● 04.05.16

● Links 5/4/2016: Linux Civil Infrastructure Project, SUSE’s New CTO

Posted in News Roundup at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Is this truly a changed Microsoft? Personally, I don’t believe it is. The day they stop this silly 235 patent BS, then we might talk about it. But you know as well as I do, if they pull the covers back on their lie-of-the-century, then they may stand to lose billions in paying back those companies they extorted in the past.

• “Oh those patents. Yeah, that was silly wasn’t it. Well, we’re sorry your company lost share holder value due to having to pay us all that money. But let’s just let bygones be bygones…whaddaya say?

• Stick it all up in your bygones Microsoft. You’re a liar and a thief and the only reason most of your higher execs aren’t in prison is that U.S. law and your good ol’ boy network protected you. You aren’t fooling anyone. You don’t love Linux any more than I love liver and onions. You have merely realized that the only way you are going to survive into the next decade is to integrate Linux into your strategies…and integrate it deeply.

• Let’s face it. You need us. More than we need you.

Server

• Watch out for some cloud providers’ complex, multi-document contract structures that may be poorly updated and oddly worded. In particular, don’t assume that you know what’s in a provision based on its heading. For example, in some terms, ‘force majeure’ seems to be elastic-sided enough to capture “changes in the taxation basis of services delivered via the Internet” as a force majeure event!

Kernel Space

• This development caught Torvald, Linux’s founder, by surprise — 15 years ago. “I never see the entire chain running Linux. Twenty five years ago I started Linux wanting a workstation. From that to a server wasn’t a surprise. There was no single point where I was surprised, but 15 years ago I started seeing these odd, embedded systems. The first one that really caught my eye was a gas pump running Linux.”

• Today, Torvalds continued, “Many changes have been invisible. Even I don’t see all the uses of Linux.”

• On the first day of the Embedded Linux Conference, the Linux Foundation announced a new software project called the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP).

• CIP is an open source framework that will support the development of software needed to run critical services that create the backbone of any modern society, including electric power, oil and gas, water, health care, communications, and transportation.

• There’s the Internet of Things — DVRs, refrigerators, and cars — and then there’s the Internet of civic things — electrical power grids, oil and gas production facilities, and highway traffic management. Linux has a role to play in both.

• Shucks. I was just getting very comfortable with Linux 4.4.* when news came of delicious new stuff in 4.6 for some of the ARMed SoC’s on motherboards I’m considering here. Having their drivers in the mainline would certainly simplify maintenance. Oh well, at least I can be sure to have software support for years to come.

Graphics Stack

• Today, April 4, 2016, Adam Jackson announced the release and immediate availability for download of the third maintenance build in the X.Org Server 1.18 stable series of the display server for GNU/Linux systems.

• After being delayed a few weeks, the final release of the open-source Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.2 arrived earlier today, April 4, 2016, for all GNU/Linux operating systems.

• We’ve already looked at the GeForce 900 series performance on Nouveau with the Linux 4.6 kernel that finally has the necessary bits for supporting 3D hardware acceleration on these Maxwell GPUs. Those GTX 900 series results didn’t end up being particularly exciting since there isn’t yet any re-clocking support on this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver. For complementing those results are some GeForce 600/700 “Kepler” graphics card results when comparing Nouveau on Linux 4.6 with Mesa 11.3-devel and using re-clocking then compared to the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver.

• Back in December a patch rolled out for supporting ETC2 and ASTC texture compression by the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver. Today that patch was finally merged for benefiting newer NVIDIA GPUs.

• With the commit that landed there is now ETC2 and ASTC texture compression support for the GK20A (Tegra K1) graphics processor as well as the GTX 750 “GM107″ graphics processors and newer.

• If you are interested in getting involved in Linux graphics driver development outside of initiatives like Outreachy and GSoC, here are some resources.

• For those wanting to get involved in DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver development, there is the DRM Janitors Wiki page that was last updated in February. The DRM Janitors page has items like subsystem refactoring, proper panic handling, better testing. and more.

• Anastasia Stulova of ARM’s Media Processing Group has provided an outline of their work on enabling OpenCL 2.0 support within the LLVM/Clang compiler stack.

• POCL 0.13 was released today of the Portable Computing Language that continues striving for being an MIT-licensed, portable implementation of the OpenCL standard.

Applications

• Html and css made the whole exercise really easy and I have something working now on GitHub in 150 lines of code where half of it is CSS. It’s not perfect, there is plenty of space for optimization, but it is really simple and fast enough. Are you interested? Give it a try and if it doesn’t work well for you, pull requests are welcome 😉

Instructionals/Technical

• Here is the scenario. You have followed one of my guides for creating a Linux USB drive but not you want to use it again for a different purpose.

• For whatever reason it only shows a small amount of disk space showing and it doesn’t show up in Windows Explorer.

• What can you do to fix it?

• This guide takes you through the steps to getting the full disk space back. Let me be clear though that at no point did Linux break the USB drive. It just repartitioned it so that it can boot on a computer with the UEFI boot loader.

Games

• Last month Croteam open-sourced the Serious Engine 1 with the original support for Windows. Now though Serious Engine 1 with its open-source code-base is running along on Linux and OS X.

