● 04.18.16

● Links 18/4/2016: Linux 4.6 RC4, Tomb Raider for GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• To work, CAPI has to be supported by the hardware, the operating system and the application in use. At present, IBM’s POWER8 CPUs, a number of accelerators, RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.2 LE (and higher), and Ubuntu LE, as well as select programs, support CAPI.

• The OpenPower effort to create an alternative to the Xeon architecture in the datacenter just got a whole lot more real now that hyperscaler Google and cloud builder Rackspace Hosting have agreed to partner on a future server design based on IBM’s future Power9 processor that both companies intend to deploy in their datacenters.

• [...]

• This is not the first time that Google has ported its software stack to alternative platforms, of course, and McKean was very clear with us last year that Google is always testing out its software on alternative architectures to prevent “bit rot” and keep its options open. But what seems very clear now is that for certain workloads at least, Google is now in position to actually start rolling out its applications on Power. The fun bit about this is that we, as Google users, will never know if it does.

• Software container infrastructure, such as Linux Containers (LXC), is fast becoming a core facilitator of the DevOps revolution and agile development in general.

• Containers are lightweight and fast, and they can help developers keep up in today’s fast-paced software development and release environment.

• An application architecture based on Linux Containers not only requires the tools to build and run containers, but also an underlying foundation that is secure, reliable, and enterprise-grade, with an established lifecycle designed to meet the ongoing requirements of an enterprise developer over the long term.

• Earlier this week, Marco Marsala, the owner of a web hosting company claimed to have erased his entire business from the internet with a single command. Well, now it appears that he made up the entire story.

• On the popular Server Fault forum, he posted his story earlier this week. On the internet, he already became a legend and people didn’t realize the need to recognize the merit of his claim.

• I’d have to say Datadog is my favorite tool at the moment! And it’s not because they’re my employer. It’s actually the other way around. The reason I joined Datadog this past summer was due to how much I loved using their products as a customer. We’re a mix of a hosted service and open source agent that runs on your servers to collect metrics. We tend to focus on environments with dynamic infrastructure (containers, cloud, and auto-scaling or scheduled workloads), as well as aggregating metrics from a number of sources including other monitoring systems.

• The open source world has seen some great developments and improvements in our toolsets in recent years. While Nagios and Cacti or Ganglia have been the workhorses of the open source monitoring stack for the better part of the last 20 years, we now have a number of new tools such as Graphite and Graphana for time series data, ELK for log management, and much more.

• You might’ve heard the tragic-but-kind-of-funny story of Marco Marsala, who allegedly deleted his entire startup with a single line of code this past week. It was the ultimate case of IT bad luck – or carelessness, as some commenters suggested.

• It turns out the the recent question regarding the misuse of rm -rf in Ansible was actually just a hoax in some kind of viral marketing effort. It become quite famous on various media and gathered a large number of views.

• Since I don’t think we should allow ServerFault to be abused in such way, I deleted the question once I learned about the hoax. However, this will rob the kind people that took the time to answer him of the rep points they earned for this, in particular the Journeyman Geek with 185 upvotes.

Kernel Space

• When the Zephyr project was announced in February, many members of the Linux community seemed to find it puzzling. Although Zephyr is hosted by the Linux Foundation, it is an entirely separate operating system that incorporates no Linux code. It also targets small hardware devices—from Arduinos to ARM system-on-chips (SoCs)—even though there are several other open-source OS projects (including Linux for many ARM SoCs) that also address that device class. At the 2016 Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego, the Zephyr team was on hand to make the case for why the new project is necessary and, hopefully, interesting to developers.

• The annual Embedded Linux Conference happened last Monday through Wednesday (April 4th-6th) in San Diego, with high-level corporate sponsors on the order of Qualcomm and Intel. It is one of the biggest annual Linux conferences in North America, with over 100 different speakers offering technical presentations this year. Let’s look at a couple of the notable aspects of this year’s conference.

• A number of Phoronix readers have been pointing out material to indicate that the Linux kernel scheduler isn’t as good as most people would assume.

• There is this paper entitled The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores that covers the research done on the Linux kernel’s scheduler to indicate it’s suboptimal.

• It’s been a fairly calm week, and rc4 is not all that big. Nor is there anything particularly scary in there.

• Changes all over the tree, with drivers (40%) and architecture fixes (30%) being the bulk of it. The rest is scattered all over, but it’s all pretty small. In fact, the “VM fixes” show up as 5+% of the patch, but that’s literally just because we got rid of the conversion-time hack to have a couple of different calling conventions for get_user_pages().

• Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 4.6-rc4 kernel release. It’s been another week of many bug/regression fixes throughout the kernel’s many subsystems. It will still be a few weeks before Linux 4.6 is officially christened.

• Another Sunday, another chance for us, Linux enthusiasts, to take the latest RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming 4.6 kernel for a test drive on our computers.

• The core Unix API is overall a reasonably well put together programming environment, one where you can do what you need and your questions have straightforward answers. It’s not complete by any means and some of the practical edges are rough as a result of that, but the basics are solid. Well. Most of the basics.

• Given that PCI was introduced more than two decades ago and that PCI Express was introduced more than ten years ago, one might think that the Linux plumbing already did everything possible to support PCI.

• One would be quite wrong.

• One issue with current PCI support is that resource allocation is handled on a per-architecture basis, leading to duplicate code, and, worse yet, duplicate bugs. This microconference will therefore look into possible consolidation of this code.

Graphics Stack

• It seems more and more independent developers are interested in getting involved in Mesa open-source graphics driver development, but aren’t really sure where to start or what are some easy tasks to get started.

• If you have a NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 “Kepler” graphics card and wish to help out the Nouveau driver developers by testing out the experimental “boost” re-clocking patches covered yesterday on Phoronix thanks to the work by Karol Herbst, here’s a 4.5-based Ubuntu kernel build to try out this weekend.

• Karol Herbst has been one of the independent developers leading the charge to improve Nouveau re-clocking support. Within his Git tree he’s been queuing up re-clocking and voltage handling improvements for this reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux driver. He’s hoping the improved re-clocking code will be ready for the Linux 4.7~4.8 kernel, but I decided to try out his Git tree this week for some benchmarking of this experimental support.

• Today, April 17, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov has proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the first point release of the Mesa 11.2 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux systems.

• Mesa 11.2.1 has fixes for VA-API, Gallin3D Nine D3D9, game workarounds, and various bug/regression fixes to the common RadeonSI / Nouveau / i965 Mesa drivers. This doesn’t contain any of the new exciting feature-work — like OpenGL 4.2 for RadeonSI that’s almost to GL 4.3 — as that’s all going into Mesa 11.3.

Benchmarks

• Some Phoronix readers have been requesting fresh tests of OpenGL graphics/gaming performance on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with its different desktop environment options. For some brief results to share this Sunday, here are some Intel Skylake numbers when running Ubuntu 16.04 and testing out Unity, Xfce, KDE Plasma, LXDE, GNOME, MATE, and Openbox.

Applications

• MPV video player is forked from mplayer2 and MPlayer, MPV supports wide variety of audio and video file formats. It offers some of the features with the former project while introducing many more. It is an command-line video player as well as offers GUI, it is lightweight and cross-platform available for Linux, Mac and Windows. From command line MPlayer’s options parser was improved to behave more like other CLI programs, and many option names and semantics were reworked to make them more intuitive and memorable.

• Several days ago, I was gazing at the Universal Install Script comic by Randall Munroe, wondering if he may not have solved all the world’s problems, save for the usual famine, war, poverty, education, corruption, and so on. But there’s a certain appeal to having THE one script to rule them all, and in BASH-ness bind them. Yes, I was bored, so I thought, let’s try it out.

• As you may know, MythTV is an digital video recorder application. It is ideal for watching and recording television programs and has many plugins that can increase Myth-TV’s power.

• As you may know, Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

• Nonetheless, when AbiWord started in 1998, it was meant as a cross-platform code base written in C++ that had to compile on both Windows and Linux. C++ compiler where not as standard compliant as today so a lot of things where excluded: no template, so not standard C++ library (it was called STL at the time). Over the years, things have evolved, Mac support was added, gcc 4 got released (with much better C++ support), and in 2003 we started using template for the containers (not necessarily in that oder, BTW). Still no standard library. This came later. I just flipped the switch to make C++11 mandatory, more on that later.

