● 02.17.17

● Links 17/2/2017: Wine 2.2, New Ubuntu LTS

Posted in News Roundup at 6:37 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• System76, the Linux hardware vendor sent out a press release announcing a refresh of their most powerful laptops, which now boast 7th Gen Intel CPUs.

• The Oryx Pro, Serval WS, and Bonobo WS all now feature Intel’s latest CPUs and have the option of a HiDPI display.

• Considering that System76 chose to unveil its new design plans to The Linux Gamer — no invite went to FOSS Force, BTW — we can’t help but wonder if a System76 Steam Machine isn’t in the works.

• If you are a Linux user, you can never go wrong with a System76 computer. Its machines come pre-loaded with Ubuntu, but they can also run any Linux distro, such as Fedora or Mint, like a champ. Operating system aside, they come with excellent specifications and superb customer service.

Server

• Docker is the king of devops tools, hybrid cloud is beating public-only and private-only clouds, and Microsoft Azure is making sizable headway in public cloud.

Kernel Space

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds took the stage at Open Source Leadership Summit this week to share some of his secrets to success in building one of the world’s largest and most successful open source projects.

• After 25 years of development, the Linux kernel last year reached more than 22 million lines of code with more than 5,000 developers from about 500 companies contributing, according to the 2016 Linux Kernel Development Report.

• Open sauce’s Mr Sweary Linus Torvalds has waded into tech companies who keep banging on about innovation.

• Swearing at the Open Source Leadership Summit, Torvalds said he really hates the technology industry’s celebration of innovation. He thinks it is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving.

• Last February, The Linux Foundation announced 30 founding members and six of those proposed contributions of code to advance blockchain technology under Hyperledger. Fast forward to today, Hyperledger is now the fastest growing project ever hosted by The Linux Foundation. More than 110 member companies that span numerous industries make up the project and support five incubated open source projects. Hyperledger membership is truly global with 39% in APAC (25% in China), 20% in EMEA and 41% spread across North America. Below is an overview highlighting the important achievements in Hyperledger’s first year.

• Today is the first day of the invite-only Lake Tahoe based Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit, where Executive Director, Brian Behlendorf is to give an update to the community on Hyperledger, the largest open source private Blockchain currently being managed by the Linux team.

• The breadth of the The Linux Foundation (affectionately known as The LF) is often overlooked due to its eponymous name. However, what may not be apparent to the layman is that The LF is providing a true foundation for the next generation of Internet infrastructure by cultivating the biggest shared technology investment in history. The LF is so much more than Linux. Our work encompasses projects from security and IoT, to networking and cloud computing, and beyond.

Graphics Stack

• With yesterday having marked one year since the release of Vulkan as well as one year since the ANV Vulkan driver code was open-sourced, here’s a look at some of what’s still left to be tackled by this open-source Vulkan Linux driver for HD/Iris Graphics.

• Ben Skeggs has queued up the planned open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver changes for the imminent Linux 4.11 cycle.

• He now has a linux-4.11 Git branch with the Nouveau DRM driver changes expected for this next kernel cycle.

• Timothy Arceri, who is now working for Valve (on the open-source AMD driver stack after leaving Collabora), has landed significant portions of his work built upon others for providing an on-disk shader cache within Mesa.

• With Vulkan turning one year old I decided to run some fresh comparison benchmarks of Mesa 17.1-dev RADV (as well as some RadeonSI OpenGL results for reference) compared to AMD’s latest public hybrid driver release, the AMDGPU-PRO 16.60.

• For those that haven’t made the move yet to Mesa 17, Mesa 13.0.5 is going to be released in the next few days.

Applications

• Looking for a nimble internet radio player app for Ubuntu?

• Radiotray-NG may be exactly what you’re scanning for. The app is a fork of Radiotray, a once popular Ubuntu radio app whose development has all but ground to a halt over the past few years.

• The third release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the now more than ten-year history as a package started by Jeff in the summer of 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.

• Weblate should be released by end of February, so it’s now pretty much clear what will be there. So let’s look at some of the upcoming features.

• There were many improvements in search related features. They got performance improvements (this is especially noticeable on site wide search). Additionally you can search for strings within translation project. On related topic, search and replace is now available for component or project wide operations, what can help you in case of massive renaming in your translations.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 2.2 is now available.

• Wine development is starting to heat up again, as Wine 2.2 is now officially available. Sounds like a good one too.

• Wine 2.2 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine for running Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems.

Games

• More than 3,000 Linux games are now available on Steam.

• Based on numbers listed by the Steam ‘Linux’ Store page the service has leaped from a mere 50 titles at launch 4 years ago to more than 3,000 today.

• The developer claims the game is “not ashamed of being weird and unique” and unique it is. The visuals are, for lack of a better word, trippy. I actually like the simple visual style, but graphics do not make a game.

