● 04.28.16

● Links 28/4/2016: Fedora 24, EE Goes Open Source

Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• He added that Nigeria being the only certified Red Hat training partner in West Africa, aims at bringing Linux (using Red Hat as a standard) to Nigerian students by providing them with Linux administration modules while focusing on core administration tasks.

• Already, two institutions, Yaba College of Technology (Computer Science Department) and The University of Lagos (Systems Engineering Department) are set to introduce Linux as a course from next session.

• Landis+Gyr is expanding distributed intelligence capabilities on the grid with an advancement in adaptability and processing power for the network connecting the Gridstream suite of AMI, Distribution Intelligence and Customer Intelligence solutions.

• Landis+Gyr is introducing a grid router built on an open-platform Linux operating system that acts as a grid-edge server in the field capable of routing and processing data, as well as executing applications from multiple utility and smart community networks simultaneously.

Server

• It may be the new ‘it’ technology, but how will it fit within current enterprise infrastructure and drive business value? Information Age seeks a clearer picture on the future of containerisation

Kernel Space

• After informing us about the release of Linux kernel 3.12.59 LTS, kernel developer Sasha Levin is back today, April 28, 2017, with details about the twenty-third maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 4.1 kernel series.

• I spoke with Susan Graves, NTF’s director of client experience, to find out more about the project’s challenges and goals.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has laid out plans to release the next version of Mesa in just over one month.

• This next Mesa release is currently known as Mesa 11.3, but could become Mesa 12.0 should core Mesa see the changes to make OpenGL 4.4 (outside of the hardware drivers).

• Emil is looking to have the Mesa 11.3/12.0 feature freeze on 20 May, which will be timed with the first release candidate. There would be the usual weekly Mesa RCs until the official release, which is currently scheduled to take place on 10 June.

• INTEL – While the Intel Mesa driver remains at OpenGL 3.3 due to missing FP64 support, that code continues to be worked on by Igalia and Intel’s OTC developers. Patches for a related extension, ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, have also now been published that will clear Intel’s Mesa driver requirements for OpenGL 4.1.

• Antia Puentes of Igalia published the ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit patches this morning for Intel’s Mesa driver and supports Broadwell (Gen 8) hardware and newer. She explained about the timing of the work, “As this work depends on the ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 i965 functionality, which is work in progress, the aim of sending the series now is to get early feedback and parallelise the review process.”

• David Airlie has pulled the ARC PGU DRM driver into his DRM-Next tree for in turn landing with the Linux 4.7 kernel.

• The ARC PGU DRM driver is for a simple display controller found on Synopsys development boards. The ARC PGU is an RGB streamer that reads from a frame-buffer and sends to a digital (HDMI) encoder. This ARC PGU hardware is found on Synopsys boards like the AXS101 and AXS103.

• It turns out that Skylake’s HD Graphics 510, HD Graphics 535, Iris Graphics 550, and Iris Graphics P555 were missing their open-source driver support from an important piece of the Linux graphics stack.

Benchmarks

• For some end-of-month benchmarks and while having a number of graphics cards out prior to being let down by Tomb Raider’s Linux benchmark, here is a fresh round of OpenGL tests while using the newest Mesa 11.3-devel code on RadeonSI with AMDGPU/Radeon DRM from Ubuntu 16.04 and then compared to various Kepler/Maxwell graphics cards with the newest NVIDIA Linux driver.

Applications

• We’ve noted many times before that VLC Media Player, available for Windows, the Mac and Linux, is one of the best open source applications of any kind. The application is known for handling nearly any kind of video file format for playback; you can use it as a video transcoder for converting video file formats; and you can listen to and manage podcasts with it.

• Going back to faster release cycle, Weblate 2.6 has been just released. There is improved support for Python 3 or brand new HTTP REST API.

• Enpass 5.2 for Linux and Windows was released today, bringing support for “Time-based One-time Password Algorithm” (TOTP), along with other improvements.

• Today, April 28, 2016, Oracle has announced the release of VirtualBox 5.0.20, yet another maintenance version of its acclaimed open-source and cross-platform virtualization software.

• Our previous work gluing Performance Co-Pilot and Grafana together has made it possible to look at a networkful of systems’ performance stats and histories with just a few clicks on a web browser, and no auxiliary software (databases, web servers, etc.) other than PCP itself.

• Many people probably stopped at the most basic use of the technology: with the grafana dashboards provided.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Looks like it has everything I need in an action game. Great visuals, some comedy, a nice assortment of weapons and abilities and a Linux version.

• Tomb Raider out now on Linux and available for review! Tomb Raider is out now on Linux and available from Steam and the Feral Store.

• Tomb Raider is the hugely successful and critically acclaimed adventure, that tells the gripping story of how an inexperienced young woman becomes the extraordinary Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.

• Publisher Feral Interactive has released the official launch trailer for the Mac and Linux versions of developer Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 Tomb Raider.

• The trailer, which is a minute long and can be watched below, predominantly focuses on the action-oriented scenes from Tomb Raider, showing a young and fearless Lara Croft risking life and limb on her archeological expedition on the island of Yamatai.

• The top story today in Linux news must be the release of Tomb Raider – GamingOnLinux and Phoronix have some benchmarks. The Ubuntu 16.10 release schedule was posted and makeuseof compiled the five best distributions for USB sticks. Sam Varghese posted his interview with Debian’s new project lead Mehdi Dogguy and Joe Collins tested Manjaro 15.12 with mixed results.

• The release of Tomb Raider by Feral Interactive on Steam for Linux was shouted up and down the boulevard today. GamingOnLinux shared their thoughts and benchmarks soon after. The only negative Liam Dawe seemed to find was some dipping framerates and sluggish behavior in a few spots saying the performance “is generally quite good.” Controls worked well and the scenery was beautiful, according to Dawe. The story was compelling, the main character well developed, and combat exciting. He concluded, “Overall, it’s a fantastic game that really draws you in from the moment you load it up.” See his full review for no screenshots! Phoronix posted some NVIDIA benchmarks running Tomb Raider on Linux, indicating I need a new video card.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• How does one go about taming Plasma? Well, that seems to be a recurring question I get asked in the emails. People are really interested to know about theme, font, icon, and window decoration management in Plasma, and how it compares to the good ole KDE4. A valid question.

• We already know quite a bit about this desktop environment. I was extremely keen on Plasma last year, and even crowned it my favorite for a while. We also talked about some neat tips and tricks on managing the desktop, so it’s not a stranger. Now, we shall delve deeper into the aesthetics side of things.

• And now two screenshots with new graphics: the first with the new activity icons, and the second is a fullscreen view of the new chessboard and background.

• Last month, my book “Dessin et Peinture numérique avec Krita” has been released. It is the first book in french about this software. I hope it will contribute to introduce this wonderful Free Software to all french speaking artists.

• This book is available in full-color printed version, as digital download without DRM or as online version, on the website of the publisher D-Booker. By the way, I’d like to thank my publisher who made it possible to write this book.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I talked a bit with Mattias Bengtsson before, and since he had been contemplating using OpenTripPlanner (OTP) for his GSoC project a couple of year ago and found it didn’t scale too well for general turn-based routing, he was quite excited about my idea of combing GraphHopper and OTP, using OTP with just transit data (loaded from GTFS feeds).

• A GNOME Software update that fixes the issue with installing third-party deb files was pushed to the Ubuntu 16.04 Proposed repository a few minutes ago.

• GNOME Software is a new software center (‘add/remove programs’ application) for any GNU/Linux system using GNOME desktop environment. At this time, there are just a few third-party reviews about GNOME Software. This article is a general beginner guide about how to use GNOME Software. For this purpose we use the GNOME Software in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus. Thanks to the developers who created GNOME Software. We hope this article helps new users.

Distributions

• I regularly find myself writing about USB sticks. Why am I currently obsessing over these cheap dongles, which many have come to regard as fundamentally obsolete? Because they’re still useful.

• Sure, you’re probably not going to use them to store your files on. In that regard, they’ve been utterly supplanted by cloud storage services like Dropbox. But they can be used to boost your personal digital security. Better yet, when you install Linux on them, they can be used to keep your digital worlds in-sync wherever you go, or to protect your computer when things go awry. Here are the 5 most useful Linux distributions for installing on a USB drive.

Screenshots/Screencasts

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The openSUSE Board announced today a call to action for a Community Release Team to assist with tasks associated to the development of the next Leap version 42.2.

