● 03.13.16

● Links 13/3/2016: KDE at CERN, FCC Versus FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 5:21 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• After writing my War on Inconsistency article, and having gone through a bunch of Arch-based distro tests, all of which exhibited the same lack of coherence, stability and predictability, I thought about what should be done in the Linux space to make it more appealing to the wider audience. Not just from the application perspective. From the brand and image angle.

• Diversity and uniqueness are important and possibly even conducive to progress and success, up to a point, but then, you cannot disregard all the things that people expect from a consumer product. Which, to a large extent, Linux isn’t today. However, making everything work the exact same isn’t really an answer either. We do need our KDE and Xfce and Gnome, but perhaps they can all behave less erratically and radiate a tiny bit more professional air. This is my current short list of what we can do, without compromising on all the little things that make Linux so special. 2016 edition. Yes, same old, same old, blah blah, we have seen this kind of list emerge every few years, etc. True. You do not need to read. If you do want, the rest of the text awaits you.

• Former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, who famously called Linux a “malignant cancer” 15 years ago, has softened his position on the open-source operating system. On 8 March, Microsoft announced plans to open up its SQL Server database software to users of the Linux operating system with a full launch planned for mid-2017.

Desktop

• After teasing its customers last month with news that the Skylake-powered ‘Project Sputnik’ XPS 13 developer edition laptop will be shipping with Ubuntu, Dell now announces that its entire Precision mobile workstation series comes with Ubuntu preinstalled.

• We really liked the updated Skylake-powered Dell XPS 13, and its bigger brother, the XPS 15, was also pretty great.

• But if you’re looking at those machines and thinking, “Well, the hardware is nice; I just wish they came with Linux,” Dell has some good news. The company’s “Developer Edition” program has just been updated to include the newest Skylake systems.

• The Developer Edition XPS 13s are slightly different from the Windows versions, as they use Intel Wi-Fi adaptors (instead of Dell-branded parts). Otherwise, little has changed save for them coming with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS instead of Windows 10. The range of configurations available is also narrower. Currently, only the i7 processor is available with the beautiful 3200×1800 touch display. This can be had with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD, or 16GB RAM and 512GB, or 1TB of SSD. Dell says that later on, an i5 model with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and the 1920×1080 non-touch display will be available.

• Have you coveted the Skylake-powered version of Dell’s near-borderless XPS 13 laptop, but wished it would ship with an open platform like Linux instead of Windows? Now’s your chance. Dell has released a new version of its XPS 13 Developer Edition that comes with Ubuntu Linux 14.04 out of the box. You’ll need a deep bank account to buy one right now, as your only current choices are high-end Core i7 models (with a quad HD+ touchscreen) that start at a lofty $1,550. You can finally get a Linux-based XPS 13 with 16GB of RAM, however, and there are promises of a far more frugal Core i5 system with 8GB of RAM and a non-touch display.

• Linux containers has been a huge force in Linux servers and most of the press happened in 2015. Why is this in a desktop article? Because setting up tools and using containers on a Linux desktop is easier than doing so on OS X or Windows because you don’t need a VM. For developers and administrators I highly suggest you run Linux natively if you are going to be working with containers. You will have less to set up and you will learn more about the environment where your containers will run.

Kernel Space

• We had several kernel updates this week, including Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS, Linux kernel 3.10.100 LTS, and Linux kernel 3.12.56 LTS, and the last one is Linux kernel 3.14.64 LTS.

• The sixty-fourth point release of the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel series is a small one, and according to the diff from the previous maintenance build, it mainly updates drivers for things like SCSI, USB, Virtual Host, InfiniBand, iSCSI, EDAC, ATA, IOMMU, and MTD.

• Linux Foundation-supported CNCF wants to spur adoption of more open source cloud apps

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has plumped for Google’s Kubernetes as its first containerisation technology.

• The CNCF, which only formed in December with the support of Linux Foundation, said Kubernetes will be the first of many open source projects that it plans to adopt.

• With Linux 4.5 expected this weekend, I’ve been running some more, one-off tests of this new kernel. One of the latest test runs was looking at the power use of the kernel on an Intel Haswell ultrabook.

• From an ASUS Zenbook (UX301LAA) with Core i7 Haswell CPU I ran some power monitoring tests of the battery when running Linux 4.4 stable on Ubuntu 16.04, Linux 4.5 Git, and also the Linux 4.6 Intel DRM-Next code (since for Linux 4.6 there is FBC and PSR enabled by default).

Graphics Stack

• X.Org Server, the open-source display server technology used by default in almost all Linux kernel-based operating systems received its second maintenance build for the 1.18 series.

• With Linux 4.5 likely coming out this weekend, here’s a look at some of the new features/functionality coming for Linux 4.6 — with this article looking at a portion of the expected DRM driver changes.

Benchmarks

• Every year or two we run >32-bit vs. 64-bit Linux benchmarks. While x86_64 Intel/AMD hardware has been extremely common for quite some time, we continue to be amazed at the number of people still running an i686 Linux distribution on x86_64 hardware.

Applications

• The third maintenance release of the stable 2.7 series of the Git open-source distributed revision control system has been announced for all supported platforms.

• Free and open-source compositing software, available for MacOS X, Windows and Linux.

• Do you use Google Play Music on your Android device? If yes, here is good news for you, Samuel Attard developed a Google Play Music desktop client and from now you don’t have to touch your mobile for Google play service because you can do it right from your desktop. It is open source, lightweight, free, and cross platform available for Linux/Windows/Mac OS X. Google is known to not make applications for Linux desktop except few like Chrome, etc.. The application has since been consistently updated, and features Google’s Material design, along with nice functionalities like a settings window.

• Quick update: Nemo (2.8.7) with Unity patches and without Cinnamon dependencies is now available in the WebUpd8 Nemo PPA for Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus.

• Due to some Launchpad changes, the PPA package search feature available in Y PPA Manager stopped working properly a while back, returning just part of the search results. The latest Y PPA Manager 2016.03.11, which I released today, fixes this issue.

• ownCloud, the free software alternative to proprietary web services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and others, reached version 9.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I do love my Steam Controller, and Valve really are doing some amazing work with it. This latest update adds a pretty big new feature.

• I actually didn’t think they would make it, but it’s nice to see another Linux supported title be funded. They even had a Linux build for backers to play with, but as I am not someone who funds Kickstarter projects (too much risk) I wasn’t able to test.

• PC Perspective spoke to Dan Baker from Oxide Games about Ashes of the Singularity and the developer seemed pretty happy with Vulkan and what it could mean for Linux.

• Knights and Merchants was originally a LinuxGamePublishing (RIP) title, and sadly the port source code must have gone with it. Topware Interactive now have a Linux beta available on Steam that uses Wine.

• Hey guys, today we have a surprise for you. We’re releasing the source code for Serious Engine v1.10! It’s the very same engine that we used for Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter and The Second Encounter.

