● 04.11.16

● Links 11/4/2016: Krita 3.0 Alpha, New Linux RC

Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The phrase “year of the Linux desktop” has been around for well over a decade but has become more of a meme rather than a statement of fact. Without a doubt, Linux has seen much success on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, as well as servers, network appliances and the emerging “internet of things” device category. However, despite Microsoft stumbling with Windows Vista and Windows 8.x, Linux failed to capitalize on these moments of weakness.

• While Linux has lost many battles to Microsoft on the desktop, the war is not over. Torvalds pledges to dedicate the next 25 years of his life to usurping Windows. Will the open source kernel prove victorious on the desktop? It is totally possible. After all, time is not finite, and even the Roman Empire fell. If you follow history, nothing lasts forever and that should ring true for Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop.

• While Linux and other open source technologies continue to rule the server and mobile markets, the desktop arena is still dominated by Windows operating systems. Linux creator Linus Torvalds knows this fact very well and expresses his commitment to work hard to make Linux a bigger force in the desktop war.

Server

• Thanks to adoption from Google and Rackspace, IBM’s Power9 CPU could begin making a dent into the server chip market currently dominated by Intel. The partnership with Nvidia should also help IBM’s Power9 become popular in servers, as well as supercomputers.

• Rethinking data center design is happening out in the open here at Google. Today we’re announcing that we’re working with Rackspace to co-develop an open server architecture design specification based on IBM’s new POWER9 CPU.

• Rackspace has been in the OpenStack cloud business since day one, being one of the original creators of the open source cloud effort along with NASA. Much of the emphasis in the past for Rackspace was on both private and public cloud offerings, operated from within Rackspace’s own data center, but that is now changing. This week, Rackspace announced a new service that brings hardware, software, support and management for OpenStack cloud operations onto a customer’s own location.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode, Nadia describes the origins of open-source in the Free software movement, its rise to popularity, and today’s golden era where mainstream and popular technologies like React, Spark and Docker are all open source projects.

Kernel Space

• Today we are launching the new, redesigned Linux.com. It’s been a long journey since we first surveyed our loyal readers about possible new features. You enthusiastically and generously responded with all of the ways you love – and don’t love – the site. We’ve since taken that feedback and redesigned the site with numerous improvements.

• It’s Sunday evening in the US, so we probably don’t even have to tell our dedicated Linux readers what we’re about to announce in this article because they’re probably already testing Linux 4.6-rc3.

• Yes, that’s right, Linus Torvalds has made available his regular Sunday release for the next RC build of the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel, which early adopters can download and compile as we speak (see download options at the end of the article).

• At the moment of writing this article, Linus Torvalds still hasn’t prepared an official announcement, but most certainly, Linux kernel 4.6 Release Candidate 3 comes with the regular improvements and bug fixes for filesystems, architectures, networking stack, sound stack, as well as driver updates.

• Linux 4.6-rc3 is the third weekly test release of the in-development Linux 4.6 kernel. Being well past the merge window, this week was about landing more bug and regression fixes throughout the 21+ million lines in the Linux Git tree.

Graphics Stack

• Mice have an optical sensor that tells them how far they moved in “mickeys”. Depending on the sensor, a mickey is anywhere between 1/100 to 1/8200 of an inch or less. The current “standard” resolution is 1000 DPI, but older mice will have 800 DPI, 400 DPI etc. Resolutions above 1200 DPI are generally reserved for gaming mice with (usually) switchable resolution and it’s an arms race between manufacturers in who can advertise higher numbers.

Benchmarks

• What games perform better on Linux/SteamOS for you than they do on Windows?

• Basically I am testing speed results of basic operations between four interpreters:

• Bash 4.3.42 Dash 0.5.8.2 Python 2.7.11 Python 3.4.3

Applications

• The idea behind this tool is to reinforce Linux command-line knowledge through repeated and guided practice in a safe (Docker) environment.

• Finally, graphical user interface for Steel is available. For more see downloads.

• Libsteel is updated to version 2.0 including major refactoring of the library. Several small bug fixes where also made.

• Command line version of Steel is also updated to version 1.4. It includes mostly minor changes to make it compatible with libsteel 2.0.

• Rhythmbox is a free, open source audio player developed by GNOME team to organize digital music in Gnome and other desktop environments using the GStreamer media framework.

• Qmmp is a popular open-source, cross-platform multimedia player, similar to Winamp and written in Qt. It has support for popular multimedia file formats, including MPEG1 layer 2/3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, Native FLAC/Ogg FLAC, Musepack, WavePack, WMA, Midi.

• WeeChat is an open-source, multi-platform lightweight and extensible chat client, having a text user interface only. Having support for scripts and plugins that can be loaded either at startup or dynamically, the app has support for IRC.

• WebTorrent Desktop (beta) is a simple, open source BitTorrent client that lets you stream torrents, available for Linux, Windows and Mac.

• A text editor is software used for editing plain text files. It has many different uses such as modifying system configuration files, writing programming language source code, jotting down thoughts, or even making a grocery list.

• Whatever the level of sophistication of the editor, they typically have a common set of functionality, such as searching/replacing text, formatting text, undo/redo, importing files, as well as moving text within the file. However, many of the editors included in this article are feature-rich, and can be further extended using plugins and libraries.

• We previously published an article on the best open source editors in 2008. Given the length of time that has elapsed, and the new projects that have come forward, it’s prudent to update the article. Here’s our updated list of the finest open source editors available for Linux. Naturally, it’s largely a matter of preference, but it’s extremely likely you’ll find your ideal editor below.

• WikiToLearn 0.7 was relased with the new WikiToLearnHome env.

• The process was not easy as i hoped but at the end of the day we got the new system up and running.

• Last week I wrote about some improvements made to Open-Source Stress Testing + Torturing Your Linux Software/Hardware while this weekend some more improvements have landed.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi is fairly new web browser compare to other famous browsers, the initial release of Vivaldi was in January, 2015. It has improved a lot and evolved since the first release. Basically it is based on the open-source frameworks of Chromium, Blink and Google’s V8 JavaScript engine and has a lot of great feature which I will table later.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Kick Ass Commandos has been in Early Access for a while now, and it already supports Linux since five months ago.

• The developer behind Banished, a city builder/survival game coming to Linux has written up their thoughts on Linux. It does make for an interesting read.

• The popular first-person mystery and adventure game Firewatch is now available DRM free on GOG, and it has Linux support of course.

• I still see a surprising amount of confusion from people on what Steam games work on Linux. Hopefully this will help clear it all up.

• I’m personally sad about this, as I have been following Enemy Starfighter for years. It reminded me of Freespace 2 which is my favourite space sim of all time. The developer confirmed to me it’s no longer coming to Linux officially, but he may team up with a porter in future.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, April 9, 2016, KDE announced the release and immediate availability of this month’s KDE Frameworks 5 maintenance release, version 5.21.0, for the latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop and KDE Applications.

