstation editions. Underpinning all three editions is the new Linux 4.0 kernel, which was first released on April 12. Among the big new features that the Linux 4.0 kernel introduces is live kernel patching.

• This article will walk through the process of upgrading Fedora 21 to Fedora 22 with use of Fedora Updater tool called FedUp.

• If you’re currently running a Xen hypervisor on a Fedora release before 22, stay put for now.

• Peter Robinson has announced that Fedora 22 for AArch64, a community-driven and -built operating system, has been released and is now available for download.

• THE FEDORA PROJECT, Red Hat’s community arm, has announced the arrival of Fedora 22, the latest version of its open source Linux OS.

• The Fedora Workstation edition is a reliable, user-friendly, and powerful operating system for your laptop or desktop computer. It supports a wide range of developers, from hobbyists and students to professionals in corporate environments. Fedora 22 Workstation builds on the previous initial release of Fedora 21 Workstation, providing a set of enhancements designed to boost your workflow and help your productivity.

• In a sentence, it’s another winner in a long line of winners from Fedora.

• If you’re a Fedora user, you’ll love Fedora 22. If you’re not a Fedora user and want to try it, it’s worth the effort to get it to where you want it. The caveat here is that you may have to tweak it a bit to do what more mainstream distros like Linux Mint or Ubuntu do out of the box. If you’re up to it, then go for it.

• This is a reminder email about the end of life process for Fedora 20.

• Fedora 20 will reach end of life on 2015-06-23, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 22, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 20 collection.

• Chapeau is a Linux distribution based on the Fedora workstation edition, and its developers are working to release a new version that is based on the latest Fedora 22 that was just released.

• Fedy, previously named Fedora Utils, is an open-source post install tool that helps the users to enable support for multimedia codecs, install new fonts, install Adobe Flash Player, Oracle Java, Atom, Brackets, Oracle Java plugins, Android Studio and other important software which is not available via the default repos. Also, the tool provides the users a way to disable unnecessary services, add sudo permissions to some users or enable automatic login.

• Now that the Fedora 22 Linux has been released, it is time to upgrade your old Fedora 21 installations. As such, we can announce today that the Fedora Project developers have prepared some neat instructions and an awesome tool that will help you get started.

• The latest version of Fedora, the Linux distribution that helps shape the features that make it into Red Hat’s (RHT) open source platforms, is out this week, sporting updates in the realms of containerization, server databases, file storage and the GNOME desktop.

• Dear Fedora fans, we are sorry to inform you today, May 28, that the Fedora Project will drop support for the Fedora 20 Linux operating system starting June 23, 2015, as the distribution reaches end of life (EOL).

• Fedora 22 was released earlier this week, and if you are running Fedora 21, you will probably want to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Fedora. Luckily, there is a tool called FedUp that is easiest way to upgrade to Fedora 22.

• It was barely more than a month ago that Red Hat made Fedora 22 available in beta form. If you’ve been holding out for a final release, today is your day — Fedora 22 received its final coat of polish is now available in three different editions.

• Fedora 22 was released two days ago with many added and improved features. As we all know, Fedora is upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is commercially supported by Red Hat, Inc. It is an American multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community. Since Fedora 22 comes up with plenty of new features, one of the notable feature is DNF.

Debian Family

• Debian 8.1 is planned for release on next Saturday.

• Debian developers are aiming to have Debian 8.1, the first point release to “Jessie”, out on 6 June.

• Adam Barratt confirmed the imminent Debian 8.1 plans via this mailing list post from Sunday.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition users will be happy to know that the next major software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system from Canonical will arrive sometime in the middle of next week.

• HP Laptops with Ubuntu 14.04 Available for Purchase Now, £100 Cash Back Limited Offer

• Aura from Entroware is new mini-PC powered by some very powerful hardware and shipping with either Ubuntu 15.04 or Ubuntu MATE 15.04.

• Canonical has been working on a way to ensure that Ubuntu Touch users have an easy time moving from one branch to another, and they have implemented a solution for this problem.

• The NVIDIA Shield Tablet is a gaming device built by Nvidia that has very specific user niche, but a user of this tablet managed to run Ubuntu on it; not the mobile version, but the desktop one.

• For those who came in late, Nvidia wanted its tablet as a gaming device with a specific user niche.However But it seems that Popescu Sorin has managed to run the full version of Ubuntu with all its touch screen goodness.

• As expected, Canonical was present at the OpenStack Summit 2015 event that took place in Vancouver, British Columbia between May 18-22.

• The development cycle for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) seem to be going smoothly and Canonical is already tracking a new Linux kernel, 4.1, which will eventually get released by Linus Torvalds.

• Canonical is preparing for the launch of the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition in Europe and it looks like Bq is also preparing to release a new phone on the European market as well.

