● 04.13.16

● Links 13/4/2016: Wine 1.8.2, Enlightenment DR 0.21 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Lawrence Pye, a lobsterman, told The Associated Press that during a recent outing, the 610-foot ship on his radar screen looked like a 40- to 50-foot fishing boat. He watched as the behemoth came within a half-mile while returning to shipbuilder Bath Iron Works.

Desktop

• Jide’s Remix OS is becoming more popular when it comes to tablets and low-cost PCs. This Android-based OS is bringing productivity features to Android and acting as a big threat to Microsoft’s low-cost PCs and Apple’s tablet market. Read more know about the current scenario.

• After the Bangladesh Bank hacking, the media was full of questions as to how IT security could be ensured.

• Initially, the hacking was reported as the result of a “zero-day” exploit, which means it was possibly enabled by using pirated versions of Microsoft Windows on Bangladesh Bank computers, as pirated versions of MS software can’t receive security updates and are vulnerable to hacking.

• In general, computers which have the latest security updates for the operating system have much better protection from zero-day exploits.

• The decision I faced was life-changing either way I went. My inclination was to go back to school and get the certs I needed to work in the Linux administration field. I already had the base knowledge and experience; it was just a matter of jumping through the hoops to get a piece of paper saying I already knew what I was learning. Not that I wouldn’t learn a thing or two along the way.

Server

• The rise of the cloud is a big reason: Tech costs are becoming cheaper thanks to the cloud’s lower prices and greater efficiency.

• Put simply, Linux application performance scales poorly as CPU core count increases. This is commonly experienced as typical Linux applications can be expected to see a 1.5X performance improvement for a 2-core CPU, but the scale quickly plateaus after that, with 4 core performance only improving around 2.5X. The performance further degrades as core counts rise. Given that, along with Intel’s announcement that its Xeon chips have up to 22 cores, scaling performance efficiently across cores is extremely important.

Kernel Space

• The software-defined storage market is crowded with dozens of vendors ranging from small startups to well-established incumbents like EMC Corp., but Khosla Ventures believes that there’s still room for one more. The technology investment giant was today named among the contributors to a $40 million round into an outfit called Datera Inc. that promises to provide a more economic alternative to proprietary arrays.

• Linux developer Sasha Levin has kicked off a project in which he proposes gathering up kernel security fixes under a single tree.

• The rationale behind the “Linux-stable security tree project”, he explains, is that sysadmins in large, complex deployments find following kernel upgrades is daunting.

• “Quite a few users of the stable trees pointed out that on complex deployments, where validation is non-trivial, there is little incentive to follow the stable tree after the product has been deployed to production,” the announcement says.

• Today, April 12, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the released of the first maintenance build of the Linux 4.5 kernel series.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• With having a clean Windows 10 installation around for the benchmarking of Ubuntu Bash on Windows 10 and Windows vs. Linux Vulkan benchmarking, I also took the opportunity to run a number of OpenGL benchmarks on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 Linux with the same hardware and set of graphics cards. In this article are benchmarks of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 16.04 with various NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 series graphics cards.

Applications

• There’s been grumblings about a growing fork of OpenELEC the past few weeks while today two Phoronix readers wrote in with news of LibreELEC, the new fork of OpenELEC as a Kodi/XBMC appliance Linux distribution that has a number of the original OpenELEC developers involved.

Proprietary

• FreeOffice is one of the best-performing Microsoft Word replacement suites for Linux. It is also a great replacement for Microsoft Windows run under WINE.

• FreeOffice’s design makes it a near twin to SoftMaker Office 2016. The differences are minor. If you have a compelling need for a pay-only option, then download the 30-day free trial edition to verify that you really do prefer the Office 2016 version.

• Vivaldi is a rather new browser, powered by libraries from more than 100 different open source projects, and growing in popularity. Recently I interviewed Ruarí Ødegaard of Vivaldi. Ruarí is a QA engineer for Vivaldi, the company behind the Vivaldi browser, which was created by the former CEO and co-founder of Opera, Jon von Tetzchner.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The second stable maintenance release of the Wine 1.8 free and open-source implementation of Windows on Unix has been released today, April 12, 2016.

• The Wine maintenance release 1.8.2 is now available.

• For those sticking to Wine 1.8 stable releases rather than the bi-weekly Wine 1.9 development releases, Wine 1.8.2 was released this morning.

Games

• I really liked Retro-Pixel Castles when I played it initially last year, and after trying it again now it has had some major updates I have some more thoughts on it.

• Greetings fans of Theme Hospital, the awesome open source engine CorsixTH has released 0.60 Beta 1 with new features and fixes.

• It now includes a map editor, the possibility of user created campaigns, drug prices impact patients choices, machines now smoke when they are getting worn out, and more. It also includes a bunch of bug fixes since the last release.

• You can now expand your trucking simulators with community create mods in both Euro Truck Simulator 2 & American Truck Simulator.

• I am super happy we get Day-1 releases from Paradox now, as I’m sure many of you are too. With less than a month to go, I will hopefully have some thoughts up on it within a day or two of release. I am expecting great things from this.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• After a little over 4 months and 500 commits, the E21 alpha release is ready for testing.

• Mike Blumenkrantz of Samsung today tagged Enlightenment 0.21 (E21) Alpha.

• Enlightenment 0.21 is working on much better Wayland support, a new gadget infrastructure, wizard improvements, and support for video backgrounds.