• On March 12, 2016, Valve pushed a new Beta build of its Steam Client to public Beta testers marked as “Steam Client Beta update for March 11,” bringing a significant amount of updates to the Steam Controller device.

• The fact it ships with binaries is pretty impressive and uncommon in these kinds of releases. The GPL2 license however kills any idea of making a commercial project using the engine unless of course you are willing to release all your source code as well.

• Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at MAME going open source after 19 years, SteamOS update 2.64 released, Rocket League due on SteamOS and Linux, and new games out for Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’m happy to announce new versions of KDE Partition Manager 2.1.0 and KPMcore 2.1.0.

• For those using the KDE Partition Manager as a KDE/Qt alternative to GParted, the version 2.1.0 release is out along with an update to its underlying KPMcore 2.1.0 library.

• The KDE Partition Manager 2.1.0 release brings F2FS (Flash-Friendly File-System) support in conjunction with f2fs-tools. However, this F2FS support in KDE Partition Manager is currently limited.

• There’s an exp-run going on for KDE4 on FreeBSD right now. That means that the official package-building machines are grinding through the entire ports tree to see what happens. This is part of the regular procedure for big updates — and this is a big one.

• While KDE4 as a desktop — with Plasma shell 4 and the old collection of KDE modules like PIM, etc. — is not getting a lot of upstream releases, it does get some updates, and some applications release new versions. This is one reason to continue to update the packages.

• Have you ever wondered how much time do you spend reading emails, browsing on internet or hacking? I have! I started thinking about monitoring my activity. Reason for this was that I work from home, where I’m alone and nobody is behind my back watching what I’m actually doing. So I came with an idea to write a simple applet which tracks the time you spent in a certain application by just checking your currently active window (application). The functionality is pretty simple, you switch focus to a window where you do something, the applet starts measuring the time and update it in some interval until you switch to another window and so on. It may not be accurate in case you will be cheating, e.g. you open a video player and start watching a movie while you switch focus to another app to avoid monitoring time spent in the video player. Given this, the purpose of the applet is pretty obvious, it should be just for you, for your personal usage when you have no reason for cheating, because you are interested in these statistics.

• We are about half way trough this WTL Sprint @CERN, so I’ve decided to post something about my experience. Actually in this post I do not want to talk about our work, probably I’ll dedicate another article to it at the end of this week, but about one of the talks we had the opportunity to listen. On monday Ezio Todesco (CERN) gave us a talk about CERN history and magnets in LHC.

• The first is weather! It was previously announced that Plasma 5.6 will be seeing the return of the weather widget. Lots of design work and planning has been done for it and while not everything we discussed will make it in for this release I do happily get to show off our new Breeze weather icons;

• A new release of digiKam Recipes is ready for your reading pleasure. This version introduces the Basic Concepts Explained appendix that covers key terms and concepts used in digiKam. Currently, the appendix contains information about chroma subsampling, cor (bit) depth, hue, saturation, brightness, and vibrance. I plan to gradually expand the appendix with time.

• Thank you KDE India for inviting us to share our experience with 250+ budding developers and spreading the knowledge we have acquired during our projects. It was beyond just a meetup, we made many new friends and also learnt a lot from each other. I would also like to thank LNMIIT for hosting such an amazing conference and for the flawless hospitality.

• We passed through retina based authentication, elevators up to 80 meters high, and at the end of the cave there it was: the CMS gigantic machine.

• After the hardware stuff under the ground we saw the data center (#1 level of triggering) and the control room, where we found Plasma 4.2 running on those machines!

• Today, on the third day of the WikiToLearn Sprint at CERN hosted by KDE e.V., we had the pleasure of listening to an interesting and inspiring lecture by Professor Pere Mato Villa, who talked about Computing for Data Processing and Analysis at CERN. In approximately one hour, we were enlightened on the techniques and methods in use in the various LHC experiments to acquire and process raw data from detectors. He also explained the massive extent of the IT infrastructure that’s needed to host all the data: currently all the LHC experiments rely on distributed computing resources, accounting for roughly 350,000 CPU cores, and 400 PB of disk and tape storage combined. That’s a huge one!

• Some time ago, I saw that CERN people had their own clang tree with a few addons, most notable one being the C++ REPL (C++ interpreter) called cling.

• Now we had a presentation by Pere Mato from CERN who talked about their ROOT data analysis framework. It seems like a really nice and powerful piece of software.

• The software is around 50 million lines of code, mostly C++. Some of it is python, but it is only used for quick-and-dirty testing of new ideas.

• A group of us at the CERN-based cross-team sprint are attempting to tame the wilderness of the KDE wikis – at least, TechBase and Community.

• A little bit of history is needed here. Originally, TechBase was the only wiki, and it quickly became a dumping ground for pretty much everything. At some point, the other two wikis (Community and UserBase) were created so we could separate things out a bit, and people wanting tutorials for how to create Plasmoids, for example, wouldn’t be overwhelmed with meeting notes from the Plasma team.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Recently, while considering possible improvements to our command line client, we realized that we’re not really confident about how useful is it for the users. Do you use it? Is it intuitive enough? Do sysadmins like it? Is the documentation all right? Do we communicate features sufficiently?

• GNOME developers working on NetworkManager are hoping to further improve this important networking component of the Linux desktop. In particular, they are hoping to make the command-line NetworkManager (nmcli) more useful.

• After a reboot, everything was back to normal! The cursor appears reliably in the top bar, Activities screen, and other overlays. In addition, some of the transient cursor weirdness I had with some applications seems to be gone.

Distributions

• 2015 was a year of quiet but continuous progress for the Trisquel project. With no major release scheduled for the period, we focused on improving the build system and server infrastructure, making the distro more reliable through quicker and more traceable updates. Our long time sysadmin Santiago Rodriguez took on the big task of taking the original build scripts that produce all our packages and fitting them into a continuous integration system and improved the build environment with pbuilder -for packages- and live-build -for images.

• This year will bring us Trisquel 8, codename “Flidas”. We have already started the development, aiming to produce the first testing images in a couple of months followed by a final release not long after the upstream distro (Ubuntu 16.04) is released in April. Editions will continue to include a main GTK-based desktop, a lighter environment and a Sugar based image, but we hope to extend that list with new additions. Stay tuned!

Reviews

• Linux Lite 2.8 is the latest release of Linux Lite. This release based on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS featuring Xfce 4.10 as main desktop environment.

• Review of Zorin OS 11 Ultimate, which comes with a convenient Look Changer that lets you switch between Windows 7, XP, 2000, Unity, Mac OS X, and Gnome 2 Classic desktops.

Google Summer of Code and Outreachy

• I’ve started preparing some ideas for Google Summer of Code projects I’d be willing to help mentor this year and one of them is for ham radio, with a focus on software defined radio (SDR).

• The Fedora Project is pleased to announce that this summer will mark our TENTH year participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program! We are happy to be accepted again as an organization this year and are looking forward to working with many bright and excited students across the world on many parts of Fedora.

