● 02.26.16

● Links 26/2/2016: Open-O Partnership, GPL Violations in ZFS/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• As an alternative operating system, Linux has always found ways to co-exist with Windows. However, I realized recently that I had gone four years without any installation of Windows in the house. I had to wonder: is Windows support even necessary in 2016?

• I haven’t written about using my Bluetooth devices on Linux in quite some time. That is good, because it means that they are all just working so there is not a lot to write about. But there have been some interesting and useful developments in Bluetooth support for various Linux distributions recently, so I think it will be useful to run through a survey of Bluetooth devices and Linux distributions.

• I got an order confirmation almost immediately with an estimate of 2 to 6 days to ship. Soon after that I got a note stating that the Wild Dog was running toward the latter end of that range. I figured I could just use my laptop until the new machine arrived if necessary, and I waited.

• While I was waiting, I still continued to use my old desktop. I noticed the rebooting issue happened toward the end of the day. It finally dawned on me (I’m a little thick) that it might be heat related. I crawled under the desk to find that the power supply fan wasn’t working. I ordered a new one of those to see if it would help.

Server

• Most of the internet is powered by Linux servers, so it’s not surprising that they’re increasingly a target for attack. In particular recent attacks have focussed on using compromised systems to distribute malware to other systems.

• Many Linux systems rely on traditional signature-based threat detection which leaves them vulnerable to zero-day attacks. Endpoint security company SentinelOne is announcing a new solution aimed at protecting enterprise data centers and cloud providers from emerging threats that target Linux servers.

• If there was ever a question about how Docker, the open source container virtualization company, planned to generate revenue from the enterprise market, it was answered this week. The company has rolled out a new platform, Docker Datacenter, as a commercial product for on-premise or private cloud container deployment.

Kernel Space

• There was a time when the Linux Foundation was just about the Linux operating system. Those days are now long past. The Linux Foundation today leads a growing list of collaborative projects leveraging the open-source model to build technologies.

• At the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona yesterday, the Linux Foundation announced its latest effort, dubbed Open-O, which aims to be an Open Orchestrator for Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

• Sony is trying to convince the community that their open Xperia devices can be used in a number of interesting ways, and they are adding support for them in the mainline Linux kernel.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman just announced earlier today, February 26, 2016, the general availability of the third maintenance release in the stable, long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.

Applications

• After being in development for the last five months or so, the Calamares 2.0 graphical installer for Linux kernel-based operating system has finally reached maturity and is now available for all OS vendors.

• Calamares 2.0 is a major release, and it introduces a significant amount of new features and improvements, among which we can mention revamped partitioning functionality, which has been rebased on the library used by KDE Partition Manager.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The latest in the Deponia series is heading to Linux on the 1st of March named Deponia Doomsday. The previous games looked great, and they are pretty popular.

• Remember: The data is for the month before, so February on the graphs are actually January’s data.

• Shadwen looks like it might turn a few heads at release, and it certainly seems like it could be interesting to me. There is now a demo available to try out.

• Arehandoro sent word in about Totem Teller, and wow it looks really something. Totem Teller is an open world adventure. The player explores, repairs and retells a broken story. Uncover lost characters and hidden things. Truth is in the Telling.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Qt Company announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Qt 5.6 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GTK+ development team has been quite busy this week, and they have recently published two new releases of the cross-platform and open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.

• Nautilus developers have pushed a final major update for the 3.20 branch of the application, and they are preparing for the launch of the stable version.

• The popular Nautilus file manager has just received its first Beta build towards the major 3.20 milestone that will be unveiled this Spring as part of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

• Hello all,

• We would like to inform you about the following: * GNOME 3.19.91 beta tarballs due * String Freeze

• Tarballs are due on 2016-02-29 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.19.91 beta release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.19.91. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

Distributions

• Due to circumstances outside of our control the Bodhi Forums are temporarily offline. We are working to bring them back to working order as soon as possible.

New Releases

• The team behind Tiny Core Linux, one of the smallest distributions of GNU/Linux on the market, proudly announced the release of Tiny Core Linux 7.0, which users can now download from the official channels.

Ballnux/SUSE

• openSUSE Chairman Richard Brown informs us today about the fact that the new hardware sponsored by SUSE has been all set up, and it is now fully functional for producing more snapshots for the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling OS.

• Today in Linux news openSUSE’s Tumbleweed is back up and rolling thanks to two new Intels. The Bodhi project suffered a glitch in their forums today causing downtime but “little to no lost content.” Bryan Lunduke interviewed nameless faceless members of the Tails team and SFC posted that including ZFS in Ubuntu does violate the GPL. John P. Mello Jr. has “the downside of Linux popularity” and Bruce Byfield looks back at the career of GNOME founder Miguel de Icaza.

• openQA workers that keep Tumbleweed tested and rolling have almost been replenished.

• The new hardware can run more workers and is newer, bigger and faster, which increases the speed of openQA testing. One of two Intel E5-2630 v3 is partially running while the other has yet to be integrated into the openSUSE infrastructure. Each machine has 8 cores with 16 threads for a total of 16 cores of 32 threads when both machines become fully functional. The new hardware has each have 256GB of RAM and 400GB Intel NVMe SSDs.

Red Hat Family

• Working in teams will naturally foster differences of opinion—and that’s a good thing. Diverse opinions help ensure all ideas are discussed, problem areas are identified, and the focus of the task at hand is in the right place.

• However, things are a little different in the open source world. Open source contributors are passionate—they often give things their all and as such usually have their personalities ingrained in what the do. This happens in the outside world too, but there’s a tendency for contributors to be more passionate about something they’re doing in their hard-earned free time.

• That might sound strange. But to understand where I’m coming from, you should start by reading The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance​, Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst’s manifesto on corporate culture and the new leadership paradigm. In this book, Jim (with a little help from other Red Hatters) explains the difference between conventional organizations (a “top-down” approach, with decisions coming down from central command to employees motivated by promotion and pay) and open organizations (a bottom-up approach, with leaders focused on inspiring purpose and passion so employees are empowered to be and do their best).

• The group worked out on the stock recommendations given by analysts in the First Call poll. Further, it is possible that the company may register per share earnings of $0.500 in the near-term quarter and $1.860 for the ongoing fiscal. The market cap of Red Hat, Inc. Common Stock was recorded at $12.07B after the stock closed at $66.095 in last trading day.

• Analysts await Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) to reports earnings on March, 23. They expect $0.31 EPS, up 3.33% or $0.01 from last year’s $0.3 per share. RHT’s profit will be $56.66 million for 53.65 P/E if the $0.31 EPS becomes reality. After $0.31 actual EPS reported by Red Hat Inc for the previous quarter, Wall Street now forecasts 0.00% EPS growth.

• Red Hat shares jumped as much as 1.5%, breaking away from its downward trajectory following Salesforce’s earnings call. Red Hat stock has lost approximately 21% since the start of FY16 on the back of broader market sell-off led by weak spending in the cloud market. However, the company managed to post solid results in its last quarter after which several analysts raised their estimates on it. Cowen & Company raised its rating on the stock from Market Perform to Outperform, citing growth on multiple fronts.

