● 03.29.17

● Links 29/3/2017: End of Linux Action Show, Top NSA Partner Pays Linux Foundation

Posted in News Roundup at 2:19 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Note that a number of folks have suggested alternative calendar applications. I’ve rejected these so far because I don’t think they’ll fit into my workflow or my environment, but they may work for others. Some of the applications I’ve seen suggested include Rainlendar, Calcurse, or KOrganizer. Some of these applications address some of the shortcomings of GNOME Calendar, but none of them address all the major issues I’ve outlined here (based on my testing thus far).

• A few days ago, I was down at the Starbucks in my local bookstore—sipping on a hot chocolate, using the free (but rather pokey) Wi-Fi, and getting some work done.

• This is pretty typical for me. Since I work from home, it’s nice to get out of the house and shake things up a little bit. Working for a few hours at a coffee shop tends to be just about right. I’m not the only person in the world who uses coffee shops as short term offices—it’s become so normal, it’s almost a cliché.

Server

• In 2017, that means skilled cloud and backend developers, as well as those who work in emerging technologies including Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) can make more money — tens or sometimes hundreds of times more — than frontend web and mobile developers whose skills have become more commoditized.

• “In Western Europe, for example, the median backend developer earns 12% more than the median web developer; a machine learning developer makes 28% more,” according to the report.

• Networking has always been one of the most persistent headaches when working with containers. Even Kubernetes—fast becoming the technology of choice for container orchestration—has limitations in how it implements networking. Tricky stuff like network security is, well, even trickier.

• Now an open source project named Cilium, which is partly sponsored by Google, is attempting to provide a new networking methodology for containers based on technology used in the Linux kernel. Its goal is to give containers better network security and a simpler model for networking.

• Much has been said about moving from monoliths to microservices. Besides rolling off the tongue nicely, it also seems like a no-brainer to chop up a monolith into microservices. But is this approach really the best choice for your organization? It’s true that there are many drawbacks to maintaining a messy monolithic application. But there is a compelling alternative which is often overlooked: modular application development. In this article, we’ll explore what this alternative entails and show how it relates to building microservices.

• Kubernetes is open source software for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The project is governed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is hosted by The Linux Foundation. And it’s quickly becoming the Linux of the cloud, says Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation.

• Running a container on a laptop is relatively simple. But connecting containers across multiple hosts, scaling them when needed, deploying applications without downtime, and service discovery among several aspects, are really hard challenges. Kubernetes addresses those challenges with a set of primitives and a powerful API.

• The Travis CI service offers a free Continuous Integration (CI) service for open source projects hosted at GitHub.

• In this release the community’s focus is on scale and automation, to help you deploy multiple workloads to multiple users on a cluster. We are announcing that 5,000 node clusters are supported. We moved dynamic storage provisioning to stable. Role-based access control (RBAC), kubefed, kubeadm, and several scheduling features are moving to beta. We have also added intelligent defaults throughout to enable greater automation out of the box.

• If you recall the early days of Docker and OpenStack, it was quite a challenge to get OpenStack cloud up and running, and even when you got it running, managing it was a tricky task in its own right.

• I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over again with people so I figured I would put it into a blog post.

• Many people ask me if I have tried or what I think of Solaris Zones / BSD Jails. The answer is simply: I have tried them and I definitely like them. The conversation then heads towards them telling me how Zones and Jails are far superior to containers and that I should basically just give up with Linux containers and use VMs.

• Which to be honest is a bit forward to someone who has spent a large portion of her career working with containers and trying to make containers more secure. Here is what I tell them:

Audiocasts/Shows

• Jupiter Broadcasting’s long-running podcast, Linux Action Show, will soon be signing off the air…er, fiber cable, for the last time. The show first streamed on June 10, 2006 and was hosted by “Linux Tycoon” Bryan Lunduke and Jupiter Broadcasting founder Chris Fisher. Lunduke left the show in 2012, replaced by Matt Hartley, who served as co-host for about three years. The show is currently hosted by Fisher and Noah Chelliah, president of Altispeed, an open source technology company located in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Kernel Space

• AT&T has become a Platinum member in the Linux Foundation, a move that reflects the telco’s ongoing effort to implement open source and open networks not only in its own networks but also to drive broader industry collaboration.

• One example of this is AT&T’s Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) architecture.

• In February, AT&T contributed several million lines of ECOMP code to The Linux Foundation, as well as the new Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project based on production-ready code from AT&T and OPEN-O contributors.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced that AT&T has become a Platinum member.

• This follows news of the company’s contribution of several million lines of ECOMP code to The Linux Foundation, as well as the new Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project based on production-ready code from AT&T and OPEN-O contributors.

• Like starting a car with the hood open, sometimes you need to run your program with certain analysis tools attached to get a full sense of what is going wrong – or right. Be it to debug an issue, or simply to learn how that program works, these probing tools can provide a clear picture of what is going on inside the CPU at a given time.

• In this week’s edition: Linus Torvalds announces Linux 4.11-rc4, early debug with USB3 earlycon, upcoming support for USB-C in 4.12, and ongoing development including various work on boot time speed ups, logging, futexes, and IOMMUs.

Graphics Stack

• Intel’s DRM driver is in the best shape for atomic mode-setting at the moment. Nouveau picked up atomic support in Linux 4.10, AMDGPU’s atomic support will come once DC lands, and the smaller DRM drivers have also worked towards atomic mode-setting. VMWgfx is now the latest.

• If you are a registered member of the X.Org Foundation, you have until 11 April to cast your ballot for this year’s elections.

• So, you’ve got a fine head-mounted display and want to explore the delights of virtual reality. Right now, on Linux, that means getting the window system to cooperate because the window system is the DRM master and holds sole access to all display resources. So, you plug in your device, play with RandR to get it displaying bits from the window system and then carefully configure your VR application to use the whole monitor area and hope that the desktop will actually grant you the boon of page flipping so that you will get reasonable performance and maybe not even experience tearing. Results so far have been mixed, and depend on a lot of pieces working in ways that aren’t exactly how they were designed to work.

