● 05.13.16

● Links 13/5/2016: ZFS in Debian, RBS Chooses Red Hat

Posted in News Roundup at 9:21 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• From time to time we read that governments don’t whole-heartedly move to GNU/Linux. India is different. Even their courts, full of serious conservative people are sending everyone to school for a day or two with their laptops to practise using Ubuntu GNU/Linux for desktop work and a Court Information System.

Desktop

• Many years ago, I was in a similar situation. I was dual-booting between Windows XP and one of the popular distros of that time. In my case, it was worth it to me to simply walk away from Outlook and start over. I did this by using one of those programs for Windows you mentioned, that convert PST files into mbox. The mbox file type is compatible with just about any email client, so I was able to get everything moved into Thunderbird without much trouble.

• Gone, however, is automatic Wi-Fi sharing with contacts, with Microsoft citing low uptake over cost of development.

Kernel Space

• Today, May 13, 2016, we’re continuing our “Watch” series of articles with a recent interview with Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel.

• In the 30-minute video keynote/interview attached below, courtesy of The Linux Foundation, which was recorded during the Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit 2016 that took place last month between April 4 and April 6 in San Diego, California, USA, Linus Torvalds talks with Dirk Hohndel about everything Linux.

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a collaborative open source project within the Linux Foundation working on a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car and it’s secured the backing of some serious partners, according to an announcement this week. Movimento, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Texas Instruments, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have joined AGL, and that’s a huge endorsement for the open-source movement in connected car, an industry that’s been locked up in proprietary software for most of its life, largely because of security concerns.

• Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.5.4, Linux kernel 4.4.10 LTS, Linux kernel 3.18.33 LTS, and Linux kernel 4.1.24 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman published details about the release of Linux kernel 3.14.69 LTS.

• Sasha Levin announced the availability of Linux kernel 3.18.33 LTS, which comes right after the release of Linux 4.5.4, Linux 4.4.10 LTS, and Linux 4.1.24 LTS kernels.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman is second in command in the Linux kernel community. In addition to doing great work on device drivers, he also maintains the stable tree of the Linux kernel.

• In his keynote presentation at CoreOS Fest in Berlin this week, Kroah-Hartman offered some inside perspective on just how massive the Linux kernel project is. And I also had a chance to sit down with him to talk about the kernel and security.

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car, today announced that Movimento, Oracle, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., Texas Instruments, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have joined Automotive Grade Linux. Additionally, it was announced that Movimento, UIEvolution and VeriSilicon have also joined The Linux Foundation.

Graphics Stack

• The latest open-source fruits of AMD’s GPUOpen project is the Compressonator.

• It’s been over one month since NVIDIA presented their proposed Weston patches for supporting Wayland with NVIDIA’s Linux binary driver but the discussion over their proposed approach remains heated.

• There are new Mesa happenings in the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) space.

• Yet another feature landing in Mesa Git ahead of the upcoming Mesa 11.3/12.0 branching for release next month is lossless compression in the Intel Mesa DRI driver.

• A series of commits today added support for lossless compression when using Intel Skylake graphics hardware.

• When working on the story this week about Intel Is Preparing A Major Restructuring Of Their Graphics Driver, I found out another bit of information worth relaying: a longtime contributor to the Intel Linux graphics driver stack has left the company to focus on a new venture.

• Martin Peres, the organizer of this year’s annual X.Org Developers’ Conference, has issued a call for papers (CFP) for those wishing to present at this conference.

• Going back six years has been work on bringing threaded input to the X.Org Server whereby the input event code would run on its own CPU thread. The work has yet to be merged in full, but Keith Packard has now revised the patches.

Applications

• The Qt Company, through Eike Ziller, announced the final release of Qt Creator 4.0, the open-source and cross-platform IDE (Integrated Development Environment) designed for the needs of Qt developers.

• Even after all these years, no one has yet dethroned Microsoft Word from its kingly position. Sure, a few alternatives have been playing a great game of catch-up and innovation, but there’s no doubt about it — Word is still the best.

• But unless you use some kind of emulation or virtualization software, there’s no way to run Word on a regular Linux setup. Which leaves us with a tough question: what’s the best word processor to use on Linux?

• There are a handful of worthy options out there. Let’s take a brief but thorough look at them to see all of their pros and cons. By the end, it’ll be up to you to pick the one that works best for your needs.

• Michael Roth has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of QEMU 2.6, the latest and most advanced version of the widely-used and highly customizable virtualization software for GNU/Linux operating systems.

• The developers behind the QEMU open-source processor emulator have announced their v2.6.0 release.

• GitHub has just released the version 1.0 of Electron, its free and open source application building platform. After two years of development, Electron 1.0 is here with new features and a Chrome extension Devtron to debug applications and make them better.

Proprietary

• The folks behind the free but proprietary Opera browser announced today that the latest developer build includes Power Saving Mode, a new feature that the company claims can extend battery life by up to 50 percent. If true, this could be a serious game changer. Free and open source software advocates should hope that the developers at Mozilla are paying attention.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Dungeons & Robots is an interesting looking Early Access action RPG that looks very promising and the developers have confirmed it’s coming to Linux soon.

• Atriage is one title I missed due to Steam’s failure to show games that produce a Linux version after the Windows release in the Linux newly released section. I do wish Valve would fix that.

• Looks a bit unusual and I like developers who try something a little different. I love the style of it and I love games that emulate board games, so it could be fun.

• Doing my usual perusing through changelogs, game updates and so on I come across new ports. This time Wailing Heights caught my interest. A body-hopping, musical adventure game, set in a horrific hamlet of monsters.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma has always been the talk of the town for its sleek and cutting edge look. KDE Plasma among all other Linux Desktop Environments have always stood out for its continuous development. The latest release of KDE Plasma is 5.6 which includes some new features, tweaks and fixes. Plasma desktop is also highly customizable so that you can customize it the way you need it to be.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Today, May 12, 2016, Frederic Peters has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the last maintenance release of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

• Hello all,

• The latest release of GNOME is here: GNOME 3.20.2.

• This is the second and final release for the 3.20 branch; this update brings many bug fixes and improvements as well as documentation and translation updates.

Distributions

• I liked earlier versions of Simplicity Linux. They remain very usable computing options. The X and Mini versions are equally capable but offer a different look and feel.

• The LXDE desktop consumes little system resources. It loads into system memory when possible to run fast and furious without having to read from the CD/DVD or USB storage.

• Simplicity Linux is generally easy to use, but the Puppy Linux-centric software requires a bit of a learning curve for users used to Debian Linux derivatives.

• If you are looking for a solid computing experience other than the X and the Mini editions in the 16.04 betas releases, check out previous Simplicity Linux releases. They offer the Puppy Linux base but include other changes, such as Google Chrome as the default browser.

New Releases

• Slackel KDE 4.14.18 has been released. Slackel is based on Slackware and Salix.

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• Softpedia has been informed by the OpenMandriva Team that the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx3 GNU/Linux operating system will use the LLVM Clang compiler by default.

• The next OpenMandriva is one step closer to becoming a release this week as the cooker developmental branch was forked off to stabilize Lx3. Petter Reinholdtsen today announced that ZFS has been accepted into Debian “after many years of hard work” and Christian Schaller blogged H264 support is now available to Fedora users. In other news, LibreOffice 5.1.3 was released and Jack Germain reviewed Simplicity Linux.

• GitHub has been forked to Lx3 and the repos will be cloned after the creation of 12 new packages and their dependencies for KDEapps. The problem of migrating from the 2014 to the Lx3 release was discussed and an action raised for the creation of a script to allow this upgrade path.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Enterprise Linux firm Suse is making it more convenient for SAP users to operate the enterprise software by making its Linux server optimised for SAP available for on-demand deployment via Amazon’s cloud-based AWS Marketplace.

Red Hat Family

• RBS has built a new Open Experience centre using Red Hat’s mobile and web-scale container application platforms to help grow innovation in the firm.

• The Open Experience centre, based in Edinburgh, allows the bank to build new applications and services for both its internal teams and its customers, helping the company foster a more collaborative environment between staff, businesses and its customers.

• Using Red Hat’s OpenShift platform allows developers create, host and scale applications faster than before, meaning they can be pushed through to testing quicker.

