● 02.06.16

● Links 6/2/2016: CoreOS Rocket 1.0, Scientific Linux 7.2

Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Issue 14 of Linux Voice is nine months old, so we’re releasing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.

Desktop

• Raptor Engineering is working on the Talos Secure Workstation, which is being advertised as a high-performance, open-to-the-firmware system that is much better than the commonly antiquated “freed” x86 systems. However, getting a high-performance, free software friendly workstation doesn’t come cheap.

• Is Canonical’s Unity interface for Ubuntu Linux ready for use by the masses? Arguably, no. But the administration of the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris apparently likes Unity well enough to deploy it throughout the university’s library.

• The ENS is one of France’s “grandes écoles,” or elite universities. It also happens to have one of the only open-stack academic libraries in Paris, which is what brought me there this week.

• I was surprised upon entering to find that the workstations throughout the library now run Ubuntu (which was not the case when I was last there, circa early 2012).

• The world has moved on. There is no longer a monopoly in IT. We can use whatever hardware we want with a variety of software to do what we need done. It’s all good.

Server

• In the still-developing container world, it seems like new functionality is being released every time you turn around. Engineers are trying to solve the questions of how to make containers run faster, smarter, and take up fewer resources.

Kernel Space

• While Haswell processors have been available for a few years now, finally work is materializing on supporting the hardware’s Observation Architecture.

• Bloomberg recently reported that IBM, along with the Goldman Sachs Group Inc., made a move in the race to commercialize blockchain technology in financial markets. They both have invested in Digital Asset Holdings (DAH), one of a group of startups looking to break into the space. The newest investments bring the total sum raised by the company to $60 million, according to an official statement released on Feb. 2.

• [...]

• This isn’t the first time IBM and DAH have collaborated. In December, they both joined with the Linux Foundation to create an open-source distributed ledger framework.

• A few weeks back, Docker made waves in the container community when it announced it had purchased Unikernel Systems, creators of the MirageOS unikernel operating system. Although Docker had praised the unikernel for its small footprint, superior security, others had raised questions about how the technology would be used in production. “Unikernels are unfit for production,” blasted Joyent’s chief technology officer Bryan Cantrill, in a blog post, arguing that, because of their design, unikernels can’t be debugged.

• To learn more about unikernels, we spoke with Lars Kurth, who is the chairman of the Xen Project Advisory Board. He is well-acquainted with the ideas around unikernels: MirageOS is a Xen subproject. He is also director of open source solutions for Citrix.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• As I’m in the process of retiring an old AMD Opteron dual-socket system, prior to decommissioning it, I figured it would be fun to go back and re-benchmark all of the Ubuntu LTS releases going all the way back to the legendary 6.06 Dapper Drake release. So here are some fresh benchmarks of this AMD Shanghai system with eight cores and 16GB of RAM when re-benchmarking the releases from Ubuntu 6.06 through the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS development state.

Applications

• The Tor Project announced today, February 5, 2016, the immediate availability for download of the first point release for the Tor Browser 5.5 anonymous web browser for Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

• Tor Browser 5.5.1 is a small maintenance release, but essential for existing users as it promises to fix a regression with the font fingerprinting defense by whitelisting the Chinese (Simplified) UI font on the Windows platform, bringing a functional private anonymous web browser to Chinese-speaking users.

• I have been using git for years now, I think I can say I know the tool quite well, yet I do all my commits with git gui. This often surprises my coworkers because a) it looks a bit ugly and b) it’s a graphical application! The horror!

• Technically, today is the 15th anniversary of the relicensing of all the VideoLAN software to the GPL license, as agreed by the École Centrale Paris, on February 1st, 2001.

• As you know there are plenty of video editors available for other operating systems (Mac, Windows) but there isn’t lack of best video editors for Unix/Linux and support wide variety of architecture (x86, amd64, x86_64, i64, sparc, hppa, ppc and xbox/x86.) but using the PPA you can only install for x86/x86_64/amd64 architectures. If you are into video editing and looking for open-source and free alternative for yourself then here is great video editing program “LiVES” for you. LiVES is an awesome, very simple, powerful video editor and VJ tool exist for Linux operating system. Using LiVES video editor you can combine realtime and rendered effects, streams and multiple video/audio files, and then encode to over 50 formats. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features. LiVES is part editor, part VJ tool. It is fully extendable through open standard RFX plugin scripts.

• We are happy to announce the release of Firejail version 0.9.38 (download). Firejail is a generic Linux namespaces security sandbox, capable of running graphic interface programs as well as server programs. The project went through an external security audit, and several SUID-releated problems have been found. Please update your software.

Instructionals/Technical

• The Linux grep command is used as a method for filtering input.

• GREP stands for Global Regular Expression Printer and therefore in order to use it effectively you should have some knowledge about regular expressions.

• In this article I am going to show you a number of examples which will help you understand the grep command.

• Way back in kernel 2.6, a new security system was introduced to provide a mechanism for supporting access control security policies. This system was Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and was introduced by the National Security Administration (NSA) to incorporate a strong Mandatory Access Control architecture into the subsystems of the Linux kernel.

