● 03.21.17

● Links 21/3/2017: PyPy Releases, Radeon RX Vega, Eileen Evans at Linux Foundation

Posted in News Roundup at 2:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• China has long been both a huge lure and a thorn in the side for Microsoft. Massive piracy of Windows XP, a decade-long effort to replace Windows entirely with a home-grown Linux variant called Red Flag and an OpenOffice variant called RedOffice, and a ban on Windows 8 for government use following the leak by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden of information on National Security Agency spying all have combined to hinder Microsoft in the Chinese market. But now Microsoft—in partnership with the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group (CETC)—is preparing to reboot its relationship with Beijing, thanks to a modified version of Windows produced specifically for China, Dow Jones Newswires reports.

• When you install a major Windows 10 update, you may reboot to find some of your programs missing. Yes, Windows 10 may remove your programs without asking you–but you can get them back pretty easily.

• This is the takeaway from some people’s experiences with the “November update,” Windows 10’s first big update. Microsoft has refused to comment on this, but it seems like the update process is designed to remove incompatible programs. Here’s what’s going on, and what you can do about it.

Server

• That’s the key takeaway from a recent survey of 2,045 IT managers and professionals, released by Quali, an IT automation solutions provider. While most people in enterprises would say at this point that they have DevOps underway in some shape or form, achieving agility is another story.

• It’s only a matter of time before every major cloud vendor offers a version of Kubernetes as a service. Now it’s IBM’s turn.

• Wow has it been a whirlwind over the last ten years in the virtualization space. Where once Xen and then KVM sat on the pedestal, the baton has been passed to the projects revolved around containers. Names like Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos are most often mentioned. As is generally the case in the FLOSS arena, evolution is a constant. Therefore, if one is in the DevOps arena, it is time to familiarize yourself with containers if you have not already done so.

• One last point. The Chinese economy continues to expand faster than that of the US, and, depending on who you talk to, will reach the size of the US sometime between 2018 and 2028. Such an economy would be expected to field an HPC capability on par with that of the US. Furthermore, China and the US should both be able to maintain an indigenous and self-sustaining HPC capability for their own use, and it’s unreasonable to think either could prevent the other from doing so. In such a world, the US may no longer enjoy technological supremacy, but it can surely have the wherewithal to control its own future in HPC.

• When you think of the public cloud, the tendency is to focus on the big ones, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. They’re massive, dominating the public cloud skyline with huge datacenters filled with thousands of highly virtualized servers, not to mention virtualized storage and networking. Capacity is divvied up among corporate customers that are increasingly looking to run and store their workloads on someone else’s infrastructure, hardware that they don’t have to set up, deploy, manage or maintain themselves.

• For local development, go crazy. For real production use.. I think you should avoid this until you’re the size of business that someone else will do this for you. If this seems controversial do the math: include backing it up, patching it, keeping it highly available, the time spent not working on your differentiating features etc. There are plenty of datastore services available that will do all this for you and let you focus your limited time on your app, and they’re really very cheap when you consider the actual cost of running a production database. Write your app so that the cost of moving to your own database later if you need to is unlikely to be high. Managing a simple web app instead of managing a web app, a production database, a message queue etc is a big win.

Kernel Space

• Intel had already sent in a batch of feature updates to DRM-Next targeting the Linux 4.12 kernel and yesterday an additional feature pull was submitted of work to premiere in this next kernel series.

• For those following the development of the open-source VC4 driver stack that notably supports the Raspberry Pi graphics hardware, developer Eric Anholt has published another status update.

• As covered already, VC4 HDMI audio is coming to Linux 4.12 as a big milestone.

• On Friday, March 31, The Linux Foundation will kick off a new initiative. No, it’s not a new project, event, or training course, although there are plenty of those in store. Instead, the foundation will begin a monthly Twitter chat, called #AskLF, with leaders at the organization.

• At the same time that Docker offered to donate its containerd technology to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), CoreOS did the same with its competing rkt.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced that Eileen Evans, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Software and Open Source at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), has joined The Linux Foundation Board of Directors as an At-Large director. Ms. Evans had represented HP and then HPE from 2012 through 2016 on the Board as a Platinum director.

Graphics Stack

• 100 Linux patches amounting to over fourty thousand lines of code was sent out today for review in order to provide “Vega 10″ support within the Linux AMDGPU DRM driver.

• Adding Vega support to AMDGPU is a big task due to all of the changes over Polaris and other recent GPUs reports Phoronix.

• Immediately after announcing the last maintenance update to the Mesa 13.0 3D Graphics Library series, Collabora’s Emil Velikov published the second point release for the new Mesa 17.0 branch.

• Mesa 17.0.2 is here only two weeks after the release of the first maintenance update to Mesa 17.0, which is currently the most advanced stable branch of the graphics stack used by default in numerous Linux-based operating systems.

• Collabora’s Emil Velikov is announcing today the general availability of the sixth and last scheduled maintenance update for the Mesa 13.0 3D Graphics Library series for GNU/Linux distributions.

• Mesa 13.0.6 is here only to backport many of the improvements from the newest stable branch, Mesa 17.0, to the Mesa 13.0 series, which some of you are still using on your Linux distro. However, you should start migrating to Mesa 17.0 as soon as you read this.

• Last week an independent developer proposed replacing the build system of libdrm — the DRM library that sits between Mesa and the Linux kernel DRM — to using the Meson build system as a potential replacement to using Autotools. That has led to another colorful discussion around build systems.

• Dylan Baker’s RFC patches can be found on the dri-devel list and the discussion that ensued. He argues that the build system with Meson would be better since it’s written in Python, Meson makes use of Ninja rather than CMake, its syntax is arguably simpler, and it’s quicker. Dylan found that his build times dropped from 26 seconds to 13 seconds when going from Autotools to Meson. When making use of ccache, the build times dropped from 13 seconds to 2 seconds. He also mentioned he’s planning on porting Mesa’s Autotools/CMake build system over to Meson.

• These 100 patches add up to 40,000 lines of code and have been sent out today for review. The idea is that AMD will use them as the basis to provide “Vega 10″ support within the Linux AMDGPU DRM driver.