• Krita Foundation’s Scott Petrovic was glad to inform us via an e-mail announcement about the immediate availability for download of the first Alpha build of the upcoming Krita 3.0 open-source digital painting software.

• On the road to Krita 3.0, we’re releasing today the first alpha version. This has all the features that will be in 3.0, and contains the translations, but is still unstable. We’re fixing bugs all the time, but there’s still plenty to fix! That said, we think we nailed the worst problems and we’d love for you all to give this version a try! The final release is planned for May 1st.

• KDE – Krita 3.0 has made another step closer to being released with this weekend’s alpha release.

• Krita, of course, is a digital painting and sketching program designed for illustrations, paintings, comics, concept art, and other use-cases. This KDE-aligned program has been ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 as part of the big Krita 3.0 milestone. The Krita 3.0 Alpha release features many other new features besides changing the underlying tool-kit and libraries. Krita 3.0 Alpha offers a revamped layer panel, support for dealing with GIMP brushes, rulers/guides/grids/snapping. tools for creating hand-drawn animations, other usability improvements, and other highlights.

• First, Zanshin 0.3.1 is a simple bugfix release. After Zanshin 0.3 started to be used more widely, two bugs were reported by our users which are now fixed: 1. in some cases the cursor in the editor would jump around preventing editing items has been tamed and shouldn’t affect you anymore; 2. if you left your Zanshin running overnight, the Workday page content wouldn’t get update at midnight, but now it reacts to change of day properly.

• The topic of the new drawing challenge is Mythical Creatures. Here it is on the forum. Post your entries in on or before April 23, 12.00am UTC, so we can vote in the last week.

• The conference runs from Sept 2 – 4. There will be talks, workshops, BOFs and meetings as well as social events. KDE BOFS will be held from Monday 5th to Thursday 8th elsewhere in Berlin.

• Here you’ll have a chance to meet in person, have a look at the latest and greatest Plasma Desktop and try out Plasma Mobile and Plasma Media Center.

• With KDE Plasma 5.6 released, the developers are now making plans for Plasma 5.7. According to https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5, the major release will become available starting with July 5, 2016, three maintenance releases for KDE Plasma 5.6 being scheduled until then.

• This year, Akademy is being held together with other Free Software conferences, all rolled up into one. The umbrella we all live under is QtCon, and it will bring KDAB‘s Qt Training Day, the Qt Contributor Summit, Akademy, as well as the FSFE Summit and VideoLan Dev Days under one roof (well, multiple roofs; one umbrella). The call for papers is now available.

The first day (5th March 2016) of the conference started with a inauguration by LNMIIT director sir and other faculty members.

• Digia, which acquired Qt from Nokia, is demerging their Qt interest so it will be a completely separate company.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME developers are working overtime these days to push the packages for the first point release of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment on the official channels.

• It’s a little more than two weeks since GNOME made yet another release. Having a release video to go alongside with it is almost a tradition by now. I’m slightly frightened and super excited about it at the same time. (-:

• Most sources advise using gnome-tweak-tool to set “Window Scaling” to 2 (or whatever). This alone doesn’t work adequately for me; when I make my external 4K monitor primary, gnome-settings-daemon decides to set Xft.dpi to 96 because it thinks my monitor DPI is too low for scaling, even though I have set window scaling to 2. Arguably this is a gnome-settings-daemon bug. The result is that most apps look fine but some, including gnome-shell, care about Xft.dpi and don’t scale. I fixed the problem by manually setting

• As you may know, Xfdashboard is a dash for XFCE (similar to the Unity 7 Dash) that displays an overview of open applications enabling the users to switch between apps easily, a workspace selector, an app launcher and a search tool. Also, shortcuts can be easily created.

• The GNOME developers are working overtime these days to push the packages for the first point release of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment on the official channels.

• GNOME 3.20.1 is currently scheduled for an April 13 release, so we can’t help but notice that many of the desktop’s core components and applications have been updated lately to the 3.20.1 version.

• Everything is still sort of a work-in-progress, but soon I expect to have patches for all the right people in all the right places. There is a lot of slight-of-hand going on here, so it’s worth taking some time to get the details documented.

Distributions

• Welcome to This Week in Solus, installation #25. If you haven’t already read our big announcement on Budgie 10.2.5, stop reading this post and catch up.

Reviews

• In the advent of Linux’s grand entrance into the PC space back in 1993, has been an insurgency of operating systems and that time also happened to be the wake of a technological-oriented generation adopting computers at a much faster pace than ever before.

• In the light of this fact, Debian took off grandly (two years after Linux was born) and through it, a staggering 200 independent distributions have poured out – thanks to Ian Murdock.

• We can likewise say thanks to Canonical/Ubuntu for driving the concept of user-friendliness and usability for the “normal human” which other distros like Linux Mint et ‘al have perfected over the years to the extent at which it is more than reliable in this day and age.

New Releases

• We’ve been informed today, April 9, 2016, by the developers of the Q4OS project, a Debian-based GNU/Linux operating system, about the release and immediate availability for download of Q4OS 1.4.9.

• Q4OS 1.4.9 is not a major release of the Debian-based OS, but a maintenance one that brings various improvements and bug fixes, along with a few new features, such as the implementation of a new Applications Menu (a.k.a. Start Menu) called “Bourbon.”

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

• The Manjaro community was happy to announce the release and immediate availability of download of the Manjaro Linux Enlightenment 16.04 Community Edition operating system.

• Chakra GNU/Linux maintainer Neofytos Kolokotronis has just announced a few minutes ago the availability of the latest KDE technologies in the main repositories of the Arch Linux-based operating system.

• Just like Arch Linux, Chakra GNU/Linux is a rolling release distribution, which means that users install it once and get free updates for the rest of their lives, or at least until they decide to move to another Linux kernel-based operating system.

• The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users.

Slackware Family

• Ah yes… my promise to build LO 5.0.5 packages for Slackware 14.1 has still not been fulfilled. Sorry folks, will see what I can do about that. But there is still some stuff which is ranking higher on my TODO list.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• As we have previously written, Debian 8.4 Jessie has been released in all the traditional flavors: Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, LXDE and Gnome.

• After that, the installation-only ISO images were created and after one more day, the Debian Project has managed to generate all the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 Live flavors.

• As you may know, Debian Jessie is the current stable release, while Debian Wheezy has reached the oldstable status.

• Yesterday, the Debian Project has announced that both Debian 8.4 Jessie and Debian 7.10 Wheezy have been released, bringing package updates and security enhancements.

