● 02.24.16

● Links 24/2/2016: Wine-Staging 1.9.4, CaffeOnSpark

Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Docker isn’t just for hobbyist developers and early adopters anymore. Docker Inc. takes the wraps off a new commercial platform that enables containers as a service (CaaS). Docker Inc., the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Docker container technology, is expanding its commercially supported product lineup Feb. 23 with the official launch of the Docker Datacenter platform. DDC builds on Docker Inc.’s existing services, including the Docker Universal Control Plane, which was first publicly announced as a beta last November.

• We love Docker. This container technology makes it possible to run four-to-six times the number of server applications as you can with Virtual Machines (VM) on the same hardware. There are only two little problems: Security and management.

Kernel Space

• HI Corporation, (“HI”, HQ in Shinjuku, Tokyo, president is Tomonobu Aoyama) announces that HI joined The Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux.

Graphics Stack

• A new driver that comes with Vulkan support has been released by Nvidia for the Linux platform, and it goes to show that the company is quite serious about the new endeavor.

• NVIDIA developer Alexandre Courbot who has been liaising with the open-source Nouveau driver developers over providing GeForce GTX 900 “Maxwell” series support has sent out a revised patch series for the “Secure Boot” support.

• Not to be confused with UEFI SecureBoot, the NVIDIA Secure Boot code is about supporting the signed firmware with Maxwell GPUs with loading by the Nouveau DRM driver. Today was the third public patch revision for this Nouveau kernel driver code.

• Canonical developers have put out version 0.20 of Mir in time for the next OTA update for Ubuntu Phones.

• As outlined via the change-log in the Mir Bazaar repository, 0.20 is quite a fine update. First up, Mir 0.20 brings support to allow screencasting to create a virtual output, which is needed for Ubuntu to support Miracast on Mir. Miracast remains the dominant protocol for connecting external monitors/TVs over WiFi. Android has supported this since the 4.x days and there’s been various Linux desktop efforts like MiracleCast while it’s great to see see Canonical/Ubuntu making more progress with their Miracast support for Ubuntu Phone/Tablet devices.

• Heads up Vulkan testers, Nvidia has updated their beta Vulkan driver for Linux. It should work better with newer kernels too.

Benchmarks

Applications

• The development team of the best free, open-source and cross-platform distributed version control system, Git, which is being used by numerous developers worldwide, has announced the release of Git 2.7.2.

• The Calamares team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Calamares 2.0, a major release that brings countless new features and improvements over the 1.1 series. Calamares is a distribution-independent system installer. After almost five months of intense development since the last maintenance release, Calamares 2.0 is a user ready product. It has been carefully engineered and thoroughly tested over many pre-release builds.

• The elementary OS team has forked the now dead Geary email client, and they have announced the launch of Pantheon Mail.

• Calamares 2.0 was released today as the newest major release of this distribution-independent, open-source installer framework.

• Calamares continues to be used by Manjaro, Sabayon, Netrunner, and other Linux distributions while with Calamares 2.0 there is even more features and functionality. Calamares 2.0 has a rewritten partitioning feature, the modules system has been overhauled, there is support for a post-install mode so Calamares can act as a first-run configuration tool, and improvements were made to many of the Calamares modules.

• Another minor release of RcppEigen is on CRAN and getting into Debian. The main focus is an upgrade to the recent 3.2.7 release of Eigen which should address another UBSAN issue. And once again Yixuan Qiu did all the heavy lifting.

Proprietary

• Using Skype on Linux has been an absolute pain since the Microsoft takeover, but starting from February 22 the Linux client is unable to join calls.

• Several Linux users are reporting an issue with Skype, Microsoft’s instant messaging and VoIP calling service. Users report that Microsoft has broken the app’s ability to join calls. Microsoft is yet to acknowledge the issue.

• Linux users are piling on Microsoft after the long-neglected Skype client on the open-source OS suddenly lost the ability to join calls from other versions of the software.

• Dutch student Nick Vernij said that since Monday, users running the latest Linux build of Skype are unable to chat to friends using Skype for OS X and Windows.

• SentinelOne, the company that’s transforming endpoint security by delivering real-time protection powered by machine learning and intelligent automation, today announced a powerful new solution aimed at protecting enterprise data centers and cloud providers from emerging threats that target Linux servers.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• It looks like, after the release of the 1.9.3 milestone two weeks ago, the Wine Staging team is back at work pushing new versions of the open-source software based on the latest upstream Wine development builds.

Games

• As anyone who’s attended a child’s birthday party knows, putting a dozen kids together can turn even doe-eyed angels into out-of-control brats. So what happens when you put thousands in a virtual world and give them tons of incentive to steal Mom’s credit card? Max found out when he took a customer support job for an online PC game that shall remain nameless. It’s roughly like World Of Warcraft, but marketed to tweens. Max handles customer support issues, like payment problems and troll banning, and what he’s witnessed will make you want to grab the nearest child and give them a stern talking-to.

• Humble Indie Bundle 16 has launched with seven lovely games, one of which has only just become officially supported on Linux.

• Not to be confused with the other popular Hitman series games, this new entry is a strategy game set in the Hitman universe. Not quite the same, but hopefully the first of more to come.

• However, today he commented on this RBDOOM-3-BFG bug report from back in 2014 that I originally created about the broken benchmark functionality in the code. He wrote today, “I will try to fix this [benchmark functionality] next month. I want this feature in the next stable release and then it is very likely that I will start porting the renderer to Vulkan. I’m very interested in RBDOOM-3-BFG benchmarks between OpenGL and Vulkan.”

• I’ve been having a bit of fun with Battlestation: Harbinger for the last few days, and I’ve actually found it to be a pretty good mix of mix of roguelike, action, strategy and more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• With the nature of open source, if you don’t like how something walks or talks, then you can change it up to how you like it. One of the up sides to linux, is the fact that if you don’t like your Desktop Environment, then you are free to modify it or even just swap it out entirely.

