● 03.18.17

● Links 18/3/2017: New Stables Kernels, Wine 2.4

Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• “Because of how this support policy is implemented, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 devices that have a seventh generation or a later generation processor may no longer be able to scan or download updates through Windows Update or Microsoft Update.”

• A recently published Knowledge Base article suggests that Microsoft is going to block Windows Updates for owners of the latest Intel and AMD processors if they try to run Windows 7 or 8.1.

• There are many, many Linux operating systems out there, variations upon a theme. Each one unique in their behavior, and appearance. In this flurry of operating systems however, a few stand out in regards to what they bring to the table. And the word for that can only be described as innovative.

Server

• Basically, Linux VPS stands for a virtual private server running on a Linux system. A virtual private server is a virtual server hosted on a physical server. A server is virtual if it runs in a host computer’s memory. The host computer, in turn, can run a few other virtual servers.

• So, you’re a developer with a great tech idea. You have a vision for a world-beating product, perhaps even one that defines a new category. But the journey from idea to execution is long, painful, and often expensive. The cloud can help developers realize their dreams while minimizing capital outlay. Here’s how.

• In the early days and even into maturity, startups are experimenting. They are testing assumptions, prototyping new features and ideally looking at usage patterns to see how these features are being received. The technology to support this cycle of innovation can be one of the most critical costs for a tech startup. Developing, testing and deploying these experiments isn’t cheap. No startup wants to buy and maintain its own server technology while it churns new ideas. Infrastructure is a distraction for these companies.

• Networking professionals sometimes use the terms virtual network functions, or VNF, and network functions virtualization, or NFV, interchangeably, which can be a source of confusion. However, if we refer to the NFV specifications the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, or ETSI, sets forth, it becomes clear the two acronyms have related but distinct meanings.

Kernel Space

• If longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Jerome Glisse has his way, the long-awaited Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support will be merged for the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• HMM has been the multi-year effort to allow device memory to be transparently used by any device process and for mirroring process address space on a device. This has big implications for modern graphics hardware among other devices. NVIDIA has been one of the companies supporting the HMM effort heavily while it should also be of relevance to AMD and other GPU vendors, FPGA hardware, and other possible use-cases.

• Linux kernel developer Ben Hutchings announced the release and immediate availability of the eighty-seventh maintenance update to the oldest long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel series.

• Immediately after releasing the Linux 3.2.87 LTS kernel, Ben Hutchings announced the release and general availability of the forty-second maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.16 kernel series.

• Linux kernel 3.16.42 LTS comes two and a half weeks after the release of the Linux 3.16.41 LTS kernel patch and is a massive update that changes a total of 339 files, with 3027 insertions and 1429 deletions. There are all sorts of improvements, for the networking and sound stacks, various filesystems and architectures, as well as dozens of updated drivers.

• Jon Corbet is at it again… giving an informative presentation at a Linux oriented conference… this particular one being Linaro Connect Budapest 2017 from last week. Enjoy!

• BUS1 remains in-development as an in-kernel IPC mechanism and the spiritual successor to the never-merged KDBUS.

• BUS1 continues advancing albeit it’s not yet in the mainline Linux kernel and it isn’t clear yet when it will be ready for merging. BUS1 continues seeing frequent commits to this out-of-tree kernel module.

Graphics Stack

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov informed the community about the upcoming availability of the sixth maintenance update to the Mesa 13.0 3D Graphics Library for Linux-based operating systems.

• Mesa 13.0.6 should arrive soon and promises to be a major patch adding over 100 improvements to various of the shipped graphics drivers, including all Gallium ones, for which various reported crashes have been resolved, as well as r300 with a fix for an old regression that should improve support for BE hardware.

• Intel developers have published their latest version of patches that implement a Single Loop Power Controller (SLPC) as a replacement to host-based power management features.

• Another Polaris 12 device ID was added to the RadeonSI driver yesterday. In AMD’s other open-source driver components they have also been tidying up their lists this week of the PCI device IDs for the upcoming Polaris 12 hardware.

• The latest device ID added to RadeonSI was 0×6995. This now brings it up to seven Polaris 12 IDs in the open-source driver. As always, it doesn’t necessarily mean there will be seven different “Polaris 12″ graphics cards AMD is launching but some of these IDs are simply reserved, etc. For reference there were nine device IDs for Polaris 11 and 11 for Polaris 10.

• Sway 0.12 was released earlier this month as the newest feature update to this i3-compatible Wayland compositor.

• This Wayland compositor effort has been in development for a while and has a steady following, in part due to its compatibility with the i3 tiling window manager.

• Support for pipeline statistics queries are now enabled within Mesa Git for the Intel ANV Vulkan driver.

Applications

• Portable Document Format (PDF) is a well known and possibly the most used file format today, specifically for presenting and sharing documents reliably, independent of software, hardware, or more so, operating system.

• It has become the De Facto Standard for electronic documents, especially on the Internet. Because of this reason, and increased electronic information sharing, many people today get useful information in PDF documents.

• Kgif is a simple shell script which create a Gif file from active window. I felt this app especially designed to capture the terminal activity. I personally used, very often for that purpose.

• It captures activity as a series of PNG images, then combines all together to create a animated GIF. The script taking a screenshot of the active window at 0.5s intervals. If you feel, its not matching your requirement, straight away you can modify the script as per your need.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine 2.4 development release is now available for download continuing the road to the next major update of the free and open source implementation of Windows on Unix.

• The Wine development release 2.4 is now available.

• Wine 2.4 has been officially released and the developers are still plugging away at their Direct3D command stream work to improve Wine performance.

• For those who don’t remember what the ‘Direct3D command stream’ is: it’s a form of multithreading for better graphical performance when running games in Wine.

Games

• Croteam are being awesome as usual, as Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter [Steam] should get the Fusion update that includes Linux and Vulkan support early next week on Monday or Tuesday.

• Factorio is the love project of Wube, a developer based in Prague, Czech Republic. I open with this because, just like the idea of a game being made in Prague surprises me (even though the idea of a game being made anywhere – especially a western nation – shouldn’t), this game is surprisingly amazing. Factorio takes everything that is good about management games and gives you total control in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve been bogged down with minor trivial pursuits.

• Sumoman [Steam] is confirmed to be coming to Linux and after watching the trailer I’m officially sold on it. We do have a great variety of platformers, but the physics at play here looks hilarious.

• The Kerbal Space Program [GOG, Steam] developers Squad have announced a big expansion named ‘Making History’ and it sounds rather splendid.

• Feral Interactive bring the latest Deus Ex: Mankind Divided story DLC to Linux.

• The new ‘A Criminal Past’ story expansion acts as prequel for Mankind Divided and features croaky Adam Jensen taking on his first mission for Task Force 29. Jensen – posing as convicted criminal – is sent into a high-security prison that is resident to a population of augmented and hostile felons. What could possibly go wrong?

