● 06.08.15

● Links 8/6/2015: Red Hat Upgraded, Debian 8.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 4:34 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The other specifications include i7-5600U CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and of course Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pre-installed as OEM specific installation. It was not possible to directly order it from Dell site, as Finland is reportedly not online market for Dell… The wholesale company however managed to get two models on their lists and so it’s now possible to order via retailers.

• Alright, so the app we’re highlighting today isn’t quite the binary version of an old newspaper seller — but it is a great way to have the latest news brought to you, on your desktop.

• Tick is a GTK-based news ticker for the Linux desktop that scrolls the latest headlines and article titles from your favourite RSS feeds in horizontal strip that you can place anywhere on your desktop.

Server

Kernel Space

• After having announced the release of Linux kernel 4.0.5, Greg Kroah-Hartman has had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.14.44 LTS.

• Normally rc7 tends to be the last rc release, and there’s not a lot going on to really merit anything else this time around. However, we do still have some pending regressions, and as mentioned last week I also have my yearly family vacation coming up, so we’ll have an rc8 and an extra week before 4.1 actually gets released.

• Immediately after having informed users about the availability of Linux kernel 4.0.5 and Linux kernel 3.14.44 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman has had the pleasure of announcing the release of a new maintenance version for the Linux 3.10 kernel series.

• Intel doesn’t provide binary installers for its drivers, but it does have a dedicated installer. Intel has just released a couple of binary blobs for the upcoming Skylake and Broxton architectures for the Linux platform.

• It’s Sunday again, so Linus Torvalds has just informed us about the immediate availability for download and testing of Linux kernel 4.1′s seventh Release Candidate (RC) version, which might also be the last, according to Mr. Torvalds.

• We haven’t heard AMD talk about KERNCZ or see it mentioned elsewhere outside of Linux kernel enablement patches. Based upon current timing and these patches just appearing recently, I would guess that KERNCZ would be the chipset for next-generation AMD Zen processors. Back in March we saw AMD begin with public Linux/open-source enablement patches around Zen and its new CPU micro-architecture.

Graphics Stack

• Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of Mesa 10.5.7.

• Intel’s upcoming Skylake and Broxton hardware will require some binary-only firmware blobs by the i915 DRM kernel graphics driver.

• libinput provides a number of different out-of-the-box configurations, based on capabilities. For example: middle mouse button emulation is enabled by default if a device only has left and right buttons. On devices with a physical middle button it is available but disabled by default. Likewise, whether tapping is enabled and/or available depends on hardware capabilities. But some requirements cannot be gathered purely by looking at the hardware capabilities.

Benchmarks

• The tests I did on an Intel Xeon box were freshly built versions of GCC 4.9.2, GCC 5.1.0, and the latest SVN snapshot of the GCC 6.0 compiler that’s under development for release in 2016. The three compilers were built the same way and then they went on to build our many open-source Linux CPU benchmarks via the Phoronix Test Suite automated benchmarking software.

• Stress-ng is a utility being worked on by Colin King at Canonical. Stress-ng is designed for stressing a computer in different ways and offers over 90 stress tests, 50 CPU stress tests, and various other tests. Colin has been working with I on incorporating it into the Phoronix Test Suite.

Applications

• LiteManager has released a new version its remote support and classroom management tool, also dubbed LiteManager, with screen sharing and support for Mac OS and Linux.

• There are some tools which we must know as Linux/Server Admin to monitor the health/performance status of any running Server. Generally we have to monitor health/status of RAM, CPU, I/O Devices and Network. Our demo is performed with Ubuntu Server 14.04. There are many System Performance Monitoring Tools For Linux, but these are the often used tools.

• Qmmp is a popular open-source, cross-platform multimedia player, similar to Winamp and written in Qt. It has support for popular multimedia file formats, including MPEG1 layer 2/3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, Native FLAC/Ogg FLAC, Musepack, WavePack, WMA, Midi.