• Now this can be a little scary to newcomers, and generally there is no best suited environment for everyone, so here we will go through a few of the more well known ones.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• To date most of the XDG-App talk for application sandboxing has been within the GNOME camp, but it’s great to see a KDE developer is now looking at supporting this important technology outside of the GNOME space.

• KDE developer Aleix Pol is experimenting with KDE applications on XDG-App for containerized applications.

• I’m happy to announce new bugfix versions of KDE Partition Manager 2.0.1 and KPMcore 2.0.1.

• Btrfs used space detection should work without crashing (it was actually cause by crash in btrfs-debug-tree program btrfs filesystem show is used). Improved support for FAT12 partitions. They were not recognized before. For now they are reported as FAT16 (gparted behaves in the same way). Installation path for libparted plugins is not force to be in system prefix anymore. This is consistent with how other KDE Applications work, but cmake might require KDE_INSTALL_USE_QT_SYS_PATHS to be set if you are installing kpmcore to /usr. We know try to find KF5 version of kdesu in libexec even when kdesu is not in $PATH. Fixed visible HTML in one dialog box (#354925).

• There is still an open issue that Partition Manager reports itself as 2.0.0 instead of 2.0.1. I tried to bump the version but there seem to be some kind of bug that prevents KDE Partition Manager and Calamares to compile or work. We will continue to investigate this issue but 2.0.1 should work well despite incorrectly reporting it’s own version

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment was released a few days ago, but it looks like some of its core apps, such as the GNOME Builder software, are late to the party.

• The new GNOME Games application is coming along, and it looks like we’re in for a treat when the GNOME 3.20 is released.

• In my city we have no local GNOME group or linux user group. I’m trying to shake that up a bit. I helped arrange an event called IT X, happening at Platform 4 which is a local non-profit venue in the center of my local city in Aalborg, Denmark.

• The GNOME Continuous effort is proving a great way for the project to achieve, however right now we’re only building and testing things on Intel based architectures. As ARM devices like the Raspberry Pis, Cubieboards, C.H.I.P.s and the just announced Endless Mini become more prominent we want to make sure GNOME software is ready for those platforms as well to the extent possible.

• We did a last push and hold the release a week to get another of the items that were requested.

• We added a new zoom level to nautilus, now you will have available 48px, 64px, 96px and 128px.

Distributions

Reviews

• While tools for message encryption have become easier to use in recent years, one gaping hole remains in many people’s infosec: the security of the device they use (their “end-point”). A new secure operating system called Subgraph OS aims to make resisting hacking attacks easier, even on fairly low-powered laptops.

• “It’s designed for anybody who wants an end-point that’s resistant against remote network exploitation,” David Mirza Ahmad, president of Subgraph, said in a phone interview. Subgraph’s four-man team recently received funding from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) to work on the operating system; the OTF is ultimately funded by grants from Congress.

• Windows XP and Windows 7 are gone…at least as far as Microsoft is concerned. For many, many users across the globe, however, those platforms still live on. Both businesses and homes still use both desktop operating systems that have seen their End Of Life. These platforms are no longer supported by Microsoft, which means they are no longer getting security updates. What does that mean to end users? It means their computers and data are at risk.

• Fear not, there is a solution—thanks to Linux.

Arch Family

• The Manjaro community is proud to announce a new stable release of the Cinnamon Edition.

• In addition to the full edition with office suite, graphics software and mailclient included, Manjaro Cinnamon 16.02 is also available as a minimal-ISO of 1GB download size, with users in mind who prefer to setup their own set of software.

• Recent development at Manjaro Linux is taking the rolling release model a step further by now delivering all desktop settings via packages. Like that users will have the option to update to the latest stage of development, even in regards of styling and desktop configuration, at any time if they wish – a feature that has often been requested.

Ballnux/SUSE

• To celebrate Leap Day, openSUSE will ship you a Leap 42 T-Shirt when you submit a proposal for this year’s openSUSE Conference by Leap Day (Feb. 29, 2016).

Red Hat Family

• After an extended period of negotiation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has become available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, where they “love Linux” but had previously been unable to offer RHEL.

• On Feb. 17, the operating system often used for Linux production systems quietly joined the ranks of Linuxes, including Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Debian, and Novell SUSE Enterprise, already accepted on Azure. It was the last to do so.

• Here’s the first bicycle accessory created by Red Hat and FreeDesktop….

• Customer experience specialist Amdocs claims it has created a system to convert mobile operators from physical network users into comms service providers in the cloud. It unveiled details of the new service at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona.

• Credit Agricole reaffirmed their buy rating on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a report published on Thursday morning, MarketBeat Ratings reports.

Fedora

• As you already know, so far DNF has been using a bunch of C libraries (hawkey, librepo, libsolv, libcomps) while yum was written entirely in Python. From now some of the DNF code will be slowly rewritten into C, more precisely, moved into libhif project. The next milestone was reached by merging hawkey into libhif and further we plan to expand libhif to support general functionality of package managers.

• Fedora’s DNF package manager that succeeded Yum officially in Fedora 22 is going to go through a phase of being rewritten in C.

• While DNF is still new and fresh, an initiative is underway in porting it from Python — the language Yum was originally written in — and to turn it into a C code-base.

• DNF developer Jan Šilhan wrote that the DNF code is slowly being rewritten into C and the Hawkey resolver was merged into the libhif library. DNF already interacts with a number of C libraries like Hawkey, librepo, libsolv, and libcomps. Libhif is designed to be a simple package manager built atop Hawkey and Librepo that’s LGPLv2+ licensed.