Red Hat Family

• A day after the Business Journal reported that the Raleigh, North Carolina-based open-source tech giant was scouting sites to open a 40,000-square-foot office in Boston, a large marquee sign emblazoned with what appeared to be the Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) logo showed up in front of 300 A St. in Fort Point. Trouble is, the sign isn’t the company’s actual logo — and Red Hat disavows any involvement.

Finance

Fedora

• Jan Kurik has passed along word that the Fedora 24 Beta has been delayed and thus the final milestones are also pushed back.

• Due to an invalid Fedora 24 Beta RC compose, at today’s Go/No-Go meeting they decided to slip the rest of the release milestones by one week. Part of the compose being ruled invalid are due to some “alpha” references being present on the “beta” images plus there are some other potential and accepted blockers.

• Fedora Project’s Program Manager Jan Kurik today, April 28, 2016, announced the delay of the Beta release of the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system by a week due to unresolved issues.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Meizu Pro 5U smartphone puts Ubuntu in your pocket, but you can’t use it as a desktop computer. Fortunately you’ve got other pockets, and you can stuff the Mele PCG02U into one them.

• The PCG02U is an HDMI stick PC, and if you hadn’t guessed from the U at the end of its name or that unmistakable orange color (or, more obviously, the title of this post) it is indeed powered by Ubuntu — Ubuntu 14.04 to be precise. It’s on sale now, and you can pick one up for just $70.

Flavours and Variants

• Budgie Remix 16.04 is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and it includes the latest Budgie Desktop 10.2.5. Budgie Desktop integrates tightly with the GNOME stack and it features a libmutter-based window manager and a customizable panel which includes an applet, notification, and customization center, called Raven.

• “Ubuntu MATE is a stable, easy-to-use operating system with a configurable desktop environment. It is ideal for those who want the most out of their computers and prefer a traditional desktop metaphor. With modest hardware requirements, it is suitable for modern workstations, single board computers (such as as the Raspberry Pi) and older hardware alike. Ubuntu MATE makes modern computers fast and older computers usable.”

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Samsung/Tizen

• A new Artik IDE development environment and the Artik Cloud give developers new capabilities with Artik modules. Samsung has given Internet of things developers several new tools to create and grow their ideas for new devices and concepts, including the Samsung Artik IDE (integrated development environment) and an IoT-focused Samsung Artik Cloud where developers can collect, store and access their data from any device or other cloud.

Android

• BlackBerry finally embraced Android with the BlackBerry Priv last year. Now the Canadian company appears to be gearing up for another run with Google’s mobile operating system.

• Lawyers for Google and Oracle fought over the final details of their upcoming copyright trial today, debating issues of courtroom technology, time limits, and what type of evidence jurors will see.

• Oracle sued Google in 2010 for violating its copyright because the search giant used parts of 37 Java APIs in creating its Android operating system. Oracle acquired Java when it purchased Sun.

• The latest data from research firm Strategy Analytics reveals that Apple Watch sales totaled an estimated 2.2 million in the first quarter.

• Apple Watch remains the most popular smartwatch, but its market share declined to 52.4-percent compared to 63-percent in the previous quarter.

Free Software/Open Source

• And since the beginning, I had tried to bring the most of the content about Free Software ideology. And this time next week, it will start the 1º Computer Science Week, and what is more amazing is that this edition is bringing people from more there 14 cities around the state of Rio de Janeiro, for watch the talks. I didn’t expect that.

• In discussing our use cases, we’ve noticed that a key domain for OpenDaylight (ODL) is Cloud and NFV. ODL is closely tied to NFV and accordingly works very closely with the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), a related project with the Linux Foundation that concentrates on providing a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services.

• Analysis: From commercial to enterprise hubs, from smaller to bigger players, open source is gearing up to be the future of the data centre.

• The use of open source to design, build and deploy software and even hardware infrastructure in the data centre seems to be an accelerating trend amongst companies in the hosting space.

• Open source software revenues worldwide are expected to go beyond the $50bn barrier this year for the first time, according to Statista. By 2020, that value will rise to $57.3bn.

• Frank Karlitschek, ownCloud’s founder and CTO, has resigned from his company. OwnCloud is a popular do-it-yourself infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.

• Next week, FOSS4G North America is coming to Raleigh, NC. FOSS4G is a conference celebrating all of the ways that free and open source software are changing the world of geographic and geospatial information science (GIS).

• These days, with ever-expanding technologies for collecting geographic data, sensor networks and the Internet of Things are driving larger and larger quantities of data that must be stored, processed, visualized, and interpreted. Practically every type of industry imaginable is increasing the types and quantities of geographic data they utilize. And the traditional closed source tools of the olden days can no longer keep up.

• Many of the applications of geographic tools are scientific in nature, from biology to oceanography to geology to climatology. Here are seven applications for geographic science that I’m excited about hearing talks on next week.

EE

• EE has collaborated with Lime Micro and Canonical on an open source project set to boost connectivity in rural areas.

• EE wants developers to create network services and applications using Lime Micro’s software defined radio transceiver and Canonical Ubuntu Snappy Core

• UK telco EE has announced that it is partnering with Lime Micro and Canonical, two of the UK’s leading open source technology companies, to launch a fully programmable network capability with the ability to change the way future mobile networks are built. The solution is built on Lime’s ‘network in a box’ solution, which developers can configure by software to provide any wireless service, including 4G and WiFi. The configuration software, available through the Snappy Ubuntu Core stores, should allow developers to create new applications and services for a mobile network.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Running hot off this week’s release of Firefox 46 is the beta release issued by Mozilla for Firefox 47.

• The Firefox 47.0 beta is another hefty update by Mozilla developers. With Firefox 47 Beta, embedded YouTube videos can now play with HTML5 video if Flash is not present, there is support for Google’s Widevine CDM but only on Windows/OSX, and the VP9 video codec is enabled for users with “fast machines.” Outside of the video work, there is now support for ChaCha20/Poly1305 cipher suites, Service Workers improvements, about:debugging additions, smart multi-line input in the Web Console, RSA-PSS signature crypto support, the Firefox User Extension Library (FUEL) has been removed, and various other user and developer additions.

SaaS/Back End

• CoreOS said a few weeks ago it was working on a way to run OpenStack as an application on the Kubernetes container platform. Today the company says it has done just that with its new Stackanetes.

• Stackanetes puts OpenStack in containers as a way to make OpenStack easier to use, according to Alex Polvi, CoreOS CEO, who spoke with SDxCentral in early April. He said OpenStack can be “a bit fragile,” and containers can be useful to make an organization’s infrastructure behave like that of a Web-scale cloud provider.

• ApacheCon North America and Apache Big Data are coming up in just a few weeks and it’s an event that Apache and open source community members won’t want to miss.

• Apache products power half the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, store billions of objects in virtually every industry, and enhance the lives of countless users and developers worldwide. And behind those projects is a thriving community of more than 4,500 committers from around the world.

• Streaming and batch big data analytics technology Apache Apex has been elevated to a Top-Level Project by the Apache Software Foundation. Used by organizations including Capital One and GE, the technology can help developers more quickly create apps that leverage real-time data.

• Less than three weeks after open-sourcing its Quark cost-based SQL optimizer, big data-as-a-service provider Qubole Inc. is at it again.

• Coincident with Kafka Summit taking place in San Francisco this week, Qubole said it’s releasing its StreamX ingestion service under an Apache open source license. StreamX is used to efficiently and reliably capture large scale, real-time data using Apache Kafka, the message broker that is surging in popularity thanks to growing interest in real-time and streaming analytics.

• StreamX ingests data logs from Kafka and persists them to cloud object stores such as Amazon Web Services LLC’s S3. It guarantees that data is delivered without duplicates, addressing a characteristic of Kafka that can cause problems for users in some situations.

• Qubole, the big data-as-a-service company, and Looker, the company that is powering data-driven businesses, today announced that they are integrating Looker’s business analytics with Qubole’s cloud-based big data platform, giving line of business users across organizations access to powerful, yet easy-to-use big data analytics.

• Proxy-FS is basically a peer to a less known feature of Ceph Rados Gateway that permits accessing it over NFS. Both of them are fundamentally different from e.g. Swift-on-file in that the data is kept in Swift or Ceph, instead of a general filesystem.

CMS

• Since its launch in late 2013, Ghost has attracted well over 500,000 registered users, many of whom see it as a worthy alternative to WordPress, if blogging is your main aim.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• Ionic the company behind a trendy eponymous open-source HTML5 framework and software development kit (SDK) for building native mobile apps and mobile web apps, is announcing today a $8.5 million round of funding.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Stallman is frequently described as an advocate of open source computing, even its father. It’s a characterization he vehemently denies. “I want people to associate me with free software, not open source,” he said. “I don’t want to make statements about open source except how it differs from free software.”

