● 04.03.16

● Links 3/4/2016: LabPlot 2.2.0, NixOS 16.03

Posted in News Roundup at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• What this means for you is that even though Linux is Linux, not all distributions are interchangeable. If you’re using one distribution and want to switch to another, you can’t just flip a switch. Instead, you would need to completely install the new distribution. If you’re running one distribution and want a piece of software that’s in the repositories of another, you can’t just connect to another repository. And if you find a software package for one distribution online, you can’t necessarily install it on your system. Different distributions might look the same, but there are technical differences between them that prevent them from being completely interchangeable with each other. Distributions are ecosystems. The big advantage of Linux is that it’s not a closed ecosystem. There’s a lot of choice and flexibility in it, so if you don’t like the default music player chosen by your distribution, it’s trivial to remove it and choose the one you like. And if a piece of software you want isn’t in the repositories, there’s usually a way to install it.

Desktop

Server

• Google Cloud Platform is running behind in the battle for cloud market share, yet recent changes will accelerate GCP’s fortunes.

• Container technologies, like the white-hot Docker platform, are quickly becoming the norm among enterprise IT environments according to a new study by the Web server and application specialists at NGINX.

• Connor Krukosky is an 18 year old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe…an IBM z890. This is his story.

• This past weekend we shipped CoreOS 1,000. Each release version number is a count of the days since the CoreOS Epoch, July 1, 2013. Sunday’s release marks 1,000 days of CoreOS Linux.

• We started CoreOS with the mission to secure the infrastructure that powers the Internet. Like Chrome made the front-end of the Internet more secure by bringing automatic updates to the Web browser, CoreOS Linux made the back-end of the Internet more secure by delivering automatic updates to servers and clusters. Since common practice is to set up a server and never touch it again, we believe the only way to secure the Internet is to provide automatic software updates to the server.

Kernel Space

• For some lighthearted weekend reading and sure to make for some interesting discussions in the forums is what was volleyed today onto the kernel mailing list: “The most insane proposal in regard to the Linux kernel development.” It’s about shaking up the way the Linux kernel development happens, but almost surely the proposal won’t end up resulting in changes.

• The proposal was sent out this morning by Artem Tashkinov who from the Linux kernel Git logs has contributed to the upstream Linux kernel just in the form of reporting issues and testing patches.

• Linux kernel developer Ben Hutchings announced the release and immediate availability for download of the seventy-ninth maintenance release in the Linux 3.2 LTS kernel series.

Graphics Stack

• The commits were to limadriver-ng, but before getting too excited, the latest changes were just some mundane tweaks. With the latest two pull requests, it’s just build fixes and a fix for adjusting the Lima dump path.

• Upon further inspection of the original Compiz code and the default configuration, resize is blocked from triggering the effect. Applying this to the updated effect code resolved the issue for the time being.

• As a bonus, a small issue encountered during the very early stages of the project was the velocity from the initial placement of the window creating some even more interesting animations:

• It’s almost the Year of Wayland on the Desktop(tm), and I have reached out to each of the projects this message is addressed to (GNOME, Kwin, and wayland-devel) to collaborate on some shared protocol extensions for doing a handful of common tasks such as display configuration and taking screenshots. Life will be much easier for projects like ffmpeg and imagemagick if they don’t have to implement compositor-specific code for capturing the screen!

• Samsung developers have been working on implementing client-side post processing effects for Wayland. This is to achieve similar effects like “wobbly windows” as were common to the Linux desktop going back many years with AIGLX / Compiz / Beryl.

• Samsung’s Derek Foreman and Mike Blumenkrantz have been working on a “Wayland Wobbly Windows” protocol that exposes when clients are being moved and when they’re being dragged in order to implement different graphical effects.

Applications

• It’s quite some time since we’ve done an update to the 1.0.x version. As it matures, we’re busy getting the 1.2.x tree ready for release. Nevertheless, fixes waiting to be delivered have accumulated over the time, so we’re releasing them now.

• Simplenote is a minimalist looking and a versatile syncing text editor that was only available for Mac OS previously. Not anymore though, because Simplenote developers have just released a new version finally enabling the application to natively run on both Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems.

• One of the most popular note-taking apps on iOS is now available for Linux desktops.

• Simplenote, developed by WordPress makers Automattic, lands on Linux and Windows 10 through the flexible combo of React and Electron.

• If you know the name ‘Electron’ but can’t quite place it, it might be because we’ve recently featured a bunch of other awesome Linux apps that use it.

• The year 2016 may become pivotal in the world of open source. It is no longer a secret that many “backbone” systems of the world work on open source products. But a “regular” user, Joe Blogs, is not so familiar with Free Open Source Software. This is changing. Internet messengers take a lead here.

• …in this series we will introduce you most famous open source tools for Linux systems.

• We are happy to announce the next release of LabPlot. You can download the source code of the KDE4Libs-based version of LabPlot here. For the KF5-version of LabPlot use this link.

• The main new feature of this release is a new tool that allows you to easily extract data from image files – Datapicker. This tool was contributed by Ankit Wagadre during GSoC2015, s.a. his final report, who continued to work on this tool even after the summer program was over.