Finance

Fedora

• Today in Linux news Mageia 6 is falling a bit behind schedule having missed a stabilization release and now delaying versions freeze. openSUSE Tumbleweed received an update to Plasma 5.6.3 and Red Hat announced their latest coup. Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield wondered how long desktop Linux can last considering the world’s obsession with portables and Eric Nicholls wondered if Ubuntu can retain their “title of best desktop OS.”

• John Dulaney starting expermenting with Linux when he was thirteen years old and made the switch to using Linux full time with Fedora Core 1. Dulaney said, “I had meant to set it up to dual boot with Windows, and accidentally overwrote the wrong partition, leaving me with just Fedora.” John has an eclectic set of childhood heroes that include Einstein, astronauts, Gumby and his father. His favorite movies are Stargate and Star Trek VI. Dulaney is a fan of Eastern North Carolina style pork barbecue who enjoys fencing, model railroading and playing the banjo.

• It’s now easier having basic H.264 support on Fedora Linux with there now being an official way thanks to cooperation with Cisco.

• can now enable the fedora-cisco-openh264 repository and then simply install the mozilla-openh264 and gstreamr1-plugin-openh264 packages for having OpenH264 easily installed on the system.

• Dennis Gilmore posted a nice blog entry explaining how you can install OpenH264 in Fedora 24.

Debian Family

• Today, after many years of hard work from many people, ZFS for Linux finally entered Debian. The package status can be seen on the package tracker for zfs-linux. and the team status page. If you want to help out, please join us. The source code is available via git on Alioth. It would also be great if you could help out with the dkms package, as it is an important piece of the puzzle to get ZFS working.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 16.04 was released in April, and it’s a great release. Ubuntu is generally known as an extremely user-friendly distribution, so it’s easy to get up and running quickly. That said, there are a few things to do — depending on your needs — to get most out of your system.

• The past few weeks have been good ones for the open source ecosystem. Three major Linux-based operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu — have debuted in final or beta form. Here’s a look at what’s new in all of them.

• While working at Dell Inc. in the 2011 I met some Linux enthusiasts that introduced me to Ubuntu. I have heard about SUSE, Debian and Red Hat before but they were never promoted as real alternatives to Windows and OS X. But Ubuntu changed my mindset toward Linux so I decided to give it a try. At the beginning I felt it was too hard to understand so I went back and forth between Ubuntu and Windows until I got used to Ubuntu. My first barrier was the fact that on Windows everything was fixed by installing a software that will do everything for you and on Linux it was all about the Terminal. But once you realize that you don’t need to deal with malware and slow performance anymore you simply don’t look back at Windows.

• Canonical announced on May 12, 2016, that they’ve updated the Photos Scope for Ubuntu Phone users with support for viewing camera uploads from their Dropbox accounts.

• Weighing in at just over a pound, the Aquaris M10 isn’t an unwieldy tablet, but it doesn’t strike us as lightweight either. It’s definitely a two-hand device, considering the acreage of its 10.1-inch display. Trying to use it with one hand is a sure way to induce wrist cramps and other discomfort.

• The Aquaris M10 has a glossy display, while the rear of the device bears a matte finish, allowing for both an improved grip and a more flattering appearance. The device is painted black for the full HD version, while the standard HD version has a bleach white finish. If you were hoping for a higher resolution and the snow-coated exterior, you’ll be hopelessly out of luck.

• Canonical’s Zygmunt Krynicki announced just a few moments ago, May 13, 2016, that a new version of the snapd tool has been pushed to the stable repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

• The BQ Aquaris M10 is the first tablet running Ubuntu. It’s also the first device in which Ubuntu delivers on the vision of convergence that started with the Ubuntu Edge campaign. Ubuntu fans will be thrilled to finally get their hands on this unique device, but Ubuntu’s developers clearly have much more work to do.

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Codenamed “Xenial Xerus” has arrived. After Six month developments, Canonical officially releases the new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on April 21, 2016. It now available to download and install on PCs, laptops and netbooks.

• For those currently running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and thinking about trying out the Padoka PPA for easily deploying the latest Mesa code on your desktop rather than using Xenial’s stock Mesa 11.2, here are some fresh reference benchmarks.

• In a few days is the main tests I’m working on of looking at the Linux 4.6 vs. DRM-Next-4.7 for Radeon/AMDGPU. But in the process of doing a clean system install and then wanting to be on Mesa Git for when doing those DRM tests, I decided to do a quick Mesa 11.2 vs. 11.3-devel comparison along the way for one of the test graphics cards: the AMD Radeon R9 290.

• As we continue our hackathon journey around China, we are back in Beijing! Since the last time we were here in Beijing, Ubuntu’s first tablet, the BQ M10 Ubuntu Edition became available worldwide. It’s more than just another tablet, it’s the first device that brings the true convergent experience to life. For those of you who are not familiar with the term convergence, it means you can turn your tablet into a fully functioning Ubuntu desktop with a set of bluetooth keyboard and mouse. And for developers you only need to write one set of code, which will run across all Ubuntu form factors – you can find out more information on the convergence feature here and here.

• [...]

• A big thanks to our location sponsor Microsoft China Headquarter for providing the awesome coding space for our developers and all the local communities and friends that made this happen.

Flavours and Variants

• Today, May 12, 2016, GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs us about the release and immediate availability of a new build of his Exton|OS Linux kernel-based computer operating system.

Devices/Embedded

• A tiny open source “MiQi” SBC that runs Linux or Android on a Rockchip RK3288, with HDMI, GbE, four USB ports, and expansion headers has launched on Indiegogo.

• A Shenzhen startup led by Benn Huang called MQMaker launched an Indiegogo campaign for a MiQi hacker board. The MiQi is available in packages starting at $35 (1GB RAM, 8GB eMMC) and $69 (2GB RAM, 32GB eMMC). Last September, the company successfully launched an open spec, OpenWrt Linux-based WiTi router board, now available for $69.

• Arduino LLC released a shield version of its Arduino Yún SBC, letting you add a WiFi and Linux to Arduino boards, along with Ethernet and USB ports.

• The Arduino and Genuino Yún Shield peels off the OpenWrt-driven WiFi subsystem of the Arduino Yún SBC as a shield add-on, letting you add Internet access to other Arduino boards. The Arduino and Genuino Yún Shield is equipped with the same MIPS-based, 400MHz Atheros AR9331 WiFi SoC as the Arduino Yún and Arduino Yún Mini, the first Arduino SBCs to run Linux.

• Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Simon Long today announced that a major update is available for the main Linux kernel-based operating system for Raspberry Pi single-board computers.

• As many of you might know already, Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled their newest and most advanced SBC, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, on February 29, 2016, finally implementing a 64-bit processor, along with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.

• Tibbo has his week unveiled a new Linux-based system they have created which is based on the based on the powerful 1GHz Cortex-A8 Sitara CPU from Texas Instruments and is a great with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of flash memory.

Phones

Android

• The open source ecosystem grows every day, and with the proliferation of mobile devices around the globe, perhaps never has it been more important than now to make sure that phone and tablet users get access to the same high-quality open source software options that desktop users have long enjoyed.

• I want to take you through some of the many open source options for mobile apps that you have available to you on Android devices, and today, we start with open source apps for drawing. For those of you on an iOS device, you may be able to find an equivalent for your device as well, but the Apple ecosystem does not lend itself to applications outside of its walled garden, so your luck may vary.

• Whether you’re a serious artist, a doodler, or simply someone who wants to provide a few apps to entertain your kids, we hope you’ll appreciate these entertaining picks. They’re not the GIMP or Inkscape (although you can find those packaged for Android as well), but they all make use of touch input in creative ways.

• Generally my earbuds are plugged into my Android phone, and on that, I have graduated from the non-open-source, pre-installed app to Vanilla Music, which claims to be open source and ad-free. I confess I haven’t tried a git pull on it yet, but otherwise, so far I am liking it. The app provides simple tab structure offering artists, albums, songs, playlists, genres, and files. Vanilla Music is simple and responsive and has all the basic features I need for my modest on-phone music collection. But I’m going to try other open source applications, so if you have suggestions, let me know in the comments.

