● 03.26.17

● Links 26/3/2017: Debian Project Leader Elections, SecureDrop and Alexandre Oliva FSF Winners

Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• In the lawsuit documents (via The Reg), the plaintiffs explain that Microsoft did not “exercise reasonable care in designing, formulating, and manufacturing the Windows 10 upgrade,” becoming responsible for damages caused to users in the form of data loss and hardware issues.

Applications

• WebTorrent Desktop is a cross-platform open source torrent client with which you can instantly stream audio and video torrent files without waiting to completely download them.

• It features a beautiful and modern User Interface, streaming support for videos from Internet Archive, music from Creative Commons, and audiobooks from Librivox, and has the ability to talk to BitTorrent and WebTorrent peers while providing a seamless User Experience.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Every GNOME Shell user will visit the official GNOME Shell Extensions website at least once. And if those users do so this weekend they’ll notice a small difference as the GNOME Shell Extensions website is sporting a minor redesign. This online repo plays host to a stack of terrific add-ons that add additional features and tweak existing ones.

Distributions

• We’re happy to announce the rollout of clr-boot-manager in our stable repository. clr-boot-manager, from the Clear Linux Project For Intel Architecture, enables a more bulletproof update experience by handling the maintenance and garbage collection of kernels, as well as configuration of the bootloader itself (i.e. GRUB2 for Legacy Boot, goofiboot for UEFI boot on Solus). Furthermore, it enables us to retain older, known-working kernels, so in the event a kernel upgrade results in the inability to boot, you’ll still be able to roll back to the last good kernel.

• Comparing Ubuntu to Arch Linux. Focus is entirely on the underlying system, as Arch don’t offer a specific interface to compare with Ubuntu’s Unity desktop.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

Red Hat Family

Finance

Debian Family

• It’s that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader!

• The Project Leader position is described in the Debian Constitution.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Similar to Ubuntu 16.10, the Mesa Vulkan drivers are not present by default on new Ubuntu installations. But to get the packaged Vulkan drivers, simply sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers. When running some tests on Ubuntu 17.04 this weekend, I was a bit surprised to see that Mesa’s Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers aren’t present by default — since it’s been one year since the Vulkan 1.0 debut and the ANV/RADV drivers have matured a lot during this time. There’s also more and more software becoming available that can make use of Vulkan while personally wishing for more Linux desktops to push Vulkan. But it’s easy to install the Vulkan drivers as mentioned. Similarly, vulkan-utils isn’t installed by default.

• Regardless of my personal problems with non-Free software, the world has largely accepted FLOSS to SAS’s chagrin. I guess Canonical should be glad except they barely mention “Linux” on their site. What’s with that? They are like some purveyors of non-Free software that talk about the benefits of their products without even mentioning what the software actually does as if that’s best kept secret…

• Every year or so it comes up how some users believe that at Phoronix we should be benchmarking with Antergos/Arch, Debian, or [insert here any other distribution] instead of mostly using Ubuntu for our Linux benchmarking. That discussion has come back up in recent days.

• In our forums and Twitter the past few days, that discussion seems to have come up by some users requesting I use a different Linux distribution than Ubuntu as the main test platform for all of our benchmarking. As I’ve said before, Ubuntu is used given it’s the most popular when it comes to Linux desktop usage as well as significant usage of it on servers / workstations / cloud. But I have no tie to it beyond focusing upon using the Linux distribution that’s used by the most folks for obtaining the maximum relevance to users, gamers, and enthusiasts reading said articles. And for allowing easy comparisons / out-of-the-box expectations. On my main production system I still use Fedora Workstation as my personal favorite and in the basement server room there are a variety of operating systems — both BSDs and Linux and from Antergos to openSUSE and Debian.

Devices/Embedded

• Now, a maker who goes by the name ‘Node’ has built a homemade project called the ‘Zero Terminal’, wherein he has converted the Pi Zero W into a phone-sized computer with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen display. The aim to build this project is to develop a small, all-in-one computer that is both portable, and usable.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• Back when news of Andromeda first arrived, we discussed how Google would need to bring Android Studio to Chrome OS if they wanted to succeed in their goals of creating a single platform that fulfills the needs of most of their users, and it looks like they may finally be following through.

• The Raspberry Pi Zero W was launched on 28th February earlier this year. It is similar to the Raspberry Pi Zero but has Wireless Fidelity (802.11n wireless LAN) and Bluetooth (4.0) functionality for just around Rs.650.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• I am extremely pleased to have confirmed the entire speaker line-up for foss north 2017. This will be a really good year!

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google’s Chrome / Chromium web-browser has added a native glTF 1.0 parser. The GL Transmission Format, of course, being Khronos’ “3D asset delivery format” for dealing with compressed scenes and assets by WebGL, OpenGL ES, and other APIs.

• There are glTF utility libraries in JavaScript and other web-focused languages, but Google adding a native glTF 1.0 parser appears to be related to their VR push with supporting VR content on the web. Their glTF parser was added to Chromium Git on Friday.

CMS

• A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular open-source CMS Drupal, asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor and long-time member of the Drupal community, “to leave the Drupal project.” Why did he do this? He refuses to say. A huge furor has erupted in response — not least because the reason clearly has much to do with Garfield’s unconventional sex life.

