● 03.11.17

● Links 11/3/2017: PiCluster 1.6, GXml 0.14, No More Fedora Alpha Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 5:17 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The man who runs Munich’s central IT says there is no practical reason for the city to write off millions of euros and years of work to ditch its Linux-based OS for Windows.

• The city authority is widely expected to swap Linux for Windows, due to a desire to drop open-source software at the council among Munich’s ruling SPD-CSU coalition.

• Last month, the general council backed a proposal that the administration should investigate how long it will take and how much it will cost to build a Windows 10 client. Once the details are known, the council will vote on whether Windows should replace LiMux, a custom version of the Ubuntu OS that is used by more than 15,000 staff across the council. The changeover would take place by 2021.

• But now the man in charge of Munich’s central IT provider, IT@M, has said there is no technical reason to switch back to Windows, describing the decision to prepare to return as being in some ways “surprising”.

Desktop

• In my last blog post, I have spoken of the completion of the Purism coreboot port for the Librem 13 v1 and mentioned that I had some good news about the Intel Management Engine disablement efforts (to go further than our existing quarantine) and to “stay tuned” for more information. Since then I got a little side-tracked with some more work on coreboot (more below), but now it’s time to share with you the good news!

• Windows, however, remains the winner in terms of pure convenience. It’s simple, familiar, and guaranteed to be compatible with virtually all software; for busy companies, that could well be more valuable in the long run.

• With all the major breeds of computers, whether laptops, desktops, and mini PCs, being Windows-centric, it’s hard to find good hardware that has an eternal love for Linux distributions. But we have seen some good machines like the Mint Box Pro.

• The minds behind the Linux-based Endless OS have also created a bunch of box computers, that come pre-installed with Endless OS. And I am sure, even if you don’t buy these machines, they’ll change your view about Linux machines regarding visual appearance. One of them, the Endless Mission One, has a wooden-finished body that makes it soothing AF in the first look itself.

Kernel Space

• Hart is a medical software technology company that improves the ways in which people inside and outside of the industry access and engage with health data.

• Founded in 2012, the startup develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner in a range of digital formats. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department, and other systems.

• Open source took center stage at the final keynote address of the 2017 Google Cloud Next conference on Friday, where tech leaders presented on the importance of openness in tech and business.

• The focus on open source was highlighted in an address from Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, who claimed that organizations that “don’t harvest the shared innovation” of open source “will fail.” Open is the new economic norm in tech and business, Zemlin said, as “all of us are smarter than any one of us.”

• The Linux Foundation discusses its ONAP Project, which is focused on consolidating efforts around open source orchestration and management.

• On this week’s “NFV/SDN Reality Check,” we speak with The Linux Foundation to discuss its recent move to consolidate its open source enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform and Open Orchestrator Project into the newly formed Open Network Automation Platform Project.

• Stephan Müller has announced the newest version of his patches for implementing a new /dev/random implementation he calls the Linux Random Number Generator, or LRNG for short.

• The LRNG design tries to ensure sufficient entropy during boot time as well as in virtual environments and when using SSDs or device mapper targets.

Graphics Stack

• Yesterday, on the launch-day for the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (GP102) graphics card, I posted GTX 1080 Ti OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks while for those more interested in GPU compute performance, here are some preliminary OpenCL compute results.

• Complementing yesterday’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Linux review with OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks and this morning’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti OpenCL benchmarks, here is a range of more standalone benchmarks for this GP102 graphics card.

• It seems Feral Interactive are continuing to help development of the Vulkan ‘radv’ AMD driver in Mesa, as they have pushed another patch.

• Previously, Feral developer Marc Di Luzio had a patch accepted which made it into the Mesa 17 release, but this time around it’s Alex Smith’s turn and it’s not his first.

Applications

• Once a computer has more than a few hundred music tracks stored on it, the enjoyment of that music is greatly enhanced by making sure each track is properly tagged according to artist, song title, album name, genre, composer, and other assorted bits of information. In my case, I’ve found over the past few years that tag management is actually quite a lot of work; errors or poorly designed tag text seems to creep into the process at every point, and so I have become a reluctant user of tag editing software.

• Calibre developer Kovid Goyal released today, March 10, 2017, a new maintenance update to the open-source and cross-platform ebook library management software for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

• Calibre 2.81 comes two weeks after the launch of Calibre 2.80, and it finally looks like it’s more of a feature release than a bugfix one. There are quite a bunch of goodies implemented in this version, starting with support for the latest firmware for Kobo e-readers, and the ability to download Amazon metadata from multiple sources.

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 134.

• I am pleased to announce v1.6 of PiCluster. In this release there are a few usability bugs fixed and a new feature that allows you to change the host of a running container. Having the ability to easily change where a container is running is a standard and crucial feature to expect from a container management platform. I am glad that it is finally here and let’s explore how it works!

• We recently introduced you to a command line music app, MOC media player for Linux, that comes with an equalizer and a mixer.

• Today we bring you another command line app called Tizonia, which can play locally stored music files and also allow you to listen to your favorite music streaming platforms.

• Tizonia is an Open Source command-line application for streaming music on your Linux desktop.

• Screenlets is basically a widgets engine which run small applications on the desktop called widgets, it is written in Python and licensed under GPL. It was designed to run on Unix-like operating systems by ‘Rico Pfaus’, ‘Helder Fraga’ and ‘Natan Yellin’, targeting specifically to run on X11-based compositing windows manager like compiz.

• Simple Weather Indicator is simple and elegant indicator designed to get weather information right on the panel. It is developed using Python languages and uses an in-house open source weather API called Eris to get the current weather condition of the user’s location.

• SafeEyes is a useful application designed to give your eyes a little break from your computer screen (this is the way how not to get eye strain, ‘asthenopia’), while also asking you to do some eyes exercise which can be useful. It is free and open source developed by Gobinath, it is an alternative to EyeLeo which is only available for Windows.

• While the last stable mtPaint version was released back in 2011, there have been quite a few development releases since then, with the last one dating to June, 2016. I couldn’t find a PPA with the latest mtPaint 3.50 development releases, so I created one to make it easy to install in Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

• Mapollage is a Java tool that can be used to put your geotagged photos on the map by creating an KML file that can be used with Google Earth.

Proprietary

• Inevitably it didn’t get as much attention as the new camera and panels did when they were announced last week, but in Blackmagic’s live stream unveiling Grant Petty also talked briefly about Resolve for Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• This is one developer deserving of support! They constantly released free development builds, now it’s free with the release on Steam for a few days and the game is really fun and works really well on Linux too.

• Valve pushed a new stable update of the Steam Client for Linux, Mac, and Windows users, as well as on its Debian-based SteamOS gaming operating system, adding, as expected, numerous improvements and some new exciting features.

• The March 9 Steam Client Update is awaiting you next time you fire up your Steam desktop client, no matter the operating system you’re currently using, and it will add a new option in the setting that lets you disable group announcement and event notifications, and removes the sing-on notifications for in-game/online friends.

• The Valve team behind Steam confirmed it’s working on a new look for the gaming platform in a video interview published Feb. 20. The news first broke when SteamDB shared screenshots on Twitter.

• Valve has released an updated SteamVR beta for Linux VR gamers ahead of the weekend.

• Fixes in this SteamVR build include an issue that could cause a system hang and an issue where the image would appear to shift around.

• For those looking to enjoy a new WWII shooter game, Day of Infamy by New World Interactive is leaving Steam’s Early Access later this month.

• Day of Infamy is developed by New World Interactive, the same studio responsible for the Insurgency game that’s also had Linux support. Day of Infamy is powered by the Source Engine, so the Linux support is in good shape. The SteamOS/Linux system requirements list a GeForce 8600GT/9800GT as being supported or Radeon HD 2600/3600 graphics. Their recommended GPU is any card with 2GB of more of vRAM. So assuming those system requirements are accurate, the game is pretty lax on modern hardware.

• A reader asked me to reach out to Stardock about their Linux plans, specifically for Galactic Civilizations III as they said they would port it with Vulkan. I didn’t get an answer on that specifically, but Vulkan has put them in a better position to port.

