● 06.28.16

● Links 28/6/2016: Vista 10 Updategate, OpenMandriva 3.0 Beta 2

Posted in News Roundup at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• One of the greatest things about running Linux is the freedom it provides. Where the division among the Linux community appears is in how we value this freedom.

• For some, the freedom enjoyed by using Linux is the freedom from vendor lock-in or high software costs. Most would call this a practical consideration. Others users would tell you the freedom they enjoy is software freedom. This means embracing Linux distributions that support the Free Software Movement, avoiding proprietary software completely and all things related.

• In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the differences between these two freedoms and how they affect Linux usage.

• To that point, there was a report that a mail server failure in a large business office remained a mystery for two days until someone found an old Pentium II back in the corner of some obscure closet with a burned out power supply. It is reported that the Slackware/Debian/Red Hat machine had been plugging away as a mail server for a number of years, completely unattended. That’s feasible I suppose, but I further suppose that it’s a modern day parable about how open source can indeed, carry the day.

• With about a month left for many PC users to upgrade to Windows 10 at no charge, Microsoft is being criticized for its aggressive — some say too aggressive — campaign to get people to install the new operating system.

• Microsoft has had to pay a Windows user in California US$10,000 over a forced upgrade to Windows 10, according to a report in the Seattle Times.

• The user, Teri Goldstein, runs a travel agency in Sausalito, a San Francisco Bay Area city in Marin County, California.

• Microsoft recently paid a (very small) price for its Windows 10 upgrade tactics, and that was before they became increasingly aggressive.

• A CALIFORNIA woman has set a precedent after a court ruled that she was entitled to damages over the installation of Windows 10 on her machine.

• Teri Goldstein, a travel agent, testified that the new operating system had auto-downloaded, started to install, failed, and left her Windows 7 computer running painfully slowly and often unusable for days.

• “I had never heard of Windows 10,” Goldstein told reporters. “Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to update.”

• Company withdraws appeal leaving it liable for $10,000 compensation judgment after botched automatic upgrade of travel agent’s computer

• As a result of a legal suit, Microsoft has paid a woman $10,000 over the forced Windows 10 upgrade.

• A California woman has won $10,000 from Microsoft after a sneaky Windows 10 update wrecked the computer she used to run her business. Now she’s urging everyone to follow suit and “fight back.”

• Teri Goldstein – who manages a travel agency in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco – told The Register she landed the compensation by taking Microsoft to a small claims court.

• Rather than pursue a regular lawsuit, she chose the smaller court because it was better suited to sorting out consumer complaints. Crucially, it meant Microsoft couldn’t send one of its top-gun lawyers – or any lawyer in fact: small claims courts are informal and attorneys are generally not allowed. Instead, Redmond-based Microsoft had to send a consumer complaints rep to argue its case.

Server

• The Docker developers are working hard these days to bring us one of the biggest releases of the widely-used open-source and cross-platform container engine, Docker 1.12.

• When Docker 1.0 debuted in June 2014, it was missing a key feature: fully integrated networking that works. In June 2016, networking in Docker containers is a very different story, with a host of new capabilities now present in the Docker 1.12 milestone, which was officially released last week.

• At the core of Docker’s networking capabilities is the libnetwork stack, which first debuted in the Docker 1.7 release in June 2015 and became fully integrated in the Docker 1.9 update. Libnetwork is based on technology built and since expanded by SocketPlane, a company that Docker acquired in March 2015.

Kernel Space

Benchmarks

• For your viewing pleasure this afternoon are some fresh NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900/1000 benchmarks with the 367.27 display driver compared to various Radeon GCN GPUs using a patched Linux 4.7 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git as of this past weekend.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• When Docker 1.0 debuted in June 2014, it was missing a key feature: fully integrated networking that works. In June 2016, networking in Docker containers is a very different story, with a host of new capabilities now present in the Docker 1.12 milestone, which was officially released last week.

• At the core of Docker’s networking capabilities is the libnetwork stack, which first debuted in the Docker 1.7 release in June 2015 and became fully integrated in the Docker 1.9 update. Libnetwork is based on technology built and since expanded by SocketPlane, a company that Docker acquired in March 2015.

Games

• I’ve been scared to click that play button on Stellaris recently, as it sucks up so much time it’s crazy. The patch named Asimov has been released!

• To be honest with you, I still think it’s one of the best strategy games available to date on Linux. For a space sci-fi fan like myself it’s a wet dream.

