● 02.16.17

● Links 16/2/2017: HITMAN for GNU/Linux, Go 1.8

Posted in News Roundup at 7:13 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• However, Matthias Kirschner, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe said: “They have now stepped back a little bit because so many people were watching, but on the other hand it’s very clear what they want.”

• The City of Munich, which has long been considered a pioneer of the transition from Windows to Linux, is now exploring ways to return to Microsoft’s solutions, with a proposal to move all computers to Windows 10 and Microsoft Office to be discussed today.

• The City of Munich will explore ways to move to Windows 10 by 2020, as part of a historic vote that could represent a major step towards the demise of its own Linux-based LiMux.

• The city of Munich, which moved its systems to Linux many years ago, is now thinking of moving back to Windows 10, following the arrival of a mayor who got Microsoft to move its German corporate headquarters to Munich.

• The city council voted on Wednesday to create a draft plan outlining the costs involved in moving back to Windows. If the plan gets the green light, then the return to Windows could take place by the end of 2020.

• At the time Munich began the move to LiMux in 2004, it was one of the largest organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city’s leaving so seriously that its then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich, but the mayor at the time, Christian Ude, stood firm.

• More recently, Microsoft last year moved its German company headquarters to Munich, and now, less than four years after the migration of some 15,000 staff to LiMux was completed, the city has taken a decisive step towards swapping the Linux-based OS for Windows—whose use has been reduced to a minimum in the city.

• Truth doesn’t seem to matter much in politics these days. Just repeat a lie. If enough believe it, you get what you want… Despite proof that GNU/Linux works for Munich, the mayor and friends are going to migrate back to Wintel at all costs.

• THE GERMAN CITY of Munich has voted to investigate the viability of creating a Windows 10 client, thus ending its multi-million euro, nine-year experiment in running the municipality on Linux.

• A final decision will be taken later, but the announcement marks the first step on the road back to Microsoft, just three years after completing the transition.

• Anyone who has used Linux for the last 15 years or so knows that things have gotten better and better when it comes to desktop environments. There are plenty to choose from and, as the years have gone by, Linux desktops have made big advances in terms of features and quality.

• One redditor recently noted how much better Linux desktops are today in a thread on the Linux subreddit.

Server

• Organisations across Europe believe that using an Agile methodology for software development can vastly improve the customer experience, while using DevOps can boost revenue from new sources.

• A new report commissioned by software company CA said that 67 percent of UK organisations using an Agile methodology saw an improvement in customer experience, while firms using DevOps practices report a 38 percent increase in business growth from new revenue sources.

• Digitization is changing the world. Businesses, organizations, and governments alike are harnessing the power of digitization to build trust, move faster, add greater value, and grow.

• As a result, the network is undergoing a huge change, too. This change is just as big as the move from analog to digital. It is the shift away from physical devices—hardware—to software that virtualizes device functions and supports digital innovation.

• Civilization rests firmly on the mainframe. These massive computers run banking systems, weave the financial webs that hold nations together and control infrastructure at every level. Yet, these beasts must also be modernized.

• OpenStack services and drivers require a robust and integrated Linux operating system for top-performing functionality.

• OpenStack is not (just) an operating system; it’s cloud infrastructure.

• Open source developers and technologists from around the world collaborate on OpenStack to create infrastructure and tools for building and managing public and private clouds. According to the overview provided by the OpenStack Foundation, OpenStack is a “cloud operating system” that is designed to control and manage large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources.

• In more practical terms, OpenStack is a framework of at least 10 independent core services that all function together as the foundation for cloud infrastructure. At its very basic level, OpenStack is a set of services provided via a group of Python-written scripts that work in conjunction with another. Like any script, service, or plugin, they require an operating system (OS) to run, function, and perform. In OpenStack’s case, the OS of choice is Linux.

• Containers, a lightweight way to virtualize applications, are an important element of any DevOps plan. But how are you going to manage all of those containers? Container orchestration programs—Kubernetes, Mesosphere Marathon, and Docker Swarm—make it possible to manage containers without tearing your hair out.

• Before jumping into those, let’s review the basics. Containers, according to 451 Research, are the fastest growing cloud-enabling technology. The reason for their appeal is that they use far fewer system resources than do virtual machines (VMs). After all, a VM runs not merely an operating system, but also a virtual copy of all the hardware that the OS needs to run. In contrast, containers demand just enough operating system and system resources for an application instance to run.

• NFV automation is the ability to transfer manual network configuration to technology; NFV orchestration creates the deployment and automation blueprint.

• The Linux Foundation has announced keynote speakers and session highlights for Open Networking Summit, to be held April 3-6, 2017 in Santa Clara, CA.

• ONS promises to be the largest, most comprehensive and most innovative networking and orchestration event of the year. The event brings enterprises, carriers, and cloud service providers together with the networking ecosystem to share learnings, highlight innovation and discuss the future of open source networking.

• The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is announcing its new Open Innovation Pipeline made possible through the aligned operations of ONF and Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) as these two organizations finalize their pending merger.

• ON.Lab, with CORD and ONOS, successfully brought together operators, vendors and integrators to build solutions for carrier networks by leveraging SDN, NFV and Cloud technologies through an open source approach to solution creation. Operators have embraced the approach, and the industry is in the midst of a resulting transformation revolutionizing how solutions will be built for 5G mobile, ultra broadband and other next-generation networks.

Kernel Space

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a Linux-based, open platform for the connected car, today announced that six new members have joined Automotive Grade Linux and The Linux Foundation. DrimAES joins AGL at the Silver level while ARM, Elektrobit, RealVNC, Telenav and Tuxera join AGL at the Bronze level.

• “We saw a 60% membership growth in 2016, and we expect that momentum to continue in 2017,” said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux. “Our new members represent a wide group of skills and expertise, from location-based services to digital storage, which will be valuable as we continue to enhance our UCB infotainment platform and expand into other automotive applications like telematics and instrument cluster.”

• Back in December, 2016, Linux boss Linus Torvalds rolled out Linux kernel 4.9. Thanks to tons of code due to Project Ara’s ‘greybus’ and AMD GPU register definition files, it was the biggest ever kernel release in terms of commits. The release also opened the Linux kernel 4.10 merge window. Kernel 4.10 is expected to be released this weekend–most probably on February 19.

• Starting with the RZ/G series of microcontrollers (1.5GHz ARM, 3D graphics, HD video), it plans to develop an embedded platform for industrial applications incorporating the project’s industrial-grade Linux operating system (OS).

Graphics Stack

• Gabriel Krisman Bertazi of Collabora has published a set of 14 patches today for implementing atomic mode-setting support within the QXL DRM driver.

• The QXL DRM driver as a reminder is for Red Hat’s SPICE with guest virtual machines on QEMU. QXL — presumably with Linux 4.12 — will join Nouveau, Intel, and other DRM drivers in supporting atomic mode-setting.

• Intel Linux developers have partially reverted Mesa work done years ago to drop the default OpenGL behavior with the older i915 driver from exposing OpenGL 2.0+ support to now only having OpenGL 1.4 out-of-the-box.

Benchmarks

• This week I’ve published Windows 10 vs. Linux NVIDIA gaming benchmarks and a Radeon Software Windows 10 vs. RadeonSI/RADV Linux comparison with a variety of interesting games. For this third article on the topic of Windows 10 vs. Linux performance are a few Intel HD Graphics 630 benchmark results.

Applications

• MPV Player, the popular fork of MPlayer/MPlayer2, is out this week with a significant feature update.

