● 03.26.16

● Links 26/3/2016: Docker Reaches Out to Proprietary, Slacklive

Posted in News Roundup at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• At the end of February I posted my initial hands-on with the passively-cooled Airtop PC that’s been exciting many readers over its unique design and being Linux-friendly. As I hadn’t written anymore about it in the past few weeks, some Phoronix readers had emailed me and tweeted, curious what the deal was and if it wasn’t living up to expectations. That’s not the case at all and the Airtop PC continues to exhibit great potential and is yet another solid offering from CompuLab.

Server

• Until today, the only practical way to run a Docker container on an Apple Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows desktop was by also running the open-source Oracle VirtualBox application. That is now changing with a new private beta effort debuting March 24 from Docker Inc. that will for the first time easily enable Docker containers to run natively on OS X and Windows.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• While AMD just open-sourced their next-gen Polaris graphics driver code this week, changes have already landed in LLVM and this morning the Mesa/Gallium3D modifications necessary have landed in mainline Mesa.

• RadeonSI Gallium3D driver now has the support changes for Polaris, the Radeon Rx 400 series hardware being released soon. Plus related changes in the hardware enablement of these new GPUs.

Benchmarks

• As an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 3 for a low-cost 64-bit ARM (AArch64) development board is the PINE 64, which was successfully Kickstarted as a “$15 64-bit single board super computer” that generated more than 1.7 million dollars. The PINE 64 is still shipping out in limited quantities for now, but the folks behind this project were kind enough to send over a sample of their PINE 64 1GB SBC for some benchmarking.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Good news astronauts! Lifeless Planet is now available in Beta for Linux & SteamOS. Hopefully there aren’t too many issues.

• Why they couldn’t just mention it on their release announcement, I have no idea. Another developer who needs to communicate better. At least I got you all an answer now.

• Why they couldn’t just say that in their announcement, or at least still mention it on their Steam page and website, I’ve no idea. Clear communication is a problem here. Given that Linux was listed right up until recently, it’s probably going to be a long wait.

• The developer of X-Plane, a cross-platform advanced flight simulator has written up a lengthy blogpost about Vulkan after going over the spec.

• The developer certainly knows their stuff, and outlines the problems with OpenGL (more than a few). A lot of this is well known to us like bad handling of multiple cores and threading, but it’s good to see another developer writing about it all.

• Something I have been speaking about with Topware since 2013 (here, here as well and so on) is finally going to happen! Two Worlds II is getting a major engine upgrade, with new DLC and SteamOS & Linux support too.

• I love city/town building games like Banished, Settlers and the like, so a brand new one on Linux was too good to pass up. Here we go with Villagers!

• For a city/town builder, it does far too much mindless chatter between characters in the first campaign mission. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to building games like this I tend to just want to be quickly told what to do, and then for the UI to get out of the way so I can enjoy watching everything be put together.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma is the desktop environment that powers Kubuntu, Chakra Linux and openSUSE (among others). This week sees the release of Plasma 5.6, which brings several tweaks and improvements.

• KDE is a modern desktop environment, but unlike several desktop environments, it has avoided the trend of “dumbing down” the interface. Although there’s much to be said for a simplified environment, power users value the ability to customize and configure their work environments. KDE provides plenty of opportunities to tweak and streamline the experience.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Now that the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment has been released with all its updated components and core apps, including the GTK+ 3.20 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit, the time has come for the project’s developers to fix some bugs.

• You didn’t think that if a software project reaches stable version is bug-free, did you? Of course not, and that’s why today we would like to inform you about the first maintenance release of the GTK+ 3.20 toolkit for the recently released GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

• Even without visual markings, logos, or wallpapers, you can probably guess that image #5 is GNOME 3. The distinctive pattern for the GNOME 3 desktop is the black top bar across a field. We perceive this arrangement as the GNOME 3 visual identity, the visual brand.

• While the GNOME desktop environment has its fair share of detractors, there are some who appreciate its simplified approach, so the recent release of the latest version is an eagerly anticipated event.

• Version 3.2 isn’t likely to win back those who jumped ship when 3.0 was released; it isn’t a resurrection of the 2.0 branch, but it does bring some new improvements that will be welcome.

