● 09.20.16

● Links 20/9/2016: GNOME 3.22 Preview, Absolute 14.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:59 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

• The centrepiece of Oracle OpenWorld 2016 this week is a plan to go head to head with Amazon Web Services within the infrastructure as a service market. Oracle is a relative latecomer to the public cloud market but boldly claims its Generation 2 IaaS can take on AWS’ offerings. It’s ambitious to say the least: a Gartner report last year said AWS’s IaaS cloud is ten times bigger than the next 14 competitors combined, not that you’d know it from Oracle’s bullish language.

Kernel Space

• It’s been a while since last having anything to talk about with regard to Bcachefs as a file-system aiming for speed while having ZFS/Btrfs-like capabilities and being spun out of the Bcache caching code. This file-system now has tentative patches for complete encryption support.

• The GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit alliance focused on developing an open in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and connectivity software platform for the transportation industry, today announced the GENIVI Vehicle Simulator (GVS) open source project has launched, with both developer and end-user code available immediately.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• mrxvt is a cool light-weight terminal emulator, not tied to a specific desktop environment and with minimal dependency. This was also one of my very first bigger contributions to Free Software. Well I had patches here and there before, but that’s one project where I stuck around longer and where I was quickly given commit rights. So it is dear to my heart. It was also my first big feature attempt since I started a branch to add UTF-8 support (actually any-encoding support), which is the normal way of things now but at the time, many software and distributions were still not working with UTF-8 as a default. Then I left for years-long wandering our planet on a motorcycle (as people who know me are aware) and because of this, drastically slowed down FLOSS contributions until a few years ago. Back as a contributor, mrxvt is not my main project anymore (you know which these are: GIMP and ZeMarmot!). I moved on.

• The open-source video editor Flowblade has a new release available for download.

• Flowblade 1.8 arrives with a batch of key improvements into, including the ability to trim clips using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

• This way of working, say the Flowblade team, feels “more convenient and precise then always working with a mouse

• The Chairman Blender Foundation and producer Blender Institute, Mr. Ton Roosendaal comw with this news about second release candidate and other projects…

Proprietary

• After bringing its free VPN services to iOS and Android, Opera has now released a free, no-login VPN for desktop users as well. The VPN is bundled in to the Opera browser and requires no sign-in or any setup – using it is as simple as the press of a single button. What this does is make using a VPN simple even for users who are not technologically-inclined. Opera’s browser VPN was first launched as a beta in April this year.

• A month later, Opera VPN was available as a standalone app on iOS. The VPN was then launched for Android in August before finally rolling out the final version for desktop users now.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is full of all sorts of strange allegories around prejudice. The game expects us to be surprised that people are distrusting and fearful of the augmented humans that could kill them in a heartbeat with their swiss army penis augmentation, when fact the augmented humans did in fact try and kill all of the regular folk towards the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution where a broadcasted signal – a bit like in Kingsman: The Secret Service – sent them all into a murderous rage. (Sorry, spoilers.)

• It’s certainly a strange thing, but if you can get your head around it (read: suspend your disbelief, ignore the pseudo-lofty stupidness, and generally crack on with things) then it’s a rather excellent game.

• You don’t need to play the first game, as they stand completely apart with their own story and introductions.

• I have to say I think it looks pretty cool, the idea of being a vampire like that in an MMO would be pretty fun.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Our packaging team has been working very hard, however, we have a lack of active Kubuntu Developers involved right now. So we’re asking for Devels with a bit of extra time and some experience with KDE packages to look at our Frameworks, Plasma and Applications packaging in our staging PPAs and sign off and upload them to the Ubuntu Archive.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• These six months has gone so fast and here we are again excited about the new WebKitGTK+ stable release. This is a release with almost no new API, but with major internal changes that we hope will improve all the applications using WebKitGTK+.

• is still true! Between backend reworks, Summer of Code projects and spontaneous contributions from awsome random contributors, here are the things that I’m looking forward with GNOME 3.22 release.

• GNOME release 3.22 happens to be during one of the core days of the Libre Application Summit Hosted by GNOME (LAS GNOME) On top of a high rise, in Portland Oregon, we’re going to celebrate GNOME 3.22 in grand style with the conference participants and end the core days at LAS GNOME!

Distributions

New Releases

• Q4OS development team is pleased to announce immediate availability of the new significant update of the Q4OS ‘Scorpion’ desktop, version 2.2. This is a testing version of the Q4OS desktop, based on the recent Debian 9 Stretch release with the upgraded Linux kernel 4.6, GCC 6 and the Trinity 14.0.4 desktop environment. The alternative LXQT desktop is supported in Q4OS, so users can have Trinity and LXQT desktops alongside installed and choose which one to log in. Q4OS 2.2 ‘Scorpion’ continues to be under development so far, and it will stay as long as Debian Stretch will be testing. Q4OS ‘Scorpion’ will be supported at least five years from the official release date.

