● 02.20.17

● Links 20/2/2017: Linux 4.10, LineageOS Milestone

Posted in News Roundup at 12:14 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• While Linux is certainly very easy to use, there are some activities surrounding it that are seen as more complex than others. While they can be all be avoided easily enough, they do have a certain, geeky appeal. How many of them do you follow?

Kernel Space

• Con Kolivas has announced the MuQSS CPU scheduler v0.152 release with support for the Linux 4.10 kernel.

• In addition to updating the MuQSS CPU scheduler as his evolved effort from the BFS scheduler, he’s also announced the Linux-4.10-ck1 patches.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of two new Linux kernel releases, the Linux 4.4.50 LTS and Linux 4.9.11 LTS, both bringing various networking improvements and updated drivers.

• As expected, Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability of the Linux 4.10 kernel series, which add a great number of improvements, new security features, and support for the newest hardware components.

• Linux kernel 4.10 has been in development for the past seven weeks, during which it received a total of eight RC (Release Candidate) snapshots that implemented all the changes that you’ll soon be able to enjoy on your favorite Linux-based operating system.

• Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.10 kernel.

• As of writing this article, Torvalds hasn’t put out anything on the mailing list but Linux 4.10 is out.

Graphics Stack

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov is announcing the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) development milestone of the upcoming fifth point release of the stable Mesa 13.0 3D Graphics Library series.

• Even if Mesa 17.0 is out for a week now as the most advanced version of the 3D graphics stack used by default in almost all Linux-based operating systems, it doesn’t mean the Mesa 13.0 series is not receiving any more updates, and the Mesa 13.0.5 maintenance update is bringing lots of improvements and bug fixes.

• Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 13.0.5.

• Mesa 13.0.5 provides the latest fixes to this previous stable series for those not yet comfortable moving to Mesa 17.0.

• Intel developer Jason Ekstrand posted a patch over the weekend for enabling MSAA compression support within the ANV Vulkan driver.

Applications

• Ooh, here’s a controversial topic for this week’s poll: Client-side decorations in Linux application.

• We want to know your opinion on the growing trend that sees app developers eschew a traditional window title bar in favour of combined window title and app toolbar.

• Green Recorder is a functional desktop screen recorder for Linux systems that was built using GTK+ 3, FFmpeg, and Python.

• It support video and audio recording on almost all Linux interfaces and Wayland support (GNOME session) will be added soon.

• Terminix 1.5.0 was released recently and it includes initial bookmarks support, a reworked terminal menu, a new feature to raise a notification when inactivity is detected after a specified period of silence, and more.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Well this was quite a surprise to see! It looks like Total War: SHOGUN 2 [Steam] is going to make an appearance on Linux & SteamOS.

• MX Nitro [Steam, Official Site] is another title that popped up on SteamDB today and the developers behind this motocross racing game stated on Steam it should arrive ‘very soon’.

• Croteam has stated on their forum that Serious Sam 3: BFE [Steam] running on their new Fusion engine which uses Vulkan could arrive in public Beta as early as next month.

• Maia [Steam, itch.io, Official Site], the colony building simulation from Simon Roth has a huge update which includes Lava and colonist relationships. It’s sounding more and more like a heavily simulated version of ‘the sims in space’.

• So you’ve bought Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition on Steam and you want to play it on your Linux gaming rig with an AMD Radeon or Intel graphics card using the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, right? Wrong!

• The game won’t start and instead it will show you an ugly error that looks like in the screenshot attached in the gallery at the end of the tutorial. I purchased the game a few months ago to play co-op with a friend, but after installing it on my GNU/Linux computer, I could not even start it with my AMD Radeon HD 8750M discrete GPU, nor with the integrated Intel Haswell HD 4000 graphics card.

• Unvanquished, the open source humans vs aliens FPS is due to get a massive update soon and it sounds pretty decent. See their blog post on it here.

• Rencounter [Steam], a reasonably good looking turn-based roguelike RPG has recently added Linux support. The reviews are a bit mixed, but it still might be worth a try.

• You play as a rather laid-back hero who has been around for a long time, the initial intro shows you as some sort of legend who has fought numerous enemies across the ages. He’s so laid-back that when he’s not doing anything he just stands around with his hands in his pockets. It’s described as a love letter to retro beat ‘em ups and I can certainly see that.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• For first time in a long time, Ubuntu will ship with the latest GNOME release.