• More than forty thousand lines of updated code have been sent out with 100 little patches for AMD’s Linux graphics drivers so they can deliver Vega GPU support when the new architecture launches. Inside the latest drivers have appeared seven discrete Vega 10 device IDs.

• More than 100 patches for ADMGPU driver, including some much talked about support for Vega 10, were released by AMD’s Linux driver team yesterday.

Applications

• I can damn sure, managing bookmarks is one of the major/important tasks to everyone now a days. Everyone have different requirement and holding bunch of URL’s for their needs and keeping those in bookmarks.

• We all knows about bookmarks, usage, and how to do in web browser, especially in GUI mode. What about command-line? Most of us doesn’t know about this awesome utility which used to create bookmarks in command-line.

• Say hello to the flat-out coolest way to keep and eye on your desktop’s CPU load.

• Because as handy as tools like Indicator Multiload are, they lack a certain …badassery.

• Indicator DOOM is a CPU load indicator for Ubuntu that displays processor load using Doomguy‘s face from the iconic DOOM video game.

• I am pleased to announce PiCluster v1.7. In this release, I wanted to make PiCluster easier to use by having the Web Console handle most of the common configuration file changes. Not everyone enjoys editing json files including myself. Now let’s go over what is new in this release.

• Today, we have ample tools available for editing memos, letters, essays, books, presentation slides, and other documents on our computers. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage: on the one hand, if you don’t like a piece of software, you can simply move on to another one any time; on the other hand, a lot of these tools, especially proprietary software, are fully compatible with their own formats only. As a consequence, the more documents you have created with such a program, the less likely switching over to another solution will be possible without investing significant time, energy, and even money. This phenomenon is called vendor lock-in.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• When I was first introduced to Linux and the Open Source community gaming was an issue that users always complained about. Interested gamers always had to use wine or implement one workaround or the other.

• There were either not good enough drivers to run certain games on Linux or the games themselves weren’t available for the platform.

• Fast forward to 2017 and the story has changed. Linux gamers now have a variety of games they can choose from ranging from free to the relatively pricey ones.

• Today, I bring you a list of the 25 best games you can play on your Linux system.

• Valve have put out a small Dota 2 update that aims to improve performance on the new Ryzen processors from AMD.

• Jack Orlando: Director’s Cut [Steam], an adventure game published by Topware is the latest game of theirs to get a Wine-port on Steam.

• We saw signs of RPG Maker MV [Steam] coming to Linux early last year, but now it’s official. RPG Maker MV now has a Linux version and it can export Linux games.

• With the release of the 1.4.0 update, anyone who owns it now has access to the Linux version on Steam. So anyone wanting to make simple RPG games on Linux has access to a highly rated tool.

• If you were an early buyer of AMD Ryzen hardware, Valve has pushed out a Dota 2 game update with some Ryzen optimizations.

• Today’s Dota 2 update from Valve mentions, “Improved threading configuration for AMD Ryzen processors.” Presumably this is with better dealing of Ryzen’s new SMT capabilities for AMD processors.

• I am a massive fan of ‘Avorion’ [Steam] as this Early Access space sandbox has a lot going for it and it just got a major update. I am also considering setting up a GOL server for it!

• This new update will mean a re-design of your ships, so be warned. The flight model has been reworked and you now need to make use of three new blocks: Directional Thruster, Gyro Array, Inertia Dampeners.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s only been days since our latest release Goedel 2017.03 was announced, but KDE software updates fully roll in Chakra and we could not delay this any further. As always, simply upgrading your system after installation will provide you with the latest available software in our repositories.

• The most recent updates for KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users. All of these have been built against an important update of Qt to version 5.8.0.

• We are happy to announce the release of KDevelop 5.1! Tons of new stuff entered KDevelop 5.1. Here’s a summary of what’s new in this version…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It was high time that we overhauled our old GtkIconView-based overview grids. Their inability to reflow the thumbnails leads to a an ugly vertical gutter of empty space unless the window is just the right size. The other problem was performance. GtkIconView gets extremely slow when the icons are updated, which usually happens when content is detected for the first time and start getting thumbnailed.

Distributions

Reviews

• Most of the projects we talk about on DistroWatch are variants of Linux or, occasionally, one of the BSDs. However, there are other open source operating systems out there, smaller projects which rarely get attention because they have fewer developers or are not as rich in features. This week I would like to discuss a project that has been put together as a hobby, but which has a surprisingly rich feature set, especially when we consider the operating system appears to be mostly the work of one developer.

New Releases

• Terry Fage from the Koozali SME Server development team announced this past weekend the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Koozali SME Server 9.2 stable series of the server-oriented operating system.

• After informing us about the availability of a new build of his Arch Linux-based ArchEX GNU/Linux distribution, Arne Exton is today announcing the general availability of ExTiX 17.2.

• Read more

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Dominique Leuenberger from the openSUSE Project is informing the Tumbleweed community about the latest updates brought by a total of five snapshots during the week that passed.

Red Hat Family

• Software giant IBM on Tuesday collaborated with open source software solutions provider Red Hat that will provide the hybrid Cloud infrastructure to help customers efficiently run Cloud applications using OpenStack APIs.

• Red Hat and IBM announced a strategic collaboration today that’s aimed at helping enterprises benefit from the OpenStack platform’s speed and economics while more easily extending their existing Red Hat virtualized and cloud workloads to the IBM Private Cloud.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9. The latest update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 builds upon more than six years of enterprise-proven success, offering a more secure, stable and reliable platform for the modern enterprise and prioritizes features for critical deployments.

• RED Hat, Inc, a provider of open source solutions, announces the results of a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Red Hat, about the use of open source in digital innovation initiatives in the Asia Pacific region.

• The results, highlighted in the study Open Source Drives Digital Innovation revealed that majority of IT decision-makers in Malaysia are turning to open source in order to maximise their IT capabilities.

• The research surveyed 455 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers from nine countries in Asia Pacific. The insights gathered reflect that 76% of respondents in Malaysia regard open source as a cost-saving option whereas 24% consider it to be a strategic investment for their organisations.