• Canonical will be kicking off June by making some announcements with their partners for new Ubuntu Phones in Europe.

• A new NTFS-3G vulnerability-related patch has been published for Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), and it looks that an annoying problem has been closed, finally.

• Some of the Ubuntu users might remember that just last week a patch was released for an NTFS-3G vulnerability that could have allowed the library to overwrite files as the administrator. NTFS-3G is the component that deal with read/write NTFS driver for FUSE.

• As a reminder, Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf is scheduled for release on the 22nd of October 2015, for now being in its early development stages, only daily builds being available.

• Canonical now facilitates the users to easily switch from one Ubuntu Touch development branch to another, without having to flash the phone. Despite the fact that installing Ubuntu Touch is not difficult, backing up and restoring data can be annoying.

• At the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was debating an initial public offering for Canonical Software, Ubuntu’s commercial division. The news was interpreted as a sign of success in many circles, but whether making Canonical a public company would be a wise move seems doubtful at best.

• As reported by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Canonical has been considering the idea for several months, but has not yet made a definite decision. Yet the idea has been raised because of the success of Canonical’s OpenStack consulting division, which has apparently become the first Canonical venture to become profitable, and includes partnerships with Microsoft and VMWare. “We now have a story that the market will understand,” Shuttleworth is reported as saying.

• Ubuntu TV was one of the early attempts from Canonical to branch out on other platforms, and it showed great promise, but it didn’t get anywhere. The project is currently shelved, but it’s interesting to see that Canonical was thinking about convergence long before they started to publicize it.

• Canonical recently released the Ubuntu 14.04 Long-Term Support (LTS) which is the first Ubuntu LTS project in two years. The Long Term Support (LTS) will be supported for five years by Canonical and is a free alternative for expensive Windows Operating System (OS). Ubuntu released the 12.04 back in 2012 but the 14.04 is more stable, reliable and cost effective. It is a good option where large scale deployments are required.

• As a reminder, the first two Ubuntu phones are developed by Bq and Meizu. The Bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition has been already available in all the European countries, but the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition can be ordered only in China, for now.

• Canonical have sent out an email to some people saying that they are invited to a Hangout on Monday June 1 to hear the announcement of a new BQ device running Ubuntu Touch. BQ already released the Aquaris device earlier this year. In the email it also says that the Ubuntu MX4 will be available in Europe ‘very soon’.

Flavours and Variants

• The first edition of Linux Mint Debian will reach EOL status (end of life) in January, 2016, and users have been advised to upgrade their systems as soon as possible.

Devices/Embedded

• Micro/sys’s compact, rugged “SBC1654″ SBC runs Linux on an i.MX515 SoC and offers a Spartan-6 FPGA, dual MIPI-CSI camera inputs, and dual 10/100 Ethernet.

• Ka-Ro’s SODIMM-style “TXA5″ COM runs Linux on Atmel’s SAMA5D42 SoC, offers Ethernet, LCD, USB, GPIO, and serial I/O, and supports industrial temperatures.

• The TXA5 is the first Atmel-based member of the Ka-Ro Electronics family of “TX” COMs. Most of Ka-Ro’s COMs have used Freescale processors, and many have been sold under the Strategic Test label, including the i.MX283-based TX-28S from 2012.

• I’ll admit it, I was skeptical about how useful smartwatches might be. But after wearing and using a smartwatch, I found it to be as useful as my smartphone — although usefulness is highly dependent on the features and capabilities of each individual smartwatch.

• The “Internet of Things,” or IoT, has the potential to change the way we interact with the devices and objects in our homes and lives.

• The IoT is the idea that all of the devices and gadgets that you interact with could be connected to the internet.

• To make this work, the “things” would need sensors, actuators and a way to connect to the Internet. And software to run them, of course.

• NASA has long had an interest in Linux and other open source technologies, and has used Linux in a variety of systems, including the R2 humanoid robot now at work at the International Space Station. With its International NASA Space App Challenge, the space agency is tapping into the maker gestalt to come up with new ideas, as well as inspire future space engineers. In this year’s two-day Space App Challenge hackathon, which ran April 10-11 in 133 cities around the world, NASA greeted participants with over 25 challenges split into Earth, Outer Space, Humans, and Robotics categories.

Phones

• Finnish mobile upstart Jolla, whose linux-based Sailfish OS is marketed as a more flexible alternative to the dominant platforms of Android and iOS, is stepping up its push to win friends and influence mobile users in the BRICS cluster of emerging markets — ahead of the release of Sailfish 2.0 this summer, which will be the first version of its OS that OEMs can license.

Android

• Smartphones and cars can focus on what each one does best with the arrival of this new dashboard connection technology.

• Reviewers say it trounces old-school in-car navigation systems

• General Motors will allow Apple and Android smartphone owners to connect with MyLink infotainment systems in 14 of its 19 Chevrolet models beginning later this year, CEO Mary Barra announced Wednesday at the Code tech conference in Southern California.