• Factorio is an absolute gem of a sandbox game and I love it. It’s another game I’m terrible scared to load up as I will lose days to it, this new update has me inching closer to the play button.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.20 has just been released on 21st of March.

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• It was a busy day in Linux with Slack, antiX, and OpenMandriva all working towards their next releases. Sam Varghese quoted Alberto Planas who said openSUSE sees about 1600 new installations each month and Gentoo’s Donnie Berkholz posted his retirement notice. Bruce Byfield posted two interesting articles today, one explaining the difference between an Open Source user and a Free Software Activist and the other describing the stringent Debian packaging policies. As a bonus, a lady in California won a $10,000 award in small claims court from Microsoft over its Windows 10 behavior.

• OpenMandriva is a cutting edge distribution compiled with LLVM/clang. Combined with the high level of optimisation used for both code and linking (by enabling LTO) used in its building, this gives the OpenMandriva desktop an unbelievably crisp response to operations on the KDE Plasma5 desktop which makes it a pleasure to use.

Gentoo Family

• I’m sad to say it’s the end of the road for me with Gentoo, after 13 years volunteering my time (my “anniversary” is tomorrow). My time and motivation to commit to Gentoo have steadily declined over the past couple of years and eventually stopped entirely. It was an enormous part of my life for more than a decade, and I’m very grateful to everyone I’ve worked with over the years.

• My last major involvement was running our participation in the Google Summer of Code, which is now fully handed off to others. Prior to that, I was involved in many things from migrating our X11 packages through the Big Modularization and maintaining nearly 400 packages to serving 6 terms on the council and as desktop manager in the pre-council days. I spent a long time trying to change and modernize our distro and culture. Some parts worked better than others, but the inertia I had to fight along the way was enormous.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

Red Hat Family

• At Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7. The company also introduced the JBoss Core Services Collection to help developers create JBoss enterprise applications.

• In San Francisco at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced the release of the Red Hat Container Development Kit 2.1 (RHCDK).

• This new developer kit, one of the many free programming tool kits Red Hat offers its Linux customers, is meant to enable programmers to easily create enterprise-ready containerized applications which target both OpenShift 3 development and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environments.

• Red Hat officially closed on its acquisition of enterprise Java tools vendor JBoss for $350 million last June. Ever since, Red Hat has been growing its Java application tools business and expanding its development products and projects.

Finance

Debian Family

• Unless you are a Debian maintainer, you probably haven’t read the Debian Policy Manual. However, when Ubuntu started promoting Snappy packages as a more secure solution to package management, the claim was challenged, not by reference to the technical structure of Debian packages, but to the Debian Policy Manual.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Today, June 27, 2016, Canonical published a new security notice to inform users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system about the availability of an important kernel update.

Devices/Embedded

• Google’s “Project Bloks” education platform is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero that controls baseboards that talk to “Puck” inputs via a capacitive sensor.

• Google announced a Project Bloks hacker platform for kids, developed with IDEO and Paulo Blikstein of Stanford University. A prototype has been built based on the Linux-driven Raspberry Pi Zero SBC, and now Google is seeking researchers, developers, and designers who are interested in using the technology “to build physical coding experiences.” Later this year, Google will conduct a remote research study with the help of these partners.

• MediaTek launched the fastest open-spec SBC to date with a 96Boards development board that runs Android on its deca-core Cortex-A53 and -A72 Helio X20 SoC.

• The “Helio X20 Development Board” is MediaTek’s first 96Boards form-factor single-board computer, and the most powerful open-spec hacker SBC to date. Although we’ve seen some fast 64-bit SoCs among 96Boards SBCs, such as the HiKey, based on an octa-core, Cortex-A53 HiSilicon Kirin 6220, the Helio X20 Development Board offers an even more powerful Helio X20 system-on-chip processor.

• After informing us the other day about the availability of a new release of his RaspAnd distro that brings the Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system to Raspberry Pi 3 devices, Arne Exton is happy to announce that his RaspEX OS works with the official Raspberry Pi Touch Display.

• T-Firefly’s open-spec, Arduino Uno compatible Fireduino SBC offers Rockchip’s dual-core, Cortex-M3 RKNanoD MCU, plus WiFi, RTC, and MP3 audio.