• MPV 0.24 is the new release and it comes with a number of notable additions. New to MPV 0.24 is an experimental C plug-in interface, an experimental stream recording feature, prefetching for the next playlist entry, VA-API now supports 10-bit video formats, and X11 pseudo HiDPI scaling support.

• MPV developer Martin Herkt released a new stable version of the popular, powerful, and open-source video player application for all supported platforms, versioned 0.24.0.

• Over 70 improvements have been implemented in MPV 0.24.0, which comes seven weeks after the release of MPV 0.23.0. There are a couple of experimental new features introduced for the player, namely a C plugin interface and a stream recording feature that can be used using the “–record-file” command-line argument.

• The latest stable update to Flatpak, the distro-agnostic, decentralised, and open-source application packaging and distribution format

• Evernote is practically a by-word for being well organised and super productive — and not just in the minds of its 100 million users but among those who, like me, aspire to be.

• But with no official Evernote Linux app available it’s been left to the community to plug the productivity gap with unofficial alternatives, like NixNote, EverPad, NeverNote, and the Ubuntu Touch notes app.

• A while back I wrote about TopMenu, a panel plugin that provides global menu (AppMenu) support for MATE, then also included support for Xfce and LXDE.

• The problem with TopMenu is that it only partially supports GTK3, it doesn’t support LibreOffice, and with Ubuntu 16.04, it doesn’t support Qt (4 or 5) applications.

• So Photoshop is the industry standard for photo editing but it is going to cost you as high as $600 a year. If you are looking for something arguably as good but cheaper as free, then you’ve got to go with GIMP. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. So how good is GIMP? Can it effectively replace Photoshop? How far Let’s take a look.

• I am happy to announce a new release of libosinfo, version 1.0.0 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.

• It is often faster to use command-line apps to play audio files and preview images than to futz around launching and using a graphical application, and you can use them in scripts. Come along to learn about MOC and SoX for playing audio files, and feh for viewing image files from the Linux command line.

• Franz is a free desktop messaging app which combines chat & messaging services into one application. It currently supports 14 messenger services such as Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupMe, Skype and many more. You can download Franz for Mac, Windows & Linux. Still its in beta, hope they will add more apps before its going stable release.

• The first release candidate to GRUB 2.02 was quietly released at the beginning of the month. GRUB 2.02 is going to be a sizable feature update with it already having been five years since the current stable version, GRUB 2.00.

• For many people, the Linux terminal represents a substantial portion of where their most important work happens. Whether a system administrator managing multiple remote machines, a programmer trying to run a new snippet of code as they walk through the source, or simply an ordinary user who is trying to read a man page for documentation as they step through pecking out a lengthy command, it’s not uncommon to need to run and see the output of multiple terminal applications at a time.

• Why should keeping track of multiple applications be a difficult proposition that requires a fancy modern GUI? Sure, you can launch multiple terminal instances, or use a terminal emulator that tiles terminals for you. But there’s an easier, and arguably better way, by using a native terminal application to manage your multiple applications just like you would in a traditional windowed environment. Enter tmux, the terminal multiplexer.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• HITMAN, the latest entry the popular Hitman franchise, is available to buy and play on Linux from today. Surprised? You should be! This HITMAN Linux release is the first game in this popular 16 year-old series to be released on the platform. “Become the Master Assassin in this intense spy-thriller story.

• With today’s release of HITMAN for Linux it’s exciting not only because there are signs of possible Vulkan support but also because Feral Interactive backed this game with launch-day RadeonSI support.

• Today, February 16, the UK-based video game publisher Feral Interactive is proud to announce the immediate availability of the HITMAN: The Complete First Season stealth game for Linux and SteamOS platforms.

• Feral Interactive is well known for porting many awesome games to our beloved Linux-based operating systems, including Valve’s SteamOS, of course. In the past, the company brought us titles like Tomb Raider (2013), Mad Max, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Life Is Strange, and Total War: WARHAMMER.

• HITMAN: The Complete First Season is now available for Linux.

• Feral Interactive just released HITMAN for Linux and it looks like they may be working on Vulkan support.

• Croteam issued a new build of Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter today and there is now VR support on Linux, pending an updated SteamVR for Linux.

• Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter [Steam] now supports VR on Linux using Vulkan, but Croteam is now waiting on Valve updating SteamVR to work on Linux.

• A new version of The Dark Mod has been released. The new version provides a new introductory map, updated and improved assets, bug fixes and some performance improvements.

• Bendy and the Ink Machine is a particularly nice short game with old-cartoonish aesthetics and an excellent ambience, which manages to be creepy and good looking. Also, the environmental sounds are at the same level of quality.

• Civilization VI [Steam] is a really fun game and it’s damn good to have it on Linux, but performance has been an issue. Aspyr Media are aware of it and they are looking to improve it.

• Arcane Magic [Steam], a digital board-game from Turbo Tape Games is showing signs that it will add Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Maps has become a much more viable piece of software with transit routing support having landed in Git master.

• Following some work at FOSDEM, GNOME Maps 3.24 will have support for transit routing so you can enter two points and get turn-by-turn directions. GNOME Maps is making use of OpenTripPlanner and they are still finalizing their deployment for transit routing but it appears all will be set for next month’s GNOME 3.24 release.

• GNOME Foundation member Marcus Lundblad is announcing today, February 15, the upcoming availability of new transit routing and reverse routes functionality for the GNOME Maps application.

• The new features could land as soon as the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment is out, which will happen in about five weeks from the moment of writing this article, on March 22, 2017, but early adopters can take it for a test drive right now if they clone the latest Git master repository of GNOME Maps.

• So, at FOSDEM a bit over a week ago, me, Jonas Danielsson, Mattias Bengtsson, and Andreas Nilsson talked about plans for landing the transit routing feature and we started doing some patch reviewing over some beers on Saturday evening.

• Thanks to a lot of awesome reviewing work done by Jonas, this work has finally landed in master!

• GNOME Shell 3.23.90 and Mutter 3.23.90 are now available for testing, which represents the component’s release for the GNOME 3.24 beta.

• With tonight’s GNOME Shell 3.23.90 release is handling Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+W in portal windows, reloading of apps when the .desktop file contents change, fixing for sub-surfaces not showing up in previews, kill-switch has been added for user extensions, and a nightlight indicator has been added to the status area. There have also been a number of bug fixes to the GNOME Shell as it gets ready for the GNOME 3.24.0 release in March.

• GNOME 3.23.90, a.k.a. the GNOME 3.24 beta, is now available for testing ahead of this big desktop update due out in late March.

• With a one-day delay, the Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment is finally here, available for public testers who want to get an early taste of its new features.

• Of course, GNOME 3.24 Beta can’t be called a feature-full release, as some things are yet to be implemented, such as the return routes and transit routing planning functionalities of the Maps app that we’ve discussed earlier, but it comes with enough changes to please the eye.

• For those eligible, Outreachy is accepting applications for their summer 2017 internship period if you wish to get paid while getting involved with open-source software.

Distributions

• Hey new Linux users, you may be wondering that which Linux distro to choose after seeing so many distros based on Linux. Most of you might be switching from windows to Linux and want those distros which are easy and simple, resemble like windows. So today I will cover those Linux distros whose Desktop Environment is much similar to windows, so let’s start.

• Running a small business is no easy task. The last thing you need is extra complexity in your IT infrastructure – so why turn to Linux? Well, it could (if you’re lucky) actually turn out to be a less complex choice for many tasks, depending on the distribution you select. And, critically, Linux is free; at least if you don’t figure in support costs. That’s an overhead ticked off the list.

