● 03.10.16

● Links 10/3/2016: Qubes OS 3.1, Linux Kernel 4.4.5

Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Hollywood, with all its glitz and glamour, seems like the last place you’ll find the mighty penguin’s influence. Well thankfully for all Linux fans, the truth is quite the opposite. The open source operating system has played a key role in turning many directorial dreams into silver screen successes. What attracts the billion-dollar industry to this ‘free as in free beer’ operating system is not its price. In fact, it is Linux’s unmatched performance is what makes it the preferred choice over some of the top-of-the-line operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X.

Kernel Space

• Just a few minutes ago, kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS.

• As you may or may not know, Linux 4.5 is the newest and most advanced long-term supported (LTS) kernel branch, which is currently used in the popular Arch Linux rolling operating system, Solus, Manjaro Linux, as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Today’s Linux kernel 4.4.5 update is the fifth maintenance build in the series, and according to the appended shortlog, it’s a fairly normal one.

• The 4.5 release is close, it’s time to look at what’s in store for the next kernel’s merge window in the Intel graphics driver.

• Headline features for sure are that FBC and PSR are enabled by default. And this time around I’m really hopeful that it will stick, since Paulo&Rodrigo have done a stellar job hunting down all the corner cases, writing testcases for them all and in general making sure we have a really solid foundation for display power saving features. There’s still some oddball cornercases, which means it’s not yet enabled everywhere and on all platforms, but like I said: Looking really good, and the culmination of over 1 year of effort to get the code infrastructure fixed up and solid.

Graphics Stack

• Today AMD released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 driver (formerly known as Catalyst), but sadly the Linux driver update is not in tandem with this new driver update which now provides official Vulkan support.

• When hearing that Radeon Software Crimson 16.3 brings official Vulkan support over their earlier Windows beta, I was excited and hoping the Linux release would join in. The release notes also mention some performance improvements with this Crimson 16.3 driver and other enhancements to complement the Vulkan mainline API support.

Applications

• Xfpanel-switch is a nifty little program that aids in managing multiple panel layouts in Xfce. I came across this application when I checked out xubuntu livecd last week. I have now pacakged this application for Fedora. It is available in rawhide and for Fedora releases 24 and 23.

• Google Play Music Desktop Player (GPMDP) is a brilliant new open-source desktop based client for Google Play Music. GPMDP is cross-platform and has just recently released 32 and 64 bit builds for Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• This is not the first time that fail0verflow announced it had successfully hacked Sony’s PlayStation 4 to run Linux, and even showcased to the public that the team was running Pokémon. After months of testing, the team has said that the console is successfully able to run Linux, but what does this mean for the future gaming titles. Does this mean that Sony’s PlayStation 4 will be open to run pirated copies of future games? The hacking group has not stated this, but has shown us on how we too can run Linux on our consoles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Is there already a release party in your area? If there is, please feel free to join! Our celebrations are open to all GNOME enthusiasts.

Distributions

New Releases

• RaspEX developer Arne Exton informs Softpedia about the availability for download of a new, special build of the RaspEX Live CD distribution optimized for the new Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computer.

• The new RaspEX Build 160307 has been specially released to support the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B SBC announced by the Raspberry Pi Foundation on February 29, 2016, in addition to it supporting the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B board.

• I’m happy to announce that today we’re releasing Qubes OS 3.1!

• The major new architectural feature of this release has been the introduction of the Qubes Management infrastructure, which is based on the popular Salt management software.

Arch Family

• Yes, I know I’m a little late with my monthly announcement for the new Arch Linux ISO image update but better late than never, so here it is: Arch Linux 2016.03.01 ISO is now available for download.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6. This new version of Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualization solution offers increased performance, scale, and security for high-intensity Linux workloads. It also updates user experience and management tools to help reduce cost and time of VMware migrations by eliminating the need to purchase a third-party migration tool. Lowering the costs and sprawl of proprietary virtualization solutions is a common customer challenge addressed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Fedora

• With Taskotron not sending comments to Bodhi anymore, there was no easy way to be notified about task results. This changed about a month ago when Taskotron started emitting fedmsgs so results started arriving to packagers. Last week, we fine-tuned notifications so packagers have more power over what result notifications they receive. Let’s have a look what are the defaults and what you can do to change them to suit your needs.

• ABRT project produces very helpful statistics about crashes in Fedora. We in the Red Hat desktop team have been using it intensively for some time. I’ve already written about it in one of my previous posts. It’s really helped us make Fedora much more stable.

