● 03.09.16

● Links 9/3/2016: Tails 2.2, Developer Preview Of “Android N”

Posted in News Roundup at 5:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• Jeff Nickoloff, principal of All In Geek Consulting Services, was approached to conduct the container square-off. You can get detailed analysis of the results in this InformationWeek report.

Kernel Space

• Back in 2014 is when longtime open-source graphics driver developer Jerome Glisse began pushing his patches for Heterogeneous Memory Management in the Linux kernel while that work is still ongoing but has now been renewed.

• We last heard an update on Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) last summer when Glisse sent out his latest patches. This big patch-set is a helper layer for a device wanting to mirror a process address space into their own MMU. HMM is designed for GPUs and others in needing to support OpenCL 2.0+ for mirroring a process address space. HMM also makes it possible for using the discrete GPU memory in a transparent manner to the application/game and other possible use-cases.

• The noise surrounding blockchain has been tremendous. As traders, banks, governments and more look into how the technology can benefit them, will 2016 be the year blockchain finds its place in the world beyond bitcoin?

• First popularised outside of computer science circles with the crypto-currency bitcoin, blockchain is now grabbing the attention of just about everyone, from financial services to government.

• Startups are beginning to promise the world, and Fortune 500 companies are at least keeping a close eye on the concept.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• Succeeding January’s 10-way Linux distribution battle is now a 15-way Linux distribution comparison on an Intel Xeon “Skylake” system with Radeon R7 graphics. Distributions part of this Linux OS performance showdown include Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Antergos, Sabayon, Void Linux, Zenwalk, KaOS, Clear Linux, and Alpine Linux.

Applications

• The Kodi developers have unveiled earlier, March 8, 2016, details about two new upcoming themes for the next major version of the acclaimed cross-platform and open-source media center software.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• A new update of the Wine Staging software has been released on March 8, 2016, which promises to improve the compatibility with older Windows software even further, as well as to fix various bugs.

• Wine Staging 1.9.5 has been seeded to public testers, based on the upstream Wine 1.9.5 software project, and it promises to address many of the issues reported by users since the previous maintenance release, as well as to add better support for many older Windows games and applications.

Games

• The Darkest Dungeon developers have said the Linux port is practically done, and we should be able to play it soon.

• Great news! The update to Arma 3 on Linux has landed, bringing us up to 1.54. Not quite the newest, but better than what we had.

• There’s plenty of new content and fixes in the 1.54 update you can read up on here.

• It’s a huge update, but it’s not without issues. I have reported them to VP (the porters).

• Fail0verflow has gone public with its Linux-on-PS4 loader, a little over two months after presenting an early and “ugly” version of it to the Chaos Computer Club conference in Germany.

• Consistent with the 32c3 conference presentation, the loader only works on firmware versions up to 1.76.

• The requirements are imposing for all but serious hackers: there’s a special PS4 Linux kernel fork (here), a PS4 kernel exploit discovered last year called BadIRET, which has just leaked in the last day or so, and of course fail0verflow’s PS4-kexec.

• At the start of the year we reported on how it is possible to run Linux on Playstation 4, but the method in which to do so was widely unavailable.

• However, hacking group failOverflow have now released the tools and directions that anyone can use to run Linux on PS4.

• Great news FPS fans! Arma 3 will see an update on the Linux port to version 1.54 tomorrow! Not quite the current version, but it’s a step closer and there’s more good news.

• Kelvin is the second Argentine point-and-click adventure game to be released in just a few days, after Dog Mendonça—a game GOL editor Segata Sanshiro plans to take a closer look at—was released on Steam for Linux last week.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME developer Debarshi Ray shares some very exciting details about some of the major features that are coming to his GNOME Photos 3.20 application this spring as part of the GNOME 3.20 release.

• We reported the fact that the GNOME Photos image viewer app tried to become an image editor too back in November 2015, so if you’re reading our website on a daily basis, today’s news should not come as a surprise to you. Non-destructive editing was implemented in the second milestone for this cycle.

• Have you ever worked on an open source software project—and out of nowhere, a flame war starts up on the mailing list? You review the emails, and think to yourself “Someone over-reacted here.” The problem may not be an over-reaction per se, but rather a cultural conflict.

• Anthropologist Edward T. Hall (not related) identified the “context preferences” of different cultures, describing high- and low-context cultures. In his 1976 book, Beyond Culture, Hall described the different communication styles of low- and high-context communicators. This difference is why, for example, German and English speakers interact differently with each other.

Distributions

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• Four snapshots released this week provided plenty of new packages for openSUSE Tumbleweed users, but what is coming in a future snapshot is what has people excited.