• During this weekends bug squashing party and developer gathering, we decided to do our part to make sure there are good books about Debian available in Norwegian Bokmål, and got in touch with the people behind the Debian Administrator’s Handbook project to get started. If you want to help out, please start contributing using the hosted weblate project page, and get in touch using the translators mailing list. Please also check out the instructions for contributors.

• As you might have heard by now, Ana (Guerrero) and I are organising a small Debian event this spring: the Debian SunCamp 2016.

• March was the eleventh month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• ubuntuBSD developer Jon Boden has just announced a few minutes ago on Twitter that the fifth Beta build of the upcoming ubuntuBSD 15.10 operating system is ready for public testing.

• This makes me so incredibly happy!

• Making notes is an essential part of life of a responsible person, if you are a student, teacher, or professional and you use Linux then you may not find applications that are famous among other OS users but it doesn’t mean unpopular applications can’t compete. Today we are going to showcase some good note taking applications which are going to help you and are available for Linux as well. So you can write notes and increase your productivity, well there are online services who offer taking notes but you may don’t want to use them. And no we are not going to talk about sticky note here. Lets Start making list what we have! Shall we?

• Do you stay too late to work on your computer or use your computer in the dark? It is probably hurting your eyesight, the blue light has more effects but you can handle this issue easily. F.lux a software designed for those you use computer in the night/dark room, it reduces blue light and give a warm color and make it comfortable for your eyes. It is free, easy to use, and cross-platform available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. It has panel indicator which is quite handy and there are bunch of options which can be configured from preferences.

• Canonical shares some impressive stats in a new infographic (which you can see below). helps to offer further insight into just how widely used Ubuntu is.

• Since April 2015, we have been silently launched a series of monthly publications of our blog called UbuntuBuzz Magazine. This magazine is a simple collection of all of UbuntuBuzz posts in every month. Until now, we have already published nine issues of UbuntuBuzz Magazine. We provide these magazine issues so our readers have something important they can save or share with another. You are free to download these publications. We want to introduce them here.

• The OTA-10 update was, however, delayed further due to an issue which cropped up in the PulseAudio sound server blocking the access of Camera and Messaging apps to the microphone when in the video mode.

• Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system and distribution for personal computers, smartphones and network servers. It uses Unity as its default user interface. It is based on free software and named after the Southern African philosophy of ubuntu (literally, “human-ness”), which often is translated as “humanity towards others” or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”.

• Ubuntu release manager Steve Langasek informs the community about some changes happening to build-dependency handling in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and upcoming versions of the widely used operating system.

• According to Mr. Langasek, the Ubuntu development team admits that the process of separating Ubuntu packages between the “main” and “universe” software repositories caused the Ubuntu development to be dragged down because the “main” repo also covered build-dependencies in addition to dependencies.

• In the run-up to the release later this month of version 16.04 of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system, the company behind it is promoting its product with the slogan “Ubuntu is everywhere”.

• Canonical, the company in question, has now been releasing Ubuntu every six months since October 2004. And to be sure, it has been instrumental in spreading the use of Linux in many spheres.

• But, there is still red ink on its balance sheet.

• Many institutions use Ubuntu, including Netflix, Snapchat, Dropbox, Uber, Tesla, and the International Space Station.

• This is according to Canonical, which is celebrating the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release.

• Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system, which is used in personal computers, smartphones, and network servers.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint has suffered a reputation damage, which has led to doubts and questions being raised in the community. Valid questions, because you don’t want any private, confidential data to be transmitted to a third party without your knowledge and consent. So you may want to check if Mint is clean, and whether it can be used safely. This article outlines the technical methods.

• However, you should also not forget that this is not the first, nor the last hack of a website related to a distro project. All the big names have had similar issues in the past. Moreover, obscurity does not guarantee security. If you’ve never thought about this topic before Feb 20, then you really should not be focusing too much energy on it now. Because all the other times you downloaded packages and updates your system, there could have been a breach somewhere, but since you were not aware of it, you did not do anything about it. Now you are aware, but it does not change the reality, only your perception. You may want to double-check everything now, it’s a natural reaction, but it’s not really grounded in any hard, solid facts. If anything, the hack only helps put more security highlight on the distros and their management, so they should now be more secure than ever before.

• There.

• This is the type of Linux desktop deployments we all want to see more of. No drama, just regular users using Linux all day to get their job done.

• The Linux Mint project is alive and kicking, despite the unfortunate “hacking” issues that happened at the end of February 2016, and team leader Clement Lefebvre talks today about the upcoming features in Linux Mint 18.

• As you might very well be aware, the major Linux Mint 18 release is coming this year a free upgrade to existing Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” users, bringing a ton of new features, improvements to the in-house built apps, as well as the latest versions of the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments.

• The Linux Mint project is alive and kicking, despite the unfortunate “hacking” issues that happened at the end of February 2016, and team leader Clement Lefebvre talks today about the upcoming features in Linux Mint 18.

• As you might very well be aware, the major Linux Mint 18 release is coming this year as a free upgrade to existing Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” users, bringing a ton of new features, improvements to the in-house built apps, as well as the latest versions of the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments.

• We’ll talk a bit about development this month. It’s still too early to talk about some of the big things we’re working on (vertical panels and multiple backgrounds in Cinnamon, new icon and GTK themes) but some cool changes landed already so I’ll try to give you a little overview.

• Before we get to that though, I’d like to thank all the people who fund us. We’re able to be where we are and to do what we do thanks to our partners, sponsors and the many people who send us donations. Our user base grew again since the release of Linux Mint 17.3 and we received more donations than usual in February and March, probably as a solidarity response to the attacks led against our project. Despite the important downtime in February and the fact that people couldn’t donate during the attacks, we recorded more than 600 donations and more than $14,000 at the end of the month. That’s really amazing.

• Another piece of good news is that we’ll soon announce a new partnership with our friends at Sucuri, who are about to become our third biggest sponsor.

Devices/Embedded

• Aaeon announced the NanoCOM-SKU, a Linux-ready, 84 x 55mm COM Express Type 10 Mini module with 6th Gen Intel Core CPUs and three PCIe interfaces.

• According to Aaeon, the NanoCOM-SKU is the industry’s first COM Express Type 10 Mini computer-on-module equipped with 6th Gen Intel Core “Skylake” processors. This certainly appears to be true, although there’s no word on a ship date, and the datasheet is still stamped as preliminary. Applications for the module are said to include graphics-intensive medical equipment or digital signage, as well as high-loading robotics and automation controllers used in industrial automation.

Phones

Tizen

• The Tizen Operating System (OS) on smartphones has been evolving quite nicely since it was first launched on the Samsung Z1, back in January 2015, with version 2.3 of the OS. Since then we have had the release of the Samsung Z3, which came preloaded with Tizen 2.4, and then the Z1 recently received a huge Over the Air (OTA) update that also took it to version 2.4.

