● 01.21.16

● Links 21/1/2016: Linux Foundation, Gates Foundation Under Fire; OpenStack Foundation Event Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 12:39 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• On top of the base, OS10 aims to support native Linux, third party and open source applications. Dell is hoping that OS10 will appeal to network operators as well as DevOps teams looking for one OS that can manage server, storage and networking.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation is an industry organisation dedicated to “promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software”[1]. The majority of its board is chosen by the member companies – 10 by platinum members (platinum membership costs $500,000 a year), 3 by gold members (gold membership costs $100,000 a year) and 1 by silver members (silver membership costs between $5,000 and $20,000 a year, depending on company size). Up until recently individual members ($99 a year) could also elect two board members, allowing for community perspectives to be represented at the board level.

• A recent change in the way Linux Foundation elects its representatives has sparked a controversy in the Linux and open source community. Before telling you about the change in representation that was uncovered by Mattew Garrett, a kernel contributor and social activist, I’ll be telling you how Linux Foundation’s board was chosen just a week ago.

• Matthew Garrett, kernel contributor and social activist, today posted of his discovery of a little change at the Linux Foundation. The foundation left regular users and individual developers behind for large corporate sponsors years ago, but today Garrett said they made it official. One little clause was removed from the by-laws, but it removes so much more from the foundation.

• The Linux Foundation has given its clearest indication yet that it caters to corporates rather than the community, by making it impossible for community representatives to be elected to its board.

• …change in policy comes months after Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Conservancy had planned to run for the Linux Foundation board…

• The Linux Foundation, a trade association formed nine years ago to represent and promote open-source operating system Linux, will no longer allow community members to elect or be elected to join its board of directors.

• The majority of the organisation’s board is made up of directors representing its nine platinum members – including Oracle, Fujitsu, HP, Intel, IBM and Samsung – which donate $500,000 per year.

• Olof Johansson sent in all of the ARM SoC updates for the Linux 4.5 merge window on Friday night. Most significant is the ARM multi-platform code update. Olof explained, “This branch is the culmination of 5 years of effort to bring the ARMv6 and ARMv7 platforms together such that they can all be enabled and boot the same kernel. It has been a tremendous amount of cleanup and refactoring by a huge number of people, and creation of several new (and major) subsystems to better abstract out all the platform details in an appropriate manner. The bulk of this branch is a large patchset from Arnd that brings several of the more minor and older platforms we have closer to multiplatform support. Among these are MMP, S3C64xx, Orion5x, mv78xx0 and realview Much of this is moving around header files from old mach directories, but there are also some cleanup patches of debug_ll (lowlevel debug per-platform options) and other parts.”

• The first general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU) now available as an open-source RTL and it already beats AMD’s Tahiti on some benchmarks.

• Dubbed Many-core Integrated Accelerator of Wisconsin (MIAOW) the GPGPU is still in its kitten stage and needs a few developers and a couple of months on a newspaper before it is properly toilet trained.

• GFXBench 4.0 was released back in November for their platforms including Android, iOS, OS X, and Windows. In an interesting move, the company emailed me this morning to announce they are supporting GFXBench 4.0 on Linux. Under Linux they appear to just be supporting OpenGL (no word of OpenGL ES) while the company already announced they intend to support Vulkan later this year.

• Today was another busy day in the Coreboot world for freeing systems of their proprietary BIOS/firmware.

• A few days ago I wrote about Coreboot being ported to the Purism Librem laptop by a Google engineer and beat the company to it even though that was one of the original goals for this “open-source friendly” laptop. However, due to restrictions by Intel and others, that Coreboot port still isn’t 100% free but does rely upon binary blobs.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• All of these file-systems were tested from the Linux 4.4.0 x86_64 kernel atop a daily build of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The same Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 system was used for all of this file-system benchmarking. All of the file-systems were tested against an 80GB Intel M.2 SSDSCKGW08 solid-state drive.

Applications

• 2015 was a big year for the Krita project. They had a successful crowdfunding campaign over the summer, which helped fund the development of an onslaught of features targeted for versions of 2.9 and beyond. With everything from big-time performance jumps when using large brushes, to the addition of support for animating, Krita’s growth has spiked and the project continues to get attention and high praise among digital artists.

• The Audacity developers have released the second maintenance release in the 2.1 series of the open-source and cross-platform audio editor software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• The time has come to bring you all Release Candidate 1 for Kodi v16. It took a bit longer than we anticipated due to some problems along the way though they should be under control now. This release consists of some nice features but more importantly the continues effort on making the underlying code more mature and future proof which should result in a more stable Kodi in general.

• Kodi 16 is bringing button long press support, improved Android rendering, better DirectX 11 support on Windows, settings improvements, PVR/DVR enhancements, better audio and video playback, and an assortment of other features.

• GStreamer, a development framework for creating applications such as media players, video editors, and others, has been upgraded to version 1.6.3 and is now ready for download.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• After approximately one and a half months, Steam for Linux managed to collect 100 more games for Linux and SteamOS users, as at the moment of writing this article there are exactly 1,801 titles available.

• Steam reaching 1,800 Linux/SteamOS games is the good news, but the bad news is that there aren’t many AAA titles available, and, therefore, the usage of Steam for Linux continues to remain very low even in 2016, under 1%.

• Team Fortress 2, the online multiplayer game developed by Valve with Linux support, has received another update and it looks like it’s all about balancing.

• The previous update for Team Fortress 2 has a couple of fixes that were really good for Linux users. One of the changes made by developers to the game actually reduced the memory usage on the Linux platform.

• SteamOS has been out for quite some time, and now we also have Steam Machines in the wild, but it looks like AMD video cards continue to be a problem for this platform.

• Nvidia, Valve, and developers of Vulkan from the Khronos Group met for the first-ever Vulkan Developers Day.

• Another day, another Steam Beta patch. The Valve developers seem to be doing a lot of work and they continue to push for major improvement.

• If you buy a Steam Controller right now, you need to install that Steam Beta client in order to get the best experience possible. In fact, the controller doesn’t even work as it should with the regular release, so the “need” part is pretty important. Only Valve knows why all of these improvements that have been made to the Steam Beta client don’t land in the Stable branch, but we’ll have to just accept that.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME development team works hard these days to bring us the fourth milestone towards the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, and they have updated several components with new features and bugfixes.