• Or, as a statement on GNU.org sums it up: “The free software movement campaigns for your freedom in your computing, as a matter of justice. The open source non-movement does not campaign for anything.”

Public Services/Government

• On 19 April, the European Commission published a communication on “ICT Standardisation Priorities for the Digital Single Market” (hereinafter ‘the Communication’). The Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy intends to digitise industries with several legislative and political initiatives, and the Communication is a part of it covering standardisation. In general, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) welcomes the Communication’s plausible approach for integrating Free Software and Open Standards into standardisation but expresses its concerns about the lack of understanding of necessary prerequisites to pursue that direction.

• The policy both reaffirms and broadens a goal laid out in the Administration’s Second Open Government National Action Plan for “improved access to custom software code developed for the Federal Government.” The Plan emphasized use of (and contributing back to) open source software to fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. It also furthers a long-standing ‘default to open’ objective going back to the early days of the Administration.

• The Department of Homeland Security’s chief information officer Luke McCormack was put in a tough position recently when he had to publicly flip-flop on the department’s official position on the use of open source software.

• McCormack was forced to post to GitHub a strong formal endorsement of a draft White House policy for publishing Federal source code in the open. “We believe moving towards Government-wide reuse of custom-developed code and releasing Federally-funded custom code as open source software has significant financial, technical, and cybersecurity benefits and will better enable DHS to meet our mission of securing the nation from the many threats we face,” McCormack wrote, reversing the concerns expressed a week earlier by members of his own team.

• Those DHS IT officials had called out the misguided geeks at the White House noting that most security companies do not publish their source code because that would allow hackers to develop highly targeted attacks.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• When Facebook rolled out the Open Compute Project in 2011, it started somewhat of a revolution in the data center market. In a way, that revolution had already been going on; Google had figured out it was better off designing its own hardware than buying off-the-shelf products from the top vendors, and it had been some time before Facebook reached that point too.

Programming/Development

• Hackathons are well-known as events where developers come together to quickly turn out a piece of software, often competing against each other. But what if they were also a place for learning? The Research Center for Open Digital Innovation at Purdue University is making that happen. The IronHacks series of hackathons is designed to allow participants to learn from judges and Center researchers to learn from the participants.

• Concourse, an open source CI pipeline tool that uses yaml files for configuring pipelines and configuration-free setup, has recently bumped its major release and is currently available in version 1.1.0. According to the team sponsored by Pivotal, the major benefits of Concourse are explicit and first-class support of pipelines, running isolated builds in containers, avoidance of snowflake build servers and easy access to build logs.

• The GNU Compiler Collection will be refreshed with updated C++ standards compliance and improvements in parallelism and diagnostics.

• Described as a “major” release, GCC 6.1 leverages the C++ 14 standard, which was approved in 2014. “The C++ front end now defaults to the C++ 14 standard, instead of C++98, [which] it has been defaulting to previously,” said Jakub Jelinek, a Red Hat consulting engineer and a co-release manager of GCC, in a bulletin.

Leftovers

• High-ranking Church of Scientology member David Miscavige’s lawyers have threatened to file suit against Miscavige’s father, Ron. The threat is a last-ditch effort to stop Ron Miscavige from releasing a tell-all book about his son’s involvement in the religion, a belief system that outsiders and former members call a cult.

• A dead body was found in one of the conference rooms of the Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. No other injuries have been reported except a female employee who was also reported to be injured. Sheriff’s department have refused to comment on this case.

• Microsoft’s relentless Windows 10 nagware has interrupted a live TV weather forecast, urging meteorologist Metinka Slater to upgrade.

• The operating system suddenly popped up a box on screen insisting the station’s computer be upgraded to the latest version – while Slater was on air describing thunderstorms rolling through Iowa, US.

• We interrupt this weather report with a very important announcement. Despite our best efforts, your local TV station has not yet upgraded to Windows 10. We warned them that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.

• Why are teen women having fewer babies? First, more teens appear to be taking advantage of effective contraceptive methods. Second, they also are having less sex than earlier generations did. In an earlier report on adolescent sex the CDC noted that since 1988 the rate of teen sexual activity had fallen by 22 percent for teen males and 14 percent for teen females. Interestingly, a 2014 study found that births to teens dropped by nearly 6 percent 18 months after the preimiere of the MTV reality show, 16 and Pregnant.

Science

• Now however, for no discernable reason, just 20% of the Australian IT workforce are women. So in order to not forget the industry’s roots – and hopefully inspire more Australian women to start crunching code – we thought we’d remember three notable innovators who radically changed the course of technology as we know it.

• ASKED by a journalist in April about Canada’s role in fighting Islamic State, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, came back with a pithy lecture on quantum computing. “The uncertainty around quantum states,” he explained, lets quantum computers encode much more information than the conventional binary sort can. This detour into geekdom seemed natural at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which Mr Trudeau was visiting to proclaim his enthusiasm for basic research. The video of the impromptu lecture went viral, adding to the glamour already radiated by the snowboarding, cannabis-legalising, refugee-embracing prime minister. The assembled physicists duly cheered; Mr Trudeau then answered the question.

• Learning is a function that has always been precious to humans. In a way, it allows us to believe the fallacy that we can revolt against our evolved, basal tendencies, and forge our future as a species through intellect, as opposed to natural selection.

• We value the capacity to learn in ourselves, but also in other species. It’s why we take so much delight in teaching a dog new tricks, and yet feel threatened by the possibility of sentient, non-human beings.

Health/Nutrition

• But obesity doesn’t exist just because of individual choices by parents and kids. On the policy front, the US government “has yet to aggressively do more than try to make some minor changes in a few programs,” Popkin added. For example, Congress and President Barack Obama reformed the school food environment in important ways back in 2010, cutting down on the once-ubiquitous availability of sugary snacks and beverages, but public school cafeterias are still constrained by tight budgets to churning out plenty of highly processed food. (More here on the the modest US lunch reforms and the brewing congressional backlash against them.) In Brazil, by contrast, “70 percent of all food served in schools must be real food that is healthy,” Popkin said.

• A planned symposium to identify potential interrelations between the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), and the United Nations International Plant Treaty is raising concerns from civil society about farmers’ rights.

• Oh, to be a fly on the wall inside the offices of the top lobbyists for the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

• So close to the July 1 deadline for complying with Vermont’s GMO labeling law, and still no court ruling to overturn Vermont’s law. Still no federal legislation to preempt Vermont’s law.

• Hundreds of millions of dollars spent to keep labels off GMO ingredients. Lawsuits, dirty tricks, shady schemes—all, so far, for naught. Meanwhile, food corporations are labeling, or announcing plans to label, and preparing to implement those plans. Others, including Dannon, will remove GMO ingredients from their products.

• The EPA’s draft report, which was released earlier this month, looked at three widely-used pesticides: chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion. It found that both malathion, which is used in agriculture, for lawn care, and for mosquito control, and chlorpyrifos, which is used on a range of crops including cotton, almonds, and fruit trees, was “likely to adversely affect” 97 percent of the 1,782 species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The other pesticide, diazinon, which is used in orchards and vegetable crops, was found to likely adversely affect 79 percent of these species.

• According to a 2007 study this may be because of previous use of arsenic-based pesticides to control the boll weevil pest on cotton. From the 1930s to the 1960s, approximately 10 to 15 pounds of arsenic-based pesticide were used per acre for every planting.

Security

• The OWASP Top 10 list is extremely well known; it is impossible to walk through the show floor at a security conference without encountering at least some mention of the top 10 list. The Top 10 list is cited several times by the PCI Security Standards Council Penetration Testing Guidance and has been used as an acceptance test criteria for contract fulfillment for public procurement.

• But open source code doesn’t necessarily eliminate all risk. Users still need to trust that the software they run on their computers actually reflects the open source code as it should. To eliminate this risk, Bitcoin developers have developed a fierce security policy which goes beyond the open source nature of Bitcoin itself: “Gitian Building.”

• A vulnerability in Microsoft Office 365 SAML Service Provider implementation allowed for cross domain authentication bypass affecting all federated domains. An attacker exploiting this vulnerability could gain unrestricted access to a victim’s Office 365 account, including access to their email, files stored in OneDrive etc.