• After talking with mleonova at devconf the other week, we got the idea in our heads to hold a weekly “web dev clinic” over video chat for the #fedora-apps crew. It will be a video chat lasting ~1 hour, once a week where, if you’re working on Fedora web apps or websites, you can come and either get help on a problem you’re facing, or show off your work, or both.

• The last time this happened was in 2012 with the end of life of Enterprise Linux 4. At that time, EPEL stopped supporting builds for EL-4 but no other changes were done. This wasn’t a big deal because EL-4 had never gotten a large number of users. However in 1 year, 1 month, EL-5 will reach the end of its production run and move into Extended Life Support. Enterprise 5 is still over 20% of all EPEL installs so I wanted to give a long heads up that EL-5 will also be removed from the builders on April 1 2017 and no builds will be done after that. Depending on other proposals, EL-5 may also be moved over to an ‘archive’ like Fedora releases are so that it is clear that it is no longer under any production. If that happens there will be clear notice of where it has been moved to and how to keep at it.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Today, we’re going to look at creating a custom Debian ISO using the Debian Live Systems project. With the project and website, you can create your own custom version of the distro to deploy as you wish around an office or in your own home. The benefit of creating your own spin is the ability to include specific packages that are relevant to your needs, have it work on specific architectures, and generally make it much more suited to your needs.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As it’s been a month since our last large Linux distribution comparison (a 10-way Linux distribution battle), here are some fresh benchmarks of six Linux distributions to see how their out-of-the-box performance compares. From a Core i7 Broadwell system, the updated versions of Clear Linux, Fedora 23, CentOS 7, openSUSE 42.1, Ubuntu 15.10, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS were compared.

• The Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016 event takes place these days in Barcelona, Spain, and Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, has a strong presence there with a huge stand to show off its latest products.

• Since Sunday’s Mint reveal, a certain segment of users is upset over the lack of security measures that lead to the February 20 attack. Bryan Lunduke is impressed with a video of Ubuntu on a tablet, but actual users less so. A KDE NEON unstable repository is open and Jeff Law introduced folks to the new features in GCC 6. And finally,in light of the Mint mishap, Kevin Fenzi has offered up a “Fedora distribution download primer.”

• Canonical, Ubuntu, and their founder, Mark Shuttleworth, are all present at the MWC (Mobile World Congress) 2016 event that takes place these days between February 22 and 25, in Barcelona, Spain.

• We reported the other day that the OTA-9.1 hotfix update for Ubuntu Phone was finally coming this Wednesday, February 24, 2016, as a phased update for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices.

• Brace yourself, Internet. I am about to say something nice about Ubuntu and Canonical. In fact… a whole mess of nice things. This article is going to be lousy with compliments of Ubuntu.

• I just watched a video, from XDA, that showed a live demo of Ubuntu that, I kid you not, made me do a little happy dance. Just so we’re on the same page, go watch that video right now. At least up to about the 4-minute mark where the hands-on demo of the tablet ends.

• The first Beta release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system will launch in a few hours for the opt-in flavors, so the Ubuntu developers have pushed a great number of new packages into the repositories.

• Yesterday we showed you, guys, one of the first video reviews of the new BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet, which has just won the “Best of MWC 2016″ award.

• The Dragonboard is symbolic for Canonical as a reference platform for Ubuntu Core 64-bit development. This means that users will be assured of compatible updates for the long-term development of their designs.

• Jon Melamut, VP of commercial devices operations at Canonical, said: “Adopting the DragonBoard 410c as our ARM 64-bit reference platform is proof of our commitment to the open platform community surrounding the board. Via snappy Ubuntu Core and the DragonBoard 410c, developers will have an affordable, accessible and flexible way to create new IoT solutions.”

• Linux is such a wonderful kernel for many reasons, but I find its adaptability to be the tops. You can get an operating system based on the kernel running on such a broad range of hardware — something Microsoft can only dream about with its venerable Windows.

• Even though Linux can run on damn-near anything, it is beneficial for developers to have a reference platform to use for creating. Of course, they can always expand from that jumping point. Today, Canonical announces that the Dragonboard 410c hardware will be the reference platform for Ubuntu Core on ARM 64-bit.

• Canonical has officially released the Ubuntu Touch OTA-9.1 update, and users from around the world should receive it in the next 24 hours.

• Sharp intake of breath required: it’s a question barbed in contention and immune to indifference.

• Even former Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon isn’t averse to needling the topic.

• Over on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list the discussion is old hat. It’s almost as much a part of the infrastructure as mailman headers and incorrect inline replies.

• The Ubuntu Design Team has put out a fresh blog post detailing some of their latest work on the visual design of convergent apps and have included plenty of screenshots / mock-ups.

• The team has been working on new design guidelines for UI and UX along with their Suru visual design language.

• Intel’s second-generation Compute Stick is a tiny computer with an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Cherry Trail processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage. It’s only a little more powerful than the 2015 model, but it offers significant improvements in WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB performance.

• The makers of Ubuntu have demonstrated the operating system turning a smartphone into a desktop PC.

• The parent company Canonical is one of many hoping to replace phones, tablets, laptops and computers with just one device.

• But there is not yet a phone/PC hybrid running Ubuntu with the necessary monitor port available for consumers to buy.

Devices/Embedded

• Toradex launched a pair of Colibri COMs built around NXP’s low-power, Cortex-A7- and -M4-based i.MX 7 Solo and Dual SoCs, featuring -20 to 85°C operation.

• As promised last September, Toradex has shipped one of the first computer-on-modules based on NXP’s i.MX7 system-on-chips. It does not appear to be the first, as CompuLab promised to ship its CL-SOM-iMX7 COM in Jan. 2016. Toradex can, however, claim to have the smallest i.MX7 module to date — its 67.6 x 36.7mm dimensions beat out the 68 x 42mm CompuLab module.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung’s Tizen-based “Connect Auto” hooks into your car’s telematics system to offer driving analysis, alerts, and an LTE hotspot for in-car WiFi.