• Douglas DeMaio of openSUSE published a new blog post on the project’s website to inform those attending the upcoming openSUSE Conference 2016 event about some much-needed details on accommodations.

Red Hat Family

• A recent blog post, 10 things to avoid in docker containers, describes ten scenarios you should avoid when dealing with docker containers. However, recommendation #3 – Don’t create large images and the sentence “Don’t install unnecessary packages or run “updates” (yum update) that download files to a new image layer” has generated quite a few questions. Some of you are wondering how a simple “yum update” can create a large image. In an attempt to clarify the point, this post explains how docker images work, some solutions to maintain a small docker image, yet still keep it up to date.

• Rackspace has released Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat, which delivers OpenStack private clouds as-a-service using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platfor

• The new offering expands the Rackspace OpenStack-as-a-Service product portfolio, further extending the company’s strategy to deliver the most reliable and easy-to-use OpenStack private and hybrid clouds in the world.

• Qualcomm and Red Hat are busy porting the latter’s enterprise-friendly flavor of Linux to Qualy’s upcoming 64-bit ARM server processors, we learned today.

• Specifically, the pair are “collaborating” to bring Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview to Qualcomm’s 24-core ARMv8-A silicon shown off in October. Red Hat’s ARM dev preview is, as it sounds, a work-in-progress ARM build of RHEL.

• Software makes the corporate world tick in the digital age and developing it is big business. The ‘open-source’ model, or collaborative software development from multiple, often unconnected sources, promotes a pooling of resources and a diverse design spectrum than any one company is capable of developing and sustaining over the long-term.

• The concept is not new, though the term open-source itself was coined in 1998, and emergence of Linux operating system came to symbolise its free spirit. In an indication of where the concept is going – within a few of years of its arrival, the likes of Microsoft started describing Linux as their biggest threat.

Fedora

• Today is the alpha freeze for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux distribution update.

• Today marks the alpha freeze along with the software string freeze and Bodhi activation point deadlines. The actual Fedora 24 release is slated for 22 March unless any delays come up, which tend to be rather common to Fedora Linux releases with F24 already having been delayed twice.

• We will be writing a series of blog posts regarding the project to help the Modularity effort move forward. Some of the posts will be about “Why?” and some will be about “How?” As the first post in the series, this article is about “Why?”

• The Rings Proposal and the Modularity Objective are both about big ideas and a long-term vision. And it should be all those things. Grand visions are how Fedora is what it is today.

• Yesterday, Fedora contributor and CommOps team member Bee Padalkar published an article on her blog about measuring the impact of Fedora’s participation at the FOSDEM conference in Europe.

• Fedora Project’s Dennis Gilmore announced on the day of March 8, 2016, that the Alpha build of the Fedora 24 Linux operating system is now officially in feature freeze, and it will be seeded to public testers on March 22, 2016.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The open-source Tails amnesic incognito live system reached a new milestone on March 8, 2016, stable version 2.2, which adds several new features and improvements, along with security patches and software updates.

• This release fixes many security issues and users should upgrade as soon as possible.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today we’re continuing our reports on the upcoming OTA-10 software update for Ubuntu-powered devices with some newsworthy developments that have been unveiled recently.

• We saw three surprising things at Canonical’s booth at Mobile World Congress 2016, and each has to do with conversion. By “conversion,” I mean a mobile device equipped with Ubuntu Core – a shared code base that enables apps to run on mobile and desktop, whether designed for touch or mouse and keyboard input – that can connect to an external monitor and see the apps optimized for the larger display.

• If that sounds a lot like Microsoft’s Universal Apps and Continuum, that is because it’s the same concept. But as Microsoft is struggling to finish and polish its software, Canonical went ahead and did it better.

• In between selling iPhone cases (yes, really) and paying for product placement on the latest season of House of Cards (yes, really), OnePlus seems to have achieved something rather cool on the software front. They’ve partnered with Canonical, the people who make the popular Linux desktop distribution Ubuntu, in order to bring the mobile version to the original OnePlus One. Neat! OnePlus made the announcement on Google Plus.

• Ubuntu developers have deprecated the fglrx / Catalyst Linux display stack for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Users of this upcoming Ubuntu release are now encouraged to use the open-source Radeon display stack.

• The tentative 16.04 release notes mention, “The fglrx driver is now deprecated in 16.04, and we recommend its open source alternatives (radeon and amdgpu). AMD put a lot of work into the drivers, and we backported kernel code from Linux 4.5 to provide a better experience. When upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 from a previous release, both the fglrx driver and the xorg.conf will be removed, so that the system is set to use either the amdgpu driver or the radeon driver (depending on the available hardware).”