Android

• BlackBerry’s CEO has used an interview with United Arab Emirates outlet The National to announce plans to move the troubled mobe-maker’s Android efforts downscale.

• Last year, the company launched into the Android market with the high-end Priv, which garnered good reviews.

• Sales, however, were another matter, and the Priv only landed in about 600,000 customers’ pockets in the final quarter of financial year 2016.

• A common criticism of free-software projects built for Android is that they all too often rely not just on the frameworks and libraries that are part of the official Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but on the proprietary APIs implemented in various add-ons from Google—such as the Google Maps API or the Google Cloud Messaging message-broker service. Working around these Google-supplied components is not trivial, but there is at least one effort underway to provide a drop-in free-software replacement: microG.

• While we prefer Android mainly because of its ability to mold to our liking, we cannot discount the value in the simplicity of iOS. Admitting that there is still a learning curve, and that the average Android user may be frustrated with the lack of features and options, many users out there appreciate the familiarity and thoughtlessness of using iOS.

Free Software/Open Source

• There has been a lot of talk lately about a most unique combination: GNU—the fully free/libre operating system—and Microsoft Windows—the freedom-denying, user-controlling, surveillance system. There has also been a great deal of misinformation. I’d like to share my thoughts.

• [...]

• Free software is absolutely essential: it ensures that users, who are the most vulnerable, are in control of their computing—not software developers or corporations. Any program that denies users any one of their four freedoms is non-free (or proprietary)—that is, freedom-denying software. This means that any non-free software, no matter its features or performance, will always be inferior to free software that performs a similar task.

• Not everyone likes talking about freedom or the free software philosophy. This disagreement resulted in the “open source” development methodology, which exists to sell the benefits of free software to businesses without discussing the essential ideological considerations. Under the “open source” philosophy, if a non-free program provides better features or performance, then surely it must be “better”, because they have outperformed the “open source” development methodology; non-free software isn’t always considered to be a bad thing.

• [...]

• Secondly, when you see someone using a GNU/kWindows system, politely ask them why. Tell them that there is a better operating system out there—the GNU/Linux operating system—that not only provides those technical features, but also provides the feature of freedom! Tell them what free software is, and try to relate it to them so that they understand why it is important, and even practical.

• It’s good to see more people benefiting from GNU; but we can’t be happy when it is being sold as a means to draw users into an otherwise proprietary surveillance system, without so much as a mention of our name, or what it is that we stand for.

• Everyone has at least a good reason to prefer software freedom over non-free software products.

• Rancher Labs have released version 1.0 of their open source Rancher container management platform, which allows the deployment of Docker containers via Docker Swarm, Kubernetes or Rancher Labs’ Cattle across a range of underlying infrastructure. Rancher manages the underlying compute fabric, exposing control via a web-based UI that can be secured via RBAC/ACL, and can be deployed across a combination of multiple public cloud vendors, private virtualised clouds and bare metal. The platform also includes integrated load balancing and persistent storage services.

Events

• OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the major international tech conference in Albania organized by Open Labs Hackerspace, the open source and free software community in Albania. The conference promotes software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, global movements which originally started more than 30 years ago.

• The third edition of the the annual OSCAL conference will take place once again in Tirana on 14 & 15th of May and will gather more than 400 free libre open source technology enthusiasts, developers, students, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the idea that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop and customize to its needs; that knowledge is a communal property and free and open to everyone.

• Document Freedom Day is a day where we celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards. It is held annually, on the last Wednesday of March. However, this year, the Ambassadors in Singapore decided to celebrate it on 24 March, 2016.

• In the “State of The Union”, David Aronchik, Kubenetes Project Manager for Google, brought folks up to date with what’s happened in the Kubernetes community and what’s ahead for version 1.3 and beyond.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Josh Matthews is a platform developer at Mozilla. He’s a programmer who writes Rust code and is active in the development of Firefox. His development experience has led him to enjoy mentoring new contributors in open source projects.

SaaS/Back End

• Cloud milestones—Amazon announcing AWS hitting a $10B annual run rate and OpenStack’s 13th release—lead some to wonder who is winning. Both are. A decade ago, the cloud was not a computing term and Amazon was best known as an online retailer of consumer goods like books. Now the company is on track to generate $10 billion in annual revenue from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud business.

Databases

• This year at the Percona Live Data Performance Conference I’ll be talking about MySQL. MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database, enabling the cost-effective delivery of reliable, high-performance and scalable web-based and embedded database applications, including all five of the top five websites.

• My interest in databases grew while working in banking in the late nineties. Back then I implemented back-end ATM servers using HP-UX and Sybase as the development platform. I remember we had an allowed maintenance window from 2am-5am, and struggled with finishing a blocking create index operation on our main table with 30 million rows. I remember thinking “Why can’t this be done while the database is online?”

Education

• Students are not taught word processing, they are taught Microsoft Word. They are not taught presentation skills, they are taught Microsoft Powerpoint. They are required to present their work, be it essay, slideshow, or graph, in Microsoft-owned proprietary formats, recorded onto thumb-drives formatted with a Microsoft-patented file systems. Nothing else will do.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Public Services/Government

• An open source telehealth kit built using a Raspberry Pi will be piloted with heart patients at a southern NHS trust this financial year.

• Richard Robinson, a technical integration specialist at HSCIC, developed the telehealth prototype called MediPi to prove that “telehealth is affordable at scale”.

• He said eight months ago his wife, who works for a charity helping socially isolated older people, was asked to find volunteers for a telehealth pilot.

• “She came home with the kit and it was all high-end tablets, 3G and Bluetooth enabled devices and I was really shocked by what I thought would cost,” explained Robinson.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Free and open source software advocates have courageously blazed a trail that is now being followed by those interested in open source for physical objects. It’s called free and open source hardware (FOSH), and we’re seeing an exponential rise in the number of free designs for hardware released under opensource licenses, Creative Commons licenses,or placed in the public domain.

Programming/Development

• I’ve been building software professionally for over 10 years now. I love what I do and I hope to be an old programmer someday. But along the way, I’ve encountered many terrible things that have made me hate my job. I wish that someone had given me a roadmap of what to expect earlier in my career, so when some new and unfortunate awfulness occurred that I wouldn’t have felt so alone and frustrated.

• This post is meant to be such a guide. I have three goals.

• We still have nightmares about GeoCities too, and yes, JavaScript has historically been used for things like that. It originated at Netscape in the mid 90s as a lightweight scripting language to add interactive properties to web pages, but it has come a long way since then. Sure, many programmers look down on JavaScript, and it’s massively overused on some websites, but it also has plenty of fans.

• The web-development community was briefly thrown into chaos in late March when a lone Node.js developer suddenly unpublished a short but widely used package from the Node Package Manager (npm) repository. The events leading up to that developer’s withdrawal are controversial in their own right, but the chaotic effects raise even more serious questions for the Node.js and npm user communities.