• When asked about Linux support on reddit, specifically if they’re confident they can do a day-1 Linux release….

• Hyperspace Dogfights [Official Site] sounds really fun and it’s starting to look really good too. The developer sent across the new teaser trailer along with some more information on their air brawling and a roguelike mix.

• Now this has me excited! In MachiaVillain you are the villian, specifically you’re building an evil mansion to trap innocent victims.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• There isn’t much theme development going on now a days for latest Ubuntu version like it used to in past, we had so many themes to choose from for our beloved desktop but it is quite unfortunate. Hopefully creators will jump in eyecandy pool once again and give us those great themes taste we used to have for our Linux desktops. But there are still some people who are giving their free time to Linux eyecandy and we must appreciate them.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Okular has a amazing table select mode where you select an area and Okular will auto detect rows and columns on it (you can fine-tune it afterwards) and then you can directly copy&paste to a spreadsheet

• The application is based on Python 3 and Qt 5, and while it is aimed at Qt-based desktops (like KDE Plasma or LXQt), it works pretty well on GTK-based desktops as well (either as a tray or as an AppIndicator).

• Finally I am writing about my experience in Season of KDE, 2017 which came to an end a few days ago. A winter learning new things, learning what really matters is not just writing code but writing good code. I would like to thank GCompris and KDE for giving me such an opportunity to be a part of the community and to try to bring happiness to people and kids using it around the world.

• While the recent revelations are not all that surprising, they did stir the pot a bit and made people at least a tad more aware of the problems of personal privacy in the modern age.

• As part of our efforts to improve out of box experience for touch screens I’m pleased to announce that Plasma 5.10 will provide integration for virtual keyboard.

• This post is to provide some clarification on a behavioral change we had to introduce with Qt 5.6.2 to the QtLocation‘s OpenStreetMap plug-in. The related change seems to have generated some confusion, so here’s the full story.

• A new bug fix release of the open-source, non-linear video editor Kdenlive is now available to download. Kdenlive 16.12.3 is the last release in the 16.12.x series. It brings a handful of important improvements to the table. Numerous causes of crashes have been fixed, as has the ‘overnight render bug‘ that affected rendering jobs that eked past midnight.

• That little red ball was a KDE widget that could be added to the desktop. A quick flick of the moue is all it took to send the ball ricochetting off the bounds of your desktop workspace, boinging and banging, from top to bottom, side to side, over and over, until it slowly expended all its energy and jogged to a slow halt.

• [...]

• At the time this widget was around desktop widgets were the “in thing”.

• Every one seemed to be offering them: Google Desktop; Yahoo Widgets, Windows Gadgets, Apple’s Dashboard and gDesk lets, aDesklets, Screenlets and KDE Plasma widgets on Linux.

• Intrepid journalist Joey Sneddon over at OMG! Ubuntu! recently pointed out to us that Plasma 5 is currently not doing so well when it comes to serving an important user demographic – bored cats!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I’ve used different services for my personal agenda and I always valued if they could well integrate into my Fedora Workstation. Some did it well, some at least provided a desktop app, some only had a web client. That’s fine for many people, but not for me. Call me old-school, but I still prefer using desktop applications and especially those who look and behave natively.

• I bought a Dell XPS13 as my new portable workstation for Linux and GNOME. This is the model 9360 that is currently available as in a Developer Edition with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (project Sputnik for those who follow). It satisifies all I was looking for in a laptop: lightweigh, small 13″, 16 GB of RAM (at least), core i7 CPU (this is a Kaby Lake) and must run Linux well.

• [...]

• I am happy with it. GNOME is beautiful in HiDPI, and it is all smooth.

• No great changes over DOM4 and previous implementations was made. So you can sleep, because your application will run, may be, just with few changes.

• A new more powerful, less footprint and good performance implementation of DOM4 has arrived. It is prefixed Gom. This new implementation will be used for all my projects now and on. It provides better implementation of namespaces and avoids using libxml2 tree internally.

• It’s a rainy afternoon in Portland so I’m cozy with an espresso watching the rain. After a short hacking session you can now export your application as a Flatpak bundle quickly and easily. Just select the workbench menu in the top right corner of the workbench, followed by Flatpak, and then Export as Bundle.

• Oomox is a tool that allows generating color variations of the popular Numix GTK2 / GTK3 theme, as well as icons to match them.

• The application comes with a large number of built-in presets that can be further customized, and it supports GNOME, Unity, Xfce4 and Openbox.

• The minimum GTK3 version required to use it is 3.18 (so it supports Ubuntu 16.04 and newer). The themes might work with older GTK3 versions, but you may encounter issues.

• One thing we are striving for in 3.24 is to make it as simple as possible for newcomers to get their development environment setup. Hopefully in time so that our next round of Outreachy and GSoC interns have an easier time getting started.

• A common installation issue we’ve seen is that people have flatpak, but not flatpak-builder. Without it, Builder can’t do builds inside of the target mount namespace with all your proper dependencies. So now Builder will detect this and install it for you if you like.

Distributions

• Linux has a bad rap as a daily driver – the programs aren’t written to run on Linux, it’s tricky to install stuff, and so on. But it might surprise people who think along those lines to learn that plenty of the distributions out there are actually quite simple to use. Here’s our latest appreciation of the desktop Linux landscape.

Reviews

• This is a short overview to Trisquel 8 Alpha Version operating system. Trisquel is a user-friendly desktop GNU/Linux distro derived from Ubuntu as 100% free software. Trisquel is certified officially by FSF along with gNewSense and Parabola. This 8th version comes with MATE as its user interface, with complete audio/video support in VLC, and a full suite of LibreOffice. Despite being alpha, it has 50000+ packages already in its repository worth to wait for the final. I hope this article can encourage anyone to use 100% free distro and spread it. Enjoy!

New Releases

• The developer of the Voyager Live Linux distribution announced today the official release and general availability of Voyager 16.04.2 LTS, a maintenance update to the long-term supported 16.04 series of the operating system.

Arch Family

• Manjaro Linux 17.0 has been released, with a nice variety of desktops available. In addition to the official Xfce and KDE versions, the Community versions with Gnome, Cinnamon, LXQt and i3 desktops have also been released.

• As is usual with a “rolling release” distribution such as Manjaro, the new ISO installation images are actually a roll-up of all the security updates, bug fixes, patches and other updates which have been made since the last release.

• The lead developer of Manjaro ARM, dodgejcr has announced that he would be ending development of Manjaro ARM. According to the forum post, he did not make this decision lightly.

Red Hat Family

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is announcing today the immediate availability of new stable kernel security updates for the CloudLinux 7 and CloudLinux 6 operating system series.

• The newly updated CloudLinux 7, CloudLinux 6 and Hybrid kernel is here to fix the recently discovered and patched CVE-2017-2636 vulnerability that was affecting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime and Grid) 2 operating systems.

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora, Fedora, Fedora, Soltanto Fedora, Fedora tra noi, here’s a song for you. But the reason we are here is not to tickle the nostalgia glands. Instead, we want to spend a little more time making Fedora extra useful, beautiful and functional, also known in the professional circles as pimping.

• We’ve done this before time and time again, including the recent stint with Fedora 24, and the installation & review of Fedora 25, and now we will do some of this magic. I would like to show you a few more tips and tricks that can enhance your Fedora experience. This article should also work nicely with my recently published Gnome accessibility guide. Fedora me.

• Last month we reported on Fedora 27 looking to drop alpha releases and now that change has been approved.

• Fedora 27 will be the distribution’s first release not doing any alpha milestones. Instead, the distribution is trying to focus on better daily quality of Fedora Rawhide / F27, similar to Ubuntu not doing alpha/beta releases and openSUSE Leap also deciding to go a similar route.

Debian Family

• Thankfully, the SATA drive and CMOS battery have survived with apparently no ill effects, since the box has been moved around through a couple of house changes with no special storage arrangements – it’s basically been “unpowered” sitting in a corner.

