● 03.30.16

● Links 30/3/2016: Torvalds in Spectrum, Fedora 24 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• My first brush with open source came while I was working for my university as a part-time system administrator in 2001. I was part of a small group that created business case studies for teaching not just in the university, but elsewhere in academia.

• As the team grew, the need for a robust LAN setup with file serving, intranet applications, domain logons, etc. emerged. Our IT infrastructure consisted mostly of bootstrapped Windows 98 computers that had become too old for the university’s IT labs and were reassigned to our department.

• Microsoft, sometime ago decided to end support for older versions of Windows such as Windows XP. No more technical support and security updates for these versions in future signalled Microsoft’s intentions to encourage users to migrate to the latest version of Windows. Lets face it, there are several users who are still on Windows XP – especially in the developing parts of the world. While upgrading Windows XP to Windows 10 seems to be the logical step, users who unwilling or unable to pay can migrate to a free operating system based on Linux.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds created the original core of the Linux operating system in 1991 as a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linux rapidly grew into a full-featured operating system that can now be found running smartphones, servers, and all kinds of gadgets. In this e-mail interview, Torvalds reflects on the last quarter century and what the next 25 years might bring.

• When Linux Torvalds put the first version of his operating system kernel on Usenet in 1991, he had no idea what it would become.

• Using open-source software is easy, getting your company to integrate open-source development is hard. The Linux Foundation and the TODO Group aim to change this.

• Hyperledger Project Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee Chair Elected; New Member Investments Underscore Demand for Open Source Blockchain Platform Development

• Jerry Cuomo, IBM’s vice president of blockchain, favors a blockchain-enabled insurance plan for driverless cars. He also sees an opportunity to move supply chains to the blockchain.

• Bitcoin development startup Blockstream is among 10 new companies that have joined the open-source Hyperledger blockchain project led by the Linux Foundation.

• The Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort to establish, build and sustain an open, distributed ledger platform that will satisfy a variety of use cases across multiple industries.

• This post is intended to detail the LVM internal disk layout including the thin-volume metadata structure. While documentation of the LVM user space management utilities is abundant, very little exists in the realm of on-disk layout & structures. Having just added support for this to CloudForms, I figure this would be a good opportunity to expand on this for future reference.

Graphics Stack

• With now having a new maintainer, the OpenChrome DDX driver is preparing for its first release in more than two years.

• It’s been over three weeks since Mesa 11.2 was supposed to have been released while 11.2.0 is now scheduled to make its debut on Friday.

• For those curious whether the Linux 4.6 kernel is bringing any noticeable performance improvements to the AMDGPU and Radeon DRM drivers over Linux 4.5, here are some benchmarks in conjunction with using Mesa 11.3-devel built against LLVM 3.8.

• Today, March 30, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov has announced the immediate availability for download of the fourth and last RC (Release Candidate) build of the highly anticipated Mesa 11.2.0 3D graphics library.

• While many of us were expecting to see the final release of Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.2 out the door in the second week of March, as originally planned, or at least the RC4 build announced today, it looks like the Mesa development team ran into some issues that needed to be resolved before the final Mesa 11.2 could be released.

Benchmarks

• Hardkernel’s ODROID-C2 64-bit ARM single board computer retails for $40 USD and is powered by an Amlogic S905 SoC. While just a fraction more than a Raspberry Pi 3 or the Pine 64+ when factoring in shipping costs, there’s very competitive performance out of this board with its four cores running up to 2.0GHz.

Applications

• It looks like the OpenShot 2.0 free and cross-platform video editor might be released this year after all, and today we’re informing you about the availability of the fourth Beta build.

• One of the biggest challenges for testers and myself is to speed up the cycle from bug fix to testable release. While some users compile everything manually, and some Linux users get updates delivered through our PPA, Windows, Mac, and certain Linux users must wait for me to create a new installer (which takes lots of time). So, I have built a cross-platform build server (i.e. really just a cool Python script which is scheduled to run every few hours). It checks Git for updates, re-compiles libraries, freezes the OpenShot Python 3 application (along with dependencies), signs the Windows / Mac versions, and uploads the files to Amazon S3, and lists these files on the openshot.org website. I currently have 3 build servers running (Windows 10, OS X 10.11, Ubuntu 14.04) and creating builds automatically.

• While OpenShot 2.0 is long overdue, things are finally looking up for this open-source non-linear video editor with going into beta this past January and today marking the release of the fourth beta.

• The popular darktable open-source and cross-platform RAW image editor software has been updated today, March 29, 2016, to version 2.0.3, the third maintenance release in the stable 2.0 series of the software.

• The developers of the popular Audacious free, open-source, and cross-platform music player software released the second maintenance build in the stable Audacious 3.7 series.

• Back in November 2015, the massive Audacious 3.7 release arrived with a multitude of new features, for both GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms, including the ability to shuffle playlists by entire albums, improved HiDPI support, recording of Internet streams during playback, and a unified window for managing equalizer presets.