• OpenShot video editor is an open-source video editor for Linux but also available for Windows and Mac, it is free and released under GNU GPL 3 license. Using OpenShot video editor you can create a film with your videos, photos, and audio tracks that you have always thought of. It lets you add transitions, effects, and sub-titles, and you can export to DVD, YouTube, Video, and many other common formats. OpenShot is written primarily in Python, with a GTK+ interface, and uses the MLT framework, FFmpeg, and Blender to power many of the advanced features. After a successful Kickstarter campaign of OpenShot we have seen that it reached to 2.0 version in recent past and made tremendous improvement. Recently developers released a new update 2.0.7 beta-4, currently main PPA doesn’t have this version but testing PPA, hopefully the main PPA will be updated soon.

• Evernote is very popular note taking application allows to create, edit and delete notes from their web based application as well as Evernote client app available for Windows, Mac and all major mobile platforms. Sadly Evernote does not provide any client app for Linux. There are some unofficial clients for Evernote such as Everpad. But there are always some issues with such unofficial clients. In this article, I have come up with the list of 3 Evernote alternatives that provide all note taking features with Linux client to sync notes right from your Linux desktop.

• We’re proud to announce that today marks the release of Discourse 1.5!

Proprietary

• Last month many users reported that Microsoft had broken the app’s ability to join calls. Two Linux enthusiasts penned the issue in a blog signed by “lots of angry Linux users.” I have contacted Microsoft numerous times over the past few weeks but it remains tight-lipped on the matter. I have a feeling Microsoft isn’t going to update Skype for Linux.

• Vivaldi is a Chromium/Blink engine based web browser with very appealing interface. The browser is tab based thus allowing user to open multiple tabs and switch between them using input devices. The browser is designed to fit all the open tabs in one windows.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Steam survey results are out for March 2016 and indicate a further reduction in the Linux gaming market-share.

• The March 2016 Steam survey results report the Linux gaming market-share at 0.85%, which is a drop of 0.06% compared to the month prior. That’s quite the drop considering that for January 2016, Steam on Linux was at 0.95%. For many months recently, the Steam Linux market-share has hovered at just under 1% and generally not seeing ~0.06% swings on a monthly basis.

• As you may know, Warsow is an open-source, multi-platform, first-person shooter game, being somehow similar to the good old Quake 3 game, but it provides a cartoonish look and feel.

• The latest version available is Warsow 2.1 (stable), which brings a big list of changes. For information about this release, see the official announcement.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The command line should be familiar to anyone who used Unix systems “back in the day.” You will also be familiar with the command line if you used the original Apple computer, or MS-DOS or any of the other DOS systems from the 1980s and early 1990s. (In 1994, I created a free software version of DOS, called FreeDOS. Many people still use FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, to run legacy business software, or to support embedded systems.)

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Since Plasma 5, the main shell is powered by QtQuick, which till now brings a requirement on a working OpenGL setup. This causes problems for Plasma in situations where we can’t run OpenGL; either extremely cheap hardware, xrdc or when a user upgrades and breaks their nvidia setup (a seemingly common occurence).

• Plasma 5.6 has finally seen the return of the Plasma Add-ons Weather widget, which had been missing the port from Plasma4.

• After our successful 4th edition of the Kdenlive café(*), we are preparing the next 2 meetings. If you are interested to join us to discuss the future of Kdenlive, you are welcome.

• During the Sprint at CERN everyone got to take a tour of the Large Hadron Collider, it was a fantastic time and a proud moment for members of the KDE community to see the massive and incredible machines which happened to have KDE software running at the controls.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Vivacious Colors is a new theme suite released by RAVEfinity targeting Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial. It looks similar to previous suites (Ambiance and Radiance Flat Colors) but from top to bottom the suite is written from scratch in order to make it better and faster for Cinnamon, Gnome Shell, and other desktops (the entire code base has been overhauled meaning it is much cleaner, modern and has some awesome new features and effects and visuals that Ambiance & Radiance Flat does not have.), it works fine in Unity, Xfce, Mate too.

• GNOME 3.22 is set to be released on September 21, 2016.

• The date is listed in the draft release schedule for the next major version of the GNOME desktop.

Distributions

Reviews

• Linux Mint is arguably one of the easiest and most user-friendly Linux-based operating systems to come by in the Linux world; and while it might be second to Ubuntu in popularity, it remains the favorite of a large majority of Linux users around the globe.

• Why? It’s easy; Linux Mint is essentially “Ubuntu done right”. While the latter might not be bad in it’s own right, it is no news that the stability and flexibility the former offers is unmatched by Ubuntu.

• I know what the Pisi team can do. I’ve seen it. Pardus was one of the more refreshing concepts for a long while, with its super-unique, super-friendly and frankly awesome approach to computing. That seems to be missing from Pisi 1.2 Xfce, and I want it.

• The current release seems to have lost some of the flare, that enthusiasm, and that can happen when projects change their name, missions statement and whatnot. What I see is an almost template-like attempt to have an Xfce edition, without all that fire and fervor that we’ve seen with Xubuntu and Mint. First and foremost, the hardware piece. After that, everything else. And like Cindy sings, I wanna have fun. Alas, not meant to be this time around. Looking forward to version 2.0, which is currently in the alpha stage. Hopefully, it will be good. Seeing what Pardus had done once upon a time, I’m counting on it.

