● 02.23.17

● Links 23/2/2017: Qt 5.9 Alpha, First SHA1 Collision

Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• China Mobile is one of the biggest telecom companies in the world, with more than 800 million users in China — all of whom are served with open source technologies. During the 2016 Mobile World Congress, China Mobile declared that the operational support system running their massive network would be based on open source software. China Mobile is not alone; many major networking vendors are moving to open source technologies. For example, AT&T is building their future network on top of OpenStack, and they have invested in software-defined technology so significantly that they now call themselves a software company.

• You may have noticed that there’s no stock symbol next to Linux’s name. This important OS isn’t made by a public company… or even a company at all.

• Linux software is open source. In other words, it’s not a commercial product which anyone owns. Rather, it’s free software which is developed and improved pro bono by the programmers who use it.

• As a result of this democratized development process, Linux is more customizable than a commercial OS. Windows and MacOS both have proprietary designs with usage restrictions, but not so with Linux.

• This makes Linux software ideal for the advanced programmers and IT professionals who make cloud computing possible. They often like to tinker with hardware and software in order to optimize it for their purposes.

Desktop

• I’ve been a regular desktop Linux user for just about a decade now. What has changed in that time? Keep reading for a look back at all the ways that desktop Linux has become easier to use — and those in which it has become more difficult — over the past ten years.

• I installed Linux to my laptop for the first time in the summer of 2006. I started with SUSE, then moved onto Mandriva and finally settled on Fedora Core.

• By early 2007 I was using Fedora full time. There was no more Windows partition on my laptop. When I ran into problems or incompatibilities with Linux, my options were to sink or swim. There was no Windows to revert back to.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Greg KH sent out his Linux 4.11 pull requests today for the different areas of the Linux kernel he maintains, including the staging area updates.

• Dmitry Torokhov has submitted the input feature updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window.

• One of the new input drivers for Linux 4.11 is the Zeitech touchscreen controller. The new Zeitec driver is zet6223 and supports the ZET6223 I2C touchscreen controller.

• Another new driver is for Samsung “touchkeys.” The Samsung Touchkey support is the new tm2-touchkey driver and allows for touch key and LED functionality on the Exynos 5433 TM2 development board.

• TinyDRM has been queued in DRM-Next for landing with the in-development Linux 4.11 kernel.

• TinyDRM aims to provide “a very simplified view of DRM for displays that has onboard video memory and is connected through a slow bus like SPI/I2C.” TinyDRM includes SPI and MIPI-DBI support.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today the general availability of two new maintenance updates for the long-term supported Linux 4.9 and Linux 4.4 kernel updates for Linux-based operating systems.

• Takashi Iwai has submitted the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel with most of that work happening in the audio driver space.

• Jerome Glisse and others have been working on the rather cool Heterogeneous Memory Management support for the Linux kernel going back several years. While Jerome hoped to see HMM merged for Linux 4.11, it will be sitting out at least one more cycle.

Graphics Stack

• There was some work years ago for supporting Intel’s own INTEL_performance_query OpenGL extension it was dropped in January for a rework and now is back in Mesa 17.1-devel.

• Timothy Arceri who has been working on the Mesa on-disk shader cache for months and most recently began working for Valve on the AMD Linux driver stack has landed support in Mesa 17.1-devel for the GLSL/TGSI on-disk shader cache for the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers.

• Good news for AMD GPU owners on open source drivers, as Mesa-git now has a shader cache enabled for r600 and radeonsi.

• This new feature is quite essential for a lot of games and will be a welcome addition to Mesa 17.1.

• While DRM-Next hasn’t even been submitted yet for the Linux 4.11 merge window, I ran some benchmarks today of an AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics card comparing Linux 4.10.0 to the current DRM-Next state.

• Peter Hutterer announced the first release candidate on Wednesday for the upcoming libinput 1.7.0, the input handling library that’s widely-used by Wayland / X.Org / Mir systems.

Benchmarks

• Last week Feral Interactive released the much anticipated Linux port of HITMAN, which debuted for Windows last year. Now that there’s benchmark support for HITMAN on Linux, I have been running a number of tests for this game that’s powered by the Glacier Engine and making use of OpenGL for rendering on Linux. In this article are our initial AMD Radeon performance figures making use of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver compared to NVIDIA’s driver and the assortment of GeForce results published yesterday.

Applications

• In a previous Magazine article, we covered tracking your time and tasks. In that article we mentioned some mind mapping tools. Now we’ll cover three mind mapping apps you can use in Fedora. You can use these tools to generate and manipulate maps that show your thoughts. Mind maps can help you to improve your creativity and effectiveness. You can use them for time management, to organize tasks, to overview complex contexts, to sort your ideas, and more.

• So you’ve landed on some data you want to analyze. Where do you begin?

• Many people used to working in a graphical environment might default to using a spreadsheet tool, but there’s another way that might prove to be faster and more efficient, with just a little more effort. And you don’t need to become an expert in a statistical modeling language or a big data toolset to take advantage of these tools.

• I’m talking about the Linux command line. Just using some tools that you’ve probably already got installed on your computer, you can learn a lot about a dataset without ever leaving your terminal. Long-time Linux users will of course laugh—they’ve been using many of these tools for years to parse logs and understand configuration tools. But for the Linux newcomer, the revelation that you’ve got a whole data analysis toolkit already at your fingertips can be a welcomed surprise.

• If you’re looking for a fast, IMAP compatible email client for Linux, why not try Trojita?

• Trojita aims to fetch and display email as quickly, and as efficiently, as possible. The open-source email app adheres to ‘open standards and modern technologies’, and is built around ‘the vendor-neutrality that IMAP provides’.

• A new version of gparted was released recently and I have updated the Fedora package to the latest version – 0.28.1.

• This version brings a rather exciting (at least, to me) update – ability to copy and resize already open LUKS filesystems.

• Keeping up my yearly blogging cadence, it’s about time I wrote to let people know what I’ve been up to for the last year or so at Mozilla. People keeping up would have heard of the sad news regarding the Connected Devices team here. While I’m sad for my colleagues and quite disappointed in how this transition period has been handled as a whole, thankfully this hasn’t adversely affected the Vaani project. We recently moved to the Emerging Technologies team and have refocused on the technical side of things, a side that I think most would agree is far more interesting, and also far more suited to Mozilla and our core competence.

• If you feel there’s a gap in your life for an Electron-based, cross-platform music player capable of streaming from multiple online sources, I’ve a plug for you.

• Nuclear is a (rather naughty) music streaming app that “pulls in content from free sources all over the internet”. In aim it’s somewhat similar to Tomahawk, but visually owes more to an ultra camp Spotify channeling its inner radioactive diva.

Instructionals/Technical

• I’ve been running my own website for a few years now. I use Apache webserver and a Wiki-style backend called triki for creating, editing and rendering my content. The content on my site is a mixture of public and private content, where people I know can log in to see restricted content. Given this, it has been on my mind that I really should secure the site using https, such that it is fully encrypted over the wire.