• Cisco started analyzing Tuto4PC’s OneSoftPerDay application after its systems detected an increase in “Generic Trojans” (i.e. threats not associate with any known family). An investigation uncovered roughly 7,000 unique samples with names containing the string “Wizz,” including “Wizzupdater.exe,” “Wizzremote.exe” and “WizzInstaller.exe.” The string also showed up in some of the domains the samples had been communicating with.

• A longtime reader recently asked: “How do online fraudsters get the 3-digit card verification value (CVV or CVV2) code printed on the back of customer cards if merchants are forbidden from storing this information? The answer: If not via phishing, probably by installing a Web-based keylogger at an online merchant so that all data that customers submit to the site is copied and sent to the attacker’s server.

• The reasons these patients are vulnerable to viruses like W32.Ramnit and Conficker is because they run legacy systems that haven’t been patched or updated for a decade. And that’s fine as long as the operators of the plant keep them isolated and assume they are insecure, hopefully keeping the more critical parts of the network away safer.

• Increased complexity without corresponding increases in understanding would be a net loss to a buyer. At scale, it’s been a net loss to the world economy.

• In 2013, a now-infamous government contractor named Edward Snowden shined a stark light on our vulnerable communications infrastructure by leaking 10,000 classified U.S. documents to the world.

• One by one, they detailed a mass surveillance program in which the National Security Administration and others gathered information on citizens — via phone tracking and tapping undersea Internet cables.

• Three years after igniting a controversy over personal privacy, public security, and online rights that he is still very much a part of, Snowden spoke with Popular Science in December 2015 and shared his thoughts on what’s still wrong and how to fix it.

Defence/Aggression

• Empire is once again fashionable. The financial crisis that is presently gutting the island of Puerto Rico plays out like the world’s worst case of botched assisted suicide. The sell of its municipal funds and its constitutionally guaranteed promise of repayment to investors has plunged the island into a very precarious situation for its millions of citizens and the opportunity of a lifetime for hedge fund vultures. While it is laudable that the current economic meltdown on the island has made some headlines, including a mostly well-thought out piece by comedian John Oliver, the same cannot be said for the congressional knee-jerk legislative reaction to it. The bill, H.R. 4900, was designed to impose an oversight board meant to administer the fiscal responsibilities of the Puerto Rican people and has unleashed a firestorm of opposition that was glossed over by Oliver’s otherwise on-point observations. The controversy surrounding this bill has served as a catalyst underscoring the deep disregard bordering on contempt that frames the question of self-determination and complete lack of sovereignty afforded to islanders.

• An Israeli tactic deemed “ineffective” at preventing civilian causalities by a United Nations commission has now been adopted by the United States in its fight against ISIS, according to a U.S. military official.

• Air Force Maj. Peter Gersten, the deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the U.S.-led coalition, explained at a press briefing Tuesday that the tactic dubbed “knocking on the roof” was, in fact, used during a strike in Mosul, Iraq against a “major distributor of funds to Daesh fighters.” A woman the military had seen come and go with her children from the building died in the strike—”an unfortunality,” as Gersten called it.

• “We went as far as actually to put a Hellfire on top of the building and air burst it so it wouldn’t destroy the building, simply knock on the roof to ensure that she and the children were out of the building. And then we proceeded with our operations,” Gersten said. He went on to say that ISIS fighters are “using the civilian force as human shields.” He said that the military saw the woman and children leave the building. They then “began to process the strike,” but the woman ran back into the building and was killed.

• Europe is rife with political conflict. Southern European economies continue to splutter along on fumes. The defeat of the Grexit (Greece’s departure from the Euro) is temporary. When the pain of austerity rises once again, the politics of exit from Europe will return. In Spain, there is no government as the conservatives refuse to give up power to the anti-austerity bloc in parliament. The “refugee crisis” continues to rattle European societies, where an anti-refugee bloc has made gains at the ballot box. Austria is the latest test, where the far right anti-refugee party and the Green Party displaced the establishment parties in the presidential elections; it is the right and the Greens that will go for a run-off. It is this polarity between the Far Right and the Left that has broken the “centrist” consensus of European politics.

• Following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision and related rulings, corporations and the wealthiest Americans gained the legal right to raise and spend as much money as they want on political candidates.

• [...]

• Most notoriously this included Halliburton, a military contractor previously led by Dick Cheney. The company made huge profits from George W. Bush’s decision to wage a costly, unjustified, and illegal war while Cheney served as his vice president.

• Military-industrial corporations spend heavily on political campaigns. They’ve given over $1 million to this year’s presidential candidates so far — over $200,000 of which went to Hillary Clinton, who leads the pack in industry backing.

• Chicago is a city on edge. Last weekend, 20 people were shot over 13 hours. According to the Chicago Tribune, 1,051 have been shot this year alone, through April 25. One hundred seventy-eight have been killed, more than one each day. And while shootings take place across the city, they are concentrated in neighborhoods scarred by deep poverty.

• I’m expecting tactical nuclear weapons to reappear overtly in the US military equation for Asia…

• Less than two weeks after executing Kenneth Fults, Georgia is getting ready to lethally inject its fifth death row inmate this year.

• Daniel Anthony Lucas is scheduled to die Wednesday night for the fatal shootings of two children. He doesn’t dispute that he committed the crime. But his story demonstrates how early childhood trauma plays out on death rows across the country today. A substantial number of executions involve people who grew up around substance abuse or grew up in environments where violence and neglect was the norm.

• Deliberately targeting a hospital is a war crime, after all, but so is the indiscriminate killing of civilians outside a hospital. And it’s worth noting, according to a Western security analyst who is an expert on Kunduz, that “even if they had struck the NDS headquarters, there still would have been civilian casualties.” The NDS office, which the U.S. military has said was the intended target, stands in a residential neighborhood, as do the private home and the tea factory that were also bombed on the night of the MSF hospital strike. An AC-130, the analyst pointed out, is a disproportionate and indiscriminate weapon, not appropriate for use in civilian areas in the dead of night.

• James Clapper has suggested that the 28 pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry may be declassified by June. I’m skeptical the pages will be entirely declassified, but look forward to them.

• Meanwhile, former Senate Intelligence Chair has begun to press for an accounting on the Sarasota cell of apparent 9/11 supporters. In an interview with NPR, he stated clearly that FBI lied (um, misstated) what they knew about the Sarasota cell and called for the investigations to be reopened without the tight time limits imposed on the original commissions.

• French MPs have voted in favor of a resolution to lift the EU-imposed sanctions initially slapped on Russia over the crisis in Ukraine and the reunification with Crimea. The document is non-binding.

• Fifty-five members of the French National Assembly have supported the resolution calling on the government not to extend the sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU. Forty-four voted against and two abstained. Of the 577 deputies in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, 101 took part in the vote.

• It has been repeatedly said that the American people are the only ones who could perform the Herculean task of bringing down the most powerful and bloodthirsty empire ever known to humankind. Humanity anxiously hopes to see the US people act, and will provide the solidarity they would have earned.

• [...]

• The continuous embarrassing exposure of prisoners’ human rights violations – including torture and serious indignities– in US public or secret prisons scattered around the world, have awakened the awareness of millions of Americans who condemn such injustice.

• According to the official statement of the dean’s office, the display of the Tibetan flag was a symbol of the institution’s freedom of thought, a critical expression of the injustices of our times and therefore a reaction to a state visit “reminiscent of communist-era masquerades”.

• For a speech purporting to challenge Washington’s accepted wisdom, there was much that was familiar about Donald Trump’s first big foreign policy address, not least the customary certainty of its delivery.

• A call to challenge radical Islam through “philosophical struggle” as well as military force might even have come from the lips of Barack Obama. Certainly no mainstream Republican would ever disagree with the somewhat motherhood-and-apple-pie exhortation for US presidents to view the world “through the clear lens of American interests”.

• Now, however, things are getting serious. Trump is, in all likelihood, one of the two people with a shot at becoming our next president. As Commander-In-Chief, Trump would have full control of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal and would be in charge of our diplomatic relationships with the other 8 nations that possess nuclear weapons.

• Trump has said that he believes nuclear weapons are the greatest threat facing our country. Yet the nuclear deterrence strategy he outlined last night during a 46-second soundbite on Fox News borders on incoherency.

• Doctors Without Borders said Thursday that a hospital it supported in the Syrian city of Aleppo was bombed, destroying the key pediatric facility and killing at least 14 people.

• The medical humanitarian aid group, also known by its French acronym, MSF, said in a statement that two doctors were among the casualties, including one of last pediatricians in Aleppo, and that other medical structures in the city had also been attacked this week.