• Chinese embedded firm T-Firefly is apparently the new name for T-Chip Technology, which sponsors the Firefly open source hardware project. Its Arduino I/O- and IDE-compatible, dual-core Fireduino board is supported by the Firefly project along with Linux/Android hacker boards like the Rockchip RK3128 based Firefly-RK3288 Reload and Firefly FirePrime. Schematics and the like have already been posted.

Phones

Android

• Google is planning a shake-up of the smartphone market by releasing its own handset, a move that would tighten its grip on mobile software and see it compete directly with the iPhone.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

Web Browsers

• So here’s the thing. My own tests shows Edge has a clear power advantage in light browsing chores; it’s just not as dramatic as Microsoft’s own tests. But the truth is actually more complicated because our browsing habits are so different, and can change from day to day. If you play a game or use Outlook all day, you can make a pretty good guess about how each will impact battery life. A browser though is a window to the unlimited and ever-changing Internet and no one uses it the same way.

Mozilla

• For months there’s been talk of a Servo/Browser.html technical preview in June and there’s just one week left to the month… It looks like Mozilla is still planning on meeting this milestone!

• Servo has made much progress this year as a next-generation browser layout engine written in Rust and featuring cool features like its GPU back-end while they’ve long been planning to ship a technical preview release in June along with a TP of their Browser.html front-end. They also have still been planning to ship at least one Servo component inside Gecko/Firefox this calendar year.

SaaS/Back End

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of its DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple completed all but the fiddliest finishing touches without help from the DTrace team. Even when Apple did meet with us, we had no idea that it was mere weeks away from the finished product being announced to the world. DTrace was a testament both to Apple’s engineering acumen as well as its storied secrecy.

• Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this point has been mostly breathless elongations of Apple’s developer documentation. With a dearth of detail I decided to attend the presentation and Q&A with the APFS team at WWDC. Dominic Giampaolo and Eric Tamura, two members of the APFS team, gave an overview to a packed room; along with other members of the team, they patiently answered questions later in the day. With those data points and some first-hand usage I wanted to provide an overview and analysis both as a user of Apple-ecosystem products and as a long-time operating system and file system developer.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Microsoft — yes, Microsoft — announced at the DevNation conference in San Francisco that it’s releasing an open-source language server protocol. More interesting still, this is being done in concert with Codenvy and Red Hat.

• Google for Education and digital education company TES announced they will be partnering to provide teachers access to digital resources that accompany Google Expeditions. For those unfamiliar, Google Expeditions is a highly anticipated pioneer program that allows teachers to take students on virtual field trips.

• Next-gen edtech and virtual reality are both high-stakes platforms that have quite a bit of potential when it comes to defining our near-future. The marriage of the platforms may be far from ready for primetime, but there is a lot of flirtation happening in the space right now thanks to some major players.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• On 21-23 June 2016, Ministers and stakeholders gathered in Cancún, Mexico, for an OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Digital Economy: Innovation, Growth and Social Prosperity, to move the digital agenda forward in four key policy areas foundational to the growth of the digital economy. Our Legal Director, Mishi Choudhary represented the United States civil society at the OECD Ministerial Panel on The Economic and Social Benefits of Internet Openness, chaired by the Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Hon’ble Navdeep Singh Bains.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• For his part, Wohlt is exploring ways to protect the online collaborative process. In his view, even more important than the transformation of bean water into an extraordinarily useful vegan ingredient is the community that has developed around it.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Excited by the idea of an open-source, Arduino-based outlet, capable of remotely controlling your various household devices?

• If so, you’ll definitely want to check out the Portlet: a versatile portmanteau of “portable” and “outlet,” which — despite only consisting of 4 buttons and a simple 2×15 character LCD screen — can be programmed to do everything from switching your lights on at a certain time to keeping your coffee heated at the perfect temperature.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Peterson also noted HPE has a variety of servers built around the Helion OpenStack world, which dovetails well with its contributions to the Open Compute Project. The teams at Helion and Cloudline have continued to join forces in order to provide a better experience for developers, end users, and IT teams working with these servers in their own architecture.

Health/Nutrition

• The Keep Hives Alive Tour, a traveling protest of farmers, agriculture scientists, and activists, has been traveling around the country bringing its message to the masses.

• Keep Hives Alive is a two-fold group: Their aim is both to educate about the desperate need for honeybees and to advocate for concrete legislation that could help protect them. As part of that effort, the tour includes an awfully stark reminder of just how bad things are out there in bee-world: a truck full of 2.6 million dead bees.

Security

• A significant security vulnerability in Google technology that is supposed to protect videos streamed via Google Chrome has been discovered by researchers from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC) in collaboration with a security researcher from Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin, Germany.