• Croteam confirmed this morning that Ryan “Icculus” Gordon who did some of the original Serious Sam Linux/OSX ports has got his work in order and opened up his platform changes.

• I love my space sci-fi games, and P·O·L·L·E·N looks incredible. I spoke to the developer, who said if there’s a demand for it, they will seriously consider a Linux version.

• Looks like for now on Linux it needs a pretty good card, but even so on Medium the game is still great to look at.

• It seems The Witness may one day see a Linux release, although the developer expects to make a loss on it, it may come to Linux “for fun or for ideological purposes”.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s your fortnightly update to the Plasma Wayland image. Rather pleasingly window decorations are the right colour and I can resize windows.

• QtCon 2016 Call for Papers is open. The event will assemble KDE Akademy, VideoLAN Developer Days, Qt Contributors’ Summit, FSFE Summit and KDAB Qt training day. We invite contributors to these projects to present their work and insight at QtCon 2016. The conference will take place from 1st to 8th September in Berlin, Germany. The talks will be from 2nd to 4th with KDE continuing with BoFs till the 8th

Distributions

• One of the complaints we hear sometimes about the plethora of GNU/Linux distributions is that they’re all “cookie cutters.” One is just like the other, we’re told, so why have so many versions of the same thing? For starters, except for a couple of rare instances, no two Linux distros are exactly alike, not even when they start with the same base. The most obvious example here would be Ubuntu, which although based on Debian, offers the user an experience completely different from the parent distro. Likewise, Linux Mint is built with Ubuntu under the hood, but as many Mint users will attest, the distro is hardly just a rebranded *buntu.

Reviews

• Matriux is an open source Linux-based operating system that’s designed in accordance with the needs of security researchers and professionals. The OS comes with more than 300 hacking tools that include the likes of Wireshark, Aircrack-ng, Nmap, Vidalia, TrueCrypt and more. Matriux hacking OS features a traditional desktop environment that’s powered by GNOME Classic

New Releases

Arch Family

• Hot on the heels of Manjaro Linux JWM 16.04 Community Edition, the Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Community Edition operating system has been released earlier, April 4, 2016, and it is now available to download.

• According to the release notes, Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 Community Edition is now powered by Linux kernel 4.4.4 LTS, includes a 64-bit version of the Chromium web browser, and the 32-bit flavor of Mozilla Firefox, a new screen capture tool that can be activated with the Print Screen button.

• As expected, the stable branch of the Manjaro Linux operating system has been used to generate the Manjaro Linux LXQt 16.04 release, which comes with the multilib repositories enabled by default for 64-bit systems, as well as the latest version of the advanced Calamares graphical installer.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• SUSE named a new CTO today, with Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo taking on the the role of Chief Technology Officer, reporting to CEO Nils Brauckmann.

• The last time I personally ever spoke to a SUSE CTO was way back in 2009, when Markus SUSERex (now CEO of OwnCloud) held the job, and SUSE was still part of Novell.

• Giacomo joins SUSE from Swisscom Hospitality Services, where he was CTO and vice president of innovation. Giacomo has as a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Geneva, where he was a senior researcher

• About two weeks ago I was on the annual openSUSE Board face to face meeting. It was great and you can read reports of what was going on in there on openSUSE project mailing list. In this post I would like to focus on my other agenda I had while coming to Nuremberg. Nuremberg is among other things SUSE HQ and therefore there is a high concentration of skilled engineers and I wanted to take an advantage of that…

Red Hat Family

Finance

• This will be the question investors and analysts will be asking when Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) is next slated to issued their quarterly results on or about 2016-06-16. Most recently the firm announced earnings of $0.34 against the Zack’s consensus of $0.31 for the quarter ending on 2016-05-31. This marked a surprise factor of 9.68%, a difference of $0.03. A large surprise can often lead to significant swings in the stock price immediately following an earnings release, or in the days and weeks to follow. As the earnings date approaches, analysts often update their models based on Street sentiment and company announcements. These can be key indicators as to if the firm will meet, beat or fall short of expectations.

Fedora

• However, these days, the world has changed. Many, many applications are now open source and managed in the Fedora ecosystem. Rebuilding applications is a fully automatable process as is the testing of those applications. Disk space has become relatively cheap, as is the bandwidth required to update individual libraries.

• What if we can ensure that the applications you have installed on your system(s) have been tested with the library that was just patched, and for the applications that have not been verified, they can continue to use the old version. In the cases where an application is facing internally only, this may be sufficient. However, if the application is public, you can elect to force it to take the patch and trust that it will just work, or choose to disable that application specifically because Fedora will know which applications are still at risk.

• I don’t get as much of a chance these days to do things like patches or other technical contribution. But I had some time free the other day and used it to stick my hands directly into a cool project, Pagure (pronounced roughly “pag-yOOR,” or listen here). You may have read about Pagure in this Fedora Magazine article a few months back.

Debian Family

• We reported the other day on the immediate availability for download of the installation-only ISO images of the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” operating system.

• It took one more day for the Debian Project team to generate all the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 Live flavors, and as promised, we’re informing you today about their availability for download, just in case you want to showcase them to your friends or deploy them on new computers.