• The first production car model integrated with Android Auto has rolled off the shop floor — and it is a Hyundai 2015 Sonata.

• On Tuesday, the South Korean automaker announced the launch of Android Auto within its production vehicles, starting with the 2015 Sonata with Navigation model.

• And that’s how Android Auto, Google’s infotainment interface that can be installed in just about any new car, led me to the western edge of San Francisco, where I ate my sandwich, drank my soda, and watched the waves.

• When it comes to the update of Android 5.0 (also known as Android L or Lollipop), it has been very slow to rollout on even the newer models of Android handsets and tablets. None have been more slow to roll out to users than the Android Lollipop update for the Sony Xperia and Samsung Galaxy Series. This is what we know about the Lollipop update for both phone series with carriers like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile.

• I love my Android phone. Coming from an iPhone, I found the level of control with Android to be far superior to what I experienced with iOS. For me, it was the applications that sold me on Android. In this article, I’ll be sharing my must have Android applications. These apps range from critical to making life easier and everything in-between.

• The question is: Can people be happy with a simple smartwatch when there are more advanced, albeit complicated, ones? Right now, Android owners looking for a watch should focus on Pebble, but if Google ever gets its act together and streamlines the Android Wear user experience, Pebble’s days could be numbered.

• Remember App Ops? Back in Jelly Bean 4.3, the feature could be accessed by resourceful users to switch on or off permissions for individual apps. By KitKat 4.4.2, the feature was completely hidden from users. Google’s explanation was that App Ops was never meant for public consumption – it was devised for internal debugging only. But users had gotten a taste of granular app permission controls and wanted more.

• If this sounds familiar, it should. This is Google Now.

• Chevrolet is putting big support behind both Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto for its 2016 fleet of cars and trucks. The company has announced that 14 models in all will be compatible with the in-dash software powered by iPhone and Android smartphones, respectively. Chevy claims this tops all other automakers.

• As we approach the end of May we approach the start of the Samsung Android 5.1 Lollipop release. With that in mind, we take a look at everything we know so far about Samsung’s upcoming Android 5.1 Lollipop update for Galaxy smartphones.

• Google announced the existence of Android Pay back in March at Mobile World Congress, but details were fairly slim at the time. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome, and Apps, called it an “API layer” that would let other companies support secure payments for Android both in apps and in physical stores, but how exactly it would work remained unclear. However, one day before Google I/O kicks off, we’re learning more — The New York Times just revealed some new details on Android Pay.

• Are you ready to watch ALL THE PIXELS? You certainly are if you’ve got a fancy 4K TV – the new top-of-the-line industry standard is begging for content, and Netflix is at the front of the queue. The streaming service has been offering some of its home-grown shows like House of Cards and Daredevil in 4K resolution to subscribers of a premium $12-a-month plan. Now you can access that sweet “UltraHD” video on Android TV… if you’ve got compatible hardware.

• Google is expected to expand its services deeper into wearable devices and the Internet of Things on Thursday and Friday during its Google I/O developers conference, which may include a reboot of the now-defunct Google Glass smart visor that it debuted at the 2012 convention.

• With Android, it’s a numbers game. Plain and simple. You want choice in devices, Android gives you that. Sure, it’s a bit of a minefield and you might come across some brands that you’ve never heard off, or incredibly convincing fakes that run a fully working version of Android (no counterfeiter has managed to successfully load a dodgy version of iOS on to a device yet).

• Unlike the Chromecast, which uses Google’s proprietary casting technology, Lenovo Cast is built on Miracast and DLNA, the standards that are available in most modern Android devices (sometimes under the Miracast option and other times under Wireless Display). It completely mirrors your phone or tablet’s display, acting like a wireless HDMI connection between them and the TV. On the downside, if your device’s screen turns off you’ll see nothing on the TV, but on the upside, Miracast is less reliant on WiFi networks so it should work where the Chromecast usually stumbles like hotel rooms for example.

Free Software/Open Source

• It looks like SourceForge has taken over the account of GIMP user Jernej Simončič who was maintaining the Windows version of the project.

• SourceForge, the code repository site owned by Slashdot Media, has apparently seized control of the account hosting GIMP for Windows on the service, according to e-mails and discussions amongst members of the GIMP community—locking out GIMP’s lead Windows developer. And now anyone downloading the Windows version of the open source image editing tool from SourceForge gets the software wrapped in an installer replete with advertisements.

• GIMP is not the only program. According to Ars Technica, a SourceForge staffer appears to have taken control of the SourceForge repository for all these projects:

• The release of the Genode OS 15.05 Operating System Framework is now available and it’s quite a sizable release.