• If you use GNOME or Ubuntu, then GNOME Disks is probably what you rely on if you ever need to do any disk management operations, so it’s a relatively important piece of software for GNOME and Ubuntu users. Now if you’re a command line geek, you might handle disk management via command line, and that’s fine, but most users don’t know how to do that. Or if you’re living in the past like Ubuntu and not yet using Wayland, you might prefer GParted (which does not work under Wayland because it requires root permissions, while we intentionally will not allow applications to run as root in Wayland ). But for anyone else, you’re probably using GNOME Disks. So it would be good for it to work reliably, and for it to be relatively free of bugs.

• If you’re going to be writing a new application based on GNOME technologies and targeting the GNOME ecosystem, then you should seriously consider writing it in the Vala programming language.

• The GNOME desktop environment is loved by many, but it allows for very little out-of-the-box customisation. However, you can extend the features of the desktop by installing third-party extensions which help to fix any weird quirks you might have observed or change the behaviour of your desktop outright.

Distributions

• Linux is built for tinkering and experimentation, which means it’s always morphing and changing. New distros are popping up all the time, because all it takes is a little bit of determination, time and effort to create a custom operating system.

• Not all of them hit the mark – there are stacks of Linux distros that have seen little to no action, and we’re almost certain that some have been released and never installed by anyone other than their creator.

• Other alternative distros, though, fare rather better. Look at the success of Linux Mint, which spun off from Ubuntu to become (at times) arguably more popular than its own parent. Indeed, Ubuntu itself grew from Debian, and its niche offshoots (distros like Ubuntu Studio) have seen good movement. If there’s a market out there for your distro, there’s traction to be had.

• So let’s look at our pick of the five distros moving up swiftly through the ranks as of early 2017. Some of these might become the best Linux distros out there, some might turn out to be awful – but it won’t cost you a penny to try them out.

• Today I am going to discuss the top lightweight Linux distros you can try this year on your computer. Although you got yourself a prettyLinuxle linux already but there is always something new to try in Linux. Remember I recommend to try this distros in virtualbox firstly or with the live boot before messing with your system. All distro that I will mention here will be new and somewhat differ from regular distros.

New Releases

• A day after announcing the release of GParted 0.28.1, which re-enabled the ability for users to resize or move primary disk partitions, Curtis Gedak is today releasing the GParted Live 0.28.1-1 distro.

• As its name implies, GParted Live is a live ISO image that allows anyone to use the powerful and open-source GParted partition editor without installing anything on their computers. The new release, GParted Live 0.28.1-1, is, of course, based on GParted 0.28.1, and includes updated components based on the Debian Sid repository as of February 18, 2017. Also included is partial read and write support for LUKS encrypted filesystems.

• Just three days after the release of GParted 0.28 open-source partition editor, which implemented partial read and write support for LUKS encrypted file systems, Curtis Gedak is now announcing the release of the first point release.

• Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 8.1. Our first incremental release to the 8.0 series. In this release we have brought all security updates up to Feb 15, 2017 as well as application updates.

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton is announcing the availability of a new build of his Exton|Defender SRS (Super Rescue System) Live DVD/USB designed for those who want to do various administrative tasks on their PCs.

• Based on the 64-bit version of the Fedora 25 operating system, Exton|Defender SRS Build 170218 comes with up-to-date tools that let you administrate and repair your operating system after a disaster. It’s now powered by the Linux 4.9.9 kernel and uses the gorgeous Cinnamon 3.2.8 desktop environment by default.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS is an independent distribution, it is not derived from or dependent upon any other current distribution. It is a rolling-release distribution, so it gets a steady flow of updates rather than having periodic point-releases. There was a time when the intention was to update the PCLinuxOS distribution images quarterly, but it seems that turned out to be too much work for too little return.

• Samuel Verschelde of the Mandrake/Mandriva-forked Mageia Linux distribution has put out a blog post concerning the state of Mageia 6.

• The last Mageia 6 test release was in June of last year and their next Mageia 6 “stabilization snapshot” has been repeatedly delayed for months.

