● 03.18.16

● Links 18/3/2016: Slackware 14.2 With Linux 4.5, Remi Repo at 100,000,000 Downloads

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

Kernel Space

• Today, March 17, 2016, Linux kernel developer Sasha Levin announced the release and immediate availability of the twentieth maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 4.1 kernel.

• Just a few days ago we reported news on new Linux kernel maintenance releases, including Linux kernel 4.4.6 LTS, Linux kernel 3.14.65 LTS, and Linux kernel 3.10.101 LTS, and today we would like to inform our dedicated Linux readers about the availability of Linux kernel 4.1.20 LTS.

• Jiri Kosina submitted the HID driver subsystem updates today for the Linux 4.6 merge window and come with some noteworthy changes for mobile/desktop users.

• The HID updates in Linux 4.6 include added/improved device support in the Sony, Wacom, Microsoft, and Logitech HID drivers. There are also code clean-ups to the much-used Wacom driver, and a wide assortment of bug fixes.

• There are a number of ARM64/AArch64 architectural improvements heading in for the Linux 4.6 kernel.

• The ARM64 pull for Linux 4.6 has some new features part of ARMv8.2 like half-precision floating point support and User Access Override functionality.

• Immediately after dropping news about the availability of the twentieth maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.1 LTS, kernel developer Sasha Levin published details about Linux kernel 3.18.29 LTS.

• Linux kernel 3.18.29 LTS is the twenty-ninth maintenance build for the long-term supported Linux 3.18 kernel series, which is used in various Linux kernel-based operating systems by enterprises and small- or medium-sized businesses. Therefore, the Linux 3.18 branch receives security patches and hardware support for a few more years than normal Linux kernel releases.

Graphics Stack

• In continuation of the results earlier this week looking at How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing With AMDGPU/Radeon Graphics Compared To Ubuntu 14.04 With FGLRX, here is an extra run with the Radeon/AMDGPU results while enabling DRI3 rendering support.

Applications

• Recently the launcher application for TOR browser has been updated to 0.2.3, but upstream immediatley released an important security fix and bumped the release to 0.2.4.

• Gordon Lyon from the Nmap project, one of the most acclaimed network and security scanner open-source software used by millions of hackers and security experts worldwide, today, March 17, 2016, announced the release of Nmap 7.10.

• Everyone today needs security and when it comes to things like data, PC, messaging, cloud etc then one become much paranoid about it. Security is required in all the fields these days. Be it dual verification from Gmail, Cinavia Message Code 3 for BluRay players or any other similar thing, every one getting curious about adding more and more layers of safety so that any mishap can be avoided.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• XCOM 2 Anarchy’s Children DLC released today for Windows, but it has been delayed at the last minute by Feral Interactive.

• Today, March 17, 2016, UNIGINE Corp. has proudly announced the release and general availability of version 2.2 of its beautiful 3D game engine UNIGINE for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

• While Game Developers Conference is happening this week, there’s already been the Unity 5.4 beta, CRYENGINE V, and the open-sourcing of Atomic Game Engine.

• More good news for developers, as the Atomic Game Engine is now open source under the MIT license. It’s available on github right now.

• The developers of Substance Painter 2 have announced they will be releasing a Linux beta of their 3D painting software.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’m happy to announce that Qt 5.6.0 has been released today! This release has taken a bit longer to finish than we originally expected, mostly because we put a lot of new infrastructure in place, allowing us to make Qt 5.6 a Long Term Supported (LTS) release. With that, Qt 5.6 (LTS) will be receiving patch releases with security updates and bug fixes for the next three years, in parallel to upcoming Qt versions. Today, with Qt 5.6, we’ve now also made our new offering for start-ups and small businesses available!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Frederic Peters of the GNOME Project has just announced a few minutes ago that the highly anticipated GNOME 3.20 desktop environment is now officially in Release Candidate (RC) stage of development.

• The GNOME 3.20 Release Candidate build is here one day late, as the official release schedule noted March 16, 2016, as the release date, but considering the fact that today’s Saint Patrick’s Day, it is more than welcome, and we have all the time on our hands to give it a proper test drive.

• Hello all,

• GNOME 3.19.92 is now out; this is our release candidate for 3.20, scheduled next week. Please go and try it.

• To compile GNOME 3.19.92, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published by the release team (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release).

• Hello all,

• We would like to inform you about the following: * GNOME 3.20.0 newstable tarballs due * Hard Code Freeze ends

• Tarballs are due on 2016-03-21 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.20.0 newstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.20.0. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

• Being well past the various freezes, today’s GNOME 3.20 release candidate doesn’t offer much more than bug fixes and translation updates. If you aren’t familiar with the new work added earlier in the GNOME 3.19 development cycle for GNOME 3.20, see our many GNOME 3.20 articles. There is much-improved support for native Wayland on GNOME, many improvements to GNOME’s many applications, and other enhancements throughout the stack.