• At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Samsung announced an automotive accessory that runs Tizen Linux, and offers real-time alerts, driving analytics, hotspot services, and more. Samsung Connect Auto connects to the OBD II diagnostics port under the steering wheel where it analyzes telematics and fuel efficiency data, and delivers reports for improving driving behavior.

• Over the last year we have created some stunning wallpapers / backgrounds for Tizen devices Samsung Gear S / S2 / Neo / Galaxy / Z1 / Z3 and TM1. Now we have some more specially for the Samsung Z1, Z3, and TM1 Tizen Smartphones.

• This month there are more of an abstract style, but if you would like anything different then please let us know in the comments section. Instructions on how you can actually set them as your background are at the bottom of the page.

Android

• Intel’s Android smartphone prototype is also a Linux desktop PC

• Intel is showing off a smartphone prototype that runs a Linux desktop when plugged into an external display. Calling it the “Big Screen Experience” at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016, the concept is similar to Microsoft’s Continuum for Windows 10 Mobile.

• Hundreds of millions of Android smartphone users have downloaded photo-collage, karaoke and video-chat apps that send location data and other identifying details back to servers in China, a new report has found.

• In 2016, you might be forgiven for thinking we’ve reached smartphone parity. After all, the difference between an iPhone and a flagship Android device arguably comes down to personal preference at this point. But if we dive a bit deeper, it becomes apparent that the iPhone is still the smartphone to beat once we account for metrics such as reliability and failure rates.

• The Gionee S8 will hit stores two months from now, and will cost just under €450 in those markets where it’ll be available. The price suggests the phone will have mid-ranged hardware, but that’s not quite so. We’re looking at a 5.5-inch Full HD AMOLED display, octa-core Mediatek MT6755 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, microSD support, 16-megapixel camera with f/1.8 aperture and fast auto-focus, 8-megapixel front camera, LTE Cat. 6 support, dual-SIM support, and a 3,000 mAh battery.

Free Software/Open Source

• You’ve done it: you’ve taken your own personal utility, library, or web application and placed it on GitHub as free and open source software for all the world to see.

• Maybe you wrote this software to fill a personal need, or maybe you’ve always hoped that it would reach more people. One thing’s certain: it’s always been yours, and yours alone—but the moment you pushed that code for the first time, your baby left the nest. What comes next is up to you.

• The nominations for the Open Source Initiative board of directors closed on February 15th and we are delighted to share our list of candidates with you!

• We are excited that so many people want to take part, and as such would like to introduce you to the candidates before voting opens on February 29th.

Web Browsers

• Short Bytes: A coder, known as Fabian on GitHub, has created x86 architecture based emulations that allow you to run Windows 98, Linux, KolibriOS etc. inside your browser.

Mozilla

• One thing that I have learned from working in the open source community is that you must never hesitate to ask for help. People are really very friendly, and finding the right mentor can prove to be immensely helpful in your life. Contributing to open source projects will only help you, so don’t waste too much time thinking about it. Take a leap of faith and dive into the community behind your favorite open source product. If you’re specifically interested in acquiring technical skills, there’s nothing a commit a day can’t solve! It also enhances your e-karma.

• Strap yourself in, this is a long post. It should be easy to skim, but the history may be interesting to some. I would like to make the point that, for a web rendering engine, being embeddable is a huge opportunity, how Gecko not being easily embeddable has meant we’ve missed several opportunities over the last few years, and how it would still be advantageous to make Gecko embeddable.

• In the past week, the conversation about encryption has reached fever pitch. Encryption, Apple, and the FBI are in headlines around the world. And lively discussions about security and privacy are taking place around kitchen tables, on television, and in comment sections across the Internet.

• Mozilla believes the U.S. government’s demand for Apple to circumvent their own security protections is a massive overreach. To require Apple to do this would set a dangerous precedent that threatens consumer security going forward. But this discussion is an opportunity to broaden public understanding of encryption. When people understand the role encryption plays in their everyday lives, we can all stand up for encryption when threats surface — this key issue related to the overall health of the Internet becomes mainstream.

SaaS/Big Data

• Yet another tech giant is sharing its artificial intelligence know-how with the world. Today Yahoo published the source code to its CaffeOnSpark AI engine so that anyone from academic researchers to big corporations can use or modify it.

• Yahoo today is releasing some key artificial intelligence software (AI) under an open-source license. The company last year built a library called CaffeOnSpark to perform a popular type of AI called “deep learning” on the vast swaths of data kept in its Hadoop open-source file system for storing big data. Now it’s becoming available for anyone to use under an open-source Apache license on GitHub.

• Google has announced that its Cloud Dataproc service — a managed tool based on the Hadoop and Spark open source big data software — is now generally available. Google Cloud Dataproc, because it leverages both Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, promises to be in strong demand, especially at enterprises.

• “When analyzing data, your attention should be focused on insights, not your tools,” Google notes. “Often, popular tools to process data, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, require a careful balancing act between cost, complexity, scale, and utilization. Unfortunately, this means you focus less on what is important — your data — and more on what should require little or no attention — the cluster processing it. We created our managed Spark and Hadoop cloud service, Google Cloud Dataproc, to rectify the balance, so that using these powerful data tools is as easy as 1-2-3.”

Databases

• Governments across the world are increasingly turning to Postgresql, an open source relational database management system, according to a press release by Enterprisedb. The company provides commercial services for the database system, and reports a hefty growth of its government contracts.

• What changes you can expect? First of all it supports all current PHP versions. It also performs way better – in my tests loading of mo file is 4-5 times faster and memory consumption went down about 10 percent. You can additionally use object API instead of traditional function based.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice typically basically has just one gtk widget per top level window and draws everything you see itself, using the gtk themeing apis to make what it draws look like they do in gtk.