Applications

• Linux system optimizer and monitoring app Stacer has picked up a few new features — just in time for some early spring cleaning!

• I recently stumbled upon about Classifier app, which automatically organize files in your current directory, by classifying them into folders of Xls, Docs, .png, .jpeg, vidoe, music, pdfs, images, ISO, etc.

• As you already know, Linux kernel is secure by default. But, it doesn’t mean that the softwares on the Linux system are completely secure. Say for example, there is a possibility that any add-ons on your web browser may cause some serious security issues. While doing financial transactions over internet, some key logger may be active in browser which you are not aware of. Even though, we can’t completely give the bullet-proof security to our Linux box, we still can add an extra pinch of security using an application called Firejail. It is a security utility which can sandbox any such application and let it to run in a controlled environment. To put this simply, Firejail is a SUID (Set owner User ID up on execution) program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications.

• Desktop scriptwriting software Celtx is officially Fin. The open-source Final Draft rival now only offers a web-based app for writers to use.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Today we want to announce some important changes regarding the Wine Staging packages provided at repos.wine-staging.com and dl.winehq.org. We completely reworked our build system to make the packages available sooner after a release and also added some new features, like downloading old packages for Debian / Ubuntu. The complete list of changes can be found in the announcement email on the Wine mailing list.

Games

• Have you ever played Fez on Linux ? Transistor ? Speed Runners ? Shenzen I/O ? Bastion ? or more recently, Owlboy ? Well if you have, you have benefited from the work of Flibitijibibo who is directly responsible for the port of such titles to your platform.

• This is an interesting one, Snoost, a new cloud gaming service powered by Amazon AWS supports Linux. It uses Steam’s in-home streaming with your own games library.

• It actually launched only this month, so it is a very new service. That means there may be things that aren’t quite as polished as you might hope. Things like miss-worded text can be forgiven for now, but I will still point it out though. Sadly the experience so far was not what I was expecting from a paid service.

• Hollow Knight [Official Site], an incredibly stylish action and adventure game recently launched for Windows, but it seems Linux gamers won’t be left waiting for too long.

• Sumoman [Steam] is a brand new and rather hilarious puzzle platformer powered by the UNIGINE engine. It released with day-1 Linux support and I took a look.

• Disclosure: Key provided by the developer before the release.

• Epic Games has rolled out their March update to the still-in-development Unreal Tournament game built atop Unreal Engine 4.

• Last week I published a number of Radeon and NVIDIA Vulkan/OpenGL Serious Sam 2017 benchmarks while those curious about Intel graphics performance for the updated Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter have some data to look at today.

• As expected, Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition [Official Site, GOG, Steam] has now been announced with a trailer and it looks like it will launch with Linux support. It will have a release on both GOG and Steam so everyone can enjoy it.

• I was caught off-guard by just how fun I found Day of Infamy, for a more realistic and harsh experience it sells the brutalities of war damn well. From the chatter between the troops, to seeing your comrades burnt to a crisp by a flamethrower, it has a lot of variety to it.

• People who follow the video game industry will have come across the CRYENGINE name before. This particular video game engine is used in the popular FarCry games. Crytek, the company responsible for developing the engine, made their product open source some time ago. Such a powerful technology needed to be made accessible to both large and indie game developers alike. A few years ago, licensing CRYENGINE was rather problematic, which is why Crytek decided to switch things up a bit.

• There’s a new Linux-friendly game launching today that’s powered by the demanding Unigine Game Engine.

• Sumoman is an adventure puzzle platformer game. With its usage of Unigine, the graphics appear rather interesting and there is also advanced physics support.

• This is a bit troublesome, the developers of Ticket to Ride have decided to abandon Linux support with no announcement.

• They have removed the SteamOS icon from their Steam store page, but they haven’t removed the game from your collections. The problem is that a few people have completely lost access to the game and it doesn’t seem like the developer has made any attempts to fix this.

• With the latest release of the open source itch.io store client, you can now stop your computer going to sleep when using a gamepad.

• Tiles [Official Site, Steam] is a simple looking action-puzzle game with 90 levels of ever-increasing difficulty and it’s now out for Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Bringing software into a safety critical environment can be tricky, especially when using the complex APIs needed for modern 3D graphics. That’s what makes OpenGL SC (Safety Critical) so important: it bridges the gap between beautiful displays and functional safety, while trying to remain as close to existing embedded standards that we all know and love. OpenGL SC will only become more prevalent in embedded graphics work as industries increasingly try to merge safety conscious methodologies with user-friendly interfaces.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

• I’ve been a long-time GNOME user, but for the past few months, I was in a loving relationship with Elementary OS. I found much to love in the minimalist Linux-based operating system, and I encouraged readers to give it a try.

• But that has changed. The number of bugs I encountered grew over time, and I’ve recently had enough. As a freelance writer, the only thing I need is a working laptop. If that’s not reliable, then I’m wasting time trying to fix the one tool my job requires.

• Linux is one of the best operating systems around, but no OS is perfect. All operating systems end up having bugs of one kind or another, including your favorite Linux distributions.

• A writer at MakeUseOf has listed six reasons why Linux distributions often have their share of bugs.

New Releases

• Black Lab Software CEO Robert J. Dohnert informed Softpedia today about the immediate availability of a new Weekly build of the Ubuntu-based Black Lab Linux operating system.

• Lakka 2.0 RC4 is available for testers. This is certainly the last Release Candidate before the stable release.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

Red Hat Family

• The latest update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 builds upon more than six years of enterprise-proven success, offering a more secure, stable and reliable platform for the modern enterprise and prioritizes features for critical deployments.

• Red Hat’s enterprise virtualization product is proving stiff competition for VMware, Paul Cormier, EVP and president of products and technologies, claimed at Red Hat’s North American Partner Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday.

