● 03.19.16

● Links 19/3/2016: Slackware 14.2 RC1, ONS 2016

Posted in News Roundup at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The main goal of Project Sputnik is to speed up adoption of new hardware technologies in Linux laptops. The effort was conceived four years ago by Barton George, a Linux enthusiast and senior principal engineer at the office of the CTO at Dell.

• Initially, Sputnik was focused on bringing Linux to “ultrabook”-style laptops with touchscreens, which were relatively new in 2012. Dell provided the latest hardware available, and George’s team started tuning Linux to work on those laptops.

• Do you know who programmers really are? What they really do? Or what tools they use? Let’s see how closely your guesses come to the reality of the 50,000 plus developers who responded to Stack Overflow’s 2016 developer survey.

Server

• CoreOS the makers of Linux for massive server deployments and a container power in its own right, launched an early version of Clair, an open source container image security analyzer late last year. Today, CoreOS released Clair version 1.0 and it’s ready for production workloads.

• Google will open-source its super-duper load balancing Maglev tool to developers – a move that will also bolster its own infrastructure developments.

• In a blog post Google said it has a history of building its own networking gear, “and perhaps unsurprisingly, we build our own network load balancers as well, which have been handling most of the traffic to Google services since 2008.”

• The Maglev software-defined load balancer, which runs on commodity Linux servers, has been critical to Google Cloud Platform for eight years, company says.

• As it’s already done with other areas of its massive datacenter infrastructure, Google this week gave enterprises a peek at Maglev, the software-defined network load balancer the company has been using since 2008 to handle traffic to Google services.

• Maglev, like most of Google’s networking systems, was built internally. But unlike Jupiter, the custom network fabric connecting Google’s data centers, Maglev runs on commodity Linux servers and does not require any specialized rack deployment, Google said in a blog post describing the technology.

Kernel Space

• Let’s be honest. Do you often feel like you really don’t know the cloud that well? I know I do, and I work with it every day and I write about it every week. That’s where the newest Linux Foundation and edX free massive open online course (MOOC) LFS151, an Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies comes in.

• On March 18, 2016, kernel developer Jiri Slaby announced the release of the fifty-seventh maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series.

• For the majority of you reading this relying upon Serial ATA (SATA) drives, the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel will support runtime power management of the AHCI host controller for saving more power on your system when idling.

• The libata pull request for Linux 4.6 provides the kernel’s AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) driver with runtime power management support. This code allows the AHCI controller to be turned off if no devices are attached.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• This week we showed how the new AMDGPU driver stack is performing on Ubuntu 16.04 and that the recent generations of Radeon graphics cards are commonly seeing 80~90% the performance of Catalyst. However, it’s important to keep in mind that aside from Catalyst being more buggy than the proprietary NVIDIA driver, the NVIDIA binary driver also tends to be more performant. So for putting the Ubuntu 16.04 open-source Radeon numbers into perspective, here are results putting them against the GeForce Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards.

Applications

• The shell is much more than just a command interpretor, it is also a programming language of its own with complete programming language constructs such as conditional execution, loops, variables, functions and many more.

• That is why the Unix/GNU Linux shell is more powerful compared to the Windows shell.

• Email is arguably one of the most popular and useful functions of a Linux system. Fortunately, there is a wide selection of free email software available on the Linux platform which is stable, feature laden, and ideal for personal and business environments. Send and receive emails, run a mail server, filter spam, administer a mailing list are just some of the options explored in this article.

• Lynis is an open source and much powerful auditing tool for Unix/Linux like operating systems. It scans system for security information, general system information, installed and available software information, configuration mistakes, security issues, user accounts without password, wrong file permissions, firewall auditing, etc.

• Lynis is one of the most trusted automated auditing tool for software patch management, malware scanning and vulnerability detecting in Unix/Linux based systems. This tool is useful for auditors, network and system administrators, security specialists and penetration testers.

• Today, Steffen Lindner, one of the developers behind the ownCloud Mail app for the self-hosting ownCloud server software, has announced the release of version 0.4 for the cool and promising project.

• The development team behind the HPLIP (short for HP Linux Imaging and Printing) project, an open-source initiative to bring the latest HP printer drivers to GNU/Linux distributions, has released the third maintenance build in the 3.16 series.

Instructionals/Technical

• Have you ever wondered where fashion and software development overlap? If so, look no further than the flip-flop. It’s a feature available in Sed, Awk, Ruby and Perl which – akin to its namesake – is short, revealing and can raise a few eyebrows.