• If you’ve spent your entire Linux career either disabling or ignoring SELinux, this article is dedicated to you — an introduction to the system that lives “under the hood” of your Linux desktop or server to limit privilege or even eliminate the possibility of damage should programs or daemons become compromised.

Games

• Heads up survivalists! Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked the good looking new DLC for the single player version of Don’t Starve is now on SteamOS & Linux.

• It’s been a while since I’ve done a proper Linux game review. The reasons being, we now have Steam, so there’s less of a distinction between Windows and Linux. That division is now blurred, and we’re past the free-only, indie-only games of yore. Good. That, however, does not mean you can’t be having fun for free.

• SuperTuxKart is one such title. It’s nothing more than a point-and-shoot racer, arcade all the way, with you taking helm in one of the many funnily shaped vehicles and racing down some crazy tracks. Then, it’s about taking on some opponents, in-game traps and perks, and gradually unlocking new levels as you make progress in the existing set. But let us explore in more depth.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• During a blistering 2-day trip to Brussels, many things were accomplished. None of these things included sleep, but many of them included waffles.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• What sets Krita apart from the other tools that you use?

• It’s the fast development and that the developers are definitely listening to the artists who use it. That is not always the case with other software.

• Three months after the first KDevelop 5.0 Beta release, I have the pleasure to announce our second beta release! We have worked hard on improving the stability and performance of our new KDevelop 5.0 based on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. We also continued to port many features from our old C++ language support to the new Clang-based C/C++ plugin, which is still an ongoing effort.

• Neon is a platform designed to give KDE users a way to get software updates quickly. It will be providing packages of the latest KDE software so users can stay up to date on a stable OS base.

• Most distro’s that ship Plasma Desktop as .. well, as a desktop to work in, have their own default wallpaper choice that isn’t exactly the upstream default. OpenSUSE has things with geekos (which I personally really like, for their understatedness). KDE neon goes for the upstream default, but that is the nature of that particular distro.

• The name Jonathan Riddell should ring a bell if you read Linux and open source news. He was the creator and longtime lead developer of the Kubuntu distribution. He was forced out of his position by Ubuntu boss Mark Shuttleworth last year because he dared to ask what happened to the funds Canonical had raised for Kubuntu. (To the best of my knowledge, Canonical never really answered to his questions about finances.)

• On this week, I’m working very hard on my proposal to Google Summer of Code, and to say some things there, I needed to know better the others printers hosts open sources.

• Well, consider them unhidden now: if you missed a structured place to link bugs.kde.org big/wish reports with KDE Phabricator tasks, look no further.

• Calligra Suite is a mature office suite, with a solid set of basic applications, as well as an integrated, often innovative set of utilities, and at least two truly outstanding tools that have developed their own popularity outside of Calligra Suite.

• Abiword and Gnumeric have their users, but when free office applications come to mind, most people think of LibreOffice, or maybe even Apache OpenOffice. Fewer have heard of Calligra Suite, and those who have sometimes dismiss it as unnecessary.

• Today, we’re releasing the eleventh bugfix release for Krita 2.9 and the second development preview release of Krita 3.0! We are not planning more bug fix releases for 2.9, though it is possible that we’ll collect enough fixes to warrant one release more, because there are some problems with Windows 10 that we might be able to work around.

• Inkscape get full breeze icon support.

• Thanks inkscape, without you I would be lost !!

• The important part of a mailreader is rendering an email. Nobody likes to read the raw mime message.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Hi! Thanks to the sponsoring of the GNOME Foundation as well as the hosts (Betacowork) and volunteers organizing the Developer Experience Hackfest I had the privilege to attend it.

Distributions

Reviews

• NayuOS – free and open source operating system and fork of Chrome OS without proprietary software like Adobe Flash, multimedia codecs and Google services. “Nayu” is a Chinese word that means “open the Universe”. If you are interested in Chrome OS – please check this review.

New Releases

• MakuluLinux Xfce is now live, please see the Xfce Edition section for more information…

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. yesterday hosted the Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific in Manila, the Philippines. The conference provided an outlet for local businesses to discuss and learn about open source technology innovations, successes, and best practices.

• With this year’s theme, “Energize Your Enterprise,” the Red Hat Forum focused on the IT solutions enterprises are using to help innovate and transform the way business is done. In addition to Red Hat’s technology vision keynote, speakers covered a range of topics, from containers to the Internet of Things (IoT).

• On February 5, 2016, Pat Riehecky of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was extremely proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the final Scientific Linux 7.2 installation images.

• One of the S&P 500’s big losers for Friday February 05 was Red Hat Inc. (RHT). The company’s stock fell 7.84% to $63.24 on volume of 2.18 million shares.

• In trading on Friday, shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) entered into oversold territory, hitting an RSI reading of 26.8, after changing hands as low as $64.35 per share.

Fedora

• I noticed today (maybe I’ve noticed before, but forgotten) that the version of flannel in Fedora 23 is older than what’s available in CentOS. It looks like this is because no one tested the more-recent version of flannel in Fedora’s Bodhi, a pretty awesome application for testing packages.