• So what’s the best choice for your small business? We’ve approached this selection with a few criteria in mind. Stability is first and foremost, because if you’re putting a distro to work, uptime is critical, and solid support provision comes a close second.

New Releases

• RancherOS developer Sven Dowideit announced the availability of version 0.8.0 of the open-source, container-oriented GNU/Linux operating system built around the popular Docker application container engine.

• RancherOS 0.8.0 is here three and a half months after the release of version 0.7.0, and it ships with some of the latest Linux and Docker technologies, including an untouched Linux 4.9.9 kernel, the long-term supported Linux 4.4.43-hypriot-v7 kernel for Raspberry Pi single-board computers, and Docker 1.12.6 installed by default.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE’s Douglas DeMaio reports today, February 16, about the latest software updates and technologies that landed in the stable repositories during last week and the beginning of this one via a total of six snapshots.

• Two Linux Kernels per week in openSUSE Tumbleweed is becoming the norm as the rolling release is providing daily snapshots of new software that are closely aligned with upstream development.

• Kernel 4.9.8 and 4.9.9 were released in the 20170208 and 20170212 snapshots respectively and the later brought a fix for a Btrfs system call.

Red Hat Family

• This BPA encompasses an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) which entitles DON to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Add-ons, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux management and provisioning tools, such as Red Hat Satellite.

• Open source communities are some of the most passionate organizations I’ve ever seen. Their members care deeply about the work they do (often voluntarily), and that passion drives incredible innovations. That’s no small feat, because open source communities are often collaborating in the face of geographic, cultural, and technological barriers that can lead to unfortunate misunderstandings.

• And yet open source communities are also extraordinarily resilient. Some of them have found clever ways to refocus their energies and eliminate sources of conflict.

Finance

Fedora

• I’ve been floating an idea around recently to people who are currently using ResultsDB in some sense – either sending reports to it, or consuming reports from it – or plan to do so. The idea was to have a group where we can discuss (and hopefully co-ordinate) use of ResultsDB – a place to talk about result metadata conventions and so forth.

Debian Family

• Debian developer Daniel Lange announced today that the host city of the next Debian conference, DebConf18, will be Hsinchu, a city in northern Taiwan located southwest of Taipei.

• While the developers and engineers behind the very popular Debian GNU/Linux operating system are currently preparing for DebConf17, which will take place in Montréal, Canada, between August 6-12, 2017, it looks like they’ve already decided which will be the next host city, but no official dates were set for the upcoming event.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The GPD Pocket crowdfunder has only been live on IndieGoGo for just over 24 hours but it’s has already amassed a staggering $700,000 — $500,000 more than it was seeking! With 2 months left to run the question now is can the diminutive computing device can go on to hit the $1 million mark?

• Alan Griffiths of Canonical has announced the release of MirAL 1.2 for Ubuntu 17.04 and the Ubuntu Stable Phone Overlay.

• There’s a new MirAL release (1.2.0) available in ‘Zesty Zapus’ (Ubuntu 17.04) and the so-called “stable phone overlay” ppa for ‘Xenial Xerus’ (Ubuntu 16.04LTS). MirAL is a project aimed at simplifying the development of Mir servers and particularly providing a stable ABI and sensible default behaviors.

• The little screenshot nestled to the left of this text contains something that makes us very happy.

• It’s a change-log for GNOME Software that mentions handler support for opening Snappy URLs is on the way.

• Why do we find that exciting? Allow me to explain.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• Google, the maker of the Android Operating System (OS), has had an anti-competitive Investigation launched against it by The South Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC), to see whether it has obstructed Samsung’s development of the Tizen platform to replace the Android OS on its mobiles.

• Of late we have been reporting on SDKs being released by some of the popular software service providers for the Tizen OS. Today’s new addition to this list comes from GameAnalytics. GameAnalytics until now has been available for iOS, Android, Windows, Unity, Unreal, etc and provides game developers with an easy to use service for getting valuable analytical data of their players. The most important part of the service is that it is completely free of cost. Tizen game developers can now make use of GameAnalytics’ SDK for Tizen and implement it into their games.

• Lots of new apps were added to the Tizen Store this month like games, funny apps, music and video apps, photo editing, camera apps, entertainment apps etc. Lately, we have also had many good camera apps added like InstaTags, Monograph. Sweet camera, angleCam etc.

Android

• With everyone from local scammers to government agencies trying to get hands on your data, there’s never been a better time to beef up your privacy game. Fortunately, there are a ton of options out there to keep your messages, files, and phone safe on Android.

• The latest smartphone figures from Gartner are out, and they paint an extremely familiar picture. Between them, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. This duopoly has been the norm for a while now (in the second quarter of 2015 this figure was 96.8 percent), but it’s always impressive — and slightly terrifying — to see how Google and Apple continue to wring the last decimal point drops of market share from global smartphone users.

• Imagine an Android operating system of the future that would work seamlessly across devices, offering similar experiences across screens and realities. Imagine an Android operating system that would receive regular updates just like the iPhone does. Google might be working on something like that. Only it’s not going to be Android. Android will be a part of that.

Free Software/Open Source

• The techie cold war did eventually thaw with projects like MIT’s Project Athena and Stallman’s work with Emacs and GPL leading a transformation in the way people worked. Project Athena allowed all the disparate corporate systems to work together through common protocols, ultimately enabling businesses and home users the freedom to mix and match their hardware and software as they pleased.

• Secure messaging service Wickr is opening its core cryptographic protocol to review by making the code available on GitHub. The move is a first for the company, which until now had kept its efforts proprietary.

• Security researchers have wanted a peek at Wickr’s code since the secure messaging app launched in 2012, and now they’re finally getting that chance. Wickr is publishing its code for Wickr Professional, the subscription-based enterprise version of its free messaging app, today for public review.

• Finally, Wickr has released its core crypto code to the open source community.

• The end-to-end encrypted messaging service launched in 2012, long before Signal took off and WhatsApp rolled out encryption of its own.Yet Wickr became one of the last to publish its code to the open source community.

• The service’s use of encrypted and disappearing messaging, à la Snapchat, helped to gain users’ trust that their messages wouldn’t be stolen, leaked, or exposed to either hackers or federal agents.

• But the company’s choice to restrict access to its crypto code made it impossible for anyone to be sure that the service was free from vulnerabilities or backdoors, except for a very few select cryptographers and security auditors.

• This is a manifesto that any private organization can use to frame their collaboration transformation. Take a read and let me know what you think.

• I presented a talk at the Linux TODO group using this article as my material. For those of you who are not familiar with the TODO group, they support open source leadership at commercial companies. It is important to lean on each other because legal, security, and other shared knowledge is so important for the open source community to move forward. This is especially true because we need to represent both the commercial and public community best interests.

• Portworx, a provider of container data services for DevOps, has announced that it is open-sourcing a filesystem that is purpose-built for containers: the Layer Cloning File System (LCFS). Created to encourage increased innovation in a fundamental technology that boots all containers, LCFS aims to improve the speed of downloading, booting, tearing-down, and building containers.

• LCFS operates directly on top of block devices, as opposed to two filesystems that are then merged. The filesystem also directly manages at the container image’s layer level, effectively eliminating the overhead of having a second filesystem that is later merged.

• PaddlePaddle, Baidu’s open source framework for deep learning, is now compatible with the Kubernetes cluster management system to allow large models to be trained anywhere Kubernetes can run.

• This doesn’t simply expand the range of systems that can be used for PaddlePaddle training; it also provides end-to-end deep learning powered by both projects.