Distributions

Slackware Family

• The release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS “final beta” in all its iterations and editions. Despite all the good news in Red Hat’s latest financial report, its stock slipped 5% since Wednesday. Analysts have been all over the place in their ratings, but Jing Pan, B.Sc, MA said today the “bears are wrong.” Speaking of bears, Eric “AlienBob” Hameleers announced a replacement server for his work, including Slackware Live.

• In the evenings of the past few days I have been working hard on getting a new server setup to replace the buckling taper.alienbase.nl server.

Red Hat Family

• For those who believe open source does not pay you back and you cannot have a money making business around Linux and open-source, here is the news for you. Red Hat has just become a $2 billion company. It is the first open-source company to reach this milestone.

• Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Raleigh-based Red Hat, and Google, which has a major presence in North Carolina, join a growing number of businesses who are protesting the passage of the N.C. Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act.

• Remember Mr. Market—an emotional character created by Warren Buffett’s mentor Benjamin Graham? Right now, Mr. Market is not in a good mood about software company Red Hat Inc’s (NYSE:RHT) stock.

• The open-source giant, which just crossed the $2 billion mark in annual revenue, added 1,500 new employees in the fiscal year, according to Chief Financial Officer Frank Calderoni. In the last quarter, the company added 480 employees, “mainly in sales, customer support, consulting and R&D,” Calderoni tells analysts on its fiscal 2016 earnings call late Wednesday.

• And the plan is to keep growing. Red Hat had 8,800 employees at the end of the year and expects to add 1,400 net new employees – a 16 percent increase in the fiscal year – though it’s not clear how many of those hires would be at its Raleigh headquarters.

• With the amassed value of the company based on its existing stock price alongside the total amount of outstanding stocks, today’s market cap for Red Hat, Inc. is valued at 13375.82. The value of the Market cap relatively ensures a stable and secure position for the company, and can be easily considered a blue chip in today’s market. Red Hat, Inc.’s market capitalization will expectantly allow investors to gauge the growth versus the risk potentials.

Fedora

Debian Family

• DebConf 16 is taking place in Cape Town, South Africa. For more information read the registration opening announcement.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Devices/Embedded

• The ready-to-use MitySOM-335x carrier board is also available as part of a development kit. The kit includes a micro-USB cable, a 5V power supply, and a microSD card that contains a pre-configured Linux build based on Yocto Project code. In addition to its browser-based tool for designing a custom carrier board, Geppetto also implements a manufacturing design service that offers 15-day turnaround for one or more prototypes of the resulting board design.

• ValentFX is Kickstartering an open source FPGA-based and Linux-driven “KiwiSDR” BeagleBone Cape, that does 10KHz to 30MHz software-defined radio processing.

• ValentFX has surpassed the 75 percent mark on its way to raising $50,000 on Kickstarter for its $199 KiwiSDR cape, which is due to ship in October. The campaign is also offering a $299 kit due in November that includes a BeagleBone Green SBC, a magnetic mount GPS antenna, and pre-installed KiwiSDR software with microSD card backup. The software-defined radio (SDR) system includes a Xilinx Artix-7 A35 FPGA, an ADC, and a 12-channel software-defined GPS receiver and front-end.

• The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it’s the best I’ve seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I’ve tried.

• Read more

• If you’d rather not spend $180 on an Amazon Echo speaker, Amazon will now help you rig up a poor man’s version with a Raspberry Pi.

• As Lifehacker points out, Amazon has posted instructions on Github for connecting a Raspberry Pi to Alexa, the company’s virtual assistant software. Although Amazon says that project requires basic programming experience, the instructions are detailed enough that anyone who’s good at following directions could probably pull it off.

• Seco’s Linux-friendly COM Express Basic Type 6 module supports 6th Gen Intel Core and Xeon processors and offers GbE, quad SATA, and triple display support.

• Accel64 for Linux software, version 1.00, is now available for GNU/Linux systems, so that advanced Data Acquisition Processor applications can be supported as 32-bit applications on 32-bit or 64-bit hardware platforms, or as 64-bit applications on 64-bit hardware platforms.

Phones

Tizen

• The brainBAND project is in its infancy, with many changes ahead, but Samsung’s newest initiative (said to run on Tizen Micro OS, the IoT system expected to be unveiled next month at Samsung’s SDC 2016 Conference) opens up a world of possibilities for athletes and has the potential to ensure that American football remains a beloved national sport for centuries to come. Athletes give us the best of their efforts on the field; they too, have the right to medical treatment that ensures they continue to “play” the sport, not live or die from it.

