● 03.23.17

● Links 23/3/2017: Qt 5.9 Beta, Gluster Storage 3.2

Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I am aware that it is a while since I added any content to this site. To be honest I have been inundated with work and so I have had little opportunity to write anything worthwhile on this blog.

• I am learning new programming techniques for my day job and this has meant watching lots of Pluralsight videos and trying out what I have learned.

• This doesn’t mean that I have been completely idle when it comes to writing but most of the content I have written has been for Lifewire.com and I wanted to point you in the direction of these articles because I’m sure many of them will be useful to the readers of this site.

Desktop

• Since Microsoft has been under the stewardship of Satya Nadella, the software giant has been embracing Linux in various different ways – ‘new Microsoft, new attitude’, as we observed a year ago – but not when it comes to OneDrive, it would seem.

• As the Register reports, there are a good number of users complaining about the poor performance of the OneDrive web app on their Linux machines (or other non-Windows platforms like Chromebooks).

• The interesting point here is that when using a Windows PC on the exact same connection with the OneDrive app, everything runs smooth and fast.

• Ever since Satya Nadella took over the reins at Microsoft, the Windows giant has been talking up how much it loves Linux – but it appears this hasn’t trickled down to its OneDrive team.

• Plenty of Linux users are up in arms about the performance of the OneDrive web app. They say that when accessing Microsoft’s cloudy storage system in a browser on a non-Windows system – such as on Linux or ChromeOS – the service grinds to a barely usable crawl. But when they use a Windows machine on the same internet connection, speedy access resumes.

• Crucially, when they change their browser’s user-agent string – a snippet of text the browser sends to websites describing itself – to Internet Explorer or Edge, magically their OneDrive access speeds up to normal on their non-Windows PCs.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.10.5 kernel.

• All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.10.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

• In a recent paper accepted at 13th International Conference on Open Source Systems, we study code authorship in a large and long-lived system — the Linux kernel. Our goal is to identify authorship parameters from the Linux kernel evolution history, as well as interpret why they appear as such. We also check whether those parameters apply to the subsystem level, allowing us to assess their generality across different parts of the kernel.

• Tuning the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel feels like a never-ending process. While it’s been around for years and continues to be refined, for some Intel CPUs on some workloads, the CPUFreq scaling driver leads to be better performance and even Intel’s own Clear Linux distribution is using CPUFreq by default. With Linux 4.12, more intel_pstate revisions are taking place.

Graphics Stack

• Seventeen more “DC” display code patches were published today for the AMDGPU DRM driver, but it’s still not clear if it will be ready — or accepted — for Linux 4.12.

• AMD developers posted 17 new DC (formerly known as DAL) patches today to provide small fixes for Vega10/GFX9 hardware, various internal code changes, CP2520 DisplayPort compliance, and various small fixes.

• Peter Hutterer has announced the new release of libinput 1.7.0 as the input handling library most commonly associated with Wayland systems but also with Ubuntu’s Mir as well as the X.Org Server via the xf86-input-libinput driver.

• Building off the work laid by Timothy Arceri and others for enabling a TGSI (and hardware) shader cache in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as R600g TGSI shader cache due ot the common infrastructure work, the Nouveau driver is now leveraging it to enable the TGSI shader cache for Nouveau Gallium3D drivers.

• Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan Linux driver is prepping support for the experimental VK_KHX_multiview extension.

• Key Intel Vulkan driver contributor Jason Ekstrand has published his initial patches for VK_KHX_multiview support within the ANV code-base. This also includes SPIR-V support for the related SPV_KHR_multiview extension.

• A few days ago we reported on Ubuntu’s Mir now supporting drag and drop while now another important desktop feature has come to Ubuntu’s Mir abstraction layer, MirAL.

• Synopsys has been working on some DRM core infrastructure patches for better handling of HDMI 2.0+ support by DRM drivers.

Applications

• If you are into game development, video editing, or 3D modeling as a professional or a hobby, then Blender is a tool you should definitely look at. Blender is a FOSS solution/alternate to many commercial tools that are available and it is able to strongly match most of these commercial tools. Blender is a cross-platform application which means you can not only run it on Linux but also on Windows and MacOS. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline, anything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and game creation.

• Meteo-qt is a Python 3 and Qt 5-based application for Linux desktops that displays weather information in desktop panels and desktop notifications, and a 6-day weather forecast in its own window.

• For this article, I thought I’d introduce another chemistry application—specifically, BKChem, a free chemical drawing program. As opposed to many other chemistry applications, BKChem provides both a nice GUI for constructing molecules and a set of chemical analysis tools to look at the properties of the newly constructed molecule.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard is pleased to announce today about the immediate availability of what it would appear to be one of the last snapshots towards the Vivaldi 1.8 stable release of the Chromium-based web browser.

• “We are very close to the 1.8 final now. Please continue to inform us of any nasty regressions since 1.7,” said Ruarí Ødegaard, Linux QA and Testing, in the release announcement for Vivaldi Snapshot 1.8.770.38, which looks like it rebases the web browser on Chromium 57.0.2987.111.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine Staging development team announced today the release and immediate availability of the Wine Staging 2.4 milestone, which comes about two weeks after the previous maintenance update.