• Solid State Drives (SSDs) are slowly becoming the norm, with good reason. They are faster, and the latest iterations are more reliable than traditional drives. With no moving parts to wear out, these drives can (effectively) enjoy a longer life than standard platter-based drives.

• Even though these drives are not prone to mechanical failure, you will still want to keep tabs on their health. After all, your data depends on the storing drives being sound and running properly. Many SSDs you purchase are shipped with software that can be used to monitor said health. However, most of that software is, as you might expect, Windows-only. Does that mean Linux users must remain in the dark as to their drive health? No. Thanks to a very handy tool called GNOME Disks, you can get a quick glimpse of your drive health and run standard tests on the drive.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 1.9.6 was released this morning as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine.

• Most prominent to Wine 1.9.6 is now that it better detects graphics cards using the Mesa drivers. There is also more support for Shader Model 5, C++ exception handling improvements, and a total of 32 known bug fixes. Shader Model 5.0 is what’s needed by DirectX 11 support.

• The Wine development team announced just a few moments ago the immediate availability for download and testing of Wine 1.9.6, the sixth milestone towards the major Wine 1.10 release.

• Wine 1.9.6 does not appear to be a significant snapshot, and the release highlights include better detection of graphics cards when using the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, support for Shader Model 5 shaders, as well as improvements to the C++ exception handling.

Games

• Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Ink scripting language and Atomic Game Engine going open source, GameWorks SDK 3.1 released by NVIDIA, and new games out for Linux.

• Are you ready to rob some banks? PAYDAY 2 is showing signs that it’s getting closer to a Linux release.

• Void Invaders is a recent discovery of mine on Steam and it looks like the developer is planning to create a Linux version!

• According to the latest round of rumors in the Linux community…

• Nvidia already has its Tegra-powered SHIELD TV and offers a variety of games over their cloud/streaming “GeForce NOW” service. So it’s highly unlikely that this full-blown Linux distribution, codenamed “NLINUX,” would be aimed at the SHIELD TV. Otherwise, the Tegra X1 would run into performance issues, and this would even risk cannibalizing the monthly subscription revenue off GeForce NOW.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Distributions

New Releases

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.3.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This is a bugfix release of the v3.3 musl based branch.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Ballnux/SUSE

Slackware Family

• Coming two months past the Slackware 14.2 beta is now the release candidate for this next major Linux distribution update.

• This Slackware Linux cycle was big for the project in that it finally began using PulseAudio, BlueZ 5 was pulled in for Bluetooth support, the AMDGPU driver was added, GCC 5.3 made it as the default base compiler, and more.

• Today, Slackware maintainer and lead developer Patrick Volkerding has announced the release and immediate availability for testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Slackware 14.2 operating system.

Red Hat Family

• The stock is an undervalued pick that faces robust growth this year. The time to buy the stock is now, ahead of earnings that are likely to come in strong.

Fedora

• Today in Linux news Stack Overflow published the results of their latest developer survey finding Mac OS X is more popular than Windows or Linux. Elsewhere, OpenSource.com ran an introduction to the Korora Linux distribution and Microsoft’s patent bulldog is outta there. Dim* has this week’s Tumbleweed review and Agam Shah looked at Dell’s Linux strategy.

• Starting with the Fedora.next initiative, the Fedora Project embarked on a journey to reinvent itself. A major piece of that effort was the creation of different “editions” of Fedora that could be targeted at specific user personas. Instead of having a One-Size-Fits-Some Fedora distribution, instead we would produce an operating system for “doers” (Fedora Workstation Edition), for traditional infrastructure administrators (Fedora Server Edition) and for new, cloudy/DevOps folks (Fedora Cloud Edition).

• I am happy to announce the release of the F23-20160318 update lives. This set of lives contain all the updates as of the date of creation. Those updates include the 4.4.5-300 kernel.

• Another release of DNF stack is there. In the new version of plugins there is support for debuginfo packages to be automatically upgraded along with the package they belong to and dnf repository-packages command was optimalized drastically. In addition over ten bugs were fixed in this release. Read more in DNF and plugins release notes.

• With the release of Fedora 24 Alpha just around the corner, it will be the first time for many to get a good look of how the final wallpaper for Fedora 24 will look on their desktop. Masha Leonova from the Fedora Design Team recently blogged showing what the wallpaper will look like in Fedora 24 Alpha.