• Ballistic Overkill [Steam], the indie online FPS has been updated once again and it now features lots of voice commands and much more.

• The Inner World – The Last Wind Monk [Official Site] is a follow-up to the previous adventure game The Inner World, but you don’t need to play the first one to enjoy it. Like the previous game, it will support Linux. I’ve had that confirmed by the publisher Headup Games directly over email.

• You might not remember Eco [Official Site], the in-development ‘global survival game’ where everything you do affects the environment. They have released a juicy new update with improved performance and some new features.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• It’s been two months since its last update and the Enlightenment 0.21 desktop environment and window manager for Linux-based operating systems has received today a new point release, the sixth in the stable series.

• Enlightenment 0.21.6 is a bugfix and stability release that attempts to address various of the issues discovered by the development team behind the open-source software or reported by users since the last update. A total of 28 changes were included in the new version, some of them bringing improvements for the Wayland display server.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE developer Albert Astals Cid announced that the release date of the upcoming KDE Applications 17.04 open-source software suite for KDE Plasma desktop environments, along with the final release schedule.

• We were just wondering when KDE Applications 17.04 will be released when the current KDE Applications 16.02 series received its second maintenance update, and we were right to believe at the point in time that the final release is coming in April, and, according to the release schedule, it looks like KDE Applications 17.04 lands April 20, 2017.

• The release schedule for the upcoming KDE Applications 17.04 has been firmed up.

• The KDE Applications 17.04 release is scheduled to happen on 20 April. For that to happen, the planned dependency freeze is 16 March, the beta release on 23 March, KDE applications 17.04 Release Candidate on 6 April, and prepping for the actual 17.04 release beginning on 13 April.

• Thanks to the last batch of improvements and with the great help of jemalloc, cutelyst-wsgi can do 100k request per second using a single thread/process on my i5 CPU. Without the use of jemalloc the rate was around 85k req/s.

• This together with the EPoll event loop can really scale your web application, initially I thought that the option to replace the default glib (on Unix) event loop of Qt had no gain, but after increasing the connection number it handle them a lot better. With 256 connections the request per second using glib event loop get’s to 65k req/s while the EPoll one stays at 90k req/s a lot closer to the number when only 32 connections is tested.

• Over the years, my experience with KDE can best be described as a rollercoaster – on ice, with rocket thrusters. KDE3.5 was a great release, followed by a somewhat mellow, emotionally curbed KDE4, which took years blossoming, and then when it finally gained solid form, it was replaced with KDE5, or rather, Plasma 5.

• Since 2014, Plasma has kept me entertained and disappointed in equal measures. At some point, I had it crowned my favorite desktop, and then it went downhill steeply, fast, struggling to recover. Not helping was the slew of bugs and regressions across the distro space, which exacerbated the quality of Plasma and what it could show the world. Today, I would like to explore Plasma from a different angle. Not from the user perspective, but usability perspective. AKA Everything What Plasma Does. After me.

• Touch input is the new kid in the block concerning input events. It’s a technology which was created after X11 got created and thus it is not part of the X11 core protocol. On X11 this makes touch a weird beast. E.g. there is always an emulation to a pointer event. Applications which do not support touch can still be used as the touch events generate pointer events. Now this is actually a huge sacrifice for the API and means that touch feels – at least to me – as a second class citizen in X11.

• One can have real pain trying to create a demo setup or proof-of-concept for an embedded device. To ease the pain Qt for Device Creation has a list of supported devices where you can flash a “Boot to Qt” image and get your software running on the target HW literally within minutes.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Now that we’ve told you all about the goodies coming to the GNOME Shell user interface when the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment will be released next month on March 22, it’s time to see what improvements landed for the Mutter window manager.

• We believe that Mutter is the second most important component of the open-source GNOME desktop environment, and the upcoming major release got a first Beta milestone the other day, bringing us a bunch of interesting improvements. Among these, there’s better EGLStream support, along with HiDPI support for the window menu placement.

• As part of yesterday’s GNOME 3.24 Beta desktop environment release, last minute updates for the GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window manager landed as well with numerous improvements.

• In this article, we’d like to tell you about the new features and improvements that have been implemented in the first Beta release of GNOME Shell, which is the most important component of GNOME 3.24 because without it users couldn’t even interact with the desktop environment.

• One of the core features of Builder is, well, building. So we need to provide the best experience we can. That means we need wide support for build systems and languages. How we get from source code to a product can vary in a multitude of ways.

Distributions

Reviews

New Releases

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton was happy to announce the immediate availability for download of a new build of his CruxEX 64-bit Linux Live operating system for personal computers.

• Tagged as with the build number 170216, CruxEX 3.3 is based on the recently released CRUX 3.3 operating system and it’s powered by a custom compiled Linux 4.9.9 kernel that Arne Exton injected with some extra drivers to support more of the latest and newest hardware components.