New Releases

• NixOS developer Domen Kožar announced the release of the NixOS 16.03 operating system, which is considered an update to the previous version, NixOS 15.09.

• Dubbed Emu, NixOS 16.03 introduces updates to most of the core components, starting with the systemd init system, which has been updated to version 229, and continuing with the Linux kernel packages, now rebased on the latest long-term support branch, version 4.4, replacing the old 3.18 kernels.

• Among other software that received updates during the six-month development cycle of the NixOS 16.03 “Emu” operating system, we can mention GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.3, which is a significant upgrade from the previous 4.9 release, the Glibc 2.23 library, Perl 5.22, as well as Binutils 2.26.

Arch Family

• Another month has passed, and it’s already April, so the time has come for the lightweight and flexible Arch Linux operating system to get its monthly ISO respin.

• The Manjaro Linux development team announced the general availability of the fourteenth update pack for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) operating system.

• It took us another month since our first preview to prepare this second preview of our upcoming stable release we call Daniella.

• The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience. We ship Xfce 4.12 with this release of Manjaro. We mainly focused on polishing the user experience on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies such as switching to a new theme called Maia, we already using for our KDE edition.

• Manjaro Project leader Philip Müller announced the immediate availability for download of the second preview release of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 16.06 “Daniella” Arch Linux-based operating system.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

Slackware Family

• The development cycle of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 Linux kernel-based operating system continues, and its maintainers have announced the release of the third Beta build.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• I’m pleased that Fedora 23 runs on my G50 laptop now. It’s a good thing, and I’m pleased with the system and its behavior. Hardware compatibility is decent, but it isn’t stellar, and there’s more to be done, including better Bluetooth, better battery life, and of course, normal and sane network. C’mon! Performance and responsiveness are just okay, not as sharp as Xfce desktops, though.

• Apart from that, all the goodies we had in the original review still work. Media, smartphone support, apps, and such. Oh, I couldn’t install Gnome extensions this time, but I believe this is a temporary glitch with the online system, and not a Fedora problem. At the end of the day, Fedora comes with its mixed bag of chaos, state-of-art technology, weird issues and surprising stability, and with Gnome 3, it delivers a fair compromise between speed and aesthetics and raw functionality. No mind-splitting conclusions here, no ugly twists. Solid, dependable, just as it should be. And now, on modern technology, too. Once again, Fedora 23 proves itself, and its availability on my Lenovo box means there ought to be some great stuff coming out soon. Have fun.

• The Council is particularly interested in talks that address any of the current Council Objectives as well as discussions around new Objectives people would like to see. Of course, innovation happens outside of Fedora itself and we’d love to hear about that as well. If you’ve been using Fedora as a foundation for other interesting Free and Open Source software and/or community work, consider submitting a talk or workshop around it.

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

Debian Family

• Today, April 2, 2016, the Debian Project proudly announced the release of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 and Debian GNU/Linux 7.10 “Wheezy” maintenance releases for existing users.

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 8 (codename “jessie”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The upcoming ubuntuBSD 15.10 operating system has just received a third Beta build on the first day of April to fix a bug reported by a user in the LightDM display manager init script.

• As you may know, Ubuntu Developer Tools Center is an command-line, open-source tool that enables the users to easily install the main platforms for Android application development.

• Ubuntu Member José Antonio Rey was happy to announce the first ever UbuCon Europe conference for Ubuntu users and developers alike, which will take place later this year in Germany.

• As you may well be aware, Canonical revived its popular Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) conference, which they’ve killed about three years ago and replaced with an online event called Ubuntu Online Summit (abbreviated UOS), under the name UbuCon last year in October.

• The first UbuCon Summit event already took place earlier this year, between January 21-22, as part of the 14th annual Southern California Linux Expo a.k.a. SCALE 14x, which was held in Pasadena, CA, USA, but not many Ubuntu members could attend, especially those who live in Europe. As such, a team of dedicated Ubuntu members have put together the UbuCon Europe conference.

• I have an awkward confession.

• At this point, we have been running Ubuntu machines for at least nine years or so, starting with Ubuntu 6.06 and moving forward from there. In all of that time, one of the things I haven’t done (and I don’t think we’ve done generally) is really dive in and learn about Debian packaging and package management. Oh sure, we can fiddle around with apt-get and a number of other superficial things, we’ve built modified preseeded install environments, and I’ve learned enough to modify existing Debian packages and rebuild them. But that’s all. That leaves vast oceans of both dpkg and APT usage that we have barely touched, plus all of the additional tools and scripts around the Debian package ecosystem (some of which have been mentioned here by commentators).

• I don’t have a good explanation for why this has happened, and in particular why I haven’t dug into Debian package (because diving into things is one of the things that I do). I can put together theories (including me not being entirely fond of Ubuntu even from the start), but it’s all just speculation and if I’m honest it’s post-facto excuses and rationalization.