• Researchers have encountered a denial-of-service botnet that’s made up of more than 25,000 Internet-connected closed circuit TV devices.

• The researchers with Security firm Sucuri came across the malicious network while defending a small brick-and-mortar jewelry shop against a distributed denial-of-service attack. The unnamed site was choking on an assault that delivered almost 35,000 HTTP requests per second, making it unreachable to legitimate users. When Sucuri used a network addressing and routing system known as Anycast to neutralize the attack, the assailants increased the number of HTTP requests to 50,000 per second.

• Hospitals are pretty hygienic places – except when it comes to passwords, it seems.

• That’s the conclusion of a recent study by researchers at Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania and USC, which found that efforts to circumvent password protections are “endemic” in healthcare environments and mostly go unnoticed by hospital IT staff.

• The report describes what can only be described as wholesale abandonment of security best practices at hospitals and other clinical environments – with the bad behavior being driven by necessity rather than malice.

• Cyber-attacks in the healthcare environment are on the rise, with recent research suggesting that critical healthcare systems could be vulnerable to attack.

• In general, the healthcare industry is proving lucrative for cybercriminals because medical data can be used in multiple ways, for example fraud or identify theft. This personal data often contains information regarding a patient’s medical history, which could be used in targeted spear-phishing attacks.

Defence/Aggression

• No rational person could blame Jeremy Corbyn for Brexit. So why are the Blairites moving against Corbyn now, with such precipitate haste?

• The answer is the Chilcot Report. It is only a fortnight away, and though its form will be concealed by thick layers of establishment whitewash, the basic contours of Blair’s lies will still be visible beneath. Corbyn had deferred to Blairite pressure not to apologise on behalf of the Labour Party for the Iraq War until Chilcot is published.

• It is an Islamic belief that kafir harbi refers to non-believers who can be slain for waging war against Islam.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The Wall Street Journal (6/16/16) published an article headlined “Environmental Groups Change Tune on Nuclear Power: Focus on Climate Change Has Raised Profile of Reactors, Now Viewed as Reliable, Carbon-Free Source of Energy.” Written by Amy Harder, the approximately 600-word piece appeared on the front page of the Journal’s B section.

• Iranian pet lovers are in uproar after dogs were confiscated in a crackdown on ‘vulgar Western culture’.

• One unnamed dog owner in the Isfahan province, central Iran, said officials had shown up suddenly at his house.

• Officers who claimed to be from a veterinary practice took the dog away because it needed to have ‘vaccinations’.

• The owner told Iran’s Shahrvand newspaper: ‘We were shown a piece of paper indicating they were from the municipal veterinary office.

• ‘They came in and took away our dogs under the pretext of vaccination. Ever since our dog was taken away, you only hear the sound of crying and sobbing in our house.’

Finance

• As the dust settles on the EU referendum battleground, some 33 million voters await with bated breath to see what the victors will do now that the nation has spoken to leave.

• Political commentators forecast a dark future for the UK: Jeremy Corbyn has just sacked Hilary Benn to head off a coup, and Boris Johnson could be prime minister come November.

• Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East – irst Iraq, now Syria – are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

• The decision by UK voters to leave the EU is such a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions that – for once – their failures have become a prominent part of the storyline. Media reaction to the Brexit vote falls into two general categories: (1) earnest, candid attempts to understand what motivated voters to make this choice, even if that means indicting one’s own establishment circles, and (2) petulant, self-serving, simple-minded attacks on disobedient pro-leave voters for being primitive, xenophobic bigots (and stupid to boot), all to evade any reckoning with their own responsibility. Virtually every reaction that falls into the former category emphasizes the profound failures of western establishment factions; these institutions have spawned pervasive misery and inequality, only to spew condescending scorn at their victims when they object.

• At 4 am, following the UK referendum on EU membership, Nigel Farage, the leader of the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party, gave a tentative victory speech. Bullish and beaming, but couching his cheer in caveats that not all areas had declared results, flanked by young men in suits jeering and pogoing, Farage announced that if the Leave campaign had won, “We will have done so without a single bullet being fired.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• There is a strong strand of belief among the political class that Boris Johnson has no intention of taking the UK out of the EU. His aim was to see off Cameron and install himself in No. 10, after which he will discover that leaving the EU is proving far too dangerous and call for a second referendum. I suspect that this credits Johnson with a Machiavellian genius he is far from possessing, though as a prediction of future events it is in with a chance. (Personally I am hoping for Theresa May, the reaction to whose elevation will speed up Scottish Independence).