• According to the executive, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), the open source software vendor’s mission-critical, end-to-end open source virtualization infrastructure, has made a name for itself in such a way that VMware customers are increasingly showing interest in the technology.

• While it saw a brief delay in some government spending late last year, Red Hat says that business has resumed and corporations are continuing to invest heavily.

• “There’s right now a sense of business confidence that is driving the stock market but also investment plans by companies,” CEO James Whitehurst told Axios on Monday. “If anything, it’s more positive than its been in years.”

• Oracle announced today, March 28, 2017, the release and general availability of the Oracle Linux 6.9 operating system, the ninth update to the Oracle Linux 6 stable series.

• Prominent features of Oracle Linux 6.9 include support for TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2 on all system components, along with vsftpd support for TLS 1.2 and auditd support for incremental_async, implementation of the cpuid utility supporting AMD, Intel, and VIA CPUs, improved SSSD (System Security Services Daemon) support for Active Directory (AD), and better support when running as a Hyper-V guest.

• Today, March 28, 2017, CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced the immediate availability of a new Beta kernel versions for users of the CloudLinux 7 operating system.

• It’s been a while since CloudLinux 7 users using the Beta channel received an updated kernel, and today’s 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.42 build addresses quite a bunch of issues and security flaws discovered lately. For example, is attempts to fix a deadlock with the HCP server backup manager developed by R1Soft.

• Red Hat on Monday announced a new Application Platform Partner Initiative at its North America Partner Conference in Las Vegas. The goal is to provide a more robust ecosystem for companies engaging in digital transformation.

• OpenStack drove a chunk of Red Hat’s largest deals during the fourth quarter, with cloud proving more lucrative than its trademark Linux business.

• One-third of what Red Hat called its largest deals in the three months to February 28 contained an OpenStack private cloud component.

• More than a third involved Red Hat’s Ansible automation management technology.

Finance

Fedora

• The Fedora Activity Day (FAD) is a regional event (either one-day or multi-day) that allows Fedora contributors to gather together in order to work on specific tasks related to the Fedora Project.

• At the end of January, the submission phase for Fedora 26 Supplementary Wallpapers opened. Now, the submission phase is closed and the voting phase is now open. If you have a FAS account and meet the CLA+1 group requirement, you can cast your vote in Nuancier.

Devices/Embedded

• Hilscher is prepping a rugged “netPI” computer that combines a Raspberry Pi 3 with its “netHAT 52-RTE” RPi add-on featuring dual Real-Time Ethernet ports.

• German Real-Time Ethernet experts Hilscher will soon launch a Raspberry Pi 3-based industrial computer with Real-Time Ethernet support. Hilscher has yet to formally announce the ruggedized netPI computer, but the board was demonstrated at the recent Embedded World show, and was revealed in a Mar. 27 Element14 Community blog by Shabaz. The system can be used as a Real-Time Ethernet gateway or controller, and it supports add-ons such as sensors or actuators to enable additional applications, writes Shabaz.

• The open spec “Orange Pi Zero Plus 2” SBC provides WiFi, BT, HDMI, MIPI-CSI, and a choice of quad-core Allwinner H3 (Cortex-A7) or H5 (-A53) SoCs.

• Shortly after launching an Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 with a 32-bit, Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3, Shenzhen Xunlong’s open source Orange Pi project shipped an Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 H5 model. The Linux- and Android-ready hacker board is identical except for the change to a similarly quad-core, but 64-bit, Cortex-A53 Allwinner H5 SoC. The open spec boards are shipping now on AliExpress, for $18.90 and $19.90, respectively, but have yet to appear on the Orange Pi website.

• The Open Knowledge Lab in Stuttgart, Germany has begun to develop their own IoT sensors that measure air quality every minute and report the data to a central server. It is then possible to display the smog levels on a map. See the map we’re using.

• [...]

• The casings are actually some standard plumbing tubes. The other two main components are a Node MCU ESP8266 microcontroller that has built-in Wi-Fi and the actual analyzer. In the current revision this is an SDS 011 analyzer. A DHT22 sensor provides readings of the current temperature and humidity. All parts cost together around €30.

Phones

Tizen

• A few days ago, a new variant of the Samsung Z2 has been WiFi certified, model number SM-Z200M/DS – Do you notice the new “M” in the model? The hardware version is listed as Revision1.0, so that is final and it is WiFi certified with connectivity b, g, n; WPA, WPA2 and WiFi Direct – basically the usual suspects.

Android

• Generally, smartwatches aren’t worth the time it takes to charge them.

• But when Huawei handed me a review unit of their new Huawei Watch 2, which has pretty much all the tech you can stuff into a smartwatch these days, and runs the new Android Wear 2, I decided to give it a chance.

• Android Inc. cofounder and former CEO Andy Rubin has taken to Twitter to tease a new slim-bezeled smartphone. This is the first device we’ve seen from Rubin’s new startup, called “Essential.”

Free Software/Open Source

• Plesk, one of the major providers of website management solutions, has chosen Kolab Systems’ groupware solution for its millions of users.

• “You can now deploy Kolab in your Plesk installation with the Premium Email powered by Kolab extension. this extension is a step forward in the field of turn key groupware and online collaboration software. This package is easy and convenient to deploy — it can literally be installed in a few clicks, and it provides full Kolab functionality without the inconveniences and potential pitfalls of having to install Kolab from the ground up,” said Kolab Systems in a press release.

• This deal shows us why smart companies put their eggs in the open source basket instead of relying on proprietary solutions.

• Peer production is one of three fundamental ways to organize human economic activity, along with markets and firms. Yet, although it underlies billions of dollars in open source software production, it is the least understood. Participants in open source are not organized in firms, where they would work under the supervision of managers and earn a salary, nor are they individuals in a market, responding to price signals.

