● 07.01.16

● Links 1/7/2016: New PCLinuxOS Magazine, Mageia 6 Close to Release

Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• CRN has brought together news from 16 storage companies from the two conferences to provide solution providers with new ideas about how to take advantage of the growing markets for Linux and Docker technologies. Turn the page and get started.

Desktop

• Remember the fears rampant when “Secure Boot” appeared? M$ could prevent installation of GNU/Linux? Well, we were told that the user/owner of the PC could disable it and normal installation would ensue. Well, there’s a case in Mexico where a model from Lenovo wherein “Secure Boot” could not be disabled….

• This article gives the history of a purchase of a personal computer. In November 2014, I bought the Lenovo Yoga 2 for its operational functions, capacity and price. I intended to install GNU/Linux, a free and open source operating system which allows for users to run, study, redistribute and improve computer software so that the whole user community benefits.

Server

• Instead of starting a potentially very long, conceptual conversation about what DevOps means, it’s more effective to identify a small but non-trivial project or area of your business that would benefit from being able to develop and deploy software faster, at scale… and more easily.

Kernel Space

• The keynote speaker for this year’s event is Julia Lawall. Julia is a research scientist at Inria, the developer of Coccinelle, and the Linux Kernel coordinator for the Outreachy project.

Graphics Stack

• It’s a conundrum: You’ve got deep learning software, which benefits greatly from GPU acceleration, wrapped up in a Docker container and ready to go across thousands of nodes. But wait — apps in Docker containers can’t access the GPU because they’re, well, containerized.

• Well, now they can.

• Nvidia, developer of the CUDA standard for GPU-accelerated programming, is releasing a plugin for the Docker ecosystem that makes GPU-accelerated computing possible in containers. With the plugin, applications running in a Docker container get controlled access to the GPU on the underlying hardware via Docker’s own plug-in system.

Applications

• qBittorent is a Bittorent client which is developed to provide free software alternative of utorrent. It’s a Cross platform torrent client which provides the same features on all the major platforms like Linux, Ubuntu, Mac OS X and Windows.

• While writing program files or normal text files, programmers and writers sometimes want to know the difference between two files or two versions of the same file. When you compare two computer files on Linux, the difference between their contents is called a diff. This description was born out of a reference to the output of diff, the well known Unix command-line file comparison utility.

• C++, an extension of well known C language, is an excellent, powerful and general purpose programming language that offers modern and generic programming features for developing large-scale applications ranging from video games, search engines, other computer software to operating systems.

• Today, July 1, 2016, Calibre developer Kovid Goyal has been happy to announce the general availability of yet another maintenance release for his popular, open-source and cross-platform Calibre ebook library management software.

• Coming only one week after the debut of Calibre 2.60, the Calibre 2.61 maintenance update brings only two new features. These are an updated driver with new firmware to allow users to connect their FNAC (BQ) eReader devices, as well as support for automatic removal of all links from a missing resource (the option is available in the Check Book component under Edit Book).

• I’ve just released Calamares 2.3, a feature release with a major focus on disk encryption support (see full release announcement).

• Calamares is a distribution-agnostic system installer, with an advanced partitioning feature and support for third party branding and modules. It is used by several distributions, including Netrunner, Manjaro, Tanglu, OpenMandriva, KaOS, Chakra and many others.

• I am happy to announce a new release of libosinfo, version 0.3.1 is now available, signed with key DAF3 A6FD B26B 6291 2D0E 8E3F BE86 EBB4 1510 4FDF (4096R). All historical releases are available from the project download page.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Today, July 1, 2016, after many months of hard work, the development team behind the SuperTuxKart open-source racing game has been more than happy to inform the Linux community about the availability of the final SuperTuxKart 0.9.2 release.

• In mid-June, SuperTuxKart 0.9.2 received a Release Candidate (RC) build, which gave users early access to the numerous goodies coming into the final release. Among these, there’s the new AI (Artificial Intelligence) support for the soccer mode, which now offers three arenas under the “Copa Antarctica” Antarctica Cup umbrella.

