● 03.20.16

● Links 20/3/2016: Clair 1.0, UbuntuBSD

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Issue 16 of Linux Voice is nine months old, so we’re releasing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. You can share and modify all content from the magazine (apart from adverts), providing you credit Linux Voice as the original source and retain the same license.

Server

• CoreOS pushes the open-source container security project to the 1.0 milestone and production stability. As container use grows, there is an increasing need to understand from a security perspective what is actually running in a container. That’s the goal of CoreOS’ Clair container security project, which officially hits the 1.0 milestone today, in an effort to help organizations validate container application security.

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 4.5 was released earlier this week, and once again Collabora engineers played a role in its development. In addition to their current projects, seven Collabora engineers contributed a total of 33 patches to the new Kernel.

• As part of its continued committment to further increase ts participation to the Linux Kernel, Collabora is looking to expand its team of core software engineers. If you’d like to learn more, follow this link.

• New wireless hardware support and other networking improvements will be present in the Linux 4.6 kernel.

• There are a number of input driver improvements en route for the Linux 4.6 kernel.

Graphics Stack

• Explore all of the new tools, libraries and more that GPUOpen has to offer. AMD’s Lead on the GPUOpen Initiative, Nick Thibieroz, deep-dives into all of the finer points of this Open Source revolution. Welcome to the new era of open source game development!

• A question that pops up with some regularity is whether libinput has a global configuration storage system, and, subsequently, why it doesn’t have one. Comparisons are drawn to the X-specific tool xinput that allows to trigger all configuration options (see below though).

• On Friday night to much surprise, AMD published the beta version of their new hybrid Linux driver stack with Vulkan support alongside OpenCL, OpenGL, and VDPAU support. Here’s some more details from my initial testing of this new driver that AMD is currently calling the Radeon Software AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver for Linux.

Applications

• And now for the main news: I’m pleased to announce the release of Nmap 7.10 with many great improvements! It’s got 12 new NSE scripts, hundreds of new OS/version fingerprints, and dozens if smaller improvements and bug fixes. And that’s not even counting the changes in Nmap 7.01, which we released in December but I never got around to announcing because I suck at marketing.

• The OpenShot video-editor project recently released builds from the long-awaited 2.0 series. Although they are still tagged as “betas,” they offer a glimpse at what the development team has been up to since its previous stable update in late 2012. Many fans of OpenShot have learned to be patient, but the 2.0 is worth a look even for those with no prior experience.

• Plank, the simple, lightweight dock written in Vala, which is used by default in elementary OS, reached version 0.11.0.

• Double Commander is a powerful open source & cross platform file manager, inspired from total commander file manager but includes new ideas and features. It brings dual pane side by side experience to enhance the use of GUI for the user. The main window of the application is separated by two panels side by side that allow you to view the content of two different location or same and browse through folders with ease. For each file, image or folder, details such as name, extension, size, date and attributes are displayed in the list. The most important function of Double Commander is that it can compress/pack files to many popular formats like ZIP, LZMA, TAR, BZ2, TBZ, GZ and TGZ you can select compression method you want to pack. Using this file manager create symbolic or hard links, change the timestamp properties and the attributes, view file properties and calculate the occupied space by a specific file. You can also compare two different files by their content side by side, change the encoding format for each one and view all identified differences. This feature is very useful for users who need to compare two documents with identical content, but still contain few different words or sentences. Use search function of Double Commander you deeply search for specific file, text, even using creation of date and file mask.

• Double Commander is a file manager that uses two side-by-side panels, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The application ships with two interfaces: GTK2 and Qt4.

• Git is an open-source revision control system, developed by Linus Torvalds, providing a big number of features and an intuitive syntax. It is used a lot by the developers that want to share their code with others.

• As you may know, Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• By ending a wait that lasted almost two years, the developers of ScummVM announced the arrival of a new version for the virtual machine preferred by graphic adventure fans: also known as “Lost with Sherlock”, ScummVM 1.8.0 is hailed as one of the most hefty releases ever prepared by the team with the addition of many games and game engines, the substantial update of graphics and sound sub-systems and the availability of new conversions for minor platforms.

Games

• Here are the latest results from the monthly GOL survey. Wait, you already did February? Previously we were showing the results as the month we presented results, which was wrong (last months posted was amended).

• Since the questions you answer are for the month before, going forward I will name the correct month in the article title that the results correlate to. So, I’m announcing these in March (and previously we would say “survey results for March”), but the questions were all about February, hope that makes sense. If it doesn’t let me know.

• Pretty great performance there. It’s really pleasing to see that Virtual Programming’s eON wrapper technology mature to this state for some.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I work in political/editorial cartoon but also in children’s book illustration. They are 2 different genres, but I like changing from time to time what kind of topics I’m working on. According to my mood I will spend more time in one or another genre.I like to denounce with my cartoons, but sometimes it is also good to put some poetry in this complicated world and the children illustrations help me to focus in something more positive.

• Akademy-es 2016 will be taking place during the next 15th to 17th of April. Here you can learn about the conference’s program.

