● 03.28.17

● Links 28/3/2017: Linux 4.11-rc4 Kernel Released, Red Hat Surge on Sales

Posted in News Roundup at 3:04 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• If you’re making the move from Windows or Mac (or even from Android or iOS), welcome to our world.

• These days, using Linux for doing everyday computer tasks isn’t that much different than using other operating systems — meaning the learning curve is only slight. In fact, my colleague Phil Shapiro works at a library that uses Linux on the computers its patrons use and says that hardly anyone even notices they’re not using Windows. It’s that easy.

• The city of Dortmund, Germany’s 8th largest city, is rapidly increasing its use of Linux. From 2015 to 2016, the number of Linux servers rose by 21%, from 200 to 242.

• In summer 2015, I posted a detailed account of my tentative switch from Windows7 and Lightroom to Linux and Darktable. This was sparked by sudden crashes that were afflicting my system, but in a deeper sense grew from frustration with Windows and, to a lesser degree, with Lightroom.

• Once I headed for Linux, I decided to plunge in fully and commit to using Ubuntu and free, open-source photo software for several months – at least until the end of that year. That would give me a chance to see whether I could actually run my photography business on the new system.

• While Dortmund uses more TOOS servers than GNU/Linux servers, they have three times as many physical GNU/Linux servers as TOOS servers…

• So it’s always good to know when your time and date values might flow over. For most GNU/Linux users there are currently four dates to “keep your eyes on”

Audiocasts/Shows

• This past Sunday, Jupiter Broadcasting announced the Linux Action Show—one of the longest-running podcasts in the Linux world, which has aired almost continuously since June 10, 2006—is coming to an end and closing down production.

• Over a decade. That is a seriously good run for any show—podcast, TV, radio or otherwise. When I and my co-host created the Linux Action Show (typically abbreviated as LAS) nearly 11 years ago, we had no idea it would last this long. Nor did we have any idea of how far it would grow.

Kernel Space

• So last week, I said that I was hoping that rc3 was the point where we’d start to shrink the rc’s, and yes, rc4 is smaller than rc3. By a tiny tiny smidgen. It does touch a few more files, but it has a couple fewer commits, and fewer lines changed overall. But on the whole the two are almost identical in size.

• Which isn’t actually all that bad, considering that rc4 has both a networking merge and the usual driver suspects from Greg, _and_ some drm fixes – and those tend to be the big areas.

• So on the whole things look fine. There’s changes all over, and in mostly the usual proportions. Some core kernel code shows up in the diffstat slightly more than it usually does – we had an audit fix and a bpf hashmap fix, but on the whole it all looks very regular: mostly drivers, networking, arch fixes and some filesystem noise. Shortlog appended as usual for people who want to skim the details.

• Go out and test,

• Linus

• As expected, Linus Torvalds made his regular Sunday announcement to inform us about the availability of the fourth Release Candidate (RC) development release of the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel.

• Coming one week after the third Release Candidate, Linux 4.11 RC4 appears to be just a bit smaller than the previous build, updating the networking stack and many of the supported drivers to be on par with what was changed earlier this week in the stable Linux kernel branches.

• Linus Torvalds has announced the Linux 4.11-rc4 kernel this evening.

• A new subsystem has been proposed for staging in the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• Peter Rosin has requested Greg KH pull in the mux controller subsystem for the Linux 4.12 kernel. He explained of this new subsystem, “This adds a new mux controller subsystem with an interface for accessing mux controllers, along with two drivers providing the interface (gpio and adg792) and two consumers (iio and i2c). This is done in such a way that several consumers can independently access the same mux controller if one controller controls several multiplexers, thus allowing sharing.”

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.10.6 kernel.

• All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade.

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

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

• For months there have been Intel developers working on 5-level paging to increase Linux’s virtual/physical address space limitations and with Linux 4.12 it looks like that will be supported.

• Five level paging allows raising the Linux x86_64 limitation of 256 TiB of virtual address space to 128 PiB and raises the physical address space limit from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. While 64 TiB of memory may seem like a lot, some Intel customers are already hitting this limitation.

• Travel tech giant Amadeus has been moving toward a fully software-defined data center strategy over the past few years — one based on open source and software-defined networking (SDN).

Graphics Stack

• While Ubuntu 17.04 is set to ship next month with Linux 4.10 and Mesa 17.0 as a big upgrade over the open-source graphics stack found in Ubuntu 16.10, if you switch over to using Mesa 17.1 and Linux 4.11 is the potential for even better performance. Here are some Radeon RX 470 tests in different combinations on Ubuntu 17.04.

• Prolific Mesa developer Marek Olšák is looking to tackle what he thinks is the “biggest performance bottleneck at the moment” for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

• Longtime X.Org developer Eric Anholt who previously worked for Intel and is now working for Broadcom on the open-source VC4 driver stack is working to add the Meson build system support for the xorg-server.

• Last week AMD began publishing the open-source driver enablement patches for the upcoming Vega graphics hardware. Today the libdrm support began to land.

• Canonical’s Timo Aaltonen announced earlier the availability of the latest Mesa 17.0.2 3D Graphics Library packages in his personal package archive (PPA) for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10.

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users who haven’t managed to upgrade their installations to the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS release, which ships with updated kernel and graphics stacks from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), are still relying on third-party PPAs for the latest Mesa builds.

• Timo Aaltonen noted on his blog that the ‘Ubuntu-X’ team now have an ‘Updates’ PPA for you to get the latest Mesa on Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 16.10.

• This is likely a result of Feral Interactive’s call for a PPA for this exact purpose. So it’s good to see something proper come out of it.

Benchmarks

• For those curious about the impact of GCC compiler optimization levels, a variety of benchmarks were carried out using GCC 6.3 on Intel’s Clear Linux platform.

Applications

• LibreELEC (Krypton) v8.0.1 MR is available bringing Kodi v17.1, hardware support for the Raspberry Pi Zero W, improved software HEVC decoding on RPi3/CM3 hardware, driver support for Fe Pi audio cards, and support for Cirrus Logic DAC audio cards (thanks to @HiassofT). The bump to Kodi v17.1 resolves several upgrade and user-experience issues we have seen with the initial Kodi v17.0 release, and happiness is enhanced for users wearing an official LibreELEC tee-shirt or hoodie.

• LibreELEC developers announced the release and general availability of the first maintenance update to the major LibreELEC 8.0 stable series of the Linux-based operating system built around the Kodi open-source media center.

• Lubomir Rintel announced that the development of the NetworkManager 1.8 major release has kicked off with the availability of the first snapshot, versioned 1.7.2, for public testing.

• MKVToolnix developer Moritz Bunkus released a new major branch of his popular, open-source and cross-platform MKV (Matroska) manipulation software, versioned 10.0.0.

• Claws Mail is a GTK+ based, user-friendly, lightweight, and fast email client.

• Claws Mail, the lightweight and open-source GTK+ based email client for Linux, UNIX, and Windows operating systems, was updated recently to version 3.15.0, a maintenance update that adds new functionalities and addresses a lot of bugs.