Games

• I took a look at Kona [Steam] while it was still in development, but now Kona is out I attempted a full playthrough, but I found game-breaking bugs.

• This week marked the roll out of Serious Sam Fusion 2017 into public beta first up with Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter and soon to be followed-up by The Second Encounter and Serious Sam: BFE. The Fusion 2017 update is interesting as it brings these classics Vulkan support, 64-bit only, and other engine improvements.

• If you’re the only Linux gamer to not own the super rad Rocket League, here’s your chance. A high-torque melee mash-up of various different genres, Rocket League launched on Linux last year.

• The massively popular Rocket League sees the start of its new competitive season today and brings with it a whole range of tweaks and new content in its latest update.

• There’s an interesting bug in the Linux CPU governor that will actually bring down performance in Vulkan games.

• You might end up seeing jerking or micro-stutter, far more than you would in OpenGL games. The issue is that when using OpenGL in games, you’re generally taxing a single core of your CPU due to less multi-threading. With Vulkan spreading the load more, your CPU isn’t being used so much.

• It has been a while since we officially spoke to Feral Interactive [Official Site] about their Linux ports, with the last time being in June 2014. It’s time to get reacquainted and see where things stand right now.

• For those looking for a free software turn-based strategy game, the open-source Battle for Wesnoth project remains under development.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Xfce desktop environment for Linux may be fast and flexible — but it’s currently affected by a very serious flaw.

• Users of this lightweight alternative to GNOME and KDE have reported that the choice of default wallpaper in Xfce is causing damaging to laptop displays and LCD monitors.

• And there’s damning photographic evidence to back the claims up.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Now that Qt 5.9 is getting closer, let’s take a look at a minor but immensely useful improvement to the basic OpenGL enablers that form the foundation of Qt Quick and the optional OpenGL-based rendering path of QPainter.

• The first Qt 5.9 tool-kit beta snapshot is now available for testing as the next feature release for this widely-used, cross-platform toolkit.

• This isn’t the formal Qt 5.9 beta but rather a snapshot to encourage testing and weed out any potential blocker bugs ahead of the formal 5.9 beta release in the near future.

• Ryou is the amazing artist from Japan who made the Kiki plastic model. Thanks to Tyson Tan, we now have an interview with him!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In case you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a new GNOME release – 3.24! The release is the result of 6 months’ work by the GNOME community.

• At the GTK hackfest in London (which accidentally became mostly a Flatpak hackfest) I’ve mainly been looking into how to make D-Bus work better for app container technologies like Flatpak and Snap.

• The GNOME Project has released the latest stable version of their open source desktop environment. GNOME 3.24, codenamed Portland, is here after 6 months of development and 28459 changes. Some of the biggest features of GNOME 3.24 are Night Light, improved notifications, new Recipes and Games application, two GPU support, etc.

Distributions

New Releases

• Alejandro Diaz informs Softpedia today about the general availability of Escuelas Linux 5.2, the newest and most advanced version of his Bodhi/Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution designed for educational purposes.

• Suman Chakravartula from the Rockstor project, an open-source NAS (Network-attached storage) solution using the Linux kernel and Btrfs file system, announced the general availability of Rockstor 3.9.0.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• So, to summarize: openSUSE Tumbleweed is a good, solid, stable Linux distribution with a wide range of desktops available. It is not anything particularly exotic or unstable, and it does not require an unusual amount of Linux expertise to install and use on an everyday system. To make a very simple comparison, in my experience installing and using Tumbleweed is much less difficult and much less risky than using the Debian “testing” distribution, and it is kept much (much much) more up to date than openSUSE Leap, Debian “stable”, Linux Mint or Ubuntu.

• I don’t say that to demean any of those other distributions. As I said at the end of my recent post about point-release vs. rolling-release distributions, if your hardware is fully supported by one of those point-release distributions, and you are satisfied with the applications included in them, then they are certainly a good choice. But if you like staying on the leading edge, or if you have very new hardware which requires the latest Linux kernel and drivers, or you just want/need the latest version of some application (in my case this would be digiKam), then openSuSE could be just what you want.

• Google Summer of Code is an annual program which awards stipends to university students to write code and learn about open source development in their summer break! Accepted students work with a mentor and become a part of the open source community.

• In last year’s edition, Ana Maria worked on a project to improve the schedule of the Open Source Event Manager. We’re proud to announce that Ana Maria will participate as a mentor again. If you’re interested in web development and Ruby on Rails, check out the projects around OSEM.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.2 addresses an inherent challenge with network attached storage (NAS) around scaling metadata-intensive operations, particularly with files under a few megabytes. These improvements to metadata operations can benefit storage of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform registries. Container registries, the heart of a container platform, are critical to resident applications and need highly elastic, durable storage. In addition, faster metadata-intensive operations can improve day-to-day operations by as much as 8x according to Red Hat performance data, increasing the responsiveness of the storage system at scale and improving the overall end-user experience.

• Red Hat has 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 US government evaluated configuration and vulnerability scanner for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7-based systems.

• OpenStack, an open source platform for private clouds, has yet to gain broad acceptance in enterprises smaller than the Fortune 100. So OpenStack provider Red Hat is turning to IBM for help in widening the technology’s appeal.