• A Criminal Past is now available to purchase for Linux on Steam, priced £9.49/$11.99/€11.99. You can also by the game’s season pass directly from the Feral Interactive website.

• It’s fun when this happens, I poked the developer of Man O’ War: Corsair – Warhammer Naval Battles [Steam] about the Linux version and they replied saying it was coming and now in the same day they’ve put it up! I guess sometimes developers just need a small reminder eh?

• Grab your gloves and your lockpick as the next elusive target is live for HITMAN [Steam], this time you’re attempting to take out The Bookkeeper.

• World to the West [Steam, Official Site] is a colourful and cartoony action adventure game that’s a standalone followup to the indie hit Teslagrad. It will release on May 5th and will include Linux support.

• The game actually had funding help from the Norwegian Film Institute who awarded the developers a $150,000 grant back in 2014.

• I wrote about Man O’ War: Corsair – Warhammer Naval Battles [Steam, GOG] coming to Linux in September last year, but with no release yet I poked the developer for more info and the reply was better than I expected.

• I’ve spent a bit of time flailing about in VThree [Steam], a new Early Access run and jump game based on speed-running to the end of a level. It’s fun, but difficult.

• Atomic Reconstruction [Steam, itch.io] is a simple-looking puzzle game about splitting and fusing atoms to complete each level. The Linux version launched in January, so it’s likely a lot of Linux gamers missed it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Akademy is the KDE Community conference. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE or Qt, this is your chance to present your work and ideas at the Conference from 22nd-27th July in Almería, Spain. The days for talks are Saturday and Sunday, 22nd and 23rd July. The rest of the week will be BoFs, unconference sessions and workshops.

• Mycroft is your own Open Source personal digital assistant you can use your voice or the keyboard to ask questions (“what’s the weather in Tokyo? / Calculate Pi to 50 Digits”), set reminders, launch apps and even search your plasma desktop for files and recent documents, you could also start using mycroft for shouting instructions like “Create a new activity” or “Lock this computer” or “Switch Users” or “Send an SMS” at your computer on a regular basis.. The Mycroft Plasmoid is the GUI front-end for Mycroft on the Plasma Desktop.

• I want to thank the people who worked so hard to create Krita and keep making it better and better. Thank you for this opportunity to show my work here and I appreciate all the encouragement and support I have received from my friends and family. I hope my art can encourage more people to paint with Krita and develop their talent and creativity. If there is any way I can contribute to making Krita better, I would be most happy to help!

• And that day would not pass in blank here in Rio de Janeiro, so the Google Development Group of Rio organized a Women Tech Makers Rio meetup. And on that meetup I made my second version of my presentation: Qt – Your Toolkit for C++ and Python with the real write once deploy everywhere.

• Cutelyst the C++/Qt web framework just got a new stable release.

• Right after last release Matthias Fehring made another important contribution adding support for internationalization in Cutelyst, you can now have your Grantlee templates properly translated depending on user setting.

• In 2013 I bought a Macbook Pro 13” which came with a HiDPI display (also known as retina display). Already back then the support for a single HiDPI display was quite alright with KDE4 and a few tweaks here and there. Months later Qt5 got native HiDPI support and most applications switched from GTK2 to GTK3 and finally the outliers (chromium based apps, godot, arduino…) got support for higher DPIs as well.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• With GNOME 3.24 due to be released next week, I’ve spent some time trying out the latest, near-final packages using Fedora Rawhide. The experience has been good and from my initial impressions it appears to be another reliable update to the GNOME Shell experience. Here are some screenshots and a recap of the new features and changes for this six-month update to this open-source desktop environment.

• Recipes looks pretty good in GNOME Software already, but one thing is missing: No documentation costs us a perfect rating. Thankfully, Paul Cutler has shown up and started to fill this gap, so we can get the last icon turned blue with the next release.

Distributions

Reviews

• deepin 15.4 GNU/Linux will be released in April 2017. Here is a review of its Beta Version showing some interesting aspects: memory usage, new appearances, new programs, and more. This new 15.4 has big improvements in its user interface, making it more beautiful, plus a new program called Deepin Screen Recorder. It’s very interesting for any GNU/Linux user to take a look. This review is a continuation of our previous review in 2016 for Deepin 15.3 GNU/Linux.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• But the update madness had just started. A couple days after the PCLOS incident, I booted OpenMandriva and Discover notified me that there were updates. I must confess that the update process in OpenMandriva has not been easy for me: I prefer to use the Control Center, but sometimes it cannot install some packages and those have to be installed with Discover. Sometimes, the latter simply refuses to load the package list.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• I went to Chemnitzer LinuxTage last weekend. That was a successful open source event.

• openSUSE has got a lot of positive feedback. Some people changed from Ubuntu to openSUSE Tumbleweed and are happy.

• There was some misunderstanding with the new release development of openSUSE Leap. Some people thought that would be a second rolling release by openSUSE. After explaining that we want to do that only in the development phase for achieving a more stable operating system and we will have a release day every year again, these cusomers have been happy again and like this idea. More stability is a good reason.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that OpenSCAP 1.2, an open source Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) scanner, has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a U.S. government evaluated configuration and vulnerability scanner for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7-based systems. This certification shows that OpenSCAP can analyze and evaluate security automation content correctly and has the functionality and documentation required by NIST to run in sensitive, security-conscious environments.

Finance

Fedora

• For those making use of containers, the Fedora Project has announced its first Layered Image Release.

• Fedora Fedora Layered Image releases are OCI container images made using the Fedora base packages that will be updated on a two-week release cycle that aligns with the Fedora Atomic release updates. Fedora Layered Image releases will work not only with Docker but with other popular container runtimes that support the Open Containers’ OCI specification.

Debian Family

• At the and of 2016 I had the pleasure to attend the 11th Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, a.k.a SugarLoaf PLoP. PLoP is a series of conferences on Patterns (as in “Design Patterns”), a subject that I appreciate a lot. Each of the PLoP conferences but the original main “big” conference has a funny name. SugarLoaf PLoP is called that way because its very first edition was held in Rio de Janeiro, so the organizers named it after a very famous mountain in Rio. The name stuck even though a long time has passed since it was held in Rio for the last time. 2016 was actually the first time SugarLoaf PLoP was held outside of Brazil, finally justifying the “Latin American” part of its name.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• When it comes to production-grade deployments of operating systems on servers, some servers systems will stay in production longer than others. While consumers refresh hardware and software rapidly, that is typically not always the case for many different reasons, in enterprise deployments.

• Dear developers,

• Last year, I wrote[1] to let you know that the powerpc architecture would be dropped from zesty as of Feature Freeze.

• We are well into Feature Freeze at this point, so an update is overdue. As of Feature Freeze in February, the status is that powerpc packages are no longer considered for proposed-migration, and we have discontinued all CD image builds for powerpc in zesty.