Debian Family

• With the announcement of the Let’s Encrypt dns-01 challenge support we finally had a way to retrieve certificates for those hosts where http challenges won’t work. Also it allows to centralize the signing procedure to avoid the installation and maintenance of letsencrypt clients on all hosts.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We had just been informed by Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical about the latest things happening in preparation for the upcoming OTA updates for Ubuntu Phone devices.

• The big news yesterday and even into today was the new Ubuntu tablet, which everyone including Canonical touted as “convergence delivered.” Well, today Randall Ross scolds news sites for missing the “timely idea” that is convergence. In other news, security researchers have identified a new exploit that specifically avoids Linux. FOSS Force found that Linux users have no interest in anti-virus software and Phoronix reports on Ubuntu performance over the years.

• Docker is reportedly going to be migrating all of their official images from an Ubuntu base to now using Alpine Linux.

• Alpine Linux is the lightweight distribution built atop musl libc and BusyBox while using a GrSecurity-enhanced Linux kernel. Alpine Linux uses OpenRC as its init system. If you are unfamiliar with this “Small. Simple. Secure.” distribution, you can learn more via AlpineLinux.org. The image for Alpine is a mere 5MB.

• This article, although it was smart to feature Ubuntu as a forerunner, it foolishly tried to give credit to Microsoft for ‘truly being the first’ to do convergence. First, did they? I had no idea. Nor do I care. Nor does anyone else I roll with. If the name has ‘Microsoft’ in it, we flee for the hills. Why? Because it’s compromised out of the box. It is dangerous.

• Convergence is not about a unified computing experience across all your devices. Although that’s an important goal, convergence is more about that point in time where your philosophy that technology should respect people converges with that of a group or company that believes the same.

• With the new Ubuntu tablet out the door, Canonical also had to upgrade the website to reflect the changes accordingly, so now ubuntu.com has a really nice section dedicated to the BQ Aquaris M10.

• If we don’t take Android into account, we can’t really say that there are successful Linux-based tablet out there. It’s not clear why that came to pass, but until this Ubuntu-powered tablet landed, there wasn’t much competition. To be fair, there is not much competition right now, since Apple and Google pretty much dominate the market, but BQ Aquaris M10 is the only one that can double down as a regular PC.

• The BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu tablet is powered by a 64-bit ARM processor, so the users have already started to ask around if they will be able to run the 32-bit apps from the phone on the tablet. The short answer is yes. The long answer is that it will take a little bit of work.

• As you may well be aware, Canonical and BQ unveiled the world’s first Ubuntu Tablet, the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition, which also happens to be the first Ubuntu converged device, which users can transform into a full-fledged PC.

• Are you using Ubuntu from a long time and you really miss those old days? Sam Hewitt has forked Elementary OS Gtk theme and icons to make it look and feel like old Ubuntu 8.04. It’s all about old school brown-y orange-y themes and gave it a name “Humanitary” theme & icons, Gtk theme made using neutral grey & brown palette and icons using a neutral palette. Since this theme is intended to use in Elementary OS which uses Pantheon[1] desktop but you can use it in Ubuntu or Linux Mint if you are using Gnome Shell, As I tested Gtk theme is not compatible with other desktops. Vertex and Masalla icons used in the following screenshots. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool or Ubuntu-Tweak to change themes/icons

• Phones from Sony, OnePlus and Fairphone will be demonstrated running Ubuntu (Touch) later this month, we can reveal.

• As you guys already know that Canonical has been working on mobile convergence from quite sometime now. Recently I was invited to the Ubuntu tablet press release and saw true convergence being done with new tablet (BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu edition) and phone (I think it was Nexus 4), and it was quite satisfactory that how things are going in the right direction.

• Ubuntu touch is really good but it also has some problem and most of it’s apps are beta and have some bugs, it also doesn’t support Persian keyboard.

Flavours and Variants

• She also designed some small informational pamphlets. We learned last year that a lot of people would stop by the booth but not have time to talk to us in person. By having these print materials on hand, we were able to more efficiently let way more people know about elementary OS!

Devices/Embedded

• Power consumption, as measured by my Kill-a-Watt, ranged from 7 watts at the Ubuntu Server 14.04 text login screen, to 8-10 watts at an idle Ubuntu 15.10 GUI login screen (the default OS it arrived with), to 14-18 watts in memory testing, to 26 watts in mprime.

• While I refuse to call this board a ‘supercomputer’ as they do on their Kickstarter page, I do think it will be a great little development board for a lot of people. While I personally prefer the Odroid product line, I think this is a great way for people who have only worked on the Raspberry Pi and other various ‘Fruit Board Clones’, to spread the wings and work with a lot more powerful hardware. While I think I will personally put my money into the forthcoming Odroid C2 for size reasons, I still think the Pine64 is a great board for many people.

• The open source movement now dominates software, but could it also become the norm in chips? Operating systems like Unix, which could be licensed for many computers, squeezed out single-vendor platforms, but then gave way in turn to fully open source OSs like Linux.