• Call me Captain Obvious who just discovered America, but until now I had a very little idea about the fact that I can filter messages from FAF and make alerts. So when a problem in one of my packages reaches, say, 1000 occurrences I receive an email or IRC message that there is a severe enough problem to look at.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Have you ever wondered how to access the internet anonymously or protecting your privacy against internet surveillance! without the effort of setting up a VPN and relay connections. Tails Linux distribution is a quite good choice for you.

• During your regular usage to the internet, you regularly send application tracking reports, search engine queries, browsing history, your location based on the current IP address, ..etc. All these kind of information could be used to invade your privacy. So, you could use an applications called “Tor” to connect you through multiple virtual tunnels and relays to hide your identity and your location. This seems pretty good, but what if you don’t want to bother with setting up Tor in your current Linux distribution, you could simply use a live session of Tails directly from a USB, DVD, and SD card.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As initially reported by Michael Larabel from Phoronix, Canonical recently updated the release notes of the forthcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system with new info on the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver.

• OnePlus might “Never Settle” for playing along with other brands. The Android OEM that has already made an iPhone case is this time collaborating with Canonical to bring the Ubuntu OS (formerly Ubuntu Touch OS) to the OnePlus One.

• Ubuntu is deprecating the proprietary AMD Catalyst (fglrx) driver in its next Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 16.04, according to an early mention in the release notes.

• Instead of the binary driver, Ubuntu recommended that users install 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,” said Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Four years ago (last leap day to be specific), the first Raspberry Pi was released. And on February 29, 2016, the third version made its debut.

• In its short lifespan, the Pi has broken records to become the best-selling British computer. With more than eight million units in circulation, it has eclipsed the sales records set by Sinclair, Amstrad and Acorn. Back in the 1980s, those companies were at the forefront of the “microcomputer revolution”.

Phones

Android

• Google released a preview of the upcoming Android N release, featuring multi-window support, improved notifications, and better Doze power saving.

• Alphabet-owned Google released the first of five planned developer previews for the upcoming Android N, available as an over-the-air (OTA) download for Nexus devices leading up to a third quarter release. Hiroshi Lockheimer’s announcement of the release appears to confirm rumors that Android N will be called Android Nutella, as Lockheimer writes “What will the N release be named? We’re nut tellin’ you yet.”

• Android N is here and ready for your programming expertise to make the next generation of Android apps. Don’t plan on releasing your new programs anytime too soon though.

• Android N could be finally named Android Nutella. This was hinted in the Android N Developer Preview announcement post by Google’s Android boss Hiroshi Lockheimer. It’s also possible that Google announces an online poll in future, be prepared!

Free Software/Open Source

• The Elastic stack is the search engine you’ve been using without knowing it. Powering some popular and big names – Facebook and Netflix, Atlassian, SEEK and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to name just five – Elastic provides an open source and freely available operating system-agnostic search engine. It retrieves data at high-speed, freeing a business from the arduous task of managing mass volumes of data to actually working with meaningful, insightful information. It opens the possibilities of exploring and finding trends, something which can only happen when your basic reporting requirements are so well met that they are no longer a pressing issue.

• Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve had to recommend alternatives to a discontinued Google product; three years ago, we helped you find open source alternatives to Google Reader for your RSS reading needs.

• While there’s no word yet on whether Google will release the code for Picasa under an open source license now that it has been discontinued, fortunately for you, there are many open source alternatives already out there to help you with your photo organizing and editing needs.

• The OSI’s new document, Principles of DRM Nonaggression for Open Standards, deals with standards bodies that are dealing with DRM, as the World Wide Web Consortium has been doing, rather controversially. The problem is that DRM is protected by laws like the DMCA, that prohibit breaking DRM even for legitimate reasons — like making interoperable products or doing basic security research. This is the opposite of how open standards are supposed to work: an open standard should be implementable by anyone, and there should be no barriers to improving it by pointing out security problems with it.

• The Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit that certifies open source licenses, has adopted an important principle about standards, DRM, and openness, and just in time, too.

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which makes the core standards that the Internet runs on, is in the midst of a long, contentious effort to add “DRM” (Digital Rights Management1) to HTML5, the next version of the Web. Laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which has analogs all over the world) give companies the power to make legal threats against people engaged in important, legitimate activities. Because the DMCA regulates breaking DRM, even for legal reasons, companies use it to threaten and silence security researchers who embarrass them by pointing out their mistakes, and to shut down competitors who improve their products by adding legitimate features, add-ons, parts, or service options. The Web relies on the distributed efforts of independent security researchers, and its historic strength has been the ability of companies and individuals to innovate without permission, even when they were disrupting an existing business.