• But there are some truly native gtk elements. Some of them new.

• For LibreOffice 5.1 we created a playlist of short videos highlighting some of the new features in action. At the time of writing, these videos have been viewed over 50,000 times in total. Here’s the breakdown:

• Calc: 15,346 Impress: 12,275 Writer: 25,229

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• TIP will bring together telecommunications companies, infrastructure providers, system integrators and other technology companies, according to Jay Parikh, Facebook’s global head of engineering and infrastructure.

BSD

• Thanks to the fabulous open-source graphics driver porting work done by François Tigeot, the DragonFlyBSD kernel’s i915 Intel DRM graphics driver is up to a comparable state to the code ported from the Linux 4.2 kernel.

• Just months ago the i915 DragonFlyBSD graphics driver was years behind the upstream Linux kernel while in recent times a lot of headway has been made where the Intel graphics driver on this BSD operating system is just a few releases behind the upstream state.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• On Tuesday, representatives of four FOSS friendly agencies testified before a New York City committee considering bills that would mandate the use of FOSS by city government.

• “Free and open source software has many advantages over proprietary software,” Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, testified Tuesday before the New York City Council Committee on Contracts. “Studies show that, over time, free software is safer from vulnerabilities. Free software is auditable — security and functionality can be verified upon inspection. Anyone can independently assess the software and its risks. Developers can more easily and quickly repair discovered vulnerabilities or bugs (and bugs are very common in all software – the Software Engineering Institute estimates that an experienced software engineer produces approximately one defect for every 100 lines of code). Free software removes dependence on a single party, as anyone can make changes to their version of the software. And municipalities can hire any contractor on the open market to work on the software.”

• ARM only announced the Cortex-A32 ARMv8 32-bit processor yesterday but already they’ve gone ahead and landed the support inside the GNU Compiler Collection.

• It’s not an entirely big surprise that there is already compiler support baked for the Cortex-A32 considering this is just an ultra power efficient cut-down version of the ARMv8 that runs in 32-bit mode. The ARMv8 64-bit support has been maturing in both GCC and LLVM/Clang for quite some time already. However, it’s nice to see the quick turnaround time by ARM on getting the support upstream.

• new features:

• Conditional Directives on Chords/Notes Create editions with/without ornaments, fingerings … Conditional items are highlighted in the display Object Inspector reports on them Enhanced Object Editor Set Conditional Behavior Initiate Search/Edit from Object New Commands Gaps in Staffs Enharmonic transpositions of passages Generating Parts Part naming extended to multi-staff instruments

Public Services/Government

• The Green party in Munich says the city’s use of the Linux operating system is wrongly being blamed for all IT issues. “The problem is usually not the operating system, but something else”, says Florian Roth, leader of the city’s Green Party. The party wants to increase support for the city’s central IT department, to bolster the open source strategy.

• The government of Portugal has opened another 20 Espaços do Cidadão (Citizen Spots), in town halls across 8 of its 18 districts. There are now almost 200 such eGovernment service access points across the country. Here citizens can go online to renew driving licences, apply for permits and request official documents.

Openness/Sharing

• One of the major issues with the Zika virus is that so little is known about it. That means that a lot of research has to be done very quickly.

• The Zika virus is at the heart of a global health emergency. It became a global health emergency after outbreaks began in 2015, and has possible links to birth defects. When the virus was first discovered in the late forties, human infections had been observed as early as 1952 according to Wikipedia.

• Municipalities and public service organisations in Belgium’s Flanders region are exchanging their eGovernment practices and ICT policies. Many municipalities are considering an overhaul of their websites in order to improve eGovernment services, reports the region’s ICT Organisation (V-ICT-OR). Additionally, local administrations are looking for solutions to manage meeting minutes, and want to boost IT security, V-ICT-OR says.

Open Data

• The National Health Service in Portugal (SNS – Serviço Nacional de Saüde) has set up an open data portal whose goal is to provide a dashboard to monitor the health of Portuguese people. Called Transparencia (Transparency), the portal gathers operational data generated or collected by the agencies of the national health system.

Open Access/Content

• So here’s a pleasant surprise. President Obama has nominated Carla Hayden as the new Librarian of Congress, and at a first glance, she looks perfect for the job. The job is super important for a whole variety of reasons, including that the Librarian of Congress controls the Copyright Office (more on that in a bit…). The former Librarian of Congress, James Billington, was really bad. He apparently was mostly focused on hobnobbing with rich people in fancy places around the globe than doing anything useful. A report by the Government Accountability Office found a massive leadership vacuum with Billington when it came to technology issues, noting that he basically ignored technology entirely. When Billington announced he was retiring, the Washington Post reported that employees were absolutely elated…

Leftovers

Science

• To solve the problem of high energy consumption by the Wi-Fi enabled devices, researchers have created a new kind of efficient Wi-Fi that uses 10,000 times less power.

Security

• FireEye security wonks Abdulellah Alsaheel and Raghav Pande have twisted the barrels of Microsoft’s lauded EMET Windows defence gun 180 degrees and fired.

• The result of their research is p0wnage of the enhanced mitigation toolkit so that instead of defending Windows it attacks it.

• The attacks the pair found affect older versions of Windows which rely on EMET for modern defences like address space layout randomisation and data execution prevention.

• Security is an important topic on everyone’s minds in today’s highly-technological world. With all of the security news that pops up on almost a daily basis, trying to be aware of the choices you make can make a big difference. Linux is often touted as the most secure operating system you can get your hands onto, but is this reputation deserved?

• With the fresh news of a compromise in the Linux Mint distribution images, I thought I would take a few minutes to explain how Fedora handles image downloads and what you can do as an end user to make sure you have the correct and official Fedora images.