• Debian ships an operating system that prides itself on stability. The Debian definition of stability is a very specific one – rather than referring to how often the software crashes or misbehaves, it refers to how often the software changes behaviour. Debian is very reluctant to upgrade software that is part of a stable release, to the extent that developers will attempt to backport individual security fixes to the version they shipped rather than upgrading to a release that contains all those security fixes but also adds a new feature. The argument here is that the new release may also introduce new bugs, and Debian’s users desire stability (in the “things don’t change” sense) more than new features. Backporting security fixes keeps them safe without compromising the reason they’re running Debian in the first place.

Derivatives

• Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 is desktop-friendly distribution based on Debian. Built on Debian’s Stable branch, Parsix comes with a useful selection of applications and some nice customizations, but so do many of the other Debian-based and Ubuntu-based distributions. So what exactly is Parsix’s niche? What does it do better than its competition? I downloaded the 1.3GB 64-bit ISO and gave Parsix 8.5 a trial run in order to try to find out.

• Booting from the Parsix ISO provides six options: “Boot or Install Parsix” with text mode, failsafe video, and failsafe alternative boot/install options; “Test CD for Defects”; and “Boot from First Hard Disk.” After using the “Test CD for Defects” option to check the ISO for errors, I selected the standard “Boot or Install Parsix” option, which resulted in a fairly quick load time. The GNOME desktop was ready to use and the installer was readily available on the desktop.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Want an x86 tablet that can run GNU/Linux? If a new crowd-funding campaign succeeds, it could be yours.

• MJ Technology has launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign to develop what it says will be the “world’s [sic] first true made for Linux/Ubuntu x86/x64 tablet.” In non-geek terms, that means a tablet that comes with a 64-bit x86 processor — the same type used in most desktop and laptop computers — rather than an ARM chip, the architecture common in tablets and other mobile devices.

• I’m not new to Linux operating systems. I have tried and reviewed earlier versions of Ubuntu as well as experimented with other Linux distributions but I have to admit that none of my earlier reviews have been positive. There were always inherent problems, graphical or systematic, that I have had to spend time trying to fix, something that I did not have time for. I expected Ubuntu to work right out of the box, much like how I deal with a fresh install of Windows where I set it up and install the applications that I want. But this was never the case with Ubuntu; the operating system always pushed me to give it more time and manually fix operating system problems.

• Linux is often used by power-users who love the operating system for its stability and ease of use, but here I will be talking about how user-friendly the system is for normal users who don’t code or use terminal commands.

• Last month we told you about a new GNU/Linux distribution called Budgie-Remix, whose ultimate goal is to become an official Ubuntu Linux flavor, possibly under the name of Ubuntu Budgie.

• Today, Budgie-Remix developer David Mohammed informs Softpedia about the progress made with the project, which Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that it would definitely support if there were a community around the packaging, as well as the availability of the second Beta build for the upcoming 16.04 release.

• We told you yesterday that the Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices has officially received a release date of April 6, 2016, from Canonical.

• And we promised to inform you about the new features that landed in the anticipated OTA-10 software for Ubuntu-powered devices. Therefore, it looks like Ubuntu Phone/Tablet owners will finally get VPN support, but without the ability to connect to PPTP VPN servers, Japanese keyboard support, and per-application download queues.

• We reported earlier that Canonical finally decided on a release date for the next major software update of its Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, OTA-10, due for release on April 6, 2016.

• Today, April 4, 2016, Ubuntu developer Olivier Tilloy reports on the major new features that have been implemented in the Web Browser app of the Ubuntu mobile OS, which will be pushed to Ubuntu Phone users on April 6 as part of the OTA-10 software update.

• Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical has just informed the community about the release date of the forthcoming OTA-10 software update for the Ubuntu mobile operating system.

• Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 has been in development for quite some time now, and we covered its development cycle during the past month, during which we told you about some of the new features and improvements that the update would bring to all supported Ubuntu Phone devices, as well as the brand new Ubuntu Tablet.

• Today is my five hundredth day of using the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition exclusively as my mobile phone. This is a nice piece of hardware (good power, good camera and simple but elegant design).

• Here’s what I’ve learnt.

• I have written a bunch of phone apps you can install and blogged it. Writing for the Ubuntu phone is by far the easiest platform I’ve developed for. Click packaging works really well and the speed at which you can release to the Ubuntu store and get the update on your phone is incredible. QML allows you to build beautiful apps quickly however can be a challenge when apps get more complicated. Qt / C++ is functional, but feels lacking compared to more modern languages. If I could get Swift and an improved QML working together I’d be very happy. I initially used the Ubuntu SDK for building and deplying the apps but have now switched to doing everything on the command line (I’ve never found an IDE that doesn’t feel over-engineered).

• Then there are tools like Cygwin that create a Linux-like environment for the Windows command line. But although the environment is familiar, it falls short of supporting the full array of commands and features that would work on a normal Linux environment.

Flavours and Variants

• The latest version of Linux Mint, dubbed “Rosa,” offers long-term support and in our tests we found that it delivers an improved user experience no matter which interface is selected.

• Linux Mint is a desktop operating system for non-tablet, Intel/AMD-powered systems, in 32- or 64-bit processor families, based on Ubuntu core components, but without Ubuntu’s Unity UI.