• Witnesses said the Al Quds hospital was hit by a missile from a fighter jet Wednesday, according to CNN.

• The US embassy has warned Americans to avoid crowded places in Sweden as Swedish security police continues to investigate a potential terror threat against Stockholm.

• A Hindu priest died on Saturday, a day after he was stabbed by a local Islamist lumpen in Tungipara of Gopalganj. The deceased Hindu man eschewed his material association with his family life and entered into a life of sainthood for greater social service and emancipation.

• Police arrested the Muslim youth identified as Shariful Sheikh (aged 25), son of Abdul Mannan Sheikh, in the murder case filed in a local police station.

• The dead, Sadhu Paramananda Roy, 75, of Dakkhin Bashuria village under Kushali union, used to preach Hindu values according to scriptures to the people at different programmes in the area, family members said. He was a disciple of Thakur Rasraj Roy.

• He was returning home on last Friday afternoon from a market near Gimadanga village. As he reached a bridge around 6:30pm, fanatic Shariful stabbed him in the abdomen and the right hand with a knife, the victim told his family members before his death.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The role and responsibility of online platforms and intermediaries is a key issue in the Digital Single MarketStrategy, which the EU Commission launched last May [see Katposts here, here, here, here and here]. After a number of public consultations, on-line and off-line enthusiasts were anxiously awaiting for the Commission to release a Communication on that very issue by the end of May 2016. A few hours ago, Politico provided for a good remedy against our anxiety by leaking the draft Communication, which bears the lovely title “Online Platforms and the Digital Single Market Opportunities and Challenges for Europe”. The draft version is dated 18 April.

• The draft Communication addresses a number of DSM initiatives where platforms’ liability is involved and shades light upon the general principles that will guide the Commission’s reform efforts as regards E-Commerce, AVMS, and IPRED Directives. Overall, the draft Communication describes a strongly pro-competition program that reminds to this Kat the EU he knew when he attended university [i.e., agesago], when the Commission was perceived as a disruptive Institution aimed at battling status quos, rather than preserving them. Be that as it may, here are the major points that the Communication addresses.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Thirty years after the catastrophe at Chernobyl, the government of neighbouring Belarus still refuses to release information about real radiation levels in the surrounding area. It’s even planning to build a new nuclear power plant.

• Driving one more nail into the coal industry’s coffin, a federal board on Tuesday officially rejected a proposal to build a coal-hauling railroad through farm and ranch land in southeastern Montana.

• Ranchers and environmentalists, who aggressively opposed the project, celebrated the Surface Transportation Board ruling.

• “It’s a historic day when a federal agency recognizes there’s no foreseeable future for coal,” stated Ken Rumelt, an attorney at the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic at the Vermont Law School, who represented the grassroots conservation group Northern Plains Resource Council (NPRC) before the Board.

• Scientists warn that the current pleasures of warmer weather will pall for US citizens as climate change brings extreme temperature rises and unhealthy levels of atmospheric ozone.

• Germany is set to launch a new incentive scheme worth about 1 billion euros ($1 billion) to get more consumers buying electric cars as it struggles to meet a target of bringing 1 million of them onto its roads by the end of the decade.

• The costs of the incentives, similar to those already established in some other European countries, are to be shared equally between the government and automakers with a view to selling an additional 400,000 electric cars, Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Wednesday.

• Critics say higher electricity generation to charge battery cars will increase carbon dioxide emissions.

• Malaysia is proposing to amend an Act to allow the government to seize control of land where big fires are discovered, as part of its long-term efforts to curb haze from slash-and-burn forest clearing techniques usually linked to palm oil plantations.

• The palm oil sector in top producers Indonesia and Malaysia has been facing criticism for deforestation and its land-clearing methods that send vast plumes of smoke across South-east Asia every year.

• Indonesia has already taken measures to reduce the industry’s environmental impact, with the latest being a moratorium on new oil palm concessions.

• Last week, the IRS asked anyone who might be exposed in the Panama Papers to come forward before they get caught. And for good reason—America is a hotbed of tax evasion.

• There’s an old myth that we can’t have a comfortable lifestyle—cars, homes, creature comforts—without sacrificing clean water and clean air, because it requires lots of energy and we don’t have the money to transition to cleaner energy sources.

• Scientists know that climate change is slowly robbing the oceans of their oxygen, but historically, it’s been hard to differentiate oxygen loss that’s due to natural ocean cycles and warming-driven loss. Now, a new study predicts that within the next 15 to 25 years, warming-caused oxygen loss will be detectable across the worlds’ oceans.

• The study, published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, used modelling to determine that, between 2030 and 2040, warming-caused oxygen loss will be severe enough — and data will be comprehensive enough — for scientists to see what parts of the ocean are being affected by human-caused deoxygenation.

Finance

• Uber has succeeded in almost completely pushing its operating costs (absent the relatively small investment needed to run the app and backoffice) down to people who often can’t afford it but are lured into trying because the alternatives seem even lower paying.

• [...]

• In addition to having to raise their own capital to essentially buy themselves a job driving for Uber, drivers face risks far above the simple “risk” associated with any “investment.”

• Public sector workers in Costa Rica were on strike Tuesday and Wednesday, demanding salary increases, higher taxes on the wealthy, and land rights for peasants.

• Thousands of teachers, medical workers, and their allies reportedly marched to the national congress building on Tuesday, demonstrating to President Luis Guillermo Solís “that the people are not happy with his administration,” said Gilberto Cascante, the president of the ANDE teachers union, one of three major teachers unions joining the strike.

• Spanish language news agency EFE reports that protesters carried banners with messages like “Let the rich pay more taxes” and “For the dignity of workers,” among others.

• Currently, there are approximately 43.3 million Americans carrying student loans amounting to an astounding $1.2 trillion. This is greater than the country’s towering credit card bill. And, it’s getting worse. 2015 graduates set a new record of indebtedness.

• Imagine, after a deep sleep, you suffered the fate of Rip Van Winkle and woke in the spring of 2040. What might you find?

• Among other things, maybe a presidential candidate railing against America’s concentration of wealth. Except this time, it’s not the 1 percent that owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent — it’s the top hundredth of a percent.

• Could it get that bad? Yes, quite easily. In fact, that nightmare is already on the way.

• To see this better, take a step back in time. If you woke up 24 years ago, you could hear candidate Bill Clinton lamenting the fact that the top 1 percent owned as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

• Creating something that people want is how one gets wealthy in a market economy. Sadly, there’s another way to get rich. It’s called cronyism, and it can make billions for the lucky businesses that get government support—whether their products are profitable or not. In the process, the taxpayers foot the bill.

• Taxpayer insurance against unprofitability takes many forms, from loan guarantees to grants, which provide a no-lose scenario for beneficiaries. If the business is profitable, then the corporation makes massive profits. If the business goes bust, then the taxpayers take a hit. Either way, the crony capitalist wins.

• Perhaps the most prominent case of cronyism in modern history is Elon Musk. A brilliant entrepreneur, Musk founded the online payment company X.com with profits he made off the sale of Zip2—another profitable company and the first online version of the Yellow Pages. X.com eventually merged with Confinity and became the wildly successful PayPal.

• The economy grew at a sluggish 0.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter. The main culprits for the poor performance were downturns in durable goods, nonresidential construction, and defense spending. This is the third year in a row in which growth has been poor in the first quarter, which means that one-off excuses about snowstorms and so forth don’t really hold water anymore. But it might be a statistical artifact. Jared Bernstein says “there’s some concern with the seasonal adjusters, which some argue are biasing Q1 down and Q2 up.” I guess we’ll have to wait until Q2 to find out.

• In our country’s current trade regime, however, “trade” is used as a justification and enabler for closing American factories and moving American jobs to places where people are paid less and the environment is not protected, and bringing the same goods that used to be made here back here and selling them in the same outlets. The people who used to employ those American workers can then pocket the wage and environmental-protection-cost differential; the country gets a massive trade deficit.

• Just like his adventure in Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s young Deputy Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman got it all wrong this week. It’s not Saudi Arabia which suffers from “oil addiction”, it’s we who are addicted. The unique Saudi drug – a cocktail of wealth, arrogance and infantile Puritanism – is far more dangerous, since it depends on the arithmetic (or myth) of its 716 billion barrels of oil reserves.

• If this statistic is as ill-conceived as the Sunni Saudi war on Yemen’s Shiite Houthis, along with its massive civilian casualties, then Prince Mohamed’s ‘reforms’ – oiled (if that’s the right word) by a $2 trillion public investment fund which would take over ownership of the state oil company Aramco – will have to kick in long before the deadline of his ‘Vision 2030’.

