● 04.28.16

● Links 28/4/2016: Tomb Raider for GNU/Linux, Proxmox VE 4.2

Posted in News Roundup at 6:42 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• But we didn’t pursue them. We replaced them with something cheaper — with Unix machines, an OS only a nerd could love. And then we replaced the Unix machines with something cheaper still — the IBM PC, a machine so poor that the £125 ZX Spectrum had better graphics and sound.

• And now, we all use descendants of that. Generally acknowledged as one of the poorest, most-compromised machines, based on descendants of one of the poorest, most-compromised CPUs.

• Yes, over the 40 years since then, most of rough edges have been polished out. The machines are now small, fast, power-frugal with tons of memory and storage, with great graphics and sound. But it’s taken decades to get here.

• And the OSes have developed. Now they’re feature-rich, fairly friendly, really very robust considering the stone-age stuff they’re built from.

• But if we hadn’t spent 3 or 4 decades making a pig’s ear into silk purse — if we’d started with a silk purse instead — where might we have got to by now?

Server

• Many HPC applications began as single processor (single core) programs. If these applications take too long on a single core or need more memory than is available, they need to be modified so they can run on scalable systems. Fortunately, many of the important (and most used) HPC applications are already available for scalable systems. Not all applications require large numbers of cores for effective performance, while others are highly scalable.

• In a previous article on next-generation cloud technologies, I mentioned Containers as a Service (CaaS), which provides a framework to manage container and application deployment.

• For those who know little about International Business Machines , the company’s hulking System Z mainframe computers may seem like little more than a relic. The 42% year-over-year decline in System Z sales during IBM’s first quarter would appear to offer proof that the mainframe business is struggling.

• But investors shouldn’t worry about this mainframe sales collapse. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. IBM’s System Z product cycle, which sees new models introduced every few years, induces an extreme amount of sales volatility as clients rush to upgrade. While IBM doesn’t report System Z sales numbers directly, the company does report year-over-year performance, and that allows us to see that the big drop in sales during the first quarter is nothing out of the ordinary.

Kernel Space

• PulseAudio gained support for utilizing the Linux kernel’s memfd as a transport mechanism as spearheaded by the systemd/KDBUS crew.

• Linux kernel developer Jiri Slaby today announced the availability of the fifty-ninth maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series, urging all users to update as soon as possible.

• Looking at the appended shortlog, we can notice that Linux kernel 3.12.59 LTS is here to patch various security issues that have been discovered since the previous point release, version 3.12.58, which has been announced two weeks ago by Mr. Jiri Slaby, along with an important piece of information, that the Linux 3.12 series will be supported until 2017 because it is used in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12.

• An open source security firm has blocked a security researcher who reported flaws in a recently issued patch in an apparent fit of pique.

• Hector Martin took to Twitter on Tuesday to note a trivial crashing vulnerability in a recently issued patch by Grsecurity.

• “I literally crashed my box by pasting a bunch of text into a terminal, due to a really sad bug in the patch,” Martin said.

• In response, Grsecurity acknowledged the issue, which it said would be fixed in the next release. At the same time it blocked Martin on both Twitter and by IP address.

• This morning, I was reading some news about Linux creator Linus Torvalds and I came across a decade-old note from him. You might have heard about Linus Torvald’s opinion of programming language C++ and this note was about the same.

• Zemlin’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate the adoption of Linux and support the future of computing.

Graphics Stack

• While waiting for today’s release of Tomb Raider on Linux, for which I just posted various NVIDIA Tomb Raider benchmarks on Ubuntu, I was running some other OpenGL benchmarks.

• One of the benchmark runs I did with various graphics cards this morning while waiting for Tomb Raider was the well known and demanding Unigine Valley demo. Tests were done with various Kepler and Maxwell GeForce graphics cards while using the brand new NVIDIA 364.19 driver on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64.

• Two questions were up for voting, 4 seats on the Board of Directors and approval of the amended By-Laws to join SPI.

• Congratulations to our reelected and new board members Egbert Eich, Alex Deucher, Keith Packard and Bryce Harrington. Thanks a lot to Lucas Stach for running. And also big thanks to our outgoing board member Matt Dew, who stepped down for personal reasons.

• The results just are in of the 2016 X.Org Foundation elections and the members have voted to become part of the SPI. The foundation thus is basically becoming dissolved to become part of Software in the Public Interest.

• After last year’s vote failed for the X.Org Foundation to merge with the SPI due to not reaching the two-thirds quorum to change the by-laws, this year was a success: 61 of the 65 members voted.

Applications

• A new release of RcppRedis arrived on CRAN today. And just like for the previous release, Russell Pierce contributed a lot of changes via several pull requests which make for more robust operations. In addition, we have started to add support for MessagePack by relying on our recently-announced RcppMsgPack package.

• Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.

Instructionals/Technical

• A while ago, a goal I set myself was to be able to maintain my build and test environments for architecture emulation containers without having to do any of the tasks as root and without creating any suid binaries to do this. One of the big problems here is that distributions get annoyed (and don’t run correctly) if root doesn’t own most of the files … for instance the installers all check to see that the file got installed with the correct ownership and permissions and fail if they don’t. Debian has an interesting mechanism, called fakeroot, to get around this using a preload library intercepting the chmod and chown system calls, but it’s getting a bit hackish to try to extend this to work permanently for an emulation container.

• Linux has taken over the enterprise. It runs the backbone for many of the largest companies. It’s one of the biggest players in big data. If you’re serious about moving up the IT ladder, at some point, you’re going to have to know Linux.

• And although the Linux GUI tools are now as good as those available for any other platform, some tasks will require a bit of command-line knowledge. But where do you begin? You start off where every Linux newbie should… with what I believe are five of the most important commands for new Linux admins to learn.

Games

• While checking on various Linux game benchmarks this morning, I noticed Warsow 2.1 was quietly released at the end of March without much attention.

• Epic Games today announced the first preview release for the upcoming Unreal Engine 4.12.

• Unreal Engine 4.12 brings the sequencer featuring a non-linear editor with 3D animation editing to the game engine for producing in-game cinematics and more. There are also other cinematic related improvements with Unreal Engine 4.12 Preview 1. In preview form for this release is audio localization support and the capability of running the Unreal Editor in VR.

• Thanks to Pepster from our IRC channel, I also managed to get results from his hardware, so we have an additional card to show results from. My computer is an i5-2500K@3.3 GHz, 8 GB of 1333 MHz RAM and the R7 370 4G. Pepster’s rig has an i7-5830K and a HD7970. My rig runs Xubuntu 16.04 and thus uses Mesa 11.2 as stated in the official requirements for the game. Pepster used a bleeding edge Mesa from git on his Manjaro 15.12 installation.