• Red Hat announced this week that IBM would offer its OpenStack software through the IBM public cloud. The hosted option for the Red Hat OpenStack Platform lets IBM handle the technical challenges that come with deploying and managing the technology.

• Red Hat is not the only private cloud option in the IBM Cloud. Companies could also choose IBM’s Bluemix platform or VMware technology. Therefore, the latest offering “is for people that want OpenStack in a hosted model, and, secondly, want a Red Hat flavor of OpenStack,” said Gary Chen, an analyst at IDC.

Finance

• Red Hat Inc . RHT is scheduled to report fourth-quarter fiscal 2017 results on Mar 27. In the last quarter, the company delivered positive earnings surprise of 13.51%. On an average, the company has delivered a positive earnings surprise of 8.74% in the trailing four quarters.

Fedora

• A casual slip in conversation that I would be attending a conference spiraled into a Fedora community booth and a PatternFly speech related mission. As a result, I went to Rolling Scopes to find out what these developer types thought about Fedora and also to present PatternFly. PatternFly is an open source project with a community of designers and developers collaborating to build a UI framework for enterprise web applications.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Server is an open source platform that does more than you might think. With its ability to serve as an internal company server or to scale all the way up and out to meet enterprise-level needs, this operating system can do it all.

• This smart person’s guide is an easy way to get up to speed on Ubuntu Server. We’ll update this guide periodically when news and updates about Ubuntu Server are released.

• This graph represents Google search volume for Ubuntu (the OS) from 2004 until now, 2017.

• Looking at the image it us hard to not conclude one thing: that interest in Ubuntu has peaked.

• A simple library update turned into a white-knuckle ride for Ubuntu sysadmins, who have lit up Reddit and StackOverflow to complain that their ‘net connections went TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Usual Performance).

• The guilty code is an upgrade to libc6 which broke the getaddrinfo() function in Ubuntu’s DNS resolver code.

• Because it auto-installed as an unattended upgrade, many of the comments in this Reddit thread came from people burned by the bug when they arrived at work in the morning.

Devices/Embedded

• As usual, last week’s Embedded World show in Nuremberg, Germany was primarily focused on commercial embedded single board computers (SBCs), computer-on-modules, and rugged industrial systems for the OEM market. Yet, we also saw a growing number of community-backed maker boards, which, like most of the commercial boards, run Linux. The new crop shows the growing diversity of hacker SBCs, which range from completely open source models to proprietary prototyping boards that nevertheless offer low prices and community services such as forums and open source Linux distributions.

• Diamond’s 3.5-inch “Venus” SBC offers an Intel 6th Gen CPU, -40 to 85°C support, up to 20GB of ruggedized RAM, and mini-PCIe and PCIe/104 OneBank.

• The purpose of the gathering was to get the ball rolling for the development of a real desktop based on ARM. The PC will likely be developed by 96boards, which provides specifications to build open-source development boards.

• The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the heart of what the World Economic Forum has identified as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an economic, technical, and cultural transformation that combines the physical, digital, and biological worlds. It is driven by such technologies as ubiquitous connectivity, big data, analytics and the cloud.

Phones

Tizen

• Color Surge is a game where you have to swipe and slide. The developer, Joseph Guy, has currently made no other games or apps, but this is a really good first game. The objective is simple, it’s like a mix of 2048 and a match game- when you swipe to move the blocks in the direction up, down, left or right you move entire column or row as long as the blocks have space in front of them.

Android

Curious to see what’s new in Android O? Here are five features from the latest developer preview of Android.

• Its now twenty years from the first fixed-mobile service bundle which launched the whole revolution of digital convergence centered around mobile. There had been digital convergence prior to mobile already on the fixed-landline-internet side but digital convergence without mobile would be… pretty pointless by now. Anything we now look at, from Big Data to IoT to Augmented Reality to Cloud Computing etc is dependent on a mobile convergence element. So lets take a stroll back through recent mobile tech history and see how we got here and where we are now going.

• Google this week released a developer preview of Android O, the next version of its mobile operating system the includes several mostly incremental feature upgrades over the currently available version Android N also known as Nougat.

• Key among the upgrades are those that are designed to improve battery life, application notifications and the ability for users to store data such as addresses, user names and passwords for auto filling login and other repetitive information.

• The Developer Preview comes with an updated software development kit that developers can use for testing the OS on devices like the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P and Google Pixel devices.

• The mass migration from the dying CyanogenMod to its spiritual successor LineageOS is happening. (Here’s all the info about the whys and the hows.) Rooted Android users in the millions, or at least hundreds of thousands, are moving over to the open-source project that, just like CyanogenMod, offers a bloat-free, flexible version of the stock Android experience.

• The great news is the you can make the switch fairly seamlessly with the LineageOS experimental build. I’ll be using TWRP recovery, but the general process will be similar on other recovery tools.

• Nubia is a ZTE sub-brand that pitches itself to the flagship end of the phone-buying spectrum that tends to sell direct to consumers, and focuses on its Chinese homeland. In recent times, the brand has reached into India and the United States.

• And for fans of actual football, the company likely paid a metric truck-load of cash to allow it to sell Cristiano Ronaldo-etched phones — whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise to the individual.