Devices/Embedded

• The $89 uCRobotics “Bubblegum-96” SBC has a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 Actions S900 SoC, 2GB RAM, 8GB eMMC, onboard wireless, and 96Boards compatibility.

• The posting of a product page for the uCRobotics “Bubblegum-96” SBC was one of several announcements about Linaro’s 96Boards open SBC project that preceded this week’s Linaro Connect event in Bangkok. First, Linaro released Android Open Source Project code for the octa-core, 96Boards-compatible HiKey SBC — the first Linaro/AOSP release to be maintained within the AOSP common tree. Meanwhile, the LeMaker Cello debuted with AMD’s ARM Cortex-A57 Opteron A1100 SoC. The Cello is the first 96Boards SBC to use the server-oriented Enterprise Edition (EE) form factor, which is larger than the CE version used by the similarly 64-bit, ARMv8 HiKey, DragonBoard 410c, and new Bubblegum-96.

• Over the past week of running benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 3 we have seen how warm this new $35 quad-core ARM 64-bit developer board can get and it’s significantly hotter than the Raspberry Pi 2.

• Some have claimed their Raspberry Pi 3 SBCs even get hotter than 100C under load, but I haven’t seen quite that extreme with my peak during monitoring being 80~90C. While raspi-config currently doesn’t allow overclocking on the Raspberry Pi 3, if you were to OC this quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC you would certainly want at least a passive heatsink if not an active cooler.

Phones

Android

• As CNET reports, the Android N Developer Preview edition is now available for the Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6, Pixel C Nexus 9, Nexus Player, and the General Mobile 4G, an Android One phone. As expected, the 2013 Nexus 7 tablet, will not be getting Android N.

• Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge are attractive, well-built Android phones that offer great battery life and an excellent camera. Those looking to splurge on a high-end Android device should consider the Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 Edge.

• But there are still a few drawbacks to consider. The glossy design gathers fingerprint smudges easily, which means you’ll have to use a case or clean it often. And Samsung’s software is still cluttered compared to that of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus phones.

• Among the related libraries is the core Android mediaserver, which Google is patching this month for six different vulnerabilities. Two of the issues (CVE-2016-0815 and CVE-2016-0816) are identified as critical vulnerabilities in mediaserver that could lead to a potential remote-code execution.

• Another two issues (CVE-2016-0826 and CVE-2016-0827) are privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Android that Google rates as high-severity issues. Google has identified two more high-severity issues (CVE-2016-0828 and CVE-2016-0829) in mediaserver as information-disclosure vulnerabilities.

• RESEARCHERS AT Michigan State University have successfully bypassed the fingerprint sensors on the Galaxy S6 and Huawei Honor 7 using an inkjet printer.

• Yes, you read that right. Kai Cao and Anil Jain, from Michigan State University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, managed to spoof the fingerprint scanners using an inkjet printer, a few drops of conductive ink and special paper used for printing electronic circuits.

• The researchers took scans of several fingers and printed them onto the paper using the conductive ink. They were able to ‘hack’ the two smartphones using the spoof, or 2.5D, print, but said that the sensor on the Honor 7 was “more difficult” to bypass than that on the Galaxy S6.

• Updates to Google’s Android mobile OS take famously long to roll out to actual consumers, but here’s one stat that really puts things in perspective: 16 months after Google first released Lollipop 5.0, it’s finally the most popular (not by a majority!) version of Android.

• In the latest set of monthly stats, Lollipop takes 36.1 percent of installed versions of Android, narrowly overtaking KitKat (down to 34.4 percent). Marshmallow, the latest release, is still languishing on 2.3 percent.

• There is a new Android king in town, and its name is Lollipop. Google released its monthly update to the Platform Versions page for Android today, and the gold and silver positions have swapped.

• Android Lollipop has managed to finally pass Android KitKat in terms of adoption. The achievement took 16 months: Google debuted the Nexus 9, the first device to sport Android 5.0, back in November 2014.

• Lenovo is getting into the Android 2-in-1 market, if recent leaks mean anything.

• The tablet, Lenovo YB1-X90L, hasn’t been officially announced, but photos and specs leaked today. Lilputing is reporting that a listing on the site of the Ghanian National Commuincations Authority (that country’s equivilant to the Federal Communications Comission here in the USA) revealed the laptop’s existence to the world.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open Source Stacks: Both cloud providers and hyperscale companies have driven the use of open source in the data center. They have made it ready for production environments at scale. This creates an abundance of available open source projects for use in the modern data center with reference models to emulate.

