● 03.02.16

● Links 2/3/2016: KDE Plasma 5.5.5, SSLv2 Bug

Posted in News Roundup at 5:12 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Such is the spirit of Linux and free software.

• If you’ve booted Linux in the past decade, you’ve used an initrd in order to load the system. Using an init ramdisk (or initram filesystem) is a great way to load a temporary, stripped-down root filesystem during bootup. Eduardo Arcusa Les explains the nuances of initrd and shows how to take advantage of the brilliant concept that makes booting Linux so easy. Using a real-world example, he describes how initrd has been incredibly useful for him and can be for others as well.

Desktop

• The next week I was able to regain about 70 percent of the original files on her hard drive…the ones with no real world substance. That hard drive is the one on which she allowed me to install Linux. Marilyn is now a happy Linux user.

Kernel Space

• Sanitization is not a new idea. Grsecurity has had it for some time. I have some background in working with kernel memory management already so it was a good match of my skills to a missing feature. Given Grsecurity had a working implementation of this already, I elected to use that as a starting point for the first submission. Typically, the upstream community likes features as small separate patches which can be reviewed individually. The Grsecurity patch is not structured this way so getting it in a form which could be submitted involved picking pieces out of the mega patch and turning those pieces into smaller patches. This is similar to doing a backport of a patch and much of the same thought processes apply here as well (i.e. blindly copy pasting will lead to trouble).

• The Linux Foundation-inspired OPNFV Project has taken a new step closer to its ideal of network liberalisation with a new release of its software.

• Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), the telecoms industry’s answer to the Stock Market’s Big Bang, aims to open the market for creating software that runs the multitude of functions within any network. The OPNFV Project aims to create a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform that uses NFV to create telecoms networks that are infinitely more flexible and adaptable than the traditional proprietary systems that locked the software within the rigid backbone of telecoms hardware.

• The Linux Foundation, in partnership with Women Who Code, has announced new steps to diversify the open source community by making it easier for women to participate in open source events.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• The ownCloud 9.0 self-hosting cloud server will be officially released in the coming weeks with numerous new features, some of which we have revealed here during the past few months, but there are some more that will be unveiled soon.

• A good week after the update to Eigen 3.2.8 in our RcppEigen package 0.3.2.8.0, we have another (local) update with RcppEigen 0.3.2.8.1 which should fix another UBSAN issue. This new version in now on CRAN and in Debian. Big thanks once again to Yixuan Qiu for liasing with Eigen upstream, reporting the bug and preparing a PR with the fix.

• I decided to rethink the state of my personal site, and try out some of the new static site generators that are available now.

• To do that, I jotted down a series of things that I want in a static site generator, then wrote a tool to convert my ikiwiki site to other formats, and set out to evaluate things.

• As a benchmark I did a full rebuild of my site, which currently contains 1164 static files and 458 markdown pages.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Out of nowhere, Daedalic decided to release a sequel to their most popular (and often divisive) point-and-click game series Deponia, announcing it just a week before release to the surprise of many. Those who played the original trilogy will know that it ended very definitively and was intended to be a trilogy with a clear beginning, middle and end. Similarly, the ending drew a bit of criticism and left fans hungry for more, so despite being an unexpected surprise, a sequel also makes perfect sense.

• I had a chance to take a look at Overfall, a very interesting mix of rogue-like exploration, RPG and strategy mechanics wrapped up in a funny looking shell.

• I am happy to say that the Linux version seems to work really well, one minor graphical glitch and that’s all I’ve noticed. Turn off Bloom, and you will have a better experience.

• Stardew Valley from ConcernedApe and Chucklefish is a big hit right now, and it’s possible it could come to Linux without enough of a push from Linux gamers.

• While more Steam Linux games continue to appear, the overall market-share still hasn’t been trending upwards in the Linux battle against Windows and OS X.

• The Steam 2016 January statistics showed the Linux gaming marketshare regressing on a percentage basis and that was carried over to February. The February 2016 Steam survey results are now available and it doesn’t show the Linux gaming market-share as a percentage improving at all.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The wxWidgets 3.1.0 release has improvements to HiDPI monitor support, the wxQt branch landed with Qt5-based wxWidgets API support, wxNativeWindow now allows embedding native widgets in wxWidgets programs, and wxGLCanvas has better support for modern OpenGL.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• My image for testing Wayland has had an update.

• Download 883 MB ISO file

• This includes the latest sources from Git master with KWin providing the Wayland compositor and built from a mix of Neon/Ubuntu/Kubuntu packages.