• CruxEX 3.3 2017 uses the LXDE Desktop environment. I have replaced the original CRUX kernel with “my” special kernel 4.9.9-exton, with support for “extra everything”.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

• This week we ‘only’ delivered 5 snapshots. But at least it was big ones, so that makes up for it. The review covers the snapshots {0211..0215}.

Slackware Family

• I am happy to announce my February 2017 release of the ‘ktown’ packages: KDE 5_17.02. What you get in this new release is: KDE Frameworks 5.31.0, Plasma 5.9.2 and Applications 16.12.2. All built on top of Qt 5.7.1. Soon, I will compile this version of Plasma 5 on Slackware 14.2 (only 64bit) as well, but I gave priority last few days to the new LibreOffice packages and a new PLASMA5 Live image. The packages that I am releasing today are for Slackware-current only (both 32bit and 64bit). As stated in my previous post, I will no longer be releasing Plasma 5 packages for 32bit Slackware 14.2.

• To conclude this week’s batch of updates in my repositories I have re-generated the ISO for PLASMA5 Slackware Live Edition – it is based on liveslak 1.1.6.2 and using Slackware-current dated “Mon Feb 13 06:21:22 UTC 2017“.

• If you already use PLASMA5 Live on a USB stick that you do not want to re-format, you should use the “-r” parameter to the “iso2usb.sh” script. The “-r” or refresh parameter allows you to refresh the liveslak files on your USB stick without touching your custom content.

Red Hat Family

• DLT Solutions will provide the Navy with Red Hat software and services under a five-year, $133.4 million blanket purchase agreement.

• The BPA includes an enterprise license agreement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, add-ons, and management and provisioning tools such as Red Hat Satellite.

Finance

Fedora

• So… Bluetooth. It’s everywhere now. Well, everywhere except Fedora. Fedora does, of course support bluetooth. But even the most common workflows are somewhat spotty. We should improve this.

• The past year has proven to be both challenging and demanding for our Ambassadors. During the past year there have been a lot of new ideas proposed and more events that are being sought out attempting to expand our base. Many of the ventures have been with hack-a-thons in several states. This has been a relatively new venture in those areas. Since our involvement in these types of events, we quickly discovered that Fedora and the associated spins were a new tool for most of these individuals attending and participating. That was a surprising fact within the community that the young and impressionable individuals seemed to be using Windows more than any other operating system available. Since those few we (Fedora) attended, there has been an increase in the open source software utilization across the board at these types of events, a total and undeniable success.

• Before looking too far ahead to the future, it’s important to spend time to reflect over the past year’s events, identify successes and failures, and devise ways to improve. Describing my 2016 is a challenge for me to find the right words for. This post continues a habit I started last year with my 2015 Year in Review. One thing I discover nearly every day is that I’m always learning new things from various people and circumstances. Even though 2017 is already getting started, I want to reflect back on some of these experiences and opportunities of the past year.

• [...]

• Towards the end of summer, in the beginning of August, I was accepted as a speaker to the annual Fedora Project contributor conference, Flock. As a speaker, my travel and accommodation were sponsored to the event venue in Kraków, Poland.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical’s Iain Lane informed the Ubuntu community of developers about the fact that the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system is now officially in Feature Freeze stage, effective immediately as of February 16, 2017, at 21:00 UTC.

• According to the Zesty Zapus release schedule, February 16 marks both the Feature Freeze and Debian Import Freeze stages of development for Ubuntu 17.04, which means that application developer are no longer allowed to push new features to the upcoming operating systems, but only bugfix releases of their packages that address critical bugs.

• After a long wait, Canonical released today the second point release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, which is the first to include an HWE stack from a newer Ubuntu version, in this case Ubuntu 16.10.

• As expected, Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS is nothing but a collection of all the latest security patches and software updates that have been released by Canonical for the long-term supported Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) series since the July 2016 launch of Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS.

• Ubuntu 16.04.X segment line has gotten its’ next maintenance and bug-fix update, Ubuntu 16.04.2, so basically it is the second point update after the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS final for Desktop, Server, Cloud-based ones as well as the different flavored versions of Ubuntu like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME have also been availed with their updated images of 16.04.2 version.

• Last Thursday Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS was delayed by a few more days with thinking it would be released this past Monday while now it’s been officially released. Ubuntu 17.04 meanwhile is entering a feature freeze.

• As part of today’s unexpected release of the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, all the official flavors have also been brought up-to-date, including Ubuntu MATE 16.04.2 LTS for Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 devices.

• Martin Wimpress proudly announced a few moments ago the availability of the Ubuntu MATE 16.04.2 LTS operating system for Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computers, an optimized build that features the latest stable MATE 1.16.1 desktop environment and supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi 3.