• Why is everyone talking about the Internet of Things (IoT)? It’s not because the IoT is a new concept — it’s not — but rather because the IoT intersects with several other key trends in the tech world, from open source and big data to cybersecurity and software-defined networking.

• In just its first year, TensorFlow has helped researchers, engineers, artists, students, and many others make progress with everything from language translation to early detection of skin cancer and preventing blindness in diabetics. We’re excited to see people using TensorFlow in over 6000 open-source repositories online.

• Today marks the fifth release of the ReactOS 0.4.x series, as well as the fifth following the 4 month release cycle started by 0.4.0 itself. Progress has continued steadily, with a great deal of work going on in the background to improve ReactOS’ general usability and stability. Many of these improvements were on display at the FOSDEM convention in Brussels that took place on the 4th and 5th of this month. Certainly one of the more notable albeit less visible additions was the incorporation of basic printing support by Colin Finck. At present ReactOS is only capable of sending print commands to a parallel port printer, but this is the first step towards universal support and Colin should be applauded for his effort. A video demonstration of it can be viewed here.

• A new stable maintenance update of the ReactOS 0.4 series of operating system that tries to recreate the design principles of Windows NT and offer binary compatibility is now available for download, versioned 0.4.4.

• Coming exactly three months after the release of ReactOS 0.4.3, a point release that ReactOS 0.4.4 implemented the Winsock library and fixed over 340 bugs, ReactOS 0.4.4 is here to add initial printing support, as well as various general stability and usability improvements, most of which were planned during the FOSDEM 2017 meeting.

• If you’ve ever wanted to join the ranks of career scientists and academics who hunt for exoplanets using the world’s most powerful telescopes, your day has come. This week, an international team of astronomers including a delegation from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale released to the public a huge set of exoplanet-detecting observations taken with the radial velocity method. To demonstrate the utility of the data set, they used it to find more than 100 exoplanets, all within 100 parsecs of us. There’s even one orbiting a near neighboring star to our own Solar System, GJ 411, which lies about 8.1 light years from Earth.

• I’m not this kind of hypocrite. I’m a pragmatic computer user. I use free software wherever I can, and open source as my #2 preference. But the main thing is that the software I use must be able to do the job.

Events

• With new devices and applications creating interesting use cases for IoT, smart cities, vehicle networks, mobile broadband and more, we are creating new ways to use networked technologies, and we need to be able to test these in realistic settings across locations. In his LinuxCon Europe talk, Thomas Dreibholz, Senior Research Engineer at Simula Research Laboratory talked about how they are building NorNet using open source software as an inter-continental Internet testbed for a variety of networked applications.

• Thomas Dreibholz, Senior Research Engineer at Simula Research Laboratory, describes how his team is using open source software to build NorNet — an inter-continental Internet testbed for a variety of networked applications.

• Friday was the first day of the conference. We got up bright and early (well, maybe not bright…) and headed over to the venue. I spent a fair amount of time on Friday attending talks.

• I started with the keynote, presented by a variety of speakers representing a wide range of Red Hat’s products. The keynote told a narrative of going from unboxed, racked servers to deploying code live from Eclipse to production on those servers (and all the steps in between).

• Next I attended “Generational Core – The Future of Fedora?” by Petr Sabata. Petr presented about Fedora’s modular future and how Factory 2.0 fits into the picture.

• Facebook’s Boston-area outpost is in Cambridge, close to MIT – they’ve just expanded from a smaller site and annexed a whole floor of a well-kept office building near Kendall Square Station. The first thing you see when you get off the elevator is a floor-to-ceiling pattern of blue lines that are meant to spell out the words “Ship Love” (Facebook’s unofficial motto) in binary.

• Some of the world’s largest and most successful companies gathered this week at Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe to share best practices around open source use and participation. Companies from diverse industries — from healthcare and finance, to telecom and high tech — discussed the strategies and processes they have adopted to create business success with open source software.

• The OpenStack Summit—the must-attend open infrastructure event—will feature a new program called “Open Source Days,” happening May 8-11 in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center. Open Source Days bring together adjacent open source communities with the goals to improve collaboration and technical integration throughout the diverse ecosystem of open source projects that OpenStack users rely upon.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• About a month ago, we told you that Red Hat’s desktop engineering manager Jiří Eischmann was working on packaging the Mozilla Firefox Developer Edition web browser as a Flatpak for various GNU/Linux distros supporting the sandboxing technology.

• Five weeks later, the developer wrote today a new blog post to inform the Linux community that he managed to also package the Firefox Nightly and Firefox Wayland builds as Flatpak packages for distribution on Fedora 25 and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems, as well as other OSes that offer Flatpak support, of course.

• When I announced Firefox Developer Edition for Flatpak over a month ago, I also promised that we would not stop there and bring more options in the future. Now I can proudly announce that we provide two more variants of Firefox – Firefox Nightly and Firefox Nightly for Wayland.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Licensing/Legal

• The year 2016 resulted in several important developments that affect the FOSS ecosystem. While they are not strictly “legal developments” they are important for the community.

• For one, Eben Moglen, the general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, stepped down. Eben has been a leader on FOSS legal issues since the late 1990s and has been critical to the success of the FOSS movement. The FOSS community owes him a huge debt of gratitude, and I expect that he will continue to be active in the FOSS community. The success of FOSS adoption was dramatically illustrated when Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation and summarized in the article, Open Source Won. So, Now What? in Wired magazine.

Programming/Development

• Facebook’s team working on HHVM, their high-performance implementation of PHP and also what’s used by their Hack language, is now up to version 3.18.

• The latest Go release, version 1.8, arrives six months after Go 1.7. Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. There are two minor changes to the language specification. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before.

• Google today announced the release of the Go 1.8 programming language implementation that is coming with six months worth of features and changes.

• Go 1.8 has a few new 64-bit x86 instructions supported, Go 1.8 now uses its new compiler back-end on all architectures (with Go 1.7 their new compiler back-end was just used on 64-bit x86) and that should yield a 20~30% performance improvement for 32-bit ARM systems. But even x86 64-bit systems should see 0~10% performance improvements with Go 1.8.

Leftovers

• One hundred and eighty South Australian Government IT workers will lose their jobs after the state government announced today that all its IT functions would be outsourced to the American multinational firm Computer Services Corporation.

• The South Australian Government announced that CSC would provide and support desktop PCs, laptops and tablets to its agencies.

• It said that 400 jobs would be created in the state as a result of the contract being granted to the American firm.

Science

• Today, the European Parliament discusses the Delvaux report on “Civil Law Rules on Robotics“. Tomorrow, we will vote on it.

• The report includes the call for a general discussion “on new employment models and on the sustainability of our tax and social systems” as robots continue to displace workers. Because the Legal Affairs Committee included calling for debate on the possibility of introducing a general basic income, conservatives are asking to delete the entire clause. It remains to be seen if the provision will survive tomorrow’s vote.

Health/Nutrition

• Once considered a breakthrough in negotiations to address problems of making cutting-edge medical products and research available to poor countries, the decade-old World Health Organization Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (GSPOA) is now undergoing review, with the WHO Executive Board calling for a report on the initiative and plans for its future next year.

• Abstract: Industrial agriculture is seriously damaging the environment, not to mention the health of citizens around the globe. With a limited window of time, reform is necessary if we want to continue to nourish, and not just feed, our people and our planet.

• Despite the fact that we presently produce double the amount of food needed for a population of seven billion, there are still calls from the United Nations and national governments to double global food production in order to avoid future famines. These calls are misguided at best, misleading at worst.