• It has been awhile since we’ve heard anything from the developers of Xfce, a popular open-source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, and it looks like some information about the next major release has been brought to light recently.

• It will likely be quite some time before the Xfce 4.14 desktop environment is released while the main focus this development cycle is on porting to the GTK+ 3.x tool-kit.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GTK+ 3.20 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit has just received today, April 12, 2016, its third maintenance build, with one day ahead of the planned GNOME 3.20.1 desktop environment release.

• The anticipated GNOME.Asia Summit 2016 conference for GNOME developers and contributors will take place at the end of next week, in Delhi, India, between April 21-24.

• GNOME.Asia Summit is an annual conference that takes place in an Asian city, usually during the spring season, and this time, it will be held in the capital territory of India, Delhi.

• For four days, attendees will be able to participate in all sorts of workshops and hacking sessions, as well as to listen to talks given by great names behind the GNOME Project.

Distributions

New Releases

• Josh Strobl from the Solus Project has published the twenty-sixth installation of the “This Week in Solus” weekly newsletter to inform the community about the latest work done for the independent Solus Linux operating system.

• There are some big announcements in this week’s newsletter, and we’ll start with the work done in preparation to offer users a minimal and more flexible ISO image of the Solus Linux distribution, as the team started shrinking the size of the system.base component, thus demoting several packages, which have been moved to system.utils.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• The new version of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE has been released. It’s a stability release with a bug fixes and user experience, translations and documentation improvements. At this time DNF-PLUGINS-CORE > 0.1.18 is needed to properly connect to COPR repositories, so please upgrade to the newest plugins to avoid potential COPR network problems. More information about the release can be found in DNF and plugins release notes.

• Internationalization is process of making product in a way, so they can adapt to any regional languages with minimal change. Its time to make sure Fedora 24 supports writing and reading of all major languages (in corresponding script) in the world. We should also make sure all locales work perfectly as expected.

Debian Family

• We have just been informed by Željko Popivoda from the Linux AIO project that they’ve passed the 200,000 downloads mark and, in celebration of the event, released a Live ISO image for the Zorin OS 11 distro.

• The announcement comes as great news for the Linux community, and we would like to congratulate the Linux AIO team for providing us with updated and unique Live ISO images that contain the most popular flavors of many GNU/Linux distributions.

• What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 20th and March 26th:

Derivatives

• The first Beta release of the upcoming antiX 16 Debian-based Linux operating system was unveiled a few minutes ago, April 12, 2016, and it looks like it brings some exciting changes that we’re about to reveal below.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Stéphane Graber has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the LXD 2.0 next-generation container hypervisor for Ubuntu Linux.

• Canonical, through Olli Ries, has had the enormous pleasure of announcing that the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system will offer users the possibility of installing snaps alongside the standard Debian packages.

• It’s not the first time we here Canonical planning this major change for Ubuntu Linux, but now it’s official. Starting with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), due for release on April 21, 2016, users will finally be able to install various applications and packages via snaps.

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux Mint developers have been working hard on version 18 of the popular desktop distribution. Linux Mint 18 will offer Cinnamon 3.0 and Mate 1.14 versions when it is released. There are also be some other new goodies that will be included in Linux Mint 18.

Devices/Embedded

• Arduino is the perfect introduction to microcontrollers and electronics. The recent trend of powerful, cheap, ARM-based single board Linux computers is the perfect introduction to computer science, programming, and general Linux wizardry. Until now, though, Arduino and these tiny ARM computers have been in two different worlds. Now, finally, there are nightly builds of Arduino IDE on the Raspberry Pi and other single board Linux computers.

• Linux has been a mainstream embedded operating system for many years. And yet, the licensing and development model of open-source software is still little understood. Let me explain. I’ll start with that that word “free,” which has two meanings—free as in “you’re free to use it,” and free as in “nothing to pay.” Linux is free in both senses, so it’s a win-win. The software engineers are happy because they get access to a large body of robust, mature source code, and the product managers are happy because there are no license fees to pay. But, of the two meanings, the first is the more important. Let’s be clear: Do not choose Linux just because it’ll save license fees. Choose it because it’s the best solution for your project.

• Stealth.com has launched a tiny, Ubuntu-ready “LPC-175F” mini-PC with a quad-core Atom E3845, dual GbE ports, and -20 to 70°C support.

• The 145 x 84 x 35mm LPC-175F is one of the smallest mini-PCs ever built by Stealth.com. By comparison, its 250 x 146 x 42mm and up, Intel 3rd Gen. Core based LPC480x mini-PC series seems more like a maxi-PC series.

Phones

Android

• While most of the talk today has been on the latest arrival from HTC, the HTC 10, one of the enduring news topics of the last couple of months is the next version of Android, which is currently entitled Android N. As is usually the case when a developer preview of the latest version of Android is released, Google has yet to decide on a final name (or at least yet to make publicly known their decision) and instead the latest version of Android goes by what is certain to be its first initial. In this case, N.

• BlackBerry is planning to launch two mid-range Android devices this year in what analysts are calling the “last opportunity” for the firm to get it right in handsets.

• This comes after the company admitted that the Priv, its first phone running Google’s mobile operating system, was too expensive. In an interview with Abu Dhabi-based publication The National, BlackBerry chief executive John Chen said there would be one Android handset this year with a keyboard and one full touchscreen, but gave no timing on when they would be released.