• With Feral Interactive releasing Tomb Raider for Linux, three years after the premiere of the Windows port, many have been wondering about the Linux performance particularly with regards to the graphics driver situation. Here are our initial benchmarks of Feral’s port of Tomb Raider on Ubuntu Linux with using NVIDIA graphics. More tests to follow.

• Hold onto your pants, as you’re in for a wild ride! Tomb Raider is officially launching on Linux & SteamOS today.

• Feral Interactive have done it again! Tomb Raider is now officially available for Linux, and I have some thoughts and a port report available for you. It’s also the first ever game on Linux to use TressFX.

• As a quick follow-up to this morning’s news about Tomb Raider coming for Linux today, the game is now officially available.

• See that earlier article for more details or by dropping by the Feral mini site for the game.

• After being in the works for more than a month, the thrilling Tomb Raider 2013 reboot developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix has been successfully ported to Linux.

• As expected, Feral Interactive is behind the Linux port of the acclaimed Tomb Raider game from 2013, whose main protagonist is the gorgeous Lara Croft, and those who have already purchased it for Mac and Windows can now also play it on their GNU/Linux operating systems, including Valve’s SteamOS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Krita developers announced just a few moments ago the release and immediate availability for download of the Beta build of the upcoming Krita 3.0 open-source digital painting tool for all supported platforms.

• We have spent the last 20 days making over 80 fixes in Krita since the last Alpha build. We have decided it is time to enter the Beta phase! Furthermore, we’ve also spent time on improving our Windows builds. This should fix all the scary G’Mic crashes on Windows.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• We’ve been tipped earlier by one of our readers that there’s a bug in the GNOME Software (Ubuntu Software) package manager which doesn’t let users install third-party .deb files in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Distributions

New Releases

• Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, a renowned company developing the Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) server virtualization operating system based on the Linux kernel, announced the release of Proxmox VE 4.2.

• Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, the company developing the server virtualization platform Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), today announced the general availability of version 4.2. The open source virtualization platform Proxmox VE is a hyper-converged solution enabling users to create and manage LXC containers and KVM virtual machines on the same host, and makes it easy to set up highly available clusters, as well as to manage network and storage via an integrated web-based management interface.

• It’s been a little over two weeks since the first Beta build of the upcoming antiX 16 Linux operating system was announced, and now we can get our hands on the second Beta release.

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• It’s been a while since last having anything to report on with the OpenMandriva Linux distribution, but they wrote in today with news about adding Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) support.

• Within their OpenMandriva “Cooker” development repository is the most interesting support with F2FS support being part of their kernel, shipping f2fs-tools by default, and their Calamares installer allowing F2FS for SSD disks. They’ve also added a F2FS patch for GRUB2. With that work in OpenMandriva Cooker, users can be running F2FS as their root file-system with ease!

Arch Family

• Today, April 27, 2016, Philip Müller from the Manjaro development team has had the pleasure of announcing the release of the third preview build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 16.06 “Daniella” operating system.

Red Hat Family

• DLT Solutions (DLT), a leading public sector technology company, is proud to announce it has been named both the Public Sector Partner of the Year and Middleware Solutions Public Sector Partner of the Year by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. These awards are part of the annual Red Hat North America Partner Awards, which were announced during the 2016 Red Hat North America Partner Conference in New Orleans.

Finance

Fedora

• Since the Fedora Developer Portal started last year, it has been the go-to place for information on setting up and using Fedora as a platform for development. This week, the Fedora Developer Portal team announced the release of the refreshed and updated version of the portal.

• Fedora Panama had a good participation on the event. José Reyes organized the event. Alejandro Pérez gave an introduction talk and Gonzalo Nina (from Fedora Bolivia) spoke about security. I gave a short workshop about SELinux. The venue was Universidad Interamericana de Panamá.

• The booth was set up on Friday before Fedora Game Night but the large TV didn’t arrive until Saturday morning, so we had a little work to do Saturday morning. We were showing games in Fedora featuring the Fedora Labs Game Spin.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Entroware, one of the few hardware companies to offer laptops with Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system pre-installed, today announced a refresh of its Orion series of laptops.

• The new Orion laptop is now in stock, and it looks like it comes with the next-generation of Intel Skylake processors, as well as the latest and greatest version of the Ubuntu MATE distro, Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

• More important than features is making Propellor prevent more classes of mistakes, by creative use of the type system. The biggest improvement in this area was type checking the OSes of Propellor properties, so Propellor can reject host configurations that combine eg, Linux-only and FreeBSD-only properties.

• Ubuntu 16.04′s support for the ZFS file system is one of many useful enterprise features on top of all the Linux desktop polish in the new OS. But Linux distributions have avoided shipping ZFS support in the past due to licensing issues, and Ubuntu 16.04’s ZFS support sits smack-dab in the middle of a controversial legal gray area.

• Want to turn a TV into a Ubuntu computer? The very orange MeLE PCG02U just might be what you’re looking for. This tiny stick computer costs only $70, meaning you can add a desktop to any TV for very little money. It’s the first Ubuntu device from Mele, a Chinese manufacturer that until now has focused on Android and Windows devices.

• Ubuntu is starting to show up in lot more places lately: tablets, phones, and this neat little computer-on-a-stick created by MeLE called the PGC02U. It’s $70, with an Intel BayTrail processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. It also comes in Ubuntu orange and has a wee little antenna to help with wireless reception. Liliputing points out that you might want to go ahead and install this build of Ubuntu created by Ian Morrison, as it’s designed specifically for stick computers.

• Chinese computer maker Mele has been offering small Android and Windows computers for a few years. Now the company is selling a PC-on-a-stick that runs Ubuntu Linux.

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was recently released, and many Linux users have been wondering what it has to offer and if it’s worth installing or upgrading from a previous release of Ubuntu.

• Not to worry, a YouTuber by the name of Quidsup has a full video review of Ubuntu 16.04 that will walk you through the latest changes to Canonical’s popular desktop distribution.

• uNav developer Nekhelesh Ramananthan announced the release of version 0.59 of the default GPS navigation app for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu Phones.

• According to the announcement, uNav 0.59, which has been dubbed “Beauty and the Beast,” comes with exciting new features, among which we can mention a brand-new navigation structure, giving users the possibility of searching for locations, favorites or coordinates directly from the menubar, as well as a refresh of the UI (details below).

Devices/Embedded

• The Gumstix “Poblano 43C SBC” features a TI AM4378 SoC with WiFi, Bluetooth, GbE, and optional cameras, touchscreens, and Geppetto-based design customization.

• The Gumstix Poblano 43C updates the two-year old Gumstix Pepper SBC, which used the TI Sitara AM335x, the same Cortex-A8 SoC used in the company’s Overo computer-on-modules. The Poblano 43C maintains the 11 x 7.5cm dimensions of the Pepper, but advances to the AM4378 SoC, a faster, but still single-core Cortex-A9 SoC from Texas Instruments.