Security

• This Valentine’s Day I’m giving everyone the gift of GIFs! Because who wants to stare at a bunch of code? Or read words?! I’ll make this short and snappy since I’m sure you’re looking forward to a romantic night with your terminal.

• Despite shrill wailings by computer security experts over vulnerabilities in Android, Google claims very, very few of people have ever suffered at the hands of its bugs.

• Speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Adrian Ludwig, director of Android security, said the Stagefright hole – which prompted the Chocolate Factory to start emitting low-level security patches on a monthly basis – did put 95 per cent of Android devices at risk of attack. However, there have been no “confirmed” cases of infections via the bug, Ludwig claimed.

• Security researchers have uncovered a flaw in conference phone systems from Mitel that create a means for hackers to listen in on board meetings.

• Boffins at Context Information Security managed to gain root access and take full control of a Mitel MiVoice Conference and Video Phone, potentially enabling them to listen to meetings without alerting the room’s occupants. The flaws also created a way to plant a remote backdoor on to an enterprise network.

• It seems that, despite what many thought was a supply and demand issue, Android is by far the most appealing, accessible and, essentially, antiquated arena for cyber-criminals to flourish in.

• Google has a daunting task of scanning 750 million Android devices daily for threats and checking 6 billion apps for malware each day as part of its management of 1.6 billion active Android devices. The numbers are staggering for Adrian Ludwig, director of Android Security; six years ago, when he joined Google, he said being responsible for the security of what would eventually be billions of Android devices seemed overwhelming.

• Capsule8 has emerged from stealth mode to unveil its plans for the industry’s first container-aware, real-time threat protection platform designed to protect legacy and next-generation Linux infrastructures from both known and unknown attacks. Founded by experienced hackers John Viega, Dino Dai Zovi and Brandon Edwards, Capsule8 is being built on the real-world experience of its founders in building and bringing to market defensive systems to protect against exploitation of previously unknown vulnerabilities. The company raised seed funding of $2.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, as well as individual investors Shardul Shah of Index Ventures and Jay Leek of ClearSky. The funding will help fuel the launch of the Capsule8 platform spring 2017.

• Security expert Bruce Schneier is painting a grim future for the tech community as the government will start to stick its nose into people’s codes.

• Schneier, present at the RSA Conference, said that until now everyone had this “special right” to code the world as they saw fit. “My guess is we’re going to lose that right because it’s too dangerous to give it to a bunch of techies,” he added, according to The Register.

• A software environment’s attack surface is defined as the sum of points in which an unauthorized user or malicious adversary can enter or extract data. The smaller the attack surface, the better. We recently sat down with Doug Goldstein (https://github.com/cardoe or @doug_goldstein) to discuss how companies can use hypervisors to reduce attack surfaces and why the Xen Project hypervisor is a perfect choice for security-first environments. Doug is a principal software engineer at Star Lab, a company focused on providing software protection and integrity solutions for embedded systems.

• Amid growing attacks on Linux devices, the 2016 Embedded Linux Conference demonstrated a renewed focus on security. One well-attended presentation at ELC Europe covered the topic of verified boot schemes. In this talk, Marc Kleine-Budde of Pengutronix revealed the architecture and strategies of a recently developed verified boot scheme for a single-core, Cortex-A9 NXP i.MX6 running on the RIoTboard SBC.

• So last year we noted how Verizon proposed paying $4.8 billion to acquire Yahoo as part of its plan to magically transform from stodgy old telco to sexy new Millennial advertising juggernaut, which, for a variety of reasons, isn’t going so well. One of those reasons is the fact that Yahoo failed to disclose the two, massive hacks (both by the same party) that exposed the credentials of millions of Yahoo customers during deal negotiations. The exposure included millions of names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, hashed passwords (using MD5) and “encrypted or unencrypted” security questions and answers.

• As noted previously, Verizon had been using the scandal to drive down the $4.8 billion asking price, reports stating that Verizon was demanding not only a $1 billion reduction in the price, but another $1 billion to cover the inevitable lawsuits by Yahoo customers.

• One of the most effective ways the Wordfence team keeps the WordPress community and customers secure is through something we call the ‘Threat Defense Feed’. This is a combination of people, software, business processes and data. It’s an incredibly effective way to keep hackers out and provide our customers with early detection.

• What happens if a bad actor turns off your heat in the middle of winter, then demands $1,000 to turn it back on? Or even holds a small city’s power for ransom? Those kinds of attacks to personal, corporate, and infrastructure technology were among the top concerns for security experts from the SANS Institute, who spoke Wednesday during the RSA conference in San Francisco.

• Some of these threats target consumers directly, but even the ones that target corporations could eventually “filter down” to consumers, though the effects might not be felt for some time.

• OpenSSL has been hit by another “high” severity security vulnerability.

Defence/Aggression

• The United States government seems to have a real thing for social media and terrorism, stoutly believing if only they could “take out” Twitter the global jihadi movement would collapse. Or something like that. Maybe it’s Instagram?

• An emergency evacuation took place at the University of Bristol this term, it has been revealed, after a student accidentally made the same explosive that was used in the Paris terror attacks.

• An investigation by Bristol University found that triacetone triperoxide (TATP) was “unintentionally formed during a routine procedure”, it was reported.

• A university was evacuated after a student made the same explosive used in the Paris terror attacks by mistake.

• Police, fire service and bomb disposal experts were called to the University of Bristol after triacetone triperoxide (TATP) was “unintentionally formed” in the chemistry laboratory on February 3.

• No one was injured and emergency services carried out a controlled explosion of the substance.

• Two radio journalists have been killed in the Dominican Republic after gunmen opened fire during a news bulletin which was being broadcast on Facebook Live.

• Luís Manuel Medina, the presenter of the news programme Milenio Caliente – or Hot Millennium – was killed while on air on Tuesday morning. Producer and director Leo Martínez was shot dead in an adjacent office at the radio station FM 103.5.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Donald Trump’s White House staff are using a secret communications app which erases messages as soon as they are read, it has been reported.

• The alleged practice is thought to be due to concern over continuing leaks from staff to the media, which has been a source of growing frustration and often embarrassment for the Trump administration.

• The app ‘Confide’, deletes messages once they have been opened on a device, meaning that there is no record of them or their content thereafter.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• As groups supporting the Indigenous-led movement opposing the Dakota Access pipeline, we were heartened by your remarks on Friday indicating your openness to divesting the City’s pension funds from the banks that fund this destructive project. Many of the largest banks, which the City also uses for its business, are financing Energy Transfer Partners, Energy Transfer Equity and Sunoco Logistics to build the pipeline, threatening the drinking water of over 17 million people and contributing to further carbon emissions and climate change. Now, Trump is determined to force through Dakota Access. We urge you to follow through on your thoughtful statements by divesting New York City’s pension funds from the banks that are refusing to withdraw from financing the pipeline and also consider cancelling the city’s direct business with these entities.

Finance

• As Techdirt reported last November, while TPP and TAFTA/TTIP appear to be dead, the trade deal between Canada and the European Union (CETA) has been slowly working its way through the system. Today, the European Parliament approved the deal, which means that the European Union has completed the formal ratification process. However, for certain aspects of the agreement, notably the corporate sovereignty chapter, further approval is now needed by the national parliaments of all the EU’s member states — which means another 30+ votes that must all go in CETA’s favor. That’s by no means certain, as resistance has been mounting in a few countries. One of them is Belgium, where the Walloon region won important additional rights that may still be invoked.