• Actually, the pound’s fall was a necessary and good development in the long run, even if it would have been better had it occurred over a longer period of time. The UK was running a trade deficit in the neighborhood of 5.0 percent of GDP (equivalent to about $900 billion in the US); this was unsustainable. And, contrary to what Legrain claims in this piece, the best way to get the trade deficit down is to lower the value of the pound.

• Legrain incorrectly asserts that the drop in the pound in 2008 did not lead to a reduction in the trade deficit. In fact, it led to a substantial reduction, although with a 1–2 year lag, as would be expected. (The pound fell from a peak of more than 1.5 euros in 2007 to just over 1.0 euro at its trough in 2008. It remained low until it began to rise sharply in 2013, reaching values of more than 1.4 euros last year, hence the large rise in the trade deficit.)

• An inflow of money from abroad was fueling a housing bubble in the UK. This has priced many people out of the real estate market. Bubbles do burst, often with very bad outcomes. The problem with bubbles is not the factor that causes them to burst; the problem is allowing them to grow in the first place.

• The referendum results in favor of Britain leaving the European Union seemed to have caught most Western media off guard. Betting markets and the pundit class had heavily favored a vote to keep the UK in the EU, but at around midnight on the US East Coast, it became increasingly clear Britain would be supporting “Brexit” by a roughly 52–48 percent margin. Per usual, the more cynical writers and pundits—no matter how contrived the task would be — would take the opportunity to take a story about a nationalistic British response to a pro-austerity EU, and make it about Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.

• After The Intercept revealed that the Clinton campaign had received campaign donations from private prison lobbyists, a number of activist groups confronted Clinton, leading her to announce that she would no longer accept the money and later declaring that “we should end private prisons and private detention centers.”

• The Labour leader called on people to unite together to oppose racism but did not address the challenge to his leadership

• Corbyn’s uncompromising ‘anti-austerity’ stance has certainly tapped into some Labour members’ discomfort with the direction taken by their party in recent years. If these misgivings predated the 2008 fiscal crisis, the resulting austerity effectively brought to a head criticisms many had of New Labour.

• Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is “highly likely” to launch a bid to succeed David Cameron as prime minister, the political editor of the Spectator magazine tweeted on Monday, without citing sources.

Censorship/Free Speech

• SABC journalist Lukhanyo Calata says he is saddened by what he’s calling the disturbing direction being taken by his employer, the SABC.

• His father, Fort Calata, was a member of the so-called Cradock Four, who were killed exactly 31 years ago.

• “Today is quite an important day for me and my family because 31 years ago on June 27, 1985, my father and his three colleagues went from Cradock to Port Elizabeth and they never returned,” he said.

• “When I woke up today and I checked Twitter and saw that my former boss Jimi Matthews had resigned I just thought this was not what my father died for,” said Calata.

• There were many proposed reasons, but the prevailing theory appeared to be the mods began deleting posts after finding out the killer was Muslim. That, combined with the fact the victims were part of the LGBT community, appeared to have caused mods to delete posts out of some fear of offending or appearing to be racist, xenophobic or homophobic rather than a duty to present the conversation as it is happening.

• China has issued new regulations demanding search engines clearly identify paid search results, months after a terminally-ill cancer patient complained that he was misled by the giant search engine Baidu

• German lawmakers, rights activists and celebrities said on Monday they had filed a civil suit against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and some of his aides for what they called “war crimes” in counter-terrorism operations against Kurdish militants.

• Turkish-German relations have been deteriorating lately over a resolution passed by the German parliament declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide.

• Chancellor Angela Merkel now faces mounting domestic pressure to hold Erdogan accountable for human rights abuses after last year’s collapse of a ceasefire between Ankara and PKK militants seeking autonomy in Turkey’s main Kurdish southeast. Thousands have been killed in the renewed conflict.

• A man who depicted Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the Lord of the Rings character Gollum has been convicted of insulting the Turkish president and handed a suspended jail sentence.

• According to Turkish media reports, a court in the south-west province of Antalya on Thursday sentenced Rifat Çetin to a year in prison, suspended for five years. The court also stripped Cetin of his parental custody rights.

• Çetin posted an image on Facebook in 2014 in which he combined three pictures of Erdoğan with Gollum, the newspaper Hürriyet said.