• Based on Slackware 14.2

• Comes in a 32 as well as a 64-bit version. Same basic functionality, but most everything updated under the hood. No longer fits on a single CD — the usual installation method is a USB stick. With this size-constraint removed, larger apps like LibreOffice and Calibre are now included in the base installation.

• The amd64 and i386 ISO images for 3.0.36 (beta) can be downloaded for testing here. Please do not use them for production systems.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• As a community-led distro with a limited amount of resources and contributors, we stand by “Release when it’s ready” and don’t want to rush a release out until we are fully happy with it. Obviously, we are not yet fully happy with Mageia 6, though it is shaping up pretty well! On the other hand, we are still very pleased with Mageia 5 and want to continue supporting it until Mageia 6 is ready to take over.

Red Hat Family

• Both hardware and software businesses are poised on making the lives of their consumers easier through further extension of their partnership to provide better solutions

• The next major milestone release of OpenStack, dubbed “Newton,” is currently scheduled to debut the week of October 3. While the release is not yet finalized, product teams at Red Hat already have a grip on what they see as the big improvements that OpenStack Newton will bring.

• HTI chose to build its new PTC system on a “private Cloud” powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and managed by Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms. The Enterprise Linux platform “allows for easier scaling for IoT (Internet of Things)-type network deployments and helps minimize the hosting footprint in Herzog’s datacenter, thanks to the flexible, stable foundation that it provides,” HTI said. Red Hat CloudForms, an “open hybrid Cloud management platform,” has helped Herzog transform its existing virtualized infrastructure into a private Cloud, through its on-demand scaling functionality. Red Hat Satellite helps Herzog maintain greater platform security and compliance with various regulatory standards, as well as manage its software lifecycle from testing through production. Herzog also worked with Red Hat Consulting to help bring its new offering to market.

• A community-powered approach to working with the broad ecosystem of marketing agencies—to which more and more firms are turning these days—can produce new and inspiring results.

• I’ve seen it myself since I began leading marketing at Red Hat, especially during something we call our annual agency workshop. The workshop is our opportunity to strengthen the relationships, values, and shared knowledge that bind our community of marketing firms together.

Finance

Fedora

• I have finally finished a, probably way too long, proposal for implementing a new Fedora Docs publishing toolchain using AsciiBinder.

• The proposal, also published using AsciiBinder, suggests that we definitively adopt AsciiDoc and convert our DocBook sources to it without delay. Further we should begin publishing with AsciiBinder, ideally by Fedora 26.

• We all live in a society. Every society has customs, values, and mores. This is how homo sapiens are different from other species. Since our childhood, in school, then college, and then at work, we follow a shared set of social values. This shared set of values creates a peaceful world. In the open source world, we strive for values that lead to us all being welcoming, generous, and thoughtful. We may differ in opinions or sometimes disagree with each other, but we try to keep the conversation focused on the ideas under discussion, not the person in the discussion.

• Fedora is an excellent example of an open source society where contributors respect each other and have healthy discussions, whether they agree or disagree on all topics. This is a sign of a healthy community. Fedora is a big project with contributors and users from different parts of the world . This creates a diverse community of different skills, languages, ages, colors, cultural values, and more. Although it is rare in Fedora, sometimes miscommunication happens and this can result in situations where the discussion moves from the idea to the person.

• I’m thrilled to announce that Jeremy Cline has joined the Fedora Engineering team, effective today. Like our other recent immigrant, Randy Barlow, Jeremy was previously a member of Red Hat’s Pulp team.

Debian Family

• The Debian project announced an update to their stable Debian 8 branch, the sixth such update since its release. This update is primarily to address security issues. Elsewhere, the Mageia folks announced an update to version 5, released last summer, to hold users over since 6.0 has been delayed. The Linux Grandma put out the call for help today as they’re running a bit low on developers over there and the Free Software Foundation as well as Richard Stallman replied to the accusations of discrimination in the case of LibreBoot.

• Just yesterday, September 18, 2016, we reported on the official availability of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” operating system, but no installation mediums of Live editions were announced.

• That changes today, September 19, 2016, as we’ve received a tip from one of our readers that both the installation-only and Live ISO editions have been released on the official channels and are now available for download (see the links below if you want to get them now).

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• 92% of omgubuntu.co.uk readers say they use a 64-bit version of Ubuntu as their primary OS, with just 7% relying on an Ubuntu 32-bit install.

Devices/Embedded

• Itead has launched a $2.10, 14 x 13.5mm “PSF-A85” WiFi module based on the ESP8285 SoC, a version of the ESP8266 that adds 1MB SPI flash.

• In recent months, before releasing the faster, Bluetooth enabled ESP32 big brother to its popular ESP8266 WiFi SoC, China-based Espressif released a follow-on to the ESP8266 called the ESP8285. Now, Itead, which also makes various Sonoff-branded WiFi-enabled IoT gizmos, has released what appears to be the first third-party WiFi module based on the chip: the $2.10 (without antenna) PSF-A85.