• Mathematica is a big powerful math package, but what do you do when you can’t justify its cost? Mathics is an open source math package that has just reached version 0.9 and it is a possible alternative.

• The Mathics project is small compared to the resources that Wolfram can throw at Mathematica so don’t expect a full clone of the commercial program. However, it is close enough for many purposes.

• Next-generation networking technologies such as SDN, NFV and cloud computing are enabling autonomous, real-time telecom operations. However, many conventional operational support systems (OSS) are based on proprietary software, which leads to fragmented technologies and interoperability issues for carriers.

• To address this issue, The Linux Foundation, China Mobile and Huawei in February held a press conference, together with China Telecom, KT and 10 other industry partners, announcing the OPEN-Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O) to develop the first open source software framework and orchestrator.

• What do Uber, Facebook, Alibaba, and AirBnB all have in common? They’re all digital-first businesses and new leaders in long-established industries. They’re proof that every industry is going digital, and at tremendous speed. Consider this:

• “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate,” writes Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media.

Events

• English is written left to right. Hebrew is written right to left. We know that. Browsers—for the most part—know that too, just like they know that the default directionality of a web page is left-to-right (LTR), and that if there is a setting that explicitly defines the direction to right-to-left, the page should flip like a mirror. Browsers are smart like that. Mostly.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla provides 21 security advisories for its Firefox 45 browser. New features in the browser include improvements to the Firefox Hello communication tool. Mozilla today released the Firefox 45 Web browser, which provides users with incremental feature updates and security fixes.

• Firefox Hello Beta is a communication tool that lets you share tabs you’re browsing in Firefox with others and chat over video or text, free and without needing an account or login. Firefox Hello Beta in Windows, Mac and Linux helps you discuss and make decisions about anything online by sharing the website you’re browsing in your conversation. This makes it easier and faster to do things like to shop online together with friends, plan a vacation with the family or collaborate on work with a colleague.

• Over the past several weeks, Mozilla has been running an educational campaign about encryption. We believe it’s essential for everyday Internet users to better understand the technology that helps keep the Web a more secure platform.

• So far, we’ve explored encryption’s role in helping protect users’ personal, intimate information. We’ve created an animated short that uses plain language to explain how encryption works. And we’ve expressed our support for Apple in its ongoing case against the FBI.

• Today, we’re spotlighting how encryption can support not only our personal security, but also how it can play a role in promoting values like free expression that most of us hold dear.

SaaS/Big Data

• Talligent, which focuses on cost and capacity management solutions for OpenStack and hybrid clouds, has announced the results of its inaugural ‘2016 State of OpenStack Report,’ an independent survey focused on identifying the key use cases, barriers and what’s driving OpenStack adoption.

• Survey results were commissioned by Talligent through media firms CloudCow and VMblog, and the State of OpenStack Report surveyed 647 virtualization and cloud IT leaders from across the globe. The most notable finding was about shifts from evaluation of OpenStack to concrete usage: Respondents stated they expect use of OpenStack to quickly expand beyond development environments, with lab growth moving from 43 percent to 89 percent and QA/Test to grow from 47 percent to 91 percent, both within the next 12 months.

Databases

• Most enterprises rely on databases in some form or another, but they can be vulnerable to attack from people looking to steal information. They can also lead to performance problems as the amount of data stored grows.

• Open source database specialist MariaDB Corporation is launching its latest MariaDB Enterprise aimed at tackling the most pressing enterprise data management challenges.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Java evangelist Reza Rahman has left Oracle, to help save Java.

• Rahman writes, on an Oracle blog, that he is “… certain that this is the way I personally can best help continue to advance the Java and Java EE communities.”

• On his personal blog he’s more candid, saying he joined Oracle in part because he’d have the chance to work with Cameron Purdy, once senior veep of development at Big Red.

CMS

• Collaborating on scholarly research projects can sometimes become complicated and disorganized. For example, using Flickr for sharing and commenting on images while communicating via email and editing documents together in Google Docs works, but it places information about the research in way too many places.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• “Windows everywhere” no longer works, thanks to Microsoft’s fumbling failures in mobile and an industry shift towards web applications and cloud computing, where Linux servers predominate. Even on the desktop, Macs at the high end and the odd Google Chromebook at the low end have weakened Microsoft’s hold. Seen in this light, the appearance of SQL Server on Linux is a sign of weakness, not strength.

BSD

• For safety and usability, xterm(1) now uses UTF-8 mode by default.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is the first release since Foliot is officially part of GNU and became GNU Foliot!

Programming

• For years, the benefits of open source code development have been self-evident to the software development community: Transparency leads to collaboration, and collaboration leads to better and more secure code. The scientific community is just starting to understand these benefits.