Debian Family

• Debian’s annual conference, DebConf, is taking place in July this year in Cape Town, South Africa. Valve is among the sponsors for this year’s Debian conference.

• DebConf 16 is taking place in Cape Town from 2 July to 9 July and preceded by DebCamp from 23 June to 1 July. The news this weekend is that registration is now open for DebConf 16. The venue of this year’s event is the University of Cape Town.

Derivatives

• The developer of the Robolinux project has announced the release of his latest Robolinux 8.4 LTS “Raptor” series of Debian-based operating systems, which includes numerous software updates and performance improvements.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Marius Gripsgård from the UBports team teased the Ubuntu community today, March 18, 2016, on his Google+ page with a photo of the OnePlus X Android smartphone running the Ubuntu mobile OS.

• Today, March 18, 2016, AMD has announced the release of a Beta driver for GNU/Linux operating systems that incorporates support for the new, groundbreaking Vulkan 3D API.

• The new driver has been named AMD Radeon GPU-PRO by AMD, and it is currently targeted at AMD R9 series of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), such as AMD Radeon R9 380X, AMD Radeon R9 380, AMD Radeon R9 285, AMD Radeon R9 M395X, AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, AMD Radeon R9 Fury, and AMD Radeon R9 Nano.

Devices/Embedded

• E-con Systems has launched a 70 x 55mm, Tegra K1 based “eSOMTK1” COM with up to 4GB RAM, up to 64GB eMMC, WiFi/BT, and an open-spec “Propus” baseboard.

• Nvidia’s Tegra K1 has seen considerable adoption in Linux-ready computer-on-modules, including Calao’s 82 x 50mm SMC-NTKE1 SMARC COM, Toradex’s SODIMM-style, 82 x 45mm Apalis TK1, GE’s 84 x 55mm mCOM10K1 COM Express Type 10 Mini, and Seco’s 95 x 95mm SECOMExp-TK1 COM Express Type 6 Compact.

• The Qt Company released version 5.6 of its cross-platform application and UI development framework, bringing Qt’s Boot to Qt embedded Linux platform in greater alignment with Yocto Project tools. As a result, “developers can easily pull in the full Qt offering to their own Yocto-based software stacks or customize Qt’s Yocto-compliant software stack to meet their production needs,” says the Qt Company.

• We reported last year that ownCloud was in talks with WD (Western Digital) Labs to help them develop a community project that would bring a self-hosted cloud storage device in users’ homes.

• Adlink has launched a “AmITX-SL-G” Mini-ITX SBC based on 6th Gen Intel CPUs, with multiple SATA, GbE, and video ports, plus PCIe and Mini-PCIe expansion.

• Adlink is one of the last of the major embedded firms to announce an embedded Mini-ITX board based on the Intel’s 14nm fabricated 6th Generation Core (Skylake) processors, following Congatec’s early March launch of the Conga-IC170. Like the Conga-IC170, however, it’s shipping now.

Phones

• There are plenty of reasons to be anticipating the arrival of GNU/Linux phones and tablets. Verizon Wireless has given us another.

• On March 7, the FCC slapped a $1.35 million fine on Verizon in a privacy case, a move that’s being hailed as a victory by some privacy advocates. If so, it would seem to be a hollow victory. For starters, the fine is too low to be much of a deterrent against a company which last year had income of over $63 billion. But there is much more wrong with the agreement the carrier reached with the FCC than merely the price tag.

Tizen

• Drone Attack is the latest game on the Tizen store that wants to take over your free time to destroy World War 2 style enemy planes. The game-play is rather very simple however its kind of the developer to add a huge “How to play” button on the start screen of the game (maybe the same amount of attention could’ve been given to rectify the typos made in the instructions).

Android

• Last week was a big week for the whole of Android due to the early release of the developer preview of Android N. This was a preview version which rolled out to all of the Nexus range including the Nexus Player. As a result, those running a Nexus Player could get a taste of what the next generation of Android looks like for the Android TV platform. Of course, this is a very early version of Android N and it is one which is considerably buggy at the moment. Not to mention that some of the really big changes (like PIP and Recording) are yet to be optimized, as they rely on developers to integrate the features into their own apps. These are not features which will come with Android TV as standard, but do rely on them being actively included. This does mean that not all Android TV apps will come running with these features.

• If you’ve ever been curious about how Android is having an impact in the enterprise, a new entry in Google’s “Coffee with a Googler” interview series is worth a look. In the interview above, Android for Work Product Manager Janice Wong explains what Android for Work is and ways developers can target their apps for the workplace.