• “Many anticipate that the pace of digital disruption will only pick up, causing wider and deeper impact on businesses, and every industry may soon find a digital competitor.

Finance

Debian Family

• DebConf17 will take place in Montreal, Canada in August 2017. We are working hard to provide fuel for hearts and minds, to make this conference once again a fertile soil for the Debian Project flourishing. Please join us and support this landmark in the Free Software calendar.

Derivatives

• The developers of the Tails amnesic incognito live system announced the availability of the third Beta release of the upcoming major Tails 3.0 operating system, which will be based on the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” OS.

• Patrick Emmabuntüs is informing Softpedia today about the immediate availability for download of the Debian-based Emmabuntus Debian Edition 1.02 operating system.

• The developers of the Debian-based antiX Linux operating system released today new Alpha builds of the upcoming antiX 17 series, the first public images based of Debian Stretch.

Devices/Embedded

• VersaLogic’s 125 x 85 x 37mm “Blackbird” offers Skylake CPUs, up to 32GB of DDR4, 3x mini-PCIe sockets, wide-range power, and MIL-STD-202G ruggedization.

• VersaLogic calls its dual-layer Blackbird an Embedded Processing Unit (EPU). Like the other VersaLogic EPUs we’ve seen, such as the Atom-based Osprey EPU, the Blackbird is a three-layer sandwich consisting of a COM Express module in the middle, a same-sized I/O interface board on the top, and a heat spreader on the bottom. Compared to the Osprey, the Blackbird has a lot more real-world ports, making it more SBC-like rather than a COM with SBC-like characteristics. The Blackbird is “supplied fully assembled and tested, including heat plate, ready to install in a system,” says Versalogic.

Phones

• For those curious what’s been happening with Jolla/Sailfish, the company put out a recap of their announcements and activities at the recent Mobile World Congress event.

• It’s been a while since any major developments have come out of Jolla, but they have continued investing in the Linux-based Sailfish OS and focusing their commercial work around licensing it to hardware partners rather than trying to bring more devices to market on their own.

Tizen

Android

• Since the first launch in 2008, the Android project has thrived on the incredible feedback from our vibrant ecosystems of app developers and device makers, as well as of course our users. More recently, we’ve been pushing hard on improving our engineering processes so we can share our work earlier and more openly with our partners.

• Android Wear provides an easy avenue for brands to slap their name on a Snapdragon 2100 chipset and a battery… and call it a smartwatch. And that’s what’s happening once again with American fashion brand GUESS. The company’s latest smart device entries are among its “Connect” line of watches, and they run Google’s Android Wear smartwatch operating system…

• Andy Rubin, a co-creator of Android, lost out on a $100 million investment from SoftBank as Apple deepened ties with the Japanese investor, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

• Rubin’s company, Essential Products, is reportedly planning to release a new high-end smartphone this spring, and SoftBank planned to market the phone in Japan, the Journal said. But Apple subsequently agreed to commit $1 billion to SoftBank’s Vision Fund, a move that “complicated” SoftBank’s investment in Essential Products, the Journal reported Monday.

Free Software/Open Source

• IBM on Monday unveiled the first enterprise-ready Blockchain as a Service offering based on The Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric version 1.0.

• IBM Blockchain, which lets developers quickly establish highly secure blockchain networks on the IBM cloud, is a transformative step in being able to deploy high-speed, secure business transactions through the network on a large scale, the company said.

• The platform offers the world’s safest Linux infrastructure, with tamper-responsive hardware security modules, a highly auditable operating environment, protection from insider attacks, and secure service containers, according to IBM.

• Open source technologies are great for organizations, but they’re far from perfect. As a matter of fact, many of the open source technologies in use today come with hidden costs and problems. This is according to a new report by SAS, which was created on a poll of 300 executives across the UK and Ireland.

• Today is the first official day of spring. With that said, Google wants us to look towards the following season — summer. You see, starting today, application entries are being accepted for Google Summer of Code 2017.

• If you’ve never heard of this program, please know that the search giant pairs students with organizations to get real-world experience working on an open source project during summer break. Google even pays them some money — it is not an unpaid affair. Pay, experience, and knowledge aside, participating will look excellent on a résumé.

• A new open source image encoder from Google, announced last Thursday, could help business websites load faster and create a more seamless experience for users. Announced via a blog post, the new algorithm is called Guetzli, and promises .jpeg files up to 35% smaller than other methods, the post said.

• According to the post, Guetzli means “cookie” in Swiss German. By using the encoder, businesses and professionals can shrink the file size of their images and graphics down, while maintaining quality, and browser and application compatibility, the post said.

• Managing the network could be a headache, especially when you don’t have the right tool. There are plenty of network monitoring tools available which lets you identify loopholes and bugs. Many of them are paid and several open source network management tools are also available.

• Instead of spending a fortune, it’s a viable choice to look for (free) open source tools, as might possible what you are looking for isn’t available with premium one. I have identified 12 best network monitoring and management software to ease IT admins jobs.

• 19 years ago on this day I released the first ever version of a software project I decided to name curl. Just a little hobby you know. Nothing fancy.

• 19 years ago that was a few hundred lines of code. Today we’re at around 150.000 lines.

Events

• This was not an everyday routine when I get up so early in the morning with my alarm clock bell at 6AM. Definitely it was not an usual morning. Thanks to Red Hat Pune site team to come up with such a fabulous initiative of University Connect. University Connect is an outreach effort in a nutshell. The Pune site team has figured out and short listed some good colleges in and around Pune, where interested speakers can go and reach out to the young, passionate crowd of students and share knowledge about Open Source, Fedora and many new technologies like OpenStack, Cloud, ManageIQ etc.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Open source projects are by their nature intended to be welcoming, pulling in contributions from many different volunteers. But in reality, open source and the tech industry in general often lack diversity. Speaking at the Open Source Leadership Summit in February, Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer Katharina Borchert told the crowd that working to bring ethnic, gender, and skill diversity to open source projects isn’t just the right thing to do because of moral grounds, it’s the right thing to do to make projects more successful.