Devices/Embedded

• VIA’s “Mobile360 HMI” flat panel starter kits run Linux or Android on VIA’s own 1GHz Cortex-A9 based WM8980 SoC, and offer WiFi and touchscreen options.

• VIA Technology’s “Mobile360 HMI” flat panel display starter kits appear to have been showcased at Embedded World in late February, but came to our attention in a recent design win announcement from VIA. One of the kit models is being used by the Italian Post Office to deploy intelligent signage systems throughout the country.

• Arduino LLC debuted a $35 IoT focused MKR1000 board, supported with an Arduino IoT site, and soon, an Arduino Create code editor and Arduino Cloud platform.

• At Arduino Day this week in Berkeley, Calif., Arduino LLC’s cofounders Massimo Banzi, David Mellis, and Tom Igoe hailed the company’s new MKR1000 board as combining the functionality of the Zero and the WiFi Shield. They were referring not to the Linux-driven Raspberry Pi Zero, but rather the microcontroller-based Arduino Zero follow on to the Uno, and the relatively new WiFi Shield for Arduino boards.

• From the beginning, Raspberry Pi has been all about education. The idea that a piece of hardware everyone could afford in the hands of students used to learn programming skills and to build things was at the heart of the Foundation’s mission to fix a problem in the education system in the UK. Soon it became apparent that the hardware was only part of the solution, and hands-on training for teachers would be needed, too.

Phones

Android

• Owners of the Android-powered BlackBerry Priv can finally have something to smile about as the Canadian company has announced that this device is now open to Android beta testing program.

• Microsoft won’t admit it, but Windows Phone is a busted flush – and it’s all Android’s fault. But while Android is great at killing off lesser rivals, it’s not so good at keeping hardware firms alive: just ask BlackBerry, whose jump to Android was almost certainly too little, too late. Have smartphones become a two-horse race?

• BlackBerry has announced that BlackBerry Priv owners can now take part in its first public beta program for Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

• Realizing that it stands no chance of attracting consumers with BlackBerry 10 OS devices, BlackBerry last year released a smartphone that runs Android. Called Priv, it offers an interesting mix of business and consumer-oriented features that make it a powerful contender in the high-end segment. Many folks seem to like it, but just how much of a success is it?

• There could be many reasons behind why a person might ditch their iPhone in favour of an Android device. But, no matter what that reason may be, anyone who has done it or plans to do it primarily cares about one thing: making the switch in a way that allows him or her to successfully transfer all their contacts, photos, music, calendars, and apps from their old phone to the new one.

• Let me start with a simple truth, I am a fan of Android. I have such a passion for Google’s mobile operating system that I worked my way to a job where I get to play with Android all day, and share my experiences with you, our faithful readers. Today I am going to talk about iOS as well, and I may have to say some nice things, hang in there and we’ll get through this together.

• So what am I hoping to accomplish with this? Well, I think if it ends up that I can use an inexpensive Android device interchangeably with iOS without significant migration pain or loss of functionality, it will have been deemed a success.

• But believe it or not, I’m pretty sure that my last (and only) Android handset was the very first Android handset, the T-Mobile G1 (i.e. HTC Dream). Suffice it to say that taking and making calls, sending and receiving text messages, snapping pictures, and doing other Android smartphone functions has advanced a bit in the past few years

• The ICT Mobile App Challenge, sponsored by University of Kentucky HealthCare Corporate Communications and powered by the Information Communication Technology (ICT) program is accepting Android mobile app submissions until Friday, July 1.

• Nokia A1 images permeated the media and it looks like the company is close to releasing a mid-range handset sometime this summer.

• Chinese handset maker Oppo is throwing its proverbial hat into the ring once again with a new flagship smartphone aimed at wooing buyers away from better-known household brands.

• The handset keeps a similar appearance as Oppo’s R7s, but with an important addition – a fingerprint sensor where the ‘Oppo’ logo sits at the bottom of previous models.

Free Software/Open Source

• Google today talked for the first time about Walt, a piece of software that people can use to figure out how long it takes for a device to respond to touch or voice input. Google has been using Walt to do performance tests on Android devices and Chromebooks, and now the software is available under an open source Apache license on GitHub.

• To encourage open source app development, Google has launched the Android Experiments I/O Challenge. The three winners of this challenge will win a trip to Google I/O Developer Conference 2016 and their projects will be showcased at Android Experiments. Read more to know how to participate.

• At OSCON 2016 in Austin, Jessica Rose, developer relations at Dream Factory, will give a talk called Impostor syndrome and individual competence. In this interview, she explains the role the Dunning-Kruger effect plays in open source communities, and offers tips for managers to help them recognize when candidates under- or over-estimate their own skill levels.

Events

• ChickTech is dedicated to introducing young girls to tech careers. It’s best known for its high school program, in which teacher-nominated students are set up with workshops, mentorships, and job shadowing opportunities.

SaaS/Back End

• “Big data” and “data lake” only have meaning to an organization’s vision when they solve business problems by enabling data democratization, re-use, exploration, and analytics. At Search Technologies, we’re using big data architectures to improve search and analytics, and we’re helping organizations do amazing things as a result.