Derivatives

• The developers of the Debian-based Elive Linux distro announced today the availability of yet another Beta milestone towards the operating system’s major 3.0 release, Elive 2.8.6 Beta.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Do you feel like tweaking your Ubuntu desktop? I got you covered. Sometimes you need to mix things up on your desktop to remove the old and boring and get things looking quite fresh, new and exciting. Ubuntu allows you to install new themes and apply them in order to alt your desktops appearance and outlook. All you need is to install the Unity Tweak tool to get going. Join me let us take a look at 20 themes to transform your desktop to give it a different and appealing feel.

• Canonical’s Timo Aaltonen is back with some great news for Ubuntu Linux gamers, as he’s now working on bringing the latest X.Org Server 1.19.2 display server and Mesa 17.0.1 3D Graphics Library to the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) release.

• In his latest blog post, the developer reveals the fact that the long-anticipated X.Org 1.19 display server is now ready for public testing on a special PPA (Personal Package Archive) for Ubuntu 17.04, along with Mesa 17.0.1, which appears to rest in the proposed repository of the forthcoming distribution at the moment of writing.

• Some big Ubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” updates will be coming down the pipe next week.

• I got drawn into a discussion today and swiftly realized there is no right answer. But there should be!

• The question is deceptively simple: Which order should graphics toolkits probe for backends?

• My contention is that the answer is: “it depends”.

• Suppose that I’m running a traditional X11 based desktop and am testing with a new technology (obviously Mir, but the same applies to Wayland) running as a window on top of it. (I.e. Mir-on-X or Wayland-on-X)

Devices/Embedded

• The Raspberry Pi Zero has some new competition. A Chinese company is running a crowdfunding campaign for a tiny computer-on-a-module called the Lichee Pi Zero that’s priced as low as $6.

• The Reflex CES Arria 10 SoC SoM runs Linux on the ARM/FPGA Arria 10 SoC, and is available with SBC and PCIe-style carrier boards.

• The Arria 10 SoC SoM has been listed on the Intel FPGA site — the new name for Altera — since October, when iWave’s similarly Arria 10 equipped Arria 10 SoC Module appeared. Enclustra’s Arria 10-based Mercury+ AA1 module was unveiled in January. Reflex CES recently began shipping the Debian Linux driven Arria 10 SoC SoM, along with two optional carrier boards.

• The MSC SM2S-AL SMARC 2.0 “short” COM offers an Apollo Lake SoC, triple display and industrial temp support, and an optional, Linux-driven starter kit.

• After months of trying, I’ve finally got my hands on a Nintendo NES Classic Mini. It’s everything I wish retropie was: simple, reliable, plug-and-play gaming. I didn’t have a NES at the time, so the games are all mostly new to me (although I’m familiar with things like Super Mario Brothers).

• An Indiegogo campaign is pitching a COM-like, 44.6 × 25.5mm “LicheePi Zero” SBC for $6 or $8 with WiFi that runs Linux on a 1.2GHz, Cortex-A7 Allwinner V3.

• A Chinese development team led by a “Wu Caesar” has gone to Indiegogo to sell a LicheePi Zero SBC that goes head to head with the Raspberry Pi Zero and recent, WiFi-enabled, $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W. The LicheePi Zero similarly offers a single-core SoC with WiFi and minimalist I/O, but for only $8 for the WiFi version or $6 without.

• OS TinkerOS (Debian)

• We’ve suspected it all along, and now it’s been confirmed: the Nintendo Switch runs on Linux. More specifically, the Linux Free BSD Kernel.

• Last year, it was rumored that Nintendo might use a version of Android for its Switch operating system, since it’s powered by an ARM processor, a popular CPU architecture used by smartphones.

• [...]

• UPDATE: As some readers have pointed out, Switch’s Free BSD kernel is more akin to Unix than to Linux, but the two share lots of similarities.

Phones

Android

• Looking for a new smartphone? There are dozens upon dozens of great options on the market today, but finding the best of the best can be a bit difficult. We’ve seen some great launches through the year and more should be coming soon too, so let’s take a look at the best Android smartphones you can buy as of March 2017.

• FilmStruck, Turner’s new SVOD service for film aficionados, has expanded access to Android TV, an operating system that works with certain Sony Bravia TVs, the Xiaomi Mi Box and Nvidia Shield, among other devices.

• As if it wasn’t obvious enough that computing is going increasingly mobile, a recent report from StatCounter says that Android is now just behind Windows in terms of the most popular operating systems for getting online around the globe. According to the analytics firm, 38.6% of global internet usage came from Windows in February 2017, while 37.4% came from Android.

• That the most popular mobile OS is gaining on the most popular desktop OS isn’t news at this point, but as this chart from Statista shows, the rate at which Android is gaining ground is notable. Just a year ago, StatCounter had Windows up by more than 20 percentage points. Five years ago, it was ahead by 80 percentage points.

Free Software/Open Source

• GAPID is short for the Graphics API Debugger and is a new open-source project out of Google.

• Adding to the list of available open-source debuggers is GAPID. GAPID allows inspecting, tweaking, and replaying calls to OpenGL ES and Vulkan. GAPID is primarily geared for debugging GLES/VLK Android applications but the user-interface runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The tracer is able to run on those host operating systems as well as Android.

• There is an adage, not quite yet old, suggesting that compute is free but storage is not. Perhaps a more accurate and, as far as public clouds are concerned, apt adaptation of this saying might be that computing and storage are free, and so are inbound networking within a region, but moving data across regions in a public cloud is brutally expensive, and it is even more costly spanning regions.

• Our digital lives are powered by programming philosophers who choose to develop their code out in the open.

• All programs begin with lines of instruction. When ready for execution these lines of instruction are converted to a binary format that the computer can execute. Open source programs are programs where the human readable code is accessible to anyone. This philosophy of openness and freedom has allowed these projects to impact the lives of everyone.

• The Linux kernel is the core of all Android devices, and nearly a third of all Internet traffic rides on just one openly developed project, Netflix. (Read the excellent article in Time magazine about this.) How does the choice of using open source software as part of a project plan affect the amount and type of risk to a project within an organization?

• Speaking to UploadVR at MWC, Alvin Graylin, President of Vive in China, said that HTC had been working on a “similar system” for full body tracking in its China research lab, and would be open sourcing it for all developers to implement into their experiences for free.

• The internet is evolving and there is a lot of excitement because no one is quite sure what it will look like in the next five years. However one thing that is sure about its evolution is that it will keep getting more social.

• Open Source software is currently being leveraged on by developers across the globe not just for blogging and publishing but also for designing feature rich and secure internal process systems and enterprise resource tools.

• Social commerce is a one of this new concepts which is relatively new especially in the Africa web space hence the need to train start-ups on how to tap into and fully explore this new innovation.

• The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation that covers the criminal justice system in the United States, has developed a free and open-source tool that allows reporters and editors to track websites of interest and receive notifications via Slack or email when newsworthy changes happen.

• The next time you play Uncharted 4 on PlayStation 4, The Legend of Zelda on Nintendo Switch, or tell Alexa to turn the lights off, bear in mind it’s all running on open source.

• We’re not doing a good job of keeping the Internet and related technologies as open and egalitarian as they used to be, allowing a dangerous oligopoly to reemerge. How can we reverse the trend? And by we, I actually mean you.

• The Senlin clustering service delivers a one-two punch, enabling developer productivity while proving VMware’s commitment to improving open source technology.

Events

• Switching from one technology to another is always going to be hard, and, despite the popularity of Node.js, it does come with its own set of complexities, and the advantages are not always apparent to management, says Trevor Livingston, principal architect at HomeAway, speaking at Node.js Interactive.

• As I announced in mailing lists a few days ago, the Debian SunCamp (DSC2017) is happening again this May.

• SunCamp different to most other Debian events. Instead of a busy schedule of talks, SunCamp focuses on the hacking and socialising aspect, without making it just a Debian party/vacation.

• It’s almost time: LibrePlanet 2017 kicks off in two weeks, on March 25! Will you join free software hackers, lawyers, activists, students, educators, librarians, and community organizers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to explore the roots of software freedom?