• For this article, I’m returning to portable science software on Android. In a previous article, I looked at a program called xcas/giac. This program is an open-source engine that is used to handle symbolic manipulation of mathematical equations. Because it is open source, it has been ported to several different platforms. Because Android’s core is really Linux, a port to the Android platform has been made, and it’s available on the Google Play store. Installation is as easy as a quick search on the store and clicking install.

Free Software/Open Source

• Science fiction ranges from complete fabrications to some surprisingly accurate visions for the future. What tool, device, object, or other item from your science fiction library do you hope, or even expect, to one day find an open source version of?

• I was amazed at Free Software in 1993, and quickly realized the potential of a group of developers working together to create great software. So in 1994, when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS was “dead,” I realized we could leverage the Free Software concept to create our own free version of DOS for everyone to use. With that, FreeDOS was born.

• Italian indie developer Digital Video and Japanese publisher Dwango have inked an agreement for the latter to acquire Toonz, a digital animation software solution. The deal goes forward under the condition that Dwango will publish and develop an Open Source platform based on Toonz, OpenToonz. This will be made available for free download on March 26.

• Security professionals are increasingly acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: No network is secure from a sufficiently skilled and determined attacker. So while every effort should be made to prevent intruders getting on to the corporate network, it’s important that you can quickly spot an intrusion and minimize the damage that can result.

• Anton Chuvakin, a security expert at Gartner, points out that if hackers are made to work hard to find what they are after, intrusion detection systems (IDS) have a far greater chance of spotting them before they can do too much damage.

• “What companies need to be doing is switching away from trying to prevent hackers from getting in to their networks,” Dr Chuvakin said. “Thinking about how they can slow hackers down so they can catch them is much more sensible. If hackers steal your encrypted data but then have to spend three days searching for your encryption keys, then you have a much better chance of detecting them.”

Events

• Networking is a vital and necessary part of the modern business world, but much as in the real world, the road is not the reason. Networks exist to enable applications, and it’s these programs and systems that companies really want. Given this truth, when building a system, it doesn’t make sense to design apps around a network; rather, it’s much more useful to create a network that fits the programs a company runs. Open-source networking hardware allows a company to do just that.

• To gain some insight into open-source networking, Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Calvin Chai, head of product marketing at Pica8, Inc., at the Open Networking Summit 2016 conference.

• I did a talk earlier today at the wonderful venue of the Science Centre Singapore at FOSSASIA 2016, titled ‘Virtualization and Containers.’ Over the last few years, several “cool new” and “next big thing” technologies have been introduced to the world, and these buzzwords leave people all dazed and confused.

• FOSSASIA, the premier conference on Free and Open Source Software in Asia is having their 2016 edition in Singapore Science Center, Singapore. Even though the today is the first day of the event, the social part of the conference already started from yesterday.

• It’s LibrePlanet time. It seems like only yesterday — actually, it was only yesterday — that they folded the tents and put the elephants on the trains after a successful run for Great Wide Open down in Atlanta. Now, on the opposite end of the U.S. East Coast, way yonder up north as we say around here, they’re getting ready for the FOSS fest to end all FOSS fests — that being the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2016, which opens for a two day run right next door to Bean Town in Cambridge.

CMS

• This isn’t just a WordPress story, it’s really an open source story. WordPress, as you probably know, is a GPL-based open source project. It supports a wide range of plugins and themes that extend and modify its capabilities and customize its look. Each of the plugins and themes is also GPL.

• Since plugins are smaller open source projects, most have just one or — at most — a few maintainers. That means if the maintainer gets tired of working on the plugin or has life circumstances that make it impossible to keep supporting it, there are two choices: let it wither, or put it up for adoption.

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• While DragonFlyBSD’s TCP code getting a per-CPU LPORT cache for listen sockets may not sound like an exciting change, it’s a huge performance win.

• The commit by Sepherosa Ziehau explains, “In order to guard against reincarnation of an accepted connection after the listen socket is closed, the accepted socket is linked on to the same global lport hash list as the listen socket. However, on a busy TCP server, this could cause a lot of contention on this global lport hash list. But think about it again: as long as the listen socket is not closed, reincarnation of an accepted connection is _impossible_, since the listen socket itself is on the global lport hash list.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Just one week after the initial public release of Gneural Network to provide a GNU project for programmable neural networks, version 0.5 has been made available and it’s a big release.

Public Services/Government

• A New York state senator says open-source programmers should be able to claim back part of their costs for writing free software.