• Pinball is something Linux has been lacking in variety, so it’s pleasing we get another! Pro Pinball Ultra is now officially available on Linux & SteamOS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• While trying to bring my setup to package KDevelop standalone for Linux into a shape where it has a nonzero probability of me picking it up again in half a year and actually understanding how to use it, I created a docker base image which I think might be useful to other people trying to package Linux software as well. It is based on CentOS 6.8 and includes Qt 5.7 (including QtWebKit), Python 3.5 and LLVM, all built against the old CentOS libs (and thus e.g. compatible with most glibc versions out there). If you want to use it, simply install docker, and

• One more year of fun and intense productivity in Randa came to an end just a few days back, and I feel so good to have been a part of it. Much progress was made by the Marble team this year by Dennis, Torsten, Friedrich, David and me. I mostly worked on the Marble Maps Android app’s navigation feature, and would like to mention the changes here very briefly…

• Midterm evaluation has passed and now it’s time for a new blog post! There are a couple of weeks from the last time I’ve talked about my progress with my Google Summer of Code project.

• Kaffeine version 2.0.4 has been released today, substantially improving its already excellent Digital TV (DTV) support!

• A couple weeks ago I went to Randa Meetings, a sprint of KDE, and there I did a lot of work in Umbrello.

• Podcast fans will know that we were struck down with lucky show thirteen. Google Hangouts crashed out twice, and we lost the live stream. We ended up half an hour late, with no Hangouts, and a hastily make-shift YouTube live stream hooked together in record time by the #awesome Ovidiu-florin Bogdan.

• The Randa meetings 2016 just ended, and they were a big success for everyone involved (thanks to Mario and his team for organizing this).

• We went there with an aim to work on Kdenlive’s Windows port, and we managed to achieve more than 80% of the build process.

• In my last blog post I said that I would work on extending support for paint operations like ‘fill’. I have done so, albeit more as a necessity in fixing the assistant code. Moreover, I have fixed a number of other paint operations which are vital in painting the various assistants Krita offers currently.

• The Randa Meetings 2016 were centered on bringing KDE technology on every device.

• we have also a design for some single KCM’s 80%. In plasma 5.7 you will see the new Desktop Theme module, but we also have some mockups for other KCM’s here you see the appearance KCM’s

• I would have liked to say, “Yeah the Android CI runs!” – But we are not there yet; pretty close actually, and close enough that it already makes sense to tell about it, yet a few last Jenkins settings remain to be done and real life issues cause this to take a few more days. So, I will give a short primer on what we prepared in Randa.

• My midterm evaluation target was to create a static histogram in Labplot with an option to add new histogram among the given types and set visible advanced settings.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Do you need to manage your work time with Pomodoro technique? Do you use GNOME Shell? Then GNOME Pomodoro by Kamil Prusko is the right utility program for you. Once installed, GNOME Pomodoro will act like an extension and be placed on the top panel so you can control it from GNOME Tweak Tool.

Distributions

Reviews

• Linux Lite 3.0 is the recently released free operating system based on the Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) and hence you can be assured that you’ll get support for the next 5 years. Linux Lite 3.0 offers a complete out of the box experience and it is lightweight, easy and simple to install. One of the main aspects that is being lauded by experts and everyday Linux users is the compactness with which Linux Lite 3.0 has been released. This means you can install Linux Lite and start working with it in less than few minutes.

New Releases

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki has just informed Softpedia today, July 1, 2016, about the immediate availability for download of the final release of the 4MLinux 18.0 operating system.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the July 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community.

• The Mageia development team announced just a few moments ago that they’d released the first stabilization snapshot (sta1) of the upcoming Mageia 6 Linux operating system.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Linux specialist Suse has released a public beta of Suse Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2, an upcoming update for the platform that adds support in areas such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) plus system security enhancements.

• Available to download now, the public beta release of Suse Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2 enables customers to evaluate and give feedback on new capabilities in the update, which is slated for release around September.