• [...]

• I’ll unpack the first: open-source communities/projects are crucially important to many people’s careers and professional lives — cf “the cornerstone of my career” — so who they allow and deny membership to, and how their codes of conduct are constructed and followed, is highly consequential.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Today at the Midwest RepRap Festival, Lulzbot and IC3D announced the creation of an Open Source filament.

• While the RepRap project is the best example we have for what can be done with Open Source hardware, the stuff that makes 3D printers work – filament, motors, and to some extent the electronics – are tied up in trade secrets and proprietary processes. As you would expect from most industrial processes, there is an art and a science to making filament and now these secrets will be revealed.

Programming/Development

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released an assessment of the Gulf of Maine cod stock in 2014 that said the spawning population was at its lowest point in the history of the study of the fish. Scientists have cited years of overfishing and inhospitable environmental conditions as possible reasons for the decline.

• Global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic, but the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic

• In a last-minute effort to sink the Republican health care bill, a powerful network of conservative donors said Wednesday it would create a new fund for Republican 2018 reelection races — but they’ll only open it up to GOPers who vote against the bill.

• The advocacy groups helmed by Charles and David Koch have unveiled a new pool of money for advertisements, field programs and mailings that would exclude those who vote for the health care bill they oppose on Thursday. The effort, which they described as worth millions of dollars, is an explicit warning to on-the-fence Republicans from one of the most influential players in electoral politics not to cross them.

• A constitutional convention, something thought impossible not long ago, is looking increasingly likely. Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, if 34 state legislatures “issue a call” for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one. By some counts, the right-wing only needs six more states. Once called, delegates can propose and vote on changes and new amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which, if approved, are currently required to be ratified by 38 states.

Security

• In the wake of the release of thousands of documents describing CIA hacking tools and techniques earlier this month, there has been a renewed discussion in the security and government communities about whether government agencies should disclose any vulnerabilities they discover. While raw numbers on vulnerability discovery are hard to come by, the NSA, which does much of the country’s offensive security operations, discloses more than nine of every 10 flaws it finds, the agency’s deputy director said.

• EFF is pleased to announce a series of community security trainings in partnership with the San Francisco Public Library. High-profile data breaches and hard-fought battles against unlawful mass surveillance programs underscore that the public needs practical information about online security. We know more about potential threats each day, but we also know that encryption works and can help thwart digital spying. Lack of knowledge about best practices puts individuals at risk, so EFF will bring lessons from its comprehensive Surveillance Self-Defense guide to the SFPL.

• [...]

• With the Surveillance Self-Defense project and these local events, EFF strives to help make information about online security accessible to beginners as well as seasoned techno-activists and journalists. We hope you will consider our tips on how to protect your digital privacy, but we also hope you will encourage those around you to learn more and make better choices with technology. After all, privacy is a team sport and everyone wins.

• First, I would like to scare everyone a little bit in order to have people appreciate the extent of this statement.

• As the figure that opens the post indicates, there are thousands of vulnerable Owncloud/NextCloud instances out there. It will surprise many just how easy is to detect those by trying out common URL paths during an IP sweep.

• Bribes on offer as courier’s custom printing service needs Adobe’s security sinkhole

Defence/Aggression

• It can be difficult to understand the intent behind anti-terrorist security rules on travel and at the border. As our board member Bruce Schneier has vividly described, much of it can appear to be merely “security theater”—steps intended to increase the feeling of security, while doing much less to actually achieve it.

• This week the U.S. government, without warning or public explanation, introduced a sweeping new device restriction on travelers flying non-stop to the United States from ten airports in eight Muslim-majority countries, and nine airlines from those countries. Passengers on these flights must now pack large electronics (including tablets, cameras, and laptops) into their checked luggage.

• The US-UK ban on selected electronic devices from the passenger cabins of flights from some countries in north Africa and the Middle East was partly prompted by a previously undisclosed plot involving explosives hidden in a fake iPad, according to a security source.

• The UK ban on tablets, laptops, games consoles and other devices larger than a mobile phone came into effect on Saturday. It applies to inbound flights from six countries – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Turkey. Six UK airlines – British Airways, EasyJet, Jet2, Monarch, Thomas Cook and Thomson – and eight foreign carriers are affected.

• It follows a similar move in the US, which applies to flights from 10 airports in eight countries – Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

• Experts agree that within a few years, at most, North Korea will have mastered the ballistic missile technology needed to destroy U.S. cities with nuclear warheads. It recently demonstrated the use of solid-fuel technology in intermediate-range missiles, and earlier this month the regime tested a sophisticated new rocket engine that even South Korea called a technical breakthrough.

• [...]

• Last fall, the influential Council on Foreign Relations issued a major white paper calling North Korea’s weapons program “a grave and expanding threat” and asserting that Washington may have no choice but to “consider more assertive military and political actions, including those that directly threaten the existence of the [North Korean] regime and its nuclear and missile capabilities.”