• AloriumTech’s “XLR8” board is an Arduino Uno clone with an Altera MAX10 FPGA that enables faster processing of specific hardware-accelerated functions.

• Alorium Technology (AloriumTech) has developed an Arduino Uno drop-in replacement powered by an FPGA, enabling much faster performance of hardware-accelerated functions. The XLR8 has the same 68.6 x 53.4mm footprint as the Uno, including identical pin headers for attaching shields. Sketches for any ATmega328 Arduino-compatible board will run on the XLR8, and you can load your code directly via the Arduino IDE, says the company.

• 91% of IoT developers use open source technology in their projects. Open source is a major factor in the Internet of Things. In this report, we examine the state of the art in how and why IoT developers use open source software, open source hardware, and open data.

Phones

Android

• Like Apple CarPlay, Android Auto is a system that makes it a lot easier and a bit safer to use smartphone functions while inside a car.

• When an Android smartphone is connected, it turns the car’s infotainment system into a user-friendly Android interface. Through Android Auto, you can use a bunch of smartphone functions directly on the dashboard of your car.

• If you’ve been paying attention to Android rumors for the past month or so, you know that at this point it’s a fait accompli that HTC will make two Android Nexus phones this year. It started (as it usually does) with some Chinese sites, was further confirmed (as it usually is) by Evan Blass, and finally today Android Police (which has been on fire with accurate Android leaks for some time now) has weighed in with some codenames and informed speculation.

• The startup backed by former Apple CEO John Sculley is most famous today for being elusive – but all that’s about to change. Obi Worldphone told us today its first UK phone will launch here next month, promising style and mid-range specs for a paltry £119.

• Obi’s story is unusual – it leveraged the economies of scale of Shenzhen’s manufacturing miracle but added design smarts. Like rival WileyFox, with which it shares some similarities, it’s basing its UK debut around a CyanogenMod design. But it’s aiming for a distinctive style, with devices designed by former head of design at Apple, Robert Brunner. Brunner’s studio designed the “Beats by Dre” headphones.

• Obi came out of the shadows in the autumn of 2014, but not much of it has been heard of since. Industry veteran Ankush Chatterjee, a lead in Samsung’s innovation team (from which the curved Edge display came) filled in the gaps for us.

• Japanese audio company Onkyo is getting into personal media players this month with the release of its first high-resolution audio device, the DP-X1. This $899 Android-powered PMP sports two ESS Sabre digital-to-analog converters and amplifiers — one of each for each channel of audio. The audio chips and circuitry reside on a separate board from the applications processor, with Onkyo aiming to minimize the intrusion of unwanted electrical noise. They even have independent local power supplies for truly phobic level of interference attenuation.

Free Software/Open Source

• It has been nearly seven years since The VAR Guy published his original Open Source 50 report on the leading open source companies, and more than four since we last followed up. The open source channel and partner programs have evolved significantly over the past several years, and it’s high time to revisit the list.

• A few moments ago, Frank Karlitschek, founder, maintainer and CTO of ownCloud, Inc., announced on his Twitter account that he is leaving the company to pursue new opportunities.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Developers working on the Rust programming language today formally announced MIR, but it’s not to be confused with Ubuntu’s Mir display server.

• MIR is short for the Mid-level IR and is a new intermediate representation to be used by the Rust compiler stack. MIR has been in development over the past year and sits in between Rust’s high-level IR (HIR) and LLVM’s IR.

• Now that everyone is enjoying the recently released Firefox 46.0 web browser, it is time for the Mozilla devs to start working on the next major version, Mozilla Firefox 47.0.

• We reported the other day that Mozilla released version 46.0 of its Firefox web browser, which happens to be a very important milestone for GNU/Linux users, as it finally brings the long-anticipated GTK3 integration.

SaaS/Back End

• Red Hat is out with a slew of cloud-related announcements at this week’s OpenStack Summit event in Austin, Texas, and one of them calls for the company to literally reach beyond the cloud — for the stars. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has built a private cloud based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform aimed to help it reach new frontiers in planetary exploration. That was just one of the major cloud computing updates from Red Hat this week.

• OpenStack is providing a powerful tool for companies and the open-source community, but there’s a second world that is often ignored in the discussion. Networking is the world behind the scenes, moving the data that makes Cloud technologies work. While OpenStack itself is not a networking solution, it does have an effect on the people who move the data. This effect is both professional and philosophical.

Databases

• When you think of game development, the first thing that comes to mind probably isn’t a database. But in the world of Jamaa, the setting for WildWorks’ massively multiplayer online kids’ game Animal Jam, a database keeps millions of cartoon animal characters frolicking and the cartoon trees from crashing down. The database chosen for this job was a specialized, non-relational database from Basho called Riak—one among the herd of new databases that have risen to handle Web-generated gluts of non-structured data.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• After slightly more than a year since last major GCC release, we are proud to announce new major GCC release, 6.1.

• GCC 6.1 is a major release containing substantial new functionality not available in GCC 5.x or previous GCC releases.

• The C++ frontend now defaults to C++14 standard instead of C++98 it has been defaulting to previously, for compiling older C++ code that might require either explicitly compiling with selected older C++ standards, or might require some code adjustment, see http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-6/porting_to.html for details. The experimental C++17 support has been enhanced in this release.

Public Services/Government

• The European Commission (EC) has set out 20 actions, from boosting eProcurement and creating an electronic VAT registration system to the development of cross-border eHealth services, all of which aim “to accelerate the implementation of existing legislation and the related take up of online public services”.

Licensing/Legal

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Since [Tsvetan] makes ARM boards, boards with the ~duino suffix, and other electronic paraphernalia, it’s only natural that he would think about building his own laptop. It’s something he’s been working on for a while, but [Tsvetan] shared his progress on an Open Source, hacker’s laptop at the Hackaday | Belgrade conference.

Programming/Development

• To ensure an improvement performance experience for its 3.5 million users, Node.js Foundation has released Node.js Version 6 with Long Term Support. This release supports 93 percent of the ECMAScript 6 standard and uses Google’s V8 version 5.0 for the JS engine.

• In one of the next posts I’ll create a neat pdf with all the books listed so far and keep updating it as I write more posts. It will be a handy reference for quality books.

• I started my career as a software developer at precisely 10am, on Monday October 6th, 1997, somewhere in the city of Olivos, just north of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The moment was Unix Epoch 876142800. I had recently celebrated my 24th birthday.

Leftovers

• YouTube’s adding a new option to help advertisers get their message to consumers — but in a much shorter amount of time than normal. Today the company announced that beginning next month, it’ll offer six-second “Bumper” ads that are designed to be a better companion to the shorter video clips that millions of YouTube users are watching on smartphones. “We like to think of Bumper ads as little haikus of video ads — and we’re excited to see what the creative community will do with them,” YouTube’s Zach Lupei wrote in a blog post. You can see a sample of one below, which was an early test by Atlantic Records.