Red Hat Family

• An Indian origin student at Carnegie Mellon University has won the Open Source Award organised by Red Hat, along with the director of engineering at DropBox.

• Red Hat launched the “women in open source awards” last year to honour women who make important contributions to open source projects and communities, or those making innovative use of open source methods.

• It’s been a busy few weeks for us on the Atomic Host team, and we’re excited to announce the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.2.5! This is a big one too. For those not familiar with our release cadence, we release a new version of Atomic Host every six weeks. This enables us to balance the reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with exciting new features and capabilities from our Project Atomic upstream community in a production ready, supportable manor.

• Red Hat and Eurotech announced the launch of a new, open source Eclipse Foundation project to manage IoT edge devices, from connectivity and configuration to application lifecycle. The co-sponsored project, Eclipse Kapua, combines with the existing Eclipse Kura project to offer IoT developers and end-users an open platform for IoT implementations.

• List: Containers, analytics, and a wedding, who said conferences were boring?

• CloudBees has joined forces with Red Hat to offer integrations on its Jenkins Platform, allowing enterprises to build, test and deploy applications.

• Containers and IoT announcements topped the headlines from this week’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, which wrapped up Thursday. Here’s a look at the news highlights that Red Hat and its partners unveiled during the event.

• Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) has raised its estimate regarding the total addressable market (TAM) for hybrid cloud to $69 million by F2019.

• Pacific Crest’s Ben McFadden maintains an Overweight rating on the company, with a price target of $88.

• The 2016 Red Hat Summit is underway in San Francisco this week and I delivered a talk with Robyn Bergeron earlier today. Our talk, When flexibility met simplicity: The friendship of OpenStack and Ansible, explained how Ansible can reduce the complexity of OpenStack environments without sacrificing the flexibility that private clouds offer.

• Red Hat hosted its annual Red Hat Summit customer event June 28-30 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with a theme of harnessing the power of participation. Once again, the DevNation developer event, which is the successor to JBoss World, was co-located with Red Hat Summit. For JBoss, 2016 is a particularly significant year as it marks 10 years since Red Hat acquired it. At DevNation, Red Hat announced the new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7 release, providing new cloud-enhanced capabilities for Red Hat’s flagship middleware platform. JBoss is now also working to help enable Java for the container era, with the launch of the MicroProfile Project, an effort to optimize enterprise Java for a microservices architecture. Java wasn’t the only focus of DevNation this year either, as Microsoft took center stage too, announcing the availability of its .NET Core for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the Red Hat Summit and DevNation 2016 events.

• Even though there have been no major changes announced to the OpenStack platform of late, it was still one of the most talked about subjects at this year’s Red Hat Summit. Red Hat plays a significant role in the development of the platform and is very proud of its contribution to the community.

• In 2007, when 3scale, Inc. was founded, some people thought it was crazy to be investing so much time and energy into API. But Steven Willmott, CEO of 3scale, Inc., said that even at that time his team knew that the future was API-driven, and they wanted to help that happen.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• AMD and Intel released the first 64-bit CPUs for consumers back in 2003 and 2004. Now, more than a decade later, Linux distributions are looking at winding down support for 32-bit hardware.

• Google already took this leap back in 2015, dumping 32-bit versions of Chrome for Linux.

Flavours and Variants

• Today in Linux news, the Red Hat announcements kept on coming including the release of Red Hat Atomic Host 7.2.5. Elsewhere, Mint 18 in Cinnamon and MATE flavors was announced by Clement Lefebvre as promised. Bryan Lunduke just finished up 10 days using only a Linux terminal saying it “was too painful” and Eric Grevstad said using Linux and LibreOffice will change your life.