• The growing open science movement is using these same lessons to make the scientific process more transparent, so that research findings will be more reproducible. In order to realize the benefits of open science, we must use a wide set of research tools to enable transparency, which will lead to increased discoverability, reuse, and collaboration.

• To that end, the Center for Open Science (COS) is funding the development of an integration between GitLab and the Open Science Framework (OSF), and is seeking interested members of the open source community to contribute to this effort.

• William Hill is a Java shop; but its next-generation bet settlement system under development is written in Erlang, which is designed for concurrency. “The syntax is simple,” said Stevenson, “and the supervisor hierarchy makes it really nice to work with.”

Standards/Consortia

• The Government Digital Service (GDS) is asking council staff and other interested parties for their views on a draft standard for delivering digital services.

• The draft local government digital service standard has 18 key recommendations, including creating a service using the agile, iterative and user-centred methods set out in the Government Service Design Manual, using open source tools, making source code open where possible, and using open standards where available.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Are patient groups, health activists and manufacturers of low-cost generic drugs always on the same page? Do India’s generic companies think alike? The short answer: not necessarily, though their interests have overlapped on many occasions.

• Both questions are once again being debated in India in the wake of the patent opposition hearings in case involving sofosbuvir (brand name Sovaldi).

• Last month, the Indian Patent Office in Delhi heard arguments by several parties on why US pharmaceutical Gilead Sciences’ patent application for the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi should be rejected. Sovaldi costs $1,000 per pill in the United States.

Security

• Microsoft has published the March edition of its monthly security updates, addressing security flaws in Internet Explorer, Edge and Windows, while Adobe has issued updates for Digital Editions, Acrobat and Reader.

• The long walk over to the CEO’s office need not be cause for termination or anxiety if you’re prepared.

• At some point in every breach investigation, the IT person or executive who has responsibility for an organization’s security will need to take a long walk to the CEO’s office to explain what happened. While no IT person ever wants to take that walk, modern reality means that it’s increasingly likely, according to JB Rambaud, managing director and co-lead of the Security Science Practice at cyber-security consulting firm Stroz Friedberg.

• Linux Mint users were exposed to a troubling vulnerability in February, when the Linux Mint website was hacked and distributed malware-infested ISOs for a day. The forum user database was also stolen. Linux Mint’s Clement Lefebvre recently posted a monthly newsletter for users, explaining how the problem has been fixed and how Linux Mint will be more secure in the future.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• WHEN Barack Obama took office as the reluctant heir to George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” he renounced some of his predecessor’s most extreme policies. There is one Bush-era policy, though, that President Obama made emphatically his own: the summary killing of suspected militants and terrorists, usually by drone.

• In less than a year, the president will bequeath this policy, and the sweeping legal claims that underlie it, to someone who may see the world very differently from him. Before that happens, he should bring the drone campaign out of the shadows and do what he can to constrain the power he unleashed.

• Seven and a half years ago, as a new reporter at ProPublica, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all reports of misconduct by federal air marshals.

• It had been several years since the US government rapidly expanded its force of undercover agents trained to intervene in hijackings after 9/11. And a source within the agency told me that a number of air marshals had recently been arrested or gotten in trouble for hiring prostitutes on missions overseas.

• I knew the FOIA request would take a while—perhaps a few months—but I figured I’d have the records in times for my first ProPublica project.

• Instead, I heard nothing but crickets from the Transportation Security Administration.

• White supremacy in its various strains is among the most significant, least discussed phenomena in US media discourse. A news report may note that a pundit stated that black people are lazier and more violent than other people, and urged public policies premised on that idea, or that a candidate’s followers singled out African-Americans or Latinos to harass or assault, and that these things are concerning.

• The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants — members of the Somali group al Shabaab — but provided no evidence to support that assertion.

• There has never been such a fascinating US Presidential race, both I a good way and in a bad way. I would never have believed somebody as genuine and bright as Bernie Sanders could get this close to becoming President. I would never have believed something as florid and off the wall as Donald Trump could become this close to becoming President.

• One of the things that makes both Trump and Sanders so entirely different from the mainstream US political class is that neither of them genuflects to Tel Aviv and both of them take the idea that Palestinians have rights too. In fact the only chance of Israeli dominance of US foreign policy appears to rest with Hillary Clinton. She may be Goldman Sachs’ dog in this fight, but she is also Tel Aviv’s.

