● 03.25.17

● Links 25/3/2017: Maru OS 0.4, C++17 Complete

Posted in News Roundup at 6:00 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The lawyers who have acted on behalf of the trio are looking to have the case expanded to a class action covering every person who has been affected by a forced upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. They allege that there are thousands of such cases.

• The trio claim that Microsoft uses various tactics to get users to upgrade and does not give them a chance to refuse.

• The system was developed by its joint venture with China Electronics Technology Group Corp, a State-owned company. Equipped with tailor-made security {sic} features, it is expected to allow the US tech giant to regain access to China’s lucrative government software procurement market.

• Curious about getting into Raspberry Pi or just Linux in general but you’re not sure where to start? This post is for you. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive guide, rather a gentle intro into the Linux world. I’m not a Linux expert, but I know from experience that it can be an intimidating platform to get started in. I want this post to show you what you need to know to get started with Linux.

• We are proud to have contributed to Ubiquity in such a way that we feel improves all users’ lives when using Ubuntu. We will continue improving the platform and hope that our users will see value in what we do.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Jesse is back but this time Félim is in his sick bed so it’s a 3 man show yet again. Some heated debates about Nextcloud’s actions, Ubuntu extended support and PowerPC distros, followed by a deep dive into the world of HiDPI 4k support in Linux.

• The Bad Voltage live stage show, from SCaLE 15x in Pasadena, March 2017!

• When I got serious about doing Linux videos on YouTube, I drew on all of that Old Media experience plus I took a few classes to make sure I knew what I was talking about before handing out advice to others. That has led to the EzeeLinux project. The goal of EzeeLinux is to educate folks about Linux and get them started on the right path to success… I have been truly humbled by the response it has gotten.

• That said, I don’t feel like I’m competing with anyone – the more, the merrier! I honestly feel that Linux and Open Source Software are arguably one of the few truly good things happening in the world today. It brings people from all over the world together and provides a means to get cutting edge technology into the hands of anyone, anywhere who wants to take the time to learn how to use it regardless of their financial situation. That is the kind of power that can quite literally change the world, folks. No one should be left behind in this Information Age. Come to think of it, Ed Murrow would probably do a documentary about Linux if he was still around today… It would be right up his street, I think. It’s the kind of thing he liked to talk about.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• While the Ubuntu 17.04 final release is expected to happen in just over two weeks and the final freeze is quickly approaching, X.Org Server 1.19 has yet to land as anticipated into the Zesty Zapus.

• Red Hat developer Lyude Paul is working on OpenGL NV_fill_rectangle support for Gallium3D and the Nouveau driver.

• Lyude has published a set of six patches for adding GL_NV_fill_rectangle support to Gallium3D and wires it up in the Nouveau NVC0 driver for GM200+ hardware.

• Intel’s Michael Thierry published the fifth version of these patches on Friday. While there has been GPU reset support within the Intel DRM driver in case of hangs, this new engine-reset support is superior as it can reset a particular engine rather than performing a full GPU reset.

• Version 1.0.45 is now the latest version of the Vulkan 1.0 specification.

Applications

• I made this video for those that are new to, or just interested in making music on the Linux OS. I go over the features, goods and bads of Rosegarden, LMMS, Ardour, Mixbus, and EnergyXT, as well as touch on Qtractor. I don’t don’t go much into details of the particular versions I am using, but the video was made in the early part of 2017 and I’m running Ubuntu 16.04LTS.

• Green Recorder is a simple, open source desktop recorder developed for Linux systems built using Python, GTK and FFmpeg. It supports most of the Linux desktop environments such as Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce and so on. Recently it has been updated to work with Wayland too in Gnome session.

• In past there were applications that allowed us to run videos/Gif as wallpaper on the desktop and make desktop look much cooler but than all of sudden the development of such Apps stopped and I can’t name any App that exist for this purpose. Komorebi is fairly new application designed to make your desktop experience much better and make desktop cool as well, we can say it is kind of ‘live wallpaper’ situation here or 3D wallpaper. It is developed by Abe Masri and available under GPL license for free.

• There are multiple ways to optimize your Linux, the most geeky way is using Terminal, there are also applications available that performs such actions like Bleachbit, Ubuntu cleaner and so on. Stacer is simple, open-source, quick and new application designed to offer you all-in-one optimizer for your Ubuntu/Linux Mint (It’s alternative to CCleaner but only for Linux).

• Long years ago, we’ve talked about a Skype alternative called Tox which was still in its early developmental stages. Tox was supposed to become the anti-thesis of Skype by being a fully open-source video and voice chat client that placed user privacy and security at its center. Well, guess what, there are now fully active and well-maintained chat clients that are built on top of Tox protocol. qTox is one of them.

• Rclone 1.36 was released recently, bringing support for SFTP, local symbolic links support, mount improvements, along with many other new features and bug fixes.

• For those not familiar with Rclone, this is a cross-platform command line tool for synchronizing files and folders to multiple cloud storages, which supports Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Amazon Drive, Microsoft One Drive, Yandex Disk, and more.

• It can be used to sync files either from your machine or from one cloud storage to another.