• GCC has a rich set of features designed to help detect many kinds of programming errors. Of particular interest are those that corrupt the memory of a running program and, in some cases, makes it vulnerable to security threats. Since 2006, GCC has provided a solution to detect and prevent a subset of buffer overflows in C and C++ programs. Although it is based on compiler technology, it’s best known under the name Fortify Source derived from the synonymous GNU C Library macro that controls the feature: _FORTIFY_SOURCE. GCC has changed and improved considerably since its 4.1 release in 2006, and with its ability to detect these sorts of errors. GCC 7, in particular, contains a number of enhancements that help detect several new kinds of programming errors in this area. This article provides a brief overview of these new features. For a comprehensive list of all major improvements in GCC 7, please see GCC 7 Changes document.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine Staging 2.2 has been released today, February 22, 2017, and it’s coming hot on the heels of last week’s Wine 2.2 development release to bring various under-the-hood improvements to its CSMT (Command-Stream Multi-Threading) feature.

• Being based on Wine 2.2, Wine Staging 2.2 inherits all of its new functionality, including the ability to set the default Windows version to Windows 7 for newly created prefixes, the implementation of additional Shader Model 5 instructions, initial support for double-buffered theme painting, as well as the new Direct3D command stream improvements.

Games

• With the competitive RadeonSI vs. NVIDIA performance for HITMAN on Linux there have been some Premium reader requests for also taking a look at the CPU/RAM usage and other vitals while running this latest Feral game port on the different GPUs/drivers.

• The rather good MMO ‘Albion Online’ finally has a proper release date! I am looking forward to creating a guild with some Linux gamers.

• Yup, the iconic open-source karting game is hoping to rev up enough interest to snatch a space amid the shelves of the Steam games store.

• “After a lot of requests and months of hard work we are launching SuperTuxKart on Steam Greenlight,” the team explain in a blog post (in which they also cite some of your comments from this site).

• One title I never had the chance to actually get into is War Thunder, so I teamed up with Samsai to check it out. Here’s a video and some thoughts.

• The game is available to download for Linux direct from the War Thunder website and Steam. So you don’t actually need Steam to run it which is great.

• Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais announced earlier today on Twitter that a pre-release version of the SteamVR virtual reality system is now available for Linux and SteamOS users.

• SteamVR for Linux is currently in beta testing stages of development for developers who want an early start for creating SteamVR content for Linux-based operating systems, including Valve’s SteamOS, which the company ships pre-installed on numerous Steam Machines stand-alone gaming devices.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I am happy to inform you that Qt 5.9 Alpha has been released today.

• Qt 5.9 Alpha is an important milestone on our way to the final Qt 5.9.0 release, which is targeted to be released by the end of May 2017.

• The Alpha release is available only as source packages. Binary installers will be available via the online installer in conjunction with the Beta release as well as development snapshots during the coming weeks.

• The Qt Company today announced the much-anticipated release of the Qt 5.9 Alpha.

• Mcomix is my go-to comic book reader for Ubuntu, but for my KDE desktop I wanted something that feels more at home in the Plasma experience.

• After a bit of digging I came across Peruse.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Greetings, GNOMErs!

• If you’re watching closely the GNOME Control Center iterations, you probably noticed it already has a bunch of new panels: Keyboard, Mouse & Touchpad, and other panels like Sharing, Privacy and Search that don’t need to be ported.

• For those who haven’t heard, I’ve been appointed as the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and I started last week on the 15th February.

• It’s been an interesting week so far, mainly meeting lots of people and trying to get up to speed with what looks like an enormous job! However, I’m thoroughly excited by the opportunity and am very grateful for everyone’s warm words of welcome so far.

Distributions

New Releases

• Clonezilla Live and GParted Live creator Steven Shiau announced the availability of a new stable release of Clonezilla Live, versioned 2.5.0-25, bringing the latest GNU/Linux technologies and up-to-date software components.

• Based on the Debian Sid repository as of February 20, 2017, Clonezilla Live 2.5.0-25 is now powered by the Linux 4.9.6 kernel and ships with a bunch of new packages, including Nmap, bicon, sshpass, keychain, and monitoring-plugins-basic.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• When I recently wrote about the new PCLinuxOS release, I was a bit disappointed to find that the Full Monty version had been laid to rest. I’m sure there were a lot of good reasons for this decision, and I have no quarrel with it. But it still made me a bit sad, because I have always kept the Full Monty on at least one of my systems (it is currently on my Acer All-In-One desktop), and I often showed it to people who were curious about Linux, as an example of its breadth, depth and flexibility.

• So I decided that it might be a useful exercise for me to try to create the equivalent of the Full Monty desktop starting from the latest PCLinuxOS KDE5 distribution. There are two major features which distinguish the Full Monty desktop – it had six virtual desktops, each of which was dedicated to a specific use, and it had lots and lots and lots of packages installed.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Kopano announced big news yesterday about being included in openSUSE’s factory codebase as development proceeds to be in openSUSE’s upcoming release, which was a big first step toward inclusion into openSUSE downstream.

• “We are straight on the path to be included with openSUSE Leap 42.3 already, which has started development just last December,” wrote Michael Kromer in a news release yesterday. “You can find the downstream requests from Factory to Leap 42.3 here: Core and WebApp.”

• Being one of the most popular Linux distros, Kopano expressed delight to be the first distribution to pick the communication solution.

Slackware Family

• The main change is the comeback of Firefox, built with GTK3 and multithreading enabled by default : This build of Firefox starts and react nearly as fast as Chromium, and with many tabs opened : scales much better in terms of responsiveness and memory footprint. You will also notice some improvements around ffmpeg, and MPV which is from now the main media player in Zenwalk. Gstreamer has been dropped from ISO but is still available from Slackware repositories. Of course this ISO contains many updated packages (see changelog below).

Red Hat Family

• BlockApps, a Blockchain-as-a-Service platform and a provider of Ethereum enterprise software, is collaborating with Red Hat in order to make it easier for enterprises to build blockchain applications that can be deployed in production across hybrid cloud environments — spanning both public and private clouds.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) announced today they are working together to accelerate the deployment of network functions virtualization (NFV) solutions based on fully open, production-ready, standards-based infrastructures. HPE plans to offer ready-to-use, pre-integrated HPE NFV System solutions and HPE Validated Configurations incorporating Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage for communications service providers (CSPs).

• A Cork-based subsidiary of open source software specialist Red Hat reported a sharp rise in revenues and profits last year, recently lodged accounts show.

• Red Hat Ltd, whose parent acquired Irish software firm Feed Henry for €63.5 million in September 2014, recorded a pretax profit of €33.2 million for the 12 months ending February 2016. This compares with a profit before tax of €26.6 million a year earlier.