Phones

Tizen

• JerryScript isn’t the only lightweight Engine that is working with embedded hardware right now. Other engines like Duktape, tiny-js and MuJS, D7, etc are also actively working on bringing Javascript support to embeddable devices. But Samsung’s backing here gives a clear edge to JerryScript and help it go mainstream.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Western entrepreneurs still haven’t figured out China. For most, the problem is getting China to pay for software. The harder problem, however, is building software that can handle China’s tremendous scale.

• There are scattered examples of success, though. One is Alluxio (formerly Tachyon), which I detailed recently in its efforts to help China’s leading online travel site, Qunar, boost HDFS performance by 15X. Alluxio CEO and founder, Haoyuan Li, recently returned from China, and I caught up with him to better understand the big data infrastructure market there, as China looks to spend $370 million to double its data center capacity in order to serve 710 million internet users.

• Samsung Electronics announced that its Hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV) media player will be available as an open source project named HbbPlayer on github, an open source developer community. This will enable broadcasters and application developers who are writing HbbTV applications to test and validate them on a platform which can be implemented on any HbbTV 1.5-compliant TV.

• Business today is all about adapting, pivoting and expanding quickly. With market conditions changing ever so rapidly, open source has become the key to helping companies modify their solutions while keeping their IT expenditures and development time to a minimum.

• Today, we’re starting to see a new crop of developers who grew up using open source methodologies to develop open source components. As these developers make their way into enterprise IT departments, they’re bringing their familiarity with and desire for open source with them.

• Accordingly, we’ve been seeing tremendous amounts of innovation come from open source projects. The focus of many open source projects is on helping to solve the complex technology challenges that most businesses face today such as how to work with big data and how to build the best cloud applications.

• So how can and should enterprises go about making open source work for them in the best way possible? Here are some factors to take note of.

• The open-source world is an endlessly interesting and exciting place for developers. The inventory of technologies is always growing, and bleeding-edge software platforms often debut in open source marketplaces. For these same reasons, however, enterprises can grow weary of open source, a seemingly endless tweaking and tinkering game to customize software for business purposes. Some say a proprietary solution that utilizes open source is preferable for businesses that need to make moves in real life.

Events

• Today, September 19, 2016, was the first day of the first-ever LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME open source conference for GNU/Linux application developers.

• As you might have guessed already, the event is being organized by the GNOME Project, the same non-profit organization that’s behind the popular GNOME desktop environment used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems around the globe, and an important part of the Free Software ecosystem.

• LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME conference’s main goal is to encourage the growth of the Linux application ecosystem among small and medium-sized businesses, as well as various educational institutions. It also aims to expand the collaboration between the Linux kernel and major GNU/Linux operating systems.

• By the time this gets posted on the blog, I will be headed to LAS GNOME. I’m really looking forward to being there!

• I’m on the schedule to talk about usability testing. Specifically, I’ll discuss how you can do usability testing for your own open source software projects. Maybe you think usability testing is hard—it’s not! Anyone can do usability testing! It only takes a little prep work and about five testers to get enough useful feedback that you can improve your interface.

• One of the core missions of a Fedora Ambassador is to represent the Fedora Community at events. On the weekend on September 17 and 18, 2016 I attended HackMIT as a representative of Fedora with Justin Flory. I was also honored to serve as a mentor to several teams.

• We still have a number of ticket for the workshop day of systemd.conf 2016 available. If you are a newcomer to systemd, and would like to learn about various systemd facilities, or if you already know your way around, but would like to know more: this is the best chance to do so. The workshop day is the 28th of September, one day before the main conference, at the betahaus in Berlin, Germany. The schedule for the day is available here. There are five interesting, extensive sessions, run by the systemd hackers themselves. Who better to learn systemd from, than the folks who wrote it?

• Every year we get a number of constraints on Microconferences which we try hard to accommodate. Accounting for all of those, we’ve put the preliminary schedule up here. If you notice any problems, please email contact@linuxplumbersconf.org and we’ll try to fix it

• Also note, this is preliminary, the Microconferences may still move around as we get requests to change them. Also note that the times of talks within Microconferences is highly likely to change (please see the MC leaders if you want this to change).

• Last month, the fourth edition of the World Port Hackathon took place in Rotterdam. Several teams worked on problems identified by representatives of the port community in workshops leading up to the hackathon. This year’s event was organised in co-creation with the Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) of Singapore.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• While being delayed one week due to last-minute bugs, Firefox 49.0 is now available this morning.

• Firefox 49 ships with Linux Widevine support for handling this CDM similar to the existing Windows support for being able to play more protected HTML5 video content.

• Mozilla developers have released a new JavaScript debugger for Firefox.

• It’s hoped the new “Debugger.html” will replace todays XUL-based debugger, which the project’s Bryan Clark describes as “incredibly hard to change”.

• That may not necessarily happen, because Clark notes there’s another team in Firefox that’s working on refactoring the existing debugger code.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Last week, Oracle disowned NetBeans. The company announced it was turning its Java-based NetBeans over to the Apache Software Foundation. Now, Oracle is changing its tune on both NetBeans and Java Enterprise Edition (JEE).