• Returning to the device in question, and the Z11 is hardly the newest handset around. At the time of writing, it is around six months old, which means that when I say it looks like an iPhone, I specifically mean an iPhone 6S.

• Apple and Google had a bunch of news yesterday, and today it’s Samsung’s turn…. although I doubt the company is happy that so much of the S8 is leaking out before launch.

Free Software/Open Source

• Nobody likes an impossibly long URL.

• They’re hard to decipher. But sometimes, between a deep directory structure on a site, plus a large number of parameters tacked on to the end, URLs just begin to get unwieldy. And back in the days before Twitter added their own link shortener to their service, a long URL meant taking precious characters away from your tweets.

• Analyst house IDC predicts that by 2018, as many as 70 percent of siloed digital transformation initiatives will ultimately fail because of insufficient collaboration, integration, sourcing or project management.

• MPLS, SDN and NFV World Congress — The open source ONAP initiative is set to release code to the public in the next few weeks, according to Oliver Spatscheck, an AT&T Fellow and director of inventive science.

• Many companies buried under data muck lack a plan to clear a path to monetization. The first step to digging themselves out is through unified governance, according to Seth Dobrin, Ph.D. (pictured), vice president and chief data officer of IBM Analytics.

• In his work with companies in the past, much time was wasted trying to cut corners around governance, Dobrin said. “We spent the first six months building a data strategy trying to figure out how to avoid data governance,” he explained. “You need to embrace data governance as an enabler.”

• Reaction Commerce has announced the general availability (GA) release of its breakthrough, real-time and completely open source commerce platform, designed to build, run and scale modern digital stores.

• Offering the simplicity that businesses expect, along with the reliability, customization and scalability that larger retailers and brands require, Reaction Commerce enables designers, developers and entrepreneurs to create transformative ecommerce experiences.

• Starting today, npm Orgs will be available for free to help users organize and collaborate on public code.

• The demand for software applications with baked-in cognitive and data science technology is raising expectations of what a developer must bring to the table. Open-source Application Programming Interfaces lower the “concept count” needed, but composing them into next-gen apps will take practice, according to Angel Diaz (pictured), vice president of cloud architecture and technology at IBM.

• “The developer is becoming a cognitive developer and a data science developer in addition to an application developer, and that is the future,” Diaz said.

• Dell appears to be using Coreboot on some of their modern Intel Atom motherboards paired with the Intel FSP and TianoCore.

Events

• There has been an evolution in communications as well as in open source. This evolution has brought open source, which was at arm’s length from commercial products, to what now seems to be a very cooperative relationship. Chris King, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Oracle Communications, discusses the evolution and open source and the maturation of the cloud.

• The local hackerspace in Tirana, Albania might be small, but they make up for size in spirit. During the weekend of March 18-19, 2017, the Open Labs Hackerspace organized the first-ever, 48-hour “open source” hackathon focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

• The UN Sustainable Development Goals are 17 objectives identified by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to build a better world, starting in our own communities.

SaaS/Back End

• Following the strong wake created by the Fail Whale, Twitter created a life raft in the form of stateless containerized micro services. In just a few years, they’ve scaled to hundreds of teams running thousands of services on tens of thousands of hosts and in hundreds of thousands of containers.

• Ian Downes is engineering manager for the compute platform team at Twitter. His team of about 10 engineers and a few other staffers buoys a platform providing container infrastructure to much of the stateless services powering twitter.com and its advertising business. Downes spoke recently at Container World on “Twitter’s Micro Services Architecture: Operational & Technical Challenges.”

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• The FreeNAS Mini XL was also added, aimed at bringing enterprise-grade storage technology to the small office and home office user

• The latest DRM/graphics-related porting effort by François Tigeot in the DragonFly space is bringing over the vga_swticheroo module from the Linux kernel.

• François Tigeot continues doing a good job porting Linux DRM drivers over to DragonFlyBSD and getting them close to the state where they are with the mainline Linux Git tree. His latest effort is about getting VGA-Switcheroo working on DragonFly.

Public Services/Government

• Crunchy Data — a leading provider of trusted open source PostgreSQL and enterprise PostgreSQL technology, support and training — is pleased to announce the publication of a PostgreSQL Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), making PostgreSQL the first open source database with a STIG. Crunchy Data collaborated with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to evaluate open source PostgreSQL against the DoD’s security requirements and developed the guide to define how open source PostgreSQL can be deployed and configured to meet security requirements for government systems.

• Open-source code platforms — in part, because they’re often free — have long been a popular choice for digital service creation and maintenance.

• In recent years, however, some agencies have turned to low-code solutions for intuitive visual features such as drag-and-drop design functionality. As Forrester Research notes, low-code platforms are “application platforms that accelerate app delivery by dramatically reducing the amount of hand-coding required.”

Licensing/Legal

• The reasons that organizations use Open Source Software (OSS) are many and varied. It speeds development, lowers costs, provides flexibility, and facilitates innovation — all of which add up to a competitive advantage for the organization.

• But there are also challenges and legal risks involved when companies shift from a development model based on custom, in-house development to one based on assembling open source components and coding only the parts that are truly unique to an application.

• In the previous post, we covered six operational challenges that organizations face using OSS.