Distributions

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Mageia made it to SCaLE 14x for the first time in sunny California, with one of our dedicated QA deputy leaders to man the booth.

• Bill Kenney, or wilcal as he is known here, did an amazing job running the Mageia booth at SCaLE. This is an extract from his report on the event.

• The Mageia booth was located right in the centre of the Pasadena Convention Center on January 22nd – 24th. Friday saw the highest traffic, Saturday was quieter, but lots of families came down to see the exhibits, which is always nice to see.

• To be honest, today I was postponing the upgrade because the machine, a rather old Toshiba Satellite which, oh horror, came with Windows VISTA preloaded, put up a fight when I installed Mageia 2 to it.

Slackware Family

• Softpedia has been informed today, March 17, 2016, by GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton about the immediate availability of a custom compiled Linux 4.5 kernel for Slackware Linux Current (14.2) and all of its derivatives.

• According to Mr. Exton, he managed to compile the recently released Linux kernel 4.5, which has been officially unveiled by Linus Torvalds on March 13, 2016, exactly the same way as Slackware’s latest kernel huge.

Red Hat Family

• Concerns over China’s economic slowdown as well have kept many global companies wary. Not Red Hat.

• The open source software major is planning to spend tens of millions of dollars in China in the next five years as part of a broader effort to lift growth in Asia, which currently contributes a fifth to Red Hat’s revenues, president and chief executive Jim Whitehurst told CNBC.

• The North Carolina-based company is expected to cross $2 billion in revenues this year with a target to hit $5 billion in around five years. It is aiming to more than double the Asian ex-Japan share of its revenue to 20 to 25 percent in the same period—up from 10 percent now.

Fedora

• Once again, the upcoming Fedora 24 operating system has suffered a delay in its release schedule, and for now, it looks like only the release date of the Alpha build has been postponed for a few days.

• Korora is Linux distribution that aims to make it easier to install and use for new Linux users, while still providing power-users with the tools and openness that they want. Originally, Korora was built on Gentoo, but in 2010, the team redid the whole thing as a Fedora Remix, with the goal of making the system “just work,” from first boot. As a Remix, it ships Fedora packages, but also a number of things that Fedora cannot directly ship, including media codecs, graphics drivers, and other useful bits that may be in non-free repositories or require a lot of expertise to install and get breathing.

• Fedora 24 Alpha due out next Tuesday has been delayed due to blocker bugs. Elsewhere, Patrick Volkerding‎ announced Slackware 14.2 Release Candidate 1 today saying, “We still have a bit of work to do.” Mitch Wagner today said that “Open Source is killing us” and Charles Schultz reported on Mageia at SCaLE 14x.

• The remi repository will be soon 11 years old, and we just reached the 100 millions of downloads

• Of course, this is only an indicator, first years are not included, some people aspire the full repository, and lot of private mirrors are used and are not included in this figure, but it allows me to observe the growing success of my work, and to compare the popularity of the various available packages.

Debian Family

• Softpedia has been informed today, March 17, 2016, by the developers behind the popular Linux AIO project, about the immediate availability for download of the Linux AIO Debian Live 8.3.0 ISO image.

• For those of you not in the know, the Linux AIO project develops unique Live ISO images that contain multiple editions of a well-known GNU/Linux distribution, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), PCLinuxOS, and many others.

• FOSSASIA 2016 is now under way. The Debian, Red Hat and Ring (Savoir-Faire Linux) teams are situated beside each other in the exhibit area.

Derivatives

• Today, March 17, 2016, the developers of the Debian-based Elive Linux distribution built on top of the Enlightenment desktop environment have announced the availability of a new Beta build.

• Elive 2.6.18 Beta has been made available for download, but the fact of the matter is that the 2.6 branch of the GNU/Linux distribution has been in development for quite too long now, and it doesn’t look like it will be promoted to the stable channel anytime soon.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Earlier this week was the How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing With AMDGPU/Radeon Graphics Compared To Ubuntu 14.04 With FGLRX, which showed off some interesting open-source Radeon Linux driver results but the Radeon R9 285 “Tonga” graphics card at the time couldn’t be tested on Ubuntu 16.04′s kernel due to a regression. That issue is fortunately now resolved in the latest Xenial Xerus kernel so here are those numbers.

• According to Marius of Softpedia, there will be a VPN panel in the System Settings after installing the OTA-10 update on devices. Other than that, the update includes improvement to pay and location services, better support for Web Apps in the Browser app, the EDS Plugin for Qt PIM module’s Organizer and improvements to Indicator-Datetime. The VPN feature though stands out of the rest and was first cited by Softpedia last year.

Devices/Embedded

• The world of electronic music has traditionally been a fairly expensive venture, whether you’re paying for expensive hardware or software. Luckily, there are plenty of free apps and open source software to enable people to get creative on the devices that they mostly have anyway. But I wanted to see how far the famously inexpensive Raspberry Pi could be pushed as a music-making machine.