• Streamlink Twitch GUI (previously Livestreamer Twitch GUI) is a multi-platform Twitch.tv browser.

• The application is powered by Node.js, Chromium and Streamlink, though it can still use Livestreamer (which is no longer maintained) too.

• Brackets is a free, open source code editor focused on front-end web development (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

• [Quick update] Terminix, a GTK3 tiling terminal emulator, has been renamed to Tilix due to some trademark issues.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• CodeWeavers’ Josh DuBois informed us via an email announcement that the CrossOver 16.2.0 commercial graphical user interface for Wine is now available for GNU/Linux and macOS operating systems.

• CrossOver 16.2.0 is not a major release of the application that lets Linux and Mac users install and use various apps and games designed for Microsoft Windows, but only a maintenance update that promises to further improve the core Windows compatibility layer, as well as to add better support for some popular applications.

• As you know Codeweavers (and other WINE contributors) have been working on DX11 support for a while – they were supposed to have DX11 support by the end of 2016, but as with all complex projects, timelines tend to slip and only very DX11 titles could run a few months ago. Since then, there was no major announcement, but it seems that the progress has been very significant in the recent WINE versions (2.3 is already out).

Games

• It’s about time we share the analysis of that Q1 2016 survey (fielding occured in March last year), especially as we are about to launch the Q1 2017 one pretty, pretty soon. That way we will be able to compare how things have changed over the course of 12 months. As usual, the whole disclaimer about online surveys is valid here (data is only as good as your n size, the appropriateness of your sampling, and the quality of the responses, etc…), but assuming it’s not all that bad and all that unreliable, let’s dig in the results. As a reminder, most of the respondents for this survey were recruited through the r/linux and r/linux_gaming subreddits, as well as the readership of BoilingSteam. This is not our first survey, and you can see our previous ones done in the second quarter of 2015, and the following one in the last quarter of 2015.

• Headup Games and Fabraz proudly announce their upcoming action-platformer Slime-san for PC, Mac and Linux via Steam & Humble Bundle. Console releases will follow soon after. Jump and slime your way through 100 levels in a unique 5-colored, pixelated world and escape from a giant worm’s innards. Get your shopping done in Slumptown, a town full of survivors within the worm. Unlock different play styles, outfits, shaders and even multiplayer mini-games! Slime-san is developed by Fabraz, an independent development studio that also released the critically-acclaimed games Cannon Crasha and Planet Diver. Slime-san was minding his own business, sliming around in a peaceful forest when suddenly…A giant worm appeared and gobbled him up! Now deep within the worm’s belly, Slime-san has to face a decision: Be digested by the incoming wall of stomach acid… Or jump, slide and slime his way through the worm’s intestines and back out its mouth!

• This is a collection of excerpts from my recent Cheese Talks project on the history of Star Wars games focusing on titles that are available on Linux in some form or another.

• In this bi-weekly open gaming roundup, we take a look at a Game Boy emulator for your Apple Watch, RPG Maker for Linux, Star Citizen switching to Vulkan, and more open gaming news.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Linux mint, the most popular Linux distribution is recommended by almost all Linux users for newbies. By default, Linux mint is released with cinnamon. But thanks to the Kubuntu team, we now have a KDE edition. Well, new users are probably wondering what all this KDE thing is? KDE is a community. KDE is a compilation of software. We will look at it in more detail on the way. Mint is a whole distro, so we will look at some specific aspects, But KDE is more than just a DE and we cannot review all of its features here. I will try to cover as much as possible in limited space.

• Ask not what you can do for Amarok. Ask what Amarok can do for you!

• Many years ago, just the mention of this music player would invoke shivers down my spine. It was stylish, exotic, modern, elegant, powerful. It did everything superbly, and there was always a hidden Joker up its sleeve. The plethora of options and possibilities and feature was endless. And then it all changed.

• Amarok slid out of the spotlight and became just another program to play your music collection. Recently, fueled by nostalgia and perhaps vain hope, I’ve invested fresh new energy and time working with it, taming it, fighting it, loving it, hating it, trying to figure out how relevant, sleek and accessibility this player still is. My curiosity peaked with the extensive Plasma testing I did last month in my somewhat ultra-long article The State of Plasma. So I fired KDE neon once again, a brand new image, and started fiddling. Here’s the Spaghetti Western of what to expect. With a big disclaimer. Read on.

• Particularly the top book, “Using KDE” by Nicholas Wells, is interesting. The first page I opened it up to was a pointer to the KDE Translation teams, and information on how to contribute, how to get in touch with the translation teams, etc. You can still find the translation info online, although the location has changed since 2000.

• KDE.org quite possibly has one of the largest open-source websites compared to any other desktop-oriented project, extending beyond into applications, wikis, guides, and much more. The amount of content is dizzying and indeed a huge chunk of that content is about as old as the mascot Kandalf – figuratively and literally.

• Twitter seems ever dominant and important for communication. Years ago I added a microblogging feed to Planet KDE but that still needed people to add themselves and being all idealistic I added support for anything with an RSS feed assuming people would use more-free identi.ca. But identi.ca went away and Twitter I think removed their RSS ability but got ever more important and powerful.or the relaunched theme a couple of years ago we added some Twitter feeds but they were hidden away and little used.