Devices/Embedded

• Today in Linux news, Matt Asay explained why Fair Source isn’t Open Source and Blogger Locutus reviewed the new Winbuntu monster. Microsoft lured Oracle’s Linux guy to Redmond and LinuxGizmos changed name and focus to Hackerboards.com. Of course, April 1 wouldn’t be the same without some April Fools’ jokes.

• Running a Raspberry Pi doesn’t need much power and a 5V microUSB executes the job. However, a Swedish student decided to go for a more badass way to run his DIY-companion and used an actual steam engine to power his single board computer.

• As you may know, RaspEX is a free and open-source distribution specially created for the Raspberry Pi 3 singleboard computer, by Arne Exton, a third party, independent developer.

• A few days ago, RaspEX Build 160331 has been released, bringing Kodi pre-installed, Wicd network manager, Mozilla Firefox as the default internet browser, SAMBA, PulseAudio and Bluetooth support, among others. The system has replaced LXDE with Kodi, but is still based on Debian 8.3 Jessie and Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.

• The RISC-V ISA has been featured in the latest edition of the Microprocessor Report written by David Kanter of The Linley Group.

• You get a Micro usb/2A power supply, a case with a 2 TB HD, a three headed cable for internal connections, a 4GB microSD (and a useless SD adapter) with the software, an elbow HDMI adapter and a screwdriver/screws to attach the PI to the case.

Phones

Android

• Three open-source projects haved joined together to announce a new partnership to create an open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware. Led by the work of the Toronto-based CopperheadOS team on securing the core Android OS, Guardian Project and F-Droid have joined in to partner on envisioning and developing a full mobile ecosystem. The goal is to create a solution that can be verifiably trusted from the operating system, through the network and network services, all the way up to the app stores and apps themselves. 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.

• Copperhead Will Be Crowdfunding with Privacy Partners Guardian Project and F-Droid

• There are several great projects you can do with an Arduino, and if you’re just getting started, you can use other people’s code. However, as the video above shows, you can also create your own simple apps for your Arduino project using MIT App Inventor.

Free Software/Open Source

• A startup wants a mobile menu for their new app. It’s going to cost them time and money to build one from scratch, so they search on Google to find one that is ready-made, a template if you will.

• It is because of publicly available ‘open-source software’ (OSS) that finding such a component is relatively easy. Simply put, OSS is when a product, and the source code that accompanies it, is made available for others to use and even change, or add on to, as they see fit.

Events

• I’ve written about foss-north earlier. From now, tickets are available. What we are looking at is a free and open source one day conference in Gothenburg. Great speakers already now, and the CfP isn’t even closed.

• This year I was able to attend this year’s FOSSASIA in Singapore. It’s quite a decently sized event with more than 150 speakers and more than 1000 people attending. Given the number of speakers you can infer that there was an insane number of talks in the two and a half day of the conference. I’ve seen recordings being made so I would expect those to show up at some stage, but I don’t have any details. The atmosphere was very friendly and the venue a-maze-ing. By that I mean that it was a fantastic and huge maze. We were hosted in Singapore’s Science Museum which exhibits various things around biology, physics, chemistry, and much more. It is a rather large building in which it was easy to get lost. But it was great being among those sciency exhibits and to exchange ideas and thoughts. Sometimes, we could see an experiment being made as a show to the kids visiting the museum. These shows included a Tesla coil or a fire tornado. Quite impressive.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• For most of its existence, Firefox has provided users with the ability to manage how cookies are stored with a rather high degree of granularity: users can block specific cookies, create site-wide exceptions to the accept/block policy, and configure behavior for third-party cookies. Up until Firefox 44, there was an additional option as well, one that allowed users to choose the expiration point (that is, expiring them at the end of the session or letting them persist) for every cookie they encounter. That option was removed in the Firefox 44 release, which has made some users rather unhappy.

• The option in question was found in the Privacy preferences screen, labeled “Ask me every time” on the “Keep until:” selector. When enabled, the option raised a dialog box asking the user to accept or reject each cookie encountered, with a “accept for this session only” choice provided. Removing the option was proposed in 2010, although the patch to perform the removal did not land until 2015. It was released in Firefox 44 in January 2016.

• If you want to learn more about how Safe Browsing works in Firefox, you can find all of the technical details on the Safe Browsing and Application Reputation pages of the Mozilla wiki or you can ask questions on our mailing list.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Because OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the open standard that I am involved in most, I want to write a few words about it.

• Since last autumn, I’m working on the ODF standard for the Dutch government. Supporting standards in government is an important task: new software comes and goes, but documents, once created, should be readable and reusable into the future.

• When you switch to LibreOffice, you can usually assume that all the features available in other office suites are available. They might have a slightly different name, or be placed in another menu, but the basic functionality should be the same in both. If you make a note of the features you use most often, and systematically learn how to do each one, you can often cope with the transition.

BSD

• A filesystem is nothing but the data structures that an operating system uses to keep track of files on a disk. The filesystem stores pictures, music, videos, accounting data and more. The different operating system comes with various filesystems. One may need to move data between FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems like OS X or Linux based devices. Knowing all about filesystem help us to archive or move data between system. The “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystem” is an essential, practical and well-written book.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I’ll discuss aspects of our behavior and jargon that stop or slow down some new users and contributors in free software, so that in outreach efforts, we can be better at bridging the gap. These include git’s terrible UI, our in-person conference structures, and widespread scorn of and dismissiveness towards team sports, Top 40 music, patriotism, religion, small talk, and Microsoft Windows. In getting rid of unnecessary barriers, we need to watch out for disrespectful oversimplification, so I’ll outline ways you can know if one of our weirdnesses is necessary. And I’ll talk about how to mitigate the effects of an inessential weirdness in your outreach efforts.

