● 03.16.16

● Links 16/3/2016: GNU Linux-Libre 4.5, NVIDIA Distro Rumours

Posted in News Roundup at 6:36 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I had played with Linux a bit, but had never considered delivering it to enterprise customers. Mere months later (which is a turn of the corner in startup time and space), I was managing a line of business that let enterprises get their hardware, software, and even books certified on a few flavors of Linux that were popular back then.

• I supported customers like IBM, Dell, and HP in ensuring their hardware ran Linux successfully. You hear a lot now about preloading Linux on hardware today, but way back then I was invited to Dell to discuss getting a laptop certified to run Linux for an upcoming trade show. Very exciting times! We also supported IBM and HP on a number of certification efforts that spanned a few years.

• Linux was changing fast, much like it always has. It gained hardware support for more key devices like sound, network, graphics. At around that time, I shifted from RPM-based systems to Debian for my personal use.

• What is the best Linux distro? Datamation asked two leading Linux experts, and they both explained their top choices. This first page is Matt Hartley’s picks. The next page you’ll see Bruce Byfield’s list of best Linux distros. Agree, disagree? List your top Linux Distros in the Comments section below.

Desktop

• Ken Starks throws down the gauntlet and puts a hundred bucks on the line in an attempt to see if civility can be brought to the forums and a particular change made to LibreOffice.

Server

• The company, which focuses on open source software for ARM chips, announced the news at its Linaro Connect event this month in Bangkok. Called Developer Cloud, the platform is based on OpenStack, the open source cloud computing operating system, in conjunction with the Debian and CentOS GNU/Linux distributions.

• AT&T is also making extensive use of open-source in order to enable its network transformation.

• “OpenStack and other open-source software platforms are central to our transformation,” Donavan said.

• Donovan noted that AT&T also works with OPNFV, OpenDaylight, ON-Lab, Open Contrail, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

• “We have doubled our usage of open-source software in just the last year, going from five percent to ten percent, and that number will continue to grow,” Donovan said.

• Cloud provider, ElasticHosts, has today launched a new cloud storage solution specifically designed for Linux users. ElasticHosts Cloud Storage is specifically built for the needs of Linux system administrators, and works out of the box with common Linux tools such as Rsync backup and SSHFS remote file servers. The new service is immediately available from ElasticHosts datacentres worldwide and can be used as a standalone service or alongside the company’s Cloud Servers, both VMs and auto-scaling Linux Containers.

Kernel Space

• Even though the course is free, the instructors — Chip Childers and Neependra Khare — are actually very impressive people. Childers is a current member of The Apache Software Foundation and is a Cloud Foundry Foundation VP. Khare is an expert on Docker, having written the book ‘Docker Cookbook’.

• If you are ready to sign up for this free course, you can do so here. Will you take advantage? Tell me in the comments.

• Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA) announced on March 14, 2016, the release and availability for download of their Linux-libre 4.5 kernel, for those who want 100% freedom.

• Building off Sunday’s release of the Linux 4.5 kernel is GNU Linux-libre 4.5-gnu as the newest version of this kernel provided for 100% free software GNU/Linux distributions.

• The Linux kernel’s ACPI and power management subsystem maintainer, Rafael Wysocki, today sent out the latest patches on a new governor for the CPUFreq CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel.

• Schedutil is this new CPUFreq governor being worked on. Schedutil makes use of the redesigned code for the Linux 4.6 kernel in being able to use callbacks invoked by the kernel’s scheduler in place of timers and making use of the kernel’s CPU utilization information from the schedule.

• ATTENTION YOU ‘orrible lot! Colonel Kitten the kernel kitten here to take you through the latest updates in Commander Torvalds’ latest manoeuvres. This time labelled Operation Linux 4.5.

• Since being recruited during the release candidate phase, I’ve risen through the ranks to become the highest ranking military cat in the history of open source and I’m here to tell you, I’ve never seen such a ragtag bunch of recruits in my life.

• As was discussed at the 2015 Kernel Summit, there are essentially no commercial Android devices running mainline kernels. At the recently concluded Linaro Connect event, though, John Stultz demonstrated a Nexus 7 tablet running mainline with just a few patches. It even has accelerated graphics via the freedreno driver.

• Regarding papers: Quick reminder to talk presenters that didn’t sent us yet your paper, we have extended submission deadline to *31th March 2016*. You only have to send us a minimum of a two pages paper to info@netdevconf.org. No more extensions after this!

Graphics Stack

• New Linux kernel patches were posted today for introducing a “tinydrm” module for making it simpler to write DRM drivers against simplified displays.

• The X.Org Board of Directors has needed to delay the X.Org 2016 elections by another two weeks.

• Timothy Arceri of Collabora has posted another big patch series for implementing another part of OpenGL 4 within Mesa.

• The latest patch series by Arceri consists of 37 patches and are for adding xfb_* layout qualifiers and API support for querying them as part of the OpenGL 4.4 ARB_enhanced_layouts transform feedback layouts support.

Applications

• It’s fun to code and if you do it well then you can be a good developer. Nowadays people are turning toward programming and they are successfully building great applications. In this post I am going to give Linux users a list of 8 Best IDEs(Integrated Development Environment) or text editors that help developers in programming great applications in Linux quickly and easily.

• GIMP maintainer Alexandre Prokoudine today announced the release of GEGL 0.3.6, an open-source project that’s used by GIMP, as well as other image editing apps to process images.

• For those not in the know, GEGL is short for Generic Graphics Library, and it has been designed from the ground up to act as a graph-based image processing framework. At the moment, GEGL is mainly developed for the GIMP software, which it uses for non-destructive editing, as well as editing of images with higher bit depth.

• OwnCloud is a free Web-based app that provides Dropbox-style file hosting. With the release of version 9 on the horizon, it’s a good time to take a look at the improved security features.

• Storing your data in the cloud is highly convenient, but it does increase the risk of data theft or tampering. Security is an essential feature of any cloud-based storage platform. And, security is a never-ending arms race between developers and crackers.

• A new version of x13binary is now on CRAN. It updates the underlying X-13ARIMA-SEATS binary to build 1.1.26 which was released recently by the US Census Bureau.

Proprietary

• The Vivaldi developers announced earlier, March 15, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download and testing of a new snapshot for their upcoming Chromium-based web browser.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Support for running Vulkan Windows programs/games under Wine is currently being developed.

Games

• Assault Cube, Open Arena, Nexuiz Classic, Sauerbraten, Red Eclipse, Warsow, Tremulous, Alien Arena, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Xonotic, Smokin’ Guns, World of Padman, Urban Terror, and possibly True Combat: Elite.

• Lifeless Planet is a really cool looking atmospheric adventure game about seeking life on a distant planet, and coming across an old Russian town.

• Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, a long time Linux game porter is working on getting the Serious Engine 1 source code release working on Linux, with official blessing.

• Faeria is truly one not to miss out on, not only is it a good answer to not having Hearthstone on Linux, but it’s also healing my wounds over Scrolls never officially coming to Linux and then getting shut down.

• Battle of Empires: 1914-1918 is a pretty good looking real time strategy game from Great War Team and Publisher Best Way Soft. It has now managed to find its way onto Linux.