• As part of its diversity outreach initiatives, Debian will be participating in the upcoming 12th round (May – August 2016) of Outreachy, an internship program open worldwide to women (cis and trans), trans men and genderqueer people, as well as nationals and residents of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

• If you are a student looking to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code or a woman or other under-represented group in tech, the Outreachy deadline is too coming up.

• Student applications for GSoC 2016 are running from 14 to 25 March. There are a lot of great participating 2016 organizations from Wayland, GNOME, LLVM, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, GitHub, GNU, Inkscape, Mozilla, and many others. If you are a student looking to get involved with GSoC 2016 for spending your summer while earning a few bucks, visit the GSoC web-site.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

• Ron Hovsepian took over as chief and presided over the infamous patent-licensing deal with Microsoft in November 2006 that made Novell a pariah in the open source community. That was the beginning of the end.

• In 2010, Novell was bought by the Attachmate Group who, showing some wisdom, relocated SUSE back to Nuremberg to be run as an independent unit. Micro Focus became the owner of the Attachmate Group in late 2014 and SUSE continued to stay in Nuremberg.

• SUSE, on its own, has about a third of the revenue that Red Hat does but with a parent like Novell it could well have been much more. When it was run from within Novell, SUSE was just about breaking even.

• Could there have been another big Linux competitor to Red Hat? It’s a pity that personality conflicts got in the way of us never knowing for certain.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) stock is currently trading at about $71.8 and lots of rating firms seem to have a target price set on the stock. The median 12-month price target of 30 analysts covering the company is $90, which suggests the stock could still gain more than 25 percent. The highest analyst price target is $98, which implies a gain of 36 percent. And roundups of analyst notes show that 18 are rating the stock a buy while 7 rate RHT a strong buy. There are 6 equity research firms suggesting a Hold and 0 consider it Sell.

• California Public Employees Retirement System increased its stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 0.7% during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Fedora

• Two years ago I purchased AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card and wrote about my experience in Fedora 20 and also experience in Fedora 21 (Rawhide at that time). I decided to post an update to this, especially after recent news of AMD and Ubuntu deprecating fglrx (catalyst) proprietary driver.

• When we created the Fedora Council to succeed the previous Fedora Board, one of our goals was for the new body to take an active role in leadership and in finding project direction. One concrete way we do this is through Fedora Objectives. We choose two to four of these on a roughly 12-18 month timeframe, with full Council consensus and broader community discussion. We also appoint Objective Leads as auxiliary Council members, with binding votes on concerns relevant to their particular area.

• It’s that time again, another kernel dropped to stable updates. This respin cycle also includes a series of updates (shown below).

Debian Family

• Some of our old-school Linux users are aware of the fact that the Debian GNU/Linux operating system and several of its derivatives are shipping by default with a web browser called Iceweasel.

• After some serious thinking, I’ve decided not to nominate myself in the Debian project leader elections for 2016. While I was doing that, I wrote the beginnings of a platform, below. I’m publishing it to have a record of what I was thinking, in case I change my mind in the future, and perhaps it can inspire other other people to do something I would like to happen.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu kernel developers have announced their weekly newsletter to inform the community about the latest work done in preparation for the April 21 launch of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is set to remove support for AMD’s Catalyst Linux driver, known as fglrx, when the operating system update releases next month. The new hybrid AMDGPU driver should be a great replacement—but it isn’t completely ready yet and isn’t compatible with older graphics hardware. The fglrx driver will be removed when you upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, if you’re using it.

• Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus has announced that its OnePlus One smartphone will get an Ubuntu operating system ROM on board. The highlight of the Ubuntu OS are the Scopes and the categorized home screens, which provides a unified view of contents in a certain category.

Flavours and Variants

• Ambiance & Radiance Flat Colors aims to be a modern and unique theme bringing class and personality to your favorite desktop environment. It features a modern and clean flat look in your choice of 13 vibrant colors: Blue, Spring Blue, Brown, Graphite, Green, Orange, Purple, Pink, Red, Teal, and Yellow. Each color comes in 2 versions Original and Pro, there are Color buttons in Original and Mono/Colorless buttons in Pro. With fully integrated and tested support for many of the popular desktops Including: Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, LXDE, OpenBox, Gnome Classic & Fallback. In Ambiance(Dark), Radiance (Light) As well as Ambiance Fusion (Ambiance with a light toolbar for dark icon themes). Ambiance & Radiance Flat is not by or endorsed by the original Ambiance team.

Devices/Embedded

• The developers of the DragonBox Pyra hope to deliver a handheld gaming device this year that runs open source, Linux-based software. Pre-orders opened last year, although the final price (and ship date) haven’t been set yet.

• But the final design seems to be coming together. Team leader “Evil Dragon” has posted a video showing an early prototype of a pretty functional-looking DragonBox Pyra.

• RaspArch developer Arne Exton informs Softpedia about the availability of a new build of his GNU/Linux distribution for ARM devices based on the Arch Linux ARM project.

• It looks amazing on paper, but my real-world experience with one has been disappointing. Between waiting for the very slow Orange Pi website and forums to load, to spending a few hours just trying to get one of the ‘official’ Linux distro images to boot correctly, to then debugging hardware issues (like USB keyboard detection, HDMI-to-DVI connections, etc.), there were obstacles every step of the way.

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung Z1 was the first Tizen Smartphone that launched January 2015. Now, a year later there are rumours surfacing of a Samsung Z1 refreshed 2016 model that is being worked on by the Korean tech giant.

Android

• Android-powered cameras aren’t exactly new, but there could be one on the way from a company you might not expect: Panasonic.

• At a round table session at Panasonic Benelux, Panasonic’s Michiharu Uematsu told Stuff Netherlands that an Android-powered camera would be on the way “very soon”.

• Sharing works pretty well in Android – the standard “share” command and its collection of APIs allows for easily getting content from one app to another. But if you’re anything like most Android users, you have dozens of apps installed that include Share functions, and you’re only used to actually using Share in a few of them. Android N has a little feature that makes that interaction much more user-friendly: Share apps can now be pinned to the top of the cross-app menu.

• A new 3D LED pico proiector combines the platform flexibility of Android with a Harman Kardon sound system to create an all-in-one portable home theater device.

• Last year, shortly after the discovery of the Stagefright vulnerability, Google and various Android manufacturers have committed to delivering monthly security updates in order to avoid exposing users to new threats. Once it launched the Priv – its very first Android handset – Blackberry also joined the bandwagon. Now, four months after Google started releasing monthly security patches, BlackBerry takes pride in being the first OEM to actually roll out these updates.