• NY senate bill S161, proposed by Senator Daniel Squadron (D) and co-sponsored by Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson (D), would allow developers to claim for 20 per cent of the out-of-pocket costs of building and sharing open-source code – although the rebate has a maximum annual benefit of only $200 per person.

• “I represent the tech triangle and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, as well as areas in lower Manhattan where the technology sector has a growing presence – supporting that kind of innovation is key,” Squadron told El Reg in a statement.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• It wasn’t too long ago that we reported here on a husband and wife team that added to the growing list of 3D printed musical instruments with their own contribution: an open source 3D printed violin. Yes, there have been other 3D printed violins, like the originally outstanding 3dvarius from France or Unique-3D’s acoustic violin from Russia. While both violins lay claim to incredible design work and acoustics, there’s one thing missing: they are not open source. This was the remarkable contribution of Matt and Kaitlyn Hova, who named their violin after their last name– the Hovalin. Now the Hovalin, being open source and accessible to 3D printing violin fans of all stripes, has been 3D printed in Wood PLA. It just keeps getting better for us 3D printed instrument fans, doesn’t it?

Programming

• According to the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming language and Rust is most loved. Stack Overflow, the popular question-and-answer community site for developers, today released the results of its annual developer survey, which indicates, among other things, that JavaScript is the most popular programming language among respondents.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The World Trade Organization said today that momentum continues to build among member states to accept a public health amendment to the WTO intellectual property rights agreement, as three more countries adopted it in the past week.

• At issue is 2005 amendment to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which encompassed an August 2003 informal waiver to TRIPS rules aimed at making more affordable medicines available to poor countries. This agreement was also referred to as the Paragraph 6 solution since it was originally mandated to be solved under paragraph 6 of the 2001 WTO Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.

• Speakers from Asian civil society provided recommendations to the public hearing of the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines held yesterday. They underlined the unaffordability of medicines in their countries, the inefficiency of current mechanisms such as voluntary licensing, and the pressure applied by pharmaceutical companies and the United States and Europe to prevent the use of compulsory licences. One speaker warned against the expert advice given by the World Intellectual Property Organization to least-developed countries, while others pointed to stringent intellectual property measures in free-trade agreements.

Security

• As previously reported by the media in and after July 2015, security researchers evaluating automotive cybersecurity were able to demonstrate remote exploits of motor vehicles. The analysis demonstrated the researchers could gain significant control over vehicle functions remotely by exploiting wireless communications vulnerabilities. While the identified vulnerabilities have been addressed, it is important that consumers and manufacturers are aware of the possible threats and how an attacker may seek to remotely exploit vulnerabilities in the future. Third party aftermarket devices with Internet or cellular access plugged into diagnostics ports could also introduce wireless vulnerabilities.

• Links to malware inside online advertising bypassed the security systems of the advertising serving companies and distributed ransomware to unsuspecting ‘link clickers’.

• Earlier this week major websites including BBC, Newsweek, New York Times and MSN ‘hosted’ malvertising on their sites that has been credited as the largest of attack of its type for two years. Previously Google’s DoubleClick and Zedo ad servers were ‘infected’ and YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo websites used advertisements served from them.

• Although ad serving networks try to filter out malicious ones, occasionally altered ones’ slip in. On a high-traffic site, this means a large pool of potential victims. Websites that serve the ads are usually unaware of the problem.

• AppNexus, one of the ad servers said it has an anti-malware detection system called Sherlock it uses to screen ads and also uses a filtering product from a third-party vendor. “We devote considerable financial resources to safeguarding our customers. Unfortunately, bad actors also invest considerably in developing new forms of malware,” said Josh Zeitz, vice president of communications.

• Tanvir Hassan Zoha, 34, security researcher, has gone missing just days after accusing Bangladesh’s central bank officials of negligence, which facilitated the theft of over $81 million from the country’s oversea accounts.

Finance

• Iain Duncan Smith has stepped down as work and pensions secretary in protest at the government’s planned cuts to disability benefits.

• The former Conservative party leader announced his resignation from the cabinet post in a letter to David Cameron.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Chicago is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, say the headlines, and the only question is which social services should communities shortchange? But is Chicago broke because experts say it is, or is there another way to look at it? We’ll hear about the “mirage” of deficits from Chicago civic educator and organizer Tom Tresser.