• The call for papers for foss-north 2017 ends on Sunday. That means that you only have three days to…

• I recently gave a short talk at the UCLA Linux User Group about Systemd Timers and how they can be used as an alternative to Cron jobs.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Days after the Firefox 52 release, Google has officially released Chrome 57.0.

• Chrome 57 comes with CSS Grid Layout support, an improved “Add to Home” screen for Android Chrome, new Media Session API, and a variety of other JavaScript / HTML5 / CSS changes.

Mozilla

• Firefox 53 includes two brand new ‘compact themes’, designed to take up fewer pixels on the screen and give web content more room to show.

• Firefox 52 was released today and it includes two major changes: support for WebAssembly and the removal of support for NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API) plugins like Silverlight, Java, and others, with the exception of Flash.

• Just when you thought that web browsers were becoming boring, Mozilla announced that Firefox 52 now supports WebAssembly, which brings greatly enhanced speeds to web apps. Learn more about how this expands the capabilities of the web for everyone.

Databases

• The open source Couchbase Mobile platform comprises: the Couchbase Lite NoSQL embedded database for mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices; the Couchbase Server that stores and manages data in the cloud; and the Couchbase Sync Gateway that synchronizes data between the two.

CMS

• After a lot of discussion among the Drupal core committers and developers, and studying projects like Symfony, we believe that the advantages of Drupal’s minor upgrade model (e.g. from Drupal 8.2 to Drupal 8.3) can be translated to major upgrades (e.g. from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9). We see a way to keep innovating while providing a smooth upgrade path and learning curve from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Funding

BSD

• We recently took one of our test systems and tried an experiment: could we boot FreeBSD 11 from a NVMe SSD using ZFS root file system using AMD Ryzen. At STH we have many FreeBSD users and developers so when there is a new hardware class out, we tend to try it in FreeBSD and sometimes popular FreeBSD appliance OSes such as pfSense and FreeNAS. You can see an example with our Knights Landing Xeon Phi x200 system booting FreeBSD OSes. In our recent testing with AMD Ryzen we found major installers with the latest CentOS 7.3 and also had issues with Ubuntu crashing using current LTS image kernels. We wanted to see how FreeBSD would fare given it normally lags in terms of hardware support.

Licensing/Legal

• As we can read in recent news, VMware has become a gold member of the Linux foundation. That causes – to say the least – very mixed feelings to me.

• One thing to keep in mind: The Linux Foundation is an industry association, it exists to act in the joint interest of it’s paying members. It is not a charity, and it does not act for the public good. I know and respect that, while some people sometimes appear to be confused about its function.

• However, allowing an entity like VMware to join, despite their many years long disrespect for the most basic principles of the FOSS Community (such as: Following the GPL and its copyleft principle), really is hard to understand and accept.

• I wouldn’t have any issue if VMware would (prior to joining LF) have said: Ok, we had some bad policies in the past, but now we fully comply with the license of the Linux kernel, and we release all derivative/collective works in source code. This would be a positive spin: Acknowledge past issues, resolve the issues, become clean and then publicly underlining your support of Linux by (among other things) joining the Linux Foundation. I’m not one to hold grudges against people who accept their past mistakes, fix the presence and then move on. But no, they haven’t fixed any issues.

• They are having one of the worst track records in terms of intentional GPL compliance issues for many years, showing outright disrespect for Linux, the GPL and ultimately the rights of the Linux developers, not resolving those issues and at the same time joining the Linux Foundation? What kind of message sends that?

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• It is still a long way to a new generation of “open scientists”, German open data researcher Christian Heise found out in his just-published PhD thesis. Heise not only investigated drivers and barriers for what he expects to be an evolution from open access to open science by theory and a survey of over 1100 scientists. He tried the concept open science the hard way, opening up the writing of his thesis paper on the net.

Open Access/Content

• As the cost of college has skyrocketed, students and parents could soon get relief on expensive textbooks under the Textbook Cost Savings Act of 2017 that would provide funding to develop free open source learning materials.

• “The state is moving rapidly towards free textbooks online,” said the bill’s sponsor Sen. Jim Rosapepe, D-Prince George’s, in an interview. “If the bill passes it will be state policy that we want to move in that direction as much as possible.”

• This is indeed an up-to-the-minute text [PDF], dated Mar 7, 2017. It’s written by Googler/MIT prof Eric Lehman, MIT/Akamai scientist F Thomson Leighton and MIT AI researcher Albert R Meyer, as a companion to their Mathematics for Computer Science open course.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Open Source Toolkit features articles and online projects describing hardware and software that can be used in a research and/or science education setting across different fields, from basic to applied research. The Channel Editors aim to showcase how Open Source tools can lead to innovation, democratisation and increased reproducibility.

Standards/Consortia

• The Khronos Group has done a Friday evening update to the Vulkan 1.0 API specification.

• Vulkan 1.0.43 includes a number of GitHub and internal-Khronos issues around document clarifications and other minor behavior differences.

Leftovers

• But the NEA will also be remembered as the agency that created arts councils in every state and most cities; that spread the professionalization of arts organizations throughout America; and that generated important new fields, such as art therapy for war victims; creative place making and the rebirth of cities; research into economics, mental health, inequality and aging, among many; and whose leaders persuaded private funders of the value of artists and the arts.

• Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) was hit with an outage early Tuesday morning that prevented users from accessing a host of applications and services including Xbox, Skype and Outlook. Many Microsoft customers in Western Europe and the Eastern U.S. were greeted with a message that their account wasn’t active when they tried to log on.

• Users complaining at website DownDector.com about Outlook.com reached in the thousands, reported Reuters. Meanwhile the hashtag #hotmail was trending on Twitter in the U.K. Microsoft confirmed the problem, saying in an Xbox Live message it was working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Microsoft Account Services, which also includes Office 365, the Windows Store and a host of other apps came back up around 9:30 a.m. EST Tuesday at which time Microsoft alerted users.

• Microsoft has made a bad habit of introducing ads here and there throughout Windows, and now people are starting to notice them showing up in another spot: inside File Explorer.

• People have reported seeing notifications to sign up for OneDrive — Microsoft’s cloud storage service — at the top of the Quick Access screen that comes up when you open a new File Explorer window.

Health/Nutrition

• Philip Hammond has promised the NHS will receive £425m in government investment over the next three years – but the way these funds are allocated could in fact lead to further NHS privatisation, campaigners have warned.

• The interviewee pointed out that while “biosimilar” and “generic” products differ, they are close enough in their underlying characteristics. Other than that, he did not challenge her characterization of them as a “rip-off”. For a listener who paid close attention to the interview, the take-away was clear– biosimilar and generic products are undesirable. It seems to this Kat that the IP community should be concerned about the level of understanding of IP embodied in this brief interview exchange. Remember that Bloomberg is a large, business-oriented media empire. As such, one might expect an appreciation of the complexity of the subject, especially from the perspective of the various stakeholders involved.

Security

• Apple has already released a statement that said the vulnerabilities have already been fixed. Google too has responded to the issue. Linux just released a statement assuring the users that its being open source is safer for most people. The idea is that open source software communities continue to work on securing systems.

• To protect mobile devices from being tracked as they move through Wi-Fi-rich environments, there’s a technique known as MAC address randomization. This replaces the number that uniquely identifies a device’s wireless hardware with randomly generated values.

• In theory, this prevents scumbags from tracking devices from network to network, and by extension the individuals using them, because the devices in question call out to these nearby networks using different hardware identifiers.

• In this case, the devices were used to form a botnet and attack other systems, conducting a denial of service attack that made Twitter, Etsy, and other popular sites unavailable to users. This was inconvenient to users, and likely cost revenue for Dyn customers. It was almost certainly costly for Dyn.

• Verifone circled back post-publication with the following update to their statement: “According to the forensic information to-date, the cyber attempt was limited to controllers at approximately two dozen gas stations, and occurred over a short time frame. We believe that no other merchants were targeted and the integrity of our networks and merchants’ payment terminals remain secure and fully operational.”