Phones

Tizen

• Today, we have some good news for our Samsung Z1 readers that are based in India, as their Z1 Smartphones begin receiving the much awaited final release of the Tizen 2.4 Operating System update version Z130HDDU0CPB1. The update will be delivered Over the Air (OTA), so will either use your WiFi or network providers cellular data. It is advised to use WiFi as the update is pretty big. For Tizen 2.3 users the size of the update from BOK2(2.3) is ~262MB. For Tizen 2.4 Beta users who are on COL6 the size of the update is ~17MB.

Android

• As soon as you connect an external HDMI monitor to your phone, MaruOS fires a Debian-based OS on the bigger screen. “Your phone runs independently of your desktop so you can take a call and work on your big screen at the same time,” MaruOS writes on its website.

• The Android 6.0 Marshmallow update for Android Wear is back. The update debuted on the disastrous LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE in November, but due to “image quality issues,” LG pulled the watch from the market after only six days. The Marshmallow Android Wear update seemed to go down with the Watch Urbane, and the update went missing in action for the last two months. According to a post on the Official Android Blog, it’s now back and will now roll out to “all Android Wear watches over the next few weeks.”

• Here’s a quick survey of the traditional Android device manufacturer landscape: Samsung is doing alright, LG and Sony could be doing better, HTC doesn’t know what it’s doing, and Motorola is done. Smartphones have grown to be the most essential piece of modern technology, and yet the industry manufacturing them has backed itself into a corner where only two companies, Apple and Samsung, are generating any reliable profit. The quarterly earnings reports keep painting the same bleak picture, with most phone makers barely breaking even in spite of increasing shipment numbers and constantly improving products. It seems a Sisyphean task, and it’s been going on long enough to invite the question of why so many companies bother making Android phones at all.

Free Software/Open Source

• Free software is tremendously democratic. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can get involved – there are no barriers of wealth or social status. Being educated in computer science helps, but there are plenty of people working on free software at Red Hat, Canonical and Intel who’ve never been to university, and who acquired their positions simply by writing great code.

• So anyone can contribute to free software, and anyone can start a new project as well. But how do you turn that great idea in your head into a real-life success? The likes of SourceForge and GitHub are littered with now-abandoned projects with barely 50 lines of code, which initially started as grand ideas to create the next killer music player, email client or game. Yes, free software is awesome, but 95% of projects never get off the ground or are abandoned after a few weeks.

• Continuing the MyStory series on It’s FOSS, today I am sharing with you the story of a blind computer programmer from Iraq who goes on the internet by the name of Ali Miracle. By the time you finish reading this article about Ali and his works, I am sure you would agree with his nickname ‘miracle’.

• I came to know about Ali when he contacted me to contribute to It’s FOSS. This was also the time when I come to know about his inability to see. I was amazed to know that despite being blind, Ali contributed to a number of open source projects.

• Linux, and the related open source projects making up the LAMP stack, were the underdogs. Essays like Raymond’s helped legitimize Linux and galvanize support for open source in a world where closed source was still the norm.

Events

• As some of you might know, I run a group that meet and learn new stuff about foss month – foss-gbg. Today it’s official that this summer foss-gbg goes foss-north and it is going to be awesome. So I welcome you all to the wonderful city of Gothenburg to a day filled with talks on a wide variety of topics around free and open source technology. It is going to be awesome!

• After rocking SCALE, FOSDEM was next and a great event. Killing, too – two days with about 8000 people, it was insane. Lots of positive people again, loads of stuff we handed out so we ran out on Sunday morning – and cool devices at the ownCloud booth.

• Linux and Free Software plays in South East Asia not that role as in Europe or North America. To change that at least a bit, I came here. The asian culture plays definitely a role and this was often discussed. But it plays lesser the vital role as we think and as the linked article shows, we will not find an easy an solution for the cultural differences. From my perspective it is lesser necessary that we adopt, the most asians I met are willing to accept the differences and can live with them.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• We last updated you on our progress with WebExtensions when Firefox 45 landed in Developer Edition (Aurora), and today we have an update for Firefox 46, which landed in Developer Edition last week.

• Today we shared a number of decisions around Firefox OS along with changes to Marketplace, foxfooding, and the Product Innovation Process. Below is the full email that was sent out.

SaaS/Big Data

• Big Data gets a lot of headlines. If any technology can be called heavily hyped, Big Data earns the prize for most breathless predictions of enterprise influence.

• Typical of the rosy predictions is this from IDC: spending on Big Data-related infrastructure, software and services will grow at a torrid compound annual rate of 23.1 percent between 2014 and 2019, reaching a hefty $48.6 billion in 2019.

• The report also suggested that the biggest concerns facing those advocates centre around security and the challenge of installing the cloud in their business.

• “There is no question that private clouds are seen as the future for many enterprise workloads, including many that are considered to be business-critical,” said Mark Smith, senior product marketing manager of cloud solutions at Suse, in a not at all brazen plug for his business.

• A direct comparison of Hadoop and Spark is difficult because they do many of the same things, but are also non-overlapping in some areas.

• For example, Spark has no file management and therefor must rely on Hadoop’s Distributed File System (HDFS) or some other solution. It is wiser to compare Hadoop MapReduce to Spark, because they’re more comparable as data processing engines.