• I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.

Public Services/Government

• Concerning France, the court decision may have a considerable impact, as the source code of any software produced by or for the various national or local administrations becomes legally “libre” or open source under no or very permissive conditions. Therefore the interest to clarify the applicable licence: when communicating it, relevant administration should then apply the EUPL or the French CeCILL, according to the 12 September 2012 prime minister Ayrault circular.

• The MIT Media Lab is part of an academic ecosystem committed to liberal sharing of knowledge. In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that we are changing our internal procedures to encourage more free and open-source software.

Licensing/Legal

• Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW’s compliance with the licence terms.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The panacea of true data optionality and portability is technically possible today, but is being held back by a range of factors at vendors and end-user firms. Andrew Miller, managing director of consultancy Net Effect, highlights the key gating factors and encourages us to take a leap of faith that will deliver benefits for all.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Open source may be ready to consume a category of products that has thus far eluded the trend: microprocessors.

• Researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Bologna have collaborated on the development of an open source microprocessor designed specifically for use in wearable devices and other small Internet of Things (IoT) things.

Programming/Development

• We have reached an exciting milestone: one million people have launched some version of Atom in the last month. That’s three times the number of active users we had under a year ago at the one-year anniversary of Atom becoming completely open-source.

• The genius minds at MIT have created a new system that uses a programming language to design complex DNA circuits and control the living cells. As a part of their research, MIT researchers have programmed 60 circuits with a variety of functions.

• So many, Python and JavaScript seem like similar languages — object oriented, functional hybrid, dynamically typed and a rich library. Keeping the same in mind, probably, a coder has created a small and simple Python to JavaScript translator.

Leftovers

• “WHEREAS,” it read, “Mr. Stephen G. Wozniak (hereinafter referred to as WOZNIAK), Mr. Steven P. Jobs (hereinafter referred to as JOBS), and Mr. Ronald G. Wayne (hereinafter referred to as WAYNE), all residents of the County of Santa Clara, State of California, have mutually agreed to the formation of a company to be specifically organized for the manufacture and marketing of computer devices, components, and related material, said company to be organized under the fictitious name of APPLE COMPUTER COMPANY.”

• It was a year ago, on 4 April 2015, when the great recovery to survival started as bottom-of-the-table Leicester beat West Ham United 2-1. With the pressure to avoid relegation at its height, Leicester won seven of their last nine games to stay up.

• Vardy has helped push Leicester City to the verge of the Premier League title, and forced his way into England’s Euro 2016 reckoning just four years after plying his trade in non-league football.

Defence/Aggression

• In fact two documents strongly backed Qaddafi on this issue. The first was a secret cable to the State Department from the US embassy in Tripoli in 2008, part of the Wikileaks trove, entitled “Extremism in Eastern Libya,” which revealed that this area was rife with anti-American, pro-jihad sentiment.

• [...]

• By October of that year, Muammar Qaddafi was dead and stuffed in a meat locker. Denied post mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world was presented with photographs of Qaddafi, dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte.

• U.S. officials are pushing a dubious new scheme to “unify” a shattered Libya, but the political risk at home is that voters will finally realize Hillary Clinton’s responsibility for the mess, writes Robert Parry.

• But critics have pointed out that the summits have only focused on highly enriched uranium in civilian possession, which, according to the Department of Energy, only accounts for 2 to 3 percent of the world’s supply. That small percentage is used mostly by academics for research and medical isotope production.

• The remaining 97 to 98 percent is held in military stockpiles, which the security summits have largely ignored. Countries keep the safeguards on these stockpiles secret, and military material falls outside the scope of international security agreements.

• Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments are on the defensive as U.S.-backed political movements employ “silent coup” tactics to discredit and remove troublesome leaders, writes Ted Snider.

• The next time a candidate or reporter asks during a debate about education or healthcare “But how are you going to pay for that?” I would like the person being questioned to respond “The same way we find money to pay for Iraq.”

• So maybe it would just be better for Flint, Michigan to claim it is under attack by ISIS instead of just being poisoned because no one has the money to fix America’s infrastructure.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• A question about fossil-fuel-industry donations to her campaign unleashed a rare flash of anger from Hillary Clinton on the rope line in New York on Thursday.

• The moment was recorded by an activist, whom Greenpeace identified as Eva Resnick-Day, who sought to pressure Clinton about the roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars her campaign has received from individuals with ties to fossil-fuel industries.

• Unilever has cancelled its contracts with the IOI Group, after the major Malaysian palm oil trader was suspended by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) for destroying forests and peatlands in Indonesia.

• The IOI Group – whose customers include Kellogg’s and Mars – is one of the largest companies to have lost RSPO certification since the roundtable was formed in 2004.