• A week after Lenovo executives pointed to partnerships as a way to drive numbers in its data center business, the company has announced an expanded relationship with SAP.

• It’s the latest in a string of partnerships, from Red Hat to Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX), all targeted to help Lenovo better compete.

Finance

Fedora

• The Factory 2.0 team is back from Brno and DevConf. We had two talks to look for, one on Factory 2.0 current work and another done in conjunction with the Modularity team on Modularity itself. Since returning, we’ve been working with other teams to set our plans for F27 while simultaneously getting the module build service ready for production for F26.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Los Angeles-based AR specialist Daqri appears to have made a next-gen breakthrough with the latest version of its Smart Helmet, which was joined earlier this month by a new sister product, Smart Glasses. Daqri unveiled the latter device in Las Vegas at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which this year featured a raft of new AR products from several manufacturers. Architects are among the market targets for the lightweight Smart Glasses.

• As expected, Canonical will be present once again at the MWC (Mobile World Congress) event this year, where the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system will showcase its latest innovations.

• MWC 2017 is taking place first thing next week, between February 27 and March 2, and we’ve been informed earlier by Canonical that they are currently finalizing arrangements for their presence at the world’s largest gathering for the mobile industry, at stand 3k31 in Hall P3.

• Ubuntu GNOME’s Jeremy Bicha is announcing today that the soon-to-be-released Nautilus 3.24 file manager will be implemented in the Ubuntu 17.10 operating system, whose development will start in late April this year.

• It’s a known fact that Ubuntu is always shipping with an older Nautilus version because Canonical always includes some patches to offer certain functionality to users. And it looks like these patches need to be updated every time a new Nautilus version is out, though some of them have failed to work do to the file manager’s constant refactoring.

• Handset maker Fairphone is teaming up with the community project UBports, which seeks to get Ubuntu Touch on mobile devices. They will be showing off Ubuntu Touch running on the Fairphone 2 during Mobile World Congress, which starts February 27 in Barcelona. While Ubuntu is probably not the first name that comes to mind when you think of mobile devices, the phone in question offers some compelling features.

• “UBports Foundation will be showcasing its work at the Canonical booth, the company behind Ubuntu. Canonical is planning to tell about the latest developments around the convergence of its devices and UBports Foundation will share its mission ‘Ubuntu On Every Device’ with the visitors,” UBports said in a February 8 press release.

• Currently, UBports’ website lists three devices as “fully working as daily drivers:” The OnePlus One, Nexus 5, and the Fairphone 2, with the latter showing all parts as functioning with Ubuntu Touch, save the GPS radio. (Interestingly, the UBports project website for the Fairphone 2 still lists the GSM radio [in addition to the GPS] as a work in progress. However there is a video of two people talking with the handset, so it’s likely the Fairphone 2 project website is out of date.) The website also has instructions for flashing Ubuntu to the Fairphone 2.

• Today, Technologic Systems, Inc. announced that it will be partnering with Canonical to make Ubuntu Core available for their TS-4900 Compute Module. The TS-4900 is a high-performance Computer on Module (CoM) based on the NXP i.MX6 CPU which implements the ARM® CortexTM A9 architecture clocked at 1 GHz.

Devices/Embedded

• When the Raspberry Pi hit the tech scene, it made a huge impact. It wasn’t the first tiny computer, by any means—the Chumby, the PogoPlug, and other hackable systems on chips preceded it—but there hadn’t been anything quite so intentionally open and affordable as the Pi. You didn’t have to hack the Pi, you just put an OS on an SD card, booted, and you were running an open source computer. The computer you were running only used a dozen watts of power, and it wasn’t encased in a bulky plastic body that would end up in the landfill when you decided to upgrade.

• The development team behind the open-source LibreELEC operating system for Raspberry Pi and other embedded devices proudly announced today, February 22, 2017, the release and general availability of LibreELEC 8.0.0.

• Dubbed Krypton, LibreELEC 8.0.0 has been in development since early October last year, during which it received over 200 nightly builds, no less than ten official Alpha versions, and a total of three Beta releases. It’s built around the recently released Kodi 17 “Krypton” open-source media center, so you’ll enjoy all of its cool new features.

• ADL Embedded Solutions unveiled a tiny rugged mini-PC with quad- or dual-core Atom E3800 SoCs, HD video, 2x GbE, wide DC input, and -40 to 70°C temps.

• A couple of months ago, San Diego-based ADL Embedded Solutions unveiled a compact ADLE3800SEC single-board computer, featuring quad- and dual-core Atom E3800 processors and based on a new, 75 x 75mm “Edge-Connect” SBC form-factor. Now, the company has built a rugged, 86 x 81 x 33mm “ADLEPC-1500” mini-PC around it.

• At ELC Europe, Intel MinnowBoard SBC evangelist John Hawley surveyed open hardware trends, and their impact on OS-enabled device and system development.

• When you mention open source hardware, people typically think about community-backed hacker boards. However, the open hardware movement is growing on many fronts, including medical devices, rocketry and satellites, 3D printers, cameras, VR gear, and even laptops and servers. At the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in October, John “Warthog9” Hawley, Intel’s evangelist for the MinnowBoard SBC, surveyed the key open hardware trends he saw in 2016. The full video, “Survey of Open Hardware 2016,” can be seen below.

• The LEDE Community is proud to announce the first stable version of the LEDE 17.01 version series.

Phones

• As I am finishing the new TomiAhonen Almanac 2017 edition, as always when looking at the data, I am noticing patterns. Ones that catch my eye are the exceptions. Where a given trend line does not conform to the overall industry growth curves. The ‘second phone’ fits this pattern. It is ‘bucking the trend’.

• I have been reporting on second phones on this blog and in my books for ages and I have been asking for industry analysts to go measure their count. This is still a murky area for which very little data exists but we can estimate its size reasonably well if we take the total population of phones in use, and subtract the number of mobile phone owners who report having at least one active mobile phone and account. So the current numbers fresh from the TomiAhonen Almanac 2017, tell us that the world has 5.15 Billion unique mobile phone users (owners) – this is a number that increasingly is now also reported by others like Ericsson, Cisco and the GSM Association; and I did the comparison of this data point earlier this week to see how valid it is. (It is very valid).

Tizen

• Ground Effect is a mobile game where you have to ride and drive your hovering aircraft on the sea. There are currently three races: Race, Ghost Race and Just Cruise. The race is the normal race where you have to you have floating cones on the water and you need to go through them to make a checkpoint there, YOU ALSO HAVE NO CHOICE!! You have to go through to make the next pair of cones light up indicating that those are the ones you need to go through. There are different racing ships, a yellow, purple and white; a white and red one; a green goo one on a white background; a flame one on a black background; a red and yellow one; a blue, white and red one; a yellow and black one; an orange and green one; a blue, black and a tiny bit of white; and a black and red one.