• After a year of development, Clementine 1.3.0 was released recently, bringing Vk.com and Seafile support along with various other improvements and bug fixes.

• As you may know, zbackup is a globally-deduplicating tool that uses rsync. When you feed a large .tar archive into it, the software will store duplicate regions on it only once and reuse it, when needed. This way, if the files are not very different, the storage required is very low.

• As you may know, XiX Music Player is an open-source lightweight music player that has support for most popular architectures, including ARM, therefore works well on both Linux and Raspberry Pi Systems.

• It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of bits and pieces of information is a minefield. In part, this is because of my passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as ‘brain fog’. To combat this, I arm myself with open source software that helps me efficiently capture a lot of information. I generally prefer to keep my information local and cloud-free, primarily for security reasons.

• There is a wide range of competent note taking software for Linux, and this article seeks to cover the finest open source solutions. I have compiled this roundup of my pick of 17 excellent note applications for organizing, sharing, and taking notes. Besides the basic note-taking functionality, the software featured here provides a good array of advanced features. I strongly believe in open source software; all of the applications listed here are released under a freely distributable license.

Proprietary

• The latest Opera beta adds a cool new feature across all supported desktops: video pop out. This feature allows shifting the video frame outside the browser, the goal being to allow “true multitasking”.

• The new video pop out feature skipped the Opera developer channel, landing directly into beta, as a surprise for Opera users. This feature only supports HTML5 videos so it won’t work with Flash.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It’s no secret that Paradox Interactive has been on the forefront of Linux gaming as both a publisher and developer of games. However, it’s still exciting to see screenshots of Linux on official development posts, especially when the contents of the posts themselves are pretty interesting.

• For those unaware, Hearts of Iron IV is the latest instalment of Paradox Development Studio’s WW2 themed grand strategy game, which has been in development for some time and seen a number of delays. Release does seem close now though, as shown in an article published by BTRE.

• With prepping for the imminent release of Tomb Raider for Linux, Feral Interactive today published the Linux system requirements for this popular game.

• The minimum system requirements on the GPU side are a NVIDIA GeForce 640 1GB graphics card with the NVIDIA 364 binary driver or on the AMD side they list the Radeon HD 5770 2GB or newer with Mesa 11.2. The recommended graphics card meanwhile is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 3GB or better with the proprietary driver.

• Feral Interactive have started the week by increasing the hype for the Linux release of Tomb Raider. They have now released the system requirements!

• We told you a few weeks ago that Feral Interactive, a video games publisher for GNU/Linux and MacOS platforms, announced that they were working on porting the Tomb Raider 2013 reboot to Linux.

• Guild Software, the developer of Vendetta Online 3D space combat MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), today announced the release of the latest update for their project.

• It has been awhile since we’ve heard something from Guild Software, as they’ve been very quiet about Vendetta Online updates during the past one and a half months. But that doesn’t mean that the game did not received improvements and new, highly anticipated features.

• Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan looks and sounds like it might be a pretty fun game, and the developers have confirmed a Linux version is currently in-progress.

• The brand new Linux-native RuneScape client “NXT” can now be downloaded to have it ready for the big release on the 18th. It does have issues though.

• First thing, as noted on reddit, they tell you to download the repository keys for Ubuntu insecurely (they only officially offer an Ubuntu download).

• They also depend on “libglew1.10″, but newer distributions like Ubuntu 16.04 which is about to become the main LTS release don’t have that older version in the repository.

• The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.39.0! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all operating systems. This release brings background cell loading and caching, which is a feature not to be missed. Initial support for object shaders has found its way back into our engine, and a host of bugs have been smashed. See below for the full list of changes.

• The OpenMW project today, April 16, 2016, announced yet another maintenance version in the development cycle of their open-source remake of the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind game for GNU/Linux operating systems.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The looong road to xfce 4.14. I hope you still want some news about Xfce !

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In the last two months, tech developers, helped by students from India in order to the Google Summer of Code, worked hard, together with the editing team, on new features and fuctions that we wanted to implement in the site. So, tech developers decided to release WikiToLearn 0.7 on saturday April 09. But something went wrong, and what would have to be an ordinary saturday of releasing became a hellish saturday.

• Plasma 5.4 introduced plasma-pa (new audio volume applet and KCM) to replace KMix, however it was missing few important features in the initial release. Unfortunately, there was no progress after that.

• So, using MXE, I built Qt and most dependencies. Still missing are Vc, OpenColorIO, GSL, Poppler-qt5 and openjpeg. I also needed to remove some of the hacks we did to make Krita compile with MSVC: we had added a couple of dummy header files to provide things like nothl and friends (these days superseded by QtEndian). A 3rd-party library we embed, xcftools, had its own equivalent of that stuff. But apart from that…

• I’m always searching for the way to use as much open source software as possible at University. Maybe it was as simple as searching google for it. Krita software, hmmm, interesting, let’s give it a try. Maybe the Krita name was familiar to me because some time ago I read about a collection of open source tools for audiovisual creativity.

• It is also used in the Cutelyst web framework for generating html, templated emails and any other use-cases users of that framework have.

• There is also rather advanced Grantlee integration available in KDevelop for new class generation, using the same principles I blogged about some years ago.

• Last night ( Friday 15th April, 19:00 UTC ) we held the second of our Kubuntu packaging parties. Using the new conference server provided by BigBlueButton ( BBB ), and things worked like a dream.

• Our last party was difficult to orchestrate as we were operating across multiple channels. Internet Relay Chat, Mumble voice server, and Google Hangouts.

• Our BBB server provides all three of those functions and allows each user to decide which of each they prefer to use.

• 1,5 years ago the VDG start with an icon theme for LibreOffice to guaranty an consistent look and feel for Plasma users. Now this new icon theme Breeze was used by default in the KDE Linux distributions and on Mac OS X.

• Breeze is a monochrome icon theme and fits well into modern Desktops like Plasma and OS X but the second reason is that the Breeze icon set is a complete icon set. We can support 100 % (and I mean 100 %) of the needed LibreOffice icons. In addition Breeze supports dark colour themes AND 32 px icon size. This is unique because only the default icon set is that much feature complete.

• Last night (Friday 15th April, 19:00 UTC) we held the second of our Kubuntu packaging parties. Using the new conference server provided by BigBlueButton (BBB), things worked like a dream.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The past couple of weeks went by so fast working on Sysprof that I think we can actually release it as a (late) 3.20 application. We don’t have many translations, but on the other hand, we didn’t have any before.

• In the year I worked with David, we turned Dasher from a research project into a well-integrated component of Gnome, improved its support for Windows, accepted code from an external contributor who ported it to OS X (using an OpenGL canvas!) and wrote ports for a range of handheld devices. We added code that allowed Dasher to directly control the UI of other applications, making it possible for people to drive word processors without having to leave Dasher. We taught Dasher to speak. We strove to avoid the mistakes present in so many other pieces of accessibility software, such as configuration that could only be managed by an (expensive!) external consultant. And we visited Dasher users and learned how they used it and what more they needed, then went back home and did what we could to provide that.

• GNOME Twitch was updated to version 0.2.0 recently, adding a much needed chat feature, along with various user interface improvements and bug fixes.

Distributions

• We now ship locales for Firefox and Thunderbird. This makes it easier to switch to the language you desire / need without having to jump through the hoop of installing addons.

New Releases

• Today, April 17, 2016, 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki was happy to inform us about the immediate availability of the Beta release of the upcoming 4MRescueKit 17.0 Live CD.

• Following the Slackware hopefully final release candidate, here we are for Zenwalk 8.0 RC1.

• The developers of the Slackware-based Zenwalk GNU/Linux operating system announced this weekend the general availability of the first and probably the last RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Zenwalk 8.0 distro.

• During the past four months, Zenwalk 8.0 has received a total of three Beta releases, and now it has finally reached the RC state, as most of the issues have been fixed by now. Moreover, the development cycle of the Slackware 14.2 operating system is nearing its final stages as the second Release Candidate was announced the other day.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• ROSA R7 Desktop Fresh is an interesting project. It has a unique spin, its own flair and identity, and it blends the old, proven – and not so proven – concepts from Mandriva with modern technology and looks. The end result is quite polar, or rather bi-polar. You will either love it or hate it. Functionality wise, most if not everything I tried worked.