• There is no mystery about it, we are totally off schedule. The last preview we published for Mageia 6 was Stabilization Snapshot 1 in June 2016, and Stabilization Snapshot 2 still hasn’t been published, although we have been saying “soon” for weeks, or even months! So what’s going on? Is Mageia dead? Fortunately not. But it’s good that you worry about it because it shows you like your Linux distribution. We need to communicate about the state of things so that you can stop worrying, so here we are.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• As we announced in the previous report, our 31th Scrum sprint was slightly shorter than the usual ones. But you would never say so looking to this blog post. We have a lot of things to talk you about!

Red Hat Family

• US-based DLT Solutions has entered a blanket purchase agreement (BPA) with the US Department of Navy (DON) to deliver its Red Hat software and related services.

Finance

Fedora

• Wiki pages are great for collaboration. But they are not that great in getting people’s attention. They can also become pretty messy and hard to navigate trough when using multiple pages that are related to each other – like documentation – which was what we had there. We needed something better. Something that would make it easy to go trough multiple pages of documentation. Something that would have a simple landing page explaining what we do. And having a simple way to review the changes people make before publishing them would be also great.

• I knew we wanted something better, but I didn’t know what exactly. I also didn’t want to invent yet another way to build docs. So I looked around, and found the Fedora Release Engineering documentation. It’s hosted in Pagure Docs, it’s built with Python Sphinx, and it also used to be a wiki. And I got inspired!

Debian Family

Derivatives

• It looks like last year’s Debian SunCamp event for Debian developers was a total success and Martín Ferrari is back with a new proposal that should take place later this spring during four days full of hacking, socializing, and fun.

• That’s right, we’re talking about Debian SunCamp 2017, an event any Debian developer, contributor, or user can attend to meet his or hers Debian buddies, hack together on new projects or improve existing ones by sharing their knowledge, plan upcoming features and discuss ideas for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The great folks from the Ubuntu Budgie (formerly budgie-remix) GNU/Linux distribution had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of budgie-remix 16.04.2.

• What’s budgie-remix 16.04.2, you may wonder? Well, as Ubuntu Budgie did not yet have a stable release, and because many people are still using the distro on their PCs with its previous name (budgie-remix), the developers updated it to be based on the recently released Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

• Being based on Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, which inherits the newer Linux 4.8 kernel and an updated graphics stack based on Mesa 12.0 3D Graphics Library from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), budgie-remix 16.04.2 comes equipped with its HWE kernel and graphics stack, as well as the latest Budgie 10.2.9 desktop environment.

• Clement Lefebvre, the founder and lead developer of the popular Linux Mint operating system, published the project’s monthly newsletter for the month of February 2017 to keep the community up-to-date with the latest developments.

• In the good tradition of these monthly newsletters, Clement Lefebvre sends his deepest appreciation and thanks to all those who donated money to Linux Mint, and then teases users with the upcoming design of the Bluetooth panel, which will be implemented in the next major release of the OS, namely Linux Mint 18.2.

• Linux Mint 18.1 Serena is an okay distro. It has more merit than Sarah, but then, it’s also had almost a year to work on polishing some of the issues, and while a few have been ironed out, big quality issues that were never the domain of Mint before still persist. The live session experience is underwhelming, the default theme is not vibrant enough and can lead to ocular exhaustion quickly, there were problems with stability, multimedia playback, and the promise of Spotify never came to be.

• On the other hand, most of the stuff works out of the box, the repos are rich, the distro can be tamed relatively easily, and at the end of the day, you have a supported, popular system full of goodies and shiny colors with only a slight aftertaste of betrayal in your proverbial mouth. Good, but only if you’ve just started playing around with Linux. This distro has no flair. It doesn’t have the magic and fire of yore. No fire, no nothing. It’s not super green. And it must pop pop pop. So I guess, grade wise, 6.5/10 or some such. All in all, ’tis Linux Mint all right, but not the best offering by a long shot.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• You’ll see that last spring I felt the world had 7.6 Billion total mobile subscriptions when machine-to-machine (M2M) connections are included. I felt the world had 7.2 Billion total subscriptions when excluding M2M and just counting those in use by humans. And the most relevant number (bottom line) is the ‘unique’ mobile users, which I felt was an even 5.0 Billion humans in 2015. The chart also has the total handsets-in-use statistic which I felt was 5.6 Billion at the end of 2015. Note that I was literally the first person to report on the distinction of the unique user count vs total subscriptions and I have been urging, nearly begging for the big industry giants to also measure that number. They are slowly joining in that count. Similarly to M2M, we also are now starting to see others report M2M counts. I have yet to see a major mobile statistical provider give a global count of devices in use. That will hopefully come also, soon. But lets examine these three numbers that we now do have other sources, a year later, to see did I know what I was doing.