• Last week, the KDE community organized a sprint at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

• Last week I attended the KDE sprint at CERN to discuss the next steps in Wayland development with my fellow Plasma developers and our awesome crew of the visual design group.

• We usually tend to cater to ordinary users, and computer geeks, and tend to get excited every time we see a computer screen with KDE software displayed on some popular TV show or a movie.

• But I have to say that all these screenshots that many of us collected during the years fade a bit in comparison to seeing Plasma running on most computers in the control centre of the CMS experiment.

• Plasma, KWin, Dolphin, and all the shebang.

• if you have a Windows Phone (e.g. Lumia or similar), then please help us on MTP & Windows Phones so we can find the correct patch to make these devices work in the kio-mtp io slave.

• Bereitschaft is a great contender on that front but at least for my ears does sound like the fearful state of a worker sitting at home on Saturday, carefully nipping his beer, hoping his boss won’t call him in. If more desktops would call it Bereitschaft, I would vote for it in KDE too because I like consistency, but in this “everyone on its own” state of affairs, I prefer Standby. And we use the dashed version of Standby-Modus because we prefer to separate foreign words from native words. It’s a matter of taste and the transition from “foreign” to “native” is blurry but the German KDE team once decided to go the “dashed” way for all but two or three words.

• This year’s conf.kde.in was organised in Jaipur. I was super excited to be part of KDE India and conf.kde.in for the first time. I was taken back by the preparations that volunteers had done. I really want to take some moment to put forward my thanks to the whole LNMIIT team for such a great welcome and hospitality. Special thanks to “Sagar Chand Agarwal” who made his whole effort in making the conference a success. I took a lot from various speakers, each of them was a pioneer in what they were doing. It was an exceptional experience for me. The best part was the development sprints where we taught students on how they can build their first own Qt applications. Students showed keen interests and asked many questions, we tried our best to help them and solve as many problems as we could in the small time span we were given. Those two days gave me an experience of a lifetime of many speakers. I want to specially mention to “Pradeepto”, at first seeing his reply on emails made me curious to meet him in person. But my perception towards changed him when I met him personally, I got to know that he was the creator of KDE India, Season of KDE and conf.kde.in, and he shared his own experience of his journey in details. We even sat on the grass to listen to his experience and felt it should never end, that was his charisma which I guess attracted almost every person who attended conf.kde.in.

• We had a really amazing turn out to the Kubuntu Packaging Party, and we had lots of Fun !

• We quickly realised that the number of people, had blown past the limits of some of the channels set up for folks to join the party. Despite a valiant effort by Ovidiu-florin BOGDAN and the KDE Sprint team in the Bus at CERN Labs who joined the Google+ Hangout via one device.

• Friday 15th April 20:00 UTC, we will !be dressing up in party frocks and pressing the “Big Blue Button” to teleport into (K)Ubuntu party land. I have deliberately broken out the K, to directly express our intent that the Kubuntu community team welcome and indeed, openly invite the Ubuntu community to come along and join us.

• Over the second week of March I’ve been at the sprint at CERN.

• If you are a student, you have a unique opportunity right now. Join the Summer of Code, submit a project proposal until March 25th, and work with the people from an open source community during the summer. You will get paid for three months, you will become part of a community, and you will have the chance to make an important step in your career as a software developer. Google is organizing and sponsoring the program and hundreds of mentors from all kind of open source projects all over the world are ready to help you to do your next step in open source. I really would have loved to have such a program when I was a student. You are living in good times.

• This is the first article of short series on ways everyone who wants to put some time into helping Krita can make a real difference. There are many ways of helping Krita, ranging from coding to writing tutorials, helping users on forums to helping with fund raisers. But let’s take a look at one task that is really important: bug triaging.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.18 added the ability to access Google Drive directly from Files (Nautilus). To use this feature, all you have to do is add your Google account to GNOME Online Accounts and enable “Files”:

• Ping Indicator is an AppIndicator created as a replacement for the old Link Monitor GNOME 2 panel applet.

• Extensions are a practical and overall useful extra layer for the Gnome desktop. They can help enrich and expand the baseline behavior, and they can improve the usability. Again, we go back to the question of why you’d need add-ons in the first place? Is it not trying to fix something that’s broken in the first place? But then, you can argue the same thing about Firefox. And the answer is, not necessarily.

• There are a few things that are still broken in Gnome 3, no doubt about that. But the framework goes beyond that, and there are some genuinely practical extensions that, yes, you can live without, but they do make the experience ever so slightly more enjoyable. For me, this is an important lesson, because Gnome and I didn’t have too much love lately. All in all, the system works, it’s realized well enough, and the repertoire of add-ons is wide and useful enough to justify existence. What I’m trying to say is, if you have entertained the through of considering Fedora and/or Gnome 3, then the extensions might be a nice ingredient in your overall proverbial culinary delight. Or something. Personally, I’m pleased, because I never thought I would find meaning and fun in this exercise. But it’s happened, and we will expand the Fedora games to new heights soon enough. We’re done.

• Terminix is a new GTK3 tiling terminal emulator. The application, which is currently in beta, allows splitting terminals both horizontally and vertically, with re-arrangeable terminals using drag and drop, and options to save and restore terminal layouts.