• The Linux Mint 18 milestone release is the first major update for the popular desktop Linux distribution in 2016 and follows the Linux Mint 17.3 update that debuted in December 2015. Linux Mint 18 is based on the Ubuntu 16.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Linux distribution released April 21 and, like Ubuntu 16.04, Linux Mint 18 is being supported as an LTS, with support until the year 2021. As was the case with previous Linux Mint distribution updates, there are multiple desktop environment choices. Cinnamon 3.0, which is developed by Linux Mint and typically is the primary deployment choice for users, brings new window tiling capabilities and default effects for window transitions and actions. Additionally, Linux Mint 18 includes a new desktop theme option called Mint-Y that brings newly styled icons to users. In terms of new integrated applications, Linux Mint 18 includes the gufw application, a graphical interface for firewall configuration. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the Linux Mint 18.

Devices/Embedded

• Tibbo’s latest complement to TBS is a Linux-based Tibbo Project PCB (LTPP). The new LTPP3 board runs Tibbo’s own, highly polished and updated distribution of Linux and is based on the powerful Texas Instruments 1GHz Cortex-A8 Sitara CPU. What sets the LTPP3 apart from plain vanilla products, such as Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone, is its mechanical and electrical compatibility with Tibbo’s Tibbit blocks and size-3 Tibbo Project Box enclosures. Uses for the LTPP3 include running Embedded AggreGate, Node.js and TiOS applications, not to mention use as a generic Linux board.

Phones

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source IT systems management is undergoing a renaissance. Adopters include global, household-name enterprises, as well as a groundswell of IT operations teams that are borrowing flexible, collaborative practices from the Agile software development movement.

• Some open source IT systems management tools are familiar to most admins, with broad adoption — think Nagios or the Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana stack. Others — Docker is a prime example — burst onto the scene recently and are shaking up IT deployments.

• Code Alliance is a Benetech initiative that connects technology professionals to volunteer opportunities with open source software projects for social good. On the first day of the CHI4GOOD conference, we brought over 40 projects to the San Jose Convention Center to participate in a hack4good Day of Service event.

• More than 100 developers, UX designers, and researchers came together to help our nonprofit cohort with their technological needs. The nonprofits benefitted from expert technical development work, and the volunteers were gracious, skilled, and excited to leverage their professional skills to give back.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The Mozilla developers working on the Servo browser layout engine and the Browser.html HTML-based web UI have kept to their goal of making a tech preview available in June.

• As of last night, the Servo developers hit their tech preview milestone we’ve been looking forward to seeing for months. Nightly builds of Servo and Browser.html have begun and they are going to be making available Linux packages shortly.

SaaS/Back End

• In recent coverage, we’ve taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support and more. Just this week, we reported on Bahir moving to Top-Level Status. Bahir bolsters Big Data processing by serving as a home for existing connectors that initiated under Apache Spark, and provides additional extensions/plugins for other related distributed system, storage, and query execution systems.

• Now, H2O.ai has announced the availability of Sparkling Water 2.0. Sparkling Water 2.0 builds off the popularity of Sparkling Water, H2O.ai’s API for Apache Spark, with additional features and functionality. New features include the ability to interface with Apache Spark, Scala and MLlib via H2O.ai’s Flow UI, build ensembles using algorithms from both H2O and MLlib and give Spark users the power of H2O’s visual intelligence capabilities.

Databases

• Before it was a database company, MongoDB was a cloud company. Founded in 2007 and originally known as 10gen, the company originally intended to build a Java cloud platform. After building a database it called MongoDB, the company realized that the infrastructure software it had built to support its product was more popular than the product itself, and the PaaS company pivoted to become a database company – eventually taking the obvious step of renaming itself to reflect its new purpose.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• A project that originated in “The Middle of Nowhere, Missouri,” as the founders call it, aims to lower the barrier to entry across a number of industries, all while maintaining a sustainable footprint. It’s called Open Source Ecology (OSE), the brainchild of Marcin Jakubowski, founder of the Factor E Farm in Missouri where OSE is based.

Open Hardware/Modding

Programming/Development

• Pulp Smash is a functional test suite for Pulp. It’s used by the Pulp developers and Pulp QE team on a daily basis. It’s implemented as a GPL licensed pure Python library, and getting started is as simple as installing Python and executing the following…

• Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Oracle has quietly pulled funding and development efforts away from a community-driven technology where customers and partners have invested time and code. It all seems to be happening for no reason other than the tech isn’t currently printing money.