• Stellaris release date on PC, MAC and Linux is set for May 9, be ready to explore a “vast galaxy full of wonder.” Stellaris is being developed by Paradox Development Studio.

• The same studio was behind some other popular strategy games like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis. They have the right expertise needed to develop a memorable, well-made stretagy game for PC.

• I’ve mentioned many times before the questionable nature of downloading video game ROMs in order to emulate them on your computer. (Heck, my very first article in Linux Journal was a description on how I built a MAME cabinet!) Although I have some emulation tricks up my sleeve for future issues, here I thought I’d mention the vast number of Flash-based emulators available on the Internet.

• Latest version of OSVR HDK headset adds diffusion technology to reduce ‘screen door’ effect

• Crytek’s CryEngine has added out-of-the-box support for virtual reality headsets based on the open-source OSVR platform.

• The company says CryENGINE V is “the most accessible, powerful, and feature-filled version of their all-in-one development solution to date.” Besides being the latest version of their engine with all of the latest technical goodies, CryENGINE V is under a “pay what you want” business model where developers can set their own price for getting full source code access and not being under any royalty obligations to Crytek. There is also a new CRYENGINE Marketplace for getting various assets for game development and a new Crytek Indie Development Fund.

• Making the rounds on the Internet today is a rumor that NVIDIA Corp is allegedly working on their own Linux distribution.

• Generating interest on Reddit and elsewhere is that NVIDIA is supposedly developing their own Linux distribution / operating system. This Linux OS would supposedly be suited for gamers.

• The premise isn’t really different from Valve’s OS and the only “proof” is an alleged screen capture of an installer screen for this operating system supposedly going by the “NLINUX” codename at NVIDIA.

• At Paradox Interactive’s GDC presentation, Obsidian have revealed their newest project. The upcoming RPG title is set in a world where heroes have failed and evil has won.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A few moments ago, March 15, 2016, KDE released the third stability update for its KDE Applications 15.12 software suite, designed for the KDE Plasma 5.5.5 desktop environment.

• KDE neon’s developer edition has gained builds of Git stable branches for Plasma. These are ideal for contributors and testers who want to check out the state of Plasma 5.6 branch and check it’s still sane. sources.list line is:

• deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/stable wily main

• Of course it’s not compatible with the unstable git branch packages.

• Read more

• In summary I would say that if KDE Plasma 5 is your cup of tea, then KaOS could be worth your careful consideration. I have found it to be clean, simple and solid (despite the minor annoyance of the missing efibootmgr). Furthermore, if you are happy with only the KDE applications and utilities, it is ready to go out of the box, but if you want you can add some of the more popular general-use applications such as Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC and such, they are available in the KaOS Add/Remove Software utility.

• After months of hard work, today, March 16, 2016, Digia has announced the general availability of the final Qt 5.6 production version for all supported platforms.

• Qt 5.6 has finally cleared the door.

• Lars Knoll announced the release today of Qt 5.6.0 as a long-term support release and offering many improvements from Windows 10 support to HiDPI improvements to major improvements to the WebEngine, Qt Location support, improved C++11 compatibility, and more.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME Software application has been updated recently as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 Release Candidate (3.19.92), bringing several improvements and bug fixes.

• GNOME Software 3.20 RC (Release Candidate) is now available, and it will be distributed later this week as part of the GNOME 3.20 RC desktop environment. As usual, we’ve managed to get our hands on the internal changelog to share with you some of the improvements and fixes introduced by the developers through patches.

• The powerful, open-source, and cross-platform GTK+ 3.20 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit is about to be unveiled in its final production state very soon, and users can now test the 3.19.12 build.

• For the usability test, I set aside a guest user on my machine, a laptop running the Fedora 23 operating system with the GNOME desktop. There are no modifications to the install that should affect the results of the test. The participants executed the test separate from one another using otherwise identical settings.

• The scenario tasks I used were taken from previous usability tests. I used the six scenario tasks on Gedit from Jim Hall’s blog. I also borrowed the four Nautilus scenario tasks from Gina Dobrescu’s blog from a previous usability test internship.

Distributions

• One of the best things about Linux is the range of choices available when it comes to desktop distributions. But that same level of choice can also be a bit confusing to newcomers to Linux. It can be hard for them to sift through all of the different distributions to find the one that might work best for them.

• Not to worry though if you’re a newbie, Datamation has a helpful article that features two Linux experts who share their picks for best Linux distributions.

Reviews

• The ReactOS project appears to be trying to recreate the experience of Windows 95 through to Windows 2000 as faithfully as possible and, from a look and feel perspective, the developers have done an amazing job. However, from a practical point of view ReactOS rarely delivered the functionality I would expect from its closed source cousin. The system refused to run on either of my test machines and, though it would install in VirtualBox, I regularly ran into system crashes, sound didn’t work and most of the Windows applications I tried to run failed in some way. I have had better luck running Windows software with WINE on Linux boxes than I did with ReactOS.

• In the end, while I admire the ReactOS team’s attention to detail in recreating the Windows interface, I do not think running ReactOS is practical for most situations. WINE will run most Windows software passably well and there are lots of good open source alternatives to most closed source applications. Running an old copy of Windows in a virtual machine would probably offer a better experience in most circumstances. The one area where I think ReactOS would shine would be if a person needed to run a Windows clone on hardware that also required Windows specific drivers. ReactOS reports itself to be compatible with drivers written for Microsoft’s operating system and I think that may prove to be the project’s strong point. Some old systems are very particular when it comes to applications and drivers and I think ReactOS might fill in nicely in those situations.

Gentoo Family

• Google doubled the bounty it will pay for a successful exploit of its Chromebook laptop to $100,000, sweetening the pot in hopes of drawing more attention from security researchers.

• The larger reward is intended for someone who finds a persistent compromise of a Chromebook in guest mode, according to Google’s security blog on Monday.

• We’ve reported a few times on bug bounties–cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs–ranging from bounties offered by Google (for the Chrome browser) and Mozilla. This open method of discovering security vulnerabilities has been embraced at Google, especially. In fact, Google has offered up as much as $1 million to people who identify key vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser.

Ballnux/SUSE

Slackware Family

• A new beta of Slackware Live was released today bringing new and exciting features. Elsewhere, Matt Hartley and Bruce Byfield teamed up to bring their “expert” picks for the best Linux distros and the FSF is gauging interest in a new free software workstation. Finally, the SUSE YaST Team posted another update on the progress of the YaST rewrite highlighting some new features.

• I finished the compilation of new KDE 5_16.03 packages (64-bit) and that was a good point to stamp a new version on the liveslak scripts and build Live ISO images based on liveslak-0.7.0. This update of the Live ISOs is using Slackware64-current dated “Mon Mar 14 02:18:20 UTC 2016” as the base.

Red Hat Family

• Today, March 15, 2016, Red Hat announced the availability for testing of the Beta build of its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.8 computer operating system for servers and desktops.

• IT organizations, especially large ones with multiple deployment types, should monitor Red Hat’s open source configuration management roadmap following the Ansible acquisition.