• Claws Mail 3.15.0 comes more than four months after the first point release to the 3.14 series of the application, and among the new features implemented we can mention a bunch of options that should help users configure Claws Mail when opening a selected message, such as checkboxes on the Display and Summaries page of Preferences.

• Deepin File Manager (DFM) reached version 1.4 at March 2017. Its a bugfix version, but very interesting as it brings many new features. The most noticeable changes are Settings dialog, new disk-space display, new “Format” option on disk storage, and new copying dialog. It’s smoother now by having drop shadow on file/folder icons. DFM is much more beautiful and usable in this 1.4 version. Anyway, you can upgrade DFM to 1.4 on deepin OS, or in another distro (Manjaro DDE or Ubuntu).

• Deepin envy is a condition afflicting Linux users who like the look of Deepin Linux’s apps, but don’t want to switch entire distro to use then.

• And there’s finally a cure: Snaps.

• Snap apps allow applications to bundle in all of their dependencies, which makes it easy for apps that typically rely on a certain set of libraries to run on distributions where those libraries are not normally available (or are, but only through additional repos and installing all sorts of junk that conflicts with your current system).

• Nord is a minimal flat design theme pattern created to enhance your work experience by improving focus and readability for code syntax highlighting and UI.

• It has 4 main colors namely Polar Night, Snow Storm, Frost, and Aurora, which are further partitioned into a total of 16 dimmed pastel. It has been used to style so many things including iTerm, Hyper Terminal, and Intelli J IDE, among others.

• The development team behind the open-source and multi-platform PeaZip archiver manager utility announced the release of PeaZip 6.4.0, an important update that brings new features and lots of improvements.

• PeaZip 6.4.0 comes one and a half months after the release of the version 6.3.1, and updates the backend to use p7zip 16.02 on 64-bit GNU/Linux platforms, as well as pea 0.61 for all supported operating systems. Under the hood, there are a bunch of fixes, performance improvements, and code cleanup.

• The development team behind the GnuCash open-source and cross-platform accounting software announced the release and immediate availability of the sixteenth maintenance update to the 2.6 stable series.

• GnuCash 2.6.16 comes four months after the release of version 2.6.15, which means that it’s also the first to launch in 2017. It also means that a lot of issues reported by users since then have been addressed, including the display of small reports on HiDPI screens, wrong menu entry in the “Tip of the Day” dialog, and much more.

• Notepadqq is a free, an open source code editor and Notepad replacement, that supports several languages (100 languages supported) and helps developers to work more efficiently.

• If you’re looking for a dual-pane file manager available for Linux (or macOS or Windows) look no further than Fman. Fman is pitched as “modern file manager for power users”. It has a clean design, runs quickly, and its functionality can be extended through plugins.

Instructionals/Technical

• As a participant in the greater open source community, and more specifically as a member of the Fedora Project, I have the opportunity to meet with many people and talk about all kinds of interesting technical topics. One of my favorites is the “command line,” or shell, because learning about how people use the shell proficiently can give you an insight into how they think, what kind of workflows they favor, and to some extent what makes them tick. Many developers and systems operators share their “dot files” (a common slang term for their shell’s configuration files) publicly out on the Internet, which leads to an interesting collaboration opportunity that allows everyone to learn tips and tricks from seasoned veterans of the command line as well as share common shortcuts and productivity boosters.

• Some Linux commands that might not be sitting in your top favorites list can still come in very handy in a number of ways. In today’s post, we’re going to examine some interesting though somewhat unusual command options.

• GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a raster image editing program for Linux, OSX, Windows and other OS/es. This is not a free photoshop program as many say so. Graphics enthusiasts and professionals rely on GIMP for image retouching or complete creation of images for artwork (which is a daunting task for novice). And yes GIMP is open source that means you get to keep it on your PC or laptop for free without legal hiatus.

• In my data-cleaning work I often make up tallies of selected individual characters from big, UTF-8-encoded data files. What’s the best way to do this? As shown below, I’ve tried grep/sort/uniq, AWK and Ruby, and AWK’s the fastest. The trials also revealed an unexpected problem with the uniq program in GNU coreutils.

• My testbed was a humongous data table called reference.txt. The file contains 233 million characters, some of which are strange Unicode items.

Games

• There was much talk among big AAA games in the past few months (for good reasons), but we should not forget that there has been a bunch of other games that have recently made it to Linux. I won’t go through the list of all the lesser known ones, but you should probably pay attention to the following.

• It’s part of an advertising campaign for their new game, which sadly won’t be seeing Linux support.

• At 37 minutes in they cover their plans for Steam 360 video. With SteamVR being in beta on Linux, presumably this new video offering will be available on Linux when the support officially rolls out.

• We’ve all been waiting on it for some time, but point & click horror game STASIS [Official Site] now has a new Linux Beta for you to check out.

• In another case of Kickstarter woes, Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom a promising looking action-RPG seems to be delaying the Linux release. The main release is now scheduled for the 18th of April and it looks like Linux gamers will be left out in the cold.

• As a big fan of the older Halo games myself, Installation 01 [Official Site] sounds like it could be pretty interesting. It also plans full Linux support due to using the Unity game engine.

• Back in January Beamdog was looking for testers on a new game. Now the Planescape website has a countdown timer. It’s legitimate too, as tweeted by the Beamdog and the D&D twitter accounts.

• The developers of Deadhold [Steam, Official Site] want to support Linux and they are thinking about releasing an experimental Linux Beta.

• Those of us who have taken up the mantle of a Linux gamer know that our path is rarely easy. For a long time, few games were released for our chosen platform. Those that were shipped riddled with bugs, compatibility issues and rarely worked out of the box. Getting games to work require using WINE and deeply complex almost arcane workarounds to force windows games to work on our quirky systems. Unfortunately, games rarely worked well and usually required hours of complex tweaking in order to get them to function properly. To top this all of, there were graphics driver problems, optimization issues, peripherals rarely worked out of the box and our lives were generally difficult.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• My nickname is Dolly, I am 11 years old, I live in Cannock, Staffordshire, England. I am at Secondary school, and at the weekends I attend drama, dance and singing lessons, I like drawing and recently started using the Krita app.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Dash to Dock GNOME Shell Extension has been updated to support GNOME 3.24, and improves its app launch keyboard shortcut feature.

Distributions

• Linux Mainstream Distros are quite popular as they have a large number of developers working on them as well as a large number of users using them. In addition, these distros also have strong support system.

• People often search alternatives for Linux Mainstream Distros but often get confused about which is the best one for them. So listed below are 7 best Linux mainstream distros alternative choices for you.

• Solus Project, through Joshua Strobl, proudly announced the implementation of Clear Linux’s clr-boot-manager Linux kernel and bootloader management tool into the stable repositories of the Solus operating system.

• The desktop-focused, performance-oriented Solus Linux distribution has pulled in another component from Clear Linux: clr-boot-manager. The clr-boot-manager is responsible for solid kernel and boot-loader management.