Android

• Our smartphones and tablets have become parts of our everyday lives now, and it’s rare to find someone using two different devices for work and pleasure. Which means that users have a little more freedom when it comes to selecting the apps and utilities that they use to get work done. Whether you just need to write up some notes, stay organized, edit pictures on the move or send files to people while thousands of miles away from your desk, this Top 10 should have something for you.

• Athletic smart watch users, a new option has popped up on the Google Store. It’s the new smartwatch that Casio announced back in January, along with the promise of up to a month of battery life. The watch is still listed as Coming Soon, but the page is there to keep an eye on. The price will be $500, and you will have your choice of black, green, orange, and red.

• What you can buy now are two new Fossil Q Founder styles. You can now get the device in black with rose gold (gold body with a black leather band) for $295 or two-tone (two shades of black with a metal band) for $315. These join the existing brown leather and stainless steel options priced at $275 and $295 respectively.

• Back at CES 2016, held “way back” in January, Casio discretely announced their first Android Wear powered smartwatch. Simply dubbed the “Smart Outdoor Watch” the WSD-F10 is a rugged, outdoor-focused smartwatch that runs Android Wear, while also featuring some of its own party tricks, too. Running the latest version of Android Wear, the Casio Smart Outdoor Watch comes with all the same sort of features you’d find in a Moto 360, but it’s built out of stronger stuff than most Android Wear devices. Casio is very much marketing this to the sort of wearer that isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty or spend time outdoors.

• Verykool, a provider of budget mobile phones, has announced its latest three smartphone models, including the recently launched $180 Spark LTE SL5011, a 4G LTE handset. Also unveiled were the $167 Maverick LTE SL5550 smartphone and the $200 Cyprus LTE SL6010 phablet. All three smartphones run on Android 5.1 Lollipop and boast a wide range of features, including bright HD displays, 13-megapixel main cameras with auto-focus and LED flash, 8-megapixel front-facing selfie cameras and expandable storage via microSD card slots. Verykool phones are designed and marketed by InfoSonics, which sells its phones through regional and prepaid carriers in the United States. The phones are built in China by third-party vendors. Customers can buy the phones and use them with the GSM carriers of their choice. InfoSonics, which also sells Verykool smartphones in South America, Central America and the Caribbean, was founded in 1994 as a phone distribution company for Samsung and went public in 2004. In 2005, the company launched the first smartphone of its own. Peruse this slide show for more details about the latest Verykool phones.

Free Software/Open Source

• The government startup that develops all of its code in the open wants the rest of government to follow suit.

• Following the March 10 publication of a new draft Federal Source Code policy, the General Services Administration’s 18F penned a response to one of federal CIO Tony Scott’s questions.

Events

• The level of Containers excitement has increased even further this year, with much interplay between Docker, Kubernetes, Rkt, CoreOS, Mesos, LXC, LXD, OpenVZ, systemd, and much else besides. This excitement has led to some interesting new use cases, including even the use of containers on Android.

• Some of these use cases in turn require some interesting new changes to the Linux plumbing, including mounts in unprivileged containers, improvements to cgroups resource management, ever-present security concerns, and interoperability between various sets of tools.

Databases

• CitusDB, a database analytics startup that is hoping to take on big boys like Oracle, today announced the release of CSTORE, a columnar store extension for PostgreSQL. The open-source tool, which the company says is the first for PostgreSQL, is available for a free download starting today.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Mostly a maintenance release to keep the package in decent order. A “Category Properties” dialog has also been added to the program.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• A team in China, saved a 9 month old baby with a 3d printed Heart. My first thought was how many poor cancer and kidney / liver sufferers could benefit IF (hopefully only when not if) this becomes something that is the new medical norm, and then the reality of cloning and using this to revive less than desireable individuals (like violent offenders) also came to the forefront. I can only hope a reasonable and sane minded (if that can truly be quantified and agreed on) body can regulate this in a way where everyone wins.

Programming

• The managers of the popular NPM registry, which houses JavaScript packages, want to assure the community that everything is OK, despite the calamity caused this week by the removal of a small package. NPM’s predicament, though, brought criticism from JavaScript founder Brendan Eich, who stressed a need to improve the module system.