• Android Studio 2.0 has been released allowing developers to build apps for the Android platform, including phones and tablets, Android Auto, Android Wear, and Android TV. It is the official IDE from Google including a code editor, code analysis tools, emulators and more.

• James Kendrick sees an easy way for the folks in Redmond to drop Windows Mobile and make Android hardware: Microsoft should acquire the Remix OS through a purchase of Jide.

• Windows Phone has all but died on the vine, and with less than 2 percent market share, it is unlikely to gain any new ground given the pummeling it is receiving from the twin mobile titans of iOS and Android.

• But one of those foes actually offers Microsoft a possible lifeline, and a way to make a bigger impact in the mobile space. It’s time for Microsoft to dump Windows Phone and start making Android smartphones.

• Hiroshi Lockheimer loves seeing his work in the hands of strangers.

• That simple fact is what he credits with his decision to take a job at Google a decade ago — and maybe, just maybe, give himself the chance to have his software show up on phones around the world.

• It was a dream that seemed both distant and wild at the time.

• “We were a tiny, tiny part of Google,” Lockheimer remembers, thinking back to his early days with the company — when Android was still a closely guarded top-secret project. “We were kind of an outpost of an outpost of an outpost type of thing.”

• Android Studio 2.0 introduces a faster emulator, new Instant Run, app indexing, and Cloud Test Lab features, and an improved GPU Developer debugger.

• When Google released Android Studio 1.0 integrated development environment (IDE) back in 2013, it was welcomed as a substantial improvement over Eclipse. Yet, Apple’s Xcode tools for iOS has been widely considered to be superior. With the recent release of Android Studio 2.0, however, Google may have flipped the equation.

Free Software/Open Source

• NGINX, Inc., the engine delivering sites and applications for the modern web, today announced the availability of NGINX Plus Release 9 (R9), the latest release of its application delivery platform. Today’s updates provide significant new features for NGINX’s innovative community of users, including the ability to dynamically install rich extensions to NGINX Plus, the inclusion of commercially-supported UDP load balancing, and new, more flexible pricing and support options.

• Nginx is making its commercially supported enterprise Web server more extensible, providing interoperability for add-on modules that have previously been used only with the open source version of the server.

• Nginx Plus R9, debuting today, uses the new Dynamic Modules feature to work with more than 100 modules for capabilities like Web security, authentication, and integrating third-party languages. Nginx will host a repository and support the modules, ensuring they have been properly compiled and tested, Owen Garrett, Nginx head of product, said.

• The ETSI OSM group announced leadership structure and roadmap for first specification release in 2 months, subsequent updates every 6 months

• At OSCON 2016 in Austin, Keila Banks will be giving a talk on The Automated Teen. Because Keila’s father, Phillip Banks, has been a long-time organizer and volunteer at SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo), Keila has been a familiar face at that event over the years, and she started giving talks there when she was 11 years old. And last year, she gave an OSCON keynote in Portland, Undefinable Me: The story of a 13-year-old girl from the inner city who codes.

• A previous article on next-generation cloud technologies listed container orchestration as one of the emerging technologies to know. As the use of containers increases and organizations deploy them more widely, the need for tools to manage containers across the infrastructure also increases. Orchestrating a cluster of containers is a competitive and rapidly evolving area, and many tools exist offering various feature sets.

Events

• The development team behind the Enlightenment window manager and desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems have published details about the upcoming Enlightenment Developer Days 2016 conference.

• We are pleased to announce the Call for Refereed-Track Proposals for the 2016 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference, which will held be in Santa Fe, NM, USA on November 2-4 in conjunction with Linux Kernel Summit.

• Refereed track presentations are 50 minutes in length and should focus on a specific aspect of the “plumbing” in the Linux system. Examples of Linux plumbing include core kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing systems, management tools, device support, media creation/playback, and so on. The best presentations are not about finished work, but rather problems, proposals, or proof-of-concept solutions that require face-to-face discussions and debate.

SaaS/Back End

• Hortonworks’ Hadoop Summit is underway in Dublin, Ireland and the Hadoop distribution player has a slew of announcements. Notably, Pivotal, already a player in the Hadoop distribution arena, will be reselling Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which is Hortonworks’ Hadoop platform.

• Mitaka, the latest release of the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, is now out. For the first time, lots of people are praising the platform for being easy to use. Is this a sign that OpenStack — after years of development but slow adoption — is finally entering production data centers in a big way?

Databases

• Tarantool, the project I joined in 2010, endorses the open source values not only with its source code (its 2-clause BSD license), but also in the governance of the trademark, and in working with the contributors. Tarantool is an attempt at a few big ideas that have been emerging for quite a while:

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• The most significant changes in this release are a rewrite of the webGUI utilizing Bootstrap, and the underlying system, including the base system and kernel, being converted entirely to FreeBSD pkg. The pkg conversion enables us to update pieces of the system individually going forward, rather than the monolithic updates of the past. The webGUI rewrite brings a new responsive look and feel to pfSense requiring a minimum of resizing or scrolling on a wide range of devices from desktop to mobile phones.

• BSD – PfSense 2.3 was released today as the newest version of this popular FreeBSD-based firewall/router OS appliance software.

• The pfSense 2.3 release has a rewritten web GUI that’s now making use of Bootstrap to provide a clean and responsive experience. The pfSense 2.3 release also converts the underlying system now to completely using FreeBSD’s pkg for package management, and there are various other underlying updates.

