● 04.21.16

● Links 21/4/2016: Yvelines School on FOSS, Android N Developer Preview on Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 6:52 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• One Reg reader working for a well-known Linux distro firm told us he’d been interviewed to fill a role in pre-sales in Redmond’s new open-source practice.

• In the four years that Cornelia Davis has worked on the open source Cloud Foundry platform at Pivotal, she has spent much time explaining the technical merits of the emerging technology to customers and partners, she said in her keynote at Collaboration Summit last month.

Kernel Space

• For those running a Linux system powered by an AMD “Carrizo” APU, there’s an updated firmware blob out today to benefit your UVD video decoding experience.

• Ceph 10.2.0 “Jewel” was announced today as their latest long-term stable release. Notable about Ceph 10.2.0 is that CephFS has been declared stable and production ready.

• The Ceph.com release notes mention of CephFS, “This is the first release in which CephFS is declared stable and production ready! Several features are disabled by default, including snapshots and multiple active MDS servers.”

Graphics Stack

• There are both Radeon/AMDGPU and Intel DRM driver fixes queued up for Linux Git this week and will find their way into Linux 4.6-rc5.

• Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC sent in another round of feature updates for DRM-Next to in turn premiere with Linux 4.7.

Applications

Proprietary

• Norwegian online browser and advertising firm Opera Software ASA has embedded a tool aimed at circumventing censorship into its latest desktop app, potentially complicating a bid for the company by a consortium from China, which censors the Internet.

• Norwegian online browser and advertising firm Opera Software, the takeover target of a Chinese consortium of Internet firms, has embedded a tool in its latest desktop app that can be used to circumvent censorship.

• The makers of the excellent and affordable SoftMaker Office 2016 suite of MS Office compatible apps for Windows, Linux and other platforms has just released a completely free version, dubbed FreeOffice.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It’s a great time to be a space strategy fan, as Stellaris is right around the corner and now Master of Orion is about to land on Linux too.

• I have been a Master of Orion fan for many years and spent an insane amount of hours playing it when I was younger and had more hair.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Definitely! Exposure to Linux and the open source communities opens a whole new world of opportunities to students that is independent of social status or financial ability. A lot of programs have student versions that you can use for practicing, or schools will get a group rate on licenses for programs, but any artwork made on either of those versions doesn’t belong to you and can’t be used for any sort of financial gain. Teaching with Krita or similar programs would empower the students to create artwork, game assets, or whatever that they truly own the rights to.

• This is the first release from the team since we became a completely volunteer group, just after the release of 15.10. Delivering an Long-Term Release (LTS) release is a superb achievement, and testimony to our community’s commitment to Ubuntu and KDE.

• Beta-tester feedback has been resounding and positive. This confirms the amazing work that is being undertaken by our upstream KDE community. Plasma 5, KDE Frameworks 5 and all of KDE continue to demonstrate how Free/Libre Open Source Software sets world class standards for innovation, usability and integration.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Ubuntu GNOME team has announced today, April 21, 2016, the official release of the Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), as part of the launch of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system.

• It’s been three years since the promising Ubuntu GNOME distribution was started, which later become an official Ubuntu flavor due to the demand from the community to use a pure GNOME desktop environment on top of a solid Ubuntu Linux base, which was not technically possible because of dependency conflicts with the Unity interface.

• The software framework that powers the network connections on many GNU/Linux systems just got its second major update in less than a year and a half, with the version 1.2 release of NetworkManager.

• NetworkManager 1.2 was released yesterday, and it’s already built for Fedora (24 and rawhide), a release candidate is in Ubuntu 16.04, and it should appear in other distros soon too. Lubo wrote a great post on many of the new features, but there’s too many to highlight in one post for our ADD social media 140-character tap-tap generation to handle. Ready for more?

Distributions

New Releases

• KaOS is a KDE optimized Linux distribution that is now being updated, with the new Plasma 5.6.2 desktop environment. Additionally the distro benefits from the new Calamares installer framework which has been updated to version 2.2.1.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• SUSE Manager 3, the latest release from SUSE, empowers IT by delivering best-in-class open source infrastructure management with new enhancements focused on improved configuration management, easier subscription management and enhanced monitoring.

Red Hat Family

• Bull City Venture Partners tried something new for its annual meeting of LPs recently—an evening of talks and panel discussions before an invite-only audience of dozens of entrepreneurs and investors in the Durham fund’s local and national network.

• A highlight of the evening at RTP headquarters was a “fireside” chat between BCVP partner Jason Caplain (top right) and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, an LP in the BCVP fund and angel investor in addition to his role running one of the largest open source software companies in the world.