• Oh, don’t get me wrong. Oracle still doesn’t want to manage NetBeans. But Oracle claims it’s not just dumping the NetBeans integrated developer environment (IDE) code. In an email, Bill Pataky, VP of Oracle Mobile Development Program and Developer Tools, told me, “Oracle is opening the governance model of NetBeans, not dropping support. Oracle has three products that depend on NetBeans.” These are:

Education

Healthcare

• Luckily an open medical record platform already existed: OpenMRS. In 2015, Save the Children International identified the need for medical data collection in the Ebola treatment centers and reached out to the OpenMRS community. Around the same time, Google Crisis Response and Doctors Without Borders were working on a similar project Project Buendia, an Android client built on top of an OpenMRS server.

• Founded in 2004, OpenMRS is a free, modular open-source electronic medical record platform used in more than 60 low- and middle-income countries. As the OpenMRS site explains, OpenMRS is a multi-institution, non-profit collaborative led by Regenstrief Institute, a medical informatics research leader, and Partners In Health, a Boston-based philanthropic organization with a focus on improving the lives of underprivileged people worldwide through health care service and advocacy.

• OpenMRS includes many features out of the box, such as a centralized dictionary that allows for coded data, user authentication, a patient repository, multiple identifiers per patient (i.e., patient can have multiple medical record numbers), data entry for electronic forms, data export, patient workflows (so patients can be put into programs and tracked through various states), relationships (to track relationships between two people, such as relatives and caretakers), and reporting tools. Add-on modules are also available or can be developed.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

• Mautic, a Boston-based open-source marketing automation firm, has disclosed a $5 million fundraise – cash one of its executives says will fuel growth across the company, including in the Triangle.

• David Hurley, the company’s co-founder and chief finance officer, is based in Raleigh. He says the firm is focused on expanding in the area.

• “We’ve been building the team from an engineering and infrastructure standpoint,” he said Monday in an interview. “We’re really focusing on the things Raleigh does well. We’ve got an awesome talent pool in the area.”

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Licensing/Legal

• The LLVM project is currently distributed under the BSD-like NCSA license, but the project is considering a change in the interest of better patent protection. “After extensive discussion involving many lawyers with different affiliations, we recommend taking the approach of using the Apache 2.0 license, with the binary attribution exception (discussed before), and add an additional exception to handle the situation of GPL2 compatibility if it ever arises.”

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The 12 minute long Netflix Original “Meridian” might not be the most exciting program they’ve ever released but it is among one of the most interesting. The program is available to anyone, via the Creative Commons license they attached to it, up to an including competitors such as iTunes and Hulu. This seemly strange move is because it is actually a benchmark for encoding streamed video and the more people that see it the more information Netflix and others will gain. It is originally filmed in 4k resolution at 60fps, which is far more than most displays can handle and much larger than residential data infrastructure is used to handling.

• The City of Vienna and KDZ have released version 3.0 of their Open Government Implementation Model to the public in German as well as English. The Model describes five stages of a strategy as well as practical recommendations for politicians and administrations to implement open government.

Open Data

• Oliver O’Brien, a Senior Research Associate at University College London (UCL), has created a wonderful visualisation of the volume of passengers traveling the London Underground on a typical workday. His Tube Heartbeat project builds on the outcomes of the TfL Rolling Origin and Destination Survey (RODS), which was made publicly available under the UK Open Government Licence (OGLv2). It shows the numbers entering and exiting each of the 268 stations and the numbers traveling each of the 762 links in between.

Leftovers

Science

• Star Trek has inspired fans, technologies, and careers ever since its creation in 1964 by Gene Roddenberry.

Hardware

• It’s the day everybody dreads: You power up your PC and it sits dormant, failing to boot because your hard drive or SSD is dead. But after you stop cursing and reaching for your backups—you do create backups regularly, right?—you might as well make the best of things.

• There’s a world of small wonders hidden inside every storage drive if you take the time to dig around. Since storage drives die far less frequently than they used to, the opportunities for dissection are rare. So we’ve broken out our screwdrivers and dissected both a solid-state drive and a traditional hard drive for you, to reveal what makes them metaphorically tick. If your drives start actually ticking, back up your data now and start looking for a new one pronto.

Security

• I had a discussion last week that ended with this question. “Why do we do security”. There wasn’t a great answer to this question. I guess I sort of knew this already, but it seems like something too obvious to not have an answer. Even as I think about it I can’t come up with a simple answer. It’s probably part of the problems you see in infosec.

• The purpose of security isn’t just to be “secure”, it’s to manage risk in some meaningful way. In the real world this is usually pretty easy for us to understand. You have physical things, you want to keep them from getting broken, stolen, lost, pick something. It usually makes some sort of sense.

• While setting up my new network at my house, I figured I’d do things right and set up an IPSec VPN (and a few other fancy bits). One thing that became annoying when I wasn’t on my LAN was I’d have to fiddle with the DNS Resolver to resolve names of machines on the LAN.

• Soon, one of the most important cryptographic key pairs on the internet will be changed for the first time.

• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the US-based non-profit responsible for various internet infrastructure tasks, will change the key pair that creates the first link in a long chain of cryptographic trust that lies underneath the Domain Name System, or DNS, the “phone book” of the internet.

• This key ensures that when web users try to visit a website, they get sent to the correct address. Without it, many internet users could be directed to imposter sites crafted by hackers, such as phishing websites designed to steal information.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The car-free day began with the Copenhagen Half Marathon, where roughly 22,000 runners pounded the pavement for 21.0975 kilometres on a course that began at Fælledparken in Østerbro and wound its way through Nørrebro, Frederiksberg and the inner city.

• The Colonial Pipeline spill has caused 6 states (Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and North Carolina) to declare a state of emergency. Gasoline (petrol) prices on the east coast are likely to spike. Yet, most puzzling is how this vast emergency and its likely effect on cost of living has gone unnoticed by mainstream media outlets. The pipeline is owned by Koch Industries: is this why the media is silent?

• A smog outbreak in Southeast Asia last year may have caused over 100,000 premature deaths, according to a new study released Monday that triggered calls for action to tackle the “killer haze”.

• Researchers from Harvard and Columbia universities in the US estimated there were more than 90,000 early deaths in Indonesia in areas closest to haze-belching fires, and several thousand more in neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia.

• Indonesian forest fires that choked a swath of Southeast Asia with a smoky haze for weeks last year may have caused more than 100,000 deaths, according to new research that will add to pressure on Indonesia’s government to tackle the annual crisis.

• The study by scientists from Harvard University and Columbia University to be published in the journal Environmental Research Letters is being welcomed by other researchers and Indonesia’s medical profession as an advance in quantifying the suspected serious public health effects of the fires, which are set to clear land for agriculture and forestry. The number of deaths is an estimate derived from a complex analysis that has not yet been validated by analysis of official data on mortality.

• The research has implications for land-use practices and Indonesia’s vast pulp and paper industry. The researchers showed that peatlands within timber concessions, and peatlands overall, were a much bigger proportion of the fires observed by satellite than in 2006, which was another particularly bad year for haze. The researchers surmise that draining of the peatlands to prepare them for pulpwood plantations and other uses made them more vulnerable to fires.

• California is now five years deep into one of its most severe droughts on record, and scientists are continually probing the different factors that affect the state’s climate, and how much those are related to the overall warming of the globe. Increasingly, this means looking back into the past for clues about how the region has changed over the last few thousand years and what influences might shape its future.

• In this connection, new research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports suggests the Pacific Ocean may play a bigger role than anyone thought — and an unexpected one. Moreover, it suggests that massive long-term droughts can hit the region in conjunction with cycles of ocean warming and cooling — and that if these patterns continue to hold, another megadrought could lie in the future.

• “What this paper provides is a new analysis of the link between what happens in the ocean and what happens in terms of the water availability on the land,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate system expert at Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study.

Finance

• An advisory board recommended a California city refuse Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to demolish and rebuild four homes around his property because of privacy concerns, saying it won’t support the building of a “compound.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Tom Watson has unveiled plans to axe Labour’s registered supporters and give MPs a greater say in appointing the party’s future leaders in a bid to prevent another Left-wing takeover.

• The deputy leader is also taking plans to Labour’s ruling body today which would see the return of shadow cabinet elections in which more moderate MPs could enter Jeremy Corbyn’s top team.

• I protected First Lady Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and their family while I served in the Secret Service Uniform Division as an officer from 1991-2003.

• By now, you have most likely seen the startling video of Hillary Clinton ‘fainting.’ Through the lens of my 29-year-career in The Service, I can see what a naked-eyed media pundit cannot: There is something seriously wrong with Mrs. Clinton.

• Pneumonia or overheating are highly suspect excuses and I’ll explain why.

• My analysis is not partisan. I cared for and protected the Clintons for many years. It was my duty to guard Mrs. Clinton in the Secret Service and I was so close to the First Family that the Supreme Court subpoenaed me to testify on the details of Bill Clinton’s late-term scandals.

• If all the major TV networks got together and decided to televise a presidential debate restricted to Republican nominee Donald Trump and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, while barring Democrat Hillary Clinton, it would be recognized as an act of media bias. But what if the debates this fall are restricted to just Trump and Clinton? That, too, needs to be recognized as an intentional act of media exclusion.

• Since 1988, televised presidential and vice-presidential debates have been controlled by a private organization with no official status: the Commission on Presidential Debates. The commission grew out of a deal cut in the 1980s by GOP and Democratic leaders. Today, even though the U.S. public largely distrusts the two major parties’ presidential candidates, TV networks seem willing to let them again dictate the terms of debate, including who gets to participate.

• Presidential debates have been televised in every campaign since 1976. (They rarely happened before then; the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 were an exception.) From 1976 through 1984, they were sponsored and run by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters. In 1980, the League insisted on including independent candidate John Anderson.