• The economics of peer production is an interesting area of study that raises many important questions regarding the incentives behind voluntary participation, the efficiency of production, the tools and models that can quantify and explain how the process works, and so forth.

• My doctoral research at Harvard University considered incentives issues that arise in a software economy. In particular, my work used principles from market design and mechanism design to address problems, such as how to incentivize high-quality submissions to address bugs or features, and how to elicit truthful prediction of task completion time.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 18th Anniversary and accomplishments, and rallied support to ensure future innovation.

• We all know that there is a diversity problem in tech. The depressing stats from numerous reports and studies all point to stereotypes and bias hitting young girls’ perceptions of STEM negatively, with this sitting alongside poor retention figures and a lack of women at the board level.

• However, one particular branch of tech may be struggling in more when it comes to diversity and inclusion – the one branch, in fact, which has inclusiveness at the very core of its ethos.

• The skills shortage in South Africa could possibly be addressed by organisations extending their willingness to collaborate as part of the open source community to collaborating on skills development and training.

• That’s the view of Muggie van Staden, MD of open source software provider Obsidian Systems, who said that rapid skills development was particularly important in non-traditional IT areas such as big data – and open source big data in particular.

• The German Federal Police (Bundespolizei) is using the Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) suite to perform business analytics for the deployment of police officers. The organisation aggregates information from various systems — more than twenty fields of operations in e.g. border entry, asylum seekers, crimes and detectives — into its data warehouse, and works this data into statistics. The resulting information is used, for example, for shift service management, specifically at the national airports, and to fulfil the department’s reporting obligations to the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

• Google is launching a new site today that brings all of the company’s open source projects under a single umbrella.

• The code of these projects will still live on GitHub and Google’s self-hosted git service, of course, with the new site functioning as a central directory for them. While this new project is obviously meant to showcase Google’s projects, the company says it also wants to use it to provide “a look under the hood” of how it “does” open source.

• Free and open source software has been part of our technical and organizational foundation since Google’s early beginnings. From servers running the Linux kernel to an internal culture of being able to patch any other team’s code, open source is part of everything we do. In return, we’ve released millions of lines of open source code, run programs like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in, and sponsor open source projects and communities through organizations like Software Freedom Conservancy, the Apache Software Foundation, and many others.

Events

• CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017 has begun and is bringing together the world’s top experts in open source cloud computing. Their goal is to maintain and promote the development of integrated open source technologies to better deploy and implement cloud computing.

• OpenSDS, a Silver sponsor of CloudNativeCon + KubeCon, has gathered the community at the conference and is demonstrating its open and flexible Software-Defined Storage (SDS) architecture solution in the exhibit hall. Project contributors are demonstrating the latest in code developments, including both northbound and southbound API definitions and microservice architecture design.

• At this year’s GUADEC in Manchester we have rooms available for you right at the venue in lovely modern student townhouses. As I write this there are still some available to book along with your registration. In a couple of days we have to a final numbers to the University for how many rooms we want, so it would help us out if all the folk who want a room there could register and book one now if you haven’t already done so! We’ll have some available for later booking but we have to pay up front for them now so we can’t reserve too many.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla released today, March 28, 2017, the second maintenance update to the Firefox 52.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

SaaS/Back End

• The Hadoop community has so far failed to account for the poor performance and high complexity of Hadoop, Johnson says. “The Hadoop ecosystem is still basically in the hands of a small number of experts,” he says. “If you have that power and you’ve learned know how to use these tools and you’re programmer, then this thing is super powerful. But there aren’t a lot of those people. I’ve read all these things how we need another million data scientists in the world, which I think means our tools aren’t very good.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• An interview with Heiko Tietze, who is working as a UX (user experience) mentor for The Document Foundation.

Healthcare

• More than half a decade after the EHR Incentive Programs sparked a frenzied rush to purchase and implement certified health IT tools, the electronic health record market has largely coalesced around a core set of commercial vendors.

• The names of the industry’s leading lights – Cerner, Epic, Allscripts, MEDITECH, NextGen, athenahealth – have become very familiar to anyone with an interest in data and documentation.

• When searching for a new EHR, a population health management solution, or a big data analytics toolset, providers have a lot of decisions to make. Cloud or server-based? CommonWell or Carequality? API-compatible or largely proprietary?

• A million-pound open source electronic patient record has gone live in a northern NHS trust’s eye department.

• Bolton NHS Foundation Trust deployed the ophthalmic OpenEyes software in January.

• David Haider, consultant ophthalmologist and chief clinical information officer at Bolton, told Digital Health News that he was doing a “slow deployment”, with the EPR being used in cataracts first.

• “Because we’re running from a fairly digitally immature trust, we didn’t want to do anything to fast.”

• Haider said the deployment had “not been particularly painful at all”.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• With DragonFlyBSD 4.8 making its debut yesterday, I was excited to give this updated BSD operating system a try now that it has UEFI support and some performance improvements. Here are some early benchmark results of DragonFlyBSD 4.8 compared to 4.6 and Intel’s Clear Linux for some additional reference points.

Licensing/Legal

• A number of perl modules have changed licenses, all moving from GPLv3+ to the Perl license (ie GPL+ or Artistic).

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• A Kickstarter campaign for the Niryo One, an open source 3D printed 6-axis robotic arm, has more than doubled its €20,000 target after just a couple of days. The 3D printed robot is powered by Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Robot Operating System.

Programming/Development

Leftovers

Hardware

• IEEE is taking a lead role in building a comprehensive, end-to-end view of the computing ecosystem, including devices, components, systems, architecture, and software. In May 2016, IEEE announced the formation of the IRDS under the sponsorship of IEEE RC. The historical integration of IEEE RC and the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) 2.0 addresses mapping the ecosystem of the new reborn electronics industry. The new beginning of the evolved roadmap—with the migration from ITRS to IRDS—is proceeding seamlessly as all the reports produced by the ITRS 2.0 represent the starting point of IRDS.