• “The next generation of people coming online and potentially willing — even eager — to engage with us, to contribute to our work, they’re not going to look like us, they’re not going to talk like us, and they’re going to have different expectations,” Borchert said.

• Three billion of us now share the Internet. But our online experiences differ greatly, depending on geography, gender and income.

• For a software engineer in San Francisco, the Internet can be open and secure. But for a low-income, first-time smartphone user in Nairobi, the Internet is most often a small collection of apps in an unfamiliar language, limited further by high data costs.

• This undercuts the Internet’s potential as a global public resource — a resource everyone should be able to use to improve their lives and societies.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Licensing/Legal

• Having watched a fair number of people attempt to engage both the Open Source Initiative’s licensing evaluation community and the Apache Software Foundation’s legal affairs committee, I’d like to offer some hints and tips for succeeding when it’s your turn to conduct a legal discussion with an open community.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• The LittleRP 3D printer, an “affordable, open 3D resin printer” released in 2014, has received a full upgrade. The LittleRP2 introduces a configurable vat, an extended height option, additional controller shield options, added projector compatibility, and more new features and refinements.

• Apparently, the iCub open-source robot can be taught anything a 4-year-old can learn. I wonder if it can be taught to whine annoyingly, be unkind to its little sister, refuse to go to bed at night, wake up its parents too early in the morning, etc.

Programming/Development

• The PyPy team is proud to release both PyPy2.7 v5.7 (an interpreter supporting Python v2.7 syntax), and a beta-quality PyPy3.5 v5.7 (an interpreter for Python v3.5 syntax). The two releases are both based on much the same codebase, thus the dual release. Note that PyPy3.5 only supports Linux 64bit for now.

• For those making use of PyPy as a fast alternative Python implementation, new builds are out today for PyPy 2.7 and PyPy 3.5.

• Version 5.7 of PyPy features updates t both its Python 2.7 and 3.5 interpreters. The PyPy 3.5 release is currently considered beta quality and only supports Linux 64-bit.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• Representatives of Chilean civil society and Congress this week presented the Chilean health minister with a proposal urging the government to take advantage of international trade law and a newly passed congressional resolution to issue compulsory licences on high-priced drugs for hepatitis C and prostate cancer.

• The proposal was made under the advisement of Luis Villarroel, director of Corporación Innovarte, a non-governmental organisation in Santiago.

• Over the last few years, we’ve written a ton about “corporate sovereignty” provisions in trade agreements. Technically, these tend to be called “Investor State Dispute Settlement” or ISDS provisions, but I really believe that a decent part of the reason they’re called something so boring is to stop people from paying attention to just how nefarious these provisions truly are. One of the reasons we first started paying attention to these provisions — as they were showing up in agreements under negotiation, such as the TPP and TTIP — was following a story involving the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly demanding $100 million from Canada for rejecting two of its patents.

• The issue was that Canada had rejected these two patents because the company couldn’t prove that the patented drugs were actually useful. Eli Lilly claimed that Canada had no right to reject patents on that basis, arguing that it was a “dramatic” shift in how patents were reviewed, and thus it was “expropriating its property” and undermining the company’s “expected future profits.” Think about that for a second. By the time this case went to an actual tribunal, the amount that the company was demanding had ballooned from $100 million to $500 million. This battle has waged on for many years — and for Eli Lilly, this was a huge deal. Management at the company basically bet the company on continuing to get new patents, and any hiccup — even a rejection of patents for not being useful — could be a disaster for the company. The company even pushed to get Canada slammed during diplomatic proceedings in the infamous Special 301 Report for the USTR for daring to reject its patents — and the USTR complied.

• Members of the Chilean Congress and a group of 6 patients visited the Chilean Ministry of Health yesterday to ask that the government use its authority under Chilean law to end patent monopolies on the prostate cancer drug enzalutamide (U.S. brand name Xtandi) and on sofosbuvir-based combination drugs for the treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV).

• The patients and members submitted a petition (signatures here) that outlined the legal authority and public policy rationale for the grant of compulsory licenses on the patents for the drugs described in the petition. Those compulsory licenses would allow prescription drug manufacturers to produce affordable generic versions of the drugs, subject to a reasonable royalty.

• The petition was written by Chilean attorney Luis Villarroel, and signed by Luis and five members of civil society and patient groups, and four members of the Chilean Congress, including Diputados Giorgio Jackson, Karla Rubilar, Miguel Alvarado, and Gabriel Boric.

• Knowledge Ecology International was asked to provide technical advice on the petition.

• After placing fourth last year, Norway is now the world’s happiest country, according to the 2017 World Happiness Report, released on Monday. The Central African Republic was the least happy of 155 countries.

• The authors of the report found that a half-dozen socioeconomic factors explain much of the difference in happiness among countries, but that social factors play an underappreciated role. As evidence, they cite periods of substantial economic growth that were nonetheless matched by declining happiness in China and the United States, which ranked 14th.

Security

• OK, hands up, who knows what High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) is? It’s an archaic networking data framing protocol that’s used in modems, X.25, frame-relay, ISDN, and other now uncommon networking technologies. I know it because I used to work with them back in the day. You’ll get to know it now because a researcher discovered a security hole hidden within the Linux kernel driver that implements it.

• An old vulnerability was just discovered in the Linux kernel, potentially allowing hackers to gain privilege escalation, or cause a denial of service. The vulnerability was quickly fixed and there have been no signs of it in the wild, although that does not necessarily mean it went unnoticed.

• OpenSSH 7.5 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

• OpenSSH, the cross-platform and open-source 100% complete SSH 2.0 protocol implementation offering both SFTP server and client support was updated today to version 7.5.

• OpenSSH 7.5 comes three months after the release of OpenSSH 7.4 in late December 2016, and promises to be a maintenance update that addresses two important security issues, implements support for the “=-” syntax to make removing of methods from algorithm lists a lot easier, and fix numerous reported bugs.

• Linux Mint has been lambasted by some in the media for security problems over the last few years. But how accurate are such perceptions? Does Linux Mint really suffer from security problems or is it all much ado about nothing?