• On CNBC’s Fast Money Final Trade, Pete Najarian said that he closed his long position in Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) after the stock moved from $65 to $72.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)’s shares initiated the session at $71.59, recorded a low of $71.36 and surged to $N/A. While writing, it was trading at $NYQ, and as per the previous close, 13.05B market cap is $1946140. It is vital to note that market capitalization, also called as “market cap” should not be confused with equity value. Also, it is not equal to a firm’s debt plus shareholders’ equity though that is sometimes called as the company’s capitalization.

• After evaluating the fundamentals of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the analysts have determined a price target of $86.941 on its stock. This EPS projection came into the picture after Zacks surveyed 17 experts in a poll. As per the survey results, the broad price range is recorded varying in a range of $75 to $97.

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating reissued by stock analysts at Deutsche Bank in a report issued on Monday, Marketbeat reports.

Fedora

• Today in Linux news, the Fedora 24 default Wallpaper was revealed. Elsewhere, GamingonLinux tried to calculate the number of Linux gamers while bloggers ran down their favorite games. Jesse Smith reviewed ReactOS and Matt Asay said “bugs are normal,” and not the point. Opensource.com posted a list of FOSS podcasts and Italo Vignoli shared photos from CeBIT.

• If you store or track storage across lots of different places, you may have heard of ownCloud. This open source product lets you manage and share data across locations seamlessly. The project is a popular one, and there’s even a commercial service built around it.

• Right now Fedora has a couple of problems with getting security fixes onto people’s systems quickly. The first has to do with embargoes. Because Fedora isn’t part of the trusted network, we don’t get advance notification of vulnerabilities before their embargo is lifted. This means that when we are notified of an urgent security vulnerability the public also has the information and we’re left scrambling to find the fix (patch, new version, etc) and ship it. Some other flavors of Linux will have had advance notice and will have these patches or new versions packaged up and ready to ship with the embargo is lifted.

• Flock in Krakow is still far away, but if you’d like to attend and submit a talk you should do it very soon. The deadline for submitting talks is april 8th!

• Fedora developers are trying to ensure that Qt applications still integrate well with the Fedora Workstation desktop, which is powered by GNOME with the GTK tool-kit.

• Fedora Workstation 24 is shipping with the adwaita-qt theme that is a native Qt theme trying to blend with the Adwaita GTK theme. There’s also the QGnomePlatform Qt platform plug-in that forces Qt applications to use this theme and the same font/icons as GNOME. In other words, it’s trying to force Qt applications to look identical to their fellow GNOME/GTK applications.

• Fedora developers have decided this summer’s release of Fedora 24 will ship with the recently released Linux 4.5 kernel.

• Fedora kernel stakeholders had a discussion to decide what kernel to use for the Fedora 24 release. While Linux 4.6 should likely be out just before the final freeze of Fedora 24, they decided that it would be cutting things close and instead would like to ensure a solid Linux 4.5 is shipped for Fedora 24.

Debian Family

• My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a bit more before I make a new release.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• I think we are getting to a place where it really doesn’t matter what the pundits say. People are getting savvy to the tricks and scams that the proprietary software moguls are pulling on users and they don’t believe the hype anymore. They simply do not trust the companies that Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates built anymore and with good reason. They are seeking alternatives and the one name that they may have just heard about somewhere is Ubuntu. I know that my saying that will ruffle the feathers of those who are not fans of the Ubuntu distribution but it’s true… Newbies learn about Ubuntu first.

• We’ve been asked by our readers about what is going on with the development of the Ubuntu mobile OS, as no news has been published lately on our website about the upcoming OTA-10 update for phones and tablets.

• To make GNOME Software (and Ubuntu 16.03 LTS) more beautiful, Canonical has urged the open source community to make a contribution in the form of new icons. Apart from the next Ubuntu Xenial Xerus release, these icons will also be used in other Linux distros that use AppStream standard.

• Another week, another newsletter from the Ubuntu Kernel Team, informing the community about the latest work done in preparation for the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

• Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury has just published news to inform us that the software repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS received new kernel packages on the day of March 15, 2016, rebasing the Xenial kernel on the latest long-term supported kernel branch, Linux 4.4.5.

• There isn’t much change to these results, which are found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Mesa 11.2 is still exposing OpenGL 3.3 for the Intel driver but at least the next Mesa release should fully take the Intel driver well into the GL4 world. Again, if you want to help test Mesa 11.2 on Ubuntu 16.04, try the the x-staging PPA. I’m still having some other Ubuntu 16.04 graphics (including NVIDIA/Nouveau) coming out in the next few days on Phoronix.

Devices/Embedded

• A Kickstarter funded “Bela” cape for the BeagleBone Black uses Xenomai Linux real-time extensions to provide analog and digital audio I/O with 1ms latency.

• There are a variety of audio capes for the audio-deprived BeagleBone Black, such as Element14’s $56 BeagleBone Audio Cape. Yet, the $76 Bela is unique. Developed by the Augmented Instruments Lab of the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, the cape adds ultra low latency analog and digital audio, as well as digital I/O for sensors. The Bela system is designed primarily for digital musical instruments and interactive audio systems, including battery-powered and gesture-controlled devices.

• SanCloud launched its $52 to $69 BeagleBone Enhanced clone, doubling RAM, moving to GbE, and adding a USB port plus optional sensors and WiFi.

• While much of the open-spec embedded industry has standardized on the Raspberry Pi’s 40-pin expansion interface, the second most imitated community board is the open source, Linux-ready BeagleBone Black, with its dual 46-pin connectors. One of the BeagleBone Black clones announced in recent months was SanCloud’s BeagleBone Enhanced. This beefed up version of the BeagleBone Black SBC has now launched on Indiegogo, starting at $52.

• Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the Raspberry Pi 3. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has long been saying that the Raspberry Pi is a viable desktop alternative and it appears that they are correct.

• If you’re one of those people upgrading to the Raspberry Pi 3, you might wonder what to do with your old, lesser Pi. Aside from turning it into an array of blinking LEDs to entertain your cat, you might consider configuring it as a microcontroller.

• WDLabs, a business growth incubator of storage solutions specialist Western Digital (WD) announced availability of the WD PiDrive 314GB, a storage device engineered to serve the Raspberry Pi community.

• Featuring low-power USB operation, reliability and ease of integration, the WD PiDrive 314GB HDD is designed to support Raspberry Pi growth by addressing barriers to hard drive adoption such as power loading and system set-up.

• The PiDrive 314GB device is based on Western Digital’s high-volume 500GB platform with design changes made specifically for Raspberry Pi.

• Looking for an Open source, GNU/Linux based R2-D2 for your home? But one that talks instead of beeping and…making that other sound that R2-D2 makes? Aido’s got you covered. Aido is a home assistant/robot from InGen Dynamics Inc., a Pal Alto-based automation firm, and is the brainchild of Arshad Hisham, a self-proclaimed robotophile and CEO of InGen.

• As we’ve noted here before, when it comes to top open source stories of the past couple of years, it’s clear that one of the biggest is the proliferation of tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. The diminutive, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi, which has been priced at only $25 and $35, has grabbed most of the headlines in this space, and recently came out in a new version with a more powerful 64-bit CPU, and for the first time, built-in wireless functionality. It sells for $35.