Android

• I got to completely geek out when Daniel Matte wrote up the things he found about Andromeda while looking through some Google source code earlier this week. It reinforced a lot of the things I thought when I first looked through all the code in August 2016, caught a lot more things that I overlooked, and examined the new code. I think Matte’s assessments are pretty close to the mark here. Not because they confirmed some of my original thoughts, but because it points out things I got wrong. Or at least I think I got them wrong. Everything about Andromeda or Fuchsia is still just educated guessing.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source solutions have long been an option for the enterprise, but lately it seems they are becoming more of a necessity for advanced data operations than merely a luxury for IT techs who like to play with code.

• While it’s true that open platforms tend to provide a broader feature set compared to their proprietary brethren, due to their larger and more diverse development communities, this often comes at the cost of increased operational complexity. At a time when most enterprises are looking to shed their responsibilities for infrastructure and architecture to focus instead on core money-making services, open source requires a fairly high level of in-house technical skill.

• But as data environments become more distributed and reliant upon increasingly complex compilations of third-party systems, open source can provide at least a base layer of commonality for resources that support a given distribution.

• Technologies such as Docker have blended these responsibilities, causing developers to need to care about what operating system and native libraries are available to their applications – after years of the industry striving for more abstraction and increased decoupling!

• Pieter Hintjens was a writer, programmer and thinker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities, which he describes as “Living Systems”. He was an expert in distributed computing, having written over 30 protocols and distributed software systems. He designed AMQP in 2004, and founded the ZeroMQ free software project in 2007. He was the author of the O’Reilly ZeroMQ book, “Culture and Empire”, “The Psychopath Code”, “Social Architecture”, and “Confessions of a Necromancer”. He was the president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), and fought the software patent directive and the standardisation of the Microsoft OOXML Office format. He also organized the Internet of Things (IOT) Devroom here at FOSDEM for the last 3 years. In April 2016 he was diagnosed with terminal metastasis of a previous cancer.

Events

• The topics are Yocto Linux on FPGA-based hardware, risk and license management in open source projects and a product release by the local start-up Zifra (an encryptable SD-card).

• More information and free tickets are available at the foss-gbg site.

Web Browsers

• Brave is a new privacy and security focused web browser with built-in support for torrent downloading and streaming. The browser allows seasoned downloaders and complete novices to get their torrent fix instantly, without any hassle.

SaaS/Back End

• Just translate the term “productivity of American factories” into the word “automation” and you get the picture. Other workers are not taking jobs away from the gainfully employed, machines are.

• This is not a new trend. It’s been going on since before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Industry creates machines that do the work of humans faster, cheaper, with more accuracy and with less failure. That’s the nature of industry—nothing new here. However, what is new is the rate by which the displacement of human beings from the workforce in happening.

• The open source software promises hard-to-come-by cloud standards and no vendor lock-in, says Forrester’s Lauren Nelson. But there’s more to consider — including containers.

• The next OpenStack Summit is just three months away now, and as is their custom, the organizers have once again invited you–the OpenStack Community–to vote on which presentations will and will not be featured at the event.

• Ambassadors act as liaisons between multiple User Groups, the Foundation and the community in their regions. Launched in 2013, the OpenStack Ambassador program aims to create a framework of community leaders to sustainably expand the reach of OpenStack around the world.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• ONLYOFFICE editors and ownCloud is the match made in heaven, wrote once one of our users. Inspired by this idea, we developed an integration app for you to use our online editors in ownCloud web interface.

• WSO2 has announced a new, fully-open-source WSO2 Internet of Things Server edition that “lowers the barriers to delivering enterprise-grad IoT and mobile solutions.”

Programming/Development

• The Qt Company today announced Qt 3D Studio, a new 3D UI authoring system, thanks to NVIDIA providing Qt with hundreds of thousands of lines of source code making up this application.

• Cavium’s ThunderX ARM 64-bit processors are now formally supported by the LLVM compiler stack.