Android

• With a 2nd-generation Huawei Watch all but confirmed for MWC, the first images of the Android Wear 2.0 device have leaked (via VentureBeat). The new model drops the shiny, luxury watch look of the original for a “sportier” appearance, while also adding cellular capabilities.

• What is Android’s next destination? Thanks to Qualcomm, it’s going to be used in untethered VR headsets.

• Android is an operating system that’s supposed to power smartphones, tablets, cars, wearables, and other gadgets. But it’s not an OS meant to take over your primary PC. Or is it? Recent reports indicate that Google has some great plans for Android, including turning the OS into a platform that can run on any device, laptops and desktops included. Even Samsung is heading in that direction on its own, as the Galaxy S8 is rumored to come with a special accessory that can be used to connect the smartphone to an external display.

• There are new smartphones hitting the market constantly, but which is the best to pick up when you’re trying to save a buck or two? We’re expecting some great new releases over the coming months, but for now, let’s go over the best affordable Android smartphones you can go pick up today…

• Google’s strategy to keep the Android platform open Source has helped the Operating System dominate the smartphone OS Capital market. The following graphic shows the market share % of various OS used in smartphones world wide.

Free Software/Open Source

• It’s amazing how much of the technology we use every day is dependent on open source software. Developers are continually drawing on free code repositories that have been shared by friendly developers. With them so freely available, it’s no wonder that these open source libraries can be found in all kinds of software the world over, including in technologies that are essential to how we live our lives.

• Entertainment giant Netflix has released a new Web application called Stethoscope designed to tackle security issues with mobile and desktop devices.

• Netflix introduced Stethoscope, an open source web app seeking to help users secure their computers, smartphones, and tablets.

• About a year ago, Dropbox built a bot to respond to suspicious activity, and today that bot is being made available to anyone interested in using the bot or making their own version.

• Named Securitybot, the bot chats with Dropbox employees inside Slack after suspicious activity is detected on their computer, email, or when they’re attempting to access sensitive parts of Dropbox servers. The employee is asked for an explanation of the activity in Slack, then an additional push notification is sent to their mobile device for authentication.

• There is a huge range of file-sharing services out there. From Dropbox to Google, Apple to Microsoft and torrenting software, there is no shortage of ways to share files at home or online — but Google wants to streamline the process.

• Businesses are feeling their way into the Internet of Things, but they’re not moving very quickly, according to new findings from a Red Hat Inc. survey that reveal a sizable gap between interest in IoT and actual deployment of projects.

• The open source software provider released its newest report today, revisiting earlier IoT trends it uncovered in 2015. In the past two years, interest in IoT has grown 12 percent within the enterprise, with 55 percent of respondents tabbing IoT as important to their organizations. Yet fewer than 25 percent of respondents are actively designing, prototyping or coding an IoT project.

• Enterprise IT decision makers have been exploring the potential of Internet of Things technologies, but they are not rushing IoT projects into development and are showing caution in their adoption commitments, according to survey results Red Hat released Wednesday. Of the 215 participants in the company’s survey, “Enterprise IoT in 2017: Steady as she goes,” 55 percent indicated that IoT was important to their organization. However, only a quarter of those organizations actually were writing project code and deploying IoT technologies.

• The software is fully open source under the Apache License 2.0. Source code is available on GitHub.

• At this point, there’s little left to say that’s new about the impact the IoT can have on the enterprise. Although the potential size of the IoT market is often hyped, the opportunities now available in various lines of business are indisputable. IoT enables entities (i.e. consumers, businesses, and governments) to connect to and control IoT devices in areas like energy, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and more.

• Twilio has been making strides to improve its WebRTC capabilities and part of its strategy includes making acquisitions to advance its objective. In September, the cloud-based telephony company purchased the team behind the Kurento Open Source Project and its assets. At the time, the financial terms were not disclosed, but now we know the deal was for $8.5 million in cash.

• In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twilio revealed that it had picked up proprietary WebRTC media processing technologies; select licenses, patents, and trademarks; and some employees who worked on the service, although specifics were not provided.

• I’ve previously written about the fact the Apache Software Foundation offers an exemplar of large-scale open source governance. Even with those supreme qualities, things can still go wrong. Apache offers some of the best protections for open source contributors but its mature rules can be manipulated by skilled politicians and/or determined agendas. What can we learn from their experience?

• In a very small proportion of Apache projects, there have been issues that seem to arise from Apache’s rules and culture being intentionally gamed. They are a non-representative fraction of the work of Apache, but they provide valuable lessons on the way open source communities can be gamed. In this article I mention two such projects: Apache Harmony, an implementation of Java SE created independently of Sun that’s now in the Apache Attic, and Apache OpenOffice, one of the successors to the OpenOffice.org project that closed after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.

• This is the 19th post of a series of blog posts tracking the development and progress of Redox.

• If you would like to learn more, please follow us on Twitter, @redox_os and @jeremy_soller. Also, please support development like this on my Patreon page.

• For those interested in the Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project, a brief status update was posted today.

• Some latest Redox OS development efforts revolve around supporting NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) storage and USB 3.0 / XHCI support. Redox is now running on NVMe SSDs and USB 3.0 is continuing to be worked on with a focus for USB Wireless network devices.

• AR.js is a new JavaScript solution that offers highly efficient augmented reality features to mobile developers. With HoloJS released a few months back, there is a potential that the free AR.js, developed by Jerome Etienne, could work with the Microsoft HoloLens as well.

• Storj Labs, a distributed cloud-storage provider, has created a peer-to-peer decentralized cloud storage solution. It protects your files both on the nodes and in transmission by using blockchain technology and cryptography to encrypt files. As an open-source project, Storj unites a large and growing community of developers who are committed to building tools, applications, and secure by design cloud storage.

• Storj Labs announces new funding and general availability of its crowdsourced distributed storage platform, that lets anyone in the world sell their unused storage capacity, securely as part of an open marketplace.

• Crowdsourcing, that is sourcing resources from many different individuals, is a popular concept for fundraising and for code development. Storj Labs is now bringing the idea of crowdsourcing to storage, enabling individuals to share their storage capacity in a secure encrypted way that makes use of Bitcoin’s blockchain technology.

• CoinScope, a tool that provides aggregated data about bitcoin nodes, has been made open source.

• The code was made publicly available on GitHub on 22nd February. The project, which has been around since 2015, is somewhat akin to Bitnodes, the node data tool operated by startup 21 Inc that seeks to map the bitcoin network by measuring the amount of nodes connected at any given time.

Events

• We are just a month away from Devoxx US and Eclipse Converge, and I’m really excited about what is coming up. Like I often say, there are only so many conferences that one can attend, so it is always hard to figure out which ones are really worthwhile. Although I am certainly a bit biased, since I am involved in its organization, here are three reasons why I think you should plan on being in San Jose the week of March 20.