Debian Family

• Mozilla and Debian have finally moved past their disagreements, and Iceweasel is going back to the original name of Firefox.

• Canonical is no longer the only company that wants to converge Linux-based platforms across desktop and mobile devices. Intel has now gotten into the game as well with an Android OS that can also run a desktop Linux software stack when plugged into an external display.

Derivatives

• Tails developers have announced earlier, February 25, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Tails 2.2 amnesic incognito live system.

• Tails – a Debian-based Linux distribution focused on privacy and online anonymity – recently released its “2.0” update. I reached out to the Tails press team to ask them a few questions, the full answers to which I am including below.

• Interestingly, I’m not entirely certain exactly who I was talking with. I know I was communicating with the official Tails Press mailing list but to whom… I haven’t the foggiest. Here’s what happened when I asked the question directly:

• Lunduke: “Any names that you’d like to be associated with the press list in the article? Or are your names top-secret? :)”

• Tails: “Many of our names can be seen on our development mailing list, but we don’t think that any name in particular is relevant for this interview.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After winning the “Best of MWC” award from Trusted Reviews, Canonical today announced on its social networking accounts that the company behind Ubuntu Linux won two more awards during Mobile World Congress 2016.

• In a very lengthy article published recently, Canonical’s Lead Designer Jouni Helminen informs the world about the latest progress of the Ubuntu convergence, obstacles, challenges, and the road ahead.

• Dell has announced that the Embedded Box PC 3000 Series and 5000 Series, furthering the partnership with Canonical by providing this hardware with Ubuntu.

• Canonical and MediaTek have entered into a partnership, and they want to build multi-purpose, future-proofed home gateways and premium routers.

• A new OpenSSL update has been pushed in the repositories for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

• The Meizu Pro 5 is a sleek looking smartphone, which looks pretty similar to the iPhone 6s Plus with its brushed aluminium body and antenna lines. The body is slightly curved at the edge to make it more comfortable to hold in the hand, and the slightly curved 2.5D glass provides a seamless display-to-body design. In terms of dimensions, it’s pretty big due to the inclusion of a 5.7in display, and measures in at 156.7x78x7.5mm. It’s also fairly lightweight, weighing in at 168g, making it 3g lighter than Apple’s iPhone 6s Plus even with a 0.2in larger display.

• After yesterday’s report on the return of the Descent OS Linux operating system, which we recommend reading in full if you want to get up to speed on what’s going on with the project, the first Alpha build of Descent OS 5.0 has now been released.

• But first, a little background on the distribution, as it is an Ubuntu derivative built around the MATE desktop environment. Therefore, Descent OS 5.0 Alpha has been rebased on the upcoming Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, which received its first Beta release just a few hours ago.

• One of the latest best things that happened this year at MWC (Mobile World Congress) for Canonical and Ubuntu, which took place in Barcelona, Spain, between February 22 and 25, 2016, is the following interview with Mark Shuttleworth.

Flavours and Variants

• We bet that many of you did not even heard about Descent OS, but we here at Softpedia wrote a few articles a few years ago about the Linux kernel-based operating system.

• Softpedia has been informed by Martin Wimpress, the lead developer and maintainer of the Ubuntu MATE operating system, an official Ubuntu flavor, about the general availability of the first Beta build of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS.

• The upcoming Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system just got its first Beta build as part of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Beta 1 release for opt-in flavors.

Devices/Embedded

• Phytec has spun a Linux-supported, 50 x 41mm PhyCore-i.MX7 COM with -40 to 85°C support, also available as part of a sandwich-style PhyBoard-i.MX7 Zeta SBC.

• NXP’s low-power, Cortex-A7 based i.MX7 system-on-chip, which includes a Cortex-M4 MCU for real-time processing and motor control, appears to be heading for the same popularity as the i.MX6. Size matters with an IoT-focused chip like the i.MX, and Phytec has announced the smallest i.MX7 computer-on-module yet.

• Eurotech’s rugged “ReliaGate 10-11” IoT gateway runs Linux on a TI AM3352, offers numerous options, and is supported with an updated ESF 3.3 framework.

• Eurotech, which is known here mostly for its Intel Atom-based Catalyst computer-on modules, has announced a new version of its ReliaGate Internet of Things gateway. The ReliaGate 10-11 runs on a Linux stack based on Yocto Project 1.6 and Linux Kernel 3.14, and is supported by a newly updated, Java-based Everyware Software Framework (ESF) 3.3 for remote IoT device management.

• DAB-Embedded’s wireless enabled “DAB-OWRT-SAMA5” router SBC runs OpenWrt Linux on an Atmel SAMA5D36 SoC linked to an Altera MAX 10 FPGA.

Phones

Tizen

• With an established R&D, there is no stopping from innovations from happening at firms like Samsung. The fact that three of these recent innovations from Samsung had been built on the slowly growing Tizen platform however, gives it a special amount of attention in the Tech community. The three products from Samsung we are talking about here are the Gear S2 smartwatch, SUHD TVs and the unconventional new Family Hub Smart Refrigerator. Samsung have decided to rejoice this moment by working closely with an Artist, Kim Seung-Bae in showing the world what the company means by its innovations and Samsung’s design language in its most recent Tizen based innovations.

Android

• Accompanying the announcement, TRI is switching its OS from Android to Jolla’s Sailfish.

• “We can now confirm that TRI has chosen to drop Android and use Jolla’s Sailfish OS. Sailfish is now running perfectly on the Turing Phone and we have started the final OS software testing phase,” the company announced on its Facebook page.

• Surveillance and privacy concerns have become central themes among mobile users around the world, highlighted by the ongoing spat between Apple and FBI.

• Indeed, TRI’s decision to both use Jolla OS and manufacture in Finland is about the primacy of privacy. Considering Android’s intimate relationship with Google growing security concerns around mobile security, the move speaks volumes.

• Still, I would say that — from what we’ve seen so far — the Moto 360 Sport is the best fitness option so far to run Google’s watch operating system. And that brings us to the price. Amazon is currently offering the device at around $280, which is $20 less than its retail $300. That’s too much, in my opinion, for any Android Wear watch. But it’s not terrible. It’s the same price as the 2nd generation Moto 360, and right around the same price as the Huawei Watch and other 2015 offerings. At this price I would probably just hold off for a while, but even if you don’t the Moto 360 Sport is a solid watch. At the very least, it’s not worse than the regular Moto 360.

Free Software/Open Source

• NASA software engineer Parker Abercrombie is using open source to create a virtual workspace. The benefit of this open source project is that scientists and engineers can visit Mars in a virtual reality environment. While NASA hasn’t yet sent a manned mission to Mars, the virtual environment Abercrombie has made possible using open source is the next best thing.

• The project, called OnSight, enables scientists and engineers to work on Mars using what is known as “mixed reality.” Special headsets equipped with the OnSight software download the latest 3D maps of Mars’ terrain, giving the user a first-person view of the planet, much as if they had landed in a spaceship and were exploring on the ground.

• Read more

• When selecting a font, the decision process involves more than choosing between serif and sans serif: understanding how the font is licensed matters too. Though typographers need to be concerned with their rights to modify and extend a given font, even you as an end user should be asking yourself some questions. Do you have permission to use a font in commercial work, or in a public work at all? Can you even share that font with another person?