Databases

BSD

• PC-BSD developer Kris Moore was more than happy to announce today, April 4, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the PC-BSD 10.3 operating system.

• Last year LLVM developers made significant progress on developing a new ELF linker for Linux/Unix-like systems. Since then, this high-performance linker from LLD (dubbed “LLD”) has continued maturing and gaining additional functionality.

• FreeBSD 10.3 is now out in stable release form.

• FreeBSD 10.3 offers improvements to its UEFI boot loader support, support for high availability setups with the CAM Target Layout, much improved support to FreeBSD’s Linux binary compatibility layer, support with the Linux compatibility layer for running 64-bit applications on x86_64, initial support for reroot support in the reboot utility, GNOME 3.16.2 is now packaged, and there are many other improvements.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A “drill” mode has been added, category navigation is now possible when the category pane is switched off, and several bugs related to the new category properties dialog have been fixed. The user manual has also been updated.

Public Services/Government

• The combination of open source software and open standards allows public administrations to standardise enterprise IT systems, according to the employment agency of the government of the autonomous region of Galicia (Spain).

• What’s good about open source software, what are its limits and how should it be used in government? These are issues that the public is now debating vigorously in a new forum created by the U.S. government following its recent push to make more government-owned code open.

• The backstory: Last month, the federal government used GitHub to solicit public comments on draft guidelines that would require federal agencies to make more use of open source code. Among other requirements, the proposal would mandate that at least twenty percent of federally owned code be released as open source.

• At the end of last week, the White House published a draft for a Source Code Policy. The policy requires every public agency to publish their custom-build software as Free Software for other public agencies as well as the general public to use, study, share and improve the software. At the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) we believe that the European Union, and European member states should implement similar policies. Therefore we are interested in your feedback to the US draft.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Walk on almost any beach or look on the side of most roads and you’ll see the bottles, bags, and cast-off scraps of a polymeric alphabet soup – HDPE, PET, ABS, PP, PS. Municipal recycling programs might help, but what would really solve the problem would be decentralized recycling, and these open-source plastics recycling machines might just jump-start that effort.

Open Access/Content

• Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world’s best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It’s time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker.

• This, of course, describes the tale of the late Aaron Swartz. His situation captured the Internet’s collective attention as the data crusader attacked research paywalls. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he tragically committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013.

• But suddenly in 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research’s Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who’s living in Russia). Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like “hacker” and “criminal.”

Programming/Development

• GitHub is a git repository service widely used to host open source software projects. The beauty of open source projects on GitHub is that people can collaborate to edit and improve the code. Trouble is, with multiple people working on the same project, it can get a bit chaotic and one uncooperative coder can ruin it for everybody. This is why GitHub is now letting project owners of public repositories block abusive users.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

Science

• Most of us would agree that human sacrifice is a bad idea. Yet many ancient civilizations (and some more modern ones) engaged in religious rituals that involved sacrificing people. Why do so many societies evolve a system of human sacrifice, despite the obvious moral drawbacks? A group of social scientists has just published a statistical analysis in Nature that reveals how this grisly practice has fairly predictable results, which benefit elites in socially stratified cultures.

• The group examined 93 Austronesian cultures in the Pacific Islands, drawing information from the Pulotu Database of Pacific Religions to determine which groups had human sacrifice and when. Previous analysts have suggested that human sacrifice helps to maintain social stratification. In this new study, the researchers wanted to understand the relationship between human sacrifice and social stratification over time.

Security

Defence/Aggression

• Evil is participatory, says interviewee David Harris at the beginning of a documentary in progress about Vietnam-era draft resisters, The Boys Who Said No!

• Evil continuing depends on people joining in, and the first step to stopping it, he continues, is withdrawing your own participation. So Harris said no to the Vietnam-era draft, and went to jail for it.

Transparency/Secrecy

• The Senate on Monday easily passed on an 87-0 vote a long-awaited measure that would strengthen federal law and provide damages for U.S. companies affected by the theft of corporate intellectual property.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• As forest fires raged like never before across Indonesia last year, President Joko Widodo announced he was setting up a special agency to tackle the annual scourge that shrouds parts of Southeast Asia in choking haze.

• But, with this season’s fires already blazing, the Peatlands Restoration Agency has barely got off the ground and has a huge task ahead of it.

• Nazir Foead, who was appointed to lead the body, told Reuters it needed at least $1 billion in funding over five years, but that the government was unlikely to allocate a budget for another two months.

Finance

• FROM THE START of the reporting based on Edward Snowden’s leaked document archive, government defenders insisted that no illegal behavior was revealed. That was always false: Multiple courts have now found the domestic metadata spying program in violation of the Constitution and relevant statutes and have issued similar rulings for other mass surveillance programs; numerous articles on NSA and GCHQ documented the targeting of people and groups for blatantly political or legally impermissible purposes; and the leak revealed that President Obama’s top national security official (still), James Clapper, blatantly lied when testifying before Congress about the NSA’s activities — a felony.

• The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), a nonprofit group based in Washington, said the cache of 11.5 million records detailed the offshore holdings of a dozen current and former world leaders, as well as businessmen, criminals, celebrities and sports stars.