• Upset over a naming issue, a developer decided to unpublish his modules on the registry, including left-pad, and as a consequence shut down several dependent programs, such as the Babel compiler. The module itself consists of only 17 lines of code, but modules that relied on left-pad could no longer be installed.

• Apple has finally brought its Swift programming language to Linux. At this moment, this open source programming language supports Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.10. This port is relatively new and the Swift Core Libraries will be included later in Swift 3 release.

• GitLab claims to have smoothed deployment to Kubernetes and introduced “confidential issues” in the latest release of its code management platform, 8.6.

• Top of the list of features in the latest rev is deployment from GitLab CI direct to Kubernetes, with the integration of Redspread’s CLI tool Spread. GitLab said this will allow deployment to Kubernetes without the need for additional scripts – although you will need to use GitLab Runner 1.1 which should be “released as stable” tomorrow.

• The vendor has also put limits on exactly how open it wants to be, in the shape of “confidential issues”. These means the “issue” will only be visible to the project members and the issue raiser.

Leftovers

• The magic of the modern world is that you don’t have to see where your shit goes after you flush it. But your excrement isn’t immediately whisked away by gnomes or teleported directly into deep space — it heads to the wastewater treatment plant, where actual human beings have to deal with it. This is even harder than it sounds.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The expert explains that “for high-altitude, high-accuracy drops, the US military uses a technology known as the Joint Precision Airdrop System,” which includes “a sort of probe that’s dropped prior to the cargo to take readings of wind speed and direction.” That’s important, because something dropped from 20,000 feet takes five or six minutes to reach the ground, and is blown by the wind during that time.

• There are three reasons for the change in strategy, two of them straightforward. First, attacks such as those in Paris and Brussels are designed to have a maximum impact, especially via the media, across the world. This demonstrates its potential as a movement with global impact and also incites further military action against it from the west. The latter point highlights ISIS’s long-term aim from the start: to provoke war in order to present itself as the true guardian of Islam under attack from the pernicious “far enemy” of the west.

• Blackwater’s Founder Is Under Investigation for Money Laundering, Ties to Chinese Intel, and Brokering Mercenary Services

• The United States National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Friday that the Brussels attacks were preventable as the information on terrorists was shared with the Belgian authorities by Turkey.

• Speaking at a panel on privacy via video conference, published by The Intercept, Snowden said that the attack was preventable through traditional means, not mass surveillance. Snowden’s comments came about as he was criticizing the western governments’ mass surveillance programs on citizens.

• An allied intelligence services, in this case Turkey, warned Belgium that this individual was a criminal that they were involved in terrorist activities, Snowden said.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Community members have taken direct action to interrupt coal exports from Whitehaven’s Maules Creek mine this morning. One woman has occupied a coal line, stopping trains from entering the coal export terminal at Kooragang Island in Newcastle.They have taken a stand to preserve the remaining ecosystems & Aboriginal Sacred Sites in the Leard State Forest where the Maules Creek mine is situated.

• Front Line Action on Coal is calling for an end to the coal industry and a shift into renewable energy sources stating that the coal industry and the Maules creek mine are detrimental to the environment, the Aboriginal cultural heritage of the local Gomeroi nation, native wildlife, ecology, water resources & community health.

Finance

• The government could be forced to retreat on plans to compel every school in England to become an academy because of an emerging broad-based opposition, the National Union of Teachers claims.

• The union’s leader Christine Blower said there could be a rapid reversal, as happened with disability payments.

• The NUT’s conference is to vote on industrial action against the plans.

• But Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has told another union there is no “reverse gear” on the reforms.

• “I want to be clear, there will be no pulling back,” the education secretary told the NASUWT teachers’ union, which is also holding its annual conference this weekend.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The lawsuit argues that the DNC unfairly barred Sanders from accessing critical voter information — specifically, a 50-state “voter file” containing information about how to reach potential voters. The DNC briefly suspended Sanders’ access to that file in December, after one of his staffers improperly accessed Clinton’s voter data.

Censorship

• On Facebook a public account identifying as Mary Toh, mother of Singaporean blogger Amos Yee, stated that Amos Yee has been missing for at least three months.