• Such threats are foolhardy and counterproductive. As many analysts point out, a pre-emptive attack by the United States cannot guarantee to destroy all of North Korea’s hidden nuclear weapons or mobile missile launchers. Missing even a handful would guarantee the incineration of Seoul, Tokyo, and other nearby cities in radioactive fireballs. Even in the best case, North Korea could respond by flattening Seoul with artillery barrages, and killing tens of thousands of Koreans and Japanese with chemical weapons.

• The United Nations has stated that, of the four famines predicted for 2017, Yemen is the worst, with seven million people close to starvation and a further ten million in urgent need.

• From the start of his presidency, Donald Trump’s “war on terror” has entailed the seemingly indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people in the name of killing terrorists. In other words, Trump has escalated the 16-year-old core premise of America’s foreign policy – that it has the right to bomb any country in the world where people it regards as terrorists are found – and in doing so has fulfilled the warped campaign pledges he repeatedly expressed.

• The most recent atrocity was the killing of as many as 200 Iraqi civilians from U.S. airstrikes this week in Mosul. That was preceded a few days earlier by the killing of dozens of Syrian civilians in Raqqa Province when the U.S. targeted a school where people had taken refuge, which itself was preceded the week earlier by the U.S. destruction of a mosque near Aleppo that also killed dozens. And one of Trump’s first military actions was what can only be described as a massacre carried out by Navy SEALS in which 30 Yemenis were killed; among the children killed was an 8-year-old American girl (whose 16-year-old American brother was killed by a drone under Obama).

• As we pass the 14th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, its chief progenitor is suddenly beloved by the mainstream media again.

• Every time former President George W. Bush pops up somewhere these days, media pundits gush about how good he looks now, compared to Donald Trump. Recently, for instance, he described himself – and was dutifully portrayed as — a great supporter of the free press.

• “I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” he told NBC’s Matt Lauer in early March. “That we need the media to hold people like me to account. I mean, power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power, whether it be here or elsewhere.”

• The same week, he similarly assured a gushing daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres that “I’m a big believer in free press.”

• Afghanistan has long been called the “graveyard of empires,” the site of failed invasions. But the U.S. – in its 15-plus-year endeavor – seems determined to dig its own grave there, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.

• The United States had an earlier experience injecting armed force into Afghanistan, with its provision of lethal aid — most notably Stinger anti-aircraft missiles — to mujahedin fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s. During that effort, U.S. policymakers showed little or no concern with the political nature and direction of the forces they were aiding, which included what we would today quickly label as violent Islamists. Those forces were used as a tool to bleed the Soviets, who got themselves stuck in a military expedition that reached a strength just slightly bigger (about 115,000 troops) than the later U.S. expedition.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Our story on March 13 concerning Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ views on the relationship between climate change and national security was based on excerpts from unpublished written exchanges between Mattis and several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee following his Jan. 12 confirmation hearing. ProPublica has now obtained more comprehensive sets of these “Questions for the Record” and his answers.

• While the exchanges mainly focus on climate change, fossil fuel and renewable energy and related security issues, which was the initial reporting focus, they include discussions of Mattis’ views on issues ranging from Iran’s nuclear weapons program to ISIS, Guantanamo and LGBT issues in the military. The merged documents are posted on DocumentCloud.

Finance

• woman who dated Uber CEO Travis Kalanick for three years, Gabi Holzwarth, says she was with Mr. Kalanick when he and a team of five Uber employees visited an escort-karaoke bar in Seoul in mid-2014.

• To adapt Dr Samuel Johnson’s famous saying: attacking the BBC for alleged bias is a last refuge of the scoundrel. In this case, the scoundrel is one Julian Knight MP, who last week assembled some 70 fellow Brexiters to attack the BBC for allegedly being biased in favour of the Remain camp.

• Yes, we Remainers still exist and, according to an interesting finding by Alastair Campbell, our numbers may well be growing, which could help to explain why the Leave camp, ostensibly monarch of all it surveys, is displaying increasing signs of insecurity, as the falsity of its prospectus becomes manifest to a more reflective audience.

• Campbell wrote in the New European that at speaking events, he asks for a show of hands in response to the question: “Are you broadly optimistic or pessimistic about Brexit?”

• When he put this recently to 250 people who recruit from universities for their companies or organisations, only one optimistic hand went up. As Campbell says: “For the other 249 or so … you get the picture. Pessimism by a landslide. These are people who feel they have no voice in the debate as May wishes to conduct it.”

• Like sheep, the British people, regardless of whether they support Brexit, are being herded off a cliff, duped and misled by the most irresponsible, least trustworthy government in living memory. The moment when article 50 is triggered, signalling Britain’s irreversible decision to quit the EU, approaches inexorably. This week, on Black Wednesday, the UK will throw into jeopardy the achievements of 60 years of unparalleled European peace, security and prosperity from which it has greatly benefited. And for what?

• The ultra-hard Tory Brexit break with Europe that is now seen as the most likely outcome when the two-year negotiation concludes is the peacetime equivalent of the ignominious retreat from Dunkirk. It is a national catastrophe by any measure. It is a historic error. And Theresa May, figuratively waving the cross of St George atop the white cliffs of Dover like a tone-deaf parody of Vera Lynn, will be remembered as the principal author of the debacle. This is not liberation, as Ukip argues, nor even a fresh start. It is a reckless, foolhardy leap into the unknown and the prelude, perhaps, to what the existentialist writer Albert Camus described in La chute – a fall from grace, in every conceivable sense.