• The GTK+ developers have released yet another milestone towards the upcoming GTK+ 3.20 open-source GUI toolkit, which is heavily used in the development of the GNOME desktop environment and numerous software projects.

Distributions

• Papyros is a new Linux distribution that uses Material Design and a new shell. It’s been in the works for a long time, but things are finally coming along.

New Releases

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs Softpedia today, January 20, 2016 about the official release and immediate availability for download of his ExTiX 16.1 computer operating system.

• The IPFire open-source firewall operating system based on the Linux kernel was updated on January 20, 2016, to version 2.17 Core Update 96, a release that adds several improvements, fixes many security issues, and updates various components.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) 7 beta.

• JBoss EAP is part of JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio of software. It’s Red Hat’s Java EE application server that’s used for building, deploying, and hosting highly-transactional Java applications and services. The beta brings containers and microservices closer to the Java EE application server, in addition to integrating the WildFly Application Server 10.

• There’s that bit (quite a few bits actually) during the Red Hat Summit conventions every year when the middleware team gets really excited about its product set.

Fedora

• “I contributed!” is a special series on the Fedora Community Blog which helps Fedora contributors understand…

• In November, we’ve been to PyCon CZ 2015. And when I say we I mean Fedora Python maint and friends team: Matěj Stuchlík, Robert Kuska, Slávek Kabrda, Michal Cyprian, Michal Srb and me.

Debian Family

• Siri and I are on a journey through India and Nepal, with the aim of learning about needs of Debian derivatives, to improve Debian and encourage closer integration.

• Theme of our trip is Debian Pure Blends. More specifically, we will meet with distribution developers and designers to try understand why they fork from (other forks of) Debian, and how Debian might improve to better serve them – ideally be able to fully contain such projects within Debian itself.

• After an amazing 15 months I’ve just “pulled the plug” on reproducible.debian.net – well, not really (at all), instead now we have https://tests.reproducible-builds.org! It’s still a bit rough and not really yet where I want it to be (more on that soon), but… hopefully it will be there, rather soon!

• As a follow-up to my last post where I discussed common Python packaging related errors, I thought it would be worth to have a separate post on how to decide on build-depends for Python (and Python3) packages.

• The python ecosystem has a lot of packages built around supporting multiple versions of python (really python3 now) in parallel. I’m going to limit this post to packages you might need to build-depend on directly.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has just informed us a few minutes ago about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the forthcoming OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices, due for release on January 27, 2016.

• It has been a while since we last heard something from the development team of the File Roller archive manager, which is used by default in the GNOME desktop environment and any GNU/Linux operating system that uses the GNOME Stack.

• File Roller 3.20 has just entered development for the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, and its development team managed to release the first milestone a couple of days ago. As usual, we managed to get our hands on the internal changelog for File Roller 3.19.1 to share with our readers some details about the newly implemented features.

• Hardware manufacturer BQ has this week confirmed they are developing a new Ubuntu tablet that will be showcased during next month’s Mobile World Congress 2016 and will feature the convergence and will take the form of the new BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung Z3 being priced under the mid-range category along with some decent specs (most notably the 5 inch Super Amoled HD display) and the kind of Brand value that Samsung carries here in India has seen a decent adoption rate to the Tizen OS based smartphone. This growing userbase is slowly attracting app developers to bring in their services and content to Tizen’s platform and such an example today is the popular e-wallet app

• Teen Patti Live! is promoted as the next generation evolution of an existing Indian poker game called Teen Patti. You get to Play realtime time games online, pitting your wits against your friends and other players in these multiplayer matches. Existing Teen Patti players are said to feel at home playing this new version of the game.

Android

• One reason why is that it’s not always easy to tell if apps in the Google Play store are specifically optimized for tablet screens. The “Featured Apps for Tablets” section in Google Play helps, but only 63 apps were featured at the time this post was written — and most of them were games.

• DevConf will be in two weeks so it is time to refresh my apps for that conference. This year I have new port of my mobile schedule for Android.

• Now, these paranoid Android users have a new way to use Tor more securely thanks to a completely separate and isolated virtual phone within their phone. This “Tor Space” will feature the same apps that can already be used on regular Android phones, such as Orbot and Orfox, but it’s designed to run on a siloed separate partition with no access to other data stored on the phone.

Free Software/Open Source

• Although some people think open source projects only need programmers—and experienced ones, at that— open source project needs go beyond the ability to write code. They also require testing, technical support, documentation, marketing, and more. And contributing to projects also is a great way to improve technical skills and connect with people who share similar interests. One barrier to participating in open source projects is not knowing how to join and get started. In this article, I’ll explain how to start contributing to an open source project.

• Open Source and good practice

• The challenge to the scientific community is how to do the work needed to make software sustainable. Either reducing the amount of work, or bringing together new resources, can make this more successful. The first is often thought of as using good software engineering practices (which has the additional benefit of making the software more likely to be correct), and the second can potentially be satisfied through Open Source communities.

• In some sense, these are both social issues, rather than technical ones. The goal is to encourage software developers, whatever the type of software they are developing, to do the extra work needed to make their own software sustainable and to build or join communities whose members work together on shared code. The task is how to achieve this.

• Fracturing a site’s contents into a plurality of arbitrary domains to improve performance is still being taught as a legitimate practice for Web servers. It remains the best way to get around HTTP 1.1’s maximum limitation of six connections per host, and the, even more, draconian limit of two connections for older browsers such as Internet Explorer 7.

Events

• The stage is set for the 14th annual Southern California Linux Expo in Pasadena, Calif., this week and openSUSE will be apart of the scheduled entertainment and tech talks.

• SCALE 14x is getting cranked up for the first ever SCALE at its new home in Pasadena, Calif., and already it’s obvious why this is the premiere community Linux fest in the country. For one thing, there’s the roster of great speakers, topped by such household names — in FOSS circles anyway — as Maddog Hall, Cory Doctorow and Mark Shuttleworth. Then there’s all of the cool things not always present at a Linux fest, not the least of which is the side-by-side UbuCon conference/unconference featuring all things Ubuntu and which is included in the cost of admission.