• The conversation ranged from advice for the startup CEOs in the room to thoughts on the region’s startup ecosystem and business climate in North Carolina to a more existential discussion involving our country’s political climate and the pace of technology advancement.

• Back in 2014, I wrote about some negative first impressions of systemd. I also had a plea to debian-project to end all the flaming, pointing out that “jessie will still boot”, noting that my preference was for sysvinit but things are what they are and it wasn’t that big of a deal.

• Although I still have serious misgivings about the systemd upstream’s attitude, I’ve got to say I find the system rather refreshing and useful in practice.

• Here’s an example. I was debugging the boot on a server recently. It mounts a bunch of NFS filesystems and runs a third-party daemon that is started from an old-style /etc/init.d script.

• Red Hat’s latest OpenStack Platform release wraps up the cloud for easier deployment, but Cloud Suite will likely claim a broader audience

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The wait is finally over, and you can now download the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating for both desktops and servers, as Canonical has officially unveiled the OS earlier today.

• Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS is now out, and its extended support makes it particularly suitable for businesses. Here’s an overview of what you can expect to find.

• Today, April 21, 2016, Canonical has officially launched the new version of its widely used Ubuntu Linux operating system for PCs, laptops, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones.

• Mozilla today, April 21, 2016, announced the availability of future releases of their popular Firefox web browser in the snap package format for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

• With today’s release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Snappy package management is being more broadly supported across the Ubuntu ecosystem. This complementary packaging format to Debian packages for Ubuntu will allow third-party applications to be more easily updated. One of the other organizations already on board with using the Snap packaging format is Mozilla.

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the latest long-term support version of Canonical’s open source, Linux-based OS, debuts this week. And it will be packed with new features for desktops, servers and IoT, including robust LXD container support and “snap,” a new way to install software.

• Canonical is set to formally release its Ubuntu 16.04 Linux operating system on April 21, providing new desktop, server and cloud capabilities.

• Ubuntu 16.04, also known as the Xenial Xerus release, is a Long Term Support (LTS) edition, providing five years of support. Canonical only releases new LTS updates every two years, with the last LTS being the 14.04 “Trusty Tahr” update in April 2014.

Flavours and Variants

• Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS was released today and it includes some interesting changes, like a complete overhaul of the MATE Welcome user interface, a new panel layout option in Ubuntu MATE Tweak, which mimics Unity with a dock-like panel and global menu setup, and more.

Devices/Embedded

• Designed to run the open source FreeRTOS, this latest LinkIt is the first to come in the form of a full hardware development kit (HDK), says MediaTek. While the other LinkIt boards, including some other RTOS-driven models (see farther below) are stripped-down SBCs similar to computer-on-modules, and ready to slot into commercial devices, the LinkIt 7687 HDK is more of a development and prototyping board.

• It’s becoming increasingly clear to makers that single board computers and the DIY devices based on them need control interfaces that are simpler and faster to use than desktop peripherals or even full-on PCs. Pičugins Arsenijs believes he’s come up with a much simpler alternative.

Phones

Android

• Technology journalist and Microsoft expert Mary-Jo Foley has just announced on ZDNet that she has dumped her Windows phone for Android. As a previous Lumia Icon user with no clear upgrade path on American carrier Verizon (the carrier is not selling any fifth generation Lumias, and the Lumia Icon may not receive Windows 10 Mobile), she explained that “it was time for me to make a move.”

• Which Android manufacturer can you count on to put customers first — to actually focus not just on crafting a quality product but also on treating you right after you’ve forked over your hard-earned cash?

• It’s a question I’ve been mulling over for a while now. For a few years, the answer was easy: Motorola.

• Lenovo-owned Zuk just unveiled its new Z2 Pro Android phone, which ticks all the flagship boxes — plus a few extra, just to be safe. It’s a followup to December’s Z1, Zuk’s well-priced but generic first offering. The phone runs the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 820 chipset, includes 6GB of RAM, and has 128GB of storage. There’s an ultra-bright 5.2-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display, a 13-megapixel optical image stabilized camera, and a 3100mAh battery. Naturally, it plugs in over USB-C, with USB 3.1 support.

Free Software/Open Source

• In the early days of big data, “everyone scrambled to collect and store as much data as they could,” said Datawheel co-founder Dave Landry. “In most cases, they didn’t develop the tools needed to better understand that data. That’s the challenge we are trying to tackle.”

• The rise of the mobile web, IoT, and APIs and modern databases paved the way for big data innovations. Everything in the world can be quantified, and those who scraped and logged early often benefitted from first-mover advantage. By making information easier to access and visualize, Landry said, big data can help businesses make faster and more intelligent decisions.