• Amazon is knocking a significant $125 off the price of the Moto X Pure White Bamboo smartphone in 16GB size to $299.99 shipped That’s by far the lowest price we’ve seen for this very stylish and well rated smartphone with 5.7-inch display, *almost* pure Android, 21MP Sony camera sensor, 5.7″ Quad HD display, stereo sound, TurboPower charging and splash-proofing. Cam reviewed it very favorably and I can’t recommend this phone enough personally. This was my favorite Android phone until the Nexus 6P was released and the only possible downsides I can think of is the large size and lack of fingerprint sensor. The Black version with plastic back is also $299.99 shipped which is $100 off.

• Matthew Garrett checked into a London hotel and discovered that the proprietors had decided that “light switches are unfashionable and replaced them with a series of Android tablets.”

• In just a few moments, Garrett was able to probe all the switches in the hotel for their on/off state and figure out how to override every one of them.

• It’s basically as bad as it could be – once I’d figured out the gateway, I could access the control systems on every floor and query other rooms to figure out whether the lights were on or not, which strongly implies that I could control them as well. Jesus Molina talked about doing this kind of thing a couple of years ago, so it’s not some kind of one-off – instead, hotels are happily deploying systems with no meaningful security, and the outcome of sending a constant stream of “Set room lights to full” and “Open curtain” commands at 3AM seems fairly predictable.

• It’s time to celebrate, Android fans — Samsung’s hotly anticipated Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge have finally been released! The phones have been finding their way into consumers’ hands for more than a week now, which is obviously quite bizarre since they hadn’t officially been released. But March 11th is the launch date on the books and you’ll now find them in stores nationwide.

• As great as Samsung’s new flagship duo is, however, there’s another pair of Android smartphones you might want to consider purchasing instead.

• Android Marshmallow has been rolling out to select Samsung high-end smartphones, but it has yet to reach devices in other countries. Fortunately, it looks like AT&T will launch it for the Galaxy Note 5 today and for the S6 on March 14.

Free Software/Open Source

• So yes, we are no more likely to see another Red Hat today than we were four years ago. But that says a lot less about the merits of open source as a model than it does about commercial valuations of software in general.

• New York University is making its channel model simulator and measurement data free and open to all, which could reduce the development time of millimetre wave (mmW) technologies for companies looking to use these higher frequencies in 5G-compliant systems. The work on mmW technology and propogation is being undertaken at NYU Wireless, a multi-disciplinary academic research centre based in the New York University’s Brooklyn engineering facility.

• In an effort to speed 5G development, NYU Polytechnic’s wireless research center will provide its channel models and measurements for cellular propagation in the millimeter wave (mmW) band as free, open-source software. The simulation will help product developers understan

Events

• Unfortunately the SCALE organization and the non-profit organization that oversees SCALE are no longer aligned with my free & open source beliefs and principles, so it is time for me to step away from my roles within SCALE. This was not an easy decision to make and one that have I struggled with for quite some time. I believe it to be the best decision for the organization and myself. I wish the team at large the best of luck in all their future endeavors and look forward to seeing what they accomplish.

• The 2016 edition of FOSSASIA is happening from 18-20th March, in the Singapore Science Center, Singapore. We are again having a Python track in this event, which starts on 19th March (Saturday). The following is a summarised entry of the schedule for us.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Now that everyone’s happy enjoying the latest Firefox 45.0 web browser, which once again failed to deliver the GTK3 integration on the Linux platform, bleeding-edge users can jump again into the Beta bandwagon, this time for Firefox 46.0.

• Users have been complaining a lot about the latest Firefox version 45.0 web browser on different forums. It is common knowledge now that this version also miserably failed to provide users with the GTK3 integration on the Linux OS. However, the fed-up users can now jump to the latest Firefox 46.0 Beta version, which just launched.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is Virtual-box an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. Presently, Virtual-box runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7/8/8.1/10), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux, Solaris and Open-Solaris OS/2, and OpenBSD.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The “open core” model, where certain features are reserved for an “enterprise edition” that is not open source, is not particularly popular with a large segment of the open-source community. There are certainly businesses that rely on the practice, but the ideas behind open core run counter to the ethos of open source in many ways. The OpenStack community has recently grappled with the definition of open core, which is explicitly disallowed as part of the project’s principles (the “Four Opens”). It is not a simple question, as there are clearly gray areas, some of which came up in the discussion.

• Technology produced by Facebook-backed Open Compute Project gets snapped up by datacentre operator Equinix

BSD

• In preparation for the anticipated FreeBSD 10.3 release later this month, 10.3-RC2 is now available.

• Marius Strobl announced the FreeBSD 10.3-RC2 release on Saturday afternoon for all major architectures plus an assortment of ARM boards. FreeBSD 10.3-RC2 fixes a potential data corruption issue with incremental ZFS send, file syncing improvements for hash-based database files, some security issue fixes, and more.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Following is a preliminary analysis of the High Priority Projects list, based on the existing list, feedback received, the panel session held at LibrePlanet 2015, and discussions among the committee.

• In just one week, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and MIT’s Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) are once again teaming up to bring the LibrePlanet free software conference to Cambridge, March 19-20, 2016, at the Stata Center at MIT. LibrePlanet is an annual conference for people who care about their digital freedoms, bringing together software developers, policy experts, activists, and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments, and tackle challenges facing the free software movement.

Public Services/Government

• The US Federal Government is one of the world’s largest buyers of software, much of which is custom developed by government contractors in response to RfP’s and sole source procurements. Not only is the original development of this software expensive, but the Government must often negotiate follow-on sole source contracts with the same vendor for support and enhancement. Beyond that, many of these contractors are incapable of building complex systems. The initial healthcare.gov fiasco is a recent example of such failure, but it is just one among numerous notable project failures and delays, including systems for the FBI, the FAA, the Social Security Administration, and various DoD projects. Elsewhere, there’s a lot of expensive, low-quality code out there, hidden from public view, but on which we are all dependent on a daily basis.

• Under a proposed open source software policy the administration unveiled yesterday, the Office of Management and Budget has 120 days to issue metrics that will be used to measure the success or failure of agencies’ open source pilot programs. In the spirit of openness, one federal IT executive said the White House should consider crowdsourcing those appropriate metrics based on what’s already available in the community, rather than reinventing the wheel.

• “I would actually say, let’s go right back to the community,” suggested Christian Heiter, chief technology officer at Hitachi Data Systems Federal, during an interview Thursday.

• With so much annoying stuff coming out of the White House lately, it’s good to see the tech folks there continue to do some good work, including pushing for a policy that should lead to further embracing open source technologies inside the federal government — in part by pushing the government itself to open source the code it writes for its own work (and even when not releasing the code to the public, at least sharing it inside the government for other agencies to use).

Licensing

• BMW uses Linux (GPLv2) yet doesn’t honour the licence for Linux. It requires users to accept a licence before downloading. I reckon they will learn to read the GPL shortly.

Leftovers

Science

• It might not have the sexiest name, but expanded polystyrene is truly a wonder material. Widely—and incorrectly—known by by the trademarked name Styrofoam™, this lightweight substance is crafted from petroleum-based polystyrene beads, which are stretched out during an intricate steaming and moulding process. The resulting product is 98 percent air, extraordinarily cheap to manufacture, and has widespread applications ranging from life rafts to fast food containers.