• GPD, a Hong Kong-based portable gaming company, that has produced a number of handheld Android-based gaming devices, is running a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to fund a device known as the ‘GPD Pocket’. Crowdfunding for the GPD Pocket has already reached past its $200,000 fixed funding goal.

Flavours and Variants

• Today, we will look at Linux lite 3.2. This is neither a distro aiming to be a lightweight distro nor a distro trying to unleash the power of Linux with all apps preloaded. Instead, It tries to strike that perfect balance between them. Now, almost all of the distros aim to do that then, what is so special about this distro which makes it unique. Well, let me introduce to the distro first and I think why it achieved so much more than other distros becomes clear after that.

Devices/Embedded

• Following up their successful $1million crowdfunding campaign for an open-source, 5G and IoT capable Software-Defined Radio (LimeSDR), Lime Microsystems and Canonical announced a second round of crowdfunding for SDR-based LimeNET.

• Described as a high capacity network in a box for mobile and IoT applications, the compact unit is based on an Intel i7 processor and the open source LimeSDR PCIe card.

• Axiomtek’s “PICO312” Pico-ITX SBC offers Intel “Apollo Lake” SoCs and up to 8GB RAM, dual-display support, plus GbE, USB, SATA, and mini-PCIe expansion.

Phones

Android

• Android can be full of surprises. Thanks to the deconstructed nature of the operating system, individual pieces of the software receive updates all the time — in a way that has nothing to do with the big, attention-grabbing OS rollouts.

• It happens with a large and ever-expanding list of core system apps that now exist in the Play Store and are updated accordingly, but it also happens silently and seamlessly with some behind-the-scenes tools that are easy to overlook.

Free Software/Open Source

• Element AI has acquired the entire team at MLDB.ai, an open source machine learning database.

• The acquisition includes all staff, MLDB.ai’s complete product line, and customer base. The company will continue to be developed as an open-source project and leverage Element AI’s resources. The Pro version of MLDB.ai will be open-sourced, as will some plugins associated with the processing of LiDAR datasets.

• The company said in a blog post that it will be winding down support contracts over the next six months, and replacing it with an expanded presence on free, community-based support channels.

Events

• I’ve gotten in the habit of going to the FSF’s LibrePlanet conference in Boston. It’s a very special conference, much wider ranging than a typical technology conference, solidly grounded in software freedom, and full of extraordinary people. (And the only conference I’ve ever taken my Mom to!)

SaaS/Back End

• The big data market is moving at lightning speed. But when it comes to solutions, there’s a widening chasm between the legacy approach and next-generation developers and vendors. While the legacy approach has worked well over the years and still has its place in what is becoming a huge market, there are many signs that open source solutions will be better placed to help business optimise the advantages that big data analysis brings.

• But first who are the legacy vendors? Typically, they have their own large internal teams, dedicated to building proprietary, bespoke software. They have solid products, reliable technology and well-funded research and development projects.

• At its annual PartnerWorld Leadership Conference, IBM announced a new partnership with open-source solution provider Hortonworks. The provider primarily deals in Hadoop deployments.

• This new relationship will bring the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) to IBM’s Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and Spectrum Scale storage offerings. Essentially, this will eliminate the need for customers to copy data from enterprise storage to a separate analytics platform. This would then ideally lower the time it takes for those customers to respond to data-based queries.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Open source textbooks have gained much traction at UConn over the past year. The most successful endeavor was the creation of an open source book for general chemistry classes, which was financially supported by the Undergraduate Student Government. About 2,000 students have used this new textbook over the last couple of semesters, saving an estimated $600,000 in total. As more sections and other classes move towards this resource students could soon collectively save millions every semester.

• So far, there have been next to no complaints about the new textbooks. This indicates that the substantial reduction in price has not led to any quality issues. Besides the price advantage, open source textbooks have the unique trait of being easily corrected because of their nature.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The moment the open source RepRap 3D printer was created, its potential for helping the developing the world was evident.

• The distributed digital production of open source appropriate technology can make a real difference. Research in this area has been heating up with numerous applications from the Enabling the Future’s prosthetic hands, to the Waterscope microscope, to more mundane things like organic farm tools.

Leftovers

Science

• Scientists fear the United States under Donald Trump could become like the Soviet Union, in which the prevailing political ideology was so powerful that science was unable to contradict it with hard evidence.

• Speaking at the beginning of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Boston, its president, Professor Barbara Schaal, and chief executive, Dr Rush Holt, both expressed concern about the use of the phrase “alternative facts” by Trump administration officials.

• Professor Schaal also criticised the proposed hardline immigration ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, saying it would damage vital collaboration between scientists.

• She said people should protest if Mr Trump, who has described global warming as a hoax and appointed a string of sceptics to key positions in his cabinet, cut government climate science projects.

Security

• Microsoft has decided to bundle its February patches together with those scheduled for March, a move that at least some security experts disagree with.