• Unfortunately, despite continuing wins and trouncing Clinton in debate, it seems most unlikely Sanders will get the nomination. Clinton control of party machinery and firm position with those who have made an extremely fat living for themselves personally out of identity politics (sorry heroes of the civil rights movement), should ensure that. Can I commend you to read The Catholic Orangemen of Togo to see how just one ride in a car with Jesse Jackson put me right off him.

• Canada formally announced it had stopped all air strikes in Iraq and Syria on 15 February. They will continue to fly aerial refueling missions, and conduct reconnaissance from the air. More significantly, Canada will up its small ground forces, who are engaged in what has to be the longest and most thorough training mission in human history, inside Iraq.

• In March 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, about one hundred CODEPINK women dressed in pink slips weaved in and out of congressional offices demanding to meet with representatives. Those representatives who pledged to oppose going to war with Iraq were given hugs and pink badges of courage; those hell-bent on taking the US to war were given pink slips emblazoned with the words “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Transparency Reporting

• The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.

• The documents were obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism in the public interest, which in turn shared them exclusively with VICE News. They were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the same law Congress was attempting to reform. The group sued the DOJ last December after its FOIA requests went unanswered for more than a year.

• Do you like irony? Documents obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (and shared with Jason Leopold of Vice) through an FOIA request show how the Obama administration and various agencies worked together to dismantle FOIA reform efforts. “Presumption of openness,” my [REDACTED].

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Bernie Sanders won a huge upset in Michigan on Tuesday night, giving his campaign a jolt of momentum even as Donald Trump tightened his grip on the Republican nomination by scoring victories in Michigan and Mississippi.

• Entering Tuesday, not one public poll had shown Sanders leading in Michigan, and most had him down by double-digits, creating expectations that Hillary Clinton would cruise to victory.

• But Sanders took the lead from the moment polls closed in the state and never let go. News networks projected him the winner just before midnight, with the Vermont senator leading 50 to 48 percent.

• All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he’s a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise—despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman.

Censorship

• Students who find themselves on the second floor of Moffett Library are likely to see a poster featuring a stack of books with the question “Have you seen us?” in bold. The books in the stack have all been censored or restricted at some point since publication, and the poster is promoting the anti-censorship movement.

• Since 1990 there have been more than 18,000 attempts to remove books from libraries and schools across the United States. A significant number of these attempts are done by parent groups or religious organizations.

• GIBA specifically wants the court to expunge regulations 3 to 12 and 22 of the NMC (Content Standards) Regulations 2015 (LI 2224) as being inconsistent with the 1992 Constitution which guarantees unfettered media freedom.

• The regulations in contention basically require media owners to apply for content authorization, submit programme guide and content for approval and go by a set of rules stipulated by the NMC or in default pay a fine or serve between two and five years in jail.

• The House of Representatives has outlined a policy to digitize broadcasting in a draft revision of the 2002 Broadcasting Law, which could make it easier for the government to control television programs in the future, according to an expert.

• The revision was first proposed to the House in 2010, but has yet to make it into law. Last January, the House’s Legislation Body included the same bill in the 2016 National Legislation Program (Prolegnas). The House then started work on the draft before eventually discussing it with the government.

• “The migration of analog to digital TV broadcasting is one of the main points in the revision of the law,” lawmaker Meutya Hafid said on Monday.

• Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has become the latest casualty of China’s tightening grip on the media as internet censors shut down its microblogging accounts on Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, as well as its WeChat page on Tuesday.

• The broadsheet’s official Sina Weibo page now leads to an error message that reads, “Sorry, there is something wrong with the account you are currently trying to access, and it is temporarily inaccessible.” A similar error message can be seen on what used to be SCMP’s Tencent Weibo page.

• Over at SCMP’s official WeChat account, an empty shell is all that remains as all previous posts published on the page have been deleted.

• If past history is any indication, the shutdown doesn’t appear temporary, and there is little chance that the accounts will be restored.

• Thus, hate speech is really anti-speech because it aims to shut down the speech of others. And in the United States, hate speech has shut down the speech of minorities and women for hundreds of years. Defenders of hate speech often disguise it as “pride,” “state’s rights” or “religious freedom.” But we are mistaken to treat anti-speech as if it were normal speech, deserving of protection. We can and should be intolerant of intolerance.

• Prominent Chinese financial magazine Caixin has highlighted censorship of its content, in a rare defiant move against the government.

• It claimed on Monday, in an article published on its English-language website, that censors had deleted an interview on the issue of free speech.

• But by Tuesday evening that article appeared to have been deleted as well.

• Chinese media is heavily regulated with government censors often removing content on websites and social media.

• One of China’s most respected current affairs magazines has lashed out at Communist party censorship of its work, just weeks after the president, Xi Jinping, demanded absolute loyalty from his country’s media.