• Ladies and gentlemen, it is the same time of the year again. It is March, and it means that the release of the next generation of your favourite operating system will be released in a month’s time!

• Yes, Ubuntu 17.04 is less than a month away. Many of you already looking for downloading of your own ISO image of the system. Yes, that’s the next version, codenamed ZestyZapus.

• But many of you are not so lucky, and will need to wait longer, because you can not or do not want to create their own DVDs with operating system images. We can help!

• After being at Canonical for nearly one decade, Jorge Castro is leaving his work on the Ubuntu Cloud and joining a new startup.

• Jorge Castro had been at Canonical since 2007, while he had contributed to Ubuntu all the way back to 2004. At Canonical he started out in developer relations and for the past number of years was a cloud liaison and most recently was serving within the Kubernetes team.

Flavours and Variants

• We are pleased to announce the release of Zorin OS 12.1 Education. Zorin OS 12.1 Education pairs the latest and greatest software with educational apps that make learning better and more impactful.

• This new release of Zorin OS Education takes advantage of the new features and enhancements in Zorin OS 12, our biggest release ever. These include an all new desktop environment, a new way to install software, entirely new desktop apps and much more. You can find more information about what’s new in Zorin OS 12 here.

• If you curious about GNOME 3.22 and later, and about the next-release of Ubuntu GNOME, then it’s good to see what’s inside Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” pre-release. Here I write an overview of its Beta 1 release and showing some interesting aspects such as memory usage, new additions (Flatpak & Snappy), new features (Night Light etc.), and its default apps (LibreOffice 5.3 etc.). This Beta 1 is already very nice and exciting to use. I hope you enjoy Ubuntu GNOME 17.04.

Devices/Embedded

• The Orange Pi compute module is based on a quad-core 64 bit ARM Cortex A7 Allwinner SoC. It is available in several models from the entry level Orange Pi Zero to the 2Gb of RAM Orange Pi Plus 2.

• The app store allows developers to share their applications, projects and scripts between themselves and with the wider Orange Pi community.

• Canonical has announced the launch of a dedicated Ubuntu App Store for the Orange Pi mini PC providing a wide range of different applications that can be easily installed on the single board computer.

• To recap the Orange Pi mini PC is equipped with a quad-core 64 bit ARM Cortex A7 Allwinner SoC and is available in a number of different versions from the entry level Orange Pi Zero to the 2GB of RAM Orange Pi Plus 2.

• Aaeon’s UP Core is a smaller version of the community-backed, Atom x5 Z8350 based UP board that swaps out the GbE port for WiFi and Bluetooth.

• Aaeon closed out the Embedded World show by announcing a more compact and COM-like UP Core version of its community-backed UP board SBC. The similarly Linux- and Android-ready UP Core will soon hit Kickstarter with a price of $69 (vs. $89 retail) with a base level of 1GB RAM and 16GB eMMC. Also at Embedded World, Aaeon unveiled several IoT-oriented products, including a LoRa gateway based on the UP SBC (see farther below).

Phones

• Even in the rich world Android now outsells iPhones at 2 to 1 ratio. And outside of the rich world it is 1 in 6 or less that are iPhones. To understand how to adjust these numbers for an annual number – this quarter Apple has 18% market share but for full calendar year 2016 Apple only had 15% market share. For the full year those regional splits would need to be adjusted downward for the iPhone and upward for Androids, by about 3 points per region, to get annual data levels.

Android

• Advantech and nine firms, including Retronix, ThunderSoft, Canonical, and Timesys, launched an Embedded Linux & Android Alliance (ELAA) for IoT standards.

• Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be another IoT organization promising to usher us into the nirvana of true interoperability, here comes the Embedded Linux & Android Alliance (ELAA). For all we know, ELAA will be the one we’re all talking about in the coming years as opposed to the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) or AllSeen/AllJoyn and other would-be IoT saviors.

• Google is likely to introduce the Android O operating system at its I/O expo in May, but so far we know very little about what the 14th major version of Android will bring to the party.

• Sure, there’s been hints relating to the name, but in terms of features, very little has been able to sneak out of Mountain View.

• That may have changed on Friday with rumours suggesting at least three major feature additions to the mobile operating system.

• SAMSUNG may have some serious competition with Tag Heuer and now Mont Blanc launching ultimate Android Wear 2.0 powered smartwatches.

• The race to combine old-school luxury brands with modern technology is well and truly on, as today Montblanc joins Tag Heuer in rolling out its own Android​ Wear watch. The Montblanc Summit is the company’s first venture into the digital timekeeping world, bringing with it some of the expertise Montblanc has for crafting mechanical timepieces. I got to see and wear this fancified Android Wear watch in London today, sitting down with Montblanc’s director of new technologies, Felix Obschonka, to discuss the thinking behind the Summit.

Free Software/Open Source

• Status is a messenger and browser to access the decentralized web of Ethereum. With the high level goals of preserving the collective right of humans to privacy, mitigating the risk of censorship, and promoting economic trade in a transparent, open manner, Status is building a community where anyone is welcome to join and contribute to the cause.

• 18F, the General Services Administration’s tech incubator, has announced the release of the U.S. Web Design Standards — easy-to-implement, open source code to allow government developers to quickly create or update websites.

• Version 1.0 of the library includes guidelines for forms, typography, buttons, alerts and more to assist in the quick creation of “trustworthy, accessible and consistent digital government services” that sport a modern feel. Mobile performance-optimized and advanced components (like mapping and data visualization) are being evaluated for future builds.

• The European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) recently put on a plugtest event in Madrid, Spain, where 35 commercial and open source implementations were tested for interoperability, and it saw promising results as released in its report.

• Bloq, a startup dedicated to developing enterprise-grade blockchain software, has launched an initiative to support open-source projects in the bitcoin and blockchain industry.

• The initiative, called BloqLabs, appears to be an extension of Bloq’s prior commitment to fostering the independent software projects of some of its employees.

• Docker donated its containerd open source code to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which has surprised some Docker fans as it attempts to solidify a container consensus.

Events

• Akshat, who works at NCRA as a programmer, the standing guy on the left shared with me in January this year that this year too, we should have two stalls, foss community and mozilla India stalls next to each other. While we had the banners, we were missing stickers and flyers. Funds were and are always an issue and this year too, it would have been emptier if we didn’t get some money saved from last year minidebconf 2016 that we had in Mumbai. Our major expenses included printing stickers, stationery and flyers which came to around INR 5000/- and couple of LCD TV monitors which came for around INR 2k/- as rent. All the labour was voluntary in nature, but both me and Akshat easily spending upto 100 hours before the event. Next year, we want to raise to around INR 10-15k so we can buy 1 or 2 LCD monitors and we don’t have to think for funds for next couple of years. How will we do that I have no idea atm.