• Donald Trump released an ad on March 17 in which he did what almost every politician does as a matter of course: said something bad about Russian President Vladimir Putin, in this case by lumping him with ISIS. The pundit class was in shock, reporting that the “bromance” between the New York businessman and Putin was over.

Censorship

• IN 1966 Bob Dylan was asked by Playboy magazine whether he believed in the “cause of peace”. His answer was typically cryptic and enlightening. “To say ’cause of peace’ is just like saying ‘hunk of butter’,” he replied.

• Twitter has long had a trolling and harassment issue, and its CEO isn’t immune to it. CEO Jack Dorsey said he has been harassed on Twitter, but he has not blocked any users himself, he told NBC “Today” show host Matt Lauer on Friday.

• On a “Today” show appearance meant to mark the 10th anniversary of Twitter (it’s Monday), chief executive and co-founder Jack Dorsey said on Friday that he’s never personally blocked anyone on the social network, despite Twitter’s perpetual problem of abuse and harassment.

• If proverbs are shorthand for real life, then this year’s parliamentary sessions were the proverbial pot of congee that is fouled by a single rat dropping.

• The congee, of course, refers to the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) [held from March 3-15].

• And the rat dropping is the list of 21 banned topics issued by the [ruling] Chinese Communist Party’s central propaganda department to journalists covering the parliamentary meetings.

• They weren’t allowed to write about smog, although it’s clearly the talk of the whole country.

• Neither were they allowed to write about the economy, other than to say nice things about it. Doubts and other news was a no-go area.

• Why settle for copyright infringement accusations when you can have it all? That seems to be pro se filer Michael Henry Smith’s rationale. Apparently, his self-published fictional account of the Waco biker/cop shootout hasn’t racked up as many sales as he believes it should. And now, the Internet must pay.

• Just to be clear on a few things before I get into the meat of this post. (1) I tend to be a supporter of Wikileaks and its goals to help whistleblowers reveal important information, (2) I’m flabbergasted that Hillary Clinton would use a private server for her emails, (3) I think YouTube made a big mistake in blocking the ridiculous Innocence of Muslims video in various countries, and (4) I’m very concerned about public officials meddling in the affairs of companies in telling them to block certain content.

• Given all that, I was quite intrigued when Wikileaks tweeted out a story this morning claiming that a recently released Clinton email “reveals that Hillary worked with Google’s CEO to keep” the “Innocence of Muslims” video blocked on YouTube. That seemed like a big deal — especially as I remembered, clearly, Google putting out a statement about all of this and rejecting the White House’s request to censor the video. The problem, though, is that Wikileaks’ tweet is vastly overstating the reality.

Privacy

• The Federal Trade Commission is warning a dozen developers about some code they’ve included in their apps that can surreptitiously listen to unique audio signals from TVs in the background and build detailed profiles of what consumers are watching. The technology, produced by a company called SilverPush, is used to track users across devices and the FTC warned the developers that if they don’t disclose the use of the code to consumers, they could be violating the FTC Act.

• Whenever you’re on Facebook, do you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched? An ad pops up that’s right up your alley, or three new articles show up in your feed that are similar to something you’ve just clicked on.

• Sometimes it seems like Facebook knows you personally, and that’s because it does. It has algorithms that track what you like, watch and click on. That information is then passed along to Facebook advertisers.

• Cryptography is the foundation of information security throughout the digital world. It means that when you log into your email, you can read the messages — but other people can’t. We use crypto when we access our bank accounts, social networking sites, and documents stored in the cloud. Crypto safeguards our medical records, our location data, and the photos we send to our loved ones. The modern digital age and the Internet we have now were built atop the math of cryptography.

• That’s hardly heartening. The DOJ would only go so far as to confirm this has happened before, likely because there’s no way to deny it. The documents from the Lavabit case have been made public — with the DOJ using a formerly-sealed document to hint at what could be in store for Apple if it refuses to write FBiOS for it.

• Unfortunately, because of the secrecy surrounding the government’s requests for source code — and the court where those requests have been made — it’s extremely difficult to obtain outside confirmation. Whittaker contacted more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies about the unnamed official’s claims and received zero comments.

• We’ve written a few times in the past year about the latest UK efforts to enact its “Snooper’s Charter” law, officially the Investigatory Powers Bill, which would give the government much greater surveillance capabilities. Right after last year’s election, Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Office Secretary Theresa May made it clear that they were going to go full Orwell, and do whatever possible to grant themselves greater powers to spy on everyone. As more concerns were raised, we noted that the government pretended to back down, while still including all the bad stuff people predicted.