• The 2017 Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) is off to a fine start even as the rain clears up here in Portland, Ore. I don’t often get to sit in on technical sessions at trade shows because of a host of meetings, but this is the exception. If you get a chance, and Linux or Android is in your bailiwick, then ELC is worth attending. It delves into the technical details for using Linux and application spaces like the Internet of Things (IoT), with more hands-on details than our popular (but higher-end) IoT show, IoT Emerge, which will be returning this fall. IoT Emerge provides a high-level view of IoT applications and issues, whereas ELC is for the hardcore developers.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Since launching the new Firefox Test Pilot program in May 2016, we’ve debuted several experiments with the goal of finding browser features that users love and incorporating them into future versions of Firefox. Today, we’re continuing our efforts toward creating a more modern and better performing Firefox with two new Test Pilot experiments.

SaaS/Back End

• Usually, it would be another couple of months before the open-source OpenStack Foundation cloud released a new version of its cloud software. This time around the OpenStack community released the latest version, Ocata, on a one-time, shorter cycle. This release is focused on improving stability, scalability, and performance of the core compute and networking services.

• The 15th release of the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is now available, with better container services integration, improved cloud federation and an enhanced dashboard.

• The OpenStack Foundation announced on Feb. 22 its 15th release of the OpenStack cloud platform with the debut of Ocata. The latest open-source cloud infrastructure platform release had only four months of development time, rather than the typical six months, though it’s still packed with new features and usability improvements.

• Sometimes, the goal of a statistical model is to predict a value—for example, given a certain size and neighborhood, you can predict the price of a house. Or, given someone’s age, weight and where they live, you can predict his or her likelihood of getting a certain disease.

• Often, the goal is to predict a category—for example, in an upcoming election, for whom are people likely to vote? Taking into account where they live, what level of education they’ve received, their ethnic background and a few other factors, you can often predict for whom people will vote before they know it themselves.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• LLVM 4.0 was supposed to have been released by now, but it’s running late due to open blocker bugs.

• Hans Wennborg commented on the mailing list that while the release should have happened on 21 February, serving as release manager, he hasn’t tagged the release yet due to open blocker bugs.

• Rubicon Communications’ Jim Pingle announced the availability of a new point release to the pfSense 2.3 stable series, which adds over 100 improvements and a bunch of new features.

• Updated to FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p16, the pfSense 2.3.3 maintenance release is here more than seven months after the 2.3.2 update and introduces several new packages, including TFTP Server, LCDproc, cellular, and tinc, a lot of improvements for the OpenVPN and IPsec implementations, as well as numerous stability and security fixes from FreeBSD.

• Dozens of bug fixes are included in pfSense 2.3.3 for WebGUI, graphs and monitoring, gateways and routing, notifications, Dynamic DNS, captive portal, NTP and GPS, DNS, resolver and forwarder, DHCP and DHCPv6 servers, router advertisements, HA and CARP, traffic shaping, firewall, rules, NAT, aliases, states, users, authentication, and privileges.

• Yesterday, I was privy to a private email message discussing a topic I care deeply about. I contacted the author and said “You really need to make this public and give this a wider audience.” His response boiled down to “if I wanted it to get a wider audience, I was welcome to do so myself.” So here’s my first ever guest post, from Jordan K Hubbard, one of the founders of the FreeBSD Project. While this discussion focuses on FreeBSD, it’s applicable to any large open source project.

Public Services/Government

• The administration of Ventspils, Latvia’s sixth largest city, is an avid user of free and open source software. The main benefits: cost and resource optimisation.

• While Munich anguishes over considering returning to slavery, Ventspils relishes the freedom of Free/Libre Open Source software.

• That makes it difficult to attach open source licenses, according to the release, but the initiative “is experimenting with a legal pathway of using contract law in the Defense Open Source Agreement to add commonly used licenses to DoD software projects.”

• Only by removing vendor lock-in and opening up development can the government hope to achieve its target.

Licensing/Legal

• The company also announced that its license management product by the same name was available in open Beta.

• Let’s start with the funding, which was led by Bain Capital Ventures along with an all-star list of participants including Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, former YouTube CTO/co-founder Steve Chen, former Skype CTO/co-founder Jaan Tallinn, Cloudera CTO/co-founder Amr Awadallah and Tinder CMO/co-founder Justin Mateen.

• Open source code can be a nightmare for engineers who are developing software. Fossa, which announced today a seed round of $2.2 million, is launching technology to help companies understand what’s actually in those lines of code, as well as helping them automate open source license compliance and tracking.

Open Access/Content

• Open education is a hot topic in both the K-12 and higher education spaces due to a number of factors, including the desire to make education more affordable.

• The cost of textbooks has added a tremendous financial burden to students around the world. In response, the U.S. Department of Education initiated the #GoOpen movement last year, which helped provide the impetus for schools and universities to consider the use of open educational resources seriously. One of the leaders in this rapidly changing landscape in education is Cable Green, director of Open Education for Creative Commons.

Open Hardware/Modding

• John “Warthog” Hawley, Intel’s evangelist for the MinnowBoard SBC, surveyed key open hardware trends at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe.

• If you’ve always wanted to see in the dark but haven’t been able to score those perfect Soviet-era military surplus night vision goggles, you may be in luck. Now there’s an open-source night vision monocular that you can build to keep tabs on the nighttime goings-on in your yard.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Calling it flawed and narrow and seemingly threatened by its contents, the leading United States business group and US government IP specialists are working to limit the impact of a recent United Nations report that made recommendations for the decades-old problem of ensuring affordable medicines reach people when they are under patent in a way that does not threaten innovation. One step in countering the UN report? Change the discourse in Geneva and elsewhere.

• [...]

• The IP Attaché program places US diplomats in many offices around the world “to advocate US positions on intellectual property matters for the benefit of US stakeholders,” as stated in a program brochure. They not only raise issues with foreign governments and provide training and raise public awareness, but they also help US stakeholders doing business in foreign markets. The main focus is foreign laws, foreign courts, and IP enforcement.

• In the face of the lack of attractiveness of investing in research for new antibiotics for the pharmaceutical industry, and the general lack of funding for research and development for novel antibiotics, a new report commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Health calls for countries to take action. In particular, the report proposes a global union for research and development, a global research fund, and a global launch reward. And access and pricing are key components of the strategy, it says.

• The report [pdf] titled, “Breaking through the Wall – A Call for Concerted Action on Antibiotics Research and Development,” was written by the Boston Consulting Group for the German Federal Ministry of Health.

• As the World Trade Organization intellectual property committee meeting next week is expected to discuss the report of the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines next week, a group of developing countries is convening a side event to engage in discussion with members of the panel. The report included several direct recommendations to WTO members.

• The side event [pdf], organised by Bangladesh, Brazil, India, South Africa, the Secretariat of the UN High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, and the South Centre, is scheduled to take place on 1 March.