• As you may know, Fritzing is an open source application, used for either designing electronic circuits, performing circuit experiments without owning the hardware pieces, or generating schematic, PCB artwork, and PCB production files.

• Conrad put out a new minor release 5.200.1 of Armadillo yesterday. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab.

• Fifteen years after Sun Microsystems released the code for OpenOffice.org, most users still don’t know what they have, especially in the text processor Writer. Far from being an inadequate substitute for Microsoft Word, in LibreOffice, the code’s latest incarnation, Writer is so far ahead of its rival that there’s no competition. You would have to compare Writer with a professional tool like FrameMaker to find a suitable comparison.

• I was recently given an ebook by a friend. It was a photography book, with tons of hi-res images and very little text. When I opened it with Ubuntu, Evince (the default PDF viewer that comes with Ubuntu) gave in: after a few pages, it slowed to a crawl. I did a bit of research, and found the program that rescued my viewing needs: MuPDF. The good news was that I could finally read my book. The bad news was that I found out that the company behind it has in the past misunderstood the terms of the GPL and started a (later dismissed) litigation against Palm.

Instructionals/Technical

• You know, now living in the Netherlands also causes that me and my wife travel back to Germany for a weekend once in a while. Leaving the cats back in Amsterdam creates a bad feeling.This leads to a little bit of coding and playing with various technologies

• Idea was to take one of boards I have at home, plug 750GB 2.5″ hdd to it and put it on a box with only power and hdmi ports exposed. All running Ubuntu (with distro kernel) or Android. And controlled by simple remote control.

Games

• Valve has made some of the Steam Universe hardware available for pre-order and you can even get them early. This includes the Steam Controller and Steam Link.

• The kid has learnt to play with the tablet and the phone before than with the computer, because our computers have no joysticks nor touchscreens. He learnt to use the touchpad before than the mouse, because it’s easier and we have no mouse at home.

• Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered is a remake of the original Fahrenheit released by a studio called Quantic Dream, and it also runs on Linux. The game comes with a promotion that will expire on June 11.

• Valve has announced that consumers who pre-order a Steam Machine will receive their hardware on October 16th.

• Unvanquished, a free, open-source first-person shooter that combines real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has been updated once more, and it looks like the developers have made some important progress.

• Valve has announced the first Steam Machines, and there are just two versions available right now. They seem to be pretty similar from a hardware point of view, but no precise information about their hardware is known.

• The Steam Link is an upcoming piece of technology that will allow users to stream their games from the PC to the TV, transforming a desktop gaming session into a couch gaming session.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Another ~6 months down, another Fedora release. While Fedora 23 looks to be an interesting release over all — with some initial changes coming to Anaconda, and some changes coming to the upgrade process — this release was more low-key for most of Fedora-land. Workstation saw updates to notifications and general theme’ing improvements, Gnome Software got AppData integration to bring the Software Center closer to an app-store experience. Of course Gnome Boxes and Gnome Builder were included as well, allowing for more out-of-the-box developer improvements in the realm of Virutalization and IDE’s, respectively. But there weren’t any ground breaking features across the board — no swapping of the init system, no BTRFS, no Wayland by default, although GDM is running the Login Screen through Wayland.

• The Skrooge teams releases today the version 1.12.5 of its popular Personal Finances Management software. This release is a bugfix version, mostly aiming at fixing issues met on some distros when the SQLite version bundled in Qt is not aligned with the System version.

• This is first update of the my GSoC project TV optimized dashboard support in the Plasma Media Center. First let me tell you what this project is about

• Therefore today I installed the same setup on my work machine and will now use the KF5 based Kate for all of my day job, perhaps that motivates me more to take a look at the issues the Qt5/KF5 port still has.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• As reported a couple of days ago, the Fedora developers proposed system firmware updates for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, implemented via the GNOME Software package manager.

Distributions

• If you’re watching our news lately, you might be aware of an upcoming GNU/Linux distribution that tries to rise above existing projects due to the fact that it offers a gorgeous, well-implemented Material Design interface.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) stock is hovering near 15-year highs, and the Linux software leader could deliver better-than-expected results when it reports its Q1 earnings after the market close June 18, says RBC.