• Çetin told another newspaper, the daily BirGün, that he planned to appeal against the verdict as Erdoğan had been prime minister, not president, when the image was posted.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The US Customs and Border Protection agency has submitted a request to the Office of Management and Budget, asking for permission to collect travelers social media account names as they enter the country.

• Facebook’s ability to discern with creepy accuracy the “people we may know” has surprised, delighted, and horrified its users for years. While the magic sauce behind friend suggestions has always been a bit mysterious, it now includes some potentially unsettling information. Thanks to tracking the location of users’ smartphones, the social network may suggest you friend people you’ve shared a GPS data point with, meaning your friend suggestions could include someone whose face you know, but whose name you didn’t until Facebook offered it up to you.

• Last week, I met a man who suspected Facebook had tracked his location to figure out who he was meeting with. He was a dad who had recently attended a gathering for suicidal teens. The next morning, he told me, he opened Facebook to find that one of the anonymous parents at the gathering popped up as a “person you may know.”

• Former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden has failed in a legal bid to win guarantees from Norway that it would not extradite him to the United States if he went there to receive a free speech award, a Norwegian court said on Monday.

• Snowden’s law firm said in April he would take the state to court to secure free passage to the Nordic country. The United States has filed espionage charges against him for leaking details of extensive U.S. surveillance programs.

• “Oslo District Court has decided that the lawsuit from Edward Snowden against the State regarding extradition, should be dismissed,” the court said in a statement.

• VPN services have become an important tool to counter the growing threat of Internet surveillance. Encrypting one’s traffic through a VPN connection helps to keep online communications private. But, what if your VPN service is compromised by a gag order? This is a question many Proxy.sh customers are asking themselves.

• The military alliance has designated cyberspace as an operational domain for war alongside land, sea and air – here’s how states are defending themselves

• Three years after a government investigation forced the shuttering of Lavabit, a Texas-based email provider, its CEO revealed Friday that an account belonging to Edward Snowden spurred the probe that put his company out of business.

• Ladar Levison shut down his encrypted webmail service in August 2013 amid an FBI investigation focused on one of his company’s nearly half-a-million customers. A gag-order that has just recently been vacated in federal has legally prevented him up until now from confirming the account in question was registered to none other than the NSA contractor attributed with one of the largest intelligence leaks in U.S. history.

• The “anti-terrorism” legislation includes a vast data-eavesdropping and -retention program so that telecom and internet companies have to record and store all customer communications for six months, potentially at a multitrillion-dollar cost.

• Additionally, all internet firms have to provide mandatory backdoor access into encrypted communications for the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency and successor to the KGB.

• Law enforcement does not need a warrant to hack someone’s computer, according to a just-unsealed court order written by a federal judge in Virginia.

• This case, United States v. Matish, is one of at least 135 cases currently being prosecuted nationwide stemming from the FBI’s investigation of the Tor-hidden child pornography site called “Playpen.”

• US District Judge Henry Coke Morgan, Jr. further explained in the order on Thursday that warrantless government-sanctioned hacking “resembles” law enforcement looking through broken blinds. In this case, however, a warrant was sought and obtained. Judge Morgan found that even if the warrant did not exist—or was found to be invalid—the search would have been valid.

• Defense teams across the US have been trying to get access to a piece of malware the FBI used to hack visitors of a child pornography site. None have been successful at obtaining all of the malware’s code, and the government appears to have no intention of handing it over.

• As we’ve discussed, some surveillance/law enforcement hawks have tried to rush through a law to expand the power of national security letters (NSLs) to paper over the long standing abuse of NSLs, by saying that they can use those documents (which have basically no oversight and don’t require a warrant) to collect a ton of private info, including email info and web browsing histories. The rushed vote on this — stupidly citing the Orlando attacks, despite the fact it would have done nothing to stop that — failed but just barely. Basically, if Senator Dianne Feinstein were able to attend the vote, it likely would have passed. The support for it was one vote shy, and then Sen. Mitch McConnell changed his vote for procedural reasons to be able to bring it back for a quick follow up vote.

• Now, as Congress rushes towards that vote, Senator Ron Wyden stepped up today to use his power as a Senator to put a hold on the entire Intelligence Authorization bill. He gave a short floor speech explaining his reasons.