• Electric Sheep Fencing LLC., through Chris Buechler, today, April 12, 2016, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the stable pfSense 2.3 BSD-based firewall operating system.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Released GnuTLS 3.4.11 a bug fix release on the current stable branch.

• Everyone who is anyone needs their own neural network package and GNU, not to be left out of the action, has just released version 0.8.0 of Gneural – what else would they call it? Is this just a gesture to freedom? Has the horse already left the stable?

Public Services/Government

• The specifications for the next support contract for free software in French Ministers have been published with an extended scope and will now include some governmental agencies.

Licensing/Legal

• In this case, the defendant used the name of the license, “CC BY-SA 2.0″ but did not include the license’s URL. The court held in favor of the defendant since the name of the license, “CC BY-SA 2.0″ is the license’s URN, which is a subclass of the URI required by the license.

• This case teaches the importance of carefully understanding the meaning of the specific technical terms of a copyright license, including open source licenses. For example, if the CC BY-SA 2.0 license instead required a URL to be used instead of a URI, the result may not have been in favor of the defendant since the text, “CC BY-SA 2.0″ is a URN and not a URL.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• This year’s Conference for e-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM16) will take place in Krems, Austria, on 18-20 May. The three-day programme features four keynotes, six workshops, and a new panel on ‘Co-Creation’.

Open Data

• The fourth International Open Data Conference (IODC16) will take place in Madrid on 6 and 7 October. On the three days preceding the main event, a large number of preconference meetings will be held by government and civil society open data groups.

Open Access/Content

• With the technical and financial capacity of any currently existing single institution failing to answer the needs for a platform efficiently archiving the web, a team of American researchers have come up with an innovative solution, submitted to the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and published in the open-access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

Leftovers

• Why the sudden uptick? In 2007, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative was put into effect, mandating that American citizens entering the U.S. by air from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean carry a passport, triggering a backlog in renewals for millions of applicants – a scenario that could easily occur again. Flash forward to today, and many travelers are also concerned about whether they’ll need to show an alternate form of acceptable identification for domestic flights to comply with the REAL ID Act, which will be put into effect on Jan. 22, 2018, and will impose more stringent ID requirements. And besides the chance to dodge a delayed – or cumbersome – process later on, there’s also the matter of entry requirements imposed by international countries. With a number of places requiring a minimum of six months left on your passport, there’s never been a better time to be passport-ready for smooth, stress-free travel.

Science

• The findings are remarkable, but perhaps not as remarkable as the fact the study is being published at all. To be able to do studies with illicit drugs like LSD is very difficult: the cost of legal access to the drugs is disproportionately expensive – running up to £100,000. The ‘schedule one’ certificate from the Home Office is hard to secure, grants are difficult to find, and there is a strong political and professional pressure not to dabble in this area.

• More and more women are finding it difficult to get pregnant, with mounting evidence suggesting chemicals used in plasticisers and pesticides are responsible. The consequences are estimated to cost the EU €1.4 billion per year.

Security

• Let’s Encrypt is leaving beta today. We’re also excited to announce that founding sponsors Cisco and Akamai have renewed their Platinum sponsorships with 3-year commitments, Gemalto is joining as our newest Gold sponsor, and HP Enterprise, Fastly, Duda and ReliableSite.net are our newest Silver sponsors.

• In 2014, Mozilla teamed up with Akamai, Cisco, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Identrust, and the University of Michigan to found Let’s Encrypt in order to move the Web towards universal encryption. Today, Let’s Encrypt is leaving beta. We here at Mozilla are very proud of Let’s Encrypt reaching this stage of maturity

• Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated and open Web certificate authority that helps make it easy for any Web site to turn on encryption. Let’s Encrypt uses an open protocol called ACME which is being standardized in the IETF. There are already over 40 independent implementations of ACME. Several web hosting services such as Dreamhost and Automattic, who runs WordPress.com, also use ACME to integrate with Let’s Encrypt and provide security that is on by default.

• A nasty piece of ransomware that took crypto-extortion to new heights contains a fatal weakness that allows victims to decrypt their data without paying the hefty ransom.

• When it came to light two weeks ago, Petya was notable because it targeted a victim’s entire startup drive by rendering its master boot record inoperable. It accomplished this by encrypting the master boot file and displaying a ransom note. As a result, without the decryption password, the infected computer wouldn’t boot up, and all files on the startup disk were inaccessible. A master boot record is a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned hard drive, while a master boot file is a file on NTFS volumes that contains the name, size and location of all other files.

• Open source code is a convenient and cost-effective way for developers to build apps. However, as CIO noted in a recent article, once that code makes its way into an app, it’s rarely ever updated to fix vulnerabilities that are found later. CIO offered up some tips on how to keep open source products secure.

• Lets Encrypt is leaving beta today. Were also excited to announce that founding sponsors Cisco and Akamai have renewed their Platinum sponsorships with 3-year commitments, Gemalto is joining as our newest Gold sponsor, and HP Enterprise, Fastly, Duda and ReliableSite.net are our newest Silver sponsors.

Defence/Aggression

• Candidates, one of you will be the fifth consecutive American president to make war inside Iraq. What will you face on day one of your administration?