Security

• The majority of fingerprint scanners can be found either on the back of a smartphone or on the front, embedded in the home button. But it looks like that status quo is soon about to change. According to a report from The Investor, CrucialTec, a manufacturer of fingerprint modules based in South Korea, will launch its on-screen fingerprint scanning solution that allows you to unlock your device by placing a finger on the screen sometime this year.

• This means that we can expect to see the first smartphones featuring the new fingerprint technology hit the market in 2017. Unfortunately, CrucialTec did not reveal an exact time frame or the smartphone manufacturers it is currently working with.

• A Chinese-speaking attacker is spreading a Mirai variant from a repurposed Windows-based botnet.

• Researchers at Kaspersky Lab published a report today, and said the code was written by an experienced developer who also built in the capability to spread the IoT malware to Linux machines under certain conditions.

• Canonical published today, February 22, 2017, multiple security advisories to inform Ubuntu users about the availability of new kernel updates for their Linux-based operating systems.

• We reported earlier that Canonical published multiple security advisories to inform Ubuntu users about the availability of new kernel updates that patch several flaws discovered recently by various developers.

• We’ve already told you about the issues that are affecting Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users, so check that article to see how you can update your systems is you’re still using the Linux 4.4 LTS kernel. But if you managed to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, which uses Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak)’s Linux 4.8 kernel, then you need to read the following.

• While SHA1 is still much better off than MD5, developers really should think about moving to SHA256 or other crypto hashes with Google now demonstrating the first SHA1 collision.

• Google today announced the first practical technique for generating a SHA1 collision where two files could have different contents yet generate an identical SHA1 hash.

• Cryptographic hash functions like SHA-1 are a cryptographer’s swiss army knife. You’ll find that hashes play a role in browser security, managing code repositories, or even just detecting duplicate files in storage. Hash functions compress large amounts of data into a small message digest. As a cryptographic requirement for wide-spread use, finding two messages that lead to the same digest should be computationally infeasible. Over time however, this requirement can fail due to attacks on the mathematical underpinnings of hash functions or to increases in computational power.

Defence/Aggression

• At the end of last year I attended a large conference of social science academics and researchers in Melbourne. Speaking on a plenary panel in front of hundreds of attendees was the director of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Australia’s primary refugee advocacy organisation. He opened the plenary by describing the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers, decrying the cruelty of Australia’s policy of offshore detention toward refugees, and the need for a more humane approach. He pointed out that funding for refugee services had been cut by a seemingly callous government that was indifferent to the plight of refugees. These are all legitimate — if familiar — points in the debate about this topic. However he then went on to say that all of this was happening whilst we spent billions of dollars on a “fictitious war against terror”.

• Take the term “Islamophobia.” It is anything but phobic to fear that pernicious Islamic ideology — which calls for the death or conversion of “the infidel” and a world without individual rights — will have negative effects on our society and our lives.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A South Korean presidential candidate known for his left-leaning populist views is proposing a government-run operation similar to WikiLeaks, the international organization that publishes classified information on its website.

• Lee Jae-myung, the mayor of Seongnam and a politician with the liberal Minjoo Party of Korea, appeared to be suggesting a new policy, South Korean news service Money Today reported.

• Lee, 52, said South Korean government staffers who leak information to the press should be protected before they are fired.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Scientists have compiled a map detailing wild bee activity across the US, but the picture it paints isn’t great.

• It’s no secret that bees are struggling to stay aloft. The precise reasons are up for debate, but many experts agree that a perfect storm of pressures from pesticide use, the rise of monocrop agriculture, declines in natural habitat, and global warming are squeezing many bee populations out of existence.

• Law enforcement officials began arresting protestors at the Oceti Sakowin campsite in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, just after 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, hours after the deadline Gov. Doug Burgum set for the camp to clear contractors can finish the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Protestors vowed to stay as long as any Standing Rock Sioux tribe elders wanted to stay.

• Several activists and media organizations broadcast Facebook Live feeds from a scene that is shaping up to be a bitter end to months-long resistance to the pipeline. As of 6 p.m. ET, thousands of people watched Facebook Live streams that showed protesters braving the snow, sleet and rain to make one last stand against what they see as desecration of the sacred land of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. While violence appeared minimal, BuzzFeed News reported one man broke his hip while clashing with police on Highway 1806.

• Hundreds of police in riot gear and carrying night sticks arrested several of the final Dakota Access Pipeline protesters remaining on federal land in violation of orders to vacate by the governor. Protesters consider the land to be indigenous property, Standing Rock, under treaty.

• Some of the last remnants of the Dakota Access pipeline protest camp went up in flames Wednesday as opponents of the project set fire to makeshift wooden housing as part of a leaving ceremony ahead of a government deadline to get off the federal land.

• The camp has been home to demonstrators for six months as they tried to thwart construction of the pipeline. Many of the protesters planned to go peacefully, but authorities were prepared to arrest others who said they would defy the deadline in a final show of dissent.

• About 150 people marched arm-in-arm out of the camp, singing and playing drums as they walked down a highway. It was not clear where they were headed. One man carried an American flag hung upside-down.

Finance

• As of 23 February, the following WTO members have accepted the TFA: Hong Kong China, Singapore, the United States, Mauritius, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Botswana, Trinidad and Tobago, the Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, Niger, Belize, Switzerland, Chinese Taipei, China, Liechtenstein, Lao PDR, New Zealand, Togo, Thailand, the European Union (on behalf of its 28 member states), the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Pakistan, Panama, Guyana, Côte d’Ivoire, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Kenya, Myanmar, Norway, Viet Nam, Brunei Darussalam, Ukraine, Zambia, Lesotho, Georgia, Seychelles, Jamaica, Mali, Cambodia, Paraguay, Turkey, Brazil, Macao China, the United Arab Emirates, Samoa, India, the Russian Federation, Montenegro, Albania, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts and Nevis, Madagascar, the Republic of Moldova, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Senegal, Uruguay, Bahrain, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Iceland, Chile, Swaziland, Dominica, Mongolia, Gabon, the Kyrgyz Republic, Canada, Ghana, Mozambique, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Nigeria, Nepal, Rwanda, Oman, Chad and Jordan.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• As Democrats head to Atlanta this weekend to vote on their party’s next chair, the race to lead the Democratic National Committee chair is coming down to its two leading candidates.

• Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.) has the edge over former Labor secretary Tom Perez in The Hill’s new survey of DNC members. But while both men claim they are close to securing commitments from the majority of the 447 voting members, neither candidate is assured victory.

• The Hill has identified the stances of 240 DNC members, either through their private responses to a survey circulated over the past week or from public endorsements.

• Out of those who responded, Ellison leads with 105 supporters to Perez’s 57. The remaining major candidates have less than a dozen supporters each, while more than 50 DNC members remain undecided.

• The vast majority of Americans are opposed to President Donald Trump’s immigration ban, according to new research that significantly contrasts with traditional polling on the subject.