• A former lobbyist for an association of for-profit colleges resigned last Friday from the Department of Education, where he had worked for about a month.

• As ProPublica reported last week, the Trump administration had hired Taylor Hansen to join the department’s “beachhead” team, a group of temporary hires who do not require approval from the U.S. Senate for their appointments.

• On the day Hansen resigned, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sent a letter to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, citing ProPublica’s reporting and requesting more information on Hansen’s role.

• So you may have noticed that Google has been caught up in a bit of a stink in the UK over the company’s YouTube ads being presented near “extremist” content. The fracas began after a report by the Times pointed out that advertisements for a rotating crop of brands were appearing next to videos uploaded to YouTube by a variety of hateful extremists. It didn’t take long for the UK government — and a number of companies including McDonald’s, BBC, Channel 4, and Lloyd’s — to engage in some extended pearl-clutching, proclaiming they’d be suspending their ad buys until Google resolved the issue.

• Over the past ten years, Ecuador has achieved major economic and social advances. We are concerned that many of these important gains in poverty reduction, wage growth, reduced inequality, and greater social inclusion could be eroded by a return to of the policies of austerity and neoliberalism that prevailed in Ecuador from the 1980s to the early 2000s. A return to such policies threatens to put Ecuador back on a path that leads not only to a more unequal society, but to more political instability as well. It is important to recall that from 1996 to 2006, Ecuador went through eight presidents.

• President Donald Trump’s administration announced a $600 million bidding contest late Friday night to kick off construction of The Wall, a towering physical barrier between the United States and Mexico.

• The process will start with little walls — an unknown number of barriers of concrete and other materials that will serve as models for the bigger wall, which Trump made central to his political campaign.

• Construction will proceed with unusual haste. Companies have just two weeks to submit proposals. Finalists will make a 2 1/2-hour-long oral presentation to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which is overseeing the contest. Winners will be announced by late May.

• Steven Schooner, a professor of government contracting at George Washington University, tweeted that the process was “extremely/uniquely complicated (and confusing).”

• But CBP officials said the approach was designed to get the best value for the government.

• “Through the construction of prototypes, CBP will partner with industry to identify the best means and methods to construct border wall before making a more substantial investment in construction,” the agency said in a statement.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Russians hacked America.

• After Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, these four words reverberated across the nation. Democratic Party insiders, liberal pundits, economists, members of Congress, spies, Hollywood celebrities, and neocons of every stripe and classification level—all these worthy souls reeled in horror at the horribly compromised new American electoral order. In unison, the centers of responsible opinion concurred that Vladimir Putin carried off a brazen and successful plan to throw the most important election in the most powerful democracy in the world to a candidate of his choosing.

• It seemed like a plotline from a vintage James Bond film. From his Moscow lair, Vladimir Putin struck up an alliance with Julian Assange to mount a massive cyber-offensive to discredit Hillary Clinton and her retinue of loyal Democratic Party operatives in the eyes of the American public.

• The plot was full of twists and turns and hair-raising tangents, including tales of Russian-American retiree-agents sunning in Miami while collecting payoffs from Russia’s impoverished pension system. But the central ruse, it appears, was to enter the email server of the Democratic National Committee and then tap into the Gmail account belonging to John Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress and premier D.C. Democratic insider.

• The New York Times (3/12/17) reported that the Trump administration, for a variety of reasons, was filling the offices of administrative agencies at a glacial pace. From the Department of Agriculture to the Weather Service, over 2,000 mid-level political-appointee positions were still unfilled; the Times called it “the slowest transition in decades.”

• One place that slowness has showed up clearly is in the staffing of what are variously called Public Affairs offices, Newsrooms or Media Offices of these government departments and agencies—the very offices that reporters in both Washington bureaus and in newsrooms around the country depend on to get routine information about what these departments and agencies are doing, or, in the case of more investigative assignments, to ask basic questions and set up interviews with key personnel.

• This reporter stumbled upon the problem earlier in the month while researching a story for High Times magazine on the fate, in the Trump administration, of the now 19-year-old ban on federal student aid for any students who are convicted of even a minor criminal drug violation. In my case, I began by calling the Department of Education’s Press Room. (As of March 17, the website was still listing Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, though he left a year ahead of Obama, and there was another secretary, John King, before Trump nominee Betsy DeVos took over.)

• A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst entitled Explaining White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism found that “while economic dissatisfaction was part of the story, racism and sexism were much more important and can explain about two-thirds of the education gap among whites in the 2016 presidential vote.” The analysis used data from a national survey conducted during the final week of October (just days before the election), and concluded that the negative effects of neoliberalism and the rule of Wall Street were not the single most important factor in the victory for Trump. Rather it was “whiteness” and misogyny which played a pivotal role.

• Chris Hedges just received a Daytime Emmy nomination for his weekly online show “On Contact.” The Truthdig columnist is nominated for Outstanding Information Talk Show Host, alongside mainstream daytime hosts like Dr. Oz and Steve Harvey.