• The decision will be seen as a test of consumer company policies on responsible sourcing of palm oil, which commit major brands to excluding suppliers responsible for deforestation and peatland drainage.

• The startling new finding was published Wednesday in the journal Nature by two experts in ice-sheet behavior: Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University. It paints a grimmer picture than the one presented only three years ago by a United Nations panel that forecast a maximum sea level rise of three feet by 2100. But that projection assumed only a minimal contribution from the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. And things could get worse in the centuries to come — the melting from Antarctica alone, not counting other factors like thermal expansion, could cause the seas to rise by nearly 50 feet by 2500, drowning many cities.

• Saudi Arabia is getting ready for the twilight of the oil age by creating the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund for the kingdom’s most prized assets.

• Over a five-hour conversation, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman laid out his vision for the Public Investment Fund, which will eventually control more than $2 trillion and help wean the kingdom off oil. As part of that strategy, the prince said Saudi will sell shares in Aramco’s parent company and transform the oil giant into an industrial conglomerate. The initial public offering could happen as soon as next year, with the country currently planning to sell less than 5 percent.

• Norway has killed more whales than any other nation over the past four years, and some of that meat has become animal feed for the Norwegian fur industry, according to new documents unveiled by two environmental organizations.

• Revelations from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) come as Norway opened up its whaling season Friday, and a week after Japan reported killing more than 300 minke whales — including pregnant females — for what it labeled as research. Now, groups are once again calling for an end to whaling — though this time the attention is placed on Norway, which along with Iceland and Japan, ignores a 30-year-old international moratorium on whale hunting.

• Federal law requires coal companies to clean up and reclaim toxic mining sites. But what happens when a coal company’s gone bankrupt?

• 2016 has got off to an even worse start. The United States’ second largest coal company – Arch Coal –­ filed for bankruptcy. The Chinese government announced the closure of more than 5,000 coal mines, with 1,000 to go this year. Almost half the UK’s coal power stations have announced closure in the last 12 months.

• So the factchecker’s job is to determine whether Clinton is right to say that she just gets money from people who work for fossil fuel companies, and that the Sanders campaign is lying about this, or whether the Sanders campaign is actually correct in saying that she relies heavily on funds from fossil-fuel lobbyists—right?

• See, that’s why you don’t have a job at NPR.

• The Bernie Sanders campaign countered by pointing to a Greenpeace tally that says she has collected “$1,259,280 in bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.”

• Additionally, Greenpeace found “$3,250,000 in donations from large donors connected to the fossil fuel industry to Priorities Action USA,” the main Super PAC backing Clinton’s campaign.

• Flint has made moves to sue the state of Michigan, citing “grossly negligent oversight” that led to the city’s ongoing water contamination crisis.

• The city filed a notice of intent to sue with the Court of Claims on March 24, and it was reported on by various Michigan news outlets on Friday.

• It names the state, the Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), and four MDEQ employees as defendants.

• Flint mayor Karen Weaver wrote in the notice of intention to file claim, which the Flint Journal has posted here (pdf), that “the damage to the water system infrastructure caused by the MDEQ employees’ grossly negligent oversight is irreversible.”

Finance

• PRESIDENT OBAMA on Monday endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his handpicked Democratic National Committee chair, in her congressional race. What’s stunning about that is that Obama felt the need to endorse a six-term congresswoman running in a heavily Democratic district at all.

• Greece called on the International Monetary Fund on Saturday to explain whether it was seeking to usher Athens toward bankruptcy ahead of a pivotal referendum in June on Britain’s membership in Europe. Greece’s comments came after I.M.F. officials raised questions in a private discussion published by WikiLeaks about what it would take to get Greece’s creditors to agree to debt relief.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Covering the Trump campaign on a daily basis today appears to be a rather miserable media existence. Reporters are threatened by staffers, and the Trump communications team seems to be utterly nonresponsive to media inquires. (“There is no Trump press operation,” one reporter told Slate.)

• As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders campaign in New York ahead of the state’s primary later this month, more than 16,000 people gathered in St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx for a Sanders rally on Thursday. He spoke alongside film director Spike Lee and actress and activist Rosario Dawson, known for her roles in “Kids” and many other films, including “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” Amy Goodman caught up with Dawson after the rally to discuss why she supports Bernie Sanders. “It’s a revolution,” Dawson says, noting the corporate media has failed to fairly cover his platform. She also discusses the rise of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. “He isn’t the problem,” she says. “There is a lot of stuff been going on for many years that has gotten out of control.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• GERMANY’S STATE BROADCASTER, ZDF, apologized on Friday for what it called satire that had crossed the line into slander and removed video of a comedian reading an obscene poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from its website and YouTube channel.

• The poem, which was read by the German satirist Jan Böhmermann on Thursday’s edition of his late-night show “Neo Magazin Royale,” described Erdogan in vile, obscene terms — even comparing him, at one stage, to Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who fathered seven children with a daughter he held in a cellar for 24 years — but the text was presented as part of a comic demonstration of the difference between satire and slander.

• It was ten years ago that the London Review of Books published an article on the Israel Lobby by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, distinguished scholars at two of America’s top universities. The following year the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux found the courage to publish The Israel Lobby, a book with 357 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews.