• It’s full of obvious bugs for you to hunt down and help fix. It’s not at all ready for every day use.

• The KDE Plasma team is distribution agnostic which is described in this quote from the KDE neon FAQ,

• The KDE Community has announced that a new iteration of the famous Plasma desktop has been released, bringing the version number up to 5.5.5.

• Kube is built from different components. Each component is a KPackage that provides a QML UI backed by various C++ elements from the Kube framework. By building reusable components we ensure that i.e. the email application can show the very same contact view as the addressbook, with all the actions you’d expect available. This not only allows us to mix various UI elements freely while building the User Experience, it also ensures consistency across the board with little effort. The components load their data themselves by instantiating the appropriate models and are thus fully self contained.

• Jonathan Riddell has updated his spin of (K)Ubuntu that comes with the latest Git code of KDE’s KWin and other packages via the new KDE Neon initiative for making it easy to try out KDE Plasma on Wayland.

• KDE Plasma 5.5.5 was released this morning as the latest monthly point release to the KDE Plasma 5.5 software stack.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We have now entered beta period for GNOME 3.20 and the release notes for Maps are starting to look final.

• This blog post will expand a bit on the official release notes, adding screenshots and some reasoning to most of the items.

• We are happy to announce that GNOME has been accepted to participate in Google Summer of Code 2016. GNOME has participated in the program every year since its inception in 2005 and it’s a pleasure to be participating once again!

• The second beta of the upcoming NetworkManager 1.2 major release is now available.

• NetworkManager 1.2 is bringing improved WiFi scanning, MAC address randomization, WiFi power-save, and many other features. NetworkManager 1.2 should be officially released around the time of GNOME 3.20 and is anticipated to land in Fedora 24 for its network management needs.

Distributions

Ballnux/SUSE

• University students can spend their summer break writing code and learning about open source development with openSUSE while earning money through Google’s 12-year old, annual international program.

Red Hat Family

• As a hiring manager of systems administrators (sys admins) for the past three years, I know the kind of candidates I’m looking for to join my open source team. My responsibility, of course, is to try to hire the best and brightest from around the world. The candidate’s responsibility is to tell me what they’ve done and how, and what they want their future to look like. I am also looking for that spark. That thing that tells me this candidate is dedicated to the success of open source.

• I start my interviews with, “Thanks for taking the time to meet with us. Don’t be nervous, and remember to breathe.” An interview is about finding the right match on both sides, so intimidation is a bad practice on my end, but it should also be a bad sign to the candidate about the culture of a company if they are made to feel scared.

• Getting IT to work smoothly is a challenge even when all the parts are in-house, but that’s nothing compared with the widely dispersed Internet of Things. Enter Red Hat and Eurotech, which on Tuesday announced a new partnership aimed at simplifying the integration of all those IoT pieces.

• Italy-based Eurotech offers machine-to-machine platforms and other IoT products. Red Hat plans to combine its open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss middleware with Eurotech’s Everyware Software Framework and Eurotech Everyware Cloud to create an end-to-end architecture for IoT. This will let enterprises integrate operational data from computing equipment at the edge of the network with cloud-based back-end services.

• One of the S&P 500’s big winners for Tuesday March 01 was Red Hat Inc. (RHT) as the company’s stock climbed 4.33% to $68.18 on volume of 1.47 million shares.

Fedora

• So I get asked the question dozens of times a day so I thought I’d outline the answer to the question “When is Fedora going to support the Raspberry Pi 2?” and “The kernel support is upstream in the 4.5 kernel, why isn’t it enabled in Fedora 24?”

• Ultimately support in the kernel is great, it’s obviously a core blocker, and the first steps to supporting a new piece of hardware in Fedora. The thing is that when people say kernel support is easy they are partially right but it’s only a very small part of what’s needed to support a complex device such has an ARMv7 Single Board Computer for the average user, especially one as popular as the Raspberry Pi! To make the device work with Fedora we could just enable the kernel bits but it doesn’t make for a good user experience OOTB (Out Of The Box).

• This is the second post in the series, the first post was on Sanyam Khurana.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Unity is not the desktop pariah you once thought it was. This desktop environment has evolved into a beautiful, efficient interface that does not deserve the scorn and derision heaped upon it by so many.

Flavours and Variants

• I’d like to thank the phpBB team and Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) for reaching out to us to see if and how they could help.