• Recently, after refactoring some Rust code, I noticed that it had suddenly become four times slower. However, the strange part is that I didn’t even touch the part of the code that became slower. Furthermore, it was still slower after commenting out the changes. Curious, I decided to investigate further.

• The first step was to use git diff to display all changes since the previous commit, which was normal speed. Then I started removing them one by one, no matter how inconsequential, and testing to see if it was still slow after the change.

• [...]

• Adding the print statement causes the code to go from 0.16 seconds to 1.7 seconds, an 11x slowdown (in release mode). Then, I posted it in the rustc IRC channel, where eddyb and bluss suggested a workaround and explained what was going on.

• The fix was to the change the print line to the following, which does indeed fix the slowdown.

Leftovers

Cars

• As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It’s a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

• I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.

• After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

• A former Uber engineer has published an explosive account of sexism and power struggles in the workplace, with allegations beginning from her very first official day with the company. The engineer, Susan Fowler (who left Uber in December and now works for Stripe), posted the account to her blog on Sunday, calling it a “strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story.” It is indeed horrifying.

• Sexism is a well-documented problem in Silicon Valley, but the particulars of Fowler’s account are astounding. She says problems began on day one, when her manager accosted her with details of his sex life:

• For those who may have missed the story, here’s the deal. Manfred Kick was driving his Model S on the German Autobahn near Munich and noticed that a person in a Volkswagen Passat was driving erratically on the highway, German publication Munchen Merkur reported. The Passat hit the guardrail several times and swerved suspiciously, so Kick realized that something was wrong.

• He didn’t know whether the Passat driver was under the influence of drugs or alcohol or whether some other issue was at stake, but he nonetheless decided to intervene to avoid a more serious accident. Kick accelerated to reach the Volkswagen Passat and when he looked over, he saw that the driver appeared unconscious.

• Charles Henderson sold his car several years ago, but he still knows exactly where it is, and can control it from his phone.

• The IBM researcher leading X-Force Red, the firm’s security testing group, wasn’t researching car security when he discovered a major privacy issue. He simply sold his car.

• “The car is really smart, but it’s not smart enough to know who its owner is, so it’s not smart enough to know it’s been resold,” Henderson told CNNTech. “There’s nothing on the dashboard that tells you ‘the following people have access to the car.’”

Proprietary Nightmares

• SAP’s named-user licensing fees apply even to related applications that only offer users indirect visibility of SAP data, a U.K. judge ruled Thursday in a case pitting SAP against Diageo, the alcoholic beverage giant behind Smirnoff vodka and Guinness beer.

• The consequences could be far-reaching for businesses that have integrated their customer-facing systems with an SAP database, potentially leaving them liable for license fees for every customer that accesses their online store.

• “If any SAP systems are being indirectly triggered, even if incidentally, and from anywhere in the world, then there are uncategorized and unpriced costs stacking up in the background,” warned Robin Fry, a director at software licensing consultancy Cerno Professional Services, who has been following the case.

• No edition of Windows 10, except Professional and Enterprise, is expected to function for more than 12 hours of the day. Microsoft most generously lets you set a block of 12 hours where you’re in control of the system, and will reserve the remaining 12 hours for it’s own purposes. How come we’re all fine with this?

• Windows 10 introduced the concept of “Active Hours”, a period of up to 12 hours when you expect to use the device, meant to reflect your work hours. The settings for changing the device’s active hours is hidden away among Windows Update settings, and it poorly fits with today’s lifestyles.

• Say you use your PC in the afternoon and into the late evening during the work week, but use it from morning to early afternoon in the weekends. You can’t fit all those hours nor accommodate home office hours in a period of just 12 hours. We’re always connected, and expect our devices to always be there for us when we need them.

Health/Nutrition

• The Flint drinking water crisis has its root causes in historical and systemic racism, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission said Friday in a hard-hitting report that calls the public health catastrophe ” a complete failure of government” and recommends a rewrite of the state’s emergency manager law and bias training for state officials.

• The report, unanimously adopted at a meeting of the commission in downtown Flint, also calls for the creation of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” a model that was used in South Africa after apartheid as a way of rebuilding government trust and credibility by listening to and addressing specific concerns raised by Flint residents.