• A writer at DistroWatch wades into the controversy and examines some of the myths and misunderstandings about Linux Mint and security.

• Some of the more common misunderstandings I have encountered recently have involved the Linux Mint distribution. Mint has been a popular project in recent years and, with many people using the distribution and talking about the project, there is bound to be some mis-communication. In particular, most of the rumours and misunderstandings I have encountered have revolved around Mint’s security practises and history. I would like to clear up a few of the more common rumours.

• Some vendors respond to security issues faster than others. Last week, the 10th annual Pwn2own hacking challenge was hosted by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), with multiple groups of researchers taking aim at web browsers, operating systems and virtualization technology.

• Mozilla’s Firefox web browser was successfully exploited on March 16, the second day of the Pwn2own event. Researchers from Chaitin Security Research Lab were the only group to attack Mozilla Firefox, and earned $30,000 for demonstrating a new zero-day exploit. The day the exploit was demonstrated, the only thing publicly revealed about the exploit is that it made use of an integer overflow flaw in combination with an uninitialized memory buffer in the Windows kernel.

Defence/Aggression

• Beijing on Tuesday called for peaceful coexistence between Israel and an independent Palestinian state “as soon as possible”.

• In a meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Xi Jinping said a stable Middle East was in the interests of both China and Israel.

• Violence, loot, murder, muslim appeasement are high. WB Government Machinery and Police are being mute spectators on attacks against Hindus and Hindu festivals (recently at Dhulagarh and Kaliachak in West Bengal) by Jihadi forces.

• Speaking Hausa, Shekau ordered his fighters to remain steadfast, adding that the sect will not back down until Sharia is established in Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Mali.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• AMONG the trove of American intelligence agency documents released by Wikileaks this week is one that instructs the country’s spies on protocols to follow while travelling abroad. Some of these are specific to the CIA’s needs. (“Talk to CCIE/Engineering about your planned TDY timeline,” the document begins, adding such tidbits as “Breeze through German Customs because you have your cover-for-action story down pat.”) But others are just good common-sense business-travel tips—for spies and corporate sales managers alike.

• The first universal advice in the document, which appears to be designed for spooks visiting an operations base in Frankfurt, is this: “If you are using a personal credit card, be sure to call your credit card company and notify them of your travel to Germany.” That seems like sound guidance.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Indonesia is home to half the world’s tropical peat lands, and the catastrophe focused unprecedented attention on their importance. Despite being illegal, clearing peat land by fire remains widespread in Indonesia, as it is the cheapest way to clear land for agriculture and industry.

• [...]

• Subandi says he moved with his parents from the island of Java to Borneo in the early 1970s. Many of today’s peat land residents were moved there by the government [...]

• Hunt saboteurs were assaulted by members of the Middleton Hunt at their meet in Uncleby, North Yorkshire on Saturday 18th March. Riders from the hunt stole a video camera and two body cams, hit sabs on the head with whips, attempted to ride them down and jumped off their horses to continue the attacks. One female saboteur has cracked ribs after being crushed between two horses.

Finance

• He was commenting on revelations today in the Weekend Herald that Apple paid zero tax to the NZ Government in the past 10 years in a period when its sales in this country totalled $4.2 billion.

• Goldman Sachs will begin moving hundreds of people out of London before any Brexit deal is struck as part of its contingency plans for Britain leaving the European Union, the Wall Street firm’s Europe CEO said.

• “We are going to start to execute on those contingency plans,” Richard Gnodde, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs International, the European arm of the Wall Street bank, told CNBC on Tuesday.

• “For this first period, this is really the period as we put in place contingency plans, this is in the hundreds of people as opposed to anything greater than that,” he said.

• British Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger EU divorce proceedings on March 29, launching two years of negotiations that will shape the future of Britain and Europe.

• Donald Trump might have sunk to record levels of unpopularity across the Atlantic, but that hasn’t stopped 72 Brexiteer MPs from taking a leaf out of his playbook.

• The august Parliamentarians have come together to form a little corp of Trump-kin Mini-Mes by signing a letter lambasting the BBC for its coverage of Brexit.

• It claims, among other things, that the corporation’s “pessimistic and skewed reporting” risks undermining the project and damaging Britain in the process.

• “It particularly pains us to see how so much of the economic good news we’ve had since June has been skewed by BBC coverage which seems unable to break out of pre-referendum pessimism and accept new facts,” it opines.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Donald Trump could reverse recently announced cuts to education programmes if his wife and son moved out of New York’s Trump Tower and into the White House, figures show.

• Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has crossed a line by comparing Berlin’s government to the Nazis and he and other officials are no longer welcome in Germany, a senior ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday.

• The rebuke from Volker Bouffier, vice chairman of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, reflects growing exasperation over Erdogan’s assertions that Germany and other European powers were using Nazi tactics by banning Turkish political rallies in their territories.

• “Enough is enough,” said Bouffier, who is also premier of Hesse state where the financial capital Frankfurt is located. “Mr. Erdogan and his government are not welcome in our country, and that must be now be understood,” he told DLF radio.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A couple of weeks ago, a federal judge in Utah decided prior restraint was the best way to handle a recently-filed defamation suit against Honest Mattress Reviews by Purple Innovations, makers of the Purple Mattress.

• Purple’s lengthy filing contained numerous allegations of harm caused by Honest Mattress Reviews’ extended commentary on the white plastic powder covering every mattress Purple ships. It also alleged HMR was just a front for site owner Ryan Monahan’s brand management work with Purple’s competitor, Ghostbed. Rather than give HMR a chance to respond, the judge decided the review site could publish nothing further about Purple or the lawsuit. It wasn’t even allowed to refer to its previous rating of Purple’s mattress.

• Honest Mattress Review didn’t care much for this decision — one it had been given no chance to contest. It immediately posted an article about the case and offered to comply with the letter of the order, but perhaps not its spirit.

• Doing a sociolinguistics module last semester made me well aware of the power of language. We use the words we do to construct our own identities, and therefore language contributes to the shaping of society. This means that it can be used in harmful ways. Yet the beauty of language is in its variety and its flexibility, and therefore we should oppose any attempt to censor language.