• Interestingly, what appears to fall outside of this meritocracy is executive compensation — unless, that is, the merit of, for example, Brian Stevens, Red Hat’s former CTO (who left the company last September to become vice president of cloud platforms at Google), was truly 100 times that of the company’s average software engineer. According to Red Hat’s Schedule 14A Proxy Statement filed with the SEC, Stevens’s fiscal 2014 compensation was $7,940,307, while according to PayScale Human Capital, software engineers at Red Hat make, on average, $80,436. Another way to look at this, of course, is that in Red Hat’s corporate culture, the livelihood of the CTO’s family was worth the livelihoods of 100 software engineers’ families. So I felt it was important for Whitehurst (whose fiscal 2014 compensation was $6,692,552) to address the issue.

Fedora

• I’m a very happy GNOME user, but on my old 32 bit laptop I wanted to try something else and so my only candidate when it comes to a Spin, is Xfce. Not that the default configuration is very good, but it uses GTK libraries and if needed I can easily install also GNOME applications.

• In this short blogpost I’d like to go beyond the normal setup and just share what I did to make Xfce working as desired. The installation of the Spin is really easy and fast, no useless applications are on board and the user really can choose what he likes more. There’s just a small “but”…..yes, settings are not working always and it depends on your usecase if the solution is easy or hard to achieve. Fedora 22 comes with the latest 4.12 Xfce release, which is so much better than 4.10 but still not perfect.

• Fedora Project had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Fedora 22 Linux operating system a while ago, as reported by Softpedia at the end of May 2015.

• Fedora Project had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Fedora 22 Linux operating system a while ago, as reported by Softpedia at the end of May 2015.

• Like yum before it, dnf also uses (by default) metalinks served by Fedora Mirrormanager mirrorlist servers. Metalinks are a great thing, but it seems like many people don’t understand them or realize what great benefits they provide, so I thought I would do this post to help.

• There’s a few more features being talked about this week for inclusion into Fedora 23.

• The latest feature proposals being discussed for Fedora 23 is supporting system firmware updates and including the Frappe Framework.

• RPM of PHPUnit version 4.7 are available in remi repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (CentOS, RHEL…).

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 8 (codename jessie). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• With a two-day delay from the official release schedule, the Debian Project has had the great pleasure of announcing today, June 8, the immediate availability for download of the first maintenance version of Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie).

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In its latest blog post, Canonical once again brags about the awesome abilities of the Snappy Ubuntu Core Linux operating system for Internet of Things (IoT).

• There is a site out there that list and catalogues the work of people who modify IKEA furniture. One of the latest coffee tables posted on IkeaHackers runs Ubuntu GNOME 15.04.

• Some members of the Ubuntu community want to organize Ubucon Europe 2016, a convention aimed at developers and users alike. The organizers are still in the early stages, and they want some feedback.

• The upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 update is still in the works, and it should land this week if everything goes according to plan. The developers have fixed an important issue that was affecting the BQ dual-sim phones, and things are looking up.

• Things might even take a further twist down the line as these users might end up sticking to the use of tablets and smartphones even for PC purposes. This is true because there are a number of tablets and smartphones already in the market that offer the abilities to be used as a PC. This would be a huge blow for PC manufacturers.However, as it seems, these OEM are not ready to quit the game.

Flavours and Variants

• If you don’t mind being joined to Google at the hip, there’s a great Linux-based cloud desktop operating system called Chrome OS. It’s on Chromebooks. If, however you want a Linux-based cloud desktop operating system where you can rely on non-Google cloud apps, you have another excellent choice: Peppermint.

Devices/Embedded

• The Rigol DS1052E is the de facto oscilloscope for any tinkerer’s bench. It’s cheap, it’s good enough, and it’s been around for a long time; with the new 1054 zed model out now, you might even be able to pick up a 1052E on the cheap.