• In 1985, the national chairs of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf, signed an agreement that referred to future debates as “nationally televised joint appearances conducted between the presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the two major political parties. . . It is our conclusion that future joint appearances should be principally and jointly sponsored and conducted by the Republican and Democratic Committees.”

• The every-four-years parade of east coast journalists trooping out into the Rust Belt of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and their neighbors has begun.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about a victory in the courts for Creative Commons licenses, noting that such judgments were still rather few and far between. That’s unfortunate, in the sense that some people still think CC licensing is weird, rarely-used or even invalid. The situation regarding Wikipedia is similar. Even though it has been around for 15 years — just like Creative Commons — it too suffers from continuing doubts about its aims and methods, and a relative dearth of legal cases helping to clarify the status of both.

• Here’s one from Brazil, which has recently been settled in favour of Wikipedia’s parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. It concerns the Brazilian musician Rosanah Fienngo, who had brought a lawsuit objecting to information about her personal life being included on her Portuguese Wikipedia page.

• A journalist has claimed that YouTube tried to manipulate her interview with the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker – days after his office backed a new tax that could cost the firm millions.

• Laetitia Birbes, a popular videoblogger, interviewed Mr Juncker for a project hosted by YouTube but says representatives of the service had asked her to run difficult questions past a press officer beforehand.

• “I found out they expected for me to ask only very soft questions,” Ms Birbes said in a video posted on Facebook on Sunday.

• A UK activist who campaigned for the rights of migrant workers in Thailand’s fruit industry has been found guilty of defamation and computer crimes.

• Andy Hall, from Lincolnshire, was given a three-year suspended jail term and fined 150,000 baht ($4,300; £3,300).

• Hall had contributed to a report by a Finnish watchdog, Finnwatch, in 2013 alleging the Natural Fruit Company mistreated its workers.

• Vice’s Motherboard tech site has also stepped up and agreed to double the amount so that even more people can file Thiel-related FOIAs.

• Of course, the name MuckRock chose for this is a clear play on the well-known Thiel Fellowship, in which he gives $100,000 to entrepreneurial college students to work on building companies, rather than completing school.

• And while I’m not so sure how much Thiel-related info is really FOIA-able, this may put to the test Thiel’s stated claim that he wasn’t against journalism that made him look bad, in funding lawyer Charles Harder to sue Gawker into oblivion, but rather to “send a message” about protecting privacy. Of course, when you try to silence the press, there’s always a chance that the press decides to turn an even bigger spotlight on you. I guess now we have to wait and see if Harder starts threatening MuckRock with trademark infringement claims over the name…

• If you have the power to censor other people’s speech, special interests will try to co-opt that power for their own purposes. That’s a lesson the Motion Picture Association of America is learning this year. And it’s one that Internet intermediaries, and the special interests who want to regulate them, need to keep in mind.

• MPAA, which represents six major movie studios, also runs the private entity that assigns movie ratings in the U.S. While it’s a voluntary system with no formal connection to government, MPAA’s “Classification and Ratings Administration” wields remarkable power. That’s because most movie theaters, along with retail giants like Wal-Mart and Target, won’t show or sell feature films that lack an MPAA rating. And a rating of “R” or “NC-17” can drastically limit the audiences who are allowed to view or buy a movie.

• Power creates its own temptation. MPAA itself has been accused of rating independent films more harshly than those produced by MPAA’s own member studios. And this year, a class action lawsuit seeks to force MPAA to use its ratings system to eliminate tobacco imagery from children’s films. The lawsuit, Forsyth v. MPAA, claims that MPAA has a special legal duty to avoid harm to children, and because of that duty, MPAA should be required to give an “R” rating to every film that contains smoking or other tobacco use.

• Noted filmmaker and actor Amol Palekar has approached the Bombay High Court challenging rules which make pre-censorship of the scripts of plays mandatory by the Maharashtra State Performance Scrutiny Board.

• Palekar, in his petition, has said the rules are ‘arbitrary’ and violative of the fundamental rights of a citizen guaranteed under the Constitution.

• “If anonymity wasn’t allowed any more, then I wouldn’t use social media,” a 14-year-old told me over the kitchen table a few weeks ago. He uses forums on the website Reddit to have debates about politics and religion, where he wants to express his view “without people underestimating my age”.

• Anonymity to this teenager is something that works for him; lets him operate in discussions where he wants to try out his arguments and gain experience in debates. Anonymity means no one judges who he is or his right to join in.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Unfortunately, the violations found by the Data Protection Commissioner have since been codified into law. The BND is harvesting even more than it was when it was inspected, having just finished a 300 million euro revamp of its surveillance tech. Much like here in the US pre-Snowden, the oversight in Germany is relatively toothless. Whatever exists will be actively thwarted by intelligence agencies (the report states that BND deleted logs the Commissioner asked to examine) or by other legislators who are always willing to sacrifice the public’s rights for national security.

• The words “mass surveillance” usually bring to mind wiretaps, security cameras, and the NSA hoovering unfathomable quantities of cellphone metadata and Internet activity. Few pause to consider the physical aspect of that last type of data collection: The government taps hundreds of cables that snake across the ocean floor, carrying data around the world.