• At least 21 percent of all public websites are using insecure SHA-1 certificates – past the migration deadline and after Google researchers demonstrated a real-world collision attack. And this is without taking into account private or closed networks that also might be using the hash.

• One company is adding to its bug bounty program efforts by offering its professional services to the open source community for free. HackerOne’s platform, known as HackerOne Community Edition, will help open source software teams create a comprehensive approach to vulnerability management, including a bug bounty program.

• Thanks to a laundry list of lazy companies, everything from your Barbie doll to your tea kettle is now hackable. Worse, these devices are now being quickly incorporated into some of the largest botnets ever built, resulting in some of the most devastating DDoS attacks the internet has ever seen. In short: thanks to “internet of things” companies that prioritized profits over consumer privacy and the safety of the internet, we’re now facing a security and privacy dumpster fire that many experts believe will, sooner or later, result in mass human fatalities.

• Hoping to, you know, help prevent that, the folks at Consumer Reports this week unveiled a new open source digital consumer-protection standard that safeguards consumers’ security and privacy in the internet-of-broken things era. According to the non-profit’s explanation of the new standard, it’s working with privacy software firm Disconnect, non-profit privacy research firm Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), and nonprofit software security-testing organization Cyber Independent Testing Lab (CITL) on the new effort, which it acknowledges is early and requires public and expert assistance.

• ESET researchers warn that augments mobile applications plus open source platforms like Google’s open could be a recipe for clever malware to come, in a recent security post.

• Currently, Google only requires developers to make a onetime payment of $25 and within 24 hours they can have an application in the Google Play Store compared to Apple which requires a yearly license which costs more than $100 and a vetting period of up to two weeks.

• Google employees recently completed Operation Rosehub, a grass roots effort that patches a set of serious Java vulnerabilities in thousands of open source projects.

• The SHA-1 hash algorithm has been known for at least a decade to be weak; while no generated hash collisions had been reported, it was assumed that this would happen before too long. On February 23, Google announced that it had succeeded at this task. While the technique used is computationally expensive, this event has clarified what most developers have known for some time: it is time to move away from SHA-1. While the migration has essentially been completed in some areas (SSL certificates, for example), there are still important places where it is heavily used, including at the core of the Git source-code management system. Unsurprisingly, the long-simmering discussion in the Git community on moving away from SHA-1 is now at a full boil.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Journalist Jason Leopold (currently in residence at Buzzfeed) has been given the nickname “FOIA terrorist” for his numerous requests and almost as numerous FOIA lawsuits. The government has taken notice of Leopold’s activity. The Pentagon once offered Leopold a stack of documents in exchange for him leaving it alone. (He declined.) The FBI played keepaway with James Comey talking points, telling Leopold they were all exempt from disclosure. This obviously wasn’t true, as these same talking points had been handed over to Mike Masnick by the agency months prior to the bogus denial it gave Leopold.

• Now, it’s the NSA using Leopold’s “FOIA terrorist” nickname against him. (This is weird because eederal employees gave Leopold the “terrorist” nickname. He didn’t come up with it himself.) In Leopold’s ongoing FOIA lawsuit against the agency, the NSA has asked for an “Open America” stay. What this would do is push Leopold’s request back in line with the others the NSA has received. The agency argues that Leopold’s decision to file a lawsuit over the agency’s lack of a timely response shouldn’t give his request precedence over FOIA requests that arrived before his did.

• The agency points out its FOIA workload has increased significantly since “a former NSA contractor began a series of unprecedented, unauthorized, and unlawful disclosures” in 2013. The agency still processes thousands of FOIA requests a year, but it’s unable to keep up with the increase in FOIA traffic.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Instead of flushing it to the sea — as the L.A. Basin has done with studied efficiency ever since the catastrophic floods of the 1930s — cities are trying to figure out how to capture and use runoff to replenish local groundwater supplies.

Finance

• The post did not acknowledge any wrongdoing or improper behavior on the part of the Uber or its employees for developing and using the Greyball program.

• But, again, simply boosting your numbers is one thing. Promoting women to the next level is another. Treating women like equal humans, including them in important meetings and events, and letting them establish new rules is another. Not talking down to them is another. Appropriately responding to complaints — while understanding that a complaint is not “complaining” — is another. Not assuming they’re “less technical” is another. Not assuming they’re doing less work because they also have a family, is another.

• An Uber driver appeared in court on Tuesday after he was charged with raping a female passenger in one of the city’s Oceanfront neighborhoods over the weekend.

• Bail is a $14 billion-a-year business with its own trade association—the American Bail Coalition or ABC—made up of national bail-insurance companies who underwrite the bonds and take a cut. This group lobbies hard for the policies that make it money and it shows. Before ABC began lobbying, in 1990, commercial, for-profit bail accounted for just 23 percent of pretrial releases, while release on recognizance accounted for 40 percent. Today, only 23 percent of those let go before trial are released on recognizance, while 49 percent must purchase commercial bail.

• Chocolate prices could rise if the UK does not secure a trade deal post-Brexit, according to Mars’ top boss.

• Fiona Dawson, global president for Mars, said the absence of a deal with EU member states would see tariffs of up to 30% for the industry.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• His new superpower: reading the teleprompter.

Censorship/Free Speech

• There has been a great deal of conversation recently about the news media and its ability to do both its job and rebuild trust amongst the public. Trust is the key word there, as that’s really all a news organization has to sell its readers. If there is no trust, deserved or otherwise, then the news has no product to sell the public.

• Techdirt has just written about how a report from the European Parliament’s “rapporteur” — basically, the subject lead — on planned reforms to EU copyright law recommends dumping one of the most stupid ideas in the draft proposals, a link or “snippets” tax. Although that’s good news, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. After all, the idea has already been tried in Germany and Spain, and failed dismally both times. The damage that a link tax would cause to the smooth functioning of the Web is so obvious that the only people refusing to acknowledge that fact are the publishers who have been demanding this new “right” as part of their copyright maximalism. But alongside the ridiculous snippets tax, there’s another extremely dangerous idea that the European Commission has slipped into its copyright reform.

• Deputy Justice Minister, John Jeffery, has re-iterated that the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill is not intended to be used as an instrument of censorship.

• He has been addressing a panel discussion of Non-Governmental Organisations from across the Eastern Cape in East London. The panel provided a platform for the public to express their views on the Bill.

• For a while now, Techdirt has been writing about the decision by some sites to stop allowing readers to make comments on articles. We’ve pointed out that’s pretty regrettable, especially when it’s couched in insulting terms of “valuing conversations” or building “better relationships.” Dropping comments is a lazy response to a real and challenging problem: how to encourage readers to engage in meaningful ways.

• Logan is a womanizing, problem-drinking, pro-bone-oh curbside-ampu-surgeon. Mutate this with a soft spot for defenseless loners and a rageful disposition toward oppressive organizations, and the result is a perfect role model for any Generation X-er.

• Just three days after the presidential inauguration, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced in a terse email that it was cancelling a three-day conference, the “Climate and Health Summit,” that was to take place in Atlanta from February 14-16. With the “translation of science to practice” as the planned theme, scientists were to present their most recent research on the physical and mental health effects of climate change, and conferees were to explore ways to improve interagency cooperation and stakeholder engagement. Though no official reason was given, it quickly became evident that the CDC had engaged in self-censorship. President Trump has alleged that global warming is a notion invented by the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing noncompetitive and, more recently, that climate change is a hoax. This “strategic retreat,” as one scheduled speaker characterized it, was the result of a fear-based decision to shut down the event preemptively, before the new administration had a chance to shut it down for them, absent any foreknowledge or hint that they would.

• The National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), has said it has become imperative to review and improve censorship criteria and classification in Nigeria.

• The Director General of agency, Mrs. Patricia Bala made the disclosure on Wednesday while speaking with newsmen during the international conference on film censorship held at Crest Hotel in Jos, Plateau State.