• Turns out, it can be quite an amazing little sequencer, as long as you know what tools to use and aren’t afraid to learn a little something new.

• Aaeon’s EMB-BSW-1 is a Mini-ITX SBC based on Intel’s N3000 “Braswell” SoCs, and featuring triple display support, dual hdmi, dual mini-PCIe, and 12-24V input.

• Due to the height of the built-in heatsink, Aaeon can’t use the term “thin” for its latest “EMB-BSW-1” industrial Mini-ITX board, but otherwise the board would likely fit that definition. The low profile, along with wide range 12-24V DC power input plus triple display make the EMB-BSW-1 well suited for embedded applications including digital signage, ATM, and point-of-sale.

• You may have heard about the crowdfunded Jolla tablet, sporting the very cool proper GNU/Linux based SailfishOS, and also that things went a little sour because of an unfortunate set of circumstances, meaning most tablets will never be shipped (I got my e-mail regarding a refund a couple of days ago).

• However by an uncharacteristic stroke of good luck one of the few Jolla tablets that has indeed been shipped, has come into my possession via the second hand market – and at a very reasonable price too. Thanks a lot to the altruistic Jolla supporter who was one of the first to pledge for the crowdfunding, and who sold it on to me after only a few days of ownership. It’s the 64 GB version including the quite elegant LastuCase of real leather and wood, which doubles as a stand.

Phones

Tizen

• The Game Developers Conference (GDC2016) is being held this year in San Francisco 14 – 18 March. This is the world’s largest annual gaming event, with an estimated 26,000 gamers and gaming professionals expected to gather and explore what are the latest trends for the gaming Industry.

Android

• If you’re like most people I’ve asked, “the keyboard” probably wasn’t one of the first things that came to mind. When you stop and think about it, though, the interface that lets you input text plays a critical role in your mobile productivity. Whether you’re editing documents or simply sending an email, it has more of an impact on your on-the-go efficiency than almost anything else on your device.

• Android N is set to be the best Android release yet with tons of improvements and new features. Here’s everything we know so far about the next iteration of Google’s mobile operating system.

• Google Keep is a great tool for managing all sorts of notes and lists — especially if simplicity, universal access, and tight integration with Google services are priorities for you. I’ve used it on and off for years myself, and lately, it’s become a core part of my mobile tech setup.

• So how do the people who actually make Keep keep their own lives organized? I thought it’d be interesting to find out. I got in touch with Keep’s product manager, Mario Anima, to get the inside scoop on his own personal Android habits and how he molds the platform to fit his day-to-day needs.

• It’s been over a year since parent company Fossil Group teased a smart Michael Kors watch was in development, and now we finally have a peek of what’s coming later this year.

• Michael Kors is making a big entrance into the wearables space with two sleek and beautiful Android Wear smartwatches: a beautiful gold-plated design for women and a sporty black one for men. The starting price for both is $395 and they’ll debut in department stores (and Michael Kors stores) in fall 2016.

Free Software/Open Source

• Garrison is half-right about the fatal nature of open source. Viewed in isolation, these problems are insurmountable.

• But if you put them together, the problems solve each other. Service providers overwhelmed by open source can turn to vendors to solve the problem, and pay the vendors to do it.

• Sure, it’s a tough competitive environment for both service providers and vendors. But that’s what disruption looks like.

• Brandt is a founding faculty member of CROSS, which was created to bridge the gap between student research and open-source software projects. Weil developed his Ph.D. thesis project into a highly successful open-source software product, the data storage system Ceph.

• This week on Ctrl-Walt-Delete, Walt and Nilay take on the long-running dispute of the public opinion on open source tech, and whether there actually is a hard definition of “open” and “closed.”

• Secondly, the dispute stands out because it provides an example of how a business operating an open-source model can call upon trademarks as a way of creating product differentiation and competitive advantage. I have previously reported on this with regards to the open source Debian and Python projects, which have both leveraged trademarks rights to protect their interests. The open source community typically eschews patent protection and is often characterised as harbouring anti-IP sentiments; but Eyeo’s complaint over Magic AdBlock shows the importance that trademarks can have in open source models.

Events

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

• Chrome 50 has improvements to push notifications, support for a preload declaration/attribute to specify resources should be loaded preemptively, audio/video buffer stream improvements, Web Animation enhancements, and a variety of other changes to assist HTML5/JavaScript developers wishing to take advantage of bleeding-edge web features. Chrome 50 is also what’s rolling out version 5.0 of the V8 JavaScript engine.

Mozilla

• unveiled the first point release of the recently announced Firefox 45.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• The 2015 Open-Source Rookies class reflects three technologies shaping the future of open-source software: Docker containers, open collaboration and AI.

BSD

• There’s a new look at the FreeBSD Foundation, with a new logo and website. The changes are intended to highlight “the ongoing evolution of the Foundation identity and ability to better serve the FreeBSD Project,” according to the post announcing the changes.