• conf.kde.in 2017 was held in the big and beautiful campus of IIT, Guwahati in Assam. During 10th to 12th March, the conference schedule was 2 days of talks followed by a day of workshop. Talks were lined-up in single track which helps attendees not to miss any talk. Conference pictures from my camera are available at flickr.

• Today, KBibTeX 0.6.2 has been released. It replaces the never published 0.6.1 release, where a show-stopping bug was detected after tagging the release.

• Animation in Krita is meant to recreate the glory days of hand-drawn animation, with a modern twist. It’s not a flash substitute, but allows you to pair Krita’s awesome drawing capabilities with a frame-based animation approach.

• Today the Kubuntu team is happy to announce that Kubuntu Zesty Zapus (17.04) Beta 2 is released . With this Beta 2 pre-release, you can see and test what we are preparing for 17.04, which we will be releasing April 13, 2017.

• Albert, a Qt5 quick launcher, was updated to version 0.10.0 (and then 0.10.1 to fix some issues), introducing completion using the Tab key, two new extensions, and more.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• After being in development for six months, GNOME 3.24 was released today, bringing improvements such as Night Light, weather information in the date / time indicator, along with updates to its applications, and more.

Distributions

• Welcome to the 42nd installation of This Week in Solus.

• Explore differences between Flatpaks and Snaps and decide for yourself which format is better!

• Also, when I use KDE Neon or other distros I miss AUR a lot: on it you can find everything and install it quickly, you can find also Git versions of apps that are in the official repos in their stable release. So I thought: since now there are distro-agnostic packages, like Flatpak, Snap and AppImage, why not create the “distro-agnostic AUR”? It would work exactly like AUR but at the end of installation process it doesn’t create an Arch package but a Flatpak/Snap/AppImage one.

Reviews

• MATE 1.18 has been released at 13 March 2017. The source code are available on their public file server and the runnable version has been available on Ubuntu MATE 17.04 “Zesty Zapus”. This short review covers some new things for end-users: better playback notifications, “safely remove disk” notification, touchpad/mouse control improvements (libinput), MATE Calc returns, and some more. It’s RAM usage on Zesty at idle is ~700MB. This is a continuation from our previous MATE 1.17 review. I hope this review will be helpful for you all. Enjoy!

New Releases

• We are proud to announce the release of the first beta of our Proxmox VE 5.x family – based on the great Debian Stretch.

• With the first beta we invite you to test your hardware and your upgrade path. The underlying Debian Stretch is already in a good shape and the 4.10 kernel performs outstandingly well. The 4.10 kernel for example allows running a Windows 2016 Hyper-V as a guest OS (nested virtualization).

• The NuTyX team is please to annonce the first release candidate of the almost stable (RC1) NuTyX 9.0.

Slackware Family

• Those of you who follow my repository RSS feeds have already noticed, but many people rely on the announcements I make on this blog (plus, I can give a lot more detail here). I uploaded the packages for the March 2017 release of my ‘ktown’ repository: KDE 5_17.03. Actually, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in this release, because I decided to do some things that were on my TODO for a long while. Read more about that below in the “NEWS” section. What you get in this new release is: KDE Frameworks 5.32.0, Plasma 5.9.3 and Applications 16.12.3. All of this is still built on top of Qt 5.7.1. This Plasma 5 release targets only Slackware-current for the moment, because of the PLASMA5 Live that I release in parallel. But packages for Slackware 14.2 (only 64bit) are already being compiled at the moment, so updates will be visible in my 14.2 repository in a couple of days at most.

Red Hat Family

• Today Red Hat Inc. announced the general availability of the latest version of its software-defined storage solution, Gluster 3.2. The 3.2 version comes with several new enhancements and features aimed at lower costs while improving small file performance and increasing data integrity. Gluster 3.2 will also have tighter integration with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

• If you are using an Enterprise Linux distribution (Red Hat Enterprise Linux or one of its derivatives, such as CentOS or Scientific Linux) and need support for specific or new hardware, you are in the right place.

Finance

Fedora

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Devices/Embedded

• The music playing script turned up an interesting Raspberry Pi problem. The Pi has a headphone output, and initially when I plugged a powered speaker into it, the program worked fine. But then later, it didn’t. After much debugging, it turned out that the difference was that I’d made myself a user so I could have my normal shell environment. I’d added my user to the audio group and all the other groups the default “pi” user is in, but the Pi’s pulseaudio is set up to allow audio only from users root and pi, and it ignores groups. Nobody seems to have found a way around that, but sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio solved the problem nicely.

Phones

Android

• I am pleased to present Maru OS 0.4!

• [...]

• There are many other improvements, fixes, and security updates included in this release, so make sure to check out the changelog for the details.

• [...]

• Maru OS has a relatively large codebase, and it is exciting to see others take the time and effort to dig in and help move this project onwards and upwards. If you are interested in contributing, please stop by our github, and get in touch with us on our developer forum or gitter!