• As student journalists, the Foghorn is vehemently opposed to any kind of censorship of student publications, especially censorship from powers we are responsible for holding accountable. But further, the Foghorn is opposed to the actions student journalists at the Santa Clara took next.

• Taiwan’s universities are reeling from accusations that they are indulging in widespread academic censorship to secure lucrative fee-paying exchange students from the Chinese mainland.

• This week the Ministry of Education launched an emergency probe of pledges allegedly signed by universities with their Chinese counterparts to uphold China’s official view on Taiwan’s status and avoid teaching sensitive content like Taiwanese independence.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A dangerous bill in California would make it easy for the government to search the cell phones and online accounts of students and teachers. A.B. 165 rips away crucial protections for the more than 6-million Californians who work at and attend our public schools. Under the proposed law, anyone acting “for or on the behalf of” a public school—whether that’s the police or school officials—could search through student, teacher, and possibly even parent digital data without a court issuing a warrant or any other outside oversight.

• So the CIA has tools to snoop on you via your TV and your Echo is testifying in a murder case and yet people are still buying connected devices with microphones in and why are they doing that the world is on fire surely this is terrible?

• You’re right that the world is terrible, but this isn’t really a contributing factor to it. There’s a few reasons why. The first is that there’s really not any indication that the CIA and MI5 ever turned this into an actual deployable exploit. The development reports[1] describe a project that still didn’t know what would happen to their exploit over firmware updates and a “fake off” mode that left a lit LED which wouldn’t be there if the TV were actually off, so there’s a potential for failed updates and people noticing that there’s something wrong. It’s certainly possible that development continued and it was turned into a polished and usable exploit, but it really just comes across as a bunch of nerds wanting to show off a neat demo.

• Earlier this year, we wrote about growing concerns that President Trump’s executive order stripping those who are not US citizens of certain rights under the Privacy Act could have major consequences for transatlantic data flows. Now two leading civil liberties groups — the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) — have sent a joint letter to the EU’s Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, and other leading members of the European Commission and Parliament, urging the EU to re-examine the Privacy Shield agreement, which regulates transatlantic data flows, as well as the US-EU umbrella agreement, a data protection framework for EU-US law enforcement cooperation. The joint letter calls on European politicians to take into account what the ACLU and HRW delicately term “changed circumstances” — essentially, the arrival of Donald Trump and his new agenda.

• The Internet has been key to providing a voice for those who have been ignored by the traditional media streams. While those groups have been able to enjoy free expression and an exchange of ideas. Yet around the world, governments are trying to limit individuals access to the web.

• On World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released a report denouncing the readiness with which leading internet companies submit to the demands of authoritarian regimes in order to profit.

• RSF is also concerned about the many cases of online surveillance of journalists and calls for the creation of binding international regulatory mechanisms.

• The trade, plied by companies with expertise in cyber-surveillance, is lucrative but dubious.

• This might be laziness. Or ineptness. Or just another indicator of how much citizens’ rights mean to their public servants. Whatever it is, it’s definitely not good policing. A drug bust that fortuitously rolled into the lap of the Colorado Springs Police Department has now rolled back out of it, thanks to a Colorado federal court. (via Brad Heath)

• Here’s the story. The PD suspected someone known as “S.B.” to be engaged in drug trafficking. S.B. owned a white BMW that was apparently used during drug deals. Detectives obtained a warrant to place a GPS locator on the car and track its location for 60 days.

• Three weeks after the tracking device was placed on the vehicle, detectives noticed the car’s rims had been removed and a “For Sale” sign placed in its window. A couple of weeks after that, the car’s location data shifted dramatically. It was no longer spending a great deal of time parked in S.B.’s driveway. It was spending a majority of its time at a new address — one with no association to S.B. and the location data previously obtained.

• As a real estate mogul and reality TV star — well before he alleged on Twitter that former President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones during the campaign — Trump expressed regular concern that his phone lines were not secure, according to three former Trump Organization executives.

• At times he talked about possible listening devices and worried that he was being monitored, two executives said. In other times, he was doing the monitoring. One of the executives said Trump occasionally taped his own phone conversations using an old-school tape recorder, although Trump once denied this.

• Former NSA senior analyst J. Kirk Wiebe, a 32-year veteran of the agency who received the NSA’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award, criticized the deep state enabled by the Bush and Obama administrations. “Over a decade and a half ago, the NSA Four (Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, Tom Drake, and myself), together with House Intelligence Committee Senior Staffer Diane Roark pleaded for a surveillance system that protected the innocent, in order to prevent the destruction of individual privacy guaranteed us all by the U.S. Constitution. Nobody listened. No one cared. No one took corrective action,” he wrote. “Today, we see unfolding before our very eyes a constitutional crisis of monumental proportions, one that threatens the very foundations of our nation’s system of governance. People hidden in the bowels of the United States Intelligence Community are leaking classified information taken from the private phone calls of innocent people—people who have not been accused of committing any crime—to the press for purely political reasons, reasons that include an attempt to take down our duly elected administration.” Had the concerns of whistleblowers from high ranking positions and Edward Snowden been addressed, the U.S. wouldn’t be faced with an impending crisis because the intelligence community lacks appropriate oversight.

• Probably not the best idea, but it’s something some legislators and private companies have been looking to do for years: hack back. Now there’s very, very, very nascent federal legislation in the works that would give hacking victims a chance to jab a stick in the hornet’s nest or work on their attribution theories or whatever.

• Republicans have long supported the sweeping surveillance capabilities of the NSA and have insisted they’re vitally important to national security. But with their man Trump caught up in multiple scandals that may involve intelligence services targeting his communications, privacy is suddenly a top priority.

• In 2013, a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden revealed US surveillance programs that involved the massive and warrantless gathering of Americans’ electronic communications. Two of the programs, called Upstream and Prism, are allowed under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That section expires at year’s end, and President Donald Trump’s administration, like his predecessor’s administration, wants the law renewed so those snooping programs can continue.

• That said, even as the administration seeks renewal of the programs, Congress and the public have been left in the dark regarding questions surrounding how many Americans’ electronic communications have been ensnared under the programs. Congress won’t be told in a classified setting either, despite repeated requests.

• With the legislation that effectively legalizes the National Security Agency mass surveillance programs Prism and Upstream set to expire at the end of 2017, Congress is once again asking for numbers on how many Americans have been surveilled. Just as it has for the past six years, though, the NSA isn’t playing ball.

• Two days after researchers exposed a National Security Agency-tied hacking group that operated in secret for more than a decade, CIA hackers convened an online discussion aimed at preventing the same kind of unwelcome attention. The thread, according to a document WikiLeaks published Tuesday, was titled “What did Equation do wrong, and how can we avoid doing the same?”

• The police cannot force you to tell them the passcode for your phone. Forcing you to turn over or type in your passcode violates the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination—the privilege that allows people to “plead the Fifth” to avoid handing the government evidence it could use against them. And if you have a phone that’s encrypted by default (which we hope you do), forcing you to type in your passcode to unlock the device means forcing you to decrypt your phone, too. That forced translation—of unintelligible information to intelligible—also violates the Fifth Amendment.

• Unlike most of the public, my initial reaction to Wikileaks release of documents detailing CIA’s cyber-spying was not one of shock at CIA’s vast hacking capabilities. As a former intelligence officer, I was not surprised by the breadth of CIA’s capabilities, what shocked me, was the depth of CIA’s counterespionage incompetence. I was aware of existing gaps in CIA’s Operations Security (OPSEC), but I had never dreamt CIA security was so broken we would witness a counterespionage failure of this scope, one that places Edward Snowden in the Junior Varsity league of intelligence leaks, and renders Bradley Manning almost inconsequential by comparison. But on March 7, 2017, the unimaginable happened as Wikileaks began publishing details of CIA’s cyber-spying capabilities, a stunning acquisition by Julian Assange.

• [...]