• Late on Tuesday night, Google’s DeepMind AI group began its show down against one of the world’s best human Go players, Lee Se-dol of South Korea. Now by the end of the week, the search giant’s robotic hivemind has defeated humanity 3-0 in a clean sweep.

• The matchup was best of five games in total between AlphaGo (DeepMind’s Go-playing software) and Lee, all played at the Four Seasons hotel in Seoul. The winner of the series receives a $1 million (£700,000) prize—so with DeepMind winning, it will donate the proceeds to charity. Lee, by virtue of being a champion prizefighter who has spent most of his life honing his Go skills, still received about £100,000 just for turning up.

Health/Nutrition

• Adult social care in the UK is in crisis. This much we are told by those in the sector and this much we can see in the statistics. To cite but a few of these: around 1.86 million people over the age of 50 are not getting the care they need; approximately 1.5 million people perform over 50 hours unpaid care per week; and the proportion of GDP the UK spends on social care is among the lowest in the OECD, with budgets having undergone an overall reduction of over 30 per cent since 2010.

• Reflecting on the severity of the situation, Ian Smith, chairman of the largest care home chain in the UK, Four Seasons Healthcare, recently declared himself to be ‘embarrassed to be British at the state of our health and social care.’ As with the NHS, a mood of impending catastrophe hangs heavy over social care.

• Yet whilst attention has overwhelmingly been focused on the impact of austerity in reducing levels of state support, something murkier and altogether more complicated is going on in the shadows.

• According to a groundbreaking new report by the research organisation CRESC, large care home chains – which account for around a quarter of the industry – are rife with dubious financial engineering, tax avoidance, and complex business models designed to shift risks and costs from care home owners on to staff, the state and private payers.

Security

• The distinction between ‘critical’ and ‘important’ has become meaningless. It makes no sense to treat them differently. Patch Tuesday needs a patch.

• NEWS ANALYSIS: The free security certificate effort backed by the Linux Foundation achieves a major milestone with one million free certificates, but are all those free users actually secure?

• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are more frequent, bigger and more damaging than ever before a new report by internet security firm Verisign has warned.

• According to statistic published in the VeriSign Distributed Denial of Service Trends Report, DDoS activity is the highest it’s ever been, with the final quarter of 2015 seeing an 85 percent rise in instances – almost double the number of attacks – when compared with the same same period in 2014. The figures for Q4 2015 also represent a 15 percent rise on the previous quarter.

• The report also suggests that cyber attackers are getting much more persistent as targets are now being hit by repeated attacks, with some reportedly being the target of DDoS attacks up to 16 times in just three months.

• Over the next few months the Let’s Encrypt client will transition to a new name (soon to be announced), and a new home at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

• The goal of Let’s Encrypt is to make turning on HTTPS as easy as possible. To accomplish that, it’s not enough to fully automate certificate issuance on the certificate authority (CA) side – we have to fully automate on the client side as well. The Let’s Encrypt client is now being used by hundreds of thousands of websites and we expect it to continue to be a popular choice for sites that are run from a single server or VPS.

• A new study has revealed that improperly configured TFTP servers can be easily abused to carry out reflection DDoS attacks that can sometimes have an amplification factor of 60, one of the highest such values.

• Much of the software you use is riddled with security vulnerabilities. Anyone who reads Matthew Garrett knows that most proprietary software is a lost cause. Some Linux advocates claim that free software is more secure than proprietary software, but it’s an open secret that tons of popular desktop Linux applications have many known, unfixed vulnerabilities. I rarely see anybody discuss this, as if it’s taboo, but it’s been obvious to me for a long time.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The old Sykes-Picot divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1916. The Agreement was enforced by the superpowers of that moment, Britain and France with buy-in from the Russians. The immediate goal was colonialism, not independent states, but the unspoken end point was a form of stability. Following the massive realignment of the balance of power that was World War I, the lines were literally drawn for the next eight decades. The lines themselves did not cause all the problems per se; the lines codified the problems on the ground.

• Americans can sleep easier now that the US military has wiped out 150 more “terrorists.” US airstrikes over Somalia targeted al-Shabab militants, who were, according to Pentagon spokesperson Captain Jeff Davis, planning “offensive operations.” Davis neglected to elaborate on what “offensive operations” were planned by the group.

• He did say that they had been monitoring the camp for a while and had a “sense” that the “operational phase was about to begin.” Unsurprisingly Davis failed to elaborate on the details of the “operational phase” or what it might have looked like. Or how they got their “sense” to begin with.

• Interestingly, Davis also said that “their removal will degrade al-Shabab’s ability to meet the group’s objectives in Somalia.”

• U.S. airstrikes in Somalia over the weekend killed more than 150 people, U.S. officials revealed on Monday.

• Signs pointed to his taking Israel’s side. During the 2014 war in Gaza, he famously told a pro-Palestinian critic at a Vermont town hall to “shut up,” and he has mostly been seen as a strong defender of Israel in its past conflicts.

• In the context of U.S. politics, however, his comments Tuesday were fairly remarkable, bucking the bipartisan establishment consensus that the United States should be openly biased in favor of Israel in its conflict with the rest of the region.

Transparency Reporting

• The Department of Justice is undercutting Chuck Grassley’s efforts to provide FBI employees whistleblower protection. That became clear in an exchange (2:42) on Wednesday.

• The exchange disclosed two objections DOJ has raised to Grassley’s FBI Whistleblower Protect Act. First, as Attorney General Loretta Lynch revealed, DOJ is worried that permitting FBI Agents to report crimes or waste through their chain of command would risk exposing intelligence programs.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Peat forests, or wetlands, are some of the most important ecosystems for Indonesia and climate change. The country holds the largest tropical peatland in the world, which acts as a major carbon sink. At the same time, carbon emissions from peat decomposition and peat fires account for 42 percent of Indonesia’s total emissions, and spikes in peat fires in 2015 pushed the country to move from world’s sixth-largest to the fourth-largest emitter.

• Blue skies breed amnesia. With the clear skies, many may now struggle to recall the urgency and anger over the smoke haze pollution in the region.

• Last year was one of the worst on historical record for fires and it was barely six months ago that the haze reached its peak, hitting a Pollutants Standards Index (PSI) of 2,300 in Central Kalimantan.

• It is critical that governments, corporations in the relevant industries and concerned citizens continue to work on the issue. Predictions are that 2016 may not be as dry as last year.

• Indonesia’s western province of Riau has declared a state of emergency over forest and land fires blazing on the island of Sumatra, a government official said on Tuesday.

• The fires, which send choking smog over Southeast Asia every year, raged uncontrollably across several provinces last year, costing an estimated $16 billion, and pushed average daily greenhouse gas emissions above those of the United States.