Health/Nutrition

• But Flint Mayor Karen Weaver has estimated that costs to undo both infrastructure and health damages caused by residents being forced to drink and use water that flowed through pipes that weren’t properly treated could be between $1 billion and $1.5 billion.

• The state may use a combination of federal and state funds for the project, which, if approved, would settle a lawsuit brought last year by a coalition of Flint residents and national groups. The suit blamed city and state officials for failing to protect residents from drinking lead-tainted water for more than a year.

Security

• Eject could be made to run programs as an administrator.

• Anyway, Stephen Kitt pointed out (thanks!) that Debian’s MinGW linker binutils-mingw-w64 has an upstream-pending patch that sets the timestamp to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH if set.

• The open source Apache Metron project will help underpin managed security services delivered from two Telstra security operations centres set to be launched later this year.

Defence/Aggression

• “The story of the Yazidis forced to flee the Islamic State genocide shocked the world in 2014, but the story of those who returned, who today risk their lives to help others, is still to be recognized,”

• As reports come in detailing the degree to which Donald Trump has escalated the “War on ISIS”—and killed hundreds more civilians in the process—this would seem like a good time for the country to sit back and examine the United States’ approach to fighting “terrorism” and its recent iteration, the so-called Islamic State.

• Not for the New York Times editorial board, which didn’t take the wave of civilians deaths as a reason to question the wisdom of America’s various “counter-terror,” nation-building and regime-change projects in the Middle East, but instead chose to browbeat Congress into rubber-stamping a war that’s been going on for almost three years.

• The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg (3/26/17), alarmed by right-wing websites with “no commitment to truth,” is eager to balance them out with some respectable conservative journalists—and seems to think he has found one in Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Stephen Hayes.

• “Beijing can now deploy military assets, including combat aircraft and mobile missile launchers, to the Spratly Islands at any time,” said the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), part of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Humanity is in the early stages of the most significant evolution in its history: learning to think as a species.

• Tiny sea urchins are helping to combat invasive algae in Kaneohe Bay—part of a restoration plan from the settlement of the 2005 grounding of the ship M/V Cape Flattery on the coral reefs south of Oahu. The grounding, and response efforts to free the ship, injured 19.5 acres of coral. Despite the injuries, the reef began recovering on its own. Rather than mess with that natural recovery, NOAA Fisheries, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Hawaii’s Division of Aquacitec Resources focused on restoring coral reefs in Kaneohe Bay.

• The largest and most successful eelgrass restoration project on the planet is now growing in the very place where, since the 1930s, eelgrass had been uprooted by successive hurricanes and destroyed by disease. Located on the Atlantic side of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the project’s innovative methods—supported by the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program—are rapidly expanding eelgrass in the region and restoring habitat using methods that may be effective in other regions around the world.

• Seagrass beds not only improve coastal water quality by absorbing nutrients and trapping fine sediments but they also provide critical habitat for commercially important juvenile fish and crabs while absorbing large quantities of carbon dioxide from the air.

Finance

• Homes converted from London council offices are permitted to be far below national minimum size due to deregulation of planning rules.

• The Chinese internet giant isn’t just an investor, Musk said after his electric-car maker disclosed Tencent had bought a 5 percent stake in his company for $1.8 billion. He also referred to the owner of the WeChat and QQ messaging services as an adviser.

• The same Chinese company that bought League of Legends a couple of years ago just became one of Tesla’s largest shareholders. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing dated March 24th, Tencent Holdings Ltd. has purchased a five percent stake in the company—8,167,544 shares to be exact. According to TechCrunch, the deal was arranged a week earlier, and Tencent paid $1.7 billion for the shares.

• A company spokesman, Kristian Agerbo, said on Tuesday Uber “must take the consequences” of the new rules, which among other things will require cabs to be fitted with seat occupancy sensors and fare meters.

• Specific closures have yet to be announced, but the number makes up 2-3% of its overall business.

• Supposedly the closures are happening due to poor holiday sales. The Q4 window is often the high point of video game sales, yet despite the launch of new hardware in the PlayStation 4 Pro and a few major releases, it wasn’t enough in the company’s eyes.

• They found that each new robot added to the workforce meant the loss of between 3 and 5.6 jobs in the local commuting area. Meanwhile, for each new robot added per 1,000 workers, wages in the surrounding area would fall between 0.25 and 0.5 percent.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• His use of Twitter demonstrates another one of his failings. The man cannot spell simple words, even with spellcheck on his phone. “Honor” becomes “honer.” Unprecedented” became “unpresidented.” This is also a common failing of people with dyslexia. The reading public can now easily distinguish between tweets written by Trump and those written by someone on his staff. You don’t need to know which phone was used to figure it out. The staff-written tweets contain complete sentences and correctly spelled words. They rarely, if ever, contain exclamation points. Twitter has been a perfect medium for Trump as he never has to write more than 148 characters. And don’t forget that this is a man who also never uses e-mail, something of a startling admission now that most business communications are conducted via e-mail.

• Last week, buried under the fracas surrounding the failed update to the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration conducted an adorable little stage play few actually noticed. The Administration invited Charter CEO Tom Rutledge to the Oval Office, where the CEO — alongside Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, repeatedly implied that Trump’s policies were somehow to thank for the creation of 20,000 jobs and $25 billion in investment at the cable giant. Press Secretary Sean Spicer was quick to applaud the “new” jobs on Twitter.

• She doesn’t sleep with him. They have separate beds, according to one anonymous source. And him?

• He has had a lot of women, some public and much, much younger, some only rumored about (but we know.) One of the most talked-about involved him, an older, powerful man, bedding a younger woman infatuated with him, and likely controlled by him.

• And it’s apparently OK to talk about all this, and shame the dutiful wife, even by feminists. At least as long as it is about Melania Trump, and not, for heaven’s sake, about that other White House power “couple.”