• The development team behind the popular qBittorrent free open-source and cross-platform BitTorrent client software announced today, March 29, 2016, the release of qBittorrent 3.3.4.

• Today, March 29, 2016, the major FFmpeg 3.0 “Einstein” open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework received its first maintenance release, version 3.0.1.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The style of it reminds me of Warcraft 2, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that comparison. Gameplay wise though it is rather different. You play through “quests” and unlock new units, tech and buildings, which is pretty cool. Enemies will also drop items for you to use, which is another nice feature.

• How can you sell a game on Steam and not test on all your supported platforms when releasing a major new version? Early Access is one thing, but this is a properly released game.

• As a big space and spaceship combat fan, as well as a roguelike fan having them all merged together is very exciting. I would like to see more space themed games like this on Linux!

• The games are very different, but it’s a people and contracts issue here. It sounds like someone has a vendetta against someone else.

• It has a new main menu, you can unlock skins with points earned during online gameplay, you can now vote for map and game-mode during online play.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, March 29, 2016, KDE had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability of the first point release for the stable KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment.

• Manjaro 15.12 KDE 64-bit in Live session felt very snappy and fast. I had no issues with the system performance.

• However, there were still some issues that I drew attention to in the paragraphs above.

• I would like to say that if I had a choice between the KDE and Xfce editions of Manjaro operating system, the latter would still be my preference.

Distributions

Reviews

• Apricity OS targets newbies and professionals alike. It has a well-thought-out design. Its execution makes both the GNOME and the Cinnamon editions very functional.

• The overall performance of the distro is impressive. I am looking forward to the release of the nonbeta version.

• Apricity OS is a Linux distro that will make you rethink why you use your existing operating system. It is a distro worth checking out.

New Releases

• A few minutes ago, March 29, 2016, Softpedia has been informed by Patrick Emmabuntüs about the availability for download of Emmabuntüs 3 version 1.03 educational GNU/Linux operating system.

• Based on the latest Xubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, Emmabuntüs 3 1.03 arrives today with updated components and dozens of improvements, keeping the GNU/Linux distribution used in schools and other educational environments stable and reliable for a longer period of time.

Red Hat Family

• InfiniFlash for Red Hat Ceph Storage offers next-generation scale-out storage for global customers

Finance

Fedora

• The Fedora 24 Alpha is here, right on schedule for our planned June final release.

• At the second weekend in March 2016, Fedora had a booth at PyCon SK, a community-organized conference for the Python programming language held in Bratislava, Slovakia. The event happened for the first time this year, and we made sure it happened with Fedora.

• Yesterday I posted some of benchmarks of Fedora 23 with available stable updates along with enabling the Rawhide Nodebug repository for easy access to the Linux 4.6 Git kernel. Those numbers weren’t terribly interesting, but is it any better on the power consumption front with these kernel upgrades for a Lenovo ThinkPad ultrabook?

• After running each of those tests of a clean install of Fedora 23, Fedora 23 with all available stable release updates as of this past weekend (thus at Linux 4.4), and then enabling the Rawhide Nodebug repository for access to Linux 4.6 Git, I ran power consumption tests for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon with i7-5600U CPU while this notebook/ultrabook was running on battery power.

• It’s been 25 years since Linus Torvalds began Linux and IEEE Spectrum ran two articles today on him and his kernel. Elsewhere, Fedora 24 Alpha was released as planned and Jack Germain reviewed Apricity OS saying it’s class and clean. The Register’s Scott Gilbertson reviewed the Ubuntu 16.04 beta and March 30 is Document Freedom Day.

• Here is some download statistics from remi repository, for the various PHP versions available.

• If you are a big GNOME fan — like me — then there is one distribution you must try — Fedora. The Linux-based operating system — the same that Linus Torvalds uses — is a great way to have a vanilla GNOME experience. Desktop environment aside, it is also both stable and fairly cutting-edge, offering modern packages and kernels.

• We reported yesterday, March 28, 2016, on the release and immediate availability for download of the Fedora 24 Alpha Linux operating system, which includes a preview of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

Debian Family

• With the (relatively, sorry) recent switch to ruby2.3 as default Ruby version, I realized that my plotting program ctioga2 crashed with ruby 2.3 (due to a rather ugly lazy hack).

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• There’s still a few weeks to go and this beta definitely has some rough edges, but Ubuntu 16.04 is shaping up to be an excellent release, particularly from an LTS stability standpoint. LTS releases always have to find a balance between incorporating the best of what’s new with the need to support those features and apps for five years.

• Leaving Unity 8 out of it means that Ubuntu users who just want stability can wait out the transition to Unity 8 with a stable system that still stays relatively up to date. Those who want to stay on the bleeding edge can upgrade again, when Unity 8 arrive in 16.10 later this year.

• ZDNet seems pretty confident in its sources on this rumor and perhaps that resurrects the rumor that we were tipped on concerning Microsoft purchasing Canonical.