• You learned with us recently of the death of a Marine in Iraq, which exposed that the United States set up a fire base in that country, which exposed that the Pentagon used a twist of words to misrepresent the number of personnel in Iraq by as many as 2,000. It appears a second fire base exists, set up on the grounds of one of America’s largest installations from the last Iraq war. Special forces range across the landscape. The Pentagon is planning for even more troops. There can be no more wordplay — America now has boots on the ground in Iraq.

• THREE WEEKS AGO, Honduran activist Gaspar Sanchez spoke at a briefing on Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to support an impartial investigation into the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres.

• Cáceres had mobilized native communities to speak out against the Agua Zarca Dam, a hydroelectric project backed by European and Chinese corporations, before being killed by two unknown gunmen last month.

• Last week, back in Honduras at a protest outside the Honduran Public Ministry in Tegulcigalpa, Sanchez unfurled a banner demanding justice for Cáceres’s murder.

• On Sunday, President Obama said this about about Hillary’s email scandal: “There’s classified & then there’s classified.”

• Perhaps that’s what has led him to decide, after 15 years, the 28 pages on the Saudis’ role in 9/11 can finally be released (or at least reviewed for declassification; given the way the 60 Minutes script ignored evidence about Bandar bin Sultan, I suspect they’ll still protect him).

• The former chief judge that presided over Saddam Hussein’s trial told RT in an exclusive interview how the tribunal, which was dependent on the US, lacking in legitimacy, and overshadowed by the killing of lawyers, sentenced the Iraqi strongman to death.

• The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine’s future leaders, not plotting to oust one government and install another.

• On 6 April in the Netherlands, just over 30% of potential voters took part in a referendum on the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement. This was one of numerous Free Trade Area Agreements established between the EU and countries all around the world, from Mexico to Mozambique. Less than two years ago, president Petro Poroshenko signed this agreement, and since that time has been partially implemented. It was ratified by all the EU-member states and, for the most part, garnered no political response from the public, with the exception of the Netherlands. Here, a liberal-right political initiative, GeenPeil, launched a collection of signatures calling for a referendum on ratification of the Agreement.

• A decade ago, the Bush administration was eager to bomb Iran but U.S. intelligence analysts challenged the casus belli by finding that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb, recalls ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• This sphere of influence Empire, on top of being horrible for the rest of the world, is also sucking the US dry internally.

• In an opinion piece for the News on Friday, Yair Lapid, who was a member of the governing coalition’s security cabinet at the time of the Gaza offensive, then accused Sanders of helping Hamas by bolstering the Islamist militant group’s “narrative that it is the real victim.” Lapid also asserted, without offering any evidence for the claim, that “the Israeli government found most of those killed in the operation were terrorists.”

• Ladd Everitt, of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, agrees that support for gun control has reached unprecedented levels. “People are finally demanding a change,” he said, citing multiple new initiatives like Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Americans for Responsible Solutions as evidence of this burgeoning engagement. Many of these groups focus on local anti-violence measures — such as the “Groceries Not Guns” campaign calling for a ban on open carry in Kroger supermarkets. “Moms head to the grocery store on a weekly, sometimes daily basis — often with kids in tow,” reads the campaign mission statement. “We don’t expect to face armed strangers when we shop with our families.”

• Particularly given the timing, I’m wondering whether any change in DOJ’s views about these memos would affect American citizens overseas, such as Liban Haji Mohamed, a Somali American who was put on the Most Wanted List last year, then detained (never to publicly have shown up in an American court) on March 2, 2015. Unlike Anwar al-Awlaki, Mohamed (who is the brother of Gulet Mohamed, who has had a whole different set of problems with the government) has actually been indicted.

• A group of armed, right-wing activists are planning a non-permitted anti-Islam rally in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend, where organizers say they will shred a Quran alongside pictures of president Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other politicians.

• One of the mechanics soon recognized Echo Papa from news photos — he was Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater. Several of the Airborne staff whispered among themselves, astonished that they had been working for America’s best-known mercenary. The secrecy and strange modification requests of the past four months began to make sense. In addition to surveillance and laser-targeting equipment, Airborne had outfitted the plane with bulletproof cockpit windows, an armored engine block, anti-explosive mesh for the fuel tank, and specialized wiring that could control rockets and bombs. The company also installed pods for mounting two high-powered 23 mm machine guns. By this point, the engineers and mechanics were concerned that they had broken several Austrian laws but were advised that everything would be fine as long as they all kept the secret.

• [...]

• The story of how Prince secretly plotted to transform the two aircraft for his arsenal of mercenary services is based on interviews with nearly a dozen people who have worked with Prince over the years, including current and former business partners, as well as internal documents, memos, and emails. Over a two-year period, Prince exploited front companies and cutouts, hidden corporate ownership, a meeting with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout’s weapons supplier, and at least one civil war in an effort to manufacture and ultimately sell his customized armed counterinsurgency aircraft. If he succeeded, Prince would possess two prototypes that would lay the foundation for a low-cost, high-powered air force capable of generating healthy profits while fulfilling his dream of privatized warfare.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• EFF has long been critical of overbroad government secrecy, which has been used to cover up everything from illegal activities to questionable legal justifications for mass surveillance.

• Given that government officials default to withholding important details from the public regarding national security, we were pleasantly surprised to read a memo that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sent to intelligence agencies last month.