• Movado has revealed its first Android Wear watch at Baselworld 2017, a few weeks after it announced its first solo foray into smartwatches. The American watchmaker calls its creation Movado Connect, a timepiece with edge-to-edge, always-on display specifically designed for Wear 2.0. It will come loaded with over 100 watchfaces, but they’ll all look familiar if you’ve ever had one of the company’s creations: they’re all variations of the brand’s iconic single dot design. Not surprising really, since even Movado’s collaboration with HP also featured a single dot watchface.

Free Software/Open Source

• We are now about 20 years into the open source software era. You might think that open source simply means publishing the source code for something useful. While this is correct by definition, the most important component of any open source project is its community and how it works together.

• Open source projects are not isolated islands. In fact, it’s common for them to depend on each other. As new projects are created, it is also common that members come from related projects to work on something new. Apache Arrow is an example of a new project that worked across many related projects, creating a new community that from the beginning knew it needed to build a community of communities.

• Whatever business nature you have, there must be some precious data which you want to store in a secured place. Finding a right storage solution is always critical for business, especially for small and medium, but what if you get a perfect solution at no cost.

• There is no doubt that business cant runs without data, but while looking for a solution, you might need to spend a fortune to cover all your storage requirements. Open source tools come as the viable solution where you won’t spend money yet get a suitable solution to store your precious data. And don’t worry we will help you to find one of the best.

• In the past few years, there is a rapid growth in the online sales. According to a survey, more than 40% people are now shifted to online stores and majorly buying products from their smartphones and tablets.

• With the expeditious rise in the online marketplace, more business introducing online stores. For the big fishes in the industry, the expenses of setting up an online store is like spending peanuts, but for the small or startups, it appears to be a fortune.

• The smart move could be open source platforms, to begin with as they are not only free also reliable and scalable. One can set up the online store not only quickly as well as, in future if you want to add some of the functionalities, which are available with only premium, can be done by paying quite a small amount.

• Free & Open source software have grown so rapidly in the last few years. Just compare the situation of being ignored and considered like a nerds-movement in the early 2000’s to the situation today in 2017. We surly made a huge advancement so far. Thanks to the amazing ecosystem of open source which links both communities and enterprises together.

• However, when it comes to individuals, a lot of people are hesitant when it comes to open-sourcing their software. They think that the “secret” behind it will be stolen. They think that they will be releasing their work “for nothing in return” when they do so. That’s definitely false.

Events

• I got an amazing chance to speak at FOSSASIA 2017 held at Singapore on “Seasons of Debian – Summer of Code and Winter of Outreachy“. I gave a combined talk with my co-speaker Pranav Jain, who contributed to Debian through GSoC. We talked about two major open source initiatives – Outreachy and Google Summer of Code and the work we did on a common project – Lumicall under Debian.

• The first of two 2017 Linaro Connect events was held March 6 to 10 in Budapest, Hungary; your editor had the privilege of attending. Reports from a number of the sessions there have appeared in separate articles. There were a number of discussions at the event that, while not being enough to fill an article on their own, were nevertheless worthy of some attention.

• Connect is an interesting event, in that it is a combination of an architecture-specific kernel developers’ gathering and a members-only meeting session. Not being a member, your editor only participated in the former aspect. Sessions at Connect are usually short — 25 minutes — and focused on a specific topic; they also routinely run over their allotted time. There is an emphasis on discussion, especially in the relatively unstructured “hack sessions” that occupy much of the schedule. Many of the sessions are focused on training: how to upstream code, for example, or kernel debugging stories in Mandarin (video).

• The free software community encompasses the globe, and we strive to make the LibrePlanet conference reflect that. That’s why we livestream the proceedings of the conference, and encourage you to participate remotely by both watching and participating in the discussion via IRC chat.

• If you are planning to attend LibrePlanet in Cambridge, we encourage you to register in advance through Tuesday morning at 10:00 EST (14:00 UTC) — advance registration helps us plan a better event. Walk ups are also welcome. Students and FSF members receive gratis admission.

• Secondly, the bulk of the event is an unconference where the attendees volunteer session ideas and run them. Each session is a discussion where the topic is discussed, debated, and we reach final conclusions. This results in a hugely diverse range of sessions covering topics such as event management, outreach, social media, governance, collaboration, diversity, building contributor programs, and more. These discussions are incredible for exploring and learning new ideas, meeting interesting people, building a network, and developing friendships.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• What does this have to do with Thunderbird? I sat in a room a few weeks ago with 10 guys at Clallam Bay, all who have been in a full-time, intensive software training program for about a year, who are really interested in trying to do real-world projects rather than simply hidden internal projects that are classroom assignments, or personal projects with no public outlet. I start in April spending two days per week with these guys. Then there are another 10 or so guys at WSR in Monroe that started last month, though the situation there is more complex. The situation is similar to other groups of students that might be able to work on Thunderbird or Mozilla projects, with these differences:1) Student or GSOC projects tend to have a duration of a few months, while the expected commitment time for this group is much longer.

BSD

• Recently I spent some time reading Dragonfly BSD code. While doing so I spotted a vulnerability in the sysvsem subsystem that let user to point to any piece of memory and write data through it (including the kernel space). This can be turned into execution of arbitrary code in the kernel context and by exploiting this, we’re gonna make Dragonfly BSD great again!