• Wireless computer mice give users the convenience of not having to deal with cumbersome wires and cables. But they might also open up the door for malicious hackers to get a way into their computers, researchers warn.

• A flaw in the way several popular models of wireless mice and their corresponding receivers, the sticks or “dongles” that plug into a USB port and transmit data between the mouse and the computer, handle encryption could leave “billions” of computers vulnerable to hackers, security firm Bastille warned on Tuesday.

• A CHILD MONITORING COMPANY is mad as heck at a security researcher for highlighting a security problem without asking its consent first. Or something.

• The company in question is uKnowkids and its target is a chap called Chris Vickery, a security researcher. His crime? Security research.

• uKnowKids.com is a kind of virtual Mary Poppins. It does not put children in danger, like Mary Poppins, but it does look out for them and keep an eye on what they do by monitoring their communications and stuff.

• We imagine that in some circumstance it has got some children in trouble. This week it is getting an older person in trouble, and accusing a security researcher of hacking as opposed to security researching.

• Spammers and malware pushers are still heavily abusing URL shortening services, messaging security firm Cloudmark has reported in its 2015 annual security report (reg required). The popular Bit.ly service has recently become a particular favourite with criminals with 25,000 individual malicious links run though that service every single day in recent times. This sounds alarming but it gets worse. According to the firm, this meant that an extraordinary 97 percent of Bit.ly links now led to malicious websites.

• Google and security firm Red Hat have discovered a critical security flaw in the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) that affects a library in a universally used protocol. This means an attacker could use it to infect almost everything on the entire internet. With the flawed code spread far and wide, it will likely take years of effort to patch the bug.

• Security vulnerabilities at the Linux Mint project highlight substantial issues with the popular Linux distribution, and the difficulty of maintaining a Linux distribution as a hobbyist project.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Forest fires spread over 500 acres in the north of the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Borneo island have raised air pollution to hazardous levels on Monday in areas close to the inferno, government data showed.

• Newly released documents show that, in back-room talks, European officials assured ExxonMobil that the pending US-EU trade agreement would force the removal of regulatory “obstacles” worldwide, thus opening up even more countries to exploitation by the fossil fuel empire.

• Heavily redacted documents pertaining to an October 2013 meeting, obtained by the Guardian and reported on Tuesday, reveal that then-trade commissioner Karel de Gucht met with two officials from ExxonMobil’s EU and U.S. divisions to address the benefits of the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

• As the Guardian notes, the meeting was held at a time when countries in South America and Africa were “tightening regulations on fossil fuel companies for the first time in a decade, despite ExxonMobil’s ambitions to open up shale gas fracking wells in North Africa, Asia and South America.”

Finance

• Google’s controversial tax deal cannot be properly assessed by MPs because of secrecy surrounding the negotiations, according to a report by parliament’s public spending watchdog.

• But the deal to pay £130m in back taxes for a 10-year period seems “disproportionately small when compared with the size of Google’s business in the UK”, the public accounts committee has found.

• Go back and work on this agreement? Oh really? Now, this is the same Paul Ryan who (as he mentions in the interview) was the driving force behind the so-called fast track or “Trade Promotion Authority.” Though Ryan totally misrepresents what that means. He claims that the TPA gave the USTR “the ability to go negotiate trade agreements.” That’s hilariously not true. After all, the USTR has been negotiating the TPP for more than half a decade at this point, and only got Trade Promotion Authority in June. All Trade Promotion Authority REALLY does is ties Congress’s hands so that it can no longer ask the USTR to go back and renegotiate sections, because the whole point of the TPA is that it limits Congressional authority to a simple yes or no vote — rather than allowing it to actually debate and challenge specific aspects of the agreement.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Tesla recently sent a letter to “Tesla Owners and Enthusiasts” living in the Indiana area asking for their help to defeat a piece of legislation introduced by state lawmakers that would prevent auto manufacturers from selling cars directly to their customers. Tesla has almost exclusively sold vehicles to customers through direct vehicle sales, and it says if the bill is signed into law it would revoke Tesla’s permission to sell vehicles from its existing storefront in Indianapolis.

Censorship

• The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), joined by dozens of artists, dramatists and theater advocates, released a statement criticizing the Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center (JCC)’s decision to cancel a production of Julia Pascal’s Crossing Jerusalem midway through its run, after complaints that it was “inappropriate and troublesome.”

• The National Coalition Against Censorship has sent out a letter criticizing the recent decision of the Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center in Miami to cancel a production of Julia Pascal’s play “Crossing Jerusalem” in the middle of its run.

• As an avid sports fan, and more specifically an avid baseball fan, I can still remember the advent of home-printed tickets. My reaction was perhaps more elation than what was warranted, but having spent years going up to the Wrigley Field box office with my father and later my friends, the idea of being able to purchase tickets online and then print them at home in order to bypass the lines and go directly to the gate was exactly the kind of technological progress that, albeit small, meant something to me.

• Starting next week, Canadian cable providers will be forced by the government to do something inherently and violently foreign to them: offer cheaper, more flexible cable bundles. In March of last year, Canadian regulator CRTC announced it would be combating high TV prices by forcing cable operators to offer cable channels a la carte, or so-called “skinny bundles” of cheaper cable channels, by December 2016. The CRTC’s full ruling declared that by March 2016, all Canadian TV providers must at least provide a $25, discounted skinny bundle, letting users pick and choose individual channels beyond that.

• Actor Adam Baldwin of the TNT show “The Last Ship” has officially jumped off the ship known as Twitter. Coming after Twitter has announced a ‘Trust and Safety Council’ and allegedly started “shadowbanning” accounts…

• Amir Houmansadr, an assistant professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, received a five-year, $581,458 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation earlier this month.

• After being banned from making any appearances on CNN after attacking its contributors using racist and vulgar language, Roger Stone denounced the network for its “Soviet style censorship.”