• I’ve just booked flight and hotel for GUADEC 2017, which will be held in Manchester. André suggested that I should decide this time. We’ll be staying a wheelchair accessible (the room is slightly bigger :P) room with Easyhotel. It’s 184 GBP for 5 nights and NOT close to the venue (but not bad via public transport). Easyhotel works like a budget airline. You’ll have to pay more for WiFi, cleaning, breakfast, a remote, etc. I ignored all of these essential things which means André has to do without that as well. The paid WiFi might even be iffy, so rather use my mobile data, plus per half June that shouldn’t cost anything extra thanks to new EU regulations. Before GUADEC I might switch to another mobile phone company to get 4-5GB/month for 18 EUR/month. André will probably want to work remotely. Let’s see closer to the date what’s a good solution (share my data?).

• This is the fifth time that we have seen the conference taking place, with it being held previously three times in San Francisco and once in Shenzhen. The Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) is an annual event that is the highlight of Tizen Devs calendars. Last year, the event did not take place but we saw a huge amount of Tizen content being featured as part of the Samsung Developer Conference 2016 and we expect the same to be true of this year’s event.

• A few days ago I returned -incredibly satisfied- from attending my personal 7th Southern California Linux Expo, which was the 15th edition of the event. I’ve read a thing or two about the beginning of Scale, and how it has grown by the years to become one of the largest and more important FOSS events, not only in the US but also worldwide. From my perspective I can tell that the event gets better by every year.

• Closing date for the CfP is April, 30th.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Many Firefox users on Linux were left without the ability to play sound in their browser after updating to Firefox 52, released last week.

• The issue at the heart of this problem is that Mozilla dropped support for ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and is now requiring Linux users to have installed the PulseAudio library to support audio playback inside Firefox.

• ALSA is a software framework included in the Linux kernel that provides an API for sound card drivers. On the other hand, PulseAudio is a more modern sound server that’s already supported on most Linux distros, but also on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and even macOS.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• OpenSSH 7.5p1 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This is a bugfix release.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Although its learning curve is too steep for novices, GIMP is free and has a nice set of photo editing tools within an open-source program that should appeal to geek photographers who like to control their editing environment.

• Do you know Gna! Software Project Hosting? It’s something today similar to SourceForge, GitHub, or Savannah, a place that host many free software projects. You find many projects source codes there, along with all development stuffs (SCM, bugtrack, forum, etc.). The important thing is Gna! supports and hosts only free software projects. Yesterday (Thursday, March 17th) I came across a sad reminder that Gna! will shut down soon. Actually this plan was announced in November 2016, it said “6-months notice before saying goodbye”, so it could be this April or May 2017. I show my support to Gna! by this article and I humbly encourage you to support them too by any way you can. Big thanks and respect for Gna! for this 13 years supporting free software.

• GNU tooling updates we have seen recently include GLIBC 2.25, GDB 7.12.1, Newlib 2.5, GCC 6.3, GCC 7 nearing release, and Binutils 2.28.

Licensing/Legal

• Someone from the FSF’s licencing department posted an official-looking thing saying they don’t believe GitHub’s new ToS to be problematic with copyleft. Well, my lawyer (not my personal one, nor for The MirOS Project, but related to another association, informally) does agree with my reading of the new ToS, and I can point out at least a clause in the GPLv1 (I really don’t have time right now) which says contrary (but does this mean the FSF generally waives the restrictions of the GPL for anything on GitHub?). I’ll eMail GitHub Legal directly and will try to continue getting this fixed (as soon as I have enough time for it) as I’ll otherwise be forced to force GitHub to remove stuff from me (but with someone else as original author) under GPL, such as… tinyirc and e3.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• To this end, Bogonovich founded Openwords with the intention of producing a free and open-source language learning platform.

Programming/Development

• In the words of Doug Gwyn, “Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things”. C is a very powerful tool, but it is to be used with care and discipline. Learning this discipline is well worth the effort, because C is one of the best programming languages ever made. A disciplined C programmer will…

• If your young child is showing an interest in learning computers, an introduction to Scratch and these instructional videos by Al Sweigart might be in order.

• Besides the above plot, which can be difficult to parse even at full size, we offer the following numerical rankings. As will be observed, this run produced several ties which are reflected below (they are listed out here alphabetically rather than consolidated as ties because the latter approach led to misunderstandings). Note that this is actually a list of the Top 23 languages, not Top 20, because of said ties.

• Somewhere in the past 15 years, it all went wrong.

Leftovers

• Now we have another huge milestone. Adidas the sporting brand has just declared that they will end TV advertising and the primary reason is mobile. Their target audience is glued to smartphone screens and if you want to reach that audience, you have to go with that media.

• [...]

• 3.3 Billion out of 3.5 Billion internet users do use mobile, and 1.8 Billion, just over half, never use a PC or tablet of any kind to access the internet.

• For arts and cultural groups across the country, the four agencies – although they account for only 0.02 percent of federal spending – have long been considered crucial in supporting outreach to underserved communities between the coasts, particularly in rural areas. Proponents of the proposed cuts have said that the proposed elimination of the agencies will open the door to a freer arts market that forces artists to produce works that speak to local audiences, rather than to bureaucrats in Washington.

• But opponents of the plan say that – ironically – the elimination of the arts agencies will do most damage in some of the parts of the country that had supported Trump the most.

Science

• the take-home point is that memory skills can be learned. “It shows that superior memory on that level is not something that is just inborn talent, but is something that essentially can be learned by everyone,”

• Science is clearly not a priority, as it is repeatedly targeted for cuts in every agency that funds it.

• The basics are a litany of red. Defense spending goes up 9 percent. Homeland Security goes up 7 percent. Everything else gets ground into dust, from the environment to arts and humanities to the State Department. But the really scary parts, the stuff that you really can’t come back from, are the cuts to scientific research.

• America’s enduring scientific greatness rests largely on the scientists of the future. And relying on private funding poses an additional problem for supporting people early in their careers. The squeeze on public funding in recent years has posed a similar concern, as young scientists are getting a smaller share of key publicly-funded research grants [...]

• Today, the University of California at Berkeley has deleted 20,000 college lectures from its YouTube channel. Berkeley removed the videos because of a lawsuit brought by two students from another university under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

• We copied all 20,000 and are making them permanently available for free via LBRY.

• Heavy traffic generates noise levels of up to 85 decibels (dB), which the Health and Safety Executive deems sufficient to cause permanent hearing damage if we’re exposed to it for several hours every day. Underground trains can pass the 100dB mark when roaring around a loud corner.

• The bedroom resentments of adolescent boys are the new mass media; they’re desperate for fraternity, they find the others, and they never get the chance to grow out of it before it’s too late. And then there are the ringleader types–older, odder men with an opportunistic talent for lurking close to both youngsters and fame, desperate for the latter but stuck with the former. We’re already too accustomed to watching them implode; eventually one of them will be cunning and consistent enough and then we’ll really be off to the races.