• It’s a familiar pattern for open source projects that have become the property of Oracle. It started with OpenSolaris and continued with OpenOffice.org. And this time, it’s happening to Java—more specifically to Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the server-side Java technology that is part of hundreds of thousands of Internet and business applications. Java EE even plays an integral role for many apps that aren’t otherwise based on Java.

• For months as Oracle Corporation’s attorneys have battled Google in the courts over the use of Java interfaces in Android’s Davlik programming language, Oracle’s Java development efforts have slowed. And in the case of Java EE, they’ve come to a complete halt. The outright freeze has caused concerns among companies that contribute to the Java platform and among other members of the Java community—a population that includes some of Oracle’s biggest customers.

• The C++17 standard is taking shape and adding new features to the vintage programming language. This major update aims to make C++ an easier language to work with and brings powerful technical specifications.

Leftovers

Security

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• British agriculture has been left “completely in the dark and rudderless” since voters went to the polls to make their voices heard on European Union membership, the National Sheep Association (NSA) has stressed.

• The organisation, which works to safeguard the interests of British sheep farmers, said there has been “nothing but political rhetoric and unanswered questions” since the British public voted to leave the European Union in last week’s referendum.

Finance

• The UK’s decision to leave the European Union has galvanized its remaining members to look anew at where they want to go as a 27-nation bloc. Part of the new policy drive should involve “adapting” competition laws, French President Francois Hollande has said.

• I wish to clarify upfront that I’ve never done any work for Apple or Spotify. A more elaborate disclosure can be found at the end of this post. The perspective from which I am writing this post is that of an app developer who happens to have fought hard for fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) behavior by companies wielding monopoly power. And one of the two iOS apps I’ll launch later this year will come with two different types of subscription offerings, which users can even use in combination. So I do have a strong interest in this, but for now I can’t see any wrongdoing on Apple’s part.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Faced with the destruction of journalistic values by the corrupting effects of the profit motive, journalists can either stand up for the principles that brought many of them into the career in the first place—or else identify with the corruption, telling themselves that they’re siding with the smart money even as it destroys the institutions that form the basis for their profession.

• Both reactions were on display in the wake of CNN‘s decision to hire recently fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. The conservative New York Post (6/24/16) quoted an anonymous “TV insider” saying that “CNN is facing a near internal revolt over the Corey hiring,”with another unnamed source saying, “Everyone at CNN — and even people who used to work there — are pissed about Trump’s former campaign manager being hired on salary.”

• Since its launch as a scrappy clickbait site in 2006, BuzzFeed has grown to become one of the biggest names in online media and news, venturing into serious news coverage of politics and world events in attempt to add gravitas to a name typically associated with levity and listicles. While BuzzFeed has certainly done important work of late, on issues ranging from sex harassment to AIDS in Africa, when it comes to the most powerful person on earth, however—the president of the United States—its coverage is almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic.

• Labour and Tories were neck and neck on 32% in the Mail on Sunday Survation poll on 25 June, the day before the Blarites launched their coup against the “unelectable” Corbyn. Before Corbyn became leader, Labour were consistently between 7 and 12 points behind on Survation. That Corbyn has done so well in popular opinion and in elections, is remarkable considering the Blairites who dominate his own parliamentary labour party have been conspiring and briefing against him from day one.

• The coup “rationale” is based on two lies – that Labour was struggling in the polls, and that an early general election is imminent.

• Whoever becomes the new Tory Prime Minister, there is not going to be an early general election. No new Tory PM will throw away the 30 seat gain over Labour the Tories will get from the new Boundary Commission Review.

• Until Thursday, the political wrangling in Britain over how, or whether, to withdraw from the European Union — a move supported by a narrow majority of the voters in last week’s referendum, but opposed by 75 percent of the members of Parliament elected just last year — seemed likely to trigger a new general election.