Reviews

• Minimal Linux Live is, as the name suggests, a very minimal Linux distribution which can be run live from a CD, DVD or USB thumb drive. One of the things which set Minimal Linux Live (MLL) apart from other distributions is that, while the distribution is available through a 7MB ISO file download, the project is designed to be built from source code using a shell script. The idea is that we can download scripts that will build MLL on an existing Linux distribution. Assuming we have the proper compiler tools on our current distribution, simply running a single shell script and waiting a while will produce a bootable ISO featuring the MLL operating system.

• Yet another option the MLL project gives us is running the distribution inside a web browser using a JavaScript virtual machine. The browser-based virtual machine running MLL can be found on the project’s website, under the Emulator tab. This gives us a chance to try out the operating system in our web browser without installing or building anything.

• I decided to try the MLL build process to see if it would work and how long it would take if everything went smoothly. I also wanted to find out just how much functionality such a small distribution could offer. The project’s documentation mostly covers building MLL on Ubuntu and Linux Mint and so I decided to build MLL on a copy of Ubuntu 16.04 I had running in a virtual machine. The steps to build MLL are fairly straight forward. On Ubuntu, we first install six packages to make sure we have all the required dependencies. Then we download an archive containing MLL’s build scripts. Then we unpack the archive and run the build script. We just need to type four commands in Ubuntu’s virtual terminal to kick-start the build process.

Arch Family

• Arne Exton announced today the release of a new build of his Arch Linux-based ArchEX GNU/Linux distribution built around the lightweight LXQt desktop environment.

• it took us a while to pull this off. Again we can present an advanced CLI installer for Manjaro Linux.

• Manjaro-Architect is a CLI net-installer, which means it does not need or provide a (real) graphical interface and all packages for the target system will be downloaded from the internet during installation rather than extracted from a compressed ISO image.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE Project’s Dominique Leuenberger was proud to announce the availability of the recently released GNOME 3.24 desktop environment into the software repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release.

• According to the developer, and to our knowledge, openSUSE Tumbleweed is now the first GNU/Linux distributions to offer the GNOME 3.24 packages to their users. We know that openSUSE is a distro mostly oriented towards the KDE Plasma desktop, but support for GNOME is provided at the same level of quality.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced a new partner program designed to enable a deeper collaborative go-to-market strategy between Red Hat and participating partner organizations and optimize the value chain for application development and integration projects.

• Red Hat introduced a “partner program within a partner program” on Monday to better support a subset of its partners leveraging its application delivery portfolio to build custom solutions for enterprises undergoing digital transformations.

• The Red Hat Application Platform Partner Program seeks to put partners with practices that leverage Red Hat’s application delivery products on more solid footing. That business is still emerging, and much smaller than the Raleigh, N.C.-based vendor’s core infrastructure business, but it’s growing 40 percent year-over-year, John Bleuer, Red Hat’s vice president of global ISVs, told CRN on the first day of the software vendor’s North America partner conference in Las Vegas.

Finance

Fedora

• Last week, we told you that the upcoming Alpha build of the Fedora 26 Linux distribution was delayed by a week due to late blockers, being re-scheduled for tomorrow, March 28, 2017.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The Debian package browser is great but it is somewhat limited. As an example even though you can get dependencies and build dependencies for any package but not reverse dependencies (i.e. list all packages that depend or build-depend on this package).

• Martin Maurer, the Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) project leader, announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first Beta of the upcoming Proxmox VE 5.0 series of the Debian-based operating system.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu’s final beta for version 17.04 has landed.

• Zesty Zapus covers Ubuntu desktop, server and cloud editions, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, MATE, Studio and Xubuntu flavours.

• It’s not a huge feature boost, but the release is using the Linux 4.10 kernel, useful if your iron runs Intel Kaby Lake or AMD Ryzen silicon.

• If configuring the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) is on your hate-list, there’s good news: the release includes support for driverless printing.

• Ubuntu member Nathan Haines is proud to inform Softpedia about the availability of the new community wallpapers for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.

• Ubuntu 17.04 just got its Final Beta release at the end of last week, and now that Final Freeze stage is approaching fast, it’s time for us to have a look at the default wallpapers shipping with the final release, which have been contributed by various artists and photographers from all over the world.

• Ubuntu has long been one of the best known and most popular Linux distributions. But has it become too boring and predictable to retain the interest of users?

Flavours and Variants

• LXLE 16.04.2 is on its way to becoming the best release ever of the Ubuntu-based distribution built around the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, and it just received a Release Candidate (RC) build.

• Continuing to get all the goodies from Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus), LXLE 16.04.2 Release Candidate is here only two weeks after the last Beta milestone, and adds quite a bunch of improvements and bug fixes. These include a reconfigured menu layout to be less cluttered for navigation, and a revamped Control Menu to act as a dynamic Control Panel.

Devices/Embedded

• The Gemini PDA is part smart phone and part laptop, combined together in a 90s style clamshell that wouldn’t look out-of-place in an episode of Sex in the City.

• It’s so delightfully 90s — and yet bang up to date.

• But the best bit? The Gemini PDA runs Linux.

• Artila’s “RIO-2010BM” remote digital I/O device runs FreeRTOS on a Cortex-M3, offers isolated inputs, and supports IBM’s Bluemix and Watson IoT platforms.

• Like Artila Electronics’ RIO-2015PG, the RIO-2010BM is a remote I/O module that runs FreeRTOS on an MCU, and offers isolated digital I/O. The device is designed specifically for transmitting Modbus/TCP remote data to the IBM Bluemix service and IBM’s Watson IoT cloud-based analytics platform.

• ARM unveiled a more flexible version of its Big.Little multi-core scheme called DynamIQ, and launched an Embedded Linux Education Kit based on the Udoo Neo.

• ARM Ltd. announced a more advanced version of its Big.Little heterogeneous multi-processing technology for balancing core loads on multi-core Cortex-A SoCs. The new DynamIQ multi-core scheme enables more flexible core configurations that were not possible with Big.Little, says ARM. Meanwhile, ARM’s educational unit released a new ARM Embedded Linux Education Kit based on the i.MX6 SoloX based Udoo Neo hacker SBC (see farther below).

Phones

Tizen

• Today, the next Tizen smartphone, which should be the named the Samsung Z4, has received its WiFi certification (certification ID: WFA70348) – Model number SM-Z400F/DS with firmware Z400F.001 on the 2.4Ghz band.

• WiFi certification is usually one of the last steps before a mobile device gets released and means a launch is coming real soon as we have already seen the Z4 make its debut appearance at the FCC. For the previous model, the Samsung Z2, we saw it get WIFi certified on 7 July and then launched on 23 August, a mere 6 weeks.

Android

• The Android UI has been known for its adaptability and possibility for it to be converted into various OS types and they had varying states of reliability. However, this is about to change with the Maru OS which not only provides the basic features you would expect from an operating system but it also provides a complete desktop experience when you are connected with your device to a display. It is able to fully run Debian without compromise.