• Research by BrandsEye, an artificial intelligence data analysis firm, showed that 91 percent of Americans were critical of Trump’s recent executive order on immigration in conversations on social media. The findings highlight the limitations of current opinion polls, according to the firm’s CEO, which generally found opinion to be more evenly divided. A Reuters/Ipsos poll at the end of January found that 49 percent of people agreed with the order, while 41 percent disagreed.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Political correctness gone wrong can yield surprisingly worrying results. A Swedish library has landed in hot water for freely offering Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to its readership, while stopping books that question Sweden’s established view of immigration. This has evoked troubling hints at censorship in a country that takes pride in its openness.

• Ezekiel Mutua is the head of Kenya’s film board. He’s really just supposed to rate films and other media. But over the past year, he has undertaken a censorship crusade expanding his mandate into the Internet, music and even forcing the cancellation of a lesbian speed-dating event.

• Brit Awards viewers were left unimpressed during Wednesday’s (22 February) live show, after Skepta’s performance was heavily censored.

• The grime artist was one of several British stars to take to the stage during this year’s ceremony, performing his song ‘Shutdown’, taken from his Mercury Prize-winning album, ‘Konnichiwa’.

• However, despite the fact that Skepta’s performance was aired after the 9pm watershed, the audio was cut several times throughout his time on stage, due to his repeated use of the word “pussy”.

• During the last few years, we have witnessed a very worrying period for free-speech within universities. In 2015 alone we witnessed 30 universities banning newspapers, 25 banning songs, 10 banning clubs or societies, and 19 worryingly banning speakers from events. Not only that, we have witnessed various feminists, human-rights advocates and LGBT-Rights defenders indicted as encroachers of acceptable propriety and consequently indicted as ‘unfit for a speaker platform’.

• Remember Jan Böhmermann? The guy who caused a major diplomatic spat back in April when he read out a satirical poem about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the notoriously thin-skinned Turkish president, on a German comedy show?

• Usually, what happens on Central European state-run TV stays on Central European state-run TV. Not this time. “Erdogate” went massively viral: there were protests in the streets of Istanbul. Techdirt covered it at length. Even a guy named John Oliver did a segment on it.

• Now Erdogate’s back in the news, with a number of media outlets reporting that a German court just permanently enjoined Böhmermann from reciting his own poem. Sucks for him, right? Actually, no. Bad as it is, things are usually a hell of a lot worse for people in his position.

• Unless the Supreme Court decides to weigh in on this long-running SLAPP lawsuit (highly unlikely — and unlikely to be appealed to that level), it looks like it’s finally the end of the line for Dr. Edward Tobinick and his quest to silence a critic of his questionable medical practices.

• The recent incident at Guangdong’s Southern Weekly appears to be galvanizing Chinese from diverse backgrounds. Earlier today, we reported how the second open letter voicing support for the newspaper has been signed not just by journalists but by lawyers, academics, artists, writers, students, migrant workers and others.

• This afternoon another open letter surfaced on Chinese social media, this time attributed to students at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University. The letter, which includes the names of 18 signers identified as students of the university, bears the title: “Today, We Are Not Without Choices: An Independent Call from Sun Yat-sen University Students on the Southern Weekly Incident.”

• Inspired by President Trump, Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, the press frequently invokes the specter of ominous reality control as exercised by the bad guys in George Orwell’s “1984.”

• No surprise, book sales are through the roof even if many journalists may not have actually read the classic they cite. But, forget Trump: if you want truly odious propaganda in action, which makes Conway look like a Franciscan Sister, check out Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.

• A recent Vice Media dissection of the situation is part of Friday night’s 5th season premiere of Vice’s newsmagazine show on HBO. It’s a two-part episode, featuring “Assad’s Syria,” which is fronted by correspondent Isobel Yeung, and “Cost of Climate Change,” hosted by Vice founder Shane Smith.

• It’s all very strong, especially Yeung’s effort that entailed dangerous reporting throughout Syria. For sure, there has been great reporting in the country. But this goes well beyond much of the sporadic American media accounts, which have tended to focus on the battle over Aleppo and the nation’s unceasing humanitarian disaster resulting from a civil war with atrocities on all sides.

• A group of prominent music groups including the RIAA has asked the Copyright Office to help solve the “broken” and “ineffective” DMCA law. The current takedown provision results in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, they say, arguing that automated piracy filters are the way forward.

• Google, being the search giant that it is, has been banging the drum for some time about the silly way the DMCA has been abused by those that wield it like a cudgel. Here at Techdirt, we too have described the many ways that the well-intentioned DMCA and the way its implemented by service providers has deviated from its intended purpose. Still, the vast majority of our stories discuss deliberate attempts by human beings to silence critics and competition using the takedown process. Google, on the other hand, has been far more focused on statistics for DMCA takedown notices that show wanton disregard for what it was supposed to be used for entirely. That makes sense of course, as the abuse of the takedown process is a burden on the search company. In that first link, for instance, Google noted that more than half the takedown notices it was receiving in 2009 were mere attempts by one business targeting a competitor, while over a third of the notices contained nothing in the way of a valid copyright dispute.

• In comments submitted to a U.S. Copyright Office consultation, Google has given the DMCA a vote of support, despite widespread abuse. Noting that the law allows for innovation and agreements with content creators, Google says that 99.95% of URLs it was asked to take down last month didn’t even exist in its search indexes.

• The Copyright Office’s study concerning Section 512 of the DMCA (the notice-and-takedown/safe harbors part of the law) had its second comment period end this week — which is why you’re seeing stories about how the RIAA is suddenly talking about piracy filters and notice-and-staydown. Via our think tank arm, the Copia Institute we filed our own comments, pointing out the already problematic First Amendment issues with the way the current notice-and-takedown system works. Remember, there’s a very high standard set by the Supreme Court before you can take down expressive content.

• Don’t be fooled by the cool and calm demeanor, Rachel Arenas is tough as nails and seems raring to pursue her new job as the chair of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB).

• At first glance, Arenas, a former representative of Pangasinan, seems more than primed to face the intrigues that come with the territory.

• [...]

• A long-term objective is to “revisit the law” governing the MTRCB. Specifically, she is looking into the different bills that have been filed in Congress, that pertain to the board’s mandate. “Our Technical Working Group is in the process of reviewing the bills and drafting our comments,” she explained.

Privacy/Surveillance

• There aren’t many rights extended to anyone in the “Constitution-free zones” we like to call “borders.” You may have rights 100 miles inland, but the government’s needs and wants outweigh citizens’ and non-citizens’ rights wherever immigration officers roam. According to the Supreme Court, warrants are required for cell phone searches. But neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court rulings apply within 100 miles of the border, where the government’s needs and wants are considered more important than the protections they can avail themselves of everywhere else in the country.

• Senator Ron Wyden is looking to change that. Rather than cede more ground to the rights-swallowing concept of “national security,” Wyden is looking to change the laws governing the “Constitution-free zones.”