Devices/Embedded

• Boundary Devices has announced an I/O-rich “Nitrogen7” SBC that runs Linux on NXP’s i.MX7 SoC and features WiFi and Bluetooth wireless, plus PCIe expansion.

• The Nitrogen7 is the first fully-integrated SBC we’ve seen based on the NXP i.MX7 SoC. The only other i.MX7 SBCs we’ve seen to date are sandwich-style boards that build upon computer-on-modules. These include the $275, CompuLabs EVAL-SOM-iMX7, which is sold as an evaluation module combining a SB-SOM-iMX7 carrier and CL-SOM-iMX7 COM. The same goes for Phytec’s unpriced, commercial-oriented PhyBoard-i.MX7 Zeta, which piggybacks the PhyCore-i.MX7 module.

• The Raspberry Pi managed to cram a lot of history into only 29 days this February, even without mentioning the introduction of the Pi 3 on Monday.

• Following the announcement, Microsoft has updated the support for the board via a new Windows 10 IoT Core Insider Preview update that’s now available for download. But, it’s interesting to note that Microsoft is selling Raspberry Pi 3 with NOOBS on its online store, which is basically a computer running a Linux distro.

• Android Wear, the OS specialized for running on smartwatches, has changed the way we perceive wearables. From early-hardware gimmicks to actual, indispensable devices that improve our workflow and productivity, smartwatches have created their own niche in the Android ecosystem. They even extend beyond Android, thanks to the likes of Tizen and iOS, offering consumers a choice in hardware and software if they so desire.

Phones

Android

• Looking to buy a new Android smartphone? Want to know what the best smartphones out there currently are? Looking for the “iPhone” of Android smartphones? read on!

Free Software/Open Source

• That is no longer the case. While an awful lot of companies are still stuck running immense software packages critical to their infrastructure, new projects are being deployed on cloud servers using open source technologies. This makes it much easier to upgrade one’s capabilities without having to rip out a huge software package and reinstall something else, and it also allows companies to pay as they go, rather than paying for a bunch of features they’ll never use.

• And there are a lot of customers who want to take advantage of open source projects without building and supporting a team of engineers to tweak one of those projects for their own unique needs. Those customers are willing to pay for software packages whose value is based on the delta between the open source projects and the proprietary features laid on top of that project.

• The Node.js Foundation is gearing up this week for fixes to OpenSSL that could mean updates to Node.js itself.

• Releases to OpenSSL due on Tuesday will fix defects deemed to be of “high” severity, Rod Vagg, foundation technical steering committee director, said in a blog post on Monday. Within a day of the OpenSSL releases, the Node.js crypto team will assess their impacts, saying, “Please be prepared for the possibility of important updates to Node.js v0.10, v0.12, v4 and v5 soon after Tuesday, the 1st of March.”

• On the tech scene today, it’s clear that cloud computing, Big Data analytics and machine learning are huge themes, and open source technologies are helping to drive these trends. There is also a shortage of skilled workers in these areas, and a shortage of understanding of the relevant technologies. At OStatic, we’ve been conducting an ongoing series of interviews with influencers focused on these key technology areas, and we’re particularly focused on how open source is involved.

• [...]

• We operate under the Apache 2.0 license, the most flexible open source license available.

• Genode OS 16.02 has been released as the newest version of this popular, open-source operating system framework.

• The prominent features of Genode OS 16.02 include a port to the RISC-V CPU architecture, secure pass-through of USB devices to virtual machines, and updates to their Muen and seL4 kernels.

Events

• ONS is the forum for service providers, enterprises, disruptive and incumbent vendors, open source projects, leading researchers and investors to discuss SDN and NFV developments and to shape the future of the networking industry.

SaaS/Big Data

• Hadoop will soon be brought up much more often in enterprise security discussions if Cloudera Inc.’s newest community effort achieves its goal. The Open Network Insight (ONI) project launched on GitHub this week to help organizations take advantage of data crunching platform’s processing power in their breach prevention efforts.

• The documentation for the tool explains that it’s a mix of free technologies from the Hadoop ecosystem and machine learning algorithms that Cloudera created in collaboration with a number of leading network protection vendors. Once all of its components are properly deployed, ONI starts pulling traffic logs from the environment that it’s protecting into the Hadoop File System, where they’re analyzed in stages.

• Mirantis is out with version 8 of its OpenStack distribution, wrapping in the OpenStack Liberty release. The company says this release is the most stable OpenStack distribution available and it sought much feedback from large customers in building this release. The company has also announced that 26,000 unique users across 3,500 development teams globally are using its distribution now.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle has published the code for its long-awaited open source JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) version 2.0.0.