• What will it take to make open source big data tools truly useful for the enterprise? OpsClarity thinks the answer is a one-stop solution for monitoring everything from Spark to Elasticsearch to MongoDB. That’s what it rolled out this week in a new platform targeted at DevOps teams.

Databases

• I’ve not really spent much time on Gammu in past months and it was about time to do some basic housekeeping.

• It’s not that there would be too much of new development, I rather wanted to go through the issue tracker, properly tag issues, close questions without response and resolve the ones which are simple to fix. This lead to few code and documentation improvements.

• Called deepSQL, the solution aims to help companies meet real-time customer demands while providing the automated scalability to capitalize on unforeseen business surges.

• “We took control of our destiny by making this our own distribution. It is fully 100% MySQL compliant, there are now application changes but it’s the best of Maria, Percona, MySQL, our own stuff and the machine learning open source worlds together,” said Chad Jones, chief strategy officer at Deep.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• OpsClarity Intelligent Monitoring provides automated discovery, configuration and rapid troubleshooting for Apache Kafka, Apache Spark and Apache Storm.

• OpsClarity, which provides Web-scale application monitoring solutions, has announced that its Intelligent Monitoring offering now provides monitoring for a growing suite of open-source data processing frameworks.

• Customers that think of Walmart as the place to get toiletries, groceries and more can now add cloud to the list.

• Perhaps taking a page out of Amazon’s success with AWS, the retail giant has announced it is releasing its internally-developed cloud and application lifecycle management platform, called OneOps, open source to the public.

BSD

Public Services/Government

• The freely-available standard, developed by the not-for-profit XBRL Consortium, was accepted by the Commission after consulting the European multi-stakeholder platform (MSP) on ICT standardisation and other experts.

Openness/Sharing

• Software freedom — the core commitment of the free software movement — does represent at least the rudiments of a better system. Resisting and reversing enclosure will not come about through “sustainable growth” or the “sharing economy,” which preserve the logics and structures of the status quo. “Openness,” or the conviction that norms of transparency and publicity will clarify (and thereby equalize) power relations, is also no solution at all.

Open Data

• The city of Riga (Latvia) will soon begin an overhaul of its approach to IT, focussing on making its data open by default, and giving companies and software developers access to some of the city’s eGovernment services through APIs. The city’s current IT architecture was designed about a decade ago, when “no one foresaw the growth of data”, says city council member Agris Ameriks.

Open Hardware

• Brushless motors are everywhere now. From RC planes to CNC machines, if you need a lot of power to spin something really fast, you’re probably going to use a brushless motor. A brushless motor requires a motor controller, and for most of us, this means cheap Electronic Speed Controllers (ESC) from a warehouse in China. [Ben] had a better idea: build his own ESC. He’s been working on this project for a while, and he’s polishing the design to implement a very cool feature – position control.

Programming

• A struggle between factions is taking place, according to a report by The Information, which matches what several sources have told Business Insider.

Leftovers

• Apple’s iOS 9 update has a little-known feature that disables iPhone 6 and 6 plus handsets that have been repaired by non-Apple technicians.

• Users have found their iPhones rendered obsolete after they had their screen or home buttons repaired and then tried upgrading the software. The software issue has been called the “Error 53″ problem, and it doesn’t have a quick fix.

• If you’re a Windows user, which most of you reading FOSS Force aren’t, then Microsoft wants to hijack your machine. It seems that the company that’s been spending millions — and has been buying into every free and open source conference it can find and a few it can’t — to get the word out that “Microsoft has changed,” hasn’t. If you happen to be unlucky enough to be using Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, you’re probably beginning to realize this right about now.

Health/Nutrition

• Half of girls and women cut live in just three countries as Unicef statistics reveal shocking global scale of barbaric ritual

• A case of female genital mutilation is reported in England every 96 minutes, according to official health figures.

• Some 5,484 instances of the ‘brutal’ and potentially lethal practice were reported from October 2014 to September 2015, and experts say many other victims go unreported.

• Tanya Barron, chief executive of Plan UK charity which campaigns against female genital mutilation (FGM), said: ‘FGM has been a hidden danger – only now is the full scale becoming clear.

• ‘Recognising that FGM is a fundamental abuse of girls’ rights is the first step to ending the practice.’

Security

• Combining this with the Juniper issue, where VPN communication could have been hacked, got me thinking about how firmware can be verified and how to ensure that it’s doing what we think it should be doing and not what someone else wants it to do.

• When virtual machine technology emerged, many organizations’ initial approach to security was to apply the same security measures to virtual machines as they did to physical machines. Only later did more specialized software emerge that was specifically designed to meet the security requirements of virtual machines.

• That process is now beginning to repeat itself, with software specifically designed to meet the security requirements of containers now starting to emerge. Some examples of specialized container security software include Clair and Twistlock.

• It might come as a surprise that South Africa is not always rated near the bottom in international surveys. According to various reports, the country comes out either third or sixth in the world of top cyber crime hotspots.