• The Israel Lobby is an understated critique of the enomous influence that the tiny state of Israel, which consists of land stolen by fire and sword from the helpless Palestinians, exercises over United States foreign policy. The crazed Israel Lobby went berserk. Mearsheimer and Walt were demonized as anti-semetics who wanted to bring back Hitler.

• Also in 2006 former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Peace Not Apartheid, was published by Simon & Schuster and became a New York Times bestseller with 846 overwhelmingly 5 star amazon.com reviews. Carter, who as US president did his best to bring Israel and Palestine to a settlement, truthrully explained that Israel was the barrier to a settlement. The Israel Lobby demonized Carter as an anti-semite, and the Jews on the board of the Carter Center resigned.

• Have you noticed how people you are eager to meet often prove to be disillusioning? Perhaps anticipation builds up huge expectations but they end up less than they originally seemed. Rather than their perceived star qualities it’s their faults and flaws you notice. Consequently, heroes end up with feet of clay.

• Justice minister says government is discussing the removal of criminal libel but the pending censorship and freedom of expression law takes precedence

• Law Commissioner Franco Debono yesterday told The Malta Independent that the whole criminal libel controversy involving shadow Justice Minister Jason Azzopardi could have been avoided if criminal libel was abolished in 2011, as he had proposed in a private members bill.

• The ‘controversy’ that Dr Debono spoke of is the 6 April criminal libel case against Shadow Minister for Justice, Dr Jason Azzopardi which was instituted through a criminal complaint by former police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit.

• Opposition leader Simon Busuttil insisted that the police, who are instituting criminal defamation charges against PN MP Jason Azzopardi, are “state apparatus in the grip of Joseph Muscat”.

• Busuttil told MaltaToday that criminal defamation is a perfectly acceptable legal tool unless “manipulated by government to intimidate the Opposition” and that Opposition MPs are only charged in court with criminal defamation in banana republics and dictatorial regimes.

• The editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times, a tabloid closely tied to the Communist Party and known for its often-rabid nationalism, isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to be calling publicly for more freedom of speech and less censorship.

• A top magazine of China’s ruling Communist Party lashed out at critics of its ongoing anti-corruption campaign, saying foreign media and individuals from home and abroad were intentionally trying to discredit the effort as a political “power struggle”.

• Chinese President Xi Jinping has pursued a sweeping campaign to root out corruption since assuming power about three years ago, and has promised to strike hard at both senior and low-level officials, the “tigers” and “flies”.

• Nonetheless, there has been persistent speculation that the graft crackdown is also about Xi taking down his rivals.

• Last summer, the Chinese Communist Party regime began a nationwide crackdown on human rights activists and attorneys. It’s time that the American Bar Association, the largest attorneys organization in the world’s most powerful democracy, took a clear, unequivocal stand on the crackdown in defense of universal values and the rule of law.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The non-profit Open Whisper Systems (OWS) organization is best known for its smartphone apps: first TextSecure and, more recently, Signal. Lately, however, the project started branching out by developing a desktop front-end for Signal, thus allowing users to take advantage of verifiable, end-to-end encryption for instant messages and group chats from the comfort of a full-size keyboard. The desktop version remains linked to the smartphone edition, although opinions certainly may vary as to whether that constitutes a plus or a minus.

• TextSecure was released as open-source software in 2011, followed by an encrypted voice-calling app named RedPhone in 2012. OWS then merged the functionality into a single iOS app called Signal in March 2015; the Android version was released in November of the same year. Signal Desktop was announced in December, via a beta program for which potential users had to sign up and wait to receive an invitation. As with all of OWS’s projects, of course, the source code for Signal Desktop is available on GitHub.

• Widespread CDN acceptance has been a security flaw that sacrifices privacy simply because it breaks web pages on anything put a text-based browser, which is a sacrifice few are willing to make for the sake of their information remaining local.

• The assemblyman, who decried Apple for “risking our national security and the safety of our kids” by using encryption, also uses an iPhone.

• Air chiefs have bought nine spy planes, each one like a flying GCHQ.

• The Boeing P-8 Poseidon is as effective at information ­gathering as the Government’s eavesdropping headquarters.

• The FBI, which just a few days ago was attempting to convince the country of its helplessness in the face of encrypted iPhones, has generously offered its assistance in unlocking an iPhone and iPod for a prosecutor in Arkansas, the Associated Press reports.

• TechCrunch has contacted the prosecutor’s office for details, which for the moment are thin on the ground — but the timing seems unlikely to be a coincidence. It was only Monday that the FBI announced it had successfully accessed a phone after saying for months that it couldn’t possibly do so — and that Apple was endangering national security by refusing to help.

• BRITISH AUTHORITIES are attempting to force a man accused of hacking the U.S. government to hand over his encryption keys in a case that campaigners believe could have ramifications for journalists and activists.

• England-based Lauri Love (pictured above) was arrested in October 2013 by the U.K.’s equivalent of the FBI, the National Crime Agency, over allegations that he hacked a range of U.S. government systems between 2012 and 2013, including those of the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

• The U.S. Justice Department is seeking the extradition of Love, claiming that he and a group of conspirators breached “thousands of networks” in total and caused millions of dollars in damages. But Love has been fighting the extradition attempt in British courts, insisting that he should be tried for the alleged offenses within the U.K. The 31-year-old, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, has argued that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S., where his legal team says he could face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail.