• A co-founder of the Panamanian-based law firm where the documents originated, Mossack Fonseca, confirmed the authenticity of the papers and said thay were obtained illegally in a hacking attack.

• The ICIJ said the law firm’s leaked internal files contain information on 214,488 offshore entities connected to people in more than 200 countries and territories.

• With more than 2.6 terabytes of data comprising more than 11.5 million documents, the release of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca’s records this week represents one of the largest data leaks in history—bigger than both the intelligence records revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden three years ago and the U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks in 2010.

• I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

• I thought – this now seems especially funny – that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones.

• I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.

• Authorities across the world are being spurred into action after a huge leak of confidential documents revealed how tax havens are used to hide wealth.

• Eleven million documents were leaked from the secretive Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

• They show how the company has helped some clients launder money, dodge sanctions and avoid tax.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Freedom of speech is our most precious constitutional right, defended by newspaper editors more than anyone. Why would the ASNE award an editor for censoring free speech of his readership and fellow citizens?

• Letters to editors are traditional forms of participation within democracies for citizens. When editors ignore or censor them, those that are printed fill an agenda and become “Letters from the editor.”

• THAT “TERRORISM” IS a malleable term of propaganda, with no fixed meaning or consistent application, is now quite well-established. Still, its recent application to a spate of violence targeting Israel’s occupying soldiers in the West Bank is so manipulative and extreme that it’s well worth highlighting.

• Israel has militarily occupied the West Bank for decades (it’s also still functionally occupying Gaza, as this two-minute video proves). The West Bank “occupation is illegal under international law and the United Nations has repeatedly told the country’s government to vacate Palestinian territory.” Even ardent defenders of Israel admit that “the West Bank is under a legal regime of belligerent occupation” and “Israel’s settlement enterprise is, and has always been, grossly illegal under international law.” Despite this world consensus, Israeli settlements continue to grow rapidly. Israel is not engaged in any meaningful efforts to negotiate an agreement to end the occupation, and leading Israeli ministers now openly oppose such efforts.

• The display on Zionism, which defined the concept as “the liberation movement of the Jewish people”, was the one that was ultimately approved.

• Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations, along with the group StandWithUs, displayed an exhibit of pride at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on Monday.

• Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow were trying to open savings and current accounts for their new party, which grew out of student group Scholarism

Privacy/Surveillance

• ANONYMYSING THING Tor has complained that otherwise net friendly outfit CloudFlare is blocking its services and making it a pretty pointless proposition.

• Tor’s noises follow a report from CloudFlare called The Trouble with Tor which claims that a significant chunk of the onion-smelling content is malicious. It is not particularly glowing and reckons that the trouble with Tor is significant.

• “Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94 per cent of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers,” wrote CloudFlare’s Matthew Prince.

• It has recently come to my attention that many in the free software movement are unaware of a relatively new development on x86 platforms that permanently removes the ability to use these platforms without also continually executing signed, proprietary code at the highest possible privilege level. All post-2013 (AMD) and virtually all post-2009 (Intel) systems contain this mandatory technology, and therefore, by design, can never be converted to run using pure FOSS. Prior to these changes projects such as coreboot could be used to replace the boot firmware with a FOSS alternative.

• The FBI is investigating whether a third, unknown person discussed an alleged terrorism plot with Alexander Ciccolo, the Western Massachusetts man accused of planning to attack a state university with guns and explosives on behalf of the Islamic State terror group.

• FBI Special Agent Jeffrey J. Lawrence said in an affidavit filed in US District Court in Springfield last week that Ciccolo told a witness who was cooperating with the FBI that he had discussed his terrorism plans with one other person.

• A large recruitment drive has been launched for the next generation of James Bond spies, in Cornwall.

• In other words, a majority of citizens not only think the dark net should be shut down, but they’re also making it very clear they have no idea what the dark net is. Shutting down the dark net would require finding and shutting down some 7,000 secret Tor nodes worldwide. Given how well anti-piracy efforts have gone in trying to shut down BitTorrent websites using IP addresses on the public Internet, just how well do people think this really would be? And that’s just Tor; you’d also need to shut down other dark net access avenues like I2P or Freenet, then magically ban any new technologies from being developed.

• So Facebook’s Oculus technically “launched” the Rift VR headset on March 28, and while the press generally seem to like the gear, the launch itself hasn’t been going particularly well. Most users that pre-ordered still haven’t received not only their headset — but any kind of hard shipping date from the company. Initially, all users had to go on were some anonymous posts at Reddit implying that Facebook lawyers wouldn’t let Oculus communicate a reason for the delays. Over the weekend however users received an e-mail informing them that because of an “unexpected component shortage” shipments have been delayed by a few weeks. To soothe the angry hordes, Oculus has decided to offer free shipping on all pre-orders.

• Last week the FCC announced that it would be imposing some relatively new basic privacy protections on broadband. While the full rules will be hashed out after extensive public and company input (meaning if anything they’ll get weaker), FCC boss Tom Wheeler’s proposal (pdf) is fairly basic: ISPs should alert customers when their data is stolen, ISPs should be totally transparent about what they’re collecting, and ISPs should provide users with working opt-out tools for any data collection service the ISP employs. None of these requirements are particularly onerous, and most ISPs will find that they’re already adhering to them.