• “I was surprised to learn that Microsoft wants to postpone by a full month,” said Carsten Eiram, the chief research officer at vulnerability intelligence firm Risk Based Security, via email. “Even without knowing all the details, I find such a decision very hard to justify. They are aware of vulnerabilities in their products and have developed fixes; those should always be made available to customers in a timely fashion.”

• Microsoft took everyone by surprise on Tuesday when it announced that this month’s patches had to be delayed because of a “last minute issue” that could have had an impact on customers. The company did not initially specify for how long the patches will be postponed, which likely threw a wre

• Microsoft has delayed the release of a security update that would have fixed a vulnerability cyber thieves are known to be exploiting.

• The fix was to be released as part of Microsoft’s regular monthly security update for its Windows software.

• In some ways, Google is like every other large enterprise. It had the typical defensive security posture based on the concept that the enterprise is your castle and security involves building moats and walls to protect the perimeter.

• Over time, however, that perimeter developed holes as Google’s increasingly mobile workforce, scattered around the world, demanded access to the network. And employees complained about having to go through a sometimes slow, unreliable VPN. On top of that, Google, like everyone else, was moving to the cloud, which was also outside of the castle.

• On Tuesday at RSA Conference, Google shared the seven-year journey of its internal BeyondCorp rollout where it affirms trust based on what it knows about its users and devices connecting to its networks. And all of this is done at the expense—or lack thereof—of firewalls and traditional network security gear.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Central Intelligence Agency documents released by WikiLeaks Thursday list Canada as one of several countries asked to assist the United States while they spied on the 2012 French presidential election.

• The three CIA tasking orders request that current French president Francois Hollande, then president Nicolas Sarkozy and current first round presidential front runner Marine Le Pen all be closely monitored.

• CIA officers were asked to uncover the secret strategies of the candidates, as well as information on internal power dynamics within the parties. Canada is listed as one of five countries working on human intelligence parts of the operation however there are no specifics on which parts of the operation, if any, Canada was involved in.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• President Trump on Thursday signed legislation ending a key Obama administration coal mining rule.

• The bill quashes the Office of Surface Mining’s Stream Protection Rule, a regulation to protect waterways from coal mining waste that officials finalized in December.

• The legislation is the second Trump has signed into law ending an Obama-era environmental regulation. On Tuesday, he signed a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution undoing a financial disclosure requirement for energy companies.

• Both the mining and financial disclosure bills are the tip of a GOP push to undo a slate of regulations instituted in the closing days of the Obama administration. The House has passed several CRA resolutions, and the Senate has so far sent three of them to President Trump for his signature.

Finance

• The EVA study says that there are over 50,000 men who should be in their best working years (25–54) who do not have jobs and who are not actively seeking jobs. This does not include men who are studying or who are on disability pensions.

• The authors of the labour market analysis refer to this group as “the lost workmen”. In statistics, they fall under the category of “others not in the workforce”.

• In addition, there are over 28,000 unemployed men in the same age group who are looking for jobs, but are unlikely to ever return to the workforce.

• Even while unemployment levels decline, the numbers of lost workmen have grown steadily over the past few years.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Some supporters of Trump, including Breitbart News, have accused the intelligence agencies of attempting to wage a deep state coup against the president. Meanwhile, some critics of Trump are openly embracing such activity. Bill Kristol, the prominent Republican analyst who founded The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter, “Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” We talk about the deep state with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept.

• Britain is beginning to reassess how reliable an ally the US is, the Scottish Conservative party leader, Ruth Davidson, has said, in comments that contrast starkly with the official policy of the UK government.

• During an interview at the Women in the World summit in Washington, Davidson said: “At the moment, from the UK, we have always seen America as being a very strong, a reliable ally, and now, even after only 26 days or however long [Donald Trump’s] tenure has been so far in Pennsylvania Avenue, we are beginning to reassess how reliable an ally the United States is.

• The scandal-hit bank that loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump has conducted a close internal examination of the US president’s personal account to gauge whether there are any suspicious connections to Russia, the Guardian has learned.

• Deutsche Bank, which is under investigation by the US Department of Justice and is facing intense regulatory scrutiny, was looking for evidence of whether recent loans to Trump, which were struck in highly unusual circumstances, may have been underpinned by financial guarantees from Moscow.

• Reporters have done it again.

• The latest media misfire on the Trump administration involves Ibtihaj Muhammad, a New Jersey native who made headlines last year when she became the first female Muslim-American to win an Olympic medal for the United States.

• Muhammad, a lifelong American citizen, claimed in an interview last week that she was detained “just a few weeks ago” by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. She said she was held for two hours without explanation.

• Her remarks on Feb. 7 earned her an entire news cycle, as several journalists ran with reports suggesting, and alleging outright, that the American Olympian had been ensnared in the president’s executive order temporarily barring immigration from seven Middle Eastern countries.