• “I am politically incorrect but it appears CNN is bowing to pressure from the Clinton apparatus — not very appropriate for an supposedly unbiased news network,” the former Donald Trump advisor told Politico.

• Last summer, our writer Tim Cushing put together something of an omnibus post of stupid DMCA takedown requests, none of which probably deserved their own unique post. One of the individuals he highlighted later went on something of a wacky defamatory crusade against Tim, posting blatantly false information about him, and claiming that Techdirt is actually owned by some telecommunications company I’d never even heard of, that is also a patent troll, or something. But now another entity in that very same post has also decided it’s upset about the post, and has taken a slightly different strategy.

Privacy

• This is the same Art Coviello who said anonymity is the “enemy of privacy.” Why? Because it allows bad people to do bad things and get away with it — a sentiment echoed by any number of law enforcement officials and intelligence agency heads.

• Coviello’s timing couldn’t be better. Against the backdrop of the FBI’s efforts to force Apple to help it break into iPhones, Coviello hopes a balanced discussion of the issues may result in workable common ground between parties he feels often “talk past each other.”

• Lots of people, mainly those supporting the DOJ/FBI’s view of the Apple fight, have been arguing that this isn’t a big deal. They’re just asking for one small thing. Other people have tried to examine “what’s at stake” in the case, with a number of the arguments falling into the typical “privacy v. security” framing, or even something around precedents related to privacy and security. However, Jennifer Granick recently wrote a great piece that does a much better job framing what’s truly at stake. It’s not privacy vs. security at all, but rather who gets to set the rules over how software works in an era where software controls everything.

• Dozens of people gathered at the Apple Store in San Francisco this evening to shout their support for the company’s position defending privacy and security in the face of irresponsible government demands.

• The news has been flooded with reactions to Apple’s principled stance in defense of user privacy. But even as Apple opposes the FBI’s demands to undermine the security of its operating system, where is President Obama on the issue of strong encryption?

• On Wednesday, the President’s press secretary said that “the F.B.I. can count on the full support of the White House.” Does that mean President Obama is going to turn his back on strong security for modern tech?

• EFF, Access Now, and a coalition of nonprofit and industry groups launched a public petition calling on President Obama to defend strong encryption and oppose backdoors in September. We used the We The People API, Obama’s preferred petition tool, and quickly surpassed 100,000 signatures.

• President Obama has promised to respond to any We the People petition that receives at least 100,000 signatures. But so far, we’ve gotten only nonresponses.

• The state of California has put companies on notice that they should be following a basic set of 20 information security controls developed by the U.S. government’s top code breakers.

• Many of the 657 data breaches California businesses and agencies reported during the past four years could have been prevented or at least more rapidly triaged had the protections been in place, according to a new state audit.

• “The set of 20 controls constitutes a minimum level of security – a floor – that any organization that collects or maintains personal information should meet,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat, said in the February breach analysis.

• The leak investigation included armed raids on the homes of veteran congressional investigators and agency staff, and ended six years later with the collapsed prosecution of NSA official Thomas Drake.

• It isn’t every day that civil libertarians and national security hawks agree on policy, but the encryption debate has created an unlikely alliance.

• Italy s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it had summoned the US ambassador to Rome over reports of widespread US surveillance of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, among several other European leaders.

• On today’s special episode of Loud & Clear, host Brian Becker is joined for the full hour by former mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson to discuss why he filed a class action lawsuit against former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the National Security Agency.

• A memoir from former NSA director Michael Hayden reveals new details about the controversial U.S. intelligence program that targeted Americans’ private communications.

• It’s not only Apple. Hundreds of technology companies large and small are engaged in a historic battle to determine how much access governments can have to your personal information. This includes Google, Microsoft, and nearly every technology company that has significantly impacted your life over the last two decades.

• There are 1.5 billion searches a day on Facebook, but the vast majority are for people’s names—the kind of search one might surreptitiously conduct after meeting an alluring stranger in a bar. Last October, the company quietly made it possible to search for all public posts on Facebook, not just material posted by friends or pages. Stocky’s team developed the new function, which uses an algorithm to rank and refine trillions of posts from Facebook users. “What we really tried to do was make Facebook a place where you could tap into the global conversation of what was happening in the world,” Stocky said at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters, unwittingly (or perhaps not) trotting out a favorite phrase of executives at rival Twitter. “We really want to basically make Facebook the best place to find what people are saying about something right now.”

• The Danish government’s controversial plan to reintroduce so-called ‘session logging’ received the backing of Danish National Police (Rigspolitiet) Commissioner Jens Henrik Højbjerg, who said the Justice Ministry’s proposal would give police a means of tracking and catching criminals who are now conducting their illegal activities on the internet.

• “Crime and communication is increasingly taking place in cyberspace. But our investigation opportunities are undermined if we do not have the opportunity to get information on internet traffic,” Højbjerg said speaking to Danish broadcaster DR.

• Denmark scrapped the so-called ‘session logging’ in 2014 and the European Court of Justice has previously ruled that the blanket retention of internet usage is illegal.

• The German Interior Ministry has approved for investigative use a spying Trojan developed by the German Federal Criminal Police (a so-called “federal Trojan”). In fact, it could end up being used as early as this week.

• ASUS’s insecure products are no different than countless others offered by competitors. Far too many companies view end user security as something that can always be patched into existence after the first big breach. Why the FTC has chosen to hang ASUS rather than any number of other misbehaving tech manufacturers isn’t clear, but it could be this is just the first in a wave of settlements.

• The FTC isn’t just unhappy about ASUS’s bogus security claims. It’s also unhappy with the company’s response time. The complaint notes ASUS failed to act quickly in response to reported security holes.

• The U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing additional court orders that would force Apple to help federal investigators extract data from twelve other encrypted iPhones that may contain crime-related evidence, according to The Wall Street Journal.