Licensing/Legal

• The OpenSSL project, home of the world’s most popular SSL/TLS and cryptographic toolkit, is changing its license to the Apache License v2.0 (ASL v2). As part of this effort, the OpenSSL team launched a new website and has been working with various corporate collaborators to facilitate the re-licensing process.

Programming/Development

• The ISO C++ committee had its winter meeting in Kona, HI, USA from February 27 to March 4, hosted by Plum Hall and the Standard C++ Foundation. Over 100 people attended, officially representing 9 countries.

• We heard earlier this month that C++17 is “done” and looked at the new features while now more details have been shared.

• ISO C++ standards member Herb Sutter has shared his trip report from their standards meeting that took place in Hawaii from the end of February to early March.

• This feature was no doubt included to allow you to play a variety of hilarious pranks on others by causing them lose data, only to find out about it years later when they want to open the archive and recover it.

Leftovers

• Five years ago, tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously wrote, “Software is eating the world.” It’s hard to think of more prophetic words coming out of Silicon Valley, and new players that have software at their core continue to reinvent entire industries. Uber disrupting the taxi industry and Airbnb the hospitality industry are just two examples.

• FedEx will give customers that use the Chrome 56 and Safari 10 browsers or newer a $5 discount once they enable the Flash plugin. The offer comes after both Chrome and Safari have started blocking Flash content by default in the past few months.

Science

• We hear a lot about robots getting smarter as the AI juggernaut rolls on, but less about significant gains in strength and durability thanks to better electric motors and batteries.

• That growing physical prowess raises risks to people near them should something go wrong, which means it is more vital than ever that these devices, set to share our living and working spaces, remain entirely under our control.

Hardware

• There’s plenty to like about the POWER8 architecture: high speed interconnections, large (and flexible) core counts, and support for lots of memory. POWER9 provides improvements in all of these areas and it has learned some entirely new tricks as well.

Security

• Google is warning that it intends to deprecate and remove trust in Symantec-issued SSL/TLS certificates, as Symantec shoots back that the move is unwarranted.

• I learned that my site was stolen on a Saturday. Three days later I had it back, but only after the involvement of fifty or so employees of six different companies, middle-of-the-night conferences with lawyers, FBI intervention, and what amounted to a sting operation that probably should have starred Sandra Bullock instead of…well…me.

• The Linux Foundation umbrella organization is responsible for this year’s WireGuard GSoC, so if you’re a student, write “Linux Foundation” as your mentoring organization, and then specify in your proposal your desire to work with WireGuard, listing “Jason Donenfeld” as your mentor.

• Bruce Schneier is one of my favorite speakers when it comes to the topic of all things security. His talk from IBM Interconnect 2017, “Security and Privacy in a Hyper-connected World“, covered a wide range of security concerns.

• Last week, WikiLeaks released a trove of CIA documents that detail many of the spy agency’s hacking capabilities. These documents, if genuine (and early reports suggest that they are), validate concerns that U.S. spy agencies are stockpiling cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The intelligence community uses undisclosed vulnerabilities to develop tools that can penetrate the computer systems and networks of its foreign targets. Unfortunately, since everyone uses the same technology in today’s global economy, each of these vulnerabilities also represents a threat to American businesses and individuals. In the future, rather than hoard this information, the CIA and other intelligence agencies should commit to responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities it discovers to the private sector so that security holes can be patched.

• The new software is a ssh-agent proxy that allows a group of trusted users to share an SSH identity without exposing the contents of that identity’s private key.

• [...]

• A common use of the ssh-agent is to “forward” your agent to a remote machine (using the -A flag in the OpenSSH client). After you’ve forwarded your ssh-agent, you can use the socket that that agent creates to access any of your many (now unencrypted) keys, and login to any other machines for which you may have keys in your ssh-agent. So, too, potentially, can all the other folks that have root access to the machine to which you’ve forwarded your ssh-agent.

• After years of training journalists and NGOs communication and operational security, after years of conducting research into the tools and protocols used, it took some more years developing a reasonable answer to most of the issues encountered during all this time.

• In todays world of commercially available government malware you don’t want to store your encryption keys on your easily infected computer. You want them stored on something that you could even take into a sauna or a hot-tub – maintaining continuous physical contact.

• So people who care about such things use external smartcard-based crypto devices like Ubikey Neos or Nitrokeys (formerly Cryptosticks). The problems with these devices is that you have to enter PIN codes on your computer that you shouldn’t trust, that they are either designed for centralized use in organizations, or they are based mostly on PGP.

Defence/Aggression

• Sovereign immunity usually protects governments from lawsuits, but the bill creates an exception that lets litigants hold foreign governments responsible if they support a terrorist attack that kills U.S. citizens on American soil.

• One of the planned cornerstones of the 15+ year Afghan Reconstruction Effort was to be an extensive, nationwide network of roads.

• The United States’ concept was roads would allow the Afghan economy to flourish as trade could reach throughout the country, security would be enhanced by the ability to move security forces quickly to where they were needed, and that the presence of the roads would serve as a literal symbol of the central government’s ability to extend its presence into the countryside.