Phones

• The future doesn’t look very bright right now for alternative mobile operating systems Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu.

• It’s always been difficult to attract developers to these platforms, and now smartphones powered by the OSes are also falling behind affordable Android devices on hardware specs. So not only must their users put up with a smaller selection of apps, but also with less powerful devices.

Android

• Android Auto has really started to take off over the past few months. With Pioneer’s aftermarket head units becoming available and car makers like Hyundai, Chevy and Buick launching Android Auto in their new models that are driving off dealer lots today. But not everyone is ready for a new car, and not everyone wants to spend nearly a grand on one of Pioneer’s headunits. Even though they have come down quite a bit, the cheapest one is about $500 right now.

• The Android 5.1.1 Lollipop update has started rolling out to Android One smartphones in India. The devices that are receiving the update include the Micromax Canvas A1, Spice Dream UNO Mi-498, and Karbonn Sparkle V.

• Google’s Android Open Source Project (AOSP) rolled out in 2007 with the goal of creating a unified framework for mobile operating systems and, in turn, expediting the development of mobile products. The core of the code was open to everyone, but to help guarantee quality products — and promote its own services in the face of Apple’s iOS — Google also organized the Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

• One day soon you may want to trade in your smartphone for a newer, better model. And before you do, you’ll want to delete all your photos, e-mails, app accounts, and other personal data—anything you wouldn’t want to get into a stranger’s hands.

• What used to be exclusive for Windows phone will now be available for Google Android and Apple iOS users following the announcement from Microsoft that it will bring Cortana, the famous phone personal assistant, to non-Windows devices.

• The keyboard is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of a smartphone or tablet. For years, iPhone users had to put up with the default keyboard simply because Apple thought that having third-party keyboards wasn’t necessary. However, as soon as they saw the success third-party keyboards were having in the Play Store, it made them reconsider their decision. Now, the market is flooded with keyboards for both iPhone and Android, making this a lucrative field for many developers and innovators.

• The Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge stand to benefit a lot from the Android Lollipop 5.1 update, particularly when it comes to the main 16MP camera it comes with.

• Nokia’s unique Z Launcher for Android has received a big update that finally adds support for home screen widgets. Users will also find a handy alphabetical app list that puts all of their software just a swipe away.

• Moto X and Moto G may receive the latest Android 5.1.1 Lollipop OS update as the software is reportedly in the works.

• Android Pay is a near identical clone of Apple Pay, but it won’t be anywhere near as lucrative, according to a new report. Unlike Apple, Google isn’t taking a cut from Android Pay transactions, so the service will literally be offered for free.

• If you’re a dedicated Android fan and not making full use of widgets, then you’re totally not using the full potential of Google’s platform. See, if we take away widgets out of the feature bag, we are easily stripping it from one of its defining features.

• Huawei is expected to start rolling out the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for its existing family of Android devices. And it might happen very soon as a video of Ascend Mate7 running the Emotion 3.1 UI based on Android 5.1 Lollipop surfaced, making a promise of some interesting features to come.

• TechWorm reported that the update will be made available on the Moto G 1st and 2nd Generation, the Moto X 1st and 2nd Generation and the Moto E 2nd Generation LTE. The Android M is reportedly already in development so Android smartphone makers are quickly introducing \ the Android 5.1 Lollipop to newer product releases.

• Overall, I think the battle for the living room is just starting. Other devices may have already gotten a head-start, but Nvidia’s big leap puts the Shield into the fight in a strong way. Short of being a computer or HTPC, the Nvidia Shield covers several basic, but important, entertainment needs — it’s a gaming system, streams video, plays music, uses apps and may provide a way to finally cut the cable company chord that’s been taking all your money.

• Realistically, it’s still a new product, but the options aren’t that few and there’s definitely more room for Shield and similar products to grow. It will be interesting to see what Nvidia and its competitors will come up with next.

• If your device or your new-device budget can handle it, we think moving to Android M is a very good idea: it’s nicer to use, more energy efficient and more secure than previous versions of Android, and if you’ve been hanging on to KitKat you’ll notice a huge difference.