• Clapper’s memo directs the heads of several intelligence agencies, including the NSA and CIA, to substantially overhaul the government’s formal classification system as part of a process known as the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Citing big-dollar donations from three fossil fuel giants—Chevron, Conoco Philips, and Exxon—a leading climate justice group is calling on the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative to stop investing in or accepting money from the industry that’s driving the global climate crisis.

• Janine Jackson: Twenty-nine men died April 5, 2010, in an explosion at Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. The mine was run by Massey Energy, and Massey Energy was run by Don Blankenship. A looming figure in the region whose tight control over his workplace was notorious, Blankenship racked up profits and political capital along with safety violations, while saying cartoon-villainous things like, “I don’t care what people think; at the end of the day, Don Blankenship is going to die with more money than he needs.”

• Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., voted Tuesday to ban fracking, the controversial oil and gas extraction method that has helped spur a natural gas boom across the country.

• “We really are with this vote taking a lead in his state and in the nation,” Councilmember Mary Lehman said at the hearing. “I could not be more proud of this county.”

• Scientists ‘incredulous’ at abnormally high numbers for April, with melting across nearly 12% of ice sheet

Finance

• We’ve mostly focused on the impact of the TPP and trade deals on the internet (and also on national sovereignty), because that’s the kind of stuff that interests us most around here. We’ve spent a lot less time looking at the more traditional free trade arguments, in part because that’s not nearly as controversial, and in part because — despite claims to the contrary — there really aren’t that many tariff-related barriers that make a big difference any more. It’s generally good to reduce such tariffs, and in response you see the typical response from firms based on whether or not they benefit from those reduced tariffs. The “benefits” of free trade tend to be focused on the companies looking to expand into those markets where tariffs are being lowered or abandoned — and not so much for companies competing against products from those same countries. Frankly, I find arguments that the companies who freak out about trade deals because it will mean more competition against them a bit tiresome, because I tend to believe competition is a good thing for innovation. We’ve mostly focused on the impact of the TPP and trade deals on the internet (and also on national sovereignty), because that’s the kind of stuff that interests us most around here. We’ve spent a lot less time looking at the more traditional free trade arguments, in part because that’s not nearly as controversial, and in part because — despite claims to the contrary — there really aren’t that many tariff-related barriers that make a big difference any more. It’s generally good to reduce such tariffs, and in response you see the typical response from firms based on whether or not they benefit from those reduced tariffs. The “benefits” of free trade tend to be focused on the companies looking to expand into those markets where tariffs are being lowered or abandoned — and not so much for companies competing against products from those same countries. Frankly, I find arguments that the companies who freak out about trade deals because it will mean more competition against them a bit tiresome, because I tend to believe competition is a good thing for innovation.

• As I have emphasized since these “partnerships” were first announced, their purpose is to give corporations immunity from the laws in the countries in which they do business. The principle mechanism of this immunity is the granting of the right to corporations to sue governments and agencies of governments that have laws or regulations that impinge on corporate profits. For example, France’s prohibitions of GMO foods are, under the “partnerships,” “restraints on trade that impinge on corporate profits.

• The ultimate irony is that the 5 billion dollar fine is dwarfed by the 13 billion dollar taxpayer bailout they received after the banks’ immoral antics caused massive economic collapse. So the net result of their appalling behaviour has been that they collect not only the profit from those bets the system would collapse, but an eight billion dollar net payment from ordinary taxpayers thrown in. Which eight billion dollars has been just a contribution to the bonuses and partner remuneration which have continued to bulge in their over-stuffed pockets since 2008, uninterrupted by the crash, thanks to the generosity of poor taxpayers struggling to balance their personal budgets.

• New Balance is renewing its opposition to the far-reaching Pacific Rim trade deal, saying the Obama administration reneged on a promise to give the sneaker maker a fair shot at military business if it stopped bad-mouthing the agreement.

• After several years of resistance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact aimed at making it easier to conduct trade among the United States and 11 other countries, the Boston company had gone quiet last year. New Balance officials say one big reason is that they were told the Department of Defense would give them serious consideration for a contract to outfit recruits with athletic shoes.

• But no order has been placed, and New Balance officials say the Pentagon is intentionally delaying any purchase.

• The recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself.

• Of course Sanders knows how to bust up the big banks. He’s already introduced legislation to do just that. And even without new legislation a president has the power under the Dodd-Frank reform act to initiate such a breakup.

• But Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he’s intent on doing exactly what he says he’ll do: breaking up the biggest banks.

• The free trade agreement being negotiated between the EU and the US will affect how laws are made in the European Union, to the benefit of corporations and at the expense of our health, our environment, and our rights. Despite growing concerns among the European public, the new EU proposal on regulatory cooperation in TTIP does nothing, not even little, to address the upcoming democratic threats.

• Doctors Without Borders and more than fifty other organizations sent a letter calling on lawmakers to reject the pending trade pact

• In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law meant to close the wage gap between working men and women. But more than 50 years later, women on average earn just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. And according to a new report by the National Partnership for Women and Families that was released before National Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, the persistent wage gap means women lose a combined $500 billion every year.

• Ever since the vote, Donald Trump’s managers have fought unionization every step of the way. They filed 15 objections with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging intimidation and forgery by union officials. After the claims were either withdrawn by Trump or dismissed by the labor board, the unions were officially certified as bargaining agents last month.