• The Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. The organization has recently elevated a number of incubated projects o Top-Level Status, which helps them get both advanced stewardship and certainly far more contributions.

• Late last week, the DHS’s Chief Information Officer Luke McCormack (or someone from his office) posted comments to GitHub arguing against the proposed policy of making 20% of its code (whatever that means) open source in the interest of better sharing between agencies. The rationale is that shared code could save tax dollars by preventing paying developers to perform redundant work. The DHS felt strongly about this and said as much using an Excel-based parade of horrors.

• I first came across Pieter Hintjens 20 years ago, in 1996. He posted to a UseNet group I followed (comp.lang.perl.announce; later announcement), about a tool he had created — Libero — which could translate state machine descriptions into runnable code, in multiple languages.

• Libero caught my attention because I was in the middle of finishing a Computer Science degree with a focus on computational theory. So I built it for OS/2, which I was using at the time, and sent Pieter email. He responded by asking if I would be interested in porting SFL, the iMatix Standard Function Library, to OS/2. By the end of 1996 and the turn of 1997 we were exchanging emails about porting SFL to OS/2.

• Operational in-memory computing company Hazelcast — known for its open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) — has shared its community growth numbers from the Github repository.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chromium is Google’s open source browser, which shares much of its core browser code with Chrome, Google’s proprietary product. Now Monorail, the Chromium bug tracker, has been made open source.

SaaS/Back End

• At the OpenStack Summit taking place this month in Austin, Texas, Ildikó aims to do just that. In her talk, How to Become an Advanced Contributor, she will guide attendees through the steps of navigating the community, including some of the principles, best practices and unwritten rules of contributing to OpenStack.

• We caught up with Ildikó before her talk to learn a little bit more about some of the barriers to becoming an effective contributor and how to overcome them.

Databases

Education

• The primary school in Saint Léger en Yvelines (France) has nearly completely switched to using free software, reports the village’s deputy mayor Olivier Guillard. “Do not underestimate the task”, he advises others on the forum of Etalab, France’s open government portal, “and most of all, persist.”

• They still keep a few machines with TOOS for compatibility and whiteboards. My advice? Stick with projectors and Gromit and the latest version of LibreOffice. I would use Debian rather than Mint. Further, to reduce the capital costs and maintenance, use ARMed thin clients and a GNU/Linux terminal server.

Healthcare

• Flexibase, the building blocks behind NHS’s Code4Health programme, is now publicly available under the Open Source license, it was announced on Thursday morning.

• It can be downloaded via Github, the public code repository, and will also soon be available on Docker hub.

Funding

• Since Docker is still relatively new to the enterprise, adopters have fewer monitoring tools to choose from than an organization using traditional virtualization software. But the gap is closing rapidly thanks to providers like Sysdig Inc., which today announced the completion of a $15 million funding round led by Accel Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.

BSD

• This weekend, the Grand Old Man (or Woman — take your pick) of Linux expos in North America takes place in the upper left corner of the United States.

• For over a decade and a half, LinuxFest Northwest has flown the flag literally in Microsoft’s backyard, an annual open source event held the last weekend in April in Bellingham, Wash. LFNW features presentations and exhibits on various free and open source topics, as well as Linux distributions and applications. It usually has something for everyone from the novice to the professional.

• It has a special place in my heart as well. While I think that SCALE is the best show on the continent for obvious reasons (the SCALE Publicity Team is solely responsible, he says in jest), LFNW is my favorite show to attend, not only because of the history but because of the community vibe the show gives off at an expo that has refused to give in to the creeping corporatism to which other shows have succumbed.

Public Services/Government

• As part of the “Second Open Government National Action Plan”, the federal government is planning to share the source code behind many of its software projects.

• To begin with, the plans call for federal agencies to share code with each other. This will help reduce development costs when government departments each work on the same functionality independently. Solving the same problem twice (or more often) is expensive and a waste of taxpayer’s money.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Back in January, gaming peripheral and PC company Razer made a splash by announcing the birth of the Open Source Virtual Reality initiative, OSVR for short, at CES. The initiative, set to include a virtual reality peripheral as the hardware development kit, will boast compatibility with most existing computer systems rather than making users meet the beefy requirements of the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift. The framework is, of course, open-source and can be used by any developer. Partners that sign on early, however, will play a key part in shaping the platform and helping it find its place in the mainstream VR space in the near future. According to a press release from Razer regarding OSVR, the system currently has over 350 partners, of whom the newest is computer and smartphone manufacturer Acer.