• The Washington Post ran an op-ed last month by a Princeton professor headlined “Ignore the Attacks on Neil Gorsuch. He’s an Intellectual Giant—and a Good Man.” But at that point, especially, you had to ask—what attacks?

• Well, it’s somewhat different now, with an announcement just this morning that Democrats may filibuster the nomination. But for media, it’s all over. The New York Times says Gorsuch will probably be confirmed, the Chicago Tribune said he’s earned it, USA Today says he “sailed through.”

• President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an order to undo Obama-era climate change regulations, keeping a campaign promise to support the coal industry and calling into question U.S. support for an international deal to fight global warming.

• Flanked by coal miners and coal company executives, Trump proclaimed his “Energy Independence” executive order at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency.

• The move drew swift backlash from a coalition of 23 states and local governments, as well as environmental groups, which called the decree a threat to public health and vowed to fight it in court.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Ironically, de facto blasphemy laws continue to apply at many universities in Britain and elsewhere, including under the guise of “safe spaces.” According to a recent report, more than nine in ten UK universities are restrictive of free speech.

• Just last week, we wrote about a fairly insane bill up for consideration in the California Assembly. AB-1104 would effectively make it illegal to post or share any “false or deceptive statement designed to influence” an election. As we noted at the time, this is about as unconstitutional as you could possibly imagine.

• In the news and publishing world, there tends to be pretty strong support for protecting free speech and, in particular, strong anti-SLAPP laws. After all, news publishers, are (unfortunately!) frequently targeted in SLAPP suits that are designed solely to shut up a news organization from reporting on something that someone doesn’t like. That’s why I’m always surprised when publications themselves seem to go after others for speech. But here we are, with a weird legal battle involving two publishers in nearby Santa Clara, California. The lawsuit was filed by Santa Clara Eagle Publishing and its boss Miles Barber against a guy named Robert Haugh, who just recently started an online-only publication called “Santa Clara News Online.” Eagle Publisher/Barber, on the other hand, publish the more established “Santa Clara Weekly.”

• Haugh’s Santa Clara News Online appears to be your typical local blog, with Haugh — a local reporter for over 15 years — posting news and opinion blog posts about local happenings in Santa Clara. Some of those blog posts criticized Barber and Santa Clara Weekly. And, thus, the lawsuit. Lawyer Ken White — better known around these parts as Popehat — is representing Haugh and has filed a lovely anti-SLAPP motion against Barber and Eagle Publishing, noting that it seems quite clear that the intent of the lawsuit was to try to silence Haugh from criticizing Barber and the SCW…

• Under censorship’s nefarious grip, cinema becomes not just a driver of social justice but a sophisticated tool of oppression.

• There is, however, a positive side effect of censorship: Sometimes it inspires filmmakers to be more experimental, innovative and free-thinking. Case in point: Poland after World War II.

• Twitter has upped its censorship game and is now blocking certain terms from showing up on the platform’s built-in search engine. The added filters are part of the company’s plans to reduce harassment on the service. Some of these filters were deployed earlier this month when users were given the option to mute certain types of accounts.

• It was a First Amendment lesson that two Buckingham Charter Magnet High students will remember for the rest of their lives, in part because they learned by doing.

• When Principal Mike Boles tried to censor a yearbook article they wrote earlier this year about Black Lives Matter, junior Vanessa Mewborn and senior Ariana Coleman were naturally upset to learn of the change, but, instead of being angry or holding a grudge, they eventually contacted a Northern California office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

• Censored Gaming covered the incident, showcasing how many of the female characters in the game were covered up from head to toe to either hide cleavage, or add extra articles of clothing to lessen the sex appeal of the character illustrations and in-game models.

• Memo to California Assemblymember Ed Chau: you can’t fight fake news with a bad law.

• On Tuesday, the California Assembly’s Committee on Privacy and Consumer Affairs, which Chau chairs, will consider A.B. 1104—a censorship bill so obviously unconstitutional, we had to double check that it was real.

• This month, the rulers of Pakistan stepped up a campaign against blasphemy, frightening news from an Islamic nation where insulting the official religion is a capital crime.

• From an American perspective, this would merely be another, distant nation’s horror — if it weren’t for one aspect of the story.

• As part of the crackdown, Pakistani leaders have asked executives of Facebook and Twitter to help them help root out people who post blasphemous material on social media sites from anywhere in the world.

• In response, Facebook said in mid-March that it planned to send a team to Pakistan to discuss the government’s request. Really?

• There are a lot of people I know who are letting out their creativity by making a short film or a web series. There is nobody to question you, no hassle of censorship or number screens, release date is there, no such calculation is required. Just find a good day, make a good film and put it out on YouTube,” the young actor added.

• A prominent entertainer and TV host Slavi Trifonov called a press conference on Tuesday, accusing his media partner bTV of censorship.

• Private broadcaster bTV cancelled Trifonov’s TV show on Monday after he publicly gave an ultimatum to Bulgaria’s 44th National Assembly, demanding that the results of a November 2016 referendum be enforced.

• bTV decided to stop broadcasting the new episode of his popular programme Slavi’s Show, which is usually on between 10.30pm and 11.30pm every weekday, stating that its material stood in “incompliance with the standards for television content.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Amid the frenzy over the Trump team’s talks with Russians, are we missing a darker story, how the Deep State’s surveillance powers control the nation’s leaders, ask U.S. intelligence veterans Ray McGovern and Bill Binney.

• [...]

• This news presents Trump with an unwelcome but unavoidable choice: confront those who have kept him in the dark about such rogue activities or live fearfully in their shadow. (The latter was the path chosen by President Obama. Will Trump choose the road less traveled?)

• What President Trump decides will largely determine the freedom of action he enjoys as president on many key security and other issues. But even more so, his choice may decide whether there is a future for this constitutional republic. Either he can acquiesce to or fight against a Deep State of intelligence officials who have a myriad of ways to spy on politicians (and other citizens) and thus amass derogatory material that can be easily transformed into blackmail.