• If you’re planning to upgrade an existing KitKat device we wouldn’t recommend doing it on day one, though: if the launch of Lollipop was anything to go by there’s every chance Android M will launch with some utterly spectacular bugs in it. It’s always worth waiting for teething troubles to be solved.

• What do you think? Will we have to prize KitKat from your cold dead hands, or are you excited about Android M? Let us know in the comments.

Free Software/Open Source

• Misconceptions range from the belief that open source is not secure enough for businesses, since it is community-based, to misunderstandings about the availability and quality of technical support. While some of them have been propagated since the early days of open source, enterprise-ready offerings today provide the same, if not higher, levels of security, capabilities and reliability as proprietary counterparts.

• Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of Internet Exchange Points are now using BIRD, an open source router solution maintained by the Czech CZ.NIC Association, taking first place from proprietary routers.

• The financial industry is on the verge of an open source breakthrough, say three companies on the cutting edge of the trend. Traditionally very secretive about their technology, banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies have begun in the past few years to talk about how they use open source software in their infrastructure and product development. They have also been steadily increasing their contributions to upstream projects in the form of user feedback and code. And some companies have initiated their own open source projects or released portions of their own code to the open source community.

• The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project has rolled out “Arno,” an open-source platform that group officials said will give users and developers a framework for testing NFV efforts, checking out basic NFV uses cases and trying out virtual network functions (VNFs). The growing demand among telecommunications vendors and other organizations for ways to more quickly adopt and implement NFV is driving the OPNFV’s efforts, according to Chris Price, technical steering committee chairman and open-source manager for software-defined networking (SDN), NFV and the cloud for network vendor Ericsson.

• NASA has released the source code for a complete set of software tools that that cover pretty much everything from aeronautics and propulsion, and from system testing and handling.

Events

• From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.

SaaS/Big Data

Education

• When I started working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we set out to revamp the website and add learning materials for educators. In the mean time, we wanted to get a few resources out in time for Hour of Code week, so we wrote them on GitHub for easy sharing. It’s easy to get started writing with markdown, and it made collaboration straightforward. Despite all being new to GitHub, the education team really liked the way this worked and wanted to stick with the method, so we did.

BSD

• OpenSSH 6.9 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This release contains some substantial new features and a number of bugfixes.

Public Services/Government

• The Government of India has implemented a remarkable new policy-level change for open source software (OSS) deployment. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has asked that open source software-based applications be included in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for all new procurements. Note there is not a plan at this time to replace existing proprietary systems with open source software.

• The bold plan is a logical step forward in an unprecedented roll-out of e-government services that began in 2000, when Estonia introduced a public system for electronic tax filing. In 2002, Estonia introduced a universal electronic identification card with digital signatures, which every citizen gets at the age of 15. The ID cards and signatures have become the keys to nearly universal access to government information and services as well as private-sector services in health care, banking and education, and law. In the years since, the Estonian government and industry have put more and more functions online, all connected by a nationwide data backbone called X-Road.

• Four case studies published the past weeks by the gvSIG community show the usefulness of this suite of open source Geographic Information Systems. The cases detail the gvSIG use by public administrations in Spain and Italy, to collect, manage and analyse information on gas pipelines, to create hiking trails, examine city commerce, and plan public transport networks.

Openness/Sharing

• Software developers have long been able to collaborate through community sites like those based on Git and Apache Allura to contribute code, synchronize software builds, and track issues around a project. And games like Minecraft allow people to collaborate in building virtual environments with embedded behaviors—including “mods” that leverage the games’ simulation capabilities to interact with other objects in a virtual world. Now, an open-source Web platform originally designed with Defense Department funding could let communities collaborate to build more tangible things—like tanks, planes, and consumer appliances.

Programming

• An intern from Qualcomm’s Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he’s hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project.