• In addition, on Sunday this year’s SCALE will be giving amateur radio enthusiasts a chance to take the test to receive a HAM license, and as reported last week by “Larry the BSD Guy” Cafiero, the BSD Certification Group will be offering the BSDA certification exam, also on Sunday. That’s not to mention the 130 scheduled talks and workshops, which are the backbone of any Linux or FOSS conference.

• In the course of the webinar we will set up an end-to-end solution comprising Kaa, Apache Cassandra and Apache Zeppelin to demonstrate their cumulative capabilities for collecting, analyzing and visualizing large sets of data in real time.

Web Browsers

• Link Bubble is the Facebook Chat Heads of browsers, a way to open links and save them for later without having to hop around between apps. Over the summer, developer Chris Lacy sold the app off. Under new management, the app became available for free within a month.

• Brave Software says that open sourcing Link Bubble is part of its focus to “fix the web.”

Chrome

• Google Chrome has made an impressive jump from Zopfli compression algorithm to Brotli compression algorithm. The Brotli algorithm is said to be 26% faster than the former. So, on the next release of Google Chrome’s new version, expect faster Chrome.

SaaS/Big Data

• Sean Roberts, former VP of development for Akanda, Inc., spoke with Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about the newly formed company and its mission to make OpenStack Neutron work. Neutron is an OpenStack project to provide “networking as a service” between interface devices managed by other OpenStack services.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• I was about to write about the main topic of this post, namely FOSDEM 2016 when we learned of the death of someone who was a really nice and gentle human being, John McCreesh. For those who may not know John, it’s important to say that while he was not as famous as Ian Murdock, he was definitely one of the pillars of the OpenOffice.org community for long years. He served as a volunteer there in various capacities, but mostly as one of the marketing project lead. During his tenure, he had to deal with complicated situations and several challenges. John was, I already wrote it, a gentle human being. He managed to help build and strengthen the OpenOffice.org community and make it bloom even when times were dire. He was nice, always listening to others, soothing and comforting people around him. John knew the value of peace and moving forward. His origins (he was born in Northern Ireland if I’m not mistaken and his family origins are quite interesting in that regard) and upbringing made him respect anyone who was coming towards him and his welcoming stance gained him many friends and many open source volunteers. In some cases, his generous and kind attitude helped him make people stay in the project even as they had every obvious reasons to leave.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• When we share those experiences with others, we strengthen the connections between the free software movement and other movements each of us are in. We learn about the path one took to become involved in free software. At the Free Software Foundation’s 30th anniversary, we asked folks in the community to share their stories.

• As part of Guile’s recent compiler improvements, we switched to a somewhat novel intermediate language.

Openness/Sharing

• The Inventors’ Showcase winner, and president of Reimer Robotics, has built a system to move tractors – driverless no less, with grain cart in tow – across a field to a harvesting combine on the go. Reimer’s invention can help producers save time during harvest – and since the software and hardware are open-source – other producers can build on his work and adapt it to their needs.

Open Hardware

• GPU’s are fantastic tools for completing scientific computational work. They’re effective at calculating math that’s highly parallel, doing it far faster than any CPU could do alone. And now the GPU is going open-source with Binghamton University’s new Nyami architecture that researchers have developed.

• This is the second article in what will be a four-part series on the current state of 3D printing compared to how things were three years ago when I wrote my first series on 3D printing. Of course, this is Linux Journal, so the focus will be on Linux and open-source-specific aspects in 3D printing. I won’t dwell much on proprietary products. In my last article, I gave a general overview on the state of 3D printing; in this one, I focus on the hardware side.

• If you were to compare 3D printers three years ago to today, probably the first thing you would notice is just how polished and consumer-focused the overall look of the machines are now. Three years ago, most printers were based off the RepRap line of 3D printers. They had a hobbyist look, with 3D-printed gears and other parts combined with nuts and bolts you could get from the hardware store. Those printers that didn’t consist of a series of threaded and smooth rods for their structure were made from laser-cut wood. The focus was much more on community and sharing designs freely to improve the quality of the printers as rapidly as possibly while still using parts easily purchased from a hardware store or on-line. Many of the commercial 3D printer offerings at the time also were some form of a RepRap printer sold pre-assembled and calibrated with some refinements and improvements, plus support from the company if anything went wrong.

Leftovers

• The result of all this is that Meteor has ended up in an awkward place.

• New developers love how easy it is to get started with it, but can get discouraged when they start struggling with more complex apps. And purely from a financial standpoint, it’s hard to build a sustainable business on the back of new developers hacking on smaller apps.

Hardware

• Quick note to discuss the silly brief fad that was around smart watches. I said before they came that there was no real economy in it, and I said when the iToy sorry iWatch sorry Apple Watch was introduced, that it won’t set the world on fire, and that it will be a rare iFlop like the Newton and Lisa, not anything like total reinvention of tech such as the Mac was to PCs, iPod was to musicplayers and iPhone was to mobile phones (the last two, that I also predicted and discussed in my writing, including this, considered by many the best forecast about iPhone’s impact, by anyone who wrote about the iPhone before it launched). And when the Apple Watch was launched for sale, I wrote one more piece warning that there was nothing there. So now, the facts are slowly emerging. So lets take stock.

Health/Nutrition

• I am writing this to you from the place where I was born—Flint, Michigan. Please consider this personal appeal from me and the 102,000 citizens of the city of Flint who have been poisoned, not by mistake or a natural disaster, but by a governor and his administration who, to cut costs, took over the city of Flint from its duly elected leaders, unhooked the city from its fresh water supply of Lake Huron, and then made the people drink toxic water from the Flint River. This was nearly two years ago.

• This week it was revealed that at least 10 people in Flint have been killed by these premeditated actions of the governor of Michigan. This governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the democratic election of this mostly African-American city—where 41% of the people live below the official poverty line—and replaced the elected mayor and city council with a crony who was instructed to take all his orders from the governor’s office.