• PEOPLE FALLING over and cat fanciers hangout YouTube is planning to make people sit through six seconds of un-skippable advertising in the sort of move that makes sense to businesses but makes people go cray cray.

Health/Nutrition

• The new contract ministers plan to force on NHS junior doctors discriminates against female medics and is potentially illegal, Britain’s equality watchdog has told the government.

• Female doctors, including those who take time off to have children, go part-time or act as carers are at risk of earning less than male counterparts and would face “inferior conditions of work” and unfair “differential treatment”.

• Today, as junior doctors are forced to strike, my eldest brother is in intensive care at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton. How I feel about junior doctors walking out while he needs around-the-clock care, however, may surprise you.

Security

• A nuclear power plant in Germany has been found to be infected with computer viruses, but they appear not to have posed a threat to the facility’s operations because it is isolated from the Internet, the station’s operator said on Tuesday.

• The Gundremmingen plant, located about 120 km (75 miles) northwest of Munich, is run by the German utility RWE (RWEG.DE).

• The viruses, which include “W32.Ramnit” and “Conficker”, were discovered at Gundremmingen’s B unit in a computer system retrofitted in 2008 with data visualization software associated with equipment for moving nuclear fuel rods, RWE said.

• Malware was also found on 18 removable data drives, mainly USB sticks, in office computers maintained separately from the plant’s operating systems. RWE said it had increased cyber-security measures as a result.

• VPNs are the backbone of enterprise remote access and yet their security limitations are starting to pile up. The problem is that the very thing that once made them so useful, network access, is now their biggest weakness. As the 2014 attacks on retailers Target and Home Depot painfully illustrate, this architecture can easily be exploited by attackers armed with stolen credentials to move around networks from within in ways that are difficult to spot until it’s too late.

Defence/Aggression

• The US government has known that Saudi financing of madrassas all over the world has been a major source of jihadist activism. The Saudi regime’s extremist Wahhabi perspective on Shia Islam is the basis for its paranoid stance on the rest of the region and the destabilisation of Syria and Yemen. The 28 pages should be released, but at a time when the contradictions between US and Saudi interests are finally beginning to be openly acknowledged, the issue is just another diversion from the real debate on Saudi Arabia that is urgently needed.

• Did the CIA meet with some of the 9/11 hijackers ahead of the attacks on New York? Did the Saudi government help finance those hijackers? Someone knows the answers, and soon, you might know as well.

• Since the beginning of April, 11 people have been killed by the police in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the Summer Olympics are scheduled to begin in just 100 days. One of the victims was a five-year-old boy.

• April 26, 2016 “Information Clearing House” – “Ron Paul Institute”- In the American police state, the price to be paid for speaking truth to power (also increasingly viewed as an act of treason) is surveillance, censorship, jail and ultimately death.

• However, where many Americans go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

• The United States feigned surprise during the simulation of an attack by the Russian aviation against the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea. And yet, as we have reported, Russia already has the capacity to block the ship’s Communications & Commands, and did so, observes Manlio Dinucci, because the ship was in the process of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Furthermore, the US nuclear deployment occurred as China is developing hypersonic launchers, a part of whose trajectory will be in glide mode, inspiring new research by DARPA. As from now, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are participating in the Tactical Boost Glide Program.

• For two years, Ukraine’s U.S.-backed regime has balked at investigating dozens of arson deaths in Odessa and now is doing little as far-right nationalists rally for another confrontation, writes Nicolai N. Petro.

• I am travelling as a peace witness in Iraqi Kurdistan. We visited a sheikh whom I had met in Fallujah in 2012. He and his family were forced to flee to Kurdistan about two years ago. Fallujah iis being held by ISIS. None of the residents are allowed to leave. People are dying of starvation.

• “Low-energy Jeb.” “Little Marco.” “Lyin’ Ted.” “Crooked Hillary.” Give Donald Trump credit. He has a memorable way with insults. His have a way of etching themselves on the brain. And they’ve garnered media coverage, analysis, and commentary almost beyond imagining. Memorable as they might be, however, they won’t be what last of Trump’s 2016 election run. That’s surely reserved for a single slogan that will sum up his candidacy when it’s all over (no matter how it ends). He arrived with it on that Trump Tower escalator in the first moments of his campaign and it now headlines his website, where it’s also emblazoned on an array of products from hats to t-shirts.

• You already know which line I mean: “Make America Great Again!” With that exclamation point ensuring that you won’t miss the hyperbolic, Trumpian nature of its promise to return the country to its former glory days. In it lies the essence of his campaign, of what he’s promising his followers and Americans generally — and yet, strangely enough, of all his lines, it’s the one most taken for granted, the one that’s been given the least thought and analysis. And that’s a shame, because it represents something new in our American age. The problem, I suspect, is that what first catches the eye is the phrase “Make America Great” and then, of course, the exclamation point, while the single most important word in the slogan, historically speaking, is barely noted: “again.”

• With that “again,” Donald Trump crossed a line in American politics that, until his escalator moment, represented a kind of psychological taboo for politicians of any stripe, of either party, including presidents and potential candidates for that position. He is the first American leader or potential leader of recent times not to feel the need or obligation to insist that the United States, the “sole” superpower of Planet Earth, is an “exceptional” nation, an “indispensable” country, or even in an unqualified sense a “great” one. His claim is the opposite. That, at present, America is anything but exceptional, indispensable, or great, though he alone could make it “great again.” In that claim lies a curiosity that, in a court of law, might be considered an admission of guilt. Yes, it says, if one man is allowed to enter the White House in January 2017, this could be a different country, but — and in this lies the originality of the slogan — it is not great now, and in that admission-that-hasn’t-been-seen-as-an-admission lies something new on the American landscape.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• With harmful algal bloom (HAB) season beginning over the next few months in several areas of the U.S., this is your chance to talk with two NOAA scientists who study the impacts of harmful algal blooms and forecast bloom conditions for various U.S. coastal regions.

• Australia hasn’t exactly been seen as a leader on climate policy in recent years: Former prime minister Tony Abbott once called climate change “absolute crap,” and current Prime Minister Malcolm Turbull hasn’t delivered the about-face on climate that many environmentalists had hoped for. But that could change with this year’s election.

• On Wednesday, Australia’s Labor Party, the main opposition to the country’s current Turbull-led coalition government, announced a plan to tackle climate change that’s more ambitious than the country’s current approach. Under the Labor Party, Australia would work to decrease emissions 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, compared with the current pledge to cut emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels. A ruling Labor party would also implement a country-wide emissions trading scheme and would set a goal of getting 50 percent of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2030.