• Hadiyul Umam, 40, a civil servant, said voting for incumbent Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, a minority Christian and ethnic Chinese, would go against everything he believes in. “As a Muslim, I believe that non-Muslims are not allowed to lead Muslims in this country, and personally, I do not like the way Ahok leads, which is not pro-poor people and his words were disrespectful and rude,” he said. Ahok’s blasphemy trial and the ease with which hard-liners attracted several hundred thousand to protest against him in Jakarta have undermined Indonesia’s reputation for practicing a moderate form of Islam and shaken the centrist government of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

• A Muslim convert was found carrying an axe through the streets to confront his Christian father over “religious differences”, a court heard.

• Newcastle Crown Court heard Clayton McKenna was taking the weapon – which he got from his mother’s shed – through Boldon Colliery in the early hours of the morning, to his father’s home in South Tyneside on July 18.

• The 22-year-old gave a series of “confused and contradictory” explanations when he was stopped by the police, including saying he was on his way to his father’s “to ask him to bow down to me” – a statement he now rejects.

• Eight Iranian girls who disguised themselves as boys to attend a football match despite an official ban were prevented from entering the stadium, an official was quoted as saying today.

• Iran argues that its ban on women attending football matches in the same stadiums as men is necessary to protect them from lewd language that might emanate from the terraces.

• “Eight girls dressed up as men to try to enter the Azadi stadium” in southwest Tehran on Sunday, the Tasnim news agency said.

• A MAN who claims he was forced to move house after renouncing his faith wants authorities to crack down on hate crime

• Fasial Bashir, of Mayville Road, Ilford decided to stop practicing Islam in the summer of 2014 over claims the religion was too “hateful” and “sending out the wrong message”.

• But when the 43-year-old stopped going to mosques in Ilford he claims he started getting harassment on a weekly basis.

• “Now I’m not suggesting you do this to the president,” he added, then demonstrating the “goose neck” wrist lock he says will defend against the hand shake.

• “As he grabs really hard and pulls you in, I go with it. I step in with the outside foot, I wrap around the elbow. As I do that, I’m going to block his arm from here, I bend the wrist in, the other hand wraps over the top of the knuckles and boom — now you have what we call a goose neck.”

• Central Intelligence Agency documents released by WikiLeaks Thursday list Canada as one of several countries asked to assist the United States while they spied on the 2012 French presidential election.

• The three CIA tasking orders request that current French president Francois Hollande, then president Nicolas Sarkozy and current first round presidential front runner Marine Le Pen all be closely monitored.

• CIA officers were asked to uncover the secret strategies of the candidates, as well as information on internal power dynamics within the parties. Canada is listed as one of five countries working on human intelligence parts of the operation however there are no specifics on which parts of the operation, if any, Canada was involved in.

• I haven’t run across anyone who voted for Trump who said “Well, that’s that, time to sit back and watch things get fixed.” A lot of these people voted for Obama, at least in 2008, and not because he was going to be America’s First Black President but because they really believed in his promise of Hope. The Bush years had worn out. We stayed scared enough, but then no post-9/11 attack came, the wars dragged on, and most of the stuff that was supposed to make us feel safe just ended up somewhere between inconvenient and bullying.

• People have no sense of being in control of their lives. They know they have a lot less money than they used to, they don’t see their kids doing better, but they see on TV that some few seem to have most of everything. They can figure if they have less and someone else has more where that more came from.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Amnesty International Hong Kong has launched a special ‘bookstore’ in Central to sell over 1000 manually redacted books in partnership with Brand Union Hong Kong – books that appear to have been censored or blacked out, to draw attention to freedom of expression protected by Article 27 in Hong Kong.

• The store is located on Lok Hing Lane, 36 Pottinger Street in Central, is open for two days on 16 and 17 February, and the public will be free to browse and donate HK$27 to keep one of the bespoke books complete with a limited edition bookmark.

• The ‘bookstore’ is the crux of Amnesty International’s “Every freedom needs a fighter” campaign which aims to underscore that if Article 27 is ignored by the authorities, censored books could become the norm.

• I was delighted to attend the private view of Wolfgang Tillmans’ mid-career show 2017 at Tate Modern this week. An exhibition on an epic scale, it covers 14 rooms and nearly 25 years of his work. The photographs on display include portraiture, landscape and intimate still lifes. (You can read more about it in the Guardian’s review.)

• I photographed quite a few of Tillmans’ pieces on my phone, including a huge close-up photograph of his friend’s backside and testicles. I posted a picture of this, along with others, to my Instagram account, and also shared it from there to Facebook.

• Facebook didn’t even upload my post. Instead I got an instant message saying: “We removed the content that was posted because it doesn’t follow the Facebook community guidelines.”

• Last month, a fire tore through an iconic Tehran high-rise building, killing more than 20 firefighters and injuring another 70 people as it collapsed.