• We all know that Amos was arrested not because he offended religious groups, but for political reasons, making fun of Lee Kuan Yew when he had just died. After Amos was released from jail, he continued to make videos which became very popular, condemning the PAP government, and saying that Amos had offended Islam was just another excuse to arrest and silence him. Although he wasn’t charged and was only asked to show up for an investigation, he knew that if the investigation continued, he would definitely be charged and sentenced, and this time since it was a repeated offence, probably sent to 3 years of RTC, which is why he chose to run away from home.

• Matthew Doyle appears to be not just an ignorant bigot, but a proud ignorant bigot. But… it still should be concerning that he’s been arrested for the crime of saying ignorant bigoted stuff on Twitter. Doyle is apparently a PR guy in the UK, who claimed on Twitter that he had “confronted” a Muslim woman on the street demanding that she “explain” the attacks in Brussels. She allegedly told him “nothing to do with me,” which, frankly, is a much more polite response than he deserved…

• [...]

• Still, even if he is a clueless, ignorant bigot, it should be very concerning that he’s been arrested for posting on Twitter. And, yes, I know the UK doesn’t respect free speech in the same way that the US does. And I know that the UK has a history of arresting people for tweets. But, still… really?

• This isn’t necessarily surprising, but it is incredibly stupid. As you hopefully recall, in the summer of 2014 the EU Court of Justice came out with a dangerous ruling saying that a “right to be forgotten” applied to search engines and that Google needed to “de-link” certain search results from the names of individuals. We’ve discussed at great length the problems with this ruling, but it continues to be a mess.

• Last summer, French regulators began to whine about Google’s implementation of the right to be forgotten, saying that it should apply worldwide. Google, instead, had only applied it to its EU domainspace. That is, if you were on Google.fr, you wouldn’t see those results, but Google.com you would. Since Google tries to default you to the right top level domain for your country, that would mean that most people in the EU would not see the results that people wanted censored. But French regulators still demanded more. Google responded, telling the French regulators that this was crazy, because it would be a threat to free speech globally. If Google had to moderate content globally based on the speech laws of a single country, we’d have the lowest common denominator of speech online, and a ton of ridiculous censorship. Furthermore, Google pointed out that 97% of French users were on the Google.fr domain, so demanding global censorship was pointless.

Privacy

• Italy’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, has spoiled the launch of SPID, the country’s new eID solution, launched on 15 March. Nine days later, the court upheld an earlier ruling that a EUR 5 million capital requirement for eID service providers is an unreasonable impediment to small and medium-sized service providers.

• A number of IETF standards groups are currently in the process of applying the second-system effect to redesigning their crypto protocols. A major feature of these changes includes the dropping of traditional encryption algorithms and mechanisms like RSA, DH, ECDH/ECDSA, SHA-2, and AES, for a completely different set of mechanisms, including Curve25519 (designed by Dan Bernstein et al), EdDSA (Bernstein and colleagues), Poly1305 (Bernstein again) and ChaCha20 (by, you guessed it, Bernstein).

• Many government agencies, including the US military, are leaving the emails of soldiers and government employees potentially in danger of being intercepted by spies and hackers by failing to implement a commonly used encryption technology.

• In the wake of the revelations of mass surveillance brought forth by Edward Snowden, the movement to promote the use of encryption technology across the internet has been seemingly unstoppable. Even the White House jumped on the “encrypt all the things” bandwagon this year, asking all government websites to use HTTPS web encryption to improve the security and privacy of their users.

• It’s difficult to take much of that at face value — especially as the government continues to push for similar court orders in other cases. And especially as Comey has been whining on and on about “going dark” for well over a year and a half now. At the very least, it does seem clear that the FBI failed to truly explore all possible options. As some iPhone forensics folks have noted, if this were truly a brand new solution, the FBI would need a hell of a lot more than two weeks of testing to make sure it really worked.

• In the meantime, I’d heard from a few folks, and now others are reporting as well, that the assumptions that many had made about the Israeli company Cellebrite providing the solution are simply not true — along with the idea that the solution involves reflashing the chip. The FBI itself now says it’s a “software-based” solution.

• The balance between national security and government intrusion on the rights of private citizens will be the topic of a panel discussion featuring renowned linguist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald. Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, will act as moderator.

• GCHQ is the reason that Cheltenham has no brothels according to an article in the Spectator by former Top Ger host Jeremy Clarkson.