• Tensions between the United States and North Korea are making their way back into the news after a series of missile tests and presidential Twitter threats. Meanwhile, a conservative think tank—previously thought all but dead—has seen a resurgence in relevancy, thanks to its alignment with Donald Trump. The result is that the Heritage Foundation has provided much of the narrative backbone for North Korean/US relations in the age of Trump, making the rounds in dozens of media articles and television appearances.

• Heritage talking heads have been featured in North Korea stories in the Washington Post (2/28/27, 3/19/17), New York Times (3/16/17), AP (3/19/17), Christian Science Monitor (3/17/17), Boston Herald (3/9/17), BBC (3/17/17), Fox News (3/10/17), CNN (3/15/17), MSNBC (3/19/17), CNBC (3/7/17), Voice of America (2/24/17) and Vox (3/17/17).

• The most prominent of Heritage’s experts is former CIA analyst Bruce Klingner, who plays the part of the Reasonable Hawk, insisting North Korea is “growing [its] nuclear and missile capabilities” and is an “existential threat to South Korea and Japan and will soon be a direct threat to the continental United States,” but opposes preemptive bombing or invasion until the threat is “imminent”—a term he never quite defines (but one, it’s worth noting, the current Secretary of State uses to describe the situation.)

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• John Pilger has been awarded the International Journalism Prize by the Press Club of Mexico in the XLIV National and International Competition of Journalism, founded in 1951 by Antonio Saenz de Miera. The citation reads, “The exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, through which international public opinion was able to ascertain the extent of the key issues of the current political situation [is] journalism that allows people to defend themselves against powerful, clandestine forces.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• According to a paper published in the journal Palaeoworld, volcanic eruptions pumped large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, causing average temperatures to rise by eight to 11°C.

• This melted vast amounts of methane that had been trapped in the permafrost and sea floor, causing temperatures to soar even further to levels “lethal to most life on land and in the oceans”.

• [...] Donald Trump reversed the Obama Administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and within the hour, TransCanada, the company behind the massive pipeline project, announced it will drop its $15 billion North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) complaint against the U.S. over the project’s rejection.

• [...]

• TransCanada dropped this NAFTA lawsuit only after Donald Trump caved on his demand that Keystone XL will be built with American steel.

Finance

• Singapore will push forward with ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Friday (24 March), at the end of a four-day official visit to Vietnam.

• The report argues that because only a handful of countries are responsible for the demand in digital work, concentrated mostly in North America and western Europe, it should be these countries that enforce a minimum standard. That way, workers would have their rights protected regardless of their location.

• As you may recall, there was a giant fuss last year, when an Australian guy named Craig Wright not only claimed that he was “Satoshi Nakamoto” — the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin — but had convined key Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen that he was Nakomoto. That was a big deal because Andresen was one of the first developers on Bitcoin and regularly corresponded with Nakamoto (Andresen’s own name sometimes popped up in rumors about who Nakamoto might be). Even with Andresen being convinced, plenty of others soon picked apart the claims and found the claims severely lacking in proof.

• Then, last summer, Andrew O’Hagan published an absolutely massive profile of Wright that only served to raise a lot more questions about Wright, his businesses, his claims to having created Bitcoin, and a variety of other things. However, as we noted at the time, buried in that massive article was a bizarre tidbit about how Wright was actively trying to patent a ton of Bitcoin related ideas. As we noted, the article stated that Wright’s plan was to patent tons of Bitcoin stuff, reveal himself as Nakamoto and then sell his patents for a billion dollars.

• Ukip’s only member of parliament, Douglas Carswell, has quit the party to become an independent MP, prompting a backlash from within Ukip and among its supporters.

• Carswell, who defected from the Conservative party to Ukip in August 2014, said he was leaving “amicably, cheerfully and in the knowledge that we won”.

• He said he would not be standing down before the next general election, and claimed there was no need for a byelection because he was not joining another party. Ukip, he added, had achieved its founding aims with the vote to leave the EU. “After 24 years, we have done it. Brexit is in good hands,” he said.

• Unite for Europe campaigners marched through central London to Westminster, the scene of floral tributes to those killed and injured in Wednesday’s atrocity.

• Opening the event, Alastair Campbell said: “Before we talk about Brexit, before we call on any of the speakers, we need to recognise that something really bad happened not far from here just the other day.”

• Campaigners stood with their heads bowed for a minute-long silence on Saturday, with the only sound the chiming of Big Ben.

• Brexit negotiations are on course to fail unless both Britain and the European Union ditch their winner-takes-all approach to the coming talks, the former president of the European commission José Manuel Barroso has said.

• With just days to go before Theresa May formally notifies Brussels of the UK’s intention to leave the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker’s predecessor said the two sides were playing a dangerous game.

• The UK’s prime minister has said she believes “no deal is better than a bad deal”, and some in her cabinet have openly talked up the prospect of walking away from the negotiating table.

• Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, has placed the settlement of Britain’s £50bn in financial liabilities as the prerequisite for any progress. Last week the French former minister conjured up a vision of queues of Dover, nuclear fuel shortages and chaos for citizens as a consequence of Britain’s failure to live up to its responsibility.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The debacle of Trump and Ryan being unable to pass their “sicknesscare” bill through a Congress that the GOP controls is diagnostic.