• BlackBerry (BBRY) has taken Nokia (NOK) to court, accusing the Finnish communications equipment maker of using several of its patents illegally. The disputed patents are related to data transmission technology. BlackBerry claims the infringed patents can be found in Nokia’s devices and software.

• Instead of seeking to block the sale of Nokia products bearing its patents used without permission, BlackBerry wants to extract payment from Nokia for illegally using its patents, according to technology news website Ars Technica. BlackBerry says in court documents that Nokia has violated nearly a dozen of its patents.

• The following post was written by Peter W. Rudder, a graduate student at the University of Sydney Business School, who contacted me with some observations and potential conclusions regarding Nokia’s share repurchase program and its earth-spanning patent litigation against Apple. I found Peter’s analysis insightful, and the fact that Nokia put unusual pressure on Apple through litigation in numerous countries right at the start of a dispute (as opposed to escalating over time, which is the more common approach and also what Nokia did against HTC) could be attributed to some of what Peter has noticed.

• Generally speaking, a share repurchase in a situation in which a certain percentage of a company’s profitability is being renegotiated either means positive leverage (Nokia’s stock would later be worth more that way) if the outcome is good or it can also make things worse (if the stock price goes and stays below where it was at the time of a buyback).

• Show me an Android tablet and I’ll show you a device that has yet to live up to its full potential. Google’s Play Store lacks a wide selection of apps that support a tablet’s larger display, with most apps only expanding the phone interface, in turn looking horrible on the smaller screen.

• In addition to the lack of quality apps, Android tablets have lacked key accessories such as a keyboard.

• For the most part, Android tablets have been relegated to a device used to catch up on Netflix or to entertain kids with games.

Free Software/Open Source

• Bitcoin is the most widely-known example of blockchain-based technology, but many of today’s startups are looking past the cryptocurrency and towards other, more business-friendly implementations.

• European blockchain startup incubator Outlier Ventures and Frost & Sullivan have mapped out the blockchain startup landscape, identifying several key areas of activity. It outlines possible paths to success following a busy year for blockchain investments.

• The Sapphire Pure Platinum H61 is the latest motherboard to be supported by mainline Coreboot for replacing the board’s proprietary BIOS.

• The Open Source Initiative® (OSI), a global non-profit organization formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source software and communities, announced that the Journal Of Open Source Software (JOSS), a peer-reviewed journal for open source research software packages, is now an OSI affiliate member.

• Serverless computing has fast become a staple presence on major clouds, from Amazon to Azure. It’s also inspiring open source projects designed to make the concept of functions as a service useful to individual developers.

• The latest of these projects, called simply Functions as a Service (FaaS) by developer and Linux User contributor Alex Ellis, uses Docker and its native Swarm cluster management technology to package any process as a function available through a web API.

• The SaaS-based tool, which features capabilities like role-based access control, semantic versioning, and package discovery, now can be used on public code on the NPM registry, NPM Inc. said on Wednesday. Developers can transition between solo projects, public group projects, and commercial projects, and users with private registries can use Orgs to combine code from public and private packages into a single project.

• The growing number of Netflix subscribers — nearing 85 million at the time of this Node.js Interactive talk — has generated a number of scaling challenges for the company. In his talk, Yunong Xiao, Principal Software Engineer at Netflix, describes these challenges and explains how the company went from delivering content to a global audience on an ever-growing number of platforms, to supporting all modern browsers, gaming consoles, smart TVs, and beyond. He also looks at how this led to radically modifying their delivery framework to make it more flexible and resilient.

• I don’t know how many of you play MUDs, but Mudlet, an open source cross-platform MUD client has hit version 3.0.

Events

• Spring is here and it is the 10th anniversary celebration of Codethink. Nobody could have orchestrated it this way but we also have GUADEC happening here in Manchester in a few months and it’s the 20th anniversary of GNOME. All roads lead to Manchester in 2017!

• The company is celebrating its anniversary in various ways: cool new green-on-black T-shirts, a 10 years mug for everyone, and perhaps more significantly a big sophisticated party with a complicated cake.

• Next Thursday at the auditorium of the School of Computer Science, we are going to install in more than 200 new students of the university FEDORA + GNOME, since during the first year they study algorithms, C programming and GNU/Linux in general.

• The inaugural OpenStack Days Poland event drew more than 300 users, upstream developers, operators and vendors to the Copernicus Science Center in the heart of Warsaw, Poland on March 22.

• Although Warsaw is Poland’s capital city—and according to “Forbes,” a hotbed of startups and multinational tech companies’ European branches—this meetup traces its roots west to Wroclaw, the Silicon Valley of Poland, according to some event speakers.

• After a successful launch at the Austin Summit, Speed Mentoring is back in action in Boston.

• Organized by the Women of OpenStack, it’s designed to be a lightweight mentoring initiative to provide technical or career guidance to beginners in the community. Mentees should already be part of the community; they should have gone through, or be familiar with Upstream Training.

SaaS/Back End

• Operators tasked with maintaining production environments are relying on monitoring stacks to provide insight to resource usage and a heads-up to threats of downtime. Perhaps the most critical function of a monitoring stack is providing alerts which trigger mitigation steps to ensure an environment stays up and running. Downtime of services can be business-critical, and often has extremely high cost ramifications. Operators working in cloud environments are especially reliant on monitoring stacks due to the increase in potential inefficiency and downtime that comes with greater resource usage. The constant visibility of resources and alerts that a monitoring stack provides, makes it a fundamental component of any cloud.

• When new contributors join RDO, they ask for recommendations about how to add new services and help RDO users to adopt it. This post is not a official policy document nor a detailed description about how to carry out some activities, but provides some high level recommendations to newcomers based on what I have learned and observed in the last year working in RDO.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• I teach an online CSCI class about usability. The course is “The Usability of Open Source Software” and provides a background on free software and open source software, and uses that as a basis to teach usability. The rest of the class is a pretty standard CSCI usability class. We explore a few interesting cases in open source software as part of our discussion. And using open source software makes it really easy for the students to pick a program to study for their usability test final project.

CMS

• Drupal, like many other open source projects, has a stated goal of welcoming and accepting all people, no matter their heritage, culture, sexual orientation, gender identity or other factors.

• Drupal is a popular open-source content-management system, used to build websites. Like many other open-source projects, Drupal is guided by several committees that are supposed to be accountable to the community and its code of conduct, which enshrines values like “be considerate” and “be respectful.” Also like many other open-source projects, Drupal attracts all sorts of people, some of whom are eclectic.

• Last week, under murky circumstances, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert banned one of the project’s technical and community leaders, Larry Garfield. Buytaert attributed the decision to aspects of Garfield’s private sex life. Many Drupal users and developers are up in arms about the perceived injustice of the move, exacerbated by what they see as a lack of transparency.

Healthcare

• When open source software is used for global health and global relief work, its benefits shine bright. The benefits of open source become very clear when human health and human lives are on the line. In this YouTube video, hear Harrisburg, Pennsylvania software developer Joel Worrall explain about HospitalRun software – open source cloud-based software used at developing world healthcare facilities.