• The presenter and journalist spent some time at the Cheltenham Festival last week, and in the right-wing political magazine he writes that in a taxi journey to a dinner party in an outlying village he learned that brothels were quickly shut down by police.

• New rules under development by the Obama administration will take data collected by the NSA, supposedly for “counter-terrorism” and put it into the hands of other federal agencies and even your local law enforcement for everyday use.

• Proponents of federal spying inevitably defend any objection to mass warrantless surveillance by playing the terrorism card.

• The NSA must be able to sweep up virtually everybody’s electronic data to protect America from terrorist attacks, so the argument goes. This carries a great deal of weight, especially in the wake of tragic bombings in Paris and Brussels. Many Americans brush off the constitutional violations and invasion of privacy inherent in NSA spy programs because they honestly believe they only target terrorists.

• Two members of the House Oversight Committee, a Democrat and a Republican, have asked the director of the National Security Agency to halt a plan to expand the list of agencies that the NSA shares information with.

• Representatives Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) and Ted Lieu (D-California) wrote in a letter to NSA Director Michael Rogers on Monday that the reported plan would violate privacy protections in the Fourth Amendment, since domestic law enforcement wouldn’t need a warrant to use the data acquired from the agency.

• We speak with Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept, which has obtained a secret, internal U.S. government catalog of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies that offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police across the country. The catalog includes details on the Stingray, a well-known brand of surveillance gear, and other devices, some of which have never been described in public before. Scahill says the catalog represents a trove of details on surveillance devices developed for military and intelligence purposes but increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to spy on people and convict them of crimes.

• A former head of two intelligence agencies had a clear message on Friday for the government as it tries to get Apple to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

• “Get over it,” said Gen. Michael Hayden, a former head of the National Security Agency and the CIA under President George W. Bush. “Understand that no matter what we do with Apple, it’s going to get harder and harder to get content.”

• Apple is currently defying a court order directing the tech giant to create software that would let FBI investigators unlock an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two terrorists who killed 14 people in California last year.

• After the Paris attacks late last year, we noted that it was clear that they were evidence of an intelligence community failure, rather than an “encryption” problem — which kind of explained why the intelligence community quickly tried to blame encryption. But, as we noted, most of the attackers were already known to the intelligence community and law enforcement — and there’s still little evidence that they used any encryption.

• It’s looking like the Brussels attacks are showing the same pattern. First, there were reports that Belgian law enforcement was well aware of the attackers and their connections.

• A bill proposed in congress this week would require that all users provide identification and register prepaid ‘burner’ phones upon purchase.

• Earlier this week we reported that burner phones are what kept Islamic extremists a step head of law enforcement in the days and weeks leading up to the Paris attack. While it’s not clear this bill is related to that revelation, it is a sign of the times and the US government’s clear-cut mission to put a stop to privacy anonymity as it relates to mobile devices.

Civil Rights

• We’ve been noting for years: when Senator Ron Wyden says that (1) there’s a secret interpretation of a law that is at odds with the public’s understanding of it, or (2) that government officials are lying, you should pay attention. It may take a while, but it always comes out eventually that he’s absolutely correct. For at least five years now, we’ve been posting semi-regular updates to Wyden calling out the government for its secret interpretations of the law, and some of that was proven entirely accurate thanks to the Snowden revelations concerning how the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act had been interpreted. However, since the Snowden revelations, Wyden has made it clear that that’s not all. In particular, he’s spoken about a Justice Department legal opinion, written by John Yoo, that Wyden insists is important and should be revealed.

• Back in November, ACLU sued to get that memo. The government recently moved for summary judgment based on the claim that a judge in DC rejected another ACLU effort to FOIA the document, which is a referral to ACLU’s 2006 FOIA lawsuit for documents underlying what was then called the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and which we now know as Stellar Wind. Here’s the key passage of that argument.

• A 23-year-old Egyptian aviation student in California has agreed to self-deportation the U.S. after a Facebook post threatening Donald Trump was turned over to the FBI, leading to a Secret Service investigation of the student, and ultimately his detention by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE).

• On February 3, Emadeldin Elsayed posted an article about Trump on Facebook along with the comment: “I literally don’t mind taking a lifetime sentence in jail for killing this guy, I would actually be doing the whole world a favor.” The Secret Service interviewed Elsayed the following day, according to his lawyer. Looks like someone spends a lot of time monitoring posts on Facebook for freedom.