• Every US intelligence agency must change with the times to stay relevant. Change is especially urgent as America’s adversaries become more adept at using the digital tools that the global technology revolution has made available within just a few clicks.

• The main Panama Papers site run by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists notes this bounty has provoked the “largest cross-border collaboration ever”; dozens of media sites are involved, although curiously few from the US. That means in-depth analysis of the implications of these documents for the rich, the powerful, the criminals and the companies they created will be appearing for many weeks, if not months. So there’s little point trying to second-guess what will emerge, not least because there is no public access to the documents involved, making deeper analysis impossible.

• Fortunately, here on Techdirt we’re interested in a few specialized angles. For example, the tech side. The Guardian states that the the Panama Papers total 2.6 terabytes of data, which dwarfs earlier leaks of financial documents: the HSBC files are 3.3 gigabytes, the Luxembourg tax files 4.4 gigabytes, and the so-called “offshore secrets” files total 260 gigabytes, while Wikileaks is a mere 1.7 gigabytes.

• A few years ago, it would have been inconceivable to “exfiltrate” terabytes of data like this. That in itself was a powerful brake on massive leaks. But today you can buy a portable, pocket-sized USB hard disk drive with a capacity of several terabytes for tens of dollars, with prices continuing to fall — thanks to Kryder’s Law and other factors. As a result, we are seeing leak inflation: where whistleblowers first grabbed megabytes and then gigabytes, but they now take terabytes, simply because they can. Why settle for a partial set, and risk leaving behind the juicy stuff, when you can simply “collect it all” (now, where have we heard that before?)

• So leaks are likely to get bigger. They may also become more common. The more high-profile whistleblowers there are, the more others are likely to be inspired to do the same. That fact has not gone unnoticed in the corporate world. In an evident attempt to stem the flow of embarrassing leaks, companies have been pushing for more laws to protect their “trade secrets.”

• Not unnaturally, perhaps, most commentary has been about the fact that Belgium’s prime minister was apparently being considered as a target. But there’s something else in this story that’s interesting, not least because it’s not explicit. The Belgian sources for this story have revealed that “plans and a photograph” were found on a computer. Assuming the laptop did indeed belong to the terrorists, that means one of two things: either the system did not use encryption at all, or that it was possible to bypass the protection. In either case, it looks like this is yet another demonstration that things are not “going dark” when it comes to terrorism, despite continued claims to the contrary.

• Given how details about the attackers are coming through very sporadically, it can be hard to see the bigger picture. To address that issue, the German journalist Sascha Lobo has pulled together all the information he could find about lethal terrorist attacks carried out by Islamists over the last two years in Europe. Specifically, these were the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014; the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in 2015; the attack on a cultural center and synagogue in Copenhagen in 2015; the second attack in Paris in November last year; and the recent attacks in Brussels.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Massive databases full of personal information are in the hands of law enforcement. There are many legitimate uses for these databases, but like anything containing sensitive information, the temptation to abuse access privileges is omnipresent. This is highly problematic when the violator is a law enforcement officer. Not only does this violate internal policies and local statutes, but it puts sensitive info in the hands of someone who has plenty of power but little apparent interest in wielding it properly.

• Officers have run suspect background checks on police review board members, used sensitive databases to screen potential dates, and spy on their ex-wives. So, it’s unsurprising that another law enforcement agency has been found to be housing abusers of sensitive databases.

• Denver police officers caught using confidential criminal databases for personal reasons – such as learning a woman’s phone number – get only light punishment, allowing the potentially dangerous abuse to continue, the city’s independent police monitor wrote in a report released Tuesday.

• The problem involves the National Crime Information Center, a database used by tens of thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country to catch criminals, recover stolen property and identify terror suspects. Its users seek information on stolen guns and cars, fugitives, sex offenders and other subjects.

• The FBI will not be talking about the Network Investigative Technique (NIT) it used to obtain information about anonymous visitors to the child porn site it seized and ran for two weeks while the NIT did its work. A recently-filed declaration (uploaded by USA Today’s Brad Heath and pointed out by the ACLU’s Chris Soghoian) by the FBI tells the court the defense will learn nothing from being provided details on the NIT’s inner workings, especially since the agency isn’t willing to turn these details over to Jay Michaud’s lawyers.

• Another policy failure of the Ministry of Justice becomes apparent: over at the Law Society Gazette, John Hyde has detailed how the MoJ has collected only a small proportion of the criminal courts charge.

• The charge has now been terminated; but the underlying problem remains: the MoJ is simply not any good at policy making and policy implementation.

• The MoJ adopts a policy, usually without assessing evidence or even thinking things through, and it then “presses on” with the policy regardless of onlookers pointing out that, well, the policy will not work.

• The policy is then eventually reversed.

• This is not just a one-off; the cycle of policy adoption-failure-reversal has been a feature of the MoJ for as long as one can remember.

• A survivor of female genital mutilation today told how she had been attacked in public over her outspoken campaign to confront the barbaric practice in London’s schools.

• Hibo Wardere, 46, who fled Somalia’s civil war at the age of 18 having suffered FGM aged six, has made it her life’s work to educate and speak frankly about the brutal surgery which affects 200 million women in 30 countries.