• On a chilly evening last March in Flint, Michigan, LeeAnne Walters was getting ready for bed when she heard her daughter shriek from the bathroom of the family’s two-story clapboard house. She ran upstairs to find 18-year-old Kaylie standing in the shower, staring at a clump of long brown hair that had fallen from her head.

• Walters, a 37-year-old mother of four, was alarmed but not surprised—the entire family was losing hair. There had been other strange maladies over the previous few months: The twins, three-year-old Gavin and Garrett, kept breaking out in rashes. Gavin had stopped growing. On several occasions, 14-year-old JD had suffered abdominal pains so severe that Walters took him to the hospital. At one point, all of LeeAnne’s own eyelashes fell out.

Security

• Experts warn that malicious hackers gain valuable insight when companies and employees reveal too much information on the Web – especially when they work at sensitive facilities.

• Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I also have nothing to do with Instagram other than that they use software I’ve written.

• Today she writes back. Clearly not convinced I told the truth before, and now she strikes back with more “evidence” of my wrongdoings.

• Now the utilities are being served malicious Microsoft XLS files, which attempt to execute the open source GCat backdoor, a technique that has been used in many other attacks.

• ESET threat man Robert Lipovsky says users are urged to execute macros and will be served with a Trojan downloaded from a remote server. “This backdoor is able to download executables and execute shell-commands,” Lipovsky says.

• Researchers at security firm Eset said they have uncovered spearphishing emails sent to Ukrainian electricity distribution companies with a malicious Microsoft Excel (XLS) file attachment.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• What a bad week for the war party. Darn you, Iran! The country that the armchair warriors most love to hate refuses to play the villain’s role assigned by the neoconservatives, “humanitarian” interventionists, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the establishment media.

• The burning question now relates to whether or not Iran’s actions constitute an attack on the U.S. It’s not a simple question. Electronic warfare and cyber warfare have become common place. It is also worth noting the two US vessels were within just a few miles of Farsi Island. Farsi Island is the home of the Revolutionary Guards’ Navy (RGN). The RGN is Iran’s maritime unconventional warfare force. For comparison, imagine a scenario in which a nation that has attacked a US civilian airliner and whose political leaders have constantly threatened war sent two boats to pass extraordinarily close to the home base of a U.S. Seal Team. The reader can decide if Iran’s actions were appropriate.

• The most important takeaway from this incident is to remember the high-tech military of the United States has an exposed vulnerability. It’s a vulnerability that was exploited by Iran. Iran is not a nation many in military circles would see as technologically advanced. The drone warfare system has a fatal flaw. If Iran can exploit it, China and Russia certainly can. Even North Korea has been able to successfully disrupt the GPS system. Beyond simple navigation, the U.S. employs the GPS system to guide missiles. If the Iranians can jam and spoof their way into controlling a drone, it isn’t a huge leap to believe have the ability, or will soon have the ability, to do the same thing with guided missiles.

• It should be noted that GPS jammers are available on the civilian market and have been detected in use inside the United Kingdom. This revelation may also be the reasoning behind the U.S. decision to require drone operators to register their aircraft.

• Twenty-five years after the first Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm is widely seen as a resounding American victory.

• “Desert Storm was probably the single most successful military campaign in the history of warfare,” retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey told Stars and Stripes. “It was an astonishing display by the country.”

• While the U.S. military successfully drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, the plight of Iraqi civilians — many of whom suffered under then-dictator Saddam Hussein before, during, and after Desert Storm — is often overlooked.

Transparency Reporting

• Mr Assange has been living in the embassy in Knightsbridge, west London, for more than three years and has been granted political asylum by the Ecuador government.

• He is wanted for questioning in Sweden over sex assault allegations against two women, which he has always denied.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Palm oil is everywhere. The cheap substitute for trans fats can be found in products ranging from soap to processed foods, butter to lipstick to detergent. It’s primarily produced on plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, and that’s the problem—for years, the palm oil industry has been destroying the rainforests in the region, sometimes breaking Indonesian laws in the process and committing acts of violence against the indigenous people who live in these places.

• Crude oil’s slump has been so severe that it’s now threatening the government-aided biodiesel programs in the world’s top producers of palm oil.

• Indonesia may miss its target of raising blending to 20 percent if crude stays below $30 a barrel, according to Fadhil Hasan, executive director at the country’s palm oil association. The slump in crude will impact the implementation of the biodiesel program in Malaysia, the nation’s Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Douglas Uggah Embas told an industry conference in Kuala Lumpur. The two nations account for 86 percent of the global palm oil supply.

• Oil is down about 21 percent this year amid volatility in Chinese markets and speculation the removal of restrictions that capped Iran’s crude sales will help to prolong a global glut. That’s sent the premium of crude palm oil over low sulphur gasoil futures to almost $290 a metric ton from the five-year average of a $13 discount. That’s clouded the outlook for palm oil prices, according to Thomas Mielke, executive director of Oil World, an industry researcher.

• African elephants could be extinct in the wild within the next decade, a major conservation conference in Botswana has been told.

• The Africa Elephant Summit, attended by delegates from around 20 countries including China – which is accused of fuelling the poaching trade – heard new figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature that showed the African elephant population fell from 550,000 to 470,000 between 2006 and 2013.

• Experts warn that global warming is tipping climate into ‘uncharted territory’, as Met Office, Nasa and Noaa data all confirm record global temperatures for second year running

• Till now, Pakistan has not used the bulk of its coal reserves – some of the largest in the world – for power generation. Not any more.

• Within the last month the government in Islamabad has signed a number of financial and technological agreements with China aimed at exploiting massive coal reserves at the Tharparkar mine in Sindh province, in the south of the country.

Finance

• DOMINO’S is once again in hot water over its treatment of young employees after a delivery driver was forced to resign for sharing a link on Facebook.

• The 18-year-old driver, who did not wish to use his name, signed and shared a Change.org petition calling for better pay for Domino’s drivers.

• His regional manager, alerted to the post by a mutual friend, then shared the link to her own Facebook page, tagging the young driver.

• “What’s the go, mate?” she wrote, going on to single out another employee who had also signed the petition.