• It’s still not clear how, but a disproportionately large number of websites that run on the WordPress content management system are being hacked to deliver crypto ransomware and other malicious software to unwitting end users.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In Pristina, the capital of the make-believe country of Kosovo, there is a street named after Bill Clinton, and a statue of Bill – done in the Socialist Realist style – towers over the main square. They also named a boulevard after George W. Bush, perhaps to hedge their bets after the Republicans took the White House. You couldn’t ask for a more “pro-American” country than this one: but that’s just on the surface. Undercurrents of rabid nationalism – and real resentment of the Americans and Europeans who have been baby-sitting the Kosovars all these years – is now breaking out that threatens whatever modicum of stability Kosovo has ever known.

Transparency Reporting

• She has informed the public of United States military activities across the globe and continues to speak out against government secrecy and in defense of transgender rights. Her words and actions have powerfully transformed national conversations, but since her arrest in 2010 on charges related to her release of information to WikiLeaks, few have had a chance to actually see and hear from Chelsea herself.

• A United Nations panel ruled on Friday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being “arbitrarily detained,” but British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond rejected what he called “a ridiculous finding.”

• Although he claimed “sweet” vindication, Assange nevertheless remains confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has lived since 2012.

• The British Government is fighting a United Nations ruling that accused it of “arbitrarily detaining” Julian Assange in violation of his fundamental human rights.

• The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called on the UK and Sweden to immediately end the WikiLeaks founder’s “deprivation of liberty” and compensate him.

• But a spokesperson for the British Government said it would “formally contest” the findings and denied that Mr Assange’s stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London constituted arbitrary detention.

• British and U.S. officials have been negotiating a plan that could allow British authorities to directly serve wiretap orders on U.S. communications companies in criminal and national security inquiries, U.S. officials confirmed Thursday.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• How scientists find the best places to put future wind energy sites in the ocean.

• This week on CounterSpin: For many, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is a clear case of environmental racism—the disproportionate infliction of environmental harms on communities of color, from the spraying of toxic pesticides to the siting of polluting factories. The government has a responsibility to address these harms—but do they do it, and if not, why not? These are some of the questions engaged by the Center for Public Integrity’s Environmental Justice, Denied series. We’ll speak with Center reporter Talia Buford.

Finance

• People who have worked for the USTR tend to pretty religiously support any and all new trade agreements, so it seems somewhat noteworthy that the former USTR, and now Senator, Rob Portman, has come out against the TPP agreement, saying that he doesn’t think that it’s a good deal.

• There’s a fairly long history of Paypal being completely obnoxious in shutting down the accounts of basically anyone challenging the status quo in any way.

• In the latest Democratic primary debate Thursday night, Hillary Clinton went after the core of Bernie Sanders’ appeal to the progressive base. The Wall Street-hating Senator’s hands aren’t as clean on financial policy as he claims, Clinton said, citing his support 16 years ago for a key favor to the banking business.

• “While we’re talking about votes, you’re the one who voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives in 2000, which contributed to the overleveraging of Lehman Brothers, which was one of the culprits that brought down the economy,” Clinton said. “I’m not impugning your motive because you voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives. People make mistakes.”

• Unlike stocks and business debts, derivatives are a category of investments that provide no tangible value to the real economy where workers sell their time to bosses so they can feed their families. They are contracts between investors that function almost exactly like betting tickets at a race track: People who have contributed nothing to the business of raising and training horses get a chance to win or lose money based on how those horses perform in the near future.

• [...]

• But the story of Sanders’ votes for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) isn’t quite as straightforward as Clinton depicted Thursday. And it implicates Bill Clinton’s trusted financial policy advisors far more deeply than it does Sanders.

• Protests have broken out in Azerbaijan against rising prices and falling living standards.

• The issue of long hours, little pay and no vacation for delivery drivers is finally out of the shadows.

Censorship

• Hyderabad: The Centre’s move last month to constitute a committee led by acclaimed filmmaker Shyam Benegal to refurbish the controversy-stricken Censor Board has led to Tollywood rooting for equal censorship rules on par with those applicable to Bollywood and Hollywood. Incidentally, while the Union ministry of information and broadcasting has called for opinions from Ttown on ways to overhaul the Board, observers rue how there’s no representa tion of the local industry on the newly set up committee. This, despite the Telugu filmdom producing the most number of movies in the country annually .

• As the head of the government appointed expert panel entrusted with the task of proposing recommendations for restructuring the Censor Board, filmmaker Shyam Benegal has his hands full. From studying suggestions/demands from the film industry, to analysing concerns raised by NGOs working on children’s welfare and women’s rights organisations, and brainstorming on the changes needed to modernise the Cinematograph Act, the panel has its task cut out. “It’s not an easy job,” says Benegal, with a smile, adding, “We are still in the process of taking stock of the feedback we have received from all stakeholders. I’m in no position to talk about what changes we intend to propose.”

• He confirms the cover-up by Germany’s state broadcaster and how his organization is able to get and disseminate politically incorrect news stories in Europe due to both self-censorship and state ordered censorship of the main-stream media.

• Immediate outrage followed, and rightfully so. Her situation, which supporters of Kincaid have called “Boobgate,” demonstrates how sexist social media censorship can be. Women can post photos of their entire breast without violating Facebook’s anti-nudity policy, so long as the nipple is covered. Men can freely post photos of themselves shirtless and no one bats an eye.