• If you’re interested in looking over the code at GitHub, here’s what Big Red says is in the box: a full JS development toolkit, SPA template-based lifecycle management, two-way binding with a common model layer, single-page app navigation and mobile support.

• Open source libraries used with JET include jQuery, the jQuery UI, Knockout, RequireJS and Hammer.

• LibreOffice Conference will take place in Brno, Czech Republic this year. It will be our third international desktop-related conference in Brno. After GUADEC 2013 and Akademy 2014. And we’re very much looking forward to it.

• The conference is still more than 6 months away, but the organization already started some time ago. We made an agreement with the local technical university about the venue. It’s the venue where GUADEC 2013 and DevConf.cz 2015 and 2016 took place. The campus premises used to be a Cartesian monastery which was founded in the 14th century. Just recently, the campus was renovated and now features a beautiful combination of historical and modern architecture.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• The Lawrence school district is preparing to roll out its first class that uses only open-source learning material written by experts, vetted by their peers and posted for free downloading.

Programming

• The startup that launched the tools to develop embedded solutions in Python language announced the brand change along with the first official release.

Leftovers

• Google’s self-driving cars have driven millions of miles with only a dozen or so accidents, all of them being the fault of human drivers rear-ending Google vehicles. In most of these cases, the drivers either weren’t paying attention, or weren’t prepared for a vehicle that was actually following traffic rules. But this week, an incident report by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (pdf) highlighted that a Google automated vehicle was at fault in an accident for what’s believed to be the first time.

Health/Nutrition

• The NHS has been declared the best healthcare system by an international panel of experts who rated its care superior to countries which spend far more on health.

• The same study also castigated healthcare provision in the US as the worst of the 11 countries it looked at. Despite putting the most money into health, America denies care to many patients in need because they do not have health insurance and is also the poorest at saving the lives of people who fall ill, it found.

• The report has been produced by the Commonwealth Fund, a Washington-based foundation which is respected around the world for its analysis of the performance of different countries’ health systems. It examined an array of evidence about performance in 11 countries, including detailed data from patients, doctors and the World Health Organisation.

Security

• DROWNAttack.com was setup to provide more details on this latest high profile, open-source security issue. There are also more details via the Red Hat Security Blog.

• The SSLv2 protocol had its 21st birthday last month, but it’s no cause to celebrate with an alcohol beverage, since the protocol was already deprecated when it turned 18.

• Announced today is an attack called DROWN that takes advantage of systems still using SSLv2.

• Many cryptographic libraries already disable SSLv2 by default, and updates from the OpenSSL project and Red Hat today catch up.

• The OpenSSL project has disclosed a new high-profile vulnerability. This one, known as CVE-2016-800, or “DROWN”, affects servers that still have the old SSLv2 protocol enabled. Yes, it has its own domain name and logo.

• As noted by Bernard Spil, the OpenSSL bugs disclosed on 2016-03-01 have very little impact on LibreSSL, especially on OpenBSD.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called her support for gun control laws a key differentiator from her opponent Bernie Sanders, who she claims isn’t tough enough on the industry. But in mid-March, a Clinton campaign fundraiser will be co-hosted by a lobbyist whose clients include the National Rifle Association (NRA).

• The Richard Nixon Foundation hosted Gen. Michael Hayden at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum on Tuesday night.

• Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA, presented his new book, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.”

• Michael Hayden [pictured left] said this in a video clip at Huffington Post Live, where the context of what he was saying was left ambiguous, but it concerned only the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, so his comment there was gratuitous: he asserted (at 23:00 in the complete interview) that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are prisoners of war and thus can legally be kept imprisoned for the rest of their lives without there being any need at all for them (and there were 775 of them) to be heard in any court — he said they’re prisoners of war and not prisoners of any legal system at all; and, so, even if they were actually captured in error (as many of them were found to have been), they’ve got no legal rights at all. Innocence or guilt is legally irrelevant to their continued imprisonment, says this former chief of America’s CIA and of the NSA.

Transparency Reporting

• Clinton supporters, erroneously, make much out of the idea that of the many, many emails that passed through her private server, none were “marked” classified. They claim that, when in fact thousands of those same emails are indeed now marked classified, that is just after-the-fact Washington squabbling.