• A new public opinion survey finds that “Americans across political lines, except conservative Republicans, would support a presidential candidate who strongly supports taking action to reduce global warming.”

• The survey of 1,004 registered voters by the Climate Change Communication programs at Yale and George Mason University yielded a number of important findings consistent with earlier polling this year by Gallup.

• Oyster beds stabilize the shoreline and filter contaminants from the water, which, in turn, promotes seagrass growth, providing habitat for numerous fish and shellfish species. Oysters are an important food source for animals and people alike, and they are fundamental to the region’s economy. A February 2014 report from NOAA Fisheries estimated that in 2012, the oyster harvest garnered $331 million in revenue in Louisiana alone.

• A series of sit-ins and protests urging universities to divest their endowments from fossil fuels gained new strength this week, as students at the University of Montana, Vassar College, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison launched their own actions to combat climate change.

• Two nights in a row, on Monday and Tuesday multiple students at Northern Arizona University (NAU) were arrested for taking part in a nonviolent action demanding their school divest from oil and gas companies.

• “Our administration would rather arrest students then take serious action on climate change,” lamented Fossil Free NAU on its Facebook page.

• “We believe that it is morally unjust to be investing in a dying industry,” said NAU senior Michaela Mujica-Steiner, one of the coordinators of the school sit-in. “We would like to see the school step up and lead with students who are currently demonstrating leadership.”

• A newly resurfaced email demonstrates that in 2008 an official from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) tried to game lead tests by suggesting that technicians collect extra water samples to make the average lead count for a community appear artificially low.

• The email was sent in response to a test result that showed one home’s lead levels were ten times the federal action level of 15 parts per billion, and urged the lead test technician to take an additional set of water samples to “bump out” the high result so that the MDEQ wouldn’t be required to notify the community of the high levels of lead in its water.

• “Otherwise we’re back to water quality parameters and lead public notice,” complained Adam Rosenthal of the MDEQ’s Drinking Water office in the email.

• Political documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has been extremely active in advocating for his hometown of Flint, Mich., since the news of the water crisis there broke months ago.

• He has repeatedly posted about Flint on his website, even going so far as demanding Gov. Rick Snyder’s arrest. And, like other activists in Flint, he’s been urging President Obama to pay a visit to the desperate town.

• Activists in Peru have forced the second-largest gold mining corporation in the world, Newmont, to abandon its $5 billion Conga copper and gold mining project.

• Indigenous Peruvians say the conga mine project, which was intended to replace the nearly-depleted Yanacocha gold mine nearby, threatens the local environment

Finance

• LUXEMBOURG IS TRYING to throw two French whistleblowers and a journalist in prison for their role in the “LuxLeaks” exposé that revealed the tiny country’s outsized role in enabling corporate tax avoidance.

• The trial of Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet, two former employees of the international accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, and journalist Edouard Perrin began Tuesday.

• Deltour and Halet were charged in connection with theft of PwC documents. Perrin is charged as an accomplice for steering Halet toward documents that he considered of particular interest.

• The secret tax-dodging strategies of the global elite in China, Russia, Brazil, the U.K., and beyond were exposed in speculator fashion by the recent Panama Papers investigation, fueling a worldwide demand for a crackdown on tax avoidance.

• But there is little appetite in Congress for taking on powerful tax dodgers in the U.S., where the practice has become commonplace.

• Saudi Arabia’s citizen population is probably only about 20 million, so it is a small country without a big domestic market. It is surrounded in the general region by huge countries like Egypt (pop. 85 million), Iran (pop. 75 mn.) and Turkey (75 mn.), not to mention Ethiopia (pop. 90 mn.) Without petroleum, it is difficult to see what would be distinctive about Saudi Arabia economically.

• The excruciatingly young prince, who was born in 1985, has a BA in Law from a local Saudi university and his way of speaking about the elements of the economy is not reassuring. Take his emphasis on the maritime trade routes that flow around the Arabian Peninsula. How exactly does Saudi Arabia derive a dime from them? The only tolls I can think of are collected by Egypt for passage through the Suez Canal. By far the most important container port in the region is Jebel Ali in the UAE, which dwarfs Jedda. His estimate of 30% of world trade going through these bodies of water strikes me as exaggerated. Only about 10% of world trade goes through the Suez Canal.

• The future independence of universities is in doubt, especially those dependent on alumni support. Old grads are turned off by the erasure of what they remember. Recent grads are not experiencing the same success. A university degree no longer brings the same economic success that it did in the 20th century. A financialized and offshored capitalism has heavily redistributed income and wealth to the One Percent. One consequence is that the alumni donor base will shrink.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Now that Charlie Koch has admitted that his money could ride on Clinton would she just tweak a few of her ideas here or there, I can only presume he may have paid for the Yahoo! ad, which can’t be cheap.

• I’m kidding. Hillary has plenty of money.

• But it would be an expression of his devotion, would it not? Koch likes her for good reason. She’s as much about the money as he is, but not everyone admires Madam.

• The dislike of Clinton is borne out in some polls. People are going to hold their noses and vote for Hillary all the way to the convention. Many dislike her, but it’s in their best interest to keep things the way they are. Not just for the Kochs, but for the majority.

• Bernie and The Donald would mess something up. This election is ultimately about pragmatism once you exit the powder room.

• Matthew Yglesias (4/25/16) gave a generous write-up to Goldman Sachs’ new commercial banking subsidiary, GS Bank, without noting that Goldman Sachs is a sponsor of Vox.

• Despite the obligatory “to be sure” paragraph, where Yglesias ran through some of the downsides (“they don’t have a checking account and there’s no ATM access”), the post mostly served to promote a new product “for the masses” from Goldman Sachs, a company worth roughly $87 billion.

• If you’ve been near a television, computer or newspaper over the past six months, you know it’s impossible to escape media coverage of Donald Trump. Beyond mere annoyance, this avalanche of attention has created a serious problem in media accountability.

• Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now!”, argues that the 24/7 Trump coverage is ruining the election. “We need a media that covers power, not covers for power,” she says, noting the imbalance in election coverage among the candidates in this year’s presidential race.

• David Trone entered Maryland’s 8th Congressional District race in late January, but his late start didn’t hinder his campaign spending. Trone broke the record for self-funding a House campaign by spending more than $12 million of his own money, breaking New Mexico Democrat Phil Maloof’s 1998 record of $6.3 million.

• Despite this significant lump of cash, Trone lost Tuesday’s primary race.

• Throughout the campaign, Trone never labeled himself a front-runner—quite the opposite. “There is no question that I am the underdog,” Trone told Bethesda Magazine in January. The “wine superstore owner” faced seven other opponents for the seat, including Kathleen Matthews, wife of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews; State Sen. Jamie Raskin; and two of Barack Obama’s former aides.