• In the end, I decided to talk about functional reactive proramming in C++ which will be a thrilling and enticing tale of event-based systems and the power of reactive streams. I’ll also cover some fun new things we are to expect from C++17 that are bringing even more functional programming concepts than we have in the current standard

Leftovers

Finance

• I just read the Guardian’s account of today’s Labour leadership hustings, and they are not Tory Lite, they are Tory High Octane. Supporting Tory benefit cuts, calling the unemployed “the work-shy”, defending £9,000 a year tuition fees, supporting Trident and falling over themselves to reject autonomy for the Scottish accounting unit. But what I find even more astonishing is that the Fabian Society audience were lining up afterwards for selfies with Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and according to the Guardian nobody wanted a photo with Jeremy Corbyn, the one decent human being there.

• There is a very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday…

• My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering.

Censorship

• Atlanta IP lawyer Sanford Asman isn’t happy that CaseRails CEO Erik Dykema won’t hand his company’s name over to him—in fact, he’s filed a trademark lawsuit over it, just as he said he would last month.

• Asman believes that CaseRails is infringing his trademark rights to CaseWebs and CaseSpace, two websites that house his own litigation-management software. In fact, Asman believes any Web-based legal software with “case” in its name should be under his purview.

Privacy

• And that points to a bigger problem with declaring that the NSA’s data collection has “ended”: The same data will still be collected, only it will be held in phone company computers rather than the NSA’s computers. The NSA will still have access to the data, only having to get an OK from the FISA court–a notorious rubberstamp that operates in secret. As NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe told FAIR, “It’s more of a psychological maneuver to make us all feel good than a true constraint.”

Civil Rights

• A Los Angeles Police Department officer was convicted Friday in connection to the videotaped beating of a female suspect who was struck in the throat and crotch in a patrol car.

• Officer Mary O’Callaghan, an 18-year veteran, was accused of felony assault under the color of authority in a 2012 incident largely captured on a patrol-car camera. The 35-year-old victim, Alesia Thomas, died later that July evening. Medical examiner officials said cocaine intoxication was a “major factor” in the Los Angeles woman’s death.

• Glasgow City College student Majid Ali faces torture and death if returned to Pakistan. Majid Ali’s brother and other members of his immediate family have been taken and I am afraid very probably murdered by the Pakistani authorities as part of their relentless persecution of the Baloch people and desire to wipe out Baloch national identity. The UK Home Office intends to deport Majid. The people of Scotland must defend him.

• Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court has upheld the sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years of imprisonment on blogger Raif Badawi, despite a foreign outcry.

• Speaking from Canada, his wife Ensaf Haidar told the BBC she feared his punishment would start again on Friday.

• Badawi was arrested in 2012 for “insulting Islam through electronic channels”.

• Neuroscience explains why our justice system keeps sending innocent people to prison — and letting guilty ones go

• Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

• In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

• Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”

• [...]

• Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.

• Mexico’s latest elections are threatened by drug cartel violence, social protests, and the mass resignation of election officials. The left, which in the past has succeeded in rallying a third or more of the nation’s voters for a single party, goes into this election deeply divided, prompting expectations of a win for the ruling party.

• A good rule of thumb is that if we feel the views of others are offensive, they probably feel our own views are offensive as well, a view they are completely entitled to when they do not act on it to harm us. If we wish to have our freedom to own and express our views protected, we must also actively respect — preferably protect — the rights of others to the same freedom.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.

DRM

• My Amazon Echo just arrived, months after I pre-ordered it. I’d totally forgotten about it until I got a ship notification the other day, and then it was there, a strange little tube promising yet another peek at a future that never seems fully within grasp.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Popcorn Time captured the minds of millions of movie, TV and anime pirates over the past year, but there’s one group of video enthusiasts who felt left out. The porn fans. A new Popcorn Time fork named Porn Time is now aiming to fill this hole.

• Yet another shady backroom so-deceptively-called “free trade” agreement, TISA, has come to light. Just like all the others, this one seeks to curtail the Internet and civil liberties and benefit incumbent big business. But things aren’t getting worse – it’s us who are getting better at spotting things.

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