Health/Nutrition

• The House Republican bill to repeal Obamacare hangs in a delicate balance as concerned GOP lawmakers publicly come out to express their opposition to the legislation.

• In May 2009, at the infancy of the healthcare reform battle that led to the Affordable Care Act, a group of nurses and single-payer activists were arrested for disrupting a Senate Finance Committee meeting chaired by Sen. Max Baucus (D.–Mont.) (Democracy Now, 5/13/09). These activists had been ignored by politicians and corporate media for years (FAIR.org, 3/6/09), and hoped an arrest, or eight, would bring attention to their cause.

• Despite the efforts of the “Baucus 8,” the New York Times did not report on the event. Nor did much of the rest of the dominant media. Not even mass arrests could get the corporate media to give voice to single-payer advocates, even though their position is supported by the majority of the public (Gallup, 5/16/16).

• This is worth remembering as the media cover the GOP House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA), the plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare. While even eight arrests couldn’t get attention to left-wing critics of the Democrat’s milquetoast health reform plan in 2009–10, today the far right is given thousands of words in the press, and plenty of air time on television, to air its ideological opposition to the current GOP plan.

• Around the same time, the city’s water utility was laying off employees in an effort to cut costs. By the end of the year, half of the staff responsible for testing water throughout the 100,000-customer system was let go. The cuts would prove to be catastrophic. Six months later, lead levels in tap water in thousands of homes soared. The professor who had helped expose Flint, Michigan’s lead crisis took notice, “The levels in Pittsburgh are comparable to those reported in Flint.”

• The cities also share something else, involvement by the same for-profit water corporation. Pittsburgh’s layoffs happened under the watch of French corporation Veolia, who was hired to help the city’s utility save money. Veolia also oversaw a change to a cheaper chemical additive that likely caused the eventual spike in lead levels. In Flint, Veolia served a similar consulting role and failed to detect high levels of lead in the city’s water, deeming it safe.

Security

• Security expert Bruce Schneier says we’re creating an Internet that senses, thinks, and acts, which is is the classic definition of a robot. “I contend that we’re building a world-sized robot without even realizing it,” he said recently at the Open Source Leadership Summit (OSLS).

• In his talk, Schneier explained this idea of a world-sized robot, created out of the Internet, that has no single consciousness, no single goal, and no single creator. You can think of it, he says, as an Internet that affects the world in a direct physical manner. This means Internet security becomes everything security.

• And, as the Internet physically affects our world, the threats become greater. “It’s the same computers, it could be the same operating systems, the same apps, the same vulnerability, but there’s a fundamental difference between when your spreadsheet crashes, and you lose your data, and when your car crashes and you lose your life,” Schneier said.

• The vulnerability made it possible for an attacker to booby-trap a digital image with malicious code that could spring into action after the picture is clicked on for viewing, according to Check Point.

• ANOTHER years-old vulnerability in the Linux kernel has been patched – the fourth such ageing security flaw that has been patched recently.

• After the Heartbleed bug revealed in April 2014 how understaffed and under-funded the OpenSSL project was, the Network Time Foundation was discovered to be one of several projects in a similar condition. Unfortunately, thanks to a project fork, the efforts to lend NTP support have only divided the development community and created two projects scrambling for funds where originally there was only one.

• According to Firefox maker Mozilla, we’re nearly all afraid of hackers, but few of us feel we can protect ourselves from them.

• The non-profit’s survey of 30,000 people found internet users’ confidence is extremely low when it comes to privacy and security. The survey found that 90 percent of people are unsure how to protect themselves online, while 11.5 percent feel they know nothing about security.

• On April 4th 2016 a new Linux Foundation initiative called the Civil Infrastructure Platform was announced. CIP aims to share efforts around building a Linux-based commodity platform for industrial grade products that need to be maintained for anything between 25 and 50 years – in some cases even longer. Codethink is one of the founding members.

Defence/Aggression

• When the Obama administration put in place guidelines meant to restrain lethal drone and other killings abroad, we were concerned that they set too low a bar, and that even that low bar could easily be overturned.

• Now, our worst fears are coming to a head. According to a recent New York Times report, the Trump administration is considering weakening or withdrawing those rules, which, while flawed, are intended to limit civilian deaths and injuries. Without them, the U.S. will further unmoor itself from domestic and international law that safeguards against extrajudicial killing, and many more innocent people will die. The Trump administration has also reportedly lifted limits on the CIA carrying out drone strikes, meaning that the CIA could return to its role as a paramilitary organization killing people largely in secret.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• It’s remarkable how quickly drones have become a familiar part of the modern world. Like most tools, they can be used for good and evil, but it tends to be the latter that is highlighted when it comes to drones. In the last few days, it was widely reported that President Trump has given the CIA power to launch drone strikes against suspected terrorists, in addition to being able to use the technology to locate them. Dealing death from the skies may be the most dramatic application of drones, but there are plenty of other, more benign, uses, even if they receive less attention. For example, activists in Hungary have been deploying them in a variety of innovative ways in order to bolster transparency and openness in a country where these are increasingly under threat. That’s because the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is a self-confessed believer in the “illiberal state,”…

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• The post-carbon industries — from solar to electric cars — are a way for rich investors to go long on climate action, and short hydrocarbons, and they become a force against the carbon barons’ efforts to continue burning fossil fuels unchecked.

• In this edited interview, Jaffe speaks with Kandi Mossett of the Indigenous Environmental Network about the march last week and what’s next in the fight against the Dakota Access pipeline, as well as other pipeline projects. (The full interview is available in the audio above and online at TruthOut.org). Mossett is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, which has been active in the Standing Rock protests since August.

• The Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Attorney Nicole Ducheneaux on Wednesday asked the appeals court for an emergency order preventing oil through the pipeline until the appeal is resolved.

• Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil producer, Aramco, is a partner with state-owned China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. in a refinery in the southeastern province of Fujian and has other Chinese projects.

Finance

• By allowing users to conduct secure transactions with one another directly, blockchain eliminates the need for regulatory middlemen. This allows companies like Abra to save time and money by avoiding the lengthy processing periods and fees imposed by traditional money transfer services.

• In an internal company-wide email, the company’s head of product refers to discussions the company held about ending Uber’s API access, which allows riders to control a driver’s sound system from their smartphones.

• So what do we do now with Theresa May apparently obdurate on blocking the referendum?

• It is important to realise politics are fluid. In a week’s time the situation will not be what it is today. The battle for public opinion is key. The unionist media (ie virtually all of it) are asserting continuously, as a uniform line, that opinion polls say the people of Scotland do not want a second Independence referendum in the timescale Nicola Sturgeon has set out – even though that is not true at all. The serial Tory crooks at You Gove came out with an opinion poll right on cue “showing” that support for Independence is hitting new lows. But I suspect it will not be long before evidence emerges that May’s unattractive diktat has profoundly assisted the Independence cause. That will change the game.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In what is turning into a pattern for the Trump administration, yet another nominee close to Wall Street—and Goldman Sachs in particular—is on his way to being confirmed for a top post. Jay Clayton, Trump’s choice for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will have his confirmation hearing on March 23.