• According to sources at Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, and Microsoft, you’ll soon be able to run Ubuntu on Windows 10.

• This combination of Windows 10 and Ubuntu will be aimed at developers. Linux fans shouldn’t expect Ubuntu to come along with its Unity interface. Instead, it’ll rely on Bash and CLI tools like make, gawk, and grep. Having said that, Microsoft’s target audience are developers, not desktop users.

Flavours and Variants

• There’s a new Ubuntu Mate theme in town and it looks suspiciously a lot like Unity. Find out not only the how-to, but the layer of irony this adds to the MATE desktop interface.

• The story of Linux Mint website being hacked and the forum database stolen is now behind the team of hard-working developers responsible for the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, and they can finally concentrate all of their efforts on improving these fantastic open-source projects.

• The Cinnamon desktop environment has been updated earlier today, March 29, 2016, to version 2.8.8, a small maintenance release that landed in the main software repositories of the Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” operating system, which is the latest stable release of the Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Alexa is mostly restricted to the US, but Amazon has posted a step-by-step guide on how to build your own companion anywhere in the world

• SolidRun is prepping a tiny, Linux-friendly COM based on Intel’s “Braswell” processors, and featuring SATA, GbE, HDMI, USB3.0, PCIe, 4K video, and more.

• It’s beyond amazing how many different project people have created for the Raspberry Pi. Here’s a look at four which are particularly noteworthy.

• The Linux-supported RTX (Rugged Technology eXtended) open-spec form factor for ARM-based computer-on-modules was developed by a new RTX Consortium with founding members Advantech, Aaeon, and Avalue. The other collaborators on the spec are ARM, NXP, and Texas Instruments (TI), although they have not been formally tagged as members on the RTX site. The RTX 2.0 spec is now available for download along with a design guide, carrier board schematics, and mechanical drawing files.

Phones

• For the better part of the last month I have been using Sailfish OS as the daily operating system on my mobile device. For those who are unfamiliar, Sailfish is a Linux powered mobile operating system that largely builds on Qt technology.

Tizen/Samsung

• SK telecom stated that it will be investing KRW 90 billion ($76 million) by end 2016 ,to set up a suitable IoT friendly network in the city while Samsung will be sponsoring all the necessary devices and equipment required for the project. Further, the city officials of Daegu also stated that they will be aiming to raise over KRW 1 trillion ($855 million) to support the establishment of infrastructure in the city and provide necessary funds for the development of local startups to make use of this future tech. The project is expected to start from November 2016 with the opening of Center for Creative Economy and Innovation at the Daegu Samsung Creative Campus.

• Doodle Jump is one of my favorite game that I used to play all the time, countless hours dedicated to jumping around this addictive platform game. I have just downloaded the game onto my Samsung Z3 from the Tizen Store. It is so much fun and very easy to play. Games play is very simple as players only need to use the left and right arrows to move.

Android

• In the latest teaser for the HTC 10, HTC, the VR-focused electronics company who now makes phones on the side, is bragging up their next phone’s performance. Not only that, but they have confirmed the Samsung-esque button setup on the phone’s chin, although it is at least in the correct arrangement.

• Google’s Android operating system may be based on open source software, but most Android phones ship with a lot of proprietary apps and services (like Google’s own Gmail, Maps, and Play Store). But there are a number of initiatives designed to make Android more open… and many also claim to make it more secure.

• Copperhead, The Guardian Project, and F-Droid have announced a new partnership and proposed a crowdfunding campaign, hoping to raise money to create an “open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware” – or in English, a secure phone anyone can buy and use straight out of the box.

• “Through a future planned crowdfunded and commercial offering, the partnership will provide affordable off-the-shelf solutions, including device hardware and self-hosted app and update distribution servers, for any individual and organizations looking for complete mobile stacks they can trust.” reads the announcement.

• There is no denying the Android operating system could use a fair amount of tweaks to make things far more secure for its users. Whether or not CopperheadOS will be the answer, remains to be seen, but the ecosystem has a few things going for it. What is even more interesting is how this collaboration with Guardian Project and F-Droid is accepting Bitcoin donations to fund development as well.

• SlashGear and out sister site Android Community have been around long enough that we have had hands on just about every Android device to launch since Android hit the market. Way back in 2008 we got hands on with the first Android smartphone, the HTC Dream also known as the T-Mobile G1. Ever wonder how the first Android device might stack up to a modern Galaxy S7? If so, this video comparison is for you.

• I’ve been thinking a lot about thumbs lately.

• Why, you might wonder? Simple: Whenever I watch unsuspecting strangers use their phones in public (it’s not as creepy as it sounds, I swear), I can’t help but notice how many people rely solely on their thumbs for on-screen typing.

• Me? I’ve never been a two-thumb typing man myself. I’m also not a full-time swiper, which is another increasingly common type of mobile tech typist you see in the wild these days.