• Artist Trevor Paglen reveals some of those cables in a recent series, offering a visual reminder of how vulnerable your data is, and how easily it is accessed. “Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world’s information goes through little tubes under the ocean,” Paglen says. “Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world.”

• Internet radio and information services will generate approximately 6,000 petabytes of data a year

• The impact of all this information has been enormous, both for the U.S. government and Snowden’s own personal life. Since releasing the information to the world, he has been holed up in Russia, with only temporary permission to stay. His American passport has been revoked. He cannot move around freely or communicate easily, for fear of U.S. covert agents seeking to apprehend him – or worse.

• The movie doesn’t depict much of his Russian life, a decision that tends to reinforce the film’s message that there is no privacy anymore. If it showed more about how Snowden communicates now, it might provide useful insights into how Americans – and others around the world – could potentially use encrypted software to communicate without being subject to government surveillance.

• Veteran American filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has been directing since the mid-1980s, has made a movie about National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden follows its titular character’s evolution from his enlistment in 2004 in the US Army Reserve as a Special Forces candidate, at which time he was a “patriot” and firm supporter of the war in Iraq, to his decision in 2013 to expose the NSA’s illegal efforts at universal surveillance.

• THERESA MAY has controversially ordered spy chiefs into the fight against illegal immigration and modern slavery – as she demands global action against the scourge.

• The PM today urged world leaders to make tackling people trafficking as important an issue as winning the war on drugs.

• And she revealed the heads of Mi5, Mi6 and GCHQ would be joining Ministers on a new ‘anti-slavery’ taskforce.

• The Washington Post says whistleblower Edward Snowden should not be granted a presidential pardon from Barack Obama. This is despite the newspaper receiving a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting of the NSA leaks sent to the Post by Snowden.

• So, last week, I wrote up a long analysis of the House Intelligence Committee’s ridiculous smear campaign against Ed Snowden, highlighting a bunch of misleading to false statements that the report made in trying to undermine Snowden’s credibility as he seeks a pardon from President Obama. The Committee insisted that it had spent two years working on the report, but it seems like maybe they just needed all that time because they couldn’t find any actual dirt on Snowden.

• In my analysis, I pointed to some of Snowden’s public responses, highlighting how the House Intel Committee was either completely misinformed or lying about Snowden. But Barton Gellman, one of the four reporters who Snowden originally gave his documents to, and who has done some amazing reporting on the Snowden leaks (not to mention, who is writing a book about Snowden) has responded to the report as well, and highlights just how incredibly dishonest the report is.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Just under 30 percent of France’s 3 to 4 million Muslims reject the country’s secular laws, according to an Ifop poll published by the French weekly Journal du Dimanche.

• When asked if they considered the Islamic legal and moral code of sharia to be more important than the French Republic’s laws, 29 percent of respondents answered “yes.”

• The poll found that 20 percent of male Muslim respondents and 28 percent of female Muslim respondents were in favour of the face veil, the niqab, and of the burqa which covers both face and body.

• Another 60 percent said they were in favour of letting girls and women wear a head scarf at schools and universities which is forbidden at France’s secular public institutions.

• Islamic State militants who have enslaved, murdered and raped Yazidi women and children must be brought to justice, no matter the price, international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney said on Monday.

• Clooney, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, is on a mission to prosecute the Islamist group through the International Criminal Court for their crimes against the Yazidi community.

• She announced in June she would represent Yazidi women in Iraq who have been victims of sexual slavery, rape and genocide by Islamic State militants, also known as ISIS.

• A 40-year-old black man who was fatally shot by a Tulsa police officer had his hands up and appeared unarmed when one officer Tasered him and another fired at him, according to a local pastor who reviewed footage of the incident Sunday.

• The department hasn’t commented publicly on the video or said whether police recovered a weapon from the scene.

• Terence Crutcher died in the hospital Friday evening after being shot once, Tulsa police told the Associated Press. Police said two officers found Crutcher standing by his SUV, which had broken down in the middle of the road.

• As Crutcher approached the officers, he refused commands to raise his hands and instead reached into the vehicle, AP reported police saying. At that point, one officer fired a Taser and another fired a round, police told AP.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today is “International Talk like a Pirate Day.” While it’s a lot of fun to act like a pirate, drink rum and catch up on Errol Flynn movies, piracy is also a serious issue with real economic and legal significance. As electronic devices become an increasingly ubiquitous part of our lives, the content we consume has moved from analog to digital. This has made copying – as well as pirating – increasingly easy and prevalent.

• Adding fuel to the flames of this rising “pirate generation” has been the content industry’s recalcitrant and often combative attitude toward digital markets. Piracy, and the reactions to it, has had an immense impact on the daily lives of ordinary Americans, shaping their digital experience by determining how they can share, transfer and consume content.