• The fire made international headlines, but it was a particularly important story for BBC Persian, the British broadcaster’s Persian-language service that targets Farsi speakers in Iran and neighboring countries.

• Rick Casey, the host of a weekly public affairs program on a small television station in Texas, recently fashioned a stinging commentary on remarks by Representative Lamar Smith that was pulled shortly before it was to air.

• The University of Manchester has been rated as one of the worst Russell Group universities for free speech

• Student demands for censorship get a lot of coverage. Spiked Online’s Free Speech University Rankings, now in its third annual edition, argues that there is a “crisis of free speech on campus”.

• By analysing the censorious policies and actions that have taken place on British campuses, Spiked concluded that 63.5 per cent of universities actively censor speech and 30.5 per cent stifle speech through excessive regulation. You can barely go a few days without encountering a new op-ed covering censorship on campus.

• Universities are supposed to be bastions of free speech and to offer a framework in which to confront students with open and challenging debate, yet just six per cent of UK universities offer such a free environment.

• The 2017 Free Speech University Rankings reveal the worrying trend of rising censorship on campuses. Between ban-happy students’ unions and restrictive university policies, students are being policed on everything from appropriate fancy dress costumes to how they speak about religion or gender.

• These eloquent words, written by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, remind us of an important responsibility we share as citizens of these United States.

• Our role is not to sit back and let government decide how best to represent our interests. Rather, our role is to represent our interests before the government and hold that government accountable to our collective will.

• A Cambridge University academic has accused the institution’s alumni magazine of censorship, after a contribution she was asked to make on the future of India was edited to remove a reference to Kashmir.

• Priyamvada Gopal, a Reader on Anglophone and Post-Colonial Literature at the university, was asked to contribute her thoughts, along with other academics and alumni, on “my wish for the next 50 years of independence”, for publication in an upcoming edition of the alumni magazine, CAM.

• Ex-English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson has been banned from speaking at yet another university. Oxford Brookes Students’ Union, where he was due to speak at a student event last week, said his presence posed a likely risk of ‘public disorder’. The event was cancelled because a group of around 130 students, accusing Robinson of spreading ‘fascism and white supremacy’, had planned a protest.

Privacy/Surveillance

• China’s nightmarish “citizen scores” system uses your online activity, purchases, messages, and social graph to rate your creditworthiness and entitlement to services. One way your score can be plunged into negative territory is for a judge to declare you to be a bad person (mostly this happens to people said to have refused to pay their debts, but it’s also used to punish people who lie to courts, hide their assets, and commit other offenses).

• More than 6.7 million people in China have been placed on a blacklist created in this manner. Once you’re on the blacklist, you are not allowed to buy high-speed rail tickets or plane tickets — and other people can see your ratings, and face social pressure to exclude you (their own scores are based in part on whether they associate with low-scoring individuals).

• As Techdirt has just reported, even though encryption is becoming more widespread, it’s not still not much of a problem for law enforcement agencies, despite some claims to the contrary. However, governments around the world are certainly not sitting back waiting for it to become an issue before acting. Many have already put in place legal frameworks that allow them to obtain information even when encryption is used, predominantly by hacking into a suspect’s computer or mobile phone. In the US, this has been achieved with controversial changes to Rule 41; in the UK, the Snooper’s Charter gives the government there almost unlimited powers to conduct what it coyly calls “equipment interference.”

• [...]

• It’s a remarkable list of technical and operational requirements that are surely unique in their attempt to minimize the key dangers of implanting clandestine surveillance software. Of course, it would be better if the use of government malware were avoided completely, and other methods were adopted. But realistically, the police and intelligence agencies around the world will be pushing hard for legislation to allow them to infect people’s computers and mobiles in this way, not least if encryption does become more of a problem.

• Another court has stepped up to inform law enforcement that just because criminals are known to use cell phones doesn’t mean any cell phone possessed by a suspect is fair game — warrant or no warrant.

• This time it’s the Superior Court of Delaware making the point. In its suppression of evidence found on a seized cell phone, the Superior Court makes it clear that cell phones are used by everyone — not just criminals. Not only that, but if an officer is going to seek a warrant that effectively allows them access to the owner’s entire life, the warrant needs to contain more specifics and limitations than this one did.

• During a consensual search of an apartment where a homicide suspect (Qualeel Westcott) was staying, police came across heroin and three mobile phones. All three of the phones were seized. A warrant was obtained to search the content of the phones. But a warrant alone isn’t good enough. While a warrant is better than nothing at all, the warrant here — according to the court — barely exceeded “nothing at all.”

• The suit was brought by British engineering firm BladeRoom Group (BRG), which in 2015 alleged “BRG spent years developing and refining the prefabricated, modular design and the transportation and construction techniques that Facebook blithely passed off to the world in 2014,” the company said in its federal lawsuit. The company said that Facebook “simply stole the BRG Methodology and passed it off as its own.” BladeRoom notes that Facebook shared some of the ideas for the Swedish data center on the Open Compute Project blog and did not “make any attempt to attribute or credit BRG for any of the elements of the innovative new approach” that Facebook “claimed” it had developed.