• Alas, that is what Cardiff Metropolitan University has done. By banning the use of certain words, they are impinging on people’s right to use language in whichever way they choose. Freedom of expression is not just about being able to express any opinion, it is about being able to express that opinion in any way you choose. Cardiff Met are restricting this freedom and therefore, whilst well-meaning, this policy is actually a step away from a more liberal society.

• Cory said the treasurer gave away copies of The Record to residents coming into her office for them to read articles relating to Brockmann’s arrest, which is being adjudicated through the 42-2 District Court in New Baltimore. Sobczak said that he never told Obrecht to personally distribute The Record, but stands by her right to do so.

• Because abusing the DMCA process only goes so far, some reputation management entities have begun exploiting an inattentive legal system to push lawsuits past judges. In some cases, these suits have featured fake plaintiffs filing bogus libel lawsuits against fake defendants and using a fake affidavit to fraudulently obtain court orders requiring Google to delist URLs.

• Those engaged in this fraudulent behavior aren’t likely to get away with it for much longer. Paul Alan Levy and Eugene Volokh managed to track down the person behind one set of bogus lawsuits and get the presiding judge to take a closer look at the bogus documents he was being handed. Pissed Consumer has also been reporting on others using the same MO, and has headed to court to get these suits examined and tossed.

• The end of line for supposed reputation manager Richart Ruddie came at the hands of Volokh and Levy, with the judge granting discovery to the defendant after being apprised of the apparently fraudulent filings. Now that Richart Ruddie of Profile Defenders has been exposed, it looks as though he’s given up the fight. Levy reports Ruddie has settled anti-SLAPP claims brought against him and is paying restitution for his reputation mismanagement.

• YouTube has found itself fighting battles on two fronts this week.

• Advertisers have launched a concerted attack against the video-streaming platform for its devil-may-care attitude to extremist content. They argue it is too hard to guarantee that advertising spend won’t end up going to the likes of far-right group Britain First, and have decided to boycott the platform en masse until YouTube can confirm changes.

• In response, YouTube’s parent company Google has apologised, and promised a raft of changes to appease the big spenders, from better categorisation of hate speech to simpler, more powerful controls for advertisers. It’s also promised to hire “significant numbers of people”, on top of the thousands who already do the work, to review questionable content.

• At the same time, in a very different community, YouTube creators are lambasting the site after the discovery that its “restricted mode”, a feature intended to let schools, parents and libraries filter out content not appropriate for children, also removed a vast amount of LGBT content. Some videos from pop duo Tegan and Sara, who are gay, were hidden from view, as were videos from bisexual YouTuber NeonFiona – but only those which talked about her sexuality.

• Late last year, we wrote about the crazy case in which journalist Kurt Eichenwald was suing an anonymous Twitter troll, claiming that the troll had sent Eichenwald a flashing gif designed to cause some small percentage of epileptics to have a seizure. Eichenwald claimed that it had worked and he’d had a seizure on the spot. As we noted at the time, we’re no fans of Eichenwald. In our opinion, he’s an absolutely terrible journalist with a fairly long history of really weird issues, and a strange obsession with massively overselling stories. He has me blocked on Twitter and has indicated that he’s no fan of us either.

• [...]

• If you can’t see those, it’s a series of Direct Messages from the “@jew_goldstein” account, saying things like that Eichenwald “deserves to have his liver pecked out by a pack of emus.” “I hope this sends him into a seizure.” “Spammed this at [Eichenwald] let’s see if he dies.” “I know he has epilepsy.”

• [...]

• If you can’t see it, that’s the flashing gif that @jew_goldstein sent Eichenwald and it says “You Deserve A Seizure For Your Posts.” This was the same one that Eichenwald’s wife found on Kurt’s computer when she found him having a seizure. The affidavit includes a screenshot she took of his computer screen showing that exact gif. Oh, and also stored in Rivello’s iCloud? A screenshot of an edited Wikipedia page of Eichenwald, claiming that he’d died the day after the gif was set. And also screen shots of an article about epilepsy seizure triggers, and an article about how the police were trying to track down the troll.

• So that’s a lot of pretty damning evidence. As lawyer Keith Lee notes, it’s something of a miracle he was tracked down. Even though he took some fairly basic precautions to cover his tracks (fake account, Tracfone phone connection), he didn’t take that many and didn’t seem to realize how many other ways there were to track him down.

• Cuban filmmaker Carlos Lechuga has pulled an acclaimed film, based on repression against gay writers in the early years of the Revolution, from an upcoming presentation in New York after festival organizers banned it from official competition and instead categorized the screening as a special presentation.

• Australian Liberal Democratic Party Senator David Leyonhjelm has criticised the Government and the Australian Classification Board in a speech delivered to the Senate yesterday.

• The Senate crossbencher highlighted the recent case of Outlast II, which was refused classification late last week due to a rape sequence during one of the game’s cut-scenes.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Home Office has acknowledged that it is preparing to accept a landmark EU ruling from last year which restated that access to retained data must only be given in cases of serious crime, unlike the range of cases provided for under the new Investigatory Powers Act.

• When the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its judgment last December, the Home Office said it was “disappointed with the judgment… and will be considering its potential implications”.

• Among those implications was the requirement for a far higher bar to access the range of data which the government had made it a legal requirement for ISPs to store on their users, including prohibiting the police and public bodies from authorising their own access to this data. Instead the CJEU ruling requires that access requests receive prior authorisation by independent courts or similar bodies.

• The police watchdog is investigating allegations that a secretive Scotland Yard unit used hackers to illegally access the private emails of hundreds of political campaigners and journalists.

• The allegations were made by an anonymous individual who says the unit worked with Indian police, who in turn used hackers to illegally obtain the passwords of the email accounts of the campaigners, and some reporters and press photographers.

• Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, said that the section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows the NSA to collect information on foreign nationals is “instrumental” in providing U.S. political leaders with intelligence.

• Former CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden is denying allegations from a former Salt Lake City mayor that the NSA conducted a mass warrantless surveillance program during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah.