BSD

• Matthew Dillon has implemented HAMMER version 7 support in DragonFlyBSD as well as work on the still-experimental HAMMER2 file-system.

• HAMMER Version 7 changes the CRC mechanic from an older, slow code-path to faster ISCSI CRC code. This new CRC code path is six times faster than the older code. HAMMER v7 was implemented with this code commit from a few hours ago.

• The developers of the DragonFly BSD operating system were proud to announce today, March 27, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of DragonFly BSD 4.8.

Public Services/Government

• Scotland’s public administrations should focus on common, shared technology platforms, according to the new digital strategy, published on 22 March. The government says it wants to develop “shared infrastructure, services and standards in collaboration with our public sector partners, to reduce costs and enable resources to be focused on front-line services.”

Licensing/Legal

• OpenSSL Launches New Website to Organize Process, Seeks to Contact All Contributors

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• The State Secretary at Austria’s Federal Chancellery, Muna Duzdar, is encouraging the making available of government data as open data. “The administration must set an example and support the open data culture by giving society its data back”, the State Secretary for Digitalisation said in a statement.

• The government of Hungary should redouble its efforts to make public sector information available as open data, and actively help to create market opportunities, a government white paper recommends. The ‘White Paper on National Data Policy’ was approved by the government in December.

Open Access/Content

• Science textbooks may be a thing of the past in Williamson County Schools.

• The Williamson County school board approved a proposal Monday night to use open source science resources instead of science textbooks.

• The switch will require a team of nine teachers to spend a year developing an open source curriculum.

• It was a long and difficult road to get the major publishing houses to open up to open access, but in the end the Dutch universities got their much awaited ‘gold deal’ for open access. A recently revealed contract between Elsevier and the Dutch research institutes lays bare the retardant tactics the publishing giant employs to stifle the growth of open access.

Programming/Development

Leftovers

• How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own.

• “Don’t let yourselves be led astray by this false image of reality! Be the protagonists of your history; decide your own future.”

Hardware

• Janz Tec’s “Falcon Active” gives you a choice of Mini-ITX SBCs based on 6th Gen Core CPUs, and offers optimized cooling and optional hot-swap SATA.

Health/Nutrition

• But over the last several years, that started changing. Scientists are finding mercury levels rising in large Great Lakes fish such as walleye and lake trout. Curiously, it’s occurring with fish in some locations but not others. Researchers are still trying to figure out why.

• A new report from Public Citizen, a US-based consumer rights advocacy group, shows that the 20 largest pharmaceutical corporations are spending only half of their profits on research and development of new medicines.

• The report [pdf] shows that, on average for these top companies, profits rose 22 percent between 2014 and 2015. Pharmaceutical companies argue that the large sums invested in research and development are what drive increases in the prices of medicine, according to the report. Public Citizen included examples of statements from industry leaders and the industry lobbying group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA),

• Public health group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced today that it has joined civil society organisations from 17 countries in Europe in filing a patent challenge at the European Patent Office to Gilead’s patent on sofosbuvir, an important treatment for hepatitis C.

Security

• FedEx is making you an offer you can’t afford to accept. It’s offering to give you $5 (actually, it’s a discount on orders over $30) if you’ll just install Adobe Flash on your machine.

• Nobody who knows anything about online security uses Flash anymore, except when it’s absolutely necessary. Why? Because Flash is the poster child for the “security-vulnerability-of-the-hour” club — a group that includes another Adobe product, Acrobat. How unsafe is Flash? Let’s put it this way: seven years ago, Steve Jobs announced that Flash was to be forever banned from Apple’s mobile products. One of the reasons he cited was a report from Symantec that “highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009.”

• Flash security hasn’t gotten any better since.

• Regel says that he has contacted Miele on a number of occasions about the issue, but had failed to get a response to his missives, and this has no updated information on the vulnerability.

• He added, bleakly that “we are not aware of an actual fix.”

• Along with death and taxes, two things appear inevitable. The first is that Internet of Things devices will not only be built into everything we can imagine, but into everything we can’t as well. The second is that IoT devices will have wholly inadequate security, if they have any security at all. Even with strong defenses, there is the likelihood that governmental agencies will gain covert access to IoT devices anyway.

• What this says to me is that we need a law that guarantees consumers the right to buy versions of products that are not wirelessly enabled at all.

• If you pay any attention to the security universe, you’re aware that Tavis Ormandy is basically on fire right now with his security research. He found the Cloudflare data leak issue a few weeks back, and is currently going to town on LastPass. The LastPass crew seems to be dealing with this pretty well, I’m not seeing a lot of complaining, mostly just info and fixes which is the right way to do these things.

Defence/Aggression

• The home minister assured that the border with Pakistan would be sealed by 2018. The decision has been taken in the wake of an increase in infiltration attempts, he said.

• Of course the fact that the authorities always seem to know where to go after such attacks inadvertently assists the public in making up our own minds. Who could have been remotely surprised that immediately after the Westminster attack there were police operations in Birmingham? Yet no one dares to extrapolate out from this. The nearest most of our political leaders can manage is a type of resigned fatalism. These things are like the weather – or the ever-increasing levels of airport security.

• My father was brutally tortured — justified by some of the fundamentalist Islamic laws of the ruling governments in both Iran and Syria. The punishment extended to my mother, my family, and other relatives, who were tormented on a regular basis.

• What was even more painful was, upon coming to the West, seeing the attitude of many people who label themselves liberals and leftists, towards radical Islam.

• The result is based on a survey of 250 jailed militants by the Bangladesh police presented at an international police seminar. Last year’s massacre in Dhaka showed how some Islamic preachers influence young people on the Internet.

• It happened in history class. Heraa Hashmi, a 19-year-old American Muslim student at the University of Colorado, was supposed to be discussing the Crusades with the man sitting next to her. Within a few minutes, however, he was crusading against Islam.

• “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” Hashmi’s classmate told her. What’s more, he complained, not enough Muslims were making a stand against terrorism.

• The carnage continues. And appears to be growing.

• With the war that President George W. Bush started and that President Barack Obama failed to end now in the hands of President Donald Trump, global outrage and condemnation was expressed over the weekend as details emerged over a U.S. bombing in Iraq that may have killed 200 or more innocent civilians, many of them children and families seeking shelter.

• The aerial attack on homes and buildings in the city of Mosul, where Iraqi and U.S. coalition forces have been battling Islamic State (ISIS) forces for months, actually took on March 17 but as evidence of the destruction and deathtoll emerged, the Guardian reported Saturday it may turn out to be “one of the deadliest bombing raids for civilians since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Royal Dutch Shell’s Nigeria subsidiary “fiercely opposed” environmental testing and is concealing data showing thousands of Nigerians are exposed to health hazards from a stalled cleanup of the worst oil spills in the West African nation’s history, according to a German geologist contracted by the Dutch-British multinational.