• Hardcore Android fans already know what Jide is. It’s the company behind Remix OS, the Windows-style Android operating system that can be installed on any computer, regardless what OS it runs. In addition to offering its desktop Android reboot free of charge to anyone looking for Android on their computer, the company has introduced Remix OS devices of its own in the past. Now, Jide has partnered with AOC to launch a standalone all-in-one PC that runs Android out of the box.

• Jide, the company behind desktop-orientated Android fork Remix OS, has put its software in an all-in-one PC for the first time. The firm partnered with Chinese manufacturer AOC to create a Remix OS-powered desktop device that’s aimed at China’s enterprise market. This isn’t a powerful computer by any stretch of the imagination (nor is it the first all-in-one device to run Android, or a variant thereof), but it’s still interesting to see what Jide is doing with its software.

• Remix OS is still in beta, but it essentially turns Google’s mobile OS into a desktop operating system. The software adds floating windows, keyboard and mouse support, a Start menu lookalike, and file manager. The software is available to download for free, and we were impressed with its capabilities when we tried it out at MWC earlier this year.

• And we’re back! Google has released the latest Android security update and, as you might expect, there’s plenty to be had. This time around, Google patched 40 vulnerabilities. Twelve of these 40 issues were marked as critical, with two of those identified as remote code execution vulnerabilities (aka, the worst kind). Unfortunately, the two remote code execution (RCE) issues are found in Android’s mediaserver. This is the same subsystem that has been plagued with issues in the past few months. Those two RCE issues aren’t the only ones to haunt the mediaserver.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source developers have built a burgeoning ecosystem of data analytics and storage solutions to address the data deluge over the past several years. Here’s a look at several of the most popular open source tools for big data storage and analytics.

• The march toward open source is rapidly turning into an all-out race, with research projects and applications extending to new industry sectors, including communication providers. What started out in the software realm has moved into the hardware space, bringing with it significant changes for providers and vendors alike. Most recently, the Open Compute Project (OCP) and its spin-offs, including the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), have not only reinforced this shift toward open source, but have accelerated the trend.

• Open source software rarely receives the kind of attention that the press lavishes on the latest hot new thing blessed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Yet these projects are the foundations of the web world.

• Without open source there would be no Slack, no Medium, no Github. Nor would there be Google, Facebook, or much of anything else.

• Without open source projects like Apache, Nginx, OpenSSL, OpenSSH and others (to say nothing of GNU/Linux, which does get some attention), the latest hot new thing would likely not exist. More fundamentally, the web as we know it would not exist.

• The focus of Node.js over the last year has been to increase the number of contributors working on the project. Node.js has seen sustained 100% year-over-year user growth for several years, but the number of contributors was, at one point, actually on the decline.

• After a year+ of community building and iteration we’re now healthier than ever. The project has reorganized itself divided into many components and sits at 400 members. Across most repos, which now make up the project as a whole, we’re seeing that ~50% of the contributors in a given month are new to that repository. That means our conversion of users into contributors is six times higher than the growth of our user community. Contributors are essential to the health and longevity of an open source project.

• As an FSF intern during the winter and spring of 2016, I had the opportunity to be around FSF’s tech team during LibrePlanet preparation, and we spent a lot of time making the streaming and recording work as well as possible so that people who were not in each talk could still watch it (all the recordings are already up on media.libreplanet.org).

• Each room at the LibrePlanet conference has a streaming set-up staffed by a volunteer. There are many skilled volunteers, but we need to minimize the risk of failed recordings due to over-complex or error-prone software systems. So, in order to improve streaming we decided to quickly develop a GPLv3 program to provide a seamless interface for an audio and/or video streaming console.

• As a newcomer to the free software community, I have been looking for ways to contribute by coding. The huge amount of projects in progress have overwhelmed me a bit. So, when it was proposed to create a piece of software to be used directly by the community at the conference, I was full of joy about beginning a project.

• The third “black box” was the network operating system (NOS). Once proprietary systems that were supplied only by the big networking vendors, these NOS products are now offered by software vendors like Big Switch, Cumulus, and Pica8. The NOS must comply with three key component areas within the device: the CPU and the motherboard (or the BSP), “U-Boot” (or universal boot loader), and the ASIC’s APIs. All three collectively need to be matched to the network OS in order to port a NOS onto that same piece of metal. This is why so-called white-box SDN vendors either sell the complete switch and OS solution or provide a list of pre-qualified switches so you can directly buy the hardware.

• Today, the California Independent System Operator announced it is using Dispersive Technologies for software defined networking (SDN) to control the flow of electricity on its power grid.

• Some people prefer open source software because they see it to be more secure in terms of virus attacks and stable as a support platform for other software. Others may prefer open source because they genuinely cannot afford to buy proprietary software. But as you explore any form of software, please remember they are all vulnerable in their own ways and need protection from attacks. Good Luck!

• The rapid success of the party lies in the sharing and collaborative approach used by open source computer software.

• Embracing open source has seen Comcast transform from a cable company to a networking company and now to a software company, highlighted Nagesh Nandiraju, Director of Next Gen Network Architecture, Comcast in his plenary talk at Open Networking Summit 2016.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The maker of the Firefox browser is wading into an increasingly contentious court battle over an undisclosed security vulnerability the FBI used to track down anonymous users of a child-porn site.

• Recently, Mozilla filed a brief with the court, urging the FBI to reveal the technique used to hack 1000+ computers of pedophile TOR users. The open source supporter said that TOR software suite is based on Firefox and any known flaw can compromise the security of the end users.

• There continue to be many people around the globe who want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. Typically, the anonymous crowd turns to common tools that can keep their tracks private, and one of the most common tools of all is Tor, an open source tool used all around the world.

• Project leaders behind Tor have continuously improved its security features, but now Mozilla is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, in the interest of Firefox users, to disclose any findings of vulnerability in Tor to it first, before any other party learns of the vulnerability. Here is the thought behind this.

• With the Tor browser being built on the Firefox framework, any exploit of Tor could affect vanilla Firefox users. Not only that, but the FBI is apparently sitting on another Firefox vulnerability it used in a previous investigation to unmask Tor users. (This refers to the FBI’s 2012 child porn sting, which also used a NIT to obtain information about visitors to a seized website.) The filing notes the FBI has been less than helpful when approached for info about this Firefox/Tor-exploiting NIT.

SaaS/Back End

• While the CLI meets the needs of managing one container on one host, it falls short when it comes to managing multiple containers deployed on multiple hosts. To go beyond the management of individual containers, we must turn to orchestration tools.

• Connectors make all our lives easier. In the case of the Spark-Cloudant connector, using Spark analytics on data stored in Cloudant is simplified with the easy-to-use syntax of the connector. With the large Spark ecosystem, one can now conduct federated analytics across Cloudant and other disparate data sources. And we all know that the days of analyzing just your own company data are long gone. Piping in more data is essential these days.

• When you’re talking big data analysis, you’re almost always talking open source. Apache Hadoop is what often comes to mind as a valuable big data analysis tool. But do you know the advantages that Apache Spark has to offer? This May 5 presentation from IBM’s Government Analytics Forum in Washington, DC does a nice job of explaining the advantages.

• RightScale came out with its 2016 State of the Cloud Report recently, always one of the more definitive barometers for the state of cloud computing. The findings showed that hybrid clouds are growing briskly, enterprise cloud workloads are on the upswing, and private cloud adoption is growing across all providers. Now, the company has announced the results of the RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Survey: DevOps Trends.

Databases

• PostgreSQL 9.6 is now up to its beta stage with a number of new features.

• Recently I provided an early look at PostgreSQL 9.6 features. PostgreSQL 9.6 brings parallel query support, synchronous replication now supports multiple standby servers, full-text search for phrases, support for remote joins/sorts/updates, “substantial” performance improvements (especially for many-core servers), no more repetitive scans of old data by auto vacuum, and much more.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice has become the top alternative to Microsoft Office on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, so whenever a new version comes out, users rush to download it and benefit from the latest improvements made to built-in apps.

• The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.1.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, supporting Google Drive remote connectivity on GNU/Linux and MacOS X.

Google’s Nest

Google’s New Parser

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• The new funding will help Weaveworks build out its container networking platform as competition heats up in this emerging market. Container networking vendor Weaveworks revealed on May 11 that it has raised $15 million in a Series B round of funding, led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) and including the participation of Accel.