• For thousands of years, methods of shipping products across the seas and oceans remained essentially the same. Products were brought to port in wooden crates, sacks, and kegs by wagons or, later, by trucks and trains. Ships were then loaded and unloaded crate by crate, sack by sack, and keg by keg. It was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Theft was a perpetual problem. Often a ship spent more time in ports, loading and unloading, than it would spend at sea.

• The advent of World War II brought new logistical challenges in supplying millions of U.S and allied troops overseas and innovative approaches were needed to efficiently supply the war effort. During this period, small, standardized boxes full of war material were introduced to increase the American convoys’ capacity to deliver wartime necessities.

• Microsoft has increased the price of its Surface and Surface Book computers in the UK by more than 15%, or £400 for some models, due to sterling’s drop in the value post-EU referendum.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The unconventional administration of President Trump may be causing consternation among American liberals. But here in Germany, the anchor of the European Union, Trump’s rise is helping fuel an unexpected surge of the left.

• What is happening in Germany is the kind of Trump bump perhaps never foreseen by his supporters — a boost not for the German nationalists viewed as Trump’s natural allies but for his fiercest critics in the center left. The Social Democrats (SPD) have bounced back under the charismatic Martin Schulz, the former head of the European Parliament who took over as party chairman last month and is now staging a surprisingly strong bid to unseat Chancellor Angela Merkel.

• US President Donald Trump has suggested he is open to the idea of a one-state, rather than two-state, solution to the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• Asked in a media conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday whether the US would continue its policy of support for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Mr Trump said: “I’m looking at two-state and at one-state, and I like the one that both parties like… I can live with either one.”

• “I thought the two-state [solution] looked easier for a while,” he added, before reaffirming he would let Israeli and Palestinian negotiators take the lead on the issue.

• U.S. intelligence officials have not been sharing some sensitive information with President Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

• Current and former officials told the news source that some information was withheld from Trump in fear that that it would be compromised or leaked.

• Just weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, you would think that everything had changed. The uproar over the president’s tweets grows louder by the day, as does concern over the erratic, haphazard and aggressive stance of the White House toward critics and those with different policy views. On Sunday, White House aide Stephen Miller bragged, “We have a president who has done more in three weeks than most presidents have done in an entire administration.”

• But Miller was dead wrong about this. There is a wide gap, a chasm even, between what the administration has said and what it has done. There have been 45 executive orders or presidential memoranda signed, which may seem like a lot but lags President Barack Obama’s pace. More crucially, with the notable exception of the travel ban, almost none of these orders have mandated much action or clear change of current regulations. So far, Trump has behaved exactly like he has throughout his previous career: He has generated intense attention and sold himself as a man of action while doing little other than promote an image of himself as someone who gets things done.

• At President Trump’s joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, he only took two questions from members of American media.

• The first question went to The Christian Broadcasting Network, which states its mission “is to prepare the United States of America and the nations of the world for the coming of Jesus Christ”; the second to Townhall.com, a website whose mission is to “amplify” conservative voices — particularly conservative talk radio.

• Most people hate flying. What’s to like? It’s a day-long gauntlet of tedious security screenings, overpriced microwavable meals and constant waiting. First, you wait to get your tickets. Then, you wait to get on the plane. Next, you wait for the plane to get onto a runway – unless Harrison Ford comes ploughing into your economy grade seat on his private plane. That ends your wait pretty quickly.

• It would be funny if it wasn’t true, but as of this morning, Han Solo is now being investigated for narrowly missing crashing his private plane into a crowded passenger jet because he accidentally touched down on the wrong airport strip. That near miss might appear to be the simple result of a harmless, momentary lapse in judgement – but it still faces serious investigation by the authorities.

• Donald Trump, however? He’s done his fair share of endangering Americans during his short term in office with his steamroller approach to diplomacy and his tweets about “trade wars” with China (not to mention his apparently laissez-faire attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons), but the laws of the land aren’t interested.

• The Russian influence scandal engulfing the White House deepened dramatically on Tuesday night with reports that some of Donald Trump’s campaign aides had frequent contact with Russian intelligence officials over the course of last year.

• A report in the New York Times came nearly 24 hours after the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign over conversations with the Russian ambassador to Washington and misleading statements about them to the press and the vice-president, Mike Pence.

• This journalism thingie has gotten so easy, anyone can do it. Let’s play make the fake news funtime!

• The elderly may remember the Old Journalism. Back in BT (Before Trump) journalists in mainstream outlets had to gather facts (i.e., true things) from sources (people with names who knew true things) that would withstand fact-checking (looking stuff up, or having a second source confirm stuff.) If you quoted something already established as a fact, you were obligated to link to it.

• There were notably exceptions. For example, in 2003, the New York Times simply “believed” everything it was told about Iraq having massive destructive weapons and typed it into the paper. FYI: The Times assisted in generating enthusiasm for the Iraq invasion, helping kill 5,000 Americans and perhaps one million Iraqis! Media such as the National Enquirer and gossip blogs would just make things up, aliens and Bigfoot and all that, but it was with a wink and everyone knew it was fake and for fun.

• Three veteran journalists and media critics share their thoughts about the state of the “free” press in 2017; among the topics they address are the election-hacking allegations against Russia, President Trump’s attacks on the press, the “fake news” label, and the close ties between “new media” and the military/security branches of government.

• Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East has been a major story during the new administration’s early days. As one of Trump’s main campaign promises, this immigration policy has generated untold hours of TV coverage and news headlines.

• The policy’s sloppy language, bungled roll-out and punitive real-world impact on innocents have rightly been prominently reported by journalists. Much of the coverage has focused on the widespread backlash to the ban, which has manifested itself in numerous legal challenges and a nationwide series of rapid-response airport protests. Coupled with the new president’s record-low approval ratings, the refugee ban increasingly tells a tale of a White House struggling to impose an unpopular agenda.

• Any administration would like to restrict what the public knows about its actions—an unpopular one, all the more so. Combine that with a frank hostility to government regulations and you have the present moment, with Trump White House efforts to make federal agencies limit what they tell the public, and efforts to give them less to talk about in the first place. It may not get the same sort of headlines, but the White House’s war on science could well yield casualties as great as other violent acts more traditionally defined.

• All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA’s human (“HUMINT”) and electronic (“SIGINT”) spies in the seven months leading up to France’s 2012 presidential election. The revelations are contained within three CIA tasking orders published today by WikiLeaks as context for its forth coming CIA Vault 7 series. Named specifically as targets are the French Socialist Party (PS), the National Front (FN) and Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) together with current President Francois Hollande, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, current round one presidential front runner Marine Le Pen, and former presidential candidates Martine Aubry and Dominique Strauss-Khan.

• The CIA assessed that President Sarkozy’s party was not assured re-election. Specific tasking concerning his party included obtaining the “Strategic Election Plans” of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP); schisms or alliances developing in the UMP elite; private UMP reactions to Sarkozy’s campaign stratagies; discussions within the UMP on any “perceived vulnerabilities to maintaining power” after the election; efforts to change the party’s ideological mission; and discussions about Sarkozy’s support for the UMP and “the value he places on the continuation of the party’s dominance”. Specific instructions tasked CIA officers to discover Sarkozy’s private deliberations “on the other candidates” as well as how he interacted with his advisors. Sarkozy’s earlier self-identification as “Sarkozy the American” did not protect him from US espionage in the 2012 election or during his presidency.

• Of course, it’s the height of irony for Donald Trump to accuse anyone of leaking, when he welcomed Wikileaks’ and the FBI’s leaks about Hillary Clinton during the campaign. And the FBI played a large role in Trump’s election.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Last summer, a Florida federal court reached some unusual conclusions in a lawsuit filed by SEO company e-ventures, which felt Google had overstepped its bounds in delisting a lot of its links. Google defended itself, citing both Section 230 and the First Amendment. The court disagreed with both arguments.