Distributions

Reviews

• You do remember my Mint Rosa resolution, before it recovered majestically? Any distro that fails the basics shall not survive the ordeal or be committed to the disk, as it does not meet the minimum requirements for sane and healthy usage. In this regard, sadly, KaOS 2016.01 failed big time.

• I like the way it looks, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are just too many bugs, too many problems, that even if the system had somehow installed nicely and without errors, I would still be probably highly skeptical of its ways. But then, it’s a hypothetical discussion that won’t be resolved today. I might get around to testing KaOS again, but surely not in the foreseeable future. And this most likely applies to any distro using Calamares or any beta-quality installers. That’s a risk I’m not willing to accept. Grades wise, you know the score. This one is not on my recommendation short list. Peace.

Slackware Family

• KDE 5_16.03 is available. I used the latest KDE releases: Frameworks 5.20.0, Plasma 5.5.5 and Applications 15.12.3. You’ll find this also as part of the Slackware Live Edition ISO images based on liveslak-0.7.0 (the PLASMA5 variant) which I uploaded a day earlier.

• Libreoffice 5.1.1 was released last week, check out the Document Foundation blog article. I Was busy with Plasma 5 updates and the Live ISOs but here they finally are: packages for Slackware -current (actually we have a release candidate! It’s now officially “Slackware 14.2 RC1″).

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• As you may know, if you follow any of my work, I am a proponent of free and open source games. The entire purpose of my OpenBlox game engine is to allow people to easily create free and open source games that they can share with the community. To achieve that, I needed to make sure that the engine itself was as portable as possible, and that every library used would be either packaged or easy to package for the various distributions that we would like to support. To that end, I started working to package RakNet, a cross-platform networking engine written in C++.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We reported this as a rumor last month, but now it is official, and the packages needed to move the Unity Launcher of Ubuntu Linux to the bottom of the screen have finally landed in the main repositories.

• It is probably the most requested feature ever for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, and Ubuntu Unity developer Marco Trevisan announced yesterday on his Google+ page that Canonical finally decided to merge the hard work done by the Ubuntu Kylin team to bring the Unity 7 Launcher on the bottom edge.

• Marco Trevisan mentioned in his quick announcement the fact that one needs to run a command to move the Unity Launcher to the bottom of the screen. Curious to see if it works, we have executed the respective command but nothing happened, and it looks like there’s no button or check box in the system settings to allow you to do that.

• The inaugural release of UbuntuBSD is now available, which the developers have codenamed “Escape From SystemD”, and pairs the Ubuntu userspace with the FreeBSD kernel.

• Similar to the now-rather-defunct Debian GNU/kFreeBSD that paired the Debian GNU user-space with the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel, developers have done the same with Ubuntu and called it UbuntuBSD. This first UbuntuBSD beta release is based off Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf and the FreeBSD 10.1 kernel.

• Plank is meant to be the simplest dock on the planet. The goal is to provide just what a dock needs and absolutely nothing more. It is, however, a library which can be extended to create other dock programs with more advanced features. Thus, Plank is the underlying technology for Docky and aims to provide all the core features while Docky extends it to add fancier things like Docklets, painters, settings dialogs, etc.

• Nemo is a complete forked from Nautilus file manager by Linux Mint team for their distribution and its goal is to extend and enhance the user experience to the Cinnamon desktop and file management. Nemo has features like: compact view, all desktop icons, etc.., open in terminal and open as root, file operation progress while copy/move files shows percentage and details, has nice GTK bookmarks management, up/forward/back and refresh buttons, nice proper status bar, better search, invoke terminal within Nemo using Terminal extension, manage images in Nemo using image extension, extensions extend the usability of Nemo and it offers much more.

• As a reminder, Debian has replaced its good old sysVinit with Red Hat’s systemd, starting with the release of Debian Jessie. Ubuntu has also adopted the change, Mark’s system being a Debian-derivative, but this under the hood change made a lot of community members unhappy.

• ubuntuBSD just went live today with its first release, v15.04 BETA1 (codenamed “Escape from SystemD”).

• This project owes a lot to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and I’d like to send you a sincere offer for collaboration.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• The last weeks have been exciting. The Raspberry Pi 3 was released, bringing 64bit computing to the world of tiny boards. This is great for our project as the 32bit version created a limitation for ownCloud: PHP is unable to handle files larger than 2 to 4GB without some nasty tricks. We might, thus, go for the Raspberry Pi 3 if we ship this as a pre-assembled device in the future. Of course, right now, we keep working on Pi 2’s for compatibility reasons.

• Steampunk usually involves sticking a few old valves on your laptop and riding a penny farthing, but [Alexzpro] understands the real thing: he just created a steam powered Raspberry Pi Zero (translated).

• His setup is a little lashed together, but works it’s a throwback to electricity generation of old and deserves the steampunk moniker. A steam boiler drives a steam turbine, which turns a motor, generating electrical power. This feeds into a regulator and a bank of capacitors that smooths the voltage out to a nice even 5 Volts, which powers the Pi.