• In October 2016, the digital economy bill began its progress through the UK parliament, including, as a Guardian editorial noted, a big shift: when it becomes law, the public’s personal data will be shared across departments without specified safeguards.

• For some, this is an essential move towards making the government more efficient. Others are concerned that government departments will be able to pool data collected without having put in place robust privacy protections, and fear that public sector bodies may end up following the “data free-for-all” that exists in the private sector.

• The mobile phone company Three has experienced a fresh data breach after some customers logging into their accounts were presented with the names, addresses, phone numbers and call histories of strangers.

• Three said it was investigating a technical issue with its systems and urged those affected to contact its customer service department.

• One customer, Andy Fidler, told the Guardian he was presented with the data usage and full call and text history of another named customer when he logged in on Sunday night. Another, Mark Thompson, said on Facebook he received a call from a complete stranger who said she had logged on to her account and was shown his details.

• The new edict was distributed in an email described as “confidential” from the US transportation safety administration (TSA) on Monday.

• The requirement forbids passengers from bringing laptops, iPads, Kindles and even cameras larger than mobile phones into the cabin. All such devices must be checked.

• US authorities will no longer allow travelers from 13 African and Middle Eastern countries to bring computers and laptops into airplane cabins anymore, two news agencies have reported.

• Passengers traveling on certain U.S.-bound foreign airline flights will have to check electronic devices larger than a cell phone once U.S. authorities formalize a new ban in response to an unspecified terrorism threat, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday.

• A Minnesota judge has issued a warrant to Google to provide the local police with all data relating to anybody who searched for specific keywords. This is an enormous expansion of the concept of mass surveillance, and turns all previous concepts of search and seizure on their heads: no longer is a suspect subject to search, but the entire population is dragnetted without restraint.

• Cisco is warning of a new critical zero-day IOS / IOS XE vulnerability that affects more than 300 of its switch models.

• The company identified this highest level of vulnerability in its product while analyzing “Vault 7″ — a roughly 8,761 documents and files leaked by Wikileaks last week, claiming to detail hacking tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Civil Rights/Policing

• “It’s quite possible he remains in jail for failing to comply with an order he can’t comply with,” he said.

• Singaporean blogger Amos Yee blamed a U.S. judge for his extended incarceration in a U.S. jail, this after blaming US President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration executive order.

• In a phone call from jail, Amos Yee spoke to Han Hui Hui in what appears to be instructions on what he expects the activist community in Singapore to do for his release.

• The video was sent to TISG by Han Hui Hui after her telephone call with Amos Yee. The video is also uploaded on Youtube with the Prickly Porcupine handle.

• The fundamental problem facing managers is that productivity is hard to measure. Faced with the inability to measure productivity, managers may feel compelled to measure time spent working. Never mind that it’s counter-productive: at least it gives management control, even if it’s control over the wrong thing.

• It’s been a very long time since I last flew somewhere without my laptop. I actually am more productive than usual on planes, and I tend to use flying time to just focus in and get a ton of stuff done. I can’t even begin to explain how ridiculously frustrating it would be to find out that I wouldn’t be allowed to bring a laptop onto a plane, and yet it appears that our new Homeland Security overlords have put in place new restrictions on flights to the US from certain countries in the middle east barring tablets and laptops from the cabin (apparently no American carriers are impacted — just foreign ones). Passengers are being told to check such things (which is odd, since normally you’re not supposed to check lithium ion batteries…). Flights from 13 countries are being hit with this, and Homeland Security won’t give any further explanation beyond the usual “national security.” And, just this morning, the UK announced that it would be doing the same thing.

• Homeland Security has been hinting that this is due to some sort of specific threat — so it sounds like there’s intelligence around a planned attack using such a device. Perhaps then the extra precaution is sensible. But, once again, this feels like a form of overkill security theater: inconveniencing basically everyone (to extreme levels) based on the slight possibility of a very small number of bad actors. There has to be a better way. Every time one of these new restrictions is put in place, it not only completely inconveniences people, but it shows people that if they somehow convince the scaredy cats at DHS of some new type of threat, they can inconvenience people even more. It’s almost as if each additional inconvenience is impacting things way more than an actual exploding laptop or whatever might.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Despite being considered one of the technology capitals of the country, San Francisco and the Bay Area continue to suffer from a lack of broadband options — just like the rest of us sorry sods. If they’re lucky, most locals there still only have the option of one of two large ISPs: AT&T and Comcast. Both companies have a long, proud history of fighting competition tooth and nail, often by quite literally writing shitty state telecom law that ensures the status quo remains intact. Attempts to break through this logjam and bring faster, better broadband service to the city have seen decidedly mixed results.

• Like most areas, ultra-fast next-generation broadband in particular is notably lacking. Some estimates suggest that just 2.6% of San Francisco residents have access to gigabit broadband service. Sonic CEO Dane Jasper, whose company is also busy deploying gigabit services to the Bay Area, tells me he believes those figures are stale and gigabit penetration rates in the city are closer to 17%. And while Google Fiber had tinkered with the idea of bringing fiber to the city, the company’s pivot to wireless has left that added avenue of competition up in the air.

• Despite the rise of heavily-hyped-but-highly-scattered gigabit deployments, the broadband industry is actually seeing less competition than ever before across huge swaths of the country. Once upon a time, broadband “competition” consisted of an equally matched telco going head to head with the incumbent cable provider (if you were lucky). These days, most phone companies lack the finances or competitive motivation to improve lagging DSL speeds across their footprints — speeds that don’t even meet the FCC’s base definition of broadband (25 mbps).

• That’s resulting in a growing monopoly for the nation’s cable broadband providers, who have quietly been absolutely butchering phone companies over the last several years. Just take a look at the latest data from Leichtman Research, which notes that while cable broadband providers collectively added 2.7 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers last year, phone companies collectively shed roughly 600,000 broadband users.

DRM

• Ever since W3C decided to start working on a DRM proposal, there have been complaints from those who oppose DRM on principle. The work has continued regardless, with W3C director and HTML inventor Tim Berners-Lee arguing that—given that DRM is already extant and, at least for video, unlikely to disappear any time soon—it’s better for DRM-protected content to be a part of the Web ecosystem than to be separate from it.