• The FBI keeps insisting that it’s legal fight with Apple is not about the precedent and not about using the tragic incident in San Bernardino as an emotional plug to break down strong encryption. And yet… now it’s come out that even before going to court, federal prosecutors from the DOJ went to the families of those killed in the San Bernardino attacks and asked them to file an amicus brief of support with the court…

• The war between Apple and the FBI is a PR war. And it’s one that the FBI has fought well, from its initial selection of the battleground (a fight over access to a dead murderer’s government-owned iPhone) to the choreographed intervention of the relatives of the victims of the San Bernadino shootings – who were contacted by the FBI for support before the dispute even became public, according to Reuters.

• They lie like a rug.

• The folks over at Pew Research usually do pretty good work, but they decided to weigh in on the Apple / FBI backdoor debate by asking a really dumb poll question — the results of which are now being used to argue that the public supports the FBI over Apple by a pretty wide margin.

• On Friday, we debunked a key FBI talking point, which the press has been parroting, that Apple had helped the FBI in 70 previous cases, and only changed its mind now for “marketing” or “business model” reasons. As we explained, that’s not even remotely true. In the past, Apple helped out because it had access to the content, and so it got it and turned it over following a lawful search warrant/court order. In this case, the situation is entirely different. Apple does not have access to the content that the FBI wants, and is now being forced to create a backdoor — build an entirely revamped operating system — that undermines some key security features found on iPhones today. That’s quite different.

• The Dutch government has started pilots with electronic identification cards and smart phone apps, to allow online identification for eGovernment services. The first eID card was handed out in mid-February, marking the official start of both pilots. The eID pilots are intended to increase security, and prevent identity fraud.

Civil Rights

• It’s still early days but it appears from the latest Wikileaks document release that an innocent Irish citizen, Bernard Doyle, was targeted by the NSA. Doyle is currently the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “Regional Representative for Central Asia.”

• Over the years, the nation’s courts have moved towards recognizing First Amendment protections for citizens who film public servants carrying out public duties. Nearly every case has involved a citizen arrested for filming police officers, suggesting far too many law enforcement entities still feel their public actions deserve some sort of secrecy — even as these agencies deploy broader and more powerful surveillance tools aimed at the same public areas where no expectation of privacy (under the Fourth Amendment) exists.

• Earlier this month, the FBI quietly launched “Don’t be a Puppet,” a website aimed at teachers and students, ostensibly to teach them how to spot and counter the “radicalization” of young people. It wasn’t a hit. One tech writer called it an “awful, out-of-touch 90s educational game.” Another headline read, “The FBI made a video game and it sucks.”

• From the landing page, players set off through five stages: What is Violent Extremism? What are Known Violent Extremist Groups? Who Do Violent Extremists Affect? Why Do People Become Violent Extremists? How Do Violent Extremists Make Contact? As players successfully answer questions, they get to cut the puppet strings and ultimately earn an “FBI certificate” upon completion.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Tech titans have drawn good press in recent months. In December, Mark Zuckerberg pledged his and his wife’s fortune to charity – sort of. Apple chief Timothy Cook is now standing up to the U.S. government’s request to unlock a killer’s cellphone, which is has been a public relations hit as well as the right thing to do. If you were reading the news superficially, it might look like the tech community had turned into a big, friendly non-profit devoted to changing the world for the better.

• But developments overseas reminds us that these companies – whatever their mix of good and bad qualities– are self-interested, for-profit corporations that aim to make money by expanding markets. And not everyone is eager to buy what they’re selling.

• Twenty years ago, large chunks of the Web went dark. These sites were changing their layout, or in some cases even going offline, to protest the Communications Decency Act, signed on February 8 by President Bill Clinton as Title V of the landmark Telecommunication Act. By some estimates, more than 5% of sites online on the early Web took part.

• The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was embroiled in controversy: as a direct response to the new law, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow wrote his influential Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace; EFF kicked off the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech campaign that became one of the most iconic images of online activism of the era.

• It’s only against that background that the largest show of online activism to that point—a web blackout campaign, known variously as “Turn the Web Black,” “Great Web Blackout,” or the “Black World Wide Web protest”—could be anything but center stage. Even if it’s not as widely remembered, though, the CDA blackout has made itself part of the DNA of online protest, and its influence can be seen on major recent protests, such as those against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

• At 25 years old, EFF is one of the few digital rights groups to have participated in the CDA protests first-hand. To mark the 20th anniversary of the passage of that law—and the protests against it—we pulled some of the most interesting material from the archives of that era.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Did you know that Coca-Cola has been attempting to get a trademark on the word “zero” for beverages in the United States for well over a decade? Yes, the most well-known soft-drink maker, which sells a product called ‘Coke Zero’, first filed for a trademark on the single word in 2003. The fight has been ongoing ever since, with Dr. Pepper Snapple Group opposing the trademark, because, well, lots of other beverage companies use that common word and because of course it did. Oddly, we covered a trademark case a few years back in which Coca-Cola was on the receiving end of a trademark suit over its use of the word, that time from a water company that offered a product it had named ‘Naturally Zero.’

Copyrights

• The Copyright Office has decided to take a stance on copyright law that requires two slightly odd things. First, it requires ignoring what the Copyright Act actually says and then, separately, it requires pretending that the law says something that it clearly does not say. That’s pretty incredible when you think about it.

• For quite some time now there have been ongoing legal fights in the copyright world over whether or not there’s a “making available right” in copyright law. The issue is actually super important. 17 USC 106 lays out the only six exclusive rights granted to rights holders under copyright.

• Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is stepping up its game when it comes to scaring would-be pirates. While people sharing files in public using BitTorrent are the group’s usual targets, BREIN has just sent scary emails to people who thought they were sharing eBooks privately using Dropbox.

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