• Within a day of Rex Tillerson’s swearing in as secretary of state, the State Department’s climate change website began to change. The changes signal a shift away from leading international climate actions that the Obama administration pursued and a pivot toward a more passive role.

Finance

• “The way the housing market is operating is exacerbating inequality and impeding social mobility.”

• Uber hasn’t issued an ultimatum or decided on the future of its operations yet. But if the ride-hailing company doesn’t want to deal with the unions,

• “This most precious and fundamental right can be waived only if the waiver is knowing and voluntary,” he said.

• But it shouldn’t be the customer’s responsibility to stop a scam. The customer buys into it because the con artist is so skillful and the world is so uncertain. The only way to stop the College Boards of the world is to expose them. Tell people to be wary.

• This week, unless something unexpected happens, the Article 50 notification will be given to start the formal process of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.

• The nascent Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement puts the United States at the center of an expanding liberalization regime connecting the Americas to the Asia-Pacific region. U.S. power is bound up with the globalization of Latin America’s political economy, and the TPP is indicative of U.S. efforts to renew its hegemony in the region. It reinforces the importance of “free trade” on the post–Washington Consensus agenda, undercutting existing Latin American–led approaches to integration while responding to China’s growing influence in the hemisphere. As the free-trade consensus is reconstructed through the TPP process, U.S. hegemony in the Americas is potentially extended even as it continues to face challenges in the structural, institutional, and ideological dimensions of intrahemispheric affairs.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on the press should alarm anyone who believes that a free press is essential to the maintenance of freedom and the avoidance of tyranny. That’s what the authors of the Constitution believed, a document Trump pledged on inauguration day to “preserve, protect, and defend.”

• Trump’s accusations of falsehood in journalism are particularly dangerous because they invite those sympathetic to the president’s cause to accept his manufactured version of reality and reject accurately reported events and statements. This is a tactic from a very old playbook, and we don’t need to look very far back in history to see where that strategy can lead.

• Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

• Across the world the political centre ground is disappearing, and the new enemy of the people is globalism. Watching the rise of the nationalist right is particularly frustrating if, like me, you took part in protests in the late 1990s and early 2000s against globalisation. These protests for a few years united the radical left with the less radical NGO world. All were in agreement that there was something rotten about free market overdrive globalisation, that it was creating more losers than winners. Millions of people turned out across the world to say ‘No’.

• But the centre left parties – the Democrats, Labour, and their equivalents across Europe – were not among them. There were multiple reasons why they gave in to the siren call of globalisation: many of them were or would one day be handsomely paid by global corporations benefiting from their policies. Most of them were taken in too by the tinpot version of economics – neo-liberal and poorly evidenced – that had taken hold in academia, with the help of rich donors. Politicians also have a tendency to think not much beyond the next election, and the effects of free trade agreements often took longer than that, though not very long, to hit home. But there was another reason why the centre left parties couldn’t get on board with the anti-globalisation movement. From the ‘non-political’ NGOs to the radical left, they were offered no alternative ways of organising economies.

• Republicans created hard-line districts that produced hard-line congressmen: obstructionist absolutists are gerrymandering’s political offspring.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Under the extreme rules proposed by the Commission in the Copyright Directive, uploads to the internet would need to be scanned to assess if any photo, video or text that is being uploaded can be “identified” based on information provided by copyright holders.

• [...]

• iIn order to encourage internet companies to monitor and delete information as thoroughly as possible, it is also proposed that their legal liability for uploads would be increased.

• The official crackdown was launched after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ordered authorities to take urgent steps to rid social media of any anti-Islam content posted by people in Pakistan.

• According to Human Rights Watch’s latest annual report on Pakistan, at least 19 people are on death row after being convicted under blasphemy law and hundreds are awaiting their trail.

• But in this age of 24-hour rolling news reporting there are many other questions, just as important, that also need answering.

• If we agree with the old idiom that a picture paints a thousand words, then what kind of words, or sentiments, should we attribute to those who take the pictures?

• Should they be framed as cold-hearted, mawkish ghouls, blind to the suffering of those around them and only interested in instant glory on social media platforms?

• The fightback against campus censorship seems to be gaining traction. Students at City University have successfully overturned a ban on tabloids, while Queen Mary’s Free Speech Society distributed copies of The Sun in defiance of their union’s ban. The government is now keen to also get in on the action.

• Echoing Theresa May’s criticism of intolerant “safe spaces” last year, universities minister Jo Johnson has proposed that universities should be actively required to promote free speech. In a letter to Nicola Dandridge, the chief executive of Universities UK, Johnson maintained that it was a “legal duty” of universities to ensure that freedom of speech is secured on university campuses.

• For those of us who maintain that campuses should be unsafe spaces where any and every idea should be aired and confronted in open and tolerant debate, Johnson’s statement couldn’t have come at a more fitting time.

• Private online platforms have an increasingly essential role in free speech and participation in democratic culture. But while it might appear that any Internet user can publish freely and instantly online, many platforms actively curate the content posted by their users. How and why these platforms operate to moderate speech is largely opaque.

• This Article provides the first analysis of what these platforms are actually doing to moderate online speech under a regulatory and First Amendment framework. Drawing from original interviews, archived materials, and leaked documents, this Article not only describes how three major online platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—moderate content, it situates their moderation systems into a broader discussion of online governance and the evolution of free expression values in the private sphere. It reveals that private content moderation systems curate user content with an eye to First Amendment norms, corporate responsibility, and at the core, the economic necessity of creating an environment that reflects the expectations of its users. In order to accomplish this, platforms have developed a detailed system with similarities to the American legal system with regularly revised rules, trained human decision-making, and reliance on a system of external influence.

• Twitter’s latest Transparency Report contains a new section that shows some governments may be trying to use Twitter’s own rules to achieve censorious goals. Legislators and misguided lawsuit plaintiffs have been complaining for years social media services don’t do enough to curtail terrorists and terrorism-related content. This has been the subject of multiple lawsuits and multiple Congressional hearings.

• However, governments can only do so much to pressure social media services into regulating content. If the government steps in to set the rules, then it crosses the line. The US government has, so far, been unwilling to act as a direct censor of content. Other governments have no qualms about censorship, but have found their efforts somewhat blunted by Facebook, Twitter, etc. being US-based companies, where compliance with foreign directives is a nicety, not a legal requirement. Of course, both companies have voluntarily acted as local censors in response to foreign laws and legal threats.

• Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap believes that in a world exposed to the internet, censorship doesn’t hold any meaning. “To have some kind of censorship in the age of YouTube and Internet is pointless. It’s not even what I think is right or wrong. What are you trying to block people from? You have to start treating your audiences as adult people who can think for themselves,” said Kashyap at the discussion panel at ongoing FICCI frames 2017 on March 22.