• A spokesman for the highly regarded Chinese financial and economic magazine Caixin on Wednesday declined to comment on the deletion of a recent article hitting out at government censorship from its website in recent days.

• In our last editorial, the Flyer News staff restated our ded­ication to the pursuit of truths in the Dayton community. We pledged our support to the Mountain Echo, the student news­paper of Mount St. Mary’s University, as they countered cen­sorship from their new president, Simon Newman–as well as the University of Dayton faculty and students who petitioned against the president’s actions. Since our last issue was published, President Newman resigned–a testament to the power of collec­tively speaking out against censorship.

• At the dead end of Latham Works Lane, a flagpole bears a rectangle of red cloth dominated by a big blue X and 13 white stars.

• It’s the Confederate flag, a symbol of the Civil War-era American South that is increasingly seen as a sign of the South’s resistance to civil rights.

• One of the United States government’s priorities in Internet policy is encapsulated by a term that’s recently been making the rounds; the “free flow of information.” It appears almost every time U.S. officials describe how they intend to protect the free and open Internet, especially when it comes to international law. The general idea is that bits of online data should not be discriminated against, hindered, or regulated across national boundaries. As a general principle, this sounds positive. It could be a helpful antidote against arbitrary data localization rules that threaten to break up the global Internet, or attempts by governments’ to block and censor foreign websites using nationwide filters.

Privacy

• As you may have heard someone runs fake sites on a similar address to the original ones and tries to fool people with that. Fake sites are transparent proxies with MITM.

• Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance must be exhausted. Vance has been the New York face of the anti-encryption push — a state-level James Comey with the NYPD as his backing band. He’s held histrionic press conferences and issued editorials via The Paper of Record. He’s also leveraging the web to muster his anti-encryption forces. As Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports for Motherboard, he’s asking law enforcement officers to show him on the webform where the encrypted phone abused the investigation.

• The UN’s special rapporteur on the right to privacy, Joseph A. Cannataci, has told the UK government to “desist from setting a bad example to other states” with its new Investigatory Powers Bill (aka the Snooper’s Charter). He is particularly concerned about bulk interception and bulk hacking, which “fail the standards of several UK Parliamentary Committees, run counter to the most recent judgements of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, and undermine the spirit of the very right to privacy.”

• In his first report since taking up the new post of special rapporteur on the right to privacy, Cannataci urged the UK government to “step back from taking disproportionate measures which may have negative ramifications far beyond the shores of the United Kingdom.” He pointed out “the huge influence that UK legislation still has in over 25% of the UN’s members states that still form part of the Commonwealth.”

• The FBI maintains that it can’t access San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c without Apple breaching its own security protocols, which the company has resisted. People familiar with Apple software and encryption keys say that the FBI actually already knows exactly how to get into the phone.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said that the FBI’s claim to need Apple to unlock the iPhone a San Bernardino shooter is a sham.

• The FBI says that only Apple has the ability to crack the work phone left behind by the San Bernardino terrorists, and last month convinced a federal judge to compel the tech giant to write a custom operating system with intentionally weakened security mechanisms. Apple is refusing to do so, and said that it is willing to take the fight to the Supreme Court.

• The UK is setting a bad example to the rest of the world with proposed changes to the law on surveillance, the United Nations special rapporteur on privacy has said.

• The criticism by rapporteur Joseph Cannataci is made in a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council. The report deals with privacy concerns worldwide but Cannataci, concerned about developments in the UK, has devoted a section to the British bill.

• He says the British government has failed to recognise the consequences of legitimising bulk data collection or mass surveillance. Instead of legitimising it, the government should be outlawing it, he says.

• MPs are scheduled to vote on the second reading of the investigatory powers bill next week. The bill is in part a response to the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 about the scale of bulk data collection by intelligence agencies in the UK and US.

• Unlike the Green Party’s Jill Stein, not one Republican or Democratic nominee has voiced any support for the NSA whistleblower or shown any willingness to allow him to return to the U.S. as a free man.

• The Maryland Special Appeals Court isn’t buying government lawyers’ arguments that warrantless deployment of Stingray devices has no 4th Amendment implications. The government had argued that “everyone knows” phones generate location data when turned on and this information is “shared with the rest of the world” (but most importantly with law enforcement).

• The court has yet to release its written opinion, but it did issue a one-page order upholding the lower court’s suppression of evidence related to law enforcement’s use of a Stingray. This ruling is especially important in Maryland, where Baltimore police have used the devices hundreds of times a year without seeking warrants or notifying judges and defendants about the origins of evidence.