• If you’re creating a work you wish to share, then licensing matters to you, and you should understand how open source applies to the world of fonts.

• In this article, I’ll share my technique for leveraging open source contributions to stand out as a great candidate for a job in the technology field.

• No goal can be accomplished without first being set. Before jumping into a new commitment or spending the evening overhauling your resume, it pays to clearly define the traits of the job you’re seeking. Your resume is a piece of persuasive writing, so you have to know your audience for it to reach its full potential. Your resume’s audience is anyone with the need for your skills and the budget to hire you. When editing, read your resume while imagining what it’s like to be in their position. Do you look like a candidate that you would hire?

• Over the last decade or so, many technology companies have begun embracing open source. Many use open source tools to run their own IT infrastructure and websites, some offers products and services related to or built on open source tools, and some are contributing to or supporting open source projects.

• In Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention study, the U.S. Copyright Office extends comment period and asserts that proprietary software is required for comment submission.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Security is paramount to a trusted Internet. Encryption is a critical part of how that trust is made real. The recent events around Apple and the FBI set a dangerous precedent. Our position on these issues is simple: the FBI should not be able to require a technology company to create code that “undoes” years of security enhancements by creating additional vulnerabilities.

SaaS/Big Data

• When it comes to leveraging existing Hadoop infrastructure to extend what is possible with large volumes of data and various applications, Yahoo is in a unique position–it has the data and just as important, it has the long history with Hadoop, MapReduce and other key tools in the open source big data stack close at hand and manned with seasoned experts.

• Yahoo has released CaffeOnSpark, which brings the fruits of two University of California, Berkeley projects together: vision-focused deep learning framework Caffe, and Big Data processing engine Apache Spark.

Databases

• Open source policy initiatives in the United States, Europe, and Asia are transforming government IT worldwide as agencies shift from costly traditional databases to EDB Postgres™

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• A new initiative by Facebook aims to speed the development of wireless networks by promoting more open source network components. The social network announced the launch of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) at Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona this week. Several hardware companies such as Nokia and Intel, as well as wireless providers like Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom have signed on to the project.

BSD

• After answering various calls for presentations to a few upcoming shows, it stands to reason that Tom Petty is right: The waiting is the hardest part.

• Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similiarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Along with our partners at MIT’s Student Information Processing Board (SIPB), we are gearing up for the biggest LibrePlanet ever. Hundreds of people have already registered to attend, and we don’t want you to miss out on your chance to be there.

Licensing

• This post discusses an atypical GPL violation. Unlike most GPL violations Conservancy faces, in this case, a third-party entity holds a magic wand that can instantly resolve the situation. Oracle is the primary copyright holder of ZFS, and, despite nearly eight years (going back to the days of Sun’s control of the code) of the anti-license-proliferation community’s urging, Oracle continues to license their code under their own, GPL-incompatible license. While this violation has many facets, and Oracle did not themselves violate GPL in this specific case, they hold the keys to this particular kingdom and they forbid the Linux community to enter. While there are complexities that we must address, in this context, Oracle could make everyone’s life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand. Nevertheless, until they do, since GPL-incompatible licenses are the root of all GPL violations, combinations of GPL’d code with Oracle’s GPL-incompatible code yield GPL violations, such as the ongoing violation by Canonical, Ltd.

• The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) thinks Canonical, the curator of Ubuntu, has breached the Gnu Public Licence (GPL).

• As the Conservancy explains, Canonical recently announced that Ubuntu 16.04 will “make OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system. Canonical reckons that adding OpenZFS represents “one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time.”

• Software Freedom Conservancy group has issued a statement saying that the recent implementation of ZFS in Ubuntu is actually a GPS violation. The truth seems to be a matter of perspective.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• This article is to reply to some points made by publishers as well as some librarians who don’t like what Sci-Hub is doing to their job now.

• I will start with an article published last wekk by Ernesto Priego Signal, Not Solution: Notes on Why Sci-Hub Is Not Opening Access

• The title is misleading by itself, if not funny. Sci-Hub is not a signal: for many researchers out there in the world, Sci-Hub is the only solution available to access articles. I can support my words by providing letters I received as well as some statistics, but I will do this in future posts. The problem are paywalls, and Sci-Hub is a tool that solves this problem. A signal is when someone talks about the problem of paywalls, like many OA advocates do. What differentiates Sci-Hub from this talk, is that Sci-Hub not talking, but actually solving this problem, providing access to those researchers who need it, including myself.

Open Hardware

• Without being noticed, keyboards have actually become one of the most important tools in our society and economy. There’s at least one in very home, office, store and school: a keyboard is truly universal. That reliance on this clever tool has already led to the development of various forms of ergonomic keyboards: keyboards that decrease the likelihood of developing wrist or hand related injuries, such as RSI. You’ve probably seen them or even worked on one: they tend to have a curve in the middle to more naturally accommodate the wrists. However, Matt Adereth has been working on a far more original model with the help of 3D printing: the Dactyl keyboard, that actually consists of two completely separate, curved keyboard segments.

• To install on an Arduino UNO, fetch the zip file from this GitHub repository, and move each subfolder to your Arduino sketch directory. You’re ready to play along.

Leftovers

• With more than 200 million systems running Windows 10—many of them having upgraded from an earlier version for free—Microsoft has decided it’s time to monetize the lock screen.

• Over the past few days, Windows 10 users have reported having their lock screens taken over by advertisements for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Microsoft started selling the game through the Windows Store last month, in what might be the start of a much bigger push into PC gaming.

• Microsoft hasn’t hid its intentions to use the Windows 10 lock screen as a commercial billboard, having first discussed its plans during last year’s Build developers conference. Now, Microsoft appears to be making good on those promises, with How-To Geek’s Chris Stobing and at least one Reddit user having seen the Rise of the Tomb Raider ads themselves.

• Idiocracy has been a long-cherished sci-fi satire in cult circles, telling the tale of two people who wake up from a cryogenic sleep to find that the country has become a wasteland of anti-intellectualism.

• Now, ten years later, the co-writer of the cult comedy classic, Etan Cohen, thinks that the movie is satire no longer, marveling that his movie has gone from fiction to non-fiction. On Twitter today, Cohen used his movie to perfectly sum up our current political climate.

• The FIFA empire has been slowly crumbling since last May following a string of allegations, investigations and scandals.

• The governing body’s former president Sepp Baltter was handed an eight year ban- reduced to six this week – from all football activities in December, just over a year after Michael Garcia’s initial investigation.

Science

• Updates to BOEM’s Environmental Studies Program Information System (ESPIS) tool, hosted by NOAA Digital Coast, now enable users to search, filter, map, discover, and download more than 40 years of studies and related data that can provide critical information for ocean plans and decisions.

Hardware

• A trio of partner projects based in Europe – Exanest, Exanode and Ecoscale – are working in close collaboration to develop the building blocks for an exascale architecture prototype that will, as they describe, put the power of ten million computers into a single supercomputer. The effort is unique in seeking to advance the ARM64 + FPGA architecture as a foundational “general-purpose” exascale platform.

• There is but a small cadre of scalable parallel file systems and while the list might be small, weighing the relative benefits of each option against the available resources can be a challenge, as Sven Breuner and his HPC admin colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute realized in 2004.