• On Thursday morning, Acer held its 2016 Global Press Conference in New York City, revealing a number of new products that should get your mouth watering. One of the announcements made during the event is that Acer plans to use technology in devices and computers that support the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) platform. The latter solutions will actually be packed with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 and Titan graphics processors, making them compatible with today’s VR products on the market.

Programming/Development

• Open source tends to work in disciplines with a broad talent pool of people with an interest in and aptitude for sharing code. This describes the R community quite well: a technical community with the ability to build R packages and a natural propensity to share that work. And at the rate that the R community shares, it’s hard to see how any single commercial entity can hope to compete long term.

• In other words, landing code in git master for a mature project should require at least one other person to look at it. This may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised…there are some very critical projects that don’t have much the way of peer review.

• GitLab, maker of the homonymous Git-based code management and continuous integration platform, and cloud platform provider DigitalOcean have partnered to provide free hosting to the open source community to move their continuous integration to the cloud.

Leftovers

• A new class of naval vessels customised for emergency aid could hold vital lessons for the world, starting with Britain.

Science

• You may have seen a viral headline floating around over the last few days: Apple recycled $40 million worth of gold last year, which was extracted from iPhones. Almost none of what was reported is true.

• The story was everywhere, from major mainstream outlets like CNN, Fox News, and Huffington Post to tech-focused and normally very good sites such as MacRumors, Gizmodo, Quartz, and The Verge. I’ve never come across a story that has been so uniformly misreported—hundreds of outlets covered Apple’s “Environmental Responsibility Report,” and not one article I read came remotely close to getting the story right.

• In 536 CE, the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote of a thick fog that suffocated the sun and plunged all of the Mediterranean into a year of cold and darkness. The phenomenon would signal the start of one of the greatest disease pandemics in history: the Plague of Justinian. In a single year, the outbreak killed an estimated 25 million citizens of the empire. It would be another two centuries until the plague finally succumbed, but by then, 50 million people had died in its wake.

• “And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed,” wrote Procopius. “And from the time when this thing happened men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death. And it was the time when Justinian was in the tenth year of his reign.”

• STEMM Role Models is a website that helps connect event organizers with presenters from underrepresented groups. Diversity is important to me, so the project caught my eye.

• I reached out to project lead Kirstie Whitaker, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Cambridge, to learn more. She graciously agreed to an interview, and what follows is a fascinating look at the STEMM Role Models project and its implications for open science, open source, and the future of humanity.

• When the Washington Post and New York Times are making the same corporate-friendly point, it’s safe to assume that some PR agency somewhere is earning its substantial fees.

• In this case, the subject is the need for nuclear power—and, for the Post editorial board (4/18/16), for fracking as well. Standing in the way of this in the Post’s version is favorite target Bernie Sanders, while the Times business columnist Eduardo Porter (4/19/16) blames the “scientific phobias and taboos” of “progressive environmentalists.”

Health/Nutrition

• Food stamps are for hungry people, which we should not have in America. There are of course cheaters, just like there are wealthy people who cheat on their taxes. The tax cheats won’t starve to death, or see their children go hungry, but released drug felons in many states will.

• It used to be that when you served your time for a crime, your “debt to society” was considered paid, and you were ready to re-enter society. But for many released drug felons, the punishment continues long after they leave jail.

• But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Security

• There hasn’t been a lot of noise coming out of the LibreSSL camp recently. Mostly there’s not much to report, so any talks or presentations will recover a lot of the same material. But it’s an election year, and in that spirit, we can look back at some promises previously made and hopefully make a few new ones.

• In my previous article I shared my thoughts on running Tor on the router. I described an ideal Tor router configuration and argued that having Tor on the router benefits both security and usability.

• This article is about that ideal Tor router configuration. How did I configure my router, and why did I choose the configuration? The interesting part is that it really is “just configuration”. No programming involved. Even more interesting, it’s easy too!

Defence/Aggression

• The UK government insists on continuing the massive supply – £2.8 billion since the start of the attack – of high tech weapons for Saudi Arabia to use against civilians in Yemen, despite opposition from the EU Parliament and every major human rights group. Furthermore UK special forces are operating inside Yemen in support of the onslaught. Thousands of civilians have died as a result, including many children.

• Given this is not exactly popular in the UK, and that after the law takes its tortuous course there will very probably be embarrassment for the government down the line, the prize which Cameron perceives must be great. Of course, western elite support for the appalling Saudi regime is a given, because Saudi cash pumps primarily into banking, armaments and high end property, the three areas most dear to the interests of the 1%.