• More than half of American voters believe that the system U.S. political parties use to pick their candidates for the White House is “rigged” and more than two-thirds want to see the process changed, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

• The results echo complaints from Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders that the system is stacked against them in favor of candidates with close ties to their parties – a critique that has triggered a nationwide debate over whether the process is fair.

• The United States is one of just a handful of countries that gives regular voters any say in who should make it onto the presidential ballot. But the state-by-state system of primaries, caucuses and conventions is complex. The contests historically were always party events, and while the popular vote has grown in influence since the mid-20th century, the parties still have considerable sway.

• This Cracked video provides a humorous overview of the presidential election process and explains why candidates can’t be honest.

• Exclude the poor from politics on the grounds that they are tempted to misappropriate public funds, and replace them with the rich: this is the project.

• During an event Tuesday night, Noam Chomsky was asked about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and said he considered him more of a “New Deal Democrat” than a radical extremist, as some have portrayed him. Chomsky said Sanders’ positions on taxes and healthcare are supported by a majority of the American public, and have been for a long time. He added that Sanders has “mobilized a large number of young people who are saying, ‘Look, we’re not going to consent anymore.’ If that turns into a continuing, organized, mobilized force, that could change the country—maybe not for this election, but in the longer term.”

• That’s how many Democratic presidential nominating contests remain. From Indiana next week to the District of Columbia on June 14—with delegate prizes as large as 546 in California and small as 12 in Guam to be won in between—14 states and territories have yet to hold their respective caucus or primary.

• “That’s why we are in this race until the last vote is cast,” said Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night, following a win in Rhode Island and losses to rival Hillary Clinton in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

• Bernie has substantively—even profoundly—changed American politics for the better, which is why he’s gaining more and more support and keeps winning delegates. From the start, he said, “This campaign is not about me”—it’s a chance for voters who have been disregarded and discarded to forge a new political revolution that will continue to grow beyond this election and create a true people’s government.

• Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was expected to do very well in the five primaries on April 26, but after the results, Bernie Sanders and his supporters face a critical moment in the election as the campaign fights for every possible delegate on the way to the convention.

• Clinton won Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware decisively. She also eked out a win in Connecticut. She lost in Rhode Island, which was the only state with an open primary that allowed independents to vote for Sanders without affiliating with the Democratic Party.

• Numerous dedicated Sanders volunteers, who have put thousands of hours into the campaign, now face low morale. Sanders supporters lost a lot of hope after New York, and much of that had to do with the establishment news media aggressively promoting the Clinton campaign’s talking points that there was no way Sanders could achieve victory (which was not accurate).

• Hillary Clinton’s victory language last night showed that she has picked up some of Sanders’ language, and her effort to fold Sanders’ vision into her party’s sounded compelling. But let me mention and rebut some of the Clinton camp’s most convincing points before … ah, elephant in the argument that could end up embarrassing Democrats and actually worsening conditions in the United States even (perhaps especially!) if Clinton wins the White House.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As we’ve explained over and over again, copyright and censorship go hand in hand. People who want to censor seem to love the power that copyright conveys on them. Take, for example, the Brazilian media giant Globo. As you may have heard, there’s a big political fight down in Brazil, as the Congress there looks to impeach the President, Dilma Rousseff. It’s a big political mess, made even more ridiculous by the fact that many of the leading voices looking to impeach Rousseff have themselves been indicted for corruption or are being investigated for corruption. Last week, David Miranda wrote an article for the Guardian, arguing that the whole thing is political, and that the corruption claim against Rousseff is just a pretext for an opposing party to gain power. In that article, he blames the major media properties in Brazil for supporting the fiction in pushing an anti-Rousseff story.

• Facebook has a long and checkered past concerning the way the company decides what a user sees in his or her timeline. Now, the social media giant is changing the formula again, and this time it will impact whether or not users will see articles shared by their friends. The method by which Facebook will do it involves another controversial issue that has dogged the company: data-mining.

• Facebook has built a multi-billion dollar empire by both providing a service its users want and mining the data of those users for the purpose of advertising sales.

• The Young Turks report that supporters of Hillary Clinton recently took down a number of Facebook pages devoted to her opponent for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders.

• “All of this on the heels of Hillary Clinton Super-PAC ‘Correct The Record’ spending a million dollars on paid online trolls [whose] job is attacking Bernie supporters online,” say The Young Turks.

• A bug in Facebook’s anti-spam algorithm has been accidentally suspending groups on the social network, sparking anger from the groups’ founders and conspiracy theories from some of their followers.

• On Monday night, six pro-Bernie Sanders groups were temporarily suspended by Facebook. A day later, five Facebook groups supporting Filipino presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte, with a total membership of more than 3 million people, were also taken down for a short period.

• Jordan has banned a performance by a popular Lebanese rock band on religious grounds, spurring criticism of the Western-allied kingdom, which portrays itself as an island of tolerance in a turbulent region.

• The band Mashrou’ Leila (“Leila’s Project”) is known internationally for violin-laced pop music with catchy Arabic lyrics. Songs often tackle controversial subjects such as corruption, censorship, state violence and sexual freedom.

• Wikipedia Zero users in Bangladesh are now being monitored, banned, and threatened by Wikipedia editors who are engaged in a continuous game of whack-a-mole against piracy on the site.

• Last month, I wrote several articles about the creative (if illegal) ways that people in Angola are using the free Wikipedia Zero and Facebook Free Basics services to share copyrighted files with each other. Both of these services zero rate data uploaded and downloaded from those sites, meaning users don’t have to pay for that data, which would normally be very expensive. Users upload files to the Wikimedia Commons database, link to them in closed Facebook groups, and, bam—free ad-hoc filesharing network.

• YORK councillors want to change the rules about what can be said in their meetings, after a major row over a public speech and a censored webcast last month.

• Should films be censored or certified? The committee headed by eminent filmmaker Shyam Benegal to provide guidelines to the Central Board of Film Certification has firmly voted against censorship and made a case for respecting the collective intelligence of the movie-going public.

• “If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters…this is a real threat to proper democratic debate.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Millions of drivers use Waze, a Google-owned navigation app, to find the best, fastest route from point A to point B. And according to a new study, all of those people run the risk of having their movements tracked by hackers.

• Researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create thousands of “ghost drivers” that can monitor the drivers around them—an exploit that could be used to track Waze users in real-time. They proved it to me by tracking my own movements around San Francisco and Las Vegas over a three-day period.

• On page 17 of his memo, Goldsmith describes the previous opinions issued by OLC. The discussion is largely redacted, but it does describe say the October 4, 2001 memo “evaluated the legality of a hypothetical electronic surveillance program,” whereas the November 2, 2001 memo “examined the authorities granted by the President in the November 2, 2001 Authorization of STELLAR WIND and concluded that they were lawful.”