• We don’t necessarily (hashtag or not!) need to rehash just how wrong this is — we’ve covered that plenty of times in the past. The fact is there are always going to be tons of places where “terrorists” can communicate with each other that no one can see. Sometimes it will be in person. Sometimes it will be in public, but using a pre-designated code. And, of course, even more importantly, this crazy decision to blame encrypted communications apps in a case where even Rudd admits the guy was a lone actor, completely ignores just how important encrypted, private communications are to the rest of us. It takes quite a misguided thought process to think “here we have a disturbed lone actor who did an attack, and therefore we need to make absolutely everyone else significantly less safe.” It takes an even more misguided process to take that thought and go on TV and announce it as an official plan of the UK government.

• [...]

• You’re not saying open up and you don’t want to go into the cloud? But you are saying that encryption shouldn’t be allowed to work? What is she even saying? This is all nonsense. The companies do engage with governments all the time. When given a valid and legal warrant, they do what they can. Sometimes that’s nothing.

• Of course, all of this is coming on the heels of another misguided outrage at other tech companies for sometimes allowing bad people to use their tools. Paul Bernal has an oasis of sanity responding to some of this cesspool of craziness.

• The UK government, spearheaded by minister for universities and science, Jo Johnson, has announced plans to urge universities to commit themselves to freedom of speech. By encouraging universities to sign up to new governance documents and codes of practice protecting free speech, Johnson and others hope to halt the censorious culture sweeping the British academy. It sounds good, but those of us who believe in free speech on campus shouldn’t hold our breath.

• There is unquestionably a crisis of free speech on campus, and it needs to be challenged. As the No Platforming of controversial speakers, Safe Space policies and bans on tabloid newspapers increasingly become the norm, Johnson is right to be concerned about the kicking free speech is getting at universities – the supposed centres of intellectual freedom. But the idea that government intervention and codes of practice will shake off this censorious culture is fanciful.

• If you’re looking to follow news and advocacy about an anticipated Vermont legislature vote this week on legalizing marijuana, a search for the latest tweets that use the combined terms “Vermont” and “marijuana” will for many Twitter users yield zero results.

• Same goes for searches for tweets using the terms “pot,” “weed” or “cannabis.”

• The latest results for “jackass” and “jerk” – words generally printed without censorship by news outlets – also yield a blank page with the message: “Nothing came up for that search, which is a little weird. Maybe check what you searched for and try again.”

• Columnist Ali Spies revealed last week in The Standard that her COM 115: Fundamentals of Public Speaking instructor, purportedly acting on instructions of the Department of Communication, rejected her proposal to research, compose and deliver a brief speech about Planned Parenthood in the United States. The instructor asserted that the topic has “… too much controversy …” and implied that, while some controversy might be acceptable, too much controversy is off-limits. Spies’s Department of Communication instructor censored Spies. Dr. Shawn T. Wahl heads the MSU Department of Communication.

• The presence of blackness in a Whitney Biennial invariably stirs controversy — it’s deemed to be unfit or not enough, or too much. The current Whitney Biennial is no exception — the art press has been awash this past week with reports of a protest staged in front of a painting of a disfigured Emmett Till lying in his casket and a letter penned by an artist who called for the work to be removed and destroyed. The painter is Dana Schutz, a white American. The author of the letter is Hannah Black, a black-identified biracial artist who hails from England and resides in Berlin. The protestors are a youthful coalition of artists and scholars of color. The curators being called on the carpet are both Asian American. Debates about the painting and the letter rage on social media, to the exclusion of discussion of the many works by black artists in the show, most notably Henry Taylor’s rendering of Philando Castile dying in his car after being shot by police. This multicultural melodrama took a rather perverse turn on March 23, when an unknown party hacked Schutz’s email address and committed identity theft by submitting an apologia under her name to the Huffington Post and a number of other publications; it was printed and then retracted. Up to now, none of Schutz’s detractors have addressed whether they think it’s fine to punish the artist by putting words in her mouth.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Home secretary wants police to be able to access WhatsApp, but any backdoor also makes services vulnerable to criminals

• Here we go again. UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said that end-to-end encryption in apps like WhatsApp is “completely unacceptable” and that there should be “no hiding place for terrorists”. Her comments resurface the debate over banning encryption – an idea that is realistically unworkable and potentially mathematically impossible.

• Secondly, if Rudd is suggesting that police are unable to read WhatsApp messages on Masood’s phone now because of encryption, that’s also likely false.

• Major General Jonathan Shaw said decrypting social media messages would see terrorists use other secure methods to communicate

• This is our last chance to save critical online privacy protections.

• We are one vote away from a world where your ISP can track your every move online and sell that information to the highest bidder. Call your lawmakers now and tell them to protect federal online privacy rules.

• Last year the FCC passed a set of rules for how ISPs deal with their customers’ data. The commonsense rules updated longstanding federal protections for Internet users. Under the rules, ISPs would be required to protect your data and wouldn’t be allowed to do a host of creepy things, including sell your Internet browsing records without your consent.

• WhatsApp and similar services must hand over encrypted messages to the security services after terror attacks, the [UK] Home Secretary says.

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

• Technology companies must cooperate more with law enforcement agencies and should stop offering a “secret place for terrorists to communicate” using encrypted messages, British interior minister Amber Rudd said on Sunday.

• However, no mention of the tags was made on social media posts regarding the bins’ rollout, a flyer sent to residents or a letter physically attached to the bin – despite the tag being just centimetres away.

• Earlier this month, WikiLeaks unleashed the Vault 7 papers, a revealing insight into the tools and techniques used by the CIA. Their release caused a stir among the security community, but if you’re not working on the field, their relevance might not be immediately obvious.

• Above all else, Vault 7 shouldn’t put you in a panic about the CIA — not if you’ve been paying attention, anyway. The most attention-grabbing techniques described in the papers aren’t anything new. In fact, they’ve been demonstrated publicly several times over. The revelation here is not the fact the CIA and NSA spy on both American and foreign citizens, but instead the incredible insight they – and presumably other spy organizations worldwide – have into cracking protections that most people consider secure.

• The bill passed the U.S. Senate: it looks like your ISP will be allowed to just sell your browsing history. While the bill still needs to pass the House (the lower legislature in the U.S.) and the President’s signature, it seems increasingly likely to unfortunately do so. This doesn’t just mean that your privacy is commercialized – it also means that search-and-seizure is: the Police will be able to just buy your browsing history from your ISP, bypassing any privacy protections completely.

• [...]

• As a final punch in the gut, the Police won’t just buy your browsing history, they’ll be doing so with your money – with taxpayer money.

• Both ISPs and their lobbying organizations have been working and donating hard to dismantle Internet privacy and bring us to this vote.

• The storm around House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) intensified Monday after it was revealed that he secretly visited the White House grounds the day before announcing incidental surveillance of President Trump’s transition team.

• Amazon is trying to build stores that would let customers walk in, pick up items, then walk out and have them automatically billed to an Amazon account without any need to wait in line. It’s apparently considering an expansion into grocery and warehouse-style stores, too, though it’s not clear if these would use the same shopper-tracking setup.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Ars and other media reported that there has been a rapid uptick in the number of such incidents: February 2017 alone had more border searches of phones, tablets, and computers than all of 2015.