• This week on CounterSpin: Cuba is not so much a country for elite US media as a cartoon; but Barack Obama’s visit—the first by a sitting US president since Calvin Coolidge—offered a chance to revisit some of the conventional wisdom on Cuba and what media blanded out as years of “historical baggage.” We talk about what would really need to change to “normalize” US/Cuba relations with historian and activist Aviva Chomsky, author of The Cuba Reader, among other titles.

• The first stay was issued March 7 and prevented the FCC from implementing new rate caps of 11¢ to 22¢ per minute on both interstate and intrastate calls from prisons. But the stay—which remains in place while the prison phone companies’ lawsuit against the FCC is still pending—did not disturb an earlier “interim” cap of 21¢ to 25¢ per minute that applied only to interstate calls, those that cross state lines. The order also didn’t specifically object to the FCC changing its definition of “inmate calling service” to include both interstate and intrastate calls.

• The Brussels bombings have highlighted an inherent problem in airline security, say anti-terrorism experts: the crowds of waiting passengers caused by the need to check for weapons and bombs inadvertently creates its own terrorism target.

• “Airport security is front-loaded as much as possible towards prevention of an event taking place on an airplane,” said Bill Jenkins, a terrorism policy expert with the Rand Corporation. But making it impossible for terrorists to get on a plane doesn’t prevent them from trying a different attack. They then look for other “mass casualty” targets, such as the airport terminal.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• So to be clear: Netflix should have been more transparent about what it was doing and provide users with better controls (desktop users can adjust streaming quality rather easily), especially if it’s going to lecture ISPs on transparency. That said, given Netflix’s positions on net neutrality and usage caps, you’re sure to see the story blown up into more than it is by ISPs and their various mouthpieces, who’ll likely either call this a net neutrality violation itself (it’s not; throttling yourself isn’t like throttling a competitor, and users have a choice of streaming services) or continue the industry claim that Netflix is a shady villain that treats giant, lumbering telecom duopolies unfairly.

• But the crux of the problem here remains usage caps, not Netflix. Sure, Netflix isn’t being entirely altruistic. Annoyed customers banging their heads against usage caps watch less streaming video, which for many fixed-line ISPs like Comcast is the entire point. For wireless carriers it’s obviously different, with the goal being to drive consumption however possible. But the fact that a company was forced to offer a lower quality service — instead of competing to provide the best stream possible — shows how arbitrary usage caps by their very nature distort and damage markets. And that’s before you even get to the anti-competitive implications of zero rating.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Indeed! EDRi has prepared a very helpful answering tool. The deadline to submit responses using this tool is 7 April. However, you can use the Commission’s tool to respond until 15 April 2016.

• There’s been a bit of a mess in the programming world, the past few days, that you may have missed if you don’t pay close attention to certain circles of the internet, but it’s fascinating on a number of different levels. The mess began when people at the messenger app Kik, realized that someone else, a guy named Azer Koculu, had a module on NPM named “kik.” Some background: NPM stands for Node Package Manager — and that’s exactly what it is: a package manager/repository for programmers to share and reuse javascript code, useful for folks using node.js (a server side javascript environment). This is a good thing as it allows for fairly easy opportunities to share code and build on the work of others without having to reinvent the wheel.

Copyrights

• A France-based Usenet provider says that his service has been raided and shutdown by the police. The 5,000 user ‘Newsoo’ service appears to have been a labor of love for its owner, but all data is now in the hands of authorities after he was arrested. A long-standing complaint by anti-piracy outfit SACEM appears to have been the trigger.

• You can almost set your watch that any company or group that comes out vehemently in favor of restrictive copyright protection under the guise of protecting artists will be found to be in violation of copyrights and acting in a manner demonstrating clearly that zero care is given to the well-being of artists. The most recent example of this is Time Warner. Recall in the past that the massive media company has regularly sued music startup groups, pimped the six-strikes agreement with Hollywood, worked with Rightscorp to milk money out of accused infringers, and back a ways waged a war unpopular with its signed musical artists against YouTube. This, all done by Time Warner in the name of advocating for artists and creators, was done even as we learned just to what lengths Warner Music has gone to make sure it paid artists as little as possible.

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

----------

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