• They are among the richest people on earth, have won plaudits for their fight to eradicate some of the world’s deadliest and prolific killers, and donated billions to better educate and feed the poorest on the planet.

• Despite this, Bill and Melinda Gates are facing calls for their philanthropic Foundation, through which they have donated billions worldwide, to be subject to an international investigation, according to a controversial new report.

• Far from a “neutral charitable strategy”, the Gates Foundation is about benefiting big business, especially in agriculture and health, through its “ideological commitment to promote neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalisation,” according to the report published by the campaign group Global Justice. Its influence is “dangerously skewing” aid priorities, the group says.

• [...]

• The group accuse the Gates Foundation of using its massive financial clout to silence international development experts and groups which would criticise its practices.

• Bill Gates, the report claims, “who has regular access to world leaders and is in effect personally bankrolling hundreds of universities, international organisations, NGOs and media outlets, has become the single most influential voice in international development.”

• [...]

• It accuses the Gates Foundation of promoting specific priorities through agriculture grants, some of which undermine the interests of small farmers. These include promoting industrial agriculture, use of chemical fertilisers and expensive, patented seeds, and a focus on genetically modified seeds. “Much of the Foundation’s work appears to bypass local knowledge,” the report claims.

• The criticism echoes the accusations made by the Indian scientist Vandana Shiva who called the Gates Foundation the “greatest threat to farmers in the developing world.”

• Each year companies lodge dozens of legal cases against governments under a little-known mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Few make headlines. But occasionally these cases do break through to the public’s attention, given the money at stake and the public interest involved.

• The latest case to fit that bill is by TransCanada Corporation—the Calgary-based energy firm—against the United States. The company seeks US$ 15 billion in damages over President Barack Obama’s decision to deny a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

• It meant that if other governments do not pay the United States they are outcasts.

• Martin Luther King, like John F. Kennedy, was a victim of the paranoia of the Washington national security establishment. Kennedy rejected General Lyman Lemnitzer’s Northwoods Project for regime change in Cuba, opposed the CIA’s invasion plan for Cuba, nixed Lemnitzer’s plans for conflict with the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile crisis, removed Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and negotiated behind the scenes with Khrushchev to tone down the Cold War. Consequently, members of the military/security complex had it in for Kennedy and convinced themselves that Kennedy’s softness toward communism made him a security threat to the United States. The Secret Service itself was drawn into the plot. The films of the assassination show that the protective Secret Service personnel were ordered away from the President’s car just before the fatal shots.

• The concept of a ‘Deep State’ has been around for a while, but rarely to describe the United States.The term, used in Kemalist Turkey by the political class, referred to an informal grouping of oligarchs, senior military and intelligence operatives and organized crime, who ran the state along anti-democratic lines regardless of who was formally in power.

• I define the American Deep State as a hybrid association of elements of government and top-level finance and industry that is able, through campaign financing of elected officials, influence networks and co-option via the promise of lucrative post-government careers, to govern the United States in spite of elections and without reference to the consent of the governed.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• To me this is his last great gift, he couldn’t give everything away but he did give us an idea of what it would mean to be popular, accessible and weird, angelic and liberated. The infrastructure of a public service broadcaster such as the BBC had a role in making David Bowie’s world, our world. This is the light by which it could navigate its future.

• The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has submitted testimony to the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee about the Koch-backed push to undermine corporate criminal accountability under the guise of “mens rea” reform. The testimony was submitted for the Committee’s January 20 hearing titled “The Adequacy of Criminal Intent Standards in Federal Prosecutions.”

• “Nobody should be above the law, no matter how rich, but the billionaire Koch Brothers have fueled a campaign through myriad groups they fund that would make it harder to prosecute corporate criminals for violating laws intended to protect American families from products or industrial practices that poison our water or air or that violate other environmental and financial laws,” said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director, who was previously served as the Chief Counsel for Nominations for Chairman Patrick Leahy of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice where she worked on criminal and civil justice policy.

• “The greatest part about this whole debate is that it actually wasn’t a debate,” says the “Daily Show” host about the U.K.’s recent discussion regarding a petition to bar Donald Trump from entering the U.K. “It turns out Parliament didn’t even hold a vote. They were all just there to sit around and make fun of Donald Trump.”

Censorship

• An art auction intended to benefit the organization Reporters Without Borders (RWB) has been canceled after the Israeli embassy in Paris complained about one of the featured works. The piece in question, by French street artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest, included a drawing of the Palestinian politician Marwan Barghouti in handcuffs and a brief handwritten note comparing him to Nelson Mandela. (Barghouti, whom some have called “the Palestinian Mandela,” is currently serving five life sentences in Israel.)

• These acts represent an erosion of our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, inquiry and exchange of ideas. They create a “chilling effect” for scientists, textbook and other publishers who fear repercussions for producing data or advocating positions that are inconsistent with current political agendas or powerful corporate interests.

• The censoring of information online is one of the greatest dangers to free speech on the Internet today. Many countries filter a wide variety of information of social and political significance, sometimes under the guise of ‘national security’. This problem is on the rise as the methods being used by governments have become more sophisticated and more resources are being allocated to the practice of censoring content.

• But activists and free expression advocates have not been sitting back. As the practice of Internet filtering spreads throughout the world, so does access to the “circumvention tools” that have been created, deployed and publicised by activists, programmers and volunteers The process of bypassing filtering and blocking websites is often called censorship circumvention, or simply circumvention. Some of these tools also allow users to share information securely and anonymously.

• Nearly half a million people had already seen the video before Dan Ilic tried to upload it to Facebook. A self-professed “investigative humorist,” Ilic manages the Facebook page for Hungry Beast, an Australian comedy show. The video—titled “The Labiaplasty Fad”—had been circulating on YouTube since the Hungry Beast released it in 2011, and Ilic wanted to repromote it after seeing mentions of labiaplasty in the news. But soon after clicking “Post,” he received a notice from the social site that the content had been removed and that he was banned from logging in for 24 hours. There was no additional explanation.

• Years back, Georgia dentist Gordon Austin was indicted on 12 counts “with multiple counts of simple battery, aggravated assault, and cruelty to children.” The details of the case were pretty horrifying, involving claims of Medicare fraud, along with multiple claims that Austin hit his patients when they would complain loudly (apparently after the anesthesia did not work properly).