• It was still dark when Rasha Tarek saw her husband Salah for the last time. Salah woke up at dawn on March 24 to go to an affluent neighborhood of the Egyptian capital for a painting job, his wife told CNN. He was due to travel to Upper Egypt after that. But Tarek suspected that her husband was being unfaithful to her, so she sent her brother, father and a family friend to tag along. She spoke with her husband while he and the others were en route to their destination. But by 8 a.m. he stopped answering her calls. She tried the others but was unsuccessful in reaching them.

• It took almost an hour before someone answered her husband’s phone.

• Now that Syria’s “cessation of hostilities” appears to be crumbling and rebel forces are gearing up for a fresh offensive, the mighty U.S. propaganda machine is once again up and running.

• A case in point is “The Assad Files,” an 11,000-word article in last week’s New Yorker that is as willfully misrepresentative as anything published about Syria in the last five years or so, which is saying a great deal.

• If anything worries me about Hillary Clinton, this is it. It’s not so much that she’s more hawkish than me, it’s the fact that events of the past 15 years don’t seem to have affected her views at all. How is that possible? And yet, our failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere apparently haven’t given her the slightest pause about the effectiveness of military force in the Middle East. Quite the opposite: the sense I get from Landler’s piece is that she continues to think all of these engagements would have turned out better if only we’d used more military power. I find it hard to understand how an intelligent, well-briefed person could continue to believe this, and that in turn makes me wonder just exactly what motivates Hillary’s worldview.

• The same cannot be said, however, of the candidates’ policies on Syria. During the debate, Clinton spoke of her recommendation to the Obama administration to set up a safe zone in Syria. Sanders countered by recalling the ghosts of Iraq and Libya, where he said regime change has not improved conditions on the ground.

• With hawkish right-wing rhetoric, Clinton steadfastly defended the Israeli government. She conflated the Jewish religion with the state of Israel and condemned critics of the government as anti-Semitic.

• A top official in the Hillary Clinton campaign has said that the shortlist of potential running mates for Clinton, should she secure the nomination, includes a woman, according to the Boston Globe. Naturally, this has fueled speculation about a possible Hillary Cinton/Elizabeth Warren ticket.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• With just two days to go until Earth Day 2016, it’s the perfect time to start thinking about the planet we live on – and how to save it.

• Every year, more than one billion people across the world mark the event by showing support for environmental protection.

• Festivals, rallies and outdoor events are held in nearly 200 countries – often, with the support of A-list celebrities and political leaders.

• But why do we celebrate Earth Day? And how is it observed by people globally?

• The EU abandoned or weakened key proposals for new environmental protections after receiving a letter from a top BP executive which warned of an exodus of the oil industry from Europe if the proposals went ahead.

• In the 10-page letter, the company predicted in 2013 that a mass industry flight would result if laws to regulate tar sands, cut power plant pollution and accelerate the uptake of renewable energy were passed, because of the extra costs and red tape they allegedly entailed.

• The measures “threaten to drive energy-intensive industries, such as refining and petrochemicals, to relocate outside the EU with a correspondingly detrimental impact on security of supply, jobs [and] growth,” said the letter, which was obtained by the Guardian under access to documents laws.

• “Africa’s human existence and development is under threat from the adverse impacts of climate change – its population, ecosystems and unique biodiversity will all be the major victims of global climate change.”

• This is how clear the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is when it comes to assessing the negative impact of climate change on this continent of 54 countries with a combined population of over 1,200 billion [1.2 billion] inhabitants. “No continent will be struck as severely by the impacts of climate change as Africa.”

• Other international organisations are similarly trenchant. For instance, the World Bank, basing on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, confirms that Africa is becoming the most exposed region in the world to the impacts of climate change.

• CBS News adds that VW potentially avoids a trial thanks to this agreement, and that Breyer has set June 21 as the deadline for additional details to be worked out.

• But it may still be too early for environmental advocates to break out the champagne. “[I]t’s worth noting that further delay means that these polluting cars remain on the road—emitting up to 40 times the allowable level of pollution—for even longer,” said Mike Litt, consumer program advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, which launched a “Make VW Pay” campaign following the Dieselgate scandal.

Finance

• Last summer, we wrote a bit about the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade agreement that is being worked on by a bunch of Asian countries, and which is often described as an “anti-TPP” or, at the very least, a competitor to the TPP. It’s being driven by China and India — two countries who were not in the TPP process. Given how concerned we were with the TPP, we had hoped, at the very least, that RCEP would be better on things like intellectual property. Unfortunately, some early leaks suggested it was even worse. And while the TPP is still grinding through the ratification process in various countries, RCEP has continued to move forward, and the bad ideas have stuck around.