• In the race for privacy, some turn to encrypting their email. Why? Because there are times when sending sensitive information needs a layer of encryption. But adding encryption to mobile email can sometimes be a bit complicated.

• Until now.

• Watch out, Samsung SM-W2016, the Gionee W909 is after you. The Android-powered flip phone was officially announced with Android 5.1 (with the custom Amigo UI).

• The W909 has two 4.2″ screens, both IPS LCDs with 720p resolution. It’s powered by the MediaTek Helio P10 chipset with an octa-core processor and 4GB of RAM. It has a generous built-in storage of 64GB, plus a microSD slot.

• Apple Watch may be the media’s darling, but Android Wear has quietly been gaining ground, as evidenced by numerous recent watch and software introductions.

• The Apple Watch drew the media’s attention last week with the announcement of a $50 price drop. Collectively, however, there has been more recent news about Google’s Android Wear. A more autonomous Android Wear 1.4 stack based on Android 6.0 has rolled out to most watches, and several new models broke cover, leading up to the Baselworld show earlier this month in Switzerland.

• Two of these — Casio’s WSD-F10 and LG Watch Urbane LTE, 2nd Edition — are now available for order, with shipments beginning Mar. 25 and April 1, respectively. We’ve included them in here in our second annual slide show of Android Wear watches (click on Gallery link below). Our list has grown by three since last year’s six entries, even as we have excluded non-Android Wear devices and replaced some older watches with follow-on models.

Free Software/Open Source

• Quali hopes to forge stronger connections with the developer community by contributing plugins for its DevOps cloud sandbox platform as open source code, a move the company announced today.

• Last June, AT&T went all-in on this bet, joining with the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) Project to form what’s now called Central Office Re-imagined as a Datacenter (CORD, formerly “Re-architected”). Its mission is to make telco infrastructure available as a service in an analogous fashion to IaaS for cloud service providers.

• At the Google GCP Next conference last week in San Francisco, the company demonstrated how it was possible with Kubernetes to update a heavily used distributed application while keeping that app running.

• For a Kubernetes 1.2 on-stage demo, Greg DeMichillie, director of program management for Google Cloud Platform spun up a service and then used load testing software to dispatch 20,000 requests-per-second to the service.

• Hey, remember when the FCC reassured us last year that it wasn’t going to lock down Wi-Fi routers? And everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because custom router firmware is actually a really good thing? Sure, it’s fun to improve your router by extending the range or making your network friendlier for guests. But open firmware is important for other reasons: it enables critical infrastructure, from emergency communications for disaster relief and building free community access points to beefing up personal security.

• There are a lot of great geographic information systems (GIS) that run in web browsers and mobile apps, thanks in large part to the introduction of new web standards in 2010-11 and recent improvements in mobile devices.

• And yet, most existing GIS systems are half-built systems that require setup by the users, which can be difficult and inconvenient to common for users who don’t know how to code. There’s also a very limited range of free and open source options for scientific data analysis. We created OpenWebGIS in 2014 to address all of these issues in a single, ready-built solution.

Events

• One question I get often is: “How can I build a business around something I’m giving away for free?” So, I wanted to attend the panel at SxSW this year called Don’t open source like a n00b, focused on how to make a project or product open source. We’ve seen many projects successfully do open source—like Linux, WordPress, and Koha—but how does a company like Booz Allen Hamilton jump from being a proprietary company to open sourcing their first product?

• Project Jellyfish was developed here in Austin by Booz Allen Hamilton; it’s software that can be described as a cloud brokering solution. The team there realized that many vendors are open sourcing their applications and that a lot of the new, cool stuff is being developed in the open. So, they made the decision to make Project Jellyfish open source, hoping their developers would more interested in participating. But, they still had to convince their partners to spend money to develop something they were going to give away for free.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• There are some sites that even with an empty profile and a vanilla Firefox build right from Mozilla Foundation cause Firefox to generate a very heavy CPU load. I briefly reported this via Twitter to one (but not the only!) of the sites in question and to Firefox Site Compatibility.

Mozilla

• The U.S. Department of Commerce has just created a Board of Advisors for topics related to the Digital Economy. I will participate as one of the two co-chairs, along with Zoë Baird, President and CEO of the Markle Foundation. The Digital Economy Board of Advisors is to provide regular advice to the Secretary of Commerce from leaders in industry, academia, and civil society on the Department’s new Digital Economy Agenda. The Agenda is focused on advancing the Internet and the digital economy across many frontiers, including promoting innovation, a free and open Internet, trust online, and Internet access for all Americans.

Databases

• SQLite 3.12 increases the default page size from 1024 to 4096, adds a number of other performance enhancements, offers new compile-time options, and has an assortment of different bug fixes.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Today is Document Freedom Day. As in the past 8 years we celebrate DFD on the last Wednesday of March all around the world. While the date is recommended this year DFD is being celebrated from March 16th to April 5th so far (we’ re still getting new registration as of this writing) .