• It would be misleading to say I did not see the potential for a counterespionage disaster of biblical proportions brewing at CIA, in part because as a CIA Whistleblower, I have unintentionally become part of CIA’s OPSEC failure narrative. I have witnessed CIA treat OPSEC with a disdain that is remarkable for an agency considered paranoid about OPSEC by many in the Intelligence Community, who are on the outside looking in. I was once one of those people looking in at CIA from the outside, as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), from 2006 until I transferred to CIA in the summer of 2009. DIA taught me OPSEC. From my initial training in DIA’s “Tomorrow’s Intelligence Professionals” to my deployment to Iraq with The Joint Special Operations Command, I learned good OPSEC could mean the difference between life and death. I also witnessed what I perceived to be the paranoia of CIA analysts, who refused to share intelligence with DIA and others in military intelligence. I mistakenly thought the behavior of CIA analysts was indicative of CIA’s strong OPSEC culture. I naively assumed CIA’s OPSEC posture was much stronger than what we had at DIA and in the military community. At the time, I had no idea CIA took a laxer approach to OPSEC than DIA. I did not understand that the pushback I had experienced during my deployment to Iraq was simply bureaucratic game playing by CIA analysts who cared more about preserving their diminishing position in the intelligence community than seriously countering terrorism.

• Should we be worried about the CIA’s cyber hacks? How did the spy agency manage to get into our cellphones? On Tech 24 this week, we tell you everything you need to know about “Vault 7″, the code name for the 9,000 secret documents WikiLeaks has just made public. Plus, we test the K’able Key by the innovative French startup PKparis. It’s a flash drive that will boost your iPhone and iPad.

• Assange said he had been contacted by a malware researcher who believed that his Apple Macintosh computer was infected by the QuarkMatter malware described in the CIA documents (it’s an implant that infects the EFI partition of a Mac’s storage device). Based on the documents leaked by Assange and WikiLeaks, that implant was still largely a work in progress. “It lools like not only is [the CIA arsenal] being spread around contractors and former American computer hackers for hire, but now maybe around the black market or being used by these American hackers who sometimes, you know cross both sides of the fence—they’re called grey hats—for attacking others,” Assange said.

• Assange also noted that while WikiLeaks was not yet publishing the tools themselves, he and WikiLeaks would share the exploits with the targeted companies in order to help them protect against attacks. Assange then accused the CIA of covering up the leak and causing damage to those companies with what he claimed was “what appears to be the largest arsenal of Trojans and viruses in the world, that attacks most of the systems that journalists, people in government, politicians, CEOs, and average people use.”

• On Tuesday, Wikileaks published a batch of internal CIA documents to its site that exposed the breadth and scope of the Central Intelligence Agency’s spying and hacking operations. The documents suggest that the CIA has at its disposal a sophisticated set of tools for spying on people using their smartphones, computers, and even their smart TVs manufactured by companies like Samsung. The documents are still being combed through by researchers, but the result of the leak is already leading to a growing chorus of Americans who believe the CIA serves no useful purpose and deserves to be dismantled immediately.

• In one revelation that may especially trouble the tech world if confirmed, WikiLeaks said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services have managed to compromise both Apple and Android smartphones, allowing their officers to bypass the encryption on popular services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate smartphones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

• Governments should be safeguarding the digital privacy and security of their citizens, but these alleged actions by the CIA do just the opposite. Weaponising everyday products such as TVs and smartphones – and failing to disclose vulnerabilities to manufacturers – is dangerous and short-sighted. It puts people around the world at risk of attack from hackers and repressive regimes, and this leak itself shows just how likely such tools are to spread beyond the organisation that developed them.

• How much have private companies compromised themselves and their customers? Based on the files, some service providers and equipment manufacturers seem to know a certain amount about what is going on.

• If you were to send me an email at x@met.police.uk it looks as it if would be sent in with no level of encryption, which is surprising as most organisations these days use TLS, and send email over HTTPS by default,

• A new bill coming before Senate aims to completely dismantle the FCC’s ability to enact data security or online privacy protections for consumers under the powers of the Congressional Review Act. Senate Joint Resolution (S.J.Res 34) was introduced by Arizona Senator Jeff Flake and cosponsored by 23 other Senators. Its goal is to remove all the hard-earned net neutrality regulations gained to protect your internet history from advertisers and and worse. Specifically, the FCC had been able to prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from spying on your internet history, and selling what they gathered, without express permission.

• The CIA has deliberately “inserted”, whatever that means in detail, its own coders into all major US tech manufacturers. (This is not unlike the US accuses China of doing – with Huawei routers being a prime example.)

• More to the point, the CIA is alleged to have turned every Windows PC into a potential remote spy tool, with the ability to activate backdoors on demand, including via Windows Update. (This has – or should have – diplomatic implications: any government that doesn’t like a foreign power having remote switches into its administration should have migrated from Windows when this ability was even suspected.)

• The Department of Justice filed a motion in Washington State federal court on Friday to dismiss its indictment against a child porn site. It wasn’t for lack of evidence; it was because the FBI didn’t want to disclose details of a hacking tool to the defense as part of discovery. Evidence in United States v. Jay Michaud hinged at least in part on information federal investigators had gathered by exploiting a vulnerability in the Tor anonymity network.

Civil Rights/Policing

• He has jailed tens of thousands of people, shuttered more than 150 media companies and called a referendum in April to enlarge his powers. Yet when local authorities in Germany, for security reasons, barred two Turkish ministers from campaigning on his behalf among Turks living in Germany, Mr. Erdogan exploded, accusing Germany of Nazi practices and knowing nothing about democracy.

• It should be noted that the above information only represents a SMALL fraction of the evidence demonstrating CAIR is a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood entity.

• … children, known as talibe, are forced to beg by teachers, called marabouts, who beat them if they fail to bring in some 2,000 CFA francs ($3) per day, according to rights groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW)

• If you did well in that environment upholding those values, I probably don’t want to work with you.

• An old anti-Communist leftist once told me the only good thing about Stalin was that he really scared the big Western powers, and one could say the same about Trump: The good thing about him is that he really scares liberals.

• After World War II, Western powers responded to the Soviet threat by focusing on their own shortcomings, which led them to develop the welfare state. Will today’s left-liberals be able to do something similar?

• He taught me that a person is born free and that it is up to him or her to live in freedom or die trying to achieve it. Slavery has no place in his life except when it comes to serving God, the one and only. Now, he lives in freedom even though he is behind bars with his colleagues Abdullah al-Hamid, Mohammad al-Qahtani and many other activists imprisoned purely for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

• When Gabriella Gillespie was six her father killed her mother; when she was 13 he took her and her sisters to his native Yemen and sold them as child brides.

• Her 17-year-old sister Issy killed herself on her wedding night rather than marry the man in his 60s to whom she had been promised.

• Across the whole of England, 2,332 attendances for female genital mutilation were recorded during the last quarter of 2016. These attendances included 1,268 women or girls whose cases were newly recorded.

• Inspector Allen Davis’s comments came as the NHS revealed there were nearly 5,500 new FGM cases reported to hospitals, clinics and GPs in 2016.

• No one has ever been convicted of carrying out female genital mutilation in the UK despite it being illegal in the country since 1985.

• Since 1985, when FGM became illegal in the UK, there has only been one attempt at a prosecution and not a single person has been convicted.

• [...]

• Davis added that the recorded number of cases were just the “tip of the iceberg”.

• We’ve been writing about the sheer insanity of asset forfeiture for many, many years. If you happen to have missed it, civil asset forfeiture is the process by which the government can just take your stuff by arguing that it must have been the proceeds of criminal activity. They literally file a lawsuit against your stuff, not you. And, here’s the real kicker: in most places, they never have to file any lawsuits about the actual crime, let alone get a conviction. They just get to take your stuff, say that it must have been the proceeds of a crime, and unless you go through the insanely expensive and burdensome process of demanding it back, they effectively get to walk off with your stuff. Law enforcement has literally referred to the process as going shopping. Most people who understand what’s going on recognize that it’s just state-sponsored theft.

• On a Saturday morning in July 2011, Nigel Lang, then aged 44, was at home in Sheffield with his partner and their 2-year-old son when there was a knock at the door.