• “We need programs where dissident voices that challenge the dominant narrative, that critique systems of power, including of course corporate power, can be heard,” Hedges said in a press release. “And there is almost no space left, and that’s what we’ve tried to do with ‘On Contact,’ to fill that void.”

• According to this study, while older generations keep thinking that democracy is essential, younger generations are much more indifferent. In Europe, about 52% of citizens among the generation born in the 1930s believe that to live in a democratic country is fundamental, but only about 45% among those born in the 1980s share this opinion. In the United States, the intergenerational gap is even more heightened. 72% of citizens born in the 1930s believed democracy is essential, while only around 30% of those born in the 1980s had the same view.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The normalisation of de jure or de facto blasphemy laws and accusations of Islamophobia when religion is criticised have created a climate where Islamic states feel free to persecute freethinkers with impunity. Motions such as the anti- Islamophobia motion passed by the Canadian parliament are no different to de facto blasphemy laws, which aim to silence critics of Islam and ex-Muslims.

• The Right to Be Forgotten™ (New York State Edition) is dead. The Media Law Resource Center reports the senator behind the bill (Tony Avella) has pretty much killed it by striking the enactment clause. This means Avella is no longer sponsoring this bill, leaving it to wander the halls of state congress like a child whose father “just stepped out to get some smokes” ten years ago.

• It’s up to some other senator to step up and attach their name (and reputation) to an incredibly stupid law. I doubt there’s a line forming, not after the negative press it’s received. The Assembly version lives on, however. Assemblyman David Weprin has a matching proposal, with the same broad language that would make it a civil violation (paired with government-levied penalties) for any site/service providing “inadequate,” “irrelevant,” or “excessive” information someone wants stricken from the face of the internet.

• Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi manages to walk the censorship tightrope quite skilfully. With his film A Separation, he was initially refused permission to shoot the film and when it was completed it was almost banned but, when it beat an Israeli film for an Oscar, it was lauded by the state.

• With his latest film, The Salesman, he has again caused some controversy by refusing to travel to America and attend the Oscars where he was to again win Best Foreign film in protest at Mr Trump’s travel ban.

• Turkey remains top of Twitter’s global censorship list, according to the latest Twitter Transparency report published on March 21.

• According to the report, Turkey issued requests to the social media company to shut down 3,076 accounts.

• A total of 844 shut down requests were transmitted by Turkish courts and 2,232 were conveyed directly by Turkish government and security officials. Upon the requests, Twitter closed 290 accounts and deleted 489 posts.

• Twitter has released its “Transparency Report” which shows that it suspended 376,890 accounts in the second half of 2016 (July-December) for “promotion of terrorism,” an increase of 60 percent from the first half of 2016.

• The latest buzzword on the Internet is fake news. But what is the difference between fake news, false news and censorship? And why this sudden panic about fake news, after the mainstream media has made millions by peddling lies and swapping pics for decades? Could it be that the MSM has lost the credibility battle by selling lies as news and now has nothing else to do but to lash out?

• In our series of letters from African journalists, Yousra Elbagir looks at how Sudan’s young poets are reviving the nation’s tradition of lyrical resistance.

• President Omar al-Bashir’s government likes to keep a tight rein over Sudan’s media and cultural institutions, with state-endorsed competitions and publications trying to replace a once-thriving poetry scene.

• The director general of the board Abdul Halim Abdul Hamid was responding to queries from Channel NewsAsia, after rumours that the movie might be banned or censored because of a character that would reportedly question her sexuality.

• On Tuesday, it was reported that the film was under review after it was learnt that there is a minor scene in the movie where Yellow Ranger Trini (Becky G) is coming to terms with her sexual orientation.

• On March 14, Maas presented a draft of a so-called network enforcement law (NetzDG), which imposes extensive surveillance and censorship responsibilities on commercial social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. If the draft becomes law, such sites will be required to react immediately to complaints and block “obviously illegal content” within 24 hours. Other illegal content must be erased within seven days.

• Nearly everyone has criticism for German Justice Minister Heiko Maas’ proposal to impose fines on social networks and their workers for failure to delete hateful content. Internet freedom advocates hate it for imposing censorship.

• With these words, the organizers of Beirut Cinema Days invite everyone to join them in speaking up against censorship in Lebanon. They are calling for a protest and discussion panel at 8 p.m. on Friday, in Metropolis Cinema, Achrafieh.

• In a statement posted on their Facebook page, the organizers of the festival explain that the move comes in response to the censorship board enforcing strict regulations on most films that were part of this year’s edition.

• The media, or more specifically the entertainment media, plays a very important role beyond serving as a form of escapism and enjoyment. It serves as a reflection of society and, at times, becomes a tool to influence society as well.

• “What we (the committee) recommended is the immediate abolishment of censorship…”

• There was once a time, when taking a class on cinema might have been academically suspect. Richard Peña, a film scholar and Columbia University professor, would know. “It was a little like forbidden fruit,” said Peña, who was in Mumbai earlier this month for a workshop series on Latin American cinema for the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum.

• [...]