Intellectual Monopolies

• But promoting innovation is only part of the Founding Fathers’ mandate — without enforcing those property rights, American competitiveness is at risk. A new administration with Lighthizer at the helm of U.S. trade policy, should help solidify recent gains with China and reinforce efforts to overhaul China’s IP system.

• This article will explore the key legal issues relating to intellectual property (IP) rights, traditionally only used in the real world, and their role in the virtual or augmented world. The basic legal position on including virtual or augmented versions of IP in virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) experiences is straightforward; if the creator of VR or AR content does not hold the requisite IP rights to include certain material in its content, it should seek permission from the owner of such rights.

• Blit argues that Canada’s patent regime has not contributed to domestic innovation, and therefore has not offset the potential welfare losses which strong IP rights may bring. It is countries which have the highest innovation intensity, Blit says, which advocate for stringent IP protections beyond the level that would maximise global welfare.

• Protection of Traditional Knowledge (TK) is a complex legal issue, owing to its dynamic nature, lack of definition and the difficulty in establishing ownership and the geographical origin of TK, as well as the absence of an appropriate scheme for its protection. Indigenous communities and traditional knowledge practitioners all over the world are greatly concerned about the increased biopiracy and usurpation by commercial entities. It is in this context that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in India formulated the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), which is an endeavor to preempt the grant of patents on India’s TK. TKDL contains approximately 2,08,000 formulations based on the traditional healing systems, such as Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga.

• TK Digital Libraries are the best defensive mechanism to prevent the patenting of TK already written down in ancient texts and manuscripts, although it still leaves scope for private appropriation of TK by making cosmetic improvements on it. India has signed access agreements with the European Patent Office and US Patents and Trademark Office, on the condition that secrecy be maintained and the database may be used as prior art for search and examination only. ‘Prior art’ is meant to encompass everything that has been published, presented or otherwise disclosed to the public as of the date of the patent and it includes documents in foreign languages disclosed in any format in any country. However, it is common sense that secrecy cannot be maintained on something that is classified as ‘prior art’.

• A United Nations Development Programme report released today places importance on transforming global institutions, and establishing fair trade and investment rules. The report calls for global reform of the intellectual property rights regime and investor protection regime. In addition, the report ranks countries on their human development level, putting Norway first followed by Australia and Switzerland.

Copyrights

• For far too many years, the video game industry struggled to assert its place as a true artform, one deserving of the kind of respect granted to movies, music, television, and literature. This has been a source of frustration to those of us who can recognize the powerful storytelling device that video games represent, as well as the way modern games contribute to art and social commentary. But by its nature as a relatively new medium, games have also struggled to preserve the industry’s history in the way more widely and permanently disseminated artforms have accomplished. And that’s where the gaming industry has taken a turn against its own artistic interests, often demonizing methods for preserving gaming history over intellectual property concerns. Emulators are the chief method at hand, where games that are ancient by gaming standards can be digitized and preserved for posterity, save for the threat of legal action over copyright infringement and the industry’s attempts to stave off these useful tools.

• Like so many issues in the intellectual property world, it’s not hard to understand the gaming industry’s consternation. There’s no doubt that many people use emulators simply to play games from old consoles and cabinets rather than pay for physical copies. Still, there’s also no doubt that these same emulators work to preserve the artistic output in the gaming realm. This was most recently evidenced in two games that might never have seen the light of day again, save for emulators.

• The copyright mistake at Concordia – a poetry centre scanned several books and posted them on the Internet without permission – has attracted considerable attention in the press and social media. Kate Taylor wrote a Globe and Mail column placing much of the blame at the feet of fair dealing, while I responded with a post yesterday that noted that no one claimed that the posting of the full-text books was permissible and that Concordia was an ill-advised target for fair dealing criticism given that it has a copyright collective licence with Copibec that compensates for copying on campus.

• Somewhat bizarrely, however, more than two years later and the case is still ongoing. According to the NZHerald, the case is now in its 29th month and is set to be the “longest, most drawn out investigation of its type.”

• The notion that online platforms should not be held responsible for the infringing acts of their users is something entrenched in law in many regions, including the United States and Europe.

• In Australia, however, a perceived drafting error in the implementation of the Australia – US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) means that safe harbor provisions only apply to commercial Internet service providers.

• Cable giants won another victory today in the legal battle over fully loaded Android TV boxes. The Federal Court of Appeal in Montreal quickly dismissed an appeal of an injunction banning defendants from selling the controversial devices.

• Cable companies and content producers Bell, Rogers and Quebec’s Vidéotron won the temporary injunction in June after launching a legal case to stamp out the Android box business.

• In a rather bizarre end to the long running copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Delhi University (DU) and a photocopy shop, the three publishers: Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Francis & Taylor who filed the lawsuit have announced that they are withdrawing the lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed by the publishers in 2012 to restrain DU and the photocopy shop from reproducing portions of copyright protected books for the purpose of creating course packs for students of DU. This had been the practice in DU and most Indian universities for several decades and was never challenged till the filing of this lawsuit. As a result, the lawsuit provoked protests and rallies by students and also rallies and a legal intervention by a society of academics and students who supported the university’s position that the educational use was covered by an exception in the Copyright Act, 1957.

• The treaty adopted almost four years ago in Marrakesh allowing for exceptions to copyright for the benefit of visually impaired people was hailed as a victory for human rights over private rights. However, as the European Union is preparing to ratify the treaty, according to a civil society group report, intense lobbying by the publishing industry is influencing the debate and might diminish the hard-gained ground in the treaty on copyright exceptions. The World Blind Union, meanwhile, said it finds the report “revealing and shocking”.

• Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra at Ficci Frames 2017, expressed that unless we build more theatres, piracy will be only way to take content out.

• Established in 1927, FICCI is the largest and oldest apex business organisation in India. Its history is closely interwoven with India’s struggle for independence, its industrialization, and its emergence as one of the most rapidly growing global economies, kick started the FICCI Frames 2017 today.

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