• Writing at the Gatestone Institute, British journalist Douglas Murray looked at Facebook as a battleground in the war on free speech Friday, recalling a recent case in which the social media giant was “forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.”

• To this, Murray adds the disturbing September incident in which German chancellor Angela Merkel was caught on an open mike, asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if he would help suppress “anti-immigration” postings… and he replied that he was already working on it.

• Building confidence in its anti-terror policies, the social media company is expanding its specialist teams in the US and Ireland to monitor extremist content

Privacy

• The state of Maryland’s defense of the Baltimore PD’s warrantless use of Stingray devices continues, taking the form of a series of motions unofficially titled Things People Should Know About Their Cell Phones.

• The last brief it filed in this criminal prosecution claimed “everyone knows” phones generate location data, therefore there’s no expectation of privacy in this information. As commenters pointed out, people may know lots of stuff about records they’re generating, but that doesn’t mean law enforcement should have warrantless access to those records.

• The American Civil Liberties Union is representing the Wikimedia Foundation – which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia – and several other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the upstream collection program, claiming the collection is unconstitutional.

• “The PCLOB’s status report offers little comfort, and only underscores that the NSA continues to copy and search Americans’ international Internet communications en masse,” says ACLU staff attorney Ashley Gorski.

• How do you create strong encryption standards when the organization tasked to build them finds itself absorbed into an organization that dedicates huge quantities of resources to break them? The recently announced reorganization of the National Security Agency this week brings this question to the forefront. As part of the reorganization, the defensive arm of the NSA (the Information Assurance Directorate, or IAD) will be subsumed by the intelligence-gathering program (which collects signals intelligence, or SIGINT). The IAD will effectively cease to exist, which raises questions about both the privacy and security of the nation’s data. We need to make sure that we have something that replaces it.

Civil Rights

• The war court prosecutor is arguing that public disclosure of a transcript of a public hearing held at Guantanamo last year could endanger national security in response to a legal motion brought by 17 news organizations protesting pick-and-choose secrecy in the Sept. 11 pretrial hearings.

• Army Brig. Gen Mark Martins makes the argument in a filing obtained by the Miami Herald that was still being reviewed for sensitive information on Thursday and not publicly released. At issue is the Pentagon’s decision to black out large portions of a 379-page transcript of an Oct. 30 hearing that included testimony from two soldiers who work at Guantanamo’s most clandestine prison, called Camp 7.

• Since law enforcement largely seems to feel sexting = child porn, the station should have found itself under investigation for distributing child porn. Instead, the only negative result of its allegedly terrible editorial practices so far is Holden’s lawsuit.

• Holden is seeking damages related to the outing of his name and sexual organs, with damages sought clearing the $1 million mark.

• Six months before media organizations published the notorious Abu Ghraib photos, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records, including photos, relating to the abuse and torture of prisoners in U.S. detention centers overseas. Since we sued to enforce our request in 2004, the legal battle has focused in part on a set of some 2,000 pictures relating to detainee maltreatment. The photos released today are part of that set, and they are the first photos the government has released to us in all these years of litigation. (The court hearing our lawsuit ordered the government to release the Abu Ghraib photos in 2004, but the photos were leaked, and posted online by Salon, while the government was appealing the decision.)

• The ACLU filed the lawsuit in 2004 following the leak of photos from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Lawyers for the US government argued in court to keep the photos hidden, claiming that a release could cause “grievous harm to national security,” as terrorists could use the images as propaganda for recruiting.

• The majority of the released photographs are close-ups of bruising, cuts, and scrapes, and have the faces of the detainees blacked out. Some of the images are graphic and highly disturbing. All have been posted on the ACLU website.

• After coming under internal investigation over involvement in a scandal that resulted in a man’s death at hands of police, three Chicago police officers are retiring. Some of them will receive pensions in excess of $100,000 annually.

• Six officers of the Chicago Police Department were accused of covering up a 2004 manslaughter incident, in which one of their own punched David Koschman in face. The 21-year-old fell into a coma and died 11 days later.

• A private service that banks, employers, and government agencies use to screen customers and clients is blacklisting thousands of people as terrorists, sometimes based on nothing more than inaccurate and bigoted materials online, according to a VICE News article.

• Thomson-Reuters’ “World-Check” database slaps a “terrorism” designation — and a picture of a red balaclava — on the profiles of individuals, charities, and religious institutions. Many of them are Muslims who have never been charged or even accused of terrorism-related offenses. The results are far-reaching and can include closure of the blacklisted individuals’ bank accounts, inability to get a job, or denial of government benefits. (And World-Check isn’t the only company chasing billions of dollars in the risk mitigation industry.)

• Most recently, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced plans to found a movement (not a political party) that claims to “democratise” the EU by 2025. Ironically, one of his first steps has been to create a web site directing supporters to Facebook and Twitter. A groundbreaking effort to put citizens back in charge? Or further entangling activism in the false hope of platforms that are run for profit by their Silicon Valley overlords? A Greek tragedy indeed, in the classical sense.