• While the virtual machine testing doesn’t really provide the necessary confidence needed to ascertain the value of a distro, I think R7 is worth testing, provided it agrees with your hardware. I’m an unlucky one in that regard. There are lots of things that can be improved, including some real, actual functionality bugs, a more modern and streamlined installer, more intuitive package manager and system menu, and such. But then, you get classic good looks, KDE style, multimedia playback, a rich repertoire of programs out of the box, and a robust design. Perhaps one day I will be able to experience all these outside the Matrix. 6.5/10. See you around.

Gentoo Family

• We have recently stumbled upon a new project on GitHub, called GNOME Without Systemd, which promises to deliver a systemd-free experience of the GNOME desktop environment to Gentoo and Funtoo Linux users.

• The GNOME Without Systemd project, which is, in fact, a collection of useful information on how to install GNOME without the systemd init system, saw its initial commit this past weekend, on April 16, 2016. You may want to know that it appears to have been put together by Dantrell B., a contributor to the Gentoo Linux and Gentoo Linux operating systems.

Arch Family

• As you may know, Arch Linux is among the most popular rolling release Linux systems. On April 14, Arch has received a major kernel upgrade, replacing Kernel 4.4.5 with Kernel 4.5, which has been added to the Testing repositories some time ago.

• The Arch developers have skipped the Kernel 4.4.6 and Kernel 4.4.7 and adopted kernel 4.5 directly. Among others, Kernel 4.5 brings better support for AMD Radeon GPUs, comes with support for the AMD PowerPlay power management technology and brings enhancements to the AMDGPU open-source driver.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE Tumbleweed users received many snapshots during the last two weeks, since the beginning of the April, so it’s time to keep you guys up to speed with what’s new in the rolling GNU/Linux distribution.

• We are happy to announce the first preview release of the upcoming Open Build Service (OBS) version 2.7. Two highlights that you should check out are the download on demand support which makes it possible to include external software repositories and the new git work flows.

Slackware Family

• So reserving time to compile the 32bit package for chromium took a while. And remember, even though I can still provide a 32bit Chromium browser, Google has ceased providing a 32bit version of their own Chrome browser – which means, no more updates to the 32bit PepperFlash and Widevine plugins.

• Finally! IcedTea 3.0.0 has been released and it compiles OpenJDK 8u77.

• Java 8 has been available for considerable time, but I have been waiting for icedtea to support it before creating packages. According to release maintainer Andrew Hughes the main cause for this delay was having to start from scratch due to the new build system and basically lack of time.

Red Hat Family

• OpenStack deployments can be easily managed and deployed using open-source DevOps tools and networking solutions, as demonstrated in a new proof-of-concept (PoC) by Cumulus Networks, Dell Inc. and Red Hat Inc.

• The three vendors teamed up to create a massive 300+ node OpenStack cluster using Dell’s servers and networking switches, Red Hat’s OpenStack platform, and Cumulus’ Linux network OS. By using open source tools like Ansible and Git, the companies fired up the cluster in just six hours.

Finance

Fedora

• A few days ago, the voting for the Supplemental Wallpaper for Fedora 24 opened. And I am impressed, how many Fedora contributors have voted so far, but I have to tell you that even I dont know the exact number yet. Nuancier is written in a way, that I cant look into the numbers before it is published. But Fedora Badges gives a little bit of an insight, but you have to see as we made that badge for the first time there was a lot of discussion about badges for voting, so it must be claimed manually and its not claimed by all who vote. But now we have already 207 badges for Fedora 24 claimed, compared to 89 for Fedora 23. So the amount of voters is already doubled and there is still nearly a week time for the votes!

• Fedora is the fast-paced bleeding-edge distribution of Red Hat. Fedora 24 is the first release of 2016 the other being Fedora 25. Let’s discover what lies in the future of this popular Linux distribution especially among developers.

• If you’re like most people, then computers are a tool for doing what matters to you. You probably use your computer to do many other things you’re interested in — like photography, for instance. Fedora turns out to be perfect for creative pursuits like this.

• Riley Brandt is a YouTuber who’s big on open source but also into photography. He recently reviewed the Fedora Design Suite, a version of Fedora built on the Workstation edition, but adding lots of free creativity tools. It’s assembled and maintained by the amazing Fedora Design team, a community of artists and designers who use free and open source software to make Fedora beautiful.

Debian Family

• The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Mehdi Dogguy! Of a total of 1023 developers, 282 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

• More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2016 page.

• This seems consistent with the strategy, that pessimists may define EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish), of seeking close integration with the GNU/Linux system.

• The move, from a traditionally hostile company that recently started showing enthusiasm towards open source software, is causing a mixture of derision and opposition in the community. As the grey beards in the IT community might recall, most of Microsoft partners, from IBM to the humble dev, tend to end up screwed in the long term. Will GNU/Linux be the exception?

• Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The utility makes adjusting almost every part of the Unity experience easy, from switching GTK theme to enabling “hidden” features like ‘Minimise on Click’ on the Unity Launcher.

• Today, April 16, 2016, Canonical has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Snappy 2.0 utility for the upcoming Snappy Ubuntu Core 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

• Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland informed the Ubuntu community about the availability of the Docker 1.10 Linux container engine for every supported architecture in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

• Jon Boden, the creator of the controversial ubuntuBSD project, an open-source and free operating system that brings Ubuntu and FreeBSD together, unveiled the distribution’s official homepage.

• Today we would like to introduce you guys to an upcoming PC stick powered by an Intel Bay Trail processor and running the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Linux operating system.

• Softpedia has been informed today, April 17, 2016, by David Mohammed about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate (RC) build of the soon-to-become Ubuntu Budgie flavor.

• Ubuntu 16.04 will support two different package formats for applications: Snaps and Debs. The underlying Ubuntu system will continue to use Deb packages, but Snap packages can be installed alongside Debs.

• As a reminder, Solus OS is a free, open-source Linux system built from scratch by Ikey Doherty. What’s interesting about it is the fact that it uses Budgie, a beautiful, very lightweight desktop environment built in GTK+.

• Recently, David Mohammed decided to take the Budgie desktop and used it by default on Ubuntu, creating his own Ubuntu flavor named Budgie-Remix.

• Right now, Budgie-Remix 16.04 RC has been released, but the developer is working hard to make Ubuntu Budgie an official flavor and release it along with the other systems from the Ubuntu family, starting with Ubuntu 16.10.

• In this video I show how to install the latest kernel in Ubuntu Linux. I discuss some of the benefits of installing your own kernel, and how you can contribute to the development of the Linux Kernel just by running the latest.

• I’m thrilled to introduce Docker 1.10.3, supported on every Ubuntu architecture, for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and announce the General Availability of Ubuntu Fan Networking!

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will allow installing snap packages along traditional deb packages, announced Olli Ries, SW Engineering Ubuntu Client Director at Canonical.

• The change comes as a way to solve the users and developers frustration in regard to installing newer software without having to worry about the impact on other applications or the system, because a snap package contains all of its dependencies, so it can’t interfere with other packages.

Devices/Embedded

• After finally reaching the tipping point with off-the-shelf solutions that can’t match increasing speeds available, we recently took the plunge. Building a homebrew router turned out to be a better proposition than we could’ve ever imagined. With nearly any speed metric we analyzed, our little DIY kit outpaced routers whether they were of the $90- or $250-variety.

• Naturally, many readers asked the obvious follow-up—”How exactly can we put that together?” Today it’s time to finally pull back the curtain and offer that walkthrough. By taking a closer look at the actual build itself (hardware and software), the testing processes we used, and why we used them, hopefully any Ars readers of average technical abilities will be able to put together their own DIY speed machine. And the good news? Everything is as open source as it gets—the equipment, the processes, and the setup. If you want the DIY router we used, you can absolutely have it. This will be the guide to lead you, step-by-step.

• DOO X86 single board computer combines the benefits of a PC and Arduino 101 to become one of the most appealing devices for a maker. This open source board is about 10 times faster than Raspberry Pi 3 and based on Quad-Core 64-bit generation x86 Intel processors.