• Logic Supply, the leading industrial and embedded computer hardware manufacturer, has informed Softpedia today about the availability of a new rugged panel PC that can run Ubuntu Linux or Windows operating systems.

Phones

Android

• One of those reasons will likely be the Android app drawer. It’s where you can store all your apps so you don’t have to keep them all on your home screen. It’s great because it helps keep your home screens organized and less cluttered.

• Last Wednesday, Google threw us all for a loop by pushing out an Android N Developer Preview well ahead of its I/O developer conference. We already dug into what this preview build means for tablets like the Pixel C, but that’s only part of the story. The only thing left to do was to throw N onto a sacrificial Nexus 5X and spent a few days getting a feel things on the small screen. Long story short, while most of you should steer clear, the preview offers a tantalizing — and feature-packed– peek at Google’s refined vision of mobile computing.

• Also in today’s open source roundup: Android N lays the groundwork for proper windowing, and how to roll back to Android Marshmallow from Android N

• Softpedia has just been informed by Arne Exton, a GNU/Linux developer responsible for several Android-x86-based and Linux kernel-based operating systems, about the availability of a new build of his RaspAnd project.

• When Nokia’s cellphone star faded, it was Samsung that stepped into the role of the world’s biggest phone vendor while others took over the mantle of being design leaders. The most copied designs today still come from Apple, but now that Samsung has introduced the superb Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, that’s about to change in a significant way. The world’s biggest manufacturer of phones is now also one of its best designers.

• The code for a number of malicious Android programs suggesst a common source, whether a developer or competing groups, according to a pair of analyses from IBM and FireEye.

• Remix OS is a big step in the right direction. More than with any other Android-to-PC release I have tested, this beta version provides the most complete Android experience on a desktop PC.

• You get the best of both computing worlds. Provided your hardware is compatible, you can run a very modern Android version on both legacy and more modern gear.

• If you do not require persistent memory, you can use it as a pocket OS and load it from a USB or DVD without doing a hard-drive installation. You have the added advantage of a more satisfying user experience on a standard computer screen.

• Fossil is expanding its Android Wear smartwatch lineup today with two new models: the Q Wander and Q Marshal. The new watches follow the Q Founder that was released late last year and offer alternative designs to the Founder’s heavy metal frame. They will be available later this year, starting at $275.

• According to estimates, less than 10 percent of the 1.4 billion or so Android devices out in the wild are encrypted, compared to over 95 percent of iPhones. Here’s how to encrypt your smartphone or tablet.

• At this time, the average for the entire bundle is $18, with it valued at over $500.

• Android N has a bunch of big new features in store for its users—the ones who eventually receive the update and don’t have those features torn out or replaced by their phone’s manufacturer, anyway. We’ve already covered a lot of the biggest user-facing stuff, including the multi-window multitasking mode, the revamped notifications and quick settings, and the new UI customization options.

• Android N is here in early beta form and while it’s not a terribly exciting update, at least for now, it certainly packs a nice collection of neat features and improvements. Beyond what you’ve already seen discussed, there are a number of things hidden inside the code that you’ll definitely want to know about because they point to some nifty upcoming features for Android.

• At this point, I think it’s a no-brainer.

• The March Nexus 5X Android 6.0.1 update doesn’t appear to have any major problems on board. Instead, it comes with important security patches and some tangible performance improvements.

• If you’re feeling leery, wait a few more days for more feedback to emerge. I think most of you are going to be better off with this build on board but there’s no penalty for waiting.

• Futarque’s “Rho Board” 4K media player SBC is up on Kickstarter, starting at $35 with a quad-core, Cortex-A7, a Pi 2 connector, and optional DVB-T2/C tuner.

• Danish digital video specialist Futarque needs another $5,000 or so to reach its Kickstarter goal for the Rho Board, with eight days left to go. The board is primarily designed as a 4K HEVC Android TV media player, but its 40-pin Raspberry Pi 2 connector also supports DIY electronics for a wider range of embedded explorations including home automation.

• We left the M release builds in the oven longer than we thought, but nothing a little graham cracker and chocolate can’t make that much better. CM13.0 brings Android 6.0.1 (r17) goodies such as the battery saving ‘doze’ functionality and new permissions model, alongside the CM features you’d expect.

• Deep dive Jide’s Remix OS is Android for a desktop or tablet OS: with multitasking, overlapping windows and the shortcut conveniences you need for productivity-style work.

• And the firmware tweaks to make it run well on x86 processors. I’ve seen what the next billion internet users will be running.

• Jide was founded by three Google veterans and draws heavily on the Android-x86 project, a heroic solo effort by Chinese engineer Chih-Wei Huang, that he began seven years ago. The founders moved to Beijing to be close the Huang and China’s supply chains.

• Fossil is going all in with Android Wear following the release of the Q Founder. The company has announced two new Wear devices—Q Wander and the Q Marshal—with a slimmer profile and some interesting styles. You can’t buy them yet, but these devices look even more “watch-like” than the Q Founder and Moto 360.

Free Software/Open Source

• Now we look at some of the excellent Linux video-creation and video-editing software options—from easy to Hollywood extravaganza. Before we go any further we must share our Number One Pro Video Tip: Shoot your videos from a tripod. Please, for the love of humanity and for the comfort of your viewers.

• Now that we’ve got that off our chest, let’s take a look at these great video editing programs for small business.

• What does it take for open source software companies — and their partners — to thrive? Fifteen years ago, that would have been a tough question to answer. But now, with so many companies already having gone open source, it’s easy to look back and identify what makes open source work, and which mistakes open source companies should avoid.

• In a convincing example of the viability of open source networking, cloud provider DreamHost saved 70% in capital and 40% in operational costs by replacing VMware’s NSX SDN with open source alternatives.

• In a presentation at the Open Networking Summit here, suppliers Cumulus Networks and Akanda – a DreamHost spin-out NFV business — said the cloud provider replaced NSX due to scaling and Layer 3 support issues. DreamHost did not speak and was not present during the presentation, but posted a blog entry on the project here last Friday.

• The DeepMind Challenge victory demonstrates that Google’s open-source “artificial general intelligence” has just launched a new era of disruptive technology.

• Just as in politics, there are passionate, long-running disputes in tech. And, in one such never-ending argument, the weapons used are the words “open” and “closed.” Open is usually considered good, and closed is bad. But it turns out these words, which once really meant something, now have very loose definitions and surprising contradictions.

• In my mind, that often renders the debate phony.

• For instance, would you believe that Apple, which is most often accused of being “closed,” supports and uses open software in some of its most recognizable products? Or that Google, often viewed as a champion of openness, uses closed, proprietary software in some of its most familiar products?

• That’s why the open source community has been racing to build better versions of Slack, even though countless open source chat apps exist already. In fact, Slack alternative Mattermost and Rocket.chat topped the Black Duck Rookies of the Year report, an annual list of new open source projects that attract the most developers and produce the most code. Along with other open source chat apps such as Friends and Let’s Chat, these projects are hoping to provide not just a more open alternative to Slack, but beat the company at its own game by providing features Slack doesn’t yet have.