• So this new information — that America’s intelligence agencies now say the contents of some of those unmarked emails match the contents of their own classified documents — is a big deal. It also suggests just how Clinton’s unclassified server came to be loaded up with classified material.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• It wouldn’t have been the first time something like this happened. People in small towns and counties get together, vote, and agree to ban fracking. And then the state legislature comes in and passes a ban on bans.

• But not this time.

• The Florida Senate’s Appropriations Committee has finally killed a bill that would have stopped towns from banning fracking, a week after the committee voted the measure down by a 10-9 vote. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Garrett Richter (R) made a motion Tuesday to not consider the bill.

• Our planet’s preliminary February temperature data are in, and it’s now abundantly clear: Global warming is going into overdrive.

• There are dozens of global temperature datasets, and usually I (and my climate journalist colleagues) wait until the official ones are released about the middle of the following month to announce a record-warm month at the global level. But this month’s data is so extraordinary that there’s no need to wait: February obliterated the all-time global temperature record set just last month.

Finance

• Last September, Techdirt reported on the EU’s plan to replace the highly-controversial corporate sovereignty provisions in TAFTA/TTIP — the “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) chapter — with something it called the “Investor Court System” (ICS). As we reported then, even if ICS addressed all the problems of ISDS — spoiler alert: it certainly doesn’t — there was a huge backdoor in the form of CETA, the trade deal between the EU and Canada. If CETA includes old-style corporate sovereignty provisions, US companies with subsidiaries in Canada will be able to use CETA to by-pass TAFTA/TTIP’s new ICS system completely, and sue EU nations using ISDS with all its widely-recognized faults. In fact, Bernd Lange, the MEP with responsibility for making recommendations on how the European Parliament (EP) should vote on international trade matters, said at the time that he would not support CETA if it included ISDS.

Censorship

• Parents, educators, and lawmakers debated the merits of teaching literature that promotes discussions about sex and violence, such as Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’

• Prominent TV anchors and news commentators condemned communications minister Sanae Takaichi’s threat to shut down broadcasters over “biased” political programming as essentially a declaration of war against free speech and the media.

• “We are truly surprised and angered by the series of remarks by Takaichi, which clearly run against the spirit of the Constitution and the Broadcast Law,” a statement released by the journalists group said Feb. 29. “TV broadcasting does not belong to the supervisory ministries but to the general public.”

• Freedom of expression is a basic human right. But do we really have it? Where are you free to express what? A group of leading figures from the arts, all of whom have taken centre stage in this debate at some point in their careers, discuss this hot topic, not only relevant to the stage, but also in our everyday lives.

Privacy

• Brazilian police have arrested Diego Dzodan, Facebook’s Latin American regional vice-president, for failing to provide WhatsApp messages related to a case of drug-trafficking.

• Facebook Inc.’s international expansion has been challenged by application shutdowns, regulatory blocks and protests. On Tuesday, the Brazilian government tried another tactic: detaining an executive.

• The latest version of the Investigatory Powers Bill has failed to clarify tricky issues like encryption and gives police and security services wide-ranging powers

• On Tuesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the nation’s leading organization for computer science, awarded its annual top prize of $1 million to two men whose name will forever be immortalized in cryptography: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.

• The 2015 ACM Turing Award, which is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” was awarded to a former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems and a professor at Stanford University, respectively.

• Now that a federal judge has ruled against the government in one of the iPhone unlocking cases — remember, it turns out multiple iPhones were involved, not just the “terrorist iPhone” — it looks like a rare victory has been scored for the right to privacy.

• Details of the data sharing arrangements agreed between the US and EU earlier in the month have been revealed in newly published documents. The EU-US Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer agreement is set to replace the Safe Harbor that had previously been in place.

• The European Commission has released the full legal texts that will form the backbone of the data transfer framework. One of the aims is to “restore trust in transatlantic data flows since the 2013 surveillance revelations”, and while privacy groups still take issue with the mechanism that will be in place, the agreement is widely expecting to be ratified by members of the EU.

• Clear Channel Outdoor — one of the largest outdoor advertising companies in the U.S. — is starting a new program called Radar that will use billboards to map real-world habits and behaviors from nearby consumers.

• The technology is sure to help advertisers better target their ads. But privacy advocates argue that it’s, well, a little creepy.

• This reminds me, somewhat of the case where some Google execs were tried and convicted in Italy, because they didn’t take down a video fast enough (the company took it down, just not fast enough). While the underlying issues are different, arresting execs of tech companies because you don’t like the way they operate their business seems like a good way to make sure innovative internet services are not offered in your country at all. And, in this case, where Facebook relies on strong encryption in Whatsapp, it seems likely that the issue may be that it was impossible to comply with the court order in this case (though the full details are not yet known). Either way, arresting an exec over this seems extremely troubling — especially in a country such as Brazil that has been trying to set itself up as a strong supporter of a free and open internet, and that had argued against surveillance.