Public Services/Government

• For many years, the open source software community has made the distinction between “free as in freedom” (the software can be used or modified as the user sees fit) and “free as in beer” (the software is available at no cost). Some have added a third type of free: “free as in puppy”. Like a puppy, adopting open source software has ongoing cost.

• What many people don’t consider is that developing open source software has a cost, too. Many developers purchase extra hardware for testing or pay for code hosting, a website, etc. A pending bill in the New York Senate aims to help offset those costs.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Open-source data—be it a compilation of informative files, a crucial API that bring together different features or downloadable yearly Census Bureau data—can be an important resources for bootstrapped startups looking for a leg up in the development stages. That’s why we spoke with Esri, a mapping technology data firm with a sizable office in D.C., who recently helped the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unload a ton of open-source, mapping datasets for public use.

Programming

• The results of Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016 is out.

Leftovers

• Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has said he’s ‘worried’ about the direction the Apple Watch is taking the company.

• Steve Wozniak said device has taken firm into ‘jewellery market’ and that it is no longer ‘the company that really changed the world a lot’

Health/Nutrition

• Today’s House Oversight Committee hearing into the Flint Water Crisis was a joke. It was partisan — more so than the previous two hearings — because Republicans finally clued in that a Republican state governor’s crisis doesn’t make them look good if they don’t kick up a stink and draw fire away from their role in the mess.

Security

• Trustwave said over the last seven days, malware-laced spam has represented 18 percent of total spam collected in its honeypots. Trustwave said malware-infected spam typically represent less than 2 percent of total spam. The recent increase to 18 percent is almost entirely traced to ransomware JavaScript downloaders. Campaigns aren’t continuous, Trustwave reported, but are delivered in hour-long bursts.

• Containers started making a big splash in IT and dev operations starting in 2014. The benefits of flexibility and go-live times, among many others, are almost undeniable. But large enterprises considering using a container platform for development or IT operations should pause and consider security first.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Of course I do not in any way condone ISIS, rape, terrorism, violence, victim shaming or slavery. But I do have what I believe are legitimate questions about a New York Times story involving those topics, and hope I can ask them here without being accused of supporting things I find abhorrent.

• I ask these questions only because while rape is tragically used all-to-often as a tool of war, claims by people or groups in war can sometimes be untrue, exaggerated, or reported erroneously for political aims. Iraqi defectors lied about WMDs to help draw America into the 2003 invasion. Claims in 1991 that Iraqi invaders bayoneted Kuwaiti children in their incubators were completely fabricated. In 2011 Susan Rice announced Libya’s Qaddafi was handing out Viagra, so that his soldiers could commit more rapes, it was a lie.

• IF THERE WAS anything surprising about Hillary Clinton’s defense of capital punishment when questioned by an Ohio death row exoneree Sunday night, it was only that she was not better prepared to deliver it. This was no gotcha question, no unscripted ambush like the one carried out last month by Black Lives Matter protesters who confronted Clinton at a fundraiser with her ’90s-era rhetoric about “superpredators.” Although the CNN-sponsored Democratic town hall dictated that candidates do not receive questions in advance, the Clinton campaign almost certainly knew that Ricky Jackson, who spent an incomprehensible 39 years in prison as an innocent man, would be in the audience — and that if called upon, he would probably ask Clinton to justify her support for a policy that sent him to die for a crime he did not commit.

• For almost a year, a Saudi-led coalition of Middle Eastern countries, backed and armed by the U.S. and U.K., has been bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the region. Saudi Arabia hopes to destroy Yemeni rebel groups such as the Houthis, and has bombed hospitals, homes, schools and even a refugee camp in the process.

• Civilians have paid a heavy toll for the conflict. Thousands have been killed, and human rights groups have for months accused the coalition of committing war crimes.

• One of the world’s largest advertising agencies has been accused of helping Saudi Arabia “whitewash” its record on human rights following the kingdom’s largest mass execution for more than 30 years.

• A US subsidiary of Publicis Groupe, the French media conglomerate that owns UK brands such as Saatchi & Saatchi, distributed an article in which the kingdom’s foreign minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir implicitly attempted to justify the execution of 47 people.

• A number of political protesters and at least four juveniles are believed to have been among those killed in January. Human rights groups are increasingly worried that three more juveniles – including Ali al-Nimr, who was sentenced to death aged 17 for taking part in a pro-democracy protest – are due to be executed imminently.

Transparency Reporting

• In 2013, there was controversy abounded when The Times of London alleged that Beyoncé’s perfect rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” during Obama’s second inauguration was the work of lip-syncing. Unperturbed, MuckRock’s founder Michael Morisy seized on this as an opportunity to use FOIA to release those tracks, providing public-domain Bey for all. Sadly, his efforts were thwarted by a combination of FOIA not working that way, and of all things, John Williams. Yes, that John Williams.