• Being familiar with our story roster when it comes to traffic and speed cameras, the only logical conclusion that can be reached is that these devices have almost nothing to do with driver safety and almost everything to do with bringing in revenue for local governments. And, with the focus being on revenue as opposed to keeping human beings from harm, the mystery for all of the corruption surrounding how these camera contracts are awarded and implemented vanishes into a story of the age-old greed of the human being.

• But to really see how spectacularly these cameras fail at just about everything, we can eschew the reports on safety and the lack of their impact for the moment and focus instead on how it’s quickly becoming clear that the cameras do a shitty job at the bringing-in-revenue part of the equation as well. We’ve seen already the staggering statistics on how many refunds have been issued for tickets issued by the camera system, but now the courts are getting involved as well. An example of this can be seen in Chicago, where a judge has ruled that camera tickets spanning back over a decade are simply void and that the city had violated the due process rights of the citizens under its care.

• Michael V. Hayden, the only person to ever head both the NSA and CIA, offers an unprecedented look at America’s intelligence wars in his memoir, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.”

Civil Rights

• Gift Abu is describing what she says was her most harrowing experience working as an anti-FGM activist in Nigeria. A mother-to-be was having complications but the cutters wouldn’t help her give birth safely unless she allowed them to cut her. “They left her for dead when she said no, and blamed me because I tried to stop them.”

• Above all, I am for what feminism is said to be — equal rights for men and women. Yes, men, too.

• I see, far too often, that feminism is about hating, demeaning, and denying rights to men.

• I am for rights — like the First Amendment right — for neo-nazis (who marched in Skokie back when I was a young teen), and for all sorts of people I think are assholes and idiots.

• I am certainly for rights of people I like, and I like men.

• Police in the icy Northern Swedish city of Ostersund have warned single women against venturing out alone after dark, following a space of violent attacks, with nine cases reported in less than three weeks.

• As yet another attack was reported on Tuesday, the local police chief Stephen Jerand told state broadcaster SVT that he was convinced that his warning, highly unusual in Sweden, had been justified.

• “It is always a consideration whether to go out with this kind of thing or not. But we don’t want to sit here for another week and have more crime victims on our desk,” he said.

• Teens sexting can’t be addressed by existing laws. Law enforcement — which far too often chooses to involve itself in matters best left to parents — bends child pornography laws to “fit” the crime. They often state they’re only doing this to save kids from the harm that might result by further distribution of explicit photos. How exactly turning a teen into a child pornographer who must add his or herself to the sex offender registries is less harmful than the imagined outcomes cited by law enforcement is never explained.

• New Mexico’s state legislature is considering a bill that would stiffen the penalties for people caught with child pornography while also legalizing consensual sexting between underage teenagers. But that’s an unacceptable tradeoff for the state’s Democratic attorney general, whose staff walked out of a hearing in protest of the bill’s leniency toward teen offenders.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Governments gathered at the 55th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Marrakesh this week have agreed to not object to the final proposal on enhancing ICANN accountability. By the move, the governments cleared the way to allow a potential handover of the management of the central root zone of the domain name system and other core databases to ICANN from the United States Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

DRM

• For years, Defective by Design and the anti-DRM movement have been fighting media and proprietary software companies who want to weave Digital Restrictions Management into the HTML standard that undergirds the Web. Winning this is a top priority for us — the DRM proposal, known as EME (Encrypted Media Extensions), would make it cheaper and more politically acceptable to impose restrictions on Web users, opening the floodgates to a new wave of DRM throughout the Internet.

• The battle is coming to a head as EME approaches a final vote by the Web’s standardization organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We need to make our voices heard now — the W3C is convening March 20-22 and is scheduled to discuss the proposal.

Intellectual Monopolies

• This Kat understands that not all language versions of the directive speak of ‘shape’. Indeed, the French version refers to ‘forme’, the German version speaks of ‘form’, and the Italian version speaks of ‘forma’. In Italian a ‘forma’ is not necessarily three-dimensional, but can also be two-dimensional, and the same is true in French and German as well.

Copyrights

• A UK pub has been fined nearly £24,000 ($34,100) for illegally showing Sky television, following an investigation by trade body the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

• Norwegian economic crime police have seized the domain name of a local Popcorn-Time website. The site in question didn’t offer any copyright infringing material, but featured news articles and links to external sites where the popular application could be downloaded. No arrests were made.

• LegendSky, a hardware manufacturer that creates devices enabling consumers to bypass 4K copy protection, has informed a New York federal court that they’re not breaking any laws. The company is being sued by Warner Bros. and Intel daughter company Digital Content Protection, who want to shut down their sales.

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