• Although the ruling Conservative Party is not required to call an election until 2020, most political observers expected Prime Minister David Cameron to be replaced by the leader of the campaign for a British exit from the EU, Boris Johnson, who would then want a fresh mandate from the public.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Last month, Techdirt noted that the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had broadened his assault on free speech in Germany with even more ridiculous actions. As well as demanding that the German comedian Jan Böhmermann should be punished for an admittedly rather coarse satirical poem, Erdoğan went on to seek an injunction against the German media boss Mathias Döpfner for daring to say he laughed out loud when he read the ditty in question.

• But Rhodesian authorities were well-acquainted with the song by then, and they banned it from state-controlled radio. But underground radio loved it, and according to Ebba, the “Watch Out” single was a big seller by heavy rock standards, estimating the record sold at least 15,000 copies despite the official blackout. Entrepreneurs prevailed despite government attempts to silence them.

• Scores of editors, journalists and members of the public picketed outside the SABC headquarters in Auckland Park, Johannesburg on Friday.

• This following the suspension and disciplinary hearings of three journalists at the public broadcaster for speaking against editorial policy changes.

• Mostly dressed in black, protesters shouted “Down Hlaudi down” and “No to censorship”.

• Karima Brown, executive editor at Independent Media, called for COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng to step down.

• A clarion call to stand up against censorship as a means of protecting the South African democracy was made on Friday when journalists, communication officers, civil society, politicians, and members of the public braced the Cape Town cold and rain, standing in solidarity with suspended journalists and against muzzling of the media by the country’s public broadcaster, the SABC.

• The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) management has come up against opposition from the media industry and civil society for cracking down on journalists who speak up about censorship at the broadcaster.

• Demonstrations were today held outside SABC offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

• Scores of journalists and members of the public on Friday braved the winter chill to protest against the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) editorial policy of not covering violent protests.

• The South African National Editors Forum called on journalists to wear black to picket outside the SABC’s offices in support of journalists who were suspended from their jobs for disagreeing with the editorial policy.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Eleven months ago, we wrote about a lawsuit filed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation seeking to get a copy of the DOJ’s infamous new rules for spying on journalists. The new rules came about after it had come out that the DOJ had spied on Associated Press reporters as well as lied to a court to claim that Fox News reporter James Rosen was a co-conspirator in a leak investigation. To date, the DOJ has steadfastly refused to reveal the rules.

• Thankfully, someone has now leaked the rules, or at least the 2013 version of some of the rules, which show that, contrary to what then Attorney General Eric Holder had suggested, it’s still ridiculously easy for the FBI to spy on reporters and their sources in trying to hunt down a leak. In fact, it appears that these rules, around the use of NSLs are actually separate from the rules that Holder was talking about — meaning that there’s an entirely separate path for the DOJ to spy on journalists. The rules show that the FBI can just issue a National Security Letter (NSL), the mechanism that the FBI has been known to regularly abuse without consequence and which it’s trying to expand. The “process” by which the media is supposedly protected under these new rules is that if someone in the DOJ is seeking an NSL to get phone records of someone in the media, they need to get some permission from someone else in the DOJ first…

• This is perhaps not surprising, but still disappointing. Former NYC mayor and current billionaire media/tech company boss Michael Bloomberg has come down on the wrong side of the “going dark” encryption fight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (possible paywall link) he scolds tech execs for daring to side with Apple over the FBI and the Justice Department on the question of backdooring encryption. Bloomberg does not appear to actually understand the issues at play.

• [...]

• Note the false framing here. Bloomberg is setting up the argument that backdooring encryption for the sake of the FBI/DOJ is “good for national security and public safety.” He’s wrong. It’s not. It’s not even close. It actually puts many more people at risk, because the only way to backdoor encryption effectively is to break that encryption and put everyone who uses it at much more risk. Yes, it means that the FBI/NSA won’t be able to track some people, but it’s a very small number of people, and they have other ways to track them without undermining the security of everyone else.