• Around 23 percent of Kuwait’s total workforce works in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), according to the World Bank. However, these companies only contribute about 3.1 percent to the national GDP.

• In an attempt to diversify its income sources, which rely mainly on oil, the Kuwaiti government launched the Kuwait National Fund for SME Development in 2013, which supports startups and SMEs.

• Nuwait had a chat with Kuwaiti entrepreneur Mohammad AlMarzouq, cofounder of web development company KBSoft about the three things that helped him venture into entrepreneurship.

• We would also like to thank our outgoing Board Directors, Bruno Souza, Simon Phipps and Tony Wasserman. Through their dedication and insights the OSI has grown in size and purpose, and matured as an organization.

• We would be remiss if we did not also recognize the special role of Simon Phipps who, in addition to serving several terms as Board President, also shepherded the OSI’s transition to a member-led organization, which made these elections possible.

• In a sign that device manufacturers are taking seriously the FCC’s new restrictions on open source firmware, TP-Link has announced that it will no longer sell wireless routers in the U.S. that support Linux-based firmwares like DD-WRT.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• The first step in the V8 release process is a new branch from the git master immediately before Chromium branches for a Chrome Beta milestone (roughly every six weeks). Our newest release branch is V8 5.0, which will remain in beta until we release a stable build in conjunction with Chrome 50 Stable. Here’s a highlight of the new developer-facing features in this version of V8.

• The Chrome 50 web-browser will usher in the stable build of V8 5.0 as its JavaScript engine.

• Version 5.0 of the V8 JavaScript engine features improved ECMAScript 2015 support with regexp unicode flags and regexp customization hooks, performance improvements for ES2015 and ES5 features, and changes to the V8 API.

Mozilla

• Servo is a cross-platform browser engine that will run on ARM operating systems (including Android) as well as on x64 platforms including Linux, OS X and Windows. It is designed to take advantage of parallelism in order to achieve optimum performance on today’s multi-core systems.

• Servo is coded in Rust, a language designed to ensure thread-safe concurrency and with a greater emphasis on security and safety than C++ – a language Mozilla says is poorly suited to preventing problems like memory bugs and data races.

• A new browser built by Mozilla Research called Servo is close to becoming reality, with a post from one of the team’s developers on the organization’s forum confirming a first release should land in June.

• Servo is a browser engine that was built from the ground up in the Rust language to specialize in performance, security, modularity and parallelism.

• The Web is the platform for game development and we’ll be showing it in action at this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. Powerful new capabilities continue to emerge and gain mindshare with developers and gamers alike as the open Web games stack reaches ubiquity.

SaaS/Big Data

• The new release of OpenStack, Liberty, is being welcomed by more and more cloud service providers, who are calling it more mature than previous releases. Unitas Global, for example, has announced the availability of its newest Enterprise Cloud service built on OpenStack Liberty. “OpenStack’s 12th release represents a significant milestone in terms of technical maturity and enables even more enterprises to make the move to open, hybrid cloud computing environments,” says Grant Kirkwood, Founder & CTO of Unitas Global.

• Apache Mesos has been supporting Docker as an alternate to its own default container since late 2014. But now the popular open source cluster scheduler platform is nearing completion on a more simplified approach that intends to replace both of the two existing containers in the hopes of easing future development of frameworks.

• The ODPi initiative focuses on promoting and advancing the state of Apache Hadoop and Big Data technologies for the enterprise. It is a collaborative project of the Linux Foundation, which hosts a number of collaborative software projects and provide the organizational, promotional and technical infrastructure needed to make the projects successful.

Databases

• Recent discussions here included a thread about the chances of users of Oracle escaping to PostgreSQL.

• Following the news last week that Microsoft is porting its hugely popular SQL Server database software into the open source Linux operating system, rival relational database vendor MariaDB had some strong opinions on the industry and Microsoft’s place in it.

• New MariaDB CEO Michael Howard described Microsoft’s decision to bring SQL Server database product to the open-source Linux operating systems as a “sad reflection of where Microsoft is” as the big vendor gives up its proprietary distribution model and has to fight in the open source market.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Collabora Productivity, the company that offers commercial solutions based on LibreOffice, has partnered with DAASI International, a provider of open source authentication, single sign-on (SSO) and federated identity management products to provide identity management integration solutions for CloudSuite. DAASI will also offer support and implementation services for companies who want to integrate CloudSuite into their IT landscape.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• The founder of Docker Inc. invests in new technology that provides a very different and very distributed way to build a container database. As Docker container use continues to grow, there is a need for a distributed database technology that is built for the container era, which is precisely what Crate Technology is now aiming to deliver.

• Crate Technology today announced a $4 million seed funding round to help build, develop and extend its open-source-based container database technology. Among Crate Technology’s investors is Solomon Hykes, the founder of Docker Inc.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Public Services/Government

• The White House has released for public comment a draft of its Source Code Policy, which establishes rules for sharing customized software between federal agencies, in the hopes of improving government access to applications and reducing development costs.

Openness/Sharing

• A new UN report provides significant detail on the increasing flows of cultural trade worldwide.

• Although the benefits of sharing big datasets are well-known, so are the privacy issues that can arise as a result. The tension between a desire to share information widely and the need to respect the wishes of those to whom it refers is probably most acute in the medical world. Although the hope is that aggregating health data on a large scale can provide new insights into diseases and their treatments, doing so makes issues of consent even trickier to deal with. A new study of Parkinson’s disease from Sage Bionetworks, which describes itself as a “non-profit biomedical research organization,” takes a particularly interesting approach.

Programming

• One thing you probably wouldn’t do is import the whole thing into a single Git repo, it’s pretty well known that Git isn’t designed for that. But, you know, Git does have some tools that let you pretend it’s a centralised version control system, and, huge monolithic repos are cool, and it works in Mercurial… evidence is worth more than hearsay, so I decided to create a Git repo with 10GB of text files to see what happened. I did get told in #git on Freenode that Git will not cope with a repo that’s larger than available RAM, but I was a little suspicious given the number of multi-gigabyte Git repos in existance.

• WebAssembly, the year-old effort for creating a low-level programming language for in-browser client-side scripting with cross-browser support is making more progress.

Leftovers

• Take a quick scan of any CIO’s list of priorities for the year, and it’s easy to see that they are among the busiest executives in the C-Suite. But driving digital transformation, thwarting cybersecurity attacks, and leveraging the Internet of Things to better understand customers – just a few tasks on CIOs’ to-do lists – don’t come easily if IT leaders are inundated with back-to-back meetings and an out-of-control inbox.

Science

• It looks like I’ve missed Pi Day by some fraction of a day, but I can’t help but get a little excited when this special day rolls around — especially if pi turns into pie. And, while I can’t remember much past 3.14159 in my head, I know that calculating pi to some outrageous number of digits can be pretty exciting and that we can do that fairly easily on Unix systems.

Health/Nutrition

• American agrochemical giant Monsanto has threatened to pull out of India and hold back new genetically modified cotton technologies if the government continues its “arbitrary and potentially destructive” interventions that seek to cut the company’s royalty fees.