• Just when we thought some surveillance reforms might stick, the administration announced it was expanding law enforcement access to NSA data hauls. This prompted expressions of disbelief and dismay, along with a letter from Congressional representatives demanding the NSA cease this expanded information sharing immediately.

• Wednesday, CloudFlare blogged that 94% of the requests it sees from Tor are “malicious.” We find that unlikely, and we’ve asked CloudFlare to provide justification to back up this claim. We suspect this figure is based on a flawed methodology by which CloudFlare labels all traffic from an IP address that has ever sent spam as “malicious.” Tor IP addresses are conduits for millions of people who are then blocked from reaching websites under CloudFlare’s system.

Civil Rights/Policing

• For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an investigative series about police abuse in South Carolina. I’ve found a dizzying number of cases, including illegal arrests, botched raids, fatal shootings and serious questions about how all those incidents are investigated. Many of these cases were previously unreported, or if they were reported, the initial reports were a far cry from what actually happened. The series will run at some point in the next week. But in the meantime, I want to share one particularly horrifying incident that I came across this week while researching the series.

• What this country calls a War on Drugs has never been indiscriminate in its victims. The punitive, interventionist drug policies embraced by a succession of US administrations have hit hardest in communities of color, and, in Latin America, it has been the poor, the indigenous and those outside of power that have borne the brunt of practices, nominally aimed at stopping drug-trafficking, that have only driven corruption and horrific violence.

• Right before the end of last year, the DOJ — facing budget cuts — announced it would be ceasing its “equitable sharing” program with local law enforcement agencies. These agencies complained loudly about the unfairness of being decoupled from the asset forfeiture money train, as this partnership often allowed them to route around more restrictive state laws.

• The Justice Department has announced that it is resuming a controversial practice that allows local police departments to funnel a large portion of assets seized from citizens into their own coffers under federal law.

• Mark Weisbrot: “They’ve been trying to get rid of all the left governments, really, for the whole 21st century.”

• [...]

• “In a flash, Argentina has become pro-American,” CBS’s 60 Minutes told viewers, and Leslie Stahl shared that watching Macri and his wife play with their daughter, “you can’t help but think of the Kennedys and Camelot.” US corporate media seem to concur: Macri is a pragmatist, and though they aren’t certain he can lift Argentina from what CBS called “a morass of debt, inflation and international isolation,” it’s clear we’re meant to wish him well.

• “You’re about to go to jail for being a dumb-ass,” said a Houston Federal Agent Calderon to PINAC citizen journalist David Warden.

• Boy, was he wrong.

• The Houston Federal Court Security Agent assaulted PINAC correspondent David Warden when he lawfully recorded outside of a Federal Courthouse on its sidewalk.

• Texas police launched a “complaint censorship” attack on David Warden’s YouTube channel News Now Houston, claiming his videos violate their privacy.

• Texas prosecutors admitted they can’t prove their contempt of cop case “BARD” against PINAC correspondent David Warden, who recorded video near a Shell Oil Refinery on the outskirts of Houston.

• In other words, state attorneys had no way to prove that David Warden interfered with public duties of an officer last December, as charged, because BARD stands for ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ and officers couldn’t conceive of a single illegal thing Warden did while recording near the oil refinery as you can see in the legal document below.

DRM

• In 2013, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) raised the ire of many in the free-software community (and elsewhere) by adopting an API that adds support for DRM modules within web content. Now, the working group that produced the API in question has come up for renewal, and a number of high-profile parties—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Free Software Foundation (FSF)—are using the occasion to push back against the DRM camp, in hopes of regaining some of what was lost.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• This week, we’ve got one standout project that seems worth highlighting here at Techdirt because of its commitment to things we all care about: cutting-edge media technology, the planet we all live on, and the public domain. Catalog.Earth is a project to use the first to capture the second and dedicate it to the third.

• Safe Harbors Work for Rightsholders and Service Providers

• Washington, D.C. – Content takedowns based on unfounded copyright claims are hurting online free expression, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the U.S. Copyright Office Friday, arguing that any reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) should focus on protecting Internet speech and creativity.

• EFF’s written comments were filed as part of a series of studies on the effectiveness of the DMCA, begun by the Copyright Office this year. This round of public comments focuses on Section 512, which provides a notice-and-takedown process for addressing online copyright infringement, as well as “safe harbors” for Internet services that comply.

• “One of the central questions of the study is whether the safe harbors are working as intended, and the answer is largely yes,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The safe harbors were supposed to give rightsholders streamlined tools to police infringement, and give service providers clear rules so they could avoid liability for the potentially infringing acts of their users. Without those safe harbors, the Internet as we know it simply wouldn’t exist, and our ability to create, innovate, and share ideas would suffer.”

• A coalition of 400 artists and various music groups including the RIAA are calling on Congress to reform existing copyright law. The DMCA is obsolete, dysfunctional and harmful, they claim, calling for stronger measures against the ongoing piracy troubles they face.

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.