• Our economy has increasingly been financialized, and the result is a sluggish economy and stagnant wages. We need to decide whether to stop the cycle and save the economy at large, or to stay in thrall to our banks and bondholders by leaving the debt hangover from 2008 intact. Without a debt writedown the economy will continue to languish in debt deflation, and continue to polarize between creditors and debtors. This debt dynamic is in fact themajor explanation for why the U.S. and European economies are polarizing, not converging.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In what is being referred to by some as a “flat-swap gate,” Permanent Secretary for Home Affairs Betty Fung Ching Suk-yee reportedly swapped flats with Chan Ung-lok, the sister-in-law of Macau casino magnate Stanley Ho, to evade taxes.

• The flat swap was made when Fung was still the director of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD). This month, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) officially launched an investigation on this flat swap deal, which made Fung the most senior serving officer to have been investigated by the ICAC so far.

• A week or so back, we had some fun discussing the 2011 incident in which campus police for UC Davis calmly pepper-sprayed the shit out of some seated students, because young people are scary. We did this specifically because news had just come out that the school had paid nearly $200k to a reputation/SEO management company to try to obscure this bit of history from these here internets. Because the Streisand Effect is a cold-hearted mistress, instead of burying the incident, the internet began discussing it yet again, all while having some fun pointing out that UC Davis’ efforts were equal parts misguided and cynical.

• A civil liberties bill introduced by State Representative Will Guzzardi (D-39) passed unanimously out of the Illinois House of Representatives on Tuesday and will now face a vote in the Senate. The bill, known as the “Speech Rights of Student Journalists Act,” guarantees protection from censorship to high school publications. The bill responds to several cases in which high school student newspapers and individual journalists were prohibited from publishing stories because administration objected to the critical nature of the content.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects. By comparison, 2016’s web struggles to deliver a page of web content in the same size. If that doesn’t give you pause you’re missing something. So where does this leave us?

• [...]

• While ads are still the web’s pantomime villain the reality is that we haven’t been paying enough attention to performance. As the web went through its awkward teenage years we let creeping featuritus take hold and eventually clutter simply got the better of us. New JavaScript gallery module? Sure, why not? Oooh that new web font would look nice here but why not add a another analytics tool while we’re in there? Should I bother resizing this 6,000 pixel image? Nah, let the browser do it, works for me.

• After backing down in the most recent encryption debate, law enforcement officials still seem to be coming up with novel ideas about how to keep encryption out of our and criminal hands. The latest bright idea proposes that app gatekeepers Google and Apple could apply some censorship to their stores to prevent users from accessing encryption apps.

• The suggestion came from Thomas Galati, the chief of intelligence at the New York Police Department, while responding to a question from Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA). The topic of discussion was around if it would be possible for the US government to impose restrictions on apps that provide encryption services or end-to-end encryption which are located outside of the country. In other words, how could/should the government force foreign app companies to comply with any future encryption laws in the US.

• It appears that more fully encrypting messaging and content is really catching on. Following Whatsapp’s big move to roll out end-to-end encryption, the super popular communications app Viber has announced it intends to do the same for its 700 million (and growing) users. It’s already testing encryption in a few markets, before rolling it out globally. The company claims that the encrypted system will also let you know if your content is encrypted based on color coding.

• The judicial system doesn’t seem to have a problem with the FBI acting as admins for child porn sites while conducting investigations. After all, judges have seen worse. They’ve OK’ed the FBI’s hiring of a “heroin-addicted prostitute” to seduce an investigation target into selling drugs to undercover agents. Judges have, for the most part, allowed the ATF to bust people for robbing fake drug houses containing zero drugs — even when the actual robbery has never taken place. Judges have also found nothing wrong with law enforcement creating its own “pedophilic organization,” recruiting members and encouraging them to create child pornography.

• We’ve talked about how ridiculous it is that many news sites (including Wired and Forbes — and apparently, now, the NY Times) have started using annoying anti-ad blocker software, in which it will block visitors from viewing their content if those sites detect (or think they detect) that you’re using an ad blocker. This is ridiculous on any number of levels, but most of all because it is forcing people to put their computers at risk. Plenty of people have tried explaining to publishers that this practice is a bad idea, but to no avail.

• However, over in Europe, one privacy activist thinks he may have found another path. Alexander Hanff wrote to the EU Commission with his reasoning, claiming that ad blockers are a form of spyware that illegally violate the EU’s ePrivacy Directive by not getting consent. As you may have noticed, not too long ago, when you started visiting EU-based websites, it would always inform you of its policy on storing cookies, and requesting that you “accept” the site’s policy. This was because of a new electronic privacy directive, that some have called the Cookie Law. However, as Hanff notes, it’s quite possible that using an ad-blocker detector script is basically doing the same sort of thing as a cookie in terms of spying on client-side information within one’s web browser, and a letter he received from the EU Commission apparently confirms his assertion.