• Adding insult to injury (a phrase that will come up more than once in this article), Michael’s follow-up request for the processing notes on his request included a very notable omission.

• Legislators and government employees aren’t allowed to choose which laws to comply with any more than the rest of us. (Theoretically…) Communications between government employees that are subject to open records requests need to be carried out on platforms where they can be searched and archived. This means no use of Telegram, just like it means no setting up your own private email server.

• The irony, of course, is that legislators are currently discussing encrypted communications (including encryption bans) and how law enforcement can no longer obtain communications they used to be able to grab with a warrant. Meanwhile, their own communications are being withheld from the public record… using encryption and automatic destruction. Perhaps the public needs to start issuing statements about how they used to get all these text messages with public records requests but can’t anymore, thanks to the efforts of the government.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• December to February was the hottest meteorological winter ever by far, topping the previous record by a jaw-dropping half a degree Fahrenheit. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that this winter was a remarkable 2.03°F above the 20th century average.

• This extreme warmth — caused primarily by the accelerating human-caused global warming trend (with a boost from El Niño) — is a key reason a number of countries have already “set records for the all-time most expensive weather-related disaster in their nations’ history” this year, as meteorologist Jeff Masters has explained.

• We already knew from NASA surface temperature data and from the satellite data that this was the hottest February on record by far. Indeed, every database confirms that February was the most extreme deviation from “normal” temperatures ever recorded for any month!

• As a new forest fire crisis builds in the country, with fire hotspots numbering in the hundreds on many recent days, Greenpeace Indonesia today launched a mapping tool allowing the public to monitor fires and deforestation in near-real time, and see to an unprecedented extent who controls the land where they are taking place.

• Last year, fires burned 2 million hectares of peatlands in Indonesia, creating an acrid haze that affected several neighbouring Southeast Asian countries.

• As nations met in Paris late last year to agree a deal to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, the huge carbon pool stored in the peatlands was going up in smoke at an unprecedented rate.

• Big companies have cleared a massive amount of peat forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan and drained the land to establish tree and oil palm plantations. Global Forest Watch estimates that the fires have tripled Indonesia’s entire annual emissions. Peatlands have become an important issue, not only in Indonesia but for the whole world.

Finance

• Farming minister Michelle O’Neill says the beef industry in Northern Ireland would “suffer significantly” if a major trade deal between the EU and US gets the green light.

• President Aliev has wasted billions on “prestige” projects. Hosting the Eurovision song contest, the European Games and now a Formula 1 Grand Prix. But ordinary people are struggling to get by on incomes which were already at third world standards and whose value has fallen still further with the collapse of the manat. None of which matters to the empty-headed bling merchants of Formula 1.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” goes a saying…

• The deep irony in this will not be missed by anyone who’s been following UK higher education. Researchers are increasingly being forced to spend their time and money on ‘impact’ activities – defined as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’. Impact activities already count for 20% in the Research Excellence Framework – the assessment exercise that determines central (non-grant) research funding. A recent FOI request suggests that it could rise to 25%. Yet now we’re being told that we must not spend government grant money on anything that will have an effect on public policy. It’s absurd.

• As the aggressive behavior of his supporters becomes as much of a story as the violence implied in his politics, Donald Trump is bringing together folks who agree on little else to denounce him. It’s true Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have policies in some ways even more regressive than Trump’s, but then neither of them is openly pining for the days when protesters were carried off on stretchers.

• Turnout by thousands of appalled citizens led to the cancellation of Trump’s Chicago rally, and a coalition of public interest groups, including MoveOn, Color of Change, Greenpeace and Jobs with Justice, released an open letter calling for a mass Nonviolent Mobilization to Stand Up to what they called a “five alarm fire” for democracy.

• The city-state has been distributing morbid anti-drug propaganda in its schools. So we asked an expert what Singapore’s harsh anti-drug policies actually achieve in reality.

Censorship

• Last year when Environmental Protection Agency staff members knew there were bigger problems with the Flint, Michigan, water supply than the agency was saying, they were under orders not to communicate with reporters without oversight by the agency.

• Missoula County Public Schools upheld Bennett’s suspension without pay for not censoring the “Free the Nipple” edition of the Willard Alternative High School student newspaper, the Student Press Law Center reports.

• Saturday was World Day Against Cyber Censorship and in a unique partnership Amnesty International and AdBlock combined to deliver 156,789,119 impressions of messages by prominent privacy and free speech advocates Edward Snowden, Ai Wei Wei, and Pussy Riot in a campaign conceptualized and brokered by advertising agency ColensoBBDO.

• Amnesty International experienced their highest ever daily web traffic.

• For 24 hours AdBlock served banners with messages from these three influential individuals where they would normally remove banners altogether. During this period it’s estimated that over 50 million internet users were reached with these thought provoking messages speaking out against the dangers of cyber censorship.