• [...]

• We also know NSA did collect some domestic collection — on about 3,000 selectors, possibly triggered to non-US persons within the US — at least until Stellar Wind got transitioned to FISA in 2009.

• The US House unanimously approved legislation Wednesday requiring authorities to obtain a court warrant to acquire e-mails and data stored in the cloud.

• The Email Privacy Act unwinds a President Ronald Reagan-era law that allows authorities to access e-mail and data from service providers without a warrant if the message or data is at least 180 days old. The 1986 e-mail privacy law, adopted when CompuServe was king, considered cloud-stored e-mail and other documents older than six months to be abandoned and ripe for the taking.

• The measure now goes to the Senate, where its chances of passage are unknown. The Senate Judiciary Committee for years has debated and even passed similar legislation, which has gone nowhere. President Obama must also sign the bill, but it’s unlikely to reach his desk before his term expires in January.

• The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 699) today, which would require the government to get a probable cause warrant from a judge before obtaining private communications and documents stored online with companies such as Google, Facebook, and Dropbox.

• The bill provides a long-overdue update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), first passed in 1986. The bill also codifies the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in U.S. v. Warshak, which held that the Fourth Amendment demands that the government first obtain a warrant before accessing emails stored with cloud service providers.

• The Email Privacy Act would reform the 1986 Email Communications Privacy Act by requiring all federal agencies (with few exceptions) to get a warrant before searching old digital communications stored in the cloud by companies like Google and Facebook.

• Just last week, we wrote about another ruling in one of the many cases kicked off when the FBI took control over a Tor-based child porn site, called Playpen, and ran it for two weeks. While the courts have said that it was okay for the FBI to run a child porn service for two weeks as part of a sting operation, they’ve been having a lot more trouble with the fact that the FBI then used its control over the service to infect any visitor with malware in order to figure out who they were. In the ruling last week, in the case against Alex Levin, in the Massachusetts District Court, the court said that the malware/hacking tool represented an illegal search under the 4th Amendment and suppressed the evidence. The key issue was that the warrant was issued for searches in the Eastern District of Virginia, but Levin clearly was not there.

• Now a court in the Northern District of Oklahoma, in a case against Scott Arterbury, has more or less reached the same conclusion. Specifically, Artebury’s lawyers pointed out that his computer was “seized” by the malware (called the Network Investigative Technique or NIT), and that was clearly in Oklahoma, beyond the bounds of the warrant. The government tried to play some games, arguing that it was the data that was seized in Virginia when it accessed the FBI-hosted site. The court doesn’t buy it.

• Congress has unconstitutionally authorized the FISA court to issue search warrants on the basis of governmental need – a standard that is no standard at all because the government can always claim that it needs what it wants. The FISA court does not require a showing of probable cause for its warrants, because it accepts the myth that the government is listening to or reading words by foreign people for foreign intelligence purposes only, not for prosecutorial purposes.

• The push to reform ECPA — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — have been going on basically as long as this site has been in existence (i.e. nearly 20 years). There are lots of problems with ECPA, but the big one that everyone points to is that it considers any communication that’s on a server more than 180 days to be “abandoned” and accessible without a warrant. That perhaps made some amount of sense back in 1986 when the law was written, because everything was client-server and you downloaded your email off the server. But in an age of cloud computing and webmail it makes no sense at all. Still, the IRS and the SEC really, really liked the ability to use ECPA to snoop on people’s emails.

• Adoption of the Intelligence Community IT Enterprise, a program that enables easier data sharing among intelligence agencies using common standards and cloud storage, could compensate for a drop off in the National Security Agency’s metadata collection capabilities resulting from congressional restrictions.

• “If you compare it to the things the federal government, the CIA, the FBI, was doing in the 1970s, the things we do now are infinitely less intrusive,” said James Carafano, a leading expert in national security and foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation.

• An “elite FBI forensic unit” admitted that for two decades, nearly every examiner “gave flawed testimony” (aka lied) about hair sample evidence in criminal trials. And geepers, they sure feel bad about all those people who were executed in prison because of it.

Civil Rights/Policing

• We recently wrote about the Rhode Island attorney general’s “cybercrime” bill — a legislative proposal that seeks to address cyberbullying, revenge porn, etc. with a bunch of broadly — and poorly — written clauses. Two negative comments written months apart could be viewed as “cyber-harassment” under the law, separating it from the sustained pattern of abuse that one normally considers “harassment.”

• In addition, the proposed law would criminalize “non-consensual communications.” If the sender does not obtain the recipient’s permission to send a message, it’s a criminal act if the recipient finds the message to be distressing — which could mean anything from emailing explicit threats to posting a negative comment on someone’s Facebook page.

• But that’s not Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin’s only bad idea. It appears he’s behind another legislative proposal — one that would amend the state’s computer crime laws into something more closely resembling the catastrophic federal equivalent: the CFAA.

• These are extraordinary claims to level against the UK’s principal party of opposition, and they have generated an extraordinary amount of media coverage, albeit no serious investigation. The common premise underlying this torrent of articles, think-pieces and polemics – that antisemitism is a growing problem within the Labour party – is rapidly congealing into conventional wisdom. Yet this basic claim is devoid of factual basis. The allegations against Corbyn and the Labour party are underpinned by an almost comical paucity of evidence, while what evidence does exist not only fails to justify the claims being made, but has itself been systematically misrepresented. There is no grounds for supposing either that antisemitism is significant within the Labour party, or that its prevalence is increasing. But, under mounting pressure, the Labour leadership’s response to the accusations has regressed from dismissive to defensive, to the point where policy interventions from such noted antisemitism experts as Richard Angell of Progress are reportedly being treated as serious, good-faith contributions.

• Egypt’s military regime is suppressing political opposition even more ferociously than the longtime Mubarak dictatorship while also collaborating in the strangulation of Gaza, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• The government questions whether The Judge Rotenberg Center has been straight with families about the risks of its electrical shock devices and alternative treatments.

• Clinton-era immigration laws “have subjected hundreds of thousands of people to arbitrary detention, fast-track deportations and family separation,” Human Rights Watch says in a new report.

• Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was sentenced in federal court today to 15 months in prison and a $250,000 fine, in addition to two years of supervised release, on the condition that he get treatment as a sex offender. Last year, Hastert pled guilty to breaking banking laws by making illegal withdrawals — which he then lied about to the FBI.

• Hastert took out $1.7 million in small amounts to avoid suspicion, according to the indictment, which he then used as hush money to prevent a victim of sexual abuse from going public. The victim, identified only as “Individual A” in the court papers, was a 14-year-old on Hastert’s wrestling team when Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach at Yorkville High school in Illinois. When the allegations become public, three other victims came forward and said that they had been molested by Hastert while he was their wrestling coach. While the statute of limitations on the sexual crimes ran out long ago, the judge can take any behavior surrounding the banking crimes into account when sentencing.