• A few lines beneath the enormous all-caps headline (“AGENCIES”), a series of truncated sentences in a large, bold type summarized the article: “Private Detectives Watching Business Men Day and Night—Spies Around the House and in the Kitchen—Questioning a Man’s Tradesmen and Pumping his Domestics—The Family History of Business Men and Their Wives Made a Subject of Daily Record, &c., &c.”

• To be accused of spying was, at this point, par for the course for the commercial credit bureaus. Thirty years prior, Lewis Tappan, the founder of the agency that would eventually turn into Dun & Bradstreet, took out an ad defending his creation, “It is not a system of espionage, but the same as merchants usually apply—only on an extended plan—to ascertain whether persons applying for credit are worthy of the same and to what extent.”

• Here comes the inevitable government backlash against WhatsApp rolling out end-to-end encryption for one billion users worldwide: if governments can no longer demand access to communications, the next best thing is to demand access to WhatsApp users.

• According to India resident Prasanto K. Roy, local governments are demanding that administrators of WhatsApp groups (the latest beneficiaries of the encryption rollout) register with the local magistrate, and will apparently hold them accountable for any “irresponsible remarks” or “untoward actions” by members of the group.

Civil Rights/Policing

• What is it with the Hillary cult?

• As a lifelong Democrat who will be enthusiastically voting for Bernie Sanders in next week’s Pennsylvania primary, I have trouble understanding the fuzzy rosy filter through which Hillary fans see their champion. So much must be overlooked or discounted—from Hillary’s compulsive money-lust and her brazen indifference to normal rules to her conspiratorial use of shadowy surrogates and her sociopathic shape-shifting in policy positions for momentary expedience.

• Hillary’s breathtaking lack of concrete achievements or even minimal initiatives over her long public career doesn’t faze her admirers a whit. They have a religious conviction of her essential goodness and blame her blank track record on diabolical sexist obstructionists. When at last week’s debate Hillary crassly blamed President Obama for the disastrous Libyan incursion that she had pushed him into, her acolytes hardly noticed. They don’t give a damn about international affairs—all that matters is transgender bathrooms and instant access to abortion.

• Security and hacking conferences provide platforms for cutting edge research into computer vulnerabilities, exploitable systems, and new defensive measures. These often vast events also let researchers and hackers rub shoulders with their friends and peers, network, and blow off steam.

• But a lingering problem remains for some women at a number of conferences: harassment and prejudice.

• In a recent example, women were targeted at an after-party of internet and human rights conference Rightscon, which took place between March 30 and April 1 in San Francisco.

• As thousands of people light up to celebrate 420 on Wednesday, entrepreneur Jazmin Hupp will celebrate something else — a business milestone.

• Three years ago, at a 420 celebration in Colorado, Hupp decided to leave the tech industry to follow her passion and become a cannabis entrepreneur. Hailing from Ashland, Ore., Hupp is the daughter of a jazz musician and an artist (“hippies,” she said) and grew up in a “cannabis-friendly” environment. To rebel, Hupp decided to move to New York and pursue business opportunities.

• “Because I wanted to reject what my parents wanted for me, I became an entrepreneur, I became business-focused, I wanted to get those six figures,” she said.

• For her crime, violating the tenets of a faith she does not observe, the courts offered two punishments.

• Option one: time in a grim jailhouse. Option two: nearly 30 lashes with a cane wielded by a anonymous man, hooded and clad in black robes, as her neighbors watched.

• She chose the latter.

• Such was the fate of Remita Sinaga, 60, a rare Christian living in Aceh, one of the most stridently Islamic corners of Asia. Her crime: selling bottles of booze on the sly, an illicit act under Aceh’s increasingly hardline enforcement of Sharia, or Islamic law.

• When the draft version of a federal encryption bill got leaked this month, the verdict in the tech community was unanimous. Critics called it ludicrous and technically illiterate—and these were the kinder assessments of the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” proposed legislation authored by the offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr.

• The encryption issue is complex and the stakes are high, as evidenced by the recent battle between Apple and the FBI. Many other technology issues that the country is grappling with these days are just as complex, controversial, and critical—witness the debates over law enforcement’s use of stingrays to track mobile phones or the growing concerns around drones, self-driving cars, and 3-D printing. Yet decisions about these technical issues are being handled by luddite lawmakers who sometimes boast about not owning a cell phone or never having sent an email.