Privacy

• Thanks largely to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, most Americans now realize that the intelligence community monitors and archives all sorts of online behaviors of both foreign nationals and US citizens.

• But did you know that the very fact that you know this could have subliminally stopped you from speaking out online on issues you care about?

• Now research suggests that widespread awareness of such mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public.

• A paper published last week in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that “the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.”

• Political dissidents and cyber criminals alike will soon be sending anonymous internet traffic through a library at Western University in Canada, thanks to a new “node” in the encrypted Tor network operated by staff there—the first to open at a library in the country.

• In Canada, the legality of running a Tor node is essentially untested, making the high profile, institutionally-backed node at Western a potential target for the feds.

• Tor is touted as a tool for people, such as journalists, to keep their browsing habits safe from spies and police. But more nefarious traffic, such as drug dealing or child pornography, also passes through the network. A small public library in New Hampshire began operating a Tor node last year, and faced pressure from the Department of Homeland Security to shut it down. The library resisted, and the node is still running.

• It’s been one of the worst-kept secrets for years: the identity of the person the government was investigating in 2013 when it served the secure email firm Lavabit with a court order demanding help spying on a particular customer.

• Ladar Levison, owner of the now defunct email service, has been forbidden since then, under threat of contempt and possibly jail time, from identifying who the government was investigating. In court documents from the case unsealed in late 2013, all information that could identify the customer was redacted.

• But federal authorities recently screwed up and revealed the secret themselves when they published a cache of case documents but failed to redact one identifying piece of information about the target: his email address, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. With that, the very authorities holding the threat of jail time over Levison’s head if he said anything have confirmed what everyone had long ago presumed: that the target account was Snowden’s.

• Nearly three years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave journalists his trove of documents on the intelligence community’s broad and powerful surveillance regime, the public is still missing some crucial, basic facts about how the operations work.

• Surveillance researchers and privacy advocates published a report on Wednesday outlining what we do know, thanks to the period of discovery post-Snowden — and the overwhelming amount of things we don’t.

• The NSA’s domestic surveillance was understandably the initial focus of public debate. But that debate never really moved on to examine the NSA’s vastly bigger foreign operations.

• EFF’s suit was filed in the wake of news reports claiming the government knew for two years about the Heartbleed Bug, a widespread security flaw affecting an estimated two-thirds of the world’s websites, without disclosing the threat.

• Here’s the background: The French Parliament is currently debating a series of regulations on the digital economy and as part of its measures, it has defined a new constraint that basically prohibits parents to upload pictures and videos of their (minor) children on social networks. According to the draft, if parents do upload this content on social networks they may get risk being sued by their own children and may be liable for civil damages and compensation. I do not know what will become of the whole draft nor that specific provision itself. What happened to me, following the news reports about the project, is that several of my friends tweeted and discussed online whether French had lost their sanity.

• [...]

• But to Melissa and I, we do this because we do not want to bring our son at his young age into the nets of marketers, big data, and surveillance. We do not want to put his face out there, despite the fact that we love him so tenderly. We do not want him to be identifiable unless he hasn’t expressed an actual will to do so.

• In a recent Deeplinks post and in some of our other communications about the Apple case, we’ve referred to what the government wants Apple to do as creating a “backdoor.” Some people have questioned the use of the term, but we think it’s appropriate. Here’s why.

• The term “backdoor” has a long history. It was originally used—along with “trapdoor”—throughout the 1980s to refer to secret accounts and/or passwords created to allow someone unknown access into a system. People worried, for instance, that a malicious programmer or system administrator might leave behind a trapdoor that they would be able to use to get into a system long after they were officially working on it. Later, in the first round of the crypto wars, throughout the 1990s, privacy advocates often referred to the government’s key escrow proposals—where the government, or private companies, would keep copies of people’s decryption keys—as a “backdoor” into our encryption.

• Today, more than two dozen civil society groups sent a letter to European leaders reviewing the “Privacy Shield” data-transfer agreement with a singular message: this arrangement is not enough. The Privacy Shield is intended to allow companies to share data about customers across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the Privacy Shield fails to provide sufficient clarity, oversight, remedy, or protections for the human rights of E.U. citizens against U.S. surveillance practices. The letter specifically calls for legislative reform of U.S. surveillance laws, increased protections for personal data, and additional redress and transparency mechanisms.

• The National Security Agency’s internal civil liberties watchdog insisted on Thursday that the agency has no interest in spying on Americans under its controversial spying tools.

• After weeks of relentlessly negging each other in their legal filings and the press, Apple and the FBI are getting in their final punches before heading to court next week.

• SME PED devices were only NSA-approved mobile phones for classified communications.

• Police arrested a 74-year-old peace activist who refused to leave a protest site outside an NSA spy base in Yorkshire on Wednesday. The force also issued an official dispersal order banning protesters from assembling there.