• As to Section 230, the court found that Google’s delisting efforts weren’t in “good faith.” The reason cited was e-ventures’ claim that the delisting was in “bad faith.” So much for this seldom-used aspect of Section 230: the “Good Samaritan” clause which states no third-party company can be found liable for actions it takes to remove content it finds questionable. And so much for “viewed in the light most favorable to the non-moving party.” Apparently, Google’s long history of spam-fighting efforts is nothing compared to an SEO wrangler’s pained assertions.

• The court also said Google had no First Amendment right to handle its search rankings however it saw fit, which is more than a little problematic. While it admitted Google’s search rankings were protected speech, its statements about how it handled search engines weren’t. And, for some reason, the court felt that Google’s ads undermined its First Amendment protections because its desire to turn a profit somehow nullified its “editorial judgment.”

• Oh, and banning speech — or trying to shut it down — will either take it underground, where it’s more dangerous, or it’ll make it that much more popular.

• The creative community in India has adopted “self-censorship” in the last 30 months after the Modi Government came to power, senior Congress leader and former Union Minister Manish Tewari said today.

• “Award wapasi (returning of awards by prominent figures against alleged growing intolerance) was a good push- back given by the country’s creative community to the current Government and its politics,” he said.

• The lawyer-politician was here to release his book `Decoding a Decade: The Politics of Policy making’.

• From his base in Latvia, Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky hopes to break the state media spell that has gripped post-Soviet audiences. The documentary filmmaker is president of Russia’s biggest and most controversial documentary film festival, Artdocfest. Sitting in his office last fall, Mansky cut a figure that is half media mogul, half political operative. Earlier in the day, Artdocfest’s e-mail addresses that are hosted on Russian servers appeared to be have been compromised, causing the festival team to scramble to set new passwords. As Mansky’s technical staff pored over their computers, their boss fielded questions about Russia-Ukraine relations from a reporter at the radio station Echo of Moscow via Skype.

• The aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton brought with it much handwringing in news media circles and on social media platforms about the dangers of fake news. Some blame fake news for causing Clinton’s defeat, with the erstwhile candidate herself calling it “an epidemic.”

• But there’s a major paradox when it comes to people’s beliefs about fake news.

• Specifically, many of us tend to believe that we can spot fake news — we won’t be fooled by it — but others out there, who are more naive and less media savvy than us, surely will be duped.

• Spiked’s annual Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) was released last week, to the usual cacophony of irritation from those on the receiving end of a Red ranking. Chief among the perpetually ticked-off, of course, was president of the National Union of Students (NUS), Malia Bouattia.

• The NUS always frets about the FSUR, because it collects in one place all the bans and regulations students’ unions inflict upon their members. Not only did Bouattia pen a ripsote to the FSUR in the Huffington Post the day before its 2017 findings came out, she also attempted another take-down in the Independent a few days later.

• In the latter, Bouattia claims that she can demonstrate ‘expertly’ that the project is flawed, suggesting that what spiked doesn’t understand is that students want to extend, not suppress, free expression. Free speech ‘is universal’, she says, but it ‘is not limitless’. To extend it to everyone means ‘sacrificing some of our rights’, preventing those who would suppress some people’s free expression from having theirs. In other words, you need to ban your way to free speech.

• The director of a major new war museum in Poland has vowed to fight against government censorship and try to bring his collection to the public.

• The Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk is almost ready to open after eight years of preparation.

Privacy/Surveillance

• As you will hopefully recall, there is an ongoing case between Twitter and the government over exactly how specific or not the social media service can be regarding the number of government surveillance requests it receives. Most of the rest of the big internet companies reached a settlement with the DOJ, including rules how specific companies could be (not very) in revealing such requests. Those rules basically were an attempt by the government to get tech companies to play hide-the-ball on transparency issues, in which the more specific a service attempted to be about how many individuals would be impacted by government orders, the more additional orders had to be lumped into those specifics, rendering the information useless.

• Twitter, to its credit, was alone in saying that the proposed settlement wasn’t good enough, and continued its fight with the DOJ. Essentially, the fight is over whether Twitter can be specific when it discloses how many orders it has received, or whether it must only disclose “bands” or ranges of orders. Recent arguments made by both sides do a nice job of highlighting the absurdity of the government’s argument.

• US President Donald Trump on Wednesday blamed what he called the “fake media” and “illegal” leaks for the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who had lied to top government officials about his contacts with Russia.

• At a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said that the media had treated Flynn “very unfairly”.

• Trump has asked for Flynn’s resignation because he had lost confidence in him after revelations the National Security Adviser had lied about his conversations with Russian officials, EFE news quoted the White House as saying.

• Two quotes are associated with Angela Merkel’s third term as chancellor. In the summer of 2015, when masses of refugees arrived in Germany, Merkel declared: “We can do this.” The other famous statement she made referred to the revelation that the NSA had monitored her personal mobile phone: “Spying among friends – that is simply not done.” If anyone searches the line in German on the internet, the Google results for the two lines differ greatly: There are about 1.6 million listings for the refugee policy quote and only 25,000 for the NSA scandal line.

• The great difference unexpectedly, but clearly, reflects the perceived public relevance of the two subjects. Refugees still play a large role – in politics and in everyday life. The fact that intelligence agencies systematically spy on private lives has more or less become a topic for experts. The uproar over Edward Snowden’s revelations dwindled down within a year, more or less.

• This is far from the encryption apocalypse promised by Comey and Vance. There’s an incremental increase taking place, not an exponential one. What could pose serious problems, though, is encryption-by-default on smartphones. As the report points out, if Android devices go the way of iPhones, 99% of the world’s phones would keep law enforcement locked out.

• But that’s only if law enforcement isn’t able to access data and communications through device manufacturer/service provider cooperation, third-party app developers, email providers, and other, more old-fashioned techniques. One sure way to beat device encryption is to obtain the passcode from the user. This won’t help much when the phone’s owner is dead or can’t be located, but compelling the production of a password is still far from settled, constitutionally-speaking. For phones secured with a fingerprint, owners are likely out of luck. A couple of courts have already reached the conclusion that providing a fingerprint isn’t testimonial and has no Fifth Amendment implications.

• CSIS could have put together a better estimate on how many investigations are thwarted by encryption, but law enforcement agencies — even those fronted by encryption opponents — aren’t interested in sharing this data with the public. The report points out that the problem remains mostly theoretical. Without data, all we have are assertions from law enforcement officials that something must be done. Failure to legislate backdoors or bans will apparently lead to a sharp uptick in criminal activity… except that’s not happening either. The report points out that there’s no data linking increased default encryption to increases in criminal activity.

• We’ve written a few times about Rep. Devin Nunes, who heads the House Intelligence Committee. He’s been a long-time vocal supporter of NSA surveillance. He insisted that there was no need for reform after the Snowden leaks and he actively misled the public and other members of Congress to shoot down an amendment that would have stopped so-called backdoor searches of “incidentally collected” information on Americans. Nunes falsely claimed that by blocking backdoor searches of the 702 database, it would have blocked things such as tracking whether or not the Orlando nightclub shooter had overseas contacts (it would not have done that at all).

• So it’s fairly hilarious to see that Nunes’ first reaction to the news of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s resignation was to demand answers on why Flynn’s calls with Russian officials were recorded.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Those who knew Mike Ilitch, the Little Caesars founder and Detroit Tigers owner who died last Friday, have spent the past few days fondly remembering his impact on friends, on Detroit residents, and on the sports community. Ilitch also had an impact on the daily life of one of the most iconic figures from the civil rights movement.