• They were certainly not the first or last organization to labor over the inevitable question of which of these scalable parallel file systems to choose, but they did take an interesting route. Notably, the limited choices have not changed over those years, either—nor have the list complaints about each.

Health/Nutrition

• The Flint water crisis didn’t just happen. It’s been a story decades in the making.

• Cities in America have been on the downswing for many years — deliberate policy on the federal and state level has favored suburbs, and also the preferences of the Boomer generation was to go in that direction too. So, people and money has slowly (or quickly in some cases) filtered out of the cities into suburbia. Also the shift of manufacturing out of America has hit the Midwest very hard (aka the “Rust Belt”). When your city is built for a certain amount of people and then you lose big chunks of your population, it’s hard to make the math work to maintain that infrastructure.

• Anyway, that’s the story on the national level. In Michigan, too, cities and schools have been starved by a “Tea Party” mentality — before the Tea Party even existed. The state has balanced its budget every year, for decades, based on mathematical trickery and from taking funds away from local governments and schools. Proposal A shifted funding from a local level to a pool managed by the state, and that was just too much temptation not to raid. Proposal A also capped the amount of property taxes charged, which puts established cities at an advantage, and helps locations that are not yet built out — because the cap cuts deeper the longer that a house or condo stays within the same ownership.

• So, federal policies and state policies have made it harder and harder for cities to function in Michigan. Flint, especially, after having lost much of its manufacturing base and then many of its people, was struggling.

• Enter the Emergency Manager idea. These problems are systemic and have been building up for many years, and raising taxes is anathema to Republicans, so what do they do? It’s so much easier to fault local government, and come up with an end-around solution to put somebody else in charge who can “make the hard decisions”. Also you want an easy answer and term limits limit who will even be around to see the effects.

• DeepMind, a London-based “neuroscience-inspired AI company” bought by Google in January 2014, has launched DeepMind Health. Its first project is a collaboration with the NHS. The company says: “We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care.”

• Working with leading kidney experts at the Royal Free Hospital in London, DeepMind Health has produced a mobile phone app called “Streams.” It is designed to present “timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury” (AKI). DeepMind says that “AKI is a contributing factor in up to 20% of emergency hospital admissions as well as 40,000 deaths in the UK every year. Yet NHS England estimate that around 25% of cases are preventable.”

Security

• Popularity is becoming a two-edged sword for Linux.

• The open source operating system has become a key component of the Internet’s infrastructure, and it’s also the foundation for the world’s largest mobile OS, Google’s Android.

• Widespread use of the OS, though, has attracted the attention of hackers looking to transfer the dirty tricks previously aimed at Windows to Linux.

• Last year, for example, ransomware purveyors targeted Linux. Granted, it wasn’t a very virulent strain of ransomware, but more potent versions likely will be on the way.

• Researchers have found that the Chinese Baidu browser and apps based on its SDK transmit user’s search terms, GPS coordinates, the addresses of websites visited and device’s MAC or IMEI address to Baidu’s servers without using SSL/TLS encryption or gaining the users permission.

• The Baidu Web browser for Windows and Android exhibits behavior that could easily allow a security researcher to categorize it as an infostealer virus because it collects information on its users and then sends it to Baidu’s home servers.

• In second place was Conficker – first discovered in 2008 – which again allows remote control and malware downloads. Together, these two families were responsible for nearly 40% of all malware attacks detected in 2015.

• Conficker meanwhile continued in its position as King of the Worms, remaining the most prevalent malware type and accounting for 25% of all known attacks during the period. Conficker is popular with criminals thanks to its focus on disabling security services to create more vulnerabilities in the network, enabling them to be compromised further and used for launching DDoS and spam attacks.

• “Thanks for letting us know about this! We’ll get it fixed immediately!” said almost no company ever.

• There’s a long, but definitely not proud, tradition of companies shooting the messenger when informed of security flaws or possible breaches. The tradition continues.

• uKnowKids is monitoring software parents can install on their children’s cell phones that allows them to track their child’s location, as well as social media activity, text messages and created media. As such, it collects quite a bit of info.

• You can add Nissan to the laundry list of companies that aren’t making security a priority in the Internet of Things era. A hacker this week revealed that vulnerabilities in the Nissan Leaf companion app allows an attacker to not only track a driver’s driving behavior, but to physically control the Leaf’s heating and cooling systems. Not quite as severe some other car vulnerabilities that open vehicles to total control, the vulnerability still allows a hacker to cause some notable trouble by running down the Leaf’s batteries, potentially leaving an owner stranded.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• GAROUA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, proclaimed the sign on the concrete and glass terminal building. The designation was something of a misnomer, because only three or four planes land each week in this sleepy outpost in northern Cameroon, near the Nigerian border, all of them domestic flights. The schedule of the flights tends to be unpredictable. The aging jet that had just flown me to Garoua from Douala, for example, had made an unscheduled stop in N’Djamena, the capital of neighboring Chad, so that a government minister could attend a funeral nearby. As a result, the plane had touched down in Garoua five hours late.

• Last Sunday, General Michael V. Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times called “To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare.” After an opening scene of a drone operator double-checking for nearby civilians before taking out two enemy targets, General Hayden makes the case that America’s program of remote targeted killings, while not perfect, is achieving results. It has disrupted terrorist plots and weakened Al Qaida, he wrote. Furthermore, according to intelligence that Hayden himself claims to have seen, public concerns of massive civilian casualties are overblown.

• I have long been disturbed by the New York Times’ coverage of the drone campaigns. I was particularly appalled by the ghastly President-as-Godfather feature published on May 29, 2012. Many conservative pundits have complained that the so-called “liberal” newspaper serves as a mouthpiece for the current administration, which is shameful in and of itself. But how and why did the New York Times become an organ of state-funded propaganda? Whatever happened to fact-based, interest-free, objective journalism?

• MICHAEL HAYDEN, the former director of the CIA and the NSA, has been making the media rounds over the last few days, discussing and defending some of the most emblematic policies of the post-9/11 era in an effort to promote his new book.

• According to its Amazon description, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror delivers “an unprecedented high-level master narrative of America’s intelligence wars.” The title is a reference to Hayden’s philosophy of pushing national security policies to their limits — what he envisions as the edge.

• In a New York Times op-ed published on February 21, former CIA director, Air Force general, and “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror” author Michael Hayden advocated for the continuing use of drone warfare. He urges the public and implicitly, the next U.S. president, to “embrace” this policy for the desired result of “keeping America safe.” After over a decade of the CIA’s and USAF’s unilateral use of this sinister weapons system, a well-documented record of their unintended consequences confronts us, if we have the courage to face it.

• The European Parliament called on the European Union to impose an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia on Thursday, saying Britain, France and other EU governments should no longer sell weapons to a country accused of targeting civilians in Yemen.

• EU lawmakers voted 359 in favour, 212 against and with 31 abstentions for the formal call for an EU arms embargo.

• Although the vote is not legally binding, lawmakers hope it will pressure the European Union to act.

• Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

• The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

• The ICC really has plumbed new depths in the current trial of ex-Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo. I do urge you to read the analysis I wrote at the time of his overthrow. Gbagbo certainly was guilty of crimes, but much more killing and violence was done by current Ivory Coast President, and former Deputy MD of the IMF, Alassane Ouattara. My article was written at the time to counter an extremely misleading one written by Thalia Griffiths, editor of African Energy, and published in the Guardian. I have since discovered more about the role of Trafigura in funding Ouattara’s forces, and the picture becomes ever clearer.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• 43.4% of the peatlands on the carbon-rich peninsula have been drained and converted to acacia plantations, mainly by APRIL, and also by Asia Pulp & Paper.

• Trade chief told oil giant in secret talks that free trade deal could address its concerns over regulations restricting activities in developing countries

Finance

• The Government of Canada appears to be tiptoeing away from a controversial provision in a new trade deal with the European Union at the same time as they’re plowing ahead with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes a similarly controversial provision.

• As we’ve documented extensively, the auto industry has worked tirelessly to erect barriers to Tesla’s market entry. Legacy automakers have been engaged in sustained hysterics specifically regarding Tesla’s direct-to-consumer sales model, which lets customers buy vehicles directly from Tesla online, with limited showrooms to view, touch and test drive the Tesla vehicles. Annoyed by this pesky Californian upstart, the auto industry has frequently tied draft legislation to campaign contributions to ban Tesla’s successful model. Why compete when you can cheat?

• Does your business follow copyright law to the best of its ability? Not good enough. At least that was the case for one long-standing peer-to-peer network, which had its payment processing shut down after more than 14 years of being a loyal PayPal customer.

• Soulseek, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, faced a Kafkaesque battle with PayPal. When its donors were cut off from making payments to Soulseek, the network struggled to figure out what it had done wrong—or even get a response from PayPal to its questions. Thankfully, Soulseek reached out to EFF. We got in touch with Paypal and helped convince them to reinstate the network.

• PayPal did the right thing by restoring Soulseek’s account, and we commend them for that. But we’re also concerned: it’s not scalable for EFF to intervene whenever a law-abiding website is shut off from a payment provider (as we have done with an online bookseller and a short story archive). In addition, we think of Soulseek’s situation as indicative of a larger trend of Web censorship, as websites that haven’t violated any laws are choked of funds—a situation that was disastrous for WikiLeaks and is currently tightening a noose around the electronic neck of Backpage.com.

• There is an alternative. Achieving it requires understanding the dynamics at work and distinguishing between earned and unearned income, between productive and unproductive means of gaining wealth. That is the antidote to the neo-rentier power grab.

• As Techdirt has noted, there is evidence from multiple sources that TPP will produce negligible economic benefits for most of the nations involved. Some governments are clearly well aware of this, because they are desperate to avoid an objective cost-benefit evaluation that would show that claims about TPP’s value don’t stack up. Even given that pig-headed determination to push the deal through, basic prudence would surely dictate that before making all the complex legislative changes required by TPP, countries should at least wait to see whether it’s going to happen.

• When Uber revealed this week it paid just over $403,000 in tax in Australia over a three-year period many small businesses were left scratching their heads.

• The Silicon Valley technology giant with a market valuation of over US$60 billion responded to questions taken on notice at the Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance to disclose the amount of corporate tax it paid in Australia has only slightly increased from $19,387 in 2013, to $134,387 in 2014, and then $249,280 in 2015.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. “That’s easy,” he replied. “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”

• Many Democrats will tell you that there has rarely, if ever, been a more menacing or evil presidential candidate than Donald Trump. “Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory,” pronounced Vox’s Ezra Klein two weeks ago. With a consensus now emerging that the real estate mogul is the likely GOP nominee, it would stand to reason that the most important factor for many Democrats in choosing their own nominee is electability: meaning, who has the best chance of defeating the GOP Satan in the general election? In light of that, can Democrats really afford to take such a risky gamble by nominating Hillary Clinton?

• Bernie Sanders finds himself in a familiar place once again. Far away from home on the campaign trail in South Carolina and Missouri on Wednesday, Sanders is once again fighting off a rush of pundits and political talkers looking to write off his presidential campaign after an upset in Nevada last weekend — but according to one new national poll, Sanders has only been growing more popular all month.

• Perhaps the most important thing Washington will do this year is decide whether to approve President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. But Republicans have already announced their decision: “No way!”

• It’s rich for Republicans to declare pre-emptively that they will not even hold hearings on an Obama nominee, considering that they used to denounce (while their party held the White House) the notion that judges’ nominations shouldn’t proceed in an election year.

• “That’s just plain bunk,” Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said in 2008. “The reality is that the Senate has never stopped confirming judicial nominees during the last few months of a president’s term.” His sense of reality has since changed.

• Here’s quite a scoop from Joe Mullin over at Ars Technica. Apparently, Disney is getting a bit desperate on the whole TPP thing. The company, which has been having a rough go of things because of the next generation not giving a shit about ESPN, decided to take things up a notch. CEO Bob Iger apparently emailed Disney employees asking them to contribute to DisneyPAC, specifically to help Disney pay for lobbyists to push the TPP across the finish line.

Censorship

• Aliran condemns the blockade by internet regulator Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) on news portal The Malaysian Insider (TMI) for purportedly breaching Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998.

• The MCMC apparently was concerned about so-called unverified information being used by certain media outlets which, it claimed, could cause confusion and an unwarranted situation in the country.

• The people must be vigilant over the possibility of the government imposing further censorship after it blocked news portal The Malaysian Insider (TMI) yesterday, Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ) cautions.

• We’ve seen all sorts of problems with the DMCA’s notice and takedown system that is frequently abused. Many companies, either because they want to avoid any risk of liability or because they don’t actually understand the details of the law, resort to a stance of automatically taking down anything upon receipt of a takedown notice, no matter how bogus. Some companies have gotten much better at reviewing the details of takedown notices before agreeing to just take down the content. However, some are going even further in trying to find that right balance. A little over a year ago, we wrote about Github moving to a system whereby the company will notify users of DMCA notices first, and give them a chance to modify the code before it’s taken down.

• In a recently discovered video, ISIS has called on its supporters to target Facebook and Twitter, along with its co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. This video is being seen as a response to the anti-ISIS actions (banning accounts, removing posts) being taken by these social media websites.

• Italian writer Umberto Eco, who became famous following the publication of his debut novel The Name of the Rose in 1980, died on Friday at the age of 84. In the winter 1997 issue of Index on Censorship magazine he wrote about “universal ideas on constraints”.

• Israel’s new military censor, Col. Ariella Ben Avraham, has greatly expanded the scope of her brief in monitoring Israeli media by requiring social media activists and bloggers to submit “security-related material” for approval prior to posting.

• In the past, the Israeli Defense Forces censors have confined themselves to overseeing Israeli mainstream media — TV, radio, and print, conceding the digital realm as a “Wild West” too big and too chaotic to tame. But in order to prove her bona fides as a censor, Col. Ben Avraham has declared far more ambitious plans.

• Chinese authorities have removed a popular gay-themed online drama titled “Addiction” from the streaming sites this week after 12 episodes. Audiences, who will now miss the last three episodes of the drama involving a homosexual relationship between two Chinese teenage boys, are enraged over the censorship.