• The FSFE has handed over Document Freedom Day to us earlier this year and while it took us a bit of time to get familiar with the way the current DFD website handles the events registration we have been steadily gathering more and more locations all over the world. So Document Freedom Day is happening on the last Wednesday of March, which is March 30th this year and Latin America seems very active in promoting Open Standards. We are very happy to meet new people thanks to the effort and will also celebrate our local DFD in Phnom Penh but slightly later on April 5th. If you are in the area please drop by, and if not please check the Document Freedom Day website for an event in your area. Happy DFD!

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• The release of OpenBSD 5.9, previously scheduled for the usual May 1st, has just been officially announced!

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GnuCash development team announces GnuCash 2.6.12, the twelfth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

• We are pleased to announce the new beta release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.10.0!

• The release comes with USB installation images to install the standalone GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of a running GNU/Linux system, either from source or from binaries.

• This release is called The Three Goblineers, because we are finally fully embracing Python 3! You could even think of this release as Py-oneering, which it definitely is. Many traditional web service tools are less-than-ideal for federation and so we’ve had to do a lot of rebuilding and retooling. This release represents lots of intense behind the scenes work to make the user experience smoother, as well as some key improvements for MediaGoblin developers and deployers.

Public Services/Government

• MIT Media Lab has declared open source to be the preferred software licensing model for its projects. According to Joichi Ito, Director of the renowned interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the academic institution can achieve greater impact by sharing its work.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The Good Work Foundation is on a mission to challenge education and the inequality between rural and urban schools.

• By using digital technology, the foundation’s Kate Groch says she wants to prove to young people that they do not have to move to big cities to access quality education.

Open Hardware/Modding

Programming/Development

Standards/Consortia

• World Standards Day is celebrated annually around the world to increase awareness of the role that standards play in the global economy. To help celebrate the importance of standards, SES – The Society for Standards Professionals and the U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day Planning Committee co-sponsor an annual paper competition for individuals in the U.S. standards community. The 2016 paper competition winners will be announced and given their awards at the U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day, which will be held this year on October 27, 2016, at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Leftovers

• One of the reasons consumers download mobile ad blockers is the impact ads have on their data plans.

• It’s the principle reason that carriers like Three in Italy and the UK, and Digicel in the Caribbean, announced plans to roll out network-level mobile ad blocking for their customers. Shine, the company that provides that ad blocking technology, claims mobile ads use 10-50% of user’s data plans.

• By now, usage caps on both fixed and wireless networks have grown increasingly common. And while broadband carriers are endlessly looking toward caps and zero rating for a competitive and financial advantage, overlooked is the fact that a huge amount of a user’s monthly bandwidth allotment is now being eroded by good old advertising. How much? According to a new study by Enders Analysis, anywhere from 18% to 79% of your monthly data bucket can go toward delivering advertising. Previous studies had pegged this between 10% and 50%.

Health/Nutrition

• The five-decade long international “War on Drugs” started by US president Richard Nixon has harmed the public health and should be scrapped in favour of a process of decriminalisation, a major new report has concluded.

• Anti-drug policies and laws have had “no measurable impact on supply or use” and cannot be justified on scientific or public health grounds, according to the authors of study commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Ivy League university and The Lancet.

• The report presents “compelling evidence” that countries such as Portugal and the Czech Republic have decriminalised non-violent minor drug offences with positive results, including “public health benefits, cost savings, lower incarceration [rates] and no significant increase in problematic drug use”.

Security

• The 2016 Linux Security Summit (LSS) will be held in Toronto, Canada, on 25th and 26th, co-located with LinuxCon North America. See the full announcement.

• A newly discovered vulnerability makes it incredibly easy to break into a large pool of Linux-based computers. A security hole found in Grub2, a widely-used bootloader in many Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Red Hat, allows a user to login to a computer by pressing the backspace key 28 times. Various Linux distributions have released a patch for the vulnerability.

• The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the classic cheap hack. It requires virtually nothing of those who wield it beyond the ability to download something from the internet, yet a DDoS offers unusually public consequences (most real security breaches happen in the dark). It is also difficult to defend against, in some part because it doesn’t involve actually breaching a network at all—just flooding it with more innocuous-seeming traffic than it can handle.

• Laser beam intrusion detection systems, iris scanners and customized access cards are just some of the controls that Google uses to protect its data centers.

• A laser beam intrusion detection system, customized electronic access cards and biometric iris scans are just some of the multilevel security measures that Google has implemented to control access to its data centers.

• If we keep thinking about this and bring the ransomware to its logical conclusion, the future versions are going to request a constant ongoing payment. Not a one time get out of jail free event. Why charge them once when you can charge them over and over again? Most modern infrastructures are complex enough it will be hard to impossible to remove an extremely clever bit of malware. It’s going to be time for the good guys to step it up here, more thoughts on that some other day though.