• On Pi Day (3/14/16), I finally acquired a Raspberry Pi model 3 B from my local Micro Center (I had ordered one from Pimoroni on launch day, but it must be stuck in customs). After arriving home with it, I decided to start running it through its paces. Below is my review and extensive benchmarking of the Pi 3 (especially in comparison to the Pi 2).

• It took a long time to get to this point, but ED and his team has finally achieved it! A fully working Pyra prototype! Looks like you won’t have to wait too long now to get your hands on something tangible (hopefully within 2016) to replace your existing Pandora, or to jump on the ship if you did not have any Pyra-like handheld until now.

• Intel talked a little about its new high-end Core i7 NUC mini PC at CES earlier this year, but today at GDC the company revealed what the final model will look like, along with its specs, release date, and cost.

• The new NUC6i7KYK, codenamed “Skull Canyon,” includes a 2.6GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) 45W quad-core Core i7-6770HQ—not the fastest Skylake laptop chip that Intel can sell you, but definitely one of the fastest. The other main draws are the Iris Pro 580 GPU, which includes 78 of Intel’s graphics execution units and a 128MB eDRAM cache (compared to 48EUs and 64MB of eDRAM in the standard Core i5 NUC we just reviewed), and the Thunderbolt 3 port which also supports full USB 3.1 gen 2 transfer speeds of 10Gbps. It takes DDR4 memory, M.2 SATA and PCI Express SSDs, and comes with a built-in Intel 8260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, just like the Core i5 NUC.

• Data Modul’s Linux-ready “eDM-COMB-BW6” COM Express Basic Type 6 module supports Intel Core and Xeon CPUs in Skylake, Broadwell, and Haswell flavors.

• The eDM-COMB-BW6 supports an unusually wide range of Intel processors, starting on the high end with Intel’s latest 14nm-fabricated 6th Generation Core “Skylake” processors. Data Modul has yet to post a product page for the eDM-COMB-BW6, but the display-oriented Munich, Germany based firm has supplied most of the key details.

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s been five years since Marc Andreessen wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed “software is eating the world.” By now, we can consider networking just about chewed and swallowed.

• We are beginning to realize how much software-defined networking is changing everything. As ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar puts it, the “softwarization” of networking is not only changing how users manage networks, but everything the network touches.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• WebAssembly is an emerging standard whose goal is to define a safe, portable, size- and load-time efficient binary compiler target which offers near-native performance—a virtual CPU for the Web. WebAssembly is being developed in a W3C Community Group (CG) whose members include Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

• Presently, Firefox supports two main kinds of add-ons. First were XUL or XPCOM add-ons, which interface directly with the browser’s internals. They are fabulously powerful, as powerful as the browser itself. However, with that power comes security risk and the likelihood that extensions will break as the browser changes.

SaaS/Big Data

• The first out of the gate is the Glance image project, which released its Mitaka RC1 milestone on March 16. Glance was quickly followed the same day by Heat, Neutron and Nova.

Databases

• It says that Oracle Corp. sent a special Postgres-related letter to at least several big Russian IT companies. In the letter Oracle is suggesting the ways to protect Oracle DBMS from migration to Postgres in government organizations and big Russian companies where many years Oracle was the default DBMS choice.

• SVN repository is still accessible, but new contributions are expected to be provided as pull requests at GitHub.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Upstream GCC developer Jan Hubička has written about his experience compiling LibreOffice with GCC6 — while also making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) — and comparing various criteria against that of other GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler versions.

BSD

• There’s a handful of BSD-oriented, desktop-oriented, developers in the Netherlands that I know of. Koos. Raphael. Perhaps some remnants of KDE-NL, or a wandering GNOME developer. Or other desktop systems. Anyway, I’m launching the idea to have some kind of get-together around mid-april (when the weather is nice) somewhere central(-ish) like Zwolle or Amersfoort. The Dutch BSD Desktop Dev Beer Day, or (DBD)2. The plan would be to occupy a cafe somewhere and talk about BSD on the desktop, and in particular porting and keeping the desktop stack up-to-date on all fronts.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Google Summer of Code 2016 is on! If you’re a student, consider applying for a GNU Hurd project — details to be found on our GSoC and project ideas pages.

• This year’s program is bursting with something for everyone in the free software movement, from inquisitive newcomers to hardcore developers.

• Keynotes talks will include NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in conversation with the ACLU’s Daniel Kahn Gillmor; Open Source Initiative board president Allison Randal; Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman; and Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler.

• GNU hackers Christopher Allan Webber (whom you may know from the GNU MediaGoblin project) and David Thompson will be co-presenting “Solving the Deployment Crisis with Guix” at LibrePlanet 2016 this Saturday, March 19th. Chris and David will be focusing on the hardships and obstacles that users face when trying to exercise their software freedom by self-hosting web applications, offering Guix as a solution. The presentation will be held from 10:55 AM to 11:40 AM in room 32-141 of the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• This April marks the 10 year anniversary of Software Freedom Conservancy’s formation. Formed in New York in 2006, Conservancy’s initial Member Projects included BusyBox, SurveyOS, uClibc and Wine. To celebrate this milestone and thank our Supporters, we will be hosting an exclusive cocktail hour in Cambridge, MA during LibrePlanet on Saturday March 19, 2016. Supporters must rsvp to rsvp-10-years@sfconservancy.org.