• There has been a disturbing trend in recent years for student leaders at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom to silence views with which they do not agree. This silencing of dissenting voices by supposedly liberal student union leaders is one of the most illiberal things imaginable. Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of any democracy and is absolutely essential for the flourishing of individual liberty. It is enshrined in legal systems of all freedom-loving countries and underpins all other rights. That is why it is at the very heart of important documents such as the Constitution of the United States and the European Convention on Human Rights. The illiberal student union leaders who seek to silence speakers with whom they disagree would do well to remember the word of Beatrice Evelyn Hall, often mis-attributed to Voltaire, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

• Throughout human history, seemingly minor censorship has been a reliable precursor to more serious crackdowns in free thought and action. Is that what’s happening now? Are “trigger warnings” — the practice of alerting students, or more widely, a listening or watching audience, that certain difficult subjects are coming up — keeping students from facing up to the difficult realities of life?

• While girls may be taking the lead in student newsrooms, they are still scarce in professional newsrooms.

• State funding for favoured media outlets, a generally poor economic situation and self-censorship among journalists pose a real threat to objective public information and make the outlook for the Serbian media worse year by year, a BIRN Serbia report entitled “Soft censorship, Changes in media sector – from bad to worst”, issued on Thursday, writes.

Privacy

• Computer scientists have documented how a large and growing number of websites discriminate against people who browse them using Tor.

• Tor is an anonymity service that is maintained with assistance from the US State Department and designed in part to allows victims of censorship in countries like China and Iran to surf the web. New research show how corporations are discriminating against Tor users, in some cases partly because it’s harder to classify anonymous users for the purpose of pushing ads at them.

• Late last night, the NY Times broke a very troubling story. Rather than finally putting an end to Executive Order 12333, it appears that President Obama is going to expand the power of it in dangerous ways. We’ve written about EO 12333 a bunch of times, but for those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s an executive order signed by President Reagan that basically gave the NSA pretty free rein to collect signals intelligence outside of the US. Because it’s not (technically) about domestic surveillance, what the NSA does under EO 12333 is not subject to Congressional oversight. That is, Congress is mostly as much in the dark as everyone else is on what the NSA is doing overseas. And, as former State Department official John Napier Tye revealed a couple of years ago, for all the talk of domestic surveillance programs revealed by Ed Snowden, the NSA’s real power comes almost entirely from 12333.

• And it has no limitations. Napier noted that the other programs — things like Section 215 (now morphed into whatever the USA FREEDOM Act allows) and Section 702 — were merely used to “fill in the gaps” not covered by 12333.

• The Obama administration is reportedly moving to broaden the current scope of information sharing between the National Security Agency (NSA) and other US intelligence agencies by stripping away existing restrictions on who exactly has access to communications data scooped up by surveillance programmes.

• The change would impact the sharing of both phone calls and email content collected alongside data from satellite transmissions and messages acquired from overseas intelligence agencies, according to The New York Times.

• MORE INTEL SHARING: The Obama administration is poised to expand NSA intelligence sharing “without first applying any privacy protections” for it, the New York Times reports. “The change would relax longstanding restrictions on access to the contents of the phone calls and email the security agency vacuums up around the world, including bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies,” the Times reports.

• Deng Xiaoping, in 1979 – his second year as supreme leader of China – perceived a fundamental truth that has yet to be fully grasped by most Western leaders: Software, if properly weaponized, could be far more destructive than any nuclear arsenal.

• Under Deng’s leadership, China began one of the most ambitious and sophisticated meta- software development programs ever undertaken.

• And what is meta-software? It’s the one science that the entire Western World has entirely overlooked. It is a high level set of principles for developing software that are imperative if a nation is to survive in a cyberwar.

• In the amicus brief filed Wednesday, EFF urges the Fourth Circuit to recognize standing for allegations of harm based on actual past and ongoing surveillance, like those alleged in both Wikimedia and Jewel.

• The foundation has had an ongoing case which has been termed Jewell v NSA, as well as Wikimedia v NSA. There are many irons in the fire in this battle and now the EFF has filed a new amicus brief in the Wikimedia case.

• On Wednesday the organization filed the brief, which urges the court to allow the various parties to continue their pursuit of the NSA for what the EFF terms “illegal surveillance”. This has been filed with the Fourth Circuit Court, which could prove favorable as it allowed Jewell v NSA to go forward after quite a bit of stalling by the government.

• The question Apple is asking the FBI: If you want to hack into our iPhone so bad, why don’t you just have the U.S. National Security Agency do it? That’s what a strongly worded legal brief filed Thursday amounts to. The brief asks a federal magistrate to throw out an order requiring Apple to build special software that would enable investigators to break into the iPhone 5c used by one the San Bernardino shooters.

• In a strongly-worded argument filed in court today, Apple pushed the US government on a question that many observers have been asking: If the FBI wants to hack an iPhone, why doesn’t it just ask the NSA?

• Last week, the company challenged a court order to build malicious software that would allow the FBI to crack the passcode of an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the deceased shooters responsible for the workplace rampage in San Bernardino last December. Apple is being compelled under the All Writs Act, a centuries-old law that allows courts to order anyone to do pretty much anything, as long as it’s meant to help execute a court order and isn’t “unreasonably burdensome.”

• Last November, lawyers defending five real estate investors against auction price-rigging allegations discovered the FBI had planted bugs to capture conversations during real estate auctions on the San Mateo (CA) Courthouse steps.

• The lawyers questioned whether these surreptitious recordings violated wiretap laws, despite them taking place in a public area. As they noted, investors often huddled away from the steps to discuss bidding strategies in “hushed tones” in order to prevent competitors from overhearing them. According to these lawyers, the “hushed tones” were not unlike the closing of a phone booth door — a key element in the Supreme Court’s 1967 Katz decision, which found an expectation of privacy could be found in public areas, provided the person being targeted by recording devices performed certain actions.

• You’ve likely caught wind of the fact that the government and Apple are in the midst of an intense legal showdown in what Edward Snowden has called “the most important tech case in a decade.” The battle is over the legality of a court order compelling Apple to write new software — which the company cleverly referred to as GovOS in a court filing today — that disables several security features that the FBI claims are preventing it from accessing the contents of the work phone of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack. Apple is resisting the order, and the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has committed to going all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary.

• Lest there be any doubt, the ACLU is with Apple on this one, as it was in a similar case several months back. The government’s request is not just about this one iPhone — it has far-reaching consequences for every device, for global cybersecurity, and for basic freedoms at home and around the world. Communications security is critical for the functioning of democracy, and the precedent the government is seeking could do terrible and lasting damage.

• Apple’s motion to vacate the All Writs Act order requiring it to help FBI brute force Syed Rezwan Farook’s iPhone is a stupendous document worthy of the legal superstars who wrote it. To my mind, however, the most damning piece comes not from the lawyers who wrote the brief, but in a declaration from another lawyer: Lisa Olle, Apple’s Manager of Global Privacy and Law, the last 3 pages of the filing.

• Olle provides an interesting timeline of FBI’s requests from Apple, some of which I’ll return to. The most damning details, however, are these.