• Docker had its Swarm orchestration product tested against Kubernetes and claims the results show a 5X advantage in speed to initiation.

• The phrase, “Software is eating the world,” first showed up in 2011. In 2015, open source took its rightful seat at the table.

• “If the theory pervades deeper – and software does eat the world – then surely open source software will swallow it, right?” Forbes hesitantly prodded in early 2015. Later in the year they more confidently thrusted with a piece titled It’s Actually Open Source Software That’s Eating the World.

• This isn’t a movement spearheaded by a single voice. Wired joined with articles like, Open Source Software Went Nuclear This Year. Replete with quotes like: “This is not just a turning point, but a tipping point,” says Brandon Keepers, the head of open source at GitHub

• Society today runs on information, and the tech world is no small part of this data revolution. However, it’s easy to forget that these programs and online services people use every day all run on black boxes, blinking away in a room somewhere. This is the data center, the core of computing technology in the modern world. While data centers have traditionally run on software and hardware from monolithic vendors, new technologies from the open-source community are creeping in under the door.

Events

• If there is one area in which open source has never suffered it is a lack of events. From your big professional conferences right down to your friendly, local meetups, there is just something so delightfully fun about getting together in person to share ideas, learn from each other, and have fun.

• One of the most popular types of event are unconferences, and there are more and more of them cropping up all over the world.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As reported yesterday, Mozilla pushed the Firefox 45.0 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• Firefox 45.0 is not a worthy update, but we still recommend users to upgrade as soon as possible if they want to receive the latest security patches, which keep their data and privacy safe from prying eyes or online scammers.

• In the last 24 hours, since our previous blog post with the direct download links for Firefox 45.0, we have noticed that several popular Linux kernel-based operating systems have updated their Firefox packages to the new version.

• Ubuntu is, of course, among them, and users of the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) should know that they need to update their systems to Mozilla Firefox 45.0 as soon as possible.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The big story today was the decision by Ubuntu developers to discontinue providing AMD proprietary graphic drivers. Olivier Hallot has been appointed to lead the new LibreOffice documentation project and Jun Auza has a round-up of Hollywood movies that use Linux in some way. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is heading for Qualcomm ARM server and Linux is back on PlayStations.

• Today, I’d like to talk about what is going on at the LibreOffice documentation project. My name is Olivier Hallot and I am a French national living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since my infancy. Back in 2002, I got involved in the OOo project leading the software translation team for Brazilian Portuguese. My background includes being an executive in two of the major software companies before going on my own and joining the open source community.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Microsoft today announced that it will be cutting support for Android, iOS, Windows Store, and Windows Phone app in the Application Insights tool for its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Application Insights, which offers analytics on performance and usage, will stop accepting new apps for those platforms on April 15, and on June 15, the feature will stop showing data for apps on those platforms.

• How does Netflix build code before it’s deployed to the cloud? While pieces of this story have been told in the past, we decided it was time we shared more details. In this post, we describe the tools and techniques used to go from source code to a deployed service serving movies and TV shows to more than 75 million global Netflix members.

• To get cracking on the business of shipping code, devs need Visual Studio, RTVS, and Microsoft R Open. The division between the last two is necessary for licensing reasons: R is licensed under the GLPv2, while Redmond’s favourite open source license is the MIT license.

• Catching attackers in their tracks sounds harder than it actually could be. Last week MSSP Dell Secureworks launched what it called the “open source honeytoken tripwire” DCEPT, to prevent those attacks which do not use malware.

BSD

• After much internal discussion, OpenBSD has officially discontinued support for the VAX architecture.

Openness/Sharing

• During their fellowships, the ICFJ Knight Fellows help spur a culture of media innovation and experimentation. Through their work, fellows develop and build a variety of new tools and technologies that have helped revolutionize newsrooms across the globe.

• The tools range from HackDash, a platform that helps keep track of ideas and participants during hackathons and other collaborative projects, to Yo Quiero Saber, which helps voters compare their views with those of political candidates. In addition to the newsrooms from which they originated, the tools can help media organizations everywhere adapt to the latest technologies and better engage their readers.