Public Services/Government

• These rules are bad and already hindering user freedom. The FCC has pulled a fast one and we need to fight back. This is a major security and privacy threat which will lead to even buggier and more insecure wireless hardware. A legal campaign to end this nonsense will require significantly more funding and criticism. Unfortunately the major players on fighting this are burning out. Christopher Waid, of ThinkPenguin, Dave Taht, of BufferBloat, Eric Schultz, Josh Gay of the FSF, and others just don’t have the time or resources to keep fighting this. Don’t let this be the end.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• Sci-Hub is a free, online repository of 48 million academic papers. It was launched by Kazakhstani graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan. Unlike most graduate students, Elbakyan is not pondering Foucauldian discourse and beer prices, but hiding out in Russia. According to a recent New York Times article, Elbakyan’s struggles to access research papers inspired her to set up the site so that other students and researchers would have the same access to knowledge as researchers at well-funded universities. The repository is generated by downloading papers from publisher’s paywalled websites using anonymous ‘donated’ subscription credentials.

Programming

• STACK OVERFLOW, the interactive Dear Deirdre for nerds, has released its 2016 user study. It interviewed 56,033 users in 173 countries, asking 45 questions that give some indication of the state of developers today.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Public health advocates, academics, patients, governments and others this week presented further ideas to the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines on ways to break the longstanding pattern of expensive medical products around the world as a way to pay for research and development.

• The second public dialogue of the High-Level Panel took place in Johannesburg, South Africa on 17 March, a day after closed-door meetings with a range of experts who submitted written comments to the panel. A first public dialogue was held in London last week (IPW, Public Health, 11 March 2016).

• At a time when genome-editing technology is still in its infancy, and its uses are yet to be determined, the voices of patients and patients’ carers, and those with disabilities, need to be heard.

• How America’s moms are leading the battle for clean drinking water

• Keri Webber got on a plane to fly from her home city of Flint, Michigan to Washington, DC this week in the hopes of finally being able to meet with her governor. “We’ve tried to meet with him in Lansing, we tried to meet with him in Flint,” she said of Rick Snyder. “We came to DC [to] meet on neutral ground. We never got a response.”

• Webber’s family has been through a lot over the last year and a half. One daughter showed lead lines in her bones last July, a sign of lead poisoning, while the other has Legionnaires disease. Her husband has lost half the vision in one eye after an artery exploded, causing permanent damage, and he also has extremely high blood pressure, both of which Webber attributes to the water contamination. He’s had to have a battery of tests and is now taking eight pills a day; his medical costs alone come to $8,000, yet the both of them rely on meager Social Security disability checks to get by. “We are going bankrupt over his medical bills, period,” she said.

Security

• Several months ago, I decided to explore a somewhat obscure topic of outbound per-application firewall control in Linux. A concept that Windows users are well familiar with, it’s been around for ages, providing Windows folks with a heightened sense of – if not practical factual – protection against rogues residing in their system and trying to phone home.

• In Linux, things are a little different, but with the growing flux of Windows converts arriving at the sandy shores of open-source, the notion of need for outbound control of applications has also risen, giving birth to software designed to allay fears if not resolve problems. My first attempt to play with Leopard Flower and Douane was somewhat frustrating. Now, I’m going to revisit the test, focusing only on the former.

• [...]

• Leopard Flower firewall is an interesting concept. Misplaced, though, for most parts. It caters to a Windows need that does not exist on Linux, and to be frank, has no place in the Microsoft world either. Then, it also tries to resolve a problem of control and knowledge by requiring the user to exercise the necessary control and knowledge. But if they had those to begin with, they wouldn’t need to dabble in per-application firewalls. Furthermore, the software is still fairly immature. There are at least half a dozen little things and changes that can be implemented to make lpfw more elegant, starting with installation and followed by service and GUI model, prompts, robustness, and a few others.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• While Sheldon Adelson has yet to endorse a candidate for president, and refused to let reporters peek at his ballot at last month’s caucus in Nevada, it’s starting to look like the conservative rebellion against Donald Trump will not be bankrolled by the casino operator and Republican donor known for his far-right views.

• In this web exclusive interview, New York Times reporter Scott Shane discusses his new book, “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone.” It just won the 2016 Lionel Gelber Prize. The book tells the story of the first American deliberately killed in a drone strike, Anwar al-Awlaki, and examines why U.S. counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 seem to have backfired.

• EYE IN THE SKY is a drone war primer in the form of a thriller. I’m not spoiling anything by laying out the premise, which is quickly established at the start of the film: The British have identified known members of al Shabaab, among them British and American citizens, in the act of preparing a suicide attack from a house in a mostly Somali neighborhood in Nairobi. Taking out the house with a Hellfire missile should be simple enough, but it risks the lives of civilians, including a young girl in the house next door. Then there are the political ramifications: In a war room back in London, an official asks, “Has there ever been a British-led drone attack in a city in a friendly country that is not at war?”