• Both of Australia’s major political parties have explicitly rejected a Senate motion calling on the Government to support public use of strong encryption technologies, in a move that comes in the wake of the US Government’s demand that Apple provide it with a backdoor for open access to its iPhone handset.

• Yesterday in the Senate, Greens Senator and Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam (pictured) moved a motion dealing with encryption technology.

• The motion called upon the Senate to note that strong digital encryption protects the personal and financial information of millions of people; that encryption is an important tool to prevent identity theft and other crime; that encryption ensures that public interest whistleblowers, journalists and other civil society actors can conduct their activities more securely; and that the Government, through services such as Medicare and Centrelink, and digital platforms such as myGov, depends on encryption to keep client information safe.

• Credit card firm Mastercard has confirmed it will accept selfie photos and fingerprints as an alternative to passwords when verifying IDs for online payments.

• The FBI’s attempt to use an All Writs order to force Apple to help it break into a locked iPhone is seemingly built on a compelling case: a large-scale shooting involving people with ties to terrorist groups. This is exactly the sort of case Comey hoped would help push his anti-encryption agenda forward. Or so it seems.

• But is the case really that “compelling,” especially in the legal sense of the word, which requires the court to weigh the imposition on Apple against the public’s interest in seeing wrongdoers punished/future terrorist attacks prevented?

• And then, just days later, Reuters/Ipsos released a poll of its own, saying… basically the exact opposite, and it’s being spun to claim that there is “Solid support for Apple in iPhone encryption fight.”

• [...]

• And, once again, the poll is basically meaningless when it comes to the actual issues in this case. You can read the details of the questions in the linked document, which shows that, before asking the key question, the pollsters asked a bunch of questions about whether or not people were willing to “give up privacy” to help the US government on a variety of things. And lots of people said no. These questions more or less framed the issue as one about protecting your own privacy — as compared to the Pew poll that framed it more as being about investigating the San Bernardino attacks. Then after all those questions, the poll asks about the specifics of the Apple case, where they frame the question much more broadly than Pew’s.

• Yesterday the NY Times put out a story claiming that Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack, with the underlying thrust being that this is a response to the big DOJ case against it, in which the court has ordered Apple to undermine key security features, which would then enable the FBI to brute force the (almost certainly weak) passcode used by Syed Farook on his work iPhone. But, here’s the thing: prior to that order and its details coming to light, many people were under the impression that the existing iPhones were ones that it “couldn’t hack.” After all, it was offering full disk encryption tied to the device where it didn’t hold the key.

• That also means more officials will be looking at private messages — not only foreigners’ phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the N.S.A…

• In a strongly-worded argument filed in court today, Apple pushed the US government on a question that many observers have been asking: If the FBI wants to hack an iPhone, why doesn’t it just ask the NSA?

• “I’m a friend of everyone, all it takes is that others respect our work”, he said. Daily La Repubblica and sister weekly l’Espresso carried the Wikileaks reports that the NSA listened in on three-time premier Berlusconi as Italy was on the brink of a Greece-style crisis, an economic emergency that eventually forced him from office. Berlusconi has often said he was the victim of an international plot.

• Even after finding out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was wiretapping former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government in Rome, being Washington’s loyal servant, won’t protest against it, Italian journalist Mario Sommossa said.

• Even after finding out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was wiretapping former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government in Rome, being Washington’s loyal servant, won’t protest against it, Italian journalist Mario Sommossa said.

• On Tuesday, WikiLeaks released a batch of classified documents revealing how the NSA was tapping different world leaders, including former Italian leader Berlusconi. Later that day, the Italian Foreign Ministry called US Ambassador John Philips to clarify the uncomfortable findings.

• Brought to light by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA program Upstream intercepts traffic from what has been called the “Internet’s backbone,” a phrase that refers to the major foreign and domestic Internet cables and switches.

• Donald Trump is pretty obviously an incipient tinpot dictator. He’s got the demagogue’s knack for both playing off and encouraging the worst instincts of his supporters, including violent reprisals against scapegoats. He’s got wide support among authoritarians. He’s even got the taste for garish prestige construction projects.

• Today, silicon microchips underlie every aspect of digital computing. But their dominance was never a foregone conclusion. Throughout the 1950s, electrical engineers and other researchers explored many alternatives to making digital computers.

• Climate negotiations between the world’s powerhouses usually take place behind closed doors — unless, that is, the U.S. government is secretly listening in.

• A batch of documents released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday reveal that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spied on communications regarding international climate change agreements, including negotiations in 2008 between United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the NSA had reportedly been spying on for decades. The NSA listened in on a private meeting between the two leaders ahead of a 2009 conference in Copenhagen, and gleaned information about their hopes that the European Union play a major role in climate change mitigation, adding Merkel thought the “tough issue” would involve carbon trading.

• For the first time, mass surveillance opponents can dig into evidence on the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet spying programs, a federal judge ruled Friday.

• Heeding the words of a December 2015 Ninth Circuit ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeffery White lifted a 12-month stay in two related class actions that accuse the government of illegally spying on citizens.

• An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said this is the first time the court has allowed a party to gather evidence on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program.

• The classical music star hailed workers at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham as “heroes”, before singing songs from her repertoire including Habanera from the opera Carmen.

• U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as “top secret” because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.

• The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.

• Well, sort of. The bill is still undergoing massive invasive surgery from entities unwilling to see this revenue stream dry up. Another proposal to scale back the state’s reliance on traffic cam income moved forward after being limited solely to state highways — basically killing off cameras in only two towns along those roads. This more expansive proposal is experiencing whatever the opposite of growing pains are. The exceptions to the proposed rule are turning the bill into a hollow shell of an idea, despite the ban having widespread support from the public.

• About 1.3 million IP addresses—including those used by Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, and Yelp—are turning users of the Tor anonymity network into second-class Web citizens by blocking them outright or degrading the services offered to them, according to a recently published research paper.

• Titled “Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users,” the paper said 3.67 percent of websites in the Alexa 1,000 discriminated against computers visiting with known Tor exit-node IP addresses. In some cases, the visitors are completely locked out, while in others users are required to complete burdensome CAPTCHAs or are limited in what they can do. The authors said the singling out was an attempt by the sites to limit fraud and other online crime, which is carried out by a disproportionately high percentage of Tor users. In the process, law-abiding Tor users are being treated as second-class Web citizens.

• “While many websites block Tor to reduce abuse, doing so inadvertently impacts users from censored countries who do not have other ways to access censored Internet content,” the authors wrote.

• I recently came across a small travel-router that claimed to provide transparent access to the Tor-network. Just make a wifi connection to its Tor access point and all the TCP and DNS traffic is routed through the Tor-network. For a price of only $25 I could not resist and bought one. Over the last month I have been playing with the device and… it worked flawlessly, it was fun!

• So, running the Tor software on cheap router hardware works, but is it a good idea? I believe it is. In this article I will argue that having Tor on the router benefits both security and usability. It opens up new possibilities for expanding the Tor-network and can provide a much needed source of income for the Tor-project.

• A federal judge in Washington has now confirmed what has been strongly suspected: that Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers at its Software Engineering Institute were hired by the federal government to do research into breaking Tor in 2014. The judge also made a notable statement in his court order that “Tor users clearly lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP addresses while using the Tor network.”