• The cost of flying Air Force One is more than $200,000 per flying hour, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch in 2015.

• What really jumped out at some people, though, was that Trump was proposing cuts to some relatively low-cost programs shortly before he prepared to fly to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to an analysis from Politico, that’s a trip that costs about $3 million each time — and it’s a trip that he’s made three times this year.

• Some Twitter users are voluntarily handing control of their accounts to the UK’s Russian Embassy, which uses them to retweet the “most important” tweets of the Russian ambassador on a weekly basis.

• In addition to eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, Trump’s budget will also jettison the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, according to The Washington Post. The costs of these programs equal $148 million, $445 million, $230 million, and $148 million respectively. Considering their combined total amounts to $971 million, their fiscal burden is a pittance compared to the trillions spent on defense and the military — which Trump plans on increasing.

• The expansion of public relations and propaganda (PRP) firms inside news systems in the world today has resulted in a deliberate form of news management. Maintenance of continuous news shows requires a constant and ever-entertaining supply of stimulating events and breaking news bites. Corporate media are increasingly dependent on various government agencies and PRP firms as sources of news.

• The PRP industry has experienced phenomenal growth since 2001. In 2015, three publicly traded mega PR firms—Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic Group—together employed 214,000 people across 170 countries, collecting $35 billion in combined revenue. Not only do these firms control massive wealth, they also possess a network of connections in powerful international institutions with direct links to national governments, multi-national corporations, global policy-making bodies, and the corporate media.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The First Amendment Lawyer’s Association (FALA) is hoping to end the California Attorney General’s crusade against Backpage. The website has already ceded ground in the face of constant criticism, investigations, and legal threats. Earlier this year, it shuttered its adult ads rather than continue to bleed money and time defending itself against bogus prosecutions and investigations.

• Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris — who blew off court decisions against her office to continue to prosecute Backpage — has now moved on to the US Senate. But just because Harris has moved on doesn’t mean the local AG’s office isn’t going to continue with Harris’ unfinished business.

• According to the article, China’s state publishing administration has imposed a quota system on domestic publishers, limiting the number of foreign picture books that can be published in any one year. Apparently, the aim is two-fold: to promote children’s books created by domestic authors and illustrators; and to stop innocent young Chinese minds being seduced by the subtle charms of Western propaganda in the form of cartoon stories about animals.

• An order from Beijing will drastically cut the number of foreign picture books for children published in mainland China this year, four publishing sources told the South China Morning Post.

• The order opens a new front in a broad campaign to reduce the influence of foreign ideas and enhance ideological control, applying restrictions to animal cartoons and fairy tales written for toddlers and older children that have few political implications. Chinese universities were previously ordered to limit the use of Western textbooks and promote communist dogma.

• Predators of press freedom have seized on the notion of “fake news” to muzzle the media on the pretext of fighting false information, says the Paris-based global media freedom agency Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

• Nonetheless, many of them have taken recent statements by President Donald Trump as a means of justifying their repressive policies. This dangerous trend is a cause for concern, says RSF.

• At a Washington news conference in February, Trump said: “We have to talk to find out what’s going on, because the press, honestly, is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

• The UK’s House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee launched an inquiry into fake news at the end of January 2017. The Committee is seeking submissions on a number of issues including the distinction between legitimate commentary and propaganda, the impact of fake news on the public’s view of traditional media and to what extent search engine operators and social media platforms should be responsible for filtering out fake news.

• “Facebook and other service providers should share all information about the people behind this blasphemous content with us,” he is quoted as saying by the Dawn newspaper.

• When Nicola Sturgeon announced her intention this week to hold another referendum on Scottish independence, it was met by many with a sigh and a roll of the eyes. Whether or not indyref2 actually happens, we know that, at the very least, we’ll be talking about it for years to come. Mention independence in Catalonia, however, and you could be arrested.

• This was the fate of Joan Coma, a pro-independence Catalan councillor from a small village an hour’s drive north of Barcelona. He faces an eight-year prison sentence for saying, ‘To make an omelette you must break some eggs’, while discussing Catalan independence from Spain. The Spanish authorities claim this could be interpreted as a call for political violence.

• Lena Hendry is facing a jail sentence for airing an uncensored Sri Lankan war documentary.

• The makers of the multi-award winning British HIV/AIDS documentary film Positive Hell, which was screened to acclaim last night at New York’s 7th annual Queens World Film Festival (QWFF), have just released a new short film on YouTube, Censored. The first in a trilogy titled Positively wrong, Censored tells how in 2016 Positive Hell was suddenly barred from several confirmed screenings in London and New York after hefty and controversial lobbying. Two of the bans were from film festivals for which Positive Hell had already been selected and programmed.

• New York’s 7th annual Queens World Film Festival (QWFF) is to open tonight’s LGBTQ+ block of film screenings with the multi-award winning British documentary Positive Hell. The film will then screen on Sat March 18 at noon in Harlem, NY, and early evening in Jackson Heights, NY, under the auspices respectively of National Action Network – House of Justice and Parents in Action for Leadership and Human Rights.

• The local branch of a Muslim civil rights advocacy group on Wednesday called for a review of the Houston Independent School District’s social media policy after they said a school teacher posted anti-Islamic messages on Twitter.

• This is something that we’ve been known to post about on quite a few occasions as well. The fact is, Facebook isn’t always good with its blocking decisions. Frankly, this isn’t a huge surprise, given that it has to use a combination of algorithms and low level human reviewers to cover a fairly large amount of content — a decision the company made when it decided that it would be the arbiter of what is and what is not allowed on the site. Mistakes are going to happen, and with it comes people mocking Facebook for making bad decisions.

• However, with Mizbala, something extra strange happened. Soon after posting a few of these stories mocking Facebook, suddenly Mizbala itself was blocked by Facebook. Entirely. Even worse, previous links to Mizbala disappeared and anyone posting a link to Mizbala was given a fairly scary sounding message suggesting the site was deemed “unsafe” by Facebook.

• While America is often portrayed as a hive of liberal debauchery, with a media environment heavy on skin and short on substance, unmentioned is a prudish strain that runs just as deep and as afoul of the mainstream. This hidden brand of puritanism rears its head in many ways, one of which is the unfortunate call to have technology companies block access to perfectly legal content in the name of protecting the gentle minds of the citizenry. Utah has attempted this in the form of calls to have phones come stock with filters to block pornography, full stop. And, while Utah is by no means alone in America in this endeavor, this sort of unconstitutional grab at the minds of the people is most often attempted in the more conservative, and religious, states. This, of course, despite all of the collateral damage to educational and otherwise useful material that comes along with this sort of thing.

• Yet the march against skin marches on. In Georgia, lawmakers have introduced a bill that would mandate filters on mobile devices that allow internet access.