• “This is not the time for the Democrats to gloat,” Moore said. “This is the time we have to now double down. [...]”

• The implication of this phrase, of course, is that the United States derives its greatness from a presumed moral authority. Corporate media are now sounding the alarm that the US’s moral authority is suddenly under attack by the Trump administration.

• According to police, white 28-year-old Maryland man James Harris Jackson took a Bolt bus up to New York City Friday for the express purposes of killing black men and did just that, stabbing 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in Hell’s Kitchen Monday night. Police say the suspect, an ex-military member of a white supremacist hate group, asked police to arrest him, warning he would attack again if they didn’t.

• This week on CounterSpin: When Neil Gorsuch’s name was first announced as a candidate for the Supreme Court, corporate media’s focus was on his “eloquence” and “intelligence.” The Washington Post published 30 articles, op-eds, blog posts and editorials in the 48 hours after the announcement—not a single one overtly critical or in opposition to his nomination. That changed somewhat when Gorsuch actually faced questions, but have we learned enough about the record and the ideas of the man who may get one of the most powerful jobs in the country? We’ll talk about Gorsuch with Dan Goldberg from Alliance for Justice.

• The general consensus seems to be that the failure to replace Obamacare is unexpectedly bad for both president and GOP: he’s exposed as a crêpe leopard, and them as a bunch of unprincipled bickering morons with nothing to show for 7 years’ empty ranting about Obamacare.

• The New York Times employs a columnist named Charles Blow (above). Blow writes the same column twice a week, about 800 words of simple name calling directed at Trump. That’s what his job is. He gets paid a lot of money for something that must take him about 15 minutes to type up. It is an amazing world we’ve entered since November.

• [...]

• He continues to have explosive Twitter episodes — presumably in response to some news he finds unflattering or some conspiracy floated by fringe outlets — that make him look not only foolish, but unhinged.

• Trump’s assaults on the truth are not benign. Presidential credibility is American credibility. There is no way to burn through one without burning through the other.

• And when he’s not making explosive charges, he’s taking destructive actions.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The key finding of this report reveal that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Thailand appear to be blocking websites at their own discretion.

• During the meeting of the Muslim envoys, it was decided that a comprehensive strategy paper encompassing all legal and technical aspects would be circulated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs among the ambassadors of the Muslim countries.

• The Ambassadors would then apprise their governments in order to develop a future plan of action.

• A United States judge has granted asylum to Amos Yee, an 18-year-old blogger from Singapore, who has been jailed on two occasions for his public views on religion and politics. Yee came to the US in December under the visa waiver program and requested asylum before an immigration judge, expressing a fear of returning to Singapore.

• Judge Samuel Cole approved his asylum, describing him as a “young political dissident” and saying that his “prosecution, detention and general maltreatment at the hands of Singapore authorities constitute persecution.”

• In May 2015 Yee was found guilty of circulating obscene imagery and “wounding religious feelings,” after posting a YouTube rant in which he criticized Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and first prime minister, calling him “horrible” and a dictator. He was also criticized Christianity, describing Christians as “power hungry.” Last September he was sentenced to six weeks in prison by a Singapore court for “wounding religious feelings” by posting videos, comments and pictures that criticize Christianity and Islam.

• He was jailed four weeks for hurting the religious feelings of Christians and posting an obscene image as part of his attacks on Lee, but served 50 days including penalties for violating bail conditions.

• The enlargement that Stark does is of course the direct opposite of censorship, and could be generalized as a defense of free speech in all cases. There’s clearly some kind of celebration of Svenonius in Stark’s paintings. But in their sheer, unavoidable legibility, they might also stand as a counterweight to Svenonius’s call for silencing voices he doesn’t like.

• Whether the move will be welcomed by users or deemed censorship remains to be seen.

• In many ways it could enable Instagram more freedom to allow content it has been criticised for barring.

• For example, the site currently controversially forbids female nipples (yet allows male areola), so perhaps the sensitive content screen could present it with a happy medium?

Privacy/Surveillance

• Whether we think about it or not, there’s an agreement at work behind the scenes when you visit some websites and use many popular apps. Call it the price of “free.” For every website visit and app use, you agree to give up certain personal data in exchange for whatever information or service you’re using.

• The problem isn’t only that these activities are taking place, it’s that many apps or services are lax in clearly disclosing that they’re monetizing your personal data. And in many cases, doing so without your explicit approval. We’re automatically being opted in when we agree to Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. Even the most conscientious reader can struggle to make sense of those agreements and the data collection activities they describe.

• In a written statement yesterday the Secretary of State for Transport, Chris Grayling, announced a ban on “Phones, laptops and tablets larger than 16.0cm x 9.3cm x 1.5cm in the cabin on flights to the UK from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Tunisia.”

• The United States issued a similar ban earlier in the day. It was not long after that that the UK followed suit, however the UK ban is structured around any inbound flights from the afore mentioned countries rather than specific airports, which is the case with the US ban.

• Whilst security is increased on these items coming into the UK, Chris Grayling does state that “These new measures apply to flights into the UK and we are not currently advising against flying to and from those countries.” so anyone travelling to any of the countries on the list is still able to do so, and there is no change to the Foreign Office’s advice against travelling there.