• Facebook has resorted to pleading with its members to drown out hate filled propaganda messages from ISIS members with love after conceding defeat in its efforts to take offensive material offline.

• The switch in tactics will see people encouraged to mount ‘like attacks’ against pages professing support for the terror organisation after Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted losing a game of whack-a-mole with terrorist sympathisers who simply post new messages for every disabled page or account.

• Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said “counter-speech” is best way to combat terrorist propaganda.

• At the World Economic Forum and international billionaire side-hug exercise Davos, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg cited “like attacks” and positivity as ways to fight hate groups online. I know tech companies are struggling to meet the US government’s increasingly forceful pleas to eradicate terrorist activity on the internet, but this is getting ridiculous.

• When rights groups and citizens took the state to court over the blocking of YouTube, the presiding judge, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, shared their anguish over the state’s ambiguity. The right to information cannot be crippled in the garb of national security, morality or religion. And if it must be done, the restrictions imposed must be “reasonable”.

• A tweak that Facebook made to its Android app could allow mobile customers in restricted places like China and Iran to connect to the social network.

• It’s a big step forward for human rights activists — and it could greatly expand Facebook’s reach into countries where its services are banned.

Privacy

• Popular ad blocker Adblock Plus claims that it was uninvited from the US Interactive Advertising Bureau’s big conference.

• The IAB represents the biggest names in the digital-advertising industry: Google, Facebook, Twitter, online publishers, and ad-tech companies.

• Each year it holds its annual leadership meeting in Palm Desert, California. It’s where the biggest names in the online-advertising industry network and thrash out their ideas on the issues and trends of the day.

• This year they’ve got Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, Yahoo’s global revenue chief Lisa Utzschneider, and Google ads boss Sridhar Ramaswamy speaking.

• Adblock Plus won’t be attending, though.

• Last week, Adblock Plus received an email saying that the company’s registration fee was being returned and its registration had been canceled.

• Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.1 In fact, in response to EFF’s FOIA suit to get access to the official U.S. policy on zero days, the government redacted every single reference to “offensive” use of vulnerabilities. To add insult to injury, the government’s claim was that even admitting to offensive use would cause damage to national security. Now, in the face of EFF’s brief marshaling overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the charade is over.

• Sometimes the courts realize today’s smartphones can’t be reasonably compared to anything else people have historically carried with them, like wallets, address books and the contents of their pockets. In the Supreme Court’s Riley decision, it noted that searching a smartphone is roughly analogous to searching someone’s house — people’s entire lives are contained in these devices. Hence, the warrant requirement, which turns phones from a “container” to the most sacrosanct domain under the Fourth Amendment.

• As a part of DARPA’s programs to support President Obama’s brain initiative, this advanced research organization has announced a new program called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD). This program aims to create a new computer-brain interface (‘biocompatible’ device) that will support data transfer at super fast speed.

• Thanks to our supporters, we more than reached the target of our Indiegogo crowd-funder. With your help we raised £20,624, which we’re going to use to produce a high-quality campaign video to explain the implications of the Investigatory Powers Bill to people who may not be fully aware of it.

• An increasingly large proportion of terrorism investigations these days start with tweets or posts, generally flagged by family members or informants. Civil libertarians worry that the FBI is using protected speech to identify potential subjects of entrapment. But the FBI’s concern is that it’s not seeing everything it needs to see.

• And at the same time, there’s increased pressure for social media companies to deny radical groups an open platform for speech.

• No wonder the government wants an algorithm.

• But there are some major problems with trying to use computer code to find “terrorists” or “terrorist” content.

• First of all, it doesn’t work. Many experts, including people with law enforcement, academic, and scientific backgrounds, agree that it’s practically impossible to boil down the essential predictive markers that make up a terrorist who is willing and capable of carrying out an attack and then successfully pick him out of a crowd.

• As TechCrunch observes, however, this kind of threat of companies enabling internal backdoors is already displacing the technology used by ISIS to set ups that are not under the control of central platforms. So such an approach could end up with privacy for the criminals, but not for ordinary, law abiding ctiizens.

• Note, the letter makes clear that those reporting Hillary had two SAP emails may not be correct: Charles McCullough’s letter doesn’t say how many emails were SAP and how many were CONFIDENTIAL. And the letter is conveniently written in a form that can be shared with the press without key information that would allow us to test the claims made in it.

• Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.1 In fact, in response to EFF’s FOIA suit to get access to the official U.S. policy on zero days, the government redacted every single reference to “offensive” use of vulnerabilities. To add insult to injury, the government’s claim was that even admitting to offensive use would cause damage to national security. Now, in the face of EFF’s brief marshaling overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the charade is over.

• One of the reasons that most people don’t use public key encryption to protect their e-mails is that the process is simply too arduous for everyday communications. Open source projects like GNU Privacy Guard and GPGTools have made it easier for individuals to use PGP encryption, but managing the keys used in OpenPGP and other public-key encryption formats still requires effort. And it’s even more of a challenge when you want to read encrypted messages on your phone. If you’re a company that has concerns about things like compliance and data loss, doing crypto without having some sort of key management can also create all sorts of risks.

• The French government has rejected an amendment to its forthcoming Digital Republic law that required backdoors in encryption systems.

• Axelle Lemaire, the Euro nation’s digital affairs minister, shot down the amendment during the committee stage of the forthcoming omnibus digital bill, saying it would be counterproductive and would leave personal data unprotected.

• “Recent events show how the fact of introducing faults deliberately at the request – sometimes even without knowing – the intelligence agencies has an effect that is harming the whole community,” she said according to Numerama.

• A coalition of U.S. groups on Wednesday urged the Federal Communications Commission to write sweeping privacy protections for the nation’s broadband users.

• The groups want providers of broadband internet services including mobile and landline phone, cable and satellite TV firms to be subject to tough privacy regulations.

• Among the firms that would be affected are AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp, Verizon Communications Inc and Cablevision Systems Corp.

• Employees at the secretive National Security Agency were not too happy about the 1998 blockbuster film “Enemy of the State” that starred Will Smith.