• As soon as electronic storage and communication technology was sufficiently developed, digital piracy became accessible. Whether it’s a song, movie, video game or other piece of software, you could suddenly reproduce it without having to steal it off a shelf or obtain any specialized machinery to counterfeit it. Additionally, if you wanted to listen to an mp3 of the latest Britney Spears album on your computer, there weren’t many lawful options. This led to a surge in online piracy and helped foster a culture of online file-sharing.

• Out of this period came some ridiculous anti-piracy campaigns, but also major legislation both good and bad (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Communications Decency Act) as well as legal battles that would set key precedents for how we access the digital world.

• Pornography helped shape the Internet—for instance, with its need for high-bandwidth technology—and it reflects and magnifies its trends. The triumph of porn has come at a cost to the industry itself, which can no longer produce a Jenna Jameson. Despite MindGeek’s near-monopoly of the tube sites (which, like other Internet platforms, are underregulated), their content is increasingly crowd-sourced. Mass production in the San Fernando Valley has been replaced by an amateur landscape in which everyone is a potential producer, and in which our fantasies and worst aspirations—our greed, our desire to humiliate, to dominate—are fed back to us in larger quantities than ever before. Decentralization hasn’t led to diversification (except at the margins, where buying ethical porn is like buying vinyl). Most porn remains conservative, brutal, and anonymous. It’s rapid-fire, often monotonous, and even if, or because, it does the trick, much of it is pretty depressing. It’s hard to see how local protests, however admirable, can resist a business model that already profits from decentralized, unregulated, amateur production. Except for the few companies that have profited from distribution, it’s unclear who makes money from porn, and how that money connects either to the work of performers or to how they are treated. With the decline of the industry, pornography, like the Internet itself, seems ever harder to control. Some will find that cause for horror, others, for celebration. Every era gets the porn it deserves. ♦

• It is not reasonable to expect a café owner to keep a database of all local WiF users. That would require an extensive and very privacy sensitive register that cannot be tampered with and that can stand up to legal procedures. And still, it would do nothing to identify an individual user on the cafés single IP address. At least not with the relatively cheap and simple WiFi equipment normally used in such places.

• It all quickly gets complicated and expensive. This would effectively kill free WiFi with your coffee.

• The same general questions can be raised when it comes to Juncker’s free city WiFi. But there is a difference. Public sector operated WiFi will have more money and can apply common technical standards. As the number of users in a city-WiFi can be expected to be substantially higher that at a single café – there would not only need to be some sort of password protection but also individual user names, linked to personal identity. At least if you want to meet with the ECJ ambition to be able to identify single users.

• In both cases, anonymity will be more or less impossible.

• And when it comes to city-WiFi, we can expect various law enforcement and intelligence agencies to show a keen interest.

DRM

• EVIDENCE IS growing that printer maker HP put a ‘self-destruct’ protocol into a firmware update that would kill off printers using hooky cartridges.

• The news follows the revelation that thousands of people started getting the same error message about their cartridge on the same day, 13 September. Not a Friday.

• One third-party ink supplier carried out an investigation and it was discovered that the end-of-life date was programmed into a firmware update in March 2016.

• A statement to Dutch media explained that HP does indeed take steps to block cartridges “to protect innovation and intellectual property”.

• However, this could have been handled better. HP could have, you know, told people and that.

• HP, one of the companies that has been forced to raise prices post-Brexit, has never made any secret of how it doesn’t like third-party cartridges, but it really should have been explicit if it was going to do this.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Guidance on protecting colour combinations in Europe has evolved over time. But in the light of recent decisions is further clarification needed? Roland Mallinson investigates

Copyrights

• The Delhi High Court has delivered a landmark judgment which allows a local university copyshop to print course packs, using parts of commercial educational books. The judge held that copyright is not an inevitable or divine right. Copying for educational use is fair dealing, whether it’s done by hand or automatically in an organized fashion.

• Entertainment industry workers usually speak about illegal downloading in the harshest of terms but for one former Disney executive, it has its upsides. Speaking at the huge All That Matters conference, Samir Bangara admitted that he “loves” piracy as it’s a great indicator of content popularity.

• Just a few weeks ago, we had lawyer Ira Rothken on our podcast (it’s a really great episode, so check it out if you haven’t heard it yet). Rothken has been involved in lots of big copyright cases, but is probably most well-known these days as Kim Dotcom’s US lawyer. In that episode we talked a lot about the Kim Dotcom situation, but also spent a fair amount of time on the case of Artem Vaulin, who was arrested in Poland for running the search engine KickassTorrents. The US is seeking to extradite him to stand trial in Illinois. On the podcast, Rothken expressed some concerns that he hadn’t been able to speak directly to Vaulin and noted that he was working on it.

• If you’re going to argue against YouTube, Spotify, etc. and the supposed wholesale screwing of artists, it helps if:

• A. You’re not a former member of an entity with decades of experience in screwing artists, and

• B. You have some grasp of basic economic concepts.

• Paul Young, a former director of licensing for Universal Music Group, has an op-ed posted at The Hill decrying the unfairness of streaming services and the wrongness of the DMCA. But any point he’s trying to make is buried under ignorance and the demand that some artists be treated more equally than others.

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.