• “The governor has declared an emergency now, to be able to prevent a repeat of the haze that occurred in 2015,” said provincial government spokesman Darusman, adding that life in the province continued to be normal.

Finance

• The Russian Ministry of Finance is planning an amendment to the criminal code to establish severe penalties for those who issue the Bitcoin cryptocurrency or other ‘money substitutes’.

• As I have previously reported, in January 2004, 12 years ago, I stated in a nationally televised TV economic debate about jobs offshoring that the United States would be a Third World country in 20 years. I over-estimated the time it would take. We are already there. We have 23% unemployment, no jobs for university graduates, deteriorating and collapsing infrastructure, large percentages of the population drowning in debt and its service, the decay of cities that were once the sites of our industrial and manufacturing power, such as Detroit, Michigan, largely in ruins, and Flint, Michigan, where the water is undrinkable.

• Companies are starting to include emissions from employee commuting into calculations of their carbon footprint. Now, there’s an app for that.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Clinton’s sudden—and hypocritical—support for “human rights” notwithstanding, the moment was predictable as it was routine. It’s been 25 years since the end of the Cold War, so younger voters may not be used to these types of loyalty rituals. But whenever the issue of socialism—or communism, its more fear-inducing cousin—comes up, the press must attempt to compel those who have previously expressed support or sympathy for red politics to “denounce” their prior statements. Sanders’ refusal to do so caused noticeable agitation among the moderators.

• [...]

• A handful of Clinton partisans jumped at the chance to paint Sanders as a far-left loony who likes to cozy up to “dictators.” Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, one of the media’s most reliable Clinton boosters, jumped right in, linking to a recent Daily Beast piece by Michael Moynihan, former senior editor of libertarian Reason magazine and current Vice/Bank of America talkshow host, who did a rundown of Sanders’ dreaded leftist past. Suddenly, a topic Marcotte had never once tweeted about, or expressed any public concern for, was of utmost importance and needed to be brought to the forefront of public discourse.

• Before almost anyone else, Ben warned about the impact of the modern wave of media mergers that accelerated during the Reagan years (and accelerated further during the Clinton administration). In the first years of FAIR, I heard from various sympathetic journalists in mainstream media who said they were thrilled that, finally, a pro–working journalist media watch group had formed . . . but that we were off-base to emphasize the impact of corporate owners—that the problem was in the newsroom far more than the boardroom. A few years and a few mergers later, these same journalists told us that we’d been right, almost prophetic—that boardrooms were undermining journalism, often quite nakedly.

• On Friday night, so many protesters descended upon a Donald Trump rally at the University of Illinois-Chicago that the Republican presidential front-runner canceled his appearance, citing security concerns. Violence broke out inside and outside the rally, with Trump quickly criticizing the “thugs who shut down our First Amendment rights.” Conservative commentators avidly defended Trump, saying that it was a shame that protesters — also making use of their First Amendment right — had shut him down.

Censorship

• Cyber censorship threatens the future of the Internet, which is why Amnesty International and Internet browser extension AdBlock are marking the World Day against Cyber Censorship by offering AdBlock’s 50 million users the opportunity to see messages on their screen that governments have tried to silence.

• These include messages from US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Russian pop group Pussy Riot and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. We are also broadcasting powerful messages from North Koreans who escaped from their country but cannot communicate with loved ones left behind who risk being sent to political prison camps if their messages are detected.

• Media treatment of a film that ridicules French billionaire Bernard Arnault has raised charges of censorship and questions over concentration of media ownership. Journalists at a a paper owned by Arnault’s LVMH were banned from mentioning François Ruffin’s Merci Patron (Thanks boss) this week and the director himself claimed there had been other cases of censorship.

• Journalists’ unions at Le Parisien newspaper accused their boss of self-censorship this week, claiming he had ordered critics not to review Merci Patron, “not even in 10 lines”, and rejected a proposal by the politics desk to report on the “buzz” it had stirred up on the French left.

• This was hardly a tabloid headline, but the article was explosive anyway, with an illustration of a mouth gagged by layers of masking tape to drive home the message. China’s most powerful journalist was taking on Beijing over censorship.

• Within hours the article attacking government controls – “Story about adviser’s free speech comments removed from Caixin website” – had been censored itself, but not before screenshots and reports of the financial magazine’s extraordinary challenge had rippled around the internet.

• Editor Hu Shuli has spent decades nurturing her connections to China’s elite, able to read opaque political currents, a gift to go right up to the government’s red line and push it but “never cross it”, with two incarnations of a powerful financial news magazine.

• The idea that a political movement should respond to criticism with violent attacks is not compatible with a democratic society. There’s no incongruity in Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s endorsement of Trump; what Trump is celebrating is the Klan’s strategy of suppressing dissent through terror.

• When peaceful protests are met with violence, as they have been again and again at Trump’s mass meetings, protesters have a choice between giving in to intimidation and staying away, or showing up in numbers large enough so that they cannot be suppressed. Last night, in Chicago, activists made the latter choice. It was the right thing to do for democracy.

Privacy

• Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden has come out swinging against US President Barack Obama after the latter, referring to the ongoing spat between Apple and the FBI, urged Americans not to adopt absolutist positions on privacy and security.

• Snowden was speaking from Moscow to the Logan Symposium in Berlin organised by the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism on Friday and Saturday. Obama was participating in a keynote conversation at the 2016 South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, the first sitting president to grace the stage of an SXSW event.

• Obama, responding to a question from Evan Smith, editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, said he could not talk directly about the Apple-FBI matter, where the FBI is demanding that Apple produce a modified version of its iOS mobile operating system so that the agency can access information from an iPhone that was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, an employee of the San Bernardino county health department and one of two responsible for the deaths of 14 people in December last year.

• While many VPN providers say they do not log their users’ activities in order to protect anonymity, it’s not often their claims get tested in the wild. However, a criminal complaint filed by the FBI this week notes that a subpoena sent to Private Internet Access resulted in no useful data being revealed about a suspected hoaxer.

• President Barack Obama says he wants strong encryption, but not so strong that the government can’t get in.

• “The question we now have to ask technologically is if it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door at all?” he asked, speaking at the South By Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin on Friday.

• “Then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot? What mechanisms do we have available to do even simple things like tax enforcement? If in fact you can’t crack that all, if the government can’t get in, then everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket. There has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information somehow.”

• Unlikely. First of all, Section 702 is designed for foreign surveillance, and would be much more likely to be used in cases of international communications. Instead, the government would be much more likely to lean on another legal authority. It might still be a longshot, but Section 214 of the Patriot Act would be a smarter bet. Section 214 was the NSA’s go-to authority when it conducted its program, discontinued in 2011, of tracking Americans’ internet and email metadata. That means it would track, for instance, the “to” and “from” fields of a given email, but not what’s written in the body, as well as which websites people visited—similar to the kinds of voter profiles developed in the show.