• That shouldn’t come as a surprise — the spy agency was portrayed as the villain — but now BuzzFeed News has obtained internal emails that prove it.

• “I saw a preview for the new movie ‘Enemy of the State’ and to my surprise found out that NSA were the ‘bad guys’ in it,” wrote one NSA employee in a question to the agency’s public affairs team.

• The National Security Agency attempted a public relations makeover in 1998 via the Jerry Bruckheimer produced spy-thriller, Enemy of the State, but the agency was disappointed it was portrayed as the “bad guys” in the film, internal emails between agency officials obtained by BuzzFeed News through the Freedom of Information Act show.

• One employe wrote in 1998, “Unfortunately, the truth isn’t always as riveting as fiction and creative license may mean that ‘the NSA,’ as portrayed in a given production, bears little resemblance to the place where we all work.”

• In the 1998 blockbuster film starring Will Smith, Congress, pressed by the NSA, attempts to pass a bill expanding the agency’s surveillance powers. At the start of the film, several NSA agents kill a congressman opposing their efforts. However, they do not realized they were secretly recorded by a bird watcher. The bird watcher, chased by the NSA, passes the information along to Will Smith’s character, who subsequently finds his phones tapped, clothing bugged, and house burglarized.

Civil Rights

• The BBC has an “ingrained” culture of quashing dissent, staff said, as a leaked official report expressed concerns that “a predatory child abuser could be lurking undiscovered in the BBC even today”.

• A draft of the Dame Janet Smith Review of practices at the BBC found that the fear of whistle-blowing at the organisation was “even worse” in the current era than at the time Jimmy Savile was abusing children while working for the broadcaster.

• A draft report into the BBC’s practices at the time of the Jimmy Savile scandal has been leaked by the investigative news website, Exaro.

• The review led by Dame Janet Smith is said to include “devastating detail” of the broadcaster’s “sheer scale of awareness” of the late TV and radio star’s activities.

• It will criticise the corporation’s culture, according to Exaro, which says it has seen a leaked draft.

• The report is said to point to a “deferential culture”, “untouchable stars” and “above the law” managers at the corporation. However, the BBC cannot be criticised for failing to uncover Savile’s “sexual deviancy”, it says.

• The retired judge’s report outlines multiple rapes and indecent assaults on children by Savile which she claims were all “in some way associated with the BBC”.

• YASEEN KADURA ARRIVED at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport more than four hours early for his flight to New York on January 15, hoping to ensure that security delays wouldn’t stop him from making his flight on time. Kadura had not been allowed to board a plane for roughly three-and-a-half years, but in his hand was a laminated copy of a letter from the Department of Homeland Security, which stated in writing that “the U.S. government knows of no reason Mr. Kadura should be unable to fly.”

• Kadura, an American citizen, was placed on the federal government’s no-fly list in 2012. Since then, in addition to being prevented from boarding flights, he has been detained, interrogated, and harassed at border crossings and pressured by authorities to become a government informant.

• Peace activist Mary Anne Grady Flores gives an extended web-only interview just hours before she reports to jail to begin a six-month sentence for photographing a protest at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in New York, where U.S. drones are piloted remotely. We also speak with Jonathan Wallace, an attorney who has worked extensively with the drone resistance movement.

• After retiring from the FBI in 1998, Levinson worked as a CIA contractor. Levinson was supposed to produce academic papers for the agency, but operated much like a case officer. Levinson traveled the globe to meet with potential sources, sometimes using a fake name. CIA station chiefs in those countries were allegedly never notified of Levinson’s activities overseas, even though the agency reimbursed him for his travel.

• I don’t defend Bissonnette if his side deals were corrupt. But this is bullshit on several levels.

• Of course, many people, including me, have noted that Bissonnette’s book was an attempt to push back on the information asymmetry — and with it, propaganda — that the government uses classification to pull off.

• [...]

• Bissonnette’s problem, I guess, is he was allegedly both, someone who shared information that undercut official propaganda, and someone who traded on his position.

• Activists fixate on the future: impatient for the world we want to see.

• You may have heard there’s a growing political movement against mass incarceration. Someone should clue in the judges.

• In the past 30 years, federal judges have turned to imprisonment — as opposed to probation — as the punishment of choice for even minor crimes, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. During that same period, federal cases have tripled in number.

• The Pew study reports that “nine in 10 federal offenders received prison sentences in 2014, up from less than half in 1980, as the use of probation steadily declined.” Despite the ballooning number of cases in that time, 2014 saw 2,300 fewer probation sentences than 1980.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• I’ve noticed a trend lately. Rather than replacing a router when it literally stops working, I’ve needed to act earlier—swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area. (Note, I am duly thankful for this problem.) As the latest example, a whole bunch of Netgear ProSafe 318G routers failed me for the last time as small businesses have upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable).

• Yes, coax—not fiber. Even coax has proved too much for the old ProSafe series. These devices didn’t just fail to keep up, they fell flat on their faces. Frequently, the old routers dropped speed test results from 9mbps with the old connection to 3mbps or less with the 50mbps connection. Obviously, that doesn’t fly.

• With Netflix saying it intends to disable video when customers use VPN services, VPN providers are criticizing the online video company and vowing to evade any measures designed to prevent their use.

• Under pressure from content owners, Netflix said last week that it will step up enforcement against subscribers who use VPNs, proxies, and unblocking services to view content not available in their countries. But even Netflix acknowledges that it’s “trivial” for VPN providers to avoid blocks by switching IP addresses, and VPN providers say they’re ready.

• The company reiterated in a note to shareholders Tuesday that those lower-paying users will soon face a choice: Keep paying $7.99 a month but get downgraded to standard-definition streaming only, or fork over the $9.99 a month that new customers pay and get full high-definition content.

• But as the EFF has pointed out, the fact that users can opt out is irrelevant. T-Mobile’s been throttling every shred of video that touches its network to 1.5 Mbps (streamed or direct downloaded) by default, and then lying about it. Critics like YouTube and the EFF have, quite correctly, pointed out that such a program should be opt-in, for both consumers and content partners. The other problem is simply one of precedent; let T-Mobile dick about with how content gets treated, and that opens the door to every carrier modifying traffic to their own benefit.