• [...]

• No wonder, as the Washington Post revealed this month, the Saudis are spending millions on Washington’s top law, lobby and public relations companies to promote foreign investment in the Saudi economy – some of them, according to the paper, “tasked with coming up with content for the [Saudi Washington] embassy’s official Twitter and YouTube accounts”. The PR firm Qorvis, it turned out, also ran the Twitter account for the Syrian Opposition Coalition. Firms like Podesta, BGR Government Affairs, DLA Piper and Pillsbury Winthrop are trying to raise the Kingdom’s “visibility”.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have incredibly high negatives. Most people don’t agree with, like or trust either. In a political system responsive to the public, an alternative with broad support would emerge if they become the nominees, as seems increasingly likely.

• Unfortunately, in our system — which enshrines the dominance of the two establishment parties — the negatives of each end up perversely being the basis of support for the other. Voters end up being trapped by the very unpopularity of the candidates. The main things holding the system together are fear and hate — even as the candidates claim to be bringing people together.

• That is, most people supporting Clinton are not doing so because they view her as upstanding, wise or just. They support her because they fear and despise Trump and his misogyny, racism and temperament.

• And the same largely goes for Trump. He supporters back him because they detest the establishment of the Republican Party as well as Clinton, who shares so much with that very Republican establishment even as she postures as a newly born progressive.

• Sanders won Rhode Island, the only state that had an open primary, allowing independents to vote. The others were limited to registered Democrats only, effectively blocking independent and many young voters from casting a ballot.

• Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David Gass has tossed a lawsuit from a Tucson, Arizona voter challenging the March 22 presidential primary, which was marred by confusion, 5-hour lines, and rampant errors.

• ‘What I want to know from my Democratic Party is…when will our voices be effective, legitimate, equal leaders?’

• The business press is all atwitter with merger news, as federal regulators are set to approve a massive deal between cable giants Charter, Time Warner and Bright House Networks. The $78 billion transaction will create the second-largest cable TV/Internet company, dubbed “New Charter,” next to Comcast, and leave just three major cable providers in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Gannett Company, which owns more than 100 newspapers, including USA Today, is attempting to acquire Tribune Publishing, which owns several major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

• Cheating is a word that simply is redefined in an open marriage. Hillary and Bill Clinton have had an open marriage for decades. Most of us don’t know the terms of the arrangement. Nor should we, I suppose. Don’t sleep with my friends or lovers might be one. Who knows? Palling around with Jeffrey Epstein the pedophile?

• With Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign falling short, his followers have limited choices. Many would support Hillary Clinton. But the cadre of activists and political newcomers, including the young who have flocked to him, may not accept that choice. Perhaps they’ll retreat from the 2016 election battle. Perhaps they’ll find another candidate.

• They would be welcomed by Dr. Jill Stein. The physician-activist is favored to win the Green Party presidential nomination this year after heading the party’s ticket in 2012.

• “The whole reason for having an independent third party that cannot be silenced is there are 25 percent of Bernie’s voters who are not going into that dark night to vote for the No. 1 cheerleader for Wal-Mart, for Wall Street, for an endless war,” Stein said in a telephone interview this week. “They are looking for another place to hang their hat.”

• So-called dark money, in conjunction with a wide-reaching “mouthpiece,” paves the road to the Oval Office—and even a brilliant John Oliver expose can’t change that.

• Bemoaning a failing democratic process that leaves too many people left out, Bernie Sanders on Thursday said his campaign would continue to bring disenfranchised people into the political process and said the Democratic Party as a whole must forge a 50-state strategy in order to restore civic vibrancy and fuel meaningful outcomes on the key issues people care about in every community nationwide.

• Since it formed in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been under siege from financial institutions. Senate Republicans tried very hard to stop it from functioning at all, and since then they’ve tried to “tighten the leash” on the agency. Nearly five years since it officially opened, a new dark money group is taking aim at the agency — and no one has any idea who’s behind it.

• Protect America’s Consumers is a 501(c)(4) group that incorporated in November 2015. Its registered agent is North Rock Reports LLC, located at the same address in Warrenton, Va., as the law firm Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky. According to Politico, “The firm specializes in untraceable pressure groups for conservative causes.” In 2012, Bloomberg News reported that the firm was tied to groups that had spent more than $250 million on the 2012 election, including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. In 2015, the firm represented the super PAC Pursuing America’s Greatness before the U.S. District Court in D.C., defending its right to use Mike Huckabee’s name in its communications. Jill Vogel, a partner at the firm, is also a Virginia state senator; her website describes the firm as “a law firm that specializes in charity and nonprofit organizations, election law, and ethics.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Remember Hillary Clinton’s internet freedom agenda? In a groundbreaking speech in 2010, Clinton outlined her State Department policy for promoting internet freedom in the context of human rights and democratisation. This meant funding anti-surveillance tools, chiding repressive governments, and funding efforts to support online democratic activism in troubled states.

• On Wednesday, China scored its worst ever marks in the new Freedom of the Press report by Freedom House, with the advocacy group blaming a “trend of ideological tightening” under Xi. Freedom House scored China 87/100 — with higher marks indicating greater restrictions — on press freedom in its 2016 survey. (Last year was the China’s previous worst score with 86.)

• In order to avoid censorship, Flaubert honed his prose to convey the scandalous in a subversively indirect manner, making readers complicit in the immorality by inviting them to apply their own understanding to the text. Analysis of Flaubert’s manuscript drafts of Madame Bovary compared to the published text reveals that the author trimmed and entirely cut explicit passages. It is hard to tell whether alterations were legally or artistically motivated. Flaubert was famously fastidious about writing and it could be that his wish to sublimate scandalous content was solely (or at least primarily) due to literary considerations.

• A newly published study from Oxford’s Jon Penney provides empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning described this phenomenon: “If we think that authorities are watching our online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain things just to avoid seeming suspicious.”

• The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations (of which 87% of Americans were aware), there was “a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned ‘al-Qaeda,’ “car bomb’ or ‘Taliban.’” People were afraid to read articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well by Penney: “If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate.”

• Every year Reporters Without Borders (RSF) compile an index of press freedom around the world. The index has been published since 2002 and measures the state of press freedom in 182 countries. It measures “the media freedom situation based on an evaluation of pluralism, independence of the media, quality of legislative framework and safety of journalists in each country”. The data is compiled through a questionnaire (answered by experts around the globe) and combined with quantitative data on violence and abuses against journalists.

• On April 21, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu revealed the long-awaited sustainable cultural development plan in Ankara. The program, commonly referred to as “culture package,” has been in the works for over four months. Davutoglu’s one-hour introduction of the plan generated more questions than answers. He suggested, for instance, that it was the responsibility of artists in Turkish society to act as amicable peacemakers. At one point during his speech he said, “When a society is approaching a crisis, you [artists] should be the light of hope. You must stand against polarization, you must spread a unifying language.”

• Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end up looking a lot like 20th century bureaucracies.

• Even in the brave new world of online communities, the Who had it right: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

• Uber yesterday announced that Huffington Post Editor in Chief Arianna Huffington would be joining its board of directors, a move that put the site’s reporters in an instant bind. To fight the notion that Huffington Post would somehow take it easy on Uber because of these ties, Huffington’s folks noted that her news operation has churned out various hard-hitting stories on Uber while the announcement was “impending,” as spokeswoman Lena Auerbuch put it.

• There was an omission, however.

• On April 6, reporter Sarah Digiulio sent a note to some colleagues apprising them of this story in the New York Times: “Uber Driver Napped as His Passenger Led Highway Chase, Police Say.”

• Freedom of expression is a universal right, but the specific threats to it vary widely from country to country and region to region. As activists fighting for free speech worldwide, it is essential that we better understand the specific legal and procedural mechanisms that governments use to silence it. When you begin to untangle the array of laws that are used to prosecute speech in a given country, you get a much clearer picture of the state of digital rights in that country.

• EFF is proud to present The Crime of Speech: How Arab Governments Use the Law to Silence Expression Online. This report was the culmination of six months of work by Wafa Ben Hassine as an Information Controls Fellow through the Open Technology Fund. The ICFP fellowship supports examination into how governments restrict the free flow of information, debilitate the open Internet, and thereby threaten human rights and democracy.