• Williams Lake, British Columbia apparently has a bit of a crime problem. According to CTV News, it consistently ranks towards the top end of the violent crime charts for communities of its size. Early last week, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a video of a man pulling a gun on a Williams Lake resident and stealing his bike.

• The U.S. National Security Agency chief said on Tuesday it was a “matter of when, not if” a foreign nation-state attempts to launch a cyber attack on the U.S. critical infrastructure, citing the recent hack on Ukraine’s power grid as a cause for concern.

• Oh, John Yoo. The former top Bush administration lawyer — who is already well-known for writing that administration’s (totally bullshit) “legal defense” for torture — has also been an outspoken advocate for NSA surveillance as well. Soon after the Snowden revelations, Yoo defended the NSA arguing that the 4th Amendment shouldn’t apply to the NSA because it takes too long. Then, he said that judges shouldn’t be allowed to determine if the NSA violated the 4th Amendment because they’re too out of touch with the American public. It’s long been known that Yoo also was deeply involved in creating the legal justifications for that very warrantless surveillance program he’s been defending, and now, finally, years later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released the May 17, 2002 letter that Yoo sent to the FISA Court chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. You can read it here.

Civil Rights

• In essence, the President was trolling us – in the proper sense of that much-abused word.

• One of the worst atrocities of the British Empire occurred well within my own lifetime – the removal of an entire people, the Chagossians, from their homeland. Uprooted and deposited across the seas hundreds of miles away, many died from the physical and psychological effects of this crime against humanity. The thing is, it is still happening. The survivors have clung together as a community, and the British government are still actively preventing their return to their homeland – all to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia. There is no reason other than simple Imperialism for America to maintain a military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

• [...]

• It is of course another example of the unparalleled talent for hypocrisy of the British state that the same politicians who declare their willingness to fight and die for the right of self-determination of the Falkland Islanders, will defend the deportation of the Chagos Islanders and their continued exclusion from their own islands. Again I would stress that Labour have been at least as guilty as Tories. The entire British state is complicit in this atrocity.

• Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden is not a big fan of journalists. At least, that’s what his new book, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror,” appears to suggest.

• You might have come across a phrase involving Snowden—in fact, this phrase isn’t easy to avoid if you favor establishment pundits like David Brooks and Fred Kaplan and Josh Marshall—to the effect that Snowden violated his “oath of secrecy.” Even former CIA director David Petraeus has claimed—awkwardly, in retrospect—there is such an oath. I wrote about this supposed oath in a bit more detail after the first Snowden stories broke, in a blog post called “Memo to Authoritarians.”

• All of us in this room know there is no “oath of secrecy”—that the notion of such an “oath” is the product either of ignorance or propaganda. There is a secrecy agreement—what here in Silicon Valley we typically call a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA. But to inflate the status of such an agreement to the level of an “oath,” akin to, say, the president’s oath of office, is false and misleading.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Most people realize that the cable and broadcast industry has worked tirelessly to protect its legacy cash cow from disruption. Dish was forced to make its ad-skipping DVR less useful if it wanted streaming licensing rights. Fox, Disney and Comcast/NBC for years kept Hulu from being too disruptive. ESPN sued Verizon for trying to offer more flexible TV lineups. Apple keeps running face first into broadcasters terrified of real disruption with its own TV plans. That’s before you even get to cable companies busy capping and metering usage to hurt streaming services, while zero rating their own services for competitive advantage.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A man suspected of being the main operator of what was once Sweden’s largest streaming site has been arrested in Germany following the execution of a secret European warrant. The man, reportedly a Turkish national, is believed to have set up advertising deals at Swefilmer resulting in around $1.7m in revenue.

• In a twist of irony, Tidal, the music streaming service owned by Jay-Z and touting its pro-music artist model, is now being sued for not paying its artists.

• It’s been no secret that Tidal, Jay-Z’s foray into the music streaming business, hasn’t exactly had the success it was supposed to have. In the wake of all the angry sentiment about just how much other streaming services were paying musical artists, Tidal positioned itself as artist-friendly, the option for fans that want to make sure musicians get paid. It sounded great, except now Tidal finds itself joining the club of streaming services facing legal action over artist royalties.

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