• In this final post of our series, we’ll review the legal risks and the spectrum of open source licenses involved.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• The latest issue of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine features a special report on open-source robotics hardware and its impact in the field. We’ve seen how, over the last several years, open source software—platforms like the Robot Operating System (ROS), Gazebo, and OpenCV, among others—has played a huge role in helping researchers and companies build robots better and faster. Can the same thing happen with robot hardware?

Programming/Development

• I’m a huge fan of GDB and DDD, but for anything beyond basic breakpoints, I’ve found myself wading through too much user documentation. What if I want a consistent conditional breakpoint, even if I add or remove earlier code? Never mind setting an initial breakpoint, then adding a data-dependent watchpoint… already, the terminology is getting thick. There has to be a better way.

Leftovers

• On 19 March 1977, the world changed, after which there was a long uncomfortable silence. The occasion was the first public screening of Eraserhead, the feature debut of David Lynch, at the Filmex festival in Los Angeles. It was not a hot ticket. The film arrived with little advance publicity at the only festival to accept it. The screening took place at midnight, drawing a modest crowd who dutifully watched for the next two hours (the film was then longer than the 89 minutes it became). When it ended: nothing. But no one left either. Just silence. Then, finally, applause.

Science

• 44 Pages is currently on the film festival circuit, with upcoming dates in Dallas, Cleveland, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Future screenings can be found on the film’s official website.

• [...] researchers with Japanese chemical manufacturer Kaneka Corporation have built a solar cell with a photo conversion rate of 26.3 percent, breaking the previous record of 25.6 percent. Although it’s just a 2.7 percent increase in efficiency, improvements in commercially viable solar cell technology are increasingly hard-won.

Health/Nutrition

• On Tuesday, the Texas Senate advanced a bill that would enable doctors to lie to pregnant patients about fetal deformities in order to coercively dissuade them from choosing to have an abortion. Specifically, SB 25 eliminates withholding information regarding fetal health as a cause of action in so-called “wrongful birth” lawsuits, which prevents parents from pursuing financial damages.

• Ongoing government noncompliance and backroom deals halt any progress the city could be making to limit the effects of the crisis, which makes even good news like the EPA’s $100 million grant for infrastructure improvements fall a little flat. The deeply flawed emergency management law, under which both Flint and Detroit’s crises emerged almost overnight, is still on the books.

• The UNFPA would like to see more doctors that are trained in treating the effects of FGM, says Nafissatou J. Diop, the Senior Advisor for the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on FGM, but for the moment they are putting their scarce resources towards eliminating the practice altogether. “We want to focus on the girls who have not yet gone through it, to make sure that they are the priority.”

• This week (20-24 March), a new round of negotiation of the free trade agreement (FTA) between Mercosur and the European Union (EU) is taking place in Argentina. For almost two decades, the negotiation of bilateral trade agreements (FTAs), outside of the multilateral international institutions, has been part of the strategy of high income countries to extend the monopolies of major pharmaceutical companies, through intellectual property and regulatory measures. Will the Mercosur/EU FTA have consequences on access to medicines in Latin America countries? After the release of the draft agreement by the European Commission, and through projections made on HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and cancer medicines, we tried to evaluate the impact of one of the TRIPS-plus measures of the Mercosur/EU FTA on the prices of medicines in Brazil. Per our calculations, an additional USD 444 million would be necessary to be spent by the public health system for the purchase of 6 medicines alone[1]!

Security

• A 15-year-old flaw in every version of Windows right from XP to Windows 10 allows a malicious attacker to take control of a system through the anti-virus software running on the system.

• Devops isn’t simply transforming how developers and operations work together to deliver better software faster, it is also changing how developers view application security. A recent survey from software automation and security company Sonatype found that devops teams are increasingly adopting security automation to create better and safer software.

Defence/Aggression

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan warned Europe that its behavior will put its citizens at risk in other parts of the world, the AFP reported Wednesday.

• “If you [Europe] continue to behave like this, tomorrow in no part of the world, no European, no Westerner will be able to take steps on the street safely and peacefully,” Erdogan said during a speech in Ankara.

• The warning was another sign of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between the EU and Turkey, which soured over some countries’ refusal to allow Turkish government officials to campaign in European cities ahead of a referendum on expanding the president’s powers. On Tuesday, Turkey announced that it is canceling all planned rallies in Germany in the run-up to the referendum on April 16.

• Last July a stolen truck driven through a Bastille Day parade in Nice killed 86. The strikes appear inspired, if not actively commissioned, by Isis in Iraq and Syria.

• In November a student used a vehicle and knives to injure 13 on a campus in Ohio, in the US. His motives and allegiance are less clear.

• Such attacks are not unprecedented, but have become much more numerous in recent years.

• He added: “Terrorism is a problem that involves Europe as a whole. Don’t forget what happened in Paris, Nice and Berlin. If this was only a Brussels problem, it would have been solved.”

• A shotgun and several bladed weapons have been found in the car of a man who tried to drive at high speed through a busy shopping street in Antwerp, forcing pedestrians to jump out of the way.

• The federal prosecutor’s office said the car was intercepted at the port docks and a Frenchman living in France was arrested.