• Dutch fashion designers Martijn van Strien​ and Vera du Pont​ have proposed a “third industrial revolution” and “democratisation of production” using 3D printing and other technology.

• Published in a limited edition of 20 copies and available to order online for free, the duo’s Open Source Fashion Manifesto shifts our gaze to what the designers deem the three most important issues facing fashion today – our dwindling planetary resources, the disposability of clothing and the questionable conditions under which that clothing is produced ­–­ only to propose a complete shake-up.

Programming

• he Eclipse Foundation, which develops open source programming tools for developers, has rolled out what it says is a next-generation development platform that leverages the cloud, containers and a plug-in framework in the form of Eclipse Che.

• SAP continues to demonstrate its commitment to open source with the announcement at EclipseCon that SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA is based on Eclipse Che. Eclipse Che is an open source developer workspace server and cloud IDE.

• This next edition complements the existing SAP Web IDE. It will allow developers familiar with the workspace to develop applications, database models and user interfaces on SAP HANA software, including the development of SAP Fiori apps. SAP along with Codenvy are two of the first companies to offer the new workspace to developers. For those developers and companies looking to develop their own environment the open source is available on Github.

• No but seriously, SAP has announced the availability of its SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA.

Standards/Consortia

• The ‘Open IT standards’ list includes only those standards that fit the open standard definition in the European Interoperability Framework (version 1.0). The Swedish National Procurement Services (Statens inköpscentral, NPS) asked the University of Skövde to check which IT standards meet the definition’s requirements.

• AMD’s Daniel Rakos has written a blog post for GPUOpen concerning Vulkan’s validation layers and making use of them for debugging and testing your code using this new high-performance graphics API.

• The plug-able validation layers is one of the big design differences compared to OpenGL. Rakos’ blog post on the matter covers different error types, preparing code for the validation support, and more.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• International experts convened by the World Health Organization this week on the Zika virus said vaccine development is a priority for the future but the most pressing need is to get diagnostic and prevention tools. Over 60 groups are hard at work on experimental products, according to the WHO, while a system of incentives to share virus samples is being considered.

• At a 9 March press briefing, Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general, Health Systems and Innovation, said the meeting took place from 7-9 March, and provided the first global platform for scientists working on Zika virology and immunology, as well as clinicians, product developers, regulators, funders and policy experts, “to take stock of the R&D (Research and Development) pipeline.”

• The World Health Organization has provided a list of suggestions to the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, highlighting WHO activities in this area and making suggestions on areas the WHO has not yet been able to complete. It also describes several new proposals by WHO, including a global “fair pricing forum,” a pooled health product R&D fund, and a global antibiotic research and development facility.

Security

• In reaction to the recent attacks on Linux Mint, many measures were taken to reduce the risk of future intrusions, but we also worked on the eventuality of being hacked again. In particular, additional measures were taken to detect issues faster, to reduce their impact and to recover from them more efficiently. Today, we’re implementing a final set of measures aimed at lowering the value of the information stored on our servers.

• The explosive growth of the Internet of Things has created a host of new threats for the enterprise. Here’s how hackers are targeting your connected devices and what you can do about it.

• The vendor security evaluation framework provides questions that organizations need to ask to accurately assess a third-party’s security and privacy readiness, Google said.

• Google has released a framework to open source that it implements internally to evaluate the security posture of the numerous vendors it uses for various services each year.

• Yesterday, the Let’s Encrypt CA issued its millionth certificate. This is a perfect occasion for us to talk about some plans for the CA and client software through the rest of 2016.

• In April of this year, all of the clients for Let’s Encrypt will be renamed to be clearly distinct from the CA service offered by ISRG. The Let’s Encrypt python client has primarily been an EFF project, so we’ll start hosting it to make that clear.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Cameron’s “moderate rebels” – Saudi supplied Wahhabi jihadists – have this past 48 hours been bombing civilian areas of Aleppo with yellow phosphorus. The BBC, which went to such extraordinary lengths to fake reports of chemical attacks by Assad, has not reported these genuine chemical attacks at all. Probably because it is too difficult to explain not just why Cameron’s allies are using chemical weapons – and who gave them the chemical weapons – but also why these “friendly” jihadists are attacking Cameron’s other allies, the Kurds, all during a ceasefire.

• This video of Robert Stuart is a must see. Let me pin my colours to the mast and say that I am absolutely convinced that the BBC did deliberately and knowingly fake evidence of chemical attacks.

• [...]