• npm itself is a module repository for Node.js code, akin to the Python Package Index or similar repositories for other languages and frameworks. Users can install a package with a simple npm install foo, but the service is also widely used by Node.js developers to automatically fetch and install dependencies: projects list their dependencies in the package.json file, and they are recursively fetched from npm and installed when the package is built. Using npm in this manner is standard operating procedure, allowing complex JavaScript applications to be written on top of multiple third-party frameworks in minimal lines of code. The service, however, is run by a private company called npm, Inc., rather than by the Node.js project.

Leftovers

• The next president of the United States will need to be an extremely effective negotiator. Armed conflict, political deadlock, and diplomatic crises abound. The president will be called upon to resolve the war in Syria, manage complex relationships with Russia and Iran, handle hot spots such as North Korea, Libya, and Ukraine, navigate competitive tensions with China, and revive a modicum of bipartisanship in Congress. Ironically, the only presidential candidate who has been asserting his prowess as a great negotiator is someone who has precisely the wrong instincts and experience for the types of conflicts the president will face. The Donald Trump approach to negotiation would be not only ineffective but also disastrous — and there are clearly identifiable reasons for this.

Health/Nutrition

• A recent study showed that 1 in every 4 children in preschool is taking medication for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The majority of kids that age have a tough time paying attention to extended periods of time because their brain and body is nowhere close to being fully developed. Medication shouldn’t be the first option when it comes to treating kids who have ADHD or who we think have ADHD.

Security

• This flaw is easily patchable and needs a firmware update from Arris. Since the cable modems are not consumer-upgradable, this patch can be only applied if the ISPs push the update to the consumers.

• More than 135 million modems are said to be vulnerable to a flaw that can leave users cut off from the internet — just by someone clicking on a trick link.

• Jason Hoffman started his career as an internal auditor, but after 7 years he was ready to leave the job he was “really good at” and try something different. The transition to security more than 18 years ago “was probably the best decision I made in my career,” says Hoffman, who is now CSO at marketing automation software vendor Marketo. “I don’t think anyone in 1998 could have predicted how important security would be today.”

• We launched Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators over 5 years ago. Just as Safe Browsing warns users about dangerous sites, this service sends notifications to network administrators when our systems detect harmful URLs on their networks.

• There was a news story published last week about the almost total lack of cybersecurity attention in undergraduate education. Most people in the security industry won’t be surprised by this. In the majority of cases when the security folks have to talk to developers, there is a clear lack of understanding about security.

• On EFI systems you can handle this by sticking the secret in an EFI variable (there’s some special-casing in the code to deal with the additional metadata on the front of things you read out of efivarfs). But that’s not terribly useful if you’re not on an EFI system. Thankfully, there’s a way around this. TPMs have a small quantity of nvram built into them, so we can stick the secret there. If you pass the -n argument to sealdata, that’ll happen. The unseal apps will attempt to pull the secret out of nvram before falling back to looking for a file, so things should just magically work.

Defence/Aggression

• British law enforcement and intelligence services have helped draw up an extra-judicial ‘kill list’ to assassinate the world’s most wanted terrorists and drug smugglers in foreign countries.

• The sensational claims, which raise disturbing questions about Britain’s involvement in the targeting of aircraft and drone strikes, will be revealed in a 50-page report by the Reprieve human rights charity to be published tomorrow.

• It will state that the UK has been a key, long-standing partner in America’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, targeting not only alleged terrorists, but also supposed drug traffickers, and earmarking them for drone and missile strikes – often on the basis of unsubstantiated ‘intelligence’ which has never been tested in court.

• Although the top secret ‘kill list’ has been in existence for years and is continually revised, Britain’s contribution has never been sanctioned by Parliament.

• The startling evidence, drawn from leaked official documents, reveals the two agencies involved are the electronic eavesdropping organisation GCHQ, and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), now rebranded as the National Crime Agency (NCA).

• Current and former members of Congress, U.S. officials, 9/11 Commissioners and the families of the attack’s victims want 28 top-secret pages of a congressional report released. Bob Graham, the former Florida governor, Democratic U.S. Senator and onetime chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says the key section of a top secret report he helped author should be declassified to shed light on possible Saudi support for some of the 9/11 hijackers. Graham was co-chair of Congress’ bipartisan “Joint Inquiry” into intelligence failures surrounding the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that issued the report in 2003. Graham speaks to Steve Kroft for 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, April 10 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

• ONE OF THE deadliest airstrikes in Yemen since a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began bombing the country used munitions supplied by the United States, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

• The March 15 attack targeted a crowded market in the village of Mastaba in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. HRW said it found remnants of a “GBU-31 satellite-guided bomb, which consists of a U.S.-supplied MK-84 2,000-pound bomb mated with a JDAM satellite guidance kit, also U.S.-supplied.” The group said it also reviewed evidence provided by British news channel ITV, which found remnants of an “MK-84 bomb paired with a Paveway laser guidance kit.”

• The report provides yet more evidence of U.S. complicity in the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Yemen. The Obama administration has been a key military backer of Saudi Arabia in its yearlong campaign against a rebel movement in Yemen known as the Houthis. In addition to billions of dollars in arms sales, the Pentagon has provided the Saudi-led coalition with logistical and intelligence support. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. role may make it “jointly responsible” for war crimes.

• According to the article in the paper, one Afghan family were killed by a missile strike after they were mistaken for a member of the Taliban.

• Despite Libya’s bloodshed and chaos, ex-Secretary of State Clinton still defends her key role in the 2011 “regime change,” but her reasons don’t withstand scrutiny, as Jonathan Marshall explains.

• From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represents chump change in the Pentagon’s wastage sweepstakes and in the context of its $600-billion-plus budget, but think of it as indicative of the absurd lengths the Department of Defense will go to when what’s at stake is throwing away taxpayer dollars.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The schemed Directive on “Trade Secrets Protection” is meant to repress industrial espionage, but applies to the whole of society legal remedies that should only apply to businesses, writes a broad coalition of journalists, lawyers, scientists, unions and associations.

• Lobbying companies working at the heart of Whitehall are exploiting loopholes in transparency legislation that allows them to avoid declaring clients who pay them thousands of pounds to help influence Government policy, The Independent can reveal.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5tn (£1.7tn), according to the first estimate from economic modelling.

• In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24tn, or 17% of the world’s assets, and wreck the global economy.

• The research also showed the financial sense in taking action to keep climate change under the 2C danger limit agreed by the world’s nations. In this scenario, the value of financial assets would fall by $315bn less, even when the costs of cutting emissions are included.

• In late 2015, the Food and Drug Administration gave the greenlight to AquaBounty, Inc., a company poised to create, produce and market an entirely new type of salmon. By combining the genes from three different types of fish, AquaBounty has made a salmon that grows unnaturally fast, reaching adult size twice as fast as its wild relative.