• The saga of Facebook Live marches on, I suppose. The social media giant’s bid to get everyone to live-stream content that mostly appears to be wholly uninteresting has nevertheless produced some interesting legal stories as a result. The latest of these is the conclusion of a string of lawsuits filed by a man who used Facebook Live to stream the birth of his child over copyright infringement against many, many news organizations that thought his act was newsworthy.

• It was in May of 2016 that Kali Kanongataa accidentally publcly streamed his wife birthing the couple’s son. He had intended for the stream to only be viewable to friends and family, but had instead made the stream viewable by pretty much everyone. Even after realizing he’d done so, Kanongataa kept the stream public, leading over 100,000 people to view the video — including some folks in several news organizations, who used snippets of the stream in news stories about the couple’s decision to stream this most intimate of moments.

• A father who live-streamed his son’s birth on Facebook and proceeded to sue for copyright infringement several media outlets that used the clips has lost his case.

• US District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled yesterday that the lawsuit filed by Kali Kanongataa must be thrown out, after the American Broadcasting Company and other defendants filed motions arguing that their use of the clips was covered by “fair use.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• President Trump’s three new law-and-order Executive Orders are designed to combat a largely-nonexistent crime wave and increase protections for one of the most-heavily protected groups in America: law enforcement officers. The orders also mixed crime prevention and national security into a single bowl, making criminal activity inseparable from threats to the nation — especially if foreigners are involved. In addition to his travel ban and his Two Minutes Hate reporting system, Trump also singled out illegal immigrants in these “law and order” orders, implying that they were to blame for much of the perceived crime problem.

• While CBP and DHS have been asking incoming foreigners for social media info for a while now, the process has been voluntary — or at least as voluntary as any process can be when one side holds all the power. New DHS Secretary John Kelly suggested this would expand further in the near future, moving from requests for social media handles to demands for account passwords.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Net neutrality is in grave danger. Back in 2015, advocates for the open Internet won a hard-fought battle to preserve net neutrality, the principle that all Internet traffic is treated equally and that providers cannot charge content providers for “fast lanes” for those who can afford it. Net neutrality is key to the work of activists and independent media outlets (like The Nation!), allowing them to reach people across the country without being drowned out by corporate media companies with big pockets.

• While T-Mobile isn’t without its faults (like its opposition to net neutrality, or the time its CEO mocked the EFF), there’s little doubt that T-Mobile has been a good thing for the wireless industry. The company has managed to drag the industry kicking and screaming in an overall positive direction, including the elimination of the carrier-subsidized handset model, the elimination of annoying hidden fees, and the recent return to more popular unlimited data options. And its brash CEO John Legere, while sometimes teetering into absurd caricature, has at least managed to bring a sense of industry to a traditionally droll telecom sector.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• We’ve seen stories in the past in which higher educational institutions attempt to slap down students’ use of school iconography when it comes to advocating for marijuana legalization. Trademark law is the preferred bludgeoning tool in many of these cases, regardless of whether or not the uses in question actually pass the muster on the tests for Fair Use. Still, at least in most of these cases the schools are at least quick to act and staunch in their attempts to silence a completely valid political position by the student body.

• That’s not so in the recent dust up between a pro-marijuana student group and Iowa State University. In this particular case, the student group got approval from ISU to use school trademarks, only to have that approval rescinded once a bunch of politicians got involved. The organization created by students is called the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.

Copyrights

• On 12 December, the Argentinian Copyright Office and the Ministry of Culture invited a group of stakeholders, among which was this author, to discuss the final draft of the Exceptions and Limitations Bill (Proyecto de Ley de Excepciones) to modify current Copyright Act no.11.723 of 1933. One wonders whether it would be better to draft from scratch a modern Copyright Act instead of patching up the old 1933 Act. Nevertheless, the bill is welcomed. Argentina, as this author has already expressed, has one of the most restrictive copyright laws in the world (see Propuestas para ampliar el acceso a los bienes públicos en Argentina – Estableciendo el necesario balance entre derechos de propiedad intelectual y dominio público, Maximiliano Marzetti, Buenos Aires, 2013).

• In a case pitting standards development organisations against internet content aggregators, a United States federal court ruled that Public.Resource.Org breached copyright by posting unauthorised copies of standards incorporated into government education regulations. Public Resource has appealed.

• While torrent sites have been a thorn in the side of the MPAA for more than a decade, there’s a new kid on the block. Speaking at the Berlin Film Festival, MPAA chief Chris Dodd cited the growing use of the Kodi platform for piracy, describing the problem as the “$64,000 question.”

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