• House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, along with his Senatorial counterpart Ron Wyden, is tackling something he promised to act on after he was finished excoriating the leaky Office of Personnel Management for ruining the lives of millions of Americans: Stingray devices.

• The National Security Agency has denied it indiscriminately spied on spectators, athletes and others who attended the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002.

• The denial came in a document filed last week in a U.S. District Court in Utah, where a group of Salt Lake City residents filed a complaint in 2015 alleging the U.S. government engaged “in widespread, indiscriminate communications surveillance, interception, and analysis, without warrants and without probable cause” during the Games that took place just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

• Starting last summer, we noted that the Department of Homeland Security had quietly tested the waters to expand the information it requested of travelers entering the United States, to “optionally” include social media handles. By December it was officially in place. And then, just days into the new administration, the idea was floated to expand this program even further to demand passwords to social media accounts.

• Sorry about that. But more and more it seems that developers are looking at ways to use AI to find you that special someone. 420 Friends, which launched this week is a dating app that specialises in finding you that special someone.

• Those who thought the domestic surveillance Ed Snowden exposed was perfectly acceptable and lawful are finding it much harder to stomach with Trump in charge. The Lawfare blog, which routinely hosts articles supportive of government surveillance activities, has taken on a new tone over the past few months. The lesson being learned: if a power can only be trusted in certain people’s hands, then it really can’t be trusted in anyone’s. This belated realization is better than none, but one wonders if the drastic change in tone would have followed an election that put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

• That’s not to say the first month of Trump’s presidency has borne any resemblance to a “peaceful transition of power.” The federal government isn’t just leaking. It’s hemorrhaging. Underneath the recent ouster of Mike Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, is something disturbing.

• What’s disturbing isn’t the surveillance — although in “normal” circumstances it might be. Flynn was dumped because recorded phone calls captured him discussing sanctions with Russian officials. This domestic surveillance isn’t unheard of. The fact that this information — including the content of the calls — was leaked to the public is more notable.

• A classified government document opens with “an odd sequence of events relating to parapsychology has occurred within the last month” and concluded with an alarming question about psychics nuking cities so that they became lost in time and space. If this sounds like a plot out of science fiction, it is – but it’s also a NSA memo from 1977.

• The first “event” raised by the NSA note is a CIA report which mentioned KGB research into parapsychology. According to this, the KGB used hobbyists and non-governmental researchers to talk to western scientists. This allowed the KGB to collect useful information without putting themselves into a position to accidentally leak confidential information to westerners. According to the NSA note, this tactic yielded “high grade western scientific data.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Yee made his first appearance at an immigration court in Chicago on 30 Jan. The blogger claimed that the American authorities backtracked on their promise to release him from the American jail after his first hearing. His next hearing is set for 7 March.

• Yee landed in Chicago O-Hare Airport on 16 Dec with a tourist visa and was detained by the US authorities when they discovered text messages between him and a US-based Singaporean activist, Melissa Chen, about his bid for political asylum in America.

• Customary landowner Anna Sipona from Malmal Village in west Pomio said the SABL is a strange concept to the people of Pomio that promotes human rights abuse.

• Representing the silent majority in the affected villages in west Pomio, Sipona said the SABL issue is not just about land and logging but about the human rights of women and children.

• Justice Ambeng Kandakasi highlighted this recently when handing down a decision on a case involving a “whistle blower” who was sacked by his superiors.

• A man who filmed himself burning the Quran has become the first person to be charged under Denmark’s blasphemy law in 46 years. The 42-year-old filmed himself burning a copy of Islam’s holy book in his back yard in December 2015. He then posted the video on the anti-Islamic Facebook group, “Yes to freedom – no to Islam” along with the words, “Consider your neighbour: it stinks when it burns.”

• Perhaps no entity generates more fake news than the FBI’s counterterrorism unit. Several times a year, a press release is issued announcing the bust of a so-called terrorist. Almost invariably, the “terrorist” has been handcrafted through the relentless intercession of undercover FBI agents.

• [...]

• Undercover agents began working with/on Hester shortly after this arrest. Seizing on his anti-government social media posts [good lord], the agents told Hester they could put him in touch with someone with direct terrorist connections. This “direct connection” was just another FBI agent. It was the FBI that suggested acquiring weapons. And it was the FBI who chose to take Hester seriously, despite his nonexistent terrorist group (“the Lion Guard”) sporting a name that had been pulled from a cartoon his children watched.

• It was also an FBI agent who suggested that even thinking about planning a terrorist attack was an irrevocable act — and that entertaining second thoughts about committing acts of violence would be rewarded with acts of violence.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• 21 states have passed laws hamstringing the rights of local communities when it comes to improving broadband infrastructure. Usually dressed up as breathless concern about the taxpayer — these bills have one purpose: protect the telecom mono/duopoly status quo — and the campaign contributions it represents — from the will of the people. Countless towns and cities have built their own next-generation networks, usually because nobody else would. But these bills, usually ghost written by ISPs for politicians with ALEC’s help, either ban locals from making this decision for themselves, or saddle these operations with enough restrictions to make them untenable.

DRM

• The news site Mashable has apparently decided that you, the general public, are simply too dumb to actually own the stuff you thought you bought because you might just injure yourself. We’ve written about so-called “right to repair” laws and why they’re so important. There are a variety of issues, but the most basic one here is about property rights. If you buy something, it’s supposed to be yours. It doesn’t remain the property of whoever first made it. And they shouldn’t then be able to deny you the ability to tinker with, modify, or repair what you bought. However, Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff (last seen here being completely clueless about the importance of anonymity online because he, personally, never could see a reason why someone might want to speak truth to power without revealing who they are), has decided that because you might be too dumb to properly repair stuff, the entire “right to repair” concept “is a dumb idea.”

• The article can basically be summed up as “I have a friend, and her iPhone wasn’t repaired properly, so no one should be able to repair your iPhone but Apple.” Really.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Perhaps the Chinese government feels that it has the domestic population sufficiently under control now that it can move on to tightening up the rules for foreign visitors.

• Much of the content, including arguments from key players, is redacted.

• This week has been dubbed fair use week by a whole bunch of organizations (mostly universities and libraries) as a chance to celebrate the usefulness and wonder that is fair use in protecting free speech, enabling creativity and inspiring innovation. As we’ve said many times in the past, fair use is an incredibly important concept — if often misunderstood — so it’s good to see these organizations working together to better educate the public on why fair use is so key.

• However, not everyone is so enthralled with fair use. The MPAA and RIAA are apparently so frightened by fair use that they, and some of its friends, have been posting weirdly uninformed screeds against fair use over the past few days. Some are more silly than others (such as one that tries to claim that the MPAA has never been against fair use, ignoring that the MPAA’s long-time boss Jack Valenti once declared — totally incorrectly — that fair use wasn’t in the law), but let’s focus on the one that comes straight from a former RIAA top exec.

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