Civil Rights/Policing

• This week on CounterSpin: In her forceful dissent from a ruling on the admissibility of illegally obtained evidence, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision “implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued.” The defendant in Utah v. Strief is white, but the suspicionless stops at the case’s heart disproportionately affect black and brown and poor people, marginalized in media as elsewhere. The press are quoting Sotomayor’s words, but do they really hear the message? Nirej Sekhon is associate professor at Georgia State University College of Law. He’ll join us to discuss the ruling.

• From the media accolades for Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in a recent Supreme Court case involving the use of illegally obtained evidence, it’s almost unclear if media realized that the ruling represents a loss for her point of view. With a 5-3 decision in the case Utah v. Strief, the Court said that a police officer may detain someone without cause and run their identification, and, if they uncover a warrant, may arrest them and charge them with additional crimes, based on what they find in a search. Previously, the fact that the initial stop was illegal would mean evidence unearthed would be inadmissible. Sotomayor, Kagan and Ginsburg dissented, with Sotomayor especially powerfully noting the disproportionate impact the ruling will have on communities of color.

• This year, we will hold the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. Not coincidentally, 17 states will have new restrictions on voting in effect that were not in place during the last presidential election. Collectively, these states contain over 114 million people and have 189 votes in the Electoral College – about 70 percent of the votes needed to be elected president. Congress can take action now to strengthen voter protections that have been weakened by the Supreme Court to ensure that every American vote counts this November.

• Digital rights defenders are amongst those who have been targeted. In March’s Digital Citizen, a monthly review published by EFF and five other organizations, we’ve covered the judicial harassment of and travel bans imposed on Gamal Eid and Hossam Baghat, two prominent advocates whose organizations—ANHRI and EIPR—have been instrumental in the fight for human rights in Egypt. More recently, OTF fellow Wafa Ben Hassine published a paper that demonstrates how four Arab countries—including Egypt—use legal means to silence freedom of expression and its advocates online.

• A month ago, folks in Austin Texas voted against a proposition that Uber and Lyft supported, concerning a number of new rules that would be put on ride hailing operations. Given that, both companies immediately shut down operations in Austin — a city with over a million residents and only 900 cabs. In response, people are so desperate for rides that they’re seriously trying to recreate the Lyft/Uber experience by using a Facebook group where people can post their location, negotiate a fee, and have someone pick them up (something that seems a lot more dangerous than typical Uber/Lyft).

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Europe doesn’t want his country to join the EU because the majority of the nation’s population is Muslim. He said his government will ask the public whether negotiations with Brussels should continue.

• “Europe, you don’t want us because the majority of our population are Muslim…we knew it but we tried to show our sincerity,” Erdogan said at a graduation ceremony in Istanbul on Wednesday, as quoted by Reuters.

• On a bright day in downtown Kabul, Jagtar Singh Laghmani was in his traditional herb shop when a man turned up, drew a knife and told him to convert to Islam or he would cut his throat. Bystanders and other shopkeepers saved his life.

• The incident earlier this month was the latest attack on a dwindling community of Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan, a deeply conservative Muslim country struggling with growing insecurity caused by an Islamist insurgency and economic challenges.

• The United States Constitution’s 4th amendment supposedly protects us from illegal search and seizure. This constitutional right against illegal search and seizure has been tested time and again in the highest court in America. Chief Justice John Roberts, who was nominated by President George W. Bush and a nominee whom then-Senator President Barack Obama voted against, is one of many pushing for an update to Rule 41. Roberts has submitted a letter to Mr. Paul Ryan describing the proposed change that any US Government Judge may “issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and to seize or copy electronically stored information located within or outside that district.”

• A conflict between an imam and a female teacher at a Berlin private school over a handshake has escalated into a legal complaint against the woman, German media outlet RBB24 reports.

• The preacher, Kerim Ucar, was initially called in for a conversation over his sons’ involvement in brawls at the Platanus School in the Berlin district of Pankow. The female teacher tried to greet the father with a handshake, but Ucar rejected the gesture citing religious reasons.

• After the Muslim mayor banned advertisements on buses and subways of bikini-clad women, what could be more appropriate (or needed) then our new ad campaign?

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Representatives from Fight the Future, the Center for Media Justice and Free Press on Friday hand-delivered a 6-foot tall package containing 100,000 letters of complaint to the Federal Communications Commission. They ask the agency to take action against AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile and Verizon for violating the agency’s Open Internet order by offering so-called zero-rating service plans.