Phones

Android

• Making this announcement in a press release to a Middle Eastern website The National in an interview, Chen made it clear that the two smartphones will be mid-range handsets affordable to everyone, following requests by various enterprise customers, who were looking at smartphones in the $400 to $500 price range.

• It seems that despite a lengthy meeting to settle the ongoing lawsuit between Google and Oracle concerning the use of certain part of Oracle’s software in Android, the two companies were unable to reach an agreement in the copyright lawsuit.

• Android N is going to make it easier for device makers to create their own version of 3D Touch pressure-sensitive screens on their devices. Hopefully, when it’s officially released, Google will figure out what to call the feature — because Apple 3D Touch is obviously Apple branding, and “support for pressure-sensitive screens” is an awful thing to have to write over and over again.

• When buying a smartphone, there are many things to consider. Should you get Android or iOS? How much should you spend? Which carrier will you use? It can be very confusing.

• If you are on a budget, however, Android is the best option — Apple does not offer truly affordable off-contract phones. Choosing a value-focused, pre-paid carrier — such as Boost Mobile or Virgin USA — can be another way to save money. Today, Kyocera announces an affordable waterproof Android handset for those aforementioned carriers. Just how affordable is it? $99!

• These days, Android game apps are hotter than ever. And when you consider how often we’re sitting in front of our Android phones, it makes a lot of sense that we’re playing using mobile game apps than ever. In this piece, I’ll share 10 great Android game apps folks are playing these days.

Free Software/Open Source

• You’ll find it parroted most in the open source community, particularly when Microsoft pulls stunts like their recent “partnering” with canonical to implement an Ubuntu-like Posix environment in Windows Ten. The phrase originates from the DOJ’s findings during the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust case in 2003, as an internal standard for their technology development. Examples of Microsoft’s attempts at this methodology are pervasive in their offerings, including ActiveX and DirectX in the web and graphics software ecosystems, and recently, their involvement with the Linux community.

• The MEF, China Unicom, ON.Lab, and Huawei are pleased to announce a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on using open source solutions to transform Central Offices and accelerate the industry transition to Third Network services. MOU partners will develop Proof of Concept use cases that illustrate how operators can deliver agile, assured, and orchestrated MEF-defined services by using open source software and open specification hardware. These use cases will serve as a stepping stone for deployable Third Network services that yield productivity-enhancing benefits for end customers.

Events

• It’s LinuxFest NorthWest time! I’ve never been to LFNW, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it’s hometown of Bellingham, Washington. Back in the day — we’re talking the late 1960s and early 70s — Bellingham was home to a hippie underground newspaper, Northwest Passage, that was known in counterculture circles of the day across the continent. Alas, the Passage has been gone since ’86, but its spirit seems to live on in a high techy, Linuxy sort of way at LFNW. From what I’ve seen, LFNW seems to be the most community driven and for-the–people of the major festivals in the U.S.

• Last Wednesday was no less than the third time the local FOSS group in Aalborg met. Today I’m looking back at how it all started so I thought I would share some thoughts that may help others who would like to spread free and open source software in their local area.

• Last month at the Rochester Institute of Technology, BrickHack 2016 came to a close. BrickHack is an annual hackathon organized by students at RIT. Close to 300 people attend every year. This year was BrickHack’s second event.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Back in March, a young operating system project attracted attention in the open source community. The project is called Redox and its developers are working on a Unix-like operating system written in the Rust language. The Redox operating system features a microkernel design (like MINIX), the permissive MIT license and some interesting design ideas.

• While I read a lot of opinions in March about the developers and their design goals, I encountered very little commentary on what it was like to use the young operating system itself. This lead me to become curious and download the project’s small installation ISO which is just 26MB in size.

• A group of the biggest US newspaper publishers — including Dow Jones, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Co. — have cosigned what they are calling a “cease and desist” letter (read it in full below) sent to the former Mozilla CEO’s new browser company.

• A quiet announcement about a new Mozilla project sounded like a death knell for the Firefox browser.

• It wasn’t. But the project, called Tofino, reveals the technology challenges Mozilla faces more than a decade after Firefox’s debut. Hundreds of millions of people still use the browser, but its star is fading compared with Google’s Chrome.

• Mozilla released details about the Tofino project Friday, saying a six-person team at Mozilla will consider how to radically revamp Web browsers.

SaaS/Back End

• One of the most commonly needed components of any enterprise application is a solid database, and the development community behind OpenStack is working hard to make sure working with databases in the open source cloud is an easy, reliable, and performant experience.

• Amrith Kumar of Tesora, Christopher Merz of NetApp, and Rob Young of Red Hat are giving a talk at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, TX later this month entitled Expanding DBaaS Workloads with OpenStack Trove and Manila which explores the integration between multiple OpenStack projects, Trove and Manila, and developers from several companies to make databases a first-class citizen and enterprise-ready application for OpenStack.

• Google machine learning wants to harness your unscheduled minutes. Pivotal expands its alliance with Hortonworks. The big data-as-a-service market is forecast to grow in a big way. Dell updates Statistica for “citizen” data scientists. All that and how your emoji choices may be driving your friends away, in the Big Data Roundup for the week ending April 17, 2016.

• At OpenStack Summit this month in Austin, Colette Alexander will give a talk called Hunting for Purple Squirrels: Hiring OpenStack Contributors in the Wild. In this interview, she answers questions about her talk, and explains how major tech companies are like the Girl Scouts of the USA and how playing the cello helps her solve professional challenges.

LibreOffice

• The government of Italy’s South Tyrol province will end its LibreOffice migration project, and instead intends to switch to a proprietary cloud-based office service. A decision was published on 12 April.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Dr. Richard Stallman is an inductee of the internet hall of fame as well as the founder of the “Free Software” movement. In the words of Robert Grüning “Richard Stallman is like the Socrates of software, the money making colleagues are the sophists.” Another member of my audience said that Stallman is like Tron – he fights for the users. Yet Richard himself disliked both characterizations and called them misleading. So I suggest you check out my Singularity 1on1 interview with Richard Stallman, learn about the Free Software movement and judge for yourself.

• DejaGnu 1.6 was released on April 15, 2016. Important changes include decent SSH support, many bug fixes and a much improved manual. Many old and defunct board files have been removed.

Project Releases

• ownCloud 9.0 Enterprise Edition is now available and includes new file controls. New options for document classification rules are among the features in this ownCloud release.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• The use of open educational resources is growing. Open education involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available to all without the restrictions of copyright and proprietary licensing models. According to U.S. Secretary of Education John King, “Openly licensed educational resources can increase equity by providing all students, regardless of zip code, access to high-quality learning materials that have the most up-to-date and relevant content.”

Open Hardware or OS

• Creating a new operating system from scratch is a daunting task—witness the slow progress of GNU Hurd, for example. But it would be hard to argue that the existing systems are the be-all and end-all of how we interact with computer hardware. At least some of the deficiencies in today’s offerings can arguably be traced to the language used to implement them; C, for all its power, has some fairly serious flaws that lead to bugs and security holes of various sorts. So it is interesting to see a new entrant that uses the Rust language, which is focused on memory safety. The result is Redox, which is still far from ready for everyday use, but may provide an interesting counterpoint to Linux, the BSDs, OS X, Windows, and others.

• Based on the recent and wild success of the Kestrel-3 home-brew computer project, I am happy to announce my next project for the open computing masses. Say hello to the Kestrel-4.

• What properly holds me back from buying one is the fact I need to use Steam to use the controller, and the few games I do play aren’t available on Steam (e.g, SuperTuxKart, MAME, etc).

• When I was a child growing up in the 1980s robots were something found exclusively in the realm of science fiction. As time passed, the 1990s emerged and Honda’s Asimo started making appearances in tech-centric television programming on the Discovery Channel or TLC (this, during an era when those networks still focused on educational content).

Programming/Development

• We plan to build a suite of compiler-based dynamic instrumentation tools for analyzing targeted performance problems. These tools will all live under a new “EfficiencySanitizer” (or “esan”) sanitizer umbrella, as they will share significant portions of their implementations.

• Derek Bruening of Google has announced the company’s interest in creating an “Efficiency Sanitizer” for LLVM/Clang for analyzing targeted performance problems.