• There is even a silly angle that’s fun to ponder. We could imagine ransomware that attacks other known malware. If the ransomware is getting a constant ongoing payment, it would be bad if anything else could remove it, from legitimate software to other ransomware. While I don’t think antivirus and ransomware will ever converge on the same point, it’s still fun to think about.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Visiting Argentina on the 40th anniversary of the March 24, 1976, military coup that marked the beginning of that period was a political gamble—much less perhaps than his journey to the Castros’ Havana—but a gamble nonetheless.

• The Washington Post has a big story delving deep into how the Hillary Clinton email scandal happened, noting that Clinton just didn’t want to give up her BlackBerry, even as the NSA told her repeatedly that it wasn’t secure and there were serious risks involved. What’s amazing, from the story, is how much everyone was focused on the BlackBerry side of things, and sort of skipped over the fact that she was using a private email account with the server set up in her basement. The WaPo article notes that for the first few months in her job as Secretary of State, the email server didn’t even have basic encryption tools enabled. All of that is a travesty, and you should read the whole article to understand the issue more, but I wanted to focus in on a related issue: the high court/low court treatment of Hillary Clinton as compared to others. In particular, the situation with Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Why can this problem not be solved? What are the forces at work that make it so difficult to prevent damaging fires and further devastation of the landscape? Two new books from NUS Press bring fresh perspectives, much-needed clarity and important baseline data to these questions. The drivers of the region’s haze crisis can be found in the environmental and social context of Indonesia’s vulnerable peatlands, and in the political economy of agriculture and agribusiness in Indonesia and Malaysia.

• One of the biggest challenges when trying to determine who was responsible for last year’s devastating fires in Indonesia was the lack of reliable information on concessions – namely, who, or what entity, was responsible for the land that burned. Greenpeace has done its best to fill this gap with a just-released land use map that is, by far, the best of its kind.

• The map was no easy effort, with Greenpeace Indonesia staff digitizing paper maps and PDF files that they collected from numerous companies. They also made the data easy to use — using the World Resources Institutes’s open-source Global Forest Watch tool to turn it into a user-friendly website entitled Kepo Hutan, or “Curious about Forests.”

• Evidence that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its worst coral bleaching on record has renewed calls for the UN to list it as “in-danger”.

• The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce says 95% of reefs from Cairns to Papua New Guinea are now severely bleached.

• It says only four reefs out of 520 have no evidence of bleaching.

• Unesco voted not to put the reef on its World Heritage in Danger list last year, but green groups want the decision reassessed.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Many, many more of 2015’s anonymous-source front-page stories were not like the above, however. For every confidential whistleblower quoted, there were dozens more unnamed “American officials” to be found; time and again, the powerful enjoyed the privilege of anonymity orders of magnitude more often than the powerless. All too often, the Times front page resembled a journalistic dumping ground for anonymous source-driven ego scoops, trial balloons, buck-passing and what University of London professor and media critic Aeron Davis calls “inter-elite communication.”

• Moving beyond this first orbit, there was an even larger ring in the anonymous-source solar system, which consisted of stories reported and written by wire services but published by the Times. (A majority of these were breaking news stories posted only on the Times website.) Last year, the combined total of these Associated Press, Reuters and other wire service stories came to more than 3,800. Combined with the total of Times-authored articles, the full-year figure of anonymity rises to more than 5,300 print or online articles—or nearly 15 anonymous-source stories every day.

• Though these stories aren’t written by Times staff, the paper still exercises judgment over whether or not to run them and, thus, owns some culpability over their pervasive presence. Still, I deemed it unfair to hold the paper responsible for any systemic sourcing problems therein, since the Times cannot exert editorial control of how AP articles are reported and edited. As such, I omitted these wire stories from my deeper source analysis below.

• A specter appears to be haunting American liberalism — the specter of democratic socialism. As Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) continues to pick up surprising victories across the country, decisively winning Washington state, Alaska, and Hawaii over the weekend, it is becoming clear that his brand of democratic socialism (what some might simply call social democracy) is not a passing fad, but the future of Democratic party politics. While he may not win the 2016 nomination, he is winning the hearts and minds of Democratic voters and Independents. And with his growing popularity, particularly among millennial voters, it has not been surprising to see some liberals dusting off red-scare tactics from the ash heap of history.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Iran’s plan to isolate and monitor all internet services within the country will place huge limitations on Iranians’ ability to safely express themselves online, according to a report published today by freedom of expression campaign group Article 19.

• The report, Tightening the Net: Internet Security and Censorship in Iran, outlines the wide-ranging and often contradictory objectives of the National Internet Project, which was first announced ten years ago under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and now scheduled for completion in 2019.

• Argentina’s pro-business government is pulling the plug on its involvement in the Spanish-language TV network that was started by the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, saying the broadcaster blocks alternative viewpoints.