• Lindis Percy, a founding member of Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB), was arrested by police at the Menwith Hill US listening post.

• Nearly three years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave journalists his trove of documents on the intelligence community’s broad and powerful surveillance regime, the public is still missing some crucial, basic facts about how the program works.

• Surveillance researchers and privacy advocates published a report on Wednesday outlining what we do know, thanks to the period of discovery post-Snowden — and the overwhelming amount of things we don’t.

Civil Rights

• What’s the worst thing your boss has ever done? Made you work on the weekend? Sexually harassed the secretary? Gave millions of dollars to an infamous dictator? Jack’s boss did that last one, and all of a sudden having to cancel your Saturday BBQ doesn’t sound so bad, huh?

• Jack was an accountant for SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering firm that managed to single-handedly disprove every nice stereotype about Canadians. Between 2001 and 2011, SNC bribed Muammar Gaddafi and friends with millions of dollars in exchange for cushy contracts, and Jack discovered it during a routine audit. He told us all about learning that his bosses were secretly funding supervillains.

• Crematoria are profitable private businesses.

• On December 16, 2010, the Salt Lake City Police Department and the Safe Streets Violent Crimes Task Force, in coordination with Salt Lake City School District officials, entered West High School in Salt Lake City to conduct a gang raid. Each one of the young people detained during the raid had brown skin. Not one was accused of committing a crime, but it didn’t matter. They were treated like criminals and labeled as gang members.

• Given the recent and re-manufactured debate over torture’s legality, morality, and “effectiveness,” our nation is presented with a stark choice: Do we learn from one of the darkest chapters in our history, or do we repeat our most grievous and heinous mistakes?

• With our core values hanging in the balance, now — perhaps more than ever — it is imperative that the Senate torture report see the light of day.

• A lawsuit recently filed by an allegedly ousted New York City medical examiner lends more credibility to the theory that the justice system is more concerned with successful prosecutions than actual justice. At the center of the allegations lies a DNA testing technique apparently used nowhere else in the country.

• As a candidate in 2008, Obama praised a Supreme Court ruling that affirmed that prisoners had a right to habeas corpus regardless of where they were held, calling it “a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo” (New York Times, 6/13/08). But that ruling was a reversal of an appeals court ruling that Garland had voted for; if you’re glad that the Supreme Court rejected the legal black hole theory, why put another judge there who embraced it?

• Government lawyers on Thursday continued their fight to bury the Senate Torture Report, arguing before the D.C. District Court of Appeals that the 6,700-page text could not be released on procedural grounds.

• When the 500-page executive summary of the report was released more than a year ago, it prompted international outcry and renewed calls for prosecution. The summary describes not only the CIA’s rape and torture of detainees, but also how the agency consistently misrepresented the brutality and effectiveness of the torture program.

• But many of the most graphic details are in Volume III of the full report, which former Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein has said contains “excruciating” details on “each of the 119 known individuals who were held in CIA custody.”

• The New York Police Department is facing criticism after arresting an adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio Tuesday night. Five Mualimm-ak was arrested while attempting to mediate a police confrontation with a homeless man in midtown Manhattan. Five Mualimm-ak had just left an event at George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, where he read his essay in the book “Hell is a Very Small Place,” about his five years in solitary confinement. Since being released from prison in 2012, Five Mualimm-ak has become a prominent advocate for previously incarcerated men and women. He serves on Mayor de Blasio’s Task Force on Behavioral Health and the Criminal Justice System. He was arrested Tuesday along with fellow prison activist Joseph “Jazz” Hayden. Five other people who attended the book reading were later arrested at the police precinct, where they went to inquire about the arrest of Five Mualimm-ak and Hayden. They were charged with “refusal to disperse.” We speak to Five Mualimm-ak and two other activists connected with Incarcerated Nation Corp., Joseph “Jazz” Hayden and Terrence Slater. All three were arrested on Tuesday.

• Senate Republican leaders are tamping down talk in their conference of voting on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court in the lame-duck session after the elections.

• Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday floated the idea of voting on Garland later this year if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. Hatch describes himself as a good friend of Garland’s, and helped move his nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals through the Senate in 1997.

• Behind the scenes, several other Republicans have discussed the lame-duck option and voiced concerns that Clinton might nominate a judge who is even more liberal. They also worry about the selection that Donald Trump, their presidential front-runner, might make, according to one GOP lawmaker.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Witnesses testifying at the United States House Communications and Technology Subcommittee today unanimously reported success of the multistakeholder preparations for the transition of oversight over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) from the US government to the multistakeholder internet community.

• The Director at the Global Internet Policy and Human Rights Project, Matthew Shears, called the proposals delivered by the two-year process at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) “the most successful expression of multistakeholder approaches to internet governance yet.”

• With Google Fiber now starting to encroach on some major Comcast territories, the company’s suddenly finding itself in the unfamiliar position of actually having to compete on price. In Atlanta, where Google Fiber is expected to appear later this year or early next, Comcast has been circulating flyers urging locals not to fall for the “hype” of ultra-fast, relatively cheap Google Fiber service.