• Worked on Google and other compoanies have been Address Sanitizer, Memory Sanitizer, Thread Sanitizer, Leak Sanitizer, Data Flow Sanitizer, and other sanitizers found in LLVM/Clang some of which have also been ported to GCC. These sanitizers have been incredibly helpful for developers in catching various problems within program code-bases, including many security issues. The latest focus being pursued by Google’s compiler engineers is on an Efficiency Sanitizer.

Leftovers

Science

• These people made contributions to the mankind but they would have never thought that their own creation would be held accountable for their last breath.

• Actor and writer Wil Wheaton wants to “add an A to the STEM acronym and make it STEAM.” He’ll be speaking at the USA Science and Engineering Festival April 16-17 in Washington about why he thinks the arts should be represented in the acronym commonly used when referring to the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

• Wheaton, 43, best known for his role as Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the 1980s and ’90s and more recently as a fictionalized version of himself on “The Big Bang Theory,” says that he has always been fascinated by science and technology, and has made it a goal of his to ensure that kids get the encouragement they need to pursue those fields.

• The existence of the Plesetsk site was not admitted by the USSR for a further 17 years.

• It was reported at the time that the schoolboys had “beat the Americans” in discovering the site. Bob Christy, another pupil who participated in the experiment, thinks they probably knew of its existence, but the school’s work made sure the information was made public.

• “It wasn’t about studying the Russian space programme, it was about helping children understand space,” he said.

Hardware

• Intel is preparing a significant round of job cuts across business units this spring, according to multiple sources inside the company familiar with its plans.

• The cutbacks will reduce employment in some parts of the business by double-digit percentages, according to Intel insiders, amounting to thousands of job cuts across the company by the end of the year. The planned downsizing could begin soon after Intel reports its first-quarter financial results Tuesday, though sources say timing and specifics remain fluid.

Health/Nutrition

• On 13 April, the EU Parliament called on the European Commission to restrict certain permitted uses of the toxic herbicide glyphosate, best known in Monsanto’s ‘Roundup’ formulation.

• Glyphosate was last year determined to be “probably carcinogenic” by the WHO, and the resolution calls for no approval for many uses now considered acceptable, including use in or close to public parks, playgrounds and gardens and use where integrated pest management systems are sufficient for necessary weed control. The resolution falls short of an outright ban called for by many and also calls for the renewal of the licence for glyphosate to be limited to just seven years instead of the 15 proposed by the Commission.

• Nearly 700 MEPs voted on the seven-year licensing of glyphosate and the vote was passed by 374 votes in favor to 225 votes against.

• If you don’t believe the Tories would destroy the NHS it’s time to face reality. It’s happening right now. The NHS is critically unwell, and whether it’s deliberate or not, death’s door is open.

Security

• Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority (CA) that just left beta stage, that provides domain name-validated (DV) X.509 certificates for free and in an automated way: users just have to run a piece of software on their server to get and install a certificate, resulting in a valid TLS setup.

• 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.

• Weeks of anxiety and concern over the Badlock vulnerability ended today with an anticlimactic thud.

• One of the promises of the “Internet of things” is that it gives us greater control over our homes, gadgets, and more. Free software also offers that sort of promise, along with the idea that, if necessary, we can support our own gadgetry when the manufacturer moves on to some new shiny object. The currently unfolding story of the Revolv hub shows that, in many cases, these promises are empty. The devices we depend on and think we own can, in fact, be turned into useless bricks at the manufacturer’s whim.

• The Revolv “M1″ home-automation hub was one of many products designed to bring home control to the Internet. It is able to control lights, heating, and more, all driven by smartphone-based applications. The product was sufficiently successful to catch the eye of the business-development folks at Nest, who acquired the company; Nest was acquired in turn by Google, and is now a separate company under the “Alphabet” umbrella.

• UL, the 122-year-old safety standards organisation whose various marks (UL, ENEC, etc.) certify minimum safety standards in fields as diverse as electrical wiring, cleaning products, and even dietary supplements, is now tackling the cybersecurity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with its new UL 2900 certification. But there’s a problem: UL’s refusal to freely share the text of the new standard with security researchers leaves some experts wondering if UL knows what they’re doing.

• When Ars requested a copy of the UL 2900 docs to take a closer look at the standard, UL (formerly known as Underwriters Laboratories) declined, indicating that if we wished to purchase a copy—retail price, around £600/$800 for the full set—we were welcome to do so. Independent security researchers are also, we must assume, welcome to become UL retail customers.

• THE SECURITY attack dogs at IBM have uncovered two normally solo malware threats working together to rob banks in the US and Canada.

• IBM’s X-Force division has dubbed the combined malware Stealma and Louise GozNym by merging the names of the individual, but now friendly, Gozi ISFB and Nymaim.

• “It appears that the operators of Nymaim have recompiled its source code with part of the Gozi ISFB source code, creating a combination that is being actively used in attacks against more than 24 US and Canadian banks, stealing millions of dollars so far,” said IBM in a blog post.

• Security and privacy are important to many people. Given the personal and financial importance of data stored in computers (traditional or mobile), users don’t want criminals to get a hold of it. Companies know this, which is why both Apple IOS and Google Android both encrypt their local file systems by default now. If a bill anything like what’s been proposed becomes law, users that care about security are going to go elsewhere. That may end up being non-US companies’ products or US companies may shift operations to localities more friendly to secure design. Either way, the US tech sector loses. A more accurate title would have been Technology Jobs Off-Shoring Act of 2016.

• Anytime you work on a software project, the big events are always new releases. We love to get our update and see what sort of new and exciting things have been added. New versions are exciting, they’re the result of months or years of hard work. Who doesn’t love to talk about the new cool things going on?

Defence/Aggression

• Hillary Clinton has a dark history in foreign policy. Indeed, if the Nuremberg principles were applied evenly, her name would certainly be on the docket, along with her former boss in the White House, who is actually less of a hawk than she. When Donald Trump publicly expressed a willingness to negotiate with Russia over international conflicts, she referred to such an idea as putting “Christmas in the Kremlin.” She’s red-baited Bernie Sanders for his support for the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions back in the 1980s. Clinton basically backs not “political realism,” but the more imperial tradition of neoconservative “American exceptionalism,” a chauvinist mindset by which the US sets the political, economic, and military priorities of the world and the places and times of its interventions, sometimes with allied support, sometimes without, at its own discretion.

• Secretary of State Clinton was harsh on subordinates who were careless with classified information, but those rules apparently weren’t for her, a troubling double standard, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

• The poll was conducted by Penn Schoen Berland, a public relations and market research firm co-founded by controversial strategist Mark Penn, and was sponsored by a Dubai-based affiliate of Burson Marsteller, once described as “the PR firm for evil.” Still, the undertaking, as outlined by organizers, sounds ambitious. It included 250 face-to-face interviews in three Iraqi cities, plus another 3,250 interviews in 15 other countries throughout the Arab world, all with men and women ages 18-24 “selected to provide an accurate reflection of each nation’s geographic and socio-economic make-up.” It claims an error rate of plus or minus 1.65 percent.

• The Catholic Church, which over the centuries has blessed many dreadful wars, is shifting to an anti-war position favored by Pope Francis and more in line with Jesus’s teachings, writes ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

• There is no question that the neocons in the room, whose lavish sinecures come to them courtesy of the military-industrial complex, were hyperventilating in anticipation of another major US invasion of Iraq (and Syria). War is the greatest DC jobs program and the hits just keep coming.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• FOR DECADES, 3M was the primary producer of C8, or PFOA, and was the sole producer of a related chemical known as PFOS. But while DuPont was caught up in a massive class-action suit over C8, 3M has largely avoided public scrutiny and serious legal or financial consequences for its role in developing and selling these industrial pollutants.

• In February, however, a state court in Minnesota, where the company is headquartered, allowed a lawsuit against 3M to move forward. And late last year, lawyers filed a class-action suit in Decatur, Alabama, home to one of 3M’s biggest plants. Both lawsuits charge that 3M knew about the health hazards posed by the perfluorinated chemicals it was manufacturing and using to make carpet coating, Scotchgard, firefighting foam, and other products — and that the company knew the chemicals were spreading beyond its sites. With PFCs cropping up in drinking water around the country and all over the world, the two lawsuits raise the possibility that 3M may finally be held accountable in a court of law.

• The environmental group WWF Finland says that as of today, the country has already used up its share of natural resources for the entire year. Energy production, traffic emissions and food production are the top ills.