• The broadband, advertising and marketing industries are absolutely thrilled about plans to kill the FCC’s new broadband privacy protections for consumers. Passed last year, the rules simply require that ISPs provide working opt-out tools, go to reasonable lengths to protect data and notify users of hack attacks, and be transparent about what data they collect and who they sell to. The rules also require that ISPs obtain opt-in consent (public enemy number one for marketing folks) for the collection and sale of more personal data like financial details or browsing histories.

• The House is also controlled by Republicans, but “we think we’ve got a shot at killing it off,” Gillula said. The House is expected to vote on the measure next week, but there’s still time to contact your legislator before a vote.

• “If we kill it [in the House], we don’t have to worry about any of this creepy tracking,” Gillula said.

• That analogy reveals something profound: that the supposedly new problem of “going dark” — of not being able to find out information — has existed as long as humans have been around. After all, there is no way — yet, at least — of accessing information held in a person’s mind unless some kind of interrogation technique is used to extract it. And as the analogy shows us, that is exactly like needing to find some encryption workaround when information is held on a digital device. It may be possible, or it may not; but the only difference between the problems faced by those demanding answers thousands of years ago and today is that some of the required information may be held external to the mind in an encrypted digital form. Asking for guaranteed backdoors to that digital data is as unreasonable as demanding a foolproof method to extract information from any person’s mind. We accept that it may not be possible to do the latter, so why not accept the former may not be feasible either?

• Recently, the United States Senate saw fit to allow Internet Service Providers to sell your web browsing history and other data to third parties. The action has yet to pass the House, but if it does, it means anyone concerned about privacy will have to protect themselves against over zealous data collection from their ISP.

Civil Rights/Policing

• [...] it serves the Turkish president’s political agenda to provoke European leaders into paroxysms of outrage.

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s upcoming speaking tour to Australia is not the first time she has visited the country, but it’s the first time there has been significant public opposition, as a group of high-profile Australian Muslim women have launched a petition against the outspoken Dutch-American activist, claiming she “does not speak for us.”

• The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that passwords can be compelled with All Writs Orders. Handing down a decision in the case of Francis Rawls, a former Philadelphia police officer facing child porn charges, the court finds the order lawful, but doesn’t go quite as far as to determine whether compelling password production implicates the Fifth Amendment.

• When Helen Beristain told her husband she was voting for Donald Trump last year, he warned her that the Republican nominee planned to “get rid of the Mexicans.”

• Defending her vote, Helen quoted Trump directly, noting that the tough-talking Republican said he would only kick the “bad hombres” out of the country, according to the South Bend Tribune.

DRM

• The World Wide Web Consortium has formally put forward highly controversial digital rights management as a new web standard.

• Dubbed Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), this anti-piracy mechanism was crafted by engineers from Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and has been in development for some time. The DRM is supposed to thwart copyright infringement by stopping people from ripping video and other content from encrypted high-quality streams.

• The latest draft was published last week and formally put forward as a proposed standard soon after. Under W3C rules, a decision over whether to officially adopt EME will depend on a poll of its members.

• The internet of things, End User License Agreements, and Digital Rights Management are increasingly being used to give electronics manufacturers control and ownership over your stuff even after you buy it. Radio Motherboard talks to Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, authors of The End of Ownership about what we stand to lose when our songs, movies, tractors, and even our coffee makers serve another master.

Intellectual Monopolies

• [...] the crux of a Supreme Court case that will answer a question with far-reaching impact for all consumers: Can a company that sold you something use its patent on that product to control how you choose to use after you buy it?

Copyrights

• Another court has ruled that streaming local broadcast TV channels to mobile devices is something that only traditional pay-TV companies can do—startups need not apply. The Ninth Circuit appeals court has ruled that FilmOn, an Internet video service, cannot use the license created by Congress for “secondary transmissions” of over-the-air TV broadcasts. That likely means that FilmOn and other Internet-based services won’t be able to stream broadcast TV at all. That’s a setback for local TV and the news, weather, local advertising, and community programming it carries.

• Copyright rules don’t belong in trade agreements—so where do they belong? For the most part, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is probably the right place; it’s a fully multilateral body that devotes its entire attention to copyright, patent, and other so-called intellectual property (IP) rules, rather than including them as an afterthought in agreements that also deal with things like dairy products and rules of origin for yarn. Although we don’t always like the rules that come out of WIPO, at least we can be heard there—and sometimes our participation makes a tangible difference. The landmark Marrakesh Treaty for blind, visually impaired and print disabled users provides a good example.

• But there’s another multilateral international body that can also lay claim to authority over international intellectual property rules—the World Trade Organization (WTO). When the WTO first covered copyright and patent rules in a dedicated agreement called TRIPS, it was decried by activists as being far too strict. Today, ironically, those same activists (even EFF) often tout TRIPS as a more appropriate baseline standard for global IP rules, in contrast to the stricter (or “TRIPS-plus”) rules demanded for inclusion in preferential trade agreements such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

• An inquiry into deporting Kim Dotcom has been underway for 29 months and is set to be the longest, most drawn out investigation of its type.

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