• Peña’s tastes are dizzyingly diverse; and he counts off a bunch of different films from 2016 that he enjoyed: the German comedy Toni Erdmann, the Oscar-nominated documentaries O.J.: Made in America and I Am Not Your Negro, and Indivisible, an Italian film. There isn’t much of a pattern. “I often like films for what’s different about them, how contradictory they can be,” he says. “I can like a very commercial Hollywood director and a director who is extremely esoteric.”

• An Senator has criticised the Australian Classification Board following its ban of survival horror title Outlast 2 last week.

• Outlast 2 was refused classification (i.e. banned) in Australia thanks in part to a scene of implied sexual violence.

• As reported by IGN, in a speech delivered to the Senate yesterday, Liberal Democratic Party Senator David Leyonhjelm urged the Government to leave gamers alone.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Lots of people were rushing to defend the fact that a man is in jail indefinitely for refusing to decrypt, and trying to spin the story as though this definitely didn’t mean that you can be put in jail for encryption. This is the worst kind of “good bureaucrat” behavior – one who can’t see an evil outcome right when it’s in front of them, just because the individual steps are familiar.

• Prosecutors revealed in a court filing on Wednesday that they were pulling data from more than 100 cell phones seized during arrests on Inauguration Day. All the phones were locked, but the government indicated they were still able to collect information from them.

• Other constitutional inconveniences will have to wait as well. The presiding judge hasn’t granted the data dump court order yet but has told arrestees any unconstitutional searches will have to be sorted out during their trials, not prior to prosecution. Expect statements of expertise from law enforcement officers where the word “drug dealer” has been replaced with “protester” to explain the likelihood of finding evidence of drug dealing felony rioting on more than 100 seized and searched cell phones.

• Technology companies should no longer be able to provide encrypted messaging services that cannot be accessed in emergencies by the security services, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said on Sunday.

• Speaking after it emerged that the police were investigating reports that Khalid Masood had used the encrypted WhatsApp service just before he launched the Westminster attack in which he killed four people, Rudd said it was “completely unacceptable” that the police and security services were shut out from messages of this kind.

• She also signalled a renewed determination to stop internet companies publishing extremist material online by declaring that they now had to accept they were “publishing companies”, with the responsibilities that went with that, not just technology firms providing a platform.

• The struggle over this data points to a growing recognition in the world of finance that personal records rank among the most valuable currencies in the increasingly digital economy.

Civil Rights/Policing

• He was accused of hurting the religious feelings of Muslims and Christians

• [...]

• Department of Homeland Security attorneys had opposed the asylum bid, saying Yee’s case did not qualify as persecution based on political beliefs. It was unclear whether they had appealed the decision or if Yee would have to remain imprisoned if they did. Attorneys have 30 days to appeal.

• Patrick G. Eddington joins us this week to tell us about the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, how the CIA operates, and what the new Wikileaks revelations mean for our privacy online.

• A blogger from Singapore jailed two years ago for making online video posts blasting his government was granted asylum to remain in the United States, an immigration judge ruled.

• Police in Belarus cracked down hard Saturday on opposition protesters who tried to hold a forbidden demonstration in the capital – a human rights group said more than 400 people were arrested and many were beaten.

• The demonstrators had hoped to build on a rising wave of defiance of the former Soviet republic’s authoritarian government, led by President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994.

• Here come even more revelations of surveillance abuse by UK law enforcement. To date, various law enforcement agencies have been exposed as participating in very broad readings of very broadly-written anti-terrorism laws to spy on journalists and activists. The latest abuse detailed by The Guardian concerns the surveillance of activists by UK law enforcement on behalf of a foreign government.

• Are you an urban police force thinking about how to control your fellow humans? Look no farther! Your pals at Bozena have an all-new RIOT system, a crowd-control killdozer for all your protest-suppressing needs!

• Alfa Bank is considering, among other things, using one of our nation’s most easily-abused laws to pursue legal action against Camp for “promoting an unwarranted investigation” into the bank’s ties to Donald Trump. The CFAA is cited as one route the bank may take towards making Camp pay for besmirching the reputation of the Russian bank. It also demands [PDF] she retain records possibly needed in upcoming litigation, including those detailed in this memorable sentence…

• The department has also refused to apologize to the news services it misled, most of which rightly feel this diminishes the public’s trust in its public servants.

• According to Chief Martin, it was a “moral and ethical” decision to lie to the public. He also says this is the first time in his 40 years as a cop he’s seen this sort of thing done. Of course, it’s now much more difficult to take this assertion at face value, especially when Martin’s refusing to remove fake news from a site after it’s already served its purpose.

• The Trump’s administration decision to ghost the IACHR today demonstrates a shocking disrespect for human rights.

• The United States has pulled its participation from hearings planned for today by a regional human rights body that has enjoyed the support of every U.S. administration since its founding.

• The toll of the US war on Iraq, following years of devastating sanctions, can hardly be reckoned. At least half a million people killed, millions displaced, made ill, their homes and communities destroyed, of course the political repercussions in the region, and thousands of US servicemembers killed and wounded—all of it based on falsehoods peddled to the US public by warmongering politicians enabled by the press.