• NASA reports that this was the hottest three-month start (January to March) of any year on record. It beat the previous record — just set in 2015 — by a stunning 0.7°F (0.39°C). Normally, such multi-month records are measured in the hundredths of a degree

• Last month was the hottest February on record by far. It followed the hottest January on record by far, which followed the hottest December by far, which followed the hottest November on record by far, which followed the hottest October on record by far. Some may detect a pattern here.

• However, his friends were worried. Muir’s siblings pleaded with him to abandon his “clouds and flowers” for more practical pursuits. “You must be social John,” Jeanne Carr, a transcendentalist friend and spiritual mentor had written him, trying to coax him to leave the mountains and re-enter public life. “I could envy you your solitude, but there may be too much of it.” Carr felt strongly that Muir had a singular gift for carrying the transcendentalist vision of a sacred nature to a wider public, a vision she believed could help to dismantle the industrial consensus that saw nature only as a commercial resource to be exploited.

Finance

• The biggest tax dodger is technology giant Apple, with $181 billion held offshore. General Electric had the second-largest stash, at $119 billion, enough to repay four times over the $28 billion GE received in federal guarantees during the 2008 Wall Street crash. Microsoft had $108 billion in overseas accounts, with companies like Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, IBM, Cisco Systems, Google, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson rounding out the top ten.

• Overseas tax havens have been the focus of recent revelations about tax scams by wealthy individuals, based on the leak of the “Panama Papers,” documents from a single Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, involving 214,000 offshore shell companies. The firm’s clients included 29 billionaires and 140 top politicians worldwide, among them a dozen heads of government.

• Bernie Sanders has revealed he earns $205,000 dollars (£145,000) a year, after being challenged by Hillary Clinton to publish his tax returns.

• Mr Sanders’ annual income, which is shared with his wife, is less than his multimillionaire rival made for three recent speeches delivered to Goldman Sachs employees.

• The banking giant paid Ms Clinton $675,000 (£475,000) for the appearances. She and her husband have an estimated net worth of $110m (£77m), far surpassing the Sanders, who are worth around $300,000 (£210,000).

• The other day Hillary promised she would appoint Attorneys General like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. “I will appoint an Attorney General who will continue the courageous work of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.” Given that the comments came at an Al Sharpton event, I assumed the comment meant to invoke Holder and Lynch’s efforts to reform criminal justice and, presumably, their even more laudable support for civil rights.

• Nevertheless, it was a disturbing comment, given that Holder and Lynch have also both coddled the bankers who crashed our economy. Indeed, when Hillary tries to defend her huge donations from bankers, she always points to Obama’s even huger ones, and insists that there’s no evidence he was influenced by them. But the Obama DOJ record on bank crime is itself the counter to Hillary’s claim those donations didn’t influence the President.

• Actor George Clooney hosted a couple of obscenely expensive fundraising events for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on Friday and Saturday nights. 1%er couples needed to pony up $353,400 to buy access. Saturday’s event was at Clooney’s home at 7:00 pm.

• At the same time, Howard Gold, a next-door neighbor of Clooney, hosted a $27 per person fundraiser in support of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, according to The Hill.

• Gold, whose family founded the 99 Cents Only store chain, called his event the “99% Party.” The email invitation to the 99% party read, “Swimming pools, Movie Stars and merriment for all! This is happening right next door to Clooney’s party for Hillary!” according to The Hill.

• IT WOULD HAVE been infuriating at any time of the year to learn about the massive tax evasion by the global 0.01 percent revealed by the Panama Papers leak. But it’s especially maddening for regular American schlubs to hear about it in April, just as we’re doing our own taxes.

• According to estimates by Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman in his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations, rich individuals and big corporations use various machinations to pay at least a third of a trillion dollars less than they owe every year. For everyone else, this translates directly into higher taxes, more national debt, and less government spending.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Gizmodo published a screenshot Friday of an internal poll that Facebook employees were purportedly using to decide what questions to ask CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a meeting in March.

• The company’s main product announcement, its attempt to turn Messenger into a hub little programs for businesses to chat with customers, was greeted by puzzlement from users and skepticism from the developers who were the main audience for the show.

• FOR YEARS, THE Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United was depicted by Democrats as the root of all political evil. But now, the core argument embraced by the Court’s conservatives to justify their ruling has taken center stage in the Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — because Clinton supporters, to defend the huge amount of corporate cash on which their candidate is relying, frequently invoke that very same reasoning.

• Four years ago, I attended a College Democrats conference in Chicago. I set foot inside Obama’s campaign headquarters and felt the enthusiasm about his presidency first-hand. For the first time, I called myself a Democrat with confidence. Democracy empowered me. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with the entire world.

• Throughout my college career, I was actively involved with the College Democrats. I served as president. I recruited friends to attend meetings, volunteer for voter registration drives, petition for candidates, canvass in local neighborhoods and spread the word about upcoming presidential debates. I even formed close relationships with fellow Democrats through it. Civic engagement and active citizenship was my life. I wanted to empower everyone around me to exercise their political power.

• [...]

• In a truly democratic system, we’d have more competent, diverse candidates. Voting no longer provides me the indulgence and satisfaction it once did. I feel it does more harm than good with our current political climate. If I vote for Clinton as a rejection of Trump, or vote for Sanders to dodge a Clinton vote, what duty am I actually performing? When I vote for a president I don’t support, I support a flawed political system. I refuse that system.

• In an article titled “Islam and the Radical West” published in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens raises the important issue of the radicalization of Western Muslims. But as far as responsible and informed journalism goes, the piece’s credibility ends there. Stephens goes on to make a number of stereotypical and weakly supported claims regarding Islam while taking amateurish pot shots at some of America’s most important thinkers, including Noam Chomsky.

• Beyond sharing this neocon “regime change” obsession, former Secretary of State Clinton also talks like a neocon. One of their trademark skills is to use propaganda or “perception management” to demonize their targets and to romanticize their allies, what is called “gluing white hats” on their side and “gluing black hats” on the other.

• Maya Randolph and Aru, who declined to give her last name, were two of the few dozen New Yorkers arrested Thursday evening at a massive protest of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. The young women were part of a group of 10 people who were arrested and charged with criminal trespass after they stormed the hotel where Trump was speaking at a private event.

• Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, refused to apologize on Sunday for his alleged assault of former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields.

• Bernie Sanders became the first socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and ran successfully as an Independent for the House of Representatives and then the Senate. Now, the Democratic challenger to Hillary Clinton has young voters “feeling the Bern.”

• The political career of Bernie Sanders nearly ended before it began. In the early 1970s, he lost his first four races — two for the Senate and two for governor — running on the ticket of Vermont’s radical Liberty Union Party, while espousing positions such as ending the Vietnam War and abolishing the CIA. But when he ran as an Independent for mayor of Burlington in 1981, the socialist Sanders beat the five-term Democratic incumbent.

• DURING THURSDAY’S DEMOCRATIC debate in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders asked this question about Hillary Clinton: “Do we really feel confident about a candidate saying that she’s going to bring change in America when she is so dependent on big money interests?”

• Clinton’s response was to invoke Barack Obama. “Make no mistake about it, this is not just an attack on me, it’s an attack on President Obama,” she said. “President Obama had a Super PAC when he ran. President Obama took tens of millions of dollars from contributors. And President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year.”

• Now Krugman has always been a defender of the banks and always in denial that banks can be crooked. A few years ago, Iceland had a problem. The banks were very crooked. They controlled the government that was about to give enormous amounts of money to the banks. I had gone over and met with the Prime Minister and former Prime Ministers and convinced them not to pay Britain and the sort of crooked depositors. They hired Krugman at a very high fee and gave him the handouts and he said no, the Icelandic banks are not crooked. Iceland should really bankrupt itself and pay for the Icesave and the British bank affiliates that went under, even though these were not bank branches but bank affiliates.

Censorship/Free Speech

• It took me some time to trust the cloud. Growing up with digital technologies that were neither resilient nor reliable — a floppy drive could go kaput without you having done anything, a CD once scratched could not be recovered, hard drives malfunctioned and it was a given that once every few months your PC would crash and need a re-install — I have always been paranoid about making backups and storing information. Once I kicked into my professional years, I developed a foolproof, albeit paranoid, system, where I backed up my machines to a common hard drive, made a mirror image of that hard drive, and for absolutely crucial documents, I would put them on to a separate DVD which would have the emergency documents. It was around 2006, when I discovered the cloud.