• For more than a decade, Ilitch had quietly paid for Rosa Parks’ apartment in downtown Detroit, according to CNN affiliate WXYZ. That story came to light thanks to Damon Keith, a Detroit native and federal judge.

• The Christian governor of the capital of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, has been fighting for his political life in an election campaign charged with religious and ethnic undertones. After voters went to the polls Wednesday, it appeared that he would have to fight a little longer.

• Unofficial results from the balloting in Jakarta, the capital, indicated that the governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, held a small lead over his nearest challenger but was unlikely to win more than half of the vote. If the official results confirm that, a runoff will be held April 18.

• Mr. Basuki, who is ethnic Chinese, has been hobbled by a criminal trial on a charge of blasphemy against Islam, in connection with remarks about a Quran verse that he made last year.

• The story began on the July 2, 1990. Fahire Kara, mother of 12, had travelled from her home in Batman, Turkey on pilgrimmage with her husband Abdoullah to Mecca. That day, their lives, like so many others, would change for ever.

• As thousands of pilgrims passed through a tunnel linking the Grand Mosque with the Mina Desert, a panic began, leading to a stampede. A total of 1,426 people were crushed to death or asphyxiated, including almost 450 Turks. Seriously injured, Abdullah stumbled through the carnage and piles of bodies, searching for his wife. He found her on the point of death, saying the Muslim creed to cleanse her soul.

• As rescuers arrived, the couple were separated as Abdoullah was rushed to hospital. On being discharged from hospital, Abdoullah once again began a grisly search for his wife, examining bodies in morgues and visiting hospitals, this time without success. He returned home in mourning.

• The major parties making up Germany’s coalition government have agreed to a proposed law that would invalidate marriages involving children under 16.

• Leaders of the Social Democrats (SPD) and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Union parties said they had agreed on a proposed law to ban marriage for anyone under 18, according to a report on Tuesday by Die Welt.

• Sweden’s 318,000 “Syrian” refugees, or migrants, will cost the country a bare minimum of $32.7 billion USD in 2017.

• That’s 33% of Sweden’s central government’s annual budget, and 5.5% of their GDP—imagine if the US spent $1 trillion on refugees, same proportions.

• That’s just over $102,000 per refugee per year. For reference, the average annual income in Sweden is $41,000 a year.

• Credit where credit is due: Trump has done more to preserve the full CIA Torture Report than Obama ever did. On his way out the door, the DOJ fought on his behalf in federal court, arguing against an order to deposit the full report with the court clerk for preservation in the ongoing trial of Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, who has alleged he was waterboarded while detained by the CIA.

• Barack Obama did stuff one copy of the full report in his presidential archives before Trump took over, perhaps in response to fears that the incoming president might make the whole thing vanish. Trump did mention his support for the use of torture on more than one occasion, and it would have been somewhat inconvenient to have an official document laying around saying torture is bad and the US shouldn’t do it.

• Maybe it’s oneupmanship or maybe the Trump’s legal counsel feels it has too much on its plate already, but as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports, Team Trump is handing over a full copy of the Torture Report to the court as requested.

• If Rawls’ devices had been secured with a fingerprint, there’s a good chance he’d already have been forced to unlock his devices. There haven’t been a lot of decisions pertaining to the use of fingerprints to decrypt devices, but those we have seen indicate judges don’t view the taking/application of suspects’ fingerprints to be “testimonial.” Unlocking a device that contains evidence to convict a person apparently doesn’t undermine their right to not be forced to testify against themselves. The reasoning in a recent appeals court decision was that a fingerprint is not something stored in a suspect’s mind. Therefore, it’s not testimony. It’s, for lack of better words, a bodily “fact,” like the blood stored in a suspect or a suspect’s resemblance to a person described by eyewitnesses.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For years, we’ved noted how incumbent ISPs have waged a not-so-subtle war on towns and cities looking to escape from the high prices and abysmal service of the country’s broadband duopoly (which is actually quietly becoming more of a cable monopoly without many noticing). Many of these cities have taken to either building fiber networks themselves — or striking public/private partnerships with companies like Google Fiber or Ting/Tucows — because the private sector has failed to deliver the service and connectivity they want at prices they can afford.

• This kind of grassroots revolution is precisely why large ISPs like Charter, Comcast and AT&T have spent the last decade lobbying for (and in most instances directly writing) protectionist bills across twenty different states banning local citizens from making these kinds of decisions for themselves. If you want to see precisely why these regional monopolists are so afraid, you need look no further than Huntsville, Alabama.

DRM

• Gaining complete control for hardware and both software has landed Apple in hot water as the tech giant is now fighting a new ‘right to repair’ legislation. The legislation proposes that consumers and third-party repair shops will have the legal right to purchase spare parts as well as gain access to service manuals in order to mend a faulty component on any Apple product ranging from its iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, iMacs and more. Here are more details on the legislation.

• For a company that likes to portray itself as serving its users better than its rivals, this is shabby behavior. It not only forces people to spend money unnecessarily, it is harmful for the environment. Discarding old models is likely to lead to more toxic landfill, even though Apple says that it tries to recycle as much as possible. It’s sad to see an otherwise innovative player lining up with the dinosaurs on the wrong side of history for this issue.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A new discovery allowing easier and swifter genome editing, considered by some as a major game changer in the field of biology, is opening doors to new technological wonders in many areas, such as medicines and agriculture. Yesterday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a ruling on a case where two US university laboratories both claimed the invention of a genome editing technique. The USPTO decided that the two universities had made distinct discoveries. In Europe, patents from both universities on the technology are also challenged at the European Patent Office.

Copyrights

• We’ve been covering the BMG v. Cox case since the beginning, and a bad decision just got made even worse — and more dangerous. If you’ve been following the case, you know that it’s on appeal right now (and a whole bunch of amici have weighed in), but in the meantime, the judge in the district court, Judge Liam O’Grady, has doubled down on his opportunity to chop up and mock the DMCA’s safe harbors by telling Cox it must pay $8 million to BMG in legal fees because its using the DMCA safe harbors as a defense was found to be “objectively unreasonable.”

• That’s crazy, for a variety of reasons, but we’ll get there. From the very beginning, this case was a joke, and it’s unfortunate that the court didn’t realize that early on. The case was filed back in 2014, and we pointed out that it was really BMG (and another publisher, Round Hill Music) acting as a proxy for copyright trolling operation Rightscorp, testing out the wacky legal theory that the DMCA requires that ISPs kick repeat infringers entirely off the internet. No one has ever interpreted the DMCA in this manner. Yes, 512(i) requires a repeat infringer policy, but it had always been widely recognized that that referred to services that hosted content, not network providers (e.g., YouTube is required to have a repeat infringer policy that kicks users off YouTube if they keep posting infringing works, but your ISP shouldn’t kick you off the internet for the same thing.)

• The Pirate Bay and dozens of other pirate sites that were blocked by Cogent’s Internet backbone are now accessible again. Cloudflare appears to have moved the sites in question to a new pair of IP-addresses, effectively bypassing Cogent’s blackhole. Whether Cogent has plans to block their new home as well is unknown.

• As more people decide they don’t need cable, the TV networks are waking up to the fact that they can’t bet the farm on the same old business models, even as they depend on cable for most of their revenue.

• The latest earnings reports from companies like Time Warner, Viacom, and Disney provide a useful snapshot of how networks are responding to cord-cutting. Spoiler alert: The responses aren’t always consumer friendly.

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