• THE US COURTS have confirmed that the Department of Defence is not immune to employing students, and used a gaggle of them from Carnegie Mellon to find a way to crack into privacy alternative Tor.

• We would expect students to be against this kind of thing, but who knows these days? People like a challenge and there are plenty who would support efforts to crack Tor. The Russians are rather keen, for example.

• Rumors that the US government used a university’s research institute to uncloak Tor users began floating around nearly two years ago. In July of 2014, the first hint that something weird was going on at Carnegie Mellon took the form of a hastily-cancelled Black Hat Conference talk on the subject of de-anonymizing Tor users. Carnegie Mellon’s lawyers stepped in and called the whole thing off at the last minute. The thought process at the time was that CMU’s legal team may have been concerned the researchers’ actions had broken wiretap laws.

• In November, Motherboard reported that a “university-based research institute” provided information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that led to the identification of criminal suspects on the so-called dark web. Circumstantial evidence pointed to that body being the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). After a media-storm, CMU published a very carefully worded press release, implying that it had been subpoenaed for the IP addresses it obtained during its research.

• There are all sorts of interesting (and frustrating and challenging) legal questions raised by the FBI’s use of the All Writs Act to try to force Apple to build a system to allow the FBI to hack Apple’s customers. But there’s one interesting one raised by Albert Gidari that may cut through a lot of the “bigger” questions (especially the Constitutional ones that everyone leaps to) and just makes a pretty simple point: the DOJ is simply wrong that the All Writs Act applies here, rather than the existing wiretapping statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or 47 USC 1002, better known by basically everyone as CALEA. CALEA is the law that some (including the DOJ) have wanted “updated” in ways that might force internet companies and mobile phone companies to make their devices more wiretap-ready. But that hasn’t happened.

• Americans inhabit an intricately mapped world. Type “Burger King” into an online box, and Google will cough up a dozen nearby options, each keyed to a precise latitude and longitude.

• But throughout much of the world, local knowledge stays local. While countries might conduct censuses, the data doesn’t go much deeper than the county or province level.

• Take population data, for instance: More than 7.4 billion humans sprawl across this planet of ours. They live in dense urban centers, in small towns linked by farms, and alone on the outskirts of jungles. But no one’s sure where, exactly, many of them live.

Civil Rights

• More than 100,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Europe so far this year – more than eight times the rate seen during the same period in 2015.

• Humanitarian organisations have already raised concern about the “huge” numbers and their implications as border controls continue to tighten on the long route to western Europe and the political will to welcome asylum seekers wanes.

• A federal judge in Philadelphia has ruled that citizens don’t have a First Amendment right to take cellphone videos of police unless they are challenging or criticizing the police conduct.

• U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney ruled (PDF) on Feb. 19 in consolidated cases involving Richard Fields and Amanda Geraci, the Legal Intelligencer (sub. req.) reports. Fields, a Temple University student, took a cellphone photo of about 20 police officers standing outside a house party because he thought it would be an interesting picture. Geraci, a trained legal observer, tried to move closer to see and possibly record an arrest during a protest of hydraulic fracturing.

• An officer handcuffed Fields, searched his cellphone before returning it, and cited him for obstructing the highway and public passages, Fields says. Geraci says an officer physically restrained her to prevent her from recording the arrest. Both sued for alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations.

• The Victorian Government will begin talks to work out Australia’s first treaty with Indigenous people within weeks.

• There were both good and bad developments buried in Obama’s speech and plan to close Guantanamo.

• I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines or read the news on President Obama’s speech this week about the plan he sent to Congress to close the Guantánamo prison. But what’s really going on? And what new developments — good or bad — were buried in the speech and the plan? Here’s our take.

• If the people running prisons know there’s a problem and do nothing about it, is that not manslaughter? Is that not depraved indifference? A person who should be alive is not — all because of the incompetence or apathy of prison administrators. This isn’t an issue of who did what or who broke what law. Every American deserves decent health care. That includes our prisoners.

• Albert Woodfox turned 69 years old Friday. He also was released from prison that day after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, more time than anyone in U.S. history. “Quite a birthday gift,” Woodfox told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, in his first televised interview after gaining his freedom. Woodfox is a living testament to the resilience of the human spirit when subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of solitary. His case also serves as a stark reminder of the injustice that pervades the American criminal-justice system.

• They like automatic cameras that record license plate and location data. They like surveillance cameras aimed at citizens around the clock. They even like dashcams and body cams, provided the released footage is limited to exonerating officers of wrongdoing.

• What they don’t like are cameras that don’t show their side of the story. A camera is inherently trustworthy — much like a confidential informant — until it isn’t, at which point any footage captured is claimed to be devoid of “context” or unable to show “the whole picture.” In some cases, the cameras don’t show anything at all.

• Sure, the footage may have been available at some point. But it’s suddenly missing when the defense needs it.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A set of senior former employees of the World Intellectual Property Organization and their representatives yesterday gave detailed sworn testimony to US lawmakers on what they termed extremely serious misconduct and retaliation at the United Nations agency. A congressional subcommittee chairman told Intellectual Property Watch afterward that based on all they have heard, they believe WIPO Director General Francis Gurry has “gone rogue” and that action against him will begin immediately. The US State Department will be pressed to demand a copy of a newly completed UN investigation of Gurry that apparently has been shared with the Colombian Ambassador in Geneva, Gabriel Duque, who is chair of the WIPO General Assembly this year.

Trademarks

• If you correct for company size, Google is generally pretty decent on intellectual property matters. But, hey, I guess no corporation is perfect. The company whose motto is “don’t be evil” is, of course, very big. And they certainly have a very big legal team. I think it might be time for that legal team to get a quick primer on the wider culture at Google and do a quick review on the company motto, because those lawyers apparently suddenly decided that a news site, called 9to5Google, was suddenly violating Google’s trademark after a scant five full years in operation.

• The threat device Google decided to employ in this case was the news site’s use of Google’s Doubleclick/Ad Exchange network, which the site claims is a decent profit center for 9to5Google. There had apparently been occasional blips of the network not working in the past, all of which had been quickly resolved. Not the case this time, however.

Copyrights

• By now most UK Internet users have gotten used to pirate sites being blocked by their ISPs. However, thanks to HTTPS many subscribers have been enjoying a glimpse of an open and unrestricted web, as several popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents are no longer being blocked by all providers.

• Apparently this has been known in certain circles for quite a while. Some pirate sites have even gone so far as to force users to connect using HTTPS to enable them to enjoy this further advantage of encryption. There’s an interesting discussion in the comments on the TorrentFreak post as to when and why HTTPS connections can get around the court-mandated blocks, and what ISPs might try to do to close this gaping loophole. Even if they do, the other circumvention methods will remain.

• A group of prominent RIAA labels have won a default judgment against piracy site MP3Skull. A Florida court awarded the music companies more than $22 million in damages and issued a permanent injunction which allows the RIAA to take over the site’s domain names.

• Police in Japan have arrested 44 people suspected of being involved in illegal Internet file-sharing. Raids in over 90 locations across the country targeted individuals suspected of downloading and distributing a wide range of content including movies, music, anime, manga and software. If convicted they face fines and up to ten years in jail.

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