• [...]

• Unfortunately, outside of Alaska, our poor management of an enormous fishing industry and important habitat has depleted fish stocks all along our coasts. Salmon species, in particular, are sensitive to environmental changes. The development and industrialization of our coast has polluted and dammed the rivers they depend on to breed. Although salmon used to be abundant on both the east and west coasts, large, healthy populations of salmon now exist mostly in Alaska.

Finance

• David Cameron’s troubles deepened on Saturday night as a Tory donor named in the Panama Papers was revealed as a trusted middleman for a company raided by the Serious Fraud Office, which is investigating what has been described as the world’s biggest bribery scandal.

• [...]

• Unaoil is at the centre of allegations that the business “systematically corrupted the global oil industry” by delivering millions in bribes on behalf of well-known multinationals to secure contracts.

• A week ago, authorities in Monaco raided the headquarters of the company, as well as the homes of some of its bosses, as part of a British-led investigation into a corruption scandal implicating businesses all over the world.

• Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have been concluded. Citizens now have access to the 30-chapter agreement that is several thousand pages long. The TPP has been opposed by four major presidential candidates, and faces criticism in Congress. Nevertheless, it is likely that the trade deal will get a vote sometime this year.

• As Hillary Clinton questions rival Bernie Sanders over the depth of his financial reform ideas this week, a group of former government officials – once tasked with regulating Wall Street and now working in the financial industry or as Wall Street lobbyists — are participating in a fundraiser for her in the nation’s capital.

• The invitation for the April 6 fundraiser, obtained by Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time, describes a “conversation” with Hillary finance chair Gary Gensler and Senators Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

• “You know, you can start off at McDonald’s at $13-$14 an hour in some cases, you could certainly find easier jobs for more money and that’s a real problem when you’re trying to keep good people in your facilities,” said Scott Kibbe with the Texas Health Care Association.

• The Bitcoin network has been supporting the Open Execution principle for quite some time now, as services owners can’t run away with people’s bitcoins, and no one else can use your coins and send them to somebody else. Moreover, no additional money can be created out of thin air.

• While speaking to a crowd in Philadelphia on Thursday, former president Bill Clinton was interrupted by protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement carrying signs criticizing the crime bill and welfare reform bill that he signed into law in the 1990s.

• In response, Clinton gave a misleading defense of welfare reform. “They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty,” he said of the protesters. “Then why did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty when I was president?”

• For as long as people have yearned for more stuff, intellectuals have chastised them for that desire. Even Plato’s “Republic” followed the “decline of a virtuous, frugal city as it was corrupted by the lust for luxurious living,” Trentmann reminds readers. But his true nemesis is more recent: John Kenneth Galbraith, author of “The Affluent Society” (1958), in which the late economist argued that modern society seeks not only to fulfill our needs but also to create new ones, propelling us to live beyond our means, go into debt and thus strengthen the power of business. Though Trentmann acknowledges that the book has been enormously influential in cementing popular notions of consumerism, he dismisses it as “not a sober empirical study but a piece of advocacy to justify greater public spending.”

• America’s great public research universities, which produce path-breaking discoveries and train some of the country’s most talented young students, are under siege. The result may be a significant weakening of the nation’s preeminence in higher education. Dramatic cuts in public spending for state flagship universities seem to be at odds with widespread public sentiment. Americans say they strongly believe in exceptional educational systems; they want their kids to attend excellent and selective colleges and to get good, well-paying, prestigious jobs. They also support university research. After 15 years of surveys, Research! America found in 2015 that 70 percent of American adults supported government-sponsored basic scientific research like that produced by public universities, while a significant plurality (44 percent) supported paying higher taxes for medical research designed to cure diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s. Nonetheless, many state legislators seem to be ignoring public opinion as they essentially starve some of the best universities—those that educate about two-thirds of American college students.

• In case there was any doubt, the presidential election fight has confirmed that blasting Wall Street, even eight years after the financial crisis, is still a vote-getter.

• Hillary Clinton has said she’d like to jail more bankers. Donald Trump has skewered the hedge fund managers who are “getting away with murder.” And Bernie Sanders has made Wall Street accountability a centerpiece of his campaign.

• Of course, financial industry lobbyists aren’t about to take this lying down. In recent weeks, they’ve turned up the heat on lawmakers to block one particular measure that Sanders has mentioned in nearly every stump speech: taxing Wall Street speculation.

• Americans are used to paying sales taxes on basic goods and services, like a spring jacket, a gallon of gas, or a restaurant meal. But when a Wall Street trader buys millions of dollars’ worth of stocks or derivatives, there’s no tax at all.

• Sanders has introduced a bill called the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would correct that imbalance by placing a small tax of just a fraction of a percent on all financial trades. It wouldn’t apply to ordinary consumer transactions such as ATM withdrawals or wire transfers.

• [The following is an imagined 1932 New York Daily News editorial board interview with Franklin Roosevelt during his presidential campaign. The Daily News comments below derive from the editorial board’s interview with Bernie Sanders on April 1, 2016. The Roosevelt statements are taken primarily from his 1933 inaugural address and his 1936 campaign speech at Madison Square Garden.]

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A poll released Friday shows that Bernie Sanders has significantly narrowed the lead Hillary Clinton once claimed in New York.

• The new Emerson College poll (pdf) shows Clinton leading Sanders among Democratic primary voters in the state by 18 points—56 percent to 38 percent. That marks a significant drop in support for the former secretary of state since the same poll was taken less than one month ago.

• BACK IN 2014, in an interview with the magazine Chief Executive, General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt explained that starting in the 1980s, “most of us” — i.e. GE executives — “saw it as our task to outsource manufacturing, to move it to low-cost countries. This continued through the 1990s and into the very early 2000s.”

• Immelt’s statement of the obvious is relevant because Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said essentially the same thing about GE this week, which triggered an angry response from Immelt.

• In a meeting on Monday with the New York Daily News editorial board, Sanders was asked to name a corporation that he believed was “destroying the fabric of our nation.” Sanders said that GE was a “good example” because it had shut down “many major plants in this country. Sending jobs to low-wage countries. … That is saying that I don’t care that the workers, here have worked for decades. … The only thing that matters is that I can make a little bit more money. That the dollar is all that is almighty.”

• “The corporate media and establishment keep counting us out, but we keep winning by large margins,” the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeted triumphantly, after the Vermont senator won the Wisconsin primary by a large margin this week.

• Journalists and activists in New York — the site of what may be the most important primary in the election — have noticed. And they are organizing in response.

• Enter Operation Battle of New York.

• It is the name of a new campaign launched by the editorial groups of The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal, left-wing citizen journalist publications that have served as important voices for American social movements for more than a decade.