• Officials at one of the United States’ most notorious prisons have reportedly punished an outspoken inmate for daring to correspond with reporters about conditions inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

• William Kissinger was abruptly relocated from Angola to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center some 70 miles south in early February, after emailing with a reporter from the New Orleans Advocate for some weeks. Prison officials say he was moved as a disciplinary action because he was guilty of “defiance” and “general prohibited behavior,” the Advocate reports — two broad and vague rules of prisoner conduct that allow officials to punish inmates for anything they decide insults staff or impedes the prison’s function.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As we’ve been discussing, the FCC is cooking up a plan to open up the closed cable set top box to third party competition. As we’ve also been pointing out, the cable industry has been throwing an absolutely epic hissy fit about this plan, given it would destroy the $21 billion in annual revenues cable operators make off of cable box rental fees. Since it can’t just admit this is all about protecting set top rental fees, the cable industry has been pushing an endless wave of editorials in newspapers and websites nationwide, claiming more set top box competition will hurt consumer privacy, increase piracy, harm diversity, and rip the very planet from its orbital axis.

• For several years now, broadband providers have been taking full advantage of the lack of competition in the broadband market by expanding usage caps and overage fees. More recently, companies like AT&T, Comcast and Suddenlink have taken this practice one step further by charging users a $10 to $35 per month surcharge if consumers want to avoid usage caps. In other words, consumers are paying more money than ever for a service that costs less and less to provide, thanks again to limited competition in the broader broadband market.

• And while companies like Comcast have used the same approach seen in the boiling frog metaphor to slowly expand its usage cap “trials” and hope nobody notices, people are definitely noticing the rising temperatures.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is the world’s most authoritative legal instrument on intellectual property. It falls under the World Trade Organisation, which sets the rules for trade between countries. The United Nations also has an agency specialising in intellectual property rights, the World Intellectual Property Organisation. The two bodies signed a cooperation agreement in 1996.

• But the trade agreement doesn’t mention traditional knowledge, let alone its association with genetic resources. The UN body, meanwhile, has been trying – unsuccessfully – to negotiate a new framework over the past 16 years. These gaps show how conventional intellectual property frameworks have neglected the knowledge that indigenous communities produce.

• [...]

• All of these examples have attracted international interest. This has prompted indigenous and local communities to spar with foreigners over the benefits that are due to them.

• In the absence of clear rules, a process called “biopiracy” has emerged. Biopirates appropriate genetic resources and their associated traditional knowledge by using patents. Sometimes these are turned into blockbuster products. Local communities don’t benefit at all.

• Patent drawings are not generally a source of amusement, as artistic as they may sometimes be. Magic Leap, the fabled and secretive augmented reality start-up valued at USD 4.5 billion, however, snuck a first class nerd joke in its application US2016/0109707 published 21 April 2016 with the memorable title “combining at least one variable focus element with a plurality of stacked waveguides for augmented or virtual reality display” (and containing no less than 152 patent drawings).

• The US Senate only just unanimously passed S.1890 (see AmeriKat report here) three weeks ago. Following the Senate vote, the Obama administration called the DTSA “important protection” for American business and industries. Why is the DTSA so important? It provides trade secrets owners with the possibility of filing civil claims for trade secrets misappropriation within the federal court system (necessary given the ease and speed with which misappropriated trade secrets can cross state borders). The DTSA also provides for a seizure order to prevent the destruction or dissemination of misappropriated trade secrets. See the recent post by trade secrets expert, James Pooley.

• With today’s 410-2 House vote, the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) has now passed both the House and Senate and is headed to President Obama for his expected signature.[1] The DTSA amends the Economic Espionage Act to create a private civil cause of action for trade secret misappropriation based upon the Congressional sense that trade secret theft exists and is harmful.[2] Trade secret misappropriation (as a civil matter) has previously been purely a matter of state law. Although there is substantial uniformity between the states,[3] there are also a number of differences and perceived procedural weaknesses.[4] The DTSA would not eliminate or preempt the various state trade secret rights but rather would operate as an additional layer of potential protection.[5] The law is designed to go into effect on its day of enactment and apply to any misappropriation that occurs on or after that date.

• The Beall/Attaran paper deals specifically with the WHO Essential Medicines List (EML), and the authors might make the argument that not much is known about the patent landscape of the entire EML, per se, but that really misses the point. There are many studies and commentaries on the patent landscape for medicines that are essential, including both those on and off the WHO EML. Much of the work in publishing patent landscapes in recent years has been done by MSF, I-Mak, and the Medicines Patent Pool, as well as several academics and health NGOs. NGOs, including but not limited to KEI, have also addressed policy issues related to the transparency of patent landscapes, not only for medicines, but also in other areas, including clean energy, climate change, and standards essential patents on mobile computing devices, for example.

• The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) does not hesitate to add even its closest friends to its annual list of concerns about possible inadequate protection of US intellectual property rights. So this year, along with perennial listees China, India and dozens of others, vigorous IP-rights defender Switzerland makes an appearance. The annual Special 301 report was issued today, and in its press release this year, USTR also included its primary client in publishing the list – the rightsholder industry.

Trademarks

• The Priceline Group has something of a history with intellectual property. Several years back, Jay Walker, Priceline’s founder, appeared to have transitioned to becoming a full-blown patent troll. In the year’s since, the company he once founded has been in something of a tussle with the USPTO over its attempt to register a trademark for “booking.com.” The USPTO had initially approved of the mark, before reversing its own decision only weeks later due to “booking.com” being essentially descriptive. The Priceline Group appealed, but the appeals board upheld the rejection of the mark, affirming it as being descriptive.

Copyrights

• The legal battles between the RIAA, MPAA and Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload have been put on hold for another six months. Virginia District Court Judge Liam O’Grady agreed to stay the cases, but did not grant a request from the industry groups to allow them to copy Megaupload’s data which remains stored at its former hosting provider.

• The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Susap Kirtsaeng v John Wiley, with justices appearing sceptical that prevailing defendants should be awarded fees in close cases

• On April 18 2016 the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in Authors Guild v Google, thus leaving in place a lower court ruling that Google did not infringe authors’ copyrights in its project to create a searchable library of the world’s books. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had held that Google’s project was a protected ‘fair use’ of copyrighted works.

• Congress has mostly stayed away from any attempt at copyright reform since the great SOPA blackout of 2012, afraid that anything will set off the public again. However, in 2013, Copyright Register Maria Pallante called on Congress to create the “next great copyright act” designed to update copyright for the 21st century. The House Judiciary Committee has been holding hearings and roundtables every few months since then, some of which have been more encouraging than others.

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