• Genode OS 15.05 is shipping with a new AHCI driver, new audio drivers ported from OpenBSD, new SD-card drives, platform support for the i.MX6, and multi-touch support.

• DocHive is an open source Ruby on Rails project for capturing data from image-based PDFs. Created for journalists and other professionals who need a more efficient way to extract meaning for tedious data, DocHive is in development and ready for testing in the community.

• Women are drastically underrepresented in the open source movement. Of the open source contributions made in 2013, only 11 percent were made by women, according to a survey of the open source community.

• Girl Develop It wanted to change that. That’s why the nonprofit partnered with civic hacking group Code for Philly last year to launch a summer-long open source fellowship for women. Fellows said the program helped them find their place in the tech community.

• There is one project called the LHC Open Network Environment (LHCONE) that was originally conceived to help with operations that involved multiple centers. To understand this, though, I have to explain the structure of the data and computing facilities.

• In my last article for Linux.com, I explored a few ways newcomers to open source projects can get started. While there are many resources to explore open source project communities, choosing which project to contribute to can still be a quite daunting task. You could go searching in the more than 23 million repositories on GitHub, the world’s largest source code hosting platform. But there are better ways. This article is meant to be a short guide to help novice open source practitioners more easily identify the first project they’d like to contribute to.

• At the end of last month, I had the unique opportunity to participate with a few of my work colleagues on the US2020 RTP STEM EXPO. About 500 students from North Carolina interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) showed up to the event. My colleagues and I gathered around a couple of tables and chatted with students, teachers, administrators, and parents about open source, open hardware, and programming.

• Open-source software makes the computer code at its heart publicly accessible. This in turn means that anyone can update it or change it to suit their own needs. Closed-source, or proprietary software, remains the property of its original authors, who are the only ones legally allowed to copy or modify it. So Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a closed-source product, but if you are reading this article on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, you are making use of an open-source product. The authors of those browsers have made the source code available to you, and – if you were so inclined – you could view the code, copy it, learn from it, alter it and share it. But read to the end before you dive in.

• With a swarm of developers from around the world converging on San Francisco’s Moscone Center tomorrow for Google I/O, Twitter wants them to keep the company’s real-time social platform at the top of mind. This afternoon it announced that its developer tools for integrating Twitter into Android apps have been open-sourced, with the projects now hosted publicly on Github.

• The Intercept and its publisher First Look Media strongly believe in the benefits of free and open source software — in part because we rely on such software every day. To keep our journalists and sources safe, we use secure communication tools like the data-encryption system GnuPG, the Off-the-Record secure messaging protocol, the SecureDrop communications platform, and the secure calling and texting app Signal. To publish on the web, we use the GNU/Linux operating system; the Apache web server; OpenSSL, a web encryption library; WordPress, the open-source blogging engine; and Piwik, which tracks web traffic. The list goes on.

• With Ice Cream Sandwich, Google introduced Roboto to the world. Since then, the family (designed by Googler Christian Robertson) has expanded to include a set of slab serif fonts, and has even seen a major revision introduced with Android 5.0 last year.

SaaS/Big Data

• Providing security in OpenStack is not as easy as simply deploying a firewall and enabling antivirus. Many additional controls need to be deployed.

• Security is a key concern across all sectors of modern IT and is often noted as a primary barrier to adoption for cloud computing. Security was a key focus of many sessions at the OpenStack Summit, which ran from May 18 to May 22 in Vancouver, B.C. Several sessions covered how to properly deploy and configure OpenStack clouds securely. Security is also being baked into the development of OpenStack itself though a number of different initiatives.

Databases

• The intensifying competition in the NoSQL world is driving Basho Technologies Inc. to move up the value chain with a new platform promising to provide a unified environment for storing and processing the growing amounts of unstructured data entering the corporate network. It’s the latest realization of the tried and true one-shop-stop approach to differentiation in the enterprise.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• THE DOCUMENT FOUNDATION, curator of the LibreOffice suite, has announced LibreOffice Viewer for Android.

• LibreOffice Viewer is the first native application from the group to offer Open Document Format documents.

• The term ‘Viewer’ should be emphasised at present, as the Foundation acknowledges that it is not ready for “mission critical tasks” in edit mode, and indeed users have to opt in to editing within settings.

• It is an important first step, however, and the community is already working on a fuller version that offers more of the expected features.

CMS

• For rapidly growing organizations, global expansion introduces hosts of new challenges. As you are spinning out more sites, you will likely be opening the door to new regional sites featuring local translations. In this scenario, a content management system (CMS) with multilingual capabilities isn’t just a nice feature to have, but rather a necessity.

Education

• OPALS is licensed under a GPL license, and libraries can elect to support it on their own hardware or have it hosted by Media Flex in the United States, or by Bibliofiche in Canada and internationally. Media Flex hosts nearly two thirds of the 2,000 libraries worldwide currently using OPALS. The other third are self-hosted and supported by MediaFlex.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is a feature release, focused primarily on the continued development of traits. This release succeeds v0.2.4, which was released 07 Aug, 2014.