BSD

• While for years developers working on FreeBSD have been porting DRM/KMS driver changes from the Linux kernel over to their kernel, they have trailed greatly behind the mainline Linux kernel driver state due to the amount of changes they have been making to the driver when re-basing it against a new Linux kernel release. Now they are pursuing a new approach of using a compatibility layer where they hope to be able to more closely follow the upstream Linux DRM/KMS drivers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Public Services/Government

• The White House open source software policy quickly grabbed headlines when officials from various agencies voiced conflicting opinions. While parties appear to be on the same page now, open source software has undoubtedly been thrust into the spotlight.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• With the contribution of scientists, engineers and programmers, UPSat is developed to participate in the QB50 international thermosphere research mission. UPSat is also the first satellite that its mechanical designs, software, and the vast majority of its components are freely available under open hardware and open software licenses.

• Smart cities may look towards open wireless standards to save billions in Internet of Things (IoT) deployment costs. Choosing open standards could cut costs by 30 percent and promote more cities to utilize IoT, according to Machina Research.

Open Access/Content

• While scientific publication is slowly moving to an open access model, patents have been there since well before the internet revolution. It would be interesting to apply their model to the patent system retrospectively and consider

Leftovers

• Since 1984 all cigarette packages have been required to include one of four specific health warnings, with the “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING” phrase set in capital letters. In 2009, President Obama signed a new law that would require larger labels with vivid graphics, but the tobacco industry put up a legal fight, and the new labels have been in limbo ever since.

• Companies can (and do) claim that they are trying to “emphasize” the important stuff by putting it in all caps. This is actually the reason so many legal documents and contracts have sections that seem to be shouting. You can blame U.S. law for this one (specifically, the Uniform Commercial Code) which requires that certain sections of a contract be “conspicuous.”

• Usually those guidelines apply to the parts of the contract that sound something like: “COMPANY X DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT WE’LL KEEP ANY OF OUR PROMISES AND EVERYTHING IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.” Makes sense that those sections should be hard to miss.

• Except that in this case, making text “conspicuous,” also makes it harder to read. And that’s because of a historical quirk.

Science

• It’s important to remember that Canada is not alone in having these muzzling problems. The article notes that during the administration of President George W. Bush, US government scientists complained that inconvenient data was being altered or simply suppressed. More recently, the UK government unveiled plans to forbid its scientists from lobbying for changes in their own field. Although it has now introduced some exemptions from the controversial “gagging clause”, these seem half-hearted and possibly temporary. It obviously needs to pay more attention to Justin.

Health/Nutrition

• Public health advocates last week told World Health Organization delegates they must act quickly to save the lives of poor populations suffering from less common diseases for which there is no research and development funding. Nongovernmental organisations showed up to a WHO meeting on the issue to urge on delegates, even holding a public demonstration in front of the UN, but there was concern afterward at the little progress made.

• Republicans ‘have tried time and time again to take health care away from the 20 million newly insured Americans,’ said Bernie Sanders.

• Since January 2014, the Hudson facility has received medical grievances from 121 individuals detained under custody of ICE. But the complaint noted that the facility “only took corrective action in 2.48 [percent] of these complaints, begging the question what role did ICE play to ensure that these complaints were fully addressed.” The complaint noted that 560 individuals were also taken to outside hospital treatments, 184 of whom were hospitalized because of medical emergencies.

• German chemical giants Bayer AG and BASF SE are both considering takeovers of U.S. seed behemoth Monsanto, according to news reports on Thursday.

• Of the potential Bayer takeover of Monsanto, valued at roughly $40 billion, Bloomberg noted that it “would create the world’s largest supplier of seeds and farm chemicals.”

• As USA Today reported, “A bid for Monsanto would be just the most recent in a wave of chemical and agribusiness consolidation.”

• Indeed, in February China National Chemical Corp. (ChemChina) announced it would acquire Swiss pesticide company Syngenta for $43 billion, while DuPont and Dow Chemical announced their merger last year.

• According to advocacy group Food & Water Watch, such consolidation has far-reaching impacts, and is bad news for farmers and communities.

Security

• Obviously, it’s worth being careful and concerned about this kind of thing. Those encrypted ransomware attacks have become quite popular lately, and you can imagine why some would think it would be fun to target Congress specifically. Still, blocking all of YahooMail seems… like overkill? Yes, obviously, warn everyone to be careful, and highlight the details and what to watch out for. Perhaps institute some other kinds of protections. But a blanket ban on YahooMail just seems odd.

• Among the most disruptive changes in Linux over the last decade has been in the introduction and broad integration of the systemd init system into Linux.

• In a keynote session at the CoreOS Fest in Berlin this week, Lennart Poettering, one of the lead developers of systemd, delivered a detailed technical keynote on some of the key parameters in systemd and how they can be used to secure Linux servers.

• This movement is fairly new. Concepts like automate testing or continuous testing, in the context of continuous delivery, still do not have 10 years of history. We need to be careful with trends. The topic is so hot these days that the association between automated testing and quality is becoming the norm, also in Open Source.

• Some of the world’s biggest security and software vendors will be rushing to patch holes in implementations of the popular 7-zip compression tool to stop attackers gaining full control of customer machines.

• EFF is proud to introduce Certbot, a powerful tool to help websites encrypt their traffic. Certbot is the next iteration of the Let’s Encrypt Client; it obtains TLS/SSL certificates and can automatically configure HTTPS encryption on your server. It’s still in beta for now, but we plan to release Certbot 1.0 later this year.

Defence/Aggression

• The Russian Embassy in London has tweeted a screenshot from PC real-time strategy game Command & Conquer: Generals.

• The image, of three green army trucks, was posted with the accompanying text: “Extremists near Aleppo received several truckloads of chemical ammo.”

• The trailblazing human rights attorney Michael Ratner has died at the age of 72. For over four decades, he defended, investigated and spoke up for victims of human rights abuses across the world. In this web-only interview, Reed Brody and Michael Smith pay tribute to their close friend.

• Michael Ratner, a fearless civil liberties lawyer who successfully challenged the United States government’s detention of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial review, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 72.

• The cause was complications of cancer, said his brother, Bruce, a developer and an owner of the Brooklyn Nets.

• As head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner oversaw litigation that, in effect, voided New York City’s wholesale stop-and-frisk policing tactic. The center also accused the federal government of complicity in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects and argued against the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency, the waging of war in Iraq without the consent of Congress, the encouragement of right-wing rebels in Nicaragua and the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war.

• “Under his leadership, the center grew from a small but scrappy civil rights organization into one of the leading human rights organizations in the world,” David Cole, a former colleague at the center and a professor at Georgetown Law School, said in an interview this week. “He sued some of the most powerful people in the world on behalf of some of the least powerful.”

• Mr. Ratner, who majored in medieval English at Brandeis University in the 1960s, was radicalized by the teachings of the New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the preachings of a classmate, Angela Davis, who went on to become a leading counterculture activist and American Communist and continues to teach and speak publicly.

• Is Wallace saying to ISIS they better “buy American?” Is Wallace in the tank for ISIS? I don’t know.

• Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.

• Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger.

• The U.S isn’t sufficiently vetting the sale of weapons to the repressive government of Egypt, and doesn’t know enough about how those weapons are being used – including night vision goggles and riot control weapons.

• The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is a beautiful, haunting place. The most iconic landmark is the “A-bomb dome,” atop a large building that was not completely destroyed. As we left the memorial, Koji Hosokawa told us to stop. He looked us in the eye and told us not to forget the victims: “People lived here. They lived here.” President Obama should meet Koji Hosokawa and other hibakusha, and hear their stories.

• Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing anything but worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking has become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition. It’s as if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked “solutions” and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking, over-armed soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.

• The gradual erosion of the cease-fire in Syria over the past month is the result of multiple factors shaping the conflict, but one of the underlying reasons is the Obama administration’s failure to carry out its commitment to Russia to get US-supported opposition groups to separate themselves physically from the Nusra Front – the al-Qaeda organization in Syria.

• The request by a U.S. Army captain to a federal court for a declaratory judgment about his constitutional duties regarding going to war is the latest reminder of the unsatisfactory situation in which the United States is engaged in military operations in multiple overseas locales without any authorization other than a couple of outdated and obsolete Congressional resolutions whose relevance is questionable at best.