• What follows are two hours of legal, tactical, and political wrangling around the decision to pull the trigger. The film, which is currently in theaters, shifts rapidly between the Nairobi streets; a bunker commanded by a hawkish British colonel (Helen Mirren); a London situation room where politicians, military officers (among them the late Alan Rickman), and lawyers ask ever-higher authorities to approve the strike; and a U.S. drone base in Nevada, where a young pilot and sensor operator gear up for their first kill operation.

• The CIA’s motto might well be: “Proudly overthrowing the Cuban government since 1959.” Now what? Did you think that the United States had finally grown up and come to the realization that they could in fact share the same hemisphere as the people of Cuba, accepting Cuban society as unquestioningly as they do that of Canada?

• Who murdered Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres?

• While the identities of the killers remain unknown, activists, media observers, and members of the Cáceres family are blaming the increasingly reactionary and violent Honduran government.

• The authorities had frequently clashed with Cáceres over her high-profile campaign to stop land grabbing and mining while defending the rights of indigenous peoples.

• Little mentioned in the Democratic campaign is Hillary Clinton’s role in supporting a 2009 coup in Honduras that contributed to a human rights crisis, including the recent murder of a renowned environmental activist, writes Marjorie Cohn.

• So is Hezbollah a terrorist organization?

• Of course not.

• So why has the Arab League decided that they are?

• Because most of the league’s member states are Sunni Muslims, while Hezbollah is a Shiite organization supporting Shiite Iran and Alawite (quasi-Shiite) Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

• So were Israel’s Arab parties right when they condemned the league’s resolution?

• Right, yes. Wise, no.

• Let’s start with Hezbollah. Surprisingly enough, it is in a way an Israeli creation.

• [...]

• Originally, terrorism just meant a strategy of striking fear to achieve a political end. In this sense, every war is terrorism. But the term is more precisely applied to individual acts of violence, the aim of which is to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy population.

• This week, the Lo Porto family’s lawyers filed briefs with the Italian state prosecutor investigating Giovanni’s kidnapping and death, arguing that strikes like the one that killed him are illegal under international law, and requesting that the prosecutor ask the U.S. government to hand over information about the operation.

• The Republican establishment likes to pretend that it is the responsible alternative to Donald Trump, but that self-image doesn’t match reality, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship describe.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• If you are concerned about global warming, you are part of a growing majority that hadn’t been this large since 2008, a new Gallup poll has found.

• In fact, 64 percent of adults say they are worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about global warming, up from 55 percent at this time last year. According to the poll, concerns about global warming have increased among all party groups since 2015, though concerns remain much higher among Democrats than Republicans and Independents.

Finance

• THE MULTIPLE, REMARKABLE crises subsuming Brazil are now garnering substantial Western media attention. That’s understandable given that Brazil is the world’s fifth most populous country and eighth-largest economy; its second-largest city, Rio de Janeiro, is the host of this year’s Summer Olympics. But much of this Western media coverage mimics the propaganda coming from Brazil’s homogenized, oligarch-owned, anti-democracy media outlets and, as such, is misleading, inaccurate, and incomplete, particularly when coming from those with little familiarity with the country (there are numerous Brazil-based Western reporters doing outstanding work).

• Campaign finance reform advocates have rallied against super PACs’ ability to influence elections since their creation in 2010, and new reporting by the Washington Post puts a spotlight on how “ghost corporations” are pumping money into these committees, with their big money contributors hiding behind a veil of secrecy.

• As the Center for Responsive Politics explains: “super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates,” though they “are prohibited from donating money directly to political candidates.” They report their donors to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) monthly during an election year.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• According to mainstream Democrats and pundits, Sanders’ demise is imminent. His downfall and Clinton’s triumph is now an inevitability. It is a matter of if not when. Sanders has called these political obituaries “absurd” and has vowed to keep fighting all the way to the convention.

• Jane Sanders is the wife of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and her influence on his campaign is increasing. This week in Arizona, she visited a number of Native American communities, supporting Apache protests against mining interests and engaging with the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe, the Indian Country Today Media Network reports. She also sat down for a discussion with Simon Moya-Smith, a journalist from Indian County Today Media Network.

• CBS chief Les Moonves famously cheered “Go Donald!” during an investor call in December, and in February said Donald Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

• Now he’s found a new way to celebrate the Trump run.

• Countering concerns in the media industry that Trump may not spend as much campaign money on TV commercials as a traditional major-party nominee, Moonves is pointing with delight to all the money down-ballot Republicans will spend to distance themselves from their party’s standard-bearer.

• Noam Chomsky sees a lot more in the Bernie Sanders campaign than just a presidential run. “Bernie Sanders is doing courageous things and organizing a lot of people,” Chomsky told Abby Martin on Telesur’s “The Empire Files.”

• “That campaign ought to be directed to sustaining a popular movement which will use the election as an incentive,” said Chomsky. “And unfortunately, it’s not. When the election’s over, the movements will die. The only thing that’ll ever bring about meaningful change is ongoing, dedicated popular movements which don’t pay attention to the election cycle. It’s an extravaganza every four years but then we go on.”