• The bomb squad was brought in and the authorities raised security in the centre of town, in places where people normally gather.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• There are no less than 16 different intelligence agencies in the United States. In 2017, they will cost US taxpayers some $70 billion (65 billion euros) – roughly twice Germany’s overall annual defense budget. The actual distribution of that sum among US intelligence services is classified, but revelations brought to light by Edward Snowden in 2013 suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) receives the lion’s share. In 2013, that sum was around $15 billion. Now the CIA, a highly funded agency tasked with gleaning state secrets from other countries, has a problem keeping its own secrets: On March 7, the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks began publishing CIA documents under the name “Vault 7.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• It won’t cost automakers nearly as much as they say it would to fit new cars with carbon-saving technology over the next decade, a nonprofit transportation research group says.

• The survival of the Great Barrier Reef hinges on urgent moves to cut global warming because nothing else will protect coral from the coming cycle of mass bleaching events, new research has found.

• The study of three mass bleaching events on Australian reefs in 1998, 2002 and 2016 found coral was damaged by underwater heatwaves regardless of any local improvements to water quality or fishing controls.

• Interestingly, a high-fat diet, or direct stimulation of these cells with a saturated fatty acid called palmitic acid (the main component of palm oil) increased their ability to spread.

• The region has seen several recent examples of sudden ‘craters’ or funnels forming from pingos after what scientists believe are caused by eruptions from methane gas released by the thawing of permafrost which is triggered by climate change.

• Norway is leading the way for the transition to zero emission electric cars.

Finance

• Theresa May and Philip Hammond have warned the EU that if they don’t like the Brexit deal, they could turn the UK into a tax haven. The truth is that being ‘offshore’ means being unfair and undemocratic – and you still pay tax

• The average FTSE chief executive earns 386 times more than a worker on the national living wage, according to an analysis published by the Equality Trust as it steps up its campaign for new government rules to expose pay gaps.

• As Techdirt has reported, the election of Donald Trump has turned the world of US trade deals upside-down. The US officially pulled out of TPP, although some still hope it might come back in some form. TAFTA/TTIP seems to be on ice, but Trump’s choice for US trade representative has just said he is open to resuming negotiations, so it’s not clear what might happen there (or with TISA). Against that confusing backdrop, the European Union has been quick to emphasize that it is in favor of trade deals, and is keen to sign as many as possible, presumably hoping to fill the economic and political vacuum left by the US.

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• But the worst aspect of JEFTA is not that it’s probably not worth the effort, but that the EU and Japan have done everything they can to prevent both the public and even politicians from finding out what a bad deal is being negotiated in their name. After the humiliating defeat of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and the more recent failures of TPP and TTIP, you would have thought that the governments involved would have realized that this kind of secret dealmaking just isn’t acceptable any more, but apparently, they haven’t. Fortunately, JEFTA is finally out in the open, which means it can begin to be subjected to long-overdue scrutiny and democratic input. What we need now is for the EU to release negotiating texts as it did for TTIP.

• There has been an effort underway these past few years to make tax season less stressful, less complicated, and less expensive for a large swath of Americans. These efforts have produced plans to make tax season “return free” for many, with pre-populated tax forms prepared by the government that can either be signed if accurate, or ignored if not with a separate filing then being produced by the person in question. That is, since the IRS already should have most of the details on how much you earned from the companies that paid you, it can send you a pre-filled out tax return document, rather than forcing everyone to redo the same work with the same documents hoping that you don’t make some mistake that will make the IRS man mad. Again, for those who want to go a different way, they can. But for those who find the IRS’s pre-filled documents to be okay, it will make tax filing significantly less of an issue. If you live outside the US, this may sound strange to you, because much of the rest of the world alread does it this way. In a recent episode of Planet Money, the analogy is made that the way we do taxes in the US would be like if credit card companies sent you a “bill” that was a blank sheet of paper, expecting you to fill out all your charges over the past month, and if you got anything wrong, you’d be punished. On taxes, most of the rest of the world the taxes are more like your credit card bill. In the US, it’s more like a blank sheet of paper. And, as in years past, some are finally trying to fix things in the US.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is skipping a major North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) Summit, opting to meet with China and Russia instead and people are worried about the message that sends.

• The Nato summit is scheduled for 5-6 April, but the State Department confirmed that Mr Tillerson would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping at President Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, from 6-7 April.

• He is also scheduled to visit Russia in April after a Group of 7 meeting in Italy, a State Department spokesperson told Reuters.

• Mr Tillerson is set to meet with 26 of the 27 foreign ministers of Nato member countries on 22 March. The meeting will include Secretary of Defence James Mattis and will be focused solely on counterterrorism and the eradication of Isis.

• Late Wednesday, the FBI said it has evidence that associates of Donald Trump communicated with Russia during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, possibly to coordinate the release of Hillary Clinton campaign info via Wikileaks.

• On Thursday, a bunch of men met at the White House to discuss taking away potentially millions of women’s coverage for pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care.

• The White House meeting was broadly about the American Health Care Act, the Republican bill meant to repeal and replace Obamacare. But it was focused on whether the bill should include a repeal of 10 “essential health benefits” that insurers in the individual marketplace must cover. Among those benefits is pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care.