• The U.S. government’s reliance on drones to sustain perpetual war in the Mideast is meeting resistance from some assigned to carry out and justify these tactics, including a U.S. Army chaplain who resigned in protest, writes Ann Wright.

• Former neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman’s decision, one he has apparently reconsidered, to sell, as he describes, “the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin” is just an another link in the long chain of America’s historical obsession with selling and owning memorabilia connected with the murder of African Americans.

• Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) launched a series of suicide car and truck bombs in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing nearly 100 and wounding nearly 200 persons. Baghdad security had improved over the past couple of years, but the Coalition United for Reform blamed political wrangling on sectarian and party bases for the security lapses that allowed the attacks to take place. The president’s spokesman suggested that Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi might need to fire some security officials responsible for the capital’s well-being for this major lapse.

• Recently I came across a 2006 article that Eric Herring published in the Journal of International Studies titled ‘Remaking the mainstream: the case for activist IR scholarship’. In the article Herring argues that “British IR [International Relations] academics… produce very little primarily empirical work which documents the record of the British state in creating human misery abroad”. In addition he goes onto note “British IR academics engage in very little research exposing the deceptions and self-deceptions deployed by the British state to deny its responsibility for that human misery”.

• A rare self-critical admission from an academic about his own work and that of his profession, Herring’s argument struck me as very important and deserving of a wider audience. Currently a Professor of World Politics and Research Director in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, I asked Herring about his 2006 article and whether anything had changed ten years later.

• Hambling argues that although most people think of armed-drones as being large pilotless aircraft such as the Reaper and Predator, their development is being paralleled by much smaller devices such as the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System (LMAMS). The latter is suitable for use by individual soldiers, each of whom would carry small but lethal explosives with a range of several miles.

• Revealing serious fractures within the 9/11 Commission, a former member of that panel has called for the immediate declassification of the so-called “28 pages” that detail Saudi ties to the 2001 terrorist attack, saying they expose evidence that Saudi government officials were involved in the hijackers’ support network.

• “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” Republican John Lehman said in an interview with the Guardian published Thursday. Referring to the commission’s final report, issued in 2004, Lehman stated: “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.”

• He said recent claims made by the Commission’s former chairman and vice-chair—that only one Saudi government employee was “implicated” in supporting the hijackers, and that the Obama administration should be cautious about releasing the 28 pages because they contain “raw, unvetted material” but no “smoking gun”—was “a game of semantics.”

• A former member of the independent commission that investigated the September 11 terror attacks has claimed that Saudi government officials supported the hijackers.

• John F Lehman, who sat on the 9/11 Commission from 2003 to 2004, said there was an “awful lot of circumstantial evidence” implicating several employees in the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs.

• “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he told the Guardian.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden weighed in on the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s alleged sharing of classified information on her private server, saying that there is no coming back for the Democratic front-runner once she committed the “original sin.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• This ancient idea, applied since Roman days, is pretty straightforward: The government has an affirmative duty to protect natural resources that are shared by everybody. In the past, the doctrine has been used to prevent the selling off of lakefront shorelines or the bulldozing of rare fossil beds. With the clock ticking on the climate crisis, many legal scholars and activists have begun asking whether it’s time to put the public trust to work on climate change.

• In November, West Virginians will have two choices. A a party-switching, self-funding, brash billionaire who denies climate change and loves coal, and a lawmaker who talks about bringing jobs back to the state.

• And that’s just the gubernatorial race.

• On Tuesday night, Jim Justice easily won the West Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary and will face off against Republican state Senate President Bill Cole in the general election.

• For the first time ever, the EPA will regulate methane emissions.

• Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private sector coal company (now bankrupt), recently faced off against environmental groups in a Minnesota court case. The case was to determine whether the State of Minnesota should continue using its exceptionally low established estimates of the ‘social cost of carbon’, or whether it should adopt higher federal estimates.

• The social cost of carbon is an estimate of how much the damages from carbon pollution cost society via climate change damages. In theory, it represents how much the price of fossil fuels should increase to reflect their true costs.

• The coal company called forth witnesses that represented the fringe 2–3% of experts who reject the consensus that humans are the primary cause of global warming, including Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen, while their opposition invited witnesses like Andrew Dessler and John Abraham who represent the 97% expert consensus.

• Taking advantage of Brazil’s present political turbulence, as the battle to impeach President Dilma Rousseff reaches its climax, reactionary politicians are quietly rolling back environmental and indigenous protection laws in defiance of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement.

• Environmentalists say that if the bill known as PEC 65/2012, now at the Senate committee stage, is approved, it means that major infrastructure projects will be able to go ahead regardless of their impacts on biodiversity, indigenous areas, traditional communities and conservation areas.

• As the suspension of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff Thursday triggers a political reshuffling, environmentalists in Latin America’s largest ailing economy worry that powers in the new administration favor infrastructure development and financial recovery over environmental laws.

• As it is now customary in multiple countries, Brazil requires environmental assessments prior to construction projects. But the Senate is now considering a bill that would give fast-track status to projects like roads, dams or ports deemed in the national interest by the president. That would allow developers to move forward simply by saying an environmental impact study is in the works, but bar agencies from halting the project once construction begins. Moreover, there is a proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate environmental licensing altogether. These proposals aren’t new, but their political backing could get a push within Brazil’s new interim government.

• Speaking after the vote, Rousseff remained defiant, denying that she had committed any crime, and accusing her opponents of mounting a “coup”.

• Key climate solutions have been advancing considerably faster than anyone expected just a few years ago thanks to aggressive market-based deployment efforts around the globe. These solutions include such core enabling technologies for a low-carbon world as solar, wind, efficiency, electric cars, and battery storage.

• If you know about West Virginia’s attitude toward coal, and you also know about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) attitude toward coal, then Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential primary results might have come as a bit of a surprise.

• Sanders — a staunch environmentalist pushing for more pollution regulations and a nationwide carbon tax — easily won West Virginia over his opponent Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. His win, some environmentalists said, was proof that you don’t have to be pro-coal to win in coal country.

• Six states have joined with TransCanada to sue the Obama administration over its rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline permit application.

• TransCanada filed the suit in a federal court in Houston in January, alleging that the president had overstepped his constitutionally granted powers. The right to regulate trans-border commerce is reserved for Congress, the suit says.

• But the president denied the permit based on national security grounds, which is well within his rights, Center for Biological Diversity attorney Bill Snape told ThinkProgress.

• “They are basically asking the court to second-guess the president on a national interest decision,” Snape said.

• This weekend, hundreds of activists will encircle a Kinder Morgan facility in British Columbia on the ground and on the water, while demanding that Canada break free from fossil fuels, listen to science, and transition to a 100 percent renewable energy.

• Following President Obama’s promise to cut toxic methane leaks at oil and gas facilities, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday announced the U.S. government’s “first-ever” set of standards to reduce such emissions—but the new regulations were decried by environmentalist critics as not far-reaching enough.

• Study of more than 600 vertebrate species shows those that have faced extreme environmental pressures in the past are now best equipped to survive climate change.

• California has long been a leader in tackling climate change. But in June, voters in the San Francisco Bay area will have the chance to take their state’s commitment to addressing the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation a step further.

• Fire is a tool in this part of the world, and every year Indonesian farmers burn down wild forest to make room for more pulpwood, rubber plantations and palm oil. But last year was different. The fires fed on peatland raged beyond control, consuming the timber that burns so easily in the country’s dry season. Indonesia became Hell on Earth, with satellites showing the length of the country swaddled in smoke. Borneo and western Sumatra, the worst-hit areas, glowed like embers. Acid haze poured over the borders and into Malaysia and Singapore and Thailand.

Finance

• Like Disney — two of its seven biggest films over the last decade were directed/written/led by women (Frozen, 2013), or led by a woman (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 2015). Yet its stock is languishing, and its lineup thin of women-directed/-written/-led. Maybe its board needs a shakeup and its stock needs to tank a little further before they wake up and realize an audience composed of +51% of the population shouldn’t be slighted by its hiring practices. Same goes for the rest of the entertainment industry: we expect better, and soon.

• TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) has sparked a public outcry in Europe. The recent leak of many parts of TTIP by Greenpeace, allowing us for the first time to read the negotiating position of the US, confirms the most serious concerns.