• A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I visited a store he made a note in his little black book (he kept calling it my profile, and he didn’t want to show me what was in it so I assume it was actually his, rather than mine). Each of those stores of course assigned trackers to me as well and soon enough I was followed by my own personal veritable posse of non-descript guys with little black books making notes.

• Last week I arrived in San Francisco to hear good news: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman had won the ACM A.M. Turing Award. This is the Nobel Prize of computer science, with a million-dollar check and priceless prestige. The choice of these 2016 honorees is both long overdue and appropriately timely. Overdue because their contribution to the field (and to the world) was public key cryptography, which they created in 1976. And timely because the consequences of their invention — which would lead to the development of online privacy tools, whether the government liked it or not — are once again a flash point of Constitutional proportions.

• The president did not directly comment on the battle between Apple and the FBI but said that ‘fetishishing our phones above every other value is incorrect’

• President Barack Obama said Friday that smartphones — like the iPhone the FBI is trying to force Apple Inc. to help it hack — can’t be allowed to be “black boxes,” inaccessible to the government. The technology industry, he said, should work with the government instead of leaving the issue to Congress.

• “You cannot take an absolutist view on this,” Obama said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. “If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, and it’s fetishizing our phones above every other value.”

• Obama’s appearance on Friday at the event known as SXSW, the first by a sitting president, comes as the FBI tries to force Apple Inc. to help investigators access an iPhone used by one of the assailants in December’s deadly San Bernardino, California, terror attack. Apple has appealed a magistrate court order that it assist the government, saying to do so would undermine its encryption technology.

• There was lots that was nasty in yesterday’s DOJ brief in the Apple vs FBI case. But I want to look at this claim, from DOJ’s effort to insinuate Apple is resisting doing something for the US government it has already done for China.

• The FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies as potential future terrorists, warning that such “extremists” are in the same category as ISIS.

• But in 2016 America, the conversation can suffer from not being grounded in an understanding of how surveillance technology is actually being used right now. Whether we are being watched by private companies or by law enforcement and the state, our guest says, not everyone is watched equally.

• Elham Khorasani was sitting in her car at a stoplight in Northern Virginia when she got the call. It was April 16, 2013. “I’m with the FBI,” a man on the line said, “and we’re at your home executing a search warrant.”

• Khorasani was flummoxed. (A pseudonym is being used to protect her privacy.) The Iran native, a U.S. citizen since the 1990s, had worked as a Farsi and Dari language analyst at the National Security Agency (NSA) going on eight years. She had recently been selected for a second tour at Menwith Hill station, the NSA’s mammoth listening post in northern England. Minutes before the FBI called, she’d left a meeting at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

• This is not all that surprising, but President Obama, during his SXSW keynote interview, appears to have joined the crew of politicians making misleading statements pretending to be “balanced” on the question of encryption. The interview (the link above should start at the very beginning) talks about a variety of issues related to tech and government, but eventually the President zeroes in on the encryption issue. The embed below should start at that point (if not, it’s at the 1 hour, 16 minute mark in the video). Unfortunately, the interviewer, Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune, falsely frames the issue as one of “security v. privacy” rather than what it actually is — which is “security v. security.”

• A U.S. judge has just admitted the existence of the NSA’s infamous PRISM program by name, apparently the first time any federal judge has done so.

• PRISM has been an open secret since June 2013, when documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were first made public. An ominous NSA PowerPoint training slide claimed that PRISM allowed “collection [of user data] directly from the servers” of major American tech companies like Yahoo, Google and Apple, though those tech companies immediately and fiercely protested that no, to their knowledge, they didn’t give the NSA such access. It’s since been generally accepted that the NSA wasn’t physically accessing those companies’ servers with PRISM, but instead creating a streamlined legal process to compel those companies, via orders processed in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to turn over users’ data.

• Binney also discusses the ThinThread data collection system that he helped create while at the NSA, which ended prematurely, and why he believes the agency chose instead to implement the more expensive and bulky Trailblazer, later widely considered to be a failure.

• President Barack Obama stopped by South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas today to talk about, among other things, encryption. The crux of his argument: techies shouldn’t be “absolutists” on the issue, because information in your phone shouldn’t be treated differently than information in your home.

• “This notion that somehow our data is different, and can be walled off from those other tradeoffs we make, I believe is incorrect,” said Obama, while also claiming he is “way on the civil liberties side of this thing.”

• A group of former Skype technologists, backed by the co-founder of the messaging platform, has introduced a new version of its own messaging service that promises end-to-end encryption for all conversations, including by video.

• Wire, a 50-person start-up mostly made up of engineers, is stepping into a global political debate over encryption that pits privacy against security advocates, epitomized by the standoff between the U.S. government and Apple.

Civil Rights

• We’ve written a few times now about the somewhat bizarre Matthew Keys case. While he still denies having done anything, he has been found guilty under the CFAA for sharing the login information to the Tribune Company’s computer systems, which apparently resulted in someone hacking a story on the LA Times website. The hack was nonsensical and lasted for all of about 40 minutes. There’s no indication that this bit of vandalism did any actual harm — or even that very many people saw it. And yet… the Feds had to work overtime to figure out how to turn this minor bit of vandalism (which everyone agrees Keys did not actually do directly) into nearly $1 million in damages (thanks to emails that the Tribune Company says were worth $200+ each, and random claims about “ratings declines” due to a separate incident involving Keys and the Tribune-owned TV station Keys used to work for).

• Since 1979 UK governments have deliberately and systematically pursued policies which prioritised the speculative financial industries of London and damaged large scale manufacturing. The apotheosis of this policy was the massive transfer of money from everybody in the land to the bankers in 2008 by Gordon Brown.

• There are two major results of this forty year policy. The first is that the deliberately engineered manufacturing decline has caused social and economic devastation in the UK outside South East England. The second has been an astonishing accumulation of wealth in a tiny number of hands as income inequality levels have risen to the highest disparity in all of human history, wealth centred in South East England.

• This has naturally led to rising discontent among many people in many areas, despite the concentrated use of mass communication media under elite control to spread narratives to contain or divert discontent. But as unrest has continued to threaten control, a particular diversionary narrative has become dominant.

• [...]

• Concern about immigration is racism. A racism deliberately whipped up to divert people from their real enemies.

• Last year, the group Global Witness named Honduras as the world’s deadliest country for environmental activists. “There is a straight line between environmentalist activism and assassination in Honduras,” said Dr. David Wrathall, a United Nations University geographer who studies Honduras. Over the last decade, Central America has become awash in drug money, Wrathall says, which frequently ends up entangled in large-scale agriculture and development projects such as dams.

• Does Bernie Sanders know what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did to Honduras? Does he care? Last week saw yet another savage murder of a Honduran activist for democracy — one of hundreds such atrocities since Clinton and Obama blessed a brutal oligarchical coup there in 2009. But Sanders said nothing — says nothing — about this damning legacy of his opponent. It’s an extraordinary omission by someone presenting himself as an alternative to the failed elitist policies of the past.