• Announcement follows campaign that urged Sanders to not attend meeting by group that promotes ‘racist, militaristic, and anti-democratic policies’

• Bernie Sanders confirmed on Friday that he will not attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington next week, and his campaign revealed that the candidate’s offer to address the gathering by video link was turned down by the organizers.

• In a letter to Robert Cohen, the group’s president, released on Friday afternoon, Sanders wrote that while he “would very much have enjoyed speaking at the AIPAC conference,” like all of the remaining presidential candidates, his campaign schedule made it impossible for him to attend in person.

• [...]

• Although Sanders promised to send AIPAC a copy of the speech he would have made, it seems possible the group did not really want to hear from him, given that he promised recently to seek a “level playing field” in his approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict if elected president.

• Donald Trump will be giving an address at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference in the nation’s capital on Monday, a move that has set off promises of protests and boycotts targeting the real estate mogul. But while AIPAC has rolled out the red carpet for the GOP frontrunner, it has moved to block activists from attending the conference and shut down planned protests.

• Immediately following the decision to host Trump, a group of expected AIPAC attendees started a Facebook group called “Come Together Against Hate” to plan protests against his speech. On March 14, a number of the planned attendees involved in organizing the protests received an email from an AIPAC staffer warning them about the ramifications of engaging in a protest against Trump. Among other consequences, the staffer said they’d be barred from the organization’s future events.

• President Obama doesn’t take on Official Washington’s powerful neocons head-on, but he does drag his heels on some of their crazy schemes, which is better than America can expect from Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.

• Or maybe the explanation is just that corporate media’s malign neglect of the Bernie Sanders campaign is paying off for Hillary. FAIR and other organizations that monitor the press have established beyond a reasonable doubt that The Washington Post and The New York Times might as well be Team Hillary’s Ministry of Propaganda. And, as anyone who can bear to watch MSNBC and CNN can attest, “liberal” cable news outlets are no better. National Public Radio may be the worst of all. Remember that at pledge time!

• Lawmakers this week hosted business groups in a briefing that sought to reframe the movement to boycott Israeli-owned companies as a threat to the American economy.

• At Tuesday’s briefing, organized by the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado opened the event by saying that since the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1985 trade between the countries has “multiplied tenfold to over $40 billion annually.”

• The boycott movement would not only impact the Israeli economy, but also the U.S. economy and “should be confronted by all means,” he said.

• The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a global campaign calling on Israel to end its occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian territory and restore full equality to its Arab and Palestinian citizens.

Censorship

• The rare meeting, reported by China’s state news agency Xinhua, suggests warming relations between Facebook and the Chinese government, even as Beijing steps up censorship of and control over the Internet.

• The Minnesota Department of Transportation is looking for a new historian to write a book about the beloved old bridge after canceling its first contract with the Washington County Historical Society last fall.

• High school students from all over the Granite State were at the University of New Hampshire on Thursday to hear from a panel of leaders in journalism — including a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist — before participating in a day of student-led Socratic discussion on freedom of expression.

Privacy

• The Federal Communications Commission will vote in less than two weeks on whether to consider proposed new privacy rules for broadband providers like Comcast or Time Warner Cable.

• The unveiling of the proposal earlier this month marked the start of an unofficial media tour by Chairman Tom Wheeler to sell the draft rules to the public. Meanwhile, industry groups are doing everything they can to keep harsh regulations at bay.

• If the rules come to fruition, they would create a massive change in the way privacy is policed at broadband providers.

• Here’s what you need to know about the proposal that could, within a year, be coming to an Internet service provider near you.

• A redaction oversight by the US government has finally confirmed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targeting of secure email service Lavabit was used specifically to spy on Edward Snowden.

• Ladar Levison, creator of the email service, which was founded on a basis of private communications secured by encryption and had 410,000 users, was served a sealed order in 2013 forcing him to aid the FBI in its surveillance of Snowden.

• Levison was ordered to install a surveillance package on his company’s servers and later to turn over Lavabit’s encryption keys so that it would give the FBI the ability to read the most secure messages that the company offered. He was also ordered not to disclose the fact to third-parties.

• After 38 days of legal fighting, a court appearance, subpoena, appeals and being found in contempt of court, Levison abruptly shuttered Lavabit citing government interference and stating that he would not become “complicit in crimes against the American people”.

• IT’S BEEN a mystery akin to the plot of The Prisoner. Who was it that the feds were after when they served Lavabit with notice that it wanted access to its servers? Information. We want information.

• We know that whoever it was, Lavabit decided it would sooner fall on its own sword than give up the encryption key, very similarly to Apple’s stance on the matter, and folded.

• We all knew it was Edward Snowden. It was fairly obviously Edward Snowden, and now, tickle our snickers, it turns out it was Edward Snowden.

• Even though a gagging order has prevented Ladar Levison who owned Lavabit, or any of his team from spilling, it now appears that the Feds have done it themselves.

• Some recently released federal papers which had been redacted showed that the marker pen had failed to redact a single email address.

• While Apple and the federal government duke it out over the encrypted phone of a dead terrorist, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is keeping things old school by advocating that educators start paying close attention to any radical leanings among their students.