• But the Trump Organization still refused to negotiate, and last week, at the last possible moment, the hotel filed for a review of the case with the labor board in Washington, further putting off contract talks.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists,” the DNC chair calmly explained, in a moment of shockingly blunt honesty.

• Sanders has brought on the unthinkable—instead of seeing her as locking up the Democratic Party nomination on Super Thursday in March, Clinton’s camp had begun to project April—following the April 19 New York primary, which she had hoped to win in double digits.

• Now, that strategy has become doubtful in the backwash from the collapse of the Clintons’ “go nuclear” attack last week. The attack failed with Sanders labeling her “unqualified”; Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver saying Hillary had made a “deal with the devil” vis-à-vis her megabuck donors; Black-Lives-Matter co-creator Alicia Garza telling the Clintons, “My back is tired of being the path to the White House”; and the amazing coincidence of Sanders’ Vatican invitation.

• THE DEMOCRACY SPRING, a protest movement calling on Congress to “end the corruption of big money in our politics” and “ensure free and fair elections,” converged on Capitol Hill on Monday, staging a nonviolent sit-in that resulted in over 400 arrests — a massive number by Washington sit-in standards.

• It’s a mystery as to why the national newspapers chose not to expose a juicy story about the UK culture secretary. But claiming that his policies were ‘influenced’ by the ‘suppression’ of the story is pure conjecture.

• Registration deadlines in New York passed months ago—but many voters, particularly those who support Bernie Sanders, say they didn’t know

• The Democratic establishment is growing impatient with Bernie Sanders who continues to delay the party’s long-planned coronation of Hillary Clinton, a vexation expressed by Paul Krugman and criticized by Rick Sterling.

Censorship/Free Speech

• There are lots of dumb ways for companies to combat online critics. You can simply claim copyright over the criticism as a way to try to silence it, although that tends to end poorly for the silencer thanks to public backlash. You can go to the court to ask for an injunction against the critic as a way to try to silence it, although that tends to end poorly for the silencer thanks to the Streisand Effect. Or you can ask the courts to test whether the criticism amounts to defamation, although, again, The Streisand Effect, the public backlash, and the fact that those types of suits are rarely successful.

• Americans wondering what life might be like in the near future — after a President Donald Trump acts on his promise to “open up our libels laws,” so that politicians with easily bruised egos can sue reporters or commentators for hurting their feelings — should pay attention to what is happening this week in Germany.

• An anti-SLAPP win has just been handed down in Nevada, one of the few states with a strong anti-SLAPP law. At the center of the failed defamation lawsuit is (you guessed it) a negative review of a business posted at Yelp.

• A student at the University of Edinburgh has claimed that on-campus censorship at the institution is “out of control.”

• Writing for online magazine spiked, first-year Charlie Peters’ comments have come amid the ongoing debate that the stifling of free speech at universities – particularly among students’ union – is becoming “an epidemic.”

• The student described how, upon starting at the Russell Group institution last September, he realised he was “foolish” to have thought university was meant to encourage unfettered debate.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.

• I’m not sure I’m convinced. After all, the Administration claims it is not examining the contents of all international letters, but rather only looking at those where selected identifiers show up in data packets. Yeah, I know it’s a bullshit argument, but they pretend that’s not searching the contents, really. Moreover we have substantial reason to believe they were doing (some) of this anyway.

• But there is a curious relationship between a claim Yoo made in his letter and the Obama Administration’s views on FISA.

• The British government is “treating the entire nation as suspects” by ignoring safeguards on retaining and accessing personal communications data, according to the Conservative MP David Davis.

• Speaking before the opening of a test case at the European court of justice (ECJ), the former home affairs spokesman called for improved protections to prevent state abuses through bulk interception of private emails and online exchanges.

• You’ve probably heard your mattress gets heavier and heavier each year from the feces of dust mites that eat the dead skin you leave behind. Still, you go to bed every night. What choice have you got?

• The National Security Agency has appointed its first transparency officer — three years after leaks made by former contractor Edward Snowden exposed the agency’s surveillance programs and led to calls for increased public disclosures.

• We’ve already written a bit about the technologically ignorant bill from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein that basically outlaws any encryption system that doesn’t include backdoors for law enforcement. However, there are still some points in the bill that have left some folks scratching their heads. In particular, the lack of any penalty at all has some commenters wondering what the bill actually does. The bill both says that it doesn’t “require or prohibit any specific design or operating system,” but at the same time does require that anyone offering or supporting any kind of encryption be able to pass along unencrypted versions of the communication to law enforcement when presented with a legitimate court order or warrant (so not just a warrant…). As Orin Kerr noted, the bill mandates assistance, rather than using the more typical requirement of “reasonable” assistance.

• I guess the real accomplishment of “The Most Transparent Administration” is how much it exposed Americans to domestic surveillance. I suppose that’s its own form of “transparency.”

• Just Security’s Patrick Toomey notes that this administration has embraced legal theories wilder and more expansive than those presented by John Yoo on behalf of the Bush administration. Yoo, despite his willingness to treat the collection of communications like a DUI checkpoint for terrorism, had his limits. This administration, however, has seen those limits and lowered them.

Civil Rights/Policing

• An assistant county prosecutor assigned to a murder case decided he could crack the case by pretending to be the jilted lover of one of the suspects. The attorney, Aaron Brockler, made several questionable moves on his way to being fired and having his license to practice law suspended by the Supreme Court of Ohio. (h/t Courthouse News)

• It is put to me frequently that people like McDonald, who were merely implementing a policy of torture, are not evil.