• Of course, the details are all classified, which leaves all of us security experts scratching our heads. On the face of it, the ban makes little sense.

• This week, intelligence authorities ramped up detentions of peaceful critics, arresting journalists Hengameh Shahidi, Ehsan Mazandarani, and Morad Saghafi. Authorities told Mazandarani, who had been released from prison just a month earlier after serving his sentence for vaguely defined national security charges, that his release had been “a mistake.”

• In his interpretation, Ahmad Fairuz said that anything that is in contradiction to Islam or anything that went against Islamic laws’ main sources, which are the Quran and Sunnah, is unconstitutional.

• In 1980, it appeared to activists as if a small bit of progress was finally being made in the push for LGBT civil rights, with the Democratic Party becoming the first major political party to endorse a gay-rights platform. That same year, the CIA appears to have released a three-page memorandum on how to recognize and ferret out homosexuals during investigations, perhaps for the purposes of blackmail.

• Hundreds of people, including a key opposition leader, were arrested in Russia on Sunday as thousands participated in unsanctioned protests against corruption and the anti-democratic tendencies of the ruling government.

• A reported 500 people were detained in Moscow alone, where opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has accused both President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of corruption, was also taken into custody.

• Qualified immunity — a legal doctrine that originates from court decisions rather than statute — received another boost from the federal court system last week. Qualified immunity is the concept that allows overreaching and abusive government employees and officials to stay one step ahead of accountability. If their actions don’t “clearly violate” established law and/or precedent, police officers, etc. can walk away unscathed from deprivations of other people’s life and liberty.

• The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court has declined [PDF] a chance to rehear a case in which the Second Amendment is implicated nearly as much as the Fourth Amendment. In doing so, no further precedent will be set, which just adds to the list of actions law enforcement officers can perform and still expect to be granted qualified immunity. If there’s no precedent set, it’s pretty hard to “clearly violate” it. Handy.

• The short story: Andrew Scott was home playing video games with his girlfriend when someone began banging loudly on his door. Since it was 1:30 am, Scott was cautious and answered to door with a gun in his hand, pointed at the floor. He opened the door to see only a “shadowy figure” and began stepping backwards. The shadowy figure was Deputy Richard Sylvester, who immediately shot Scott six times, killing him.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• If you recall, the cable industry has spent the better part of the last decade arguing that a la carte television (offering users the ability to buy channels individually instead of in bloated bundles) would do two things: raise rates for all consumers, and kill off niche channels, which the industry argued simply couldn’t survive outside of the bundle. The industry repeatedly used this logic to justify its decision to avoid delivering not only a la carte, but cheaper and more flexible channel bundles in general.

DRM

• Well, it depends on what you mean by “own”. If you mean you can do what you like with your new tractor, think again. This is because your splendid machine is now controlled by software that comes embedded in the vehicle – and John Deere controls the software.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The role of farmers in agricultural innovation can be perceived in different ways. Proponents of intellectual property rights view farmers mainly as recipients of innovation, while others view farmers as main drivers of innovation. Considering those seemingly contradictory points of views, some measures could help reconcile IP rights and farmers’ rights, a UK professor in international governance said this week.

• [...]

• Another speaker at the event spoke on the United Nations draft declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas, currently under negotiations in a dedicated open-ended intergovernmental working group at the UN Human Rights Council, which includes reference to intellectual property rights and farmers’ rights to seeds.

• According to Dutfield, there are different views on the role of farmers in terms of innovation.

• The conventional view since the Second World War is of a formal sector where farmers get seeds, agro-chemicals, credits, and expertise, and tend to be viewed as passive recipients, he said.

Trademarks

• When you write enough about trademark disputes, a recurring thing that happens is you keep thinking you’ve seen it all, but then something insane happens. And truly, after years of writing here at Techdirt, I’ve come across some mind-bending trademark disputes. But I can’t think of a single one that matches the Broadway version of A Bronx Tale changing its set design to appease a cafe owner who insists he is a monarch of Italian pastries.

Copyrights

• The very idea of major movie studios simultaneously complaining about movie piracy during the initial release of a film and instituting long release windows so that films are only in the theater for legitimate viewing has never made a bit of sense. As study after study has shown, one great way to reduce piracy for a film is to make it available for home viewing as early as possible. The reason for this should be obvious: in this case, piracy of a film is a sort of market study, one which informs the studios that a part of the public really wants to watch the movie at home as opposed to in the theater. Trying to force that part of the market into the theater by delaying home rentals or purchases no longer works, because piracy is an option. Stamping out piracy has never worked, but making the film product available the way the customer wants would, at least to decent percentages.

• We’ve written a number of times about Carl Malamud and his organization Public.Resource.org, a nonprofit that focuses on making the world’s laws more readily accessible to the people governed by those laws. You’d think that people would be excited about this, but instead, Carl just keeps getting sued. All the way back in 2013, the state of Georgia first threatened Carl for daring to publish online the “Official Code of Georgia Annotated.” Two years later the state did, in fact, sue Carl for copyright infringement.

• The case is, at least somewhat tricky and nuanced — even if it shouldn’t be. The key issue is the annotations and other additions to the official laws created by the legislature (the state of Georgia claims that “names of titles, chapter, articles, parts and subparts, history lines, editor notes, Code Commission notes, annotations, research references, cross-references, indexes and other such materials” are all covered by copyright). Obviously, it’s crazy to think the underlying law itself is covered by copyright and unpublishable, but this has to focus on the annotations — which are the various notes and links to relevant case law that add important context to the code itself. As people studying the law quickly learn, “the law” is not just the regulations written down by legislators, but also the relevant caselaw that interprets the laws and sets key standards and makes decisions that influence what the written code actually means. I don’t think anyone disagrees that a private party who develops useful and creative works as annotations could potentially hold a copyright on the creative elements of that work (merely listing relevant cases, probably not, but a deeper explanation, sure…). And here, these annotations are developed by a private company: LexisNexis. The issue is the “official” part. Under contract with the state, LexisNexis creates the annotations, gets the copyright, and then assigns the copyright to the state of Georgia on those annotations, with Georgia releasing it as “the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.”

• A content industry dream is to order infringing content to be taken down and for it to remain down permanently, no matter what. That’s currently outside the scope of the DMCA, but some anti-piracy outfits are already trying their luck by suggesting that content should never reappear. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if they targeted the right stuff in the first place.

• The Court found that merely providing links does not qualify as distributing files protected by copyright, even though the sites generated revenue via advertising.

• If you’ve been reading Techdirt for any time you’ll know that copyright collecting societies have a pretty poor record when it comes to supporting the artists they are supposed to serve. Sometimes, that is just a question of incompetence, but often it veers over into something worse, as happened in Spain, Peru and India. TorrentFreak has some interesting news about an audit of the Greek collection society (AEPI).

• After more than five years, some of the Megaupload evidence retained on hard drives has become unreadable. The MPAA and RIAA have submitted a plan to recover the data, and while Megaupload is in partial agreement, it refuses to sign away the constitutional right to access its own files.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.