• As more and more complaints about the bill were raised, we noted May decided to try to rush the bill through, along with a healthy dose of “if you don’t do this we’re all going to die!” FUD. That included releasing a new draft of the bill, which pretended to address the privacy concerns people raised, but which did so basically by just adding the word “privacy” to a heading and making no substantive changes to protect privacy at all (and possibly changes that made things worse).

• Cindy Cohn was always a compelling choice to give the keynote speech at ABA Techshow. The Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director has been involved in numerous high-profile court cases against the National Security Agency over its mass surveillance data-collection programs.

• [...]

• Cohn’s speech was partly informational, as she guided attendees through the various ways the government can collect data and justify its methods. Noting that many of those in attendance had probably heard of PRISM, the NSA program revealed by Edward Snowden that collects Internet communications from at least nine service providers in the U.S., Cohn talked about other ways the government conduct surveillance. Most notably, Cohn spoke about the subject of the Jewel case: the NSA’s “upstream collection,” where the government intercepts Internet cables to copy everything that gets transmitted on them. “This turns the entire Fourth Amendment upside down,” Cohn argued. “In this case, the government is collecting everything first and then analyzing it to sort out what they need.”

• Robert Hannigan, Director of GCHQ, warns of scale of hacking on business as he launches Britain’s first National Cyber Security Centre

• The truth is many of the same people do not give a second thought to their privacy when using public platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. In fact, the internet has never really been that private. It is a public medium that enables people to reach out to different corners of the world.

• American citizens’ eyes were opened by the awesome power, reach and constitutional violations of the surveillance activities carried out by the National Security Agency and other government agencies, as revealed by the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. Lately, we have discovered that the Obama administration is drawing up rules that will allow the NSA to share raw surveillance data with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other intelligence agencies without first applying any privacy protections.

• All through 2014 and into 2015 the FBI was given direct access to all of the data the NSA was vacuuming up from the Internet, according to a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). This means that all the while FBI Director James Comey (shown) was complaining about the “going dark” problem and a shrinking pool of surveillance tools, his agency had nearly limitless amounts of the very data he claimed he was missing out on.

• ‘Insider Threat’ program, based largely on Manning’s WikiLeaks disclosures, targets government employees for ‘continuous evaulation’ using a variety of subjective labels

• It was Edward Snowden’s email account the FBI was targeting in its extraordinary legal case against Lavabit, we can now confirm.

• Lavabit ran an encrypted email service that Edward Snowden was thought to have used in 2013 to contact journalists about the top-secret NSA files he had in his possession.

• In documents published earlier today, hundreds of pages of previously sealed material related to the Feds’ battle with Lavabit were made available. It was immediately noticeable that there were huge swathes of redactions, most of them covering the email address and details of the individual the agents were specifically looking for and why.

• As the NY Times notes, these details certainly add some pretty hefty weight to the First Amendment arguments about “compelled speech” that Apple has made (and that the EFF doubled down on in its amicus brief). As for what then would happen… that’s up to the court, but it’s likely that the court would find Apple in contempt and/or start fining it. But that still leaves open the question of how does it comply if not a single engineer is willing to help out.

Civil Rights

• The mutual adoration society that is long-running reality show “COPS” has just landed one of its protagonists in the middle of an evidence suppression order. Evidently forgetting his star turn in an episode of the show, Officer Miguel Hernandez of the Fort Myers (FL) Police Department performed an illegal search of a man walking down the street and concocted a story to cover up his actions. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

• Unfortunately, Hernandez’s stop of Hubert Solomon was all captured on tape — and apparently broadcast as well. Hernandez spotted Solomon walking down the middle of a street. Sidewalks are for walking, Hernandez thought (and Florida law agrees: pedestrians “must use sidewalks if one is available”), and he circled the block to cite Solomon. Solomon was on the sidewalk by this point, and shortly thereafter, so was Officer Hernandez’s patrol car.

• But a small victory. After extraordinary outside pressure from Congress and veterans’ groups, the State Department agreed to undo a change to visa procedure that would have condemned even more Afghan translators to their deaths.

• The Times quotes one of the political scientists behind the rankings as saying that assigning a score based on the appointing president is considered to be a “reasonably good predictor of voting on the Supreme Court.” But that depends what you mean by “reasonably good”; David Souter and Clarence Thomas, after all, were both appointed by George Bush Sr., for example, and their Martin/Quinn scores were wildly different. Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia, both nominated by Ronald Reagan, are a similarly divergent pair, not quite as extreme—as are Dwight Eisenhower’s John Marshall Harlan and William Brennan.