DRM

• Researchers have released a report dissecting the BooXtream ‘Social DRM’ eBook watermarking system. Inspired by publisher Verso who refused to remove the DRM from an Aaron Swartz book, the Institute for Biblio-Immunology responded by tearing down the privacy-busting system.

Intellectual Monopolies

• This point may be simple and obvious, but it seems to have been lost on most of the people arguing about inequality. In these discussions we hear continual expressions of concern over how technology is behind the massive upward redistribution of income we have seen in the last four decades. This upward redistribution is usually treated as an unfortunate fact of nature. Even if we don’t like to see the rich continually get richer at the expense of the rest of society, what can we do, stop technology? A little serious thinking could go a long way.

• The story of Bill Gates’ copyright protection, along with patent protection for prescription drugs and all sorts of other things, are a big part of the story of inequality. The key issue is that these protections are created by the government. They don’t come from the technology. It is the protections that make some people very rich, not the technology.

• We grant patent and copyright monopolies in order to provide an incentive for innovation and creative work. It is arguable whether these mechanisms are the best way to provide these incentives. For example, in addition to making drugs very expensive, even when they would be cheap in a free market, patent protection also provides an enormous incentive for drug companies to misrepresent the safety and effectiveness of their drugs. But the key point for the inequality issue is that the strength and length of these monopolies is set by government policy.

Trademarks

• As I write this, it has over 6,000 retweets and over 7,000 likes. Not bad. Based on all of this, Jay Lender, a writer/director for SpongeBob SquarePants, Phineas and Ferb… and also his own movie, They’re Watching, created an image in the style of Shepard Fairey’s famous (and legally disputed) Obama Hope poster.

• [...]

• It’s not at all clear if Frito-Lay made this request or if it’s just CafePress worrying about future Frito-Lay concerns. Lender asked CafePress for clarification, and all they sent back was a link to Frito Lay’s corporate contact page, telling him to contact Frito Lay to ask for authorization, implying that Cafe Press made this decision on its own. But, really, there appears to be a ton of other merchandise hosted at CafePress that mentions Cheetos in some form or another, so if the company is suddenly concerned about trademark threats from Frito-Lay, it seems to be targeting rather selectively.

• In the best of circumstances, the law of licensing is the murky side of trademark law.

• Comodo, the world’s biggest issuer of browser-trusted digital certificates for websites, has come under fire for registering trademarks containing the words “let’s encrypt,” a phrase that just happens to be the name of a nonprofit project that provides certificates for free.

• In a blog post, a Let’s Encrypt senior official said Comodo has filed applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office for at least three such trademarks, including “Let’s Encrypt,” “Let’s Encrypt with Comodo,” and “Comodo Let’s Encrypt.” Over the past few months, the nonprofit has repeatedly asked Comodo to abandon the applications, and Comodo has declined. Let’s Encrypt, which is the public face of the Internet Security Research Group, said it has been using the name since November 2014.

Copyrights

• In what’s believed to be a first of its kind ruling, a federal court in Oregon has dismissed a direct infringement complaint against an alleged movie pirate from the outset. According to the judge, linking an IP-address to a pirated download is not enough to prove direct copyright infringement.

• Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp is promoting its browser hijacking system to ISPs. In a proposal revealed by Internet provider RCN, Rightscorp suggests a gradual approach where pirating subscribers eventually have to pay a fine to regain Internet access.

• Soon after the domain was registered in Hong Kong, the now-defunct Megaupload.com grew into one of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites. At its peak, the site engaged nearly 50 million users a day and took up around four percent of the world’s Internet traffic. Users uploaded nearly 12 billion files overall.

• IP trolls are about 90% cardboard facade. They puff themselves up with blustery legal threats written on serious-looking legal letterhead, but it’s really no different than the defensive mechanisms of many creatures found on the lower end of the food chain. For most, the slightest of pushes back results in the whole charade collapsing.

• There’s a great future in speculative invoicing, said no one ever in any seminal coming-of-age, post-college disillusionment film. Just look at Prenda Law, which resorted to fraudulent behavior when its aggressive, but incompetent, trolling failed to pay the bills. And yet, nothing stops the trolls from trolling. The occasional speed bump surfaces, but trolls dismiss these rather than meet the challenge head on. They’re in it for settlements, not wins… and certainly not precedent.

• More than four years after the Megaupload raids, Kim Dotcom continues to fight extradition to the United States. However, if that battle fails, how might he be treated by authorities there? Revelations from a previously jailed Megaupload programmer show that things could get pretty miserable.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.