• After months of coverage dominated by pro-war pundits and former generals—Iraqis themselves rarely heard from—many Americans likely accepted the official story that the invaders would be welcomed as liberators in the streets of Baghdad. But vast numbers did not. Millions marched in the streets in opposition to the war before it started, but that viewpoint was sidelined and worse in corporate media, whose current rehabilitation of the author of the nightmare, George W. Bush, is only the latest sign of their eager amnesia about the role they played in leading us to an illegal war based on lies.

• The U.S. border has been thrown into the spotlight these last few months, with border agents detaining travelers for hours, demanding travelers unlock devices, and even demanding passwords and social media handles as a prerequisite for certain travelers entering the country. As the U.S. government issues a dizzying array of new rules and regulations, people in the U.S. and abroad are asking: are there meaningful constitutional limits on the ability of border agents to seize and search the data on your electronic devices and in the cloud?

• The answer is: Yes. As we’ll explain in a series of posts on the Bill of Rights at the border and discuss in detail in our border search guide, border agents and their activities are not exempt from constitutional scrutiny.

• In this first post, we’ll focus on the First Amendment.

• A new report released by ICE is trying to coerce police across the country into becoming immigration enforcement agents.

• Immigration and Customs Enforcement yesterday released its first report attempting to name and shame police departments that require more than ICE’s say-so in order to hold someone in jail. This is just the Trump administration’s latest attempt to smear sanctuary cities, but it’s also a trap for local law enforcement—ICE could be shaming them into violating your rights.

• In the FAQ for the report, ICE goes out of its way to suggest that a detainer is something that it isn’t—a simple request to know when someone is being let out of jail. But that simply isn’t true. A detainer is a request to hold someone in jail, often longer than the local law enforcement agency is legally allowed. Doing so can lead to illegal arrests and the violation of a person’s constitutional rights.

• He then demanded I remove my pants and tights. I tried to calm him down and reassured him I had nothing to hide, but he started to forcefully pull down my underwear. He touched me inappropriately, running his hand over my vagina. I was so scared and confused — I couldn’t understand why he was doing this. It clearly wasn’t necessary for security purposes. Now that I look back, I feel so stupid that I let it happen. And I now realize it was all for his own enjoyment.

• A few minutes later, the same officer took my younger sister, who was just 17, into the same room. My sister emerged the same way as I had: crying and terrified. My sister is just a kid — I never thought he would do to her what he did to me. To this day I still can’t believe it. I feel so guilty. We thought we had left a world of violence and oppression, only to realize immigration enforcement officers in the United States appeared to be no different than law enforcement in our home country, abusing the tremendous power and responsibility that comes with their job.

• [...]

• Since the incident, I’ve come to learn that Customs and Border Protection is the largest law enforcement agency in the United States and, through the ACLU, that many children trying to escape from trauma and abuse in their home countries often experience additional abuse and mistreatment in the hands of these U.S. border agents. Unfortunately, few people know this. CBP often refuses to own up to its actions and hides the reports of abuse and doesn’t reveal if officers are disciplined.

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed on Saturday that he will reinstate capital punishment “without hesitation”, ahead of the referendum on 16 April that could lead to a radical extension of his powers.

• Speaking at a televised rally in Canakkale, the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) promised that he would sign a bill on the death penalty, stating: “I believe, God willing, that after the 16 April vote, parliament will do the necessary concerning your demands for capital punishment”.

• His controversial comments come over a decade after Turkey completely abolished the death penalty in its efforts to join the European Union.

• On 22 February US President Donald Trump issued new deportation rules to find, arrest and deport irregular immigrants in the United States who have been convicted of any crime. The Mexican Foreign Minister, Luis Videgaray, responded by stating that Mexico will go to the United Nations to defend the rights of immigrants in the United States.

• Interestingly, that sort of response has been the exception. Very few commentators have looked to international institutions to advocate against Trump’s deportation policy, or his earlier executive order severely restricting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. This is likely due to the fact that the international advocacy infrastructure around migrants’ rights is weaker than in most other advocacy issue areas. However, in the current context of surging nationalist populism, the need for a new convention on migrants’ rights and a competent entity to oversee, promote and censure violations of these same rights is becoming ever clearer.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For decades now the FCC has been an expert at imposing utterly meaningless merger conditions. Usually these conditions are proposed by the companies’ themselves, knowing full well these “demands” are utterly hollow — and FCC punishment for ignoring them will be virtually non-existent. The end result has been a rotating tap dance of merger conditions that sound good upon superficial press inspection, but wind up being little more than hot air. It’s a symbiotic relationship where as the telecom sector consolidates (often at the cost of less competition) the FCC gets to pretend it’s not selling consumer welfare down river.

• Late last year Google Fiber announced it would be pausing expansion into several new markets, axing its CEO, and shuffling a number of employees around. Reports subsequently emerged suggesting that Alphabet higher ups were growing frustrated with the high cost and slow pace of fiber deployment, and were contemplating an overall larger shift to wireless. While the company continues to insist that there’s nothing to see here and that everything is continuing as normal, signs continue to emerge that the ground Google Fiber is built on may not be particularly sturdy.

DRM

• The latest draft of the EME standard was issued on 16 March and sent to W3C members. Whether it is adopted or not depends on how the members vote.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The European Patent Office will grant patent rights over the use of CRISPR in all cell types to a University of California team, contrasting with a recent decision in the U.S.