• Relationships between some of the most successful and trusted advertising agencies in the world and Saudi Arabia have been condemned, after it emerged that the country has been employing PR advisers to promote the nation’s reputation.

• Cached documents exclusively revealed by The Independent today detail human rights groups’ fears that the agencies are helping to “whitewash” human rights abuses by Saudi Arabia; a country which has been accused of murder, torture and committing war crimes against its own citizens.

• It emerged that Qorvis, a subsidiary of the conglomerate that owns brands such as Saatchi & Saatchi, distributed an article on behalf of the controversial regime which appeared to defend execution of citizens, including juveniles.

• The Independent revealed a cached letter from human rights groups to the PR brand expressing concerns about their work for the country which they said had: “effectively served to strengthen the 80-year relationship between the Saudi and American people and governments.”

• Prison phone companies are trying to stop a new Federal Communications Commission effort to impose rate caps on intrastate calls, with one executive claiming that immediate enforcement of new caps will cause “jail unrest.”

• The phone companies and the FCC have different interpretations of a stay order issued on March 7. Prison phone companies say the court order should mostly preserve the status quo, while the FCC argues that the order lets it apply its existing caps on interstate call rates to intrastate calls.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• When T-Mobile last November launched BingeOn, its zero-rating service that lets subscribers watch select streaming video services like Netflix without eating into their monthly data allotment, there was one question on everyone’s mind: Where’s YouTube?

• Well, there was another question, too, namely whether or not the service was a violation of net neutrality, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Till Lampel and Martina Pfaff review recent decisions from German courts regarding trade marks, in particular some notable decisions from the Federal Supreme Court

Copyrights

• Site blocking is viewed by entertainment companies as a key weapon in the piracy wars but since workarounds are easily available, its efficacy remains suspect. However, if entertainment companies have their way, amendments to Russian law will outlaw the promotion and discussion of block circumvention techniques.

• Spotify has agreed to do a better job at allowing music publishers and songwriters to claim and receive royalties from the streaming service. However there’s a caveat: to strike the settlement deal with Spotify, copyright holders cannot make an infringement claim against the company.

• In recent months, Spotify has faced a number of lawsuits from musicians who have challenged the Sweden-based firm’s alleged failure to licence artists’ works before making them available for streaming.

• Netflix has jumped on the DMCA takedown bandwagon. In recent weeks the company has reported tens of thousands of pirate links to Google alone, hoping to make pirated copies of their programming harder to find. Netflix’s position on piracy deviates from a few years ago, when CEO Reed Hastings highlighted its positive sides.

• I got very excited yesterday when I saw a court system alert that there was a new decision out in the appeal of Lenz v. Universal. This was the Dancing Baby case where a toddler rocking out to a Prince song was seen as such an affront to Prince’s exclusive rights in his songs that his agent Universal Music felt it necessary to send a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube to have the video removed. Heaven forbid people share videos of their babies dancing to unlicensed music.

• Of course, they shouldn’t need licenses, because videos like this one clearly make fair use of the music at issue. So Stephanie Lenz, whose video this was, through her lawyers at the EFF, sued Universal under Section 512(f) of the DMCA for having wrongfully caused her video to be taken down.

• Nearly a year ago I wrote The Maginot Paywall about the rise of research into the peer-to-peer sharing of academic papers via mechanisms including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub and #icanhazpdf. Although these mechanisms had been in place for some time they hadn’t received a lot of attention. Below the fold, a look at how and why this has recently changed.

• Last month, Techdirt wrote about the growing interest in Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers — more than 47,000,000 of them at the time of writing. As Mike noted then, Elsevier’s attempt to make the site go away by suing it has inevitably produced a classic Streisand Effect, whereby many more people know about it as a direct result. That was first pointed out by Mike Taylor in a short post, where he listed a few titles that had written about Sci-Hub. This week, David Rosenthal has produced a kind of update, listing many more posts on the subject that have appeared in the last month alone.

• Rosenthal’s list includes an article entitled “Should All Research Papers Be Free?” that was published in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. It’s probably the most significant contribution to spreading the word about Sci-Hub more widely, but it doesn’t really add much to the debate. By contrast, another post mentioned by Rosenthal, found on the Inside Higher Ed’s site, and written by the college librarian Barbara Fister, may lack the impact of The New York Times news analysis, but does make some genuinely novel observations about what is going on here.

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