• The evil of American “democratic capitalism” is total and irredeemable. TTIP gives corporations unaccountable power over governments and peoples. The corporations must be slapped down hard, fiercely regulated, and forced by threat of long prison sentences to serve the public interest, and not the incomes of the executives and shareholders who comprise the One Percent.

• Workers at Darden Restaurants chains are routinely told they must accept prepaid debit cards instead of paychecks, according to a new report from the worker organization Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United. A quarter of workers surveyed said they asked to be paid some other way and were told the cards are their only option.

• Middle- and low-income households in the U.S. made less money in 2014 than they did in 1999 as the middle class lost ground in almost 90 percent of the country’s metropolitan areas, a new analysis by the Pew Research Center released Wednesday has found.

• The report looked at 229 of the 381 federally designated “metropolitan statistical areas” in the U.S., from Seattle to Boston, which accounted for 76 percent of the nationwide population in 2014. It found that poorer households saw their income drop from a median of $26,373 in 1999 to $23,811 in 2014, while middle-class incomes fell from $77,898 to $72,919 in that same time period.

• The erosion of the middle class came as household incomes decreased, “a reminder that the economy has yet to fully recover from the effects of the Great Recession of 2007-09,” Pew said—but more than that, it is a reflection of rising income inequality.

• It’d be great if we were all self-made men, like Citizen Trump.

• Of course, his self-making, like that of many wealthy people, is based in large part on a wealthy parent giving him a ton of money. Why work for a living when you can just hang around drinking single malt until daddy dies and leaves you his money?

• Trump’s papa left an estate valued at between $100 and $300 million in 1999. A nice start for a career in real estate for Don and his siblings.

• During his election campaign, Khan vowed to be “the most pro-business Mayor London has ever had”; stated his opposition to the “mansion tax”, the nationalisation of banks, and has pledged to work with the Tory government to defeat Corbyn’s push for a “Robin Hood Tax” – a fee on buying stocks, shares and derivatives publicly backed by the Labour leader last summer; and in recent weeks, Khan has described the fact that there are 140-plus billionaires and 400,000 millionaires in London as “a good thing” – echoing the haughty words of Labour’s true blue Tory Peter Mandelson,

• If the U.S. does not end its “hypocrisy” and hold itself to the same tax transparency standards as other nations, efforts to reform offshore secrecy will fail, leaders of the UK’s overseas territories warned at the global anti-corruption summit in London on Thursday.

• The comments—from leaders of the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the Isle of Man—came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told those gathered at the summit, “Corruption, writ large, is as much of an enemy [as terrorism], because it destroys nation states, as some of the extremists we are fighting or the other challenges we face.”

• The summit follows a massive leak of documents known as the Panama Papers which exposed how the world’s elite use offshore tax havens to hide their wealth, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, who hosted the conference.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This just in from the Obama administration: corruption is bad, m’kay?

• No, seriously.

• Apparently, President Obama’s commitment to fighting corruption is so important that Secretary of State John Kerry actually felt the need to fly to London to reaffirm the United States government isn’t full of dirty rotten scoundrels who are just up to no good.

• Today the government will publish a white paper setting out its plans for the future of the BBC. At the BAFTA awards on Sunday the director Peter Kosminsky rightly received a standing ovation. He used his acceptance speech to voice his fear that the White Paper will compromise our precious, independent, world-renowned organisation. He cautioned that the BBC was on a path to evisceration that would leave the broadcasting landscape bereft – and the output of television and radio determined solely by what lines the pockets of shareholders.

• The government’s proposals would be a blow to both the BBC’s freedom from government interference, and its place at the heart of British popular culture.

• Apocalyptic rumours followed by a row-back and relief. It’s an age-old strategy, but what’s the reality behind the government’s BBC proposals?

• I have cropped this to protect the identity of the sender, but I assure you it is perfectly real and not at all unusual. (This is actually sexist on my part as if it were a man I would not have cropped it. I can only ask you to forgive me, I am old). I am sure Kuenssberg, being vastly more famous, gets more abuse than I do. But the fact either of us receives abuse does not mean we are above criticism. The young woman tweeting above being unpleasant is not evidence I am right about anything. Still less does it mean criticism of me should be suppressed.

• To say that abusers “hijacked” the petition criticising Kuenssberg for her terrible biased journalism, is like saying your car is hijacked by an insect landing on it.

• But the extremely cheerful news is that the furore caused by 38 Degrees removing the petition has meant that tens of millions more people have heard of the petition, than if it had gone ahead. David Cameron standing up in the House of Commons saying Kuenssberg is not biased in itself will have made a million people realise that she is. Laura Kuenssberg, meet Barbra Streisand. The “Streisand Effect”, named after the actress’ attempt to suppress photos of her mansion, is the internet phenomenon whereby attempts to suppress information lead to far more people knowing it.

• Donald Trump’s ascension to the Republican presidential nomination was predictable, paved by years of right-wing fear-mongering and dissemination of anti-knowledge, says former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren.

• As the presidential election of 2016 unfolds, presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump seems bent on proving a simple aphorism: No one ever went broke overestimating the misogyny of the American people.

• Trump continues to spew rhetoric seemingly designed to alienate women voters, prompting pundits and analysts to search for the strategic significance of such utterances. “Donald Trump has been playing the man card,” Kelly Dittmar of the the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics told NPR’s Asma Khalid in an interview that aired on Tuesday.

• And lately, he seems to be micro-targeting the key domestic-violence constituency. At a campaign stop in Spokane over the weekend, Trump renewed his complaint against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for playing the so-called “woman’s card.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Companies like Facebook and Twitter aren’t obliged to host users’ posts, but their efforts to filter our feeds nonetheless seem at odds with the values of free expression

• The dream of internet freedom has died. What a dream it was. Twenty years ago, nerdy libertarians hailed the web as the freest public sphere that mankind had ever created. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, warned the ‘governments of the industrial world’, those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, that they had ‘no sovereignty where we gather’. The ‘virus of liberty’ was spreading, it said.

• When does video game localization become ‘censorship’? And how often are localization decisions just made for business reasons?

• Today on Kotaku Splitscreen, former XSEED editor Jessica Chavez joins the show to talk about her experiences bringing games from Japan to U.S. shores. She’s got plenty of stories from the trenches of localization, which is far more complex than most people realize. (As it turns out, the localization decisions that some people complain about are usually made in tandem with the developers themselves.) We also talk Trails and geek out about Suikoden II because of course we do.

• On Wednesday, May 11, in the midst of final exams, over 70 Brown University students in the Brown/RISD Hillel community gathered in the Hillel building to watch three short films about the Palestinian Nakba, produced by the Israeli NGO, Zochrot. As members of the Hillel community, we came together to watch these films on the eve of Yom HaAtzmaut, eager to make a space for Jewish students to learn about a history often excluded from mainstream Jewish discourse. In the post-screening discussion, students from diverse political backgrounds reflected on the thought-provoking films and unpacked their relationship to the Nakba as American Jews.

• Ramírez has since apologized for the comment, saying that he was sorry to the “Jewish people if they were offended by the remarks,” but added that Israel had made a “disproportionate response” to his comments.

• Despite having lived in Israel for 22 years with no criminal record of any kind, Omar Barghouti (above) was this week denied the right to travel outside the country. As one of the pioneers of the increasingly powerful movement to impose boycotts, sanctions and divestment measures (BDS) on Israel, Barghouti, an articulate, English-speaking activist, has frequently traveled around the world advocating his position. The Israeli government’s refusal to allow him to travel is obviously intended to suppress his speech and activism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the world leaders who traveled last year to Paris to participate in that city’s “free speech rally.”

• Jensen added, “When Facebook and other tech companies claim to be neutral because they’re running these algorithms and they’ve taken human judgment out of it, that’s no more of a coherent claim than when The New York Times claims to be neutral.”

• It is difficult to convince ourselves that Facebook is on a par with traditional corporate media, simply because most of what we consume on the site is content that our friends generate. But in reality, Facebook’s goal, like all profit-based corporations, is to make as much money as possible. To that end, it is crucial that the company sell as many eyeballs to advertisers as possible, just like traditional corporate media. Whether the alleged manipulation of news feeds was geared toward that end is as yet unknown. Still, it is worth reminding ourselves that what we are exposed to when we use the website may be slanted.

• Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organization

Privacy/Surveillance

• Computer security pioneer John McAfee pulls out his cell phone to stare at a notification on the screen.

• “It says something changed in my account, please press next,” McAfee says. “I have the best (security) habits in the world and I cannot keep my phone secure.”

• McAfee, whose name became synonymous with antivirus protection, says he’s no longer as worried about computer security. Now, he says, the danger comes from the camera and microphones we carry everywhere in our pockets, attached to our smartphones. It’s a “trivial” matter, he says, for a hacker to remotely and secretly turn on a phone’s sensors.

• There are many dimensions to the concept of privacy.

• A fundamental question is: Who owns you and your life?

• If you are not the owner of your person – that will open up for abominations like slavery, organ farming, and some absurd utilitarian concepts.

• But if you are the owner of your person – this must include your body as well as your mind and your faculties.

• So… if you are the owner of your person – does anybody else (a private person or a collective of persons) have the right to look into your mind, your thoughts and your beliefs? Does anybody else have the right to look into your relations to other people, your quest for knowledge or your personal habits and preferences?

• A letter signed by nearly 45,000 people calls upon Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to reverse the company’s broad VPN ban. To enforce geographical restrictions Netflix started blocking VPN users more aggressively this year, but according to OpenMedia there are better alternatives that respect the privacy of users.

• After buying a software tool to access a dead terrorist’s encrypted iPhone, the FBI is exploring how to make broader use of the hack while bracing for a larger battle involving encrypted text messages, e-mails and other data, Director James Comey said.

• If it’s not that, then you would think it’d have to be the wacky interpretation, the middle option. After all, Americans are at least as likely to use Gmail as foreigners are, so to get the Gmail of Americans overseas, the NSA would presumably ask Google for assistance, and therefore trigger 703, unless there were a wacky legal interpretation to bypass that. There are things that make it clear NSA has a great deal of redundancy in its collection, even with PRISM collection, which makes it clear they do double dip, obtaining even Gmail overseas and domestically (which is why they’d have GCHQ hack Google’s overseas fiber). It’s possible, though, that the NSA conducts so much bulk collection overseas it is actually easier (or legally more permissive) to just collect US person content from bulk collections obtained overseas, thereby bypassing any domestic provider and onerous legal notice. I suppose it’s also possible that NSA now uses 703 (my proof they don’t dates to 2012 or earlier), having had to resort to playing by the rules as more providers lock up their data better in the wake of the Snowden revelations. (Note, Mieke Eoyang has an interesting FAA suggestion that would require exclusivity when NSA accesses content from US providers, thereby preventing them from stealing Google data overseas.)

• When you ride on buses or trains in many parts of the United States, what you say could be recorded. Get on a New Jersey Transit light rail train in Hoboken or Jersey City, for example, and you might notice an inconspicuous sign that says “video and audio systems in use.”

• A lot of riders are not happy about it.

• “Yeah I don’t like that,” says Michael Dolan of Bayonne, N.J. “I don’t want conversations being picked up because it’s too Orwellian for me. It reeks of Big Brother.”

• The FBI has been building a massive biometric database for the last eight years. The Next Generation Identification System (NGIS) starts with millions of photos of criminals (and non-criminals) and builds from there. Palm prints, fingerprints, iris scans, tattoos and biographies are all part of the mix.

• Despite having promised to deliver a Privacy Impact Assessment of the database back in 2012, the FBI’s system went live towards the end of 2014 without one. That’s a big problem, considering the database’s blend of guilty/innocent Americans, along with its troublesome error rate. The FBI obviously hopes the false positive rate will continue to decline as tech capabilities improve, but any qualms about bogus hits have been placed on the back burner while the agency dumps every piece of data it can find into the database.

• The FBI has shown little motivation to address Americans’ privacy concerns by providing an updated Impact Assessment (the one it does have dates back to the program’s inception in 2008), but has wasted no time in alerting legislators about its own privacy concerns.

• Oregon standoff defendants want a federal judge to order prosecutors to disclose whether law enforcement intercepted their emails, phone calls or other electronic communications using national security surveillance methods.

• “Defendants are entitled to know how the government monitored their communications and activities and then to test … whether the government’s evidence is derived from that surveillance,” defense lawyer Amy Baggio wrote in a court filing Wednesday afternoon.

• “You’re gonna make me do this?” Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA director, said to Business Insider before watching the “Snowden” trailer for the first time.

• After about 30 seconds, Hayden looked up from the iPad screen and said: “Could we be done?”

• Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” tells the story of NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden who infamously leaked classified information about the NSA’s surveillance activities to journalists in 2013. To Hayden, the portrayal is an “alternative universe.”

• On September 12, 2001, Bill Binney snuck back into work at the NSA dressed like cleaning staff so he could try to help understand who had attacked the United States. A top NSA mathematician, Binney had rolled out a sophisticated metadata analysis system called ThinThread, only to have it canceled less than a month before 9/11. Top executives at the agency had decided a clunky program called Trailblazer, contracted out to the intelligence contractor giant SAIC, would be NSA’s future, not the cheaper, more effective and privacy-protective ThinThread.

• While NSA Director General Michael Hayden had sent most NSA staffers home on 9/11 and the day after —hence Binney’s disguise — the contractors were hard at work. As Binney describes in “A Good American“ — a documentary about Binney due for wider release in September — some contractors working in his unit had gotten a warning. “While I was in there trying to look at the material on my computer, the president of the contracting group that I had working on ThinThread came over to me and said that he’d just been in a contractor meeting” with a former top SAIC official who moved back to NSA, supporting Trailblazer. The contractors, it turns out, were warned not to embarrass companies like SAIC, which (the implication is) had just failed to warn about the biggest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. “Do not embarrass large companies,” the former SAIC manager, according to Binney, said to the other contractor. “You do your part, you’ll get your share, there’s plenty for everybody.” Stay quiet about the failures that led to 9/11, and you’ll be financially rewarded.

• Ever heard of an “app interception system”?

• So-called app interception or cloud interception systems are small physical boxes that steal social media passwords, emails, Dropbox contents and more from smartphones of passers-by, all with no interaction from the target.

• Now, in response to Freedom of Information requests from Motherboard, the FBI has refused to neither confirm nor deny whether the agency has any contracts with two of the main companies selling such devices.

• “The mere acknowledgment of whether or not the FBI has any such records in and of itself would disclose techniques, procedures, and/or guidelines that could reasonably be expected to risk of circumvention of the law. Thus, the FBI neither confirms nor denies the existence of any records,” the responses to two requests read.

Civil Rights/Policing

• We’ve noted a few times how interstate inmate calling service (ICS) companies have a disturbingly cozy relationship with government, striking (technically buying) monopoly deals that let them charge inmate families $14 per minute. Worse, some ICS companies like Securus Technologies have been under fire for helping the government spy on privileged inmate attorney communications, information that was only revealed after Securus was hacked late last year. Given the apathy for prison inmates and their families (“Iff’n ya don’t like high prices, don’t go to prison son!”) reform on this front has been glacial at best.

• As such, ripping off inmate families and delivering sub-par services continues unabated. As many prisons eliminate personal visits, these ICS firms have expanded revenues by pretending to offer next-generation teleconferencing services. But while slightly more economical ($10 for 20 minutes), apparently companies like Securus with no competitors, a captive audience, and no repercussions for sloppy technology haven’t quite figured out how to make this whole video chat thing work yet.

• Amos Yee, the teenager who was found guilty for hurting the feelings of Christians and posting an obscene image online last year, was arrested by the police on Wednesday and since released on bail.

• Teenage blogger Amos Yee has been arrested again for offences under two sections of the Penal Code – a year after he was convicted of wounding the feelings of Christians and uploading an obscene image.

• Police told the newspaper that Yee had violated sections of Singapore’s Penal Code after he published a YouTube video in November last year.

• Teen blogger Amos Yee has been arrested again, a year after he was convicted of wounding the feelings of Christians and uploading an obscene image.

• Teenage blogger Amos Yee, whose online comments on religion prompted police reports to be lodged against him, has been arrested, his former lawyer Alfred Dodwell confirmed. Yee was arrested on Wednesday (May 11), said Mr Dodwell, who was contacted by Yee’s mother seeking help.