• Yet Vice President Mike Pence, who was at the meeting along with President Donald Trump and Republican members of the House Freedom Caucus, tweeted out a picture showing that the meeting didn’t represent the exact people who most directly benefit from pregnancy, maternity, and newborn coverage in their health plans: women. This, unsurprisingly, drew quick criticism from groups like Planned Parenthood.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Foreign journalists were then [2010] barred from reporting in Papua unless they receive a government permit.

• Perhaps the thinnest skinned politician on the planet — Recip “Gollum” Erdogan — is at it again. His legacy of injunctions, legal threats, and even copyright abuse continues. The latest to draw Erdogan’s wrath is Switzerland, which, to be fair, has drawn his wrath in the past. The repeat “offender” was targeted by Erdogan in 2016 for an art exhibit he didn’t care for. This wouldn’t have happened if Switzerland didn’t have a law on the books forbidding insulting foreign leaders. Erdogan has the uncanny ability to sniff out foreign laws that might help him remain un-insulted, but so far has only managed to Streisand himself into infamy.

• The Swiss justice office has refused four requests by Turkey for judicial cooperation over comments posted on social media platforms about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he deemed offensive. Writing in January, the Tages Anzeiger said Turkey had lodged half a dozen requests for legal aid, demanding that Switzerland pursue critics who had ‘insulted’ Erdogan.

• On Thursday a spokesman from the Swiss justice office, Folco Galli, told broadcaster SRF that four requests lodged by Turkey in mid January had been rejected, citing free speech.

• Switzerland would only be obliged to cooperate if the act concerned was considered a crime in both Turkey and Switzerland, he said.

• On Monday, Utah repealed a law that restricts the “advocacy of homosexuality” in schools, recognizing that young people should have equal access to information and resources regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

• “We need more screen density in India. Censorship also causes people to hire content away from legitimate sources because people want to see the director’s vision and the complete product. Piracy is a leakage & gets 35% more than box office revenue. It needs to be fixed.” He added.

• This week, Disney decided to pull Beauty and the Beast from theaters across Kuwait, because our local censors, ever-ready to step up to defending antiquated beliefs of separation, decided it was best to cut what they deemed was inappropriate for the masses.

• In what French film industry group l’ARP sees as a potential sign of what’s to come should France’s far right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen advance in May’s local elections, a feature seen as critiquing her National Front (FN) party has been pulled from a municipal cinema in the south.

• [...]

• Prior to the film’s release last month, it had already raised the ire of the real-life FN. One party Vice President considered it “anti-National Front” propaganda, “scandalous” and “unacceptable.” He had only seen the trailer at the time.

Privacy/Surveillance

• In a 50-to-48 vote along party lines, the U.S. Senate decided to kill FCC rules blocking your ISP from selling your browsing history to the advertising industry without permission. Should the change pass the House, as is expected, the likes of Comcast and Verizon will be able to make money disclosing what you buy, where you browse, and what you search from your own home, all without asking permission.

• The Senate just voted to roll back your online privacy protections. Speak up now to keep the House from doing the same thing.

• ISPs have been lobbying for weeks to get lawmakers to repeal the FCC’s rules that stand between them and using even creepier ways to track and profit off of your every move online. Republicans in the Senate just voted 50-48 (with two absent votes) to approve a Congressional Review Action resolution from Sen. Jeff Flake which—if it makes it through the House—would not only roll back the FCC’s rules but also prevent the FCC from writing similar rules in the future.

• Despite a last-ditch effort by the EFF and other consumer and privacy groups, Congress today voted to dismantle privacy protections for broadband subscribers in a 50-48 vote. The rules, passed last October by the FCC, simply required that ISPs clearly disclose what subscriber data is being collected and sold by ISPs. It also required that ISPs provide working opt out tools, and required that consumers had to opt in (the dirtiest phrase imaginable to the ad industry) to the collection of more sensitive data like financial info or browsing histories.

• Another part of the rules, which simply required that ISPs were transparent about hacking intrusions and data theft, had already been killed off quietly by new FCC boss Ajit Pai.

• The rules were seen as important in the face of greater consolidation in an already uncompetitive broadband market, where said lack of competition eliminates any organic market punishment for bad behavior on the privacy front (unlike the content or other industries). Now, with neither broadband competition — nor meaningful regulatory oversight — privacy advocates are justifiably worried about the repercussions to come.

• Today, March 23rd 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 “Dark Matter”, which contains documentation for several CIA projects that infect Apple Mac Computer firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed) developed by the CIA’s Embedded Development Branch (EDB). These documents explain the techniques used by CIA to gain ‘persistence’ on Apple Mac devices, including Macs and iPhones and demonstrate their use of EFI/UEFI and firmware malware.

• Among others, these documents reveal the “Sonic Screwdriver” project which, as explained by the CIA, is a “mechanism for executing code on peripheral devices while a Mac laptop or desktop is booting” allowing an attacker to boot its attack software for example from a USB stick “even when a firmware password is enabled”. The CIA’s “Sonic Screwdriver” infector is stored on the modified firmware of an Apple Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter.