• He opened it to find a man and two women standing there, one of whom asked if he lived at the address. When he said he did, the three strangers pushed past him and one of the women, who identified herself as a police officer, told Lang and his partner he was going to be arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

• He knew he was innocent but was powerless to prevent what happened next, as over the coming days, weeks, months, and years, through absolutely no fault of his own, events took place that would cost him his health and his career, and put serious strain on his relationships with those he loved the most.

• Lang described the arrest, and what followed, as “the most horrendous and horrific time of my life.”

• What makes Lang’s ordeal all the more shocking, BuzzFeed News can now reveal, is that his wrongful arrest, and all the consequences of it, stemmed from what police called a “typing error”.

• [...]

• But it would take years, and drawn-out legal processes, to get answers about why this had happened to him, to force police to admit their mistake, and even longer to begin to get his and his family’s lives back on track.

• Police paid Lang £60,000 in compensation last autumn after settling out of court, two years after they finally said sorry and removed the wrongful arrest from his record.

• A teenage blogger awaiting a Chicago immigration judge’s ruling on his asylum request to stay in the United States said Friday that he’s afraid of returning home to Singapore, where he was jailed after posting scathing blog posts about the government.

• A teenage blogger awaiting a Chicago immigration judge’s ruling on his asylum request to stay in the United States said Friday that he’s afraid of returning home to Singapore, where he was jailed after posting scathing blog posts about the government.

• Taser, the company, gets a lot of cop love because of its titular product, which is deployed (too) frequently to subdue arrestees. It probably doesn’t get as much love for its body cameras, especially since it’s already wired one line to sync footage with Taser deployment.

• [...]

• What it won’t do is prevent cops from “fixing it in post.” As long as officers have access to uploaded/stored footage, there’s always a chance the recording will be deleted, altered, or made useless. True accountability can’t be achieved with a holster add-on. It has to start at the bottom and be enforced by the top.

• How much do “Blue Lives” matter? More than non-Blue Lives, apparently, given the national legislative enthusiasm for generating stupid, easily-abused, redundant legislation.

• Louisiana — one of the few states where legislators have agreed to extend greater protections to an incredibly-protected group — has already seen its newly-minted “Blue Lives Matter” law abused by law enforcement. It’s been abused so badly that even law enforcement’s best friend — local prosecutors — has refused to pursue charges under the statute.

• But most state legislatures have yet to entertain this ridiculous idea to its illogical conclusion. As Julia Craven reports for Huffington Post, fourteen states have floated “Blue Lives Matter” laws — a total of 32 legislative trial balloons.

• The good news is most of these have gone nowhere. The data compiled by Craven shows a majority of these have died shortly after introduction — most likely due to them being both (a) bad laws and (b) redundant. All 50 states already have some sort of sentencing enhancement on the books for perpetrators of violent acts against law enforcement officers. Trying to twist legislation meant to protect underprivileged groups to include some of the most privileged members of our society hasn’t found much support beyond police unions and others similarly self-interested.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The U.S. Federal Communications Commission should reverse course and keep the net neutrality rules it passed just two years ago, several Democratic senators said Wednesday.

• Back in 2013, a couple of Internet pranksters who were fed up with Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) dismal customer service released a parody video and website that asked, “What Can We [TWC] do Worse?” In response, the company launched an aggressive takedown campaign against the parodists. But thanks to the New York Attorney General (AG) Eric Schneiderman, we now know exactly what Time Warner Cable did “do worse.”

• There are about 100 AT&T lobbyists currently making the rounds in Washington, trying to convince regulators and the press that the deal will provide an incredible boon to consumers. The folks who actually try to protect consumers aren’t so sure, arguing that a larger combined company could make it harder than ever for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete with AT&T (and its own streaming service, DirecTV Now). And that’s before you even get to the fact that AT&T’s using usage caps to give its own services an unfair leg up in the market (aka zero rating).

• President Donald Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission chairman, Ajit Pai, has wasted no time in setting an agenda that could wind down the open internet as we know it.

• In a presentation at the Google Cloud Next conference today, Google Chief Internet Evangelist and “father of the internet” Vint Cerf didn’t mention Trump or Pai by name — but he clearly addressed what he sees as the dangers of such an agenda, and defended the institution of the open internet.

• “The guys who started Google didn’t have to get permission to start the service, they just put it up,” says Cerf. “It’s permissionless innovation.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Last month, we discussed the stark reversal by the Chinese government in the matter of many trademarks for President Trump’s businesses. In that post, we tried to tackle the question of whether China’s sudden approval for a “Trump” trademark on construction services was a violation of the emoluments clause. How you answer this question tends to fall along political fault lines, which is unfortunate. Notably, those that did not find a violation by the trademark approval often suggested that this was one trademark that had been in dispute for years, long before Trump began his campaign for the presidency. Is one single trademark being granted to a sitting President that claims to no longer control his business directly really going to amount to a constitutional violation? Many didn’t think so.

Copyrights

• Last month we wrote about the adoption of a new secret agreement between copyright holders and the major search engines, brokered by the U.K. Intellectual Property Office, aimed at making websites associated with copyright infringement less visible in search results. Since the agreement wasn’t publicly available, we simultaneously issued a request under the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), asking for a copy of the text. Today we received it.

• Last summer, Mike reported the EU Commission was about to institute a “link tax” on news snippets. In essence, the tax would have punished search engines for sending traffic TO news sites. Not only is that part of it a stupid, backwards idea, but previous attempts by European countries to institute link/Google taxes were abject failures, resulting in Google refusing to list taxed news articles in its search results.

• Readers were invited to comment on the proposed tax. It’s not clear whether those comments were heard above the overly-confident dull roar of industry lobbyists, but whatever the turning point was, the link tax idea is dead. What’s being offered to publishers is something completely different: an opportunity to sue Google, et al for supposed infringement.

• Techdirt has been warning about the problems with the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License (CC NC) for many, many years. Last September, Mike wrote about an important case involving the CC NC license, brought by Great Minds, an educational non-profit organization, against FedEx, the shipping giant. Copy shops owned by FedEx photocopied some of Great Minds’ works on behalf of school districts. The material had been released by Great Minds under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license — that is, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

• Back in 2014, much was made about piracy in Australia, specifically whether Aussies using VPN services to get the American flavor of Netflix should be more heavily combatted and how release windows for movies in Australia were pushing the public to pirate the film instead of waiting for it. While much of the conversation about Netflix was unfortunate, we did see some positive signs about release windows coming from distributors in Australia. One distributor, Village Roadshow, even had its CEO admit how badly a delayed-release window had boned them when it came to the wildly popular The Lego Movie.

• We all know by now the music industry’s mantra that piracy kills artists. Well, not kills kills, but kills their musical careers before they could even really begin, so destructive is the dissemination of free music amongst the public. After all, if the public doesn’t pay for every last instance of every last bit of music, how in the world could musical artists ever make a living? This mantra is one that tends to be applied universally to the concept of free music by the industry, with zero in the way of nuanced discussions about potential business models that might work for some, or many, artists.

• Politico Europe published a draft report [paywalled] by Therese Comodini Cachia (EPP), the Member of the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee responsible for the Parliament’s reaction to the Commission’s copyright reform proposal.

• Silicon Valley has pushed back hard against Europe’s copyright reforms in the forthcoming response from the European Parliament’s rapporteur, a full draft of which has been seen by The Register.

• Politico published a partial draft of the European Parliament’s response to the Commission’s proposals – only the odd pages – earlier this week, but the version we’ve seen is complete and up to date. The report by MEP Therese Comodini Cachia will form the basis of the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee’s reform of the rules on copyright in Europe in the digital age.

• Comodini guts many of the proposals that would oblige major platforms to be more market- and content-friendly in Europe, and the response attempts to allow technology companies greater scope over using Europeans’ content and data. One Brussels expert described Comodini’s 73 proposed amendments as a “coup for Google”.

• One of the more incredible allegations about Prenda Law—the porn copyright-trolling operation that sued people for downloading movies online—was that the lawyers behind it might have created and uploaded some of the porn in question simply as a way to catch more offenders.

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