• When the credits rolled over Sholay’s powerfully ambiguous ending—Sanjeev Kumar’s Thakur on his knees beside the body of the man he had just killed, Amjad Khan’s Gabbar Singh, weeping in despair—Ramesh Sippy had established his film as perhaps the most iconic representation of Indian popular cinema in the public consciousness.

• Save that it didn’t quite turn out that way. The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) deemed the idea that a police officer would violate the law and kill a man in this fashion distasteful. It demanded that the ending be changed. A furious Sippy complied and shot the anodyne sequence everyone knows; the police arrive in time to prevent Gabbar Singh’s murder and arrest him instead. Sholay had enough going for it to survive the hit mostly unscathed—but Sippy’s authorial vision had been violated.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had its first opportunity to review a government request for telephone call records since the enactment in June 2015 of the USA FREEDOM Act, which placed some restrictions and oversight on the NSA’s surveillance powers. Unfortunately the results of this first post-USA FREEDOM FISC review are not pretty, and remind us all that there is still much work to be done.

• In approving a request for “call detail records” by the FBI, Judge Thomas Hogan allowed the FBI to get people’s call records even in the absence of any belief that those records will be relevant to an investigation, and let the bureau keep records with no foreign intelligence value for 6 months or longer even though USA FREEDOM requires “prompt” destruction of such records. He also declined to take advantage of the new provisions that allow him to appoint an amicus to help sort through the new statute. The opinion, issued on December 31, 2015, was made public April 19, 2016.

• The Supreme Court on Thursday approved changes that would make it easier for the FBI to hack into computers, many of them belonging to victims of cybercrime. The changes will take immediate affect in December, unless Congress adopts competing legislation.

• Previously, under the federal rules on criminal procedures, a magistrate judge couldn’t approve a warrant request to search a computer remotely if the investigator didn’t know where the computer was—because it might be outside his or her jurisdiction.

• The rule change, sent in a letter to Congress on Thursday, would allow a magistrate judge to issue a warrant to search or seize an electronic device if the target is using anonymity software like Tor. Over a million people use Tor to browse popular websites like Facebook every month for perfectly legitimate reasons, in addition to criminals who use it to hide their locations.

• You should know by now that YouTube’s ContentID system is a horrible mess. This system, which allows purported intellectual property owners to claim other people’s uploads as containing their content, and then allowing those purported owners to either take the videos down or monetize them for themselves, is so rife with abuse, trolls, and mistakes that it’s a wonder anyone at any point thought this was an idea that could work. Lost in all of this bowing towards intellectual property owners has bred some creative methods for getting around ContentID abuse, but it’s still a problem. A problem particularly challenging in the video game reviews space on YouTube, where entirely too many game studios think that using ContentID to flag game reviews is a practice worth repeating.

• At a press briefing on Monday, National Intelligence Director James Clapper stated that his intelligence network has no idea how many Americans are spied on by the National Security Agency (NSA).

• Congress is being pushed to approve giving the nationally-mandated Federal Bureau of Investigation access to NSA data, undermining the claim that the notorious surveillance agency is not targeting American citizens, but lawmakers seek an answer to a basic question before giving approval.

• There’s the online persona you want to share with your friends — carefully filtered Instagram photos of your sublime beach vacation, for example.

• Then there’s the side you’d perhaps rather keep private — like your Tinder profile.

• But a new feature on the dating app seems to be mixing the two.

• Tinder has come under fire after testing a new feature called Tinder Social for a small number of users in Australia.

• It allows users to create a group of friends, who can then swipe and match with other groups of friends.

• Mark Zuckerberg has dominated the desktop internet. He’s dominated the mobile internet. Now he’s going to dominate Facebook itself, and the company is probably going to let him.

• German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen outlined on 26 April a plan to establish a dedicated cyber and information command by merging the Bundeswehr’s current cyber and IT units.

• The Kommando Cyber- und Informationsraum (Cyber and Information Space Command) will be responsible for cyber, IT, military intelligence, geo-information, and operative communication. It will be headed from 1 April 2017 by a lieutenant-general.

• A defense authorization bill that cleared a House committee early Thursday would elevate U.S. Cyber Command and launch a review into whether the agency should still be run by the National Security Agency (NSA) head.

• In an acknowledgement that cyber war is gathering momentum on the international stage, the House on Thursday cleared a defense authorization bill that could split off the U.S. Cyber Command from under the direction of U.S. Strategic Command and the National Security Agency (NSA) and elevate it to its own military command, according to The Hill.

• The film covers similar ground as Citizenfour, the 2014 documentary chronicling the fallout of Snowden’s revelations, which was directed by Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who helped report on the documents, along with Glenn Greenwald. Citizenfour received the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015.

• The Wall Street Journal has been a reliably pro-surveillance voice over the years, calling Snowden a “sociopath” while calling for even less NSA oversight, making up bizarre conspiracy theories, and fighting back against any surveillance reform. It even once argued that the tech industry should put backdoors into its encryption to better help the surveillance state.

• The U.S. government claims the right to eavesdrop at will on your email when you’re writing to someone who lives abroad. Now it wants to be able to use those emails to convict you of a crime.

• [...]

• No court has yet reviewed the law’s constitutionality because until 2013 the government didn’t tell anyone that it had been doing this. The Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that no one had legal standing to challenge the law based merely on the speculation that it might be applied to them.

• The Italian data protection authority has ordered Facebook to provide an Italian user with all their data, including the personal information, photos, and posts of a separate fake account set up in that person’s name by somebody else.

• In addition, the US social network must provide details of how the personal data was used, including who it was sent to or might have obtained knowledge about it.

• Last year, as the school bathroom wars were heating up, I asked a group of college students how they’d feel if they had to share a toilet with people of a different gender. Nobody seemed to mind; indeed, some of them were doing so already.

• The answer, says National Intelligence Director James Clapper, is that we have no idea. “We’re looking at several options right now, none of which are optimal,” said Clapper at a press briefing in Washington DC on April 25. Security officials argue that analyzing the dataset would mean even more intrusions upon Americans’ privacy. “Many people find that unsatisfactory, but that is a fact,” says Clapper.

• The first trailer of political thriller Snowden, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is out. If the 2.39 minute-long trailer is anything to go by, the movie seems to be fast-paced, action-packed and chaotic.

• Academy-winning director Oliver Stone, whose directing opus includes Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July and George W Bush biographical drama W, is the mastermind behind this sensational thriller. The movie recreates the story of Edward Snowden, who went from being an aspiring Special Forces member to a fugitive living in Russia under political asylum. In the movie, Shailene Woodley features as Snowden’s long-term girlfriend Lindsay Mills, while Nicolas Cage plays an unnamed government official.

• The story of National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden captivated the US in 2013 and now Snowden is getting the Hollywood treatment, as the trailer for Oliver Stone’s Snowden was released on Wednesday (April 27).

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Proclamation called on Irishmen and Irishwomen to strike for freedom. The republicans were “supported by her exiled children in America.” “We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.” Sovereignty meant independence from Great Britain, the United Kingdom, England. James Connolly explained, “the essential meanness of the British Empire is that it robs under pretence of being generous.” What was true of the British Empire is doubly true for the American who call robbery “aid.”

• There has been a “stark deterioration of press freedom” in Europe in 2016 with conflict in Turkey and Ukraine creating especially difficult conditions for journalists.

• Index on Censorship said it had seen 301 verified incidents reported to its Mapping Freedom project over the first three months of the year, including four deaths and 43 assaults. The figure is up 30% on the first quarter of 2015.

• Three of the killed journalists died while reporting on conflict in Turkey, while a third, Russian culture journalist Dmitiri Tsilikin, was stabbed to death in his St Petersburg flat.

• Of the 43 assaults, more than half occurred in Ukraine, Italy or Russia, with 12 in the Ukraine alone.

• There were also 27 arrests recorded, with 15 in Turkey when journalists were reporting on violence or protests, with a pattern of arrest on terror charges or during anti-terror operations.

• Sen. John McCain’s re-election fundraisers all list the same name as the RSVP contact, but that name also showed up as a person arrested during the bust of a meth lab Tuesday.

• In Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff’s deputies made arrests when they found an operational meth lab as well as other illicit drugs when they were carrying out a search warrant for the woman’s home. According to The Arizona Republic, the sheriff’s office identified Emily Pitha, 34, who is a former staffer of retired U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). She also has worked most recently as a campaign fundraiser for McCain’s 2016 reelection.

• In brief: the new Hillsborough Inquest could not have ranged as widely without Article 2 of the ECHR having effect in domestic law – the same ECHR which May wants the UK to leave.