• Lieutenant Timothy Filbeck of the Butts County Sheriff’s Department found himself in a not-at-all unusual situation: his home was being foreclosed upon. Like many others who have undergone this process, Filbeck was served with a variety of notices explaining the steps of the process and warning him of the consequences of not complying.

• Filbeck moved out of the doomed home and into a family member’s. This would apparently be the last rational thing he would do in response to the foreclosure. The insurance company for the bank inspected the home four times before coming to the conclusion it had been abandoned by Filbeck. The utilties had been turned off and “cobwebs extended from wall to wall in every room.”

• When the company began preparing the house for auction, things started to get interesting. Employees spent a day cleaning the house out and removing any abandoned property inside it. At some point, Filbeck apparently decided to drop by his old house and noticed the things he had left behind were missing. He could have contacted any of the companies involved in the foreclosure proceedings. He could have done nothing after realizing that leaving a foreclosed house abandoned tends to result in the removal of property also considered abandoned. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals notes that Lieutenant Filbeck chose “none of the above.”

• BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team have been expelled from North Korea after being detained over their reporting.

• Our correspondent, producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard were stopped by officials on Friday as they were about to leave North Korea.

• The myth of the widely debunked “Ferguson effect” on policing is hard to kill. FBI Director James Comey once again raised the specter of the impact of protests against police brutality on police effectiveness yesterday, when he made comments suggesting that a spike in violent crime in some cities may be correlated to officers’ fear of doing their jobs because of community hostility and the growing popularity of cop watching.

• The education law that President Obama signed at the end of last year to replace No Child Left Behind, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, has garnered widespread bipartisan support. The legislation is particularly popular among states and teachers, who hope that ESSA will allow them to play a larger role in shaping the education system.

• With the sentence commutations announced last week, President Barack Obama has now cut more than 300 harsh drug war prison sentences, besting the previous six presidents combined. Thousands more could be eligible for commutations, but bureaucratic obstacles inside the Justice Department mean the clock is likely to run out before Obama gets a chance to free them.

• The Ferguson police department has been in turmoil since the August 2014 killing of Michael Brown—but a newly appointed police chief hopes to correct the deep-seeded wrongs. It starts with clearing the department of crooked cops, which is the new police chief’s goal.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve noted several times how one of the sleaziest lobbying tactics in telecom is the co-opting of minority or “diversity” groups to support policies that actually hurt these groups’ constituents. Such theater benefits large telecom companies by presenting the illusion of broad support for what usually are extremely anti-consumer (or anti-small business and startup) policies. And it’s not just minority groups being used in such fashion; telecom lobbyists have long used “retired seniors,” hearing impaired groups and cattle rancher associations to push bad policy.

• This kind of disinformation is pervasive, incredibly destructive, and common practice in everything from the construction industry to patent reform.

• But telecom lobbyists have long been masters at this particular game. It works something like this: an ISP like Comcast (or some other telecom-affiliated lobbying group) will help fund a group’s new event center. In exchange, these groups parrot any policy Comcast puts forth, be it opposition to net neutrality or support for the latest merger. Quid pro quo obligations are never put in writing, letting these groups claim their positions only coincidentally mirror that of their donors.

• People operating open WiFi networks in Germany have long risked being held liable for the actions of those using them. However, to the relief of thousands of citizens that position will change later this year after the country’s coalition government decided to abolish the legislation which holds operators responsible for the file-sharing activities of others.

DRM

• Dear member of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Advisory Committee,

• You may have heard that over the past year we’ve been trying to insert legal safeguards into the Encrypted Media Extensions project at the W3C, which standardizes streaming video DRM. We’ve previously been opposed to the W3C adopting EME, because of the legal issues around DRM, and because DRM requires user agents to obey third parties, rather than their owners.

• However, we think that there’s a compromise that both DRM advocates and opponents should be able to live with.

• I’m writing today to see if you will support us in an upcoming W3C vote on the charter of the Media Extensions Group, where we will be proposing this compromise.

• This letter briefly describes briefly the problem, our proposed solution, and what you can do to help.

Intellectual Monopolies

• US President Barack Obama yesterday signed into law a measure aimed at strengthening trade secret protection including by allowing federal courts to hear cases involving trade secret theft.

• As Techdirt readers well know, Big Pharma really hates compulsory licensing of its patented drugs, where a country steps in and allows an expensive drug to be made more cheaply in order to provide wider access for its people. Such massive pressure is applied to nations contemplating this move, that even global giants like India quail. A new story is unfolding that reveals just how far companies are prepared to go in order to prevent it from happening. It concerns Colombia’s possible use of a compulsory license for the drug imatinib, sold under the name Glivec, and used to treat leukemia. Despite the fact that the company holding patents on the drug, Novartis, is Swiss, the US has started to lean heavily on Colombia in order to persuade it not to go ahead with the move.

Trademarks

• There are two slogans that will be ever-identified with Andy Grove. The first is “Intel Inside”, while the second is “Only the Paranoid Survive”, the title of his 1996 book in which he emphasizes the importance of a company to avoid complacency, if it hopes to stay ahead of its competitors. The Economist magazine, in its remembrance of Andy Grove, could have chosen either slogan as best capturing Grove’s legacy. It chose to entitle the piece– “The man who put Intel inside”.

Copyrights

• The Intellectual Property Office has outlined harsher approaches towards copyright, trademark, and patent enforcement in the UK over the next few years.

• Rather than the “notice and takedown” approach currently used for handling copyright infringement, the UK government is mulling the idea of advancing it to “notice and trackdown,” although the details are not yet clear.

• Beyond increased enforcement, it appears that the IPO also wants to educate consumers and users of “the benefits of respecting IP rights, and do so.” The IPO wants to get ‘em young, too, by encouraging “greater respect” for copyright among children and students.

• These new strategies are outlined in a new UK government paper called “Protecting creativity, supporting innovation: IP enforcement 2020.” The document sets out how it will make “effective, proportionate and accessible enforcement of IP rights a priority for the next four years.”

• Another day, another story of copyright being used for censorship, rather than as an incentive to create. Here’s the headline: Gene Kelly’s widow is suing to stop an academic book exploring various interviews that were done over the decades with the famed actor/dancer. And here’s the lawsuit, in which Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, who was married to Gene Kelly for the last seven years of his life, claims that she holds the copyright on every interview that Kelly ever did.

• During hours of unrelenting cross-examination today, Andy Rubin, Google’s former Android chief, was on the stand in the Oracle v. Google trial defending how he built the mobile OS.

• Rubin’s testimony began yesterday. He’s another one of the star witnesses in this second courtroom showdown between the two software giants in which Oracle has said it will seek up to $9 billion in damages for Google’s use of certain Java APIs in the Android operating system. Since an appeals court decided that APIs can be copyrighted, Google’s only remaining defense in this case is that its use of those APIs constitutes “fair use.”

• Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “world-class attorneys,” as Judge William Alsup noted to the jury. And while each company would prefer to spend their money elsewhere, these are businesses that can afford to spend years and untold resources in the courtroom.

• Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the overwhelming majority of developers in the computer industry, whether they’re hobbyist free software creators or even large companies. Regardless of the outcome of this fair use case, the fact that it proceeded to this stage at all casts a long legal shadow over the entire world of software development.

• For purely emotional reasons, this retrial appears rigged to me. Various pretrial decisions didn’t seem evenhanded to me, with Google perhaps benefiting from Judge Alsup’s frustration with the fact that his highest-profile IP ruling was nullified by three higher judges than him. Judge Alsup would, of course, benefit from a final decision in Google’s favor in the sense that his 2012 non-copyrightability blunder would then be deemed inconsequential in retrospect.

• Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz took the stand today in the second Oracle v. Google trial, testifying about how the Java language and APIs were used while he was at Sun’s helm.

• After a brief overview of his career path, Schwartz launched into a discussion about Java, a software language that Sun created and popularized. It’s critical testimony in the Oracle v. Google lawsuit, in which Oracle claims that Google’s use of Java APIs, now owned by Oracle, violates copyright law. Oracle is seeking up to $9 billion in damages.

• Was the Java language, created by Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, “free and open to use,” Google lawyer Robert Van Nest asked?

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