• “We can expect corporate media to do everything it can to prop up Clinton and ignore or mischaracterize Sanders and the increasingly broad and diverse movement that supports him,” Operation Battle of New York writes in the description accompanying its Indiegogo campaign.

• Before dropping out of the presidential race last month, Marco Rubio repeatedly declared that the 2016 presidential election is “the most important in a generation.” Such language is, of course, not uncommon to hear during election seasons. Politicians have been assuring the public for decades that the “next election” will be more significant than ever before, and that if the opposition party wins, the consequences will be catastrophic. As Rubio once stated in overtly apocalyptic language, “if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.”

• Establishment politicians running for high office live and breathe elaborate focus group-tested lines. In time, they become those lines. But every now and then, extreme political pressures can force a few unscripted words to slip through. And when that happens, we gain a rare glimpse of the candidate’s deeper understanding of their world and our world, and the gap between the two.

• Hillary Clinton suffered such a moment on Tuesday afternoon while speaking at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Before taking the podium she already knew from internal polling that Sanders was going to win handily in Wisconsin. That meant she would be a loser in six of the last seven states, and by landslides, no less. Her staff is telling her not to worry; all the math on her side. Her delegate lead is so large Sanders can’t possibly overtake her.

• But Hillary is not stupid. She saw Sanders draw 18,000 people in the Bronx, virtually all people of color, and that was before his latest Wisconsin victory. She knows that nothing is set in stone if your opponent is clobbering you in primary after primary. Political momentum is something to fear and could infect the big states like New York and California.

• On top of that, young people are giving Bernie more than 80% of their votes. Even large majorities of young black and Latino voters are flocking to Sanders. How can that be?

• Sanders had the support of 47 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters while Clinton had 46 percent—a narrow gap that fell within the poll’s 2.5 percent margin of error. The national survey was conducted in the days before the Vermont senator handily defeated the former secretary of state in the Wisconsin primary, and it tracks other polls in the last week that found Sanders erasing Clinton’s edge across the country. In a poll that PRRI conducted in January, Clinton had a 20-point lead.

• On Wednesday, the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), “which targets Russia and [the] former USSR.” The “Putin attack” was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, WikiLeaks added, saying that the US government’s funding of such an attack is a serious blow to its integrity.

• If three is officially a trend, chalking is now a trendy — and highly controversial — way for Donald Trump fans to show their love.

• This week, two schools — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — jumped into the chalking fray, joining the headlines made in March at Emory University with pro-Trump messages scrawled on campus grounds.

• Following a now-familiar timeline, the chalked messages appeared and the storms followed. At UTC, it hit the student government.

• Krugman being Krugman, that means he’s been flooding the zone with anti-Bernie columns and blog posts.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Panama Papers will have political and social fallout for months and years to come, much like the Libor scandal or the Edward Snowden leaks. A vote of no confidence for Iceland’s prime minister and Internet censorship in China are likely but the beginning.

• Is the government considering to relax the process of film certification? Also will filmmakers be able to get certification online instead of going through a long and winding process as is the case now?

• Can media affect behavior? Can a violent movie or video game provoke violence? Can visiting obscene, racist or misogynistic websites breed anti-social behavior? Should government step in to stop or regulate them?

• While the Internet now provides easy access to the darkest corners of the imagination, these concerns are not new. Even when the first films unspooled a century ago, authorities worried that the cinema would corrupt our communities. Pennsylvania became the first state to pass a law regulating motion pictures.

• Fan Binxing, architect of the China’s infamous Great Firewall, was put in the embarrassing position of having to use a VPN in front of a live audience when trying to access a blocked web page.

• On April 3 Fang Binxing was giving a speech on internet safety at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute Technology. During the speech, he presented a defense for internet sovereignty and used North Korea’s own version of the system as a talking point.

• Harare West legislator Jessie Majome says the censorship board is concerned with controlling political space, leaving information considered immoral and misappropriate finding its way into national radio and television.

• Censorship was a key instrument for controlling the masses during Soviet times. These days Uzbekistan’s ageing President Islam Karimov — who served as the First Secretary of Soviet Uzbekistan’s Communist Party before independence — regularly rages against anything and everything connected to the old Union.

• Nevertheless, the system he has fashioned in the Central Asian country of 30 million remains remarkably similar to the one it emerged from in 1991.

• Last month, in the early hours, an act of traumatising racist violence occurred on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Students woke up to find that someone had written, in chalk, the words “Trump 2016” on various pavements and walls around campus. “I think it was an act of violence,” said one student. “I legitimately feared for my life,” said another; “I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus”. Dozens of students met the university president that day to demand that he take action to repudiate Trump and to find and punish the perpetrators. Writing political statements in chalk is a common practice on American college campuses and, judging from the public reaction to the Emory event, most Americans consider the writing to be an act of normal free speech during the national collective ritual of a presidential election. So how did it come to pass that many Emory students felt victimised and traumatised by innocuous and erasable graffiti?

• Hitler was a Shakespeare fan; Stalin feared Hamlet; Othello broke ground in apartheid-era South Africa; and Brazil’s current political crisis can be reflected by Julius Caesar. Across the world different Shakespearean plays have different significance and power. The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, a Shakespeare special to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, takes a global look at the playwright’s influence, explores how censors have dealt with his works and also how performances have been used to tackle subjects that might otherwise have been off limits. Below some of our writers talk about some of the most controversial performances and their consequences.

• China’s online censorship system protects national security and does not discriminate against foreign companies, the country’s Internet regulator said, after the United States labelled the blocking of websites by Beijing a trade barrier.

• The US Trade Representative (USTR) wrote in an annual report that over the past year China’s web censorship has worsened, presenting a significant burden to foreign firms and Internet users.

• Last week attorneys representing Blizzard Entertainment sent a cease-and-desist letter to the administrators of Nostalrius Begins, a private “legacy” server that had been running a version of World of Warcraft as it existed between 2004 and 2005 since February 28 of 2015. As of last night a Change.org petition to Blizzard CEO and co-founder Michael Morhaime had garnered more than 55,000 signatures in protest, but the plea for survival went unanswered, and the server shuts down forever effective today.

• Blizzard, of course, is acting within its rights. Nostalrius’ existence essentially amounts to piracy (particularly since the game proper is still going strong), and such things are expressly forbidden by Blizzard’s own terms of use. In a sense, this was inevitable, and it’s frankly surprising that Blizzard let it thrive for so long without taking action.

Privacy/Surveillance

• “This bill makes effective cybersecurity illegal.”

• In a short span of time, Edward Snowden has built an impeccable reputation on Twitter.

• ALVARO BEDOYA HAS been working on surveillance, privacy, and technology in Washington for years now. Before founding Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, he served as chief counsel to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.