Project Releases

• A test build of Blender 2.75 was released this past week and it will be of interest to a lot of open-source designers and artists.

• Blender 2.75 notably has added initial support for OpenCL on AMD Radeon GPUs with the Cycles Rendering. The AMD OpenCL support is coming as the Cycles compute kernels have finally been split into smaller kernels, so they now compile and work for AMD GPUs. However, the AMD OpenCL stack failing to work with transparent shadows due to a compiler bug. The AMD OpenCL improvements for Blender was work led by AMD that we previously covered on Phoronix.

• The Blender Foundation has informed users today, May 27, about the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta test build of the forthcoming Blender 2.75 open-source and cross-platform 3D modelling software.

Licensing

• The Symphony Foundation joins the growing number of technology companies that are embracing open-source licensing for better industry collaboration. The Symphony Foundation will use the Apache License 2.0, which allows for the broadest use and adoption of Symphony code adaptations, and will be open to the community in early 2016.

Openness/Sharing

• Over the nearly two decades that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has spent inventing things, he’s figured out that one of the most important ingredients of new ideas is something closer to play—experiments taken on not to profit immediately, or to develop a product, but because they’re flat-out fascinating. It’s what he figured out at MIT Media Lab, where he first became Internet Famous after his correspondence with a Nike customer service representative over getting the word “sweatshop” stitched into his sneakers went viral. And it’s what he promoted at the Brooklyn art and technology nonprofit where he built Eyebeam OpenLab, an open-source research and development space for artists.

Open Hardware

• We believe the Cubic SoC board has a lot more performance and capability than other similar products out there (e.g., Arduino or Raspberry Pi) and — using the Cyclone FPGA’s pin migration capability — adding additional hardware resources by building the same board with a larger capacity FPGA is possible. All that processing power does, however, come at a price premium, probably retailing for sub-$200, which we believe is still very accessible for many hobbyists and commercial product developers.

• Exiii, which consists of graduates from Sony’s manufacturing industry including Gentu Kondo, Hiroshi Yamaura, Tetsuya Konishi and by Akira Morikawa – have concluded the first iteration of their Open Source HACKberry bionic hand and have just released all of the design files online for others to use in creating their own bionic hands using a 3D printer and some basic hardware components – including an existing smartphone for the onboard computer.

• One exciting thing about 3D-printed prostheses is that the designs are all freely available open source and constantly evolving. Holmes-Siedle is particularly interested in tensioning, and the fishing wire that acts as tendons in the prosthetic hands. He made some changes to the basic design of Joe’s hand and within minutes of sharing his new designs online, other volunteers around the world were printing, testing and giving feedback on the adjustment. He’s now working on a new revision based on what he’s learned.

• For many people, technology assists and augments our lives, making certain tasks easier, communicating across long distances possible, and giving us the opportunity to be more informed about the world around us. However, for many people with disabilities, technology is not an accessory but essential to living an independent and quality life.

• [...]

• Examined through the lens of accessibility, open hardware brings a lot of advantages, such as letting people with disabilities use readily available hardware that others use regardless of ability. Open hardware’s basic tenets in openness and usability allow for the creation of more customized, personalized assistive technology devices that fit a user’s needs. Open hardware allows for features to be added or removed as an individuals’ needs change with age and ability, extending the life of their device. The availability of parts, detailed guides, and tutorials on various single-board computers (SBCs) and components, ease of repair, and affordability are all profound qualities that are not only wanted, but needed in AT. Also, since open hardware is not locked behind proprietary controls and patents, there’s no requirement to use insurance or obtain medical permission to alter, modify, or change the state of what is truly owned by the person—in this case, their own assistive technology device.

Standards/Consortia

• The 6th May 2015, the European Commission published a communication to the European Parliament, the Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions councerning a new Digital Single Market Strategy for Europe.

Leftovers

• Administrators increasingly outnumber faculty, and they’re weighing down higher education.

• So my message to TV Licensing is this: Good. Lets go to court. Lets have a court hear how I’ve written twice, let a court see my payment already made and my in date license; and then let the court hear my counter claim for the waste of my time and loss of earning incurred from attending. I’ll donate any award from the court to a local food bank.

Science

• Scientists in labs across the globe are busy perfecting computer chips that can be implanted in the human brain.

Security

• Lead software security engineers, security consultants and others tasked with repelling cyber-threats can expect to earn six-figure salaries per year.

• Salaries for security tech professionals can greatly exceed the baseline for IT professional salaries, according to a report from Dice, the IT jobs portal.