• [...]

• Turkey, recently, demanded that German authorities remove a satirical German video titled Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan mocking their President. In response, Germany reminded the Turkish diplomacy of that lovely little thing called freedom of speech, and in the meantime, Extra 3, the group that had released the video on YouTube, added English subtitles to the video. Just for perks. I hope you gave a brownie point to Germany, even as you scrambled to see the video.

• The decision to hide issues of a student-run newspaper at the University at Albany that called attention to a rise in reported campus sexual assaults — coming during a visit by accepted students — was inappropriate, a top college official said.

• JUST living in Australia for a few months and watching television, makes you see clearly, how the Fiji public is so badly denied by the poverty of Fiji media offerings and silent censorship

• There are wonderful Australian media programs such as Q and A, Insiders, Catalyst, Landline, Insights, Foreign Correspondent, Four Corners, to name just a few, not even mentioning the many specials every week on ABC and SBS.

• Just in the past two months alone, Landline explored how an Australian sugarcane farmer, successfully intercropped rice to pander to his Vietnamese wife. Another intercropped with sunflowers for the seeds and oil, and mung beans (which Fiji farmers have also tried on a very small scale).

• Recently, a pair of controversial federal food issues has made the news. The unpredicted increase in USDA farm subsidies and continuing fallout from the new dietary guidelines have captured headlines. They’re worth focusing on together, as they represent some varied and truly awful federal food law and policy.

• Earlier this week, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Tx.) blasted critics of farm subsidies, claiming we live in a “fantasyland” where such subsidies aren’t needed.

• UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi may be forced to resign after documents were released earlier this week which show the school paying $175,000 of university funds to scrub Google results of references to the 2011 pepper-spray incident.

• The California university is being accused of censorship after paying a firm to try to hide references to the incident in which police sprayed protesters in 2011

• This week, I and much of the internet learned that UC Davis paid at least $175,000 to a Maryland firm by the name of Nevis & Associates to disassociate the pepper spray incident of 2011 — in which footage of a campus police officer very casually and callously covering student Occupy protesters with pepper spray at close range was caught on video and disseminated — from both the name of the university and its chancellor in Google search results.

• A discussion on Pakistan’s media on Sunday found that the industry, while certainly more independent than years past, is also following dangerous patterns of conformity and is no longer a watchdog for public interest.

• New Delhi-based activist Saif Mahmood moderated a session titled “Media: More Independent, Less Responsible’. He began by quoting an IBA-USAID study where Pakistan’s media was given a responsibility score of 5.46, and an independence score of 5.74, and added that these were reasonably good scores in his opinion.

• “Censorship on films is futile in India. There are several other media these days which provide inappropriate content to youngsters for free,” said Bollywood director Sudhir Mishra, who is known for directing critically acclaimed films like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Dharavi and Chameli.

• The British press has played ball, agreeing not to name YMA, his husband PJS and the two others, AB and CD with whom a threesome is supposed to have taken place but it is impossible for law enforcement agencies to control what appears online. Google has been the first port of call for many curious-minded people eager to learn the names of those involved, and the search giant has said that — despite many requests to do so — it will not censor search results that could lead people to the names.

• Spend a little time on Twitter, Facebook, and numerous other websites and it won’t be long before you learn — if you don’t already know — the identities of the four people involved. Web Sheriff is not happy about this, and has requested that Google remove search results in a way that is reminiscent of the Right To Be Forgotten. As noted by Torrent Freak, Web Sheriff is usually associated with copyright-related takedown notices, but now also seeks to remove data that could harmful to reputations.

• CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL alienated a broad swathe of the German public on Friday by approving a request from Turkey to prosecute Jan Böhmermann, a comedian who insulted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by reading an obscene poem about him on late-night television.

• In the same statement, however, Merkel said that her government would move to repeal the law Böhmermann appears to have violated, an obscure provision of the German penal code that makes it a crime to insult foreign heads of state. If approved, the change would not take effect until 2018.

• In the meantime, Böhmermann now faces possible prosecution both for breaking that law — an artifact of the ancient prohibition on hurting the feelings of monarchs, known as lèse-majesté — and for ordinary defamation, because Erdogan has also filed a separate defamation complaint with a state prosecutor.

• Terry Tyler, a member of Great Ashby Community Council, says the communications policy he and other members must adhere to is so restrictive it is preventing him from doing his job.

• The policy, seen by the Comet, says ‘correspondence with the public from individual councillors should be avoided’ and states ‘the clerk should clear all comments to the media with the chair of the council’.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Imagine for a moment that everybody’s front door has the same key. Now imagine that the police have a copy of that key, and can saunter into your living room to poke around your belongings while you’re out, and without your knowledge.

• [...]

• According to privacy expert Christopher Parsons from Canadian security research hub Citizen Lab, the RCMP may still have the ability to read anybody’s encrypted BlackBerry messages, as long as the phone isn’t linked to a corporate account.

• The US Senate has published a draft law to force tech companies to show encrypted messages to security services.

• The Compliance with Court Orders Act would force companies to hand over what is called “intelligible” or non-encrypted data, if they receive a court order.

• It follows decisions by Apple and Whatsapp take a stand on encryption.

• Apple has been locked in a battle with the FBI over its refusal to unlock its iPhone.

• And Facebook recently announced all messages on its messaging app, Whatsapp are now encrypted.

• The next time you ride the subway in St. Petersburg, watch out for 21-year-old photographer Egor Tsvetkov. He recently unveiled a new project called “YOUR FACE IS BIG DATA,” which he created by semi-secretly photographing passengers seated across from him on the city’s metro, without asking their permission.

• Power and money are the two great aphrodisiacs, and few people or institutions are immune to their attractions. Not even the Economist, a posh magazine which resolutely sees itself as floating above the vulgar ruckus of journalistic hackery. Last week, like an elderly dowager seduced by Justin Bieber, the venerable publication checked its collective brains at the door and swooned over Mark Zuckerberg, the infant prodigy who now presides over Facebook, and so possesses both power and money.

• A coalition of privacy and civil liberties groups are working together to oppose proposed changes to an executive order that governs the overseas interception of phone, e-mail, and other communications during intelligence investigations. The reported proposed changes to Executive Order 12333 would relax the NSA’s limitations in sharing with other agencies communications information the agency collected about individuals.

• Now, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Security Agency is withholding its own ethical and legal guidelines, calling them “top secret.” This is ridiculous.

• The boss of GCHQ has apologised for the historic ban on gay people working for the intelligence agency in Gloucestershire.

• The director of GCHQ has apologised for historic prejudice against homosexuals by the agency and the “horrifying” treatment of Alan Turing.

• Robert Hannigan said the secret service failed to learn from its mistaken treatment of the genius and archaic attitudes had persisted for decades, stifling the careers of brilliant minds.

• It included a ban on homosexuals joining the organisation that remained in place into the 1990s, causing long-lasting psychological damage to those who found themselves outed, interrogated and ostracised over their sexuality.

• THE head of GCHQ believes that the surveillance agency will one day be run by a gay man or woman — but admits that it might take decades.

• Since 2000, 57 people have been killed in the UK by Islamic terrorism. Since 2000, 74 people have been killed in the UK by cattle. So cows are actually a more potent threat to our personal society that terrorism.

• Some Senate members are promoting a bill that is apparently in response to the Apple vs. FBI case (see my visual explanation of that case here). But that bill is so broad that no one could truly predict its implications.

• If you’re curious about the draft text for the senate crypto bill please, read the text for yourself or a summary on Wired. If you have ever used a security product, you’ll probably quickly realize that it would make most (if not all) of today’s encryption illegal.

• For example, a product like an hard drive with built-in encryption is covered since seagate provides a process for storing data. Upon a court order, seagate must provide the data on that drive by making it intelligible, either by never encrypting it or if it is encrypted, they must decrypt it.

Civil Rights/Policing

• As expected, the European Parliament approved the Trade Secrets Protection directive by a large majority (503 in favour vs. 131 against).