• A majority of enterprises, 65 percent in fact, have already incorporated Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into their environments, gathering data from sensors, equipment and other devices and using it for business purposes, according to 451 Research’s inaugural Voice of the Enterprise: Internet of Things report. The most common type of data collected is of the machine sensing type (71.5 percent), followed by environmental data (20 percent) and biological data from people and animals (8.5 percent).

• Even though they may not be familiar with the term “Internet of Things” (IoT), 65 percent of organizations are collecting data from equipment, devices, or other connected endpoints. And they’re using that data for business purposes, according to an IoT study conducted by 451 Research.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A reporter says she was kicked out of the Gatineau courthouse because her skirt was too short and her shoulders were exposed.

• CTV Ottawa’s Annie Bergeron-Oliver says she was in court to cover a manslaughter case Thursday morning when a male police officer approached her and said she’d have to step out.

• “Of course, I’m confused. I don’t have my cell phone out. I’m not eating. I don’t think I’ve broken any rules,” she told CFRA’s Ottawa Now. “So he pulls me outside and says ‘I’m sorry. Your skirt is too short. ‘ ”

• One of several problems with hastily-enacted laws meant to deal with advances in technology is that they often skip a step or several when being written. In many cases, the step skipped is an important one: the consideration of intent. By crafting laws that cater to subjective views of a situation — whether it’s meant to address cyberbullying or other forms of online harassment — the laws blow past, sometimes intentionally, the requirement that there be malicious intent behind the targeted actions.

• This has led to courts striking down newly-enacted laws as unconstitutional because they have skipped this step. Without this requirement in place, the laws curb free speech by enacting new limits on First Amendment expression based almost solely on subjective reading of the allegedly “criminal” content.

• In what is likely a sign of the coming government-rent-seeking apocalypse, a 19-year-old Stanford student from the UK has created a bot that assists users in challenging parking tickets. The inevitable result of parking nearly anywhere can now be handled with something other than a) meekly paying the fine or b) throwing them away until a bench warrant is issued.

• While a variety of bots have been created to handle a variety of tasks, very few have handled them quite as well as Joshua Browder’s “robot lawyer” — which is certain to draw some attention from disgruntled government agencies who are seeing this revenue stream drying up.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• At this point it’s pretty much a monthly event: Comcast does something stupid, then only bothers to correct the problem once the press gets involved. We then get a breathless explanation from Comcast about how this sort of thing is the exception instead of the norm, despite being able to set your watch to the dysfunction.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A resolution on access to medicines proposed by a number of developing countries was adopted today by the United Nations Human Rights Council, as well as a resolution on enhancing capacity-building in public health. This marks yet another United Nations fora in which developing countries seek to raise the issue of access to medicines, particularly with regard to high prices.

• The Northern District of California appears to be the first federal court to enter a written decision under the Defend Trade Secret Act.

• Kanye West’s music video for “Famous” has sparked outrage for portraying naked celebrities in bed, in the form of life-like wax figures. It is not simply the nudity, but the individuals portrayed, which has led to criticism; Rihanna is seen lying next to former boyfriend and abuser, Chris Brown, alleged serial rapist Bill Cosby is featured, as well as Taylor Swift, Anna Wintour and Amber Rose. Subsequent to the release of the video, Kanye tweeted, “Can somebody sue me already #I’llwait” but later deleted it.

Copyrights/Culture

• When you get quotes like that — especially on the record — for someone retiring from a longstanding job, you know things were bad. And Hayden appears by almost any measure to be perfect for the job. She’s run large libraries, showing that she has the knowledge and administrative skills to run the Library of Congress. She’s also got experience dealing with a variety of policy issues, including ones around surveillance and access to information. I’ve spoken to many people who either know or have worked with Hayden, and I can’t recall ever hearing such levels of praise about anyone.

• But, of course, some are unhappy about this. But with such a supremely qualified nominee, the attacks have been weird and getting weirder. We recently wrote about a laughable complaint that Hayden was “pro-obscenity” because she fought against mandatory porn filters on all computers in libraries. And now someone has pointed out a complaint from Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation, claiming that Hayden is unqualified for the position… because she’s a librarian. Really.

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