• Social movements aligned with the regional Latin American and Caribbean integration body ALBA has rejected Argentine President Mauricio Macri’s efforts to cut ties with teleSUR and effectively remove the station from the air, criticizing the move as politically motivated censorship of the outlet founded by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

• What’s worse than living under a repressive regime that tightly controls your ability to engage the rest of the world, censors anything remotely critical of the government, and only doles out broadband internet access to privileged individuals?

• Why, Google, of course.

• That’s the basic thesis of a recent article in The Nation, written by Sujatha Fernandes, a professor of sociology at Queens College and the City University of New York (CUNY).

• Charges against a talent agency boss accused of inciting racial hatred on Twitter have been dropped, in a U-turn by the authorities.

• Police charged private schoolboy Matthew Doyle, 46, with a public order offence on Friday after he tweeted about confronting a Muslim woman and asking her to ‘explain Brussels’.

• We’ve written a few times about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who appears to have one of the thinnest skins of any national leader anywhere. He’s been filing an average of over 100 lawsuits a month over “insults” to himself. And the latest is that the Turkish Foreign Ministry summoned the German Ambassador Martin Erdmann to explain why a German television station, NDR, broadcast a silly satirical video (gently) mocking Erdogan.

• In light of numerous warning letters sent to national television stations, which it says have fallen on deaf ears, the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI) has requested that the House of Representatives amend the Broadcasting Law to give the body authority to closely monitor TV programs.

• KPI commissioner Amiruddin said the KPI wanted the authority to oversee the content of all television programs, including the power to censor content before it was aired.

• “House Commission I has given us the space to provide input to them regarding KPI’s authority. What we have proposed has been received and is now being discussed,” Amiruddin said, adding that the House of Representatives was enthusiastic about strengthening the KPI.

• Somehow and for some reason, the head-scratching lawsuit between actress Lindsay Lohan and Take-Two Interactive continues to move forward. If you’ll recall, in 2013 Lohan began asking her lawyers about suing Take-Two over what she claimed wrongly was a direct depiction of herself in the game Grand Theft Auto 5. The character in question is clearly a composite parody of all kinds of Hollywood starlets, in part composed of references to Lohan’s antics, and in part composed of references to other starlets’ antics. Which is ultimately entirely besides the point, because the depiction is parody in nature and that really should have been the end of all of this. Except Lohan’s legal team moved forward with the suit, and even amended it to include as much paperwork as possible, all while asserting that her legal claims could get around the statute of limitations on bringing the suit because Take-Two had manipulated the cover image for the game, which featured a bikini-clad girl Lohan also claims is a depiction of herself, in order to fit it on the DVD the game was shipped with.

• China is consolidating its ability to censor the Internet by drafting new rules requiring businesses that serve domestic Internet users to register their Web addresses inside the country, a move seen as targeting Chinese companies but that has raised concerns among foreign businesses.

Privacy/Surveillance

• FBI is pushing back against the order of a judge on revealing the technique it used to catch the defendant in a case of a dark web child pornography. The judge had ordered the FBI to reveal the full malware code used to hack visitors of a dark web child pornography site.

• The Department of Justice pulled out of its fight with Apple over dead terrorism suspect Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c yesterday, saying it had figured out how to crack into the phone and no longer needed Apple’s help. But as of Tuesday, the government is still pursuing a similar case in New York—a case where known exploits already exist for the iPhone model in question.

• It’s a bizarre move to continue to pursue the New York case after retreating in the San Bernardino case. In the San Bernardino case, the government repeatedly argued that only Apple was capable of bypassing its own iPhone security.

• Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (‘Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik’, BSI) has published a list of security requirements for cloud services. The catalogue is aimed at providers of cloud services and their clients. Use of the list is not mandatory.

• “Particular attention is paid to the transparency of cloud service provision”, the BSI said in a statement. The list helps users understand the location of data, jurisdiction and place of litigation and legal requirements for disclosure to authorities.

• All web browsers have vulnerabilities, but one piece of Chinese software might be eligible for the title of most insecure browser ever.

• Likely unbeknown to its users, QQ Browser has been transmitting identifying information—including web histories, search queries, and nearby WiFi networks—with poorly implemented or no cryptographic protection.

• The FBI hack of an iPhone 5c running iOS 9 may have left the device just a little bit insecure in the eyes of some users, as the agency has not provided details of how it was able to access data on the phone used by the San Bernardino terrorist.

• The questions raised by the DOJ announcing that it was, in fact, able to get in to Syed Farook’s work iPhone continue to grow. The latest is that, if it could get into that phone, running the fairly secure iOS 9, why is it still fighting the case in NY where it’s trying to get into a drug dealer’s phone running iOS 7? As you may recall, the case in NY has been going on for longer than the San Bernardino one. It started back in October when the DOJ demanded Apple’s help in getting into the iPhone of Jun Feng (a drug dealer who admitted guilt, but who claims he forgot the passcode) and magistrate judge James Orenstein stepped in to ask Apple if this was a reasonable request.