• Mrs Wardere, a teaching assistant who visits schools to educate children about the procedure, has written a book about her one-woman fight to wipe out FGM in her lifetime.

• According to Mashable, the Transportation Security Administration apparently spent $47,000 on an app that is essentially a random number generator—it was briefly used to assign travelers to left or right lanes at airports.

• As the website reported: “The app was used by TSA agents to randomly assign passengers to different pre-check lines as part of a now-discontinued program called ‘managed inclusion.’”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said yesterday that he has no plans to investigate Netflix for throttling its own video streams, despite Netflix’s critics calling for an investigation.

• Netflix acknowledged last week that it reduces video quality on most mobile networks to help users stay under their data caps and avoid data overage charges. Opponents of net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from throttling online content claimed Netflix is being a hypocrite, since the video company supported the FCC’s ban on throttling.

• Well, part of the Internet. The 24-story art-deco building is what’s known as a “carrier hotel,” a hub where telecommunications companies exchange Internet traffic to boost efficiency. There are five such hotels scattered around New York, according to Wired, housing everything from large Internet Service Providers like AT&T, to consumer tech giants like Google, to tiny startups in need of server space and blazing-fast speeds.

DRM/TPMs

• Netflix is in terrible danger. In fact, these might be its last days.

• Oh, not today’s Netflix. The Netflix you’re using today is fine. It made it—got to do something daring and edgy, prove out its model, and become part of the establishment.

• But the next Netflix—the company so cool it makes Netflix look like Blockbuster Video—that Netflix is practically dead in the water.

• Imagine you wanted to start a business where you bought copies of movies, fair and square, and then sold the right to people to watch them from their homes, painlessly sending them right to their doors. Every copy you bought might be viewed by hundreds of people and you could charge each one of them for the right to look at the movies you transmitted to their homes, and you wouldn’t have to give anything back—after all, you bought the movie, you own it, and you can do what you want with it.

• Sounds crazy? Illegal?

• It’s Netflix, from its founding in 1997, the company mailed DVDs around America and then the world, right up to 2007, when it switched to streaming. Right from the start, major movie studios hated Netflix (and its competitors, like Redbox). They even tried to get their retailers to refuse to sell discs to Netflix (though indies and documentary makers loved having a powerhouse who’d put their wares on equal footing with products from the big five studios). Netflix plowed on, and on the way, became the studios’ best friend, and now it’s a studio in its own right, making some of the most innovative programming on any of our screens.

• Trusted Platform Modules are fairly unintelligent devices. They can do some crypto, but they don’t have any ability to directly monitor the state of the system they’re attached to. This is worked around by having each stage of the boot process “measure” state into registers (Platform Configuration Registers, or PCRs) in the TPM by taking the SHA1 of the next boot component and performing an extend operation. Extend works like this:

Intellectual Monopolies

• An interesting case has been brought to our attention by Eric Goldman. What happens when someone takes it upon themselves to play IP Policeman for a large corporation? The plaintiff in this case, David Heller, uncovered piracy of Adobe products in Florida (referred to in the opinion as the baseball-esque “Florida Pirates”). He brought this information to Adobe’s attention. Adobe was pleased. So was Heller… at least for a little while.

• The problem seems to be that Heller felt he should have been paid for his investigative efforts while Adobe felt he should have been satisfied with being a Good Citizen.

• Shortly after publishing his discovery on his personal blog, Heller was contacted by Adobe’s outside counsel, David Pham. A meeting between Heller and Adobe reps was set up.

Trademarks

• Okay, this really needs to stop happening. There has been a recent wave of those in some way involved in the video gaming business applying for trademarks on insanely common gaming terms and phrases. We saw this in recent examples, such as Sony’s brazen attempt to trademark “let’s play,” a term for wildly popular online videos showing games in action. Tangentially, the Fine Brothers’ attempt to transform “react videos” into a licensing revenue stream was met with heavy criticism, warranted or not. And now we have Bandai Namco trying to trademark the term “finishing move” in Japanese.

Copyrights

• WordPress.com is taking a strong stance against copyright takedown abuse. The company is recommending that the U.S. Copyright Office should introduce statutory damages and bonds to decrease the frequency of fraudulent and abusive DMCA takedown requests.

• Hollywood’s major movie studios are protesting a request from Megaupload’s legal team to put their civil lawsuit on hold for another six months. The movie studios will only agree to the request if they can get copies of the Megaupload servers stored at Cogent, something the defunct cloud-hosting service fiercely objects to.

• A ruling in the Swedish Supreme Court today establishes that Wikimedia, the publisher of Wikipedia, must pay compensation to the creators of original sculptures and monuments when publishing Wikimedia’s own photos of said sculptures and monuments. Note that this isn’t about using photos without permission; the photos are used with permission. It’s the fact that the photos depict public – and taxpayer-funded – art. This is the Freedom of Panorama gone wrong, and shows just one facet of the copyright regime’s utter brokenness.

• Sweden’s supreme court ruled on Monday that the non-profit internet giant Wikimedia breaches Sweden’s copyright laws by publishing photos of public artworks.

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