• But bubbling under the surface of the deal for the American Idol producer was concerns from investors, regulators and entertainment executives in the U.S. and abroad about the deal’s viability. Specifically from the typical CFIUS or censorship concerns that normally occur when Chinese buyers target U.S. companies.

• “Young Americans for Freedom remains a student organization in good standing at the university,” said McGlone. “The university has a code of conduct for registered student organizations and enforces it consistently and fairly. University police responded to protests at the Ben Shapiro event, allowing the event to continue and all parties to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

• Barney Rosset was born and raised during a time where liberal, and even socialist or communist, was not a bad word. He came out of a Chicago known for its art and progressivism; worked in the Army during a war that championed democratic values over bullying fascism. And he found his way with the help of a family fortune small enough to have limits yet big enough to allow him a bit of playing. He flourished at a time when literature and the arts in general, alongside science and philosophy, were as respected as business acumen. It was a brief era when you could sell hundreds of thousands of copies of edgy books such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X or the early self-help pioneer Games People Play, or push anti-colonial theses into the nation’s classrooms with ease.

• That was the most bizarre example of a take-down. Most of the other ones, obviously, showed bodies, and could be interpreted, by some, as sexual. “I think there are a few surprises, but I think that one is just the most controversial. Why? Because it’s really-really not sexual.”

• Instagram ultimately didn’t really cooperate with the book, but that never was Byström and Soda’s intention. “I think certain people at Instagram definitely know that we made this book, but were not really interested in Instagram’s reaction,” Byström explains. “Yeah, that’s not the point,” Soda adds. “Also, who is Instagram? A lot of people see Instagram as this one persona that you can’t really talk to. But Instagram actually has… how many people working for them?”

• So far we’ve seen no response from the Domain Name Association (DNA) to our criticisms from earlier this month about its self-styled Registry/Registrar Healthy Practices [PDF]. Part of its plan is that domain registries ought to yank online pharmacy domains from the Internet without due process on Big Pharma’s say-so.

Privacy/Surveillance

• EFF and a diverse coalition of advocacy groups sent a letter to the California legislature urging elected officials to oppose A,B, 165. This bill would roll back privacy protections for students and teachers by exempting California public schools from the prohibition on warrantless digital searches lawmakers enacted two years ago.

• The letter calls for the legislature to protect the legal rights of the 6-million Californians who study and work in public schools. Signers included Transgender Law Center, Courage Campaign, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Health Connected, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, the American Library Association, and many others.

• Given the often-comedic “security” featured on “smart” tea kettles, televisions, refrigerators and light bulbs — was there any question that your sex toys would suffer from the same problems plaguing other Internet of Things devices?

• Last fall, a company named Standard Innovation was sued because its We-Vibe vibrator collected sensitive data about customer usage. Specifically, the device and its corresponding Bluetooth-tethered smartphone app collected data on how frequently (and for how long) users enjoyed the toy, the “selected vibration settings,” the device’s battery life, and even the vibrator’s “temperature.” All of this rather personal data was collected and sent off to the company’s Canadian servers, where the company claims it’s used to conduct research for future products and product updates.

• Unlike many IoT products, Standard Innovation does fortunately encrypt this data in transit, but like most IoT companies, it failed to fully and clearly disclose the scope of data collection to customers, what was being done with that data, and how to opt out (or preferably, opt in).

• The DHS and CBP have both taken a healthy interest in travelers’ social media posts. The DHS head even suggested withholding this information would no longer be an option — that demands for account passwords were on the way. (Considering the government can search every person and their electronic devices at the border, demands for social media info would seem to be mostly redundant…) The underlying premise is this would give the US a jump on incoming terrorists by checking travelers’ posts against a list of troublesome terms.

• This isn’t a welcome development, but the federal government continues to be its own worst enemy. You can’t fear what can’t be deployed competently. The DHS isn’t going to stop trying to hoover up social media posts as part of the vetting process, but as a just-released Inspector General’s report [PDF] points out, it may be several years before this vetting program operates in any sort of useful fashion.

• The warrant commands Google to divulge “any/all user or subscriber information”—including e-mail addresses, payment information, MAC addresses, social security numbers, dates of birth, and IP addresses—of anybody who conducted a search for the victim’s name.

• Telecoms and ISPs are also lobbying politicians, specifically House Representatives and Senators in both houses who have introduced bills to strip away FCC privacy rules and regulations and make sure that they never have the ability to enforce net neutrality rules again under the Congressional Review Act. The House version is H.J.Res 86 and is supported by 17 House Representatives. The Senate version is S.J.Res 34 and is supported by 23 Senators. It is imperative that Americans contact their House Reps and Senators to let them know to vote against H.J.Res 86 and S.J.Res 34. It is also imperative that Internet users around the world take note of these developments as they could happen in your home country as well. If your government doesn’t protect your online privacy, you’ll have to do so yourself.

• “Web browsing and app usage history are not ‘sensitive information,’” CTIA said in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission yesterday. CTIA is the main lobbyist group representing mobile broadband providers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint.

• But alas, Hennepin County Judge Gary Larson signed Edina’s warrant and Detective Lindman served it about 20 minutes later. Because it’s an active investigation, there’s no way to know yet if Google challenged the warrant for being broad, vague, or unlawful, or if Google even has the data to provide.

• The standard for warrants is probable cause. The warrant obtained by Edina, MN police doesn’t even approach reasonable suspicion. In its attempt to locate the person behind a fraudulent bank transfer, the Edina police have asked Google to bring them everyone, as public records enthusiast Tony Webster reports.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Khalid Adem, 41, was arrested for using scissors to mutilate the genitals of his 2-year-old daughter.

• He was deported on Monday after serving 10 years in prison.

• Co-director Patrick Farrelly said: “It is astonishing that FGM is not the top priority for the feminist movement, the women’s movement and the whole human rights movement. Two hundred million women and girls have been mutilated in the world today and it isn’t top of any of those agendas.”

• The spokesman also criticised a “group of individuals” who arrived at the store during the afternoon of “harassing and bullying” the shop’s 80-year-old former owner, who was “not responsible for the filling of the skip”.

• Ankara has warned it could cancel a March 2016 deal with the EU to curb the influx of refugees to the bloc, a move that came after Turkish ministers were barred from holding rallies in Europe.

• Bibi has been in prison for over a decade after being accused of insulting Islam, a crime punishable by death under the country’s strict blasphemy laws.

• She faces death if her final appeal fails.

• Germany proposed a new law today to fight hate speech, threatening social media networks like Twitter and Facebook with €50 million fines.

• Many of these ex-Muslims were anonymous on social media, hiding their true identities for fear of being disowned by their families and the wider community. For many more there is the fear of being beaten and even death for leaving Islam and proudly shouting that they no longer believe.