• A third front in our battle to reform the USTR’s closed and opaque trade negotiation practices is in a submission to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that we submitted this week. The ITC was seeking public submissions in an enquiry on digital trade, to gather input into a report that it is writing to advise the USTR on the topic.

• [...]

• As the renegotiation of NAFTA is around the corner, the need for USTR to reform its outdated practices is becoming increasingly urgent. With Congress, consumer groups, and international trade experts all demanding similar reforms from the next Trade Representative, we certainly hope that Robert Lighthizer is feeling the heat, and that he will rise to the challenge once he takes office.

Trademarks

• When it comes to trademark law, it’s worth repeating that its primary function is to prevent customer confusion and to act as a benefit for consumer trust. This mission has become skewed in many ways in many countries, but one of the lessons learned via the Washington Redskins fiasco is that even well-meaning attempts to have government play obscenity cop will result in confusing inconsistency at best and language-policing at worst. When government begins attempting to apply morality to trademark law in that way, it skews the purpose of trademark entirely.

• To see that on display elsewhere, we need only look to Hungary, where the government is considering stripping the trademark protection for some of the branding for Heineken beer because it resembles the ever-scary demon that is communism.

Copyrights

• Well, we all knew this was coming, but Rep. Bob Goodlatte has been passing around a draft of a bill to move the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress. Specifically, it would make the head of the Copyright Office, the Copyright Register, a Presidentially appointed position, with 10-year terms, and who could only be removed by the President.

• [...]

• Either way, by making this a Presidential appointment, the MPAA and RIAA know that it will give them significantly greater say over who leads the office. Right now they can (and do!) lobby the Librarian of Congress on who should be chosen, but the Librarian gets to choose. One hopes that the Librarian would take into account the larger view of copyright law, and who it’s actually supposed to benefit — and we’re hoping that the current Librarian will do so (if given the chance). But making it a Presidential appointment will mean heavy lobbying by industry, and much less likelihood that the public interest is considered.

• People tend to have a hard time discussing the two mathematical concepts of zero and infinity. It’s not hard to understand why this is, of course, with reality being a material thing and both the lack of and the infinite amount of something being somewhat foreign. And this manifests itself in all sorts of disciplines, from cosmology to spirituality to physics. And, of course, economics, particularly in the digital age where many of the axioms surrounding physicality no longer apply to digitized goods. Zero and infinity play heavy roles here, both in the discussion of free content (zero) and the concept of digital and freely copyable goods as a resource (infinity). The economic nature of these concepts have long vexed established industries, even as some of us have pointed out how efficient and useful infinite digital goods can be if properly applied.

• [...]

• With nearly half of eBook pirates falling into their thirties or forties, and the study later showing that two-thirds of eBook pirates have household incomes of at least $30k per year, and almost a third having incomes in six figures, this simply isn’t a situation that can be explained away by pointing at young poor people. So, why do older, more affluent people pirate eBooks?

• I would argue it’s instinctual. Most of these people may not even be able to explain the term “marginal cost”, but by instinct they feel that something that costs nothing to reproduce ought not to require payment. Their brains do this calculation behind the scenes, not thinking about the sunk costs of initial production, nor the sweat-equity spent by the content creator. Marginal cost is the term used by economists to explain pricing laws that emerged organically through human instinct.

• Unfortunately for them, the company is a miserable performer and has lost millions over the past few years. On a good day its stock is worth around $0.04. On a bad one, barely half of that.

• Copyright safe harbors for Internet intermediaries are under attack from Big Media both in the United States and in Europe. Laying the blame for falling revenues on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook (despite that fact that revenues aren’t actually falling at all), their aim is to impose new controls over how these platforms allow you to access and share content online. The control at the top of their wish-list is a compulsory upload filter, that would automatically screen everything that you upload. Such a requirement would be a costly imposition on smaller platforms and new innovators, and provide governments with a ready-built infrastructure for content censorship.

• In Australia, the situation is a little different—because due to an oversight in implementation of the original U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement in 2005, they never had a copyright safe harbor system to begin with; or rather, a much narrower one which only applies to ISPs, but not to other Internet platforms, nor even to other Internet access providers such as libraries and educational institutions. This oversight was due to be remedied with the passage of new amendments to Australia’s Copyright Act. (The TPP, had it passed, would also have required Australia to bring in this reform.)

• It was just last week that we discussed the pleasant news that Australia’s Prime Minister was backing the idea of reforming the country’s safe harbor laws, which are far out of line with much of the world as the result of poor wording. The whole thing can be basically summarized thusly: in Australia, safe harbor protections only apply to commercial ISPs, as opposed to service providers like websites or institutions that offer internet access, because someone decided to use the term “carriage service providers” in the law as opposed to simply “service providers.” Essentially everyone agrees this was done in error as opposed to intentionally, yet it’s been decades and nobody has bothered fixing the law.

• Until some members of the government revived an attempt to do so and got the Prime Minister’s support. Doing so would have put Australian law on equal footing with the EU and American safe harbor provisions, meaning that service providers generally couldn’t be scapegoated for the actions of a third party. You know, holding the actual people culpable of a crime accountable instead of the service provider.

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