• But as surveillance became a major national issue thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Bedoya saw something disturbing amid the Washington wonkery: a huge gulf between the discussions of government spying, on the one hand, and aggressive policing tactics in minority communities on the other.

• A year ago when the Internet of Shit account was spawned, it started as a personal joke: I was hearing a lot about internet-connected smart devices, but they all sounded like terrible ideas.

• In recent times, however, we’ve seen a new slew of devices pouring onto the market with no real specific purpose, as far as anyone can tell. At first I was just making jokes about these things, but the situation is worse than I initially thought.

• [...]

• The opportunities are delicious for bloated internet companies: now a software company could know how warm your home is, what times of day are noisy, whether you have a pet, when you turn on your lights or if you listen to music while having sex.

• Smart devices are sold as a way to improve your life — and in many ways, they do to an extent — but it also means those gadgets are incredible troves of data that could eventually turn into Software-as-a-Service money makers, just like Nespresso did to coffee.

• The Atlantic had the excellent idea of commissioning Sarah Jeong, one of the most astute technology commentators on the Internet (previously), to write a series of articles about the social implications of technological change: first up is an excellent, thoughtful, thorough story on the ways that the “cashless society” is being designed to force all transactions through a small number of bottlenecks that states can use to control behavior and censor unpopular political views.

• Even if you like the idea of racists and jihadis and human traffickers being limited in their crowdfunding and financial ambitions, the power to control commerce at a fine-grained level, combined with the scale at which transactions flow, means that these restrictions end up being a dragnet, not a speargun. When you fish with a dragnet, you always catch some dolphins along with your tuna.

• If you want an indication as to how the surveillance state is growing, take a look at college recruitment by the National Security Agency (NSA). The agency routinely recruits students with internships and scholarships around the United States but now the NSA is looking for employees in the backyard of its controversial Utah Data Center.

• A long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee encryption bill would force companies to provide “technical assistance” to government investigators seeking locked data, according to a discussion draft obtained by The Hill.

• The measure, from Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), is a response to concerns that criminals are increasingly using encrypted devices to hide from authorities.

• While law enforcement has long pressed Congress for such legislation, the tech community and privacy advocates warn that it would undermine security and endanger online privacy.

• There is a rather interesting legal battle concerning data retention going on in Sweden. Parties are the ISP Bahnhof and the government oversight authority Post- & Telestyrelsen (PTS).

• Two years ago, to the day, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated the EU data retention directive — stating that it is in violation of human rights, especially the right to privacy.

• That’s because Facebook has changed its rules around sponsored content. On Friday, the social network announced that it will now let publishers, celebrities, and brands post sponsored or branded content on their Facebook pages as long as they follow a couple of rules, including getting a verified by Facebook and using a special tag for each of these posts.

• If you haven’t posted anything personal on Facebook FB in awhile, you’re not alone. A damning report published by The Information on Thursday revealed that Facebook has been struggling to reverse a 21% decline in “original sharing,” or personal updates, from its 1.6 billion monthly active users.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A man who spent more than three decades serving time for crimes he did not commit was finally released from a Virginia correctional facility.

• 60-year-old Keith Allen Harward got his first taste of freedom Friday afternoon, thanking his lawyers, whom he called “heroes,” and lamented the fact that his parents could not see him walk free.

• “That’s the worst part about this, is my parents,” said Mr Harward, holding back tears as he addressed media outside the prison. “It killed them. It devastated them.” He added that he was not allowed to attend their funeral because of the sentence.

• A new-old idea is rattling around the Middle East five years after the Arab Spring stirred democratic ambition: that restoring stability, especially if accompanied by some economic and political improvements, should be reform enough for the moment.

• This discourse appears to be taking front and center these days, most obviously in Egypt — the region’s most populous country and the one that raised the highest hopes for democracy advocates when the military in 2011 removed longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak as millions rallied against him and his Western support collapsed.

• Last week students at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) disrupted a board meeting after learning administrators planned to sign a $50 million, seven-year, contract with security giant GardaWorld. Protesters are angry the administration has sought to expel student leaders and ramp up security at the politically active campus as they cut programs.

• THE 1992 PROSECUTION of Fran and Dan Keller was based on a trifecta of credulousness, hysteria, and bad evidence.

• The middle-aged couple was living quietly in Austin, Texas, where they ran a small drop-in day care out of their home, when the unimaginable happened: A little girl occasionally left in the Kellers’ care made a claim of abuse at the hands of the couple. At first, the allegation was simple: Dan Keller had spanked her, the 3-year-old told her mother in the summer of 1991. But rather quickly — in part due to repeated questioning by her mother and a therapist who had treated the girl for behavioral problems before she’d ever visited the Kellers — the allegation morphed into accusations far more lurid.

• Today the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to impose limits on a disturbing exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows random detention of motorists within 100 miles of a border—a zone that includes two-thirds of the U.S. population. Since the rationale for these stops is immigration enforcement, they are supposed to be very brief. Yet in 2010 Richard Rynearson, an Air Force officer who brought the case that the Court today declined to hear, was detained at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Uvalde County, Texas, for a total of 34 minutes, even though there was no reason to believe he was an illegal alien or a criminal.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Moonshine packs a punch in this corner of Appalachia, where making hooch is steeped in local lore. But when Colin Fultz, the grandson of a bootlegger, opened a gourmet distillery here last fall, he ran afoul of a spirit even more potent than white lightning: University of Kentucky basketball.

• With his outlaw grandfather — who spent 18 years behind bars for smuggling — very much on his mind, Mr. Fultz, a businessman and onetime coal miner, set out to carry on his family’s tradition in a legal, and thoroughly modern, way.

• He tinkered with recipes, blending peaches and blackberries into mash brewed in his garage. He hired a lawyer — “My wife got on me, said I was going to get into trouble,” he said — and renovated an old car dealership, where he now distills and sells fruit-infused whiskey, serving it in thimble-size cups from an exposed-brick tasting bar.

Copyrights

• Less than two years ago the MPAA launched its search engine WhereToWatch, offering viewers a database of alternatives to piracy. However, those who try the search engine today will notice that results for Netflix, the largest entertainment platform in the United States, are no longer listed. Is there a feud going on behind the scenes?

• THE UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published information on what people should do if they receive one of those scary shakedown letters from firms accusing them of breaching piracy laws and owing money.

• Take them with a pinch of salt is the very short version of this, but the IPO has a bit more information.

• The organisation is alerting people to the sort of missives sent by companies like Goldeneye that have a very fishy smell and a bad reputation. The messages are sometimes described as speculative invoices.

• Internet pirates are a swarthy bunch that have been known to hijack anti-piracy projects to further their own aims. The BPI is aware of these kinds of efforts and has registered a whole heap of ‘pirate’ domains to avoid a similar fate befalling the UK’s Get it Right From a Genuine Site campaign.

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