• By refusing to ban zero rating outright, the FCC has opened the door to a flood of similar ideas that are even worse and, cumulatively and aggressively, are eroding the idea of an open Internet. Worse, it’s happening to the thunderous applause of some consumers, who think they’re being given a gift when an ISP imposes utterly arbitrary usage caps, then graciously allows select content to bypass said caps. Make no mistake though; the act of fucking about with traffic in this fashion is an assault on net neutrality. That many people don’t understand this yet (or are eager to ignore the fact when it benefits them) doesn’t magically make it less true.

• A few years ago, Netflix’s Hastings went on a Facebook rant about how Comcast was unfairly letting its own streaming services bypass the company’s usage caps. But now that Netflix is seeing benefits from zero rating, it’s apparently willing to throw its principles in the toilet. Netflix may want to be careful where it treads. As some companies have discovered, zero rating isn’t your friend — and the special treatment that benefits you today may come back to bite you tomorrow.

• Owen DeLong is a Senior Manager of Network Architecture at Akamai Technologies, a leader in content delivery network (CDN) services that help to make the Internet “fast, reliable, and secure.” He will be speaking at SCaLE 14x about IPv6 adoption (because we’re out of IPv4!). Owen is also a member of the ARIN Advisory Council—an advisory group to the Board of Trustees on Internet number resource policy and related matters—and is an active member of the systems administration, operations, and Internet Protocol policy communities.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Two weeks after announcing it’s working with Lyft on a network of self-driving cars, General Motors is snapping up employees and intellectual property from the recently defunct ride sharing company Sidecar.

• The move, reported by Bloomberg Business, will bring about 20 former Sidecar employees to GM, including CTO Jahan Khanna. GM has confirmed it’s scooping up employees and IP from Sidecar, but declined to specify details.

• GM hasn’t said anything about what kind of work its new employees will be doing or how it will use the newly acquired IP. A spokesman says the move has nothing to do with the Lyft deal, and that the automaker simply jumped on a good opportunity to pick up some expertise in an area it’s starting to explore.

• The United Kingdom has a vibrant creative sector but many businesses don’t take full advantage of their intellectual property, IP Minister Baroness (Lucy) Neville-Rolfe said in her introduction to an Intellectual Property Office five-year strategy report released today. IPO research shows that over 90 percent of firms haven’t valued their IP, and small to mid-sized companies often don’t understand or know how to protect it, she said. Even a modest boost in those figures could have a significant impact on the UK economy, she said.

Trademarks

• It’s no secret that Sony has never been shy about wielding trademark like a cudgel. That said, there seems to be something new brewing with the company in its recent attempts to trademark fairly common terms, worrying some that it would use those trademarks in the same heavy-handed way. The first of those attempts was the recent Sony filing for a trademark on the term “Let’s Play”, which any gamer will recognize as the term for popular YouTube videos showing games being played, often offered by well-known YouTube personalities. While the USPTO had already refused the trademark on the grounds that a prior mark for “Let’z Play” had already been registered, a law firm that specializes in gaming law jumped in to try and have the court instead declare that “Let’s Play” is now a generic term.

• Can the shape of the KitKat chocolate bar be registered as a trade mark on grounds that it has acquired distinctiveness through use? What is required to prove that a trade mark has acquired distinctiveness through use?

• As IPKat readers will remember, these were some of the very issues that Arnold J had to address in the context of litigation between Nestlé and Cadbury over the shape of the (in)famous chocolate bar that the former had already attempted in vain to register as a UK trade mark in Class 30.

Copyrights

• In the meantime, Katfriend and IP enthusiast Nedim Malovic (Stockholm University) has provided a recap of what has happened since Svensson [Katposts here] and ventured to anticipate what the CJEU might say in the near future. His conclusion? The CJEU will likely regard linking to unlawful content as an act of communication to the public.

• Now, it appears Crowell has made an enemy in the federal court system. Unfortunately for him, this enemy is presiding over most of his Doe lawsuits. Fight Copyright Trolls reports federal judge Michael W. Mosman has set up Default Judgment Roadblock, Esq. in response to Crowell’s tactics.

• It’s hard to believe we’re almost three years into the U.S. copyright reform process kicked off with a call to Congress for the Next Great Copyright Act—and that we’re kicking off the third annual Copyright Week to boot. Once again, we’re working alongside great partners in the copyright space to make sure that the public—from technology users, to readers, to fans, to artists—get their voice heard in debates that are all too often limited to a few industry lobbies.

• We’re entering a critical stage, too. It’s been four years this week since Internet users staged the largest ever online protest of a bad copyright law, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that would’ve curtailed online speech and created a system of blacklists for sites and users. Four years ago, millions of us spoke up and derailed that proposal. But a lot can change in four years, and indeed we’ve started to see Hollywood and others try to sneak elements of SOPA back into the debate, through private agreements with intermediaries, influence on state officials, extraordinary injunctions in court, and more.

• Together the studios went tough by demanding six months in jail plus more than $93,000 in damages.

• But despite agreeing that the main had illegally made available at least 1,200 films and TV shows, downloaded around 700 from The Pirate Bay and then made them available to the public, the ruling from Tønsberg District Court falls far short of those demands.

• According to information distributed to its members yesterday, Rights Alliance said that the Court handed the now 21-year-old a six month suspended sentence and ordered him to pay around $28,000.

• From Spain’s Podemos to France’s National Front, anti-establishment parties are clamoring for power across Europe. Up north in Iceland, it’s Pirates who are making the biggest ahoys.

• With just over a year until parliamentary elections are due, the Icelandic Pirate Party has been consistently topping opinion polls.

• Should that support translate into real votes, it would win more than a third of the ballots, making it the biggest party in a country traditionally governed by coalitions.

• That could have a revolutionary effect on a country that’s only now returning to normal after the 2008 collapse of its biggest banks. While the Pirates’ main focus is on direct democracy and less stringent copyright laws, they also want to introduce a 35-hour work week and split the investment and commercial units of banks.

• The country’s prime minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, isn’t too concerned.

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