• The government security agent, Martin Fredriksson, was mainly active during the years that former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt was dictating Sweden’s foreign policy, when the “Assange Affair” was widely publicized on the home page of Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to statements Fredriksson posted on Twitter, his “work” at SÄPO covered different periods between 2004 and 2010, the year Sweden opened its ‘investigation’ against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

• The shocking story isn’t the rise of Donald Trump but how the GOP slowly morphed into a party of hate and obstruction.

• For months now, Donald Trump has been complaining about the level of violence inflicted on protesters at his campaign rallies. Complaining, that is, about protesters — who have been tackled and kicked, pushed, spat on, and sucker-punched — not being subjected to nearly enough violence.

• In the latest instance, at a rally in St. Louis on Friday, Trump complained about the overly gentle treatment of protesters being dragged from a theater and things got ugly outside, as his supporters faced off with protesters.

• THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a resolution that strongly condemns “the torture and assassination” of Italian student Giulio Regeni in what the resolution describes as a pattern of “torture, death in custody, and enforced disappearances across Egypt.”

• Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian researcher, disappeared in Cairo on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak. Regeni’s body was found last month on a highway on the outskirts of Cairo bearing signs of torture. Italy’s interior minister said Regeni had suffered “inhuman, animal-like” violence. Egypt’s security forces, notorious for arbitrary arrests and abuse of detainees, are widely suspected of being involved in his death, though the government has denied any involvement.

• Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who inspired Chinese pro-democracy student protesters in the late 1980s, gives a fascinating and insightful account of his life in a memoir now published nearly four years after his death in exile. In “The Most Wanted Man in China,” Fang takes us from the 1940s, when he joined an underground Communist Party youth organization, through the years when he was expelled from the party and sent to the countryside to dig wells, labor in a coal mine and work on a railroad construction site.

• Yet in 1976 I was a Liberal, and politically centre or only slightly left of centre. My views were absolutely mainstream and were voiced in mainstream media every day.

• While standing still, I now find myself far left as the mainstream political spectrum rushed rightwards past me.

• Is this because the Thatcherite revolution, carried on so enthusiastically by Blair and New Labour, proved wildly successful? Is it because deregulation and privatisation has brought prosperity, harmony and an inarguably better society?

• No, not at all. The new right wing consensus has been a disaster. It led directly to the great crash of 2008 and the resulting austerity, which will dog us for another two decades at this rate. It led to massive, astonishing inequality of wealth and a society in which it is considered normal for top executives of an organisation to be paid 100 times more than the lowest employee. It led to hedge fund managers owning our politicians, and to Russian mafia owning our football clubs. It led to a world where Save the Children can pay its chief executive £375,000 a year of donation money yet nobody pukes. It led to collapse in manufacturing and to vast areas of blight and hopelessness, to a generation who will never afford a house while buy to let multi millionaires abound, to QE transferring yet more money straight to financial institutions.

• [...]

• I am not without hope. There is no doubt that the Sanders/SNP/Corbyn phenomenon represents a reaction to the dreadful inequality of society and all the evils which I have described. But I would also argue that this reaction has only been practical because of the new maturity of social media, weakening the grip of corporate media on the popular field of debate and the popular imagination.

• Five years ago, when the Arab Spring seemed at its most hopeful point, a Saudi diplomat told me, scornfully, that it would come to nothing. I had met him in the halls of the United Nations, where I had been asking diplomats about their views on Libya. The Saudis were eager to have the UN validate armed action to remove Muammar Qaddafi. A Saudi news outlet, al-Arabiya, had suggested that the Libyan military was killing its citizens with abandon. Fog surrounded Libya. The U.S. State Department seemed clueless. It did not have any reliable intelligence. Hillary Clinton, who pushed for war, relied upon the French and the Saudis for their assessment of Libya. These were unreliable narrators. Saudi Arabia, at least, wanted the Arab Spring shut down. It threatened its own undemocratic regime. The diplomat’s scorn grew out of this anxiety.

• Like an angry dragon, Saudi Arabia lashed around the region, throwing money and arms, encouraging chaos in this and that country. One underestimates the biliousness of monarchs: at a 2009 Arab League meeting, Qaddafi had cavalierly dismissed the King of Saudi Arabia as a creation of the British and a protectorate of the Americans. It was evident that the monarchs would not tolerate his existence for much longer. Two years later, they—with Western help—dismissed him.

• Four more prisoners are reportedly to be killed by Saudi Arabia as the country moves to “complete” a wave of mass executions that started in January.

• The kingdom put 47 people to death on a single day that month, including the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and at least one teenager, sparking global protests.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has submitted Thursday a plan for ending U.S. oversight of key technical Internet functions in favor of a global multi-stakeholder governance model. The plan was finalized this week at an ICANN conference at Marrakech, Morocco.

• A majority of enterprises, 67 percent in fact, plan to increase their software-defined infrastructure (SDI) spending in 2016, according to a new survey from 451 Research.

DRM

• Netflix’s release of the fourth season of House of Cards has turned into a bitter disappointment for fans in dozens of countries. Due to “legacy” licensing agreements, Netflix is not allowed to show its own original programming in countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Hong Kong, causing many people to turn to pirate sources.

Intellectual Monopolies

• This year’s conference, chaired by Mr Justice Richard Arnold and – as usual – attended by practitioners and academics alike, is devoted to exploring the scope of IPR protection.

Trademarks

• You know the word “selfie” by now (whether you like the concept or not), but what about “dronie”? It seems that, back in 2014, Twitter, of all companies, decided to try to make “dronie” a thing, combining drones with selfies (i.e., photos of yourself, taken from drones). It even set up a twitter feed for @dronie and tried to highlight examples of such things — focusing on a campaign around the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. The concept did drum up some fairly lame press coverage (because of course it did), with some puff pieces on “dronies,” pretending that it was the next new thing — even though it was just a Twitter marketing campaign. Never mind the fact that others apparently had been using the term before Twitter started in.

Copyrights

• Hoping to find out more about the collaboration between the MPAA and Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood, Google recently requested a deposition of MPAA lead counsel Steve Fabrizio. This week the Hollywood group told the court that the request goes too far, claiming that Google is using the legal process to uncover its anti-piracy strategies.

• A couple of months ago, I wrote a long post trying to dig into the details of David Lowery’s class action lawsuit against Spotify. In the end, while there was some question over whether or not streaming music services really need to get compulsory mechanical licenses for producing reproductions of songs, it seemed like the fact that such licenses are compulsory and can be obtained easily via having the Harry Fox Agency issue a “Notice of Intention” under Section 115, it seemed crazy to think that the various music services had not done that. In fact, we noted that the only way the lawsuits made any sense was if the various music services and HFA ignored this and didn’t send out such NOIs. At the time, I noted that this would be a surprise, and it could mean the services were in deep trouble.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.