• The first-ever head of a small federal privacy watchdog is resigning this summer, a year and a half before his term ends in 2018.

• The surprise announcement from David Medine, chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), will leave a hole at the top of the five-member board, which has been instrumental to shining a light on the National Security Agency (NSA).

• In a statement, President Obama said that Medine’s tenure took place “during an especially momentous period, coinciding with a concerted examination of our national security tools and policies to ensure they are consistent with my administration’s commitment to civil liberties and individual privacy.

• “Under David’s leadership, the PCLOB’s thoughtful analysis and considered input has consistently informed my decision-making and that of my team, and our country is better off because of it,” Obama added.

• Speculation—no matter how baseless—that online black markets for weapons helped make the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels possible hasn’t helped the reputation of the dark web’s anonymous corner of the internet. But one new study shows that even before that dubious link between online anonymity and terror attacks, global opinion on the dark web was already overwhelmingly negative.

• Perhaps the CNN reporter who wrote this really meant “this particular type of phone,” in which case the statement would be only marginally more believable, but the idea that it only applies to “this particular phone” makes absolutely no sense, and suggests the DOJ is flat out lying again. The only way in that works with just this phone would be magically finding Farook’s passcode (perhaps he left a post-it somewhere?). But if that was the case, the DOJ wouldn’t have asked for two weeks to “test” the method (even if they only took one week). Finding the passcode and testing it doesn’t take that long. Update: A DOJ spokesperson says that CNN got the quote wrong and that the actual statement was that the crack only applied to iPhone 5C devices.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Young men in the Molenbeek district of Brussels were sent messages over the weekend calling on them to “make the right choice” and “fight the westerners”.

• The texts were sent on Sunday night from a prepaid account that could not be traced or replied to. It followed a video distributed on Facebook, since removed, apparently showing local youths celebrating the attacks in Brussels last week. The death toll from the bombings has risen to 35, Belgium’s health minister said on Monday.

• Some 70 years after the disappearance of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of thousands of Jews in World War II, an application has been filed to formally declare him dead, the daily Svenska Dagbladet reported Tuesday.

• The application to the Tax Authority was made by his trustees, so his estate can be wound up, and is expected to be completed in the autumn, according to the report.

• Wallenberg, who was born in 1912, is credited with helping thousands of Jews escape Nazi death camps in World War II while serving in Hungary.

• He arrived in Budapest in July 1944 to work at the Swedish legation, although his work was mainly funded by the War Refugee Board, set up by the United States.

• Wallenberg adopted unconventional methods to carry out his brief, at times offering bribes to rescue Hungarian Jews who risked deportation. At times, he issued special passports.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Netflix’s criticism of usage caps and vocal support of net neutrality (not to mention its threat as a pay TV competitor) has helped it replace Google as public enemy number one for the telecom industry. As such, every PR, lobbying, and political asset at the telecom industry’s disposal has taken aim at the streaming giant over the last few years, accusing the company of being a dirty freeloader and horrible hypocrite that’s unfairly lobbying the government to attack poor, honest, hardworking companies like AT&T and Comcast.

• For many years now we’ve seen a dramatic spike in programming contract disputes between broadcasters and cable operators, usually resulting in consumers losing access to TV content they’re paying for. These feuds usually begin simply enough; with a broadcaster asking for a programming rate hike cable operators don’t want to pay for. But instead of sitting down and hashing out a new deal that satisfies both parties like grown ups often do, the companies take their feud into the public sphere, punishing paying customers in the process.

• Since Netflix’s admission last week that it throttles video on most mobile networks to help customers avoid data cap overage charges, Internet service providers and anti-net neutrality think tanks have been blasting the online video provider. Netflix is a hypocrite because it throttles its own video streams even as it supports net neutrality rules that prevent ISPs from throttling traffic that passes over their networks, they claim. Even AT&T, which has throttled its own unlimited data users for years and tried to avoid any punishment for doing so, said it is “outraged” by Netflix’s actions.

• THE lobby of the sprawling, low-roofed Netflix headquarters in a sleepy town in California is dominated by a huge television screen, a popcorn cart and a series of glass display cabinets. They hold 13 golden Emmy Awards that Netflix has won for its stellar original series, including Orange is the New Black and House of Cards.

DRM

• Imagine a new, disruptive company figured out a way to let hundreds of people watch a single purchased copy of a movie, even though the rightsholders who made that movie objected. The new company charged money for this service, and gave none of it back to the movie’s creators. That’s exactly the business model that a controversial project at the Web’s premier open standards organization seeks to prevent.

• With the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I’ve been lobbying the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets the open standards that the Web runs on, to take measures to protect security researchers (and the users they help) from their own bad decision to standarize Digital Rights Management as part of HTML5.

• The W3C decided to incorporate DRM into HTML5 despite the calls from public interest groups, free software developers, security researchers and others. Now, we’re trying to get them to take the minimum steps necessary to prevent the worst harms from DRM.

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…

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