• Lead software security engineers, directors of security, security consultants and others tasked with repelling cyber-threats can expect to earn six-figure salaries per year, so long as their skills, experience and certifications prove to be a match for demanding roles that are continuously evolving, the report noted.

• Great, so because whoever is in charge of managing that electronic billboard couldn’t be bothered to take the advice any competent technology person who came across the setup, of which there must have been at least one, the great people of Atlanta were treated to one of the most disgusting images in human existence. I’m generally loathe to blame the victim, but the owner of a public-facing billboard must have some culpability when it comes to securing their display. And I say that there was at least one person who warned them about this, because at least one has come forward publicly.

• Ever had a job where you had to constantly look over your shoulder and were hesitant to make decisions because you could be blamed for them? It’s not fun. I once found myself in such a situation, but fortunately, it didn’t last too long.

• In the late aughts, I worked for a large national bank that was acquired by an even larger national bank. Our bank still ran our own IT operation, but we engaged with the larger bank’s incident management team for any major problems. Part of my job supporting our Retail Bank organization was incident coordination.

• Glitch causes iOS to choke when certain non-Latin script is sent in a text message, causing the device to crash

• The discovery last week of another major flaw in TLS was announced, nicknamed “Logjam” by the group of prominent cryptographers who discovered it. It’s getting so hard to keep track of these flaws that researchers at INRIA in France created a “zoo” classifying the attacks (which is not yet updated to include Logjam or the FREAK attack discovered in March). Despite the fact that these attacks seem to be announced every few months now, Logjam is a surprising and important finding with broad implications for the Internet. In this post I’ll offer a technical primer of the Logjam vulnerability.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Yes, the news that the former British prime minister has quit his job as a peace envoy for Quartet after eight years has been met with the sort of reaction you’d expect. At least: the sort of reaction you’d expect on Twitter. Which is a mixture of mirth, relief and irony…

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan has now weighed in on The Times’ misleading article advancing baseless industry allegations that the EPA illegally lobbied on behalf of clean water protections. But while Sullivan recognized that the article has some significant problems, she nonetheless defended it as a “solid story” overall.

• Other investors are likely to follow Norwegian fund’s move out of coal-based investments, due to its size as the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund

Finance

• Because capitalism is so regularly defined as “a market system,” we may consider first the actual nonequivalence of capitalism and markets. Capitalism became the dominant economic system in England in revolt against feudalism there in the 17th century. Capitalism spread from England to the western European mainland and thereafter to the rest of the world. However, capitalism was neither the first nor the only system to utilize markets as its means of distributing resources and products. In the slave economic systems that prevailed in various times and places across human history, markets were often the means of distributing resources (including slaves themselves) and the products of slaves’ labor. In the pre-Civil War United States, for example, masters sold slaves and cotton produced by slaves in markets. Thus, the presence of a “market system” does not distinguish capitalism from a slave system.

• That’s one way to put it, and the article, by “Women at Work” columnist Claire Cain Miller, puts it that way repeatedly. Women are paid less in Chile as a “result” of the law that requires employers to provide childcare for working mothers. Maternity leave measures “have meant that” European women are less likely to achieve powerful positions at work. Policies intended to mitigate the penalty women pay for their traditional “dual burden,” the Times says, “end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place.”

• The workplace repression of women is described as the “unintended” impact of family-friendly policies. Sure, such impacts weren’t intended by the policies’ drafters, but that makes it sound as though there were no conscious human beings behind decisions to pay working mothers less or not to hire women. It isn’t the policies that “make it harder” for women, but the male-centric management structure’s unwillingness to integrate those policies into the way work is done. Why not say that?

• McCarthy is the type of investor that KKR and its private equity competitors including Blackstone Group LP and Carlyle Group LP are increasingly courting. Family offices and their advisers manage an estimated $4 trillion, including for the newly rich in Silicon Valley and China, Midwestern entrepreneurs and old money in Europe.

• Sterling fell on Thursday after data confirmed that the UK economy grew at 0.3 per cent in the first quarter compared with the previous three months, disappointing those who had expected a higher reading.

• In a significant omission, one of the European Parliament’s key committees, INTA, has not called for the rejection of the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in its TTIP report, which will be voted on by the full European Parliament on June 10. Although neither today’s vote, nor the plenary next month, has any direct effect on the negotiations, it is regarded as an indicator of the mood of the MEPs, and of how any eventual vote on ratifying TTIP might go.

• The second-largest party in the European Parliament, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group, published a position paper on ISDS back in March, which said: “we have made it clear that we do not see a need for its inclusion and have called for it to be excluded when negotiations for the investment chapter start.” It appears that S&D MEPs initially held onto this position in INTA, but as the result of what the Greens MEP Michel Reimon calls a “dirty last-minute deal” between the main political parties, they voted to drop all mention of ISDS from the committee’s final report.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Surely Wehner remembers that after the first half of Clinton’s first term, Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate for the remainder of his administration—exactly as happened under Obama. There were 30 Democratic governors when Clinton took office, and 19 when he left; there were 29 when Obama took office, and currently there’s 18.