• A lot of people are pointing to John Brennan’s assurances that CIA won’t ever torture again as if it means anything (usually ignoring Brennan’s motivation from institutional preservation, not efficacy or morality or legality).

• We are on the road in San Francisco, as we continue our conversation about the 2014 police killing of Alex Nieto and a slew of other police killings—Mario Woods, Amilcar Pérez-López and now Luis Gongora. Three of four of these killings happened in San Francisco’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, the Mission District and Bernal Heights. We speak about the link between these police killings and gentrification in San Francisco, with author Rebecca Solnit and community organizer Adriana Camarena.

• The day after more than 400 people were arrested on Capitol Hill, US Capitol Police on Tuesday arrested 85 mostly elderly activists who were blocking the south entrance of the Capitol. They were all participating in “Democracy Spring,” a weeklong series of rallies and marches on the Capitol aimed at bringing attention to the control of money over politics in Congress and what organizers say are unfair voting laws.

• One particular post that garnered a great deal of attention and support was written by a British expat living in Turkey. He described the outrage he felt at the seemingly total apathy expressed by the international community. In his post, he eloquently outlined the hypocrisy of those who “were” Charlie Hebdo, and who changed their profile pictures to the French flag when Paris was hit with simultaneous, horrific attacks earlier this year, yet were nowhere to be seen when we needed support. He perfectly exemplified the outrage, frustration, and humiliation experienced here in reaction to this internet version of a callous shrug. And in his statement, he supposed that perhaps the reason for the lack of western empathy in particular was because the west sees Turkey as being part of the Middle East, a categorisation he is quick to dismiss. We are not the Middle East, we are Europe, and therefore it is an outrage that we are being treated as though violence is normal or permissible here.

• The point of this series was to examine the conditions which led to the rise of Fascism in the 1930s to see if there are useful insights that might guide our understanding of conditions in the US today. In introduction to this series, I suggested several points of convergence, and over the last three months I have tried to flesh out those ideas.

• [...]

• Neoliberalism is also an excuse for hating immigrants and Muslims, who are coming here to take the jobs of deserving people, so it actually works to deflect the anger of the first group of scapegoats, at least for those who take the bait.

• [...]

• As I reread the posts in this series, I realized how angry I am about the way politics operates here. I am repulsed by the elites who act as if there were no alternative. I am nauseated by liberal wonks whose views of what is possible are claustrophobic. They are the descendants of the liberals who told me and my generation that nothing could be done about the murderous war in Viet Nam. I cannot stomach the conservative elites. They are the scum who think their mission on earth is to undo the New Deal; the direct spawn of the John Birchers and the McCarthyites and the rest of the fear-mongers. They are the wreckers.

• Polanyi says that when a social structure imposes too much stress on too many people it has to change. We don’t know how many disaffected people there are In the US, but it is clear that there is an enormous number, in both parties and among the unaffiliated, and that change will come. The US has always prided itself on its openness to change. We believe that everything will work out for the best, because we are the exceptional people, the City on the Hill. We assume that change will be for the best. Arendt points out the sickening reality: some changes are deadly.

• Since September, the small community of 2,000 has seen 101 attempted suicides. That’s around 5 percent of the population.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In recent weeks, we’ve noted how ISPs are now moving beyond broadband usage caps and overage fees, and have begun charging users a $30-$35 premium if they want to avoid usage caps entirely. While the industry often dresses this up as everything from “improved flexibility and choice” to something necessary for the sake of fairness, it is, quite simply, an aggressive rate hike on uncompetitive markets. Users are being socked with dramatic new limits and fees — simply because most have no real competitors to flee to.

DRM

• The W3C’s Encrypted Media Extensions system is specifically designed to prevent anyone from making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if those uses are allowed by law. With EME, companies get to decide which software can access the videos they send out, and what features that software is allowed to have.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A longstanding inquiry about alleged misconduct at the top of the World Intellectual Property Organization may be moving toward resolution one way or the other.

Trademarks

• Hofbrau Steak House and American Grille has been serving up German food in Northern Michigan for over six decades. Staatliches Hofbrauhaus has been brewing beer and operating eateries since the late eighteen-hundreds. Yet it was only recently that the brewer sent letters to Hofbrau demanding it change its name, claiming that it had a trademark on “hofbrau.”

• 2015 was a year of definite improvement over 2014 for design decisions from the Court of Justice and the General Court in Luxembourg. David Stone explains, however, that progress still needs to be made to provide certainty for designers and practitioners

Copyrights

• In the latest broadside in the content takedown debate, RIAA chief Cary Sherman has suggested that Google-owned YouTube is short-changing the labels by operating a DMCA-protected protection racket. Unsurprisingly Google sees things quite differently, noting that the tools already exist to take down unauthorized content on a permanent basis.

• While we’ve certainly seen a fair share of ridiculous intellectual property protectionism stemming from the Star Wars Franchise, including overreaches like trying to silence people from photographing legally purchased toys and keeping breweries from making beer-themed puns, one area where Lucasfilm was generally pretty good on was fan participation, at least before the acquisition of the Star Wars rights by Disney. This included fan-fiction and films, gatherings, and role-playing events. That’s what makes it so strange to see Lucasfilm decide to bully a non-profit group for daring to put together a “lightsaber battle” event.

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