• This crisis (yes, “crisis” is an overused word, but in this highly unusual set of circumstances we believe it is appropriate) came to light mostly by accident after President Trump tweeted on March 4 that his team in New York City’s Trump Towers had been “wiretapped” by President Obama.

• The Open Rights Group (ORG), and a number of other such groups, were given a six-week period in which to respond to the Investigatory Powers crap that started in February. They’ve finished early and voiced a number of criticisms and concerns. They are concerned that the Home Office has been a bit of a dick here, and chose to communicate in lawyer speak, presumably with the intention of bamboozling people.

• Today Home Secretary Amber Rudd claimed that end-to-end encryption is “absolutely unacceptable” when referring to how she believed terrorists primarily communicate.

• Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, the Home Secretary said: “It used to be people just steam open envelopes or just listen in on phones when they wanted to find out what they were doing” and has further added “…but in this situation we need to make sure our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp.”

• When Rudd was told directly that she may need to legislate in order to achieve this goal, she responded by saying “…we would not resile from taking action if we need to.” and later added that she was not stepping away from legislation.

• Under the repeal, the companies that provide your broadband service—be it Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, AT&T, or Verizon—will be able to engage in all sorts of underhanded ways to monetize your personal information. They’ll be allowed to collect your browsing history, hijack your search results, insert unwanted advertisements, and sell your data to marketers. In other words, if this repeal passes, no user should rest assured again.

• Back in October of 2016, the Federal Communications Commission passed some pretty awesome rules that would bar your Internet provider from invading your privacy. The rules would keep Internet providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable from doing things like selling your personal information to marketers, inserting undetectable tracking headers into your traffic, or recording your browsing history to build up a behavioral advertising profile on you—unless they got your permission first. The rules were a huge victory for U.S. Internet users who value their privacy.

• The Internet is up in arms over Congress’s plan to drastically reduce your privacy online, and that includes small Internet providers and networking companies. Many of them agree that we need the Federal Communication Commission’s rules to protect our privacy online, and seventeen of them have written to Congress today to express their concerns.

• The situation before the FCC’s intervention was succinctly described in the fine print of Verizon’s privacy policy: “If you do not want information collected for marketing purposes from services such as the Verizon Wireless Mobile Internet services, you should not use those particular services.” That was refreshingly honest. Other ISPs including AT&T, Charter, and Sprint also monitored their customers in intrusive ways, but were less frank in admitting it, even in their privacy policies.

• When Matt L. started to raise the alarm about educational technology in his school district, he knew it would ruffle some feathers.

• As a system administrator (or sysadmin), Matt has had a front-row seat to the increasing use of technology in his rural, public school district. At first, the district only issued Chromebooks to students in guest “kiosk” mode for test-taking. Over time, though, each of the district’s 10,000 students got individual access to school-issued devices, from iPads for younger students who cannot yet type to Chromebooks and G-Suite for Education logins for students as young as third grade.

• Last week, the Senate voted 50-48 along party lines to kill consumer broadband privacy protections. That vote then continued today in the House, where GOP lawmakers finished the job, apparently happy to advertise how ISP campaign contributions consistently, directly manifest in anti-consumer policy with a 215 to 205 vote (you can find a full vote breakdown here). The rules, which were supposed to take effect this month, were killed using the Congressional Review Act — which not only eliminates the protections, but limits the agency’s ability to issue similar rules down the road.

• The broadband industry’s effort to kill the rules is one of the uglier examples of pay-to-play government in recent memory. The protections, originally passed last October by the FCC, have been endlessly demonized by the broadband industry, despite the fact that they’re relatively straight forward. The rules would have simply required that ISPs are transparent about what they collect (and who they sell it to), and provide working opt out tools. ISPs were also required to have consumers opt in for more sensitive data collection (financial, browser history data).

• The White House issued a statement today supporting the House’s action, and saying that Trump’s advisors will recommend that he sign the legislation. That would make the death of the Federal Communications Commission’s privacy rules official.

• After only one hour of debate and no allowance for amendments, S.J. Res 34 passed through the House of Representatives with a majority vote of 215-205 along party lines. President Trump has signaled that he supports S.J.Res 34 and will sign it.

• Last time we checked in with (former) Brooklyn prosecutor Tara Lenich, she was facing state charges for abusing wiretap warrants to listen in on conversations between a police detective and one of her colleagues. This stemmed from what was termed a “personal entanglement” between her and the detective.

• The wiretap warrants couldn’t be obtained without a judge’s signature. Since there was no probable cause for the warrant, no judge would sign them. Lenich had a solution. She just forged the judge’s signature on the warrant. And then she kept forging judges’ signatures, stretching out her illicit surveillance for more than a year, with a faked signature on every 30-day renewal.

• Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black people

• Shibly — a 23-year-old filmmaker, New York native and the son of Syrian immigrants — had already given up his cellphone and password for an unwarranted search a few days prior while re-entering the USA. This time, he refused. Within seconds, Shibly was surrounded by officers who grabbed his legs, placed him in a chokehold and physically removed his cellphone, according to an NBC News report. Watching this, McCormick dutifully complied when asked to surrender her phone.

• it also reflects a longer-standing problem specific to Turkey and Europe — namely, the Turkish government’s conviction that diaspora Turks everywhere in the world owe their first allegiance to Turkey. Erdogan doesn’t just want Turkish expats’ votes; he wants their unwavering loyalty, and, to the consternation of European governments, he has proved willing to go to extreme lengths to secure it.

• Prosecutors are already investigating the use of imams to transmit information on Gulenists to Ankara from German mosques.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The students said they never had to ask permission to play Holi in the past

• In a letter published in the Straits Times forum, the Association of Criminal Lawyers of Singapore (ACLS) expressed their outrage at the assertion by the American courts that Singaporean blogger Amos Yee was persecuted by the Singapore Government, and the consequent impugning of the Singapore criminal justice system.