• A Freedom of Information request submitted by the Mirror shows that between 2011 and 2016, London had nearly 1,500 cases of the devastating crime, which burns the skin and leaves victims cowering from their injuries.

• Republican lawmakers in at least 18 states have proposed a spate of bills making blocking streets a felony in North Carolina, allowing businesses to sue people protesting them in Michigan, and forcing Minnesota protesters pay the costs of policing.

• A top J&K officer told India Today that terrorists often try to create a smokescreen, inciting locals to target forces during operations. But, this video leaves little ambiguity on terrorist using locals to hamper counter terror operations.

• The young commander in his monologue dismissed the idea of democracy while calling everyone to turn towards Islam.

• My mother went to Saudi Arabia to make our lives better. She was promised 1,600 riyals a month, but the employer did not pay her even one riyal. When she asked for salary, the employer started harassing her. Unable to bear the harassment, she ran away from the employer’s house. But he brought her back to his house and pushed her from the third floor, fracturing both her legs.

• What went wrong? In an excellent new book, “Purifying the Land of the Pure,” Farahnaz Ispahani both recounts and laments Pakistan’s “descent” into what it has become today: unfree, undemocratic, intolerant and both a sponsor and victim of terrorism.

• Say what you will about President Harry Truman, but at least he didn’t leave the White House a suspiciously rich man. He also actually went home, to Independence Missouri, and moved into a modest house he didn’t own. It was the same house belonging to his wife’s family where he had lived with Bess (and his mother-in-law!) decades earlier.

• Flat broke, and unwilling to accept corporate board positions or commercial endorsements, Truman sought a much-needed loan from a local Missouri bank. For several years his sole income was a $113 monthly Army pension, and only the sale of a parcel of land he inherited with his siblings prevented him from nearly “being on relief,” as Truman allegedly stated. In the 1950s, perhaps almost entirely to alleviate Truman’s embarrassing financial situation, Congress authorized a $25,000 yearly pension for ex-presidents Truman and the much-wealthier Herbert Hoover.

• A Luxembourg appeals court has upheld the convictions but reduced the sentences of two former PwC employees who blew the whistle on rampant tax evasion. In 2014, it was revealed that Antoine Deltour and Raphael Halet passed confidential tax rulings, documenting widespread multinational tax avoidance, to journalists. The ICIJ published the documents as LuxLeaks, in a release that directly implicated the president of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker. Just this week, EU Competition Commisioner Margrethe Vestage has confirmed that the disclosures were justified.

• Deltour and Halet were convicted of theft and breaking secrecy laws, and Deltour was given a 12-months suspended prison sentence. Edouard Perrin, a journalist involved in the initial wave of disclosures, was one of the original defendants alongside the whistleblowers, but he was acquitted. All three rulings were appealed, and today an appeals court has confirmed the convictions but reduced Deltour’s suspended sentence to six months.

• Courts in Hawaii and Maryland ruled against the president’s executive order in another stinging rebuke of the president.

• The federal courts have dealt two more blows to President Trump’s ongoing attempt to ban Muslims from entering the United States. The two rulings, issued yesterday in separate lawsuits in Hawaii and Maryland, made clear that the president’s second Muslim ban executive order is just as unconstitutional as the first.

• The first blow came yesterday from a federal court in Hawaii. Just hours before the travel ban was scheduled to go into effect at 12:01 a.m. this morning, the court issued a ruling blocking the operative provisions of the executive order — both the ban against people from six predominantly Muslim countries and the provisions blocking refugee resettlement in the United States. The second ruling, in a case brought by the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center on behalf of clients including the International Refugee Assistance Project and HIAS, came just before 2 a.m. from a Maryland district court. That ruling also blocked the six-country ban.

• The breadth of the Hawaii ruling means that, for now, no part of the executive order can take effect without further input from the courts.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Commission and European consumer protection authorities will “take action to make sure social media companies comply with EU consumer rules,” the official said.

• Last month, we noted how New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Charter Communications for knowingly providing broadband service well below advertised speeds. After an initial first read I didn’t think much of the lawsuit (pdf), but upon closer inspection it provides some pretty damning evidence that Charter not only knowingly failed to provide decent service (and just didn’t care, since this is the uncompetitive broadband industry), but in some instances actively made connections worse for its own competitive advantage.

• The AG’s suit highlights how Charter manipulated data for a program run by the FCC to monitor consumer connection speeds. This program, co-operated by a UK outfit dubbed SamKnows, gives volunteers custom-firmware embedded routers to monitor connection quality and speed. The FCC was then using this data to name and shame ISPs that failed to deliver advertised speeds. The lawsuit highlights how Charter executives worked to intentionally deliver faster speeds to just these customers in order to trick the FCC into believing its network was performing better than it actually was.

• It’s 2017, and climbers can tweet from Mount Everest, astronauts can post YouTube videos from the International Space Station, and ocean explorers can live stream from the Mariana Trench. Considering the ability for technology to overcome those harsh environments, we see no reason that California can’t develop a way to ensure that youth in our state have secure and supervised access to the internet in juvenile detention and foster care programs.

• EFF is throwing its support behind A.B. 811, a California bill sponsored by Assemblymember Mike Gipson, that would establish that youth in custody have a right to “reasonable access to computer technology and the internet for the purposes of education and maintaining contact with family and supportive adults.” The bill would also establish the right of youth in foster care to have access to computers and the internet.

DRM

• While sales through shops increased 7% in 2016, ebook sales declined by 4%. It is the second year in a row that ebook sales have fallen, and only the second time that annual ebook sales have done so since industry bodies began monitoring sales a decade ago.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The OIN patent license and member cross-licenses are available royalty-free to any party that joins the OIN community.

Copyrights

• The coupling of a proportional representation electoral system and the steadfast campaigning of the Dutch Pirate Party means that there is a very real chance of seeing a Pirate elected to the Dutch Parliament (Tweede Kamer) with a second Pirate being an outside possibility.

• David A Elston, Pirate Party Acting Leader has already stated his (and our) strong support for our friends just across the sea and Mark Chapman, Pirate Party Spokesperson has previously written positively on the work of PPNL.

• And that rocky road to harmonizing Australian copyright law with the EU and America is being laid by the usual entertainment industry suspects, whose objections are familiar tropes. Music and entertainment groups are complaining that offering safe harbor protections to such unworthy entities as schools and libraries, along with websites like Google and Facebook, amounts to codifying piracy. That’s silly for all the reasons you should already know, but which can be best stated as it being quite dumb, and immoral, to saddle a third party with the guilt of a pirate just because it’s an easier and more lucrative target. Because that’s all this opposition amounts to: the desire to sue a school if a student infringes copyright. Or Google. Or a museum that provides internet access. This is what the entertainment industry wants to go to bat over.

• In addition, the hip-hop mixtape service notes that the labels, that are now suing, repeatedly reached out to them for promotions. This even happened after the lawsuit was filed last month.

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