• It’s true that Obama has been been bad news for his party—but as FAIR has long pointed out, that’s true of Clinton as well. An honest appraisal of the administrations of both Clinton and Obama, with their emphasis on deficit-cutting and corporate-friendly trade deals, reveals both Democrats to be establishment centrists—and centrist politics, contrary to what the punditocracy would have you believe, do not have a particularly winning record at the ballot box.

Privacy

• Overdue modernisation of the way the authorities monitor criminals and terrorists – or a Snooper’s Charter eroding our basic liberties? The proposal outlined in the Queen’s Speech to “modernise the law on communications data” will divide opinion. But prepare for another long battle over the way that law is framed and the balance it strikes between privacy and public safety.

• [...]

• The Open Rights Group (ORG), which campaigns against increased surveillance, is convinced this is the return of the so-called Snooper’s Charter, with increased powers of data collection and retention aimed at the entire population, coupled with attacks on encryption.

• The ORG’s executive director Jim Killock thinks the bill will have two aims – codifying existing practices by the intelligence agencies uncovered by Edward Snowden and expanding data retention by ISPs.

• But he believes that the increasing use of encryption by the likes of Google and Facebook means that ordering ISPs to store their customers’ data won’t be enough: “There’s going to be a very interesting discussion about whether government can break encryption or order companies to break it.”

• According to documents obtained by the ACLU, the FBI briefly had a crisis of (4th Amendment) conscience while putting together its license plate reader program. How it talked itself out of its privacy concerns remains secret, as do any policies or guidelines addressing potential privacy issues. All we have so far is a heavily-redacted email in which the FBI’s General Counsel is noted as struggling with the issue.

• The German BND and the American NSA are not so different in the end, especially regarding their objectives and actions. The NSA might be better equipped technically and the BND signs formally correct contracts. In any case, this shows again that we can not trust that suggestions like “Schengen-Routing”, data storage in Germany only or even German inventions like “De-Mail” serve to protect the privacy of communications and data.

• The Queen’s Speech, delivered this morning at the opening of UK parliament, has confirmed earlier indications that the Snooper’s Charter is on its way back, with the UK government promising that “new legislation will modernise the law on communications data.”

• An analysis in The Guardian claims this new legislation will also include “an extension of the powers of the security services in response to the surveillance disclosures by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,” although no sources are given for that information.

• The old joke goes “George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a ‘how to’ manual.” But that joke is increasingly less funny as the UK really seems to be doing everything it can to put in place Orwell’s fictitious vision — just a few decades later. Right after the election a few weeks ago, we noted the government’s plan to push forward with its “extremist disruption orders” (as had been promised). The basic idea is that if the government doesn’t like what you’re saying, it can define your statements as “extremist” and make them criminal. Prime Minister David Cameron did his best Orwell in flat out stating that the idea was to use these to go after people who were obeying the law and then arguing that the UK needed to suppress free speech… in the name of protecting free speech. Really.

• A sophomore honors student at Flower Mound High School who posted online some of the photos he took as part of his yearbook class, has been forced by school administrators to take down the photos. Anthony Mazur, 16, is on his school’s yearbook staff, and over the past year has been learning about photography- focusing mostly on sports photography. Mazur posted his best photos on Flickr, and had even been successful at selling a few of them to the parents of his subjects, until school administrators threatened him with in-school suspension or loss of privileges unless he removed them all.

• [...]

• Hass declined to answer our followup questions about how the AUP applied to the situation, since his work was related to a class project (yearbook), and since photographs taken at public events have no legal expectation of privacy, or whether Brown threatened him with expulsion, confiscating money, or reporting him to the IRS.

• Although the Mazur family is fighting the decision, Anthony says he is undeterred. He has since obtained his own camera, and is continuing to photograph sporting events, where he says he has the same access as other members of the public, and members of the media. “They’re not going to stop me, I’ll keep doing what I love,” said Anthony.

• The operator of 8chan says the bandwidth of millions of Hola users is being sold for reuse, with some of it even being used to attack his site. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Hola founder Ofer Vilenski says that users’ idle resources are indeed utilized for commercial sale, but that has been the agreement all along.

Civil Rights

• Some months back, we noted that something odd was happening in Japan: online gaming cheaters were being arrested. Yes, arrested. Not arrested in a virtual sense, not banned from games, arrested as in picked up by police and charged with a crime. This, in case you are undecided on the matter, is insane. Cheating and online gaming have been a virtual arms-race for going on forever and generally it’s been on the gaming companies to win that war. If they can use law enforcement as a new ally, the implications could be scary, especially when it’s quite easy to levy accusations of cheating and when simply finding ways to exploit an advantage within a game is often times mistaken for cheating as well.