Security

• Years ago we used to have debates about whether open source or proprietary software was higher quality, by which we mostly meant fewer bugs. Coverity’s reports each year showed that, in fact, open-source software did have a lower bug density on average.

• Despite of what I wrote earlier, we now print warnings for Release files signed with signatures using SHA1 as the digest algorithm. This involved extending the protocol APT uses to communicate with the methods a bit, by adding a new 104 Warning message type.

• A tricky Tuesday for VMware’s vRealize products, which have received the first maintenance release for version 7 and also become the subject of a security alert.

• Let’s do the alert first, as it explains that several vRealize products have a pair of cross-site-scripting bugs that could compromise a user’s workstation.

• The mess means that vRealize Business Advanced and Enterprise 8.x on Linux need a patch, to version 8.2.5. VMware vRealize Automation has a similar problem. This one’s nothing to cancel a good lunch over: it only impacts version 6.x on Linux. Upgrading to version 6.2.4 will sort things out.

• Microsoft’s PowerShell has once again become an attack vector for malware, this time a file-less attack dubbed “Powersniff” by Palo Alto Networks.

• The attack arrives through e-mails containing Word documents bearing malicious macros, almost as if it isn’t more than 15 years since the first macro viruses were let loose on the world.

Transparency Reporting

• The Senate’s passage Tuesday of a bill to amend the Freedom of Information Act is a good step toward improving government transparency. Congress, however, can and should do more to fix the 50-year-old federal sunshine law.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The pay-to-play model of government advanced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) scored another victory this week. On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Senate voted along party lines to approve a bill that would prohibit local communities from issuing their own rules on plastic bags and other containers.

• This is part of an emerging national trend.

• Preventing local governments from banning, charging a fee for, or otherwise regulating plastic bags is part of a national strategy by corporate interests and groups they fund, like ALEC to override progressive policy gains at the city and county level.

• Similar state “preemption,” or state intervention, measures have gone after popular city measures to increase the minimum wage, require paid sick leave, ban fracking, and bar discrimination.

• Hunters in Malta will be permitted to shoot 5,000 turtle doves this spring despite the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently adding the migratory bird to the “red list” of species at risk of being wiped out.

• The Maltese government, the only EU member to allow recreational spring hunting, said it was taking “special measures” to minimise the impact of its shoot on the bird’s plummeting population, cutting the shooters’ allowance from 11,000 birds.

Finance

• Legislation to turn every school in England into an academy independent of local authority control will be unveiled in the budget.

• Draft leglislation, to be published possibly as early as Thursday, will begin the process of implementing a pledge made by David Cameron in his conference speech last autumn.

• The prime minister said his “vision for our schooling system” was to place education into the hands of headteachers and teachers rather than “bureaucrats”.

• The move follows criticism of the government for going into stasis during the referendum campaign. Cameron and the chancellor, George Osborne, are keen to show that they are in charge of a “reforming” government.

• As the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the dieselgate scandali begins its work in Brussels, a leaked lobbying document from the European car manufacturers’ lobby, ACEA (European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association), reveals a sophisticated, multi-faceted behind-the-scenes lobbying strategy aimed at weakening new emissions tests.

• Last September’s dieselgate scandal exposed how car manufacturers were meeting legal NOx emissions limits in laboratory tests, but massively exceeding them on the road (by up to 40 times in the case of Volkswagen). While this was news to the general public, the European Commission had known manufacturers were vastly exceeding limits back in 2011 and was designing new on-the-road tests, or ‘Real Driving Emissions’ (RDE) tests, to tackle the problem in diesel cars. But as the leak shows, ACEA and its members had other plans. Their intention: to weaken and delay the new tests, scheduled to be finalised in 2015 and introduced in 2017, which could prevent thousands of premature deaths every year but would most certainly dent profits if implemented in full.

• The man who led Sweden between 2006 and 2014 is swapping politics for banking, his new employer confirmed in a press statement on Tuesday.

• Reinfeldt, 50, who also served as president of the European Council in 2006, has been hired as a senior adviser for the bank in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

• Johan Lustig, head of Nordic Corporate and Investment Banking for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, called the ex-PM “one of Europe’s most highly respected politicians in recent years.”

• Overall, respondents believed most CEOs made less than a tenth of what they actually do—on average, they thought CEOs earned nearly $1 million, whereas the real average is about $10 million. Still, 74 percent think those CEOs are overpaid.

• The factors that shape EU trade policy are many. But among those that shape most actual and current negotiation dynamics in the EU Japan FTA negotiations, which started in 2013, a few months before the transatlantic TTIP talks, two stand out: United States free trade agreements and the EU agriculture sector, argues Iana Dreyer.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Although corporate media outlets have blasted presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for “living in an economic fantasy world,” his proposed plan for free tuition in public universities is hardly radical. To be funded by a modest financial transaction tax—0.5 percent on stock transactions and 0.1 percent on bond transactions—it’s essentially an older policy being reinstated to create revenue for a social program.

• Many countries, including the UK, France, Japan, India and Taiwan, already have similar taxes and the US had one until 1966. And a number of industrialized nations, like Germany, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and the Scandinavian countries, have instituted free college tuition without evident chaotic societal breakdown.

• And yet a flurry of media “experts” have rushed to denounce not only the financial tax as a means to fund college tuition, but the prospect of socialized higher education as a concept.

• Bernie Sanders, while well behind, is still a viable candidate and is very much staying in the race. One wouldn’t know this, however, from watching last night’s cable news coverage, because the three major 24-hour news networks–CNN, MSNBC and Fox News–cut away from Sanders’ speech.

• [...]

• Sanders’ major sin appears to have been choosing to discuss policy rather than dishing out the typical hoorah platitudes. His hour-long speech which, according to Talking Points Memo, wasn’t carried even in part, focused on issues like campaign finance reform and the barriers to mass political change. You can watch the whole thing here, courtesy of C-SPAN.

• I don’t look at my own Wikipedia page, but was told about it yesterday. I therefore googled Philip Cross and was amazed to discover that he is allegedly an alias for Oliver Kamm attacking people online. Furthermore that Kamm has employed lawyers to threaten those who claim that he is Philip Cross, and by Kamm’s own account the Metropolitan Police have even warned off Neil Clark from saying Kamm is Cross. The Kamm/Cross affair was discussed on George Galloway’s show on Saturday.

• Things started to go off the rails on Friday, when Clinton, attending the funeral of another former first lady, Nancy Reagan, offered up a startlingly inaccurate account of “how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s” until a national conversation finally began “because of both President and Mrs. Reagan — in particular Mrs. Reagan.”

• Donald Trump just won a key endorsement going into Tuesday’s Florida primary: the state’s attorney general, Pam Bondi.

• But her bigger favor to Trump may have been her decision in 2013 not to pursue an investigation of Trump’s for-profit education chain after he made a big donation to her re-election campaign.

• As Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel reported at the time, Bondi announced in September 2013 that her office was reviewing a series of complaints related to the Trump Institute of Boca Raton, a for-profit education company that is no longer in operation. Three days after the report that Bondi was considering joining other states’ attorneys general in taking action against Trump’s for-profit education chain, the real estate mogul dumped $25,000 into a committee organized for Bondi’s re-election. Bondi ended up taking no action.