• One day before the New York presidential primary, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the state’s Board of Elections.

• Hundreds of New Yorkers signed onto the lawsuit, alleging that their party preferences were changed without their knowledge.

• Then on Tuesday, the day of the primary, numerous reports surfaced about “broken machines and belated polling” throughout Brooklyn and Queens.

• The media has continued its bizarre insistence that the GOP primary has been settled after the completely expected Donald Trump rout in New York on Tuesday,and are seemingly convinced this non-existent reset had something to do with the Trump makeover that is likewise non-existent.

• SuperPACs and billionaires are bankrolling our elections, and as a result, most Americans have virtually no influence in our political system—a damning state of affairs for the world’s oldest surviving democracy.

• The decline in the level of discourse in this year’s election cycle has been a disgrace, with Democrats behaving better than Republicans — one egregious GOP candidate, of course, in particular. But even supporters of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have stooped to disingenuous arguments, gratuitous sniping and ad hominem attacks. The trolls and zealots have been out in force with their name-calling and sometimes threats of physical violence and none of it’s helping anyone.

• In January 2002, President George W. Bush opened the Guantánamo Bay Detention facility. It was to hold, in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, the “worst of the worst” in the War on Terror. Over time, its population rose to nearly 800 prisoners from 44 countries, some captured in Afghanistan, some traded for bounty payments by vindictive neighbors or hostile tribesmen, and some seized by CIA operatives in countries far from Taliban territory. The prison then held more al-Qaeda and Taliban followers than leaders, but many prisoners were neither: they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Recognizing this, within a few years the Bush administration sent more than 500 of the detainees back to their countries of origin or to other countries willing to accept them.

• One might think that need not apply, however, to Raed Saleh, the head of Syria’s Civil Defense Units, a USAID-funded project also known as the White Helmets. After flying from Istanbul to Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, the 33-year-old Saleh was told his visa was canceled. He was scheduled to receive a humanitarian award from InterAction, a D.C.-based NGO.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The much-advertised World Intellectual Property Organization conference on the digital content market kicked off this morning with a speaker calling for the broadening of intellectual property rights income as a way forward for a sustainable economic ecosystem and reducing inequalities. The WIPO director general meanwhile said digital technology has brought new possibilities and reduced prices but also carries its load of regulatory challenges.

Copyrights

• Congress appears to be gearing up to really look at copyright reform again, and so it probably shouldn’t be a huge surprise that we’re starting to see a ramp up of crazy hyperbole about how horrible infringing is, how it’s destroying millions of jobs and billions in revenue. These claims seem to get even more ridiculous whenever legislation is on the line. I may do a post about some of the more recent whining about all of this, but for this week’s reading list post, I thought it might be good to point people to Bill Patry’s excellent Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. Patry has been involved in the copyright world for decades, working on copyright issues in Congress and with the Copyright Office — and also in private practice as a lawyer. He’s written a massive treatise on copyright law called Patry on Copyright as well as a treatise focusing just on fair use — both of which are frequently cited in legal decisions. He now works for Google — which causes some people to try to dismiss what he says as biased. But with his background, knowledge and experience, you’d be foolish to do so.

• That News Corp hates Google is well known. The company’s CEO, Robert Thomson, has a history of barely comprehensible anti-Google rants, based on a confused (i.e. wrong) understanding of how the internet works. Thomson keeps claiming that Google is “stealing” News Corp content by linking people to it and sending the company traffic.

• [...]

• Of course, that’s because we know what the real complaint here is: News Corp wants Google to give it money. Whatever you might think of the EU’s antitrust case against Google in other areas, this argument seems particularly ridiculous and just seems like Thomson and Rupert Murdoch’s sour grapes over the fact that Google is a successful company.

• We’ve been covering the ridiculous saga of the Harvard Law Review Association and its pricey legal threats to Carl Malamud for daring to publish a public domain set of legal citations. As a bit of background, legal citations tend to follow a standard found in the Bluebook, which is put out by the Harvard Law Review Association (which, confusingly, is actually made up of four top law schools). Many have criticized the Bluebook heavily, including appeals court judge Richard Posner who has ripped into the Bluebook, and suggested a much simpler form of legal citations, leading (in part) to something called the Maroonbook, from the University of Chicago Law Review. And, yet, the Bluebook has still mostly remained atop the heap, generating a ton of money for the law schools that back it. A few years ago, the Bluebook ran into some intellectual property issues, when Professor Frank Bennett sought to build support for the Bluebook into his open source citation tool, Zotero, and the Harvard Law Review Association obnoxiously said no, claiming copyright over citations (which seems… questionable).

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