• Twenty months ago the Islamic State (ISIS) abducted thousands of Yezidi women and girls as the extremist group swept through their villages in northern Iraq in the middle of a terrible summer. Many were forced to become sex slaves for the group’s fighters. Hundreds remain enslaved and many of those who have escaped are still reliving the trauma and often not getting the help they desperately need.

• Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

• Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

• [...] Sleep deprivation, as I’ve said before, can be accomplished in a matter of hours. You can let someone go to sleep in a dark room with no windows, and you can wake them up in 15 or 20 minutes. They have no idea how long they’ve been asleep. And with no windows, they have no idea what time of day it is. You can let them go back to sleep, and you can wake them up in 20 minutes. They still have no idea. And they’ve since—within 45 minutes, they’ve lost all sense of time. Two or three hours later, you can convince this person that he’s been living for four or five days, when it’s really only been an hour.

• As this blog is now read daily by tens of thousands of people who had not heard of me before, some idea of where I come from might be in order. After a diplomatic career of rapid promotion (senior civil service age 36, my first Ambassadorship in Uzbekistan age 42) my opposition to Bush/Blair’s immoral and counter-productive foreign policy got me sacked.

• This telegram (diplomatic communications are called that; cable in the USA) I am with retrospect very proud to have sent. To have made at the time the observation that the Bush/Blair policy of invasion, oppression and torture would not suppress fundamentalism, but would create it, was prescient. I should say I understood very well I would be sacked. Some things are worth being sacked for.

• On provenance, after being kicked out I typed this up from my handwritten draft which I had in my briefcase; hence it does not carry the identifiers it would gain when sent. I assure you it is genuine, and by now I expect it should be obtainable under a Freedom of Information request. If someone makes one I would be grateful – the date on it is the day I wrote it, it might have got sent a day or two later, so give them a range.

• The Deputy Leader of the Green Party for Northern Ireland has suggested making “reckless conception” a criminal offence for men “in the interests of equality”

• While on the plane, he called his uncle to tell him about the dinner and ended the phone call by saying “inshallah” — a common term used in Arabic that translates to “God willing.” But after he hung up, he noticed a female passenger eyeing him suspiciously. The passenger reported Makhzoomi, who was then removed from the flight and searched.

• So once again people from The World’s Most Frightened Country (C) fully overreacted to nothing. One of the 230 million people worldwide who speak Arabic happened to be on an airplane and happened to use one of the most common expressions in his language.

• [...]

• Makhzoomi explained he was talking on the phone with his uncle and, as he said goodbye, he used the phrase “inshallah,” which translates as “if God is willing.” The student said that after hung up, he noticed a female passenger looking at him who then got up and left her seat.

• Moments later an airport employee made Makhzoomi step off the plane into the arms of security officers. Makhzoomi was told the woman thought he said “Shahid,” meaning martyr. Because in-shal-lah and sha-hid sound the same, at least to a dumb ass who speaks no apparent Arabic and likely learned the term shahid when it was last mispronounced on AM talk radio.

• AS IT HAS grown in volume and influence, the movement reaffirming the value of black lives has raised its cry for racial justice from the streets and the internet to the race for the Democratic nomination, especially in the New York primary, where talk of police accountability, mass incarceration, and structural inequality has become an integral part of the candidates’ pitch to voters.

• At the Democratic debate on Thursday night, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spoke frankly about racism, with Clinton calling on white people to “recognize that there is systemic racism,” and Sanders again criticizing Clinton’s 1996 comments about “super predators,” saying that “it was a racist term and everyone knew it was a racist term.”

• But while competition for the so-called black vote continues to heat up ahead of Tuesday’s primaries, and the generational gap that has defined the primary race persists, members of Black Lives Matter remain determined to keep all candidates in check on matters of race and racism.

• So on the one hand, Obama is making a big show of declassifying the 28 pages. On the other hand, he is lobbying (privately until this NYT report) to ensure that nothing legal will come of the release of those pages.

• It feels kind of like Obama’s treatment of torture, allowing very limited exposure of what happened, all while ensuring there will be no legal accountability (legal accountability, I’d add, that would threaten to expose others higher up in the US executive branch; and note that while the Administration is permitting a lawsuit of James Mitchell and Bruce Jesson, I’m skeptical this well get very far either).

• Against this background, the Saudis are trying to negotiate an oil freeze to bring up prices, but apparently have delayed doing so, ostensibly because of rising animosity with Iran but also, analysts suggest, to hurt US capacity.

• “It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the World Trade Center on September 11.

• Do we have a more unattractive “ally” than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? In order to find one, we have to go all the way back to World War II, when the US was allied with the Soviet Union while “Uncle” Joe Stalin was murdering millions in the gulag.

• Hollywood star and Democratic Party booster George Clooney pulled off a clever script-flipping trick on Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.” When confronted with Bernie Sanders’ recent critique of the cost required to attend the two fundraisers he and his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, hosted over the weekend for Hillary Clinton in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, Clooney completely agreed with it.

• If Shah wasn’t concerned about putting a possibly innocent person behind bars, it’s unlikely his yearly salary of $101,039 would have been much of a motivating factor for better work either. It could be that this was an isolated incident — the one time Shah cut corners to increase throughput. (Which, truth be told, is kind of how our entire criminal justice system operates: throughput is preferable to diligent effort.)

• But odds are that if Shah got caught, it’s something that happened eventually, rather than immediately. Bad habits are easy to develop and tend to spiral out of control until the inevitable happens. There’s no way to tell if this was a one-off. Conversely, there’s no way to positively state this didn’t happen all the time. Hence the thousands of criminal cases now being viewed as questionable.

• The Israeli propaganda line is that the Palestinians are natural, intrinsic terrorists who are always attacking Israelis out of blind hatred for Jews and who casually deploy terrorism on a mass scale and refuse to recognize the inexorability and naturalness of several million European and North African and other Jews living in Palestine.

• It notes that Sanders’s demand for even-handedness in US policy toward Israel and Palestine is unusual in the Democratic Party.

• He may be an investment banker himself, but Ryan prefers Sanders’ pledge to begin breaking up the banks in his first 100 days in the White House over Clinton’s more indirect promises.

• “She has a thousand talking points, but when the lights are turned off and all the glare of the election fades, politics-as-normal will return, the lobbyists will get to work, and nothing at all will happen,” he said.

• Frank, still speaking anonymously, agrees. “Hillary Clinton is paying lip-service to Wall Street changes. Maybe in her heart she means business, but for me income inequality is the civil rights issue of our time, and I feel strongly we need a president who is totally committed to making this happen.”

• The ACLU lawsuit alleges that either the bureau conducted an inadequate search, or is illegally denying the existence of documents.

• Meanwhile, since the 1960s, when African Americans secured the right to vote in practice, not just theory, Republicans have been recruiting displaced and alienated white voters into their ranks, taking advantage of racist and nativist animosities, and anything else that they could put to use.

• The media often would like us to believe that Sanders’ promises to continue his quest for equality are too lofty and unrealistic, and even impossible. Is it really impossible to treat Black people like humans instead of just votes? Is it really so impossible to make an investment in our students instead of the $17 billion the Clintons invested in police, military grade weapons and prisons? Is it really impossible to invest in the healthcare of the American people instead of the $26 billion wasted training foreign armies under Clinton as Secretary of State? Is it really impossible to demand transparency from our police departments and our criminal justice system in an effort to bring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to fruition once and for all? Is it really impossible to take the necessary steps to get more teachers and counselors in our schools instead of labeling them super predators and putting them on the school to prison pipeline?

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• HTML5 was released in 2014 as the result of a concerted effort by the W3C HTML Working Group. The intention was then to begin publishing regular incremental updates to the HTML standard, but a few things meant that didn’t happen as planned. Now the Web Platform Working Group (WP WG) is working towards an HTML5.1 release within the next six months, and a general workflow that means we can release a stable version of HTML as a W3C Recommendation about once per year.

• President Obama is throwing his weight behind a plan that would lead to competition in the market for set-top cable and satellite TV boxes. Most viewers now rent the boxes from their TV providers. The Federal Communications Commission wants to make it easier for viewers to buy the devices.

Intellectual Monopolies

• It will be deeply concerning in India, then, that one of the country’s international high-tech success stories and flagship companies – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – has been found by a US district court to have misappropriated the intellectual property of a competitor in what looks to be one of the highest-value trade secrets disputes of all time.

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