• In January, the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement – a liaison between the FBI, other feds, and local and school law enforcement – released an unclassified paper detailing a plan to keep an eye on any latent anti-American activity in high school youths.

• SilverPush is called a ‘cross-mapping’ platform that unifies data points from the billions of digital devices around the globe. In the company’s words, “Redefining TV Advertising.”

• Why is the US Federal Trade Commission so worried that is it sending letters to some Android developers?

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden opened the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2016 conference on Saturday with a discussion of free software, privacy and security, speaking via video conference from Russia.

• Snowden credited free software for his ability to help disclose the U.S. government’s far-reaching surveillance projects – drawing one of several enthusiastic rounds of applause from the crowd in an MIT lecture hall.

• Even after National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless spying was revealed publicly in 2005, and even after Edward Snowden exposed massive governmental surveillance programs in 2013, the instructive example of Fly’s battles with Hoover never registered in public debate. The consensus history skips almost directly from the Supreme Court’s 1928 Olmstead decision legalizing warrantless wiretapping to the FBI’s abuses in the 1960s and the Supreme Court’s 1967 Katz decision, which reversed Olmstead by establishing that wiretapping violated a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard. Paul Starr’s widely lauded 2004 book The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Modern Communications, published shortly before the NSA wiretapping story broke, reads back American legal guarantees of private communication to the Post Office Act of 1792. “Lack of popular trust in the privacy of communications,” Starr argues, is a hallmark of “closed or restricted regimes” that should be contrasted with America’s more restrained and successful libertarian model.

• No, Mr. President, it works the other way around. You’d better backoff on your encryption demands, or else the tech community will revolt, That’s what’s already happen with Apple’s encryption efforts, as well as app developers like Signal and Wickr. Every time you turn the screws, we techies increase the encryption.

• It’s not a battle you can win without going full police-state. Sure, you can force Apple to backdoor its stuff, but then what about the encrypted apps? You’d have to lock them down as well. But what about encrypted apps developed in foreign countries? What about software I write myself? You aren’t going to solve the “going dark” problem until you control all crypto.

• If you succeed in achieving your nightmare Orwellian scenario, I promise you this: I’ll emigrate to an extradition-free country, to continue the fight against the American government.

• VPN comparison tables can be a great way to find out information about VPNs in a more efficient manner. We’ve created this to be “that one privacy VPN comparison chart” you rely on–a HUGE list of the most important information that you will need.

Civil Rights

• Ho, ho, another brainiac goes down as stupidity is mistaken for a real threat, apparently our national pastime.

• A Cleveland city employee has been fired after posting inflammatory comments about the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on his Facebook page, lamenting that he didn’t kill the “little criminal” himself.

• “Tamir Rice should have been shot and I am glad he is dead,” wrote Jamie Marquardt, a supervisor for Cleveland’s Emergency Medical Service, according to Cleveland’s Fox 8 TV station. “I am upset I did not get the chance to kill the little criminal.”

• A spokesperson for the city denounced the post and called Marquadt’s comments “egregious.”

• Contrary to popular belief, the FISA Court does not operate in complete isolation from traditional courts. On several known issues — notably, the access to location data and the collection of Post Cut Through Direct Dial numbers — FISC has taken notice of public magistrate’s opinions and used that to inform, though not necessary dictate, FISC practice. As I have noted, at least until 2014, the FISC used the highest common denominator from criminal case law with respect to location data, meaning it requires the equivalent of a probable cause warrant for prospective (though not historic) data. And FISC first seemed to start tracking such orders during the magistrate’s revolt of 2005-6. That’s an area where FISC seems to have followed criminal case law. By contrast, FISC permits the government to collect, then minimize, PCTDD, though it appears to have revisited whether the government’s current minimization procedures meet the law, the most recent known moment of which was 2009.

• The protester, Ray McGovern, a retired Army officer and CIA analyst, was wearing a black “Veterans for Peace” T-shirt, when he was set upon within sight of Secretary of State Clinton, who ironically was delivering a speech about the importance of foreign leaders respecting dissent. The assault on McGovern left him bruised and bloodied but it didn’t cause Clinton to pause as she coolly continued on, not missing a beat.

• Bassel Khartabil, open source developer, Wikipedian, and free culture advocate, was taken from his friends and family he loves four years ago this week. On March 15, 2012, Bassel was kidnapped from the streets of Damascus by Syrian military intelligence. Since then, we know that he has suffered torture, solitary confinement, arbitrary detention, dangerously overcrowded prison conditions, and even the bombing of his prison’s neighbourhood by Syrian opposition forces.

• What we don’t know right now is his current location, the state of his health, or even whether he is still alive. Bassel was taken from his civilian prison cell in Adra jail four months ago and was swallowed up by the country’s military field courts. No news of him has emerged since then, though rumors of a death sentence have caused anguish for his many supporters.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently approved H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act. The legislation attempts to codify Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Wheeler’s pledge not to use the Open Internet Order to regulate broadband rates. This seems like a straightforward task and technically it is a straightforward task. However, some members of Congress want to use this bill to fundamentally undermine the central purpose of the Order itself.

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