• By now, most companies who do any business in the EU are aware of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect in 2018 and applies to any entity doing business within any of the 28 EU member states. Not only does the GDPR apply somewhat broadly to “monitoring the behaviour” of EU residents, but it also comes with some hefty fines (up to €20 million, or 4% of worldwide turnover) for companies that violate the regulation. In short, the new regulation is going to require companies to implement entirely new processes and procedures around the collection and storage of personally identifiable information (PII), which will likely result in changes to data storage solutions as well.

• A congressional resolution to roll back the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband privacy rules could see a vote in the Senate as early as Wednesday evening.

• Even if you agree that the FCC’s rules are unfair or confusing, using the Congressional Review Act to reverse them completely at best complicates future privacy enforcement. One problem lies in the phrase “substantially similar.” The act is seldom used, and depending on how courts interpret it, the FCC could end up barred from introducing even the less controversial parts of the privacy order. “The only difference between the FCC rules and the FTC rules is that [the FCC rules] moves web browsing history to the ‘sensitive data’ category,” says Dallas Harris of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. In other words, the FCC could be banned even from passing a less strict set of rules closer to the FTC’s provisions.

• In December, we wrote about how (thanks to EFF’s lawyering) mobile phone provider CREDO Mobile was finally (after many years) allowed to reveal the National Security Letter (NSL) it had received from the DOJ back in 2013. As per usual, the NSL had a complete gag order, barring the company from admitting it had received such a letter. Then, just about a month later, Cloudflare was similarly ungagged over an NSL it had received in 2013 as well.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Propelling the flight is the kingdom’s wilaya, or guardianship, law. Although it has received less publicity than the world’s only sex-specific driving ban, it imposes harsher curbs on female mobility. To travel, work or study abroad, receive hospital treatment or an ID card, or even leave prison once a sentence is served, women need the consent of a male wali, or guardian. From birth to death, they are handed from one wali to the next [...] women are treated as minors all their lives.

• The shocking statistics, obtained through Freedom of Information requests, have prompted calls for specialist training for police investigating child abuse that occurs through online platforms, which have increased dramatically in recent years.

• A military judge ruled Tuesday that defense attorneys could call former CIA officials as witnesses in their bid to derail the death-penalty trial of the alleged USS Cole bombing plotter, who was waterboarded in the spy agency’s secret prison network, the Black Sites.

• The one-page ruling by Air Force Col. Vance Spath, the judge, authorized Witnesses A, B, C and D.

• Government evidence in a rendition case will be heard in secret for the first time following a high court ruling.

• Lawyers for the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office in a case brought by two Pakistani men will be allowed to present evidence behind closed doors under rarely used provisions of the Justice and Security Act.

• The two men, Amanatullah Ali and Yunus Rahmatullah, claim they were subjected to torture and rendition.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Once upon a time, Netflix was among the fiercest supporters of net neutrality, and a consistent critic of arbitrary and unnecessary broadband usage caps. So much so that the company effectively became public enemy number one at many of the nation’s broadband providers, resulting in a steady stream of bizarre policy and lobbying attacks on the company. Netflix, we were told by a rotating crop of ISP-tied mouthpieces (even by current FCC boss Ajit Pai), was a dirty freeloader, and a nasty company responsible for most of the internet’s ills.

• But as Netflix has grown larger and more powerful, the company’s positions on usage caps and net neutrality has, well, softened.

DRM

• Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a mechanism by which HTML5 video providers can discover and enable DRM providers offered by a browser, has taken the next step on its contentious road to standardization. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that oversees most Web-related specifications, has moved the EME specification to the Proposed Recommendation stage.

• The next and final stage is for the W3C’s Advisory Committee to review the proposal. If it passes review, the proposal will be blessed as a full W3C Recommendation.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Stuck in the 19th Century, the Federal Circuit Rule 30(a) requires appellants to submit six paper copies of the appendix to the briefs. In a recent filing, pro se appellant Urvashi Bhagat asked the court to waive this requirement in favor of another form of out-dated technology known as “CDROM.” Bhagat’s argument is that the 1,000+ pages of her appendix, would be cost prohibitive, unwieldy, and an unwarranted consumption of paper. The copying and delivery cost here really is several thousand dollars — easily outweighing the $500 appeal filing fee.

Copyrights

• Last summer, we wrote about a potentially important case going to the Supreme Court, technically about the copyright design of cheerleading uniforms. As we’ve discussed, copyright is supposed to apply to artistic expression, and it’s been considered not to apply to functional products or industrial design — sometimes referred to as “useful articles.” Along those lines, things like fashion design, have always been considered not subject to copyright. In this case, Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, the question was raised about the design of certain stylistic elements on cheerleading uniforms, and whether one copy using similar elements on its cheerleading uniforms infringed on the copyrights of the other. A district court said no, the appeals court said yes. And now the Supreme Court has weighed in saying that the designs can be covered by copyright and creating a new test on such matters (previously, there was something of a mess of different tests that judges would apply, sometimes haphazardly). Having a single test seems better than a mishmash of competing tests, but the situation here is… potentially very dangerous to a variety of innovations.

• The European Parliament announced today that its Legal Affairs Committee approved new draft legislation to bring European Union law into line with an international treaty providing copyright exceptions for special format books for visually impaired people. Limitations to the scope of the treaty, such as commercial availability or compensation, were disregarded by Parliament members.

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