• Hackers target ‘deeply disturbing’ presidential candidate and ask for support to dismantle his campaign and expose private details

• Mo Ansar is in the news again. In particular, there is an article in the current issue of Private Eye about a complaint he was seeking to make to Twitter.

• (For background to Ansar, see this dossier by Jeremy Duns, which details threats made against journalists and bloggers, including me.)

• Ansar has made a great deal of his legal experiences, and often refers to his exploits in courts. I exposed his claims as being a “lawyer” in May 2014.

• [...]

• I have asked Ansar about these passages, but have not yet had a response.

Censorship

• Yang Jisheng knows all about censorship. His book “Tombstone,” an epic account of Mao Zedong’s great famine, is banned in China.

• Two weeks after China’s President toured state media offices and called for absolute loyalty from the press, a website with links to the government published an explosive letter asking him to resign “for the future of the country and the people.”

• The letter was reportedly posted in the early hours of March 4 by a website called Wujie News, which is jointly owned by SEEC Media Group, Alibaba and the government of Xinjiang, in China’s far northwest. The Washington Post found a cached version of the document that shows the post live on the site.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen on a screen above delegates during the second plenary session of the National People’s Congress in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 9, 2016.

• The recent censorship crackdown inside China is typically met with a shrug, but now the Chinese are censoring content worldwide. Here’s how. The famous Great Firewall of China has been in effect for decades. But in recent months, China’s current authoritarian leader, President Xi Jinping, has been taking domestic censorship to a new level.

• Under Xi’s leadership, Internet police officers have been embedded inside Chinese tech firms, depictions of extramarital affairs and homosexuality have been banned from TV and even news articles that complain about censorship are being censored.

• Jiang Hong, whose interview in a Chinese magazine was taken down last week, says ‘mistakes can be made’ if a society listens to only one voice

• Chinese parliamentary delegate Jiang Hong has spoken to the BBC about censorship and the “obstacles” Chinese people still face in being able to speak out.

• Mr Jiang was interviewed on the fringes of the National People’s Congress. Previous interviews to online media outlets have been deleted by the authorities.

• He told the BBC’s John Sudworth, “If a society only listens to one voice, mistakes can be made”.

• After 11 days of interminable speeches, followed by ritualistic voting to approve everything put before it, China’s annual parliamentary gathering will, once again, leave little worthy of note in its wake.

• That is precisely the intention of course because it is not meant to hold power to account.

• That is kept tightly in the hands of the ruling Communist Party, and the key policies have long been decided in advance.

• Lawmakers voted 131-12 Tuesday to limit the power of public schools to censor student media, including publications financed by the school. Administrators would still be able to block content that is slanderous, libelous or otherwise breaks laws.

• A campaign to relax strict photography rules in the Senate has now been backed by Communications Minister and Manager of the Government Business in the Senate Mitch Fifield.

Privacy

• Franco Caraccioli, who sued Facebook rather than the party who uploaded a video of him pleasuring himself (under the username “Franco CaraccioliJerkingman”), has lost his lawsuit. This is due to his decision to pursue a party protected under Section 230, rather than the uploader, against whom he might have been able to pursue actual criminal charges.

• Caraccioli’s original complaint argued that Facebook’s refusal to delete the account amounted to defamation (among other things). It wasn’t the craziest of pro se filings, but given the subject matter, Caraccioli might have been better served with another reread or two before submitting it. It accused Facebook of “thrusting” Caraccioli’s video into the public eye — including the eyes of children — and noted that the “sensitivity” of the content was due to the reasonable expectations of any person who “holds their genitalia as a private part.”

• Since the 1990s, U.S. law enforcement has expressed concern about “going dark,” defined as an inability to access encrypted communications or data even with a court order.

• Silicon Valley companies are rolling out encrypted products that allow users alone to access their data, and in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials argue that their fears are being realized.

• Open Rights Group is urging MPs to oppose the Investigatory Powers Bill, which has its second reading in the House of Commons this afternoon.

• The FBI on Thursday threatened to raise the stakes in its legal battle with Apple, suggesting it could demand access to the iPhone’s source code and the electronic signature used to verify its software updates.

• But is this unprecedented corporate access into our lives permitted just because it’s technically possible? What expectations of privacy remain when we shop or walk down the street? How does it relate to government surveillance and, as with government surveillance, shouldn’t we ask who, when it comes down to it, is most likely to be harmed?

• So, having to obtain permission to send messages someone might take the wrong way is Kilmartin’s hamfisted way of dealing with online harassment. This changes social media interactions from “I don’t want you to get mad, but… ” to “I don’t want you to press charges, but…” with $1000 and up to a year in jail awaiting the person who fails to receive the go-ahead to send something distressing.

• The ‘two or more separate non-continuous acts” language is there to close the loophole in the anti-cyberstalking law — something that has apparently bothered the AG ever since that badly-written law was abused by law enforcement.

• The Small Business Web is a trade association for companies that sell cloud software to other small- and medium-size businesses. What began in 2009 right here at South by Southwest (SXSW) has grown into an organization with over 1,000 members, including companies like Constant Contact and Hootsuite.

• While attending the conference this weekend I had a chance to chat with Sunir Shah, founder and president of the group (and the chief marketer at Olark, itself a cloud software company that provides a live chat tool that businesses can use to talk to customers online). He shared some thoughts about the ways the federal government, especially via National Security Agency (NSA) domestic spying, is hurting small businesses like the ones his trade association represents.

• In one of the more unusual analyses of the Apple v FBI debate, former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker has compared Tim Cook to 1940s Hollywood star Doris Day.

• Addressing an audience at SXSW young enough to have no idea who Doris Day was, Baker quoted Hollywood musician and actor Oscar Levant, who said: “I remember her before she was a virgin.”

• He then said Apple had only recently changed its strategy in handling law enforcement requests for access.

• One of the key lines that various supporters of backdooring encryption have repeated in the last year, is that they “just want to have a discussion” about the proper way to… put backdoors into encryption.

Civil Rights

• Backpage.com has been pretty busy in court. The site, which basically took over the market for “adult” classified ads after Craigslist shut down its ads (after being misleadingly attacked) has been sued a bunch of times, almost always by people misunderstanding Section 230 of the CDA which, as we’ve discussed hundreds of times, says that sites are not liable for the actions of their users. Last year, however, Backpage won a big case in Massachusetts in May, but then lost one in Washington in September. (Separately, it won a different case going after Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart for meddling and getting credit card companies to stop supporting Backpage.com — the company just asked the lower court to dismiss what’s left of that case). The September ruling was surprising, as it’s one of a very, very, very small number of cases that basically says that Section 230 doesn’t apply.

• “I don’t like the name ‘Saudi Arabia,’” Mohammed Nimr al-Nimr said with a smile. “It’s actually called the Arabian Peninsula, not Saudi,” he laughed, noting the country is named after its ruling dynasty.