• It calls on Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to invite experts to provide training on “implicit bias” to his cabinet, his team responding to Flint, and to require all state departments, including the Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Health and Human Services, to do the same for their staff. Implicit bias is unconscious bias that can be directed toward historically disadvantaged groups, influencing decision-making.

• The 129-page report does not claim there were any specific violations of state civil rights laws, but says “historical, structural and systemic racism combined with implicit bias” played a role in the problems, which still linger in the city’s drinking water almost three years later.

• “The presence of racial bias in the Flint water crisis isn’t much of a surprise to those of us who live here, but the Michigan Civil Rights Commission’s affirmation that the emergency manager law disproportionately hurts communities of color is an important reminder of just how bad the policy is,” state Sen. Jim Ananich, a Democrat from Flint, said.

Defence/Aggression

• Janine Jackson: “Women Killed in Yemen Raid Were Qaeda Fighters, Pentagon Says” was the headline on a January 30 New York Times story on the recent commando raid in central Yemen, the first on Donald Trump’s watch.

Finance

• The Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA) has expressed its concern about the nearly 79,000 men in the prime working-age group who are not in employment, not in education and not eligible for disability pension.

• “Finland is home to 78,657 prime working-age men who can be labelled as missing workers. Not much is known about the activities of these 25–54-year-old men – except that they have disappeared from the labour force, apparently permanently,” EVA states in a report published on Thursday.

• Mary Jo White, whose tenure as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Obama bitterly disappointed those who hoped she would aggressively enforce banking laws, is rejoining the corporate defense team at Debevoise & Plimpton, marking her sixth trip through the revolving door between various government jobs and the white-collar defense law firm she calls home.

• Debevoise represents numerous major financial institutions under federal investigation, and White will now help those corporate clients manage their legal exposure.

• White got the call to return to Debevoise on Inauguration Day, her last day at the SEC. As Debevoise presiding partner Michael Blair told the Wall Street Journal, “We had been waiting to make that phone call for several years.”

• This latest trip through the revolving door is particularly disturbing because White declared in ethics disclosure forms before becoming SEC chair that she was retiring from her partnership at Debevoise, receiving a lump sum retirement payment of over $2 million. Instead of staying retired, she immediately went back to Debevoise after her government service ended, pocketing the money.

• It is not, however, surprising.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• As President Trump descended the stairs from Air Force One on Saturday evening, with a patriotic country song playing and thousands cheering, the 2020 election season officially began.

• Although the past several presidents have waited more than two years before jumping back onto the campaign trail, Trump’s first four weeks in office have shown that he just can’t stand too much time in Washington. One adviser calls political rallies the president’s “oxygen” — and Trump seemed to direly need a deep inhalation following a week that included his national security adviser resigning and his top replacement pick turning him down, his nominee for labor secretary withdrawing from consideration and accusations involving his campaign and Russia.

• “Life is a campaign,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Making our country great again is a campaign. For me, it’s a campaign.”

• Shortly following new revelations from the New York Times that President Donald Trump’s campaign team was in “repeated” contact with Russian officials ahead of the 2016 election, #TrumpImpeachmentParty began trending on Twitter in a call to take Trump out of office. But while the hashtag might be gaining steam, the process of impeaching a president is a lot easier said than done.

• What does it mean for a president to be impeached, what does the process look like, and is it even possible for Donald Trump to be impeached less than a month into his presidency? Here’s what you need to know.

• Representative Ted Lieu, a congressman from Los Angeles County, California, led fourteen other House Democrats on Friday in urging the House Government Oversight Committee to investigate “troubling reports” of President Donald Trump’s apparently poor security practices and the potential danger to national security posed by them—including his continued use of an unsecured Android device to post to Twitter, discussion of sensitive information (including nuclear strategy) in the restaurant at his Mar-A-Lago resort, and leaving classified material unlocked while visitors were in the Oval Office.

• President Trump attended a private fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday evening, without informing the press corps that follows him and reports on his movements.

• Trump made an unexpected stop at a fundraiser for Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute held at his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., the Washington Post reported.

• The event was not on his schedule.

• A video posted on Instagram shows Trump arriving at the private fundraiser, where he was met with cheers. More than 800 people attended the event, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Sunday.

• Donald Trump invited wealthy members of one of his golf clubs to help interview candidates for posts in his administration, leaked audio recordings have revealed.