• Whatever the truth of that judgment, the surge continued. When his win seemed assured, but just before the actual vote, the second column fantasised on his first hundred days in power. This made the point that for many in the Labour Party, especially the tens of thousands of new members, Corbyn’s appeal stemmed from opposing what was seen as the cavalier way the Conservatives were reversing previous coalition policies in pursuit of ideological certitude:

• The idea of the committees is to enlist counselors, social workers, religious figures, and other community members to intervene with people the FBI thinks are in danger of radicalizing — the sort of alternative to prosecution and jail time many experts have been clamoring for. But civil liberties groups worry the committees could become just a ruse to expand the FBI’s network of informants, and the government has refused to provide details about the program.

• The FBI recently spent more than $1 million for assistance in decrypting a device’s contents. It may have overpaid. Alternatives exist, whether it’s a $5 wrench or indefinite imprisonment for not helping the government with its prosecution efforts.

• On April 16, Ecuador suffered an earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter scale. One week later, the death toll stood at 656, with more than twelve thousand injuries reported and more than fifty people still missing. Hundreds of aftershocks, some very powerful, continue to shake the country’s northwest coast and cause more damage.

• The day after the disaster, aid began arriving from Ecuador’s Latin American neighbors: Colombia, Peru, Venezuela and Bolivia. Quick responses were crucial, as hundreds of people were still missing, many trapped in crumbling rubble.

• I have accepted an offer from Sky News tomorrow to discuss anti-Semitism in the UK, where I shall argue that opponents of Israeli policy are being tarred with anti-Semitism in an witch-hunt.

• [...]

• There is a deliberate ploy by Israel to brand Palestinian sympathisers and critics of the Israeli state as anti-Semitic, in order to delegitimise criticism of Israel, as the settlements programme makes any two state solution completely non-viable.

• Fascism is not only a form of prejudice, it is also a political logic. A logic that reduces complex problems to ‘us and them’ issues.

• During an event Tuesday at the Brooklyn Public Library, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author and professor, was asked about Bernie Sanders’ run for the White House. “[H]e’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat,” Chomsky said. “His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower, who said, in fact, that anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn’t belong in the American political system. That’s now considered very radical.” Chomsky concluded by noting that Sanders “has mobilized a large number of young people, these young people who are saying, ‘Look, we’re not going to consent anymore.’ And if that turns into a continuing, organized, mobilized force, that could change the country—maybe not for this election, but in the longer term.”

• The victory of the Hillsborough families in their long struggle for justice was won against an establishment that viewed them and their loved ones as nothing more than scum and which, make no mistake, continues to do so today. Harsh words, perhaps, but true nonetheless. For at the very core of this scandal is the issue of class and the legacy of a prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who throughout the 1980s waged war against working class people, communities, and sought to destroy the bonds of solidarity that provided them with their strength and pride in who they were.

• Populist leaders today are unable to completely abolish multi-party systems, free press, individual freedom, or instigate actual war both inside and outside the country. But we can’t ignore the danger they present.

• At the corner of 17th and Valencia Streets in San Francisco late Tuesday afternoon, a group of about 20 protesters remained camped outside the Mission Police Station, fueled by coconut water, vitamin supplements, and cars honking in solidarity. Several were in the sixth day of a hunger strike. Their goal: The ouster of San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr and his boss, Mayor Ed Lee, over a string of police violence and alleged misconduct.

• A stash of rations sat near the entrance of the station, where last week five people began the protest: Maria Cristina Gutierrez, Ilyich Sato, Sellassie Blackwell, Ike Peterson and Edwin Lindo. The demonstrators also set up three tents on a nearby corner. Gutierrez, a short, soft-spoken woman who runs a neighborhood preschool, has also at times escaped the cold evenings in her van parked across the street.

• One of the largest cell phone carriers in America is trying to derail a years-long campaign to organize tens of thousands of workers by creating a fake in-house union, Communication Workers of America (CWA) officials say.

• Union leaders are accusing T-Mobile of co-opting worker dissatisfaction through a new internal organization it calls T-Voice. The group functions as “a direct line for Frontline feedback to senior leadership,” according to an internal email obtained by Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson. But management selects the workers who serve as part of T-Voice, and has allegedly pointed to the group as a reason not to unionize during captive-audience meetings with employees.

• How the U.S. military restricts servicewomen from accessing abortion on military bases is a discriminatory scandal.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• After taking a PR beating for several years on the matter, Comcast has announced that it’s significantly bumping the company’s usage caps. Since 2013 Comcast has been conducting a “trial” in many of the company’s less competitive markets, capping usage at 300 GB per month, then charging users either $10 per each additional 50 gigabytes, or providing users the option of paying $30 to $35 per month extra to avoid the cap entirely. But according to a new blog post by the cable giant, the company will be bumping that usage allotment to one terabyte per month starting June 1.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Blizzard, maker of World of Warcraft, has a long and dubious history when it comes to trying to twist intellectual property laws and requirements to be whatever they want it to be at the time. These instances have mostly revolved around using copyright in an attempt to stop people who use cheat-bots to play the company’s games, as well as those who make the bots. The actual tactics Blizzard uses in those cases, which chiefly revolve around twisting copyright into knots as never intended, can get lost because of the hatred most players have for those who game the gaming system.

• But it’s a different story when it comes to Nostalrius, which was the name for fan-servers offering up a “vanilla” version of World of Warcraft to gamers who wanted to play the game without any of the expansion packs that Blizzard has released. Serving thousands of individual gamers, Blizzard decided the fan-server was a threat to its business and used trademark law to threaten those running it into shutting the whole thing down. Smart or not, Blizzard was within its rights to do this. Its explanation as to why, however, is absolutely dripping with bullshit and needs to be called out.

• I expect that an important result of the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) will be the creation of supplemental federal jurisdiction over contract and employment disputes that are otherwise a matter of state law decided by state courts. The majority of trade secret lawsuits also involve breach of contract and/or employment law claims – with the breach serving as the requisite ‘improper means,’

Copyrights

• This Kat wants to make it clear: from his discussions, it seems that with a few stellar exceptions (some of whom this Kat has had the pleasure of working with), the broad strokes of his tale are not unique to the particular publisher involved. And yes, this Kat holds “the Machine” responsible in part. This Kat would like to think that he is not naïve. He knows that in today’s business climate, there is a strong push to replace labor with capital, even in the publishing world. Digital platforms are ultimately cheaper than additional employees. However, publishing still rests on the human element—author, editor, and publisher. Over reliance on a digital manuscript submission platform does harm to that interrelationship and the exercise of human judgment that has been a linchpin of publishing. Even if, for over 300 years, “the Machine” has been good to authors and publishers, it seems to this Kat the publication process is impaired when it develops an over reliance on digital platforms, at the expense of the human element and at the cost of rigidity and tunnel vision.

• Nevertheless, Patry was then convinced to write a follow up book How to Fix Copyright, in order to respond to those critics (most of whom will never be satisfied). Once again, the book is an excellent read. It is not — as some believed — an entire book dedicated to discussing possible solutions. Instead, it again spends a lot of time making sure people really understand how messed up copyright law has become, and then towards the end proposes a few, relatively simple, solutions (which, frankly, may not go far enough). It talks about things like bringing back formalities (i.e., make copyright opt-in again) and shortening copyright terms.

• Famously, Prince, via Universal Music, was behind the “dancing baby” DMCA lawsuit, which featured Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” playing faintly in the background of a short clip as a toddler danced. Ultimately our friends at EFF, who were representing defendant Stephanie Lenz, prevailed on their fair use claim. In 2013, EFF awarded him their “Raspberry Beret Lifetime Aggrievement Award” for “extraordinary abuses of the takedown process in the name of silencing speech.”

• Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit appeals court tossed out the lawsuit that Google had filed against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, following Hood’s decision to send a subpoena that was written by the MPAA’s lawyers, as part of a plan by the MPAA to pay money to get state Attorneys General to attack Google.

• While some in the legacy copyright world painted the ruling in the Fifth Circuit as a “victory” for Jim Hood, and a loss for Google, anyone reading the details would recognize it was anything but that. The court made it pretty clear that Hood’s subpoena was ridiculous and had no chance of surviving a judicial review… but dumped the case on a procedural issue, arguing that since Jim Hood had not yet taken any action concerning Google’s unwillingness to respond to parts of the subpoena, there was nothing to dispute. Basically, the court said “wait until Hood actually tries to force you to do something… and then we’ll tell him his subpoena is bogus.”

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