• Last year you’ll recall that T-Mobile launched its “Binge On” zero rating program, which exempts the biggest video services from the company’s usage caps (aka “zero rating”). Net neutrality advocates quickly complained that the practice violated net neutrality, since the very act of giving some companies an advantage automatically disadvantages some others. After T-Mobile spent some time lying about the nature of the program, the EFF came out with a detailed report noting that T-Mobile was just throttling all video files back to 1.5 Mbps, whether the content was being streamed or directly downloaded.

• Net neutrality advocates like the EFF argued that the program should be opt in instead of opt out, voicing concerns that T-mobile continues to ignore. YouTube similarly initially complained about the program and that video partners were being throttled by default. But in a matter of months, Alphabet/Google appears to have completely changed its mind, issuing a new blog post that says it’s now partnering with T-Mobile to zero rate Google Play Movies and YouTube content traveling over the T-Mobile network.

• The World Intellectual Property Organization has released data on disputes between trademark owners and third parties who are registering new domain names with the original brand name. Disputes are on the rise and the proportion relating to new generic top-level domain names is growing, it found. Fashion and banking are the prominent areas for disputes.

• [...]

• Asked to describe the relationship between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and WIPO, Gurry said WIPO historically has been charged with the development of a dispute resolution procedure, which was adopted by ICANN in 1998/1999.

• For years, AT&T used contract fine print to prohibit its customers from suing it. Instead, users were forced to participate in binding arbitration, a system whereby company-employed arbitrators weigh the evidence — and unsurprisingly rule in favor of the company employing them a dramatic majority of the time. Initially, lower courts repeatedly derided this behavior as an “unconscionable” curtailing of consumer rights and abuse of the law. But in 2011 the Supreme Court’s AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion ruling declared that what AT&T was doing was perfectly ok, resulting in countless companies now following AT&T’s lead.

• T-Mobile USA and YouTube have reached a compromise that will bring YouTube into T-Mobile’s Binge On program, which reduces streaming quality but exempts videos from data caps.

• The Google-owned YouTube was the most notable absence from Binge On when T-Mobile launched the program in November. YouTube later said that while reducing data charges can be good for customers, “it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent.”

• There’s a a growing trend to close off publishing platforms by demanding a login in order to view the content. Which is a move away from an open web. In December 2015 Facebook launched its own in-app browser, which is basically a web-view that loads links you tap on using the Facebook app. It may provide convenience for some but the primary goal is to keep users inside the application longer. This opens up more advertising exposure and associated revenue. This poses a challenge to the open web because this overrides the user’s default mobile browser keeps the eyeballs in a closed ecosystem. The feature Instant Articles for publishers is done such that it loads articles available nearly instantly in the app compared to a mobile browser. This opens up for monetizing viewing and privacy invasions by Facebook on users. The in-app browser lack decent privacy controls.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The European Commission will be obliged to consult with US authorities before adopting new legislative proposals following passage of a controversial series of trade negotiations being carried out mostly in secret.

• A leaked document obtained by campaign group the Independent and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) from the ongoing EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations reveals the unelected Commission will have authority to decide in which areas there should be cooperation with the US – leaving EU member states and the European Parliament further sidelined.

Trademarks

• About a year ago, we wrote about a somewhat strange trademark dispute between Macy’s and a company called Strategic Marks. The issue in the case was that Strategic Marks was attempting to sell merchandise and create popup stores for brands that had been dissolved through acquisition into larger companies, such as Macy’s. These brands were once staples of the storefront experience, including names like Marshall Field’s, Bullock’s, and Foley’s. All were once well-known regional department stores that Macy’s bought and rebranded as Macy’s stores. Macy’s, despite all of this, claimed it retained trademark ownership over those, despite their being generally unused.

Copyrights

• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important ruling last Fall in the long-running “dancing baby” case, affirming that copyright holders must consider whether a use of material is fair before sending a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We welcomed that ruling, but the majority decision also set the bar for enforcing that requirement higher than Congress intended. So Stephanie Lenz asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case en banc to address those elements of its ruling that risk leaving many victims of improper takedowns without a practical vehicle to vindicate their rights (EFF and the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, LLP, represent Stephanie Lenz in the case).

• In an amended opinion issued today, the Ninth Circuit declined Lenz’s request for rehearing. At the same time, the appeals court made some interesting changes to its first ruling.

• What hasn’t changed: The court’s new opinion stands by its earlier determination that rightsholders must consider whether a use is a lawful fair use before issuing a takedown notice. It leaves intact its determination that fair use is not just a carve-out of the copyright system but a right on the same level of those described in the rest of the statute. Finally, the new opinion retains its determination that a victim of takedown abuse can vindicate her rights even if she cannot show actual monetary loss.

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.