• The Republican was taped telling guests to “come round” and help interview potential “generals and dictators”, claiming it would be “fun”.

• Audio recordings from a party hosted by Mr Trump at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey in November – just two weeks after his election win – reveal comments he made to members.

• Since 2010, the Washington Post has been banking on its pedigree and prestige by putting on Q & A sessions with influential Beltway personalities—sponsored by corporations directly involved in the topics of discussion. Event sponsors include Bank of America, Eli Lilly, Qualcomm, WGL Energy, AFLAC, GlaxoSmithKline and UnitedHealth, among others.

• These events, billed as “Post Live,” are generally fluffy, non-combative industry hype sessions sponsored by a relevant corporation and quarterbacked by a Washington Post columnist or reporter to lend it gravitas. The ideological scope, as one would expect based on who funds them, ranges from “how capitalism and the US military can be more awesome” to “capitalism and the US military are already awesome.” This ideological capture is seen most starkly in Post Live’s coverage of healthcare and war.

• Mickey Huff (Director of Project Censored, professor of social science and history, Diablo Valley College), Andy Lee Roth (associate director of Project Censored, instructor in sociology, Citrus College) and Elizabeth Blakey, (lawyer, sociologist, First Amendment scholar, and assistant professor of journalism, Cal State-Northridge) will examine news censorship, the origins of “fake news,” and how critical media literacy, particularly among young adults, will be essential for sustaining democracy in the 21st Century.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Over the next few months, there’ll be plenty of debate about the role of the government in funding public broadcasting.

• The Trump administration reportedly has the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — and a host of other cultural and arts organizations– targeted for elimination.

• The biggest advantage of the medium, is that there is no censorship yet, says Suzanna. “In film and television, censorship is the biggest problem. At the end, owing to cuts, one finally cannot end up telling the story he or she sets out to do so,” Suzanna adds.

• Back then, cinema and television, on account of their inaccessibility to ordinary researchers, did not provide a convenient source of research information. To put it simply, it was basically impossible to cite television, and motion pictures were exhibited at the cinema houses at the whim of the film distributors.

Privacy/Surveillance

Civil Rights/Policing

• Allegations of a new Islamist “Trojan Horse” plot to wrest control of a state school have been made by a headmistress in the north of England.

• Trish O’Donnell, head of Clarksfield Primary School in Oldham since 2006, emailed the local council saying she had “very strong reasons to believe that… a ‘Trojan Horse’ agenda [is] being played out”, The Sunday Times reported.

• “Trojan Horse” refers to plots uncovered in 2014 in Birmingham schools in which Islamist groups attempted to infiltrate positions of authority and impose a conservative or Salifist ethos on their running.

• Fears of a new “Trojan Horse” Islamic plot to take over a state school in Oldham have been raised by its head teacher, who says she has been concerned for her personal safety.

• Trish O’Donnell, head of Clarksfield Primary School since 2006, has been so worried that she has worked from home for short periods in recent months.

• A 14-year-old girl has been beaten and detained for wearing ripped jeans in Iran in the latest incident of police brutality against women and girls.

• Zahra*, who The Independent is not identifying for fear she may suffer reprisals, was celebrating her birthday with friends last week when a patrol of “morality police” pulled up.

• The teenager said officers tried to force her and her friends into their car in the city of Shiraz, beating them when they resisted.

• The Homeland Security Department has drafted sweeping new guidelines aimed at aggressively detaining and deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, according to a pair of memoranda signed by DHS Secretary John Kelly.

• The memos dated Friday seek to implement President Donald Trump’s broad directive to crack down on illegal immigration. Kelly outlines plans to hire thousands of additional enforcement agents, expand on the priority list for immigrants marked for immediate removal and enlist local law enforcement to help make arrests, according to a person briefed on the documents, who confirmed the details to the Associated Press.

• “The surge of illegal immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed federal agencies and resources and has created a significant national security vulnerability to the United States,” Kelly wrote.

• Since Donald Trump announced Neil Gorsuch as his nominee for the Supreme Court, media have coalesced around a few themes: One is about whether any Trump appointment should be blocked as payback to Republicans, as expressed in a New York Times headline (2/13/17): “Democrats’ Quandary on Gorsuch: Appease the Base or Honor the Process.” Spoiler: The paper thinks the real strain is on “those in the middle.”