• Varoufakis rails against authoritarian establishment figures who don’t put the citizens’ interests first. Ironically, big data and the cloud are a far bigger threat than Brussels. The privacy and independence of each citizen is fundamental to a healthy democracy. Companies like Facebook are obliged – by law and by contract – to service the needs of their shareholders and advertisers paying to study and influence the poor user. If “Facebook privacy” settings were actually credible, who would want to buy their shares any more?

• But when, right on the heels of that, a UN human rights group released a report saying African-Americans face “systemic racial discrimination” and deserve “reparatory justice,” that was not so newsworthy. The UN’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent cited “the persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education, housing, employment and labor, and even food security, among African-Americans and the rest of the US population,” and pointed to police killings, zero tolerance policies in schools, the criminalization of poverty, environmental racism, discriminatory voter ID laws and schools’ insufficient teaching about the history of slavery as constituting a human rights crisis that must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Verizon Wireless is testing the limits of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules after announcing that it will exempt its own video service from mobile data caps—while counting data from competitors such as YouTube and Netflix against customers’ caps.

• The only way for companies to deliver data to Verizon customers without counting against their data caps is to pay the carrier, something no major rival video service has chosen to do. While data cap exemptions are not specifically outlawed by the FCC’s net neutrality rules, the FCC is examining these arrangements to determine whether they should be stopped under the commission’s so-called “general conduct standard.” The FCC is already looking into data cap exemptions—also known as zero-rating—implemented by Comcast, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA.

DRM

• Author and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) activist Cory Doctorow presented the opening keynote at SCALE 14x in Pasadena on January 22, using the opportunity to highlight the project that brought him back to the EFF after a decade. That project is Apollo 1201, an effort to challenge the ever-expanding problem of “digital rights management” (DRM)—now built into all manner of mass-produced products, not just entertainment media—that threatens the rights of individuals. The dangers of DRM are even greater than those posed by traditional proprietary software, Doctorow said, precisely because the rise of “smart” devices is putting DRM-locked software everywhere around us.

• Something is rotten in the state of Intel. Over the last decade or so, Intel has dedicated enormous efforts to the security of their microcontrollers. For Intel, this is the only logical thing to do; you really, really want to know if the firmware running on a device is the firmware you want to run on a device. Anything else, and the device is wide open to balaclava-wearing hackers.

• Intel’s first efforts toward cryptographically signed firmware began in the early 2000s with embedded security subsystems using Trusted Platform Modules (TPM). These small crypto chips, along with the BIOS, form the root of trust for modern computers. If the TPM is secure, the rest of the computer can be secure, or so the theory goes.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Remember that Read is magnificently compensated for running this business, but what does he bring to the table? It has nothing to do with drug creation and manufacture. His contribution is measured by how little Pfizer pays in taxes, and how well he engineers earnings, and certainly not by any contribution to the well-being of humans.

• We don’t have to allow this business model to flourish with tax cuts and benefits. It’s corrupt to the bone.

Trademarks

• We all know that the NFL doesn’t want anyone to use the term “Super Bowl” without having paid the NFL first (and paid lots and lots of money). As we’ve pointed out in the past, most of this is pure bullshit. In most cases, people and companies totally can use the term “Super Bowl” but few people want to deal with any sort of legal fight, so they just don’t.

• We’ve been talking about the insanity occurring in the beer industry regarding trademark for quite some time now. If you haven’t been following along, the short version of this is that as the craft beer revolution has exploded the number of breweries taking part in the industry, so too has it exploded the number of trademark spats within it. In some senses, we should have seen this coming. Given the number of new players in the market with the limited linguistic resources available with which those players could name their companies and products, perhaps it was somewhat inevitable that some of the companies involved would try to lean on trademark law to fend off what they saw as impeding competition with too-close brand names. That said, many of these conflicts fail to live up to the purpose of trademark law, many of them giving barely even a nod towards an actual concern over customer confusion. Instead, protectionism reigns.

Copyrights

• The Dutch movie industry is holding the local government responsible for the country’s high piracy rates, claiming it tolerated and even encouraged unauthorized downloading for years. In response, a coalition of movie companies is demanding damages for the losses that they’ve suffered over the past decade, totaling more than a billion euros.

• Tomorrow, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in Luxembourg will hear arguments in a case about one of the most fundamental online activities: hyperlinking. The case may decide the fate of the World Wide Web in Europe. This isn’t hyperbole. Let us explain.

• As any Internet user knows, linking is the lifeblood of the web. By connecting webpages together, links are what enable the interconnected nature of the web; they’re why we call it a “web” in the first place. It turns out that under current EU copyright law, hyperlinking may have (far-reaching) legal consequences, as the CJEU has been asked yet again how to apply copyright law to hyperlinking on the web.

• Earlier this week, we wrote about a legislative attempt in France to outlaw hyperlinking without a license (really), but would you believe that whether or not you can link without a license is still an unsettled matter of law in the EU? As is described in great detail over at the Disruptive Competition Project blog, just this week the Court of Justice of the EU heard a case concerning whether or not linking is legal. We wrote about this case last year, but the court has finally heard the case, with an Advocate General recommendation in early April, and a final ruling in the summer. There was a similar earlier case, the Svensson case, which the EU Court of Justice got right, but there’s some concern about this new case.

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