• In an unsurprising move, Steam has replaced the Linux icon of “tux” with their own SteamOS icon. I completely understand why they did this, but it does make things confusing.

• If you’re more worried about the government spying on you than you are about the government losing “valuable surveillance tools”—well, I guess AP is not the news service for you, then.

• One such PATRIOT Act preservation effort is labeled a “compromise” by AP—Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr’s proposal to extend the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic phone records until 2017—in what AP calls a “transition.”

• The FBI had somebody wearing a wire at the London Olympics to capture the FIFA corruption taking place in the margins. What were the British authorities doing? Nothing.

• Britain prides itself as having in London the world’s leading financial centre. Substantial assets, both financial and real estate, from FIFA corruption are located in London. But Britain has taken over the crown from Switzerland as the major financial destination which will always protect ill-gotten wealth.

• Alisher Usmanov played a major role as bagman for the corrupt Russian World Cup bid, particularly with delegates from FIFA’s Asian Confederation. His place as Britain’s third richest resident is very obviously based on extreme Russian corruption and he rose to power and wealth solely with the use of gangster muscle and contacts he gained and expanded while serving a prison sentence for blackmail. But he is a billionaire and beloved by the City of London so there is no danger of him ever being investigated in the UK.

• With some of the recent news stories about how cheating, or other crimes, committed in virtual settings is resulting in real-world legal consequences, I’m sort of surprised the media hadn’t picked up on this story before. Apparently back in the summer of 2012, two teenagers, Patrick Nepomuceno and Michael Stinger, ran a scheme in Blizzard’s Diablo 3 in which Stinger would send out a link to another player that allowed Nepomuceno to take control of the player’s computer, force the player’s character to drop all of his/her valuable virtual game items, and then Stinger would scoop them up.

• Israel Shimeles operates a food truck (SUSPICIOUS!) and moved those items to his parked car to make more room in his truck. He has since apologized and calls his own actions “stupid.” That’s the world we live in today, where a propane tank and a pressure cooker laying in plain sight in a parked vehicle results in destroyed property and apologies from the person who’s now out a pressure cooker, propane tank and rear window.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Back when Verizon sued to overturn the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules, the telco argued that the FCC was aggressively and capriciously violating the company’s First and Fifth Amendment rights. According to Verizon’s argument at the time, broadband networks “are the modern-day microphone by which their owners engage in First Amendment speech.” Verizon also tried to claim that neutrality rules were a sort of “permanent easement on private broadband networks for the use of others without just compensation,” and thereby violated the Fifth Amendment.

• Imagine you’re on the phone with your doctor, discussing a very sensitive and private matter that requires your full attention. Suddenly in the middle of a sentence, your mobile phone provider injects a recording saying you’ve used 90 percent of your minutes for the month and to press 1 to contact customer service, and repeats the message until you either hit 1 or hit 2 to cancel.

• Or you’re on a call with a buddy, talking about your favorite sports team. Suddenly you get several text messages with “special offers” from companies that sell jerseys and other sporting goods.

• While net neutrality may have recently found its way into the Merriam Webster dictionary, it still hasn’t managed to find its way to Europe. Most assumed that the EU would have passed net neutrality protections long before the States, so the FCC beating the EU to the punch surprised more than a few people. That was especially true if you’d been watching some of rhetoric coming out of the EU over the last few years.

• [...]

• The EU’s net neutrality bill began in 2013 when Kroes introduced a proposal for a Telecoms Single Market (TSM), or a single piece of regulation covering all telecom issues across the EU. That proposal was slowly but surely boiled down to just two major proposals: one aimed at eliminating wireless roaming between EU nations to reduce consumer rates, and one focused on enshrining net neutrality into law. Like initial efforts in the States, however, this proposal was packed with all manner of loopholes pushed for by major telecom carriers, worried their ability to abuse limited last-mile competition would come to an end.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• For the last few years, we’ve been covering a long (now complete) saga concerning the status of the copyright on Sherlock Holmes. A few years ago, we wrote about the odd state of the copyright according to the Conan Doyle Estate — which insisted that the character was not in the public domain in the US (even as it is in the public domain in many other countries). That’s because, while nearly all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works were published long before 1923, a final set of 10 stories were published after. The Estate erroneously argued that as long as any part of Sherlock Holmes was under copyright, all of it was. In 2013, a scholar of Sherlock Holmes sued the Estate to argue otherwise. And despite the silly fears of the Estate, both the district court and the appeals court rightly explained how copyright law works to the Estate, noting that all of the early works are in the public domain, and the only copyright that may be maintained is in the marginal creative additions in those final 10 works. The appeals court even went so far as to argue that the Estate was abusing antitrust laws in demanding fees from everyone. And the Supreme Court refused to review the case.

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