• Another theme is Gorsuch’s “eloquence” and his being “hard to pigeonhole” as conservative: One story said he “didn’t skip a beat” when a friend came out to him as gay.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This week on CounterSpin: “T-Mobile Very Pleased with Direction of Change under Trump Administration, CEO Says.” That headline tells you pretty much what you need to know about Ajit Pai, Trump’s choice of chair for the FCC—the entity charged with representing the public interest in the communications industry. The phone company exec is pleased, he says, because Pai’s appointment signals “an air of less regulation.”

• The idea that the media industry hates regulation is fiction, given that it’s government that grants licenses to companies to use the public airwaves and monopoly franchises to cable companies. In so doing, as media scholar Bob McChesney has said, government isn’t so much setting the terms of competition as picking the winners. What’s objected to, of course, are public interest regulations—including the net neutrality rules that allow for a democratic and diverse internet. What’s ahead for the public interest under Ajit Pai’s FCC? We talk with Jessica Gonzalez, deputy director and senior counsel at the group Free Press.

DRM

• The next stable version of Chrome (Chrome 57) will not allow users to disable the Widevine DRM plugin anymore, therefore making it an always-on, permanent feature of Chrome. The new version of Chrome will also eliminate the “chrome://plugins” internal URL, which means if you want to disable Flash, you’ll have to do it from the Settings page.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Back in 2012, the N.D. Cal. district court ruled that the portions of Java structure that Google copied were not themselves entitled to copyright protection. On appeal, however, the Federal Circuit reversed and ordered a new trial. In particular, the Federal Circuit panel led by Judge O’Malley held that the Java API taxonomy copyrightable as a whole and rejected the applicability of idea/expression merger doctrine. “Merger cannot bar copyright protection for any lines of declaring source code unless Sun/Oracle had only one way, or a limited number of ways, to write them.”

• Search engines Google and Bing have signed a voluntary code of conduct with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the Motion Picture Association to prevent consumers from being directed to copyright-infringing websites, the UK Intellectual Property Office said on 20 February. The deal, brokered by the IPO, comes into effect immediately and is intended to reduce the visibility of infringing content in searches by 1 June, the office said.

• New Zealand’s High Court has found that Kim Dotcom, best known for creating the now-defunct file sharing service Megaupload, is eligible for extradition to the U.S., rejecting a legal appeal by the self-styled “internet freedom fighter.”

• But the judges supported an argument put forth by Dotcom and his legal team that the U.S. cannot extradite him for charges related to copyright violation, reports the New Zealand Herald.

• An appellate court in New Zealand has upheld a lower court’s 2015 decision that Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants should be extradited to the United States to face criminal copyright-related charges involving his former website, Megaupload.

• In a ruling issued Monday afternoon local time (late Sunday night, Eastern Standard Time), Justice Murray Gilbert of the High Court of New Zealand ruled that while he agreed with one of Dotcom’s attorneys’ primary arguments—”that online communication of copyright protected works to the public is not a criminal offence in New Zealand”—the judge noted that nevertheless, Dotcom and his co-defendants remain eligible for extradition based on other elements in the case.

• This case is no longer the “largest criminal copyright case”, 1 at least as far as New Zealand is concerned. As we have said all along, there is no such offence under our Copyright Act. We were right. However, this afternoon the High Court judgment 2 was issued and, ultimately, although it concluded we are right, 3 the Court concluded that Kim is still eligible for surrender.

• A New Zealand court ruled on Monday that internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom could be extradited to the United States to face charges relating to his Megaupload website, which was shutdown in 2012 following an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion.

• The Auckland High Court upheld the decision by a lower court in 2015 on 13 counts, including allegations of conspiracy to commit racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering and wire fraud, although it described that decision as “flawed” in several areas.

• Dotcom’s lawyer Ron Mansfield said in a statement the decision was “extremely disappointing” and that Dotcom would appeal to New Zealand’s Court of Appeal.

• It’s likely you’ve never heard of mp3toys.xyz since the site has very little traffic. However, thanks to a bungling anti-piracy outfit, the site is now the second most complained about ‘pirate’ site on the Internet, with Google receiving more than 49 million notices in just over six months.

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