• Well, one subsection of America that seemed genuinely happy to see Amos Yee in the land of the free is the subreddit, The Donald, which comprises some of President Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters.

• While Yee’s lawyer and supporters did their homework by supplying the immigration judge with detailed cases of persecution of activists and political opponents by the Singapore government and even called Kenneth Jeyaretnam, an opposition party leader whose father was subjected to endless prosecutions by the PAP government as a witness, the Homeland Security Department did not call any witness to rebut Yee’s claim.

• The US court was satisfied that the primary purpose of the video was to criticise Mr Lee, the Singapore Government and Singapore. This would then classify Yee’s action as a political one. The MHA statement doesn’t even mention anything about Yee’s political content and activity, which is odd since Yee is applying for political asylum.

• “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 14(1).

• Amos Yee has now been granted asylum by the United States on the grounds of persecution by the Singapore government. While the Singapore government may be unhappy with what the Immigration Judge Samuel B Cole said in his judgement, I am sure it is pleased with “getting rid” of him.

• Were one to observe the media attacks and coordinated statements against the US ruling, one would probably agree with the judge that Yee would not be safe* in Singapore, whether it be state-sanctioned actions or not.

• A March 24 decision by a US immigration court in Chicago to grant asylum to Amos Yee, an 18-year-old blogger from the tiny Asian city-state of Singapore, has lit up news media worldwide because it illuminates new dangers to freedoms of speech, not only in Singapore — which ranks near the bottom of every assessment of press and other freedoms — but even in the US, where Yee’s asylum was opposed by President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

• Observers walking into the viewing gallery of the Guantánamo Bay military court are met with a number of signs depicting prohibited behavior. One of them cautions against any manner of “visual enhancement devices” and features a calm, smiling woman undisturbed by the constitutional and human rights violations transpiring a few feet away. This mundane image serves as a symbol for what we as a society must avoid: normalizing the due process violations and excessive secrecy that have marred the military commissions since their inception.

• “In view of this, if the Supreme Court holds that triple talaq in one sitting is not a valid form of effecting divorce, then that would amount to rewriting of the Holy Quran itself, which is nothing but the ipissima verba (the precise words) of the Almighty himself and is the entire genesis of Islam. Such an alteration of the specific verses of the Holy Quran would actually amount to altering the very essence of the religion of Islam.”

• “DO NOT confuse politics and religion,” Indonesia’s President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo said on Friday as he sought to drive home a crucial message on the merits of diversity to a nation still struggling between secular and religious politics.

• “They should be separate so people know what is religious and what is political,” he said.

• “We are a group of people who are striving to bring rational thought into Pakistani society. We, like you, do not like the current Talibanisation of our country and are trying to combat that in our own way on the social media by running a forum that is 10,000 strong.”

• Speaking about Islamic schools, where the science curriculum is censored and music and art classes are banned, Hirsi Ali said: “It is child abuse pure and simple. Muslim schools should not be allowed in liberal society.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

• The report was launched ahead of the 2017 OECD Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum on 30-31 March.

Trademarks

• Urban homesteaders can speak freely about their global movement for sustainable living, after convincing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to cancel bogus trademarks for the terms “urban homesteading” and “urban homestead.” The authors and activists were represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and law firm of Winston & Strawn.

• “This is a victory for free speech and common sense. Threats over this trademark harmed us and the whole urban homesteading community—a group of people who are dedicated to sharing information about sustainable living online and elsewhere,” said Kelly Coyne, co-author with Erik Knutzen of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City. “We are so pleased to have this issue settled at last, so we can concentrate on making urban life healthier and happier for anyone who wants to participate in this global effort.”

Copyrights

• After three years of discussing changes to copyright law, Congress’s first bill is a strange one. House and Senate Judiciary Committee leaders have introduced a bill that would radically change the way the Register of Copyrights is picked – taking the process out of the hands of the Librarian of Congress and putting it into the hands of Congress and the President. That sounds like a pretty technical move, but it could have real consequences for future innovation and creativity. Let’s break it down.

• As it stands now, the Register is appointed by the Librarian of Congress, and serves under her direction and oversight. The “Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017” would require that the head of the Copyright Office be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and would authorize the President to remove the Register. This would make the Register’s appointment process more democratic – but also more a captive of special interests.

• For many years now, we’ve been talking about the copyright questions surrounding pre-1972 sound recordings. There are a ton of ongoing cases about this and it may be a bit confusing to keep up with it all. In short, under old copyright law, copyright only applied to the composition itself, but not the recordings. Many states then tried to step in and created state copyright laws (or common law doctrine via the courts) that gave sound recordings some form of copyright protection — some of it much crazier than ordinary copyright law. Eventually Congress federalized copyright for sound recordings, but it didn’t apply to any sound recordings from before 1972 (and a few at the very, very, very beginning of 1972, but it’s easier just to say “pre-1972 sound recordings.”) And then, even though the 1976 Copyright Act took away state copyright laws having any power, they still applied to certain aspects of pre-1972 sound recordings. This has… made a mess of things. The easiest solution would be to just admit this is dumb and say that pre-1972 works should be covered by federal copyright law, but lots of folks have been against this, starting with the RIAA (more on that in a bit).

• And with things being confusing, some copyright holders have been using the weird status on pre-1972 sound recordings to effectively try to shakedown online streaming music sites into giving them better deals. The various cases have been all over the place, with the first few cases coming out saying that because pre-1972 sound recordings aren’t covered under federal copyright law, things are different and copyright holders can sue over them. This upended decades of what was considered settled law.

• For pretty much all of the history of Techdirt, we’ve been hearing from the legacy entertainment industries about how the internet has been destroying art and destroying culture. They were making things worse, and we’d have more starving artists and less content — and whatever content we did have would definitely be terrible. That’s the story we were told over and over and over again — and there are still a few in the industry who pitch this story.

• The problem is it’s simply not true.

• [...]

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