• The impeccably dressed and amiable 29-year-old Saudi activist and engineer was in Washington, D.C. for the 2016 Summit on Saudi Arabia, the first international conference to call into question the close U.S. relationship with the theocratic absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

• India has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom.

• The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India to assess religious liberty in the country. But India has not issued visas to members of the commission.

• Part 2 of our conversation on Donald Trump with the father of fascism studies, Robert Paxton, professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University and author of several books, including “The Anatomy of Fascism.”

• Donald Trump warned on Wednesday that his supporters could riot at the Republican convention in Cleveland if he is not “automatically” made the party’s nominee if he arrives with the most votes but fails to secure a majority of convention delegates.

• President Obama has nominated federal judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left open by the death of Antonin Scalia. Widely seen as a moderate, Garland is the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

• Yesterday the department called upon state court leaders to ensure that court rules and procedures on fine and fee collection afford due process and equal protection of the law and align with sound public policy. The timing could not have been better because today the ACLU reached a settlement in our lawsuit against Biloxi, Mississippi, which challenged the jailing of poor people if they could not pay the entire amount of their outstanding court fines and fees up front, in full, and in cash. The agreement provides a critically important model on how to implement the Justice Department’s recommendations and do even more to treat the rich and poor equally and fairly when they step into court.

• The US Justice Department cautioned local courts that it is unconstitutional to jail someone for not paying fines without determining whether they are able to pay, and warned against using court fees to generate revenue for cities.

• The warnings came as part of an effort to reform court practices that “perpetuate poverty and result in unnecessary deprivations of liberty,” the Justice Department said.

• “The consequences of the criminalization of poverty are not only harmful – they are far-reaching,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a statement. “They not only affect an individual’s ability to support their family, but also contribute to an erosion of our faith in government.”

• While there may not be a single policy issue this year’s presidential candidates can agree on, there does seem to be a bipartisan consensus on one thing: Protest will not be tolerated at campaign rallies.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• We mentioned this a few weeks ago, but wanted to remind folks to help us tell the EU not to wreck the internet with a series of bad regulations. There you can see the letter that we put together, which has already been signed by a wide variety of internet companies, including Reddit, DuckDuckGo, Medium, Automattic, Patreon, Shapeways and more. The issue is a big deal right now. European bureaucrats (who couldn’t even program a web survey to operate properly) are in the midst of putting together plans to regulate internet companies. This is under the umbrella of what they’re referring to as the “Digital Single Market,” but which some Commissioners are using as part of a plan to saddle the internet with a variety of new regulations, which have the potential to wipe out important safe harbors that made the internet what it is today.

• The growing trend of closed content silos—publishing platforms that require a login in order to view the content—is a step away from a more open web. As this trend continues, owners of closed silos will have even more control over published content and traffic that content drives. This is why content producers should also consider ways to publish content openly, and for their users to have the option to access content through their web browsers rather than being driven into closed ecosystems.

• American telcos don’t have a monopoly on monopolies. Foreign telcos can be just as inappropriately (and pehaps illegally) protective of their turf profits.

• Despite government programs, national broadband plans, billions in subsidies and a lot of recent hype paid to gigabit services like Google Fiber, U.S. broadband is actually getting less competitive than ever before across a huge swath of the country. Companies like AT&T and Verizon have been backing away from unwanted DSL networks they simply don’t want to upgrade. In some cases this involves selling these assets to smaller telcos (who take on so much debt they can’t upgrade them either), but in many markets this involves actively trying to drive customers away via either rate hikes or outright neglect.

DRM

• Have you ever bought music, movies, games, ebooks, or gadgets, only to discover later that the product had been deliberately limited with Digital Rights Management? We want to hear from you!

• We’re preparing a petition to a government agency on fair labelling practices for DRM-restricted devices, products and services. DRM used to be limited to entertainment products, but it’s spread with the Internet of Things, and it’s turning up in the most unlikely of places. As the Copyright Office heard during last summer’s hearings, DRM is now to be found in cars and tractors, in insulin pumps and pacemakers, even in voting machines. What’s more, the manufacturers using DRM believe that they have the right to invoke the “anti-circumvention” rules in 1998′s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to prevent competitors from removing DRM in order to give you more choice about the products you own.

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will consider adopting a DRM non-aggression covenant at its Advisory Committee meeting in Boston next week. EFF has attended several of these meetings before as a W3C member, always with the intent to persuade the W3C that supporting DRM is a bad idea for the Web, bad for interoperability, and bad for the organization. By even considering Web standards connected with DRM, the W3C has entered an unusually controversial space. Next week’s membership meeting will be accompanied by demonstrations organized in Boston by the Free Software Foundation, and other cities where the W3C has a presence.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Flanagan tries to get the ownership of her game’s IP early documented by the dean or other heads of the school, and also keeps her work separate from the school by creating games under her own company. There’s a balance, as she puts it, asking for permission sometimes, and taking risks the other. And she warns that not only can overthinking IP can halt creativity, but it can set false expectations with universities, who will think video games are often worth millions.

• The Ukrainian Parliament is currently drafting an amended Customs Code to introduce a number of changes to the country’s intellectual property legislation. Moreover, in mid-March, local lawmakers authorised Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko to ratify the protocol amending the TRIPS agreement which enables increased exports of pharmaceuticals produced under compulsory licences to countries which are not capable of manufacturing them locally.

• The United States government has increasingly engaged India on intellectual property rights and other trade issues in recent years, and US negotiators are under still more pressure to include industry in this engagement and deliver more results, a recent letter from 14 members of the US Congress shows.

• The congressional letter comes at a time when recent submissions by US industry to the annual US government process for assessing the IP protection of trading partners caused a reaction in India by indicating commitments have been made by India’s government not to use compulsory licensing and other measures to dodge IP rights.

• China, Japan and South Korea are among the top five countries filing international patent applications at the World Intellectual Property Organization, while the United States continues to lead in patent and trademark applications. Far behind, developing countries seem to be having a hard time catching up.

Copyrights

• Businesses that provide free and open Wi-Fi to customers are not liable for copyright infringements committed by users of that network, a top legal adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has decided.

• Advocate General Maciej Szpunar’s opinion (PDF) is not binding on the final ruling of the CJEU, but is generally a good guide to what the court will decide when it hands down the definitive judgment.

• However, the Advocate General ruled that national courts may issue injunctions against the provider of free Wi-Fi services in the case of copyright infringement provided they are “particular, effective, proportionate and dissuasive”; and “that they are aimed at bringing a specific infringement to an end, and do not entail a general obligation to monitor.” Moreover, courts must strike a fair balance between “freedom of expression and information and the freedom to conduct business, as well as the right to the protection of intellectual property.”

• Can the provider of a password-free free Wi-Fi be liable for infringements – specifically: of copyright – of those who use his/her service?

• This question is not an abstract one, but rather the core of a case currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU): McFadden C-484/14.

• As readers may imagine, should the answer be ‘yes’, this would change quite a few things …

• Two men have been arrested at a cinema in the UK after being found in possession of an audio recording of the movie The Divergent Series: Allegiant. The men, aged 19 and 44, have been released on police bail pending further inquiries and are now banned from all cinemas in England and Wales.

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