• It is clever propaganda because careful analysis of the text reveals a story very different to the overall picture being deliberately portrayed. Just after the women appear, the reporter slips in that the hardship is caused by hoarding by rebels – i.e. it is actually David Cameron’s moderate forces, not the government, who are causing suffering to the civilians. But you would have to be following very closely and analysing very carefully to pick up on that.

• The BBC really has become one of the more outrageous vehicles of government propaganda on the international scene.

Transparency Reporting

• EFF recently received records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice for information on how the US Marshals—and perhaps other agencies—have been flying small, fixed-wing Cessna planes equipped with “dirtboxes”: IMSI catchers that imitate cell towers and are able to capture the locational data of tens of thousands of cell phones during a single flight. The records we received confirm the agencies were using these invasive surveillance tools with little oversight or legal guidance.

Finance

• Talvivaara’s embattled Sotkamo mining company handed over nearly one million euros to the parent company just one day before it filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy estate has only recovered part of the funds and is now taking the matter to court.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Right off, the framing is inaccurate: The scope wasn’t “this week,” it was a 16-hour period after the Flint, Michigan, debate—and following a weekend in which Sanders won three of four state contests with Hillary Clinton. The do-or-die stakes for Sanders in Michigan couldn’t have been higher, and how one of the most influential newspapers in the United States covered his debate performance and his primary showing was important.

• [...]

• At a moment when even the Koch brothers are coming out against overincarceration, a story that thumbnails it as “releasing lots of criminals” can indeed be considered a negative framing, if not more importantly one that shortchanges readers’ intelligence and understanding.

• Still, note that “negative” is not intended as the opposite of “factual.” When the George Bush Sr. campaign focused on Michael Dukakis’ prison furlough program—the so-called “Willie Horton” issue—its attacks were nominally fact-based. Yet many people saw them as an unfair exploitation of racial fears, and it was relevant to address them on those terms.

• Bigger picture: The reason the graphic and FAIR’s blog post went so viral is because people can intuitively look at a litany of stories over such a short period and see bias. Nature made us pattern-seeking mammals for a reason, and the Washington Post’s post-debate coverage post-debate displays an obvious pattern.

• You wouldn’t know it from watching TV last night or reading the national papers this morning but Bernie Sanders’ Michigan win ranks among the greatest upsets in presidential primary history.

• Should he win the nomination it will be go down as the biggest upset of any kind in American political history.

• If he wins the election it will change the fundamental direction of the nation and the world.

Censorship

Privacy

• If you are a company that collects customer data, it’s your job to protect it. Your customers expect it. You can’t dodge that responsibility by altering your terms and conditions, especially when finding them is equivalent to playing “Where’s Waldo?” on your website.

• This is not only outrageous, but in EFF’s view, also not legally enforceable.

• VTech, Hong Kong-based maker of many children’s digital toys, apparently doesn’t see things this way.

• First, a little background. In November 2015, VTech was hacked and information of as many as 6.3 million children and 4.8 million parents was compromised. Data exposed by the breach consisted of children’s names, age, gender, photos, chat logs, and information linking them to their parents and their home addresses. After downplaying the extent of the hack, VTech finally came forward with the details, including an estimate of the number of victims by their country of residence.

• The FBI’s claim that only Apple is capable of recovering data from San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone is akin to animal excrement, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said Tuesday.

• Department of Justice attorneys said in a court filing last month that Apple has the “exclusive technical means” of accessing data off an iPhone 5c recovered from Farook after he and his wife killed 14 people in a December 2015 rampage. Both perpetrators died after during a shoot-out with police, and the Justice Department has asked a District Court judge in California to issue an order compelling Apple to unlock the phone since it claims it’s otherwise impossible to recover any digital evidence from the device.

• “Respectfully, that’s horse****,” Mr. Snowden told attendees at the Blueprint for Democracy conference in Washington, D.C. this week through a video link from Moscow.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden believes that Apple engineers are not the only ones who can unlock the San Bernadino killer’s iPhone. Snowden said yesterday that the FBI could have bypassed the phone’s auto-erase function without help, The Intercept reported.

• “The FBI is arguing in court that Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’” of accessing the iPhone’s data, Snowden said via video link from Moscow at a conference organized by Common Cause. “Respectfully, that’s bullshit.”

• Snowden stopped short of explicitly supporting Apple, which is resisting a court order to unlock the phone for the FBI’s investigation. But he later Tweeted a link to an ACLU blog post that details how the FBI could crack the phone’s encryption.

• Fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden has rubbished claims that the FBI can’t unlock an iPhone.

• The FBI has taken Apple to court in a bid to force the firm to unlock an iPhone owned by terrorists.

• The two terrorists were responsible for a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California that left 14 people dead late last year.

• “The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that’s bullsh*t,” Snowden told a conference via video-link, the Guardian reported.

• Following his remarks, Snowden tweeted his support for a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

• If the FBI wins in its case against Apple to help it unlock the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone 5C, it won’t be long before the government forces Apple to turn on users’ iPhone cameras and microphones to spy on them, according to the company’s head of services Eddy Cue.

• The FBI has demanded that Apple creates custom software that bypasses certain security features of the company’s iOS to allow law enforcement to brute force the passcode of the gunman’s iPhone 5C.

• But according to Apple, making the modifications necessary in this case would set a dangerous precedent in offering backdoors into users’ smartphones.

• Governments could demand access to iPhone cameras and microphones to spy on civilians if Apple loses its high-profile battle with the FBI, one of the company’s most senior executives has said.

• While the ongoing battle between Apple and the FBI has been grabbing a lot of media attention, a recent allegation raised by Director, James Comey, came as a blow against the NSA. Although the National Security Agency (NSA) was not named directly in the San Bernardino case by the agency, the implication was clear.

• Even though an online encryption standard adopted Jan. 1 is meant to make the Web safer, Mozilla and Symantec opted to make an exception to the protocol so that people whose devices can’t support the upgrade aren’t put at risk.

• “We increasingly need to reach out to commercial companies,” many of which are unfamiliar with federal acquisition regulations, said Jennifer Walsmith, NSA’s senior acquisition executive.

Civil Rights

• Here are five things to remember when you hear the Prime Minister praise the “sovereignty of parliament”.

• First, ministers and officials are encouraged to use statutory instruments as much as possible, which do not get proper parliamentary scrutiny.

• Second, the government has sought to cut the “Short money” which funds the scrutiny work of opposition parties in parliament.

• Third, the government is seeking to push through the Investigatory Powers Bill through parliament at speed, just as it did with the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act.

• Fourth, when the House of Lords (sensibly) rejected cuts to certain benefits (which were later dropped), Cameron sought to limit the power of the Lords.

• The last-minute addition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made a few giant leaps toward gender parity possible.

• “And let us not forget that several years ago Trump was in the middle of the so-called Birther movement trying to delegitimize the President of the United States of America,” Sanders continued, to applause. “My dad was born in Poland and I know a little bit about the immigrant experience. Nobody has ever asked me for my birth certificate. Maybe it has something to do with the color of my skin.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Patent attorneys in Europe have become accustomed in recent years to the EPO appeal boards refusing to consider on appeal claim amendments that could have been, but were not, filed in first instance proceedings.

• Katfriend Heiko Sendrowski tells us that this approach is now being adopted by the German courts also. Just so we have our acronyms straight, the tale involves nullity proceedings which were decided at first instance in the Federal Patents Court, or Bundespatentgericht (BPatG) and which were appealed to the Federal Court of Justice, or Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) which is in effect the Supreme Court other than in constitutional matters.

• Last year, Techdirt wrote about how one of the most significant breakthroughs in the field of genomics is already embroiled in a nasty patent battle. But it’s not just the fundamental techniques in this field that are being held back by selfish attempts to “own” key technologies.

Copyrights

• We wrote last year about a copyright dispute between DC Comics and guy by the name of Mark Towle, who had been custom producing Batmobiles for Batman fans. Mike’s analysis in that post is wonderfully detailed and you should read it if you want a deep dive into the specifics of how the court ruled, but I will summarize it here for you as well. The 9th Circuit ruled that the Batmobile was deserving of the same copyright protections as other fictional characters, despite it being a depiction of an inanimate object, and it completely ignored the entire expression/idea dichotomy that is supposed to govern copyright law. That dichotomy can be explained as giving copyright protection to specific expressions of an idea without protecting the idea itself. For instance, the depiction of HAL the homicidal computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey may be covered under copyright, but the idea of a homicidal artificial intelligence is not.

• The legal dispute between Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group BREIN and Usenet provider News-Service.com will continue after a Dutch court delayed its decision over a requested piracy filter. The court wants both parties to answer detailed questions about the efficacy and costs associated with such a filtering mechanism.

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